RConversation

Innovating on the Live Web

Earlier this week I attended an off-the-record meeting (i.e., no blogging about the details of who was there and exactly what was said by whom) with a group of executives from various news and media organizations to discuss the future of news. These news organizations are all trying to figure out how to rethink pretty much everything: the way they report and deliver the news, how they interact with their audiences, how they interface and collaborate with citizens' media,  PLUS re-invent their business models - so that they can find a way to pay the salaries of quality journalists and newsgathering operations. Put it this way: assuming that reliable, factually accurate and thorough journalism that informs the public discourse on important issues is something that society values - how do you provide it to the public it in a way that can be monetized, and how do you pay to support the kind of journalistic work that is difficult, dangerous, time consuming and expensive?

The fact that nobody has found any good answers - at least not for the American newspaper industry - was demonstrated on Thursday when Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeffrey Johnson was forced out of his job by the Tribune Co. As the L.A. Times itself reported, his ouster came "a little more than a month after he defied the media conglomerate's demands for staff cuts that he suggested could damage the newspaper."  After reporting the circumstances of Johnson's ouster, the L.A. Times describes the larger context: "The turmoil at Tribune's largest property comes at a time of marked uncertainty for many media companies, which have seen their audiences and advertising revenues declining with competition from the Internet and other news outlets."

Doc Searls believes newspapers are in crisis because they "are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that." He then offers ten recommendations for how newspapers might turn themselves around. There is a lot of sound advice in there - much of which was discussed at the above-mentioned meeting (which he didn't attend though I wish he had). Click here to read all his recommendations at length. His ninth recommendation emphasizes an issue that many news execs are just becoming aware of: with a few notable exceptions, most news media websites are struggling to evolve from the "old Static Web" of the 1990's to today's "Live Web." This "Live Web" - or Web 2.0 as techies and venture capitalists like to call it - just happens to be the natural habitat of blogs, wikis, YouTube, and MySpace. As Doc writes:

Ninth, get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static verbs. They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).

Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. ...

Dan Gillmor, who was at the same meeting I attended earlier this week, made a great point during the discussions about how news organizations are compounding their inability to innovate by slashing their staffs and investing little or nothing in research and development - the kind of "R&D" investment that's obligatory for any technology company. Blogging later from the J-Lab's Citizens' Media Summit, Dan expanded on this idea, pointing out that much of the most ground-breaking technology innovations in the news media field are coming from small citizens' media startups:

One thing they have in common: they all developed their own software to run their sites — and now they’re selling that software. The social networking software developed for Bakotopia — which goes beyond letting users blog and add photos and gives them MySpace-like profile pages, and the ability to add other users to “friend lists” is now for sale. Morris Digital now sells the mdSPOTTED photo gallery software that enables reader-participants of Bluffton Today to upload photos to the site. And YourHub, a community platform in a box for newspapers, is now licensed in nearly a dozen markets.

Dan also sees an exciting opportunity for journalism schools and journalism students:

My sense is that journalism is becoming a high-tech profession — not just in using the net as a distribution mechanism but developing new software. Which brings me to another point: J-schools should start thinking about technology transfer. Tech schools often make quite a bit of money licensing technologies developed in university labs. J-schools should start creating the next-generation technology platforms — and fund new innovations from licensing revenues.

This is a great idea. As I wrote in a blog post here last December, technology has now evolved to the point at which the most interesting innovations are happening at the edges: users are experimenting with open-source software and creating "hacks" that enable them do what they want.  You don't need a huge corporate budget and casts of thousands behind you to innovate in media anymore - in fact having a large organization to manage (and shareholders to answer to when things don't pan out) increasingly looks like an impediment to experimentation and creative thinking. I've had conversations with people who work in the web departments of news organizations whose understanding of RSS, tagging and other standard features of the read-write web (or semantic web or Live Web, or Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it) pale in comparison with that of many self-taught bloggers who learned by playing around with the free and/or inexpensive software tools. Dan's right, there's no reason why journalism students couldn't be the source of some of the next big innovations in news - if journalism schools would do more to support and encourage them in doing so.

The JZ challenge to news companies: Start fighting censorship!

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center where I'm a fellow, and currently a professor at Oxford, has written an article titled Dodging the Internet Censor. He argues that Western news organizations should build peer-to-peer networks that help people access their stories from countries where the Internet is subject to heavy government censorship. News organizations have been covering lots of stories about censorship in authoritarian countries, and reporting how various internet geeks have found "hacks" to get around censorship. But JZ (as we call him in Berkmania) points out that news org's have not actively tried to use any of those clever circumvention technologies to fight online censorship of their own news reporting by authoritarian governments.  An excerpt:

Western media outlets have covered this story with great interest. Yet they apparently fail to realise that these peer-to-peer technologies have the potential to "decensor" the news for more people in countries like China. Peer-to-peer technologies make filtering more difficult, because they make nearly any consumer of information part of the process of transmitting it. For example, news organisations could conclude deals with other companies to ensure that uncensored reports are echoed from one free server to the next. That would defy Beijing to filter the entire internet if it wants to eliminate content. But news organisations operate as businesses, and defying powerful governments can be a bad business strategy.

That is why there has been so little rebellion among media companies when authoritarian governments threaten journalists, editors and publishers. It also explains why journalists in those countries have so often bent over backwards to apologise for individual transgressions, rather than stand in defiance.

But news organisations could reach many more people if they worked to circumvent internet filtering instead of passively relying on those inside the firewall to figure out how to reach beyond blocked sites on their own. Doing so might even make good business sense. Building a creative digital distribution system that eludes the censors would help news organisations establish and enlarge their markets.

That would be wonderful. But will any news organizations do this? Because doing so would require them to free their content from behind paid firewalls and to let it be accessed and passed on via websites they don't own or control. I e-mailed JZ with the following thoughts:

...you know, the thing is, most Western journalists don't even really consider the fact - certainly aren't thinking about the implications of, or pushing to change the fact - that their journalistic works aren't even freely accessible to their own countrymen for very long.  As you know, after two weeks or so most news companies (with a few enlightened exceptions) still put their stories behind a paid firewall. Thus it becomes very difficult for these journalistic works to remain part of the public discourse online unless they are heavily excerpted (pushing the boundaries of "fair use") or reproduced in full (in technical copyright violation) on various blogs and nonprofit websites.  Journalists tend to hand in their stories and think shockingly little what happens next or whether there's a more socially useful or effective way for their journalism to be delivered to the public. (..or whether their company's business model is capable of supporting a more socially responsible mode of sharing their journalism with the public.)

If news organizations were to participate in such p2p journalism-sharing systems as you propose (and I agree it would be a great boon to freedom of speech if they did), they would first have to free their content in perpetuity and forget trying to charge for it. There's also the question of whether they would lose ad revenue by doing this - seems they probably would.  Do we now have a situation in which a for-profit news business model is no longer capable of maximizing free speech - and may perhaps be helping to limit free speech? 

Had I participated in such a p2p scheme while working for CNN so that more Chinese people could have seen my stories I would most definitely have been ordered to stop or have been fired. It would have been considered a violation of CNN's IPR, violation of agreements with advertisers and cable distributors, and various other commercial commitments, let alone whatever probs it might have caused with the Chinese govt. Sadly, don't see too sign that my former employer's thinking on such issues or the thinking of most other news companies has changed so significantly in the past three years that they would be willing to entertain your idea. Though I would love to be proven wrong.

JZ replied (with permission to blog his response):

It's tough for individual journalists to make the call to circulate their own work and not upset their employers, just as it'd likely be copyright infringement for members of the public to copy news articles they see and put them wholesale into p2p circulation.  But of course the news organizations could themselves do it, and I think it needn't further harm the already-ailing business models that put the content behind pay-per-view firewalls after a few days.  That's because it's still modestly inconvenient to find and download material from p2p networks.  Since news articles are text they're conveniently small -- no long download times -- but search is trickier, since most p2p engines still go on file titles rather than on file contents.  And, drawing from some music industry counter-tactics, one could even see some authoritarian governments swamping p2p networks with decoy files -- perhaps going further to be among the p2p sources of them, to track down those who download the files with provocative filenames.

That's why I see the current p2p technologies as a start but not a finish.  They evolved either as focused ways of addressing the demand for music and movies (where searching only by title can work), and as ways of moving big files without causing congestion (e.g. bittorrent).  With a little effort, major newspapers could band together, perhaps including some foundation support and participation from the likes of the Open Society Institute, and create a p2p distribution method more honed to this particular problem, and more sensitive to protecting IP addresses as people search and download.  We've seen networks like Tor now packaged into easy-to-use browsers-on-a-USB-stick like Torpark; this is a natural evolutionary step.  The biggest barrier here is not technology or copyright or even the economics of the news business, but the philosophical step to believe that strategies for collectively disseminating news against official resistance is as central to twenty-first century journalism as collecting and creating it under hostile circumstances.

That would indeed be a huge step. Are news organizations prepared to stand up and fight for free speech? I replied:

I totally agree with your last sentence. I agree that if one defines the purpose of journalism as serving the public discourse with information, it is essential that news organizations do something like that.

However if one is an organization whose priorities are driven by the need to boost circulation, ratings and share price, I could see how the heads of most news organizations - especially those run by multinationals whose primary purpose is not news - would find it too risky a prospect with no return-on-investment upside.  Call me cynical. I am very cynical about the news biz. I would love if some news organizations would prove me wrong, though. Maybe the BBC and some others with a less bottom-line and more public-service mission could lead the way.

In the event that some news organizations might be willing to try something like this, I asked JZ if he'd help them do it. He said "sure!"

Any takers out there??

Reuters supports NewAssignment.net

Over the summer NYU's future-of-journalism guru Jay Rosen announced a new participatory news venture. NewAssignment.Net would organize a new form of what he calls "pro-am" journalism: bringing together journalists, bloggers and other members of the "amateur" public who aren't professional journalists to work on investigative reporting projects.

Today, Jay announced on his blog PressThink and on the Guardian's Comment is Free that Reuters will be supporting NewAssigment.Net, to the tune of $100,000, so that Jay can hire a full-time editor to make the whole thing work. An excerpt of Jay's post:

NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it’s closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today’s announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.

One of outstanding facts of the Net era is that the costs for like-minded people to find each other and work together are falling rapidly. Someone has to figure out what the consequences of that fact are for original reportage. This is what NewAssignment plans to experiment with if it can find a few more supporters like Reuters and a lot more participants...

Jay writes extensively on NewAssignment.Net's operating philosophy and how it is likely to work. You should read his whole post. But here is another excerpt:

NewAssignment.Net will use the Web as both a “collaboration medium,” the way Berners-Lee intended, and a publishing tool, which he also intended. The site will begin as a niche producer that tries to do one kind of work only: open source reporting projects in the pro-am style. It will follow a middle path between good old fashioned we-bring-you-the-world journalism and the new forms that have exploded on the World Wide Web: blogging, citizen journalism, and what the Neterati call social media. (Social because they connect people horizontally to one another, not vertically to The Media.)

Reuters' Chris Ahearn, who also made the decision last year to fund Global Voices Online, the project I co-founded and which has just won the Knight-Batten Innovations In Journalism Grand Prize, wrote about his support for both of our projects in today's Huffington Post. The news industry is in a crisis, he admits up front. "Without corrective action, we are in danger of the public losing faith in the fourth estate," he says. "As professionals, we need to support good journalistic ideas, encourage broader public participation in the reporting process, and explore different newsgathering business models."

I imagine a lot of Reuters journalists and bureau chiefs wish the money had gone to their operations instead, given that Reuters operations are all run on fairly tight budgets. But Chris makes a rather good case for the need to support innovation outside traditional newsroom and news bureau structures:

While encouraging good journalistic ideas is a worthy goal in itself, Reuters believes that supporting new and varied networks of creators with different perspectives is good for both journalism and business.

Ultimately, journalism is about the story and the pursuit of truth; it is not about the news industry, a j-school or a traditional newsroom structure. By building bridges and finding new ways to augment and accelerate the creation of quality journalism, we believe that ultimately the public will benefit and perhaps change their minds about the noble profession of journalism.

Jay asked me in an email what I thought about Reuters' motivations. I wrote back:

Reuters top management clearly understands that news organizations need to re-think themselves. On one hand, the principles of good journalism are timeless: good journalism should provide the information - accurate, timely, and with the necessary context and background - that we as individuals require in order to conduct our lives in our own best interest. But while the point of journalism remains the same, the accepted methods of achieving these aims are now broken or badly discredited.

The challenge is: How do you do good journalism while at the same time participating in a give-and-take, a conversation about events, which in turn helps to inform your journalistic work? Reuters realizes the answer is not as simple as getting some of their journalists to blog. In fact that may not be the answer at all. What’s more important is to help journalists figure out how to interact with the blogosphere— that big global, interactive, viral conversation about the things that matter to people. How do you interact with these conversations in a way that makes your journalism more relevant, more useful - and more true to the point of journalism in the first place?

Unfortunately, news organizations today are so stripped-down and budgets are so tight, journalists barely have time to cover their beats properly, let alone learn new things about the internet, figure out ways to innovate, or learn about RSS readers and trackback pings. There is very little R & D happening in news organizations today - and usually it’s being done by the tech people, not the reporters, photographers, writers, and editors. Ironically, information media innovation is not being driven by professional journalists who are actually paid full-time salaries to create media. The innovation is coming from citizen media creators: the people who blog, who podcast, who use YouTube, who edit Wikipedia, and who write open source code in their spare time.

...and in other related news, Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a piece about the new human rights video partnership between Global Voices and Witness.

Global Voices: We won!!!

Here I am with Global Voices Online Caribbean & Podcast Editor Georgia Popplewell and Francophonia Editor Alice Backer, right after receiving the Knight Batten Excellence in Journalism Grand Prize on behalf of the entire Global Voices community.

The other finalists were all extremely impressive, showing how various media organizations (big, small, grassroots and MSM) are using the Internet to accomplish journalism's core mission: serving the public discourse by helping people not only find the information they need - but also to have the conversations they want to have on issues that matter to their lives.

This Grand Prize for Global Voices vindicates the hard work of bloggers around the world who are so passionately dedicated to amplifying citizen voices from outside North America and Western Europe - and doing their part to redress global media imbalances.

For more about the award see the J-Lab website, and the post in which we publicized the text of our application form for the award.

Here is the text of the press release issued today by the Berkman Center, from which Global Voices was spawned:

Global Voices Online Awarded the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism from the Knight-Batten Foundation

Cambridge, MA -- The Knight-Batten Foundation awarded Global Voices Online, a citizen media project run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism.

The Knight-Batten Awards spotlight the creative use of new information, ideas and technologies to involve citizens in public issues. They are administered by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland.

"It's an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world,” said the Knight-Batten panel of judges. The judges also credited the project and its corps of bloggers with helping to elevate standards in the blogosphere.

Global Voices Online is a network of global news and conversation from more than 160 countries - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. Co-founded by two research fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, technologist Ethan Zuckerman and journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, the site is run globally by a team of 16 international, multilingual blogger-editors, and more than 80 volunteer contributors.

"People in many parts of the world are frustrated that the international media ignores or misunderstands them. They are now taking matters into their own hands by blogging, podcasting, or uploading pictures and video to the web," said co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon. "This award vindicates the hard work of many people. It gives us hope that innovative new media structures may promote a more democratic and inclusive global discourse."

Launched in the summer of 2005 with seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Global Voices Online now receives core funding from Reuters, making it possible to support a global team of blogger-editors who select, explain, and translate citizen news and views from outside North America and Western Europe.

"As a strategic partner, it gives us great pride to see Global Voices Online recognized for innovation in journalism by such a prestigious organization;" said Dean Wright, Senior Vice President and Managing Editor for Reuters Consumer Media Services.  "This is quite an accomplishment for everyone involved and real evidence of the important role bloggers are playing in the global conversation."

Global Voices Online recently launched a content partnership with WITNESS, a human rights video network, to amplify human rights-related video being uploaded onto the Internet by concerned citizens around the world.

The site's parent organization, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development.

"We at the Berkman Center could not be more proud of what the Global Voices community has accomplished in an extraordinarily short period of time," said John Palfrey, Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center's Executive Director.  "As the Knight-Batten Award has recognized, Global Voices is helping to change the way people access, publish, and analyze information about enormous parts of the world that mainstream media has failed to include meaningfully in its coverage."

"Real" Journalism on the Read-Write Web

At the conclusion of his latest New Yorker article Columbia J-school Dean Nick Lemann writes:  "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."

Absolutely. Journalism schools are not going to be doing their jobs unless they're doing everything possible to help students get comfortable alongside bloggers and everybody else here on the Internet. Bloggers hang out here every day, ready to engage journalists in debate and conversation, and even to collaborate with them for the sake of a more informed public discourse. The most effective journalists of the future will find ways to utilize the Internet's read-write potential, as opposed to 20th-century media's read-only capacity. (For more about read-write versus read-only media see Ethan Zuckerman's great summary of Larry Lessig's talk at Wikimania.)  In the world of read-write journalism, the public is not merely reading and listening to our reporting but participating - as well as filling in gaps that journalists may not be reporting at all for lack of resources, lack of space or airtime, editor's lack or interest, commercial pressures or the parent organization's political fear. Jeff Jarvis has written up a great set of recommendations for how journalism should be taught in the new read-write age. He made a great point about how journalists need to become curators and moderators of conversations  related to the subjects they cover taking place across the web.  A real value-add that professional journalists bring to the table is solid journalistic editing. According to the latest Pew study, despite the proliferation of information out there on the web, most people have not increased the amount of time they spend each day consuming it. Which means that there is a very valuable role for professionals to help the overwhelmed public find what they want and what they need to know - from credible sources - without spending all day looking. This should of course be in addition to the solid, hard work of infoming those conversations with strong old-fashioned gumshoe reporting that bloggers with day jobs might not have the time and resources to do. Those are a full-time journalist's major value-adds.

It is definitely also true that the read-write web forces journalists to learn new ways to collaborate with bloggers and other non-professional creators of citizens media - not only for the sake of a better story but because audiences, especially younger ones, will increasingly expect to participate, not just consume information passively. I thought Susan Crawford made an excellent suggestion for helping reporters find their voice and impact on the Internet: "...a better approach might be letting reporters have a personality online -- not just the occasional video, but a constant online presence that's more than a byline."

Susan's right. Every journalism student ought to maintain a blog, and experience what it feels like to have your audience talk back to you (or ignore you).  They too can discover as I first did two years ago, when I was posting on North Korea zone several times per day, that our readers can help us uncover information we never would have come up with on our own, and that the debates fanning out in reaction to our blog posts can force us to sharpen our analysis because we'll quickly be called out on any contradiction or error. (See this article and this report about my experience - both PDF.) As Jay Rosen points out, learning to survive and thrive in the blogosphere as a journalist is actually very hard work:

...what the sweaty champions of “journalism as a form of blogging” overlook is how hard it is for your average reporter to thrive in the link-filled, argument-rich, emotionally-present, here’s-where-I-stand style that traditional bloggers have cultivated over the years. It takes time. Perhaps the hardest part is you actually have to be interested in what other people are saying.

And believe me, listening is a new skill for many people in the profession. He also says:

We hear every day how “the pros are gonna blog you under the table.” Count me unimpressed. I say a majority of the blogging is going to continue to be done by the traditional underwear types who have the passion and irreverance the pros seem to lack.

Actually, though, lots of journalists are using blogs to do read-write journalism, with passion, in new and creative formats. But many - myself included - have had to leave established big-name media organizations in order to do so. Global Voices Online, an edited aggregator of blogs from outside North America and Western Europe which I co-founded and which is now a finalist for the Knight-Batten Innovations in Journalism award, is working with Reuters figure out how journalists can both serve and inform the rich and truly global online discourse. (See this Mideast Crisis page and this Cuba page to see how blog content is being integrated with Reuters journalism to help inform and serve the public discourse on major world events.)  New micro-media organizations run by journalists using blogging software, are doing some very good work that is definitely defined as journalism. One of many examples is Chris Nolan's Spot-on - check out this fabulous dispatch from Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing, examining Chinese reactions to Israel's war on Lebanon. The list goes on.

What's more, if you look around the world, in many places "real" journalism is actually fleeing to the read-write web from MSM. Globally, many journalists are being driven to blogging because the corporate and political climates in their own countries make it impossible for them to do the kind of journalism they want to do within established news organizations. Real journalism being: the kind that informs the public about what they need to know, whether or not various powerful people want the public to know it. Case in point: Roland Soong in Hong Kong (who I hope will come hang out with us at HKU as much as he wants) points out on his EastSouthWestNorth blog that the territory's last independent broadsheet newspaper, the Hong Kong Economic Journal, is being bought by a major corporation which maintains cozy ties with the Chinese government - which in turn means the end to hard-hitting reporting on many subjects. [CLARIFICATION/CORRECTION Aug.7th: Thanks to LfC and an anonymous commenter below for the correction plus some important perspectives and additional information on the HKEJ situation.] According to Roland, a swansong editorial by columnist Kong Shaolin provides his readers with a list of Hong Kong blogs that they can now turn to for the independent commentary they may no longer find in the Hong Kong MSM. Fortunately in Hong Kong, unlike in mainland China, blogs are not blocked or censored. (One of the several ways in which "one country two systems" formula of the Hong Kong SAR still holds.) Not yet, anyway.

Global Voices Online is full of examples of how blogs are increasingly being used to cover events in countries that the mainstream media just simply fails to cover very well, if at all. Many seasoned journalists, like Addis Abbaba-based Andrew Heavens, believe strongly that there is more to say about Africa than editors in the English-language media are willing to publish. Andrew begins  this recent summary of reports and commentary from the Ethiopian blogosphere by saying:

Ethiopia’s bloggers kept a nervous eye on their country’s southern border with Somalia over the past two weeks as rumblings of renewed conflict got ever louder.

The growing tension received next to no coverage in the mainstream media who focused most of their international coverage on southern Lebanon.

But the bloggers were there to fill up the vacuum.

Some of them actually have jobs as journalists, some of them have other day jobs, but no matter. The point is they are collaborating to make sure the word gets out when the MSM is distracted and focused elsewhere.

Which brings me to a tough question for which I don't have the answer. What are journalism schools for? Do they exist merely to teach the next generation how to secure and hold jobs in media organizations - whether or not those jobs actually practice anything remotely adhering to the ideals of journalism that we teach? The dean of another major U.S. journalism school recently told me he worries that J-schools are training people to do the kind of journalism which, increasingly, fewer and fewer news organizations actually have any interest in producing.  Are J-schools doing enough to equip young people with the values, skills, creativity, ingenuity and COURAGE necessary to help reinvent both the industry and the profession - so that by the end of the 21st century it will still be possible to get paid to do something resembling real journalism? I guess I'll find out soon...

What Lemann didn't discuss in his New Yorker piece

There is lots of blogger reaction to Columbia J-school Dean Nick Lemann's New Yorker piece about why online citizen journalism in the form of blogs isn't historically new and won't (or shouldn't) replace the work of professionals. The article begins with Glenn Reynolds' claim in An Army of Davids that: "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff—and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession.”  The rest of the piece supports Lemann's counter-argument that actually, if bloggers completely replace journalists, we will not be better off.  That's true. I agree. Most of the people I know who blog or spend a lot of time poking around the global blogosphere would also agree. Most of the blog posts I've read in reaction to his piece are generally puzzled as to why Lemann chose to focus on such a non-issue. (For examples click here, here, here, here, and here.)  Most notably, Jeff Jarvis and Steven Johnson have done a good job of pointing out that Lemann is rehashing the bloggers vs. journalists argument that Jay Rosen rightly declared dead at our Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference in early 2005. But my favorite response comes from Mitch Ratcliffe who writes:

What must be embraced by the citizen journalists out there is the rigor and self-criticism that journalism represents. Where Nicholas Lemann's critique of citizen journalism falls down is his lack of critical reflection on journalism itself. Yes, most citizen journalism today looks like church newsletter writing, but so does a lot of "real" journalism. The celebrity-and-spin mechanism has taken such thorough hold of the mainstream that good journalism is the exception there, too.

Mitch's conclusion:

The only thing that journalism as a professional endeavor does is recognize that its practitioners are human, prone to mistakes and bias like humans are. The process of journalism is to review the resulting reporting for mistakes and errors of omission or commission, in that order of escalating importance. When journalism "listens" to the market in the sense that Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis insist is the defining difference between journalism and citizen journalism, that is reflexively, it produces the pablum that is The View, Entertainment Tonight and The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, more stuff that reinforces our beliefs without challenging our intellects.

I want us to think and debate as a society, and citizen journalism, especially when it learns from the standards of professional journalism, can help us do that. The more voices the better, but let's set up the expectation that participation must be informed and rigorous in its self-criticism, the same as the Founding Fathers believed, conducted in the midst of change rather than seeking a conclusion that exists whole and unassailed by change on either side of tremendous social upheaval. History is a living document, not a process with a defined goal; let us, therefore, have processes that repair human shortcomings and leave history to history while we sort out the problem of living today.

This isn't blogging vs. journalism we're talking about, it's a matter of how humanity will continue to grow up.

Hear hear. Bloggers and veteran journalists could all use a very large added dose of humility and mutual respect, at which point maybe we can all figure out how to better inform and support the public discourse.

It's also important to point out that Lemann's article makes a lot more sense when seen in the context of an ongoing and fairly personal debate he's been having with right-wing radio host, blogger, and "blog swarm" artist Hugh Hewitt. Last year Lemann wrote a profile of Hewit for the New Yorker, which sadly is not online - but is mentioned elsewhere on the web. In particular, see Chris Nolan's excellent dissection, with an excerpt, on Personal Democracy Form. She describes how Lemann and Hewitt disagreed strongly on whether it is desirable for journalists to strive for "objectivity" - which Lemann preaches at Columbia - or whether the pretense of "objectivity" is not only impossible but is a sham behind which journalists hide their failings and hidden agendas, which many bloggers on both right and left believe audiences have a right to know. Should a journalist reveal his or her voting record and other biases when covering a political story, for instance? Nolan writes:

Lemann takes the standard Harvard-trained, Columbia-soaked establishment journalist's view of Hewitt and, of course, completely misses the point. His story is based on a refusal to acknowledge that the business of journalism has changed. So, next time you get all gooey-eyed about how the Internet is changing politics, it might be worth having a gander at these few paragraphs from Lemann (which are only on-line because I'm typing them from a printed copy of the magazine).

    If Hewitt does write about me, he will surely ask me to reveal whom I voted for in the last Presidential election. I might as well get started with the transparency now. Although I do vote, I'm not to going to tell him. Like the house of the Lord, journalism has many mansions, and the one Hewitt inhabits is surely one of them. But in another of the mansions, reportorial journalism, the object is different. One can be curious or not, fair-minded or not, intellectually honest in the use of the evidence or not, emphatic or not, imprisoned by a perspective or not. For a reportorial journalist to announce his voting record is to undermine his work. It dishonors the struggle to do it right….

This is silly, of course. Although he claims to be transparent, Lemann issues an argument against the very idea. Besides, as a Harvard-educated son of the South, a man who worked for the Texas Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Monthly and who currently holds down a staff job at the New Yorker and his gig at Columbia, there is no way in hell that Lemann didn't vote for Democrat John Kerry.

And that is precisely Hewitt's point. The very one that flies by Lemann's nose. In trying to get establishment Liberals to admit they have a particularly narrow view of the world, Hewitt is trying to show them -- as reporters and writers at Big Media outlets -- how their points of view shape the news. It's not rocket science, this exercise. It's the Socratic method. And it works. Why do you think it's named after a guy who's been dead for more than 2,000 years?

Hewitt's condition for granting an interview to Lemann was that he could in turn profile Lemann and the Columbia Journalism School. Hewitt's resulting article, published this January in The Weekly Standard, is titled The Media's Ancien Regime. Referring to CJS's patron saints Walter Lippmann and Joseph Pulitzer, Hewitt concludes:

Lippmann's world, Pulitzer's world, even Nicholas Lemann's world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976--they are all gone. Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.

Lemann understands completely what has happened. I think he regrets it. He is certainly trying to salvage the situation. And there is simply no way he can succeed.

I can't read his mind and I haven't asked him, but it wouldn't be surprising if Lemann has been feeling somewhat on the defensive lately - and somewhat in need of explaining to students why they should fork out what amounts to a year's salary for many people in order to get a journalism degree. With this context, Lemann's choice of focus makes more sense, but it also makes me wonder why he chose to avoid addressing the objectivity debate in his New Yorker piece, choosing instead to focus on the comparative quality of amateur vs. professional reporting.  In my observation, the most popular bloggers are valued less for the quality of their reporting (when they even do any original reporting) but rather for their authenticity of voice and openness about their political views: when you read Glenn Reynolds, he makes it very clear that he falls somewhere on the libertarian side of right wing. When you read Nick Lemann, you can only guess at his politics as Chris Nolan does, and he won't answer questions if you ask him in person. Which then leaves him and much of the journalistic profession open to all kinds of accusations of hidden political bias and dishonesty. Which in turn leads to a call from the more angry corners of the blogosphere for a reformation. This loss of public faith in American journalism's claim to objectivity - and the question of what should be done about it - is the real story in my view.  If people don't trust you, it doesn't matter how impeccable your reporting is, does it? That's what's happening today - the good work of many excellent journalists is being unfairly dismissed as biased by many Americans because of this loss of trust. What should journalism as a profession do about it? Tell those who don't trust in our professionalism that they're ignorant fundamentalist rednecks and if they were smarter they'd realize we're really great reporters after all who really do deserve all those Pulitzers and Peabodys?  Hmmm.. great idea... I'm sure that will work...

One final question in the spirit of devil's advocacy: Is the fact that Lemann's latest article avoided mentioning his ongoing argument with Hewitt an exemplary demonstration of the author's own objectivity in handling his subject matter? Or has he demonstrated a disappointing lack of transparency regarding his motivations for writing this particular article in this particular way? Don't be shy. Hit the comments section and give your views... Perhaps Mr. Lemann might accept an invitation to respond?

This post is already long enough for one blog post. In an upcoming post, I'll discuss what I was originally planning to write about: my thoughts on where journalism and journalism education might consider going from here. At the end of his article Lemann writes:

As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.

Jeff Jarvis responds:

But that, I say, should have been the beginning of his piece: Just how, Dean Lemann, do you propose to do that?

In my next blog post rant, I'll string together some of my own responses to Jeff's question.

Moving to Hong Kong in January!

Rumors have been swirling for some time, but now it's official. I've signed the contract. In January I will be joining the faculty of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, where I will be responsible for teaching "New Media," among other things. (That picture there is the colonial-era building where the JMSC is located.)

I'm really excited about this. Being on the JMSC faculty will enable me to continue doing many of the things I'm already doing, but in a more structured and long-term kind of way, plus teaching.

I look forward to helping journalism students figure out what skills they need - not just technical, but ethical and intellectual - to lead their profession into new uncharted territory. Clearly the question of where journalism is headed, what students ought to be taught, and whether journalism schools remain relevant (if they ever were) is subject to much heated debate. (Yes, I will post soon with my own response to Nick Lemann's New Yorker "encyclical" - as Josh Marshall  Andrew Sullivan termed it - on citizens' journalism. [Thanks Sree for pointing out my initial brainfart there.]) I myself have questioned the point of journalism schools, and have written about the need to re-think journalism education.  But I do believe that while the emergence of citizens' media is exciting, important, and ought to be supported, the news business and journalism as a profession must also find a way to survive. Democracy is not possible without informed public discourse. That discourse, I believe, can be best served by a combination of professional journalism as well as journalism performed by concerned citizens. I look forward to challenging my students to think about how they as professionals can best serve this public discourse - and how they can work collaboratively with concerned citizens who have other day jobs but who are for the most part eager to contribute to the cause of a better informed public. The real threat to journalism does not come from amateurs: the real threat to journalism comes from information monopolies, propaganda, lies, censorship, surveillance, and ignorance. Journalists (and journalism professors) should spend more time fighting those true threats rather than wasting time arguing about whose journalism is more legitimate... but more about that in a future post.

... but that's not the only reason I'm excited! Being based in Hong Kong is a fabulous fit for my China and Asia expertise.  At Hong Kong U I hope to spearhead research about the landscape of online citizens media in Asia, how new media ecosystems are forming with traditional media, and what this means for journalism. I look forward to supporting and participating in new experiments in online citizens media locally in Hong Kong and around the region. And last but not least, Hong Kong is an ideal place from which to continue my work on related to online discourse and freedom of speech in China.

..and yes, I will continue to guide Global Voices Online as it continues to grow. Much of what I do for GVO will overlap with my work related to online citizens media at HKU. What's more, the plan is that GVO will increasingly be run not by myself and co-founder Ethan Zuckerman, but by people from outside North America and Western Europe whose voices GVO is meant to amplify. And yes, I will continue to be a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society until the end of this year, after which point I look forward to joining the ranks of Berkman Affiliates who make up an amazing collaborative brain trust.

Now I just have to figure out where I want to live in Hong Kong. After a week of looking round, I'm torn between the convenience (but high rents and small apartment sizes) of the Pok Fu Lam area and Western Mid-Levels, or the cheap rents, seaside views, and proximity to nature (but longer commute) on Lamma Island. Any local Hong Kongers got any opinions for me?

Roland Soong: Bringing China to the West

I'm in Singapore at the Fourth Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference, where I finally had a chance to meet Roland Soong, the Hong Kong-based blogger whose blog EastSouthWestNorth has become an indispensable resource to anybody who follows contemporary China.

In his presentation, Individual Blogging for Social Transformation, Roland says:  "My goal in running the blog is for neither fame nor fortune, but it is a personal attempt to bring about a social transformation."

He points out that Western coverage of China - even at its best - is spotty and driven by the interests and attention spans of far-away editors. Thanks to an un-demanding job which leaves him with a decent income and plenty of free time, Roland has dedicated himself to serving a very important cause: helping the English-speaking world understand the Chinese world better by filling in the gaping information gaps not filled by professional media organizations.  Every day Roland translates huge amounts of material from Chinese-language news websites, BBS chatrooms, blogs, and other sources. He works hard to document and track information about breaking news events in more detail than any mainstream news organization has time or space to do. Last year I wrote a post detailing Roland's important role in tirelessly documenting the Taishi Village conflict between peasant farmers and local authorities in Southern China - while English-language media coverage was fickle and fleeting. Also see this news article about him.

Roland's presentation (which you should read in full) links to a long list of stories about which his EastSouthWestNorth blog provided the only comprehensive English-language coverage. I know for a fact that ESWN has become required reading for journalists covering China, and quite a lot of people have done stories based on information that they first found on Roland's blog. Will this indeed bring about social transformation as Roland hopes? He concludes:

Let us review the limited goals that had been set up previously.  The first goal was to make a difference in specific cases.  It is possible to list a number of cases in which the blog has informed and influenced opinion.

The second goal was to create the awareness that things may be more complex than it seems.  The blogger should think that the regular blog visitors would agree that this is offering a more complex picture of China .  This blog cannot replace mainstream media, but it can supplement them.  It has even created the awareness that blogs can outperform mainstream media in covering certain types of stories.

As for the larger goal of re-dressing the overall imbalance between Chinese-language and English-language news on China , it is beyond the capability of a single citizen.  However, this blog seemed to have raised the awareness for this particular model.  If there are dozens or even hundreds similar blogs run by individual citizens like this one, there will be a social transformation, both in transnational understanding and media culture.

Roland was one of the people who inspired Global Voices Online, the edited aggregator of blogs outside North America and Western Europe which Ethan Zuckerman and I co-founded, and which is now run by an amazing team of international bloggers. Concerned citizens around the world are discovering that it is possible to use blogs fill in the gaps left uncovered - or badly covered - by the Western English-langugage media. We link to Roland and bloggers like him in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe & Russia, East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia. I hope that his well-documented success in influencing the media will inspire even more people to wield the power of online citizens media.

WeMedia, WhereMedia?

It has been an exhausting day - I moderated two panels, one on the evolving media landscape in China/East Asia, the next on media trends in India/SouthAsia. I couldn't take notes because I was moderating but fortunately Jeff Jarvis has blogged the whole day in detail, and there's a long writeup here on the WeMedia blog. Neha and Kamla did fabulously on the South Asia panel. Rachel's Africa panel was brilliant, showing a vibrant and growing African media scene, with a growing community of bloggers. Ory Okolloh via satellite from Kenya charmed the room. People from all over the world joined the live chat and watched the webcast, adding ideas and insights that we wouldn't have benefitted from otherwise.

As the Media Center's Bill Weiss said, "it's not about new media or old media, it's just media." How do we get beyond the arguments about who is more trustworthy than whom, and start working together to create a better, more inclusive, more informed public discourse? And what are the business models to sustain and support these efforts?

The Media Center has issued a call to action: "we propose a worldwide We Media Global Initiative to invest in bottom-up media." They say they're open to suggestions from everybody on how this kind of initiative should work.

WeMedia Day 2: more listening & dialogue, less lecturing?

As my colleague Rachel R. notes, there have been some technical problems with the webcast (video only, tsk tsk) and online chat today.  The tone of some of the panel discussions has left some bloggers, including my colleague Neha V., feeling a bit frustrated and defensive.

Tomorrow should be more relevant and accessible to the international blogosphere. Rachel and I will be moderating several panels in which we are hoping to reflect the views of people from around the Global Voices community. So I hope you'll follow the webcast and join the live chat via this page as we explore the citizens media revolutions in East and South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. (As my colleague Georgia Popplewell laments, Latin America is most unfortunately not represented. A massive oversight!!)  We hope that the perspectives not represented in the room will be voiced online. Rachel and I will do our best to represent these views back into the room.

UPDATE: MY Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has a great post, observing the conference from afar. He makes an excellent point:

...while global news organizations seem obsessed with the bloggers/journalists “dichotomy”, local media seems more open to this idea. I gave a lecture at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts a few weeks ago as part of a class taught by Bill Densmore, who has edited several Berkshire County newspapers. Bill observed that local newspaper editors generally understand the value of journalists cooperating with bloggers because local papers don’t get produced without the help of lots of amateurs. That baseball story, town meeting summary or theatre review might have been produced by a seasoned, experienced journalist… and just as likely was produced by an intern, an amateur trying to get some experience, or someone in the community who was passionate that an event get covered.

Maybe these conversations aren’t best yelled held between bloggers and journalists from highly professional, structured, hierarchical news organizations - maybe community papers could help provide an ideological bridge between camps?