Jeff Jarvis: When It Comes To New Journalism, 'Transparency Is The New Objectivity'

People don't know why you're here. How many people have read Jeff's book "What Would Google Do?" Tell us about that book and why it's important for everyone in here to read it.

It's not a book about Google. It's a book about all the changes in our world, that this group understands well but the rest of the world doesn't understand well, so i hope it serves to translate a little bit.

So you, besides this book which was a huge hit, came out about a year ago?

A year.

You don't know this, but you've been a mentor to me in the sense of, from the very beginning I looked up to you. There was a session in '05 I think, or '06 somewhere back east.

Washington.


You took me out.

Well you took the New York Times Out. And then I took you out for the way you took out.

I just said something about the New York Times is, what did I say? That the were biased.

You said that they were in the pocket of a start up.

Something like that. And you, you actually like took me out on stage and I felt like I'd been...

But we hugged.

Yeah. made up later. But the point is that you've never given me any wiggle room in terms of, you don't have to say yes to whatever. So, over time, I've learned to ask you for advice on things about journalism, and should I blow a source who something like that and you've always given me good advice.

So you are, what is your current job, Director of Interactive Journal, what is that?

No, I'm Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, Graduate School of Journalism. This morning, my students presented their pitches for their new businesses. Trying to prove that journalism and entrepreneurship are not an oxymoron.

You are also a consultant to a lot of mainstream journalism, and they look to you sometimes for advice on how to handle the new world.

Or as a target for spitballs, depending, yeah.

Yeah. So you come from both worlds, old school, dead, dying media, and vibrant, new, awesome blogging type things.

Time crunching media.

Yeah. So, what I want to talk to you about is the conflicts of interest issue, which I don't wangaze too much, at all really. But I think there's a bigger topic. So I have disclosed that I am making investments and competitors have freaked out about that and tried to make a big deal out of it, and that's fine.

I can defend myself. But there's this issue of transparency in journalism that bothers me as a consumer of journalism.

Right.

How big of a problem do actual journalists see that?

Well, let me ask you a question first. Are you a journalist?

No. Absolutely not.

Why do you eschew the title?

I see journalists as priests. They're the only ones that are allowed to tell us what the news is.

But you reject it rather than taking it over. Why not take it over? Why not say that you are a new kind of journalist?

Why do I need to do that?

So, the title means nothing to you.

It doesn't mean a whole lot to me, no. And I understand.

What does it mean to you?

Pardon me?

What does it mean to you? What does it convey?

When I think of journalism I truly think of people who are very, very biased hiding their bias behind theoretically objective text. But I see that the adjectives that they use, what they choose to cover and not cover, shows who they really are. And I remembered at a dinner once in New York, I met a guy who had been at CNN forever, before that the Washington Post.

And he was telling me how he had covered politics for a long time. And I said, "So are you a Republican or a Democrat?" He said "oh I can't tell you". And I said "why?" And he goes. "Well that would be, you know if that got out, what I was and effect how people view my content." I have a right to know what your actual views are so that I can read your supposedly objective content in light of that." We absolutely agree about that, that I said it one way and then David Weinberger said it better, that transparency is the new objectivity.

That objectivity was bullshit, there's no such thing.

Sure.

It's impossible to do. And transparency is the least you owe your audience and your readers and the least they should expect from you. Right, so there's two issues for you and the actions recently. One, transparency, I think you did the right thing. The second question is whether or not people think you should or shouldn't not invest in companies, and whether that affects your reputation with them.

How many of you think that it's perfectly fine for Michael, as the head of Tech Crunch, to invest in companies. How many people think it's not fine?

Security.

How many don't give a shit? Somebody's not raising their hands.

But that's an issue that I'm not interested in discussing.

OK.

Mostly because I don't really care. I assume like what Tim just said. If I screw up on that, we'll lose our audience.

I agree. I agree.

What I'm more you're interested in is.

Well and actually you go back to the earliest days of TechCrunch, people forget that it was not a content product. It was you, investing, and using it a way to get out.

But should the NY Times, should a reporter for the New York Times reporting on say, Obama, put their political affiliation, ey voted. in the by liner down by the bottom.

I believe so. Now Ibest argument, I think is if it's reductive to a simple word it's not very helpful. In other words if you're covering religion, and you used to be Catholic, then you say that? I think it's relevant. But can you presume what that person's attitude toward abortion is based on that fact?

No you can't. So if you say "I voted for Clinton" or "I voted for Obama", or I voted for " McCain". I voted for Clinton first, Obama next. What does that tell you? Well, you know that's part of the story but I think we should do it, if expecting the rest of the world to be transparent.

Did you vote for Gore?

Yep.

Even Gore? So you vote Democrat no matter what?

I voted my first year, voting I voted for Gerry Ford.

Geez.

Jimmy Carter was that bad.

You're that old?

Oh, fuck you. You're looking older.

I didn't start voting in the seventies, I'll tell you that. So there not going to ever do that?

No, there not going to do that but I think that they should. If you go to my blog at Buzzmachine .com, the 'about me' page is obnoxious in it's telling you too much information about me, but it does that for a point. That we should tell people anything that is possibly relevant. about what we do?

Well, you see, I can't be that transparent. I mean if I'm transparent as to who my sources are on a story, I'd lose my sources. If I have buddies out there that they help me with stories. I never disclose that. Clear conflict of interest, right? Because then maybe they end up speaking at our conference or I cover something that maybe I almost wouldn't have covered otherwise.

When can you make judgments about what's worth covering, and what's not. I can't disclose that.

Well. If you If I just made a list of all my friends, it would be a disaster.

Do you have some?

I set myself up for that.

Sorry, yes you did.

But, I don't know, I'd push you harder on that and you pushed transparency as the salve for this issue of investment. I think you should try to push it as far as you possibly can as long as it doesn't affect your reporting.

Well, see my opinion, I'm transparent about financial conflicts of interest because I have to be. And it makes sense.

Right .

I'm not transparent about who my sources are, even though I argue that, that makes me biased. What I think, is that we're never going to get people to disclose. I'm just one of my sources. Or I like this guy because he spoke at my conference. I think the best thing we can do is to educate an audience into thinking everyone is biased.

There is no such thing as an unbiased piece of reporting.

Absolutely, and the idea is are you an advocate? Everyone's an advocate. The reason that journalists pick the stories they pick is because its going to have some impact on the world, right? So, I guess the rule for you was that you should be transparent about everything possible that doesn't directly affect your reporting and that the reader shouldn't have a proper right to know to judge your work.

None of our competitors will do that. That's what I say almost every day.

That 's the only thing to me. I don't really care about the definition of journalism. I don't really care about that. But, to me, I find that very interesting that you don't aspire to taking over that world, you just ignore it. Because you think it's devalued.

I'm trying to point out some of your tweets here. I think that I do see it as a priesthood in that priests are the only ones that can talk to God, and you're not allowed to read the Bible and etcetera, etcetera. That's ridiculous. anybody that wants to become a blogger can become a blogger, and report news.

What's wrong with that?

Yeah, absolutely.

I wrote a post this weekend about the idea that I think that the architecture of journalism is starting to mimic that of the internet. So, the witnesses are telling the world what they see and they carve it. If you don't follow Andy at MPR ACRVIN, he's looking at it from above and plucking out all the good stuff from Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia and so on.

That's the new role of the journalist. The conversation goes on without us. We in journalism thought the conversation needed us. That's not the case anymore. It's end to end, like the internet. e can add value to that in all kinds of ways. We can vet and find good people and find nodes and networks, and give perspective to journalism.

In journalism school is that what they're teaching?

The old stuff. The facts and I don't know whatever.

The way we put it in CUNY is that we still teach the eternal varities.

What does that even mean?

It means completeness, fairness, the obvious things, but I learned all kinds of new ethics from the blog world. I learned the ethic of the correction. You don't see corrections on the evening news. They make mistakes. I've learned the value of a conversation. I've learned a lot of things in this world.

Arianna, I think that her insight, I asked myself why no major media company, aside from the Guardian, started a Huffington Post and nobody bought it. And I answered my own question, concluding that because they don't think it's content. Because content is that what content people make. She's not a content person.

This is the hoi polloi talking. There's a disrespect to the public.

It's basically an aggregator.

Right, this is disrespect to the public which in turn, brings a disrespect.

I also kind of go "eh" about that. I mean, aggregators they have their value, but we tend not to aggregate. If a story's been overcovered, we tend to leave it alone and move on. So I'm kind of with the other people on that. Arianna and I have been talking about doing something, and she actually announced it on stage, although I didn't know she was going to.

We're going to put together a site to have a discussion around this, and we really want you and Jay Rosen to be a part of this.

We'd be delighted to.

And so, we're going to be, anyway, it's already been announced. We're going to be doing something over the next couple of weeks.

Arianna does that, doesn't she?

Yeah, she tends to...

She just announces things.

She just announces things, yeah, so. And so I think this is the beginning of a very long, ongoing discussion that I'm fascinated with, which really comes down to, "Do I have the right to do what I do for a living?" And I think I do.


Well you certainly have a right to do it, and the question I think is, "I would, I would love to see you change your mindset a little bit and imagine if you called yourself a journalist, how would you define that?" 'Cause I think that's, that's listen: you are a model for my entrepreneurial journalism students.

The idea that the industry of journalism is going to be saved by the big old institutions is far Innovation is going to come from entrepreneurs. Journalists have to make their own jobs. They've got to disrupt the industry. So you're, you're a role model.

Hmm.

Scares some people. But you need to be a role model because you're an entrepreneur and a journalist. I would say.

You know that sounds like how are we going to protect the buggy whip manufacturers, too.

No I don't want to protect them.if I would've dropped them then you were the model for doing that. That's what I'm saying.

We're doing our best. We have one question and then we're going to have to end.

I say this as a colleague of Mike's and afriend of Jeff's but...

So say, just say who you are.

I'm Saul Stencil from the Huffington Post Media Group And previously with the New York Times.

Previously with the New York Times and I couldn 't agree more with all of, where you want things to go. Transparency and clarity and the end of the priesthood and the multi-part communication but I think you were throwing a baby out with the bathwater in your dismissal of everything in the past, and the key thing is...

Who are you talking to?

I'm talking to both of you. Yeah.

I don't think I'm dismissing everything in the past.

There is a skill that transcends technology in eing able to go and talk to someone and make it clear that whatever you thought before that conversation, you're putting that on hold, so that you understand hat they're saying, and you can describe it to someone else and to say that, you are, where you come from, is true, but the professional skill of listening is good for people in business, it's good for people investing, right?

You're a better investor if, even if you think that it's a stupid category to be in, you turn that part of your brain off and you listen.

Amen Saul, of course.

And the whole professional ethic of journalism is all about making all...

Are you going let him say that about you?

No.

He just attacked everything you

So the problem here is, A, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water, so maybe you didn't listen well enough today.

Nice.


B, I think the journalists have done a very bad job of listening. Look at your former boss Bill Keller's obnoxious leak baiting column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine this weekend on Twitter. Right? It's just trying very hard to say "Fuck You!" to the entire world. And say we I don't want to hear you.

Your conversation to us is noise. That's what Keller said. Not good listening. The technology provides new tools and new ways to listen and journalists are starting to learn that you were key to that. You changed the voice of The New York Times itself by blogging there. You were more open to the whole world.

You changed it a great deal but still have a long way to go. Sold it.

I like how you tore him down and then you built him back up.

It's like classroom.

So this is to be ...You 're good? He doesn't look like he is good.

No he is not. He goes like that. It's alright.

He is going to make my life Listen, this is the beginning of a conversation. Thank you so much for coming. I know you're jumping on a flight now. I really appreciate it. Thanks Jeff.

Sure. That was good, guys. Okay, well this is my favorite part, the battlefield, and we're going change things around, we're going to bring a panel of