NYU Professor Jay Rosen is a long-time critic of how journalists worship at the altar of old-school “objectivity,” something he argues convincingly that they have never been able to achieve. Instead of being truly neutral and unbiased observers, he says that journalists fall into a variety of groups he labels with names like “church of the savvy” and the “view from nowhere.”
In a recent post to his Press Think blog, Prof. Rosen argues that rather than being “objective,” whatever that means, they should work on being transparent. Rosen argues that reporters need to “show their work” by explaining their point of view, how they did the reporting, and what they still don’t know, among other things.
Here are the basic principles of transparency from his post “Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism“:
- Here’s where we’re coming from.
Lay out your basic values and where you are coming from as a reporter. - What we know and don’t know.
Journalists are often much better at reporting what they do know and ignoring what they don’t. - Here’s how we did this.
Journalists should show their work on how they reported their story. - Don’t believe us? See for yourself.
With online support for printed stories, you can share the original documents and data so readers, viewers and listeners can analyze the information for themselves. - These are our current priorities.
These are the news stories we’re currently interested in. - Help us investigate.
Ask your audience for help. Crowd source to get outside of your own bubble. - What it costs to do this work.
Explain to audience members how much doing the reporting costs and how much revenue it’s bringing in. - What did we miss?
Engage in a bit of self criticism. - Attack our reporting? We will respond.
Journalists need to respond to criticism, both fair and unfair. And when it’s unfair, journalists need to explain why. They can’t just suffer in silence. - If you’re coming in the middle of the movie.
Give audience members who haven’t been following the story fro the beginning a chance to catch up. Like sharing your data, this is something easy to do online. - When you have nothing to add, don’t try to add anything.
Don’t say something just for the sake of saying something.
This is just the briefest of summaries of a much longer and better post from Prof. Rosen. Go read the original post now.