Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.
Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in "Delete".
"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making," he argues. "It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events."
- Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index on Censorship. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Solicitors Carter-Ruck have withdrawn the terms of an injunction preventing the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question by Newcastle-under-Lyme Labour MP and former journalist Paul Farrelly.
This has been seen - rightly - as a victory for free expression, and a demonstration of the amazing power of the web in the face of attempted censorship.
Once the Guardian had published its slightly cryptic story on its website last night, containing such tantalising phrases as: “Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret”, it was inevitable that people would go searching.
Within hours, the Internet was alive with speculation, links to leaked documents, and republication of cached articles. At one point on Tuesday morning, phrases relating to the case constituted four of Twitter’s top ten “trending topics” --- a scarcely believable profile for a story that, technically, no one was supposed to be talking about.
Carter-Ruck seem not to have noticed the mindset of an increasing number of web users: once we are told we can’t know something, modern web users will set about finding out about it with a gleeful determination --- and more often than not with neither the cautiousness nor the proprietary attitude to information that can slow down “traditional” reporting.
The Streisand Effect -- whereby attempts to censor information end up ensuring the information is only spread more widely, is something that lawyers and judges are going to have to figure out.
The strong libertarian culture of the Internet quite simply means that you cannot get away with telling people what to do, and what to read, while surfing. Today’s Twitter triumph is more a victory for the culture of online social networking than it is for the technology.
And an important victory it is. What was at stake here was not merely a newspaper’s right to tell a story, but the very principal of open democracy: if newspapers and other media cannot report everyday parliamentary proceedings without fear of the courts, it is not just the journalism industry that suffers: it is the common citizen’s ability to participate in, and scrutinise, politics.
Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.
Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:
Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among corporate users.
Click to enlarge
What's most interesting in the report, now in its 14th year, is what the corporate research firm says is a long way off from the mainstream.
Funny how long hype cycles take to pay out. Three years ago, in its 2006 Hype Cycle Report, Gartner predicted Web 2.0 would go mainstream within just two years.
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
The recent election in Iran was one of the more dramatic stories this year, with powerful images of protests and street-fighting dominating television and online coverage.
Because traditional news organizations were essentially shut down by the authorities, it fell to citizen journalists -- many of whom were among the protesters -- to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
This has raised a number of ethics, standards and legal questions for mainstream journalists. My colleague John Clarke, Reuters Global Television Editor, found himself in the middle of the issue as images became available and clients demanded coverage of the election's aftermath. John discusses the issues raised, the lessons learned and the opportunities for the future below. As always, his opinions are his own.
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Protests following the controversial Iranian election have put citizen journalism even more firmly in the spotlight. With traditional news gathering organizations effectively shut down by authorities, text, video and stills being produced and posted on social websites by the protesters themselves became the main way that much information was getting out of the country. This dramatic coverage -- regardless of (and perhaps even enhanced by) its shaky nature -- was accessed by Reuters (and other news organizations) and distributed to clients and viewers around the world.
Citizen journalism isn't new. We have long accessed amateur footage of stories around the world, from plane crashes to wars to natural disasters. However, the internet and mobile devices have resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of content available and the speed of delivery, the ability to deliver outside of normal controls, more uncertainty over origin, ownership and verification, and the viral nature in which it can all spread around the globe.
At Reuters, we have used video from social networking websites for several years. We put in place strict rules about how such material can be accessed and used, with only senior editors authorized to approve running this material.
Verification is a major issue. Video or photos might not be what they purport to be, either because of sloppy information from the person posting it, or deliberate deceit, either to create mischief or for political or other reasons.
Another important consideration is that copyright still applies to the internet. The person posting material might hold copyright, or worse, they might not hold copyright. The material could originate from a private individual, a company or another news organization. Wherever possible, we have sought to find and seek permission from the originator of the material, as we would do for any third-party material accessed in any other way. This can apply to hard news and lighter material, including funny visual postings that have gone viral and have become stories in their own right.
When the Iran story broke, even when we were able to operate, we still accessed internet-posted amateur video. But such footage became even more important when our operations were hampered by authorities –- the sheer number of mini-cams and mobile phones taking visual images meant there would be good material we would want, even if we were able to operate freely ourselves.
Early on, we set up a 24-hour monitoring of Twitter and various social networking sites. We made a call early on that we would relax our rules on clearance –- protesters posting video and pictures on social networks wanted to get them to the world, and we were another conduit for that. Other news organizations followed a similar rationale.
Throughout the Iran story, however, we were extremely careful about what we wrote and said about material accessed from social networking sites, certainly not taking at face value what (little) information usually comes with such posts.
We have been clear when we are unable to verify content or location or date, and have also clearly stated that we’ve accessed it from a social networking site. Our subscribers (and their viewers) are also intelligent enough to know that no-one can 100 percent verify this type of material and are similarly circumspect, and the shaky, low-resolution quality of much of this material is an immediate signal to clients and viewers that it was shot by an amateur.
This approach does not, of course, absolve us of all responsibility. There have been many videos and photos we haven’t used because they have not rung true for one reason or another.
Iran was also a special case in that citizen journalism was not only a way to get video and photographs, but it was a very important part of the story itself. We didn’t just get video from citizen journalists, we did several stories, like the one below, about the importance of citizen journalism in Iran, which put our use of it in its proper context, too.
Iran was in many respects the culmination of trends in the way citizens have been using the web for the past few years –- a confluence of the proliferation of mobile recording devices, internet delivery and social networking sites that allow almost instantaneous interactions between users and an exchange of information and ideas.
How social networking intersects with traditional news organizations is also an evolutionary process.
It will not be good enough for traditional news companies to simply take from citizen journalists –- it needs to be a two-way exchange of content, information and ideas, with mainstream news companies contributing via blogs, chatrooms and other social networking sites, whether in the general news area or in specialist forums such as those for the financial community.
Verification, copyright and quality will always be significant issues -- even more so as millions of people around the world have the ability to distribute and exchange content. The combination of citizen journalism, and the standards of news organizations of companies such as Reuters, has the ability to produce a richer flow of information around the world.
Provided we clearly flag the origin of material and put the relevant context around it, our subscribers, our viewers and our readers –- who are already immersed in social networking as consumers and contributors themselves –- are smart enough to evaluate this content, without challenging our core journalistic values.
– Reese Erlich is a freelance foreign correspondent who covered the Iranian elections and is author of The Iran Agenda: the Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Polipoint Press) The views expressed are his own. —
Iran is not undergoing a Twitter Revolution. The term simultaneously mischaracterizes and trivializes the important mass movement developing in Iran.
Here’s how it all began. The Iranian government prohibited foreign reporters from traveling outside Tehran without special permission, and later confined them to their hotel rooms and offices. CNN and other cable networks were particularly desperate to find ways to show the large demonstrations and government repression. So they turned to Internet sites such as Facebook and Twitter in a frantic effort to get information. Since reporters were getting most of their information from Tweets and You Tube video clips, the notion of a “Twitter Revolution” was born.
We reporters love a catch phrase and, Twitter being all a flutter in the west, it seemed to fit. It’s a catchy phrase but highly misleading.
First of all the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter. While reporting in Tehran, I personally didn’t encounter anyone who used it regularly. A relatively small number of young, economically well off Iranians do use Twitter. A larger number have access to the Internet. However, in the beginning, most demonstrations were organized through word of mouth, mobile phone calls and text messaging.
But somehow “Text Messaging Revolution” doesn’t have that modern, sexy ring, especially if you have to type it with your thumbs on a tiny keyboard.
More importantly, by focusing on the latest in Internet communications, cable TV networks intentionally or unintentionally characterize a genuine mass movement as something supported mainly by the Twittering classes.
I witnessed tens of thousands of mostly young people coming out into the streets in spontaneous campaign rallies in the days leading up to the election – most of whom had never heard of Twitter.
They shared a common joy not only campaigning for reformist Mirhossein Mousavi, but in being able to freely express themselves for the first time in many years. When the government announced an overwhelming victory for hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only two hours after the polls closed, people became furious.
Over the next few days, hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets in Tehran and cities around the country. They organized silent marches through word of mouth and phone calls since the government had shut down text messaging just prior to the election. Contrary to popular perception, these gatherings included women in chadors, workers and clerics – not just the Twittering classes. Spontaneous marches took place in south Tehran, a decidedly poorer section of town and supposedly a stronghold for Ahmadinejad.
Iranians initially protested what they perceived as massive vote fraud, but that quickly evolved as the protests grew in size and breadth. In the week after the June 14 election, millions of Iranians vented 30 years of pent up anger at a repressive system.
Iranian youth particularly resented President Ahmadinejad’s support for religious militia attacks on unmarried young men and women walking together and against women not covering enough hair with their hijab. Workers resented the 24 percent annual inflation that robbed them of real wage increases. Independent trade unionists had been fighting for decent wages and for the right to organize.
Some demonstrators wanted a more moderate Islamic government. Others advocated a separation of mosque and state, and a return to parliamentary democracy. They are well aware that when Iran had a genuine parliamentary system under Prime Minister Mossadegh, the CIA overthrew it in 1953 in order to promote the Shah as dictator. I didn’t meet any Iranians calling for U.S. intervention; that’s strictly a debate inside the Washington beltway.
Some Iranian friends have asked me why Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei would throw his support behind Ahmadinejad when his presidency was so clearly damaging the country at home and abroad. Initially, Khamenei supported the president because they share common ideological and political positions. Later, the top clerical leaders saw the mass movement that coalesced around Mousavi’s campaign as a direct threat to government stability and their future rule.
Since June 21, the top clerics, military and intelligence services have mobilized their entire apparatus to crush the movement for social and economic change.
The mass movement that sprang forth in the past few weeks has been 30 years in coming. It’s not a Twitter Revolution, nor even a “velvet revolution” like those in Eastern Europe.
It’s a genuine Iranian mass movement made up of students, workers, women, and middle class folks. It may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles.
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
Are we too connected?
In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.
Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.
At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”
We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:
"Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom".
"post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney". (This one's fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world's most followed Twitterer).
"Just got picture with Dule Hill."
Given the quality of the material, it's little wonder that a Nielsen study found that Twitter retained only 40 percent of its new members after a month of use. And that was after Oprah started sharing her 140-character thoughts. Before that it was 30 percent.
But could it be that this “me, me, me” quality of Facebook and Twitter is just an early evolutionary stage of something smarter and more useful? There are some encouraging signs -- and that's a good thing, because we're becoming ever more connected.
How connected are we?
Facebook has more than 200 million active users and more than 100 million log on at least once a day. More than 3.5 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook and more than 20 million users update their statuses at least once a day.
A Nielsen survey found that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the last quarter of 2008, an astonishing 80 messages a day. That's more than double the previous year's figures and works out to more than three messages an hour -- if they never sleep or go to class.
How connected are we going to be?
Delta Airlines reported that more than 300 of its aircraft will be equipped with wi-fi this year, enabling email users to stay connected -- or shackled -- to their accounts even seven miles above the earth. Other airlines are closely watching Delta's experience.
Media outlets and other institutions are finding ways to take advantage of this connectivity, moving beyond gossip and gab.
ProPublica recently introduced Change Tracker, an application that monitors government websites and sends out notices of changes as they are posted via a Twitter feed. Some of the changes are a bit obscure -- "Biography of Millard Fillmore [rare] changed on 5/27" -- but others track changes to the website following the spending of economic stimulus money.
The Vatican has added an iPhone app to reach out to young, connected people, according to Online Media Daily. Young people "are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Social Communications department.
At Reuters, we're using Reuters Messenger to build chat rooms in which our journalists can expand their conversation with the marketplace through informal, dynamic interactions with a group of engaged financial news clients on our terminals.
We're also using Twitter in some intriguing ways:
Specialist journalists use it to share articles and build up a following.
Online editorial staff and bloggers use Twitter to distribute news and solicit reader comment.
Journalists are using Twitter during live events like Davos (Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger used it to break news there earlier this year) and to solicit questions for newsmaker interviews.
There are huge implications for those of us in the news media as we try to reach an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience awash in information, some of it wanted and much of it not.
And journalists who work and live in the digital world (and that’s just about all of us now) will find that there is little or no difference between our professional and private personae in the wide-open world of social media. A visit to my Facebook page, for example, would reveal to my friends that I have a strong interest in horse racing; an affection for the New York Yankees (an obsession, my wife would argue); and take great pleasure in the words and music of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. What you won't find is an indication of my politics or religion.
Here at Reuters, we are developing guidelines for how our journalists interact with social media.
If Reuters journalists want to use Twitter or social media as part of their professional role they should seek the permission of their manager.
If Reuters journalists use Twitter professionally they should use the word "Reuters" in the name of their streams or somewhere else on the page.
The Trust Principles apply to Twitter and social media -- they should do nothing that compromises them.
Microblogging and use of social media tend to blur the distinction between professional and personal lives: When using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity our journalists should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about their personal lives.
In an email to the editorial staff, Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger told Reuters journalists, "whether we like it or not, our online identities are inextricably linked with our workplace identities....Things we do online could very easily taint our journalistic activity. If one of us self-identifies as 'very liberal' politically, it may well be the truth, but would advertising it simply feed the myth that journalists in general have a liberal bias?"
"The easiest rule," Schlesinger cautioned, "is to stop, think and imagine: How would you feel and how would you react if someone made your Facebook page or blog or online comment a story? Could you defend your objectivity? Could Reuters defend having you on the beat you’re on? Could your reputation, and ours, survive someone making an issue of it?"
I'm sure neither Schlesinger nor I have had the last word on the relationship of journalism and social media, nor on whether we're all too connected. What we need to pay attention to is the quality of those connections.
What do you think about how journalists are and should be using social media and microblogging? Let us know here -- and don't feel like you have to keep your thoughts to 140 characters.
John C Abell is the New York Bureau Chief for Wired.com and edits the Epicenter Blog. The opinions expressed are his own.
Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the social media space, with some 200 million members, a valuation of perhaps $5 billion and a base that has expanded well beyond its early roots as a private hangout for bored Ivy League students.
But, like the ad says, life comes at you fast — and there is nothing more unforgiving than internet time. So, are the best years ahead for Facebook, or is the finicky mob of cool kids — and now their parents and grandparents — already peering down the road for another Next Great Thing?
One thing is for sure: Nothing lasts forever. We need Microsoft, perhaps, but nobody gets very excited about it anymore (except maybe a hyperactive Steve Ballmer). AOL? They could do no wrong when dial-up was king. But when broadband made competitors out of the telcos AOL had leveraged to create an onramp to the internet, a steady decline into near oblivion began.
The internet roadside is littered with bold ideas hatched too early or denied a dignified death. David Wetherell was considered a bold genius when, in 1999, he turned up his nose at a deal that would have valued his internet incubator CMGI at about $18 billion. Fast Forward to 2009: CMGI is now ModusLink Global Solutions, and worth about 1/100th that.
But at least it’s still around. Netscape, the granddaddy of all dotcom IPOs, was purchased by AOL before the dotcom bubble burst and was RIP for all intents and purposes in 2007. Video powerhouse Broadcast.com? Bought by Yahoo and now ghostware. Yahoo isn’t doing all that great, for that matter.
So far, though, Facebook keeps catching the wave. It not only makes money, but a profit — perhaps as much as $200 million this year. Not bad for a company that has no discernible business model. It is said to be worth as much as $5 billion, a figure extrapolated from rejected cash infusion offers by private equity firms and the secondary market for employee insider shares. That’s a far cry from the $15 billion valuation implied by Microsoft’s $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake in October 2007, but it ain’t hay, and we are in a global recession.
Valuation is an important part of the Facebook story, but other numbers are even more important: Facebook’s demographics. The story of this metric can almost be told with a single factoid: Mark Zuckerberg matched the median age of a Facebook member when he started the thing — and now, at 25, he still does.
Age creep is a good thing — the alternative is death, remember. The college farm system delivers basically the same number of students at any given time, and they are always about the same age. Growing your membership would mean skewing the metric up or down. It’s hard to go down too much. As it happens the fastest-growing group is women over 55, and there are even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.
So far Facebook has avoided the worst mistakes of other social networks, which contributed to their own irrelevance by failing to adapt. It might have been the death knell for Facebook to open up to the parents and grandparents of their earliest adopters, but it didn’t turn out that way. Facebook has attracted a vibrant developer community, but they don’t allow the rampant customization that makes some MySpace pages epilepsy inducing. And even though it has flirted with the dark side when it comes to user privacy, its support for OpenID may prove to be the most significant milestone in the advent of an open and social web.
Even so, Facebook must be hearing footsteps from Twitter, the new kid in town. Twitter is in many ways the anti-Facebook: a distributed society that does one simple thing rather than a gated community with a gazillion avenues and possibilities. Twitter became a geek darling at the 2007 SouthBySouthWest conference in Austin, Texas, and went vertical earlier this year when politicians and celebrities “discovered” it. Some of the cool kids are already saying it has jumped the shark now that the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Sen. John McCain on are it — but they are probably just jealous about the hundreds of thousands of followers these celebrities have.
For the moment, Twitter seems to be sucking all the air out of the room. In the “fastest-growing” metric it is as much a no contest in Twitter’s favor — quadrupling to 17 million U.S. visitors in the past two months — as it is in Facebook’s for overall membership. Like Facebook, Twitter has no real business model yet and yet seems able to sustain itself just fine for many years to come. On those rare occasions Twitter gets bad press, as it did last week when it changed an arcane user setting without warning, the worst insult hurled its way was that its imperious behavior was Facebook-like.
Even Facebook seems to get it. It rolled out design changes two months ago in a clear nod to the Twitter view of the world. As TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld put it: “Despite its already considerable size, Facebook is showing how adept it can be in responding to new threats. If Facebook cannot buy Twitter, it will try to beat it instead.”
Facebook has already made many transitions that have tripped up less nimble organizations. It went from being as exclusive as you could possibly be — Harvard students only — to letting in anyone. It’s as popular now with grandparents as it is with their grandchildren. It is a daily fixture in the lives of tens of millions of people.
Now that the panic over the H1N1 flu strain has somewhat subsided, experts are contemplating what role Twitter played in helping the virus, commonly known as swine flu, go viral.
The H1N1 virus has caused around 6,500 infections in 33 countries and 65 people have died so far, according to the World Health Organization. Common seasonal flu kills up to 500,000 people a year worldwide.
So did Twitter put the media before the message and escalate anxieties by propagating rumors of biological attack and pork production infection?
Or did the Twittersphere prove itself to be the first choice in information for the wired era?
I've been tweeting from the World Economic Forum, using the microblogging platform Twitter to discuss the mundane (describing crepuscular darkness of the Swiss Alps at 5 a.m.) or the interesting (live tweeting from presentations).
Am I destroying Reuters standards by encouraging tweeting or blogging?
(These aren't rhetorical questions - I've been challenged by many people who would answer those questions as No, Yes, Yes, and Yes! I answer them as Yes, Potentially, No and No.)
The foundation of what we do as a company and as a news service are the Reuters Trust Principles.
While it is vital to read the five as a whole, I take the fifth ("That no effort shall be spared to expand, develop and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business") as an imperative for continual innovation and experimentation.
I have no idea what journalism will look like in five years except that it will be different than it is now. That's a great thing, I believe.
I have little patience for those who cling to sentimental (and frankly inaccurate) memories of the good old halcyon days of journalism that were somehow purer and better than a world where tweets and blogs compete with news wires and newspapers.
Bring it on, I say!
Journalism is one of the great self-declared professions and crafts. I am a journalist because I said I was one more than two decades ago and have spent the years since working on my abilities. I am not one because I am somehow anointed with a certificate or an exam result.
Journalism is ideally designed for democratisation.
Working for Reuters gives me a tremendous platform and great access. It does not give me a license.
Microblogging and macroblogging and social networks are themselves great platforms.
If great storytellers use those platforms to display their knowledge, access, expertise and abilities, I think that is a marvellous advance.
If I don't beat the Reuters wire with a live tweet because I deliberately hold back, someone else will. If I don't beat the Reuters wire because I'm slow or inattentive, someone else will.
The reason my live tweeting was fast is that it was unintermediated, while the journalist covering the story went the traditional route and had a discussion with an editor about how best to position and play the story.
Both methods have important roles. In this case, the editor added value.
In a democratic world where publishing platforms are available to all, editors and institutions like Reuters MUST add great value if they are to survive the competitive fight with the unintermediated storytellers.
I love that.
I love the competitive pressure that brings.
I love the way it will force us continually to redefine our role vis-a-vis unaffiliated storytellers.
I love the way it is and will continue to force us to redefine our profession and our craft.
Are there potential pitfalls and dangers? Could a mistweet hurt our reputation? Of course. And over time we will have to work hard to decide what we have reporters tweet in their own names and what we have them do in the company name; we'll have to refine our rules about micro and macroblogging to allow the maximum of free expression while holding fast to our important values of being fair, accurate and free from bias.
But we will get there. And consumers of news will be the ultimate beneficiaries.
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
A little girl in my family got a typewriter for Christmas.
Not a laptop. Nothing with a screen. A typewriter. The old-fashioned manual kind with a smeary ribbon and keys that stick.
Typewriters had pretty much gone the way of dodo birds, car tail fins and cigar-chomping editors who yell “Stop the Presses” quite some years before my granddaughter was born. But it was the typewriter used by the school-age, aspiring journalist in the movie “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" that captivated her.
Or maybe it was the way the typewriter was used. In the movie, a tween-ish girl, played winningly by Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine"), does old-fashioned journalism and writes stories that help right a wrong in Depression-era Cincinnati. Kit may be young, but in a challenging environment she keeps her wits—and a strong sense of ethics—about her.
In today’s rapidly realigning media landscape, typewriters have long since given way to laptops, BlackBerries, camera phones, video phones and Twitter. But here at Thomson Reuters, and in the media as a whole, the need for a strong sense of ethics has never been more necessary.
Not all Hollywood depictions of our profession are that inspiring to would-be journalists — mainly because of the way some on-screen reporters behave.
Take "Ace in the Hole," Billy Wilder’s 1951 tale of a reporter (Kirk Douglas) who cynically prolongs and manipulates coverage of a man trapped in a cave in the hope of returning to the big time. Douglas’s Chuck Tatum is as cynical as Kit is idealistic.
“I can handle big news and little news,” he tells an editor. “And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.” Later, referring to a sign in the newsroom that reads “Tell the Truth,” Tatum acknowledges some guilt. But, “Not enough to stop me. I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken hearted wife for Leo, then that's alright too!”
In both movies, the journalists use typewriters. It’s what they do with them that makes the difference. And today, it’s what we do with our hardware—the journalism we produce—that makes the difference.
At Thomson Reuters, there are five Trust Principles that form the bedrock on which our journalism rests. The principles, adopted by Reuters in 1941 and fully embraced by Thomson when it acquired Reuters in 2008, state that:
• Thomson Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction;
• Integrity, independence and freedom from bias shall at all times be fully preserved;
• Thomson Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals and others with whom Thomson Reuters has or may have contracts;
• Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and
• No effort shall be spared to expand, develop and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business.
To me, at the heart of these principles are the preservation of integrity, independence and freedom from bias and the requirement that we expand, develop and adapt to maintain a leading position in news and information.
It means ethics and standards are compatible with innovation. In fact, they have to go hand in hand.
It means independent and unbiased news reporting. It also means embracing blogging, multimedia storytelling, providing knowledgeable and insightful columnists like James Saft and Bernd Debusmann; engaging with our community of users and taking advantage of the offerings of citizen journalists in You Witness. It means being ready to use technology and storytelling forms we haven’t thought of yet.
There’s a lot of room for innovation here, but there’s no room for a Chuck Tatum, who would do anything to get to the top.
In about 2020, my granddaughter will probably be using technology that hasn’t been developed yet to work on her school “newspaper,” and it almost certainly won’t be produced on paper. She won’t be using her typewriter but she will, I hope, be using what she’s learned from the journalists of this generation. It’s up to us to set the right example.
