Flacks, hacks and punters compete for online news agenda

By Jane O'Dwyer

The war in Iraq was a war on two fronts. One was the military. The other, a new communications front where journalists, spin doctors and ordinary people pit their views on the war. Underpinning both fronts is technology.

Salam Pax, allegedly a 29-year-old architect in Baghdad who adopted his alias from the Arabic and Latin words for peace, became one of the most famous chroniclers of the war. His enigma grew out of the war, despite that two weeks into the war he ceased posting his online journal or ‘blog’ as it is known in Internet terms.

A search of the web shows that just about every major news organisation has carried a story about Salam Pax. The UK newspaper, The Guardian, even published his blog verbatim. Following his disappearance, mainstream media and Internet news sites questioned Salam Pax’s identity, reliability, and if he was actually writing from Baghdad.
Salam Pax and the numerous web bloggers epitomize the impact of new communications technology on news. Ordinary people can become star eyewitnesses of monumental events, usurping the role of traditional media.

The Internet was heralded as a revolutionary technology that would change the way we perceive and receive news. Some even predicted the end of traditional print journalism.
But 10 years after the Internet came into common use, and five years since most journalists became connected online has it really revolutionized the way the journalists work?

It has and it hasn’t according to two journalists working in Tokyo. Jake Adelstein, a writer for Yomiuri Shimbun, says that while journalists use the Internet constantly, and are even required to write short news pieces during the day, the focus is really on the newspaper and "everyone thinks the Internet is a pain in the ass."

Stephen Lunn, Tokyo Correspondent for The Australian agrees. He argues that he could still do his job adequately without the Internet, but it’s an add-on. "It’s just one tool and people need to remember that," says Lunn.

Jake Adelstein (left) and Stephen Lunn in Tokyo.

Yomiuri Shimbun, one of four national newspapers in Japan, is 120 years old and with a circulation exceeding 10 million papers a day is the biggest circulation newspaper in the world. The main hub of the Yomiuri empire is a grey, 12-storey 1960’s building in Otamachi in central Tokyo.

The building houses everything needed to produce a newspaper – from journalists to printing presses. It has an old style newsroom feel about it. It is grotty and worn around the edges with a vaguely depressing air. Paper is stacked up in every corner of the newsrooms, and at the city desk hardened crime beat reporters fill ashtrays under the "No Smoking" signs.

The only sign that this is a newsroom of the new millennium and not one of the 1960’s are the banks of computers. Journalists slave not over typewriters but flat screen computers, upload interviews straight to the computer from digital recorders, and constantly research the Internet for new ideas.

In the city newsroom, Adelstein types away stories in Japanese. The only American employed as a reporter at the Yomiuri, over the past ten years he has worked his way up from a regional to a roving reporter breaking stories. He is one of 2000 journalists employed by the Yomiuri.

A couple of floors above Adelstein, Lunn works from a small office with a computer. The offices of foreign correspondents from around the world line the eighth floor. Despite being the only national daily newspaper in Australia, with a circulation of just 130,000 The Australian seems tiny in comparison to the Yomiuri.

As a correspondent for a national daily newspaper 9000 kilometers away, Lunn is dependent on the Internet and email for staying in touch with home. "I wake up in the morning and I turn on the internet, check my emails, check my competition’s stories on their websites to see if I missed anything and check the stories that I have written on my website to check they haven’t been butchered in the sub editing process. Then I start to look for any big breaking story of that day."

But that is where he says the Internet slips from being vital to only a helpful guide. "In terms of writing a story the Internet loses its impact to a degree because the way that a newspaper works now you have to have something fresh, so it’s important to still have strong contracts, be able to phone people and generate your own ideas off an idea that you might have gathered from the internet to make your story different or better."

Adelstein agrees and also sees technology as backing up traditional phone and journalism footwork. He points to the contact and database as the most commonly used information tools in the Yomiuri newsroom. "Previously it took a long time to access information, now with the database accessible by Internet you can check articles from all four major newspapers and a huge database of who’s who."

He points to the danger that lurks within story databases. "Now when you are writing a story you automatically look up the other stories to see what we have written on it so far. Of course the dangerous problem with this, and this has happened two or three times, someone has copied and pasted an old story into a new piece, and the old piece has had an error in it which has been repeated."

Carl M.Cannon, writing in the American Journalism Review in April 2001, listed numerous urban legends that have found their way into mainstream press since the rise of the Internet, email and newspaper databases. He termed the unchecked use of information from email and the Internet ‘the real computer virus’.

Lunn recognises this danger but not just from a point of accuracy. "You do have to be careful about attribution. I am always pretty careful and meticulous about attributing things I have found from other sources. If I see that a government official has said something on the net I will ring to confirm it for two reasons; one, to confirm they actually said it; and two, so I don’t have to say ‘so and so told AP’."

"The skill is to independently verify it. There is no trick to journalism. There is nothing secret. The telephone is your best piece of equipment. If you had your choice between the Internet and the telephone you would take the telephone every time."
Despite the accuracy issue, the Internet has become an important tool for journalists for fact checking and keeping up with the news.

Lunn says he regularly checks a limited number of websites – News Ltd, competition papers, CNN, BBC World and the Japanese newspapers English language sites. He pays for Factiva, a service that gives access to the major wire services such as Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse. For quick research he uses the Google search engine because of its easy interface.

Adelstein uses the Internet differently. While he still accesses news and wire sites – in his case the Japanese wire services Jiji and Kyodo press as well as competitor’s websites, and Google News – he turns to Channel Ni and similar sites, which are a unique Japanese phenomenon. Channel Ni is a clearinghouse for embarrassing government and company documents. Professional shakedown artists most likely connected to organized crime post the documents. Adelstein says that the material on the sites require meticulous checking before they can be used as a news story but many big mass media stories originate from such sites.

This brings up a significant difference between the use of the Internet as an information tool by governments in Australia and Japan. Whereas the Australian government routinely post reports and statements online at the time of release, this is not the case in Japan.

"The Japanese government is still pretty bad at putting government information on their websites. And one of the things is that the Japanese press has really opposed the government putting up the same information they get. The real reason for this is if people could see the same information we get at the same time we get it, they would know just how much of a job we are not doing because a large number of the articles we have are just rewrites of government announcements. So the media has been one of the biggest suppressors of the digitalization of government information in Japan," says Adelstein.
Whereas Australian papers have embraced the Internet and, with the exception of the Australian Financial Review, provided free content, Japanese newspapers are not so keen to do the same.

Adelstein recalls writing an article about the new Google news service that horrified the Yomiuri management. "They realized that the newspaper could become part of a big database that people could grab information out of for free. So they sued a small news provider creating a legal precedent that will prevent Google and like news services from linking to the Yomiuri."

Adelstein believes it is likely that all the major Japanese newspapers will move to requiring payment for online content or only allowing subscribers to access it.
Regardless of the media company’s approach to the Internet, Adelstein and Lunn say the Internet saves time and is useful for research and getting a sense of what is happening in the world.

"It’s such a handy tool for minutiae. I was writing a story yesterday about Kim Jong-Il and I didn’t know how old he was and it took one minute to find how old he was, when before the Internet I would have phoned the library and they would have checked Who’s Who and that would have taken ten minutes," says Lunn conceding that the Internet has changed the way he approaches writing for a paper.

"Another big change the internet has caused means you can’t write your story along the lines of ‘blah, blah, blah, something happened yesterday morning’ because it will have been on the internet all afternoon and so you really have to work a little bit harder to find something that is not on the internet or takes the story a little bit further because otherwise the story feels dated even though it’s the next morning."

"In the old days you would read the newspapers in the morning, think of a story idea, ring someone up and write down what they said. You’d ring the other side and write down what they said and turn it into a story. Now that story could very well have been on your own or a competitor’s website all afternoon. So you have to actually think what can a newspaper offer that a story on the Internet can’t. One of those is often pictures, and sometimes length."

For Adelstein, the old style of journalism still exists, especially for scoops. While for day-to-day news he provides short articles for posting on the website, when it comes to scoops, the focus is still on the newspaper. "We never post our big stories online until after all the other newspaper deadlines have passed."

In a world of instant news reporting, changes in news production mean organisations change and require some change from their journalists. To Adelstein and Lunn, the paper still remains the primary driver of their approach to news.

As for Salam Pax and the many bloggers competing for a voice, their impact may be slower to hit newspapers. However, they have already impacted heavily on electronic media. The BBC had its correspondents in Iraq produce their weblogs apart from their regular reports via satellite phone. News on the US missile hitting a Baghdad marketplace was first broken on the BBC weblogs before making it to air.