Archive for the ‘Credibility’ Category

Count ‘em. Seven. In The New York Times, of all places.

So what do we conclude? That we can’t trust the mainstream media to get it right? Just the opposite, I’d say. In his explanation of the fiasco, Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt pulls no punches in describing the mess:

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

There are troubling questions. What was a reporter with a history of errors doing at the Times anyway? Well, covering television. How much harm could she do there?

Newspapers make mistakes. The frequency and severity of those mistakes varies widely. In my experience (a decade as a writer and editor for a daily and 25 years or so as a public relations professional), the worst are “mom and pop” weeklies, where the lines between advertising and news get far too blurred for my taste. As a rule, reporters for the national media are far more careful, and a “fact checker” often calls later to make sure the reporter got it right.

The Times probably has the best system in the world for making sure stories are correct. But in the crush of a deadline, they didn’t use it. They waved the story through without the scrutiny their political and business stories usually receive. I’ve had the experience of reporting on tight deadlines in crisis mode, and we made a lot of mistakes too.

It happens. That’s one reason I’m not a fan of 24-hour cable news, especially when a big story is breaking. They have to work too fast. Stories don’t get evaluated and tested. They don’t have a chance to separate rumor from fact. And you can watch CNN all day without knowing any more than you could reading the AP wrapup at the end of the day.

I trust them not because they made mistakes, but because they faced up to them. They not only ran a very embarrassing correction, but they explained in painful detail what went wrong. They “manned up” (pardon the sexism), as it were.

I haven’t seen the numbers yet, but there’s no doubt that the death of Michael Jackson has trumped the struggle for a fair election in Iran, as well as the global swine flu pandemic. I usually avoid discussing content, but I couldn’t resist in this case, because it has been years since we have made such a choice between the titillating and the important. What are the public policy implications of Jackson’s death? I can’t think of a single one.

The event has exposed all the weakness of 24-hour cable news, as the cable networks virtually abandoned regular programming to cover the non-story. That, of course, meant “reporting” on every rumor and tidbit with no sense of perspective or concern for accuracy.

BusinessWeek’s going to try to to sell a repackaged version of content that will remain free on its web site.

According to the MediaWeek story, Businessweek.com General Manager Roger Neal said the content would be the same as that available for free, but paid subscribers would get a “different experience” of the content. Among other things, it will be more “print-like” and users will get instant access.

I don’t want to criticize this effort sight unseen, but I’m a skeptic. Forbes and Fortune are both selling subscriptions via Kindle, and people seem to be willing to pay a small amount for the convenience. But paying just for “different experience” on the desktop? I’m not betting the rent money on that.

Publicly traded companies tend to dump their bad news toward the end of the quarter, which I believe accounted for the spike in media bankruptcies in April. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the same in June.

Editor & Publisher has a good story about just what bankruptcy means in terms of a company’s ability to survive. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of talk like this lately about the President bypassing the media through web sites, his Jay Leno appearance and other says. I don’t know what the big deal is. At the rate print media are disappearing, there are fewer and fewer reporters covering almost anything, except maybe the octuplets.

The media simply are not gatekeepers any more. One part of their transition will be to make the information out there meaningful by prioritizing and “connecting the dots.” This isn’t some evil new scheme. Pure objectivity has never existed, and when attempted it leads to silly attempts to dig up non-credible sources to “balance” a story.

You may not know Richard Curtis’s name, but you know his work. Curtis was the designer who created the look of USA Today, which changed the entire newspaper industry in 1982. I was an editor at The Birmingham News at the time, and I first saw USA Today when our consultants brought it in and, literally, showed us the future. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED: Do Readers No Longer Care About True News Values?

UPDATED: Do Readers No Longer Care About True News Values?
Businesses or industries who fail to note the changes in what customers want — but keep improving their product in the ways it once drew customers — will fail.

By Michael Odza

NEW YORK (August 24, 2007) — I am very glad Professor Michael Bugeja and so many of the people who responded to his essay still have that passion for the news that drew me to this career, and I hope that they spread the “virus” far and wide. However, I do have to disagree with several key statements.

First is his timeline of the beginning of our troubles, which Bugeja seems to peg to the rise of the Internet. My reading of our history shows that newspaper circulation as a percentage of the population peaked in the 1930s. While gross circulation rose through the 1970s, total newspaper readership began to fall after World War II. Newspaper circulation as a percentage of all households has been declining for generations. The Internet is only the latest challenge.

The second issue is the sentence Bugeja resurrects from his May 2005 response to Michael Kinsley: “Don’t we realize that our entire history is associated with the community, which we have abandoned because consultants in the dubious ‘dot.com’ days told us to go online where the money was … or risk extinction?”

I don’t know which consultants he’s referring to, but the ones I read in the late 1990s were right on the money — poor choice of phrase —were quite accurate in their predictions of the changes the new many-to-many structure of the Web would entrain. Read “The Cluetrain Manifesto” or “Blown to Bits” now, and see how accurate they remain.

Then there’s the fact that newspapers overall actually have been very slow to go online. Yes, they had “a” web site (ours was called The Zia Connection, in 1996), but only as a defensive move. But with rare exceptions, they didn’t embrace it the way Schibstedt did in Norway, or the big three did in launching cars.com and Careerbuilder.com. And certainly not the way their competitors have!

Then there’s that word “money.” It’s still rare to find a newspaper (or magazine publisher or TV station director) publisher who is proud of his or her Internet revenue even today. They didn’t go to the Internet for the money — they went there following their readers.

Bugeja briefly mentions readers, but only by dismissing them in favor of concentrating on reporters. But I don’t think reporters and editors changed anything they did before the mid-2000s, and then only with the greatest reluctance. They were (and in many cases are) still covering beats defined in the nineteenth century even while the world changed around them. As a small example, years ago I created a successful news business out of the gap between the rigid beats of education, science and business, about inventions arising from academic research that became the seeds for new businesses. I had no competition from newspapers for a decade!

Finally, Bugeja completely misreads the quotation from David Miller, starting by ignoring this central sentence: “But perhaps newspapers are now structured on promises of value, such as independence and objectivity, which fail to substantially exist in the minds of consumers.”

Bugeja then quotes E.W. Scripps in opposition to Miller, when they’re clearly saying the same thing: quality first, then revenue. If the reader does not perceive the quality (independence and objectivity, to name two aspects), is it because the consumer’s vision is faulty (it’s really there); or because it’s no longer there (the newspapers started failing to deliver — which according to my timeline must have started decades ago). Or because the reader no longer values those things they ought to continue to value?

One of the lessons from “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is as brutal as anything Bugeja fears: businesses or industries who fail to note the changes in what customers want, but keep improving their product in the ways it always used to draw customers, will fail. As much as I believe that the foundation for a democracy is an informed citizenry, and that that is the sacred duty of the press, philosophical or moral imperatives do not have the force they may once have had. A Harvard study released in July 2007 found that 60% of teens pay little attention to the news; up to age 30, 48% are inattentive to daily news.

What does Bugeja propose to do about that?
***

Bugeja responds below.
___

Odza gives me a reading list on consultants when he should read the bibliographies of my two recent books, “Interpersonal Divide” and “Living Ethics” (Oxford Univ. Press), which will give him a fuller picture of my research and how it is supported by scholarship and empirical data–hard to incorporate in 1500 words.

Here’s a pull quote: Technology changes everything it touches without being changed itself. Media technology incorporates motives in the interface or application that are pegged to profits, not truth, and we’re entering an era now in which profit is so consolidated in the hands of a select few that we must invent new terms above “media mogul”: Comic Book Antihero and 007 Nemesis.

Fact: A great industry that held government accountable has been harmed, perhaps irreparably, by a handful of people who focused more on future revenue than on past standards.

Speaking of which, Odza ends his response with a question to me: “A Harvard study released in July 2007 found that 60% of teens pay little attention to the news; up to age 30, 48% are inattentive to daily news. What does Bugeja propose to do about that?”

I’m thinking class action suit against venders of consumer technology whose interfaces and applications rely on university wireless distribution systems that have so distracted our youth, especially college age, that they carry the largest debt load in history. Why don’t many reading this know the student loan scandal is wrapped up in this? Because it is an investigation you can only get on-site and not from the luxury of sitting in front of a computer terminal.

My zeal tracks back to The Washington Post during Watergate. I cannot imagine Al Lewis checking arrests online; Bernstein, arraignments there; and Woodward, finding Mark Felt at deepthroat@hotmail.com.

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As ad revenues decline, we can expect more media to be tempted to swap favorable editorial coverage for ad purchases. Among larger media, this has long been confined to special “advertising sections,” but since those are pretty clearly labeled for what they are, we’ve all winked at them. But when the main editorial staffs begin to make news decisions based on who’s advertising, we’re on very thin ice. Readers have to trust that editorial content is independent and fair.

Where I’ve seen this the most is in small “mom & pop” weeklies — most commonly in Texas, for some reason. Don’t ask me why.

PR Biz Update

Paid to Play: Nearly 20% Say They’ve Bought Advertising In Exchange for CoverageAlmost 17 percent of senior marketers say their organizations have bought advertising in return for a news story, according to the results of the fifth annual PRWeek/Manning Selvage & Lee Marketing Management Survey. The survey, which polled 279 U.S. chief marketing officers, directors of marketing and marketing managers, focused on consumer generated media, integrated marketing and industry ethics.

The survey also found that 7 percent of marketers said their organizations have had an implicit/non-verbal agreement with a reporter or editor that they expected to see favorable coverage of their company or products in exchange for advertising. Furthermore, 5 percent of marketers said their companies had paid or provided a gift of value to an editor or producer in exchange for a news story about their company or its products.

“These results indicate that there continues to be a group of marketing executives that do not respect the proper role of news media,” said Mark Hass, global chief executive officer of MS&L. “Even the smallest percentage of people who are willing to pay in return for a news story creates an ethical issue that the marketing industry needs to address.”

When the survey respondents were asked if the gift or payment was publicly disclosed to the audience, a total of 58 percent of marketers whose companies had given a gift said it was not. Moreover, the majority of marketers at large companies had specifically requested for the payment to be disclosed but the media outlet did not divulge the payment or gift.

The survey also addressed other ethical issues that affected the marketing industry this year. Fifty-five percent of respondents, for example, said that Wal-Mart’s non-disclosure of its authorship of a blog was a recent event that most strongly represented a breach in marketing ethics, and 46 percent agreed that former Wal-Mart marketing head Julie Roehm’s acceptance of gifts and dinners from a future advertising agency was also a strong breach. A slightly smaller number, 41 percent, believe that Turner Broadcasting placing magnetic lights around the city of Boston that closely resembled bombs was a major breach in ethics, and 32 percent said that Microsoft acted unethically in how it provided Windows Vista on loaded laptops to technology bloggers.

Ethics and the need for full disclosure have been a hot topic in recent months. Numerous fake blogs and the cloaking of online identities have been revealed and become a focus for public debate on the need for open and honest communication. It is issues such as these that have caused the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and various agencies to increase their education and training on proper and ethical media relations, specifically in the online world.

“Marketing executives may not understand there is a line they shouldn’t cross, but ethical issues shouldn’t be discussed only when a company is found out,” said Hass. “Ethical issues in this new digital age need to be a regular part of the discussion. If they’re not, marketers will start to err on the side of excess and risk doing the wrong thing.”

The survey was conducted by PRWeek and Millward Brown. Survey results were collected between April 26 and May 9, 2007. The results are statistically tested at a confidence level of 90%, the standard error is 5.98% and the margin of error is + or – 2.99% points.

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Last week, I referred to the recent Pew Research Center study on who knows what, and what they read or listen to. The top-line numbers are grim. While we have more news than ever coming into our computers and homes, we seem to know less than we did eight years ago. Compared to 1989, 5 percent fewer can name the vice president, even though Dick Cheney probably has the highest profile of any VP in history. Eight percent fewer can name their state’s governor, and 11 percent fewer can name the president of Russia.

There are some encouraging signs. Compared to 1989, 8 percent more know which party controls the House, and 7 percent more know the chief justice of the Supreme Court is a conservative.

Now, here’s odd stuff. Pew calculated levels of knowledge by different media. Whose readers/viewers seem to know the most?

Uh … the ones who watch the political comedy programs, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. With 54 percent in the “high knowledge” category, the Comedy Central programs fare better than the news magazines, CNN, Fox News Network and pretty much everybody else. I don’t think it’s because they give such great news. Rather, it’s because they attract educated viewers who tend to know more about public affairs. The truth is that it takes a pretty well-informed individual to understand and appreciate the comedy shows’ brand of humor. Other media with knowledgeable audiences include major newspaper web sites, Jim Lehrer, O’Reilly Factor, NPR and Rush Limbaugh, showing that if nothing else, both the right and left have people who know their way around.

Dragging up the rear, with fewer than 40 percent scoring in the higher knowledge levels, are network evening news, online news discussion blogs, local TV news, Fox News Channel, and network morning news shows.