A recent piece in The Guardian describes how the blogger — whose real name is Eliot Higgins — is able to quickly identify different forms of rockets and bombs, and how this encyclopedic knowledge has made him a crucial source not just for those who are following the news but for human-rights agencies that are documenting the strife in Syria, and even for traditional journalists like C.J. Chivers of the New York Times, a former Marine who is now an investigative reporter.

In fact, Chivers based an article he wrote for the Times earlier this year on information that was originally uncovered by Brown Moses, and gave him credit both in the NYT piece and on his own blog, saying:

“For weeks we had been watching the spread through the civil war in Syria of weapons made in the former Yugoslavia, and been admiring the work of Eliot Higgins (a.ka. Brown Moses) as he tried mapping their appearances in the videos of varied and far-flung armed groups. Thank you, Eliot, for your patience, and your fine eye, and for creating an opportunity for merging new and old forms of reporting.”

Unlike Chivers, the British blogger has no background in the military, nor did he have any expertise in munitions or military weaponry before he started following what was happening during the Arab Spring. He’s actually a 34-year-old father of one who lives in a suburb of Leicester, and was laid off from his job with a financial company in October (his wife works at the local post office).

Much like NPR’s Carvin, Higgins has spent hours building a network of bloggers and social-media users in the region, and essentially acts as a filter or curator of the content they produce — mostly YouTube videos of exploded munitions, which he then identifies using the knowledge he has built up himself as well as that of his social network. Every night, he combs through more than 450 YouTube channels.

Higgins’ obvious commitment to this task, even though he isn’t being paid, and his commitment to being as accurate as possible (“You have to be first and you have to be right,” he tells the Guardian) makes him a good example of citizen journalism at work. And his partnership with Chivers shows that this kind of journalism can be a great supplement to — not necessarily a replacement for — traditional reporting.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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ITN Productions, which makes ITV News and Channel 4 News, has launched TruthLoader — a YouTube channel that will showcase amateur footage from hotspots around the world and whose own investigations will be led by discussion in a subreddit (group) on the Reddit community.

TruthLoader, the latest online video channel launched by the traditionally TV-led news agency, is funded by YouTube’s originals program (which gives UK producers up to £500,000) and brings a video spin to a “citizen journalism” construct that has conventionally been focused on text and still images.

“Citizen” video contributions are identified by Storyful.

Presenter Phil Harper will also host a weekly live video debate with citizen journalists over Google Hangouts and Skype.

TruthLoader’s challenge will be to bring a degree of measure, fact and balance to much of the raw footage it gets, for example, from protest spots in the Middle East, where some video footage nowadays attempts to paint a misleading picture of events and which large news organizations spend time validating. Often, footage is not just from “citizens” but active participants in stories.

Release (via Journalism.co.uk).

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Formed in Finland late 2010 by Petri Rajha and tested mostly in Scandinavia until recently, the service is a mobile app through which users offer their photos for sale and through which media organisations can post paid photo assignments for users.

User submissions typically sell for around €17 ($22) whilst media entities typically set prices of €10 to €20 for “tasks”; Scoopshot takes a 30 percent cut.

CEO Niko Ruokosuo, an ex LA Times journalist, tells paidContent the service includes authentication that could help news publishers identify fake pictures:

“It works by having control of the image. When the image is captured with Scoopshot it is sent to us and no longer resides on the originating camera. It is impossible to edit those photos and that same exact file exists nowhere else, we guarantee that.

“Second, we know the exact GPS location and time where that photo was taken. It adds a level of security. We know the sender.”

These techniques aren’t necessarily fool-proof — not least because, as #FakeSandy showed, few such images typically come through formalised citizen-news services as much as they do through an array of social accounts and blogs.

“I wouldn’t trust a robot to do the job,” Stephen Sidlo, a breaking news picture editor for rival UGC service Demotix, which was acquired by Corbis this month, tells paidContent.

“Research on UGC verification manually is necessary, the rest can be manipulated.”

Likewise, Associated Press recently named Fergus Bell its social media and UGC editor after he constructed a similar human verification process for UGC atop the AP’s existing checks and balances.

“We can’t verify something unless we speak to the person that created it, in most cases,” Bell told Poynter last week. “When it comes to UGC, we only put stuff out when we can confirm it.”

Even the humans on social networks themselves seemed to do a good job of debunking fake Sandy images.

Still, Ruokosuo says Scoopshot also supports human editor checks on contributors. “Typically, we have their name and phone number. Editorial people in charge can actually contact those people for further information or verification.”

Regardless, Scoopshot’s main business line may not be news after all. Ruokosuo says the outfit has sold on 160,000 photos on its members’ behalf, but the majority are to online directory sites to accompany pages like restaurant reviews.

And already Scoopshot is extending its platform to brands for marketing, as well as editors for news. Fiat recently set Finnish members a Scoopshot task, through an advertising agency, to photograph its Fiat 500 car on city streets, resulting in 1,054 submissions.

But the outfit is also launching Scoopshot Pro, providing news editors with a sub-set of only professional photographer members whom to assign to events around the world.

“You can send assignments to professional photographers all over the world using the same interface in a matter of minutes – for example, in Gaza to cover your content needs,” Ruokosuo says.

News editors are often apprehensive about assigning amateurs and pro-ams on assignment to dangerous jobs. But Scoopshot claims 60 media partners are using the service including Finland’s Sanoma, Metro International, Time Out UK and Finnish public broadcaster YLE.

“We are definitely aware of the risks related to that,” CEO Ruokosuo says. “We would never encourage behavour that puts people at risk.”

What’s next? “We have identified a few key markets and are hoping to make some press releases about that in future. We are in a funding round that is looking good and should be closed soon.”

Scoopshot hired Dave Rickley, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, as north America EVP this month for its U.S. expansion.

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The site allows users to find their town on a map and then customize their own local feed with sources from categories like news, tech and entertainment. It is launching with content in 60 cities and a total of 1900 providers – but don’t be surprised if you feel like you’ve seen some of these videos before. Glocal is seeding its site with a lot of content pulled from YouTube, but Cavalieri told me that the goal is to eventually sign up publishers for their own site and get their content exclusively.

So why should publishers decide to put their videos on Glocal, and not YouTube? Cavalieri told me that he thinks local content gets lost on the Google-owned video site. He also believes that he can unlock content from local publishers that have been hesitant to put their assets online, in part because he wants to help them monetize it through a yet-to-be-launched ad network aimed at local advertisers. “Our platform is more conductive to monetization than YouTube,” he said.

Glocal was built by a team of four, and has been backed with a $1 million seed round by Compuware Ventures. Does a small, scrappy startup from Detroit have a chance to compete with the big boys? To be honest, I’m sceptical. However, the local focus of the site is a good reminder that online video doesn’t have to be about those big success stories that are popular everywhere.

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Enright started the event, which was put on by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, by asking Carr what he thought about the coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign, and how he would handle it as a journalist if he was reporting on a speech by a politician like Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and he heard something that was obviously a lie. Would he challenge that claim in print? Although Carr didn’t say specifically what he would do in such a situation, he said that in his view the internet and social media in general do a pretty good job of correcting mistakes and false information, and used a metaphor coined by New Yorker writer Sasha Frere-Jones:

"we're living in a golden age where the internet is kind of self-cleaning oven" and the truth eventually comes out says @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 13, 2012

Carr talked about the impact that “citizen journalists” have had during events like the Arab Spring, where live reports from Egypt and elsewhere were available to anyone — and were verified in real time by people like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, who became the go-to source for information about the revolutions — and Enright asked whether citizen journalism wasn’t a little like “citizen dentistry,” a common criticism levelled by anti-social media types. Carr scoffed at this idea, however, and argued that if Enright were living in a place without dentists and had a toothache, he might not be so scornful of having a neighbor down the street who was “pretty handy with the pliers.”

The New York Times writer and author of the memoir “Night of the Gun” said that he wasn’t predicting some kind of utopian future where professional journalists were replaced by the crowd, since he expected society would always need someone to make the phone calls and put a little “shoe leather” into their reporting — something that not everyone would want to do, especially for free. But Carr added that alternative media and digital-native media were adopting the attributes of traditional media (such as investigative reporting and fact-checking) a lot faster than the mainstream was adapting to digital, and that a kind of hybrid of both seemed to be emerging.

“Old media isn’t adapting to the new tools of the insurgency”

"old media isn't adapting to the new tools of the insurgency and using them -- we're moving toward a hybrid media" @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 14, 2012

Carr, who once reported from the red carpet during the Oscars and has also tried to do his own video broadcasts in the past, said that one of the most promising aspects of digital media is that almost anything is possible — and it doesn’t hurt to “give things a whirl.” This kind of approach doesn’t work for the print version of the newspaper, he said, but the best quality of digital is that it is always “iterate, iterate, iterate.” The videos he recorded in his basement didn’t really work, Carr said, so they killed them and moved on to something else that his audience might want more.

Carr also talked about how so much of the news that traditional media outlets used to rely on as their bread-and-butter, such as the death of someone famous or news about a disaster, has become a commodity. When his children mention that they heard or learned something newsworthy, Carr said, he has no idea where they got that information — whether it was from a news crawl on a screen in Times Square, or from Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or from a text message or a Digg headline. One of the biggest threats to the traditional media business, he said, is that “most people don’t really care where the news comes from.”

"this whole burbling atmosphere of news that's like an ionized atmosphere we all move through -- it's a commodity" @carr2n #cjfjtalk

—
Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) September 14, 2012

Both during his interview and in a discussion afterwards with local journalists such as the former publisher of the Toronto Star, the NYT writer also described the painful transition that many newspapers — particularly the medium-sized metropolitan papers — are having to go through as their print advertising revenue declines and digital fails to make up the difference. He said that more papers will likely have to restructure themselves the way that Digital First Media has with the Journal Register Co. (which recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time), in part because of their looming pension obligations, which he said even the NYT is wrestling with.

The future looks fairly bright for smaller newspapers that are intimately connected with their communities, Carr argued: If someone wanted to buy a newspaper company, the best way to figure out which one to buy would be to ask whether “a picture of some kid’s football team would make it to the front page,” he said. If the answer was yes, then the paper would likely do well, simply because the connection between a newspaper and the lives of small town residents is much tighter than for larger newspapers. And while major international brands like the New York Times might prosper thanks in part to paywalls, he said, “the whole middle of the newspaper business is just gone.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Petteri Sulonen

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There are plenty of warning signs about the ongoing disruption in the media industry, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. But when it comes to their journalistic competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look primarily at other media players such as the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed or Politico. As information architect and web developer Stijn Debrouwere notes in a smart post about the evolution of media, however, the reality is that much of what we find competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely even recognize as journalism. How the industry adapts to that change will be the real challenge.

Debrouwere says that when he thinks about the changes in journalism, he’s not thinking about “digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze,” or any of the other aspects of democratized distribution and the social web, such as citizen journalism — all of which he notes have had a huge impact. Instead, he says we should be looking at the things that are actually replacing traditional sources of journalism in our day-to-day consumption habits.

Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit are replacing some aspects of journalism

In this category, Debrouwere mentions services such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as Spotify and Rdio — all of which feature recommendation engines, and in many cases social aspects that to some extent replace reading record reviews or concert reviews in a newspaper. Not only is there less clutter, he says, but you can listen to or watch the content right away. Other sites offer topic-specific content that is much deeper and richer than any general-interest newspaper could hope to be on a subject. And then there are sites like Reddit and Quora and Wikipedia:

Reddit’s I Am A board, with threads like “I am an astronaut, ask me anything” and “I am an Australian nightclub bouncer, ask me anything,” looks like any other internet forum, but it is also what interviews and profiles can look like in the 21st century. Wikipedia has, for pretty much everyone, replaced news organizations as the place where you go to get in-depth information about anything that didn’t happen today.

Debrouwere’s point about Reddit was reinforced during a recent “Ask me anything” discussion the site did with Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for the New York Times. Although there were some typically light-hearted and irreverent questions from Reddit users, it was as illuminating an interview about Krugman’s views as I have read in any magazine or newspaper. David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has also written about Reddit as a prototype for a different kind of journalism.

Is what Reddit does journalism? Is what Wikipedia does or Quora does journalism? These might be the kinds of questions that journalists like to get wrapped up in, but people looking for information probably aren’t as interested in splitting semantic hairs. All they know is whether it’s useful or not (EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty had an excellent response several years ago when someone asked him “Is data journalism?”).

Readers aren’t interested in debates about the nature of journalism

You can see this phenomenon in action whenever something new comes along that impinges on media consumption in some way, including Twitter. In just the past couple of years, the service has transformed itself from a harmless tool for wasting time into a real-time global newswire, but it wasn’t that long ago that critics were asking whether posting things to Twitter qualified as journalism. Before that, it was the question of “bloggers vs. journalists,” an issue that got debated endlessly. But I think Debrouwere is right when he says that this misses the point:

[Neither] YouTube nor Facebook or any of these other companies aim to be an alternative to journalism and much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all. A good chunk of it contains written or spoken words, but sometimes not even that. It’s not journalism. But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news.

Debrouwere’s post is entitled “Fungible,” a term economists use to refer to commodities that are effectively interchangeable. Most journalists would probably rather not think of what they produce as being “fungible.” They would prefer to think of it as being unique, but that is rarely the case. As economists love to point out, your competition isn’t the product that is better, it’s the one that is good enough. And as media-studies professor Nikki Usher noted in a recent post at the Nieman Journalism Lab, newspapers may be convinced that everyone still wants and needs them — but they could be mistaken.

So what can traditional media entities do in this environment? Debrouwere has some suggestions, including focusing more on storytelling and personality “because those things are irreplaceable,” as well as “writing to peoples’ passion” and trying to be more entertaining in the same way that sites such as The Awl and Gawker are. But for many traditional journalists, that is going to sound pretty hollow — just as the recent suggestions by Washington Post president Steve Hills about having more slideshows seemed to strike a sour note for many writers there and elsewhere.

In the end, Debrouwere has a harsh question, but it bears thinking about:

Are we trying to get better at something that doesn’t matter anymore? Perhaps we should take the best traditions of journalism and do something entirely new with it. Whatever we are doing now is not working.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Denise Chan and See-ming Lee

We’ll be discussing these media issues and much more at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in NYC. Register today.

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Bambuser footage has been used extensively in recent months by major news organizations to report about the conflict in Syria. The company is concentrating on mobile live streaming, and the AP will also explore to use Bambuser’s platform for its own journalists.

The partnership between Bambuser and the AP is significant in part because it formalizes the relationship between the news organization and citizen video reporters, who on occasion are thrown into the spotlight just because they happen to be live streaming from what turns out to be a major event. The AP will credit any footage used in its coverage with the Bambuser username of the person who shot it. That’s a big step up from how footage has been used in the past: Major news networks regularly show footage on TV, only to describe its origin as “found on the Internet.”

It’s also an important step for Bambuser, which has been working on casting itself as a platform for high-quality footage captured with mobile phones. The company introduced a new technology last year that makes it possible to broadcast live with limited bandwidth over mobile networks, and then upload additional video frames from a Wifi network to enhance archived footage.

Check out our previous interview with Bambuser CEO Jonas Vig and Chairman Hans Eriksson:

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As we have described a number of times at GigaOM, journalism has become something virtually anyone can practice now, thanks to social tools and digital media. This democratization of distribution has had a profound effect on the coverage of uprisings in Egypt and Libya and more recently in Syria. Thanks to YouTube, Twitter and other networks, more information is available about what is happening in those countries. But is it reliable? According to some reports, the news coming from Syria has been altered by activists who are trying to make a specific point. Does that mean citizen journalism is flawed? Not really. It just means that we need better tools to make sense of the flood of news that is all around us.

As Britain’s Channel 4 described in a recent piece about the rise of citizen journalism in Syria, dozens of video bloggers have emerged who are literally risking their lives to bring video evidence of the violence there to the world: In at least one case, a video blogger died while live streaming a demonstration. While the death of veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin in February got a lot of attention, so far not much has been paid to the “citizen journalists” who are putting themselves in similar situations. In a piece on Colvin’s death, New York Times media writer David Carr said that foreign reporting requires more than just “clicking on a YouTube video.”

Citizen journalism often comes with a viewpoint

Carr is right, at least in the sense that what is missing when we try to understand a place like Syria or Egypt through YouTube videos or Twitter is context. How do we know the videos or reports we are getting are true? Channel 4 said on Tuesday that it has discovered at least one video of the city of Homs was altered by the person who uploaded it, with a cloud of smoke added to the picture.

The video journalist who took the video admitted that he altered it and said he did so to raise awareness of the violence taking place in the city so the world would respond. This sounds a lot like the arguments that some observers made in defense of Mike Daisey, whose report on Public Radio International about visiting Apple factories in China turned out to be partially fiction. Some — including Daisey — said his embellishments were justified because they exposed a larger truth about Apple and its conduct in China, while others said any altering of facts made the entire story suspect.

One of the issues in a place like Syria or Egypt is that much of the reporting we get from nonmainstream sources almost inevitably comes from people who are either involved with a rebel group or are friendly toward it (although it should be noted this is the case with much traditional foreign reporting as well). This phenomenon was also seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when video reporters like Tim Pool emerged to tell the story of the protests and developed a large following very quickly, despite making it clear that they didn’t see themselves as journalists.

Traditional and citizen journalism are not adversaries

One response to this phenomenon is to lament the loss of traditional foreign reporting, as Carr seemed to be doing in his tribute to Colvin, and criticize the emptiness or unreliability of YouTube videos and citizen journalism. But another response is to see the value of the phenomenon — as Nick Kristof of the NYT seemed to in comments he made about citizen journalism and the Occupy movement — and try to apply journalistic principles to this maelstrom of content coming from a thousand different sources, some reliable and some not. This is what the BBC does with its user-generated-content desk, which sits in the newsroom and filters and verifies reports coming from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

This is also what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with his Twitter account ever since the Arab Spring revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. As he described in a recent interview with Current.org, Carvin sees Twitter as the place where he does the majority of his journalism — and where his followers act simultaneously as sources, fact-checkers, editors and distributors:

It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism — it’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.

Whenever I write about what Carvin is doing, someone inevitably makes the argument that what he is doing isn’t “real” journalism, which presumably consists of flying to these locations and reporting on camera the way we are used to. The argument seems to be that since Carvin is sitting at his desk monitoring Twitter (and using the telephone), that he isn’t really doing journalism. As I have argued before, this is absurd. Carvin is applying exactly the same journalistic principles that traditional reporters always have, including the duty to verify facts. He is simply applying them in real time and in full public view, which is arguably better than the traditional alternative.

Citizen journalism and the rise of social media don’t mean that we don’t need traditional foreign correspondents anymore, or traditional reporting. If anything, we need those kinds of skills even more than we ever have. But the globe-trotting war correspondent is no longer the only game in town when taxi drivers can report bombings just as easily as a CNN crew, and training the new breed of curator journalists may involve Twitter and YouTube lessons instead of flak jackets. In the end, as Jay Rosen has said many times, journalism gets better when there are more people doing it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Yan Arief Purwanto

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Cont3nt founder and CEO Anton Gelman calls the marketplace “an e-commerce platform for journalism,” enabling videographers and photographers to license their content to news agencies by giving them full control of the transaction. Journalists can specify 30-, 60- or 90-day exclusive or non-exclusive licenses to their content, with Cont3nt.com handling all billing and order fulfillment.

One big advantage of the Cont3nt platform is that it gives more money back to the content provider. While other marketplaces command as much as 50 or 60 percent of the license fee for content, Cont3nt takes a maximum of 5 percent per transaction. That’ll be key as it hopes to recruit more professional and semi-pro video journalists.

The goal is to bring to light video that might not have been seen, and to help monetize content that would have otherwise ended up on YouTube. While some news agencies have used YouTube footage in their reports, it’s often difficult to verify the accuracy of the reporting and the source of the content.

To that end, Cont3nt currently has about 170 publishers tapped into its platform, and about 15,000 journalists signed up from around the world. It’s focusing specifically on international markets like Sudan, Syria, Libya and Russia. As a result, much of its work has been around ensuring that journalists on the platform provide high-quality content.

“It’s very difficult to verify a piece of content,” Gelman told me in a phone interview. So Cont3nt works to verify and create a trusting relationship with the person delivering the content. To do so, the startup has been searching for good content online and trying to contact journalists directly, and has been recruiting media organizers who work in the regions it’s targeting. Once signed up, they can create media profiles and establish credibility as their content is licensed by major publishers.

All that said, there’s really only one major requirement for producers who wish to license their video on Cont3nt, according to Gelman: “It has to be true, it has to be good and it has to be yours.”

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Being the ombudsman or “public editor” for the New York Times  has to be a pretty thankless job at the best of times, but it got a whole lot more thankless for Arthur Brisbane on Thursday, when he touched off a blog and Twitter firestorm by asking whether the newspaper’s reporters should be “truth vigilantes.” Many of the responses expressed shock that the paper would even have to ask such a question — what else should a media outlet like the NYT be doing? While Brisbane protested that his point was more nuanced than his critics suggested, the furor over his question reinforced a crucial point: Many traditional media sources are clinging to an outdated view of what their purpose is, and how to accomplish it.

In the column, Brisbane said reporters often come across statements made by political figures that are of questionable veracity — for example, repeated comments from Mitt Romney that President Obama has “apologized for America.” In a nutshell, the question Brisbane posed to New York Times readers (since the idea of the column is that the public editor represents the readers rather than the newspaper itself) was whether reporters should question those kinds of statements directly in the article they are writing, or whether they should do it in some other way, presumably in a follow-up piece, etc.

What else should the NYT be doing but checking facts?

Most of the initial responses to the column, however — including those from prominent journalists, as well as commenters on the post itself — focused on the question implied by the headline, which seemed to be asking whether the NYT’s reporters should be doing any fact-checking at all. Brisbane tried to clarify his point in a follow-up post, and in comments to media industry veteran Jim Romenesko, saying his question was not whether they should do so, but how and when.

But by then it was too late, and the waves of criticism continued to build as each new blog post was published — including a response from the executive editor of the New York Times, who took issue with Brisbane’s suggestion that the paper didn’t fact-check enough (although he never actually said that) in a statement appended to his follow-up column. By the end of the day, Brisbane had even achieved the dubious honor of spawning a parody Twitter account. And critics such as Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald were using the public editor’s column as evidence of a failure of the entire media industry:

This post from the NYT Public Editor should be put on the wall of a museum to explain contemporary US journalism is.gd/R0aLbG—
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 12, 2012

That might be overstating the case somewhat (Greenwald later expanded on his tweet in a column noting that the New York Times routinely engages in what he called “selective stenography” by printing what politicians say without questioning it). But there’s no doubt that the response to Brisbane’s column says a lot about where the NYT and other mainstream media stand. In the past, their reporting may have been looked at as infallible, but incidents such as the Judith Miller case — in which statements about the Iraq war were published without question — have dismantled a lot of that authority.

The “view from nowhere” is no longer good enough

At the same time, there are so many other sources of news and commentary now, many of which are unafraid to be opinionated. That poses a threat to what used to be a cornerstone of traditional media: objectivity, or what journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the “View From Nowhere.” To newspapers like the NYT, providing a scrupulously balanced report of two viewpoints might seem like the right thing to do, but to what seems like a growing body of readers, this is actually the king of all cop-outs. As media theorist Clay Shirky noted in a piece for The Guardian, the “truth vigilante” question revealed a sharp divide between what the newspaper seems to think it’s duty is — i.e., reporting the news — and what readers seem to think its duty is. In Shirky’s words, Brisbane:

[I]s evidently so steeped in newsroom culture that he does not understand – literally, does not understand, as we know from his subsequent clarifications – that this is not a hard question at all, considered from the readers’ perspective.

Those who run newspapers like the New York Times may still think objective reporting is all they need to do, apart from the occasional opinion column or editorial, and that selectively fact-checking the occasional egregious statement is enough. But as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark points out in a response to the Brisbane column, the rise of entities such as Politifact (which had already checked one of the statements the public editor referred to in his post) and Factcheck.org shows that people want more — and media outlets that leave this kind of function to third parties risk losing the trust of their readers.

The reality of media today is that entities such as the New York Times no longer have an exclusive claim on that kind of relationship. Anyone can effectively achieve it, whether they describe themselves as a journalist or not, and there are plenty of examples of that happening — including Andy Carvin’s use of Twitter during the Arab Spring revolutions, and the rise of citizen journalists such as Tim Pool during the Occupy Wall Street protests. And to the extent that others do a better job of truth-telling than the NYT, they will find an audience and the New York Times will not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic and jphilipg

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