August 5th, 2006

NuJournalism

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 11:49 pm

Categories: Business & Technology

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Jay Rosen has penned a long response to my comments last week on those of Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and a columnist for The New Yorker, who I was responding to, as well. In a well-cover-copied email to me [Click here to read a PDF], Rosen asked me to reply at greater length than I did to his NewAssignment.com project, which I said in my first posting will likely fail because of the way funding is linked to deliveringWe need to invest in people participating in a process that will be something different than journalism in the mass media era. a story that meets certain expectations of the people who paid for it. Here are my detailed ideas about the problems I referred to in a couple paragraphs last week:

NewAssignment is conceived as a swarm financing system for supporting journalism, as Jay emphasized in his reply to me, without media, that is, without the economic and distribution systems that exist in mass media. In his email, Jay deals with concerns about editing and editors being supplanted, wich I didn’t raise. Let me just say that I don’t worry about the lack of editing, per se, but the way citizen journalism relates critical reviews of information prior to publication to the process NewAssignment hopes to fund. Wherever there are writers, there will be editors; until we figure out the economics of this Whole New Thing, however, everyone is working for scraps anyway. Getting everyone together to produce solid factual reports and informed analysis is the challenge. Both reporting and analysis are important to journalism, though many people believe "objective fact" is the signature of journalism.

There are two critical issues and a practical problem to discuss. First, the matter of financing stories by placing a pitch, or story idea, into a setting where it will live or die on the basis of funders’ willingness to pay for the research and writing of each story. It is my position that funding stories instead of people is as dangerous a perversion of media as any crimes of modern mass media, because money will determine not only what gets covered, but also how it is written. If future funding for a reporter is predicated on delivering the story promised (in contrast to researching a story and reporting what was found, regardless of what the reporter told an editor or publisher or funding swarm the story was about) makes agreeing with the perspective of the funders more important than telling the truth as the reporter experiences it. That’s yellow journalism, in which the publisher’s agenda dominated all news covergae, all over again, though with a trendy Surowieckian wisdom-of-crowds flavor. 

Here is the essential problem with citizen journalism as it has been conceived based on the idea that the readers are in charge: No one knows what an important story is until after it has been reported, therefore you have to trust the judgment of someone who will occasionally ignore the wisdom of the crowd and go somewhere unexpected or unwanted. When we talk about the readers being in charge, we neglect to acknowldge the fact that media companies pay people to work all day, every day, all year long and readers only get the last five percent of the effort at the end of the day. Suggesting that we can freelance our way to an alternative media is missing the learning a reporter (citizen, professional or otherwise) gets from doing the job all the time, rather than just when a group of funders says "Sounds good, we’ll pay for it." I’ve written at length about this kind of patronage-based media in Lessig’s Razor. 

Second issue: This funding model makes failing to deliver a story, which journalists should be far more willing to do, rather than making more of something than it is in order to keep their jobs, a failure or unfinished job. How do we fund someone if they decide, based on their best judgment and research, that there is no story? Don’t we want that? I, for one, think we have enough reporting based on thin facts and some supposition already. That would be a valid critique of Lemann’s piece, that he assembled it from his selective reading of other works, including Jay Rosen’s work to make a controversial column—not the best analysis, if you ask me and as I pointed out, because Lemann brushes aside bad blog writing while ignoring the rafts of crap that pass for professional journalism these days.

Traffic or readership does not a success make. Yes, it pays some bills, but traffic isn’t a proxy for quality. Nor is the decision of someone with some money to pay for a report that justifies their world view a valid basis for calling something "news." And the problem, from the perspective of NewAssignment, is that all money looks the same, so it’s highly likely that, as I wrote last week:

…the many people funding reportage are unlikely to agree on what is the "correct version" of facts and, so, are not likely to hang together to support the really hard tedious work of journalists, which has almost no flavor of immediate gratification. I like that it capitalizes on the excitement represented by the medium, but the best we can hope for is competing versions of reality funded by groups that want verification of their views. It’s the human way, to reinforce belief rather than challenge our views. Journalism, the profession, was an attempt to circumvent that human tendency.

What must be embraced by the citizen journalists out there is the rigor and self-criticism that journalism represents. Where Nicholas Lemann’s critique of citizen journalism falls down is his lack of critical reflection on journalism itself. Yes, most citizen journalism today looks like church newsletter writing, but so does a lot of "real" journalism. The celebrity-and-spin mechanism has taken such thorough hold of the mainstream that good journalism is the exception there, too.

Too often, bloggers quantify their success in terms of audience and page views, which is the same basis for claims of quality by mass media: It’s big so it must be good. For example, at ZD Net bloggers are compensated based on the number of page views they receive and a fraction of the pages in TalkBack, so at the end of the month the size of a check expresses something, but not necessarily our success in being informative or accurate. As I wrote last week, the whole Vs. trope, where Windows and Linux or digital and analog or Republican and Democrat are squared off against one another in order to create a sense of drama or controversy is bullshit if the reason is to please people’s expectations that in one blog or publication they will find all their prejudices confirmed. 

Let’s imagine a situation where NewAssignment is taken as a model for a citizen journalism site. What if the number of page views was the only metric on which a journalist were supported by funders? It would be fairly easy, based on proven historical models, to succeed in getting more funding by delivering lots of page views with articles titled "Bush buggers French maid" or "Britney/Chimp controversy: "I didn’t have sex with that monkey!"

Ah, but you say, "That’s ridiculous, no one would pay for that!" Well, they do at the checkout stand every day. But, what if a higher standard were applied, what would it be? Quality of information? Okay, how do you measure that in a world or a nation so polarized that any five people are likely to split 3-2 in five different combinations about five different stories? Remember, these people are the funders, the swarm paying for stories they believe need to be told. Without an investment in people and a process of self- and institutional-criticism (the process called "journalism" when it works well), rather than stories, there is no check on the worst behavior people can engage in, the pursuit of their own comfort level with the world.

Those are the two main reasons I believe NewAssignment will fail. There is an additional practical problem, that the NewAssignment process, being open and accessible in order to make funders aware of stories citizen journalist/reporters want to tell, gives the subjects a heads up that they may soon be under investigation. There is simply no way, if the system depends on per-story funding provided by the public, for the reporter to begin and conduct research, contacting sources who may need or want anonymity, if they must declare what they are going to investigate publicly. The recent spate of Bush Administration efforts to seal off leaks by appropriating reporters’ phone records is ample proof that this is a valid criticism of NewAssignment.

We need to invest in people participating in a process that will be something different than journalism in the mass media era. It’s pretty easy to corrupt information by demanding a certain spin on it if you’re paying the freight for the news, but somewhat harder to corrupt people whose reputations will be destroyed if their complicity in spinning the news is exposed. Finally, when you have a thoroughgoing process of self- and institution-criticism—which could be a public process based on the idea that readers as a group know more than the individual reporter or news organization—you’ve insulated the news as much as possible from the baser angels of our nature. We shouldn’t stop halfway to a citizen journalism that meets that last highest standard.