The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option

“She’s from a small town, with small-town values — but apparently, that’s not good enough for some of the folks out there attacking her and her family. Some Washington pundits and media big shots are in a frenzy over the selection of a woman who has actually governed rather than just talked a good game on the Washington talk shows and hit the Washington cocktail circuit.” —Fred Thompson addressing the Republican convention, Sep. 2, 2008.

John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were. The Politico is reporting just that: Palin reignites culture wars.

I have no idea if the ignition system will work; nor do I claim that “this is what they were thinking” when they made the decision to nominate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Other interpretations may turn out to be truer than mine. This is my look at the bets McCain and company seem to be placing. I am not recommending the strategy. I am not predicting it will succeed. I think it was improvised, like my description here.

The storm around Sarah Pailn overtakes the story of the Republican convention and merges with it, like a smaller but stronger company taking over a larger but troubled enterprise. Behind the storm a “wave narrative” builds as her appointment generates headlines on multiple fronts. The irresistible force of fact-fed controversy meets the immovable enthusiasm for Palin as cultural object: charismatic everywoman straight from the imaginary of conservative small town America.

• The basic strategy is: don’t fight the “crisis” narrative. Rather, do things that bring it on, and in that crisis re-divide the electorate hoping to grab the bigger half.

The evangelical wing, and other social conservatives are strongly moved by her candidacy. More and more of their commitment to McCain is vested in him through her. As Andrew Sullivan writes: “The emotions involved - especially among the Christianist base who have immediately bonded on purely religious and cultural terms with Palin - are epic.”

• The strategy: sell the epic version of her candidacy. Allow her to become bigger than McCain in narrative terms. And let the two mavericks together overawe the Republican party, a damaged brand.

Continued bad news on the investigation front adds further drama, new fact streams and more protagonists to the Sarah Palin story. As more comes out about the decision to name Sarah Palin to the ticket, it’s harder to see how anyone on the inside thought it McCain’s best choice for president-in-waiting.

• Strategy: Give no ground, pile on the praise for her performance in Alaska, pump up her governor’s experience to death-defying extremes, hope for theatrical confrontation with characters in the mainstream media who can star as the cosmopolitan elites in the sudden politics of resentment the convention has been driven to.

Bloggers and open platforms continue to publish riskier—and risque—material, some of it unfit for family consumption, some of it false, salacious and reckless, some of it true, relevant and damaging, a portion of which is picked up by the traditional press.

• Strategy: confound and collapse all distinctions between closed editorial systems (like the newsroom of the New York Times), open systems (like the blogging community DailyKos.com) and political systems, like the Democratic party and its activist wing. Whenever possible mix these up. Conflate constantly. Attack them all. Jump from one to the other without warning or thread. Sow confusion among streams and let that confusion mix with the resentment in a culture war atmosphere.

As more emerges about how the McCain camp made the decision, the appointment looks more and reckless, the decision rushed, the vetting inadequate. This leads to advanced jeering from the left, intense criticism in the press, damaging leaks from within the Republican party, fueling calls from within and without for Sarah Palin to remove herself.

• Strategy: stick with “she was fully vetted” no matter what comes out. People who don’t believe it are trying to bring down Palin’s historic candidacy; or they don’t accept that a conservative woman can be the one to break the glass ceiling. If some establishment Republicans are skeptical or trying to stop her, that’s good for the crisis narrative, and good for two maverick candidates.

Sarah Palin under intense pressure then gives a charismatic performance on Wednesday of convention week and wows much of America, outdrawing Obama in the ratings and sending a flood of cash to McCain and the GOP.

• Strategy: bingo, that’s your big break. A wave effect is unleashed by a stunning televised performance. It is shock and awe in the theater of the post-modern presidency.

Journalists watching all this keep saying to themselves: wait until she gets out on the campaign trail. Wait until she sits for those interviews with experienced reporters and faces a real press conference.

• Strategy: double down on defiance by never letting her answer questions, except from friendly media figures who have joined your narrative; like Cheney with Fox. No meet the press at all. No interviews of Palin with the DC media elite— at all. De-legitimate the ask. Break with all “access” expectations. Use surrogates and spokesmen, let them get mauled, then whip up resentment at their mistreatment. Answer questions at town halls and call that adequate enough.

Meanwhile, the investigation of her performance in Alaska puts more and more pressure on the Palin appointment as things come out that would ordinarily disqualify a candidate from consideration or cast doubt on her truthfulness in a grave way.

• Strategy: Comes from Bush, the younger. When realities uncovered are directly in conflict with prior claims, consider the option of keeping the claims and breaking with reality. Done the right way, it’s a demonstration of strength. It dismays and weakens the press. And it can be great theatre.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:22 AM | Comments (55) | Link 

Hype Busting at Mother Jones Goes Bust

Mother Jones is currently running a feature called The Audacity of Hype? It offer us the views of 24 writers, thinkers and historians on a question the editors find important:

Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history?

There’s no quote from Obama comparing his campaign to the great progressive moments in American history. There’s no link to a text where he says that. This seemed odd for 2008; by now, the ethic of the link is reasonably well known among those who publish online. I asked the people in my Twitter feed, “If you’re editing this for Mother Jones, do you run the feature without a quote or link where Obama offers the comparison?” Russ Walker, formerly an editor at washingtonpost.com, said, “Absolutely not.”

In the email I got from David Corn as he pushed out to his list a promo for the Mother Jones feature, it says, “Prominent thinkers and writers ponder Obama and his claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Obama really said something like that? His campaign is a “movement” comparable to, say, the civil rights movement, or to second wave feminism, or to the labor movement after the industrial revolution? If so, I had missed it. So had Dan Kennedy. (“Let’s have the precise language.”)

Now I’ve heard Obama say, “this is our moment, this is our time.” So have you. But that’s different from a truth claim like, “my campaign is a movement comparable to the great progressive movements in history.” My doubts were increased by the headline: The Audacity of Hype? This doubles the editors’ bet. They’re not only suggesting he made the claim, they’re saying it’s been repeated often enough to be an audacious form of self-promotion. They’re provoking Pat Buchanan and giving him a forum to say things like…

It is absurd to argue that the nomination or an election of Barack Obama would be as important a historical event as the liberation of 3 million slaves after the bloodiest war in American history, that took 600,000 lives and set the South back a century.

It would be absurd, if anyone had argued that. Buchanan is clowning, and Mother Jones is helping him. From what I know of the contemporary attack machine, any statement from the candidate himself that compared Obama ‘08 to the great movements for freedom and justice in our history would have been quite the controversy, what with the McCain camp already mocking his messiah complex and calling him “The One.” Why would Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, accuse Obama of the same thing McCain is attacking him for?

It didn’t make a lot of sense, especially without a quote, link, or reference point. So I wrote to David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, asking him: where did Obama make this claim? What were you guys talking about? He kindly sent me an excerpt from a speech given by Obama. He said it should have been part of the introduction to the published forum, but somehow wasn’t. (Okaaay… so you’re going to fix that, right?)

This is what Mother Jones editors sent to the participants along with the question, “Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history?” I present it as a public service. See if you can find the point where that particular comparison is made. I couldn’t, but I am just one reader.

Nothing worthwhile in this country has ever happened unless somebody, somewhere is willing to hope. Somebody is willing to stand up. Somebody who is willing to stand up when they are told “No you can’t” and instead they say, “Yes we can.”

That’s how this country was founded. A group of patriots declaring independence against a mighty British empire—nobody gave them a chance—but they said, “Yes we can.” That’s how slaves and abolitionists resisted that wicked system, and how a new president charted a course to ensure we would not remain half slave and half free.

That’s how the greatest generation—my grandfather fighting in Patton’s Army, my grandmother staying at home with a baby and still working on a Bomber assembly line—how that greatest generation overcame Hitler and fascism, and also lifted themselves up out of a Great Depression.

That’s how pioneers went West when people told them it was dangerous, they said, “Yes we can.” That’s how immigrants traveled from distant shores when people said their fates would be uncertain, “Yes we can.” That’s how women won the right to vote, how workers won the right to organize, how young people like you traveled down South to march and sit in and go to jail, and some were beaten and some died for freedom’s cause. That’s what hope is. That’s what hope is.

That’s what hope is. That moment when we shed our fears and our doubts. When we don’t settle for what the cynics tell us we have to accept. Because cynicism is a sorry sort of wisdom. When we instead join arm in arm and decide we are going to remake this country, block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. That’s what hope is.

There’s a moment in the life of every generation, when that spirit has to come through if we are to make our mark on history. And this is our moment. This is our time.

Which comes closest to your view?

1.) Sure enough, Obama in this except “compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history” and Mother Jones caught him at it, puncturing the Obama hype. Good for them!

2.) No, Obama does not “claim that his campaign is comparable to the great progressive movements in U.S. history.” Not even close. Mother Jones is engaging in the kind of audacious hype it claims to be opposing. Bad move.

3.) It doesn’t matter whether Obama actually said anything like that because his supporters believe his campaign is a movement of transcendent historical importance, and that’s what Mother Jones really meant, it’s just that the editors phrased it badly, attributing to the candidate claims that have been made by others about him.

My vote is for 2.) Yours? And if you have a better text where the claim is made that “Barack Obama for president” is like the great social movements of the past, send it along. (This speech to the NAACP might have had that language in it, but doesn’t.)

I’ve been around the block before on an issue like this. (““Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype.”) Is the concept really so hard for the editors to grasp? Hype-busting and the exercise of hype are very closely related things; one may easily turn into the other if you’re not careful, in the same way that playing the race card and accusations of playing the race card bring on the same dynamic.

Mother Jones wasn’t being careful. I think the editors should correct their mistake, which was to publish this feature without any reference point or link. That would be “smart, fearless journalism,” circa World Wide Web. They should add that Obama didn’t explicitly make the claims they are accusing him of making, unless they have a passage where he does.

I’ll update you if anything happens.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links...

Meanwhile, Digby says of the forum:

I think the most interesting thing about the answers is the degree to which just about everyone sounds ambivalent or confused. It’s a very odd array of answers from people who are immersed in politics and history and who should be able to rattle off a compelling rationale for the candidate without any problem, even if they disagree with the notion that it’s a movement on par with civil rights or the labor movement. I think all of the people queried want Obama to win, but virtually none of them seem to be sure what he’s going to do.

But Paul Rosenberg of Open Left disagrees with Digby on a few points.

The editor of Mother Jones replies and the magazine adjusts its feature online, adding the text of the speech participants were reacting to. That corrects for part of what’s wrong with it.

Dan Kennedy, The audacity of Mother Jones. “I think the truth is #2 plus a strong dose of #3, along with at least a slight whiff of #1…. It’s not so much that MoJo is completely wrong; it’s that the magazine is being reductionist and stupid. Why?”

At the MoJo blog, Jonathan Stein posts Obama’s Historical Comparisons, with more explanation. “Obama does indeed put himself in a historical context alongside the great progressive movements of the last century,” he says. “Do I personally think that Obama sees his candidacy as on par with the civil rights movement or Revolutionary War soldiers? No.”

CJR’s Campaign Desk: Obama feature falls flat. Jane Kim on the sound of it: “No, they say (almost) in unison, Obamania isn’t a truly progressive movement. In fact, it’s not even really a movement—let me tell you what a movement is. Still, let’s not forget that it’s historic; I definitely didn’t say that it wasn’t historic.”

Maybe it’s the question’s fault, Jane. Political man, he’s prone to exaggerate, right? So how good a question did our premier progressive political magazine ask of their 24 people: did political man exaggerate when he said…? But for instant production of a hype-busting atmosphere, a lame question like that actually works.

Kennedy points to this observation by Jonathan Stein at the MoJo blog, back in February. Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex. Definitely worth reading.

Does this post play unhelpfully into the pernicious and growing Obamaism-as-cult meme that we’ll likely see repeated over and over by the right wing if Obama gets the nomination? It does. Sorry. But Obama’s rhetoric makes an undeniable suggestion: that his election, not an eight-year administration that successfully implements his vision for America, would represent a moment in America of the grandest, most transformative kind. And that’s a bit much.

I asked Mayhill Fowler of OffTheBus, who has heard in person quite a few Obama speeches, if he was making the comparison Mother Jones accuses him of making. She wrote back:

Yes, because what’s the point of having the rights if you don’t come to the public square to exercise them? That’s what the Obama Campaign is about—bringing us all, regardless of party, together to effect in the body politic. In that sense, the Obama Campaign is the coda to the Civil Rights Movement. First and most obviously, African-Americans are exercising their right to vote and may be the deciding factor in this election. Secondly, the Obama Campaign is running on two tracks right now: winning the office and laying the groundwork for governing. That’s the 50-state strategy—getting citizens involved in the political process now so that a year and years later they will be pressuring their congressional representatives to step up to the plate on whatever difficult legislative choices Obama programs will entail.

So Obama sees himself as a successor to King, and before King to Lincoln. Many of his speeches are infused with his sense of this personal destiny. Obama is body to a movement, as MLK was. And right now that movement is centered in the campaign. (It will be interesting to see how a transition from campaign to governance works out.)

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:44 AM | Comments (22) | Link 

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News

(This is a revised and expanded version of a post that ran at Idea Lab July 17, 2008.)

1. The Giant Pool of Money: Greatest Explainer Ever Heard

Behold the special episode of “This American Life” called The Giant Pool of Money. It’s a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, producer Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass and told the story, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with.

If you don’t know “The Giant Pool of Money” you really should (here: download the podcast) because it’s probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard. I listened to it on a long car trip when everyone else was sleeping. Going in to the program, I didn’t understand the mortgage mess one bit: subprime loans were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old, respected firms?

That’s what I knew. Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam: what happened, why it happened, and why I should care. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts and different levels, with no heroes. And the villains were mostly abstractions! Typical of the program’s virtues is the title. It’s called The Giant Pool of Money because that is where the producers want your understanding to start. They insist.

Lots of people have noted how effective the program was. Adam Davidson told NPR’s ombudsman, “By a very long margin, this is the most positive response I’ve ever seen to any story I’ve worked on.” I knew there would be fans of this episode listening, so I asked the people in my Twitter feed what made it different and “explainey” to them.

• Mike Plugh: Compression of time and space, like in a classic movie, “a broad network of characters into a few representative types.”

• Liza Sabater “Because when Richard finds out the bank lied about his monthly income, it sums up how the loans were just a scam.”

• Denise Covert: “Because it used small words. Because it still used big words for those of us who could grasp them.”

• Scott Karp: No demonizing. Instead, “why it seemed like a good idea at the time… What were they thinking when they were doing all this? And why did they think it would work?”

• Howard Sherman: It met the ultimate explanatory test. “I could actually explain the mortgage debacle to someone else.” He calls it viral: you can pass the explanatory gains on. “It also made me really angry. Their incredulity was contagious.”

• “You can almost lust, with the characters, after the money that the idiots have left available.” Oh, sorry… that was me, talking on Twitter.

2. Explanation leads to information, not the other way around

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to “The Giant Pool of Money.” I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. (How one caused the other was explained in the program’s conclusion.) ‘Twas a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information. Before that moment I had ignored hundreds of news reports about Americans losing their homes, the housing market crashing, banks in trouble, Wall Street firms on the brink of collapse.

In the normal hierarchy of journalistic achievement the most “basic” acts are reporting today’s news and providing current information, as with prices, weather reports and ball scores. We think of “analysis,” “interpretation,” and also “explanation” as higher order acts. They come after the news has been reported, building upon a base of factual information laid down by prior reports.

In this model, I would receive news about something brewing in the mortgage banking arena, and make note it. (“”Subprime lenders in trouble: check.”) Then I would receive some more news and perhaps keep an even closer eye on the story. After absorbing additional reports of ongoing problems in the mortgage market (their frequency serving as a signal that something is truly up) I might then turn to an “analysis” piece for more on the possible consequences, or perhaps a roundtable with experts on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. I thus graduate from the simpler to the more sophisticated forms of news as I learn more about a potentially far-reaching development. That’s the way it works… right?

Wrong! For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop. I respond with indifference, even though I’ve picked up a blinking red light from the news system’s repeated placement of “subprime” items in front of me.

On top of that, if I decide to buckle down and really pay attention to “subprime lenders in crisis” news—including the analysis pieces and the economics columnist—I am likely to feel even more frustrated because the missing narrative prevents these good-faith efforts from making much of a difference. The columnist who says he is going to explain it to me typically assumes too much knowledge (“mortgage-backed securities?”) or has too little space, or is bored with the elementary task of explanation and prefers that more sophisticated work appear under his byline. Or maybe, as with this story, the very people paid to understand the story barely know how to explain it. That’s the opening theme of this column from The New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, “Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club.

I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, “Can you try to explain this to me?” When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: “Can you try again?”

I remember reading this column at the time and feeling grateful that someone at least tried. (He got about a third of the way there.) But Leonhardt’s column wasn’t displayed or classified in the right way. It should have been a tool in the sidebar of every news story the Times did about the mortgage mess. Instead it was added to the content flow, like this: news, news, news, “analysis,” news, news, news, “interpretation piece,” news, news, news, news, “Leonhardt: explain this to me,” news, news, news…

That’s messed up. That’s dysfunctional. We have to fix that.

3. A case of demand without supply?

After the first version of this post ran at Idea Lab, blogger Simon Owens interviewed This American Life producer Alex Blumberg about some of the ideas in it. ““I feel like my constant problem with the daily news media is that either you’re always entering the story in the middle or often at the end,” Blumberg said. “And they don’t do a very good job of talking about the beginning and what got us to this point where it became news.”

Exactly. And that’s a problem. It’s been a problem for a long time, except that no one ever does anything about it. Why? Because they get paid to produce “the news,” not the big narratives that would permit more people to understand that news. But this may be a case of demand without supply. “The Giant Pool of Money” is This American Life’s most popular episode ever. Blumberg told Owens that it beats its nearest competitor by 50,000 downloads. Turns out my reaction was a common reaction:

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.

The producers of this American Life started with the same feelings I had: ill-informed, overwhelmed, and out of the loop about the “subprime” story. But then they mastered it; and it is that trajectory—from drift to mastery—that the listener takes during “The Giant Pool of Money.” In a way the star of the story is understanding itself. It struggles but emerges victorious.

Simon Owens ends his post with something I told him over the phone: “It’s not only necessary background for the future readers of news, but also the future writers.” I learned this from Meranda Watling, a young journalist working for the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, Ind. Shortly after I started Twittering about “The Giant Pool of Money” she got an assignment to do a story on the local fallout. Watling reports on K-12 education most of the time; here she was pressed into service on a mortgage crisis story.

FREDDIE MAC/FANNIE MAE FALLOUT — Charticle on A1; impact story for back page. A look at what the local fallout will be. Talking to investors, mortgage lenders, house hunters (potential borrowers), real estate agent about what this could mean for this area. Meranda 12 inches w/wire story.

“That was essentially my total direction,” she said. “The idea was to take something our readers would be hearing about on a national level Monday and give it a local spin. Our business reporter was tied up finishing a Sunday package, or he would have done it himself.” Hearing about it on Twitter, she grabbed the transcript of “Giant Pool” and read it before heading out for interviews. Public radio’s national explainer fed local competence, making a journalist in Indiana marginally better.

“I was able to ask intelligent questions of the bankers and real estate agents,” Meranda Watling told me. “Rather than say just ‘how do these changes to the mortgage practices impact us locally?’ and hope they give me an honest answer I understand.” Here’s her story. It wasn’t one of her best, she said, just marginally better because of the same quick gains in mortgage crisis literacy that my other informants reported. Absorbing the explainer “helped me save face, ask the right questions and understand what the bankers were telling me.”

Saving face. Asking the right questions. Grasping what the bankers are telling you. Watling’s reasons for needing it are the same reasons driving the hundeds of thousands of downloads.

4. Start with clueless journalists!

And so I ask you: What’s basic? If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

In a recent post about an ethnographic study of news consumption sponsored by the AP (the pdf is here) Ethan Zuckerman summarized one of the researchers’ findings:
“News consumers in the US get lots of facts, quickly updated and delivered through a variety of media. But they get very little backstory to help contextualize the facts delivered, and rarely get follow-up stories, or speculations about the future.” Zuckerman doubts that the AP intends to provide much of that, even though it would be a worthy service and the study it commissioned says there’s a need.)

To close this, here are the striking things for me in the story I told you.

• The journalists doing the explaining started with zero distance between themselves and the users; they were clueless! “Start with clueless journalists”— how often does anyone recommend that? And it’s not that I’m recommending it. I’m saying that any commonly shared opacity is a signal of deep public need that can only be met by outstanding story-tellers who are reporters too.

• National explainers like “The Giant Pool of Money” feed the rest of journalism in two ways: 1.) creating that scaffold of understanding in the users that future reports can attach to, thus driving demand for the updates that today are more easily delivered; 2.) allowing the rest of the press to catch up quickly and deliver better reports. A product with two uses like that should be successful. (But that doesn’t mean it will be easy to get there, especially in the current climate of disinvestment and economic crisis.)

• Too often when journalists use the term “in depth,” their reference point is not the user’s missing knowledge or the depth of field required to actually grasp a story, but rather other quicker, shorter forms of news. I can’t even count how many TV journalists have patiently explained to me that “four minutes is a long time in network news.” And it is… relatively speaking. But if journalists continue to think this way—measuring “depth” by relative length—they will never fix what’s wrong with the news system.

• Part of the problem in developing competence at explainers is that journalists think they already do this, and they don’t.

• The question of which editorial “shop” will—or should—come to specialize in national explainers is an open one. I don’t know. But it would certainly be logical for Pro Publica to develop the form. (Are you listening, Paul Steiger?) And I would be surprised if this American Life doesn’t do it again. Of course the reason we don’t see more of them is they don’t break any news. But without them the news system will remain broken.

Finally (an Aug. 21 update) the Librarians are wondering if there’s room for them in the National-Explainer-Stream. And these people took notice (“explanations in plain English”). To me it’s a classic example of unclaimed territory in the editorial sphere.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 11:18 AM | Comments (24) | Link 

"The Whole Anthrax Case Would Make For a Good Journalism Class." Brian Ross Responds.

For the background see Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001 (PressThink, Aug. 4, 2008.)

Q. Could you tell us what happened?

A. Three confidential sources told us it was arson. Just before deadline, the fire department called. “It was not arson,” a spokesman said. So I reported: “Arson! Three sources said so.” Later, a colleague of mine went on the air to report what the fire department said: that it was not arson. I immediately went back to my sources and asked them: guys, what’s going on here? A couple days later, a fourth source said it was arson. So I reported that: four sources now say arson, though the fire department says no. Then a few days after that I again reported what the fire department said: that it was not arson, even though our sources had said it was arson. By this time, my sources had changed their mind: not arson, they all said. So I think our audience was kept well informed throughout.

Q. I see… Well, did you ever correct your first report, stating that it was arson?

A. I just told you: six days after I reported that it was arson I reported that the fire department said it was not arson. That’s a correction.

Q. But the fire department had said it was not arson even before your original report, so why did you—

A. Because on first inspection my sources said it was arson, okay? They later came to a different conclusion. That’s not my fault. You’re only as good as your sources.

Continue reading ""The Whole Anthrax Case Would Make For a Good Journalism Class." Brian Ross Responds."

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:54 AM | Comments (39) | Link 

Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001

No need for a big preamble. Dan Gillmor and I are posting these questions simultaneously. (Here’s his case for them.) We think ABC News should answer them. They arise from two columns by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been tracking this story for some time.

• Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News, in which he shows that ABC News was probably duped by someone on a story of huge importance, putting Iraqi fingerprints on anthrax attacks that actually came from the U.S at a time when the case for war with Iraq was beginning to get traction. (Salon.com, Aug. 1)

• Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation in which he makes the case for revealing the sources who completely misled ABC News or lied to it, including precedents where journalists have done just that. (Salon.com, Aug. 3)

If you want to understand our questions, go read Greenwald now.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:11 AM | Comments (16) | Link 

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

There are other definitions, but they will have to be discussed in the comments.

… And here’s the video version, “Got it?” by Chuck Olsen for The Uptake (“Will journalism be done by you or to you?”). YouTube has a thread for it.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Portuguese blogger, journalist and new media person Alexandre Gamela reacts at his blog: “What really stands out is the absence of the middle man.”

American blogger, journalist and new media person Ryan Sholin in the comments: “I think to inform each other is the crucial piece of business.”

Yeah. If a definition can have a strategy, mine is to eliminate any reference to the news media as pipe through which current information vital to the public has to flow.

Lisa Williams in the comments: “I named the site I run Placeblogger in part as a reaction to the term ‘citizen journalism’…”

This post began on Twitter, where the tight restrictions of the form—140 characters, no more—make you make nice with concise. Twitter is a micro-blogging service where you follow people’s 140-character updates and they follow you. To see my Twitter feed go here.

Wikipedia says citizen journalism is:

The act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information,” by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis… Citizen journalism should not be confused with civic journalism, which is practiced by professional journalists. Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content.

“What became known as citizen journalism is the result of the digital era’s democratization of media.” Dan Gillmor in a post he put up today, after a journalist asked him if he knew “who coined this term and when it entered the mainstream media.”

Not all citizen media is citizen journalism. Most is not.

As to who coined it first in its current, digital-age meaning, or at least came closest, I’m not sure there either. But I’d start with Oh Yeon Ho, founder of Korea’s OhmyNews, who said back in antiquity (2000) that “Every citizen is a reporter.” Mr. Oh is one of the real pioneers in this arena, as we would all agree.

I certainly would. He’s one of the founders of the form.

Andy Dickinson has got it. “Jay’s definition is about defining the activity and not its relationship to the media.” That it can happen without the media may be the reason the media cannot get a grip on it. And he asks: is user generated content dead, as some are saying?

Picking up on my definition of citizen journalism, the Rising Voices project of Global Voices Online lists some fine examples of how enterprising people in the developing world “employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another.”

Invaluable if you’re trying to get your mind around it: Steve Outing, The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism. His post is “designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media.”

The parallels between citizen journalism and similar shifts in education are explored here. A bit more here.

And how have pro journalists reacted to citizen journalism?

• The most common reaction—an ignorant, breezy, hapless condescension—is illustrated by this post. “When I hear the term ‘citizen journalist,’ I reach for my pistol…”
• A better showing is this forum at The Guardian site.

“When the people formerly known as Christians employ the spiritual gifts they have been given to reach the lost, that’s missional evangelism.” Link.

Observe how the “so-called” tick works. This is from the PBS Newshour, with producer Jeffrey Brown:

For old and new institutions alike, the action is increasingly moving online. USA Today, with the nation’s largest circulation, combined its print and online newsrooms. And it, like other organizations, is incorporating more elements of reader-generated so-called citizen journalism. (Jan. 2007)

There, “citizen journalism” is something the media is doing more and more of.

PC mag in its encyclopedia of IT terms says citizen journalism means:

News and commentary from the public at large. Using wiki sites and blogs, anyone can contribute information about a current event. Also known as “collaborative citizen journalism” (CCJ), “grassroots media” and “personal publishing,” the concept behind citizen journalism is that many volunteers help to ensure that the information is more accurate than when it is being reported from only one source.

Daniel Bennett says my definition needs some adjustment:

I think it might be worth adding emphasis on publication by including the word “many” and also sticking in the phrase “an event deemed to be newsworthy” or for brevity just ‘a newsworthy event’. Here’s my stab at it:

“When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform many others of a newsworthy event, that’s citizen journalism.”

Some similar advice from PeriodismoCiudadano (CitizenJournalism) in Spanish.

Leonard Witt: “Jay, is this definition the first step in clealy articulating citizen journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right? It would be nice.”

The BBC Radio 4 program, “Anaylsis” did a half-hour on the connection between the “public journalism” movement of the 1990s and the situation today with the press and citizens media. Kevin Marsh, the former editor of the Today program and now an executive with the BBC’s College of Journalism, hosted and thought it through. I was interviewed. So was Charlie Beckett, the UK’s leading explicator of networked journalism. Here is how the program ends:

…Reinvention, migrating the tribe, re-skilling to share the news business with former readers. Whatever you call it and whichever way you slice it, the press has a job on its hands and the finances of news mean time isn’t on its side. But it might just be that the public journalism movement in pre-web America got it more right than they earned credit for. Maybe, in the end, it will be the public that saves the press for the public.

You can listen here. Here’s the transcript.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:37 AM | Comments (34) | Link 

Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism

Now this is interesting. Kind of an anti-curmudgeon site. The opposite of bitching about the bosses. Or unloading your frustrations on newspaper interns. I give you Tree House Media Project and its blog, which appears on a tab called “Fuck Google.” (Just an expression, wastes zero time on that.)

The first entry—Free or Subscription?—is informative and unhysterical. It highlights some of the “niche” news sites that have proven sustainable on the Web, each created by a person, not a firm.

The tone is self help for angry journalists. Empower ex-newsroom people with tools to learn with. Enough with the ignorant griping, the site says: figure out the self-publishing puzzle and you can take matters into your own hands. It’s like a band with a new sound. “No amount of bitching will prevent Yahoo from poaching our readers.” Suck it up, news tribe.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:24 PM | Comments (34) | Link 

Migration Point for the Press Tribe

(This is a revised version of the talk I gave to the Personal Democracy Forum, June 23, 2008. Originally published at TechPresident, same day. I have been using the “migration” image for a while, but felt it needed fuller expression. Hence…)

We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that it’s theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.

The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:40 AM | Comments (20) | Link 

Update on Beatblogging.org Six Months In

I have an update for you on Beatblogging.org, the project I announced six months ago in this post: These Beat Reporters Will Try the Social Network Way. (“Thirteen sites want to see if it works: from the Houston Chronicle to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, plus ESPN.com, MTV, the Seattle Times… Some of the beats: Child welfare, Dallas public schools, ‘green’ tech, Big Pharma, digital music, Procter & Gamble.”)

I said then that the project—which is part of NewAssignment.Net—offered a simple proposition: “Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a ‘live’ social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.” I felt the only way to find out was to try it for a year, with different beats in different locales and different editorial settings.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:42 AM | Comments (1) | Link 

Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page: A Demo

The mission of NewsTrust—it’s nonprofit and non-partisan—is to be a “guide to good journalism.” The site offers a “range of tools to help you find and share” the best work. It has a system for surfacing quality news that anyone can participate in by rating news stories and works of commentary, or by submitting them to be rated.

NewsTrust is one kind of answer to a question I am often asked. If supply keeps expanding (because so many have media power now) won’t there come a crisis in demand? And don’t we lose something if we no longer have that common narrative once provided by Big Media? (A favorite of Big Media interviewers.)

Sites like NewsTrust take it for granted that expansion in media space is a good thing. But filtering and forwarding systems must keep pace. The better we are at that—finding the good work, forwarding it to eager users—the easier it is to relax and accept that anyone can be a producer, or that good contributions can come from anywhere.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 4:30 PM | Comments (18) | Link 

When Mayhill Fowler Met Bill Clinton at the Rope Line

You like your citizen journalism by the case? OffTheBus brings you another case with Mayhill Fowler in the middle of it. (See my post, From OffTheBus to Meet the Press, about her first one.)

…On the final day of an epic primary season, Mayhill Fowler is in Milbank, S.D. on the rope line as Bill Clinton and the crowd make contact. From three directions people are shouting at him to get his attention. He’s grabbing hands and accepting well wishes. People are taking pictures as they get close to Clinton and some record the commotion on their cell phones. Fowler means to hand him her business card, which explains who she is and why she might be asking questions, but somehow she fumbles it. As Clinton comes within ear shot she extends her hand and with it asks her question. “Mister President what do you think about that hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair…?”

Posted by Jay Rosen at 11:57 AM | Comments (80) | Link 

What Happened to Scott McClellan in Longer Perspective: 100 Years of the White House Press

“You got to be able to step back and look at the big picture,” said Scott McClellan on the Today show this morning, talking about his book disturbance. I did that in April 2006 when McClellan resigned as White House spokesman. See The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away. Most of what I have to say on this week’s events is in that post.

(This week it was still on the first page of results for a Google search of McClellan’s name. The New York Times topic page for McClellan also picked it up. So did Mahalo. Long form bloggers live for these moments, when the live web and search come together.)

McClellan saw that he became just that: the jerk, the guy whom everyone could abuse. He is now trying to explain, in public, how such a thing happened. In “The Jerk at…” I was talking about his visible part in the Bush presidency— on television, in the public eye. Invariably, Washington reporters I met would tell me what a good person McClellan was… in person. “Great guy to work with.” And they almost always said the same thing about why his performances were so excruciating. “He’s in a tough spot.” And then their voices would trail off.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 2:15 PM | Comments (58) | Link 

Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public Good

Ever wondered: where’s the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures that people are planning? Well, Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time.

Shirky, who teaches at NYU but in a different program, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody (“The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.”) This speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here— after absorbing this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along with Shirky as he explains “the cognitive surplus” we developed during the age of TV.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 10:15 PM | Comments (9) | Link 

The Presses Stop But the Press Goes On: Capital Times Lives on the Web

Over drinks the night before meeting, Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger went years past where I planned to time-travel the next day. Talking about the presses they’d just spent tens of millions of pounds buying, he shrugged and said:

“They may be the last presses we ever own.”

Jeff Jarvis, The Last Presses, Buzzmachine, Dec. 5, 2005.

Take a look at this photograph. It shows employees of the Capital Times in Madison, WI, holding one of the last editions of their newspaper, an afternoon daily founded in 1917. These people are losing their jobs, and the newspaper they brought forward six days a week will no longer stretch across the big machines you can see behind them.

The photo isn’t a celebration. The people in the picture, though proud of their work, are not full of that fighting spirit. They are gathered to mark the end of something. Every day they put out a newspaper that won’t be put out that way any more. Behind them are the last presses at the Capital Times.

The presses have stopped but the press goes on. That’s my headline. Here’s the New York Times account and a local report. I wanted to add my own.

Posted by Jay Rosen at 1:08 AM | Comments (14) | Link 

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?"

This was originally published at the Britannica Blog as Newspapers and the Net: Where’s the Business Model, People?, part of a week long forum on the future of the newspaper and whether we care if it dims. I made a few small revisions.

In The Great Unbundling Nick Carr states the problems facing newspapers clearly and well. He has a good grasp of what the Web is doing to the economics of news and advertising, and this is why he’s able to be clear. I liked his ending:

“How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?” The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

I think he’s right. It’s possible we will lose some of the public goods that newspapers under the old subsidy system were able to bring forward. People ask me about this all the time. When I tell them there’s no answer at the moment a strange look comes across their faces. A social problem with no answer? Is that even allowed?

Posted by Jay Rosen at 12:04 AM | Comments (9) | Link