The Problem of Streeters

It's high time we acknowledge what is considered to be a necessary evil in journalism: streeters.

For those outside the news industry, "streeters" is the mildly pejorative term for "people on the street". The idea is that a journalist should go out and ask "average Joe citizen" what he or she thinks on a current issue. This opinion is then reduced to a sound byte and inserted into a news story or sidebar, often alongside the opinions of a number of other streeters. When a news story is comprised entirely of streeters, the piece itself is called a streeter.

Questions for streeters range from hard to soft news; from "should the government pull out of Afghanistan" to "how about this weather we're having". These stories can be used to gauge reaction to an event, survey public opinion, or to fill space as the case may be.

The vast majority of my journalist peers despise doing streeter stories, as do I. It can be hard to convince people walking the sidewalks to take time out of their day and talk, on the record, about a topic they may have little knowledge of or interest in. The possibility of being on the 6:00 news only sometimes outweighs a person's fear of looking like an idiot.

What this means for the journalist is an hour or two of rejection from complete strangers. Understandably, this makes these stories a giant pain in the ass to do.

I vividly remember standing next to a building in downtown Saskatoon with a microphone, asking passers-by what they thought about H1N1. Looking around, I noticed a few homeless people on either side of me asking for spare change.

The parallel was a bit chilling.

I can see why editors like sending reporters to get streeters; it's a reliable, simple, and easy way to fill gaps in content, especially on a slow news day.

But as a news follower, I tend to see streeter content as lazy, pointless journalism. What do I care what Anne the laundromat attendant thinks about health care? Who is she, and why is her opinion valuable? Since when is coffee row an authority on anything?

But streeters aren't just problematic at a content level. There are ethical considerations here that need to be acknowledged. First of all, the notion of streeters implies the existence of the "average person". I have yet to meet this "average person" in my time as a reporter, but if I do, I have a feeling that he or she would be very boring.

Beyond that, what are journalists actually doing when they ask a streeter for an opinion? They are choosing somebody, at random, to speak on behalf of everybody else.

This, to put it simply, is not fair.

It's not fair to that individual, it's not fair to everybody else, and it's not fair to the journalist who's recording device has suddenly become the infallible wand of public opinion.

So, by way of a conclusion, I'll put in a request to editors and news directors everywhere: please... no more streeters. These stories are nothing but a crutch for when the idea well runs dry. I know coming up with actual story ideas is tough. Really tough.

But with a little more effort, we can make journalism everywhere a little stronger.

On Internet Reporting

How does one write about the Internet? He asked, rhetorically.
It’s fair to say that the majority of whatever target audience you’re writing for knows what the Internet is, and what you can use it for. But when you get into the area of Internet culture, where do you start?
I came across these difficulties in writing an article about memes for “Ink”. Your average message board patron, even if they haven’t heard the term “meme”, will at least grasp the concept. They will have been inundated with “LOLcats” and been “Rickrolled” more times than they care to mention. They may have even created a “Demotivational” or two.
But as widespread as the internet is, relatively few people have waded very far into the black intellectual wasteland that is your average internet forum or blog. Few have the patience, let alone the will.
This is a common problem in any topic you write about I suppose. But the demographics of the Internet don’t really follow any predictable pattern. As British computer science academic Garry Marshall writes in his paper “The Internet and Memetics”, “Virtual communities are not structured in the same way as real-world communities. Constraints of geography and status do not come into play: what matters is a common interest.”
In other words, the demographics of traditional media don’t conform to Internet demographics. So there’s no way I can assume that ANY demographic knows what I’m talking about when I say “LOLcats” or “Rickrolling”.
The super-geek in me wants to talk about the implications of memes in regards to Internet culture; something which is seriously under-examined. But if I skip definitions and examples of memes, it’s like trying to teach somebody chess strategy when they don’t know the rules.
It's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" things. Regardless of what I do, a section of the "Ink" readership is going to feel either patronized or lost.
One more thing about Internet reporting: the “best” source for this topic is really Wikipedia. Though I can already fell the scowls of professors everywhere, I will only say that the “experts” on Internet culture are exactly the kind of people that would take the time to write a Wikipedia article in the first place.
You won’t find an expert on the history of the ORLY owl on any faculty list in any university in the world. And even if you could, why bother? The Wikipedia article on that subject will tell you exactly the same thing. In researching the meme piece, I read an article from a legitimate news organization that actually quoted Wikipedia.
Okay, it was FOX News. But still…

“O brave new world! That has such people in't!”
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest, (presumably talking about internet forums)

ACORN and the Birth of Douchebag Journalism

A pimp and his prostitute walk into an office building.

It is the Baltimore office for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,) a nationwide, federally-funded, community organizing group. They say that they want to start an underage prostitution ring using girls from El Salvador in order to fund the pimp’s future congressional campaign.
To their credit, the advisors behind the desk are extremely helpful. They advise that the prostitute refer to herself as a “performing artist” on tax forms so she can write off clothing, condoms, and other tools of the trade.
One ACORN employee suggests that they list a few of the girls as dependents in order to apply for child tax credits.
Unfortunately for ACORN, the whole thing is being recorded on a hidden camera.
This video is the first of a series of stings at various ACORN offices ranging from Baltimore, to Brooklyn to Washington DC, each potentially more damning that the last. An advisor at the Brooklyn office suggests that the couple hide their income in a tin can and bury it in the back yard.
So, alleged support of illegal activity by an organization partially funded by taxpayer dollars.
Here’s the twist: it wasn’t uncovered by the Washington Post. It was 25 year old law student James O’Keefe and his 20 year old Facebook friend Hannah Giles.
Both right wing activists, O’Keefe and Giles spent six months and $1300 planning the ACORN sting. Pimp and prostitute costumes were pieced together from friends’ wardrobe, save O’Keefe’s pimp jacket, which was on loan from his grandmother.
Their goal, as described by O’Keefe in a FOX News interview, was to get a “gotcha moment” out of the employees there.
The videos were posted online before being aired by FOX News. The conservative media in the United States had been suspicious of this organization ever since the 2008 presidential campaign, when the Obama-backing ACORN was (falsely) accused of massive voter fraud. O’Keefe and Giles’ little stunt confirmed, in the eyes of the right-wing, long-held suspicions of wrongdoing, making them the new rock stars of a conservative media who now tout them as a young Woodward and Bernstein.
Or maybe like a young O’Reilly and Coulter.
O’Keefe can be seen regularly on right-wing television, sometimes wearing the very pimp costume he used to break the story.
“I think journalism is dead. It’s dead.” O’Keefe said on FOX News, “this is the future of investigative journalism, and it’s the future of political activism.”
To their credit, the duo did what the mainstream media did not: expose a legitimate story of public concern within ACORN. But is this stunt; this deliberate sandbagging of a left-leaning organization for political reasons really the future of journalism as O’Keefe suggests? Does award winning journalism involve a feathered cap and cane?
No.
Well, let’s hope not.
In a CNN interview, ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson described this approach to story-breaking as a “right-wing set up”, and “an attempt at ‘gotcha’ journalism” that is more about “creating the news rather than reporting the news.”
Though O’Keefe and Giles’ efforts resulted in the firing of those featured in the undercover videos, ACORN is threatening legal action against the pair. O’Keefe’s response: “Bring it on.”
I struggled to place O’Keefe and his methods into a category of journalism. An investigative model comes to mind, but these journalists don’t seem to care about what ACORN actually does, or what public implications there may be. The ‘gotcha’ method implied above almost fits the mould, though it would not account for the blatant partisanship and shameless self-promotion seen both in the videos themselves, and in the media coverage that resulted.
No, an entirely new form of journalism has emerged out of these videos: something I am dubbing “douchebag journalism”. I think this moniker embodies these subjects and their work pretty accurately. The douchebag journalist acts independently, is driven by bias, and employs a slash-and-burn approach to storytelling.
O’Keefe has promised that these videos are only the beginning, and that several more ACORN employees in different locations will soon be on the chopping block.
“Why go after ACORN?” Giles asked herself in a New York Post interview, “Because I love America”.
Now isn’t that a perfect answer from one of douchebag journalism’s proud founders?