The Danger of Always Being On
THE Times introduced a regular video newscast on its Web site late last month. “TimesCast” shows scenes from the morning meeting where planning starts for the next day’s paper, and it features editors and reporters discussing the top stories that are developing, often with compelling video and photography from world hot spots.
“A quick bravo to you folks,” wrote Stephen Beaumont of Aurora, Ontario. “I’ve already become addicted.”
It is one of many ways The Times is trying to use technology to showcase its journalism and journalists for a larger audience. Twitter and other social media are also being used to promote The Times and are turning out to be powerful reporting tools as well.
But several stumbles in the past few weeks have demonstrated some of the risks for a print culture built on careful reporting, layers of editing and time for reflection as it moves onto platforms where speed is everything and attitude sometimes trumps values like accuracy and restraint.
On just the second day of “TimesCast,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, misspoke about a sensitive story involving Israel. A week later, a business reporter in Japan, unhappy over common reporter frustrations — lack of sleep, bad coffee, bossy press handlers and a newsmaker who did not take her question — lost her patience and tweeted, “Toyota sucks.” And, on April Fool’s Day, two Times bloggers fell for hoaxes.
“What ties them together is the acceleration of the news cycle,” Keller told me. “We’re always on, which increases the danger that things will not get checked as they should.” He said news organizations have always had times when they have had to work quickly on deadline, and they know there is more danger of mistakes on those occasions. “The difference now is the deadline is always.”
Another difference is that The Times is opening more of its news process to public view. It once did not matter if editors had all of their facts straight at the morning news meeting; there was plenty of time for reporting and editing. But with the world looking over their shoulders, things are different. Editors are dressing better, speaking in complete, sound-bite sentences, and mistakes are embarrassing.
Paul Iredale, a veteran Reuters reporter, said he watched “TimesCast” on its second day and was unhappy to see Keller say that Britain had expelled “the head of Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence service, “in retribution for the Israelis’ having assassinated a Hamas militant in Dubai.” The British had not accused Israel of the assassination. Nor had The Times established that the person sent home was the Mossad station chief.
“Agh,” wrote Keller when I sent him Iredale’s message. “This is why I went into print rather than TV.” Because “TimesCast” is taped and edited, Keller said he should have said, “cut,” and given a more careful summary of the story then in progress. Ann Derry, the editor in charge of the paper’s video operations, said, “Several pairs of eyes view every segment — and the entire show — before it goes up.” She said they all missed Keller’s errors and will “‘button up’ our procedures going forward.”
Nobody edits Times reporters on Twitter, and its prevailing style — fast, chatty, personal — can lull a user into opening up far too much. The Times has written guidelines for social media. As Philip Corbett, the standards editor, put it, they boil down to a warning that Times staffers on Facebook and Twitter “can’t think of it as a personal activity. Like it or not, they are seen as a representative of The New York Times.”
Hiroko Tabuchi, who said she knew the guidelines, nonetheless let frustration get the better of her on March 29, when she attended a news conference by Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota. Her string of tweets about the event was first reported by The Nytpicker, an anonymous Web site that focuses on The Times.
With less than three hours of sleep, Tabuchi wrote, she had to get up at 6 a.m. “We love you Mr. Toyoda!” After the news conference, she wrote that Toyoda took few questions and “ignored reporters, incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I’m sorry, but Toyota sucks.”
Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor, said reporters have always complained to one another, about irritations at work, sometimes vividly, but when they do it “to the world, live, I think it’s unacceptable.” I would have pulled Tabuchi from the Toyota story, but Ingrassia said he decided not to because what she wrote indicated she was upset with the company’s press arrangements, not prejudiced against it or its products. He said he saw no bias in her reporting and had received no complaints about it.
Tabuchi said: “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I’d want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage.”
Tabuchi said she regards Twitter as an invaluable way to connect with readers and to get sources for stories. Jennifer Preston, the social media editor, said The Times has used it successfully on major breaking news like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and the shootings at Fort Hood.
But using the new tools without old-fashioned reporting can get you in trouble. Two writers for the City Room blog found out the hard way on April 1.
David Goodman, who writes New York Online, an aggregation of news from many sources, bit on a claim by Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer and blogger, that he had been appointed official White House law blogger. Goodman tossed in a short item at the end of his April 1 post. Turkewitz wrote the next day that he had been hoping to catch political bloggers, “whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it,” but instead bagged “the vaunted New York Times.”
Goodman, who said he knows he should have checked it out, especially on April Fool’s Day, said that because several prominent legal blogs also had the item, he gave it more credibility than he should have. What he did not know was that the other bloggers were in on the hoax. Corbett said the episode pointed up the risks of news aggregation and the need to rely on trustworthy sources.
Andy Newman thought he had a trustworthy source when he wrote the same day about a supposed project of a street theater group: more than 1,000 people riding subway trains nude from the waist down. The troupe’s leader had been a guest City Room columnist for a week in January, answering readers’ questions about performance art, and Newman said he thought the man was reliable. When a Times Web producer asked the source directly and repeatedly if he was pulling an April Fool’s joke, he denied it.
When further reporting established that the police and subway officials knew nothing about naked riders that day, red flags should have gone up. Newman said he did not check Twitter or Facebook to see if there was any chatter about the naked riders. One would think that 1,000 people without pants, skirts and underwear would have attracted some public attention — even in New York.
The technology may be new, the speed faster, the culture different, but in journalism, the old rules still apply: be skeptical, check it out.
The New York Times
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