SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FAR FROM THE BEST POLITICAL REPORTING OF 2008

By Chris Daly


I realize that the train has pretty much left the station on the Times/McCain story. But I wanted to wait to let the whole life-cycle of such a piece unfold before commenting. Now we can see (or infer) the process in something like its journalistic fullness:

--concocting the story line
--reporting it
--editing it
--sitting on it
--hearing footsteps of someone reporting about your reporting
--publishing the story.
--getting criticized for it
--following up in the news pages, while at the same time…
--sending Executive Editor Bill Keller out to defend it.
--commenting on the whole thing by the ombud... er, Public Editor.



One easy issue: the “romance” angle. It may have happened, but you cannot tell from this article. They simply didn’t nail it down. When that happens, there is an inevitable choice to make: keep reporting, or give it up. It is not an option, especially on the front page during a presidential election season, to say, “What the hell? Let’s go with what we’ve got and hope for the best.”
This was an embarrassing journalistic failure, one that begins with the reporters but certainly extends up the food chain to all the editors who have a hand in Page 1 stories. The story violated the paper’s own rules on sourcing, as well as common journalistic standards and common sense.

One sub-issue raised by the reporting on the “relationship” has to do with the competencies of sources. Not all sources are alike. Not all sources are competent to help us get at the truth of things. In this case, (never mind the anonymity for the moment), the sources were cited as experiencing “waves of anxiety” about WHETHER the boss was having an affair. The narrow and not-terribly-interesting question was their state of mind, and they can be reliably quoted on that topic. They are, after all, experts on their own feelings.

But those sources are not NECESSARILY experts on the truth or falsity of the things they were worried about. For the broader and more interesting factual question of whether there was an affair, the Times needed a different kind of source, or better yet, some hard evidence. In other words, it’s not enough to just have a source; the source has to know what he or she is talking about.

As to the anonymity: that’s always a judgment call, but in this case, it must be said that it would have been a whole lot better to have sources on the record, or to just bag the whole project. To quote a brief passage from the Times’ own lengthy (and admirable) policy on confidential sources:

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading.

Predictably, the “romance” angle has blotted out the rest of the sky. The main theme of the story – that the righteous John McCain has blinders when it comes to his own public ethics – is an important one. If the Times had started with the Keating 5 and stuck with the abundant on-the-record material about McCain, they could have put together a solid (i.e., un-sexy) story on a serious issue. As it is, they just made McCain (and a lot of other people) mad for no good reason.

As Machiavelli warned: “If you would strike at a Prince, you must kill him.”

SECOND THOUGHTS ON FREE ACCESS

"By Chris Daly


“Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute,
copy and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it
can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.”
--Stewart Brand, “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT” (1987)



When the top brass at The New York Times announced last week that the paper was scrapping its experiment in posting a tollbooth on the information superhighway, there was a lot of cheering. Most commentators hailed the move as an acknowledgement of the new media realities. Dan Gillmor, for example, the estimable head of the Center for Citizen Media and an insightful former journalist, said:

"Glad to see that the Times is putting its great cast of columnists more firmly back into the public conversation than they’d been behind the pay-wall. That’s excellent news for the writers and the readers."

At first, I agreed with him (and others, like Doc Searls) and joined the cheering section. After all, who wants to be against freedom?

But in the past few days, I have felt troubled by some of the implications.

Originally, of course, the Times made a pretty straightforward business decision in setting up the TimesSelect pay wall. (It must have been a business decision, because it certainly made no sense from a journalistic, public-service, or historical point of view.)

The calculation was that the paper recognized that its celebrated and comprehensive news coverage was attracting a lot of what economists call "free riders," or what the rest of us call "free-loaders" -- people who wanted something for nothing. They were coming to the Times' website, reading to their heart's content, and contributing no revenue to the expense of running the paper. They were behaving in a way that is somewhere between window-shopping and shop-lifting. So, why not try to get some money out of them?

As someone who used to make my living as a journalist on the payroll of traditional news media, I have to say that I do not consider the idea of asking your customers to pay to be inherently evil. I know that many cyber-thinkers and bloggers think so, but I do not. I think that having squads of professional journalists doing original reporting is worthwhile, and it is certainly not free.

So, my question is this: If the readers won’t pay, who will?

And this brings me to what I find troubling about the Times’ decision to give away its news report for free: it makes the newspaper even more dependent on advertising revenue.

As I point out in my book, the news business has operated since at least the early 19th Century on a model that was based on a “dual revenue stream” – money coming in from subscribers and money coming in from advertisers. The exact proportion varied a bit from place to place and from time to time, but they were both important.

Now, obviously, the old business model is crumbling. The question is: what will replace it? A model that depends 100% on advertising is not self-evidently better. If there is no revenue coming in from readers, the news organization is entirely dependent on advertising revenue. History tells us that advertisers can have all kinds of bad influences. For one thing, ad revenue is fickle: it goes through an annual cycle of ups and downs, and it tends to shrink in recessions. Not only that, but advertisers have been trying to weasel their way into news and editorial decision-making since the earliest days, and there is no reason to believe they will ever stop.

If the news must depend on a single stream of revenue, I would rather see that stream made up of millions of readers trying to learn things than see it made up of a few hundred corporations trying to sell things.