Getting it first but first getting it right is tougher than ever for reporters.
Faced with instant digital deadlines, journalists today must report quickly, accurately and competitively on government reports and bills containing thousands of pages, all-but-indecipherable language and a hundred other vital details.
To grasp the challenge, imagine being handed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s 6,000-page majority staff report on the CIA’s extreme interrogation methods by an editor clamoring for a staccato burst of click-grabbing stories to satisfy the insatiable appetite of digital readers demanding details right now.
Such scenes occur regularly in a city where 1,600-page continuing budget resolutions and 2,300-page health care reform bills have become the norm for legions of journalists covering the federal government.
“Even just 10 years ago, when I was a reporter covering a lot of government reports, even if you got a report at that time, you had at least a few hours to go through it,” Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway told the Washington Examiner.
“And now the news cycle is such that everyone’s competing with each other to get things out within a matter of minutes,” she said. “That is a legitimate challenge because people are desperate for information.”
Occasionally, reporters are given embargoed copies of government reports, allowing them time to prepare thoughtful and detailed articles. Journalists can also search out the authors of forthcoming government documents and use them as informed sources.
But these methods are not a sure thing, so journalists are developing new strategies to address the dilemma of reporting quickly on impossibly dense government reports.
“[I]n general, with big documents like [the CIA ‘torture’ report], a lot of people pitch in,” Huffington Post law enforcement and Justice Department reporter Ryan Reilly told the Examiner.
“[A]s a general rule, I seek out help when I have limited time with a lengthy report. A recent example would be the DOJ report on Cleveland police. My colleague Dana Liebelson and I were able to get through the report in a couple hours and then update the story with additional examples after it was published,” he said.
The Washington Post’s Kristine Coratti explained her organization’s approach to the issue.
For the CIA “torture” report, “the planning began weeks in advance when the question around the report’s release changed from ‘if’ to ‘when,’ ” she told the Examiner.
“National security editors, reporters and graphics editors conceived of how the Post would write about and display the report’s findings long before knowing what they were. As they learned about the release itself, reporters prepared to divide up the document, read for reporting highlights and share their findings across staffs involved in the production.
“This required reporters, editors and producers to prepare well through Monday night and into Tuesday morning, when the report was made public last week. The staff began work on three full stories, several important graphic elements and a reaction file that could be ready to publish at a moment’s notice,” she said.
The Post has also employed “crowdsourcing,” which involves asking readers to help sort through stacks of documents, including the time it asked for additional help investigating former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails.
“We have experimented from time to time with crowdsourcing,” Coratti said, referring to the method as a “tip sheet.”
“It doesn’t mean we just report out what people point us to, but they may see something interesting we can then look into further,” she said. “In the case of the CIA report, we have a tremendous amount of in-house knowledge and expertise. … We didn’t employ crowdsourcing in this case, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful.”
Reuters’ Samantha Sunne said news organizations, including hers and NPR, now often use a data-digging tool called DocumentCloud.
It’s “a text analysis tool (among other things) that many newsrooms used for the CIA report and related,” Sunne said.
The tool can quickly provide reporters with a “breakdown of the people, organizations, places, dates and other entities found in [government documents]. This allows reporters to zoom straight in on people and their connection to incidents of torture, quickly find which officials made which public claims, or any number of other findings,” she said.
“[W]hen I was covering a really high-profile court case, I used [it] to quickly find data points to explain the case as I was reporting documents that were just released,” she said.
Not surprisingly, the number of data tools available to media groups is growing, according to computational journalist M. Ed Borasky. Borasky is a newsroom consultant for several media organizations.
There are several “natural language processing tools that can be brought to bear,” he said, adding, “there are robots to help you with the routine stuff and visualization tools in place.”
However, he suggested, “most newsrooms still [comb through government documents] with human resources, especially when the document is something that evolves over time online like the ‘cromnibus’ bill.”
The Examiner, for its part, adjusts its strategy for reporting on government document dumps according to the document itself, divvying up workloads among writers and employing DocumentCloud as the situation merits.
For now, the thirst for immediate coverage of events in the nation’s capital is powerful, Hemingway said, but there is also a desire for careful, in-depth reporting.
“In the same way that the new media has some problems, it also has tons of opportunities for people who want to capitalize on the country’s general interest in well reported, thoughtful takes on hot issues of the day,” she said.
“So even though we are in a media environment that is very surface-level and quick-response in a lot of ways, there is certainly plenty of opportunity for people to make their mark by doing those deep reads, becoming familiar with a particular area and sharing that information,” she added.
