Primary Source Journalism and the Rise of “Little Brother”

Last Feb­ru­ary, the Polk Awards made an inter­est­ing, dra­matic state­ment about the direc­tion of jour­nal­ism. They gave a Polk Award (which is to the Pulitzer what the Golden Globe is to the Oscars) to an anony­mous video­g­ra­pher for the 

Polk Awards more typ­i­cally rec­og­nize what we would think of as tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism — enter­prise projects, dra­matic inter­na­tional break­ing news or inves­tiga­tive efforts with high-impact. But the Polks, in part because of their flex­i­bil­ity of cat­e­gories, have always been among the most forward-thinking of the estab­lished jour­nal­ism prizes. In 2008, for exam­ple, the judg­ing com­mit­tee gave an award to Talk­ing Points Memo for the site’s work on the U.S. Attor­neys scan­dal, before the Pulitzers allowed online-only entries.

The Neda video was rec­og­nized in part because it stood above the rest of media’s very good cov­er­age of the Tehran protests. Recog­ni­tion of the Neda video is emblem­atic of one of the trends that is crys­tal­liz­ing as legacy media’s dom­i­nance erodes, a phe­nom­e­non which I’ll refer to as “pri­mary source jour­nal­ism.” (There will be peo­ple who quib­ble whether pri­mary source con­tent an be con­sid­ered “jour­nal­ism” in the tra­di­tional sense. I’m going to argue yes. Pho­to­jour­nal­ism has been con­sid­ered a form of pri­mary source jour­nal­ism for decades.)

Basi­cally, we are see­ing the rise of pri­mary source mate­ri­als — doc­u­ments, video, pho­tos — as cohe­sive units of con­sum­able jour­nal­ism. Turns out, despite the great push for cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, cit­i­zens are not, on aver­age, great at jour­nal­ism, but they are good con­duits for raw mate­r­ial — those pho­tos, videos or doc­u­ments. They record videos or pho­tos as an eye­wit­ness, obtain doc­u­ments through Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion requests, or have access to files through the work they do. We are see­ing an impor­tant ele­ment of account­abil­ity jour­nal­ism emerge.

There has been an increas­ingly rapid drum­beat of raw mate­r­ial that have made a splash. Wik­iLeaks, before its global headline-grabbing mil­i­tary and diplo­matic data dumps, released doc­u­ments from Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank show­ing highly ques­tion­able bank­ing prac­tice, which led to voter out­rage. Video of a Wash­ing­ton DC police offi­cer

Daniel Ells­berg, arguably the most famed leaker in the United States, has even pub­licly said if he were to get access to the Pen­ta­gon Papers today, he would release them on the Inter­net instead of wait­ing for a major media orga­ni­za­tion, like The New York Times, to process them.

Big Brother has long been raised as a threat of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment (and cer­tainly the National Secu­rity Agency has done its fair share of snoop­ing). But in real­ity, it is the encroach­ment of Lit­tle Brother that aver­age Amer­i­cans are more likely to feel in our day-to-day lives — that peo­ple around us carry dig­i­tal devices that can be pulled out for photo or videos, or they can eas­ily copy dig­i­tal files (com­pared to the months of covert pho­to­copy­ing that Ells­berg did for 7,000 pages) that oth­ers would rather not have shared with the world.

One notable strength of raw mate­r­ial: it has a nat­ural viral lift for two rea­sons — audi­ence engage­ment, and the way legacy media has oper­ated with regard to sourc­ing and competition.

Social media is a three-legged stool: cre­ate, con­sume, and share con­tent. Because orig­i­nal mate­r­ial often feels more like an orig­i­nal dis­cov­ery, it is more appeal­ing to share. Doc­u­ments, videos and pho­tos are there for any­one to exam­ine and expe­ri­ence first­hand. The audi­ence can inter­pret, debate, com­ment as they choose, and they feel greater free­dom to re-upload and remix that mate­r­ial, espe­cially video. The Neda video was recon­fig­ured numer­ous times, with var­i­ous sound­tracks, intro­duc­tions and spliced pho­tos. At a cer­tain point nearly all of the top 20 YouTube videos in the news and pol­i­tics cat­e­gory were dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Neda video. Many of these forms — par­tic­u­larly video and pho­tos — more eas­ily tran­scend inter­na­tional borders.

For an audi­ence mem­ber, see­ing some­thing first-hand is more engag­ing than hav­ing it described to you. David Finkel, a reporter for the Wash­ing­ton Post, describes a Bagh­dad heli­copter shoot­ing scene from July 2007 scene-by-scene in his book, The Good Sol­dier, that came out last year. Wik­iLeaks released footage described in the book (with some amount of con­text and edi­to­ri­al­iz­ing) in April of this year. The video exploded on the Inter­net, while that sec­tion of the book did not.

Pri­mary source mate­ri­als give extra lift to sto­ries because it gives other out­lets a start­ing point to con­firm the story, whether it was bro­ken by a rival news out­let or not. The famed Abu Ghraib pho­tos were widely dis­sem­i­nated beyond the two out­lets that orig­i­nally had them, New Yorker and CBS. Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic com­ments could be con­firmed once TMZ put up the police report. On a lighter note, the Face­book pho­tos put up by the White House crash­ers in Novem­ber 2009 allowed other out­lets to quickly fol­low The Wash­ing­ton Post’s orig­i­nal story.

Con­scious of this, Wik­iLeaks made their Bagh­dad video, in short and long form, acces­si­ble to all the major media out­lets. Like­wise, it released a data­base of half a mil­lionpager mes­sages from Sept. 11, 2001 that other media out­lets sifted through.

There are some con­se­quences as pri­mary source jour­nal­ism claims a larger piece of the account­abil­ity jour­nal­ism pie. For one, “smok­ing gun” doc­u­ments or images will nat­u­rally pop out in this land­scape. But they cover but a sub­set of abuse of power or indis­cre­tion. A lot of wrong­do­ing can only be pieced together, because they come in frag­ments and emerge out of inconsistencies.

And they often lack con­text. David Finkel, who was embed­ded with the mil­i­tary unit, said the Wik­iLeaks Bagh­dad shoot­ing video failed to show the height­ened con­flict in that area around that time. Robert Gates, the Sec­re­tary of Defense. said that it was like look­ing at war “through a straw.”

Another dan­ger to pri­mary source jour­nal­ism is that it can be manip­u­lated to seem like some­thing that it is not — and it’s hard to put the genie back in the bot­tle. For exam­ple, with the infa­mous ACORN pros­ti­tu­tion tax-evasion video, selec­tive edit­ing makes it seem that James O’Keefe was wear­ing an out­landish pimp out­fit at the Acorn offices while he was in fact wear­ing blue button-down and chi­nos.

And there will be a time, if it has not hap­pened already, when gov­ern­ments stage videos to cre­ate “first-hand” accounts of a con­flict or upris­ing. Already, there are ques­tions of whether cer­tain inci­dents were staged.

So what will this mean? As jour­nal­ism trans­forms, we’ll need infra­struc­ture that will fun­nel the high-quality pri­mary source mate­r­ial from the peo­ple who have access to them. We’re already see­ing that frame­work con­geal. Wik­iLeaks now has achieved global promi­nence with its mega­leaks, and now has inspired other –Leaks spawn. Scribd and Doc­u­ment­Cloud are emerg­ing as inter­ac­tive plat­forms to dis­play oth­er­wise awk­ward PDF files.

For wit­ness video, YouTube has become the default plat­form, a fact the com­pany under­scores with Cit­i­zen­Tube, a high­light of break­ing news videos on the site. If a news­wor­thy video doesn’t start out on YouTube, it will end up there, as in the case of the Neda video. This is a bit dis­com­fit­ing for local media, because the global video plat­form is essen­tially bypass­ing tra­di­tional out­lets. To address this, YouTube has been push­ing YouTube Direct, which allows the audi­ence to sub­mit videos directly to media orga­ni­za­tions, who can then decide how to use them. While YouTube Direct is a good prod­uct in the­ory, but not quite as user-friendly as it needs to be to gain major traction.

News­wor­thy pho­tos have found homes in a range of sites, from Twit­pic (which hosted the photo of the plane crash on the Hud­son) to CNN’s iRe­port. When a taxi cab sud­denly caught on fire in mid­town, I turned to Twit­ter and found a dozen pho­tos that peo­ple have posted, though then spent a great deal of time track­ing peo­ple down so I could secure their per­mis­sion to use them on The New York Times City Room blog.

Media out­lets would do well to build up the infra­struc­ture and a clearer per­mis­sion sys­tem. Lit­i­ga­tion over the Haiti pho­tos which had been posted on Twitpic.

Wik­iLeaks has an inter­est­ing model that can be riffed on by oth­ers, with­out as much cloak-and-dagger mys­tique and drama. Indeed, we are already see­ing oth­ers: Brus­sel­sLeaks, Open­Leaks, IndoLeaks. Whether they have the tech­nol­ogy to guar­an­tee true anonymity will be fas­ci­nat­ing to watch.

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This article was originally posted on Jennifer Lee’s blog

Photo Credits: Flickr CC Don Solo, Degilbo on Flickr and cláudia gabriela marques vieira