
Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism - smacktoward
http://pressthink.org/2017/12/show-work-new-terms-trust-journalism/
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kybernetikos
I'd love to see more linking to primary sources in news stories. Academic
writing normally has lots of references that allow you to follow things for
yourself. It's understandable that newspapers wouldn't want their stories to
be 30% references, and it seems that many major news sources write their
online stories in the same way they would write newspaper stories, but on the
internet it's actually quite possible to provide all kinds of extra detail,
such as notes from the fact checkers, external references that corroborate or
contest, relevant reference material, documents, perhaps even links to
summaries of digested information where it wouldn't be ok to publish the raw
details.

On the web, stories can still be quick and easy to read for those that want
that, while providing a huge wealth of information for those that want more
background or a better understanding of where a story came from.

I like the slogan 'show your working', I just think that it can be done in an
even more radical way online than even this article suggests (and might also
make people more prepared to pay for the work, when they can see what they're
getting for their money).

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hugo0384729109
Not sure I agree with the general premise that what the vast majority of
consumers of journalism want is proven transparency versus reinforcement of
what they already agree with and tribalism.

The article seems to completely ignore many real world factors of human
psychology present in people’s relationship to consuming news as well as the
complex financial forces involved, or propagandist motivations of some state
controlled media.

Also doesn’t account for news sources shifting dramatically to being mediated
by social media gatekeepers rather than direct relations between publisher and
consumer so it doesn’t account for pervasive filtering and how well researched
and transparent journalism is pushed out for tribalist click bait anyway.

Nice utopian vision but too far removed from key real world factors to be
practical I think.

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CM30
These points are valid, though I feel what's more dangerous than social media
filters reinforcing existing beliefs is those sites and their algorithms
putting such a high focus on speed rather than quality. Face it, doing a lot
of careful research and producing a well written article does worse in a lot
of cases than just kicking crap stories out the door as quickly as possible to
show 'consistency' and ride hype trains. The technical setup meant to provide
'relevant' content seconds after something happens discourages anything more
thoughtful by design.

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hugo0384729109
Agreed. I think fast food vs eating healthy is a good comparison. The message
in this type or article strikes me as sugesting better labeling for healthy
food assuming that’s what people want while discounting the fact that fast
food is cheap and easy and people buy it most often to satisfy a subjective
feeling of hunger (while they have a ton of other stuff to focus on) rather
than treating each meal as an objective assessment.

A lot of articles with suggestions posted here (HN) for making “things” better
often focus on the mechanics of the thing and technical or procedural changes
but a lot of the time ignore the reality of human behaviour and motivations. I
think that relates to engineering/programming culture and focus on STEM with a
lot less value placed on humanities which is then reflected in products and
opinion pieces and people being frustrated that things can’t just be “fixed”
through clever changes to objective mechanics and approach.

That’s drifting into other bigger topics but it’s a frustrating trend.

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harlanji
I wholeheartedly agree that focusing on lower level mechanics is the way to
solutions and am at times frustrated by their dismissal in preference for some
higher level debate across a seemingly arbitrary division. In my case health
debate terms are basically down to gut flora and conditions that cause me to
crave french fries. Well, I don't crave french fries anymore (or meat, and
decreasingly dairy except the Super burritos :).

I've had this particular OP debate about journalism with a coworker, that
maybe such a publication doesn't need mass appeal if the thought leaders would
be willing to pay more for it. I throw money at thought leaders whenever I
can, eg. "this album on Soundcloud is good, I'll send a dollar per track. CRAP
it's 25 tracks..." and still send it all. (in retrospect, they must know
people behave like this... or at least, I do now :). BUT... if it weren't
authentic work, I wouldn't get that impulse, so it's not really a secret that
can be exploited.

It's not the most popular thinking mode. Put the body into a healthy state,
and it will crave healthy things. Like math class or starting strength
training, you might just have to endure it for a little bit. But to myself,
perhaps many, salad was iceberg lettuce and veganism was boca burgers.
Couldn't be farther from the truth, in reality. There's even bigger money in
some food industry sectors than green/vegan, I wonder who might have incentive
to say being healthy is sooo expensive when the alternative is lots of their
own products.

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ThomPete
Journalisms biggest Achilles Heel is its insistence on the concept of quality
journalism and the idea that normal people care and especially care enough to
pay for it.

Let's not forget that fundamentally, journalism is little more than verified
gossip (Have you heard that the UN Secretary is involved in a scandal) and its
primary value is not in how it's written but the revelation of the piece of
information in itself.

Sure we have investigative journalism, but most people aren't going to pay for
that.

So at the end of the day, the only people who really care about journalism are
journalists themselves.

The biggest change in journalism IMO is that it's finally become clear that
the postmodernist was correct.

Context and perspective define truth. And so all transparency in journalism
will ever do is attract the people who already agree with the context and
perspective of the individual journalist as loyal readers.

Helping journalism it wont.

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aalleavitch
We generally perceive peer-reviewed science as being capable of approaching
objectivity. Why can this not be true for the reporting of events as they
occur as well?

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colatkinson
The goal of science is for experiments to be repeatable. If I were to build a
copy of the LHC under my house, presumably I would be able to verify any of
CERN's results.

But I can't verify anything in journalism. If two reporters watched something
happen and their accounts differ, who is right? No one knows, and both will be
accused of bias.

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maxerickson
Is water wet?

Maybe!

The point being that there are plenty of journalistic enterprises that are not
especially sensitive to bias.

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ThomPete
Yes when they are void of anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down)

The second you add journalism to the mix you are getting into bias land no
matter how you turn it around.

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anigbrowl
I think when you say 'journalism' what you mean 'analysis' vs 'reportage'.

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ThomPete
No,

"Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction
of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that
impacts society to at least some degree. The word applies to the occupation
(professional or not), the methods of gathering information, and the
organizing literary styles. Journalistic media include: print, television,
radio, Internet, and, in the past, newsreels."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism)

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anigbrowl
This seems at odds with your earlier statement: _Yes when they are void of
anything to do with journalism (Plane goes down)_

I can't really figure out what point you're trying to make but that's OK,
doubtless it will be clearer in some other context.

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jancsika
One cost would be that this would make a special case out of investigation
journalism, where the journalists often cannot reveal their sources.
Especially in cases where retribution against the source could end in death.

Since that is probably the most important and consequential type of
journalism, I'd expect facile attacks claiming investigative journalism "isn't
transparent" if this takes off.

The obvious and easy protection against such an attack is to critically read
multiple sources and be familiar with journalists' track records over time. So
I'm afraid we don't have workable protections against this attack atm. :)

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Spivak
Why would they need to claim it? The way you've set it up it's vacuously true.
The difference between Pizzagate and investigative journalism as you've
defined it is reputation. And when trust in the press is lost what separates
the curds and the whey is evidence which a fabricated story cannot provide.

The protection you offer even in the ideal case is worthless when there isn't
trust that a journalist will bend to political pressure, financial incentives,
threats, or to push their own or their publisher's agenda.

Saying that people need to "crtitically read" is just intellectual
grandstanding.

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jancsika
> The difference between Pizzagate and investigative journalism as you've
> defined it is reputation.

Not with the example you've given. Investigative journalism is one form of
journalism. I won't attempt to define journalism except to say the forms its
stories take do not include posting a tweet in reference to someone's sentence
fragment from a Facebook status. That may be a part of the "raw material" of a
story that covers how conspiracy theories begin and spread. But neither that
raw material nor the journalistic stories which essentially just tracked the
effect of a wild conspiracy theory on a national election are examples of
investigative journalism. (There may be pieces of actual investigative
journalism wrt Pizzagate, but I haven't read them.)

But let's say we compare Seymour Hersh's story on the killing of Bin Laden and
some random Facebook fake news story pretending to be a piece of investigative
journalism. At least at present we're not at a point where a fake news artist
can do a good enough job mimicking a piece of serious investigative
journalism. But disregarding that, the main difference there would be
reputation.

But that isn't a small difference. "Reputation" covers a lot of ground-- it
includes the publication and the journalist. It also includes the age of the
publication, its intended audience, its business model, and even whether the
name of the publication appears to have been chosen to be similar to the name
of a more reputable publication.

That certainly doesn't mean I reflexively accept all of Hersh's claims-- I do
like other non-experts on the subject and withhold judgment until other
experts begin to assess the veracity of his story over time. But it _does_
mean that I can reject out of hand the viral Facebook link to some url that
looks like "cbsnews.com" if you squint. I can save time and not read it at all
based on reputation alone.

> And when trust in the press is lost what separates the curds and the whey is
> evidence which a fabricated story cannot provide.

It depends on why the trust was lost. If it was because a critical mass of
journalists' track records got worse over time, then you're right.

On the other hand, if it is because a critical mass of readers can't tell the
difference between a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation of media corruption
and a click-bait website on Facebook, asking them to "weigh the evidence we're
showing you for yourselves" isn't going to solve anything.

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jawns
Former news editor here. When I was working for a daily metro paper, we had
toyed around with ways to expose some of this "show your work" information as
metadata in the online editions. Sort of like EXIF data for a photo, but for a
news story. If a story mentioned an event at a particular location, the
metadata might include coordinates for that location. The benefit of the
metadata approach is that it's much more easily consumable by machines, but we
can still use it ourselves on the frontend (e.g. show a map of the location).

Google tried getting publishers to do the same thing, but I think it
eventually realized that they weren't going to get buy-in if it meant
reporters and editors had to do the extra work of compiling the metadata, so
they decided to just automate everything and use natural language processing
to extract the metadata.

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CM30
For all the talk about transparency, there's not much about actually providing
a source for your claims. That's something a lot of media outlets are failing
at, with both offline sources and online often lacking proper source links or
references and those that do have them preferring to link to secondary and
tertiary sources rather than the original.

Still, transparency is getting better, and both source links and the other
things mentioned in the article (like claims for comment, disclosing financial
ties/free products, and talks about what they know/don't know) are becoming
more common now.

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aalleavitch
A problem with this is regarding anonymous sources, in which it's often
necessary to protect the identity of the source.

Perhaps some sort of verification network, in which one news outlet is
randomly assigned another outlet who must also independently verify the
anonymous source?

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CM30
True, never thought about anonymous sources. In that case, some sort of
verification network could work okay, though it's always going to be tradeoffs
regardless of what route is taken.

However, there's no excuse for stories based on public sources not to link to
or provide a reference for those sources. If your source is another news site,
blog, wiki page, forum post, video, etc... then you should damn well be
linking to the original. Doing otherwise is like taking ownership of someone
else's work, especially if you do what some sleazy sites do and rehost the
original work as well.

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loteck
It's a new model of journalism in search of a rare breed of news consumer: one
who cares to read reporters' profiles, source documents, and descriptions of
how reports are gathered.

Lofty goal, to say the least.

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hellbanner
Good writeup and I agree with the sentiment that news sources need to
disclosure their sources & biases.

However, we are entering into a strange age where information can be
fabricated so well that we won't be able to reliably trust any information on
a screen, especially as the timestamp exceeds what a Desktop computer would
take to generate such data.

On AI Generated fake porn - video editing with face swapping.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040463)

[https://medium.com/@samim/obama-rnn-machine-generated-
politi...](https://medium.com/@samim/obama-rnn-machine-generated-political-
speeches-c8abd18a2ea0) \-- Audio & Visual imitation of Obama according to a
script.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902)
\- Adobe Voco 'Photoshop-for-voice' causes concern

Now tell me, why should I trust anything on this screen? I shouldn't and I
won't.

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horsecaptin
Journalism by peer review and open access and open data.

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ShabbosGoy
Would a project like Po.et work for establishing “trust” in content.

I use that term loosely, because trust means different things in different
contexts. For example can you trust the movie you downloaded was licensed?

