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Context, verification and BuzzFeed’s decision to publish that dossier …

A few people have asked me what I think of BuzzFeed’s decision to publish a 35-page document describing unverified claims about connections between Russia and President-elect Donald Trump.

Here’s my take: This story required news organizations to navigate the sometimes competing demands of verification and contextualization. BuzzFeed chose a (perhaps radical) version of the latter. CNN broke the story Tuesday and took a different approach, holding back the dossier itself but reporting that Trump and President Obama had been briefed on its contents.

The  existence of the documents and their inclusion in presidential security briefings is, indeed, newsworthy. This is not, as Trump said on Twitter, “fake news.” CNN was right to report the information and did a good job unpacking a rather serpentine narrative. It was also appropriate for other news organizations, BuzzFeed included, to advance the story.

The debate over how to best accomplish that represents the very public way editorial decisions unfold in today’s media landscape. At first, I was firmly in the verification-above-all-else camp, especially given the digital proliferation of hoaxes and half truths. In general, I admire BuzzFeed’s news operation, but I rolled my eyes when I saw its push notification about publishing the dossier.

After I read the documents, though, the situation felt murkier. In many ways, the specter of the dossier was more salacious than its actual contents. The allegations are troubling but not surprising. Reporting on the intelligence community’s reaction without providing the full context of what it was reacting to creates an environment ripe for rumors. By publishing the documents – and  pointing out potential problems with the information – BuzzFeed may have made a complicated story more accessible to the average reader.

Or it might have done just the opposite, making it even easier for partisans to play fast and loose with facts. We still don’t know and may not for weeks or months to come.

As BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith wrote in a memo to his staff, the decision to publish “was not an easy or simple call.” Instead, Smith said, it reflects BuzzFeed’s tendency to be transparent whenever possible and “how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”

Transparency is untidy, but that’s neither new nor bad. Journalism is a study in humanity and, as such, has always been messy. It’s inherently full of contradictions, chaos and, as Jack Fuller once wrote, “provisional truth.” When deadline hits, questions remain unanswered. Some may never be answerable at all. Digital publishing makes it more necessary that we’re honest about this reality, both with ourselves and with the public we serve.

We must remember, though, that messiness and sloppiness are not the same. Being open about the former and guarding against the latter is something else journalists must do in 2017 and beyond.

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Makeover time!

Quick note: I’m spending the final days of 2016 overhauling this site, so please excuse whatever mess I’m about to create and come back in January to see what’s new.

As always, thanks for reading.

Meg

 

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September and everything after

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The September 11 and 12, 2001 editions of the Biddeford Journal Tribune, where I worked my first job as a reporter. The Journal Tribune was an afternoon paper, giving the editors time to remake the front page after the attacks began.

Every time I pass through Southern Maine, I’m startled by its openness. There are no roadblocks on the highways or police officers patrolling the bridges. Portland harbor is busy, traffic is often heavy, and airplanes pass overhead. To a casual visitor, there’s little to hint at the shock and fear that descended there 15 years ago.

My tenure as a resident of Southern Maine was brief, but those 11 months are inseparable from one brilliant, blue September day and the grim autumn that followed. To me, it’s a region frozen in time, and even the briefest visit evokes a dizzying disconnect, similar to what happens when I remember my college journalism students were preschoolers when Mohamed Atta boarded an early-morning commuter plane at the Portland Jetport.

When it happened, my college diploma was three months old, and I dreamed of a life as a writer. Late that August, I’d started my first job as a reporter at a little paper in Biddeford, a city about halfway between Portland and the New Hampshire border. I had a shitty apartment in a building that reeked of tobacco and sweat. On most nights, the guy down the hall came home drunk and screaming. I installed yellow contact paper on the backsplash in the galley kitchen, stuffed my bookcases with empty journals I planned to fill and began learning the intricacies of covering city government.

The editors at that paper were the best first bosses I could have hoped for, especially on that day. When we knew the second plane was not an accident, there was no coddling – just assignments and a promise that we would shovel information to our readers until we dropped from exhaustion. A photographer and I crisscrossed the city, stopping at a high school, a department store, a college. We paused downtown, where the streets were silent and drivers wept in pulled-over cars. Later that week, I sat across a kitchen table from a woman who’d escaped one of the towers and come to Maine to stay at her parents’ beach house. I stumbled through my questions, scribbled notes and wondered how long it had taken to wash the dust from her hair.

For a long time, I tried not to think about what that autumn was like for me. I wasn’t in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. or Shanksville. I didn’t know anyone who died. It felt wrong to make myself a protagonist in a story that harmed so many others in so many more devastating ways. My thinking is different now, mostly because of my journalism students. Last year, I walked into a crowded classroom and started a discussion about coverage of the Paris terrorist attacks. The cafes, the theater, the dead and the wounded were on another continent, but my students were frightened in a way that tugged at something deep in me. At some point, they began to ask me about the fall of 2001 the way I ask my parents about Kennedy and Kent State.

Over the years I’ve developed a September tradition of reading E.B. White’s 1949 essay “Here is New York.” It’s a sweeping meditation of the city’s speedy post-war evolution, beautiful, chaotic and, as he writes in this passage, terrifying:

“The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.”

We no longer need to live in physical cities to feel this kind of geographic vulnerability. We spend our days inside a sprawling, digital metropolis of videos and photos. Every place can feel like our place. Paris. San Bernardino. Brussels. Ankara. Orlando. The shattering headlines aren’t one giant break but an evolving tangle of tiny, thread-like fractures.

Two weeks ago, I met a new batch of bright journalism students. I hope we make it through this year without another act of violence that spurs questions about where I was – about who I was – on that day 15 years ago.

That is, alas, unlikely.

When it happens, we’ll look at the news alerts, analyze the credibility of facts, critique the narratives that emerge. If they ask about that time I lived so briefly in Southern Maine, I’ll answer. I’ll also tell them this: We were not annihilated then. By embracing knowledge and compassion and grace, we will not be annihilated now.