The line between ivory tower and careful reporting?
I had an interesting exchange with a colleague at work today that involved whether to blog about a survey in a popular magazine. My colleague didn’t want to give the survey undue credibility by blogging about it on my newsroom’s web site; my colleague knew the survey’s methodology was suspect.
I argued that blogging about it injected us into a conversation about the survey — which was on a subject that would certainly spark discussion. My colleague’s expertise, I argued, would be valuable to readers.
I won’t discuss the details because I don’t want to embarrass my colleague. But the issue can be served by posing it as a hypothetical.
A popular consumer magazine publishes a survey grading which cities were the best for birdwatching. Your City gets a failing grade — ranking at the bottom of the list. Journalists know these surveys are a dime a dozen. In fact, another group released a survey that showed somewhat different results not long ago.
But this magazine crunched its data and came out with its list. Your Town fared badly.
Your Town has an active birdwatching community, however, and would likely have a lot to say about the magazine’s survey. Yet the reporter on the Audubon Beat has no interest in mentioning the survey on his BirdWatch Blog.
“We discredit ourselves by spreading non-facts from publications like these,” he says. “We could crunch different data and make it say whatever we want it to and accomplish the same goal of generating discussion. But if it’s not factual, what purpose does that serve?”
Fair point. On one hand, our job as journalists is to help our communities make sense of the world around them. On the other hand — the hand I would favor — we aren’t the only people involved in the conversation anymore. Lots of people can “commit journalism” — whether we think it’s good journalism or not.
The popular consumer magazine is going to publish its survey whether we like it or not. It will be on newsstands and on the magazine’s web site. Readers will find it, if they’re interested. By ignoring it, we take ourselves out of the conversation and miss an opportunity to lend our expertise and our voice to the conversation.
I don’t believe that blogging about it discredits us.
Maybe I’m wrong.
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June 27th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
It’s the media’s job to distribute information to the public, not to arbitrarily assess the value of it or present certain aspects of it in a way irrelevant to the overall story.
The story with this is the motivation behind such studies. That the methodology was suspect seems enough reason to warrant it as a news item with emphasis on how it would affect the city.