Technovia

There are plusses and minuses to online newsrooms

Investigative journalism to make an online come-back? | Blog | Futurismic.

"The problem being that, currently, online advertising doesn’t provide enough income to run a proper newsroom, even with the lower overheads of the straight-to-web model. But will that always be the case? I’d be a lot more tolerant of internet advertising if I felt I was getting decent content as a result of it."

This is worth saying, repeatedly, to those who claim that there's no problems with moving news online.

The Jeff Jarvis conundrum

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ron Rosenbaum's post about Jeff Jarvis. Like Ron, I used to be an avid reader of Jeff's blog, and liked it a lot. And, like Ron, I've become disillusioned by Jeff and his arguments over the past year.

Let's make this clear from the start: a lot of what Jeff says is right.I have absolutely no need for Jeff to "save" me. I have no idea how long exactly Jeff has been involved in online publishing, but I doubt that he could describe me as a print zealot. I first worked as an online-only journalist around 1998 (when I was first dedicated online editor for MacUser) and although I've moved back to print a couple of times (follow the money!) since then, I'm currently, again, only working day-to-day online.

However, as Ron says, somewhere over the past year Jeff has become increasing reluctant to accept criticism, instead concentrating on smearing anyone who criticises him. Arguments which are still in play are dismissed out of hand as "old hat", and anyone who raises them as a "curmudgeon".

I think that one of the commentors on Jeff's supposed-rebuttal, "Chris", puts the way I feel about it best:

"It is possible to simultaneously believe …

1) That Jeff always has a lot of sharp insights and has kept coming up with them for many years;

2) That Jeff has become progressively more infatuated with his stature and that his opinion of his own brilliance and deep significance just keeps growing;

3) That print journalists need to hear the tough insights Jeff offers; and

4) That Jeff hasn’t come close to a coherent answer to the question of where revenue is going to be found to sustain anything close to the level of journalistic thoroughness to which we’ve grown accustomed.

I live in California, a megastate with an extremely poorly run state government that has grown steadily more dysfunctional. Nevertheless, over the past five years, the print journalists covering Sacramento have been cut by at least half. At important hearings on things like overcrowded prisons or failing schools, hearings where the future of the state is being shaped, sometimes there are no journos in sight. Before long, the Sacramento Bee, the L.A. Times and AP may be the only ones with regularly staffed bureaus in the capital of the nation’s largest, richest state.

This is not healthy. For all Jeff’s smarts, I’ve never seen him offer a single insight into how this sort of common journalistic decline will be addressed — or at least a single insight that I thought had a practical chance of success."

Chris is completely right - and unfortunately, Jeff has spent a lot of time not answering this question, and accusing anyone who raises it of being "a curmudgeon". While Jeff has been happy to dish out the rhetoric, it appears that when someone uses the same tools against him, he gets more than a little thin skinned.

Words you write, but sense you make not

What on Earth does this mean? Said to be shopping? Said "shopping About.com"? What?

Hold the front page

I know standards in publishing aren't what they were, but "man falls off chair" is not a story worthy of the front page of BBC News.

Jeff Jarvis is wrong when he says "any witness can perform an act of journalism". Mostly.

Lots of good stuff in Jeff Jarvis' post on myths about the Internet that you hear from "nay-sayers" in "Once and for all". But there's also this bit, which I have to take issue with:

"Bloggers aren’t journalists. True and false. The Pew Internet & American Life survey says only a third of bloggers consider what they do journalism. But today any witness can perform an act of journalism, giving us more eyes on society - which journalists should celebrate." [My italics added]

Saying that "any witness can perform an act of journalism" is rather like saying "any trumpeter can play a guitar". It's conflating "doing music" with "playing a particular instrument" - or, in the above case "giving an accurate first-hand report" with "doing journalism".

As I've argued before, journalism is a process, not a product. It means researching, multiple sources, and revealing something which wasn't revealed before. It's not something that is exclusive to those calling themselves "journalists", but neither is it something which any witness to events can perform simply by giving an accurate account of what they saw.

One thing that history teaches us is that eyewitness accounts often conflict, and the job of a journalist is to dig deep enough to corroborate or refute some of those eyewitness accounts. While any witness can contribute to an act of journalism, unless they do a lot more, they're not themselves doing journalism.

The true state of journalism today

Telegraph journalist: I'm pessimistic about the new newsroom culture | Media | guardian.co.uk.

"The growth of blogs and online communities seems to be contributing plenty in the way of opinion, of which there's already plenty and not much in the way of facts. This is creating a brand of journalism in which it doesn't really matter if you get things wrong.

Again, it's becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in. Facts are no longer the currency they used to be."

I know that Jeff Jarvis and other new media boosters will race in and tell this guy to get with the programme, shape up or die, and stop being a curmudgeon. But they are wrong. They should read that sentence about the Telegraph's business model over and over again, because it is the true nature of frontline journalism now.

Is that the journalism we want? A journalism where journalists never leave their screens, but instead endlessly rewrite stuff in order to chase page views? A journalism where a strident, fact-free opinion is worth more than something that digs into the meat of a story and finds new gems there?

It used to be true that 80% of a journalists work was rehashing - other people's stories, press releases, feeds, whatever. But it was the other 20% which added value, because it was based on writing stories which were unique to you, from your sources. Now that 20% has been taken over by writing opinion instead, because opinion is cheap and - if you write something controversial which readers can argue with - attracts page views.

Again, it's worth asking: Is that the journalism we want? If it is, then fine. But we have to be aware that in moving to that model we will be losing something valuable. Calling people curmudgeons for pointing that out is silly.

Journalism is picking up the phone

My friend Danny recently reminded me of one of the smarter things that I've said. I'm glad Danny keeps track of those odd moments of lucidity, because I tend to forget all about them.

This particular gem came out of an argument we had years ago about the difference between blogging and journalism, and, as I put it, "journalism is picking up the phone".

There are two points to this. The first is that journalism involves research. It means more than just putting down what you think about something or doing a cursory Google search. It means actually making the effort to find out to find out some facts about what you're writing about, seeking out some experts and quoting them. For some kinds of journalism - notably news - that's all there is to it: if what you're reading is something that's "said by you" rather than someone else, you're failing in the job.

But it also implies something more than that. Saying that journalism means "picking up the phone" means that journalism is a social thing. Most of the job isn't writing - it's finding and cultivating sources, getting to know people, and getting to that point when you can pick up the phone and talk to someone about what you need to know.

As Danny points out, this means that lots of things which bloggers do are really journalism, and, contrariwise, lots of professional journalists don't really do journalism. Opinion columns, rewrites of feed-driven news stories, lifts from others are all not journalism: there's no aspect of "picking up the phone".

That's why I find stuff like the Telegraph's multiple-screen news room and constant feed-driven input (direct into journalist's brains in version 2.0) worrying. It encourages journalists not to get out, not to get to know people, not to nurture and develop sources. It just encourages them to rewrite the same stuff that everyone else is writing, never leaving that glorious high-tech news room.

I take back everything mean I said about Wired UK v.2.0

Ben Hammersley's Other Blog • It won't be what you expect..

"David Rowan’s editorship of the UK edition of Wired raises many questions. The first being “Who is going to be his number two?”

The answer to which is, after signing yesterday, me. Starting in a few weeks, first issue next year; more news to come."

If Ben's involved, it will be interesting.

A news story is not a single page: it's a network

Monica Guzman:

"'I'm convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,"

This is totally true, and actually reflects a significant change in what a news story (or, for that matter, a blog post) actually is. Rather than think of a story as a single finished article, think of it as part of a network of the story, it's comments, and the comments and posts that it spawns across the web. As a writer, you write the story: but you also act as something like a curator for the conversation across the web, too.

A story is no longer a single page: it is a network of pages.

Relating this back to my post the other day, about how self-correction in blogging is a vice, not a virtue, this raises a simple question: is the job of a "journalist" is not just to write the story, but to tend and curate comments and discussions wherever they exist on the web?

I think that might well be the way things are heading. This then means going back to rework the original post in the light of the ongoing discussion, but also planting "seeds" into other nodes of discussion, too.

And here's the bad part for publishers: this is time consuming, and expensive, but it's also the only way to be truly step beyond the one-way model of "broadcast" journalism we've all grown up with.

The Guardian needs to start disclosing its own commercial interests

Another day, another story from The Guardian attacking the BBC's plans for local news - this time, in the guise of "reporting complaints from local radio stations" about the plans. There's no comment from the BBC, which is surprising.

What's also missing is any kind of acknowledgement that Guardian Media Group includes GMG Radio, which has 13 stations around the country. Neither, in its reporting on the BBC local video proposals, has The Guardian disclosed GMG's ownership of GMG Regional Media, which has numerous local newspapers as well as "city TV station" Channel M - all of which could potentially be in competition with the BBC's new local news.

The Guardian needs to start full disclosure where GMG has competing interests - particularly when it repeatedly prints comment pieces knocking those competitor's plans. Anything else is leaving it open to the same kinds of criticisms that have rightly been levelled at other media organisations over the years, where commercial competitors of the group have often appeared to get a hard time in the newspapers.