Transcript: Kirk Lapointe on the role of journalists in a community-generated news world

This transcript is part of an interview Kirk Lapointe did with Ira Basen for the CBC Radio Sunday Edition documentary News 2.0. Series air date on CBC Radio: Sunday, June 21 and Sunday, June 28, 2009.

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IB: From your perspective as a mainstream news editor, what do you make of the whole Steve Jobs heart attack hoax story?

KL: I think what happened there is that people were applying an old media lens to a new media practice, and expecting that whatever was instantly being Tweeted was verified.  And I think it is one of those consumer beware things and will be for a long time to come.  When everyone has access to the equivalent of a printing press or television station or radio station, it can get in the wrong hands.  People can jump the gun.  Even seasoned people can jump the gun for fear of being 2nd or 3rd or 5th in the race. 

And that's where I think the role of the journalist still applies.  You know, have you verified the information, are you confident of its validity before you proceed to publish it and disseminate.  And as I see the landscape still I find there are an awful lot of people are prepared to simply repeat the rumour and are still prepared to jump the gun on very flimsy information - a friend of a fiend of a friend told me, and they go with it.

And some of that is that there don't yet seem to be legal consequences for people who jump the gun.  I think those consequences are going to come.  I think they're inevitable.  because too many people are being maligned and hurt by it.  It's not really stock prices that we should be worried about there are reputations and other things that matter a lot more in the long term and that will have to be dealt with. 

But I think in the short term I think people should just have a little bit of awareness, and a reality check on who is providing the information., and that's where I think turning to the trusted and reputable sources will help at least in the short and medium term until something really happens around the legal consequences to force people into a more responsible conduct, because at the moment, it's not quite the wild west, you know people are beginning to put down roots and communities are being built and that sort of thing, but it's a little closer to the wild west than it is to the finished city, and I think there are a few intermediate steps that have to take place.

IB:  A lot of people hold this up as a triumph of citizen journalism because the story was corrected so quickly.  And because of that self-correcting mechanism, they aren't hung up about getting the story right before they publish.  What do you think of that?

KL: I have to say that we want to be first all the time, but we really want to be first, and be right. It's way better to be second and be right than be first and be wrong.  And I think that a lot of the newer organizations have such a real mandate built inside themselves to make sure they outfox people and get the goods out there fastest, and I think that when that happens you develop a culture that is a little sloppy and reckless where you don't do the smart second checking on things and bad things will happen.  Good things will happen too.  Sometimes you'll get information out that a lot of lumbering giants are slow to disseminate, but mostly you can just miss-step a lot more.  And as we know, we've learned this as a business over a hundred some odd years, it becomes pretty difficult to patch up the mistake.  You know, people feel they never get things made right.

So we've often been accused of caution-ness, or scrutinizing information way, way, way too long, and yet the truth is we don't stumble into a lot of legal misconduct as a result.  We pay people to ensure that they do get it right as they publish.

IB: It seems these days that big breaking news stories - natural and man-made disasters - are all broken on social media sites like Twitter or YouTube.  Does that pose a problem for mainstream papers like yours?

KL: For eyewitness accounts, the crowd source is an amazing thing.  And inasmuch as I don't necessarily think it's the only way that you tell the story, it's increasingly an important element of the story in that they're the people who are right there, wherever there is, who are able to get you the information.  And yes, people can point to that plane that went down in the Hudson River and people sent pictures to Twitter who tweeted about that and got the information out there faster than the all news television stations, the wire services and eventually the major news organizations.  They were the first points of contact with it.  But in the end, people needed to turn back to the larger organizations to tell the larger story of how it is that a plane wound up in a river and what it did in order to float, and what the captain did, and all those types of things, something that isn't easily done by a crowd source.

IB:  You've written recently that people aren't really sufficiently aware of what quality journalism really costs.  Why is that a problem?

KL: I worry about those places that don't think through the support models that go into financing good journalism. They're going to find themselves in pretty short order with a house of cards that collapses pretty quickly. And we can look here as an organization that has built over a long period of time and say we're still going to uphold all of our principles and  in the end, I'd sure like it if all the start-ups had those principles too because they would be improving all of us instead of bringing some of us down.  

I suppose you can say you get what you pay for, and if you really do believe that the cost of generating good journalism is free, or near free, then you're going to find out that the quality of it is cheap or really cheap.  It costs a lot of money to do good things across any sector of our economy and journalism is no different.

I've seen a lot of sloppy thinking recently around what it costs to do good journalism, and I wish people would not short-sell this because the people who are listening to this broadcast, who are buying newspapers, who are consuming television news, who are online, the more serious stuff, I think they know in their hearts that that this material didn't step forward out of the warmth of someone's heart for free.  It costs money to do.  And it costs money to build the encouragement and the culture to make sure it gets done, and to market it and in a lot of ways to make sure it's going to reach its audience with a distribution channel.  All of these things come at a cost.  So I don't think you can just pull the plug on a newspaper and move to an online only entity and expect that you are just going to play through.  It just doesn't happen that way. 

IB:  One of the mantras of the Web 2.0 crowd is that information wants to be free.  But that often means people are being asked to work for free.  An example would be the Huffington Post, which has a policy of not paying for content.  What are your thoughts about that?

KL: What's always good about any model that corrals expertise and liveliness and good information is that if you find a new way to get it out there you're adding to the overall public sphere, and that's always commendable.  The downside is that you are preying on people's generosity with their time.  And in some cases you are asking them to go even further and put a bit of their professional reputation on the line in a public way on your behalf.  And you can't always take that to the bank.                    I think that sooner or later you've got to find a way to ensure that the people who are your great contributors are going to feel loyal to you and you are going to demonstrate some loyalty to them.  And it requires some kind of transaction.  It requires a reward system, a recognition system that goes beyond the buzz of having your name floating at the top of her blog roll.  So while I look at her model interestingly, I also say she is still in the venture capital phase, there's no really a big profit that's being generated there….

I think that there are people who are legitimately want to contribute and are not expecting compensation for it, and I don't necessarily look at those people as those that you prey on.    I think it's the other way around.  I think there's a lot of strong generosity and altruism out there, and people who simply want to help inform the public and they are not really worried about getting money back for it. 

I just think that if that is your entire slate, if everybody is going to be working for you free, and get nothing in return, than you can't actually hold it all together.  You can have elements of it, where people are prepared to be genuine and generous, but you can't hold it all together as a big free site.  And you also can't go down that route of rewarding them on the basis of page views, because that too can be a very slippery slope.  So you've got to find something in there, and again, I'm at a loss for the answer, but something has to emerge out of all this that allows people to get some kind of reward out of all this or recognition for the work that they do if they so choose. 

So you can't go the all free model.  You can't go the all page view model, and what's clear too is that it's a real challenge to go the all paid staff model.  So somewhere in there is a hybrid right, and beats me what that might look like.  There are far sharper minds than mine that I hope are going to solve that so that I don't have to worry.