If you are looking for a strong example of reader-driver distributed news reporting, click over to Josh Marshall’s TPMCafe.com today. Under a post by Paul Begala, readers are filling in the details of Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting a fellow hunter in Texas over the weekend.
Readers with hunting experience are blowing a hole (I know, really bad pun) in newspaper reports that Cheney stood 30 feet to 30 yards away from the victim when the vice president shot him. Based on the reported number of pellet strikes, the hit pattern and the number of pellets in a shell, readers are concluding that the victim may have been shot at close to point-blank range.
Another administration cover-up? Whatever the case, this incident may yet provide another example of how the Internet can connect thousands of sharp readers who, collectively, can find flaws in stories that a small handful of traditional reporters might miss.
About Robert Niles
You can’t be serious.
All we see is the distributed speculation as a result of the paucity of information that’s been delivered– not to mention the overnight growth of “Duck Cheney” fan clubs. This is not a new phenomenon.
The early stage of all investigative journalism, ultimately, is speculation. As that speculation becomes more informed, it becomes fact. As more people publish online each year, more people can witness, and participate, in the development of public knowledge about a story. That’s significant.
This isn’t about people cracking wise. (Though there is much of that out there.) This is about trying to get at the facts of the story, which the White House seems eager to block. Traditional journalists should welcome the public’s assistance, and follow up on these leads. These folks, in this example, know a lot more about the physics of a hunting accident than the White House press corps, I’d wager.
People always speculate. Now they speculate online. But there are *many* places to speculate online. Do we have any reason to believe that the Scoop conversation structure can produce more refined speculation? Do we have any reason to believe that TPMcafe’s implementation of Scoop, and TPMcafe’s community, produces more refined speculation? Without any hypothesis or evidence, I am still skeptical to both questions.
The most I can conclude from the present observations is that a beltway pundit such as Paul Begala is capable himself of knowing the “physics of a hunting accident.” Your post continues the push the myth that reporters haven’t the foggiest of who to ask when something veers outside their territory. Yes, the Internet helps. But here the case is that the “Big Head” of the pundit is orders of magnitude more reliable than the “Long Tail.”
Please, by all means, call up Paul Begala and ask him whether the comments to his story proved any more help than any professional pundit. Or ask the community whether any of the posts proved helpful to each other. I am willing to draw conclusions based on the data we find. I have done some studies along these lines of this on the whole of the Howard Dean campaign blog, and the only thing I can conclude so far was that Joe Trippi’s conclusions aren’t backed by the evidence. Further hypothesis: for an outside reader, past a certain number of comments, there’s no value to reading any more. These are all things we need to study, and my patience is running thin on the number of academic journals that are actually advocating for rigorous study of these phenomena.
If you are looking for evidence of sucessful distributed reporting, I would submit that the “Jeff Gannon” investigation a year ago qualified, since the DKos community did produce key key facts towards the eventual storyline. And remember also that some of the most advanced reporting on the recent cartoon row came via Wikipedia at first, because of the global nature of the story. I’d wager that far more national reporters can find people familiar with bird hunting than people familiar with Denmark.