meta is better, take two

[[ updated and corrected: In the comments, Kit Seelye clarifies when her piece appeared, in what form, and who did the editing. I've updated this post accordingly. Deletions and inserts are in brown. ---ed.]]

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A couple of years ago, just after I started blogging, I saluted the NYT’s Kit Seelye for the first time (for “going off the reservation” to comment on the making of the news from within in the news pages of the paper). Her perspective on the changing nature of newsmaking and newsgathering was refreshingly candid and honest.

Here’s what Seelye wrote (in 2006)—she noted that the “news” on TV has been a devolving enterprise—competing with the fictional programming—for a long time.

Ever since [”Monica-mania”], the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.

If you’ve been reading my blog, which is about that very subject, you’ll understand that I always read Seelye’s work with interest—she’s attuned to the evolution of media, and she takes the time to provide NYT readers with the context they need for understanding the reports they read or hear or see in that constantly evolving media.

Sometimes that gets her into trouble with her Times overlords, who then seem to edit her after the fact, different versions of her stories appear online and in the dead-tree paper, sparking my suspicions of nefarious editorial monkeying around at the Times. (It has been known to happen. —ed.) I last noted this on January 1, when Seelye covered Mike Huckabee’s initial surge in popularity with the media.

Now the Times has done it to Seelye again , my suspicions were aroused again, by a piece that originated on the paper’s Caucus blog and then appeared in the dead-tree version on Wednesday, and then migrated over to the hybrid (I guess) “online.” [I'm all for "online"; I would, however, like to understand how it works in terms of corrections and glaringly obvious post-facto edits. Is there a policy? ---ed.] I can only link you to one version, because that’s the only one that exists. (As it made the journey from the Web to the paper [the piece on the Web is the original, published on April 14], it was Silently Edited for Excessive Eliteness, to remove edited down for length to fit in the paper and to add a reference to Arianna Huffington’s exact whereabouts at the time she was quoted for Seelye’s piece; info about Jay Rosen was added too.)

But before you jump to the [Arianna] gossip, it’s worth reading Seelye’s piece.

The Flack lays out the story Seelye tells so well:

In a nutshell, the Obama campaign invited one Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old reporter for Off the Bus, the Jay Rosen/Arianna Huffington’s consumer-driven campaign press corps, to attend an Obama fundraiser in California supposedly as a contributor. It was at this closed-to-the-media event where the mostly inspiring candidate dissed all gun-loving, religious types living in pivotal Pennsylvania.

Ms. Fowler, wearing her journalist hat and armed with her digital recorder, struggled with whether to report the ill-timed and ill-conceived remarks by her candidate-of-choice. Four days later she did, and all hell broke loose.

Since this is a PR blog, I found it especially intriguing, in an age of the Internet-driven political campaign, how the Senator’s handlers thought they could keep the media lid on what was ostensibly a public event. Ms. Fowler gained a “credential,” (i.e., access) as a supporter, not as a reporter, but she believed otherwise:

“We had a fundamental misunderstanding of my priorities,” Ms. Fowler told me. “Mine were as a reporter, not as a supporter. They thought I would put the role of supporter first.”

He concludes with the wisdom of today’s PR professional (and what every person in public—or even semi-demi-public—life should know [e.a.]):

Today, most of the smart PR set acknowledges that everyone and anyone can be a journalist, nothing is off-the-record, and that total command over a client’s public portrayal is a thing of the past.

His postscript leads to the long-promised (by me) gossip:

BTW - I did get a kick seeing Obama-supporter Ms. Huffington’s quoted in the newspaper this morning:

I’ll let Hendrik Hertzberg take over from there [e.a.]:

I’m a longtime aficionado of what Steven R. Weisman (of the New York Times) calls New York Times humor. … I think this qualifies. It’s the penultimate sentence of Katharine Q. Seelye’s backgrounder about how the Huffington Post got its big Obama/cling/bitter scoop, from page A17 of today’s [April 16 ---ed.] paper:

“We are a news site,” said Ms. Huffington, who cleared the post by cellphone while aboard David Geffen’s yacht in Tahiti. “We have opinions, points of view, but we’ll post whatever is newsworthy.”

No word on whether La Arianna was wearing pajamas.

Ouch. I have my differences with Ms. Huffington, but she didn’t deserve that hit from Hertzberg at all.

On the other hand, what exactly is Arianna trying to hide, and why? What a juicy morsel that is about Arianna in Tahiti! Of course she’s allowed to take cruises on David Geffen’s yacht. Who cares how elitist it makes her look?—especially since her judgment on the Fowler stories was correct: that they were news. No matter how uncomfortable those stories were for her (and Geffen’s) preferred candidate, she’s now in the reporting business and she knows it, and she acted accordingly.

I think Seelye also deserves kudos for her extremely nuanced and detailed reporting of the (excruciatingly nuanced) backstory of how “Bittergate” came to be: through the work of a “citizen journalist.” And I am totally impressed by the responsible, thoughtful performance of all the players behind the scenes at OffTheBus, not least Mayhill Fowler (and Arianna Huffington).

There’s a lot more to read on this subject. See Jay Rosen. See Jeff Jarvis contra Michael Tomasky. See also Marc Cooper’s blog post in which he explains how he edited Mayhill Fowler’s stories.

This post is long enough, but I’d be ignoring my subject matter if I failed to mention that even as we’re debating the proper role of the citizen in journalism, we don’t yet know the ramifications (and may never know for sure) of this “incident” on Obama’s campaign—that is a) on his securing the nomination of his party and b) on his chances of winning the general election if he does secure the nomination.

What we do know, however, is really interesting—and that’s the fact that the fallout from this “incident,” which in fact was a pseudo-event—has caused (or catalyzed) changes in the real world (Obama was supposedly “bad news-proof”; now he’s on the defensive). More about that another time.