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Misadventures In Online Journalism
An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
The media believing that article recently that was a blog joke, I ferget the topic...someone remind me...
Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news.
But this seems to say that the poster committed homicide to get the story out. Quick, spread the word!
Better late than wrong. Better never than stupid.
Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news.
Isn't this every journalists job description?
Disclaimer: Yes I'm trying to say that journalism is a bullshit job. The non bullshit version of a journalist is called a researcher. A researcher provides data, often in form of experimental results, along with their conclusion. A journalist interprets (they say cites, but anybody who's ever been cited knows this is bullshit) "sources".
I am the lawn!
Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives.
That doesn't even address how that problem compounds when the news organization in question has a political agenda or has their talking points of the day handed down from political operatives in exile. There's no allegiance to the truth or journalistic integrity. Fact checking is secondary to staying on message, even if the facts get kicked around in the process. No corrections for stories that turn out to be false, no apologies when lives (or countries) are ruined. It's not a news organization, it's a front for propaganda.
I think a news organization promoting itself as say fair and balanced while hiding an agenda behind a veneer of respectability is far greater threat to both individuals and the country than the occasional weekend early release accident.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
While Churchill came up with the "getting his pants on" quote.
No wonder that this sort of article is posted on Techcrunch, those guys clearly have a lot of experience in that regard! ;-)
And no, I do not want to flame, they even use an older Techcrunch story as an example in TFA. They really speak from experience.
No editing is going to save biased propaganda passing itself off as "news", of which "fake but accurate" Dan Rather is probably just the most egregious example of many.
"And then within half a minute -- bloggers being what they are -- the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact." So what happens when Reuters sends out inaccurate information? It gets reproduced around the world very quickly and they certainly do make mistakes. As for editorial feedback, large media organisations seem to be far worse at taking any notice of their readers than bloggers are. For example, if you write to the BBC pointing out some howling mistake, you might be really lucky and get a reply. If they correct it at all, they will simply quietly correct it without any visible admission to the readers that a mistake was made.
It is ironic that the summery which blasts the misinformation of bloggers gets quote attribution wrong: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on" is usually attributed to Mark Twain but the quotation was delivered in a sermon titled "Joesph attacked by the archers" in 1855 by C. H. Spurgeon! - Most misinformation I guess. ;-) - http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0017.htm
And "journalists" as a whole have YET to excoriate him for passing off as authentic documents in the exact same font as the default of MS Word that were faxed in from a random Kinkos by a nutcase with an ax to grind.
That should tell us all we need to know about journalistic "standards".
Since a real-life big steaming pile of feces from a male cow doesn't try to pass itself off as something better, I'd say calling journalism a "bullshit job" is an insult to bullshit.
Sure, because they're badass hard-ass thugs, yo, and sportsmanship be da weakness to 'dem. In other words, this is another fine African-American contribution to society. Not to be outdone, they later came up with gangsta rap, thug culture, and ebonics and found that major corporations like MTV were only too happy to sell the latest idiocy to suburban white kids who think they know what the ghetto is like. But it's okay, because George Washington Carver was really good with peanuts a hundred years ago.
Really though. There ARE successful black businessmen and philantropists and intellectuals. You know why they don't become household names and role models while the thug element does? Because they're not the image that is being deliberately and systematically promoted.
It doesn't become fact just because it spreads person to person. Anywhere else, that would be called a rumor. But when it spreads blog to blog, it's different? Just because it's being written down instead of spoken doesn't change the truthfulness of the statements.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
Every journalist learns quickly that you hear some shocking story, you call up the accused to check it out, and the story often turns out to be misleading, misinterpreted, wrong or downright lie (think weapons of mass destruction).
I write about medicine. I once did a story on needle exchange programs. http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/needlex.htm The scientific evidence seemed overwhelming that needle exchanges saved lives, but a lot of doctors, and politicians, were obstructing them. I spoke to Herbert Kleber, who was supposed to be one of the bad guys who was obstructing them. To my surprise, he had changed his position because of the weight of the scientific evidence. Happens all the time. But I see bloggers attacking people for things they don't actually believe, because they didn't check their facts.
We old guys have been working to develop what you now call the Internet for >60 years. Independent journalists like George Seldes and I.F. Stone used to do a great job, and we were looking forward to the great day when a lone journalist could publish a newsletter without printing and postage costs. It's been good and bad.
The most obvious flaw that I notice in blogs is that most of them -- but not all -- don't check their facts. It's a big game of telephone. Some blogger cuts and pastes a paragraph from another blog, which came from another blog ... which came from the New York Times. I can read the NYT myself. If you want to add value to that story, you can check the NYT's facts, and in my experience, you have a pretty good chance of finding them wrong. Make a fucking phone call to the original source and see if the NYT got it right. Or check out a different source. If you want a lesson in journalism, examine their health care reform coverage.
It's like replicating DNA. A bunch of enzymes copies a stand of DNA, and then another bunch of enzymes checks the duplicated strand to make sure it's copied right. If you don't have error-checking enzymes, you wind up with (sometimes disastrous) mistakes.
There are a lot of blogs that are written by people who have such a good command of the facts, have such expertise, that they're not likely to make mistakes -- they've already checked out the facts, for their academic work or their books, like Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
But most journalists aren't experts. They have to check their facts with the experts. That's the game. No matter how smart I am, I interview and quote somebody who knows more than me.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
A blogger who does nothing more than copy a story from a major news source like the NYT, or, even worse, from a blogger who wouldn't meet the reliable source standards of Wikipedia, is just adding noise, not useful information.
If you want to add useful information to the Internet, you're not going to find it on the Internet, obviously. Call up an expert and get some new information. And then call up an expert who disagrees with him, to make sure he hasn't given you a sales job.
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Blog Marketting Feed @ Feed Distiller
That's why I only trust Slashdot to bring me tech journalism of the highest integrity.
This guy's the limit!
Information distribution is in a gray area now between the past, when reputation came top-down from the creation of large distribution organizations as surrogates for reputation to the new model, (which still does not work well) where reputation comes bottom-up, from various sources and from group interaction. After this issue gets a lot worse, people will start using peer-weighted reputation as a filter before who they believe, but that shift will take a generation to really take hold widely.
News orgs and blogger sites are often rated on how long they take to break a story. Instead of focusing on the content, they are focused on getting the latest infonugget out to as many eyeballs as possible. That just seems wrong. The old adage about "it's easier to print a bogus story now and a correction later than wait for confirmation" applies more and more to the news media.
Yahoo, always a favorite punching bag, got roasted over the Iranian story and it turns out to be FALSE? Outrageous. What can they do? Sue some blog site? Go after people spreading the bogus story? They would end up throwing good money away chasing ghosts.
This isn't the first time either. There are bogus press releases announcing a new product or detrimental story about a company. The company's stock tanks...then someone does some basic research behind the PR to discover that it is 100% bogus.
If we can't trust the newsmedia to deliver facts, who can we trust? Joe Blogger?
is why bloggers are not journalists.
Your blog is a bunch of unsubstantiated personal opinions peppered with horrible grammar and spelling. So yes, it's just a typical blog after all, a complete waste of time.
I've been a journalist since 1978, and the most important thing I learned was to go back to the source and check my facts. Most bloggers don't check their facts. But don't feel bad. A lot of New York Times reporters don't check their facts either.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen. If a blogger does his research, names his sources, and stays honest, he's a journalist just as much as an employee of a major metropolitan newspaper.
We just need a few bloggers to gain respectability through sustained effort.
You can't take the sky from me...
Oh the irony. Slashdot posts a story about bloggers not checking their stories and says:
"This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"
It looks like you didn't check your reference, like the bloggers you accuse.
It seems that the original quote was by British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, not Winston Churchill, and he said "boots" not "pants".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3288907.stm
In the UK "pants" means "underwear" and not "trousers" as in the USA. Was Callaghan taking a quote from Churchill talking about underwear? I don't know. I'd welcome further reference hunting....
You forgot all of Fox news. And maybe Robert Novak.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Here is a recent example; the 128-bit Windows troll by Barry Collins at PC Pro.
There has never been a "Robert Morgan" working at Microsoft Research. The Google cache version of the LinkedIn profile cited in the article states that he attended "Glendale University." A modicum of effort researching this will reveal that Glendale University is an unaccredited online degree supplier that sells you a "degree" for "what you already know."
In other words, that 128-bit Windows story was a complete and total troll. Anybody who even attempted to do any fact-checking would have discovered this within 30 seconds. I still don't see an admission of error and an apology from the PC Pro or the Slashdot editors appended to the article.
A quick intertubes search reveals this quote is well over 150 years old and is really more of a proverb than a quote.
But yeah, the OP did abuse is pretty badly.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
Don't forget the Columbia Review of Journalism, http://www.cjr.org/
Yes, but that requires work and thinking, and no one wants to do either of those anymore. Too little time anyway what with the kid's soccer practice and music lessons, and getting some time in at the gym and don't forget those new sitcoms on tv, after putting in a 50-60 hour work week. We're a nation of people who can't form a thought deeper than a two minute soundbite and you expect them to actually do research and weigh facts and report in a blog both sides of an issue? Good luck with that.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
The most important thing any journalist can do is declare the source of the article, i.e. identify that it is from an eye-witness, or a source article (by name or link) so interested people can go back to the source if the writer is not the originator of the "fact". This would really flatten out the delivery tree because any journalist could then go back to the first textual copy of the story and short out all of the bad bits that were added in between.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
A blog is an online diary. The author alone is responsible for its content. Blogging per definition doesn't involve any editorial process outside the author-recipients channel. And the feedback bloggers get from their readers in near realtime is potentially more valuable than the feedback they would get from some editor, but of course they are free to block or ignore it.
The mistake lies in confusing blogs with journalism, or with some company's misnomer for articles they publish online.
And this is why the print will never die. Hooray for editors!
right...
I was talking about the NBA, not blacks. While there might have been a majority of blacks in the NBA (I don't know, I don't follow basketball) I really don't care if the players had black or pink and blue candy striped skin. The behavior was there. Maybe in sports in general but I first saw it in the NBA. I think you're dead on about the corporate sales push though. A colleague told me the NBA once designated a convicted spouse abuser as the MVP. If that's true I rest my case. You're right about the rewards system, but why is the public uptake there? Because there, I'm right.
What idiot reads ZD FUD and thinks it's real? You may as well believe Fox News.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
"Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)"
Wasn't it actually Hannibal Lecter who said that?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
When getting it first is more important than getting it right.
RLH
A journalist's favorite site is a hardcore lefty news organization. Nice. And how dare you impugn the honor of the New York Times, all their stories are fact-checked. At least, that's what I was angrily told last time I dared to question the veracity of the Grey Lady on slashdot.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
two minute soundbite
140 characters, the triumph of humanity
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example, but just one of many - and they can tell where and how the blessed New York Times got it wrong (which is pretty much always, on any subject of even moderate complexity) without having to call anyone.
They are your fact checkers.
Levitt Institute, Hungry Beast.
http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/09/hungry-beast-pranks-7pm-project-and-a-few-others-too.html
It seems that if you are involved in, or know a great deal about, any topic published in the newspaper, it's obvious to you just how badly the newspaper got it wrong.
Now, imagine about things you aren't involved in or know about. Yeah.
Those documents were never proven to be forgeries, and they were vetted by CBS, for content. If those memos were faked, they faked the truth. This is nothing more than another pathetic argument of convenience from Republicans, who invent a standard that applies to one person they don't like at one time (like Gore's taking credit for his role in creating the Internet) but never apply to anyone else.
Like you know, all the media sources that xeroxed the Bush Administration's claims of WMD's and ties between Iraq and Al Queda.
This was already picked apart. The authors did not control for the risk faced by the gun owners. People are more likely to be armed if they are likely to be attacked. http://reason.com/blog/2009/10/05/why-skydivers-would-be-better
What you fail to grasp is that bloggers aren't mere journalists, they very often are experts in a particular field - ScienceBlogs being a good example
I thought I pointed that out. I gave the examples of Juan Cole and Glen Greenwald.
Blogs by experts are fine. I'm just defining the role of a journalist -- someone who isn't necessarily an expert on the subject at hand but knows how to round up experts.
Doctor A is an expert who believes in treating a disease with surgery. Doctor B is an expert who believes in treating a disease with medication. My job as a journalist is to get Dr. A to explain why he believes in surgery, get Dr. B. to explain why he believes in medication, and get each of them to explain why they disagree with the other guy. In my story I can wind up with a broader perspective than you might get from a blog by Dr. A or Dr. B.
Take prostate cancer. Some doctors believe you should operate routinely (which leaves the patient impotent about half the time). Other doctors (especially in Europe) believe it's rational to do without surgery in a large percentage of cases. I've written a lot of stories lining up the arguments for both positions and trying to lay it out in a way that helps you figure out who's right.
If a blogger is going to give the arguments on all sides, then he's doing what a journalist does (or a good scientist), and more power to him. Conversely, the journalists in the news sections of journals like Science, Nature, etc. usually have some expertise of their own. Some of the journalists who write for the New York Times have MDs or PhDs.
And there you have it. The only difference between a blogger and a journalist is the organization backing up the latter.
Journals, or dailies if you will, are nothing more than web logs. They have no more moral value, inherent, by virtue of being printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.
A blogger is just as entitled to a police press pass and the protection of the First Amendment as a reporter from a metropolitan newspaper, but I've done both and there are a hell of a lot of advantages to working for a news organization. If I'm writing a biotechnology story, I could walk down the hall and talk to somebody who understood finance.
The major newspapers, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Joural (pre-Murdoch, anyway) are able to let a reporter take six months off for intensive investigation of an important story -- like those New York Times stories that traced contaminated drugs like heparin from the U.S. back to China. An independent blogger can do great stuff, but how many bloggers can fly to China to see first-hand how they make heparin there, if that's where the story leads?
And don't forget the legal department in case you get sued for libel.
I thought those were counter-examples. If you're presenting Cole and Greenwald examples of the sort of fact-checking you're after, then journalism's problems run much deeper than you think.
But that's just a false perspective taught to you in journalism school. There are always (at least) two sides to the story, but much of the time, one of those sides is dead wrong. When you're discussing evolution, you don't need to talk to an intelligent design proponent. When you're discussing medicine, you don't need to talk to chiropractors or homeopaths. When you're discussing vaccination, you don't need to talk to Jenny McCarthy.
Dr A and Dr B might both have valid points of view. But they can present their points of view themselves. We don't need a journalist to intermediate and get all the facts wrong on both sides.
We do need reporters, still. Journalists, not so much.
And it has also been leading to (or becoming a ruse for) wars.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
I just checked http://scienceblogs.com/ and picked a story in a field that I follow. I will be forever grateful to Ed Yong for comparing wrapped DNA to dried raman noodles http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/10/what_is_the_difference_between_the_human_genome_and_a_pair_of.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
However, Yong is a science writer and journalist, not a scientist. He writes for New Scientist and Nature. He got his story by interviewing the Harvard researcher (rather than from the BBC report). My point is, that's what bloggers, journalists, reporters, anybody should do if they want to produce useful science information.
There's a process in science for finding the truth (which is a good model of the process of finding the truth in other disciplines). The process is not to get a really smart guy who can tell you the truth. The process (as Feynmann described it) is to take an idea, examine it skeptically, have people from diverse viewpoints challenge it, and see how well the idea holds up. Science journalism follows and facilitates that process. It doesn't matter to me whether you do it on a blog, a daily metropolitan newspaper, or the news section of Nature.
People who don't understand and don't follow this process are not going to write useful blogs.
To return to my original point, if you want to contribute information to the Internet rather than noise, one of the important steps is to check your facts. It sounds trivial but many bloggers (like TFA for this Slashdot story) don't understand this.
my problem with you 'everything is statism' guys is that you sat on your hands doing nothing from 2000-2008, while --your party-- destroyed the writ of habeas corpus, the geneva convention, the FISA courts, the 4th amendment, and every other law that has been passed that has been supposed to protect citizens from government. thats the whole definition of 'liberalism', in its original form. not 'big taxes', but 'protection against an over-powerful state'.
why do you love the 2nd amendment but throw the others out the window? where have you been for 8 years?
We had a local TV reporter in Phoenix show up at a polling place for one of the "lessor" elections, meaning no presidential or shiny local initiatives.
He was live on the local news expressing his shock that there were almost no people there to vote.
I had a good laugh about it, because I'd been wondering why for weeks prior there were no news stories about the election.
In Phoenix, the news is all crime all the time, and we get little to nothing from the major local media, because news with substance doesn't put butts on the couch.
Don't put all the blame on journalists, like government, we get the media we deserve.
The "traditional" news agencies get just as little editorial oversight, these days.
+++OK ATH