Making things public and the decline of newspapers

When I was reading Anne Kingston’s interesting story in Maclean’s magazine about the future of my Globe and Mail newspaper, she referred to a masterful essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” by Clay Shirky and this quote that has been rolling around in my mind ever since: “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves—the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem.”

Clay Shirky (one of the clearest and most honest writers on this subject) of course is right. I’m writing this morning on my iPhone. In a couple of minutes I will make this public on my blog. But that is not the end of the story, or a reason why we are not losing something of great significance to democracy when we lose our newspapers, as it now seems we almost certainly will, at least in their paper form.

What we are losing is not information being made public, but a meeting place, a place where a community would encounter stories that concerned and intested all of us. Newspapers have made collective action possible.

I am writing at a desk that was once used by a great newspaper columnist. He composed his columns on a typewriter when he was in this corner of the world. He made his revisions with a pen and then sent the pages by fax to an editor at a major big city daily newspaper who had the piece typed. It was then returned to an editor who put it electronically on a page. In the morning that column would be read by several hundred thousand people.

If that column were written today, I could read it on my iPhone, for free, which is how I read Anne Kingston’s piece.

So herein lies the problem for the future of newspapers. In the virtual world they are no longer grounded in time or place, and journalists are giving away their work. Online publishing trumps the printing industry’s expertise in making things public, and at the same time has created a void in our communities that is not being replaced by the information flowing into this little device I am holding in my hands.

As Shirky points out, few of us are willing to admit the magnitude of what is happening: “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

“There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

Working for a newspaper was the best job I ever had, despite the terrible hours and working conditions. It was the best job because on good days we helped our community become a more civilized place. We were participants in political life in the most profound sense. The columnist who sat at this desk believed that and when he pushed his papers into the fax machine certainly felt a sense of mission that is not there when I press the button at the bottom of my screen that says “published” but means something else altogether.

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‘Three strikes and you’re fired’

The story of the firing of St. Thomas University journalism student Matt McCann has now officially gone international. A campaigner for accuracy in newspapers comes down on the side of our student.

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Since when is misspelling a name a firing offense at a newspaper?

The Toronto Star reports this morning on the firing of St. Thomas University student Matt McCann from the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. McCann is the reporter who was shown the door after writing a story about a group of University of New Brunswick professors who were protesting the awarding of an honourary degree to Premier Shawn Graham.

Interesting story, with comments from the TJ, which continues to maintain that McCann was fired for performance reasons, not because the University of New Brunswick complained about the story.

TJ editor Shawna Richer is quoted as saying: “The editor didn’t make the mistakes. … The number one thing the kid did, he spelled a proper name wrong, and that was the tipping point.”

You can find my defense of Matt McCann here. I have little to add, other than to ask if misspelling a proper name is a firing offense at any newspaper in the free world?

It just so happens that there is a Canadian journalist who is an expert on newspaper errors. The Poynter Institute has published an interview with Craig Silverman who runs a blog called Regret the Error: Mistakes Happen that documents the fascinating world of newspaper corrections. His interest in the subject began in the summer of 2004 when he read the following correction in the Lexington Herald-Leader: “It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.” He launched his blog soon after, recognizing that this was obviously a rich area for exploration.

In his interview, Silverman notes that studies have found that between 40 and 60 per cent of news stories contain factual errors. In Silverman’s view, far too many of these errors aren’t corrected. He suggests the best way to address this problem is to create an atmosphere of openness around errors and corrections. In other words, it is not bad reporters who make mistakes – everyone does. Reporters and editors should be encouraged to point out their errors and correct them. We need to remove the stigma from the mistake. Nowhere does he suggest a misspelling of a name is a firing offense, or should be. In fact, he suggests that this punitive approach would result in fewer errors being corrected at all.

He says in the interview:

There are two essential things journalists should know about errors:

1. Everyone, regardless of their level of training or experience (or lack thereof), will make them. Here’s what Ariel Hart, a fact checker at the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote: “Pound for pound, the most mistake-packed article I have ever checked was written by a Pulitzer Prize winner.” We are all fallible. Accept this and understand that:

2. Errors have a provenance. They should not be explained away with vague excuses like “I was sloppy” or “I messed up.” They occur because of a set of circumstances, and the same set of circumstances can produce an error again and again. We have to take a larger view of error and examine how our people, technologies, processes and sources play a part in causing them. Spell checkers cause errors. The way our brains process language causes errors. Handing a story from one editor to another causes errors.

If we take the time to examine exactly why errors occur, then we can begin to prevent them.

We have much to learn about the true root causes of press errors. A shift in how we perceive and examine them could reveal a lot, and put us on the right path.

By the way, the Toronto Star reported that Matt McCann is working at a Toronto flower shop. He is, in fact, working at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. I’m sure the Star regrets the error.

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In defence of Matt McCann

On May 12, the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal published a story written by Matt McCann, a St. Thomas University journalism student. The story was about a group of UNB professors who were circulating a letter objecting to the university’s decision to award an honorary degree to Premier Shawn Graham. After the story was published, Mr. McCann was fired. In recent days, his firing has become a public issue. Mr. McCann did interviews with CBC, and the Telegraph-Journal responded publicly, stating in its weekend edition that the CBC story had “no regard for facts or truth.” Shawna Richer, the Telegraph-Journal editor, said that Mr. McCann was fired for “performance reasons.”

Until the Telegraph-Journal story appeared on the weekend, I had no intention of saying anything publicly about this matter even though I wasn’t happy about what had happened to my student. I spoke with the publisher, Jamie Irving, and the editor, and told them that I hold Mr. McCann in high regard. I also respect their right to run their newspaper as they see fit, and so I felt I had done all I could. However, now that Mr. McCann has been accused in public of writing a story that “contained a number of factual errors” and was unbalanced, and that his performance on this story constituted grounds for dismissal, I feel I must defend him. For if I had been held to the same standard, I never would have had a career in journalism.

On a spring morning a couple of decades ago, I wrote my first story for the Evening Times-Globe in Saint John, which was then the sister newspaper of the Telegraph-Journal. When I arrived back in my hometown, I was kind of a hot shot, at least in my own mind. I had come from Newfoundland where I had been winning journalism awards at a muckraking weekly called The Sunday Express. But that paper had stopped publishing and I was on the City Hall beat in Saint John and not all that happy about being there. I wanted to be breaking big stories. Instead, I was toiling in the trenches. I can’t remember exactly what my first story was about, but I do remember interviewing and quoting in the story a woman that I called “Linda Collerin,” who was one of the operators of the Cherry Brook Zoo.

The newspaper went to press about noon and hit the streets and later that afternoon the city editor, a veteran newsman named Bruce Peters stopped by my desk to tell me I had gotten a couple of things wrong in the story, including the spelling of Linda Collerin’s name. Bruce shook his head sadly and said in his soft voice (I don’t ever remember him raising his voice). “both names.” I felt the blood rush to my head. I frantically checked the clippings file on the zoo, and there she was: Lynda Collrin. Damn. Mr. Peters walked back to his desk, and I learned the first of many lessons in a daily newsroom. But I still had a job and Mr. Peters never mentioned it again.

(Shawna Richer was working in that newsroom also, on that very day. We go back a long way in this business and I know she understands that my disagreement with her on this matter is just that, and nothing personal. It’s never a pleasant task to have to disagree with friends in a public space. But sometimes, we have to do what we have to do.)

When Mr. McCann submitted his story about the professors who were objecting to Premier Shawn Graham being awarded an honorary degree, the editors at the newspaper put the story on the front page, and made it the top story of the day. It was accompanied by a photograph of a member of the UNB history department sitting in a chair with a stern look on his face. That photograph was the largest piece of art on the page. The editors, not Mr. McCann, made the story a big deal in that edition of the newspaper.

On May 13, Mr. McCann was fired. Last week, he spoke to reporters at the CBC about what happened, and the subsequent CBC stories didn’t explicitly state as fact, but suggested by inference, that that Mr. McCann’s story had made the premier look bad and therefore he had been fired.

On Saturday, the Telegraph-Journal published its version of the story of Mr. McCann’s firing in which editor Shawna Richer said the UNB story contained a number of factual errors, including the misspelling of a name, failing to report a person’s proper title, and misreporting the premier’s university degrees. That sounds like a nasty list of errors, until we look at the specifics.

Here are the errors:
• Error #1: Stephen Strople’s name was spelled Stropel.
• Error #2: Mr. Strople’s title is “university secretary for UNB”, not “university secretary for UNB Fredericton,” as Mr. McCann reported.
• Error #3: Shawn Graham’s degree from UNB is in phys ed, not education, as Mr. McCann reported. The premier received an education degree from STU.

Ms. Richer also said the story “did not adequately portray both sides of the story.” In other words, the story was unbalanced. I recognize that this is a judgment call, but in my view the story was balanced. It was a story about the letter of protest circulating on campus. It was not a story about whether Shawn Graham deserved the honour or whether he had done right or wrong with regard to post secondary education. That kind of story could have been assigned. But it wasn’t. Mr. McCann filed a story about the letter and protest, therefore the protestors voices were more prominent in the story. He did include comments from Mr. Strople.

The question of balance, and the question of the play the story received in the newspaper (overplayed by a country mile in my view) would be fodder for a good old-fashioned newsroom argument. The wonderful managing editor character in the television series The Wire remarks that newsroom arguments are an essential part of making a good newspaper.

“You know what a healthy newsroom is? Gus asks. “It’s a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time.”

It’s also a place where reporters make factual errors all the time. With this much deadline driven writing and the frailties of being human, mistakes appear in newspapers. That’s why the New York Times runs a list of corrections in every edition. Here are some recent corrections from just one edition of the Times:

• An article on May 30 about the fight over affirmative action in the context of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court misidentified a case involving New Haven firefighters on which she and two other appellate judges ruled. The name of the case, now before the Supreme Court, is Ricci v. DeStefano, not Ricci v. New Haven.
• An article last Saturday about the sentencing of a New Jersey man who leaked classified United States military documents to an Israeli agent in the 1980s misspelled, at one point, the surname of the federal judge who imposed the sentence. As noted elsewhere in the article, he is William H. Pauley III, not Pawley.
• An obituary last Saturday about Franklin H. Littell, a father of academic studies of the Holocaust, misstated the given name of his second wife, who survives him. She is Marcia Sachs Littell, not Maria. The obituary also described incompletely the outcome of a libel suit against Dr. Littell by the political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. A court did decide that Mr. Buckley had been libeled when Dr. Littell described him in a book as a “fellow traveler” of fascism. But an appeals court held that that comment was nondefamatory, constitutionally protected opinion.

As you can see, the correct spelling of all names plagues even the New York Times. I would bet my house that none of these errors resulted in firings at the Times. I would suggest Jamie Irving (who worked with me when he was an intern himself) and Shawna Richer also had the good fortune not to be fired when they made errors during their reporting careers, especially when they were starting out.

There is a famous moment in the Watergate story when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein make a terrible error in fact that was published on page one of the Washington Post. The White House communications team launched a verbal assault on the Post and especially editor Ben Bradlee, calling him a blatant supporter of the Democrats who was making up news to harm President Richard Nixon. Bradlee’s response? He sat down to write a correction, then wrote simply that the Post stands by the story and said something like, “Fuck it, let’s stand by our boys.”

In the news business, we are always under fire. Someone, somewhere, takes issue with something in almost every story. So that’s why we need to stand by each other when the going gets tough.

The Telegraph-Journal story this weekend said that it “stands by its decision to fire Matt McCann for the performance reasons outlined.”

The newspaper has the right to set its own standards, and stand by who it wants to stand by.

In this case, I disagree. And so, for what it’s worth, I’m standing by our boy.

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‘A neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter’

David Simon, the former Baltimore newspaperman and creator of The Wire, recently testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the decline of newspapers. He argued that the newspaper collapse has serious consequences for democracy, that citizen journalists and bloggers can’t replace journalists, and that we need to be looking at non-profit models for the newspapers of the future. The fifth season of The Wire (from which this photo is taken) showed us how much Simon loves newspapers and understands what they do. When he speaks on this subject I listen.

Here’s some of what he said:

It is nice to get stuff for free, of course. And it is nice that more people can have their say in new media. And while some of our internet commentary is – as with any unchallenged and unedited intellectual effort – rampantly ideological, ridiculously inaccurate and occasionally juvenile, some of it is also quite good, even original.

Understand here that I am not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But democratized and independent though they may be, you do not – in my city — run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall, or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars and union halls where police officers gather. You do not see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You do not see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.

Why? Because high-end journalism – that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place — is a profession; it requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history – no more than the last fifty years or so – a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modem newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information.

The idea of this is absurd, yet to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don’t know what they don’t know – which is a dangerous state for any class of folk – and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere. Indeed, the very phrase citizen journalist strikes my ear as nearly Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

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Big change-up at the Globe

See Truth and Stories for the internal memo outlining the big changes in the Globe and Mail newsroom. Here is the official Globe story. Developing…

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Mulroney drama at the Globe

Edward Greenspon, the editor of the Globe and Mail, has written to the counsel of the Oliphant inquiry to refute parts of yesterday’s testimony of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The response was prompted by Mr. Mulroney’s strange tangent when being questioned about his response to the three-part series written by lawyer William Kaplan and published by the Globe in 2003. Mr. Mulroney suggested the Globe killed part four of the series for mysterious reasons. He said he was counting on part four and it never appeared. That, Mr. Mulroney suggested, was a story worth investigating. Mr. Greenspon says in his letter that there was no part four, and moreover, Mr. Mulroney tried to convince him not to run the stories, which detailed the infamous cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber. He writes: “It may be that what Mr. Mulroney is referring to is information he offered me in an effort to induce The Globe and Mail not to publish Mr. Kaplan’s third article revealing that Mr. Mulroney had accepted cash payments from Mr. Schreiber. When he found out that the Globe intended to publish Mr. Kaplan’s story, Mr. Mulroney contacted me several times trying to appeal to me not to publish the story. In at least one of the conversations, Mr. Mulroney offered to trade me information about a story that he said was explosive and would be of greater interest to The Globe than Mr. Kaplan’s story about the cash payments.”

So Mr. Greenspon has now weighed in. We’ll see how this unfolds. I should note that the publication of the Kaplan series was not the Globe’s finest hour. In fact, the newspaper buried the lead. The reference to the cash payments appeared many paragraphs down in the story, and it was a kind of passing reference. I recall reading that and saying to myself – cash payments? What the hell is that information doing way down here? It would be interesting to hear the story of what was happening inside the newsroom at the time because my memory of that series was that it was one of the strangest and confusing series of news stories I had ever read. Obviously there were a lot of people feeling pressure all over the place. And perhaps rightly so. The stakes were and continue to be high.

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Lens

A cool new feature at the New York Times. Photojournalism – Photography, Video and Visual Journalism Archives – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com.

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In defense of Stevie Cameron

I’ve been following the testimony and cross examination of former prime minister Brian Mulroney at the Oliphant inquiry and note that from time to time he drops the name of journalist Stevie Cameron. He refers to her as a Mulroney hater and the cause of much of this trouble in which he now finds himself. Stevie doesn’t need me to defend her, but I want to say a couple of things for the record. St. Thomas University hosted Stevie last fall for eight weeks and she was a lovely guest and generous teacher, developing relationships with our journalism students that have continued long after she left us. She has become a mentor to many of our students and we couldn’t be more pleased. Finally, if Mr. Mulroney doesn’t like the place where he finds himself today, I can say this: He is the one who accepted envelopes of cash from German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber in secret hotel meetings, and then failed to disclose these cash transactions when he was suing the government of Canada a decade ago in an action in which this information was entirely relevant (I could go on). Mr. Mulroney maintains the only mistake he made was not asking for a cheque (see yesterday’s testimony). The issues run a little deeper than that and he has no one but himself to blame for the position in which he finds himself today. The continued shots lobbed in Ms. Cameron’s direction are unseemly. But then so is this whole spectacle.

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On the White House and Hannah Arendt

After having spent several weeks this winter and spring at St. Thomas University reading political philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the “banality of evil”, this column in the New York Times about the Bush White House and torture appeared particularly frightening and enlightening. “Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it,” writes Frank Rich. “But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to ‘protect’ us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war.” As Hannah Arendt reminds us, in political life obedience and support are the same thing. We can’t just hang this one on Bush and Cheney, walk away and say we’re moving on. How did this happen? There needs to be a reckoning, or as Rich puts it, a reaffirmation of the rule of law.

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