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By Paul Gillin

Next spring, colleges and universities will graduate thousands of new journalism students. They’ll go forth into newsrooms across the country to practice the skills that have served journalism well for over a century. They’ll know how to interview sources, summarize their findings and write a few hundred words of clear prose in an inverted pyramid style.  These are the skills that journalism schools have taught for decades. And they will be almost meaningless in the world these newly minted journalists will soon inhabit.

Journalism changed forever starting in early 2004. At that time, there were about a million people worldwide writing the online personal diaries called blogs.  There was no MySpace, no Facebook, no Digg and no YouTube. Apple’s iPod had sold less than a half-million units. The Internet was emerging from a two-year hangover.  Few people saw the explosive changes that were about to take place.

Three years later, the online world is a very different place. More than 100 million people have created blogs, and a third of them update their blogs regularly. MySpace is so embedded in the psyche of America’s teens that nearly everyone under the age of 18 has an account. More than 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. New services like Twitter and Jaiku allow ordinary citizens to publish information globally using cell phones. In the summer of 2007, prominent blogger Robert Scoble wrote of learning about an earthquake in Mexico on Twitter an hour before it was reported in the news media.

The media has called this phenomenon Web 2.0, but it’s basically a revolution in personal publishing. For the first time in history, ordinary citizens have the means to publish to a global audience cheaply and easily. Journalism will never be the same.

A venerable craft

The craft of reporting as we know it was refined in the days when information was scarce and the purveyors of information were the few who could afford the substantial capital investments needed to deliver stacks of newspapers and broadcast streams to the masses. In an era of information scarcity, knowing what to cut out was at least as important a part of journalism as knowing what to keep.

The classic approach to reporting is error-prone, wasteful and full of subjective decisions, but until recently, it was the best we could do. Here’s a summary of how the process typically works:

Armed with an assignment or story idea, the reporter strikes out find and interview knowledgeable sources.  Typically, 90 percent or more of the information she gathers never appears in the final story. The reporter attempts to synthesize facts and opinions into a single account. Despite the fact that she is often less informed about the topic than any of the sources, we put our faith in her because she is impartial and trained to do this.

When the reporter writes, she must treat her audience as a single entity, even though she knows that they have a diverse range of interests and characteristics. A story about Oriental rugs, for example, is of different relevance to a weaver, a home decorator and a child labor attorney. But it doesn’t matter; the story can only be written one way.

If the published story contains an error, there is little that can be done about it. A letter to the editor or a correction may show up several days later, by which time most readers have forgotten the original story anyway.  If the story is picked up by a wire service, the error is picked up as well.

A new approach to journalism

The practice described above was acceptable in an information-starved world. However, many of the structural limitations of traditional media are now gone. Information is plentiful, the tools of online publishing are cheap and the networks to deliver information are fast and reliable. There is simply no reason to continue doing things the way we have done them.

Consider how a reporter might tackle a story in the future. She contacts a source to request an interview.  The source agrees under the condition that the conversation be recorded, posted on a website and linked to from the published article. Or perhaps the interview is conducted via e-mail or instant messenger, creating an archived trail that can be published for any one who’s interested to read. The reporter’s notes are, in effect, online for all to see.

When the reporter writes, she still synthesizes information, but she also weaves in links to source material, blogger commentary and background articles. Readers are given pointers to additional material that may appeal to their particular interests. Readers can also comment on the story, adding information and perspective.

If there’s a mistake, corrections are instantly made online. However, the chance for a mistake is much lower because source material is easily available. Over time, the story is updated and embellished as new information surfaces. There’s no need to repeat the facts over and over because earlier accounts are always available. The reporter and editor become, essentially, aggregators of information.

This radical new approach to journalism is actually being practiced right now. Wikipedia, the massive online reference work that anyone can author, is perhaps the most prominent example. Wikipedia’s community model, in which there are no named editors, has created a resource that is more than eight times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica and of nearly equal quality, according to independent studies.

What’s often overlooked on Wikipedia is its current events coverage. Using content assembled from mainstream media, first-hand accounts, amateur photographers and bloggers, the site is remarkably effective at providing comprehensive news and perspective. Its coverage of the October, 2007 California fires is an outstanding example of this.

Other experiments in this new form of journalism are proliferating, including iBrattleboro.com, Northwest Voice and Korea’s OhMyNews.com.  Mainstream media like USA Today and The Washington Post are experimenting with reader comments on published news. These publications are on the leading edge of the new journalism.  However, they are still in the minority. Most newspapers don’t even include hyperlinks in the stories they publish online.

Some people refer to this new approach to newsgathering as citizen journalism.  This concept has drawn skepticism and even derision from the mainstream media, who argue that ordinary citizens lack the skills needed to produce well-structured, impartial accounts.  They’re right, but they miss the point. Citizen journalism is not about replacing reporters with ordinary citizens; it’s about supplementing the work of professional journalists with the newly accessible observations and insights of interested people. The result of this interaction is a new brand of journalism that is more comprehensive, accurate and reflective of the varied needs of the readership than the model that was constrained by the limitations of print and broadcast media.

We’re on the verge of an exciting reinvention of journalism enabled by personal publishing. The transition will be tumultuous and even painful, but the result will be well worth the effort.

PAUL GILLIN is a writer and social media consultant whose 2007 book, The New Influencers, documents the impact of new media on markets and institutions.

By Francis Plourde

“You have two stories, one about a group of Chinese protesters for the independence of Tibet in front of the Vancouver Public Library, the other one about a stolen trash basket in front of the French Cultural Centre. Which one do you pick?” a senior reporter at Radio-Canada once asked me. His answer: “Don’t hesitate, take the story about the trash basket.”

He was kidding, of course, but his little joke summarized what a reporter faces when working in a French environment in Vancouver. I quickly faced issues that I never expected when I started working for Radio-Canada, my previous experience being in print reporting.

At Radio-Canada, the French arm of the national public broadcaster, I’ve found that newsworthiness is often tied to French language proficiency – something which may seem superficial to the majority of the population of Vancouver, but which is crucial to our audience, a small enclave of francophones in an anglophone world. As I’d soon realize, these challenges are compounded when the medium is radio or television.

Being a French reporter in Vancouver is a little bit like being a foreign correspondent. But unlike foreign correspondents, who have a mandate to tell what is going on in a certain country, and to talk to local people for a far-away audience, we have to interview people from the community for the same community. Which often makes things complicated.

To provide information to his viewers, the foreign correspondent has no choice but to interview people who, most of the time, don’t speak the language of his audience. It’s the best way to report accurately on what is going at the local level. At Radio-Canada, though, our coverage is a continual balancing act: between French speakers and people who will have an impact on B.C., between local and provincial reporting, between English and French communities. Most of the time, we will pick the Chinese protesters over the trash basket. Yet from time to time, the trash basket is going to win.

Language and newsworthiness

At work, I rarely ask myself about the ethics behind my newsgathering. When dealing with deadlines, my concerns are two-fold:

1) Find a source with something to say on today’s issue.

2) Ask the source if he or she speaks French.

The construction of news stories is simple. If the source doesn’t speak French, her comments will end up in a clip of five seconds or less, with the rest of her thoughts quoted indirectly. If the source does speak French, she might end up with a quote of 10 or 15 seconds. Or, even better, a live interview on one of Radio-Canada’s shows aimed at the francophone community.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the sources we choose to interview and their impact on the quality of the information we provide. For my editor, Marylène Têtu, there’s no dilemma about this rule.

“We’ll always interview people who have something to say, but if they speak French, all the better,” she says.

In real life, it’s not always that simple. To his credit, the mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, is always willing to tackle an interview in Molière’s language. And he speaks a decent, although very slow, French. As a result, what would take a normal speaker perhaps 10 to 15 seconds can sometimes take him 30 seconds. An eternity in radio. And often his quotes are much better in English.

The general policy?

“If they hesitate too much, just do it in English,” Têtu tells me.

On the other hand, politicians with a good grasp of French might not get the same treatment. “It’s more tricky when someone like Paul Martin, for instance, comes here and speaks only English. Our listeners know he does speak a good French and hence, they’ll think our reporter hasn’t done his job if we quote him in English only,” she adds.

The French reporter as local reporter

Many reporters, no matter the language they use and their medium, have experienced what is called community reporting. Sources will get back to you on things you included in your stories, or will expect you to take a positive spin on what they are doing. Even though Radio-Canada is based in Vancouver, its audience has similarities with a small rural community.

Franco-Columbians account for only 54,400 out of the nearly four million people living in B.C. They are a community less than the size of Prince George — with a small difference: They are all dispersed across B.C., mainly in Vancouver, Victoria and the Okanagan, while Radio-Canada’s staff in the province — less than 20 reporters for both radio and television — are mostly based in Vancouver.

My colleague, Jeanne Ouellet, is an expert in community reporting for French television. She started her career at Radio-Canada in the end of the ’70s in Alberta. She’s worked for eight years at Radio-Canada in Vancouver, and covered francophone issues for a number of those years.

I asked her whether doing local reporting changes a reporter’s job. “In terms of reporting, it doesn’t change a lot,” Ouellet says. “We’re doing our job and have a neutral perspective. What we observe, though, is a dichotomy between our editorial choices and what the francophone community would like us to cover.”

Franco-Columbians have expectations, she says. “Some of them will have an idea of what they’d like to see, and if their point of view is criticized, they won’t appreciate it. We’ll get strong feedback,” Ouellet says.

B.C.’s many francophone organizations might expect some support by the only French broadcaster in the province. Others, like Réjean Beaulieu (nicknamed Gaulois), whose website Le Canard Réincarné monitors regularly both the work of what he calls “La Francophonie organisée” and Radio-Canada in the province, don’t hesitate to criticize our mandate in B.C.

Among reporters at Radio-Canada, Beaulieu touches on a very real debate about the broadcaster’s raison d’être. Some think our mandate is to provide provincial news in both French and English across the county, while others think the network is bilingual to support French communities in minority situations, as a way to ensure the survival of these cultural communities. In other terms, promote what is going on in francophone communities in B.C. The same is probably true with anglophone communities in Quebec.

The balancing act

I often wonder what kind of impact our attempt to report in French on local issues going on in B.C. has on the quality of the information we provide.

There are downsides to privileging French speakers, and, to a lesser extent, francophone issues. Some interesting interviews can’t be used, while occasionally interviews will be done with interviewees from the east coast who are French speakers, but not necessarily aware of everything going on in BC. On the other hand, it’s always thrilling to find a source who speaks French and with whom your listeners and viewers will be able to identify.

I haven’t quite figured out how to balance the fine line between local and national reporting, and between privileging the quality of an answer and the language the person speaks. I am a local reporter, reporting on local issues for a close-knit community, yet I often approach my stories as a foreign correspondent and try to bring my listeners into a world they might not know. Sometimes I get stories the anglophone media don’t.

But I’m always looking for people with a good grasp of French to interview. If you know of any, just let me know.

FRANCIS PLOURDE holds a graduate degree from UBC School of Journalism. He works part-time at Radio-Canada in Vancouver, where he often asks people if they speak French. The accomplishment he is the most proud of so far is snagging a phone interview with a French-speaking cab driver in Whitehorse. His writing has also appeared on The Tyee and in magazines in Montreal.

by Amanda Stutt

Somewhere out there, the people who thought up Craigslist are sitting pretty. It’s no secret that the independent, interactive online services site dealt a blow to the lucrative classified ads sections of many major daily newspapers, sending the business into a tailspin, scrambling to restructure and stay relevant.

This phenomenon has created a niche market for companies like The American Press Institute. The “old, monolithic newspaper model is in disruption,” they say, knowing that they are tapping into a psychography of businesses that are reacting to sustained losses of both revenue and readership, and are trying to figure out how to recover. The newspaper business is, after all, a business.

API has come up with a proposed solution called “Newspaper Next.” It’s a workshop led by Marketing Director Elaine Clisham that tours major urban beats and university campuses preaching a premise that would send chills down the spine of any journalist with a spark of creative fervour left.

“Your vision needs to be: Connect local customers with local businesses…developing products for people who have decided, for whatever reason, not to read,” said Clisham told leading local editors at a recent seminar at the University of British Columbia co-hosted by the UBC School of Journalism.

Instead of figuring out why core readers aren’t reading anymore, API proposes a shift in the critical mindset: Don’t worry about the reader — focus instead on the consumer.

Other, more interactive forms of media such as Google, Wikipedia, Netflix, and the like are thriving, and have largely replaced hardcopy daily newspapers for advertising and reference materials. Clisham referred to these sites as ‘disruptive innovators’ to the old newspaper model, and offered tips on how to stay competitive.

The “new” way is that news is not enough; rather, “we need to be everything you need to live in this community…We used to be the dominant source of information in our community… and we aren’t reaching as many people anymore,” Clisham said.

API’s biggest success model is The Desert Sun, a 22,000 daily circulation paper in Palm Springs, California. Clisham called The Desert Sun a good case study “because they were focused on organizational structure…in terms of building new audience, they’ve figured out the whole database thing very well.”

Steve Silberman, executive editor of The Desert Sun spoke at the seminar via a videotaped interview. “I was thinking too much about the reader and not enough about the consumer,” he said, explaining how implementing Newspaper Next’s model of restructuring worked for his newspaper.

Any mention of how to address public scepticism that may have turned readers’ eyes in other directions was conspicuously absent, but the point was not lost on some audience members.

Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun said, “the core question for a lot of us still seems to be in the newsrooms, which we really refer to as the high-end quality of our business…Are we covering too much, and uncovering too little?”

LaPointe is concerned about dipping into a “finite talent pool” of investigative journalists, and the hazards of placing too much emphasis on feedback to a market.

“We will not have the resources to break ground and investigate matters that raise public awareness and mobilize their interest and passion…You can’t take your eye off the ball,” he said. “We are coming from a model where, it’s not that we didn’t ask people what they wanted, we thought that part of the beauty of journalism was that we could, in fact, create a market for something. That you could lead the public experience and raise their awareness”.

But Chisholm maintained that newspapers no longer have the ability to create a market. “For better or worse, those days are over,” she responded, reiterating that the newspaper business must focus instead on tapping into “what the consumer wants.”

“No journalist…can survive in this media environment without understanding how business works and how a journalism organization can make money,” said Clisham. “We’re focused on the future and how to pay for that journalism.”

She agreed there is a strong market for investigative journalism, but rather than addressing ways to get the reader engaged in that journalism she asked, “how do we engage people who might not pick up the paper but still need access to information?”

Chisholm advised newspapers to nuance and digitalize the local telephone directory, tapping into consumers’ unmet needs — such as late night pizza-cravings. She suggested an online service directory with entertainment options and advertisements for “low-end pizza restaurants.”

“Local information [that is] easily accessible is a huge resource for building local audiences,” she said. “We need to get out of the mindset of creating content, and into the mindset of creating a platform.”

Clisham emphasized focusing energy on putting out “light versions of daily newspapers.” Examples of this model in Vancouver are 24hrs and the youth-oriented online Dose. “Circulation” will become “distribution” said Clisham, referring to the guy who stands on the street corner handing out newspapers to passers-by.

At the end of the day, critical ethical questions resonate. What has happened to the readers? Spending the morning coffee or transit commute immersed in a hardcopy of the local daily is rapidly becoming a vanquished pastime. So why aren’t readers reading anymore?

These questions have broad societal implications that Newspaper Next failed to address. Should the dominant paradigm in journalism shift from a focus on conveying messages to the reader and creating a market for consciousness-raising to a model that focuses on advertising products and services to a consumer? It’s these questions that haunt the sparsely populated hallways of the world of investigative journalism, and that anyone concerned with the future of newspapers should be asking.

With files from Stephanie Lim

AMANDA STUTT holds an MA degree from the UBC School of Journalism. She completed a B.A. in English Literature and Sociology. Her writing has appeared in the Ubyssey, The Seed and the Tyee. She specializes in investigative and human- interest journalism.

By Mahmood Ahmadi Afzadi

Fox News says Iran should be bombed. This doesn’t surprise me, given that channel’s track record in Iraq. What worries me, however, is that the hawkish channel has just begun saying that its drumbeat for war is a mere reflection of public opinion, and not studio war mongering.

Based on a recent poll by the channel, most Americans believe Iran’s nuclear program is for military purposes. Furthermore, more voters would rather see the United States take a tougher line with Iran than a softer diplomatic path. “A tougher line” is a euphemistic term for war.

But is its evidence really “documented”?  I have gone through its recent poll and found a few interesting points. The timing of this poll is highly questionable; even the network’s website admits that the poll’s coincidence with “all the controversy over the Iranian president’s visit to New York may have somewhat inflated feelings about Iran”. The same poll at any other time could produce a less war-supportive result.

Fox then asked if the viewers thought “al-Qaeda or Iran pose the greatest threat to the safety of the United States today”. The answers suggest that al-Qaeda is envisaged as twice the threat as that of Iran. The milder anti-Iranian result, however, is not reflected in the channel’s analysis, which still insists on Iran’s clear and present danger.

The most elusive question posed in the poll is whether the visiting Iranian president Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s intention to visit Ground Zero was to honor the victims or the terrorists who killed them. Regardless of what the real intention might have been, how can any intention like that ever be discovered, much less polled?

Furthermore, the majority of those asked said they thought Iran’s uranium enrichment program was for military purposes and not producing electricity. However, that falls short of suggesting the viewers voted for a US bombing of Iran.

We can hardly hold Fox News responsible for a war that has not yet happened. Whether or not the Bush administration will go to war with Iran is still uncertain. But what is certain is that the channel has practically raised the possibility of a military encounter with Iran, simply because its anti-Iranian antagonism spoken on behalf of the US people and government is believed and taken seriously by the players at the other end of the game: Iranians.

Thanks to its ability to arouse anti-American sentiments, Fox News is now the most quoted American political source among the hard-line Iranian media including the state-run radio and television and the pro-government dailies, which are scrutinizing every single minute of its programs in search of vilifications of Iran.

Iranian state-run radio and television news have referred to Fox News (which they call “the official organ of the Pentagon”) 94 times in the past two months as compared to 75 and 32 times for Reuters and CNN in the same period respectively. And while the latter two have, in more than 70 percent of the cases, been referred to for news other than the US-Iranian standoff, Fox News has been quoted or mentioned for vilifying Iran in each and every one of those 94 cases.

The pro-government daily, Iran, has meanwhile reported on the network’s provocative language more than other Iranian newspapers. Each time Fox News is quoted with reference to a US confrontation with the Islamic republic, the morning daily has run up to five articles slamming the United States in the same edition, on average a five-fold increase in its daily anti-American rhetoric.

Interestingly, the daily seems to be hardening its tone in proportion to the tone and intensity of Fox News’s anti-Iranian reporting. In its editorial one day after President Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University, Fox News was buzzing with anti-Iranian sentiment, while Iran likened the standoff to “a battle which will eventually result in a bloody American defeat.” Such an explicit reference to war by an Iranian medium is still rare, but the rhetoric is increasing as Fox’s does. It was about this time in the lead-up to the Iraq war when the other American networks started following Fox’s lead; now it seems to be Iranian media that are following the network’s style.

Spreading mutual hatred at this pace will undoubtedly contribute to more tensions between the United States and Iran. A sentence from Thomas Schelling’s wonderful cold war era book, Arms and Influence, written in 1966, illuminates the present situation: “The threat of war has always been somewhere underneath international diplomacy, but for Americans [and I would dare add Iranians] it is now much nearer the surface.”

At this precarious point in history, both Iranian and American media would do well to reflect on how their reporting draws the threat of war to the surface.

MAHMOUD AHMADI AFZADI has worked in Iranian radio and television since 1992, reporting on events like the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 1996, the killer earthquake in the southern Iranian city of Bam in 2004, and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also interviewed such politicians as Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Benazir Bhuto and Mahmood Ahmadinejad. He has been researching the Iranian nuclear issue since 2003. He is currently studying at the University of B.C.’s Individual Interdisciplinary Program.

By Kendyl Salcito

The 21st century has heralded the advent of countless new journalism ethics societies, codes and vows. Ombudspersons have become fixtures in the newsroom; public apologies have become a mainstay in big papers that publish big errors. Or have they? A recent accountability failure by the New York Times requires concerned journalists to demand whether newsrooms are truly taking responsibility for all they print.

On April 24, a panel of five Indonesian judges acquitted American gold producer Newmont Gold Corp. and its president director, Richard Ness, of charges regarding environmental degradation in an Indonesian bay. The verdict was decisive, and the judges minced no words in calling the prosecution’s case “weak” and their evidence “flawed because prosecutors had used conflicting evidence, gathered unscientifically. Much of it was provided by the NGO advocates who had begun pushing to have the mine closed even before it opened.

In its coverage, the New York Times quoted the judges, recognizing the law had spoken. The Times was less forthcoming with the verdict the paper itself had laid down a year and a half prior. Times reporter Jane Perlez wrote a damning series about the goldmine that ran on page one and swept the globe. Beginning on September 8, 2004 (the same day the World Health Organization issued a report declaring the bay in question clear of mercury pollution), Perlez asserted that fish had died off and villagers had been sick since the mine opened. Perlez’s medical sources were a visiting coral paleontologist and a public health lecturer.

She rejected several doctors’ accounts of villager health. The villagers she quoted had been traveling the world with anti-mining NGOs since 2002 and earlier. For most of her claims in the article’s top 15 paragraphs, she cited no one at all. As for Newmont’s representatives and scientists, she spoke with them but failed to quote them. The indisputable conclusion readers drew from her accounts was that an American colossus was ruining the lives and livelihoods of defenseless villagers.

The story is credited with urging Indonesian authorities to arrest five Newmont employees, holding them for 32 days, uncharged, while reports came pouring in from international organizations, local universities, and government scientists indicating that the bay was clean and the villagers were suffering from very basic symptoms of poor nutrition, bad hygiene, and allergies. These reports were occasionally covered by the Times, but never on A-1. The trial’s verdict made page A-8 last month.

So, the Times never came clean on its initial faulty reports about the Newmont case. But, surely Perlez herself was scolded. Perhaps a slap on the wrist?

To the contrary, Perlez was recently promoted to the New York Times London bureau, where she continues to write A-1 stories. On May 2, she scored a front-page slot for a story on an immigration “loophole” for Britons of Pakistani descent, citing American officials with concerns over the number of terror plots involving Britons of Pakistani descent. Because British people with Pakistani parents are, by law, British, they need no visa to enter the United States. But, Perlez does not explain how this is a loophole at all – by all accounts, this is not a loophole so much as a guarantee of equal citizenship rights for all British citizens, regardless of their descent.

I have not seen a public apology from the New York Times for quite some time. Not for the faulty Newmont story in 2004, and not for the racist “loophole” story from this week. If this is allowed in 21st century accountability, we need rework our definitions. Talk is cheap they say, but it comes with a high price when readers are held in such low regard that they don’t merit apologies for such slights.

by Mahmoud Eid, Ph.D.

As U.S. threats against Iraq mounted in 2003, the majority of media decision-makers docilely accepted the Bush administration’s claims that linked Iraq to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Their reports lacked sufficient investigation and verification. There were rare examples of truthful and responsible journalism, however. Oliver Moore of The Globe and Mail, on December 6th, 2002, reported on the Iraqi insistence, through the announcements of the Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammed al-Douri, that everything related to the weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed. Moore explained that the Iraqi government was “tired of repeating ‘again and again’ that it is not breaking any U.N. resolutions”.

Though Moore’s truthful coverage was not appreciated by audiences or governments at that time, I think The Globe and Mail was very proud of their responsible coverage and increasing credibility when the truth was revealed later on.

By and large, the media strive to tell the truth, but what if the ‘truth’ as they know it consists of distorted facts? The unavoidable end result is that they repeat lies. Further, what about the subjectivity of truths arising from their societal context? As with ethical practices, what might be considered ethical practices from one perspective can be considered quite the opposite from another. It would seem, therefore, that there must be a way to solve these dilemmas and make media conduct more responsible, no matter what side of the fence reporters are on.

A reasonable solution to the ethical dilemmas media personnel face can be found using mathematics. In game theory (a branch of pure mathematics), there is one type of a game called the Truth Game. The Truth Game focuses on the ethical principle of telling the truth, but it can be broadened to encompass the ethical principles that guide any response to a dilemma. The Truth Game, which has been explained mathematically in my dissertation (2004), highlights the fact that telling the truth is a rational conduct that, in general, will lead to the best outcome for the media in relating to their audiences.

Investigating the ethical and unethical paths that journalistic coverage takes, one finds a motivation for journalists to report ethically and honestly. Journalists, editors, managers, and owners are likely to take actions that will (provably) benefit the medium and contribute to the common good of society. My dissertation demonstrated that telling the truth is fundamental in achieving goodness and managing a conflict peacefully (or winning a game). Therefore, motivation towards ethical conduct, where otherwise the tendency may be to opt for another path, would stem from a desire to achieve beneficial consequences. Further, this contributed to clarifying the debate surrounding the ambiguity of “ethical and unethical, but from whose perspective”, as journalists recognize that in telling the truth, whose veracity has been checked and verified – regardless of what it is, or who is favored by its content – will benefit them and ultimately result in favorable consequences. In essence, rational thinking, through use of game theory, helps us to understand and explore the advantages of ethical obligations in journalism. Rationality obligates media workers to adhere to ethical codes as a key condition for benefiting all parties involved.

When modeling the verification problem between superpowers in his Superpower games: Applying game theory to superpower conflict (1985), Steven Brams introduced a simple two-person, non-constant-sum (non-zero-sum) game of imperfect information played between a signaler (S) and a detector (D)—The Truth Game. I argue that if the mass media take the signaler position and the audiences take the detector position in the truth game, as illustrated below, it is rational choice that they will tell the truth in order to achieve their safer outcome (the next-worst) and avoid the possibility of getting the worst outcome, while they also participate in allowing their audiences to get their best outcome.

In the truth game between the mass media and their audiences, the media face the challenge of telling the truth. Media executives must decide whether to tell the truth when choosing content, and after they have made their choice, their audiences must then decide whether to believe the content. The Truth Game uses numbers to rank the outcomes of decisions made by the two players (the media and the audience) that satisfy specified goals (truth-telling and believability). Counterintuitively, verification and falsification exist on diagonals, both involving true and false statements. That means that verification ranges from strong to weak, strong being a believed truth and weak being a disbelieved fallacy. Conversely, the falsification diagonal crosses from believed fallacy to a disbelieved truth. In other words, falsification is range of wrongness and verification is a range of correctness. The chart below assigns numerical values to each option, indicating that strong verification (2,4) is numerically the highest and best outcome, while weak verification (1,3) is the worst. That means that the worst possible scenario for journalists is to have an audience that knows it lies. Journalists have seen this in action as citizen journalism has skyrocketed in stature.

It is worth noting that as a game of hiding and discovering the truth, with a secondary emphasis on the mass media’s desire to be believed and the audiences’ desire that the mass media be truthful, the truth game enables one not only to distinguish verification (main-diagonal outcomes) from falsification (off-diagonal outcomes), but also it suggests a strong and weak distinction in each of these main categories. Thus, verification is considered stronger when one believes the truth than when one disbelieves a lie (or untruth), because the truth is still unclear in the latter case. Similarly, falsification seems stronger when a lie (or untruth) is believed than when the truth is disbelieved, because disbelief in the truth indicates that one has missed the truth but not necessarily that one has been hoodwinked into believing a falsehood.

Given the fact that this game is not one of total conflict, i.e. what one player wins does not necessary mean that the other loses, both players do better at (2,4) than at (1,3). That is, it is better for everyone when the news is truthful and the audiences believe it than any alternative. In other words, truth to be believed is better than lies (or untruths) to be disbelieved because the former is strong verification while the latter is weak verification. In addition, the fact that (2,4) is better for both players than (1,3), and there is not another outcome better for at least one player and not worse for the other than (2,4), means that this is the best outcome that the mass media should work for, given that they start playing first.

Because there is no stability in this game, the mass media can do immediately better by departing in the directions shown by the vertical arrows, from (2,4) to (4,1) and from (1,3) to (3,2). Also, audiences can do immediately better by departing in the directions shown by the horizontal arrows, from (4,1) to (1,3) and from (3,2) to (2,4). However, if audiences could predict the mass media’s strategy choice with certainty and if the mass media knew this, the game would reach an equilibrium if it were played sequentially. The mass media would choose (T) and audiences would respond with (B); but each would do worse by departing from these strategies.

In other words, there is a risk for the mass media of not telling the truth, and the worst outcome stems from audience disbelief in the face of media untruths. In contrast, if the mass media tell the truth, the audiences will be most benefited (seek their best outcome) by believing them. This provides the media decision-makers with internal motivation to tell the truth, thereby following one of the major journalistic ethical principles, that is based on their recognition that rational thinking will lead to achieving their desired goals and help them to practice their responsible role in society.

It can even be argued that the media can play an influential role in government policymaking by being truthful. That is, if rationality leads the media to be truthful and abide by ethical principles, they will not rely blindly on announcements by governments or military authorities. Rather, they will access various sources of information ensuring that the veracity of this information has been checked and verified before passing it on to the public. If this adherence to the truth is followed, then audiences will trust that what the news media say is true. But, and here is the catch, if they find that the news media say “the authorities are hiding facts” or that there is no access for the media to the information, then the audiences will think that the government is doing something wrong, since if they weren’t they would not be afraid of the media’s scrutiny. Thus, denying the media access or telling them lies will lead to negative attitudes towards the authorities. That is, the credibility of the media that has been acquired by playing the Truth Game rationally and telling the truth to audiences gives them power over authorities, but their choice of not telling the truth, which is irrational according to the Truth Game, will make them lose credibility not only with their audiences but also in their relations with the authorities.

Dr. MAHMOUD EID is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He previously taught in the University of Regina’s School of Journalism, and in Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. His professional expertise lies in quantitative and qualitative research regarding the effects of mass media and social development. His teaching experience, research interests, and publications concentrate on media ethics, international communication, terrorism, crisis management and conflict resolution. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation is: ‘Interweavement – Building a crisis decision-making model for rational responsibility in the media: International communication, political crisis management, and the use of mathematics.’

by Stephen J. A. Ward

After a century of service, the old warhorse of newsroom practice — a strict distinction between news and opinion — is so weakened by scepticism, and so useless in controversial cases, that it should be retired.

The recent controversy over Jan Wong’s Dawson College article and recent moves by The New York Times to distinguish news and opinion only confirm my view that this is a topic dominated by fuzzy logic.

Attempts to distinguish between reporting and non-reporting in terms of “just the facts” and “just your opinions” are greeted by a wall of scepticism. Many people refuse to believe that journalists can separate fact from value, fact from interpretation.

This scepticism is supported by academic studies and by trends in news reporting. Much of journalism today straddles the boundary between “straight” and “unstraight” reporting.

I do not reject the distinction between news and opinion. I do not say the distinction is unimportant. I do say that the old way of understanding the distinction is exhausted. It fails to apply to new or hybrid forms of journalism. It fails to help us deal with controversial cases. It is time to re-think the entire concept.

Consider the Wong case. Her “Get Under the Desk” report in The Globe and Mail (September 16th, 2006) raised the possibility that the Montreal shootings were linked to alienation among non-francophone communities due to the “decades-long linguistic struggle.” On September 23, Edward Greenspon, Globe editor-in-chief, wrote: “In hindsight, the paragraphs (that linked the shooting to others in Montreal’s recent history) were clearly opinion and not reporting and should have been removed from that story. To the extent they may have been used, they should have been put into a separate piece clearly marked opinion. That particular passage of the story did not constitute a statement of fact, but rather a thesis — and thus did not belong in the article.”

Did this appeal to reporting-versus-opinion settle the issue? Hardly. On the CAJ list-serve, journalists wondered if Wong, a well-known columnist, had written a news article. One journalist said the Dawson article contained Wong’s picture, like articles by other Globe columnists. Another journalist questioned a premise of the discussion: “I doubt it is possible to report a story without opinion. First one has to decide whether to write a story at all about an event — a matter of opinion. . . . Then there is the decision on what to emphasize by putting it in the lead — again, a matter of opinion.”

I note this debate not to take sides but to show how, in today’s journalism, the news-opinion distinction can produce as much disagreement as agreement.

The traditional news-opinion distinction also provides little help in evaluating the many forms of journalism that lie between straight reporting and commenting – the analysis, the backgrounder, the first-person news account, the investigative inquiry.

For example, take those “special reports” in weekend newspapers. On September 30, the front page of The Vancouver Sun featured a large photo of criminal eyes. The headline blared: “Stolen Goods.” Readers were directed inside to two pages of articles by reporter Chad Skelton on the high rate of property crime in Vancouver.

The pages contained different forms of journalism with different purposes: statistics on crime and court sentencing; a featurish report on police interviewing repeat offenders; tips on how to protect your home from robbery, and so on. It was part feature, part straight reporting, part consumer report. It contained not just facts but perspectives and values.

The old news-opinion distinction has little application to this form of journalism.

Take, as another example, Michael Valpy’s analysis of Belinda Stronach and her alleged affair with Tie Domi. In the Focus section of the Globe and Mail on September 30, 2006, Valpy began with this: “Belinda Stronach, multimillionaire divorcee and recent minister of the Crown, likes sex. She likes athletes’ good hard bodies. Acquaintances say she’s partial to younger men. And, being a dude magnet, she appears able to come-hither any hunk who catches her eye.”

Sheer naked opinion, right?

Wrong. In the rest of his article, Valpy provided an interesting analysis that used many of objective journalism’s methods – an appeal to facts, to biographical documents, to relevant sources and interviews. He didn’t just express opinion. He grounded in fact his interpretation that there is more to Stronach than meets the eye.

What does the news-opinion distinction say about this form of journalism? Not much.

One response to the blurring of the news-opinion distinction is to alert readers to stories with significant amounts of interpretation. The New York Times established a “News/Opinion Divide Committee” of nine editors to not only separate news and opinion, but to recommend better ways to identify the many types of analytical articles that fall between straight news and opinion columns.

One result is that on September 20, articles that are not “straight news” will appear with a ragged right-hand margin – a convention already used for columns. I applaud the paper’s efforts to clearly label stories. But it also shows how complex the categorizing of articles has become.

How might we re-think the news-opinion dichotomy? In The Invention of Journalism Ethics, I offered a book-length theory of news objectivity for today’s more interpretive journalism. I can’t repeat my theory here, but I can boil it down to a few fundamentals.

1. Stop thinking of the objective reporter as a passive stenographer of facts. Start thinking of all journalists as active, value-guided inquirers who interpret and investigate their world.

2. Stop thinking that a report is objective if it contains only facts. Similarly, stop thinking that any report that contains opinion or interpretation is therefore incurably biased. Start thinking of good journalism as informed interpretations – informed by multiple perspectives and tested by objective standards of fact, logic and knowledge.

3. Stop thinking that objectivity applies only to straight reports. Objectivity, as a set of standards, can be used to evaluate analysis or features.

4. Stop dividing journalism into two camps — reports and opinion. Start thinking about journalism as a continuum of forms of communication that contain varying degrees of interpretation for different purposes.

5. Stop thinking that, if journalists choose their facts and sources, then they cannot be objective. All inquirers, including scientists, select and choose. Start thinking of objectivity as standards to test the selection process.

6. Whether or not my theory works, it is time for journalism to move on beyond a simplistic news-opinion dichotomy, with its reliance on a narrow idea of objectivity.

It is time to give the old warhorse a decent burial.