From “the First and Last Word” to News as Conversation
This post was triggered in a somewhat roundabout way - Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog picks up on a report from the Digital News Affairs conference, covering a speech by Digital Editor Ed Roussel from the Telegraph Media Group in the U.K. The key quote from Roussel’s speech:
“In dismissing the idea (perhaps a myth) that the web was simply about breaking news and the paper about analysis, he said that the strategy for your website was to be about the first and the last word on a story.”
For me, this touches on a key theme in journalism research, and like Paul, I’m worried that this understanding of news reporting leads us exactly into the wrong direction. I agree with the first part of the statement - the days of the newspaper as the premier space for news analysis are numbered, as (for example) the 2007 poll wars and their recent rekindling have shown -, but the positioning (or indeed, posturing) of any one news Website as the authoritative source on the news is a similarly outdated idea.
It’s an idea which betrays a profound, if common, misunderstanding of the nature of news reporting - a view of news which is influenced less by journalists’ and audiences’ everyday experience of the news than by marketing departments’ insistence that their news organisation’s product is the authoritative account of the day’s events, that you can “get the full story here” and nowhere else.
From a marketing point of view, to frame the news that way is perhaps unavoidable - it’s one way of trying to convince audiences to buy the paper rather than rely on radio and television, or (in earlier days) to buy the morning rather than the evening paper. If journalists, editors, and journalism researchers begin to believe the spiel, however, things come off the rails. When I researched Gatewatching, for example, I came across this statement in Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, a book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: they bemoan the fact that in our “new Mixed Media Culture”,
A Never-Ending News Cycle Makes Journalism Less Complete: … Stories often come as piecemeal bits of evidence, accusation, or speculation - to be filled in and sorted out in public as the day progresses. (7)
Quite apart from the question of whether we ever actually inhabited any sort of ‘unmixed media culture’, again this idea of a move towards a “less complete” journalism where news reports are “piecemeal” rather than “the first and last word on a story” strikes me as both odd, and at odds with our everyday experience. When is a news story ever complete - isn’t there always the potential for further detail, additional perspectives, different interpretations to be added? If so, for news organisations to strive to provide the first and last word on a story must necessarily remain a quixotic, impossible quest; for journalists to insist that they do indeed have “all the news that’s fit to print” is naive at best and disingenuous at worst - with shades of Shanahan’s ‘we understand Newspoll because we own it (so shut up everybody)’ thrown in for good measure.
Which is why citizen journalism - which im- or explicitly recasts news reporting as conversation and debate rather than the construction of a comprehensive, finished product - often provides such a stark alternative to industrial journalism. Even here, though, a misconception of news as something which can be ‘finished’ does prevail in some quarters: as I’ve argued elsewhere, one of the reasons Wikinews has been doing so poorly is that Wikinewsians continue to misconceive news as product. Where they cling to a story-based form of news reporting which aims to create the first and last word on a story (and fails), a comparison to its more famous sibling Wikipedia is instructive: here, the encyclopaedic approach means that entries on topics in the news are always and continually up for extension and revision.
One of the ways that Wikipedia is unique amongst encyclopaedias is that its coverage of breaking stories as well as of emerging concepts and ideas gives not only conventionally produced encyclopaedias, but even mainstream news publications a run for their money. Take, for example, its entries on events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, or the 7 July 2005 London transport bombings, but also pages on, say, Web 2.0 or Facebook, each of which is more informative, comprehensive, and up-to-date than what’s possible under a conventional news model. (At once fascinating and sad, there’s an animated timeline of the development of the 7 July 2005 page, which shows the process in action right from the morning of 7 July.)
Citizen journalism at its best works in much the same way - not by simply replicating industrial news processes using volunteer labour, but by placing news reports at the start of an ongoing process of development, extension, reevaluation, and debate, or in other words, by admitting that available information is always incomplete and in need of further improvement. It accepts that its reports are neither the first word on a story (and indeed often builds on mainstream media and other sources, which it extends, critiques, or debunks), nor the last (and it actively invites its users to add their own views in order to extend its coverage). It’s this acceptance of our understanding of news, information, reality as inherently unfinished which I think is a key characteristic of produsage approaches in general.
Of course that’s not to say that citizen journalism approaches will always generate ‘better’ content than those of the journalism industry, or that the contributors to and users of citizen journalism sites necessarily consciously understand how such sites are different from mainstream media outlets. In many cases, openness to participation and extensibility of content have also proven to open the door to misinformation and misuse. That, too, is the nature of news as conversation - unsustainable opinions and incorrect ‘facts’ may be shared along the way, and it may take some time for them to be debunked through collective discussion and debate (if indeed the community of participants is engaged and diverse enough to do so at all). Professional journalists - (supposedly) trained in fact-checking and the evaluation of divergent opinions - would have a useful contribution to make here.
After all, what other options remain? The idea of news as product, of news publications as “the first and last word” on the news, has now passed its use-by date; thanks in no small way to the disruptive presence of pundits masquerading as journalists, the idea of journalism as a profession able to condense the day’s events into a reliable package of unbiased, objective news reports now seems quaint and naive. Good luck to the Telegraph if it still clings to that model. Ultimately, the individual journalist has no greater authority or claim to knowledge of the truth than does the average citizen actively seeking information on the topics that concern them; the mainstream news organisation, where it is driven at least in part by the desire to present its news reports as a marketable, comprehensive product, no longer enjoys a significant advantage over the engaged community of citizens coming together at a citizen journalism site to conduct an in-depth, critical conversation about the news.
Good post.
A couple of questions, where do you think Crikey fits into this? Is that the “news channel” of the future?
And this - “Professional journalists - (supposedly) trained in fact-checking and the evaluation of divergent opinions - would have a useful contribution to make here.” I recall Crikey saying a couple of years ago (it’s been that long since I read their emails) that staff writers were being “bled white” by having to write both articles and up-to-the-minute blogs to straddle this divide. It seemed to be a desperate attempt to stay relevant even then, just wondered what you thought of it.
Cheers.