Hi. I’m Bernard Hickey. I’m a financial journalist by trade and want to try doing my job a little differently. I want to connect more deeply with the real world and have a conversation with my community of interest rather than just broadcast a sermon or report from the mount.
Here’s the background. For the last 18 years I’ve done it the traditional way and it’s made me a living. I’ve worked for Massey University’s student radio station and its newspaper. I’ve trained formally as a journalist. I’ve worked for Reuters, the Financial Times group (in partnership with marketwatch.com), the DominionPost, Telecom’s XtraMSN and Fairfax Media in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and Singapore. I’d like to think I’ve got some experience and can do a good job.
But I’ve always had this nagging suspicion that journalists (just like me) usually get some minor (or major) detail wrong when they write a report without checking it with every source or roadtesting it with someone who knows the subject of the report better than the journalist does. I have made a point of checking as many details as I can and being honest about where I’ve found information or about the real angle of the story (rather than some pre-conception or editor’s bias).
However, whenever I’ve read a report that was about me or something I knew quite well there was always some little or large thing wrong with it. Sometimes it was the angle in the lead or the basic figures or a misrepresentation or misinterpretation of some fact. I found this frustrating and it always made me wonder. Is there a better way?
Journalists often also believe (wrongly) that they know the subject better than anyone else. This means the process of writing a report often takes the following path.
Firstly the journalist stumbles across an interesting fact or has a novel idea (they think), or is told to write something by an editor. The journalist will then talk to several experts in the area for quotes and facts that back up the original idea. The better ones will allow their story to follow these new facts and perspectives into something approximating the truth that may well be different from the initial hypothesis .
Then, under the pressure of a deadline or some need to publish, the journalist will write the story with the known facts and their own perspective at that time. A sub editor or chief reporter will then check it and may introduce their own knowledge or bias into the story. The final step is the process of putting on headlines or introductions, which is often done by another editor. This is an extremely important step because it is the first impression any story will get and I’m can’t remember a day in my journalistic life when I or my colleagues didn’t grumble about some sub editor or editor “stuffing up my story” (until of course I became an editor and then I could do nothing wrong…)
I’ve always wondered what might happen if somehow I could find all the experts in the area, as well as those non-experts who have an interesting perspective or need to know, could get involved in the story writing process.
What if they could check every fact and actually have a debate about what is the truth and what are the different perspectives on that truth? And what if every reader could see how that story developed and challenge the story as it was being written? And what if they could then comment and correct the final version of the story?
Would that produce a better result? Would the end result of the journalism be better and more honest and more accurate? Would I be prouder of it? Would I feel more connected and useful?
The obvious conclusion I suspect some have guessed is that I want to try using a blog, this blog, to practice journalism on a subject I’m deeply interested in (online media in New Zealand).
I want to experiment with the idea of asking my readers what the real story is and asking them to check and challenge the journalism I produce. I’d love to make the blog the centre of the online media community because it produced useful, reliable and honest information. I’d love it if this blog became the centre of an informed and challenging debate about online media in New Zealand.
I have a lot of work to do and I hope I can produce a great forum for news, information and debate.
Here goes.
