I’m very excited by the fact that newspapers are beginning to carry content from the top five or so Web 2.0/tech sites. These blogs (the word no longer seems apt for what they do; Vindu Goel calls them ‘news sources’) have really evolved in the past three years and the quality of their coverage, particularly that of ReadWrite Web, has grown in leaps and bounds. Now it’s being carried by the New York Times.
A couple of nagging questions remain, however.
1) Is this old media eating new media, or new media eating the old? On the surface this is a big coup for folk like ReadWriteWeb—which didn’t really exist three years ago—but look more closely, and I suspect we may consider this kind of thing as the beginning of the acknowledgement by old media that they have ceded some important ground that they used to dominate. This, in short, marks the recognition of traditional media that theses news sources are, to all intents and purposes, news agencies that operate on a par with, and have the same values as, their own institutions.
2) Is new media ready for old media? I have a lot of respect for ReadWriteWeb, and most of the other tech sites included in this new direction. But they all need to recognise that by participating with old media they need to follow the same rules. There’s no room for conflicts of interest here: Even the NYT has reported on potential conflicts of interest for Om Malik and Michael Arrington (here’s a great piece from The Inquistr about the issue, via Steve Rubel’s shared Google Reader feed.)
The thing with conflicts of interest is that they’re tough. It’s hard to escape them. And it’s not enough to disclose them. You have, as a writer (let’s not say journalist here, it’s too loaded a word, like blogger), a duty to avoid conflicts of interest. Your commitment as a writer has to be to your reader. If your reader doesn’t believe that you’re writing free of prejudice or favor, then you’re a hack. And I don’t mean that in a nice way.
Which means you have to avoid not only all conflicts of interest, but appearances of conflict of interest. Your duty is not just to disclose conflicts of interest, and potential conflicts of interest, but to avoid them. If that means making less money, then tough.
So, for these ‘news sources’, the issue is going to become a more central one. Of course, the question will grow larger as these outfits move mainstream. But it may become more pressing for the carrier of the news, not for the provider: Who, say, accepts responsibility for errors and conflicts of interest? NYT and The Washington Post, or the carriers of the news? I’m sure there will be lots of caveats in the small print, but if material is on the NYT website, I think a reader would assume it reflects that paper’s ethical standards. If you’re in doubt, think of the recent United Airlines case.
That story’s reappearance started on Google News, and then was picked up by Income Securities Advisors, a financial information company, which was then picked up by Bloomberg. The technical error was Google’s, in finding it on a newspaper website and miscategorising it as new, but the human error was in the ‘news source’, which saw it and then fired it off to their service, which is distributed via Bloomberg. Who is to blame for that mess? Well, the focus is all on Google, but to me the human element is the problem here, namely the reporter/writer who failed to double check the source/date etc of the piece itself.
The bottom line? It’s great that old media are recognising the quality of new media. What I want to see is this rising tide lifting all boats. Old media needs to not only grab at these news sources out of desperation but learn from their ingenuity, easy writing style and quality, and these outfits need—or at least some of them need—to take a cue from old media, take a look long and hard at themselves and ask themselves whether they could serve their readers better by shedding all conflicts—real, potential, or perceived—of interest.