
Push Journalism vs. Pull Journalism - colinprince
https://phillipadsmith.com/2019/02/push-journalism-vs-pull-journalism.html
======
AlexTWithBeard
TL, DR:

Push journalism is what's happening now:

\- The reporter has a hunch about a story

\- The reporter checks with a couple of sources and their editor

\- The story is published

\- Then everyone in the organization PUSHES LIKE HELL to get the story in
front of as many people as possible

Pull journalism would be the alternative (better) approach:

\- Have a hunch about a problem that people might be experiencing

\- Interview those people – perhaps a dozen of them – and listen for signals
that your hunch is correct

\- Also listen for signals that your hunch is incorrect

\- Formulate a hypothesis based on these conversations about what might
address the problem

\- Go back to those dozen people, if possible, and present your work. Rinse.
Repeat.

\- Publish it, and then present it to all of the people that you’ve spoken
with and ask them, if they believe it’s useful, to let people know.

~~~
untog
One issue that immediately comes to mind is that the people you're
interviewing often don't want the story covered, or they want it covered in a
way that promotes their angle on the issue. The "go back and present your
work" part collapses there because they're going to be actively fighting
against publishing, not promoting it. I'm not sure what adversarial journalism
looks like under the pull model.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
That's handled by going to multiple people. If you are seeing fighting by all
or some people, or if you have conflicting information, that's a story in
itself.

The important part is going to those people in the first place, whether they
cooperate or not. You generally get a good idea of what's going on when you
present later collected facts to people and get their reaction.

Treat it like a police investigation, you don't just interview a witness once,
you interview them, go interview people from their statement, then come back
and interview them again to see if everything matches up with what everyone
said.

~~~
ceejayoz
> Treat it like a police investigation, you don't just interview a witness
> once, you interview them, go interview people from their statement, then
> come back and interview them again to see if everything matches up with what
> everyone said.

Lying to the police can lead to charges like obstruction of justice, filing a
false police report, lying to the FBI, etc.

Journalists don't have this weapon in their quiver. Unless you're going to
propose giving journalists subpoena power, your "come back and interview them
again" approach simply isn't going to work.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
The article is the charge. Like I said, if they don't comment then note that
in the article, and ask others.

If noone comments then note that in the article.

~~~
ceejayoz
"Treat it like a police investigation" without giving journalists police
_powers_ (which they rely _heavily_ upon to complete an investigation) results
in a pretty pointless process.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Since when is verifying facts a pointless process?

~~~
ceejayoz
There are many other ways to verify facts versus an interview with a
reluctant/belligerent subject of a piece.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Such as?

------
matt4077
This is a rather confusing list of grievances. I have no idea why it's being
upvoted, except maybe that any broadside against journalism currently finds
its audience?

As far as I can tell, the author mostly wants journalists to focus more on
what people want to read.

That's rather surprising, considering the criticism usually revolves around
journalists writing too much _for the market_ , i. e. the perennial complaints
about page view maximisation, buzzfeed's big clickstream leaderboard, too much
political horse-race coverage, emotional storytelling, etc etc.

In fact, the article here makes this point almost explicit: "newsrooms aren’t
empathizing, prototyping, or testing their work with their audience before
they publish." Count me among those quite happy with newsrooms not deciding
coverage on the basis on "empathizing and prototyping". Because that would
seem the quickest path into the filter bubble.

The article also ignores that most journalism already reaches its audience by
what I would consider "pull", in as far as the concept has any meaning: I pay
for magazines and a newspaper, and follow some publications and journalists on
twitter or RSS.

The author complains about journalists "PUSHES LIKE HELL" (all-caps theirs). I
have no idea what that's supposed to mean, really. Posting the article to
Twitter and Facebook? The author lists "[..] email blasts, social media
campaigns – and, possibly worst of all, paid social media campaigns". The
first two seem completely benign, except that they are phrased to suggest some
sort of malfeasance. A newsletter you presumedly signed up for is not an
"email blast", it's just an email. Nor are social media posts the same as
"social media campaigns". As to paid social media posts, I rarely if ever see
see any paid advertising for individual stories. Does anybody?

Another complaint is journalists ignoring facts contradicting their pet
theories, and not asking sources that would contradict them. That's a
complaint seemingly completely unrelated to the article's main thesis. But in
any case, it's mostly fantasy. Read any article in, say, Politico, The
Atlantic, or the NYT and you will find either a quote from the subject of an
article, or a statement such as "XYZ declined to comment / did not reply to a
request for comment".

------
jancsika
I don't really see the relevance, at least wrt journalism with high stakes
like the national security beat:

[https://theintercept.com/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-
cente...](https://theintercept.com/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-center-
torture-scandals-alfreda-bikowsky/)

How could that possibly have been published using the "pull" method?

But most importantly, it seems like a red herring. Regardless of push or pull,
the significant question for national security reporting is this: does the
news gathering organization have enough money and prestige for a legal and PR
team large enough to publish against the objections and pressures coming from
the government?

If the answer is yes, you've got yourself a functioning national security
division. If the answer is no, you're that "knucklehead" just asking to be
made an example of, and you (wisely) don't publish the name[1].

I'm sure a lot of other types of news require similarly strong teams to write
meaningful news stories against the wishes of other large and powerful
organizations.

Edit: "knucklehead" quoting the ACLU lawyer's advice to that independent
journalist. I personally admire his work on that story, and he's mentioned in
the Intercept piece. :)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeEB6F8fmbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeEB6F8fmbY)

------
sharkjacobs
this is a list of broad criticisms of journalism, not a radical new approach
to journalism.

> journalists don't contact enough sources for stories

> journalists ignore sources which contradict their initial assumptions

> journalists don't work closely enough with their sources in writing their
> story

> journalists tell stories which are not useful to their audience

> journalists should use a grassroots network of interested individuals to
> spread word about new stories instead of traditional mass media channels of
> distribution

~~~
Gpetrium
It feels that a majority of the issues you have listed is mainly due to
resources.

> Not enough resource to reach out to a wide number of sources, especially
> when you know some stories will not pan out.

> If something goes against a journalist's assumption, it can make their story
> null. This can jeopardize their career and cost a lot of resources to the
> company

> In order to sell, journalists may emphasize the areas that makes the story
> look juicy, besides, not all sources are reliable.

> The industry requires businesses to keep throwing watered-paper at the wall
> to see if it sticks. It is the incentive it has to remain afloat. Besides,
> what is useful to person X may not be useful to person Y (think of horoscope
> for example).

> Some journalists will find it more profitable to sell to the mass media or
> work a 'cosier' job in mass media instead of grassroot networks. Similar to
> someone going to work for a FAANG instead of a startup.

------
phillipadsmith_
Author of the post in question here. Thanks for the thoughtful commentary.
Always nice to stumble on a conversation about something I've written that I
assume nobody has read. :)

Few quick responses to some of the themes that you've all surfaced:

The essay is coming from the context of my own work, which is focused on
public-service journalism and local journalism. These types of journalism can
result in different types of reporting products, e.g.,
[https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-
tickets/](https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-tickets/) Many of us in the
industry consider these types of products "journalism," but they are not
necessarily what comes to mind for most.

National security reporting (The Intercept) and national reporting of any
kind, are for sure different beasts, and beat to a different drum. National
reporting, as pointed out, tends to report what has happened. National
security reporting is typically adversarial reporting, and -- as pointed out
-- the concept of pull journalism is probably not a fit there.

However, in the context of local and public-service journalism -- where, when
it works well, it aims to explain "the climate not the weather" (i.e., _why_
something is happening, not simply that it happened) -- I believe there is an
opportunity to do a better job "centering the user" in the conversation about
what to report, and -- frankly -- what the reporting product looks like (Is it
written? Is it video? Is it a database? Is it a podcast?).

All that to say, the essay simply proposes that there are patterns in
journalism that have become cemented over the decades, and that re-thinking
these patterns in the context of the changes that have occurred in the way
people consume and interact with information are worth exploring for new
journalism undertakings.

Three cents! :)

P.S. Thanks for catching the typos!

------
rchaud
I don't understand what the author's issue is with what he describes as
"push". Sounds like how an investigative journalism project is supposed to
play out. Couple of things:

> The reporter has a hunch about a newsworthy story that hasn’t being told yet

A 'hunch' isn't something an editor signs off on when budgets are low as it
is. More like "a reporter gets a lead about a newsworthy story".

> Then everyone in the organization PUSHES LIKE HELL to get the story in front
> of as many people as possible in the hope that it will reach the people who
> need that information the most

This seems like what the author has an issue with. If it's their story, they
have the right to push it across whatever channels they have at their
disposal. Today they use paid social. Yesterday, they may have used
newsstands, or a syndication agreement with another publication.

What's the big deal?

------
awkward
Coming from a field where "worse is better" has been the motto for a while, I
don't think pull journalism seems like something that is going to really work.

~~~
rgoulter
Nice rule of thumb. "worse is better" would instead imply that solutions to
the identified problems aren't likely to be implemented in some pure solution,
but something much messier and more practical.

------
ben_utzer
> A few months back, I sat down for a coffee with a with a journalist who was
> starting a new a regional news project.

What about proofread journalists? :-)

------
smacktoward
There are some fundamental misunderstandings here about what journalism is and
how it's produced.

 _> [H]ere’s how I see push journalism:_

 _The reporter has a hunch about a newsworthy story that hasn’t being told
yet_

Most journalism doesn't start with a reporter's hunch; it starts because
_something happened somewhere_. President Trump offended somebody; two
soldiers were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan; the local factory announced
it's laying off 10% of its workforce; the city council voted against filling
the pothole on Main Street. _Something happened_ , an editor decided that
thing was newsworthy, and now the reporter's task is to tell the reader about
it.

Because of this, most reporters don't spend time thinking Big Thoughts about
long-term trends. They tell a story of _something that happened_ , and then
move on to the next thing that happened while they were writing about the
other thing. Hence the saying that "journalism is the first rough draft of
history" ([https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-
of-...](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/08/on-the-trail-of-the-
question-who-first-said-or-wrote-that-journalism-is-the-first-rough-draft-of-
history.html)). Explaining long-term trends is what historians do. Journalists
do something different; they tell people _what happened._

Most of the other misunderstandings in the piece fall out from this one.
Journalists don't look for solutions to problems, they don't even look for
_problems_ ; they look for _things that happened._ (Which is why problems like
"the President offended somebody" get more coverage than problems like "in
twenty years climate change will drown us all" \-- the President's offense is
_something that happened_ , the creeping, inexorable apocalypse is something
that _hasn 't happened_ yet.) Journalists have neither the time nor the need
to consult twelve sources for every story; they're not looking to determine
the ideal response to some problem, they're just looking to tell people about
_something that happened_ , and you only need two or three independent
confirmations that something happened to be able to say with reasonable
certainty that it did in fact happen. And most journalists aren't "PUSH[ING]
LIKE HELL to get the story in front of as many people as possible"; when
they've told the story of one thing that happened, they move on to the next
one. Things are always happening, after all.

None of which is to say that this process is necessarily _ideal_ , of course.
(Few things in the world are.) Just that, if you want to reform journalism,
you have to start with a firm grounding in what journalism _is_. And
journalism is not a quest for product-market fit, or a flavor of
historiography, or an attempt to figure out What It All Means. Journalism is
_telling people about things that happened,_ and the further you get from that
elemental task, the less what you're doing can be considered journalism.

------
40acres
I don't know much about journalism but I follow a lot of journalists on
Twitter. (And I play a doctor on TV). Aside from coverage of Donald Trump,
where in the past he has basically acted as the assignment editor for all of
mainstream media -- I don't think this characterization of journalism is
correct. For instance, the fact that the title of 'assignment editor' exists
helps to dispel the effectiveness of "hunch" based reporting.

A lot of the high quality journalism I'm attracted to (NYT, This American
Life, etc.) seems to be more "pull" than "push"... journalism through other
media (namely TV and video) seems to be more oriented towards PUSH, while
print, especially from older outlets (TIME, NYT, WaPo) seems more PULL.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> A lot of the high quality journalism I'm attracted to (..., This American
> Life, etc.)

 _This American Life_ is journalism? I wouldn't call it that. It's more
nonfiction storytelling, which isn't journalism in the same way someone's
autobiography isn't journalism.

~~~
extra88
TAL does sometimes engage in journalism. Here are a couple of excerpts from
the site below about journalism, I think some TAL pieces meet these criteria:

"Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting
news and information. It is also the product of these activities."

"That value flows from its purpose, to provide people with verified
information they can use to make better decisions, and its practices, the most
important of which is a systematic process – a discipline of verification –
that journalists use to find not just the facts, but also the 'truth about the
facts.'"

[https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-
essentials...](https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-
essentials/what-is-journalism/)

~~~
CharlesColeman
> TAL does sometimes engage in journalism....I think some TAL pieces meet
> these criteria:

Give examples.

~~~
extra88
> Give examples.

A little politeness costs nothing.

From this week's episode, New Sheriffs in Town.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/669/scrambling-to-get-
off-t...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/669/scrambling-to-get-off-the-
ice/act-one-2)

It's similar to other work by Zoe Chace, like this story reporting from Jeff
Flake's office around the Kavanaugh hearings.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/658/the-unhappy-
deciders/ac...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/658/the-unhappy-deciders/act-
one-6)

BTW, TAL calls what it does journalism.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about)

