Chapter 5
Principles of Trustworthy Media Creation The 2009 videos were dramatic, capturing several employees of ACORN, the housing-advocacy organization, apparently offering their help to clients on how to set up a brothel and evade any number of laws. Using hidden cameras, conservative activists had gone undercover to capture conversations that led to a political uproar and Congressional action against the advocacy group. The creators of the videos made no secret of their goal: to “get” ACORN and expose it as a corrupt organization. They called themselves journalists, and there was an element of journalism in their reports—though the videos were later revealed to have been edited in massively misleading ways. But when one of the creators of the ACORN videos was later arrested in New Orleans on charges that he’d attempted to spy on a Democratic senator, his journalistic bona fides disappeared entirely. If you venture into anything resembling journalism, I hope you’ll be more honorable than that crowd. This chapter addresses people who are ready to go beyond purely personal or speculative blogs or occasional appearances on YouTube and the like. It’s for those who have become mediactive consumers and now want to apply mediactive principles to their own creative work online, especially if their intent is to provide useful information to other people. Important: What you’ll be reading in the next few pages may seem like it’s intended only for professional journalists. I’ll be happy if some of them do read what follows, because lord knows that too many have forgotten or abandoned some vital principles. But even though I do plan to talk quite a bit about what they do— and will be quite critical about how some have done their jobs in recent years—I hope you’ll read what follows in the context of what you might be doing to create your own media now and in the future. These are universal principles, not just for people who call themselves journalists but for anyone who wants to be trusted for what they say or write. They 64 Mediactive are for all of us in a mediactive world, and the more you hope to be taken seriously, the more I hope you’ll appreciate them. Like the active-consumer principles in Chapter 2—the bedrock on which these creation principles rest—they add up to being honorable. In brief, they involve: Thoroughness Accuracy Fairness Independence Transparency Transparency is the most difficult principle for traditional media organizations, even though it’s relatively common among bloggers. In the end, however, it may be the most important of all, so I’m making it a major focus of this chapter. I find that I’m advocating it more and more ardently in all kinds of communication, from blogs to the BBC.* Let’s look at the principles in more detail. You’ll see that they blur into each other at times, just as the principles for media consumers overlap. As I did with those, I’ll flesh out some of the tactics to live up these principles in the next chapter.
- Be Thorough In Chapter 2, I stressed the importance of asking more questions. Whether you’re asking so you can be better informed or so you can inform others, the digital world gives us nearly infinite tools for reporting, defined here as the gathering of information or just plain learning about various things. But none of these tools can replace old-fashioned methods such as making phone calls, conducting in-person interviews and visiting libraries. People can do shoddy research online or off, but the learning opportunities provided today by online communications and resources remove almost any excuse for lack of background knowledge.
*You’ll notice that I don’t list “objectivity” as a principle for creators of journalism. It’s an ideal rather than a principle, and it’s impossible to achieve—no human being is or can be truly objective. We can get closer to this ideal now than ever before, in part because the Internet’s built-in capacity for collaboration makes it easier to find counterpoints to our own views and for our critics to find us (and then for us to respond). Author and Net researcher (and friend) David Weinberger calls transparency “the new objectivity,” but I believe all of the principles in my list help us approach the ideal of objectivity. Dan Gillmor 65 You can’t know everything, but good professional reporters serve as a good model: They try to learn as much as they can about whatever topic they’re working on. It’s better to know much more than you publish than to leave big holes in your story. The best reporters always want to make one more phone call, to check with one more source. I had a rule of thumb as a reporter. I felt confident that I’d done enough reporting if my story used roughly 10 percent of what I knew. That is, I preferred to be so overloaded with facts and information that I had to be extremely selective, not to hide things but to write only what really mattered. The Web offers all sorts of excellent material about how to do research. I’ll list a bunch of these resources on the Mediactive website (mediactive.com), but take a look, for starters, at the University of Washington Libraries’ “Research 101” site and the excellent News University collection at the Poynter Institute. Online, we can take our research in amazing new directions, in particular by inviting others to be part of the discovery process. We can tell people what we’re working on and ask them for help. “Crowdsourcing,” which in journalism takes the form of asking the audience for help, has bolstered journalists’ research on many levels, but it’s only one of a number of ways to improve our reporting. Let’s spend a minute on the in-person interview. It’s not easy to ask a stranger for information (at least, not for most people). It’s even harder to ask probing questions. There are only two questions you should always ask, right at the end: 1) Is there anyone else I should talk to about this?, and 2) What didn’t I ask that I should have asked, and what’s the answer? It’s also important to remember that a lot of what we need to understand about the world can only be found in libraries, county courthouses and the like, and we should remember that those dusty paper stacks and files have plenty of value. Google can’t digitize everything—not yet, anyway. New facts and nuances often emerge after articles are published. One of Wikipedia’s best characteristics is its recognition that we can liberate ourselves from the publication or broadcast metaphors made familiar during the age of literally manufactured media, where the paper product or tape for broadcasting was the end of the process. We may not get it totally right collectively—in fact, humans almost never get anything entirely right—but we can get closer as we assemble new data and nuances. I’ll discuss this further in Chapter 7. 66 Mediactive
- Be Accurate Factual errors—especially those that are easily and clearly avoidable—do more to undermine trust than almost any other failing. Accuracy is the starting point for all solid information. While it’s understandable that errors occur, given deadline pressures, it’s disheartening that even in long-form journalism, such as magazines with human fact-checkers, some major and silly mistakes still make their way into articles. And it’s stunning that professionals get things wrong when a simple Google check could have prevented the goof. But accuracy rests on the bedrock of thoroughness, which takes time. It means, simply put: Check your facts, then check them again. Know where to look to verify claims or to separate fact from fiction. And never, ever, spell someone’s name wrong. In my first daily-newspaper job I spelled the name of a company wrong throughout an entire article, and didn’t discover this until after publication. My mistake was simple: I got it wrong on first use as I wrote the story, and then, with the misspelling ingrained in my head, repeated the mistake every subsequent time. I didn’t go back and check. The next morning, my editor called me into a small conference room, pointed out the error—the company’s owner had called the paper—and told me, “You’re better than this.” I felt about one foot tall. I abjectly apologized to the owner of the company, who took it with amazingly good humor, and I learned a lesson. That story is relevant to all of us. If you’re applying for a job and your resume and/or cover letter are full of misspellings or outright inaccuracies, your application is likely to sink to the bottom of the pile. When people blog about me, one of the surest ways I know whether to pay attention is to see how they spelled my name. If they get it wrong, as so many do because they don’t check, I’m not terribly inclined to take the rest of what they say all that seriously. Getting it right means asking questions until you think you may know too much. Smart journalists know, moreover, that there are no stupid questions. Sometimes there are lazy questions, such as asking someone for information that you could easily have looked up; asking a lazy question will not endear you to the person you’re interviewing. But if you don’t understand something, you should just ask for an explanation. I enjoy being the person at a press conference who asks an obvious question that other reporters are too embarrassed to ask, for fear of seeming ill-informed. I’d rather have someone snicker at me for being a newbie than get something wrong. Dan Gillmor 67 When I was writing my newspaper technology column, I frequently called sources back after interviews to read them a sentence or paragraph of what I planned to write, so they could tell me whether I’d succeeded in explaining their technical work in plain English. Usually I had it right, but sometimes a source would correct me or offer a nuance. This made the journalism better, and made my sources trust me more. Accuracy online extends past publication. You should invite your readers to let you know when they spot an error. MediaBugs’ Scott Rosenberg and Regret the Error’s Craig Silverman are working on a Web initiative to encourage publishers to put a prominent link on their pages, giving readers a way to report errors in a standardized way. Mediactive.com will be part of this. When you do make a mistake, you should obviously correct it. How to make corrections online is a new genre in itself. Here are several possibilities, in my order of preference: For significant errors and updates, correct in context, with a note at the top or the bottom of the piece explaining what has been changed, and why. For minor errors, such as a misspelled word, use the “strike” HTML tag to visibly put a line through the errant material — like this—and then add the correct word or words. Correct in place and, in a note on the item, link to a corrections page that explains what happened. The one kind of correction I never advise is the one too often used: an in-place fix with no indication that anything was ever wrong in the first place. Again, remember that mistakes happen, but acting honorably should always be the first order of business.
- Be Fair and Civil Fairness is a broader concept than accuracy or thoroughness. It encompasses several related notions: Even if you are coming at something from a specific bias or world view, you can be fair to those who disagree with you by incorporating their views into your own work, even if simply to explain why you’re right and they’re wrong. 68 Mediactive Recognize that you can’t be perfectly fair, and that people will hear what you’ve said through the prisms of their own world views. It’s still worth trying. You can extend the principle of fairness by inviting others to join the conversation after publication. You can stress civility, moreover, as the guiding principle for the conversation. Why bother, especially if you don’t feel others are likely to reciprocate? First, it’s just the the right way to do things. You want other people to deal with you in a fair way, especially when someone is criticizing what you’ve said or done. Do the same for them, and maybe they will take a similar approach even if they haven’t before. Second, it pays back tactically in audience trust. The people who read or hear your work will feel cheated if you slant the facts or present opposing opinions disingenuously. Your work will be suspect once they realize what you’ve done—and many eventually will. How can you be fair? Beyond the Golden Rule notion of treating people as you’d want to be treated, you can ensure that you offer a place for people to reply to what you (and your commenters) have posted. You can insist on civility both in your work and in the comments. My rule when hosting an online community is that participants will be civil with each other even if we disagree on the issues. This can break down when someone joins a conversation under false pretenses. These can include some obvious behaviors, and others that are more subtle. Here are examples of people to watch out for: Someone who is paid by some industry group or has an interest in its success, but who chimes in with opinions about matters of direct concern to the industry without revealing that connection or bias. Someone with ideological beliefs that influence his or her position in ways that go beyond a consideration of the facts and issues directly relevant to the position, but who presents the opinion as just the result of reasoning. Someone who has a history of unethically (perhaps even illegally) abusing the system in which he or she is participating for personal gain. Dan Gillmor 69 It’s important to expose the connections, if you detect them, while taking care that the exposé is not an ad hominem attack. Creating and sustaining a healthy online community is hard work, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter, but it’s essential. Another essential way to be fair is to use links. Point to a variety of material other than your own, to support what you’ve said and to offer varying perspectives. Most of all, fairness requires that you listen carefully to what people are saying. Journalism is evolving from a lecture to a conversation we can all be part of, and the first rule of good conversation is to listen.
- Think Independently This is similar to the principle described Chapter 2 of opening your mind. It can cover many habits, but independence of thought may be the most important. Creators of media, not just consumers, need to venture beyond their personal comfort zones. Professional journalists claim independence. They are typically forbidden to have direct or indirect financial conflicts of interest. But conflicts of interest are not always so easy to define. Many prominent Washington journalists, for example, are so blatantly beholden to their sources, and to access to those sources, that they are not independent in any real way, and their journalism reflects it. Jay Rosen calls out another non-independent frame of mind among the top journalists, particularly in Washington, referring to it as the “Church of the Savvy.” According to Rosen, these journalists see themselves as having no ideology but actually share a profoundly deep one: Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in—their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including [political] operators like Karl Rove). In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” 70 Mediactive and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. Yet aren’t we all part of a similar cult in our own lives, or sometimes tempted to be? It’s certainly more comfortable to hang out with people who share our own world views, and to seek them out when we’re looking for more information. Being independent as a questioner and pursuer of what’s actually happening—and I don’t care here whether you’re paid to be a reporter or not—can get in the way of comfort. Independent thinking has many facets. Listening, of course, is the best way to start. But you can and should relentlessly question your own conclusions after listening. It’s not enough to incorporate the views of opponents into what you write; if what they tell you is persuasive, you have to consider shifting your conclusion, too. Whether you’re a blogger or a paid journalist, independence isn’t likely to stretch so far as revealing your employer’s dirty laundry or even your own dissatisfaction with what the enterprise is doing. That said, loyalty has its limits; I’d like to think I’d speak out if an employer acted in grossly unethical ways, though I’d probably quit first. In general, however, we should expect that criticism of this kind is normally done in person, behind a closed door. An organization decides its own level of public disclosures, and some internal criticism—especially the kind that might be fodder for a plaintiff’s lawyer—is unlikely to see sunlight. This brings us to the truly new principle: embracing much more openness than ever before.
- Be Transparent Transparency is essential not just for citizen journalists and other new media creators, but also for those in traditional media. The kind and extent of transparency may differ. For example, bloggers should explicitly reveal their biases. Big Media employees may have pledged individually not to have conflicts of interest, but that doesn’t mean they work without bias. They too should help their audiences understand what they do, and why. Transparency in the traditional ranks has scarcely existed for most of the past century. While journalists are more publicly open than many other industries in at least some ways, there’s a notable hypocrisy quotient. As any of us, professional or not, demand answers from others, we should look in the mirror and ask some of the same questions. The transparency question boils down to something that may sound counterintuitive but is actually logical: If you do an honest job as well as Dan Gillmor 71 you can, greater transparency will lead your audience to trust you more even while they may believe you less. That is, they’ll understand better why it’s impossible to get everything right all the time. Transparency takes several forms. I strongly believe that news organizations have a duty to explain to their audiences how they do their journalism, and why. They could take a page from the newcomers, such as bloggers, the best of whom are much more open on this; their world views and motivations are typically crystal clear. And their audiences, even people who disagree with those world views, can refract their own understanding of the topics through those lenses. The response I get when I say these things is typically along these lines: If journalists say what they think, they’ll call their objectivity into question. Well, I don’t believe in objectivity in the first place. And the public already perceives journalists to be biased, which of course they are—though I don’t believe this is the same as being unethical. Bloggers, through their own relentless critiques, have also helped foster transparency in traditional media. However unfair bloggers’ criticism may often be, it has been a valuable addition to the mediacriticism sphere. Not all bloggers are adequately transparent. Some, to be sure, do reveal their biases, offering readers a way to consider the writers’ world views when evaluating their credibility. But a distinctly disturbing trend in some blog circles is the undisclosed or poorly disclosed conflict of interest. Pay-per-post schemes are high on the list of activities that deserve readers’ condemnation; they also deserve a smaller audience. As noted earlier, these principles aren’t the beginning or ending of what trusted media creators should embrace. But if we use them, we’re moving in the right direction. Now let’s dig a little deeper into transparency, or being open about what you do and who you are. As I’ve noted, it’s an essential component of being trusted. Some of what’s ahead refers to traditional media, but that context is useful for all of us, no matter what media we create in any format. World Views I wish that U.S. news organizations would drop the pretense of being impartial and of having no world view. There’s no conflict between having a world view and doing great journalism. When I go to London I buy The Guardian and The Telegraph. Both do excellent journalism. The Guardian covers the world from a slightly 72 Mediactive left-of-center standpoint, and The Telegraph from a slightly right-ofcenter stance. I read both and figure I’m triangulating on the essence of (British establishment) reality. Even if I read just one, the paper’s overt frame of reference gives me a better way of understanding what’s happening than if it pretended to be impartial. And— crucially—both newspapers run articles (and lots of op-eds) that either directly challenge their editors’ and proprietors’ world views or, more routinely, include facts and context that run contrary to what those individuals might wish was true. Journalism’s independence of thought means, in particular, being willing or even eager to learn why your core assumptions could be wrong. Contrast this with the Washington Post’s record. This newspaper had a vividly obvious world view during the run-up to the Iraq War: proadministration and pro-war. The view was reflected principally in the fact that the little journalism it did questioning the premise for invading Iraq rarely, if ever, made the front page, in contrast to the relentless parroting of war-mongering from Bush administration insiders. Even Post journalists admitted as much, though not in those words. I’m guessing that the newspaper’s editors, who are as good as anyone else in the field, would have done a better job of covering the opposing facts and views if the paper’s world view had been stated as a matter of policy, partly because the best journalists enjoy challenging conventional wisdom, even when it’s from their own bosses. Sidebar: Consumer Reports’ Integrity in Action Consumer Reports is a publication that works hard to get things right. But its February 2007 issue ran a dramatically wrong review of children’s car seats—due to poor testing methods—and seriously jeopardized the trust it had won from its readers. The organization’s recognition of the problem was the best demonstration I’ve seen of a) owning up to one’s mistakes, b) figuring out what went wrong, c) explaining what happened and d) putting into place policies to prevent such messes in the future. And it was all done in a public way, with a systematic transparency that’s exceedingly rare in journalism. Soon after the article, which reported that many car seats failed the magazine’s tests, came under challenge, it became clear that the tests themselves were flawed. The response from the magazine to its readers and the world was quick: It issued a retraction. Dan Gillmor 73 I subscribe to the CR online site. I got an email, and a friend who gets the paper version got the same letter via postal mail, from Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the title’s parent. He apologized, sincerely. He explained what he knew so far about the error, apparently caused by an outside lab’s tests. He announced a further investigation. And he promised extraordinary efforts not to let it occur again. In March 2007, the very next issue, CR posted a detailed report (which also ran online) titled “How our car seat tests went wrong.” The “series of misjudgments” described in the piece is remarkable. It was especially worrisome given the publication’s record. I don’t rely on CR for everything I buy, but I’ve learned to trust its overall judgment on relatively uncomplicated consumer goods such as kitchen appliances, where I’m unlikely to spend much time on my own extra research. Were I the parent of small children, I might well have included car seats in that category. The report explained everything about the tests in clear and unsparing language. It included justifiably angry comments from a car seat manufacturer and from outside critics. It was self-criticism of the sort one almost never sees from a journalistic organization, blogger or other media creator of any kind. CR also posted a story called “Learning from our mistake,” a description of what it would do to avoid similar catastrophes in the future. Among other things, it announced that the publication planned to bring outside experts into the process when creating complicated testing procedures (and already does that to a degree), to fix the way it works with outside labs and to look much harder “when our findings are unusual.” The last of those should have been second nature to the journalists and scientists at CR. After all, it’s famous for telling readers that when something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. In this case—with all those car seats failing the test—perhaps it was too bad to be true. The magazine might consider opening its testing procedures in other ways. For example, it could create videos of the tests as they’re being conducted and post them online. Bring in the designated experts, by all means, but maybe some readers who are experts in their own way might spot something useful, such as an omission in the testing procedure or a valuable way to improve it. Bloggers, Come Clean One of the most entertaining blogs in the tech field has been the “Fake Steve Jobs” commentary by author and magazine writer Daniel 74 Mediactive Lyons. His identity wasn’t known publicly during the blog’s early days. When it was finally revealed, a number of people recalled something else Lyons had written. As Anil Dash wrote on his blog in a posting called “Hypocrite or New Believer?”: Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs”, a 3000-word screed vilifying anonymous bloggers who comment on companies in the technology industry. In 2005, I spoke to Lyons for the article, though the comments I made about both the efforts that have been made to encourage accountability in the blogopshere, as well as the many positive benefits that businesses have accrued from blogging, were omitted from the story. My initial temptation was to mark Lyons as a hypocrite. Upon reflection, it seems there’s a more profound lesson: The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor. I’m going with hypocrisy. (I say that with this caveat: Lyons’s Fake Steve Jobs remains a terrific feature, often better in my view than his work at Forbes and, as of this writing, Newsweek.) Lyons’s decision to admit who he was—after he was outed by a reporter who did sufficient legwork—was a victory for transparency in a sphere that is often more transparent than traditional media, but not always. The online world is rife with conflicts of interest stemming from non-transparency. On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter so-called “sock puppets”—people posting under pseudonyms instead of their real names, and either promoting their own work or denigrating their opponents, sometimes in the crudest ways. As with people engaging in the often odious practice called “buzz marketing” —paid or otherwise rewarded to talk up products without revealing that they’re being compensated — it’s widely believed that the people getting caught are a small percentage of the ones doing it. Enforced Online Transparency The Federal Trade Commission, with laudable goals, issued a document in late 2009 aimed at better disclosure, with penalties of up to Dan Gillmor 75 $11,000 in fines for violations. Basically, the FTC was saying that if you have a “material connection” to a product or service you’re praising, you are an endorser who must disclose that connection. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But when you read the FTC’s ruling you get the sense of a government-gone-wild travesty. The system is unworkable in practice, which is bad enough. Worse, the rules are worryingly vague and wide-ranging. Worse yet, they give traditional print and broadcast journalists a pass while applying harsh regulations to bloggers (and others using conversational media of various kinds). Worst, and most important, they are, in the end, an attack on markets and free speech, based on a 20th century notion of media and advertising that simply doesn’t map to the new era. The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same. The commission took pains in the uproar that followed the guidelines’ release to insist that no one planned to go after individual bloggers. Rather, the targets would be slippery marketers who were trying to pull wool over the eyes of consumers. This clarification was only modestly reassuring. Plans change, and the rules were written with such deliberate vagueness that I predict it’s only a matter of time before the FTC does begin chasing after individuals it deems problematic. The FTC’s first enforcement action was heartening, in a way, as it seemed to show a keen sense of how such regulations should be used. The commission settled a case with a California PR firm whose employees had posted glowing reviews of clients’ games in Apple’s online store without disclosing they were being paid for this. The firm, Reverb Communications, agreed to remove what amounted to advertisements and not do it again, though as usual in these cases it didn’t admit (or deny) doing anything wrong. If these are the kinds of things the FTC will go after, we’ll be okay. I continue to worry, however, that the agency could go further and damage online speech. We should all loathe the odious practice of using bloggers and other online conversationalists as commercial sock puppets in a deceptive online word-of-mouth operation. And we can all agree that disclosures are always better than hiding one’s affiliation with a company. We already have laws against fraud. Let’s enforce those—first against the serious fraudsters, who keep getting away with it—before we even consider harsh regulations on speech. 76 Mediactive Can Honor Prevail? A few years ago, when I was working on my Bayosphere local media startup, my co-founder, Michael Goff, and I wondered how we could do more than simply encourage Bayosphere’s citizen journalists to operate according to the best principles of journalism in their posts and comments. We came up with an idea that failed, like the overall site, but I still believe it had some merit. The notion, which we called “Honor Tags,” was meant to be a system by which site participants could label themselves as “journalists,” “advocates,” or “neither,” with clear definitions for the first two roles. We hoped to persuade people to assess themselves and their own work, and we had in mind a second-level system by which others in the community could judge whether the tags were accurate. The idea was modestly praised by some as a potentially valuable system, and mercilessly ridiculed by others as utopian nuttiness. The key value we hoped to instill, however, has not faded at all. If honor isn’t a part of how we do our work, we’ll forfeit any reason to be trusted. This is why I sometimes despair about professional journalists’ rampant violations of their own standards at the media organizations I respect the most, such as the New York Times, where anonymous sources still get too-free reign. Yet it’s also why I nod with satisfaction when I see a news operation work harder to explain itself and its work, and why I grin at the many experiments aimed at adding transparency and accountability—elements of honor—to journalism at all levels. News providers of all stripes can announce their standards. If you’re one of them, you should do so and live up to them, admitting publicly when you fail. In the end, community members, doing commerce in the fabled marketplace of ideas, will enforce them.