Journalism as a Conversation

Few subjects arouse more attention in American journalism than objectivity. It’s also easily the most misunderstood, and journalists haven’t necessarily done a great job demystifying the thing.

The New York Times threw a spotlight on objectivity this weekend with a thoughtful column from its new reader representative Public Editor Arthur Brisbane. Though the column applies to shifting standards and expectations at NYT, it could well apply to mainstream news in the U.S.

Back in colonial America at the beginnings of the press, news was viciously partisan, sometimes inflammatory and patron-supported to the bone. You’d be tossed out of the local pub on your ass if you feigned objectivity, and make no mistake: the pub was the town square of all news. We have Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook where we talk about the news. They had pub crawls, with beer, booze, brawls and old-fashioned face-to-face. That was the context. Sometimes I long for those days. 

With the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, news got cleaned up for economic reasons. First, it went mass, thanks to technological advances and the railroads. Now national advertisers had a way to reach ginormous audiences and make ginormous profits. And when you’re writing and photographing and cartooning for a mass audience, you’re kind of aiming for the lowest common denominator, stuff that might appeal to everyone anywhere.

You all probably know this. What few people talk about is the scientific revolution that coincided with this period, especially in the U.S. Love of all things scientificy swept across America, buoyed by Pragmatism, the only philosophical movement the states ever produced and the only one journalists really embraced.

Pragmatists were just that: practical, feet-on-your-ground, no-nonsense, cut-the-bullshit-and-give-me-the-facts practitioners of life. Leave your opinionating at the door and tell me what you know to be true, not what you surmise in your arm-chair philosophizing. If I want impressions, I’ll go to Europe and listen to people in frilly shirts who pretend to know more than they do and blah, blah, blah their way through the day.* 

Objectivity was the rule not just for practicing science but for practicing journalism. But what does that mean?

Author’s note: This is one in a series of occasional posts about a study I’m doing on the conversational news practices of The Seattle Times in its winner for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

Somewhere between the glasses of wine and my whining one Saturday night about the lack of practical applications for much academic research, Albert * hit on what would be my first follow-up study to the dissertation: a case study of conversational journalism in The Seattle Times’ winner for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

On the Sunday morning of Thanksgiving Day weekend last year, a deranged ex-con opened fire on four sheriff’s deputies in a Lakewood, Wash. coffee shop. Coverage of the ensuing manhunt for Maurice Clemmons, burial of the deputies and investigations into Clemmons’ slips through the criminal-justice system earned The Times the Big Prize. In many ways, the paper came of age in that coverage, using myriad collaborative Web tools to tell the story, from Twitter to Google Wave.

In the months ahead, I’ll be looking at the coverage through the prism of my doctoral research, looking for hits and misses with the experimental data and lessons learned. But before I could proceed, I needed to talk to the chair of the nominating jury for the breaking news Pulitzer, Felice Belman (pictured above), editor of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. I knew going in that if The Seattle Times’ social-media practices in anyway hurt its Pulitzer entry, my study could be toast.