Blogging, Journalism and Credibility (Page 5)

In Conversation

Jarvis: Dan Gillmor, you said that the public has to start to learn news differently. You're right. They have to do more work. They have more tools. They have to learn that the first story out isn't necessarily the right story out: "Oh, that trailer! It's making WMDs!" "Oh, it's making yogurt." You know?

In the old days, it would have taken a day for the story to get out, and maybe it would have gotten debunked, but now it's out. They've got to try to figure out their sources, they've got to figure out lots of things. How do we train, or retrain, the public on news?

Dan Gillmor: I think people will have to recalibrate their BS detectors for this new world. We have pretty good ones in the traditional media world, which is to say we know the supermarket tabloid that is blaring a headline about George Bush's latest alien love child is probably false, whereas the piece in the Times is probably true.

We are going to have to do the same thing online, but one of the problems among many is that any random website can look as good as any other website. We are going to be working this through for a long time. I guess we'll have to tell people to be skeptical for some time to come, and I hope we don't get to the point where--like every old editor tells every young reporter--if your mother says she loves you, you'd better check it out. It would be a problem if everyone had to do that.

Jeff Jarvis [to John Hinderaker]: You were at the center of Rathergate, [telling Dan Rather and CBS,] "Hello, Dan. Hello, this doesn't look right." You helped spread that. Is that the kind of skepticism that is going to help journalism? Do some people say that hurts journalism? What's your view on your relationship to journalism in that story?

John Hinderaker: Well, it'd better help journalism. I mean, if we don't have a lot of journalists who learned a lesson from that episode, then I think the industry really is in trouble. The main thing we say about that incident is that it shows the power of the medium. And the thing that we emphasize is that there were a number of different issues that were raised with respect to the authenticity of those documents, but none of them were areas in which any of us were experts.

All of the information came from our readers, and our role was to assemble it, review it, select what seemed to be the most interesting, point out conflicts where there were conflicts and publish it to an audience that within a matter of hours was numbering in the millions.

That goes back to the point about our readers knowing a lot more than we do. The world is full of smart people, and what the Internet gives us is the opportunity to pull together thousands of little bits of information that those people have in a widely scattered way. Now, if I were a professional journalist who hadn't already figured that out, I would look at that incident and say, "Wow, there is power there that we in my industry need to learn how to mobilize."

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