Food fights

Lots of friendly fire over the last few days, what with Slate's Jack Shafer and BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis taking aim at Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz -- who they essentially accuse of crying wolf (Shafer) or plugging-his-ears-and-going-la-la-la (Jarvis) on the topic of newsroom cuts and how old-line news organizations are grappling with Web 2.0 realities. 

Now Kurtz has joined what he (half-jokingly) calls "a good food fight," answering what he seems to think are certain oversimplifications in the starve-the-newsroom argument.

Says Kurtz (in the second item, after Obama):

"Newspapers -- good ones, at least -- do two things that, if their staffs shrivel, no TV station, Web site or blogger will be able to match. One is to provide detailed local coverage of schools, hospitals, zoning battles and town councils. The other is holding public officials and business executives accountable with aggressive investigative work.

"[Newspapers] are also tradition-encrusted places that need to become less cautious, less stuffy and less arrogant. But if the critics think that a starvation diet will somehow produce healthier reporting, they are fantasizing."

All due respect, but Kurtz isn't answering the real thrust of the journopopulist argument, which has never claimed that "any one blogger" could match a newspaper's best efforts.

The idea, or at least one idea that's being kicked around, is that communities of bloggers--or teams of citizen journalists, or wise crowds or open-source reporters or whatever term we eventually settle on--can contribute something that might very well match what a newsroom can do.  Might even best it, when the team/crowd/open-source community is fired up and firing on all cylinders.

At the very least, the efforts of these communities have the potential to provide something every bit as valuable. And not all old-line journalists are afraid to start experimenting with that potential: David Cohn at NewAssignment.net profiles one such effort run by an opinion editor at one of the Post Company's free-daily competitors, the Washington Examiner. And Vince Maher reports that a major South African journalism award has added a citizen-journalism category for this year's round.

(Pause for irony: While Kurtz has been busy (sorta) espousing a fundamentalist doctrine, Washingtonpost.com boss Jim Brady has essentially been evangelizing in the other direction, according to Editor & Publisher.)

Meanwhile the BBC is out-thinking most of us, which won't surprise anyone who follows this sort of thing: In a speech to the World Digital Publishing Conference last week, a BBC exec outlined new-style journalism plans designed to let information move both ways:

"Other plans [may] include ... wiki style pages that would let users contribute to compilations of information. ... A news API could let users outside the BBC access BBC content for their own development projects."

This last, a news API, is a critical piece. Jarvis, who's argued for just such a thing many a time, is busy with a startup, DayLife, that would seem to be working more or less in this vein. (He restates today, in another context, "the essential change in media" such things are designed in part to address:  "We, the people, won’t go to where you are anymore. You have to come to us.")

A news API that sets content free (or at least makes its distribution reasonably simple and automatic) is one way of committing good journalism and doing good business in that new reality. And it's close to my own vision of news as an open-source project, a collaboration between seasoned professionals and enthusiastic amateurs and interested neophytes. We're tinkering with similar functionality as part of TheNewsRoom, but this really shows (once again) that the BBC is on the absolute cutting edge of thinking about these things.

Comments

[john]

There is no doubt that the model is changing, like it or not. Traditional media has to exploit the shift or there will be different leadership. But is it any wonder that there are pockets of denial? If, in broad daylight, Bloomberg can steal some of Reuters' thunder and Asian start-ups can dismember Detroit -- each in record, pre-Internet time -- why should it come as any surprise that there is resistance in some bunkers to the idea that journalism has to adapt because of outside forces?

In a way, what is going on fits a familiar template. Journalists are never at the scene when news breaks (the Hindenberg tragedy is a notable exception). Reporters have always relied on private citizens to be their eyes and ears and moles and snitches. They always will. Recent emphasis on governance has newspapers crediting the often many contributors to a story instead of only the person who gets the byline, casting a public light on an institutional distinction between reporting and writing. How different is it that your sources and stringers have an informal or no relationship with you, as long as what is being asserted is verifiable? How much better can journalism be with eyes and ears increased by orders of magnitude?

But even if they are unable to engineer evolution in their favor, MSM stakeholders do have an important obligation: they must enforce and project the professional standards and practices upon which journalism is entirely based.

By embracing open source journalism (my new favorite appellation) MSM will be able to more effectively shape the future and ensure that integrity prevails. But it must succeed in the latter even if it fails in the former.

[peter]

if reporters are so overwhelmed with work due to staff cuts, then how does Howard Kurtz find time to host a weekly program on CNN? Fat? What Fat?