Om Malik is a guy whom I’ve known for some time and whom I’ve been able to bounce ideas off of regarding this and other deals, so it’s no surprise that I was able to compel him to write about us. With other writers, I wasn’t sure about the cachet which PubSub’s notoriety would carry, and whether the idea of it coming back (in the generic sense) was enough to tickle their interest.

The good news is it was. But what’s interesting is the lesson I got in realtime journalism, today, as the story unfolded.

I sent Michael Arrington an email via FaceBook, since we’ve never met before, to see if we could set up a briefing time for a pitch. I told him a little about what we were up to and what has transpired in PubSub’s past. I had also filled out the Contact Form at the TechCrunch web site not really expecting it to go anywhere important. What happened next, between Michael and me and Om, was unbelievably impressive.

Michael called me within 3 minutes of sending the FaceBook email. I was astonished. We started talking about our news pretty-much right away and I gave him some background on us and on PubSub. We got down to the nitty-gritty, and I talked about our vision and our product goals, some of which were later mentioned in the piece. I could tell he was working on background checks and talking to other people even as we were conversing — proof (no surprise) at how well-connected he has become. He’s not a fan of embargoes, which is PR lingo for holding a story until a specific release date, so he wanted to roll right away.

Meanwhile, Om was grilling me on IM after I mentioned that I was going to “let” Michael break the story (I now owe Om dinner for not giving him the scoop). It took me about 15 minutes to realize that Om had written the first paragraph of the story and was banging away at the “PUBLISH” button every single time he made an edit or added another sentence. So his post, which beat Michael’s by about an hour (Om now owes me dinner for taking the scoop anyway) but with limited detail, and he grew the piece ad hoc as he interviewed me. If you reloaded the page during that time, as I started to, you could use it as a rolling bulletin. I don’t think that many users of GigaOM appreciate how often he does this … it’s a very compelling idea, but I think the method is slightly kludgey.

Anyway, an hour after talking to Michael I got a call from TechCrunch’s LA office following up on the form submission. They were interested in doing a story, too… and the correspondent seemed almost angry that Michael (his boss) had scooped him.

Next, a number of tech bloggers that I reached out to while talking to Om started emailing back and forth. I’m looking forward to their more detailed pieces in the coming days and weeks. Again, it’s their responsiveness, in the face of what surely is a firehose of information, that impresses me and gets them the opportunity to write good stories.

In contrast, I’m still waiting for a number of print media types to get back to us, having reached out to them days ago. Sure, we want them to cover the story, as it’ll interest their readers, but they’ve lost the chance to break some cutting-edge news.

Anyway, hats off to Michael, Om, Mike, and Richard… I really appreciate what you’re delivering to the realtime news ecology.

The most spectacular such take is The New Republic’s Stephen Glass [1], which case blew up in 1998. As a 25-Year-Old rising star in the annals of journalism, he went from fabricating the occasional quote for far-flung articles to making up entire pieces using fictitious people, organizations, and events. He wrote stories to suit his ambition to be recognized as an emerging talent with an ability to uncover the wild, the eccentric, the incredible.

“Everything around him turned out to be incredibly vivid or zany or in some other way memorable,” said Leon Wieseltier, a co-worker at The New Republic, “and at the meetings, we used to wait for Steve’s turn, so that he could report on his next caper. We got really suckered.”

If it’s too good to be true, kids, it probably is. Steve Glass made cosmetic attempts to fool the magazine’s fact checkers and to his amazement they continually worked. As he got away with it more and more frequently, he began to push the envelope. As I saw on 60 Minutes [2] last weekend, he fabricated stories about Monica Lewinsky Condoms and an evangelical church that worshipped George W. Bush. Nobody caught on — perhaps because they didn’t want to?

Stephen Glass is apologetic and pathologically repentant for his actions, claims to have been in therapy, and.. oh — by the way? He’s just published a fictional novel based on his life story (he apparently still can’t grasp his own irony) called “The Fabulist” [5]. His undoing was a wholly fictitious piece about a 15-year-old hacker who worked his way into the systems of a fake company called “Jukt Micronics” and extorted the company for tens of thousands of dollars not to do it again. When Forbes Magazine [3] attempted to follow up on the piece, well, they couldn’t verify a single fact.

The penny dropped.

More recently we hear the tale of 27-year-old New York Times reporter Jayson Blair [4], recently outed and accused of the same thing, though he made very few attempts to conceal his fabrications to fact-checkers. When the story broke this past May that Blair had plagiarized huge tranches of a story from the San Antonio Express-News for a New York Times piece on Iraq war MIAs, the New York Times began a forensic bumfuzzling that revealed a long history of fabricated quotes, people, and events– along with other blatant examples of plagiarism — among Blair’s 700 articles, and published a 7200 word article accounting for these. The accounting took only a week to examine the previous 7 months (73 articles) for Blair’s inventiveness.

The question is… if you can check 73 articles in a week, why aren’t you checking the facts all along? I suspect that the answer is more nefarious than Publishers or Editors would like to admit. The reality is that, in competing more and more for their audience, newspapers and magazine have made bold attempts to become edgier, innovative, conniving. Woodward & Bernstein agonized for weeks as they waited for fact-checkers, researchers, editors, and lawyers to release their Watergate story once completed. The reality is that, nowadays, editors risk missing out on a story by waiting too long — there’s too much competition from realtime media like CNN, CNBC, and Internet publications to risk missing out on a big piece.

And as the drive to be different from the pack gets ever more compelling, what constitutes a “big piece” becomes a broader and broader topic for editors. The lesson, as always, is that we just can’t hold these institutions in such high esteem as we do. They’re fallible, because they’re human, and as money and power and competition and politics further intervene in the journalistic process they tend to become more fallible, more easily manipulated, and more inaccurate.

…and, apparently, they become platforms for young fiction authors seeking to make a name for themselves. Even in the college of writers, apparently, it doesn’t matter how you get famous. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie based on Jayson Blair..

-Ian.

[1] http://www.tnr.com/archive/0698/062998/ourreaders062998.html [2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml [3] http://www.forbes.com/1998/05/11/otw3.html [4] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/ 691dnacb.asp [5] http://www.pressdemocrat.com/opinion/columns/21note.html

THE FAILED PROMISE OF NEW JOURNALISM Greg Hughes takes a harsh, unflinching look at why political journalism on the web is falling short of its potential.

| Dec.13.2002 |

The world of modern journalism has become a much busier (and more complicated) place in the last ten years.

For the average Westerner, the early 21st century is already turning out to be an interesting, albeit dangerous, era of political and economic change. And in this feeding frenzy of stories, some journalists and activists have been turning to the web to write, record and publish their views.

In effect, these reporters are trying to create a new form of historical record that is D.I.Y., innovative and above all else, independently-run.

But in spite of independent news groups like indymedia.org, mediachannel.org, mediaaccess.org and fair.org, there hasn’t exactly been a renaissance in the number of media outlets that actually get heard. Quite the opposite.

By the time you read this, a United Nations-endorsed, American-led coalition of nations bent on eliminating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his military apparatus will be making plans for a second visit to the Persian Gulf in a decade.

Yet besides the prospect of yet another war in this extremely unsettling political environment is the fact that, at least in the United States, popular support for such an attack on Iraq has been given the virtually unanimous support of the mainstream media; Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, CNN’s Pat “Soviet Canuckistan” Buchanan and a host of other television and radio hosts and networks gave their tacit approval to George W. Bush — permission to “go forth young man” and end what daddy couldn’t ten years earlier.

The irony of Americans’ continued deference to their media and political elites came when President Bush addressed the U.N. last month, stating that “Iraq’s state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.”

And it’s not as though Canada hasn’t been willing to follow suit. Foreign Affairs minister Bill Graham was quoted saying, “I think what will happen is Iraq will conform. I think its neighbours are now putting pressure on it to say, ‘Look, there is no alternative.’ And it’s very much thanks to the role of the United States that we’ve got the pressure there to make sure that this happens.”

In a perfect world, potential conflicts like Gulf War II wouldn’t even be happening. But even in a less-than-perfect situation, opposition to such an obvious, cloying attempt at masking U.S. oil interests in the Middle East should have better popular support — especially amongst the netizen journalists.

It seems so self-evident: The internet generation has been raised on, if you’re politically-minded, a steady diet of Noam Chomsky conspiracy theories, a five-party Canadian Parliament and youthful, invigorating political zines like punditmag.com. A medium like the net, rightly or wrongly, lets all voices (some abhorrent, some amusing) be heard.

Or so we figured.

Believing the internet to be a vehicle for real political change and dissenting voices is a view we might have subscribed to in, say, 1995. Nowadays, even the most compelling web site, the most well-organized chatroom or the best email listserv can’t hide the fact that the most effective means for political dialogue is a face-to-face dynamic.

The internet was supposed to help facilitate new kinds of communication and new kinds of thinking that went beyond the video screen or audio connection. What was hoped to link people, places and events beyond traditional media has turned into, well, every other mass medium. The lines have been drawn between corporate media juggernauts and bathtub gin operations — there is no middle ground anymore.

So why hasn’t the web given us a news source that promises ideas in a forum of immediacy and relevancy beyond corporate media?

Legitimate news groups like the CBC, CTV and CityTV are so strong in propagating their presence online because they are trusted and have the institutional memory to back up claims of their legitimacy. For one, the web remains in its infancy in terms of reporting legitimate news. While more opinions and views are present online, the culture of Matt Drudge — news based on rumours, not facts — remains dominant. While the public’s hunger for information has increased since the web’s breakthrough into popular consciousness, our demand for trustworthy sources has as well.

Yet web-based media has made the mistake of trying not only to emulate television, radio and print media all at once, but effectively reinventing the wheel several times over: Even sites like Plastic or Slashdot, some of the most “credible web media,” remain locked into niche reporting that relies mostly on second-hand information. And yes, Slashdot users are basically a large community of reporters, as are many web media sites. Even Salon, a zine conceived during the web’s initial foray into public life in 1995, has become a fluffier, less relevant source.

Does this mean that the net has matured to the point that, while any John or Jane Q. Public can set up a website on al Qaeda and voice their views, they won’t even be heard in the sea of CNNs and News Corps? Can independent voices and FTAA be taken seriously online if they don’t have the historical legacy to support themselves?

Well, not exactly.

Truly successful web-based journalism depends on going back to the basics of reportage; writing narratives and historical legacies that reflect the web’s non-linear perspectives. What this really means is that the adage “everything old is new again” is becoming more important in a medium that thrives on unique approaches to storytelling.

In many ways, some of the more successful forms of authorship online have been basically old forms of storytelling; weblogs are the electronic equivalent of written correspondence, serialized news stories are reported in a format similar to old newspaper serials, and websites such as bitbooks.com are writing and adapting works of fiction exclusively to reflect electronic realities.

While streamed video, Flash animation and audio feeds are only just beginning to make their mark on the web, this means the web must take a journalistic approach that harkens back to an era that did not have video or audio capabilities.

In effect, this means going back to the days of George Orwell, Charles Krauthammer and Hunter S. Thompson, in which stories were written with an almost literary feel that drew the reader in.

While political chatrooms, Ontario Premier Ernie Eves or emaillist servs can talk on end about the virtues of Maoist China, the New Democrats’ hopes for the future or even Friedrich Hayek’s libertarianism, the net will truly realize its potential for high-quality journalism when it has the power of original narratives behind it.