Is Social Media Good (for Journalism)?

This panel was moderated by Jerry Murdock and included Pete Cashmore, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Arianna Huffington, Vivian Schiller, Orville Schell, and Mark Whitaker.  It took place on stage at the Belly Up as part of the Aspen Ideas Festival.  The ostensible theme was “Is Social Media Good For Journalism?”

Peter Jackson 02 Jul 2011Peter Jackson

The quote of the night goes to Arianne Huffington.  In trying to explain the value of social media, she noted that it sometimes plays a significant role in keeping stories alive that traditional media might otherwise abandon.  Painting with a broad brush, she suggested that old media has ADD, while new media has OCD.  In other words, old media tends to move on to the next story, no matter how trivial (“Squirrel!”), while new media sometimes latches onto some piece of prey, like a shark, and shakes it obsessively until it’s dead.

The panel as a whole eventually admitted that citizen journalism doesn’t really work, regardless of the occasional ‘scoop’ (plane crash in the Hudson River) or alerting function (Osama Bin Laden raid).  Yes, first-hand tweets and pictorials can be good, but real reporting is more than that.  Joe and Josephine Public aren’t trained to interview and investigate, nor should they, for the most part.  Crowdsourcing the analysis of Sarah Palin’s emails was a dumb idea; even Rush Limbaugh is right sometimes.

Pete Cashmore reinforced a perception I have been forming about his generation when he said that all news can be regarded as biased.  One might judge this to be cynicism, but it really isn’t.  It just means that you take everything you read under advisement, considering the source, and factor it into everything else that you see and hear and know.

If all of America started doing this, the country might actually have a chance of solving its problems.  Instead, many people believe implicitly whatever they read in the New York Times or the National Review.  Orville Schell was skeptical that technology was making people smarter, but my sense is that social media mavens are more sophisticated than we think (even when we take that into account).

This brand of pragmatism is entirely consistent with something John Seely Brown said in another session: ‘Meaning is content in context.’  I can read something written by a serial killer and make up my mind about whether to believe it or not based on that contextual knowledge.  Every truth doesn’t have to be uttered by a saint, neither is everything a saint says true.  Unreliable media organs can get some things right (see Rush above).

There was a brief tussle about the value of comments (who reads them?).  Mark Whitaker thinks they are fairly worthless, but perhaps not if they were ranked by sanity rather than recency.  (Surely there’s an app for that?)  Rajiv Chandrasekaran talked a lot of sense about the relationship between new and old media, and how high value contributors might earn free passes behind news paywalls for their pains.  Vivian Schiller, having recently moved from NPR to NBC, was also bullish about an accommodation between the new and the old, in which each will find its proper place, the one validating and verifying the other.

So, after many twists and turns, it seems that social media is (or will be) good for journalism.  For what it’s worth, I tend to agree.

Peter Jackson is chief scientist and vice president of Thomson Reuters, where he’s been since 1995. He has built a group of 40 research staff with expertise in the areas of document search, text and data mining, and machine learning. Jackson is also responsible for university collaboration with respect to joint research projects. His most recent book, Natural Language Processing for Online Applications, came out in a second edition in 2007. From 1992 to 1995, Jackson taught post-graduate classes in artificial intelligence and parallel computing at Clarkson University in New York and was a visiting professor at Singapore Polytechnic. In 1988, he moved to the US and became a principal scientist at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories. Before coming to the US, he taught in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University from 1983 to 1988 and wrote the textbook Introduction to Expert Systems.



  • Tom Golway

    Peter thanks for sharing the information and your insights.

     

    I would have to disagree with the opinion on citizen
    journalism and would say that the question of citizen journalism isn’t about if
    it works, but how to incorporate it into mainstream media.  On the question of being trained to interview
    and investigate, I would pose the same question about many professional
    journalists.

     

    The statement around news being biased, I’d say it is almost
    impossible to be completely objective.
    Humans seen and listen with “filters” which interpret content based on
    their life experience.  The story is
    already biased before it gets written.
    The editorial process can provide greater balance, but never complete
    objectivity.

     

    Of course in the real world, at times is seems that middle
    of the road isn’t interesting.  Too many
    people want to hear a biased spin on the story, especially if it is line with
    their preference.  At time, it does seem
    like objectivity doesn’t sell.

     

    Well those are just my comments, not that they will be read by
    Mark Whitaker, although I have the only comment and therefore am ranked highest
    by both sanity and recency, he might.

     

    • Peter Jackson

      Well, the jury”s still out on your sanity, and I”m taking away your recency :-)

      Your point about citizen journalism is well taken.  The NYT and other papers have blotted their copybook a couple of times in recent years, and of course we have the recent ”body parts in Texas” snafu.  I think we can expect more unhealthy interactions between new and old media before we get it right.

      But I think we will get it right eventually.

      Re bias, I think that this used to be within bounds, but now it”s out of bounds, with people blaming the government for everything that bothers them.  This has been a great selling job by the ”Big Govt” crowd, but the fact that everyone drinks Coke and Pepsi doesn”t mean that it”s good for you.

  • Brian Dall

    Ah, Peter this was great commentary!  We”ll miss you.  I”ll miss you.