Facts as commodities (and, yes, blogging and journalism again)
Jeff Jarvis has taken some heat for writing:
Too much of journalism is turning this way today: If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.
I think Jeff is right, although this is embedded in a particular case where the facts happen to be in debate, and I (very likely) went wrong. I want here to skip the particularities of the case not just because I was very likely wrong (although that doesn’t hurt) but because I think the more general point is generally right, in two ways.
First, I think most of us agree that facts by themselves aren’t enough. Unless we’re looking things up in an almanac, we want facts assembled into stories. Now more than ever. I don’t know about you, but more and more, I read newspapers through weblogs. I find out about stories by reading someone’s recommendation or critique of them. And I think that’s a good way to read. Social reading is the new sitting alone in a bathtub.
Second, Jeff was speaking informally, I’m sure, when he said that “anyone” can get the facts. Obviously, some particular facts are hard to dig up. Some are a pain in the tuchus to unearth but you know exactly how to get them (digging up birth records), and some require months of foot-numbing research and Yoda-like intuition (“All the President’s Men”). Some are mired in Louisiana muck, emotion, and political ambition, like the facts in the Russert case that Jeff and I were originally commenting on. So to say facts are commodities (as I have said before) is not to say that they are all equally easy to come by. But once they’ve been disclosed, they become commodities in the sense that they are low-margin entities and I don’t much care where I get them. If I want to know who Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court or who won the Sox game, there are a gazillion places I can find out. And tomorrow there will be a gazillion + 100.
This matters insofar as newspapers still consider their value to be the reporting of facts. I think some papers are being forced further into this belief because of the “onslaught” of bloggers. That seemed to me to be the position of John Lloyd of the Financial Times yesterday at the Accountability conference. He defended the news media’s traditional turf by talking about objectivity vs. opinions. I took him to be saying that opinions are easy but facts are hard, and newspapers do the hard and skilled work of fact-finding. Yes, they do. But having done that, the facts then become commodities. Our shared concern is who is going to do this if newspapers can no longer afford to pay reporters. (As far as opinions being easy goes: Yes, but interesting opinions are not commodities.)
Maybe enough citizen journalists will become skilled reporters that we don’t need professional newspaper reporters. But we shouldn’t let the promise of citizen journalism distract us from the evident fact that another key value of the news media has already devolved to the citizenry: We’re already providing the editorial judgment on which the media so pride themselves. I no longer look at the front page of the NY Times to tell me what’s important. I look at it to see what people like the editors of the NY Times think is important. I’m finding the news that matters through the Internet recommendation engine: Blogs, emails, mailing lists, my aggregator, websites that aggregate and comment on news, etc. With the growth of social filtering and whatever some genius in a garage is inventing, the Internet is only going to get better at this. While we wonder if and how citizens will replace reporters, citizens are rapidly replacing editors.
(Note: If you want to argue that some facts are not commodities even after they’re disclosed, I’ll accept that because you probably have some great examples in mind. But such non-commoditized facts are, I believe, too rare to build a newspaper business model on.) [Tags: media journalism facts accountability JeffJarvis JohnLloyd FinancialTimes]
Thomas Crampton of The International Herald Tribune was also on the Accountability panel and has blogged how blogs are different from journalism. You’ll be happy to know that neither the word “irresponsible” nor “pajamas” shows up in his list :)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David,
One of the most interesting blog commments came after our panel when speaking with Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of malaysia who was recently released from jail.
His name is rarely mentioned in malaysia’s state-controlled media, but thanks to alternate media such as blogs, more than 50,000 people turned up last week at a political rally in rural Malaysia. (Not one mention of the rally in the official media afterwards, he added.)
While I didn’t use the words “pajamas” or “irresponsible”, I will call you on one classic journalist mistake: You misspelled my name! (There is no n in my spelling of Thomas).
Bloggers and journalists do have a lot in common!
Thonas,
Thanks for the correction, which I will make without actually noting in the body of the post that I made it.
More important, thanks for pointing to Anwar Ibrahim both here and at the session yesterday. You made a valiant effort to get him to speak…
Should we revisit the “facts as social constructs” theories in this context. I don’t think so. Because linguistically, we still need to make the difference between “22 soldiers killed today” and “this war is evil.” Having said this, the mediated character of every bit of information we consume only means that what we have at the end is our ability to agree on the “facts”… and the most natural process for this to happen is the conversation (polylogue). That’s why, increasingly, the old media process of “finding” the facts and broadcasting them will be receding under the pressure of the new web-enabled conversational processes. In the scientific communities for example, it is not the published articles, even less books, that establish the “facts.” Scientists, as we know, less and less speak about facts… and more and more are satsified to work with temporary agreed upon notions evolving in an ongoing (mostly web enabled) exchange of opinions (one of the original functions of the Internet, as we know).
David, do you really feel that citizens are replacing editors, or that some citizens are becoming, as Jeff called them, “editors as newsgatherer”s and that some of the best bloggers among us exemplify that? The difference, to me, is rather crucial. One says there is no opportunity for editors to cross over into our participatory, two-way environment, the other says that editors can learn new skills that change their focus quite a bit – but that they still have value.
A couple of ragged thoughts —
a) Observation.
The journalist should give us neither objectivity nor opinion. Give us observation, articulate observation.
b) Physical fact.
Some kind of distinction between social fact ( commodity ) and physical fact ( truth? and rare ). I just read that humans with light skin extract more vitamin D from sunlight than humans with darker skin, that humans living in parts of the world receiving less sunlight tend to have lighter skin tones. Also, the staple foods of the diet of darker skinned Inuit living in Arctic North America are high in vitamin D.
This was presented as fact, well known since about 1970. If true, this physical fact invalidates entire bodies of social fact presented many times and many places, sometimes objectively reported by journalists.
“I no longer look at the front page of the NY Times to tell me what’s important. I look at it to see what people like the editors of the NY Times think is important. I’m finding the news that matters through the Internet recommendation engine: Blogs, emails, mailing lists, my aggregator, websites that aggregate and comment on news, etc.”
This parallels something I wrote about tagging:
“Tagging, I’m suggesting, isn’t there to tell us about stuff: it’s there to tell us about what people say about stuff.”
The kicker being that what people say about stuff is, ultimately, all there is to tell. Knowledge – and, for that matter, news – has always been produced in cloud form, as an emergent property of conversations. When we counterpose knowledge to conversation, we’re really saying that certain conversations have ended – or been brought to an end – and left unchallenged conclusions behind them. What’s changed is that, until recently, the conversations which produce knowledge (and news) have taken place within small and closed groups, so that most of us have only seen the crystallised end-product of the conversation. What Wikipedia, blogging, RSS and del.icio.us give us is the rudiments of a distributed conversation platform, enabled by pervasive broadband. (Which is why the ownership of the authority to stop the conversation – and crystallise the cloud – is such a big issue.)
I don’t believe in Web 2.0, on the other hand. I’m cranky that way.