What kind of journalism is most valuable? - and econ myths busted, in MoJo

Edited Oct 15.
Some blogposts (h/t Nieman Labs) & a story I've run across recently (h/t MuckReads), the latter illustrating the former.

What may I blog about? A journo practices & standards Q

My question to you: What aspects of last night's Meckler/McClintock forum are legitimate turf for blogging?

Salient aspects & facts:

Journalism manuals

There's probably a better compilation out there, but recently I've run across these -

• KPOV's citizen journalism handbook for radio (pdf)
• FAIR's investigative journalism manual. (This FAIR being the Forum for African Investigative Journalists , not the anti-immigration group.)
• Story-Based Inquiry - step by step investigative journalism, "treats investigative journalism as an integrated process focused on producing an original story." (h/t HelpMeInvestigate's 5 ways to simplify an investigation; added 2011-08-08)

Of the 3, the last seemed most worthwhile; but all are helpful.

Feedback for Poynter's online training site NewsU

Dear NewsU folks:

Miscellany - quotes and a story

Updated.
Mostly about journalism.

From Paul Graham's essay on essays -

When it comes to [collecting] surprises...there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But...how do you find the fruitful ones?

I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong.
...
Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're "inappropriate," or not important, or not what you're supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway.

If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don't do as you're told. Don't believe what you're supposed to.

From a Nov. 2007 talk in London by the NYT's Bill Keller - -

"The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers."

This part made me smile -

"My friend Jeff Jarvis, a blogger of long-standing and professor of journalism at the City University of New York - refers to news bloggers as "citizen journalists", which has a sweet, idealistic ring to it."

Something I just learned recently - Bill Keller's father, George M. Keller, was CEO of Chevron, and even had a stint as chairman of the board, of the American Petroleum Institute. It sounds like he led an interesting life...

Returning to journalism -

"The better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be." - David Halberstam

There are two ways of appearing "smart." First, you can write something so complex, obscure, and abstract that no one can refute your bullshit. Second, you can write simply, clearly and directly. If you have something interesting and true to say, then the second method is better. On the other hand, if you are forced to say something boring or false, then pick the first method (and then change your life).*

Investors need to learn to look for the little lies, those minor inconsistencies that can be the first clue to bigger problems.*

"It may be true, as [I.F.]Stone said, that "all governments lie," but democracy cannot function if journalists do too." - Eric Alterman*

Had second thoughts & removed the story link - writing that captures one's zeitgeist* at time T can seem too morbid at time T+5 minutes.

Compare and contrast: journalism vs. science

Journalism's got a lot in common with scientific research - in both endeavors you're trying to understand and convey the nature of reality. But there are differences too, that you may not grasp if you're coming at it from the "science" end - it's not just that "journalism's peer review is a good deal easier to sneak through."

The good Dr. Heisenberg plays a much larger role in journalism, because your forays into gathering data involve the efforts of, in effect, lab techs who may have a strong desire to skew or otherwise obscure the results. And you won't necessarily know whether they're trying to do so, since you barely know them - with each story, you're working with a different group of techs.

So you need to put a fair amount of effort into controlling for any bias introduced by the techs - which means running the same experiment using different techs, or - if you realize you've left some "wiggle room" in an experiment - rerunning it more rigorously, using the same tech.

(Stripping out the metaphors, what this means is that you'll want to ask multiple people the same question, and you may ask the same person multiple variants of the same question. Which, I have found, makes the lab techs take umbrage...)

News values of the Associated Press

"We abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions

We always strive to identify all the sources of our information...

We avoid behavior or activities that create a conflict of interest and compromise our ability to report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action.

[I]t is the responsibility of every one of us to ensure that these standards are upheld.

Any time a question is raised about any aspect of our work, it should be taken seriously.

Transparency is critical to our credibility..."

- from the AP News Values page

Related - "1919: Upton Sinclair includes a scathing criticism of the AP in his investigative book on contemporary journalism, The Brass Check."

Another thought on why we bury the lede

We bury the lede (aka take our time in getting to the point, aka circumlocute) because that's what we've been socialized to do in conversation, where if we don't, we get tagged with less-than-favorable labels.

The NCFocus staff seems to be averaging one thought a year on this topic; here's last year's.

A failure to communicate: Scientists, journalists, reality

A very nice explanation of why journalists - and scientists - have failed for so long to inform the public about global warming*, in Pants On Fire, part 1 over at Little Blog in the Big Woods - it's the very forseeable, and very unfortunate, outcome of their different cultural strictures and conventions, regarding communicating about reality:

...we [in our society] rely on scientific opinion, as reported; by reporters.
...
...[It is remarkably common] for humans to speak to each other, hold what passes for a conversation, and leave the conversation reasonably satisfied; but with no information having changed hands.
Scientists, journalists, "policy makers", and the general public, are doing this now, big time...[They] do not, in fact, speak the same languages; and they do not know it. We need interpreters, and have none...
[Consequence, re global warming:]
...The real equation, in 1988, was that 85% of the scientists who studied the problem were 85% sure we were heading for horrifyingly serious problems, and the majority of their opposition were known fools.
...[But] what [journalists] reported was: no one is sure, and Dr. Billy, a colorful contrarian, says "BULL!".

Not unrelated: xarker on Science and Media, and their practioners' respective failures to communicate and to adapt.

...a New Yorker cartoon of two aging scientists in a quiet, darkened lab office. One says to the other, "Well, at least we never stooped to popularizing science." There's a lot of dark humor implied in that subject, and it's not related solely to scientists.

And (Wed update) The Truth About Denial - Newsweek on the deniers' funding machine

Crowdsourced journalism at NCFocus

An account of the local crowdsourced/collaborative journalism projects I've tried to get started. Wanted to publish it now, since our Assignment Zero "crowdsourcing" interviews are slated to appear - or start to appear - at Wired this week, and since my A.Z. profile says I've been a "(rarely successful) instigator" of crowdsourced journalism projects but goes into no detail whatsoever.

Here are the crowdsourced journalism projects I've tried to instigate:

1. Last summer's project encouraging county leaders to see An Inconvenient Truth - a project perhaps best described in this post -
went strong on the "offering tickets and encouragement" phase (we offered a lot of tickets, and a lot of encouragement, and got a lot of people to take tickets and at least some to see it) but then fell short in the "collecting followup evaluations" phase; after my most active co-instigator moved away, I was pretty much on my own, and IMO you really do need a partner for a project like this - or for any project.

2. Its subsequent retrenchment and reformulation as an "ask your county supervisor if he/she has seen the film" project; I count this as a success in that we all did ask our respective Supes, and did report the outcome, and the project writeup did shed light on the views of our Supervisors.

3. Not crowdsourcing per se, but an attempt to do local collaborative journalism, by enlisting other news media outlets in a joint effort to look into Nevada City's then-poor drinking water (described in last January's post Citizen Journalism on NCFocus) was unsuccessful (two didn't respond; the third did respond, and did meet with city officials, but I wasn't invited and nothing was published about the result)

4. A more recent attempt from a few months ago, to mobilize a group to look into a local issue and to get editorial support from a newspaper to work with us, didn't get off the ground. We never got an answer from the paper, and the "mobilization moment" passed.
(This was mostly my fault; I didn't give this the sustained push it would have needed, to make it happen.)

So - by a "got the data, and the result got published" metric, there's been one success out of 4 attempts.

A bolus of quotes

Taleb:

Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?
[the News that oozes issue]

Laura Rozen:

The phenomenon of local papers like the KC Star avoiding publishing well reported material that local political constituencies would perhaps find inconvenient is an enormous disservice to the cities they cover. *

Philip Meyer:

We are trying to push journalism toward science. Almost everybody else, it seems on most days, is trying to push it toward art....

One response to information overload has been the elevation of spin. When attention-getting is more important than discovering and imparting the truth, the marketplace rewards those who are skilled at creating appearances. Our goal needs to be to find a way to help the marketplace reward the truth-tellers....*

Greenwald:

the predominant criticism of our media is not based on a desire that [reporters] act more like partisans than journalists. It is based on the fact that they do not act like journalists at all.*

As for columnists -

Interestingly, almost *none* of these noted pundits ever call us to ask questions about our operations, or the deal, or our perspective. They just opine. *

DeLong:

If there is a point to mainstream journalism at all--rather than dueling press releases--it is that reporters get to ask questions. *

BillG:

having access to a blog as a platform is useful, but for almost everyone using that platform to respond to a reporter’s story is about as effective as talking to yourself in an empty room.*

Anon:

...every time a smart [blogger] invests a paragraph in pointing at [particular person's] stupidity, or makes a detailed analysis of the corruption of the big-money US media, while one of the smart person's friends is doing the same on her/his blog, good ideas and important facts are being crowded out.*

Zimmer:

Obviously, the blogosphere gets a lot of its strength from its decentralized structure, but it seems to me that productive debate is a lot like life. If you pack a lot of enzymes and DNA and other molecules in a tight package, you get life. Disperse them, and you get a few random reactions. Pack comments about a particular paper in one place, and a real debate can emerge. Disperse them across the blogosphere, and you encourage cheap shots and irrelevant tangents, while good observations go unappreciated. *

TNH:

There are two kinds of debaters: those who think debate is a method for testing the validity of propositions, and those who think it's about who wins. That second sort isn't worth anyone's time or trouble. *

Unfogged:

when someone shows himself unable to understand or accept overwhelming evidence for a theory that is conceptually rather elegant and simple, it does indeed throw his intelligence and judgment into question. *

And, returning to Taleb:

certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating -- or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

Thoughts on burying the lede

*

Why can't these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead - to get lost in a sea of information. ... *

So why do reporters feel the "natural temptation to bury the lede*"?

Assertion: it's because we're social animals and maybe we're a little bit insecure, so when we reach a conclusion, and we want to show it to our readers, we don't want to coerce them, and we want company, especially company in which we're the expert, so we try to lead readers to our conclusion along the same path we took to get there, figuring that with someone to lead them, they'll have an easy time of it - it'll be like a field trip, they'll admire the flowers we point to along the way and the lovely path we've made for them, and then will be awestruck upon sighting the hike's destination. And it's that much more fun for us to keep them in suspense along the way.*

But instead the readers get tired and cranky when we're only partway there, because they don't see the point.