I've been called by several reporters today. It appears that both the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal will be doing stories about this week's Webcred conference. Both stories are likely to come out on Friday. The reporters have been asking similar questions. They are questions a lot of people have also been asking on the web. Over the weekend I was trying to meet a writing deadline and deal with a lot of logistical details for the conference, and thus didn't have a chance to sit down and write a long post addressing all the questions and criticisms in a systematic way. So here, belatedly, is my F.A.Q. on the origins of and thinking behind Webcred. Mind you, this is purely my own version of reality. Other organizers may have other versions of reality, or perspectives, or goals, which may differ slightly from my own. However the basic motivaitons for holding the conference are shared by all the organizers.
Q: Where did the idea for this conference come from and why are you having it?
It's a long, long, long story but you asked. Here goes....
About a year ago I came to Harvard. I was taking a 5-month leave from my job as CNN's Tokyo Bureau Chief and correspondent to do a one-semester fellowship at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. In the year leading up to my leave of absence I had developed a fascination with blogs (thanks initially to Joi Ito) and decided to spend the semester exploring what blogs mean for journalism, and how journalists might use blogs to do better journalism and have a more interactive relationship with the public. So I started blogging: a crude open notebook to which I posted erratically called Techjournalism (now discontinued and reborn as RConversation) and my main experiment, North Korea zone, a blog focused on discussion and information exchange about North Korea. I ended up writing a long paper on my experiences blogging about North Korea and why I thought blogging was an exciting new tool with major implications for journalism.
In the middle of all this, I decided to quit CNN after working for them (mainly in China and Japan) for over a decade. There were many reasons for this, some of which I wrote about here. But my most fundamental reason for leaving was my conclusion that American TV news is no longer the place to be if you are serious about doing journalism in service of the public interest. I became a journalist in the first place because I believe, as Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel put it so well in their book The Elements of Journalism : "the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing." I believe that most of America's mainstream media no longer serves this purpose as its primary goal. Those of us who care about the profession must either help restore journalism to its original purposes find alternatives. I was inspired by Dan Gillmor's description of how new forms of participatory media are turning old media's one-way lecture of old media into new media's two-way conversation. I wanted to be part of the future, and maybe even help shape it a little. So I resigned from CNN in March.
By then I had been spending a lot of time over at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I got to know Dave Winer and the great folks at the Berkman Thursdays blogging group who were so patient with newbies like me. I continue to learn a lot from them. I also spent a lot of time picking the brilliant brain of Ethan Zuckerman, who has done a lot of very good research on what stories the media does or doesn't pay attention to - and what blogs care and don't care about as well. Ethan hopes that blogs may help us solve the problem that our media basically ignores most parts of the world that people in Washington aren't talking about. It is a hope I share. So anyway, when I resigned from CNN, Ethan introduced me to John Palfrey, the Berkman Center's director. Palfrey asked me if I would like to be a fellow for the 2004-05 academic year. (Berkman fellowships are very loosely-structured things that pay almost nothing, but which provide an the moral support and intellectual environment from which to do some really interesting projects.)
We talked about some of the projects I might be involved with, mainly related to the future of journalism in the age of the blog. I made an observation: while the challenge of blogs to journalism was a major topic of discussion by many Berkman fellows and affiliated bloggers, the academics and journalists back at the Shorenstein Center - and at many other centers around the country that study journalism, not to mention most journalism schools - had barely heard of blogs. (Mind you this was almost a year ago now.) Nobody over there had heard of RSS, or aggregators. When I gave a presentation to these academics and journalists, projecting these things from my laptop onto a screen, peoples mouths were hanging open. There was lots of discussion taking place amongst the faculty and visiting fellows there every day about all the things that have gone wrong with American journalism and the root causes, but very little understanding of the technology that is simultaneously transforming the media landscape. I suggested to John that maybe we should try to bring these two groups together for a conversation, because there didn't seem to be much cross-fertilization, and I thought that was a shame. He agreed.
Meanwhile Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein center had become increasingly fascinated by weblogs over the course of that spring and was interested in doing some projects exploring what the blogging phenomenon might mean for the future of journalism.
I brought the two of them together. "Maybe we should do a conference," we said. January seemed like a good time. We also agreed that the most contentious issue at the intersection of blogging and journalism has to do with the problem of credibility. (Ask me more about that in a minute.)
In the fall, as we were starting to formulate plans, we were introduced to Rick Weingarten of the American Library Association's Office of Information Technology Policy. The OITP was looking to get involved in projects related to the credibility of information on the web. They had some funding. It was a natural fit. So we set up a listserv and wiki to coordinate conference planning and brainstorming between the three organizations. Webcred was born.
Q: So, why focus on credibility?
A: Mainstream media is facing credibility crisis right now. It's why I quit my job. Blogs are doing much to challenge professional journalists' credibility, and with good reason. But there are also interesting questions about credibility and blogs. These questions are increasingly important to news organizations and more and more of them start experimenting with having their journalists blog, or with linking to outside blogs. How do you maintain standards of accuracy and credibility in a conversational, largely first-person format that circumvents the editor and talks directly to the public? What happens if one of your news organization's blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting) or if a reporter puts something, un-vetted by editors on their blog? Is it enough to just put stuff out there and let your audience (no longer an audience but a community) "fact check your ass", as Jeff Jarvis would say? Or are there other things one should be keeping in mind if one wants to ensure that at the end of the day you are filling your raison d'etre as a news organization: providing the citizens of our democracy with the quality, accurate information they need to make meaningful, informed judgments about who they want to represent them, and whether their government is doing its job well? These are tough issues. Definitely worth getting a small group of people together for a day or so to discuss.
Q: How did you decide who to invite?
A: When you're doing conference-organizing-by-committee, everything is a compromise. We wanted to keep our group small, so that everybody would have a chance to talk and there would be a real give-and-take. No lectures to a big audience. The three sponsoring organizations all needed to have their own people and some project partners in the room. So that took up a bunch of seats. We all had long lists of people we wanted to invite. We started negotiating. At the end of the day all of us only got a small percentage of people invited who we really wanted to invite. On the Berkman side, that meant a bunch of bloggers we wished we could have invited weren't invited. A number of mainstream media people and academics on other peoples' lists didn't get invited either. Then we sent out invitations and some people invited in the first round responded and others didn't. Some of the non-responders included A-list bloggers. I'm not going to go into which A-listers were or weren't invited and who blew us off. I see no point in that now. Nor am I going to go into who I wanted to invite and wasn't able to. There is also no point.
Q: Are you trying to set ethical standards for all bloggers?
A: No, we definitely are not. However, we are very interested in the ethical questions surrounding the process of blogging. For instance: How much about yourself do you need to disclose (personally, financially, and politically) as an independent blogger - or as a journalist who blogs for a news organization - if you are going to be deemed credible by the public over the long run? Other questions: Is linking different than quoting? If a news organization links to an independent blogger who was blogging the tsunami but who then suddenly posts libellous photoshopped pictures of local politicians in the midst of scandalous acts, is that news organization liable? There are questions about whether a community might deem certain online (or offline) information to be "credible" even when it is not, actually true. (Large parts of the world still believe Israel's Mossad was behind the 9/11 attacks, for example.) What influences the public's decisions over what they think is or isn't credible - from mainstream media or from blogs? How much does that have to do with fact? Then there's the question of how you make money while credibly and responsibly informing the public over the long run?
These are just my favorite questions. I'm sure the other organizers and other participants have their favorite ones. If we're lucky, maybe by the end of the conference we might be able to agree which are the most important ones, and which would benefit most from further systematic examination - maybe even academic study?
Q: Why do you think your group has any authority on these issues?
A: We don't have any more authority than any other random group of people. We just happened to assemble. It would be great if more people organize more conferences and discussions on this issue. But it's not like we're passing legislation or something - although to hear some of our critics, you'd think we were! Nor are we using taxpayer money. We're just getting a group of people together, using our own funds, to yak for a couple of days. Clearly we chose to yak about a contentious issue, but I don't think the conference is as threatening as some people seem to think it is.
Q: What do you make of all the criticism?
A: A lot of people criticizing the conference have raised some very legitimate issues. It's an imperfect conference, and that's life. I haven't attended a conference anywhere that didn't have its flaws critiqued ad nauseum by half the participants. You can't please everybody.
Other people commenting on the conference blog have raised some really good questions about credibility, journalism and blogging that will definitely get incorporated into the conference discussion. We're webcasting and doing a live IRC chat so that we can get more feedback from the blogosphere during the conference.
As for the snarking well, that's life in the blogosphere. Sticks and stones. But I gotta say, this guy was really onto something. He exposed our dirty little secret over at the Berkman center:
But there are also interesting questions about credibility and blogs.
...
How do you maintain standards of accuracy and credibility in a conversational, largely first-person format that circumvents the editor and talks directly to the public?
How much about yourself do you need to disclose (personally, financially, and politically) as an independent blogger - or as a journalist who blogs for a news organization - if you are going to be deemed credible by the public over the long run?
All wonderfully valid and direct questions.
And all wonderfully valid and direct examples of why it makes the discussion makes no sense without including people who have to struggle towards credibility because they have no professional background.
Posted by: The One True b!X | January 18, 2005 at 11:04 PM
Ochone! Ochone!
Ms. MacKinnon! Madame! You have bruised my snarkly vanity! (And yes, "snarkly" is a word, but it's copyrighted to me, and I am owed a nickel each time it is used in a blogly form. (You don't want to know who owns "blogly," though, trust me.))
Your link to the "evil-cyborgs-kittens" story goes to my most excellent friend NTodd's blog. And while I respect his snarkly powers (Quakers have unsuspected resources), the origins of the snark in question can be found in the slapdash blog I put up here, to which he merely links (without fact-checking, the bounder). And, for the record, the original post DID make it to Atrios's main page, though it has not yet made the leap to Crossfire or the Factor. Give it a week. Who knows? Maybe at some point some well-coiffed Fox reporter will be cornering your university's fine president, demanding to know why some cyborgs are inherently programmed to ingest felines and others are not.
To drop the snark, though, for a moment, in my original comment I was hoping, first, to change the tone somewhat to snark rather than vitriol. There is, I would insist, a difference, though I can appreciate why it might be hard to see this when you're on the business end of it. I do hope, though, that the second reason for the post was clear -- to make a point. With all due respect, it is IMO legitimate to rise ethical questions about the "disclaimers" at the top of that thread. There is a chain of links from a free blogspot site to Novak and O'Reilly, and whatever the intentions of anyone at the blog-end of the chain, when the story hit the broadcast media, the truth was a partisan casualty (and it was bloodied at the print level, too).
Given that a conduit like this exists -- a right wing, pro-administration one, mostly, obviously -- I would really like to see someone at your organization seriously address the fact-checking responsibilities implicit in linking. It can be a very dangerous game and can cause a LOT of trouble (as you may have noticed). And, no offense, but I will still say that those "disclaimers" are inadequate. Frankly, they looked like CYA, not a well-considered ethical standard for handling difficult decisions. That's why you got a thread with 150+ comments, BTW.
And on another note: civility is overrated. If I had merely posted a polite demurral a few days ago, you would have been (a) denied a chance to have a laugh with your colleagues (which I hope broke the tension a bit), and (b) nobody would have noticed it amid the noise and haste. Snark can be an effective and legitimate rhetorical mode online. At any rate (vulgar blogwhore) it is possible to make a principled stand against civility itself.
Please accept my sincere wishes for a productive conference, and give my love to the kitties.
Posted by: Thersites | January 19, 2005 at 12:41 AM
Huh? Who is it that has to struggle towards credibility? It takes time, of course, to build credibility. What we've found with online media is that time is sped up-- and before reputations are built up on a quicker pace, they are often destroyed on a quicker pace. So I think what I'd like to see out of this conference is some better mechanisms for building reputations. My suggestion is the Hearsay Network.
Posted by: Jon Garfunkel | January 19, 2005 at 01:35 AM
"I've been called by several reporters today. It appears that both the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal will be doing stories about this week's Webcred conference. Both stories are likely to come out on Friday."
Remember the other day when I was talking about why it is important that progressives should not just pooh, pooh this conference because they say, "We're just getting a group of people together, using our own funds, to yak for a couple of days." ?
The media follows the establishment around to get their experts. Where do these experts come from? They look to the usual suspects. What if the true movers and shakers aren't part of this group? Why that would take research! Or Googling. I'll tell you a secret about Googling, they weight "credible" sources as part of the search algorithm, it is one way to defeat the search engine optimizers that just throw up tons of links. So when the words of the conference are tied with Harvard (the "H" bomb!), your rank goes up. Then when the reporters do their stories on the topic it bumps up the page rank some more.
Of course the curious thing is that I'm guessing a bunch of your web traffic came from Atrios or Ntodd, neither of whom are likely to be quoted within the stories.
What a lot of journalist might not get is how easily blogs are twisted to serve a political purpose and how that same easy twisting will soon be used to serve corporations product goals. The twisting is sometimes done by understanding the thirst of the journalist for scandals (supplied by Drudge), or controversy (Memogate and fonts). If you want to start looking at how journalists are influenced today, look at how blogs are influenced. Some blogs are done cynically for money and fame (Drudge) others are done out of ideological drive (Free republic, Kos) but think how simple it would be for a political player to drop a directive comment into heavily trafficked blogs. The Idea is picked up, echoed, transmitted from lower to "higher" status blogs until the mainstream media "have to comment on it".
If they don't want to take the chance at a group of bloggers picking up an Idea they seed it with a specific individual who can be two to three steps removed from the source. That was the method for the Rather story. Didn't it seem at all curious how quickly that person had done the memo analysis (posting before the show was even over?)
The deal is that the media WANT to do the story. The political source knows that and since they can't take the story from named sources, they slide it out as a "grassroots" source. They then can attribute the story to "the internets".
It's kind of sad to see so many people suckered, but it happens.
I've already spotted comments placed on both right wing and left wing blogs as seeds for ideas and stories. If I was a good IP sleuth I could track these to the placement sources. Now wouldn't THAT yield some interesting data! Who is feeding what to whom! Maybe it isn't important, but it is a role that the blogs are playing now whether or not journalists want to admit it.
Posted by: spocko | January 19, 2005 at 02:51 AM
LOL! Looking at the last few days, I think you folks have made enough mistakes to last a whole series of conferences on ethics and credibility :-).
FAQ: "What happens if one of your news organization's blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate"
Disclaimers: "We link to things online that we find interesting and worth further discussion or examination before and during the conference. We do not fact-check articles, blog posts, and other online material before linking to them."
FAQ: Mainstream media is facing credibility crisis right now. It's why I quit my job.
...the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal will be doing stories about this week's Webcred conference
Hmm. According to Laura Gross, two WSJ journalists wrote a sloppy and inaccurate article, complete with a fake quote, using another journalist's material. So how come you're still giving interviews to a mainstream media outfit that has proven it is not credible? It just doesn't make sense.
And from what I read here, the Berkman Center journalists have their own credibility problem.
Poor kittens!
Posted by: Matthias | January 19, 2005 at 04:08 AM
Mainstream media is facing credibility crisis right now. It's why I quit my job. Blogs are doing much to challenge professional journalists' credibility, and with good reason. But there are also interesting questions about credibility and blogs.
Actually, those questions aren't that interesting. There are three basic varieties of blog facts:
1) A blogger relates a fact from personal experience
2) A blogger relates an unsourced fact
3) A blogger relates a sourced (usually linked) fact
if the journalist has any questions, ask the blogger, or follow the link. The vast majority of them will be more than happy to help out any journalist that makes inquiries.
This isn't rocket science---indeed, its so obvious that pretending the question of blog credibility is "interesting" suggests that there is another (subconscious?) agenda at work here.
Journalism is, as you note, suffering a credibility crisis. But that crisis is insoluable---the problem isn't a lack of good reporters, or a lack of journalistic standards, its the complete lack of major mass media corporations that actually give a damn about good reporting and journalistic standards. Of course, those corporations are merely responding to the fact that news consumers care far less about good reporting and journalistic standards than they do about Amber Frey or Brad and Jen.
So journalists and their academic counterparts are now avoiding the issue by projecting the problem of "credibility" onto the blogging community, and treating the "blogging credibility crisis" as if it exists.
But it doesn't. Some bloggers care deeply about how their credibility is perceived, others don't give a damn. But its not a problem for either group.
There probably isn't a working journalist who doesn't know that the reason Bush won the election wasn't because the "youth vote" didn't turn out, or because of "values"---it was because Bush voters were, to but it bluntly, ignorant. But the journalistic community was so afraid of the "eastern liberal media bias" label that they didn't say that---instead they came up with all sort of other reasons Bush won. (Plus, admitting that we now live in the United States of Stupid is an acknowledgement of what a horrible job journalism has done over the last four years.)
Its far from an original thought, but there is more "truth" in 22 minutes of The Daily Show than in 24 hours of CNN.
Next time, hold a conference to figure out how journalists can get back in the "truth" business.
Posted by: paul_lukasiak | January 19, 2005 at 08:19 AM
Your link to the "evil-cyborgs-kittens" story goes to my most excellent friend NTodd's blog. And while I respect his snarkly powers (Quakers have unsuspected resources), the origins of the snark in question can be found in the slapdash blog I put up here, to which he merely links (without fact-checking, the bounder).
I'd like to go on record that I do not endorse the evil kitten-eating cyborg story. I just found the story interesting and worth further discussion.
But please note that I did find some very credible photoshopped evidence that there are evil kitten-eating cyborgs. And I have a friend who knows this guy who is going to send me a picture he has that clearly shows Rebecca being evil AND eating a kitten. I suggest you all watch Crossfire tonight for more on that interesting story.
Posted by: NTodd | January 19, 2005 at 09:00 AM
BTW, I just wanted to say that I think your accepting the mantle of cyborg is wicked cool and goes a little way toward establishing some street cred for you. Really. If you can't take a pie in the face with aplomb, you're in the wrong biz.
There's a lot of serious discussion that goes on in the blogosphere, but you can't take it too seriously. Life's too short.
PS--My contacts were a bit bleary this AM and I didn't notice the classic running kitten in the photo you posted. Bravo.
Posted by: NTodd | January 19, 2005 at 01:39 PM
Who is it that has to struggle towards credibility? It takes time, of course, to build credibility.
Of course it does. And when you start out as just some random citizen claiming to be doing reporting, you have to earn credibility over time -- in essence, struggling to gain acceptance and trust.
That has been my point in all of this. Those who come to weblogs-as-journalism without any background a reader can use as a cue have had to build up trust and credibility over time -- in a way that those participating in this conference have not. Thus, there's a gap in the conversation.
Posted by: The One True b!X | January 19, 2005 at 04:25 PM
b!X,
Yes, there are lots of gaps in the conversation and there are lots of people I would have liked to invite, but at this point we've got the group that we've got. This conference is not the final word on anything. There will probably be other projects and gatherings in the future. Meanwhile it's good to know who out there is most passionate about these things.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | January 19, 2005 at 04:31 PM