A Platonic Dialogue on Journalistic Fairness, the Internet, Judy Miller Sourcing Ethics, Cross-Potomac White-Collar Outsourcing, and Other Topics

Capitalisticus: So what's this about Michael Froomkin's younger brother Dan?

Academicus: You won't believe me.

Capitalisticus: I won't believe you?

Academicus: Nope.

Capitalisticus: Try me.

Academicus: Well, you're aware that he writes this column--a combination of the Defense Early Bird and the White House Watch that Ryan Lizza currently does for the New Republic--called White House Briefing for the Washington Post's website? Anyway, the Washington Post Ombudsman took a strafing run at Dan's column, saying that it was inappropriate to call it "White House Briefing," that its name should be changed, and that the Washington Post's political reporters did not like it because it was "opinionated" and "liberal."

Capitalisticus: What a minute--did you say "the Ombudsman"?

Academicus: Yep.

Capitalisticus: Deborah Howell, the person who is supposed to handle complaints from readers about reporters and editors?

Academicus: Yep.

Capitalisticus: She based her column on complaints from readers?

Academicus: Nope. Readers seem pretty pleased. The column's principal aim was to try to tell people that the print Washington Post is a very different thing than the WPNI--Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive--operation that is http://washingtonpost.com. To the extent that the column had a base, it seemed to be based on complaints from unnamed Washington Post print newsroom reporters. And on a big complaint from Washington Post national political editor John Harris.

Capitalisticus: That would seem a broadminded view of her role--that is is supposed to include airing complaints from editors about reporters, for example.

Academicus: Yep.

Capitalisticus: What did John Harris say?

Academicus: That Froomkin's column was "an obstacle to our work." That it "dilute[d] [the Post's] only asset -- our credibility" as objective news reporters. That he found claims that Dan Froomkin was a "second-rate hack" to be "not far-fetched".

Capitalisticus: What?

Academicus: When New York University's Jay Rosen of PressThink asked him to document his complaints about Dan, John Harris responded by sending Rosen a webpage address-- http://www.patrickruffini.com/archives/2005/03/dan_froomkin_se.php--as part of his answer: "Does Dan present a liberal worldview? Not always, but cumulatively I think a great many people would say yes—-enough that I don’t want them thinking he works for the news side of the Post. Without agreeing with the views of this conservative blogger who took on Froomkin, I would say his argument does not seem far-fetched to me." The title of the web page was "Dan Froomkin: Second-Rate Hack."

Capitalisticus: Were the arguments on the webpage cogent?

Academicus: Didn't seem so to me--some of the things Froomkin wrote that were called "biased" were pro-liberal, some were pro-libertarian, some were pro-consistency, and most seemed pro-transparency. More important, I think, is that the author of the web page was Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney 2004 Webmaster and currently eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee.

Capitalisticus: Harris thinks journalism is bad if Republican operatives don't like it?

Academicus: It sure looks like it. One theory--held by Jay Rosen--is that what is really going on is a Washington Post that is terrified, terrified of offending the White House.

Capitalisticus: And Harris holds out this Ruffini character and his "not far-fetched" arguments as evidence that Froomkin shouldn't be writing a column called "White House Briefing"?

Academicus: Not quite. You see, Harris didn't call Ruffini "Bush-Cheney 2004 Webmaster and currently eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee." He called him "this conservative blogger."

Capitalisticus: Harris got played? He didn't know what Ruffini's day job was?

Academicus: Nope. Harris was the player--or tried to be: When asked "[W]ill you fess up to what exactly you know/knew about Patrick Ruffini and when exactly you knew it?" Harris answered: "I'll address the matter here. I did know that some people raising questions about Froomkin are Republicans..."

Capitalisticus: So he tried to sell Republican operative Patrick Ruffini to Jay Rosen and his readers as a grassroots conservative weblogger?

Academicus: Yep.

Capitalisticus: Why?

Academicus: Well, wouldn't people have laughed at him if he'd told Rosen, "I think Froomkin has a liberal bias because Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney 2004 Webmaster and currently eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee, says so"?

Capitalisticus: But people must be laughing at him now?

Academicus: Yep.

Capitalisticus: And he didn't anticipate that anybody would fact-check him? This is just not credible. I don't believe you.

Thrasymachus: Remember: he comes out of print daily news journalism. In daily print news journalism, it's easy to be sleazy. If you want to you can make your hit unanswered and then be gone. Your target writes a letter to the editor, it maybe gets published five days later, without context, and if the target is lucky the letter to the editor repairs a tenth of the damage. Can either of you think of an example of a daily print news journalistic hit in the past in which the target managed to effectively respond?

Capitalisticus: Ummm... I still don't believe you.

Academicus: Back when Max Frankel set Fox Butterfield to slime the victim in the William Kennedy-Smith rape case in the New York Times. There was substantial push back then--a lot of New York cocktail party chatter on how it was near-criminal how eager the New York Times was to go into the tank for the Kennedy clan.

Thrasymachus: That's one example--one exception that tests the rule. Are there any others?

Academicus: Ummm...

Thrasymachus: That's the daily news print for you. You can slime. It's in print. You're gone. And they can never catch up. The fact that the web works differently--that you can be fact-checked and the fact-checking can be as widely distributed as your initial slime--that was... not a thing that Harris thought about when he decided to call Pat Ruffini "this conservative weblogger" rather than "Bush-Cheney 2004 Webmaster and currently eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee."

Capitalisticus: But his only asset is his credibility as an objective news reporter. He put that at risk...

Academicus: But identifying Pat Ruffini as a conservative weblogger is like identifying Jim Carville as the spouse of a Republican strategist...

Capitalisticus: Or like Judy Miller's promising to identify Scooter Libby as an ex-Capitol Hill staffer...

Academicus: John Harris has a book about Clinton out, The Survivor. He can't afford--he professionally can't afford--to exhibit Judy Miller sourcing ethics...

Thrasymachus: Did I say that Harris was particularly smart, or thoughtful, or understood his own best interests?

Platon: You have to laugh.

Academicus: You do indeed.

Capitalisticus: You realize that I don't believe you? That this is simply not sane?

Academicus: I told you so.

Glaucon: Yes, you do have to laugh. But has all this done Dan Froomkin any damage?

Academicus: I don't think so. WPNI boss Jim Brady appears to like the work that Froomkin does. And Brady says that he's not thinking of changing the name of the column. The Post's New York Bureau Chief, Michael Howell, has weighed on in the side of approving of what people like Dan Froomkin and Jefferson Morley do:

I’ve been following the latest battle between blogistan and the print world and I had a few thoughts. I am a fan of Dan Froomkin and Jeff Morley, among other bloggers on our website. I admire the loose-limbed free associative quality of their writing.... A few of my esteemed (and I’m not being facetious in my use of that adjective) colleagues have dismissed Froomkin and Morley as clip jobbers. That’s unfair and a bit foolish. They are terrific bloggers, who read widely and compare and contrast and draw connections—-often obvious—-that reporters sometimes shy from for fear of appearing less than objective. (Aspiring to objectivity as opposed to, say, fairness, always has struck me as a desultory intellectual cul de sac.)... That said, I can see the argument for tweaking Froomkin’s labelling. When Froomkin’s column first appeared, I assumed we had added a reporter to our corps in the White House (I would note in my clueless self defense that I am based in New York City and so lag on my awareness of newsroom hires).... [I]t would be terrific if the Web triumphalists, who seem never to have experienced a moment’s doubt, could acknowledge that this just might, possibly, be honestly felt. As political editor John Harris notes, there’s a long and proud tradition of the journalist as independent and removed observer.... [P]rint reporting is a “cool” medium; blogistan is often as hot as Hades. There are perfectly good and honest reasons that some of our best reporters are wary of turning into some version of the mindless babblers who hold forth on television (and, in fairness, on a few blogs) and so they put their toes one at a time into the Web waters.... [M]any of us suspect that the Post maintains a separate web operation for another more prosaic reason. Our dot.com operation is a non-union shop...

Glaucon: I'm surprised. I would have said "clip jobber" is exactly what Froomkin and Morley do--but that to do a good job of clip jobbing, of synthesis and analysis in real time, is a very difficult task and the ability to do it is a very valuable skill. There are more people who can summarize Scott McClellan's briefing in three hours than who can figure out what today's news means and what pieces of it are important in three hours.

Academicus: Did Harris or Howell say what they wanted the name of the column changed to?

Glaucon: Michael Froomkin recommends: "Dan Froomkin's 'Cooking with Walnuts'."

Platon: Still, nothing here seems to explain the energy and the animus that you can feel coming out of Howell and especially Harris, in waves...

Academicus: Yes. What's really going on over there the Washington Post anyway?

Glaucon: I think it's a matter of Froomkin's not having paid his appropriate dues. Dan Froomkin says that he's just providing a bunch of links and commentary so that you can easily keep up with that day's news about the White House. And he is. But he's also being Walter Lippmann--he's telling you where the real news is, and what the day's news really means.

Capitalisticus: And everyone in the Washington Post newsroom thinks that you only get to be Walter Lippmann after paying your dues, when you finally--after decades of loyal service--get promoted from objective news reporter to columnist.

Glaucon: You are not supposed to sneak in the side door, webmaster one day and author of "White House Briefing" the next.

Platon: May I point out that the fact that the Post and the Times choose their "Lippmanns" as a reward for long-time loyal service rather than on the basis of their intelligence or synthesizing ability is a reason that their mindshare is low, and falling? I mean Herbert... Tierney... Broder... Cohen... ye Gods, give me strength!

Academicus: The most heartfelt criticisms of Froomkin's "White House Briefing" I have heard coming from within the print Post aren't objections to Dan Froomkin's being "opinionated" or "liberal"--but rather print journalists' cries that one of us ought to be doing this, or we ought to be rotating it among ourselves, rather than outsourcing it to somebody who doesn't live in the print newsroom.

Televisticus: I think you all are missing the real source of energy here...

Glaucon: You do?

Televisticus: Yes. You have to pick up on Powell's "non-union" comment. I think that this is key: the employees of WPNI--Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive--are not in the print Washington Post's newsroom. They are across the river, in Arlington, Virginia. They are not members of the Newspaper Guild. Print reporters look at shrinking print advertising and growing online advertising revenues, think of how as more and more homes acquire more and more computers it makes more sense to take advantage of the efficiency of electronic distribution, think about how declining print runs and rising page views will shift the distribution of revenue sources for the entire Post operation, and think hard about what's going to happen to them in five years.

Academicus: And that is?

Televisticus: That as print circulation shrinks, and online circulation grows, the Washington Post Company is going to take advantage of this by shifting its beat reporters out from under the aegis of the print Washington Post and onto the books of WPNI. The print reporters will find that their jobs are being eliminated, but that they are welcome to apply to new jobs being created in Arlington. New jobs that do exactly what their old jobs did, but for the web rather than the print edition. New non-union jobs. New jobs that pay half of what their old jobs did.

Academicus: Ah. I see.

Televisticus: And that, I think, is the principal, although perhaps not entirely conscious, source of John Harris's imperative need to throw mud at the WPNI operation. He and his people must establish, and establish immediately, a large quality and reputational difference between Washington Post and WPNI in readers' minds, if they are to have any chance of keeping the Washington Post Company from halving their salaries and making them work in northern Virginia in the long run.

Academicus: Ah. So this is really a cross-Potomac white-collar outsourcing issue?

Televisticus: I think so.

Thrasymachus: You are naive.

Televisticus: Well, yes, I agree that I am naive. But in what way do you think I'm naive?

Thrasymachus: You said that Post corporate headquarters will transfer jobs from the Washington print newsroom to the Arlington web newsroom, in the process destroying the Newspaper Guild and halving journalists' salaries.

Televisticus: I did.

Thrasymachus: Why should they transfer jobs? Why shouldn't Post corporate headquarters wake up to the fact that its three White House print beat reporters spend a large chunk of the day trapped in the White House briefing room (or similar locales) on assassination watch, in the equivalent of a news isolation chamber where their only source of "information" is Scott McClellan? Post corporate headquarters will say:

Wait a minute. This is really expensive. Someone like Dan Froomkin--blogging in his bathrobe from his basement, running off of the wire services and the press releases and the think-tank reports and his own network of policy- and political-relevant sources--can pull together something that is as interesting and as informative as what the beat reporters do, and do it much cheaper. It won't be real White House reporting, but then reporting what Scott McClellan said today isn't real reporting either. And what Froomkin does is just as satisfying to the readers.

The print newsroom jobs won't be moved from Washington to Arlington. The print newsroom jobs will vanish. The White House Briefing Room will be empty--save for the AP and UPI and Knight-Ridder staffs. And, from the print reporters' perspective, their entire profession will have been replaced by something cheap and inferior.

Academicus: Ah.

Thrasymachus: And the only lever the print reporters have to stop this process is to try to make readers think that the work product of the Froomkins and the Morleys is vastly inferior and shoddy so that Washington Post Corporate won't dare undertake such a shift.

Glaucon: Vastly inferior compared to the work product of the Harrises?

Capitalisticus: The guys with the Judy Miller sourcing ethics?

Academicus: The guys who are easily browbeaten by Republican political operatives?

Thrasymachus: Did I say that John Harris and company were effective at making their case?

Comments

[kharris]

So the real trick is to allow the best reporters to have the highest pay, while letting things like seniority, conviviality, closeness to the boss and the like fade into unimportance? That's how print reporters can save the world they know? Uh, but that isn't a way for print reporters to save the world they know. They would then live in a world of far greater competition, greater turn-over, greater accountability. So there is no way for print reporters to save the world they know?...

[jim]

One more aspect.

WPNI is not just non-union. The work its people do can be, is, measured. No-one knows how many people read each article by the reporters in the Post newsroom. No-one knows how much impact any of them has on the Post bottom line. But for each article on washingtonpost.com WPNI management knows how many readers it has and how many of them proceeded to page 2. To the extent that ad rates are keyed to page views, the value to WPNI of each contributor to washingtonpost.com can be computed.

This is, of course, useful to Jim Brady in defending Froomkin. But it is a threat to traditional newsroom culture. Promotion by paying one's dues is a practice which can't withstand measurement.

[Cranky Observer]

I have no brief for Harris' attitude, but there is a serious question here: where does the material that Froomkin (and similar) use as their basis come from? Josh Marshall is talking about hiring two full time reporters for his web site. That is 2, for one of the most popular political web sites on the market. Say Kos could hire 4, Atrios 1. Maybe a few others. Even my local rag has more reporters than that. Where does the raw material come from?

It may be a meaningless question however with the current profitability trend of newspapers.

Cranky

[Steady Eddie]

Brad, you've posited an interesting scenario, and not an overly far-fetched one, either.

But it raises an equally interesting and much more immediately relevant dilemma for the John Harrises of the world. Surely there is little value to retaining a highly-paid bunch of DC political beat reporters if they are to be, not just captives in the literal WH Briefing Room, but stenographers for press releases and anonymous statements from all over DC.

Faced with the prospect of losing their jobs, do you think the more serious editors and reporters -- a notch or two above the John Harrises of DC -- will be emboldened to abandon (or at least reduce their) stenography with the promise to do some real reporting, including costly research digging, to convince senior management to save their jobs?

[Anderson]

Excellent dialogue. I had forgotten that this was the John Harris who wrote "The Survivor," a book I had considered reading.

Thanks very much for helping me cross one off the list--every bit helps. (Currently on "Postwar," fantastic, and "Anna Karenina," goes without saying.)

[john eckstein]

Um, could we have an upper bound of, say, 3 for the personalities in dialogues. Trialogues. Whatever.

[Emma Anne]

Cranky: "I have no brief for Harris' attitude, but there is a serious question here: where does the material that Froomkin (and similar) use as their basis come from?"

That's why AP and Knight-Ridder will still show up for the press briefings, I guess.

[alcalt]

Excellent post! I just finished reading "Search" and I sure would not like to make a living selling newspaper ads in the near future.

[Kathleen]

Nice work!

[s9]

Cranky: "I have no brief for Harris' attitude, but there is a serious question here: where does the material that Froomkin (and similar) use as their basis come from?"

Emma Anne: "That's why AP and Knight-Ridder will still show up for the press briefings, I guess."

No, Brad's version of Thrasymachus is wrong. The press briefing room will be empty. AP, UPI and KR will never be any more able than WP and NYT to justify trapping their reporters— or even stringers, for that matter— in the press briefing room to be Scott McClellan's little bitch for three hours of bondage and discipline training. AFP and Reuters might, but I'll bet the White House will just shut down the daily meetings in the press briefing room before the population of reporters dwindles that much.

The future of ink and paper news is the weekly arts and entertainment tabloid. Daily print operations cannot compete against the Internet press. The writing has been on the wall since Brad Templeton founded ClariNet, and only the most hidebound and dense of professional journalists are still refusing to heed the warning— which is why Brad is continually asking Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Press Corps?

Oh, and the kvetching about union vs. non-union labor is a sideshow. It isn't the unions killing print journalism. The unions are just suffering collateral damage, and they're moving too slowly out of the free-fire zone. There is a *reason* Ken MacLeod wrote that joke into _Cosmonaut Keep_ about the Information Workers of the World Wide Web.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Nice analysis - and I like the Platonic dialogue format. I had read about the Union bit but it just bounced off my thick skull. As usual, many of your commenters also have good points. I don't think we can survive without real reporters, though I can't imagine why three of them ought to be trapped in the WH press office. Obviously, the Newspaper Guild needs to get on the job of unionizing bloggers!

[Doctor Jay]

I've thought for several years that somehow the news sector of the economy devoted too much resource to covering certain stories. Scott McClellan's White House briefing is certainly a prime example. But consider the Super Bowl, too. How many reporters go to cover that story? Was the expense for the trip really justified? Don't we get really dumb stories out of it (assuming you like sports in the first place, that is).

One of the problems that news delivery has in maintaining independence is that it's expensive. So they make use of prepackaged "news" which are really press releases.

By rethinking the cost structure, and how you are going to cover stories and write about them, maybe enough money will be freed to fund reporters going after stories, you know, investigating, not merely sitting in a press briefing for hours.

We definitely need some reporters out there somewhere who cultivate contacts in the government. But how many of them do we need?

[Jonathan Goldberg]

IMHO, the overriding fact defining the situation in all of this is that young people don't read newspapers. They also don't seem to use any other source for hard news, including television and the web. Thus the triumph of Fox over CNN, and the ability of Limbaugh, Bush (at least during his campaigns), and co. to operate in a fact-free zone.

A bird-dog like Froomkin, for all his merit, need birds. He makes it possible to get the most use out of those there are, and that is praiseworthy. But what is most needed by real news is customers. Why is the number of customers dropping? If I knew that I'd be smart.

[Anna Haynes]

I just want to expand upon the observation of Thrasymachus -

> "In daily print news journalism, it's easy to be sleazy....make your hit ... Your target writes a letter to the editor, it maybe gets published five days later, without context, and if the target is lucky the letter to the editor repairs a tenth of the damage."

And if the target is unlucky, the paper will have structured its online archive search so as to retrieve only the original story, not the letters.
(and emails to the paper asking about this will invariably be lost in transit)

[bhagavathy]

I think Brad is on target and as some commenters note some thought needs to be given to who will report on the news after all. I think the answer is obvious: the reporters will come from Reuters, AP and so forth. Yahoo's front page features news from exactly these sources. And the Yahoos of the world have figured out how to pay Reuters on the backend and make money by giving news away free on the front end. Google has too (except that they don't currently pay Reuters etc, but they will soon).

The trouble for the Wash. Post is not only that their reporters are dispensable but also that their online operations are not making anything close to the money that their print operations are used to. Again for a very simple reason: people advertise in print newspapers because that's where you should be. Online advertisers only advertise if the economics makes sense.

I offer an anecdote. Listening to KQED's Forum a couple weeks or so ago, SF Chronicle's Phil Bronstein was on the program and he boasted that their website sfgate.com received on the order of 2M unique visitors and 10M total visits a month (I might be off on the exact numbers but the orders of magnitude are right). Think for a moment how pitiful that is. Not only do their visitors read about 5 pages a month (compare that to the number of newspaper pages in a month), in revenue terms that probably gets you no more than $50k a month. Google makes that revenue in what? 5 minutes?

Google and Yahoo have figured out how to get those visitors and keep them. Newspapers are currently doing a very poor job of acquiring and keeping their customers on their pages. Newspapers can fight back in one of two ways: put out a very high quality product and charge for it (WSJ news pages, definitely *not* Times op-ed pages) or give away all of your news free but get the readers in, and keep them on your pages. Arthur Sulzberger Jr may be known not just for the fall of Ms Miller but the fall of the Gray Lady herself.

[Chris]

Mr Goldberg, being a young person who hangs out with young people who do and don't follow the news I can tell you that if you make the assumption that our society will be free and prosperous as long as you are alive it makes much more sense to take advantage of that freedom and prosperity than it does to worry or think about the nature and structure of it.

And how does Josh Marshell's operation fit into all of this?

[bakho]

At some point the WH will recognize that it is more efficient to conduct the briefing online. If "Call-in" shows can take calls from listeners (after screening) or carrying on split screen discussion from multiple studios, so can the WH.  I believe that a President Gore (journalist and creator of funding for the internet) would have moved far down this road in his second term.

[Barry]

Cranky_observer: "I have no brief for Harris' attitude, but there is a serious question here: where does the material that Froomkin (and similar) use as their basis come from? Josh Marshall is talking about hiring two full time reporters for his web site. That is 2, for one of the most popular political web sites on the market. Say Kos could hire 4, Atrios 1. Maybe a few others. Even my local rag has more reporters than that. Where does the raw material come from?"

From real reporters, possibly. Which some large fraction of the current stars of the large papers are not.

That's probably one of their chief fears - the newspapers don't need reporters who act as stenographers, they can hire cheaper rewrite people. And they don't need editors for that, either, they just need supervisors of rewrite people.

[Barry]

Brad, about a reporter's/editor's chief asset being credibility: I think that you need to specify 'credibility to whom'? In this attack, Harris obviously feels that his most important asset is being a credible servant to the powers that be. Being credible to readers is only necessary to the extent of plausible deniability, and a good thick coat of whitewash.

[Oberon]

Mr. deLong:

Thank you for using the phrase "exception that tests the rule".

And using it correctly.

Made my day.

[John Evans]

How about "White House Beefing"?

[Cranky Observer]

Try a google for

washington post harris

I found the results interesting! Probably not what Mr. Harris was hoping.

Cranky

[Senor Guapo]

Here's my question:

Harris is concerned that because the column is called "White House Briefing" that people will think Froomkin is reporting from the White House.

But honestly, who cares where Froomkin is reporting from? Does it really affect anyone's ability to interpret the news Froomkin is reporting?

I just find Harris' position on this bizarre.

[Cranky Observer]

> But honestly, who cares where Froomkin is
> reporting from? Does it really affect
> anyone's ability to interpret the news
> Froomkin is reporting?

Remember that the first crack in the Jason Blair case came when Blair missed the late train from New York to DC. He was supposed to take that train to DC, get off at the station, call his editor, say "I'm filing from Washington", and then get back on the train and go home. In the NYT's world that justified puttting a "from Washington" byline on the story. He missed the train and called his editor from his friend's apartment in NY instead.

Now, did that make any sense to you? Me either. But apparently it was very important to the NYT that some person physically be in Washington for 5 seconds to make the byline "real". I think your point falls into the same weird newspaper world.

Cranky

[looj]

had a meeting with a post reporter a few weeks ago (metro desk, getting lots of fp's for the beat, even above fold, guess which metro story is big in DC right now?), and one of the first things he asked in the elevator going to his office, after i commented that i read the post regularly, was "online or print?" These guys know the clock is ticking.

[Ba'al]

I believe that Rosen is most likely to be correct and that The Post is terrified of the White House, but you sure do raise some interesting alternative hypotheses.

This literary form has not outlived its usefulness in the last couple of thousand years.

[ice weasel]

It's all speculation. At least you have managed to make it entertaining and interesting. Freaking brilliant post Brad.

Thanks.

[Tilli (Mojave Desert)]

I wonder how long before we have to pay for online subscriptions to the major newspapers?

[wkwillis]

When we have a real online newspaper. Call it USA Tomorrow.