During a visit to Toronto last week, I noticed the entire city was pivoting around a story by Gawker, a site that has a broad range of interests, but at its core is dedicated to detailing the running silliness of life in Manhattan.
I saw and heard Gawker mentioned dozens of times — on the television in the hotel and on the front pages of both The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, even while I was in line for the ferry.
Why? Because a month ago, while the rest of the city’s news media gossiped, looked for string or looked the other way, Gawker wrote that Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, had been caught on video smoking crack cocaine.
The Toronto Star, which had been looking into the story, immediately published its own take after the news broke, but Gawker then initiated a crowdsourced effort to buy the cellphone video. (The site reached its $200,000 goal, but by then the people who had claimed to have the video had gone to ground. John Cook, the editor of Gawker, says he still holds out a slim hope that the video will surface. Gawker will donate the money to an addiction recovery program in Canada if it doesn’t.)
The story got new life on Thursday morning, when law enforcement officials staged a huge raid in the area where the mayor is said to have been taped, and they made a number of arrests. All anybody could talk about was how it might affect the mayor. Mr. Ford has repeatedly denied that such a tape exists or that he uses crack cocaine.
By traditional news standards, what Gawker did was transgressive every which way: it called a sitting mayor of the fourth-largest city in North America a crackhead based on a video that it said it had seen but did not possess. It also asked its readers to chip in to pay for its version of journalism. (“Oh, you mean like The New York Times does every day with its paywall?” quipped Mr. Cook.)
But even though Gawker was working the far edge of journalistic practices, the rest of the press in Toronto was compelled to follow because the story was out there and taking on a life of its own.
It is not a totally new phenomenon. Any number of big stories have started out as untouchable in suspect news outlets like The National Enquirer, but eventually broke into the mainstream. But now information increasingly finds its own digital path, and if the news is big enough, it will be seen by all, regardless of who first puts it out in the world.
It is the supply side of an equation that my colleague Brian Stelter first touched on five years ago, citing a student who said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Traditional news organizations used to be free to break news — or not — in their backyard and on their chosen beats. Now they have to be looking over their shoulder — at everyone. And in virtually every aspect of culture, from business to technology to fashion, the big guys now compete with a range of Web sites that break their share of news through obsessiveness and hyperfocus.
The big news that Rupert Murdoch was getting a divorce after a 14-year marriage to Wendi Murdoch did not come from tabloid newspapers, gossip magazines or E!, but from Deadline Hollywood, the business entertainment site run by Nikki Finke.
The business disruption in the media world caused by the Internet has been well documented. But a monopoly on scoops, long a cherished franchise for established and muscular news organizations, is disappearing. Big news will now carve its own route to the ocean, and no one feels the need to work with the traditional power players to make it happen.
Sources and news subjects simply have far more options now. In politics, for instance, people who have had rocky relationships with the news media can just fire up a video camera, upload to the Web and set up their own little news channel. Sarah Palin did it when she retired, as did Michele Bachmann more recently. Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman, announced his candidacy for mayor of New York by releasing a video in the dead of night.
If an abuse of power akin to Watergate happened today, it might not take the might and muscle of The Washington Post to get the story. The Mitt Romney “47 percent” video, arguably a turning point in the last presidential campaign, came out on the Web site of Mother Jones, a relatively small liberal magazine.
In the 2008 campaign, the comment that got Barack Obama in hot water, about “bitter” voters who “cling to guns or religion,” was first reported on The Huffington Post by Mayhill Fowler, an unpaid blogger. And of course once big news breaks, everyone is forced to follow along.
The jailbreak on information reached a pinnacle less than two weeks ago, when Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian, broke the news of systematic surveillance by the National Security Agency, after he was chosen by Edward Snowden as a conduit for a big leak. Having a large presence in Washington and a brand name does not ensure news supremacy: Mr. Greenwald is a former lawyer turned journalistic advocate of civil liberties — an American writing for a newspaper based in Britain while living in Brazil. Because a source picked him to break the biggest story of the year, the rest of us did as well. And the video that accompanied it, as in the instance of Mrs. Bachmann, Ms. Palin and Mr. Weiner, allowed Mr. Snowden to make his own case before he was defined by media and government.
“There has been an institutional bias that traditional outlets cling to — that anyone who doesn’t do the things that they do in the way that they do them isn’t doing real journalism,” Mr. Greenwald said in a phone interview. “Since nobody can say that the stories that we did are not serious journalism that has had a very big impact, the last week will forever put an end to that myth.”
In this instance, the historical strengths of big news organizations like the one I work for — objectivity, deep sources in the government and a history of careful reporting — were seen by Mr. Snowden as weaknesses. He went to Mr. Greenwald because they share values, because Mr. Greenwald is a loud and committed opponent of the national security apparatus and because he is not worried what the government thinks of his reporting. Of course, Mr. Greenwald had the international reach of The Guardian behind his story, and Mr. Snowden also shared information with The Washington Post, although it was clear that Mr. Greenwald’s past coverage on the issue was as important as where he worked.
The way to break a big story used to be simple. Get the biggest outlet you can to take an interest in what you have to say, deliver the goods and then cross your fingers in hopes that they play it large.
That’s now over. Whether it’s dodgy video that purports to show a public official smoking crack or a huge advance in the public understanding of how our government watches us, news no longer needs the permission of traditional gatekeepers to break through. Scoops can now come from all corners of the media map and find an audience just by virtue of what they reveal.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/big-news-forges-its-own-path.html?partner=rss&emc=rss