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 There has been much discussion in recent months about the rising frequency with which newspapers publish material from outside sources.
Upstarts like Politico and Troy Media offer an oversized bank of material for newspapers on downsized budgets. With a quick search from a comfy desk chair, newspapers can almost instantly fill empty space on the page, and they can usually do it for very cheap, if not free.
While these websites increasingly recruit trained journalists and thus are able to provide more reliable content than what might be found among the emerging throngs of other citizen journalism outlets, questions still arise about just how reliable this content is.
What we hear over and over again is that newspapers will not disappear, as many claim they will, but they will play diminished roles in the way news is gathered and disseminated in the rapidly growing and changing digital environment.
We are already seeing this. Diminished staffing of newsrooms has opened the door for many smaller news organizations to sell or give away their material to mainstream outlets that once would only run material from bigger wire services like Reuters or Canadian Press, and what came from within its own newsroom. Well, things are changing.
Troy Media is one such organization that offers content, mostly free of charge, to whoever will take it. The Calgary Journal is one of the reported hundreds of media outlets to utilize the service. The Calgary Herald is another.
Of course, newspapers have long had a way of reworking press releases enough to pass as an article, and this has happened because of a number of reasons, but especially limits of time and resources (reporters) required to do a job any better.
Illustration by Courtenay Davidson
Diminished staffing of traditional newsrooms has opened the door for smaller organizations to sell or give away their material to mainstream outlets. But questions about vetting this material are being asked.
So, is this increased pool of resources and expanding army of reporters – both of the citizen and professional variety – any kind of solution? Well, possibly, but so far there seems to be as many skeptics as stakeholders, with questions arising about the quality of the work and the need for a strict vetting process, and if this process is happening.
“There are going to be some newsrooms, I can guarantee you, they’re going to get garbage and they’re going to print it,” said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida, as quoted in The New York Times.
Licia Corbella is the editorial pages editor at the Calgary Herald, and she’s adamant that when she runs something from Troy Media – which she said is quite rare anyway – it is hardly “crap.” But she did say that of the hoards of citizen material that comes across her desk every day, much of it is indeed not just crap, but “horrific” crap. But this stuff doesn’t make it very far.
“I don’t print garbage … I don’t need to,” she said, and added that she has so much to choose from that she ends up forced to discard good stuff.
So, is it possible that all this fuss about newspapers printing garbage is overblown? Corbella said that it at least is not happening at the Herald, and she doesn’t really see it happening in the future either.
“If newsrooms put a push on for more citizen journalism,” she said, “they’re going to have to hire four times more staff (to edit it).”
"There are going to be some newsrooms, I can guarantee you, they're going to get garbage and they're going to print it."
-Kelly McBride, Poynter Institute
So it is important to acknowledge that there are still differences between professional traditional newsrooms, the edited content from an organization like Troy Media, and the unedited writing from your average wannabe scribe waxing philosophical on a Macbook from Starbucks, passionate as it might be.
Corbella said she thinks Troy Media has, however, done a good job carving out a nice niche for itself, especially as a way to give voice to think tanks like the Canada West Foundation and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which both pay Troy Media to host and hopefully distribute content they produce. Corbella said there might occasionally be a place for material like that from these groups to appear in newspapers, but only if properly labeled as such and, of course, thoroughly edited and fact-checked.
Photo by Josh Naud
And anyway, one must ponder the relevance of even asking about this apparent lack of vetting from upstarts, when you consider how much – or little – actual reporting is done in many mainstream news outlets anyway. A report out of Baltimore, MD, published in January, took a closer look at who and what is triggering news coverage, and uncovered some trends that might be present among the media in other major cities around Canada and the U.S., namely that very little enterprising reporting is being done anymore, and that newspapers tend to repeat information originally reported by other sources, often without credit to these sources.
“As the press scales back on original reporting and dissemination, reproducing other people’s work becomes a bigger part of the news media system,” reads the report. “Government, at least in this study, initiates most of the news. In the detailed examination of six major storylines, 63 per cent of the stories were initiated by government officials, led first of all police. Another 14 per cent came from the press. Interest group figures made up most of the rest.”
"I don't print garbage ... I don't need to."
-Licia Corbella, Calgary Herald
All is not lost though. While the study did find that of the six stories, “fully 83 per cent of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information,” it also found that “of the 17 per cent that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media…”
While the sample size is obviously quite small, the report said that “this snapshot was in many ways a typical week – marked by stories about police shootings, state budget cuts, swine flu, a big international soccer game in town and a mix of fires, accidents, traffic and weather.” Swap soccer for hockey and you’ve got something very closely resembling a typical issue of the Calgary Herald.
Corbella was also quick to echo that much of what appears in alternative media, including citizen journalism, is really only commentary on news that was originally reported in the mainstream press. But citizen journalism outlets, for now, are still free of an existence dependant on ad revenue which inevitably keeps the mainstream press in the middle of the road striving for balance – this is what objectivity looks like for some, but in reality looks a bit like politics.
So while traditional local media outlets across the continent may be quick to brand upstart content as unprofessional, maybe the surge in alternative media – including social – only serves as a sort of watchdog to the watchdog, and is a welcome addition to the fray for the demanding and increasingly fickle news consumer. Right now though, it seems only time will tell how it all will play out. |
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