Keogh - "Journalism, Storification, and Harassment"

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Brendan Keogh wrote an article about the ethical responsibilities of writers who are gathering information from Twitter and then storifying links into their articles. The article is needed, and I also think it brings up a point about editorial ethics in the current system. I wholly believe that writers should be sensitive to the lived conditions of the people tweeting and violence that could occur to those people because of their personal, obscure-until-collected tweets (especially after my own major mistake in that area recently.) But I also think that there is an equal responsibility on the parts of editors to nip these stories in the bud. 

Brendan is specifically talking through some articles that Patricia Hernandez has recently done which makes it a little more complicated in that she is an editor for Kotaku herself (can someone educate me on the hierarchy of this? Does a Kotaku editor approve her or his own posts?), but he is totally right that it is a massive practice that I see deployed more and more often. The recent Gameranx article where someone essentially ghost interviewed several people about previews and then wrote an interview-style piece without the consent of the interviewees also brings to light some ethical issues here.

I'm not sure where I'm going here. I do think that things that are published on blogs, on websites, in public outlets are definitely up for quoting. But twitter? I don't know.  I think a serious problem with video games writing right now is a lack of strong editing at a number of outlets, and that might be a problem. As a "Leigh" comments at the bottom of Brendan's post:

The problem is two-fold.

We are being too nice about it, and should hold our games media to account at all times.

Twitter itself.

In both cases of Borderlands 2 'girlfriend mode' and 'Tiny Tina' controversies it was a journalist's snark or derisive re-tweet that framed the discussion. I know this because that's how I caught wind of both. 

David Wildgoose tweeted about sexism and linked the original Eurogamer article, which did not (if I remember correctly) mention anything about sexism.

Ian Miles Cheong tweeted about 'grabbing popcorn' to watch 'game devs' argue about racism in Borderlands 2.

(I think that's what they said)

I don't follow either of these guys and I'm not blaming them for simply tweeting, but we all know how Twitter can be mis-used and there will always be terrible people reading the internet.

We should see more stories about sexism and racism and homophobia, because that is how people are educated. If they are done poorly, than that is an issue for the author, not the audience.

The film industry talks these issues out through their medium and commentary; the games industry has shown it is nowhere near mature enough to do so yet. But I'm an optimist.

And I am sort of 100% on board with this. We are too nice with the games media. We don't hold each other accountable enough (I think). And honestly, I think that can take place in forums like this one, or on Twitter (badly, hence this group), but I think it should start with editors and editorial responsibility.

I don't have any questions or anything. At the very least we should all be reading Brendan's article and thinking about our complicity in all of this (especially the joy we derive from twitter wars). 

[Ethan Gach]

I'm not settled yet on how I feel about a lot of the issues Brendan raises in the post.  I don think though that a lot of it could be solved by better defined editorial "spaces." 

Since I started writing about games, and since I came to it from political blogging, one thing I've noticed is how poor most outlets are at distinguishing "bloggier" spaces from more professional and highly edited ones. A site like the Atlantic has content that goes through a normal editorial process (pitch, write, edit, fact check, revise, etc.) and then other content that its editors/bloggers shoot from the hip. In the latter, it makes total sense to me to raise and issue with something that happens on Twitter if they think it will be of greater value/bring attention to something worthwhile. But I do see it posing a significant problem if it constantly makes its way into the stricter, more official, and presumably more vetted parts of the outlet.

Kotaku is just one example of many where the lines between what is "news" what is "feature" what is "opinion," and what is pure aggregation or commentary are poorly defined and thus lead to messy collisions between readers, writers, and the subjects of the content.

[10rdBen]

Just a reply re: the structure of Kotaku internally...

I interviewed Kirk Hamilton for my PhD almost a year ago, and I also interviewed Maggie Greene (former weekend Kotaku ed in 2007-8) for same, and CONSISTENTLY they both talked about the frustration they have with people on the outside having no idea about the way Kotaku posts happen.

tl;dr - the idea of an "editor" is not a thing that really occurs at Kotaku (unless that's changed since then - which I doubt). Everyone has post requirements (X posts a day, or whatever. I think this applies even to Totilo. There are no straight up "editors".) and there isn't a whole lot of "oversight" in the same way that a newspaper has it, since there are no editor positions. For both Kirk & Maggie (who I hope will excuse my speaking on their behalf) Kotaku is/was better to think about as more like a group blog. The reason people get so mad at Kotaku for running Bashcraft stories next to Patricia's pieces, for instance, is largely because people don't understand this. 

So while I think they could definitely communicate this better, and the way the layout, design and sense of a "place"/community that Kotaku has doesn't always reflect the "group blog" thing, I think it's worth taking into consideration.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Thanks for the clarification. I literally had no idea how that worked, though I did remember when Patricia was moved up to "editor." I didn't really know what that meant at the time, but I guess it means full time employment.

[Brendan Keogh]

I do regret not linking to examples from more websites in my post as I think, despite all my caveats, it sounds like I am accusing Kotaku and Patricia of being 'lazy' or 'bad journalists' which really wasn't my attention. I understand how Kotaku works (even if it isn't well communicated on the website), and I don't think reporting on a conversation that happened on Twitter is necessarily a bad thing to do. I just wanted to note the issues/questions that are arising from this kind of reporting and to address them going forward. To that end, I think I could have written it in a less accusatory tone.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

I think you're fine tonally (I also am not the best at judging this.) You did the work of explicitly commenting on a practice instead of a person, and I think that's important. I think Patricia does great work and she's doing something that has been totally normalized by the video game journalism community in a very short amount of time. 

When did we start getting storified articles? The latter half of last year? November? They seem to be a really big thing over the past month or so.

[Maddy Myers]

"The reason people get so mad at Kotaku for running Bashcraft stories next to Patricia's pieces, for instance, is largely because people don't understand this. "

That's HARDLY the reason why Bashcraft's stories anger me. I don't think a better understanding of Kotaku would allow me to finally "get" his stories. Whatevs.

Re: Leigh's comment about 'girlfriend mode' -- I read the Eurogamer article and found its contents to be deplorable without needing someone on Twitter to frame it as "sexist" for me. I did it allllll by myself. Not sure if I'm understanding Leigh's point correctly.

So, Patricia's story about the PS4 event. A lot of dicks ended up harassing Leena and Elizabeth DeLoria (and probably other people) on Twitter after the fact. Elizabeth's tweets in particular were 1. jokes and 2. taken completely out of context, and so did not seem like jokes in Patricia's post. I ended up jumping in the ring and talking to a couple of Elizabeth's trolls, which I NEVER do (I think that was my first twitter fight with a troll who hadn't attacked me first -- very out of character for me, but I really didn't like what I was seeing and felt like I had to deflect/distract if I could).

I don't even think this is just about what can or can't be discussed within Twitter as a forum. It has more to do with how big Kotaku's megaphone is.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that writers need to ask permission before linking to tweets. Actually, I think I'm going to go so far as to say I don't think these storify concepts are good pieces of journalism, period. If you want to write about a controversy, you can do better than linking to some tweets. You can write something yourself in your own words. You can quote someone else's work if it's topical. It seems cowardly to just link to a stream of other opinions, almost like you're trying to take the pressure off of yourself. "Look, all these other people have this controversial opinion too, see? Look at THEM!"

I guess I'd just rather see pieces of writing explaining a concept or a problem, as opposed to spending far less time compiling a few people's ill-formed, immediate thoughts on a this topic and sharing them with hundreds and hundreds of people, as opposed to just the biased sample of progressive folks who already follow these people and who saw the full context and conversation surrounding these sentences. It doesn't even need to be that long of a post.

So, yeah, don't quote me in your storify piece for a major publication. I can write my own damn post somewhere else, after actually thinking about it beyond a couple of angry/funny sentences, and maybe get paid for it, even, since it's my idea. (But that's a whole OTHER issue ...)

I'm a little worried about how jerky this may sound, but it's 1:30 AM and I've been working all night so there you go. THAT might be why. Forgive me? Patricia already knows she's one of my favorite writers so I think we're cool. I just don't wanna get storified, thx.

[10rdBen]

"The reason people get so mad at Kotaku for running Bashcraft stories next to Patricia's pieces, for instance, is largely because people don't understand this. "

That's HARDLY the reason why Bashcraft's stories anger me. I don't think a better understanding of Kotaku would allow me to finally "get" his stories.

Oh, sorry that's not what I meant - I meant that when people get angry at Bashcraft's stories, it tends to be to the tune of "Oh MAN Kotaku SUXX!" when really it's just Bashcraft's articles that suck. Should Kotaku (whatever we mean by "THE" Kotaku - what is Kotaku? A website? Who is responsible for it? Totilo? Gawker? Everyone involved?) probably ditch Bashcraft? Absolutely, but like the way the anger gets directed at the WHOLE SITE as though it were ONE UNIFIED THING is what both Kirk and Maggie have said to me is a bit frustrating (even if they both get, like, why it happens). I have some sympathy for that. We don't always get to choose our colleagues. Heaps of academics are utter, utter douchebags but I like to think that people can separate out "being an academic" (or "writing for kotaku) from "is a horrible dickbag".

 I don't think these storify concepts are good pieces of journalism, period.

I agree, but again the people who write for Kotaku (and Patriciah in particular has gone to pretty great length to repeatedly emphasise this about herself) are not all journalists. In fact most probably aren't. Remember when Kotaku went to the hourly blocks of "programming" thing? Totilo made it really specific that he was trying to change the perception of the site to this kind of bloggy-entertainment-schedule-news-mix thing. Saying that it fails at being good journalism misunderstands the aims of Kotaku. I mean we can criticise it all we like, but I think it's only fair that we at least criticise it for what it's trying to be, not what it's not.

[Dan Golding]

All of that notwithstanding, I do think there is a Kotaku 'voice' of writing which aids the feeling that the site is a more united house of writers than it may be behind closed doors.

[Dan Cox]

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that writers need to ask permission before linking to tweets. Actually, I think I'm going to go so far as to say I don't think these storify concepts are good pieces of journalism, period. If you want to write about a controversy, you can do better than linking to some tweets. You can write something yourself in your own words. You can quote someone else's work if it's topical. It seems cowardly to just link to a stream of other opinions, almost like you're trying to take the pressure off of yourself. "Look, all these other people have this controversial opinion too, see? Look at THEM!"

I guess I'd just rather see pieces of writing explaining a concept or a problem, as opposed to spending far less time compiling a few people's ill-formed, immediate thoughts on a this topic and sharing them with hundreds and hundreds of people, as opposed to just the biased sample of progressive folks who already follow these people and who saw the full context and conversation surrounding these sentences. It doesn't even need to be that long of a post.

There was a practice I noticed starting last year, and it's something I have followed in my own work, in responding to a tweet, verifying the person's position, and then arranging for a longer comment. When I talk to game developers for my work for Indie Game Magazine, I always contact them either via a direct message or e-mail and ask for them to clarify their own thoughts on something. Of course, that's much more a "journalistic" approach, and I've had mixed results with it too.

I do agree with you, Maddy, that I also find the quoting of tweets to be questionable. While, yes, it allows a quick snapshot of a discourse, it also often also blocks off further debate and discussion too. As we -- and particularly I -- saw with the recent flare up over what Cameron wrote on "confessional" writing, who is cited and where is an exercise of power. Links encode this and, for who is quoted on a story, this is equally true.

While we didn't invent it, I do think Nightmare Mode helped push this forward around summer of last year, at least that's how I remember it. There was a push for more real-time writing on issues in the community and there were several long e-mail conversations about how, when, and where to do this. (I was mostly part of the "how" discussion at the time, having moved from contributor to sometimes tech support and mostly code consultant.)

However, what I thought at the time, and I still do now, is what you have written: in practice, it is often a way of affirming the existence of a discourse without explaining it. And it's sometimes used for gotcha moments as someone will write something on Twitter, thinking it a private space, and then forgetting that the walls are very thin and have the comment spark a twitter war. The lack of divisions between friends, colleagues, and the public can, and often does, create a position of people saying things they meant for a select group being broadcast to a larger audience.

This doesn't excuse it, but there is a very "public commons" thing going on here. It's unusually to quote people on the street talking, yet selecting responses on Twitter to create a narrative is becoming common. It's very concerning, then, to position some comments over others. I'm not sure where the ethical line there is, or even if it exists at all for this.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

This doesn't excuse it, but there is a very "public commons" thing going on here. It's unusually to quote people on the street talking, yet selecting responses on Twitter to create a narrative is becoming common. It's very concerning, then, to position some comments over others. I'm not sure where the ethical line there is, or even if it exists at all for this.

Well this is actually a really interesting point to bring up in conversation with Maddy above. The "old media" parallel to storified articles is "person on the street" interviews, which I don't consider to be journalism so much as informal polling. In a world where you can target your "on the street" people and then selectively point out what they have written it is a pretty brutal tool. So maybe the practice is assumed to be okay because we think of Twitter like a street and Twitter isn't so much a street as a bunch of social groups in a big cafeteria.

[Ethan Gach]

I find the problem with concieving of Twitter as a digital analogue to "the street" is that it involves so much more artificial sorting and stratification. There are horizontal elements--I can tweet at a Randy Pitchford or a Stephen Totilo and occasionally get addressed back--but for the most part Twitter consists of a series of interlocking and sometimes overlapping clicks its more about entering into transactional discourse than creating content through fuller discussion.

 

What tweets as content seem most useful for then is commenting on or criticizing the discourse or the modes of how communities are interacting than actually being newsworthy in and of itself. So on the one hand a tweet exchange might raise an interesting question (like in the Tiny Tina example), but the question alone doesn't really justify itself as aggregated content. What it really calls for is a post that examines the question and seeks to answer it rather than just note its existence and the fact that, what do you know, people disagree about it.

 

Some people might find this brief post by Freddie Deboer interesting on the general idea of twitter and privacy, and people's expectations about whatshould or shouldn't be used to represent them.

[Maddy Myers]

I can understand Kotaku folks being angry that folks generalize the entirety of Kotaku as having the tone of Bashcraft's stories. These days, I often see folks making the opposite claim: that Kotaku is super liberal and progressive now, and that Patricia and Kirk make up "the Kotaku voice" ... and that Kotaku "suxX now" because of that. I think the juxtaposition of Bashcraft stories with Patricia and Kirk's stories intends to make the readers feel like everyone's "needs" have been covered.

I'm not sure to what extent this happens at other Gawker sites, but I know it happens at Jezebel, where progressive stories appear alongside piles of trash by Hugo Schwyzer. Even though Gawker doesn't want to have a style, I'm pretty sure this is their style: a curated collection of varied (read: contradicting) voices, intended to draw a varied audience. They seem to emphasize the Cult of the Author, accepting that most readers won't like (and couldn't possibly like) everyone they publish on each site, so they have Author RSS feeds. Their sites get divided by topic. They have got specialization down.

I just don't think Kotaku gets a pass on not being called journalism, though, no matter their intentional internal contradictions or their lack of editors (am I reading that right? writers put up posts with little oversight?). Even Fox News is journalism, albeit sensationalist, poorly researched journalism intended more to entertain and frighten people than inform them. I feel like I've seen other gaming sites struggle with this "are we journalism? do we have to say we are?" problem, too. Destructoid, for example, went through a long process of insisting on being "just a blog, we're just bloggers" before finally embracing the fact that their huge audience had afforded them legitimacy, and with that, responsibility. Back in 2009, Jim Sterling mocked Melissa McEwen for her critique of Fat Princess in an article, which led to most of his audience harassing her, googling for pictures of her and putting photoshops of them online, and so on -- all of which Sterling seemed totally cool with, at the time. (This event, along with a handful of other events around that time, catalyzed my learning more about feminist and progressive issues.) It's hard to imagine Destructoid or Sterling doing something like that today. And thank goodness for that.

Obviously, no one can MAKE Kotaku (or any other writer) stop making storifies that shout through a megaphone which progressives have written "controversial" tweets lately. But if you're a website that does news reporting, as Kotaku does, and if you're a website that has piles of people reading it, as Kotaku does, then I don't think you get to claim that what you're creating doesn't matter. I'm not saying writers are inciting riots or encouraging harassment, per se, but these websites do hold huge spotlights and it's up to them where to point those lights. Does it matter if that's "journalism" or not? It's social power.

This question of what is and isn't journalism reminds me a little of the discussions of what is and isn't a game. Are you a person who journals? Then you are a journalist. This probably stems from my having read enough books about journalism to realize how much different writing it can encompass. Just as games journalism has had iterations, so too has "the rest" of journalism had The New Journalism, The New New Journalism, Gonzo Journalism, et al.

You might be a very bad journalist who does not check sources, who no one reads or cares about, with no editors to help you, no training ... but if you report on the events of the internet (even with just a few sentences and then links to tweets), you are a journalist. I see a lot of people clarifying, "No, I'm a writer!" or "I'm a critic!" Fine. If you hate the word journalist, okay. To me, fear of that word seems like a fear of too much authority or legitimacy.

The problem is, you don't actually get to decide whether you have power. Other people decide that for you. The Penny Arcade guys, for example, did not decide to become famous critics of video games. They just made some silly comics, and now, thousands of people care about their influence and opinion on ALL topics, from pick-up artists to all manner of other topics that they've sounded off about in blog posts and comics they've written. Now those guys have to deal with the responsibility of that social power; they continue to do a shit job grappling with their influence, obviously. If the Penny Arcade guys link to a game, or a person's site, or what have you, THEY SHOULD KNOW what's going to happen by now (if it's a tiny indie game, the site will crash, for one thing). The act of linking someone or something can be seen as an attack in and of itself, or an invitation to attack, depending upon context.

Writers, even those who do not identify as journalists, still have to care about all of the same issues that journalists have to care about: getting sued for libel if a story is poorly researched, for example. Or, putting their sources in physical or emotional danger.

[Javy]

[Sorry, had a dead link and a typo]

Interesting and well articulated post, Brendan. I didn't pick up on an accusatory tone while reading. I think there's a clearly defined line between using a event/person A as an example and simply pointing the finger at them.

I find this whole thread--I'm guessing this is what we're calling these conversations--fascinating because of our perceptions about Twitter. Personally, I see it as a digital version of the Burkean parlor, so tweets are fair game as far quoting them in articles and such goes (for me). They contribute to the various conversations about gaming culture in both positive and negative fashions. That said, I do think that storifying or creating an article that consists of embedded tweets and some threadbare commentary makes for a lackluster read. The best way to remedy that is to add more prose from the writer's end. Not padding, obviously, but more detail that helps the reader get situated within that context and perhaps they'll even throw in their two cents on the matter.

[Zoya]

So, thing number one: this discussion has made my try to think about how I'm going to deal with quotation on whathaseadonenow.com, so I have a provisional quotation policy on there. Albeit a not-very-important, fairly frivolous, probably-a-bad-idea, miniature side project that I only started two weeks ago, it brings up an issue nonetheless: I do want to quote tweets because the object of enquiry is twitter discourse. At the moment I attribute tweets correctly so that I'm not stealing other people's words, but of course that attribution is the thing that can cause problems. At the moment it seems like it's about case-by-case judgement calls and being aware of the possible consequences of your actions.

I've found in my work on other sites that posts that are just straighforward storifies of people's tweets usually aren't very successful, be it in terms of traffic or average reader duration or social network shares or comments. I don't think people find them very interesting most of the time. I think there has to be some narrative, some analysis, some fully developed ideas and opinions for people to actually want to read it.

Maddie, it's gratifying to read your rants about Kotaku and Jezebel, and it's useful to hear from Ben some explanation of how the network flows at work make Kotaku, at times, a very toxic virtual environment. I haven't put enough effort into understanding Gawker, because I don't have the emotional energy for it. I've simply universally blocked it in my Chrome settings because at least 80% of the links I get to Gawker sites seem designed to enrage me. I feel sad about this, I want to read the really great stuff that goes up on there, and I don't honestly believe that the ugly stuff represents 80% of the content on Kotaku, Jezebel, etc. 

It's only that 80% of what ends up getting linked from there on the social media sites I use is maddeningly offensive. Almost every time I disable the block I end up reading something that makes me feel angry and isolated and in dire need of a strong drink. It's like the 'share' button is hard wired to our limbic system; humans cannot help but click it when something causes an extreme emotional response. Then we end up troubling everybody else with revolting trash that should just be ignored.

I'm not assuming bad faith on the part of the people responsible. I know that there are scores of people at Gawker who are far smarter and wiser and more in tune with progressive issues than I am, so I feel like I'm in no position to criticise. I'm glad to hear about the author-dependent RSS feeds, I'm definitely going to do that to keep up with what Patricia and Kirk write on Kotaku so that I don't have to see baiting headlines in the sidebar (or tolerate Gawker's netbook-unfriendly formatting).

[Dan Cox]

Not too long after I wrote something earlier, I read Ben Abraham's "Garden as Subtweet" and thought it complemented this discussion nicely. (Hi, 10rdBen!) Since I was already thinking about the Confirmation Bias of the follower dynamic on Twitter anyway, I realized it might be worth bringing up that it is rare, at least to my own anecdotal evidence, to "follow" people you fundamentally disagree with. Given that, I sometimes worry about the self-affirming nature of many of the twitter wars I've seen -- and from which quotes later appear in articles.

To write to the Social Power both Maddy and Zoya discuss, I think it has become quite interesting -- and by "interesting" I mean "intensely powerful" -- to see the Cult of the Author in full effect on Twitter as someone prominent links to an article, site, or even video with minimum words. That content, inevitably, confirms whatever their "followers" have come to expect and thus casts a bias even before the user clicks on it. And I still think of it as being slashdotted (which probably shows my age more than anything else). 

The lateral nature of Twitter, as Ethan points out, is interesting too. Thinking of it as a transactional discourse is fascinating to me. We obviously pick who to follow, when to RT, and how to subtweet too. While we can passively read across feeds, we must have first selected those "voices" to read and respond to before that point. Inevitably, and I noticed this with the article Javy linked to as well, we will privilege certain known "voices" over others, usually the others we already "follow" in thought or expect our audience to know.

[Sparky]

As someone who's done the "person on the street" interview before (as a journalist), I feel I have to point out that those interviews are always ALWAYS supposed to start with the interviewer identifying himself as a journalist. "Hi, I'm Sparky from the Blahblah Times. Would you like to share your opinion on the new Bagel Hut?" Also, the opinion is both stimulated by and expressed directly to the journalist. There's a significant difference between that and a journalist reporting a conversation that took place between two other people on Twitter who didn't "know" she was listening.

Now, to what extent is it ethical for a reporter to repost tweets without asking permission? If somebody gives a public speech or holds a public debate, they have no expectation of privacy, but if they casually mutter a thought while walking, or have an animated discussion with a friend, even if it's in a public space, it's probably not as ethical to report what they said. One problem of twitter is that it has elements of both fully public and semi-private discussion. And this doesn't even touch the issue of retweeting.

The easy way out is to say "lock your account if you don't everything you say to become public record," but this is, essentially, a silencing tactic, one that I think journalists are ethically enjoined from employing. In general, I think the best policy given the ethical complexity and the limitations of twitter discourse is to treat tweets in the same way as statements "off the record". That is, make use of the information, and if you want to get the tweeter's personal word on the matter ask them directly for an on-record statement. That addresses the ethical dimension, and is also going to lead to a better story because now the article offers something more than can be gotten by just climbing up a publicly-available timeline.

[Brendan Keogh]

The easy way out is to say "lock your account if you don't everything you say to become public record," but this is, essentially, a silencing tactic

YES. Precisely, Sparky. That is my issue with some of the responses that are saying if you are willing to say it in public, you should be willing for everyone to hear it. That conflates "public" with "everywhere" and is totally a silencing tactic. 

This has been a fascinating discussion and I really important and insightful one. I don't think I have much more to add, but I am delighted it is happening.

One thing, actually, is that this has gotten me thinking more generally about how we can forget our own power when we amplify someone else. Maddy mentioned Destructoid and PA. I've had various discussions since posting about how simply RTing someone can have a similar effect (I've before RT'ed a IRL friend to 2000+ people and then immediately regretted it). And, perhaps ironically, this blog post got far more attention that I ever expected but which, in hindsight, it was always going to get. Really I probably should have just emailed Patricia and Kotaku my concerns before making it a public thing. In a very similar way to storifying tweets on a mainstream news outlet, I acted in a way completely ignorant of my power. So I think we have tapped into something far broader than simply the practice of storifying tweets.

Also, if anyone missed it, Storify responded to my story on Twitter, noting that Kotaku isn't using the Storify website (but one similar), and that on Storify's privacy page, it recommends always asking someone for permission before you archive their tweets. So that is interesting.

On Saturday, February 23, 2013 9:17:37 AM UTC+11, Sparky wrote:

As someone who's done the "person on the street" interview before (as a journalist), I feel I have to point out that those interviews are always ALWAYS supposed to start with the interviewer identifying himself as a journalist. "Hi, I'm Sparky from the Blahblah Times. Would you like to share your opinion on the new Bagel Hut?" Also, the opinion is both stimulated by and expressed directly to the journalist. There's a significant difference between that and a journalist reporting a conversation that took place between two other people on Twitter who didn't "know" she was listening.

Now, to what extent is it ethical for a reporter to repost tweets without asking permission? If somebody gives a public speech or holds a public debate, they have no expectation of privacy, but if they casually mutter a thought while walking, or have an animated discussion with a friend, even if it's in a public space, it's probably not as ethical to report what they said. One problem of twitter is that it has elements of both fully public and semi-private discussion. And this doesn't even touch the issue of retweeting.

[Sparky]

So this blog post on Gamasutra by Sara Gross is basically everything that's wrong with using twitter for reporting all rolled into one piece. I doubt that the author asked permission to use the tweets, and the tone of the piece is deliberately inflammatory. The intent is to attack these people and the effect, regardless of intent, may be to encourage the gaming public's population of angry anti-hipsters to join in that attack. Gross may not have intended this post to reach a wide audience, but ironically she received the macro-level RT that is PAR: The Cut. This gets at the main thing Brendan was worrying about.

Then Gross goes on to illustrate the serious limits of using tweets as the basis of a story. She interprets tweets in a specific way without evidence that she asked for clarification. Generally, these tweets read like general Twitter snark, throwaway comments that might reflect the writer's deeply-held beliefs, or might just be something said because it seems funny at the time. The author treats them as real beliefs of the authors and then assails this perceived set of beliefs. Worse, from this reading many of the tweets cited attack not the general philosophy of Destiny, which is where her energies are directed, but rather the vacuousness of the game's "reveal". Some of the tweets are completely ambiguous ("Bungie?") and others seem to portray genuine interest. Gross' presentation of the tweets lacks much-needed context (which would *benefit* her case with respect to Jon Blow, for instance) and thus adds little value in terms of understanding whatever attitude she thinks they reveal.

Also, Gross uses hundreds of words and several images to attack vaguely-expressed points compressed into 140-420 characters. That is, she uses the asymmetry of blog vs. tweet as a tool against the people she is citing. The intent of the piece is obviously not to give a fair hearing, but this particular use of tweets is an excellent illustration of how lopsided things can get. Using the limitations of twitter to make the subjects of a story look worse is precisely the sort of thing that should be avoided in conscientious reporting.

[Zoya]

It's a shame, because the design arguments she's making could have been interesting. The arguments didn't really require this excessive level of vox popping and the space could have been better used developing them clearly rather than just writing out expletives in capital letters.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Yeah, it is a sad moment of "good argument, terrible rhetoric" and I think it got a lot more play than I think it probably should have.