Selling the News

The other week, when I wrote my post What Is the News and Do Reporters Matter?, I got an interesting response from long-time arts journalist and writer advocate Debra Cash (who gave me permission to quote her email and address this on the blog):

Mostly I'm in agreement, especially about the issue of "recognizing" news and of course the idea that all journalists don't go to journalism school!

However, when you say but ultimately, the audience decides what is news, not the reporters

I respectfully disagree. Sometimes, often -- and especially in international or technical news -- reporters on the ground/beat know something is significant early on and it can't interest the audience until it either builds up a head of steam or impinges on the personal/local/national concerns of the reader. It would have been easy for readers to say "who cares about break-in at the DNC at Watergate?" It would have been very easy to write it off as just another petty crime story. If it had not happened in Washington, with Washington Post readers having a vested interest in the DNC, it might have been. Can you imagine what would have happened if the office had been, say, in suburban Cleveland?

I thought my response to her might be worth considering:

What you’re suggesting is that sometimes, when you’re trying to sell an idea that you think is important, the sales cycle is longer than you might normally expect. And I’d agree. But it’s a thin line that separates a Watergate from a Spanish American War. Too often the press has turned something into “news” when it was crap.

There is a difference between making news, taking time to uncover news, and getting audience buy-in. Ultimately, if you can't get audience buy-in, you don't have news. That's not to say that the buy-in comes immediately. There will be stories that you have to develop because your audience may not see the implications right away. (I can remember having to do this with an editor who wanted to know why the business topic I suggested hadn't yet appeared in major media. The answer was that it was a growing issue and the business reporters simply didn't know about it or get it. Ultimately, it turned into a good-sized story.)

But this doesn't mean that journalists "decide" on the definition of news. They're still following what is of interest to the audience. Like good sales practitioners, they sometimes will find something that people don't realize they want. When that happens, you need patience and persistence to get the story out.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, news judgment is the ability to correctly guess more often than not when your audience will care and when they won't. And there is always the issue of having only so many resources to tell a finite amount of stories. Whether on paper or pixels, no publication ever has the people, time, and money to write every possible story. You have to make the best decision you can and hope that you're right.

Perhaps it's in the hope that the best antidote to journalistic arrogance resides. When you remember that you're mortal and fallible, the best you can do is hope that you're doing the best you can do, and remember your audience and why you write what you do. I recently had the experience of posting a story on BNET that had a couple of readers declare that I was being sensationalistic, bringing up something that they considered a non-story. I stood by my guns and said that the issue had been under reported. In this case, I was right, and the topic resurfaced in a big way a few weeks later.

Sometimes persistence pays off in a renewed sense of being on the right track and doing well in following your craft. There is that constant battle -- particularly online, with the pressure to increase page views -- between working with integrity and manipulating the system to use story topics and keywords as "link bait." But focused as I get on this blog (and in my work day) about the business of writing, I like to remember that there are things far more important than money.

Cross Promotion on Twitter and YouTube

I'm mainly pointing to a blog post by web video journalist Robb Montgomery that should be of interest to any independent journalist or writer: How I used Twitter to get 9,000 views on YouTube. (He's @robbmontgomery on Twitter.) The headline gives you a good encapsulation of the topic, but what it fails to get across the detail in which he goes into how he actually drove traffic, building credibility in a specific search term (or trending hashtag) on Twitter so people would come to see him as a "credible source" and not a spammer. It may be that this step is more important when trying to tie into a topic on Twitter on the upsurge of popularity but of limited lifetime, like the tag referring to Obama's speech in Cairo. I suspect it may be different if you're posting regularly using an ongoing hashtag.

Because of his preparatory work and some lucky timing of comments by some people who could give him a boost, he got 8,901 views on YouTube in one day.

What Is the News and Do Reporters Matter?

There have been a couple of blog entries -- Dave Winer on whether something is news if it's not reported, and Jeff Jarvis on journalistic narcisism -- that got me typing. Although I first started this as a comment on BuzzMachine, given the quickly burgeoning length, I thought it made more sense to post here. (I also skipped BNET Media for this post because it's a bit long and possibly theoretical for there.)

I've certainly disagreed with Jeff Jarvis in the past, but I do agree that there is too much self-importance in much of the press. Perhaps my view comes from never having formally studied journalism. My educational background was in math and engineering, and other than a brief exposure when I was much younger, I didn't get into journalism until my late 30s. So I'm something of an outsider and see the business and craft differently than someone who didn't spend time in corporations, in management, in consulting -- and also doing grunt work in restaurants, in construction, and in trucking.

When journalists feel that they are needed, I think they are reaching toward something, but making the mistake of seeing themselves as center of the issue, rather than serving the topic. (That mistaking the importance of self-expression and voice in comparison with story is one of the biggest problems I see in much writing.) News doesn't happen: events do. Circumstances do. News is a relative importance that people place on the events. But the problem is that it takes effort to put the events, people, actions, and so on into a context, so you're not just the mouthpiece for one aspect or another. That's where reporting becomes important, if you think that trying to get at least a half-way balanced view of the world is important. Someone has to be interested enough to do investigative reporting, to get views from more than one camp, to question the answers they get. That's reporting and I think that it's necessary to society that someone do it. That someone doesn't have to be a "professional" journalist. The person simply has to undertake the necessary skepticism, curiosity, open-mindedness, research, and patience ... and develop enough skills in writing to be able to coherently present something.

Unfortunately, I see journalists focusing more on enjoying vicarious power, building and maintaining careers, and congratulating themselves. Too many talk only among themselves and not to enough other people. Too many don't understand the topics they cover, although they begin to think that proximity is the same as understanding. There's been more than once when I've had to talk editors into a story that were for a given audience. All you had to do is know enough about the topic, the logical implications, and the interests and needs of the audience to see the connection. I saw it because I had been part of the audience at one time. The editors took convincing because they never had been, although they regularly wrote about the topic.

Of course something can be news if it's not reported. How else could you have journalists complaining about being pushed into doing too much celebrity coverage, say, and not being allowed to do "real" stories. But, again, they begin to mistakenly think that they are in the middle of it all. It's not that journalists decide what is news. They are supposed to recognize news, which is completely different. That implies being tied in to the readership well enough that you begin to understand their concerns, and that you then seek out information accordingly. Here's what Jarvis wrote:

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment.

The problem there is the word "judgment." According to Merriam-Webster, it can mean "a formal utterance or opinion." But I think the intended meaning of the word is actually "the process of forming an opinion by discerning and comparing." Ultimately, it ain't news if the audience doesn't care. News judgment is the ability to correctly guess more often than not when they would care and when they wouldn't. It comes down to knowing your customers.

That shift from recognition to declaration is what makes much of the public so angry with journalists. They don't want to be told what to think and what they should find important or not. Look at what Winer wrote:

At least for me, the reporters are as irrelevant as paper delivery of the NYT, WSJ and SJM had become in 1994. I know what they're going to say before they say it. I also don't feel their ability to set an agenda anymore.

Ultimately, I think he's saying that journalists can't tell him what is important. Exactly. All they can do is present information that they think he might find interesting.

The positive thing about having more sources for various types of news is that you have more people looking and, hopefully, fewer things falling through the cracks. But ultimately, the audience decides what is news, not the reporters. Otherwise they could get paid for writing about any old thing, and anyone in the business knows that would last no longer than the end of the first pay period.

That said, I find that there is actually a mirroring of the same fault. (Remember the old saying that what bothers you most in another person may well be something in you as well.) It's also important for individuals like Winer, and for journalists, to remember that the country is big, including many individuals with different tastes, interests, and backgrounds, and just because something doesn't interest you, meaning you don't think it's news, doesn't mean that no one else finds it important. As Winer wrote:

The only reason Palin has any viability is that the press remembers who she is. For me, and I'd bet a huge chunk of the electorate, she's a fading memory of an election we've put way behind us as we've turned to face our futures. For me the last election was only important in that it got Bush and the Republicans out.

That may be true for him. It might even be true for a "huge chunk" of the country. But it certainly isn't true for everyone. It would help if individuals, as well as journalists, began to ask themselves, "Am I trying to decide what others should be interested in?" Perhaps the real problem the news faces is not the hubris of journalists, but the hubris of our culture.

New Journalism Models and Spot.Us Public Funding

There's a recording of an interesting discussion, including my BNET colleague David Weir, about new business models for journalism. Another participant was someone from Spot.Us, a site at which the public can suggest stories and journlaists can seek community funding for reporting projects. It's an intriguing approach. A reporter can pitch a story and see whether people will pay money to see it. If you, the writer, get the funding and do the story to eventually place it somewhere, you pay back the money you were fronted and the contributors get a refund. If you can't sell the story, it becomes something available under a Creative Commons license, making it open for distribution. Looking at the site, I noticed one story about sustainable school lunches for which the site had raised $120 out of a target $380. Another story had raised $920 out of $1000. This is a site that is definitely worth checking.

Aftermarket Journalism

I posted something on BNET that I thought readers of this blog might find interesting:

I’ve heard many people insist that the future of traditional news media is to work with aggregators like Google, because they represent a new model of delivering the news. Recently, I noticed a blog post by Jeff Jarvis, which was about the auto industry. Although it may seem off-topic on first thought, it actually isn’t, and the flaws in his argument about cars explain the underlying problem with the “embrace Google” argument.

Rest of the article

Sree Sreenivasan podcast of Twitter for journalists online discussion

For those who don't know about him, Sree Sreenivasan teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism and is highly regarded as someone who gets how to use technology well in the pursuit of journalism. He does occasional webcasts now - I just got an email about one on LinkedIn for journalists today at 3:30 to 4:30 pm Eastern (at the link and available afterward). But right now I'm listening to the archived version of the webcast on Twitter for journalists. It's got an interesting set of speakers, and it's free. One reason to catch the webcasts as they happen, though, is that you can dial in (instead of coming in over the web) and ask questions. In today's economy, who can't use a good deal?

SPJ Seems to Woo Freelancers Again

The Society for Professional Journalists seems to be running a blog - called The Independent Journalist - aimed at freelancers. Amy Green is the author. Personally, I"m going to wait and see how the organization behaves towards freelancers, and not make a judgment based on what someone in SPJ says. There was a right dust-up last year over the stance SPJ took regarding the ongoing cases involving some photographers and the National Geographic as well as its then-president floating an idea of certification for "professional" journalists:

• SPJ Freelance Committee Chair Resigns over National Geographic Support


• SPJ President Seems to Support Certification for Pro Journalists


• SPJ President Responds to National Geographic Criticism


• SPJ Withdraws Name from National Geographic Brief


• Incorrect Information Again from SPJ President


• Lawyer Robert S. Becker Responds to SPJ posts

The organization has traditionally focused on the needs of staff journalists and had not been altogether welcoming of freelancers. I know some people had tried to change that and had eventually resigned from the organization. Perhaps things are different now, and I'm sure the new chair of that group's freelance committee is sincere and well-meaning. But ultimately it can be nearly impossible to move an organization beyond what its leadership wishes to do, particularly when the leadership is long entrenched. Perhaps SPJ will see the role that freelancers play, particularly when more and more news rooms lay off staff and newspaper owners are left wondering how they will survive in the long run. But it will be action on the part of the organization as a whole that will tell.

Not Getting Taken By PR

Forget about the obvious spin, or press trips, or other mechanisms that companies and their press representatives use to try and get journalists to say what they want. Instead, it's often the small things that cause the biggest damage to truth. For example, I remember once, after having sent a query via ProfNet, getting a response from a PR person, writing about his Fortune 500 client. But the company was in the technology sphere and completely unknown to me. I don't have an absolute grasp on all the Fortune 500 company names, but generally I've heard of the technology companies, having covered that space a fair amount. So I went to Fortune's site and looked up the list ... and found that the company wasn't on it. When confronted, the PR person responded, "I meant a Fortune 500 type company."

Oh. Right. Of course.

Such fracturing or even bending of the truth happens all the time, because companies and individuals want to be perceived in a specific way, to their own ends. Some PR people don't know better, some are deliberately manipulative, and some are trying to deal with pressures from their clients. It doesn't matter - you have to check out each claim and crack them open.

I had another recent example - a food company that had approached me about reviewing their product for my Flash in the Pan blog. No problem, as I do that fairly often. The products came in, and they were unimpressive. I went back to the PR agency's email and noticed some healthy lifestyle claims pegged to the USDA's guidelines. Then I looked again at their numbers: meals under 320 calories, less than 10 grams fat, and under 600 milligrams of sodium.

How much sodium?

I went and found that while the caloric and fat contents were each about 15 percent of a 2,000 calorie comparative chart, the sodium was a full third of the suggested amount. Because the food was so tasteless after processing, I suspect they knew that the sodium would make most people think that there was some flavor, even if there really wasn't. Guess what went into my review?

The claims could be the would-be expert mentioning what was essentially a vanity-published book, treating a commonly-known business practice as something new, or any of a host of other grey-tinged lies. All you can do to avoid being taken in is some homework. When faced with the book credit, look up the publisher on the Internet and see if it seems legit or one of the growing number that write books for experts. Consider the business practice and check with someone who might know if it's unusual or not. In short, make the claims prove themselves. It rarely takes that much time, and it can keep you from looking like a fool to an editor, or in print.

Entrepreneurial Skills for Journalists

Thanks to reader Debra Cash, I learned of an article on how some J-schools are trying to teach entrepreneurial skills, as that's what the future is going to require. But a class may not be enough, as Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark noted:

“I got the sense that [the students] have a grasp on the rapid change in the market and that’s helping them out,” Newmark said. “But they, like everyone else, are struggling to connect with the change and prepare themselves for the wild ride. They are clued-in but no one knows what’s going to happen. They’re in the awkward position in that the nature of the world is changing as they take the class.”

That is true - a class, or multiple classes, alone will not teach writers everything they need to know. That requires practice, falling down, and picking yourself up again. And here's an interesting comment about advertising:

“My view is that you need to start treating advertising as content,” he said. “It’s not just the thing that pays our paychecks and otherwise we want to flee from it. Once you realize that, then you think about how to preserve your credibility, and tell people, ‘yes we take advertising’ and show people that it doesn’t affect the editorial. It’s going to require more transparency, which frankly is a healthy thing. It’s not like this fiction that advertising was never there before. The public generally felt that it was affecting the editorial, so there’s an opportunity to explain this to people and distinguish ourselves from sites that don’t care [about a separation between ads and editorial].”

On the Journalism of Understanding and the Need for Why

The Poynter Institute ran an interesting piece by Charles Peters, founder of The Washington Monthly and president of a foundation called Understanding Government, a self-described "nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving the performance of the executive branch by helping journalists do a better job of covering it."

In the article, Peters announced that his foundation is offering a $50,000 prize for the best example of preventative journalism - "reporting that identifies inept leaders, wrong-headed policies and bureaucratic bungling before they lead to disasters like the bad intelligence about WMDs and the travesty that was the response to Katrina," as he puts it.

Peters essentially argues - and I'd have to agree with him - that most journalism is reactive. Some situation happens that is calamitous, and the reporters then swarm out to paint a picture of what happened. Journalists are fixated on drama and conflict, which is understandable to some degree, because they are elements of good story telling. But the writers don't then take any responsibility for not having covered the topic before, and certainly not after. They think they've already "done" the story.

But they haven't. I think "preventative journalism" isn't the best phrase, either. That carries some supposition that you are checking the health of something, know what constitutes problems, and will fix the issues. It smacks of the superior "We know what's good for you" attitude that journalists too often get.

Furthermore, reporters often have little understanding of the topics they cover. A phrase I've been using of late is the journalism of understanding. The point isn't to chase the story as it runs ahead, but to understand the systems - whether government, business, legal, or societal - and to grasp the conflict of factors and forces. You let the system and the people involved with it tell you what the stories are, and then you report on them.

In this approach, the stories are often not so black and white. For example, I have a piece coming out next week in IP Law & Business about some serious issues in management of the US Patent and Trademark Office. Many involved in the intellectual property industry are saying that management there has become too political. Yet that's too easy a story by itself. Try to understand the situation, and you find many pressures and that management, Congress, those filing patents, and established conditions all have varying degrees of fault.

When you try to understand a situation, you're not just looking at what people are doing, but why they do it. Suddenly, you start losing the good guy/bad guy approach. Yes, some people may be doing something poorly or even acting in a morally questionable manner, but you start losing the accusatory edge and start gaining some empathy for what all are going through. That isn't to say that you become an apologist - far from it! Instead, you try to show how things got to a given point and what it might take for them to change.

The big difference, I think, between ordinary journalism and the journalism of understanding is that the former really focuses on physical issues - what happened, who was involved, and how did A cause B. The latter focuses more on the why - the question Peters emphasizes as well.

The why causes you to look at all other questions differently. Asking how something happened doesn't stop at a recitation of current physical details. You have to see the route things took to get to where they are. Apply why to what - the levels of profit that Enron appeared to show early on - and you start questioning the quality of the numbers. Apply why to reports of WMDs and you ask the common sense question of whether everyone really did agree on their existence.

Finally, there is a difference between asking questions to get information to fit into a story formula, and asking questions because you want to understand something. The latter is more open ended. You aren't checking off a list and getting what you need for a story that is essentially already written except for the specific details. Rather, you are wrestling with concepts and coming to an understanding that dictates the story. And when you work from understanding, you become less machine-like and more human - which, I think, is the real point of journalism (and writing in general) anyway.

Journalistic Ethics - the Short Version

Someone on Freelance Success pointed out the story of a WMAQ reporter in Chicago who didn't step over the journalistic line - she swam over it. On her day off, she accepted an invitation to take her two sons swimming in the pool of "the estranged husband of a missing Plainfield woman.":

Sources said Jacobson told her bosses that she was on her way to the East Bank Club in River North to go swimming with her sons Friday when she received a call from Craig Stebic's sister, asking her to come to his house to talk about the case.

And then a competing station that had a camera man staked out in a neighboring house caught her on tape. Uh oh. And now she's resigned from her position.

I've seen many freelance reporters ask about what is ethical and not. I know a few who are hyper-vigilent willing to go to extremes to avoid anything that would smack of a conflict, and I know others that often look for ways to get yet another freebie. To stay on the right side of the line doesn't mean memorizing a list of rules, just understanding a few principles:

• Avoid appearance of conflict. It may be that you can actually get close to a source and still write in a reasonably fair and unbiased manner, but it's not just a question about what you can do. The issue is what impression you'd give by doing it. Assume that anything will come to be known by the public. If a third party would be suspicious of your motives, then don't do it. And if you find yourself trying to argue that the person really wouldn't mind, then assume that the person actually would. This is a case where the reporter doth protest too much.


• Avoid freebies. This can be tough, particularly if you review products, performances, or music. You shouldn't be paying for such items unless you're getting reimbursement from the publication. But if the freebie is not necessary to conduct the review, or if the ultimate subject of the review can directly influence and control your experience (as with a restaurant meal), don't take it.


• Don't be beholding. If you find that you want to moderate your story because the company or PR person may not give you the same type of access to people, products, or situations in the future, you shouldn't be writing the piece. Bite the hand that feeds you and watch yourself in the future, because you are displaying the inclination to tilt coverage for personal reasons.


• Don't use friends and acquaintances as sources. It's convenient to interview people that you know, because you have no fear of them and it's likely that you will get cooperation. But unless the person is a real expert in the area and you may not find someone as qualified, keep on moving. You are unlikely to want to present someone in a bad light, which means subconsciously you will probably censor the questions you ask and conclusions you draw. This gets particularly bad - and dangerous - when you use fellow writers as sources, because editors may well recognize the names and decide, rightly or wrongly, that you are slacking. Keep on your toes and find other sources. (And you can check here for some pointers on finding people.)

It comes down to common sense - and applying it when you're in the middle. The biggest tool you have is when you find yourself asking the question, "Is this ethical?" The answer is probably, "No."