Journalism and the Scarcity Illusion
I’ve been asked to participate in the Brittanica’s forum, appropriately titled “Are Newspapers Doomed?”
Nick Carr gives an excellent summary of the status quo. As data on the industry’s decline continue to confirm our suspicions, the full ramifications of just how much the ‘unbundling’ effect has on the business is being realized, in full Wile E. Coyote fashion, by publishers. Clay Shirky responds by asking for news organizations not to wallow in nostalgia, but rather to use this moment as a chance to experiment.
They raise good questions, and here’s my response: There will be a market for good news reporting, and for linked metadata surrounding the reporting.
That’s partially because many of us, for a variety of reasons, will want to use good reporting as a jumping off point for our own investigation, and we’ll gladly pay a premium for it.
But it’s really because news journalism is deeply entrenched in an ethical hazard produced by a crisis of trust.
Over the last couple months, I’ve seen two unrelated but eerily similar examples of how trust, and a lack thereof, undermines the entire news reporting process.
The first example is one of the fictional story arcs in the fifth and last season of the Wire. A journalist at the troubled Baltimore Sun is accused of fabricating information, which he obviously has done. In reaction, the reporter gets indignant, yelling “it’s in my notes!” And we discover later (spoiler!) that his notebook, in fact, is empty.
The second example, however, was the one that really hit me where I learn. Of course, I’m referring to the major controversy related to journalistic ethics that broke loose a few months ago at Northwestern’s Medill School.
A column written by senior David Spett in the Daily Northwestern implicated our Dean John Lavine in possibly fabricating quotes in an article the Dean had written months before. The story made for a juicy headline, and was picked up by Gawker, the Chicago Tribune, and the AP. The Dean eventually had to send a letter to all students at the school essentially defending his right to keep his position at the school. In the e-mail, Lavine wrote the following:
“I had hoped to write this letter earlier and quickly settle this controversy by providing the emails and notes I used as the basis for the letter to alumni. I and others searched my email from a year ago. Then we tried to retrieve email that had been deleted at the time when the article was written. After extensive efforts on the part of Microsoft, they said that after five days, the system my office uses permanently deletes messages that I have deleted, and they cannot be recovered.”
I take our Dean at his word, and I believe that his only fault has been a lack of organization.Unfortunately, the teaching moment in the Lavine story was lost on students and faculty on Medill, who were too busy picking sides in the kangaroo court to re-examine why the news reporting process continues to stubbornly remain a black-box.
When it comes to trust, news organizations haven’t evolved beyond a reactionary position of printing retractions when they end up getting something wrong. Of course, by then it’s always too late. This reactionary model is a relic from the time of scarcity. News organizations continue to take it for granted that storing information is expensive, and finding information is difficult. That’s not true at all. If you’re a journalist, it is impossible to disclose too much.
In fact, because breaking news and opinions are quickly becoming commodified by the development of civic journalism, trustworthiness is now the core value that news organizations should be offering. But this trustworthiness will not be the result of a heritage, a legacy, a tradition, or a “code” of ethics. This trustworthiness will be earned by publishing information about sources, and their reliability. Aggregating criticisms from within the newsroom and by the community, directly into the fold. Media being published should always include a log of how raw material like photographs or video have been manipulated to get to their final state. (It’s a mystery to me why television news isn’t doing so already)
In short, here’s my advice: if in doubt, include it. Bury the extra info in a tree structure. Your audience is already really good at ignoring things they don’t care about, so don’t worry about overwhelming them. Just remember - storage is cheap. Search is easy. Shake the scarcity illusion, people!
And of course, reporting metadata should be published using standard data protocols, paving the way for utilities and services to emerge to help us be better informed citizens by comparing which news sources to see which ones are producing the best and most reliable journalism. This will effictively produce a market incentive for good journalism.
And journalism schools need to take the initiative in implementing this experimentation. I propose a class for Medill called “transparent newsreporting”, pioneering this practice in a generation of journalists who will be crucial in regaining trust, by no longer it for granted.
