A few days ago I attended a meeting of the UK Online News Association in the UK; rather than myself explain what it was meant to be about I’ll quote the flyer:

UK MPs expenses was one of the biggest stories of 2009 that has continued to be felt well into 2010. It was at its heart a story of detail, data and piecing information together and is just one example of how developers and journalists are working together.

What does this mean for the future of journalism and news gathering? ONA UK invites you to an evening exploring Hacks & Hacking […]

…or, in short, it was Rufus Pollock talking about how Governments are (hopefully) going to start publishing all their data in accessible, documented, timely, nearly semantic formats; Chris Thorpe talking about how the Grauniad is reaching out to meet this, and Becky Hogge stitching it together with some perspective.

Inevitably the discussion came around to Wikileaks and related matters, which were being discussed by various grandees and educating-the-next-generation-type journalists. It was at that point I asked a question of the journos and I flubbed it, because although geeks like Rufus were nodding along and apparently following what I was trying to ask, the journos glazed over, their soundbite-sized attention spans having overrun.

What I was trying to ask was:

In a world where both the Guardian (left wing) and the Daily Mail (right wing) would hypothetically be able to download the same complete spreadsheet of MP’s expenses, and analyse it for themselves, and then spin a story upon it… given that, how would either paper be able to differentiate their story in order to pander to the supposed prejudices of their readership, and thereby retain readers, especially when the data underlying it can also be checked by any reader?

I based this question on my experience of once being hauled through the press, leading to a long public debate with the selfsame journalist, and which taught me that the primary goal of journalism was/is not to seek truth but instead sell newspapers; and that this is achieved by not challenging your readership’s expectations.

Anyway I got blown off, and so I was thrilled yesterday to see Jay Rosen note almost exactly the same thing in a form (and forum) that journalists might understand and care about – because he is one.

Jay wrote:

5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com:

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.

The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

For “blind spot”, read also “prejudice”.

Read “anything based on biased interpretation”.

Read “falsehoods”.

Regrettably a single instance of this will not change everything overnight; but there’s certainly a business opportunity in proactive damage control available for those who understand the both the goals of WikiLeaks and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and what it is that really motivates newspaper sales journalistic website revenue generation.