Jay Rosen and Dave Winer kicked off the latest episode of their Rebooting the News podcast with the assertion that journalists need to adopt a mindset from the tech industry that there will be bugs in their product and should therefore welcome it when the audience points out those bugs.

While I agree that journalists should welcome audience input and not snap at readers when they point out a mistake, I take issue with something that Rosen said on the subject — that journalists should say to the audience, “This is the best we could do in the time we had, now you help us improve it.”

From a consumer point of view, if a software company sold me a product with that statement attached, it would do nothing for my confidence in the company or its products. As a consumer, when I invest money in a product, what I’m paying for better be fully functional, and you telling me that you delivered this product fully expecting it to be something less than that is the wrong way to market yourself. Maybe developers accept bugs as a fact of life, but consumers of their software do not share those same sentiments. When a computer game crashes, it frustrates and infuriates the users. They don’t shrug and go, “Oh, it happens. I’ll let the company know.” Rather, it’s, “How the hell could someone ship a game like this?! I’m going to complain!” Sure, the consumers would report the bug, but in their minds, that doesn’t make it ok for a company to have sold them a product with bugs in the first place. You don’t buy software from a company because of their reputation for being friendly when you report a bug; you buy from a company because of its reputation for producing software that alleviate you from having to report a bug. Welcoming user reporting of bugs is a way to appease and apologize to the user for a screw-up. It’s damage control — a way to keep you from losing any more of your credibility, not a way to build it.

Apply that back to journalism. Rosen wants journalists to shift away from building their authority on the idea that they are presenting a polished and complete recap of the news and adopt the “help us debug our work” mindset, but in many ways, it’s really up to the audience to allow journalists to move away from their current mindset. If, in the audience’s eyes, you lose credibility when your standard MO is to present them with works in progress, then you can’t really build authority that way. And I would argue that the current audience attitude toward news does restrict journalists in that respect. News may be a process for the people involved in reporting it, but for the people who consume it, it is still a product in which they invest time and (in some cases) money. As such, for the most part, their reaction toward a mistake or an incomplete report is not, “Oh, here, let me help you fill in the blanks.” Rather, it is, “Here’s the stuff you left out or got wrong. Why do I have to fill in the blanks for you? Aren’t you being paid to do that?” It’s fine to be honest and gracious when a reader points out a mistake, but that’s a far cry from telling the audience that you expect what you are reporting to contain mistakes or incomplete facts, and that their having to point out your mistakes is a built-in part of your reporting process. The audience’s attitude toward what your work is supposed to be doesn’t change just because you said so.

So until the audience also accepts the news on their screens and in their hands as an ongoing process and sees its incomplete and sometimes erroneous nature as being a natural and acceptable part of that process, journalists have no recourse but to continue striving to maintain the ideal of trying to present a polished, edited, and relatively complete view of the news (Rosen calls this a facade, but I personally see it in a better light). The audience’s expectations do not afford journalists the luxury of tossing out partial work and saying, “Here, help us debug and finish this,”  because in the audience’s mind, that’s the journalists’ job, not theirs, just as it is the developers’ job to make sure a game works correctly BEFORE it’s shipped. If the consumer/audience has to debug, the consumer sees it as a screw-up by the people who made the product, not a part of the process of making the product. Therefore, telling the audience that you are expecting them to help you debug your product dents your credibility.

A couple thoughts on other parts of the podcast:

• At one point, Winer wondered why journalists from the New York Times who are twittering haven’t been discussing the Maureen Dowd plagiarism fiasco on Twitter. Here’s a guess: Maybe it’s not just a smart thing to do in a professional working environment. Aside from comments from Dowd herself and her superiors, there is very little to be gained from other people in the office publicly discussing a fellow employee’s screwup. That’s true in any line of work and has nothing to do with any kind of newspaper “tribal” thing. Discretion still does have value even as we are living more and more of our lives in public.
• Winer also posed this question: “Should we consider people on Twitter bloggers and have the same expectations for them as we do for bloggers?” I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony: Wasn’t this the same question journalists were asking about bloggers when blogging was first taking off? And haven’t most of us come to agree that blogging is just a platform; it’s what you with it that matters?