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Musings on Journalism in the Online Age

Category: digital media

February 22, 2016

The Intercept, Two Years On

Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world

That was the sub-headline on a Columbia Journalism Review article on October 17, 2013. It perfectly summed up the excitement many of us felt about the announcement that billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and national security journalist Glenn Greenwald were getting into the journalism business together. But, alas, the partnership still seems to be very far from reaching its objectives and potential.

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By February 2014, Omidyar and Greenwald, with a barebones staff, had launched The Intercept. According to its mission statement, The Intercept is “dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism. We believe journalism should bring transparency and accountability to powerful governmental and corporate institutions, and our journalists have the editorial freedom and legal support to pursue this mission.”

Over the past two years, The Intercept has undoubtedly proved to be an important new player in American journalism. It has hired stellar journalists such as—in addition to Greenwald—Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and Peter Maass. It has been a relentless watchdog on powerful people and institutions, initially as a platform for Greenwald’s ground-breaking reporting on the National Security Agency based on leaked documents from Edward Snowden.

Yet, by The Intercept’s own reckoning, the launch of the publication was severely hampered by the management style of First Look Media, the parent company Omidyar created for an envisioned $250 million investment in journalistic projects.

In June 2014, Greenwald, Poitras, Scahill and Matt Taibbi—who was hired to start a separate First Look Media publication called Racket—wrote a letter to Omidyar complaining that budgetary and personnel restrictions were jeopardizing the whole enterprise. The Intercept, already up and running with big-name journalists, managed to work out some of the kinks with First Look. But Taibbi left the company to return to Rolling Stone magazine, and First Look shut down Racket before its launch.

The recent scandal involving reporter Juan Thompson indicates that The Intercept’s organizational problems are far from over. And these problems are beginning to infect The Intercept’s credibility.

In “A Note to Readers” on February 2, 2016, Editor in Chief Betsy Reed announced the firing of Thompson, who had covered race and criminal justice issues for The Intercept since November 2014. An internal investigation had revealed that Thompson fabricated quotes, deceived editors, and lied about his reporting methods.

One of the egregious examples was a Thompson story dated June 19, 2015, about 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who slaughtered nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina two days earlier. The article quoted Scott Roof, who was identified as Roof’s cousin, saying that Roof went “over the edge” when a girl he liked started dating an African American man. The Intercept’s internal investigation, which included speaking with two members of the Roof family, said the family did not know of such a cousin.

In her note, Reed accepted responsibility for the Thompson affair, apologizing to the subjects of the stories, to people who were falsely quoted, and to The Intercept’s readers. “The best way we can see to maintain the trust of readers,” she wrote, “is to acknowledge and correct these mistakes, and to focus on producing journalism we are proud of.”

That may not be enough to maintain the trust of The Intercept’s readers. The Thompson fabrications amount to an institutional scandal of great proportions, particularly for an organization that prides itself on reporting highly sensitive stories based on anonymous sources.

The Intercept should follow through with a full (and preferably independent) investigation into Thompson’s career and work at the publication. The review should not only cover Thompson’s reporting methods and deceptions, but the editorial process that enabled him to get away with the fabrications. Precedents for such accountability have been set by other publications, notably the New York Times in the Jayson Blair scandal, and Rolling Stone in the case of its discredited story about a vicious gang rape at a college fraternity house.

Also curious is The Intercept’s decision to keep Thompson’s 40-some stories for the publication as well as his biography on its website. The Dylann Roof story is labeled “Retracted” with an editor’s note explaining why, and four other stories are labeled “Corrected” with similar editor’s notes.

However well intended, this approach does nothing to restore the breach of trust that The Intercept has created with its readers. It leaves the impression that everything is more or less okay, except for a few errors here and there by a lone reporter that have now been “corrected.” It leaves the mea culpa seeming half-hearted.

Perhaps a better idea is for The Intercept’s homepage to display a prominent hyperlinked “Correcting the Record” box, where readers would be taken to a full report on the affair and an account of measures being taken to prevent future breakdowns in the editorial process.

If Thompson’s bio is to remain, it should  be accompanied by text clearly explaining his role in the breach of trust. His journalism should be transparently removed from the website, or kept in a special section devoted entirely to the scandal. Readers can hardly have any confidence in his articles after his own editor in chief stated that “Thompson went to great lengths to deceive his editors, creating an email account to impersonate a source and lying about his reporting methods.”

After all its organizational problems, New Look Media is well advised to get its act together. This is an outfit that was flung together too quickly, without regard for the importance of creating a foundational institutional culture suited to the work of journalism. Omidyar  formed the partnership with Greenwald within a few weeks of meeting him for the first time, without even discussing roles and responsibilities. Omidyar’s idea resembled what New York University’s Jay Rosen calls the “personal franchise model” of assembling star journalists and supporting them.

The Intercept itself diagnosed the problem with this idea, in a remarkable article it published in October 30, 2014 about the turmoil within First Look Media that led to Matt Taibbi’s exit:

First Look and the editorial staff it hired quickly learned that it is much easier to talk about such high-minded, abstract principles than it is to construct an organization around them. The decision to create a new editorial model left space for confusion, differing perspectives, and misaligned expectations.

—Scott MacLeod

November 14, 2015

NYT: “Our Path Forward”

Its 96-page internal “Innovation” report in March 2014 called for a strategy to make the New York Times newsroom “a truly digital-first organization.” Last month, the strategy was unveiled, and it might rather be termed a “mobile-first” strategy.

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Executive Editor Dean Baquet, Chairman and Publisher Arthur O. Sultzberger Jr., and eight other officials of the 164-year-old newspaper company declared in an 11-page memo solemnly titled “Our Path Forward”: “Our company was built for the print era and now must be redesigned for the mobile era… Our first two million subscribers grew up with The New York Times spread out over their kitchen tables. The next million must be fought for and won over with The Times on their phones.”

The memo noted that in the last five years, the newspaper has doubled its digital revenues to $400 million. The headline from the memo was a goal to double the digital revenues again to $800 million by 2020. Last summer, the Times announced that it had surpassed the 1 million mark in digital subscribers.

The Times is making an impressive effort to figure out how a major news organization rooted in the print era can survive in the digital era. With so much at stake—the Times‘ epic contribution to American journalism, the legacy of a great newspaper family—one assumes this strategy is as cutting edge as it gets. But will it work?

The Times is betting on its uniqueness. It is betting that the best business model should focus on getting users to pay for Times journalism—on the basis of the uniquely high quality product it offers—rather than depending on advertising revenues.  The Times is betting on digital subscriptions, and it believes that loyalty of digital subscribers is what will drive whatever digital advertising it also manages to attract.

From the memo:

Though “user-­first” has become a popular buzz phrase in recent years, it has real meaning for us. While most of our competitors chase scale, our unique business model is built on directly asking our most loyal readers to help us pay for our massive news gathering operation.  In addition to contributing all of our digital subscription revenue, they also are responsible for driving the majority of our advertising revenue  through their deep engagement. The sustainable path to long-­term revenue growth requires that we always prioritize user experience and  the needs of our customers over hitting quarterly revenue targets.  These deep reader relationships are our  most valuable  asset.

The Times newsroom, 1,300 journalists strong, has already re-geared as a digital-first organization. The memo accepts the “inevitable decline in print.” But the memo’s talk about the need to “deepen the engagement with our current readers” and “building new relationships with people around the world” is a leap of faith.

The Times has prioritized hiring journalists “with new skills in graphics, video, technology, design, data, audience engagement and much more.” In outlining fresh approaches for the digital era, the memo points to innovations like digital storytelling techniques, big multimedia projects, video reports, liveblogging, mobile phone alerts, newsletters, translations, service journalism, and new formats like Apple Watch and Snapchat. These are in line with the Times‘ core goal of making the user experience as enriching and personal as possible.

Yet, it’s not clear how those wonderful features produced by digital-savvy journalists are going to enable the Times to keep its 2 million current paying customers—one million of them buying the print paper—let alone recruit new ones. Undoubtedly news consumers everywhere will continue to love reading the Times. The question is whether enough of them will be willing to pay for it.

The memo predicts that “over the next few years, the battle is going to be won or lost on smart phones.” Yet, mobile devices with five-inch display screens don’t seem to be a very ideal platform to support what the memo rightly calls “ambitious, original, high-quality journalism that is essential for an informed society.”

In the last few financial reporting quarters, the Times has been clocking 20 percent or so increases in its digital subscribers—no doubt, one of the reasons for the surprising confidence expressed in “Our Path Forward.”

Other numbers continue to be sobering, however. Digital advertising revenues, though steadily improving across the industry, only contribute about one-third to overall ad revenues. Print ad revenues have been steadily declining at the Times in 2015—down 11 percent in the first quarter, 13 percent in the second quarter, and about 1 percent in the third quarter. In the third-quarter results released at the end of October, just three weeks after the “Our Path Forward” memo was issued, even digital ad revenues declined by 5 percent. As the memo says, “for all we’ve accomplished, our digital business is not yet close to supporting the scale of our ambitions.”

The Times’ strategy is a clear-headed appraisal of the challenges it faces, and a reasonable action plan for survival in the digital era. It aims to not only survive but thrive. The Times‘ goal is nothing less than attracting readers who will “build a lifetime relationship with The New York Times.” Times‘ executives deserve enormous credit for their unyielding commitment to quality journalism rather than bottom lines. Yet the Times‘ future depends to a great extent on dynamics outside its control.

The memo notes, for example, that the Times will particularly focus on younger readers, who are “reliable first indicators of major trends that ultimate affect our entire audience.” Already the under-35s make up 40 percent of the Times’ mobile audience. But studies show that these so-called Millennials have adopted digital media consumption habits for the digital age—digital natives are getting their news from networks such as social media more than via destination news sites. It is far from certain that the Times will be able to demonstrate to this demographic “the unique value of consuming The Times on our own platforms.” The memo acknowledges the ominous phenomenon of readers’ “changing habits.”

As the memo notes:

Skeptics still openly wonder if we can continue to deliver on this journalistic mission, given the seeming mismatch between the economics of news media and the scale of our operations. They suggest the days when a media company can fund a big, ambitious  newsroom are over. They doubt we can continue to cut legacy costs and fund digital innovation at the same time.

These are serious and fair questions. The most pressing challenge is not to prove that our journalism matters—it’s to demonstrate that our business can continue to support this mission.

—Scott MacLeod

November 7, 2015

Catalyst Chicago: Small Is Beautiful

With Old Media disrupted, and New Media overwhelming us with dating advice columns and kitty videos, how wonderful it is to see a non-profit like Catalyst Chicago celebrating 25 years in business. Founder-editor-publisher Linda Lenz launched the publication in 1990 to provide extensive coverage of Chicago Public Schools. Catalyst has been an exemplar of community journalism since the print age, and it is also a model representing the possibilities of journalism in the online age.

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Lenz’s story of Catalyst’s origins, which she relates in a 25th anniversary issue, sounds like good strategy for an online start-up:

My idea for Catalyst Chicago began with the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which cracked open and breathed new life into a calcified school district. The key feature was revolutionary: creating elected local school councils—six parents, two community members and two teachers—that would have the power to select their schools’ principals, a make-or-break decision for schools regardless of who does the choosing.

That structure created a need, I thought, for an independent source of in-depth information on education issues so that council members and others newly involved in the system could knowledgeably participate in this grand experiment in local control.

For the previous decade, I had been the education reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, and I knew that the news media would not have the time, space—we were still a print world—or inclination to dig deep into school-improvement issues on a regular basis.

Creating an editorial plan was easy, but I didn’t know how to put it into motion, so I consulted a savvy news source, Anne Hallett, who was then executive director of the Wieboldt Foundation. Anne said: “Go talk to the Community Renewal Society,” which at that time had been publishing The Chicago Reporter, an investigative newsletter focused on race and poverty, for 17 years.

At CRS I reunited with Roy Larson, the Reporter’s editor and publisher, who had been the religion editor at the Sun-Times and my pod-mate. Roy melded my idea with CRS’s idea for a newsletter for parents, and together we went in search of funding. As it turned out, the MacArthur and Joyce foundations had been looking for a way to track implementation of the Reform Act, and The Chicago Community Trust was interested in assisting parents.

So in February 1990, the first issue of Catalyst rolled off the presses. Reviewing our early issues—and they are all online—I am struck by how little the major issues have changed. In our first few years, we reported on principal selection, testing, school choice, the shortage of bilingual teachers, funding equity and overcrowding in Hispanic communities.

Catalyst is published by but is editorially independent from the Community Renewal Society, a civic group founded in 1882 whose mission statement calls public engagement one of four primary components of a theory of change:

For citizens or organizations to take action on an issue, they must first be aware of the issue and its importance and understand its causes, its consequences and possible solutions to it. Effective public engagement is intertwined with building knowledge and understanding. Community Renewal Society’s newsmagazines—Catalyst Chicago and The Chicago Reporter—will surface issues and provide insightful analyses into pressing social concerns.

Catalyst, today an online publication that has reduced its newsmagazine run from nine to three issues per year, has gone on to do solid reporting on every imaginable issue confronting Chicago public education. It has won some 50 prizes for its reporting, including a Studs Terkel Community Media Award in 2011. In the last few years Catalyst’s coverage has included in-depth reports on the shortage of funds for sports facilities, the challenges high school graduates face in completing college, drugs in schools, and teacher turnover.

In October, a 2013 story by Catalyst reporter Sarah Karp on a $20 million no-bid professional development contract to train school principals yielded spectacular results: the federal indictment of former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett on charges of funneling contracts to former employers in exchange for kickbacks; within days, Byrd-Bennett pleaded guilty to one count of fraud in the bribery and kickback scandal, and agreed to cooperate on further cases.

Karp’s story had pointed out that Byrd-Bennett had worked for the company receiving the no-bid contract immediately prior to joining Chicago Public Schools, initially as a consultant. Karp’s reporting intrigued the school system’s inspector general, and soon federal prosecutors were on the case. The fact that it was a community publication that broke the scandal, and not the major Chicago media players like the Tribune and the Sun-Times, is testimony to the critical importance of community journalism.

As Lenz told the Columbia Journalism Review: “What we do is give our staff the gift that most journalists want, which is time. Our journalists have time to go through reports. They become really expert on the nitty-gritty, how a school system works. And then they have the time to go after things.”

How does Catalyst manage to pay its great journalists? Its longtime business model is one that more and more media organizations are starting to consider. It is funded by print and online advertising, contributions from individuals, and grants from companies and foundations including: the Boeing Company, The Chicago Community Trust, Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Robert R. McCormick Foundation, McDougal Family Foundation, Oppenheimer Family Foundation, Polk Bros. Foundation, Spencer Foundation and the Voqal Fund.

—Scott MacLeod

October 8, 2015

Are Millennials Newsless?

In a column in The Hill earlier this year titled “The young and the newsless,” Washington strategy consultant Mark Mellman summed up a number of studies indicating that young Americans are not paying attention to politics and public affairs. Data suggested that Millennials—young adults aged 18–34—don’t follow news online, in newspapers, or on television. “The simple truth,” Mellman argued, “is that young people do not like news.”

For another take on this issue, see the studies issued in 2015 by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute, Associated Press, and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago: “Breaking Down the Millennial Generation: A Typology of Young News Consumers,” issued in September; and “How Millennials Get News: Inside the Habits of America’s First Digital Generation,” issued in March.

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The March study found that nearly two-thirds of American Millennials “keep up with what’s going on in the world and/or read or watch news.” The study said that the young people are getting their news through networks such as social media, rather than traditional “news sessions”—sitting down to read the daily newspaper, or switching on World News Tonight every time the clock strikes 6:30 p.m.

For Millennials, the study reported:

Keeping up with the world is part of being connected and becoming aware more generally, and it often but not always occurs online. In many cases, news comes as part of social flow, something that may happen unexpectedly and serendipitously as people check to see what’s new with their network or community of friends… This generation tends not to consume news in discrete sessions or by going directly to news providers. Instead, news and information are woven into an often continuous but mindful way that Millennials connect to the world generally, which mixes news with social connection, problem solving, social action, and entertainment…

By any number of measures, staying in touch with the world is an important part of the lives of the first generation of digital adults…

Millennials are hardly newsless, uninterested, or disengaged from news and the world around them.

A few key points in the study:

Receiving news through networks may broaden rather than restrict exposure to different ideas:

Contrary to the idea that social media creates a polarizing “filter bubble,” exposing people to only a narrow range of opinions, 70 percent of Millennials say that their social media feeds are comprised of diverse viewpoints evenly mixed between those similar to and different from their own. An additional 16 percent say their feeds contain mostly viewpoints different from their own. And nearly three-quarters of those exposed to different views (73 percent) report they investigate others’ opinions at least some of the time—with a quarter saying they do it always or often.

Millennials are actually willing to pay for information, but tend to feel that news should be freely available for all:

When it comes to paying for the news, 40 percent of Millennials report paying for at least one subscription themselves, including a digital news app (14 percent), a digital magazine (11 percent), a digital subscription to a newspaper (10 percent), or a paid email newsletter (9 percent). When subscriptions used but paid for by others are added, that number rises to 53 percent who have used some type of paid subscription for news in the last year.

Interestingly, this digital generation is more likely to have paid for non-digital versions of these products. For instance, 21 percent say they have paid in the last year for a subscription to a print magazine, and 16 percent for a print newspaper, rates that are higher than for digital versions of the same products.

News publishers also may have some work to do in the digital space when it comes to subscriptions. In the qualitative interviews, we heard the notion that, because news is important for democracy, people feel they should not have to pay for it. It should be more of a civic right because it is a civic good.

Facebook and search engines like Google are critical pathways for Millennials’ acquisition of news information:

Facebook has become a nearly ubiquitous part of digital Millennial life. On 24 separate news and information topics probed, Facebook was the No. 1 gateway to learn about 13 of those, and the second-most cited gateway for seven others…

When Millennials want to dig deeper on a subject, search is the dominant method cited by 57 percent (and it is the one cited most often as useful).

The September study classifies Millennial news consumers into four categories: the Explorers and the Activists (the groups more likely to seek out news and information online) and the Unattached and the Distracted (well, you get the idea). Eight-five percent and 80 percent of Explorers and Activists, respectively, regularly go online to learn what’s going on in the world; and 44 and 51 percent pay for a news subscription (compared to 31 and 40 percent of the Unattached and the Distracted).

The API-AP-NORC studies may prove that Millennials are not completely “newsless,” but I am not too reassured. The finding on search engines may highlight the problem: when Millennials want to dive deeply into a topic, fewer than 5 percent turn to a national newspaper (in print or online) and the figure is about the same for local newspapers. The study seems to confirm that young people do not fully understand and appreciate the importance of journalism in our societies—the presentation of reliable news by professionals using a well-developed discipline for assembling, verifying, and being accountable for facts. As the Center for News Literacy at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism warns:

News aggregators, bloggers, pundits, provocateurs, commentators and “citizen journalists” are competing with traditional journalists for public attention. Uninformed opinion masquerades as news. Lines are blurring between legitimate journalism and the propaganda, entertainment, self-promotion and unmediated information on the Internet. This superabundance of information has made it imperative that citizens learn to judge the reliability of news reports and other sources of information that is passed along their social networks.

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Another study released in 2015 should justify concerns about the news literacy of the current and coming digital generations: “America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future,” published by the Educational Testing Service’s Center for Research on Human Capital and Education. It found that young adults in the United States fall short of Millennials in other developed countries when it comes to the skills employers want most: literacy, practical math, and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. The study also found that the U.S. Millennials lagged behind other age groups within America itself. This is in a context in which 43 percent of Americans have earned college degrees, and 90 percent of Millennials now own a smartphone.

Equally troubling is that these findings represent a decrease in literacy and numeracy skills for U.S. adults when compared with results from previous adult surveys… In literacy, U.S. Millennials scored lower than 15 of the 22 participating countries. Only Millennials in Spain and Italy had lower scores.

The ETS study defined literacy as “the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written text to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

—Scott MacLeod