Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

The Tampa Tribune’s executive editor recently wrote a commentary about how journalism is reacting to recent changes in the media industry. I had a few more questions for her, and Janet Coats was kind enough to take a bunch of time out of her busy schedule to explore the subject further.

You will note that the email exchange includes her previous last name, so Janet Weaver = Janet Coats.

In your commentary, you say newspaper decision makers are wasting time by worrying about the survival of print. What specific steps would you have them take immediately to ensure journalism survives?

[Weaver, Janet S.] I think the most important first step editors should take is understanding audience more deeply. Editors and publishers have never been very good at this. Unlike the online world, where you can track every single mouse click and monitor audience movement in real time, our print-based research has tended to be slow-moving, too broad and unfocused. We need to understand the research we do have in hand better, and be more aggressive about going to the market more often, with more focused questions. And then we need to listen and act on what the audience is telling us. We have the very human tendency to discount findings in our research that we don’t like or don’t agree with or don’t want to do. Being willing to shape the product, in print and online, to the audience can be done without giving up our First Amendment obligations to cover the unpopular story or challenge those in authority. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and one can actually feed the other.

I think another important step is recognizing that what works for one medium doesn’t necessarily work for another. I think that newspapers, as an industry, have spent the last 10 years trying to create “online newspapers’’ instead of understanding what really makes the medium work – interactivity, data vs. narrative, real time journalism vs. the value we place on vetting and repetitive editing. We should quit trying to impose print conventions on a digital world. I want to make an important distinction between those conventions and our ethical obligations. For instance, I think verified news is vital to journalism and can be a competitive advantage to print organizations online. We need to find the balance between editing and vetting that verifies and editing that is just a reflection of our perfectionist print culture – chasing punctuation errors, for instance. We have not been very good about the incremental building of stories and information online, and that’s a convention we are changing through our continuous news desk. I think we’re finding with the CND that incremental building of stories is actually good for the print version as well as the online version – we get more feedback both inhouse and from readers when we do stories this way. It is almost like thinking the story out loud, being about to watch how it builds through the day. I know I ask more questions about the direction of stories now that I’m watching them build in real time.

Journalists are tasked with finding facts. Since any given set of facts will affect different people (racial minorities, women, young people, the poor, etc.) in different ways, how can newspapers remain relevant to the population as a whole?

[Weaver, Janet S.] Fact-finding is only the beginning of the process for journalists, and it is often harder than it looks at first blush for the very reasons you list. For instance, take a very contentious public issue such as abortion. There are absolutely facts to be reported about the medical procedure itself. But then you layer in religious beliefs and social conventions and arguments about privacy rights, and you get a debate that is bordered by facts but has much more gray than black & white in the way people sort through it. Journalism succeeds, I think, when you are able to represent all of those gray areas so well that you help readers see the impact of one set of facts on someone who doesn’t live or believe like you do. One of my favorite literary characters is Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ When he tells Scout that she will never understand another person until she sees things from his point of view – “until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it’’ – he’s describing what I think journalism at its best can do. It lets us walk around in somebody else’s skin.

Doing that requires a commitment of time and resources that is getting harder and harder to justify in our current economic model. But I think taking that time is vital to keeping journalism relevant.

You suggest that journalists embrace the opportunity to connect with and learn from other viewpoints. How have you encouraged your reporters in this enterprise?

[Weaver, Janet S.] We’ve done some of that in an organized way, and some of it just through our newsroom culture. We have organized community feedback groups and held meetings with our journalists so they can hear directly from the people we cover or should cover better. I’ll be the first to admit that, while we’ve been working through a lot of organizational change this year, we haven’t been as vigilant about those efforts as we need to be. It’s something I’m hoping to kickstart in the next few months. We’re working with our community Web sites to get more interaction between reporters in our bureau offices and readers who want to submit their own content. That’s an effort that has gained more traction in some parts of the county than others, and we’re looking at ways to take some of the successes we’ve had and plant those seeds in other areas.

And how have your reporters responded to your directives?

[Weaver, Janet S.] I don’t issue many directives, outside of some of the structural changes to the newsroom organization that we’ve made. And those were based on conversations with the senior editors and on research. I think the role of an executive editor is to put ideas out there for the staff, to encourage and to recognize and reward efforts that work. Some journalists have embraced the ideas I’ve been talking about wholeheartedly, and have built on my very imperfect musings to create powerful work. I think of Jeff Houck’s work both in print and online, turning food coverage into something that really reflects a wide diversity of people, places, approaches. The CND team is really breaking new ground as a rapid response unit, learning about how to tap into online audiences and let that information guide the direction of their work. It’s like any workplace – some people get it and run with it, some people are waiting to see if it’s really going to work and are dipping toes in, some people wish it could be like the old days again. Overall, I’d say people are energized by what we’re doing. For too long, newsrooms have felt hostage to the fate of the industry, and I think some folks are seeing some new paths through to regaining relevance.

If citizen comments uncover additional facts related to a story, do journalists have a responsibility to acknowledge this new information?

[Weaver, Janet S.]

Yes. That has always been true, even back in the olden days when I was a reporter. I think it is a misconception to believe that citizen feedback to journalists was only enabled by the Internet. The Internet has given those who feel passionate about issues of public policy a more immediate, unfiltered forum. But I can assure you they were there, giving feedback on stories, back when I was a baby reporter. And I can remember very specific stories where my reporting was directed by new information that citizens brought to me. That said, our obligation as journalists is to test information that comes forward and not just blinding repeat or publish it. Verify, verify, verify.

Journalists are tasked with finding the truth, while the editorial board shapes a newspaper’s official opinions. Since citizen comments often include opinion, what newspaper department should be responsible for ensuring “responsible citizen journalism?”

[Weaver, Janet S.] Oh Tommy, you are acting like an old-fashioned print guy and trying to paint these things as black and white! There is room for everybody on this one. Journalists aren’t just tasked with finding truth – they also are tasked with gauging reactions to truths, debates about what is true and what isn’t, tracking the evolution of thought about how to apply truths. There’s a lot of opinion baked into everything we report. I am rather an old-fashioned girl when it comes to journalist expounding on their opinions about the news they cover, and that’s a line I’m not willing to fudge. But we can certainly act as the conduit for citizen opinion. I think one of our obligations online as well as in print is trying to make sure that we’re seeking those opinions more broadly and encouraging participation from diverse groups and not just from those who are impassioned on a particular subject and have access to a computer. That is the tricky part of the new blend between citizen voices and journalists’ work that we need to be thinking about and exploring in a much more directed way.

You state that you understand why “some journalists argue… [that] The Internet makes it too easy” to screen out important (paraphrased) stories. What is the difference with pre-internet distractions such as the Sports page, celebrity news, comic strips, and crossword puzzles that have been in the print media for decades?

[Weaver, Janet S.]

What is different is the common base of information. There’s always been distraction, sure, and people could always pick and choose what they wanted to read about. But newspapers in the pre-internet age served up a common “home page’’ to every user. You had to at least glance by the headlines on the school tax or the presidential debate as you fumbled through your morning paper to get to the comics. I think what is concerning to many editors now – and it is not just a selfish concern about our business, it relates to our First Amendment duty – is that readers can screen all that “important’’ stuff out entirely, not even get a whiff of the headlines. I like Atlanta Braves baseball and Kevin Costner movies and Keith Urban songs. If I want to set myself up so that the only news I get is on those topics, I can. I can certainly become expert on those topics, but my field of expertise is a fairly narrow one and my incidental exposure to other issues is limited as a result of the filters I’ve built for myself. That’s the difference.

You say you “look at reader comments” and say that your journalists use them to generate new stories. Can you give an example of this (url if you have it)?

[Weaver, Janet S.] We’re working on one today. We had tremendous reader response online yesterday to the story about the Hyde Park rapist getting out of prison, lots of questions about the “contract’’ he had to sign and how ridiculous it was. That’s leading us to work today on a story about the terms of release for sexual offenders, how they differ from other kinds of offenders, and the larger questions about what we do with these guys when they finish a prison sentence.

Your wrapup paragraph says the combination of reporting and online conversation will lead to success. Since conversation often employs opinion, are journalists allowed to join in on the conversation?

[Weaver, Janet S.] Joining the conversation in a factual way is OK. Revealing your own opinions about things you cover is not what journalists do.

How come online readers cannot leave comments on your commentary on this subject? Why is your email address not included with your online commentary?

[Weaver, Janet S.] Hey, I never said I was perfect! I grew up as an analog journalist, and thinking digitally will always be a little like a right-handed person doing work with her left hand for me. I should have thought about the email address and making sure that the comments field was open on the story. I’ll remember next time. We learn by doing.

And as if that didn’t take up enough of her time, I asked some follow up questions too - and jumped all over the “Revealing your own opinions about things you cover is not what journalists do” line:

Thanks for all of your very thoughtful answers. And, yes the “newspaper department” question was a trick question - nice answer.

I do have a couple of follow-up questions…

Since editors and publishers have never been very good at understanding their audience, do you think they will take the time and resources to make that a priority? Is your company doing this?

[Weaver, Janet S.] I think this is a process. We’ve certainly become more dedicated to it in the last couple of years, and part of the influence in that has been watching audience metrics in the online world. We just finished a major study of the market and are in the process of getting that information back. I’m looking at ways to share that information more broadly with the newsroom. In the past, that has been something we talked about at the editor level, and I’d like to make it more available to the entire staff. And we are sharing audience numbers for TBO and our single-copy data more fully and regularly with the entire staff through regular weekly notes that I write for the newsroom.

Speaking of time, you say the current economic model makes it difficult to justify the time it takes to explore all those many gray areas. Where will the model change to allow this? Or are we to leave this extended exploration to readers and commentators?

[Weaver, Janet S.] As editors redeploy newsroom resources, we have to be much more judicious about the staffing choices we’re making. I’ve said I want to build a moat around local, community news coverage, explanatory journalism and investigative journalism and put more emphasis on those topics. That means we have to quit doing some other things, and those choices aren’t easy ones. I think, for instance, it means doing more with breaking news and crime news online and not trying to translate all of that coverage into print, while we put more print focus on analysis and investigation. A good example of this is the story we did when we were covering the series of rapes in the USF area. Reporter Valerie Kalfrin did an analysis piece that looked at statistics about rape in Tampa , focusing on the fact that stranger rape is actually the exceptional case, that women are much more at risk from people they have some kind of acquaintance with.

At the end of the day, it’s about using our editorial judgment and our resources wisely. It’s about asking which stories have more long-term impact and making choices to pursue them, even when that means giving something from the day-to-day coverage short shrift. That’s hard to do, but it is going to be increasingly necessary if we’re going to explore the gray areas.

I don’t know if there is a misconception that reader input came about via the internet, but it has allowed other readers to actually see that input. Should journalists acknowledge online comments as a source of a story? Should journalists acknowledge any source?

[Weaver, Janet S.] Speaking of gray areas, this is one where I don’t think you can make a generalization. Certainly if any source – another mainstream media source, a blog or a reader comment – contributes substantial factual data that forms the heart of a story – in other words, reporting –, we should give credit. If it falls into the category of generating a story idea, or something to follow up on, or a tip that we expound upon through deeper reporting, then acknowledging where that tip came from is probably less necessary. There are lots of ideas out there in the marketplace, and just because you see an idea and then expound on it through original reporting doesn’t mean you need to reveal the source of the idea. I always tend to err on the side of transparency and giving the reader as much information about where stories come from as possible. This is one that will probably require more thinking and more adapting as the MSM world and the world of reader gen and blogs come closer together.

Does Media General encourage or discourage hyperlinks within stories to outside sources with further information on a given subject - specifically to your professional competitors such as the St. Pete Times, as well as those links to unprofessional bloggers? What is your policy on internal hyperlinks within stories on TBO.com?

[Weaver, Janet S.] We encourage links if we think they add value or context to the readers, and that includes links to direct competitors or to non-journalist bloggers (I’m not gonna call ‘em unprofessional – your word there!) The emphasis is on valuable, and while that is an editorial judgment for sure, I’d say it has to be something that adds additional information, is on point with the coverage, has some degree of verification to it.

What role do independent bloggers fill in a market’s overall media picture?

[Weaver, Janet S.] I think they add more voices to the mix. I think they add eyes and ears in the community and on subjects that we just don’t have enough journalists to cover. I think that their passion on particular topics always them to go deep in ways that we don’t or can’t in MSM and I think that has value to the community conversation and to those of us who make a living through journalism.

I was part of a movement in journalism that started almost 20 years ago called public or civic journalism. I worked in Wichita , which is where that movement really got started, and my boss there had done deep thinking on the topic, driven by his disgust with national coverage of the 1988 presidential campaign (you know, Dukakis in the goofy helmet driving the tank). We really wanted to try to build those connections between journalists and the people who would eventually become bloggers – people who cared about the community or about particular subjects, were willing to do their own research, wanted to share their knowledge and opinions. And we did quite a bit of that kind of work in Wichita . Much of the rest of the industry just mocked those efforts. I often think about where mainstream media would be today if we had really focused on building those kinds of connections back then, when we had a sweet spot of public disgust with traditional news coverage and we still had a pretty powerful soapbox for airing that disgust and changing our methods. I think that the best of the bloggers have found that sweet spot some of us were searching for and having such a hard time convincing other journalists to explore.

Which of your community sites is having the most success in “connecting with readers who want to submit” content?

[Weaver, Janet S.] Brandon has had the most success. We’re making some inroads in the Northwest and Carrollwood areas. I see some encouraging efforts starting among the journalists in those offices who want to build that bridge.

Disallowing journalists’ opinions disallows them to be human. With those rules in place, it’s easy to see why journalists are hesitant to offer any comment on your (or any) website. If reporters do not engage in the conversation taking place on a story that they researched, how is it possible for them to help change the perception that journalists are “scandalmongers, biased advocates, and purveyors of gossip?”

[Weaver, Janet S.] Nothing like starting a question with a position statement! So let me counter with one of my own.

All journalists are human, and we all have our opinions about the people and events we cover. Give me a journalist who has no opinions, and you’ll give me a very stupid journalist. Because we see things up close, because we observe people and processes at close hand over time, we absolutely form opinions about what we observe.

It’s our job to recognize that. And then to work against it, to a certain extent.

Forming opinions for journalists is a lot like scientists forming hypothesis. If you cover agencies or officials for any length of time, you will probably form an opinion about how they are doing their work. The job before a journalist is to try to form that opinion dispassionately, based on fact and patterns of observable behavior – not based on personal political beliefs, or social beliefs, or your religious upbringing. The work calls for you to separate that – your own experiences and your own belief system – from the reportorial opinions you form through observation. Your reporting tests each hypothesis you form – you have to work against it, as much to disprove it as to prove it. You have to be so aware of it that you are always on the look out for fact and behavior that challenge what you’ve previously observed.

It is not dissimilar from what doctors do in their work. A doctor may have personal beliefs about physician-assisted suicide or the propriety of birth control or any number of other health issues. But to live up to his oath, he has to set those personal beliefs aside and act in the best interests of his patient.

Journalists don’t swear an oath in a formal sense. But I think we do make a promise to our readers about our credibility. That means that we work as professionals, that what you read under our bylines is the result of searching for fact and observing and collecting informed comment from other voices, and then putting that together in a format that is intended to enlighten and to let the reader decide.

None of that precludes journalists from participating in conversation. I think we do a lot better journalism if we participate primarily as listeners instead of as speakers. There’s far too little listening going on in this world, and way the hell too much talking.

If journalists do not join the conversation, they can still learn from other viewpoints. But how can they “embrace the opportunity to connect” with those people they are serving?

[Weaver, Janet S.] See above. I think you confuse connection with blabbing about your own take on things. You can connect very nicely by listening, by offering comments that spring from observable fact, by being informative rather than opinionated.

You are a journalist, and are able to successfully offer an opinion (albeit on the commentary page). Do you feel that your audience will be unable to discern reporters’ opinions in comments from the facts in a reporter’s story?

[Weaver, Janet S.]Lord help me, but I just don’t understand why we’ve moved to a world where opinions have such cache. I do not shortchange the audience one bit; I’m pretty confident they can discern the difference between the two. But in a world where everybody and his sister has an opinion on everything, shouldn’t there be at least one safe harbor from the deluge of opinion? Shouldn’t there be one place where the stated purpose of the correspondent is to collect fact, and the informed opinions of others, and then let you make up your own mind? I think the answer is yes.

You singled out Jeff Houck’s work as a good example of one who “gets it.” He also is unafraid to offer opinion on various local websites, including his own personal blog, and answers commentators on “The Stew.” This seems to fly in the face of your contention that opining on stories “is not what journalists do.” Why is this different?

[Weaver, Janet S.]

This is where you’re going to try to catch me in a contradiction, and I’ll admit up front that I’m going to be slicing my logic pretty fine here. And I’ll also admit that my “not what journalists do’’ comment was pretty unsophisticated and too definitive. But you’ve had me typing answers for days here, so cut me some slack.

There is commentary and analysis, all over journalism, and to a certain extent, the distinctions have to do with the subject matter you are covering. I would argue that Jeff offers social commentary, based in observation and reporting, that is written with a strong voice. I don’t read Jeff as offering up opinion that tells you “these people are crooks’’ or “you should never vote this way or believe this thing.’’ I read Jeff as observing and commenting on what he observes, much as newspaper columnists have done for years. Sports coverage has a long tradition of offering observation and commentary on facts ( I would argue that much national sports coverage, especially televised sports coverage, is in danger of becoming an argument desperately in search of a fact.)

What scares me most about journalists crossing the line into opinions, at least in how I’m reading your framing of the question, is moving beyond observation and proving hypothesis and into commentary that begins with “I feel…’’ When journalists start talking about opinions they have because of their personal beliefs, beliefs that aren’t necessarily derived from observation and reporting, then I think we’re giving up something very precious. John Kennedy once described himself as an idealist without illusions, and I would describe myself the same way as an editor. I am not under the illusion that our business is not going to continue to change, and change rapidly. The idealist in me wants to believe in, and protect, our role as an honest broker of information, as an impartial party who can offer up information that others can then comment on and build upon. I know there is skepticism about whether we’ve ever really performed that role, but I sure have tried my hardest in 25 years as a journalist to live up to that. It’s a goal that is unique to our institution, and one that I think is worth saving.

Once again we want to thank Janet for sharing her expertise with a less-than-perfect interviewer. We’re putting together our thoughts on all of this, and will wrap it up with a post shortly.   I encourage you to leave your thoughts, ideas, and questions below in the comments.