Lecture: William Bastone

William Bastone of The Smoking Gun at NYU.
Photo: Cleve Wiese.


The Smoking Gun.com has long been a staple of many media mavens’ news diets. But in recent months the website’s brand of investigative journalism, which consists chiefly of posting documents in their original form, has become increasing popular. TSG’s page view rate was 45 million in February 2005; a year later it had jumped by 30 million, according to The Kansas City Star.

The website’s growing cachet can be attributed partly to its deadpan, irreverent style (a welcome antidote to what some perceive as the tepid voice of mainstream journalism); the fact that it dovetails with the do-it-yourself ethic engendered by an increasingly two-way blogosphere; and its history of scooping the mainstream media on a few well-publicized occasions.

But as William Bastone, TSG’s editor-in-chief, noted in his lecture at NYU’s Department of Journalism on March 10, its success is also a symptom of the growing distrust in traditional news outlets. By posting documents rather than reported stories—in other words, by enabling readers to judge for themselves the facts of the matter, rather than selectively reporting what the editors deem significant—the website has attracted an audience suspicious of political spin and ideological bias in the corporate newsmedia.

“Everyone thinks that everyone else is pushing an agenda,” Bastone told an audience of journalism students and faculty. “There are a lot of people out there who just don’t trust what they see on the tube or what they read in the paper.”

When Bastone created TSG with his wife, graphic designer Barbara Glauber and freelance journalist Dan Green, in 1997, targeting this jaded demographic wasn’t his intention. From the beginning of his career at the Village Voice, Bastone spent “a lot of time chasing documents.” He was guided by the belief “that you may not be able to get a person on the phone, you might not be able to get cooperation from someone, but there is always a mass of public information out there for you as a reporter … to tap into.”

According to Bastone, most reporters are either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the paper trail, to him an inexhaustible resource. He was continually amazed by how rarely he encountered fellow reporters while working on stories in the libraries, clerks’ offices, and municipal building basements he soon came to know well. Documents, he eventually realized, might make for a good niche in the online media market.

“We thought maybe we could create a website that [was] all about paper,” he said. The inherent irony was not lost on Bastone or his co-founders. “It seemed, at the time, unbelievably silly,” he said. “The last thing you’d expect when you go on the Internet is to be confronted with paper; I mean, that’s what you’re running away from.” But TSG’s mass appeal was immediately apparent.

“I remember the day we launched the site,” Bastone said. “I realized we had kind of tapped into something that I hadn’t expected.” Accustomed to receiving an average of two or three snailmail letters in response to one of his Voice articles, Bastone was stunned by the overwhelming response to the website. “It was a revelation: there are people out there, people who have something to say about the work,” he said.

The appeal of TSG depends largely on the timeliness and cultural relevance of its content. Of necessity, Bastone is a news junkie. He reads every major newspaper published in New York City and generally believes what they write. It’s “a crime” for journalists not to read multiple newspapers, Bastone told his audience. The last thing he meant to do with TSG was strengthen the notion that the media is guilty of bias.

“People are constantly writing in, saying, ‘I’m so happy you guys are providing us with black and white documents, so that we don’t have to judge for ourselves [what’s true],” he said. “That was never the idea, we never thought, ‘Oh, OK we’re going to be the guys who say, don’t believe what comes to your mailbox or what you buy at the newsstand: those guys can’t be trusted.’ We just thought of ourselves as a nice supplement to your media diet.”

As Bastone’s lecture progressed, the audience started shifting in their seats, growing increasingly impatient. The posters promoting his talk highlighted a subject he’d barely touched on: TSG’s recent exposé of bestselling memoirist and former literary It-boy James Frey as a fabricator of the first order.

Asked about the Frey affair by Professor Bill Serrin, Bastone revealed the painstaking process of contacting nearly every police department in Ohio and Michigan in search of Frey’s arrest records. Warming to his subject, he spoke excitedly of discovering an incident report containing a police officer’s written account of an event corresponding to a central scene in Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. In the book, Frey describes running over a cop with his car, while drunk and on crack cocaine, and then trying to incite a riot as he was being arrested. But, according to Bastone, the report “couldn’t have been more vanilla”: No collision. No riot. Just a drunken, illegally parked—and generally cooperative—Frey.

Clearly, breaking a story gets Bastone excited. By contrast, media firestorms, like the one ignited by TSG’s expose of Frey’s fabrications, do not. The fact that major news outlets, such as CNN and The New York Times, ran with the TSG story appears to interest Bastone far less then the reporting that made it possible. He’d much rather relive the search than dwell on the success.

Cleve Wiese is an NYU graduate student pursuing a masters in print journalism.

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