Tag Archives: journalism

News as a Public Good

I know I harp a lot on the deficiencies of contemporary media. That’s because I worry a lot about the consequences of those deficiencies.

I was reminded of the importance of good journalism the other day, during a discussion in my Media and Public Policy class. The reading assignment was an article by Paul Starr, a highly respected scholar, titled “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption).” Starr began by describing news as a “public good,” noting that newspapers have “been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm system,” and–in response to those who point to the internet as a sufficient replacement–pointed out that a significant proportion of actual news found on the internet originates with and is aggregated from newspaper reporting.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it is subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.

Starr worries that more and more of American life will “occur in the shadows. We won’t know what we won’t know.”

That last sentence really struck home–in more ways than one. Not only is it true generally, it is especially true that we don’t know what we don’t know about local and state government.

When I was in City Hall, in the late 1970s, there were four full-time reporters covering Indianapolis government–and they had all been there long enough to acquire what we call institutional memory. They knew what questions to ask, and who was responsible for what. Today, the Star has two opinion columnists who write about local governance issues, augmented by occasional reports by actual reporters. If any reporter has an exclusive city “beat,” it isn’t apparent from the coverage.

My class considered a number of City initiatives that received far too little attention, from the  50 year Parking Meter contract, to the Broad Ripple Garage financing, to the “recycling” contract with Covanta.  These projects were reported, but without the detail and context that would have permitted citizens to understand and evaluate them.

The same superficiality characterizes coverage of the Governor’s office. Reporting on the Governor’s decision not to apply for an 80 million dollar grant to support preschools was a perfect example: supporters of that decision claimed–among other things– that “the research” shows preschool interventions aren’t valuable; critics countered that this was a deliberate mischaracterization. If reporters investigated the research to see who was telling the truth, I missed it.

As far as reporting on the Statehouse, we finally did learn about Eric Turner–but only after his behavior was so egregious it couldn’t be ignored. More circumspect misconduct goes unreported.

And of course, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t need paper newspapers, but we desperately need journalism.

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Hope for Journalism?

There are some welcome signs that our muddled and fragmented media landscape–which has clearly been “in transition” to something–is beginning to figure out how to do real journalism in the post-Newspaper age.

Recently, Ezra Klein announced that he was leaving the Washington Post, where he ran a very well-regarded and well-read blog, in order to start a new (as yet unidentified) media venture. As the Poynter Center reported, he is not the only one:

Klein’s new venture joins a suddenly crowded market of startups founded or staffed by journalists with large personal brands:

• Nate Silver decided last year to leave The New York Times for ESPN, which plans to relaunch his FiveThirtyEight.com under its auspices soon.

• Glenn Greenwald left the Guardian last year to join a “a new mass media organization” funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen also joined the new organization in varying capacities.

• Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman will be the editor-in-chief of a starting shareup called Whisper.

• Gabriel Snyder, formerly the editor-in-chief of The Wire, will be chief content officer of a mobile news startup called Inside.com.

• Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s site AllThingsD announced last year they would part ways with Dow Jones & Co. and relaunched as Re/Code this year. The Wall Street Journal launched a replacement site, WSJD. Both promised live events. Another spinoff from the Journal: The Information, a subscription tech-news site edited by former WSJ reporter Jessica Lessin.

• Proto-blogger Andrew Sullivan left The Daily Beast in early 2013 to relaunch his Daily Dish as an independent, subscription-based publication. Sullivan wrote on Dec. 31 that in its first year, the publication had raised more than $800,000 in subscription revenue and has “almost 34,000 subscribers.”

• The New York Times, while obviously not exactly a startup, announced late last year that it would launch “two newsroom startups,” including one headed by former Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt aimed at the same subject areas as FiveThirtyEight.com.

These moves are a welcome sign that some journalists, at least, disagree with the conventional wisdom that has paralyzed the media and all but destroyed news geared to a general audience: the belief that there is simply no business model that will generate enough money to sustain a mass news-gathering organization in the age of the internet.

Of course, even if these efforts are successful, they don’t address citizens’ most pressing need: coverage of local government, which is virtually non-existent in far too many places. (Just today, the Indianapolis Star announced the departure of one of the few remaining reporters covering city hall.)  Interestingly, Pew reports an uptick in audiences for local television news–which I take as a sign that folks aren’t getting such news from the sad remnants of their local newspapers. Let’s hope that the new national ventures prove so successful that they spark a renewal of interest in investigative reporting focused on city halls and statehouses.

Relying on the Mayor’s office to tell us what’s happening really doesn’t cut it.

 

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Why the Absence of Journalism Matters

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Rachel Maddow highlighted why the presence–or increasingly, the absence–of local journalism is so critical. And by “journalism,” I don’t mean puff pieces about local celebrities, or articles about the best way to take care of your ingrown toenail, or “reporting” on new shopping or dining venues.I mean reporting. Journalism. As Rachel wrote:

If it weren’t for the dogged local press corps, Christie would still be ridiculing this story,attacking the legislators investigating it and persuading most of the national press to dismiss it.

…..

The bridge story is still unfolding. But the pattern of how the scandal came to national attention is familiar.

When Connecticut Gov. John Rowland was still denying the allegations of corruption that would ultimately force him out of office, his wife read a poem (to the meter of “The Night Before Christmas”) mocking Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender at a local Chamber of Commerce meeting:

“When out on the yard there rose such a hub-bub,

I thought maybe Jon Lender had jumped in the hot tub.

Now surely that man needs to go soak his head,

but there on the lawn stood Santa instead.”

Lender didn’t jump into anything, but he did stay on the story, and the aforementioned hot tub turned out to be one of the illegal gifts that would send the governor to prison.

When then-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was not hiking the Appalachian Trail but visiting his mistress in 2009, reporter Gina Smith from the State newspaper drove 200 miles to be in the Atlanta airport at 6 a.m. as Sanford got off his overseas flight. His ruse thus unraveled.

When Mayflower, Ark., learned the hard way last March that an aging ExxonMobil pipeline ran under it, the Arkansas Times’s dogged reporting included a crowd-funding effort to pay for its reporters to team with journalists experienced in covering pipelines to get to the bottom of what ExxonMobil did and whether other communities with buried pipelines should feel protected by existing regulations.

Most of the time, national news happens out loud: at news conferences, on the floor of Congress, in splashy indictments or court rulings. But sometimes, the most important news starts somewhere more interesting, and it has to be dug up. Our democracy depends on local journalism, whether it’s a beat reporter slogging through yet another underattended local commission meeting, or a state political reporter with enough of an ear to the ground to know where the governor might be when he isn’t where he says he is, or a traffic columnist who’s nobody’s fool.

Here in Indianapolis, since Gannett acquired our one remaining newspaper, coverage of the statehouse has dramatically diminished, and coverage of city hall has pretty much gone missing.  About the only way citizens can gauge how well–or how poorly–Mayor Ballard is doing is by how long the snow remains on the ground and how many more people got shot overnight. (Local media does report on the kinds of overt criminal activity that don’t require investigation.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m curious about all the stuff we don’t know.

I miss having real news.

 

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The Rest of the Story

There used to be a radio show hosted by Paul Harvey called “The Rest of the Story.” It would begin with a “story,” be interrupted by a commercial, and then conclude with a recitation of facts that made you realize that what you’d been hearing was a different take on a familiar biography or event.

I’ve thought about the rest of the story several times in the past couple of days–and especially about the obligation of journalists to share with their readers those facts that constitute the “rest of the story.” Reporting is supposed to be about digging beneath surface recitations–giving readers all of the facts relevant to a situation, whether they confirm a partisan’s preferred telling or not.

The first example was a glowing, puff piece in the Star about the successes of the Tindley Academy, a charter school operating in the Meadows neighborhood. The rigor of the school was credited with stabilizing the neighborhood–attracting and retaining the right kind of parents. The Mayor was quoted as saying he planned to use similar charters to help revitalize other neighborhoods.

A friend sent me a link to Department of Education statistics showing that, year after year, the school has enrolled 100 students and graduated 20. As he noted, charter schools can and do dismiss students for numerous reasons, including academic non-performance that might drag down their averages.

Once I knew “the rest of the story,” Tindley didn’t look quite like the panacea for revitalization that the Mayor suggested.

The second example was a column by Matt Tully, supporting the Broad Ripple development that would include Whole Foods. The arguments he made were reasonable ones; however, as my husband–and subsequently Paul Ogden–both pointed out, the way in which Tully framed the debate was less than accurate.

Tully focused upon whether the reuse of the parcel was appropriate, and whether a Whole Foods is compatible with Broad Ripple’s character.  As he framed it, such a redevelopment would be a welcome detour from the over-reliance on bars in the Village. Hard to argue with that.

Except that isn’t what the argument is about.

The question is not: would a Whole Foods be nice on that corner? The questions actually being debated are: should the city be subsidizing (to the tune of some $6,000,000) a development that will include a grocery that will compete with the existing (unsubsidized) Broad Ripple grocery? And is the design of the proposed development–which includes apartments and other elements in addition to the Whole Foods–consistent with the character of the neighborhood?

Now, reasonable people can certainly come to different conclusions about those questions, but knowing what the dispute is actually about would seem to be a pretty important “rest of the story.”

Where’s Paul Harvey when you need him?

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The Silver Effect

Remember facts? Those verifiable observations about that thing we call reality?

Pinch me, because I think they may be coming back. The signs are there, although subject to alternative interpretations (making predictions is not unlike reading entrails).

First, there was Nate Silver. Silver’s dogged focus on data drove a lot of discussion during the election. That focus wasn’t new–he’d also predicted the 2010 Republican blowout–but his insistence upon empirical investigation hadn’t previously gotten noticed by people outside the world of political junkies. When the spin-meisters pooh-poohed his “novel methodology” (aka beginning with facts), they succeeded in illuminating their methodology, the technical name for which is  “making stuff up.” In the wake of the election, there has been a subtle but discernible shift in the media toward actual fact-checking.

Exhibit two: Costco. No kidding. I got my most recent Costco member’s magazine, and was leafing through it, when I came to an article titled “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” It was a story about fact-checking on the Internet. The gist was that more and more fact-checking sites are popping up to join Politifact, Snopes and Factcheck.com. This phenomenon tells me a couple of things: there’s a market for fact-checking the “information” that’s so readily available but so often misleading; and recognition of the need for verification is widespread enough to merit notice from a mass retailer like Costco.

Exhibit three: in an inventive vein, I got an email the other day advertising something called LazyTruth [link]. It’s a plug-in for Chrome that automatically scans email for information that FactCheck.org and Politifact have deemed false. If something doesn’t check out, it’ll provide a few words of correction and a link to where you can find out more. You can then easily pass that verified information on to the crazy uncle or friend who forwarded the email to you in the first place. Down the road, the developer plans to add more kinds of rumors to LazyTruth’s filter — urban myths, hoaxes, false security threats, etc. — but for now the tool is limited to political tall tales.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’ve been very concerned about the loss of journalism–real journalism that deals with verifiable facts about actual events that matter in a democratic system, that gives us the information we need to keep our government and other institutions accountable. These signs that we may be groping our way toward new ways of obtaining the facts we need  are incredibly encouraging. The return of respect for actual facts rather than desirable fabrications is more than welcome.

I think I’ll call it “the Silver Effect.”

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