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June 27, 2006
The People Formerly Known as the AudienceThat's what I call them. Recently I received this statement.The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about. Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were. Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that? The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this: The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.
The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us. (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were one exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention. Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.” Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have. Should we attend the theatre, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them and you can have yourselves a nice little business. But we’re not on your clock any more. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.” We graduate from wanting media when we want it, to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun. Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.”) Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.” Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.” Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.” We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts. The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers.” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the U.S.) Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen.” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League.) Fithian, Kirschner and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs…”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile. You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us. The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links Check this out: The People formerly known as The Congregation (March 28, 2007.) Revises and extends my remarks into the situation with organized religion today… We are The People formerly known as The Congregation. We have not stopped loving the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nor do we avoid “the assembling of the saints.” We just don’t assemble under your supposed leadership. We meet in coffee shops, around dinner tables, in the parks and on the streets. Caused quite a stir online too. I have been using the phrase, the people formerly known as the audience, for a while. But I had never tried to define it. This post came out of reflections after BloggerCon IV (June 23-24, “empowering the users”) and in anticipation of the Media Giraffe conference (June 28-July 1, “Sharing News & Information in a Connected World”) but also in the course of writing Web Users Open the Gates (Washingtonpost.com, June 19). Google Blog Search for the phrase “people formerly known as the audience.” Regular ‘ol Google Search for the phrase. “Guys, citizen’s media isn’t fairy dust that you can sprinkle on an existing program and make it magically interactive, bloggy and web 2.0 compliant.” Ethan Zuckerman is talking to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” on how not to approach the former audience: So let’s get this straight - Marketplace isn’t able to answer email from listeners, even when those listeners are offering to help them work on getting a former contributor out of prison. But Marketplace is interested in having me fill out a 19-field form so they can contact me via email and, if neccesary, call me for a quick soundbyte on an upcoming story. Dave Winer gets lyrical at Scripting News (July 1): We live in the age that Emerson predicted, self-reliance. Make your own music and your own products. Everyone gets to be creative. The brains are in what we used to call the audience. No more looking up to the ivory tower for all fulfillment. Thank god we don’t all have to be as beautiful as Farah Fawcett and Christopher Reeve. Everyone gets to sing. Users and developers party together. Amy Gahran at Poynter about TPFKATA: “Seriously: News pros should be watching and joining this conversation.” Amy also points to a BlogPulse tool for tracking the ripples outward from this post. Ripple: At the Associated Press Managing Editors website, Mark Briggs of the (Tacoma, WA) News Tribune says to fellow editors: You need to read the post – and the comments – to understand what is happening “out there.” The audience is off the sidelines and in the game and is going to play. It’s up to you to play with it in a way that benefits everyone. They used to be our most loyal customers. Fine Young Journalist, commenting on this study by a Harvard master’s student (“Emerging Collaborative News Models and the Future of News”) says about the users of Digg.com, Slashdot.org and other wisdom-of-the-crowd sites… “These aren’t just the people formerly known as the audience, they’re the people formerly known as our audience.” Should you be in the immediate vicinity, I will be performing this post on Nantucket Island, July 26 at Nantucket Antheneum (8:00-9:30 pm, Great Hall) as part of the Geschke Lecture Series. If you are a blogger and want to attend, e-mail me. Doc Searls is right that power “shifting,” while crudely accurate, is less than apt for my case. Power is expanding and dispersing because broader participation makes for a “bigger” press. Doc: The expansion of authorship from few to many is a postive-sum development. So is the expansion of authority and influence that naturally grows in a market constantly enlarged by broader participation, and not merely by a growing choice of “content.” There are lots of ways for “old” media to adapt to the new system. “Unfortunately, few or none of them are in the toolboxes of the old system.” Read his response to TPFKATA. And Doc returns to the subject here. Ripples… Stowe Boyd: “Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back.” Jeremie at Temporally Relevant likes the term: “To be an edgling is to share and participate with your peers through open technology.” Stowe Boyd’s follow-up post, Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything (July 11). Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge. The Edglings vs. the Centroids. I like it. “The concept of audience remains valid.” At First Draft, Tim Porter responds to this post: We are all each other’s audience. A good listener is an audience. So is a critic. Or someone who clicks on someone else’s Flickr photo. The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today it is a loop, not a pipe. I agree with Tim. The audience hasn’t “gone away.” Porter: “The ‘audience’ is out there. Journalists need to be out there, too.” Here’s the link to a French translation of this post: Le peuple jadis connu sous le nom d’audience. And here’s a response in French to the French translation. Other reactions of note:
Scott Walters asks how this post connects to the world of theatre, while elearnspace says, “I’m waiting for a similar announcement from learners in corporate and higher education,” and this blog (“advocacy strategy for the age of connectivity”) says “Rosen’s riff on the Audience is directly related to the way advocacy and organizing groups think about members and supporters.” J-school student Ryan Sholin imagines a career path in journalism starting with “the community editor’s position.” Wherein it’s my job to bootstrap the newspaper’s online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them. This means learning some more web design and coding to modify some existing open source software, but the hard part is getting the community (and the editors) to see your newspaper as a place for participation. From the incomparable Cursor, Media Patrol column, June 27 edition: A new hire by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “to help improve [her] image among liberal bloggers,” is called “a major coup.” The Economist in April 2006: Almost everywhere, download speeds (from the internet to the user) are many times faster than upload speeds (from user to network). This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes assumed that the internet would simply be another distribution pipe for themselves or their partners in the media industry. Even today, they can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out. Seth Finkelstein dissents in the comments at Dan Gillmor’s blog: Dan, we’re still the audience. If you don’t like my comment, you can personally attack me to a number of readers that is orders of magnitude more than I could realistically reach myself. I have no effective way to reply. That’s “audience”. Like the news media, Seth is an inflater of the balloons he pops. He refutes propositions I haven’t made: that the audience is no more, that media power has been equalized. As I wrote in the comments to another poster: The post I wrote does not say “the people” have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there’s been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new “balance of power,” which is another way of talking about a limited change. Don’t miss the comments to this post.
Posted by Jay Rosen at June 27, 2006 1:26 AM
Comments
Brilliant, Jay, and this has profound implications not only for all media but for commerce itself, since contemporary buying and selling paradigms are based on mass marketing. Without the mass -- or the perception of mass -- buying and selling returns to the commons, and success there requires more than Superbowl ads and the biggest budget. This will be the arena of opportunity in the months and years ahead, and the people formerly known as the audience will be on the front lines. Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 27, 2006 9:38 AM | Permalink There has always been an subset of the audience that wanted to be active (the actience?), but the tools that make it possible only just became available. The meteoric rise of computer gaming was an early indicator of the latent desire of the former audience to be participants. There is also a subset of the audience that wants to be passive. There is something to be said for letting artists and experts entertain and inform you. I also see a distinction between two flavors of the actience. There are those who manage passive media to take control of "the point of their engagement." They are still consumers but want to decide the terms of consumption. Then there are those who seek to create their own content. This group has the potential to truly shake things up because there has never been a time when there was more opportunity for anyone to produce, publish, and distribute original content. But while anyone can now become a producer, producers still need an audience. And developing content for this new model audience will be challenging and exciting. Posted by: Mark Howard @ News Corpse at June 27, 2006 12:29 PM | Permalink Another excellent piece, Jay. Posted by: Scott Butki at June 27, 2006 12:54 PM | Permalink I enjoyed reading this piece very much. It was inspiring and exciting. It is interesting to participate in different blogging communities and discover someone who writes like you. Thank you. Jay, fantastic. From a response here, I wanted to share a particular final thought: "While Rosen shines the spotlight on the audiences of media, all of us are catching the reflected glow as participants in every marketplace. The points made above are not restricted to the world of media, or of journalism. They are, instead, another channel marker on a collaborative, generation-long journey where we all get to choose the ports-of-call." Great piece. Posted by: Christopher Carfi at June 27, 2006 5:59 PM | Permalink I have only one quibble, Jay: You said that the old media system gave it's "operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others", but I'm not sure this is true.... the "exaggerated" part, that is. I think their power is very real, and not to be so easily dismissed. True, bloggers like most of us here have made some gains in recent years, but we are still nothing more than a mouse nibbling on the toes of a giant. I agree with the spirit of your piece. Bloggers are on the rise, and we will change the world and the discussion. In the meantime, let's not forget that there are 5 or so media conglomerates who exercise a staggering amount of control over our viewing, reading and listening habits. My blog, cool as it may be, is not going to become a regular column in Newsweek anytime soon (unless I clean up my act like Wonkette... and get really popular). The media still has the power to put a piece of crap on the air in a hundred markets and see if it flies. The radio conglomerates still very much control what bands get on the air. If they don't like your songs (or your politics, your hairstyles, your lack of fealty, etc.), you don't get played and that's the end of that. The entrenched media has several other advantages. If they see a new power rising on the internet, they have the resources to simply buy it, a la Rupert Murdoch and MySpace. Digg.com getting a little too much play for the NYT's taste? Buy'em out. They own this media landscape; we're just starting out. Their oligarchy will probably continue for years and most people will never know what they might've missed. For all the web's power, we are still in the infancy stage, or maybe the terrible twos. We've got a long way to go if we want to overthrow the old regime. But how many people can afford to blog on such a lovely page as this? I wouldn't have read anything you said if this was posted at Blogger.com, or Myspace.com for that matter. Does that make me a snob? And a voice online will cost you time and money: $15/year for a domain, $70/year for a host, some kind of education, at the very least knowledge of HTML, preferably CSS, and PHP. And still you might not be heard without SEO knowledge. Posted by: PJ at Knowing Art at June 27, 2006 7:59 PM | Permalink What is so weird is that the media seems to react so defensively and angrily. Well, I guess it's not weird. But it seems to me that if they want to KEEP us, they shouldn't go out of their way to alienate us by responding snippily or nastily to letters and complaints (mine are always politely worded, and I still get sarcastic responses from the editors and reporters). They shouldn't act like the half of their readers who vote for the party out of power are mere "partisans", like the very act of expressing your viewpoint means you can't possibly have a view worth considering. I would also think they should figure out that they have to make themselves indispensable now that we have other options. Most bloggers can't do true investigative reporting-- only newspapers and other media that can pay salaries and legal fees can do that. So why are they wasting their money on high-priced pundits like David Brooks (pundits are a dime a dozen out there on the Web-- why bother to read an ill-informed and thoughtless column by Brooks when you can find other stuff on a dozen blogs)? They should get real reporters who know their jobs and correct mistakes before bloggers notice them (hopefully before they get into print). But instead they're replicating what blogs do better-- opinion-- and for free. Are editors and publishers really so stupid? Posted by: telly at June 27, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink I think for starters we need to get straight that the internet as we know it is a virtual commons made possible by several generations of Pentagon spending combined with government regulation to ensure net neutrality plus tax breaks to give online businesses competitive privileges. The internet, online business models, and the active audience are the antithesis of free market deregulation in the standard issue plundering, neoliberal privatization-of-the-commons style. That's why net neutrality was dropped by the Bush FCC. Dropping net neutrality IS privatizing the virtual commons, yet another round of corporate accumulation via socialist subsidization of the corporate oligarchy. The GOP is socialist if you are in the Fortune 500. Individual responsibility is for the little people. The active audience and the internet are Big Government plus government subsidies writ large. Nothing could be further from the "free market" cartels deregulation is determined to produce than the active audience and the internet as we know them. The Senate is debating whether to take it all back as we discuss this post. If congress kills net neutrality, many of the issues this post raises will become moot for reasons directly traceable to the militant ignorance of neoliberal political philosophy. Is the active audience politically active and effective enough to insist that their Senators keep the regulatory infrastructure in place that makes it possible for them to continue to be an active audience? At this point, I would suggest we need a little more activism and a little less self-congratulation over our newfound agency and media autonomy. Absent net neutrality, the active audience will be a fantasy on the order of having our votes accurately counted this coming November. Talk to your Senators about net neutrality so that the issues Jay raises in this post are still real possibilities next week as well as this week. With the success of the Internet has come a proliferation of stakeholders - stakeholders now with an economic as well as an intellectual investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 27, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink Vemrion: I don't disagree with what you said. The post I wrote does not say "the people" have the power now, and the media lost theirs. It says there's been a shift in power. (And there has, but only a partial one.) It also speaks of a new "balance of power," which is another way of talking about a limited change. I'm not claiming that the power shift is total, or even decisive. Only that it's signficant, and changes the equation. Exclusive influence, monopoly position, the right to dictate terms, dynastic continuity, priestly authority, guild conditions for limiting competition-- these have been lost, not the entrenched media's social and market power, which as you say remain considerable. This post is exactly what the official media need to hear. On the other hand, there's still the reality that most of us have to work mac jobs for a living no matter how big an audience we get on youtube. This piece on media cluelessness on the religion beat was pretty entertaining - and a good example of why "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" (PFKA (TM)) have increasingly had it with the media. Picture this scene. A flock of Pentecostal Christians has gathered at the U.S. Capitol for yet another prayer rally about sex, abortion, family values and the public square. "At times, the mood turned hostile toward the lawmakers in the stately white building behind the stage," wrote The Washington Post in its coverage of the event. Then, without explanation, the story offered this on-stage quotation from a religious broadcaster: "Let's pray that God will slay everyone in the Capitol." Slay what? Clearly, the reporters didn't know about the experience that Pentecostal Christians call being "slain in the Holy Spirit," in which they believe they are transformed by a surge of God's power. The result was a journalistic train wreck that ended up in the book The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. "The problem," wrote authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, "was that the reporters didn't know, didn't have any Pentecostals in the newsroom to ask, and was perhaps too anxious for a 'holy sh-t' story to double-check with someone afterward whether the broadcaster was really advocating the murder of the entire Congress." This mistake made "a strong case for the need for humility" at the news desk, they said. A blog/commentary-friendly platform on the Web would go a long way towards ensuring such stupidy was quickly and soundly corrected. Of course, few newspapers have thus far embraced the technology. I mean, really - why does someone else have to put together something like The Annotated Times (sadly, no longer running, it seems) or the single paper equivalent of memeorandum? Just as important, though, hiring editors need to look beyond their bean-counting approach to diversity and reach out to new segments of the PFTA - that is to say, "Americans." Bias is a problem. But, in my experience, apathy and ignorance cause most of these laugh-to-keep-from-crying gaffes. It would help if newsroom executives spent more time thinking about intellectual, cultural and even spiritual diversity, in addition to focusing on gender, race and class. Preach it, brother! Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 28, 2006 9:39 AM | Permalink Quick survey - If I said I was "convicted," how many of you guys would know what I was talking about? Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 28, 2006 9:40 AM | Permalink Wow. Great piece Jay. PJ, I have to say that if you really wouldn't read something because someone wrote it on Blogger, then you are a little shortsighted. This is about voice and content, not showy graphics. I have two thoughts: one is that the shift in audience power is going to change scholarship as well. I'm not sure how yet, but it will come. One of the best things about scholarly publishing is that the work is vetted by other scholars, so sloppy analysis doesn't see the printed page. That said, there are probably great pieces of research that don't get printed too. I wonder what a reviewed journal would look like online... The second is that there's a bunch of work on institutional organizational theory, and about how institutions promote themselves vis a vis their proprietary technology. But what hasn't been researched is what happens when institutions lose their technology. Take, for example, the post office. For years it had the only technology for shipping letters. Then along came fedex with a new technology for shipping, and UPS changed its strategy, and now there are many different ways to send thing, at different price points, etc. The media is currently losing its technology. It turns out that the technology was distribution (and in the case of newspapers, the printing press). But the technology was not writing and reporting. That work turns out to be non-proprietary, and given the way the press organized itself, reporting can be done by anyone. This causes uproar in media. But it also provides a marvelous laboratory to study institutions in chaos and loss of control. I live in an interesting time. What Mark Anderson said a few posts up: if Net Neutrality isn't preserved, we may well wind up right back where we were. I doubt they'll ever make the pipeline completely one-way again, but they can make it a lot more one-way, and do a lot more crowding out of noncorporate content, than it is now. So keep on leaning on your Senators. My advice would be, forget Snowe-Dorgan for now; better to ask your Senators that they kill the Stevens telecom bill altogether for this Congress and write a better bill next year. If the Senate bill passes, even with the Snowe-Dorgan Net neutrality amendment, there'll be a House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences in the bills, and Snowe-Dorgan won't survive conference. JennyD - can't be sure, but one thing I'm reading in PJ's post is simply that having a blog on blogger.com doesn't mean anyone's reading what you write. As one such blogger, I speak from experience - there are millions of blogs out there, and just because you've got something to say doesn't mean anyone's going to read it. Fortunately, to a certain extent I'm writing just for my own satisfaction in being able to say what I want to say in my own space, even if not a soul is reading my words. A couple of questions: 1. When "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" decide that the top story of the day is "Humble Grocer Gives Away Millions" -- a day when Israel has invaded Gaza -- is that altogether good? Are you (or other commenters who seem to agree with you) arguing the "Priests" at the NY Times should include more stories on the front page about humble grocers giving away millions of dollars? (Note that the Israel-Gaza story doesn't even show up on Digg's "World & Business" pages). 2. Will the "People Formerly Known as the Audience" be sending someone to Iraq, Gaza or Afghanistan? Your manifesto may be a description of reality, or a reality to come. But I guess I am yet convinced we'll be better off, or better informed in this new world you're describing. Put another way: I wish we in the "new media" world would spend more time focused on building services that really do allow us to be better informed and better entertained, and less time and effort issuing triumphalist declarations about the coming demise of mainstream media. Right on, and well put. What we're dealing with here is part of a generalized trend that grows naturally on the Net. That trend is toward the demand side supplying iself. This is less a matter of power shifting than of power originating from a growing population of individuals and the organizations they form or reform. The trend is positive-sum. Maybe immeasurable-sum. I just expanded on these observations in this post here. A pull-quote: It is impossible, however, to understand the new world we're making in terms of the old one we're also still living in. You might as well resurrect Ptolemy to explain Copernicus. Posted by: Doc Searls at June 28, 2006 1:57 PM | Permalink really great post, Jay! (looking fwd to seeing you later tonight at MGP, btw....) What's come to my attention lately, though, is how many established newspapers and big media enterprises want to incorporate "citizen journalism" under their auspices--and that this might not serve the best interests of c.j.'s nor their communities... Perhaps rather than being part of a local paper's web presence, citizen journalism might need to watchdog local media--as much as efforts like TPM watchdog Big Media. But if the established--and more easily located-- local "citizen journalism" is folded into the local paper's web presence (for whatever motive), where there is usually some editorial oversight, some c.j. stories might end up receiving an editorial spin much like the Front Page... If that's the case, who are the c.j. posts serving? the community or the status quo? And if they're serving the status quo, isn't that defeating the purpose of people participating in media endeavors? Further, what about the possibility of c.j's being used as "stringers" for the newsroom? There's potential for that to happen in almost any combined citj/establishment enterprise. Is that even ethical? Some might argue "yes" because the citizens are not true journalists, but that's specious reasoning. The people may have the power, but who, really, might up with the control? I don't mind the idea of journalists mentoring citizens in the practice of journalism (if they would like that mentoring) but when does mentoring become control? I really hate to be the one playing devil's advocate, but sometimes one has to look at how the best intentions could lead straight back to the same old same old. Posted by: tish grier at June 28, 2006 3:21 PM | Permalink Where you see an audience I just see customers who bought their news and entertainment from publishers and broadcasters with their subscription dollars and their attention. (That attention was then resold to marketers who needed a means to find customers for their businesses.) For years there were enough barriers to keep all the media's customers (both the audience and the advertisers) coming back no matter how disappointed they were in what the media provided them. As those barriers started to crumble the disappointed customers naturally began to look around for an alternative. And when they found one, they defected. Barriers falling and customers defecting is a trend that has already completely disrupted the cozy in other industries. Now the bell tolls for the media. 'bout time. BTW contemporary buying and selling paradigms are not based on mass marketing. Take a look at the shrinking share of the marketing dollar spend on "mass marketing" and you can see the trend. Posted by: laurence haughton at June 28, 2006 4:36 PM | Permalink Thanks for proving my point Jay. :-( I thought you were better than that. You left off the last part of my comment: "Don’t shoot the messenger." Is this the worst personal attack I've ever received in my life? No, not at all, by far. But it's illustrative of the inequality of audience, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at June 28, 2006 4:57 PM | Permalink Great post. I am an educator and I recently wrote an economics lesson considering the nature of monopolies in the beginning of the Twenty First Century. I encouraged students to consider if it would be harder to establish a monopoly today than 100 years ago. The think the answer is unequivocably yes. The Internet and the communication tools on it have given the activist much greater power to make his/her own voice heard. However, there are still many people who choose not to exert their own voice. They remain the audience. Andy Pass Posted by: Andrew Pass at June 28, 2006 6:13 PM | Permalink Jay: point taken concerning the shifting bit. I think we're in the very beginning of this shift. The possibilities are suddenly there. I can take on CBS if I was insane enough. I can start a net radio station or an online publication like Wayne Madsen. We are not on their level.... but at least we're in the game. At any rate, I'm just glad to have a voice through my blog; that choice wasn't even there before, except for photocopied 'zines that were popular in underground music scenes during the 80s and 90s. At least on the web my site has an address, just like CNN. Of course the telco companies want to change that (I'd be curious to know your take on Net Neutrality, btw). The fact that the telecom companies have seen fit to respond to the net's power by threatening to restrict the voices of those who don't pay "protection money" is strong evidence for your point. Still, I think it's going to be a long time before the playing field is level. If the established corporations have their way that day will never come. I fear that they will manage to co-opt the movement before it gets too strong. In some ways, I'd rather you didn't let the MSM know what kind of threat they're facing so they will be blindsided, but that's just me thinking tactically. :-) Ah well. Let it never be said that the bloggers didn't warn the media that systemic change was coming. RE: Economist in After Matter, "This is because the corporate giants that built these pipes ..." Idiots. I blame Joseph Lechleider. John Cioffi, too. Posted by: Gave up 56k for DSL at June 28, 2006 8:12 PM | Permalink Quick survey - If I said I was "convicted," how many of you guys would know what I was talking about? I you say "I've been convicted" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you have been convicted of a crime. If you say "I hope the President is slain" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you want the President killed. ...and it makes perfect sense for everyone to do so. It is not the responsibility of the press to understand your personal jargon; words have meaning and when you use words in public spaces, you are responsible for those words. It isn't the responsibility of the press to take special steps to understand you mean by "convicted", any more than its the responsibility of the press to take special steps to know what you mean by "I" and "was" in the sentence "I was convicted". Just a shout-out here to an extremely topical new Paul Graham essay, The Power of the Marginal, a fringe's-eye view of how innovation comes from the fringe. Excerpts - and much much more.
Posted by: Anna Haynes at June 28, 2006 10:13 PM | Permalink Quick survey - If I said I was "convicted," how many of you guys would know what I was talking about? -- Jason Van Steenwyk Frankly, Jason, as always, it's a great mystery exactly what you are talking about. Perhaps you're talking about being "convicted" of howling at the moon because a couple of newspapers printed a story that has been around for four years, ever since The Counter Terrorism Blog and a 2002 United Nations report revealed the same thing ? Or perhaps you're talking about how, egged on by the White House, knowing as they do how to create a useful diversion, you took the bait ? Who knows ? Certainly not me, So let's end the suspense, sweetie -- what are you talking about ? Posted by: Ann Kolson at June 28, 2006 10:43 PM | Permalink viva la revolucion... "I’ll admit that I’m out of my league here debating with Rosen, but i’ve watched my partner blog with a baby with a full Maternity leave. It’s really hard to make the time to make that happen… the citizen, i think, is a bit more complex than mr. Rosen is letting on. I’ve been called back to the blog today by an article that i came to through Stephen. Jay Rosen wrote a rousing article that came out of, apparently, his bloggercon presentation. It’s entitled, the people formerly known as the audience and talks in broad tones about the the coming of the revolution, how the people have been empowered, and how the world will change along with the media." Posted by: dave cormier at June 28, 2006 10:48 PM | Permalink The Senate Commerce Committee rejects the Dorgan-Snowe Net Neutrality amendment. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 29, 2006 12:08 AM | Permalink If that was Dave Cormier, he didn't link to his actual post on the topic. But the technology was not writing and reporting. That work turns out to be non-proprietary, and given the way the press organized itself, reporting can be done by anyone. - JennyD In theory, reporting can be done by anyone. (I am equating reporting and blogging here.) But in practice, according to Cormier: And change comes when EVERYONE is in on the revolution. How much time do the single mothers have to blog? We did get a call from the western sahara on a brainstorm the other night… magical for its rarity. (and not exactly culturally representative of the rest of the people in that camp) You work all day, you see your kids, kiss the husband/wife have a beer, go to bed. Oh, and probably turn on your TV. Do you spend three hours configuring your RSS feed? not so much. Mark Hall writes: Are you (or other commenters who seem to agree with you) arguing the "Priests" at the NY Times should include more stories on the front page about humble grocers giving away millions of dollars? No, I'm not. Other commenters will speak for themselves. This is not a post about what the New York Times should be doing. It's about who has joined the New York Times in the "press" space. Quick question, are you saying that more bloggers should do posts attempting to calculate how many times a famous married couple could have possibly screwed each other over the last few years? Will the "People Formerly Known as the Audience" be sending someone to Iraq, Gaza or Afghanistan? No, probably not. Well, maybe. Let's back up. They sent Chris Allbritton to Iraq in 2003. (See this.) They sent Josh Marshall to New Hampshire in 2004. I believe they've sent Michael Yon to Iraq to report, as well. I wouldn't make big claims about a short track record like that. These are tiny experiments. But they allow us to go forward with an idea that maybe there are other ways... Certainly that has yet to be proven. I wish we in the "new media" world would spend more time focused on building services that really do allow us to be better informed and better entertained, and less time and effort issuing triumphalist declarations about the coming demise of mainstream media. I agree about building stuff that works being more important than declarations like this one. More important, harder, realer in its consequences. But... Where in this post do you see any declaration about mainstream media's demise? I say it's not there. In fact, you may be engaging in hype when you say that. Anne and pluk, you illustrate my larger point perfectly. I you say "I've been convicted" in a public space, everyone is going to assume that you have been convicted of a crime. No, they wouldn't. If I said so in the context of an evangelical rally, for example - or even simply talking about a sermon at a mainstream Protestant worship service with other churchgoers, that would not be the case at all. The fact that you have trouble grasping that is illustrative of the larger point - you lack the cultural information to make sense of the term, and would therefore have screwed it up had you reported on it. On the micro level, that's not a terrible thing: I wouldn't expect the reflexively secular liberal to catch the use of the term in that context. The problem arises when you have entire newsrooms full of people with the same outlook, and so nobody is capable of understanding it. And then assigning one of those people to the religion beat - which is how you get journalism laugh lines like "assault ministry," uncritical reporting on Al Gore's "where your heart is, there is your treasure also" (It should be obvious why Gore flunked out of divinity school), and most notoriously, "Poor, uneducated, and easy to command." . It is not the responsibility of the press to understand your personal jargon Except that it's not my personal jargon, but a very common expression. Just not in your limited circles. Actually, I haven't heard it in some time in Florida. I heard it a lot in Tennessee. If you're going to cover the religion beat, it sure as hell IS the responsibility of the press to understand the language of the community. Actually, I would consider it to be a very basic responsibility of the reporter covering the beat. You might want to make excuses for your ignorance, but you'd have to pay for that a lot by showing up in the corrections section. The fact that you resent having to learn it is telling. words have meaning Yes, they do. Too bad you don't understand them. and when you use words in public spaces, you are responsible for those words. Funny. Everyone else at the rally seemed to understand what "slay" meant. "Slain in the spirit" is a very common expression, with 5.4 million hits on Google. The reporter at that rally, apparently, was the only knucklehead who didn't get it. Now who's the "uneducated" one? Yes, it is. That is, if the mainstream press is not the intended audience to begin with, and if the press is starting out from a position of ignorance (not a bad assumption on the religion and military beats alike), then the reporter ought to take some time to educate himself in the field. At the very least, to doublecheck what he thinks he's hearing with someone who's not starting from a position of ignorance. Unfortunately, because of the lack of ideological diversity in newsrooms, he can't rely on his editors and colleagues for that very fundamental check and balance. Simply put, if the reporter thinks it's not his responsibility to understand, then he should be fired, and replaced with someone who's either better educated, or a bit more curious. Certainly not me, So let's end the suspense, sweetie -- what are you talking about ? Darlin', if you don't already know, you just prove my point. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 1:02 AM | Permalink Not long ago, we had a world where the "story of the day" was decided by a small number of professional journalists. Today, it is a little more split, with conservative talk radio providing a second nexus. In the future... The raw facts of political and economic news are still often only available to the established press, which has people with the time, funds and credentials to get it. As long as this is true, the power of the audience to produce news is limited. However, the audience can create its own circles of opinion, where the framking of issues is distributed into these blogs. This doesn't produce more facts, but it does interject political (or whatever) bias in a different way. But perhaps the most active thing most in the "former audience" will do is choose from a much wider set of "channels" - frequently locking only onto those that match their existing biases. I fear that this trend will lead to increasingly disparate groups, each in its own echo chamber. The far left will Kossify. The right will... well, add blogs to talk radio. Many people will no longer be exposed to contradictory opinions (of course, the soft left, if it continues to feed off of the MSM, will continue to never see contradictory opinions anyway). America today seems strongly and rigidly divided. How much of that is already the result of having two primary viewpoint sources - the MSM (roughly, for the left) and talk radio (mostly for the right)? Do the blogs change this? Amplify it? Change a bipolar split into a multipolar chaos? Or do they really not do much most of the time? Posted by: John Moore at June 29, 2006 1:50 AM | Permalink First off I love the letter. It is a nice ideal, and I do believe that there is a big shift going on, and the landscape is getting ever so more blurred. I look forward to a world when sites like the news is now public, and others can afford to buy cable stations, and podcasts are carried on satelite radios stations. It will be neat to see how the media landscape is in 5 years.. who comes out on top, who gets the most views, not just who is talking, but more importantly who is listening, and to what... perhaps we can all have a hand in this to amke it better! Lordy, Jason. You got 'em right between the eyes! MarkL Posted by: MarkL at June 29, 2006 7:44 AM | Permalink Thanks Hue, yes, that was the same person. I always feel weird linking directly to my own post in someone's comments... kinda feel like someone else should do that if they feel that my post is relevant. And Jay, as you well know, while you didn't 'say' anything about the demise of the media, the tone of the post does certainly suggest something. It's about audience i suppose... correct tone for bloggercon and people who would like to go there if they were more geographically/fiscally fortunate... maybe not so much for people more skeptical and less bloggish. Posted by: dave cormier at June 29, 2006 7:44 AM | Permalink Jason: Actually "Slain in the spirit" only gets 50,000 hits in Google when you include the quote marks. Otherwise you're including all pages with "spirit" and "slay" anywhere in the text. Including the quotes makes sure that they are actually talking about the phenomenon you're referring to. Incidentally, I hope you are fine with people viciously mocking you when you are inexperienced with something, since you seem to take so much joy in mocking others. The "golden rule" and all. Google it if you don't know what I'm referring to. :-) Here's a couple of passages from Father Richard John Neuhaus in First Things: the Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life: An eager young thing with a national paper was interviewing me about yet another instance of political corruption. “Is this something new?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it’s been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” There was a long pause and then she asked, “What garden was that?” It was touching. "uneducated," indeed. And this is from a national. What prompts me to mention this today is that I’m just off the phone with a reporter from the same national paper. He’s doing a story on Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate, I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. “That raises an interesting point,” he said. “Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” Actually, I believe historically, they practice what is known as "telecommunion." He obviously thought he was on to a new angle. Once again, I tried to be gentle. Toward the end of our talk, he said with manifest sincerity, “My job is not only to get the story right but to explain what it means.” Ah yes, he is just the fellow to explain what this pontificate and the encyclical really mean. It is poignant. Touching, indeed. Our national media is sending innocent kids out to write serious stories on religion when the only thing their fund of information equips them to write is stories along the lines of "So what's the deal with the Pope's funny hat?" And even then they'd need a backgrounder. You gonna cover the fish? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect reporters to learn to swim. Obviously, you're going to have glitches and mistakes here and there. But when journalism pros make excuses for their ignorance - when they wave away atrocious reporting on a rally as if the bad reporting is somehow the fault of the participants - and when editors and reporters, collectively, are not only utterly clueless about religious communities, but are in abject denial about how ill-informed they are (when somehow a liberal education and four year degree didn't imbue one national reporter with the cultural knowledge to comprehend a reference to the Garden of Eden), then there aren't going to be any meaningful improvements made. The republic is not well-served by lousy quality control such as this. And it is not well-served by the cultural inbreeding that dominates our newsrooms, and makes Pauline Kael syndrome possible. For those not in the know, Pauline Kael was a longtime film critic in New York. When Nixon slaughtered McGovern in the most lopsided, decisive election in living memory in 1972, Kael, touchingly, said "How can this be? I don't know a single person who voted for him!" The fact that such an inbred, monolithic, homogenous culture is even possible in a national news organization ought to be a mark of shame for the big-city journalist community. It should have been corrected long ago. You'd still have the occasional munchkin asking "What garden was that?" But the errors would be a lot less likely to see print. Assault ministry, indeed. More here, and a modest proposal: I propose, for starters, that from now on editors assign religion stories only to reporters who know religion just as well as their publication's political reporters know politics and their sports reporters know sports. Sounds reasonable to me. But wait! Plukasiak thinks it's not a journalist's responsibility to "take special steps" in order learn the language and terminology of his beat! I guess we're going to have to have a good purging of the ranks before we're intellectually equipped to take that little measure. I'm not mocking simple inexperience, vemrion. And notice I'm not naming names - the experts rolling their eyes at the doe-eyed dorks calling them up from the nation's newsrooms are mercifully keeping the names of the reporters involved to themselves. Rather, I'm mocking the willful embrace of ignorance and inexperience - which is itself rooted in the atrocious cultural skewing evident in newsroom demographics. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 11:40 AM | Permalink You're late and a dollar short, Jason. USA Today beat you to the rant with this Op/Ed. And with considerably less bluster that the journalistic world has gone straight to hell. Look around and you'd notice that most media outlets are aware of the problem and have taken steps - with varying degrees of success - to create more professional and more informed reporting on religion and faith. For nearly a decade, newspapers of varying sizes have given more space, more time and more reporters to cover religion. That's hardly a sign of not caring. Mistakes happen. Ill-informed reporters and their gaffes are embarrassing. And worse, fuel half-formed analysis that the media are involved in "the willful embrace of ignorance and inexperience - which is itself rooted in the atrocious cultural skewing evident in newsroom demographics." So relax. Soon enough, it seems, the light of a million blogs will shine. The audience will provide the news and mistakes will be a thing of the past. Posted by: Dave McLemore at June 29, 2006 1:42 PM | Permalink Jay, This issue is not one that is confined to journalism, it is relevant to communications as a whole. As a public relations practitioner, I am trying to get my colleagues to move away from the idea of "target audiences" and think about "communities of interest." Tim Porter talks about the "loop" that must exist, and I agree not everyone craves that interaction. However, communicators (journalists, PR people, marketers, etc.) must recognize that individuals at least want taht option, and more importantly, view two-way communications as more credible. A community needs to have the capability of sharing and collaboration. An audience does not. Goodbye audience, you never really had a chance Posted by: Jeffrey Treem at June 29, 2006 2:03 PM | Permalink What objective measure would reliably tell an editor which "reporters know religion, politics or sports?" (BTW business reporting suffers also when business reporters don't know business.) University degrees are no guarantee of knowing anything are they? And experience is equally unreliable? I'm just asking... Posted by: laurence haughton at June 29, 2006 3:31 PM | Permalink Really enjoyed this post and the comments. Thanks. Your (?) line: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Reminded me of that great ironic line from A Passage to India: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." I work on the website of a slow-moving, congenitally-print trade title and what makes our journalists resistant to buying into digital and two-way mediums is exactly that fear: that by welcoming strange, new things into our space we diminish our own sense of what we are. It's natural to talk about the 'old' media in terms of power wielded, because that's the public currency of the classic producer/audience relationship. I think it's worth remembering, though, that for most journalists their chosen career is crucial not just to their financial stability but also to their self-definition - you can apply to journalism the German aphorism about teaching: Lehren ist kein Beruf, sondern eine Berufung. (How's my German? Call 0800-QREKT-IT-Y'SELF.) What the print staff I work with are nervous about isn't losing power over an audience, it's losing their profession and professional identity to a medium they look at in the same way 18th century weavers did the spinning jenny. Finding a new relationship between (ex-)producers and (ex-)audience seems to me to hinge a great deal on changing those attitudes at the coalface (I'm not saying they're widespread, by the way - they're clearly much less in evidence on something like Guardian - I'm just wondering about how this revolution will come to the smaller, less glamorous bits of the media like the one I work in). Dave, Thanks for the link. Actually, that USA Today article was the first piece I linked to. But thanks for trying to keep up! ;-) For nearly a decade, newspapers of varying sizes have given more space, more time and more reporters to cover religion. That's hardly a sign of not caring. Your confusing a qualitative problem and solution with a quantitative one. No one has mentioned there's not enough coverage. Just that reporters are ignorant. More ignorant reporters who all come from the same knee-jerk secular-left background only compound the problem. If coverage sucks, adding more sucky coverage from sucky reporters just sucks that much more. Same with the military beat: Putting more reporters on the military beat does no good when the editorial standards are so pathetic you can sneak in a reference to "Purple Stars," confuse a sergeant with an officer, and assert that we award the Medal of Honor for songwriting. I'd trade ten of those idiots for one good one. And we should pay the good ones a lot more to do what they do. The first step, though, is in firing the editors who insist that journalists are "under no obligation to take special steps to understand" their beats. To the extent that that view is widely held - and I'm the only one on this board so far to attack it - that fundamental arrogance and laziness is itself the root of the problem, and the chief hurdle that needs to be overcome. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 29, 2006 5:27 PM | Permalink please folks. stop responding to Jason. don't let him hijack this thread with worn out old gripes, (Purple Stars, again?) we heard you 100 comments ago. Posted by: anti Jason at June 29, 2006 5:40 PM | Permalink Jason: your tactics are getting tiresome. Proving that journalists don't know squid about crab... tiresome. Also fishy. Nathan: I loved, "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." I think it is very apt. Professional journalists often fail to appreciate how deeply they identify against rather than with the public. It doesn't sound as noble (the "against" part) but it's actually crucial to professional identity. David Remnick, if you ask him about editing the New Yorker, says he doesn't take orders from readers, and wouldn't. He's suspicious of giving the readers what they want. I worry about pleasing myself, he says. If I didn't, I'd wind up with a really bad magazine, he says. By identify against I also mean they build up their professional selves by contrasting the disciplined practices of a pro journalist to what's normally expected of sloppy, biased, overly passionate or easily distracted civilians, your average Joe and Jane. For example: "You Howard Deaniacs out there, you are interesting people to write about; you see just one side of the issues, and that's fine... for you. We're journalists and we'd like to be passionate too, but we have to see both sides of the issues. You don't. You do understand that, right...?" And it's a short step from there to defining yourself by formula. In order for me to be the balanced pro I need you to be the imbalanced partisan. Sometimes these needs can get out of hand. Thus, Nathan says of his shop: "What makes our journalists resistant to buying into digital and two-way mediums is exactly that fear: that by welcoming strange, new things into our space we diminish our own sense of what we are." The people in the audience are supposed to stay in their seats. That's what many journalists feel about what's called the read-write-Web. Stay in your seats. Stay where we put you. Of course some don't feel that way. (An outstanding example of one.) They welcome the writing readers because they know if they don't they can't really welcome the read-write-Web into their journalism. Jay, try to pay attention. Clearly you do not understand that Jason is the expert par excellence on all matters -- military, religious, journalistic, and, even more breathtaking, constitutional. (All matters, that is, except ones that pertain to the actual topic of this post.) That he is not yet on the Supreme Court is only one of life's cruel ironies. Yet, oddly, he has yet to respond to the observation that the administration's program of tracking international bank transactions has been public knowledge for at least four years -- ever since The Counter Terrorism Blog and a United Nations report in 2002 revealed the same information. That's why it's so important not to get messed up with facts -- they're so damned inconvenient. Posted by: Ann Kolson at June 29, 2006 10:55 PM | Permalink No worries, the New York Times has the SWIFT program under control. Meanwhile, Ann Kolson ridicules Jason so he'll go back to his seat and Stay There. I concluded that Ann's ridicule of others at PressThink answers Siegal's questions: Should we be responding systematically to outside critics who attack our believability for political or commercial reasons of their own? What is an effective vehicle for doing this?It's not about the "little" errors, Jason, it's about the majesty of knowing. Posted by: Tim Schmoyer at June 29, 2006 11:39 PM | Permalink "Jason: your tactics are getting tiresome. Proving that journalists don't know squid about crab... tiresome. Also fishy." This is beyond hilarious. The Lefties here are annoyed that someone is saying perhaps it would be a good idea if reporters knew a little about the topics they were covering to avoid mistakes. Posted by: andrew at June 30, 2006 12:54 AM | Permalink Van Steenwyk -- To drag this thread back to its original topicŠ: your long-held position in advocacy of cultural and ideological diversity in newsroom hiring is stipulated. The relevant question here is the one alluded to by McLemore. To what extent will the shifting of the center of gravity of journalism away from the professionals those newsrooms hire towards these PFKA, to use Rosen's formulation, be a better remedy for the Kaelesque problems of cultural blindness you cite -- solving them not through ideological affirmative action in hiring but by outreach to expertise in the universe known as the "former audience?" Or, to paraphrase Moore, to what extent will the PFKA be so atomized and riven along ideological lines that not only will the professionals lack ideological diversity but the amateurs too? Moore¹s future seems to be a Balkanization where one segment, for example, would talk in nothing but Biblical terms while another uses nothing but secular language. By the way: you never did tell us what being "convicted" does mean in the Pentecostal sense of the word. Is it just olde English for "convinced" or does it have similar overtones to the "slain" formulation, in that somehow one has been conquered by one¹s beliefs? Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at June 30, 2006 1:13 AM | Permalink Today on Anderson Cooper, I learned that Usama bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri of al-Qaida are two of those "people formerly known as the audience." They used to send their videos to al-Jazeera, but al-Jazeera's editing and censorship became tiresome and overweening. Also, sending a person to one of the very few al-Jazeera offices became a clear security risk. Consequently, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri now upload their video and audio clips directly to the web from Pakistani internet cafes, cutting out the hierarchical chokepoint in the Middle East's broadcast media system. One of the guest experts was clearly about to close with some reflexive al-Jazeera bashing and then realized as he was speaking that it's out of al-Jazeera's hands now, so in spite of himself he was left having to hold bin Laden and al-Zawahiri responsible for their own actions and to leave the "media conspiracy" diatribe out of it altogether. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 30, 2006 2:39 AM | Permalink Wow, amazing how much this post was bounced around the blogosphere, like it's something new. You posted about this the phrase 18 months ago in your Top Ideas of 2004 blog post, and it seemed pretty clear what you meant at the time. Jay, I admire your enthusiasm, your ability to headline a conference panel, and the loyalty of your readership, er, your commentership. But here at the Media Giraffe conference, the gathered media professionals and citizen-media-producers pretty much accept this formulation that you gave at the Wednesday night opening panel-- and then we moved on to discussing applications of this. Yesterday, Fabrice Florin introduced his NewsTrust endeavor and the worthy research under it, and Michael Skoler of MPR gave a brilliant talk about the Public Insight Network. It's these specific applications of digital media (or TPFKATA if you will) that your readers should be interested in learning about. But if you're just repeating bromides from 18 months ago, I can't see the value in reading PressThink. I stopped long ago, and haven't missed it. Posted by: Jon Garfunkel at June 30, 2006 8:46 AM | Permalink And we haven't missed you. By the way, I'm on the advisory board to Michael Skoler's project at MPR. The theme of Jay's essay at the top of this thread isn't news to the new-media geeks who haunt PressThink and a select circle of other blogs and sites, but it's revolutionary to most people out there, and by "out there" I mean "the newsroom." One of my journo-blogging colleagues forwarded this to one of her colleagues, and the idea was so new to her that she had to ask for an explanation. New ideas take a lot of repetition before they truly enter a culture. Any culture. Second: Much of the friction that comes out whenever pro-jos discuss this idea can be boiled down to one unresolved issue: By redefining "the audience" to include roles that were once reserved for journalists, we are, essentially, forcing journalists to redefine what they do. This is both threatening and annoying to many of us. Who are "they" to tell "us" what to do? But I think we ought to quit fussing about it and start asking ourselves the right question: What set of skills separates a professional journalist from a gentleman amateur? I can answer that for myself, but I'll be damned if I want to sit around a table with a bunch of pompus assholes in suits trying to come up with a formal statement on such a thing. It may just be easier to start fresh than to transform some of our established journalism institutions. Posted by: Daniel Conover at June 30, 2006 10:19 AM | Permalink Andrew, your long-held position in advocacy of cultural and ideological diversity in newsroom hiring is stipulated. Only on paper. It's easy to pay lip service to "diversity," as long as it doesn't mean anything. Cultural and ideological diversity in newsroom hiring makes sense because it improves coverage. Lack of it, therefore, is a problem. But there are still a number of people who deny, for example, that it's a problem, or who think they're "middle of the road," because everyone in their upper west side apartment elevator agrees with them (HAR!) or who think they're "under no obligation to make a special effort" to understand their beats. It's stipulated by Siegal, no doubt. And it's further stipulated by Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel and others on paper. I've seen both Jay Rosen and Dan Okrent stipulate to it, on paper or on digits. At least in theory. But then there's the other camp, which regards any criticism from outside the Cool Kid's Club as partisan sniping - and who are so paranoid that any critic of the Fourth Estate might have, somewhere in the mists of time, voted Republican, and will grasp at that straw or any other to resort to ad hominems as a desperate means of avoiding the issues. Until that's resolved, and the lip service paid to diverse demographics is translated into staffing, all the interactivity in the world will do little more than highlight the shortcomings of the current model, and at best improve coverage through the threat of embarrassment. Or, to paraphrase Moore, to what extent will the PFKA be so atomized and riven along ideological lines that not only will the professionals lack ideological diversity but the amateurs too? I think the danger of that is very real. It's already happened in the blogosphere. 85-90% of my commenters and emailers agree with me. That's no good. I have to come here to get good game! It's already happening in the book publishing world, too. Someone published a terrific infographic somewhere (which I can't find now) depicting just how predictive of future book sales past books are - and how unlikely it is that anyone who ever purchased a Rush Limbaugh book will ever purchase one from Markos Zounigas or Bill Press or anyone else who falls under the left column. It's going to take a long time. But we need to hold j-school students - and ALL liberal studies students - to a higher standard of rigorousness, and expect them to hold a broader fund of information than we do today, where national news outlets are content to hire people who don't know what a Purple Heart is, and have to ask questions like "What garden was that?" Until the intellectually lightweight Old Guard is purged, all the interactivity in the world will be nothing more than a ring in the snout of a pig.
Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 30, 2006 11:54 AM | Permalink By redefining "the audience" to include roles that were once reserved for journalists, we are, essentially, forcing journalists to redefine what they do. This is both threatening and annoying to many of us. Who are "they" to tell "us" what to do? Well, in many cases, of course, they have expert or first-hand knowledge of the subjects the pro-jos are writing about. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at June 30, 2006 11:57 AM | Permalink It's already happening in the book publishing world, too. Someone published a terrific infographic somewhere (which I can't find now) depicting just how predictive of future book sales past books are - and how unlikely it is that anyone who ever purchased a Rush Limbaugh book will ever purchase one from Markos Zounigas or Bill Press or anyone else who falls under the left column. -- Jason. At last, Jason, thee and me find common ground. The problem with most blogs -- this one being a notable exception -- is that they attract people of common disposition, and thereby degenerate into endless loops of self-congratulation and mutual backpatting. If the blogosphere is any indication, the People Formerly Known as the Audience, far more than any newsroom I've ever been in -- and I've been in a few -- "is atomized and riven along ideological lines." Example: You won't find me at Jason's blog and, if I had one, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't find Jason at mine. (There's a reason that amazon.com prints that hugely popular "people who liked this book also like these books" feature. It sells books.) That's why Press Think is an original. It attracts butterflies of different stripes and colors. Which (I'm guessing) is why we all keep coming back.
Posted by: Ann Kolson at June 30, 2006 8:06 PM | Permalink We need more muslims in the news rooms so that we can have a more informed discourse on islam, and more atheists in the newsrooms to inform us on the ills of religion, and .... In fact, we should use statistical sampling theory and design newsrooms as microcosms .... Posted by: village idiot at June 30, 2006 9:51 PM | Permalink There are bloggers that are PFKA, and there are bloggers that want their picture taken with MoDo; Is there a distinction to be made? Posted by: village idiot at June 30, 2006 10:13 PM | Permalink I made a crass comment, and that left me wide open for criticism. I'll accept it. I was running off to the conference this morning and hammered it out. This post, by contrast, has taken me an hour to research and write. To start: let's get serious about the echo-chamber effect here. Technorati reports 46 references to Public Interest Journalism, Minnesota Public Radio's revolutionary project over the last three years, building a social network of 19,000 sources of listeners through out the state. Here's an article in Current which discusses it. This post alone has 62 references. Do other people sense an imbalance here? Dan Conover, I can't speak for a colleague of one of your colleagues, but Jay's quoted the heads of AP, Reuters, News Corp, BBC (as well as the usual blogheads) from the last 2 years or so. I can't imagine this is truly news. The actual details of the PIJ model, on the other hand, are very new and worthy of inspection. Jay, maybe you feel it's a conflict-of-interst if you write up people you advise. But there's not even a list of people you advise here. That would be interesting enough. Let's consider that other chestnut: "my readers know more than me." I'm going to avoid that value judgment. I don't know more than you, Jay; I'm really an amateur here. I have learned from you, reading your 1999 book. Perhaps it's better to say, "My readers possess knowledge of facts pertinent to the story that I haven't reported on." Ok, so what's the next step? Does the publisher/author/reporter include those in the follow-up? How long a period do you give for comments? Do you write a second version? Write another piece? Who evaluates whether these facts are indeed pertinent? How do we measure this? Are some publishes/authors/reporters better than others at getting the facts first? If some constantly need backfilling of pertinent facts, do the readers stay with them? When you originally wrote about My Readers Know More Than I Do 18 months ago, you mentioned an experiment in open source journalism (back in 1999!) between Jane's Intelligence Review and Slashdot. Jane's solicited feedback from the Slashdot audience and ended up re-writing the article from scratch. It's a difficult project to do in a competitive industry, but that's not a problem for PressThink. It seems to me like a good, open model to embrace here ("Having introduced the PFKA concept 18 months ago, I'm curious what you my readers have to add...") I'm not jonesing for an inclusion of MPR/PIJ because I have an interest in it. What piqued my interest my Michael Skoler giving a stellar presentation here at MediaGiraffe (FTR, Fabrice did as well, but his project is still in pilot phase). And I just think it tells your story best about your audience shift concept. Posted by: Jon Garfunkel at June 30, 2006 11:21 PM | Permalink Ann: Thanks for this. I think you missed this post, Jon. That would figure, since you no longer read PressThink. Meanwhile, I will take your observation--that MPR deserves the links PressThink got by repeating itself--under advisement. While I am doing that, I think you should write notes to at least some of the 60+ linkers to TPFKATA and explain to them how very wrong they were, and how Jon Garfunkel could author their blogs much better than they can. But where did you get the bizarre idea that I consider--or anyone considers--this post news, as in information not revealed before? I don't. But what a wacky premise that is. Look, can't we go back to the way things were-- where you don't read my blog, and don't miss it, and I don't miss your pointless objections? That was working... We need more muslims in the news rooms so that we can have a more informed discourse on islam, and more atheists in the newsrooms to inform us on the ills of religion, and .... In fact, we should use statistical sampling theory and design newsrooms as microcosms .... Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not. In some cases, you could solve the reporting issues by hiring more well rounded people. If you were going to turn newsrooms into something approaching a sociological index of U.S. Demographics, I suspect we would need fewer atheists, not more. Are we really screwing up reporting on Islam that much? I would have to assume so, but I don't think we report on Islam as a faith very much at all. Do we need to index? Well, I invest that way - and it is, I believe, the best way to invest, and there are mathematical and logical reasons why it works - some of which could be applied, broadly speaking, to newsrooms. Concepts like eliminating tracking error, etc. It's not necessary to be a woman to report on women's issues, though. And it's not necessary to be a veteran to report on military issues. It helps, certainly, but Joe Galloway, the watermelon-smashing author of "We Were Soldiers, Once, and Young" is not a veteran, as far as i know, and does a great job. It IS necessary to respect your beat, and to do your homework, whatever your beat is. And so I don't think we need to create artificial hiring programs so much as remove the artificial barriers to entry into the field from other professions. And fire the people who think reporters "aren't obligated to make a special effort." That attitude is pure poison. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 1, 2006 12:19 PM | Permalink Jay... the next time I make the mistake of responding to one of JVS's attempts to hijack a thread, please feel free to delete my comments immediately. paul At last, Jason, thee and me find common ground. Of course we do. We both are passionate about journalism, and about the Republic of which we are citizens. I have more to talk about with someone like you than I do with 80% of the rest of the country. Oh, and it's "thou and I" or "you and I," as the subjects of the sentence. "Thee" and "me" are each object/oblique forms. "Thou" is nominative, "thee" can be accusative or dative. Another message brought to you by the Society of Disgruntled Former English Majors -- Dedicated to countering the ravages of a j-school education. :-) Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 1, 2006 8:22 PM | Permalink Jason -- Well, no wonder. I myself am a member of "the Society of Disgruntled Former English Majors" -- courtesy of Pitt, class of '69. And without a hint of "a J-school education." Goes to show you -- birds of a feather do not always flock together. ;-)
Posted by: Ann Kolson at July 1, 2006 11:21 PM | Permalink Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 2, 2006 1:40 AM | Permalink The next question is: since this is the case, is there a future for the salaried writer? Or must we all take crash courses in self promotion? Posted by: Daniel Burstyn at July 2, 2006 3:47 AM | Permalink Why don't you get some experience --say umm 30 years in the biz-- and then come back and write this drivel. Blogs for the most part, are a waste of my time. You have to have someone you can trust to deliver the info on a big story.. and not all of us are "big media" but just grunts trying to give you the fuckin' story! You're exactly why I started this blog, JD. Because people like you believe that without 30 years experience in the biz a writer has no business talking about the press. I did notice you have experience as a "producer, writer, and voice talent for corporate videos in Kansas City." Were those truthtelling videos? JD's attitude is typical of the kind of arrogance professional journalism encourages (j-school, too, being one of the sources of it). The sad thing is: Such arrogance is most certainly not justified by much of anything in professional practice, including education or years of experience. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to help students avoid this kind of thinking. I'm not sure it's doing any good. I'm not sure arrogance or encourages are the correct or precise words. That kind of attitude is a biproduct of the job. I was a reporter before the advent of blogs, and on any stories, sources and readers would leave strange anonymous voicemails, complaining about some weird or tangential aspects of the stories. (Not to say there weren't legitimate gripes or that journalists don't make errors.) You never get an anonymous voicemail or a call saying that was a great or interesting story, not that you expect those. Sources also want to see the stories first before it's published. When I've made that mistake, they would want to change their quote for take some facts back. So in a way, journalists adapt a certain attitude or stiff arm of the audience) to do their job. TPFKATA = the live/instance focus group? I don't know why this jd guy thinks we ought to trust him. I don't see him as any more trustworthy than some random blogger. 30 years of experience in journalism (Actually 26 years - JD seems to overstate his exp.) doesn't really qualify you as an expert in anything except what it's like to be a journalist. Most blogs are a waste of anybody's time. Most news stories in the mainstream media are a waste, too. Then there are gems, both in the news industry and in the blogosphere. It's nice to have someone I can trust to deliver a big story. But reporters on a religion story who don't know what is meant by The Garden, reporters on a finance story who write stories on Ten Hot Stocks to Pick Now who themselves can't figure out the inverse relationship between bond prices and yields, and reporters on military stories who don't know what a Purple Heart is aren't on the list. And they drag the good ones down, and lower the value of the product, alienate affluent and profitable audiences, and ultimately drive salaries down. And I KNOW you guys can understand that! :-) Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 2, 2006 7:17 PM | Permalink Speaking of having "someone you can trust" to deliver the facts on a big story, here's one who thinks JFK was assassinated in 1969. But hey, we're professionals, right? We have a disciplined process that sets us apart from the bloggers. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 2, 2006 8:12 PM | Permalink The fight between journalists and their readers -- some of whom are bloggers -- reminds me of Marx's observation that races and classes fight it out with each other, and are distracted while the wealthy and powerful walk off with the spoils. But let's not get into a discussion about Marx; let's just use that as a jumping off point to get into the facts. Today, large national media companies are publically traded companies and under tremendous pressure to cut costs. Usually the biggest line item at a media company is payroll. So, newsrooms experience layoffs. With a few exceptions, journalism isn't well paid, and the only way to get a raise or to advance in a career is to leave your current job and get another one, which means that many papers simply don't have the kind of people who have been in one place for many years to accumulate local and/or "beat" knowledge. I'm sure everybody who reads PressThink has heard the "publically traded media companies are in tough shape" spiel. What might be less familiar is the plight of privately owned newspapers. In cases where newspapers or other media companies are not publically owned, the picture is often even worse. While there are a small number of family-owned newspapers and newspaper chains, most smaller newspapers and chains that serve suburbs (read: where the majority of Americans live) are heavily in debt to private equity firms. These PE firms bankroll what used to be family-owned newspapers with millions in cash and encourage them to become mini media moguls, buying up other local papers. But PE firms aren't like a bank that holds a mortgage on a house: they typically want their money back in anywhere from 3-7 years, and with a VERY BIG PROFIT. The only way to get this profit is to make the chain attractive to a public company or another set of private equity investors. And the only way to do that is cut, cut, cut. As a result, where I live, local papers usually only have one reporter. As a blogger I'm not even outnumbered by the local paper (though, note, we have been extroardinarily fortunate in the reporters who we have had over the years). The chain that owns my local paper was recently sold from one group of PE investors to another, for an estimated profit of $85mm. That's money that didn't go into the newsrooms. And now that they're with another PE firm, will there be another round of cuts to flip the chain again? I hope not, but what are they going to do, hold it out of charity? The PE firm's money often comes from pension funds, and they'll be wanting it back. As a result, even when papers are profitable they are *still* under pressure to make more cuts to justify a high sale price of the whole chain to another investment group. What's happening is that equity investment is strip-mining American newspapers. And it shows. Frankly I'm often amazed at what journalists do manage to do given what they're working with. And the economic picture is not getting better: it's getting worse. I wrote a story about the saga of my local newspaper's involvement with chains and private equity called The Long Strange Trip of Grandma's Nickel. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 2, 2006 8:56 PM | Permalink Lisa, your saga of Grandma's nickel is a brilliant analysis of what is exactly the problem. As long as small newspapers can be traded like poker chips, they will remain largely content-free. Which is why they open up a golden opportunity for operations like yours. Grab it (though it appears you already have.) Posted by: Steve Lovelady at July 2, 2006 9:26 PM | Permalink This discussion has suddenly struck a wee bit close to home. The large news corp. where I've worked for 25 years is preparing a buyout offer as part of its transition from newsprint to digital news. (Let me at this point stress my very significant disagreement with Jason's curious statement that experience means nothing. That is, of course, bullshit.) Anyway, I'm not going to argue that print is inherently superior to digital news. Or that journalism is going to hell in a handbasket unlike the 'good ol' days.' Frankly, I remember some aspects of the good old days that sucked. The varied ways news can be transmitted and received and the multitude of providers makes it as exciting time. It's also part of the problem. The fragmentation of news delivery, the myriad voices and - as been noted - the tendency for folks to congregate, participate and 'report' online with like-thinking others has, I fear, a potential to numb the news by exorcising the the facts/topics/people we don't like and don't want to know about. Even now, in these days of old-school journalism's waning powers, news reports can still be hard to ignore, especially the unpleasant facts of how we're governed and how we call on the young to risk their lives on government's whim. There are many exciting ways to learn about the world - more news options than ever before. But too often we're only seeking out those that give us what we verifies what we already believe. Sometimes, it's not what you want that's important, it's what you need. And we need to know the things that make us uncomfortable or angry. I'm not sure how much we're going to get that in the brave new world. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 2, 2006 10:21 PM | Permalink There aren't enough Lisa Williamses or H20Towns. Journalism always will be a business, whether it's publicly traded, private equity or just plain privately held. I believe Lisa runs H2OTown because she enjoys it. I don't think she can support herself with her excellent blog if she had to. And H20Town would exist even if there was a thriving newspaper in the same community. Great local blogs often end up like The One True b!X for economic reasons. Technology has given each us our own printing press. But how many of us can really afford it? The publisher of PressThink has a day job. This shift in power to the audience is a platform shift, not an economic shift to TPFKATA. It's not a zero sum game. The media's declining revenue is simply lost to its newsrooms, which weakens its profits, resources and content. It's a downward spiral that doesn't seem to benefit the TPFKATA. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Hue writes "The publisher of PressThink has a day job." This, today, is the critical difference between journalists and the TPFAKA. The journalists have day jobs, ones which pay them to find and report on facts. TPFAKA, such as myself, rarely have the time (or the credentials, but that's another discussion) to use primary news sources, except in those cases when we happen to be or be assoiated with those sources (as I was in the 2004 presidential campaign). So a question is: are there enough TPFAKA members that in aggregate they have access to the raw information? If so, some method of organization could allow them to do the entire job of journalism (the editing and distribution already have some obvious solutions). The Command Post was an experiment in something closely related. We had enough contributors that when just about any media outlet reported new facts, we had a TPFAKA member who heard/read it and published it on the board. In that sense, this news aggregator was providing the first notice of news facts to many journalistic organizations (CNN reportedly had a Command Post page up continuously during OIF). If TPFKATA do not have access to the facts, they still have a role to play: sanity checking and the assignment of importance. Traditional MSM has little sanity checking in some areas (see Jason's complaints and ones I have made in previous threads), and has little feedback on its prioritization of stories. TPFKATA bloggers have changed this already. Stupid or erroneous reports, on subjects of interest, are challenged and those challenges reach the widely read blogs, ultimately impacting the author (ask Dan Rather and crew for an extreme case). Agenda setting (such as the Times' failed attempt to stir up a national furor over a golf club not admitting women) and prioritization can also be affected by TPFKATA bloggers. KOS or Instapundit or Drudge can move stories from the back page to the front. Posted by: John Moore at July 2, 2006 11:08 PM | Permalink Hue, I agree. I am not what you might call a "blog triumphalist." I think it would be terrible if our local newspaper failed. However, there are already places where this is happening, as in Mankato, MN, where the local newspaper, in trouble, bought by someone who cared but didn't have the resources to keep it going on paper, now publishes exclusively online. In those cases, online publishing serves a role similar to that of a volunteer fire corps -- perhaps not as well trained or equipped as a professional urban force, but quite a bit better than nothing, and they still put out fires. As to there not being enough of me, well, I am flattered. But in my town of 32,000, there only needs to be one. Now, as to the economics. I have no better ideas than anyone else inside the media world or out of it as to how to make content pay for itself online. Local sites in particular are very poorly served by online ad networks such as Adsense, run by Google. Most blogs that are a commercial success are very "keyword friendly," that is, they focus on topics that have high pay-per-click rates for advertisements (think gadget blogs like Engadget, or Gizmodo). Local news blogs that cover a geographic area are a response in large part to the economics of local media, not the content of local media -- it's become increasingly difficult to support local news on paper in its current form, and online publishing represents a radically low-cost way to distribute information. (It costs me $40 a month to run H2otown. Google ads pay for this and my coffeeshop tab). One thing that is true is that the web has a very poor sense of physical location. There are few automated ways to tell if a blog post is written from a particular geographic place, so there's no way for ad networks to hook on to local advertisement. Even when they do text search, that can be faulty (Watertown, for example, is a very common place-name). I think that this will change -- mapping, increasing GPS technology, and widespread wi-fi enabling location-awareness will make localizing ads possible. We have local blogs today because the tools for multiuser sites and aggregation are now low cost or free. When (if? I am still on the when side of this fence, I think) ad technology adapts to localism, it will make what we have now look like nothing. More than likely, the beneficiaries of this will be newspapers with good online operations. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 2, 2006 11:14 PM | Permalink Oh, and Hue, there is a third option: newspapers held as a public trust, as the excellent St. Petersburg Times is in Florida. Maybe once the PE firms get done with the local papers -- once the last one holding the hot potato gets burned -- this will happen, much in the way the Philly papers are undergoing a transition from publically traded control to local control (though not a trust). Longevity is also an interesting question and one I think about a lot. H2otown is actually modeled on a voluntary organization, and not on a newspaper business. When I look around, the organizations that are more than 100 years old where I live are churches, fraternal organizations, the YMCA. Not businesses. I figure the only way H2otown will outlive me, or continue to survive if I couldn't do it, is to make it useful enough to a community of people that they could pick it up after I was gone. That means I must make them my peers in a meaningful way today -- I let them post stories just like I do -- and cultivate a sense of ownership among my fellow participants. Voluntary organizations tend to survive by keeping costs as low as possible and creating structures to allow easy succession. Also, I think it's meaningful to make a distinction between national or regional media -- which I agree, will remain a business for a long time -- and local media, which business is either squeezing or abandoning. Let me be clear: I don't think blogs are going to replace the NYT or CNN any time soon. But they already are replacing local news outlets in very small communities that can't support a newspaper but still need news to serve a civic function. Another thought. It has occurred to me that journalism is a lot like writing software. That is, it's a preindustrial process, a craft. It's impossible to send out 100 reporters each to write one line of a story. In an industrial process, it is possible to break something into 100 individual jobs and end up with, say, a car at the end. Software resists automation in much the same way and as a result has many of the same organizational features -- a guild-like structure by which knowledge is passed on and individual practicioners achieve mastery. Software developers, however, have much more friendly relations with amateur and/or open source "hackers," in large part because they've found useful ways to work together. My husband, who is a professional programmer, uses open-source tools created by enthusiasts every day to create the for-profit products he makes. They are, in fact, invaluable to him (ask a programmer about how they would feel about losing, say, EMACS, or BIND). In our previous discussion of "distributed newsgathering" we discussed stories that could be broken up into many pieces, but I suspect that there are many stories that can't be done in the distributed way. What's exciting about distributed newsgathering is that it makes the reporting of certain stories possible that were not possible using any other means. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 2, 2006 11:30 PM | Permalink Steve: Thanks. I come from a long line of newspaper -obsessed women, and I'm pissed off about what's happening to the papers that my mother reads every day. Dave Mc: Be sure to convince them that you have a totally! brilliant! revolutionary! online strategy! Seriously: the companies that seem to fare the worst in these LBOs are those where the original agreement is just based on rollups -- that is, buying other papers and combining advertising. The investors get bored with it too quickly, they might be willing to hang on longer with what they see as a digital play, because of their fascination with the unknown. Usually the guys at the PE firm -- even though the bulk of the money comes from pension funds -- are personally wealthy, often entrepreneurs. They're risktakers, and they respond to entrepreneurial kindred spirits. Many have mothballed their own dreams and are running this PE firm and playing golf. They're bored unto their soul and desperately want to go on an adventure. Give it to them. Give them the ride of a lifetime, a rocket to the unknown. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 2, 2006 11:43 PM | Permalink Pardon a few expressions of mild frustration... Who the hell said the mainstream news media is going away, and why do I have to hear so many times that it isn't? That's getting really boring. And why is it that if you point out there's a new balance of power between the people in the audience and Big Media, people rush to inform you that Big Media still has a good deal of power? Again, who in blazes said it didn't? And why is that if you point to what people in the audience can do, which is a statement about possibility, readers will "correct" you by saying that not everyone will do those things, which is a statement about probability, and thus not a correction to the first statement at all? Word your post carefully, so that it doesn't make any extreme statements, and in commenting on your post people will challenge the extreme statements you thought you were careful not to make. Why? Lisa: Great posts. Keep 'em coming. Posts by Steve Lovelady and Jason were deleted for being completely off topic. Lisa, I just mean that are you are there in Watertown, but there might not be a Lisa Williams in, say, Mayberry, N.C. If you were living in New York City or Des Moines, you probably would still have a blog, covering your neighborhood or part of town. I don't think there are good local blogs for every small town or even bigger cities across the country. Maybe I'm wrong. Do you communicate with similar bloggers like yourself or Anna Haynes? Is there such a network of bloggers writing about their local areas and politics? If you were writing about golf or movies or national politics then your location doesn't matter. Daniel Conover and I have traded e-mails about trusts (and the St. Pete) as preferred ownership. Steve Lopez at the LATimes has written columns, here and here, wishing for a Poynter in LA. Joan Kroc left $200 million to NPR. With Bill Gates and Warren Buffett having philanthropic money burning holes in their pockets, the media and community representatives should lobby their foundations for some of that money. Gannett, the most profitable and worse kind of publicly-traded owner, also has its foundation, the Freedom Forum, a tax spinoff. I wish that foundation can somehow funnel money back into the newspapers and communities it had strip-mined. re: software developers versus open source journalism. Reporting and writing don't seem to lend itself to that kind of collaboration. It has to do with control. When I was a reporter, I never liked to be assigned a story with another reporter. One person has to take the lead and does basically all of the writing. The non-writer hands over notes and quotes. There is a huge imbalance even though the byline is shared. Software and coding are more science and art (not to say journalism is art). Writers don't collaborate well. There are good reporting teams, but reporters (pros and amateurs) don't always work well on an ad hoc basis. Maybe that's why there are few open source projects so far. Or maybe the technology wasn't there. Software tools, however, can be tested, by simply running it. With journalism, you have to trust that the informating gathered is correct. Or spend a lot of time going back to verify. And why is that if you point to what people in the audience can do, which is a statement about possibility, readers will "correct" you by saying that not everyone will do those things, which is a statement about probability, and thus not a correction to the first statement at all? When you talk about possibility, don't you need to consider probability? If we say it's possible that Democrats will win a Congressional chamber this fall because of Bush's low approval rating, culture of corruption etc. Are we then not allowed to consider how probable that is with gerrymandered districts, power of incumbency and number of contested seats? And why is it that if you point out there's a new balance of power between the people in the audience and Big Media, people rush to inform you that Big Media still has a good deal of power? Again, who in blazes said it didn't? I think Steve's comment about Lisa's blog just sent the conversation into a different tangent, and we just referred to TPFKATA to stay on theme. Feel free to delete any or all of this. Here's an interesting one, Lisa: The Tyee in British Columbia, Canada. TPFKATA re-birth the alternative press in blog format. Their about page is worth reading. I met the founder at the Media Giraffe conference in Amherst, MA. Serious fellow. Let me at this point stress my very significant disagreement with Jason's curious statement that experience means nothing. I said experience means nothing? Cite, please. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 3, 2006 1:42 AM | Permalink Hue, That is in fact one of my upcoming projects, to see exactly how many local newsblogs there are. I get email several times a week now, from someone in Duluth or a neighborhood of DC saying they are doing it too. I notice that discussions about local newsbloggings often use the same few examples. I happen to be one of them, but the whole thing strikes me as unfair. I mean, how many of you have heard of HopNews, or the hilarious Swellesley report, for tony Wellesley, MA? I suspect that there are way more local newsblogs than any of us realize. What I would like to do is to make a huge list of them all, and an aggregator showing a live stream of news items from all of them, so we can get a sense of the rate of coverage and also similarities and differences in newsgathering techniques. I already have an OPML file of about 150 that I've gathered without really looking, and I already notice some interesting similarities between how these bloggers -- who don't know each other, generally -- go about doing their work. Regarding the software vs. journalism thing, I think you're right. One thing the software guys have is a very easy to define separation of where "my stuff" ends and "their stuff" begins. It's highly modular. But they've had 30 years to get it right. At the beginning of modern software programming, it looked a lot more like contemporary journalism, where each program was built soup to nuts by one person or one small group of people. One thing that's notable about software collaborations is that the open-source end of a collaboration is usually either a tool -- like an editor or add-ons to a programming language, or a platform -- like a web server, database, or operating system. The programmer then uses the freely-developed tools to build on top of the freely-developed platform. Few for-profit software companies will throw themselves into building tools or platforms because it's a labor of love and hard to make money at. Maybe that's how the relationship will develop: outsiders -- inspired hobbyists -- will build technological tools, and others will build platforms -- like databases. Then individual journalists will use these to write stories they couldn't have written before. The nice thing about this arrangement is that it avoids the entanglement you were talking about. People who write software using free tools and platforms still have total ownership of what they develop with/on them. One thing that hasn't been worked out in the collaboration between journalists and nonjournalists is how to arrive at an arrangement that allows each party maximum freedom -- eg, they can each write what they want -- and maximum control -- eg, the journalist and their editor control what appears in the paper or the paper's website, while the blogger controls what happens on their blog. If you have the blogger writing on the newspaper website, both sides lose freedom and control. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 3, 2006 10:47 AM | Permalink What I would like to do is to make a huge list of them all, and an aggregator showing a live stream of news items from all of them, so we can get a sense of the rate of coverage and also similarities and differences in newsgathering techniques. That would be a very interesting list. An open source project, newsblogs adding themselves to this database of resources? I suspect that there are way more local newsblogs than any of us realize. Agreed. Interesting post from Ethan Zuckerman. I disagree that the public radio show "Marketplace" is excellent (to me it's superficial and soundbitten) but the rest of the post is dead on... So, I got an email Friday from Marketplace, the excellent business and finance show carried on WAMC, my local National Public Radio affiliate. According to the email, “You can help Marketplace cover the news”... As finance coverage goes, Marketplace isn't that bad. But then, you don't have to be that good to be strong in comparison. I've heard some good stories on Marketplace, but the quality is uneven. Can't stand the folksy, affected, sing-songy tone of some of it. Same with "On the Media." But once per show there's something really good, usually. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 4, 2006 12:58 AM | Permalink An online data base would monitor spending by Congress On the right, support for the plan reflects an old concern about spending and a new faith in the power of blogs. Supporters picture a citizen army of e- watchdogs, greatly increasing the influence of anti-spending groups in Washington.It seems to me that a bipartisan blogger effort would create a better database. Posted by: Tim Schmoyer at July 4, 2006 11:56 AM | Permalink I gotta say: The more I think about it, the more I hear about it, the more convinced I become that quality, currated databases and informational archives are key to our future. Valuable for journalists? Sure. But probably more valuable for bloggers. Bloggers need quick access to information they can trust, whether posting or commenting, and don't have editors and staff librarians backing them up. So, yes, any citizen's group that conducts any form of study should think in terms of organizing and presenting that information FOR ONGOING PUBLIC USE. We saw "An Inconvenient Truth" last night, and this morning I called up the movie's website and just shook my head. Every single chart, every single animated diagram, every single study from Al Gore's Powerpoint ought to have a URL and come with linked citations to the original material. But you can't find those charts via the movie website. If the Inconvenient Truth people had thought to use their site that way, then bloggers would amplify their message by linking. Those links would cross polinate into audiences that would never pay $7.50 to see a movie about a former Democratic presidential candidate. Gore would reach people who are beyond his reach today. re: Tim's point about bipartisan blogger efforts, he's bang-on. Maybe what we need is a bipartisan citizen's audit group that examines and rates the quality of citizen-currated databases. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 5, 2006 11:02 AM | Permalink re Jay's why as in "for god's sake please stop it", or as in "this is interesting, why do people's brains work that way?" Assuming you mean the former, you might want to do something that's helpful in product requirements specifications, namely provide a brief "this is what it _doesn't_ do" (or "this is what my post is _not_ saying") section, to head off the most common misinterpretations. in other words, design the post for the readers you have, not for the readers you wish you had. Will it help? one way to find out. And even if it doesn't, you'll have the satisfaction of directing commenters to it, thus exposing us for the exceedingly sloppy readers that we all too often are. Posted by: Anna Haynes at July 5, 2006 3:11 PM | Permalink re Daniel's comments on the An Inconvenient Truth website - it's very frustrating, I agree with him 100%. But let's move that thread to Xark. Posted by: Anna Haynes at July 5, 2006 3:25 PM | Permalink Lisa wrote: It has occurred to me that journalism is a lot like writing software. That is, it's a preindustrial process, a craft. It's impossible to send out 100 reporters each to write one line of a story. In an industrial process, it is possible to break something into 100 individual jobs and end up with, say, a car at the end. Software resists automation in much the same way and as a result has many of the same organizational features -- a guild-like structure by which knowledge is passed on and individual practicioners achieve mastery. Writing software, like plumbing or building furniture, requires technical skill. It requires skill that cannot be picked up by a non-craftsman easily or quickly. I don't think that reporting a news story falls into that category. Certainly writing a news column doesn't fit. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many bloggers and citizen journalists. I don't think that reporting a news story falls into that category. Certainly writing a news column doesn't fit. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many bloggers and citizen journalists. What a curious thing to say. Writing well - concisely and clearly and with accuracy - is indeed a skill. Doing all that on deadline even more so. It may be a skill that is in transition to something else or it may be a skill less appreciated than it once was. But it is a skill. Otherwise so many bloggers, citizen journalists - and print reporters - would do it so poorly. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 5, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink I really should use the preview more often. The last line above should read: "Otherwise so many bloggers, citizen journalists - and print reporters - wouldn't do it so poorly. mea culpa, y'all. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 6, 2006 12:06 AM | Permalink I think there is skill involved; it's just that computer programming requires more learning up front before you can do anything at all. Interviewing, for example, is a skill, as is writing well. One of the things that the blogosphere has taught me , however, is that talent isn't rare: distribution is rare. There are way more good writers than there are books on the shelves at the local big-box bookstore. Since I read a lot of local newsblogs, one thing I note is that what seems to be the tool of choice for reporters -- contacts and the phone -- is the tool of last resort for many local newsbloggers. There's a sort of diffidence, and in the best, this diffidence combined with diligence, in local newsblogs. I think many people doing them feel that they don't have the standing to assert themselves, to "bother people" by asking them questions. One of the great advantages to being a reporter (during the very short time I did it) was the sense of an absolute carte blanche to call up anyone and just start asking questions, because you could say you were a Reporter from a Paper. "Hi, I'm some random person!" just doesn't have the same effect, and not all local newsbloggers have developed the boldness to say, "Hi, this is X from XBlog, do you have a minute?" As a result, local newsblogging is often the reverse of access journalism. It's journalism by people with no access. Sometimes this has advantages. I have one contributor who likes to crunch numbers regarding school test scores. One of the things his crunching came up with was that the general narrative about why our schools were doing so poorly -- namely, that it was Those Kids -- was simply flat wrong. But what a reporter would have gotten out of an interview is the usual "our scores are being dragged down by X thing you believe because you're already inclined to believe it." Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 6, 2006 1:20 AM | Permalink Given a choice, I'd much prefer reporters who get facts right and provide useful context to reporters who "write well." The idea that J schools can produce professionals is as weak as asserting that Ed schools produce people who can teach. Likewise, the idea that journalists need J school is as silly as requiring teachers to have education degrees. Posted by: John Moore at July 6, 2006 1:42 AM | Permalink Most reporters who end up at the major dailies didn't go the J school. I shouldn't say most since I don't know for sure. But I would guess that J school is a recent phenomena. People who went into the business in the 70s just had a college degree. Before that, a degree was not even needed. Writing is a small and important part of the job. You have to weave the facts into a coherent narrative. My experience was that I spent 70%-90% of the time reporting, and writing at the last minute. And many times, you're still reporting while you are writing because people returning your calls and the information changes. Lisa, the best reporting is both, though it's not practiced much. If you can crunch the numbers first, then you can get a response during the interview. I think education reporting tend to me school-board meeting centric and less at data crunching. "Writing software, like plumbing or building furniture, requires technical skill. It requires skill that cannot be picked up by a non-craftsman easily or quickly." Lisa, I will disagree with you here. Software is not really that hard for non-craftsman to pick up easily or quickly, but it requires a completely different skillset than journalism. It is like the difference between English and Math. In English, you can make communicate by invoking a feeling or telling a story. In Math you commmunicate with equations and "IF" statements. All of these equations and "IF" statements are put together to move data and create computer systems. I would also say that journalism requires a "technical" skill in being able to put into words a concept and story from existing facts. Writing software, like plumbing or building furniture, requires technical skill. It requires skill that cannot be picked up by a non-craftsman easily or quickly. I don't think that reporting a news story falls into that category. Certainly writing a news column doesn't fit. If that were so, there wouldn't be so many bloggers and citizen journalists. I'm still mystified by these statements from someone who spent 15 years as a journalist. JennyD, maybe you should have written software, been a plumber for made furniture during that time instead of being paid for something anyone could have done. We all have skills like writing or playing baseball, but not all of us can do it professionally because of our talent level or the availability of paying jobs for those skills. Many of us write software, build furniture, do our own plumbing, and create or own blog in our spare time. A few years ago many of us thought we were savvy investors and traders when technology gave us the same tools as those on Wall Street. Even with the long tail concept, very few amateurs get a wide view audience. And talent for the small guys is hard to keep. By the way, Amanda Congdon just left Rocketboom. Hue, one of things I study now is the education of professionals, and almost always it requires some lengthy training and apprenticeship before someone is a professional. One of the key aspects of being a professional is technical skill, but more than that. Professions often have special technology of practice, built on specific knowledge, that implements specific protocols. Like doing heart surgery. You must know anatomy, understand disease, know HOW to do surgery, and what to do if something unexpected happens. I'm trying to figure out if journalism is a profession. Maybe not. Is software designing a profession? Probably not. So if something is not a profession, what are its features? It sounds as though the skills used in writing software are pretty easy to pick up. Journalism skills are too. That's one set of thoughts. Now to another. I noticed when I was a journalist that the evaluation of my work was subjective. There was no clear way to know if it was good or bad. Was I a good writer? I don't know. How would I know that? Was I a good reporter? I don't know. I thought so. A few editors thought so. Some of the people who read my work didn't think so. Did I have better skills to be a journalist than others? I don't know. How would I know that? What I do know is that I successful at my job because I wrote a lot of stories, got them in on deadline, didn't get beat by my competition. But those sound like skills that would have made me a good copier salesperson too. I agree that writing is difficult and hard work and so on. But I'm offering this different view of the work of journalists to help understand what that work is. It's unsurprising, on a blog, that journalism would eventually be compared to computer programming. It's also inspiring that blogs would be where modern technology and thought examines status quo journalism's processes and myths. I would suggest that debating the similarities/differences is leading the conversation astray from the more important (original) question of distributed/collaborative journalism. IMHO, computer programming differs from journalism because they are different genres of composition and has more to do with the difference in the "audience" than the difference in the writer or composition process. Lisa Williams wrote: Regarding the software vs. journalism thing, I think you're right. One thing the software guys have is a very easy to define separation of where "my stuff" ends and "their stuff" begins. It's highly modular. But they've had 30 years to get it right. At the beginning of modern software programming, it looked a lot more like contemporary journalism, where each program was built soup to nuts by one person or one small group of people.But this is where experimentation is already. Wiki(etc.) is the most well-known. But, like software development, there is a status quo belief system that must be challenged. Moving from punch cards, batch processing on mainframes and the QA/QC processes built around this system had to adapt with changes enabled by Moore's Law. Is the ideal motivating this the "omnicompetent journalist", the "omnicompetent citizen" or something else? Is it omnicompetent journalism through collaborative competence? What is the role of j-schools in the development of pro/am collaborative competence in journalism? Can (should?) j-schools embrace an approach which challenges the foundational thinking that formed their raison d'être? Can pro/am collaborative journalism rollback the influences of communication science and structural bias? The new science of communication, at least as metaphor and aspiration, marched into journalism education with generally unfortunate results. A science of control and a journalism of freedom make unlikely and antagonistic partners, but a partnership it often became. This was not a science of enlightenment or citizenship, a science in society, designed to clarify our vision, enlarge our choices, stipulate our dilemmas, increase our exactitude, but a science of society, a science designed to rule over citizens, even if benignly.Will pro/am collaborative journalism that challenges the myths, religion, and status quo actually save the j-school? I'd rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who's mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you've got a chance at decoding city hall. If you're a computer-assisted reporting wizard, maybe you can reformat my hard drive.Can amateurs contribute to a "holy profession"? JIM LEHRER: Ben Bradlee is one of America's most famous newspaper editors and he believes the practice of journalism is more than a job. Posted by: Tim Schmoyer at July 6, 2006 10:47 AM | Permalink I don't think anyone has claim that journalism is profession, more like trade. A trade that does require skills, drive and ambition. I don't think journalists (at least the ones I've worked with) compare themselves to physicians or engineers or even attorneys -- professions that require advanced degrees and certification. Sure, anyone off the street can do the job and there is huge amounnt of writing or reporting talent out there. But there are still only a few paying journalism jobs for sheer number of people who can do it, and your earlier statements really diminish the talent and achievements of those working in the field. Hue, that's where we disagree. I don't think my statements diminish the talent and achievement of those in the field. Writing a lot of stories, getting them in on deadline, those are achievements. But they aren't achievements of some holy profession, requiring extraordinary talents. If I wrote 12 perfectly reported, stunningly written stories per year, would that be better for my newspaper than writing 365 plain-vanilla stories? Would it be better for the people who read the paper? Better for the paper's business? Who would decide if my 12 stories were more valuable than the 300? How would they know? Then we agree to disagree. The holy profession or speak truth to power is not a standard that everyone strives for or believes in. Most reporters I knew were more cynical than that. I may be talking from my own experience. I just wanted to be a writer, and when I got into the business, I learned that there was a lot more reporting involved, skills like interviewing, finding documents, asking the right questions, working under stress and deadline. Why does anyone need to decide whether 12 stories are more valuable than 300? If you are looking for advancement, then the hiring editor decides. That may not be fair, but that is the system. The great thing about journalism is that you can be the 300 stories a year reporter or the 12 stories a year reporter. The output would be whatever suits your ability or what you can negotiate with your editors. Perhaps the need to have standards is among the reasons you are a PHD student. You might find this story about bylines interesting or hilarious. I'm starting to think that general criticisms of journalism are really about asymmetric power. A reporter and a blogger might have comparable levels of knowledge and talent and precision, and both now have access to readers/viewers. But this equality breaks down when it comes to distribution: millions of people will read or hear about an NYT story, whereas an arguably better blog-based analysis might struggle to make its way into the discussion. It's an element of Rollback: What gives you the right to ask these questions, set these agendas? The President says: Who elected you? Experts in various fields say "Why do you guys get to frame these stories?" Some of our best reporters can answer that pretty forcefully, but they're like a few really skilled 19th century cavalrymen individually charging against a line of modern machine guns. Plus, I think we're missing a trick if we just view this question as political gamesmanship or blog jealousy. We're being asked: What special skills and qualifications do you have that justify all this mass-media power you've been given? And when we don't have a good answer for that, then people conclude that we don't deserve the power. We see ourselves as one of the checks and balances on political power, and we are. What we are so slow to realize is that TPFKATA want checks and balances on media power, too. They can't know each of us personally. They need some way of knowing about us systematically. If the question is, "How do we know that you are using this power properly?" then our answer is, "Well, trust us." Or: "We take this very seriously." Which is, in a sense, like the White House saying "We know that we've got the country's best interests at heart, so we reject the notion that we have to play by your 'rules' and submit to checks and balances like warrants and laws passed by Congress." Press people correctly challenge that stance, because we're trained to recognize the value of checks and balances on power. But then we reject any type of systematic check and balance on our own power. Having said all of this, I add a caveat to my own statement: There's a simple solution to every problem, and it's wrong. Yes, I think we need some kind of system that provides a C&B on mass media news power, but it is far easier for me to imagine the many ways that this could be done poorly (or with malicious intent) than the few ways that it could be done well. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 6, 2006 12:15 PM | Permalink Yes, I think we need some kind of system that provides a C&B on mass media news power, but it is far easier for me to imagine the many ways that this could be done poorly (or with malicious intent) than the few ways that it could be done well. Which, usually, is why press people are so resistant to attempts to dillute their power. When it's gone, it's gone. As I suggested earlier, I'm not afraid of the future. The future - and digital news - is there whether I'm afraid or not. It certainly promises a more democritized news delivery. I hope it will. But the goal, the responsibility, of journalism is not to count bylines or quibble whether its a profession or a trade. It's how best to keep people informed and tell them the ever-shifting events of the world honestly, even if it's stuff they don't want to hear. When I see lay-offs of the experienced driven by corporate's need for 20 percent profit; when I see the ever-fragmentation of news into affinity groups, when I see conglomeration and blog counts mean more than how we cover the news, I get a little nervous about the future. Whether its delivered on paper or through the ozone. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 6, 2006 1:05 PM | Permalink Daniel, The check and balance on media power will not be done by some kind of "system". It will be done the American way, by each American in how they act in reponse to media's believability. In my opinion, the essense of America is to avoid the concentation of power, be it Presidential, Congressional, by the Courts, by the States, by corporations, by religions, by special interest groups and by the media. I have bee trying to ask your question in various posts on this blog. Journalist, "How do I know you are any good at what you do?" As with any other concentration of power I would like independent verification. I don't another group of insiders telling me how good their friends are. I can get that from politicians, accountants, lawyers, doctors and other self-regulated groups. Daniel, hit the nail on the head. Why do journalists deserve my attention, respect, etc.? How do I know what they do is as good as it ought to be, as it needs to be, as they it is? How can I measure the "goodness" of the product? Is there a Consumer Reports for journalists so I know which one needs fewer repairs over time? Hue said: The great thing about journalism is that you can be the 300 stories a year reporter or the 12 stories a year reporter. The output would be whatever suits your ability or what you can negotiate with your editors. Which means the editors are arbiter of what makes a good reporter, what makes good journalism. And good journalist is whatever you can negotiate with them. This doesn't bode well for the future of journalism. I need better standards than that. Daniel says quibbling about byline counts, etc. isn't really important. He's right, but absent some other way to judge the "goodness" of journalism, what should TPFKATA do? I think it is critical that journalists of all stripes take control of their reputations by being clear about what is good journalism, and telling TPFKATA the standards by which all work is done. I love journalism. I miss it. I admire many journalists. And I know that some are wielding power they didn't earn by doing stellar work. Dave says: Plus, I think we're missing a trick if we just view this question as political gamesmanship or blog jealousy. Yes. When we start reading the situation as blogs *VS* traditional media we obscure everything we could ever learn about each other. We're also creeping toward a very interesting topic: the role of assignments and deadlines (or lack thereof) in shaping what gets done. My sense is that the difference in style and output between the average local newsblog and the average local newspaper happens upstream of the person doing the writing. And I don't think distributing editing power via a Digg-like infrastructure would really work. To me the big hurdle for a newsblog is the same as for a newspaper: consistency and comprehensiveness. No one would accept, "Oh, sorry, light newspaper for a week," from the NYT, nor would they accept reading it every day and missing an important national story like, say, Katrina. Getting it out on time, and being there for the important stories, is the major cause of TUMS consumption in newsrooms, I would guess. This cohesiveness and comprehensiveness is an important feature of a news organization's product. Newsblogs either don't attempt it or go about producing it in a very different way than in a newsroom (I think, not being in a newsroom). Yet sometimes the story-idea-to-assignment process seems to go awry, resulting in stories that seem to already have been written before any people have been interviewed (think bad, canned trend story), or the sense of what should be covered (every town council meeting, every move of a major employer) drifts away from what's really changing the lives of people living in a place. Or the combination of staffing levels and deadline -- and in particular not letting reporters break news to the web -- gets in the way. In the blogosphere, the biggest potential for corruption (in my opinion) is at the editorial level. Look, for example, at the story of Tech Central Station, which is run by a lobbying firm and just happens to have columnists that support those interests. Now the bloggers involved say -- and I believe them -- that they aren't being paid directly. But the lobbying firm is paying the editors, who are using bloggers who already support a predefined point of view as useful idiots. However, citizen journalists are 1,000 times more likely to lack anything useful they could get from editorial coordination than to suffer from corruption and manipulation at the editorial level. There's plenty of citizen journalism, but there is no citizen assignment desk, and what results is often a random rattle bag of stuff, without the power and impact cohesiveness and consistency can give. Posted by: Lisa Williams at July 6, 2006 1:40 PM | Permalink I love journalism. I miss it. I admire many journalists. And I know that some are wielding power they didn't earn by doing stellar work. And this differs from attorneys, doctors, plumbers and tenured professors how? Isn't there a considerable life-is-unfair component to any profession? Or life itself? Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 6, 2006 1:43 PM | Permalink Dave, I say the same things on blogs about professionalism and medicine, etc. There's no difference. And all these professions are now (and perhaps have in the past) weathering the kind of scrutiny that journalists now face. Remember when no one questioned the doctor? Now there are second opinions, boatloads of medical information online, HMOs and insurors wanting more information, and doctors find themselves having to answer patients' questions and demands they didn't have to a generation ago. And as a grad student, I can't even begin to recount the vast amount of criticism of tentured professors.:-) Personally, I don't want to see the good work of journalists pecked and pecked at until there's nothing left. But part of defending journalism is making sure it is defensible. So I ask these questions to get ideas of how journalist can defend their work, the power they get along with their jobs. I want to know how I can tell people with some certainty how they can identify good journalism from bad, and what is actually happening in newsrooms to make sure bad journalism doesn't end up in print or elsewhere. Doctors have state medical licensing boards, lawyers have bar association and such. Admittedly these are weak efforts to demand quality practice among practitioners, but it is something. What does journalism have like it? (Sadly, I can't think of such a group for professors, and I don't know enough about plumbing to say anything.) I think it's going to be settled by economics. Since journalism is a business, it will be determined by P&L, and quality has a factor in that. I don't see a problem with the current way to settle things. Every other business that faces a change in technology has to adapt or perish. I don't believe boards and licensing will help journalism. P&L rules until a different kind of ownership evolves. "However, citizen journalists are 1,000 times more likely to lack anything useful they could get from editorial coordination than to suffer from corruption and manipulation at the editorial level. There's plenty of citizen journalism, but there is no citizen assignment desk, and what results is often a random rattle bag of stuff, without the power and impact cohesiveness and consistency can give." The editor is the audience. They decide with every remote, mouse and radio button push what their cohesive view of the world is. It is the lack of consistency that is important. Without an editor I can find out that both sides to the same coin, because an editor usually thinks the information from one side is more important to know than the other. It depends on the editor. Most I've worked with were less concerned with exercising power to concoct a 'cohesive view of the world' than squeezing 35 inches of information into a 20-inch hole and still convey the meaning and spelling are intact. Much of the commentary here appears to ignore the sometimes baffling diversity of the media. All reporters and editors are not fitted into one neat space. They are brilliant,lazy,conscientious,bored,concerned,ignorant . Some have college-trained. Some are strictly OJT and up from the ranks. They work in an environment where the raw materials of production of in constant flux and subject to change the minute the paper hits the street. The results of journalism can't really be fit into a template of good/bad, no matter how we refit the mold. How you know good journalism is the results over time. What people learn and how it informs their lives. And though I truly enjoy being mistaken for Daniel Conover, it's more of an honor than I deserve. Above, where someone wrote Daniel said, I said it. And where someone expressed that Dave said, Daniel did. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 6, 2006 4:09 PM | Permalink Dave, that was me who did the mixing up of people. Apologies. I have a broken finger and have been typing up a flurry of typos. Having said that, Dave I have a question: What do I make of the vagueness of what is good journalism? How many years of journalism do I have to see before I can tell of it's good or bad? Isn't this just as bad as other experts who say, trust me? What worries me is that this approach leads me, former journalist now consumer of journalism, to say--none of journalism really matters. It's all just today's perspective, fluff, a blip in some existential winding out of what might, or might not be, important or objective or useful or valuable. So, then, as a consumer what do I do? Some people give up and go to Fox News. At least they know what the deal is there. Others, like me, stop subscribing to newspapers, read the web news, blogs. I really think journalism would benefit in many ways by setting standards for itself, that are transparent for me to see. The check and balance on media power will not be done by some kind of "system". It will be done the American way, by each American in how they act in reponse to media's believability. A popular sentiment, but from my perspective, it's a romantic fiction. Individually, none of us has the time or resources to keep up with the raw output of something as large as "media." And to fact-check it? Absolutely not. Other people will come along and offer "expert" opinion on media for us, but that just takes us back to the original conundrum: Who is Watching the Watchmen? As we've said before, real-time epistemology is a bitch, and no generation has ever been asked to deal with a mediascape this large before. Individually we can't cope with it, and when we cling to romantic ideals about that, we are in essence ceding our opinion-forming to various intermediaries. Wanna believe the media is a godless horde organized around the principle that Republican must be punished? Here's your MRC link. Wanna believe it's a lap dog for entrenched conservative powers? Click here to get your Buzzflash update by e-mail every single day. Diversity and debate = good, but inability to speak a common language = Tower of Babel. Tim Schmoyer e-mailed me off-thread to ask what ways this kind of check-and-balance system might be done well. I don't think the answer will be a new bureaucracy, or some top-down regulatory system. Besides, if you tried to impose standards on a bunch of competing media corporations, their lawyers would tie you in knots. Instead, I'd look into creating some kind of non-profit, bipartisan, best-practices certifying/auditing agency. Think ISO standards: A manufacturer isn't legally required to meet them, but every manufacturer has a competitive reason to seek ISO certification. A restaurant doesn't have to shut down if it gets a B sanitation grade, but every restaurant desperately wants an A rating. For obvious reasons. I told Tim that if we put our energies into building a transparent press-certification agency, based on rules and principles we can all agree on, then we might have some success. You can't reorganize something that's never been organized. But if you build a public-interest group with meaningful standards and enough people got behind it, eventually the industry would have to follow. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 6, 2006 4:33 PM | Permalink JennyD, I'm tempted to say that good journalism is good journalism. You know it when you see it. Is it informative and factual? Clearly and concisely written? Does it inform your awareness of your community and your world? But that's a little glib. The worlds that journalism reflect keep shifting, the facts change and the perspective alters. It's journalism's task to keep up, like a juggler on teeter-totter. Of course journalism is concerned with today's perspective. That's where the journal part comes in. It's a daily report. That hardly makes it inconsequential, fluff. Our lives are made up of the daily experiences and journalism, at its best, helps us understand those experiences and keep track of them over time. Daily reports of a war or of the doings at City Hall bring light on things in the shadows. Things we need to know. Yes, we've asked the reader to trust that we've done the legwork and the due-diligence in the reporting. But they've always been free to use it anyway they wish. How do you know good journalism? By seeing it. The reporter or editor isn't the judge. The recipient is. I grant you, news people have seriously underestimated the partnership with the reader. One good aspect of the change we're going through is that the subscriber of news - that audience we've been speaking of - is finding a voice to express its judgment. And we're forced to listen - and not always well. Frankly, Jenny, I'm a little puzzled at your comments. What is it your giving up on? What do you find more trustworthy online? Don't web news and blogs require you to read and analyze the news as presented and make up your own mind, just like reading a newspaper? Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 6, 2006 5:22 PM | Permalink You can't figure out what is good journalism after 15 years in the business, but you expect some board or a certification process can? People don't give up and go to Fox news. They go to Fox because it fits their world view. I'd rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who's mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you've got a chance at decoding city hall. If you're a computer-assisted reporting wizard, maybe you can reformat my hard drive. Heh. I'd hire both of them, part time, and and have them hot-seat the same desk. Bonus points: You save on benefits. Makes the almighty shareholder happy. Yes, I'm evil. But the real point is, the two prospects bring two different - and complimentary - skill sets to the paper. Properly managed, the team can be worth more than the sum of its parts. And to borrow a term from the investment world, diversification decreases tracking error and lowers risk. Screwed up, skewed assumptions and a lousy factual grasp of information = tracking error. As the number of participants increases, the tracking error, theoretically, is reduced toward zero - subject to the systemic biases of, say, the population of computer savvy and Americans. You have some class biases there which would be tough to diversify away, in practice. But as Harry Markowitz showed in modern portfolio theory, even modest diversification can yield significant risk reduction. Dan Rather's experience is a good case in point: Without the intellectual diversity that blogs provided in that story, we'd still be believing in Rather's "unimpeachable sources" That can happen on a grand scale, where a story is totally debunked - as in Rathergate - or it can happen incrementally -- with the first rough draft of history being reviewed and refined and improved on as eyewitnesses and experts weigh in - and faster and in a more easily distributable medium than ever before. Which improves future mainstream media treatments of the subject - hopefully. But if the reporter doesn't know how to tap the secondary support network of bloggers and commenters, etc., then it's like a rabbinical scholar who knows Torah, but does not know Talmud. There's a lot of good stuff in Talmud - and Torah far richer for it. A free lunch. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at July 6, 2006 6:30 PM | Permalink One shape emerging here is the difference between the journalist and the organization existing to produce journalistic output. Traditional journalism has the structures, but TPFKATA are just developing them. Consumers overwhelmed with media will find (and fund, through advertising or purchase) sources of condensed and edited information - whether it's the NYT, KOS or a collection of blogs. At least in that area, the market will provide - not perfection, but at least what the consumers think they want. As to journalism as a profession, and the comparison with software... let me address software, which is what I do most of the time. "programming" or "software engineering" covers a very, very wide span. It ranges from the kid programming the HTML for his web page to the a team of serious professionals, educated in depth, doing serious and difficult engineering. Software production, like other engineering disciplines, has one characteristic distinguishing it from the "soft" professions such as journalism: direct measurement of results. If the computer doesn't behave, there's a bug. If Dan Rather uses fudged sources, there's no solid feedback - or at least that's the way it used to be. Software cannot help but be "objective," while objectivity in journalism cannot even be accurately measured. But we'll complain about the lack of it anyway. Posted by: John Moore at July 6, 2006 8:28 PM | Permalink Software production, like other engineering disciplines, has one characteristic distinguishing it from the "soft" professions such as journalism: direct measurement of results. Actually, John, as journalism moves online, that's no longer true. I run a website critiquing journalism that updates itself several times daily. Part of the beauty of online is that I can discern with precision which posts get the most readership, which get most linked and which get most e-mailed. That's "direct measurement of results." The danger is that I will become a slave to those measurements, and allow them to determine future assignments. At that point, I'd be surrending myself not only to the wisdom of crowds but also to the madness of crowds. Ain't gonna happen.
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at July 6, 2006 11:50 PM | Permalink This one ended strong. Thanks to all participants, especially Lisa and Daniel but that is not to slight others. Thread now closed. New post is up: It's a Classified War. William Safire was, I think, wrong when he asked himself on Meet the Press “who elected the media to determine what should be secret and what should not?” and answered with: “the founding fathers did.” See you there. |
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