Legendary reporter Robert Fisk recently gave a public lecture in Wellington, New Zealand, and offered some very strong personal thoughts on web journalism. Newswire reports:
“Mr Fisk said the internet had led to the erosion of quality writing.
He recalled being challenged about a quote of his that had been published on a website – although he had never said it. “But I read it on the internet,” was the response, to which Mr Fisk simply hung up.
Often “misquoted or requoted” on the internet, he is furious when people cut pieces out of what he has said or written, especially if someone uses ellipsis to indicate something has been cut from a quote, when they have actually culled 380 words.
Gordon Campbell – political editor of Scoop and host of the evening – attempted to defend the internet, taking the microphone off Mr Fisk several times to reassure the audience of the benefits of web journalism.
At one point, Mr Fisk retorted: “To hell with the web, it’s got no responsibility.”
I wonder what his problem is. I have always admired Fisk. He’s an exceptional journalist. But like so many exceptional journalists who have earned their living reporting for newspapers, I don’t think he understands what blogs actually are.
Let me ask you this: Why do we report news? To inform, yes. To educate, yes. To apply a sense of public voice… absolutely. For reporters like Robert Fisk, a blog should make him weak at the knees with excitement. If you read Reesh’s piece in full, you’ll come across this statement:
“British-born Fisk (pictured), a journalist who has lived in the Middle East for 30 years, describes as disgraceful a newspaper cutting off the bottom part of a photo of a man holding his dead daughter. By not showing the bone protruding from her leg, the newspaper got away with the caption: ‘A man carries his wounded daughter.’”
With a blog, he could have posted that picture in full.
In fact, everything Fisk claims is wrong about Middle East reporting would be solved if he posted his work on a blog as well as just in a newspaper.
Fisk’s work achieves the goal of informing and educating whoever reads it. But if we’re looking at ABC figures, that puts it at 235,289 on average per day. That’s a very small percentage of a small country.
I say if we, as journalists, are to really do our job as the world’s mouthpiece, then Fisk needs to embrace the web, before the web consumes him.
“In fact, everything Fisk claims is wrong about Middle East reporting would be solved if he posted his work on a blog as well as just in a newspaper.”
Why would he? You don’t get paid for blogging! I think Newspapers are like radio, reports of it’s imminent demise are overstated.
There’s two approaches to being misquoted on the internet.
1. Claim that the internet and everything about modern life is rubbish, and it was all better in the olden days, when journalists could drink and smoke in the office.
2. Set up some quick and easy Google alerts on your own name, and respond when people misquote you. It’s called reputation management, and it’s a skill more and more online people are learning from the time they first start joining a social network.
As for claiming the web has no responsibility, he’s managed to lump together 113 million blogs (Technorati figures), God knows how many websites, and any number of highly responsible and informative writers, journalists and bloggers into one ill informed statement.
I’ve worked and seen great journalists and some incredibly bad ones. And the tool they used to publish had no bearing on their skill level.