The Morality And Effectiveness Of Process Journalism
June 7, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
The New York Times Sunday edition team picks fights like no one else. The problem is they tend to pick the wrong fights.
In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the day that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue that year. soon after there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That composition was retitled and rewritten to unmistaken errors and change the overall tone.
I can’t help wondering whether our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, that moment aimed squarely at us. Not only does writer Damon Darlin they get a lot wrong, he just absolutely folded to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face.
When Damon reached out to me by e mail to talk about the story I wrote back something along the lines of “The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me” considering of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they’ve decided to write But Damon persisted, saying “I want to shout you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors.” Seemed fair adequate, I have lots of thoughts on that subject.
We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the editorial as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can’t be trusted, at all.
Damon was laser focused in the write-up on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here’s that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up. Damon says:
Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, adequate to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.
Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”
But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)
Damon is suggesting that I reported the rumor as whether it were real, and waited until deep into the post to say anything about it being unlikely. 133 words into it!
The fact is we didn’t talk about the rumor until the third paragraph of that story, and the statement about it being unlikely to be true came immediately after the sentence that stated the rumor:
Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally dependable source that evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. whether these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting that rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.
There’s just no way to interpret that paragraph as a cheap way to get traffic by misleading readers. We say precisely what we were hearing, and what we believe to be true. And by the way, it shouldn’t matter, but we’ve subsequently confirmed that Apple and Twitter were in fact in acquisition discussions, and the original source for our story was unmistaken.
The other money quote from Damon is plus misleading and was taken out of context:
That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”
Note the break amoung “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there considering there were paragraphs of dialog amoung them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to prepare us look poor. He did that considering it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.
The Real Story
The real story is what I said amidst those two sentence fragments, and it’s that stuff that makes all the difference. I talked to Damon about how stories evolve on our blog. How it can start with a rumor, which we may post whether we find it credible and/or it’s being so widely circulated that the fact of the rumor’s existence is newsworthy in itself. But thereupon we evolve a post to get to the truth.
Jeff Jarvis calls that Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture in a post today. His arguments deserve to be fleshed out into an entire book.
We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the day. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. whether we post something we think is rough, we say so. whether we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.
A good example of
That update is 100% unmistaken. Google was in talks by a notes deal, and there were discussions of an acquisition. Our original source got his knowledge from a Google employee. We have subsequently confirmed that a Google employee did in fact tell him that they were in late stage acquisition discussions with Twitter, considering he believed it to be true. There was some internal miscommunication about the discussions.
But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it’s a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best knowledge we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts.
Some society ask why we don’t just wait until we have the whole story before posting. That’s where the cheap/expensive quote above comes in. The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through that process. CEOs don’t always take our calls when we’re asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many folks come out of the woodwork to give us additional data.
It’s that iterative process, which Jarvis nails completely, that I was trying to guide Damon to. He can like it or hate it, but it works. And readers love it. The only humans who don’t like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn’t even know there was a story to start with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth.
The other thing Damon conveniently left out of his commentary are the many, many big stories that we have broken by the years. There’s a reason that we are no. 1 on the TechMeme leaderboard. There’s a reason why we have more than twice the weight of CNET, at no. 2 and the NY Times at no. 3. It’s considering we have an exceptional reputation for honesty and hard work, and we spend all our day in the community building friendships with the public who are driving that industry forward. I translated the word “friend” into “source” for Damon so he could understand what I was talking about. I don’t just shout these public when I have a question on a story. I additionally signal them to take in about their kid’s elementary school graduation, or to give them advice on which venture capitalist might want to invest in them. They trust me, and they talk to me.
Here are a few of the stories that we’ve broken by the years. These aren’t stories where we followed someone else, they’re things that we broke first and nailed. I don’t think the NY Times or anyone else can point to that kind of track record:
Google Buys Youtube (we had the parties and the price nailed)
Yahoo’s Offer To Buy Facebook (we posted internal Yahoo documents showing their valuation modeling of the Facebook deal, and broke the fact of the discussions first)
Google/Yahoo Search Deal (we broke the news that a deal was happening, down to the day it was being announced, although we were off by two hours considering Yahoo changed the moment. that was a major stock market mover)
Existence of New Palm Pre (we were the first to report on the existence of the Pre)
Palm’s second Pre-like phone (we were the first to report on the second Palm phone using the Pre OS)
Bebo Getting Acquired (we had the price range and speculated on lots of buyers while competitors were yelling that it wasn’t true)
Facebook In Dubai Raising More Money (story was 100% true, despite the fact that Facebook continuously denied that they were raising more money right up until they announced that they had raised more money)
Cisco Buys Flip (we had parties and price, no on else was anywhere near that story)
MySpace Founder/CEO Chris DeWolfe firing (we owned that story, plus we broke the news on the new COO)
These are just a few of the big stories we’ve broken by the years, and there are countless other smaller stories that we’ve owned completely as well (like this). Readers flock to us considering we have the most interesting tech news and considering we always maintain 100% transparency. Our love of that community is obvious to our readers. I just wish fear of the unknown didn’t blind the NY Times and others to the future of journalism. considering that fear is driving them precisely away from the truth.
I always shudder when journalists say “don’t say something, get a source to say it and thereupon quote them.” It leads to really terrible stuff. posing that you’re writing one story when you’re really writing another, and soon after twisting what your sources tell you to fit whatever it is that your editor told you to write isn’t ethical journalism. It may check all the boxes that were laid out for you in journalism school, but it isn’t anything other than op-ed with nothing real to back it up.
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