Driven Sourcing: How Journalists Use Digital Search Tools to Decide What's News
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Data-Driven Sourcing: How Journalists Use Digital Search Tools to Decide What's News Katherine Fink Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Katherine Fink All rights reserved ABSTRACT Data-Driven Sourcing: How Journalists Use Digital Search Tools to Decide What's News Katherine Fink This dissertation examines the efforts of journalists to expand their pool of potential sources beyond a group of people often called "the usual suspects." This group consists of public officials, business leaders, experts, spokespeople, and other people who are in the news often. Using interviews, participant observation, a survey, and online ethnography, this research investigates how a growing skepticism of the usual suspects and increasingly powerful technology have led to innovations in the source search process. Some journalists have seen potential in digital search tools, including databases and social media, for finding sources that had once been too difficult or time-consuming to find. Journalists themselves have created two source-finding initiatives: a database called the Public Insight Network, and Storyful, which calls itself the "world's first social news agency." Storyful journalists specialize in finding and verifying social media content from the scenes of breaking news events. Journalists have also used other tools created by public relations professionals and technologists. How did the availability of these tools change the reporting process? It varied by tool, and by journalist. Although the tools were designed to do similar things, journalists used them in different ways. This dissertation examines how journalists used these tools in three stages of the reporting process: finding sources, verifying sources, and managing sources. Ultimately, most journalists used these tools not to find new sources, but to follow and research sources they had already identified by name or location. Few journalists had discovered new sources and story ideas with the help of digital search tools. So while these tools opened new possibilities for finding sources, journalists were still more likely to cover some people and topics over others. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Charts, Graphs, Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Considering Sources 6 Chapter 2: Sources as Suppliers 58 Chapter 3: Digital Source Tools 124 Chapter 4: Finding Sources 158 Chapter 5: Verifying Sources 210 Chapter 6: Managing Sources 250 Chapter 7: Conclusion 282 Bibliography 302 Appendix A: Beat Journalist Interview Methodology 336 Appendix B: Beat Journalist Interview Schedule 346 Appendix C: PIN Analyst Survey 347 i LIST OF CHARTS, GRAPHS, ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.1 Story instigators, categorized by source type 108 Figure 2.2 Sources used by journalists, categorized by type 113 Figure 2.3 Article labeled by Brenda and coded according to source type 116 Figure 2.4 Article labeled by Jack and coded according to source type 118 Figure 2.5 Article labeled by Sabrina and coded according to source type 120 Figure 2.6 Percentage of words attributed to each source type 121 Figure 2.7 Percentage of sources compared to percentage of word count 122 Figure 3.1 Author's profile in PIN's Source system 128 Figure 3.2 Example of PIN query 129 Figure 3.3 Sampling of videos available to Storyful clients 139 Figure 3.4 Profiles of some of the 285 users on Storyful's Twitter list for Syria 141 Figure 3.5 Geofeedia map display 149 Figure 3.6 Banjo interface 152 Figure 4.1 Journalists' tweets in response to "fiscal conservative" statement 170 Figure 4.2 Tweets in response to Lhota's "Rocky" reference 172 Figure 4.3 Journalist's tweet with responses below 175 Figure 4.4 Locations options offered by Facebook 178 Figure 4.5 Geotagged tweet from Ukraine anti-government protests 179 Figure 4.6 Location of Grinchenko's tweet 180 Figure 4.7 Photo of bullet in Kyiv, Ukraine 180 Figure 4.8 Map from the BBC's Thatcher funeral coverage 182 Figure 4.9 Example of Facebook photo-tagging prompt 188 Figure 4.10 Image from ICanStalkU.com website, July 21, 2010 191 Figure 4.11 Tweet from journalist Izzy Hyman, May 24, 2009 192 Figure 5.1 @NPRNews tweet, January 8, 2011 214 Figure 5.2 @Reuters tweet, January 8, 2011 215 Figure 5.3 PIN Query template 222 Figure 5.4 Published response to the query "What's your commute like?" 223 Figure 5.5 Example of Storyful story page, February 27, 2014 230 Figure 5.6 Examples of Andy Carvin's tweets during the Arab Spring 236 Figure 5.7 Tweet from Mashable Executive Editor Jim Roberts 243 Figure 6.1 Tweet from Fox sports journalist Jay Glazer, December 28, 2012 262 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would have never happened without the generosity of journalists who allowed me to hang around their newsrooms and pester them with questions. I would like to thank American Public Media, Storyful, and other news organizations and journalists who graciously allowed me access to their spaces, their thoughts, and their time. I would like to thank my dissertation adviser, Michael Schudson, for his invaluable mentorship, enthusiasm, and diplomatic but dead-on critiques. Thank you also to the other members of my dissertation committee: Andie Tucher, David Stark, Mark Hansen, and Diane Vaughan, whose courses, writings, and conversations gave me much to think about during this process. I would like to thank the Brown Center for Media Innovation for its generous support during my final year of research, and for the opportunities it has provided for me to learn from technologists and storytellers who are driving exciting advancements in media research. I would also like to thank the Yale Law School's Information Society Project for allowing me to learn about communications and technology from a legal perspective. Alumni and students of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism have generously provided me valuable insight, energy, camaraderie, and advice. I would like to thank in particular Chris Anderson, Julia Sonnevend, Colin Agur, Ruth Palmer, Katherine Brown, Lucas Graves, Ben Peters, Soomin Seo, Travis Mushett, Charles Berret, Katie Montalbano, Ri Pierce-Grove, and Andi Dixon. iii I owe a tremendous amount to journalists and broadcasters who taught me and inspired me in my career, especially Kevin Gavin, Mark Nootbaar, Scott Hanley, Rob Graham, and Sarah McConnell. I am also grateful to my mentors in business school, who convinced me that it was the most natural thing in the world for a journalist who got an MBA in her free time to quit her job and get a Ph.D. Thanks to Ken Matejka, Diane Ramos, and Jim Weber for helping me find a way to make it happen. Thanks to Mary, Jeremy, and Mary Catherine Nienow, for being supremely welcoming and generous hosts while I was in the thick of my research. Thank you to my parents for tolerating my bobbing and weaving in my career and life, and trusting that I would come out all right on the other side. And thank you most of all to Matt, for always being ready with laughs, love, ideas, and harmony joyrides. iv INTRODUCTION "The philosophy of the work itself needs to be discussed; the news about the news needs to be told." (Lippmann, 1920, p. 18) This dissertation is highly personal for me. I left my job as a journalist in hopes of addressing some of the things that frustrated me about being a journalist. One of those frustrations was the fact that journalists returned to the same small circle of sources over and over again, even when other people were available and had important things to say. I did not always take journalism so seriously. Even my decision to become a journalist was a bit of a whim. I got my first reporting job after I graduated college with a Russian degree, and had no idea what to do with it. I answered an ad for a job at a local news/talk radio station because I thought it sounded like fun. And it was fun. I got to talk on the air. My colleagues and I listened for breathless, excited voices on the police scanner that signaled that something newsworthy was happening. We would race out to events, then race back to report them before our chief competitor, the local television station, could. We would watch their evening news and cackle victoriously, knowing (even if few other people did) that we had scooped them by a whopping five minutes. Over time, several sobering assignments made me see the job as less fun. I witnessed the execution of a convicted murderer. I shoved my microphone in front of people who had just lost their relatives in car wrecks. I mistakenly reported that a 1 missing girl had been found alive, when in fact it was her lifeless body that had been found. I loved many things about being a journalist, but it was also a heavy burden. I felt that I had become desensitized to other people's hardships, because they were the stuff of my daily routine. I tried to justify what I did by reasoning that I was providing a public service; I was doing good by keeping people informed. But I had no idea whether I was actually doing good. Did airing the tape of the crying widow inspire sympathy and activism? Or macabre voyeurism? Was it even my responsibility as a journalist to care, or was I supposed to inform the public and be done with it? I didn't know. But I did know that we as journalists made choices about what information we provided to our audiences.