First, a new startup is attempting to create a platform to maintain profiles of journalists.
A few days later, news broke that Google is integrating Google Plus profiles of journalists along with articles in Google News.
While knee jerk reactions that Google is simply trying to find a way to incentivize people to use G+ are probably not wrong, the idea of journalist profiles as meta data is very interesting. Historically bylines consisted of names and organizations, if at all. Over the past dozen years or so email addresses have become very common additions to stories, but that is about all that can be done in print. On news websites emails became live links and publication sites could create static profile pages for writers. Eventually they began adding a search of other stories from the writer or links to writers' various social media profiles. But everything is left up to individual publishers. And if a writer contributes to multiple publications, or changes employers over time, profiles would not link.
So this leads me to two questions:
- Is there value is good journalist profile information?
- Where should this information reside?
For the first question, I believe it is a strong yes. The News Transparency website claims a goal to improve "transparency of journalism by making it easier to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news". I think it also is a question of credibility. Again historically journalists were seen to be the most credible source of news and information. Content published in respected newspapers, magazines, and television stations was known to have been created by journalists who had education, training, and experience to fully investigate stories, print facts that were true, not be libelous, and avoid a biased agenda. (How true this actually was may be another question.) Since the internet has lowered the barrier of entry of publishing to nothing so that anyone and their grandmothers can instantly become bloggers (like me!), there is a value in identify the credibility of individual writers so that readers can judge the source of the material.
This actually gets into the question of what is a journalist? I have a degree from a supposedly top journalism school, but I do not believe that this gives me a special privilege or guaranteed quality level. Certain skills and knowledge are more important in different situations. I want someone with experience in deep investigations and thorough analysis reporting on political corruption. But for analysis of the national economy, level of knowledge of economics and good writing skills are arguably more important than any degree. My point is that we don't need to separate into two camps: journalists and others, such as bloggers. Both can be great or lousy sources. But readers would benefit from transparency to understand who they are reading. Some bloggers are doing a good job with disclosure. Whereas most journalists are still forced to rely on a masthead for credibility. (Try finding in-depth bios of NY Times reporters on their website...)
So now to the hard part. How could this be done?
- Should profiles remain the responsibility of individual publications? This has severe limitations as content moves across platforms and writers move between publications. And publications have incentive to promote their brands, not individual contributors.
- Should a single company create a data base of information to be updated by individual writers (a la Google Plus) or via the public (a la News Transparency)? That gives a lot of power and responsibility to one company.
- Should we just wait for a single online profile to become the default and expect everyone to link to it? Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter? These are not focused on necessarily providing information on a person to judge his ability to report or write about a specific topic. Will there become a dominant owner of the professional content social graph?
None of these options seem satisfactory. I think in the near term we will see all of these options pursued in parallel but none become dominant.
The final factor in this is revenue. Google's other goal to begin tagging articles with profiles may be to better identify original sources for news. If this helps drive revenue streams (traffic, ads, etc) to publishers or writers and away from aggregators, it may be the one incentive to get publishers to hand over control of profile data to a third party.
(Note that I recognize the irony that I have very little profile information available at the moment. I am in the process of determining what to add and where.)
