If even a blind pig can find an acorn or a truffle every once in a while, even a mainstream media journalist can figure out that there’s a new sheriff in town, although it generally takes him or her a while.
For a good example, consider this colloquy at the august Nieman Foundation at Harvard between “Internet thinker” Clay Shirky and investigative journalist Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe, who led the paper’s prize-winning coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex scandal.
There’s some discussion specific to the state of the Catholic Church, but for the most part it’s a conversation about how investigative work is made both more effective and (arguably) less common by the Internet — with an emphasis on how the declining role of giant, storied newspapers is impacting what some powerful folks can get away with.
Of particular interest to readers of the Big sites are the following remarks:
Shirky: So if you want to bury a story now, to take the second half of your question, there’s been a curious inversion of the news cycle. It used to be the front-page news was bad for you because that would indicate some synchronization of the public. But with the news cycle now down at 36 hours if you want to bury a story, get it all out at once right away. Everything. Everything on one day, and then the next day say, “That’s yesterday’s news.” The thing that kills people now is drip, drip, drip.
Because the ability to create a long cycle of attention to a story, which used to come from the daily-ness of daily newspaper, there is now no media outlet alone that can decide whether or not a story is going to unfold over a long period of time. So the way you frontload that in your favor is you take advantage of the news cycle, particularly in the market-driven parts of the industry. We just get it all out at once, and then you say, “That was last week. Are you still talking about that? That priest thing? We told you everything we know.” It’s really when it becomes a story every day and there’s a new revelation.
The ACORN people — the people who took ACORN down, they released a video. They didn’t release everything they had. They released a video and ACORN said, “What’s this? It’s awful! Of course we object to this. We will fire that person at once. Nothing like this would ever happen in another office!” Next day, another video. And it was on day four when they realized they have a potentially unlimited number of things they can say about ACORN, that the dam broke. So if they released everything about ACORN, ACORN could have said, “It’s terrible. Terrible. We’re taking steps” and be done.
So if you ever get into that kind of trouble, the post-Chappaquiddick advice but now even more forcefully. The sooner and in more detail you can announce the bad news the better.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it in the age of the Internet. Take it away, Ella!