Rigorous editing is a casualty of click-bait

Debates about fake news reinforce the need for editors to maintain rigorous standards for online.

Debates about fake news and the loss of public trust in mainstream media just reinforce the need for editors to maintain the same rigorous standards with their online offerings as they have traditionally applied in print.

Readers may be surprised by that sentence, but in truth most print newspapers and almost all broadcast television news services apply much higher standards to their traditional products than they do online. And not just in what they publish but also, often in the case of free sites, in the seniority of staff they appoint to their digital businesses.

Why? Well in the late noughties the view from managements across the media, most of whom did not really have a clue about digital, was that the editor was dead. The buzzword was curation: just shovel it, in other words.

And hipsters who understood devices were more highly valued than journalists who understood their craft. That was probably inevitable as many older journalists struggled with the technology.

Yet there were unintended consequences. A century of discipline that had created very strict expectations of editors was junked as smart young things harvested the best of their own newsrooms but also picked widely from across the internet.

The idea was that editors — with their fusty old ideas about getting things right, making sure news was indeed new, ensuring stories were checked legally and being sticklers for grammar — would just hamper the free flow of information blooming across the web.

And of course the young digitally savvy journos appointed to run online sites had to be fast so their stories could rank highly on Google search and generate the all-important clicks that drive online advertising revenue.

That’s right dear reader. On many sites, especially free ones and those with porous paywalls, more traffic comes from search and social media referrals than from loyal customers who call up the site, app or digital replica edition.

So begins the lowering of standards as online editors at such places — think the Mail Online or even The Sydney Morning Herald’s website — look for ever quirkier stories or ever more outrageous political commentaries and race to get them up before they even wonder if they are correct. Some university student writes an outrageous piece defaming the prime minister and it leads the site, for an hour or two, when it never deserved publication at all.

I had a valuable lesson about all this on November 4, 2010, when Fairfax Media’s sites were first to report a Qantas Airbus A380 had crashed over Indonesia. The reports were based on tweets from people who claimed to have seen wreckage falling from the sky. There was no confirmation from Qantas that a plane had crashed. The plane landed safely in Singapore and this paper eventually got the exclusive interview with the pilot, Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny. Fairfax got the digital traffic on the day but The Australian kept its honour, refusing to publish a wildly incorrect story that would have meant the deaths of hundreds of Australians.

While not fake news as President Donald Trump would describe it, this was my first brush with a new culture of journalism that put facts last. Even though The Australian was cautious with the story, I decided I needed to pay more attention to the factual details on my website and The Australian needed to make sure it never joined the race Fairfax was in.

After all, readers who pay for this paper online expect exactly the same accuracy and standards as they are used to in the print product. And they are right to. Yet even on the best papers, like this one, the barriers to publication are lower online and the level of attention given to the words, headlines and general subediting is less rigorous. If you check the feedback from users it is clear they hate the spelling and grammatical errors online. On free sites the problem is even worse.

And now we see journalists who deliberately do not corroborate their facts arguing they were “just putting it out there” when stories fall over an hour after being published online. When was “just putting it out there” journalism?

None of this is about the rise of deliberately fake news and fake news sites that sprang up around the world in the lead-up to the US presidential election last November. Yet in a similar way — with a similar click-based business model — mainstream mastheads are inadvertently polluting their credibility with exactly that poison by failing to apply the necessary rigour to their editorial judgments.

Related to this is the privileging of opinion journalism over news reporting as traditional media fracture and polarise. People are wanting to read, watch and hear opinions they agree with.

Now this is a real problem for democratic governments, with the need for an informed electorate.

In ancient Athens, home of the original idea of democracy, citizens were few and the body politic small enough that people had an accurate knowledge of the issues and the views and qualities of their leaders. But in huge modern democracies where people start to distrust their mainstream media and many only read what they agree with, how can a system that requires accurate knowledge of what is really happening for the voters to make an informed decision work to elect governments that function well?

You can see were I am going with this. If there are no objective truths and or widely accepted facts, is the electorate as a whole likely to be able to deliver meaningful government at election time?

Former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson always says “the mob will work you out”. Recent election results in this country, where populists with little education and almost no clue about economics and public policy have been elected, would suggest the mob is struggling to join the dots. It is electing Upper House wreckers who are only succeeding in creating chaos in government. Maybe the media needs to stop turning these people into heroes of nightly television and start applying some journalistic scrutiny.

Discussing fake news on Q&A last Monday night, my colleague and friend Mark Day said all journalists could do in the face of “alternative facts” was continue to apply traditional journalistic methods to what they produce and prove their work accurate.

I agree. And editors need to be more rigorous than ever. Our democracy depends on it.

Eventually the public will come back to real information from trusted sources. After all, the senior staff at a great newspaper are better than bloggers and tweeters, and much of the modern free journalism pumped out as click bait is actually the opposite of journalism.

Just as William Shakespeare always was better than a bus ticket, whatever postmodern educators argued about utilitarianism and language, experienced journalists at a great newspaper really are better than partisan polemicists. Real news is better than click bait.

At least in the modern era it is easy to follow a range of media sources across the political spectrum so as to be able to make an informed and balanced judgment about issues. That is a far more intelligent course than only reading and watching what you agree with.