04-23-2007, 06:17 AM
The Internet is now the first draft of history
James Robinson
`Old media' is still valued for its accuracy, but Web 2.0 gets the scoops.
â PHOTO: AP
Co-hosts of an NBC television show report on April 19 on a video manifesto and photos sent to their network by Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui, shown on a studio monitor at left.
THE CONTROVERSY over NBC's decision to broadcast the thoughts of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui illustrates the daily dilemmas faced by news journalists. Most of their counterparts would find it difficult to justify withholding the tapes. "We are not censors," says John Ryley, Sky's head of news, succinctly summing up the consensus on this side of the Atlantic. But once the controversy over the screening of Cho's "multimedia manifesto" recedes, the massacre is likely to be remembered as a great leap forward in the evolution of Internet news.
Social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace were an integral part of the event â survivors reportedly logged on to find out what was taking place even as Cho continued his rampage. Soon after, the rest of the world joined them, posting messages of support, sympathy and outrage online. In the aftermath, tributes, eyewitness accounts, photos and video appeared on the Net.
"Old media" outlets responded by plundering material posted on the web and pumping their own content into the online ether. The Internet encouraged a collective expression of emotion, which has been faithfully reported by established media outlets: "Students turn to web in time of tragedy," said The Los Angeles Times last week.
It helps that nearby Roanoke is one of the most wired cities in America, and that Virginia Tech's students are part of the most web-literate generation in history. But the Internet has done more than create an online community of grief; the immediacy of the medium helped to relay the full horror of the event. Once again, "citizen journalists" armed with mobile phones supplied invaluable material, including pictures and video footage of the shootings, to established news organisations.
Some, including CNN, snapped up exclusive rights to phone footage. Other broadcasters and newspapers have been busy pilfering whatever content they can from cyberspace, often with scant regard for copyright.
Suddenly, the Internet looks less like a threat to "old media," and more like a resource it can easily exploit. That is partly because established outlets have marched online. Sky News re-launched its website last Thursday, and plans to shift more resources online. The Daily Telegraph has staked its future on the Internet, and The Times is the latest newspaper to invest heavily in its online offering. Anne Spackman, the editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the Virginia coverage "feels like a coming-of-age moment."
She points out that "even a year ago" technological constraints meant her site would have been unable to carry the video footage, including a link to footage of the carnage filmed by a student. Nor could it have displayed Cho's chilling video messages.
"In the early day of the Internet, we were all excited that it allowed us to get stories out more quickly, but essentially it was the same information the paper carried the next day," she says. "The Internet hasn't just expanded our coverage, it has made it much deeper and richer." In that respect, at least, newspapers are catching up with broadcasters, who have been screening "user generated content" sent in by viewers for years, notably during Hurricane Katrina.
Gratifyingly for Ms. Spackman, a user at American website Fark.com, which aggregates news from sources around the globe, asked last week: "Why does The London Times have better reporting than we do?"
"Fark is exactly the kind of site that people said would kill off papers like us," Ms. Spackman points out. But newspapers still have the best content, she claims, and "people will search that out."
The killings led to a spike in Internet traffic as well as TV audiences. Sky's website had four million page impressions on Monday, a million more than usual, and major U.S. news sites experienced a huge increase in volume. CNBC's website saw a 157 per cent rise in traffic from Sunday to Tuesday.
Alex Burmaster, an Internet analyst at Nielsen Netratings, says: "More people are now going to the Internet for news because it's not just static content. Since the advent of broadband the Internet has evolved hugely in terms of audio and video content and news is a massive beneficiary."
This is "convergence" being played out in real time, but its arrival has been nervously awaited by many traditional news organisations. If information is available, unfiltered and uncensored, online, why should consumers turn to them to find it? The answer, as the Virginia shootings showed, is that the Net's greatest strength, its immediacy, cannot compensate for its biggest weakness â inaccuracy. False reports about the killer's identity were on the Net within hours. "We had pictures of `the killer' on Tuesday morning," Ms. Spackman says, "but our picture desk expressed reservations." Sure enough, it wasn't him.
"People trust brands like us because we have built a reputation for checking facts over decades," she says. "It is basic, sound journalistic practice."
Sky's Mr. Ryley agrees that the widespread dissemination of information "will reinforce the brand value of trusted organisations. But at the same time it will put a lot of pressure on all of us to check and double-check. It used to be your own staff that brought stuff in. Now you need journalists who are not just curious, but sceptical." He says user-generated content is "another source, just as the diaries of infantrymen are a source for a historian studying Waterloo." News organisations must do what they have always done, verifying its authenticity before airing or printing it.
"The joy of the Internet is if you make a mistake you can take it down quickly. With a newspaper, it's there forever," says Ms. Spackman. But although a sophisticated public knows it will find gossip, innuendo, and speculation online, it expects responsible news outlets to deal only in hard facts.
Established media must also meet higher standards of taste and decency as well as accuracy. That explains why NBC was forced to apologise for screening Cho's videos last week. Chris Shaw, who oversees Five's news and current affairs output, argues that the Internet can affect decision-making. "I don't think TV would have shown this video so quickly if they didn't know if would be on the Internet within hours," he says.
The Internet is influencing the tone of mainstream media coverage in more subtle ways too, says Financial Times executive John Lloyd. He says Israelis' view of the recent war with Lebanon was profoundly affected by "emails and photos [from Israeli soldiers] that were streaming back in real time." Most of them questioned why they were on the front line, and that had a profound effect on public sentiment.
Beyond that, says Mr. Lloyd, "hooking into these streams of emotion is now becoming a very large part of the way these events are covered. You see emotions in blogs and on the Internet that, for the most part, are kept out of objective news coverage." That constitutes a threat to the traditional media operations, he says, because "some people are grasping the news by emotion rather than through a narrative."
Covering horrific events in an era of 24-hour news presents its own challenges for "old media." But if they can remain impartial and objective in the face of this trend, they could find their output becomes more valuable, and sought-after, than ever. â
James Robinson
`Old media' is still valued for its accuracy, but Web 2.0 gets the scoops.
â PHOTO: AP
Co-hosts of an NBC television show report on April 19 on a video manifesto and photos sent to their network by Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui, shown on a studio monitor at left.
THE CONTROVERSY over NBC's decision to broadcast the thoughts of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-hui illustrates the daily dilemmas faced by news journalists. Most of their counterparts would find it difficult to justify withholding the tapes. "We are not censors," says John Ryley, Sky's head of news, succinctly summing up the consensus on this side of the Atlantic. But once the controversy over the screening of Cho's "multimedia manifesto" recedes, the massacre is likely to be remembered as a great leap forward in the evolution of Internet news.
Social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace were an integral part of the event â survivors reportedly logged on to find out what was taking place even as Cho continued his rampage. Soon after, the rest of the world joined them, posting messages of support, sympathy and outrage online. In the aftermath, tributes, eyewitness accounts, photos and video appeared on the Net.
"Old media" outlets responded by plundering material posted on the web and pumping their own content into the online ether. The Internet encouraged a collective expression of emotion, which has been faithfully reported by established media outlets: "Students turn to web in time of tragedy," said The Los Angeles Times last week.
It helps that nearby Roanoke is one of the most wired cities in America, and that Virginia Tech's students are part of the most web-literate generation in history. But the Internet has done more than create an online community of grief; the immediacy of the medium helped to relay the full horror of the event. Once again, "citizen journalists" armed with mobile phones supplied invaluable material, including pictures and video footage of the shootings, to established news organisations.
Some, including CNN, snapped up exclusive rights to phone footage. Other broadcasters and newspapers have been busy pilfering whatever content they can from cyberspace, often with scant regard for copyright.
Suddenly, the Internet looks less like a threat to "old media," and more like a resource it can easily exploit. That is partly because established outlets have marched online. Sky News re-launched its website last Thursday, and plans to shift more resources online. The Daily Telegraph has staked its future on the Internet, and The Times is the latest newspaper to invest heavily in its online offering. Anne Spackman, the editor-in-chief of Times Online, says the Virginia coverage "feels like a coming-of-age moment."
She points out that "even a year ago" technological constraints meant her site would have been unable to carry the video footage, including a link to footage of the carnage filmed by a student. Nor could it have displayed Cho's chilling video messages.
"In the early day of the Internet, we were all excited that it allowed us to get stories out more quickly, but essentially it was the same information the paper carried the next day," she says. "The Internet hasn't just expanded our coverage, it has made it much deeper and richer." In that respect, at least, newspapers are catching up with broadcasters, who have been screening "user generated content" sent in by viewers for years, notably during Hurricane Katrina.
Gratifyingly for Ms. Spackman, a user at American website Fark.com, which aggregates news from sources around the globe, asked last week: "Why does The London Times have better reporting than we do?"
"Fark is exactly the kind of site that people said would kill off papers like us," Ms. Spackman points out. But newspapers still have the best content, she claims, and "people will search that out."
The killings led to a spike in Internet traffic as well as TV audiences. Sky's website had four million page impressions on Monday, a million more than usual, and major U.S. news sites experienced a huge increase in volume. CNBC's website saw a 157 per cent rise in traffic from Sunday to Tuesday.
Alex Burmaster, an Internet analyst at Nielsen Netratings, says: "More people are now going to the Internet for news because it's not just static content. Since the advent of broadband the Internet has evolved hugely in terms of audio and video content and news is a massive beneficiary."
This is "convergence" being played out in real time, but its arrival has been nervously awaited by many traditional news organisations. If information is available, unfiltered and uncensored, online, why should consumers turn to them to find it? The answer, as the Virginia shootings showed, is that the Net's greatest strength, its immediacy, cannot compensate for its biggest weakness â inaccuracy. False reports about the killer's identity were on the Net within hours. "We had pictures of `the killer' on Tuesday morning," Ms. Spackman says, "but our picture desk expressed reservations." Sure enough, it wasn't him.
"People trust brands like us because we have built a reputation for checking facts over decades," she says. "It is basic, sound journalistic practice."
Sky's Mr. Ryley agrees that the widespread dissemination of information "will reinforce the brand value of trusted organisations. But at the same time it will put a lot of pressure on all of us to check and double-check. It used to be your own staff that brought stuff in. Now you need journalists who are not just curious, but sceptical." He says user-generated content is "another source, just as the diaries of infantrymen are a source for a historian studying Waterloo." News organisations must do what they have always done, verifying its authenticity before airing or printing it.
"The joy of the Internet is if you make a mistake you can take it down quickly. With a newspaper, it's there forever," says Ms. Spackman. But although a sophisticated public knows it will find gossip, innuendo, and speculation online, it expects responsible news outlets to deal only in hard facts.
Established media must also meet higher standards of taste and decency as well as accuracy. That explains why NBC was forced to apologise for screening Cho's videos last week. Chris Shaw, who oversees Five's news and current affairs output, argues that the Internet can affect decision-making. "I don't think TV would have shown this video so quickly if they didn't know if would be on the Internet within hours," he says.
The Internet is influencing the tone of mainstream media coverage in more subtle ways too, says Financial Times executive John Lloyd. He says Israelis' view of the recent war with Lebanon was profoundly affected by "emails and photos [from Israeli soldiers] that were streaming back in real time." Most of them questioned why they were on the front line, and that had a profound effect on public sentiment.
Beyond that, says Mr. Lloyd, "hooking into these streams of emotion is now becoming a very large part of the way these events are covered. You see emotions in blogs and on the Internet that, for the most part, are kept out of objective news coverage." That constitutes a threat to the traditional media operations, he says, because "some people are grasping the news by emotion rather than through a narrative."
Covering horrific events in an era of 24-hour news presents its own challenges for "old media." But if they can remain impartial and objective in the face of this trend, they could find their output becomes more valuable, and sought-after, than ever. â