What are the new-media lessons, if any, to be drawn from the resignation earlier this month of Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock? Her immediate reason for resigning was having a prominent correction slapped onto one of her stories, the second in the last five months. Most of the discussion about her resignation has focused on who’s to blame. WaPo ombudsman Patrick Pexton says that “The Post failed her as much as she failed The Post.” On The Awl, Trevor Butterworth says WaPo is more at fault.
What caught my eye in this story, though, was a different kind of failure, one involving not reporters or editors, but the tools they use.
In an earlier article on Flock’s first corrected story last December, Pexton focused similarly on failures involving the human element. In this story, Flock incorrectly attributed to the Romney presidential campaign the use of an old Ku Klux Klan slogan. Although she tried to contact campaign representatives by e-mail, their reply correcting the story was lost in the WaPo spam filter. Quoting executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Pexton concluded that “‘We had a reporter failure and we had an editor failure.’”
But then he went on to raise a quite different kind of failure:
“Another problem here is that too many reporters see the computer as their main tool of the trade. I’m old-fashioned, and I think the telephone is still the first tool of the trade if you can’t do a personal interview. Fine to use the Internet for some basic research, or in a pinch to e-mail a source for a comment, but it’s faster and often better to call. You get more nuance, more spontaneity, and you usually get a real human being to answer a question. E-mail is too easily ignored; a person on the phone is harder to put off.”
My first reaction to this was an odd mixture of agreement and skepticism. I think it’s true that younger journalists tend to rely too much on online tools and not enough on old ones like the telephone. But Pexton’s suggestion that the Internet is only good for basic research or as a last resort is wrong too.
All of these tools are useful. But they all fail at times as well. The key is to use them all and to trust none.
If you happen to be attending the event, I hope you’ll drop in to my presentation. I’ll be talking about how the transformation from industrial media to social media is changing career paths for editor, reporters, and other content creators, and outlining nine keys to a successful new-media career. I’ll also be giving away a few copies of the paperback edition of the New-Media Survival Guide to audience members hardy enough to stay with me through the entire talk.
