How News is Created and Shared

What the Steven Slater Story Says about How News is Created and Shared

Posted by Steve Myers at 12:57 PM on Aug. 23, 2010

When Flight 1052 went wheels-up on Steven Slater's (presumably) last flight with JetBlue, he was just a man. Hours after he took the evacuation slide, he was a legend. 

How we got to this point -- in which this JetBlue flight attendant has 213,000 fans on Facebook, a Hollywood agentand perhaps a reality TV show -- tells us some things about how the media, social media, the Web and the public amplify, consume and share the news.

The buzz around Steven Slater stemmed from the initial story of him blowing his cool after being wronged by a passenger. Coverage quickly shifted from the event itself, to his elevation to instant hero, to what that popularity means. 

Meanwhile, over the next few days, as the story crested, some news outlets tried to see whether the facts supported the picture of Slater as a modern folk hero. Those facts may yet emerge; as with many stories that blow up so quickly, the facts have a hard time catching up to the legend. 

Popularity is a self-fulfilling news story.

This was one of those stories that you want to share as soon as you hear it. That popularity fueled more stories, which added to the buzz, which in turn fueled more coverage.

Slater made his dramatic exit -- entrance, really -- on August 9. The initial reports were all pretty similar, describing an altercation between a rude passenger and Slater after the plane landed, which put him over the edge. Slater was seen as both victim and the hero.

People don't just talk about the news now, they create in response to it. So they created Facebook pages, wrote parody songs, and set up sites to sell T-shirts and solicit fantastic quitting stories. 

Soon enough, the coverage shifted from what had happened to how popular Slater was becoming. And the coverage increased. According to Google Trends, media coverage trailed search traffic for "Steven Slater," with search traffic peaking on Aug. 11 and news coverage peaking on Aug. 12.

To some extent, popularity has always been a measure of newsworthiness. What's different is that popularity is out in the open and easy to measure. It's hard to know how many people are talking about a story on the phone or e-mailing links; it's easy to see how many people "like" a Facebook page.

And companies can do sentiment analysis on all the discussion online; The New York Time cited Zeta Buzz, which noted that online comments about Slater were 93 percent positive. 

Any of these things can be the hook for a follow-up story, even if they're not particularly meaningful. Sure, someone setting up a site to sell some T-shirts indicates some measure of popularity, but who's buying? 

At one point, a news story noted that four people had joined a "Steven Slater for president" group on Facebook and that 30 people had joined a legal defense fund group. (Both have more members now.) In comparison, there are 88 members of a Facebook group to organize a convention of people named Phil Campbell (or Phyllis, Philippe or any other variation) in the town of Phil Campbell, Ala. Which is more newsworthy?

The media is the meta.

A few cracks appeared in the initial account the day after the incident, but by then, much of the coverage was one step removed from what happened on the plane, focusing on Slater's popularity.

And then it shifted again, to an examination of how this gay flight attendant in New York became a hero of the working man. What did our response mean about our culture, aboutthe recession, about air travel, about how we admire scofflaws? A USA Today story hit many of these themes:

"That a flight attendant has become an instant folk hero for allegedly telling off a passenger and abandoning his duties speaks not just to the frustration many people feel about a travel experience that has become riddled with inconvenience and rudeness. It also casts a spotlight on a broader anger felt by many workers who are fed up with jobs in which pay raises, if they exist at all, are smaller or less frequent than they were a few years ago and with the threat of layoffs looming constantly, some workplace specialists say."

Some of these stories relied on experts and university professors, who are often willing to engage in high-level discussion of an event. As a journalist, I'm not immune to this, so I spoke with Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia University in New York, who had already been quoted in a New York Times story. 

"The fact that the story took off in the form it did, with weak sourcing," he said, "to me says something about the strength of the fantasy that he was in a sense conscripted into enacting as a character in our collective life."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I needed him to say it so I didn't have to.

Journalists gravitate to such stories; they enable us to use the events at hand to craft a view of the world around us. Slate's Jack Shafer loves to expose "bogus trend stories," those thinly reported stories that rely on anecdotal evidence. When presented with a story like Steven Slater, we need just one really, really good anecdote.

Done well, such "meta" stories help us understand the world around us, why some things matter and others don't. Done poorly, they're creative writing exercises, with quotations by real people offering a flavoring of journalism.

This is what sparked Howard Kurtz' mini-tirade at the end of his "Reliable Sources" show on Aug. 15. "News outlets are taking a colorful incident," he said, "and inflating it into a cosmic, cultural protest because that gives them an excuse to keep pumping it up."

Legend travels faster than facts.

While much of the media used this incident as a hook to write about airline travel, politeness or folk heroes, some local media treated this as a hard news story. The New York Daily News was one of the few. 

"We covered this as if we were doing an investigation," said Daily News reporter Richard Schapiro, who started working on the story from the second day. "We were really going at it as, 'What actually happened on this plane?' "(Novel, isn't it?)

Reporters started looking for passengers who could corroborate Slater's story. They got the plane's passenger manifest and were able to reach about 40 of the 100 passengers. 

Schapiro described a winding path of reporting that at firstseemed to contradict Slater's story and later appeared to confirm that something indeed set Slater off on that plane.

The facts are more complicated than what most of us heard. According to some passengers, Slater already had a cut on his head when they boarded the plane in Pittsburgh, and he struck people as unhinged during the pre-flight safety routine and the flight. 

But another passenger told Schapiro that he was one of the first people on the plane, and Slater was uninjured. Moreover, he said he heard (but didn't see) an argument of some kind that involved a woman who wanted to put an oversized bag in an overhead compartment.

Still, there are some uncertainties. Schapiro said he hasn't been able to find this phantom passenger who didn't want to check her bag. He hoped that she would speak up when other passengers described Slater's bizarre behavior and sentiment seemed to turn against him, but that hasn't happened.

These days, who has time to substantiate the narrative?

While it would seem natural to spend the time reporting this story out, these days it's not a given. It made sense for New York media, for whom this was a sensational, local story. (In fairness, not all of the local coverage was exactly substantive.)

A reporter or editor, Gitlin said, has to decide "how many working minutes are available to run after this, trying to catch this and stuff it back in its factual container as opposed to moving on, doing something else."

In some cases a reporter or a news organization is rewarded by doggedly pursuing a story that runs counter to the grain of the media at large. Gitlin noted, for instance, thatMcClatchy's Washington bureau did not fall for the Bush administration's arguments that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 

Yet no matter what you think of flight attendants, Steven Slater is no Saddam. And so when the spotlight shines elsewhere, there often isn't much incentive to follow up on such stories.

Slater's story shows how similar journalists are to those who read and watch their stories. We love unexpected results, compelling characters and searing irony. If we're biased for anything, we're biased for a good story, like people at a ballpark root for a home run. 

That doesn't absolve our duty to verify and to report out the story. It doesn't give us a pass when we extract five rash minutes from one man's life to make sweeping conclusions about the nature of life in our democracy. But it does show that we're all part of the same system of talking, sharing and reacting.

"There's a place for stories that are quirky," Gitlin said, "but they should still be true -- as true as one could make them."

That's exactly what I was thinking.

CORRECTION: Richard Schapiro's name was misspelled in the original version of this story.

Source : http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=136&aid=189218