Media Nation

Emily Rooney scales back, but will keep beating the press

It will be a big night in Boston media as Emily Rooney hosts “Greater Boston” for the last time. It’s been quite a run: Emily has been at the helm since 1997.

Fortunately, she will continue as host of the Friday “Beat the Press” show, and will contribute to WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) and WGBHNews.org as well.

I’ve had the privilege of being part of “Beat the Press” since the late ’90s, first as an occasional guest and later as a regular. Congratulations to Emily on a job well done — and thank you for remaining a part of our Friday nights.

Earlier:

‘Serial’ is untraditional, but it’s journalism at its best

The highly acclaimed podcast “Serial” concludes this Thursday. To mark the occasion, longtime journalist Brian C. Jones wrote a guest commentary on Tuesday regarding what he believes are the series’ journalistic and ethical shortcomings. Today I offer my response. — Dan

Sarah Koenig has often been quoted as saying that she doesn’t know how her podcast “Serial” will turn out. And those of us who have listened to every episode understand she still harbors suspicions that her protagonist, Adnan Syed, actually did murder his ex-girlfriend when they were Maryland high school students 15 years ago.

Brian C. Jones makes much of this in his commentary, writing that “Serial” is more voyeurism than journalism. “Without an answer,” he says, “it’s a little like digging up a coffin just to see what’s inside.” Jones offers some strong arguments about ethics and a journalist’s responsibility, but I disagree with his assessment. “Serial” may not be traditional journalism, but it is journalism, and of a rather high order.

Instead of a five-minute piece (a lifetime on radio, even on public radio) looking into a murder case about which questions remain, we’ve been brought inside the journalistic sausage-making factory. Koenig doesn’t know whether Syed killed Hae Min Lee, and we are with her every step as she gropes for answers. We are participants with Koenig; her emotions are ours. Yes, that’s a long way from a wire-service story that begins with the words “Police said.” But does that kind of journalism work anymore? Did it ever?

More important, it’s easy to make too much of Koenig’s uncertainty, as I think Jones has. In fact, she did a lot of reporting — perhaps the bulk of her reporting — before the first episode was uploaded. She’d been at it for a year, and had done several segments for “This American Life” (I confess I have not heard those early pre-“Serial” stories) before the saga of Adnan Syed was spun off.

From the beginning of “Serial,” it was clear that Koenig seriously doubted Syed’s guilt, even though she didn’t entirely rule it out. Moreover, her reporting revealed there was little or no physical evidence linking the murder to Syed, and that the prosecution’s main witness, Jay, who was Syed’s alleged accomplice, had told wildly inconsistent stories to investigators. As the series has unfolded, we’ve also learned that the timeline prosecutors laid out was close to an impossibility, and that Syed’s lawyer, who was probably seriously ill during Syed’s two trials, made crucial errors. Anti-Muslim animus may have entered into the proceedings as well.

That’s more than enough not just to launch a serious journalistic inquiry but to publish the results. A better way of thinking about the dilemma Jones defines might be to say that Koenig did not know how “Serial” would turn out once her reporting hit the Internet. Of course, she had no way of knowing that her work would become a phenomenon; but surely she understood that people who cared about the case would hear it. Having established doubt — maybe even reasonable doubt — about Syed’s guilt, perhaps her series would result in more evidence coming out. Maybe someone would even identify the real killer, assuming it is not Syed.

On a recent episode Koenig addressed news reports such as this one that Syed had been granted an appeal. It wasn’t so simple, she explained. Syed is at the very beginning of a long road, and he may not get very far. Once someone has been convicted, it is extremely difficult to get that conviction overturned unless there is compelling evidence of innocence. (And even then.) Given the realities of the justice system, the chances of Thursday’s final episode being a blockbuster seem unlikely.

Still, Koenig’s meticulous reporting has raised sufficient doubts about Adnan Syed’s guilt that he may get another chance. Isn’t that what good journalism is supposed to do?

‘Serial’ isn’t journalism. It’s voyeurism. Here’s why.

The highly acclaimed podcast “Serial” concludes this Thursday. To mark the occasion, I’m pleased to present this commentary by veteran journalist Brian C. Jones on what he believes are the series’ journalistic and ethical shortcomings. Tomorrow I’ll respond. (And here it is.) — Dan

By Brian C. Jones

“Serial” may be a podcast phenomenon, but almost from the beginning I’ve thought of it as flawed journalism.

Sarah Koenig, the lead producer and narrator, acknowledged when the episodes began that she didn’t know the outcome; she’d done considerable digging, but her investigation wasn’t finished.

That’s a problem.

A developed story like this obligates the reporter to know — before going public — why it’s worthwhile, other than it’s “interesting.” Without an answer, it’s a little like digging up a coffin just to see what’s inside.

Unfolding in weekly segments every Thursday, the story is about the 1999 murder of a Maryland high school student. Her ex-boyfriend, convicted and imprisoned for the slaying, says he’s innocent. Koenig says a friend of the defendant asked her to revisit the case.

A podcast follower can be excused for jumping to the conclusion that Koenig might answer the he did it/he didn’t do it question. The episodes are so detailed and skillfully told that it’s obvious Koenig has tapped a rich lode of material, suggesting that “Serial” has the potential to refute or confirm the jury’s verdict.

But Koenig never promised a “Perry Mason” ending, only that listeners would accompany her on a journey of exploration: about the case, about the criminal-justice process, about the effort required of journalists and nonfiction storytellers.

What’s wrong with that? One thing is that real-life stories hurt the peopled involved, at least some of them. Just being in the spotlight can be excruciating; details are inevitably embarrassing; wounds will be reopened; doubts created; reputations roughed up.

Actual people and their lives are not figures to be marched around a Clue board, not answers to 4-Down in a crossword puzzle, not characters in a video game.

Last week Koenig read from a letter from the defendant saying that his psyche has been bruised by her persistent questioning of his character. I imagine some prosecutors, cops and others whose work has been scrutinized feel the same.

I’m not saying that a reporter should know where she wants a story to go when she begins it — of course the facts should determine the outcome. I’m not saying that ambiguity has no place in journalism — most stories are complex and confounding.

My objection is that when the reporting phase is exhausted, it’s crucial to understand what kind of a story it is, and maybe whether it is a story at all. At the very least, the writer has to be honest with listeners as to the “why” of the story.

Koenig said the story will end with Thursday’s episode. Maybe she’s gotten lucky and “Serial” will conclude with a bombshell; millions of downloaders will cheer; and Koenig will be hailed as the industry disrupter who popularized podcast storytelling.

For me, that won’t get her off the hook, since she never knew what would happen.

Instead, she used the tools of legitimate reporting — the right to public records, access to experts, the goodwill of interviewees, compelling soundbites, stylish storytelling and the credibility of “This American Life,” from which “Serial” was spun off — to intrude into and disrupt real lives for the fun of it. It’s voyeurism, not journalism.

Brian C. Jones, a freelance journalist, worked 35 years for the Providence Journal, including a stint as the paper’s media reporter. Later, he was a contributing writer for the now-defunct Providence Phoenix and wrote histories of three hospitals in Rhode Island.

Correction: An earlier version of this commentary erroneously stated that the defendant’s mother asked Koenig to review the case.

Telling the story across media platforms

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For their final project, my graduate students in Fundamentals of Digital Journalism had to produce a story on a topic of their choosing that included three elements: a bloggy feature story (bloggy because it’s full of links), photos and a video.

Their reporting took them from a program in New York that promotes alternatives to prison to a horse farm in Goffstown, New Hampshire, for kids with disabilities. Most of their stories, though, were based in the Boston area.

There’s some good work here, and I hope you’ll take a look at the map. Each marker will take you to a different story. You’ll need to zoom in on Boston.

Edelman speaks

The Boston Herald talks to Ben Edelman about the Boston.com T-shirt controversy. This doesn’t sound like it’s over.

Boston.com retracts claim about racist email from professor

The tale of the Harvard Business School professor who flipped out because he’d been overcharged $4 by a Chinese restaurant took an ugly turn Wednesday night. Boston.com, which first reported the story, posted a follow-up claiming that Ben Edelman had sent a racist email to the restaurant owner — and then replaced the follow-up with an “Editor’s Note,” explaining that the authenticity of the email couldn’t be verified. The Boston Herald has a summary of what went wrong. (Boston.com is part of The Boston Globe’s network of websites.)

The original story about Edelman, by Boston.com’s Hilary Sargent, had gone viral. Who, after all, can resist reading about a privileged Harvard professor threatening legal action against a hard-working business owner because the prices on his website hadn’t been updated for a while? So when Boston.com retracted its explosive allegation (carrying Sargent and Roberto Scalese’s bylines) that Edelman was not just a contentious jerk but a racist as well, Twitter exploded.

Well Jesus, @BostonDotCom: pic.twitter.com/p4l5g0brzx

— Adam Reilly (@reillyadam) December 11, 2014

So what did Boston.com publish? It wasn’t long before screen grabs started to make their way around the intertubes. J. Alain Ferry posted a copy here. What happened was that after Edelman apologized to Ran Duan, whose family owns the Sichuan Garden restaurant in Brookline, someone claiming to be Edelman sent another email to the restaurant owner, writing, “You may have won the battle Duan, but at least we can agree your menu is a little less slanty-eyed.” That’s followed up by an apology for accidentally sending what was meant as a private joke, which has the effect of making the mail seem more authentic.

Edelman’s domain name, benedelman.org, is easily found on the Web, and it’s not difficult to send an email using any address you like. The Sichuan Garden website offers an email form that lets you do exactly that. One clue is that all of the legitimate emails Boston.com has posted from Edelman are marked as coming from “Ben Edelman,” whereas the racist email and subsequent apology were from “ben@benedelman.org.”

Hmm so the restaurant contact form lets you enter any email: http://t.co/ZLTyRAcsdf & the ben@benedelman.org address isn't a secret @lilsarg

— Kyle Alspach (@KyleAlspach) December 11, 2014

Despite the retraction, Boston.com as of this moment is still all-in on the rest of its Edelman package. We’ll see what, if anything, comes next.

Update: Kyle Alspach just posted on this at BostInno. He’s got some really interesting technical stuff.

Update II: Here’s a screen image of a tweet Sargent sent out last night that she subsequently took down:

Caitlin Flanagan on the harm caused by Rolling Stone

The single best analysis I’ve run across regarding the meltdown of Rolling Stone’s story about rape at the University of Virginia campus is by Caitlin Flanagan, the author of a long investigation into fraternities that was published by The Atlantic earlier this year.

Flanagan was interviewed by “On the Media” over the weekend. Give it a listen and you’ll understand why journalistic failures by Rolling Stone and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely have done so much damage to the campaign against sexual assault on campus.

The gold standard for reporting on this issue has been set by my friend and former colleague Kristen Lombardi of the Center for Public Integrity. Here is an archive of her work.

Northeastern J-School partners with Esquire magazine

By Jeff Howe

Earlier this year Northeastern University’s School of Journalism received a Knight Foundation grant to launch a Media Innovation graduate program. Students — mostly mid-career journalists and the occasional newly minted J-school grad — would pursue one story over the 18-month course of study. We’d let the story discover its own media, so to speak, rather than, say, imposing an interactive treatment on a piece that wants to be a photo essay. Then we would crack open the considerable resources of Northeastern University to our students. Javascript, data-scraping, digital videography — each student writes her or his own ticket, like a Knight Fellowship with a degree at the end.

In the final semester we would work assiduously to place the story with a well-respected media outlet. Poker isn’t poker without money, and journalism isn’t journalism without readers. Since we mostly acquire the craft in a newsroom, we figured we’d bring the newsroom into the university. So far, and to our great pleasure, reality has followed the blueprint.

In the spirit of marrying education to editorial, this week we launched a partnership with Esquire magazine. The goal is to create both a physical and virtual research and development lab for digital storytelling. Online platforms have recently delivered a cornucopia of long-form journalism, but we’re still in the messy — a.k.a. totally awesome — phase of experimentation. Most of the current experimentation will fade away without a trace. But some of it will stick.

Esquire and Media Innovation decided to approach the subject from three directions:

StoryLab, a full-semester course taught at Northeastern’s School of Journalism beginning in spring 2015, in which students will work with Esquire writers and editors to reimagine both classic and new Esquire stories for the digital age.
Storybench.org, a news site that offers an “under the hood” look at the latest and most inventive examples of digital creativity — from data-visualization projects to interactive documentaries — as well as the tools and innovation behind them.
StoryChallenge, an annual new-media storytelling competition, launching in October 2015, which will challenge journalists to reinvent the way magazine stories are told.

These projects serve a few highly pragmatic purposes. As one of the nation’s most prestigious venues for literary journalism, Esquire has a great interest in the future of that form. As educators, we’re doing our best to prepare journalism students to enter a workforce that expects creativity and a collaborative imagination as much as shoe leather reporting.

Recently we had Jay Lauf — the founding president and publisher of the business news site Quartz — speak to our students. Like Vice and BuzzFeed, Quartz is growing fast and hiring accordingly. I’m so accustomed to journalism’s famine mentality I assumed they were getting inundated with talented candidates.

That’s not the case. “We are getting swamped with résumés,” Jay says, “but not always with qualified candidates.” Jay defines these as journalists who may have a base-level fluency in programming but, more important, they can demonstrate an easy facility with numbers and data and social media. In fact, the various digital journalism ventures in New York, Jay says, are battling it out for the few journalists that fit the new mold.

There’s another mission threading throughout these efforts: How do you train journalists for jobs that don’t exist yet? One way, we figured, was to try to invent those jobs here. We’re not going to do that by stroking our chins in Aristotelian reflection. We’re going to do it by doing it. There have to be readers at the end of the process, and real sources and real stories. Poker ain’t poker if you’re not using real money. Journalism ain’t journalism unless the stakes are real. And that’s what these Esquire partnerships bring to the table.

Jeff Howe is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University. This post was previously published at the Knight Blog.

Some thoughts about the meltdown of The New Republic

I don’t have much to offer on the meltdown of The New Republic except for a few inchoate thoughts. Many people have written many things, but it seems to me that the one essential read is Lloyd Grove’s piece in The Daily Beast. Now then:

1. Despite owner Chris Hughes’ excruciatingly awful behavior last week, it still isn’t clear to me why everyone resigned. When then-owner Marty Peretz fired editor Michael Kelly in 1997, mass resignations were threatened, but only one writer — media columnist William Powers — actually walked out the door. Kelly was an enormously popular, charismatic figure, but maybe the lack of solidarity was in recognition of how far he had dragged the supposedly liberal magazine to the right. Still, does no one want to see if there might be some positive aspects to Hughes’ plan?

2. And yet — if Hughes wants a digital media startup, why didn’t he just do it instead of buying TNR and turning it into something else? That makes no sense. And yet again — if Hughes is looking for the kind of print/online/events strategy that has transformed The Atlantic, as media-business analyst Ken Doctor argues, how could that possibly be a bad thing? I’d be the first to admit that I don’t like The Atlantic nearly as much as I did when it was a staid, Boston-based monthly. But it has managed to combine success, influence and seriousness, and that’s nothing to be scoffed at.

3. During Peretz’s long ownership, TNR was derided not just for its lack of diversity but for its hostility to any steps aimed at ensuring racial justice. I wrote for TNR twice. The first time, in 1998, was about the departure of Boston Globe columnists Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle for fabricating, and Barnicle for plagiarizing as well. When I received the edited version of my piece, I saw that someone had inserted some harsh anti-affirmative action language. (The idea was that both Smith, an African-American, and Barnicle, an Irish-American, had been beneficiaries of some sort of affirmative-action mindset.) I was appalled, and fortunately was able to get the language removed before publication. But it showed what kind of thinking prevailed at TNR.

4. Among the former TNR editors lashing out at Hughes is Andrew Sullivan, who, among other things, once gave over the cover of the magazine to the authors of “The Bell Curve,” a racist tome that argued that black people just aren’t as intelligent as whites. Sullivan also published an infamous, falsehood-filled article by Betsy McCaughey that trashed the Clinton health plan and may have contributed to its defeat. Sullivan did far more harm to TNR than Hughes, but now he’s seen as a defender of tradition. (For more on the sins of TNR during the Peretz era, see Charlie Pierce.)

5. Probably the worst thing you can say about Hughes is that he decided to blow up The New Republic just as it was rediscovering its footing as a liberal journal. Editor Franklin Foer, by all accounts, was doing a fine job before Hughes fired him. But what is the role of a magazine like TNR in the digital age? The policy pieces in which it specialized are everywhere. Hughes could have kept it going as a small, money-losing journal, of course. But there was a time when TNR was an influential small, money-losing journal. Those days are long gone, as Ezra Klein notes at Vox. You can’t blame Hughes for wanting to try something different. If his behavior had been less reprehensible, maybe he could have brought his talented staff and contributors along for the ride.