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

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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

A Pat on the Back for Good Journalism

CBC journalists net 18 CAJ award nominations 'Canadian journalists still produce plenty of amazing, important and impactful journalism,' CAJ says CBC News Posted: Apr 07, 2016 1:29 PM ET Last Updated: Apr 07, 2016 1:29 PM ET The Canadian Association of Journalists has released the list of finalists for its annual investigative journalism awards, and there are a number of CBC nominees among them. The public broadcaster netted 18 nominations in a broad range of categories, alongside media colleagues at the Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post, CTV, Maclean's, Postmedia, BuzzFeed, the Toronto Star, Global, APTN, the Canadian Press, the Georgia Strait and others. "Congratulations to all our finalists," the CAJ said in a statement. "Your work has been outstanding, inspiring and a reminder of how, despite the unending fiscal challenges facing our industry, Canadian journalists still produce plenty of amazing, important and impactful journalism." CBC has secured nominations in the following categories: Open media CBCNews.ca: Nahlah Ayed, Tracy Seeley and Richard Devey for Refugee crisis: Walking across a continent. CBC News: Harvey Cashore, Frederic Zalac, Dave Seglins and Alexandra Byers for KPMG: The Isle of Sham. Open broadcast feature The Fifth Estate and the Globe and Mail: Harvey Cashore, Terence McKenna, Joseph Loiero, Alexandra Byers, Zach Dubinsky, Chelsea Gomez, Nicole Reinert and Greg McArthur for The Mob and Michael DeGroote. The National: Kelly Crowe and Marcy Cuttler for A price to pay. The Sunday Edition, CBC Radio One: Karin Wells for In the presence of a spoon. Open broadcast news Marketplace: Tiffany Foxcroft, Tyana Grundig and Erica Johnson for Coffee Cups. CBC News Nova Scotia: Angela McIvor for Crisis in Rape Funding. The National: Adrienne Arsenault and Nazim Baksh for Canadian Jihadis. CBC News Toronto: Heather Evans, John Lancaster and Sarah Bridge for Border Investigation. Community broadcast CBC News Edmonton: Jennie Russell and Charles Rusnell for Smoked out. CBC News Vancouver: Natalie Clancy for Real estate seminars exposed. Data journalism CBC News Investigative Unit/The National: Diana Swain, Timothy Sawa and Lori Ward for Campus sexual assaults: The fight to get the real picture. Online media CBCNews.ca: Susana Mas for Temporary foreign workers favoured under express entry. CBC News: Cate Friesen, Cecil Rosner, Connie Walker, Duncan McCue, Tiar Wilson, Kimberly Ivany, Martha Troian, Chantelle Bellrichard, Joanne Levasseur, Teghan Beaudette, Kristy Hoffman, Donna Lee, Tara Lindemann, William Wolfe-Wylie, Richard Grasley, Michael Leschart, Michael Pereira for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Daily Excellence The World This Weekend, CBC Radio One: Margaret Evans for Paris Mourns. Human rights reporting The Fifth Estate: Tamar Weinstein, Lynette Fortune, Mark Kelley and Liz Rosch for Too young to lose. The National: Nahlah Ayed and Tracy Seeley for Inside India's gender revolution. Labour reporting The National: Nick Purdon and Leonardo Palleja for Up close: Prison guards. The Canadian Association of Journalists is a professional organization with more than 600 members across Canada that focuses on public interest advocacy and professional development. The CAJ award winners will be announced at a gala in Edmonton on May 28 and will receive $500 cash prizes for most categories.

Learn to be a Journalist Kit

Spotlight

“Spotlight” is “the year’s least relaxing film,” according to Anthony Lane. The movie about the investigation into the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal has been nominated for a best picture Golden Globe. The Saddest Scoop in Boston “Spotlight” is a commanding portrait of how a team of journalists uncovered a scandal in the Catholic Church. NYER.CM|BY ANTHONY LANE

Why do so many Americans believe Donald Trump's “Muslims Cheering 9/11” lie?

 / CORY DOCTOROW / 12:12 AM TUE DEC 1, 2015 Why do so many Americans believe Donald Trump's “Muslims Cheering 9/11” lie?  Matt Taibbi, in typical blazing form in the Rolling Stone, asks how it can be that millions of Americans believe Donald Trump's fairy-tale about Muslims cheering after 9/11 when it just didn't happen. There are many related questions, like how can so many people believe the (ahem) trumped-up stories about Planned Parenthood selling baby-parts, or the nonsense about how "92 percent of the jobs lost under Obama belonged to women." Taibbi says that investor-driven media, which no longer even plays lip-service to the idea of informing the public, is partly to blame -- but so is the public for demanding it. Though I will read Taibbi all day long, I don't entirely agree with his point here. There's a lot to be angry at in today's media landscape, but I don't know that it's uniquely sensationalistic or that the public is uniquely badly informed. There have been long stretches in US history when newspapers were nakedly partisan (in Canada, there's still a newspaper called the Whig Standard, and in the UK, one major daily's name trumpets the fact that it isn't affiliated with a party, because this is still noteworthy in the age of the "Torygraph"). For centuries, the media have served to sell colonialism, racism, and sexism, from their editorial pages and from their investigative columns. But the new bad news isn't exactly the same as the old bad news, and it is worrisome, and it makes us worse, and so I'm thankful to Taibbi for writing about it: What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier. When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping. And who shops for products he or she doesn't want? That's why the consumer news business was always destined to hit this kind of impasse. You can get by for a long time by carefully selecting the facts you know your audiences will like, and calling that news. But eventually there will be a truth that displeases your customers. What do you do then? America Is Too Dumb for TV News [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone] (via Kottke)

Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have

Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have 15,3048 Jordan Sargent Filed to: ELECTION 201611/20/15 1:10pm Journalists: Send Us the Most Useless Opposition Research You Have In the course of a political campaign, reporters will often be leaked what is called opposition research—dirt, or potential dirt, compiled by campaign staffs (or affiliated nonprofits) to use against their opponents. Oppo research can be useful to journalists. Maybe a campaign has uncovered the existence of a rumor too salacious for the candidate herself to touch, leaving its secret dissemination to a reporter as their only recourse. Well, we don’t want that stuff. (Okay, we do, but not for this. Please email tips@gawker.com with your good oppo research.) What we want is the other stuff. The frequently useless, absurd, and pathetic oppo research that campaigns desperately leak in their lowest moments. You know, something like “Jeb Bush dropped some gravy on the floor of a VFW in Iowa and DIDN’T clean it up.” If you are a campaign reporter who has been fed oppo research so dumb that all you can do is laugh about it over drinks at a musty New Hampshire Marriott, we want to publish it. Nothing is too stupid! You can email me at jordan@gawker.com. We will keep you anonymous. [image of The Insider via YouTube] Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com. 8250Reply Jordan Sargent’s Discussions All replies cuntybaws Jordan Sargent 11/20/15 1:22pm In all seriousness, and with no offense intended, I feel this kind of thing should be done by the politically connected Gawker guys in dive bars and pool halls, rather than asking us. If you’re serious about a new political slant and want to give the (accurate) impression you’re well connected, and all ... 81 Reply17 replies rvbee cuntybaws 11/20/15 1:41pm “pool halls” lol 12 Reply cuntybaws rvbee 11/20/15 1:42pm I was going to suggest a speakeasy but thought that might be over-egging the pudding.

John Stackhouse, former Globe and Mail editor, on mass digital disruption 'Is serious journalism still possible?' asks Stackhouse in his new book By The Early Edition, CBC News Posted: Nov 09, 2015 7:00 PM PT Last Updated: Nov 09, 2015 7:00 PM PT (The Lavin Agency) Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse talks about news in digital era 7:13 Newspapers in the digital age Newspapers in the digital age 10:13 John Stackhouse: Canada needs traditional media in digital era Can Adele save the music industry, or just slow its demise? Disney invests $200M in Vice as it launches new TV channel Why Canadians are spending more on wireless and internet services Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse probes the future of serious journalism in the digital era in his new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution. He sat down with CBC's Stephen Quinn on The Early Edition to talk about how newspapers can survive in a world where smartphones rule. When you took over at the Globe in 2009, the Apple 3GS had just come out. Why do you think news leaders failed to see what was coming? I don't think it was just in the news business. We all knew the smartphone was incredibly popular and powerful, but no sector I think knew how pervasive it was going to become and how we live today with it attached to us and how it dominates our lives. Was it denial? As often happens with technology, you see it coming and you think it is a small wave, and you don't realize it is a tidal wave that is going to splash over you. We spend six hours a day on digital media, half of that's on our phone — three hours a day on our phones. That is a gross underestimate. I came across a new study in the U.S. from a consulting firm Activate, that estimates we spend 11 hours on media, on our phones. That includes e-mail, twitter, chat. The human life has changed profoundly in a decade because of the phone. We all know what that has done to newspapers financially. What has it done to the essence of what newspapers are? Newspaper used to bring communities together. I am not nostalgic for that. I look at the great power that had in society — and not always good — but we organized ourselves as communities and as a country around, to some degree, around newspapers and what they published. We as readers organized our day around the daily newspaper and evening newscast and that is long gone.Now we are getting more information — that's good — and sharing more information — that's good too — but not doing it in a very organized fashion. We've been sort of shattered into millions of atoms, as the news out there is. The influence of that on democracy is significant and something we need to come to grips with. I logged onto Facebook this morning. Someone had put up a video of a dog chasing its owner with a hose, spraying water on the owner. You will likely see that, if it's new, on television news at some point today. The funnies have always been part of the media, even the great serious newspapers of 50 years ago had the funny pages. When I was delivering papers as a kid — 40, 45 years ago — I often found the best way to get people to pay their bills was to withhold the comics or TV guide. That got their attention. Even then, it was apparent what drove interests; popular and profound were always a good mix in media. What we have lost is the ability to ensure that the profound — what is important in our society — is as prevalent as presumably a great video of the dog you saw. Where is the place for serious journalism? How come New York Times, Guardian can pull it off online, but others do not do as well? We are seeing an emergence of global news power houses. Where the great challenge and crisis is, is at the local level. How do local news media ensure their viability? Advertisers have to come to the table and figure out how they can contribute more to what media are doing. Journalists have to come to grips with the economic model. Owners of local and national media have to understand this is going to be a 10-year project to get this right. Is local media not in a unique position? One of the great challenges is to get people to pay for it. I am a strong advocate for a free and publicly-funded CBC, but there needs to be locally privately-owned media, that people will pay for. Publishers and editors need to make it compelling enough to go out to readers to say you have to pay a buck a week, or whatever it is, to start to put some money on the table for this thing we call journalism You suggest in the book, that the disruption is not over. What happens when the iPhone 7 comes out? The great challenge of disruption is it's never over. This is the forever war. Media, journalists, owners, advertisers are going to continue to have to reinvent what they are doing, year after year, season after season. Somehow newspapers will find a business model that allows them to survive? The great news is that serious news has never been so popular, despite all the videos we are seeing. When important things happen — we saw this in the last federal election — people are consuming serious news from what we would agree are serious outlets. That to me is very encouraging that there is huge demand out there. We just have to get the pricing right. This interview was condensed and edited. To hear the full interview, click the audio labelled: Former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse talks about news in digital era

Confessions of a Paywall Journalist

Features-From the Washington Weekly November/December 2015 Confessions of a Paywall Journalist Thanks to a booming trade press, lobbyists and other insiders know what’s happening in government. The rest of the country, not so much. By John Heltman Back in 2009, I had a job with a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter called Water Policy Report. It wasn’t exactly a household name, but I was covering Congress, the federal courts, and the Environmental Protection Agency—a definite step up from the greased-pig-catching contests and crime-blotter stories I had chased at a community newspaper on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my first job out of college. One of my responsibilities at the newsletter was to check the Federal Register—the official portal that government agencies use to inform the public about regulatory actions. In December of that year I noticed an item that said that the Environmental Protection Agency had decided that existing pollution controls for offshore oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico were adequate, and that there wasn’t enough pollution coming from those platforms to warrant further review or action. Curious about that finding, I called Richard Charter, an environmentalist, oil-drilling expert, and senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation to ask him what he thought. Charter told me that the use of a general permit to cover discharges over a broad area like the Gulf of Mexico is ridiculous, and, more specifically, that there were ways in which the EPA went about reissuing the old permit that might not be totally legal under the National Environmental Policy Act. But the more important issue, Charter said, was the hopeless inadequacy of the government’s oversight of offshore oil drilling. Federal oversight agencies had been documenting shortcomings and conflicts of interest at the Minerals Management Service for years, he said, and in 2003 the House Energy and Commerce Committee heard testimony outlining the ways in which response agencies and drilling companies were unprepared to handle a blowout if it got out of hand. The dangers were not hypothetical, Charter said. The Montara blowout in Western Australia had just that August spilled more than one million gallons of oil into the Timor Sea and took seventy-four days to cap. Closer to home, if not in more recent memory, was the Ixtoc blowout in 1979, which spilled more than three million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico and took almost a year to cap. I thanked Charter for his time and wrote my story about the EPA permit, ignoring the broader issue of oil platforms or their environmental risks. Five months later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded forty miles off the coast of Louisiana, killing eleven people and setting off the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. By any measure, Deepwater Horizon was the most important environmental catastrophe of the decade, and it illustrated deep and profound shortcomings in the U.S. regulatory approach to offshore drilling. And when it happened, I knew that I had been handed a credible lead and had blown it. But I couldn’t have followed that lead even if I had wanted to. Offshore drilling safety was tangential, at best, to the core issues covered by the newsletter I was writing for. The law firms and companies that subscribed to us paid thousands of dollars each for a subscription, and they paid that much because we helped them stay abreast of every bit of policy minutia that came out of the government in order to identify threats to their existing investments and potential new investments, or to keep their current clients informed and attract new clients. They paid for the story I wrote, not the story I missed. On some level, I thought that if what Charter was telling me was that big a deal, it would already have been reported in the New York Times, or on 60 Minutes, or—more likely—in one of the regional newspapers like the Houston Chronicle or the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which report on areas where offshore oil drilling is a big part of the local economy and readers have a keener-than-average interest in the possibility of catastrophic oil accidents. I probably would have been right had it been twenty years earlier. But by 2009, newspapers in general, and the big regional papers especially, were in the midst of a colossal wave of downsizing brought about by the collapse of their business model. With internet outlets like Craigslist siphoning away their classified ads, newspapers could no longer afford to subsidize their large D.C. bureaus, with teams of reporters covering Congress and the agencies and writing stories about the intersection of government policy and issues important to their readers back home. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, the number of newspapers with bureaus in Washington fell by more than half from the mid-1980s to 2008. The number of newspaper reporters accredited to cover Congress fell by 30 percent between 1997 and 2009. The Center is currently working on research to update those numbers. Political reporting, however, has not declined at all—quite the contrary. Campaigns, scandals, and fights within and between the parties are covered today with an alacrity that borders on obsession. Growing partisanship and divided government have made the stakes of each day’s political news seem immense, as anyone can see by watching the endless flow of scooplets from Politico and Talking Points Memo, or who watch hour after hour of commentary on FOX News or MSNBC. But while political news is everywhere, coverage of the day-to-day inner workings of government—the slow, steady development of policy in Congress, in the administration, and in the independent regulatory agencies, and how those policies are implemented—has become increasingly scarce in the media that average citizens historically have relied upon. The opposite, however, is true of the “paywall press”—that is, high-subscription, insider-oriented news organizations like the one I worked for in 2009 and the ones I have worked for since. This sector of the Fourth Estate is booming, and its coverage of government has never been more robust. Trade outlets are steadily adding to their staffs in Washington. New entrants like Bloomberg Government and Politico Pro are experimenting with newer and faster ways to get their coverage to consumers. Long-standing trade publications are merging or being bought up for unbelievable prices. The audiences for these publications are lobbyists, corporate executives, Hill staffers, Wall Street traders, think tank researchers, contractors, regulators, advocacy group and trade association policy wonks, and other insiders who have a professional interest in up-to-the-second news on the policy issues and whose institutions can afford subscription prices that run thousands of dollars per year. That’s not to say that trade journalists are shills for corporate interests. They are typically smart, energetic professionals with the same ethical standards and passion for digging as their mainstream colleagues. Indeed, with the mainstream press’s shrinking attention to government, trade reporters are often the only ones regularly covering important federal beats. But because of the nature of its business model, the trade press encourages its reporters to pursue the stories its elite readers most want, not necessarily the stories the public most needs—as I saw in my own experience covering offshore drilling. The rise of the paywall press and the decline of mainstream media coverage of government aren’t causally connected. But the two trends coincide with a palpable populist outrage, in which average Americans are suspicious of how their tax dollars are being spent and observe Washington insiders operate at ever-greater levels of power and secrecy. The irony is that policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it. A Senate gallery reporting credential is the gateway to reporting in Washington. Officially, a Senate press pass allows reporters to wander unaccompanied throughout the Capitol complex. Unofficially, it serves as an official press credential at conferences, agencies, and events around town. It is the solid-gold bona fide that separates the bearer from the public. In pursuing this story, I analyzed the Congressional Directory from the 101st Congress (1989-1991) through the 113th Congress (2013-2015), counted how many reporters were listed in each bureau, and categorized each bureau as either a newspaper, newswire, trade publication, foreign bureau, or online publication. What I found was that there are roughly the same number of accredited reporters in Washington today as there were twenty-five years ago, but that more of them are working for trade publications and fewer are working for newspapers and newswires. The division between the Senate’s two press galleries—the Senate Daily Press Gallery, traditionally home only to daily newspapers, and the Senate Periodical Press Gallery, traditionally home to everything else, especially the trade press—has also been breaking down. More trade publications are sprouting up in the Daily Gallery, while trades in the Periodical Gallery are consolidating into fewer publications with larger staffs. While that consolidation is most pronounced among the trades, it is true among all publications in both Galleries—the number of outlets in the Daily Gallery shrank by roughly a fifth (411 in 2013 versus 515 in 1989) and the number of outlets in the Periodical Gallery shrank by roughly a third (224 total outlets in 1989 compared to 160 in 2013). These numbers don’t tell the entire story, however. Trade publications and outlets have increasingly been targeted for high-dollar acquisitions and expansions, while mainstream news outlets are being bought out of pity and for fractions of what they used to be worth. One of the highest-profile acquisitions came in 2011 when Bloomberg—already a behemoth in the business intelligence sphere—bought longtime employee-owned trade outlet the Bureau of National Affairs. BNA, as it is known, went for $990 million. More recently, McGraw Hill Financial—which owns Platts, an energy trade outlet that has been active in Washington for decades—announced its bid to buy SNL Financial, a financial and business intelligence trade outlet that has in recent years expanded its footprint in energy and climate reporting. McGraw Hill agreed to buy SNL for $2.23 billion in cash. Contrast that with the recent sales and acquisitions of more household names in journalism. The Washington Post was sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million. The Boston Globe sold in 2013 for $70 million. The international education firm Pearson sold its 50 percent stake in the Economist for $731 million, valuing the 172-year-old institution at around $1.4 billion. Even the New York Times’s market capitalization is about $2 billion. This demonstrates that the market is convinced of the business case for trade journalism and its potential for growth, and that it is not similarly assured of the future of newspapers. Trade reporting has been in Washington almost as long as professional reporters have. The first reporters to cover Congress in the new capital city in the early 1800s were mostly working for local D.C. publications, but by the 1820s newspapers around the nation began sending dedicated correspondents to cover the federal government. Many of those early reporters also moonlighted for foreign newspapers and sent specialized dispatches to Boston shipping interests and southern planters who were eager to learn more about the national tariff for business reasons because the existing coverage was inadequate, acting as a kind of first-generation trade press. There were also specialized trade publications in the nineteenth century, including American Banker (where I now work), which was founded in 1835, and the Journal of Commerce, which ran its own ad hoc postal service to get news to Washington in the 1830s. But the scene really grew as government programs and spending exploded after World War II. The demand for specialized coverage over a variety of new topics—environmental policy, health care, defense, education, transportation, and more—drove the steady growth of the trade press, which gradually came to take over the Senate Periodical Gallery. “For years it was five or six newsmagazines that dominated that room,” the retired Senate historian Don Ritchie said. “All of a sudden it became dozens of trade publications.” For much of the twentieth century, trade publications worked alongside newspapers with Washington bureaus, the latter providing coverage of federal agencies and congressional committees that affected whatever local industries might be prevalent in each paper’s city or state—energy and shipping issues in New Orleans, for example, agricultural issues in Iowa, mining concerns in Nevada, the space program in Houston, and so on. Indeed, one of the most successful trade publications, Congressional Quarterly (known today as CQ Roll Call after merging with that highly profitable insider newspaper), was founded in 1945 by the owners of the St. Petersburg Times as a way for reporters from local papers in D.C. to keep track of the complex goings-on of Congress. But in the late twentieth century, just as newspapers were beginning to lose their foothold, the trades were entering into a new era of ascendance and consolidation. One of the big reasons for the trade paper explosion is the massive increase in lobbying over the past few decades. In 1975, according to David C. Johnston’s book Free Lunch, Washington lobbyists together made less than $100 million a year in fees. Thirty years later, they were raking in $2.5 billion, a growth rate ten times faster than the economy as a whole. Opensecrets.org, a website operated by the Center for Responsive Politics that tracks lobbying spending, estimated the size of the lobbying market at $3.24 billion last year, and that’s not counting the money many of the largest industry trade groups spent on advertising and public relations consultation. It’s not just lobbyists who are willing to pay for that insider info. The amount of money spent on federal contracting more than doubled in less than a decade, from $206 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $537 billion in 2011. Another big customer base—one more squarely in the targets of populist outrage—is Wall Street trading. The sector’s growth in the 1990s and 2000s meant that there was a considerably bigger pool of potential readers willing to pay for reporting on the latest information on, say, regulatory filings by the Federal Communications Commission—intelligence that might enable them to make smarter trades on communication company stocks. At the same time, the amount of primary information available online has exploded. The Federal Register, Congressional Record, all bills offered in Congress, and every proposed rule and comment are available online. Almost all congressional hearings are live-streamed on the committee websites, on CSPAN, or on both. Even press conferences with the White House and the State Department are available online. Everyday Americans might not know or care to look this stuff up, but for trade reporters—or all reporters, for that matter—the pool of source material from which stories can be drawn has broadened and deepened immensely. With an almost unlimited amount of source material to draw on, a rapidly growing set of potential elite readers, and fewer competitors in the form of newspapers and newswires, it’s no surprise that the paywall press would blow up while newspapers faltered. “It’s just simple economics, it makes total sense,” says Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School. As demand for well-reported insider news has grown, new players have entered the market. One is Bloomberg Government, a subsidiary of Bloomberg LP, the media giant founded by Michael Bloomberg and best known for providing market data to Wall Street traders via proprietary terminals. Bloomberg Government, or BGOV, was established in 2011 to provide subscribers—lobbyists, contractors, and investors—with the kind of fine-grained data and analytics about government that Bloomberg’s other operations provide about companies and markets. The company also has free web products, like Bloomberg News and Bloomberg/Businessweek, with reporters in D.C. All told, Bloomberg has increased its news operations from seven correspondents in 1991—when it first applied for accreditation in the Senate Daily Press Gallery—to 193 in 2013, not including the additional 185 employees of Bloomberg BNA. The same year, 2011, that Bloomberg entered the D.C. trade market with BGOV, another new player emerged: Politico Pro. The subscription-only arm of the upstart political news outlet Politico, Politico Pro has grown to twelve separate verticals—including technology, agriculture, and energy—and to eighty-one dedicated reporters and editors in just under five years. Each vertical offers three kinds of products: a morning news tip sheet modeled after the Politico reporter Mike Allen’s hugely popular Playbook; short and quick dispatches of news throughout the day, called “Whiteboards”; and occasional lengthier, more in-depth pieces. Politico Pro has quickly become a major source of revenue for the company, which projected in a 2013 memo that subscriptions would account for nearly half of the company’s revenue by 2016. What Bloomberg and Politico have facilitated, to a large degree, is the efficient delivery of targeted news, and have sold that efficiency for a premium. But the news itself—and this is true of the majority of trade reporting, regardless of venue—would not excite the average reader. It is, in a word, boring. The stories tend to be about modest turns of the screws of government that would be of interest only to specialized audiences: a subcommittee chairman’s announcement of an upcoming vote on a tax provision affecting depreciation schedules for paper mill equipment; what a proposed tweak in an EPA regulation might mean for asphalt futures. The former Washington Post reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum, who now heads the public relations division of the lobbying firm BRG Group, is an avid reader of Politico Pro. He describes its coverage as “not just inside baseball, but inside the baseball.” A viable and growing market for such minutia exists because trade advocates and lobbyists are expected to know everything—and I mean everything—that is going on in Washington that affects their world. Several sources I spoke with admitted that they read Politico Pro’s morning updates before they get out of bed in the morning (I am also guilty of this). “These lobbyists live in constant fear of being caught flat-footed not knowing something,” said one editor at Politico Pro, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “They want to know before everyone else. They need to know before their morning call with their client.” By sheer numbers, this is the growth sector in Washington coverage today—hyper-granular coverage consumed mostly by business interests and their handlers. But the trade press also breaks news stories of broader importance before the mainstream press. In 2011, American Banker published a leaked copy of the Volcker Rule, a controversial provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that bars banks from making trades simply to benefit the bank, rather than its customers. Other mainstream outlets jumped on the story and passed on the leaked document, with varying levels of attribution (some didn’t cite at all, others cited the origin of the leak in the bottom of their stories). In November 2009, Stephen Colbert did a bit on his news-comedy show about business lobbies pushing back against rules barring child labor, citing as his source a story from Inside U.S. Trade, an international trade-focused newsletter published by Inside Washington Publishers (parent of my former publication, Water Policy Report). Last December the nationally syndicated public radio show This American Life did a segment about a company cutting its CEO’s pay that was based on a story published by the investment trade newsletter Institutional Investor. Trades are not entirely passive in their ability to reach a more mainstream audience. Most have public-facing websites they can use to publicize stories that originate with their subscription services that are broadly newsworthy or enterprising. For instance, the Politico Pro reporter Jon Prior reported a story on Politico’s main site in September outlining how some of the nation’s largest banks and mortgage lenders are continuing to accept payments for mortgages that they later filed for foreclosure—violating the terms of a $25 billion settlement with the Justice Department—and getting away with it because of lax government oversight. Unfortunately, some of the best trade reporting is never seen by the public. In 2013, for instance, Bloomberg Government published an astute analysis of an emerging conservative legal argument against the Affordable Care Act, months before the mainstream press took note. The story predicted that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court. But because the analysis stayed behind the BGOV paywall, it never became part of the broader Washington conversation about Obamacare, and public advocates of the law were unprepared when the case was, in fact, taken up by the Court. Ironically, as the trade press has gotten bigger and better resourced, its inclination to do longer, deeper enterprise journalism appears to be declining. That’s largely because readers of paywall journalism—like readers everywhere—are being deluged with news. “The information overload is very difficult to cope with,” says a K Street lobbyist who subscribes to dozens of trade and mainstream publications. “It used to be you’d get your information periodically, from Newsweek, etc. Now it’s instantaneous, a rush.” To help their customers cope, trade outlets are delivering their products in shorter and shorter form. When BGOV first came on the scene, it was putting out long, data-rich reports on key policy issues. But when internal metrics showed that most customers weren’t reading the longer stories, says one former BGOV editor, the reports were reduced in size to six pages, then to one, with a couple of charts and a paragraph or two of text. Not all readers were pleased with the slimming down. “I actually used to like Bloomberg Government,” says a D.C.-based reporter for a mainstream magazine that subscribes to the service. “They had teams of quants writing plain-English white papers about issues.” But in general, concedes the former BGOV editor, the shorter-form content is “what the market wants.” The same market pressures are being felt elsewhere. An editor at Politico Pro reports that the longer-enterprise pieces he and his team produce (and are most proud of) are the least read, while the shortest products, like the morning news summaries, are far more popular. In a concession to the market demand, National Journal, the insider publication founded in 1969 that is now part of the Atlantic Media Group, announced in July that it is ending its much-admired long-form print publication and moving editorial staff and resources to its “higher velocity” digital publications. But it has also promised to bring greater analytic depth to its digital offerings. “People are fearful of missing out, so they do want the nuggets,” copresident and publisher Poppy MacDonald told me, but they are also “looking for somebody to really put some context around it and help them understand that fire hose of information.” The pressure of competition has also led paywall outlets to create business lines that serve almost as consultancies to their corporate and lobbyist customers. National Journal, for instance, earns much of its revenue from “membership” services that include specially produced D.C. reporting tailored to the needs of an individual corporation, trade association, or lobbying firm. “Break down the latest developments on the Hill for your C-suite and Board—and demonstrate your D.C. team’s ROI,” reads the Membership Services page on National Journal’s website under the heading “Corporate Government Relations Teams.” Similarly, Bloomberg Government sales reps have been hawking new data analytics designed to help lobbying firms expand their business—showing, for example, which competing lobbying shops have recently lost which corporate contracts. National Journal, Politico, and other trade outlets, along with many mainstream publications like the Washington Post, also do a lucrative business in sponsored conferences, where lobbyists and corporate clients pay big money to rub elbows with government policymakers and their staffs. Even with all its eyebrow-raising revenue schemes, an ascendant trade press is preferable to the only probable alternative, which is no press coverage at all (an increasingly common situation in many state capitals). And from my own experience and interviews I did for this story, I can say with confidence that trade press reporters are not brainwashed by the industries they cover or blind to the public responsibilities they have to find the truth and report it. No one I spoke to thought that a trade reporter held a distinct disadvantage over any other mainstream reporter to run down a great story and to have it make its way into the public consciousness. But the fact remains that on a day-to-day basis more and more information is flowing to Washington’s elite while less trickles out to the American public. And while trades vie zealously for a larger slice of that Washington Insider market, publications that appeal to a wider audience are either struggling to keep their lights on or leaving traditional reporting about government behind altogether. I don’t want to be overly sentimental about the demise of newspapers, but they did at least make an effort to inform the public about the goings-on within public institutions. Through an accident of history, there was a unique period in the twentieth century when advertisers subsidized news gathering by D.C.-based reporters, who in turn gave readers back home information and insight about what their congressional delegations were doing—good and bad—and how federal policies were affecting the issues and industries most important to them. Advertising—formerly the cornerstone of news funding—hasn’t gone away, of course, and it still pays for much of the mainstream coverage of government that exists. But it doesn’t buy what it used to, so mainstream newspapers and magazines are trying to rework their business models to stay afloat. The Wall Street Journal was among the first to put up a paywall for its stories on the web, and the New York Times reportedly now earns about half of its revenues through paid digital subscriptions, while still allowing free access to twenty stories per month. Other outlets like Slate are toying with so-called “freemium” models, where paid subscribers have access to certain content that nonsubscribers do not. And many publications have begun to bring in significant revenues via advertorials and other “sponsored content.” Reporting about government hasn’t entirely disappeared from the mainstream press, either. Big national papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still do a decent, and occasionally excellent, job. Some newer digital publications have also stepped in to fill part of the reporting void. BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Slate, and Salon all have Senate Press Gallery credentials. And thanks to the internet, this reporting is available to anyone anywhere in the country or the world. But journalists at big national papers and newer digital sites tend to write for national audiences. What has not emerged is a class of news outlets that customize their coverage to the needs and interests of local readers the way the old bureau system used to. Gathering news costs money, and that money has to come from somewhere. If there is sufficient demand for information, someone will gather it, as the rise of the trade press has demonstrated. The problem is that despite the struggle and innovation that has been taking place in the news media since the internet disrupted its business model, no one has come up with a profitable way to provide information about government to average Americans in ways they care about. That vacuum provides an opening for outlets that peddle in the kind of bias, treachery, and quackery that we have always been afraid of. Conspiracy theory blogs, pseudoscience sites, white supremacy forums, and all manner of senseless bullshit are trading at face value because, for many, there’s no credible alternative. I don’t mean to overstate my case— deepening ideological rifts in America are not the fault of declining newspaper revenues. But misleading or conspiratorial ideas about government activities can spread more easily when the public lacks credible information to counter it. And instead of solving that problem, the market is directing more and more journalistic resources and talent toward figuring out how to keep insiders better informed and at a greater convenience. Columbia’s Nicholas Lemann suggests that with for-profit solutions failing to materialize, some nonprofit media—ProPublica, the Washington Monthly—and semipublic news outlets like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System have gone part of the way toward filling that informational gap. But he proposes a more aggressive, if unpopular solution: directly subsidizing news gathering with government funds. Lemann cites a 2009 Columbia Journalism School report by the former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and the Columbia Journalism School professor Michael Schudson that laid out the case for how a government-subsidized news enterprise could work. News outlets—either established newspapers or startups or blogs—could compete for government contracts to provide local news for a specified period of time, much the way arts funding is distributed. But the journalism profession and the public would almost never accept that kind of arrangement, Lemann said. “American journalists are so libertarian, that what I just proposed is considered insane. A research university gets a third of its funding from the U.S. government to conduct scientific research. According to the theory of my fellow journalists, that shouldn’t work. But it works pretty damn well.” Richard Charter, the environmentalist who tipped me off to the lax regulations in offshore drilling just before Deepwater Horizon, said that for all the attention that disaster received, he feels that the public is no more protected from the risk of a well blowout today than they were when we first spoke in 2009. The Minerals Management Service was disbanded in 2011 and its duties split between two new agencies. A handful of safety rules, based on voluntary best practices already observed within the industry, were adopted. But the public seems to have moved on. “Information is power, and how that information is framed and how that is transmitted—but more importantly, how that information is gathered and organized by the media—that chain of events influences public policy,” Charter said. “If public policy fails—and I consider the Deepwater Horizon blowout to be an obvious failure of public policy—then the consequences can be very great.” I told him I still felt a little guilty about not following up on his lead back then, and I wanted him to let me off the hook. “Deepwater Horizon is not your fault,” he said. “There was not really a place for it in your publication.” John Heltman is a reporter for American Banker. print4 Comm