On transparency: part 1
I’ve been mum for the past week because I’ve been working through some thoughts on transparency that have been threatening to turn into one spiraling, omnibus post. But I think these thoughts might cohere better if I break them up. So here’s a start:
Assumption: Whatever the information ecosystem of the future looks like, it will involve more people taking more responsibility for producing and filtering their own media.
Consequently, let’s posit that these folks might benefit from knowing some of the better techniques journalists have refined for evaluating and presenting information. Let’s also suppose that this knowledge is not already widespread, largely because we’ve muddied it up with a lot of pointless conventions that obscure some of the best components of the journalistic process.1
What I’m getting at is the notion that journalists are acquiring a growing responsibility to let our communities in on how we do our work, for reasons that have little to do with the transparency battles of yesteryear. Increasingly, transparency is an instrument not just for enhancing the credibility of our journalism, but especially for informing an audience that might want to extend or repeat or improve it.
One of the least-remarked-upon aspects of the best journalistic blogging is how much it demystifies the process of journalism. The work that earned Josh Marshall and company a Polk Award seems so humble and accessible in retrospect. Follow the dots the TPM crew connects as they start to unearth the extent of the story, and you might just begin to believe you could do something like this yourself. The very tone of the coverage invites participation. From 1/15/07:
Strange days? Less than a week after news broke that the Bush administration has forced the resignation of San Diego U.S. attorney Carole Lam, we learn that it has done the same to Daniel Bogden, U.S. attorney for Nevada.
According to today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, no one seems to know why he’s been asked to leave before his term expires in 2008. As in Lam’s ouster, there appear to be no charges of wrongdoing against Bogden.
There’s a question mark here. There’s an implied mystery — “no one seems to know.” The blogger has told us why the story piques his curiosity, what he knows and where he learned it, and what he hopes to find out next. Meanwhile, his fellow muckrakers — in the best muckrakish tradition — are breathlessly promising “More soon!”2
Notice that transparency doesn’t obfuscate narrative here, it facilitates it. The way the TPM reporters frame
their work makes you want to know what happens next. In the past, we’ve envisioned transparency as a cumbersome add-on to the reporting and storytelling process (e.g. a “How we reported the story” sidebar). Bloggers have shown that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Contrast the TPM blogging with the first New York Times story to hint at the scandal, published five days after Josh Marshall’s muckrakers started to smell a rat. That story is a black box, arriving as a seamless package of factory-assembled facts, with no history or future.
My hunch is that journalists will do ourselves and our societies a favor by building on the approach demonstrated by TPM and other bloggers inside and outside of Big Media. If we do our part to spread knowledge about how we acquire and evaluate information, we make it likelier that our audiences will consider that knowledge as they do the same. Exposing our methods in a more open fashion might allow them to be criticized, but who’s to say those critiques won’t help us improve those methods?
For these reasons and others, I intend to ask the reporters working on the prototype to blog their progress as they gather and filter information for the site. Of course, the blog will also be a forum (not the only one, I think) for the community of people deeply interested in the topics we’ll be covering.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect that just because we blog transparently, folks will magically start turning into journalistic savants right and left. But I do think it’s an important piece of how journalism should change. More (!) on this forthcoming.
- Like, for example, our unwillingness to use the first person, which produces a stilted, distancing prose in its best moments, and actually misleads or confuses in its worst. Or our insistence on he-said/she-said journalism, which continues to be a significant black mark on our coverage of some of the most important issues of our era, such as climate change. Or our recent nonsensical contention that good journalism was somehow antithetical to blogging, which means moments like this just serve us right. We’ve expended so much energy upholding such superficial conventions as being somehow useful for evaluating what constitutes authentic journalism, that we’re shocked to discover how easily those conventions are aped and our public deceived. [↩]
- Marshall has a practical reason for this approach: his brand of reporting relies on audience participation. If the Talking Points Memo community wasn’t tipping him off to reports of attorneys being dismissed across the country, it would have been much more difficult for him to piece the story together. [↩]
Related posts:
- In search of great questions Earlier this year, I posted that I wanted to see...
- On transparency: part 2 I was all set to jump in and make some...
- On transparency: part 3 Or, How Wikipedia talk pages are like newsrooms. As Newsmaven’s...
- On transparency: part 4 All right, this is it for the transparency series for...
Another great example is the best new political blog of the past four years, FiveThirtyEight.com. I don’t think another site has done a better job of showing readers how to process data — which polls have odd configurations, which have poor records, which have house effects, which have (yes) problems with transparency.
The lessons seem to be:
1) Blog your own process;
2) Be willing to criticize other media sources (and have arguments to back it up);
3) Trust your readers.
In particular, I keep coming back to this idea from a now-defunct digital humanities site I read a while back: give your users the tools to visualize their own data. I would add: extend those tools to help them understand others’.
This works both ways. Throwing open the gates to let anyone and everyone talk and comment turns out to be much less potent than creating meaningful structures for people to act and interact with information, whether it’s news, digital archives, or their own photographs.
If this phrase “meaningful structures” seems impossibly vague, that’s because what that is still pretty wide-open. Blogs are one kind of meaningful structure; social networks are another; Wikipedia is a third.
I would add; our inherited model of the newspaper is another, and a very powerful one.
Tim
21 Oct 08 at 6:26 pm
I think you make a very valid point about including the public in the process. One point of contention (and as a relatively new reader to your site, perhaps you have addressed this - if so I apologize) I offer is that while TPM was ahead of the Times in the US Attorney situation, these instances may be the exception rather than the rule.
So what happens when a blogger/journalist, in the interest of transparency, and in an effort to include the reader, jumps the gun with a hunch BEFORE all the facts are in? In the TPM case there were unethical political motivations for the dismissals and it was brought the proper attention. But if it is a matter of too much speculation too soon, who becomes responsible for any individuals harmed if it becomes clear that the situation is on the level.
Isn’t the role of journalist to process whatever doubts they have about a situation internally, gather more information, and then report the story? I am just afraid that the more and more a hunch or speculation is disproved (and inevitably, won’t more of these be refuted than not) the credibility you seek will be lost, the public will lose interest, and the journalistic process will be diluted as more and more websites post unsubstantiated hunches in the interest of being the first to break a story (presently, a big enough problem as it is).
I do agree with you that there is a compelling narrative to how the journalist processes a story, but I still think the process needs to fully occur before revealing those steps.
R.S.
21 Oct 08 at 6:58 pm
R.S., I think, sees the “story” as the story — it gets researched, written, edited and published fully formed, and until then has to stay under wraps. That might be necessary occasionally, but not for most stories.
As Matt has written about previously, in today’s “information ecosystem” (I like that), facts, not stories are the basic building blocks. In this model where facts are added to event and issue topic pages which are continually augmented, corrected and edited in a wikipedia-like database, there is no single point where the “story” is finished and published, so you can’t define a point where the process is ready to be revealed. The process is open, and part of the ongoing story.
The discussion pages that lie behind every Wikipedia entry, or their equivalent, will provide the transparency and allow both news gatherers and consumers to discuss the process and especially to question accuracy, methodology, relevancy, fairness, etc. in such a way that the “story” itself can be rewritten and improved in real time as events unfold (while maintaining a transparent record of those changes in the “history” page of the wiki).
Newsmaven
22 Oct 08 at 8:05 am
I like the way Andrew Sullivan formulated his experience under Michael Kinsley in this talk with Marc Ambinder. Apparently Kinsley would cut articles halfway or three-quarters down — whether it was a “natural” place to finish or not — because he was bored. Unfinished* journalism has more energy, a stronger futurity.
As for the worry about jumping to conclusions, it’s worth noting that in the early stages of reporting the attorney scandal, TPM didn’t say, “clearly there’s a political scandal of monumentous proportions at work, orchestrated by Karl Rove as part of a widespread attempt to legitimate charges of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democratic voters and win elections.” They reported the facts as known — with the full story incomplete and unfinished — plus a question mark.
What one could argue is that because of the high profile of the Washington Post or the New York Times, reporters can’t really tip their hands without getting serious pushback and starting the wagons circling. Woodward and Bernstein had to find Deep Throat because people stopped talking to them. Blogs can continue to gather information, send out feelers, and work sources without (as of now) generating the same kind of response. Obviously, this is story-dependent, but it is worth considering.
* Unfinished doesn’t necessarily mean incomplete. It can also mean a pair of pants whose cuffs haven’t been tailored yet.
Tim
22 Oct 08 at 8:23 am
[...] was all set to jump in and make some points in the comments to yesterday’s post, but you guys covered all the points I would have made, and set me up for another couple of posts [...]
On transparency: part 2 at Newsless.org
22 Oct 08 at 9:50 pm
[...] Newsmaven’s recent comments reminded me, I’m convinced nothing captures the dynamic of a newsroom dialogue about a [...]
On transparency: part 3 at Newsless.org
23 Oct 08 at 4:55 pm
[...] other day, Newsmaven made another point worth repeating. In the context of an ongoing story, transparency takes on a new significance: In [...]
On transparency: part 4 at Newsless.org
24 Oct 08 at 11:45 am