The journalist in the world

MARK LYNDERSAY

MANY YEARS ago, a friend explained the economics of the snatch-and-grab to me after seeing a dollar on the passenger seat of my car.

“Don’t leave that there,” he warned.

I was puzzled. It was just a dollar, after all.

“Listen,” he said patiently, “the cost of a big stone is zero. The cost to buss your windshield is zero. The reward is a dollar. The math is not in your favour.”

Refreshing our calculations is something that all journalists should be doing.

The old math, which granted us automatic authority by being the people producing news no longer adds up.

The assumption that a byline granted immunity from all but the most pointed of letters to the editor has been unceremoniously annihilated.

The power of the press, as embodied by Mark Twain’s quote, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” has been upended in less than a decade.

Journalism is now one facet of a wider community of comment, sharing, review and, yes, reporting, that has been lubricated by platforms of engagement where the cost of participating is zero.

The fuss about the Guardian’s recent reporting comes at an interesting time for me.

I’ve just finished Brian Krebs’ Spam Nation, which reports authoritatively on the phenomenon of pharma spam, a business that earns millions, but costs billions to block and disable.

I’m just starting Conspiracy, by Ryan Holiday, about the expensive war waged by tech investor Peter Thiel after he was outed as gay by Nic Denton’s Valleywag, one of the websites in the shuttered Gawker online publishing empire.

Thiel had the money to spend to seek revenge for an act he considered pointless and unfair, but almost anyone interested in current affairs now realises that they have another weapon – free access to online mediums and, in many cases, the time to wage unfettered, unceasing and often unthinking war on journalists they disagree with.

The response to the Guardian’s publication last week of photographs of Michele-Lee Ahye revealed an open secret – her relationship with an attractive partner who happened to share her gender.

It appeared just a few days after vehement comments surfaced on social media channels condemning Justice Devindra Rampersad’s landmark decision to strike down Sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offences Act.

Within hours, close to a thousand people, and not just the usual social justice faces by any means, had weighed in on the treatment of the matter, virtually all attacking the paper for their front page.

The prevailing tone was angry disappointment.

The Guardian returned to the story the following day, writing about the response with a verbal ten-foot pole and then finally caved in with a front page, above-the-fold apology on the third day.

On its face, the three-day storm was a reporting and framing misstep. Two decades ago it would have been accepted differently. But this isn’t 20 years ago, or even ten.

The Guardian’s mistake with the Ahye report wasn’t in publishing it, it was in misunderstanding what its role was in sharing the information and the reactions made that clear.

The vigorous jousting that shook the Guardian shouldn’t be a cause for finger pointing by its peers, but it needs to be a signal for introspection for journalists working in a world that’s at once much larger and much smaller than it used to be.

Journalists have always been enjoined by the spirit of their profession to consider carefully the value of their reporting to their audience. It should be apparent now that it’s no longer clear who’s holding the stone or which side of the glass we stand on.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there