Washington Post Makes Bizarre, Factually Incorrect Claims About Glenn Greenwald, Can't Figure Out How To Update

from the keep-working-at-it.. dept

The Washington Post's institutional jealousy towards the Guardian and its role in the Ed Snowden leaks continues to be quite bizarre. At the same time that some of the Post's reporters are doing excellent work on the story, including breaking a few of the stories themselves, the old timers seem to be reflexively attacking the Guardian for doing the same thing -- and, at the same time, attacking Snowden himself for being a source. The latest example is Walter Pincus, the octogenarian and long-term Washington Post "national security" reporter, who wrote a bizarre column "asking questions" of Ed Snowden, and by association, of Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras (who has assisted both the Guardian and the Washington Post with the Snowden story) and Julian Assange. Pincus makes a bunch of "connections" that he finds concerning about the Snowden ordeal, suggesting strongly that the whole thing was somehow orchestrated in secret by Julian Assange.

The only problem with this is that a very large number of the factual claims made by Pincus are complete bunk. Not only that, but they're such complete bunk that even a basic fact check would have told you they were complete bunk. It's a perfectly legitimate journalistic practice to ask questions based on information presented -- but when those questions are based on complete falsehoods, it makes you wonder. Much of Pincus' piece is based on the incorrect claim that Greenwald has a close connection with Assange and Wikileaks, stating, falsely, that Greenwald "wrote for the WikiLeaks Press's blog about Poitras and WikiLeaks being targeted by U.S. government officials." That's completely untrue. Greenwald wrote his piece for Salon not for Wikileaks, and has never written for Wikileaks in any manner.

Greenwald confronted Pincus about this and other inaccuracies in the piece, leading Pincus to grudgingly admit that it was a mistake, but saying his confusion was because the Salon piece "was carried on the Wikileaks Press page without attribution to Salon as the originating venue." Except, that's not true. The blog clearly carries just an excerpt with a link to the full piece at the end. Still, Pincus promised that a correction would be coming but, despite being aware of the mistakes for at least a day, the Washington Post (at the time I'm writing this) still has not posted a correction. Pincus told the Washington Post's Erik Wemple (who has been doing good work on the story, and who rightly scolds Pincus for his actions) that a correction "is in the works." Not sure why it should take so long, through.

Of course, there are a number of other pretty big factual errors by Pincus, which he has refused to acknowledge. For example, the claim that Julian Assange "previewed" the first Snowden leak a week before Greenwald published it in the Guardian. However, as anyone following these issues knows, Assange was talking about a completely different NSA surveillance program (Stellar Wind), which had been leaked many years ago and was shut down a few years back. Instead of admitting this error, Pincus is doubling down, telling Wemple that perhaps his point was "badly phrased," but Assange and Greenwald were talking about the "same program."

Except, they're not. They are both NSA surveillance programs, but Stellar Wind was revealed years ago. The Greenwald revelations were much more detailed and were about very different programs, many of which came after Stellar Wind. Considering that Pincus is supposed to be the Washington Post's "national security" expert, you'd think he'd recognize that. Instead, he tells Wemple that the complaints are "argumentative." Pincus also, falsely, suggested that Snowden only worked at the NSA for 3 months, ignoring -- as has been widely reported -- that Snowden worked at the NSA as a contractor for four years. He merely switched which firm he was contracting for (from Dell to Booz Allen).

Again, asking questions is a perfectly reasonable activity. But those questions should be based on facts. And... when those facts are shown to be wrong, you issue a correction. And, once you've admitted you're flat out wrong, and say that you'll fix it, it shouldn't take over 24 hours to do so....

Filed Under: ed snowden, erik wemple, glenn greenwald, laura poitras, walter pincus
Companies: the guardian, washington post, wikileaks

The Guardian Makes It Super Simple For Blogs To Repost Its Content

from the contrarian-journalism dept

We've pointed out a few times that The Guardian newspaper in the UK is not just a believer in the value of keeping its content free online, but is also doing a lot of very interesting experiments. As we hear daily about newspapers and organizations like the Associated Press threatening to sue blogs that repost some of their content (even for commentary purposes), The Guardian is going in the completely opposite direction. As part of its Open Platform program, it has created a tool that lets any Wordpress-based blog repost any Guardian article for free. Yes, this is the complete opposite of what most publications are doing. Rather than whining about "freeloaders" and "copycats" and "aggregators," The Guardian has decided to embrace them and take advantage of the situation.

The only conditions are that you have to republish the full article in the exact format provided (including "text, links and images"). That's because The Guardian is also embedding ads with those syndicated stories. Assuming the ads are not particularly intrusive or annoying, then I would imagine that many blogs find this to be a perfectly reasonable deal. And, yes, if you were wondering, the site doing the syndication is free to include their own ads elsewhere on the page. However, according to The Guardian's explanation of this offering, you can add your own commentary -- it just needs to go above The Guardian's content.

Basically, the Guardian seems to be realizing what so many other newspapers have failed to grasp: that people republishing your stuff are helping to promote your work and spread your work in useful ways. Rather than breaking out the lawyers and the nastygrams, why not figure out a way to make everyone better off?

Filed Under: embedding, journalism, syndication
Companies: the guardian

Guardian Picks Up Blogger Who Escaped From Murdoch's Paywall

from the just-want-to-be-free dept

This is amusing. The UK's The Guardian has been a strong advocate of keeping online news free and has pointed out how paywalls are generally a very, very bad idea. Of course, its competitor, Rupert Murdoch's The Times of London has famously put up a paywall. Right when that happened, we noted that a blogger for The Times had chosen to part ways with The Times, as he had no interest in having his own work hidden behind a paywall where it harmed his own, personal brand. It seemed likely that other top journalists would look for positions that were better for their own careers as well.

Now, in a bit of a snarky move towards The Times, the Guardian has agreed to start hosting the blogger who left The Times. Yes, the Baby Barista blog has jumped from The Times, to its own site, to The Guardian in the course of a month.

Filed Under: bloggers, paywall, rupert murdoch, tim kevan, times
Companies: news corp., the guardian

Guardian Tries CwF+RtB, While Experimenting With Hack Day Event

from the cool-experiments dept

With our upcoming Techdirt Saves* Journalism event to be held June 16th at Google's offices, we've been looking deeper and deeper into stories of newspapers doing interesting things. The Guardian, over in the UK, has been pretty adamant that a paywall is a bad, bad idea, and has, instead, been looking into some more innovative business models. In fact, it recently announced a premium membership program that sounds quite a bit like the whole CwF+RtB formula that we've talked about for quite some time -- and which (of course) we've experimented with ourselves for a while now. Back when the NY Times was exploring options, it also had considered a similar system, but chose to go with a straight paywall instead.

The Guardian's offering is that you pay £25 per year and you get a variety of scarcities outside of the content of the paper (which remains free). Those scarcities include things like newsroom visits and events involving journalists and editors (i.e., the scarcity of "access") and other offers as well -- such as tickets to various cultural events. Unlike the various paywall efforts out there, none of this is about locking up infinitely copyable content, but about using that content to make scarcities, like access, more valuable and giving people a real reason to buy. It'll be interesting to see how well it goes. I like the basic idea of it, though I think they could do some more to segment their audiences.

That's not all The Guardian is doing. At the same time it announced this Guardian Extra program, it also held a "hack day", where the Guardian asked various media partners to ask for certain tools or features, and folks would try to create them using the Guardian's open platform. The results (for a quick two day hack event) look pretty impressive. It's pretty cool to see these sorts of experiments going on in news organizations, rather than the typical "woe is us" complaining.

If you'd like to talk about these ideas and many others (as well as hopefully come up with some new ideas for what news organizations, both new and old, can do going forward), I hope you'll consider attending our Techdirt Saves* Journalism event. Sign up for here, if you haven't already: We look forward to seeing you there.

Filed Under: cwf+rtb, journalism, premium services
Companies: the guardian

Bad Web Experience: This Article Removed Because Of Copyright?

from the wake-up,-get-with-the-times dept

I've really never understood news sites that "remove" old articles. Talk about breaking the way the web works. At Techdirt, we receive a good bit of traffic to our archives, and that's valuable traffic. Not only do such visitors actually tend to be more likely to click on advertisements (regular readers have ad blindness), but they're like fresh "leads" to get regular new readers. And yet, so many publications ruin all that traffic by sending them nowhere. The Associated Press is particularly bad about this, forcing partners who pay the AP for content to remove it after a month. In those cases, visitors are just given an error page. But here's a bizarre one. Jake points us to a story at The Guardian's website, where the headline and the little blurb, along with an image are left in place, but in place of the actual article is just a message saying, This article has been removed as our copyright has expired. How annoying is that? Why do publications even agree to post stories that they will then be forced to pull down in the future? It completely kills the web experience. It breaks any links to the article. It kills off any discussion about the article. It's exactly how not to do things on the web, and it shows, yet again, what the traditional newspapers -- even one that seems to "get it" as much as The Guardian does -- still has a long way to go in adapting to the online world.

Filed Under: content, copyright, journalism, news
Companies: the guardian

Guardian Editor Details Why Paywalls Harm Journalism

from the others-should-listen dept

While lots of newspapers have been talking up the idea of putting up a paywall (even as early results look really, really bad), the Guardian has been one publication that has been pretty adamant that paywalls for online news make no sense. This view was put forth again, quite eloquently, as Editor Alan Rusbridger detailed why it makes little sense not just from a business perspective, but from a journalism perspective:

It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

At the same time, he points out how paywalls also try to position papers as an "authority" rather than being involved in a wider story:

The second issue it raises is the one of 'authority' versus 'involvement'. Or, more crudely, 'Us versus Them'. Again, this is similar to the other two forks in the road, but not quite the same. Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves -- and were perhaps considered by others -- special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn't. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it -- and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context -- ie which can't be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay -- both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?

Putting up a paywall is really just newspapers pretending they can go back to being "authority" figures without realizing that this is not what people look to them to be, nor is it what they want them to be. And this actually brings up a really important point. Beyond the business model issues, paywalls impact journalism in the connected age:

As an editor, I worry about how a universal pay wall would change the way we do our journalism. We have taken 10 or more years to learn how to tell stories in different media -- ie not simply text and still pictures. Some stories are told most effectively by a combination of print and web. That's how we now plan our journalism. As my colleague Emily Bell is fond of saying we want it to be linked in with the web -- be "of the web", not simply be on the web.

Some stories can be told in one sentence plus a link. Some journalists are fascinated by the potential of the running, linked blog. Andrew Sparrow's minute by minute blog of Alastair Campbell's appearance before the Chilcott inquiry was a dazzling example of this new form of reporting, which relies on the ability to link out to sources and other media, including original documents and even (in the lunch break) Campbell's own Twitter feed....

This, journalistically, is immensely challenging and rich. Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response -- harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.

As he notes, this open linking and sharing policy leads to better journalism, and that could be hurt in a paywall world. Not only that, but it would cut off the one part of the business that is actually growing and improving:

In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers' digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That's right, a mainstream media company -- you know, the ones that should admit the game's up because they are so irrelevant and don't know what they are doing in this new media landscape -- has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.

He also effectively points out that the argument shouldn't be about "new media" vs. "old media," but about how the two work together:

We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table -- editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers. The members of that community could not hope to aspire to anything like that audience or reach on their own; they bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn't possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.

There is a mutualised interest here. We are reaching towards the idea of a mutualised news organisation.

The whole speech is much, much longer and well worth reading. But it adds a rather important element to the debate. Most of the argument has really focused on the business question, and whether or not paywalls would even work (or if they would just hasten the decline of newspapers). But this speech points out how paywalls also seem to get in the way of doing the type of journalism that the world now craves, and which the technology now allows.

Filed Under: alan rusbridger, journalism, paywalls
Companies: the guardian

The Guardian Embraces Crowdsourcing The News In Useful Ways

from the supply-the-data... dept

Some old school newspaper folks bristle at the whole concept of "participatory journalism" but that's generally because they don't understand it, and think it just means that reporters will be out of a job and a bunch of amateurs will pretend they're reporters. But that's not what real participatory journalism is about. The Guardian recently gave a really good example. Following the recent controversy over expense claims from UK elected officials, the paper put all the data online and let people dig through it to see what they could find -- and they found a lot of interesting stuff that a group of reporters, by themselves almost certainly never would have had the time or skill to dig out (some of it included statistical analysis of the data). But, then, of course the "professionals" were able to take those interesting nuggets and do additional reporting. This is a perfect example of why some folks have been pushing for years to get newspapers to open up their data sources for the community to make use of. Hopefully the Guardian's success with this project will inspire others -- but I fear most "old school" newspaper folks will continue to sneer at the suggestion.

Filed Under: crowdsourcing, newspapers, participatory journalism, uk
Companies: the guardian

The Guardian Follows The NY Times In Making News A Platform

from the good-job dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in the wonderful news that the Guardian, in the UK, has opened up an API and is sharing data in such a way that others can build programs on top of the news. This is fantastic -- and follows on a similar move last month by the NY Times. It appears that both the NY Times and the Guardian really are pushing the boundaries of recognizing that being an online newspaper these days needs to be about a lot more than delivering the news.

Perhaps even more interesting (though, getting much less attention) is the companion bit of news from some editors at the Guardian -- who are pointing out that they hope and pray each day that the NY Times gives into temptation and starts trying to charge for news... because it will create a huge opening for the Guardian to create a much larger online audience. This is what plenty of people have been pointing out for years: if clueless newspaper execs decide to start charging for news, it just opens the door wide for smarter news organizations to stay free and accumulate a much larger audience.

Filed Under: api, news, newspapers, platform
Companies: ny times, the guardian