“[W]hen that naming happens, the case is over before it’s begun: no matter whether the accused is guilty or innocent, they are handed a life sentence. Until the day they die, whenever a potential employer or a new friend Googles their name – up will come the allegation. And, prison terms notwithstanding, that allegation carries the same punishment as guilt – a lifetime as an unemployable, unfriendable, outcast. There’s a reason why the Internet is a great way to ruin someone with false allegations – and it’s the same reason why falsely accused people are just as likely to harm themselves as guilty people.”
The post was written after TechCrunch decided to delete a story about an alleged sexual assault and is a useful read in provoking us as journalists in any medium to reflect on how we treat stories of this type.
There are no hard rules of course, and associated legal issues vary from country to country.
In the Judith Griggs case, for example, was I right to post on the story? My decision was based on a few factors: firstly, I was reporting on the actions of those on her magazine’s Facebook page, rather than the ‘crime’ itself (which was hardly the first time a publisher has lifted). Secondly, I waited to see if Griggs responded to the allegations before publishing. Thirdly, I evaluated the evidence myself to see the weight of the allegations. Still, I’d be interested in your thoughts.
It’s barely 24 hours since the Cooks Source/Judith Griggs saga blew up, but so much has happened in that time that I thought it worth reflecting on how other publishers might handle a similar situation.
Although it’s an extreme example, the story has particular relevance to those publications that rely on Facebook or another web presence to publish material online and communicate with readers, and might at some point face a backlash on that platform.
In the case of Cooks Source, their Facebook page went from 100 ‘likes’ to over 3,000, as people ‘liked’ the page in order to post a critical comment (given the huge numbers of comments it’s fair to say there were many more people who un-‘liked’ the page as soon as their comment was posted). The first question that many publishers looking at this might ask is defensive:
Should you have a Facebook page at all?
It would be easy to take the Cooks Source case as an indication that you shouldn’t have a Facebook page at all – on the basis that it might become hijacked by your critics or enemies. Or that if you do create a page you should do so in a way that does not allow postings to the wall.
The problem with this approach is that it misunderstands the fundamental shift in power between publisher and reader. Just as Monica Gaudio was able to tell the world about Judith’s cavalier attitude to copyright, not having a Facebook page (or blog, etc.) for your publication doesn’t prevent one existing at all.
In fact, if you don’t set up a space where your readers can communicate with you and each other, it’s likely that they’ll set one up themselves – and that introduces further problems.
If you don’t have a presence online, someone else will create a fake one to attack you with
After people heard about the Cooks Source story, it wasn’t long before some took the opportunity to set up fakeTwitter accounts and a Facebook user account in Judith’s name. (UPDATE: Someone has registered JudithGriggs.com and pointed it at the Wikipedia entry for ‘public domain’, while a further Cooks Source Facebook page has been set up claiming that the original was “hacked”)
These were used in various ways: to make information available (the Twitter account biography featured Judith’s phone number and email); to satirise Judith’s actions through mock-updates; and to tease easily-annoyed Facebook posters into angry responses.
Some people’s responses on Facebook to the ‘fake’ Judith suggested they did not realise that she was not the real thing, which leads to the next point.
A passive presence isn’t enough – be active
Judith obviously did have a Facebook account, but it was her slowness to respond to the critics that allowed others to impersonate her.
Indeed, it was several hours before Judith Griggs made any response on the Facebook page, and when she did (assuming it is genuine – see comments below) it was through the page’s welcoming message – in other words, it was a broadcast.
This might be understandable given the unmanageable volume of comments that had been posted by this time – but her message was also therefore easily missed in the depths of the conversation, and it meant that the ‘fake’ Judith was able to continue to impersonate her in responses to those messages.
One way to focus her actions in a meaningful way might have been to do a ‘Find’ on “Griggs” and respond there to clarify that this person was an imposter.
Instead, by being passive Judith created a vacuum. The activity that filled that vacuum led in all directions, including investigating the magazine more broadly and contacting advertisers and stockists.
Climb down quickly and unreservedly
While being passive can create a vacuum, being active can – if not done in a considered way – also simply add fuel to the fire.
The message that Judith eventually posted did just that. “I did apologise to Monica via email, but aparently [sic] it wasnt enough for her,” she wrote, before saying “You did find a way to get your “pound of flesh…””.
This “blaming the victim”, as one wall poster described it, compounded the situation and merely confirmed Judith’s misunderstanding of the anger directed at her.
An apology clearly wasn’t what people wanted – or at least, not this sort of reserved apology.
A quicker, fuller response that demonstrated an understanding of her community would have made an enormous difference in channeling the energy that people poured into what became an increasingly aggressive campaign.
UPDATE (Nov 9): As of a few hours ago Cooks Source appear to have published an official statement which includes a more fullsome apology. The statement doesn’t help, however, partly because it doesn’t address the key issues raised by critics about where it gets content and images from, partly because its sense of priorities doesn’t match those of its audience (the apology comes quite late in the statement), and partly because it is internally inconsistent. Commenters on the Facebook page and blogs have already picked these apart.
Even if Judith had shut down the Facebook page (not a good idea – it would have merely added further fuel to the fire), the discussion – which had now become a campaign and investigation – was taking place elsewhere. Engaging in that in a positive way might have helped.
A magazine is not just content
One of the key principles demonstrated by the whole affair is that magazines are about much more than just the content inside, but about the community around it, and their values. This is what advertisers are buying into. When I asked one of Cooks Source’s advertisers why they decided to withdraw their support, this is what they said:
“I would estimate that between the emails, [Facebook] messages, calls, and people following us on Twitter, we’ve been contacted by more than 100 people since I first heard of this about 5 hours ago. That doesn’t include many many people who commented on fb to our posts stating that we had requested to pull our ads from the publication. We are just simply trying to run our small business, which by most standards is still in its infancy, and being associated with publications like this that don’t respect its readers (who are all our potential customers) is unacceptable to us in light of their practices. What angers me even more is the fact that it is being made light if by the Editor herself. It is disrupting our business and linking us to something we do not support.”
UPDATE 7: The official Cooks Source webpage now features a rather confusing statement on the saga, apologising to Monica Gaudio and saying they have made the donation asked for. The page claims that their Facebook page was “cancelled” and “since hacked”. It’s not clear what they mean by these terms as the original Facebook page is still up and, clearly, could not be hacked if it had been “cancelled”. They may be referring to the duplicate Facebook page which also claims (falsely) the original was “hacked”. In addition the statement says they have “cancelled” their website – but as the statement is published on their website it may be that by “cancelled” they mean all previous content has been removed. This discussion thread picks out further inconsistencies and omissions.
UPDATE 5: The magazine’s Facebook page has now been updated with a message from editor Judith saying she “did apologise” but “apparently it wasn’t enough for her”, shown below:
For much of today people have been tweeting and blogging about the magazine editor with 30 years’ experience demonstrating a by now familiar misunderstanding of copyright law and the ‘public domain’.
To the writer whose material they used without permission she apparently responded that “the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!”
What makes this of particular interest is how the affair has blown up not just across Twitter and Reddit but on the magazine’s own Facebook page, demonstrating how this sort of mistake can impact very directly on your own readers – and stockists and advertisers:
Meanwhile, others were suggesting investigating the magazine further:
It all adds up to a perfect lesson for magazine editors – not just in copyright, but in PR and community management.
The previous posts of this series have left an impression that online journalism is left behind by the technological developments in new media. Linear text is preferred over hypertext and multimedia (hypermedia). Traditional norms of gatekeeping are preferred over participatory journalism and alternative flows of information, albeit interactivity seems to play a larger role when it comes to how major breaking news events, like crises events, are researched and covered.
Journalists and editors seem, at least to some extent, eager to embrace change brought forward by new technology, while users don’t seem to care. All in all; it seems that technology may not be the main driving force of developments in online journalism. The question is therefore: how can research on online journalism better grasp why online journalism develops as it does?
Some researchers suggest that ethnography and a closer look at the practices and routines of online news production is the answer. Pablo Boczkowski is a premier example of this trend, first with his 2004 “classic” Digitizing the News, and now with the newly released News at Work — a book in which he investigates online journalism from multiple perspectives (from inside the newsroom to audience perception).
The case studies presented in Domingo and Paterson (eds) Making Online News (2008) — a book which comes in a new edition with new studies next year — are also examples of this ethnography-trend. However, both Boczkowski’s work and the studies in Making Online Newsare quite dominated by the technological discourse.
These studies provide valuable insights into the complexity of online journalism production and put forward findings that shed light on why technology is not utilized to the degree that has been previously postulated.
Notwithstanding the significant contributions of these studies, there are still many shortcomings of the research on online journalism. I will conclude this series with six suggestions for further research.
First, studies of online journalism could benefit from a broader contextualization Mitchelstein and Boczkowski (2009) (restricted access) argue that the research on online journalism lacks historical dimensions. Relating online journalism to developments in journalism prior to the Internet boom could therefore be a suggestion. Viewing online journalism in reliance to media theory and how media and media products transform over time could be another. Mitchelstein and Boczkowski (2009) also identify a need for more cross-national studies, and for online journalism researchers to look beyond the newsroom and the news industry and take into account structural factors of for instance the labor market and comparable processes in other industries in order to better understand “who gets to produce online news, how that production takes place, and what stories result from these dynamics” (2009, 576). It should however be noted that Mark Deuze’s 2007 book Media Work (preview in Google books) and a special issue of the journal Journalism on Newsworkto some extent address these shortcomings.
Second, the research on online journalism is flooded by a range of theoretical concepts that are either interchangeable or are interpreted differently by different researchers. Concepts like interactivity, hypertext and multimedia are understood in different ways, and other concept, like genre and innovation are generally used without any theoretical discussion on what they represent and how they might inform the research on online journalism. A stronger emphasis on conceptualization is therefore needed
Third, most of the research on online journalism is limited to a focus on the presentation and to some degree the production and reception of hard/breaking news and the rhetoric of online news sites’ front-pages. The development of other genres therefore seems to have been downplayed in the research, even though some studies have been conducted on online feature journalism (Boczkowski 2009 (restricted access); and some of my own research (my PhD as pdf)). Furthermore, sections and stories that are reached by other means than via links from the front-page (e.g. traffic to stories and sections generated from search engines) seem to be under-represented in the research. A stronger emphasis on the diversification of online journalism is therefore needed.
Fourth, research on online journalism could benefit from a greater recognition of and reflection on the text as a research unit. Although most research on online journalism deals with text in one way or the other, there is a striking neglect of theoretical and methodological reflections on what texts are, how they facilitate communication, how they relate to media, and how they connect media with society. Genre theory and discourse analysis could for instance be valuable tools to establish research approaches that aim at investigating online journalism as communication. Lüders et al. (2010) (restricted access), for instance, show how the concept of genre provides vital insights into the emergence of new media like the personal weblog.
Fifth, although some of the research mentioned in this series makes longitudinal claims, the empirical material is seldom of longitudinal character. This seems to be a flaw considering the swift development of online journalism and the lack of common theoretical and methodological approaches, which makes comparisons between findings difficult.
And finally, sixth, research of online journalism suffers from a methodological deficiency. The research is dominated by content analysis, surveys and interviews. Qualitative approaches are rarely utilized, even though ethnographic news production studies seem to gain popularity. However, given the limited cases that are possible to investigate with such a methodology, more ethnographic research is need. Furthermore, content analysis should to a greater extent be combined with qualitative textual analysis of online journalism texts – all in order to uncover the complexity of online journalism.
The latest in the Hyperlocal Voices series looks at new hyperlocal blog The Lincolnite, launched by recent Lincoln University graduates, who also managed to secure funding for their venture.
Who were the people behind The Lincolnite, and what were their backgrounds?
The people behind The Lincolnite are Daniel Ionescu (Managing Editor), Elizabeth Fish (Associate Editor), and Chris Brandrick (Senior Editor). Daniel and Elizabeth are journalism graduates from the University of Lincoln, while Chris is a Web Technology graduate from the same institution.
Besides our journalism and web technology training, all of us are also freelance writers for several publications, and have run the award-winning student newspaper at the University of Lincoln for two years.
We also have several contributors and freelancers on board.
What made you decide to set up The Lincolnite?
The idea was something I had at the back of my mind for a couple of years. I believe hyperlocal can be one of the strengths of small independent media outlets, and Lincoln was missing such a publication.
The small city (approx. 100,000 people) is served by county-wide media (one newspaper and two radio stations), yet no dedicated local news source existed. So The Lincolnite came to fill a gap in the market in the city — a news website dedicated to covering only Lincoln. Continue reading →
I can’t compete with that, so I thought I’d start a list of Media Oops-es, i.e., cockups. This is all in the interest of media transparency, you understand. Shooting from the hip is just as big a problem for blogging journalists as it is for rednecks and Harriet Harman – though I suspect her invective was planned.
(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog in addition to the Wardman Wire).
The first one comes via Justin McKeating, who’s doing something slightly similar, though I suspect we’ll be tracking different bits of media silliness.
Rentoul came up with a slightly unflattering comparison:
A friend draws my attention to a resemblance I had not noticed.
Ed Miliband, he says, reminds him of Watto, the hovering, scuzzy garage owner on Tatooine who enslaves little boys in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, my favourite film of the six.
Miliband spoke in his speech to Labour conference of his being compared to “Wallace out of Wallace and Gromit” – although he department from the text issued, “I can see the resemblance”, to say: “I gather some people can see the resemblance.”
But I thought he looked more like Gromit – the dog who is cleverer than his master who expresses himself mainly by his eyebrows.
If he’d just left it there none of us would have made a fuss. But he thought better of it and deleted the piece. As Justin says:
It looks like the mighty John Rentoul thought better of comparing Ed Miliband to the Watto character from The Phantom Menace and pulled the post without comment. You now get a ‘page not found’ error when you click on the link. Particularly piquant was when Rentoul noted Watto is ‘scuzzy’ and ‘enslaves little boys’. And he deleted his tweet advertising his insightful blog post (we know it was there because somebody replied to it). What a shame, denying future students of journalism this exemplary example of the craft.
Who am I to deny an education to students of journalism? I love computer networks with memories; and also search engines with caches.
For the record, here’s the Milliman, who Rentoul (and everybody else) has previously compared to a panda:
The best bit is that the next Rentoul blog post was all about “tasteless metaphors“.
Pot. Kettle. White and black.
(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog).
Science journalist Angela Saini has written an interesting post on ‘devaluing journalism’ that I felt I had to respond to. “The profession [of journalism] is being devalued,” she argues.
“Firstly, by magazines and newspapers that are turning to bloggers for content instead of experienced journalists. And secondly, by people who are willing to work for free or for very little (interns, bloggers, cut-price freelancers). Now this is fine if you’re just running your own site in your spare time, but the media is always going to suffer if journalists don’t demand fair pay for doing real stories. Editors will get away with undercutting their writers. Plus, they’ll be much keener to employ legions of churnalists on the cheap. In the long-run, the quality of stories will fall.”
Firstly let me say that I broadly agree with most of what Angela is saying: that full time journalists offer something that other participants in journalism do not; and that publishers and editors see interns and bloggers as sources of cheap content. I also strongly support interns being paid.
But I think Angela mixes economic value with editorial value, and that undermines the general thrust of the argument.
What reduces the value of something economically? Angela’s argument seems to rest on the idea of increased supply. And indeed, entry-level journalism wages have been consistently depressed partly as a result of increasing numbers of people who want to be journalists and who will work for free, or for low wages – but also partly because of the demands of and pressures on the industry itself.
“Although entry-level journalists are badly paid, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the economics of Nicholas Kristof’s salary. Kristof’s pay goes up or down based on what the papers can afford, which is driven by subscriptions and advertising. In fact, the more liars and bad writers are out there with healthy audiences, the bigger is the pie for the best journalists to fight over. Effectively, that’s just a few million more hacks that Kristof is better than. The best columns in journalism are a classic positional good: their worth is determined by how much better they are than their competitors.”
Editorial value, not economic
Angela’s point, however, is not about the economic value of professional journalism but the editorial value – the quality, not the quantity.
There’s an obvious link between the two. Pay people very little, and they won’t stick around to become better reporters (witness how many journalists leave the profession for PR as soon as they have families to feed). Rely on interns and you not only have a more unskilled workforce but the skilled part of your workforce has to spend part of its time doing informal ‘training’ of those interns.
So where do bloggers come in? Angela mentions them in two senses: firstly as being chosen over experienced journalists, and second as part of a list of people willing to work for little or for free.
‘Blogger’ is meaningless
But, unlike the labels ‘intern’ and ‘freelance journalist’, ‘blogger’ is a definition by platform not by occupation, and takes in a vast range of people, some of whom are very experienced journalists themselves (with high rates), and some of whom have more specialist expertise than journalists. It also includes aspiring journalists and “cut price freelancers”.
Does their existence ‘devalue’ journalism? Economically, you might argue that it increases the supply of journalism and so drives down its price (I wouldn’t, but you might. That’s not my point).
But editorially? Well, here we have to take in a new factor: bloggers don’t have to write about what publishers tell them to. And most of them don’t. So while the increase in bloggers has expanded the potential market for contributors – it’s also expanded the content competing with your own. Competition – in strictly economic terms – is supposed to drive quality up. But I’m not going to argue that that’s happening, because this is not a market economy we’re looking at, but a mixed one.
I guess my point is that this isn’t a simple either/or calculation any more. The drive to reduce costs and increase profits has always led to the ‘devaluing of journalism’ as a profession. Blogging and the broader ability for anyone to publish does little to change that. What it does do, however, is introduce different dynamics into the picture. When you divorce ‘journalism’ from its commercial face, ‘publishing’, as the internet has done, then you also break down the relationship between economic devaluation and editorial devaluation when it comes to journalism in aggregate.
Ahead of speaking this week in Barcelona, I spoke to a few people in Spain about the situation regarding open data in the country. One of those people is Ricard Espelt, a member of Nuestracausa, “a group of people who wanted to work on projects like MySociety [in Spain]”. The group broke up and Ricard now runs Redall Comunicacao. Among Ricard’s projects is Copons 2.0: an “approach to consensus decision making”.
This is what Ricard had to say about the problems around open data, e-democracy and bottom-up projects in Spain:
I think there are three points to bear in mind when we to try to analyse how the tools are changing politics & public administration:
The process of the governments to review data, so it will be easier to use data for all the citizens. Open data.
The process of the governments to involve the citizens in the decisions. E-democracy.
The action of the citizens (individuals or groups) to engage other citizens to work for the community. Is a good way to make lobby and influence in the decisions of the governments.
Spain, like other countries, has been developing all these points with different levels of success. Continue reading →
In a guest post for the Online Journalism Blog, Shane Redlick shares his experiences of launching two hyperlocal startups – one, launched 5 years ago, based on a traditional advertising model. The second – launched this year – seeking to innovate with a broker-based model and crowdsourcing technologies.
2005: Opinion 250 News
In 2005, myself along with 2 partners launched the hyperlocal startup Opinion 250 News in Prince George, British Columbia (Canada). Myself and my company performed technical development, admin and financial tasks, while the other 2 partners (long time media industry people/semi-retired) did all the reporting and managed a small team of topical/weekly writers.
All content is original for local news. We had a lot going for us and we managed to make some good gains in the first year. To date the company is profitable and can pay modest salaries for those involved. But it has taken the better of 4 years to reach that point.
The effect we were having locally was significant (read comments to story here, for instance). The biggest challenge for us was building monthly ad revenue.
We did not sell on CPC or CPM basis. It was a flat monthly cost. We had a couple of people selling the ads and we had quite a bit of local good will and resulting support via ads. Even with a lot going for us however, this was a big challenge. In fact in the first month, when we launched, we’d sold nearly $10,000 CAD (monthly recurring) in ads. Continue reading →
Earlier this year I and Andy Brightwell conducted some research into one of the successful investigations on my crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate. I wanted to know what had made the investigation successful – and how (or if) we might replicate those conditions for other investigations.
I presented the findings (presentation embedded above) at the Journalism’s Next Top Model conference in June. This post sums up those findings.
The investigation in question was ‘What do you know about The London Weekly?‘ – an investigation into a free newspaper that was (they claimed – part of the investigation was to establish if this was a hoax) about to launch in London.
The people behind the paper had made a number of claims about planned circulation, staffing and investment that most of the media reported uncritically. Martin Stabe, James Ball and Judith Townend, however, wanted to dig deeper. So, after an exchange on Twitter, Judith logged onto Help Me Investigate and started an investigation.
A month later members of the investigation had unearthed a wealth of detail about the people behind The London Weekly and the facts behind their claims. Some of the information was reported in MediaWeek and The Media Guardian podcast Media Talk; some formed the basis for posts on James Ball’s blog, Journalism.co.uk and the Online Journalism Blog. Some has, for legal reasons, remained unpublished. Continue reading →
Online Journalism Blog 
