An editor asks by email a question I hear often as journalists address the challenges of digital journalism: “Is it better to be first, or be right?”
Three times recently, the editor said, his staff was beaten (not on breaking news), but the competition had major errors in its reports. “When we published, we got the stories right, though, again, not first,” the editor said.
I regard this as a false choice, but if you must present it that way, my answer is that you always want to be right. Accuracy is one of our highest values as journalists, and you don’t sacrifice accuracy for the sake of competition.
The reason I don’t like the choice, though, is that I think it is used too often as an excuse or as cover by journalists who have been beaten. Being first with the news is also high on the scale of journalistic values. You want to be first and right, and if the competition is beating you, you need to step up your game, rather than seeking cover.
I believe accuracy and verification become more important in digital journalism than in print journalism. The daily deadlines of print usually give you hours to nail down the facts before you have to publish. The constant deadlines of digital publishing mean that you publish when you have the facts verified.
Reporters and editors in the print-only days frequently had stories where we thought we had the facts nailed down and a source turned out to be wrong, taking the story in a different direction before we reached the deadline. We got the story right, but if the deadline had come earlier, we would have been wrong.
When you can publish as soon as you get facts verified, you cannot relax your standards of verification. In fact, you should strengthen them (my accuracy and verification tips and accuracy checklist and Craig Silverman’s accuracy checklist will help).
What does change in digital journalism is the standard of completeness. If you have nailed down the central fact of a story (doesn’t have to be a breaking story; could be a routine daily story on the beat), you can publish the basic fact (and be first), noting that you are still developing the story. Then you keep working on the details (and your initial bulletin allows you to crowdsource some of the details) and report them as you nail them down.
This applies in liveblogging, which I strongly advocate as a new form of telling stories as they unfold. You will hear things at an event that you don’t know to be true. You certainly can report that someone said something, particularly if the setting is a public meeting or if the source is in a position to know. But you still are responsible for the accuracy of the information you publish. Report what the source said, if the fact that she said it is newsworthy, but note that you have not yet verified what the source said. And try to verify quickly, even if you have to take a pause from the liveblog.
With constant deadlines, you will make some mistakes (you made mistakes with daily deadlines, too). When you do, correct your errors quickly and candidly (don’t blame sources; you need to take responsibility for your accuracy and your errors) and examine your verification procedures and standards to see where you failed and whether you need to be more diligent.
Here’s my answer: You always want to be right. And you always want to be first. If you aren’t managing both, you need to work harder.
I prefer to think of the highest standard for journalism as being not accuracy, but truth. I remember the discussion in the movie “Absence of Malice” about how something can be accurate but not true, and vice versa. For example, the statement “The White House chief of staff’s influence on legislative policy has waned in recent months because of heated disagreements with other presidential advisers, according to several sources” could be completely accurate. But the truth is contained in the context — Are the sources the “other advisers,” or people close to the chief of staff? Do these sources have characteristics that could imply an agenda in leaking the information? Is the situation temporary or will it linger? Did it develop suddenly or over a long period? What does it mean for the future direction of policy? To what degree is the statement, sans the qualifier “according to several sources,” accurate in and of itself? Is it actually necessary to construct a dialectic around the statement — “this one said, that one said” — if the statement is found to be true?
Good stories explore all of these questions. In fact, good journalism means asking and answering questions until there aren’t any more. Do I mean that a story isn’t worth publishing until that point? Does every bit of information a journalist holds need to be in a story? Of course not … but at all times, whatever a journalist puts out should be as close as possible to the truth. Be up front what you don’t know yet, and how it affects any conclusions the reader/viewer might draw from the information. A continuous awareness of the big picture is essential, especially where a piece of information has a high degree of inherent news value — or appears to, without sufficient context.
I acknowledge that “truth” is an unattainable goal. But the quixotic effort to reach that standard — not “objectivity” or “accuracy” or “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” — is what drives the greatest journalistic accomplishments. There is no reason that the same standard cannot be applied at any level or stage of journalistic endeavor.
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Thanks for some good points. I think I was clear that journalists are responsible for the accuracy (and, I’ll add, the truth) of what sources tell us. I have blogged repeatedly that Judith Miller’s excuse blaming sources was bogus. I’ll agree that truth is a higher value than accuracy. An accurate statement might fall short of truth on some rare occasions because of inadequate context. However, I question whether a statement can be true if it fails to be accurate. That sounds like Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” And I don’t equate accuracy with objectivity. Too many journalists use objectivity as an excuse to publish did-not-did-too stories that are balanced but neither true nor accurate. Our obligation is to learn, verify and publish the facts.
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Fair enough, I’m not really arguing with you, but more with the tendency of journalists everywhere to use what I think is a flawed lexical framework. This is just a drum I’ve been beating for a while. And yes, the pithy dichotomies of “Absence of Malice” notwithstanding, I don’t think you can have truth without accuracy. For me, the main issue is context, wherein the truth always lives … and news without context, which is the norm these days, makes every bit of itself a potential mine in a minefield.
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Steve, getting away from the philosophy for a moment and towards the the business side of things – your solution to the truth vs time conundum (to ‘tell what you actually know now and then follow up with what you learn later’) provides an excellent example of the way that the cultural constraints of an incumbent industry (in this case, reporters which maintain a culture developed in support of traditional news print) can/does lead to imminent Disruption of those incumbents.
To understand this connection, we begin by recognizing that under the tradtional newspaper paradigm, publication is done once per day and as such there are time deadlines associated with story reporting.
In that system, when news is developing at a rate where the difference between what is known at deadline vs 2 hours after deadline is of substantial import, then publishing the latter, far more complete version 2 hours prior to its confirmation can lead to signficant comparative advantage – even of some part of it is innacurate as a result. “Scooping” the competition in this way (to the extent that the resulting innacuracies are tolerated by readers) can and does lead to competitive advantage to the (newsprint paradigm) publisher and as such can be expected to benefit the career of the reporter – so these kinds of actions become part of the supporting culture.
To carry that cultural paradigm (rather than the approach you propose) into the world of electronic publication is not only unecessary (precisely due to the viability of your alternative approach), but could quickly become disadvantageous given the declining extent to which innacuracy is tolerated by the readership (as the lessening need to be tolerant of it becomes increasingly understood).
What may be more important from the business perspective and further drive an increased potential for Disruption (capitalized to specify the Christensen protocol) are the advantages that can be developed using your suggested approach that could (and would) never be considered when operating under constraints of the prior technology.
Consider that at the conclusion of the first (short but known to be accurate) installment of a report, one can use todays technology place a link where the reader can enter contact information where they wish to be contacted by email or text message when additions are made to the story (which of course serves to lock the reader into your publication above others). One can further extending this advantage by securing permission to send the story updates by text message or e-mail, in order to save the reader the trouble of browising the web page. Getting this permission from the reader can readily lead to getting permission to contact that reader with other breaking news, which then further locks in the reader’s attention, and provides for revenue opportunities which come with documentable added attention (“eyeballs”).
Because these kinds of possibilities were not available under the incumbent technology, it makes sense that they would never be considered as a possibility by those coming from the incumbent culture, so while they may eventually come to understand and accept the added dangers of reporting unconfirmed information, they are not as likely to perceive the potential benefits of the new technology and thus regard it as their enemy. – And as a result – they become simply more cannon fodder for the Disruption at hand.
For more information/involvement in the discussion on Disruptive Innovation, feel free to join us at the Disruptive Innovation forum at LinkedIn
Rick Mueller
http://www.linkedin.com/in/decisionscience
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Interesting points, Rick. As you may know, I am a longtime fan of Clayton Christensen and his teachings about disruptive innovation. He was our partner in the Newspaper Next project when I was at the American Press Institute. If only the newspaper industry had followed more of his/our advice …
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Fascinating discussion on our rapidly changing media. Thanks!
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