By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Let’s see how many media outlets report on the speaker who angrily referred to President Obama as “Barack Hussein” (not even the typical “Barack Hussein Obama”) at this morning’s tea-party rally on the Boston Common — and on all the members of the audience who cheered. Not this one, unfortunately.
I won’t call it racism, but it’s certainly a case of playing on racial fears.
Who doesn’t like to talk back to the news? That, in its essence, is the idea behind NewsTrust, a site I’ve been involved with almost from its inception in 2005. The basic idea is to rate news stories on journalistic criteria such as sourcing, fairness and depth. You can rate news organizations, and other reviewers get to rate you as well.
Last week Mike LaBonte, a volunteer editor for NewsTrust who lives in Greater Boston, visited my Reinventing the News class to lead a hands-on demonstration. Dividing the class into four groups, we reviewed a story in the Washington Post on a day in the life of an Iowa tea-party protester.
It was a difficult story to rate, and my students were of two minds. On the one hand, the story was woefully incomplete, and the reporter allowed the protester to make all kinds of ridiculous assertions about President Obama and health-care reform. On the other hand, the story had value if viewed not in isolation but, rather, as part of the Post’s ongoing coverage. As a result, student reviews ranged from a high of 3.5 (out of 5) all the way down to a 1.7.
We followed that up with a class assignment: each student was asked to find, post and rate at least three stories, and to write about the experience, as well as the positives and negatives of NewsTrust, on her or his blog. Here is our class wiki, which links to everything.
Unlike previous semesters, we did not participate in a news hunt on any particular topic. Thus you’ll find stories ranging from the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the pending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to lighter fare such as why yoga appeals mainly to women.
Students have differing views about the value of NewsTrust as well. One positive aspect, it would seem, is that perusing NewsTrust restores some of the serendipity that existed back when everyone read a print newspaper every day.
Yet Mark DiSalvo observes that Google News and the people he follows on Twitter already put news stories in front of him that he might not otherwise know about, and with less technological hassle. “Google News has better customization tools, and the people I follow on Twitter are already people whose taste I trust,” he writes.
Hannah Martin writes that NewsTrust makes her think about the news in a more critical and discerning way. “What I liked about the reviewing experience was it forced me to really analyze my news on its journalistic value, which, as bad as it sounds, is often something that slips my mind,” she says. “I browse the headlines of nyt.com, read what looks important, and accept it as fact, rarely stopping to count sources or assess context. The process of reviewing though, forced me to think through all the elements of each piece, and consider what, as a journalist, should ultimately be there.”
My own view is that NewsTrust is potentially valuable as a crowdsourced front page — an alternative to letting the New York Times or the Washington Post tell us what the most important news of the day is. The problem is that the software is time-consuming and not particularly intuitive, even though it has been improved over the past year.
And though NewsTrust claimed more than 15,000 registered users by the end of 2009, most of the stories you’ll find seem to have been posted and rated by just a small handful of regulars. This is not surprising. Studies have shown that two much-bigger crowdsourced sites, Wikipedia and Digg, are the handiwork of small numbers of unusually active users.
I hope NewsTrust will continue to grow, because the idea is sound. The challenge is that crowdsourcing only works when there is a crowd.
In my latest for the Guardian, I write that ProPublica’s Pulitzer haul is evidence that the era of non-profit journalism has arrived.
Gail Spector, editor of the Newton Tab, has written a must-read column on how casino gambling nearly destroyed her family because of her late father’s gambling addiction. Always a problem, his addiction raged out of control once the Oneida Indian Nation’s Turning Stone Resort and Casino, in upstate New York, opened near the town where they lived.
Spector’s personal story is well-told and deeply moving, and I don’t want to spoil it by trying to excerpt it here. I will instead go with her conclusion:
Preying upon and purposefully aggravating the torment and destruction that gambling addictions cause families is cruel. Further justifying it as a means to create local aid for communities is devious and shameful.
Unfortunately, it appears that is precisely what the Massachusetts House is on the verge of doing — to be followed, you can be sure, by the Senate and Gov. Deval Patrick.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe’s Brian MacQuarrie is taken for a ride with some happy gamblers who took a bus from South Station to Foxwoods. Among the people whom MacQuarrie meets is Curtis Harris of Cambridge, “a self-described poker professional.”
Harris, 34, tells MacQuarrie he has a system that brings in $100 a day, and that he supports his two children with his gambling. “This outing went well,” MacQuarrie writes. “Harris, who played nonstop from 2 p.m. Friday until noon Sunday, left with $710.”
Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing there are some aspects to Harris’ story that he withheld from MacQuarrie. The reason they say the house always wins is because the house always wins. And I don’t think making it easier for Harris gamble on his children’s future is going to make things any better for his family — to say the least.
Could Facebook — or at least the Facebook ethos — help turn the tide of negativity when it comes to online newspaper comments?
Richard Pérez-Peña reports in the New York Times that an increasing number of news organizations are requiring commenters to use their real names, or at least providing incentives to do so. They credit Facebook and Twitter, where most people use their real names, in fostering a change in attitude. Pérez-Peña writes:
Several industry executives cited a more fundamental force working in favor of identifying commenters. Through blogging and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, millions of people have grown accustomed to posting their opinions — to say nothing of personal details — with their names attached, for all to see. Adapting the Facebook model, some news sites allow readers to post a picture along with a comment, another step away from anonymity.
Several months ago I led a workshop on social media for the New England Newspaper & Press Association. The most interesting idea to come out of the workshop, I thought, was put forth by a weekly-newspaper editor who said he had been posting links to many of his stories to a Facebook group and encouraging readers to comment there.
The Facebook group, he said, had turned into more of a real online community than the comments at his newspaper’s Web site, where anonymity had transformed even mundane matters into fodder for nasty rhetoric and personal attacks. And it’s not just real names; it’s the entire online persona people create on Facebook, with pictures and personal information, all of which encourage users to act more like human beings when they start typing. I was so excited that I instituted a real-names policy at Media Nation as soon as the conference was over, though I’ve held off from taking the Facebook route.
But what about the notion of sending readers away from your Web site, where you presumably have some advertising you want them to look at? I would argue that if you become a trusted source for your readers, they will reward you by coming back and providing you with more traffic than you would otherwise get.
Besides, as Pérez-Peña notes, advertisers generally don’t want to be associated with the kind of vitriol that characterizes anonymous comment sections.
Facebook is a great technological solution for small organizations that don’t have the wherewithal to offer a registration system of their own. But Howard Owens has managed to put together a registration system accompanied by a real-names policy at the Batavian, the community-news site in western New York that he owns. Owens writes:
Real names may not prevent people from spewing misinformation and defamatory bile, but at least if readers trust that the person making such assertions is using a real name, they can judge it accordingly, or fact check the source themselves.
Owens goes on to note that if the Cleveland Plain Dealer had had a real-names policy, it could have avoided the ethical dilemma in which it finds itself over a judge whose e-mail address was being used to post anonymous comments about cases in which she was involved. (The judge claims, not too convincingly, that the anonymous poster was her daughter.)
The Plain Dealer outed the judge, Shirley Strickland Safford. And last week Saffold sued the paper for $50 million, claiming the paper had violated its own privacy policy.
Of course, that’s something of an inside-out argument — that is, the Plain Dealer wouldn’t have done anything unethical if it didn’t have private information it could handle unethically. The best reason for real names is to foster a civil discussion. Along with strict moderation, real names can help fulfill the promise of a comments section that helps build community and readership.
Congratulations to my “Beat the Press” colleague Joe Sciacca, who’s been named managing editor for content at the Boston Herald. (And to Jim Potter, the Herald’s newly promoted managing editor for production, whom I don’t know.)
Sciacca has been a staunch advocate of a Web-first strategy for the Herald, which is important given that the paper is printed in Chicopee and has unusually early deadlines.
And as Sciacca himself has pointed out, BostonHerald.com is an example of a newspaper.com that is quite different from the print edition in look, feel and, to some extent, content — a separate-path strategy that other newspaper executives would be wise to pursue.
Definitely a good move by Herald editor Kevin Convey.
I took a walk this afternoon along the abandoned railroad tracks in Danvers from Chestnut Street to Topsfield Road (Route 97), which is supposed to become part of a North Shore bicycle trail. For more information check out Danvers Bi-Peds.
Since I forgot to bring my camera, I took these with my BlackBerry instead. I’m astonished at how good they came out.
I just sent the following e-mail to my state representative, Ted Speliotis, D-Danvers:
Dear Ted —
I’m writing today to urge you to vote “no” on Speaker DeLeo’s bill to expand legalized gambling in Massachusetts. The negative effects of casinos and slot machines would be far greater than could be justified by any increased revenue the state would receive — revenue that, in all likelihood, would not be nearly as great as proponents predict.
Not only would casinos in Massachusetts be a bad idea in and of themselves, but they would almost certainly lead to expanded gambling in New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
I first became aware of the hazards of casino gambling when a few wealthy investors used the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to put forth a plan in Middleborough, the town where I grew up, to build what at one time was described as the world’s largest casino. As you probably know, that effort was fraught with corruption. Glenn Marshall, the tribal leader, ended up going to prison.
Studies have shown that casinos lead to increased crime and a higher divorce rate, and have even been linked to an increase in suicides. I urge you to get the facts from United to Stop Slots in Massachusetts, which is online at www.uss-mass.org.
Sincerely,
Dan Kennedy
Danvers
The Boston Herald has been hit with a libel suit for the second time this year. The Boston Globe’s David Abel reports that the plaintiff is Joanna Marinova, who accompanied state Rep. Gloria Fox, D-Boston, to the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater last year.
The Herald published a front-page story on May 28 by Jessica Van Sack claiming Fox had snuck Marinova in to see her boyfriend, a convicted murderer named Darrell Jones, and that Marinova had been “previously bagged for engaging in ‘sexual acts’ with the killer con.” The Herald cited “two prison sources,” both anonymous.
Marinova sued the Herald and WHDH-TV (Channel 7), which also ran the story, saying through her lawyer, David Rich, that the news organizations “blatantly ignored readily available facts that would have demonstrated the falsity of these assertions.”
According to Abel, the Herald declined to respond and no one at Channel 7 would return his calls.
As with a libel suit recently brought against the Herald by Tom Scholz of the band Boston, it makes sense to wait and see what’s in the Herald’s and Channel 7’s official response. In this case, though, Adam Reilly did some reporting last year for the Boston Phoenix that cast considerable doubt on (1) the Herald’s claim that Fox had falsely portrayed Marinova as her aide and (2) that Marinova and Jones had engaged in illicit sex during a prison visit.
Reilly, now a producer with “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), noted that Marinova had told the Globe that the so-called sexual contact for which Jones had been punished consisted of Jones touching her knee during a visit. And Reilly pointed to other sources, including Jones’ blog and an official report, that tend to support that version of events.
If the Herald’s and Channel 7’s reporting was wrong, that doesn’t necessarily mean they committed libel. Even though it is Marinova who’s suing, it’s Fox’s involvement that made this a newsworthy story. A judge could rule that because Fox is a public official, Marinova must prove that the Herald and Channel 7 either knew their reporting was wrong or strongly suspected it, yet went ahead anyway — a legal standard known as “reckless disregard for the truth.”
On the other hand, a judge could rule that because Marinova herself is a private person, then she need only prove that the defendants acted negligently.
Looking down the road, I would imagine that Marinova will try to force the defendants to reveal their confidential sources as well.
Needless to say, this will be a very interesting case to watch.
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the difference between right-wing and left-wing hate is that the former has moved into the heart of the Republican Party, whose leaders seem either not to understand or care about the possible consequences.