Who REALLY keeps 'em honest?

Last night while being interviewed at City Lights Coffee for The Digitel's new podcast, Digitel founder Ken Hawkins asked me one of those questions that's been rattling around the hollow parts of the world for about five years now: If newspapers fold, who will scrutinize our various institutions?

That's usually an infrastructure/business question ("Who will pay for our watchdogs?"), but as it rattled around in the empty parts of my brain at 2 a.m., it occurred to me that most of the answers to that question miss the most obvious point:

Most newspapers AVOID serious "watchdogging" on a regular basis and limit themselves to re-writing, publicizing, and (in the best cases) critically examining the substantive work of volunteer or non-profit watchdog groups.

Why do these groups give their work to newspapers and TV stations? Until recently, it was because those were the communications channels available to them. Why do they do it now? 1. Because those channels are still the biggest, and 2. Habit.

What percentage of your local news media bandwidth is actually devoted to ORIGINAL watchdogging by local journalists? I don't have figures, but after 20 years in the business I'm here to report that the percentage is tiny. Watchdogging is expensive, it angers people with power and influence, it pisses off huge swaths of the audience you're trying to serve, and effective watchdogging requires sustained study and careful analysis.

So even when a newspaper takes a couple of reporters and applies them to an "investigative" piece for months, their finished product typically relies on data sets that were developed over years by non-journalists watchdogging one particular institution, agency or industry. In most cases these studies were paid for not by "business models," but by donors.

Which brings us to a fairly obvious conclusion:

Now that the real watchdogs have access to worldwide networked media and can go directly to the audience, why should they even bother going through the traditional news media filters?

Yes, quality journalism adds value to the work of these interest groups. But most journalism today is shoddy, not quality. News companies have been cutting quality for the better part of a decade, and that comes at a price.

The usual game goes like this: An interest group does some research, finds something interesting, slips the results to a reporter (either privately or via e-mail blast) who (with the help of many editors) produces a story that arranges some he-said / she-said quotes around it. I know this because I've been that reporter (and those editors). If I took a topic seriously, I might spend parts of three days dressing it up, checking out the facts, looking for examples that would challenge the conclusions. But the real work that produced the data might have taken months.

So long as people support the groups that do the research and provide the scrutiny, the issue is simply how we go about spreading the word. How do we create trust while amplifying one message (local government is quietly skimming money from Group X to give to Group Y) when the other message (Local Government: "Group X is wrong! Group X is disgruntled!") is louder and more authoritative?

Newspapers and local media could chose to be part of that answer. Most have chosen to put their resources elsewhere.

Comments

[Ken Hawkins]

Interesting thoughts. I had been thinking that newspapers did largely two things: 1) junk stuff anyone could do: rehash press releases, write down event times, etc., and 2) the trained journalist stuff: cover crime trends, investigate corruption, etc.

But this post encourages me connect the dots differently regarding point two. A lot of the fact finding and tip offs regarding point two do come from community members in the know and organized groups.

So, maybe it's not that journalism is dying but it's two core tasks are being spun off. Task one to the community (largely via topic-focused bloggers) and task two to organized groups that are willing to investigate to further a cause.

All of that just furthers my belief that the newspaper's role and product won't die, but be shattered into a thousand pieces. And it furthers my belief in what we're doing at TheDigitel. It's not about owning the media in the community anymore, it's about building the reed that can bend to connect folks to the hundreds of different mouthpieces and provide context.

[Ben]

I also found this insightful. The NYT (who still does reporting) had an article a few days ago about the drastic reduction of the Washington Press corps. I knew about this, but it really bothered me, because someone DOES need to watch government. I mean, Cox (who owns the Atlanta paper, and other biggies) doesn't even have a Washington bureau anymore.

On the other hand, when did anyone but a member of the major national media (WaPo, NYT, Newsweek, etc) break a major "watchdog" story? It seems like most Washington reporters, at best, localized the impact of Washington events. And they didn't need to be there to do that.

And Dan has added dimension to that insight. Still, what I wonder, is what is lost by giving up the principle of the "unbiased" watchdog, no matter how many postmodern ways we must nuance "unbiased." Most of the groups doing the investigating have an explicit agenda. Maybe that's a pure improvement, if only in terms of honesty.

At the same time, though, it may nakedly reduce information about Washington to information wars between people with a stake (financial, moral, rights-wise, whatever) in public opinion. IN that sense, "news" becomes just another arm of lobbying.

The critique, of course, is that this has ALWAYS been the case; we just haven't acknowledged it. But a lot of people making that argument are media-critics who have never worked under journalism's old "non-biased" ethos. When I was a journalist, I took that ethos seriously. I failed to embody it at times, but I tried. And I think the attempt affected the outcome in a positive way.

By reducing newsgathering to interest groups (even non-profit one), we effectively say that this attempt to be fair is worthless. I think that's a loss. Unless we change how journalism works as an institution/business, though, it may be an inevitable one.

[John Fleck]

As both a producer and consumer of journalism, I don't think your generalization here is at all accurate. Some of what you describe really happens, lots of journalists and publications do their own "investigating", and the majority of journalism is of an entirely different "watchdog" sort - the nuts and bolts tracking of straightforward civic processes.

But there's a second problem with your analysis. To the extent that mainstream journalism is dealing with the sort of topics you describe - data collected and analyzed by non-profit and volunteer groups, the ones that I deal with *don't* use the direct-to-new media path for a good reason. It's certainly available to them, but they go to mainstream media because it allows them to reach an audience that would not otherwise self-select the topic at hand. That whole "thrown on a zillion driveways" thing is of critical importance to their ability to get their message injected into the civic dialogue. And to the extent that new media participants want to influence civic discourse, their most commonly used strategy remains the well-used tactic of shaming the mainstream media into covering something - to move the topic beyond the blog dialogue among self-selected audiences and into that "general public" space created by stuff thrown on a zillion driveways or pumped onto a zillion TV sets.

[robert ivan]

@ben
Drudge first received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that Jack Kemp would be Republican Bob Dole's running mate in the 1996 presidential election. In 1998, Drudge gained notoriety when he was the first outlet to break the news that later became the Monica Lewinsky scandal. -from wikipedia

Matt Drudge was managing a CBS gift shop at the time i think which makes this a case of watchdogging in my opinion.