Despite State 29’s warning, I talked to Erin Crawford from the Register yesterday about the Iowa blogging community. (In the interest of full disclosure, I used to work at the Register).
It was a good conversation in which she asked me a number of questions: How did I get started blogging? Did I feel the pressure to keep posting? Did I feel like a member of the community? Did it feel good to be a member of the community? Why I started blogging? And of course some standard demographic type questions about where I live, what I do, my age, how many kids I have, etc?
In turn I got to ask her some questions.
I asked her why she left her editor position at the alternative paper Cityview. She indicated that the stress level and the atmosphere had got the point where the job was not fun anymore. In addition, an opportunity opened up at the Register; which was a nice fit. With the merger of Cityview and Point Blank, its probably better that she’s not there now to suffer through layoffs and turmoil.
I also asked her whether she sensed any apprehension from bloggers she interviewed regarding the context of bloggers vs. the mainstream media. She said that she hadn’t sensed this, but one person told her that he/she would post the interview on his/her blog. In addition, she said when writing stories she tries to “figure who or what is most affected and tell a story as it is.” This is not to say she doesn’t think about the context of the biases behind stories or the medium – but that’s not her focus when working on a story.
As I’ve suggested to many in newspapers, a better approach would be to move toward total transparency and reveal the context of a story. Instead of focusing only on the story, newspapers need to open up the blackbox that is the newsroom. Publish full transcripts of all interviews. Publish a list of all the people you talked to and why you talked to them. Publish the reasons behind editorial decisions about what stories run when and where they run in the paper. Publish why you chose to report on a particular story. Use cheap bandwidth and expose this information on the web to make up for expensive newsprint.
This openess may seem scary to people in the newsroom, but it will only serve the newspaper and the readers better. Readers already make up answers to fill the black hole that is the newsroom (“the paper’s too liberal”, “they don’t care about that person’s perspective”, “they left out that quote because it didn’t fit the biased story they were trying to tell”). You’ll only help yourselves by telling people the real answers to these questions.
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I agree with you about being more transparent. The internet makes that waaaay to easy, and it’s not like this is 1970 and you’d have to have some girl in the steno pool typing up trasncripts just so you could put them online. Everything we work with these days is electronic, just dump it all out there and let us news junkies filter it. What reason would a newspaper have for hiding things from it’s readers?
As a side note, I found this ( http://www2.indystar.com/articles/4/235596-7544-021.html ) yesterday while looking for an article on the VX Gas they are destroying in Indiana. Incidentally, this was the only story Google could dig up yesterday and today there are over 15. Shouldn’t this be news BEFORE it happened? They stated opening the canisters today (5/6/05)
The irony of the Indy Star article you point to is that it’s by Dennis Ryerson, former Editor of the Des Moines Register. I would love to see something like this every week in the papers. The Christian Science Monitor has a column every day called “Reporter’s Notebook” which gives context and editorial background to some of the stories they publish.
If people heard the real reasons some stories make it to the front page and some don’t, they would quit bitching about bias. The real reasons are much less interesting and include things like, story came in after deadline, we already covered a similar story today, slow news day – we had to put something on the front page, busy news day – we had to cut something, etc. None of these reasons provide much room for controversy.
That’s an idea I hadn’t thought of before… and it’s a darn good one. It would be a great way for the newspapers to say “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” or at least for them to acknowledge the changing landscape of news and buy into it rather than stick their heads in the sand.
Thanks for the comment GradualDazzle. Newspapers are strange places. Despite the usually progressive-liberal views they print, the organizations themselves are very conservative and slow to change. They have too many people who’ve been in the industry too long who tend to come up with recycled old ideas.
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