“Events by which ‘Dr. V’s Magical Putter’ came to be published are now the best argument I have for you on diversity in the newsroom. Here is what can happen when you are not diverse enough. Like it?”

The most striking fact for me in this rousing apology letter from Bill Simmons: (I wrote about it in my last post, which provides the context for this one…) was the number of editors who pored over the piece, Dr. V’s Magical Putter, without seeing anything amiss. Some 13 to 15 pro journalists read it before publication and no one saw the problems for which Simmons, pro journalist, founder of Grantland, later had to apologize.

This is significant information. Before Grantland described the editing, it seemed like thin performance by inexperienced or distracted people. They just weren’t paying attention. At Nieman Storyboard, where narrative non-fiction is dissected, I came across this exchange about Dr. V between two experienced editors:

I think that piece is emblematic of so much of what I think is wrong with what’s happening in journalism today. We’ve got journalism and journalists struggling more than ever before to make a name and a living, and thereby more and more pressure on landing an amazing story. We’ve got less and less staff and experience, fewer and fewer “adults” around, more and more talented kids desperate to make a name and very little mentoring.

That turned out to be way off. Not a case of too little adult supervision. The editors were on it. They were all over it. They had been through it a hundred times. They had agonized and called in help. And they all thought alike on some things, even the “outside” help. This is the big reveal for journalists in the Dr. V episode. Events by which “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” came to be published are now the best argument I have for you about diversity — real intellectual and intercultural diversity — in the newsroom. “Here is what can happen when you are not diverse enough. Like it?”

@jayrosen_nyu Next time I teach why diversity is not just about feeling good or making amends for history, I'm using this as a case.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) January 21, 2014

There can be stories where it can be made almost invisible to you: just what you are publishing— and committing to. This happens when you can’t read your own work well enough to edit it properly. Readers are going to notice before the editors know there’s something to notice. And notice: when you have missing knowledge at the editors table, more editors taking a look doesn’t help. All this happened to the editors of Grantland, a rising franchise in writerly journalism. They all had the same sense of smell, and for a time didn’t know what they were serving. Read the letter again. It’s in there.

As I followed these events over the weekend they broke (January 17-19, 2014) I thought: We need to adapt Joy’s Law to journalism. Joy’s Law is named for Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

In slightly more technical terms:

this ‘law’ emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces many enterprises today, that is, that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge [is] to find ways to access that knowledge.

Adapted to journalism it reads something like this: “No matter how good you are, most of the smartest sources are untouched by your reporting and unknown by your people.” They’re in the potential user base, though. They can be attracted by their own networks to mistakes in what you published— or it’s success. Most of the smartest sources aren’t in your story, but they can be brought to it by break downs and screw ups that become crossover hits.

Joy’s Law for journalism doesn’t always apply. Some stories: four or five people know everything. They’re the sources. Try to get them. Some stories: the users in the aggregate and some users in particular know way more than the journalist. Consult the Editor’s Letter. First reactions come in from the brethren in journalism: great piece! Go Caleb! Second wave of reactions saw something the editors did not. When the editors looked, they saw something they could not defend.

On January 17-18 in online conversation and in emails to the office from readers, the smartest judges of the Grantland story worked for someone else. “Most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization…” That’s why, if you’re one of the 13 to 15 who approved the story, you listen hard to the Twitter rage at you over the weekend, and try to make sense of it, even if you don’t “agree,” even if some of it is “extreme.” Because it’s probably picking up what your roundtable missed. Joy’s Law for journalism says that’s likely.

Odds for this method: unlikely.

Everything you guys have been saying is true: Blocking people feels fantastic.

— Caleb Hannan (@calebhannan) January 17, 2014

I’m in Canada next week for Post Media Network (I’m a consultant) to conduct a discussion with the Montreal Gazette’s newsroom team. The next day it’s the Ottawa Citizen. This is what I am going to ask them.

I often try to combine blogging and public presentations. Example. Last year I published this attempt to find common ground with newsroom traditionalists: Look, you’re right, okay? But you’re also wrong. (Feb. 3, 2013.) I then presented that post in person to journalists in five Post Media cities: Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa.

This time I am bringing to Montreal and Ottawa a question, and blogging it before I get on the plane, as I did with “Look, you’re right…” So here’s my question:

I’ve been writing for some time about the concept of a “networked beat.” (Here’s a presentation and blog post I did on it, where I described some ways I thought I could work: Designs for a Networked Beat.) It all starts with the discovery Dan Gillmor made when he was covering Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury news in 1999. Gillmor may have been the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, and it was the experience of doing the blog that convinced him: “My readers know more than I do.”

That isn’t true for all stories. It isn’t true for all beats. Sometimes only four or five people know what’s going on, and the reporter’s job is to find those people and turn them into sources. But if your job is to cover, say, traffic and transportation in a metropolitan region like Montreal, the people using the system often know more than the “insiders” running it. Covering public education is like that. So is covering a “scene” like the music scene in Austin, Texas, or covering military families in Norfolk, Virgina, where there are a lot of them.

A few years ago I came across this ad for a reporter’s position at the Seattle Times. The job was to cover Microsoft. “One of our premier beats,” the ad said. You can see why. The Seattle Times has to excel at Microsoft coverage for people in the Puget Sound area and for the community of interest in Microsoft news that is scattered around the world. If the Times cannot distinguish itself on this beat, with Mircosoft in its back yard, then the whole value proposition for that newsroom goes soft. You can hear these facts in the job posting:

Seeking a hard-driving, enterprising reporter to cover one of the most influential corporations in the world: Microsoft. This reporter should have considerable experience [and] take pride at being ahead of not only local competitors, but the national media as well… Skilled at working with financial documents, understanding technology, building sources and breaking through a PR machine second to none… Skilled at anticipating events, putting together stories that connect the dots and [explaining] to our readers why these events are important. Writing abilities must be sharp and wide-ranging enough to appear regularly on A1, the Business section cover and above the fold online….He or she will be principally responsible for daily and enterprise coverage of Microsoft’s corporate affairs, strategies, core products, personnel and workplace issues, and software industry trends…

Whew! That is a hard job. The most the Seattle Times can devote to it is two experienced and highly proficient reporters dedicated to the Microsoft story, plus spot coverage from other desks. But when you look across the story — the life and times of Microsoft for all the people who care about its fortunes in Seattle and for those involved with the company elsewhere — it is a massive reporting task. Even the most skilled reporter can only do so much. But reporter plus network, acting as force multiplier…?

I don’t think we know as much about that as we should. We should be much further along than we are in building out a networked beat. Quick definition: A networked beat is when many people with useful knowledge can easily contribute and add value to a reporting pattern that is the ongoing responsibility of a few.

So imagine the Seattle Times had said this in its ad:

Seeking an ambitious and entrepreneurial journalist to help develop a networked approach to one of our premier beats: covering Microsoft.

The Times identifies the key user groups for its Microsoft coverage as 1.) MS employees and those who work in the larger Microsoft ecosystem, 2.) buyers and users of Microsoft products, and 3.) investors who need to know how MSFT is doing. According to this study published in 2010 by an economist at the University of Washington, Microsoft accounted for 28.5% of total jobs added in the state of Washington since 1990. It employed 41,000 people in the state. Its multiplier effect as an employer is large: 6.81 jobs created for every Microsoft employee. That’s about 282,000 jobs directly and indirectly tied to Microsoft, according to the 2010 study.

The holders of those jobs are all potential readers, sources and contributors. They are the people Dan Gillmor was talking about. (“My readers know more than I do.”) Likewise with the heaviest users of Microsoft products, the Windows fans and Xbox freaks. Total it up, that’s a lot of people who know more than the Seattle Times does.

Still, getting them to contribute is another story. We need a source of realism for what we can expect from readers if reader-assisted beat reporting is going to work. Fortunately I have one. It’s called the one percent rule in online participation. It says that:

…if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

Here a design rule we can incorporate into plans for a networked beat, thusly:

* Assume that 90 percent of the users attracted to the Seattle Times Microsoft coverage will be “read only.” Meaning: they are just consumers of it. For them, the beat makes news and information products. These products have to do the job they were “hired” for, especially: save the user time in trying to keep up with Mircosoft news.

* Assume that ten percent maximum will interact with the beat on any level. For them, we need easy, efficient systems for commenting, contacting, suggesting, referring links, speaking up. Of course the ten percent is a ceiling, not a guarantee. If you’re successful at engaging and enticing them, maybe 10 percent of the users will interact with the beat in some useful way.

* One percent at most will contribute ideas or material that actually improves the products for other 99. For this group we need to worry about the give-get bargain and their incentive to share knowledge with journalists, but also about compensation if they become regular and valuable contributors. Ultimately there has to be a business model for the networked beat, but I think we can find that.

Let’s review: When the many contribute (easily) to reporting that is completed by a few, that’s networked reporting. Lots of journalists practice this in one way or another, from finding sources on social media to using web forms to gather knowledge. When networked reporting is fully incorporated into a beat — by design — that’s a networked beat. The best kind of beat to try it with is one where “the readers know more than we do,” where knowledge of what’s really happening on that beat is widely distributed, not closely held by a few inside sources, and where succeeding with the beat is critically important to the newsroom we’re trying to improve.

Now I’m ready to ask the question I came here to ask: suppose we were to invest in a networked beat in Montreal at the Gazette, or in Ottawa at the Citizen, which beat would be the smart one to start with… and why?

I look forward to our discussion.

“We don’t have a news system that keeps us informed and helps us grasp the stories we care deeply about. We have one that floods us with reports on a schedule that makes sense for the manufacturers.”

I am going to make one point in this post and get out. Have you ever said to someone: “keep me informed?”

Of course you have. And what did you mean when you said that? You probably meant: let me know when something important happens.

Boss: Okay, keep me informed.

Employee: Will do. You’ll have three updates a day.

Boss: That’s not what I asked for…

Employee: Sorry, I could put it all into one report at the end of the day. Does that work?

Boss: No. When something big happens I may need ten updates that day. At other times: none. Can you do that?

Employee: I think so. Let me make sure I understand…

These are two different perspectives on information provision, which is the business that journalists claim to be in. These views are in tension. The writer of the reports finds it easier to send updates on some regular schedule because that organizes the act of production. The employee can predict when the boss wants the product (“…one report at the end of the day?”) and create a work routine for gathering and packaging information around that.

The boss defines “product” in a different way. It’s not a stream of reports arriving at regular intervals but the steady state of being kept well informed. Reasonable from the user’s point of view, this demand plays havoc with the producer’s schedule and quest for efficiency. Efficiency for the user is: don’t bother me with an update when there’s nothing new for me to know. That’s not only irregular — and disruptive — for the employee but riskier, too. Everything depends on good judgment. The “product” is essentially that.

Reader: I’m feeling overwhelmed. Help me understand this story!

Reporter: Here’s the link to my archive. It’s all in there.

Reader: That’s not really what I need…

Reporter: We have a topic page for this story. Does that work?

Nobody has that conversation, of course. And it’s true that the need for timelines and explainers (“context!”) has finally penetrated into quality newsrooms. Good journalists know they should be doing that. Meanwhile, start-ups like Circa (tag line: Save Time. Stay Informed.) try to deliver “push” updates only when there’s something important for me to know, which is smart. And I will concede the point that some of you are silently making in your head: that for some users sometimes a package of updates at regular intervals is exactly what they want.

And yet… What I don’t think we appreciate is the extent to which the news system we have is still organized around definitions of “product” and “efficiency” that assume supply side supremacy, meaning: a media universe in which we took what companies offered at the regular intervals they offered it, and a news-o-sphere in which the updates keep coming, whether or not they improve our understanding.

We don’t have a news system that keeps us informed and helps us grasp the stories we care deeply about. We have one that floods us with reports on a schedule that makes sense for the manufacturers of news. Individual journalists are aware of this problem, but they are working within a system that is not set up to address it. There’s been a power shift in media. We don’t watch TV anymore when the networks decide to put their shows on. The users are more like the boss in my “keep me informed” parable. But in news this shift has been incompletely carried through.

So why am I telling you now? Because it helps if you want to understand why Ezra Klein left the Washington Post for his new partner, Vox Media. Look at these phrases from his announcement tour. They are all signaling the same thing: a shift from supply side logic in the production of news to demand-side: Keep me informed. Help me understand this. Don’t give me updates when you have them, but when I need them to stay on top of things. Missing background often prevents me from understanding the news; solve that problem for me and I will rely on you for my information. Here’s Klein:

New information is not always — and perhaps not even usually — the most important information for understanding a topic.

We are better than ever at telling people what’s happening, but not nearly good enough at giving them the crucial contextual information necessary to understand what’s happened. We treat the emphasis on the newness of information as an important virtue rather than a painful compromise.

The news business, however, is just a subset of the informing-our-audience business  —  and that’s the business we aim to be in.

The product is not “news” but understanding and that steady state of feeling well informed. The news system that today’s journalists inherited is simply not organized that way. And so it’s no surprise to me that Ezra Klein had to leave the Washington Post to find backers who understood what he wanted to do.

These are my notes for a talk I’m giving today at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno

What I’m calling the personal franchise model in journalism is not new. I.F. Stone’s Weekly was a personal franchise — it fit the definition I am about to give you — and he started that in 1953. Also, I’m not trying to be comprehensive in this analysis. There are instances of the personal franchise model that I am not going to mention.

There are lots of sites built around individuals, like almost every blog in the world. There are lots of born-on-the-web news companies, and they were all begun by individuals. By “personal franchise” I mean something more: a central figure or personality has given birth to a newsroom, a larger operation. But the larger operation still feels like an individual’s site.

The personal franchise model in digital journalism, simple definition:

A news and commentary site built around the talent and sensibility of an individual journalist with a unique voice and a following online.

Key features:

* Charismatic journalist — and founder — at the center, joined by a staff hand picked by the founder.

* Editorial control rests with the founder, even when ownership does not.

* Stands in contrast to the more institutional news brands — like BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, NPR, or Politico — where talented people come and go while reputation attaches to the name, product (and logo!) of the institution.

* Talking Points Memo doesn’t really exist without its founder, Josh Marshall, but the Washington Post definitely exists — and persists — without Marty Baron, its current editor.

* Identifiable niche or approach. No attempt to be comprehensive or to offer “all news to all people.”

* Mix of news, opinion, analysis, data without a lot of fuss about separating these categories. Plenty of voice, attitude and style mixed in.

* Business model (or subsidy system) varies from site to site. There is no one best way to do it.

Eleven examples of the personal franchise model in news:

1. Dealbook, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
2. Grantland, Bill Simmons, ESPN
3. Five thirty eight, Nate Silver, ESPN.
4. xoJane, Jane Pratt, Say Media
5. GigaOm, Om Malik, independent
6. Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall, independent
7. Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan, independent
8. Recode.net, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, independent
9. Tech Dirt, Mike Masnick, independent
10. Project X, Ezra Klein, Vox Media
11. The Information, Jessica Lessin, independent

Other possibilities not included: Drudge Report, Huffington Post, MMQB.

1. Dealbook, Andrew Ross Sorkin

Begun: 2001.

Beat: Deal making on Wall Street among the major players in finance.

Built around: The reporting skills, source network, “inside” approach and television presence of Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Founder is: A business reporter and columnist for the New York Times, book author, television pundit for CNBC.

Background: Mergers and acquisitions reporter for the Times.

Ownership: Wholly owned by the New York Times.

Business model: Email newsletter, advertising, sponsorship, conferences.

2. Grantland, Bill Simmons

Begun: 2011.

Beat: Sports and popular culture

Built around: The writing style, audience intimacy and editorial vision of Bill Simmons.

Founder is: Writer, columnist, podcaster, interviewer, occasional TV commentator and Boston sports guy.

Background: Local sports columnist who went national.

Ownership: Owned and operated by ESPN.

Business model: Advertising, sponsorship.

3. Five thirty eight, Nate Silver

Begun: 2014.

Beat: Data journalism and quantitative analysis of sports, politics, economics, science.

Built around: The data literacy, writing talent, online following and nerdy charisma of Nate Silver.

Founder is: Statistician, forecaster, blogger, book author.

Background: Sports stats geek, Daily Kos diarist, New York Times beat blogger.

Ownership: Owned and operated by ESPN, which bought the fivethirtyeight.com domain.

Business model: Advertising, sponsorship.

4. xoJane, Jane Pratt

Begun: 2011.

Beat: Women 18-49, lives and lifestyles

Built around: The editorial eye, confessional sensibility and overall charisma of the entrepreneurial Jane Pratt

Founder is: Editor, writer, publisher

Background: Founding editor of Sassy, beloved magazine for teenage girls

Ownership: Say Media

Business model: Advertising

5. GigaOm, Om Malik

Begun: 2001.

Beat: Intersection of business and technology, digital media

Built around: The tech moxy, analytical gifts and entrepreneurial spirit of Om Malik.

Founder is: Tech reporter, editor, investor

Background: Technology reporter and writer for Forbes and Business 2.0

Ownership: Independent

Business model: advertising, research by subscription, conferences

6. Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall

Begun: 2000

Beat: National politics from a left liberal perspective

Built around: The knowledge and sophistication of Josh Marhall, observer of American politics.

Founder is: Writer, blogger, editor, web publisher

Background: History PhD, writer for the American Prospect

Ownership: Independent

Business model: Advertising and premium subscription

7. Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan

Begun: 2000.

Beat: Politics and public debate, culture and literature seen through the lens of a gay, Catholic, British-born, lapsed conservative writer.

Built around: The live out loud voice and roving eye of Andrew Sullivan.

Founder is: Blogger, writer, columnist, editor

Background: Editor of the New Republic, 1991-96

Ownership: Independent

Business model: Subscription, metered model, no advertising

8. Recode.net, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher

Begun: 2014

Beat: Breaking news and views about the technology industry centered in Silicon Valley

Built around: The reviewing talents, reporting skills and industry-wide reputation of Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher

Founders are: Technology reviewers and reporters, editors, entrepreneurs

Background: Technology journalists, Wall Street Journal

Ownership: Independent

Business model: Advertising, sponsorship and industry conferences

9. Tech Dirt, Mike Masnick

Begun: 1997

Beat: Intellectual property, civil liberties, digital economics, public policy in the technology sector

Built around: The analytical skills and personal voice of Mike Masnick

Founder is: Writer, blogger, analyst, entrepreneur

Background: Business development and marketing

Ownership: Independent

Business model: Sponsorship, “insight community,” a focus group method employing knowledgable members of the user base and the Insider Shop for fans.

10.Project X, Ezra Klein

Begun: 2014

Beat: Explanatory journalism and background knowledge of politics, economics, science, tech.

Built around: All around wonkery, explanatory skills and multi-platform charisma of Ezra Klein

Founder is: Writer, blogger, editor, television host and pundit.

Background: Blogging with an emphasis on public policy

Ownership: Vox Media

Business model: High value advertising plus…

11. The Information, Jessica Lessin

Begun: 2013

Beat: Tech news for “professionals in technology and in industries being upended by it.”

Built around: The reporting chops and entrepreneurial energy of Jessica Lessin

Founder is: A technology journalist

Background: Covered Silicon Valley for the Wall Street Journal.

Ownership: Independent

Business model: Subscription only, $400 per year.

Key factors in the rise of the personal franchise model

* Audiences can more easily attach themselves to individuals and “stay” with them, as with Andrew Sullivan’s travels from Time.com to Atlantic.com (2007) to Daily Beast (2011) to independence (2013).

* Users can more easily “follow” individual journalists and get alerts when they have something new to offer.

* The nature of authority and trust in journalism is changing. It’s easier to have confidence in “here’s where I’m coming from…” compared to the view from nowhere and its institutional voice.

* Institutional inertia and the need to protect the brand create a risk-adverse culture toward which the founders of personal franchise sites feel a radical impatience.

* Genre constraints, tired conventions, artificial divisions between news and opinion, top down decision-making, weak tech frustrate the ambitions of talented and entrepreneurial journalists.

* The personal franchise site is the rationalization (or in Josh Marshall’s terms, the domestication) of blogging. This is blogging, regularized and made into a sustainable business.

* Successful niche blogs become group blogs, a natural succession. Successful group blogs become businesses. The personal franchise model follows upon this path.

* It’s easier to solve the difficult and complex problems of adaptation-to-digital by letting a smart, able and “with it” person try his or her hunches, as compared to the difficulties of management-by-committee. That is what Ezra Klein is going to do.

I read hundreds of bylined works of journalism a week. Every so often one of them forces me to go back and read it over and over…

This is usually because the writing contains within it a density of pressthink — my subject here — that cannot be gotten through in one or two tries. It happened this week with a post by Chris Cillizza, one of the Washington Post’s franchise players on the national politics beat: Why the CBO report is (still) bad news for Democrats.

Ordinarily I would summarize what Cillizza was writing about, quote from his piece, and try to isolate what’s screwy or revealing about it. But Dave Wiegel did that at Slate already. And I did it for a very similar piece published on Cillizza’s site in 2012. See my post: Everything That’s Wrong with Political Journalism in One Washington Post Item.

Instead, I have written a short reader’s guide to Cillizza’s post. Your instructions are to absorb the guide, then click the link at the end and re-read what @TheFix wrote. Got it? Alright then…

Nobody knows exactly when it happened. But at some point between Teddy White’s The Making of the President, 1960 and the Willie Horton ads in 1988, political journalism in this country lost the plot. When it got overly interested in the inside game, it turned you and me and everyone who has to go into the voting booth and make a decision into an object of technique, which it then tried to assess. We became the people on whom the masters of politics practiced their craft. Then political journalism tried to recover an audience from the people it had turned into poll numbers and respondents to packaged stimuli. Tricky maneuver.

This is what led to the cult of the savvy, my term for the ideology and political style that journalists like Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin spread through their work. The savvy severs any lingering solidarity between journalists as the providers of information, and voters as decision-makers in need of it. The savvy sets up — so it can speak to and cultivate — a third group between these two: close followers of the game. The most common term for them is “political junkies.” The site that Cillizza runs was created by that term. It’s called The Fix because that’s what political junkies need: their fix of inside-the-game news.

Junkies are not normal, but they accept their deformed status because it comes with compensations. They get to feel superior to ordinary voters, who are the objects of technique and of the savvy analyst’s smart read on what is likely to work in the next election. For while the junkies can hope to understand the game and how it operates, the voters are merely operated on. Not only does the savvy sever any solidarity between political journalists and the public they were once supposed to inform, it also draws a portion of the attentive public into emotional alliance with the ad makers, poll takers, claim fakers and buck rakers within the political class— the people who, as Max Weber put it in his famous essay “Politics as a Vocation,” live off politics.

But we’re not done. The savvy sets up a fifth group. (The first four: savvy journalists, political junkies, masters of the game, and an abstraction, The Voters.) These are the people who, as Weber put it, live for politics. They are involved as determined participants, not just occasional voters. Whereas the junkies can hope for admission to the secrets of the game (by taking cues from Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin and the guys at Politico) the activists are hopelessly deluded, always placing their own ideology before the cold hard facts.

If you follow the Twitter feeds of Ron Fournier of National Journal and Chuck Todd of NBC News you routinely see a category they call “partisans” described as silly, insane, overheated, unreasonable, absurd. Click here for Fournier doing it and here for Todd. Somewhere in their dinosaur brains those who “live off” politics understand that the people who live for it could steal their constituency and turn the savvy into the absurd creatures. Thus the constant ridicule of partisans. Thus the self-description on Ron Fournier’s Twitter bio. Political affiliation: Agnostic.

So this is what the savvy in the press do. Cultivate the political junkies. Dismiss and ridicule the activists, the “partisans.” Assess the tactics by which the masters of the game struggle to win. Turn the voters into an object, the behavior of which is subject to a kind of law that savvy journalists feel entitled to write. Here’s Cillizza, writing one:

Remember that most voters — people who don’t follow this stuff as closely as me, you or, likely, most people we know — make their decisions based on 30-second TV ads.”

I’ll remember, Chris. Inhale that sentence, click this link and behold how badly our political journalists have lost the plot.

The bet is that a news brand can be both: its own thing and the thing that talented, driven, fully-voiced individuals want to do in journalism

First Look Media, where I’m an advisor, launched its first “digital magazine” yesterday. It’s called The Intercept. (A name I like.) The Intercept is led by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. It has a masthead, a mission, its own look and feel and the following URL: http://firstlook.org/theintercept.

Attention should properly focus on the journalism that The Intercept launched with. It’s a story by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Schahill that essentially says: the U.S. doesn’t know who it’s killing with some of its drone attacks because the targeting is done by tracking SMS cards in phones. The article is based in part on the Snowden documents and also on the testimony of a new source: “a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA,” and who cooperated with The Intercept without revealing his name.

Read the story. Read how it departs from consensus judgment in the press. And about the public service, troublemaking tradition it is a part of. I just want to make one point here for those who are following First Look’s development from the concept I wrote about in October, to the initial sketch of its structure, to the video where Pierre Omidyar described his intentions in more detail, to this week’s developments (“Glenn Greenwald’s new website launches with fresh NSA revelations.”)

Recently I have been writing about the “personal franchise model” in digital journalism:

There are lots of sites built around individuals, like almost every blog in the world. There are lots of born-on-the-web news companies, and they were all begun by individuals. By “personal franchise” I mean something more: a central figure or personality has given birth to a newsroom, a larger operation. But the larger operation still feels like an individual’s site.

First Look has been structured so that it can support the emergence of any number of such sites. The Intercept is just the first. It is grounded not in a topical niche as much as an editorial approach, and some convictions that three editors share, like…

The prime value of journalism is that it imposes transparency, and thus accountability, on those who wield the greatest governmental and corporate power.

When Ezra Klein proposed to the Washington Post a newsroom built around his interest in explanatory journalism and the sort of background knowledge that breaking news coverage often leaves out, Katharine Weymouth, the publisher, received his proposal and concluded that it was a poor fit. Her exact words: “It seemed to be potentially a bigger distraction that would take resources without building the Post.” And so Klein left to try his idea with Vox Media.

All Things Digital was a personal franchise site and conference brand owned by the Wall Street Journal, and run by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, two exceptionally talented technology journalists. When their contracts were up, they negotiated with the Journal but wound up leaving, along with their staff, for a new venture: Recode.net. The Wall Street Journal then folded the All Things D site into the Journal’s souped-up technology coverage. The old URL, allthingsd.com, now forwards to WSJ: D, the Journal’s technology section.

The logic is pretty clear: why have two brands when the Wall Street Journal is such a strong name in business coverage?

But what if this conflict — between a franchise built around a few individuals’ editorial ambitions and the requirements of the larger newsroom brand — didn’t exist, because the larger newsroom brand acknowledged the strengths of the personal model from the start? This is a key feature of First Look’s design. It accepts and incorporates the personal franchise style, treating it as no threat to the editorial ambitions that First Look has for itself.

In fact, the hope is to attract others who can launch sites like The Intercept, and to offer a common core of services — data skills, design help, good publishing tools, strong legal advice, marketing muscle — that the founders will need to succeed. (And the quality of the services keeps centrifugal forces in check.) Under this model, the diverse paths that such sites may take are not a “distraction” from the core business or a subtraction from the editorial brand but a vital part of both.

First Look will also do curation (sometimes called continuous news) and it will have its own staff of investigative journalists digging and publishing under the First Look name. The bet is that a news brand can be both: its own thing and the thing that talented, driven, fully-voiced individuals want to do in journalism.

I recommend that you read my guide first, then endure the ads and watch the segment, but it works fine the other way too.

Viewer’s guide to: MEET THE PRESS, Feb. 16, 2014. Scientist Bill Nye and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., discuss the politics of weather emergencies and climate change with host David Gregory. (Transcript, news story.)

Gregory wanted to elude a criticism he thought he could anticipate: that he would give undue forum to the climate change resistance forces by letting Marsha Blackburn do her thing on Meet the Press. He had a plan for that. He also wanted to avoid getting lost in the weeds, which is why he picked Bill Nye, a television communicator, rather than asking a climate scientist to debate Blackburn. As the Washington Post put it: “Perhaps Nye — who has perfected communicating complex subjects to children — will have more success.”

Earlier, a simple count by Media Matters showed that Meet the Press had almost entirely avoided the subject of climate change for a year. But now they had a news peg. “This extreme weather moment… is there new urgency to act?”

Embedded in that frame was the show’s design for avoiding a cartoon debate about climate change, in which the existence of any scientific consensus is disputed and the segment is overtaken by reactions and counter-reactions, with the host looking weak for not pushing back hard enough on the denialism when it appears, leading to charges of false balance.

Gregory saw all that coming. His plan was to push back hard, and insist that the discussion “move on.” Meet the Press was going to transcend the dispute over “is it happening?” by asking: what are we going to do about it? The lead-in referred to a “new focus on the need for action,” as against another fruitless exchange about whether the earth is warming and human action is the cause.

Having ignored the debate, Meet the Press figured it would step in and advance the debate. But in order to push back, as David Gregory self-consciously planned to do, you had to have someone pushing, first. You needed as a Meet the Press guest a figure whose way of flirting with denialism was to go there on camera: a show off. Only against that ground could Gregory show up as a figure of resistance.

His resistance included quotations from the Atlantic magazine about consensus in the Republican party moving off the rejection of climate science toward a focus on the costs to address it, and from a large corporation that had begun moving toward acceptance. (Message: Meet the Press is Advancing the Debate.) Other resistance moves included saying before he asked his first question, “In the scientific community, this is not really a debate about whether climate change is real. The consensus is that it is,” responding to Blackburn by reminding her of that consensus, and interrupting at one point after Blackburn tried to say, “There is not consensus there” to re-assert what the real issue is: not whether the earth is warming due to human action, but what to do about it. He also cut Bill Nye short to inject: “I want to stick to the point about what’s going to happen in the future with policy.”

Blackburn’s gambit was to smile and nod and say “that’s right” or “you’re exactly right” when David Gregory said the issue was what to do about climate change — playing along with the Advance the Debate premise — and then slip in when she could the denialist message: the science is unproven, there’s disagreement among scientists, what about the benefits of more carbon in the atmosphere? This naturally led Bill Nye to object, bringing on the very discussion that Advance the Debate was meant to transcend, which then allowed David Gregory (the adult) to continually re-focus things on “what to do.”

Gregory thought he would outwit his critics by accepting the validity of the false balance critique and becoming the enforcer of scientific consensus. Of course, there’s a simpler way to accomplish that: just don’t put on the air political figures who flirt with denialism! But the problem with that is that David Gregory doesn’t get to interrupt and set things right. He can’t vivify his intention to Advance the Debate and show off what he’s learned from the critics.

Finally, in his self-awareness David Gregory overlooked one big thing. Creating confusion works just fine as a mode of resistance to the scientific consensus he thought he was advancing. (See this study.) Because his Advance the Debate segment required that denialism make an appearance, so that it could be visibly gotten beyond, and because no one on Meet the Press had any intention to stick with the topic long enough to sort out the confusing things Blackburn injected (like the benefits of more carbon) the actual result was an informational mess. Which advances nothing.

That’s what I recommend you watch for. Now watch:

Watch this famous clip. It’s two minutes:

The clip is from May, 1997. Interviewing the conservative politician (later party leader) Michael Howard is the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. The clip as edited invites you to enjoy the spectacle of Paxman, the presenter of Newsnight, asking Michael Howard the same question (“did you threaten to overrule him?”) twelve times before letting go without an answer.

I found the Paxman link in this excellent Dave Weigel column about Piers Morgan: Thank goodness Piers Morgan Live is dead. Some sources say Paxman later admitted that he was asked to stretch the interview out and had nothing else to ask about. I share it with PressThink readers only to append this comment:

Twelve times! Including some meta time on how rude it looked to keep asking. You almost never see that on American television. If David Gregory of NBC’s Meet the press follows up with the opposition leader once, he’s being bold. Twice: that’s considered aggressive. Three, four times on the same question: Gregory is making a point by being that insistent. At five repetitions of the question David Gregory would be out of ideas for pressing further, at six he would be out of air. “We’ll have to leave it there.”

For if he is paid for anything he is paid to know that the give-up-and-move-on point on Sunday morning political television is closer to three or four that it is to Paxman’s twelve consecutive tries at getting an answer from a politician. The guests in the green room know this too. Famously, they are from both sides. But the side they are all on, the guests as much as the host or presenter, as well as the producers in the control room, is the undisrupted flow of the broadcast itself. It has to keep moving. It can’t stop for the spectacle of eight, nine, ten repetitions of the same question without success. And that simple fact affects everything that appears on air.

The people who keep the show moving are on the same team, no matter for whom they say they play.

“How was some guy in a basement who happens to have an obsessive interest in your subject going to bust into your peer group and start shooting up your journalism in a way that raises doubts about you and your magazine? Never going to happen… in 1989.”

Students of cultural lag in American professional life should find their way to Felix Salmon’s latest post on the Newsweek cover story that went awry. There they will find — these students of cultural lag — a wonderful example of accomplished journalists living in a vanished world that they insist is quite present.

The Newsweek story, by Leah McGrath Goodman, tried to solve one of the mysteries surrounding bitcoin, the digital currency that some geeks follow with a passion. (Why such interest in bitcoin? Chris Dixon explains his.) Newsweek claimed to have located the founder of bitcoin living a modest life in California. “The reclusive inventor of the troubled virtual currency has been hiding in plain sight,” the teaser said. But many people online thought the case implausible. Then the guy Newsweek discovered, Dorian Nakamoto, told the AP he was not the inventor of bitcoin. Since then it’s been a brutal time for Newsweek and Goodman, as the best and the worst of online forensics are practiced upon them.

Felix Salmon already wrote a very good post on this controversy, March 7th. His conclusion:

…The responsible thing to do, from Newsweek’s perspective, would have been to present a thesis, rather than a fact. For instance, when Ted Nelson attempted to reveal Satoshi’s identity last May, he put together a video where he put forward a theory which he said was “consistent, plausible, and, I believe, compelling”. He then took a step back, and let the bitcoin community more generally come to their own conclusions about whether or not to believe him; in the end, they (generally) didn’t.

Newsweek could have done that. It could have said “here’s a theory”, and then let the world decide.

It could have, but it didn’t. Why? Because Newsweek believes in the strong, proud and continuous existence of something called “the magazine cover story,” which can still be reported, written, edited, published and defended as if our calendars say 1989, rather than 2014. “I want it to be 25 years ago!” is not an attractive attitude in a journalist, but that is what you hear between the lines in Salmon’s latest post, which is based on his interview with Leah McGrath Goodman.

Salmon calls Goodman “a proud journalist, who gets personally offended whenever anybody raises questions about her journalism, her techniques, or her reporting.” Sorry, that was 25 years ago. Today when someone raises questions about your reporting there’s almost an equal chance that a.) they know a great deal more than you, and you will have to listen carefully because your story may turn on it; b.) they’re a troll causing trouble because they can; c.) they’re completely naive on the subject and just coming to the story. Finding out which of these is the case can be difficult. But if you’re offended at having to sort a.) from b.) from c.) you are in the wrong business. Salmon:

Goodman feels that her own personal reputation, combined with the institutional reputation of Newsweek, should count for something — that if Newsweek and Goodman stand behind a story, then the rest of us should assume that they have good reason to do so.

Sorry, that was 25 years ago, when the people who counted in the game of “my reputation” were: colleagues at Newsweek, Time and US News, editors who had hired you or might hire you in the future, other reporters on the beat that you’re on, non-fiction book editors who could offer a contract, and judges for the National Magazine Awards or similar prizes. Reputation-wise, that’s who counted, 25 years ago. And when someone raised a rude question like, “did that feel like a piped quote to you?” your reputation could answer. Because how was some guy in a basement who happens to have an obsessive interest in your subject going to bust into your peer group and start shooting up your journnalism in a way that raises doubts about you and your magazine?

Never going to happen— in 1989. Today: there are many ways for people who know nothing about the reputation system that nominated you for the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award to weaken your story while damaging the reputation of Newsweek. Just by getting to the top of one of these stacks they’ve pulled part of it off. Salmon:

In aggregate, says Goodman, an enormous amount of evidence, including evidence which is not public, persuaded her that Dorian Nakamoto was her man. Goodman has not decided whether or how she might publish that evidence.

Sorry, that was 25 years ago. Today: Show your work. Don’t tell us how much work went into it. You publish your story, you know it’s going to come under attack, you prepare for battle and when the time is right you release the evidence you have. Instead: “Goodman feels that she should be given the respect due a serious and reputable investigative journalist, working for a serious and reputable publication.”

That’s not “show your work.” That’s, “You didn’t hear us. We are Newsweek magazine.” They heard you. They don’t care. And they know that Newsweek sold for $1 a few years ago. Here’s Salmon on Goodman and her editor, Jim Impoco.

Both have been largely absent from Twitter and Reddit and RapGenius and other online places where the debate is playing out; instead, they have been giving interviews to mainstream media organizations, which are often unhelpful. TV interviews devolve into stupid fights; interviews with print or online journalists result in just a couple of quotes.

Sorry, that was 25 years ago, when you do some interviews with other journalists and that’s called publicity. Today: publicity is what is actually happening to your story in real time as it gets shared, discussed and lampooned. If you want to intervene in that you go where it is happening. You make an appearance. It doesn’t mean you have to respond to every attack, or dignify the haters, but you do have to participate in the dialogue. This does not cut it. Salmon:

Impoco and Goodman are mainstream-media journalists producing mainstream content for a mass audience; Goodman’s article was probably already pushing the limits of what Impoco felt comfortable with, given that he couldn’t reasonably assume that most of his readers had even heard of bitcoin. Impoco was interested in creating a splashy magazine article, for the print reincarnation of a storied mass-market newsweekly. Of course, seeing as how this is 2014, the article would appear online, and would reach the people who care a lot about bitcoin, who were sure to make a lot of noise about it. But they weren’t the main audience that Impoco was aiming for.

Felix is trying to be polite. But his phrase, “seeing as how this is 2014…” gives the game away. In 1989, the “audience you were aiming for” and “the audience you would actually reach” by publishing a cover story for Newsweek were likely to match up. Who else would read Newsweek other than the subscribers of Newsweek and the small number who might buy it at the newsstand because the cover “got” to them? Today the situation is not that at all. People you weren’t thinking about when you wrote your article may be a majority of the users online. They’re comparing it to what else they know about bitcoin, not to other great cover packages from Newsweek’s National Magazine Award past.

You don’t get to decide to whom this article will spread. The people formerly known as the audience will do that. Other journalists writing about your screw-ups, like Felix Salmon, will do that. You can’t publish your work on the internet, then act like it was placed gingerly in some mailbox in New Rochelle.

Look, Newsweek. You decided to dig into a subject — bitcoin — about which there is a fairly large and obsessed online community. If you publish on the internet, where it lives, you don’t get to ignore that community anymore, no matter how many creeps, trolls and ignorant fools attack you and earn your disgust. As Felix Salmon is trying to explain: the very form you chose, the Great Newsmagazine Cover Story Chase, is ill-matched to the knowledge distribution and discussion climate around this subject. The thing might have worked as a quest: let’s put our heads together and find the founder of bitcoin! It might have worked as a thesis with evidence attached: show your work! But you don’t know from these forms because you want it to be 25 years ago in journalism time… and it’s not.

Not the most experienced editor but he’s had an experience other editors have not had. He’s successfully said to the U.S press: “Current practices could be better. These are better. Here, let me show you.”

The protoblogger and software maker Dave Winer, a friend of mine, recently wrote, “Blogging needs your help. There’s cobwebs in the blogosphere.” His cri de coeur…

The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog.

This is my niche blog, PressThink: Current events in the way American journalism explains itself to itself. Nate Silver’s new site for ESPN, the re-born FiveThirtyEight, launched this week. That was a current event for my niche.

First the review:

Economics blogger Tyler Cowen (“so far I don’t think this is working”) was not impressed. Paul Krugman (“hoping that Nate Silver and company up their game, soon”) was underwhelmed. Kevin Drum (“its first day didn’t do much for me”) was skeptical that demand for Silver’s goods would ever prove out. Via Mathew Ingram’s assessment comes this tweet, summing up:

On first look, new http://t.co/4F0PoWNm2H site seems like Slate for spreadsheet fetishists. Mildly disappointed. http://t.co/jxx4mcOB21

— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) March 17, 2014

Others were more than “mildly disappointed.”

In The Guardian, my colleague Emily Bell argued that sites like fivethirtyeight, Ezra Klein’s Vox.com, and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media (alert: I am on their team, see this for disclosure purposes…) these brave new start-ups weren’t going to change much if they couldn’t manage a more diverse pool of initial hires. See: Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men.

An interviewer for New York magazine asked Nate Silver about this.

…The idea that we’re bro-y people just couldn’t be more off. We’re a bunch of weird nerds. We’re outsiders, basically. And so we have people who are gay, people of different backgrounds. I don’t know. I found the piece reaaaally, really frustrating. And that’s as much as I’ll say.

Picking up from that remark, Zeynep Tufekci gave a brilliant explanation for how the self-conscious “outs” can become the less-conscious “ins,” drawing on her knowledge of nerdom (girl programmer) and sociology (Pierre Bourdieu fan.) Her piece: No, Nate, brogrammers may not be macho, but that’s not all there is to it.

“Building A Diverse Newsroom Is Work,” said Shani O. Hilton, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed, in another good response to Emily Bell’s provocation.

Any newsroom in which the black staffer is expected to speak up for blackness while the white staffers only have to speak for themselves is a newsroom that’s failing.

Getting to that level of diversity takes work. It’s something BuzzFeed is OK at — and we’re working on improving. The undercurrent to much of the criticism of Silver and Klein et al. is an assumption that it’s easy to hire a diverse staff if you try, but white dudes just aren’t trying. I’m not a white dude, so I can only speak to the first part of that sentence, as someone who’s done a fair amount of hiring in my year at BuzzFeed. So here goes: It actually isn’t easy to build a diverse newsroom.

One reason this matters even more for FiveThirtyEight: if the newsroom’s “cuts” on the data aren’t diverse enough, that’s a potential source of error… right?

Speaking of error:

People are trashing 538 using an embarrassingly small sample size. It's been up for two days, right? Relax.

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) March 19, 2014

But two days was long enough for Leon Weiseltier, who runs the back of the book at the New Republic and always has, to figure out what FiveThirtyEight has wrong: The Emptiness of Data Journalism: Nate Silver could learn a lot from those op-ed columnists he maligns.

The new technology, which produces numbers the way plants produce oxygen, has inspired a new positivism, and he is one of its princes. He dignifies only facts. He honors only investigative journalism, explanatory journalism, and data journalism. He does not take a side, except the side of no side. He does not recognize the calling of, or grasp the need for, public reason; or rather, he cannot conceive of public reason except as an exercise in statistical analysis and data visualization. He is the hedgehog who knows only one big thing. And his thing may not be as big as he thinks it is.

“He does not take a side, except the side of no side.” Ryan L. Cooper in The Week made a similar point: Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and the dangers of being ideologically neutral. “By claiming the mantle of pure analysis, Silver is falling into a familiar journalistic trap…” Cooper brings in my own writing to make this point: “Everyone, without exception, has some kind of ideological-theoretical perspective that informs the way they interpret the evidence they see.”

Silver has ripped into lazy columnists for consulting their “ideological priors” first, but he’s not saying he has no priors… is he? Cooper’s warning: failure to answer that leads directly to Slate-style contrarianism.

And that would be disappointing! My own view of FiveThirtyEight’s launch is different from these, but that’s because my “launch object” is different. I take it for granted that the product will be weak at first. What interests me — initially — is the argument for practical improvement on which the new service is launched. You start with some (poorly informed) hunches about what would be worth a try, based on some (firmly held) convictions about what’s presently done badly or not at all in the practices you are trying to make better.

When Bloomberg View (the opinion section of Bloomberg News) launched in 2011, it didn’t launch behind an argument identifying defects in the opinion publishing system that Bloomberg View was just itching to address. It wasn’t like that. Rather, the editors thought they could have a strong entrant in an existing op-ed and editorial page competition. “Get the best people, pay them good money…” is all the strategy you need. Bloomberg had a successful brand, it had the money, and a boss, Mike Bloomberg, who wanted the influence. Great editors sign up the brilliant writers they know. Voilà! Bloomberg View is born. One of the “name” writers they signed, Ezra Klein, had already proven himself at the Washington Post.

So that’s one way of introducing a product: make it like the other products, but try to find better people.

Nate Silver and ESPN aren’t doing that. Neither is Ezra Klein with Vox, or Pierre Omidyar with First Look, or Jessica Lessin with The Information. These ventures may go nowhere. Their work will have to compete with what’s online already, a huge flow of blogging and journalism about politics, technology, sport, economy, world affairs. It is harder — way harder — to come out with something different than it is to describe the different thing you envision making. To illuminate a different starting point is easy. To practice differently by starting from that point: difficult.

As your guide to its pressthink I’m trying to understand the nature of the bet FiveThirtyEight is making. Nate Silver wrote a manifesto, What the Fox Knows, about that. It spells out his pressthink at launch. This is blogging: “If you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog.” (Dave Winer.)

Why Do We Expect So Much From Nate Silver? by Benjamin Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine— this should be shared, especially for its conclusion:

The hope invested in these projects is that as the industry shrank, perhaps, at the very least, what was left might become smarter. The profession has retreated, but maybe it has retreated to higher ground. Which explains, I think, some of the big talk that has accompanied their introduction. And it may explain too the very slight sense of letdown that accompanied the launch of FiveThirtyEight this week.

For a lot of people in journalism, “big talk” and launch manifestos are on their face ridiculous. What matters is the work you can publish and defend. No one needs to know about your grand intentions. Let the journalism carry the message. It will anyway! That view has a healthy constituency in newsland and after my first five months as a part-time adviser to Omidyar’s First Look, the wisdom in it is… a lot clearer. But Ben Wallace is right, too. There are thousands and thousands of journalists (and young people hungry to be journalists) who know that the news industry is going to be smaller in the years ahead, but it can be way, way smarter. And make better products.

For those people, I think it’s fair to say, the rise of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has been an important marker of… we can be way smarter. He’s not the most experienced editor, but he’s had an experience that almost no other editor has had. He has successfully said to a particular cohort in the U.S. press: “Your current practices could be better. These methods are better. I am going to show you that they work.”

The part of journalism in which he made this intervention — predicting what’s likely to happen in presidential elections — is an easier problem than you might think, a point that Silver frequently has to make in his public appearances. In What the Fox Knows he isolates three “your practices are weak, I have a better way” opportunities:

* what counts as explanation in advanced news writing today;
* the making of generalizations by journalists steeped in the particulars;
* the art of prediction, the science of likelihood, and products in between.

In these areas he thinks he can make improvements by bringing the discipline of data science to the topsy turvy of news. Whether that will make a big enough difference is the unknown. That’s why we run these experiments.

Finally: My colleague at NYU, Mitchell Stephens, author of a forthcoming book, Beyond News: The Future of Journalism, thinks “explanation” may be a mistaken path to user satisfaction because it takes the fun out of following the news.

[Margaret] Sullivan sounds a bit condescending when she maintains that “the reasonable reader” requires a prominent news summary because that reader can’t be expected to have been keeping up with the news. Can’t that “reasonable reader” just check Google News, or one of a hundred other sites, if momentarily perplexed? There also strikes me as something potentially condescending in Klein’s infatuation with explanation. If readers remain a bit weak on what, say, the debt ceiling is, can’t they just click around the Web a bit and find out? (Siri, on my iPhone, comes up with a pretty good answer.) Do journalists have to spoon feed? Wasn’t an insistence upon aiming at the least common denominator—with a simplified vocabulary and three paragraphs of background in each story—part of what was wrong with traditional journalism? Aren’t the best television shows, the best films, now doing less not more explaining – in part because figuring stuff out on your own is fun?

Stephens is onto something. Past a certain point “explanation” can become a substitute for participation, a barrier to engagement. Another way to say it: The quest to understand is even more involving than a need to know. And mystery is the most engaging metric of all. Explanation that invites participation: what are the odds that with the new FiveThirtyEight we could wind up with something like that?

In 1994 we would not have advised beginners in journalism: start your own trade magazine! Here in 2014 I do advise something like that.

My colleague Lisa Williams speaks of narrow comprehensiveness— “everything about something.” Keep that image in mind.

When people entirely new to it ask me what’s the best way to get going in journalism — if you are starting as an outsider, with no credentials or experience — I always give the same advice, and I know other people give this advice too. It’s obvious enough. Start a niche news service on a subject some people care a lot about.

One of the best niche sites I know is Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan and crew. It goes for the granular on search engine news. That’s a tight subject some people care expansively about. There has always been a trade press that carried “niche” news, so that’s nothing new. But in 1994 we would not have advised beginners in journalism: start your own trade magazine! In 2014 I do advise it: a niche site that serves a narrow news interest well.

Of course, it does not have to be a “site.” It might be a stream, ‘cast or mobile-first feed. “Research it first. Then try to build your own niche news product from scratch.” — the advice, updated. I don’t know why others recommend it. My reasoning: Most everything you learn in trying to serve a narrow but interested news niche is elementary instruction in online journalism.

The solids. The basics, like… It’s a two-way transaction between niche users and journalists. Metrics tell you what’s working, but only to a point. The audience knows more than you do on some subjects so be social, ask for help and correct quickly. People love watching “niche” video if you can find some or make it. Your headline counts hugely in whether good work spreads, but it won’t turn bad work to good. Niche audiences are demanding. If you don’t have your reax post up, if you don’t live blog the big events, they will stop relying on you for coverage they want. That’s bad. If you have the data and make it easier to use, people will come to you. No matter how good you are, you have to promote your stuff…

And so on. These are a few of the simple virtues and basic lessons that a good niche blogger acquires by building a service from scratch. You don’t need permission to do it. Initial investment: less than $1000 for design, hosting. It’s a free country, a free press. And at first, you will probably be doing it for free.

Building a niche site is hard work, turning it into a business harder. But it’s a plausible route for someone starting from zero. An extreme example of it working:

The reason Henry Abbott started writing a blog was simple: It seemed like the only viable route he had to being a sports writer.

That was almost a decade ago. Now the founder of the NBA blog TrueHoop will be taking over the reins of basketball coverage on ESPN.com.

The second reason I give this advice is explained well by Ben Thompson in his post, FiveThirtyEight and the end of average. Read the whole series and it should clarify the “shifting media landscape” argument for “…start a niche site that serves a narrow news interest well.”

Part 1: FiveThirtyEight and the End of Average
Part 2: The Stages of Newspapers’ Decline
Part 3: Newspapers are dead; long live journalism

Ben did the larger context well. Why should I repeat it?

A third reason I give this advice: it just happened. News Deeply, the company started by Lara Setrakian, a former ABC News correspondent… publishers of the flagship project Syria Deeply, a “single subject site” that combines journalism and technology to better cover a complex, ongoing story… said it will give birth to Arctic Deeply, the same idea “deeply” spread over a second, and different kind of niche: what’s happening to the Arctic as climate change overtakes it… all sponsored by the World Policy Institute, a New York-based think tank with this mission.

After you build your niche site, see if you can build a niche site generator. That’s what Lara Setrakian is up to with her company, News Deeply. “Everything about something…”

Finally, I try to practice niche journalism a bit at my specialty site, PressThink: “Current events in the way American journalism explains itself to itself.” That’s the niche you’re at now. When something lands that is dead center for the niche, you do a round-up post, in which opinion at key points around the discussion field is sampled and the writer takes a view. That’s niche blogging 101. Last week Nate Silver debuted the new FiveThirtyEight for ESPN, and with it an essay laying out some of his pressthink. That event is dead center for this site.

So here’s my round-up post: Review and comment on the launch of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com for ESPN. More than most readers want. But it wasn’t made for them, was it?

My presentation to the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) in Austin this weekend was called: “Giving Good Advice: Reflections of an academic on 25 years of advising journalists and media companies.” I composed it using an outlining tool, Dave Winer’s Fargo. You can find the results here. Click on the arrows to display the notes that are “hiding” underneath.

The final part of my keynote was the first reading of something new I have been working on for a while. It’s intended to be a performance piece: PressThink in front of a live audience. Whether I will ever have a completed work good enough to present “live” I do not know. My idea is to develop the work in five-minute sections that are the performance equivalent of blog posts. A complete “show” would be 12-15 of those. (A cultural reference and wow point for the project: the great Spaulding Gray monologues of the 1980s and 90s, which I still love…) You can see the PressThink Live idea in rough form in this video, based on a post I wrote in 2005.

There’s more to it, but this is all I want to say for now because my plan may not work at all! Meaning: I may not be a good enough writer of scripts for myself, or a good enough performer to actually pull it off live even once. But the reaction in Austin to this little section was good. Good enough to convince me to keep going.

Why Aren’t They Asking for My Advice?

It’s one of my clearest and more potent memories from childhood. I am sitting on a hard wooden bench outside the office of a family therapist and child psychologist. Dr. Horowitz. Inside the office, my mother, two older brothers and an older sister are trying to figure out why they keep fighting and making each other miserable. It’s hard to believe now, but they used to call households like ours — single mom, raising five kids on a schoolteacher’s salary — “broken homes.” And there was something broken about it: everyone was constantly fighting!

All I wanted was peace, and green grass to play on. But at nine years old I had no power to make peace. My options were two and I exercised both. First: I declined to participate in the warring. This made me invisible. But that’s an advantage! When you’re invisible no one throws an ashtray at you. Second: I took notes. Invisible notes. I saw exactly what he did to needle her, and how she over-reacted, which only encouraged him. I felt the interlocking genius of their misery. I knew what co-dependence was 20 years before I knew the name for it. And I did feel a kind of awe at the power and efficiency of human denial. It’s all in my notes.

So there they were, around 1965: inside the consultation room with Dr. Horowitz. And there I was: working on my pattern recognition skills, alone, on that hard wooden bench. And I remember the feeling: “This is crazy. They’re locked away with their problems. All I do every day is study their problems. Why aren’t they asking for my advice?”

Well, the answer is obvious now. I was invisible to my own family. And from that another writer was born.

I’ve asked a lot of journalists over the years: why did you choose journalism as your life’s work? The answers fall into patterns: I love to write. Something new every day. I wanted to tell stories, expose bad guys and make a difference. I wanted to take that magic carpet ride and see the world.

One thing you never hear when you ask journalists that question: “I got into journalism because I have a passion for being… objective!” Or: I’m into detachment, that’s my thing. So I figured this would be a good field for me.

No one ever says that, but they do say: we don’t take sides, so we can’t use the word “torture” to refer to torture in the news pages. Now calling deeds of torture “enhanced interrogation” in the news pages of the New York Times is not why people decide to become journalists. They learn that after they join. Their pressthink gets in the way of what got them into the press in the first place. Which is the kind of thing I point out at my blog, called PressThink.

In 1965 it was: why aren’t they listening to my advice? Today it’s like this:

You want my advice?
—Not particularly.
Great! Well, here it is…

That’s blogging. It feels a lot better than the bench.

Photo: Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Creative Commons.

Here’s the video from the conference. My keynote starts around minute 39 and goes to 1:27.

The Washington Post and the Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize for public service today. There’s no prize for the network of journalists and newsrooms that brought the surveillance story forward.

As the New York Times reported:

Though the citation did not name specific reporters, the work was led by Barton Gellman at the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill at the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and journalist who worked with both newspapers.

And people will debate that— not naming the reporters. Just as they debate the handling of the Snowden documents by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to First Look Media.)

Here I share some thoughts about the Snowden story — or story system — that go beyond what the prizes can recognize.

The Pulitzers are national (they honor U.S. journalism), institutional (the award frequently goes to a newspaper or newsroom) and individual (writers with bylines are typically named.)

The Snowden story is an international enterprise, involving the press, and press law, in the UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Canada and the United States for starters. It involves collaboration and alliance among freelance journalists with their own standing (Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras especially but also to a degree Barton Gellman) who are contracting with institutions and their unique strengths: the Guardian, the Washington Post won the Pulitzer but there are many others: the New York Times and ProPublica (with whom The Guardian shared some of the Snowden documents) Der Spiegel in Germany, O Globo in Brazil, CBC in Canada— and more. There’s no Pulitzer for that.

“Closest to those whose privacy has been invaded.”

Greenwald has said this about the strategy that he and Poitras followed in reporting out the Snowden files:

I reported on most of them under a freelance contract with the Guardian, and she has reported on most under similar contracts with the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian and especially der Spiegel. But we also have partnered with multiple media outlets around the world – in Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Spain, Holland, Mexico, and Norway, with more shortly to come – to ensure that the documents are reported on in those places where the interest level is highest and are closest to those individuals whose privacy has been invaded.

In my view that decision — through collaboration, release stories in the press vehicle “closest to those individuals whose privacy has been invaded” — won the Pulitzer today.

“We did not have to do our reporting from London.”

At crucial moments, the “networked” part of the surveillance story kept it from being contained by the authorities. The most dramatic is when Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian told the men from the UK government that he would comply with their demands to destroy the computer hard drives containing the Snowden files. But:

I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

In a sense it’s that moment that deserved the Pulitzer today.

The international press sphere

When the Guardian shared some of the Snowden documents with ProPublica and the New York Times, there was a logic to spreading the wealth and joining forces in this way. They had worked it out over Wikileaks. Rusbridger:

[It] happened just after we took possession of the first tranche of WikiLeaks documents in 2010. I strongly suspected that our ability to research and publish anything to do with this trove of secret material would be severely constrained in the UK. America, for all its own problems with media laws and whistleblowers, at least has press freedom enshrined in a written constitution. It is also, I hope, unthinkable that any US government would attempt prior restraint against a news organisation planning to publish material that informed an important public debate, however troublesome or embarrassing.

In a sense it has been the international press sphere, an alliance of newsrooms on several continents, operating as publisher of the Snowden files. And that way of doing it won a Pulitzer today.

“I wish Snowden had come to me.”

In its entirety the Snowden story system is a hard thing to hang a prize on. But we know what some of its principles are. In November of last year Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (there is no larger figure in Pulitzer lore) complained about the way the story system was working. Snowden had made a mistake by not coming to him, Woodward said. He, Bob of Watergate, would have known how to bring order and narrative to the revelations. Incredibly, he argued for keeping Snowden’s identity a secret, as if this was up to the great reporter with his prize source to rule upon and not to Snowden as a public actor himself.

Gellman reacted swiftly to Woordward’s Sun King suggestion. He did it in public, with no hestitation about taking on an icon of the Post:

“I can’t explain why Bob would insult the source who brought us this extraordinary story or the exemplary work of his colleagues in pursuing it,” Gellman said in an email to HuffPost Thursday.

“The ‘others’ he dismissed include [The Washington Post's] Greg Miller, Julie Tate, Carol Leonnig, Ellen Nakashima, Craig Whitlock, Craig Timberg, Steven Rich and Ashkan Soltani — all of whom are building on the Snowden archive with me to land scoop after scoop,” Gellman continued. “I won’t get into why Snowden came to me or didn’t come to Bob. But the idea of keeping Snowden anonymous, or of waiting for one ‘coherent’ story, suggests that Bob does not understand my source or the world he lived in.”

Gellman knew that for this story only coalitions of journalists with sources could get it done. For me, that moment of push back also got a Pulitzer today.

Classic forms of he said, she said are not so much a “sin” against high practice as an increasingly crappy level of service for what is supposed to be a high end product: New York Times reporting.

Saturday the New York Times published on its front page an article by reporter Jeremy W. Peters about Republican Senator Rand Paul criticizing his party for backing laws that make it harder for some people to vote by requiring forms of identification they may not have. Unquestionably, this was news. The Times report included this paragraph:

Few issues ignite such passion among the base of both parties. Democrats argue that the laws are intended to keep poor voters away from the polls because they often have difficulty obtaining identification. Republicans contend cheating is rife in today’s elections.

Excuse me: Would you happen to know, New York Times, whether fraud at the polls is “rife in today’s elections?” Is that something I should expect you to know, seeing as you are the high-end product in the national news marketplace? Or is Democrats argue/Republicans contend/We have no idea a good enough standard, and it is my expectations that are out of scale?

In this article, at least, the Times does not know whether cheating is rife in today’s elections. But it knows of a passion for polarizing the issue among the bases of both parties. This helps makes it a classic in the “he said, she said” genre.

Look, we have no idea who’s right. How would we? Figure it out for yourselves! Don’t be asking us to sort out what’s real from what’s fiction. We’re just New York Times journalists. We don’t do “there’s no basis for that.” We do “Republicans contend…”

I’m satirizing but to make a point: this standard isn’t good enough. At least since the launch of Politifact.com in 2007 — which does do “sorry, there’s no basis for that,” sometimes — it’s been made clear to mainstream practitioners in the U.S. that the classic forms of he said, she said are not so much a “sin” against high practice as an increasingly crappy level of service for what is supposed to be an upscale product: New York Times reporting. If you can say (reliably) there’s no evidence for… and you don’t, how well have you done by Times authority?

Here I hand the mic to a fellow blogger of this one sad but (we think) telling paragraph, Felix Salmon, now of Fusion. Felix broke it down proposition by proposition: False equivalency in the NYT. (“How Jeremy Peters’s voter ID reporting is even more wrong than you think.”) I urge you to read his post and come back to this one.

Meanwhile, this report from — hey! — the New York Times in 2007 testifies:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Also this from Politifact/Georgia rating as “mostly true” the claim that in-person voter fraud is a very rare phenomenon, so rare that “only 10 cases of in-person voter fraud have been proven nationally.”

Or this in 2013 from Politifact/Texas: “By our reading of the attorney general’s records, 18 instances of voter fraud have been confirmed in Texas since 2002.” That’s an average of 1.6 cases per year. In a state where more than a million votes are cast in an off year. Rife?

Or read what law professor and election law scholar Richard L. Hasen, author of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown (Yale University Press: 2012) has to say on how “rife” it is:

Federal Judge Lynn Adelman looked at the evidence from Wisconsin and reached a conclusion unsurprising to those of us who study how elections are run. “Virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin,” Adelman wrote, “and it is exceedingly unlikely that voter impersonation will become a problem in Wisconsin in the foreseeable future.”

Wisconsin is not alone in lacking such evidence. When the United States Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008, the state conceded there was no evidence, ever, of impersonation fraud in the entire state.

As Salmon says, you don’t have to pretend that there is a lot of fraud to be in favor of more controls. “In fact, you don’t even need to think that cheating exists in order to support such measures. It’s entirely rational to support a voter ID law even if cheating is rare or nonexistent, on the grounds that cheating is just too easy right now and that you want to make it harder.”

So what is that exceedingly crappy paragraph doing there on the newspaper-of-record’s front page? Salmon says it’s laziness. (“He-said-she-said is so easy, for a journalist on deadline, that both journalists and editors tend not to really thinking about exactly what they’re saying.”) Certainly ease-of-use is part of the device’s fading delights.

Here’s how I described the appeal of he said, she said in 2009. It makes the story writable on deadline when you don’t know enough to sort things out. In a “he said, she said” classic:

* No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)

* The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.

* The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter [and the user] in the middle between polarized extremes.

I question whether that between-two-extremes territory, the “you figure it out/for us partisan polarization rules” space is valuable turf in the news business. I doubt that it’s “safe,” either, if you mean by safe: won’t do the brand harm. I think it’s likely to corrode trust over time. A conventional explanation for he said, she said says: it may be lazy or incomplete, but it is also a safe middle ground place to land so you can get the damn paper out!

But it’s not that safe. Democrats argue/Republicans contend/We have No Idea… increasingly won’t cut it for the Times, or its competitors like the FT, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg. The upscale, high-information readers the Times wants to charge more money to, the core loyalists who are being asked to finance more of the operation— these users are increasingly likely to know about various preponderance-of-evidence calls independent of whether the Times knows enough to include that review in its reporting. When this kind of reader comes upon he said, she said reporting on a big story where it’s CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE, as with the right to vote: bad moment for the Times brand.

My sense: What was acceptably lame under market conditions that Bill Keller began with is a more corrosive practice today. I think The Masthead knows it. This is one of the reasons they created the Upshot, where preponderance of evidence, not a summary of partisan talking points, is supposed to be the baseline practice.

A good way to prove it: The Upshot looks at the evidence and makes a call on “Republicans contend cheating is rife in today’s elections.”

“NPR is far stronger than this short-sighted and half-assed decision suggests. It has nothing to fear from an empowered ombudsman.”

UPDATED FOUR TIMES, JULY 15 TO 19

I always read job descriptions for open positions in journalism. They tell you a lot about which way the field is headed. Last week I came across this opening for the NPR Ombudsman/Public Editor position. Two phrases jumped out at me:

The primary responsibility of NPR’s Ombudsman/Public Editor is to connect NPR’s audience to NPR and to provide a forum for audience views. The Ombudsman/Public Editor serves as an independent reporter on behalf of the public.

The NPR Ombudsman/Public Editor focuses on fact gathering and explanation, not commentary or judgment.

Here it is again:

In addressing audience complaints about journalistic errors in NPR News coverage, the Ombudsman/Public Editor will gather facts and can interview key news managers. The Ombudsman/Public Editor will then explain any errors without passing judgment…

What is going on with these phrases in bold, which appear to prohibit the ombudsman from criticizing the performance of NPR journalists?

Well, it’s a change in policy. In the past, the NPR ombudsman has routinely come to judgment in addressing complaints. A typical example from 2011, when Alicia Shepard held the position:

Lots of things drive NPR’s audience crazy. One I totally agree with is this: NPR often does a lousy job of identifying the background of think tanks or other groups when quoting their experts.

Here, Shepard is picking up on a complaint she’s heard from listeners and making a judgment: NPR is doing a lousy job! Until now, this was a normal part of the position.

As you may recall, NPR incorrectly reported that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had died when she was shot at a public appearance in her district. The ombudsman gathered facts and explained what happened. She also came to several conclusions:

At the point the hospital confirmed Giffords was in surgery around 2:30 p.m, NPR should have done two things: sent out another e-mail alert correcting its mistake and when it next broadcast at 3 p.m., it should have said that NPR mistakenly reported Giffords’ death and given the new, correct information.

Neither of these things was done that day….

What NPR should have done it did not do. That isn’t fact-gathering or explanation or representing the listeners. That’s making a judgment. Again:

NPR had two sources, though neither was identified in any way, and should have been. And the newscast should have put the news in context, explaining that a tragedy had just occurred, the story was changing quickly, and this was what NPR knew at that moment.

Making a judgment doesn’t necessarily mean slamming NPR. Here’s the current ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, evaluating complaints about NPR reporter Mara Liasson appearing on Fox News.

My conclusion on Liasson’s work is simple:

Applaud her.

I find that her NPR stories were straightforward and based on solid reporting. Her Fox contributions were the same. She was smartly analytical, but did not take a position on issues or veer into opinion. Just as important, she did not tilt or load her characterizations of political figures such as President Barack Obama or Republican leaders.

Much of the complaints about Liasson, it seems to me, are really about Fox. The complaining listeners do not like Fox’s rightward stance, and especially the incendiary views of some of its prime time talk show hosts such as Bill O’Reilly. They tar Liasson by association.

I looked at her work. In my assessment she does not tilt one way or the other. I think complaints from listeners about her appearing on Fox are really about Fox, not her. That’s the ombudsman coming to a judgment, after investigation. Under the new rules, he couldn’t do that. He could explain how NPR views Liasson and gather facts about NPR’s guidelines but he could not comment on her performance or assess the validity of the listeners’ complaint, which was the whole point of his November 2013 column.

A further clue to the changes is in the new title. The ombudsman has become Ombudsman/Public Editor in NPR’s usage. Thus: “The primary responsibility of NPR’s Ombudsman/Public Editor is to connect NPR’s audience to NPR and to provide a forum for audience views.” I asked Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s first ombudsman, what he thought. Dvorkin, who is now a journalism academic, helped create the position back in 2000. He said he was concerned that “the Washington Post weakened model of ‘readers’ representative’ is working its way into or even infecting NPR.”

In March of 2013 the Post announced that it would no longer employ an ombudsman who was independent of the newsroom and empowered “to critique the newspaper’s journalism and field readers’ questions.” Instead it would have a reader representative, “a staff member who will answer questions and respond to complaints.”

The journalist who took the position later said, “My primary mission is to respond to readers… I’m not [charged with] holding the newsroom accountable.” Dvorkin said that his job as NPR’s first ombudsman “was to evaluate and adjudicate NPR’s reporting.” That’s gone now. “A media organization that values its reputation should not be in a defensive crouch,” he added. NPR “may be opting for a safer harbor in which the ombudsman/public editor plays less of the lightening rod role.”

I was able to reach former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard, who is now working for a news start-up in Afghanistan, to ask about the changes. “To not comment diminishes the role,” she said to me via email. “The new job description appears to defeat the purpose of having an ombudsman.” I agree with that.

I also asked Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, about the “no passing judgment” rule in the NPR job description. She said:

My experience at The Times tells me that readers do seem to want the public editor to weigh in with a verdict, at least most of the time. Sometimes, of course, it’s appropriate just to present findings, or an explanation, or editors’ opinions. But I certainly appreciate the option to express my point of view and it’s always been central to the way The Times and its public editors have interpreted the role.

Seeking comment from NPR, I contacted their spokesperson, Isabel Lara. Our brief Q & A:

What were the concerns that led NPR to emphasize in the new job description that the ombudsman/public editor does not comment or pass judgment?

There were no concerns. We’re looking for someone who can offer a rigorous, independent account of our work. The ombudsman is positioned to help the audience understand how we approached our coverage and whether our reporting meets NPR’s journalistic and ethical standards. The ombudsman may reach certain conclusions based on a careful examination of that work, but should not be perceived as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

Where in the organization did those concerns originate?

The changes were based on discussions with outside experts, senior news leadership and the President and CEO, to whom the ombudsman ultimately reports.

Who made the decision to include those phrases in bold and why?

The job description was approved by the President and CEO.

That the ombudsman should “not be perceived as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong” is behind language which says: just gather facts and explain them, DO NOT JUDGE. Okay, NPR. If that’s your story….

My conclusions: NPR has downgraded the ombudsman position. Two former ombudsman agree with this. To understand why, just think about the effect that “your job is not to pass judgment” has on the pool of potential applicants. It’s likely that similar moves by the Washington Post helped clear the way. It’s possible also that dissatisfaction with the performance of previous ombudsmen contributed to the decision, along with a feeling that criticism rains down from all sides nowadays, so why do we need an in-house critic?

In my view, NPR is far stronger than this short-sighted and half-assed decision suggests. It has nothing to fear from an empowered ombudsman. Its own internal standards are much improved since the position was created. Its ethics handbook — a public document — is a model of transparency and accountability. Whoever is responsible for the downgrade made a bad call.

UPDATE I, July 15. Many people are suggesting to me that the reason the ombudsman position was clipped was in reaction to this massive investigation by Edward Schumacher-Matos. It’s known that NPR executives were exasperated with the ombudsman over it. So maybe it was a factor:

@yomum @jayrosen_nyu Sources say the newsies not happy with recent ombuds postings esp. on the foster care series. Pressure to rein in next.

— Jeffrey Dvorkin (@jdvorkin) July 15, 2014

That’s plausible. However, if NPR executives wanted to steer the next ombudsman away from investigations like that one they could have written into the job description: “The NPR Ombudsman/Public Editor does not re-report NPR stories.” They went far beyond that.

UPDATE II, July 16: NPR changed its mind. It says the part about “not providing commentary or passing judgment” was a mistake to include. The job description will be changed. (Check: it is changed.) The new CEO, Jarl Mohn, issued this statement to Media Matters:

The Ombudsman is a critically important role at NPR and the expectations of the job have not changed. The Ombudsman must be fully independent and fully transparent in order to do their job on behalf of the public. The language in the current job description about not providing commentary or passing judgment is a mistake and we are removing it. I take this position very seriously and am committed to recruiting an outstanding journalist for the job and ensuring he or she has the resources required.

Good move. Former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller comments:

New @NPR CEO Jarl Mohn does the right thing here: http://t.co/vhsW8tp7PZ

— Vivian Schiller (@vivian) July 17, 2014

UPDATE III, July 18. In a conference call with affiliates before the CEO’s decision and statement, top NPR executives lash out at me, call my reporting “lazy” and ask public radio colleagues to give them the benefit of the doubt. Link.

UPDATE IV, July 19. Jeffrey Dvorkin, the original NPR ombudsman (and a believer in the position, an active member of this organization) asked me for comment on the conference call with affiliates at his post: NPR Learns About (New) Media Accountability – the Hard Way. I re-print it here with some tiny changes.

It was my understanding that ‘fact gathering and explanation, not commentary or judgment’ is an idea well known in the public radio community. There is not a lot of ambiguity about what it means. But just to make sure, I asked some people with NPR experience. So I like the chances for my interpretation over Kinsey Wilson’s ‘The job description was in no way meant to diminish the role, limit the independence or handcuff them.’

Here’s what I did in reporting my post. I will leave it to you to decide if I was being ‘lazy.’

* To make sure my impression (that NPR ombudsmen routinely comment and make judgments) was correct, I reviewed dozens of past columns and found some typical examples.

* I contacted several former NPR ombudsmen for comment and quoted two who would go on the record. From one I got an earlier job description for the position.

*I contacted several ombudsmen or former ombudsmen at other national news organizations and quoted one who went on the record.

*I know more than a few people who work at NPR and they know me. I knew they wouldn’t comment on the record but I talked with them to check my assessment against theirs and make sure I wasn’t crazy.

* I contacted NPR’s spokesperson around 10:30 am July 14, and said I wanted to post the piece that evening, so could she please get back to me by 5 pm. I also told her that two former ombudsmen interpreted the language the way I did, so there was zero chance that NPR would be surprised by my take. I later spoke to the NPR spokesperson by phone to clarify what I was asking about.

* I received the NPR statement around 5:30 pm July 14 and published it in full later that night.

And has none of this figured out.

Pierre Omidyar published a blog post today that gave an update on First Look Media, the company he started with Glenn Greenwald and others and backed with $250 million of his own money. Nine Months in, First Look is Still Very Much a Startup.

As regular readers of PressThink and my Twitter feed know, I am an occasional adviser to First Look, but not an employee. So factor that in. I am not a spokesman for First Look and did not clear this interpretation with them.

In my opinion, this was the most important part of Pierre’s post today:

…rather than building one big flagship website, we’ve concluded that we will have greater positive impact if we test more ideas and grow them based on what we learn. We are unwavering in our desire to reach a mass audience, but the best way to do that may be through multiple experiments with existing digital communities rather than trying to draw a large audience to yet another omnibus site…

For First Look the way to a large user base isn’t “one big flagship website” or an “everything you need to know” news app to go up against, say, the Guardian or npr.org. That kind of “omnibus” product will not be forthcoming anytime soon, today’s announcement said. Instead:

We’ll test an approach to journalism that starts with being part of well-defined communities of interest, understanding the people in them and serving their needs and aspirations in new ways. The digital world gives us unprecedented opportunities to meet this vision.

You begin with the users of news in a few well-defined communities of interest. By understanding their “needs and aspirations” better, you try try to generate more trials, more fruitful errors, and — if the method works — products and services that mesh with people’s lives more effectively.

This is not a part of Pierre’s thinking, so don’t use it to characterize First Look’s approach, but the argument is similar to my PressThink post from March: When starting from zero in journalism go for a niche site serving a narrow news interest well.

That’s my advice to individuals starting in journalism. Get yourself into a journalistic situation, first. A “journalistic situation,” as I define it, is when a group of people who share a common interest are actually depending on you for news. From there the rest will flow. What you learn by trying to provide a living community with news instructs you in what to try next.

First Look will test an approach that “starts with being part of well-defined communities of interest.” Begin with a journalistic situation. From there a distinct approach may grow. Of course, journalists who are distinct and talented enough can sometimes create their own community of users through a unique mix of investigation, commentary, reportage— and personality. First Look is testing this proposition too.

Which leads to the second item of news in Pierre’s blog post. Combined with a doubling of the editorial staff to 50, it was this:

…rather than immediately launching a large collection of digital “magazines” based on strong, expert journalists with their own followings, as we imagined earlier, we’ll begin by building out the two we’ve started and then explore adding new ones as we learn. Whatever direction our experiments lead us, we will continue to invest in our journalists and support their commitment to fearless, fact-based reporting. We will continue to fund deep investigative reporting and back it up with the travel and research budgets necessary to support it.

Building out The Intercept and the Matt Taibbi venture will be the primary publishing project for now as First Look turns one of its founding phrases “fearless, fact-based reporting” into actual journalism (and other projects.) When the learnings from The Intercept and Taibbi come in, the collection may be filled out. Or not. Also: There doesn’t have to be an editorial brand called First Look, and there may never be.

This was the third bit of news:

I expect we’ll be in this planning, startup and experimental mode for at least the next few years as we explore how to become integrated into people’s lives in meaningful ways.

In other words, First Look has none of this figured out.

I may update this post today or tonight if I have more to say.

“Members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel,” the AP said on Twitter. Then the AP decided that it could not say that. Why?

It’s early in the game. I have only been writing about this concept for four years. Okay, nine. Whatever! I keep at it. This is a work of pressthink that I am still trying to render properly for readers. Starts like so:

Alongside the production of news and commentary American journalists working in mainstream newsrooms have to continuously reproduce their own innocence. By “innocence” I mean some kind of public showing that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of unfairly tilting the news this way or that.

It’s not enough to proclaim innocence: we have no party, we take no side. In the style of journalism I’m talking about — the house style at the AP, CNN, NPR, the BBC — innocence is a production requirement. If the requirement isn’t met, the work fails, and it can be sent back to the shop.

Sometimes innocence is built into the form. On CNN’s Crossfire, circa 2005, the show would open like this:

ANNOUNCER: From the left, Michael Kinsley… From the right, Mary Matalin.

This simple routine is a load-bearing feature of the show’s design, balancing the stresses on CNN’s reputation and restoring innocence nightly.

Any fan of NBA basketball has seen defenders put their hands up in the air ostentatiously, with funny facial expressions to match. It’s meant to show the refs: See? I’m not pushing. In news there are moves like that, and this is what I’m calling the production of innocence.

On July 29, the Associated Press sent out this bulletin:

As much of world watches Gaza war in horror, members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel: http://t.co/DepO2etLQS

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 29, 2014

About five hours later the AP caught itself:

Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel in Gaza war (revises wording in this @AP tweet: http://t.co/RZs5dh0m2L ): http://t.co/OvBKx75U6Z

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 29, 2014

“Members of Congress fall over each other…” is a characterization of the facts chosen by the AP writer and supported by the information in the story. If there’s any situation in American politics where they “fall all over each other” it’s support for Israel in the United States Congress. So this statement is a little saucy, a little cynical but it is accurate. The AP nonetheless decided it was “too much.”

The original header produced the news well enough but it failed to produce enough innocence for the AP. “Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel…” is not more true than “they fall over themselves.” But it is more innocent. When the switch is made the AP feed suffers a loss of vivid. Its colors wilt. There is less voice, less urgency in the language. And the AP willingly pays this cost. Why? Lots of reasons. I isolate these two:

* In the sociology of newswork one of the first things you learn is that a firm involved in news production is uniquely vulnerable to public criticism and prone to costly mistakes. A news report is a first draft, an improvised understanding. It is frequently wrong or blind. Therefore an established firm in the news business needs regular and reliable ways to protect itself from the criticism it knows will come, including some criticism for which there is no good defense, nothing beyond: I know, but we didn’t have time!

* In the American setting media bias is a driver in politics, and culture war is where some people go to live. A major provider like the AP gets hit hard in the bias wars, so the principle, don’t give them ammunition! has to be built into its routines. That’s the production of innocence. I’ve rendered it this way:

AP SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM: “Members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel.”

INNOCENCE METER BOT: Headline script approved on accuracy. Failed on innocence. Please try again and re-submit.

AP SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM: “Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel in Gaza war.”

INNOCENCE METER BOT: Headline script approved on accuracy. Approved on innocence. You are cleared to post.

William James used to call it the “cash value” of the concept. What can you do with it? Well, you can ask good questions.

Q. 1 The production of innocence has benefits that are obvious. Risk-reduction. Haven from criticism. But it also has costs. Loss of voice, loss of nerve. How do we know when the costs exceed the benefits?

Q. 2 And what if costs are rising in the field of innocence production? Isn’t that the whole point of making culture war on the media, to drive those costs up?

Q. 3 What advantages do born digital newsrooms gain over legacy newsrooms when they decide they no longer care about the production of innocence– as say, Gawker, has?

Q. 4 When you finally come to the conclusion, there is no haven from criticism, the world doesn’t work that way any more, are the costs of producing innocence alongside the news still justifiable? (“BBC Trust says 200 senior managers trained not to insert ‘false balance’ into stories when issues were non-contentious.” Expensive!.)

Q. 5 I know, I know: advertisers like the signs of innocence and advertisers pay the bills. How’s that going?

Q. 6 Let’s say you junk the innocence machinery. What gets put in its place? (My bet: “here’s where we’re coming from” + make a good argument + high standards of verification beats the old system.)

Q. 7 As they mount, reports that get “approved on accuracy” but “fail on innocence” represent colors of truth the news provider feels it cannot provide. Is that a trustworthy system?

Q. 8 Suppose you junk the production of innocence due to mounting costs and diminishing value. Now you have fewer means for avoiding criticism. Which means you have to reply more to criticism. But how do you do that well and still have time to produce the news?

I don’t know. But as I said, it’s early times.

You use the product. We have the power. You can exit any time. Before then we can screw with you.

Alex Goldman: Have you thought about bringing in, say, like an ethicist to, to vet your experiments?

Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid: To wring his hands all day for a hundred thousand dollars a year?

Fabulous exchange, isn’t it? As soon as NPR’s On The Media pointed it out, I wanted to know more about Christian Rudder’s elegant derision. I had read his post at the OkCupid blog, We Experiment On Human Beings!

We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

Facebook by accident had this conversation. OkCupid would now have it on purpose. Then I listened to the interview. Three times. It’s that good.

Pertinent facts:

* Christian Rudder will soon be promoting a book, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking.
* He doesn’t shrink from public controversy.
* Tim Camody analyzed why OkCupid’s admission didn’t bother people as much as Facebook’s, and why it should have.
* I have written for the Washington Post and spoken up at the Atlantic about the Facebook study that became an issue in the public sphere.

Listener’s guide to TLDR‘s July 31st podcast: Q & A with OkCupid’s co-founder Christian Rudder.
Here’s the clip. It’s 14:20.

You can read the guide first and it affects the way you listen, or listen first, then read.

1. Why I love this interview: the entire thing is about the legitimacy of OkCupid experimenting on its users. They are never not talking about that. Perfect for a podcast.

2. Christian Rudder admits right away that he was “sensationalizing” in his we experiment on you! post. (Most writers don’t admit to that.) I’m trying to provoke, he says at several points during the interview. We have to allow for this. But even someone trying to be provocative reveals themselves in their choice of heat-seeking styles. A man who volunteers that he was “sensationalizing” when he said to users, yeah we experiment on you, so what? is leaning into the scandal narrative, pushing confrontation with it, because he strongly suspects there is nothing there.

3. Rudder’s best point is that websites like his have to experiment on human beings to improve the product. How else would you do it? he asks, interviewing the interviewers. The attempt is to get you, the listener, to shift position. Don’t identify with the hapless user, unwittingly experimented upon. Climb into the chair of the site’s operators. We have this algorithm and we hope it works. But we have to run tests to prove it. Some ethicist says that might be a problem. Is this going to stop you?

4. Alex Goldman and the TLDR crew are at their strongest on informed consent. They make that case come alive. But instead of pretending that he’s obtained consent (by having users check a “terms of service” box) Rudder jeers at the whole idea. Informed consent is a joke, he says. When you participated in those psychology experiments in college you had no idea what they were measuring. It was un-informed consent. That’s how websites work. They are semi-legitimate enterprises. The smarter users — or the users we want — already know this. They accept a certain amount of “getting screwed with” as the price of having an OkCupid that works. It’s the ethicists who don’t get it. The world has moved on. They wring their hands.

5. The interviewers are persistent. They try to solve the problem of consent. Why not level with people? Tell them you’re about to experiment on them. Ask them if they want to be included. Rudder shuts this down. Once they know they’re being studied, they will act differently. In other words: He doesn’t want to solve the problem of consent. He wants to recognize a power differential between the site and its users.

6. Rudder doesn’t put it this way, but he’s really sneering at the whole concept of user trust. Users don’t trust us to never put our interests before theirs. They know we sometimes do that. They know we don’t tell them about it. Mainly, they just want the site to work. And we do too. Trust, “ethics,” legitimacy, consent: aren’t these terms a little full of themselves?

7. PJ Vogt had the best line: “I’m not comfortable being a guinea pig to the extent that you guys are comfortable making me a guinea pig.” But if he broke up with his girlfriend he would probably be back at the site, he said. That’s Rudder’s point. We don’t need you to be comfortable with our methods. We don’t need them to be seen as ethical or fair. Users won’t know if they’re being manipulated. That’s how websites like ours work. You use the product. We have the power. You can exit any time. Before then we can screw with you.

These are my discussion notes to The Executive Editor on the Word ‘Torture’, a letter to Times readers from Dean Baquet, August 7, 2014.

“It’s time to celebrate that the newspaper of record is no longer covering for war criminals.” That’s what Andrew Sullivan, who has kept watch on this story, wrote Thursday. The news he was celebrating: the New York Times gave up the ghost on euphemisms for torture.

Alright, we celebrated. For an hour, maybe. Now let’s ask what came to an end with this strange announcement. Terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “harsh tactics” and “brutal treatment” had been preferred usage at the Times in news stories by its own staff about the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody after 9/11. “Torture” was removed as a descriptor that the Times itself would employ. The decision to reverse that came Thursday in a brief note to readers from executive editor Dean Baquet.

From now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.

1. As Erik Wemple wrote, Baquet here “pledges that the newspaper will deploy the English language to describe things.” Wemple’s paraphrase points up the strangest part for me: the Times felt it had to exit from the vernacular to stay on the responsible journalism track. This I find hard to accept.

The baseline in daily journalism is supposed to be plain English, spoken and written well. Non-exclusive language is the norm. The market is the common reader and the reader’s common sense, not a specialized class of knowers vibrating in the power circle. It’s not incumbent on an already understood term like torture to prove itself neutral enough for newswriters, but on the specialist’s construction (“enhanced interrogation”) to prove itself relevant in these proceedings at all.

Even with scare quotes around it, a term like “enhanced interrogation techniques” starts with zero currency, extreme bloodlessness and dubious origins. A lot to overcome. In the years when the Times could not pick between it and torture — 2002 to 2014, approximately —  it seemed that its editors and reporters were trying to re-clarify what had been made more opaque by their own avoid-the-label policy decision. Thus the appearance of do we have to spell it out for you? phrases like “brutal interrogation methods,” meant to signal: this was really, really bad. So bad you might think it amounts to…

Baquet tries to explain:

The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.

So for the fruits of avoiding a label the Times becomes a force for fuzzing things up. Early in a public reckoning with acts of state torture it decides it cannot call it that. Wrong side of your Orwell there, mister editor. To report what happened you have to first commit to calling things by their right names. The Times lost sight of that somewhere in a fog it helped to create. The editor’s note doesn’t explain how it happened. (See Barry Eisler on this point.)

2. You could see the reversal coming.

Now that Obama has said “we tortured some folks,” safe enough for the New York Times to put it that way in the news pages? A man can dream.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 1, 2014

Baquet’s note doesn’t mention Obama’s concession on August 1. “We crossed a line and that needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that.” The president is being more direct than ever: yes, we tortured people. The Senate Intelligence committee report, with lots of details about torture, will be coming out soon. Fights about its release could be making news for weeks. Linguistically, the Times was headed for a crash if everyone in the political system could talk of torture (and be quoted on it) but Times reporters couldn’t say that themselves. The game was up. When the reporters lobbied for release, what choice did Baquet have?

Marcy Wheeler in Salon, August 4, sensed the collapse:

For 10 years, journalists have willingly perpetuated this linguistic absurdity, even as more evidence came out proving the CIA used torture and not some fluffed up interrogation process, even as more and more neutral arbiters judged our torture torture.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has spent five years trying to understand and come to grips with the torture done in our name. Isn’t it time for journalists to do the same?

3. It’s easy to proclaim (and I am with those who say) that the Times showed excessive deference to government officials during the “make the picture fuzzier for our readers and let them decide” phase of reporting. But how did the editors think themselves into this mess? That is what I am trying to understand in these notes.

4. My contribution is this concept: the production of innocence. You can use it to understand what happened.

Alongside the production of news and commentary American journalists working in mainstream newsrooms have to continuously reproduce their own innocence. By “innocence” I mean some kind of public showing that they have no politics themselves, no views of their own, no side, no stake, no ideology and therefore no one can accuse them of unfairly tilting the news this way or that.

For newsrooms that still have it in their model, the production of innocence is supposed to chime with the publication of news. But what if the news is about a clearer and clearer case for calling it torture? This happened from 2002 to 2012. As the evidence became too great to ignore, the dispute in Washington over calling it torture escalated because of massive consequences up and down the chain of command. With avoid becoming party to a dispute a newsroom priority, the Times got caught on the wrong side of the evidence pile and added to the fog of euphemism. Manufacture of innocence, darker side.

Listen to a Times spokesperson explain it in 2010.

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

It’s that intention — avoid taking sides in a dispute —  to which I draw your attention. It won out over 1.) “use the vernacular!” and 2.) a growing body of evidence. Until last Thursday. So what changed?

5. Innocence, I said, is a production requirement. You need to satisfy it somehow. But there are different ways to generate enough “points” to make a thing reportable. For example: if the press pack is doing it, you’re home free. That’s as innocent as you can get, even if the story is wrong. If the government admits to it, you’re innocent for telling the public it happened. If the president urges Americans to face the fact, that’s all the cover you need. When the Times could hit its innocence numbers in other ways, DON’T USE THE WORD TORTURE ON OUR AUTHORITY was dropped from the production routine.

Obama’s “we tortured” added innocence. http://t.co/ROEulsi2MB Once it became accurate AND innocent, “torture” was OK. http://t.co/53CNmKcnpo

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 7, 2014

6. From an exchange last year between Bill Keller, the executive editor under whom much of this happened, and Glenn Greenwald, who is deeply critical:

Greenwald: A failure to call torture “torture” because government officials demand that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demonstrably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul.

Keller: Sometimes fair play becomes false equivalence, or feels like euphemism. But it’s simplistic to say, for example, unless you use the word “torture” you are failing a test of courage, or covering up evil. Of course, I regard waterboarding as torture. But if a journalist gives me a vivid description of waterboarding, notes the long line of monstrous regimes that have practiced it, and then lays out the legal debate over whether it violates a specific statute or international accord, I don’t care whether he uses the word or not. I’m happy — and fully equipped — to draw my own conclusion.

To which I say: accountability can’t start until things are called by their right names. The Times became a force — not the force, but one among many in the system — for confusion and delay in the public reckoning with torture. Until, as Dean Baquet wrote: “The Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program.”

7. The Times actually used the word “torture” a lot during the period when the ban was in effect. This is important. The ban applied to a relatively narrow class of cases. Some of the situations in which it did not apply:

* Quoting someone who alleged: this was torture. (“We’re not saying it, he is.”)
* Citing reports documenting torture. (“We’re not calling it that. But this report does.”)
* Reporting on the debate: was it torture? did it work? (“We’re not saying. We’re just telling you there’s a dispute”)
* Publishing in op-eds and reviews other voices who do call it torture. (“We’re not saying it, this writer is.”)
* Editorials in the Times. (“That’s opinion. No problem.”)

A good example is a 2005 review essay by Andrew Sullivan: (My bold.)

Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment ”abuse” or some other euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed it was sanctioned from above. ….At Guantánamo Bay, newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt they were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington.

Was the torture effective?

If the Times was concerned about getting ahead of the legal system, how could it allow these straightforward uses of the term? Times readers somehow won’t be unfairly influenced when Andrew Sullivan does it in the book review, but they will be if the news staff tries the same thing? Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless you understand the production of innocence. The Times wasn’t trying to keep “Wake up, people! The U.S. did commit torture …” from readers, the way it might keep a rape victim’s name out of the news. It was trying to avoid making the statement on its own authority. As long as others took the responsibility — outside writers, human rights groups, quoted sources in a dispute, editorial boards — the innocence requirement was met and production went forward.

8. This has been going on for years. And not only at the Times but across the sector. In 2006 Eric Umansky (now at ProPublica) dug into the early patterns in coverage of torture for Columbia Journalism Review. His analysis, Failures of Imagination, is detailed and persuasive. For my notes, this part is key:

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time — what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

Which is an innocence calculation, it you take my drift. Umansky is direct:

Any article, no matter how straightforward or truthful, that treats abuse as a potential scandal — even by simply putting allegations on the front page — is itself making a political statement that “we think this is important,” and, implicitly, wrong. To make such a statement takes chutzpah.

“Avoid taking sides in a political dispute…” This does not take chutzpah.

9. Bill Keller, who was top editor of the New York Times when most of this was transacted, whose decision-making was undone by Dean Baquet’s note to readers…  Keller has a new job. Founding editor of The Marshall Project, a fascinating niche site with an important mission. (Their bold.) “There is a pressing national need for excellent journalism about the U.S. court and prison systems. ”I agree. This part caught my eye: “With growing awareness of the system’s failings, now is an opportune moment to launch a national conversation about criminal justice. There are numerous indications of the country’s appetite for reform.”

Obviously Bill Keller in 2014 is comfortable with that: “Launch a national conversation about…” He wants to equip with information “the country’s appetite for reform.” He feels he knows how to do the journalism part of that equation— for criminal justice. I can’t wait to see what he produces.

“With growing awareness of the system’s failings, launch a national conversation about…” That never happened for the New York Times under Bill Keller once it became clear that the United States tortured people after 9/11. Under Howell Raines, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet, the Times helped delay our national reckoning with torture. The facts were there. Required levels of innocence were not.

After Matter: Notes, Reactions & Links

Barry Eisler (former CIA, now a writer) notes something important in his post. The standard legal definition of torture “is pretty much what the Times wound up using anyway.” In other words, a judgment the Times says it’s able to make now is the same judgment that could have been made then to say that U.S. conduct met the legal standard for torture.

Seems relevant:

1. NYT refuses to call torture torture 2. This helps government refuse to prosecute torture 3. This allows NYT to start calling it torture

— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) August 8, 2014

The Times archives has topic pages for coverage of torture and CIA interrogations. Most of the relevant coverage can be found there.

Listen to this quote:

What I believe in is deep reporting, and then if a reporter really digs, there often is what I call weight of evidence in stories that are about contentious subjects.

That’s Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, speaking last week. “Weight of evidence” is exactly the judgment The Times dodged when the subject was whether to call it torture.

NPR’s David Folkenflik was a media beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun in 2004. This is from one of his columns (May 26, 2004). It shows what was riding on the issue:

Rumsfeld also used misdirection — a “look at this hand, not that hand” approach — to brush off questions about whether U.S. troops had tortured prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld told reporters: “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… I don’t know if… it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there’s been a conviction for torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the torture word.”

Yet it’s not hard to see torture in some of the pictures obtained and published so far by the media of abuses at Abu Ghraib. And the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and a subsequent international protocol of 1984, both of which have been signed and ratified by the U.S. government as law, do address the torture word. The 1984 document states:

“The term `torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him … or intimidating or coercing him.”

The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 makes such conduct by a member of the U.S. armed forces a “war crime” punishable by fine, imprisonment or, in cases resulting in death to the victim, the death penalty.

Photo of Bill Keller used under a Creative Commons license. Photo of Dean Baquet courtesy of New York Times.

If the weight of the evidence allows you to make a judgment, but instead you go with “he said, she said,” you’re behaving recklessly even as you tell yourself you’re doing the cautious thing.

It’s my job to notice when a piece of standard brand pressthink “flips” around and no longer works as intended. I have one.

For a very long time, the logic behind “he said, she said” journalism, and “get both sides,” as well as, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to leave it there” was that operating this way would reduce risk to a news publisher’s reputation. (See my 2009 post.) When you have both sides speaking in your account, you’re protecting yourself against charges of favoring one or the other. By not “choosing” a side — by not deciding who’s right — you’re safer.

You’re safer because you could be wrong if you choose, so why choose? You’re safer because even if you’re not wrong you can be accused of bias, and who needs that? You’re safer because people will always argue about [fill in some bitterly contested narrative here] and you don’t want to be a contestant in that. In the middle is safe. Neither/nor is safe. Not having a view of the matter is safe… Right?

Increasingly that is not right. More and more — but not always — the “no position” position is the chancier move, especially when disputes turn on factual questions and checkable claims. A newsroom that goes with “he said, she said” when a call can be made is engaged in reckless behavior that may easily blow up in its face. That wasn’t true ten years ago. But it is now.

Let me illustrate. On August 4, the New York Times ran this story: Reagan Book Sets Off Debate. It’s about Rick Perlstein’s new book, “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.” Much of the story talked about accusations of plagiarism aimed at Perlstein by Republican operative and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. The Times used the classic “he said, she said” form. Shirley and his lawyer make accusations. Perlstein and his publisher defend themselves. The Times stays in the middle:

Mr. Perlstein, 44, suggested that the attack on his book is partly motivated by conservatives’ discomfort with his portrayal of Reagan. Mr. Shirley is president and chief executive of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, which represents conservative clients like Citizens United and Ann Coulter.

But Mr. Shirley and his lawyer contend that Mr. Perlstein paraphrased original research without properly giving credit. “The rephrasing of words without proper attribution is still plagiarism,” Mr. Shirley said in an interview.

The problem here is that the Times had what it needed to make a call. “Perlstein plagiarized Shirley” was a checkable claim. Shirley’s accusations were online. Perlstein’s source notes were online. The Times knows what plagiarism is. Its writers and editors have to guard against it every day. Under these conditions, “leaving it there” amounts to malpractice, even though it still feels like normal practice and, as I said, the safer choice.

The risk the Times was taking was exposed the following week. After receiving complaints from readers, the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, took a closer look. “We wrote about it because it was out there and thought we could take it head-on in the story,” said deputy media editor Bill Brink. “We did that in the most responsible way possible, and put it in context.”

The most responsible way possible? In Brink’s mind, maybe. But that’s the problem! “The Times conferred a legitimacy on the accusation it would not otherwise have had,” Sullivan wrote.

And while it is true that Mr. Perlstein and his publisher were given plenty of opportunity to respond, that doesn’t help much. It’s as if The Times is saying: “Here’s an accusation; here’s a denial; and, heck, we don’t really know. We’re staying out of it.” Readers frequently complain to me about this he said, she said false equivalency — and for good reason.

The readers are ahead of the editors. The old standard isn’t good enough. But that news hasn’t reached the middle managers in newsrooms who grew accustomed to reducing risk by leaving it there. Climate change is probably the most famous (and most serious) example of the shift I’m talking about. Where the weight of the evidence makes it possible to render a judgment, but instead you go with “he said, she said,” you are behaving recklessly even as you tell yourself you’re doing the cautious and responsible thing.

Last month, the Telegraph in the UK reported that 200 senior managers at the BBC had to be re-trained not to insert “false balance” into stories like climate change, where a call could be made. “The BBC’s determination to give a balanced view has seen it pit scientists arguing for climate change against far less qualified opponents such as Lord Lawson who heads a campaign group lobbying against the government’s climate change policies.” That’s a form of distortion, practiced by the BBC against itself. But instead of favoring one side, it pushes the account toward a phony midpoint. Still distortion, but it looks more innocent.

Editors have to be on the lookout for those points. They’re dangerous, as I’ve been telling the New York Times for… oh, about five years.