From the University of Colorado’s Digital Media Ethics Symposium, March 14-15, 2014
Keynote Address by Steve Buttry
Steve Buttry is the Lamar Visiting Scholar at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. At the time of his address, he was digital transformation editor for Digital First Media, which operates about 800 multi-platform media products nationally (including in Colorado). He is a prominent consultant in digital journalism and author of the blog The Buttry Diary.
Thank you, and it is a pleasure to be here. Before I start, I should note that I’ll be posting this address and my slides on my blog as well as on Slide Share, if that’s helpful to anyone. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to my Digital First Media colleague Toni Momberger, who was Digital First’s 2013 Journalist of the Year. She’s a proud University of Colorado alum, and I hear her son goes to Colorado. She is editor of the Redlands Daily Facts in California. We’re really proud of her and the work that she’s done for us.
Journalists who wish life were simple like to say that ethical standards shouldn’t change over time. They seem to want ethics to be a rock we can cling to in difficult times. Our business is changing, and the job market is changing, and expectations of journalists and the public are changing. Can we at least anchor ourselves to these timeless ethical principles? Well, yes — but no. My view is that we uphold these timeless journalism ethics only by updating and upgrading them. Technology and changing markets present new situations where journalists face ethical choices, and we need to update our advice to apply to those new situations and those circumstances. At the same time, some unethical practices have undermined our cherished principles, and we need to strengthen our guidance for journalists if we want to uphold our values. We cannot let loyalty to long-held principles keep us from following the wise voices calling us to do better.
Our sense of what is right and wrong changes in other aspects of life—why would we expect journalism to be insulated from how life changes? Rocker and provocateur Ted Nugent recently sort of apologized for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel.” Even to politicians who would overlook Nugent’s previous outbreaks, this one went too far. But Nugent’s vile characterization of our biracial president used to be not only a mainstream view in white America—it was the constitutional view. The U.S. Constitution actually quantified people with President Obama’s heritage as subhuman—exactly three-fifths of a human being.
Many people here, including me, honor the authors of that document as our founding fathers and revere the Constitution itself as perhaps the greatest document in the history of human governments. But our sense of ethics, our sense of right and wrong, today is outraged that someone would refer to a person of a different race as subhuman. If the sacred U.S. Constitution needs to be updated to reflect changes in how people think, and how people believe and live, then I don’t think it’s too outrageous to expect and demand that we update the principles that guide journalism.
A document even older than the Constitution is the Hippocratic Oath, the first ethics code for the medical profession. Doctors taking that oath have sworn not to cause abortions. But some doctors today specialize in performing abortions. Many people today think that that prohibition for doctors was right and should be continued today, but do you know what else doctors swore to in the Hippocratic Oath? They swore not to practice surgery. They swore to practice medicine without fee or covenant. I’m betting most of the faculty members of the medical schools of the universities represented here today get a better salary than most if not all of us gathered here today.
Just as our Constitution needed to evolve, and ethics of the medical profession were updated to reflect our changing world, journalism ethics needs to update too. For better or for worse, we’ve changed. Laws and codes of practice and public attitudes in many areas of society have changed: about who can marry, about whether we can help the terminally ill hasten their deaths, about what’s acceptable to show on television or movies. A certain Tweet about our symposium seems to be referring to the fact that we’re meeting in a state that reflects how the nation’s thinking about recreational use of marijuana has changed. I don’t know about about the rest of you, but I’m here to pledge that I don’t plan to violate any state laws on my visit to Colorado. I think we’ve achieved consensus on some of the issues I mentioned—slavery, paying med school professors. Others, such as abortion and marijuana, remain hotly contentious. Law and ethics and morality are not the same thing, though all are efforts to guide our behavior and shape our views of what is right and wrong.
With that context, let’s shift our focus to journalism. I want to discuss briefly some of the areas where values remain rock-solid today, like the Constitution’s First Amendment or the doctors’ credo to first do no harm (which by the way isn’t in the Hippocratic Oath). I want to discuss at greater length some of the areas where we need to reconsider our ethical standards and guidance because of changes in technology, changes in the marketplace, or because of challenges from wise voices such as Jay Rosen, whom we heard this morning, who are calling on us to rethink and update our ethical standards. Before I talk about ethics codes, I want to note that efforts in this nation to outlaw abortion, or marijuana, or alcohol, or marriage by gay and lesbian couples didn’t come close to stopping people from ending pregnancies, altering their moods, or expressing commitment to their lovers. That’s something to keep in mind if you’re drafting an ethics code for your news organization.
Just as a law can give you a way to prosecute people who perform abortions or sell marijuana, an ethics code can give you grounds to fire someone who is caught violating your ethical principles. But it doesn’t ensure ethical journalism. And let’s be honest: many newsrooms’ actual practice of using unnamed sources doesn’t match the ethics policies, and nobody gets fired. Good journalism ethics don’t grow from strong rules; good journalism ethics grow from strong conversations about our values and about making good decisions based in those values. I’m delighted that this symposium continues a lot of excellent discussion we’re having recently about journalism ethics.
The most cited guidance for journalists is probably the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. I called for an update to the SPJ code in 2010, and I’m pleased that SPJ is finally considering an update. I was part of a digital subcommittee headed by Monica Guzmán that made recommendations to the SPJ ethics committee. Even where some core principles remain valid, I think we need to update some of the advice we give journalists about practicing those principles. In some cases we need to update to reflect changes in journalism and the world where we practice it. Or maybe we need to strengthen the code to condemn shoddy journalism practices that the old code failed to address. In some cases we need to update to improve our ethics, as leaders in our profession have challenged us to do better and have shown us how.
I presume you’re familiar with the four principles of the SPJ code of ethics: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable. For about 20 years, Poynter’s guiding principles virtually echoed the SPJ code, also organizing Poynter’s ethics advice around the principles of truthfulness, independence, and minimizing harm. Accountability wasn’t a core principle in the Poynter document but was stressed in its elaboration of the other principles. “Seek truth and report it” remains to me the core of ethical journalism, and truthfulness was the first point of the new Poynter guiding principles that were published last year in Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenstiel’s book, The New Ethics of Journalism.
I’ll address truthfulness at more length shortly, but it’s worth noting that the new Poynter principles shifted the emphasis in the core principles. They haven’t abandoned independence and minimizing harm but there are no longer four principles; transparency and community are new core principles. I was glad to see Tim McGuire make a good case for the continued importance of independence, and I encourage journalists to maintain independence from the things we cover, in most cases. The truth is, most of my blogging is about topics to which I’m closely tied. I blog about my company’s effort to transform into a truly digital-first news organization. Sometimes I blog about my family. Long before McBride and Rosenstiel embraced transparency as a new core principle of journalism, I had decided transparency was more important than independence in my own journalism. I blog frequently about matters in which I am intimately involved. But I disclose those involvements to my readers and they can decide whether that influences my judgment, or gives me insight, or both or neither—but they know where I’m coming from. If you read my blog you know my experiences and connections.
The revisions of the SPJ code and the Poynter guiding principles are two important parts of a robust discussion of journalism ethics afoot in our profession, and I’m delighted to see it. I have also been involved in three other notable efforts to provide more and better guidance for journalists. J-Lab’s Rules of the Road, developed by Scott Rosenberg to guide ethics the growing field of hyper-local journalism, addressed some of these issues for the people doing journalism who don’t consider themselves journalists, and it answered some questions they have as well addressing some concerns we have about citizen journalists. Several journalism organizations last year collaborated on a summit to fight plagiarism and fabrication, and we collaborated in the publication of the e-book Telling the Truth & Nothing But. The European Journalism Center recruited several journalists to collaborate on the verification handbook, which is designed not just for journalists but for activists, emergency workers and others who gather and spread information in times of crisis. We’re going to cover a lot of issues in the symposium and I won’t presume to cover them all in this address, but I want to cover four matters where we have time-tested values to guide us, but where technology, or shoddy practices by some journalists, or wisdom offered by other journalists offer us ways not only to maintain our high standards but to update and upgrade them.
I’ll share some of my thoughts about the guidance we need to offer journalists today in four areas: accuracy, attribution, confidential sources, and social media.
Accuracy
I think journalism’s highest calling remains what it has been for all of my career and beyond, and what the SPJ code states eloquently and simply: seek truth and report it. Journalists must always report facts accurately, place them in truthful contexts, and help people gain truthful understanding about events and issues in our communities, our nation, our world. That hasn’t changed. Fairness is not one of the four core principles of the SPJ code. It’s a secondary principle, mentioned in elaboration of the principle of seeking the truth. And nowhere does the code mention objectivity. But somewhere through the years our commitment to fairness and a misguided sense of objectivity have often overridden our commitment to the truth. Sometimes the truth isn’t fair, and it isn’t balanced. We thought fairness and objectivity meant telling both sides of the story and that has led to simplifying stories that have far more than just two sides. It has led to the “he said and she said” stories that Jay Rosen has rightly identified as an embarrassment to journalism. I didn’t address that today but I’ll link to it at my blog, some of the things he’s written about “he said she said” journalism, which carries out this sense of faux balance that is part of journalism ethics for too many people, in my view, today. I can’t understand or support an ethic that elevates balance in the simpleminded view of requirements above truthfulness.
Another way that journalism ethics needs to evolve is to listen to the wise voices urging higher standards. Craig Silverman, author of the book and blog Regret the Error, makes a compelling case for routine use of accuracy checklists in our quests to seek and report the truth. Returning to the analogy of medical practice, surgeons and their medical teams routinely use checklists to avoid errors. My wife, Mimi Johnson, recently had surgery on a toe, and as I sat with her in the prep area prior to surgery, two nurses, the surgeon and an anesthesiologist checked the mark on her left food, and then they asked her and verbally confirmed with which toe and which foot the surgery was going to be on. They were following their checklist, and without fail they operated correctly on the big toe on the left foot. Medicine is damned important, but it’s not protected in the Constitution. If our profession is so precious that its practice is protected in the Bill of Rights, why don’t we follow the practice of the medical profession and checklists, which are a proven way of preventing errors? I can see why we didn’t do that 20 years ago when ethics codes were last being revised, because nobody was advocating checklist use by journalists of that time. But with a leading voice on accuracy making a compelling case for checklists, we need more organizations, ethics scholars and ethics teachers, like we have assembled here today, acknowledging their importance and insisting on their use.
Attribution
I’ll return to accuracy when I discuss social media, but I think it’s important to note that my discussion of accuracy so far has nothing to do with technology. But we have to discuss digital tools in addressing the issue of attribution. The SPJ code addresses attribution only in the context of whether or not to identify sources. Well, digital tools that have been developed since the SPJ code was written back in the ‘90s have given us new and better ways to attribute. In a profession where digital research is an important part of most reporters’ work, and where many news organizations routinely refuse to link to digital sources, anyone striving for relevance and ethical leadership needs to address the issue of linking and digital content.
My biggest disappointment in Poynter’s new guiding principles for the journalist was the vagueness of the call for journalists to “show how the reporting was done or explain your sources.” The principles should have approached linking as an imperative in digital attribution. Links and embeds are the best ways to show and explain our digital sources. McBride and Rosenstiel, who are leading voices in journalism and are friends of mine, performed a great service in updating the guiding principles and addressing the important issues, but their failure to address linking was a glaring omission, and one they should correct and one the SPJ should not repeat.
Links are good journalism on multiple levels—they not only provide clear attribution, they provide depth and context, and routine use of links will ensure more ethical practice of journalism on multiple levels. If editors expect journalists provide links routinely it will get more and more difficult for fraudulent journalists to get away with plagiarism and fabrication. A plagiarist isn’t going to link to the source he or she rips off, and a fabricator has nothing to link back to. The lack of links will raise a red flag and the editor will start asking questions and have a better shot of exposing the unethical journalist before publishing the story that was made up or stolen. I’ll add that this is an area that shows how practical conversations about ethics and teaching are more important than rules. The SPJ code of ethics offers two simple and unequivocal words on the topic of plagiarism: don’t plagiarize. That’s all it says: don’t plagiarize.
That was the ethics code for journalists in 2003 when Jayson Blair plagiarized, and in 2004 when Jack Kelly plagiarized. And it was the ethics code in 2004 when so many journals plagiarized that Craig Silverman called it “journalism’s summer of sin.” But that rule about plagiarism and similar rules and ethics codes of virtually every newsroom where the cheaters practiced journalism didn’t prevent these blows to our credibility. If we want to prevent plagiarism we do that by teaching and practice. We need sound practices like linking, to make it harder to get away with plagiarism. We need editors who randomly Google unique-sounding phrases from the stories they edit to see whether they have appeared somewhere else. And reporters need to know that their editors make those spot checks. I’m always skeptical when journalists blame sloppiness for plagiarism, but we need to teach the importance of being careful in our research and writing.
The ease of cutting and pasting from the Internet often gets blamed for plagiarism, but cutting and pasting isn’t inherently bad journalism. If you cut and paste a quote from the web or from your notes, you’re not going to introduce an error in your typing. Whose typing is perfect? Not mine. You’re not going to drop a word or type “now” when you mean “not.” You’re not going to turn a murder trial until murder trail. So I would argue that cutting and pasting is actually a good journalism practice that ensures accuracy. But journalism professors and editors need to teach journalists how to cut and paste correctly. There is a phrase from one of my blog posts: attribution is the difference between research and plagiarism. Sometimes you think, “OK, did I hear that, or am I stealing that from somebody?” So actually when I was writing this I Googled it to see if I had heard it from somebody, because when you’re writing about plagiarism you don’t want to rip somebody off. That was actually something I had written before.
And so if I’m going to put that into a blog post I first put in the link, I put in the attribution, I put in the quotation marks, and so when I hit “paste,” it’s there fully attributed. I’ve quoted it accurately by cutting and pasting it, but if the phone rings now and I run off to do something else and I come back later I don’t think that I wrote that. I know whom I quoted from—the attribution is already there. So we can teach people how to cut and paste to improve their accuracy and not get caught in acts of sloppy plagiarism.
One more point about linking before I move on: practice and expectation of linking and placing relevant links and stories also helps us improve our accuracy. It’s that truthfulness thing again. Imagine if even one of the journalists who initially fell for the hoax about the supposed death of Manti Te’o’s fictitious girlfriend routinely linked to related sources. The expectation of linking would have forced those journalists to do a little more research, a little more verification. If they had started searching for an obituary or an accident report, or any evidence that she was truly a Stanford student, the lack of links would have raised red flags, and the journalists would have exposed the hoax instead of perpetuating it.
We also need to stress that attribution is no substitute for accuracy. In explaining one of journalism’s most egregious failures during my career, Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, said if your sources are wrong, you are wrong. Everyone teaching or writing about ethics in journalism needs to be absolutely clear where the responsibility for accuracy and truthfulness belongs—with the journalists and with the news organization. Our best, most honest sources have faulty memories and only part of the story. Many of our sources are honestly mistaken and others are simply lying and trying to manipulate us to give credibility to their lies. The journalist’s job is not simply to parrot our sources and hide behind their attribution, our job is to ask again and again, “how do you know that?” And how else do you know that? And do you have documentation for that? And then to ask tough questions about the documents too. Our job is to debunk the lies and errors of our sources and assemble the full truth from the partial truths of our honest sources. It’s hard work, but it’s the work that makes journalism valuable and worthy of our First Amendment protection.
Confidential Sources
Confidential sources are another area where we need to update ethical standards, and our need to do that is a mix of addressing standard practices that aren’t ethical enough, and addressing the issues that technology raises. Let’s deal with the practices first: too many journalists and too many news organizations have harmed their credibility and the credibility of our profession by being too promiscuous in their use of unnamed sources. We were too seduced by the story of Deep Throat a couple of generations ago. We started caving in to every source who wanted to avoid accountability, but hiding behind our bylines. It’s time that we elevate our standards and afford our protection only to genuine whistleblowers.
Another of journalism’s profound shames in recent years was that multiple journalists granted confidentiality to Scooter Libby and Richard Armitage in their efforts to harm the credibility of Joseph Wilson, a Bush administration critic, by noting his wife’s job with the CIA. Think about that a minute: professional journalists who were so eager to get some partisan insider gossip that they missed the bigger story: a top aide to the vice president committing a felony.
Every journalist in every news organization should have five sound practices about using confidential sources:
1) We will never, ever use opinions from unnamed sources. Without a name, an opinion is worthless.
2) We will never, ever use information from eager, powerful people disclosed in an effort to hurt someone less powerful or a political opponent. A powerful person who approaches you with dirt on someone else had better be accountable for what he said, or he’s not going to be a source of mine.
3) Confidentiality is something you grant to persuade a reluctant source to talk. It’s not something we grant to sources who approach us. If you’re trying to persuade a victim of sexual abuse or domestic violence to do an interview, or if you’re approaching someone vulnerable who you think might have damaging information to share about a powerful business or government leader or institution, then confidentiality is a valid tool to get in the front door and hear her story. But if the source approaches you seeking confidentiality, you should either turn him away or make clear that you probably won’t use the information he gives you unless you can confirm it independently from on-the-record sources.
4) We don’t attend background briefings where we can’t attribute information to the source by name. Sources play this game because we play this game, and we should stop it.
5) Confidentiality is something we use primarily in the recording stage rather than in writing. We’ll grant confidentiality to a source who can point us to documentation or on-the-record sources who will help us tell a credible story with strong attribution. Or we’ll grant confidentiality to hear a source’s story and then negotiate with the source about what we can get on the record. And if we can’t get the story on the record or confirm it independently, many times we should refrain from telling the story.
Now I haven’t said a thing about technology and confidential sources yet, but technology is a huge factor in this issue. Look at what’s happened with the AP and James Rosen and what we’ve learned about NSA surveillance. If you’re going to grant confidentiality to a source in a story that challenges people in power, you should presume that the person’s employer will have access to that person’s computer and telephone used in their work. And if it’s a case challenging federal or local powers, you should presume that those in power can obtain those records, either because of their access to government computers and phone records or through electronic surveillance granted through a warrant or exercised in an abuse of power. But somehow, your electronic communications with these potential sources can be hacked, can be surveilled, can be found out.
So don’t grant confidentiality in any case that threatens anyone in power, unless you’re able to protect that promise of confidentiality. Will your newsroom pay for “burner” cell phones so your calls can’t be traced to you? Can you encrypt your email? Can you be sure that you communicate with your source only in person or through secure communication from personal accounts? If not, you might be making a promise you can’t keep. A journalist’s willingness to go to jail to protect a source becomes irrelevant if we give authorities an electronic trail directly to the source.
One final point on confidential sources: have you noticed what term I haven’t used yet in this discussion? Anonymous sources? I believe journalists have hurt their own credibility with use of this term in their stories, and in their public discussions about our use of unnamed sources. In most cases the sources we don’t identify are not anonymous to us at all. We know them well, or we’ve vetted them thoroughly. We do occasionally get tips help from anonymous phone calls or email or a comment where the person isn’t identified, or maybe a comment on social media where it’s not sure where it came from, but we don’t base our reporting on those. Maybe we use the tip as the start of our reporting and we nail down our facts based on interviews and documentation and getting people on the record, or with other sources we trust that we can identify. We should use unidentified sources far less than we do, and when we do we shouldn’t make them sound less credible than they already are by making them sound anonymous, because we check them out thoroughly.
Social Media
Now for some discussion of social media, which I’ll keep short because I want to leave time for questions and because I’m going to be discussing this topic on a panel tomorrow. I think social media illustrate well how we want to honor and maintain timeless journalism values — but still update our standards. Whether reporting through social media or gathering information from social media, our commitment to accuracy still has to remain strong. The verification handbook provided an important guide for journalists as they seek the truth in digital content and try to report the truth and debunk the lies. Social media provide lots of ways for journalists to assess the veracity of their sources, whether they’re using their social media posts as content, or contacting them directly for an old-school interview. We can look at someone’s connections; we can contact others who might bolster someone’s credibility; we can check the time stamps and location data in social media posts to see if they confirm or contradict someone’s claims. The errors journalists have made using social media are not errors inherent in social media—they have been failures to use verification techniques used in other situations.
But one way that journalists’ use of social media has raised new ethical issues is in the area of real-time crowdsourcing. As an old-school journalist who has long taught and practiced that we don’t publish rumors, I was a little taken back the first time I saw Andy Carvin, Jay Rosen’s new colleague at First Look Media, doing some real-time crowdsourcing about matters he hadn’t verified. For instance, when he was at NPR he Tweeted a link to this photo, noting that an Arab media outlet’s Facebook page had identified the shell found in the Libyan uprising as possibly being from Israel. That’s potentially a huge story—the Israelis arming the Libyan rebels? And Andy didn’t know if it was true but he Tweeted it anyway. But I watched his inquiry unfold and I learned something (being open to learning is one of the most important ways that we update and upgrade our ethical standards). I want to show three things Andy did that made this seemingly questionable practice completely ethical:
1) He told what he didn’t know. He said, “I need help to ID this.” So he doesn’t know whose it is.
2) He asked the crowd (Andy has a pretty big crowd on Twitter). He asked the crowd what they knew.
3) He sought truth and reported it.
I used to be a pretty good investigative reporter, and I think I could have tracked down the answer to whether the Israelis were arming the Libyan rebels, but it might have taken days or weeks. By ethically unlocking the knowledge of the crowd, putting the crowd to work for him, Andy reported the truth much faster than I could have using my old-school methods. In just a few hours, his crowd helped him show documentation that these symbols on the shell are not actually a Star of David and a crescent. The star is a glowing shell, and the “crescent” is really a parachute. This is the symbol for an illumination flare, a symbol that has been used on ammunition since World War I — before the creation of the state of Israel. And Andy sought that truth and reported it quickly and ethically. He raised my awareness of how we can use social media to do better ethical journalism.
Most of the newsroom policies on using social media were based in fear and written largely by editors who knew little about social media, and who responded in their ignorance with a resounding “thou shalt not.” The new guiding principles for the journalist do a better job of addressing these issues of social media. Many journalists are concerned about whether they or their staff members can and should express opinions or show any personality in social media. Jay addressed the opinion and the point-of-view issue well, so I won’t elaborate on it here. But I want to make the point that if you decide journalists shouldn’t express opinions in social media, that’s not the same thing as showing personality. Social media are social. And if we’re going to use them effectively, we need to be people and we need to show personality, just as we do in other journalism situations.
Personality and personal connections have always been important for journalism success, despite our culture of objectivity. When I succeeded as a reporter it was because I made a personal connection with my sources. I didn’t get people to trust me with their stories of rape, abortion, child molestation, domestic violence, a child’s suicide, and a disaster they had survived just because I carried a notebook. In fact, the notebook was a huge obstacle I had to overcome. I connected with these sources as a human. And I laughed, and I cried with them, and on a few occasions I hugged them. I didn’t express opinions about the issues we were discussing, but I was a person who wanted to listen to them, and they told me their stories.
I was a reporter for the Omaha World Herald when 9/11 happened, and I spent much of the rest of my time there covering the work of the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies. Many of my studies about their work there were positive, but I also reported on controversial things they were doing. I didn’t express any opinions about the Center’s work in my interviews I had with the dean of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, but I made a personal connection. He’s a Tigers fan, and I’m a Yankees fan, so we trash-talked sports a little bit, or we’d reminisce about the days of Mickey Mantle or Al Kaline, or we’d talk about our oldest sons, who were both starting careers in politics. Somehow that personal connection we made—by just being people with each other—helped me get the stories I needed from him even when the questions I was asking were the tough ones.
And that personal connection has always helped us in journalism, and there’s nothing wrong with being a person and showing some personality in social media. If you follow me, you know most of my tweets are about journalism; most people who follow me need to know about journalism. But if you follow me you’re also going to see pictures of my granddaughters when I visit them next month. You’re going to get a little sports banter now and then, and if my plane is late you’re going to see a few Tweets about “United sucks.” But it’s important to show personality to be in journalism effectively, so it’s not unethical at all.
I’m pleased to be here for this discussion of journalism ethics, but in my fifth decade as a professional journalist I am not here to protect old-school ethical standards. I’m here because I think we can and must raise our ethical standards. I’m happy to answer any of your questions or hear some of your comments or arguments.
Q: How can journalists accurately report on fields outside their areas of expertise, for example the sciences?
Buttry: There used to be a popular cartoon among journalists in the style of your The New Yorker, something like a reporter starts his day and there’s this dartboard that’s got energy, agriculture, environment, business and finance, whatever, on there, and he’s blindfolded and about to throw a dart, and the caption says, “Today I’m an expert in…”
And that has always been both a challenge and a failing of journalism. I did a project I’m very proud of about the use of hazardous waste as fuel in the manufacture of cement. And in starting that project I knew nothing about the manufacture of cement. How many of you know anything about cement? Nobody. So I now know more than all of you, but not nearly as much as any of my sources. Somehow I had to learn enough to do some bullshit detection with the people who were bullshitting me (and they were), to play some sources against each other, to do some independent research, and I don’t think we had to do any corrections on the project. I think it was accurate and truthful. I’m still not an expert in the manufacture of cement. I knew a lot more when the project was finished than I know now. So I think that there has always been a bit of thin ice in the journalist’s necessity to be an expert on something other than journalism. Right now I write about journalism, and I know journalism well so I can write authoritatively about that. But the manufacture of cement, or abortion or sexual abuse, some of the things I reported on, the issues in Afghanistan, I’m learning about that through my research. So we have to be good at doing research.
I think we need to be more honest—this goes to the transparency that I’ve talked about some and that Jay talked about—we need a better about saying what we don’t know. And so if we’re reporting on a study, I think an ethical and transparent way of reporting that would be initially to say, “OK, here’s what the study says… What do you know about that? Can you help me check that out?” And there’s a lot of bullshit that government agencies, academics, businesses and professional organizations publish that we probably parrot and should be tougher about. But I think unlocking the wisdom of the crowd like Andy Carvin did is one way to do that—we can find the experts who think it’s bullshit.
Q: Can journalists have a social and a professional presence in social media?
Buttry: I think there are two issues there. There are some journalists who worry about being on Facebook. You should always know that people you connect with on your personal page think of you as a journalist. And what people would ask me when I was doing ethics workshops for the American Press Association, people say they use Twitter professionally and use Facebook personally. Is it OK to keep them separate? And I would say, “Does anyone ever suggest a story to you on Facebook or complain about anything related to journalism?” And the answer is, of course they do. So you always need to behave appropriately on Facebook or other social sites, but it’s OK to temper that.
In terms of the people who think you need to clean it all up and look like you’ve never had an opinion, I’m with Jay on that; I think it’s OK to admit that we’ve had opinions — in some circumstances.
Abortion is such an inflammatory issue. I never breathed a word to a source or anyone else about my opinion on abortion outside my home in the time that I covered abortion. And I won the trust of people on both sides of the issue. But my next job was as a religion reporter for the Des Moines Register, and I had a column. So in the column I was not only allowed to, I was expected to have some commentary. So we do have in our print context some acceptance of the fact that people can express opinions in columns and still do some objective reporting. And I actually found that it helped my credibility at times. I was told more than once—and it might have hurt my credibility too—but I was told more than once by a source that they were talking to me because I’d done a column they disagreed with. But they found a story I wrote to be really fair. And so I don’t think it hurt me to have my opinions out there if my reporting was factual and fair. So to a journalist who is worried about what is out there in social media, I would look more at how your conduct is professional.
Q: (Question regarding relative lack of diversity in journalism and if institutions ought to address that.)
Buttry: Oh, absolutely. One of the reasons I didn’t address that is because I know there’s going to be a whole panel on it. But Emily Bell is one of the best and most insightful voices in journalism today, and I endorse everything that she has said about diversity, especially a year ago when she was taking on Dylan Byers at Politico ripping on Jill Abramson for being a tough boss. She is a great voice on anything in journalism but especially these issues.
I think that it is tremendously important for organizations to become more inclusive, and I favor that not because it is right, because there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s right that we can’t afford to do, or don’t have time to do, or because it’s not our job to achieve justice. But I think that a news organization or startup headed by a white man is going to do really well with the white-man audience, but it’s a limited audience. Your growth opportunities are in the full community and in relating to the full community. Which is not to say women only read stuff written by women or that minorities will only read stuff written by others of their own race or ethnicity, but having a broader experience in your news organization helps you see a broader world and think of different stories. So I see it as a business imperative to make diversity a top issue. At Digital First we’ve increased our diversity by gender and race and ethnicity at the top level.
Q: Talk about the falling investment in investigative journalism.
Buttry: Well, investigative journalism is expensive. And it certainly is a challenge as newsrooms are cutting staff, so there is a challenge there. But I am delighted to see how many organizations and non-profits focus on investigation. There’s ProPublica, there’s California Watch, there’s Iowa Watch, there are a lot of non-profit journalism startups that I’m very excited about. But I think that traditional journalism companies still have a good opportunity to do investigative journalism. I run our annual editorial excellence awards. We still recognize investigative journalism as one of the things that we give awards for, and the investigative category for small newsrooms was the biggest category. We had 25 submissions. Twenty-five of our newsrooms said, “We’ve got something worthy of a prize here in investigative and enterprise journalism.” So small newsrooms are still doing it.
There is a notion in journalism now that breaking news is what drives traffic, and there’s some truth to that. But part of that is because we’re focused on Sunday stories for our enterprise, and so we publish our enterprise online Sunday or Saturday or Friday night — when there’s nobody online and the traffic sucks (to almost anything we publish then). At Digital First we’re pushing people to publish more of their enterprise stuff online during the week. It’s early, but I’m liking the early results that I’ve seen. So people are interested in the digital formats, and I think it’s still going to be a part of it. It’s still going to be tough. In every newsroom I’ve worked in, we did investigative journalism and we didn’t do enough. And we still do investigative journalism, and we still don’t do enough. I think we need to be committed to it, and I’m glad we have some organizations getting up.
Q: What about diversification of businesses owning media outlets, as more and more are bought up under a few large umbrellas?
Buttry: I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, but I concentrate my work on where I can have an impact, and I don’t think I’m going to change that. So I try to change how journalists practice more than (ownership trends). If I could wave a wand and go back to locally owned mom-and-pop newspapers and TV and radio stations, I would do it in a heartbeat. I agree with you that it’s bad, but I have no ideas on how to fix it or address it.
Q: What are you doing in your newsrooms to foster this kind of ethical reflection.
Buttry: We certainly encourage those conversations at the local level. I have done workshops in some of the locations when I visit. We had a couple instances of plagiarism and said, “This has got to stop,” so we required everyone to take a plagiarism webinar. It included what I talked about earlier regarding cutting and pasting, and an attribution quiz. I think it’s a conversation we’re having a lot in our newsrooms, but not enough. I’m part of that, and so are people on the local level.