The New Journalism
I have lots of friends who are journalists, and they work on a wide variety of titles. Sometimes they agree with what they’re writing and sometimes they have to write what their editor wants them to write. It’s just like any job really, you gotta make sure you keep the boss happy or you become an ex-employee.
This means that sometimes journalists have to, er, adjust a story to meet the desired angle. This is something that unsuprisingly doesn’t always go down well with people who’ve been interviewed. Of course it’s not always bad intentions, sometimes articles have to be cut down to meet a word limit, they’re subbed by someone else, the journalist doesn’t have the specialist knowledge to get the big picture, or they just make a mistake, and hey, we all do that.
Like any job, there’s techniques journalists use that benefit them rather than their interviewee. A key one of these is the way you interview someone, if it’s in person or on the phone, it’s easier to push someone to make a comment, that with thought, they may not have said. Selective quoting of a rushed conversation can then be tweaked to push an angle or fit within that 200 word article.
Being quoted out of context can be quite unsettling, but historically there’s been little that you can do. The upperhand is always with the publisher as their distribution network beats yours. The rise of the internet and blogging in general, lets everyone have their own right to reply. Commenting on the articles of mainstream media sites has also begun to let passive readers correct errors on actual articles, rather than be reprinted in tiny type on page 64 four days later.
This week Wired Magazine tried to get a response from two blogosphere A Listers, Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis, they were happy to answer questions, in writing, that they would also publish on their blogs. Not a traditional thing to do, but something that was fair enough. They don’t need the publicity, they were helping out Wired, and didn’t want to be mis-quoted. Wired writer Dylan Tweney wasn’t happy with this, Jason then blogged about it, stating his suprise that tech-friendly Wired doesn’t do email.
Amusingly there’s been another response from Wired, this time Ryan Singel again calling Jason out for his stance.
Traditionally this kind of attack from a publication is quite hard to deflect, just think of all the gossip stories you read where a newspaper makes snide references to people, there’s never any comeback from the celeb or for that matter the audience. However this traditional stance against Dave and Jason has spectacularly backfired against Wired, if you read the comments to any of the Wired posts on the subject you can see a torrent of abuse from readers about how disappointed they are with the magazine.
The power of using your audience reach to steamroller an idea through, true or not, is definitely on the way out.