Steve Brill finds ‘fact-free’ fodder for his class
This Steve Brill and Micah Sifry email exchange about Sifry’s “Watergate and the Internet” post was sent to me to share with Romenesko readers:
On 4/10/12 8:01 AM, “Micah Sifry” wrote:
Steve Brill
Steve [Brill]:
Thanks for making time to talk with me on Sunday.
Here’s the piece: [URL removed]
Stay in touch.
Micah
Brill responded:
On 4/10/12 8:43 AM, “Steven Brill” wrote:
You didn’t tell me [about] the Jay Rosen piece. Can you send me the earlier piece you posted? I would really like to see it — and use it for my class as an example of a certain kind of fact-free journalism. And could you explain in detail the “accident” that led you to post it early. Please be specific, so that I can understand that it was really a technical accident, not that you got second thoughts after Woodward complained. Please send asap, as I might use for my Reuters column as well as in class.
* Jay Rosen: “I apologize to Mr. Woodward. I’m sorry I wrote that, Bob. I was wrong.”
UPDATE: I invited Sifry to comment and he sent the following:
Here’s the email I literally just sent to Brill in response to him.
Micah
11:58 AM (0 minutes ago) to Steven
Steve:
The original unfinished draft is below.
Micah Sifry
The earlier piece was basically the first 10 grafs of the final version, ending on the Jay Rosen quote, and then followed by this bit of material, which I’ve dropped from the final version because it was irrelevant. (I also cut out my parenthetical remark in the first draft about Josh Marshall, because as I continued reporting on this I learned that he indeed was on the ASNE panel and his Gonzalez story was discussed):
Well, Internet, what do you think?
On the Yale Daily News website, a blog post about the Woodward anecdote drew this comment from a student named Colin Ross, who writes for the YDN: “I was in the class in question. I don’t recall it being so blatant as saying we could just google Nixon’s secret fund, but some papers did rely heavily on the power of the Internet rather than the hard work of journalism. So no, it’s not a fabrication. An oversimplification, maybe, but he’s right to worry about over-reliance on the Internet.”
I’ve reached out to Ross, as well as to Mark Schoofs, who teaches a class on journalism at Yale this spring, for comment.
Obviously, I wasn’t done yet with the piece. /CONTINUES
Here’s the chronology of what happened on Friday. In the morning I started drafting the piece, working on our Drupal-based editorial CMS. The draft had the working title, “Did Bob Woodward Make Up His Anti-Yale Internet Story?” It was saved in our system, but marked as “unpublished.”
At around 12:30 I called Woodward (I had also emailed him a list of questions), but he was in the middle of a meeting and said he’d look at my email when he could. In the meantime, I made a few edits to the post, and–I thought–saved it again as a draft. (I’ve since checked with my managing editor, and it’s likely that what happened is it somehow went to our default setting of “published.”)
At about 2:30 I got an email from Woodward, asking me to call him. As soon as he got on the phone, he started complaining about how I could have posted my piece without speaking to him, etc, and I realized, to my horror, that it had somehow appeared online. (I’m guessing that he got a Google Alert built on his name–I don’t know how he saw it otherwise, as it hadn’t been pushed out in any other way.) I apologized right away and took the post down, and then put up that short apology post.
I didn’t have second thoughts–I wasn’t done collecting first thoughts!
Since this happened, I’ve had my managing editor change the default setting on our CMS so all posts start out as “unpublished” even if they are saved as drafts. And my technical lesson learned is to stop being lazy and composing drafts in our CMS and instead to stick to using another word processing program on my laptop instead, as an additional safeguard against accidentally putting unfinished work online.
Micah
Here’s the original unfinished post:
Did Bob Woodward Make Up His Anti-Yale Internet Story?
BY MICAH L. SIFRY | Friday, April 6 2012Tuesday afternoon at the American Society of News Editors annual conference, on a panel called “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?” veteran investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were waxing nostalgic about the good old days of traditional shoe-leather reporting when the following exchange occurred, according to Washington Post reporter Dan Zak:
“One of the colleges asked students in a journalism class to write a one-page paper on how Watergate would be covered now,” said Bob Woodward, “and the professor — ”
“Why don’t you say what school it was,” suggested Carl Bernstein, sitting to Woodward’s left…
“Yale,” Woodward said. “He sent the one-page papers that these bright students had written and asked that I’d talk to the class on a speakerphone afterward. So I got them on a Sunday, and I came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, ‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to “Nixon’s secret fund” and it would be there.’ ”
“This is Yale,” Bernstein said gravely.
“That somehow the Internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events,” Woodward said. “And they went on to say the political environment would be so different that Nixon wouldn’t be believed, and bloggers and tweeters would be in a lather and Nixon would resign in a week or two weeks after Watergate.”
A small ballroom of journalists — which included The Washington Post’s top brass, past and present — chuckled or scoffed at the scenario.
“I have attempted to apply some corrective information to them,” Woodward continued, “but the basic point is: The truth of what goes on is not on the Internet. [The Internet] can supplement. It can help advance. But the truth resides with people. Human sources.”
I read this and thought, what a shame that no one spoke up on behalf of the ways that the Internet enables journalists (professional or amateur) to sleuth out a story together with smart readers, the way Josh Marshall did with his blog’s readers on the Alberto Gonzales/political firings of federal district attorneys story, which led to the Attorney General’s resignation and Marshall’s winning the George Polk Award for reporting. And I also thought, could it really be this black-and-white? Could Yale students really be that gullible about the Internet and naive about how powerful actors will try to hide information from public view?
But then I ran into NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen yesterday at MIT, and asked him for his take. He said that he doubted that the Woodward anecdote about the Yale students was true. On his Facebook page, Rosen wrote Wednesday morning, “I don’t even believe this anecdote about moronic Yale students that Bob Woodward used to illustrate how clueless young people are today about journalism. It sounds made-up or very, very distorted from something one of them wrote.”
Well, Internet, what do you think?
On the Yale Daily News website, a blog post about the Woodward anecdote drew this comment from a student named Colin Ross, who writes for the YDN: “I was in the class in question. I don’t recall it being so blatant as saying we could just google Nixon’s secret fund, but some papers did rely heavily on the power of the Internet rather than the hard work of journalism. So no, it’s not a fabrication. An oversimplification, maybe, but he’s right to worry about over-reliance on the Internet.”
I’ve reached out to Ross, as well as to Mark Schoofs, who teaches a class on journalism at Yale this spring, for comment.
Brill then replied:
From: Steven Brill
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:06:02 -0400
To: Micah Sifry
Subject: Re: my story is upThanks for the explanation.
Colin is a really smart, good student. I’ve now looked at all of the papers handed in, and his was among those that did not take the approach that Bob ACCURATELY described. But I can tell you now, having reviewed them all, that Bob was completely fair in his characterization. And again, that was for three years running.
Steve
P.S. That headline: How would you like it if I wrote a story about you with this headline: “Is Micah Sifry a Sleazy Journalist?” And then many paragraphs in I allowed as how you weren’t?
