The Citizen’s Agenda in Campaign Coverage: Ten Steps to a Better Narrative

1.) Four to six months before the vote start asking the electorate a simple question: not, “who are you going to vote for?” or, “which party do you favor?” but: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes in this year’s election? The idea is to find out from voters what those voters want the campaign to be about, and what they need to hear from the candidates in order to cast an intelligent vote.

2.) To answer this question, you will need every method known to the modern newsroom. Don’t rely on one or two; instead, use them all. Redirect the polling budget away from horse race questions and put it in the service of the citizen’s agenda. Send reporters out to talk to voters— a lot of voters. Survey the views of community leaders, meaning: people in a position to know what their “crowd” wants the candidates to be talking about. Hold events designed to solicit those answers. Announce that you are putting together a citizen’s agenda to guide your campaign coverage this year, and that you want to hear from everyone, through any portal they care to use. Allow people to fill out a web form, or send an email, or record a phone message, or put it in a blog comment thread, or communicate over Twitter and Facebook. Use direct mail, advertise in the newspaper and on air, set up listening stations in coffee shops and shopping malls.

3.) As you fan out into the community in search of the citizen’s agenda, you will find a few people who are especially enthusiastic about what you are doing or clued into why it’s important. Ask these people if they want to join your advisory network, the sole purpose of which is to aid in the drafting of the citizen’s agenda and make sure that it reflects what’s coming in. Aim for 10 percent of your total sampling, knowing that the yield will be smaller than that.

4.) Based on all the information collected in step 2, compose an initial draft of the citizen’s agenda, in the form of 6 to 10 items ideally framed as questions that consume 50 words or less. An example from the New York State Governor’s race:

Our schools are not performing: New York’s public schools spend more per student than any other state. But New York ranks 40th among the states in the percentage of high-school students that graduate. Why is this and what do we need to do to change it? (46 words)

Once you’re confident that the 6 to 10 items reflect what you heard, use your advisory network (similar to a public insight network pioneered by American Public Media) to give you feedback on whether you have it approximately right. Ask participants to weight the items on the draft list by distributing 100 points among them. Allow them to write in any item that should be on the list but it isn’t. Adjust the draft accordingly.

5.) Three months before the election, publish the ranked list as your Citizens Agenda 1.0, emphasizing that it’s still in motion, that you want to get it right, and that feedback is still being sought through all available portals. Version 2.0 comes out two months before the election, and version 3.0 one month before. In between you can revise it as often as necessary, refining the language, adding items that feedback shows were missing, and adjusting the ranking of items.

6.) Once you have a version of it up and running, the citizens agenda is your working template and master narrative for election coverage. When the candidates speak, map what they said against the citizens agenda. When you have an opportunity to question the candidates, ask them questions that flow from the citizens agenda. Reporters assigned to cover the campaign should dig deep on the items that make up the citizen’s agenda. Background pieces and in-depth reporting should build upon the citizen’s agenda. Decisions to make about where to put your resources? Consult the citizen’s agenda, a set of instructions for the design of campaign coverage in all its forms.

7.) It’s called a citizens agenda because that’s what it is, a list of action items and declared priorities. What campaign coverage should achieve is serious discussion (among candidates, journalists, campaign observers… and the public) of the stuff on the citizen’s agenda. Election year journalism succeeds, in this model, when it raises awareness, clarity, knowledge and the overall quality of discourse around the various items on the citizen’s agenda. It fails when it permits confusion, ignorance, neglect, demagoguery and silence to prevail on those same items. Truth, fairness, accuracy and non-interference in an outcome that should be determined by voters, not the media: these remain bedrock principles. But there is an agenda here. Journalists should not hesitate to take action on it. They should be clear with themselves and up front with voters about what they’re doing. This isn’t the View from Nowhere.

8.) One of the big advantages of deploying a citizens agenda in campaign coverage is that it substitutes for that default agenda we’re all familiar with: horse race journalism, and the inside baseball style of coverage. Instead of that, this. Use the citizens agenda to shrink the horse race narrative down to a saner size. Meaning: it’s fine to keep track of who’s ahead and point out what the candidates are doing to win. That’s part of politics. But it should not be the big lens through which journalists view the campaign because it’s simply not useful enough for voters. (Should we vote for the candidate with the best strategy? How does that work…?) Once it is reduced to a more appropriate size, the horse race can be added color beside the main event. I would specifically call it “the game” and limit it to no more than 15 percent of the whole. Reporters who cannot abide by that ratio do not belong on this beat.

9.) Be prepared for conflict with the candidates and their staffs. Their job is to win the election, to improve their chances and cripple the other guy. If that means supporting confusion, ignorance, neglect, demagoguery or silence on certain issues, they will not hesitate to do that. We know this. Therefore, being serious about the citizens agenda means doing battle with the forces that would undermine it. But that’s why we have a free press….right?

10.) In order for the citizens agenda to work, you have to get it right. You have to be authoritative. The 6 to 10 items on the citizens agenda have to resonate with most voters, and actually reflect what’s on their minds. They have to be able to recognize themselves and their concerns in what you say is “their” agenda. If you are wrong, or overlooking something important, you need feedback loops good enough to correct yourself. The citizens agenda needs constant testing and adjustment until you are confident that you’ve nailed it. Even then, ways for minority concerns to be heard and for items not on voters minds but still important to their future have to be worked in. This is a pragmatic exercise, a sophisticated form of listening, adjusting and feeding back what is heard.

What does the electorate want the candidates to be discussing as they campaign for votes in this year’s election? If you don’t think you can distill a good answer to that, and defend it as the honest outcome of your best reporting, then the citizens agenda is not an approach for you. Go back to the horse race!

Post-script: The citizens agenda is not a new idea. It was tried in 1992 by the Charlotte Observer during the early years of the civic journalism movement, of which I was a part. Others picked it up after that. I wrote about the Observer’s experiment in my 1999 book, What Are Journalists For? You can find the gist of that description in this essay, “Part of Our World: Journalism as Civic Leadership,’ sections 3 and 4. The key anecdote comes from the former editor of the Observer, Richard Oppel:

Voters were intensely interested in the environment…. So our reporters went out to senatorial candidates and said, “here are the voters’ questions.” Terry Sanford, the incumbent senator, called me up from Washington and said, “Rich, I have these questions from your reporter and I’m not going to answer them because we are not going to talk about the environment until after the general election.” This was the primary. I said, “Well, the voters want to know about the environment now, Terry.” He said, “Well, that’s not the way I have my campaign structured.” I said, “Fine, I will run the questions and leave a space under it for you to answer. If you choose not to, we will just say ‘would not respond’ or we will leave it blank.” We ended the conversation. In about ten days he sent the answers down.

Which raises the question of why the citizens agenda didn’t become standard and replace the horse race, that miserable thing. I’ve thought a lot about that. The only answer I have is: political journalists wanted it this way, and their bosses permitted it.

Der Spiegel: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It

New York Times: The War Logs

The Guardian: The Afghanistan War Logs

From my internal notebook and Twitter feed, a few notes on this development:

1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

2. The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:

• This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)

• There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)

• Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us! (Hold on: you’re hunting the guy down and you’re outraged that he didn’t contact you?)

• Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not an objective news source. (So does that mean the documents they published are fake?)

• “The period of time covered in these documents… is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy.” (Okay, so now we too know the basis for the President’s decision: and that’s a bad thing?)

3. If you don’t know much about Wikileaks or why it exists, the best way to catch up is this New Yorker profile of Julien Assange.

He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

And for even more depth, listen to this: NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter formerly at the New York Times, about Wikileaks and what it does. (35 min with Q & A.)

4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com:

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.

The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

6. From an editor’s note: “At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.” There’s the new balance of power, right there. In the revised picture we find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors.

7. If you’re a whistle blower with explosive documents, to whom would you rather give them? A newspaper with a terrestrial address organized under the laws of a nation that could try to force the reporter you contacted to reveal your name, and that may or may not run the documents you’ve delivered to them online…. or Wikileaks, which has no address, answers no subpoenas and promises to run the full cache if they can be verified as real? (And they’re expert in encryption, too.)

Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t even be in contention?

8. I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?

I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem. But the comment bar is open, so help me out.

9. Few people realize how important leaking has been to the rise of the political press since the mid-18th century. Leaks were actually “present at the creation” of political reporting. I’m moving quickly this morning, so I only have time for a capsule version. Those with a richer knowledge of the British Parliament’s history can confirm or correct this outline. Once upon a time, Parliament’s debates were off limits to newspapers. But eventually, through a long period of contestation, the right to report on what was said in Parliament was securely won (though not constitutionally guaranteed.) John Wilkes is the pivotal figure and 1770 the date when the practice became institutionalized.

A factor in that struggle was the practice of leaking. The way it worked then is essentially the same as it works today. There’s a bitter dispute in Parliament and people line up on one side or the other. Unable or unwilling to accept defeat, the losing faction decides to widen the battlefield by leaking confidential information, thus bringing the force of public opinion into play. It’s a risky maneuver, of course, but the calculation is that fighting it out in public may alter the balance of forces and lead to a re-decision.

Each time the cycle is repeated, the press becomes a bigger factor in politics. And internal struggles for power remain to this day a major trigger for leaks. Conscience, of course, is a different trigger. Whistleblowers can be of either type: calculating advantage-seekers, or men and women with a troubled conscience. We don’t know which type provided the logs to Wikileaks. What we do know is that a centuries-old dynamic is now empowering new media, just as it once empowered the ink-on-paper press.

— David Carr, New York Times, Outspoken Is Great, Till It’s Not

Sometimes we can only reach clarity by separating two things that have become tangled up with one another. Authoritative reporting and objectivity in journalism need to be disentangled, or the situation David Carr was satirizing will persist. These notes were written for Marcus Brauchli, the editor of the Washington Post, but anyone can read them. He’s the one who needs them.

A system of signs

The basic unit of journalism is the report, an account of what happened. The longer I’ve studied it (which is, uh… 25 years) the more I’ve come to see that “objectivity” as practiced by the American press is a form of persuasion. It tries to persuade all possible users of the account that the account can be trusted because it is unadorned.

Some specific ways in which it does this are: playing up facts gathered and playing down opinions; using constructions like “he said,” or “according to the Senate report” rather than “I think;” refusing to characterize what easily could be characterized; rehearsing rather than resolving disputes; betraying no position on controversial items, and so on. J-school students when they are taught to write in this style are often told not to use the word “I” and to lose the adjectives.

These are some of the signs of objectivity, which is a system of signs. But since the word “objectivity” has become a term of abuse, journalists who believe in this system now shy away from using that word. They may talk of the “tradition of non-partisan news coverage,” or put neutrality in place of objectivity. “No axe to grind.” “No vested interest.” “Straight reporting.” Different call letters, same station. Often (and I mean very often) they will concede a bit to the skeptics, “Of course no one can be totally objective…” and then re-affirm what they have always felt: “but I believe it’s important that we try to keep our opinions out of it.”

There is always more to it

Shifting about in these language games, journalists have kept objectivity more or less the same over the years: a system of signs meant to persuade us to accept an account of what happened because it appears to contain only what happened and not what the composer of the account feels about it. That’s why you should trust it: because it appears unadorned. The way we capture this in popular culture is by reference to Joe Friday: “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

That’s not to say that an account presented this way actually is pure fact. No way. There is no act of journalism that is not saturated with judgment. Even a photograph is framed by the picture taker. When I refer to “Just the facts” I simply mean: that is how the story asks to be understood, not… “that is all there is to it.” There is always more to it.

So objectivity is persuasion, the method is “just the facts, lose the adjectives,” and the outcome is supposed to be the user’s trust. Got it?

I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it

In my recent post, Fixing The Ideology Problem in Our Political Press, I said that the work of the journalist cannot be done without a commitment to the act of reporting, which means gathering information, talking to people who know, trying to verify and clarify what actually happened and to portray the range of views as they emerge from events.

A primary commitment to reporting distinguishes the work of the journalist. It is also bedrock for journalistic authority, which begins in the statement: “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” Or: “I was at the Tea Party convention interviewing participants, you weren’t, let me tell you about it.” Or: “I investigated BP’s numbers for how many barrels a day were leaking into the Gulf, you were too busy living your life, so… let me tell you about it.”

Reporting can be trusted if it is cured of opinion. Reporting can be trusted if it is dusted with opinion. Or even completely interwoven with opinion. It can lead to conclusions. Or the conclusions can be left to others. It can be persuasive with or without the adjectives. The presence of the word “I” does not prevent an account from being trusted. It all depends. Persuasion is an art form, a skill. It is rhetoric, which comes in different styles. It doesn’t always succeed, and rarely succeeds on everyone. Reporting has authority because the reporter did the work. I checked it out, you didn’t, let me tell you about it.

If we saw objectivity — or the vow of neutrality — as a form of persuasion we would be in better shape for arguing about incidents like the resignation of reporter and blogger Dave Weigel from the Washington Post. For a bunch of things follow from this basic point.

Easing the strain

1. “Grounded in reporting” is far more important than “cured of opinion.” What editors and news executives should worry about is whether the news accounts delivered to users are well grounded in reporting. That’s the value added. That’s the sign of seriousness. That’s the journalism part. Original reporting and the discipline of verification—meaning, the account holds up under scrutiny—should be strict priorities. Whether the composer of the account has a view, comes to a conclusion, speaks with attitude (or declines these things) is far less important. Here, looser rules are better.

2. If objectivity is persuasion, it’s possible that its power to persuade can fade. This is particularly so because of what I said earlier: every act of journalism is saturated with judgment. By not disclosing such acts, “just the facts” sows the seeds of mistrust. All it takes is an accumulation of users who want to know where these judgments arise from. Ostensibly “objective” accounts will fail that test. Mistrust will rise. As the clamor grows, journalists may misidentify it as a demand for even more objectivity. Now you have something that looks a lot like a death spiral, at least for those users who are no longer persuaded. (In part because audience atomization has been overcome by the Internet.)

3. Disclosure sets the fairness bar higher. James Poniewozik of Time magazine was seeking an escape from that spiral when he said that reporters should disclose their political preferences:

Modern political journalism is based on the bogus concept of neutrality (that people can be steeped in campaigns yet not care who wins) and the legitimate ideal of fairness (that people can place intellectual integrity and rigor over their rooting interests). Voting and disclosing would expose the sham of neutrality—which few believe anyway—and compel opinion and news writers alike to prove, story by story, that fairness is possible anyway. Partisans, bloggers and media critics are toxically obsessed with ferreting out reporters’ preferences; treating them as shameful secrets only makes matters worse.

In this sense neutrality can hamper credibility because it masks the hard work of proving you can be fair despite the fact that you have your views.

4. The View from Nowhere may be harder to trust than “here’s where I’m coming from.” Objectivity is often seen as safer by self-styled traditionalists in the mainstream press. But I like to put the accent on what’s tendentious about it. So I make use of my own term, the View from Nowhere, to describe the ritualized uses of objectivity and suggest that there is something strained about them. Easing that strain is not impossible. It means shifting to a different rhetoric: “Here’s where I’m coming from,” sometimes called transparency. This is a different bid for trust. Instead of viewlessness, “You know where I stand; judge accordingly.”

5. In deciding what the rules should be, the wise newsroom will trade polarity for plurality. Lose the binary, news people! Instead of two rigid poles—neutrality or ideology, news or opinion, reporter or blogger, adults or kids—I recommend a range of approaches that permit journalists to report what they know, say what they think, develop a point of view in interaction with events, and bid for the trust of users who have many more sources available to them. A plurality of permissible styles recognizes that trust is a puzzle unsolvable by a single system of signs.

The View From Nowhere at Twilight Hour: A PressThink Series

This post is part of a series I’ve been writing at PressThink over the past two years. The series is about the fading light behind what I’ve called The View From Nowhere, a term I started using in 2003 and have developed further on Twitter. The series is also about what might replace this broken practice, and the vocabulary I have chosen for describing what’s wrong with it.

1. Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press (January 12, 2009) Print.

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.

2. He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User (April 12, 2009) Print.

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.

3. The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism (Feb 21, 2010) Print.

“The quest for innocence means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus ‘prove’ in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! What’s lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about…”

4. Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press (June 14, 2010) Print.

That it’s easy to describe the ideology of the press is a point on which the left, the right and the profession of journalism converge. I disagree. I think it’s tricky. So tricky, I’ve had to invent my own language for discussing it.

5. Fixing The Ideology Problem in Our Political Press: A Reply to The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder (June 22, 2010) Print.

“If your job is to make the case, win the negotiations, decide what the community should do, or maintain morale, that is one kind of work. If your job is to tell people what’s going on, and equip them to participate without illusions, that is a very different kind of work.”

6. Objectivity as a Form of Persuasion: A Few Notes for Marcus Brauchli (July 7, 2010) Print.

“Reporting can be trusted if it is cured of opinion. Reporting can be trusted if it is dusted with opinion. Or even completely interwoven with opinion. It can lead to conclusions. Or the conclusions can be left to others.”

If you read them all, you will know what I think is happening to political journalism as it struggles to find a new footing amid culture war, platform shift, and collapsing trust in the political class, of which journalists are a part. If you read them all, let me know what you think.

The Politico was so hopped up about the story that it took the extraordinary step of posting on its site a PDF of Rolling Stone’s article because Rolling Stone had not put it online fast enough. In one of the many articles The Politico ran about the episode the following observation was made by reporters Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee:

McChrystal, an expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has long been thought to be uniquely qualified to lead in Afghanistan. But he is not known for being media savvy. Hastings, who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two years, according to the magazine, is not well-known within the Defense Department. And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Now this seemed to several observers—and I was one—a reveal. Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to “burn bridges” with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.

Let me enumerate why this is worth noting:

1.) It’s an admission that preserving their own future access is a hidden factor in what institutionally-bound reporters are willing to tell us today.

2.) Carol Lee covers the White House for the Politico. She is a beat reporter, so she would know, right? She’s not going to let an observation that rings false to her ear go out under her by-line… is she? Doesn’t make sense.

3.) This is exactly the sort of observation in which the Politico trades: the “inside” fact you might not know that tells you how Washington really works. It’s part of the brand.

4.) The Politico was actually founded to reveal just this sort of fact. The idea from the beginning was to open the kimono on journalism itself. This is from the days (2006) when it was first announced that John Harris and Jim VandeHei would be leaving the Washington Post to start a new online publication.

Mr. VandeHei, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, said he hoped that the venture would knock down some of traditional journalism’s “state secrets,” such as how stories get leaked and whose motives are served by certain political stories.

Right. And that’s exactly what Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee did. They revealed one of political journalism’s state secrets: beat reporters have a motive to preserve key relationships, so they often don’t tell us everything they could, which makes them more reliable, more predictable, in the eyes of the powerful people they cover. They were being good Politico people by asking: how could McChrystal and his staff be so unsavvy?

And Andew Sullivan picked up on it. “Why, one wonders, have we not heard a peep of this from all the official MSM Pentagon reporters and analysts with their deep sources and long experience? Politico explains…” Then he cut to the passage from reporters Lubold and Lee that I began with.

Meanwhile, Thomas Ricks, formerly a beat reporter covering the military for the Washington Post, made a similar observation at his blog for Foreign Policy magazine:

Reporters doing one-off profiles for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Esquire have less invested in a continuing relationship than do beat reporters covering the war for newspapers and newsmagazines. That doesn’t mean you should avoid one-off reporters, but it does mean that they have no incentive to establish and maintain a relationship of trust over weeks and months of articles.

Our reveal is looking pretty good, isn’t it? Gordon Lubold and Carol E. Lee have no motive to make it up. Lee is a beat reporter herself, qualified to speak on the subject. Lubold has covered the military for years. Politico trades in this kind of observation; it was founded to reveal some of journalism’s “state secrets.” Tom Ricks, a former beat reporter for the Washington Post who also covered the military, says pretty much the same thing: beat reporters have an investment in continuing the relationship so they are less risky for a powerful figure like McChrystal. (Jamie McIntyre, former Pentagon reporter for CNN, says the same thing.)

And then, the next day… the reveal disappears. The Politico erased it, as if the thing had never happened. Down the memory hole, like in Orwell’s 1984. The story as you encounter it online today doesn’t have that part (“would not risk burning bridges…”) in it. Clint Hendler of Columbia Journalism Review, who discovered the missing lines, asked The Politico about it…

Managing editor Bill Nichols declined to discuss the deletion with me or to send on a version of the article as it was originally published—making it quite difficult to tell how extensively the article was revised or updated beyond this excision.

“[W]e don’t get into why we make editing decisions, Nichols wrote in a brief email.

The current version notes that it was updated at 8:35 this morning, but there’s no note to inform readers how or why the article was changed.

The paragraph was widely touted as a perhaps unintentionally revealing diagnosis of the dangers of Washington reporters becoming captive to the institutions on their beat.

Now there is a debate about whether the reveal is accurate. Jack Shafer, Press Box columnist for Slate, says it is not:

According to this theory, freelancers happily burn their subjects because they’re not likely to return to them, whereas beat reporters must rely on maintaining good day-to-day relations with them. I don’t buy this. Feature writers and beat reporters are equally capable of taking a dive for their subjects. I don’t know of any beat reporter who wouldn’t have gotten a promotion for catching McChrystal and his staff shooting off their mouths, and I don’t know any newspaper that would have hesitated to publish the story.

I don’t think Shafer quite grasps the suggestion here. The suggestion is that a beat reporter would know when he’s being trusted not to reveal back stage behavior. It would never get to the point of “should I publish this damaging but spectacular story or hold it back to preserve my access…?” because the reporter would mentally label what he saw as unusable material. It wouldn’t be a question of “catching” the General and his staff because he would have internalized the difference between “on” time and down time, and this might even be part of his sophistication.

Joe Calderone, formerly a reporter for Newsday and the New York Daily News and someone I know because he teaches at NYU, said on Twitter than anyone who thinks beat reporters are just as likely to write damaging articles about key sources they will need later “never worked as a beat reporter I guess.”

What grounds could the Politico possibly have for redacting its own reporters’ work, and then refusing to talk to the profession’s leading journalism review about it? I can only speculate because the editors refuse to explain. But my guess would be that other beat reporters complained to the bosses and said…this makes us look bad! And the bosses, instead of standing up for their creed—revealing journalism state’s secrets—decided to cave and go Orwell on us. “That never happened” is the new story they offer readers. Along with “no more questions.”

They revealed too much, and quickly covered it up. That’s what I think. Now if John Harris, top editor of The Politico, wants to recover his senses and explain what was wrong with the original passage, I may change my mind. And while he’s at it, he can explain why he posted on his site the PDF of an article Rolling Stone was about to publish, in a brazen attempt to “win the morning” with someone else’s work. Until then I am flunking The Politico on this month’s legitimacy exam.

UPDATE: Yesterday, the Politico said it doesn’t explain its editing decisions, so why are you asking? Today, I got this explanation from The Politico’s Tim Grieve:

Hey, Jay – I read your post on our McChrystal piece and wanted to circle back —

Having done my share of media criticism at Salon, I know how satisfying it is to score a gotcha on the press. But I can tell you that there’s no “there” there on this one.

As we often do on big, breaking stories, we wrote through and reposted our main McChrystal piece many times Tuesday and Wednesday – adding new facts and shedding less relevant ones along the way. At around 5:45 Tuesday evening, I re-worked the piece to add new comments from President Obama and otherwise reflect the latest news. Together with the other adds that had come in during the day, my inserts made the story very long and unwieldy, so I quickly deleted or substantially reworked more than a dozen paragraphs that struck me as either tangential or out-of-date.

The “offending” paragraph about beat reporters vs. freelancers was one of them. No one – no source, no reporter, no editor above or below me – had said a word to me about the paragraph. I removed it solely for the purposes of keeping the story tight and readable. And in fact, I thought so little about doing it that I didn’t even remember taking it out when we first got an inquiry from CJR Wednesday.

I love a good conspiracy as much as the next guy, but this ain’t one.

Tim Grieve
Deputy Managing Editor
POLITICO

And Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart comments on the same issues I tackle in this post, but… better!

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The big camp includes everyone who thinks it’s easy to describe the ideology of the political press in the United States. Most on the progressive left, most on the conservative right, and almost all of the people in the press itself think this way. Of course, they would describe that ideology very differently, but that it can be done in a sentence or two… about this they have little doubt.

(Now I’m generalizing here, okay? This means I’m aware that there are exceptions and that I am overlooking certain nuances that divide observers within camps.)

The left says: Look, it’s very simple. The political press ultimately serves the interests of the people who own it— the corporate capitalists, the ones with money and power and “access” to politicians, the people who run things and always have. Those who are unwilling to make peace with this fact don’t make it very far in political journalism.

The right says: Look, it’s very simple. Press coverage reflects the bias of the people who produce it— and they’re liberals! Conservatives who are against abortion, suspicious of gay rights, skeptical about global warming, against the redistribution of wealth and instinctively wary of government regulation don’t make it very far in political journalism.

Look, it’s very simple, our journalists say. The press isn’t on the side of the left or the right. Of course, journalists are human. They have passions, they have interests, they have opinions. But these are irrelevant to the way they define and do their job, which is to find out what’s happening and tell the world about it. Ideologues don’t make it very far in political journalism.

In the puny camp that I’m a part of the first sentence is: This is complicated…

Political journalists are cosmopolitans

For example: If we were able to survey their opinions on the issues that divide left and right, we would undoubtedly find that the people in the political press—the Gang of 500, as Mark Halperin calls them—are much more liberal than the population as a whole. We would also find that they are typical of the population in the cities where they work, which formed the basis for this famous column by Daniel Okrent: Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

But if we were able to engage our political journalists in a deeper discussion we would also find that most of them are skeptical about changing society in any fundamental way. And they are big believers in the law of unintended consequences. So: liberal or conservative? My answer: it’s complicated. One thing we can definitely say: political journalists are cosmopolitans, and they will see the world through that lens. They may also stop seeing it as a lens, and that’s when it becomes an ideology.

But even if we had an x-ray machine that gave us perfect information about the beliefs of the journalists who report on politics, the ideological drift of the work they produce wouldn’t necessarily match the personal beliefs or voting patterns of the reporters and editors on the beat because there are other factors that intervene between the authors of news accounts and the accounts they author.

Take for instance the way professional journalists try to generate authority and respect among peers, or, to state it negatively, the way they flee opprobrium. Here it is important for them to demonstrate that they are not on anyone’s “team,” or cheerleading for a known position. This puts a premium on stories that embarrass, disrupt, annoy or counter the preferred narrative—the talking points, the party line—of one or both of the sides engaged in political battle. An incentive system like that tends to be an ideological scrambler, which doesn’t mean that it scrambles consistently or symmetrically across political lines. It means what I said earlier… this is complicated.

“True believer,” a term of contempt

Related to the scrambler effect is the delight most reporters take in inconveniencing with reported fact and discomfiting questions those who represent a particular point of view: whether they are office holders, spokespeople, activists, or committed ideologues. Important fact: “True believer” is a universal term of contempt in newsrooms, skeptic a universal term of praise.

Also involved is the one bias most journalists will admit to exhibiting (which doesn’t mean the only bias they have.) I refer to the love of a good story, and the glory of being credited for breaking that story, which causes them to look for revelations that will capture attention, provoke reactions and dominate a given news cycle. (A recent example.) Here is the late David Shaw, media beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times, with a view I’ve heard many times since he expressed it in 1988:

The one thing a journalist prizes above all else in his professional life is a good, juicy story, and most good stories offer bad news -scandal, war, disaster, murder. Most journalists I know would rather write an expose than a flattering profile, regardless of whether their subject is liberal or conservative. That may reveal something unhealthy about journalists’ psyches, but it doesn’t say anything about their partisanship.

Each of these factors cuts different ways in different circumstances. There are ideological implications to all of them. For example: one of the consequences of the contempt for true believers is that street protests and marches aren’t taken very seriously in political journalism. Also, religious leaders getting involved in politics have a huge hurdle to overcome. Third effect: Ironists do better with the press than idealists. None of these things is “neutral.”

Friends on both sides but friend to neither

Ed Henry is CNN’s White House correspondent. In March of 2009, he had a chance to pose a question to President Obama at a White House press conference. In a follow-up he asked why Obama had waited days to express outrage about the bonuses granted to executives at AIG (after a government rescue package that totaled $180 billion.) “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak,” Obama said, with some edge in his voice. Henry later gushed about the exchange on CNN.com:

I waited patiently and then decided to pounce with a sharp follow-up. From just a few feet away, I could see in his body language that the normally calm and cool president was perturbed.

But it’s in moments like that we sometimes find out what’s really on a president’s mind. In this case, he’s not happy about the scrutiny on AIG. So he did slap me down a bit.

Anderson Cooper said later half-jokingly that yours truly was “nursing his wounds.”

Even more comical to me was the flood of e-mail I got from Democratic and Republican sources.

Invariably, my Democratic friends tweaked along the lines of “how’d you like the smackdown” because they were pleased the president pushed back.

But my Republican friends hailed me by saying essentially, “Thanks for doing your job— he never answered the question.”

So the exchange was a great political Rorschach: Each party saw their own talking points in the reflection of the back-and-forth.

What do I think? I’ve got no hard feelings toward the president and I assume he feels the same, but I can’t worry about that. I was doing my job — and he was doing his

It delights Ed Henry to provoke these responses. He has produced a moment of theater that gets people “on both sides” (a magic phrase in pro journalism) cheering and jeering. He gets a warm glow from being “slapped down” by Obama because you only get slapped if you ask a tough question, inconveniencing the power holder in his effort to sell the nation on an image of mastery. (“Tough” is another universal term of praise in newsrooms.)

His Democratic friends love it because Obama showed a flash of anger. Take that, Ed! His Republican friends love it because Henry annoyed Obama. Way to go, Ed! Ed loves it because the narcissistic reactions of both sides prove how mature and professional and detached he is: just doing my job, folks. He has friends on both sides but in his mind he is friend to neither. And this is where we must try to locate his ideology.

Moderates, mavericks and pragmatists

Dana Milbank is the Washington Sketch columnist for the Washington Post. To me, Milbank is one the most extreme ideologues in the business. I say that because of lurid passages like this…

On Tuesday, I learned that I am a right-wing hack. I am not a journalist. I am typical of the right wing. I am why newspapers are going broke. I write garbage. I am angry with Barack Obama. I misquote Obama. I am bitter. I am a certified idiot. I am lame. I am a Republican flack.

On Thursday, I realized that I am a media pimp with my lips on Obama’s butt. I am a bleeding-heart liberal who wants nothing more than for the right to fall on its face. I am part of the ObamaMedia. I am pimping for the left. I am carrying water for Obama. Lord, am I an idiot.

I discovered all this from the helpful feedback provided to me in the “reader comments” section at the end of my past four columns on washingtonpost.com

The conceit of Milbank’s column is that he had never read the comments before, but on the advice of an editor he finally went sewer diving. “As a sociological experiment, it was fascinating.” He discovered that everyone’s a bitter ideologue— except him, the columnist who by duty observes the foibles and excesses and pure BS of the hotheaded believers on both sides. What I mean by an “extreme” ideologue, then, is that Milbank is extremely likely to see the world is this hyper-symmetrical and self-congratulatory way.

In political journalism there are almost always two sides, not two-and-a-half, three or four. Inhabitants of the “it’s complicated” camp place a good deal of importance on this maniacal two-ness. The two party system and the journalist’s method of pushing off from both sides to generate authority fit perfectly together. That’s ideological. More from Milbank:

On April 10, I wrote a column about an Obama appearance urging Americans to refinance their mortgages— a fairly gentle piece pointing out that the president sounded like a LendingTree.com pitchman. The comments compared me to Bernard Goldberg and Glenn Beck. One complained that “I gave Bush and the Republicans a pass.”

Actually, a National Review column called me “the most anti-Bush reporter” in the White House press corps, but never mind that. “Uh oh, Milbank,” wrote commenter “farfalle44.” “Now the Obamabots have labeled you an Obama hater— watch out!”

For Thursday’s column, I criticized the “tea party” outside the White House. Conservatives left hundreds of indignant comments—I was an Obama “lap dog” and “licking Obama’s shoes”—but that didn’t buy me credibility with the left.

The man is simply compelled to tell the truth no matter who’s offended by it, so he is popular with neither side— and of course there are always and only two. But in order to keep up this image (for that’s exactly what it is, an image, similar to John McCain’s brand as a “maverick”) Milbank must continually locate “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,” as that bouncy song from the 70s put it.

What this means ideologically is that the people with political sense in press treatment will usually be the moderates, mavericks and “pragmatists,” a word that in political journalism has almost no content beyond, “opposite of true believer… ideologically flexible… not a purist.”

High Broderism and its heirs

This belief—that political sense, as well as reality, as well as the winning strategy in most elections resides in the center, while “the extremes” on both sides are equally extreme, deluded and irresponsible—has come to be called High Broderism, after the famous Washington Post reporter and sage, David Broder, for many years the “dean” of the capital press corps. And since High Broderism is a belief, there are true believers for it within the press corps. But this is one case where fundamentalism is perfectly acceptable.

It’s always been interesting to me that after Broder retired from daily reporting he was given a column on national politics by the Washington Post. It lives in the Post’s opinion section. But as far as I know, Broder has never openly declared any political opinions. (I kind of assume he’s an Eisenhower-style Midwestern Republican, but I don’t know that.) He continues to write as if he has no politics himself, even though he is fully licensed to express his views as a columnist for the op-ed page. What his column is really about, then, is the ideology that is baked into political journalism by years of practicing it at an elite level. (Correction: Broder’s column began well before he retired from reporting.)

One of the purest statements of this ideology came from a leading heir to Broderism: Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek. This is from a November, 2009 column on Sarah Palin as a star in the Republican sky:

What Obama advisers privately refer to as “Palinism” has created a climate of ideological purity inside the GOP. To deviate from the anti-Obama line at all—that is, to acknowledge that politics is the art of compromise—risks the censure of the party. Pure ideologues will argue that this is a good thing; others like, say, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of Palin’s onetime champion John McCain, think differently. Graham was denounced last week by the Charleston County Republican Party for working with Democrats on issues such as climate change; the senator’s office replied by invoking President Reagan’s belief that “elected officials need to find common ground and work together to solve difficult problems.”

Note the contempt for purists, the praise for moderates, and the fuzzy pragmatism that is also called “bipartisanship.” These signify. Meacham goes on:

Reagan realized that movement conservatives like him needed moderate conservatives to win and ultimately to govern. In 1976, in his challenge to President Ford, Reagan announced that he would run with Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, a Rockefeller Republican. It never came to that, but four years later, in Detroit, Reagan seriously considered only two men for the ticket: Ford and George H.W. Bush, both men from the middle, not the far right, of the Republican Party. It is difficult to imagine the 2012 nominee choosing a more moderate running mate, not least because there are so few moderates left in the GOP. Even those of centrist inclinations are finding it virtually impossible to work with the administration for fear of a backlash from the base.

We have been to this movie before, when the unreconstructed liberals of the fading New Deal–Great Society coalition obstinately refused to acknowledge the reality that America is a center-right nation, and that Democrats who wish to win national elections cannot run on the left. We are at our best as a country when there is something approaching a moderate space in politics. The middle way is not always the right way—far from it. But sometimes it is, and a wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?

In Meacham-land “center right” is the right place for politics to be played not because the center-rightists have the best answers to the nation’s problems but because “the reality [is] that America is a center-right nation.” Now we’re near to the beating heart of the ideology that holds our political press together. That is when journalists try to win the argument not by having better arguments but by standing closer to a reality they get to define as more real than your reality.

Trust me on this: If you try to factor in the behaviors I’m describing, you will soon find that we don’t have a ready language for the kind of politics that is operating. What we have is an exhausted critique of media bias. In my own criticism I’ve tried to remedy this. Re-description has therefore been my aim.

Terms that don’t easily scan

So here are some of the key terms in the strange language I’ve had to invent in order to separate myself from the “it’s simple…” camp. My terms don’t scan easily. They have to be explained, which is the whole point of using them.

1. The Church of the Savvy. This is my name for the actual belief system that prevails in political journalism. I’ve been keeping a kind of public notebook on it via my Twitter feed.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, “the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his or her observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy. This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.

2. The Quest for Innocence, which is the agenda (I say) the press must continually serve, even as it claims to serve no one’s agenda.

Innocence [is] a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved… The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade.

3. Regression to a Phony Mean, an especially dubious practice that is principally about self-protection.

Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

4. The View from Nowhere, the taking of which journalists associate with their claim to legitimacy.

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. It can’t be that simple, that beautiful, that symmetrical… can it? Temptation says yes.

When you have an obligation to remain outside the arena, it is also tempting to feel above the partisans who are struggling within that arena. (But then where else are they going to struggle?) You learn the attractions of a view from nowhere. The daily gift of detachment keeps giving, until you’re almost “above” anyone who tries to get too political with you, or at least in the middle with the microphone between warring factions. There’s power in that; and where there’s power, there’s attraction.

5. He said, she said journalism, a formation I have been trying to bust up by pushing for more fact checking.

“He said, she said” journalism means…

- There’s a public dispute.
- The dispute makes news.
- No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
- The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
- The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

When these five conditions are met, the genre is in gear.

6. The sphere of deviance. The power to place certain people, causes and ideas within the deviant sphere is one of the most ideological things journalists ever do.

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible…

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate

This post is too long, so let’s wrap it up. Consider:

It’s very simple. The press ultimately serves the interests of the people who own it…

vs.

It’s very simple. Press coverage reflects the bias of the people who produce it…

vs.

It’s very simple. The press isn’t on the side of the left or the right…

vs.

This is complicated! You’ve got the Church of the Savvy, The Quest for Innocence, the View from Nowhere, Regression to a Phony Mean, He Said, She Said, the Sphere of Deviance. These form the real ideology of our political press. But we have to study them to understand them well.

You can see, then, why my camp is so tiny.

The occasion for asking was this report, CNN Fails to Stop Fall in Ratings. “CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.” Anderson Cooper, currently the face of the brand, sometimes loses in the ratings to re-runs of MSNBC’s “Countdown.”

And yet, “CNN executives have steadfastly said that they will not change their approach to prime-time programs, which are led by hosts not aligned with any partisan point of view.”

So this is what I told the reporter:

Almost every time I see this subject addressed CNN is placed in a mental lock box by media reporters who share a component of its ideology but of course don’t acknowledge that. The shared component is that the View from Nowhere, also called “straight news,” is inherently superior and always preferable.

But audiences seem to like their news delivered with opinion: right wing in the case of Fox, left leaning in the case of MSNBC, these reporters say. And so the choice is framed: whether to continue with the journalistically superior “we don’t have a view, we’re just giving it to you straight” coverage, which is sometimes called “hard news,” or to cave into a ratings-driven trend: ideologically inflected news.

But not everything in the world fits into that frame. A few thoughts that don’t…

Maybe the View from Nowhere has failed, not because audiences want opinion rather than news but because the Voice of God isn’t as convincing as it once was. From this point of view, nothing will improve at CNN until the people running the news report consider that viewlessness may not be an advantage but ideology-in-command is not the only alternative.

Maybe what Anderson Cooper calls “keeping ‘em honest” journalism has failed at CNN because the way the network operates most of the time it practices “leave it there” journalism, as Jon Stewart so brilliantly explained.

My alt line-up for CNN prime time looks like this: (Please excuse my jokey titles…)

• 7 pm: Leave Jon King in prime time and rename his show Politics is Broken. It should be an outside-in show. Make it entirely about bringing into the conversation dominated by Beltway culture and Big Media people who are outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media and who think the system is broken. No Bill Bennett, no Gloria Borger, no “Democratic strategists,” no Tucker Carlson. Do it in the name of balance. But in this case voices from the sphere of deviance balance the Washington consensus.

• 8 pm: Thunder on the Right. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational liberal that mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition… and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning. The television equivalent of the reporting Dave Wiegel does.

• 9 pm: Left Brained. Flip it. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational conservative that mostly covers liberal thought and the tensions in the Democratic party…. and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are left leaning.

• 10 pm: Fact Check An accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements to find the dissemblers and cheaters. The week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month, season, year or era. CNN’s answer to Jon Stewart.

• 11 pm.: Liberty or death: World’s first news program from a libertarian perspective, with all the unpredictablity and mix-it-up moxie that libertarians at their best provide. Co-produced with Reason magazine.

Now that’s a line-up that doesn’t pretend the View from Nowhere is superior and doesn’t turn CNN into MSNBC or Fox. Get it?

Audience Atomization Overcome

The people formerly known as the audience, once connected up to big institutions and centers of power, but not across to one another, have overcome their own atomization, which was a normal condition during the age of mass media. With the rise of social media and mobile devices they are now connected horizontally, peer to peer, at the same time as they connect vertically: to the news, the program, the speaker, the spectacle. Simple example: Tweeting during the Academy Awards. More intricate example: Pet lovers find each other on affinity sites when the major media isn’t attentive to their concerns.

The horizontal flow changes the situation for speakers and producers in any communication setting that retains the trappings of one-to-many. The change is especially dramatic in an arena I know well: the professional conference where I might sit on a panel or attend a presentation. The popularity of the backchannel—years ago it was IRC, today it’s Twitter—has empowered those in the audience to compare notes and pool their dissatisfaction during a performance that misfires. Audience atomization has been definitively overcome, raising the bar and increasing the risk for speakers who walk in unprepared.

Especially at risk are “big name” speakers whose online or offline status is such that they may complacently assume their presence alone completes the assignment and guarantees success. Organizers may be so delighted to have landed the CEO of the hot company or the thought leader in a particular space that they fail to ask for much in the way of new material or a carefully thought-out ideas. This was always a problem at conferences; what’s different now is the audience is able to do something about it, and they will savage you on Twitter if you falter.

These facts were clearly in view for me and my colleagues as we prepared for our recent panel at South by Southwest: The future of context. We were acutely aware that the bar had been raised, especially at a conference like SXSW where everyone is wired. When Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared at South by Southwest for a keynote interview, the answers felt so thin to so many in the room that he had to post this after.

Here are ten things we did in recognition that audience atomization has been overcome. I must say: our plan worked. The Future of Context was the most well-received panel I have ever been on. (A good live blog of it is here, a reaction post here, a sample tweet here. The room—Hilton H, a big one—was full and people were turned away. You can list to the event—panel plus Q & A—here.)

How to avoid getting killed in the backchannel

1. Unfamiliar to them, super familiar to you. First, you need a subject that hasn’t been picked to death at conferences. But it’s also got to be something you grok or the thing won’t rock. I wrote my first post on background narratives vs. newsy updates in 2008; I’ve been thinking about it since then. Co-panelist Matt Thompson introduced the phrase “the future of context” in 08, as well. He spent a year on the problem as a fellow at the University of Missouri. In a sense, we had two years prep time. But to most of our listeners, the problem was new. That was our edge.

2. Go for intellectual diversity. We had a mainstream journalist (Matt Thompson of NPR) an academic (me) a software developer and entrepreneur (Tristan Harris of Apture.com) and a tech writer and media reporter (Staci Kramer of paidcontent.org.) The youngest panelist was less than half the age of the oldest. We had an African-American and three whites, a woman and three men. People notice.

3. Get serious about advance planning. One conference call (“So Sally, what do you want to talk about?… Is Sally still on the line?”) is not what I mean by serious. We had five calls over four months. We worked out a beginning, middle and end that made sense to all of us: Frame the problem, drill down on a few specifics, float possible fixes, then go to the crowd.

4. Blog it first. Eight days before the SXSW panel I posted News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest. A few days later Matt Thompson posted The Case for Context: My Opening Statement for SXSW and Tristan Harris came in with Context: The Future of the Web. By blogging it first we could promote the event with something juicier than “come to my panel!” We could use early reactions to hone later presentations. We had three comment threads active before the panel started. Here’s how I curated the discussion my pre-post engendered. This pre-tweet told me to underline a key distinction between informative and informable.

5. Create a dedicated site for the panel. Invite your crowd to it. See futureofcontext.com, which Matt Thompson pulled together. Anyone can write a post for it or comment. And it says to the audience: welcome, we’ve set a place for you.

6. The title you pick should be “write once, run anywhere.” (Why that phrase?) Thus: the future of context is simultaneously the name of the SXSW panel, the domain name of the site, the hashtag on twitter and the search term we wanted to claim.

7. Watch the backchannel like a hawk during the event. This chart shows that hashtagged tweets were coming in at a rate of almost 300 an hour. It’s your moderator’s job to monitor that flow, sense where it’s going and react when necessary by talking directly to the backchannel and letting the crowd know it’s being watched. This takes someone who can scan posts, type quickly and think across multiple streams. Staci Kramer did all that. After the five phone calls and the three blog posts and the dinner the night before to go over the plan, she already knew what we were going to say, which allowed her to focus on the incoming. (Umair Haque, who interviewed Ev Williams at SXSW, said he should have done what Staci did.)

8. Adjust on the fly. We didn’t have time for our third section, float possible fixes, so we skipped it in order to…

9. Leave at least 40 percent of the time for Q and A. Anything less than that and people start resenting you for hogging the mic. It’s amazing to me how many panels cannot manage this simple feat of timing.

10.Arrange a meet-up directly after for those who want to continue the discussion and interact with the participants face-to-face. This was something I wish we had thought of. (It was suggested to me by Jeremy Zilar of the New York Times, who attended.) That way no one walks away wishing there was more time.

Now if you’re thinking that none of these ideas is particularly original or ingenious— well, I agree. My point is you need a complete approach to avoid getting killed in the backchannel and give demanding conference-goers what they have come to expect.

Of course there’s another alternative: the unconference, where the room is the panel.

Here are some of my ideas, questions and puzzlers in advance of that event. I am posting them today in hopes of generating a discussion I can use to improve my performance in Austin. (It’s already happening, see the comments.)

1. Why are we serving people the news without the background narrative necessary to make sense of the news? I first became interested in this problem after listening to The Giant Pool of Money, the awesomely effective one-hour This American Life episode that finally explained to me what the mortgage banking crisis was, how it happened and why it implicated… well, just about everyone. I was grateful, because up to that moment I had absorbed many hundreds of reports about “subprime lenders in trouble” but had not understood a single one of them.

It wasn’t that these reports were uninformative. Rather, I was not informable because I lacked the necessary background knowledge to grasp what was being sent to me as news. On the other hand there was no easy way for me to get that background and make myself informable because the way our news system works, it’s like the updates to the program arrive whether you have the program installed or not! Which is rather messed up. But what do we do about it? The first thing I did is write my 2008 post, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. So if you want to help me out, start there.

2. Another way of putting the problem, though I admit this is kind of abstract: why are Wikipedia (which specializes in background knowledge) and nytimes.com (which specializes in newsy updates) separate services? Why aren’t they the same service, so that the movie still makes sense, even if you come in during the middle of it, as most of us do? The news industry’s current answer to that question is topic pages, like this one on global warming, which gets linked to in a news story such as this one, “Lawmakers From Coal States Seek to Delay Emission Limits.” Not terrible. (Also see Google’s Living Stories experiment.) But is that the best we can do?

3. The Giant Pool of Money is far and away the most downloaded program in the history of This American Life. It won a slew of awards. Clearly, there was lurking demand for explanation that was going unnoticed and unmet prior to the program airing. This is one of the reasons I created explainthis.org, which is up in beta form. The idea of the site is partly explained in the subtitle: “What’s your question? Journalists are standing by.” (But also see this post, and this report on the idea.) The goal is to surface the hidden demand for explanation and create a kind of user-driven assignment desk for the explainer genre, which is itself under-developed in pro journalism. Are there other ways to surface this kind of demand?

4. My next move is to match up explainthis.org with a news site that has journalists who are skilled at explanation “standing by.” For a little preview of how that might work, see the special page we made for The Nation magazine’s explainer podcast, The Breakdown, with Washington correspondent Chris Hayes. I can’t say its clicked so far, but we will keep trying. What ideas do you have?

5. Why is explanation under-emphasized in the modern newsroom? A number of factors, I think.

• All the day-to-day rewards go to breaking news. Productivity is measured that way.

• Reporters on beats don’t compete to explain things more clearly to more people, even though this would create future customers for their updates. They compete to break stories and grab buzz.

• It feels like a come down from the “rush” of newswork to go back and explain how the international banking system works; it’s much more fun to report that Iceland may soon be booted from it.

• A reporter and editor may receive data on how many users clicked on the report they just posted about Iceland’s banking troubles. They do not receive feedback on how many understood that report, started following the story, and became customers for the future updates.

• Like other experts, reporters become immersed in their beats and lose track of what it was like for a newcomer to the subject. They begin to identify with the most sophisticated users of their work, which is a tiny portion of the actual market.

• When the platform was static print, or a broadcast news program, it was expensive, inconvenient and disruptive to devote space and time to a background narrative when there’s news to report and stories to tell. On the web its much more doable to serve the narrative and the news at the same time, but this may not be apparent to people raised on the prior platform.

• Even if a first-class backgrounder got produced, newspapers that are still print-centric often lack the manpower or knowledge to make it sticky and keep it in front of users; instead it just disappears with the flow. (A point made by Lisa Fleischer in the comments.)

What factors should be added to these?

6. Alex Bloomberg, one of the reporters on The Giant Pool of Money, was interviewed about the program’s success and mentioned something that I consider pure gold:

People were saying things like, “I didn’t really understand this. It was in the news all the time but I didn’t know what they were talking about until I heard that episode.” It was very gratifying because that’s exactly what my intent was. Because that was me; I didn’t understand it either.

This suggests that if journalists could put themselves in the shoes of ordinary users more effectively they would realize all the places where It was in the news all the time but I didn’t know what they were talking about applies. When you make the journey from “I didn’t know what they were talking about…” on over to “…now I see why this is news,” you’re more qualified to assist others in the system as they travel from cluelessness to informable. (Note that journalism and journey share a common root.) And so part of the puzzle here is: how do we put the news producers into the shoes of users who are getting the updates to programs that were never installed on their news and current affairs hard drives in the first place?

I will keep adding to this post, so please comment and leave links. Thanks!

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

The SXSW discussion has its own site: Futureofcontext.com, with ways to add posts of your own, comment on key concepts and get up to speed.

UPDATE, March 17, 2010. The event at South by Southwest went well. We had a full room and good buzz. Steve Myers of Poynter live blogged it, showing considerable skill in that form. Elise Hu wrote a very good summary at her blog. Also see my follow-up post, How the Backchannel Has Changed the Game for Conference Panelists.

You can listen to the event—panel plus Q & A—here.

Comments from Twitter helped me realize a key point I’m making: In order for the news to be informative people have to be informable, and simply delivering a steam of newsy updates won’t get us there.

I mentioned the Giant Pool of Money, but as two readers pointed out in the comments http://www.crisisofcredit.com/ is also very effective in explaining the mortgage crisis. It’s an 11-minute video by Jonathan Jarvis.

This Giant Pool of Money spawned its own unit at NPR: Planet Money. In order to explain what a “toxic asset” is, two of their reporters decided to buy one, for real. Man, it makes for great radio and it’s a brilliant example of providing the requisite background knowledge to make sense of toxic asset news.

The South By Southwest panel was put together by Matt Thompson, now of NPR. See his post, parallel to mine: The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW.

Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates…

For the first time, we have a medium perfectly equipped to capture and deliver both episodic and systemic information. How will these two modes of information interact on the Web? What sort of design and storytelling structures must we invent to impart context? Fundamentally, in a medium that’s not constrained by time, what is the future of the Timeless Web?

Matt has been writing effectively about this subject at Newsless.org. Especially valuable are: The three key parts of news stories you usually don’t get and his essay in Nieman Reports, Antidote for Web Overload.

Joining us on the panel will be Tristan Harris, the 25 year-old CEO and co-founder of Apture, which makes it simple for users to intuitively get more information without leaving the page.

Tristan’s preview post is up: Context: The Future of the Web. “What news needs is object-oriented journalism in which context is a basic building block upon which to create articles.” (This of course is a reference to object-oriented programming.)

Moderating and leading will be Staci Kramer, who is co-editor and Executive VP of ContentNext Media, publisher of paidcontent.org

In The market for explainables Doc Searls builds on this post and points out that when we don’t have stories that explain an issue to us, we fall back on default narratives like, “who’s winning the politics of health care.”

So the easy thing is to go back to covering the compromise bill’s chances in Congress, and the politics surrounding it. That at least makes some kind of sense. We have all our story elements in place. It’s all politics from here on. Bring in the sports and war metaphors and let automated processes carry the rest. Don’t dig, just dine. The sausage-machine rocks on.

Loyal PressThink reader Andrew Tyndall of the Tydnall Report writes about the CBS Evening News trying to develop the explainer genre with mixed success.

Howard Weaver, former VP for News at McClatchy newspapers, in the comments: “Incrementalism in reporting — one or two new facts atop four paragraphs of old B-matter — don’t keep readers well informed. In fact, they may hurt; after while, we give up on chasing every incremental update. When we do tune in, what we get is a brief glimpse of parts of stories.” More Weaver at the futureofcontext site.

While narrative prose will always play a central role in human communication, the future of public service journalism does not reside with “the story.” Serving news audiences today demands the ability to deliver information that is, as Matt Thompson says, “both timelier and more timeless.”

Chuck Peters, CEO of The Gazette Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a forward-leaning newspaper and broadcasting company, says in the comments that “context is critical.”

However, I can’t see providing that context without changing how we create information in the first instance. Any factual element (photo, incident, quote, data, etc.) can be relevant to numerous contextual narratives. So each of those elements needs to both “stand on its own” and be tagged with as many potential relationships as possible…. We usually create information today in locked-down packaged articles, which block the easy flow of the elements between and among narratives.

Read the rest. Getting disciplined and strategic about tagging may be one way professional journalism separates itself from the flood of cheap content online.

Graphing narrow and broad against shallow and deep to create a matrix, Josh Young complicates our picture in this 2009 think piece that is well worth re-visiting.

In the comments, J-professor Donica Mensing brings up a critical issue: “how to organize explanations about issues that are highly contested.” As Mensing notes, “Explainers aren’t neutral. Actors and motives have to be identified and shaped; arguments over those can be endless.”

Click here to return to the top of After Matter. To see what I am up to on Twitter go here.

In this post, I will explain what we’re up to and why we’re doing it. I don’t speak for the editors of the Times, but I have been discussing the East Village project with them for over a year and I have some sense of what brought them to this collaboration. And it is a collaboration: NYU will produce the site; the Times will publish it. The Times will provide the online platform and strong editorial guidance; NYU will try to bring the East Village community to that platform and innovate on it.

Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiative for the Times, said the project was made possible by shared values, a single set of standards, the most important of which is “increasing the volume and scope of quality journalism about issues that matter.”

Here’s my own description of the project and how it will work:

1. The Local: East Village will be a news site about the culture and politics, the life and times of the East Village of Manhattan. That to us means the area bounded by 14th St. on the North, Houston Street to the South, the East River and Broadway to the West, which is about 110 city blocks. The offices of the NYU Journalism Institute (at 20 Cooper Square) lie within the coverage area. We work in the East Village, and many of our students live there.

2. The url will be http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com (It’s not live yet.)

3. The Local: East Village (or LEV, as we’re calling it) builds on the prior work of the Times in starting two other community news sites on the wordpress blogging platform: one for Maplewood, Millwood and South Orange New Jersey, the other serving Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is collaborating with the Times on the Brooklyn Local.

4. In another sense the collaboration unveiled yesterday builds on two earlier announcements: that the Times would join with the Bay Area News Project in a San Francisco edition and the Chicago News Cooperative in a Chicago edition. In all three cases, a non-profit supplies content to the Times and permits it to provide better coverage than it otherwise could. Chicago and San Francisco are key places on the cultural map for the New York Times; so is the East Village.

5. The editor of the site will be an NYU faculty member, Richard G. Jones, who is a former metro reporter for the New York Times. He will work closely with Mary Ann Giordano, a deputy Metropolitan editor at the Times who is in charge of The Locals. These two people are the “hinge” between institutions. We already know they can work together because they did before, when Jones was at the Times.

6. Whereas CUNY took over the production of an existing site, LEV is more of a start-up. The Local: East Village doesn’t exist yet. The Journalism faculty and students at NYU are to give form to it, and we are presently hard at work on that, assisted by the editors and blogging team at the New York Times.

7. Deciding how to launch the site, how it should operate, and how to make it effective in the East Village community are ideal tasks for students in NYU’s Studio 20 program, which I direct, assisted by my colleague, Jason Samuels, formerly of ABCNews.com. The students in Studio 20 are immersed in the innovation puzzle in journalism; they learn by doing projects with media partners who are struggling with the same puzzle. We’ve devoted their spring seminar—a class called Studio 2, which I teach—to this collaboration with the New York Times. They are working on every aspect of the project: from the design of the site to relationships with the community, from work flows to topic pages, data apps to user participation, social media to beat reporting.

8. Once the site officially launches in the fall of 2010, The Local: East Village will be partly sustained by a new course in NYU’s Reporting New York program. It will be called The Hyperlocal Newsroom, and offered during the fall, spring and summer terms. Faculty members Yvonne Latty and Darragh Worland will teach it, assisted by Rich Jones, the editor of LEV. The idea is that there’s no better way to learn about “reporting New York” then to cover a neighborhood in New York for nytimes.com.

9. Coverage of the East Village—including blog posts, news reports, video, audio, slide shows and the like—will come from students in the The Hyperlocal Newsroom, plus other NYU students and alumni who wish to contribute, plus contributors we recruit from the East Village (bloggers, citizen journalists, community leaders, writers and video artists who live there) who want to report on their community or speak to it. This probably won’t happen right away, but a key goal is to get to 50 percent community contributions. (Wanna help us get there? Email studio 20.)

10. The Times is providing: the publishing platform including the servers, editorial supervision, the nytimes.com url, other tools and data sources available to its various blogs, and, of course, inspiration, reputation and a standard of excellence recognized around the world. NYU is providing: the editor’s salary, student and faculty labor, offices (including a meeting space, production studios, classrooms and a location in the East Village) plus the reputation of its journalism program and the University at large. No money is changing hands, but ideas are flying. A simple one page agreement governs our relationship.

11. There are other parties collaborating in this project. Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU and technical adviser to Studio 20, has already contributed east-village.org, a river of news-style feed that will help us curate the blogosphere and wider web. He will advise us on other parts of the project, as well. Avi Fein and Natalie Marchant, students from the Stern School of Business Consulting Corps, are working with Studio 20 on the sustainability puzzle. I’ve asked them to figure out what the most likely sources of revenue are and recommend a strategy we can follow over the next year or two. Anuj Bajaj, Erik Froese and SungHyun Bang, students in Professor Evan Korth’s Information Technology Projects class in the computer science program at NYU are collaborating with Studio 20 on an open source assignment desk system that we can use for LEV. (This is one of the holy grails of citizen journalism.) Darian Shirazi, founder and head geek at fwix.com , is building us an aggregation tool based on his system for isolating new web content about particular places.

12. We plan to pay for at least some of the contributions flowing into the Local East Village from the community, students and freelancers. How much we can pay and what percentage of the content will be paid for…. well, we cannot say at the moment. But Brooke Kroeger, director of the Journalism Institute, is determined to raise enough money to give the editor a modest “war chest” that would compensate key contributors and fill the gaps when NYU is not in session. LEV will be a pro-am site. The only compensation system that makes sense, and the only one that is practical for us, is to pay for a portion of the content, with priority given to the most reliable contributors, the highest value journalism and work that takes the most time, effort and talent. We certainly know that these sketchy promises will do little to mute criticism about exploiting cheap labor. All we can do at this point is to acknowledge that we’re aware of the issue and will take what steps we can to address it. (Want to help fund us? Email me.)

13. Once The Local: East Village launches, Rich Jones will edit it, the Hyperlocal Newsroom course will feed talent to it, the East Village community will be invited to contribute to it, the open source assignment desk will (we hope) make it easy to be involved in it, and students in the Studio 20 program will be able to innovate with it. Again, I don’t speak for anyone at the Times, but based on my discussions with them, I believe the editors are hoping we can make progress on the hyperlocal journalism puzzle and maybe think of things they didn’t. One of my priorities is the ergonomics of participation: making it super easy and efficient for people without journalism backgrounds to contribute. Another is to operate the site so that it helps sustain the local news ecosystem, including the existing blogosphere. Jason Samuels adds another: “How do we leverage the new and rapidly emerging tools of digital journalism to consistently produce engaging multimedia content to serve our LEV audience?”

14. Our aspiration is not to give birth to a replicable site—the East Village is not your typical neighborhood—but an outstanding one. Then we can say to the journalism world: go ahead, steal some of our best ideas. We’re not aiming for typicality but we are deeply interested in practicality. One example: if the open source assignment desk works in the East Village, it can work in Grand Rapids, Michigan, too. We’ve conceived of the LEV as a learning lab for extremely local, web-based, pro-am journalism. NYU will pour as much into it as we can. Not because we think every neighborhood will one day have this level of service; that’s unlikely. But what we discover by trying to provide very good service to a single community can benefit other communities and other sites in the same general category.

15. Permit me to say what I find so fascinating about this project. Man, it has everything in it— everything I’ve been studying since I gave my first talk to newspaper editors in Des Moines, Iowa in 1989. It’s neighborhood journalism; it’s cosmopolitan too. It’s about innovation; it’s about the classic virtues, like shoe leather reporting. It combines the discipline of pro journalism with the participatory spirit of citizen journalism. It’s an ideal way to study the craft, which is to say it’s an entirely practical project. It’s what J-school should be doing: collaborating with the industry on the best ways forward. It’s news, it’s commentary, it’s reviewing, it’s opinion, it’s the forum function, community connection, data provision, blogging— all at once. LEV I said is a start-up, but it’s starting with the strongest news franchise there is: the New York Times.

16. But the thing I really love about it… NYU is a citizen of the East Village, a powerful institution (and huge land owner) within the frame. Our students are part of the community; they live there, or at least a lot of them do. Because we’re located there; we can’t really separate ourselves from our subject. Look, not everyone is going to be thrilled that NYU is doing this with the New York Times. We’ll have to take those problems on, not as classroom abstractions but civil transactions with the people who live and work here. You know what? It’s going to be messy and hard, which is to say real. But what better way is there to learn what journalists are yet good for in 2010?

See also this interview at Nieman Lab: What the Times-NYU partnership says about the future of journalism education: A Q & A with Jay Rosen.

Update, July 19, 2010. Unfortunately, this article on what we’re doing, which appeared in Capital New York (a new site covering the city) is flawed. “The interns will not be paid,” writes the author, Eliza Shapiro, “but they will develop skills that may or not be valuable in a few years, depending on the success of projects like the Local blogs and the idea of citizen journalism.” This is incorrect. All the interns working on The Local: East Village are paid. She writes:

At The Awl, Choire Sicha wrote that the site was cynical in that it seemed to be premised on the notion that the way to finance local news operations is on the back of free labor.

Shapiro never asked us if that was correct. (Neither did the Awl.) The LEV is planning to employ a mix of volunteer and paid systems for its contributors. For more on The Local: East Village see this page.

Before I get to the line that interested me, I need to acknowledge that the investigation the Times undertook for this article is wholly admirable and exactly what we need professional journalists to be doing. Reporter David Barstow spent five months—five months!—reporting and researching the Tea Party phenomenon.

He went to their events. He talked to hundreds of people drawn into the movement. He watched what happens at their rallies and the smaller meetings where movement politics is transacted. He made himself fully literate, learning the differences between the Tea Party and the Patriot movements, reading the authors who have infuenced Tea Party activists, getting to know local leaders and regional differences, building up a complex and layered portrait of a political cohort that doesn’t fit into party politics as normally understood.

This is original reporting at a very high level of commitment to public service; it is expensive, difficult, and increasingly rare in a news business suffering under economic collapse.

So I want to make it absolutely clear that I treasure this kind of journalism and indeed devoured Barstow’s report when it came online. (Although I wish it had been twice as long.) And I have no problem with his decision to confine himself to description of the Tea Party movement, rather than evaluating its goodness or badness. The first task is to understand, and that is why we need reporters willing to go out there and witness the phenomenon, interview the participants, pore over the texts and struggle with their account until they feel they have it right.

“A narrative of impending tyranny.”

As Barstow said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, “If you spend enough time talking to people in the movement, eventually you hear enough of the same kinds of ideas, the same kinds of concerns, and you begin to recognize what the ideology is, what the paradigm is that they’re operating in.” The key words are spend enough time and begin to recognize.

Now to the part that puzzles me:

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. This narrative permeates Tea Party Web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube videos. It is a prominent theme of their favored media outlets and commentators, and it connects the disparate issues that preoccupy many Tea Party supporters — from the concern that the community organization Acorn is stealing elections to the belief that Mr. Obama is trying to control the Internet and restrict gun ownership.

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny…That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story. The New York Times has done a lot of reporting about the Obama Administration, but it has been silent on the collapse of basic freedoms lurking just around the corner. Barstow commented on the sentence that disturbed me in his interview with CJR:

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

As a matter of reported fact

Now we can predict, with a reasonable degree of confidence, what the reply would be from the reporter, his editors (who are equally involved here, as the Times is a very editor-driven newspaper) and his peers in the press. The reply is the reply that is given by the common sense of pro journalism as it is practiced in the United States. “This was a news story, an attempt to report what’s happening out there, as accurately and fairly as possible. Which is not the place for the author’s opinion.” Or: “I was trying to describe the Tea Party movement, and to understand it, which is hard enough; I’ll let others judge what to make of it.”

Sounds good, right? But this distinction, between fact and opinion, description and assessment, is not what my question is about. It may appear to be responsive, but it really isn’t. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but… as a matter of reported fact, is the United States actually on the verge of tyranny? That is my question. Would an honest depiction of the American political scene by the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times lend support to the “impending tyranny” narrative that Barstow observed as a unifying theme in the Tea Party movement?

It’s a key point, so let me state it again: Based not on a subjective assessment of the Tea Party’s viability or his opinion of its desirability but only on facts he knows about the state of politics and government since Obama’s election, is there any substantial likelihood of a tyranny replacing the American republic in the near future?

I think it’s obvious—not only to me but to Barstow and the journalist who interviewed him for CJR—that the answers are “no.” For if the answers were “yes” it would have been a huge story! No fair description of the current situation, nothing in what the Washington bureau and investigative staff of the New York Times has picked up from its reporting, would support a characterization like “impending tyranny.”

In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so— despite the fact that they must have spent over $100,000 on this one story. And whatever that thing is, it’s not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the “narrative of impending tyranny” is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.

A faltering sense of reality

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That’s what created the pattern I’ve called “regression to a phony mean.” That’s what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.

I explained the quest for innocence in a 2008 essay on campaign coverage for tomdispatch.com. (It also ran in Salon.)

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there’s an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion.

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! As it did in Barstow’s account. Now let’s speed up the picture and imagine how this interference in truth-telling happens routinely, many times a day over years and years of reporting on politics. What’s lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about. In its place is savviness, the dialect of insiders trying to persuade us that they know how things really work. Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than familiar statements like “in politics, perception is reality.”

“For some reason, American political coverage is exempt.”

And in fact frustrated observers of political journalism have complained about this loss of the real. The latest to groan about it is George Packer in the New Yorker. He was commenting on how David Broder of the Washington Post, the dean emeritus of political reporters, had written a surreal column about Sarah Palin that nonetheless seemed entirely normal if you know the genre:

Broder wasn’t analyzing Palin’s positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesn’t seem in the least bit odd, and it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Italics mine. Packer’s point becomes clearer when he transplants this kind of reportng to Afghanistan with the sense of reality dropped out. “Imagine Karzai’s recent inaugural address as covered by a Washington journalist,” he writes:

“Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, “If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist.” Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzai’s own inner circle.

This sounds like politics the way our journalists narrate it, but as Packer notes, “A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.” Exactly. That’s the exemption Barstow was calling on when he wrote. “… running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.” Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared.

I leave you with a question: how the hell could this happen?

Quick definition: “He said, she said” journalism means…

• There’s a public dispute.
• The dispute makes news.
• No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
• The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
• The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

When these five conditions are met, the genre is in gear. The he said part might sound like this:

Mr. Greenberg asserted that he would have reduced or at least hedged A.I.G.’s exposure to credit-default swaps in 2005, when A.I.G.’s credit rating was reduced.

“A.I.G.’s business model did not fail; its management did,” he asserted.

Followed by the “she” said…

That provoked another scornful counterattack from his former company, saying that Mr. Greenberg’s assertions were “implausible,” “not grounded in reality” and at odds with his track record of not hedging A.I.G.’s bets on credit-default swaps.

I had read enough of the Times coverage of Mr. Greenberg to wonder why the editors would run something so lame. Their business columnists have been (excuse the expression) kicking ass on meltdown coverage, including A.I.G. But here there was no attempt to assess clashing truth claims, even though Times journalism was available to do just that. Instead Hank Greenberg got to star in a game of “you say black, I say white.”

It seemed strange to me that in 2009 stories like that were still being waved on through. On Twitter I sometimes talk to Ryan Chittum, who writes The Audit column for Columbia Journalism Review. It’s a running critique of the business press after the banking meltdown. So I asked Ryan, “is this the best the Times can do?” because he knows a lot more about the coverage than I do. A few hours later he answered me at CJR.

This one’s easy: No. The Times’s story offers no analysis and forces readers—95 percent of whom know little or nothing about Greenberg’s tenure at AIG—to try to guess who’s right.

Which is why these stories are so frustrating: we’re left helpless by them. I want to quote the rest of his judgment because it helps nail down what is meant by he said, she said, not just at the New York Times, which has no special purchase on the form, but anywhere. The means are available to do better, but these are not employed. Chittum:

There’s no attempt to try to separate out who’s right here, even though everybody but Hank Greenberg knows he has major responsibility for driving AIG into the ground.

Here’s some stuff that helps explain why. I just culled it from the excellent Washington Post three-parter on AIG in December (if you haven’t read that yet, make sure you do):

He created the Financial Products division in 1987 with traders from soon-to-be disgraced Drexel Burnham Lambert, approved its entry into the credit-default swap market in 1998, empowered Joseph Cassano, oversaw FP when it set up “sham” companies that resulted in tens of millions in fines, was an unindicted co-conspirator in a huge fraud at AIG, oversaw the company’s credit downgrade from AAA, was in charge when half of the company’s $80 billion in CDS on subprime CDOs were written. Apparently, Cassano and FP stopped issuing CDS within months of Greenberg’s exit in 2005.

How much more evidence do you need to tell your readers that this guy has significant responsibility for the disaster that came to his his company and the entire economy—to not let him spin away?

“How much more evidence do you need?” is the kind of exasperation a lot of us have felt with what he calls “false balance,” which is another name for the pattern I’m describing.

So far so good. I told you what he said, she said is, and gave you an example. CJR chimed in, and told the New York Times it could do way better, showing how. Press criticism lives! (Twitter helps.) But this does not tell us why he said, she said reporting still exists, or ever existed. To understand that we have to cut deeper into news practice, American style.

Turn the question around for a moment: what are the advantages of the newswriting formula I have derisively labeled “he said, she said?” Rather than treat it as a problem, approach it as a kind of solution to quandaries common on the reporting trail. When, for example, a screaming fight breaks out at the city council meeting and you don’t know who’s right, but you have to report it, he said, she said makes the story instantly writable. Not a problem, but a solution to the reporter’s (deadline!) problem.

When you kinda sorta recall that Hank Greenberg is a guy who shouldn’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt in a dispute like this, but you don’t know the history well enough to import it into your account without a high risk of error, and yet you have to produce an error-free account for tomorrow’s paper because your editor expects of you just that… he said, she said gets you there.

Or when the Congressional Budget Office issues a report on ethanol and what it’s costing us in higher food prices, the AP reporter to whom the story is given could just summarize the report, but that’s a little too much like stenography, isn’t it? So the AP adds reactions from organized groups that are primed to react.

This is a low cost way of going beyond the report itself. A familiar battle of interpretations follows, with critics of ethanol underlining the costs and supporters stressing the benefits. Of course, the AP could try to sort out those competing claims, but that would take more time and background knowledge than it probably has available for a simple “CBO report issued” story. “Supporters of ethanol disagreed, saying the report was good news…” gets the job done.

These are some of the strengths of the he said, she said genre, a newsroom workhorse for forty years. (Think it’s easy? You try making any dispute story in the world writable on deadline…)

The best description I’ve read of the problem to which devices like he said, she said are a solution comes from former Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor, who covered national politics. Here’s a comment about it that I left at the New York Times Opinionator blog. It was an attempt to explain a phrase I use to describe the kind of distortion that he said, she said can produce: “regression toward a phony mean.”

Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to.

In his 1990 book, See How They Run, former Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor (once seen as heir to David Broder) explained why regression toward a phony mean is so common in journalism. It answers to a need for what he calls “refuge.” Here is what he said:

“Sometimes I worry that my squeamishness about making sharp judgments, pro or con, makes me unfit for the slam-bang world of daily journalism. Other times I conclude that it makes me ideally suited for newspapering– certainly for the rigors and conventions of modern ‘objective’ journalism. For I can dispose of my dilemmas by writing stories straight down the middle. I can search for the halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone (or some policy or idea) and write my story in that fair-minded place. By aiming for the golden mean, I probably land near the best approximation of truth more often than if I were guided by any other set of compasses– partisan, ideological, pyschological, whatever… Yes, I am seeking truth. But I’m also seeking refuge. I’m taking a pass on the toughest calls I face.”

Clearly, there can be something extreme about this squeamishness, too. Clearly, the desire for refuge can get out hand. Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

Like the “straight down the middle” impulse that Taylor writes about, he said, she said is not so much a truth-telling strategy as refuge-seeking behavior that fits well into newsroom production demands. “Taking a pass” on the tougher calls (like who’s blowing more smoke) is economical. It’s seen as risk-reduction, as well, because the account declines to explicitly endorse or actively mistrust any claim that is made in the account. Isn’t it safer to report, “Rumsfeld said…,” letting Democrats in Congress howl at him (and report that) than it would be to report, “Rumsfeld said, erroneously…” and try to debunk the claim yourself? The first strategy doesn’t put your own authority at risk, the second does, but for a reason.

We need journalists who understand that reason. And I think many do. But a lot don’t.

He said, she said reporting appears to be risk-reducing, but this is exactly what’s changing on the press. For a given report about, say, former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, “the halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is no more likely to be accurate than the one-fifth mark, especially when you factor in the reality of the Overton Window and the general pattern we know as “working the refs.” The halfway point is a miserable guideline but it can still sound pretty good when you are trying to advertise to all that you have no skin in the game. This is how I think of he said, she said reporting. Besides being easy to operate, and requiring the fewest imports of knowledge, it’s a way of reporting the news that advertises the producer’s even handedness. The ad counts as much as the info. We report, you decide.

“Ex-Chairman of A.I.G. Says Bailout Has Failed” was a text most likely intended for the print edition of the New York Times business pages. The newswriting formula that produced it dates from before the Web made all news and reference pages equidistant from the user. He said, she said might have been seen as good enough when it was difficult for others to check what had previously been reported about the ex-chairman of A.I.G., but that is simply not the case for Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews in April, 2009.

There has been a loss of refuge. And this is why he said, she said journalism is in decline, even though you still see plenty of it around. Today, any well informed blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can easily find the materials to point out an instance of false balance or the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Professional opinion has therefore shifted and among the better journalists, some of whom I know, it is no longer acceptable to defend he said, she said treatments when the materials are available to call out distortions and untruths. (That doesn’t mean the practice has halted; I’m talking about a shifts in the terms of legitimacy among journalists, and about efforts like this.)

In fact, it’s taken a long time to get to this point. Back in 2004 setting a higher standard than he said, she said was still a novel idea. Chris Mooney wrote about it in the context of science coverage under Bush. (“How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality.”) As CJR’s Campaign Desk noted…

The candidate makes a statement. You write it down, then you call the other side for a response. It’s one of journalism’s fundamentals. Tell us what he said, tell us what she said, and you’re covered, right?

Well, no. Given the amount of spin this election year, the old rules don’t apply any more. Campaign Desk herewith proposes a new ground rule: “He said/she said/we said.”

… With a variety of Internet research tools readily at hand, it has never been easier for reporters to draw an independent assessment on any given day of who is right, who is wrong, and in what way.

The tools are there to make an independent assessment of who is right: for journalists, that is the critical point. (See also my post from 2004, He Said, She Said, We Said and Rethinking Objectivity by Brent Cunningham from 2003.) Because of that—and because of working the refs, the Overton Window, the failures of the political press under Bush—he said, she said no longer has the acceptance rates it once did. Which is why it was so easy to get Ryan Chittum to answer my question, “is this the best the Times can do?”

It wasn’t. And it’s easier than ever to show that. More people are involved in showing it, too. This raises the question of whether a he said, she said treatment loses you more in user disgust with your lameness than any informational gain in having fresh news to report about Hank Greenberg trading barbs with A.I.G. Do people want to feel helpless in sorting out who’s bullshitting them more? Is that the news media’s role, to increase that feeling? Is such a practice even sustainable in the Web era?

That it may not be (and the industry knows it) is shown by what The Politico called a “high-stakes experiment” at the AP’s Washington bureau. The plan was to move “from its signature neutral and detached tone” to a more aggressive style of newswriting that bureau chief Ron Fournier calls “cutting through the clutter.”

In the stories the new boss is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.

So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.

In other words, we can’t skate by on he said, she said any more. Call it like they see it is, in fact, a successor principle but this means that AP reporters are now involved in acts of political judgment that can easily go awry, and their own politics can be at issue.

Time to wrap this up.

Part of the problem is that American journalism as an occupational scene has never gone for the candor Paul Taylor showed in his comments on searching for the halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said. The pro system talks about the reporting of news as a truth-telling enterprise, but not a difference-splitting or dilemma-disposing one. It says: we’re the source of “the most authoritative news coverage,” as the AP recently put it. But it rarely mentions the refuge-seeking part, which subtly undermines that authority.

As I tried to explain in Why Campaign Coverage Sucks (published at TomDispatch.com and Salon, January 2008) there is an “innocence agenda” at work in the mainstream press. It favors certain practices:

Who’s-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It [plays] well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press.

But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession.

In its heyday he said, she said was like a stamping plant in the factory of news. It recognized that production demands trumped truthtelling requirements. But these were the production demands of a beast that is now changing. Refusing to serve as a check on Hank Greenberg’s power to distort the news when the means for a such a check are available— this too can have a cost, just as importing the knowledge to do the check has a cost. At a certain point in this dynamic, he said, she said journalism loses its utility and becomes one of the things dragging the news business down. But as the industry sheds people and newsrooms thin out, there could be greater reliance on a more and more bankrupt and trust-rotting practice. That’s a downward spiral.

Criticism of he said, she said practices and the flippancy that comes with it should therefore continue. The other day, Paul Kane of the Washington Post said it was too much to expect him to import into his account the background knowledge that a Republican Senator warning about the dangers to Senate comity of proceeding with only 50 votes had voted to do the same thing when her party held the majority but not 60 votes. (Matthew Yglesias picked up on it.)

Kane said he was astonished by this demand; he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. “We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us.”

If he’s not just blowing smoke, and he really doesn’t know— that is a problem for the Washington Post.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Richard Sambrook of the BBC comments on this post. He has some reservations about my critique.

Mike Allen of The Politico has a twist on he said, she said. He said (on the record, can be held accountable) “it” said (off the record and unaccountable.) The “it” is the official Bush administration view, spoken by a mouthpiece known only to Allen. The mouthpiece was allowed to attack Obama for harming national security by releasing evidence that torture had been authorized by the Bush Adminstration. For a frank exchange of views on he said, it said reporting see Mike Allen to Glenn Greenwald and back to Mike Allen.

Can a fact lapse from “true” back into a more tenuous state if major pressure is put upon it? See this from The Plum Line, Greg Sargent’s blog at WhoRunsGov, a Washington Post site still in ramp up:

Today’s New York Times has published a whole article devoted to the claim by former Bushies, and some Republicans, that Obama’s release of the torture memos endangered our national security by revealing secret torture techniques that we can now never use again.

It is a matter of simple fact that much about these techniques were already publicly known, well before Obama’s release of the memos.

But today’s Times treats this as a matter of debate, as a claim being made by “Democrats” — even though the Times has itself reported this as outright fact in the past.

Read the rest. As Sargent points out, the truth claim that is now in dispute—did Obama tip off the terrorists with new information about what they might face?—is suspect according to the Times earlier reporting. But it is now framed in he said, she said terms.

Why would that happen? From the perspective of this post, the answer is: there are gains on the innocence (or, “extra studious neutrality”) agenda to be had now, whatever was said before. These offset the losses on a strict truthtelling scale. Is it like a conscious decision they made? No, it’s not. Newsroom routines do most of the “thinking” here.

Dana Milbank pens a little masterpiece of he said, she said reasoning. He finally reads his comments and discovers—what else?—angry people on both sides denounce him. Of course, Milbank is a columnist and wit as much as a reporter, but he is the sort of columnist who tries to be sandpaper to both sides. The idea is for the friction to be turned to laughs.

One of the nifty things about this gadget: when the political reasoning that creates the friction takes withering criticism, the author can just switch to the satire track and gain on the “look ma, no politics” agenda that way. Critics turn into humorless scolds. Thus David Carr of the New York Times said on Twitter that “Dana Milbank seemed to be having fun” with the criticism, not complaining about getting hit from both sides. Give him a break!

And after you give him a break read Digby on Milbank because her post is also about this post. She adds a few things I wish I had included.

Witness this On the Media segment that’s really a bitter struggle over the legacy of he said, she said reporting, and the mistrust it has engendered.

What an interesting summary by Michael Scherer, political reporter for Time magazine, at the Swampland blog: “Jay Rosen, new media deep-thinker, scourge, scold and provocateur, makes a substantial argument for reporters making more of an effort to take sides in public disputes when facts can be ascertained.”

Not to be picky—thought you have to be with this subject!—but I did not say additional effort should be expended in “taking sides” (a signal to journalists to freak out) but in calling out lies and distortions. But… If “calling out lies and distortions” equals “taking sides” to Scherer, that might help explain why it’s an infrequent practice. For then refusing to call out lies and distortions means refusing to take sides, and that’s a good thing in journalism… right?

Scott Rosenberg, who has written a really good book on blogging that’s out in July, in the comments:

A great value hesaid/shesaid used to have for the working journalist — and I think this is real value — was as a check against unfairness. It forced you, the reporter, to give at least a little space to a point of view you disagreed with.

In the days when you, the reporter, controlled the mike (along with your colleagues and rivals at other publications), this was an important safeguard. If you didn’t give some space to “the other side of the argument” that you were making (either explicitly or, more often under the “objectivity” standard, covertly), it might well not have been heard at all.

Today there’s less need for it, he says.

John Walcott, McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief, in the comments. “This is a topic that deserves more attention, along with beat-sweeteners, access journalism (an oxymoron) and other afflictions of modern life.” He left a link to his excellent I.F. Stone award lecture:

Does the truth lie halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or between communism and democracy? If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, must you then give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels? If you write an article that’s critical of John McCain, are you then obligated to devote an identical number of words to criticism of Barack Obama, and vice versa?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden comments at Making Light: “It’s unclear whether [Paul] Taylor realizes, implicitly or otherwise, how this rhetorical posture makes him the willing servant of whichever powerful person or organization decides to stake out a completely crazy position.” (This is the dynamic that has since gained a name: the Overton Window.)

Cheryl Rofer: He said, she said and the usual suspects. Some testimony from New Mexico.

More from Ryan Chittum on he said, she said: WaPo Skittish on Its Own Chrysler Scoop.

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter John McQuaid responds to this post: “The problem with [he said, she said] is that it implicitly assumes what everyone now knows to be wrong: that public figures make statements that can be taken at face value, and the truth can be ascertained by juxtaposing contradictory statements. It’s been obvious for some time that this is unworkable because the public ‘conversation’ is too splintered, its participants too practiced and manipulative.”

Fred Zipp, editor of the Austin American Statesman, says its hard to quarrel with my conclusions. However, “Rosen pays scant attention to the practical difficulties of the truth-telling function he considers appropriate for journalists in 2009.”

Mark Danner, writing about torture during the Bush years in the New York Review of Books:

It is a testament as much to the peculiarities of the American press—to its “stenographic function” and its institutional unwillingness to report as fact anything disputed, however implausibly, by a high official—that the former vice-president’s insistence that these interrogations were undertaken “legally” and “in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles” continues to be reported without contradiction, and that President Bush’s oft-repeated assertion that “the United States does not torture” is still respectfully quoted and, in many quarters, taken seriously. That they are so reported is a political fact, and a powerful one. It makes it possible to contend that, however adamant the arguments of the lawyers “on either side,” the very fact of their disagreement makes the legality of these procedures a matter of partisan political allegiance, not of law.

A 2007 post from Australian critic Julie Posetti on the Howard Government and he said, she said reporting there.

Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory write on The George Will global cooling controversy and the reactions of Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

By letting Will express himself Bush-style, without being inconvenienced by any actual science, The Post was saying, yes, opinion writers are not merely entitled to their own opinions, but also their own “facts.” (Though Hiatt preferred to call these “inferences”):

“It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject—so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.”

Hiatt’s argument that George Will ought to be able to make a dissenting point, regardless of its basis in reality, is an argument for false balance, he-said-she-said journalism, in lieu of real analysis. On March 23, Chris Mooney asked a smart follow-up question in the Post: “Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?”

Chris Mooney at his Discover Magazine blog responds to this post. “Is ‘He Said, She Said, We’re Clueless’ Coverage Dying?” Mooney does not think so.

This Julian Sanchez post from three years ago is notable for its description of “one-way hash arguments,” a major factor in the rise of he said, she said reporting.

If you’re interested in where this is all headed, then you are definitely a customer for Rosen’s Flying Seminar in the Future of News, an earlier post at PressThink.

Future-of-news blogger Josh Young, who was featured in my Flying Seminar, says in the comments to this post.

So, sure, maybe sometimes it’s embarrassing to pass the buck of analysis. It’s reveals an intellectual lack of seriousness. But maybe other times it’s just what works best, allocating responsibilities to the parties most able and interested in bearing them.

“This news has got to get out the door!” a newspaper editor might say. “Let’s revisit our he said, she said simplicity in a minute or an hour,” he might say. “We can post a link from the original to the update later. Maybe that thoughtful update will be ours, written not by an intern but by a wise veteran. But maybe it won’t….”

In January, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center published a study by Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune. He shows that he said, she said “stenography” is the pathetic norm in climate change reporting. The right role is to be an active referee, calling fouls when there are fouls. But it is rarely done. Here’s the Environment Defense Fund blogger on it, with a link to the PDF.

Click here to return to the top of After Matter. To see what I am up to on Twitter go here.

The Huffington Post announced today that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. It is being funded by The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Philanthropies, and will be headed by Nick Penniman, founder of The American News Project, which will be folded into the Investigative Fund.

The full press release is here. I will have a role:

Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, will serve as a senior advisor to the project. Rosen, as a director of NewAssignment.Net, his research project at NYU, previously collaborated with The Huffington Post on OffTheBus — an experiment in citizen journalism that drew 12,000 contributors and gained widespread media attention for its coverage of the 2008 campaign.

Said Rosen: “In addition to collaborating on OffTheBus, I’ve been writing for years about this possibility – distributed reporting projects that efficiently coordinate the efforts of volunteers, data-combing efforts that are open source, as well as teams of pros and amateurs working together — and I think The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is the next logical step.”

It is important to stress that the new Investigative Fund is separate from the Huffington Post as both a legal entity and an editorial producer. It is a new non-profit, and so the announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the operating principle is: “report once, run anywhere” because work the Fund produces will be available for any publication or Web site to publish at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post. (Probably through a Creative Commons license, but this has not been decided.)

Much about how the fund will operate has yet to be determined, but mostly what the money is for is to pay journalists and the costs of investigations. Some of those journalists will work for the fund as staff editors, some will be contracted for as freelancers on a story-by-story basis. Some of the money will, I hope, be used for innovative projects that move in an open source or pro-am direction. That is one of the reasons I am joining up, to advise on that portion. I also think the Fund is an important and public-spirited thing to do; I want to see it come out right, and to gain more resources than it has at the moment.

• Here is the AP story about the Fund.

• Arianna Huffington’s announcement post.

• Jeff Jarvis is already thinking about how this fits into the new ecosystem of news.

• I discuss my own thinking about the potential such a fund has in this 35 minute podcast with Dave Winer. We talk about it in the beginning and then return midway through. (One bit from it: “Just as modern professional journalism was optimized for low participation by the users, readers, viewers, modern professionalized politics was optimized for low participation by voters.”)

The Fund will be run by Nick Penniman, who has been heading up The American News Project. As a senior adviser to Nick and the Fund, my role will be to give sound advice. I will be a paid consultant to the fund during the initial phase (April-September, 2009.) I won’t have decision-making authority, and I don’t expect my advice will always be followed, but that’s probably a good thing. I’m particularly interested in the open source and distributed reporting possibilities, and in pro-am investigations that combine the talents of paid professionals with people who know stuff and want the story to come out.

But I also counseled Nick and Arianna (she will help raise money for the fund, and find partners for it) that the best approach is to have no orthodoxy and to support very traditional investigative reporting by paid pros who are good at it, as well as teams of pros and amateurs, students working with masters of the craft, crowdsourced investigations, and perhaps other methods. They were already there with an ecumenical approach, combining old and new.

The American News Project is all about web video, and that staff will be folded into the Fund. So it will have a strong video component. The Fund expects to hire editors in different topic areas—like the environment or high finance—who can commission pieces in those areas from freelance reporters. Nick Penniman and I have also discussed hiring web-friendly journalists with investigative chops who might blog intensively for the Fund about a key topic for several months and develop new information that way— Josh Marshall style. And there will be some money available for innovative reporting projects for which there is no template at the moment.

Obviously the Fund must also support a very high standard of verification. Its reporting has to hold up. Compared to that, everything else is a detail.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

For more details about the Fund and what’s potentially significant about it, see Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute: Huffington Post Investigative Team a Nonprofit Model in the Making. Nick Penniman explained the relationship with the Huffington Post, a commercial company, this way…

The nonprofit investigative unit will have “a sisterly or brotherly relationship” with the for-profit Huffington Post “as opposed to operating within it. This will be an important distinction for anyone looking at these models going forward. They’ve given us a financial contribution and essentially they’re giving us their name … but we’re a separate legal entity.”

Unlike many nonprofit startups that hope to develop a sustainable business model beyond contributions, Penniman indicated that the HuffPo Fund will likely return to benefactors repeatedly. He said he does not anticipate selling ads on the investigative site.

“My guess is we’ll be more of a syndication service,” he said, but with a twist: content free for the asking.

As Mitchell points out, “That kind of no-favorites sharing of benefits is critical to preserving a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status because it demonstrates that the organization is not simply serving the interests of one of its backers.”

For the big picture, into which some of these developments may fit, see my previous post: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News, with 12 key essays you need to read about the collapse of the old model and the struggle for journalism next.

Andrew Sullivan picks up on my phrase, “report once, run anywhere,” which I adapted from the original in geek. See Wikipedia: Write once, run anywhere.

Steve Smith, ex-editor of the Spokane Spokesman_Review, at his blog, Still a Newspaper Man:

The Huffington Post initiative, as is the case with so many other laudable experiments, will produce journalism for a national audience. What happens to watchdog, investigative journalism in midsize communities such as Spokane, or Boise or Wichita? What happens in small cities such as Yakima, Walla Walla, Eugene?

He also presents some calculations showing that for a local newspaper two full-time investigative reporters cost about $280,000 a year when everything (including legal) is factored in.

Martin Bosworth: Journalism Will Survive. Comments on this news.

The American Spectator blog with a colorful report:

The program’s startup budget will be $1.75 million. The money will be provided by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies is headed by Gara LaMarche, who used to be a vice president of liberal uber-philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute. LaMarche is a member of Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that is organizing to impose socialism on America.

Will the new program fund anything other than left-wing hit pieces? Your guess is as good as mine.

Hit pieces? Some said this was a hit piece. In my opinion, they were wrong.

Lately, the pace has picked up. A trigger was the March 13 appearance of Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. That essay went viral; it now has a phenomenal 741 trackbacks, making it an instant classic in the online literature about the fate of the press. As good as Shirky’s piece is (very very good, I think) “Thinking the Unthinkable” is only a piece of the puzzle, and mostly backward-pointing.

That’s why I’ve collected the following links. Together, they form a kind of flying seminar on the future of news, presented in real time. They are all from the month of March 2009. The “flying” part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.

They are in the order I think you should read them.

1. Paul Starr, Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption) (The New Republic, March 4, 2008)

Starr is one of our top sociologists and the author of one of the best books ever on the history of the American media system. He thinks the crisis in newspapers is a crisis for American democracy because the “public goods” they manufacture will not be easy to replace. “Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good—and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.”

Starr worries there will be more corruption and malfeasance in government with fewer eyes on the people in power. That places him in good company; lots of people are worried about that. But Starr has a longer and more detailed view of what created the public service press and what we might call the politics of subsidy. We start with him because he’s coming from way back in the history of the American press with his view of what’s in peril today.

2. Yochai Benkler, A New Era of Corruption? (The New Republic, March 4, 2009) Benkler is one of the leading students of the Internet in the world, and a professor at Harvard Law School. He specializes in understanding “commons-based peer production,” an academic (and precise) term for the “open” methods that gave rise to Wikipedia and open source software. Benkler thinks Paul Starr is “too skeptical of the possibilities of the new media” in rising to the occasion if the old press falls apart.

“Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model—be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica—to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and non-market, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual.” We may be losing capacity in the commercial press but gaining it on the commons, Benkler argues. You have to factor in both.

3. Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. (Blog post, March 13, 2009) Shirky studies media and technology and teaches at NYU. His post shot around the Internet in a matter of days because of the striking way he depicted the loss of reality inside newspaper companies, which saw the crisis coming long ago but were unable to think their way out of it because they never reconciled themselves to the loss of their publishing premises. We solved anew the problem the publishing business had mastered: the distribution of copies. Furthermore, there was no way to prevent it from happening to your stuff!

Between “adapt” and “give up,” the industry found a third path: go on, but minimize mental disruption. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution,” Shirky writes. “They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”

4. Steven Berlin Johnson, Old Growth Media and the Future of News. (Speech and blog post, March 14, 2009) Steven Johnson is also a leading student of technology and an author of several important books. He argues that if we look at technology journalism, the form that was disrupted first by the Internet, there is reason to hope that the fall of the old press will not be the civic disaster that Starr (and many others) have predicted. Technology coverage is better today. There is more of it. It is more diversified, richer.

“When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago. That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial [to look at]. It is the old-growth forest of the web.” Not a desert, but a thriving ecosystem. (Bonus link: Johnson collected reactions here.)

5. Dan Conover, 2020 vision: What’s next for news. (Blog post, March 20, 2009) Conover is a career newspaper man who, like so many others recently, took the buyout. He also has the creative imagination of a geek, and the restlessness of an entrepeneur. In this post he takes for granted the declining value of newspaper journalism and speculates on what will come next. “Journalists tend to think of the future in terms of their jobs, and from that perspective What’s next is another round of layoffs. Sorry, folks. Do the math. But take a slightly longer view and What’s Next is a decade of experimentation, opportunity and chaos.”

Conover is forward pointing. He describes and hooks you up with 35 different trends, eruptions and development paths that we can watch for. It’s a mentally organized guide to what’s going to happen… or could, according to one man, who knows it from the inside but thinks it from the outside. His post is starting to pick up traction with future-of-news people, as they realize how valuable his watch list is.

6. David Eaves, The Death of Journalism? (or journalism in the era of open) (Blog post, March 17, 2009) Eaves is a Canadian writer specializing in negotiation and public policy— not journalism. His post is the most unusual of those I have collected here. He suspects that a misfiring component in North American journalism is not just the business model for news, but the image of politics and public life that pro journalists take for granted, especially when they are in heroic mode. He points to a certain conception of how truth comes out that is heavily mythologized by our journalists: the exposure model, where things are kept hidden but the reporter acting on behalf of the community and its right to know does the hard work: digging, cultivating sources, being there when the phone rings, meeting in garages if necessary. Eaves asks a simple question about the exposure model: what if the institution involved isn’t trying to keep anything hidden? What if it is trying to be transparent—and succeeding at it—not from the goodness of its civic heart, but because that is the best way for the institution to conduct business in an age of transparency?

Pretty good question. Also true: there’s always a dark side, as Dick Cheney famously put it. Therefore we’ll always need the exposure model, and the acts of courage and persistence that go with it. But Eaves has another brain twister: What if the really big stories we need from the press aren’t gotten by exposure at all because the key facts in them are already public but very, very scattered? No one’s pieced them together; they are “known” but unwoven into any public narrative that allows us to see what was really going on in time to stop it— like with the financial meltdown we are living through. If that’s the problem (and sometimes it is) exposure journalism isn’t an answer, even though we still need people who specialize in that form.

7. Dave Winer: The reboot of journalism (Blog post, March 19, 2009) Dave Winer comes from the tech industry. He makes power tools for people who want to be heard. His frustrations with the industry press pushed him into blogging, and he in turn pushes blogging which means irritating people. Where others look upon creative destruction in the news business and wonder what’s next, Winer thinks “next” is already here. We already have an alternative news system, he says, based on a slightly different idea, which he summarizes as: the sources go direct. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, said A. J. Liebling. Blogging means any source can own one.

“Apparently I am one of the very few who think we’re in the middle of the reboot of journalism, not at the start,” says Winer. “It’s not in the future, it’s been happening for a long time.” Anyone who knows how reporting works knows that sources drive stories as much as reporters and editors do. If today it is much easier for sources to publish themselves, that changes the equation. Winer intends to push this point as far as it will go. For him it’s a long fight. “This is what we’ve been working on in the blogging space for 15 years. I wrote about billions of websites in 1995. And before that, desktop publishing and laser printers made it possible to print newsletters in 1986, 23 years ago. All that time, every time a former source started publishing on their own, the process of new journalism took a step forward.”

8. Josh Young, What the Structure of Content Means for Context. (Blog post, March 19, 2009) At his blog, Network(ed) News, Josh Young tries to peer into the information logic underneath the visible forms of news, a valuable thing when models are crashing. Here he conjures with four kinds of news goods: broad and narrow, deep and shallow. So, for example, The Politico is perfecting the production of “narrow and shallow” news; it knows how to extract value working especially hard in that quadrant. In the “broad and deep” category is The Giant Pool of Money by This American Life and NPR (which I wrote about in National Explainer.) But such masterworks are rare.

Young explains how Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo has mostly done away with “the article” as the container of its editorial contribution. Instead, it offers a series of posts, updates, links, stories that are broad and shallow, each one adding a little bit to a big picture, which ends up revealing a lot. These dispatches aren’t meant to be comprehensive; they don’t capture “the” story. “They catch the reader up on past reporting with a few links to previous posts. Or they start off with a link or two to others’ posts or articles, promising to pick up the issue where they left off. Then they take a deep look at a small set of questions, teasing out contradictions, and end up with a set of conclusions or a new, more pointed set of questions for the next post.” And over time, this stream reveals a story, capable of winning a big prize.

9. Mark Morford, Die, newspaper, die? (SFGate.com, March 20, 2009) Morford is a SFGate.com columnist. That’s the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is under duress for all the reasons this seminar has spelled out. Morord’s been taking the class. “Shirky, Winer, Johnson et al, a smart, motley crew of big-name, big-brained tech seers and programmers and futurists have weighed in” on the newspaper’s future. “These big guns have all stepped away from their normal discussions of deep tech arcania and turned their attention to a 500-year-old technology undergoing its first epic, bloody revolution.”

And when the smoke clears what should the newspaper do? The “geek gurus” don’t have any idea! Just theories that Morford says he can’t buy. “I hotly disagree with [Shirky’s] unchecked worship of social networking as the imminent platform for — and solution to — well, just about everything that’s wrong with news media today.” He also doubts that Dave Winer’s self-published sources will improve anything. Who’s in charge in such a system? “Everyone. Anyone. You. That guy over there. The judge at the trial, and the jury. The cop. The patrons at the restaurant. The chef. Shirky. Winer himself. You know, citizen journalism. Everyone’s a reporter!” Can you tell he’s a skeptic? Morford delivers on that tone, but he has also a begrudging respect for the “gurus” as analysts of the newspaper’s living demise.

10. Tom Watson, Ink-Stained Retching (Blog post, March 15, 2009) “I come from a newspaper family, and worked as a reporter and editor for more than a dozen years, before peeling off for the allure of my own digital printing press in the 90s,” writes Tom Watson, a blogger and book author. “I love newspapers, and I’ve always believed that they’re central to the American version of representative democracy - a stalwart check on the power of government.” The theme of Ink Stained Retching is loss, which shades into bitterness but… it’s under control. Watson knows what he’s doing, and denial is not his thing.

“The Internet has been a destructive force for many business models, but none threatens the basis of the republic as much as the digital knife busily sawing at the fraying Achilles tendon of American newspapers,” he writes. Shirky’s Unthinkable essay was “a grim and all-too-accurate assessment.” But look at the loss: the newsroom itself, an engine of public good. “The models just don’t work - nothing online sustains a newsroom of 100 reporters and editors working in a beat system. Cut and paste works online. Endless commentary works online (but only pays the aggregators, in most cases). Endless links work. Newsrooms do not.” To him there is nothing good about this situation.

11. Allan Mutter, Why media must charge for web content (March 1, 2009, two parts.) Mutter is a former newspaper journalist who went to Silicon Valley and started companies. He blogs at the intersection of his “twin passions, journalism and technology.” Mutter believes that to save modern journalism news sites will have to begin charging for their content. (Others think so too.) “Free is not a business model that will support journalism produced by professional news organizations,” he writes. And it should never have happened! “When the Internet emerged, most publishers committed the Original Sin of thoughtlessly giving away their content for free in the hopes of attracting millions of page views where they could sell the sort of high-priced ads that had built the value of their print franchises.”

This was not an historic inevitability but a “monumental strategic blunder” that threatens the survival of those franchises. Page-view advertising is not going to sustain them on the Internet. They have to charge. But it won’t be easy. “Given the open and unfettered nature of the web, it is unreasonable to believe generic news can be effectively sequestered behind a pay firewall,” Mutter writes. “A publisher attempting to do this simply would divert readers from his site to some else’s, throttling the traffic that is the lifeblood of any media business.” It has to be journalism “sufficiently unique, authoritative and valuable to motivate consumers to pay for it.” You can’t charge on your own say so. You have to hike the added value, then try to get people to pay for it.

12. Amanda Michel, Get Off the Bus: The future of pro-am journalism (Columbia Journalism Review, March 5, 2009) Amanda Michel was the executive director of a project I co-founded with Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post, OffTheBus.Net. It was intended to test whether a “pro-am” model was possible in political coverage during the 2008 campaign. The pro-am approach looks for the hybrid forms that combine substantial openness with some controls. With OffTheBus, anyone could sign up, but there was an old fashioned gate before publication in the vertical of the Huffington Post the project controlled.

Michel writes in the first person from her experience in organizing over 12,000 contributors to provide a “ground level” view of the campaign, part of which involved going where the on-the-bus press couldn’t go. Distributed reporting projects were another part of it. The nurse with vast practical knowledge writing about the candidates’ health care plans as an informed amateur— that was part of it. “Our experience with OffTheBus demonstrates that what Clay Shirky calls the ‘mass amateurization’ of journalism can provide real breakthroughs—not only in the democratization of news and information but also in bolstering the role of the media as a pillar of democracy. What we did won’t replace what traditional newsrooms do, but if taken seriously and used properly, this pro-am model has the potential to radically extend the reach and effectiveness of professional journalism.” We should not be looking merely to preserve but also to extend and enlarge newsgathering capacity. Pro-am has promise, but there is a long way to go.

A concluding word: I don’t know what will replace the newspaper journalism we have relied on. It’s a terrible loss for the public when people who bought the public service dream lose their jobs providing that service, and realizing that dream. I do not look forward to explaining to my students the contractions in the job market and why they’re likely to continue for the near term. It feels grim to have to say: “There is no business model in news right now. We’re between systems.”

I honestly don’t know what’s next. But I’m a professor of it. So I’m supposed to know where journalism is headed. Instead of that, I have this: my flying seminar from the last month of trying to figure it out. You’re supposed to take the course and feel caught up. I’ve given you a lot of looks at it because the only solution I have to offer is pluralism itself: many funders, many paths, many players, and many news systems with different ideas about how to practice journalism for public good (and how to pay for it, along with who participates) alive at once.

The future of news is open, more entrepreneurial. Open can also mean broken, repair date unknown. If you know how the old one fell apart, it’s easier to put something new together. That’s the faith that makes a seminar like this fly.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

In New York if you buy a dozen bagels they give you the 13th for free. In that spirit my bonus link is Doc Searls: After the Advertising Bubble Bursts. He’s been way out in front on that transformation.

I will be senior adviser to a new venture: The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, launched with $1.75 million in initial funding. It will be a new non-profit, producing all kinds of journalism that will be distributed free on the Net. The new operation will be editorially distinct from the Huffington Post itself. See my post about it: Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It). (March 30, 2009)

Dave Winer and I discuss “the sources go direct” in this 55 minute podcast (mp3 over skype) about rebooting the news. See also this account in the LA Times, which refers to our ‘casts. In the March 29 podcast with Winer, I explain how this post was born on Twitter and tested there, among other topics we explore.

Yes, I am quite aware of the gender imbalance in my post. I am not explaining it, or avoiding it. If you have comparable essays from women writers from the March 2009 explosion, do put them in the comments or email me.

Dan Gillmor in Boing Boing, March 19: Paying for News: A Mega-Merger Thought Experiment. “What would happen if some top English language journalism organizations simply merged and started charging for their breaking news and commentary…?”

If charging for news is your thing and you don’t understand why there’s even a debate about it (“if you’re losing money, you need to charge, right…?”) Tim Burden did a nice round-up of the arguments in February. See Paywall Madness.

Bernie Lunzer, president of the Newspaper Guild (the major union in the business) sent me this link, representing—he said—the Guild’s best thinking. It’s a reply to Shirky and it’s called Brilliant Drivel. Read it for the Guild’s perspective on these things. I asked Lunzer where in Shirky’s post he found the “proclamation that we don’t need newspapers” because I’ve read it four times and I still can’t locate where Clay says anything dismissive like that. And he certainly says we need the public goods newspapers once provided: “The work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers.”

Well, Lunzer did reply.

I was probably over-reacting to Shirky when he says, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” It’s really semantic, because after I wrote this blog and went back to look at both pieces - I would have to acknowledge that we are both trying to preserve the same thing. I’m just frustrated, more by the Jeff Jarvis types who think the web will quickly replace what newspapers have represented. So – I was likely guilty of overblown rhetoric – probably should acknowledge that with a coda.

Yeah, especially since Lunzer himself says the Guild is not trying to preserve the newspaper form. “It’s always been about the journalism,” he wrote. That means he agrees with Shirky: we need the journalism, not the newspaper combine. I wouldn’t call that a semantic quibble, mister union president; I would call that: “I didn’t read the essay very carefully, I just lashed out.”

Oh, and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine does not say it will be easy to replace what newspapers represented. He says the world is changing faster on you than you think. That’s how I hear it.

One of my readers is clamoring for me to include in my best-of David Simon’s piece from March 1st, In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police. He’s the former Baltimore Sun cops reporter who went on to create The Wire for HBO, a fantastic achievement. It’s an excellent piece about what you lose when you lose reporters. One part that is (in my opinion) demagogic:

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers.

I’m sure he’s right about the not tripping. But did anyone ever say bloggers would step in for police reporters if the professional police reporters went away? I don’t think so. It’s a dumb idea. Lame-ass linkless jeering at propositions no one’s actually making is standard practice on the newspaper death watch. Tom Watson condemns the “digital triumphalists” but he does not feel strongly enough about their sins to link to any.

Tom does talk to my June, 2008 post Migration Point for the Press Tribe. “The land that newsroom people have been living on—also called their business model—no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.”

Migration Point plus “Where’s the Business Model for News, People?” (part of a forum at Britannica asking if newspapers were doomed, with Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky) plus this post today represent the best of my “newspaper in crisis” writing. What I was saying in 2004: The Migration.

The Newspaper Association of America: Don’t Stop the Presses! Ten experts share their ideas for reinventing the print newspaper.

This speech on the newspaper crisis by the Boston Globe’s editor, Marty Barron, is notable because it accepts the Shirky verdict. (April 2, 2009)

I have seen a few hypotheses for how a major metropolitan newsroom could become online-only. I can honestly say that I have seen none that allows for anything close to the breadth and depth of coverage that metropolitan newspapers offer today. It is not enough to say that something will be sacrificed. In fact, a great deal will be sacrificed.

And yet — and here I’ll quote the Internet scholar Clay Shirky — “’‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model.”

Dan Kennedy in the Guardian makes an argument about the future of newspapers—that it depends on the future of civic involvement—that I began making in 1989. See chapter one of What Are Journalists For? (1999, Yale University Press)

Hey, cool. The head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation made reference this post in a big speech he gave about the future of journalism. Thanks.

Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper by Eric Alterman ran in The New Yorker in a year before these pieces. It covers similar ground but from its own perspective.

Disclosures: Some of these authors I know well, some a little.

I don’t know Paul Starr. But I’ve followed his writings and consider his book, The Creation of the Media, an important work.

I’ve met Yochai Benkler a couple times and I’ve been at conferences with him. He is certainly one of my intellectual heroes.

Clay Shirky is a colleague of mine at NYU, we are on the same side of many Internet issues, I am a fan of his work and he’s friendly to what I do. On Twitter he’s @cshirky.

Steven Johnson is someone I know as a writer in New York and from when he taught at NYU. I am friendly with him and a big admirer of his books. (Big fan base on Twitter.)

Dan Conover (Xarker on Twitter) is a friend of mine and a loyal reader of my blog, PressThink. We sometimes scheme together. To me he’s one of the more creative people in journalism.

David Eaves I did not know prior to being linked to his essay. But he’s on Twitter.

Dave Winer is a friend and fellow blogger; we have worked on conferences together and recently we’ve been doing a series of podcasts on rebooting the news. (Follow him on Twitter)

Josh Young is someone I have not met but I plan to soon. He is jny2 on Twitter.

Mark Morford I do not know. But he follows me on Twitter.

Tom Watson is a blogger whose work I have followed. Here he is on Twitter.

Allan Mutter I recently met after following his blog, Newsosaur for some time.

Amanda Michel I hired to work for me on NewAssignment.Net, then as project director and prime mover in OffTheBus. She now works for ProPublica.

Click here to return to the top of After Matter. To see what I am up to on Twitter go here.

I recalled for Moyers how Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s deputy, later described the people running the Bush White House as radicals. Wilkerson’s piece is reproduced here. That Wilkerson—an insider, a Republican—might have been right was too much for the category mind of the press. His description got consigned to the sphere of deviance.

Was that necessary? I say no.

The predicate for my appearance on Bill Moyers Journal was this PressThink post, Audience Atomization Overcome (Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press) and a subsequent podcast interview with Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com about the arguments I therein. Moyers has big ears. He heard it, and the show was born.

Audience Atomization Overcome is probably PressThink’s most-linked-to and discussed post ever— in the political blogosphere. Just scroll through the After Matter section to see what I mean. In the political press-o-sphere, not a word was said about it. Literally.

I have been studying the national press since I received my PhD in 1986. This is the first time I have been able to unfold my own view of it on national television. So thank you very much, Bill Moyers and PBS. It felt great. (Here’s a speech Moyers gave to the Media Reform Conference that I recommend often to young journalists. “It’s your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.”)

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for posting and podcasting about my writings and lending his platform—one of the biggest in blogging—to some of my words. I like Glenn because he is serious about what he does.

PressThink readers who missed the show can watch it online and tell me what you think.