Annotations to Jay Rosen’s take on WikLeak’s Afghanistan War logs, the WaPo’s surveillance state investigation and the media:

1. If a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it. ((*Bullshit*. Herd journalism is the rule of the land — and the real story isn’t the documents anyways, but how they’re interpreted. ))

4. Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. ((No — it’s able to report because of the effort of a few highly motivated, tremendously skilled people working in a technological framework that, thanks to concerted effort by privacy activists, still allows privacy.))

5. So [the newspapers] were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.
Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show. ((Actually, we don’t know if this is effective or not. We’ll find out in years to come. Maybe we’ll find out that journalistic gatekeepers really play a crucial role, and the crowd is very unwise with this sort of thing; or vice versa; or neither. They hypothesis is now being tested.))

7. Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t even be in contention? ((No, we can’t. Or should whistleblowers on financial malfeasance skip the WSJ?))

8.  [The WaPo’s investigation is] an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes. ((Disagreed. Because what’s needed to do the fixing is a civil society with a functioning democracy, engaged media and active citizenry, all manifested in the sort of concerted effort that occurred during Watergate. We don’t have that now. A minority of the public cares about what the WaPo exposed; and those who do are too fragmented, disorganized and distracted to pull the last few rusty levers in the broken machine of our society.))

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? ((Agreed on the last point. As for the first two: what if the elites just don’t care about reform?))

In response to a discussion of the scientifically distasteful term “missing link,” and how SEO favors its use:

I wonder sometimes about how many of our traffic-enhancing strategies, including those focused on search engine optimization, are grounded in solid data and proven hypotheses, and how many are based on hunches, wishful thinking and preconceived notions.

To take the latest example, “missing link” is a hot search term. But its use is going to affect your — apologies for this word — brand; if I see an outlet using it, my snap judgement will be that they’re not credible. So I’ll be a bit less likely to look at other of their stories in the future; the chance of my subscribing to the outlet’s RSS feed, and providing a great many pageviews thereafter, drop to nil; and I won’t spread the story through my social network. (And then there’s the question of whether there are advertising or payment-relevant differences in the audiences of “missing link” and “non-missing-link” approaches.)

Maybe all this doesn’t matter, and lowest-common-denominator SEO really is the best possible approach to monetizing pageviews. But I’d like to see rigorous data to back this up, and not just marketing spiels from SEO consultants with products to sell.