I’ve been updating a newsroom policy guide for a project some of my students will be working on, with a particular section on objectivity and impartiality. As this has coincided with the debate on fact-checking stirred by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, I thought I would reproduce the guidelines here, and invite comments on whether you think it hits the right note:

Objectivity and impartiality: newsroom policy

Objectivity is a method, not an element of style. In other words:

• Do not write stories that give equal weight to each ‘side’ of an argument if the evidence behind each side of the argument is not equal. Doing so misrepresents the balance of opinions or facts. Your obligation is to those facts, not to the different camps whose claims may be false.
• Do not simply report the assertions of different camps. As a journalist your responsibility is to check those assertions. If someone misrepresents the facts, do not simply say someone else disagrees, make a statement along the lines of “However, the actual wording of the report…” or “The official statistics do not support her argument” or “Research into X contradict this.” And of course, link to that evidence and keep a copy for yourself (which is where transparency comes in).

Lazy reporting of assertions without evidence is called the ‘View From Nowhere’ – you can read Jay Rosen’s Q&A or the Wikipedia entry, which includes this useful explanation:

“A journalist who strives for objectivity may fail to exclude popular and/or widespread untrue claims and beliefs from the set of true facts. A journalist who has done this has taken The View From Nowhere. This harms the audience by allowing them to draw conclusions from a set of data that includes untrue possiblities. It can create confusion where none would otherwise exist.”

Impartiality is dependent on objectivity. It is not (as subjects of your stories may argue) giving equal coverage to all sides, but rather promising to tell the story based on objective evidence rather than based on your own bias or prejudice. All journalists will have opinions and preconceived ideas of what a story might be, but an impartial journalist is prepared to change those opinions, and change the angle of the story. In the process they might challenge strongly-held biases of the society they report on – but that’s your job.

The concept of objectivity comes from the sciences, and this provides a useful guideline: scientists don’t sit between two camps and repeat assertions without evaluating them. They identify a claim (hypothesis) and gather the evidence behind it – both primary and secondary.

Claims may, however, already be in the public domain and attracting a lot of attention and support. In those situations reporting should be open about the information the journalist does not have. For example:

• “His office, however, were unable to direct us to the evidence quoted”, or
• “As the report is yet to be published, it is not possible to evaluate the accuracy of these claims”, or
• “When pushed, X could not provide any documentation to back up her claims”.

Thoughts?

The first study (PDF) of magazines and their various approaches to websites, undertaken by Columbia Journalism Review, found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium.

There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached.

Following the responses to the multiple choice questionnaire and the following open-ended questions -

• What do you consider to be the mission of your website, does this differ from the mission of your print magazine?
• What do you consider to be the best feature of aspect of your website?
• What feature of your website do you think most needs improvement or is not living up to its potential?

- the researchers called for a collective, informed and contemporary approach to magazine websites with professional body support.

The findings were separated into the following 6 categories:

Staff Structure and Decision Making

The researchers found decision making on the website to be the single most important factor in how its website functions.

Most websites were staffed by people who primarily worked on the print editions, and less than a quarter of staff were hired with web experience (29 per cent).

Independent web editors were the only decision makers in the most profitable websites, and the higher a magazine’s circulation and monthly web traffic, the more likely it was to have an independent web editor making budget and content decisions.

Standards and Practices

The researchers found the approach to fact-checking and sub-editing for online content website standards were in general much less rigorous than for printed editions; 51 per cent of original content that appears on web sites is either not copy-edited at all, or is copy-edited less rigorously than in print.

Just under half (43 per cent) of respondents reported either a lower standard for fact-checking online (35 per cent), or no fact-checking at all (8 per cent).

Strangely, they found that websites are more likely to have lower standards in these areas as web traffic rises and when content decisions are made by independent web editors.

Many website editors correct errors without acknowledging the mistake; they are often more likely to be corrected than print, but less likely to publicise the correction – particularly when an independent web editor is involved.

The most common reason for material to appear online is because it ran in the print edition, often because it is breaking news, multi-media content or to maintain freshness and, sometimes, because the quality is not high enough to run in the print edition.

Business Model

For 68 per cent of surveyed publishers, advertising is the largest revenue source – just over half of the magazines (52 per cent) offer all their print material online for free, and profitable sites offer all of their content online for free more often than non-profitable ones.

Only about a third of magazine web sites make a profit, and magazines that publish more frequently, and those that have a higher web traffic, tend to have more profitable web sites.

However, they found magazine circulation generally has little bearing on web site profitability.

62 per cent of the web sites with between 1.5 million and 2 million unique monthly visitors were profitable, compared with 21 per cent of those with less than 50,000 unique monthly visitors.

Social media and community building

Unsurprisingly, most web sites, (47 per cent), have adopted social media tools and techniques, and do so more when independent web editors are in decision-making roles.

However, editorial standards tend to slip even more in this environment. Blogs are rarely copy-edited or fact-checked and comments are moderated at editors’ discretion.

Most magazines have blogs on their Web sites (64 per cent), and those are mostly maintained by staff members (87 per cent); 39 per cent use freelancers or contract-writers for blogs.

Web sites are more likely to have blogs when independent web editors are in charge of the budget. Most magazines allow comments on blogs or other online content (73 per cent).

Technology

The researchers found most magazines are not keeping pace with mobile display and interactivity technology.

Less than one in five are designed for smartphones and very few are formatted for e-book readers (4 per cent).

Again, web sites are more likely to have multiple display options when independent web editors are in charge of budget or content decisions.

Roughly half of magazines surveyed use metrics to guide content decisions (47 per cent), but only 8 per cent closely monitor and rely on them.

Less than half use traffic statistics (43 per cent), and those that do so regularly for content decisions are significantly more likely to be profitable.

Web sites that receive more traffic are more likely to use traffic statistics in content decisions.

Most magazines name Google Analytics as the online metric that is most helpful to their web sites.

Content management systems vary, with custom-designs proving most popular.

Mission

Most editors said their website and their print magazine shared a common mission.

16 per cent of respondents said their Web site’s mission involved community-building with readers.

Interestingly, only 5 per cent mentioned new or unique content as integral to the site’s mission, with 96 per cent reporting the primary use of content from the print magazine online.

In conclusion, the researchers call for a “Habermassian convention” to continue the discussion of issues raised by the study.

They suggest an inclusive and wide-ranging approach to help foster the democratic ideal of the public sphere in online publishing, to address the challenges for the future of journalism and of online business models.

Specifically they call for the following questions to be addressed:

• What is keeping web experience out of magazines and why?
• Why doesn’t the industry create codes of conduct and guidelines on matters such as online fact-checking, copy-editing, and error-correction?
• Is it true, as one respondent said, “if it’s fact-checked, it’s not a blog,” and is this an existential or a definitional question?
• Subject for discussion: Why have earlier attempts at standardizing the world of blogs and social media notoriously failed? Is it, at long last, possible to identify best practices for using the tools and techniques of digital journalism?

The third part of the results of my survey of blogging journalists looks at how blogging has affected how stories are researched.

As journalists move onto gathering information for a story, the scope of easily accessible sources is made broader by journalists’ involvement in blogs.

It may be that in some cases the process of ‘having an idea in public’, as highlighted in part two, means that story research is increasingly done by readers before, or alongside, that done by the journalist. Once they begin pursuing a story journalists are using the blog format as a way to ‘put the call out’ for information and sources while they work.

Although journalists asking members of the public for information on a story is nothing new, the nature of the relationship appears to be different, in that it is a two-way, ongoing process:

“On hot-button stories where our readers are asking a lot of questions, we post updates every time we make a phone call. For example, [a company] declared bankruptcy and the new owner wouldn’t take the previous owner’s gift cards. Our readers were peeved and hounding us to do something. The corporate folks weren’t saying anything so we didn’t have any new information to report. Because we didn’t have any new info, we didn’t write anything in the paper. But on our blog, we would post updates at least daily to tell people when we left a message and if we had heard back yet. We eventually scored an interview with the new CEO and posted it in its entirety on our site. Another reporter saw it and called us. We swapped info. Our readers also post links to other stories on the topic from other news orgs.” (Respondent 63, US, newspapers)

In some examples, this collaboration becomes a form of crowdsourcing:

“Last year, there was a vote in the Senate to oust Renan Calheiros, the chairman of the house. The votes were kept in secret, and he was absolved. Interviewed, much more senators would say they had voted to oust Calheiros than the votes the proposal actually got. So, I proposed that readers contacted the senators to ask them about their reasons.” (Respondent 24, Brazil, freelance)

As highlighted previously, blogging journalists report finding it easier to find sources who don’t come from a government agency or professional association, and to keep up with events they are not participating in.

Many post links to original material and ongoing updates as they research, or to reports on stories that they do not have time to follow up.

But for some the pressure to publish meant more reliance on rumours, and less rigorous research, with the onus placed on blog readers to clarify and fact-check.

On a practical level the actual process of newsgathering is also changing as a result of the demands of the blog.

Journalists report being more likely to gather multimedia material such as images, video and audio to post on the blog – or, in the case of broadcast journalists, to gather more material than they used to, as there is now a platform for material that wouldn’t otherwise make it to broadcast.

“It ensures avoiding that trap of TV reporting,” noted one: “one sequence, two interviews and we have a story without digging deeper.” (Respondent 156, Belgium, TV).

More detail is shown in the following tables:

Read Part 4: Blogging and news production here.

Has blogging affected how you gather information on a story? Let me know in the comments.