Journatic, and the troubling questions of outsourced local news
The fake byline thing may have been wrong, but what are the ethics, and realities, of using non-local staff to churn out cheap local journalism? Are newspapers going to be forced to do it for economic reasons? What is the real effect on quality? Does anyone read these sorts of stories anyway?
- The unfolding story on Journatic has been brewing for the last few days, mostly from Poynter. If you haven't been following it, here's the place to start. More news broke this morning, regarding fake bylines:
Chicago Sun-Times ends relationship with Journatic immediately as fake byline scandal spreads to other papers journ.us/Pbx8SR- 32 fake bylines have been uncovered at the SF Chronicle as Journatic investigation spreads: journ.us/Pbx8SR 2 clients leave Journatic
- I think everyone in this conversation is in agreement that fake bylines are wrong. But I wondered if this was distracting us from deeper questions -- or giving us an excuse to criticize Journatic, when it might just be showing us uncomfortable truths about local news production.
@jonathanstray That's sort of the unspoken evil of this, right? That nobody noticed a quality difference? It took an insider to uncover?
@jeremybowers Right, and rasies the q: for that type of work, DO you have to be physically in the community? If not, huge implications.- @jonathanstray I prefer to think of this as proof that algorithmic =/= second-class.
@jonathanstray The TAL segment did a nice job of noting the differences between physically local reporting and holo-local news-writing.- @jonathanstray It’s subtle, maybe, but the difference is real. Knowing that makes it easier to think clearly about resource allocation.
- Clearly the stars were aligned, because Mathew Ingram at GigaOM published a post addressing these very points just as we began our conversation.
new from me at GigaOM: "The uncomfortable truth behind the Journatic byline scandal" gigaom.com/2012/07/04/the…- As usual, Mathewi and I seem to share a brain MT @mathewi: The uncomfortable truth behind the Journatic byline scandal gigaom.com/2012/07/04/the…
- But before we can evaluate what Journatic does, and the lack of reaction before all of this reporting on the company, we first have to know whether anyone actually read their work.
@kissane @jonathanstray of course, there's a chance that nobody was really reading the crap they were writing. So nobody noticed.
@jeremybowers @jonathanstray does that mean it was decent quality or that no one reads or cares?- @kissane @jonathanstray because there's a false assumption that just because it can be put out there, it gets read.
- And even if this sort of reporting is done well, does anyone care?
- @kissane @jonathanstray as @juggernautco points out often, a lot of local data points are painfully boring.
- @dansinker @jonathanstray I think one lesson is that reproducing local data without context is pretty easy. And not very interesting.
- @kissane @jonathanstray eyep. And the problem is that context is also often not very interesting to more than a dozen people.
- So now we have a tangle of different questions, and clear answers to none of them.
- @dansinker @derekwillis @jeremybowers @kissane many questions: 1) did anyone read? 2) does quality matter here? 3) what does local get you?
