Musician Carroll's viral video as tool--and lesson--for journalists

The following article is also posted on my Examiner.com page.

In case you have not yet heard of Dave Carroll, he's the Canadian musician who posted a music video on YouTube, last week. It describes, in lighthearted and humorous fashion, how United Airlines broke his $3,500.00 Taylor guitar. Among the funniest shots in the video are the way Carroll depicts indifferent airline employees as he tried to alert them about his broken guitar. In just over a week, the video is approaching three million page views. Carroll also posted a statement acknowledging the support he's received; in it he suggests that United Airlines take the money it is now willing to pay, and donate it to charity.

Clearly, getting his guitar broken is the best thing that could have happened to Carroll in terms of advancing his career. His injured instrument and the song it spawned are the kind of PR a musician can't buy. For United Airlines, it's an object lesson in how not to handle customer service and consumer complaints. This is the sort of incident and outcome that will be studied in business schools for years to come.

With all the attention the video is generating, the mainstream media are reporting the story, but not necessarily to the extent you might imagine or expect. Local TV news in particular is a medium that historically has thrived on taking a populist approach to consumer reporting. But everything has changed. With video on the web coming of age, along with relatively inexpensive production tools available to everybody from home video enthusiasts to companies that make wedding videos, TV newsrooms have competition in terms of visual storytelling. But is it journalism?

Ultimately the answer is yes, but it is a qualified and conditional yes. As a stand-alone piece of work, Carroll's video is not journalism in any traditional sense. It is, however, an important part of a journalistic process that is both dynamic and evolving. How news organizations learn about stories and develop news tips and leads determines what gets covered. Carroll's video became the story and it opened the door for traditional news organizations to cover his situation and expand it. In the marketplace of story ideas finding new sources serves journalism well. Empowering technologies allow talented people to tell stories directly and passionately.

The fundamentals of good journalism, fair, accurate, unbiased reporting, can then flow. When journalists have a heightened awareness of facts and situations, they have a responsibility to apply sound principles to the information before them. Advocacy journalism is still journalism, as long as it is fact based and its positioning is not tainted by partisan or commercial benefit as a reason for the reporting. Journalism should draw conclusions and take advantage of a wide range of sources.

The idea that non-journalists can create journalism is the key to understanding the future of the news media. We still need professional journalists who follow an ethical path and provide unbiased reporting that makes sense out of complicated situations and facts. As Brian Williams says in an NBC promo, their job is "making sense of it." Many may disagree and say that news organizations should just report the facts. But the very decisions of which stories to cover, what facts to report, and how much prominence one set of facts gets over another, is part of the "making sense" process. And, as entertaining and good humored as Dave Carroll's video is, that's a different process from what Williams describes in the promo. In our evolving universe of news, both approaches have a place. Understanding the difference is a form of media literacy we all should be learning.