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How similar is reporting the Snowden files to indulging in five minutes of self-gratification? If you don't closely follow the "future of journalism" debates, here's hoping those two things seem pretty damn different to you.
Not so, says Felix Salmon – late of Reuters, soon to join Fusion, and pretty much the most outspoken follower of those debates: when it comes to journalism, Salmon claims, "breaking news is the most masturbatory thing journalists do".
Salmon was talking up the new wave of explanatory journalism sites, like Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, or Vox. Neither site plans to break new stories – they want, instead, to explain the world (and the news) through data and analysis.
That's a fine enough endeavor, but Salmon goes further: because "readers don't care who breaks the news", he writes, "chasing after scoops is silly".
That is wrong, but let's begin where Salmon might generously be given the benefit of the doubt: no one, whether a journalist or not, should care – at all – who tweets a news story first. (That only qualifies as a "scoop" to an insider group of hacks and social media journalists.)
Here's something else that doesn't matter: the journalist who gets a carefully-spun political announcement to run before his competitors – by approximately seven minutes, and with minimal outside reporting at that. For a lot of "news", first means absolutely nothing: what matters is to get it right, to try to move the story forward, or to at least put the news in the appropriate context.
But "breaking" news masquerading as an "exclusive" is not a scoop. A true scoop can bring information to the public that would otherwise stay private. Some scoops are huge, and read all over: the WikiLeaks and Snowden stories on which I worked, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, warrantless wiretapping, you name it – many pieces of hard-earned journalism have changed the world in which we live.
Others get less attention, but remain hugely important: revealing a piece of political corruption, finding a hidden story in jobs figures, looking into corporate malpractice and many, many more, from blogs to local newspapers to our fellow Pulitzer Prize winners this year and Thursday night's National Magazine Award winners.
Without this work, explanatory journalists, columnists and even media futurologists are pretty irrelevant. At some point, someone's got to produce something to talk about. Salmon may be right that readers don't even care who exactly broke any given story – though Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein may disagree – but that's missing the point.
Digging is at the core of journalism. Telling stories that need to be told, instead of regurgitating the information everyone can access – that kind of supposed indulgence matters. If anything, it's all the other stuff that's masturbatory. And that's the shame in so much of this new wave of explanatory journalism, and in our Twitter-fed breaking news environment: it's as if the nerds building the "future of journalism" forgot the importance of the scoops at its foundation.
Collecting and analyzing data is a brilliant way to potentially generate scoops, though: the trend you spot in the figures can prompt further digging, then interviews and outside work, to produce a story that might lead a website, spark a debate or (gasp!) grace a newspaper's front page.
The alternative – to point at the trend and note, in the middle of another think piece, that it's interesting – relies on someone else, perhaps without the in-depth knowledge and experience of the data, to spot and do the work.
Vox and FiveThirtyEight are both incredibly new journalistic endeavors, if pseudo-journalistic in their experimentation with what journalism means. They may both decide to pursue exactly this course of point-and-'splain, or some other similar version of it – or they might just not know what they are quite yet.
But make no mistake: there is huge potential for newsrooms with a bunch of writers and developers who have statistical and analytical skills, who are still happy to do the extra work to turn an interesting theory into a real human story. Despite lots of recent US media hiring to tap that very potential, there's no established newsroom in the world, and certainly no budding web newsroom in Washington or New York, that has fully realized that kind of vision. Eventually – maybe even soon – one will.
Against that potential, the problem of analysis-without-news becomes clearer: it's a little like visiting a great steakhouse and getting a salad. It's interesting – tasty, even – and it's whetted the appetite. But sooner or later, we're going to want the red meat.
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