The New Journalism

I have been mostly rolling my eyes at all the talk lately about ‘hacktivism’ and ‘hackers’ as a distinct culture. Even though I remember thinking that programming was the only job I could ever have in business, and the feeling of belonging to a very exclusive club with our own secrets and jokes, I know a lot of engineers, physicists, physicians, etc., who feel the same. But watching the current clash between computer geeks and journalists has caused me to wonder; is there really a completely different core philosophy here? And what will be the result of this clash?

I think the key to this clash may be the ownership of not just the data, but the actual job of journalism, does it belong to journalists or the people? And not just at the beginning, when the story is written, but later as well. The traditional model of journalism is highly competitive. Since the earliest days, reporters would hide their sources, outwit their competitors, and go to great lengths to be the first with the story. Once that story ran, the reporter would sit back and reap awards, criticism, or at least a paycheque, and own the rights to that story forever. Yes, hated editors would hack their story to pieces, but that was usually just one person to fight, and the fight only lasted until the story went to print, when it remained in hard copy forever.

For programmers, however, the fight began when we ‘published’. In the days when IT was ‘highly trained and somewhat surly technical staff’ and the employers were referred to as ‘stupid users’ we occasionally took into consideration the end result that we were supposed to be producing, but we were coding for each other. Sometimes one person was given complete ownership of a section or an entire office, but that didn’t always work out well. There was the guy who sent all of his bank’s rounding errors to his own account. I knew someone who, after being let go from a major bank, was contracted back to them for roughly 8 times his original salary for more than a year because he had coded the system to be incomprehensible to anyone but himself. After a few years of that, most companies got smarter and made us keep an eye on each other.

But ownership of code was always contentious. There was always the gossip about who wrote incomprehensible spaghetti code, who wasted CPU or storage. If your program had a bug, it was likely a co-worker who would be called to fix it – and tell everyone about it at coffee break. When you went into an old work of art you had created, it would be defaced by coworkers’ snide comments, or changed to reflect their idiosyncrasies. Those that liked to name fields after their cats, or favourite drugs, or coworkers, would feel a chilling in their social life.

There was pride as well. Some people coded so elegantly, they would have a block of code declared the most efficient and used by all of their friends. Sometimes we would make their subroutine into a macro and name it after them. We always asked each other for help if there were giant assembly dumps to go through or we needed a fresh pair of eyes. These were the days of ASCII and assembler language and sometimes we were grateful for any eyes but our own. Most programmers were not noted for social skills, criticism was free and harsh, but respect was also quick and unqualified, regardless of who had earned it.

When your efforts were ready to ‘publish’ there was a huge adrenalin rush, the result of coding without a test area. Mistakes could be truly spectacular, good enough to feed urban legend for years.

The journalists I read (bloggers, really) write very much in that style. They will frequently put out a call for information before they write. They will frequently update or change a post when they first submit it, but they are submitting it to their audience in a raw state, unseen by editorial eyes. The game begins, not ends, when the article is published; if there are mistakes in data or research, or logic fails, the internet is a harsh and unforgiving place. If the piece is perceptive, original and well supported, that will be commented on by anyone who reads it, regardless of whether they have ever heard of the writer. If risks have been taken and strong positions are being held, the comment section can become highly animated, rather like a theatre in Elizabethan times.

It is possible that the journalists who are still working for old style media, who still have their work checked by friendly eyes, and who are shielded from the baying hordes, may like their jobs just the way they are. It is possible they feel they own their work when they have published it, that it should not be instantly tossed around the internet in fragmented pieces, rewritten and ridiculed, but should be preserved in a pristine and untouched condition unless they give permission for other use.

I wonder really … are traditional journalists concerned about the public having unfettered access to information? Or are they possibly worried about the public having unfettered access to them?