Slashdot Mirror
Chicago Tribune Stops the Journatic Presses
theodp writes "In April, the Chicago Tribune touted its investment in and use of news outsourcer Journatic. 'We're excited to partner with Journatic, both as an investor and as a customer,' said Dan Kazan, the Trib's Sr. VP of Investments. 'Journatic will expand Tribune's ability to deliver relevant hyperlocal content to our readers, and we believe that many other publishers and advertisers will benefit from its services as well.' That was then. In a Friday-the-13th letter to readers, the Tribune announced a plagiarized and fabricated story has prompted the paper to suspend its relationship with Journatic. The move comes two weeks after Journatic's standards and practices were called into question by This American Life, which noted several Journatic-produced stories had appeared this year on TribLocal online with false bylines. Explaining why he went public about his experience at Journatic, reporter Ryan Smith said he felt 'people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out.'"
Journatic: Go with us and you can fire all those expensive reporters on the ground and we'll replace them with cheap freelancers for next-to-nothing! And you won't take any hit in quality, honest. Hey...would we lie to you, pal?
Chicago Tribune: Yay, sounds great! We like money. And words are hard, 'specially the long ones.
Journatic: While we're at it, just between us, we also have some prime Florida real estate we can let you have for a steal...
Chicago Tribune: Yay, more money!!!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
For some reason there was no link to the original source that kinda got the scoop. So here's the link to 'Switcheroo' which is This American Life's episode that covered this. It's free to stream, you can click the third link to Act II just to hear the coverage of this thing. I listened to it on the radio when it aired and sent it around as I found it really interesting (also a follow up here). There's a funny part where Ryan Smith is revealing everything about Journatic and he makes a comment about how it's not what journalism is supposed to be and Sarah Koenig says, "You are so fired. You realize that, right?" And then there's this odd pause and he says "Yeah, I am I guess. I'm okay with that." Another great part of that clip is when the owner of Journatic (CEO Brian Timpone) comes on and openly talks about it and defends his company (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion). But hats off to him, he is a huge fan of TAL and so instead of giving one of those canned "could not be reached for comment" they got a real person arguing for his business venture. He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.
My work here is dung.
I highly recommend review of the This American Life Episode referenced in TFA.
Although broadcast only a few weeks ago, I'm not sure when TAL recorded the interview. That said, the enthusiasm of the company's CEO was striking given the strong line of questioning posed by the This American Life Interviewer. I would imagine the interview was fairly recent.
Although conceding that the stories sometimes lacked full detail on the things going on on the community being covered, with base material consisting often of only a quick phone interview to get a quote and a press release to provide the story -- Journastic CEO Brian Timpone did clalim a degree of passion for enabling some form of coverage for stories that may simply go unreported on.
This kind of enthusiasm for idealistic coverage of Norman Rockwell's Small Town America really files in the face of the general approach of the company to the job at hand -- which included a policy to use falsified (read: made-up) by-lines. That is to say, the off-shore reporters writing the stories for Journastic and then syndicated to newspapers like the Chicago Tribune had a field in the story submission setting for a name to associated with the story. Amazing.
News has been outsourced for years. Read a newspaper and see for yourselves how many stories are AP, Reuters, AFP or syndicated from the NYT, WA Post or LAT. This trend was evident in the early nineties to anyone paying attention to the papers they read. It was not unusual for the front section of the SF dailies to be mostly wire service content and advertising. The net didn't kill the newspaper industry, they were busy digging their own grave before the net became popular. The net just helped them fall into the hole they dug.
Seems either pointless, boring, or hyper-gossipy.
Hows that different from non-Hyperlocal newspapers?
Hyperlocal spam might be more interesting than non-hyperlocal spam. There's a Cabella's around 50 miles away, and I get spam for it, that spam is useless to me. Hyperlocal spam would be my neighborhood Gander Mountain, there's at least theoretically a chance I'd find that useful.
I'm not sure what the point is of a newspaper in 2012. My young son asked me about newspapers, and I explained it as "A tiny little part of the internet, printed out yesterday, and delivered to your house". He's completely uninterested. Everyone in my generation knows we're supposed to feel newspapers are important, maybe a sense of guilt at not subscribing. Rather like the donation campaigns for the Ballet at work, no one wants to go but we've all been socialized to believe its important. However, newspapers are so far off the modern cultural radar, that my kids don't even get the point. They're simply doomed. You know you're in big trouble when the conversation switches from "you're no longer relevant" to "what are you?"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Does that mean "what's happening in this group of 5 houses in this cul-de-sac"?
No, it's hyper-local in the journalistic sense, covering news that individuals will find relevant, but which historically the print media which covered that area would have found too localized to bother spending the money for someone to cover it.
The example in the This American Life episode which originally talked about these guys is a town hall meeting where new articles were up for debate. IIRC, the paper which covers that area is the Chicago Tribune, who normally doesn't have the resources to cover a small-town meeting like that. But the citizens of that town would find it as relevant (if not more so) as downtown folks would find a city hall meeting, which the Tribune would cover.
I think the core idea has merit, but I don't know how you can do it in a manner that assures quality.
An example from my own life that could benefit from a service like this - there's a new very high density housing subdivision going in behind where I live; there's a local meeting about it every few weeks (none of the local folks around here want it of course, but our township folks insist this is the only way they'll be able to pay for new roads - which of course are only needed because the township keeps approving huge new high density housing subdivisions). The township meetings are almost always held at a time which is incompatible with my schedule, so I can't attend these. I rely on my neighbors to tell me about it, but they're all so steamed up that their version of the events is usually vague and inconsistent. Having an actual journalist report on this would be really useful to me. It's too small-potatoes to attract a journalist though.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
But this isn't about the newspapers as a medium. It's about the content they publish.
Even if traditional newspapers migrate to the Internet they still have to offer a modicum of quality content to remain relevant. Let's not confuse the content issue with the medium of delivery issue, even if both are relevant.
Even in the Internet era you still need journalists to corelate and verify facts, to uncover hidden issues, to give stories the personal touch, and last but not least, to write with professional and even artistic command of the language. Sure, you can try to use machine-generated or outsourced content, but this story has shown exactly how insipid that kind of content is. This very story would have never been created by Journatic, it took a real journalist to write it.
It's cool that we're switching to a world where information doesn't flow only one way like it was with old TV, radio and newspapers... but it doesn't mean that we don't need oversight, validation and professionalism anymore.
I disagree. Newspapers are extremely important. Maybe not on "paper" but the news and information they can provide is amazingly important. This weekend I bought the local newspaper, on accident. It was in the news stand box of the bigger city's newspaper box. It had an excellent article describing the hardships of the local townships as they deal with increased costs of maintaining their roads, while not getting enough taxation dollars from the wind electric generators. The county, state, and schools get more than their fair share of funds all the while the township keeps the roads maintained and is spending more money than they take in. How does this get fixed? The state legislature set the rates and is now unreceptive to attempts to change the dissemination of tax funds. Local townships can't up their taxes in any fair way. Should they close those roads to the wind towers? (I think they should... force the issue and make those with the real $$$ make change happen.) Anyways I had never heard of this issue till Sunday while sitting there relaxing and reading the paper. It _is_ sitting on the front page of their website. However I have found the on paper medium of newspapers much more refined than their to date attempts on the web.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Newspapers are for people who can't get wifi in their toilet.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
Journalist here.
What you're missing is the strong definition of "cover". In that very example, IIRC, the Journatic stringer just rewrote an agenda for the meeting, published before the meeting. The report that got published did not reflect what actually happened at the meeting, had no context of whether citizens questioned, applauded, or rioted. The Journatic stringer did not contact anyone to get a second source.
Think if this model were replicated on a larger scale. "Official government press releases said that the Congress is functioning smoothly and all citizens are happy" or "Microsoft press releases stated that Office 2018 is a must-buy and everyone loves Windows."
Newspapers - also usually quite good at attribution...