Newsless.org

December 16, 2008:

I’m meeting with two grizzled editors at the Missourian who seem to eye me with a weariness borne of decades managing an endless semesterly churn of young reporters-in-training while trying to fill a daily news product. Because their newsroom is part of a university, I am among a similarly constant stream of folks who breeze through their offices promising to remake their business in the image of Google or Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia or whatever the kids are on about these days. So I try to exude humility and earnestness as I ask them the most stupidly broad question they’ve ever heard: “What should I know about growth and development in this town?”

After a moment of complicated blinking and throat-clearing (code, I figured, for “Is this dude serious?” “‘Fraid so.”), they begin to speak. What ensues is brilliant — an hour-and-a-half stream-of-consciousness firehose of names, infrastructure financing mechanisms, development projects, ballot initiatives, and the like. Picture a cinematization of the game SimCity scripted by David Foster Wallace and David Mamet, and you’ll sort of get it. I take furious notes, and leave the office to begin assembling what will become more than 800 pages of dossiers on what I just heard.

January 23, 2009:

I’m back at the Missourian newsroom after some scintillating holiday reading about storm-water runoff and transportation development districts.  I’m giving the editors a sort of book report, outlining what I see as the major themes and unresolved questions in a body of literature they were instrumental in creating. We have a thrillingly enlightening conversation. And then one of the editors says something extraordinary. Matt, he says (in paraphrase), I’m just wondering when you’re going to figure out how much about all this we don’t know.

* * *

Journalism has long been described as a sort of cartography. But in news, local news especially, we almost never actually draw a map. Instead, we furnish a daily series of notable waypoints: at this intersection, you’ll find company layoffs; go down that road a stretch and you’ll bump into some public corruption.

Between those two moments at the Missourian, we sketched out the rough contours of a world composed of two equally important hemispheres – what we know, and what we do not know. Part of my goal is to help chart in ever-greater detail the former terrain – capturing the accumulated wisdom of our editors and reporters, our mayor and councilpersons, our developers, our activists, our supermarket clerks, our postal workers, our opera singers. And what I hope becomes the goal of my profession is to dispatch that body of explorers into the hemisphere of the unknown, toward the infinite task of claiming land from the wilderness.

I was revisiting Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” the other night, a text credited with having presaged the Web. Reading it, I realized that Bush had also foreseen Wikipedia: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

Best of all, Bush provides an excellent description of the role of tomorrow’s journalist: “There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. That’s a mission statement I can believe in.

As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches a fever pitch, I’m dismayed how much of it continues in this ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy that I thought had ended with the ‘who’s a journalist’ wars. I’m still reading criticisms of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting, or reporters whose work doesn’t match their professed standards of objectivity. In my darker moments, I’ll confess to thinking sinister thoughts about cable news personalities who engorge the public with an endless stream of trivia.

As we confront what we’ve lost in the decades-long contraction of the newspaper industry, and as we begin to figure out what we needed but never had, we have to reframe this conversation in purely first-person terms. It’s our society that has to evolve a journalism ecosystem to meet its information needs. It’s a bit of a forehead-slapper to write this, but we’re all in this together, folks.

I thought about this as I read Paul Starr’s excellent report on the decline of the traditional press and Yochai Benkler’s equally excellent rebuttal. Starr’s story is peppered with a panoply of thems; each section invokes the familiar faceless hordes that have long lent authority to news accounts — “some observers,” “many journalists,” “some critics.” That trope has been the downfall of many a news story, given that it’s often used to set up either a straw man or a he-said-she-said moment. The most effective elements of Benkler’s response draw on his tendency to recast those moments with an “I,” “we” or “our.” As in, “I think we do not have good research to know whether this system is also working for local politics and potential corruption as well. This, as Starr shows, is an important area we need to study and understand.” That “we” is universal; it’s any of us. It suggests any citizen might (must!) play a role in understanding this gap.

If a central element of the undoing of the traditional press is unbundling — the diminishing power of jointly packaging advertising and news, the atomization of formerly coherent monopoly news products into info-snippets on blogs and aggregators — a central element of journalism’s renewal will be connection — our ability and responsibility to all play shifting, complementary roles in a potentially vast system of journalism.

Today I’ve seen plenty of variants on a remark about Jon Stewart’s evisceration of Jim Cramer: “Why didn’t a journalist do that?” Answer: Because the role Stewart played is no longer reserved for journalists, if it ever was. Any of us can unleash a devastating act of media criticism, as Stewart did, or re-tweet such an act where and when we find it.

In all the coverage I read about growth and development in Columbia, Mo., the most significant investigative package didn’t come from the Missourian or the Tribune. It was a pair of studies done by citizen activist and university professor Ben Londeree, conducted with all the rigor of an academic. Londeree sought an answer to the question of how much it cost Columbia to hook new developments up to water and sewer connections, roads, and other infrastructure, as compared with the fees the city exacts from developers for their projects. Working with an activist group called the Smart Growth Coalition, he surveyed 40 Midwestern cities (.doc) to get an average of similar costs and fees elsewhere, to see how Columbia stacked up. Then, he compiled a dizzying array of variables specific to Columbia to estimate a figure for the city. And he was transparent about his methodology:

Community websites were studied to obtain as much information as possible about these financing issues. Some websites either didn’t have the information needed for the survey or I was unable to locate it. The most difficult to pin down is the category of exactions for off-site infrastructure because these typically are negotiated at the time of annexation, rezoning, or plan approval.

After the website search, the data were e-mailed to each community’s CEO (mayor or city manager) to verify for accuracy and completeness. A second request was e-mailed to non-responders about four weeks later. Since many still did not reply, telephone calls were made to planning departments and public works departments with excellent cooperation. In several cases, these calls helped to identify additional fees charged by a separate entity such as the county, metropolitan districts, benefit districts, co-ops, and private utilities.

As it happened, Londeree’s studies got quite a bit of local press. The next few years would see the Smart Growth Coalition expand its profile in Columbia city government. Advocates of the coalition’s ideas have now won four out of seven seats on the City Council.

Maybe once upon a time a group of reporters would have beaten Londeree to the punch, or replicated and extended his work to give it that journalistic seal of approval. We’re not in that world anymore. Our society’s welfare will increasingly depend on citizens taking on work that ambitious, as members of non-profits, for-profits, universities, knitting clubs, and every other type of organization out there. And it will depend equally on our ability to evaluate the work not by who did it — not whether it was “us” or “them” — but by how it was done.

Ezra Klein blogged yesterday about what he calls “one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism,” riffing off this quote from the NYT’s Matt Bai:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Klein makes a wonderful point:

Obviously, that doesn’t make much sense. Matt Bai’s conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don’t tell themselves that they’re tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn’t have been important to them at all, and instead, they’d have been more interested in a new direction and something called “change.” What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they’ve been told about their vote than about why they’re voting the way they are.

But Bai’s piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize “talking to people about stuff” over “learning about stuff.” If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I’m “reporting.” So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I’m not “reporting.” I’m researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves “reporters,” none call themselves “researchers.”

If this democracy business is going to work out in the long run, all the “us”es of world are going to have to stop sorting people into “them”s and snorting at them. That goes double for journalists.

As this all shakes out, I am confident we will emerge with a corps of individuals who claim journalism as their livelihood. Some small segment will be Sy Hersh-ian muckrakers, rock stars and outliers, stalking through shadowy worlds to singlehandedly expose untold corruptions. But many of them will be Josh Marshalls, for whom investigative journalism could not be done without a thousand engaged citizens each doing a tiny piece of it, and ten thousand more ponying up ten dollars in support of it.

Just as newspapers have lost their monopolies on their audiences, journalists have lost a monopoly on journalism. The responsibility for gathering information and evaluating it has spread throughout the citizenry. We have to figure out how to make that work. All of us. I’m confident we will.

Corrections are high on the long list of broken elements on news websites.

If a news article you read is later corrected, chances are very good that you will never know. Most news orgs, including the New York Times, still run a daily list of corrections as an article, tucked somewhere deep inside the bowels of the site. On the Times site, it’s not easy to see previous corrections; the Star Tribune offers an unhelpful dump of links as its corrections section. Many organizations have at least advanced to the point where the correction is posted to the original article, but many haven’t even gotten that far.¹

Handling corrections is one more thing blogs do better than articles. Because blogs are linear over time, bloggers can insert a correction into the flow of posts, alerting their communities to prior mistakes. And instead of the typically opaque correction news organizations give, bloggers have developed a wonderful standard practice — preserving the original text but striking through it, so readers know exactly what changed.

Wikis have the potential to do even better. The public revision history is an astonishing feat of transparency, allowing you to view at any moment exactly how a page has changed since you last saw it.² Whenever you revisit a story on a news site, you should be able to see exactly how it’s evolved over time. While at MSNBC, Rex Sorgatz once mused about the terrific notion of placing a slider at the top of every news story that would allow each visitor to see the story’s gradual transformation. This sort of idea becomes even more valuable when the stories are intended to live indefinitely, updated as developments emerge.

We could do much more with corrections, of course. At a minimum, corrections should be databased. This shouldn’t be any more difficult than adding a correction field to each story in our CMS, instead of just writing our corrections into the body of the story itself. It would allow readers to search for corrections by date, section or author, rather than having to check the corrections page every day to see what’s been corrected recently.

We should also be much more proactive about getting corrections to readers. If you read something on our news site that has changed or been corrected since you last saw it, we should alert you of the change during your next visit to our site.³

About four years ago, I daydreamed about an independent, crowd-sourced corrections site that would allow anyone to post a correction or clarification to information contained at any URI. In some ways, with the ubiquity of browser plug-ins and the like, that type of thing would be easier today. I constantly wonder about the accuracy or completeness of information I come across (often on major media sites just as much as indie blogs). I can think of a hundred logistical reasons why such a resource could never work, but folks practicing journalism could do a lot to make it unnecessary.

A robust corrections policy should be part of the ethic of every site that purports to do journalism. We should do our absolute best not to get facts wrong, but when we inevitably do, we should do our absolute best to make sure our visitors know it.

1. Take this doozy of a correction: In a Jim Souhan column on Page C1 Tuesday, the Ottawa player who retaliated for a Cal Clutterbuck hit was misidentified and the biting incident involving Jarkko Ruutu [Ed. note: !!] was mischaracterized. Ottawa’s Chris Neil did not play in the Saturday night game, and Ruutu was suspended for two games in January for biting the thumb of Buffalo’s Andrew Peters. Not only would you never know the original article was corrected, I’m having trouble figuring out from the two articles what exactly did and didn’t happen. [↩]
2. Like many things on Wikipedia, a diff page — which shows the difference between any two revisions of an article — seems prohibitively technical to laypeople. [↩]
3. I recognize that this would be a complete turnaround from the current, shamefaced way we treat corrections. I’ve worked with respected longtime reporters who have fought tooth-and-nail to keep minor, unquestionable corrections — such as misspellings — out of the paper. [↩]

I’m often asked, “Do people really want context? Say you build out all these neat-o topic pages laying out the context behind the headlines. Do you really think anyone’s going to read that stuff?”

I say I don’t look at it as a matter of whether people want context, but when.

If you told me in July of 2007 that one of the hottest articles on StarTribune.com would be a detailed explanation of the workings of gusset plates and roller bearings in bridge engineering, I would have raised a very quizzical eyebrow. But when that bridge fell in August, gusset plates were the new Britney Spears.

Traffic to any given Wikipedia topic probably accrues over a long tail of time. Today, most folks probably have no interest in knowing about people who’ve had pies thrown at them. But chances are that over the years — probably in beer-friendly settings — a reasonable crowd of people will find themselves looking up that time Thomas Friedman dodged a pie at Brown University. Likewise, the Sarah Palin page that drew only a quiet, steady stream of interest for years suddenly lit up one day in August ‘08, for obvious reasons.

Road infrastructure financing isn’t a sexy topic. Headlines on bonds for road projects may languish unread while cute puppy photos get all the pageviews. But we’ll build and tend that road financing topic page anyway. And one day, when a bumpy ride or flattened tire has you wondering why your city has all these #$%@! potholes, we’ll be ready for you.

I’m not arguing that news organizations should create repositories of useless topics in the hope that one day some calamity will make those topics relevant. I’m saying journalists should ask themselves what’s most important for their communities to know, and cover it diligently. Not with the expectation that the coverage will draw an instant wave of traffic, but with the understanding that if it’s truly important, it will spark enough relevant news to draw a significant audience over time. And the more of that context we lay out, the more relevant we can be at any given moment. This is how we’ll begin to build relationships that matter with our communities.

By creating information assets, we make it likelier that our information will find our audiences when they want it. Consider the story of Jacqueline Dupree. One day, Jacqueline decided to start taking pictures of her a nearby neighborhood¹ to put on her website. She knew she wanted to document how the neighborhood was changing. Before long, the site had become a living history of an area in transition. Eventually, Jacqueline “reluctantly” found herself covering public meetings, publishing local data feeds, and generally creating a deeply comprehensive contextual record of the place.

Twenty months after Jacqueline began working on the site in earnest, the city announced it was building a stadium in the neighborhood. The site took off, and won a Batten Award for Innovation last year. Take a look, it’s not hard to see why.

Context as an engine for news

A focus on context also changes the definition of what we consider news. As my team creates these topic pages, we’re finding gaps in our understanding, stories that have fallen off our radar, and an infinite well of other fodder for further reporting. It turns out that when you attempt to assemble the most important information you have on a place, you begin to realize there’s no such thing as a slow news day. As I’ve said before:

Not two weeks ago, the Star Tribune’s reader representative was complaining about the midsummer absence of news. If we committed to providing regular updates on those important stories, we would be unearthing legitimate news that too often gets buried by the tyranny of recency. “Still No Action On Strengthening Levees,” the headlines might have said. “Bridges Languish in Need of Repair.” And if the warnings aren’t heeded, at least we will have traced the progress of a possible disaster before the fact, giving us unprecedented insight into what went wrong and when.

If truth is an asymptote, great journalism has no end.

The other day, Howard Weaver left a comment that seems appropriate to mention here:

For years I’ve warned newsrooms against the kind of thinking that led an educator to pronounce, “I was teaching, but they weren’t learning.” Impossible. And I think we need to embrace a similar responsibility: if 50% of the public still thinks Saddam was involved in 9-11, or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, journalism has failed. Even if we did everything right, perfectly, by established standards, we have to be judged by the outcomes, not the inputs.

The upshot of my entire argument in this blog is that journalism’s highest purpose is delivering understanding. We don’t just cover the news for the sake of telling people what happened; we cover the news to help our communities understand themselves better, so they can improve. A story about a homicide might have some intrinsic value, but the greater value emerges when that story teaches its audience something about why homicide happens in a community and how the next one might be prevented. If we’re doing our jobs right, every such tragedy in a community becomes another hook to the larger story about how these tragedies might be stopped.

Using the news as a hook for context doesn’t mean running versions of the same story over and over again. It means reporting until we’ve exposed enough of the broader context of an issue for it to reach an audience. And when it finds that audience, it means giving them a means to discuss and debate and extend the story.

After New York Times reporter David Barstow unloaded a massive, months-long investigation into the Pentagon’s deployment of “military analysts” on television news shows last April, the news networks said nary a word. The story has since proceeded along a familiar path: Barstow wrote a follow-up story in November, trying to keep the issue in the spotlight. Another follow-up last month (the Defense Dept’s inspector general found no wrongdoing in the Pentagon propaganda program) was downgraded from the front page to A11. Any rage that boiled amongst the American people after the publication of the initial story has cooled to a simmer over time. And if someday the government is found to have launched another more insidious propaganda campaign, the New York Times will say, “We taught, but they didn’t learn.”²

I remember my own anger and disbelief when I read that original story in on NYTimes.com on the evening of April 19th, reciting aloud some of the sordid revelations to my boyfriend. I scanned the Sunday talk show transcripts the next day for mentions of the story, certain it was only a matter of time before it snowballed into a giant scandal. And when the networks were silent, I wanted more. Maybe a wiki that would trace the ongoing television appearances of all these well-compensated former generals and their connections to the defense industry. Or a Firefox plugin that could slip in a message on any page I viewed that mentioned one of the exposed “analysts” — talk about relevance.

A focus on delivering context means that the news is never the endpoint. The giant investigation doesn’t conclude with the Sunday A1 story, it erupts into something bigger. And the trail of a story doesn’t end with the passage of a bill or the resignation of an official. It doesn’t end at all. It merely connects with more and more dots that form an ever-clearer picture of a better society.

1. Correction: Jacqueline doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but just outside of it. [↩]
2. All this is not to say the story didn’t have an effect. Congress clearly got the message, and even after the inspector general’s report, the GAO and FCC are still investigating the Pentagon program. But I think the only thing that could really keep this from happening again is a sort of enduring public vigilance that never really had a chance to blossom. [↩]

Earlier this year, I posted that I wanted to see more focused discussions about journalism’s future:

If what we want to ask is “How can we save serious, detailed, local investigative journalism?” then I suspect we can have a more focused and productive conversation if we actually asked that question. Ditto if the question is “How can we make sure the local school board meeting is covered?” When folks rightly say that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems plaguing journalism, it’s because we lack even a one-size-fits-all question. “How do we save The Newspaper?” certainly isn’t it.

I’ve been hearing fewer how-do-we-save-the-newspaper-ish questions recently, but I’m still picking up conversations like, “What’s the business model for journalism?” So I figure that instead of railing against the questions I’m not impressed by, I’ll volunteer some questions that do nag at me.

I’m interested in being somewhat methodical about this. Again, journalism isn’t science. But an effort to quantify what we might be missing (or in danger of missing) could help us focus our efforts to provide it.

What are the most valuable functions currently performed by news organizations that are imperiled by the transition to digital?

We shall bicker about the “most valuable” component of this question, but I think a little bickering now-and-then is good. More on that in a second. Meanwhile, I’m especially keen on a focus on functions, rather than institutions or processes.

How might we measure the value of these functions?

I’m very curious about this. It seems distastefully clinical, but nonetheless really intriguing. Have there been efforts to measure the value of different journalistic functions? We know a free press correlates strongly with lower corruption. Do we know whether more journalists equals less corruption? If so, is there a sort of margin of diminishing results beyond which the number of journalists per capita doesn’t matter? Does journalism training affect the equation? Is publicly-funded journalism as effective at suppressing corruption as privately-funded journalism?

Outside of corruption, are there other measurable advantages of journalism? What effect do crime reporters have on crime? Does art criticism beget better art? Without the business press, would the meltdown have been worse?

If we could begin to quantify the value journalism provides, I think we could more effectively support it. The current prevailing argument — “Without news organization X, you wouldn’t have had investigation Y” — is acquiring the flavor of Senator McCain’s POW story circa September. If we could make the case that crime coverage tends to suppress crime, we’ve got a great marketing pitch for a community to come together and find some way to support a crime reporter.

What functions have been neglected by news organizations that we should account for in this transition?

I think we digital triumphalists have done a pretty good job of pointing out many of these. Someone should start cataloguing the sorts of brand-new functions tomorrow’s journalism is already starting to perform: like creating a place for communities to coalesce around the news and helping communities organize in the midst of a crisis.

What models of support might map well to each of these functions?

If we’re serious about building a sustainable journalistic infrastructure, I think this question will get us further than almost any other. We have plenty of evidence that different journalistic functions will map better to particular support models. Investigative journalism is already beginning to incline towards a non-profit, philanthropic model. Education reporting might be given to an advertising model of some kind. If we can begin to catalogue different models functioning effectively in different situations, we might be able to answer questions like, “What options should a health industry reporter in Minneapolis pursue to acquire support?”

How should these functions evolve to meet the opportunities afforded by digital media?

Plenty of experimentation on this front is already occurring, of course. As more beats start moving online in force, I cannot wait to see what results. Crime journalism saw the beginnings of a revolution with the dawn of ChicagoCrime.org. Talking Points Memo broke new ground in investigative journalism. Which niches remain untransformed? How do we transform them?

Update: Will tweets along a couple of questions: “Is what journalists value the same thing as what ‘readers’ value?” “How can we monetize it online without it sucking, or whats the next Craigslist?”

All right, this is it for the transparency series for a while, but I needed to clear my system before I could get to some other topics.

The other day, Newsmaven made another point worth repeating. In the context of an ongoing story, transparency takes on a new significance:

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.

In today’s world, once a story is published, criticisms from readers can draw only one of two responses: defense or apology.¹ But if we reinvent a story as something dynamic and evolving, sharing our work and inviting comment offers us an opportunity to constantly improve it. Not just to “get it right,” but to constantly get it more right.²

When I wrote about the idea of a separation of powers in journalism, I had in mind this notion of a transparent newsroom, where the acts of gathering and filtering information are actually outputs of the process of journalism, not just components. I finished that post by asking what news might look like if we published more of the raw materials of the process — interview transcripts, raw video, and things like that. Let me broaden that a bit to say we should air not just our materials but our methods.

1. Don’t get me wrong, we learn lessons from these criticisms as well, but I’m purposely discounting our promises to do better next time. [↩]
2. My friend Rex had a great idea that never came to fruition while he was working at MSNBC. He was toying with the idea of placing a slider at the top of every news story, to allow users to see the history of revisions on each story. As you pulled the slider from left to right, you could see how the story evolved over time, as new facts were added and old ones removed or deemphasized. One day we’ll see this idea in action. [↩]

Or, How Wikipedia talk pages are like newsrooms.

As Newsmaven’s recent comments reminded me, I’m convinced nothing captures the dynamic of a newsroom dialogue about a difficult story better than a Wikipedia talk page. If you have never waded into a talk page discussion, definitely do take a look. I’m almost always impressed by the sincerity of the Wikipedia editors’ desire to get the story right, and their diligence in shepherding tricky editorial issues to a conclusion. They grapple with a range of truly journalistic issues with a scrupulousness that would satisfy the most severe editor.

In the Barack Obama article, for example, an editor asks whether the lede of the article sounds too promotional:

“After announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, energy independence, decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities.”

None of the other 3 candidates have a section which describes their campaign goals, so I have a few questions: 1. Is this type of language appropriate for Obama? 2. Would a sentence like this be appropriate for each of the other candidates? If not, why?

Our stories certainly don’t betray the back-and-forth that goes into making decisions about which information to include and how to present it. But I imagine if they did, the result would look a lot like a talk page.

I 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 today. Thanks, hive mind! So, to summarize, synthesize, and hopefully extend:

Transparency involves reporting what you don’t know. R.S. asked a great question — “Isn’t the role of journalist to process whatever doubts they have about a situation internally, gather more information, and then report the story?”

Tim gave an elegant answer:

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.

Exactly. One of the striking elements of the TPM coverage is how restrained the editors were (despite their ideological motivations) about speculating or drawing conclusions. Instead, they ask good, fair, pointed questions, then dig for the answers to those questions. In this case, “Why did all these highly competent U.S. attorneys get fired?” was an excellent question.¹

I don’t think most people are naturally good at asking fair-but-provocative questions, or separating inquiry from speculation and insinuation. I include many journalists in this assessment. Earlier this fall, for example, Andrew Sullivan packaged a host of barely-baked questions about Sarah and Trig Palin into a rather embarrassing innuendo-fest.

That’s all the more reason why the Josh Marshalls and Renee Fergusons of the world, who have a knack for this sort of thing, should help clue the rest of us in on when a nagging question rises to the level of an investigative treasure map. TPM-like transparency is a great way to do that.

1. Previously, I identified pattern recognition as one of the traits of the best investigative reporters. The instinct that inspires folks like Josh Marshall and Renee Ferguson to ask and pursue good questions is another. [↩]

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.

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]