Journalism News
Errol Morris: Journalism is an ‘obsession’
Nov 11th
In a commencement speech at the Berkeley School of Journalism, the Academy award-winning documentary filmmaker describes the journalist’s pursuit:
“A scientist tries to come up with general laws, but there are no general laws to be found in the chaos of everyday life. We are forced to make sense of experience the best we can. A scientist can repeat an experiment over and over and come up with the same results. Human events are “one-offs.” They occur only once, and the effort to repeat them never comes close to the first time around.
And this brings me to the central problem of journalism. We often do not realize that history is perishable. It depends on evidence. There are countless stories where evidence is lost, corrupted or hidden, and hence, our attempts to re-assemble a picture of reality are doomed at best. If we lose all the evidence of the Battle of Hastings, what then can we say about it? Journalism may be the first draft of history, but sometimes it’s the only draft. It is often the journalist who collects evidence before it is lost…
… As I said at the beginning, journalism is not just a job, but an obsession. It’s about pursuing stories beyond the dictates of common sense, about disappearing down rabbit-holes, but always in the pursuit of truth. It’s essential.”
As a relative newcomer to the field, I can completely vouch for the existence of the infamous “journalism bug.” Once bitten, there’s no going back.
GlobalPost Dabbles in Mercenary Journalism
Nov 24th
NPR has an interesting story about the journalism model behind GlobalPost, a new foreign-news site geared toward an American audience.
It raises a lot of interesting questions, but the most intriguing aspect of GlobalPost is its paid journalism venture called Passport Custom Research. The Web site markets the service thusly: “a focused, timely, and cost-effective solution to your international business research needs. We deploy our global network of credentialed journalists to find authoritative answers to your urgent questions. The result is greater business certainty, at a speed and cost that beats the competition.”
From NPR:
Perhaps most daringly, GlobalPost charges private clients thousands of dollars to commission specific reports for their own reading. In one instance, the investment analysis firm Riedel Research wanted information on credit card use in China. David Riedel, a GlobalPost reader who is president of the company, said he recently signed up his firm to pay for 10 such reports next year.
That use of journalists’ energy might raise eyebrows among purists. Sennott and Balboni say they have created safeguards to protect the integrity of their reporters and their news outlets. First, they do not tell the reporters the identity of the client. Second, the pieces are intended to report, not advocate. Third, while clients have exclusive rights for several weeks, GlobalPost ultimately retains the right to publish any material it uncovers. And fourth, under the terms of the contract, it can always return the money and publish immediately if the news is hot enough.
Executives say they simply have to find new ways to pay for original reporting by driving up Web traffic and creating new streams of revenue.
“We think that kind of unbiased, fair, balanced, well-researched information has unique value,” says Sennott. “America needs more eyes on the world.”
And Sennott and his colleagues say they very much hope they have hit upon the way to pay for those eyes to stay focused on events in distant lands.
It’ll be interesting to see if this type of thing takes off. Personally, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with journalism commissioned by outside groups, as long as the safeguards described by Sennot are upheld. But it does raise some serious questions.
Does this type of thing fly in the face of the independence principle or is it possible to do commissioned journalism and still stay true to those core values?
WikiLeaks: Restoring distrust
Dec 1st
Posted by Graham Moomaw in Commentary
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Slate’s Jack Schafer pushes back against the bipartisan vitriol toward WikiLeaks over cablegate:
I fully understand the concerns of people who feel that these documents serve mainly to embarrass rather than expose wrongdoing, but I find the calls for retribution against WikiLeaks — which remains a mere publisher of information — much more disturbing than the fact that some diplomatic dirty laundry has been aired in public.
The authoritarian governments in China and the Middle East have been embarrassed the most by the latest leaks, yet they’ve successfully clamped down on media coverage of the documents.
The balancing act between transparency and national security has always been a contentious issue for journalists. But even though Assange and WikiLeaks may be pushing some ethical boundaries, the overwrought reactions to the leaks are a much bigger threat to Democratic society than a publisher that errs on the side of total information freedom.