Who's Easier To Intimidate: A Newspaper In Need Of Advertising... Or A Group Of Concerned Citizens?

from the just-asking dept

As newspaper folks continue to insist that only newspapers can really do investigative reporting, their reasoning just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The latest is publisher (not radio host) Alex Jones who suggested in a recent interview that we need big news organizations to do investigative reporting, because the subjects of those reports are likely to try to intimidate the investigators and only a big organization can stand up to that sort of intimidation. However, Tim Lee points out why that doesn't make much sense, and why a group of concerned citizens is probably a lot less likely to be intimidated than a single organization. It's the same basic theory as the difference between a distributed system and one with a single point of failure:

Jones gets the implications of this story completely backwards. It's only because newspapers are large, profitable, commercial enterprises that the kind of intimidation techniques he talks about work at all. Imagine it's 2020 and the Idaho newspapers have all gone out of business, and they've been replaced by several hundred bloggers, most of them amateurs. A whistleblower discovers some evidence of wrongdoing by a prominent Mormon official. Is it easier or harder for the whistleblower to get the word out?

Obviously, it's easier. She can anonymously email the evidence to a dozen different bloggers. Those bloggers don't have to all prepare long "investigative journalism" write-ups; some of them can just post the raw documents for others to look at. Once they're widely available, other bloggers can link to those raw documents and provide commentary. The official being criticized has three big problems. First, taking legal action will be vastly more expensive because he'd have to sue dozens of bloggers rather than just one newspaper. Second, many of those bloggers won't have any assets to speak of, so he's unlikely to recover his legal costs even if he wins. And finally, if he foolishly presses forward, he'll discover our friend the Streisand Effect: the fact that he files the lawsuit will cause a lot more people to cover the original allegations.

Likewise, the threat of a boycott only works because newspapers are for-profit operations with significant overhead. Threatening a boycott against, a blogger who writes in a his free time is no threat at all.

As if to prove this very point, there were stories this week about a newspaper columnist being fired (and, yes, the newspaper disputes some of the details) for writing a column that highlighted an investigation of a major advertiser in the newspaper. Oh, and what has the fired guy done? He's gone and set up his own blog. Again, none of this is saying that professional reporters and news organizations aren't an important part of journalism -- but the idea that no one else can do what they do is just silly.

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Perhaps Watergate Leak Credit Should Go To The FBI More Than To Woodward And Bernstein

from the investigative-journalism-at-work... dept

We've talked in the past about how those complaining about the supposed "loss" of investigative journalism, if newspapers go away, are wrong. First, investigative journalism of the kind that people think about (i.e., Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate) is a relatively new phenomenon, and was not a common part of newspaper journalism until just a few decades ago. Second, very few newspapers put that much in the way of resources towards investigative reporting anyway. Third, there's nothing stopping other organizations from doing investigative reporting -- and we've been seeing a growing range of new online publications that focus on investigative reporting and do a great job of it. But a separate point is that it's often really not the investigative reporters who uncover the story, but the folks involved in the news themselves -- and those folks rarely get credit for providing the info that makes the journalistic effort possible.

Over the weekend, the news came out that the NY Times actually had the Watergate story before Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. The acting director of the FBI leaked it to the Times just before Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI, leaked it to the Washington Post (and became immortalized as "Deep Throat"). As Jay Rosen points out, this really means the FBI "broke" the story just as much as Woodward and Bernstein did. If there's a story that needs to get out there, never underestimate the folks on the inside for leaking it to get it out there -- and then there will be no shortage of folks to help spread the news. Again (so people don't misinterpret this), I'm not saying investigative reporters aren't needed -- but that not all of the story comes from the reporters themselves. And, on top of that, there are a growing number of publications willing to pick up the slack.

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Could PR People Replace Journalists?

from the oh,-the-horrors dept

One of the most common complaints about the trouble facing newspapers today is the woeful cry "but who will do investigative journalism?" Of course, that's silly. There are plenty of new entities springing up everyday online that do investigative journalism -- and do it well. On top of that, we noted that especially in the political realm, where partisans had tremendous interest in digging up dirt on opponents, we had little fear that investigations would take place. And while the initial investigations could be biased, getting the info out there would allow more non-biased parties to sort through the details and figure out what is and what is not true.

Romenesko points us to a column by Tim Cavanaugh taking this concept one step further: suggesting that a subset of PR people may end up taking on the role of investigative journalists. Now, I'm sure plenty of journalists are cringing at the concept -- and certainly, as someone who gets bombarded daily with idiotic story pitches that are spun to such ridiculous levels I can only laugh at them (as I hit delete), it makes me cringe a bit. But some of his points are worth thinking about. First, he notes that the number of PR jobs has been growing rapidly -- and that, fundamentally, there are a lot of similarities between the two jobs (in fact, many people go from one to the other), in that a key role is putting together a good "story."

And though it's considered wise to believe the contrary, these communications types are not constructing all these news items entirely (or even mostly) by lying. Flackery requires putting together credible narratives from pools of verifiable data. This activity is not categorically different from journalism. Nor is the teaching value that flackery provides entirely different from that of journalism: Most of the content you hear senators and congressmen reading on C-SPAN is stuff flacks provided to staffers....

But the idea of public relations (and its many fancy permutations, from "image management" to "oppo research" to "crisis") replacing objective journalism becomes less scary when you reflect that, pace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the cast of High School Musical 3, we are not all in this together. Communications is a highly competitive environment, and it is becoming more competitive. Frequently the most valuable information comes out just because somebody wants to make somebody else look bad.

No, it's certainly not the perfect solution (but what is?). But the main point is that there are other ways to get investigations done and get information out there... and then there's still lots of room for others to pour through the info to see what's real and what's not. I don't think that PR people will replace investigative journalism by any stretch of the imagination, but it's worth thinking about how they certainly may pick up the slack in some areas.

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Will People Pay For Investigative Journalism To Get The Results A Week Early

from the some,-but-not-many... dept

Tracy writes in to alert us to an attempt by a Milwaukee newspaper to get people to pay, specifically for investigative reporting, by publishing it in the paper a week before it goes online for free and by offering it online only to paying subscribers:

Investigative reporting is the most expensive form of journalism produced by the Journal Sentinel newsroom. Because of the expense and resources it requires, we are giving our print and e-edition subscribers exclusive access to the Preacher's Mob series. We will be doing this on a regular basis with certain enterprise stories and investigations. Online readers will be able to see the full story later this week. For now, all readers can read this summary version below or click on several interactive and multimedia features, including a mini-documentary that contains jailhouse interviews, audio files of secret recordings of Michael Lock by a law enforcement informant, and an interactive map of key dates and places in the world of Michael Lock. With an e-edition subscription, you can read the full series as it unfolds over five days in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel starting May 17.

On the whole, I don't think this is as bad an idea as some others, but it's difficult to see how it'd be successful. If the details of a story are really that interesting, then any other news organization in the area has incentive to at least report on the high points for free online and get all the online traffic that the Journal Sentinel should have received. Also, the number of people who really think it's worth paying for a few investigative reports to get it a week before others get to see it seems like a very small audience. I'd imagine the lost online ad revenue from not drawing traffic to the website is a much bigger number than the incremental new subscribers who want to read the story at the Journal Sentinel.

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Oh Look, Investigative Journalism Still Isn't Dead

from the it-keeps-going...-and-going...-and-going dept

We've already discussed a few times how silly it is to claim that investigative reporting somehow "goes away" if newspapers go away. There are still plenty of sources of journalism, and the ability to make use of new online tools, including things like Wikileaks, suggests that corruption should be a lot more difficult to get away with in the future, rather than easier. But, still some old school newspaper folks insist that investigative journalism will die. And yet... we keep hearing of new investigative journalism operations. The latest is that the Huffington Post has put together an initial $1.75 million from some donors to create an investigative journalism arm. It's hardly the first, either. There are a growing number of online-only outfits focused on investigative journalism -- and it's likely that many will be a lot more efficient and better at what they do than newspapers who never put all that much money towards investigative journalism in the first place.

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Investigative Journalism Done Better, Faster And Cheaper Without Newspapers

from the let's-get-real dept

There have been a series of ridiculous articles lately claiming that, with the collapse of some newspapers recently, somehow investigative reporting and local coverage won't work, meaning an era of corruption and the collapse of democracy. Fortunately, some are demonstrating the fallacies underlying these proclamations of doom.

Jay Rosen has been running an interesting experiment trying to find out just how many truly local stories an average newspaper includes in its paper, between all the national wire service stories. A look through a recent Seattle Times issue showed a grand total of seven locally produced stories. And a look at an issue of the Chicago Tribune found a total of eight locally produced stories. We're not talking about huge numbers here.

And, in fact, the finding of eight stories in the Trib comes from Geoff Dougherty, a guy who created quite a stir in newspaper circles when he claimed he could provide the equivalent (or better) local coverage of the Chicago Tribune for just $2 million a year, and provided the spreadsheet to back it up. And he's not just talking in theory. He's doing it. Today. For much less than the Tribune (which is bankrupt).

He's not the only one either. Talking Points Memo has been quite successful with its investigative reporting, which does a lot to leverage its community to help out in the process, while still employing full time journalists who are doing tremendous investigative reporting -- which should only improve as better tools are created to enable more to be done. The first link in this paragraph also discusses another example, the Voice of San Diego, which does local investigative reporting, and was funded by a bunch of local businesses that felt there wasn't enough investigative reporting locally.

Those who say that this can't be done apparently aren't looking around. Sure, some of these experiments may fail, but it's about time we got rid of two myths:

• Myth 1: Newspapers put tons of money and resources into investigative journalism. They don't. And never have.
• Myth 2: Only newspapers can do investigative journalism.

Not all of the new business models will work out, but some will, and we'll likely find the new models actually work much better than what we have today (which, let's face it, hasn't been that good in investigating things like corruption).

I was on a panel recently for journalists and PR people, and someone raised their hand to ask how people could "put the genie back in the bottle and charge for information again." The problem is that the question itself is wrong. There's no genie and there never was a bottle. People have never paid for the news. Newspapers never spent that much on investigative reporting, and they rarely did a particularly good job of it, other than an occasional big story in an attempt to win a Pulitzer. People can pine about that mythical genie and bottle, or they can start focusing on all the opportunity out there that will be coming out of some of these (or other) experiments.

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Wait, Weren't Big Newspapers Needed For Credibility?

from the so-much-for-that-plan dept

Over the last few years, it's been amusing to watch defenders of mainstream journalism trash online journalism by claiming that traditional journalists can do real investigative journalism, whereas online-only sources are too easily suckered into fake stories. In fact, one of the loudest complaints about the demise of newspapers is that no one will do "investigative" reports any more. There's no doubt that newer journalism properties get stories wrong at times, but traditional journalists seem just as likely to screw up as well. Witness the big news about the LA Times getting totally suckered into believing a completely made up story concerning Tupac Shakur's murder. Who broke the LA Times mistake? The online site, TheSmokingGun.com. This isn't to say that new media is any better than traditional media -- but it does highlight that for all the supposed "authority" of traditional journalists and their lofty standards, there's a pretty long track record of stunning mistakes and poorly fact-checked stories made by them.

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