RConversation

"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.

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.

Beyond Broadcast Highlights

Quote of the day:  Prof. Charlie Nesson: "There is divinity in the net and the challenge is to be gentle to your enemies."

My favorite panel of the day was about online communities - moderated by my colleague Ethan Zuckerman. He has a great writeup of his intro to the panel. Andy Carvin has great notes from Brendan Greeley's descripton of Radio Open Source and Tom Kriese about Omidyar.net. A lot of great blogging from conference participants is aggregated here.

A lot of the discussion all day focused around a question near and dear to me: how media - whether it's professional or citizen-produced - can better serve and facilitate an informed public discourse, which I believe is essential to healthy democracy. At one point during a morning panel on public media, Terry Heaton of Corante claimed that the Internet is the "new public." Several of us challenged the panel that a lot of people are excluded from this online discourse due to economic and social reasons. I asked whether American public media organizations are going to do anything to work directly on digital divide issues  so that everybody in the U.S. can have easy access to high speed internet, which is essential to full participation in online discourse. Also I asked whether they are going to do education and outreach so that people throughout society are aware of the tools that are available to them. As it turns out, unfortunately, not all public broadcasters think that should be their role. Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network blogged in detail about the exchange and his reaction.

Sociologist Eszter Hargittai had a great presentation about what young people really do online (thanks Andy again for the great detailed blogging). Her research indicates that giving people internet access may not be enough if you want to encourage widespread public involvement in media creation and discourse. There needs to be more education about what tools are out there and what can be done with them - and that there's a lot more to the web than chatting, shopping, and dating. She concludes: "Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality...Skill differences may result in differential web use suggesting different opportunities." Addendum: Lynne Johnson has an interesting reaction to Eszter's talk here.

There was a panel about business models that was as usual inconclusive. Mark Cooper: We need a different business model than charity or advertising. The problem is not distribution; the problem is attention.  I thought Mark made another important point about basically 2 kinds of journalism that are worth preserving and nurturing, and which we need to figure out how to support:

1. Professional insight journalism: High quality, expensive investigative journalism that needs to be monetized and supported financially in order to be done well.
2. Networked individualism: non-monetized work motivated by passion or duty.

UPDATE: I was going to explore the relationship between these two kinds of journalism further on day two in a workshop with Dan Gillmor, but unfortunately I have come down with a bad chest cold and went home to bed.  Fortunately, there are session notes on the conference wiki here.

beyondbroadcast

Beyond Broadcast Conference Begins

I'm at the Beyond Broadcast conference here at Harvard where James Boyle of Duke Law school just gave a brilliant opening keynote. See Ethan's thorough summary of the talk here. (You can follow the conference on the live webcast here.)

Boyle pointed out that the Internet - and its freeness - actually happened by accident.  "Its not that history is sweeping us to greater openness inexorably," he points out. It's that a bunch of geeks were accidentally allowed to make this happen.

If a bunch of government officials, lawyers and companies had been able to sit down and design the internet, rather than the network where control is at the ends and anybody can create virtually anything, it would have been constructed in a much more top-down, centrally controlled way. Corporate and government forces worldwide are trying very hard now to take it in that direction. We cannot assume that freedom will win because the net is intrinsically free. It's not. And it will cease to be free unless people fight to keep it that way.

Boyle points out that we as  humans have a horrible track record at predicting the future. With this in mind we need to operate under the following assumptions if we want to create system that maximize social benefit and individual freedom:

1. Make sure you leave as open as possible for as long as possible the construction and design of the system you're making;

2. Make sure you're open to as many kinds of feedback as possible for as long as possible in order to collect and incorporate ideas, and adjust to problems that never would have occurred to you independently;

3. Push against your own instincts about what kinds of control are needed.

Sounds like good advice for any media organization.

beyondbroadcast

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?

WeMedia: the real question

There has been way too much re-hashing today at the We Media Global Forum of the old and tired debate: "bloggers vs journalists, who is better" blah blah.

The question we really ought to be focusing on is: how can citizens and professional journalists work together to create a better and more well-informed public discourse?

We Media, Whose Media?

Day 1 of the We Media Global Forum has started here in London. Click here for the live chat and live webcast. Click here for a feed of Global Voices commentary and Reuters coverage.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be banging my usual drum - the issue of inclusiveness which several people brought up at the last WeMedia conference and the conference before that too.

There's a concern here in the room that online participatory media could be creating an echo chamber of connected elites which will be less inclined to hear voices of people who don't spend time online.

Of course it's necessary for media to stop delivering a one-way lecture to audiences, and build a multi-directional conversation. But with whom? The advent of internet-driven participatory media and citizens' media alone won't make the media more inclusive of minority, disenfranchised and hitherto ignored voices. Media will only become more democratic if concerted efforts are made to bridge digital divides, build communities of conversation in places not heavily covered by the media, and then amplify the new voices.

Many of these efforts are unlikely to be financially profitable, at least in the short term, for commercial media companies. But it such efforts are needed to build a more informed and democratic public discourse.

Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace

I'm at the first day of a conference here in Manila called "Freedom of Expression in Asian Cyberspace" organized by the South East Asian Press Alliance.  Chi Dang from Vietnam just told us that two members of her delegation were arrested at the airport on their way to this conference.

My colleague Ethan, as usual is doing an amazing job of live-blogging the speakers - people from around Asia who are at the forefront of pushing for free speech online.  The speakers are also being videoblogged  here. And Portnoy from Taiwan is blogging the conference in Chinese here. Also see blog coverage on the blog of PCIJ, one of the conference's Filippino sponsors.  More TBA.