<nettime> Seth Abramson: We need a new kind of journalism (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

A little bit too much plug for his book to my taste, which also (as I 
read here) carries a whiff of the Latin proverb 'who proves too much 
proves nothing', yet good stuff all teh same.
Cheers from the French Himalayas, p+2D!

...........

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/22/trump-russia-too-complex-to-report-we-must-turn-curatorial-journalism


Trump-Russia is too complex to report. We need a new kind of journalism
Seth Abramson

The archive of prior relevant reporting is now so large and far-flung 
that more and more articles are frustratingly incomplete – but 
curatorial journalism can fill the gaps

The Guardian, Thursday 22 Nov 2018


The ongoing federal investigation into collusion between the Kremlin and 
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is the most complex, far-ranging 
criminal investigation of our lifetimes. The story of Trump-Russia 
collusion crosses so many continents, decades and areas of expertise – 
and has swept into its net so many hundreds of public officials and 
private citizens from nations around the world – that it can be 
difficult to understand any one piece of reporting on the scandal 
without having access to the context provided by several dozen others.
When newsrooms are dominated by white people, they miss crucial facts
Read more

This historic complexity makes the Trump-Russia story exceptionally 
difficult to report on using conventional methods alone. And it has led 
some members of the public and the press to misunderstand the 
significance of parts of Mueller’s investigation, or even doubt its 
importance – a fact which Trump and his cronies have tried to capitalize 
on by calling the probe a witch-hunt, a hoax and fake news.

In these respects, Trump-Russia shares a lot with other defining 
contemporary events, from gun violence to climate change. Such phenomena 
are massively distributed in time and space, and powerful interests 
often have a stake in misrepresenting them. Making sense of them 
requires new modes of journalism – ones that build on and amplify 
traditional models of news gathering, and which might help to restore 
Americans’ faith in the media.
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In 2018, there are actually more reliable news reports than ever before, 
as there are now more responsible media outlets online and in print than 
there ever have been – a fact that often gets lost in debates over “fake 
news”. The digital age has also internationalized hard news reportage, 
meaning that readers have access to high-quality reports from around the 
world with an ease that was impossible before the advent of the 
internet.

But this sudden expansion in focused, reliable news coverage has 
coincided with some of the largest and most prestigious media outlets 
cutting resources for investigative reporting. The upshot of all this is 
that reporters have less time or ability than ever before to review the 
growing archive of prior reporting before they publish what they’ve 
uncovered.

Invariably – and especially in the case of highly complex stories – 
context is lost, and new reporting focuses on the present or the recent 
past to the detriment of a longer view of events and their implications. 
This is where emerging models of journalism, like “curatorial 
journalism”, are needed.

    Curatorial journalists find the gaps and blindspots in scattershot 
or even excellent reporting and then fill them in with reliable, germane 
reporting from other sources.

Curatorial journalism on Trump-Russia brings together news reports 
relevant to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation from as far 
back as 30 years ago and from reporters working in the United States, 
Russia and over a dozen other countries. By connecting the output of 
reporters who often work under tight deadlines and, consequently, 
without having read all the prior reporting relevant to their research, 
curatorial journalists find the gaps and blindspots in scattershot or 
even excellent reporting and then fill them in with reliable, germane 
reporting from other sources.

In the case of the Trump-Russia investigation, the benefits of 
curatorial journalism are already evident. The significance of Trump’s 
31 March 2016 national security meeting at the Trump International Hotel 
in DC was not publicly known until curatorial journalism connected it to 
a single statement made by a Trump national security adviser at the 
Republican national convention. The associations between Israeli 
business intelligence expert Joel Zamel and Mike Flynn, George 
Papadopoulos, Cambridge Analytica and Russian oligarchs linked to the 
Kremlin was revealed only by connecting obscure Israeli news reports 
with widely discussed American ones. The volume of evidence compiled by 
British media in support of the Steele dossier’s claims of Russian 
kompromat on Trump was largely invisible to American readers until 
curatorial journalism ferreted it out.

Collating so many disparate facts allows curatorial journalists to 
establish an overall timeline of events, which in turn makes possible a 
holistic yet dynamic “theory of the case” – the investigative term for 
the narrative that best explains an emerging pattern of facts. The 
result is an understanding of complex events that is at once more 
retrospective, adaptive and predictive than any one news article or 
single-source series of articles could ever be.

For instance, the American media has often uncritically reported White 
House claims that candidate Trump lacked much connection to Paul 
Manafort, Rick Gates, Flynn or Papadopoulos – all of whom have since 
been convicted of charges brought against them by Mueller. But these 
reports don’t exhibit an awareness of the full stories of how Trump came 
to know each of these men, and of their respective roles in Trump’s 
campaign – stories which, together with other facts, establish that 
Trump colluded with the Russians and, in doing so, violated of a number 
of federal criminal statutes.

Oversights like this are not the result of media incompetence, laziness 
or malfeasance, however. The truth is more banal: the archive of prior 
relevant reporting that any reporter could review before they publish 
their own research is now so large and far-flung that more and more 
articles are frustratingly incomplete or even accidentally erroneous 
than was the case when there were fewer media outlets, a smaller and 
more readily navigable archive of past reporting for reporters to sift 
through, and a less internationalized media landscape.

While in another era consumers might be thought incapable of catching 
such errors, now social media crowdsourcing immediately detects and 
magnifies journalistic missteps. The result is a media ecosystem in 
which reporters feel disrespected and consumers poorly served.

Curatorial journalism intervenes in this unhealthy tug-of-war by 
reinvigorating individual media reports – showing how, even when they 
are incomplete, they can do critical work if placed in conversation and 
collaboration with other articles. At the same time, curatorial 
journalism distills for newsreaders the key connections between the 
reports they’re being bombarded with on a daily basis, and does so in a 
way that makes the heterogeneity and frenetic pace of contemporary media 
seem like a positive development.

Proof of Collusion, my just-released book on the Trump-Russia 
investigation, is a work of curatorial journalism that began with an 
attempt to master the timeline of the Trump-Russia case, continued on 
Twitter to a daily curation of relevant news sources the world over, and 
culminated in the development of a “theory of the case” that relies 
entirely on well-sourced facts and evidence rather than my own opinions 
or speculation.

That theory holds that years before the announcement of Trump’s 
presidential candidacy, the Kremlin, anticipating the New York City 
businessman’s political future, successfully bribed him into adopting a 
foreign policy distinctly beneficial to Russia and harmful to America. 
Once in-campaign, this money-for-policy quid pro quo led to a series of 
collusive meetings and agreements that both aided and abetted Russian 
cyberwarfare against the United States and illegally solicited monetary 
and in-kind donations (including stolen digital materials) from both 
Kremlin agents and Russian cutouts.

This theory of the case might seem unduly speculative to those who read 
only a handful of news sources. But Proof of Collusion contains over 
1,600 endnotes and nearly 2,000 citations, directing readers to hundreds 
of media outlets and investigative reports from around the globe in 
support of its encompassing metanarrative.

What I do on Twitter and in my book many others are now doing in other 
media, such as podcasting and cable television. The Mueller, She Wrote 
podcast has become an indispensable source of curatorial journalism for 
many Trump-Russia watchers, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is undoubtedly one 
of the most popular and instructive curatorial journalists of the 
Trump-Russia era. Curatorial journalists like me are increasingly sought 
out by conventional reporters hoping for a broader understanding of the 
stories they have been chasing down.
Citizen journalists – the fighters on the frontline against Russia’s 
attacks
Read more

My hope is that something similar can be replicated for other complex 
conundrums, such as America’s ongoing healthcare crisis; the scourge of 
gun violence oppressing our elementary, middle and high school students; 
and the slough of increasingly dire global climate changes that will, in 
short order if not already, be irreversible.

In each of these cases, what is needed is not just a recitation of facts 
but an encompassing, reliably sourced, readily digestible narrative that 
establishes how and why we have come to the point we have – without 
sacrificing the complexities of the subject. Done well, the result of 
all this compiling, connecting and synthesizing will be not just a 
thorough history but also the production of new knowledge on each of 
these critical topics.
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In this way, curatorial journalism can help ameliorate the deficits of 
understanding our digital age inevitably produces, leaving us not just 
better informed but also more trusting of the work done by our most 
deeply committed investigative reporters. Here’s hoping this new 
subgenre of new media journalism continues to inform us at this critical 
juncture in history and perhaps, in time, gets its due.

    Seth Abramson is an assistant professor of communication arts and 
sciences at University of New Hampshire and the author of 10 books, most 
recently Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (Simon & 
Schuster, 2018). A graduate of Harvard Law School, he worked for many 
years as a public defender in New Hampshire and Massachusetts


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