Chicago Tribune Stops the Journatic Presses

theodp writes "In April, the Chicago Tribune touted its investment in and use of news outsourcer Journatic. 'We're excited to partner with Journatic, both as an investor and as a customer,' said Dan Kazan, the Trib's Sr. VP of Investments. 'Journatic will expand Tribune's ability to deliver relevant hyperlocal content to our readers, and we believe that many other publishers and advertisers will benefit from its services as well.' That was then. In a Friday-the-13th letter to readers, the Tribune announced a plagiarized and fabricated story has prompted the paper to suspend its relationship with Journatic. The move comes two weeks after Journatic's standards and practices were called into question by This American Life, which noted several Journatic-produced stories had appeared this year on TribLocal online with false bylines. Explaining why he went public about his experience at Journatic, reporter Ryan Smith said he felt 'people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out.'"

The This American Life Program

[eldavojohn]

For some reason there was no link to the original source that kinda got the scoop. So here's the link to 'Switcheroo' [thisamericanlife.org] which is This American Life's episode that covered this. It's free to stream, you can click the third link to Act II [thisamericanlife.org] just to hear the coverage of this thing. I listened to it on the radio when it aired and sent it around as I found it really interesting (also a follow up here [poynter.org]). There's a funny part where Ryan Smith is revealing everything about Journatic and he makes a comment about how it's not what journalism is supposed to be and Sarah Koenig says, "You are so fired. You realize that, right?" And then there's this odd pause and he says "Yeah, I am I guess. I'm okay with that." Another great part of that clip is when the owner of Journatic (CEO Brian Timpone) comes on and openly talks about it and defends his company (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion). But hats off to him, he is a huge fan of TAL and so instead of giving one of those canned "could not be reached for comment" they got a real person arguing for his business venture. He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.

Enthusiasm from Journastic CEO

[rwade]

I highly recommend review of the This American Life Episode [thisamericanlife.org] referenced in TFA.

Although broadcast only a few weeks ago, I'm not sure when TAL recorded the interview. That said, the enthusiasm of the company's CEO was striking given the strong line of questioning posed by the This American Life Interviewer. I would imagine the interview was fairly recent.

Although conceding that the stories sometimes lacked full detail on the things going on on the community being covered, with base material consisting often of only a quick phone interview to get a quote and a press release to provide the story -- Journastic CEO Brian Timpone did clalim a degree of passion for enabling some form of coverage for stories that may simply go unreported on.

This kind of enthusiasm for idealistic coverage of Norman Rockwell's Small Town America really files in the face of the general approach of the company to the job at hand -- which included a policy to use falsified (read: made-up) by-lines. That is to say, the off-shore reporters writing the stories for Journastic and then syndicated to newspapers like the Chicago Tribune had a field in the story submission setting for a name to associated with the story. Amazing.

Re:Enthusiasm from Journastic CEO

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, the Tribune used Journatic ONLY for TribLocal. The actual content of the TribLocal, since I live in a town covered by one, is pretty useless. Since you listened to the TAL episode, you got a glimpse of some of what they do which is all true. Regular features include the top 10 Redbox rentals from a collection of stores (3 or 4 for me) in the area covered by that TribLocal, recent home sales and prices of homes in the area, generic sports listings and some actual articles about sports teams, a real cover story article (that isn't very interesting), and as mentioned in TAL the worst police blotter ever. The blotter is arranged as a table with only cold hard facts: date, time, location, and "event". Now event isn't your typical blotter blurb that summarizes what happens, about half of the listings are "EMT call; non-vehicular" and that's as much as you get.

Basically Journatic is a data-mining operation using real people as miners and delivering nothing but plain dirt.

Re:Hyperlocal

[ddtstudio]

Journalist here.

What you're missing is the strong definition of "cover". In that very example, IIRC, the Journatic stringer just rewrote an agenda for the meeting, published before the meeting. The report that got published did not reflect what actually happened at the meeting, had no context of whether citizens questioned, applauded, or rioted. The Journatic stringer did not contact anyone to get a second source.

Think if this model were replicated on a larger scale. "Official government press releases said that the Congress is functioning smoothly and all citizens are happy" or "Microsoft press releases stated that Office 2018 is a must-buy and everyone loves Windows."