Johnette Alter Johnette Alter

Measuring Reality

Gathering and ordering the “soundings” of human activity with a new methodology that parallels the scientific method is the next frontier in journalism.

For a time, the pandemic even changed the weather.

Weather prediction, it turns out, is partially reliant on your trip to Disney or that sales meeting in Las Vegas via a previously little-known commercial flight measurement called an aircraft sounding.

The evocative term “aircraft sounding” conjures an old technology that goes back to ancient seafarers. Still sometimes used, soundings allow sailors to gauge the depth and composition of the sea floor using just a lead weight secured to a line pre-marked with fathoms*.

Depth sounding off the coast of Norway. The anchor is hanging ready at the bow. Image: Olaus Magnus woodcutting, circa 1555, Wikicommons {{PD-US}}

Depth sounding off the coast of Norway. The anchor is hanging ready at the bow. Image: Olaus Magnus woodcutting, circa 1555, Wikicommons {{PD-US}}

Today, more than 3500 commercial aircrafts plumb the skies for more than 250 million weather observations per year, according to the National Weather Service, a massive amount of data.

Depiction of 24 hour global cycle of air traffic contributing meteorological data. Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Depiction of 24 hour global cycle of air traffic contributing meteorological data. Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Aircraft soundings, along with reports from 900 weather stations across the globe, are fed into predictive models that assist meteorologists with their forecasts. Helping us in turn to decide whether to proceed with that backyard BBQ, ball game or outdoor wedding.

But during the early days of the Covid pandemic with the precipitous drop in air traffic, the accuracy of the predictive models dropped by 50% - 75%. That’s a huge statistical shift which was anecdotally noticeable.

You may recall grousing around that time about yet another problem, unreliable weather predictions. Well, it was true.

What is a forecast ultimately but a snapshot of reality? A meteorologist uses consistent data points to assemble a prediction of future likelihoods based on the same conditions in the past.  Those same points, after the fact, create a final record, or history of what was occurring that moment, hour, day and ultimately year and century. It’s not comprehensive but the snapshots become our window into the past.

Accounts of happenings in our community and world give us data points of another kind. News reports are the soundings we use to mark human history and in turn predict future possibilities.

Taken December 17, 2011 in downtown Cairo near Tahrir Square. Photo: "Two journalists and two children shelter from stone throwing militia" by alisdare1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Taken December 17, 2011 in downtown Cairo near Tahrir Square. Photo: "Two journalists and two children shelter from stone throwing militia" by alisdare1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Journalists, like meteorologists, are taking their measurements of the daily human experience and putting the data into “models”, that is patterns of behavior, in an area of expertise or beat.

For instance, if you cover city hall long enough you begin to recognize signs of misuse of public funds or of corruption. There are repetitive characteristics of both courage and graft in the human record.

Journalists are public servants that sort through the raw data of the daily human experience and turn it into a report that helps us understand a broader narrative.

That reporting helps us navigate a complex world enabling us to, again like the weather forecast, make decisions that can harm or benefit our individual lives. Ultimately the work of journalists significantly contributes to the overall history of humankind. And it’s absolutely essential for democracy.

With so many of us asking anew, what is truth? How can we understand as a group a shared, objective human experience? My answer is quality journalism. The alternative is hearsay, propaganda, and disinformation.

Data journalism is at the forefront of a new approach to analyze human activity. Using forensics, analytics and open-source information to mine social media, GPS data, financial data and more; professional and citizen journalists are breaking news using innovative methods.

We are seeing the emergence of a new level of transparency and evidentiary corroboration that is staggering.

Belllingcat and ProPublica are at the leading edge of this kind of work. Bellingcat’s most famous contribution to date is the evidence they extracted to definitively connect Russia to the downed civilian Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine which took the lives of 298 people. I highly recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

Makeshift memorial at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 which crashed in the Ukraine on 17 July 2014. Photo: Roman Boed from The Netherlands is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Makeshift memorial at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 which crashed in the Ukraine on 17 July 2014. Photo: Roman Boed from The Netherlands is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Journalistic best practices and ethics over time act as a developing body of standards to regulate the quality of information gathering. Now that we are awash in data and the traditional information gatekeepers of old, a small consortium of newspapers and book publishers, are no longer controlling the narrative, we need new filters to protect the quality of our understanding of the world.   

Aristotle, one of the original pioneers of the scientific method, gifted us a type of thinking on how to observe the natural world. 

As described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “For Aristotle, empiricism, careful observation (but passive observation, not controlled experiment), is the starting point, though the aim is not merely recording of facts. Science (epistêmê), for Aristotle, is a body of properly arranged knowledge or learning—the empirical facts, but also their ordering and display are of crucial importance. The aims of discovery, ordering, and display of facts partly determine the methods required of successful scientific inquiry.”

And later, Enlightenment thinkers refined the profile of those pursuing truth, “The scientist is humble in the face of nature, not beholden to dogma, obeys only his eyes, and follows the truth wherever it leads.” The character attributes of scientists and journalists closely mirror one another.

Gathering and ordering the “soundings” of human activity with a new methodology that parallels the scientific method is the next frontier in journalism. The capacity of thinking machines to help us grasp the nature of reality in aggregate, though not comprehensively, is an area where advances are due. Those advances must also come with, yet to be defined, guardrails.

We are on the threshold of a new type of journalism. Like depth soundings and weather measurements taken at a variety of locations -then put together and processed through a tested model that yields a view of the natural world that is unachievable through our individual senses - this new science of human observation will find novel truths of our combined human endeavor and may spark a revolution in philosophy that rivals the tectonic shifts born of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.

As a resident of Springfield might put it, this new journalism will “embiggen” our understanding of humanity and truth.

*Annotation:

A fathom, derived from Old English, Norse and Saxon, means: arms, embrace, and grasp. It’s a measurement based on the anatomy of a large man with outstretched arms as if about to give you a bear hug, taken from the middle finger of one hand to the other.

This work on a map from street artist Id-iom illustrates the gesture perfectly. His description of what this man is getting up to cracks me up, “This gentleman is trying to embiggen his arms somewhat so he can be like Stretch Armstrong. But alas i d…

This work on a map from street artist Id-iom illustrates the gesture perfectly. His description of what this man is getting up to cracks me up, “This gentleman is trying to embiggen his arms somewhat so he can be like Stretch Armstrong. But alas i don't think he'll achieve it. For one he's just a normal human called Geoff from Dorking (as the map suggests) and second he's mucho crazy in the brain (in fact that probably helps when trying to grow your arms out - thinking outside the box and all that malarky). At least he's happy!” Image: "Embiggen" by id-iom is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

I like to imagine the fathom was born when one such man was describing to another how far it was to the bottom of the river with arms thrown out saying, “It’s about this far.” Used mainly to describe depth, it has been standardized over time to about six feet (yet another anatomical measurement). Reaching into the unknown to take this measurement was critical for navigating safe depths, map readings and where to park the ship (or not).

Photo: "Morning Haze" by Terry Kearney is marked with CC0 1.0

Photo: "Morning Haze" by Terry Kearney is marked with CC0 1.0

Incidentally, the word plumber originates from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. Ancient Roman pipes were made of lead. The artisans that crafted and repaired the waterworks were known as those that worked with lead. Yikes. Plumbing was a more dangerous occupation back then. The symbol for lead, Pb, makes a little more sense too with that insight.

Lead pipe to supply water to the Roman Baths in Bath, England. The pipe has a folded seam and is thought to have carried water under pressure. Photo: Andrew Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0

Lead pipe to supply water to the Roman Baths in Bath, England. The pipe has a folded seam and is thought to have carried water under pressure. Photo: Andrew Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0

So, the next time you are plumbing the depths of some gritty problem, you can visualize spreading your arms as wide as a large, weathered Norseman to size it up and find understanding as if pulled to the bottom by a lead weight.

Weathered Vikinging Met in June 295648340_1a4420694a_m.jpg

"Viking" by Sune P is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Johnette Alter Johnette Alter

Reputation

As we descend into a modern tribalism and the “golden of age” of the newspaper recedes, how do we assemble a shared view of reality? Who can we trust?

If you can’t trust the messenger, can you trust the message?

Long before the birth of journalism or even the printing press, only those with the wealth of kings could afford to pay for news, information that might make or break their literal fortunes. These information hungry titans of old did so via a private network of trusted informants. Trusting the reputation of the messenger was essential to actionable intel.

You’ll find an account in my dogeared copy of Andrew Pettegrew’s, The Invention of News, of two 11th century monasteries, located 100 miles apart, trading messengers every three years to get caught up on the news. Talk about breaking news!

The monks, kings and populace of medieval Europe were suspicious of news from an unknown source but willing to pay vast sums for reliable intelligence from proven sources.

Pettegrew’s research revealed a “profound distrust” of the written word even once Guttenberg entered the scene with his printing press around 1440.

Pettegrew discovered that, “Rather the contrary: a news report gained credibility from the reputation of the person who delivered it. So a news report delivered verbally by a trusted friend or messenger was far more likely to be believed than an anonymous written report.”

Centuries later, even after the advent of print journalism in the 18th century, the integrity of the messenger remained paramount. Personal reputation was crucial for any individual with ambitious prospects in business or personal alliances (e.g. beneficial nuptials). Social capital was the secret sauce for trade, with wealth and prospects highly contingent on maintaining the good opinion of others.

Messenger boy for Mackay Telegraph Co., Waco, Texas, 1913 Photo: Lewis Hine. CC License.

Messenger boy for Mackay Telegraph Co., Waco, Texas, 1913 Photo: Lewis Hine. CC License.

Reputation was built in small communities from direct experiences with someone proving their honesty and reliability, over time. Perhaps a friend, who had proven their trustworthiness, could vouch for a stranger and by extension endow them with the use of their good reputation.

Great care was taken to protect reputation and cultivate the 19th century version of a credit score.

Jane Austen brilliantly signaled the currency of reputation in the world inhabited by Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Women and men alike were subject to potentially catastrophic financial loss if they suffered a corresponding loss of reputation.

We are still wary of the unknown or strangers like our pre-Gutenberg and 19th century forebears. As evidenced by the growing numbers of us that get our news predominantly from a friend sharing it on social media.

Like the original social media, word of mouth, stories today shared by a trusted friend online are laundered and imbued with a scent of truth.

But as we descend into a modern tribalism within walled off silos of media and the “golden of age” of the newspaper recedes, what will become of our information innovations?

The practice of journalism, a set of methodologies pioneered to tuss out the most accurate, truthful set of facts feasible from the human experience has grown in sophistication and quality of output since its invention.

For instance, the development of the novel requirement of corroboration in the 16th century - the practice of waiting for confirmation or evidentiary documentation from multiple sources to verify information. Innovation didn’t stop there. Over the next 300 years the practitioners of journalism gradually perfected a system of checks and balances to consistently report reliable news.

Today, there are still excellent journalists churning out the good stuff but their numbers, for the moment, are dwindling.

Ann Arbor News, final edition. Photo: Dan Bruell

Ann Arbor News, final edition. Photo: Dan Bruell

News organizations had 455,000 people on their payroll in 1990. By 2019, it had dropped to 88,000 employees.

With the move to digital media, ad dollars shifted from the content creators - newspaper and broadcast journalism - to the search and social middlemen, Google and Facebook.

Layoffs and closures of local newspapers followed and the corresponding loss of reliable information for us. The Covid pandemic ad revenue losses may be the final extinction event for many more local newspapers.

Here we are, like our Victorian predecessors on the precipice of our version of the Industrial Revolution, living in a new era of disruption, at the dawn of a Communication Revolution.

Most of us are residing in large, complex, interconnected communities. Regardless of our geography, we still need a pragmatic understanding of our world to make good decisions. We cannot build for the future, as individuals or communities, in a suspended state of cynicism or bifurcated reality.

The question remains, how do we identify trustworthy news messengers now?

We must pioneer an updated system of news reporting. It will inevitably require faith in a proven reputation of either the individual reporter or of the organization based on the consistent use of best practices to find and share facts.

When you visit a doctor or hire a CPA, their work is trustworthy because the profession long ago created a certification system that codified, then required the use of best practices. Violate the expectations egregiously, foremost among them do no harm, and you could lose your license.

What is needed is not only a voluntary code of ethics, but a more formalized set of expectations and methodologies, perhaps even a certification for those who dedicate their life’s work to the honorable profession of journalism.

Only within the cradle of a shared set of facts can American democracy and the promise in the U.S. Constitution of equal treatment and opportunity be realized and continue to be nurtured globally.



Sources: 

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/28/7922617/pride-and-prejudice-charts

https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/The-Industrial-Revolution

https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Social-upheaval

https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/why-the-golden-age-of-newspapers-was-the-exception-not-the-rule/

The Invention of News by Andrew Pettegrew

https://hapgood.us/2018/11/14/a-teaser-on-some-results-on-cynicism-and-online-information-literacy/

 

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