No. 17 for June 2003
Integrity: The new management challenge
Two recent events - the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times and the closing of several reporters' Web logs - have me musing again about one of the signature challenges for news organization managers in the coming decade.
Integrity.
It's more than just honesty, sincerity, morally straight and all that other Boy Scout stuff. That's the last definition of the word in my dictionary. The first is "complete, unbroken condition, wholeness."
Truth and honesty are integral to complete, unbroken and sound journalism. But the next big management challenge is not to just do it right, but get it right; to find the best way to present the story across products that might flow from the same organization but have markedly different personalities; and to do it with a multiskilled staff not tethered to the office.
In short, giving the reader, the viewer, the surfer - and the staff, owners and investors - a product that has integrity.
A paragraph in a story by the Washington, D.C., City Paper about Blair's fable-filled romp caught my eye.
"No list of Blair enablers, however, is complete without technology," Erik Wemple and Josh Levin wrote. "Like many reporters in the field, Blair shuffled his communications between cell phone and e-mail. It's possible that his editors never spoke with him over a land line, a piece of ancient technology that might have helped them ascertain whether Blair was indeed visiting Anguiano in southern Texas."
Hold that thought, and next consider travel writer Dennis Horgan of Connecticut's Hartford Courant, told recently by his editor to stop writing the Web log he produced on his own time. Earlier, employers pulled blogs by reporters from CNN and Time magazine. Before that a Houston Chronicle writer was fired for a blog he wrote under the pen name Banjo Jones that poked fun at public figures in the county he covered and sent an occasional jab the Chronicle's way.
The demise of Horgan's blog, which had little to do with his travel writing but more with his views on the Iraqi war or the Boston Red Sox manager, for instance, brought an exchange on Cyberjournalist.net between blogger and online columnist J.D. Lasica and journalism professor and publisher Eric Meyer.
Meyer says if Horgan "wants to bask in the Courant's spotlight, he has to stand where the Courant wants it to shine." Lasica says writers are not chattel and to pretend they have only the thoughts and ideas their employer permits is ludicrous: "Just think of it: journalists with opinions. Communicating online with other people like ... like regular human beings!"
So you'll tell reporters to start using pay phones again and make sure they can't blog. Too late. The genie is out of the lamp.
And that's the crux of the integrity challenge.
Until now, newsrooms operating as assembly lines that would make Henry Ford proud have forced integrity on the process. The copy has been gathered, assembled and run through the sieve of the assigning desks and then forced into the copydesk funnel supposedly tuned to uncover integrity problems. In television, everything had to come through the producer for the 5, 6 or 11 p.m. news.
But what if the "publishing" stretches throughout the day? Technology is advancing to when we will be able to almost continually update even "print" products. That means more untethered reporters, and, probably, freelancers, using communications not dependent on place or, perhaps, even time (think Blair and the technological curtain behind which he hid).
And what if the city budget "story" is in "pieces" - short stories, video, audio, graphics, an analysis, perhaps a "build your own budget" game - that cannot arrive together, do not go through the funnel together, but have to maintain the overall integrity of the story and of your publication? And what if that story also has to be presented across varying "brands"? (Some newspapers already have multiple Web sites with differing personalities. Or think Chicago and the battle between the Tribune and the Sun-Times with their youth-oriented products.)
And your City Hall reporter does have a Web log and perhaps a scheduled "chat." Someone remembered that journalists with a personality have always helped circulation, and readers told you they wanted a more personal connection with their news. But who edits that blog? And how do you edit a "chat"? (Already the issue of plagiarism has arisen with some blogs.)
Integrity starts to get a lot more interesting.
Editors have dealt successfully with similar challenges, but largely while focused on the newspaper. Now they likely will be part of a multiple media organization. Before, they had time to find new equilibriums; now, that time continues to shorten.
This will be an issue even for smaller community papers where it can be a struggle just to get the next edition out the door. Classes teach the public how to shoot video and get it quickly to the Web. (Might they become freelancers?) Some of your readers are bloggers, and many likely get significant information each day from instant messaging. One man, in south Wales, already has been arrested for taking a picture in court with one of the new cell phone cameras.
But if it's that easy for the public, no matter what the market size, might they not expect something even better, and quicker, from the "pros"?
Recently, I interviewed some of those in the industry thinking about such issues and editors' futures. One conclusion: the editor, now largely a media specialist and story generalist, becomes a story specialist and media generalist. And that editor is going to need training in new ways of maintaining integrity.
One of those I spoke with, Tom Silvestri, the
president of Media General's community newspapers, said, "I É need editors at the front end who don't
touch the paper."
In other words, editors who are trained in and spend more time thinking about integrity.
Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315. Past issues of Common Sense Journalism can be found at http://www.sc.edu/cmcis/news/archive/comsenarchive.html