Look mum, hyperlocal news with no hands!

The New York Times article published April 12 ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers chronicles the idealised dream of robots amassing neighbourhood news using feeds from authorities such as government agencies and police. A bunch of start-ups are pushing the envelope on hyperlocal news, mashing citizen journalism and bloggers to produce a real-time feed of community life. The jury is well and truly out on how effective this type of coverage will be – but it is an interesting experiment that challenges to some degree traditional models of journalism.

In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods. 

A cautionary word for the unwise and unwary. The most credible information may not be the police statistics supplied by the police department, as the people of New York know only too well. The New York Times ran many a Page One article on the topic.

Crime has been dropping dramatically for the past six years, to the lowest level since the 1960′s, when the late-20th-century crime wave exploded in the United States. But now charges are being raised that police commanders in several cities have falsified their crime statistics to keep up with the nationwide decline, and this is raising concern that some crime data may be skewed.

In the past few months, senior police officials have been demoted or forced to resign because some crime statistics were manipulated in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Boca Raton, Fla. New York Times

Likewise, any government information in just about any form has the word SPIN welded on.

Imagine how delighted these spin doctors must be, knowing that their information will be dispersed so widely, so easily, with nary a question or challenge before it is devoured by a reader or amplified by a community of bloggers addicted to almost mindless linking and retweeting. A far cry from the newsroom wastepaper basket where so many “press releases” usually end up. Now, this is not a rejection of citizen journalism and the exciting future of data transparency. No way. This is a call to action: to be on the lookout for the spam of misinformation that will swirl about as robots, not people, become the information spine for new era local news portals.

It will be a rare breed of journalist that can interrogate an rss feed about the reliability of its sources!

Why opinion writers shouldn’t break news

Let me make this clear. This is not a breaking-news opinion piece. Facts will be thin on the ground here. Straight out opinion: that’s what we’re talking about. Opinion writers (read bloggers) are fascinated by news. Not that they really want to report the news. They just want to have their say. And mostly they are never short of a view or position.

Sometimes, they might stumble across a great piece of news. They might have overheard something. They might have seen something. Remember, as opinion writers, they have spent months, perhaps years, spewing their opinions forth, inflicting their views on everyone around them. These days, they measure their influence by clicks, diggs and connections and can track their performance with pinpoint accuracy. Their followers and adversaries know them too well by now – and mostly their opinions on a range of specialised passions are seriously welded on. Immoveable type. They are known for the ferocity of their viewpoints.

Still, they chat and gossip and occasionally listen.

And when they nail that tidbit of news, they want to be the news breaker. But not in the usual way. They don’t really want to report the news. Trust me. They just want to blurt the news out as opinion. They just want to say: “Guess what I heard today – blah blah blah – isn’t that outrageous and here’s why”. The news to them is simply a platform for their next opinion. Actually, it’s more sinister than that. In a sleight of hand, the commentator seeks to validate their opinions, no matter how wild, using their new-found opportunity to deliver facts. The opinion writer doesn’t listen for news in the same manner as a professional reporter. They know what they saw. They heard the conversation with their own ears. It’s a goddamn fact so why do we need to check it, to verify it, to balance it by going to the source for an explanation? 

A good reporter is trained to listen, not so their notes are accurate (although that’s vital!), but to seek out the gaps, the misrepresentations, the fibs, the misunderstandings, the spin. They ask questions, and the questions become more specific, seeking the detail that will support or shoot down the story. “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,” describes the dilemma of a journalist who is under pressure to publish a story that is not supported by the facts. For the opinion writer, it’s a no-brainer. Opinion can fly in the face of facts. 

The audience – whether a newspaper reader or an avid consumer of blogs – learns over time that facts do matter. Eventually, their marriage to a strident columnist will become a source of embarrassment when the facts speak too clearly. They then seek clarity and a sense of fundamental truth. And they learn to mistrust the closely-held opinions of columnists as a pseudo-source of factual information. Yes, columnists are entertaining, but are not to be trusted.

Now, a reporter who gets a fact wrong will correct it. The newspaper may publish a correction or even an apology. The opinion writer cannot and will not concede so easily. Steeped in their bias, uncompromising and unapologetic, the commentator cannot be a credible news breaker. Whatever they say will need to be checked by someone else. Sometimes, they expect you, the reader, to do that legwork. 

You know where this is going. Now that bloggers have taken over the universe – and traditional journalism is threatened – who will break the news globally, nationally, locally and be believed? Not the government. Not the robots. Not the warring chaos of the blogging community. Nope. The unregulated, free market of opinion may well send trust to the grave.

Twitter and the unrest in Thailand

The unrest in Thailand this week revealed how politically naive people (like myself) can be hoodwinked on Twitter. The great unwashed (myself included) take many things on face value – so we tend towards believing a first-hand account from a major news event. In Bangkok, the “redshirts” were creating havoc on the streets, burning buses, hijacking gas tankers, great throngs of them facing off the army. Twitter, still nascent in many respects, produced a constant stream of first-hand accounts, or so I thought. We began following these accounts at the Geelong Advertiser (@geelongaddy) and made contact with an American copy editor from the Oregonian for a news report. Yep.  He was who he said he was. We checked him out. But then, as the protests continued, allegations of “yellowshirt fascists” were levelled at some of the other Tweeters. All was not as it seemed.

While the “redshirts” were protesting on the streets, the “yellowshirts” dominated the Twitter accounts – and so influenced media organisations everywhere with their pointed view of the conflict. At least one British TV newsroom spent considerable hours trying to organise live reports from these political activitists without knowing their political agenda. One Tweeter @andrewspooner made a point of revealing the yellowshirts at regular intervals.

“Warning to fellow tweeters -several PAD (described by Asian Human Rights Commission as fascist) activists tweeting here,” said Spooner. And; 

• “Let’s be fair – how many poor #redshirt Thais use twitter? most don’t even own PC or have ever used internet.
• “PAD now mobilising on twitter -be warned that most Thais posting here are quoting only pro-govt PAD sources – trust BBC/CNN more.
• “Thai twitter community is not representative of Thai population – foreign tweeters need to be aware of that
• “A point for int tweeters-most thais wealthy enough to write english & own pc will be yellowshirt supporters – #redshirt are generally poor.”

The accused “yellowshirts” did not hide, but staunchly defended their political affiliation - and so the live news coverage became a tit-for-tat Twitter slanging match in virtual reality while real people died on the streets of Bangkok.

Also revealed* – some of the live reports translating Thai TV bulletins emanated from Bali and another Tweeter, @BangkokBill, claimed on his blog to be ex-U.S. Army in the 4th PSYOP group! He says he is now a manager at an English school in Thailand and has spent 3 years in the country. He was in the thick of the action, uploading hundreds of pictures to flickr. 

Increasingly, the traditional media is being challenged to report news instantly, because the new media audience of bloggers and tweeters is flooding RSS feeds and mobile phones with immediate, first-hand accounts. But, as we have seen in this one, recent, major news event, that same audience is not what it seems at first blush. There is a clear and present danger that  public perception can and will be easily manipulated by agent provocateurs and activitists in the absence of more rigorous verification of the facts.

Updated: Further discussion on this post:

That Twitter could be used for disinformation is not surprising. Just like any open network that anyone could join, it’s open for manipulation by anyone with an agenda. I don’t believe that social media inherently benefits the “good guys” over the “bad guys” – in most cases, the good guys just also happen to be rather progressive and forward-looking on a whole set of issues, technology included, so they are naturally more skillful at using the Internet. More

* Bangkok Bill has responded on his blog to this post and makes the following point.

 

Now maybe I am reading too much into this paragraph (please respond if I am Peter) but it seems that it is being implied that I am a Yellowshirt. If this is so I am a bit confused how being an ex-member of the 4th Psyop group and a manager at an English school makes one a Yellowshirt but I would love to hear the answer.

Now just to set the record straight. I don’t believe I am a Redshirt or a Yellowshirt. I honestly find the whole Thai political mess to be incredibly hard to decipher to the level where I can pick a clear “good guy” and “bad guy” in the current situation. Based on my experiences and knowledge I would say that both sides have good and bad parts to them – as to which side is better than the other I have no idea.

 

The rise of fact-based blogging

Read any blog, even this one, and opinion rules. It rules, because anyone can have an opinion and opinions are cheap. Every blog seeks comments, links comments, loves comments. Even this blog would love an unsolicited comment that might evolve into a discussion. But the basis of most blogs remains rooted in opinion. The typical blogger gleans their facts from other sources, whether original web sources or news media. Bloggers seldom reveal facts from their own research, unless it is in the form of a review. Bloggers love reviewing and critiquing. This website, that software, what the hell was Facebook thinking and so on. Short on facts, they enter a bidding war of opinion that drives a controversy without the steadying influence of substantive, verifiable facts. 

But as newspapers and conventional subsidised news media fail in the fragmented world of online advertising (it is advertising, not content, that is reshaping our news paradigm), then we face the prospect of far fewer facts finding their way to an audience that seeks truth. Traditional journalism models attempt to separate facts from opinion. Readers have demanded this after hundreds of years of news evolution. It would be so much easier if a newspaper could survive on a diet of opinion. Opinions are much cheaper to publish than hard-to-get facts. In most newspapers, however, opinion is a fraction of the content. Fact-based journalism provides the platform for analysis and opinion. Conversely, in the blogosphere opinions predominate – and in a bizarre distortion of the process, they become pseudo-facts through the sheer spread of their influence. Top bloggers assume god-like qualities with hundreds of thousands of followers – an almost religious experience for their devotees.

Credibility, authority, trust – these cornerstone brand values of traditional journalism – are being tested by the mob-rule of internet voices. While the mob may cheer the lynching of each news organisation biting the dust, what will replace the fact-gathering, often unpopular journalism, that might not sell a newspaper, but stops the mob from lynching the wrong person? Will it be the rise of fact-based blogging, devoid of opinion?