Thread by @SethAbramson

The two most talented and successful "curatorial journalists" on TV are Rachel Maddow and John Oliver. What I try to do on Substack via digital articles, source curation and thousands of links is what Oliver does in (NSFW) eviscerating Tucker Carlson here.

With Oliver does here is show how scores of disparate but reliable major-media data points—discernible across decades—are in conversation with one another.

What results is a network of information whose individual nodes are transparently offered and can be *traced and assessed*.

But even as Oliver is issuing a coherent report on Carlson, you'll notice that it's all "metajournalism"—he is exclusively using information produced, published, and originally disseminated by others. He is not claiming to have any sources and he is not conducting any interviews.

What he is doing, at least to the extent you can do it in multimedia—it's easier for me to do it with my writing, links, and endnotes—is acknowledging the provenance of his information, with each node in the network being discernably tied to the locale in which it first appeared.

Those who don't understand curatorial journalism/metajournalism falsely say it's "taking others' work." Mind you, they don't say it about Maddow/Oliver—they're too big to take on. They don't even say it because they believe it. They say it when they think it can take someone out.

People wondering at the success of Maddow/Oliver sometimes fall back on the presumption that they're successful only because they're articulate in speaking to a progressive worldview. That's part of it—but what too often gets ignored is the ingenuity of their journalistic method.

When you watch Maddow/Oliver, it's not that your opinions are privileged, but that your need for reliable data to intelligently support those opinions is privileged. Other shows just have a pundit on saying "Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist"—Maddow and Oliver prove it to us.

These techniques are common in various spheres of academia—including both history and a subject in which I have one of my terminal degrees, literary studies. But they haven't commonly been employed with journalism covering breaking news. That makes journalists suspicious of them.

Indeed, curating data points to produce a narrative is actually transparently "the way" in nearly every sphere of professional activity *except* breaking news reportage on complex stories—which is usually so focused on the present that it ignores how the past informs the present.

When I practiced law, my motions practice—like any attorney's motions practice—was based on curating data points from both case precedent and the case file. The reason contemporary reporters want to focus only on the present is because they have little expertise in anything else.

Reporters feel threatened by those who bring research into breaking news reportage, as they worry *they* don't have the subject-matter expertise to conduct such research or curate data points from the archive. So their response is to call curatorial journalists thieves/grifters.

What they don't realize is that reporters are absolutely essential to creating the archive of information that curatorial journalists and other metajournalists need. So the existence of the latter two groups is a necessary adjunct to reportage—it'll never be a replacement for it.

What we don't have yet is mutually supportive collaboration between reporters and curatorial journalists, even though curatorial journalists are daily working as hard as they can to augment the audience for the best reportage. That service—and grace—is not returned by reporters.

My substack, PROOF, offers the best curatorial journalism on the January 6 insurrection in the United States—and the insurrection is one of the two most important stories in the nation right now. It augments the audience for hundreds of hard-news reports on this critical subject.

But what we don't have—yet—is a culture in which reporters have any respect or regard for curatorial journalism (or any form of metajournalism). Fortunately for them, curatorial journalism and metajournalism still have a relatively small audience. I say "fortunately" because...

...as soon as you are exposed to quality curatorial journalism on any subject, you become *upset* at the insufficiency of reportage alone. This means that as more people become consumers of curatorial journalism, reporters will face increased pressure to acknowledge its utility.

Another group threatened by curatorial journalism is fact checkers. Fact-checking is an essential genre of journalism that's come into its own in the Trump era. But it offers a very different service from curatorial journalism, and is still anxious about its place in journalism.

Fact-checkers feel like they don't have the respect of reporters—in part because they don't. Reporters don't want their work reviewed/corrected by anyone but their immediate bosses—editors. That fact-checkers can embarrass reporters at any time is a threat to the reporter class.

So the one thing reporters and fact-checkers will naturally agree on is that they *hate* curatorial journalists. It's a common enemy of both, at least in their benighted perception of their own self-interest, rather than the interests of journalism or news consumers broadly writ.

It's one reason why PROOF—just 4 weeks into its existence—came under attack by both Daniel Dale, the chief factchecker for CNN, and Maggie Haberman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning access journalist at the New York Times who self-describes (only semi-accurately) as a hard-news reporter.

Neither Dale nor Haberman had read PROOF, but they "knew" from the last 5 years of this Twitter feed growing its audience from zero to nearly a million that curatorial journalism—as resident in this feed and at PROOF—was something they didn't do or understand, and that they fear.

If either Maddow or Oliver would come out as curatorial journalists, it might change everything. But there's no particular reason for two such successful journalists to be reflective in this way about their method. Their success is their success, and a sort of endpoint in itself.

That's not a criticism of either of them. It's just hard to help grow a new genre of journalism in the U.S. when it remains easy for bad-faith actors working in other genres of journalism, like Dale and Haberman, to attack an emerging genre in their field as somehow illegitimate.

Many people become new followers of this feed daily—but many also unfollow this feed daily. The main reason for unfollows is people feeling there's too much of what they consider "self-promotion" here. I get that critique. But I also know that what I'm trying to do is *not* that.

When I emphasize that my books, feed or substack comprehensively covered critical news "before" most breaking-news reporters—despite paradoxically *relying* upon breaking-news reportage—I'm trying to help popularize an already-popular but unrecognized-as-such genre of journalism.

I'm not saying I don't want credit for my work, or shy away from attention or praise. I'm human—so obviously neither of those things are true. But I do see this feed and my substack, despite the success of both, as facing an uphill struggle to bring certain phenomena to the fore.

And again, what's ironic is that this emerging genre of journalism is already *at* the fore. We love Maddow and Oliver *because* this is what they're doing already—but in a TV format. And frankly, the success of this emerging genre on Twitter goes *well* beyond this Twitter feed.

The question I'm asking on Twitter is if this emerging genre of journalism can be acknowledged for the critical component of contemporary journalism it is. And the question I'm asking on Substack is if this emerging genre of journalism can be institutionalized into a publication.

This isn't a journey everyone's going to dig—in the same way that not everyone digs long threads. I think folks should follow or not follow whoever they want online—and frankly I only get annoyed when people come here to rail against what I'm doing with no interest in discussion.

(END) If all of this makes sense to you, and you're interested in following along as this journey to popularize "curatorial journalism" advances, I hope you'll continue reading this space—and also check out PROOF (whether as a free or $5/month subscriber): sethabramson.substack.com

(PS) Sorry for the typo in the second tweet! I meant, "What Oliver does here..."