Media Gawking
Jessica Coen, Patrick Phillips, and Jay Rosen on Media Gawking. Jay is moderating. He’s editor of Pressthink, and Jessica edits Gawker, and Patrick edits I Want Media.
Patrick left Hearst corporate public relations to start I Want Media. On his site, he tracks changing media, business models. He covers technology, media, and journalism. Patrick started his site, and now he has people like Sumner Redstone quoted in his work on the site, and he says that Tina Brown knows about his site.
Jay says "Low barrier to entry." Yes, this is low barrier. A computer is all you need.
Jessica was just starting Columbia Journalism School, when she had the chance to write for Gawker. She never looked back. Now she speaks at Columbia.
She checks her email everyday, before anything, before Drudge. And she fields 1,000 emails a day from tipsters, and 300 are useful. She notes that NY Times reporters occasionally ask her to make fun of a story they wrote so it will be on the most emailed list.
Here’s Jay on PressThink: He started his blog having heard the advice "write short." He broke the rules. His posts are long, and long by most internet standards. PressThink is an exercise in decontrol in journalism.
Question: In academia they have a very strict publish by refereed journal. My question is how do you reconcile being in academic, and being in journal, and trust and truth and transparency and heirarchy?
Jay: If I were on a standard academic track, I would write for scholarly journals that reach 2000 people. But PressThink reaches 10,000. The university is going to be another one of the institutions that adapts to this. I broadcast journalism education outside, widely.
Q: What about media reporting on itself?
Jessica: CBS has launched this thing Public Eye and it is a sad, sad little website. Vaughn Ververs can’t write about what he wants to write about.
Patrick: The blog doesn’t really say very much. It seems like it’s a response to several things, but it really doesn’t address any of them.
Q: Do you get the equivalent of news tips about, say the NY Times and the Judy Miller story? Do you pass them on to other reporters? Are you a player behind the scenes?
Jay: I don’t pass them on like that. If I wanted to write stories using anonymous sources and break news, I could.
Q: At what point do the media gawkers have rresponsibility?
Jay: I don’t have rules about it. The way I create trust at my blog is very different from what Gawker does or the NY Times does. The rules for creating trust at Pressthink set my limits for what I can do. If people come to my blog and say what do you think about Judy Miller, and I say I don’t care, that doesn’t create trust. So what I do is say, here’s what I think.
Jay: Al Gore give us a really good challenge. We have to figure out how to use the horizontal media to utilize our public reasoning. As a keynote, it actually struck a note. Maybe that’s why he’s a professional politician.
