How the Web Can Restore Journalism's Credibility

By: Steve Outing Newspaper journalism took a body blow with the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times. An unscrupulous reporter run amok at the leading newspaper in the land has sullied the reputations of all newspapers by association. Rebuilding of public trust isn't just a necessary exercise for the Times; it's of necessity throughout the industry.

But this needn't be an insurmountable challenge. Newspapers have at their disposal tools and techniques for regaining public trust that weren't available to previous generations of newspaper executives. I'm speaking, of course, about the Internet.

Using in-print and online techniques, newspaper leaders can: document their journalists' work for all to see; open up to a greater degree the lines of two-way communication between journalists and readers, and editors and readers; and utilize the public's knowledge to better identify and correct reporting and editing errors. Here's how:

It Starts in the Print Edition

One of the best tools for accountability can be found in the printed editions of many newspapers. Now increasingly common, it's the e-mail address either attached to a reporter's byline or added to the end of a story. (Less frequently, there's also a phone number on the end-of-story tagline: "Staff reporter Dave Jones can be reached at djones@newspaper.com, or by phone at 555-555-1212.")

Such published contact information, unheard of only a few years ago, is commonplace today. Reporters routinely receive e-mail messages from readers as the result of having their addresses published in print. Most report that their e-mail feedback is considerably more than contacts by phone -- the likely reason being that it's easier and less threatening for readers to approach journalists via e-mail than confronting them by phone, especially with complaints or criticism.

The majority of reporters seem to like the idea of this easy conduit to the public. A recent discussion thread about printed reporter e-mail addresses on the Cops & Courts Reporters discussion list operated by Criminal Justice Journalists demonstrated that most reporters find article-tagline-generated e-mail (and phone) contact more useful than annoying. While hearing from the occasional "crank" or "weirdo" is clearly a negative, the positive is the amount of tips and story leads that otherwise wouldn't be found. The process clearly improves journalism at newspapers that publish reporter contact information, prompting stories that would go untold without it.

Such easy reporter-reader contact also often unearths reporting and editing errors, as readers with knowledge of a story's subject matter catch inaccuracies and report back to the writer.

Not Far Enough

There's an obvious problem with the reporter being the sole point of contact for feedback about a published article, of course: The system breaks down if the reporter is a Jayson Blair type who chooses to hide complaints. What newspapers need to do in print is expand the simple reporter-byline e-mail address/phone technique to include others involved in creation of the story. This is a departure for the news industry, but I think it's overdue.

The first step is to decide that each reporter's principal line or assignment editor should share in the credit for creation of significant stories. Don't include reporters' and editors' addresses up top in bylines -- that tends to encourage feedback from some readers who don't bother reading much beyond the headline and lead paragraph, and may react without having the full story -- but rather create contact-info taglines at the end. Try something like this:

E-mail reporter Jane Smith at jsmith@newspaper.com. Complaints should be addressed to John Jackson, principal editor of this story, at jjackson@newspaper.com.

Or, simply:

Reported by Jane Smith (jsmith@newspaper.com); edited by John Jackson (jjackson@newspaper.com).

Post-Jayson Blair, there have even been suggestions that all the individuals who touched a story be documented -- not only reporter and assignment editor, but also copy editors, proofreaders, fact checkers, librarians/researchers, photo editors, etc. While that approaches the point of being ridiculous in print for all but the most extensive enterprise packages -- imagine every staff-written story in a newspaper containing a list of five or six people involved -- it's not so crazy online. On a newspaper's Web site, every story can have an "Editors for this article" link to a page documenting who beyond the writer was involved in its production. Back in the print edition, it should be noted somewhere that this detailed production information is available on the paper's Web site for any staff-produced print story. (The wire services would be well advised to take this same approach to their content.)

A benefit to this "all-hands" approach is that it demonstrates to the public the process of a story getting into print (or being published online) -- confirming to those who might not know better that there is a serious procedure for confirming that a story is accurate between the time a reporter makes his first phone call and the morning edition rolls off the presses.

Pardon me if I'm being too obvious, but for short staff-written news stories or briefs, you won't want to go to such great pains. But it's still worthwhile to include a feedback/complaints tagline on every published article that's more than a brief -- something like:

"Feedback/complaints about this article should be addressed to jjackson@newspaper.com."

And a final point: It's better to include the name of a human being than a generic "editor@newspaper.com" e-mail address. It makes the newspaper and its Web site less impersonal and more of an institution that's approachable. Web users often feel that mail sent to those generic addresses disappear into a black hole.

Centralized error reporting

One bit of fallout from the Jayson Blair scandal is that newspapers are publishing more corrections and acknowledging more reporting and editing errors -- not necessarily because more errors are being made by journalists, but because the public is more likely now to report errors that they find. E-mail contact information, too, is making it easier for readers to alert a news organization to its mistakes. The Boston Globe, according to a story by its ombudsman, published 135 errors in May, post-Jayson Blair, vs. 85 the previous month, and 80 in May a year ago.

This increased public response to journalistic errors calls for a new way to treat corrections and clarifications. For a print edition, consider posting instructions for readers to send in mistakes they discover. On the Web, have a form that readers can fill out which alerts editors. The Web site also should have a centralized Corrections page that acknowledges mistakes and matches them up with originally published articles -- so that everything is easily accessible in one place.

Give Each Reporter a Public Feedback Area

Moving online, one technique for keeping reporters accountable is to require that each one have a feedback area or public discussion board. Instead of relying solely on private e-mail to reporters and their editors, you can encourage readers to post comments about a reporter's work on a Web discussion area. By using a database approach, a Web page can be created for each staff reporter that contains a list of all his or her published stories, plus reader feedback for each. At least then, editors can keep tabs on reader complaints about inaccuracies in reporting. Surely this approach would have tripped up Jayson Blair before he became a national headline instead of just writing them.

Tell the Stories Behind the Stories

This next section of ideas focuses on significant works of journalism, and utilizes the Web. It involves telling the stories behind the stories that are published by a newspaper in print and online.

One of the nice things about the Web is that it offers unlimited publishing space. (The online audience doesn't have unlimited time to consume everything you might publish on the Web, but that's another matter.) So why not use that space to give the public a glimpse inside the reporting process?

A good example of this approach in action is Nicholas Kristof, a columnist with The New York Times who maintains a Kristof feedback forum and an "explanations" area (Kristof Responds) on NYTimes.com. Here, Kristof responds to reader mail publicly and expounds on his reporting technique.

For example, in a recent column about the real facts behind the U.S. rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch during the Iraq war, Kristof documented some of the reporting by him and Times researchers. As Steve Klein, coordinator of the electronic journalism program at George Mason University, notes, "It was more than Kristof could do in the space allotted to him in the newsPAPER, but perfect for the creative use of a truly multimedia NEWSpaper medium." There's also an area where Kristoff talks about his travels and how he writes.

It's typically the case, especially for enterprise journalism by newspapers, that there's more to a story than what ends up in newsprint or published on the Web. For a reporter or team with such a story, it makes sense to document the process -- sort of like those "Inside Look at [Movie Name Here]" documentaries produced by some filmmakers. (Especially for their best works of journalism, some newspapers do this documention anyway in preparation for submitting the work to the Pulitzer Prize jury.)

This does not have to be difficult or time consuming. A team working on a major piece of journalism could maintain a private Weblog during the reporting and information-gathering process, with members posting blog items during each phase of the process documenting information gathered and techniques for getting it that might not make it into the final product. Upon publication of the work, this blog can be edited and made public online, as documentation about the published package.

In the past, we probably would have thought that this behind-the-scenes stuff was too arcane to be of interest to our readers. Or that this information should NOT be in the public's hands -- it's private stuff that should always remain behind the curtain. But Jayson Blair has changed the equation. So has the Internet.

The next wave of journalism should include much public comment, feedback, advice, tips, and complaints. It should contain more information than has ever been made publicly available before. It will make newspaper journalists accountable and journalism credible. It will take us beyond the Jayson Blair scandal.

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