Cross-posted from XCity Magazine

The future of journalism, according to The Guardian’s ’3 Little Pigs’ film, is “open journalism”. Users are becoming part of every element of news production. The newsroom no longer has walls.

If that is going to happen then journalists need to huff, and puff, and blow down three particular houses of our own: our preconceptions around the sources that we use online; around why people contribute to the news process; and about how we protect our sources.

The house of straw: the myth of democratisation

It’s well documented that not everyone has access to the web, and that that access is unequally distributed according to age, class, and various other factors. Even among those who have access, some are more vocal, more literate, and generally busier than others.

At a basic level, even when we seek out voices, we narrow the possible ‘sample’ of voices by relying on particular channels: we prefer Twitter over Facebook, Facebook over forums, and forums over Flickr groups. So as our processes rely more on these platforms we need to make sure that we challenge those habits (picking up the phone doesn’t solve things: not everyone has a listed landline either) and make ourselves as accessible as possible across numerous platforms too.

More importantly, perhaps, we need to monitor the ways that social media platforms can – and are – effectively censored by authorities and organisations in the UK. Those wanting to find critical voices on the day of the royal wedding, for example, would have found a surprising lack of them on Facebook, where 50 legal activist pages, including UK Uncut, had been shut down in the run up to the May Day bank holiday. The map, as they say, is not the territory.

The house of sticks: giving users the tools

It’s good to see that we’re moving beyond the ‘build it and they shall come’ mentality of publishing; the assumption of the gate keeper that we don’t need to give people a reason to contribute. In an open journalism system we’re no longer gatekeepers, and we need to give people the means, motive and opportunity to come to us – or for us to go to them.

We need to give our sources as many reasons as possible to participate in ‘open journalism’ – whether that is freedom of information (FOI), open data, acknowledgement, or picking up the batons that they hand on.

In some cases that will involve lobbying for a retention or extension of laws such as the FOI Act, or for release of publicly-funded data, as The Guardian has with Charles Arthur’s Free Our Data campaign. Or for more protection of whistleblowers.

More broadly, we should be concerned with legal developments that make it easy for organisations or public authorities to prevent the publication of information they do not like. Some recent examples include the use of harassment law, Section 127 of the Communications Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act (see this recent decision and video), copyright laws, and so on.

The house of bricks: protecting sources at every point of contact

One of the reasons for Wikileaks’ success was the way it solved a security problem between sources and journalists. Part of that was technical, but part also legal: when the Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera launched their own Wikileaks clones, commentators pointed out that not only did they both have security weaknesses, but that that they would still be no match for requests from government agencies:

“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, [Al Jazeera's service] can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” [WSJ's] SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is“insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”

Providing a secure facility for passing on leaked documents is just the most obvious aspect of the contact between journalists and sources, but with so much of that contact taking place digitally, journalists will need to understand the data trail that is being laid by both parties.

Brian McDermott, for example, writes about how facial recognition technology “might be driving some sources away” from the news. In 2010 Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was quoted saying:

“Show us 14 photos of yourself, and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the Internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”

Even bloggers are vulnerable. Previously on OJB I blogged about the sad case of Nightjack, a police blogger outed by The Times. Their report, it now turns out, relied on the hacking of Nightjack’s email account, while Belle de Jour and Girl With A One Track Mind say they were also hacked. Hacking from a different source appears to have been used against journalists in Tunisia.

For journalists working in an ‘open’ system this is problematic: trust is our bargaining chip. Local journalists understand this when they see their national counterparts parachuting into an area and acting unethically, giving their profession a bad name without having to stick around to take the consequences.

Nowadays a journalist or brand using questionable methods to get their story will find those methods associated with their name on Google.

We can give users the means, but without trust they have no motive to choose that particular journalist to work with.

In timely fashion, Cleland Thom offers a checklist of 10 ways for journalists to protect online sources. What’s notable from this generally very useful list is the ‘horse has already bolted’ reaction to some of the points.

• Is it possible for us to cover a patch without ‘friending’, following or connecting to anyone who might potentially leak a story to us at some point?
• Even the first tip – to use direct messaging instead of public messaging – has a vulnerability: if the person registered with the service using their work email, then a DM will show up in the work’s email inbox.
• Operating from an assumption that we will already be connected to potential sources, how can we protect them?

Thom covers a lot of the ground already: don’t talk about who you’re meeting; assume all your electronic communication is or will be made public. But perhaps there’s an educational role here as well. When we do meet a contact in person, ask which email account their Twitter DMs go to; ask if their mobile phone is owned by their employers; and make sure no one is taking pictures for their Facebook account. If we have to make a call, to use Skype, and tell the other person to delete their call log.

Increasingly, police will not need to ask journalists for their sources: interception of communications; approaches to web hosts and ISPs; and a quiet word with the social media platform hosts are all now options.

As users become more savvy to the vulnerabilities of living in public, we’ll have to up our game with our new ‘open’ colleagues if we are going to earn their trust.

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Note: for those coming from Poynter’s summary of part of this post, the phrase ‘don’t have to be trained’ has an ambiguity that could be misunderstood. I’ve expanded on the relevant section to clarify.

Another set of answers to another set of questions (FAQs). These are posed by a UK university student:

How would you define the blogosphere?

The blogosphere is, technically, all blogs – but those don’t often have much connection to each other. I think it’s better to talk of many ‘blogospheres’ around different topics, e.g. the political blogosphere and so on.

The term has become more problematic as the blog form has spread beyond pure blog platforms: for example, social networks give users blogging functionality (e.g. status updates); Twitter is a microblogging platform; and photo, video and audio sharing sites add a multimedia dimension.

It’s probably more useful simply to talk about a community of interest rather than a blogosphere.

What about the issue of the blogosphere being accurate and pursuing the truth, as contrary to ‘proper’ journalism there is no regulation and no rules?

It’s a false comparison, in all sorts of ways. Firstly. the blogosphere is defined by platform, whereas journalism is defined by form. You can’t say blogging is or is not journalism, any more than you can say printing is or is not journalism.

Secondly, it’s a selective definition. There is plenty of journalism which is unregulated (not every publisher is a member of the PCC) and plenty of blogging which is ‘regulated’, either formally (bloggers adhering to a code of conduct, or being members of the NUJ or similar) but, more often, informally (being ‘regulated’/held to account by users).

Ultimately, bloggers and journalists both have to follow ‘rules’, most notably the laws that apply to us all. The internet is not a lawless wild west. Bloggers and journalists also have to follow the rules of society – norms and values which, if transgressed, lead to social exclusion. Many bloggers seek to hold journalists to account in ways that they see regulators failing at, so the argument can be made both ways: are journalists, driven by commercial demands, more likely to publish false or inaccurate information than bloggers who do not have the same demands? The truth is that both commercial and amateur journalism is subject to positive and negative forces in that respect.

This post on blogging vs journalism ethics has more.

To what extent are people more easily deceived by what is read on blogs and is it possible to stop false information from spreading?

Again, there is a problem here with treating ‘blogs’ in general, just as there is in treating the media in general. Journalists are among the least trusted professions – in general – but dig deeper and you find that BBC journalists have much more trust, and tabloid ones less. The Daily Star is trusted less than Twitter (a stupid comparison, but illustrative nonetheless), but The Times is trusted more than many other publications.

So, people are ‘more easily deceived’ by what is credible. They make judgements on a variety of criteria: the brand, the journalist, the context, and particularly the information itself. This applies whether the story is on a blog or a mainstream media outlet.

I’d love to see some research which explores what role the platform has in that mix when applied to specific content (e.g. show people the same content on different platforms and look at differing trust levels, then change the author, etc. to see how much impact that has), rather than research which simply asks people ‘How much do you trust blogs/newspapers/etc?’

Is it possible to stop false information from spreading? It is certainly possible to seek to spread the true story, and social media helps with this – again, whether it comes from blogs or the press (witness the various Twitter uproars over misleading media coverage). When shutting down social media was mooted after the UK riots the emergency services objected because they said social media allowed them to debunk rumours much faster than would otherwise be possible – which I think is illustrative.

We also have to acknowledge that false information is spread by traditional news organisations as well, and blogs have played an important role in tackling this too.

How can blogs actively promote truthful news/stories when contrary to media outlets, the bloggers are not necessarily trained?

There’s an assumption that all journalists are “trained”. They’re not. Many journalists have not been to any sort of journalism school, and some don’t receive in-house training.

Likewise, many bloggers have studied journalism or media, or done journalism or media production training courses.

We should also remember that journalism training is a relatively modern thing – for a long time most journalists entered the profession without training, and some great journalism has been produced by ‘untrained’ journalists.

There’s the suggestion here that people need require training in order to tell the truth. They don’t, of course. People, by and large, tell the truth. There’s a certain egotism to journalists who feel that their trade somehow has a monopoly on truth-telling.

In practical terms, journalism training largely takes truth-telling for granted as something that has been learned many years previously (if it hasn’t then that is addressed in informal and formal feedback).

Journalism training consists, if we’re honest I think, of taking ‘the truth’ – which can be complex, boring, and confusing, and showing how to turn that into a story – simple, interesting (through, for example, focusing on a ‘conflict’, even where that may not be as important as portrayed) and clear. Or, even before then, of which parts of ‘the truth’ to seek out to optimise your chances of getting ‘the story’ quickest.

As journalists we know that the truth is often more complicated than we represent it, so we cannot accuse bloggers of being generically unreliable without acknowledging that our own methods have flaws too.

We also know that any truth that we present is always partial – subject to the limitations of what information we could gather in the time available to us. Official statements and data go unchallenged; we run out of time to find an appropriate ‘victim’ – or we generalise from the same one that everyone else did. When the news agenda moves on, journalists don’t always return to check what else we know. Bloggers, at least, can be less concerned with the news agenda (but they can’t always get an official reaction).

The opportunity in online journalism – whether by professionals or amateurs – is to better represent that complexity, through linking to more detail (full interviews or raw footage, original documents, complete data) or providing for interactivity (how the story affects their postcode, family, or school; experiencing how a process works)

I’d also be interested to see how news consumers’ judgment of ‘truthfulness’ evolves with the medium. Will we attribute more credibility to a story if there are links to source material? Will we be more sceptical if comments are turned off? If we correct content rather than treat it as static? Bloggers tend to be better at all the above – journalists need to catch up.

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Here’s the latest in my attempt to answer questions publicly so that I can lazily point people to the answers when they ask them again. These are from a Norwegian student at London Metropolitan University:

Do you consider yourself a journalist? Why?

Yes, when I produce journalism. That is: finding newsworthy information and communicating it to others. I find G Stuart Adam’s definition best here – sadly no longer online but copied below:

“Journalism is an invention or a form of expression used to report and comment in the public media on the events and ideas of the here and now. There are at least five elements in such a definition: (1) a form of expression that is an invention; (2) reports of ideas and events; (3) comments on them;(4) the public circulation of them; and (5) the here and now.”

I studied journalism, worked as an editor, and am paid to write journalism and books. I’ve also founded a website with funding from a broadcaster – all of these would be considered institutional bases for declaring myself a “journalist”. But even if that wasn’t the case I would consider much of what I write unpaid to be journalism.

What are the main distinctions between journalists and bloggers?

Journalists are defined by what they produce; bloggers are defined by the technology they use.

If the blogger several times in their blog comes up with raw material and strives to be objective with some sources, do you think we then can view them as journalists? Why?

Yes. See Adams’ definition above.

But also, there are journalists who produce no raw material and do not strive to be objective with their sources, and we still call them journalists simply because they work for a magazine, newspaper or broadcaster. I don’t think the title counts for that much – journalists seem to project a lot of values onto the title that don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, and are not necessarily shared by non-journalists.

As journalists don’t really have to have some sort of journalist degree - how then can a blogger become a journalist?

By producing journalism.

Which kind of blogs can we trust as journalistic pieces of writing? Can we really trust their blogs if they ‘just look nice’?

The link has been at the heart of blogging since its beginnings as a technological platform, and bloggers are expected to link to their sources. It is difficult to trust a blogger that doesn’t link to their sources.

So how can we trust blogs? By the evidence that they give for what they write, and the quality of that evidence. Curiously, many professional journalists still expect users to trust them without showing their own evidence, and that leads to suspicion.

A further source of trust is how a blog stands up to interrogation – do they respond to questions in the comments? Again, mainstream publishers could learn a lot from this.

There have been some situations in my native country, Norway, where bloggers don’t have anything on their blog saying they have been promoting lots of cosmetics and fashion brands. What do you think of bloggers that promotes brands without saying this?

Firstly, it’s increasingly illegal. Both the ASA and the OFT in the UK have started to take an interest in this and take on a punitive role. And clearly there are ethical issues as well – whether an ‘outed’ blogger’s blogging career is effectively ended depends on the ethics of their particular community, but socially the punishment can be as harsh if not harsher than a journalist – whose work and personal life are likely to be more separate – would expect to suffer.

Secondly, I don’t think we should be naive enough to think this is limited to blogging. Magazines in some sectors are enormously close to their advertisers, for example, and will fail to disclose deals that basically lie behind editorial – your example is quite close to this. Ad sales people make promises to advertisers to clinch a deal and products make their way into magazines as a result – each person in that chain makes a tiny compromise on their values which adds up to a much larger one. And of course there are explicitly corrupt journalists who will accept money to write about particular items in their work – unsurprisingly sometimes when you learn how much they are paid by the publisher.

In a nutshell where there is enormous pressure on a person – whether that’s to meet advertising targets, to pay the rent, or to keep a company alive – then people will make unethical decisions, whether they are bloggers, journalists or publishers.

You may find some other answers to these and similar questions at http://audioboo.fm/tag/faq and http://onlinejournalismblog.com/category/faq/

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Yet another survey came out this month providing comfort to those who still refuse to believe that new media forms like blogs represent a genuine threat to their businesses.

Only 18% of people questioned trusted “personal blogs”, while 39% trusted radio or magazines and 46% print newspapers.

I get this sort of stat thrown at me every time I speak to rooms full of journalists. It’s a meaningless stat, reflecting nothing. You trust what you’ve learned to trust, whether that’s one paper over another, one broadcaster over another, or one blog over another. I don’t trust “newspapers” – I trust one or two. I don’t trust “blogs”, I trust the ones I’ve communicated with.

And that’s where individual blogs have an advantage: they can have a personal conversation with the reader. The author can enter into discussion, add corrections and links. Their trust is built on a relationship, not on a brand.

More interesting in this research are the 3 sources which come out as more trusted than mainstream media: Emails from people we know (how many of us feel we ‘know’ a particular blogger?); consumer reviews (a staple of blogs); and, curiously, portals/search engines (links). And why do people trust these more than ‘radio’ or ‘newspapers’?

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