Archive for category Journalism Theory/Analysis

Date: July 22nd, 2010
Cate: Journalism Theory/Analysis, Uncategorized
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An Ethical Argument for Transparency – Part II

In a recent post on my website I examined an ethical argument for transparency. I will continue this internal dialogue with the caveat that I am not a journalism academic. I do not prescribe my beliefs to anyone but myself. This is a disgustingly theoretical post (I promise the next one will be practical up the wahzoo). I should also note the inspiration behind these two posts was a discussion at FOO Camp: Philosophy and Technology – Tim O’Reilly and Damon Horowitz.

The First Chapter

The first post on this topic hinged on the idea that transparency is necessary for public participation in journalism.

This Wikipedia quote puts it bluntly. The argument for transparency then isn’t ethical so much as practical. It’s a second order argument. The process of journalism must be transparent if we expect people to participate in a meaningful way. This assumes, however, that we want people to participate.

If we can reason that participation in journalism is ethical and transparency is necessary for participation to occur, it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

Which means the next step is to examine the base of this syllogism: There is an ethical argument for participation in journalism.

The Goal of Journalism

What is the purpose or goal of journalism? In philosophy I might pose this as, what is journalism’s Telos — its purpose, aim, end and/or design.

The reason this question (and blog post) is important is that if you look at the current understanding of ethics in journalism you can see that it is more along the lines of a professional code than an ethical debate or analysis. Public accountability is mentioned in many of the existing code of ethics. As is the rightful dissemination of information to the public. But in almost all of these cannons of journalism the public is acted upon and is rarely an actor.

When I ask what is the goal of journalism I am not interested in the journalism industry or a journalism company. The goal for both of which would be the same for any industry (protecting itself as an economic good) or company (increasing revenue).

The tagline for my blog is “journalism is a process, not a product,” and that continues to be my rallying cry. Too often our ethics, ideas of success and end goals are determined by journalism as a product, industry or company. I am more interested in the process of journalism. What is the end goal for an act of journalism?

Now here I have to posit a question: If an act of journalism is committed but never published, is it an act of journalism?

Many people don’t know this, but I used to be a musician. I’ve actually recorded at least two albums. But I never promoted my work. So if a work of art is not shared, is it art? What is the distinction between art and hobby? Related: If an act of reporting occurs but is not shared, is it journalism? What is the distinction between journalism and journaling?

I ask this question because it gives me the platform to pose a possible end goal of journalism — to inform. Journalism, which is a tricky thing to define, is the process of collecting, filtering and distributing information that has meaning. One caveat of course is that the information is non-fiction (true and accurate).

If we take away the “distributing” of information we no longer have the process of journalism. It is the final step in the process because it is the final Telos of journalism — to inform our fellow human beings. Size of the audience aside, journalism is fundamentally a process of education. But when we look at the conversation about journalism, those two words are most often coupled around journalism education (journalism schools) and rarely about how the two endeavors are intimately tied.

Informing is Participatory


So the goal of journalism is to inform people about events in the world. This is fundamentally a social act and would remain the goal of journalism if we lived in a democracy, republic or any other kind of society.

Historically speaking, the “participation” of journalism consumers was to consume. That is a form of participation, but not necessarily the kind that I wan to justify. If it were, this blog post could have been much shorter: “We can justify transparency in journalism because people need to be able to read it!”

The kind of participation that I want to argue for is more engaging. Members of the public are not participating by the sheer act of be informed, but they are self-informing. It’s the difference between roads that make public transportation possible and roads that make all forms of transportation possible.

Why Individual Participation is Ethical

And herein lies the base of this whole thought process. It comes down to the individual. It is the individual, as part of a collective, that journalism seeks to inform. The individual should be actively participating in the dissemination of information for several reasons:

1. On a utilitarian level, they will become more informed and help inform more people. If the good of journalism is to inform, then letting more people participate will inform more people. Similarly, the mission of roads is to enable travel/transportation, not to safeguard public transportation. (There could be unintended consequences, of source, such as pollution.) The mission of journalism is to inform, not to safeguard journalism companies. A network has infinity more connections and that requires active participation and self-informed informants.

2. They have a moral right as an individual to participate to the extent that they do not hinder others from participating. (See individualism).

Anti-climactic?

So, to review:

  • Transparency is required for well-informed participation to happen.
  • Participation is needed because….
  • Journalism’s end goal is to inform other people.
  • More people participating in the process of journalism means more people being informed.
  • Combine this with individual rights and …

The journalism industry has a moral obligation to make the practices and processes of journalism more transparent so that the larger citizenry can participate.

Behind the lack of climax

Perhaps I could have shortened this blog post. I made every attempt to go step-by-step and lay out my line or reasoning.

Why?

Too often our discussion of participatory journalism, citizen journalism, etc takes an industry or company view. Either citizen journalism is good or bad because of its relationship to a bottom line.

Slighter better arguments are that participatory journalism is good/bad because of its quality (or lack of).

What I’m suggesting is that participation in the media is a net positive because of its intrinsic value.

Date: July 14th, 2010
Cate: Journalism Theory/Analysis
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The Ethical Argument for Transparency in Journalism – Part I

If one can make an ethical argument for participation in journalism and that transparency is necessary for participation to occur, then it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

For a long time I’ve had a post inside of me dying to get out. A few months ago I was invited to speak at the International Symposium of Journalism with Dan Gillmor, Ethan Zuckerman and Jan Schaffer. The presentation I gave is here. I got a great chuckle from the second and third slides.

International Symposium

But there was one slide which almost made me re-do the entire presentation. Because it struck me as something worth exploring. It was slide seventeen on “Transparency” seen below.
This quote comes from Wikipedia.

“For well-informed participation to occur, it is argued that some version of transparency, e.g. radical transparency, is necessary, but not sufficient.”

Perhaps it stood out to me because of the “necessary, but not sufficient” which flashed me back to logic class when I was a philosophy undergrad. For whatever reason – I dwelled on it.

I’ve dedicated the majority of my career to two things in this order: Increasing participation in journalism and increasing transparency in the process of journalism. Something I’ve zenned out on recently is how connected the two are and how we often treat them as mutually exclusive.

I’d argue that we need transparency in order for journalism to become more participatory. How can we expect people to participate in the process of journalism if that process is opaque? Only a fool dives into muddy water.

If one can make an ethical argument for participation in journalism and that transparency is necessary for well-informed participation to occur, then it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

Which means the next topic should be “An Ethical Argument for Participation in Journalism.”

Now a confession: It’s late at night and I’m tired. In fact, the only reason I started this post is because I can’t sleep. Perhaps now that I’ve started this thread, I’ll count some ZZ’s. But you, dear reader, can help me. What is the ethical argument for participation in journalism as you see it?

Date: July 7th, 2010
Cate: Current Affairs, Journalism Practice, Journalism Theory/Analysis, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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Five Lessons to Learn from NewsTilt

Note: This is the second attempt at this post on a sleepless Saturday night. The first and better draft was lost. Alas, this one may be less robust.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

  • In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
  • Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
  • An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.

Date: June 21st, 2010
Cate: Crowdsourcing, Journalism Theory/Analysis, Uncategorized
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WikiLeaks: Ethics, Ideals and Questions

  • If: Information is power.
  • And: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
  • Then: Absolute information corrupts absolutely.

What is WIkiLeaks: According to wikipedia it’s “an amorphous, international organization, originally based in Sweden,[1] that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of their sources.”

The organization has made a splash recently with its collateral murder video that showed U.S. soldiers killing suspected terrorists (turned out to be journalists) from a helicopter while not following standard procedures.

Bottom line: I think WikiLeaks is important and a positive thing for freedom and democracy. As Adrian Monck said via Twitter: “Nasty but necessary.” An idealistic free speech absolutist part of me wants to cheer them on until I lose my voice. But a very practical side of me asks tons of questions. All of these questions come back to ethics.

Quick disclaimer: I am not a scholar. I am not one who speaks on behalf of the journalism world. This is my personal blog where I have a conversation with myself. It helps me sleep better. I make no claims as to the ethical state of Wikileaks – I just leave with questions. I also have no doubt in my mind that the founders of Wikileaks have the best of intentions.

Why this post?: Since Collateral Murder was released there has been an ongoing saga with WikiLeaks. Their source has been arrested. Coverage of it in Wired has been very thorough (disclaimer – I used to work at Wired) and included chat logs between Manning (the whistleblower) and Lamo (the informant). In the chat logs Manning makes reference to 260,000 government cables that he leaked to Wikileaks. The WikiLeaks organization denies they have these documents but does accuse Wired.com of ethical breaches – helping Lamo turn in Manning to get a scoop. The back-and-forth has been analyzed by Salon, CJR and others. This post is not intended to add to that back-and-foth. The fact is, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know the series of events that took place. I can’t place blame on anyone. I’m an outsider. IF Manning is a spy – I’m glad we got him. If Manning is a whistblower – I hope they fight it and win. If Wired entrapped Manning, shame on them. If not, kudos on the reporting. If monkeys fly out my butt – it will hurt. I simply don’t know or care. It is an example of particular justice. I am more interested in a general and theoretical situation. Because the situations I concoct below are theoretical – I will cast no aspersions to WikiLeaks.

The Meat of this Post: A Theoretical Ethical Conundrum

If Manning did leak 260,000 government cables to WikiLeaks – the organization finds itself in a very big ethical conundrum.

Do you sit on the government documents? Aside from going against the “information wants to be free” philosophy you essentially become a spy. You will be sitting on way too much information and hence power. (if information is power, and power corrupts….). At the same time – you can’t just “leak” those 260,000 documents for the world to see. It would be irresponsible. Even if you could 100% verify the information as true these are potentially the kinds of documents that get people killed, start wars, trash economies and more. Even the most free speech absolutist must recognize that words have consequences and releasing 260,000 documents can do a lot of damage. It’s blood you don’t want on your hands. The only medium is to sit on the majority of documents and leak the ones that you feel are most important or ethical to leak. But that still puts the power in one person’s hand.

WikiLeaks claims they don’t have the 260,0o0 documents. I hope for their sake it’s true – because I would hate to be in the position above.

This theoretical situation, however, brings up two more poignant questions about ethics and journalism. One is about WikiLeaks itself and the other is about the “profession” of journalism and tension this profession has with the process of journalism which is (and should be) open to anyone.

WikiLeaks and The State

I was talking to Jay Rosen (affectionately called “Boss Rosen”) a mentor of mine who called WikiLeaks a “wild card.” I have felt the same way but couldn’t articulate why – until Jay put it this way. Jay studies “the press” which is a legal entity defined by the state. In other words – you can’t have “the press” until a governing body gives freedom of the press to some varying degree. If they provide no freedom of the press – then communication is literally an extension of the government itself (propaganda). In the United States we have the first amendment which gave birth to “the press” broad enough that the press can literally take down the government itself (Watergate).

What makes WikiLeaks interesting is that they have no national ties. They are not accountable to any foreign government’s laws. Well, at least, that was true until recently. I have not dived into Iceland’s new media reforms but I’m sure it has direct consequences for WikiLeaks. The reform itself was spearheaded by WikiLeaks, perhaps because they recognized that without a country providing that kind of legal framework they were operating almost as information pirates. Even a pirate that steals from the rich and gives to the poor is a pirate operating outside of any legal framework. It’s interesting that Iceland had to pivot itself to become the “Cayman Islands” of information exchange in order to provide a legal infrastructure broad enough for WikiLeaks. Again, this is a new development and I’m not 100% sure what it means – but it does start to address one of the underlying issues of WikiLeaks. Just as a business working internationally needs to have a legal home in some country, so too does an organization that works in journalism.

The problem that remains, however, is the theoretical situation I described above. I don’t know if WikiLeaks has 260,000 documents. If they do, however, they are in a tight ethical spot. Iceland is now right there with them. The country of Iceland might be able to protect them legally, but jurisprudence is just one facet of ethics.

Ethics in Journalism: Journalism ethics is very interesting. I was a philosophy major (many years ago) and studied Kant, Hegel, Peter Singer, John Rawls and others. Most of the time when we talk about “ethics” we are talking about a system of beliefs that constitute ones idea of right/wrong/justice/ etc. These beliefs then guide actions.In some respects, however, when we talk about journalism ethics we are talking about it within the context of a profession. The closest thing journalism has to an ethical code of conduct is SPJ’s code of ethics which I have always greatly admired. SPJ’s code seems to be based on a Kantian ideal that if one is to do something, they have to be prepared for everyone else in the world to do it as well. But it’s important to notice the “P” in SPJ – ie: “professional.”

How much of this “code of ethics” is based on professional practices, situations, scenarios, etc? For the most part I still find SPJ’s code of ethics to be pretty inclusive and stand on their own – but I wonder how much of it translates to the realities of folks outside of newsrooms? I would like to think that all of it does – but when you look closely you’ll see even in the preamble: “Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility.” Why is “professional” the cornerstone? Shouldn’t ethics, especially Kantian ethics, be  universal?

Date: April 29th, 2010
Cate: Journalism Theory/Analysis, Links and People, Open Source and Community, Straight Geek
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The Logic of Journalism Innovation

Seth Lewis has asked me to speak to his class a few times and interviewed me for his dissertation. I am always happy to do stuff like that. What I say is that “I am as open and available as humanly possible.”

That said – I will occasionally ask for favors back. When Seth presented the result of his dissertation at the International Symposium in Austin I was blown away. Partly because it felt as though he was reading my mind (particularly from slide #6 and on). So I asked Seth for his slides. He one-upped me by adding audio to it – so I don’t have to describe a thing. Awesome. Also see his blog post.

View more presentations from Seth Lewis.
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