Tag Archives: ezra klein

Should newspapers publish full interview transcripts online?

Washington Post economic and domestic policy blogger Ezra Klein has called for newspapers to make full interview transcripts available online, where there are not the traditional space restrictions of a print edition.

Klein cites last week’s New York Times article on Paul Volcker, which is “clearly and proudly set around a wide-ranging, on-the-record interview with Volcker himself”:

But that interview, aside from a few isolated quotes, is nowhere to be found. This is a baffling waste of good information. Reporters are endlessly interviewing newsmakers and then using, at most, a handful of lines out of thousands of words. The paper, of course, may not have room for thousands of words of interview transcripts, but the web certainly does.

Klein’s comments echo those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who criticised the media on Friday for not making use of the huge amount of space available online to make primary source material more readily available.

The main issue for Klein, like Assange, seems to be one of transparency, especially for the interviewee:

It’s safer to have your full comments, and the questions that led to them, out in the open, rather than just the lines the author thought interesting enough to include in the article.

“And for the institution itself,” writes Klein, “it’s a no-brainer. You get a lot more inward links if you provide enough transcript that every niche media site can find something to point their readers toward.”

But news organisations considering such a move would have to weigh any potential increase in traffic – and any respect garnered by increased openness – with what is surely, for most, an unwelcome level of transparency. To say nothing of having to transcribe the hours and hours of interviews conducted by a newspaper such as the New York Times.

It is an interesting question for online journalism nonetheless. With programmes like the Open Government Data Initiative tipping more and more raw materials into the internet, will news organisations benefit overall from taking the same open approach?

Read Ezra Klein’s post here.

Jack Shafer: Washington Post should ‘undiscover a few of its current chin strokers’

On Slate this morning, Jack Shafer takes the Washington Post to task in a response to the accusation (by the Post’s own domestic-policy blogger Ezra Klein) that the paper gives over too many of its op-ed contributions to politicians.

The problem isn’t the politicians though, according to Shafer, whose analysis of the last month’s pages shows up relatively few political bylines. The problem is that the op-ed page’s “real estate” is too often occupied by a two dozen-strong coterie of regular writers.

So absolute is the regulars’ lock on the Post op-ed page that it’s not uncommon for its every column inch to be filled by one of them (…) Instead of discovering America’s next great pundit, I’d rather the Post give its op-ed page some breathing room by undiscovering a few of its current chin-strokers and recruiting unconventional writers (John Ellis, James Altucher, and Heather Mac Donald, just to get the conversation rolling) to fill the space with a few ideas we haven’t heard 25,000 times before. (I’m talking about you, Richard Cohen.)

In a perfect world, a publication is edited for readers. In the imperfect world that we inhabit, too many publications are edited for the benefit of their staffs and their friends and associates. The Washington Post op-ed page, which hoards its space for its own, is one of the worst offenders.

Full story at this link…

American Prospect: Are reporters reporting or making the news?

Should journalists report, explain, but also ‘make news’, asks American Prospect’s Ezra Klein.

Klein refers to assertions made by CNN’s Ed Henry about a recent Obama press conference, in which Henry said his strategy was to ‘make news on something unexpected’ – a tactic that lead to the story on overturning the policy at Dover Air Force Base preventing media coverage of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full article at this link…