Dan Lyons, writing about Apple’s public relations and press:
The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama — a company that can do no wrong. Even in Silicon Valley, where much of the press corps are pretty much glorified cheerleaders (think of all those slobbering cover stories about the Google guys) Apple’s kid-gloves treatment stands out. Reporters don’t just overlook Apple’s faults; they’ll actually apologize for them, or rationalize them away. Ever seen reporters clapping and cheering at a press conference? Happens all the time at Apple events.
Newspaper folk are particularly inclined to complain about the negative effects the web has had on reporting.
In journalism’s new Internet-dominated landscape, in which attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth, handiwork like John Crewdson’s is seen as taking too long and costing too much. His situation is hardly unique — the other investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune’s D.C. bureau was told to leave at the same time, as was the top investigator at the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which is also owned by the Tribune Company. But as an example of journalism’s very best, Crewdson’s dismissal is a symbol of the extent to which the news media are imploding. And that implosion is a development with far-reaching implications.
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Meanwhile, websites are not obligated to spend money on newsprint, printing plants, or union drivers to drop their product at readers’ doorsteps. Yet they benefit from linking to all that work they’ve not done or paid a nickel for. And they supplement this borrowed reporting with user-generated content and material produced by freelancers who are paid a pittance or nothing at all. They’ve also opted for chat rooms and ongoing dialogues among their adherents — a laudable, democratic impulse, but one that often devolves into an unedited legitimization of stupidity and bigotry.
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Why should we care?
This matters because of the unique role journalism plays in a democracy. So much public information and official government knowledge depends on a private business model that is now failing. Journalism acknowledges and illuminates complexity, and at the same time prioritizes, helping us to evaluate the relative significance of developments playing out all around us. …
And, importantly, there’s a sense of social mission. Good journalism keeps public and private officials honest and helps citizens make thoughtful decisions. It does this by systematically gathering, processing, and checking relevant information, and by doing it with a spirit of independence. It’s how two previously unknown Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, put together the Watergate puzzle that forced the 01974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. And as they pursued their investigation, they, like all good reporters, followed certain commonly accepted ethical norms: You don’t take money from the people you’re covering. You don’t bow to special interests or to the economic interests of your employer. You confirm and reconfirm the accuracy of assertions and supposed facts and quotes. As an old saying used to go at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now-defunct training ground for decades of reporters, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”
It seems to me that there’s a real opening for bloggers to do serious journalistic work. Although newspapers and TV reporters give us the major stories, they also give us a lot of garbage we don’t want. Bloggers have the advantage of highly targeted, self-selected audiences.
And if print is withering and the web is the platform of the future, then we need to have people who are intimately familiar with the web to begin filling the gap. With no writing-related income except from readers or advertisers, a web journalist is under less pressure to leave out information or avoid certain subjects.
I can’t say whether this will happen, or what form it will take, but I have been thinking about this for several months now. Here’s my thoughts on what it should look like.
Make changes visible. Everybody makes mistakes. For newspapers, this means publishing retractions and corrections. Unlike print, which can’t be edited after publication, the web is infinitely rewritable and has no space constraints. Publish retractions and corrections as usual, and update the relevant article — but don’t just edit it; let readers see what’s changed.
Share your source material. I don’t agree with the idea that journalists are the only ones able to draw together information in an informative, useful way. Journalists are often better at it, but stories have their own trajectory and the journalist will necessarily miss one or a dozen alternative stories, some of which may be even more interesting or significant. So publish everything that inspired you, that helped you along. Articles, book excerpts, conversations, anything. Unless it would cause a source to be fired, it should be shared — and even then, consider doing it in a paraphrased form.
Let readers become writers. Readers will find unexpected uses for your material. If they care enough to create something new, then you should care enough to let them publish it on your site, or give a good link if they have their own site. Encourage others to do what you’re doing — you can’t specialize in every subject or write all the stories the world wants to tell, but others can help. This may even be something as simple as translations.
Develop a consistent, powerful form of organization. You may take the approach of Steven Johnson or James Fallows, shoving everything into a freeform database that’s brilliant at working with text. You may go my route and shove everything into a bookmarking system, recording metadata and keywords. Whatever your technique is, make it available to everyone else.
But if you want readers to be involved, personal organization isn’t enough.
Use clean, clear URLs. There should only ever be one way to link to your article. Make it easy to find. Don’t do what newspapers and magazines tend to do with their web versions, offering regular views, print views, multi-page views and single-page views.
Develop a good keyword system and use it everywhere. If I want to find things relating to, say, Steve Warren, I search my bookmarks for
by:stevewarrenandstevewarren. If I want to find things relating to music, I search my bookmarks formusic. Although it takes extra effort to record these keywords when reading, it pays off fabulously later on when you know you read something about music that had an idea you want to reuse but can’t remember where or when you read it or who wrote it or…Develop a good source storage system. I don’t know what the best approach would be. Wikileaks and Wikisource seem to do well with the wiki format, but that may not be ideal.
Remember to share your legacy. Dave Winer, in 01994:
This offer expires on 10/31/94 — who knows how long these messages will live? — I still get requests for a freeware program I wrote in 01988!
The effort that you put into writing now is worth more and more as time goes on. Spread your work around as much as possible. Not that you should put everything in the public domain (but good work if you do); I personally use Creative Commons to allow others to reuse my work under certain conditions.
I’m breaking my own rules. I have ideas, but I’m not much good at programming or writing. I’m also running on a publishing platform I don’t entirely control, which makes some things impossible.
So where do I stand?
Changes are visible. Because all my articles are co-published in a version control system, it’s possible to trace the history of what I’ve done. But although it’s convenient for the author, it’s not overly convenient for the reader.
Source material and organization: As noted above, I use a bookmarking system that holds just about every external document I link to in my entries, along with a ton of stuff I don’t have an immediate use for. Like the changes, the system is pretty transparent, and it’s certainly convenient for me. But running it on this site directly would be better, because I could simply pull over the tagging system and have my keywords. A bigger issue is that bookmarks don’t save copies. I can generally rely on the link still working a year or two later, but it’s not guaranteed. If I were to save my own copy I wouldn’t have to care.
But none of stuff I’ve written up there means anything unless you’re writing.
If you aren’t, why not? We all have something to say, even if we’re not very skilled at saying it. I doubt I’d be hired to write a column, but I enjoy doing it here for free.
If you are, consider opening up the process. But more importantly: keep writing. You don’t know when your time will come.
