Accuracy, privacy -- and your anonymous posting; amid new layoff speculation, a 'messy' Internet

Last Friday, I joined a web producer for PBS TV's Frontline World as invited speakers to a journalism conference in Berkeley, Calif. The topic was online investigations, and I described using crowdsourcing to report Gannett layoffs. The audience of about 60 people asked several questions about the risks of relying on layoff numbers given by anonymous readers posting in this blog's comments sections. Those risks are real, I said, but are unavoidable on a blog that Gannett's management would prefer employees not visit.

I have many obstacles in publishing Gannett Blog. Without the promise of anonymity, readers would fear providing information, because they'd likely be disciplined, maybe even fired. Yet, anonymous posters can't be held accountable, so they may not be scrupulously accurate. Meanwhile, it's not feasible to develop a comprehensive network of on-the-ground sources while still covering a company with more than 100 daily newspapers, 23 TV stations and hundreds of other subsidiaries in more than 30 states in the U.S. and the U.K.

Questions about anonymous posting are part of a broader industry debate about unidentified sources, and growing worries over privacy rights for readers who post in comments sections. Only last week, a reporter for a large U.S. newspaper interviewed me for a story about cases where anonymous posters got outed. One of them was a Gannett Blog reader; another was a reader of a Gannett newspaper in Wausau, Wisc.

The most popular topic on this blog is layoffs, according to traffic tracker Google Analytics. But my readers aren't always comfortable when I rely on anonymous comments. Yesterday, Anonymous@1:23 p.m. scolded me for publishing an unconfirmed report of layoffs at USA Today. "What you're doing is raising the fear level just like our government does to get a reaction,'' they wrote. "I'm sure the goal is to create more hits for your site. You're not in this to help Gannett employees; you're in this for your own greed. Fess up."

The reader's concerns are entirely reasonable. My reply: "This is the (imperfect) way I've counted workforce reductions since Day 1. It's generally resulted in an undercount, however. Corporate has never provided this level of detail. That said, I'm open to suggestions for better methods."

July's layoffs: 1,400, more or less
Crowdsourcing presumes that if an assertion is subject to enough scrutiny, it will eventually be proved accurate -- or not. In other words, the truth will out. For example, U.S. newspaper division chief Bob Dickey said last summer that 1,400 jobs would be cut through layoffs and other means during early July. Relying mostly on anonymous comments, I created a paper-by-paper list of jobs lost. By the time I stopped counting, and with several dozen small papers to go, my tally reached 1,301 -- very close to the forecast.

The actual number of jobs cut remains a mystery, however. Dickey told a group of Wall Street stock analysts in December that the division had cut 24% of its jobs in 2009 -- a figure equal to as many as 7,000 positions.

A Wisconsin-wide Web
The Internet is still a largely unexplored world, with new rules of conduct being written daily. A year ago, I asked Gannett's chief digital officer, Chris Saridakis, about the Wisconsin case, where the Wausau Daily Herald was accused of turning over a reader's identity to a government official he'd criticized anonymously on the paper's website. That messy incident prompted a strong reminder about privacy rights from Corporate.

Here's what Saridakis told me in his e-mailed reply: "With regard to it being a 'mess,' what part of the Internet isn't a mess, when it comes to content sharing, redistribution rights, privacy, fact checking, digital rights, etc.?"

Now, what do you think? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.

[Image: yesterday's Daily Herald, Newseum]