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Journal’s Sarb-Ox goof, Kos’s flawed polls: New kinds of errors demand new kinds of corrections

June 30, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Once upon a time in journalism, an error was a mistake in a story, and a correction was a notice published after the fact fixing the error. This kind of errror and correction still exists, but in the new world of news the error/correction cycle keeps mutating into interesting new forms.

Consider these two recent examples, one involving the Wall Street Journal and Twitter, the other involving Daily Kos and its polling program.

On Monday morning, decisions were pouring out of the U.S. Supreme Court and keeping reporters who deal with it very much on their toes. I noticed a flurry of comments on Twitter suggesting that the court had struck down Sarbanes-Oxley, the corporate-fraud bill passed nearly a decade ago in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. That struck me as odd, and so I clicked around till I found an AP story about the ruling, but that piece reported that only one tiny provision of the law had been overruled.

Eventually I traced the source of this confusion back to a single tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s Twitter account, announcing “BREAKING: Supreme Court strikes down Sarbanes-Oxley.” Twelve minutes later the Journal tweeted, “Only part of law is affected. We’ll have more.” Another 13 minutes later, the Journal quoted Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion as saying that Sarbanes-Oxley “remains fully operative as law.” So in 25 minutes the Journal did a 180.

Now, anyone trying to post breaking news to a service like Twitter is going to make mistakes. If you followed the Journal’s stream it was evident that the paper had simply goofed in its first take. (Felix Salmon takes them to task here, and Zach Seward, the Journal staffer who was manning the paper’s tweet-stream, responds in the comments.) How should a news organization deal with such a goof?

I’ll give the Journal half-credit: they re-reported a more accurate version of the news quickly. Their staff was forthright in explaining the situation in public on the Web. And they didn’t take the cowardly memory-hole route of simply deleting the erroneous tweet.

What the Journal never did, though, was simple admit the error as an error. This should not be so hard! The moment it became clear that the tweet was a mistake, the paper should have posted something along the lines of: “We goofed with our previous notice that Sarb-Ox was struck down”, along with a link to the tweet-in-error.

There is no good argument for not doing this. Embarrasment? Forget it, this is the ephemeral world of Twitter. Legal repercussions? If the paper is worried about lawsuits, it shouldn’t be attempting to distribute breaking news via Twitter at all. Reputation? That’s better protected by admitting error than by driving past it.

I think the Journal’s handling of this mistake reflects the imperfect efforts of an old-school newsroom to adapt its traditions to a new world. Next time something like this happens, and of course it will, let’s see how much the paper has learned.

For an example of how a new-school newsroom handles a much larger problem, take a look at Daily Kos’s dispute with the pollsters at Research 2000, which had been providing the popular liberal blog community with its own polling for some time.

A trio of “statistics wizards” uncovered some patterns in Research 2000′s data that suggested it was unreliable at best, fabricated at worst. Kos proprietor Markos Moulitsas didn’t just announce the problem; he published the entire statistics dissertation explaining the issue and posted a lengthy explanation of his own view of the affair.

The whole thing is highly embarrassing for Daily Kos. You can bet that any conventional news hierarchy would have done its best to hide the evidence, minimize the damage, and “stand by our story” as much as possible — particularly in light of the likely lawsuits down the road.

Kos instead throws the whole affair onto the table and declares war on his former polling partners. It’s not pretty, but in its own way it’s admirable.

[Cross-posted to the MediaBugs blog]

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Memo to Steve: We already are a nation of bloggers

June 2, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 27 Comments

Let’s look at Steve Jobs’ comment last night at his onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference and see how many mistaken assumptions and fallacies we can mine from it:

“”I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. We need editorial more than ever right now.”

First, there’s a condescending assumption here that bloggers are some sort of inferior order. This is the sort of ressentiment we often hear from laid-off newsroom denizens who blame legions of bloggers for the business troubles of their former employers. But it’s funny to hear it from one-time rebel and industry-disrupter Jobs. Jobs has his own beef with the tech-news blogosphere, which relentlessly struggles to break the cone of silence he imposes on Apple news. But here he lets the chip on his shoulder place him on the wrong side of history. The media institutions he praised at D (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) have all been leading the charge to embrace blogging themselves.

Next, there’s this strange notion that blogs aren’t, or can’t be, “editorial.” If an editor is someone who makes choices about what to cover, then any good blogger is also an editor. If an editor is someone who reviews someone else’s copy for mistakes or quality control, then most bloggers have an army of editors — their readers. Yes, blogging has largely discarded the old model of editing as bureaucratic workflow, and that has pros and cons. But to suggest that blogs are somehow bad because they aren’t “editorial” — and that the traditional newsroom’s editing process guarantees something better — betrays a real ignorance of how journalism really works.

Most important, there’s Jobs’ implicit belief in a zero-sum, either-or media world, in which either bloggers prosper at the expense of the old-fashioned newsroom, or traditional media prospers and bloggers are put in their place. Such views have always been wrong-headed, and never more so than today. We are in the middle of a full-throttle reinvention of the news industry, as old-line journalism rushes to figure out how to bring its skills and traditions to bear in the new realities of online news and throngs of hard-working, imaginative bloggers are experimenting with new styles and techniques of journalism that technology has enabled. It is not a time for handwringing about the prospect of a “nation of bloggers.” We are already a nation of bloggers. The only question is, how do we make sure we get the news and information we need now that we are?

Given all this, it seems a shame that — when it comes to media, at least — Jobs, who once encouraged his Macintosh team with a war-cry about how much better it was to be a pirate than to join the navy, has chosen to side so visibly with the fleet.

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“Say Everything” in paperback, and new postscript

June 1, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

When we were preparing the new paperback edition of Say Everything — on sale as of today! — I knew I wanted to add some material covering the period since I brought the book to a close (roughly the end of 2008). To keep this material as timely and up to date as possible we decided to publish the postscript online rather than add it to the book.

I offer this now for what I hope is your pleasure. The essay, “Four cases for the persistence of blogging,” stands on its own as a look at the impact of four phenomena — Twitter, Facebook, Apple’s App Store, and the rise of content farms — on blogging and the future of the independent Web.

To keep my life simple I’m not hosting comments over on the book’s site, but this thread here at Wordyard can serve that purpose.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

The Internet, as it has evolved in the nearly two decades since its emergence from the public sector that incubated it, is a messy, sometimes anarchic commons. The same openness that allows myriad novelties, including blogging, to prosper also leaves it vulnerable to con artists, junk peddlers and spam. Businesspeople from Steve Jobs on down dream of reasserting control over the environment, cleaning up the mess, banishing the hackers and cranks and porn merchants, and figuring out how to reinflate profit margins that the Web has, for the majority of industries, decimated.

For this vision to be realized, the legions of bloggers whose ascent Say Everything chronicled must drop their keyboards and docilely accept losing all the autonomy, bonhomie and voice that their posts have provided for them. No one should wait up for that to happen any time soon.

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The Wall Street Journal: Cavalier about corrections?

May 25, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 24 Comments

Last week I wrote about my fruitless quest to alert the Wall Street Journal to a mistake it had made in a book review — misspelling the name of the author the piece mainly focused on.

Yesterday I made one final effort to close this loop; I emailed the book review’s author, Philip Delves Broughton. Broughton responded quickly and courteously, agreed that it was a mistake (one he’d been responsible for), and noted that as a freelance contributor all he could do was notify the book review’s editor.

As of today this mistake, now 11 days old, remains uncorrected. In the face of my persistent and no doubt annoying barrage of emails, phone calls, and blog posts, the Journal newsroom has remained entirely mum.

Now, there are a few ways to read this situation. You could say: Who cares? It’s just a misspelling of somebody’s name.

If it’s your name, of course, you may care a great deal. If you’re the author, you might care not just for vanity, but for the sake of the people who might be Googling your writing or looking your book up to purchase it on Amazon.

In this case, the author, Mac McClelland, happens, right now, to be doing some on-the-ground reporting from the Gulf oil spill for Mother Jones. If you were her, you might want readers to connect the book review with the in-the-news byline.

So another possible response is: The Journal’s editors and reporters are very busy people. They’ve got financial meltdowns to cover. Why are you harassing them with this trivia?

That’s just fine — unless the Journal actually cares whether its readers trust its coverage. If a news outlet can’t be bothered to get an author’s name right, can you count on it to get the financial stories right?

I’m sorry, but none of these responses is adequate. Until and unless we get a more plausible response, the only interpretation that makes sense is a very sad one: that the Wall Street Journal, once one of the world’s great trusted news institutions, lacks a functioning correction process. Or it simply doesn’t care about sweating the details any more.

UPDATE: This post is now linked to from Romenesko, and the very first comment there provides a nice illustration of my argument. Mark Jackson writes, “Really? This is a big deal to you? Column inches. Limited space. Priorities. Possibly the world financial system crashing was a bigger issue? Just sayin’.”

It seems to me that the Journal has every right to say, “We no longer have the resources to fix small errors like misspelled names. You should no longer count on us getting that stuff right.”

Something tells me no editor at the paper is likely to say that. Because when most of us signed on as journalists we signed on for the small stuff too. And readers expect that — and expect some kind of response from the newsroom when they point out an error.

[Crossposted at the MediaBugs blog]

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How hard is it to report an error to the Wall Street Journal? Hard.

May 20, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 9 Comments

The correction process is a simple thing in most newsrooms, right? If the news outlet gets something wrong, people will tell the editors — they’ll email or call or post a comment on the website. And then the editors will correct the mistake.

End of story? If only.

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”)

Now, MediaBugs is focused on Bay Area-based news organizations and coverage, and — while we’ll handle reports that focus on the Journal’s Bay Area coverage — we’re not going to deal with most of the paper’s content. So we marked the McClelland report “off topic.”

But I figured that it did seem to be a real mistake, albeit a small one (but not that small, unless you think misspelling the name of the central subject of an article is not a big deal). If I were an editor at the Journal I’d want to know about it and correct it. So as a courtesy I set out to inform the newspaper.

My first stop was the story’s comments, where I thought I’d just post the information and let the Journal editors glean it at their leisure. The page had zero comments, so I figured my note would not be lost in a sea of rants.

I wrote a brief note about the problem, then discovered that I would need to register at the Journal site before they’d accept my comment. So I registered and confirmed my email address, re-entered my comment, and clicked “post.” Nothing happened. I tried again with a different browser, guessing that there might be some browser-specific posting bug. No luck with either Firefox or Safari. No wonder the story has zero comments! So much for that feedback channel. (To try to figure out what the problem was, I took a look at the next day’s Journal books piece. It had five comments — so sometimes, I gues,s the comments work. Interestingly, these comments reported errors in that review: it contained impossible, self-contradictory dates. These errors were reported five days ago. The piece has not been corrected.)

For my second approach, I looked for some link on the Journal site for “corrections” or “report an error.” No such link exists on the Journal home page, nor did searching voluminous “Help” and “Customer Service” pages turn up anything. The “Contact us” page offers three general email addresses for feedback, labeled as follows:

Send a comment/inquiry about an article or feature in The Wall Street Journal to: wsjcontact@dowjones.com.

React to something you’ve read on WSJ.com at: newseditors@wsj.com.

Offer a comment/suggestion about features and content on WSJ.com at: feedback@wsj.com.

I challenge anyone who is not a part of the WSJ organization to interpret which of these three lines of inquiry would be an appropriate choice to report an error. Apparently there’s a distinction between responding to the print and Web editions of the Journal, but what about with stories that appear in both places, as is the case for so much Journal content? And what are we supposed to make of the distinction between “reacting to something you’ve read” and “offering a comment/suggestion about features and content”?

I opted for door number one, since I was reporting a mistake in the printed Journal and that seemed to be the choice relating to the newspaper as opposed to Web-only material. But plainly I was grasping at straws. I sent a polite note to the wsjcontact address, and copied it for good measure to the managing and executive editors’ addresses that were also listed on the Contact page. This was two days ago.

For my third effort, I resorted to the good old telephone. The Journal only lists a single phone number on its Contact page, so I called it. It turns out to be an automated inbox for the entire Dow Jones operation. So you walk your way through the voice menu patiently, only to end up at a recording that tells you there’s no one to receive your call but you’re welcome to leave a message.

So that’s what I just did. I will now rest from my labors. We’ll see if any of these efforts elicits a response, or whether this post somehow prods the Journal beast from its slumber.

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.

[Crossposted to the MediaBugs blog]

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No more bouncers at the journalism club door

May 3, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 25 Comments

[I'm posting a lightly edited text of the talk I gave Friday at Stanford Law School's "Future of Journalism: Unpacking the Rhetoric" conference. As you will see, I took seriously the concept of unpacking the rhetoric, and tried to answer the questions on the event's agenda.]

I’ve been asked to defend the tenet “We are all journalists now.” But there are so many questions in those five words!

Who is we? What is a journalist? When is now? And, most importantly, for those of you whose memories extend back to the Clinton administration, what is the meaning of is — or in this case, “are”?

We aren’t all journalists now. My wonderful parents? they’re not journalists. They have a computer that’s connected to the Internet. But they’re not journalists. My ten-year-old twins? They aren’t, either. Not yet, anyway.

Am I? I’ve been a writer for 30 years. Worked for a newspaper for 10, a web magazine for another 10. But I never went to journalism school. Never been a member of SPJ or any other professional organization.

So I’m not happy with “we are all journalists now.” Let’s give it an edit. Let’s change it to “Now, anyone can do journalism.”

So what have I done here? First, I’ve moved from focusing on the role, the label, the professional imprimatur of the word “journalist,” to the verb, the activity, the pursuit. I’ve switched from talking about an individual’s identification with a professional label to pointing our attention to an activity.

Second: I’ve changed the statement from one about static definitions of states of being to one about the potential for participation.

We’re still going to have to address the fact that the “we” in the first version and the “anyone” in the second still ignore those reaches of our society and world where the tools of the Internet remain either inaccessible or unfamiliar. So we probably need to do one more tweak of the wording, maybe to “Now, anyone who’s online can do journalism” — or “Now, anyone on the network can do journalism.”

Now these are tenets I can get behind.

Still, we’re left this term “doing journalism.” What are we talking about here?

Here’s my take: You’re doing journalism when you’re delivering an accurate and timely account of some event to some public.

[Read more...]

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Roberts is to pager as Bush is to scanner

April 23, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

Way back in ancient times, a decade ago, I wrote a piece for Salon that mentioned the widely circulated anecdote about President George H.W. Bush (the elder) casting a wondering gaze at a supermarket scanner. The tale had legs during the 1992 election cycle because it echoed a sense in the electorate that Bush was out of touch with the common people who were then suffering through a miserable recession.

I believe Bush was indeed out of touch. But my reference to the tale evoked several outraged emails from readers who accused me of perpetrating an urban myth. Bush had been treated unfairly by this news meme (Snopes.com has the details), and I had repeated the injustice.

I learned a couple lessons from the experience. One was to redouble my efforts as a journalist to question received wisdom. The other, more important lesson was that the knowledge my readers were going to send (and sometimes hurl) my way was invaluable. (Or, in Dan Gillmor’s famous phrase: “My readers know more than I do.”)

I thought of all this recently as I encountered the latest transmutation of the Bush/scanner meme. Yesterday The Huffington Post picked up a report on a law blog that made out Chief Justice Roberts to be a technological naif who had to ask, in the middle of an argument, “what’s the difference between email and a pager?”

I read the original blog post. Then I read the comments. Then I read the link to the original transcript of the argument that a commenter had helpfully provided. And I concluded for myself (you might feel otherwise, but I doubt it) that — however much Roberts may be more radical a conservative than I would wish — he’s not an idiot, and he had a reasonable basis to ask the question.

The self-correcting online feedback loop works a lot faster today than it did 10 years ago, and a lot more openly (we didn’t have comments on Salon back then). The “Roberts doesn’t know what a pager is” meme ought, by rights, to have been stopped in its tracks. It will be very interesting to follow its course in coming weeks and months. Past experience suggests that, despite having been arrested early on on the web, it will now be amplified on cable and in print and have a long half-life in our collective psyche.

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