Brendan R. Watson

I am speaking to the Maryland-District of Columbia Scholastic Press Association tomorrow (hence some content I am adding to the site for demonstration purposes). I created this introduction of myself and got some help from cool help from Seesmic illustrating the power of social media. A former staffer for the BBC online weighs in on important lesson for high school journalists.

High School Journalism OnlineI am speaking to the Maryland-District of Columbia Scholastic Press Association, Oct. 31. I am demonstrating Seesmic, as well as other tools for easily creating a dynamic web presence online. What should high school journalists know about producing digital news?

I am not sure that structure is synonymous with additional hoop-jumping. But this notion of ’structuring comments’ got me thinking about what that means.

Currently, comments are largely a blank slate, which the reader can fill with whatever crosses their mind. And based on my experience moderating comments, readers minds are pretty sick and twisted (or just filled with a lot of dribble). But what happens if readers are given more structure? And what kind of structure do they need?

I am thinking of structure more in terms of a specific task than more data, though I agree with the Northwestern students that less anonymity for commenters results in better behavior. When you ask readers to send pictures of their children’s halloween costumes, you almost never get people sending you porn. I think this dribble is pretty inconsequential and that newspapers need to get out of the cute puppy photo business if they’re serious about journalism (and I don’t think that’s a given these days).

But this idea of giving your reader a structured task could be used for more productive ends. A great example of this is a site in the UK called FixMyStreet. Users can upload reports of nuisance problems in their neighborhood and the site sends the reports directly to the town council on the user’s behalf. The site reports a respectable degree of success getting problems resolved, but not always. And there’s nothing newspapers like more than reporting on an ineffective, non-responsive government. A project like this would be a prefect fit for newspapers’ reporting missions (unlike cute puppy photos).

The fundamental role of journalists is to help make the public well-informed, active participants in a democracy.

The contemporary media landscape makes this goal difficult, if not impossible, particularly given our existing journalism models. Information overload drowns out much of the significant work journalists do, not to mention the infotainment, merely a marketing gimmick to compete for an increasingly fragmented audience, which makes up much of the day’s “news.” Overwhelmed by a deluge of information, much of the public simply tunes it out, or pays attention very selectively, picking from the media that adds clarity.

The great irony of the Internet is that despite being a repository for an amazing wealth of knowledge, it has largely acted to reinforce and amplify individuals’ existing beliefs, allowing the audience to seek out opinions that confirm theirs. That’s partly why the electorate is currently so polarized. The unprecedented around-the-clock political coverage hasn’t resulted in more informed voters, but has deepened existing biases, reinforcing voters’ ignorance.

What is needed is a fundamental shift in journalists’ biases, away from reporting on what is new, even when it is not significant. This existing bias only adds to the information overload. The more we bury the audience with information, the more they have to dedicate cognitive resources towards to the search process. These finite resources are draw away from processing information.

What journalists need to do is redefine the gatekeeper role — perhaps we see this role as a guide or a reference librarian on steroids. Instead of primarily creating new information, the journalists’ primary mission becomes helping the audience to aggregate and analyze information. What form this is communicated to the public is unknown, but the hyperlinked world of the Internet makes it infinitely easier to aggregate and illustrate connections between sources.

This new emphasis doesn’t eliminate reporting. Reporting remains an essential element of gathering sources and analyzing information, and remains critical particularly in areas of investigative journalism. Establishing expertise in a given area/beat is also critical to meaningful aggregation. But there is little information that the journalist has that is new, that isn’t accessible to the public elsewhere. Thus, the primary role of the journalist becomes acting as a filter/editor/analyst of existing data. Some editor-driven aggregation sites like The Daily Beast and to an extent the Huffington Post are already leaning in this direction.

However, I would argue about these sites, if their primary goal is to inform, they should eliminate all non-moderated content. Much of what passes as “citizen journalism,” and especially reader comments, doesn’t contribute anything beyond simply creating more information — frequently inaccurate — for the audience to sift through. Philosophically, I think it is important to incorporate feedback from the audience. But you don’t have to blow down the gate to let the audience in. Really, all forms of journalism need to be reassessed: Do they communicate meaningful information, or are they simply acting to add to the noise?

The goal of the researcher in helping to define this new model of journalism is not to start with biases of traditional journalistic forms, which result from imagining the research question from the perspective of the media. But rather is to approach media from the perspective of the audience, understanding their cognitive processes and information needs in order to suggest an effective and sustainable journalistic model.

Even though I know there are many community weeklies that exist in this manner, I tend to be dismissive of — even laugh at — such jack-of-all-trades job postings (my college newspaper was more sophisticated than this).

“Plan publications, focus and coverage. Cover community events; conduct interviews and take photographs; write and edit stories. Maintain rapport and active exchanges with residents, schools and government. Layout and paginate newspaper. Supervise Sports Editor and Reporter.”

Sadly, though, I can also imagine a time when almost all newspaper jobs are like this, though I hold out hope that the decline of newspapers does not spell the decline of journalism, while knowing that there is going to continue to be a painful transition period.

The question has become: Has the drum-beat of fact-checks blended into white noise, letting significant misstatements and deceptions get lost in the mix? More from Politico

In some ways Paul Farhi’s essay isn’t even worth responding to. He says, “Newspapers are in trouble for reasons that have almost nothing to do with newspaper journalism, and everything to do with the newspaper business.” I find that position completely incomprehensible and indefensible.

True, the newspaper business model is in a state of crisis, but study after study shows that journalism is, as well. Surely, your local newspaper — and even the Washington Post — is not filled with the high-minded analysis and investigative work with with Farhi likes to associate himself with.

Rather, journalists — not business executives — are pursuing an extremely self-destructive editorial strategy. Thomas E. Patterson explains in his 2000 research paper that the journalism decisions newspapers are making are “shrinking the news audience and weakening democracy.” This is not a business-side problem, but reflects poor editorial judgement, which is only being accelerated by a misguided short-term strategy to pursue online page views at any cost, driven as much by editorial as business executives.

There’s lots of research out there — Patterson’s is a good start — that can help one understand the role of (bad) editorial decision-making in this crisis. This is if you want to do something about the crisis rather than just wash your hands of it.

Jeff Jarvis also tackles this subject in his own overstated, pundit-like manner.

In her article “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual” Gaye Tuchman discusses journalistic ‘objectivity’ as a ritual, a “routine procedure which has relatively little or only tangential relevance to the end sought” (661). Presumably, that end sought is the truth. But if it were, why is there such a perliferation of “fact-checking” websites in this election cycle, some which are run by journalism organizations who presumably are presenting truthful accounts of the campaigns through their reporting?

That’s because the right-wing has mounted an extremely successful campaign against the ‘liberal media elite,’ so much so that more than ever journalists are falling over themselves to be “objective.” This doesn’t mean truthful, but rather means giving equal weight to both sides of the debate with “little or only tangential relevance” to the truth. Thus, the rise of the truth seeking website to take it’s place, often using different reporters to be arbiters of the truth, a different vehicle and format to publish its conclusions, insulating the reporters from charges that they too are part of the ‘media elite.’

The journalism organizations invested in this outside enterprise are also careful to pick relatively non-controversial “facts” (“1.3-million people in America make their living off eBay”) and almost always use half-rulings (mostly true, half true, barely true) to hedge their bets and cushion their blows. What I would be curious to study, is that after one of this journalism organizations does rule on a fact, does that conclusion make its way into its traditional reporting, or are readers still left with a safe “he said/she said account”?

Regardless, I think journalism organizations would be far better served to focus on truthful reporting throughout their enterprise than to focus on these mostly separate factual enterprises. Even as a frequent consumer of allegedly serious political reporting, I’ve been left with little factual information to base my vote on, being left instead as have most voters to mainly base their vote on party affiliation and whether or not one “likes” a candidate, eroding the usefulness of political journalism in our civic lives.

According to a New York Times report on a false CNN iReport:

Apple’s shares abruptly declined as much as 5.4 percent after the post on iReport, CNN’s citizen journalist Web site, stated that Mr. Jobs had had a “major heart attack.”

…Apple immediately said that the rumor was false.

Don’t let citizens publish directly to the web. There, I said it. Input from the public is an important part of the future of news, but there must be human filters to make sure that the information that they contribute is in good faith and meaningful. Otherwise, they’re just contributing to the noise, and in this age journalists’ aim should be a filter of that noise, not contribute to it.

In the latest issue of the American Journalism Review, Philip Meyer, gives perhaps the most eloquent, if not persuasive, view of newspaper’s future. An absolute must read!

The highlights:

Robert Picard, a media economist who looks at newspapers from an international perspective, believes that they try to do too much. He expressed this view in June at the Carnegie-Knight Task Force conference on the Future of Journalism at Harvard University. Newspapers “keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner,” he said. “This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper.”

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If they should peel back to some core function, newspapers would still have to worry about the Internet and its unbeatable capacity for narrowcasting. The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.

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Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.