News Coverage of Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden

Ratio of News stories by day covering Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden

Coverage of Sarah Palin's interview with Gibson, Couric, and Tina Fey's impersonation on SNL

Ratio of stories citing John McCain that also cited Sarah Palin vis-a-vis Ratio of stories citing Barack Obama that also mentioned Joe Biden

Palin's coverage: MSNBC and Fox

The differences are particularly significant given that most articles follow the “horse race” format, and hence mention both Obama and Clinton.

*Article count from LexisNexis Power Search with search term “Barack Obama” and “Hillary Clinton” respectively. The source field was constrained to “New York Times”, “Washington Post”, and “US Newspaper and Wires” respectively.

“My name is Nick and I fear I am in danger of becoming an Australian political junkie. I find myself boring friends with the swings needed to win obscure marginals, which, up until six weeks ago, I never knew existed. My mind is cluttered with useless information, like how the South Australian seat of Makin is named after a post-war Australian ambassador to Washington.

Had you asked me 18 months ago, I would have hazarded a guess that Eden-Monaro was a type of Dutch cheese. Now I can quote the land mass of this all-important bellwether seat.”

While Nick Bryant did - on average - a reasonable job of reporting on the Australian elections, it seems debatable whether journalists can start filing in-depth analytically rich reports on a country days after landing in a country about which they know next to nothing.

Another reporter (Kevin Connolly) from the BBC – this time covering the US elections– wrote,

” On your first days in a new assignment as a reporter, you work hard - sometimes a little too hard - to look for clues that will help you to decode life in your new adopted home.

When we changed planes in Chicago midway through my never-ending New Year’s Eve, I found myself lingering in the self-help section of the bookstore, puzzled by the sort of advice for which Americans are prepared to pay. I now own copies of God Wants You To Be Rich and You’re Broke Because You Want to Be. “

There is a danger that journalists new to the country will weigh idiosyncratic details about the country they notice disproportionately in their analysis and reporting.

Good reporting – as is understood – is seen to a large extent as tough minded commitment to pursuing the ‘truth’. It is seen as a skill that surpasses bounds of geography and culture. And certainly there are elements of it that remain constant throughout. However, lack of a deeper understanding of the country, and culture can severely jeopardize not only “ability to contextualize events and issues, but also “objective” elements of reporting. The ability to contextualize is of particular importance for the apathetic ill-informed home country readership.

The foreign reporting standards have dropped precipitously as the length of foreign tours has dropped precipitously over the last many years to now average between one and three years. Reports from foreign journalists nowadays often take the quality of a tourist blog with substandard reports about preconceived notions that need validation. In this age of Internet, I am in fact unsure of the need for foreign journalists. Liaisons with prominent news organizations within the country should be pursued to produce reports.

While the problem of under-qualified reporters is the most prominent in foreign reporting, it is not limited to it. Greenhorns reporting on politics often times carry the open-eyed celebrity wonderment about the political figures they report on.

It is partially to understand the same - why stories of allegedly diaper wearing astronauts become ‘news events’ - that I met with Mr. Frankel.
Mr. Frankel is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, and former editor of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. He worked for over 27 years at the Post in varying capacities including working as foreign correspondent covering South Africa, Israel, and United Kingdom. In 2006, Mr. Frankel joined the Stanford faculty as a ‘Visiting Hearst Professional in Residence’ in the Department of Communication, where he now teaches journalism students.

Mr. Frankel is highly perceptive, articulate, and intelligent. He is also somebody who cares deeply, and has thought carefully about the ethics of journalism, the role of journalism in society, and the factors influencing what gets reported, and how it gets reported. In the three hour long conversations that I have now had with Mr. Frankel, he has maintained a dogged, and unwavering stance about the key elements and importance of what he thinks are the principles of good journalism. He believes that you have to be fair to be accurate, and that you have to report about everything - the events, the characters, and the context.

We started our conversation with talking about ‘Episodic’ coverage in news. Shanto Iyengar, a professor at Stanford University, in his book, Is Anyone Responsible?, uses the term, ‘Episodic’ to articulates one of the ways in which news is ‘framed’ - Episodic framing refers to a style of reporting in which events are reported independent of larger context. ‘Episodic’ framing is in contrast to thematic framing which generally refers to a style of reporting in which some attempt is made to provide background context or ‘theme’. “Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence.”

Iyengar, and since then many others, have found that television news routinely uses ‘episodic’ framing. Taken in conjunction with the finding that subjects shown episodic reports are less likely (than people exposed to ‘thematic’ coverage) to consider larger societal elements responsible for a particular problem (be it crime or poverty), we can begin to see the larger impact of presentation decision on people’s perception.

The larger unstated point here is about the medium. Each medium not only has its own constituency, its differing monetization methods and the constraints imposed on it because of that, its audience, its limits on what it can present and not present, but also its temptations, and ease with which certain things can be done, and not done. So the importance of ’strong’ visuals in television, and the “need to be the first”, has meant the ascendance of adrenaline-pumping, helicopters with search lights, kind of ‘live breaking event’ ‘episodic’ reporting on television. “You sort of defined the most essential part of how television functions – it is constantly looking for the visual, sort of the simple narrative; it is looking for the visceral impact story. It has no particular interest in themes. It is only interested in grabbing you at what you see,” adds Mr. Frankel.

The other threat of the dominance of ‘episodic’ coverage, and dominance of visuals, according to Mr. Frankel, is that it is so much easier to manipulate television. “The feeling is that if you came up with the visuals, if you came up with the sound byte, and you came up with the stage, you are going to be on the Evening News.”

Mr. Frankel almost always makes it a point to present the ‘escape hatch’ from the negative attributes that emerge from traits of a medium or something else, and the escape hatch is almost always found in following the principles of good journalism. “Medium do effect the message and it is naïve to think that there is no spillover but yes the important thing is good journalistic approach and it doesn’t matter what the platform is,” Mr. Frankel argues. “All platforms have their pitfalls. Some stories lend themselves better on one platform than the other but nonetheless it’s not a question of platform – it is a question of sensibility, of commitment to content.”

Talking about the Internet, Mr. Frankel adds, “Web is an enormous potential resource- it has all kind of contextual material, all kinds of ways of filling in, and newspapers are slowly finding out what links can do for you and are beginning to use them to offer some background, interpretation and things. And that’s enormously promising. Technology gives you enormous opportunity. But, Technology is just that – it’s a means to an end. If it’s not used by people to understand the value of providing people a larger context, it won’t be used for that. It won’t happen. I guess what I am saying is that the same basic sensibility that dictated how to provide information to readers in 1972 is still there – you still have to have that if you really want to get readers the information they really want and help public get more informed. It is the same process you have to go to and the same understanding that you have to have. If you don’t have that – you will have the sort of episodic ‘quick hit’ phenomenon and the stories about the jealous astronaut in the diaper going to kill her boyfriend’s lover. It still takes the sensibility to understand what you need to provide.”

“And that’s, for what it is worth, we try to teach here. We give people training across different platforms but what we are really offering people is a solid grounding in what journalism ought to be.”

The principles of good journalism, the ’sensibility’, according to him, transcend medium and time. “You know journalism in some ways is still the same. I was a foreign correspondent in the 80s and then I went back in 2002 for one more round. I was at the London Bureau and I did that for three or four years. The platforms are changing rapidly but you know the fundamental thing that I did everyday in 2005 was very close to what I did in 1983. Now that’s only 22 years, and that is only one slovenly journalist, but what I am saying is that the fundamental thing that I was doing then I think is the same fundamental thing a journalist was doing in 1945 or 1925; he is trying to give important information, trying to find out what they don’t want you to know.”

The biggest disservice that the ‘episodic’ format has done is that it doesn’t allow people to see relationships, and see the linkages that exist across time and across events. Journalists – jour comes from the French word for ‘day’ – across board sometimes seem preoccupied with assiduously cataloging reports about the daily events. Mr. Frankel, after acknowledging the truism, brings the discussion back to that ‘escape hatch’ and how good journalists should approach reporting. “What good journalists are supposed to do is see the relations within events. Yes to report out the event but - to use the analogy of building a wall – there is one brick and there’s another brick - as you are analyzing and sort of putting the bricks in place you gradually see the wall and you see a social phenomenon and you need to describe that well and you need to write about it.”

The beauty of the good journalistic method is that it is ground up and it takes specific events and slowly constructs a theme, a theory, a phenomenon, a trend, according to Mr. Frankel. Narrating his experience of covering South Africa in 1985, he illustrates how a functioning ‘ground up’ method looks in reality. “Covering South Africa in 1985 and going to say one township where kids are battling with police and police are shooting, and going to another, and seeing things replicating themselves, and gradually making connections and seeing that actually there was an uprising with a capital U, and to understand where that uprising may go. As I went from place to place, I could see that there was an important new phenomenon taking place and that I needed to understand it, I needed to analyze it for my readers, and I had to be very knowledgeable about it – I saw it at many, many places, talked to many, many people about it including academics, and got raw information and pulled out whatever analysis I could from people whose job it was to understand these things. That’s what good journalism is about and there are a lot of bad journalists and not just on TV.”

He surprisingly ended the quote pointing out, “So the episodic is the easy fall back option,” –perhaps seeing it from the perspective of the journalist – and his expectation of what a journalist should be doing. And indeed, episodic reporting is virtually painless for the journalist except when it involves standing in Gail force winds to present a report on hurricanes.

Research takes time, and it requires you to talk to ‘many, many’ people. And that work you put in to understand an issue and the work you then put in to pass on that understanding to people is the essence of good journalism.

There are multiple types of frames in news, and we have covered one –episodic/thematic -but another important one remains. It matters if the journalist focuses on the individual rather than the sociological, and the environmental. It matters whether we spend more time analyzing, and understanding the people, rather than the system.

Mr. Frankel, like in our previous conversation, bristles at the suggestion that covering individuals somehow makes reporting too subjective. Chaste, a contributor here on Spincycle, has correctly argued that morality doesn’t exist in tired half-explanations of flawed men in important positions, but in grounded analysis of how they have caused harm. Hence when we report ‘personal profiles’, we introduce subjectivity into morality, and into the broader themes. We simultaneously make it harder for people to find ‘blame’ and assign ‘blame’ correctly. We make the system less accountable.

Mr. Frankel, only half agrees with what I say, if that. Instead he argues that good journalists can do both – that is they can cover the individual and the context. And I get the sense that he believes that good journalists should do both, that one is not quiet complete without the other. “If we dwell on people, if we focus our journalism on people - we run the risk of missing certain important things, and about being critical about certain things. Good journalists do both – good journalists bring you fully formed human beings that you can visualize in front of you and understand and they are extremely critical of the phenomenon they have put in place. You take the example of ‘The Looming Tower’, by Lawrence Wright, about the making of Al-Qaeda. He gives you a pretty good sense of who some of these guys were, their family lives - but you know you don’t fall in love with them. But you do get a much better understanding of who they were. Events are driven by people. Wright even explains the social movements of political Islam mostly through telling the stories of the individuals and how they interact with the politics. It affected them and they affected it – I think it is a great narrative technique – it is not the only one.” The narrative technique that Mr. Frankel rightly observes in Wright’s book is known as the ‘Coleman boat’ in Sociology. The technique refers to the macro affecting micro affecting macro progression.

“When you are humanizing people – when you are writing about the Bush administration, when you are describing about their family life – what’s the purpose of that and how effective is that in concealing more than what you are revealing. What are wonderful narrative writers doing occasional small things as Post reporter [name not clear] did about Bill Frist’s family or John Negroponte and his five adopted Honduran kids – that’s gives you an insight into his mind and into his thinking, into his values and what he does. And even though it tends to be a piece that’s fairly sympathetic to John Negroponte it is still a very valuable piece. Doing that piece doesn’t take away from we wrote about Abu Ghraib and whatever John Negroponte and all of his predecessors were up to. I think we have to learn about everything.”

It is a naïve hope – to learn about everything, more so to teach ‘everything’ to the apathetic multitudes. The audience not only has little interest, but also limited time, and limited cognitive capacity. By focusing on the individual and some leader’s dog, one runs into the danger to confusing people – especially the majority who pay scant attention to politics. They need to know how each of the different stories needs to be weighed to produce a reasonably good understanding of what is going on. And if a journalist feels obligated to run that personal portrait, cues should be left for the reader so that they can peg the story –accurately- in a broader understanding of the topic. Mr. Frankel grapples with it a little tangentially. Conversation is always an exercise in parallel narratives. “That’s a good point. You know where it came was the run up to the Iraq War because we had lots of stories and we had some critical stories but it was such a huge flow of stories that we weren’t giving the readers any roadmaps to what was really important and what they really needed to know and keep an eye on or worry about. You know the defense of many editors after the Iraq War – we had that story. We ran it on that X date just didn’t get any traction. Probably we didn’t get any traction because we didn’t put it out in the front page, make it a big deal, and keep at it in the same way deciding that this was the most important thing that we needed to keep writing about. It got lost in the flow of stuff. And you are right – if we give the reader all this material and don’t give them signposts and sort of emphasize what we think is really important then how is a reader supposed to sort it out.”

From exhorting about the principles of good journalism, Mr. Frankel quickly moves on to being a realist defending infotainment when we switch topics, and start discussing the increasing prominence of ’soft news’ items, especially on the web. While he was critical of the preponderance of entertainment on web portals, he argued that some entertainment was essential.

“All journalism is a compromise and especially American journalism. Mainstream American Journalism is an effort to entertain as well as inform because it perceives that you cannot do one without the other. If you are a publication like New York Review of Books with a circulation of 150,000, that is one thing, whereas if you have a publication which has 1.7 million customers you have to cater to a very broad church of interests and ambition and demographics. That’s the great joy of writing for a place like Washington Post – you are writing for a really large audience.”

“The Washington Post more or less invented the modern Style section back in the 60s with Watergate and all that. They sort of added this section with gossip and celebrities. Washington Post front page was seen as the deadliest front page in American journalism. And then we had ‘Style’ – we had the beauty and the beast. That’s the balancing act. And I think both are important.”

“When I was working as a Deputy National News Editor at the Washington Post, it was during the time of OJ Simpson and many of my colleagues didn’t think that the OJ Simpson story needed to be out there on the front page. It was sleazy. I disagreed. I felt that the themes would emerge – this was the story that America was focused on – and that we didn’t have to be National Inquirer to want to put that story on the front page. And actually serious themes did emerge about women, about race, celebrity, DNA evidence- many, many American themes. It was actually a struggle to that story on the front page. A lot of my colleagues were never comfortable with that story because they thought it was frivolous and pandering to the audience.”

I am unsure where the ‘compromise’ ends being a compromise and instead becomes a Faustian bargain. I am sure Mr. Frankel is concerned about it too for he frets over what he sees are these ‘get to know a celebrity’ blurbs that now find space on the Washington Post digital homepage. He is also concerned whether good serious journalism will be able to sustain itself in this era of rapidly multiplying options, and drastically different monetization. He says that “Another thing that we have at Washington Post- and it may be a theory that might be proven wrong shortly - If we do really good journalism as a brand for good journalism, if we provide good journalism, tie together things and give you a perspective on how the world is changing and if we are able to do that – we will prosper and survive. That’s a theory I have always believed in and I am really having some doubts about it. That in spite of what we hear about the crisis about dead tree journalism – that if someone does good enterprising journalism and reveals important surprising facts about how the world works that the journalist would survive and that somebody would pay for it, people want that information and will reward those who provide it. My whole career has been based on the belief in the relationship between good journalism and financial success.”

1) near the top you say I did three foreign assignments for the Post—actually it was four because I was London bureau chief on two separate occasions—1989-92, 2002-2005. Toward the bottom you quote me as saying: “The Washington Post more or less invented the modern Style section back in the 60s with Watergate and all that…” I suspect what I really said was “along with Watergate and all that…” Watergate had nothing to do with the Style section. I was arguing here that while Watergate is the Post’s most recognized claim to fame, the invention of Style was equally important as a ground-breaking journalistic innovation that gave the Post a unique identity. Also, Style was invented in the late 1960s, Watergate happened in 1972.

Since ‘horse race’ was first used to define media coverage of elections, I have extended the term to how media covers issues though a more appropriate analogy here would be ‘football game’ style coverage given that is heavy on reporting or ‘analysis’ of strategy.

The reportage today is focused towards analyzing the strategy of ‘teams’(parties), which are understood chiefly through its celebrity players (political leaders), engaged in a highly complex game. News coverage on domestic politics today involves extensive coverage of the process of how decisions are made (and not made), the innumerable stories on the power dynamics between the Legislative branch and the Executive, or between the leaders of the parties, whilst little attention is paid to charting out the impact of the policies. Whereas we see extensive coverage and analysis of alleged ‘missteps’, we hear little about the substantive topic of interest – issues at the heart of it.

There is now a virtual army of pundits – each appropriately fitted with meager intellect, large ego, and partisan affiliation - that dissects each and every political move and its impact on the public perception of a particular leader or of political parties. Be it the reporting about the ‘immigration bill’ or “Iraq’, there is now an abundance of reports that talk about ‘Bush’s loss’ or ‘Rove strategies’ or the ‘lame duck president’. Indeed strategy is an intrinsic part of politics, and dictates what is possible and what isn’t, but reporting on strategic aspects shouldn’t come at the expense of reporting on issues.

Causes

Driven partially by celebrity style coverage that puts individuals at the center rather than issues, serious reporters have mistakenly taken on the view that it is important to devote substantial energy on reporting on PR and strategy aspect of how decisions are made and how they will influence some person or organization.

Part of this style of reporting has to do with how news organization choose to organize and how they prioritize- There is a ‘White House’ and there are generally a few reporting from the bowels of congress, but aside from a regular crime beat there are few reporters assigned to analyzing issues. Analysis is either left to polemicists or hack pundits.

Certainly a substantial part of the reason has to do with reporters who haven’t thought through what is worth reporting what isn’t. There is this bizarre idea that news is current, that if news is a day old then it is stale and unworthy. What the heck is the utility of this news either way for poorly informed citizens of a democracy? I understand why news about the weather has to be reasonably fresh, and why some business news has to be fresh, but why does anything else have to be delivered within five seconds of it happening? This harks back to the comments I have made about the marginal (more likely no) utility of breaking news. The point though is broader – lack of a theory of news – aside from race to earn the most money – has seriously compromised not only the overall coverage, which is more Paris Hilton than substantive news topics, but also the coverage that is given to ’serious’ topics.

• Interview with Christopher Rose, Comments Editor of BC
• Interview with Lisa McKay, Executive Editor of BC

Can you tell me about your current role in BC and how you came to be involved with it?

Well, I am the Executive Producer at Blogcritics. I take the position to mean doing whatever it takes to move the site forward and take it to the next place, wherever that next place happens to be.

I had been writing a sort of e-magazine by the name, Dumpster Bust, in 2003 and 2004 and I would distribute it to friends and fans via e-mail list. Then in November 2004, I started an eponymous blog. It had just been a month since I had started the blog when I discovered Blogcritics.org.

It was an extraordinary moment — I’ll never forget it. I simply couldn’t get over how great it was to have a community where writers from all over the world could congregate and write about pop culture and politics and everything in between and chat and argue and laugh and hang out.

I got pretty involved, pretty active right away, and became an editor a few months later I think.

It was apparent to me from the very beginning what an enormous value that BC offers to both writers and readers. As a writer, I noticed that my own writing was improving, that I was reaching a much larger audience than I ever could have on my own, that I could access free review materials, and most of all, I was making connections and even friendships with great, interesting, wonderful people from all over the world.

I became an Executive Producer somewhere around the late summer of 2005 and moved into helping provide editorial oversight, though over time my role has evolved to mostly take on business development and public relations.

Tell me a little more about your decision to blog under real name plus what do you do for your “real” job?

I use my name because I want to present who I really am, “expose” my writing and the person behind it.

It’s a little strange being that “naked” before the world sometimes, but that’s a decision all writers much make

My “real” job is producing websites for a company in Los Angeles. I do try to keep the two roles separate to an extent, though you can of course infer that there’s tremendous crossover in terms of what I have the privilege of learning and experiencing each day.

Blogcritics is a passion and a job that has to fit into the cracks of my regular life, but that’s something that millions of fellow bloggers out there are also contending with. It’s a balance thing. Relatively few can pull a full-time wage from blogging so it’s an activity born of passion and devotion and even obsession for most!

Fred Turner, a professor at Stanford, has written a book called ‘Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism’. What impresses me about BC is this volunteerism. You do a full time job and still take time to volunteer.

I think that people — including the 1,700 “writer-bloggers” of blogcritics, our passionate readers and commenters, our most involved site users, and most of all our hardworking and dedicated and monumentally talented editorial staff members (which includes many of the site’s best writers!) — put in so much effort because they are passionate about the site and our community and want to see it grow and prosper and do well.

That’s certainly what drove me and what still makes me eager to get up in the morning, flip on the computer (it’s usually on all night, actually!) and see what’s happened since my last visit.

By the way, I am now one of the three co-owners of Blogcritics.org so my position is no longer strictly a volunteer position.

In your response, I think you were also alluding to the fact that the success of BC and the volunteerism that we see on it is due to its symbiotic nature.

Yes, BC is symbiotic — I like to use the somewhat cheesy term “people power” — Blogcritics is a grassroots success story (we’ve never had a dime of investment) literally powered by its membership.

So our “sinister cabal of superior writers” help one another to succeed, producing stories and work that is good and beneficial to the Internet community.

BC has an open commenting policy and an open attitude towards accepting new writers. I am sure there must have been plenty of behind the scenes discussions about it. Tell me a little about the process of deciding about policies around BC.

Open commenting has been around since I joined the site in 2004, and it really falls under the umbrella of creating a wide open community that is open to multiple viewpoints and that has as low a barrier to entry as possible.

Because of the increased menace of spam, we may one day have to require membership for commenters, but for now we can maintain this arrangement as we always have.

Tell me a little more about the vision you have for BC.

Whew… that’s a big one! Blogcritics is in a very exciting phase right now in that we’re expanding into a suite of sites that we call the BC Network.

Desicritics, our first network site, is now a year old and is thriving as a platform for people who live in and are passionate about the Desi world.

Now we are looking to create specialty “niche” sites that can capture a new audience that isn’t necessarily into the more magazine-style format that BC presents

GlossLip has now launched under the direction of Dawn Olsen and is a fantastic place to check all things celebrity and gossip, subjects in which there is an insatiable audience for new stuff, and particularly when it’s done with style and attitude and savvy, which basically sum up everything that Dawn is about.

We’ve also just within the last few weeks launched BC Forums into private beta and will very very soon go wider with it. Just in testing, we’ve seen the explosive potential of this area — which provides yet another way for our community to communicate, interact, joke around, or just hang out.

So that’s really the vision right there — providing new ways for our audience and potential audience to learn, interact, and communicate, creating cutting edge content-community networks online

Eric, I was talking to the other Eric - Olsen- recently and he was telling me of he quickly realized that he would have to assume responsibility if the site had to go anywhere. There are always key actors in a grass root organization. In a way, I am questioning how grass root is a grass roots organization? You are creating a media company from bottom up and I am interested in understanding how norms and policies are decided and who are the key players

Yes, Blogcritics is as grassroots as it gets — most people don’t realize this!

The only full-time employee is founder and publisher Eric Olsen, so he is the “man at the helm” for emergencies, trouble shooting, fire patrol, you name it!

Phillip Winn is our technical director and lives outside of Dallas. I live in Pasadena California and EO lives outside of Cleveland.

And our editors live around the world — several key editors live in the UK which is great because it gives us “wide coverage” in terms of the unending 24 hour production cycle.

So it’s all virtual, all grassroots, all people working together to create something that’s never been done before. That’s the thing that’s important remember: Blogcritics is singular in so many ways.

That’s why it was named as part of the AlwaysOn 100 in the trendsetter’s category, I believe and that’s what makes BC so fascinating.

Now Eric, a harder question! Do you see this as a model for running media organizations? Even mainstream ones? What the advantages to it? And what are the problems? Is this a model for a more accountable media?

Well — I see your questions as taking on a few different issues. Let me start with the first one.

I do see virtual organizations and small teams of founders working closely together as the present and future of software development. The barrier to entry is so much lower than it has ever been, which is a huge boon to the Internet industry and people who simply dig the Internet and technology.

I’m not sure if it’s the model for “mainstream ones” — I think it depends on the particular circumstances but certainly it’s there as an option.

At the same time there’s really no replacing in person day-to-day contact. As to your other question about a more accountable media, I think you’re talking about the role of the blogosphere in making the mainstream media and other institutions more accountable?

I believe so but I am also interested in talking about ownership and editorial policy decisions that are decided differently than they are today. BC is creating a new type of socially owned media company and do you think media itself can be reorganized via this principle and what kind of issues do you see around it.

Well, I think media in general is in a state of great flux with the role of traditional media companies declining in some ways and changing rapidly to deal with changing times while new and online media companies are gaining audience and credibility and dealing with the many issues that come along with that accountability and responsibility.

Take for example Mike Arrington at TechCrunch — he’s an interesting case in that he outright declares that he’s not a journalist while reviewing start-ups and tech companies, issuing opinions, and so on, all while openly investing in many of these companies, reviewing competitors, etc.

We’ve really arrived at a new place!

It seems blogosphere itself is going under reorganization as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time?

I see a blogosphere that is maturing and dealing with issues that come with it, pretty similar to what I mention in terms of the greater online media community. I see the blogosphere and traditional media companies, which are online, incorporating elements of one another.

Yeah,.. WP, NYT, BBC - all have blogs…

Yes, I’ve recently covered how companies like Reuters and The Economist are incorporating blogs into their online offerings.

My overarching theory on all of this boils down to a term I call “hybrid social media,” which I think is the future of news online.

I have covered some of the issues you raise in the article, Netscape Is the Future of News.

Very briefly, hybrid social news posits a future in which news will incorporate three main forms of content: original content produced by the online media company publishing the site, social news content driven by user submissions and user voting, and administrator or editor-selected content, which includes editor-selected pieces from all over the Internet, including those submitted by the general audience.

Blogcritics.org has always tried to combat that trend by forming an open platform where competing ideas and ideologies and values can co-exist together under a big tent of sorts. That said, a lot of our stories revolve around popular culture so can therefore escape some of the combativeness found in the arena of politics.

Though of course we do have a politics area that can get rowdy at times but generally does very nicely in bringing in a vast array of news stories, thoughts, and opinions.

Lisa McKay is the Executive Editor of Blogcritics.org. Lisa has been with Blogcritics.org since August, 2004.

The interview was conducted via email a couple of months ago.

You joined BC at a time when BC was much smaller than today. Tell me a little more about how you came across BC and what led you to join it.

I came across BC a few months before I actively joined, while I was in the process of looking for good sources of movie and music reviews. It was unlike anything else I had come across – it still is, really – and I started checking in on a daily basis to read stuff. Eventually, I worked up the courage to post a comment here and there, and then decided that maybe I should actually join the site and try to get some writing done.

You work full time, are a mother of a young son and a wife. How do you juggle your responsibilities?

Actually, only two of those facts are true at present – my son just turned 21 and has been away at college for the past couple of years, so juggling parental responsibilities hasn’t been part of the equation for a long time. Having said that, I think that people make time to do the things they want to do if they want to do them badly enough. My husband and I both have pretty intense interests outside of our work and our family life (which includes a lot of shared interests), and we’ve been very supportive of each other’s pursuits, so part of it is that I have a built-in support system, and part of it is that I’ve become very good at multi-tasking and prioritizing. Even so, I wish I could use all 24 hours in the day sometimes.

While writing an article about why you chose to ‘come out’, if you will, and start writing under your real name, you say that part of the reason was to lay claim on the articles that you have written. This works both ways – now people know whom to hold accountable when they see a ‘perceived’ injustice or have an axe to grind. Has blogging under your real name been a problem? How comfortable do you feel about commenting and blogging about contentious topics?

It probably says something about the nature of what I write that using my real name has never been a problem. The place where the discussions really seem to get personal is in the political arena, where people seem to take everything to heart and can get quite ugly when they disagree. I don’t have the stomach for that type of discourse, so I stay out of that particular venue. I have opinions on pretty much everything, and I have no problem with expressing them when asked directly to do so, but I really don’t see those contentious discussions as serving much purpose. There are a lot of people who like to “argue” just so they can call names – it has nothing to do with actually listening to what other people are saying – and I just don’t have the time for it, as I see it as unproductive.

At the heart of your decision to blog under your ‘real name’ is an ethical question that surrounds online media outlets – the issue of accountability. Of course there are real people behind these ‘false’ online identities and they often are accountable but somehow the cost free nature of leaving even the most borderline crazy comment or article under an assumed identity does probably sabotage perhaps reasoned commentary? What are your thoughts on the issue?

While I understand the reasons that many people have for remaining anonymous online, I do believe that a false persona makes it easier to say things that one might not say when using one’s real name. The faceless nature of the Internet makes that easier anyway – even when using a real name, I think many people say things to faceless strangers that they would never dream of saying in person. Accountability online is certainly a different animal than it is with print media, or with television or radio journalism. This is still in many ways the wild, Wild West, and I think one probably has to work a bit harder in the blogging arena to build up a reputation and to build trust among one’s readership. Once you’ve built up that trust, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a pseudonym or not – you maintain integrity the same way you would if you were using your real name, by doing your homework and being honest.

Blogcritics has grown exponentially over the past three years from a small fringe Internet outpost to a relative decent size media outlet. Tell me about some of the key inflection points in this journey – as you see them.

Certainly the biggest change was when we went from a self-publishing site where anyone could publish just about anything they wanted to, to what we have in place right now, where every piece that’s published has been edited. We work very closely with our writers to make sure that we publish polished and well-written pieces while still retaining that which makes us unique, which is our multitude of voices. Our strength has been our continued refusal to homogenize what we do – writers find it easy to feel at home here because we don’t have an editorial “voice” in any of our content areas – we ask our writers to be excellent, but other than that, we ask them to be themselves. I’m not sure there are many places with a readership as big as ours that can offer that.

Blogcritics is trying to create the norms of running a media organization on the fly. The key policy decisions – open commenting, open attitude towards accepting new writers, etc. – tell me about the behind the scenes struggle that has gone on around them and the kind of ethical questions that you have had to deal with to come to this place.

We’ve certainly had our share of policy discussions about the open comments policy. As is the case with every site that allows open comments, we get our fair share of flakes and cranks and just plain ugliness. We have yet to come to the point where we squelch that in favor of having more civil conversations, and I think that’s another area where we’re unique. We do have a comments editor who applies our very liberal comments policy with a very gentle hand, and I think that’s about all the control we’re going to have on that for a while. Our open attitude toward accepting new writers seems to work very nicely now that we have editors in place. People are either excited about the challenges and take advantage of the opportunity, or they leave because they don’t make the cut or they don’t want to put in the work. In either case, that works to our advantage, and it’s raised the level of our writing tremendously. BC’s growth has been a really organic process, at least from my vantage point. There have been growing pains to be sure, but we move past them pretty quickly.

Perhaps this current place is not the final resting place of this ongoing change. Tell me about your vision of blogcritics.org for the future?

That’s a great question – I wish I had a crystal ball. The quality of what we publish just keeps improving – we’re attracting some really amazing writers, and the section editors are continually working to shape coverage and come up with new ideas. I envision us getting bigger and better.

What kind of policy decisions do you think are integral to how you see BC? As in what kind of policies can you not see BC without, if any?

Well, I think we’ve set some editorial standards over the past couple of years in terms of what we will and will not publish (in terms of quality, not content). I can’t see us without those any more – we’ve really raised the bar, and the writers have really risen to the challenge. This is part of the process by which we become accountable.

How do you look at the role of a Critic? Is there merit in everybody being a critic kind of model? It certainly seems like a competitive market of ideas. What do you see are the positives and negatives of blogosphere?

Well, it depends on what you’re looking for, I think. The blogosphere has certainly democratized the whole process of criticism, which isn’t to say that everything everyone writes is good, or even worth reading. Sometimes you want to stand around the office water cooler and talk with your friends about the film you saw this weekend, and the blogosphere can certainly provide you with that, and sometimes you want an informed opinion about something, which is what real criticism entails. I think one of the neat things about BC is that we provide both; we have some very enthusiastic reviewers who can give you a very entertaining man-in-the-street opinion about something, but they aren’t necessarily approaching it from an academic point of view, and we have other writers who are incredibly well-informed, educated, and knowledgeable about their area of expertise, and they offer a very different perspective. The challenge and the beauty of the blogosphere in general is that the reader needs to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. In general, we may need to wade through more stuff, but in the end I think it sharpens our powers of discrimination and makes us better consumers.

Blogosphere is widely credited with making mainstream media more accountable. Do you see that as its job? If not, then what do you see are the roles of the blogosphere?

I don’t think it’s the blogosphere’s job to hold the mainstream media accountable. I think that’s our job as citizens, and we’re failing at it miserably. We have the media we deserve. The roles of the blogosphere are as varied as the folks who populate it; I don’t think it has a defined role, or is “supposed” to be one thing or another. It’s a tool, a means of communication, a marketplace of ideas, of commerce, of social interaction – it’s a way of organizing, presenting, and retrieving information. It’s a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s continually evolving. It is whatever we want it to be at any given moment.

It seems blogosphere itself is going under reorganization – as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time?

As soon as people figure out that there’s money to be made somewhere, things change. Certainly that’s happened in the blogosphere, but a lot of the people who are Internet entrepreneurs are also in the business of putting the tools of production and commerce into the hands of the end users. That’s us, and that’s a good thing. I think the business models we’re used to have changed, and are continuing to change. Since I have no business background at all, I wouldn’t even want to hazard a guess as to how this is going to look in five or ten years’ time. If you told anyone twenty years ago what we’d be doing online now, they wouldn’t have believed it.

How did you come to be involved with Blogcritics.org?

I just surfed in one day and was drawn in by the way the site is so open and accepting to all kinds of people. I made a few comments and then, nervously as I was a fairly novice blogger, applied to join. Afer a few months I was offered the role of Comments Editor, which I mostly love.

Can you tell us a little bit more about your role in BC and how it has grown?

Well, after becoming Comments Editor, I also started contributing ideas, some well received, about how we could develop the key qualities of the site into other areas. Hopefully some of this will start to become more apparent over the course of this year as we look to develop some more sites.

You are part of three major projects aside from BC. Tell us a little more about those projects and how you juggle your responsibilities.

Well, I don’t know how major they are but I love the potential the web offers to develop new ideas quickly and economically. In addition to my own three blogs, I love the idea of citizen journalism and have developed a repeatable model of how such sites can be launched and made interesting, relevant and profitable very quickly and this is something I’d like to develop more fully. I am also developing an entirely original idea which has the (modest) twins aims of making people’s dreams come true and ploughing a lot of money into micro-credit financing projects to help the world’s poorest people to help themselves. I think the micro-finance model is very strong due to its inherent sustainability and that it doesn’t create welfare dependency but actually empowers people to help themselves. The project just needs a little work on the payment system and a little legal clarification to be fully actualised but I need to find solutions to those two issues so if anybody reading this would like to help, I’d be very gratefu!. I also work as the Managing Editor for the Niner Niner family of blogs, which perfectly complements the work I do for Blogcritics. I am also developing four hopefully major new online projects, two for Blogcritics and two of my own. Taking on a bit more than I can handle is possibly one of my signature habits but I like to be busy - and life is for living, right!

Ethics, Normative Standards, Policy Making and Blogcritics

At the heart of your decision to blog under your real name is an ethical question that surrounds online media outlets – the issue of accountability. Of course there are real people behind these ‘false’ online identities and they often are accountable but somehow the cost free nature of leaving even the most borderline crazy comment or article under an assumed identity does probably sabotage perhaps reasoned commentary? What are your thoughts on the issue?

I think it’s mostly a question of personal preference. I have several online identities, of which the most well known is Alienboy. It’s a name I started using for online gaming which was re-inforced by the fact that I live in Spain, so I am indeed literally an alien boy! I have a semi-dormant-due-to-lack-of-time blog called Alienboy’s World and when I first joined Blogcritics I carried on using that ID for a while. I then decided that the character of Alienboy just didn’t seem right for Blogcritics and reverted to using my full name. Alienboy still has a lot of plans for new sites that will be developed down the road aways but these are temporarily on hold. I don’t see the identity issue as an ethical question unless people abuse it by pretending to be other people, which is obviously totally unacceptable. As to sabotaging reasoned commentary, that’s actually a more complicated issue. Freedom of speech is obviously a major concern and ought to be protected but if people abuse that by making deliberately insulting or offensive remarks then I think there is a case for careful and restrained editing. It’s an incredibly fine line that calls for some serious and careful judgment before hitting the delete key and an issue that I try to keep in the core of my thinking at all times. In the end, I just do the best I can and hope that will be acceptable but it is impossible to please all the conflicting points of view all the time.

Can you elaborate on how are norms created within a new media organization? The kind of decisions that you had to take, along with rest of the BC community, about the nature, editorial policy and style, commenting policy etc. of BC.

Well, when an organization forms, obviously the decisions are taken by the people who start it up. The three people that own and maintain Blogcritics are mostly incredibly open to input and tolerant of a very broad range of views and I think that is an important part of what BC is about. It would have been a much less interesting proposition if “The Troika” had tried to imprint their own very diverse views onto the site and wisely they have largely avoided that. On the other hand, they’re all so very busy with stuff that it can be a bit hard to find out what they’re up to. I hope to be able to help bridge that gap and enhance the level of communication between us all over the coming months.

Blogcritics is trying to create the norms of running a media organization on the fly. The key policy decisions – open commenting, open attitude towards accepting new writers, etc. – tell me about the behind the scenes struggle that has gone on around them and the kind of ethical questions that you have had to deal with to come to this place.

Well, those policies were in place before I joined so I can’t shed much light on those early days but I feel they were absolutely crucial decisions. Dogma and other rigid belief systems are absolutely the enemy of all humankind and I very much doubt that I would have become involved with the site if it limited itself in that kind of way.

In your role as a Comments Editor – you probably have to had to deal with ad hominem attacks, spam and other conflagrations with people using all sort of sophisticated ways to get their message across. Tell me a little more about the challenges and how you deal with them while maintaining a free open commenting policy.

There is a perpetual and natural conflict between freedom of speech and the need to maintain the site’s neutrality, open door policy and simple readability. It’s obviously important to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect and try to maintain some basic level of good manners or simple common civility. On the other hand, to simply not allow any kind of personal remark would render the site sterile and stifling. Wisely, the site uses guidelines rather than rigid rules, which is much more time consuming to manage but I believe that is well worth the extra time and effort involved.

How do you deal with people who post multiple comments under different names? Should this practice be frowned upon and why?

It’s not actually that common. There are a few who like to do that for dramatic effect, which is fine. When it is done to create a false sense of support for somebody’s point of view, that is basically just lying and is not tolerated. The worst is when people pretend to be other already known characters in order to create false content and is also not tolerated.

What kind of policy decisions do you think are integral to how you see BC? As in what kind of policies can you not see BC without, if any?

I just think that as long as BC maintains its open door policy and avoids becoming controlled by dogma, it will remain the fascinating multi-faceted jewel it is.

From the policy decisions of BC to how do you look at the role of a Critic? Is there merit in everybody being a critic kind of model? It certainly seems like a competitive market of ideas. What do you see are the positives and negatives of blogosphere?

There is information and there is the interpretation of information. Making sense of the ever-increasing complexity of the world we live in is a vital part of contemporary life. There are many often conflicting takes on all that on Blogcritics and that dialectic struggle is part of what makes it so special.

Blogosphere is widely credited with making mainstream media more accountable. Do you see that as its job? If not, then what do you see are the roles of the blogosphere?

It’s both more complicated and simpler than that. There’s been a huge flattening of society worldwide, although obviously different parts of the world are at different points in that process, which has been going on for at least fifty years now. A lot of the old school mainstream media have imitated the blogosphere by adding comments space to their websites for example. That’s a step in the right direction but until they value it as highly as sites like Blogcritcs do, it often seems like a token measure rather than really getting the point. However, to answer your original question, it’s certainly not the blogospere’s job to make the MSM do anything. They will either come to understand the nature of the new world order we live in and adapt to it or they will fade away into history.

Blogcritics has grown exponentially over the past three years from a small fringe Internet outpost to a relative decent size media outlet. Tell me about some of the key inflection points in this journey – as you see them.

The two key points for me have been 1. the incredibly smart decision by the founders to accept all (legal) points of view on the site and not limit the Blogcritics space on any cultural or ideological grounds and 2. the later introduction of having all articles edited rather than self-published. This has been crucial in establishing a massively popular, well-written non-dogmatic site. The fact that the whole operation, editors and writers alike, is entirely voluntary is pretty impressive too. We really do work hard to help the writers improve their writing ability and bring their work to as wide an audience as possible.

Perhaps this current place is not the final resting place of this ongoing change. Tell me about your vision of Blogcritics.org for the future?

I think the main site can carry on as it is. I would like to see all the fantastic content by a diverse range of great writers put to better use. I think the simple fact that we have around 1,700 (and rapidly growing) writers offers a lot of potential for the rapid creation of other more focussed sites in the future. I have a few ideas for the kinds of sites we could develop; sites that would offer compelling content around specific themes and those conversations are ongoing. I don’t really know what other ideas the troika may be considering…

It seems blogosphere itself is going under reorganization – as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time?

Probably both yes and no! Unless a company understands the interactive essence of the online world, its attempts to operate on the web will be compromised. For example, trying to prevent employees from expressing their views is symptomatic of the old way of doing things. It’s been well documented that companies that empower their workers and include their feedback in the company’s development have a competitive edge over those businesses that try to run an old scholl centralised command and control structure which sees workers as nothing more than cogs in a machine. I believe in transparency and that carries through all levels of a business in a particularly powerful way that transforms everything it touches, to the mutual benefit of all. A corporatized blogosphere that seeks to control what is said will always be inferior to one that allows true free expression.

I will stray here for a second to wrestle with how the gay rights movement is understood and framed and what it says about the current state of our society. Gay rights movement is at once framed as the “civil rights movement” of our era and as a movement about individual choice. The movement expropriates the terminology from the civil rights tradition (social good and social inequity) intermittently along with the postmodern discourse fixated on the individual expression. The highest ideal of this day and age is that individual be able to express himself or herself to his/her best ability. There is little thought towards what this means for society. It is a framing tradition that usurps the darling of existentially challenged and the individual capacity obsessed, Ayn Rand. It is not capability that is hindering the individual but freedom. What won’t an individual do if provided an opportunity. Frankly, not much. And it seems unlikely to me that a society can handle the unmitigated ambition and psychological needs of the millions. Roping back to the point with which I started this diversion - I don’t see gay rights movement as the most important movement of generation. The 650,000 Iraqis killed in four years, and the 200,000 more in Darfur, are the issues that need to be dealt with along with poverty and hunger. The gay rights movement has become the hip thing to support (and certainly I support it whole heartedly) but its hipness and cultural currency, something which was deliberately created, is a comment on the bankruptcy of social movements to raise issues more ethically and substantively. All social movements, from Darfur to environment, have become fads and they have become so because the marketers in those movements have woken up to the merits of framing things in a way that sells well. Unfortunately, they have done so by undercutting the moral validity of their positions.

The more insidious element of breaking news is that repeated news stories about marginal events, which most breaking news events are – for example a small bomb blast in Iraq, a murder in some small town in Michigan, provide little or no information to a citizen consumer about the relative gravity of the event or its relative importance. In doing so they make a citizen consumer think either that all news (and issues) is peripheral or that these minor events are of critical importance. Either way, they do a disservice to the society at large.

This doesn’t quite end the laundry list of deleterious effects of breaking news. Focus on breaking news makes sure that most attention is given to an issue when the journalists on the ground typically know the least about the issue. To take this a step further – often times the ’sources’ for reporting during the initial few minutes of an event are often times ‘official sources’. In doing so the breaking news format legitimizes the official version of the news which then gets corrected a week or a month later in the back pages of a newspaper.

While there is little hope that the contagion of ‘breaking news’ will ever stop (and it stands to believe that web, radio and television will continue to be afflicted by the malaise), it is possible for people to opt for longer better reported articles in good magazines or learn about an issue or an event through Wikipedia, as Chaste in his column for this site suggested earlier.