RConversation

Good luck with the WaPo, Marcus!

Marcus Brauchli, who I first ran into on a boat going down the Yangtze doing a story about the Three Gorges Dam, and who threw some rather good parties in Shanghai in the late 90s (including a pajama party in the Peace Hotel), is now editor of the Washington Post.

The NYT writes that "at age 47, he is young enough to remain in place for many years..."

...assuming the WaPo survives for many years... 

As the news of his appointment broke today, online journalism guru Mindy McAdams posted 10 "simple facts" about the survival of journalism:

   1. Newspapers did NOT make a huge mistake by giving the content away for free. Duh, look at the Internet. Everything except the porn and the dating services is free.
   2. Journalism CAN be done, and done well, without newspapers. It’s okay if you love newspapers, but they’re really expensive to produce and the audience is abandoning them, as are the advertisers, so it doesn’t help us much to go on talking about newspapers.
   3. Journalism costs a lot of money to do (and especially if it’s done well), because it requires dedicated people. So we can’t pretend that the work will get done for free. It will not.
   4. Citizens and amateurs and well-meaning whistle-blowers, etc., etc., will sometimes commit wonderful acts of journalism. But they will NOT do so reliably, day in and day out, and there aren’t enough of them with the interest, free time, and goodwill to do everything journalists have been doing for about 400 years.
   5. Newspapers were a nice business. Publishers could make the product insanely cheap (remember the penny press), and the advertising would cover the expenses, plus generate fantastic profits. However, this is clearly over. It’s done. It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passengers ships, it will never work again.
   6. No one today goes to one spot online as the trusted information source. People don’t even go to five or six. Everyone goes to dozens, hundreds — more. A subscription scheme is therefore not workable.
   7. Future generations will not read newspapers. Ever.
   8. Journalism is vital to a democratic system of government, because without independent busybodies (yes, journalists) sticking their nose into everything, governments and large corporations can cheat, oppress, and starve people. (Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen famously said there has never been a famine in a democratic country because the news about food shortages or distribution failures cannot be hidden and suppressed.)
   9. The business model to sustain journalism in the 21st century has not been seen yet.
  10. Newspaper companies, in particular, seem unlikely to blaze the trail toward a viable business model for journalism.

I agree with all these points.  I don't care whether newspapers survive. I do care that journalism survives - and I don't believe the two are equal. Clearly many people disagree.

It will be interesting to see whether Marcus spends his time fighting for a newspaper's survival or if he focuses on reinventing journalism for the 21st Century - and on finding a business model which likely won't involve selling lots of bundles of paper.

I don't envy him at all.  It's much easier pontificating from where I sit in academia, playing around with my nonprofit citizen media organization.

(Clarification since somebody asked: Nothing seedy about the Shanghai pj party - it was an elegant soiree...lots of people in Shanghai wear pj's in public in the summertime, so "come in your pajamas" was shall we say a party theme.)

Global Voices, generative media structures.. and the end of nationalism?

Photo by Neha Viswanathan: A small subset of the Global Voices bloggers who met in Budapest.

(Apologies in advance for the length of this post. I've decided to subject my readers to this even-longer-than-usual "brain dump" because at least a few people out there are interested in some of the ideas related to global participatory media, and I'd like feed back on some of the outstanding questions faced by Global Voices.)

At the end of last week's Global Voices Summit, one of our Middle Eastern bloggers came up to me and said: "nationalism is dead for me now." He said that ten years ago he was a strong nationalist. Being a blogger and debating issues with other people online over the past few years has greatly weakened that feeling. Now after four days hanging out with bloggers from all over the world, nationalism makes no sense to him any more.

(For full accounts of the summit, see David Sasaki's excellent overview, Ethan Z's great series of posts,  our media digest, the summit blog, technorati, google blog search, Rezwan's excellent roundup of summit bloggers, etc.)

The blogger's rejection of nationalism (I'm not going to name him because he is sensitive about how he has been portrayed in the past), and the role GV seems to have played in his change of thinking, brings me to Joi Ito's post-summit blog post. Joi is now on the GV Board and has been involved since the very beginning - when it was just a meeting of bloggers. He writes:

Global Voices is a super-important part in fixing what I call the "caring problem". There is a systemic bias against reporting international news in most developed nations. When pressed, many editors will say that people just don't want to read articles about other parts of the world. This is because most people don't care. They don't care because they don't hear the voices or know people in other countries. I think that by providing voices to all over the world, we have the ability to connect people and get people to care more.

I also believe that voice is probably more important than votes or guns. I believe that combating extremism is most effectively done by winning the argument in public, not by censorship, elections or destruction. I believe that providing everyone with a voice to participate in the global dialog is key. The ability to communication and connect without permission or fear of retribution is a pillar of open society in the 21st Century. Global Voices is the best example of this that I know of.

Patrick Philippe Meier, a self-described GV "outsider" and doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative had this conclusion:

...The Internet, and the information society, the global network of social nodes and connections, is becoming more complex. This complexity adds to diversity and balance. Most people, most of the time, in most places are nonviolent. Social extremes are by definition minorities. Global Voices are more informed and moderate. Giving a voice to these Global Voices online is likely to diminish the impact of extremists. How do we find these voices in the symphony of the superhighway? We need to make quanta of information more indexable and more searchable. Tag, tag, tag away. Only then will locality, diversity, opportunity be made more visible....

So how did we get to the point that people are saying such things about GV - things we never imagined when we started the project - and where might we go from here? As this article that I wrote jointly with Ethan Zuckerman back in 2006 tries to explain, GV arose as an attempt to address badly skewed global information flows in which the voices of people from North America and Western Europe are disproportionately amplified in the global media. But now here's the problem: the skewed flows aren't just happening on a global scale, there are imbalances within countries, regions, and communities. So the question is: what is the best way to achieve a global media environment where everybody has the ability to speak and be heard? And is there also a way for people to find authenticity, relevance, and quality amidst the cacophony of cat-blogging and hidden agendas?

By having a tiered system of expert blogger-editors and translators who curate what they find to be globally relevant and authentic from their regions, we've made a decent but imperfect stab at the second question, although I think we need to revisit our systems in the future and find ways to improve them, funds and people permitting. This year's discussions in Budapest focused largely on the first question: equity of "voice" within national borders as well as across borders.  At several points during both the public conference and the internal community meetings, people talked about the importance of amplifying minority, non-elite, disadvantaged and dissenting voices alongside "representative" or "typical" voices from various countries. Simultaneously, there's also the problem of "silent majorities" who tend to spend less time seeking media interviews, demonstrating in public, and doing things that headlines than people who tend to be on the more atypical extremes of any given country's political spectrum. These attention deficits lead not only to imbalance in media coverage, but also create social pressures that lead to self-censorship: people think, think "why should I stick my neck out and risk getting in trouble for an issue few people in my country really care about or agree with?"

It's not just mainstream media that presents a skewed and un-representative picture to the world; it turns out that blogospheres, at least as they have naturally evolved so far, are amplifiers for the voices and views of educated, wired elites. As David Sasaki, who runs Rising Voices, Global Voices' outreach arm, writes: "As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the 'blogger demographic' tends to [be] very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries."

Whose voice - and whose life - gets to represent a particular nationality, ethnic group, or community, is a problem that both Ethan Z, who co-founded GV with me, and web philosopher David Weinberger have been writing about over the past few days. Media reporting about any given issue tends to rely on a few colorful examples, chosen for their interestingness, the willingness of the subjects to talk to the media, and their ability to speak articulately Weinberger points out that extrapolating reality from a few examples  results in what he calls "The Fallacy of Examples."

As Ethan points out, "it’s lots easier to write about extreme examples rather than median ones." He cites Clay Shirky's excellent new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - which I happened to read on the plane en route to Budapest. Shirky analyzes the way in which online communities tend to follow a "power law." Ethan describes the phenomenon: "If you attempt to generalize about the group as a whole from the most prolific participants, you’re going to misunderstand what’s going on."

There are many factors contributing to who gets to the top of the power curve, starting with who even tries to speak, who succeeds in speaking, and who is silenced.  The digital divide - access to affordable internet and mobile communications - is only one small part of it. Many people are so accustomed to being ignored, it doesn't occur to them that creating their own media would produce any useful result. They worry about bringing trouble on their families by calling socially unacceptable attention to themselves. In Budapest, we agreed that Global Voices has an important role to play - and some believe a responsibility -  in supporting people who have stories to tell but who are isolated for various reasons. When local authority figures (or their parents and spouses) discourage them from speaking, they can be encouraged by the fact that people around the world are indeed linking to them - and that if something happens to them, questions will be asked.

Censorship and threat of imprisonment also skew the conversation: if certain kinds of views are silenced - or driven to quiet largely-unnoticed pockets of their online communities - then it becomes hard to tell whether the loudest and most predominant voices really represent the majority view of a particular community if the censorship and threat of retribution had not been imposed on its people. There was some discussion in Budapest about to what extent our regional editors and bloggers who represent certain countries have an obligation to amplify "representative" or "mainstream" views and to what extent they should be amplifying minority and "dissident" voices. It's a tough balancing act, and no matter what you do, you get criticized by people who think you're misrepresenting their country or community.

Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem on Global Voices is how to be truly fair to everybody - to minorities as well as majorities, while not appearing to take sides in various people's independence struggles. Now here's the background: Our editorial structure is based Wikipedia's list of countries - a list maintained by a very active community who fight fiercely about any addition or subtraction. It generally serves us well - or better than any of the alternatives seemed likely to do - but it's impossible to please everybody, and there are people who regularly trash GV for this choice. Our ideal goal (far from being realized) is to have a contributor from all of those countries except North America and Western Europe. This stems from a decision at the beginning that if we started out including those two regions, GV could get dominated by those bloggers who have other global platforms anyway. Our priority was to create a platform for people who have a harder time getting their voices heard. At any rate, the countries that we do cover are then divided up into regions, each managed by a "regional editor". We also have a number of language editors who post summaries and excerpts of translated content from non-English blogs into English on the main site. What languages we translate onto the main site is primarily a function of funding and volunteer interest. (Meanwhile, as Ethan described in this post, a family of websites have sprung up on which volunteers translate GV's English content into various languages.)

One of the questions debated most heatedly in Budapest (though politely and respectfully after several days of eating and drinking together and sharing hotel rooms) was this: Should GV include blogs from North America and Western Europe, especially those from minority communities whose voices are not well heard in their own national medias let alone the global media? Does it make sense to be covering Macedonia but not Greece? And the corollaries: Does our system of organizing the world - and thus people's identities - largely according to their U.N.-recognized nationality help or hinder the idea that people from anywhere on the planet should be able to have a voice and be heard? But if we don't organize ourselves according to the nation-state framework, and on top of that a regional hierarchy of editors, how do we organize our website without descending into chaos - or turning into a platform for the world's independence groups? On the other hand, there have been strong disagreements in the past year or so amongst contributors and editors over whether we should have separate categories and/or contributors for "Tibet" and "Chechnya" (to give just two examples of many others) - and if by failing to do so we are failing to adequately represent online voices from those places, and thus in effect discriminating against those minorities? It was fascinating to see who came down on what side of these questions - and it was not split along regional, ethnic, or socio-economic lines at all, people from all continents came down on both sides of these questions, to varying degrees. One observer of our community who I spoke to after the meeting suggested creating a "shadow" or "parallel" website in which we try organizing ourselves according to some other criteria than nation-state and see what happens. It's an interesting idea. I'd be interested in hearing more ideas and opinions from readers of GV as well as contributors and community members. Can GV come up with an innovative and equitable way to organize a global citizen media website without using the nation-state as its organizing principle?

...which brings me back to Shirky's book. Another point he makes which I agree with is that "communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."  Activities like blogging, podcasting, and uploading videos to YouTube-like websites are no longer considered technically innovative by the Silicon Valley set. But these tools are only just starting to be used by indigenous Bolivians, barrio kids in Medelin, Colombia, young people in Madagascar, kids in Kolkata's red light district,  etc. Only after digital citizen media tools become commonplace in such communities will the most interesting social innovation really start to happen on a global scale. What excites me is that people who work on Global Voices are perhaps uniquely positioned to understand what's going on - as well as play a part in it. One thing that's clear from the GV experience so far is that people have multiple identities: many bloggers chafe at being pigeonholed in accordance with one accident of birth above all others. At the same time, others - especially bloggers from countries that gained independence in the past decade or so - are extremely proud of their national identity and proud to have the opportunity to promote that identity on a site like GV. Others come from minority groups seeking independence. How best to build a collaborative citizen media community among people who define their identities -  and identities of others - very differently? What - beyond an interesting website - might result from such an attempt? Is it possible to build a global citizen media community with a post-nationalist identity?

Shirky also talks about how systems of collaborative production - like Wikipedia, for example - are not organizationally flat. A very small percentage of Wikipedians do the bulk of the work. There are also community "enforcement" systems in place in order to prevent this open platform from being completely destroyed and overrun by a few ill-intentioned individuals. At the same time, these systems and structures - "rules" if you like - were not driven by a central management team in the way that the president and publisher of a news organization would decide (largely top-down, in my experience) and enforce (journalists' fear of being fired or laid off in the next round of cutbacks) how things should be run and what the editorial policies should be. If you ask Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales whether he had a plan for "solving" the many problems of vandalism and self-promotion Wikipedia faces, he says he didn't - the core community of Wikipedia's most passionate and active volunteers came up with solutions and developed the "management" and "enforcement" structures around them. Likewise, I'm quite positive that Ethan, myself, and GV's core management team are not going to come up with answers and solutions to the questions and problems I brought up in the previous paragraph. The solutions are going to have to be generated by the community, somehow, if enough of them even want to solve these problems or can achieve some sort of consensus. Who knows if that will ever be possible.

...which brings me to another book:  Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It. JZ (as he is known at the Berkman Center) is concerned about the Internet's potential loss of "generativity:" the ability of PC users at the edges of the Internet to innovate - develop software applications and all kinds of media platforms - without coordinating with some central authority, whether it be a computer or device manufacturer or whoever controls the Internet connections between devices. Increasingly, people are connecting to the Internet with what he calls "tethered devices" that are not generative: they don't allow the user to create new applications or media without working directly with the manufacturer, or at very least using the manufacturers designated and/or proprietary systems. A PC is generative while iPods, TiVo's, Wii's, etc., are not. There are some good reasons - security and user simplicity primarily - why these devices are tethered, not generative. But Zittrain warns that as the Internet becomes less and less generative, innovation and freedom of speech will suffer.

Reading the book on my way back from the GV summit I wondered:  if the Internet becomes less generative just as growing numbers of people in the developing world are connecting to it, what does that mean? Will indigenous people in Bolivia and teenagers in Malawi be deprived of the chance to shape the future of global communications to the same extent that college kids in California and Finland were able to do? If this is a real concern (which I think it is, the more I think about it), what do we do to make sure that generativity is preserved in the next generation of Internet-connected devices (largely mobile phones and set-top boxes, most likely)? At least for enough of those devices that people in the developing world will have the chance to innovate and shape communications technologies to their own community needs to the extent that Westerners have shaped technology to theirs?

Zittrain also talked a bit about generativity as an organizing principle, with Wikipedia once again as the prime example. This got me thinking about Global Voices and the extent to which GV is also a generative organization. Traditional news organizations are non-generative for the most part: changes in the way things are done generally are not due to initiative taken by reporters in far-flung bureaus: you can suggest changes but the policy decisions have to be made at the center then implemented downward - and substantial reforms happen very slowly, usually with great organizational resistance. GV is I think probably less generative than Wikipedia the way it's currently run, but still a lot more generative than a traditional news organization. Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, and especially Lingua all arose from activities that bloggers in our networks saw the need for and were taking it upon themselves to do, long before GV created formal platforms for these activities. Since we are a largely volunteer-driven organization with only a couple full-time staffers, a couple dozen part-timers who are really working for love more than money and a couple hundred volunteers, we can't make any major policy decision about structure or funding without first gaining consensus from the community.  One might argue that this slows down executive decision-making, but on the other hand, if our community doesn't agree with a decision they'll stop contributing and GV will cease to exist anyway - like Wikipedia our volunteers are not tied to us by salary and employment contracts. But is GV generative enough? Are we enabling enough innovation at the edges and are we enabling new ideas that come from far-flung volunteers to get support and be implemented if the community agrees that they're worth implementing? I don't know the answer. I hope some of our editors and volunteers will let me know what they think.

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Footnote: To be clear, I take zero credit for the success of the Budapest summit, as I had very little to do with the planning other than a bit of fundraising and a bit of brainstorming early on. Most of the credit goes to Georgia Popplewell, Sami Ben Gharbia, Solana Larsen, and David Sasaki, not only for the awe-inspiring public program, and an advocacy workshop before the public summit, but also for two days of "internal" brainstorming meetings for people who contribute directly to the various GV projects. The meetings were so energetic that even cynics lost some of their cynicism. But the real magic came from all of our community members, just by being there and being themselves. It's not hard to have a great meeting when you bring together some of the most articulate people from around the planet who are generally not on the conference circuit, and thus have new things to say and brand new perspectives that you've never heard before!

Global Voices praised in State of the News Media 2007

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its massive annual report, State of the News Media 2007: An Annual Report on American Journalism. If you are interested in the future of journalism anywhere, this report is a must-read. I'm going to write something longer in the coming days - both on this blog and elsewhere - with my take-aways from that report and some other recent reports that help us get a grips on what journalists and news organizations are and aren't doing to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

But first things first.

I must pay tribute to the amazing group of people who run Global Voices.

As a result of their creativity, energy, and hard work GV was praised by this year's report one of the most "interesting experiments in new journalism" and scored as one of four "High Achievers" in an analysis of a broad range of news sites (broadly defined) including the NYT, Washingtonpost, CNN, Daily Kos, Digg, and many others.

The narrative overview of the entire report begins by stating that "The pace of change has accelerated" in the news business. It goes on to describe this rapid change, the sense of uncertainty at many news organizations. It also affirms that "traditional journalism is not, as some suggest, becoming irrelevant." A statement with which I fully agree. But it points out that professional journalists have been slow to adapt:

...But practicing journalism has become far more difficult and demands new vision. Journalism is becoming a smaller part of people’s information mix. The press is no longer gatekeeper over what the public knows.

Journalists have reacted relatively slowly. They are only now beginning to re-imagine their role. Their companies failed to see “search” as a kind of journalism. Their industry has spent comparatively little on R&D. They have been tentative about pressing for new economic models, and that has left them fearful and defensive. Some of the most interesting experiments in new journalism continue to come from outside the profession — sites such as Global Voices, which mixes approved volunteer “reporters” from around the world with professional editors.

(Emphasis added.)

The report's Digital Journalism section evaluates 38 websites according to the following five criteria: user customization, user participation, use of multimedia, site depth, editorial branding, and revenue streams.   Global Voices came out as one of only four "High Achievers." The report says:

Only a few of the sites studied excelled across more than two of the content areas we studied. They might be called High Achievers, sites that scored in the highest possible tier for at least three of the five content areas.

Only four of the sites qualified, and they had little in common beyond the breadth of what they offered. They were a network TV site (CBS), a newspaper (Washington Post), a British television and radio operation (BBC) and an international citizen media site (Global Voices).

And what did these sites emphasize? All of them scored highly for the originality of their content. All of them also scored highly for the extent to which they allowed users to customize the content, to make the sites their own or make the content mobile. None of them, interestingly, scored particularly well at allowing users to participate. Only two, CBS News and the Washington Post, involved a lot of multimedia components.

(Emphasis added.)

I must point out that the main reason why GV shines, in my view, is that there are so many thousands of bloggers out there around the world with things to say and much to teach us - but who have no other way of being found easily by a broader audience. Global Voices is in many ways a no-brainer, just putting a bit of organized energy and some Web2.0 talent towards amplifying the amazing work that is already being done out there.

Here is the report's full analysis of GV (alphabetically, in between Foxnews.com and Google News):

Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonline.org )

Of all the Web sites we examined, Global Voices was in many ways the least conventional. The end result was that it scored high in several of the areas we measured. It was the only citizen media site that would fit our definition of a high achiever, a site that earned top marks in three of five content areas.

The site is non-profit, with an emphasis on relating information that the staff editors find interesting, not on providing the top news of the hour (or minute or day).

But Global Voices takes a unique four-step approach to identifying what is interesting. First, rather than searching stories from mainstream news outlets, editors cull through a vast number of blogs from around the world. The editors, who themselves are located across the globe, then decide which postings are worth passing on. Next, they add their own comments or background information to put the blog entries in context. Finally, when necessary, entries are translated into English, often by a different “language” editor.

Take, for example, January 10. In the afternoon the lead was “Philippine free press under attack.” The entry featured a lead-in by an editor noting that the Philippine press has been “one of the freest in the world” since Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, but reporting that the current first family “is harassing journalists by filing libel cases” against them. The post then ran blurbs from the Pinoy Press and the site Freedom Watch. The next post used the same approach to look at the Iraqi government’s efforts to register bloggers.

In our inventory, the site scored well, in the top tier, on customization. While its home page could not be modified by users, there were many RSS and podcast options available to users.

Global Voices was also one of only three sites studied to score in the top tier for depth. It did well because of the large number of stories it grouped together in packages and the archive it included.

The site also earned top marks for the degree to which it was offering a unique brand in which its own editorial process and judgment was emphasized. With thestories chosen by paid editors and with content that came from wholly staff, even when citing other sources, it exercised significant editorial quality control. The banner across the top of the page pays tribute to its many authors. The page’s logo and name sit next to the headshots of four bloggers, each one linking a short bio and a compilation of that blogger’s work. Each post then has the link to the original blog as well as a tag-line of the Global Voices editor. And running down a side column is the list of blog authors and the number of posts each has contributed to date.

The site also scored well, in the second tier, for user participation. It did not offer live discussion and interactive polls, two of the more controversial elements of web participation. But it contained a good deal of opportunity for users interact. In addition to the editorial choices, user content — through a user-based blog — is a big part of this site. At the end of each piece users are invited to “Start the conversation” by posting comments, which are moderated by site editors.

The one content area where this remarkably well rounded site did not stand out is for multimedia. This site is about words, 95% of the content available from the home page was narrative.

The site’s score for revenue streams placed it in the bottom tier as well – perhaps not surprising since it is a non-profit.

The strongest impression one has when visiting this site, however, is its international feel. The largest box of text is a list of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Next to that is a thinner blue box with a list of topics ranging from Arts & Culture to Governance to History to Youth. Under that is a slim one-line search box that runs the width of the page.

Global Voices is not a site to visit to get the latest headlines or find out what the media are talking about. But it shines a bright light on issues the big media often pass by.

User participation and multimedia are two things the GV team is working to improve. We are putting the finishing touches on a major site redesign which we hope will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

Finally, I cannot end this post without a hats off to Boris Anthony, GV's information architect, whose genius with RSS feeds, blogging software, and Web2.0 in general is the reason we got such high marks for customization and depth. He is assisted by the young and sharp Jeremy Clarke and several others who help them from time to time. All of them could be making a lot more money working on for-profit ventures. But fortunately for everybody, they place high value on the opportunity to innovate and to be part of media history.

Reuters Africa: breaking new ground

Reuters has taken an important and trend-setting step with Reuters Africa.

It is important in several ways. First, it demonstrates Reuters' commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story -  to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media.

As Reuters Africa editor John Chiahemen told The Guardian: "We want to show that Africa can be covered as a business story, not just a disaster story. While it is true that African information is available from other sources, there is no single media I know that has the breadth of content Reuters has available."

A press release elaborates further:

Reuters Africa features an interactive map to access local Reuters news across the continent, organized by country. Reuters Africa also provides extensive economic, business and financial news and data, including stock and currency market data and company information, from around the continent. Reflecting the importance of commodities to many African economies, the site features exclusive online content on metals and mining, energy and oil, and agricultural commodities.

This is important. My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman has written a great deal about how the global English-language media (and entertainment industry) needs to start treating Africa like a place and an opportunity - not just a crisis. In his work on global media attention, he shows how Africa gets the least amount of media attention than anywhere  else (nobody is too surprised at this), but more interestingly he also argues (original pdf article here) that there is a connection between this lack of global media attention and the inability of businesses and policymakers in Western developed nations to take African countries seriously as destinations for investment and business.

Is China's growing business influence in Africa now an added incentive for Western news organizations to take Africa seriously as a business story? At any rate, Reuters deserves kudos for taking the lead.

Second, Reuters Africa extends the news agency's commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do. Global Voices Managing Editor Rachel Rawlins, who used to work as a correspondent in Africa for the BBC writes:

It’s frequently depressing reading accounts of Africa in the mainstream media. Doubly so, in fact. Firstly because what is defined as worthy of reporting is, well, depressing. And secondly because it so seldom engages with the complex and vibrant reality of the continent in all its massive diversity, preferring instead to deal in simplistic stereotypes.

(Disclosure: Reuters is the main funder for Global Voices which I co-founded so there is a reason I'm paying a great deal of attention to its site and its significance - but I'd like to believe that I'd find it significant even if I wasn't connected to GV, and that many people who aren't will.  If you think I'm completely full of it please hit the comments section and let me know - nobody has ever hesitated in the past!)

As  you'll see from the screenshot that Rachel took from the Uganda page of Reuters Africa, each country page not only includes news headlines but also the Global Voices Uganda feed, pointing to blog posts coming from Uganda, selected by people like our amazing Africa editor Ndesanjo Macha.

   

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a great post titled Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media in which he interviews Reuters president Chris Ahearn on why his company has begun to take blogs seriously. My favorite quote: "last I checked, the business we’re in is to inform people."

Yup, and the bloggers we link to on Global Voices are as serious about doing that as journalists are.

Two more key quotes:

...as we start to arm the quote-unquote mainstream with the same tools as journalists, editors and reporters have, there’s an interesting asymmetry here. I talk to a lot of people who say, ‘How come blogging software seems to be a richer news-telling experience than some of the tools we put into journalists’ hands?’ Interesting dynamic, that.

and:

The cost of newsgathering has plummeted. How do we take that and deploy more resources into newsgathering and news presentation? Why is it that right now, at a time when the world is getting more difficult to understand based on everything that’s happening are news organizations pulling out of so many places around the world? Why?

It's worth reading the whole post to get a further glimpse into Chris' vision of where the industry is going, and why news organizations should recognize that we are entering a "golden age" for journalism - not leaving one.

In the same post Mark also interviewed Ethan, who pointed out there's a lot more potential synergy between Reuters journalism and Global Voices' global community of bloggers that so far has not been explored:

There’s a rising tone of anxiety and despair in the Zimbabwean blogosphere, for instance, but it won’t ‘break’ as a story unless the civil service strike goes off tomorrow and sparks a violent government response,” Zuckerman said via email. “In a perfect world, I think we’d find a way to help our friends at Reuters anticipate stories that might break based on our coverage — that hasn’t happened as much as I’d like.

Perhaps that will be next.  But as Rachel points out in her post on Global Voices, the blogosphere  has a long way to go as well:

This is a great step forward, but there’s still a long way to go. There are large and exciting blogging communities in several countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya but there are other areas where coverage is very sparse and still others, such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, where online expression is severely curtailed by the government.

We hope that the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left unheard but also encourages others to join the conversation and brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but cannot.

Amen sister.

Hong Kong bloggers, the SCMP, and influence on the Web

There is an interesting discussion taking place in the blogosphere about who first broke the news to the English-reading world of the protest letter against Sina.com written by several prominent Chinese lawyer-bloggers, who brought attention to it, how and why.  Here is a full chronology of my actions during the time period in question, to clear up any misunderstandings about what I did or didn't do, when, or why:

• Letters From China blogged an excerpt on Friday. (Regrettably I did not see it.)
• Meanwhile over the weekend I received links to the Chinese original from several list-servs I am on.
• I see the story on Sunday morning in the South China Morning Post as I'm going out the door for a hike. I make a mental note to find a translation of the full letter - or translate it myself if necessary - later that evening.
• Unfortunately I couldn't blog the original SCMP story because it's password-protected for paying subscribers only, and if I copy and paste the whole thing they could go after me for copyright violation. So when I get home that evening I go online to see if I can find an online version of the SCMP story or whether the news agencies have picked it up. The  wires had not picked it up. Then I checked the Asia Media site because they often re-run SCMP stories on a site that is freely accessible and can be blogged. However, it was still Sunday morning on the U.S. West Coast where that website is based and while eventually they did post the article, they hadn't at the time I was looking for it. And anyway, it didn't include the full translation.
• I look on my Skype buddy list and see Roland online. I figure I might as well ask him whether he is planning to translate the lawyers' letter so that I won't be duplicating his (faster and better) efforts. So I drop him a line. (Roland has since reproduced our exchange on his blog so you can read it there if you are interested in the detail.)
• I do some other things then check back a couple hours later. Lo and behold, Roland has indeed posted a translation.
• At 12:45am  Monday morning, I publish a post about the letter on my blog.
• The next day I exchange e-mails with BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin, with whom I communicate from time to time on free speech issues. I had originally e-mailed her about Isaac's letter to Google and she says she's going to write a post about it. I thank her and give her the link to my post about the lawyer letter as well, since it's a related issue.
• Xeni does a big post about the lawyer letter and Isaac's letter. I am thrilled that she has helped bring attention to the views of the lawyers and of Isaac, and that I have managed to play a useful role thanks to the help of many others.

A discussion then ensues in the comments section of Letters from China about who had brought the story to the attention of the English-speaking world, and the role that Roland may or may not have played. Daai Tou Laam wrote a post titled SCMP Gets It Before ESWN to set the public record straight. Then Roland published our Skype chat transcript to clear the air on his side.

Hopefully this post serves to clear the air even further, as I am certainly not taking credit for anything in particular, other than being a conduit. I don't pay attention to my blog's traffic numbers. I just felt it was important to bring more attention to that letter by the lawyers (and to Isaac's open letter to Google). I had the ability to do so, thus I did.

This entire sequence of events highlights why it is such a bad strategy for a newspaper like the SCMP to put its content behind a paid firewall.

As LfC pointed out in his comments thread, the SCMP has made itself irrelevant in the global blogosphere:

... SCMP is a gross failure on the web. It requires subscription; its articles cannot be linked to; nor can they be googled! How many subscribers does SCMP have?

ESWN is open to all and linkable. Rebecca MacKinnon apparently picked up the protest from Mr Soong. So did the Time Blog. Boing Boing then stepped in. They invariably point to ESWN’s translation and comment.

It's true that the SCMP played a significant role in the story getting out. But they get little credit and no traffic to their website as a result of their role - which if I was them I would consider unfortunate.

We do know, however, thanks to an e-mail received by one of my students, (and a phone conversation conducted by another) that the SCMP is planning a big redesign.

I hope the SCMP's revamp includes opening up their site so that their hard-working journalists will be able to gain the same global relevance and impact that some Hong Kong bloggers have achieved singlehandedly with no marketing departments.

Joining the worldwide online conversation - from which they have so far excluded themselves - is good for the SCMP's business and brand in the long run, I believe. Especially since, as I understand, their online paid subscriptions have hit a plateau and are not expected to grow substantially.

Another lesson learned from this whole episode: Obviously I need to re-arrange my feed reader and move LfC's blog up to a more obvious position :) 

Bahraini and Malaysian bloggers face the courts

Bahraini blogger Mahmood has never been one to shy away from criticizing his government. Today he announced that Bahrain's minister of municipalities and agriculture is moving ahead with a libel case against him.   The blog post in question, from 22nd December, was titled "First ministerial brainfart of the season," and posted under the special category of his blog labeled "brain farts" (a most entertaining page indeed). The post's content, while hard-hitting, is not dissimilar to things one frequently sees on sharp-witted political blogs around the world. Mahmood is raring for a fight and says:

I didn’t want this as I still feel that it is a frivolous case at best, which now will probably turn into a benchmark that will further sully Bahrain’s reputation internationally. You can be sure that this case will now be included in all the press indicies for 2007 as a black spot against this country, thanks to a minister who cannot take criticism.

Meanwhile Malaysian blogger Jeff Ooi, who has been involved with Global Voices from the very beginning and who I consider a friend, is prevented from writing on his blog or speaking directly about anything related to the defamation lawsuit for which he and fellow Malaysian blogger Rocky are being taken to court in early March. As a fellow blogger writes:

Whether agree to what Jeff and Rocky blog about or not, I certainly don’t want to lose my last source of local issue in Malaysia, as I’ve given up mainstream media since a long time ago. This is a line I’m willing to help defend.

Support in the Malaysian blogosphere includes a campaign  “Walk With Us,” Bloggers United, and web banners you can put on your site. Opposition leader Dr. Lim Kit Siang wrote on his blog:

There must be space on the blogosphere however for free and fair comment, which is anathema in the mainstream media where important national issues and prominent personalities are concerned.

The NSTP defamation suits will have a chilling effect on freedom of bloggers and citizen journalists as litigation is so expensive that its costs will cripple and paralyse the ordinary individual blogger, making no contribution whatsoever to a healthy process to delineate and define the legal rights of bloggers and citizen journalists.

As these are the first two cases of Malaysian bloggers being sued for defamation, it will have far-reaching consequences for the healthy, mature and democratic growth for free speech and expression, not only on the Internet but in the country as a whole.

Without going into the merits or demerits of the defamation proceedings launched by NSTP, which will be sub judice, bloggers and all concerned about human rights should rally behind the two bloggers to ensure firstly, that there is a level playing field in the defamation proceedings particularly in terms of financial resources and capabilities, and secondly, that the legal rights of bloggers and citizen journalists are properly developed and entrenched in keeping with the imperatives of an information society and knowledge economy which Malaysia aspires to become.

In many countries where the news media is neutered or cowed for various reasons, blogospheres have been emerging as influential spaces for citizens to exchange unvarnished perspectives.  Are these spaces going to have concrete poured into them until the media landscapes of countries like Bahrain and Malaysia go back to the way they were in the good old pre-blog days? That is what some officials seem to be hoping. Good luck to them..

Radio Open Source on the end of foreign correspondence

Radio Open Source ("the blog with the radio show") hosted by Chris Lydon aired an excellent show on Monday titled The End of the Foreign Correspondent - I just listened to it today as a podcast. If you're interested at all in the future of global journalism, it's well worth your while.

The show appears to have been inspired at least in part by Ethan Zuckerman's blog post about the extinction of foreign correspondents, in reaction to a paper on the same subject by journalist Jill Carroll. Also note that Ethan wrote another post on Monday just before the show with more observations about American news and information priorities. I added my own reactions to Carroll's paper and Ethan's original post, which led to some interesting comments by Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune, veteran journalist Ellen Hume and others, which (Thomas tells me) led to Thomas being invited as a guest on the show. In the comments thread of a further follow up post that I wrote a couple days later, Thomas shared more insights to the challenges that reporters face when trying to make the world interesting and relevant to different audiences - and to their editors.

There was much discussion on Monday's show about whether bloggers might be replacing foreign correspondents to some extent. It was also pointed out that even though the mainstream U.S. media supports fewer reporters living and reporting around the world than ever before, thanks to the Internet Americans have more access to more news from around the world than ever before - if they choose to seek it out. And that, of course, is the problem. Putting it out there isn't enough to make people care, especially if they also have to spend too much time sifting through it. Which is where the professional journalist and editor comes in - not only finding ways to tell stories that audiences can relate to, but also curating and helping people sift through the flood of information and picking out the stuff that's likely to be relevant and interesting to them. Thomas spoke about how it is his job to spend hours each day following all kinds of online sources that most people who aren't full-time journalists simply don't have the time to follow. So in addition to doing his original reporting and writing, he is also acting as a filter of information for people who trust his judgment.

Another insightful guest on the show was Jon Sawyer of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The Pulitzer Center is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is "to promote in-depth coverage of international affairs, focusing on topics that have been under-reported, mis-reported - or not reported at all." The Center accepts proposals from journalists who want to cover in-depth global stories but whose news organizations don't have the funds to support the reporting of these stories - or from freelancers who simply wouldn't have the financial backing to do these stories otherwise. When they support the work of freelancers, they also help to "sell" the finished story to various news organizations.

It is interesting that the philanthropic sector is stepping up to support serious international reporting that plays a role in helping the public understand policy issues, but which simply isn't getting covered by for-profit news companies. I hope that the Pulitzer Center will be the first of many such initiatives. Perhaps if we want quality global journalism to survive and thrive, those of us who believe in its importance who have a little extra cash should step up and help support it via non-profit organizations like these - especially if our commercial news brands continue to disappoint when it comes to informing us about global events.

Initiatives like the Pulitzer Center could also help change the relationship between journalists and news companies. It may become easier for journalists to survive as independent freelancers. Global correspondents may decide in growing numbers that they can no longer reliably depend for their livelihoods on a single news organization and on the business decisions being made by that news organization's corporate board. Increasingly, people no longer need to work under the cover of a company's "brand" and reputation in order to do successful journalism. People will discover in growing numbers that they are better off building their own individual journalistic "brands" and reputations and relying on themselves, working with many different news organizations but never putting all eggs in one fickle basket. Perhaps one way to save global correspondence (note I refuse to use the word "foreign") would be to develop consortia of largely independent journalists, via which people could find ways to access seed funding from non-profit as well as for-profit sources for their reporting ventures and projects.

Global journalism, hiring, firing, and the Internet

This post is in reaction primarily to these works:

"Goodbye Gutenberg," Nieman Reports, Winter 2006 Issue 

Jill Caroll, "Foreign News Coverage: The U.S. Media's Undervalued Asset," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Working Paper Series, Fall 2006, #D-39 (downloadable as PDF here). (NOTE: Jill's paper has been taken down temporarily from the Shorenstein website due to several errors. I am told that they will put it back up when the errors have been corrected.)

Ethan Zuckerman, "Are foreign correspondents going extinct? Or just changing their stripes?," My Heart's in Accra, Jan 26, 2007.

Michael Hirschorn, "Get Me Rewrite: A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006 issue.

I was making my way through the latest issue of Nieman Reports with its cornucopia of articles about how the Internet is changing journalism - and that the change can be for the good if we make it so - when my friend Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very thoughtful post reacting to Jill Caroll's academic paper defending foreign news coverage.

(Jill as you recall was the freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor who was held hostage in Iraq - making me pause in a moment of deep respect before venturing to criticize anything she has to say.)

Unfortunately the Boston Globe was not listening to Jill's arguments: that foreign news coverage is highly valued by newspaper readers; it and builds trust, credibility, and uniqueness that can't easily be gained in other ways; and that foreign news is actually good value when you consider these factors. A friend of mine is one of the four remaining Globe correspondents being called home from overseas. It is truly depressing for a person who has spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent to be faced with a job market in which there are fewer and fewer opportunities.

But are newspapers going to be talked into reversing this epidemic of foreign bureau closures?  Not likely. Unless the entire industry - including individual journalists themselves - start thinking radically outside the box.

Jill offers two suggestions to make foreign correspondence more affordable and justifiable to newspapers:  use more freelancers rather than setting up full-time bureaus with full-time staffs (Jill herself was a freelancer in the Middle East), and do more foreign stories with local angles.

Ethan is surprised that Jill did not address the role of news agencies in any detail. He also points out that she doesn't really deal with the Internet much other than to say that it has hurt circulation and advertising revenues. Ethan's point about the web and foreign news has mainly to do with the potential of citizen media, and how news organizations should be thinking about how to tap the power of thousands of talented and articulate bloggers around the world.

But the challenges and opportunities of the Internet go beyond that - as the many contributors to Goodbye Gutenberg discuss.

Phillip Meyer writes: "It is still possible to save journalism, but maybe not journalism as we know it." One could substitute "foreign correspondence" for "journalism" in that sentence.

As a teacher of journalism in an age where j-schools also need to reinvent themselves to remain relevant, I was particularly struck by the following passage by Roanoke Times editor Michael Riley about how news companies need to rethink themselves:

"No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world.  A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work."

If news organizations are going to do a better job at covering international news in original ways and reverse recent trends, people wanting careers covering global stories are going to have to reinvent themselves as much as their employers must.  So must editors who handle international news, if they want to save their own jobs. This is just reality.

Here are a few directions such innovations might take. None of these ideas are mine alone.

- Try harder not to duplicate agency and each other's coverage. In the Internet age when everybody is checking Google and Yahoo for their breaking news anyway (or Reuters and Bloomberg if they work in finance), people are still spending way too much time duplicating stories that the agencies are covering - or that all the other foreign correspondents are covering. Editors have got to allow reporters to break away from the pack and do truly original reporting that readers won't find anywhere else, and which they will come to value and miss if it's absent. Reporters need to push harder to do such stories even when editors are calling up and saying "Reuters [or the NYT, or CNN or whoever] reported xxx can you file something on it?" 

- Focus on global stories that have clear and direct relevance to your core home audience, and make the connection much more clear.  My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans. Sure, there's international news coverage, but even for those who read and watch it, the connection to people's daily lives is not very clear or well understood. This I believe is partially the fault of how news organizations structure their coverage. There is almost no foreign news story that doesn't have a U.S. domestic angle and almost no U.S. domestic story (especially anything economic or business related) that doesn't have international angles to it. Maybe rather than getting rid of foreign news reporters what we really need to eliminate are the separate sections of the newspapers and newscasts that silo foreign news into a category of topics that are distant and strange. The rest of the world is not distant and strange at all. It reaches into your kitchen and your bedroom daily. We need to do a better job of covering the world as the interconnected place it truly is. If we do that properly, I believe having reporters overseas will seem much more indispensable than it does today.

- Create communities of conversation around your reporters. This idea was articulated well by Michael Hirschorn in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He sees one possible future in which star reporters are better off as freelancers:

It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

The solution he proposes: "Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms." 

In this scenario played out, some readers who are serious Friedman fans would get their New York Times content primarily via Times headline feeds running through Friedman's blog - rather than the Times' front page. There on the blog they would discuss his stories with him and each other, and share recommendations for other journalism by other people.

Under this model, I should think, a news organization has real incentives to support such communities of conversation around its star foreign correspondents, whose talents can be better showcased and who can help be a "draw" for the news organization's other content. If the Christian Science Monitor had Jill Carroll doing exactly that, would more people wind up reading the CSM more faithfully? A certain segment of news junkies like me probably would.

- Involve local immigrant communities and diasporas. This is something that Doug McGill - a former foreign correspondent now in Minnesota - has been going on about for some time: the need for more "glocal" reporting that ties local communities to the broader world. One way to do this is for local newspapers to get a better grip on where the ethnic immigrant communities in their city come from and do a better job at covering those countries, with a special emphasis on stories that span between hometown and homeland. How many U.S. cities with large Ethiopian or Vietnamese populations do a decent job at covering those countries? How well do Hong Kong papers cover the global Hong Kong diaspora? This doesn't necessarily mean opening lots of new bureaus. By utilizing a smart combination of freelancers and readers/viewers who may not be professional journalists but who have stories to tell and things to say that are relevant to your audience, one can bring a great deal more global coverage into the mix - coverage of things that your local community wants and needs to know.

- Engage with citizen media. The Reuters partnership with Global Voices, the BBC's increasingly active engagement with bloggers, and many other initiatives are showing how professional reporting and citizen media can complement each other well. As the Washington Post has found, displaying the blog posts that are linking to your stories helps spread a web of global conversation to your journalism and builds readership and audience loyalty. Then there is a modified OhMyNews model in which editors can work with volunteer citizen-reporters in places where no professional freelancers are available - or on specialized topics they're not qualified to cover.

The web enables all of these things in ways that simply weren't possible before. As Jon Palferman writes: "Given its transformative capacity, we can regard the Web as a problem or we can see it as a potential solution to a broader problem that we would have had to face anyway."

What does all of this mean for young people planning to enter the profession? I think it means that there still are opportunities for young people to go into international news - and for not so young foreign correspondents to re-invent their careers. But we can't expect that things will ever go back to the way they were, or that people ten years from now can have the same careers that some of us had ten years ago (or in some cases even one or two years ago). But if you're not afraid of the web, have an open mind and are ready to innovate, I believe the opportunities will be there - if you help create them.

China's Starbucks-blogger-gate: Hype and reality.

This morning I was invited to appear on RTHK3's "Backchat" show to comment on the blogger-driven firestorm about whether Starbucks should have been allowed in the Forbidden City and whether it should stay. (The show's audio will eventually be archived here.)

The firestorm was started by Rui Chenggang, a star anchor on Chinese Central Television (CCTV)'s English-language service, who also writes a blog on Sina.com - one of China's largest blogging platforms - as well as on CCTV's blog site. On January 12th he wrote a post arguing that Starbucks should leave the Forbidden City. Roland Soong translated it on ESWN here.

The story - largely framed as grassroots cyber-nationalism and an example of the newfound power of Chinese "netizens" - has been lapped up by newspapers across the globe. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece late last week titled How blogging can galvanize China (thanks to Gen for the link to a freely available version on post-gazette.com).  It quotes Rui as saying: "Blogging is giving ordinary grass-roots Chinese people a chance to express themselves."

Let's keep a few things in perspective. Rui is no "ordinary grass-roots Chinese person." I first met him not in Beijing but in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. Unlike most "grass-roots" people he gets invited to speak at international meetings where he rubs shoulders with CEO's. As a very smart, sophisticated, and globally minded guy, Rui can talk to powerful people in their own language and they bother to answer his e-mails.

Rui is one of several relatively young and increasingly influential Chinese journalists who write popular blogs - and whose popularity and influence has increased thanks to their blogs. Let's call them "China's A-list Journo-bloggers," shall we? (Suggestions for some other term are welcome..)

His Starbucks blog post got the attention it did because of his position, because it contained original information about a direct conversation with a global CEO, and because the editors of Sina.com chose to highlight that blog post prominently on their front page. My friend Roland Soong says he told a journalist who called him for comment about the story that the power in this situation lies as much with anonymous editors at Sina.com who giveth influence and taketh away. (The journalist did not end up quoting Roland on this point.)

Another influential Chinese A-List Journo-blogger, "Rose" Luqiu Luwei of Phoenix TV, writes a blog in Chinese called Rose Garden. She has just published an article in the latest issue of the journalism journal Nieman Reports titled Blogging News in China that helps to provide  more context to the Chinese Journo-blogger phenomenon.  Her blog is also on Sina.com. She started it after a friend who works at Sina urged her to do so. Rose's blog, with accounts of her foreign travels to major world events as a Phoenix TV reporter and interviews with world leaders, quickly became a hit with the Sina.com readership - precisely because her life is so unlike that of the ordinary "grass roots." Her article explains why in more detail.

Rose also points out that three articles she posted on her blog were taken down because something about them was too sensitive - she declines to specify exactly what. Her piece concludes:

We are left to wonder whether in the near future China will allow citizen-journalism Web enterprises like Korea's OhMyNews to exist. If so, Chinese people would have more access to information about what is happening in their country and in the world. However, the restrictive changes Chinese officials recently instituted for the news media—both domestic and foreign—indicate they fear the power and the influence of the Internet.

Read the original article in full - it is fascinating and  you'll learn a lot - but my point is this: the Starbucks-blogger-gate is not about how anybody in China can go on the Internet and bring about widespread public debate and even provoke a policy change. What is really happening is that certain people who are already relatively successful and famous can use the Internet to galvanize public sentiment to bring about change in ways that weren't possible before.

That in itself is a big step forward, but as Rose's experience shows, her power, or Rui Chenggang's, or any other Chinese journo-blogger's power is limited to issues that the Chinese blog-hosting companies and blog site editors feel: a) will likely be appealing to large numbers of readers and thus generate traffic and discussion on their service; and b) won't get their companies in trouble with the authorities. 

One other thing to keep in mind with this story is that in some quarters Rui Chenggang is being unfairly lumped in with China's head-banging anti-foreign nationalists - mainly because some such people have been commenting enthusiastically on his blog and citing him as a champion. Rui himself has made it clear (see a follow up post "What am I really trying to do?") that he is a globalist and he is not complaining about Starbucks in the Forbidden City because he is anti-foreign. Rather he is complaining about the rampant commercialism by the authorities who run China's national monuments more generally, and thinks that allowing tacky displays of commercial branding at China's World Heritage Sites is unbecoming of a people who ought to be proud of their heritage. His goal, it appears, is actually to provoke a total rethink about the way such sites are managed.

To highlight Rui's globalist perspective, the indefatigable Roland has translated a post that Rui wrote on September 30, 2006 titled An essay about Japan that every Chinese person ought to read. It is a call for Sino-Japanese friendship. It is also an appeal for young Chinese to stop going around with historical chips on their shoulders and rather to "look at Japan, America and the world in a multi-dimensional, diversified, rational and self-confident manner."

Newspapers get bad grades for innovation

This chart comes from the N2 Newspaper Next report recently issued by the American Press Institute (click to enlarge).

I'm sitting at a conference on the future of news, sponsored by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, where Scott Anthony, who leads the Newspaper Next project is giving a presentation about the report. (Click here for a live webcast of the conference. I'll be on a panel with this afternoon.)

I agree with many of the things Scott has to say: newspapers are not devoting nearly enough resources to innovation, many are not thinking sufficiently outside the box in order to reinvent themselves in the internet age. The report - and Scott's presentation - contains a great deal of useful analysis about the lack of innovation in the newspaper industry today, with many ideas for how newspapers can innovate, reach new "audiences," and fill new and un-filled needs of consumers.

But. However. I'm sitting next to Jeff Jarvis listening to all this, and we are shaking our heads.  While acknowledging the report is a good start, Jeff recently wrote: "the task force that made this report and many of the projects that come out of it are still insular, with very little effort to get new voices, fresh blood."

The thing is,  this report still views news - and journalism - as a linear process. The news organization speaks, and the "consumer" and "audiences" receive happily - and even more happily when the newspaper has innovated and figured out how to meet their information needs better. What they miss completely is that media has now gone non-linear. On the Live Web, news has the potential to be a  genuine conversation with citizens and communities. How do you welcome the members of your community into the conversation - to participate in the civic discourse? That should be the central question.

In the Q&A Jeff put it more sharply, pointing out that the N2 report still applies the "old model of consumer.. sitting with our heads back consuming content and crapping cash." [Clarification: Jeff points out he was quoting Doc Searls there.]

News organizations have got to start treating people - fellow citizens - as equals in a conversation about public affairs. The web makes that possible. It's in the public interest and it's how news organizations can win over (or regain) the public's respect.

With trust and respect, business models will follow. Without trust and respect, everything else is ultimately a waste of time - at least if your goal is journalism, not just infotainment and marketing.

(NOTE that the N2 report is available in PDF only, and they require that you fill out a form with your personal info in order to get the PDF. What's more, the page containing the direct link to the PDF says: ("PLEASE DO NOT PUBLISH OR DISTRIBUTE THIS LINK." How un-blogger friendly is that? It demonstrates that they are treating you as a consumer who should gratefully receive their wisdom rather than as an equal partner in a conversation. They're more interested in getting your information for marketing purposes than in maximizing the spread of their ideas - or in engaging in a conversation with  you about their ideas.)