Take That, Mr. Newsman!
Answering Back To the News Media, Using the Internet
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
2 January 2006
The New York Times

"Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts -- taping interviews, gathering e-mail exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations -- and publish them on their own Web sites.
This new weapon in the media wars is shifting the center of gravity in the way that news is gathered and presented, and it carries implications for the future of journalism".

example:

''Nightline'' broadcast a segment in August about intelligent design that the Discovery Institute, a conservative clearinghouse for proponents of intelligent design, did not like very much. The next day, the institute published on its Web site the entire transcript of the nearly hourlong interview that ''Nightline'' had conducted a few days earlier with one of the institute's leaders. It urged readers to examine the unedited interview because, it said, the transcript would reveal ''the predictable tone of some of the questions'' by the staff of ''Nightline.''

"All these developments have forced journalists to respond in a variety of ways, including becoming more open about their methods and techniques and perhaps more conscious of how they filter information. "

Posting primary source material is becoming part of public relations strategies for interest groups, businesses and government. The Pentagon and State Department now post transcripts of interviews with top officials on their Web sites or they e-mail them to reporters, as does Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

While the publication of raw material is often aimed at putting the journalist in a bad light, it can sometimes boomerang on the source. The Pentagon got into a dispute with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post in 2004 over quotations in his book ''Plan of Attack'' that were attributed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about the invasion of Iraq. The quotations had not appeared in the Pentagon's official transcript of Mr. Woodward's interview with Mr. Rumsfeld. But they appeared in full in Mr. Woodward's transcript, and the Pentagon had to admit that it had deleted those portions from its transcript.

Sometimes the subjects of news articles even post such material on the Web in advance of an article or broadcast, scooping the reporter and getting their version out first. Earlier this year, Edward Nawotka, a book critic based in Austin, Tex., described in The Texas Observer an interview he had conducted via e-mail with Ann Coulter, the conservative writer, a couple of years ago. She sent him a 2,000-word response by e-mail, which he then asked her to trim so he could include it in a daily e-mail newsletter -- only to discover that she had already posted her entire response on her Web site.

In 2001 David D. Kirkpatrick, who then covered the publishing industry for The New York Times, wrote an article about Dave Eggers, author of ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.'' Mr. Eggers posted a 10,000-word response on his Web site complaining about the tone of the piece, and included their e-mail exchanges, which Mr. Kirkpatrick had asked be kept private.

In another case involving The Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin, a business reporter, interviewed Mark Cuban, the technology billionaire, via e-mail last summer for a column about Mr. Cuban's investment in an Internet company. Mr. Cuban was unhappy with the column and posted their e-mail exchanges, touching off an extensive discussion on the Internet about, among other things, the value of seeing a reporter's raw material.

Blogs make the subjects of the news easiely to publish their sides of story:

Blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter's original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the blogger's version of events remains available forever.

In corporate world:

Posting of original material may be somewhat less common in the corporate world than among individuals representing themselves. Steven Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Communications, the New York public relations firm, said that posting raw material was ''another tool in the tool chest'' and that if a corporate client had been damaged, ''you'll certainly want to get something out that's Google-able.''
But, he said, a corporation must also consider whether publishing such material would alienate an influential beat reporter as well as an entire news outlet and possibly reporters for other outlets. ''You have to balance the incident over the long-term relationship,'' he said. ''But you can get your side out in a benign way. It doesn't have to be antagonistic.''

Impact on Journalism:

Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said reporting on reporters had created a kind of ''Wild West atmosphere'' in cyberspace.
With reporters conducting interviews more frequently by e-mail, he said, ''You have to start thinking a couple of moves ahead because you're leaving a paper trail. And the truth squad mentality of some bloggers means you are apt to have your own questions thrown back at you.''

Some news outlets are posting transcripts of their interviews with newsmakers, and some reporters are posting their own material. Stephen Baker, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, has posted not only transcripts from his interviews but also his own notes on his Web site, saying he likes to involve his readers in the journalistic process.

While some say they are learning to accept the new interactivity, they also worry that the view of many bloggers -- that reporters should post their raw material because they are filtering it through their own biases -- ignores the value of traditional journalistic functions, like casting a wide net for information, coaxing it out of reluctant sources, condensing it and presenting it in an orderly way.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting it in context were especially vital now because there were so many other sources of information.

''With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people are trying to shape things into their own reality,'' he said. ''I don't worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail five minutes before someone else. It's more important that we take that information and tell you what it means.''

Rebecca MacKinnon (a former CNN correspondent who is now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where she studies the effect of blogging on journalism. ) predicted that traditional journalism and the art of distilling information would not vanish. ''Most people don't have hours and hours every day to read the Web, and they want someone who can quickly and succinctly tell you what you need to know,'' she said. ''But it's great the raw materials can be made available to those who have the time.''