Tweetgeist: Feeding Google, objecting to objectivity, Quinn's folly, and Net niceness

Who reports the Google news?

Jonathan Stray of the Nieman Journalism Lab performed a detailed data analysis of 121 pieces in Google News that covered a specific event -- "last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China." Stray concluded that only 13 (11 percent) of the pieces "included at least some original reporting," and "just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently."

On the one hand, Stray's analysis supported the conventional wisdom that most news stories break as the result of work by traditional news organizations. On the other, it also suggested that the vast majority of traditional news organizations devote most of their energy to repeating one another's headlines.

@joeybaker @cshirky re: Google/China isn't the fact that there are 13 reporters working on one story something to be marveled at?

@cshirky @joeybaker Not if those 13 reporters are being copied 787 times. Problematic for the newspapers "bloggers as free riders" critique.

In a Nieman Lab followup, C.W. Anderson widens the analysis and offers these conclusions:

• Most “original reporting” (as traditionally defined) is still done by large news institutions.

• Most traditional news institutions are regurgitating the work of other news institutions, rather than adding anything new.

• An additional, smaller set of online web-sites are also doing original reporting, but this reporting often gets overlooked in studies of where news comes from, mostly due to boundary-drawing issues. And it also gets overlooked by news organizations themselves.

• Aggregation, curation (or whatever) is something unique and valuable, but it isn’t quite reporting and we don’t quite know what to call it yet. In fact, it might be better for democracy to link to a really smart blogger than it would be to call up a source and get the same meaningless quote that 1000 other journalists have also gotten.

• Online, news often originates and moves in a “blippy,” heartbeat-like fashion, but we can only see this if we take aggregation seriously as a journalistic form, and only if we include “obscure bloggers” in our data-set.

Objections to objectivity

Jay Rosen's post on "The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism" -- which asked why David Barstow's New York Times investigation of the Tea Party movement described Tea Partiers' belief in "a narrative of impending tyranny" but failed to evaluate whether that narrative had any basis in reality -- continued to fuel a go-round of the "objectivity" debate:

@joeybaker If objectivity can be done right in #journ, it has to be the writer struggling to argue for both sides. Compare following 2 pieces: (1/2)

@joeybaker (2/2) @MotherJones http://tr.im/Pyed vs @nytimes http://tr.im/Pyeh 1st sounds like honest struggle. 2nd a struggle to not laugh at Tea Party

Stephen Baker wrote:

I think it's better to let readers come to their own conclusions. That said, the Times should follow up with another article specifically on that issue. Millions of Americans appear to think we're falling into a dictatorship. What are they seeing? Is it delusion?

In Reason, Tim Cavanaugh praised Rosen's Twitter feed as "the most flexible, biting and truthful work of media criticism being done today" but couldn't get behind Rosen's critique:

It's hard to get bent out of shape about Barstow's uninflected report that Tea Partiers are wary of government's natural tendency toward tyranny. But one feature of the mainstream media -- you might even call it a narrative that runs through a sprawling industry -- is how much emphasis everybody is always putting on concealment. Given that there's nothing in Barstow's piece (beyond the laboriously constructed Everyperson "throughline" these features always have) that you couldn't have picked up from Facebook over the last five months, this seems like another way that news organizations are no longer efficient vehicles for news.

Sally Quinn's family folly

Sally Quinn used her 2/19 Washington Post column, headlined "No 'dueling' Bradlee weddings, just scheduling mistake" to offer a many-hundreds-of-words explanation of a sticky social-calendaring problem for her high-profile family.

The piece's head-scratchingly Marie-Antoinette-ish quality called forth snorts of derision: "an enormous turd that'll eventually get mentioned in another story about how the Post has lost its way," wrote the City Paper' Erik Wemple, as he reported the news that Post editor Marcus Brauchli was canning further Quinn columns from the print edition.

@jayrosen_nyu The print guys won and they thought this was fine thing to run in the Washington Post http://jr.ly/z38b Jaw-dropping.

In Politico, Michael Calderone gave Quinn an extended platform to defend herself. She declared, "I have absolutely no regrets at all."

Has the Net gone nice?

In the New York Observer's "My Town of Kind", Meredith Bryan chronicles what she sees as the outbreak of "Internice"-ness in a post-bubble, post-snarky New York media world. Admitting the possibility that this new civility might simply be "favor economy"-driven backscratching, Bryan nonetheless seems to welcome it. Whereas, inevitably, Gawker -- represented by Hamilton Nolan -- is appalled:

Civility is a good quality to cultivate in daily life, but it has only limited value in journalism. We all have those secret little friend lists in our head, demarcating the people we are determined to treat nicely. Those media people who want to remain useful to readers will do their damnedest to keep those lists as small as possible. The rest of the media people, with the long lists, will probably get the better jobs. Until some snotty little asshole without a friend in the world comes along to tear them down again.

Bryan locates the new nice's epicenter in the Tumblr blogosphere. For a different view of Tumblr's ascent, read Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in Silicon Alley Insider: he argues the blogging service's simple design is responsible for its success.

Noteworthy links

• Michael Wolff describes a high-level News Corporation conclave planning Rupert Murdoch's effort at creating a for-pay "Hulu for news." Meanwhile, Gawker's John Cook chronicles "The Fall of the House of a Murdoch" as a King Lear-like saga of a mogul beginning to enter his dotage.

• Two fact-checking efforts on Thursday's healthcare debate, from Politifact and Factcheck.org.

• Dan Gillmor explains "Why Journalism Organizations Should Reconsider Their Crush on Apple’s iPad", pointing to Apple's recent banning of risque apps from its App Store.

  @davewiner Thought experiment: What happens to the Engadget app when they run a leaked Apple announcement? Hint: Apple sued bloggers over this.

• In Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Silverman catalogues how journalists can inoculate their work against the possibility of inadvertent plagiarism.

• Three good lists: Conor Friedersdorf's Best Journalism of 2009; GOOD's Decade in Web Video; and McKenna Ewen's list of exemplary multimedia journalism from #wjchat.

• Laughs for the weekend: The embargoed journalist's revenge (video, some NSFW dialogue) and the Linkbait Generator.