Nieman Journalism Lab
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Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST
 When BostonGlobe.com was split off from Boston.com last fall, the most obvious new revenue source was the newspaper site’s new paywall. BostonGlobe.com, the new, handsome, straight-laced sibling, got all the attention and the accolades not just because of its design, but also because it promised to bring in new money. Well, though perhaps to less fanfare, so will Boston.com. With its new distance from the newspaper brand, Boston.com is investing in e-commerce as a money driver, notably with its recently launched Boston.com Tickets, which sells tickets to Boston sporting events, even directly from a game preview story. From reading about Sunday’s Patriots-Ravens game to buying a ticket is now just a click. (Two seats on the 30-yard line, just $595 a piece!) The actual ticket vending is handled by Ace Ticket; Boston.com will get a cut of the sales. The arrangement might cause moderate-to-intense eyebrow-raising among some journalists, who’d argue that a news site shouldn’t be helping sell tickets to games they cover. A number of other newspaper sites have a similar arrangement — here’s the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel selling Brewers tickets, and here’s the San Francisco Chronicle selling Warriors tickets. But many papers link out to a ticket-vending partner rather than sell them under their own brand. But what’s interesting about Boston.com’s approach is that it’s enabled in part by the separation of the newspaper brand. Making BostonGlobe.com the primary home for newspaper-style journalism and reporting has left Boston.com to further explore its role as a pageview-hungry website — one that can try out revenue ideas that some newspaper brands might not be okay with, just as it presents a mix of content that wouldn’t be a perfect fit for the more serious BostonGlobe.com. When I talked to Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products for the Globe, he said the bifurcation of the sites has created two new, distinct properties. “Boston.com is more about fun, practical information. Finding a car, finding a home, finding something to do,” he told me. “The Globe is journalism and what is going on in Boston from a journalistic perspective.” Which is not to say that Boston.com is going to drop its ethics off in a dumpster. Moriarty told me one of the areas they struggled with was the placement and branding of the ticket service. While they didn’t want it to blur the line between commerce and journalism, the goal, he said, was to make it clear to people they could buy tickets they’re reading about. “It’s really about surfacing tickets that are valuable tonight, or the game that you’re looking at,” he said. Even before the spin-off last fall, Boston.com was a prime example of the idea of news site as information portal, a place where newspaper stories mingled with entertainment listings, local services, and other information. Now Boston.com is doubling down on that idea, not just through the tickets service, but also through their Groupon-esque offering Boston Deals, as well as an integration with Open Table to make restaurant reservations (see page bottom). Chris Rattey, Boston.com’s director of product development, said creating the ticketing feature was a collaborative effort, not just with Ace, but within the Globe, as the editorial, advertising, and digital side all played a part in developing it. In order to figure out how they could best implement a ticket system, Rattey’s team got access to an API from Ace that allowed them to query different types of data from the ticket broker. That was important, he said, because in order for the system to be valuable to readers, they had to figure out what the most important information to display. Moriarty said they’re still experimenting with the system to see what people respond to, including A/B testing to see what drives clicks to the tickets feature and what actually converts sales. But that may just be finesse to a certain degree, since selling sports tickets in Boston isn’t exactly tricky. In the last 10 years, the city’s seen a Stanley Cup, a Larry O’Brien trophy, a couple World Series wins, three Super Bowl victories, and a current run at another Lombardi trophy. The obsessive fan base here eats up sports coverage and snaps up tickets as soon as they go on sale. (I’ve seen the lines when Sox tickets go on sale. The word interminable comes to mind.) Coverage of the local teams drives consistent traffic to Boston.com, so it makes sense to add tickets to the site, Moriarty said. Sports is just a part of life, and, naturally, so are tickets. “It’s like the currency of Boston,” Moriarty joked. |
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Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST
 Once in a while the cultural fault lines in American journalism come into unexpectedly sharp relief. Jon Stewart’s now-legendary star turn on “Crossfire” was one of those moments; the uproar over NPR’s refusal (along with most major news outlets) to call waterboarding torture was another. The New York Times may have added another clash to this canon with public editor Arthur Brisbane’s blog post on fact-checking last week. For anyone who missed it (or the ensuing analysis, rounded up here) the exchange can be summed up in two lines of dialogue: Times to Internet: Should we fact-check the things politicians say?That was an actual response, and a popular refrain: More than a dozen comments included some variant of, “This is a joke, right?” Several readers compared the column to an Onion piece. By far the most common reaction, which shows up in scores of comments, was to express dismay at the question or to say it captures the abysmal state of journalism today. A typical example, from “Fed Up” in Brooklyn: “The fact that this is even a question shows us how far mainstream journalism has fallen.” The stunning unanimity of reader responses was undoubtedly the big story, as the news intelligentsia pointed out right away. It underscores the yawning gulf that separates professional reporters’ and everyday readers’ basic understandings of what journalism is supposed to do. Of the 265 comments logged in the three hours before the Times turned off commenting, exactly two (discounting obvious sarcasm) disagreed with the proposition that reporters should challenge suspect claims made by politicians. (More on the dissenters, below.) Brisbane’s follow-up, suggesting many readers had missed the nuance by assuming the question was just whether the paper should “check facts and print the truth,” seems off base. A few may have made that mistake, but most clearly have in mind what is sometimes called “political fact-checking” — calling out distortions in political speech. If anything, reading through the comments what’s striking is the robust and stable critical vocabulary readers share for talking about the failings of conventional journalism. More than a dozen take issue with the definition of journalistic objectivity implied by Brisbane’s wondering whether reporting that calls out untruths can also be “objective and fair.” As a reader from Chicago wrote, I see this formulation as a problem. Objective sometimes isn’t fair. Some of the people reported on are objectively less truthful, less forthcoming, and less believable than others.False “balance” in the news is a common trope in the comments, which readers refer to both directly (at least eight times) and via now-standard illustrations of “he said/she said” reporting, like the climate-change debate (brought up by five readers) or the parodic headline “Shape of the Earth? Views differ” (mentioned by another nine). Journalism-as-stenography also comes up frequently — at least 20 of the responses make the comparison specifically, while 16 declare that the Times may as well run press releases if it isn’t going to challenge political claims. As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?To anyone not steeped in the codes and practices of professional journalism, this sounds pretty odd: Testing facts is the province of opinion writers? What happens in the rest of the paper? As JohnInArizona commented, Mr. Brisbane’s view of the job of op-ed columnist vs that of reporters seems skewed.Journalism has a ready response for this line of critique: The truth is not always black and white, and reporters run the risk of “imposing their judgement on what is false and what is true” (Brisbane’s phrase) by weighing in on factual questions more complicated than the shape of the earth. Politicians are expert in misleading without lying, and people may genuinely disagree about what the facts are — based on different notions of what constitutes a presidential apology, for instance. Even in these cases though, a reporter can add context to help readers assess a claim. Brisbane himself suggests that, Perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the President has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less: “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”A few readers responded that the second sentence is superfluous. Several others suggested doing additional reporting around the question, along these lines: “A real reporter might try to find those speeches. A real reporter might request that the Romney campaign provide examples of times where Obama has apologized for America…” That sort of reporting is exactly what fact-checkers at PolitiFact and the Washington Post did to refute the claim, reconstructing the “apology tour” meme as developed in various Republican documents (Romney’s 2010 book “No Apology,” a Karl Rove op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, a Heritage Foundation report, etc.) and digging into the actual text of Obama’s speeches as well as comparable ones by previous presidents. PolitiFact went so far as to interview several experts on diplomacy and political apologies. Reading the public editor’s letter, though, you’d have no idea that the key example he uses to illustrate his column already has been checked and found wanting. More to the point, you’d have no clue about what AJR has called the “fact-checking explosion” in American journalism — a movement that is at least a decade old (the short-lived Spinsanity launched in 2001, followed by FactCheck.org in 2003) and now spans dedicated fact-checking groups as well as newspapers, TV networks, radio outlets, and even journalism schools. (Full disclosure: I’m writing a dissertation, and eventually a book, about this movement.) Fact-checking has been very much in the ether lately, with news gurus weighing in on the limits of this kind of journalism, especially during the controversy over PolitiFact’s latest “Lie of the Year” selection. The fact-checking movement is part of a larger ongoing conversation about journalistic objectivity that began with the news media’s failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war. (See Brent Cunningham’s “Rethinking Objectivity,” Jay Rosen’s “The View from Nowhere,” Michael Massing’s “Now they Tell Us.”) Most fact-checking groups don’t spend a lot of time tweaking their peers in the press, even though the claims they check usually go unchallenged in news accounts. But they don’t have to — their entire project is a critique of mainstream journalism, a self-conscious experiment in “rethinking objectivity.” That sense of mission — of fact-checking as a kind of reform movement — is unmistakable when fact-checkers get together, as at a New America Foundation conference on the subject last December, and one at CUNY the month before. (Here’s a write-up of the two conferences.) In a report written for the New America meeting, the Post’s original “Fact-Checker” columnist, Michael Dobbs, placed fact-checking in a long tradition of “truth-seeking” journalism that rejects the false balance practiced by political reporters today. (Three reports from that conference will be published over the next month.) From the precincts of this emerging reformist consensus, Brisbane’s column seemed surprisingly out of touch. Still, the public editor raises questions that haven’t been answered very well in the conversation about fact-checking. It’s easy to declare, as Brook Gladstone did in a 2008 interview with Bill Moyers, that reporters should “Fact check incessantly. Whenever a false assertion is asserted, it has to be corrected in the same paragraph, not in a box of analysis on the side.” (I agree.) But why, exactly, don’t they do that today? Why has fact-checking evolved into a specialized form of journalism relegated to a sidebar or a separate site? Are there any good reasons for it to stay that way? I cannot claim to be a regular reader of the New York Times, and I cannot claim to have ever been to journalism school. Finally, I also cannot claim to know what “the truth” is. I do not understand why so many readers are presenting such unequivocal opinions as commentary here.This reads like a more thoughtful version of David Gregory’s infamous response when asked why he doesn’t fact-check his on-air guests: “People can fact-check ‘Meet the Press’ every week on their own terms.” It rests on the concern — elaborated in this Politico post and in a Journal editorial — that fact-checking tends to shade into opinion, glossing over genuine differences in political ideology. The WSJ decried a “journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and ‘facts,’ rather than differences of world view or principles.” The only problem with the “don’t draw conclusions” standard is that reporters draw conclusions all of the time, and now more than ever. The decades-long trend toward more analytical reporting, probably self-evident to any news junkie, has been thoroughly documented by communications scholars (who, following Kevin Barnhurst, sometimes call this “the new long journalism” or the “decline of event-centered reporting.”) Reporters are of course especially comfortable drawing conclusions about political strategy, liberally dispensing their analysis of what a candidate or officeholder hopes to gain from particular “messaging” and whether the strategy is like to work. So objective journalism applies the ban on drawing conclusion very selectively. What seems to make reporters uncomfortable is not analysis per se but criticism, especially criticism that can be seen as taking sides on a controversial question — which they will avoid even at the risk of profound inconsistency. Here’s Bill Keller’s much-ridiculed rationale (quoted in a Media Decoder post) for refusing to describe waterboarding as torture in the pages of the Times, though the paper had often referred to it that way before the U.S. took up the practice: When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.The result revealed the awkward gap between common sense and journalistic sense. Common sense says, if it was torture then, it’s torture now. Journalistic sense says, this is really controversial! It’s not our job to accuse a sitting president of authorizing an illegal global regime of torture! (Conversely, it was profoundly uncontroversial to apply the label to waterboarding in a country such as China. Journalists could do so unthinkingly.) This political risk aversion is nothing new. One of the most cited pieces of research on journalism is Gaye Tuchman’s ethnographic look at the “strategic ritual” of objectivity as practiced in a newspaper newsroom in the 1960s. Tuchman stressed the essentially defensive nature of the claim to be objective, and of the reporting routines it produced. Her “newsmen” shied away from criticism of public figures or public policies — or found someone else to voice them — because they were deeply, institutionally afraid of drawing attacks or even lawsuits from the people they reported on. (They used the “news analysis” label to set off reports that were less “objective,” though Tuchman found reporters and editors could not supply a coherent rationale for distinguishing between the two kinds of stories.) The new, professional fact-checkers are specialized in ways that mitigate (but don’t eliminate) these concerns. They dedicate pages to analyzing even a simple claim, showing all of their work, so that someone who dislikes the result might still agree it was reached fairly. Full-time fact-checkers don’t have to worry about losing “access” to a public figure, because they don’t rely on inside information. (For the same reason, fact-checkers don’t use anonymous sources.) And they obviously — to occasional criticism — make an effort to check politicians from both sides of the aisle. And still, fact-checkers constantly come in for vehement attacks from political figures and from the reading public. It’d be hard to prove that this is more pronounced than what traditional news outlets weather; my anecdotal sense is that it might be. (They manage this feedback in interesting ways; for instance, neither FactCheck.org nor PolitiFact allow comments on the same page as their fact-checks, though they do often run selections from reader mail.) Without validating the view that “if everybody’s mad at us, we must be doing something right” — a journalistic reflex one also hears from fact-checkers — it has to be acknowledged that this is a deeply polarizing activity. Managing that polarization is part of what fact-checkers have to do in the effort to stay relevant and make a difference in public discourse. The hope for building fact-checks into everyday news reports is that it would push political reporters to be more thoughtful and reflexive about their own work — to leave out quotable-but-dubious claims, to resist political conflict as the default frame, and in general to avoid the pat formulations that are so ably managed by political actors. But inevitably, all of us will be disappointed, even pissed off, by some of these routine fact-checks — and perhaps all the more so when they’re woven into the story itself. To take Brisbane’s question seriously and think about how this might be put into practice, we have to consider how reporters will manage the new set of pressures this work will expose them to. And we have to confront the paradox that trying to create a platform for a more fact-based and reasonable public discourse may also, at the same time, promote further fragmentation and politicization of that discourse.
Lucas Graves is a PhD candidate in communications at Columbia University and a research fellow at the Media Policy Initiative of the New America Foundation.
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