atw: Re: Was: First impressions of Google Wave? Qualified 'tick': Now what's a "feature"?

Chris - That's not a nice answer at all. Are you trying to get a rise out of
me?

Matthew da Silva   BA (Hons) MMediaPrac Syd
m 0434 536 772 | e journo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | w matthewdasilva.com | t
twitter.com/matt_dasilva

-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Virtue
Sent: Thursday, 29 October 2009 11:30 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: Re: Was: First impressions of Google Wave? Qualified 'tick':
Now what's a "feature"?

Hang on, Matt. Geoffrey asked a question to the list. You posted a link 
to an article that didn't answer the question. I reckon your response to 
Geoffrey's initial post was a) off the topic of the new thread and b) 
shameless self-promotion. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps you didn't 
understand his question.

Quit before you get further behind. Stop defending yourself. You're 
starting to look silly.

Matthew da Silva wrote:
> Peter - I think you claim a bit too much importance for newspapers. Your 
> desire reflects rather elegantly that other one, of reporters and 
> editors who over-egg the pudding when it comes to the possibility of 
> catching an elected official out, with their hand in the cookie jar. I 
> think we're all getting a little bit Dustin Hoffman here...
> 
>  
> 
> The issue of verifying sources is one thing. Quite another is the issue 
> of impartiality. I'm not completely convinced by the argument as to 
> impartiality, which is somehow going to lead us effortlessly to 
> accumulating a huge volume of credibility. Impartiality is - some would 
> say - an impossibility.
> 
>  
> 
> As for balance, not only does every journalist have an opinion about 
> whatever she or he is writing. But there's often simply not enough time. 
> For the feature I linked to it took a day's work just to get the quotes 
> of Cramer, the guy from Reuters, because I had to attend a talk at UTS. 
> It took another half-day to get the quotes from the UTS academic.
> 
>  
> 
> How far do you go? If an 800-word piece is worth only 500 dollars, how 
> much time does a journo have to get the perfect foil for every interview 
> he or she does? At J-school we were told to get one interview for every 
> 100 words. For an 800-word piece that means eight interviews. That can 
> take time. Just finding the 'right' person takes - sometimes - days if 
> not weeks. Add to that the immense amounts of time that can get sucked 
> up by FOI applications, and you're literally squeezing the poor journo 
> dry by demanding perfect balance.
> 
>  
> 
> As for McClymont, I think she's over-egged it a bit, as you point out. 
> Nevertheless, she did say at the top of the piece that the guy wouldn't 
> give his name. This fact should make any reader beware and, hopefully, 
> most were. But stories work themselves out over time. One story does not 
> a Walkley make. Nor a true account of a big deal like McGurk's murder. 
> The truth will out in the end, to be sure, and allowing McClymont a bit 
> of room to get there is what her editors need to do.
> 
>  
> 
> */Matthew da Silva/*   BA (Hons) MMediaPrac /Syd/
> 
> m 0434 536 772 | e journo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> <mailto:journo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> | w matthewdasilva.com 
> <http://www.matthewdasilva.com/> | t twitter.com/matt_dasilva 
> <http://twitter.com/matt_dasilva>
> 
>  
> 
> *From:* austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Peter Martin
> *Sent:* Thursday, 29 October 2009 10:17 PM
> *To:* austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> *Subject:* atw: Re: Was: First impressions of Google Wave? Qualified 
> 'tick': Now what's a "feature"?
> 
>  
> 
> /Matthew da Silva:/
> 
> /You wrote:/
> 
> /> Geoffrey - You may not/
> 
> /> agree with the findings of the story, but unfortunately you cannot 
> doubt that it is a/
> 
> /> feature. In journalistic parlance, as you may know, a 'feature' is 
> anything that is not/
> 
> /> 'news', which is what they put prominently/
> 
> /> on news websites such as theage.com.au. In this case, also, the 
> feature is not/
> 
> /> 'opinion', but contains reported utterances of key stakeholders./
> 
> />/
> 
> /Oh dear.   Sorry, but this argument skips over one important stage in 
> the process of distinction between news and opinion which an ex-journo 
> couldn't resist pointing out./
> 
> /That (previously essential?) stage involves the assessment of the 
> reliability of sources.    For example, I can get a very interesting/
> 
> /collection of "key stakeholder" comments from inmates of mental 
> hospitals and/or gaols.  If I quote them, presumably it's news.  If I 
> say what they say, it's opinion?   Or maybe there's a bit missing in the 
> middle about checking how reliable the information you're quoting is, in 
> the first place ? /
> 
> /To illustrate this, let's deal with an example: a recent running story 
> from the SMH and I gather, The Age./
> 
>  
> 
> /I call it:    "Kate McClymont and the Three Bears"....     with an 
> apology for a certain proxility...  and copyright reserved, outside of 
> this immediate forum. /
> 
> Kate McClymont of the Sydney Morning Herald has been in the line for the 
> odd Walkley award for journalism. That's something that from time to 
> time (with the odd exception) one might show respect for. But to judge 
> from her recent efforts in the whole McGurk saga, if she is qualified 
> for a Walkley on this one, Robert Southey should be up for one for the 
> bit about bears having a house in the woods where they eat porridge for 
> breakfast every morning.  
> 
> It's not that these aren't good "stories" in themselves:  rather, it's 
> that they so far seem to share the same level of authentication and 
> factual confirmation as the classic Southey story, or the products of 
> Hans Christian Anderson.  If one major test of journalist's quality is 
> the ultimate quality of his or her journalistic sources, Ms McClyntock 
> is looking as though she should either share the front pages of the SMH 
> with the said fairy story authors  or just get someone to draw some 
> coloured pictures and publish this stuff separately as a new (Brothers 
> Grimm?) storybook tale for the kiddies.
> 
> Firstly, it turned out fairly early in the piece that the said McGurk, 
> as Ms McClymont's scoop source on the subject of his own killing, has in 
> fact been a huge fairy story in himself. His real name, his age, his 
> origins and his concern about the nasty ethics of the people he said he 
> was dealing with, turn out to have been all fairy stories. Apparently, 
> his real name originally wasn't McGurk, he was not the age he said he 
> was, didn't actually come from where he said he did, and seems to have 
> had not a skerrick of real concern about ethics in business, government 
> or human relations generally.
> 
> It has to be said, of course, that Ms McClyntock has revealed this 
> stuff, and included it in her stories!  But did this reporter of 
> integrity then think to suggest to her editor that in the light of the 
> doubts about the person who told her a big story being a person who 
> tells Big Fat Lies, maybe the front page of the paper was not the place 
> for this stuff ?    Apparently not.  
> 
> Well, in a sense, you couldn't expect her to, because she'd already also 
> relied for the big chunk of her first story on the word of that most 
> reliable of journalistic sources, the lovely Jim Byrnes.   It was Good 
> Old Reliable Jim who Ms McClyntock was able to quote on the subject of 
> McGurk having a mysterious tape that was, (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) 
> supposedly a possible cause of Mr McGurk's demise.
> 
>    
> 
> Some of us who had been reading other pages of the SMH before the McGurk 
> shooting, had heard of Mr Byrnes before, and surely Kate couldn't have 
> missed it.  Because Mr Byrnes had himself long been the subject of a 
> whole series of very pointed SMH mentions (albeit not on page one), over 
> quite a period of time. All of these articles were decidedly 
> unfavourable, and distinctly scathing when it came to assessing Jim's 
> reliability as a witness.  
> 
> Again to be fair, the later McClyntock stories held passing mention of 
> these known aspects of Jim's character.  Thus, good old Jim is known to 
> have been found wanting in character, veracity and honesty, having been 
> found guilty of some unpleasant violent "work" with a baseball bat, and 
> described as a "standover thug" by a magistrate.  In other areas, and 
>  on other charges, Jim has banned from being a director of companies by 
> the corporate regulators, for a certain lack of well... honesty and 
> integrity. So this gets mentioned,too.  But the story still rates front 
> page credibility, based on a combination of McGurk and Byrnes.
> 
> Then thirdly we get the big mention of Graham Richardson, confirming 
> another part of this grand story. As we all know, Richo might not be 
> regarded in all circles as being a completely ... well, unbiassed 
> narrator of history.   For a start, he's a paid lobbyist -- not an 
> illegal business, but one where credibility is to be worked on, and has 
> a price -- about $9000 each customer per month, it turns out!  Richo 
> also did get copped on record a while back as saying that sometimes it 
> was necessary to tell lies about matters of public interest.  And he's 
> on the list of a string of people who find themselves puzzled about how 
> significant sums of money manage to get deposited in Swiss accounts in 
> their name, as if by magic or extraordinary benevolence from a fairy 
> godfather.   So there's a chance he's probably also got a slight memory 
> problem.
> 
>    
> 
> Is this really to be the foundation of the grand series of page one 
> stories from now on?  I doubt it. Rather, it's the full bloody trifecta. 
> In whatever order you like, it's Big bear, Middle sized bear, and 
> Teeny-Weeny bear who all have extraordinary stories to tell, just like 
> the ones others told to or by Southey and Anderson.
> 
>    
> 
> Meanwhile, we all knew this was always / probably / possibly / maybe 
> about some sort of deals that have been "fixed" and pushed through 
> because of developer money influence on government ministers and 
> officials... the sugar on the porridge.  The only trouble is, it  now 
> turns out that all the "fixed" deals seem not to have worked:  no-one's 
> actually got a good working breakfast at this table. Not even the State 
> Opposition can point to a single decision affected in this way.  
> 
> That doesn't mean that none of us still think some of these things 
> exist, or could exist one day, with the way some of the legislation 
> hands out power.  But there just hasn't been any proof of this 
> happening. So we have "undue influence" that turns out not to have had 
> any influence or effect.   An interesting idea, but not startlingly 
> untoward, one would think. (After all, we see that sort of result with 
> shock-jocks every day of the week.)
> 
> Now you wouldn't expect Richo to point this out, given the business he's 
> in (any more than the shock-jocks do). It's not something you'd want to 
> advertise to those who have $9000 a month to spare, in the belief that 
> something, someday, might happen. Nor would you expect Big Jim to point 
> it out... he has enough problems.
> 
>  
> 
> And of course, McGurk's not in a position to.
> 
> So maybe a reporter who can assess the reliability of her own data can 
> give an assessment.  It's not too late, Kate:  get onto the front page 
> now and say it:  barring a major break-through and the discovery of at 
> least one reliable witness, there's no grounds for considering that the 
> original story was worth a breakfast crumpet.... the sources that 
> started it were never going to hold up. And she can then let the police 
> get on with the job of trying to find out what happened in a 
> cold-blooded murder, without them having to pick their way through an 
> atmosphere clouded by suspicion, unsubstantiated gossip and rumour, week 
> after week, masquerading as news on the front page of a Once Great 
> newpaper.
> 
> /No, Matthew.  It's not enough to say that if you publish stuff quoting 
> other people it's ok / a feature / or whatever.....   There's this 
> other, basic and important, albeit old-fashioned stage:   how far have 
> you gone to authenticate / check your sources with 
> (reliable/authenticated) other sources?/
> 
>  
> 
> /Without the double-checking of sources, we're all in fairytale land.   
>  (Or in Kate's case, in Propaganda Land, doing the job for Fairfax 
> management and loading anything possible onto a pretty dubious state 
> government with equally dubious journalism.)/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -PeterM
> peterm_5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> There is no love sincerer than the love of food. - George Bernard Shaw
> 
> -PeterM
> peterm_5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> The Truth is realized in an instant; the Act is practiced step by step. 
> - Zen saying
> 
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