Henry Abbott is a sportswriter who started blogging at TrueHoop last year. I'm not a basketball fan, but I've been following Abbott's work over the last few weeks because of his ongoing experiment in what he's calling open source journalism.
Abbott has been looking into the identity and dealings of William "Wes" Wesley, a former shoe salesman described by ESPN's Scoop Jackson as "the most powerful man in sports." But despite Wesley's supposed influence, he remains a mysterious figure. According to Abbott, "the Detroit News, the Akron Beacon-Journal, the Oregonian, the New York Times, GQ, and reportedly Sports Illustrated and HBO" have all written about or investigated Wesley without being able to fully explain just what he does or how he earns a living.
Abbott's not making any allegations of wrongdoing against Wesley, but he's intensely curious about how someone becomes so influential at the highest levels of sport and society, with links to Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Jay-Z, Phil Knight and even Bill and Hilary Clinton, while remaining so far in the background.
Abbott decided he was going to learn as much as he could about Wesley, and he's done an impressive job of piecing the facts together. Here's his description of the process:
In 2006, we're going to find out who [Wesley] is... And we're going to conduct the investigation in a new way. Welcome to open-source investigative journalism (as discussed in The New York Times and carried out at TalkingPointsMemo). It works like this: I'll keep blogging away as always, putting all of the William Wesley news I can get my hands on in the new "Who is William Wesley?" category you'll see on the right.
I will also pick up the phone and even leave the comfort of my office to conduct actual reporting. If the people I'm talking to will go on the record, the interviews will be recorded and shared here in podcasts and/or transcripts--so that you can judge the story for yourself.
But you will also do a lot of the work. I'm counting to readers of TrueHoop to help in a lot of important ways.
- Tips...
- Searching online and off...
- Photos...
- Chronology...
- Sightings...
- Fact-Checking...
So why do I care about all this if I'm not a basketball fan? And why should you? Because more and more journalism is going to be conducted according to this "open source" model, and the absence of an editorial apparatus constraining the journalist is going to create unique opportunities and challenges.
The opportunities are obvious: Engaging readers as fellow journalists and leveraging their collective knowledge, and having the freedom to pursue stories simply because they're fascinating top the list. I'm sure you can think of a few more.
The challenges are more subtle. One issue Abbott's running into right now is knowing when to stop, when to let go of a story and move on. In a recent comment on TrueHoop, UNC-Greensboro economics professor and occasional blogger Dan Rosenbaum raised some thought-provoking questions:
When Henry began this, I think William Wesley was such a "black box" that this reporting arguably struck the proper balance between the public's desire for information and some respect for Wesley's privacy.
But at this point, I think Henry has uncovered a lot about Wesley and now we know more about him than we do many public figures. Are there holes in what we know? Of course, but what has been uncovered is substantial.
Thus, for me personally, this has turned from the justified investigative reporting that it started out as to an invasion of privacy that serves few interests other than our prurient curiosity.
It appears that in this guy's line of business, keeping out of the limelight is an important part of what he does. That is perfectly understandable. (To a certain extent, that is true in my line of business, as well.)
So now that Henry has reported a great deal about Wesley, has this project crossed the line that divides justified investigative reporting from paparazzi-like hounding of a semi-public figure?
Despite the tremendous respect that I have for Henry, I worry that it has.
Not suprisingly, Abbott disagrees. My point isn't that we're better off when our individual freedom to investigate is curtailed by an editorial apparatus, but rather that in unscrupulous hands, that freedom can and will be abused. (And some people already feel that Abbott's investigation has crossed that line. I disagree, but I think he's come pretty close.)
Given the ever-lower barriers to entry in online publishing, and the inevitable development of attention-based services that will help individual authors find their niche audience, the question isn't whether we should adopt open source journalism; it's how we will best support this new model, take advantage of its strengths, and address its shortcomings.
tags: open source journalism journalism blogging truehoop henry abbott attention attentiontrust
