Are TMZ and Twitter Trumping the Times? A Reader's Perspective on the Role of Social Media in News Reporting - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger
While visiting with a major news organization last week to discuss how women use social media, I was asked to take a detour in my topic:
My contact asked, "Can we talk about Iran?"
I'm not an expert in international affairs, or in news-gathering, for that matter, but the question of how Twitter factored in relaying news from politically hard-to-reach places was top of mind with the network. Later in the week, the surreal death of Michael Jackson also put social media front and center of the discussion of how news reporting is changing.
The online Hollywood gossip blog, TMZ (http://www.tmz.com/), reported Jackson's death before most traditional media organizations could confirm it. One could argue that these organizations lagged because they have more stringent standards of confirming news before releasing it, to the benefit of the reader. Later, ridiculously false (perhaps even maliciously false) reports across social media outlets of Jeff Goldblum's and Harrison Ford's deaths didn't exactly reflect well on news a la social network. But you do have to ask the question, what's happening to news? Are Tweeters supplanting beat reporters? Has the old method of news collection proven rusty?
"Could we say that TMZ is a hybrid of the worst of tabloid journalism with some of the best practices of traditional and new media?" asked Gena Haskett, one of our Research, Education and Academia editors.
Kurt Andersen said about TMZ's Jackson scoop in The New York Times:
Among many journalists, "there's still this residual but not yet vestigial instinct to think 'Oh, it's just TMZ, let's wait for The Associated Press or The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times before we can say it's true," he said, adding: "I don't think in, say, five years, that will be the case."
Five years seems like seconds to traditional journalists and an eternity to bloggers. Last year, the Omnicom PR firm Brodeur released a study that revealed a huge dependency of traditional news outlets on the blogosphere, with over 75 percent of journalists reporting blogs "as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue."
BlogHer Contributing Editor Anaiis Flox who writes OMG. OMG. OMFG, a social-media commentary blog, wrote a fantastic piece from the blogger side. More specifically, from the bloggers who unwittingly feed scoops to unplugged journos for no credit.
She writes of a blogging friend who sparked an LA Times story and was linked to but not credited with a story-making quote he received from a source. The LA Times reporter who used the quote credited the comment as "having appeared on 'another blog post.'"
Flox reached out to Journalism professor Jay Rosen, a prominent advocate of the role of social media in news reporting, about the incident.
"It happens all the time (he said). It sucks."
He referred Flox to the site, Can I Get a Link Please?, a not-recently-updated clearinghouse for tips disseminated by mainstream media that were not properly credited to blog sources. He also agreed that, sucky as it might be, there really is no universal standard for properly crediting bloggers.
Twitter's role in Iran certainly marks a corner turned toward crediting bloggers universally, if not individually, but I don't think that this recognition threatens the importance of traditional beat reporters. But rather than be the scoop sources, they will be the verifiers of news, aggregators, in effect, who will sort out the degree of veracity behind reports and create an official record. A beat will still be a geographic area, industry or sector, where the reporter's collection of grassroots and "official" sources will have to include the grassroots online. A reporter will still be obsessed with facts, but will have to hone the skill of extracting them from a series of more granular and relevant, but perhaps less contextual or even truthful, sources.
BlogHer News and Politics Editor Erin Kotecki Vest, an ex-patriot of broadcast news and incessant Twitterer, said to me recently that the art of news scoops has changed. In the past, breaking news required physically being in the right place at the right time. Now breaking news about tapping the most immediate sources. Responding to criticism of CNN's coverage of the opposition to Iran's presidential election results, which was rampant enough on Twitter that it elicited a hash tag (#CNNfail), Kotecki Vest defended the network and her former medium:
"CNN isn't getting its news from Twitter in so much as it's finally figured out how to continue to gather news in the digital era.
"Think of it this way, usually we'd be sitting in a news room making beat calls and listening to a police scanner. Running out when we caught wind of something and then talking with whomever we found on the scene.
"Twitter is now the scene. And you can find people at any given moment involved in any given news story. At first CNN was only setting up accounts and answering questions, talking about programming. … Now CNN has realized it can use Twitter like a police scanner and go find people at the scene. They were calling people I know in DC near or on the Metro within minutes of the train wreck ... because they were listening to the police scanner called Twitter."
To CNN's credit, its citizen-generated news site iReports stands as a separate, yet distinctly connected brand from which producers may promote the most promising stories and, once verified, make them CNN.com-worthy.
I think traditional news sources will shift in other ways as well. After Jackson's death, we were able to see full tributes, interviews with the pop star's closest friends and colleagues on television and print. We may have received first word through social media, but chances are we went to our most trusted news sources to verify and seek context—hear others' reactions and commentary from entertainment journalists, even medical professionals, who could help string together informed thoughts as to how or why Jackson died. These were the sources I wanted to hear from.
That may be small consolation to legions of trained journalists, who have spent years tracking down stories and who are now being shuffled into the roles of fact checker and news scrapbooker, but I think it actually elevates their roles and makes them interpreters. Those journalists who embrace their new role in this new era of news-gathering stand to remain trusted, if they trust their readers. This is one reader who wants that relationship to continue.
As co-founder and President of Strategic Alliances for BlogHer, Jory Des Jardins is an innovator in online advertising, women's media and Internet entrepreneurship. Jory can be contacted at jory@blogher.com.
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