Perhaps it is becoming old fashioned but seems from here that a byline on a story ought to identify the person responsible for not just writing the exact assembly of words but reporting or verifying first-hand the pieces more important elements. The by in byline should mean reported by.
That's the point of this post. To back up and go through a chronological arc, last week in conversation with a few experienced colleagues the topic of how to inspire more and better science news coverage came up. One idea was to impress upon editors of small, local daily papers the rewards to readers from frequent doses of science-related news. Their segment of the old line media is among the few still doing well. I cracked that such editors already have that covered – they use Live Science. It's lots cheaper than hiring somebody.
That was hardly meant as a slam against this news service. And anyway, I do not know how many small papers subscribe to it directly (several large outlets do use it). But Live Science has an enormous flow of science, space, environmental and other news every day. Most of it gets past the eyeballs without the bull***t alarm ringing. It has a sizeable staff and hires a fair number of freelancers. It performs a service. So do its sister agencies such as Our Amazing Planet and Space.com in the technocentric stable of its Utah-based parent outfit TechMedia Network.
Later in the day I came across a handsome example of its product:
- Marc Lallanilla, Ass't Editor: Invasive Pests vs. Polar Vortex: Who Will Win? ; About hopes, and chances, that the Arctic air masses lately turning the US midwest and east side into their favorite holiday spots will have at least one bright side. They plausibly could freeze to death enough larvae of emerald ash borers, pine beetles, gypsy moths, and other tree killers to damp the rise in forest blight. Entomologists I've talked to blame a warming climate for revvving up insect metabolisms, expanding their ranges and their reproductive rates. Monotonic global warming would only bring forest trouble. But weather weirding, including pieces of restless Arctic air that head south, is not all minuses
But then I got this feeling I had read this before. But where? It was not hard to find out. Every single quote in the story came with a label, with full disclosure of the name of the news outlets that the source had said it to prior to Live Science's use of the quote. They are, in this instance, solid and in some cases sterling news providers: NPR, NYTimes, and Capital News Service (Michigan State University's J-school is behind that one). Marc Lallanilla had the byline. But the reporting was by others.
By the way, these are hardly the only news outlets that ran with the polar vortex as pest killer angle. Prominent among them is the Washington Post with recent reports by Kevin Ambrose on crop-eating stink bugs in West Virginia, and this week the Post's Darryl Fears blogged a longer such report on several other insect pests hitting the ground as frozen corpses.
A quick run through Live Science's homepage revealed a few more stories that appear to have depended largely if not entirely on the work of others', mainly reporters at other outlets or public information officers.
LiveScience is no cheap rip-and-pretend-it's-ours operation. LiveScience runs some stand-out original reporting. I found one from a few months ago by a distinctly competent journalist who I know to do his own reporting, Charles Q. Choi, Fracking Practices to Blame for Ohio Earthquakes. And this week, a story on black hole conundra, more of an essay than a news report actually, does look to be a special to LiveScience by freelancer and ex-BBC staffer Katia Moskvitch, Paradox Solved? How Information Can Escape form a black Hole. None of the quotes, when put in search engine, pop up anywhere but in renditions of this LiveScience piece. That's a good indication she wrote this from notes and files that were her own.
But still — here is what the "about us" part of the parent company's web site says: "Our expert product reviewers and award-winning journalists produce hundreds of original videos, news, fact-based review, and product testing articles daily." It amphasizes the point in a reference to "Thousands of original news articles" every month.
One would think that "reporting" to journalists would mean the gathering of information through one's own inquiries to experts, not to be confused with press officers. Questions posed to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other news search engines likewise do not count. A face to face conversation is the ideal, phone or skype etc. a close second, email also passes muster. But lifting info from a press release is not reporting. A story that reads quite well at Live Science and also at its sister in the fleet, Space.com, by Mike Wall, Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet, appears to have little or no such reporting in it but it maps rather nicely, despite a good rewrite, to a University of Hertfordshire Press Release. Wall, I might add, does a lot of original reporting such as this one newly out on reasons that an airliner might just disappear from radar.
All sourcing at Live Science appears properly credited, including pieces picked up whole. For instance, a report a few weeks back on audio recordings of unusual species of whale venturing into Arctic waters run originally by Discovery News's Tim Wall. Ditto for press promotions. Google recently expanded its street view function of Google Maps to include such towns as Churchill along Hudson Bay in Canada, where the cameras caught a few roaming polar bears curious about the big white truck with a camera mast. LiveScience ran a bunch of photos, attributed the package in the normal byline slot to "LiveScience staff." It also has a "Credit:Google" nearby.
Is LiveScience mostly real journalism, or churnalism? I'd carried a high opinion of the operation. Was it wrong? At this point in my working up to this post I got the little alarm bell ringing that meant better check your facts, buster.
I sent a query to Techmedia's press operation asking how it defines original reporting. Also, how much of its output is original in the standard meaning of the word? How much is – if fully credited – rewriting or direct re-use of the work of other news outlets or of press releases? So far, no answer.
Then a smarter idea arose in my near-vacant cranium. Ask an editor at Live Science specifically , as that's my main interest here. The tracker site is mainly journalism criticism, and we critics often just sit on our wise-asses and react to what we read without asking anybody anything. But that's not a rule. We can, uh, report too. In an email exchange I learned a lot from managing editor Jeanna Bryner. Her byline has appeared often in the tracker, often amid praises. I'll take her at her word.
First, Live Science is big. It directly gets about 15 million visits per month and, in combo with its partner site Space.com, is the largest independent digital publisher of science news. It syndicates to many outlets including Yahoo News, NBC, Fox, Discovery News, Scientific American, and the Washington Post. Live Science in 2007 won the Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism and in 2010 a Webby for science coverage. Space.com got a Webbie last year and one three years before.
Second, most of Live Sciences stuff is by its staff, but freelancers are not uncommon. On its staff are 13 writer-editors plus copy editors, an infographic artists and video producters-editors.
While some articles are inspired by press releases, the outlet routinely also looks at papers and other primarty material and interviews with authors and outside sources, digs up other pertinent studies and similar material for context. So, churnalism is not at all the norm.
Here is what she said about the piece on polar vortexes and pests that caught my eye and raised my curiosity. Its form "one of our content types – We pull together threads and nuggets from varioius outlets, along with research we've dug up or already have written about, to create a unique and meaningful look at some news item, idea or trend".
Fair enough. All news outlets have compiled stories that way, even the best ones, in an emergency. If it's all attributed, quite fine. But digital journalism has brought a tidal wave of pure rewrite and rampant byline inflation. Live Science is clearly striving for excellence in traditional journalism, even if it generates it all digitally.
At a first–rate outlet, an unadorned byline ought not be on a story that is entirely derived from material that took no enterprise to get. Credit, sure. No problems attach to a signer that says something like "compiled and edited by …", or a tagline at the end with the same info. Maybe add to the distinction by putting a running category on such stories, such as "Live Science Periscope" or "The News We're Reading."
If a story has a byline that says it is BY somebody it ought to be the somebody who did the reporting.
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