This trend isn’t specifically a result of the growth of social media or even the rise of the web in general, Stray says. In fact, the research he describes — a study published earlier this year (PDF link) by two researchers at Columbia University — shows that it has been going on more or less continuously since the beginning of what we call the mass-media era in the 1950s (an era that itself may just have been an accident of history, as I discussed in a recent post). “Contextual” journalism of various kinds has been climbing steadily and conventional fact-based reporting has been declining.

As Stray puts it: “Journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts.” He notes that no one really needs a news organization whose sole job is to tell us what the White House is saying when all of their press briefings are posted online — an extension of the principle that now “sources can go direct,” an idea proposed by media theorists like blogging pioneer Dave Winer. As a result, Stray says, journalism has to figure out how to “move up the information food chain” and provide more than just facts.

If context is all, what happens to objectivity?

Interestingly enough, both Stray and the authors of the study note that this kind of journalism doesn’t even have an agreed-upon name. Some call it in-depth reporting, some call it longform journalism, some refer to it as analytical or explanatory, but it has no established terminology. As the study’s authors note:

“Although this category is, in quantitative terms, easily the most important change in reporting in the past half century, it is a form of journalism with no settled name and no hallowed, or even standardized, place in journalism’s understanding of its own recent past.”

Stray, who runs a data-visualization project for Associated Press and also teaches computational journalism at Columbia University, says that he believes one reason for the lack of discussion about this change in the media is that it conflicts with the view that journalists have to be scrupulously objective — in other words, that they provide “just the facts, ma’am.” If everything requires context and interpretation, then that means an end to the rigid version of objectivity that many journalists were trained to accept and the rise of other values such as transparency and engagement.

“This seems to be a tricky place for truth in journalism. Much easier to say that there are objective facts, knowably correct facts, and that that is all journalism reports. The messy complexity of providing real narratives in a real world is much less authoritative ground.”

It may be messy and complex, but I think Stray is right when he says that the shift must be made — and that the desire for context helps explain the rise of unbalanced outlets like Fox News, but also of commentary-based journalism of the kind practiced by publishers like Gawker Media and even individuals like Andrew Sullivan. Where the trend ultimately takes us remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

A recent blog post from startup founder Chad Whitacre re-awakened this debate: in a post on Medium, the publishing platform started by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams, the founder of Gittip described how he responded to an interview request from TechCrunch about his company, which is building an online gift exchange. When Whitacre suggested that the reporter do an “open interview” via Google Hangouts that would be posted on YouTube, the TechCrunch writer declined.

“Me: If you’re not comfortable with streaming/posting the call, I will totally understand. In the future I’ll be sure to let journalists know up front about my open call policy. :-) Let me know one way or another …

TC: Yeh, good luck with that.”

Open interviews add more value

Many — including Sam Biddle at Valleywag — seemed to see the startup founder’s request as bizarre and somewhat ridiculous. But is it? We don’t see it as ridiculous when interviews are broadcast live, or when places like Reddit do the AMAs (Ask Me Anything) interviews. If anything, one could argue that they add value because everyone can see the questions and answers, and decide for themselves which parts of the interview are the most important or relevant. Fact-checking in public can be better.

In the interests of putting my money — or my ego — where my mouth is, I did my own open interview with Whitacre via Google Hangout’s “On Air” feature, which both streams the recording and automatically posts it to YouTube.

Whitacre’s proposition got me thinking about how rarely journalists include either audio recordings of their interviews with sources (as I did in a recent post based on my interview with Planet Money producer Alex Blumberg) or transcripts — even though the technology to do this is well established, and in many cases free. SoundCloud is an easy audio-hosting service, for example, and YouTube does automated transcripts, and there are many other solutions as well.

Not wanting to draw back the curtain

When I asked the question on Twitter, some journalists said they do this routinely and think it should be done more often. Others, however said they don’t think doing this is necessary unless there is some editorial debate about the context of a quote, or a source raises a stink about a story and so the outlet has to prove they were right. And many questioned whether there was any broader value in doing so.

@whit537 That's essentially what I'm getting at. I would rather my competition not be able to study my one-on-one interview methods.—
Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) May 08, 2013

@mathewi 1) Journos sound stupid in interviews, stumbling, asking dumb questions (many times because they're just learning about an issue)—
Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) May 08, 2013

Seeing the media sausage being made

Are media outlets reluctant to do this because they think no one will be interested in the full interview, or because (as Whitacre suggests) they don’t want to lose whatever scoop-like qualities are associated with the story? Does it stem from a fear of being criticized for focusing on specific parts of the interview? Or do they think their interview questions will seem unimpressive, and they don’t want to let readers see the journalism sausage being made? (I confess I was unusually aware of my questions and my appearance while Whitacre and I were talking).

@mathewi That old saw about seeing how the sausage is made?—
King Kaufman (@king_kaufman) May 08, 2013

@mathewi @Dan_Rowinski much like sharing academic data – that's messy and hard to read too. but it's not there for the average reader—
Walt Frick (@wfrick) May 08, 2013

Sources are already going direct

Here are a few things I think we do know: The life-span of a so-called “scoop” has been declining rapidly, and is probably now measured in minutes (possibly seconds) rather than hours — and all the “Breaking news!” headlines and embargoes in the world can’t change that. Meanwhile, the ability of sources like Whitacre to “go direct” and reach an audience is increasing, thanks to blogs and other forms of social media, forums like Reddit, etc. And in many cases a frustration with the way traditional media outlets handle interviews is a driving force behind that desire.

To take just a couple of examples, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton is well known for refusing many traditional interview requests, and asking instead that reporters talk with him via instant message or some other “live” medium. Billionaire media mogul Mark Cuban became notorious at one point for posting transcripts of interviews on his own blog, so that the full context of a discussion would be available for readers to make up their own minds.

@whit537 I could see questions like "why did you focus on this and not that?" from readers. Would have to back up choices more. @mathewi—
Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) May 08, 2013

One of the most common responses to my question was that most readers or listeners would be bored by audio or video or transcripts of full interviews — and that is definitely a risk. And as someone who often takes a long time to get to the point of a question, so is the risk of looking foolish or incompetent. But aren’t those risks that are worth taking if it increases the level of trust that “the people formerly known as the audience” have in us?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Santos and Shutterstock / wellphoto and Shutterstock / Fengyu

A recent piece in The Guardian describes how the blogger — whose real name is Eliot Higgins — is able to quickly identify different forms of rockets and bombs, and how this encyclopedic knowledge has made him a crucial source not just for those who are following the news but for human-rights agencies that are documenting the strife in Syria, and even for traditional journalists like C.J. Chivers of the New York Times, a former Marine who is now an investigative reporter.

In fact, Chivers based an article he wrote for the Times earlier this year on information that was originally uncovered by Brown Moses, and gave him credit both in the NYT piece and on his own blog, saying:

“For weeks we had been watching the spread through the civil war in Syria of weapons made in the former Yugoslavia, and been admiring the work of Eliot Higgins (a.ka. Brown Moses) as he tried mapping their appearances in the videos of varied and far-flung armed groups. Thank you, Eliot, for your patience, and your fine eye, and for creating an opportunity for merging new and old forms of reporting.”

Unlike Chivers, the British blogger has no background in the military, nor did he have any expertise in munitions or military weaponry before he started following what was happening during the Arab Spring. He’s actually a 34-year-old father of one who lives in a suburb of Leicester, and was laid off from his job with a financial company in October (his wife works at the local post office).

Much like NPR’s Carvin, Higgins has spent hours building a network of bloggers and social-media users in the region, and essentially acts as a filter or curator of the content they produce — mostly YouTube videos of exploded munitions, which he then identifies using the knowledge he has built up himself as well as that of his social network. Every night, he combs through more than 450 YouTube channels.

Higgins’ obvious commitment to this task, even though he isn’t being paid, and his commitment to being as accurate as possible (“You have to be first and you have to be right,” he tells the Guardian) makes him a good example of citizen journalism at work. And his partnership with Chivers shows that this kind of journalism can be a great supplement to — not necessarily a replacement for — traditional reporting.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

As Fast Company described in a recent piece about the venture, which launched earlier this week, Syria Deeply began when founder Lara Setrakian — a foreign correspondent who had worked for outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg covering the conflict for the past several years — decided that telling the story of Syria required more than just filing occasional reports to TV or newspapers. In a sense, she told the magazine, the story was almost too large to fit into the typical packages or rhetorical devices used by the mainstream media. As Setrakian describes it:

“The user experience of the Syria story sucked. It was just abysmal. It was bits and pieces, very hard for the end user (being the news consumer) to take it and process it and come to any kind of synthesis.”

A technology platform dedicated to a specific story

After seeing the crowdsourced-information tool Ushahidi, which was built during the turmoil in Kenya in 2008 as a way of collecting data from ordinary citizens as well as emergency personnel, Setrakian convinced the builders of the service to help her design what became the Syria Deeply site. In many ways, it looks like a typical online news site: it has headlines about recent stories, it has a video unit, it has related messages from Twitter and it has links to opinion pieces — but instead of it being about all the news in a specific town or city, it is all about Syria.

So one recent item is what amounts to a transcript of a phone call with a Syrian university student, a woman from a conservative Sunni family in Aleppo who has journeyed from that city to her family’s home in Idleb, and who simply describes what she encountered on the road — the “liberated” villages and Islamic jihadist checkpoints she had to go through, the lack of food in Aleppo, and other details. It’s not a traditional news story by any means, but it is very revealing.

The site also has audio reports and interviews uploaded with SoundCloud, which is one of the technology providers that Setrakian has partnered with — a group that also includes Google+ for Hangouts and the presentation tool Prezi. According to Fast Company, about 75 percent of the content is aggregated or automated in some way, but the other 25 percent is original content, whether based on interviews or reports from sources that Setrakian and her team have in the region.

Topic niches are what the internet does best

In a sense, what Setrakian — who is funding the site herself, along with a crowdfunding effort through Indiegogo — has done with Syria Deeply is similar to what technology bloggers like John Gruber of Daring Fireball have done: namely, focus on a single niche and try to dominate that topic. It’s a little like taking a section of a newspaper or a column or feature from a magazine and ripping it out and making it a separate website. I think it’s part of the same trend that designer Craig Mod recently described as “sub-compact media,” which strips down content to its component parts.

And why not do that? Aggregating news about hundreds of different topics for a broad, mainstream audience is something that was invented to fit the publication model of a newspaper, not the internet. There’s an argument to be made that focusing on a specific niche actually makes it easier to attract revenue opportunities — although a site about Syria might be more difficult than a blog about Apple (Setrakian says she is hoping to sell the insight the site develops to companies and other organizations).

What other topics might deserve a dedicated site or service like Syria Deeply? Instead of trying to aggregate as much content as possible, maybe some newspapers and other traditional publishers should be thinking about how to create similar topic-specific sites that can stand on their own. As Setrakian puts it in a piece at the Huffington Post:

“Consider Syria Deeply the open source R&D. What we learn and hone we hope to apply to a range of global issues: think Iran Deeply, Pakistan Deeply, Drug War Deeply, Debt Crisis Deeply. If we do that, we can get a whole lot smarter, together. Then the good we all have in us will have better information to go on, shrinking wicked problems down to size.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Yan-Arief Purwanto

Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

As Andrew Beaujon at Poynter describes in a post about the response to Ryan’s speech, the Republican VP’s comments about what President Obama did or didn’t do appear to have set a new high-water mark for political fabrication and there have been a series of prominent fact-checking pieces that have taken the speech apart piece by piece to demonstrate that — including one at Salon magazine, and even one at Fox News. A special news app the Washington Post built even allows readers to watch the video and go through the speech line-by-line, with fact-checks inserted.

The Washington Post also did a feature on the entire first night of the convention, awarding the Republican party “four Pinocchios” — complete with graphics of the long-nosed puppet — for their repeated distortions of a quote from President Obama. And of course there were reports from the traditional fact-checking outlets Politifact and FactCheck.org, which also noted the vast discrepancies between Ryan’s comments and the truth. Tthe Huffington Post notes that many reporters were publicly calling out Ryan’s distortions and untruths on Twitter during the speech:

this new debt commission Ryan is extoling? Ryan was on it and voted against its report.

—
Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) August 30, 2012

The New York Times ran a piece about Ryan’s speech that didn’t pull any punches about the mis-statements contained in it, saying up front that the candidate “made several statements that were incorrect, incomplete, or incompatible with his own record in Congress.” A number of observers praised it for being devoted to unambiguous fact-checking — as opposed to the kind of fake balance that Rosen has complained about in what he calls the “View From Nowhere,” where even the most absurd claims are treated as equally deserving of space as the truth.

Has political journalism changed? Not really

So if all of this has been happening — along with repeated fact-checking of Mitt Romney’s comments and ads by the campaign — can we be satisfied that traditional media outlets are doing the job, along with dedicated sites like Politifact and FactCheck.org? Not really. If anything, the fact that all of this checking is being noticed and publicly applauded reinforces the reality that it is still an unusual activity. The response from CNN’s political host Wolf Blitzer, which Glenn Greenwald describes in a seething post at The Guardian, is typical of the reaction that speeches like Ryan’s get from many outlets, even when they are riddled with lies.

As New York magazine writer Frank Rich pointed out in an interview on Reddit as part of that site’s “Ask Me Anything” feature (which the president took part in on Wednesday in a historic first), even having special reports or features that focus on “fact checking” is an admission that fact-checking doesn’t occur during the regular process of reporting many news stories. As he puts it:

“It is embarrassing (and depressing) that “fact-checker” is now a journalistic gimmick rather than part of the actual process of reporting stories as they emerge… We have lived in the age of Truthiness ever since the Bush administration successfully sold a war in Iraq on pure fiction, which much of the press, including nearly all the major journalistic institutions, going along for the ride. For all the soul-searching that followed that journalistic debacle, I’m not sure that much has changed, sadly.”

The public editor of the New York Times triggered an earlier flame-war over this phenomenon when he asked in a column whether readers expected reporters for the paper to be “truth vigilantes” who challenged candidates and politicians directly on their untrue statements — and the most common response seemed to be shock and outrage that the newspaper hadn’t already been doing exactly that. But as former newspaper editor Dan Conover noted in a recent post, fact-checking of the political kind (as opposed to hard facts like place names or dates) requires a newspaper or journalistic outlet to have a firm position, and that’s not something objective journalists are supposed to do:

“Until a media company rejects the ‘fair and balanced view from nowhere’ that we called ‘journalistic objectivity,’ it simply can’t independently evaluate anything. Just as surveyors must establish a reference point before they begin measuring property lines, so too must journalists find and announce a meaningful perspective before they attempt to measure truth.”

James Fallows at The Atlantic says he is hopeful that in the response to Ryan’s speech, we are seeing the construction of a mainstream press that can cope with what he calls “post-truth politics.” But part of the problem is that once the election campaign is over, even many political journalists will likely go back to the way they used to write and report and think about their coverage, because the source of the most egregious kinds of obvious lies — politicians campaigning for election — will be gone.

Why can’t we have the kind of fact-checking we’ve seen over the past few days all the time? Some newspapers are trying to build tools with which to do that, like the Washington Post‘s “Truth Teller” project, for which it got financing from the Knight Foundation. But more than anything, we need more sources that are willing to call a lie a lie — which is what blogs and alternative sources like Reddit are good at, since they don’t feel a compulsion to adhere to the “view from nowhere” — and more traditional media outlets that are willing to look outside their own newsrooms.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hans Gerwitz and jphilipg

That’s why Storyful, a service that partners with media companies to aggregate and verify news from social networks, says it has decided to open up its formerly private Twitter account to help crowdsource the distribution and verification of breaking news reports.

Before he started the company in 2010, Storyful’s founder Mark Little was a foreign correspondent for a number of outlets such as Ireland’s Raidió Teilifís Éireann — much like Burt Herman, a former Associated Press reporter who started a company with a somewhat similar name: Storify. But while Storify is designed as a tool that anyone can use to pull together or “curate” a social-media stream from sources like Twitter and Flickr, the idea behind Storyful was to build a professional service staffed by journalists who could track breaking news reports through social networks and help media companies verify them. The company has a staff of 33 editors working in dozens of countries, and works with a number of outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters.

Collaboration is becoming a key journalistic skill

As part of its service, Storyful had a private Twitter account called StoryfulPro, which collected and distributed breaking news reports from both its own team and the various sources they monitored within their countries or their fields of expertise — including both professional journalists and citizen reporters, or what the company likes to call “networked journalists.” The primary audience for the account was over 1,000 professional journalists that Storyful had worked with before. On Tuesday, Little announced that the service had decided to make the Pro account public, allowing anyone to use or contribute to the process.

In a blog post, the Storyful founder said he decided to do this because he believes crowdsourcing is the best way to determine the truth of a breaking news report as quickly as possible. As he puts it:

“Storyful believes the key skill for journalists in a social age is collaboration. There really is no alternative to working with others in the Golden Hour. If a newsroom decides to go it alone, the chance you will be consistently first is nonexistent. The chance that you will often be wrong is 100 percent.”

As we’ve seen in a number of recent cases — including the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. and the death by suicide of director Tony Scott — the pressure on media outlets of all kinds to break news first can result in a profusion of incorrect reports, which then get redistributed through Twitter and other social networks faster than any correction or clarification can match. Little’s phrase “the golden hour” refers to the first hour after a news event occurs, which Storyful believes is the most crucial period for fact-checking, and he says one of the most important contributions that can be made is when someone — either a professional journalist or reliable source — kills a false report before it can spread. Says Little:

“Breaking news now emerges in a ‘Golden Hour’, when skilled intervention is most valuable, when a celebrity death starts to trend on Twitter or an explosive video goes viral on YouTube. In this Golden Hour, the best journalists are often the ones who STOP a story, not start it.”

Crowdsourced news verification is almost always better

Storyful isn’t the only company or media-related startup that is trying to bring some kind of professional rigor to the process of real-time news verification: the NBC project Breaking News, which started as a Twitter account, also has a growing team that curates and distributes real-time news it has verified, and Sulia develops Twitter lists of credible sources (both professional and amateur) around various topics and breaking news events. Some media outlets also have their own internal teams that do this, such as the BBC’s “user-generated content desk,” which verifies reports from social media for use by BBC reporters.

I’ve argued before that one of the most compelling examples of crowdsourced news verification is the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio used his Twitter account as a real-time newswire — or what he prefers to call a public newsroom — to filter and verify reports coming out of Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, something other media outlets should emulate. And in a recent post, I also tried to make the case that this kind of verification or fact-checking is almost always better when it is done in public (although many readers seem to disagree with me on that).

One of the reasons for that is the amount of knowledge that can exist in what journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” Little says in his post that the company’s golden rule is that there is always someone closer to the story — and in many cases that person is not a traditional journalist or mainstream news source:

“Often, the closest person is still the wire reporter or networked journalist. But rarely do we rank the key source on the basis of authority and power. Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism.”

Little says the closed nature of the Storyful Pro account always troubled him, because of his belief that crowdsourcing is almost always a better route to take for fact-checking the news (something he has written about in the past for the Nieman Foundation) and that’s why the decision was made to open it up. I’m glad the company decided to do so as well, because the more services and networks and media outlets there are trying to do this — whether it’s Storyful or Sulia or Breaking News or even Wikipedia — the better off we will all be as news consumers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Petteri Sulonen