By Paul Rodgers
“What do you think the impact of the internet will be?” asked the editor of New Scientist during a job interview I had there in the mid-1990s. It was my cue to expound on Marshall McLuhan’s theories about “the media is the message” and my own about how the internet would change the way we work. When I paused for breath, the editor said: “It’s just a fad.” So much for that job.
It isn’t a fad, and it has changed the way we work. This was drilled home today (18 May ’10) in a seminar with blogger Ed Yong, author of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yong was talking about the use of links and their importance in modern journalism, providing transparency and ensuring accuracy. It got me thinking.
Ed Yong: Not hyperlinking produces a strawman fallacy. Picture credit: The people from the Tango! Project
When I started as a journalist, almost all of the information that went into my stories came from interviewing people, with perhaps a bit of background from the cuttings file (a physical folder with cut out bits of the newspaper stuck to sheets of A4). Of the information I collected during a day, I would discard 80 per cent because it was irrelevant, repeated or just didn’t fit the story I was writing.
Now when I start to work on a story, my first stop is Google, and I’m quickly wallowing in thousands of times as much information as I could possibly use. Gathering information is easier, filtering it harder. When you’re interviewing someone, you can ask specific questions and interrupt them if they meander. If you get much of your information online, you have to be good at refining your search terms, fast at skim reading or both.
Among other techniques I’ve tried to manage this flood with are printing out documents and using a highlighter or copying long web pages into Word so that I can search them for keywords. But I almost invariably end up with a couple of dozen tabs open on my desktop by the time I start writing. Wading through all this material leaves me less time to write, and less time to check.
The last piece I co-wrote, about the WHO reaction to swine flu, was almost immediately attacked online by Gimpy for not providing evidence to back up its assertions. My initial reaction to this was: “Tough, it’s a newspaper article not an academic journal. We don’t do footnotes and we don’t have the blogger’s luxury of links. And we’re under much greater pressure to make our body text interesting.”
But then Yong chose an Indy story to illustrate his point about old-journalism’s lack of links. Tim Luckhurst began his piece by setting out his unnamed opponents’ argument. I saw this as a rhetorical device, common among the commentariat. Yong saw it as a straw man fallacy. Either way, it was weaker than if the writer had been specific.
What hit me, though, was that the piece Yong showed us was the online version. So was the version of the WHO article attacked by Gimpy. Why don’t the web versions of these articles have links? One of my fellow students said that at the Financial Times, where he’s doing an internship, all stories are written as if for the internet, with links. This makes sense.
I’ve resolved that from now on this is how I’m going to work too, even for stories that never make it online. It will at least help me deal with the flood, if not the critics.
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It's no surprise, I suppose, that we adapt to changes in technology and it's interesting to see how quickly a news article can be 'shot down' because now everyone (who's capable of using it) has access to the same massive supply of evidence via the internet. However, as a writer of scientific papers, trained in no other way than for that job, I feel the need to see suitable links to evidence cited in 'journalistic' articles. My hope for the MA in Science Journalism now being taught at City University is that the scientific journalist (with a non-scientific background) will adopt the stringent rules of citing evidence already used by scientists, rather than journalists who already have a scientific training becoming more lax in their approach. In conclusion, it is hoped that by undertaking the writing of articles using the "facts and evidence" approach of scientists that many of the 'sources' of information available will be instantly dismissable due to their lack of evidential support.
Ah hang on, I think I may have just realised where we disagreed. To me, Luckhurst didn't set out his unnamed opponent's argument - that would indeed be a common and acceptable rhetorical device. What he did was make up a fictitious opponent and set about destroying it - that, the straw man fallacy, is also common but it reduces Luckhurst's credibility and the relevance of his argument. If Luckhurst had used links, he could perhaps have demonstrated where the viewpoints he brought up actually exist.
Otherwise, lovely piece Paul. Glad you got something out of the talk.
The article says:
"Among other techniques I’ve tried to manage this flood with are printing out documents and using a highlighter or copying long web pages into Word so that I can search them for keywords."
Erm, go on some basic courses please! There are much better ways to do this (like say searching in the browser), and also information management, reference management, and notetaking/idea-formulating software which could assist you in your tasks and keep track of references for you. Try for example http://www.zotero.org/ as a good firefox plugin to assist you in doing this. But including references and citations for things (which isn't a 'science' thing guys, we do this in the humanities as well!) you don't need to provide links to websites, just provide a footnote with the citation information whether print, online, or personal communication.