Rosalind Helderman A.B. ’01 is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post, where she has reported since graduating from Harvard College in 2001. She regularly contributes to MSNBC and was part of The Washington Post’s team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. At Harvard, Helderman studied history and lived in Pforzheimer House.
John Harris is a co-founder of POLITICO and currently serves as its editor-in-chief. Before co-founding POLITICO in 2007, he formerly reported for The Washington Post for over two decades, where he covered local politics, Virginia state politics, and national politics. Harris graduated from Carleton College in 1985, where he studied American history.
Harvard Political Review: Rosalind, your colleague at The Washington Post, David Fahrenthold, often uses crowdsourcing in investigations. That’s one way he exerts Twitter as a medium to democratize journalism and get followers to contribute. What are your thoughts on crowdsourcing and democratizing journalism in this manner?
Rosalind Helderman: My colleague David Fahrenthold has really perfected the art of using crowdsourcing as an investigative tool, and what he does is really impressive, and there’s really a lot there that we can all learn from. I don’t feel like I have that skill quite as much as he does at this point. It does take a few things – one, it requires the right story. Obviously, the thing you are reporting on can’t be secret. In a lot of investigations, there are good reasons to be pursuing them in a discrete and quiet fashion. If you’re going to go on Twitter and ask people to help you with them that’s going to reveal the nature of the investigation. The other piece of it — and I think it’s very important that people understand this — is you don’t just crowdsource and then write what people tell you on Twitter, and that certainly is not true of Dave. You gather tips and you use Twitter as a way to reach out to sources that you don’t even know exist all at once to gather information. When you take that information and you apply traditional journalistic tools to it to see what’s true and what’s not. It becomes one tool to find information by talking to people very effectively and very quickly, but it can never be a substitute for the traditional work of figuring out what’s true. I read far too many stories these days that are just basically an aggregated list of things people say on Twitter, and I don’t find that to be a useful story. I find that to be an interesting journalistic experience for myself, but I wouldn’t want to bring it to other people.
HPR: John, you mentioned you believe that current journalism looks at who’s clicking on what. What are your general thoughts on how social media interacts with journalism and pitching different articles?
John Harris: I don’t think we at POLITICO pitch stories based on anticipation of how much traffic they’re going to get or how they’re going to play, and it’s certainly not a primary emphasis of our editorial judgment. What I do think is that we’re in an era where everybody is his or her own editor, making judgments about what they think is important, about what they think is relevant, about what they think is worth sharing. And that is the truism of politics today. It’s only remarkable for people who can remember another era when the primary power of the press was service, defending norms, and making judgments about what was properly a part of the agenda of national news coverage. As for the gatekeeper role – I don’t think there are gates to keep anymore.
RH: One thing I think is amazing about the era we live in is that you have this instantaneous feedback about whether or not people are interested in individual pieces of content that you write. I mean, it used to be that the paper would thump on the doorsteps of however many people and you know, no idea whether your story was read by each home or not. Now you have this instantaneous feedback — how it does on social media and also through web analytics. I am generally more encouraged by that then sometimes other people are because I see what breaks through. I find that from my own stories, what breaks through is when you uncover new facts that people did not know about a subject that they care about. That’s what goes viral.
HPR: Some national, digital news outlets have algorithms that comb through social media trends and search results. Who do you think is fundamentally controlling the coverage if it’s not the people and if it’s not social media?
JH: We’re aware of what stories are and how the audience is responding – not just the clicks on it, but also the level of engagement with the story, how long people spend on it, and how deep they went into the story, so attentiveness to your audience is something that should mark journalism of any era. Right now we have tools that make that a much more precise exercise. I think just simply trying to serve up what you think people are going to respond to, like a fisherman throwing shark chum in the water doesn’t represent mine, and I’m sure, doesn’t represent Ros’s vision of what journalists do. We make decisions about what we think is interesting and important, then we base our work on that and we defend our decisions. I agree with what Ros said – the most important work does tend to get an audience. There are some subjects that are important but not naturally sexy and they don’t, but a lot of good coverage does. My concern actually is more or less about the audience, then about the ability to stay focused on questions. That’s not just the media’s job, but it’s part of the phenomenon, larger political culture. There are things that I see that, by my lights, should be subjects on all consuming public attention and debate and further scrutiny and accountability. And I think very often those things blow up for 24 or 48 hours, and then in a week, we can’t remember what we were indignant about the last week or the week before.
HPR: To what extent do you think that social media engenders uproar created by any investigative topic coming out in the digital space? For instance, the story earlier this year by Buzzfeed’s investigative team that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, and Mueller’s response to that, which was unprecedented. Do you think this is just a natural effect of journalism becoming more digitally sound, or is something that has long been common?
RH: Well, I think because the world moves so much faster in the digital space, journalism tends to be self-correcting faster than it used to be. So you know, that was a long and complicated story. There was some sense of what was right and what might be problematic about it within the course of just a few hours. Within a few weeks after the Cohen testimony, I think we understand with a lot of depth about what was right and what was wrong in that story. And I’m not sure that would have been true in an earlier era where you did not have the ability to sort of have a conversation about the story instantly upon it appearing.
HPR: John, you mentioned POLITICO taking steps to become more conducive to the digital era. One offshoot of this has been the formation of AXIOS by individuals who formerly worked at POLITICO. And now they’re partnering with streaming services and using a brief style to hold reader’s attention. What do you think the future of journalism looks like in the digital space? And do you think AXIOS is emblematic of where we’re headed?
JH: The bunch of us that started POLITICO did so with the spirit of innovation and restlessness. And it was in the context of a time when the so-called “legacy media” which had so much of their business model tied to the old ways of distributing information, specifically a print newspaper that they weren’t innovating enough. And I think there’s no media anywhere that is not constantly asking itself the question, what’s next? How do we engage with this? So anytime we reckon with the fact that that there’s so much information, how do we recommend the fact that it’s harder to get people’s attention, it’s harder to set the agenda and things you think are important. So the people at AXIOS have that spirit of innovation and what we wanted to that we had when we started POLITICO, I think that is now characteristic of The Washington Post, for example, under its current leadership. So as to what they specifically do there, I’d be surprised if it represents the future of journalism. And it represents different experiments and trying things. So that’s the right thing to do. And that’s our lot in life: if you are in the media business, you are not going to settle. If you’re looking for a comfortable status quo without disruption, there are other lines of business that you should go to, not media.
RH: And I mean, for as much as we all need to be experimenting and innovating, it feels like AXIOS has had some success at what is the traditional thing we all do, which is breaking news. They have a very well-sourced Washington reporter, Jonathan Swan, who breaks news on a fairly regular basis. And when he breaks new facts about things people want to know about, people read it. And that’s a formula that I think is found in all successful news organizations, and breaking news about things people want to read is actually not particularly innovative or new.
HPR: What are your ultimate thoughts on where journalism is headed with respect to its interaction and convergence with social media?
RH: I think no conversation about the future of journalism can be complete without a depressing, brief moment to talk about local and regional news, which is challenging in the digital space. I’m thankful to work for a news organization that is financially, as far as I can tell, fairly healthy at the moment and has a bright, broad and wide audience. But I’m deeply concerned, as I think most people in journalism are, about the increasingly limited options for consuming news about people’s own local communities. And I don’t think that people have yet broken the sort of innovation formula for how to bring local news online and into social media in a way that it’s financially viable. And that’s really problematic.
JH: I think there will be no single model for local news, investigative news, or foreign news. Those are all things for which there hasn’t yet emerged a really promising, robust long-term business model, unlike Washington news, where POLITICO is a representative of a successful business model. Meanwhile, The Washington Post is increasingly finding success with its strategy, and The New York Times is finding success with its national and international subscription strategy. There are places where we’ve been and places we haven’t yet found out. It is concerning. And yet, I think there will be examples of success. There will be lots of different models that support journalism. If people have successful profit models, they’re going to be successful. Certain types of journalism are done by foundations and wealthy benefactors. Another kind is an increasingly citizen-focused, grassroots-up model of journalism in which people are happy to pay for things to support, which is certainly equivalent with what PBS used to do or still does with its pledge drives. The good news is that there’s more great journalism being produced than ever. And I think the one byproduct of the Trump era is that it’s underscoring for a lot of people – including a lot of younger, talented people – the importance of journalism and the attractiveness of a career in it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Image Credit: Wikimedia/Jack Weir.