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Friday, February 10, 2012
Editorial: Transparency and scrutiny
by Ben Ilfeld, published on September 30, 2009 at 9:13 PM
Storyline: Feedback
There are not a lot of solid rules for starting up a hyper-local site fueled by community contribution. We think, rethink and question just about every policy and design choice for The Sacramento Press.
We strive to act with integrity as individuals and as an organization. Our highest principles at The Sacramento Press are openness and transparency.
Our policy is to allow anyone to publish. Then we and our community read, rate, flag, comment and add to the story. We ask our contributors to use their real names. We ask them to stay local and to disclose their affiliation with the issues they write about.
Recently there was considerable debate here and elsewhere on the Web about our policy of publish first, ask questions later.
I want to open up a debate here about how to do a better job.
The article that sparked off the debate was published by Ronald West, Mayor Kevin Johnson’s brother and a consultant for Sacramentans for Accountable Government (SAG). While he did use his full name, he did not offer disclosure of his involvement in SAG. Soon after the article appeared, the conversation on the article heated up and uncovered these facts.
The response there (in the conversation) and elsewhere was to question whether we should first screen articles in order to make sure authors give full disclosure of affiliations.
In order to promote transparency this sounds like a good idea. However, the interesting thing is that our community actually uncovered these affiliations in the conversation, not us. If we give one person the job to screen then we take power away from our community and give it to someone in our office. That person is fallible and will undoubtedly make mistakes.
There are also gray areas to consider. I am not sure if I feel comfortable asking people to disclose that they are the brother or sister or mother of anyone. We ask people to disclose their affiliation with organizations.
I like a system that allows our community to take everything with a grain of salt, question the author directly and have the support of our editors and staff in asking for full disclosure.
There is some kind of myth about the press that media mega-corporations have concocted over some years: That journalists are like scientists carefully revealing truths without bias. Journalists may strive to be unbiased, but they are not scientists. Neither are editors. I fear that the more we try to control and sanitize The Sacramento Press the further we move from our core mission of openness, transparency and our service to the community.
That said, we do lay out our front page everyday, composed of articles scrutinized by our community and then by editors.
So, theories aside, what happens when someone comes to our site for the first time or lands on a biased opinion piece straight from a google search or an aggregator? How do we tell these people that our site is radically open and that this article is written by someone with skin in the game and not a traditional journalist?
I think that is where our site is broken.
What happens when we make a correction that our community discovered long after the initial publication of the article? And what if the reader doesn’t read the conversation and only reads the article?
I have some thoughts.
One idea: We can create a pop-up that shows the first time someone comes to The Sacramento Press explaining how we work. That way first timers will know that The Sacramento Press is an open platform where anyone can post an article.
We can also create separate forms by which PR professionals can submit press releases which have fields for disclosure - and mark those articles appropriately. We could make separate forms for submitting op-ed pieces, events, news or other information.
We could have an unfiltered section of the latest articles, like the list at the bottom of the front page, that doesn’t live on the front page and clearly states that these articles have not been reviewed by editors.
Please help us build an open and transparent online newspaper. I put it to you, our community— what do you think about our policies? What can we change to make this a better place?
Conversation Express your views,
debate, and be heard with those in your area closest
to the issue.
Leave a Comment
I would encourage you, as I have previously, to contribute to our site if you feel that you can add a higher quality of content. I very much enjoyed seeing your poetry on our site (http://bit.ly/frxDV), and on our front page 6 weeks ago.
This month you have an added incentive to write. We will be giving away thousands in cash and prizes to the best stories and highest quality journalism on our site via our first Journalism Open (http://www.sacramentopress.com/open).
Enjoy your writing and photos on SacPress, btw. Thanks again.
Keep in mind an old judicial practice -- once a party to an action is caught in just one lie, judges many times discard virtually anything they have to say...
If you feel we have taken sides or portrayed something unfairly please detail those inequities in an email to feedback@sacramentopress.com (which I receive) and I will review and attempt to rectify them. Thank you for reading our site.
We are covering multiple points of view on the strong mayor issue. Our coverage includes the views of "strong mayor" initiative critics such as SAVE Sacramento and Councilwoman Bonnie Pannell. We are providing frequent coverage of the Sacramento Charter Review Committee, which has released draft recommendations that conflict with the strong mayor initiative.
At the same time, we are covering the views of Mayor Kevin Johnson and Sacramentans for Accountable Government. We are including multiple perspectives in order to provide residents with in-depth information about both the strong mayor initiative and the Charter Committee's recommendations.
You can read some of our stories on this issue at the following links:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/14249/Charter_meeting_Strong_mayor_hiring_powers_discussed
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/14147/Public_invited_to_Charter_Committee_town_hall_meetings
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/14002/Strong_mayor_friends_foes_react_to_committees_report
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/13833/Committee_supports_current_councilmanager_system
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/13784/Council_unlikely_to_address_strong_mayor_issues_raised_by_city_attorney
Cheers,
Kathleen
Without the pop-up, it doesn't seem like everyone takes the time to read up on what the site is really about, and misunderstandings are the result.
At the bottom of the pop-up there should be a link that a visitor can click to read in more detail about the purpose of Sac Press, its staff, its history, etc.
The buck stops with Ben Ilfeld and myself.
To that end I would love to meet you in person if you feel that replying via email is not the most effective way to communicate.
I am generally available during our office hours which are from 10a.m. - 6p.m. Monday - Friday. Our office is located at 431 I Street, Suite 107.
In the above article there were a few comments I took issue with:
"However, the interesting thing is that our community actually uncovered these affiliations in the conversation, not us. If we give one person the job to screen then we take power away from our community and give it to someone in our office. That person is fallible and will undoubtedly make mistakes."
This sounds like a cop out. If there was some measure of credibility to the screening process involved with what gets posted I would be more inclined to take this site seriously. I also understand, however, that from a community perspective being able to publish a self promoting article is one of the appeals. Leaving the commentors to uncover the allegiances of the author is poor journalism. A: Not everybody wants to read the comments section because it usually appeals to the lowest common denominator B: What about the first time reader of an article? If they got to West's piece before it was vetted by readers they wouldn't have realized the true background of the piece. On a bigger picture level one has to question the inherent danger and serious community disservice involved with giving politicians an unverified platform like this to publish propaganda.
This was the other passage from above I took issue with:
"I am not sure if I feel comfortable asking people to disclose that they are the brother or sister or mother of anyone. We ask people to disclose their affiliation with organizations."
Why not? Do you feel more comfortable with the alternative? About the time I decided to slow down on reading Sac Press was when I saw an article containing a byline by the very person the piece was about. Comfortable or uncomfortable that's just cheesy.
Okay I lied, there was one more thing I took issue with:
"There is some kind of myth about the press that media mega-corporations have concocted over some years: That journalists are like scientists carefully revealing truths without bias."
If this is one of your arguments the alternative you present is not much better. Myth versus blatant self promotion? Also, in fairness I can think of several local journalists who possess a great deal of integrity who struggle with bias and do their darndest through investigation and fact checking to deliver honest reporting to the community they serve.
Your two solutions for how to fix this I think are good ones both with the pop-ups and the separate category for PR, etc. In theory I like the idea of Sac Press but like communism it only works if everyone behaves, otherwise the opportunities to exploit the system are many.
There's a very noble ideal at the center of the Press (everyone is invited to participate to help improve local reporting), but that ideal also holds a fundamental contradiction: the act of letting everyone participate doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the articles. Some sort of gatekeeper is needed (traditionally, editors and staff writers -- both of which the Press now has) to separate the wheat from the chaff. For an article on a major issue, like city charter revisions, there are likely going to be enough readers to ferret out propagandists and malcontents, but I can't trust that the readers will uncover and call out every person using this site for their own ends rather than to inform the community, especially on articles that receive low levels of traffic.
To be taken seriously, you have to present a quality product. For journalistic enterprises, quality can be measured by factual accounts, trustworthy writers, and quality writing. Unfortunately, putting the onus on your consumers to enforce that quality is little better than just showing them the door. Sactoe and I (and likely others) have already reached for the doorknob.
However I would like to amend one principle that I believe may not have been precisely expressed about how we filter at The Sacramento Press.
Our editorial department bears some of the burden of checking facts and examining what contributors submit to our site. There have been numerous occasions where we have stepped in and provided a filter or correction for content.
The point you both make is that we may need to increase the effort by our staff and add additional scrutiny and practices to our operation to allow it to better serve the community.
I hope that in the end we can change your minds about our site. And know that unlike any other media outlet of which I am aware we actively incorporate the changes our community suggests even if they are fundamental to how we operate.
Bill Anderson's got some great ideas below. I'd add better publicizing and enforcing of disclosure rules. For a decisive measure, you could even hire an army of editors to work with writers to improve stories before they're posted, too. Each idea has their cost in "openness", though.
I think this comes down to an odd trap the Sac Press is caught in: it can't grow without quality writing and reporting, but it's hard to maintain quality if you're actively soliciting input from everyone. You'll have to draw the line on submissions somewhere, and I don't envy you the task of figuring out where.
I don't agree with your "broken" assessment but it is very possible that your above stated ideas could help. In the end, however, I think that you should continue to do your best to be open and be guided by your own judgment. Please know that you will never be free of someone criticizing whatever you do.
You know the old saying, "you can please some of the people some of the time but you can never please all of the people all of the time." Keep up the great work!
While criticism can hit us hard, we need it. I firmly believe that if we had solely relied on our own judgement to this point we wouldn't be here. But I do agree we take some of the more fearsome and aggressive criticism with a grain of salt.
If anyone wants "traditional media", then all they have to do is browse over to the daily in town previously owned by a national conglomerate. I don't read it, because while they have a supposed journalistic "standard" in checking some facts, they also OMIT a considerable amount of information that often turns the facts on their heads. I've caught this enough times to become displeased with the coverage offered in general, and I am often suspicious of what I do find interesting on that site.
I find the sacpress to be a breath of fresh air. It may be going through growing pains right now, but the staff running it are being completely open and honest about those pains, and are asking for advice from readers on how they would best like to see fixes implemented. That takes a considerable amount of maturity and courage to do. Even if you don't respect the authors and their stories that you read here, please respect the effort of the people who make that forum for free speech available.
For the sacpress staff, consider looking at what digg.com has done regarding inaccurate story postings. A user based flagging system already exists at sacpress, so posting a "conflict of interest" or "innacuracy statement" at the top of an article due to meeting a number of user submitted flags would not be out of line. It would probably be a good idea to filter this method of flagging through an actual editor until the algorithm is clear of people gaming it. This is not the same as yanking a story, and it leaves it up to the reader to determine the truth of what they read with the additional editorial disclosure.
I would also enable an Op-Ed tag of some kind for stories, either actionable by the submitter or the editorial staff. This is important, because often times people will confuse their op-ed piece with what would really be considered news.
Third, I would suggest making your basic journalism class (which is free) a requirement for story posting rights. I know that this might slow down the amount of stories presented, but in reality when someone submits a news story here they legally MUST meet minimum journalistic standards, and whether the submitter understands those standards or not, they can be held legally accountable for not meeting those standards (recent cases vs bloggers reflect this sentiment in the courts, I am only repeating this here, please don't blame the messenger). Having the class as a requirement would cover the basic needs of everyone involved.
Fourth, I would also suggest that there be a ranking system enabled for your citizen journalists, based on ratings, flaggings, submission frequency, and how many classes have been taken to confirm their level of understanding of the requirements of good journalism. Trusted people with higher rankings can start handling some of the flagging, abuse, and other editorial issues you have been discussing as editorial moderators. This puts ownership of these issues back in the hands of people who are both accountable and have a strong affinity for citizen journalism.
Best wishes in your efforts, and good luck.
The story that prompted your question about transparency was marked as "Editorial" after the fact. The truth is, that while the mayor's spokesman and brother would be displaying courtesy and professionalism by disclosing their affiliations, their "articles" on the Strong Mayor Initiative aren't professional or courteous to begin with. They are full of opinion, buzzwords and invective, directed at the public and SacPress readers (who are forced to repeatedly correct their intentional misrepresentations).
So, aside from who they are, let them take responsibility for what they write. What they contribute to SacPress should meet basic journalistic standards that any of your community writers may aspire to, let alone the spokesman with the professional journalism background.
If they continue to come here to campaign with slogans, smears and tough guy tactics, their contributions should be marked as opinion; unless and until a time that they decide to engage the public with actual facts and information. Perhaps even professional courtesy.
I agree completely. Reporting the news is a process and part of the process is the community of readers needs to add their insights and additional information to complete the picture. It's exactly what happens between journalists at different publications so why not between contributors of the same publication. The community vets the information being presented.
As far as how to alleviate the issues of false information begin spread by suspect sources. How about badges, individual ratings, and verified identity. The badges would reveal if this person is a Community Contributor, Staff Writer, Editor etc.
The ratings would be based on the thumbs up/down on stories and comments compiled site-wide. Get bad comment or story ratings and your overall rating will be poor. At least would give readers a gauge to measure by.
The identity verification could be a process requested by Community Contributors to add credibility. Simple enough, Community Contributor answers some additional questions to confirm their identity and a staff member verifies. Provide a verified identity badge to add trust to the source.