From our friends over at Dealbreaker, we learn that those bastions of professional journalism, Reuters, published a premature obituary for George Soros (where they left in the XXs for his age). Upon realizing this, Reuters issued an apology, but apparently left the original story up for about an hour before someone realized that perhaps they should pull it down. Hey, everyone makes mistakes, but it seems a little silly when people want to argue that bloggers are untrustworthy and that the mainstream media is careful about these things. Following their massive fuck up concerning the Boston Marathon bombing and then followed by stories like this, I think it's safe to note that mistakes happen across the board -- though it seems as if amateur blogs and the like often seem a lot faster about making corrections...

One thing I always find particularly silly in the mainstream media is when they claim "exclusive" on a story. News is not "ownable," and the second someone gets a story out, that news is out there and the facts are available to anyone else. So every time I see publications claim "exclusive!" it makes me laugh. It may be exclusive for a few seconds, at best. But, old school journalists seem to get really really picky about those things, as evidenced by this particularly stupid argument over who gets "credit" for a story. It seems that the NY Times and Reuters both had reporters working on the story, and the NYTimes tweeted the news out about 26 seconds before Reuters did -- but the Reuters reporter is still demanding credit -- first claiming (incorrectly) that he tweeted it first, but then noting (correctly) that they published first. The simple fact is that no one cares, other than a couple of journalists. No one keeps score, and no one owns the news. After all, if we have to go back to the "original" source, then wouldn't it be the person the story is actually about?

This probably isn't a surprise. Lots of traditional journalism folks have been busy slamming "anonymous" commenters online, often falsely blaming them for things they did not do. Earlier this year, we pointed to an excellent defense of anonymous commenting, by the Washington Post's Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, with the key line being:

For every noxious comment, many more are astute and stimulating. Anonymity provides necessary protection for serious commenters whose jobs or personal circumstances preclude identifying themselves. And even belligerent anonymous comments often reflect genuine passion that should be heard.

We've seen it here. We've always allowed anonymous commenters, even as we've continually added more and more features to make it worthwhile to identify yourself. And yet, if people do want to be anonymous, we're fine with that. To be honest, in over a decade of doing this, I've really seen no difference in either the level of "bad" or "good" comments from anonymous commenters as I have from named commenters. We have anonymous commenters who are brilliant, insightful, well-informed and add to the discussion all the time. In fact, with a few of them, I can even recognize that they're the "same" commenters via their writing style (even as some of them are totally anonymous, via proxies). At the same time, some of the commenters who freely admit who they are, can be some of the rudest, most obnoxious and uninformed commenters around. And, of course, the reverse is true as well. Certainly there are plenty of anonymous clueless commenters and plenty of insightful named commenters. The point is that the anonymity is the wrong thing to blame. We've seen no indication that anonymity leads to a higher level of clueless comments.

Unfortunately, however, some have decided to go in a different direction. Reuters is apparently now the latest to ban anonymous comments on their site. This is unfortunate, as among the big news providers out there, Reuters often seemed more "aware" of how to best embrace the internet, but this move seems like it's a mistake. It won't stop snide comments, but they may lose many valuable community members who, for whatever reason, did not have enough incentive to reveal who they were.

For the most part, the way this blog works is that we write stories based on what's being reported on elsewhere, and add some analysis or opinion or response to the story. Then, we let the discussion happen. We never claim to be complete, and one of the reasons why we leave the comments so wide open is we fully expect people to stop by and fill in more information. That's why we're always amused that when we respond to a story where the original source got some facts wrong, some commenters snipe in the comments about our failure to fact check, often with some snide comment about how we're what's killing journalism and/or something about how we are biased/covering up the real story, etc. I've never quite understood this, because we certainly don't hide our process. We link to all our sources, and explain our reasoning, and if a story changes, we're more than willing to post an update, always indicating what's changed.

But the fact is that all sorts of publications get stories wrong, even the big famous ones. For example, reading through my feeds, I recently saw a Reuters report claiming that the Discovery Channel had sued Amazon for patent infringement on July 14th. That struck me as odd since we had written about that identical thing... but back in March of 2009. Looking at the details, it seemed like all that happened was that Discovery set up its own patent holding subsidiary, Discovery Patents, and assigned the patents to that new organization, who took over the case in a procedural move. Big deal.

And indeed, a few hours later, I reloaded the Reuters story, and the story changed, with the new headline saying Discovery says infringement case v Amazon not new, rather than the original which said "Amazon accused of infringing patents with Kindle." I find the new headline amusing, because it's basically saying "hey, we reported on news that wasn't news." But, kudos to Reuters for not just disappearing the story, and admitting (sort of) in the story that it got the original story wrong. Of course, it doesn't fully come out and say it got the story wrong. It just changed the story to now say "Discovery said" that this was just a procedural move, rather than admitting that's exactly what happened. No need for the he said/she said. You can come out and say what actually happened.

Anyway, we're certainly not doing this to mock Reuters, which actually does a lot of good reporting. Just to highlight the fact that lots of media publications make a mistake here or there, and it's no sign of "hiding facts" or "bias." Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake.

Just a couple of months ago, I wrote about something that I thought was really impressive by Thomson Reuters. A Reuters blogger wrote a blog post on his official Reuters blog questioning Reuters itself after rumors started spreading that the company had spiked an article after pressure from the article's subject. Now, the two stories might cancel each other out in some way. Spiking a story based on pressure from the subject is bad, but allowing an employee to publicly question the action on a company blog shows an openness that I thought was impressive.

However, with the release of Reuters' new social media policies, it looks like the blogger, Chris Clair, would have broken one of the new rules:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you -- do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters.

Then there's this:

We're in a competitive business and while the spirit of social media is collaborative we need to take care not to undermine the commercial basis of our company.

The thing is, since you are in a competitive business, it's worth noting that all of your competitors are trying to "undermine the basis" of your company -- and thus it tends to be better to undermine yourself before someone else undermines you. So, while I understand why Reuters would say the following about Twitter usage:

As with blogging within Reuters News, you should make sure that if you have hard news content that it is broken first via the wire. Don't scoop the wire.

It doesn't really make much sense. It also goes against what some at Reuters have successfully done. You can still "scoop the wire" and then publish a full report on the wire. In fact, if you use Twitter correctly, you can build a lot more interest in the upcoming full story.

While there are plenty of reasonable and useful suggestions in the Reuters social media policies, some of it seems to go against what Reuters own Editor in Chief, David Schlesinger, said just last year:

The old means of control don't work.
The old categories don't work.
The old ways of thinking won't work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won't control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can't control access using old forms of accreditation any more.

Well, here's an interesting one. There were reports last week claiming that Reuters had spiked a story about hedge fund big shot Steven Cohen after Cohen complained to Reuters management. While Reuters has since strongly denied the charge, it is interesting to note (as sent in by reader JJ) that at least one Reuters blogger complained quite vocally about this decision. The full blog post, written on Reuter's Hedge World blog is well worth reading. Here's a brief snippet:

As a news organization, all we have connecting us to our audience is our credibility. When we make mistakes, when we miss the point, when we fail to publish in a timely manner--each of these creates a little crack in that credibility. Once enough cracks form over time, the credibility is eroded and ultimately broken apart. At that point it doesn't matter how many orange dots you have swirling around your TV commercial or how intelligent you claim your information is. Once that bond is broken you're screwed.

Because Reuters is my company, there's a big part of me that hopes this incident has been blown out of proportion; that the blogs don't have the whole story. I fear that's not the case, however. The way it looks now is positively scandalous. And as a journalist it makes me almost physically ill to think about it.

I hope someone above me addresses the situation publicly, because lord knows not addressing it ain't working. Right now this incident is relatively contained (although it was the most viewed post on ZeroHedge as of Tuesday). But by next week, this will be all over the place--Romanesko, Drudge. From there it could get real ugly real fast.

And herein, I hope, lies a lesson for whomever killed Matt Goldstein's Steve Cohen story: When you make a decision like that, under those circumstances, the back story will get out. And the fallout from that back story will always, always be worse than the fallout from the story itself.

What strikes me as most interesting about this is that this Reuters post is still up. Reuters did not pull it. It does have an update link at the top to another blog that posted Reuters' denial (not even a Reuters page... which is also noteworthy). While I'm still curious about the decision to spike the story, I have to admit that the fact that a Reuters blogger was allowed to post this blog seriously questioning the integrity of Reuters management (his own bosses) lends at least some more credibility to Reuters itself. This is strengthened by the fact that the blog post has remained up as well.

Compare this to the stories that went around when the Associated Press was announcing its silly and totally useless attempt to DRM the news. At the time, I heard from a few different AP reporters who thought it was a ridiculous idea that made the Associated Press look bad -- but they weren't allowed to say that publicly, and had no real outlet to do so. Reuters and the AP compete pretty directly in the newswire business, and every time I compare them to one another Reuters seems to come out ahead in recognizing where the world is heading. If it is true that Reuters spiked the Cohen story, that would be quite damning and could make me question trusting Reuters, but how it's handled this news so far, and how it's reacted to its own blogger talking about the story is impressive.

A few weeks ago, after the AP announced its plans to crack down on people who it felt were linking/excerpting too much, we suggested that Reuters should speak up and respond to the AP's position by encouraging linking and sharing of news. It appears that Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters, has taken us up on the offer, writing a nice little manifesto: Why I believe in the link economy. And, of course, helping to prove that, he linked to a bunch of other sites -- including our original blog post asking him to make a statement just like this (in contrast, by the way, while I've been quoted multiple times by the AP, I'm pretty sure they've never linked to Techdirt in an article). His post is pretty much exactly what I'd hoped Reuters (or others) would say (though, Ahearn is better at being diplomatic about the AP). Here are some key excerpts:

The Internet isn't killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven't been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting "resources" (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies -- they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

Exactly. There's been too much misdirected blame placed on the internet, even though the internet has never been the problem. Not keeping up with what readers want is where the mistakes have been made.

I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories -- it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.

I don't believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged.

That's basically exactly what I had suggested Reuters say... so that's great. Once again, this makes me want to look for Reuters alternatives to any AP story I happen to come across.

Of course, I don't agree with everything Ahearn has to say, though I do agree with the overall spirit of what he's saying. He talks about the need to agree "on a code of conduct and ethics." I'm not against the concept, I just don't see how it's possible or even necessary. These things tend to sort themselves out. Players who are "bad actors" become obvious over time. Good players get rewarded for it, and you deal with some questionable players on the margin. Rather than worrying about what everyone else is doing, why not just focus on providing more value yourself?

Then there's this:

Let's identify how we can birth it and agree what is "fair use" or "fair compensation" and have a conversation about how we can work together to fuel a vibrant, productive and trusted digital news industry. Let's identify business models that are inclusive and that create a win-win relationship for all parties.

The thing is, the law says what's fair use, not any voluntary agreement. And "fair compensation" isn't determined by everyone chatting (that could be seen as collusion, actually), but in the market actually doing deals. I'm all for discussions on positive business models that are inclusive and create win-win relationships. That's why we highlight examples of that all the time around here. But I don't think discussing good business models means getting an entire industry to agree to use them ahead of time. For better or for worse (well, I'd argue for better), the world just doesn't work that way. The win-win business models are being developed already -- and that's great. Let's keep looking at those success stories, and pull out the important lessons from them -- but that doesn't mean everyone "agreeing" to things beforehand. Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. There are too many vested interests to make it work. But the nice thing is that those who don't figure it out get swept out with the tide.

About a year and a half ago, we wrote about a talk given by the CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, supposedly about the future of journalism. It was a very strange speech. It talked about recognizing how times were changing and how the AP could no longer be a "gatekeeper." And... then spent a large portion talking about how the AP was going to be a gatekeeper, and was going to force other sites to stop quoting its content without paying. Since then, of course, the AP has backed up those contradictory words with its ridiculous war against aggregator sites.

What's surprised me, however, is that competing "wire" services haven't stepped into the breach. It seems like a wide open opportunity for Reuters to step up and say "we want to work with everyone -- and we're not going to freak out if you send us traffic." While it hasn't gone that far, a talk given by Reuters' Editor in Chief, David Schlesinger, to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on rethinking journalism suggests Reuters recognizes the future a lot more clearly than the AP, and is looking to embrace it fully, rather than block it, like the AP.

The whole thing is absolutely worth reading -- especially the bits where he knocks the IOC for its ridiculous restrictions on both athletes and the press on how they can report. For example, apparently the IOC got mad at Schlesinger himself because he took some photos and posted them to his blog. Since he was only accredited as a reporter, not a photographer, the IOC demanded he remove the photos. Here are a few choice snippets. At the beginning he notes just how much people are using social networks to communicate these days, and then he says:

But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don't work.
The old categories don't work.
The old ways of thinking won't work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won't control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can't control access using old forms of accreditation any more.

Those statements mean what they say and not necessarily more.

I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die.
No, just that they must change.

He goes on to talk about how silly it is to think of "accreditation" and defining who is and who is not a journalist by pointing out that everyone is a journalist in some way. This isn't necessarily the "citizen journalism" trumpeted by some pundits, but a recognition that social networks make everyone the journalist of their own lives:

To say they can blog as long as it isn't journalistic, misses the point.

To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a "news feed" of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn't a distinction.

Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life.

And none of these things is really private. They can get indexed by Google; they get searched; they can be public to the world with a potential circulation of every single user of the internet.

Take this scenario: I will easily aggregate my imaginary athlete's comments and thoughts on winning or losing or on the standard of judging with tweets giving the audience perspective from various parts of the stadium. I'll then add that in with mobile phone camera pictures and video posted on Flickr and youtube.

Well, my friends, who really needs the rightsholders, AP or Reuters if you can do that?

And this is the point where traditionalists freak out and talk about putting up special walls. But, Schlesinger seems to recognize both how that's silly, and how the real response is to not freak out about the threat, but to embrace the opportunity:

Some may be frightened of the picture I paint. Some may think I exaggerate. I actually get energised.

The only question I ask is: So what can we do to survive, or more fundamentally, to stay relevant?

I think the only path is to embrace the change and embrace the new. Longing for the ways of the past will not work.

We in the traditional media and you in the IOC must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful. It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy. Could you imagine gun toting guards trying to confiscate every phone off every spectator? That would become the story of the Games and it would ultimately fail, anyhow.
No, working with them is the answer.

Inspire them, and encourage them to do things that will enhance the Olympic spirit and actually improve the bottom line.

And, finally, he notes how silly it is to think that professional journalists are somehow above everyone else:

We have spent countless decades enveloping our activities in the cloak of professional mystery.

That era is over.

We must devote the time now to demystifying what we do, and working in concert with those who would seem to be a threat to the old order.

Remember that the world ultimately is a reciprocal place.

Treat people with respect and as partners, and they will partner with you.
Treat people as a threat or as criminals, and they will threaten your institution and ultimately bring it down.
This path doesn't have to be scary.

That last bit applies to so many industries today. It's great to see that, at least via these words, it looks like Reuters is really looking to embrace what the technology allows, rather than pulling an AP and pretending it can somehow turn back the clock.

One of the sillier attempts by businesses to look cool by setting up shop in Second Life was that of Reuters, which assigned a reporter to hang out in the virtual world full-time and report on it as if it were any other economy. While we noted at the time there might be some interesting stories in Second Life, that seemed to be taking a back seat to the publicity value of the stunt. It was surprising to learn that the Reuters reporter was still there until recently, when he finally gave up the beat, calling it "about as fun as watching paint dry." With 9 out of 10 efforts by businesses going into Second Life ending in failure, perhaps there wasn't much for a business reporter to cover any longer. For what it's worth, the reporter says Linden Labs should give up on the idea that Second Life is a business application -- not because of its shaky in-game economics, or because there's no value for there for most businesses, but because of technical problems. While those may be easier to solve for the company, they pale in comparison to the sheer pointlessness of real-world businesses establishing themselves in Second Life.

While the Associated Press has talked a lot about adapting to a new internet-centric world, there's still very little evidence that it's doing anything different. It's still trying to act like a gatekeeper rather than an enabler. However, it appears that Reuters is actually experimenting with something interesting. It has a new project, called OpenCalais, designed to help any information provider extract useful metadata from written content. In other words, it's an automated system that you can run an article or a blog post through, and it will return useful data in a structured manner. For example, if you wrote an article about Google's earning report, it would note that the article was about Google, that it had to do with an earnings report, and maybe connect some important other points. The idea, then, is that the more useful semantic data that's there, the more useful things that can be done on top of it. For those who believe that better use of semantic data is the key opportunity for newspapers to jump to the internet age, this could represent a very big deal. Of course, there's a very big "if" in that statement. The service actually needs to work well and be useful. It also needs to attract users. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, as the really useful apps built on top of that data won't come unless the data itself is available. Having Reuters behind the project suggests a strong initial base of content, but it remains to be seen how much adoption can actually be driven through this system. Some of it may depend on how much in the way of resources Reuters has put behind this project to jumpstart it (and whether that commitment continues after Reuter's acquisition by Thomson Financial closes). Either way, it's an experiment worth following, and one a lot more interesting than simply demanding that people pay more money.