"No dia em que os jornais acabarem, acaba o jornalismo", adverte Miguel Sousa Tavares
Rui Rio diz que "a comunicação social não cumpre o seu papel da forma como
devia cumprir e [por isso] contribui para a degradação do sistema
politico”.
Uma dessas questões foi suscitada pelo comentador
político Miguel Sousa Tavares que perguntou: “O jornalismo em teoria pode
extinguir-se?” Momentos antes tinha sido a vez de Azeredo Lopes, ex-presidente
da Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social e professor de Direito na
Universidade Católica do Porto, perguntar: ”As redes sociais e os blogues estão
a matar o jornalismo?”
Já se tinha falado muito de comunicação social e jornalismo, mas o debate
ganhou um novo fôlego quando Miguel Sousa Tavares declarou que o "jornal é o
barómetro da saúde dos doentes" e que "no dia em que acabarem acaba o
jornalismo".Sousa Tavares não deixou de reconhecer, contudo, a importância das plataformas digitais, mas advertiu que se “o fim dos jornais acontecer, isto transforma-se "numa selva”. Estas palavras foram pouco depois reproduzidas por Rui Rio, que abriu a conferência sobre “O jornalismo (que temos) serve a democracia?"
O ex-presidente da Câmara do Porto disse que a comunicação social tem cumprido a sua função "por acaso”. “Não cumpre o seu papel da forma como devia cumprir e [por isso] contribui para a degradação do sistema político”, afirmou.
“Há na sua actuação, muitas vezes, um claro défice de qualidade e de rigor na forma como as notícias são feitas. É assim que aparecerem títulos enganadores para vender e títulos enganadores para ser parcial, para beneficiar alguém ou prejudicar alguém", insurgiu-se o ex-deputado do PSD, denunciando a "parcialidade fantástica" do Jornal de Notícias nas últimas eleições autárquicas no Porto.
"Coisa só vista no tempo do PREC. Como é que é possível fazer a coisa tão mal, tão mal, tão mal que deu uma ajudazinha ao doutor Rui Moreira porque foi demasiadamente mal feito. Não exactamente os últimos 15 dias mas durante para aí dois ou três anos a tentar vender aquilo que lhes interessava", assinalou. E depois deteve-se nos "frequentes atropelos aos direitos básicos dos cidadãos", que criticou, afirmando "é tão inadmissível fazer isso a Leonor Beleza como a José Sócrates" e que "uma coisa é dar as notícias outra coisa é fazer perseguição às pessoas e fazer o julgamento na praça pública".
Sousa Tavares discordou em muitos aspectos de Rio, afirmando que “não há profissão tão escrutinada como a comunicação social, muito mais do que qualquer outra actividade”. Azeredo Lopes, que moderou o debate, rebateu esta afirmação, frisando que “o jornalismo não é escrutinado": "Não há uma prática de sanções aos jornalistas”.
O ex-director do Expresso Henrique Monteiro alertou para o facto de o “jornalismo se estar a transformar numa profissão instantânea". "Temos problemas graves que têm de ter solução”, alertou.
Por seu lado, Pacheco Pereira centrou parte da sua intervenção no jornalismo político, que - sublinhou - assenta “em fontes anónimas, na ausência de documentos e na intriga". Para o historiador e comentador político, “a maior parte da informação política transforma-se em recados”. Referiu depois que se “assiste a um acantonamento social" e que "a maioria dos jornalistas nunca entrou numa fábrica”.
A questão do segredo de justiça foi também aflorada pelos convidados. Uns são a favor da violação do segredo de justiça sempre que esteja em causa um assunto considerado de “relevância pública”, como Pacheco Pereira, e outros que se opõem a essa violação.
O ministro-adjunto e do Desenvolvimento Regional, Miguel Poiares Maduro, que encerrou a conferência, declarou que a democracia enfrenta vários desafios na actualidade e evidenciou o papel da comunicação social na melhoria da "conversa democrática".
"É fundamental o papel da comunicação social, enquanto editores da esfera pública. É fundamental esse papel na melhoria do nível da conversa democrática em que assenta a nossa cultura política. De novo, não compete ao Governo definir como é que isso vai acontecer", afirmou o ministro, para quem “o grande desafio comum que o jornalismo e a democracia têm hoje é aquele de contribuir para um melhor debate público, de contribuir para um melhor espaço público".
 |
| Conferência conta com a participação de seis jornalistas do PÚBLICO |
“A Internet pode ajudar o jornalismo a ser mais profundo e mais sério”
Jornalistas, realizadores e académicos de Portugal, EUA, Espanha e Holanda
reúnem-se em Lisboa para debater “o regresso do jornalismo”.
Estarão em Lisboa, desta sexta-feira até domingo,
além de jornalistas e directores dos media portugueses, jornalistas e
especialistas de vários países, principalmente dos EUA onde há mais novas
experiências envolvendo os jornalismos narrativo e literário na Internet, que,
segundo Paulo Moura, “quando aplicados ao formato digital, podem abrir enormes
possibilidades”.
Mark Kramer – que fundou o Programa Nieman na Universidade de Harvard – vem a
Lisboa falar sobre jornalismo literário e não tem dúvidas de que o género tem um
importante papel a desempenhar na realidade digital. Agora e no futuro. “Não
importa qual é a tecnologia”, diz ao PÚBLICO. “O jornalismo literário pode ser
muito, muito preciso e até mais informativo [do que o jornalismo comum],
mantendo a integridade e a autenticidade.”“A brevidade [dos artigos] não importa”, continua. “Quando se diz que o jornalismo online deve ser feito com textos curtos, é com base na ideia de que é desconfortável ler textos longos no computador. Mas já é mais confortável no iPad. E ainda mais no Kindle.” Para o escritor residente na Universidade de Boston, a tecnologia está a ajudar a esbater as diferenças entre os diferentes suportes em que se tem feito jornalismo – e assim vai continuar.
Kramer já publicou no New York Times, na National Geographic ou na Atlantic Monthly, mas sublinha que é dos títulos mais pequenos e independentes que tem vindo muita da inovação. “É simplesmente impressionante” a quantidade de novos títulos a fazê-lo, juntamente com alguns dos maiores e mais importantes jornais do mundo. É também por isso que acredita que o jornalismo literário, sobretudo o que é feito através de narrativas multimédia, será lucrativo.
Amy O’Leary, do The New York
Times, é outro dos nomes internacionais da conferência, que conta
com 36 oradores e se divide sete mesas redondas e 14 conferências. O tema de
abertura são as novas fronteiras do jornalismo digital.
“Quando havia escassez de boa informação no mundo (e um vasto público sedento
dela), o jornalismo parecia ser uma indústria muito segura, com um futuro
risonho”, diz Amy, em declarações ao PÚBLICO. “Chegados a este ponto da história
humana, estamos a consumir mais media do que alguma vez aconteceu.
Agora, o jornalismo tem de competir com muitas outras formas de entretenimento e
informação pela atenção e pelo tempo do público. A surpresa pode ser uma
excelente maneira de captar a atenção de alguém e de a manter”, adianta a
jornalista, que vai também encerrar os três dias de debate respondendo à
pergunta de como tornar o jornalismo viciante.À procura do "grande jornalismo"
Estarão ainda em Lisboa para a conferência o director-adjunto do jornal espanhol El País, Borja Echevarría, o editor-executivo do The Atavist, Charles Homans, o jornalista Joshua Hammer, que depois de 18 anos na Newsweek colabora agora com a New Yorker ou a Atlantic, o realizador Travis Fox, que foi o primeiro produtor de vídeo para a Web a ganhar um Emmy, e a directora da Iniciativa para Jornalismo Narrativo na Holanda, Paulien Bakker.
O rol de jornalistas e especialistas
portugueses é mais extenso e inclui Adelino Gomes – que falará sobre o
“jornalismo eterno” –, os repórteres Cândida Pinto e Jorge Pelicano (SIC), o
jornalista João Paulo Baltazar (fundador da TSF) o fotojornalista João Pina
(The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time…)
e os autores do projecto Estrada da Revolução, que venceu no
ano passado o Prémio Gazeta Multimédia – Tiago Carrasco, João Henriques e João
Fontes.
Simone Duarte, directora executiva online do PÚBLICO, vai debater os
modelos para o jornalismo digital em Portugal, na manhã de domingo, com o
director das novas plataformas do grupo Impresa, Henrique Monteiro, o director
da TVI, José Alberto de Carvalho, e o director-adjunto de informação da
Renascença, Pedro Leal.
A conferência conta ainda com duas
outras jornalistas do PÚBLICO: Alexandra Lucas Coelho, que logo no primeiro dia
tentará responder à pergunta “Somos Todos Repórteres?”, e Vera Moutinho, que se
junta na manhã de domingo a Amy O'Leary, Joana Pontes e Charles Homans para
discutir se são os meios que estão ao serviço da história ou a história ao
serviço dos meios. Susana Moreira Marques e Catarina Fernandes Martins,
colaboradoras habituais do PÚBLICO, também estão no programa
– a primeira logo no debate de abertura, sobre textos longos na era digital, e a
segunda sobre a formação do jornalista do futuro, na mesma manhã, com Vera
Moutinho, Adelino Gomes e Filipa Subtil.
O debate não termina no domingo. O PÚBLICO começa uma série de reportagens sobre os desafios dos jornais na era da Internet ainda em Novembro.
The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web
Katharine Viner,
deputy editor of the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, gave
the AN Smith lecture in Melbourne on Wednesday night. Here's her speech
Katharine Viner theguardian.com, Wednesday 9 October 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/the-rise-of-the-reader-katharine-viner-an-smith-lecture
I'd like to begin with a true story.
I was recently conducting a job interview for a Guardian
role, and I asked the interviewee, who had worked only in print journalism, how
he thought he'd cope working in digital news. In reply he said, "Well,
I've got a computer. I've been using computers for years."
His answer was funny, but also revealing: clearly he
believed that digital is just a technological development; just a new kind of
word processing. In fact, digital is a huge conceptual change, a sociological
change, a cluster bomb blowing apart who we are and how our world is ordered,
how we see ourselves, how we live. It's a change we're in the middle of, so
close up that sometimes it's hard to see. But it is deeply profound and it is
happening at an almost unbelievable speed.
I'd like to talk about what this change is doing to
journalism, and the opportunities that are possible if you are truly open to
the web. I'd also like to look at how many journalists' resistance to this
change is damaging their own interests, as well as the interests of good journalism;
and how there is more a need than ever for the journalist as a
"truth-teller, sense-maker, explainer".
Information: from fixed to free-flowing
The web has changed the way we organise information in a
very clear way: from the boundaried, solid format of books and newspapers to
something liquid and free-flowing, with limitless possibilities.
A newspaper is complete. It is finished, sure of itself,
certain. By contrast, digital news is constantly updated, improved upon,
changed, moved, developed, an ongoing conversation and collaboration. It is
living, evolving, limitless, relentless.
Many believe that this move from fixed to fluid is not
exactly new, and instead a return to the oral cultures of much earlier eras.
Danish academic Thomas Pettitt's theory is that the whole period after
Gutenberg's invention of the printing press - of moveable type, the text, the
500 years of print-dominated information, between the 15th and the 20th
centuries - was just a pause; it was just an interruption in the usual flow of
human communication. He calls this the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The web, says
Pettitt, is returning us to a pre-Gutenberg state in which we are defined by
oral traditions: flowing and ephemeral.
For 500 years, knowledge was contained, in a fixed format
that you believed to be a reliable version of the truth; now, moving to the
post-print era, we are returning to an age when you're as likely to hear
information, right or wrong, from people you come across. Pettitt says that the
way we think now is reminiscent of a medieval peasant, based on gossip, rumour
and conversation. "The new world is in some ways the old world, the world
before print" he says.
Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, has a similar idea:
"If you went back to Ancient Greece, the way that news and information was
passed around was, you went to the agora after lunch in the town square. This
was unfiltered, multi-directional exchange of information".
It makes me think of this line from The Cluetrain Manifesto,
one of the most influential business texts of the internet age, back in 2000:
"What if the real attraction of the internet is not its cutting-edge bells
and whistles, its jazzy interface, or any of the advanced technology that
underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic
throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales?"
Medieval, Greek or prehistoric: take your pick.
What the free-flowing world means for journalism
So what does this free-flowing world mean for journalism
now? What does it mean when we move away from a one-way dissemination of
information, achieved by editorial processes which had been honed over
centuries?
I'd like to talk about some of the new possibilities of a
journalism that is genuinely open to the web, and some of the dangers and
traps.
Digital is not about putting up your story on the web. It's
about a fundamental redrawing of journalists' relationship with our audience,
how we think about our readers, our perception of our role in society, our
status.
We are no longer the all-seeing all-knowing journalists,
delivering words from on high for readers to take in, passively, save perhaps
an occasional letter to the editor. Digital has wrecked those hierarchies
almost overnight, creating a more levelled world, where responses can be
instant, where some readers will almost certainly know more about a particular
subject than the journalist, where the reader might be better placed to uncover
a story. That's why Jay Rosen calls readers "the People Formerly Known as
the Audience"; why Dan Gillmor calls them "the former audience".
In the era of the newspaper, there were few writers and many readers. Now, it
can be hard to tell the difference. The People Formerly Known as the Audience
don't just sit there, and if you don't listen to them, work with them, work for
them, give them what they want and need, they have plenty of other places to
go.
The open web makes it possible to interact with this
audience like never before, and collaborate with them to discover, distribute
and discuss stories in an array of new ways.
Your readers often know more than you
In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico was out of control. Oil was gushing out and no one knew how to stop
it. BP had done a call-out for solutions, seemingly because they had no idea
what else to do. So the Guardian environment team did its own call-out called:
send us your ideas for how to cap the Gulf oil spill. We created a Googledoc
for readers to post their suggestions, and before we knew it we had ideas from
professional divers, marine engineers, physicists, biochemists, mechanical
engineers, petrochemical and mining workers, pipework experts.
We curated some of the best, and subjected them to scrutiny.
It was an incredibly rich and deep piece of work, made possible because of the
people formerly known as the audience. Some of your readers really do know more
than you.
You're more accountable if you're transparent
In a world in which we are all flooded with information,
readers also want to know how you arrived at a story, and how you account for
any errors you may have made. This is why readers' editors who are independent
from editors are so vital, and why the 'show your workings' approach is a
powerful tool.
In June this year, just a week after the launch of Guardian
Australia, we ran as a splash a story based on quotes that the then shadow
foreign minister, Julie Bishop, had given to Lenore Taylor, our excellent
political editor. Bishop had told us, in an interview, that Indonesia would
co-operate in turning back boats of asylum seekers.
This was a strong story: a putative foreign minister
appeared to be saying on the record that Indonesian officials had given her
private assurances that contradicted Indonesia's public position. Apart from
the newsworthiness of that alone, it appeared that a person who expected to
become Australia's foreign minister had made a diplomatic gaffe. The story
pre-empted an issue which has proved to be a big challenge for the new
government.
Unfortunately, we made an error in launching the article
with a headline that suggested Bishop had said there was an actual agreement in
place. This was not quite what she had said, and technically only governments,
not oppositions, can make such agreements. Bishop complained, and we happily
changed the headline and inserted a clarifying paragraph.
I thought our speedy correction would be the end of the
matter. But over an hour later Bishop issued a press release saying that she
had been the victim of a "Guardian beat-up" - that we had exaggerated
the story and used quotes selectively, even in the corrected version.
This simply wasn't true, so we decided to share our version
of events with the readers. We published a blog which explained the editorial
decisions we had taken, explained why we changed the headline, and published
the transcript of Lenore's interview with Bishop. We then asked our readers
what they thought. Many of them told us they were delighted and fascinated by
this open approach; that they felt they could trust us more, knowing that we
would be transparent.
Open brings you scoops
Being open can bring you great scoops, too. My favourite
example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting,
when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper
seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the
protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack.
We were searching for eyewitnesses.
We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and
within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an
investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of
his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone.
On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage,
and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the
ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop.
Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in
2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been
struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family
by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation.
None of this would have happened if the Guardian hadn't been
open to the web, with international reach.
Commodification
It's also a good example of what journalists need to do more
than ever: break stories. Find things out.
Many publishers have responded to the web by commodifying
news and producing so-called "churnalism" – rewriting wires, press
releases and each other. In his 2009 book Flat Earth News, my colleague Nick
Davies showed that 80% of stories in Britain's quality press were not original
and that only 12% were generated by reporters. This is partly because of
economic pressures, but not only: as an industry we are addicted to chasing the
same things. Look at the famous photograph of the new Prince George emerging
from hospital, with hundreds of photographers and reporters looking at him.
What would have happened if all but, say, three of them had been off doing
something else? What bounteous other stories were we missing that day? If we're
not careful, photographs like these will be our industry's epitaph.
The big opportunity is surely in the opposite: not chasing
the pack, doing something different. As CW Andersen, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky
put it in their spectacular essay on post-industrial journalism, "hard
news is what distinguishes journalism from just another commercial
activity". What we're really here for are the things that matter, with
Lord Northcliffe's famous dictum ringing in our ears: "news is something
someone somewhere doesn't want printed. Everything else is advertising".
On Guardian Australia, which launched only four months ago,
we've tried to bring something fresh and new to the Australian audience. If
you'll allow me a short moment of un-British exuberance: we have seen a 75%
increase in unique browsers year-on-year; some days our traffic is 100% over
what it was a year ago, against already a high figure. The revenue this month
is more than treble the target. I know, it's early days, but it's going well so
far.
There was and is a gap in the market in Australia, and being
digital-only means that we've been able to embrace everything that digital has
to offer. Not having a paper to think about, you start with an event or an idea
and then you ask: what is the best way to tell this story? As an article? Or as
a live blog, a list, a series of tweets, a video, some audio, a picture
gallery, a data blog, a visualisation, an interactive, a panel of short blogs,
a networked piece, an open thread where we publish one line and then open it up
to the reader? Or something that begins with the reader? Or with the data? Or
something aimed specifically at the user on mobile?
These conversations have led to content such as the
incredible immersive interactive, Firestorm, which told the story of the bush
fire at Dunalley, placing it in the context of climate change, using text,
photography, video, audio and graphics ; the revelations by Oliver Laughland
about Sayed Abdellatif, an asylum seeker who was labelled a jihadist murderer
in parliament but, as we discovered through investigation in three countries,
was nothing of the kind; the deep analysis of policy that Lenore Taylor and
Katharine Murphy bring to Canberra politics; holding ministers to account; the
thoughtful and bold perspectives of David Marr, especially in his insightful
piece Ashbygate: the great disappearing scandal about to roar back to life; an
interview with Everlyn Sampi, the child star of Rabbit-Proof Fence who had
never spoken before but whose difficult life in the ten years since the film
told a distressing story about the experiences of Indigenous Australians; a
policy of finding new and diverse voices from all sorts of different
backgrounds on Comment is Free, getting away from the dominant middle-aged
white male commentator as standard; a serious focus on the environment and
climate policy; a rigorous approach to data, spearheaded by Nick Evershed; a
commitment to running Indigenous writers, including a partnership with the
IndigenousX Twitter feed; a close relationship with our community on our site
and on social media, bringing in perspectives and stories.
It's also about our approach: it's journalism with a
progressive voice, which seems to be particularly important in a media market
so dominated by a single media owner so vociferously on the right.
That's not to say we're all about hard news. I've always
believed that no subject is off-limits, as long as you can find a way to make
it significant, thoughtful and interesting. If you're going to run something
about twerking, then place it in its political context, analyse its
significance in gender relations, decode it with flair. Similarly, our witty
content about sport has proved very popular, as has our "total
coverage" approach to arts festivals. These kinds of articles brings
readers close, bind them to you.
But so far it's the serious stuff which readers in Australia
seem to want most. Getting away from commodified news, to serve the public
interest. Doing something different.
Being part of the web's ecosystem
So being open has many advantages for journalists. But to do
it, you need to be part of the web's ecosystem, not just plonked on top of it;
to submit to the web's architecture, psychology, mores, rather than imposing a
newspapers's structure over it.
When you put the reader at the heart of what you're doing,
then you learn from them how the web works at that moment. In this transitional
era we're all creating this new ecosystem together - and the users are often
one step ahead of us, working it out as they go along.
I'd like to discuss four examples of issues that many are
struggling with in this new ecosystem: paywalls, linking to sources, readers'
conversations, and how to handle data.
The trouble with paywalls
The issue of paywalls gets to the heart of the central
difficulty facing media organisations in the digital age: who is going to pay
for it all.
Journalism, particularly the serious and painstaking kind,
is expensive.
And with the collapse of the old newspaper business model,
money is needed. A paywall is a typical "newspaper mindset" answer to
that need - readers paid for content before, let's make them pay again. It is
still unclear whether paywalls bring in enough money to be worthwhile, and it
may be that they work better for more specialised content. Economically, it's
too early to rule them out when we're all trying to survive.
But journalistically, paywalls are utterly antithetical to
the open web. A paywalled website is just print in another form, making
collaboration with the people formerly known as the audience much more
difficult. You can't take advantage of the benefits of the open web if you're
hidden away.
The narrative in defence is that good journalism must be
paid for. Well, certainly good journalists must be paid. But these are
different things. As Melbourne writer Bronwen Clune points out in New Matilda,
"the theory behind a paywall … is that people will pay for good
investigative pieces that are in the interests of the general population. But
if information is in the interests of the general population, how is putting it
behind a paywall fulfilling the role of journalism?" And further, why is
it that, if important journalism must be paid for, media organisations often
drop their paywalls when they have a particularly important story?
Clune adds: "We need to reframe the paywalls debate as
a journalist's dilemma. It's an illusion that the future of journalism is safe
behind them". Indeed, I would argue that we are confusing two things.
Journalists want to be paid, yes. And we want to find business models that make
that possible - via advertising, partnerships, donation, cross-subsidy. But how
could the future of journalism be safe behind a paywall, when the future of
journalism is going on outside them?
Linking to sources
In September this year, Guardian Australia got the scoop of
persuading Julia Gillard, the former prime minister who was ousted in June and
had not spoken since, to break her silence with an exclusive and extensive
article. It was very revealing, thoughtful, personal, a big scoop, and of
course was followed up by all news organisations in Australia and many around
the world.
But only small handful of Australian sites included a link
back to the original Guardian article.
If you look at the idea of linking out to external sources
with an old media, newspaper perspective, of course you'd never do it. They're
a competitor, why on earth would you give them traffic?
It's only when you adjust to the logic of new media that you
see that linking out to a source is essential. It's only when you use the web
yourself that you realise how annoying it is if a site doesn't link out to a
something it's talking about. Not linking out means prioritising what you want
your readers to have, instead of what all evidence of digital behaviour shows
they want and need, which is diversity and connectivity.
Linking out makes for a much richer experience for the
reader, and it's part of the reason why Katharine Murphy's politics live blog
for Guardian Australia is so successful: not only do you get her witty,
knowledgeable take on the day's events; you also have a one-stop shop for
anything else of interest that might be happening - you'll be linked to it -
and a genuine two-way conversation.
Readers' conversations
For several years, the Guardian has been running comments
beneath many of our articles, especially op-eds, requesting engagement and
response. An article doesn't end with the op-ed writer's last full stop; in
many ways, a piece is brought to life with the first comment. An op-ed without
comments is now not only unthinkable to Guardian readers, but to Guardian
writers too.
But it has not been an easy process. If you open stories up
to comments, then sometimes readers will say things that are threatening and
rude; and certain groups, such as women and writers who are not white, can have
a difficult time, despite a skilful team of moderators who give them more
protection than they are afforded on social media. Some writers hate it, and
it's hard to blame them.
But when it works, it is a multi-layered encounter which
helps readers and writers alike refine their points of view, hone perspectives,
acquire useful new information.
When we launched Comment is Free in Australia in May, we
learned from the successes and mistakes we'd made in the UK over many years. So
right from the beginning, we treated our users with respect: launched the
article at an appropriate time for their lives, not a time that suits newspaper
deadlines; asked the writers to engage with the commenters, with editors and
other Guardian colleagues; did light-touch moderation; explicitly solicited
readers' views; profiled interesting commenters; commissioned interesting
commenters; used Twitter as a place to find writers; engaged with comments on other
platforms too, particularly Facebook; and treated both praise and protest with
consideration.
Go with your gut instinct… but use data too
The Guardian has an in-house traffic measurement tool to
which I am addicted. I read it first thing in the morning, even before Twitter.
It tells you what is being read in what numbers; where the readers came from –
via the front page, or search, or social media; and where they go next - have
we managed to interest them in another item?
Traffic data is a controversial area. We've all heard horror
stories of content farms where people are paid by the click to write about
Miley Cyrus's tongue, or "traffic whoring"; we've all seen media
organisations turning away from genuinely important stories in order to focus
on those that drive mass traffic. Old-fashioned journalists can consider
knowing about traffic as beneath them, as part of the dumbing-down of a
once-great industry. Old-fashioned editors may consider their gut instincts to
be what got them to the top, and think that is quite sufficient, thank you very
much.
My experience, however, has been different.
Watching the traffic isn't about clickbait - it's about
finding out how your readers behave and what they are interested in, and if
they're not, working out why not. I use our measurement tools to push for
greater traffic for things we know are good. If a story is important, and it's
not getting many readers, then I want it to get more. So we might promote it to
a more prominent position, or we might change its headline for something that
might work better for Google's mysterious algorithms. We might send it to a
relevant person on Twitter, or to a broadcaster, or post it on our Facebook
page. This is us, trying to get more readers for something that matters. In the
print world, you never knew what was really being read, despite all those
readership surveys. And you had no way to try to get it read more, because once
the paper was out, that was it. You kissed it goodbye at last edition.
This isn't to say that gut instinct doesn't have a role. On
the contrary - the best journalists always need a nose for a story, and a
sensitivity to the zeitgeist, that in some people is ingrained and in others is
learned through experience. But decent measurements can help you refine your
instinct.
Behind the barricades
In this new, open world, where everything we once knew is
being disrupted, many journalists are barricading themselves in, building
higher walls than ever, literally and metaphorically.
They get furious that anonymous nobodies can have their say
in response to their articles. There seem to be more award ceremonies for
journalism than ever before, and endless conferences on the future of the
media, where someone always claims, like a groovy free-thinking radical, that
print has got a limitless future, actually. Before they've even had a go at
finding out what Twitter is all about, staff journalists request a blue tick of
verification on Twitter, confirming that they are different from everyone else
on Twitter, that they are a person of substance. They are obsessed with
survival, both personal and industrial. Up against it, they are defending their
traditions, their titles, their access, their status.
As Clay Shirky says: "it's true that if you're in the
layer that's getting disrupted you might go to the beach at low tide and stand
out and hold your arms up and command that the tide not come in, but the tide
actually doesn't care".
But outside the barricades...
Meanwhile, really big stories are often being broken by
people who are not necessarily like conventional journalists.
The biggest story of the year, the revelations that the US's
National Security Agency, the NSA, is undertaking widespread surveillance of
our emails and phone calls, was leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden to
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist with the Guardian in the US. Glenn is an
iconoclastic columnist who has written extensively about the invasion of
citizens' privacy by the state in a way that is unlike anyone else; for this
reason, Snowden took his leaked information to him. He gave the scoop to a
journalist he trusted; he gave the scoop to someone he knew shared his concerns
about the effect of mass surveillance on ordinary people's lives.
You might have thought such devastating revelations would
have brought glory to the journalist who exposed them, especially among the
journalistic community. But instead it brought fury, with Greenwald classed, by
other journalists, as somehow undesirable.
The host of NBC's Meet the Press, David Gregory, wondered
whether Greenwald should be 'charged with a crime' for 'the extent he aided and
abetted Edward Snowden' and questioned whether he is a real journalist.
Jeffrey Toobin, of the New Yorker and CNN, compared Glenn
Greenwald's partner, who had been held at Heathrow for nine hours, to a
"drug mule".
And Willard Foxton, a blogger for the UK Telegraph,
described Greenwald as "odd" and began a column musing 'I sometimes
wonder why I don't like Glenn Greenwald'.
The source, Snowden, has been vilified too, even though he
put his liberty on the line to reveal the extent of the digital surveillance;
as has Chelsea Manning, now in jail for 35 years for leaking the US Embassy
cables to Wikileaks; as has Wikileaks' Julian Assange, about whom a senior
correspondent at Time tweeted, "I can't wait to write a defense of the
drone strike that takes out Julian Assange".
As David Carr wrote in the New York Times, "What are we
thinking?". Why are we so appalled by people exposing these big,
significant, devastating stories? There are different kinds of journalists –
those who try hard to present themselves as neutrally as possible, and those
who happily declare their political perspective in a transparent way. Surely we
want as many different kinds of people doing journalism as possible.
Instead, journalists are turning on journalists.
Very real threats to journalism
And all the while there are very real threats to journalism
that make these internal squabbles look petty.
As Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said,
"governments are conflating journalism with terrorism and using national
security to engage in mass surveillance. The implications just in terms of how
journalism is practised are enormous".
What happens to journalists' sources if all our metadata,
the tracks of our emails and phones, are available to this government,
unaccountable corporations and every subsequent government? Will secret courts
and politicians really prevent surveillance of conversations between a
journalist and a source, when journalists' partners are being held under
anti-terrorism legislation at Heathrow airport, and when journalists' sources
are being sent to jail for 35 years? And why on earth aren't journalists around
the world absolutely up in arms at this threat to journalism? By focusing on
our own loss of status, two bald men arguing over a comb, we could be missing
the far larger story of new technology making journalism near-impossible.
What is a journalist?
"So what is a journalist?" is the question that's
being asked, in a classic example of the sort of self-examination that happens
in a time of crisis.
Margaret Sullivan says in the New York Times that "a
real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn't shy
away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press". I
like this definition because it's about a state of mind, not a closed shop.
Journalists need to be on the outside of all kinds of power - political,
institutional, corporate. We are here to find things out which otherwise
wouldn't be known - and while journalistic experience and techniques are
excellent qualifications for this, you don't need a press card to do it.
Yochai Benkler, who testified at Private Manning's trial in
July 2013, said that journalism isn't what you say about yourself, it's what
you do: "It's not a unique organisation or individual identity. It's a
behaviour."
Journalism as a behaviour. Journalism as something you do,
not something you are.
In a provocative post headlined 'There are no Journalists',
Jeff Jarvis wrote: "anyone can [now] perform an act of journalism… anyone
informing anyone. We [need to] reconsider journalism not as the manufacture of
content but instead as a service whose goal is an informed public".
People are performing acts of journalism everywhere.
In defence of journalism
Nevertheless, there is a crucial role in society for
journalists to play.
As Anderson, Bell and Shirky say, "now and for the
forseeable future we need a cadre of full-time workers who report the things
that someone somewhere doesn't want reported, and who do it in a way that
doesn't just make information available, but frames that information so that it
reaches and affects the public."
This is not necessarily straightforward.
Original reporting is often misunderstood by those who don't
do it, often perceived as simpler than it is. It can be complex and twisty,
laboured and intricate. Nurturing a source over many months so they bring you
their story. The ability to spot a story; the sense when something isn't right,
something is being hidden. Asking uncomfortable questions. Getting the
important bits of information from a witness. Knowing how to talk on the phone.
Knowing where to find a certain public record or piece of data, and knowing
what you're looking for. Knowing how and when to challenge a CEO, or read
between the lines of what they're saying; having the discipline to challenge a
politician you might otherwise agree with. Knowing when to go with a story, and
when to wait. Bravery to resist pressure from others - whether from the police,
the politicians, or journalists on other publications - or in the case of the
Guardian's reporting of the phone hacking scandal in Britain, all three.
None of these things is as simple as non-journalists often
imagine.
Who to trust in the digital age?
Doing serious, transparent reporting is one way you get to
be trusted. And trust is a job that needs doing in this digital age: after all,
in that town square, in the agora, someone needs to be the one people believe,
the one who can confirm some stories and debunk others. Who will that be? Will
it be the journalist as verifier, as interpreter?
During the English riots of 2011 the Guardian produced an
interactive showing how rumours spread on Twitter during the riots. I love
Twitter, it has changed my life, but how much can you trust it? How much can
you trust anything? On the interactive you can see, as an example, how an
untrue story about tigers escaping from London zoo went viral. This is the
pre-Gutenberg world in action: a rumour begins, is spread, and then is quashed.
False rumours are usually, eventually, overcome: people get to the truth in the
end. But only if you stay until the end.
Sometimes, false rumours are not quashed.
In April 2013,
in the hours after the Boston marathon was bombed, Sunil
Tripathi and Mike Mulugeta were named as suspects on Reddit and Twitter. So
certain was the crowd that they had got the right men, that one of the
speculators tweeted "If Sunil Tripathi did indeed commit this
#BostonBombing, Reddit has scored a significant, game-changing victory."
Tripathi was a missing student, completely unrelated to the
bombing. Mulugeta didn't exist. But as the ABC's Media Watch showed, quite a
few conventional news organisations repeated the line, including here in
Australia three TV channels and three newspaper mastheads. Reddit publicly
apologised; most of the conventional media didn't.
Some social media had failed catastrophically - the town
square gossip labelled the wrong people. But some conventional media failed
even more catastrophically, by failing in its duty to verify, to report only
known facts, and by not accounting for their errors when they got things wrong.
The story is a case study of the chaos we're in. The downsides of that gossipy
town square, but validated by organisations you're supposed to be able to
trust.
It's well-known that there is a crisis of trust in the
media. Edelman's trust barometer for 2013, a global measure, puts media as only just
ahead of banks and financial services in terms of public trust. In Britain, the
phone hacking scandal led to deep alarm among the public about some
journalists' methods, particularly in relation to ordinary people. Australia,
meanwhile, ranks 24th out of 26 countries surveyed on how much its media
trusted, ahead of only Turkey and Russia.
And undoubtedly, journalists have betrayed trust, whether by
hacking phones, engaging in corrupt relationships with officials, or getting
too close to the powerful people they should be holding to account. So if they
want to earn the public's trust, they have a battle on their hands. But surely
the best place, the only place, for the media to be is getting it right. Better
to be late and right. Better to be late and right and transparent about how you
got there.
The alternative is to publish something that isn't true,
like tigers running through London, and get a load of traffic for it.
What is journalism for?
I guess it all depends on what you think journalism is for.
If you think it is for speaking truth to power, if you
believe that the role of the journalist is as an outsider, then you will be in
favour of the open web, open journalism, the free flow of engagement and
challenge and debate with the people formerly known as the audience.
But if you think journalism is instead for brokering power,
influencing power, keeping power, then you will want to close down the web as
much as possible and keep debate to a minimum. More about your own interests,
less about the public interest.
This is where the issue of media ownership is the crucial
underpinning. In my view, the Guardian's ownership is the secret to its digital
success and rapid growth to 40m users as the third-most read English-language
newspaper website in the world. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, and
our lack of a proprietor or shareholders gives us real editorial freedom: all
money must be reinvested back into journalism, and being open to readers and
the web fits the ethos. It means that people come to us with their stories
because they know we are independent, whether it's Edward Snowden or Julia
Gillard; it means that readers are more likely to trust our motives, trust that
we're not running something for commercial gain or political purchase.
But many media owners don't like the open web, which
undermines hierarchies in such a dramatic and visible way.
The increasing concentration of ownership in the media
provides less diversity and less breadth for readers; and, arguably, more
complacency in those who are left. Australia has the highest concentration of
newspaper ownership in the world, dominated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, and
with the top three newspaper companies taking a 98% share of daily circulation,
compared with 26% in the US and 62% in the UK.
As we saw at the beginning of this lecture, the digital
revolution is not just a technological change. It is a shift in power. The open
web has the potential to be a huge democratic space; even better than that
Grecian town square, because now respectable women go there to talk, and slaves
too. The doors are open anyone with the internet, currently 39% of the world's
entire population, up from 16% just eight years ago.
But it might not go like that. The web has been fragmenting
for a while: instead of one internet, there are many different products and
platforms: desktop, Android, iPhone, tablet. As Jonathan Zittrain has written,
"tethered appliances" like iPhones have led to a closing down of web
innovation. Anonymity online is now harder to pull off. We know that every page
we look at can be monitored by international spy agencies. And, in light of these
revelations, there is a new issue: countries such as Brazil are talking
seriously about a 'national internet': so instead of the world wide web, we
face the prospect of a Brazilian internet, an American internet, maybe an
Australian internet. What a loss that would be.
If tech companies, media owners and some governments have
interests in shutting down the flourishing open web, it may not lead to the
democratic utopia some are imagining.
Shaping a new journalism
But it doesn't mean it isn't worth a try. We are privileged
to be living in this era of great transition, privileged to be alive to help
shape a new journalism for a new age.
Remember the Gutenberg parenthesis of 500 years?
First, there was a whole heap of conversation but no clear
version of the truth.
Then, there was a very clear version of the truth, but no
space for conversation.
Now, what we have is the truth made better by conversation.
What if we were to embrace the ecosystem of the web and
combined established journalistic techniques with new ways of finding, telling
and communicating stories? Opened ourselves up? Put the people formerly known
as the audience at the heart of everything? Combined the elite and the street…
and the tweet?
Not gut instinct or data: both.
Not the phone or Twitter: both.
Not neutral journalists or politicised journalists: both.
Not original reporting or verification,
journalists or bloggers,
journalists or activists,
journalists or readers.
The future of journalism, with humility, is all of the
above.
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