Ben Smith Shares Slack Conversation Revealing Chaos Over Facebook Papers Collaboration

Several prominent news outlets had come together to collaborate on sifting through the Facebook Papers, a stockpile of leaked documents provided by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen previously testified to Congress about negative impacts of Facebook, alleging that it increases political divisions, harms children, and prioritizes its profits over safety.

But then the New York Times appeared to publish a story earlier than agreed upon on Friday, and other outlets scrambled to catch up — and the pettiness seeped onto Twitter.

New York Times media columnist Ben Smith posted a screenshot of a Slack conversation on Friday night, noting that the Facebook consortium “has devolved into a pretty bitter argument.”

The conversation showed two individuals jumping to publish Facebook Papers stories following the Times’ story.

“My editor says if the nytimes doesn’t have to abide by these rules then we are out,” wrote one individual. “I’m really sorry. This sucks. And now it’s a media story.”

Smith noted that he did not receive the Slack messages from a fellow New York Times reporter and that the Times “denies jumping the gun.”

According to the Associated Press, 17 American news outlets including themselves had collaborated on the project. CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote Friday that those outlets included CNN, NYT, NBC, WaPo, The AP, and The Atlantic.

The outlets were supposed to all publish their stories on Monday, but the Times put up an article on Friday detailing internal concerns at Facebook about its role in spreading election fraud disinformation.

After the Times story published, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and others soon followed.

Times reporter She-Ra Frenkel wrote on Twitter that the “embargo was lifted on a small number of documents today based on the WSJ story that went up.”

But it’s clear from both the Slack conversation and posts on Twitter that folks are not happy with the flood of stories before Monday and/or unaware of the supposed partial embargo lift.

The Associated Press’ Frank Bajak tweeted that consortium members “who broke embargo…have some explaining to do.”

“Further, a scoop is by definition a piece of news discovered and published by one news outlet (or person) before others,” he added. “If many organizations have that information because they have agreed to honor an embargo then the org that jumps the gun isn’t scooping anyone.”

https://twitter.com/skirchy/status/1451708685949014016

Amir Efrati, executive editor of The Information — who published a story outlining the consortium’s efforts on Friday — had noted earlier on Friday that AP’s Vice President for Investigations said, “[I]t’s remarkable to see these news organizations, large and small, set aside some of their competitive impulses and work together to work on something that is unquestionably in the public interest.”

Facebook’s PR team tried to get ahead of the stories earlier this week, calling it “a coordinated series of articles” and alleging that “outlets had to agree to conditions and a schedule laid down” by a PR team.