Beta Journalism

Thanks to some schoolmarmish finger-wagging from the nation's newspapers of record, and to his own propensity for vigorous self-promotion, Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who cleverly repurposed a ten-year-old rumor of CIA cocaine-trafficking into a major newspaper expose, seems well on his way to becoming journalism's next Joe Esterhaz. Book deals and movie deals are in the works; if Webb plays his cards right, even a shoe contract from Nike seems within the province of the possible.
In a way, it's surprising that so much of the attention surrounding the Mercury's "Dark Alliance" series has focused on Webb's reporting. Certainly it's true that several of his conclusions were ripe for refutation. While Webb maintained that the drug dealers he profiled had high-level connections to the Contras and "funneled millions in profits" to them, both the Washington Post and the L.A. Times determined that a more accurate estimate, based on accounts from law enforcement officials and Contra fund-raisers, was actually closer to $60,000. And while Webb suggested that a three-man drug ring -- consisting of Nicaraguans Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon and African-American "Freeway Rick" Ross -- almost single-handedly helped spark the "crack explosion" in L.A., both the Post and the Times quoted experts who concluded that the spread of crack was a complex, decentralized phenomenon that couldn't be attributed to any single person or group.
While such close scrutiny of Webb's reporting unearthed many inconsistencies, it overlooked one of the most significant aspects of the Dark Alliance series: that it achieved at least as much of its impact from its presentation as it did from its content. Of the three major newspapers that critiqued the series, only the L.A. Times gave more than cursory attention to the fact that Dark Alliance was widely available to readers in a format quite unlike the standard newspaper article. Indeed, while the print version and the Web version of Dark Alliance shared the same text and debuted at the same time, what readers who first encountered the story in its Web incarnation got was something much closer to what you might find on the Fox network than in the morning daily. With its twenty something grunge typography, its conspiracy-coated title, and its free-wheeling sensationalism, Dark Alliance exuded both maximum X-appeal and a decidedly tabloid TV sensibility.
As several hundred newspapers have reported in the past month, ever since the more-retired-than-ever Pierre Salinger filed his Flight 800 scoop, the Web is a haven for post-Cronkite conspiratainment buffs seeking the "real story." Unlike its competitors, who have merely written about the phenomenon, the San Jose Mercury News was actually savvy enough to capitalize on it. Online for several years now, it understands exactly what techniques and subjects generate attention here -- and thus it chose Webb's tale of Contra chicanery, so pregnant with potential newsgroup innuendo, to serve as the foundation for its most ambitious online presentation to date. It was hardly coincidental that that the series' first installment appeared on August 18, just one day after the Mercury eliminated its AOL presence to focus its online efforts entirely on the Web. Dark Alliance was the perfect vehicle for restoring the paper's status as a digital pioneer, a reputation that dates back to the early '90s, when it became the first U.S. daily to establish a significant online presence.
In their HTML presentation of Dark Alliance, the Mercury's editors and designers followed the same maxim that TV news producers have been using to such great effect for years: make the news seem more like entertainment. Their effort started with the "Dark Alliance" title itself. This technique of affixing a proprietary name to a major news event has been a network staple ever since the Gulf War; it gives stories a recognizable brand appeal -- so crucial in today's glutted info-market -- and it also imbues them with an exciting, fictive energy. Couple the sexy appellation with Day 1...Day 2...Day 3 subheads and a slick logo that superimposes a suave crack smoker over the official seal of the CIA, and a ten year-old rap staple suddenly achieves marquee status: "Dark Alliance, the exciting news miniseries from the San Jose Mercury! Thumbs down from the Post and the Times, but Siskel and Ebert love it!"
Eventually, the Mercury removed the CIA seal from its logo, but apparently the paper's editors believe the "Dark Alliance" title itself falls within the bounds of acceptable imputation. Because of the site's use of HTML frames, the title is always on prominent display -- and yet, with a kind of ludicrous, self-deceptive honor, Webb and the Mercury's editors stubbornly insist that nowhere in the series did Webb explicitly say that the CIA knew Contra rebels were selling cocaine to Los Angeles drug dealers. Since it seems fairly likely that professional journalists and editors know the definition of the word "alliance," one can only marvel at the purity of their disingenuousness: like tabloid TV news producers, they seem to believe they have the right to invent the most provocative titles imaginable without any sense of responsibility for having to back them up.
In another skillful adaptation of tabloid technique, Mercury staffers pre-hyped the series by alerting various newsgroups to its imminent publication. This is standard Internet practice, of course; grassroots publishers without an advertising budget gamely try to capitalize on the Net's just-in-time mass media capabilities by posting to newsgroups where "early adopters" may be waiting to help spread the word. At the same time, it's fairly unusual for a large organization like the Mercury Center to engage in such tactics. And although there's nothing terribly wrong with hyping articles via the newsgroup circuit, such efforts can certainly test the acoustics of an organization's good reputation. Indeed, when you aggressively troll your story on credibility-optional newsgroups like alt.conspiracy, and you reap the benefits of the overenthusiastic evangelism that results, it sounds pretty hollow when you subsequently deny any accountability for the wild conclusions that your article helped engender.
Some readers might object that this whole Dark Alliance thing is being taken a bit too seriously. Given the site's CD-ROM strategy-game interface, there should be more room to relax and have fun, maybe waste a couple rock-pushing Contra rebels, though apparently that functionality doesn't exist yet. (Perhaps Dark Alliance II will introduce it.) In the meantime, the site does include some interesting supplemental features: a "Timeline" that tends to conflate events and developments that may not have actually had such close causal connections to each other; a "Who's Who" that offers trading card synopses of Dark Alliance's star players; a "Pipeline" that details international drug routes in a charming, retro-PowerPoint style; and a multimedia "Library" of over 30 related documents -- court transcripts, telephone conversations, articles, depositions, etc. There's even a review of a Nicaraguan restaurant! (If you go there, get the grilled steak.)
This surfeit of information does little to advance the series' implied accusations of CIA involvement in Contra drug-dealing, but its "official" nature, as well as its sheer bulk, give Dark Alliance a mantle of well-documented legitimacy. This sort of information overload has always been a standard technique of conspiracists -- which is why the Web, with its capacity for making huge amounts of data available perpetually, pervasively, and cheaply, has quickly become the conspiracist's medium of choice. While way new journalism advocates may trumpet the fact that economies of print and distribution no longer influence what information is or isn't included in a story, one can't help but notice how conveniently this reduces an investigative journalist's ethical responsibilities. Information that's a bit too suspect or tangential to receive the imprimatur of a byline can simply be presented, in laissez faire manner, as supplemental material. "All the news that's fit" becomes "all the news that fits." The problem for today's online journalists is that everything now fits.
Indeed, we seem to have entered a new stage in the history of reporting -- call it Beta Journalism. In his Media Rant column at HotWired, Jon Katz often writes enthusiastically about this practice. Publication, he suggests, is now just the start of a story; the responses he gets from readers help him refine his ideas and recast his arguments. For Katz, who traffics mostly in opinion, this is fine -- but what happens when hard news gets presented in this manner? In recent weeks, the Mercury has added a Postscript section to the Dark Alliance series which includes links to critiques published elsewhere on the Web, as well as a follow-up piece written by a Mercury staffer not originally involved in the project. This latter article is especially noteworthy. In the way it corrects and clarifies various instances of the initial series, it brings to mind the "readme" files that software developers send out in the wake of a bug-ridden, version 1.0 release.
In addition to this article -- and to the deletion of the CIA seal in the Dark Alliance logo -- the Mercury made at least one other important change to the series. In the Dark Alliance bulletin board section -- where so much of the innuendo and misunderstandings surrounding the series first swirled, and where Webb made his strongest, albeit off-the-record, accusations about CIA involvement -- the following introduction initially appeared: "For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency..."
After reporters from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times challenged this conclusion, however, the Mercury amended the introduction. It now reads: "The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras. The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion." [Italics mine]
In Silicon Valley, where the Mercury is located, software developers like to joke that the bugs which sometimes plague their products are, in fact, "features." In the case of Dark Alliance, this was most assuredly true; the coverage the paper has received from other media due to its controversial series has raised its national profile considerably. And the series itself has become a cyberspace blockbuster. Over three months after its initial publication, it remains a front page fixture on the Mercury's site, reportedly garnering as many as 100,000 extra hits a day. Such numbers -- and the fact that the Mercury has so facilely absolved itself of any blame for the sensationalism and rumor-mongering it engaged in -- will no doubt inspire imitators.
If way new journalism truly wants to live up to its advance hype, however, it would do well to abandon Hard Copy as a model. The new capabilities of this medium -- its speed of transmission, its capacity for targeting receptive audiences and establishing real dialogue -- are powerful attributes that call for unusually high levels of responsibility and restraint. But in the chaotic, short-attention-span environment of the Web, where thousands of sites battle daily for the medium's scarce supply of eyeballs, will anyone be willing to answer that call?
(November 26, 1996)

CNN reported last month that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farakhan might organize a class action suit against the government on behalf of crack addicts in light of recent allegations first put forward by the Dark Alliance series. He also linked the controversy to his Day of Atonement, stating that the U.S. government should "atone" for its intelligence agency. You can read CNN's account of the story by clicking here.

The best source for responses to the "Dark Alliance" piece -- both rants and raves -- is at the Mercury News web site, which certainly says something encouraging about the paper's willingness to take on its critics. Check out their "Postscript" page for outside links, and while you're there, you might as well stop by the original Dark Alliance piece.

We debated the promise and risk of the "way new journalism" here at FEED this June, in our Dialog, "Wiring the Fourth Estate" -- featuring Slate's Michael Kinsley, Word's Marisa Bowe, and FEED's own Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson.
In September, Webb posted the following comments to the Mercury News BBS: "One thing I did want to respond to directly is the writer who claimed there wasn't any 'proof' of CIA involvement in this thing. That's like saying there's no proof of General Motors involvement in making Chevrolets. I also heard a great line while I was doing a radio show in Florida yesterday: Now we know what CIA really stands for: Crack In America." You can read more of Webb's remarks, and add your own, by visiting the Dark Alliance "Forum."

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	Thanks to some schoolmarmish finger-wagging from the nation's newspapers of record, and to his own propensity for vigorous self-promotion, Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who cleverly repurposed a ten-year-old rumor of CIA cocaine-trafficking into a major newspaper expose, seems well on his way to becoming journalism's next Joe Esterhaz. Book deals and movie deals are in the works; if Webb plays his cards right, even a shoe contract from Nike seems within the province of the possible. In a way, it's surprising that so much of the attention surrounding the Mercury's "Dark Alliance" series has focused on Webb's reporting. Certainly it's true that several of his conclusions were ripe for refutation. While Webb maintained that the drug dealers he profiled had high-level connections to the Contras and "funneled millions in profits" to them, both the Washington Post and the L.A. Times determined that a more accurate estimate, based on accounts from law enforcement officials and Contra fund-raisers, was actually closer to $60,000. And while Webb suggested that a three-man drug ring -- consisting of Nicaraguans Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon and African-American "Freeway Rick" Ross -- almost single-handedly helped spark the "crack explosion" in L.A., both the Post and the Times quoted experts who concluded that the spread of crack was a complex, decentralized phenomenon that couldn't be attributed to any single person or group. While such close scrutiny of Webb's reporting unearthed many inconsistencies, it overlooked one of the most significant aspects of the Dark Alliance series: that it achieved at least as much of its impact from its presentation as it did from its content. Of the three major newspapers that critiqued the series, only the L.A. Times gave more than cursory attention to the fact that Dark Alliance was widely available to readers in a format quite unlike the standard newspaper article. Indeed, while the print version and the Web version of Dark Alliance shared the same text and debuted at the same time, what readers who first encountered the story in its Web incarnation got was something much closer to what you might find on the Fox network than in the morning daily. With its twenty something grunge typography, its conspiracy-coated title, and its free-wheeling sensationalism, Dark Alliance exuded both maximum X-appeal and a decidedly tabloid TV sensibility. As several hundred newspapers have reported in the past month, ever since the more-retired-than-ever Pierre Salinger filed his Flight 800 scoop, the Web is a haven for post-Cronkite conspiratainment buffs seeking the "real story." Unlike its competitors, who have merely written about the phenomenon, the San Jose Mercury News was actually savvy enough to capitalize on it. Online for several years now, it understands exactly what techniques and subjects generate attention here -- and thus it chose Webb's tale of Contra chicanery, so pregnant with potential newsgroup innuendo, to serve as the foundation for its most ambitious online presentation to date. It was hardly coincidental that that the series' first installment appeared on August 18, just one day after the Mercury eliminated its AOL presence to focus its online efforts entirely on the Web. Dark Alliance was the perfect vehicle for restoring the paper's status as a digital pioneer, a reputation that dates back to the early '90s, when it became the first U.S. daily to establish a significant online presence. In their HTML presentation of Dark Alliance, the Mercury's editors and designers followed the same maxim that TV news producers have been using to such great effect for years: make the news seem more like entertainment. Their effort started with the "Dark Alliance" title itself. This technique of affixing a proprietary name to a major news event has been a network staple ever since the Gulf War; it gives stories a recognizable brand appeal -- so crucial in today's glutted info-market -- and it also imbues them with an exciting, fictive energy. Couple the sexy appellation with Day 1...Day 2...Day 3 subheads and a slick logo that superimposes a suave crack smoker over the official seal of the CIA, and a ten year-old rap staple suddenly achieves marquee status: "Dark Alliance, the exciting news miniseries from the San Jose Mercury! Thumbs down from the Post and the Times, but Siskel and Ebert love it!" Eventually, the Mercury removed the CIA seal from its logo, but apparently the paper's editors believe the "Dark Alliance" title itself falls within the bounds of acceptable imputation. Because of the site's use of HTML frames, the title is always on prominent display -- and yet, with a kind of ludicrous, self-deceptive honor, Webb and the Mercury's editors stubbornly insist that nowhere in the series did Webb explicitly say that the CIA knew Contra rebels were selling cocaine to Los Angeles drug dealers. Since it seems fairly likely that professional journalists and editors know the definition of the word "alliance," one can only marvel at the purity of their disingenuousness: like tabloid TV news producers, they seem to believe they have the right to invent the most provocative titles imaginable without any sense of responsibility for having to back them up. In another skillful adaptation of tabloid technique, Mercury staffers pre-hyped the series by alerting various newsgroups to its imminent publication. This is standard Internet practice, of course; grassroots publishers without an advertising budget gamely try to capitalize on the Net's just-in-time mass media capabilities by posting to newsgroups where "early adopters" may be waiting to help spread the word. At the same time, it's fairly unusual for a large organization like the Mercury Center to engage in such tactics. And although there's nothing terribly wrong with hyping articles via the newsgroup circuit, such efforts can certainly test the acoustics of an organization's good reputation. Indeed, when you aggressively troll your story on credibility-optional newsgroups like alt.conspiracy, and you reap the benefits of the overenthusiastic evangelism that results, it sounds pretty hollow when you subsequently deny any accountability for the wild conclusions that your article helped engender. Some readers might object that this whole Dark Alliance thing is being taken a bit too seriously. Given the site's CD-ROM strategy-game interface, there should be more room to relax and have fun, maybe waste a couple rock-pushing Contra rebels, though apparently that functionality doesn't exist yet. (Perhaps Dark Alliance II will introduce it.) In the meantime, the site does include some interesting supplemental features: a "Timeline" that tends to conflate events and developments that may not have actually had such close causal connections to each other; a "Who's Who" that offers trading card synopses of Dark Alliance's star players; a "Pipeline" that details international drug routes in a charming, retro-PowerPoint style; and a multimedia "Library" of over 30 related documents -- court transcripts, telephone conversations, articles, depositions, etc. There's even a review of a Nicaraguan restaurant! (If you go there, get the grilled steak.) This surfeit of information does little to advance the series' implied accusations of CIA involvement in Contra drug-dealing, but its "official" nature, as well as its sheer bulk, give Dark Alliance a mantle of well-documented legitimacy. This sort of information overload has always been a standard technique of conspiracists -- which is why the Web, with its capacity for making huge amounts of data available perpetually, pervasively, and cheaply, has quickly become the conspiracist's medium of choice. While way new journalism advocates may trumpet the fact that economies of print and distribution no longer influence what information is or isn't included in a story, one can't help but notice how conveniently this reduces an investigative journalist's ethical responsibilities. Information that's a bit too suspect or tangential to receive the imprimatur of a byline can simply be presented, in laissez faire manner, as supplemental material. "All the news that's fit" becomes "all the news that fits." The problem for today's online journalists is that everything now fits. Indeed, we seem to have entered a new stage in the history of reporting -- call it Beta Journalism. In his Media Rant column at HotWired, Jon Katz often writes enthusiastically about this practice. Publication, he suggests, is now just the start of a story; the responses he gets from readers help him refine his ideas and recast his arguments. For Katz, who traffics mostly in opinion, this is fine -- but what happens when hard news gets presented in this manner? In recent weeks, the Mercury has added a Postscript section to the Dark Alliance series which includes links to critiques published elsewhere on the Web, as well as a follow-up piece written by a Mercury staffer not originally involved in the project. This latter article is especially noteworthy. In the way it corrects and clarifies various instances of the initial series, it brings to mind the "readme" files that software developers send out in the wake of a bug-ridden, version 1.0 release. In addition to this article -- and to the deletion of the CIA seal in the Dark Alliance logo -- the Mercury made at least one other important change to the series. In the Dark Alliance bulletin board section -- where so much of the innuendo and misunderstandings surrounding the series first swirled, and where Webb made his strongest, albeit off-the-record, accusations about CIA involvement -- the following introduction initially appeared: "For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency..." After reporters from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times challenged this conclusion, however, the Mercury amended the introduction. It now reads: "The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras. The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion." [Italics mine] In Silicon Valley, where the Mercury is located, software developers like to joke that the bugs which sometimes plague their products are, in fact, "features." In the case of Dark Alliance, this was most assuredly true; the coverage the paper has received from other media due to its controversial series has raised its national profile considerably. And the series itself has become a cyberspace blockbuster. Over three months after its initial publication, it remains a front page fixture on the Mercury's site, reportedly garnering as many as 100,000 extra hits a day. Such numbers -- and the fact that the Mercury has so facilely absolved itself of any blame for the sensationalism and rumor-mongering it engaged in -- will no doubt inspire imitators. If way new journalism truly wants to live up to its advance hype, however, it would do well to abandon Hard Copy as a model. The new capabilities of this medium -- its speed of transmission, its capacity for targeting receptive audiences and establishing real dialogue -- are powerful attributes that call for unusually high levels of responsibility and restraint. But in the chaotic, short-attention-span environment of the Web, where thousands of sites battle daily for the medium's scarce supply of eyeballs, will anyone be willing to answer that call? (November 26, 1996)
CNN reported last month that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farakhan might organize a class action suit against the government on behalf of crack addicts in light of recent allegations first put forward by the Dark Alliance series. He also linked the controversy to his Day of Atonement, stating that the U.S. government should "atone" for its intelligence agency. You can read CNN's account of the story by clicking here.
The best source for responses to the "Dark Alliance" piece -- both rants and raves -- is at the Mercury News web site, which certainly says something encouraging about the paper's willingness to take on its critics. Check out their "Postscript" page for outside links, and while you're there, you might as well stop by the original Dark Alliance piece.
We debated the promise and risk of the "way new journalism" here at FEED this June, in our Dialog, "Wiring the Fourth Estate" -- featuring Slate's Michael Kinsley, Word's Marisa Bowe, and FEED's own Stefanie Syman and Steven Johnson.
In September, Webb posted the following comments to the Mercury News BBS: "One thing I did want to respond to directly is the writer who claimed there wasn't any 'proof' of CIA involvement in this thing. That's like saying there's no proof of General Motors involvement in making Chevrolets. I also heard a great line while I was doing a radio show in Florida yesterday: Now we know what CIA really stands for: Crack In America." You can read more of Webb's remarks, and add your own, by visiting the Dark Alliance "Forum."