The ideas that I share with you tonight originate in a personal obsession of mine that is now 14 years old. It dates back to 1999 when I read this article by Andrew Leonard in Salon: “Open Source Journalism.”

Leonard’s piece is not a manifesto. It tells the story of a specialty site, Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, which lacked confidence that its draft article about cyber-terrorism was good enough. So Jane’s decided to consult the readers of Slashdot, who knew a lot about the subject. And they made the article better. (Here’s the original Slashdot thread.)

This, I felt, had implications for beat reporting.

Also in 1999, Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, the first newspaper journalist to have a blog, strung these simple words together. “My readers know more than I do.” It was one of the discoveries he made covering Silicon Valley during the first internet boom. Of course this would have been true in 1959. Gillmor was one of the first to see what was different about 1999. The people who knew more than he did could easily reach him with that knowledge. They were more connected: to the reporter and each other.

This too had implications for beat reporting.

In 1999, that fateful year, Dave Winer published his seminal post, Edit this Page, in which he said: “Writing for the Web is too damn hard.” He and others were then working on blogging tools that would explode over the next year or so: Winer’s Frontier, blogger.com, Live Journal, and later Movable Type.

To me, Edit This Page is the moment just before the web goes from Read Only to Read/Write. (Later, of course, it would become read/write/share.) In 2009, Winer put the consequences as clearly as he could: “The sources go direct.” They can now publish directly to the users.

This had further implications for beat reporting.

Behold, then, the spirit of 1999:

* “My readers know more than I do.”
* Open source journalism can work.
* Edit This Page, which became blogging
* “The sources can go direct.” (And they do.)

The spirit of ’99 affected me personally. These are projects I undertook in the same spirit:

2003 PressThink
2006 Assignment Zero
2007 Beatbloging.org
2008 Off The Bus.

So this is my obsession, distilled down:

When the users know more than the journalists, what are good journalists supposed to do?

Many people who are here tonight do this kind of work every day. A good name for it is networked reporting, which is by now an established practice. Consider:

* Live blogging as demonstrated by The Guardian and the New York Times Lede blog is an inherently networked practice.

* So is Andy Carvin’s “twitter anchor”.

* CNN’s i-Report is a network of contributors that can be activated when there is breaking news.

* Web forms as used by ProPublica, The Guardian and other sites allow for collecting data from those very users who know more than journalists.

And, of course, it is routine for journalists to find sources through social media.

We’ve made a lot of progress since 1999! But not nearly enough. So this year I shared my obsession with my graduate students in NYU’s Studio 20 program. We began with a simple definition of networked reporting:

When the many contribute (easily) to reporting that is completed by a few… that’s networked reporting.

Our aim was to make incremental progress on that problem by doing small projects with six partners using 2-3 person teams. Here’s the list of projects. My partner was Quartz, Atlantic Media’s new business publication. I wanted to work with Quartz because their concept of editorial obsessions intrigued me. I proposed that we work together on designing a networked approach to covering what they call an “obsession.” They would give me the specs, I would reply with my designs.

The specs from Quartz are here. (“Put together a suite of tools and techniques for quickly booting up a network around a fast-moving, ongoing global news story that cuts across traditional beat boundaries and is worth obsessing about…”) The tools were researched and tested by Anna Callaghan, a journalism grad student at NYU. We decided to use covering bitcoin as window into digital money as the “fast-moving, ongoing global news story” that we would design a networked approach for.

Warning: These ideas are 100% synthetic. They are not original to me. They have emerged from the practice of networked reporting and the use of social media tools by thousands of journalists since 1999. So if your instinct is to reply, “we did that four years ago!” you’re right. You probably did.

Pro tip before we begin: It’s smart to treat the One Percent Rule as a design principle for a networked beat.

Thus, a networked beat…

√ makes better products for the 90 percent who will only consume…

√ from efficient interaction with the 10% who will possibly engage, while

√ recruiting the best of the 1% into co-production.

My eight steps to a networked beat follow:

Step 1: Define the right combination of news flows for this particular beat.

Step 2: Put an intelligent filter, made for multiple uses, on the combined flow.

Step 3: From smart filters on combined streams, make a series of simple and useful products.

Step 4: Start to register, verify and make contact with the best independent sources on the beat.

Step 5: When they’re good enough hook the filtering tools up to the work flow for beat coverage.

Step 6: Launch your “inbox on steroids” and prove to the users that it works.

Step 7: Bring key sources (from step 4) and fellow obsessives into co-production. And be prepared to compensate.

Step 8: Go pro-am. Try some campaigns. Crowdsource from an earned crowd.

Another way to display the same design is to describe the different levels of investment in networked reporting. You could also call them stages of development. I see three:

Level One (steps 1-4): Minimum viable product. It includes:

* Bot for the beat: an automated Quartz Twitter feed for bitcoin news
* People to follow: a list of people who converse and share links about bitcoin.
* Rock solid explainer: original content by Quartz explaining background to bitcoin for its users.
* Preferred sources list: the best of the best, selected and vetted by Quartz
* River of news: An automated feed of bitcoin news via select sources curated by Quartz.(Like this one for tech.)

* Register as a Quartz bitcoin source: (Legal name or pen name allowed. This is one way people can raise their hand as a fellow obsessive, and get vetted.)

* Good alert systems for writers and editors, making assignments easier and coverage better
* Newsroom talent ready to do stories when signals are strong.

Level Two (steps 5-6). Committing to the beat.

* Twitter feed for beat, handmade and a human voice

* Link and comment blog fed by Quartz filters.

* Inbox on steroids

* Beat journalism made clearly distinct from commodity coverage

Level Three (steps 7-8). Turn to the community

* Engage key contributors in co-production, similar to the moment when a successful blog becomes a group blog by hiring from the comments.

* Launch a sources poll. A weekly survey of obsessives, carefully designed to consume a finite amount of time per week, which takes the temperature of the beat but also provides clues to what the beat should be covering by asking the people who care the most. (Sort of like this.)

* Crowdsourced investigations. By now a known practice.

* “Quest journalism,” an example of which is here.

Summing up: My recommendations for Quartz.

Recommendation 1. Invest now in Level One development: unique news flows and intelligent filters– something Quartz should try to become good at. Very good. This is my primary recommendation.

Recommendation 2. “Filtered by Quartz.” We think there are brand opportunities for Quartz in making its own: Intelligent filters, Preferred sources, Rivers of News (another Dave Winer concept.)

Recommendation 3. Influence the development of tool companies that make your filters smarter and your work easier. Little Bird and Storyful are two we especially recommend.

Recommendation 4. Pick your spots for fuller investment in a beat via metrics that flow from the minimum viable product. An obvious example: where the alert systems are spitting out very good story ideas, the beat is ready for more investment.

Recommendation 5. Put all tools and practices to the “enterprise journalism” and “unique signature” tests. Meaning: you’ll know it’s working if the tools and methods recommended here help Quartz transcend commodity coverage and produce journalism with a unique signature. If they don’t help with that, drop this approach.

Recommendation 6. Quartz Pro. There’s a possible business opportunity in monetizing signaling systems that you know from Quartz experience work. That’s why its crucial to bring some of the obssessives in from the cold, so to speak.

Recommendation 7. Campaigns can be good punctuation points. Once they’re over, fold your tent and move on to other beats.

Recommendation 8. Stage Three beats are an insight community, as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick calls it. Some will pay to know what a crowd earned this way thinks.

Quick: How many shifts in power can you spot in this one report? From Reuters:

AllThingsD, the widely read technology blog run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, has begun discussions with owner News Corp about extending or ending their partnership, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters. According to these sources, AllThingsD‘s contract with News Corp expires at the end of the year…

Sources said the website is receiving a lot of “inbound interest” from potential buyers parallel to its talks with News Corp. Among the names mentioned as having reached out to AllThingsD were Conde Nast, where Swisher recently signed to work as a contributing writer for Vanity Fair, and Hearst.

… While AllThingsD is recognized as the brainchild of Swisher and Mossberg, News Corp actually owns the website and its name. However, according to provisions in their contract, Swisher and Mossberg have approval authority over any sale, the first source said.

I count five power shifts. Now I’m not claiming that any of these are new this year, so don’t freak out! Several have been watchable trends since before Barack Obama ran for president. But they continue to alter what is possible for journalists, so it’s worth going over them one by one.

* Writers ascendant over publishers. Not completely. Just: relatively speaking. The brainchild of Swisher and Mossberg… Swisher and Mossberg have approval… It’s their franchise, not News Corp’s. AllThingsD is built around their talents as reporters, interviewers, reviewers and occasional breakers of news. Robert Cottrell, editor of The Browser, an aggregation site, put it this way in a recent essay for the Financial Times:

Think back to the days when print media ruled. Your basic unit of consumption was not the article, nor the writer, but the publication. You bought the publication in the hope or expectation that it would contain good writing. The publisher was the guarantor of quality.

Professional writers still see value in having publishers online, not so much as guarantors of quality, but because publishers pay for writing – or, increasingly, if they do not pay for it, they do at least publish it in a place where it will get read.

Readers, on the other hand, have less of a need for publishers. One striking trend I have noticed in the past five years is the way in which individual articles uncouple themselves from the places where they are first published, to lead their own lives across the internet, passed from hand to hand between readers.

Right: readers have less need of publishers. That is one reason writers are in the ascendant. Another is what my friend Clay Shirky said: “There’s a button that says ‘publish,’ and when you press it, it’s done.” The internet does much of what publishers used to do: bring the goods to the users.

* Shifting modes of scarcity. Technology news isn’t scarce. The ability instantly to distribute technology news: that isn’t scarce. (The internet does it.) The capital required to begin providing technology news is extremely low, so that isn’t scarce. Genuine news is scarce. Talent and experience–and scoops, of course, which come from being well-sourced–are scarce. Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and their colleagues at AllThingsD are good at what they do. By now it is primarily this, not the fact that they did it under the banner of Dow Jones (owned by News Corp) that makes a difference. Even a 19 year-old kid can be a player in technology reporting if he has the (scarce) goods. And check out the way Mark Gurman is compensated:

Despite the fact that his work is only part-time, his pay check from 9to5Mac is not. Weintraub [his boss] tells us, “I have an unorthodox model where I give my writers ad space on their posts and on the homepage. For Mark in particular, it has been very successful because his exclusives get a lot of attention.”

How successful? Weintraub says he “makes enough money to buy a Tesla every year (he hasn’t…yet) with change left over.” Teslas generally sell for ~$100,000 a pop.

* The economics of human presence. AllThingsD began in 2003 as a conference. The site was created for people who could not be there. It grew from that to become a daily source of news and views. The conference is still the soul of the enterprise. Here it is, sold out in February, though it doesn’t happen until May. Speakers haven’t even been announced yet! News isn’t scarce, commentary isn’t scarce, but an opportunity to watch Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, think on stage? That is scarce; people will pay for it. The site boasts:

D is different from other conferences: no canned speeches, no marketing pitches, and no bull. Instead, creators and executive producers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put the industry’s top players to the test during unscripted conversations about the impact digital technology will have on our lives now and in the future.

Swisher and Mossberg were smart to make the conference about the interviews, rather than speeches, panels or presentations. That way it is their presence, as well as Tim Cook’s or Marissa Mayer’s, that makes the event go. To some degree they have achieved what Tim Russert of NBC News had when he was host of Meet the Press. Sitting down for an interview with Swisher and Mossberg is a thing you do to show that you are a serious player. That’s the economics of human presence. Which is why the Atlantic, The Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post (among others) are trying to make events part of their business model. There is no “save as” command for events.

* The renewed importance of voice. Kara Swisher is fast on her feet, witty and sarcastic, hyper-informed about the tech industry and she’ll try to cut you to pieces on Twitter if you challenge her, especially one of her scoops. Walt Mossberg is like a graybeard of tech, part of its institutional memory, someone who has seen it all and cannot easily be snowed. These personas are part of what they have to sell, and they emerge especially in conversation with industry leaders at their annual conference. If they were View from Nowhere journalists their franchise would not be nearly as strong as it is.

From Mossberg’s “ethics statement” on the AllThingsD site: “I am not an objective news reporter, and am not responsible for business coverage of technology companies. I am a subjective opinion columnist, a reviewer of consumer technology products and a commentator on technology issues.” From Swisher’s: “While I still intend to break news on this site, as with my previous print column, I will make subjective comments on the business and strategies of technology companies and issues.”

They know where the value lies.

* The rise of niche journalism. It’s not called “all things newsy,” or “all things business.” The business that Swisher and Mossberg built is about “digital technology meets consumer capitalism.” And that is all. This is the logic of niche jounalism. The writer Nicholas Carr summarized it five years ago:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.

“The bundle falls apart.” That’s a power shift. And it leads directly to: Sources said the website is receiving a lot of “inbound interest” from potential buyers…

Look, you’re right. About a lot of things.

Editing by click rate is stupid and unethical. Chasing traffic is an abyss. The hamsterization of journalism is degrading the work environment for news professionals. Expecting reporters to report, write, blog, tweet, shoot video, sift the web, raise their metabolism, and produce more without time and training is guaranteed to fail. Trading in print dollars for digital dimes has been an economic disaster for newsrooms that ran on those dollars. Online advertising will never replace what was lost. The editorial staff is the engine that makes the whole thing go. You cannot cut your way to the future. The term “content” is a barbarism that bit by bit devalues what journalists do. Pure aggregation is parasitic on original reporting. Untended, online comment sections have become sewers, protectorates for the deranged, depraved and deluded. That we have fewer eyes on power, fewer journalists at the capital or city hall watching what goes on, almost guarantees that there will be more corruption. Bloggers and citizen journalists cannot fill the gap. Experienced beat reporters are the community’s institutional memory. Everyone needs an editor. It’s absurd to claim that “anyone” can be a journalist if we mean by that someone who knows how to find the right sources and ask the right questions, dig for information, counter the spin, produce a fair, accurate and unflinching account without libeling anybody– and do it all on deadline.

But you’re wrong about a lot of things too.

Being ignorant and uninvolved in “the business side” has been a disaster for the newsroom. For all its strengths, separation of church and state also meant no seat at the table when the big decisions were made. Anyone who doesn’t want to know what the numbers say should not be trusted with editorial decisions. Listening to demand is smart journalism, so is giving people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. If you are good at one, the other goes better. “Do what you do best and link to the rest” isn’t a slogan, it’s your only hope for comprehensive coverage. Figuring out how to make things happen at lower cost is intrinsic to quality journalism today. Pack journalism and duplicative coverage mock your claims of crisis. In the aggregate, the users know more than you do about most things. They are in many more places than you can be. They also help distribute your stuff. Therefore talking with them is basic to your job. Google isn’t the source of your troubles; it sends you traffic. Digitally, the original sin wasn’t failing to charge when the first news sites came online; it was re-purposing the old platform’s material. A journalist is just a heightened case of an informed citizen, not a special class. The First Amendment doesn’t mention your occupation; it refers to everyone’s right to publish. “Who’s a journalist?” leads nowhere so drop it.

“Lie of the Year,” people in the establishment press called it. As bad as it gets.

To which professional strategist Stu Stevens, head thinker for the Romney campaign in 2012, says: Nonsense, gentleman, our work on this ad was pristine. A model of accuracy, upholding a standard in verification beyond what is normally seen in politics.

Surreal exchange, right? But it happened the other day, as I will soon explain.

But first, a brief check-in with common sense.

1. Standard deviation from the verifiable fact

To some extent all political campaigns are run against reality. No mystery lies about it. There is a tendency to portray the opponent as the embodiment of everything wrong in the country. There is a tendency to portray your own candidate as right about everything, and a great husband and father or wife and mother to boot. There is a thing called confirmation bias. We may safely posit a kind of standard deviation from the verifiable fact that is part of the messy carnival of politics. It is juvenile to make too much of it, or to get worked up about its appearance on one side of the ledger, while minimizing or ignoring its solid presence on the other.

However, it can also happen, and here we drift out of “common sense” and into a political argument with consequences for press treatment… It can also happen that a political party works itself into a position where it has to run against reality in a more serious way, beyond some standard range of distortion. Because, for example, a substantial portion of its base is committed to propositions that aren’t so, like: Obama is for sure a socialist and probably a Muslim. Or: what unites the various factions is thinning, and so a demonized other and paranoid charges serve as the “glue” keeping parts of the coalition together. Non-standard deviation from verifiable facts becomes normal politics for the party in such a weakened state. Wilder charges must be made for reasons internal to the party’s malfunctioning state of denial.

2. Agreed upon untruths.

For this thesis (in which I join) Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s April 27, 2012 Op Ed in the Washington Post is the standard text. Part of the reason for that is Mann of the Brookings Institution and Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute are establishment figures par excellence, think tank centrists and students of How Washington Works who for that reason have been among the most quoted men in political journalism over the span of their influence. So when they say it, the meaning is somewhat different:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

One of the flash points during the campaign–and one I wrote about–was the tension between Romney aides doing what it takes to win and fact-checkers in the press, who had to cope with distortions that sometimes went beyond the normal range. These tensions led to the now famous statement by Romney pollster Neil Newhouse: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

That was a true statement. If they had to bend more facts beyond the sort of breaking point that establishment journalists had set up, it was not because they were professional liars or more mendacious than your average campaign Joe, but because political fictions — agreed-upon untruths — were doing more of the work in holding the Republican Party together, even though the Democrats and the Obama campaign relied on distortions too, sometimes outrageously so. (A list of the ones that concerned me, written during the campaign.)

That’s what Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann were trying to try say to the sober-minded political professionals they wanted to reach. It’s not you, Stu: your party has become an outlier. Of course Stuart Stevens didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t believe it, and never accepted it.

3. Re-litigating the Lie of the Year.

The campaign has been over for almost three months. Here and there, the Republican Party has started the confrontation with its ruling fictions that it could not have afforded during the struggle to get Romney elected. But for at least one of the guys who ran the Romney campaign, the tourniquet of denial has tightened since the election returns came in.

Witness the letter Stevens recently sent to the Washington Post fact checker column, asking to re-litigate a Romney campaign ad that had suggested, using weasel wording, that Jeep was shipping American jobs to China. (Romney said this on the campaign trail too: “Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”) Stevens thinks that new facts announced recently show that the original ad was true. “I would hope that you would take another look at this and stress test it for accuracy away from the heat of a campaign,” he wrote to the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.

Kessler agreed. He took another look and re-awarded the ad Four Pinnocchios, the highest level of mendacity the Post system registers. Keep in mind: this is the same ad that won Politifact’s Lie of the Year award. The Politifact researchers noted that not only did Romney make the false claim himself, and then work it into an ad, but the campaign then “stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.” (The Weekly Standard’s take: a pathetic case of liberal bias; the ad is true.)

But it gets even more strange. For Stu Stevens isn’t saying, “Oh come on, fact checkers, it was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.” He’s not trying to make an outrageously false claim seem routine– within the standard deviation for campaign rhetoric. No, he’s upholding the “Jeep shipping jobs to China” statement as exceptionally well-founded, a kind of model for people in his business. “I believe that the ad and Romney’s statement were completely accurate, unusually so by any standards,” he wrote to Kessler. Thus we have:

Lie of the year!

(Folds arms.) “Unusually accurate.”

We double checked. Still a total lie.

(Stamps foot) “I shall not hear of it!”

Why is this a conversation that Stuart Stevens wants to have? He’s initiating these events, after all. For what reason? Is there even a strategy here?

4. Both sides do it most of the time.

It’s worth nothing that Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, and Michael Scherer of Time magazine, along with others who do fact checking or cover politics full time, are convinced that it’s simply too hard to say which side is distorting the facts more in a hard fought campaign. Both sides do it most of the time, they say. People tend to see mendacity in the other guy and forgive their own side’s BS, as Scherer explained at some length in Time. This is from Scherer’s Fact Checking and the False Equivalence Dilemma:

Kessler at the Washington Post has what he calls the Pinocchio tracker, which gives you the average number of Pinocchio’s for a given politician for the statements he has reviewed. Obama gets an average of 2.04 Pinocchios out of 4, while Romney gets an average of 2.35 Pinocchios out of 4. Romney has had 10 statements that received the maximum [number of] Pinocchios, compared to six statements for Obama that received the maximum. Does this mean anything? According to Kessler, not really.

Kessler has repeatedly said that he thinks all politicians “will twist or spin information if they believe it will advance their political interests.” To him that’s the right starting point. He has “a both sides do it” thesis, born of experience, and unfriendly to… The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. Stevens should be happy with Kessler, who is willing to slap Four Pinocchios on a particularly bad ad but usually resists conclusions like “The GOP is a party unmoved by conventional understanding of facts.”

5. Embrace asymmetry, avoid distortion.

Look at Mann and Ornstein’s op-ed, again:

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

After the campaign they assessed the news media’s performance in meeting this challenge.

“The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth,” said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Mann and Ornstein had this advice for the press: “Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?”

Embrace asymmetry, in other words. That’s the way to avoid distortion.

6. Danger, journalists

Here I speculate: In his attempt to re-litigate a campaign ad that everyone else had nearly forgotten about, Stu Stevens is fighting Mann and Ornstein’s advice to the press, which comes from a key part of the Washington establishment. He has some advice of his own:

Danger, press corps. Don’t switch out of your symmetry-making machinery just yet. And don’t be so quick to declare “unbalanced phenomenon” conditions. For there is doubt. Even about your Lie of the Year, Four Pinocchios and all that– there is doubt. My advice: do seek professional safety. You are risking a lot when you try to declare: Which politician is telling the truth?

“Fierce arguments still rage over…” That’s the sentence you should bet on if you care about being right and avoiding distortion. Allow me to demonstrate…

And thus we have Stuart’s fierce argument, raging at a kind of consensus verdict in the political press about the mendacity of the Jeep ad.

“A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality,” Mann and Ornstein had advised the press. Along with: “The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth.”

“Even about your Lie of the Year there is doubt. So don’t try anything.” That’s what I hear Stuart Stevens saying back.

For about 20 years (yikes!) I have been trying to move American journalists off their default view of newsroom “objectivity.” The default view goes like this:

There is something called “news,” another thing called “opinion,” and professional journalists can be trusted because they keep their opinions out of the news.

My primary objection to this safe, cozy and ultra-simplified view was that it imposed certain intellectual costs on journalists that could not be waved away. The costs lay in everything the default view rendered invisible– like, say, framing decisions. The news is rife with such, but it’s hard to call them opinions, and they certainly aren’t “objective.”

A nice illustration of that came the other day from The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who took note of an ordinary Wall Street Journal story that began like this:

Americans are using more gadgets, televisions and air conditioners than ever before. But, oddly, their electricity use is barely growing…

The story wound up framing this oddity as bad news for utility companies, rather than good news for climate change. His point was not to denounce the Journal for its pro-utility bias. Rather:

I mention this story because it’s as stark an example as you’ll find of the impossibility of presenting “objective” news, and of the power of the “frame” the writer and editor choose to place around the daily increment of information.

Exactly. And if there’s power in a frame, there’s trouble when framing patterns escape notice and become defaults themselves. Another example is what’s come to be known as false balance (or phony equivalence, fake symmetry) a form of distortion that arises from the pressure to demonstrate that the journalist doesn’t have an opinion and isn’t taking sides. Dubious framing decisions and false balance are invisible to the default view of objectivity, which makes it harder for journalists to fix these problems when they become chronic.

By now the default view comes with its own concession, which is intended to shore up the model by acknowledging a problem or two. The concession goes like this: “Of course no one can be totally objective, we’re all human. But we try to come as close as we can.” In an alternate version, the second sentence reads: “Maybe a better word is fairness.” (It is a better word, but in the concession speech it means pretty much the same thing as the term it replaces.)

For the last few years I have been using the phrase, the View from Nowhere, when I want to reference the default view and deny it the prestige it has accumulated in mainstream newsrooms. I’ve said that it’s getting harder and harder to trust the View from Nowhere (or in broadcast news, the Voice of God) but easier to trust a journalist who can somehow say, “here’s where I’m coming from.” (Example in this disclosure page.) Part of the reason for this is that finding multiple frames around the same facts is a normal occurrence for a consumer of news on the Internet. One thing the users know: those frames didn’t get there objectively.

More and more, the heaviest users of news are exercising a kind of veto over the default construction of newsroom objectivity. If the users don’t find “we keep our opinions out of the news” a credible statement, if they’re on to things like lazy frames and false balance, then not only will journalists hear these complaints with noisy regularity, but further assertions of objectivity aren’t going to reverse the trend and produce more trust. They will in fact produce less. And it doesn’t matter how many old school journalists stamp their feet and repeat the mantra. That’s what I mean by the users’ veto.

Over the weekend the Public Editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, took on these issues without over-simplifying them. She also interviewed me for her column, for which I am grateful. Sullivan did not endorse my take. But she helped legitimize the argument about the costs of the default view. It’s easy to see why. The previous public editor had openly demonstrated his naiveté on the matter, to devastating effect. Sullivan hears a lot from readers about phony balance and calling bullshit on false claims, and so she writes about these things. On Sunday she said it plainly:

What readers really want is reporting that gets to the bottom of a story without having to give opposing sides equal weight. They also want reporters to state established truths clearly, without hedging or always putting the words in a source’s mouth. They’re most interested in truth.

Right. Truth telling is more important than a ritualized demonstration of viewlessness; Times readers are demanding it. Sullivan also shifted the ground a little, away from objectivity toward impartiality, which is also a constitutive term for the BBC in Great Britain. I find it hard to dismiss the struggle to remain impartial, because in some ways that’s what any truthteller is trying to do: get beyond a partial view and try see a bigger picture. Two years ago I put it this way:

If objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about-–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–-I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us: yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes.

The View from Nowhere is my attempt to isolate the element in objectivity that we don’t need, and call attention to it.

Sullivan began her column with the now forgotten tale of Farnaz Fassihi’s viral e-mail. She’s the Wall Street Journal reporter who was stationed in Baghdad and in 2004 wrote an email to friends giving her impressions of how miserably the war was going. The email, which was quite compelling, got passed around among friends and eventually became public, raising the question: why isn’t this the news? As I wrote at the time:

Her e-mail report can have references to what a friend of hers saw on a drive through Sadr City. Her Wall Street Journal report cannot. The “authorized knowers” in her Journal reporting tend to be experts and authorities, often government officials, or they are participants in events, people close to the action.

Fassihi was telling friends what she felt she knew. In her email she herself is the authorized knower, and she speaks directly, not through sources and quotes. As the Houston Chronicle put it in an editorial, “Though the missive apparently does not contradict her reportage, it is blunt, bleak and opinionated in a way that mainstream coverage generally avoids.”

Viewlessness as a means of trust production in news came with voicelessness for the individual author. That is now ebbing away, especially with social media and two-way interactions between journalists and users. But it’s not just that. As Eric Black of MinnPost put it three months ago:

After 35 years of doing my scribbling within the confines of the “objective journalism” paradigm, including objective journalism about perceptions of journalistic bias, I’ve about had it. Journalists’ worries about being brought up on bias charges do more to get in the way of good reporting and analysis than any benefit it delivers.

The costs of sticking with the default model in trust production are visible and mounting, and increasingly journalists are looking for a way out that doesn’t cause them more problems than the View from Nowhere already has. The outlines of the new system are coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance. Progress is slow, we’re not there yet, but this is the direction things are headed in.

Sullivan’s column is an important  marker in that struggle. So read it and let me know what you think in the comments.

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan announced that he’s parting ways with the Daily Beast and taking his blog, The Daily Dish, independent. Truly independent: no advertisers! (Though he hasn’t ruled that out for the future.) Today he announced that he’s already raised a third of his $900,000 annual budget by asking loyal readers to pay $19.99– or more if they choose. I’m a big fan of the site, and a daily user, so I bought a membership on the first day. And I’m rooting for Sullivan and his team.

What interests me most about his gamble is what Andrew Sullivan is gambling on: the relationship between an obsessive blogger and his most loyal users. As Mathew Ingram puts it: “Sullivan is betting that his personal brand and goodwill with his readers is enough to convince a substantial proportion of them to fund his writing.”

Thus: “The only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.”

Independence from big media = dependence on passionate users. Before they ran this calculation, Sullivan and his team (it totals seven people) had several indicators of how strong their relationship with the users actually was. For example: “The computers say the average Dish reader spends up to 17 minutes a day on the site – a massive investment of time and energy.”

Another indicator was the contents of the inbox. Conor Friedersdorf filled in on the staff of the Daily Dish when Sullivan and his team were employed by The Atlantic. He describes what it’s like to sift through the emails that come in to the Dish:

I finally saw the reader inbox in all its glory while guest blogging for Sullivan as he vacationed. It’s a gig I did several times, all of them while The Dish was hosted here at The Atlantic. I’ve never received so much delightful correspondence. The Dish readership is massive, highly educated, ideologically diverse, employed in a stunning array of fields, and spread out across the world. Of course, those same attributes characterize the readership here at The Atlantic, and I’ve gotten tons of wonderful emails in the course of my current job, but something about the blogger’s personal, informal tone inspires correspondence of a different character. Compare the comments on the average item here at The Atlantic with the loyal readers Ta-Nehisi Coates has cultivated in the comments section of his blog, where it’s more like an intimate community.

At The Daily Dish, I once asked readers in advance of a road trip across The South what I should see. I didn’t just get hundreds of suggestions; I didn’t just get extended essays on the geography, sociology, and competing styles of barbecue that characterize the region; I didn’t just get notes from people in eleven states; I also got invitations to stay overnight with Dish readers in a dozen cities, or to stop by for dinner at the houses of their parents, or to please write if I passed through where they live so they could at the very least buy me a cold beer. I was just a guest blogger. I don’t doubt that Sullivan could live rent free for five years if he asked nicely.

In other words, core users have been “giving” to Sullivan’s site for years. They have been giving their time, their persistent attention, their loyalty (meaning: a bond strong enough to withstand the moments when Sullivan offends the user with his opinions and unruly emotions) and such other contributions as can be seen only by sifting though the inbox.

Q. Can you charge for news and commentary on the web?

A. It depends.

It depends on how strong the relationship is between you and the regular users of your site. Sullivan and crew have ample reason to bet on that relationship– not only the stats, but the inbox, out of which emerges regular features like View from Your Window and the curated reader comment posts. The Daily Dish is mainly an aggregation site. The editors find some of the stuff, the users find the rest.

I know of no site that better fulfills Alan Rusbridger’s vision of “mutualised” journalism. (He’s the editor of The Guardian in the UK.) What Rusbridger means by that is simple, really: We, the journalists, have part of what it takes to create an informative and exciting site. You, the users, have the other part. You give to us so that we can we give to you.

This open and collaborative future for journalism – I have tried the word “mutualised” to describe something of the flavour of the relationship this new journalism has with our readers and sources and advertisers – is already looking different from the journalism that went before. The more we can involve others the more they will be engaged participants in the future, rather than observers or, worse, former readers. That’s not theory. It’s working now.

And, yes, we’ll charge for some of this – as we have in the past – while keeping the majority of it open. My commercial colleagues at the Guardian firmly believe that our mutualised approach is opening up options for making money, not closing them down.

I would never have given my twenty dollars to Sullivan if I couldn’t link to items on his site, knowing that any user of my Twitter feed could freely access them, regardless of whether they subscribed to the Daily Dish. Part of the intimacy between Sullivan and his core readership involves this (somewhat obscure) third party: the much larger group of web cruisers who will never pay but who will visit from time to time when something strikes their interest. If the core users understand and accept that they are, to some extent, subsidizing the more occasional visitors then their annual payment is more likely to be renewed.

Eliminating advertisers from the equation promotes this kind of clarity. My guess is that the more open Sullivan chooses to be about the finances of the site, the more successful he will be in raising money from the most loyal users. An advertiser-supported site has a harder time being completely transparent, for the simple reason that “part of what we sell is you, commoditized…” is not easily communicated to fully sentient beings.

One of the first things I teach my students about the transformation of journalism by digital means is the unbundling effect. Nicholas Carr summarizes it:

Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

The unbundling effect–which is (sorry to use this term) a mega-trend in digital media–strongly favors niche journalism. So what is Sullivan’s niche? It would be awkward, but you could try to characterize it topically: gay rights including gay marriage, Obama’s “long view,” the coming crack-up of the Republican Party, decriminalizing pot, the struggle for freedom in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and its discontents, all views of the world descendent from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the critic Christopher Hitchens…

But a better way to put it would be: Andrew’s own obsessions. That’s the real niche. This is the extreme opposite of the “all the news that’s fit to print.” I think Sullivan and his team are going to meet their goal. They will raise more than the $900,000 they need to run the site for the first year of their independent existence. They could never do it if they fell back on the View from Nowhere. Loyalty and obsession are intimates.