11 Stories These Journalists Wished They Had Written.

Damn, We Wish We’d Written These 11 Stories By FiveThirtyEight Filed under 2016 In Review Published Dec 28, 2016 Every year, Bloomberg News publishes a “Jealousy List” — the stories Bloomberg staffers wish they had published. It’s a delightful and endearing concept, and one that makes us incredibly — what’s that word? — envious. So, here are the stories other folks published in 2016 that made the FiveThirtyEight staff super duper jelly. arrow-1 “Will I Know Anyone At This Party?” By This American Life “You don’t think there’s Sharia? I’m just blown away. We’re living on two different planets,” South Dakota state Rep. Al Novstrup tells reporter Zoe Chace about 45 minutes into the Oct. 28 episode of This American Life. Chace and Novstrup came to their conversation with an entirely different set of facts. (Zoe’s facts happen to be the accurate ones.) It’s an exchange that makes explicit much of the divide that fueled the 2016 election, and I found Zoe’s piece to be one of the best pieces of journalism produced this year. It made me think Americans are retreating to separate worldviews while at the same time becoming more convinced that they are well informed. –Jody Avirgan, podcast editor arrow-2 “Spies in the Skies” By Peter Aldhous & Charles Seife, Buzzfeed This story has some of the most striking cartography that appeared all year, showing the flight paths of 200 federal planes circling U.S. cities as part of Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security monitoring programs. The visualizations are as beautiful as they are discomforting – who’s watching me from above right now? –Reuben Fischer-Baum, visual journalist arrow-3 “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns” By Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ “Just a small fraction of murders in cities are ever solved.” That line makes its obligatory appearance in almost every story about urban gun violence, but rarely does any story explain why so few cases ever reach investigative resolution. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns” does just that. Laskas blends the absurdity of a federal agency banned from using computers to do its job with the can-do attitude of resourceful public servants navigating the powerful gun lobby; the result is a gripping story about the unexpected connections between a brick building in a small West Virginia town, the uniquely American ethos around gun ownership and the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. –Anna Maria Barry-Jester, science reporter arrow-4 All things Todd Schneider, but especially “A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bike Rides By Todd Schneider, toddwschneider.com Writers at FiveThirtyEight have a wonderful group of editors and visual journalists working to make every story smarter, clearer and nicer to look at. Todd Schneider has Todd Schneider. Yet this year, the Genius software developer, who works on his personal, eponymous site in his spare time, produced a mammoth analysis of the mammoth data set of New York City bike-share rides, covering everything from how fast riders go by age and gender, to how weather affects ridership, to how private the data really is. Oh, and he also published a great breakdown of “Simpsons” data this year. –Carl Bialik, reporter arrow-5 “Six maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure” By Tim Meko, The Washington Post Tim Meko’s maps of the infrastructure underpinning our nation are genius in their simplicity. Plus, they’re gorgeous. –Ella Koeze, visual journalist arrow-2 “Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half” By David Robinson, Variance Explained I’m jealous of this piece by David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, who conducted an analysis that showed it was likely you could differentiate between @realDonaldTrump tweets sent by Trump himself and tweets sent by his staff by looking at whether the tweet was from an iPhone or Android device. Robinson looked at characteristics that differed between @realDonaldTrump’s Android and iPhone tweets, including time of day, use of quotation marks and links, the content of the tweets, use of hashtags and sentiment. The investigation, replete with code snippets, graphs and nerdy footnotes — as well as a GitHub link to the full source code behind his analysis — provides substantial evidence that the Android tweets may indeed be from Trump himself. –Dhrumil Mehta, data journalist arrow-4 “Gawker Media’s Biggest Mistakes” By Ashley Feinberg, Gawker On the eve of Gawker’s last day, Ashley Feinberg dredged up all the story ideas she unsuccessfully pitched to editors there (a review of “Mein Kampf,” “Which Famous Dead Person Do You Love More”). It confirmed my suspicion that Gawker was as fun to work at as it was to read. The follow-up is hilarious, too. –Gus Wezerek, designer arrow-1 “This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?” By Josh Keller and Adam Pearce, The New York Times The Upshot’s analysis of the new geography of imprisonment in the U.S. is revelatory and a perfect example of what we at FiveThirtyEight call an “outlier story” — a piece of reportage that explains a phenomenon by focusing on one of its extreme cases. Dearborn County, Indiana, has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country and is emblematic of an upward trend in inmates per capita in rural areas, even as those numbers have dropped dramatically in cities. Told through a combination of analysis, visualization, mapping and shocking prison sentence comparisons based on some very smart reporting, this story is the full package — and it really bums me out it didn’t appear on FiveThirtyEight. –Ritchie King, data visualization editor arrow-3 “The Future of Shopping: Trapping You In A Club You Didn’t Know You Joined” By Rebecca Greenfield and Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg News I love this story. It’s an exhaustively researched piece that busts up a single bad actor, Adore Me, an online lingerie store, while addressing a longstanding issue in an expanding business model — subscription services that automatically renew. The history is fascinating, the data is enlightening and the art is a delight. After reading it, I started questioning how I spent my own money. –Walter Hickey, culture writer arrow-5 “‘You Want A Description of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem” By Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times This Los Angeles Times investigation was a fascinating and thorough look at OxyContin and opioid addiction. It’s a fantastic piece of reporting and writing, using people, documents and data to tell a critically important story. –Blythe Terrell, science editor arrow-4 Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You By Julia Angwin, Terry Parris Jr. and Surya Mattu, ProPublica We all know that algorithms are playing an ever-greater role in our lives. And many of us have a sense that these algorithms can have worrisome and unintended (or occasionally intended) consequences. But in a series of stories, Julia Angwin and her team at ProPublica put into human terms how little-understood snippets of computer code are increasingly influencing both our online and offline lives. –Ben Casselman, economics editor CORRECTION (Dec. 28, 9:25 a.m.): A previous version of this article misstated the location of Dearborn County. It is in Indiana, not Illinois.

Fake and Real

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting By JOHN HERRMANNOV. 18, 2016  Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq and a critic of Donald J. Trump, was smeared in articles on pro-Trump sites. Credit Elsa/Getty Images Something is deeply wrong when the pope’s voice, reputation and influence can be borrowed by a source that describes itself as “a fantasy news site” to claim that he has endorsed a presidential candidate, and then be amplified, unchallenged, through a million individual shares. The attention paid to fake news since the election has focused largely on fabrications and outright lies, because they are indefensible, easy to identify and extraordinarily viral. Fake news is created by the kinds of people who, when asked, might call their work satire, or admit that they’re in it for the money or for the thrill of deception. Theirs is a behavior that can and should be shunned, and that Facebook is equipped, and maybe willing, to deal with. For many people, and especially opponents of President-elect Donald J. Trump, the attention paid to fake news and its role in the election has provided a small relief, the discovery of the error that explains everything. But as the attention has spread widely — even President Obama talked passionately about it on Thursday — it may lead to an unwanted outcome for those who see it not just as an explanation, but also as a way to correct the course. It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force. False news stories posted on fly-by-night websites were prevalent in this election. So, too, were widely shared political videos — some styled as newscasts — containing outright falsehoods, newslike image memes posted by individuals and shared by millions, and endlessly shared quotes and video clips of the candidates themselves repeating falsehoods. During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else. I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump. The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them. This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.” Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself. As the campaign progressed, criticism of Mr. Trump was instantly projected back at his opponent, or at the critics themselves. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained. Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms. This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen. “Fake news” as shorthand will almost surely be returned upon the media tenfold. The fake news narrative, as widely understood and deployed, has already begun to encompass not just falsified, fabricated stories, but a wider swath of traditional media on Facebook and elsewhere. Fox News? Fake news. Mr. Trump’s misleading claims about Ford keeping jobs in America? Fake news. The entirety of hyperpartisan Facebook? Fake news. This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are. Facebook may try to address the narrow version of the problem, the clearly fabricated posts. Facebook has plenty of tools at its disposal and has already promised to use one, to bar sites that have been flagged as promoting falsified content from using its advertising platform. But the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway. Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces. Facebook tried this, to a very limited extent, with Trending Topics. Members of the company’s editorial staff wrote descriptions of trending news stories, accompanied by links they deemed credible. This initiative collapsed in a frenzy of bias accusations and political fear. But it is easy to imagine a system in which a story, upon reaching some high threshold of shares, or a source, upon reaching some cumulative audience, could be audited and declared unreliable. This could resemble Facebook’s short-lived experiment to tag satire articles as such. A number of narrow measures could stop a fake story about the pope, for example. But where would that leave the rest of the media? Answered and rebutted, and barely better positioned against everything else that remained. It would be a still-dominant news environment in which almost everything there before remained intact, the main difference being that it would have all been declared, implicitly, not fake. Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and voting, and yet one where negative inputs are scarcely possible, and where conflict is resolved with isolation. (Not that provisions for open conflict on a platform present any easy alternatives: For Twitter, it has been a source of constant crisis.) Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy — more closely, perhaps, than most of the organizations that are identifying them. Their removal will be an improvement. The outrage at their mere existence, and at their promotion on a platform with the stated goal of connecting the world, will have been justified. But the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force, not despite Facebook but because of it. The company that created the system that resulted in hoax news stories should try to eliminate them, and with any luck it will. But the system stands to remain intact. Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns despite, or perhaps because of, its being credited with causing those concerns. Some have come to the realization that this was mistaken, even absurd. Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

According to Snopes, Fake News is Not the Problem-Failing Media Is.

According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem Take it from the internet’s chief myth busters: The problem is the failing media. Snopes Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment? Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff. Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist. Verdict: FALSE. This is the state of truth on the internet in 2016, now that it is as easy for a Macedonian teenager to create a website as it is for The New York Times, and now that the information most likely to find a large audience is that which is most alarming, not most correct. In the wake of the election, the spread of this kind of phony news on Facebook and other social media platforms has come under fire for stoking fears and influencing the election’s outcome. Both Facebook and Google have taken moves to bar fake news sites from their advertising platforms, aiming to cut off the sites’ sources of revenue. But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.” The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. “When you’re on your fifth story of the day and there’s no editor because the editor’s been fired and there’s no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don’t have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up,” she says. Founded two decades ago to debunk urban legends, Snopes has grown into a major correction operation with an editorial staff of nearly a dozen people sifting through the internet for news that smells fishy. No, delayed military absentee ballots would not have swung the election. No, Melania Trump has not filed for divorce, nor was her husband born in Pakistan. No, Mike Pence definitely did not tell Fox News that gay conversion therapy saved his marriage. Snopes reporters often choose stories to investigate based on their own web reading. “You know, some of us are just inaccuracy snobs, but some of us are ideologues, too,” Binkowski says. She certainly falls into that camp. “I believe in sunlight being the best disinfectant, and I believe in the power of the truth,” she says. The incendiary made-up headlines are often the most straightforward falsehoods to identify. “Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it’s such obvious bullshit,” she says. “A site will have something buried somewhere on it that says, ‘This is intended to be satire. Don’t sue us.’” Binkowski says the more important work involves setting the record straight at legitimate publications that get things wrong. For example, in December, a story about El Chapo threatening ISIS appeared in the New York Post, on Forbes, and in the Washington Times, among other outlets. It didn’t sit right with a Snopes reporter, yet news outlets were reporting — and rereporting — the story. Binkowski had spent a portion of her professional journalistic career covering the border region between Mexico and the United States. “If El Chapo had made a statement like this, I would have heard about it because I’m in contact with all these Zapatista groups in Mexico,” she says. So she tracked down the original author of the information, a Brit who had written the piece as satire. “He was like, ‘I didn’t think this was going to go viral. I guess I just really nailed that El Chapo narrative,’” she remembers. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you sure did.’” Snopes published a story in which the author said that the El Chapo story was satire and he’d never intended it to get so big. As a result, the duped publications ran corrections. Binkowski also points to the challenges the media face in relaying complex information quickly and accurately. To help, recently Snopes has begun to publish important news-related information as a resource for journalists and others. Last week, for example, Binkowski wrote a piece about how the electoral college functions that served as a reference for other reporters writing about the election. “It’s really complex stuff that you can’t just read about and then write about,” she says. “We’re going to be doing more of that.” Two decades into its existence, Snopes has built a strong brand as a credible myth buster. If you aren’t sure whether something is true, Google it. If a Snopes link is among your first search results, it’s probably not. Even so, corrections rarely get the attention the original stories generate. Against the viral tidal wave of misinformation, it can be hard to tell how much impact the Snopes team is having. “The only thing that we are doing that we can really keep doing is: just say the truth again and again and again and again and again, and just keep doing it,” says Binkowski. “You have to really have a specific type of personality to not want to just go back to bed.”

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth

God forbid, the New York Times is not the top representative of good journalism, but they do make an effort to do their job right: TECHNOLOGY How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth Farhad Manjoo STATE OF THE ART NOV. 2, 2016 Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election? Much of that remains unclear, because the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.” For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case. More than a decade ago, as a young reporter covering the intersection of technology and politics, I noticed the opposite. The internet was filled with 9/11 truthers, and partisans who believed against all evidence that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election from John Kerry, or that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. (He was born in Hawaii and is a practicing Christian.) Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Of course, America has long been entranced by conspiracy theories. But the online hoaxes and fringe theories appeared more virulent than their offline predecessors. They were also more numerous and more persistent. During Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, every attempt to debunk the birther rumor seemed to raise its prevalence online. In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher in a “post-fact” age. Eight years later, in the death throes of an election that features a candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama’s birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age. Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth. You’re Not Rational The root of the problem with online news is something that initially sounds great: We have a lot more media to choose from. In the last 20 years, the internet has overrun your morning paper and evening newscast with a smorgasbord of information sources, from well-funded online magazines to muckraking fact-checkers to the three guys in your country club whose Facebook group claims proof that Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are really the same person. A wider variety of news sources was supposed to be the bulwark of a rational age — “the marketplace of ideas,” the boosters called it. But that’s not how any of this works. Psychologists and other social scientists have repeatedly shown that when confronted with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not. This dynamic becomes especially problematic in a news landscape of near-infinite choice. Whether navigating Facebook, Google or The New York Times’s smartphone app, you are given ultimate control — if you see something you don’t like, you can easily tap away to something more pleasing. Then we all share what we found with our like-minded social networks, creating closed-off, shoulder-patting circles online. That’s the theory, at least. The empirical research on so-called echo chambers is mixed. Facebook’s data scientists have run large studies on the idea and found it wanting. The social networking company says that by exposing you to more people, Facebook adds diversity to your news diet. Others disagree. A study published last year by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, found that homogeneous online networks help conspiracy theories persist and grow online. “This creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information doesn’t matter,” said Walter Quattrociocchi, one of the study’s authors. “All that matters is whether the information fits in your narrative.” No Power in Proof Digital technology has blessed us with better ways to capture and disseminate news. There are cameras and audio recorders everywhere, and as soon as something happens, you can find primary proof of it online. You would think that greater primary documentation would lead to a better cultural agreement about the “truth.” In fact, the opposite has happened. Consider the difference in the examples of the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. While you’ve probably seen only a single film clip of the scene from Dealey Plaza in 1963 when President Kennedy was shot, hundreds of television and amateur cameras were pointed at the scene on 9/11. Yet neither issue is settled for Americans; in one recent survey, about as many people said the government was concealing the truth about 9/11 as those who said the same about the Kennedy assassination. Documentary proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered. This gets to the deeper problem: We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases. Researchers have shown that two people with differing points of view can look at the same picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas about what it shows. That dynamic has played out repeatedly this year. Some people look at the WikiLeaks revelations about Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and see a smoking gun, while others say it’s no big deal, and that besides, it’s been doctored or stolen or taken out of context. Surveys show that people who liked Mr. Trump saw the Access Hollywood tape where he casually referenced groping women as mere “locker room talk”; those who didn’t like him considered it the worst thing in the world. Lies as an Institution One of the apparent advantages of online news is persistent fact-checking. Now when someone says something false, journalists can show they’re lying. And if the fact-checking sites do their jobs well, they’re likely to show up in online searches and social networks, providing a ready reference for people who want to correct the record. But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery. That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time. “Where hoaxes before were shared by your great-aunt who didn’t understand the internet, the misinformation that circulates online is now being reinforced by political campaigns, by political candidates or by amorphous groups of tweeters working around the campaigns,” said Caitlin Dewey, a reporter at The Washington Post who once wrote a column called “What Was Fake on the Internet This Week.” Ms. Dewey’s column began in 2014, but by the end of last year, she decided to hang up her fact-checking hat because she had doubts that she was convincing anyone. “In many ways the debunking just reinforced the sense of alienation or outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you’ve done more harm than good,” she said. Other fact-checkers are more sanguine, recognizing the limits of exposing online hoaxes, but also standing by the utility of the effort. 26 COMMENTS “There’s always more work to be done,” said Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of Snopes.com, one of the internet’s oldest rumor-checking sites. “There’s always more. It’s Sisyphean — we’re all pushing that boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down.” Yeah. Though soon, I suspect, that boulder is going to squash us all. Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Internet Seizes News, Grip on Truth Loosens. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Journalism Has A Future

MEDIACHECK A Modest Proposal for a New Media Landscape Tyee editor Robyn Smith was asked to advise MPs on Canada’s journalism industry, and its future. Here’s what she said. By Robyn Smith Today | TheTyee.ca Robyn Smith is editor of The Tyee. 175SHARES JOIN 16 Comments Old media are struggling, but government can help foster new models for news and information. Photo by Gabriele82, Creative Commons licensed. [Editor's note: The Tyee was pleased to be invited to speak to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, which is currently examining the media and local communities in the context of the collapse of traditional news outlets and the increasing concentration of ownership. Here is a slightly expanded version of the statement editor Robyn Smith will make to committee this morning.] You are studying the state of Canada’s media industry today, the impacts of new media, and what the future might be. I hope that telling you about my experience at The Tyee sheds some light on that. CONTESTS, EVENTS & MORE FROM TYEE AND SELECT PARTNERS Tyee Presents: The Future Of Public Education: Beyond The Headlines An evening exploring what is and what can be for public education in British Columbia. Tyee's Andrew MacLeod Wins Social Justice Award Honours for 'A Better Place on Earth,' chronicling stark BC inequality. I feel very fortunate to work in journalism. I graduated school in 2011, when the legacy media outlets in this country were already convulsing with the impacts of the digital revolution. My peers and I were wary, but since many of the reporters we looked up to still worked at the big papers, we were hopeful a Plan B would emerge. But it just got worse and worse. Advertising revenues kept dwindling, setting off waves of layoffs at the big chains like Postmedia and Torstar. Traditional beats — the expertise at the heart of journalism — dried up as thinned newsrooms tried to keep up with the 24-hour digital news cycle with fewer people. Facebook and Google relentlessly decimated ad revenue as a support for news production. Corporate newsrooms responded by blurring the line between real reporting and advertorial. Meanwhile, the CBC was cutting back drastically at the whims of its budget’s political masters. We watched as talented reporters we admired took early buyouts or fled the industry. A lot of them joined the ranks of public relations spinners, who now vastly outnumber news reporters in British Columbia. A few of my friends did find good jobs, some in non-traditional newsrooms that were experimenting with new models. But many gave up. They couldn’t make a living from the scant available work, mostly insecure or part-time. Or they couldn’t stomach the industry trends towards chasing clicks, re-packaging stories, or writing bland sponsored content designed to serve advertisers. Twenty years ago, I am told, a freelancer was generally paid three to five times more a word than today. What other industry’s pay scale is going so dramatically in reverse? The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada I say all this because I want to be clear that it isn’t just critical public interest journalism that has been lost as our legacy media outlets have struggled and shrank. Canada is producing lots of smart people who want to do this work, to throw all their brainpower and passion into informing our vital democratic conversation. But there are fewer places for them to hone their craft, and fewer mentors with the time to teach them. The result is that we are failing to nurture the next generation of journalists, the kind of steely-eyed muckrakers and solutions reporters that help manifest real and necessary change in the world. And that is a huge loss. (I should acknowledge here all the writers who never even had a shot at the industry, because they couldn’t afford the well-connected schools and the access to newsrooms they provide.) So I was lucky to land at The Tyee, which over 13 years has built a healthy regional and, increasingly, national following based on readers’ appetite for what concentrated, corporate media were missing, ignoring, or increasingly unable to do. But despite pride in all we’ve done, we worry immensely about our industry. We don’t want public-interest journalists, regardless of who their employer is, to be out of work. And no one in Canada has yet figured out a digital-only online business model that easily supports a large number of full-time paid professional reporters. None of the local digital outlets have the size and scale that legacy media outlets once had. We worry there’s a dangerous chasm that’s opened up as legacy media fails, and digital media isn’t catching up fast enough to bridge the gap and cover what’s lost. I personally don’t think bailing out Big Media is the answer. I’d prefer a future where Canada’s monolithic media companies are broken up and the news and information outlets bought by smaller regional entities that care about their communities, and have strong relationships with local institutions that support them. But barring that, I do think there’s a lot that a government with some imagination and appetite for change can do to revive our industry. Imagine there was a recognized, valued and well-supported sector for digital media outlets like ours in Canada. Imagine a flourishing of Tyees of all different stripes and missions, with different business models behind them: a mix of charity, for-profit, co-op, and hybrid structures. It starts with some investments, and it needn’t cost a lot. It doesn’t even need to come directly from government, but government can help make it happen. I recently asked our founding editor, David Beers, how much it cost to launch The Tyee back in 2003. It was $190,000. At the time, there weren’t many models like ours, he said. And so he and our founding investors thought: all Canada needs is a template. All we need is $190,000. If it bears fruit in the first year, we’ll put in some more. If not, we’ll pull out. And that’s how The Tyee was off and running. Today, $190,000 is less than one-fifth the cost of a tear-down house in my city, Vancouver. It’s also, from what I’ve read, a little less than what it cost to move two of our prime minister’s aides from Toronto to Ottawa. That $190,000 helped get things going. It turned into repeated investments of similar amounts, as The Tyee broke stories, drew an ever-larger audience, and obviously mattered. That $190,000 kick-started the development of several other pillars of earned revenue that now support our operations, including advertising, event sponsorships and partnerships, income from our Tyee Master Classes, and increasingly, voluntary support directly from our readers. Patient investor commitments and diversified revenue streams are what has sustained The Tyee and built it into a respected, award-winning platform for public interest journalism. True, that $190,000 that launched The Tyee in 2003 may be a little more today. Say it’s $350,000. Supporting the launch of 20 Tyee-like outlets across Canada would cost $7 million. That’s seven houses in my town. Save Canada's News Media? Like We Said in 2005... READ MORE That is the vision I am holding out here today. Canada needs some combination of policy innovation and wilful prioritization to make the $190,000 that launched The Tyee gravitate, over and over again, towards independent journalism experiments across Canada. We need incentives — tax breaks, matching grants, lifted philanthropic restrictions — to encourage stakeholders in our communities to seed fund independent media. We need infrastructure to help single independent media efforts like The Tyee more easily mesh into a network of other such experiments, perhaps a recognized sector of independent media sharing core costs, revenue streams, reporting projects, technological advances, and audiences. There is a role for government in this. Not in directly funding content. Frankly — and I’m not trying to be disrespectful — The Tyee would not seek such funding from the government, because we are in the business of reporting on your activities. However there is much to be done in building out the now proven, but still needlessly starved, potential of the independent media sector as a complement to corporate media and the CBC. Let me return to the quick mention I made of changing philanthropic laws. The Tyee has benefited over the years from contributions from forward-thinking philanthropic institutions, through a relationship with our sister non-profit. Tyee Solutions Society. That demonstrates that great things are possible. But we’ve also learned how federal policy makes the collaboration of philanthropies and public interest journalists needlessly difficult. When Tyee Solutions Society accesses philanthropic investment, we do solutions-oriented journalism. Solutions journalism uses investigative reporting techniques as its bedrock, but it is not about muck-racking or dinging politicians. It’s focused on how to fix seemingly intractable problems. It’s worked out well. We’ve so far done nearly $1-million worth of solutions journalism over the last seven years, on critical topics like food security, indigenous education, affordable housing, and Canada’s energy future. Tyee Solutions was among the first in North America to pursue solutions journalism. Now, there’s a big version of what we do in Washington, and an increasing number of similar outlets popping up all over the world. And we’ve done it despite Canada’s incredibly restrictive philanthropic rules. And it’s the kind of journalism my generation is interested in. To be clear, again, we’re not asking you to fund our content. We’re asking you to find ways to loosen up the money. We’re asking you to consider a start-up fund for new media outlets like ours. We’re asking you to help us attract more core investment funding and encourage a better investment climate for media in Canada overall, whether it’s supporting community trusts, or perhaps offering tax breaks. And we’re asking you to make it easier for philanthropies — individual and institutional — to support our solutions journalism. I’m so glad that there was a place like The Tyee when I started my career. I’m asking you to wrap your heads around helping to create and support other homes for people like me. Thank you.

Is this the greatest pieces of journalism ever written?

How John Hersey's Hiroshima revealed the horror of the bomb 22 August 2016 From the section Magazine From the BBC a story about a New Yorker story that told of a new terrible world being born. In today's Magazine Trump’s shock troops: Who are the ‘alt-right’? Quiz of the week's news The ‘handsome weeping boys’ paid to wipe your tears New plan to boost S Korea birth rate At the end of this month 70 years will have passed since the publication of a magazine story hailed as one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever written. Headlined simply Hiroshima, the 30,000-word article by John Hersey had a massive impact, revealing the full horror of nuclear weapons to the post-war generation, as Caroline Raphael describes. I have an original copy of the 31 August 1946 edition of The New Yorker. It has the most innocuous of covers - a delightful playful carefree drawing of summer in a park. On the back cover, the managers of the New York Giants and the New York Yankees encourage you to "Always Buy Chesterfield" cigarettes. Past the Goings on About Town and movie listings, past the ritzy adverts for diamonds and fur and cars and cruises you find a simple statement from The Editors explaining that this edition will be devoted entirely to just one article "on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb". They are taking this step, they say, "in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use". Seventy years ago no-one talked about stories "going viral", but the publication of John Hersey's article Hiroshima in The New Yorker achieved just that. It was talked of, commented on, read and listened to by many millions all over the world as they began to understand what really happened not just to the city but to the people of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and in the following days. Image copyrightSCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES It was spring 1946 when John Hersey, decorated war correspondent and prize-winning novelist, was commissioned by The New Yorker to go to Hiroshima. He expected to write, as others had done, a piece about the state of the shattered city, the buildings, the rebuilding, nine months on. Readers who sent letters to The New Yorker wrote of their shame and horror that ordinary people, just like them - secretaries and mothers, doctors and priests - had endured such terror On the voyage out he fell ill and was given a copy of Thornton Wilders's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Inspired by Wilder's narrative of the five people who crossed the bridge as it collapsed he decided he would write about people not buildings. And it was that simple decision that marks Hiroshima out from other pieces of the time. Once in Hiroshima he found survivors of the bomb whose stories he would tell, starting from the minutes before the bomb was dropped. Many years later he told of the horror he felt, how he could only stay a few weeks. Hersey took these accounts back to New York. Had he filed from Japan the chances of them ever being published would have been remote - previous attempts to get graphic photographs or film or reports out of the country had been halted by the US Occupying Forces. The material had been censored or locked away - sometimes it simply disappeared. John Hersey - 1914-1993 Image copyrightAP Born in China, the son of US missionaries Returned to the US aged 10, later studied at Yale Began writing for Time in 1937, reported from Europe and Asia during the war His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944) - about a Sicilian town occupied by US forces - won a Pulitzer Prize Hiroshima tops one list of the best 20th Century American journalism Hersey's editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, knew they had something quite extraordinary, unique, and the edition was prepared in utter secrecy. Never before had all the magazine's editorial space been given over to a single story and it has never happened since. Journalists who were expecting to have their stories in that week's edition wondered where their proofs had gone. Twelve hours before publication, copies were sent to all the major US newspapers - a smart move that resulted in editorials urging everyone to read the magazine. It was read out over four consecutive nights on the new Third Programme, despite some concern among senior managers about the emotional impact on listeners All 300,000 copies immediately sold out and the article was reprinted in many other papers and magazines the world over, except where newsprint was rationed. When Albert Einstein attempted to buy 1,000 copies of the magazine to send to fellow scientists he had to contend with facsimiles. The US Book of the Month Club gave a free special edition to all its subscribers because, in the words of its president, "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more important at this moment to the human race." Within two weeks a second-hand copy of The New Yorker sold for 120 times its cover price. If Hiroshima demonstrates anything as a piece of journalism it is the enduring power of storytelling. John Hersey combined all his experience as a war correspondent with his skill as a novelist. It was a radical piece of journalism that gave a vital voice to those who only a year before had been mortal enemies. There in a cataclysmic landscape of living nightmares, of the half-dead, of burnt and seared bodies, of desperate attempts to care for the blasted survivors, of hot winds and a flattened city ravaged by fires we meet Miss Sasaki , the Rev Mr Tanimoto, Mrs Nakamura and her children, the Jesuit Father Kleinsorge and doctors Fujii and Sasaki. The six characters Miss Toshiko Sasaki - personnel department clerk aged about 20 who was 1,600 yards from the centre of the blast, her leg is horribly injured The Rev Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto - pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, falls ill from radiation sickness Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura - the widow of a tailor who died serving in Singapore, with children aged 10 and below Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge - a German Jesuit priest who feels the strain of being a foreigner in Japan and suffers from exposure to radiation Doctors Masakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki (not related to Miss Sasaki) - two temperamentally very different medics Orientals had been demonised long before Pearl Harbor. The Yellow Peril of the cartoon strips had sunk deep into the American psyche. In 1941 Time-Life ran an extraordinary article telling readers how they could tell Japanese from Chinese - "How to tell your friends from the Japs". The pilot of the Enola Gay is reported to have said he felt like sci-fi hero Buck Rogers the day he dropped the bomb. So only a year after the end of the war these six close-ups on five Japanese men and women and one Westerner, each of whom "saw more death than he ever thought he would see" were unexpected and shattering. Readers who sent letters to The New Yorker, almost all in admiration for the work, wrote of their shame and horror that ordinary people, just like them - secretaries and mothers, doctors and priests - had endured such terror. John Hersey was not the first to report from Hiroshima but the reports and newsreels had been a blizzard of numbers too big to fully comprehend. They had reported on the destruction of the city, the mushroom cloud, the shadows of the dead on the walls and streets but never got close to those who lived through those end-of-days time, as Hersey did. It was also becoming increasingly clear to some that this new weapon carried on killing long after the "noiseless flash" as bright as the sun, despite intense government and military attempts to cover it up or deny it. Image caption The book has never been out of print Hiroshima was the first publication to make the man on the San Francisco trolleybus and the woman on the Clapham omnibus confront the miseries of radiation sickness, to understand that you could survive the bomb and still die from its after effects. John Hersey in his calm unflinching prose reported what those who had survived had witnessed. As the nuclear arms race began, just three months after the testing of further atom bombs at Bikini Atoll, the true power of the new weapons began to be understood. Such were the reverberations of Hersey's article, and Albert Einstein's very public support for it, that Henry Stimson who had been US Secretary for War wrote a magazine article in reply, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - a defiant justification for the use of the bomb, whatever the consequences. News of the extraordinary article had been reported in Britain, but it was too long to publish - John Hersey would not allow it to be edited and newsprint was still rationed. So the BBC followed American radio's lead and about six weeks later it was read out over four consecutive nights on the new Third Programme, despite some concern among senior managers about the emotional impact on listeners. The Radio Times commissioned Alistair Cooke to write a long background piece. Alluding to its publication in The New Yorker, renowned as the home of witty cartoons, he called it "the deadliest joke of our age". Find out more Listen to Hersey's Hiroshima at 23:00 on Monday 22 August, on BBC Radio 4, or catch up afterwards on the BBC iPlayer The 1948 reading of Hiroshima will be played in four parts, at 18:30 from Tuesday 23 to Friday 26 August, on Radio 4 Extra - you can catch up on the iPlayer here The listening figures were high and the BBC decided to rebroadcast the reading on the Light Programme all in one go, just a few weeks later, to make sure even more people heard it. That's the Light Programme whose remit was, according to the BBC Handbook for that year, "to entertain its listeners and to interest them in the world at large without failing to be entertaining". There was little to entertain in this two-hour programme. The Daily Express critic, Nicholas Hallam, called it the most terrifying broadcast he had ever heard. Hersey never forgot his survivors - in 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the bomb, he went back to Japan The BBC had also invited John Hersey to be interviewed and his cabled reply is in the BBC archives: "Hersey gratefullest invitation and BBC interest and coverage Hiroshima but has throughout maintained policy let story speak for itself without additional words from himself or anybody." Indeed, Hersey was only to give three or four interviews his entire life. Sadly not one of them was for the BBC. A 1948 recording of a reading of Hiroshima remains in the BBC archives. The effect of the crisp English voices telling this harrowing story is startling. The prose is revealed as rhythmic and often quietly poetic and ironic. One of the readers is the young actress Sheila Sim, newly married at the time to the actor Richard Attenborough. By November, Hiroshima was published in book form. It was translated quickly into many languages and a braille edition was released. However, in Japan, Gen Douglas MacArthur - the supreme commander of occupying forces, who effectively governed Japan until 1948 - had strictly prohibited dissemination of any reports on the consequences of the bombings. Copies of the book, and the relevant edition of The New Yorker, were banned until 1949, when Hiroshima was finally translated into Japanese by the Rev Mr Tanimoto, one of Hersey's six survivors. Hersey never forgot his survivors. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the bomb, he went back to Japan and wrote The Aftermath, the story of what had happened to them in the intervening four decades. Two of them had since died, one of them certainly from radiation-related disease. More from the Magazine Image copyrightSCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY When time stood still - a Hiroshima survivor's story

The real dangers of very rich, outed, closet queens, have on a free open society which is open to all. They threaten the open freedom of all it their twisted queerdom. Home U.S. Politics World Business Tech Health Motto Entertainment Science Newsfeed Living Sports History The TIME Vault Magazine Ideas Parents TIME Labs Money LIFE The Daily Cut Photography Videos TIME Shop NEXT GENERATION LEADERS THE BOUNDLESS CLOUD THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE THE 25 BEST INVENTIONS OF 2015 FUTURE OF GIVING GLOBAL TRADE KNOW RIGHT NOW PERSON OF THE YEAR 2015 TOP OF THE WORLD A YEAR IN SPACE SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTERS FEEDBACK PRIVACY POLICY YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS TERMS OF USE AD CHOICES RSS TIME APPS TIME FOR KIDS ADVERTISING REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS SITE MAP HELP CUSTOMER SERVICE © 2016 TIME INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. SIGN IN SUBSCRIBE LATEST MAGAZINE VIDEOS Gawker Founder Nick Denton on Peter Thiel, ‘Conflict and Trollery’ and the Future of Media Game of Thrones Has a Lot at Stake in the Brexit Vote. Seriously. Mud, Music and Miles-Long Lines as Glastonbury Clashes With Brexit Referendum Adam Driver’s TED Talk Is Surprisingly Moving Flume’s New Album Skin Might Be the Future of Electronic Music U.S. House Sit-In Leader John Lewis Moved by ‘Spirit of History’ The Catholic Church Should Encourage Women Leaders We Should All Aspire to Tweet Like Martha Stewart NHL Approves Expansion to Las Vegas A Former NASA Engineer Built the World’s Biggest NERF Gun Go Behind the Scenes of Your Luggage’s Journey to the Airplane New Game of Thrones Photos Tease an Epic Season 6 Finale Why It Pays to Be a Copycat J.R. Smith Is a National Treasure and the Cavaliers Championship Parade Is Proof No Wonder This Kid Got to Dance On Stage With Justin Bieber Tim Tebow and Jameis Winston Visit Orlando Shooting Victim at Hospital Kendall Jenner Joins Marilyn Manson as Goth Goals for Marc Jacobs’ Latest Campaign President Obama Just Approved an Overhaul Regulation on Thousands of Chemicals Here’s the Throwback Star Wars Character Forest Whitaker Is Playing in Rogue One Vinyl’s Cancellation Sheds Light on HBO’s Current Struggles Are Disney Princesses Hurting Your Daughter’s Self-Esteem? Burger King Just Unleashed the Most Dangerous Snack of All Time This 41-Year-Old Stay-At-Home Dad Has Been Skateboarding Every Day to Prove He Can 275 Arrested in Crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid Fraud How Can Virtual Reality Affect Your Life? What Would You Do If You Could Enhance Your Brain? DJ Idris Elba Just Dropped a New House Banger Watch Beyoncé and Serena Williams Dance In Official ‘Sorry’ Video Will Smith Knows Exactly How Bad Wild Wild West Was ‘Infant Trackers’ Help Parents Keep Tabs On Their Babies HUMAN DATA Here’s Who the West Wing Cast Thinks President Bartlet Would Endorse in 2016 This Major Star Wars Character Will Appear in Rogue One American Parents Are Miserable The Link Between Uterine Fibroids and Miscarriage Rogue Bounce House Flies Away and Hits Power Line in New York Fed-Up Cristiano Ronaldo Tosses a Reporter’s Microphone Into a Lake Canon’s New Camera Is a Good Option If You Still Want a Point-and-Shoot 3 Reasons Why Elon Musk Wants to Combine Tesla and SolarCity Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington Had to Face His Worst Fear While Filming ‘Battle of the Bastards’ MORE IDEAS » IDEAS MEDIA Gawker Founder Nick Denton on Peter Thiel, ‘Conflict and Trollery’ and the Future of Media Belinda Luscombe @luscombeland June 22, 2016 Eve Edelheit—AP Gawker founder Nick Denton speaks to the media, in St. Petersburg, Fla. on March 18, 2016. Belinda Luscombe is an editor-at-large of TIME 'I’ve always had a surprising amount of respect for Rupert Murdoch' RECOMMENDED FOR YOU Varys's Mission on Game of Thrones May Be Darker Than You Expect Women Are Winning on 'Game of Thrones.' But It Feels a Little… This Is the Bizarre Advice Donald Trump Gave 11-Year-Old Daniel… Promoted Know thyself: The science of threat intelligence Recommended by Recently, you had a $140 million judgment against Gawker Media, declared bankruptcy and put the media empire you founded up for sale. How’s your mood? Actually it’s good. It’s a bit of a relief. We have a deal in place with Ziff Davis. And separately we’ll pursue this litigation with the various plaintiffs who are being backed by [PayPal billionaire] Peter Thiel. And we expect frankly to win all of those cases. Can you explain the news value of the story that triggered the lawsuit, the Hulk Hogan sex tape? People, journalists, publishers will have different opinions about whether they would have published the eight seconds of grainy sex that was the illustration of the article. I don’t want to get into that debate all over again, just to note that a federal court has already determined that the piece was newsworthy. Hogan’s lawsuit against you was bankrolled by Thiel, whom Gawker outed in 2007. Is there a sense in which he’s won, now that you’re selling? To the extent that the bankruptcy of Gawker was one of his objectives, he’s achieved that. But he and his secret scheme have all been exposed. He has been embarrassed. And I doubt that any billionaire will be pursuing precisely this template again, having seen how strong the backlash is. Why do you think you lost? Was it an issue of tone? The Village Voice would have been equally offensive to a jury in Tampa [where the case was tried] 40 years ago, but it would not have been read by people on a Tampa jury. I think the cultural gap between a liberal metropolis like New York and the rest of America is more stark than it has been, and the conflict plays out in Internet media because Hulk Hogan’s [Florida] neighbors can read Gawker. Are there any stories you regret publishing? Absolutely. I don’t think we’ve ever made a misstep as big as say the New York Times‘ reporting of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. We haven’t gotten anybody into any wars. But we’ve absolutely made mistakes. If you’re not making some, you’re probably not doing your job. Is there a media mogul that you identify with? I’ve always had a surprising amount of respect for Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. I respect publishers and media executives who’ll put out good, true, provocative stories and deal with the blowback. You’re a Brit, Murdoch is Australian. Do you ever feel like American journalists are too soft? I’m not the only one who has noted that the American newspapers—maybe because they have been local monopolies—are concerned more about respectability than their British peers. And concerned less about getting the story out. The British press certainly seems more rambunctious than the American newspapers. You recently got married. Has the fate of the Gawker empire become less central to your happiness? At my wedding, I think I actually said that I always thought I’d be successful but I never expected to be happy. And I am happily married to somebody who despises news in all its forms. I don’t know whether Gawker ever made me happy. I think it made me satisfied. Do you feel like you have a rosebud? You mean something driving me? Maybe because I was gay, I grew up hating open secrets. Usually if someone’s gay it’s a pretty open secret. Their friends know, their family knows, but out of some misplaced sense of decency nobody talks about it. Generally my view is that, let’s just have it out. The truth will set you free. That’s what I believe. Is Gawker.com as we know it, the site that drove a certain type of internet culture, a thing of the past? Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Jezebel represents about 90% of the audience of the group. It’s only really because media people are so obsessed by Gawker.com that it’s had such an outsized share of attention. I think the Peter Thiel legal campaign, a secret campaign to set up critics demonstrates why independent media is so important. And it underlines why Gawker.com continues to have such an appeal. So I think as long as readers—whether they admit it publicly or not—as long as readers have a hunger for true, critical, funny stories about how the system works and about the concentration of money and power in modern society, as long as they have that appetite, then a site like Gawker.com is going to have a continued purpose. You had litigation insurance, which you’ve used up. Did the Hulk Hogan lawsuit cost you personally? The company’s actually not majority owned by me anymore. My net worth is tied up almost entirely in stock in Gawker Media Group. We ran this as a small business. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and we didn’t take any outside capital. And I and the other founders took very low salaries for nearly a decade. So my net worth is entirely pooled up in the value of Gawker Media Group. I have a stake of about 30%. And then I have an apartment with a mortgage, and that’s it. All of that stuff is publicly available. We have become not just proponents of radical transparency; we are living radical transparency with pretty much every single aspect of our financial lives and existence being now public. Which is fine by me. What will the media landscape look like five years down the road? First of all, I think that properties like Gizmodo and Lifehacker and Deadspin and Jezebel have a much better chance of prospering in this new world than general news brands, news and media brands. Facebook will be the only general news brand, and maybe another social network or two. The more specialized, more focused publications will be the ones that prosper. I think that’s one thing that’s going to happen. And my personal interest is to find a way online to allow writers and readers and subjects and sources to debate and develop a story together. Not necessarily through conflict and trollery, but through civil disagreements online which further everybody’s understanding of an issue. You’ve invested a lot in your online comment system, Kinja. Why? Comments and online discussion have been my obsession for several years. I don’t believe that journalists have any monopoly on understanding. And I think it’s healthier when not just their viewpoint but the viewpoints of their sources, the viewpoints of their subjects of an article, viewpoints of experts are all given equal weight in an article. I think the role of journalists as gatekeeper is more challenged now than it has been. And the internet, internet forums, internet comments, essentially social media environments, give the opportunity to more people to contribute to a story and contribute to our collective understanding. But so much online commenting is just trollery… And often those trolls do crowd out civil discussion. Sometimes I feel like the only people left on Twitter are the trolls. The basic idea of the comments on Gizmodo and Lifehacker and Kotaku and the other Gawker properties is that they should reflect a conversation between the writer and readers. And I think most people agree that our comments, they’re not perfect, the occasional troll makes his or her way in. But generally discussions augment the stories and that’s why people spend longer on a Gawker story and are more likely to be engaged than they are on other news properties. Why are online comments so misogynist? There’s racism, there’s misogyny, there’s many nasty thoughts. I think it boils down to the fact that people are mean. Sometimes they’re supportive and loving but sometimes they’re mean. And anonymity gives people a chance to share things about themselves that they would never share with anybody else, in a constructive fashion. Do you think other media outlets have been lax in covering Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is a huge story and has been covered thoroughly. But Silicon Valley billionaires and Silicon Valley companies are notoriously controlling. I worked as a journalist for The Financial Times in Silicon Valley and I remember even back then that if you played along and if a story followed a company’s talking points you were fine. And if you asked critical questions, particularly if those critical questions got an airing in the article itself, then you’d lose access and you wouldn’t be invited back, you wouldn’t get early sight of gadgets or a piece of news. Silicon Valley, I think, has used the media and public fascination with its products as an instrument of power. And I think that’s natural. And I think it’s also natural that there be a reaction to that. And readers gravitate to more skeptical, cynical or critical coverage. Which is the reason why Valleywag, the Gawker section covering Silicon Valley, was such a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. People may have hated it, but they were all reading it. Do you have any regret about not selling before these legal troubles depressed your sale price? The consolidation of digital media has only been going for the last 12 months. This lawsuit began in 2012. There was no window. Wasn’t the Huffington Post sold before 2012? That was 2011. Look, we built the largest independent digital media company without outside capital, without buying traffic. And we pursued that path for as long as we could. The market is consolidating right now. If Gawker Media ends up as part of Ziff Davis I think it’s be an extremely powerful combination. It will be the dominant digital media player in technology and video games coverage, it will be very strong in lifestyle. This is a game of musical chairs. And there aren’t all that many chairs. There are plenty of people dancing around. And I think Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin and Jezebel are going to be enduring properties, hopefully with stronger backing, stronger financial backing than they have been in the past. And less distracted by the litigation that enveloped Gawker.com. Is there anybody you wouldn’t sell to? Anybody I wouldn’t sell to? I think there’s certain potential acquirers that our writers would not want to work for. But my main focus is to get the very best deal that we can to maximize value and to provide satisfying and secure jobs for the people who work here. The people in my newsroom here want to know who was your favorite editor-in-chief at Gawker. This is just a matter of personal taste. I liked the original Elizabeth Spiers Gawker. I like in particular the way that the humor was delivered. I like the way that she writes intelligent pieces with witty asides, clearly marked. So you know what she’s saying, you know what’s a joke and what’s serious. And that meshes with my own personal style. Is there a future for independent journalism? I think Facebook instant articles and the strength of Facebook as a marketplace for both content and advertising actually does offer some opportunities to independent publishers. The original goal of Gawker was actually to be a completely lightweight organization employing only writers and using technology, and taking technology and advertising sales kind of off the shelf. And I think it was early, and that’s why we developed our own publishing platform and our own advertising sales force. But I think the time for that idea will come again.

Where Do We Find the News?

Two more threats to a free and vibrant media from the New York Times: For News Outlets Squeezed From the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust Mediator By JIM RUTENBERG APRIL 17, 2016 Jim VandeHei, co-founder and former chief executive of Politico, says that “journalists are killing journalism.” Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times Earlier this month, a couple of inventive young go-getters at BuzzFeed tied enough rubber bands around the center of a watermelon to make it explode. Nearly a million people watched the giant berry burst on Facebook Live. It racked up more than 10 million views in the days that followed. Traditional journalists everywhere saw themselves as the seeds, flying out of the frame. How do we compete with that? And if that’s the future of news and information, what’s next for our democracy? President Kardashian? Grandkids: It was not so long ago — oh, say, five, maybe six years — that traditional news organizations like this one could laugh at BuzzFeed’s gag along with everyone else, smugly secure. An exploding watermelon was just an exploding watermelon. These days, however, news articles — be they about war, voting rights, the arts or immigration policy — increasingly inhabit social media feeds like the frighteningly dominant one that Facebook runs. They are competing for attention against zany kitchen experiments; your friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah; and that wild video of a train whipping through a ridiculously narrow alleyway in Thailand. After watching the fruiticide, I noticed a Twitter post by the freelance journalist Erik Malinowski that read, “the watermelon … is us,” and sighed. Seemed about right. The sense of dread was compounded a few hours later, when the website Mashable, which first came to prominence covering Internet businesses and culture, appeared to pare back an ambitious effort to prove that serious world and political news could thrive alongside “Grumpy Cat.” Mashable announced that as part of a reorganization it was shedding several highly regarded journalists, including its executive editor, Jim Roberts, a former assistant managing editor at The New York Times. Look out, White House, I thought, here comes Kimye. Then, sweet relief (or was it?): The Financial Times reported that BuzzFeed — which is best known for hits like the watermelon video, though its news team wins awards — missed its financial targets last year and was revising this year’s projections downward. BuzzFeed, which does not disclose its finances, denied the report, saying this year will meet expectations. But traditional newsrooms everywhere were reveling in the schadenfreude just the same. Aha! Perhaps random snapshots of callipygian Corgis do not a business model make; news as we know it is safe. Well, not really. We may not yet be the watermelon. But executives who run news organizations almost universally say that we’d all better find our own watermelons — and find them yesterday. Photo Pete Cashmore, chief executive of the website Mashable, which announced job cuts this month. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times It means big changes are coming fast in the way major news institutions present their journalism, what that journalism includes, and how decisions are made about what to include. The goal: to draw big, addicted audiences. A lot of it is being done in the rushed panic that comes with the demands of quarterly earnings. And yet, given the highest calling of the news industry — hold politicians to account, unearth corruption — the importance to our political and civic life could not be greater. A good way to understand the fast-evolving thinking is to check in on people who are trying to build a news and information business from scratch. I did that last week over breakfast with Jim VandeHei, a co-founder of Politico, and Mike Allen, one of the site’s best-known journalists. Both are also veterans of The Washington Post. Mr. VandeHei, who stepped down last week as Politico’s chief executive, and Roy Schwartz, the company’s departing chief revenue officer, have been seeking potential investors and video and television partners. Mr. Allen is for the time being continuing to write his vital morning tip sheet at Politico, “Playbook,” seven days a week. When I met with Mr. VandeHei and Mr. Allen, they were tight-lipped about their next venture. They would only describe it in the broadest terms, as “a media company” that will focus on news and information, exist largely on mobile devices and social media, and not directly compete against Politico. But that was O.K. for my purposes. I was more interested in hearing what this venture wouldn’t be doing. Their answers may require a trigger warning for the proudly ink-stained set. It starts with Mr. VandeHei’s admittedly provocative proposition that “journalists are killing journalism.” They’re doing this, he says, by “stubbornly clinging to the old ways.” That’s defined as producing 50 competing but nearly identical stories about a presidential candidate’s latest speech, or 700-word updates on the transportation budget negotiations. Survival, Mr. VandeHei says, depends on giving readers what they really want, how they want it, when they want it, and on not spending too much money producing what they don’t want. It’s not only about creating big audiences for advertisers, he and Mr. Allen said. It’s about convincing already-inundated audiences that they want what you’re producing, and they want it so badly that they will pay for it through subscriptions. That’s essential as advertising revenue drops to levels that will not support robust news gathering. Hooking people on your news product is a lot harder than, say, hooking them on heroin or even coffee. But news organizations have ways they never had before to figure it out. Jonah Peretti, chief executive of BuzzFeed, which has denied reports that it trimmed its financial projections for 2016. Credit Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times Through real-time analytics, reporters and editors know how many people are reading their work and through which devices and sites, how long those readers are sticking with it, and what they’re ignoring. Screens featuring these analytics are increasingly showing up, prominently, in American newsrooms, including those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. This is the biggest and least talked about development in traditional print media as it converts to digital: It now has ratings, just as television does. The findings from these ratings have been fairly consistent. Videos, podcasts, short items of interest that can be read easily on smartphones, and almost anything with the words “Donald Trump” rate well. Perhaps counterintuitively, deeply reported features and investigative pieces like The Times’s coverage of ISIS’ brutality or its nearly 8,000-word article about one man’s lonely death in Queens can draw readership levels that were never possible in the print-only era. That’s a big deal, and in Mr. VandeHei’s and Mr. Allen’s view — as well as those of the bosses at The Times, The Post and elsewhere — it shows that big, important work will prove more valuable than fun stunts that may or may not draw big online audiences. What do not necessarily rate well, however, are the (often important if sometimes unsexy) articles about yesterday’s doings — or, nondoings — at the Federal Election Commission, or the latest federal budget fight. “We didn’t know if, in a newspaper, people were reading our 600-word piece on the transportation markup on A10 — now we do,” Mr. VandeHei said. “I’m not saying you let the audience dictate everything, but a smart, aggressive, forward-leaning media company is going to write what it thinks is important and its audience thinks is important.” This is talk you hear in newsrooms across the country, and it’s where there is some cause for concern. Those drier articles may not score in the ratings, but they can lead to the bigger ones. Watergate started as a story about a burglary. The wide-ranging sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church that The Boston Globe exposed — captured in the movie “Spotlight” — began as a 700-word column about a single priest. Once ratings come into the picture, will reporters still want to pursue those smaller stories? And will their editors, who once called these stories “spinach,” want to publish them? The answer from Mr. VandeHei and like-minded news executives is yes, but it’s incumbent upon news organizations to do a better job with them — make them shorter and more distinctive, with data and striking visual presentation. Understood. All I’m asking is that we be careful not to lose too many core values on our way to the future. Otherwise, it’s watermelon flambé at the Kardashian inauguration, and yes, we’re the watermelon. Correction: April 19, 2016 An earlier version of this column misstated where a video of a train going through a narrow alleyway was taken. It was Thailand, not India. A version of this article appears in print on April 18, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: For News Outlets Feeling the Squeeze, It’s Bend or Bust. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|SubscribeMedia Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic By JOHN HERRMANAPRIL 17, 2016 Inside of the offices of BuzzFeed in 2014. The company has denied reports that it trimmed its financial projections for 2016. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The business of online news has never been forgiving. But in recent weeks, what had been a simmering worry among publishers has turned into borderline panic. This month, Mashable, a site that had just raised $15 million, laid off 30 people. Salon, a web publishing pioneer, announced a new round of budget cuts and layoffs. And BuzzFeed, which has been held up as a success story, was forced to bat back questions about its revenue — but not before founders at other start-up media companies received calls from anxious investors. “It is a very dangerous time,” said Om Malik, an investor at True Ventures whose tech news site, Gigaom, collapsed suddenly in 2015, portending the flurry of contractions. The trouble, the publishers say, is twofold. The web advertising business, always unpredictable, became more treacherous. And website traffic plateaued at many large sites, in some cases falling — a new and troubling experience after a decade of exuberant growth. Online publishers have faced numerous financial challenges in recent years, including automated advertising and ad-blocking tools. But now, there is a realization that something more profound has happened: The transition from an Internet of websites to an Internet of mobile apps and social platforms, and Facebook in particular, is no longer coming — it is here. It is a systemic change that is leaving many publishers unsure of how they will make money. “With each turn of the screw, people began to realize, viscerally, that this is what it feels like to not be in control of your destiny,” said Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who left the company in 2007. Audiences drove the change, preferring to refresh their social feeds and apps instead of visiting website home pages. As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary detours, leading to the weakened traffic numbers for news sites. Sales staffs at media companies struggled to explain to clients why they should buy ads for a fragmented audience rather than go to robust social networks instead. Advertisers adjusted spending accordingly. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst. The power shift was made clear last week as the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage for the company’s annual developer conference. He stood in front of a diagram outlining an audacious 10-year expansion plan, which included several features to help keep people inside Facebook’s world instead of following links out. Mr. Zuckerberg also spoke about his company’s ambitions to host TV-style live video, an initiative that some media companies, including The New York Times, are investing in seriously, despite uncertainty about the rates at which videos will be monetized. Facebook also announced that it would open up Instant Articles — which encourage publishers to post their content directly to Facebook — to “any publisher.” The company demonstrated chat bots, through which users can interact directly with media companies, including publishers, through Facebook’s Messenger app. “Messenger is going to be the next big platform for sharing privately, and for helping you connect with services in all kinds of new ways,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, after demonstrating a CNN chat bot on stage. At the same time, publishers pored over a report from the analytics firm Parse.ly, detailing how important Facebook had become to their business: Among sites tracked by the firm, more than 40 percent of web traffic came from the social network. Facebook’s users seem to be following Mr. Zuckerberg’s lead. NewsWhip, which tracks how publishers are performing across major Internet platforms, says the rate at which links to outside websites are shared on Facebook, compared with videos and Instant Articles, has declined. Liam Corcoran, NewsWhip’s communications director, says that in recent months a wide range of publishers have called him to ask whether sudden drops in Facebook reach are widespread, and asking how they might be remedied — as if they were asking how to cure a disease. “It’s a doctor’s office,” he said. So far, publishers are responding in a variety of ways. With the help of venture capital funding, companies like BuzzFeed and Vox are investing heavily in video production with a focus on TV and film. Others, like Mashable, are diverting resources to increasing their audience on Facebook, hoping that enough money — through revenue-sharing arrangements with the company — will follow. “We invest in a number of strategies, then figure out which strategies are most effective,” Pete Cashmore, Mashable’s founder, said in an interview. Others are planning to do less with less. “We talk about our business as though we’re in a shrinking market, and plan accordingly,” said Alex Magnin, chief revenue officer at Thought Catalog, an essay site. Online news sites have watched the rise of social platforms closely. Publishers have started in recent years to obsessively monitor the ways in which their readers arrived at their sites. The sheer speed with which Facebook, Twitter, Google and Snapchat have come to dominate the landscape has taken publishers by surprise. In 2014, Gawker Media’s founder, Nick Denton, wrote a memo to his staff that admonished them for giving in too fully to the influence of platforms, which drove many of his company’s most popular stories. “We — the freest journalists on the planet — were slaves to the Facebook algorithm,” he wrote. Looking back at 2015, however, Mr. Denton, once known for harsh assessments of the media business, struck a conciliatory tone. “The Instant Articles deal seems great,” he said in an interview last week. “Users get relevant stories and relevant ads. It’s the realization of that particular Internet dream.” Mr. Denton said he was hopeful, like many publishers, that deep “niche” brands have something to offer advertisers. E-commerce partnerships, in which publishers are paid commissions by retailers for products recommended, or mentioned, on their sites, now cover the company’s editorial spending. The arrangement largely sidesteps social networks, but relies on agreements with another huge partner: Amazon. Other companies are looking to focus more on branded content like videos, sponsored stories and full-fledged campaigns. But publishers have quickly learned that those efforts are labor-intensive and put them in direct competition with advertising agencies. A broad slowdown in venture capital funding leaves even newer media companies with hard choices to make; even those built with social media in mind have been forced to fundamentally reconsider their plans. Mr. Malik of Gigaom, whose site employed 85 people at its peak, said if he were to start the business today, it would probably be a Facebook page. There is an opportunity, clearly, to reach people there. Money? That’s another matter. “How do I monetize?” he asked. “Still not clear.” Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting. A version of this article appears in print on April 18, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic Bring Uncertainty to Online News. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Really?

Thanks to the New Yorker for the first one.

And from the New York Times: Ink-Stained Wretches Journalists can be odd people. Their main job is to interrogate the world; to that end, they must be extroverted but discontented, energetic but grumpy, open-minded but incredulous. When the theatre critic Alexander Woollcott used the phrase “ink-stained wretches,” in 1921, he applied it to writers “who turn out books and plays,” but there’s a reason it’s now associated with reporters and editors: their work is animated by gleeful, even joyous, dissatisfaction. This week, we bring you stories about publishers and journalists. Many are about people and institutions from journalism’s ink-stained history: Wolcott Gibbs on Henry Luce (the founder of Time, Inc.); Joan Didion on the history of the Los Angeles Times; David Remnick on Bill Bradlee and Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post; Calvin Trillin’s Profile of the legendary New York Times reporter R. W. Apple. Other stories are about journalism’s tumultuous present: Evan Osnos and Michael Specter write about defiant journalists in China and Russia, respectively. Journalism can be an anxious profession—but, occasionally, a noble one, too. —Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, Archivists

Protect your sources or you will endanger getting the real news: CBC declines to turn over Panama Papers data to CRA News organization's spokesman says policy is to never reveal journalistic sources CBC News Posted: Apr 11, 2016 5:27 PM ET Last Updated: Apr 11, 2016 5:27 PM ET Andrew Treusch, the head of the CRA, wrote to the CBC last week asking for the leaked Panama Papers, which outline tax havens. CBC has refused the request. Related Stories Modigliani masterpiece seized in wake of Panama Papers CRA adds more staff to crack down on tax cheats, Diane Lebouthillier says Panama Papers expose human costs of global tax avoidance David Cameron slams 'hurtful' allegations about family's finances after Panama Papers The Canada Revenue Agency has formally asked the CBC to hand over offshore tax-haven data from the massive Panama Papers leak, but the news organization is refusing. The commissioner of the agency, Andrew Treusch, sent an email on Friday to the president of the CBC asking for the data, saying the agency wants to begin work immediately on reviewing the information. CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson said the corporation rebuffed a similar request from the CRA in 2013 for another massive cache of tax-haven data — and will do so again. SPECIAL REPORT | Modigliani masterpiece seized in wake of Panama Papers "Simply stated, CBC News does not reveal its sources and we're not about to start now as a result of this request," he said. Earlier this year, the Panama Papers were distributed electronically to CBC News and other select news organizations around the world, and stories about the contents began to appear this month. The blockbuster revelations are having serious political repercussions in some countries, while others are looking at ways to stop the wealthy from stashing cash offshore to avoid paying taxes. Co-ordinating distribution The Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is co-ordinating the distribution of the data, and plans to post a subset of the information on a searchable database in early May. Treusch said in his letter he did not want to wait for the ICIJ posting. "As you can appreciate, this information would be of greater value to us if obtained in a timelier manner so that we can begin our work immediately," he wrote. "Please note that we are not asking you to reveal your sources or how you came into possession of the information." 'We are not asking you to reveal your sources.' - Andrew Treusch, CRA commissioner The deputy director of the ICIJ, Marina Walker Guevara, said other tax agencies have approached news organizations in Britain, Italy, Ireland and Latvia, among others, to turn over Panama Papers data, all without success. Tax agencies have also directly approached the ICIJ, which has a long-standing policy to refuse such requests because it "is not an arm of law enforcement and is not an agent of the government." Walker Guevara said the posting of Panama Papers data in early May will be a small slice of the information, allowing anyone to search among 214,000 offshore entities and the people connected to them, including shareholders and directors. But documents, pictures, email addresses, passport numbers and other information touching on privacy will not be posted. CBC President Hubert Lacroix was sent the Panama Papers request from the CRA last Friday. (Left: Nathan Denette/Canadian Press, Right: John Woods/Canadian Press) "We believe that information about who owns an offshore company should be public and transparent," she said in an interview. "So this is going to be a bare bones, searchable database. It's not going to be documents." On Monday, National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier announced more money and more auditors would be put into tracking down offshore money in tax havens.

Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism

Here is an important alert to a shift in journalism attempting to adapt and function in a radically changing world. One were we really need real accurate information to function as a responsible citizen in a democracy. From the New York Times - MEDIA Panama Papers Leak Signals a Shift in Mainstream Journalism Mediator By JIM RUTENBERG APRIL 10, 2016 Bjarni Benediktsson, the minister of finance in Iceland, leaving a meeting in Gardabaer, Iceland. Credit Birgir Por Hardarson/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — Four years passed between The New York Times’s first article based on the Pentagon Papers and the end of the Vietnam War. Two years passed between The Washington Post’s first story establishing Richard M. Nixon’s link to the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. Last week, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland couldn’t make it 48 hours before having to step aside after the disclosure of the shady bank dealings contained in the Panama Papers, some of which involve him. O.K., I know: It’s just Iceland, remote and adorably tiny. Who knew it had a government position higher than forstodumadur Fiskistofa (director of Fisheries)? Kidding, Iceland, kidding! I understand how you’re at the center of something bigger than both your country and mine, and I promise that you won’t be mad at me by the time you’re done reading this. Because while we Americans were transfixed by the latest plot turns in our presidential campaign, you and the rest of the world were living through the biggest corporate data leak in history. It had reverberations not only in Iceland, but in China, Britain, Russia, Argentina and some 50 other countries. But the leak signaled something else that was a big deal but went unheralded: The official WikiLeaks-ization of mainstream journalism; the next step in the tentative merger between the Fourth Estate, with its relatively restrained conventional journalists, and the Fifth Estate, with the push-the-limits ethos of its blogger, hacker and journo-activist cohort, in the era of gargantuan data breaches. Back at the dawn of this new, Big Breach journalism, The Times’s then-executive editor, Bill Keller, wondered aloud in the paper’s Sunday magazine whether “The War Logs,” a huge cache of confidential war records and diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in conjunction with The Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and others, represented “some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency.” He concluded, “I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy, at least not yet.” That was in 2011. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE David Cameron Releases Tax Data After Panama Papers Backlash APRIL 10, 2016 Opinion Patrick Chappatte Chappatte on the Panama Papers APRIL 8, 2016 British Banks Must Disclose Links to Panama Papers Law Firm, Regulator Says APRIL 8, 2016 Before and After the Panama Papers: David Cameron of Britain on Tax Avoidance APRIL 8, 2016 Advertisement Continue reading the main story Five years later, it is safe to say that we are getting much closer. This is changing the course of world history, fast. It is also changing the rules for mainstream journalists in the fierce business of unearthing secrets, and for the government and corporate officials in the fiercer business of keeping them. Any early questions about the effect of WikiLeaks’s trove were answered a few months after Mr. Keller’s article appeared, when WikiLeaks won credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring. It revealed a cable highlighting the opulence and self-dealing of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and his family, enraging his already restive and economically pinched public. His ouster shortly followed. Last year, a federal judge doubted the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records after the program was disclosed in data leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s information also helped set up this year’s standoff between Apple and the Justice Department over iPhone encryption. Now we have the 11.5 million files known as the Panama Papers, based on documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that detail shell companies and tax shelters used by the world’s wealthy and powerful. They are causing political heartburn — and potentially worse — for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, and yes, Iceland. But for everyday mopes who file their taxes by the letter of the law, as opposed to through its loopholes, the biggest shocker was how much tax avoidance contained in the Panama Papers was legal, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept. That is a lit match to the political tinder of the increasingly global view that the game is rigged — something that’s at the heart of the appeals of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump here at home. It’s the stuff journalists live for. But the deep data sets that are making these sorts of revelations possible are presenting new conundrums for reporters and editors more accustomed to banging the phones and interviewing live human beings. This issue initially surfaced in the WikiLeaks “War Logs” collaboration. In their carefully constructed stories with WikiLeaks, The Times, The Guardian and other partners redacted the names of sensitive sources mentioned in the documents. But later, some WikiLeaks-held reports spilled out online with names of sensitive sources, drawing accusations that lives were put at risk. The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and his supporters have noted that no known physical harm came from any of it. But none of this helped the “War Logs” source, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), the Army private who received a 35-year prison sentence on charges of violating the Espionage Act. The sentence was part the United States government’s aggressive attempts to put this Big Breach era to an end. Fat chance. As a group, investigative journalists and their sources operate in grave fear of jail time, but not as much as they fear being cowed out of important stories by the government. Things can be trickier when the data belongs to corporations. Consider the Sony Pictures Entertainment hacking, said to have been perpetrated by North Korea in a bid to scuttle the Sony film spoofing the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. Reporters found some juicy tidbits in executive emails. But they were also, as the Sony lawyer David Boies claimed, unwittingly helping “a nation state using the intrusion to attempt to intimidate and suppress the distribution of a film.” Mr. Boies got only so far in his attempt to convince the news media that they were legally bound to ignore the data, and delete any they had downloaded. But, he told me, the more reporting gets away from serving an obvious public interest, “the more problematic” it becomes to publish information that was acquired illegally. The organizers of the Panama Papers project, at the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said they kept that in mind as they pursued the leads in the database of the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which says the information was hacked. When I visited the consortium’s Washington office on Friday, its director, Gerard Ryle, told me he did not know if the data was hacked. But he pointed me to the writing atop the big white board laying out the Panama Papers’ production schedule: “Is an issue of global concern?” (A: Yes.) Taking some cues from the Sony and WikiLeaks cases, Mr. Ryle said his consortium had been extra careful not to make all of its data public, especially the personal information of nonpublic figures, playing a gatekeeper role. Referring to WikiLeaks, Mr. Ryle said, “We’re trying to reclaim ground that they stole — or, they took,” which mainstream journalism allowed because “we got lazy and sloppy and arrogant about what we were supposed to do: shine light into dark places.” Not everyone is thrilled with this. WikiLeaks wrote in a tweet: “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism.” But that criticism is not universal in Fifth Estate circles. Which brings us back to Iceland. A leader of the opposition Pirate Party there, Parliament Member Birgitta Jonsdottir, was a WikiLeaks volunteer who at times worked intimately with Mr. Assange. She has the United States subpoena for her personal Twitter information to show for it. (The “Game of Thrones” actress Carice van Houten plays her in “The Fifth Estate.”) When I spoke with her last week, she was thrilled with the Panama Papers. “It’s amazing to see,” she said. Ms. Jonsdottir’s party is vying to take control of the government on a platform that includes making Iceland “one place in the world where data could be hosted without danger to whistle-blowers” — a haven for data breach journalism. As they say in Iceland, if that isn’t the raisin at the end of the sausage. Correction: April 10, 2016 An earlier version of a picture caption with this article rendered incorrectly the English spelling of a town in Iceland. It is Gardabaer, not Garoabaer. A version of this article appears in (In the New York Times) print on April 11, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Data Breaches Change the Rules. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe