Como se ha transformado el periodismo

Steven Sinofsky

@stevesi

This thread below offers a view on why the media had so much difficulty with the news
yesterday compared to the way online worked. It is an important perspective that I wanted to
build upon. It should not come as a surprise that the "competitor" to the media yesterday is
also called "open source". OS News has all the properties of "open source" that we are familiar
with from software. That means all the benefits. It also means all of the negatives as viewed by
incumbents. Much like proprietary software, the flagship media outlets view news gathering
through the lens of proprietary source, only in this case the source generally means access to
people, information, data that is not available to laypeople. Since the post-Watergate era
reporting has meant knocking on doors, cold calling, and most of all having relationships with
established sources and experts on topics. Conversely, these established sources and experts
rely on these relationships to spoon out information and views in an effort to shape a
narrative. This is a routine/process/game that has only become more institutionalized. And
those sources cold-called, much like people who did not have access to reusable code they
were wildly mismatched with relative to the professionals. That is why so often these people
inadvertently shaped a narrative that later proved to have problems. In the past before open
source, stories would run, information would be provided by "sources close to" whatever was
happening in the world, and then that was the established narrative. In today's world it is not
just that everyone anywhere can post their thoughts, personal experiences, videos/photos, or
anything that may or may not contribute. It is also that there is a community of people willing
to test the veracity of that information. And then there is a community willing to compare the
results of those tests and so on. It becomes essentially impossible for the news to be defined
by a private conversation between a "well-placed source" and a reporter. This reality extends
even further to the vast array of sensors from satellite imagery to maps, witness recordings,
historical information and records, and an incredible collection of data sources—many
provided by the government itself. These sources provide more inputs to a wide-ranging
community testing the validity of stories. Finally add to this that often there are true experts
on events that are no longer bound by organizations involved who are willing to lend their
opinions. It isn't simply the domain knowledge or access to the data, but the checks and
balances, and the debate (vigorous as it is) across all those bits and pieces. And it is also the
speed at which that system works. The participants are available around the clock, in every
language, in every time zone. No newsroom has that no matter how big. An example
comparison is the world of securing and maintaining software systems. By now most in the
industry know that security vulnerabilities are discovered and understood far more quickly
outside the makers of those products than inside their own organizations. The information to
identify, defend, and correct these problems—whether proprietary software or not—exceed
that of the companies themselves. This promise of open-source software has held true from
the early days. It is why the old school of keeping close to the vest in this space has so totally
failed for vendors—this aspect of the proprietary model no longer works. It has been
disruptive. Events like yesterday clearly demonstrate just how disruptive the open-source
news model is to events compared to the proprietary source model of the past. It also explains
why there is a perception that news is far more opinion than it used to be—opinions can be
branded and made proprietary far easier than trying to staff a team to compete with a
community devoted to geoverification, for example. Some long for the days of the 6pm
newscast. This is most certainly a rose-colored view of the past. Those who recall this era
remember being soothed by the packaging of the news. In hindsight, what we were watching
was not a careful synthesis of fact-checked news but the opinions and interpretations of a
small number of people with very limited expertise and even more limited information. It is
only events like "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and others recently that have shown the
limits of this process in the face of modern information, data, and analysis. I kept asking myself
yesterday how different the WMD story would have been had it happened 20 years later. How
would a generation of events have unfolded? It is easy to cry "misinformation" but that is not
what is going on. Misinformation is when actors deliberately falsify what is going on. Sharing
something and having an opinion as just a random person isn't that. It is misinformation for
institutions that trade on trust and truthfulness to put forth information that has not been
vetted by a community or has not used all available sources. News gathering has come far
enough now to know that the news is not simply what one actor said off the record confirmed
by a person down the hall from that actor. The actors themselves have to deal with open-
source information and make a case that stands up to the sources available to everyone.
Journalists then were exceedingly well-intentioned and did all they could at the time and acted
with integrity as much as any profession. That is no different than what commercial software
used to be—it was the right way and only way to make software at the time. Disruption has
many forms. We tend to focus on specific technologies and markets and the business impact.
What we witnessed yesterday was a prime example of old-school versus modern reporting in a
fluid, chaotic, and difficult situation. I believe it is incredibly important to take lessons from this
and to adjust our view of what is reliable at the time.
John Burn-Murdoch

@jburnmurdoch

Some quick thoughts on why large parts of the mainstream media keep slipping up on
Gaza/Israel (and why it was the same at times with Covid): The main reason is a failure to keep
pace with modern news gathering techniques, but there’s more.

18 oct.

With the proliferation of photos/footage, satellite imagery and map data, forensic video/image
analysis and geolocation (~OSINT) has clearly been a key news gathering technique for several
years now. A key news gathering technique *completely absent from most newsrooms*.

18 oct.

Obviously not every journalist should be an OSINT specialist, just as not every journalist is a
specialist in combing through financial accounts, or scraping websites, or doing undercover
investigations. But any large news org should have *some* OSINT specialists.

18 oct.

Some of the biggest international news orgs now do have OSINT teams (or similar).

@washingtonpost

calls theirs “visual forensics”,

@nytimes

and

@FT
go with “visual investigations”. But most news orgs, even large ones, still don’t.

18 oct.

This means that when you have events unfolding rapidly amid a fog of war, most news orgs are
still completely reliant on what they’re told by their sources. This isn’t ideal at the best of
times, but especially so when different sources are clearly motivated to mislead.

18 oct.

It was the same during Covid, when everyone was quoting officials talking about things that
could easily be checked and sometimes debunked by someone capable of doing their own data
analysis. But there weren’t enough of those skills in newsrooms, so unchecked claims
abounded.

18 oct.

Even when newsrooms have built up these resources (whether OSINT or data) the newness of
those teams means there’s some initial wariness about relying on new people (often young
and not from traditional journalism backgrounds, so considered outsiders) for massive news
lines.

18 oct.

The result is most mainstream news orgs today are either simply not equipped to determine
for themselves what’s happening in some of the world’s biggest stories, or lack the confidence
to allow their in-house technical specialists to cast doubt on a star reporter’s trusted source

18 oct.

So you end up with situations where huge, respected news organisations are reporting as fact
things that have already been shown by technically adept news gatherers outside newsrooms
to be false or at the very least highly uncertain. It’s hugely damaging to trust in journalism.

18 oct.

Even without an in-house OSINT team, organisations like

@bellingcat

and

@airwars
have been around for almost a decade now to assist. With a situation like Gaza/Israel, any time
you’re getting a comment from an official spokesperson, you should also be getting a comment
from OSINT

18 oct.

Of course, news orgs also don’t help themselves by insisting on coming out with definitive
takes immediately. I obviously get the desire to be first, and the instinctive dislike of ambiguity.
But in situations like this, surely it’s better to be second and definitively correct?

18 oct.

Plus, with the sheer amount of footage these days, and the number of OSINT specialists
combing through it, we’re often only talking about waiting a few hours.

18 oct.

I’m sure mainstream media will catch up, but it needs to happen fast in order to retain trust
and even relevance, or readers will go elsewhere. “According to a spokesperson” just doesn’t
really cut it when the primary evidence is right there.

18 oct.

Beyond OSINT, I think the overarching issue is: There’s an implicit assumption in most of
journalism that the only way to find out what’s happening is to ask someone. For years now
it’s been possible to do better than that, but the industry has not fully taken this on board.