Posts about processjournalism

The scoop is dead and deserves to be

June 28, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was just asked about CNN’s, Fox’s, and others’ screw-ups with the announcement of the Supreme Court health decision in the context of process journalism. I disagreed with the characterization. My response:

I could not disagree more strongly with your characterization of this as an error of process journalism. Hardly!

This was not a matter of reporting what you know when you know it. This was a matter of reporting your misunderstandings before you know enough to say that you know anything.

The entire decision was made and written. CNN, Fox, and others listened to a bit and went with it.
The New York Times, on the other hand, essentially admitted it didn’t understand enough to make some things clear. It was oddly phrased — saying that something about the decision couldn’t be known when, instead, it couldn’t yet be understood fully. Whatever. At least The Times used restraint and appropriate caveats. We saw a similar case in the Italian murder appeal of Amanda Knox, when TV said too much too soon.

(Later: What the Times said in its earliest version was: “It remained unclear whether the court officially upheld the mandate or chose a more technical path that effectively allowed it to stand.” Well, yes, it remained unclear to The Times because The Times hadn’t had the opportunity to absorb and understand the decision and its implications yet. It said so.)

In true process journalism, the news itself is a process, not a fait accompli like a court decision. Process journalism is about news itself as a process and journalism following that process — again, with due caveats. Process journalism is about covering a truly breaking story — a storm, a riot, a revolt, say — and recognizing that fact in how we cover it.

This was a matter of TV news making bad assumptions on too little information and speaking too soon. That has been the danger since 24-hour news immemorial.

The real lesson here is that the scoop is and always has been a dangerous act of journalistic narcissism. Did it truly matter if one outlet “broke” the same information that other outlets — and the world of the internet — knew a second before another? Or was it indeed worse when those outlets got it wrong because they were hasty and stupid? They were still seduced by the scoop, which has no value in media that operates at the speed of the link.

Journalists must think how they can best add value to information, not how they can most rapidly repeat it. Explaining the story is adding value. Getting it wrong detracts value and devalues credibility.
CNN and Fox and others fucked it. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a matter of process journalism. Please!

After I wrote that, my correspondent wrote back quoting my discussion of process journalism with references to, for example, the misreports in the breaking, moving, confusing stories of tornadoes and shootings. I added this:

That’s talking about things that are presently unknowable by the reporter but are known, the reporter hopes, by others. (Does anyone know of prior problems with this politician? Does anyone know whether the power is still out downtown?). That is *not* the case here. Everything that needed to be known by CNN and Fox was knowable. They just spoke before they knew it. I repeat: That’s fuck-up journalism, not process journalism. Please do not libel the one with the other.

LATER: Steve Myers of Poynter continues to go down the road of blaming process journalism for CNN’s and Fox’s fuckup. I was responding to him above.

Beta life

June 15, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Three apparently unrelated items on the shift from valuing the product to valuing the process as the product:

* Trendwatching tells the story of what it calls “foreverism” – that is, that things never end (friendships, news stories, product development) and uses as illustration not only process journalism but also beta chocolate. TCHO is a chocolate company populated with geeks and so they brought betathink to their candy, releasing it as a beta, taking feedback from customers, and iterating it 1,026 times before coming out with the 1.0 chocolate. They didn’t put out bad chocolate to start with; they did their best. But then their customers helped make it better, ever better.

* Experientia.com reports – translating the newspaper La Stampa – that Italians are buying goods less often and renting them more often.

But the real revolution is that renting is becoming a way of life which is changing consumption and society. Car sharing, bike sharing, i.e. quick rentals of cars and bikes, but also dress sharing, i.e. the rental of clothes and handbags. There is toy sharing: children toys, small machines, lego, and puzzles. Even tools for the disabled, wheelchairs, orthopaedic supports, computers, and whatever you might need in the gym, sports or vacation. You don’t need to buy, you can just rent.

I think this ties into the idea of process: You can always rent the latest without having to buy it. You can afford to do so because you are sharing the cost with other users. Companies can find larger customer bases who are likely to be satisfied more because they are getting the latest. We move from a consumption economy to a use economy.

* NYU student Cody Brown delivers a neat take on the discussion about process v. product journalism last week, making distinctions between batch and real-time processing of journalism (read: The New York Times as opposed to blogs). Because The Times’ brand hinges on it as a product that has been curated and edited and checked and polished – note editor Bill Keller’s language on The Daily Show about his package – it finds itself in dangerous territory trying to compete in real time with those whose brand expectations are entirely different.

Brown says that for print, the “gestalt” is “batch processing.” How should it develop its brand? “As the voice of god.” How should it publish information on a developing story? “Cautiously. It should triple check it’s information and call every source involved in the story to give them an opportunity to comment.” How should it produce its product? “Into tight neatly written comprehensive articles … meant to exist as a ‘first draft of history.’” Who should do this? “Professionals. It’s expensive. A finite number of pages means a constant question: what is newsworthy to the most number of people?”

Compare and contrast with his take on online. Gestalt: “”Real Time Processing. Information is processed on the fly.” Brand? “An open platform…. Take the values/tactics that go on behind the walls of a newsroom (’the magic journalism box’) and execute them publicly.” How to publish? “Instantly. When a page is able to be updated at any frequency, corrections can be made just as fast. Rumors and gossip can be used as leverage to get sources, who otherwise wouldn’t, to spill what they know. Publishing incomplete information is the fastest way to get users to contribute to the bigger picture. This is a tactic in effective commons-based-peer production and it is how Wikpedia grew so fast and so well. As Harvard Law Professor, Yochai Benkler, describes, it often looks like a ‘disaster area.’ This is the ’scuttlebutt’ the Times can’t wrap its head around.” How should it produce its work? “API.” Who should do it? “Everyone in the beat. When a website has unlimited pages: there is no excuse.”

Brown says it’s possible for one to produce like the other But “the challenge is in branding.”

The messy, opinionated, incomplete, rumorladen, shit-show that is actual news production is hidden away. If you want a real time news website, it must be brought to the surface. This isn’t a problem for a brand like Tech Crunch, but it puts print news brands in a terribly awkward position. How does The New York Times show the mess under its articles without wrecking the omniscient aura of the brand it has worked so hard for? …

Batch is killing them. Online, it is expensive, slow, and wasteful. It’s not sustainable and it’s a problem that will only get bigger for the The New York Times. … The fundamental problem The New York Times has online is that its brand carries too much weight. The Times stamp means a piece has been packaged, and is no longer in process. If they’re interested in participating in the journalism of the 21st century, they need to shed the baggage of the last one.

They won’t.

Very neat take on the question. It’s not just the standards, tradition, and ego of the legacy press that prevents it from enjoying the benefits of beta, Brown argues, but the perception and value of its practices and reputation. That would seem to argue that it’s impossible for the legacy to update from product to process. I’m not sure I agree, but I do think that Brown put the challenge clearly through one end of the prism. The question is whether the legacy press – for the benefit of its staff even more than its audience – can issue enough caveats to enable it to work real-time. Forget blogs in this discussion. Will The New York Times ever be comfortable working on the standards and practices of 24-hour cable news? Can it afford to? Don’t they have to?

(By the way, the subject of last week’s NYT snipe, Michael Arrington, did well in an On the Media interview on his process with Bob Garfield.)

Gotta love the link

June 9, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis

Through the power of the link, someone I’ve never heard of riffs on the discussion this weekend about product v. process journalism from an artist’s perspective, adding this:

Think about the change from the camera in the 19th century to the projector in the 20th. The camera framed objects, alluded to three dimensions, stilled time. The projector blasted synthesis – one frame negating another and at eye blinking speed. We may think of blogging as the result of another technological frontier not unlike the camera and the projector.

A newspaper by its very nature stills time; states the fact wrapped in the eternity of print – it is a moment of truth stilled. A blog is more akin to the projector: the movement itself. Recording the changes of truth over time. Revisionist, processing, excluding and incorporating.

But what of the truth the blog seeks? In art that truth is the thing that is coming into being, it is intertwined with the perceivor.

When we discuss in blogs the movement from rumor to not rumor, when one moment’s truth collides with the next, what is the truth? Where does it end? When does it become fact?

If the truth must be corrected – wouldn’t the truth finally have to be the sum total of process AND product? Shouldn’t it be a document of changes which tells the truth about editing, as well as about the information being edited? And wouldn’t it imply information is only momentarily true. That the end of a story doesn’t have to do with truth it has to do with interest or the loss thereof?