Newsworthiness and Public Interest

Recently Twitter was hacked and the hacker sent the spoils of his efforts to TechCrunch, a technology blog, which published at least some or part, and are set to publish more, of the stolen documents (read here, here and here).

The head honcho of TechCrunch, Micael Arrington, has defended his posting of confidential information as being “newsworthy”. Further commenters on the blog justified the act as being in the “public interest” and good “journalism”.

While I cannot comment on the legal ramifications of the whole episode, it disgusts me to see the above three terms in quotes being horribly misappropriated. I feel the need to clear up their meaning.

Let me start first with journalism and its inextricable ties with the notion of a public sphere. GOOD journalism contributes to this sphere in which citizens are able to put forth ideas and discuss freely the things that concern them directly. This, of course, also happens to underpin democracy. It is then not too hard to see the meaning of public interest. It is not simply an “interested public”. “Public interest” is anything that directly concerns the public at large and affects their well-being (i.e. defining the interest of the public and only the public, i.e. not government or business) or that of the public sphere. Information that is in the public interest or of public interest is news, and such information is termed “newsworthy”. Anything else is gossip, and “good journalism” brings out the newsworthy and avoids gossip.

Let’s now put the Twitter/TechCrunch saga in context. The confidential documents that have been posted on TechCrunch include a financial forecast (others that remain unpublished so far include executive meeting notes and partner agreements to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees).

Is this newsworthy? Is this in the public interest? No. The documents aren’t. The only thing that is in the public interest is news of the hacking, revealing security flaws in the online company, which could affect the information and security of the public at large. All else is gossip. The posted financial forecast is gossip, gossip is not newsworthy, and anything that paints the un-newsworthy as news is not good journalism. Let’s not forget that the documents are confidential information obtained by ill means, although that does not matter in the logic here about newsworthiness (for example, if, say, a government department was hacked into and information was found revealing plans to suppress the rights of the public-at-large – that information would still be confidential and obtained by ill means, but would be in the public interest and hence newsworthy).

Good journalism has been slandered in this debacle.