A response to Dan Gillmor

Dan Gill­mor is writ­ing a book about jour­nal­ism and blog­ging and asked peo­ple to help him with it. I have just sent an email on the intro­duc­tion and fig­ured it might be use­ful to other peo­ple inter­ested in this sub­ject. So here it is:

You are hit­ting on the right points but there may be a need here for more details related to inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. In the past, reporters were given more of a chance to spend more time on a story. In today’s world of dead­line every minute and pro­duc­ing vol­umes of copy to feed the paper, site, syn­di­ca­tion engines, there is more of an empha­sis on get­ting the story out, and get­ting it out before one’s competitors.

In the process, inves­ti­ga­tion is dropped. As the dead­line every minute frame of mind becomes more com­mon, less time is spent on doing more research. If Water­gate hap­pened today, I fear that the story would end up get­ting buried and Wood­ward and Bern­stein would be rede­ployed on other sub­jects. In a way, the Water­gate scan­dal and the Trent Lott ouster par­al­lel each oth­ers. A small, appar­ently insignif­i­cant event builds over the course of time and becomes a sig­nif­i­cant issue that even­tu­ally top­ples a pow­er­ful politician.

The only dif­fer­ence between the two is in who did the research. In the case of Water­gate, the Wash­ing­ton Post edi­tor gave its reporters enough lee­way to inves­ti­gate fur­ther. In the case of Trent Lott, a group of weblog­gers decided to do their own inves­ti­ga­tion and share the bits they had found. In a way, the Lott story could be a good exam­ple of col­lab­o­ra­tive jour­nal­ism and could bring forth a rebirth of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. Inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism is time con­sum­ing, very costly (think of the out­put of an inves­tiga­tive reporter vs. a beat reporter) and can be risky from a legal stand­point (most inves­tiga­tive sto­ries uncover things that peo­ple don’t want known).

On the other hand, col­lab­o­ra­tive jour­nal­ism can spread the load. It allows for mul­ti­ple peo­ple to build on research from pre­vi­ous peo­ple. I would not be sur­prised if, a few years from now, every seri­ous news­room has an inter­nal blog with sec­tion bro­ken out for big­ger sto­ries, allow­ing for mul­ti­ple reporters to work jointly on stories.

Ulti­mately, blog­ging is about com­mu­nity, it’s about peo­ple shar­ing knowl­edge, and build­ing on other people’s knowl­edge. This is why the Lott story hap­pened. Some­one posted a note about the orig­i­nal remark, a reader remem­ber another fact related to the story and con­tributed it to the con­ver­sa­tion. That trig­gered an answer by a third per­son, and so on and so forth. Because blog­gers are pas­sion­ate about what they are doing, they pro­vide heavy back­ground in the form of links to actual sources, mak­ing it more and more dif­fi­cult for any­one to hide in plain sight.