It’s endlessly frustrating that public-trust journalism (especially investigative journalism) is so often held up nostalgically as the profession’s ideal, when that’s really not how the industry works now.
Plenty of journalists routinely populate their work with their mates, lean heavily on PR, trawl online discussion forums for quotes, and turn their social networking presences into brains trusts.
I’ve spotted my industry friends openly asking Facebook and Twitter for story leads or interviewees, or even brainstorming questions ahead of interviewing international celebrities. I’ve done it too.
Every so often Media Watch will blow open a particular piece of PR guff. And the Centre for Independent Journalism has analysed how widespread PR-driven content is in Australian newspapers.
Yet this stuff eludes discussions of quality journalism because it’s summarily dismissed as bad journalism. Rather than ask why information gathering has taken this turn, media commentators are content to name and shame the offenders.
Instead, we need to make contemporary, internet-led, PR-informed journalism more transparent, impartial and ethical. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using social networking sites as primary research tools. But we need to distinguish between research that is scrupulous, intelligent and original, and that which is lazy, unimaginative and exploitative.
The industrial reality is that journalists are short on time and budget, but long on contacts developed and nurtured online. It’s rare these days to do library research or groom potential sources face to face. Instead, a journo’s key professional toolbox includes Twitter, Facebook and Google.
When I first taught online journalism at Monash University, I was shocked to discover that most of my students were not Gen-Y tech heads; rather, for them the internet comprised what they could Google or access through Facebook.
Some were not tenacious researchers. They weren’t good at structuring their searches to yield targeted results, tended to give up when they reached the limit of their resources, and asked for help rather than inventing new approaches.
It’s when working journalists behave like my students did that they resort to leaning on publicists, padding out trend pieces with clichés, and outright plagiarism. So a solution here might be to teach more inventive, resourceful internet search techniques.
Another problem with over-reliance on social networks is that journalists don’t observe a personal/professional divide. While everyone has, at one time, asked friends and family for work-related advice, it used to be done privately. These days, many journalists don’t even feel the need to appear independent in public.
Recently, a certain weekend lifestyle newspaper supplement put a call out in its own pages seeking quirky shops for an upcoming feature. This week, a journalist from the magazine was emailing around — including her former editor — asking for more quirky shop leads.
This episode reveals not just shamelessness and stunted research skills, but also a worrying placement of the story-cart before the story-horse. This magazine is clearly choosing its content based on nebulous concepts rather than real-life observations. And it’s happy to reveal as much to its readers.
But at least it was explicit. Often, only when you work in the industry yourself do you realise (for instance) how many ordinary people featured in trend pieces and vox pops are in fact staffers from the admin or ad departments, or mates of the writer or editor.
Launched last September, SourceBottle is a leads service that connects journalists with potential sources. Because it operates via email, it avoids the scattershot approach of stumbling across information in a Facebook or Twitter feed, and it allows journalists and sources to be specific and filter the appeals that interest them.
Site founder Rebecca Derrington tells Crikey the most popular genres in which journalists request sources are social/cultural trends, lifestyle, business/entrepreneurial, women/parenting and health.
“In terms of publications that are using the service most heavily, I’d say e-mags/blogs, newspapers, magazines and television networks, in that order,” Derrington says.
SourceBottle can put fairly cynical practices out in the open, and for this reason has been the subject of derision among media observers. It can also foster epic journalistic laziness.
But I believe SourceBottle is ethical because it’s public and impersonal. The calls are published openly and don’t rely on individual journalists’ personal networks.
It’s also like journalistic junk food: best consumed as part of a balanced research diet.
“I think it’s fair enough for journalists to be concerned if their colleagues are relying exclusively on services like SourceBottle,” Derrington tells Crikey. “However, journalists generally use it to supplement their more traditional information-gathering methods … I’d stress that it’s just another tool to include in a journalist’s arsenal.”
In January, Brisbane freelancer Andrew McMillen used SourceBottle as a starting point for a feature on country music. Only through painstaking research, including 18 phone interviews, did McMillen figure out what his story angle would be. He later described it as “the most exhilarating journalistic experience of my life”.
Surely that excitement of using your own brain to uncover fresh information is the right reason to work in journalism.
This article seems to me to be far to general in its criticisms to give a really insightful point.
I don’t really see why asking around friends/co-workers for a person to be in a trend story is “lazy, unimaginative and exploitative” (nor do I see why that source bottle site would be so bad, though I have never tried it so cant say for sure).
Trend stories are by their very nature anecdotal, otherwise they would be research-based. The point of these stories is to provide “human interest” or, with case-study articles to show the human impact of new research etc.
In my job as a medical writer I would mainly be looking for people to be interviewed who can provide a human side to, for example, new medical research. The research provides the solid/hard news side and the case study provides the human interest side.
That case study could be sourced from patient advocate groups, blogs, colleagues or acquaintances – why is this lazy or unimaginative or indeed shameless?
And what exactly are these “more inventive, resourceful internet search techniques” that are being promoted? I would have liked to see some actual examples of what constitutes “good” and reliable sourcing of case studies.
I also think it is silly to equate asking around a group of broad group of aquaintances/acquaintances of work colleagues with using a case study that is a person who works for a PR company that has sent out the research in the first place.
Maybe there has been a rise in lifestyle/trend stories but I don’t think there has been a rise in journalists finding case studies for those stories from their pool of aquaintances. Where do you think journalists got case studies from in the past?
Hello Amy, you’re right that this is a pretty general article. Crikey just doesn’t have the space for an essay on the subject, although perhaps its editor might be into the idea of a regular MasterChef-style Journo Masterclass feature, which examines the research process behind particular stories.
I’ve never denied that journalists build personal networks to use as resources for their work, and that personal case studies humanise feature stories. However, what I see as lazy and unethical is openly and unashamedly getting other people to do your thinking for you – whether that be a PR company, users of a leads service such as SourceBottle, or your Facebook/Twitter circle.
Andrew McMillen, whose blog I linked to, offers an excellent case study of how a good story is shaped by the research; it isn’t an empty, predetermined outline that you retrospectively stuff with information that other people track down for you. But here are some other examples!
GOOD
I get a press release about a hot new TV series. I ask myself what vested interests might be at stake. I think about what industrial circumstances might be at play in the show, and I research the professional backgrounds of the people involved. I also assess the new show in the contexts of other trends in TV and in pop culture more generally.
BAD
I get a press release about a hot new TV series. I write a ‘news’ story that rephrases the release and includes the quotes therein as if I myself had interviewed the person being quoted.
BAD RESEARCH
I want to write a story about celebrity branding in the fashion industry. I Google “fashion industry celebrity branding”. I get a sea of results too large to be very useful. I give up and go on Facebook. I write a status update: “I’m writing a story about fashion, celebrity and branding. Can anyone suggest any case studies I can write about?”
GOOD RESEARCH
I want to write a story about celebrity branding in the fashion industry, the ‘hook’ being a presser I’ve received about yet another model launching her own bikini label. I already maintain a list of relevant RSS feeds for fashion and marketing-related blogs and websites, and use topic-themed lists to segment the people I follow on Twitter, but now I arrange to have Google Alerts emailed to me with targeted keywords such as “model turned designer” and “celebrity fashion label”. I search Google News, blog indices and online news databases using similar keywords. Rather than putting out a public call for interviewees, I target and individually contact swimwear designers, retailers and/or marketing commentators to be my talking heads.
Well said Mel – and wish that those of our current “lazy group” would take note. The beauty about good journalism, from a mere reader’s point of view, is to open up and see something that is fresh, interesting and displaying at least some innate quality of writing.
Too much of our current media is stale, unremarkable and often resembles an overworked cycle of ‘barbecue conversations’. Some sources are so lazy and predictable, that you can now easily guess the content and range of reports that will appear in our media on a daily basis. Generally speaking, Australian media is not providing “insightful analysis and reporting of the news”, nor “stories and thought provoking articles of interest” – instead we are often fed a diet of shallow journalism, which resembles an approach once used only in farmer’s almanacs and gardening publications. Gardeners were (and still are) only too delighted to receive yet another seasonal reminder that now was the right time to plant the onions (or beans, tomatoes, Zahlias, etc, etc). Likewise, many other topics, such as soil conditioning, pest treatments and seed selection, are appropriately linked to seasonal cycles – so there is no real harm in pulling out last year’s text and recycling it for the advid readers.
So, let’s keep it real people. Journos can’t simply pull their fingers out and sweat on their wits. It is just plain hard work – apart from the gifted few who may be able to rattle off copy and keep us all listening/reading/amused and anxiously waiting for the next article – every day producing news that is not borrowed from others, lacking in depth and limited to the range of critical thinking, content and banal communication styles that now pervades the social media (the modern version of the public bar shouting and pig-swill utterances that quickly passed us by in the name of CB radio).
Hi Mel – thanks for your response, I think I understand what you were saying a little bit more clearly now as from the article I didn’t realise you were talking about people using facebook to come up with whole ideas for stories (I think of sourcing a case study as more being about looking for someone to be interviewed, not looking for people to tell you an example of something to talk about).
I still think that getting people to come up with your ideas for you in the manner you describe would be the exception rather than the rule but perhps I am being naive!
Although it seems that journalism is fast becoming “churnalism”, it’s probably been happening for decades but Internet search engines now make it easier for us to spot.