A Note on Trust

Trust in journalism is at a low point, and in part I blame our strange tradition of not explaining what it is we do.

There are other factors that have sunk our reputation, of course: whole cable channels broadcasting political propaganda while enjoying the first-amendment protections extended to anyone who claims to be a journalist; the way that search engines and social media companies stole the work of journalists and then built a metrics-driven business model that made it impossible for them to compete; the human tendency and public-relations playbook that chalks bad coverage up to bias and favoritism; the access to power that some journalists are willing to make unsavory deals to enjoy. But I can't turn all of that around. Instead, I'm going to try to dispel the central misconception about the supposed unaccountability of journalists, by trying to explain to you how I've been taught to hold myself accountable for doing this job right.

Over and over I've been in a protest, a wildfire, or a living room and spoken with someone who clearly believes we either make things up on the fly, or that we take specific direction from a cabal above us. I'm always grateful for that moment, because within a few minutes I'm able to explain the rules and requirements to which good journalists hold themselves, and invariably the people I speak to express surprise and relief at the professional discipline most of us observe. Here I'll do the same.

But first, a note of context. The practice of journalism is an odd one, in that it arguably shapes the collective understanding of global issues, and yet nowhere, and especially not in the United States, do you have to be in any regulated way trained or certified to practice it. I certainly wasn't. Some in my profession go to journalism school, and they graduate with a sense of the accepted process and standards involved. But many wander into journalism either from another profession — scientist, lawyer, chef — or, like me, wander into it because it rewards curiosity, competence, skill with language, and evidence-based reasoning.

The laws of the United States confer on everyone an equal first-amendment right to "practice" journalism, without making any distinction between an experienced professional and someone pretending to do it. Once upon a time the expense involved in owning a printing press and a fleet of trucks to distribute what you print meant that those wanting to be journalists needed the permission of those who held those resources to make use of them. This created a funnel of approval that on the one hand industrialized a white, male perspective and excluded most others, and on the other hand created a set of expectations that one had to meet in order to practice the profession.

Today that is no longer true, as anyone with a phone and an internet connection can broadcast their thoughts to the world. The benefit, of course, is that a much wider variety of humanity is able to report on a much wider variety of stories. The good that comes from that is inarguable. Journalism was once a one-race, one-gender profession. But the problem now — one that I worry is becoming overwhelming — is that  the easy access to the tools of journalism leads to the temptation to misuse them for attention rather than for quality reporting. Reporting a story responsibly is hard, and the best-reported stories often don't receive a passionate reception from the audience. As a result I constantly encounter journalist doppelgängers who chase nothing but attention, and yet meet all of the legal but none of the ethical definitions of the profession. At a Stop the Steal rally I covered overnight in Las Vegas for NBC News in 2016, I noticed a television correspondent standing in front of the crowd of protesters. At first glance she had all the trappings of the job: bright lights on her, a microphone in hand, a camera operator working to keep her in frame. But as I got closer I realized she was actually leading the crowd in a chant of "we love you President Trump," and when I looked her up later on YouTube I saw that she was soliciting donations from the audience.

I've been tortured by the memory of that scene ever since, and torture myself trying to sort out the distinction between her and me. At that time, both of us were financially rewarded for the attention our work received. But at NBC I wasn't directly compensated by live donations from the audience in the middle of my coverage, and I was overseen by lawyers and editors who held me to specific institutional standards. At NBC we were rightly prohibited from directing our subjects in any way — to even suggest they say this or that for the benefit of the camera is a fireable offense — and if anyone saw me leading the crowd in a political chant, I'd have had to pay my own way home. Her incentive structure rewarded her for as much attention as she could attract, through any means at her disposal, with no professional downside to observing restraint or pursuing balance. Whipping up the crowd served her professional purposes, whereas for me doing so would have meant abandoning them.

The First Amendment, however, makes no distinction between the two of us, meaning that there is no difference, legally speaking, between a propagandist who sells conspiracy theories, a journalist who has to run everything past a team of editors and lawyers to make sure he hasn't misconstrued anything, and an independent reporter like me. And beyond that, I've learned over the years that the top executives at social media companies also see no distinction between us. Most if not all the leaders of those companies consider propaganda, news, and perspective to be equivalent noise, from which they believe the wisdom of the market will isolate a signal.

Now, of course, as journalists like me leave traditional media institutions as the business model in which we made our careers collapses, a new category of independent journalist is emerging, and I've joined that category. This creates enormous complication. In this medium I'm rewarded entirely for the attention my work receives, and now the distinction between myself and the YouTuber I was so worried by in Vegas is nothing more than the choices I make each day. But I'm sticking to what I learned. Inside the editorial offices and newsrooms in which I was trained, there is a set of expectations as to accuracy, brevity, balance, and tone that keeps us on the rails, and my plan is to carry those standards with me into my new life as an independent journalist, in the hopes that an appreciation of those standards will attract and retain my audience, even as other first amendment daredevils chase their audience in other ways.

It's against this background that I present to you the rules I follow.

My Rules

Informed Perspective

I think that the value of any journalist assigned a beat like mine is their ongoing, evolving set of opinions about the people and events they cover. There are those in journalism who don't believe they should offer those opinions publicly, and in certain roles over the course of my career it was the rule of the institution that employed me that I should keep mine to myself. But I believe pretending not to have those opinions is a form of dishonesty, and so I try as best I can to be honest about the opinions I have, and transparent about how I've arrived at them. Here you will read my opinions about all sorts of things, but I can promise you that I'll explain my opinions openly, that I base them on the best available evidence, and that I will be clear about the places in which my opinions evolve, or even contradict one another. The world is messy, and moving fast, and my opinions tend to do the same. You'll see that here.

Transparency

If I know information, I will make every effort to make sure you know it too. If I don't know information, I will admit that. There are rare exceptions to this rule (see "Off the Record," below), but in general my standard is that my fundamental responsibility is to be a vector of knowledge. The difficulty, as any experienced journalist can tell you, is in choosing when to share one's knowledge, because sharing information gleaned from only a single source, before I have a chance to understand how little I may actually know, can lead journalists pressured by their deadline to deliver a take too early. There I believe that speaking clearly to just how much or how little I know at any one time is crucial to maintaining my credibility, and working to make sure that any discourse I deliver comes along with an evaluation of how thorough my reporting has been.

Off the Record

I consider any "off the record" information I accept from a source as a conspiracy I am entering into with that person against my audience. As a result it's important to weigh whether that conspiracy will in the end serve to eventually give the audience more and better information, or less and worse information. When someone I do not know comes to me to blow the whistle on their company, or to tell me something deeply painful from their past, I offer them an initial off-the-record conversation in which they can evaluate what it's like to speak with me, and I with them. I restrict this to people for whom speaking out is a risk, and a service to others. I don't extend this same courtesy to corporate actors, such as communications professionals or executives representing the interests of the company, because for those people speaking to me is advantageous. In dealing with corporate actors, I do not want to know and ask not to be told anything they do not want me to publicly report, so that I am not conspiring with them against you. There is a deeply frustrating tactic in Silicon Valley, imported from Bush Jr. and then Obama-era communications strategies, of using "off the record" sessions as a way of burning a journalist's time and hopefully diverting them away from filing something damaging, all behind the cover of agreed-upon anonymity. When I ask corporate communications people for comment, they often ask if we can have a "quick background chat," in which they clearly hope to stall or spin me. (People inside the corporate comms industry tell me that many companies tie bonuses to how many stories each year a comms person manages to kill in this way.) Early in my career I went along with this. Now, in dealing with companies or agencies, I insist that we communicate only on the record, with a spokesperson's name attached, or not at all.

Conflicts of Interest

When I was starting out as a business reporter in San Francisco in the 1990s, during the first Internet boom, our boss gathered the newsroom and told us we shouldn't be invested in any of the companies on which we reported, and ever since I've been more or less running away from the opportunity to make money off of what I know. It's a personally difficult part of this job: bringing money into it damages our ability to see the world clearly, and damages our reputation with our audience. So I'm pretty stringent. I accept money to speak to audiences or to appear as the host of a television series, and I'm paid to write a book or a magazine article, but I don't accept money for, say, consulting on the public image of a company, and I don't accept free goods in exchange for reviewing them. There are endless temptations to use this job for personal gain, and God help me I'll continue to avoid them.

Fair and Balanced Reporting

I consider the quality of any reporting to be directly related to how many contradictory opinions the journalist has fielded during her or his investigative process. The job is to aggregate and synthesize many perspectives into a cogent, reasonably accurate narrative. So I have to talk to a lot of people, and I have to make sure they're evenly distributed across the many opinions available on the subject. I make every effort to get information from multiple sources, and when Person A accuses Person B of wrongdoing, I go to Person B to offer them the chance to react in my finished piece. It's worth noting that when Person B is a tech company, that company often tries to use this journalistic obligation to its advantage in ways I consider unscrupulous (see "Off the Record," above), but I do my best to navigate those tactics while still delivering everyone a chance to be heard.

No Rehearsed Conversations

When an interview subject asks me to send them a list of questions in advance, I refuse. I'll offer them a broad description of the scope of the conversation I'd like to have, but pre-submitted questions drain the interview of life and spontaneity, and give the interview subject what I consider an unfair opportunity to rehearse her or his responses. In podcasts and on-camera interviews, I make it a habit to sit down right when we're due to begin, so that I can avoid small talk, which invariably turns to "so, what do you think you'll ask me?"

Trauma

Journalists have the very holy but very difficult responsibility of often asking people to relive their most horrible memories for us, and so I give enormous consideration to people in advance of that. When I'm interviewing someone who has been traumatized by an experience, I begin by warning them that speaking to me will likely bring their trauma back to the surface, and I advise them to put aside any other obligations for the rest of the day. This, for instance, is one of the few times that I'll give someone a chance to speak to me off the record first, so that they have a sense of me, and I of them.

Diversity of Background and Perspective

Just as I try to gather as many conflicting accounts as I can (see "Fair and Balanced Reporting"), I try to make sure that my reporting is informed by as wide a variety of lived experiences as possible. In tech, for instance, non-white, non-male interview subjects are often hard to find, especially at the top of an executive org chart, and as a result the white dudes I speak with may not recognize the downstream effects their products may be having on people who aren't like them. There is a long list of this sort of thing: facial recognition, credit scores, automated job recruitment. Gathering a diverse array of backgrounds is key to seeing larger effects and broader context, and so I keep a tally of the backgrounds of the people I speak with, and actively seek to make sure there's broad diversity in my sourcing.

Misrepresentation

I have been lucky enough to receive some very thoughtful on-the-job training over the years, and have gathered a number of guidelines that I observe in whatever I do. There are too many of those to list here, but that list would include...

• No false attribution of belief or opinion. When you read the words "President Trump believes," you are reading a fundamentally unprovable statement. A person's beliefs are unknowable and thus unreportable. You can only write "President Trump says he believes."

• No false authorship. When a corporation issues a press release with quotes attributable to an executive, it's important to attribute them accurately. The convention of quoting what "the CEO said in a statement" doesn't reflect the communications machine that typically generates language for leadership. I try wherever I can to make it "the company wrote in a statement."

• No phantom critics. If criticism has been levied against a person or institution, I cite the source of that criticism, whether it's "several dozen replies to a social post" or "a trio of former employees." Phrases like "widespread criticism" or "some say" are tempting to use (and in my professional life I have used them), but in an era where criticism can easily be made to appear louder and more widespread than it is, it's important to quantify and source it.

Feedback and Corrections

Reach out to me with your reactions. I am eager for good-faith commentary on the quality of my work, and I give special weight to criticism from those with no vested interest in what I've put out there. If I make an error, and it's clear that I need to correct what I've written or filmed, I won't just clean it up invisibly — you'll see a correction note attached to the article or video so you can see clearly what has changed. Disagreement over matters of opinion may also warrant inclusion, especially if I've gained new perspective from it, and I'll make that clear as well.