Undermining Journalism

How the Media's Attempt to Adapt Could Kill it Instead

The heart of the New Haven Register's newsroom remains a place of active collaboration, for now. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

CNN laid off approximately 50 editors, librarians and photojournalists in a surprise announcement on Nov. 11 as part of a three-year restructuring effort seeking to bring the company in line with changes in “technology and workflow.”

“Technology investments in our newsrooms now allow more desk-top editing and publishing for broadcast and online,” Jack Womack, the company's SVP of domestic news operations, wrote in a note to staff explaining the layoffs. “This evolution allows more people in more places to edit and publish than ever before.”

Womack continued that CNN management had considered the impact of user-generated content, social media and CNN iReporters (who create content based on prompts that the news agency provides) as part of the assessment.

CNN's layoffs are hardly shocking. They are only the latest in a decade-long series of changes to the American media landscape that have squeezed professional journalists into smaller and smaller corners. The closing of foreign bureaus, the shift to 24-hour online news cycles, and the increased reliance on “citizen journalists”: these are all symptoms of a systemic problem with the structure of news gathering and reporting.

The near-consensus is that under the current business model, the expense of producing news is too high to be sustainable. The solution for many agencies has been to trim - or sometimes gut - the newsroom while filling the gap with content created by nonprofessionals.

In that context, CNN's move to outsource its news function to unpaid users makes a certain sense. Video and audio recording technologies are now prolific and familiar to millions of people. Although the production quality of a video shot on an iPhone may not be polished enough for an advertiser's needs, they are perfectly suited for the two-minute throwaway story that a cable news agency can use to keep itself fresh on a slow day. Moreover, it is cheaper and faster than sending a reporter out into the field to cover an event that may be over by the time she or he arrives.

The layoffs prompted a satirical reaction from “The Colbert Report” host Stephen Colbert, who pointed out that CNN iReporters do not get paid.

“They get something even better: badges. Which I assume are redeemable for food and rent,” he said. He went on to promote his own user-generated video feature, which included footage of a colonoscopy, a goat, and a man waiting for a bus.

Colbert's comedic commentary revealed a darker side to this kind of corner-cutting. Volunteers, as eager as they may be, have different incentives guiding them, some of which may be suspect. Even those who mean well often lack the legal, ethical and technical knowledge of paid professionals. And with fewer trained reporters and editors responsible for curating content that they have not generated themselves, the depth, accuracy, and credibility of news can more easily be undermined.

The danger in cutting corners is that it can undercut the very relevance of journalism altogether.

The Shrinking Newsroom

Al Santangelo, news editor at the New Haven Register, has witnessed first-hand the slow collapse of the traditional newsroom.

Half of the offices of the Register are empty, like miniature ghost towns built out of cubicles. The business department is gone. The former design office is an empty room. The award-winning sports department used to stretch across one end of the newsroom, but now consists of four desks and a television.

Santangelo says that the newspaper makes a profit of millions of dollars each year. Yet it could still face further consolidation. There is talk of ditching the newsroom. Reporters would file stories remotely. Instead of printing the paper in-house, production of the actual paper would be outsourced to another location.

His workplace is being stripped in part because the paper's parent, the Journal Register Company, filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Two years later, the Journal Register Company is trying to rebuild its profitability under what CEO John Paton, who took over after the bankruptcy, calls a “digital first, print last” model.

When the Register was under family ownership, which lasted until the 1980's, the amount of money his paper makes would have seemed profitable. As part of a conglomerate driven by shareholder interests, however, the question shifts from one of absolute profitability to whether those profits are rising or falling. It also matters less how an individual publication is doing; profitability for the company is determined by the sum of its parts. In the The Journal Register Company's case, that's more than 350 multi-platform products in 992 communities.

“Not all of those publications make money,” says Santangelo. “Unfortunately, the ones that do end up subsidizing the others.”

The Journal Register Company released a chart Nov. 28 with its vision for the reorganization of the New Haven Register. It's not all bad news: a dedicated investigative reporting team will be created, and several dedicated beats are being added.

Much of the reorganization, though, is reminiscent of the shift that CNN and other news agencies have taken. It calls for aggregation of statewide content, linking out to other content providers, audience-contributed content, and partnerships with local outlets.

It is not likely that any of these steps will lead to much hiring. The investigative and beat reporting teams will be made up of long-standing employees who used to serve other functions in the newsroom, according to the Journal Register's press release.

For instance, the Register's former Business Editor, Cara Baruzzi, will be shifted to head up a new “breaking news team.” On top of covering the area's news, this team will also have responsibility for delivering “a Connecticut-wide curated breaking news report by linking out to other information sources – including The New Haven Independent, members of The Register’s Community Media Lab and sources traditionally viewed as competitors.”

The idea behind sharing content from competitors, says Santangelo, is to create a one-stop shop for the online reader, who would no longer have to jump around from source to source to find out what is going on in the state.

Santangelo is skeptical about the wisdom of that approach, however. He freely admits that such a sharing scheme allows other organizations to have the exact same breadth of content on their own sites. When asked what would prevent people from going to any of those other sources, he shrugs.

“Nothing. There's no loyalty on the Internet,” he says.

Just around the corner from the bustling newsroom at the New Haven Register, emptied cubicles sit in darkness. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Duplication and Verification

The practice of sharing news stories began long before the Internet. The Associated Press wire service is, in essence, a mechanism to allow papers to share news. It has become a staple of the newspaper industry because individual papers rarely have the resources to send reporters to faraway sites to cover every major breaking story.

The AP saves news agencies costs that might otherwise be prohibitive, and this is the key to its long-term success. However, it and other sharing schemes open news agencies to a potential worry: they cannot independently verify the content that they receive.

This trade-off was not much of a problem for newspapers with a local focus through most of the twentieth century. Many communities had multiple papers competing for the same audience, and they did not share with one another. This competition led to incentives for each paper to protect its reputation by being both fair and accurate. The wire services were mainly reserved for stories outside of the paper's coverage area.

The culture began to shift toward the end of the century. Cable news channels that ran 24 hours a day had more space to fill than they could with the amount of content they could afford to produce. Media mergers turned former competitors into colleagues and changed the profit motive.

Then the Internet put the pace of demand for continuous updates into high gear. For large media conglomerates, it simply made no business sense to send three or four reporters to cover the same story when one could run it across multiple platforms.

What makes business sense, though, is based on a monthly or yearly calculation often made by people who live out of state (or out of the country). The reputations of the old journalistic institutions were built on presumptions that they were integral to the communities in which they existed and would be around for decades to come.

In that old world, the unique observational capacities, background knowledge, and community ties of each reporter were valuable commodities. If a reporter from newspaper A wrote about the same event as a reporter from newspaper B, each paper could tout the different creative angle that its reporter would bring to bear on the story. The reader could compare different versions and learn things from one story that the other might miss.

More importantly, the reader could compare the facts in each story. If there was a contradiction, it would hurt the reputation of the paper that failed to properly vet its product. This created an incentive for both parties to be honest and careful about what they published.

In the brave new world of digital media, these incentives have largely disappeared. The encouragement of sharing to prevent story duplication leads news organizations to cite one another as a stand-in for independent verification, which can exacerbate the spread of misinformation.

This game of “telephone” blew up in the face of media professionals in June, when an unverified tip from police about a mass grave in Liberty County, Texas produced a rash of reporting by major media outlets the world over. The mass grave did not exist.

In an investigation by WNYC’s On the Media, it was discovered that the original story came from KPRC, Houston's Channel 2. Liberty County police called the station about a tip they had received from a psychic. They were planning to check it out. Someone in the newsroom posted to Twitter the following message: “Dozens of bodies have been found in Liberty County. Join us for KPRC at 5 p.m. for the latest information."

The Twitter post did not mention a source. Nor was it vetted; the news team had not yet visited the supposed grave site to verify the information.

From Twitter, Reuters picked up the story, citing KPRC as the source. The New York Times cited Reuters as its source. London’s The Guardian ran the Reuters version as well. SkyNews, the BBC and others also passed it around.

One newspaper that did not rely on the media’s rumor mill was the Houston Chronicle, which never said that the story was anything more than an unconfirmed report.

“I don't know how anyone in their right mind or with an iota of professionalism in their veins could have reported such a thing, absent any confirmation from anybody,” said Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson in an interview with OTM host Bob Garfield.

If the worldwide reporting debacle is any indication, Tolson and his colleagues represent a dying breed. The pressures are strong to get a story out now, without first placing a call to a local source for confirmation or sending someone down to check things out.

Many long-time reporters are all too aware of how the change of pace hampers their ability to vet stories. Hartford Courant reporter Christine Dempsey, who has been in the business for 25 years, said in a recent panel discussion with journalism students at the University of New Haven that she often feels uncomfortable with the quality of her fact-checking these days.

She said she had not made any major blunders she knew of. But, she added, “I’ve felt like I was walking a tightrope sometimes.”

Message Manipulation

Dempsey has a legitimate cause for concern. Time and resources are becoming increasingly scarce for smaller teams of editors and reporters, even as the amount of information they have to contend with is growing at an exponential rate.

At its heart, journalism is about selecting the most relevant information. The flipside is that, by necessity, some information is discarded or ignored.

Journalists have developed a number of ethical standards and rules of thumb to make the selection process easier. The system is not perfect, of course. The “equal time” rule may give people on different sides of a conflict a chance to have their views aired, but it can also create a perception of false balance. By giving the same space to mainstream and fringe views, the audience may come away with the perception that both views have similar factual weight or popular support.

These heuristic issues are troublesome, and journalists spend a lot of time debating about how best to resolve them. All of the possible solutions involve spending more time on stories.

Meanwhile, the newsroom is moving in the opposite direction. It is being facilitated in this process by individuals and groups with their own agendas who submit material designed to fit the mold of news production.

Public relations offices are notorious for writing stories “for” reporters, even though it violates the ethical standards of traditional journalism to reprint a press release verbatim. But overtaxed journalists can easily be lulled into believing that getting a slanted story out is better than not producing anything.

The UK charity Media Standards Trust developed a website called Churnalism.com in 2011 to combat the practice of reprinting press releases. Its “churn engine” allows readers to paste stories and find out how much of them are grafted from press releases.

Independent filmaker Chris Atkins developed some fake news releases of his own and sent them out to the press after speaking with Martin Moore, director of the trust. One story explained a new "chastity garter" that contained a microchip that would send text messages to a woman's partner if she was cheating on him or her. The story became “most read” on the website of the Daily Mail, and made headlines across the US and the UK before the hoax was revealed.

Slanted reporting need not come from outside sources. In the US, FOX News and MSNBC are well-known as mouthpieces for the political right and left, respectively. Though their audiences are smaller than the controversies that surround them, a growing proportion of the population turns to them for news that fits their views. The Internet is also a great boon for the echo chamber, in which people can seek information that confirms their preconceived notions without having their biases challenged.

Media fragmentation has led to a further erosion of an adherence to facts or fairness. The widespread adoption of these ideologically-driven approaches to reporting is relatively new, and determining their influence is a daunting task. Older people still overwhelmingly consume middle-of-the-road media from network television and newspapers. They may not agree with everything printed in their local papers, but they are used to formats that stress accuracy over assertion.

Veteran journalists like Dempsey and Santangelo are also loathe to violate the news gathering values they were taught. For the moment, they act as a bulwark against a tide of editorializing.

New Normal?

What about younger people, many of whom are growing up in a world where selective exposure is the norm? Can they distinguish between objectivity and spin, and do they care?

The relative prosperity of left- and right-leaning blogs and online news sites is one discouraging indication of a trend toward greater polarization. The Huffington Post is unabashedly liberal, while Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe have made their marks by promoting a conservative agenda.

Though politically partisan media has always been lurking on the edges of society, its new-found prominence has been accompanied by a remarkable willingness to dispense with standards of objectivity for the sake of rocking the proverbial boat. O'Keefe in 2009 sparked a national debate over what it means to be a journalist when he released a video purporting to show him and college student Hannah Giles getting advice from workers at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now devising ways to hide sex trafficking and and avoid taxes.

The corruption that O'Keefe and Giles uncovered may have been real. However, their methods of “news gathering” were disingenuous, unethical, and broke laws in several states.

Attorneys general in California and Massachusetts, the District Attorney's office in Brooklyn, and the US Government Accountability Office all conducted investigations into ACORN's actions. In the process, they reviewed the unedited versions of O'Keefe's and Giles's videos. In every case, they found the videos to be heavily doctored and thus absolved ACORNof any wrongdoing.

The truth did not matter to O'Keefe or Giles. They were out to attack ACORN for what they perceived to be a left-wing agenda.. They succeeded in devastating the organization, causing it to file for Chapter 7 liquidation in 2010. Most of its offices were closed.

O'Keefe was the mastermind behind the project, and he convinced Giles to pursue it with him to further her own career. When the story became a national sensation, she appeared on FOX News's “The O'Reilly Factor,” where host Bill O'Reilly called her an “undercover reporter.” He characterized ACORN's lawsuit against Giles as a “revenge play,” without ever offering the agency's rationale for its actions.

During the interview, a clearly excited Giles said she had always “wanted to be an investigative journalist.” Now, with the nationally recognized figure of O'Reilly validating her actions, she was surely convinced she had done what every good reporter should in the pursuit of a story.

And perhaps, with the new norm allowing newsmakers to violate every journalistic ethic, she will find a place to thrive. Such a norm would benefit the business owners, who know that sex and scandal pad the profit margins, regardless of how it's created. It would benefit public relations firms, because they can more easily infiltrate a media culture that doesn't concern itself with telling the whole story. It would benefit political ideologues, who prefer propoganda to balance.

The only question, then, will be: who will serve the public once the old guard dies off?