Rethinking Breaking News
How it’s failed us, why it’s failing, and what can be done
Over the last year and a half the failures of breaking news and big news organizations have come into sharp focus. Mainstream media has come late to breaking news, misreported stories, and missed others entirely.
It is becoming clear to a lot of people, including myself, that news organizations are failing us. Not only that, but it seems this is how news organizations have always operated. We now have enough access to the raw information to be keenly aware of the shortcomings.
In the current media landscape savvy consumers of news must find the right people tweeting about an issue to follow, the right livestreams to watch, and get their own context through wikipedia articles and google searches. Readers are left to find and verify their own news given a flood of information remarkably often.
The Occupy Movement
During the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street the non-coverage of the protestors in New York became it’s own news story without a hint of irony. News happened while TV hosts pontificated over whether their attention to the protests was sufficient. News coverage was mocking when it wasn’t absent. The members of the movement and their supporters noticed, loudly. Occupy has the potential to be the political movement of a generation, and that generation felt dismissed by the media. Anyone interested in following the story quickly learned the skills of being their own journalists, finding their own sources on social media.
“They openly mocked protesters here as dirty hippies, uneducated fools and drug addicts and potential criminals – and they don’t know what they’re talking about, frankly,” said protester Chris Cobb.
The protestors were, perhaps mostly, made up of educated technologically-savvy youth. Not everyone agreed with them (polls from 2 months into the protest, range from 22-43% of Americans supporting), but even those that didn’t had to go to livestreams and twitter feeds to figure out what was really happening. No one watching any one particular news source could possibly claim to be getting an objective story.
A large swath of the American public was alienated by big news organizations. They found and made their own news instead. And those skills didn’t go away after parks across the country were cleared by police and the spectacle was over. They were newly armed with ways of dealing with news events, no traditional journalists required, and didn’t hesitate to apply them as fresh stories came up.
The Boston Bombings
As horrified Americans learned about the Boston bombings millions tuned to their TVs to follow the story. Parts of the internet jumped at the opportunity to help as well as watch, as it tends to do.
But a lot of people like me looked to Twitter, police scanners, and reddit threads to get constant updates on the progress of the search. A CNN stream was muted in the background, but glanced at decreasingly often as the hours passed. There are always perils in relying on an unverified stream of information, but unfortunately professional journalists at news organizations simply repeated and amplified rumors everyone was hearing on social media, when they should have been sorting and verifying them. Why not just go directly to the source?
CNN, in a race to be first, ran information they had “verified” but turned out not to be true. The place of silence in reporting by professional journalists is becoming more and more important. Twitter will report all of the rumors- and it can. Journalists owe it to their readers to rise above that and provide reporting that provides not only more context but more certainty.
We are collecting dots. It’s a day to be careful about connecting them. - Steve Inskeep 3 days after the bombing
Wendy Davis’ SB5 Filibuster in Texas
The business of state government is rarely national news except for a handful of hotly-contested issues like the legalization of recreational cannabis, attempts to curb the power of unions, and in this case abortion. These small battles help tell the larger stories of a national debate, and the supporters of both sides use the outcome to create momentum for their cause.
As Wendy Davis stood to filibuster a bill she and her pro-choice supporters said would hurt the health of women and potentially set a repugnant precedent for states around the country, no major news organization was covering it.
However Davis’ supporters brandished the #StandWithWendy hashtag on social media, and turned the filibuster into a full-fledged meme. The action of the day was unexpectedly riveting. The filibuster was aptly described as an endurance contest.
The sports-like atmosphere was increased by the “three strikes” she was allowed by senate rules, and the opposition looked for any chance to call a point of order. Over the course of her 11-hour speech two were called, one for another senator assisting her with a back brace (assistance is not allowed), and another for speaking on a subject not directly related to the bill. By the end of the day there were over 100,000 viewers on the livestream of the proceedings.
The final minute before the crucial midnight deadline resulted in 4,900 tweets a minute, which was 4,900 more tweets than from any mainstream media source. - Truthout
As the looming midnight deadline, and success, approached Davis was dutifully continuing her speech. Supporters filled Texas’ capitol building, and virtual supporters were glued to the livestream. In the final minutes a third point of order was called, and Davis’ opposition moved to vote on the bill. The gallery erupted in noise as activists in the gallery screamed so that a vote could not be held.
Aaron Sorkin could not have scripted it better, though he may have polished up the dialogue a bit. - Truthout
In another made-for-TV turn, the republican opposition held a vote anyway, at 12:03am. Dramatic TV was being consumed, created, and curated by amateurs and was no where to be found on actual TV.
As the senate livestream was turned off, hundreds of thousands jumped to a livestream from a citizen journalist and self-identifying occupier who captured the energy of the crowd amassed in the rotunda of the capitol building, receiving over 200,000 views. Twitter erupted in it’s own right, and watched outraged as the official date of the vote was changed from 6/26 to 6/25 to make the vote look as if it hadn’t taken place after the special session had ended. Before and after pictures flooded twitter but some news organizations ran headlines like “Texas Lawmaker’s Bid to Kill Abortion Bill Thwarted”.
One must imagine that in a previous era where those organizations would be our primary source of news, the tactics of Davis’ opposition might have worked. Even more, what kind of news is happening today that we don’t even know we’re missing?
These are different examples that have caused varying segments of the American public to wake up to the shortcomings of their media.
Similar examples have occurred across the world. Most recently in Turkey where the story of the local Turkish CNN affiliate airing a documentary on penguins as police brutally attacked activists became famous enough for the penguin to become an icon there, appearing as graffiti and even as stuffed penguin toys hanging around protestors necks in days afterwards. Similar complaints have been raised about US media’s coverage of other foreign protests that happened as part of the arab spring and beyond. Whatever the reason for the inadequate coverage; perceived lack of interest, lack of ability, conflicts of interest, it is becoming rapidly clearer an alternative solution is needed. Social media is only a part of that puzzle for those that want the best news as quickly as it happens.
New methods are being tried
Technologies like Storify are emerging to help news organizations better grapple with the amount of information coming from social media in breaking news situations. Andy Carvin has blazed a path for how a modern journalist should deal with social media, developing sources to verify potentially unreliable first-hand reports from Twitter and using retweets and Storify to curate them into understandable and verified narratives.
Another attempt for big media to tap into Twitter is through the tracking of hashtags and other data. During the 2012 election the Washington post tracked a candidate’s mentions to determine their “buzz”, with questionable effectiveness in actually representing the reality of the race.
Widgets like The Washington Post’s Mention Machine and Time magazine’s Campaign Buzz Meter track mentions on Twitter and other social media to determine who’s up and who’s down on any given day of the campaign. As of Thursday afternoon, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were jockeying for the top spot on Time’s Campaign Buzz Meter. But Paul has yet to win a GOP primary contest, and Romney has far and away secured the most delegates. - Nieman Lab
Mainstream media has haphazardly embraced Twitter for distribution, mainly treating it as an avenue to push links to their articles. This may make sense from a birds-eye-view (people go to Twitter for the news), but publishers need to understand sometimes people go to Twitter to actually get the news, not to be told where to find the news.
Information and updates should be posted right there on Twitter in all their glory of 140-characters, and followed up with a link to the story on their website. If it’s an important story no one will mind multiple tweets after one another, they just want to know what’s happening, now.
Other efforts include TV news networks showing tweets in the text scroller at the bottom of the screen, or having producers select tweets and having anchors read them as conversation-starters or even worse, to simply move on as if nothing was said at all.
Probably the best example of doing it right is Al Jazeera’s “The Stream” which interacts with their audience through social media naturally, whereas other networks tweets feel like another bulky feature strapped on an already weak news show that the anchors must bear or blunder through.
With The Stream, Al Jazeera may succeed where the majority of American media organizations have fallen short: not only in fully integrating social media into a news operation, but also in embracing the medium as an inherent feature of the new news programming. - Nieman Lab
Al Jazeera’s approach is to be commended and emulated, as they seem to have approached Twitter as another source, rather than a second-class citizen to be entertained because it is now in fashion.
Where tweeting and blog updates had once been a secondary concern, there were now dedicated staffers covering those jobs around the clock. “Previously, you relied on your correspondents and your wires or other news organizations, and suddenly you’re relying on the Internet effectively,”
“If there’s a reason liveblogs and live video do well, it’s because the audience now has an expectation of being to drill down into a topic, quickly. At the same time, the relative size of updates we receive on Twitter and Facebook are shorter than the average news story and have changed the atomic unit of news. How media organizations respond to that will determine their success online, Nanabhay said.
“We’ve historically produced a unit of content that contains the entire story, so it has all the context built in. We have the introduction, we have the meat, we have a conclusion and that’s a story or a video package. What’s changed now is the context has moved from that particular video package into a stream of content,” he said. “So each of those individual tweets and Facebook updates and YouTube videos themselves wouldn’t provide you with context. But if you look at a stream of data coming through you would see a bigger picture.”
- Nieman Lab (emphasis mine)
But Al Jazeera is just one example of it being done right. Where are the others?
What can be done?
During breaking news events, journalists need to be the professionals in the room. They need to be the ones to tell everyone to calm down and wait for good information to come, and we should be able to trust them that they will give it to us when it does. They should know we’re watching Twitter just like them.
News organizations need to use their unique skills to curate and verify the flood of information that comes out during big events.
The news need to reorient to breaking news faster, and have whatever templates and procedures necessary for that automated as much as possible so journalists can do their jobs. Use the concepts of object-oriented journalism. Let computers do the job of finding old footage, clips, and photos that relate to the backstory of the event. Every human that does that job now should re-orient to working real-time to direct message with sources on Twitter, call people close to the event, or get there in person. Let the human journalists, with their gut feelings and sources and buddies work in real time to find out what’s happening and, you know, get us the news.
If you don’t know anything new, show us what’s happening, don’t speculate or vamp. Show us the roadblocks. Those are just as interesting. One thing that livestreamers seem to know inherently is that if you can’t get close enough to cover the story because a cop is blocking you, you cover that. Too often the nightly news edits this out to present us a vanilla-white boring story, while the people who covered it earn free drinks telling friends the interesting story of how they got it, that the viewers never see.
News organizations need to embrace whatever medium the current story is best told through, and always give it a first-class treatment. Sometimes this is livestreams, sometimes this is long in-depth articles, sometimes it’s a map, and sometimes it’s a photoessay. I am a firm believer that different stories benefit from particular mediums that put different lenses on what is happening. When you’re a TV news network, of course you’re going to go there with your camera and your lights, but as places like NPR are showing you don’t need to limit yourself to your medium, and you’re crippling yourself if you do.
Big news needs to embrace the collaborative nature of the web and not shy away from linking to competitors or better sources of information. If someone has a great liveblog of a current event, why are you spending your resources having your own reporters replicate it? If they’ve cornered that market, accept that and adapt. Contribute information, find new sources and angles, expand on the story in ways they can’t because their attention is on the liveblog. I hate seeing TV news reporters and their cameraman lined up next to their vans, telling the same story through different anchors separated by a couple of feet.
The news needs to embrace and channel the desire users/readers/viewers have to interact with and shape a story. We saw this most clearly in the internet detective-work done by Reddit after the Boston bombings. News organizations should find ways to capture and direct the desire of the users to work together, uncover new things for themselves, and possibly get noticed because of it. A closer connection between journalists and their users means fewer surprises like Wendy Davis’ SB5 filibuster: people will tell you what they want you to cover.
I think these are very tough goals. I think that many news organizations are much too big, structured for a different era of news, and unwilling to accept too much change.
I think there is tons of room for new upstarts to come in and pick up the slack and be very successful doing it. But it requires entirely rethinking the way news is both collected and conveyed, and I think that will require a start-up style culture embracing news rather than a newsroom culture embracing technology.
