Printed Matters

A column by Russell Smith in the Globe and Mail this morning highlighted an aspect of the new media landscape – the same news tends to get repackaged and regurgitated on many different websites. The Project for Excellence in Journalism was the spark for Smith’s lament, when it reported 10 days ago in its annual State of the Media report that despite all the choices consumers have to get their news, they didn’t have more news to choose from.

Both the report and Smith’s column came down particularly hard on bloggers. This from the report:

Newer media seem to have an even narrower peripheral vision than older media. Cable news, talk radio (and also blogs) tend to seize on top stories (often polarizing ones) and amplify them.

This from the column:

The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media.

I have two observations to make. First, the conventional media (I like to call them the mainstream media, or MSMs) are just as guilty of this as any blog. They do it too, repackaging wire feeds or press releases for quick turnaround on the web. I don’t mean to pick on the CBC, because I’ve noticed all the MSMs do it, but I have a couple of examples from the CBC in recent times: one where they repackaged a press release and did not check the facts in it; and one where they reprinted a press release and hardly changed a thing.

The first example has to do with caffeine and miscarriage. I was doing research for this story on the subject for my Interactive Journalism class. I saw this article from the CBC on the connection between caffeine use by pregnant women and the associated risk of miscarriage. It says:

The study out of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research is published in the online issue of American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a peer-reviewed publication.

Presumably, reporting that the study had been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal lends some credence to the reports and to the article.

Then I went and found this press release on the Kaiser Permanente site, which said this:

The research appears in the current online issue of American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

So now I knew where the CBC had gotten that little tidbit. So being a good little reporter, I went to the current online edition of the AJOG and – what? – no such paper. So I emailed PR at Kaiser Permanente, and was told, “Yeah, it’s not up there yet. I’ll email you the report.”

CBC didn’t check the facts on a press release.

The second example comes from Fagstein. Check near the bottom, where he hides an interesting tidbit about CBC’s handling of a press release. Then he says:

I’m just going to go ahead and assume the CBC did not, in fact, check to make sure these statements were true.

He has a good chance of being right, since I know for sure they didn’t check the facts in the caffeine/miscarriage case.

I’ll close off this observation with a meta-observation: I’m not sure what the hurry is to get wire copy and press releases up on websites, but someone should explain it to me one day. For now, all it seems to do is clog up my Google search results with 2,000 versions of the same story.

My second observation is that, sometimes, it just takes that slightly different voice, that perceptible change of context, that ever-so-subtle change of wording to make a story stand up and kick you in the face. For example, I read (parts of) the State of the Media report when it came out 10 days ago, but the only thing that stood out for me then was the fact that journalists were citing financial concerns as their biggest worry, overshadowing all other concerns. Duh. Didn’t even seem blog-worthy, though I Twittered on it.

Now Smith writes a column that triggers a thought, welds a connection, starts a conversation. Similarly, bloggers reflect and amplify what’s going on in the news. I think that’s important, that the Internet lets us so easily hear the voices of others and what they think of a story: different approaches, bits of arguments, new tidbits of information that help you put it all in context.

Yeah, the bloggers are not on the ground, digging up the stories, hounding the pols for scoops, pressing their contacts for inside info. Blogs will never replace MSMs, I believe, because they don’t have the pockets to finance that kind of operation (and as soon as they do…oops, they’re MSMs now). But the conversation they generate is useful and important. And the MSMs are guilty too.

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