Category archives: Journalism

Do they pay a ‘living price’ for newspapers on Mars?

David Herrera,

The following quote comes from a journal article called Is an Honest and Sane Newspaper Press Possible?, by “An Independent Journalist,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1909.

If no magazine writer has yet included this quote in the beginning of an article before eventually coming around to, “The year? 1909,” someone surely will eventually.

The question of complete editorial independence is a very delicate one, and it is not a theory but a condition that confronts us in dealing with it. The situation would be infinitely healthier if readers had been “brought up” on the right principle of paying for value received, as they do in the case of other comforts and luxuries. That men otherwise liberal and extravagant should insist on getting a 3-cent paper for 1 cent, or a 5-cent paper for 2 cents is a phenomenon that would puzzle a visitor from Mars, where, we must hope, newspapers command a “living price.”

‘Show your work’: a personal progress report

David Herrera,

In September I attended the 2011 Online News Association conference in Boston, where I met some great, smart people, including plenty of fellow budding journo-geeks.

As part of the conference I was also lucky enough to receive some encouragement, training, and offers for help from the established community of journalist-programmers. In return for their generous effort I promised myself that I would involve myself more in the community of journalists and developers.

In that spirit, I’m here to publicly evaluate my progress in the last two months — on Django, contributing, and showing my work.

Django and Python

In a thank-you email to Michelle Minkoff shortly after the conference, I said I would post to my blog about my plans for Django and what I would build first.

Well, I never wrote that post. I did tear into the tutorial offered on the Django website, but lost steam about halfway through. Eventually I finished the tutorial, but by the end I was phoning it in.

That was the disappointing extent of my Python work until this weekend, when I attended the daylong Intro To Python Workshop organized by PyLadies and ONA LA. I left the workshop feeling much more comfortable with the basics of writing Python code. And after a good discussion about Django with Katharine Jarmul I feel ready to try it again, with the goal of writing an app for posting about music I like (because I’m tired of giving that information to Facebook). Grade: hopeful.

Show your work

I’m happy that I’m making more use of my GitHub account, posting four new repositories in the last couple of months. On a related note, I’ve been trying to take the “show your work” mentality to my graduate thesis as much as such things allow through my Argumentation in journalism blog. I’ll turn my thesis in to the university in the next few weeks and soon afterwards post the whole thing to the blog. I’ve also kept the source files inside a Git repository, which I’m thinking about uploading to GitHub as well. Grade: not bad.

Next steps

Python and Django are the big targets on my list, specifically the music app. I might run into some Ruby, too.

Will journalists learn content strategy?

David Herrera,

To help me prepare to relaunch Losses of Life, I re-read Erin Kissane’s book The Elements of Content Strategy. It’s a fine book to get you thinking about content strategy, but it also got me thinking about journalism.

I was struck by how many of the “principles” of content strategy as defined by Kissane are strategies shared by journalists:

  • “Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose.” Change “content” for “story” and it sounds like every editor who has asked me to “pitch my story.”

  • “Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users.” Takes me back to editors shortening my ledes, excising my jargon, and, later, making my headlines SEO-friendly.

  • “Mandate consistency, within reason.” Journalists are perhaps hypersensitive about consistent style.

  • “Omit needless content.” This was required reading in editing class.

The point of quoting these principles is that, generally, most journalists should be down with the ends of content strategists.

But that’s the thing. “The aims of content strategists.” Kissane often refers to content strategy as a discipline or position unto itself. “If your content strategist…” does X or Y, and so on.

I don’t have a problem with people being content strategists, but I do wonder about “content strategy” joining a history of “things that are not journalism” and so being ignored by journalists, to no one’s benefit.

To oversimplify a bit, journalists have been isolated over the years from the various parts of what make media machines run. The discipline is only now working to retreat from the notion that journalists need to worry about just “writing news” and not about running a business or programming.

Given this historical dismissal-to-slow-acceptance cycle among journalists toward skills that are important to what they do, there is reason to think content strategy will enter the same pattern, especially as content strategists define themselves as something different from journalists.

The more content strategists differentiate themselves from journalists, the more journalists might feel free to ignore content strategy because it “isn’t journalism.” No one mentioned content strategy to me during my two years as a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism, anyway.

So imagine when a news outlet decides to hire a content strategist. What the reaction be when the content strategist starts talking to reporters?

My worry is that the reaction of reporters will be the same resentment and encroachment there would have been if, 15 years ago, management asked the IT department to start running editorial meetings, or 50 years ago asked the business department to begin pitching story ideas.

That conflict is not useful for anybody. Moreover, seeing as journalism and content strategy have similar goals, it will represent a lost opportunity to cooperate, not compete, in pursuit of those goals.

So, will journalists be able to learn just enough about content strategy that they can keep it in-house, as it were? Are there examples of it already happening? Am I wrong to predict conflict between content strategist and journalist?

The relevance to online journalism of argumentation and informal logic

David Herrera,

In this post I want to try to suggest that journalists who are building relationships with communities online could learn much from the fields of argumentation and informal logic.

The basic argument is this:

  1. Online, journalists build relationships with us. Assuming there are some general ethical guidelines for how to treat partners in our relationships, then whether journalists act ethically then depends, somewhat, on whether what they do matches how an ethical person treats partners in their relationships.

  2. A big part of what journalists do is make arguments. We, the audience (users, readers, whatever) often argue back, especially online. When I’m talking about arguments, by the way, I don’t mean “disputes” or “bickering.” I mean merely that we give positions on issues — we argue “that” something.

  3. A good portion of argumentation and informal logic concern themselves with how to ethically give arguments and how to ethically respond to the arguments of others.

    So given that journalists argue with us in articles, tweets, blog posts, etc., and given that we respond to them with arguments of our own, and journalists respond back:

  4. Journalists who are familiar with argumentation and informal logic might be better prepared to engage in these back-and-forth discussions with the community, treat its members fairly, and take advantage of the opinions and ideas the community offers.

If “argumentation” and “informal logic” sound scary, they shouldn’t. Those fields contain some of the most approachable academic work I know of (although they contain unapproachable work, too).

(I studied argumentation and informal logic during the past semester. This fall I begin writing my graduate thesis, which uses those fields to evaluate the quality of journalists’ arguments. I wrote some posts about journalism and argumentation during the semester. This post is related to my thesis, but is on a slightly different angle.)

Ethics online

Point (1) comes from Jane Singer‘s book chapter Norms and the Network: Journalistic Ethics in a Shared Media Space. Singer argues that the ethical justification for journalists’ principles, such as the principles of truth-telling or political independence, differs when journalism is online from when it was primarily print-based.

The print media of old incurred ethical obligations to tell the truth or remain politically independent in large part because they held privileged positions as gatekeepers. Compared to today, there were few chances to independently disseminate information necessary in a democracy.

So journalists, as “the conduit through which the information necessary to a democracy must pass,” needed ethical principles so that those of us on the other side of the gate were well served. Journalistic principles included protecting against “misinformation and disinformation” passing through the gate, to ensure that we can “believe what we are told.” The justification was that there was no one else, really, to do it.

However, “when journalists move to a network [the internet], the ethical principles remain essentially the same — but the rationale for them changes to one based on relationships,” Singer writes. “Truth-telling … is as important as ever, but not because the public will not get the truth unless the journalist provides it. Rather, it is important because telling the truth is, generally, the ethical thing to do in any relationship.”

Strong relationship ethics are what make journalists relevant when, online, individuals have more options for who serves as their gatekeeper. The field of potential gatekeepers is wide-open. But if I know that I can trust a journalist because they will treat me as I deserve to be treated in a relationship, then my reasons for choosing the journalist as my gatekeeper (curator, filter — pick your term) increase.

Journalists argue

I think journalists can be accurately characterized as giving arguments, meaning they try to demonstrate to us that something is, was, or will be true about the world.

I’m not going to belabor this point here. I think you can get a good sense of what I mean in this earlier post, and, soon, I plan to post a more complete argument from my thesis proposal. I hope that even if you are skeptical about my claim that journalists argue, then you will, for now, accept it as an assumption.

Ethical argument-giving and argument-receiving

So far I have two premises: Journalists do what they do online in relationships with others, and so journalists incur ethical obligations to act as one should in a relationship. And one of the things journalists do is argue.

When you deliver news online to someone with whom you are in a relationship, you should do certain things. This is Singer’s point. She advocates, as an example, for more “personal disclosure” by journalists of the rationale for their decisions and how they feel about the results.

Similarly, when you attempt to deliver news through argument, as I think journalists do, then, ethically, you should also do certain things. Scholars in argumentation and informal logic attempt to hash out just what those certain ethical things are.

Moreover, as philosopher George Boger suggests in an article in Informal Logic, those who study argumentation and informal logic have a goal of their work grounded in humanism. These scholars teach fallacy detection or argument models, for example, not so that students can learn to “win” debates. Instead, they teach these ideas so that people can improve their lives through argument, by trying to reason together toward acceptable positions that guide them in decision-making.

For their part, journalists provide information to citizens not so the journalists can have the “right answers” about something (or that the citizens can have them for that matter), but so that everybody can try to figure out what to do given the democratic choices they have.

So journalists, I think, can feel some affinity toward these goals of argumentation and informal logic theorists. They might learn something from those theorists.

Let me offer one example of how argumentation and journalism come together. Boger quotes ten “rules for reasonable argumentative discourse” offered by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst. Here are a five of them:

Rule 1: Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints.

Rule 2: A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so.

Rule 3: A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.

Rule 5: A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit.

Rule 10: A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.

Even if journalists reject these particular rules, the general thrust of the rules is, I think, consonant with what journalists try to do online and why.

Another quick example: Some discussion of late has focused on whether and why journalists link in their stories. A link can point us to more evidence for a claim, or to the claims of others that are being challenged in a story. Not linking to claims that a journalist’s story attacks (the “linkless hypebuster”) is potentially the same thing as a “straw man” fallacy. One of the concerns of studying argument and informal logic is to see when exactly such arguments are problematic.

So for journalists to act ethically online, they might think about studying the practice and ethics of argument. Argumentation and informal logic can enable journalists to try to argue ethically, which in turn increases the strength of their relationships with others online (or there’s a good chance it will strengthen that relationship, anyway).

Reading

Here are a few articles from Informal Logic that I think would also be of interest to journalists. I link to only Informal Logic articles here because it’s an open-access journal; many good articles appear elsewhere, but they require a journal subscription.

  • John D. May, “Reportage as compound suggestion.” May discusses what he calls “invited inference.” These are “suggestions or pragmatic meanings” that are prompted by certain kinds of speech. Specifically, he focuses on “invited inferences” within journalism. These basically can be labeled as assumptions that are relatively easy for the audience to make, and are sometimes required when reading journalism. “Journalistic narratives are rich in suggestion — and sometimes are insidiously suggestive.”

  • Thomas J. Richards, “Attitudes to reasoning.” Richards is concerned with designing logic courses. But he thinks we must first answer: What are the prevailing attitudes toward logic and reason in society? His essay sets out to suggest what they are and why they’re dangerous. I wrote a blog post about this article in March.

  • Robert Fogelin, “The logic of deep disagreements.” Deep disagreements are situations in which normal argumentative exchanges do not exist. They are caused by fundamental differences in our most basic “system of mutually supporting propositions.” Deep disagreements “cannot be resolved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing.”

I would also recommend to anybody who wants to dive deep into these fields the textbook Fundamentals of argumentation theory by Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans.

Repaying the kindness shown me at #jcarn

David Herrera,

Earlier this week I fortunate enough to sit in at Hardly Strictly Young, a conference at the Reynolds Journalism Institute organized by David Cohn and perhaps better known as #jcarn.

The goal of the conference was to suggest ways of implementing four recommendations of a 2009 Knight Commission report on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. At least two conference roundups have already been posted, and more probably will follow under the #jcarn hashtag.

The participants all had in common that they contribute to the ongoing Carnival of Journalism. I, on the other hand, have not contributed to the Carnival, which is why I say I was fortunate to attend #jcarn. Both David and the attendees were gracious enough to let me listen to their conversations despite my not being on the guest list.

I tried to keep out of the way (I broke my silence once and feel bad about it). Still, I know I got a big intellectual benefit.

I know of two ways to show thanks for these kinds of gifts: By demonstrating that I paid attention to what was made available to me and by using it in my work. This post attempts to fulfill the first method by offering a few observations and comments on the good, fascinating ideas I heard. #jcarn folks, let me know what I screwed up.

Reaching out to teachers

One Knight recommendation addressed teaching media literacy (defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create the information products that media disseminate”).

The group I sat with focused on pre-college classrooms under the reasoning that teaching literacy to college kids is teaching them too late in life and is too likely to target those who already have experience with producing and consuming media.

The group suggested finding educators already innovating in teaching media literacy and tapping their knowledge, as well as connecting those innovators with one another to foster a community among them.

Early in the discussion, the group noted the obvious implications of resource disparities among communities. Richer communities will have more resources to teach digital media literacy than poorer ones. The kids in richer areas will have more access to the technology outside of school. And so on.

It would seem to follow that the innovating teachers will, generally, also come from the resource-rich areas. What works for those innovators might not work for a teacher in another community because the second group of teachers and administrators will be less familiar with the technology, as will the students and parents there.

So when talking with teachers finding success in innovation, it wouldn’t hurt to ensure that the reasons why their methods work aren’t inseparable from their available resources and their students’ background.

Road trip

During day two of the conference I suggested on Twitter that the next #jcarn take a road trip to Cooter, Missouri. (The tweet was actually the second time I broke my vow of silence. It seemed less egregious because I can be easily ignored on Twitter, as can this blog post.)

The previous day, one group I listened to talked about information needs in small towns. They researched whether and how Cooter — suggested by Courtney Shove as the smallest town (population: 440, give or take) the group knew of — conversed online. The group then talked about what tools the community could use both for their own discussions and for accessing government information and data.

Thinking more about it, though, maybe a road trip — to some small town or other — might be useful.

More than a few times at #jcarn someone reiterated that the potential new tools under discussion needed to be actually used by people, and that those people might not use (or want to use) the tools in the way their builders imagined.

A road trip might begin to tackle this problem. Set up a meeting with the mayor of a small town, or a city council, or whomever to talk to them about what they know how to use, what technology they want, or what technology they need — if any. The people at #jcarn are smart enough to incorporate those discussions into what they might build. They also might be able to, on the spot, recommend and show off existing tools that the communities could start using right away.

#jcarn could also partner with a nearby university or other organization that would send someone back to the town a few weeks later, after some of the excitement dissipates and reality creeps back in. That person could report to #jcarn about which suggestions worked, which didn’t, and which ideas the community still wanted to pursue, even after the “cooling off” period.

‘The full reality of communities’

Nobody was particularly happy with the language in another the Knight recommendation addressed — “Expand local media initiatives to reflect the full reality of the communities they represent” — and understandably so.

The group I sat with focused on helping news organizations reflect the “full reality” of communities with fewer resources, particularly less access to digital tools. How are those communities best reached? How are their “information needs” determined and met?

These are very important goals. But they seem to cover only some of Knight’s recommendation.

Knight asked about “the full reality of the communities” media represent. Presumably, the better-off are also both real and part of the community.

So, while determining the “full reality” of neighborhoods filled with poverty, malnutrition, poor education, and other serious problems, Knight seems to be pushing to ensure the problems of the rich receive adequate attention, too. Those with more resources can usually address their problems, or at least most of their problems. They can’t do everything, of course, but they at least, generally, have a head start in finding people who can fix things or acquiring the training to do it themselves.

Given that “media initiatives” often work with limited means, it certainly makes sense to let the better-off take care of their own information needs while focusing the means of the “initiatives” on those who lack them.

But, again, the recommendation seems to demand that attention be paid to those with resources, too.

The terms of the recommendation could be conveniently redefined on the fly to eliminate the problem. It could simply be assumed that the “full reality” of the upper classes is adequately covered by existing media.

Perhaps, though, there is some sort of attention that could be paid to upper-class communities that would improve community ties, which is a goal of the report (I guess I could envision that being the case). I don’t want to assume that reflecting the upper classes more “fully” is necessarily a bad thing.

Or perhaps the recommendation is just poorly written. Or perhaps some other conclusion?