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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.'"
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. 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
Yes, it's a bullshit job. Then again, so is being a programmer, lawyer, salesman, investment banker, teacher.... Everybody thinks every other profession is less valuable than their own.
Not all journalism is good, just like not all programmers are good. But journalism is not a bullshit job. There are some bad ones out there, but the very idea of journalism is reporting, not interpreting, and that is an extremely valuable service. If you would like your information thoroughly researched and verified experimentally then good luck trying to negotiate the real fast-paced world where getting the latest information has strategic value.
This is not a defense of sloppy reporting or for not verifying sources and facts, it's mostly a rebuttal to an incredibly broad and useless generalization about the profession of journalism.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
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
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.
That's why I only trust Slashdot to bring me tech journalism of the highest integrity.
This guy's the limit!
peer-weighted reputation...
Peer-weighted reputation, like "web of trust" systems, won't work if the "peers" are anonymous. Otherwise, we get link farms and similar forms of bulk spamming.
Even without anonymity, imagine Rush's "dittoheads" as a source of authority for news.
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