This Week in Review, Spy vs. Spy edition: Backlash against snooping by DOJ and Bloomberg
[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 17, 2013.]
Outrage at seizure of AP records: The journalism and media world was collectively seething in a way you don’t often see this week after the Associated Press revealed that the U.S. Department of Justice had secretly obtained more than two months of phone records from more than 20 of its journalists’ work and home lines. The government hasn’t publicly said what they’re looking for, but it’s widely believed to be part of their investigation into the leaker behind the AP’s story last year about a foiled Yemeni bomb plot. The two best explanations of the situation come from Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and Free Press’ Josh Stearns.
The DOJ has moved quickly to defend itself publicly (and to deflect some attention): It wrote a letter to the AP claiming it had the legal right to make the seizure, which drew an indignant response from the AP. Its head, Attorney General Eric Holder, held a press conference in which he emphasized the seriousness of the leak being investigated — and also told NPR he wasn’t sure how many times his department had seized such records of journalists. Holder also testified before Congress, and the White House pushed to revive a media shield bill that would require the government to notify news organizations before their records were seized, allowing them to fight it in court (with some exceptions).
New Yorker attorney Lynn Oberlander and Jeffrey Hermes of the Digital Media Law Project both reviewed the law behind the case, finding that while the DOJ might be able to argue for the legality of its actions, it probably violated its own (non-binding) policy for such seizures by not informing the AP beforehand or getting judicial review. This case, as Hermes argued, “called attention to the fact that the DOJ’s Media Policy has significant problems with transparency, accountability, and scope.” The Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee marveled at the fact that the DOJ’s actions are probably completely legal, and warned of the implications for all cell phone and email users.
Other writers provided some historical context: The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple looked at a couple of past cases to illustrate the difference made when the government gives prior notice, and also examined the long-term effects of its 2001 seizure of an AP reporter’s records. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, meanwhile, noted how the DOJ has abused its supposedly careful process for record seizure in the past.
Journalists were virtually universally outraged, as The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson chronicled in a pair of posts. The DOJ’s actions were condemned as a violation of the freedom of the press in pieces from journalists and observers ranging from The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, Poynter’s Al Tompkins, Free Press’ Josh Stearns, and Slate’s Emily Bazelon. The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, as is his wont, placed the seizure in the context of the Obama administration’s ongoing attacks on civil liberties, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sounded a warning to all of us about the privacy of the communication we entrust to third parties.
Marcy Wheeler of Salon broke down the administration’s rationale for the leak investigation, arguing that it was motivated by resentment at the AP for pre-empting a planned announcement, and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick concurred that it was driven more by embarrassment than national security concern.
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Snooping with Bloomberg terminals: The DOJ’s seizure wasn’t the only snooping story in journalism this week, though journalists were the offender rather than the victim in the other one. The financial news service Bloomberg came under scrutiny with reports that executives from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have confronted Bloomberg over reporters’ use of its terminals to track terminal usage by their companies’ employees. Reporters’ access to that information has since been cut off, but the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Treasury Department are all examining the situation. Not only that, but the Financial Times reported (paywalled; here’s The Verge summarizing it) that thousands of confidential terminal messages had inadvertently been available online for years, though they’ve now been taken down.
A bit of background on Bloomberg’s terminals: They’re everywhere in the financial services industry, and they’re by far the largest share of Bloomberg’s revenue. Their primary purpose is to track financial data and news, but they can also be used to send messages, and its users’ login and customer service data is available to Bloomberg reporters. Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler downplayed what information reporters have access to through the terminals, but noted that they’ve used that data as a feedback to tailor their reporting since the early days of the company.
The Wall Street Journal’s William Launder went into deeper detail on the historical intertwining between journalists and the terminals’ financial data, and Quartz’s Zachary Seward gave a fuller picture of exactly what Bloomberg reporters can see regarding the terminals’ users. BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria reported that a Bloomberg anchor had been disciplined in 2011 for making on-air comments about using terminal data to track a source, and The New York Times’ Amy Chozick reported that Bloomberg reporters did talk about using terminal data to help break news. Nitasha Tiku of Gawker gave some more details about how the terminals were used in reporting and the information Bloomberg reporters store and share about their sources.
Some observers debated about how big of a deal this snooping was. Both Adam Penenberg of PandoDaily and The Daily Beast’s Stuart Stevens compared it negatively to News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal, but the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum and The Guardian’s Heidi Moore noted that reporters couldn’t get that much information from the terminals, and, as Moore argued, were simply mining data for any minute advantage in the same way their clients were.
The most insightful piece on the issue came from Quartz’s Zachary Seward, who wrote that the ability to see customers’ data was an open secret, a feature rather than a bug for a company built on a borderline obsessive culture of external secrecy and internal “transparency.” “Data comes into the company—as much as possible, from wherever possible—but it doesn’t leave because, at Bloomberg, information is money,” Seward wrote.
Former Bloomberg reporter Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D also detailed how deeply ingrained this surveillance is at Bloomberg, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon argued that Bloomberg’s terminal system is essentially a social network, where, like Facebook, users trade their data for the value the network provides. The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin wondered if Bloomberg’s model is ripe for disruption, and The New York Times’ David Carr tied together the DOJ and Bloomberg scandals, noting that spying is more of a two-way street than journalists like to acknowledge.
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The struggle over online video: There were a few interesting developments on the online video front worth keeping an eye on this week: ABC announced that it would begin live-streaming its feed through its iPad and iPhone apps to users in the area of some of the local stations it owns. It’s the first time a network has offered any type of live mobile streaming, but it’s not as much of a step forward in accessibility as you might think: It’s only available to cable and satellite subscribers, despite the fact that it’s a free over-the-air signal.
GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers looked more closely at the technology behind live streaming and how it’s cleared the hurdles that have held it back in the past. He noted the ways in which the service contrasts with that of Aereo, the service that lets subscribers access streaming network TV on mobile devices, much to the consternation of media executives. Aereo, meanwhile, has simplified its price structure and is expanding from New York into Boston and Atlanta. CNNMoney’s Julianne Pepitone said despite the moves by ABC and Aereo, live online TV is still a ways off from becoming a reality for most people.
Elsewhere in online video, YouTube debuted its subscription channels last Friday, and as Peter Kafka of All Things D pointed out, it’s almost entirely devoid of both big-media players and YouTube-native stars. The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor questioned whether people will want to pay for what’s offered, and Janko Roettgers of paidContent argued that the key is finding content whose market neatly intersects with YouTube’s.
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A new Strongbox for leaks: The New Yorker this week launched Strongbox, a method of securely submitting sensitive information to the magazine, designed by recently deceased digital activist Aaron Swartz and former hacker and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. It’s a pretty complicated process, involving the anonymity network Tor, encryption, and multiple computers and thumb drives. Poulsen explained Swartz’s role in creating the underlying code for the process, known as DeadDrop.
The most useful analysis of Strongbox comes from Source, where several journalist/developers discussed its advantages and limitations, generally finding it to be a helpful tool that’s nonetheless not silver bullet for security, and which may be too complex for many people to use. You can also see some early optimism about Strongbox’s viability in posts by the Village Voice’s Sydney Brownstone and Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with Timm calling it the most promising leak submission system since WikiLeaks.
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Reading roundup: A few other stories to check out this week:
— Protests against the possible sale of the Tribune Co.’s newspapers to the conservative billionaire Koch brothers continued this week in Los Angeles, with another one planned for Orlando. Tribune Co. CEO Peter Liguori, however, tried to reassure employees that a sale of the papers wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi said stopping the Kochs from buying the papers is something unions should do, while Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon said the Poynter’s potential influence may be overblown.
— Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported on surprising new research finding that 92% of the time spent consuming news is on legacy platforms — print, radio, TV — rather than computers or mobile devices. Mathew Ingram of paidContent contested the usefulness of the data in illustrating the current state of media consumption.
— At MediaShift Idea Lab, Brian Moritz gave four lessons for journalism students from his experiences at Syracuse working with the cutting edge of digital technology, such as drones, 3D printers, and immersive virtual reality tools.
— Finally, NYU j-prof Jay Rosen laid out a blueprint for a networked beat, focusing on how it might work at The Atlantic’s business news site Quartz. He also talked to paidContent’s Mathew Ingram about his ideas for how to rework the beat with the public at the center.
This Week in Review: Howard Kurtz goes under the microscope, and Politico’s paywall test
[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 10, 2013.]
Kurtz’s rare accountability: Media critic Howard Kurtz’s status was pretty well settled by the end of last week after his disastrously erroneous column earlier in the week — he was fired by The Daily Beast, but still in good standing as host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Kurtz allowed himself to face a 2-on-1 grilling by NPR’s David Folkenflik and Politico’s Dylan Byers, summarized well at Mediaite.
Hardly anyone watched it, but a number of media observers found the Kurtz’s apology (he called his work “sloppy and inexcusable”) and interview significant — Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon offered a good rundown of some of their opinions. Several of them still had lingering questions after the episode: Sharon Waxman of The Wrap was unimpressed with what she saw as a thin response to questions, writing, “Merely repeating an apology and stressing one’s sincerity is not a ticket back to play on the journalism field.” Variety’s Brian Lowry found it jarring to see Kurtz immediately return to his perch as the media’s ethical cop, and The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized him for refusing to apologize when his error was first found out.
The interview also addressed another aspect of Kurtz’s story — his role at the Daily Download, a little-known website which he mentioned and appeared on often. Before and after his firing, Daily Beast staffers voiced concerns that he was devoting too much energy to the site. The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone said Kurtz downplayed his role at the site in the interview, in which he said he’s only a contributor. The Washington Post’s Wemple examined Daily Download founder Lauren Ashburn’s increasingly ubiquitous role on CNN, and both Calderone and j-prof Dan Kennedy questioned the Knight Foundation’s decision to award the site a grant in 2011.
Other saw something noble in Kurtz’s show on Sunday. Several commented on just how remarkable and rare it was to see a critic and pundit willingly subject himself to such scrutiny: J-prof Jeff Jarvis hoped it would become an example for journalists who make high-profile mistakes, and Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times suggested that “as social media and the online world have made our errors more visible than ever, such directness just might make the difference in gaining and maintaining the public’s trust for the future.”
Salon’s Alex Pareene also marveled at the rarity of Kurtz’s questioning, but also contended that the extent of the consequences Kurtz will ultimately face is mere embarrassment, thanks to his elite status. Still, Time’s James Poniewozik saw the fact that Kurtz faced any sort of consequences as surprising, as he wished for other pundits to be held to similar public scrutiny when they get things wrong.
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Politico tries a paywall: Politico, one of the most influential non-legacy news orgs in the U.S., joined the paywall brigade this week with its announcement that it would test a metered pay plan for its site. Politico will test the plan out on readers in six states and outside the U.S. (sorry about that, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming), experimenting with various prices and meter limits.
The announcement emphasized that Politico’s leaders aren’t sold on the paywall model, but want to try it out because they believe their audiences are more likely to pay than they had previously thought. They also said it’s “highly unlikely” they’d try out a paywall in Washington, D.C., where their advertising-and-traffic-based model is working well. As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted, Politico also ventured into sponsored content on its homepage for the first time this week.
Elsewhere in paywalls, the Lab’s Justin Ellis reported on tweaks The Dallas Morning News is exploring its (currently relatively hard) paywall — possibly a metered model, or time-limited access. He also gave some details of how The Boston Globe used its free/paid two-site strategy to cover last month’s Boston Marathon bombing. And blogger Andrew Sullivan provided another update on his pioneering pay model, reporting that he’s expecting to fall short of his $900,000 annual goal and is brainstorming about new sources of income to add.
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Big guns line up against Kochs: The campaign to keep the conservative billionaire Koch brothers from buying the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other Tribune Co. newspapers has building over the last couple of weeks, and it came to a head this week. As The New York Times reported, 10 public employee unions sent a letter to the company’s largest shareholder, Oaktree Capital Management, threatening to press to withdraw Oaktree’s pension fund assets if the deal went through. The two top leaders of California’s legislature also objected to the sale.
The Guardian reported that more than 250,000 people have signed a petition, organized by the Courage Campaign and the liberal blog Daily Kos, to urge Oaktree not to sell to the Kochs. Public sentiment hasn’t been voiced nearly as strongly in Chicago, where only a couple dozen people turned out to protest Thursday in front of the Tribune’s offices, as Crain’s Chicago Business observed.
A number of conservatives, of course, saw the outrage over the Kochs’ potential ownership as myopic concern over a newspaper that hasn’t played it straight for quite some time: Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas and the Washington Times’ Dorian Davis questioned what exactly constitutes objective coverage for those objecting to the Kochs. Zócalo’s Joe Mathews said that while he doesn’t support the Kochs, he thinks their ownership of the Times could be positive for the city, as it either provides a check against the city’s establishment or implodes and prompts L.A.’s most ambitious journalists to create better alternatives.
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Reading roundup: A few other stories going on during this slow week in media:
— News Corp. posted good results in its quarterly figures this week, though Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo said the numbers also emphasized why News Corp. is headed for a corporate split (helpfully diagrammed by Quartz’s David Yanofsky) later this year. Meanwhile, its New York Post is attempting to reduce 10% of its staff through buyouts, and News Corp. shareholders continued to call for Rupert Murdoch to resign.
— The Royal Charter that had been proposed to set up a stronger regulatory body for the U.K. press has been tabled while politicians talk to newspaper editors about their alternative proposals for the plan. The plans saw a breakthrough a few days later when the papers agreed to drop their right to veto appointments to the new commission.
— Gittip’s Chad Whitacre made some waves this week by requiring that journalists’ interviews with him be live-streamed and posted on YouTube. He blogged about the experience and the nature of collaborative journalism, and paidContent’s Mathew Ingram wondered why more journalists don’t open up the interview process to the public. Meanwhile, Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark delineated the difference between journalistic transparency and translucence.
— A few great data journalism resources: PBS MediaShift often useful summaries from two data journalism events, one from Italy and the other from West Virginia. And j-prof and PolitiFact vet Matt Waite wrote a thoughtful post on turning stories into data, not just data into stories.
— An anonymous newspaper ad exec explained to Digiday just how much trouble the industry is in, and TVNewsCheck’s Randy Bennett offered newspapers’ woes as a caution for local TV.
— Finally, Texas j-prof Robert Jensen issued a thought-provoking call for a prophetic, apocalyptic journalism to fit our apocalyptic times.
This Week in Review: Fuzzy math at newspapers, and more opposition to Kochs’ media plans
[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 3, 2013.]
Newspapers’ digital subscriptions jump: Newspapers’ biannual circulation reports came out this week, and there were a couple of ways to read them. The New York Times went the glass-half-full route, emphasizing that digital subscriptions are up, now accounting for 20% of total circulation figures. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici went glass-half-empty, pointing out that overall circulation is down, meaning that “publishers seem to be shedding print subscribers faster than they can replace them with readers of online, mobile or replica editions.”
The big news among individual papers was that The New York Times passed up USA Today as the second-largest newspaper in the U.S., behind The Wall Street Journal. Ad Age reported that the Times’ jump in digital subscribers since its paywall was introduced two years ago has come mostly from new digital subscribers, not print subscribers who added digital subscriptions. 10,000 Words’ Lauren Hockenson pointed out the slowdown of the Times’ paywall growth, though recently paywalled blogger Andrew Sullivan compared the Times’ situation favorably to the free (for the time being) Washington Post.
Despite its continued drop in circulation, USA Today’s publisher, Larry Kramer, sent out a cheerful memo published by Jim Romenesko that noted that it’s relying on a different model — free and ad-based — than its competitors, which doesn’t give it the digital subscriptions to match up against theirs. J-prof Dan Kennedy also broke down the difference digital numbers are making among the Boston papers.
Mathew Ingram of paidContent, meanwhile, called BS on the whole exercise, pointing out that circulation figures allow newspapers to count someone who reads the paper in print, on the web, and on a tablet as three different readers. With numbers so inflated and open to interpretation, Ingram said, “The bottom line is that no one really knows what the ‘real’ readership numbers are for newspapers.” Media analyst Alan Mutter echoed his point, arguing that newspapers’ fuzzy digital circulation numbers are masking a collapse in print subscriptions over the past several years.
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More pushback against the Kochs: The news that the conservative billionaire Koch brothers are talking about buying the Tribune Co.’s newspapers (which include the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) came to the fore last week, and opposition to the move continues to bubble up. Kathleen Miles of The Huffington Post reported that in a show of hands at a recent meeting there, about half of the LA Times newsroom said they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper. The Times also reported on three LA city councilmen who threatened to pull city pension money from the investment firms who currently own the paper if they sell to the Kochs.
The Newspaper Guild-CWA called for the Times to only sell to a buyer that will commit to preserving the paper’s objectivity, while locals in south Florida have circulated an online petition against Koch ownership of a Tribune paper there. At the Times, David Horsey urged LA residents to rise against Koch ownership there. Craig Aaron of the media reform group Free Press called on readers of Tribune Co. papers to do the same across the country, but said the best (though extremely unlikely) solution would be breaking up the chain in favor of local ownership.
Forbes’ Daniel Fisher wondered why the Kochs might think the deal might work well from a business perspective (it won’t), while at USA Today, Michael Wolff did the same with their potential for political influence. Those papers’ influence would be limited to their cities, Wolff said, none of whom seem to be clamoring for a loud conservative media voice. “Other than a few editorials tilting to their views, it is hard to imagine how they get a new conservative national voice to rise from Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford and Baltimore — or in Spanish,” he wrote. Jack Shafer of Reuters offered a similar caution to the Kochs, while also contending that they’re not the hard-right loons they’re being painted as.
Elsewhere, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post gave some background on the Kochs’ dealings with the media — they generally refuse to talk until after an article about them is published, then complain loudly afterward. And Texas grad student Brian Baresch looked at some of the history of newspaper ownership driven by conservative ideology.
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Daily Beast fires Kurtz: Howard Kurtz, longtime Washington Post media critic and one of the web’s most prominent media writers, was fired yesterday by The Daily Beast. There were a couple of possible causes — one more immediate and another more general. Kurtz wrote an erroneous column earlier this week that was critical of Jason Collins, the NBA player who announced Monday he was gay. Kurtz accused Collins of hiding the fact that he used to be engaged to a woman, but Collins actually revealed that in the very Sports Illustrated column in which he made his announcement. The Daily Beast retracted the column Thursday morning and fired him later that day.
The other factor came in the form of a report by The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone on Kurtz’s heavy involvement with a little-known website called The Daily Download, which is increasingly the subject of his tweets and a publishing venue for his perspectives on media. Kurtz is on the board of the site but told Calderone he isn’t paid, so Calderone said his extensive work there is raising eyebrows at The Daily Beast.
Alex Pareene of Salon tied the two together, arguing that while his main flaw previously had been his blandness and subservience, this error was evidence that he’s spreading himself too thin. The question, then, was what role both played in his firing: Calderone reported that the Collins error was a last straw in a series of grievances, and hinted that Kurtz’s role at The Daily Download may be greater than what he has said publicly. The Washington Post and The New York Times both quoted a (very similar-sounding!) anonymous Daily Beast source who said the firing wasn’t just a reaction to the Collins story but was over problems that had accrued over time, and that Kurtz has had too many distractions from his work there.
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Stopping hacking on Twitter: A week after its hack of the Associated Press’ Twitter account, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked 11 Twitter accounts for the Guardian over the weekend, getting control of them through phishing emails. Twitter responded by sending a memo to journalists regarding security that, as Marketing Pilgrim’s Frank Reed wrote, didn’t exactly inspire confidence: As BuzzFeed’s John Herrman noted, Twitter is actually telling journalists “to stay off the internet on the computers they use for Twitter.”
At the Investigative News Network, Amy Schmitz Weiss had some good tips for journalists to keep their accounts and CMSes secure. Meanwhile, Twitter posted a job listing for a “head of news and journalism” to better manage its relationships with journalists.
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Reading roundup: A much quieter week this week than the last few, but still several interesting items worth noting:
— Politico owner Robert Allbritton sent a memo to the site’s staff announcing that he’s exploring selling his TV stations, though he was emphatic that he wouldn’t be selling Politico, which The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone posted with some background. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wondered whether Politico is truly as profitable as Allbritton asserts.
— Yahoo announced six new original web shows and a variety of TV parternships, which, as Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth argued, left the distinct message that it’s still a media company. Its proposed purchase of the French video-sharing site Dailymotion, meanwhile, was shot down by the French government.
— Two interesting conversations that developed this week: The New Republic’s Marc Tracy declared the death of blogs, and blogger Andrew Sullivan said it’s more likely magazines that are dying. And Northwestern journalism student Katie Zhu urged j-schools to rethink their approach to data and computer science, and journalist/developer Derek Willis chimed in with his own call for reform.
— Betaworks, which also owns Digg, bought the content-saving app Instapaper late last week, and The Atlantic looked at Betaworks’ quiet but increasingly significant role in the online news world.
— Twitter expanded its self-serve ad platform, which was launched last year and had been invite-only, to all businesses in the U.S. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine explained what it might mean for Twitter and for advertisers.
— Two thoughtful pieces to read through this weekend: Legendary sociologist Herb Gans argued that public opinion polls don’t actually measure public opinion, and The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen looked at the Internet giants’ control over online speech.
This Week in Review: Verification and the crowd in Boston, and the Kochs’ newspaper plans
[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on April 26, 2013.]
Stemming the misinformation epidemic: As The New York Times’ Brian Stelter pointed out, the media — both old and new — played as large a role in the manhunt that followed last week’s Boston Marathon bombing as it has in any major news story in recent history. There are a myriad of angles to this story, but we’ll start with misinformation on traditional media, then social media, then cover the Reddit-fueled crowdsourced investigative efforts.
First off, there was some fantastic reporting done on this story, led by the local media applauded by the Columbia Journalism Review and Mashable, as well as NBC’s Pete Williams. The New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, also praised her paper’s restraint. That kind of quality was the exception, though, as a parade of news orgs were skewered for reporting false information (as well as heaps of mindless speculation).
The AP chastised itself, but two other news orgs that didn’t were the subject of particular ridicule: The New York Post was savaged for misreporting the number of deaths and identifying the wrong suspects by Reuters’ Jack Shafer and Salon’s Alex Pareene, with the latter predicting its demise. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, tried to defend it. CNN was also singled out for its inept coverage, which was broken down well by The New York Times’ David Carr. (CNN did score some high ratings for its coverage, and former CNN anchor Ali Velshi argued that Twitter critics were excessively harsh toward it.)
So what exactly was at the root of this journalistic failure? The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple argued that the problem with the poor coverage on cable news is … cable news, specifically that its round-the-clock format encourages journalists “to find and tout breaking news all the time, even when it’s not breaking.” Farhad Manjoo of Slate said the problem can’t be tied to a particular medium, but that breaking news itself is broken, especially because we’re enticed to follow it too closely.
Traditional news orgs had their defenders as well. Jack Shafer of Reuters said errors have long been an accepted part of breaking news reporting, provided audiences knew journalists would acknowledge them, and Slate’s John Dickerson said we have to expect them as part of the speed we now demand from news. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin defended the type of incremental breaking-news scoop journalists were chasing last week, saying they can be critical to revealing bigger, deeper stories.
The other hub of confusion and misinformation was on social media, though, as Choire Sicha of The Awl pointed out, some of that “useless, misleading and random noise” was coming from the social media editors of traditional news orgs, too. Storyful’s Mark Little argued that the true problem isn’t so much social media as a “me-first” form of journalism. In its place, he called for journalism that can humbly pull a coherent narrative out of social media’s noise. And NPR social media editor Andy Carvin urged journalists to be less breathless and more transparent and proactive in helping readers understand rumors and the process of reporting breaking news.
BuzzFeed’s John Herrman and Ben Smith took a similar tack, advising journalists to acknowledge that online readers are going to see rumors and misinformation anyway, and to focus on contextualizing it. Reuters’ Felix Salmon countered that journalists shouldn’t let misinformation set the news agenda, even if it’s being widely distributed online. The Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan collected some principles from a variety of perspectives at a Columbia panel on breaking news reporting.
A particularly smart strain of advice came from j-profs Jeff Jarvis and Mike Ananny. Jarvis posited that in times of breaking news, the best way for journalists to add value is to tell the audience what they don’t know, and Ananny made a thoughtful case for the role of silence in journalism, explaining the trust implicit in it and offering some practical principles for when it’s appropriate. “Instead of assuming that more speech is always better,” he wrote, “it might be a bigger public service to speak and consume attention only if you have a clear and defensible reason for doing so.”
There were also some technical solutions proposed: Masdar Institute researchers introduced a platform to verify information on social media, and Wired’s Mat Honan suggested a Twitter function that would allow users to edit or correct tweets, which would allow it to re-pop up in the streams of everyone who saw the original. Josh Stearns of Free Press also started a discussion on developing norms to indicate accuracy and validity of information on Twitter.
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Reddit and crowdsourcing bad info: Reddit users were particularly prolific (and reckless) in sharing information as the search for suspects went on, coordinating their own attempts to identify those suspects. It played a key role in misidentifying a missing man named Sunil Tripathi as a suspect, in what was probably the most potentially damaging reporting error in the bombings’ aftermath. Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic traced the development of the false information, and Reddit general manager Erik Martin apologized for a “witch hunt,” while the creator of the subreddit in question talked to The Atlantic Wire about its role.
The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield noted that what especially drew the news media’s attention to Tripathi was Reddit users doing something Reddit deeply frowns on — naming names and personal information, also known as doxxing. The redditors’ behavior drew broad condemnation: Media analyst Alan Mutter saw it as further evidence of the great damage that can result when “untrained, undisciplined or even unscrupulous people can say anything that comes to mind,” and The Guardian’s Charles Arthur and The New York Times’ Nick Bilton expressed similar sentiments.
Reddit had plenty of defenders as well. The Guardian’s Fruzsina Eordogh said Reddit didn’t need to apologize, because several mainstream news orgs made similar errors without apologizing for them. Alex Fitzpatrick at Mashable argued that Reddit can’t be considered a single community to blame as a whole (Jesse Brown of Maclean’s made a similar point), and its users shouldn’t be considered journalists. Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco also pointed out that Reddit’s most reliable information tended to be given the most visibility from its users.
In a pair of posts, Mathew Ingram of paidContent mounted a fuller defense of Reddit, arguing that news organizations could learn from the successes of Reddit users’ open verification practices instead of simply dwelling on its failings. Canadian student Jeff Cho also praised its transparency, while the London School of Economics’ Charlie Beckett said journalists and contributors to sites like Reddit need to pay attention to each other in order to improve their own practices. Meanwhile, the Seattle Times’ Monica Guzman urged us to take responsibility for the fact that we are now a “self-informing public,” and The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki suggested some improved crowdsourcing methods for Reddit.
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Newspapers as conservative political tool: Following up on an initial LA Weekly report a month ago, The New York Times reported that the politically influential conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering buying the eight newspapers of the recently bankrupt Tribune Co., including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun. The move would be an explicitly political one, the Times reported, aimed at supplementing the Kochs’ political organizing by giving conservative causes a more prominent mainstream voice.
The Kochs don’t currently own any traditional media properties, though as the Columbia Journalism Review reported, they’re the top donors to the nonprofit group that funds the state government-focused Watchdog.org sites, which CJR profiled. In a strong analysis of the possible deal, the Lab’s Ken Doctor also looked at U-T San Diego as a cautionary tale of ideological ownership. The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson said a straw poll of LA Times journalists revealed many of them planned to leave if the Kochs took over. He cautioned the Tribune Co.’s board not to see a sale to the Kochs as a purely financial move, but as a political move with potentially disastrous implications.
Forbes’ Tim Worstall argued that the potential political influence of Koch-owned newspapers was being overstated, however, because newspapers’ political views are inevitably determined by those of their audience. “Proprietors do not mould the views of the readers. They chase them instead,” he wrote. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta made a similar point, saying that big cities make their papers liberal, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Slate’s Matthew Yglesias (a liberal himself) saw Koch-owned major papers as a possible boon for the country, as a way to improve the anemic state of conservative journalism.
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Leadership style and sexism at the Times: Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, was the subject of a scathing feature by Dylan Byers of Politico based on anonymous quotes from staffers who characterized her leadership style as difficult and demanding. Tom McGeveran of Capital New York provided much of context and history that was missing in Byers’ piece, describing some of the history of Times editors’ perceptions within the newsroom and recent office politics there.
The backlash to the story was fierce. As Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon noted, not only was the case Byers and his sources made pretty thin, but it also reeked of sexism toward the Times’ first female top editor. Times reporter Brian Stelter said the piece didn’t ring true to him, Slate’s Hanna Rosin pointed out that while many top executives, especially in newsrooms, are difficult to work with, we’re often quite willing to see past that when they’re men. (She also got Abramson’s charmingly nonplussed reaction via email.)
Former GOOD editor Ann Friedman illustrated how the story might have been written if Abramson was a man, while former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell lamented the deep-seated sexism within journalism, where “a woman’s character traits are central to a critique of she does the job. Men, who are equally awful in just as many ways, are judged more on output and success.” Byers issued a reply to Bell’s critique, arguing that Abramson shouldn’t be immune to personal criticism simply because she’s female.
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The AP’s Twitter hack: We had more problems with misinformation on social media early this week, when the AP’s Twitter account was hacked and a tweet about explosions in the White House was posted, causing stocks to momentarily plummet. In the aftermath, Wired’s Mat Honan reported that Twitter is working on two-step authentification, which requires to have not just a password, but a previously registered device. VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly explained, though, that two-step authentification wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the AP’s hack, and National Journal’s Brian Fung said the blame for this is on the AP, not Twitter.
Both Dan Gillmor at The Guardian and David Cohn of Circa drew the same lesson from the incident: Journalists need to practice a slower approach regarding information from social media, even if it’s from trustworthy organizations like the AP. The Committee to Protect Journalists also provided some tips for journalists and news orgs that get their accounts hacked.
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Reading roundup: There was actually quite a bit of media news this week even beyond the big stories outlined so far. Here’s a quick sampling:
— The New York Times Co. issued its quarterly earnings report, with a drop in income fueled by a double-digit drop in ad revenue. The company will also roll out lower-priced Times subscriptions, as well as a higher-priced “extras” package and more conferences, games, and e-commerce. Media analyst Ken Doctor has a good, quick breakdown of the news, and Quartz noted the slower growth of the Times’ paywall.
— After five months without an ombudsman, ESPN has hired the successor to Poynter at the position — longtime sports journalist (and ESPN critic) Robert Lipsyte. The Gawker sports blog Deadspin was excited about the move, and Lipsyte talked to The New Republic, Poynter, and The Nation about the gig. Notably, he’s taking The New York Times’ Margaret Sullivan as his inspiration for a web-friendly style.
— Reuters fired its deputy social media editor, Matthew Keys, this week, a month after he was charged with helping Anonymous hack into news websites in 2010. He was apparently fired not for the charges, but for his tweeting of the Boston news last week, as The Atlantic Wire explained. Keys gave his account of the firing on his Tumblr.
— Twitter has been busy lately as it prepares for a potential IPO, hiring its first data editor, announcing a video partnership with BBC America, and forming a partnership with one of the largest ad buyers on TV.
This Week in Review: Verification online and off in Boston’s wake, and an underdog’s Pulitzer win
[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on April 25, 2013.]
Social media skepticism about breaking news: As has become the norm following large-scale tragedies, the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed two and injured more than a hundred sparked a lively discussion about social media, journalism, and the value of simply getting information right during crisis situations. The attacks spurred some remarkable journalism — most notably by the Boston Globe and Boston Herald — but it also launched a mess of misinformation and hasty conclusions. We’ll cover the misinformation on social media first, then get to the traditional media accuracy issues.
Guardian journalist Simon Ricketts aptly documented many of the falsehoods floating around Twitter after the bombing, arguing that Twitter has become more unwieldy during crises as so many people tweet out of a need to “feel involved, concerned, part of the conversation.” Mathew Ingram of paidContent said that this is the way news flows now, for better or worse, and that it’s better to ask journalists to verify information than the platforms themselves.
Here at the Lab, Hong Qu argued that it’s a mistake to pit journalistic norms against social media behavior, because the two complement each other. Poynter’s Jason Fry wrote a thoughtful post on how news orgs can bridge those two domains, proposing that while having reporters “on the ground” is still the core of covering breaking news, they should also have an “eye in the sky” gathering, filtering, and making judgments about a wide range of information, then presenting the best of it to readers. News orgs have long had this role internally during big breaking stories, he said, but it’s now shifted to an external one.
Others saw more restraint on Twitter this time around than during past tragedies. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple took note of all the Twitter users urging caution about believing and disseminating information, and PandoDaily’s David Holmes called the greater skepticism a small step in the right direction as more circumspect news orgs separate themselves from more irresponsible ones. Journalism prof Dan Gillmor wondered if we’re starting to see a “slow news” mentality start to catch on.
Slate’s Jeremy Stahl and 10,000 Words’ Karen Fratti both offered helpful guides for journalists on how to tweet during a tragedy — don’t pass on speculation, don’t shame others for doing so, don’t try to score political points, don’t let any tone-deaf scheduled or off-topic posts get through. Wired’s Mat Honan had good advice for all of us on social media during times like that: Resist the urge to chime in with me-too tweets and simply stay silent unless you have something truly meaningful to say.
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CNN and the New York Post’s prominent failures: Traditional media sources were hardly blameless in reporting this story, either. Their worst day was Wednesday, when several news orgs, led by CNN, reported that an arrest had been made in the case, only to be refuted by law enforcement officials (and other news orgs) later in the day. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and Mallary Jean Tenore put together a good Storify documenting the confusion on Twitter, and Salon’s Daniel D’Addario summarized CNN’s misinformation on Twitter, while Talking Points Memo chronicled its about-face on the air. Hilary Sargent of Chartgirl explained who reported what about an arrest in chart form, and Jon Stewart ripped CNN on Wednesday night.
The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone gave some explanation as to how CNN might have screwed up the story — possibly misinterpreting a source’s “got him” to mean someone had been arrested, rather than simply ID’d as a suspect. And Erik Wemple of The Washington Post noted that CNN’s breakdown was as much reporting that a “dark-skinned man” had been arrested as it was reporting the arrest in the first place. On the other end of the spectrum, at least one organization, Breaking News, the social media-oriented breaking news operation owned by NBC News, explained how it balances speed with verification, then fleshed it out with an example illustrating why they decided to hold off on the arrest story.
The other news org that performed particularly poorly on this story was the New York Post, which reported that there were at least 12 people killed in the bombings, while the number of confirmed deaths (which virtually every other news org reported correctly) turned out to be just three. Gawker’s Tom Scocca documented the Post’s adherence to its faulty information despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Poynter’s Craig Silverman lamented the press’s unwillingness to own up to its major reporting errors.
A few other angles to mention: As copy editor Charles Apple pointed out, the New York Daily News doctored a photo of the blasts to make an injury appear less gruesome, with a spokesman telling the Post’s Wemple that “Frankly, I think everybody in the media should have been this sensitive.” The New York Observer reported on another graphic photo that was prompting mixed decisions over whether and how to run. Meanwhile, Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out that coverage of this event followed the disaster-journalism formula to a T, and Poynter’s Al Tompkins provided a great basic guide to reporting the aftermath of a disaster.
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Pulitzer underdogs and shutouts: The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday afternoon (just minutes before the Boston bombing, actually), and many of the winners were the usual array of national giants like The New York Times (which won four awards) and strong regional newspapers. There was one small web-based organization that caught people’s attention, though — InsideClimate News, which won the national reporting Pulitzer for its work on lax oil pipeline regulation.
As Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo noted Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler saying, InsideClimate News is probably the least well-known news org ever to win a Pulitzer. It may also be the smallest: It has just seven full-time employees, and most of them don’t work in the same office. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici both profiled the six-year-old site, detailing its nonprofit structure and its rise from its mostly derivative early journalism to more in-depth work now. Bercovici noted their key to doing top-notch work with such a small staff is simple — they focus on just one thing, 24/7. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard explored its reporting on the oil pipeline story in particular.
Another notable Pulitzer was the Times’ win in feature writing for its much-acclaimed “Snow Fall” multimedia feature. Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon asked a few critical questions about the Pulitzers in general, including one about the fact that The Wall Street Journal hasn’t won for its reporting since Rupert Murdoch took over in 2007. (It did win for commentary this year.) Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review tied the Journal’s Pulitzer drought to Murdoch’s antipathy toward longform stories and any sort of higher calling for its journalism. “This is about creating a healthy news culture with the public interest at its core and having everything else radiate out from that. Do that, and the Pulitzers will take care of themselves,” he wrote.
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Joining forces in longform publishing: Medium, the not-a-microblog-not-quite-a-blog publishing platform run by Evan Williams (of Blogger and Twitter fame), announced it was buying Matter, a longform journalism site focusing on science and technology. Matter was launched last year with $140,000 through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. It publishes one in-depth story a month available to subscribers who pay 99 cents a month.
The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon have some background on the acquisition — Matter and Medium both say not much will change with the site, other than some cross-posting. PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie interviewed Matter co-founder Jim Giles about its creative efforts to sell individual stories, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon expressed his optimism that the pairing will work well.
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Reading roundup: This week was dominated by the terrible news from Boston (and, to a lesser extent, the terrible news from Texas), but there were a few other media stories going on elsewhere:
— At Poynter, Tom Rosenstiel wrote a smart post on the need to reorient the conversation about journalism education by looking at other experiments beyond the “teaching hospital” model. Social media manager and grad student Patrick Thornton urged journalism students to take risks and innovate while they’re involved in college media, rather than seeing it as “a minor league for professional news organizations.” And Forbes’ Lewis DVorkin gave some useful information in his recounting of a Q&A session with Mississippi journalism students.
— The Guardian launched a free app called GuardianWitness that would allow users to send video, photos, and text straight to the paper’s content management system. The Next Web’s Paul Sawers had a good explanation of what it looks like and what it might mean.
— Felix Gillette wrote an illuminating feature for Bloomberg Businessweek on Rupert Murdoch’s ability to skate away from News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal cleanly.
— Finally, two thoughtful pieces on possible paths forward through journalism’s present state: Reuters’ Reg Chua on the role of stories in making sense of data, and here at the Lab, Nicco Mele and John Wihbey discussed reorienting within news orgs to focus on individual talent and smaller, more passionate audiences.