PressThink: Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media

"What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never..."

Yesterday the CBS Building, the one they call Black Rock, was wrapped in yellow crime scene tape, a gimmick to advertise the popular crime scene show, CSI: NY, on CBS Wednesday nights. I was rushing by it on my way to a roundtable at the nearby Museum of Television and Radio. The roundtable was about Big Media, the Bloggers and where the two are likely to meet over the next few years of Web development and cultural change. Which is basically the subject of the book I am writing.

“The bloggers were the usual suspects who write about the issue of blogging, journalism and the media,” said David Weinberger, who was there. “The MSM folks were high-level execs at the usual suspect TV and print mainstream news organizations.” True. (We weren’t a representative group of bloggers, either. No one from the cultural right, no minorities, only a handful of women, no one in his or her 20s. Apply whatever discount rate you wish.)

I was 20 minutes late. As I slid into my seat it took time for my eyes to adjust to the room because they were still on the “emergency” yellow of the fake crime scene tape CBS had wrapped itself in. Black Rock looked sad to be dressed that way. Then I looked around the room and saw three “teams” sitting around in a big rectangle with microphones and a moderator. My team, Bloggers and Net Heads, had…

Tim Porter (press blogger at First Draft, ex newspaper guy, thinks it time for journalists to wake up.)
Jeff Jarvis (packs them in at Buzzmachine) future J-professor, ex-President of Newhouse Online, evangelist for citizens media.
Dan Gillmor (who blogs at Bayosphere) once a top columnist and blogger for the Mercury News in Silicon Valley, quit Knight-Ridder for a citizens media start up.
Susan Crawford, the law professor who blogs where intellectual property, technology and democracy meet on the Web.
Debbie Galant (Barista of Bloomfield Ave.) pioneer in hyper-local blogging for fun, dollars and civic import in the middle of Jersey.
Terry Heaton (POMO Blog) the television news director who got radicalized by the Web, and quit television to blog, write essays and consult on new media.
David Weinberger (Joho the Blog) ClueTrain author, Web philosopher, Berkman Center Fellow.
The author of PressThink.
And Bill Gannon, who is not known as a blogger but is editorial director of Yahoo News, a company on the rise (with news about Kevin Sites and new columnists) and bigger than all the other firms represented by far.

The Big Media team was led by bosses, people who run news factories, including:

Jonathan Klein, the President of CNN/US (who famously defined a blogger as some “guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas,” not that this is all he’s known for…)
Andrew Heyward, President of CBS News, who has figured in more than one PressThink post during the saga of Dan Rather and the Killian Memos. (See this one.)
Rick Kaplan, President of blog-crazy MSNBC. He formerly had Jon Klein’s job.
Paul Steiger, Managing Editor of the (yes, we charge) Wall Street Journal.
Alisa Miller, Senior Vice President for Public Radio International, a major distributor of programming to NPR.

Joining the Bloggers Corps (Bill Gannon included) and the Big Media Bosses was a third team: People actively involved in the migration of the old journalism to the new environment of the Web, including some bosses of the Web operations.

Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, which just introduced TimesSelect. See my post about it, Charging for Columnists.
Kinsey Wilson, editor-in-chief of USA Today.com, one of the highest traffic news sites.
Bill Grueskin (see his Q and A with PressThink), Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal Online.
Stephen Baker, Senior Writer, Business Week, co-author of Blogspotting for Business Week Online.
Vaughn Ververs, Editor of the new ombudsman-like blog, Public Eye, at CBSNews.com, where I guest blogged recently.
Stephen Shepard, formerly the editor of Business Week, now the Dean of the new CUNY J-School who gets to create a Web era curriculum from a tabula rasa.
Christy Carpenter, executive director of the Media Center project at the Museum, a convening body for the broadcasting industry, designed to help leaders come to grips with big issues. The Museum’s roots are in a one-to-many world, and the glamour of network television. But the world is changing, so the Museum has to reach out.
Merrill Brown—who doesn’t blog, but should—wrote an influential report warning news executives that the world is changing, so you have to reach out. He was Editor-in-Chief at MSNBC.com, which he helped launch in 1996. Brown could have been on all three teams, which is probably why he was moderating.

The ground rules prevented quoting without permission, a condition I don’t like and would never request, but some of the big executives need the cover, so we do it that way. You have the cast of characters. Here’s what I heard:

I didn’t sense any sign of panic from the bosses or the migrating pros. They’re cautious in making statements about the future, but pretty confident they’ve got a handle on the Web. They enjoy reminding each other—and you—about the illusions that spread during the first Net boom (1995-2000), implying that a similar fever has overtaken some people now.

The advertising picture is the same one we have heard lately: rapid growth in Web advertising, but from a small base, which is not enough to catch up with the looming fall off in other ad revenue for the big news and information companies. Classified ads are the best example of “fall off.” But it’s known that product manufacturers may find new ways of reaching people without traditional media as the connector at all. No one has an answer to this. The advertising market is in flux. Where it will wind up is unclear.

Therefore no one really knows what will guarantee into the future the big capital expense of a fully staffed newsroom. This is what worries Big Media people, and they argue that it ought to worry us. They have most of the rest figured out, they believe. But not how to fund the newsroom. As David Weinberger wrote: “They’re facing the possiblity of genuine discontinuity.”

No one doubts the news business will eventually migrate to a new platform on the Net. In the meantime, the traditional model—including trucking the newspaper to people—is a big business with sound cash flow. It’s foolish to think it will soon expire. Yes, a new foundation is emerging. For now, the old structures remain because they bring in the money the Web cannot. This isn’t like the tech industry where market position can melt away in a year if you don’t innovate.

Still, it was agreed: Big Media does not know how to innovate. What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never. Do these firms attract designers and geeks who are gifted with technology? They don’t, because they don’t do anything challenging enough. (See this guy’s testimony.) They don’t innovate, or pay well. So they can’t compete.

In competing on the Web, the bloggers do not alarm big media. It’s people like Bill Gannon. Yahoo worries them, with its surging revenues, huge traffic flow, and recent moves in news and editorial that involve original content. The portals attract talent, and with their billions they can fund innovation, and roll out new products. This capacity dwarfs what the old line media companies can do, even if everyone on the editorial staff became a Webbie overnight.

There is an awareness—or a belief—that technologies not visible yet, ranging far beyond the model of blogs and RSS, may come along and transform the business even more dramatically.

Weinberger: “The bloggers didn’t have to spend half the morning explaining that most bloggers aren’t journalists, that bloggers are in conversation.” Blog literacy is up, that’s true. And there’s more respect. Jeff Jarvis in his write-up: “The tone has changed. There is no dismissive huffing from the big guys about blogs.”

Big Media sees bloggers as better tuned to conversation about the news than news producers. Bloggers are more connected to “what’s bubbling up…” Therefore they have to be watched; they can’t be dismissed. There was loose talk about “leverging the power of the blogosphere” that probably originated in this sense of bloggers being closer to public chatter.

Media people still look at blogging and demand to know: “where’s the business model?” half expecting bloggers to have the answer, half satisifed when they don’t. Jarvis wrote down my comment: “There is no law of God that there needs to be a business model for everything. There may not be a business model for the Internet. The Internet may just be part of life.”

Paul Steiger of the Wall Street Journal: “Whatever the business model, in order to keep getting paid, people in the blogosphere or traditional media would need to do at least one of two things very well: either provide uniquely broad credibility, which will still have value even in this revolutionary world, or uniquely exciting argument.”

Media people want to believe in the figure of the “who cares if its true?” blogger, the one who will run anything, who has no editorial standards, who can be duped or dupes others. The image still tends to dominate their imagination, perhaps because it puts the most distance between what bloggers do and what they do.

I discussed an example of collaborative, open source journalism-by-blog. In November of 2004, Josh Marshall got mad when Republicans voted to change ethics rules to benefit their Majority Leader Tom DeLay: (“There was a vote. It wasn’t recorded. There’s no official tally. But everyone who was there was asked to say yea or nea. Why shouldn’t they be willing tell their constituents what they said?”) So he asked readers of his blog who live in Republican districts to call their Congressperson, as a constituent, and try to get an answer: was it yea or nea on the rules change? If you get a reply or a clear refusal to say, e-mail us, Josh says. We’ll make a list and tell everyone else. And by such means—distributed fact-collection—he and his readers tried to get the vote recorded.

I told them this story. They liked it. It made “citizens journalism” a lot less abstract. And they insisted that Josh’s callers would be less reliable than journalists. Blog readers wouldn’t know when they were being fed a line. Because they’re partisans suspicious of DeLay, they would hear only what they wanted to hear. Dan Gillmor tried to inform them that Talking Points Memo was widely read on Capital Hill. Staffers for a Republican Congressman would know if Marshall had screwed up. They’d fire off an e-mail right away to correct the record. This information made no visible dent. Big Media was adamant. One could not trust information gathered by amateurs.

Stephen Baker wrote about it today at his Business Week Blog: “But how reliable was the reporting, media execs asked. Who were their sources? How about if one of the citizen reporters had it in for one of the Republicans? I didn’t add my two cents on that point at the meeting. Here it is now: As a reader, I’m happy to look at that citizens’ reporting. It’s additive. There was nothing. Now there’s something. True, the anonymous reporters are not accountable for their work. So I wouldn’t cite it, journalistically, as evidence that a certain Republican voted one way or another.”

But the exercise Marshall and crew undertook wasn’t designed to answer the question: who voted which way on exempting DeLay? That information was lost to recorded history. Marshall said so at his blog. He was asking: was there pride in the vote? (“Why shouldn’t they be willing tell their constituents what they said?”) In his scheme, Congress people and their staffs are met with a second decision: what to say to constituents about the first? Who’s willing to stand up and be counted? The object was to re-establish accountability—and minimal transparency—after the majority party put them on holiday. I thought it was great journalism.

There wasn’t time for me to explain my suggestion for a next big project in open source journalism— a blog-organized, red-blue, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and attempt to decipher every word of every bill Congress votes on and passes next year.

As Susan Crawford wrote after; “The emotional energy that filled the room when the print guys started decrying the ‘potentially deadly’ inaccuracy of bloggers was remarkable. We Are The Truth, they seemed to think — We Have Standards.” “Bloggers ran with pre-mature exit poll data!” was still rattling around for them. (See this about it.) And you could hear the sarcasm in their voices when they discussed the alleged fact-checking powers of the blogosphere, summarized as: “throw it out there, and we’ll figure out later what part is true.”

The blogosphere tends to be seen as a collection of individual blogs, each unedited, each without “standards” (although some are very good.) Therefore the ‘sphere as a whole is weak on verification, and so Big Media retains a crucial advantage. (Says Big Media.) Other attempts to explain how open source methods can be highly effective—Wikipedia for example—do not seem to have made any impression.

Even so, Big Media knows it has to change. To stand pat is not a credible position. The market will not be there. Lots of experimentation is going on, or due soon as Web intergration becomes more of a reality. Paul Steiger in his closing notes: “The world has really, really changed and will keep changing and we in mainstream media may not like it but it’s a fact and we have to embrace it or we will die.” (Link.)

Terry Heaton writes: “Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, noted three areas where his thinking has been changed.” 1.) Heyward talked of a breakdown in newsroom formulas influenced by bloggers and the power of their conversation. 2.) The illusion of omniscience is hurting news. “That’s the way it is” journalism isn’t credible anymore. 3.) Therefore point-of-view has started to become more acceptable because it seems more inevitable. This was probably the most significant surprise of the meeting: an actual shift in press think. At the top, no less.

Oh, and everyone said nice things about my weblog.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Lisa Williams, who blogs at H20town (Watertown, MA, is her home) says in comments:

I beat my local paper all the time. It’s not because I know things first; it’s because I hit Enter first. But at H2otown, I rarely point to articles in the local paper. At first it was because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do better than simply rehashing articles in a paper whose very understaffing was the main reason I started H2otown. After some months, I noticed I didn’t even think about the local paper very much anymore. I had my own sources, my own beats, and a growing community, blogs launched on H2otown by local politicians, including the President of the Town Council.
Lisa to Traditional Media: I’m just not that into you. Sorry — you’re a great guy and I know there’s someone out there for you. Somewhere.

The woman speaks truth, writes beyond well, knows her community, and is totally tech aware. What else can be asked? Check out the rest of her comment and follow her progress.

With Lisa’s H2Otown and Debbie Galant’s Barista.net we see how blogs are taking over in journalism, not by encroaching on the territory of Big Media, but by entering a territory in journalism where Big Media is nowhere to be found.

Mike Phillips, editorial development director for Scripps-Howard Newspapers, in comments here:

There are days when I’m tempted to gather a few friends, move into a nice town with a newspaper run by one of the slower-moving publishers, start up something that’s digital and citizen-driven and make a nice living picking the big guy’s pocket. If you want to convince them, take a bite out of their revenue.

Yep. I definitely think someone will do that within the next few years. It’s only a matter of where it will happen and when. Scripps-Howard owns the Ventura Country Star, a blogging-friendly local news site. See an earlier letter from Phillips to PressThink: “We need to get serious about Web-centricity.”

Brian of mgoblog—it’s about the University of Michigan Wolverines—comments on this post, in particular: trust and the single blogger:

A blogger is not a message board poster, largely anonymous and indistinguishable from the rest of the chatter on the board. I have a reputation—a brand even—that goes under that banner at the top and whatever trust I have I had to earn by not being completely useless and have to maintain by not slandering people…
Boi From Troy sent out an email soliciting ideas about how bloggers can get the same sort of access that your mainstream media types do. I realized that I didn’t want access…. I’d hear the same things, be denied the same interviews, and sit in the same press conferences. I’d also write the same articles, because access corrupts…

Since I don’t have access, I’ve got to come up with another selling point, a way to differentiate myself from the rest of the Michigan sports media world. This is venting and snark in some portion, but not in whole. It appears that it’s mostly bigass tables… bigass tables that you’ll never see in a newspaper because instead of seeing with their own eyes they’re listening to what someone else tells them.

“I’m not a journalist; that’s the point,” he says. By “tables” he means posts like this, charting the performance of Michigan football. When you really want to understand the game, you go to Brian. This is exactly what Big Media misses with the iconic figure of the “don’t care if it’s true” blogger.

Since I don’t have access, I’ve got to come up with another selling point. Exactly, Brian.

Absolutely brutal interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show between Hewitt and Brian Montopoli of CBS’s Public Eye blog, formerly of CJR Daily. At issue was this list Public Eye posted, A Guide To The Journo-Blogs, which Hewitt thought slighted right-of-center journalists. Here’s an excerpt:

HH: You’ve got 30 different blogs listed here. 25 of them are center-left or hard left. You’ve excluded obvious center-right people like Jack Kelly and Michael Barone. I don’t think intentionally. You’ve designed the rules to exclude people like me and Michelle Malkin, because you don’t like us, and then you purport to be objective…
BM: You’re on our blogroll, Hugh. How do you say we don’t like you. And another thing. I e-mailed you, asking you to do a critique of our website. We have this outside voices feature. Jonathan Last is doing it. You never got back to me.

HH: I don’t want to do anything for CBS. You guys are like…you’ve got the Plague.

BM: Well, at the very least, you could have written me back. Here I am on your radio show.

HH: I might catch what you have. If you have…If I end up working for you, I’m going to end up being identified with CBS, which has a terrible reputation, because of punk stunts like this, Brian.

The rest. And here’s an e-mail exchange between Hewitt and a mystified CBS News.com editorial director Dick Meyer. Blogger and journalist Lex Alexander of the News-Record in Greensboro in comments: “This is the behavior of someone who’s looking to score cheap points in order to reinforce the myth of the Big, Bad Liberal Media Conspiring to Shut Out Right-Wing Voices.”

Ed Cone in CIO Insight (Ziff-Davis), Rise of the Blog: “The tide of simple, low-cost publishing and collaboration software is rising within companies, whether technology management is ready or not.” (April, 2005)

Michael Conniff in Online Journalism Review: Just what is a blog, anyway? “Defining this variable form is not easy in the highly opinionated blogosphere - nor is it simple in the increasing number of newsrooms that are in embracing blogging.” But he gives it a shot.

Tim Porter wrote a pre-Roundtable post, which gets lyrical:

When I think of the blogosphere, I recall the colorful world maps that hung on the wall of my high school geography classroom. On them, curved arrows and various shapes and sizes depicted the swirling rivers of ocean and air currents that move endlessly, seamlessly around the globe. The Jet Stream, the Gulf Stream, the Alaska Current. The blogosphere is the same — The Thought Stream — moving across geography, beyond nationality, node by node from one individual to another, tying people together in a swirling current of ideas, debate and interaction.

“The national conversation is gone,” says Porter, “replaced by the global conversation.” Porter After digs out some lines of his from two years ago to illustrates another handicap:

To produce newspapers in this manner requires efficient, repetitive action - papers are scripted in advance, before the news happens; reporters are told how long to write, before they cover the stories; photographers are given dimensions of an illustration, before they take the pictures. This way of working discourages innovation and encourages rote behavior.

Yes, and it’s efficient, repetitive mental action he’s talking about too. Like group think, press think is rote behavior.

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit read these notes: “The Lords of Media today are the monks toiling away in their cloistered monasteries, illuminating one manuscript a month, and scoffing at those rat-beggars with their crude printing presses. ‘Can any of those printers illuminate parchment as beautifully and meticulously as we can?’”

Do see Peter Daou, The Triangle: The Limits of Blog Power. An essay reflecting on his time as John Kerry’s point person for “blog outreach” during the 2004 campaign.

I had to improvise my way through the election, trying to reconcile two distinct worldviews. I felt the disconnect keenly. I alternated between informal conversations with a small blogger brain trust—Kos, Atrios, Digby, Steve Soto, Bill of Liberal Oasis, Dave Johnson, among others—and meetings with Beltway stalwarts such as Bob Shrum, Tad Devine, and Joe Lockhart. I attended communications strategy sessions where veteran consultants presented one set of ideas, then plunged into Democratic Underground’s forums to read thousands of impassioned arguments to the contrary….

Daou found two obstacles: The Internet was so effective at raising money that it wasn’t seen as good for anything else, and “the natural antagonism of the old guard toward the new” led to marginalizing of the “Net roots,” as he puts it. Some of the comments are interesting too. Read it.

Posted by Jay Rosen at September 29, 2005 10:48 PM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

One thing confuses me about Hewitt's complaint (by the way I think he's a windbag): as it's common knowledge that most journalists identify as center-left, what did he expect a listing of journalist bloggers to look like, politically? Meyer comes off as a passive aggressive ass, but he's somewhat less objectionable here due to the sheer bloody-mindedness of Hewitt.

Posted by: Brian at September 30, 2005 12:34 AM | Permalink

Certainly. When one is denigrated by a passive-aggressive ass, the first concern should always be how politely moderate you can be in response.

After all, one never wants to upset passive-agressive asses, does one?

Posted by: Bill Quick at September 30, 2005 1:37 AM | Permalink

> Therefore the ‘sphere as a whole is weak on verification, and so Big Media retains a crucial advantage. (Says Big Media.)

Actually, the `sphere has an "unfair" advantage wrt verification. When the NYT, CBS, and NBC got caught lying a couple of times, I started discounting almost everything they said, and became very skeptical of ABC on the "they say that they're the same, so who am I to disagree" theory. With a very few incidents, most of MSM got small from my point of view.

If I catch 30 bloggers lying, I've still got 30 million to go to. (In fact, by going to 20 bloggers, I already have a far broader information source than I ever got from MSM.)

In other words, MSM's branding works. My level of trust is organization-wide, just like they want it to be, so the bad apples spoil a very large barrel. Oops.

Their way out may be to shrink the brand to distribution and offer me lots of independent products. Those products can leverage a shared infrastructure for information gathering.

I don't see that happening because I don't think that they can see themselves that way.

Posted by: Andy Freeman at September 30, 2005 9:18 AM | Permalink

Thank you Jay for another revealing glimpse of why the media is where they are.....

Susan Crawford's assessment/comments of how Big Media moguls felt about bloggers just made me laugh and laugh.....

"And you could hear the sarcasm in their voices when they discussed the alleged fact-checking powers of the blogosphere, summarized as: “throw it out there, and we’ll figure out later what part is true.”

Mmmmm......early TV and print coverage of Katrina, anyone? Funny, funny, funny.

Posted by: Kristen at September 30, 2005 9:53 AM | Permalink

Who was it that said, "Culture is people. To change culture, you have to change people."

Maybe it was Reagan...and perhaps a simplistic statement (some of his appeal, actually) but I can't tell you how often I've seen the reality of that one...

Posted by: Kristen at September 30, 2005 10:09 AM | Permalink

Jay, thanks. But all of it has this kind of echo-chamber quality...the same ten bloggers, the same ten money guys, the same big news guys.

Except I find it quite interesting that no print people were there except Steiger. And for people to say that printing news on dead trees and delivering it people's homes continues to be a good idea...well, did they read the news last week about big layoff at newspapers?

One other thing that makes me wonder: there's a lot of talk about the container of news. But little talk about the content in the container. As though it will be the same. As though you'll ship out reporters who know a little about a lot, and they'll fill a different container with their reports.

Sorry to ramble a little, I'm still trying to decide what it all means...if anything.

Posted by: JennyD at September 30, 2005 10:12 AM | Permalink

as it's common knowledge that most journalists identify as center-left, what did he expect a listing of journalist bloggers to look like, politically?

That's an interesting point. Aren't we always hearing that journalists are 90% liberals? If so, having 5 conservatives on a list of 30 is better than you'd expect, statistically speaking.

Maybe Hewitt is asking for affirmative action for conservative bloggers? They shall overcome, some day...

Posted by: Jason Lefkowitz at September 30, 2005 10:24 AM | Permalink

He's looking for balance. If jounalists are going to pull this kind of crap, then they might as well stop claiming to be objective and just outright say that they are the DNC's propaganda arm. Not that anybody actually still believes they are objective.

Posted by: Jordan at September 30, 2005 11:51 AM | Permalink

The conflict between bloggers and traditional media over "truth gathering" evolves from a different mindset. Reporters have been ingrained with an almost pathological fear of making errors. Any error has 24 hours to float around the world before a newspaper gets a chance to correct it, and that's often too long to repair the damage. But the pathology doesn't prevent errors from happening, and many a promising career has been ruined because of a stupid mistake or two.

Bloggers appear to be far more confident that the truth can catch up to errors. For the first time in human history, they may in fact be right about that. But it's a hard thing for us old-timers to take in, and it's difficult to take people seriously who lack the usual pathology.

Posted by: David Crisp at September 30, 2005 11:54 AM | Permalink

Out of curiousity, how restrained and cautious was Blog World in those early days of Katrina? Were they talking about rampant break-down of civilization like the TV folk and some print? Or were they waiting for verification?

I don't mean a blog or two. But, rather, how did Blog World report the news?

Posted by: Dave McLemore at September 30, 2005 12:24 PM | Permalink

While "Big Media" sits and stews about pointless questions like those raised by Michael Conniff in his OJR article, those of us in the "Medium Media" are busy experimenting with different journalistic practices. Heck, we started blogging four years ago.

Posted by: Ken Sands at September 30, 2005 12:26 PM | Permalink

David Crisp: "Reporters have been ingrained with an almost pathological fear of making errors."

You know, I've been trying to knit together (in my own mind) the aggressive-defensive culture in newsrooms and William Powers description of a media culture that "rewards people who get the story not quite right—reporters who allow errors of fact, judgment, and emphasis to subtly shape their work."

Posted by: Sisyphus at September 30, 2005 12:53 PM | Permalink

You do have a fascination for brick walls, Jay. I admire you for that, but I don't see this MSM/bloggers conversation ever going anywhere. The folks who run media companies love the Web's revenue growth rate, and I know more than a few of them who like citizen journalism because it looks like a way to automate at least part of the news. A few have it in them to get excited about making content more relevant to the audience or about improving the role of the press in a democracy. Glark Gilbert at Harvard says journalism spent 150 comfy years wrapped in the cocoon of a simple business that now is complicated and starting to decline. What we should do is build a new business around journalism, he says. I agree, depending on how you define journalism. There are days when I'm tempted to gather a few friends, move into a nice town with a newspaper run by one of the slower-moving publishers, start up something that's digital and citizen-driven and make a nice living picking the big guy's pocket. If you want to convince them, take a bite out of their revenue.
--Mike Phillips

Posted by: Mike Phillips at September 30, 2005 12:54 PM | Permalink

Mike, Yahoo seems about to be do that -- move in and replace news.

"Who funds the newsroom?" -- the right question.
Maybe, nobody? Instead, the Great news reporters, like Kevin Sites (maybe?), like the late Stephen Vincent (?), might be able to sell their services; when will CBS buy Michael Yon's reports from Iraq?

Great reporters might well become free-lancers, doing journalism, writing books, speaking lecture circuit?

Yahoo looks good.
Why wasn't Craig Newmark (?) of Craigslist invited/ discussed?
Local freebies plus world class free lancers.

I don't know; but nobody does. Michael Totten left for Lebanon, for Pajamas Media.
Global Voices sends me email daily.
There's lots of real reporting; lots of content.

In fact, too much.

The killer app is prolly not reporting (sorry Glenn) -- it's editor selection.

And of course, the main initial business model is advertising for eyeball attention.

[What, no media biarrrrghh. Well, Hugh said it, but far harsher than I would have. I kinda like Public Eye.]

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at September 30, 2005 1:14 PM | Permalink

I think the fact that I was a part of the panel refutes any arguments that it was the same old group of people gabbing at each other. The print industry was well represented (WSJ, NYT, USAToday, etc.).

I agree with the commenters who suggest that its unlikely the MSM will ever fully embrace the personal media revolution. They are two entirely different animals. The question is which will the people prefer. I think both will survive, although perhaps not in the forms to which we are accustomed. I was warmed by what I felt were walls coming down but cooled by continued denial and the damned question over who does a better job of vetting. Red herring!

Why does the MSM cling to the notion that their value proposition is based on reliable standards? This is the crux of the "how can anybody trust the bloggers" argument. Standards don't produce trust, only the illusion of trust. This is the great lesson of the personal media revolution.

And let me repeat something I said at the conference. The media is the biggest issue in our country today, but the media doesn't participate in the conversation. I've seen this through my work with local blogging communities; it's a blind spot that undermines the trust the MSM seeks, for the public views the media largely as a group of role-players, and in a sense not real. Media impacts everything we touch in our daily lives, and yet that is rarely, if ever, discussed by those who participate in the media process. Bloggers are unafraid of entering into this territory, which I believe is one explanation of citizens media's popularity. Think about it.

Nice to finally meet you, Jay.

Posted by: Terry Heaton at September 30, 2005 1:32 PM | Permalink

I'm sorry, but Hugh Hewitt is a tool, and the exchange on Public Eye just proves it.

He deliberately mischaracterizes Montopoli's list. He deliberately conflates "mainstream media" with "journalist" (and criticizes Montopoli for doing badly something Montopoli hadn't been trying to do at all). He criticizes the list for being incomplete when Montopoli has made it clear that he KNEW it was incomplete and had specifically asked for people to use his comments to suggest blogs by mainstream journalists that he has overlooked. (Oh, and Hugh? Your excuse for not enabling comments on your blog? Lame, lame, lame. You and I both know that as long as there's a complaint mechanism to which you respond, you're off the legal hook.)

This is not the behavior of a critic sincerely trying to be helpful. This is the behavior of someone who's looking to score cheap points in order to reinforce the myth of the Big, Bad Liberal Media Conspiring to Shut Out Right-Wing Voices.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of cheap points as long as they're entertaining. But I don't mistake them for serious criticism (or serious discourse of any other kind), and neither should anyone else, despite Hewitt's desperate attempt to cast himself in the role of an intellectual player and cop on the media beat.

Posted by: Lex at September 30, 2005 1:37 PM | Permalink

Somebody get the clue-by-four, fast. There are some heads in serious need of having sense beat into them.

"Media people want to believe in the figure of the “who cares if its true?” blogger, the one who will run anything, who has no editorial standards, who can be duped or dupes others. The image still tends to dominate their imagination, perhaps because it puts the most distance between what bloggers do and what they do. "

Yeah, they wouldn't run stories about mass murders in the Superdome without checking them first.

"Big Media was adamant. One could not trust information gathered by amateurs."

Far better to trust qualified professionals, like Jayson Blair.

"How about if one of the citizen reporters had it in for one of the Republicans?"

Yeah, we'd be much better off listening to an impartial source like Dan Rather.

"Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, noted three areas where his thinking has been changed."

Unfortunately, firing Dan Rather already wasn't one of them. I wonder if he was one of the Big Media guys talking about "reliability." If so, how effectively did the other people there at stifle their laghter?

Posted by: Ralph Phelan at September 30, 2005 1:42 PM | Permalink

My parents read blogs but I don't think they know it yet. They're subscribed to the NPR podcast with ITunes but they just call it a radio show. The argument that only a small percentage of the population knows what a blog is might be flawed. People do know, they just call them websites.

The open source analogy is a good one because some software companies see themselves, not the services they provide, as part of the free market system. Microsoft rallies against open source because they see themselves as the pinnacle of capitalism. But they're successful because they existed before truely free markets were really even possible.

I suggest the MSM execs as well as the bloggers convinced there's money to be made look at the Apache Foundation for an idea of what the future of media will look like (especially the donate link).

I wonder if journalism will survive like open source software does now. I use Wordpress for my blog and paid $50 for it even though it's free. Wikipedia also survives on donations. That won't work in a world where journalists rank near politicians in terms of trust-worthyness.

If you have Netflix I highly reccomend watching Sweet Smell of Success which nicely sums up the trust issues associated with the old media.

Posted by: KirkH at September 30, 2005 1:53 PM | Permalink

Brian sez:

"One thing confuses me about Hewitt's complaint (by the way I think he's a windbag): as it's common knowledge that most journalists identify as center-left, what did he expect a listing of journalist bloggers to look like, politically? "

I this was a failed attempt at a sort poliitcal checkmete move.

What he could have done, if he was less of a windbag, is succinctly ask:
"Your listing of journalist bloggers isn't going to exhaustive, but I'd expect it to at least be representative. So why is it 80% liberal? You got something against conservatives or something?"

This would leave Montopoli and Meyer trapped into choosing among:
A) Admitting personal bias
B) Admitting their colleagues are biased
C) Claiming it was a fluke (and being demolished by anyone who's ever heard of a t-test).
D) Pretending not to understand the question and consequently looking like an idiot.

Now since "B" is both obviously true and totally taboo to admit, this sort of thing can be a really fun way of making journalists squirm. But it only works if your question is coherent enough to make option "D" as uncomfortable as "B".

Unfortunately, the way Hewitt rambles on "Huh? What are you getting at?" winds up being a perfectly respectable response.

Posted by: Ralph Phelan at September 30, 2005 2:00 PM | Permalink

Crisp writes:

"Reporters have been ingrained with an almost pathological fear of making errors. "

Not to be rude or anything, but

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Dan Rather
Jayson Blair
Mass Murder in the Superdome
NYT story on a John Roberts memo, retracted the next day
Any news story I've ever read about a subject I already had independent knowledge of.

Gimme a BREAK!

Posted by: Ralph Phelan at September 30, 2005 2:16 PM | Permalink

Free markets are leading to the demise of the MSM so is it really surprising that most old school journalists lean left? Or that there are unusual numbers of libertarian bloggers?

F.A. Hayek argues that smart people lean toward Socialism even though it doesn't work because the truth is counter-intuitive and smart people are intuitive. Smart people tend to make more money so it's possible that the right wing corporate media types are pushing a left wing agenda because advertisers will pay more for smart, and therefore wealthy, readers. It'd be kind of humorous and elegant if it was that simple. Maybe the journalists start out in the middle but eventually the adulation of their growing readership contributes to the leftification.

Posted by: KirkH at September 30, 2005 2:22 PM | Permalink

To answer McLemore's question about how "Blog World" reported Katrina---it depends. Non-LA blogs fell into two basic categories: Liberal: Racist neglect caused poor NO residents to suffer the unspeakable things that only a racist would assume actually happened; and Conservative: A fatherless underclass culture caused poor NO residents to do the unspeakable things the anti-Bush MSM falsely reported they did----plus the press will not call the Black Democrat Mayor or the Female Democrat Governor to account. (h/t Kaus)

This crapola is absolutely useless to anyone who wants real information. As I noted in another thread, I have many relatives in NO area, but since they were white and middle-class, MSM didn't care about them. So I turned to nola.com and Slidell Damage blog for information during the days my NO relatives were incommunicado. Non-NO blogs provided partisan BS---not useful.

Posted by: kilgore trout at September 30, 2005 3:25 PM | Permalink

KirkH,

How did you fit so much food for thought into one measly paragraph! It can also be argued that both libertarianism and socialism are appealing in theory, while in practice serving as a mechanism for excusing corruption, and thus perpetuating power, appealing therefore to the powerful, especially the less scrupulous among that group. That those who might do something about it fight amongst themselves about which one works better is gravy. I know - they've never really been tried!

As for journalists starting out in the middle, more likely journalists start out either tabula rasa (though well versed in a variety of drinking games, with an extensive DVD collection), or going along to get along with the CV that held sway on campus. Leftish, but flabby from obliviousness to any dissent from that CV.

Posted by: Bezuhov at September 30, 2005 3:28 PM | Permalink

Sounds like the approach Montopoli took in putting together his list of journo-bloggers, by his own admission. Is this a bad thing?

Posted by: Bezuhov at September 30, 2005 3:35 PM | Permalink

A neat, precise analysis, Kilgore. I didn't have time to keep up with the blog reports on Katrina or Rita. In retrospect, it looks like the blogs used the disaster as a sounding board for whatever ideological points they could harp on. Is that about right, Kilgore?

So how is this news reporting? The excellent reports in NOLA.com -- and the folks at the Times-Picayune deserve all honors for their reporting -- are essentially the same you'd see in most newspapers. Down to assertions of rape and murder in the SuperDome. Those were the facts available at the time. In an age of 24-hour news, you're going to get the chaff with the wheat.

But again, how did the blogs out-perform the MSM? Though I grant you, the tv coverage - local, national and cable, was atrocious.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at September 30, 2005 4:22 PM | Permalink

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom was not without his own sophmoric point-scoring, but his general approach of asking for actual evidence before bringing out the guillotine was, and is, a sound one.

"Down to assertions of rape and murder in the SuperDome. Those were the facts available at the time."

Assertions are not facts.

Posted by: Bezuhov at September 30, 2005 4:55 PM | Permalink

Terry, I am thrilled that you and Debbie G. were there. That does indeed look like progress.

But notice that the print people were the "digital" people. Like all the thinking about digital media can be done in a smallish department off to the side of the main business. Am I reading that right?

Also, and I said this at Jeff's site, I think I hear the big media saying that they'll conquer the web by stuffing the same content into different containers. That doesn't sound smart to me.

I do have to take issue with one thing. I don't think that "The media is the biggest issue in our country today...." as you said. I can think of other issues that are even bigger.

Posted by: JennyD at September 30, 2005 4:59 PM | Permalink

Off Topic News Bulletin related to Jay's posts of last year on Jason Eason, Davos, and CNN:

Republican Senator and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, John Warner, has demanded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld formally respond to concerns about the increased detentions and shootings of reporters in Iraq by US forces (already way over the total for Vietnam) and the repeated arrest and imprisonment of Iraqi journalists working for foreign news media for months and years without charges. Senator Warner asks how can this treatment of journalists be squared with the requirement that the US public be informed about developments in Iraq and the strategic necessity that the US's behavior in Iraq be perceived as promoting democracy rather suppressing it?

The Pentagon has agreed to consult with local Iraqi journalists about their concerns and respond to the committee.

"Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, raised the issue...after receiving letters from Reuters and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and a telephone call from Paul Steiger, CPJ chairman and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal."

This story doesn't seem to fit the culture war's apologetics for the Bush administration's special accomplishments. Has the radical left secretly seized control of The Wall Street Journal corporation? Has the WSJ been infected with a lefty virus by associating for too long with journalists and crazy, obsolete enlightenment ideas about freedom of speech and public opinion being minimum requirements for democracy? Or do Senator Warner and 2002 Business Journalist of the Year, Paul Steiger, just hate America?

Posted by: Mark Anderson at September 30, 2005 5:08 PM | Permalink

McLemore, nola.com and Slidell Damage blog were not concerned with
DNC talking points. Those blogs were filled with people (including me) asking for information on missing loved ones, on where to go for food/water/help, on what areas you could go to and what areas were hopelessly damaged (the house my Aunt and Uncle had called home since the early '60s--only 3 miles from Lake P), on what the local authorities (boots on the ground) were saying. In other words, McLemore, the Non-NO blogs were fighting the cultural bias wars, and the NO blogs were saying "people (even if they aren't poor and black) are hurting--let's help them.

Posted by: kilgore trout at September 30, 2005 5:10 PM | Permalink

McLemore, nola.com and Slidell Damage blog were not concerned with DNC talking points.

I don't recall saying they were. I'm simply trying to grasp how blogs provided news better than the mainstream press. You raise the point that NOLA.com provided useful information on the areas damaged, where to get help and information and reports on what local authorities were saying.

That's also what the Louisiana and out-of-state newspapers did as well. NOLA.com is, indeed, the online outlet for the Times-Picayune.

Bezuhov: When assertions are made by officials in charge of dealing with the disaster and you have no way of quickly checking them out, they become the only detail you have.

Are you suggesting that because the media couldn't immediately verify the mayor's assertions about conditions in the Dome or a FEMA director's assertions that help is on the way, the media shouldn't report it?

Posted by: Dave McLemore at September 30, 2005 5:27 PM | Permalink

I run a local news weblog and community site, H2otown.info.

I note how the conversation is centered over the area where blogs and major media overlap in terms of topics. In this area, bloggers do do a lot of pointing to the MSM, and they don't work the way the MSM does.

But doesn't keeping the frame of reference this way tip the balance in favor of the MSM?

Don't get me wrong -- I loved it when bloggers covered the 2000 political conventions, and I raised my mouse in the Blogger Power Salute when FishbowlDC got credentials for the White House press room.

But the measure of the blogosphere will not be how well it apes CNN.

It will be in how it covers things that nobody bothers to cover today, by people who go to the web first, not last.

Major media treats the web as a dumping ground, someplace to throw content once it's used up; the last dusty depot on the content train.

The conversation is also centered over the blogs and bloglike entities that have the business model that is closest to their own -- they pay attention to blogs sponsored by newspapers, or by blogs that have an ad-supported model. Efforts that don't fit this model seem to sit in a huge blind spot for them.

I beat my local paper all the time. It's not because I know things first; it's because I hit Enter first. But at H2otown, I rarely point to articles in the local paper. At first it was because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do better than simply rehashing articles in a paper whose very understaffing was the main reason I started H2otown. After some months, I noticed I didn't even think about the local paper very much anymore. I had my own sources, my own beats, and a growing community, blogs launched on H2otown by local politicians, including the President of the Town Council.

Lisa to Traditional Media: I'm just not that into you. Sorry -- you're a great guy and I know there's someone out there for you. Somewhere.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at September 30, 2005 7:52 PM | Permalink

Hey Anderson, have you noticed that more journalists have been killed by insurgents, freedom fighters, terrorists, whatever, than the US military? Why not ask the insurgents, freedom fighters, terrorists why they are killing journalists and demand they be held accountable and brought to justice? And where's Reuter's outrage toward the insurgents, freedom fighters, terrorists, whatever?
Ooops, forgot----never mind!

Posted by: kilgore trout at September 30, 2005 7:54 PM | Permalink

I challenged the author of a CJR author who wrote a "hype buster" article about citizen journalism how many such sites they could name without Googling. My suspicion is that neither the journalist who wrote the pro article nor the person would still have fingers left to wave with after they'd named all they knew.

They didn't reply.

I'm starting to think that many of these articles are written in simple ignorance.

Posted by: Lisa Williams at September 30, 2005 7:55 PM | Permalink

I have to admit, I have a horse in this race.
I hired Brian Montopoli early last year, and he did fine work for me before I lost him to Public Eye not that long ago.
But it sure looks like Montopoli, point, set and game, to me.
Reading Brian's entire exchange with a blustering Hugh Hewitt, who is clearly suffering from a bruised ego and is furious about it, is like witnessing a slow-motion automobile accident -- you don't want to see it, but you can't resist.
Hewitt is facile, and most of the time he is glib. But he lost it here. It's going to be a little harder to take him seriously hereafter.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at September 30, 2005 8:10 PM | Permalink

Here's my take on MSM vs. bloggers. MSM can't/won't give us the whole story due to a variety of reasons, many appearing on the PressThink right sidebar. You'll never get the whole story from Josh Marshall and his ilk either, because they won't call bullshit on their own side----for that you need to consult Power Line, Captain's Quarters, Instapundit, etc.

If the whole country was blessed with the journalistic diversity of NYC--NYTimes, Post, DYNC, Observer, Sun, Press, VV,(I love 'em all) etc., we'd be in good shape. But since we're not, blogs fill in the gaps and allow those of us who want a more complete picture to get it.

Posted by: kilgore trout at September 30, 2005 8:25 PM | Permalink

"Are you suggesting that because the media couldn't immediately verify the mayor's assertions about conditions in the Dome or a FEMA director's assertions that help is on the way, the media shouldn't report it?"

There's reporting and then there's stenography. I thought passing along any old rumor while having no idea as to its accuracy was something that disreputable web journalists like Drudge did. But it made for compelling, movie-of-the-week-style TV and print accounts, so that's alright.

Posted by: Brian at September 30, 2005 9:13 PM | Permalink

Oooooh, this thread is just too juicy!

I know it's early, but Hugh Hewitt is in the lead for the Over The Top Hyperbole Award for his "You guys are like...the Plague". A close second is Daou who paints those who didn't support Kerry in '04 as a bunch of zombies, mindlessly following Rush, Drudge and Fox News in "blind allegiance to Bush". It's the famous "Vote for Me, Stupid" strategy that has made the Democrats the minority party they so richly deserve to be.

Then there's the hapless Lex, who decries those who "score cheap points in order to reinforce" a myth, but Lex has no problem scoring his own cheap points by reinforcing the myth that Republicans are racists and bigots when he spread the rumor, with no proof, that a certain Republican was passed over as successor to DeLay because he was gay. I guess "cheap points" are in the eye of the beholder, eh Lex? You certainly help reinforce the stereotype that the press is more interested in rumor than fact. But, hey, that's the reality of the "reality" based community, innit?

Posted by: kilgore trout at September 30, 2005 9:50 PM | Permalink

Fair enough, Brian. So a city is devastated by flood. Hundreds are killed; tens of thousands are displaced. The governmental structures are in chaos and aid is slow in coming. Streets are impassable.

There is no food, no power, no telephone. The mayor, the police and survivors are scattered across the state and all tell horror stories occurring in the Super Dome. On the record. This isn't one-source stenography. You're hearing the story from a variety of sources. And you can't get in the Dome to check it out.

Mind you, the bosses are watching CNN and Fox and getting the reports. The blogs are picking up on the theme. And you've got a 6 p.m. deadline. So you just ignore it?

Oh, I agree that reports like those at the Super Dome should be verified. At the very least, qualified with a 'could not be confirmed.' But in a 24-7 news cycle, the old rules get strained beyond belief.

So how would you report it without the benefit of hindsight? As a bonus question, how did the blogs reports it differently from the mainstream?

Posted by: Dave McLemore at September 30, 2005 9:54 PM | Permalink

Dave, while the reporting was going on in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, the media was doing more to inflame passions with dramatic language than to pierce the hysteria and chaos with facts. I found it depressing then, I find it depressig now. Were blog reports just as inflammatory? Yes--but is that really the standard you want? Mob hysteria with press credentials?

Did you hear the one about the mother trapped in the St. Bernard nursing home? Yes, stenography--pure stenography--is how some reporters treated Broussard's tale--until it emerged that the timeline of that story didn't make any sense. Whoops.

Meanwhile, a reasonable observer would have expected the bodies in the convention center to be stacked in every corner like cordwood. It was hell on earth! The stench of death everywhere! Oh, six? Well, nevermind that then.

The reality of the devastation made accuracy more crucial, not less crucial. And the lack of accuracy became a powerful tool for demagogues and partisans and bomb throwers. Qualifications of those wild rumors? They often got cut for lack of space.

Look, Shephard Smith was almost in tears! He's so handsome when he's being righteous! That, sadly, was what many pundits preferred to talk about.

Posted by: Brian at September 30, 2005 10:21 PM | Permalink

Jay:

Your blog is a treasure, one of the few places in cyberspace where it is sometimes possible for literate partisans from both sides of the culture war to pause a moment, listen to another perspective and decide whether to reach across the divide to pursue higher truths, or descend into battle. All too often the choice is the latter (Kilgore, Lovelady), but more and more I get a whiff of the former. (Jenny D., Mark Anderson's heart-felt post on Dowd from the prior thread).

I guess I would be classified as a neo-conservative, but I live in the SF Bay Area, and the majority of people I know are somewhere between Left and Far Left. They are usually very thoughtful humans, and as I avoid political topics unless we are well-acquainted, by the time my friends realize where I stand in terms of political philosophy, they have grown to trust my views in other areas and we develop a level of mutual respect. In such settings I have the most delightful discussions where I think both parties evolve in their thinking. I have helped some people acquire nearly libertarian views regarding taxation and healthcare, and I have learned to see value in thier views on collective energy policy, ecology and private property issues. I feel I have matured as a result. I can only hope my liberal friends feel the same way.

All too often, this wonderful blog has been hijacked by partisans from both sides who come to shout, but never to listen -- they must have it all figured out. So much certainty, so little human decency.

Keep the faith Jay, I suspect many like me are lurking and observing, thinking & learning, pulling occasional nuggets of gold from the rich seam of diverse commentators who post here.

As a convicted news junkie (and a professional marketer), I find the accelerating pace of disruption in the "channel" to be fascinating, so the story you are tracking holds my attention. The wide distribution in percpetual understanding across this field is typical of professions undergoing revolutionary change.

Please stay on the case Mr. Rosen, do not let those who have cast aside learning bring you down....

Posted by: Evor Glens at September 30, 2005 11:16 PM | Permalink

People are finding out that the media got it wrong from ... the media.

The Times-Picayune is the MSM, isn't it? If not, the Los Angeles Times and AP certainly are, and they followed quickly on the Times-Picayune's story on the myths of New Orleans.

If the media, including The Times-Picayune, hadn't reported these claims at the time, many bloggers would be accusing them of cover-ups. But that's no excuse for getting it wrong.

Other bloggers have done original reporting -- more than many people think. Some bloggers were sending photos from the Astrodome when the media didn't have access. Other bloggers were helping set up medical clinics and communications in New Orleans neighborhoods that the media hadn't reached.

Here's a lesson that people haven't talked much about: Within a few hours, in the middle of an enormous hurricane, a dead-tree newspaper became a round-the-clock blogging, community journalism, rooftop-by-rooftop-reporting, online presence. "Dinosaur"? Perhaps not.

Posted by: Brian Cubbison at September 30, 2005 11:39 PM | Permalink

Terry Heaton: "Standards don't produce trust, only the illusion of trust. This is the great lesson of the personal media revolution."

Let's recognize, Terry, that this lesson is totally counter-intuitive in professional journalism, and most professionals on hearing it would think you've gone nuts. They would say you no longer know a thing about the news business. You have got post mod brain rot. Of course standards produce trust. They're all we've got! "All we own is our credibility."

Why do you say standards make for the illusion of trust? I have my own theories about it, but I'd like to know what you mean. Please advise. And it was great meeting you, too.

My idea is: standards make for the illusion of trust because it's a lot harder to maintain trust (which involves you in the minds and hearts of the people out there) than it is to maintain standards, which are simple, static, impersonal-- and of course can be routinized. People can't.

Newsroom logic is: Standards produce trust, so if we always follow professional standards we will always have their trust, right? That's how you get the people who are the public out of the trust transaction. But of course newsroom logic is limited, and you can never get the people out.

If you have the wrong truthtelling standard (because people changed, or you, or the world did), but yet you meet it day-to-day, then by maintaining your standards you lose trust. And you're not likely to know it: thus, the illusion of trust.

If on the other hand you do realize it--we have the wrong standards, it's killing us!--and you try to change it, what's the first thing they're going to say about you? He's abandoning our standards!

Lisa Williams: That is one beautiful post. So witty, so apt, so true. I added it to the "After" section.

Evor: Thanks, that was encouraging. I would like to add: the comments are monitored and edited (by me) not primarily to benefit the participants, but to benefit the readers who are looking in and "following," the great majority of whom do not participate. Even in a thread with 200+ comments, it is common that 90+ percent of its readers are watching, not playing. I try to remain aware of this at all times.

Pretty often readers will say to me: "Your posts are wonderful of course, Jay, but I often spend more time with the comments because they're so..." and the adjectives vary from there.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 30, 2005 11:40 PM | Permalink

I hired Brian Montopoli early last year, and he did fine work for me before I lost him to Public Eye not that long ago.

So, Montopoli was a tool for the Salivating Navasky sock puppet.

Posted by: Speckled Jim at September 30, 2005 11:57 PM | Permalink

Brian Not-Cubbison: Your argument that the reporting in the immediate aftermath of the storm was inflammatory is correct. But with storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters, it always is: facts are coming in piecemeal, everything is chaos and calm, rational thought is at a premium. And there's always that deadline.

Is that an ideal situation? No. And your very right that this is exactly the time you need accuracy and caution. The problem comes in how you do that when the news of the event is being aired to the public in near-real time. The viewers are audience to the chaos.

No. I don't want that for either mainstream media or blogging. But that is the way it is. So how do we change the process. How do we slow down long enough to make sure the information is correct yet timely.

Brian Cubbeson: Exactly right. The mainstream press, the print side, anyway, did a much better job of correcting information on the fly. And was largely clearer in establishing that the news about deaths in the dome came from unverified reports from official sources and people in the dome.

The staff of the Times-Picayune performed admirably and well from the moment the storm hit to the present moment.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at October 1, 2005 12:30 AM | Permalink

This post gripped me completely.

One comment related to a mention that access for bloggers might mean nothing. I disagree.

Access to the political conventions' venues gave us unfiltered observations, except as filtered by the blogger. So what, that it's up to me to discern truth and accuracy? If more of us believed in, respected, pushed for the teaching of and used critical thinking, citizen journalism as a source of otherwise unknowable information (like the congressional vote referenced in a previous comment), and not just information sorted out by opinion would be, could be de riguer.

I think of it as news unplugged, with nothing between me and the news except the person observing and revealing it to me, like the musician playing music unplugged.

As a life-long consumer of news, and someone educated in the legal profession, I know too well how much we don't know. I hate that. Sometimes it serves a purpose, but often, it masks far deeper questions and concerns.

The unplugged nature of blogging has the potential to keep asking the questions and applying the pressure for answers in a way that MSM can never be expected to do, and most likely never will do on its own.

Posted by: Jill Zimon at October 1, 2005 10:16 AM | Permalink

Hey, Steve Lovelady, I read some pretty damaging things about you at Jason Van Steenwyke's blog. Care to respond, either here or over there?

Posted by: john moulder at October 1, 2005 11:24 AM | Permalink

Hey, Steve Lovelady, I read some pretty damaging things about you at Jason Van Steenwyke's blog. Care to respond, either here or over there?
Posted by: john moulder at October 1, 2005 11:24 AM

John --
"Damaging?"
In whose eyes ? Yours, obviously, and Jason's, of course.
But it's odd ... somehow I don't feel "damaged."
I'm entirely comfortable with my observations on Jason and on Leonard Pitts.
Jason isn't.
That's life.
Get used to it.
Steve
PS -- And, by the way, next time you see Jason, please tell him I am not the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. It will increase his credibility greatly once he learns to produce at least the first sentence of a contentious post without error.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at October 1, 2005 12:32 PM | Permalink

Jay,

"a blog-organized, red-blue, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and attempt to decipher every word of every bill Congress votes on and passes next year."

sounds like a wonderful idea...I'd love to see a bi-partisan blogger project such as that.

As for Brian Montopoli...when he used to cover blogs at CJR he made it a habit to only link to his busom blogger drinking buddies and magazines he used to work at, but didn't disclose: link.

Perhaps if Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt take Brian out for a night on the town he might add them to his next journo-blogger list.

And he's quite the journalist...Brian Montopoli contributed nicely to the racist hysteria which permeated through the MSM after Katrina (that may have led to the deaths of many people) with this wonderful article about things being so bad that a cop had to give a CBS reporter a knife to protect herself: link.

Posted by: Ron Brynaert at October 1, 2005 12:36 PM | Permalink

Instapundit this morning highlights a few links that compare the AP's description of Condi Rice's speech at Princeton with a couple of bloggers who were there and described it. Please take the time to read these contrasting "news" stories from different sources. It is a perfect example of what so many of you discuss on this site.

Mr. McLemore made the mistake earlier in his post to say "But again, how did the blogs out-perform the MSM?" His question actually demonstrates the problem.... No one ever said "It's us vs. them" but that's how so many people seem to think of this "arguement," call it what you will.

The reality is that as an intelligent citizen I look for accurate reporting AND analysis that puts the "news" of a town, city, country, world into perspective. I can wade through different points of view, in fact it's better if I have access to lots of "takes" of a subject.

But it always comes down to the quality of the product. And the Condi speech demonstrates that for whatever the reasons, Big Media has lost its quality edge (and who knows that it ever had it b/c we had nothing to compare it to until recent years).

Collaboration and a determined focus on the end goal will help the media recover its trust. The end goal is to bring me, the citizen, the BEST description and context of the news. And, I do believe, unfortunately, that resistant people or those who do not understand the current information world simply have to be replaced quickly with those who do. And there are lots out there who do. The problem right now is that many of the people in the "firing" positions, those big moguls, also don't quite have a handle on what's happening.

Posted by: Kristen at October 1, 2005 12:46 PM | Permalink

"I'm entirely comfortable with my observations on Jason and on Leonard Pitts."

And Jason's just doing his leftist duty of afflicting the comfortable, doing his best to speak some truth to power and not being heard. Funny how the tables turn...

Posted by: Bezuhov at October 1, 2005 2:54 PM | Permalink

Catching up lately on Jay Rosen posts, for which thanks. He tries to go deep. But I wonder if he’s feeling my frustration.

There was another blogging panel discussion in NYC last week, sponsored by Newhouse School and New Yorker mag. Ken Auletta moderating Ana Marie Cox, Jason Calacanis, and Arianna Huffington’s business partner, whose name I’ve forgotten. Huffington herself canceled at last minute. (Nora Ephron posted about it at the Huffington Post.)

To be sure, the talk Rosen describes sounds more substantive than what I sat through. Also to be sure: Newhouse discussions are usually fun, smart, and provocative. But the whole blog-panel thing seems stuck in a rut.

Media people dedicate way too much energy to debating whether blogs are (good) journalism. Can we finally stipulate that each side pretty much understands the other? That the truth (if that’s what we’re after) is in the middle?

It’s taken on the feel of a show fight … At my event, we actually had to sit through happy talk about bloggers working in pajamas… Am I the only one who’s reminded of the “great taste/less filling” ads?

“Echo chamber,” someone above commented. I agree.

Rosen’s roundtable notes most intrigue when they hit on core paradoxes all media confront these days in tuning up their business models. (Would the whole blog topic excite even half as much interest were it not for the general commercial pressures big media feels?)

For example: Rosen’s notes state: “No one really knows what will guarantee into the future the big capital expense of a fully staffed newsroom.” That’s a super-central question. And blogs, or the Web for that matter, (as many have noted before) play only a partial role in helping us answer it.

When the famously paid-subscription WSJ Online gets trotted out as a success story, nobody ever remembers to point out how much that site depends on the old media WSJ. It’s highly unlikely Dow Jones applies the massive expense associated with its newspaper newsroom (or its wire service newsroom, for that matter) to its online P&L. Yet that’s the content for which its famously-paying subscribers are famously paying!

Newhouse School Dean David Rubin asked the same question of the bloggers on his panel, but in a different way (I’m quoting from memory): “If newspapers go out of business, what will you all write about?” By the time he framed this interesting issue – just a starting point really -- the panel was over.

Currently, the most prominent features of the media ecosystem are enormous MSM news (and entertainment) organizations. Like polar ice caps or tropical rainforests. They’re eroding. Verrrry slowly. (Other stuff is growing elsewhere, too.) The rest of the discussion depends on your time frame. Near-term discussions are much different than longer term ones.

Some debaters will go this way: What will happen when icecaps/rainforests are gone? Are they really eroding slowly –or has erosion gathered speed? Is it our fault? Have we done something wrong as a society to bring this “disaster” upon ourselves? What will happen to the media? (Should we colonize the moon?) What will happen to the American free press? What will happen to capitalism and democracy in America? What will happen to capitalism and democracy in the world?

Others will go this way: How can I keep doing good work without being distracted by the jabbering on the sidelines? How can I position myself (whether I’m old or new media) as a trusted filter? How can I become self-sustaining?

Posted by: David Longobardi at October 1, 2005 4:01 PM | Permalink

The continuing shock(!) at the inaccuracy of some of the post-Katrina coverage borders on the disingenuous ("Your winnings, Capt. Reneau.").

My question to the people who still don't understand how the MSM (or bloggers... or the mayor... or the president... or the military) could have gotten this or that wrong is, "Have you ever had to pass along information in a confusing situation?" And if you have, and you've never gotten flustered, bamboozled, flummoxed or otherwise screwed up, I would like to offer you a job.

To put it bluntly, real-time epistemology is a bitch. Reporters and editors continue to bash their heads against it, but they're not the only ones. Stock brokers, marketing directors, military commanders, fire chiefs, SWAT teams, quarterbacks: If you're in the business of acquiring, communicating and analyzing any kind of information in real time, you've made mistakes and you'll probably make more of them.

One argument is that the media needs to show more restraint regarding the demands of the 24-hour news cycle. There's some validity to that, of course, but it's hardly a meaningful prescription for better journalism. One of the core values of information is its timeliness, and no amount of Monday-morning-quarterbacking is going to change that equation.

Critics who say "They shouldn't have rushed!" should be asked a follow-up question: What policy would you have us adopt that would prevent this from happening in the future? And if they say "You shouldn't rush!" then we should politely show them the door. Yes, we shouldn't rush. We shouldn't spell words wrong, either. But it happens.

I like the way Colin Powell put it back when he was actually a military commander. Powell said he liked to make his decisions based on acquiring 75 percent of the information picture (I'm sure he used a different term, but I'm operating from memory). If he went with less than 75 percent, he was guessing -- and if he waited around for certainty approaching 100 percent, the result was command paralysis (personally, I always wanted to know how he measured that 75 percent, but I guess that's where command moves from science to art). This is a decision-maker who includes the dynamic relationship between accuracy and timeliness in his thinking.

We like to believe that a great leader (or editor) can make that uncertainty go away, but that's wishful thinking. Human beings, including professionals, make mistakes. And there is absolutely no systematic way to eliminate that built-in imperfection. It's a logical impossibility.

The MSM now seems to define its brand as "Hey, You Can Trust Us Because We Actually Wear Pants." But for all the various systems that we mainstream guys create in our newsrooms to protect and enhance our credibility, there is no escaping error. We don't deal with that honestly in-house, because editors believe that this will send the message to their subordinates that errors are OK.

By making a fetish of perfection, we do a disservice to the goals of transparency and reliable accuracy. We wind up presenting an illusion of news as gospel truth, which our critics are more than happy to hang around our necks when some portion of the information we process turns up absurdly wrong.

There are limits to the improvements we can make to the news media, and when you grasp that concept it suggests an alternate course of action: Why not focus instead on improving the receiver's ability to evaluate the information we provide? Why not "show our work" so that the people on the other end of the information transaction have something more to go on than just our word?

That's an uncomfortable concept for us mainstream people, because it elevates the "audience" from passive target to active partner in the sending and receiving of information. It implies more two-way communication. It demands that we get down off our high-horses every now and then.

Our goal should be a system in which the errors that occur are honest mistakes which can be dealt with openly and without the kinds of histrionics that newsrooms and critics go through now. Wherever we are today, we're a long way from that.

Posted by: Daniel Conover at October 1, 2005 8:20 PM | Permalink

"Does Leonard Pitts have a witness to verify his claim?"
Posted by: Speckled Jim at October 1, 2005 03:46 PM

Gee, I don't know, Jim. But Leonard is a grown-up, so I suspect that he has a spouse, and children, and neighbors.

I also suspect that, since he lives in Miami and he writes for an intensely local audience, that he wouldn't go public in the Miami Herald with a claim that none of his fellow citizens could affirm with their own experiences.

That's the beauty of local. Unlike with federal, or with national, with local you can't fake it.

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at October 1, 2005 9:48 PM | Permalink

Sorry, Kristen, but I think that 'us vs. them' is precisely the underlying theme in many of these discussions.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that information flow is evolving and that MSM media must adapt to a changing audience and a changing view of the news. I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. I find Lisa Williams approach particularly interesting.

But listen for a few posts to the conversations here and elsewhere and the mainstream reporting has failed and the blogs get it right. Such as your comparison of AP's version of Condi Rice's speech with that of a couple of blogs. How exactly did AP fail and the blogs succeed?

And I'm all for collaboration and understanding. But frankly Kristen, suggesting that mainstream old farts should just get out of the way if they don't understand isn't a real good sales pitch for collaboration.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at October 1, 2005 10:33 PM | Permalink

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at October 1, 2005 09:48 PM | Permalink

Gee, Steve-o, you're starting to sound a little like Dan Rather on this one. Maybe you need make yourself useful and go to New Orleans so you can help count the "10,000" dead bodies that you boys in the press lied to us about.

Posted by: Speckled Jim at October 1, 2005 10:48 PM | Permalink

Daniel Conover: "By making a fetish of perfection, we do a disservice to the goals of transparency and reliable accuracy."

Thanks for that comment, Dan. I think it's worth tying that in with Andy Cline's post:

Journalism is a discoursive practice that gets at the truth over time. The irony is that journalism hurts itself by not getting at the truth more quickly. And that happens quite often because competitive pressures encourage journalists to set aside the fundamentals--the very things that would allow them to get at the truth sooner in the news gathering process.

Posted by: Sisyphus at October 2, 2005 12:16 AM | Permalink

They're (reporters) required to hurry by editors who just need some kind of story by 5. Journalists do indeed correct any mistakes. That's the deal.

Posted by: papa at October 2, 2005 12:32 AM | Permalink

Dave wrote:

I just wrote about this at Jeff's. The AP provided a factual story, in context. But the AP chose the facts and the context for the story, and thus it used a rhetorical device sometimes called "ordering the world so you can win." It's quote left out most of the speech, and picked quote that were the most controversial, or about what the AP believes in the most controversial of the day. The context, thus, were those controversies, Iraq and Palestine, described in detal. The story also brough in that Bush is under attack over these, and that Dems were critical.

In some ways, none of this context had anything to do with the speech. Or all of it did. It depends on what kind of spin you're trying to put on the story.

And that is where the AP failed. But it put spin on the story. IN an effort to be objective.

We know this because other reporters (bloggers) were there who reported different quotes and put a different spin on the story.

I once worked at a very small newspaper and covered a speech by Colin Power way back when. I filed my story, and my editor held in until the AP story was filed. That way he could see how much they differed and decide what to do or change about mine.

Posted by: JennyD at October 2, 2005 3:47 AM | Permalink

Jay, Terry...

Re: Standards...

You can find a dozen lists of standards of various news frats and corporations and yet you will also find trust in the people those organizations represent continuing to fall.

Agreeing to a standard of ethics doesn't make you ethical; agreeing to a standard of truth doesn't make you trusted.

In fact, I'll argue that the reliance on -- the hiding behind -- these standards is a major cause of the separation of journalism from the public that you've chronicled, Jay.

Standards are a fine thing if they are a guide, if they are part of education: Strunk & White & God.

But at the end of the day, ethics are all about the decisions you make and trust is all about how others judge your decisions. This happens at a human level: Each of us makes our own decisions. And this happens case-by-case, story-by-story.

If this were a religious debate, it would be about fundamentalism vs. relativism, wouldn't it? Some follow the letter of the law. Others say that decisions must be made -- and trust earned -- every day.

In the nascent Media Bloggers Association, I opposed the notion of setting standards of ethics and behavior precisely because weblogs bring media -- or what we used to call media -- back to the human level. At that level (apart from marriage, I suppose), we don't sign pledges.

I don't need to sign a pledge not to screw over my neighbor. My neighbor gives me the benefit of civilization -- not just about following the law, the written standards, but also about not being a jerk -- until I violate that. I think that is what has been lost by mainstream media -- the presumption of trust -- because, in their monopolistic isolation, big-time journalists didn't think they had to earn trust with every story. They said -- and say -- that they already had trust because they had the degrees, they had the standards. And that is why they are so shocked now when their standards and trust are questioned.

Posted by: Jeff Jarvis at October 2, 2005 7:55 AM | Permalink

One more thing...

It doesn't help when the standards get reduced to the absurd.

The Times is now going out of its way to tell us where reporters are physically (as if that matters anymore) just because Jayson Blair lied about where he was. As if this would have prevented l'affaire Blair.

And there's something absurd about Judy Miller's enforcement of standards.... only, as you say, we don't know what that is.

Posted by: Jeff Jarvis at October 2, 2005 8:39 AM | Permalink

Jeff Jarvis,

I've concluded that journalists want the trust of their readers/listeners/viewers. It is important to their work ethic. That gives me hope (admittedly, I'm generally an optimist).

What gets in the way, sometimes, is the expectation that having explained the processes and/or meeting standards, the "receiver" [as Conover aptly calls us in terms of journalism as lecture] will understand (presumption of trust). If they don't, then there are many institutionalized fall back explanations for journalists (partisans, "don't want to hear", ...)

I found these bullets promising:

* Weinberger: “The bloggers didn’t have to spend half the morning explaining that most bloggers aren’t journalists, that bloggers are in conversation.” Blog literacy is up, that’s true. And there’s more respect. Jeff Jarvis in his write-up: “The tone has changed. There is no dismissive huffing from the big guys about blogs.”

* Big Media sees bloggers as better tuned to conversation about the news than news producers. Bloggers are more connected to “what’s bubbling up…” Therefore they have to be watched; they can’t be dismissed. There was loose talk about “leverging the power of the blogosphere” that probably originated in this sense of bloggers being closer to public chatter.

I see this as progress toward Readers (which is what bloggers are) Know More ....

Posted by: Sisyphus at October 2, 2005 10:58 AM | Permalink

This is the most intelligent thing I have ever heard Lovelady say here: "That's he beauty of local. Unlike with federal, or with national, with local you can't fake it." So true, Lovelady. Can anyone imagine their local press pulling the crap MSM pulls and be able to get away with it? (Unless NE corridor and LA-SF corridor is your "local").

Posted by: kilgore trout at October 2, 2005 1:38 PM | Permalink

"I think that is what has been lost by mainstream media -- the presumption of trust -- because, in their monopolistic isolation, big-time journalists didn't think they had to earn trust with every story."

To the extent that they've lost it (older generations raised on Murrow/Cronkite still by and large trust the established media brands, and, not too far beside the point, they vote), it is due to their reluctance to extend trust themselves. Not a naive, unquestioning trust - one can trust but still verify - but an abandonment of the liberal principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Those reluctant to trust are rarely trustworthy. Basic human dynamics.

Posted by: Bezuhov at October 2, 2005 5:13 PM | Permalink

Jeff, come with me back to my parents' childhood. The radio is on and the correspondent tells them he is near the front and he can hear the incoming fire. It's 1944 and it's riveting. My mother in upstate New York has never been to these places, and they seem far away and dangerous and the correspondent is brave and articulate.

Fast forward to 2005. I can catch a plane to Iraq. My brother-in-law is a consultant who flies into former Eastern bloc countries. My husband has been around the world several times over. I realize that someone else's view is no better than theirs.

Standards? Like, what, journalists have been to the airport, or stood outside the Superdome, or pondered what life is like in upper Michigan or outer Mongolia having spent 24 hours there in a nearby hotel? Give me a break. Standards. I can hear from residents via the web.

This is what you know. It's the erosion of exclusivity. We all can go places, or most of us, and the world is not longer the province of journalists. Now Iraqis in bunkers can blog, and so can the Chinese and Chileans.

So what do journalists bring to party? Maybe that they can sleep over in the apartments of diplomats?

Posted by: JennyD at October 2, 2005 8:10 PM | Permalink

I agree that the day has passed for your basic blog panel with Wonkette and Jason Calacanis-- or Jarvis and Rosen. However, this wasn't a panel, and there were no speakers. It was a discussion. Make a difference?

A year ago Jon Klein was ridiculing the notion that bloggers have anything to add. Here he is listening intently, certain he has something to learn. A year ago Andrew Heyward knew about blogs what Dan Rather "knew"-- less than zero, because the little he knew was false. His name was on the invitation to this roundtable; he co-convened it. Then at the meeting he acknowledges what bloggers have been saying: my fellow Americans, the era of the omniscent news provider is over. Meanwhile, across the table, his in-house blogger, Vaughn Ververs, is the first network ombudsman.

It's true that blogging would be in the same place without this movement. But it isn't true that these events are insignificant, or that there's nothing new.

People have been shouting "echo chamber, echo chamber" at me since I started writing about blogging and journalists. I have a hard time getting anything from that criticism-- in fact, I usually ignore it, preferring to trust my own ear.

In January I wrote a long essay called Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. But people tap me on the shoulder all the time and say, "I really think this blooggers vs. journalists thing is getting tired." I don't use the expression, "duh..." because it's so inelegant, but if I did...

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 2, 2005 8:34 PM | Permalink

Mickey Kaus:

Hurricane Parties: It's getting a bit confusing, what with the press revisionism and all. Let me make sure I've got the competing party lines down correctly--
Liberal position: Racist neglect caused poor New Orleans residents to suffer from the unspeakable things that only a racist would assume actually happened!

Conservative position: A fatherless underclass culture caused poor New Orleans residents to do the unspeakable things the anti-Bush MSM falsely reported they did!

Man, aren't you tired of competing party lines?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 2, 2005 10:27 PM | Permalink

It occurs to me that journalists might do well to study the early days of the Royal Society; you know, Isaac Newton and that lot. The procedures they invented have stood us in good stead for several centuries now, and look like enduring for a while longer.

The basic rule is "Tell what you see, first, as completely and as honestly as you can, then whatever conclusions you draw from it."

The nice thing about that rule is that it's profoundly cynical at its base -- it assumes that both the observations and the resulting conclusions are wrong, but it gives a later observer a clue as to what to look for and how to investigate what corrections are necessary. Even if the observer isn't honest, and doesn't actually report things as he or she sees them, the act of complying with the rule gives later investigators a place to start.

Journalism today appears to me to have things back to front. Journalists seem to think that "honesty" requires them to inform us of their reactions to the visible events and the conclusions they draw from them. Along the way, they seem to have lost the notion of describing what they see.

Data is not information; data is what information is made out of. Informed opinion is useful as all Hell, even when I disagree, if and only if it's accompanied by the data from which it was drawn. If all I have is the opinion, without the data or with what I'm afraid, or convinced, is an incomplete subset of the data, I have nothing.

Journalists are losing trust because they aren't delivering the data. They aren't reporting. They're explaining to us what it all means without bothering to tell us what "it all" is in the first place. Don't tell me they're afraid they'll get it wrong. I know damn well that they'll get some of it wrong all of the time, and all of it wrong some of the time. But if they tell me honestly what they see before they start giving me their opinion about it, I have some basis for evaluating their opinion and the start of a way to check their "facts". Then I can give them "trust but verify". If I can't verify, I can't give trust.

Emotions are a different matter. Emotions are irrelevant. They're horrified by all the dead and dying. It's a cliche. Everybody is horrified by the dead and dying; the only data they've given me is that they're members of "everybody", and I already knew that. It may be "honest", but it's redundant and useless. Emotions can't be avoided, and I'm not recommending the Joe Friday approach, but the TV people (especially) seem to have adopted an "emotional reactions first" concept, and frankly it's not only useless, it's getting boring. To journalists: Yeah, it's horrifying and you're all broke up about it. Tell me what "it" is, dummy.

Regards,
Ric

Posted by: Ric Locke at October 2, 2005 11:44 PM | Permalink

I'm sorry, JennyD, I'm a little confused.

AP chose the facts and the context for the story, you say. Which is exactly what the blog reporters did as well. What makes their choice of quotes preferable to AP's?

AP didn't report the whole speech. Neither did the bloggers. Granted there were links to the State Dept.'s site for the entire speech. But the reports? No. By definition, anything that isn't a stenographic copy requires making choices.

I'm not sure that AP's goal was 'objectivity' as much as reporting the fact of the speech and it's context to a larger political picture. Which you said they did. Or didn't. Or something. It's about there things started getting hazy.

But the question remains, for me, anyway, is why were AP's choices in reporting failures while the bloggers were not?

Please tell me it's something more than that AP represents the Old Media and bloggers the new.

Posted by: Dave McLemore at October 2, 2005 11:46 PM | Permalink

It is true, Steve, you are not the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

It is also irrelevant.

Will you address the substance of the criticism? Will you point out - in the TEXT of my writing, exactly where I said that what Leonard Pitts says happened to Leonard Pitts did not happen to Leonard Pitts?

You made the assertion. You said you're "comfortable" with it. Can you back it up, based on the text?

No side tracks, no ad hominems, no red herrings, like whether or not you ultimately report to a co owner of The Nation.

Can you support your assertion with textual evidence?

Jason

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at October 3, 2005 12:01 AM | Permalink

Ric - very nice approach. I don't have a problem with emotion and humanity in journalism - real people have real feelings. Making the reporter the center of the story, though, is generally a Bad Thing. Perhaps it has to do with a celebrity-infatuated culture, that makes celebs of almost anyone who appears on television. I can almost see the subconscious gears spinning "I'm on the tube, so I'm a celeb. Our stories are about celebs. This story is about me."

Posted by: Greg Burton at October 3, 2005 1:32 AM | Permalink

a blog-organized, red-blue, 50-state coalition of citizen volunteers who would read and attempt to decipher every word of every bill Congress votes on and passes next year

Of course, the bills that don't get passed deserve attention too.

This strikes me as perhaps one of the most useful tools to enable ordinary folk to understand what their government is doing. Is there anything more written about this?

Posted by: Todd Agulnick at October 3, 2005 2:37 AM | Permalink

Dave (gosh, it's a little loud in here, but I want to answer over the din):

It's not Old Media versus bloggers.

Not at all.

It's that they are not different.

The AP has "standards and ethics" and all. But in fact, despite these, it wrote a story that was selective as those by bloggers. The AP chose its facts. The bloggers chose their facts. All are to be read with equal skepticism.

That's fine, except that's not what the AP would tell us. They'd talk about professional standards, etc.

Posted by: JennyD at October 3, 2005 10:16 AM | Permalink

Jay - Hmmm. Guess I deserved some of that. For the record, I absolutely don't mean to disparage a PressThink-mediated version of bloggers vs. journalists. I hope *that* debate isn't over. And I do remember (now) reading your January essay and agreeing wholeheartedly.

But my frustration remains: Too much of the overall national conversation that's emerging on this issue sounds like tastes great/less filling to me. And what I was trying to ask -- ineptly, as I seldom post anything anywhere! -- is whether you share my frustration that this tendency generally persists.

By the way, I'm similarly reductionist when it comes to shield laws – and I see my two reactions as related. Shield laws frighten me in general for the obvious and traditional reason that licensing the American free press would be a bad thing. Nonetheless, I’m willing to discuss the merits of broad shield laws. But when people (esp. in government but anywhere, really) start making strong assertions about who’s a *real* journalist (and who’s not), my inclination (sorry) is to want to cancel the conversation altogether.

That’s not me saying I think I’m above such a discussion. It’s me just sort of viscerally rejecting a falsely framed debate – one that sets out to look for a clean, crisp answer (a codification) that I don’t think exists. And in the case of shield laws, whatever such answer we come up with is bound to bring trouble.

Again, and for what it’s worth, the PressThink fray doesn’t turn me off in this way (quite the contrary). But plenty of what I hear elsewhere does. And some of what you suggested was discussed at Museum of TV & Radio, as estimable as that panel was, also seemed to wander off in that direction. Maybe I took away the wrong impression.

I also would continue to tout the advantages of debating business models -- because they address the important issue of self-sustainability and directly bring the free-market standard into the discourse (as a proxy for mass readerships) -- and help keep us out of those definitional arguments that make me queasy.

Best and thanks,

Posted by: David Longobardi at October 3, 2005 2:46 PM | Permalink

Oh, they're reporting the data and sometimes offer conclusions or trends. You just don't like the data so you attack the messenger. Textbook bias, on your part there Ric.

Posted by: EH at October 3, 2005 5:34 PM | Permalink

Jay & Commenters:

Although the posts veared ina different direction, I wanted to get back to CBS versus Hugh Hewitt -- because I think there's a huge double standard being perpetrated here.

If you read the whole e-mail chain between Meyer at CBS and Hewitt, it is HEWITT who challenges CBS to run the e-mails, not Meyer. And then Hewitt didn't do it!! Yeah, he snuck in a link to Public Eye with no comment.

So I don't get it. I think Public Eyeis pretty dry but it sure looks to me like it's totally different than anything any paper or network has done before. And now you have the blogging community bitching because it isn't cloggy enough whilke at the same time Hewitt gets away with murder. As Bob Dole woulde say, "where's the outrage?"

Posted by: Oak Shot at October 4, 2005 11:16 AM | Permalink

kilgore trout: [[Lex has no problem scoring his own cheap points by reinforcing the myth that Republicans are racists and bigots when he spread the rumor, with no proof, that a certain Republican was passed over as successor to DeLay because he was gay. I guess "cheap points" are in the eye of the beholder, eh Lex]]

Uh, KG, I *am* a Republican. Since '78. And I didn't "spread a rumor," I posed a hypothesis, explicitly labeled as such, for which I was seeking knowledgeable feedback. Please try to keep up.

Posted by: Lex at October 4, 2005 1:07 PM | Permalink

That's cute, Lex, but not convincing. I've noticed that even as you parrot the DNC party line, you claim you're a Republican. Well, mebbe so. A Republican in CA or NY is not the same as a Republican in KS or UT. But I can repeat over and over that I'm a supermodel, and just because I say so, doesn't make it true.

What you insinuated about the supposed successor to DeLay is nothing less than McCarthyism. While the '50s McCarthyism was about the right outing left-wing Communists , the new McCarthyism, which you evidently promote Lex, is about the left outing right-wing gays. I can't tell you how this offends me, and when you, or any of your ilk, play this game, I'll be there to denounce you.

Nice try, Lex.

Posted by: kilgore trout at October 4, 2005 5:24 PM | Permalink