A week ago the Washington Post ran the following correction:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

You don’t need to be much of a hiphop expert (I’m certainly not) to know that the Public Enemy song in question, “911 Is a Joke,” predates the attacks of 9/11/2001 (it was released in 1990) and has nothing to do with them.

The Post’s error made it look ignorant and silly — like having to say, for example, “An article incorrectly reported that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a Central European folk tune. The song is actually by Queen.” But it was the straight-faced solemnity of the correction’s wording, juxtaposed with the amusement so many readers felt as they clicked on its URL, that transformed this little footnote into something bigger.

Within a couple of days, the Post’s correction had gone viral (a post from Leor Galil at TrueSlant traces the path of dissemination). It inspired an outpouring of mocking imitations on Twitter, all marked with the hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections. Here is a sample of some of the feigned cluelessness I chortled at last weekend:

MoreAndAgain: Having a baby by 50 Cent will not actually make you a millionaire

BlackCanseco CORRECTION: Despite the song, it not only rains in Southern California, it apparently snows, too.

jsmooth995 George Clinton has assured us his roof remains intact, and he takes fire safety quite seriously

phontigallo: 2Pac’s “I Get A Round” was not about the life of a bartender.

I’m not sure whether the realms of newsroom practice and pop culture have ever collided so absurdly. (Although I do recall that, once upon a time, as legend has it, New York Times style required the paper’s music critics to refer to “Mr. Loaf,” for Meat Loaf, and “Mr. Vicious,” for Sid. The former, according to the Times, is apocryphal, but the latter seems to be real.)

There was another kind of collision here: between the informal populist free-for-all online and the stiff back of old-fashioned newsroom impersonality. It would have been a lot harder for the Twitterers to make fun of the Post if, instead of having that starchy correction to parody, they’d instead read a low-key blog post by the reporter (and/or editor) responsible for the goof, saying something along the lines of “Wow, we really messed that one up — here’s how it happened. We’re really sorry.”

But no; the newsroom must wear its tie. And so instead of dialogue we have silence on one side and ridicule on the other. #washingtonpostcorrections ended up as a sort of game of the dozens in which only one of the parties played along; the other didn’t even seem to realize the game was on.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman writes about this story at Columbia Journalism Review, tracing the hashtag’s origin back to Twitter user @phontigallo — Phonte (Phonte Coleman), a member of the Grammy-nominated hip hop group Little Brother.

News this morning is that AOL is going down the path already cleared by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content, and getting into the business of commissioning small content “piecework” based on consumer interest as gauged by search queries (and advertiser interest as gauged by keyword prices).

In other words: if you know people are searching for “how do I fix a flat tire?”, you crank out a quick web page, SEO it up, and sit back. As long as you make a little more cash from the search ads on the page than you spent on the writing, you’ve got yourself a business model. It’s an “automated story factory,” as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD puts it.

This sweatshop approach to content creation is, of course, anathema to old-fashioned writers and editors. It raises all sorts of disturbing questions about the advertising cart leading the editorial horse (as PaidContent suggests). It holds no appeal to me, personally. It is the polar opposite of what most bloggers do: For the most part they remain — as I argued in Say Everything and as the most recent Technorati survey continues to show — motivated by their own interests and passions, not by the fleeting prospect of fame or revenue.

And yet, as my knee jerks instinctively against the “crank out just-good-enough content” approach, I also start to wonder, why isn’t some enterprising old-media company doing something like this to support its newsroom? If this is the way advertising revenue works on the Web today, why not exploit it for yourself? Why let the AOLs and Demand Medias own the pie? If there are advertising vs. editorial issues to be navigated, why wouldn’t traditional editors and publishers want a say in how they’re resolved?

This is the sort of thing I was imagining when I wrote, earlier this year, that media companies should start from the revenue side in order to figure out new models for supporting the socially important but economically imperiled work of journalism.

Certainly, the New York Times or Time magazine aren’t going to want to sully their brands with such stuff — but why not create a new down-market brand owned by the same company?

Most freelance writers have, for their own survival, always resorted to a parallel strategy: they do high-paying but not always fulfilling work part of the time so they can do work that they enjoy but that doesn’t necessarily pay the bills the rest of the time.

While SEO-driven piecework doesn’t pay well per page, collectively it appears to generate real profit. That money can go to fill an entrepreneur’s wallet, but it could also fund journalism. Maybe that’s what Tim Armstrong plans at AOL: let the generic junk pay the salaries of old-fashioned journalists he’s hiring. Why wouldn’t the owner of an old-line newsroom do the same thing? Why haven’t they done so already?

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan connects the dots: AOL et al. are finding ways to make money from those search visitors that newspaper companies have lately been dismissing as worthless.

• Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the different kinds of mistakes journalists can make? Do weigh in over there and help us sort out this epistemological puzzle!

• Andrew Leonard had a fine take on the Duran Duran guy’s complaint that easy access to the musical past devalues the present and inhibits innovation:

  But rather than worry about whether the Internet is exerting a baleful influence, I think we just need to make our peace with the fact that every new technology creates a different space for cultural practice. Duran Duran without cable television or a high-end production studio is simply unthinkable. Recording technologies enabled the commodification of musical performance on a mass basis. Networked computers have crippled the profitability of that commodification. The adventure is ongoing.

  Perhaps the digitally-enabled overhang of the cultural production of previous generations is a heavy burden. But I guarantee you that those artists who do break free of its restrictions, and can come up with something interesting to say, will be easier to find and easier to enjoy than any pioneers of any previous era were.

  Nick Carr’s is worth reading too:

  Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

  Carr seems a little bummed about that price, but I’m more sanguine: Our culture had swung way too far in the direction of artist worship anyway. Less fetishization of the purchased object and the personality who produced it is fine with me.

• Megan Garber’s piece in CJR on the Pacific garbage patch story funded by Spot.us and appearing in the NYTimes sparked an extended debate in the small but vocal world of new-media journalism punditry. The framing of Garber’s piece, in particular the headline, positioned it as a critique of Spot.us for failing to “deliver” a New York Times piece of sufficient quality. But the body of the piece made the far more useful argument that the garbage-patch reporter, “Garbage Girl” Lindsey Hoshaw, shone far more brightly in the daily blog she produced than in the relatively conventional Times feature.

  To me, it looks like Hoshaw gave the Times what it doubtless asked for in terms of fairly impersonal feature writing. The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — the blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.us model.

  Hoshaw’s postmortem is worth reading in full, but this comment stands out:

  And the most rewarding part of the Spot.us project was getting to meet some of the donors in person before I left, listening to their ideas, writing to them on my blog from the middle of the ocean and emailing them when the story came out to celebrate our success.

  I had images of my readers’ faces in my mind while I was at sea and it kept me accountable. These were real people not some unimaginable group called “the public.” I knew their names and I’d met with some of them in person. They were tangible and I thought, “what would Alex think if he knew I blogged on behalf of the ship or that I wasn’t diligent about taking photos at every opportunity?”

  (Full disclosure: I was one of many people who kicked in a small donation via Spot.us to fund the garbage story.)

While we’re on the subject of the value of search…

Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s provision of millions of results means it’s doing a poor job of serving it’s users.

“I searched for ‘the real William Shakespeare,’ ” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I got five million results. That’s useless.”

We hear this one all the time — and it gets Google’s value precisely wrong. When Google came along in the late ’90s we already had search engines, like AltaVista, that provided millions of results. Google is the antidote to the millions-of-results problem. All of Google’s value — and the reason that Google originally rose to prominence — was that it solved this problem, and got columnists like me to rave about its value while it was still a tiny startup company.

Let’s do that “real William Shakespeare” search. Right now I actually get 15 million results. Who cares? Nobody ever looks past the first, or at most the second or third, page of results. And Google’s first page of results on this query is not bad at all. Many of the top links are amateur-created content, but most of them provide useful secondary links. As a starting point for Web research it’s a pretty good tool. If you fine-tune your query to “Shakespeare authorship debate” you do even better.

Yes, it’s true that the Google search box is less useful with generalized product and commercial searches (like “London hotels”), where the results are laden with ads and fought over by companies armed with SEO tactics. Google has all sorts of flaws. But it’s time to bury the old “millions” complaints. They’re meaningless. And Auletta’s willingness to trot them out doesn’t give me much hope for the value of his new book.

I’ve been reading Ryan Chittum’s recent posts at Columbia Journalism Review about the whole Murdoch/WSJ “We’re seceding from Google” flap.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.

[photo from twitpic via Larfo]

I have a very personal relationship with the ups and downs of the Bay Bridge replacement project. This is not only because I’m a Berkeley resident who often depends on the structure. And it’s not only because I’m lucky enough to have a view of the bridge (distant but majestic) from my back window.

I used the project as a framing device in Dreaming in Code. You see, there are always people pounding the table complaining, “Why can’t we build software the way we build bridges?” It’s a fair question, but it forgets a couple of things. There’s the obvious: software is abstract, bridges are physical, and therefore they are constructed differently and behave differently. But the table-pounders are also forgetting about the long history of bridge failures. As I watched the Bay Bridge project unfold during the time I worked on Dreaming, I began by wondering what made bridge-building and software construction so different. Three years later, as the bridge project had quadrupled in cost, been redesigned several times and been put on hold for many months by a political dispute, I ended up asking whether the two undertakings were really so different after all.

Now the bridge even has its very own bug, and some down time. They could hang a big Fail Whale from its girders!

As it happened, I spent this evening playing a new game with one of my sons, so I was relatively off the grid, and found out about the bridge’s sudden closure only when I scanned Twitter a little while ago.

I first turned to the SF Gate home page, where I found a solid and informative lead story that must have been assembled and posted by the Chronicle’s reporters and editors very quickly indeed. The Chron story also leads the Google News block on the event.

The Oakland Tribune also had a reasonably thorough piece, with a focus on commute details, that the San Jose Mercury News — now part of the same chain — reprinted, along with another Trib feature that basically compiled people’s Twitter messages about the event. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat has a solid take posted, too.

KRON had a fairly full report of its own and easily accessible video from its newscast. CBS5 had an AP story and some raw video. KGO/ABC had a brief story. Yahoo had a fuller version of the AP’s story. KTVU had a story credited to itself and Bay City News.

Over at SFist I found a bloggy take on the event, with more links but less hard info than the Chron story (which SFist linked to). Other local blogs, like Berkeleyside and Oakland Local, also did some linking and summarizing.

CNN had a brief story. As I write this, the New York Times’ new Bay Area blog doesn’t have anything up. Wikipedia’s Bay Bridge page already has a sentence about the news. And over at Spot.us you can find a pitch — out for a while now but likely to see fresh wind in its sails — for an investigative project by some veteran journalists, backed by the Public Press and McSweeney’s (whose founder, Dave Eggers, seems to have kicked in a generous grant), looking into why the bridge project has had such problems.

So there you have it. The longterm investigative pieces that might once have come from the big-paper newsroom must now be funded by other means (I kicked in my $20!). But the papers are still doing some valuable spot-news work. With a story like this, at least, the best combination of speed and depth in an early report still comes from the leading local daily newspapers.

We knew that, of course. But we also know that we simply aren’t going to be able to count on having those sources that much longer. This week brought news of a precipitous decline in the Chronicle’s circulation. We should be planning (as Dave Winer has been urging for a long time) for life without it.

And that means figuring out how to make sure that our community has a way to find out what happened, and what’s going on, the next time a cable breaks on the bridge.

[crossposted from the MediaBugs blog]

Americans trust the news media less than ever: “Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate,” according to the latest results from the Pew Research Center released this week. That represents a drop of 10 percentage points from 2007, when 53% of Americans said that news stories were often inaccurate. And an alarming 70 percent of people surveyed believe that news organizations “try to cover up their mistakes.”

There’s a problem here, for sure. Many journalists understand this and work hard, every day, to try to solve it. Others are in denial. In reaction to this report, journalism scholar Jay Rosen wrote the following series of tweets yesterday:

Top explanations from journalists for fall in public confidence: 1. All institutions less trusted; 2. Cable shout-fest; 3. Attacks take toll

Top explanations from journalists for fall in public confidence, cont. 4. Environment more partisan; 5. Public confusion: news vs. opinion.

Top explanations from journalists for fall in public confidence, cont. 6. People want an echo chamber; 7. Numbers don’t really show a fall.

Each of these explanations doubtless has some merit. But together they constitute a kind of head-in-the-sand stance. Missing from the list is the simplest, most obvious explanation of all: Maybe we’ve lost confidence in the press because of its record of making mistakes and failing to correct most of them.

In other words, perhaps so many people think the news is full of inaccuracies because, er, they’re right.

Read Craig Silverman’s excellent book Regret the Error, based on his blog of the same name, and you’ll learn the sad numbers from the best studies we have on this topic: They show that the percentage of stories that contain errors ranges from 41 to 60 percent. Scott Maier, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon who has studied this field, tells Silverman that he found errors are “far more persistent than journalists would think and very close to what the public insists, which I had doubted.” Only a “minuscule” number of these errors are ever corrected.

Some of these errors are substantive, others seemingly trivial. But each one of them leaves readers or sources who know the topic shaking their heads, wondering how much else of the publication’s work to trust.

Since reversing this dynamic is the central goal of MediaBugs, we’ll be writing about it a lot here.

Mark Bowden is a seriously good reporter, and his piece in the new Atlantic, “The Story Behind the Story,” is one that every student of today’s mutating media should read. Bowden traces the route by which the soundbite that came to define, though not derail, Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination entered the media bloodstream. I can wholeheartedly recommend the reporting in Bowden’s piece, but I must take issue with some of his interpretation.

The “wise Latina” clip, it turns out, was first unearthed by a conservative blogger named Morgen Richmond and published on his blog, called VerumSerum. And the problem with that, Bowden suggests, is that Richmond, being a partisan in search of ammunition rather than a journalist in search of truth, presented it to the world without making an effort to understand it or put it in context — to see that, in fact, Sotomayor wasn’t saying anything that outrageous at all: As Bowden puts it, “Her comment about a ‘wise Latina woman’ making a better judgment than a ‘white male who hasn’t lived that life’ referred specifically to cases involving racial and sexual discrimination.”

Bowden credits Richmond as “a bright and fair-minded fellow,” but argues that his “political bias made him tone-deaf to the context and import of Sotomayor’s remarks. Bear in mind that he was looking not simply to understand the judge, but to expose her supposed hidden agenda.”

…he makes no bones about his political convictions or the purpose of his research and blogging. He has some of the skills and instincts of a reporter but not the motivation or ethics. Any news organization that simply trusted and aired his editing of Sotomayor’s remarks, as every one of them did, was abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting. It was airing propaganda. There is nothing wrong with reporting propaganda, per se, so long as it is labeled as such. None of the TV reports I saw on May 26 cited VerumSerum.com as the source of the material, which disappointed but did not surprise Richmond and Sexton.

The trouble with all this is that Bowden is focusing his ire on the wrong people. Richmond is not, as far as I know, claiming to be a journalist — and yet, as Bowden admits, he is actually “fair-minded” enough to feel that the Sotomayor quote was maybe not that big a deal. Surely the failure here is on the part of the TV news organizations that turned it into a marquee soundbite without looking more deeply into it. Wasn’t that their job, their process, their vetting — the safeguard that ostensibly distinguishes them from the unwashed blogging masses? Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be after truth rather than scalps?

Blogs may have helped accelerated gotcha journalism, but hit pieces and skeletons-in-closets existed long before their advent. The partisan warfare around Clarence Thomas’s nomination far outdid the Sotomayor hearings, and Anita Hill’s charges — whatever your view of them — required no blog posts to ignite their conflagration. The Web has crowdsourced opposition research, but the conflicts that motivate it have been around for ages.

It is television that creates soundbites; the Web at least allows for far more context and nuance, though it does not always deliver them. I do not understand how Bowden could fail to see this. He writes (of Richmond and his co-bloggers):

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

“The blogger’s role is to help his side.” This is sometimes true, but no more definitive than to say, “The TV newsperson’s role is to help his side.” It is a broad-brush dismissal of an entire class of writers who are actually far more diverse in their goals and techniques. It is no more accurate than the carping of the extremists (of both left and right) who tar all “MSM” journalists with the sins of a minority of hacks or ideologues. It’s disheartening to see a writer of Bowden’s stature placing himself on that level.

There are pundits and news-show hosts who earn our trust as straight shooters, and there are others for whom partisanship plainly trumps truth. There are reporters who aim to shoot straight, and others who hide their own blatant partisanship behind a scrim of ersatz objectivity. In the end, all we can do is find individuals and institutions who, based on their record and their willingness to show their process, seem to place truth ahead of “victory.” Such individuals and institutions are no rarer on the Web, and among bloggers, than among the old guard of journalism. If the public is being ill-served by echo-chamber coverage and shallow sound-bite gotcha clips, the cable news channels bear primary responsibility. Bowden’s own narrative of the Sotomayor “story behind the story” is just the latest demonstration.

BONUS LINK: Here’s Richmond’s thoughtful response to Bowden.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!
– Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

This week the conversation about pay walls for news sites online — a/k/a the “how do we make them pay for news?” question — has reached a feverish pitch. In what may well be remembered as the apex of the ostrich argument, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi maintains, in the American Journalism Review, that newspapers should either “build that paywall high” or — this is where the ostrich beak burrows far below daylight — quit the Web entirely.

“Downplaying the Web, or dropping it altogether and going back to print only, looks not just smart for the struggling newspaper industry, but potentially lifesaving,” Farhi writes.

Never mind that newfangled printing-press thing! Can’t you see we’ve got scribes to support?

A number of exasperated media observers who think the paywall is a bad idea but who have grown tired of the endless debate are echoing Farhi’s cry: If you think it’s such a great idea, they’re saying to publishers, shut up already and just start charging.

For the thorough explanation of why the strategy is doomed, just read Alan Mutter’s post today: “Publishers consistently have told me that they fear they could lose 75% or more of their traffic and banner revenue if they started to charge for content.” My experience at Salon –where we briefly went “all pay” after 9/11, when the ad market disappeared — suggests that even this number is optimistic.

I’m exasperated too, but I won’t join the “put up or shut up” crowd because I’d hate to see the further ghettoization of oldfashioned journalistic expertise on the Web. New models for news are sprouting on the Web every day. The journalism profession has a wealth of expertise and knowhow; the support of a dying industry’s paychecks will continue to dwindle, but the expertise can still be transmitted to a new generation of journalism ventures. That won’t happen If major media outlets wall themselves off from the Web. They will cut off not only their revenue but also their chance to influence the practice of journalism as it evolves online.

The alternative to “go ahead, build your wall” is for newspaper companies to accept that monopoly profits will not return and cannot be replaced. (Yes, I know that accepting such a reality is difficult and unlikely.) Instead, begin exploring new business models by starting from the revenue side and seeing what sort of complementary journalism can be supported.

John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, has taken this notion to heart and called for ideas and proposals. Brainstorming rather than masonry — what a concept!

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:

We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”

Let’s unpack this.

“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.

Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.

After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (“journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.

In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.