In moving beyond the heated debate about whether or not having lots of Twitter followers makes you important (rilly – the things people get heated up about) Jeff Jarvis makes some broader, more important points. And, unusually, I find myself disagreeing with him on one.
Jeff makes this assertion about the role of journalists, and whether or not they deserve to be regarded as expert in a subject (bold emphasis is mine):
“[T]he press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness. But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said. This is why I always cringe when reporters call themselves experts. No, reporters are expert only at finding experts.”
Let me start disagreeing by agreeing. Jeff is right on this, in a historical sense. Many reporters are not experts about what they report on. Indeed, it’s probably accurate to say most stories are written by journalists who have only just come to the matter in question. They enter the scene – a motorway crash, a political dispute, a murder investigation, whatever – find the principle figures, ask questions and write up the answers. That’s their job.
But away from those staples, there’s a strong argument for journalists in the future to be experts in what they write about, especially when they cover complex fields. Experts make fewer mistakes, and say fewer sillier things. Read Ben Goldacre’s summary of The Year In Bad Science to see what a potent mix of innumeracy, scientific ignorance and bad reporting can bring readers over 12 months. Or, another way: anyone who has been the subject of much press coverage, or read much coverage of a subject they really know about, will know that journalists often make mistakes.
Sometimes it’s a simple error of fact, but a common transgression is the error of interpretation; the facts are all there, and correct, but presented in such a way as to introduce an inaccuracy. It’s like reading a Google Translate version of a bit of writing; the words are all there, but the translation doesn’t necessarily make any sense to a native speaker.
This kind of error creeps in because that interpretation only comes with deep knowledge and experience, and a journalists can’t get that deep understanding by writing just a single story.
Sometimes, specialism isn’t possible. And this inefficiency has been the case for as long as journalism has existed – part of the trade-off needed to allow an affordable mass media (you lose economies of scale if you have an expert on staff for every occasion, and a specialist write-up of every niche story. Staff, ink and paper cost money).
But that trade-off is also at the heart of what is changing today in journalism, because in some cases staff, ink and paper costs are falling to zero. True experts – often non-journalists – can find a mass media voice too, without journalism having to be their job. Someone can live the story – but they can also blog, tweet, podcast and vidcast about it. They’ll find an audience if they’re any good, and anyone’s interested.
Having insiders cover a story they are also part of presents an obvious ethical challenge, but a concern has to be readers may not care, valuing insider access over ethics (they may figure they can figure out biases for themselves). And in this world, the old journalism – the old, generalist, non-expert just-ask-the-questions-ma’am journalism – doesn’t work any more. Across specialisms, there will be people who know more, doing a better job of explaining what’s going on than the pros.
How does journalism react? Well, as Jeff says, by doing what we do best and linking to the rest. But it would also be very limiting to reduce journalists to simply making calls to bring the right people together (although that must be part of their role too, of course). Expert knowledge injects passion, lets us ask better, harder, fairer questions, lets us call bullshit where we see it, enables a view of their bit of the world that goes beyond he-said-she-said. Where editors believe particular stories are core to their journalistic mission, we need to employ the experts – or encourage journalists to become expert in their subject.
A rise in specialism in journalism – and more true experts working in journalism – is going to be a central plank in journalism’s recovery from the hole it’s in. It’ll keep it relevant, and make it better.
Maybe many journalists haven’t made great gurus to date. But, in the future, cringe at the thought of journalists as experts? Nah – celebrate them. They’ll be some of our profession’s saviours.
Hi,
Your piece about ‘experts’ and the blogosphere seems to assume that specialisation somehow equates to consensus.
There is virtually no area of science, industry, law, politics, sport, art or any other subject that is regularly reported on in which all of the so-called experts are in complete agreement.
Granted, your chief concern relates to getting facts right and explaining complex concepts in more depth, something that journalists don’t always score highly on. In the case of something like the mapping of the human genome, for instance, an actual geneticist would probably do the subject more justice than a normal reporter.
However, experts don’t get everything right all the time, furthermore they sometimes actively avoid doing do. In the case of scientific papers, it is well known that it doesn’t take a genius to skew statisitics and ‘shape data’. Countless examples have been exposed over the years as scientists scramble for funding.
Surely it is the presentation and layering of differing points of view, not just what such-and-such “expert” says, that is at the heart of the journalistic craft, a unique skill which is as necessary today as it has ever been.
cheers
David Binning
Is this not a stage in the long journey from the “Renaissance Man” who knew a fair bit about everything? As knowledge grew and became more complex, specialists evolved. If I read a piece about teaching I can soon tell if the writer has a clue – and if I read a piece full of comma-splice I know they’re damned.
@David – a good point. Maybe, as well as more knowledge of the things we report on, we need to ensure the journalistic fundamentals are attended too properly. Good journalists manage to be knowledgeable, but also skeptical outsiders.
“There is virtually no area of science, industry, law, politics, sport, art or any other subject that is regularly reported on in which all of the so-called experts are in complete agreement.”
This is where Jeff Jarvis is correct in saying journalists are only good at finding experts. But the way he phrases it implies that all the journalist needs is a list of people. If you have plenty of time, then you can just go down the list, call them all and derive the points of consensus and dispute in any story. And you are going to waste a lot of time on interviews that go nowhere. With a bit of knowledge about the subject and who people are, you probably already have a good idea of who to call and why.
The danger arises when you have acquired enough specialist knowledge to pick up blind spots – areas of assumed consensus that might be wrong because things have changed in the background. I’ve seen this happen in technology reporting where the journalist is an specialist with an engineering background. Sometimes they arrive with a body of knowledge from their previous job and they assume every engineering company does things the same way.
The danger for the generalist is that, on that long list of interviewees, you arrive at a false consensus because half the people who granted an interview talked nonsense and you weren’t able to filter that out. But, the generalist’s advantage is a better view of what a general reader wants to know. A specialist can spend so long in the detail they miss important stories.
Would a geneticist naturally do a better job of reporting on the mapping of the human genome? Some of the assumptions made by geneticists before it was completed were not borne out by the results and the science has changed a lot in the wake of the project. And it was a project that called on a lot of disciplines, from computer science through molecular biology. Just because geneticists were the most interested community does not necessarily make them best placed to report on the project. Nor the worst.
There is a strong argument, however, for much better education among journalists on statistics, particularly where it comes to ideas such as significance and how to interpret P and r values. It’s a skill that cuts across all the sciences, so there’s no need to claim expertise in one
.
I understand Jeff Jarvis’ maxim “do what you do best and link to the rest” as: journalists have different fields of erpertise, and they should link to those of their colleagues who are the best informed about a subject. Jeff himself argues that the Los Angeles Time should link to the Washington Post for US national news and offer news about the entertainment business to other sites.
My impression is that – at least in Austria where I live – journalists with real expertise on a topic are the most successful in a difficult market.
Thank you for the excellent post!
Neil, firstly, I think you should have added in that the error can creep in not because of the journalist but because of others in the chain – a sub-editor who changes copy, an editor who over-eggs the tale or plays up an inaccurate angle. (I know by saying ‘journalist’ you mean the whole profession but some readers may not see that)
But there’s another side to this and it’s one that’s worrying for the future. Yes, it is the job of the journalist to find the experts, but it is also the job of the journalist to present that information in an easy to read manner because quite often (and scientists can be the worst at this) they are awful at presenting their point of view/facts.
I always thought one of the great things about newspapers being online would be that you would have your story – written for the mainstream (even stories in specialist areas like Media Guardian and so on are relatively accessible by the mainstream reader) and then links to further indepth reading, but so few publications even now have grasped that opportunity.
I think you’re always going to need generalists who reach across areas just as papers should have specialists. The big question is who is going to pay their salaries as people go more and more niche/blinkered in their reading?
I’m tired of pundits…
- T
http://mostemailednews.com