NewsBios compiles and sells dossiers on journalists. Its executive editor is Dean Rotbart, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal. The clients are primarily public relations firms and corporations seeking to prep company executives on the journalists who interview them. Mr. Rotbart said news organizations had also bought the profiles for use in hiring staff members or checking out their competitors. “The idea is to write true dossiers on journalists, unvarnished dossiers,” he said, “things they would not disclose or be inclined to disclose” on LinkedIn. The reports may include “information that reflects on the journalist’s character and proclivities,” according to the NewsBios site. NewsBios’ small-scale intelligence-gathering bears some resemblance to the computerized data-mining that large-scale information brokers use to classify consumers’ behavior. For instance, Experian Marketing Services, which helps companies tailor their marketing pitches, segments consumers into categories like: “postindustrial survivors,” “metropolitan strugglers” and “bourgeois prosperity.” NewsBios compiles information on journalists from public sources like voter records, real estate records and motor vehicle records. It also parses their public social media accounts for clues about their political leanings, entertainment interests and favorite sports teams. And it makes inferences based on that data. “We will literally turn over every rock that’s out there that might have some bearing on what the journalist thinks or reports,” Mr. Rotbart said. After our phone chat, Mr. Rotbart kindly sent me my own profile. A client had apparently commissioned it in 2009, the year I moved to a new job as a reporter in the business news department of this newspaper from its Style section. The profile has not been sold or updated since, he said. The dossier contained many correct facts — the universities from which I graduated, my contact information, the name of my editor at the time, a list of some front-page articles I had written, citations from published corrections to my articles. There were also a couple of errors. The profile said I had written for a magazine to which I never contributed. It also mistakenly attributed a conservative editorial — published in The Forward, where I had worked as a Moscow correspondent in the 1990s — to me, citing the piece as evidence of my personal politics. I was not much troubled by the factual errors in my profile. As people who regularly check their credit reports well know, companies often collect incorrect information — and even correct data can quickly become out of date. But I was uncomfortable with instances in the profile that speculated on my personal motives or feelings. These assumptions were often off base, yet had the potential to affect my reputation. The dossier, for instance, contained a cropped photograph of the back of my head and neck. Under the picture was a note, tagged “NewsBios Observation” to indicate that it was opinion. “The fact that only the back of her head is showing may be coincidental,” the profile said, “or it may be further evidence that she, a veteran fashion and cosmetics industry reporter, herself has a low self-esteem when it comes to appearances.” In fact, the original photo, which ran in this newspaper to accompany an article I wrote about unglamorous backstage jobs at New York Fashion Week, showed a larger scene in which I sat on the floor, painting the toenails of a fashion model. I wore a utilitarian black outfit, issued to me by the nail polish company with which I was embedded for the article. Even so, Mr. Rotbart contended that the profile made a reasonable deduction about my self-esteem — based on the fact that I looked frumpy in the picture and that there were fewer photos of me online than of many other reporters. When I told him I cover privacy issues — that’s the reason I have opted to use an avatar on Twitter — he allowed: “It may be 100 percent that you have a personal privacy thing.” He said that he would amend and update my profile should a client order it again. -- Natasha Singer, The New York Times
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 18:04:21 +0000
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