You know what's great? Readers. And what's better than readers? Intelligent, educated, *interested* readers, such as the readership of Public Address. Quit blushing now - you know you rock.
Even you right-wingers. Even you dirty hippies. Well, maybe not the anonymous flamers, but you regular angry-folks are okay.
Seriously, you've been a great audience to write for. Poll Dancer was a strange, unplanned experiment in online New Journalism, and a readership like Public Address' was the perfect petri dish for it.
Poll Dancer was originally conceived as a travelogue through the election campaign, with portraits of the colourful locals and reviews of the food, but pretty soon, it became an excuse for me to get into shin-digs and get people to talk to me. It became the only blog that regularly used its own primary sources, and that changed the game entirely.
It meant a lot more work, but it also meant the ability to talk about things that nobody reported on, and it also meant being able to - in new, exciting, entirely original and very public ways - fuck-up.
It's important for me to acknowledge these embarrassing booboos, and it seems only appropriate that I follow the fine Parliamentary tradition of doing it during this post-Christmas lull, when nobody gives a toss.
Booboo #1: 30 April, 2005
The election will be held on 2nd of July.
As Kenny says: "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." This one should definitely have been folded.
I heard this information from a friend, who had heard it from someone working in Parliament, who overheard it in his office. When Scoop asked me how sure I was about it, my answer was: "Not very. It's a punt."
If I was my editor, I would have smacked me over the head and binned it without a second thought. As it was, I had put the odds of it being true at around 30%, but I figured that everyone had an election-date prediction, most of them end up being wrong, so why not take a punt on a long-shot?
It was a juvenile call that fell through mercifully quickly.
Booboo #2: 21 June, 2005
Labour will drop a bomb(shell) on the National Party conference.
It didn't start off as a bad call. I had heard from three separate Labour Party people that "something big" was going to happen on a particular weekend, and that weekend just happened to be the National Party conference weekend. Speculating that the two were related was pretty reasonable.
In a 1261 word post, 125 words were spent speculating that this bombshell was going to be some kind of dirt, a la Benson-Pope. One mystified Political Editor confirmed/convoluted the issue, telling me that he was the designated "hitman" for the job - but that he'd only heard that second-hand!
The next day, at the National Party conference, I found out that a lot of people actually read Poll Dancer, because people - many from the Press Gallery - kept coming up to me asking what this dirt that was going to be released was. Then the PM's Press Secretary called me up, rather angrily, and demanded that I stopped spreading this false rumour that the Labour Party even *had* a dirt file on National MPs.
As it turned out, Helen announced the apology from the Israelis for the spies on the Sunday. It may or may not have been the "something big", but regardless, I felt pretty dumb, announcing that something which required secrecy to happen would happen.
The glib "Deep Dark Secret" reference rang excruciatingly true.
Booboo #3: 23 August, 2005
"**NATIONAL IS FUNDING THE ENTIRE TAX CUT PACKAGE OUT OF A $12.8b INCREASE IN DEBT OVER FOUR YEARS** Waaaaaaaa!!!!"
At $9.6 billion, this beats that time TelstraClear tried to overcharged me by $1,700.
The worst thing about this one is that it was actually a tiny, technical mistake on what was otherwise a pretty good find. A $3.2b find, in fact. I originally spotted an ambiguous use of language on a National press release:
"Gross sovereign issued debt is forecast to be approximately 1% higher relative to GDP than currently by the end of the forecast period."
Did "currently" mean higher than currently forecasted, or higher than current debt? It was a pretty fiddly bit of public accounting semantics, but the difference was several percent of GDP - i.e. Billions of dollars.
I actually had it right up until this point. Unfortunately, I was using 2004 figures as the baseline, while the numbers were based on 2006 figures, which means that my estimate was off by two years, and, um, $9.6b.
When I reached my $12.8b conclusion, I made numerous calls to do sanity-checks. In hindsight, starting a phone conversation with "hey, have you got a moment? I think I've just found where the National Party is hiding 12.8 billion dollars" is not the best way to get an objective answer; and also with the benefit of hindsight, nobody outside of Treasury was going to be able to tell me, over the phone, that I had the wrong baseline year.
I tried to contact John Keys, who told me through David Farrar that I was wrong, but he didn't say why.
Here's where being a lone gunman sucks. Sitting alone in the office at night, Queen pumping on the stereo, psyched up because I'd just deciphered a whole bunch of accounting jibberish, there's nobody there to say "oi - slow down". Quite the opposite - the immediacy of the medium screams for you to do things now, always.
It's not that I was stupid, but it's just so easy to get caught up the story. You really do need someone whose job it is to look over your shoulder to pour some cold water on you and scrutinise what you're doing.
I convinced myself that the broad strokes of the story was right. Me, myself and I unanimously agreed that I needed to put it online right there and then.
Ate my words for breakfast the next morning. Not nutritious.
Now I know: This is why you ask subjects for comment, and this is why you wait for it.
I was surprised and grateful that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy didn't take the opportunity to stick the boot in. In fact, a few were rather nice in complimenting the speediness and transparency of my retraction.
I think it's vital to acknowledge mistakes, but indeed, it would be better not to make them.
I think the degree of transparency possible with a combination of online publishing (connecting to sources, documents, recording, transcripts, articles) and New Journalism (taking the reader through the journalistic process; detailing assumptions, extrapolations, uncertainties - acknowledging the weaknesses) is incredibly powerful. It's a form that allows readers to scrutinise the information themselves, as opposed to the traditional model where readers are completely dependent on the ability of the journalist, judged by their credibility.
I had, up until the last incident, underestimated the degree to which trust and credibility still mattered in cyberspace. As much as transparency can lead to credibility, trust in an individual still play a large, if not the largest, role in how people judge an information source. Maintaining this trust still relies on old-fashioned journalistic discipline and adherence to process.
It's been a long year, but ultimately a very good year. And here I am, talking about old-fashioned discipline and following the rules. Surely, if I sound like such an old fogey, I *must* have learnt something. Right?