COMMENTARY --
Later this week, the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, the American Library
Association's Office of Information Technology and the Shorenstein Center
on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government will play hosts to bloggers and journalists to address the
increasingly thorny issue of blogging, journalism, and credibility. On the
conference's home page
], organizer Rebecca MacKinnon asks "Can journalists who also blog do their
work without conflicting standards? Might bloggers adopt standards and a 'transparency'
that will elevate their credibility?"
Wherever there has been a gross injustice because of a broken system, the muttering "transparency" usually isn't far behind. If we can go behind the scenes, we'll spot trouble before it happens, and the actors--knowing we're there--will all behave better.
The last three years have been a challenging for the press, as exemplified by episodes like RatherGate and the acceptance by Armstrong Williams, a nationally syndicated radio, TV and print journalist, of $240,000 in exchange for his promotion of Bush's education agenda in his weekly column during the months leading up to the presidential election.
Between these and other big media gaffs, the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with the media establishment, and is turning to other sources of information such as independent bloggers. Blog publishing has given rise to several questions. Among them, what's the difference between a blogger and a journalist? Answer: None. Dan Gillmor was a journalist for the San Jose Mercury News. Today, he's a blogger for his own operation on Grassroots Journalism. Now that he has parted ranks with the traditional media, should he also be stripped of his press credentials? Would trading in their New York Times credentials for Blogger.com accounts be all it takes to disqualify columnists William Safire or Maureen Dowd as journalists? The integrity of Gillmor, Safire, and Dowd have nothing to do with the frame their words appear in, the frequency with which they publish, the length of their musings, or the brand whose flag flies above their headlines.
Likewise, while their voices can be seductive, there's no automatic Good Housekeeping seal of approval on the integrity of the content that bloggers publish either. Bloggers and so called "citizen journalists" have to earn their credibility, and the community at large does a good job of regulating the environment--quality will usually rise to the top.
To the extent that technology is what enabled an explosion in the number of journalists, starting from the early days of personal Web pages and now with blogs, my question is: What role can and should technology play in contributing to transparency--full disclosure--in the media? After all, given that it's been such an enabler to the revolution in journalism, shouldn't it also be a driving force in integrity as well?
By providing the uncensored, unedited raw data used to assemble a news story, opinion piece, or blog entry, the problems of misquoting, quote truncation, placing quotes out of order to arrive at an unintended meaning, quoting out of context, or manipulating interviews in the interests of a particular agenda could go away.
If you read my recently published opinion piece on how enterprises should consider the deployment of subscription-centric software infrastructures, you'll notice how that it relies extensively on the quotes of Scott Young, CEO of Userland. What you'll also notice is that where it quotes Young, there also appears a code like [MP3 23:21]. This code is a pointer to the exact location in the MP3-based podcast of my interview with Young where his quote can be heard.
Where could we go from this sort of journalist's electronic bibliography? Any number of directions. As an infrastructure choice, podcasting makes sense because it enables multiple multimedia enclosures to be packaged together for delivery on a subscription basis. A journalist's audience can optionally subscribe to and review some of the material that was used to assemble a story.
This approach obviously can't deliver 100 percent transparency. The raw material behind a credible story may exist in a variety of media, and there's also the thorny issue of protecting sources. Also, with no software to make it easy to map quotes to specific locations in a sound or video file, this sort of transparency puts a significant burden on the journalist.
The notion of transparency as applied to journalists or even corporations can be even more extensive than publishing unedited tapes or transcripts along with opinion pieces. At the end of the interview with UserLand CEO Scott Young, he offered to send me a book by Rogers Cadenhead on how to use Radio UserLand. I accepted the offer. It's not unusual for vendors to provide journalists who are reviewing their technology with additional documentation. But, as I played the recording back and thought of how transparency was in effect, I couldn't be absolutely certain that all members of ZDNet's audience would see it the same way. I'm not going to send my address to Scott Young and, instead, if I decide that I need the book, I will pay the $24 charge for it with my own company's money. Already, transparency is having its effect.
I do hope that you write to me (david.berlind@cnet.com) and let me know what you think. Also, I hope other journalists take what I've done into consideration and expand on the idea. In the name of integrity, we won't know the answers until we start trying some solutions.
You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check my blog Between the Lines.
