For the past week or so, there’s been a pretty good debate going on (maybe “debate” is too civilized a word) regarding the concept of process journalism. Vocal on one side is Mike Arrington, reacting quite strongly to a piece in the NYT by Damon Darlin. Jeff Jarvis provides the naming/concept.At its core, the question being discussed is simple: what is the best way to break news. Specifically, what is the best way to break news that is changing, not verified, or lightly sourced. Note that this does not apply to large swaths of what we generally consider news – the stuff that breaks and is pretty apparent what happened – elections, sporting events, etc. Process journalism in this usage really refers to investigative pieces, tips, rumors, deals, acquisitions – stuff that is much harder to confirm. Here is the nut of the dispute (from Mike’s first blog on the topic):
Damon was laser focused in the article on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here’s that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up. Damon says:
Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.
Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”
But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)
Damon is suggesting that I reported the rumor as if it were real, and waited until deep into the post to say anything about it being unlikely. 133 words into it!
The fact is we didn’t talk about the rumor until the third paragraph of that story, and the statement about it being unlikely to be true came immediately after the sentence that stated the rumor:
Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.
There’s just no way to interpret this paragraph as a cheap way to get traffic by misleading readers. We say exactly what we were hearing, and what we believe to be true. And by the way, it shouldn’t matter, but we’ve subsequently confirmed that Apple and Twitter were in fact in acquisition discussions, and the original source for our story was correct.
The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context:
That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”
Note the break between “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.
Mike’s point is that editing a story in real time – posting it when there is sufficient detail and then adding more and updating over time provides a valued service, and that readers are smart enough to make up their own minds. Jarvis notes that there is nowhere near as much difference between the MSM and the bloggers as some of the journalists might think, saying:
The pity is that there are Timesmen who already are using these new methods. I see bloggers there asking readers to help them with stories, admitting they don’t know everything yet - which means they are publishing incomplete news. I wish one of those people had been assigned to this story (if it needed to be written at all) and that such an open-minded, curious journalist could have seen and explained these different worldviews and how they are clashing as they also merge. But that, apparently, was not the assignment.
I disagree with Jeff here – asking for input online about a story is not really the issue here, nor is tweeting and asking for sources to contact them.
But the core of the debate (again from Jarvis) is this:
Online, we often publish first and edit later. We do that on blogs. One could say that 24-hour TV news does that, though I rarely see the editing. Even a division of The New York Times Company - About.com (where I used to consult) - does its work in that order. (That is why About had dozens of writers for every editor [I don't know the mix today], while The Times has three editors for every writer. That level of editing before publication is what makes The Times The Times - both from a journalistic perspective and, today, from an economic perspective; it may be what makes a newsroom like that unsustainable.)
Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story - that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish - as caveats - rather than afterward - as corrections.
On its own, this seems noncontroversial. On the other hand, it represents a real challenge which is this: People continue to believe most strongly that the first thing they see is accurate, regardless of subsequent corrections and amplifications. This is why speed of response to inaccurate coverage is so critical in the communications field, if you we can’t correct quickly the damage is very hard to undo.
Mike sets the standard thusly:
We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.
I’m of two minds here. Firstly, Mike has essentially hewed to this standard for some years. Readers are familiar with it and apply the appropriate set of mental weighting they feel fit. A reader of gawker will not make a stock purchase based on a rumor item. :) But the same standard applied by the WSJ or NYT or any other “mainstream” media, which to be fair have had a higher standard (if they reach it consistently is another topic) is much more problematic.
So in the end, I come down on the side of transparency AND accuracy. I believe it is possible to practice journalism in the public eye, with updates in real time. This is a service. But we should also expect very clear caveats upfront, deeply sourced reporting and a high bias for getting it both right and first.