Last week Ben Goldacre explained how a Telegraph story on rape badly distorted a press release.
The details of what happened are not only discrediting, but also revealing about the respective merits of Blogging and early internet journalism. And I think the latter will soon change.
A good Blog always seeks to source statements. This is the beauty of the Hyperlink.
However, the early internet journalist, especially those from the "print" traditions, will tend not to source statements.
This is partly because journalists sometimes see themselves as professional interpreters of sources; but more often, as Nick Davies points out in Flat Earth News, it just disguises laziness and exaggeration.
Readers of internet journalism will increasingly expect hyperlinks to sources to be embedded into internet news stories.
So, in the example highlighted by Ben Goldacre, any story which relies on the statement "claim scientists" would link directly to the press release or to the published research.
Indeed, as a general rule, any "claim scientists" story which now does not link to the source is undoubtedly crap.
I expect some old-fashioned journalists and editors will resist this transparency, not least because it could instantly demonstrate how little - or just how much - they are actually adding to their source.
However, I also expect that the new generation of internet journalists, even in the mainstream media, will instinctively link to their published sources.
Any good internet journalist who invariably linked to - and demonstrably did not distort - their published sources would become highly credible with readers and will secure a following, and this in turn will please editors and advertisers.
However, I suspect "churnalists" will soon just not be bothered with by readers, and then by editors and advertisers.
I reckon that, in a year or so, good internet journalists - like good Bloggers - will routinely link to their published sources, and readers will forget that once this was not the case.
Or am I just being optimistic?
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
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We went through an article on bio-identical hormones (BIH) and had to guess the papers with quite some difficulty in some cases in order to check them. And, they did need checking as one revealed an undisclosed conflict of interest and some worrying lack of detail for search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria in a 'review'; and another paper was used to lend support to a claim that BIH might prevent dementia - most of the studies were in animals or petri dishes.
Coined a new acronym to reflect this - TRINGE - This Really Is Not Good Enough. We really should not need a special decoder ring to be able to follow-up on news stories.
The othe great advantage of the internet for journalism is comments.
Bad journalism can very quickly be pointed out and such feedback can be used to make corrections very quickly. I get very frustrated when news items in MSM articles do not have a comment facility.
A curious feature of journalism is that research is often reported before it is available to other researchers, like this recent stuff on caffeine and Alzheimer's Disease, not only did many stories get the details wrong but it turns out the paper had not been published at the time.
Maybe overoptimistic. I am not so sure that the discerning readership model will arise. Online newspapers just want eyeballs to fall on their ads. You can achieve this cheaply with 'linkbait' articles that have no real merit but simply attract attention in one way or another.
I recently posted a blog that was in two parts almost a month apart, because the original reference was difficult to track down from the content of the piece. Partly because the Mail utterly misrepresented the content.
I think this is a little optimistic, if only because it's the print media websites that still dominate the internet.
The print issue of the Guardian is never going to link to papers, and the online stuff is mostly just the same articles.
And ominously, the BBC's online content, which isn't copied from print, is often just as bad. No links, science churnalism, etc.
I agree that eventually things will change, but I don't see much improvement in the next year.
The Guardian does frequently add links into their articles, though. These are usually just links to other relevant Guardian articles, for background, but it's a start, and shows that they aren't just doing copy & paste all the time.
A similar example can be found in The Scotsman newspaper. It is now so badly run in the modern school of churnalism that their 'science' reporting is limited to the cocaisional large article, often outsourced, and small snippets on a fairly regular basis.
These small snippets turn out to have been lifted wholesale from a press release or AP release. Literally copied verbatim then a couple of words changed around. More importantly, they always manage to cut out the useful information, such as which scientists where did this research, leaving only a couple of sentences on what the research showed. In order to find out what the story was actually about I have to google sentences from it. Whoever does the chopping has no interest in the science or indeed in communicating things to the public, they are just looking for something to fill space.
As Neuroskeptic said 'ominously, the BBC's online content,..........is often just as bad.'
Anything that makes it easier for someone to leave a web site is going to be discouraged by those who seek to make money from their web site.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but I think there will be resistive pressure.
I'm afraid I think you're being over-optimistic, too.
How many people would bother to click on the links? I suspect that thoe of us who do are a negligible minority (in the papers' minds). It would probably take a long campaign of complaining about every unsourced article in every outlet to change anything - maybe.
And just clicking on the link to an academic paper isn't enough as many readers wouldn't know how to interpret what they are reading. This is not being patronising, it's indicative of science knowledge.
Good comedy link at the end of you post.
Bloggers already offer too many links. But most links are back to bloggers comments on each others' original comments - they rarely link back to sources or to fact.
While that situation continues, what encouragement does the reader have that clicking a link will provide useful information rather than yet more hair-splitting commentary?
"I reckon that, in a year or so, good internet journalists - like good Bloggers - will routinely link to their published sources, and readers will forget that once this was not the case."
For El Reg readers this is already the case eg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/north_atlantic_carbon_iron_research/
"The print issue of the Guardian is never going to link to papers,"
A while back the Graun went through a phase of putting tinyurl addresses for source material in the print version. It was always patchy, and the practice seems to have died out (outside the tech section, anyway), but it was a step in the right direction. And the science section on the website usually links to the studies or gives enough detail to find it on PubMed or wherever.
RE: Science journalists vs. sensational "churnalists"!?
I fully sympathize with your optimism on the global good journalism, in print or online.
Especially, the survival of science journalism will depend on integral good journalists, as I recently opined here: "Maxine Clarke: End of the line for science journalism? -- RE: Hardly!" (NatureNetworkUK; July 4).
Best wishes, Mong 7/9/9usct1:45p.
As Noam Chomsky has established at length, journalists' clients are those who pay the bills, (be they predominantly advertisers or less often: public servants), and the product they are selling to them is the readers' collective purses and tribal allegiances.
The main paradigm-shift that internet 'journalism' affords is the willingness of posters to provide their expertise for free.
It is an entirely different polarity of model, in that it shifts the client from the paying advertiser to the interested activist(s).
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