PressThink: "Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype."

"Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype."

And PressThink asks whether the printing press progressives at Mother Jones have any kind of grip. "They saw the Internet and freaked: this can't be real. Recovering their bravery, they decided to debunk it."

Mother Jones magazine has come out with a special Politics 2.0 package. It has a great collection of interviews with “bloggers, politicos, and Netizens,” including MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong, Howard Dean, Chris Rabb of Afronetizen, Digg’s Kevin Rose, conservative Grover Norquist, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, and Phil de Vellis, the guy who created that “Hillary 1984” video. Absorb them all and you have a tour d’horizon for how the Web is changing politics.

The writing and framing from the journalists at Mother Jones is another story. This will give you the flavor:

Are we entering a new era of digital democracy—or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?

New dawn or techo con game: such illuminating alternatives! Again:

Blogs, social networking, and viral video are redefining where political discussion takes place. But are they just replacing the old machine bosses with a new group of bullies?

And what an irony that would be. (See Meet the New Bosses.) Another:

Is old media dead, or is the blogosphere just a flash in the pan?

Because we know it’s one or the other. Those quotes come from a press release that landed in my box yesterday, provoking me with breezy hype about all the hype-busting going on at Mother Jones, an investigative magazine of the left.

“Mother Jones invites you to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype.” (Press release again.) When I later asked Clara Jeffery, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, from whence comes this impulse to debunk (and who provided the bunk that made your de-bunking so imperative…?) she said: impulse to debunk? We weren’t out to debunk. I don’t know what you’re talking about. We said some good things and we said some skeptical things. You have a problem with that?

Which is kinda how the whole interview went.

I thought I was her asking about an editorial decision Mother Jones made: to frame and present its report on “open source politics” not with an idea of its own, or a conclusion reached via reporting, but with the standard myth-busting software journalists load into their prose machines a zillion times a year.

The package begins with a page that is made up like a Wikipedia entry for Open Source Politics. (Of course no one can edit it, except Mother Jones.) This was meant to ease you into the bouncy, crap-detecting spirit of the section and get you to read it, while having a little fun with the form. Thus…

The neutrality of this story is disputed.
Open-Source Politics

Open-source politics is the idea that social networking and participatory technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Forget party bosses in smoky backrooms—netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life. The halls of power will belong to whoever can tap the passion of the online masses. That kid with a laptop has Karl Rove quaking in his boots. And if you believe that, we’ve got some leftover Pets.com stock to sell you.

Fun, right? I had lots of questions about this part but Jeffery was again mystified as to why I would even ask. Sure, it’s snarky, she said. But the point of the fake wiki page was “to set up the ‘it’ll change everything,’ ‘it’ll change nothing’ tension that runs throughout the package.” And that is how the package is framed. My question was: why? Through several emails and a phone interview, I failed in getting an answer.

Ohmygod this is going to change everything! as against Same shit as always. To Clara Jeffery those are two different thoughts. To me they are the same idea: don’t think it through yourself, use rote forms: the revolutionary and his glorious dawn to come, the reactionary who spits at the new. To her there is some kind of “tension” between these views. To me there is no tension because they are fake alternatives to begin with— just off-the-shelf bi-polar hype-speak from Mother Jones.

If you read their interviews with smart people who know politics or know the Web, they are far more grounded. Take Mike Cornfield of George Washington University, who said:

There’s a big difference between having a technical capacity to do something and having the willpower to organize people and persuade them and make history. There’s just a huge gap there.

Or Jane Hamsher on the kingmaking powers of the online left:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama probably don’t need the netroots behind them— they just need us not to hate them.

So I asked Jeffery: if your sources, the people you talked to for this report, didn’t hold such extreme views (“it’ll change everything” or “it’ll change nothing”) and if, after checking into it, twelve writers and editors working for Mother Jones didn’t come down in either of these camps, then why in the world would you use that “tension” to frame the thing? Where did it come from? Couldn’t you find anything better in the reporting you did?

The question—like all my questions—did not compute. She did, however, say that taking two extreme-ified claims and discovering that the truth is somewhere in the middle was a “perfectly standard” treatment in journalism. I had to agree with her on that. But it seemed like a strange explanation. Ours is the same lame frame game you see everywhere in the press, so what’s your problem with it, Jay?

Reality is elsewhere. That’s my problem with it. Here’s what Phil de Vellis said…

There are still gatekeepers. There are just a lot more of them, and new ones all the time.

Observe how this sort of statement doesn’t scream out, “revolutionary alert: there are no more gatekeepers!” Nor does it idiotically contend, curmudgeon-style, that since everything hasn’t been overturned nothing is really different. Vellis says: The political media system hasn’t crumbled, it still stands. But there are changes, and some of them show a pattern that is quite different from the old pattern, so we have to keep an eye on this.

Compare that to Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery in their editors’ note introducing the Mother Jones package, piling irony on irony in their hype-busting prose.

And what of the glorious netroots? Already we’ve seen some of these gate-crashers act more like gatekeepers, promoting groupthink, punishing dissent, and growing drunk on the tribute that old-school pols and the msm now provide them. Not only that, but the blogosphere hardly looks like America yet: as Afro-Netizen’s Chris Rabb notes, those “who could afford to sleep on Howard Dean’s couch in Vermont are the same people who can raise the money to build a digital consultancy or a social networking site.” Is democracy’s best hope just another—if somewhat bigger and younger—elite? Even if the online conversation broadens, not everyone in the crowd is wise, as the digital road rage in comment threads so often proves. And if you thought Willie Horton and Swift Boating were slimy, wait till every last racist smear or dirty lie finds its way to YouTube or Digg.

An outstanding feature of this kind of writing is the question that really isn’t a question because for savvy journalists there is only one plausible answer.

Can revolutionaries hold true to their lofty declarations, or will they inevitably be corrupted by power?

Pop quiz: which of those views is meant to scan “naive,” and which reads “savvy?” Give up so soon? Revolutionaries holding to lofty ideals as they become more established— not likely. And Mother Jones did not find any cases worth reporting. Revolutionaries with lofty rhetoric getting corrupted by proximity to power? Well, yeah— that happens. That’s where the real word is. That’s the savvy view.

“In the world of ‘Politics 2.0’ the masses are forging a more transparent political system—one where bottom-up organizing trumps top-down messaging,” the press release says. “Or so we’ve been led to believe by bloggers and web consultants.”

I asked Clara Jeffery who these bloggers and web consultants were, the ones who were leading us to believe things that Mother Jones just had to challenge. Had she spoken to any? Those true believers she wrote about, did they have names or anything? Again she didn’t understand the question. Why was I asking her about imagery in a press release that some flack sent out?

(Hey, Shel, help me out here, isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Press release goes out. PressThink receives it and has a few questions. Flack passes me along to editor. Editor says: huh?) Jeffery did mention that in this interview a real live revolutionary with lofty declarations could be found.

In March Jonathan Chait wrote about the Netroots in The New Republic, not the same subject but very similar terrain. Unlike the happy balloon poppers at Mother Jones, he at least had an interpretation to offer:

The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.
This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves.

When I asked Clara Jeffery what her interpretation was from all the reporting time her team put in, she had one: “Politics 2.0 is still a work in progress.” (MOTHER JONES CHALLENGES THE POLITICS 2.0 “REVOLUTION;” CLAIMS RESULTS ARE NOT IN YET.) Chait agreed that the results are not in, but didn’t leave it there:

What they have accomplished in just a few years is astonishing. Already, the netroots are the most significant mass movement in U.S. politics since the rise of the Christian right more than two decades ago. And, by all appearances, they are far from finished with their task: recreating the Democratic Party in the image of the conservative machine they have set out to destroy.

Which may not be entirely accurate but it does cause conversation, and from conversation additional layers of understanding may grow.

The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp, but they were too busy fabricating myths they could bust up later— and so they missed it. Jerome Armstrong told them: right now there’s a generational conflict being played out within the campaigns. In 2004 the “big” operators around the candidate weren’t focused on the Internet, and didn’t see why they should be. And so at times the kids and outsiders could show the way to new uses, bypassing legacy thinking at the top.

Now in ‘08 all the old hands have woken up to the Internet and through embrace and extend they have tried to exert control over that department, colonizing it for the kind of command and control, push-the-message politics where (boomer) knowledge is ancient and decisive. “I know people on all these campaigns that work on the Internet and they’re frustrated as hell,” said Armstrong. “That’s throughout the Democratic Party.” But I bet you could find a similar dynamic on the Republican side.

“It’s a generational gap between the decision makers that lead the candidates and campaigns, and the campaign managers, who are directors of the different departments.” Somebody will do that story (a good story!) but it won’t be the printing press progressives at Mother Jones. They saw the Internet and freaked: this can’t be real. Recovering their bravery, they decided to debunk it.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

“There is no Boss Tweed of the blogosphere, and I don’t think there ever will be.”

Daniel Glover, National Journal’s Beltway Blogger reacts to the treament of his ideas by Mother Jones. He was interviewed for the package, and was also asked to write for it. His quotes about bloggers being thin-skinned made it into Daniel Shulman’s piece, Meet the New Bosses. What didn’t make it in? “The fact that I disagreed with his very thesis — that an elite group of mafia-type bosses in the liberal blogosphere controls lesser bloggers and intimidates traditional power brokers.”

Glover says he saw signs of a “pre-determined thesis.” He says my objection to the tone of the package “is a legitimate criticism.” And he says blogger reactions to Mother Jones show that the thin-skins and knee-jerk reactions remain. In other words: a must read post.

And don’t miss the comments where (in a civilized discussion) Daniel Schulman says: pre-determined thesis? Impossible, and insulting. Co-editor Monika Bauerlein says “Dan Schulman is too good a reporter to go into a piece with a predetermined conclusion.” Impossible! But Glover sticks to his guns. How does he know? Because he heard the pitch for the piece himself when Mother Jones asked him to take it on as a freelancer, and he saw his views coveniently ignored when they didn’t fit the thesis.

Shulman then comments at PressThink: “[Glover] said that while some bloggers command bigger followings than others, no single blogger is setting the agenda so to speak. I agree and you’ll notice that I don’t suggest otherwise in my story, (nor will you find the words ‘gatekeeper’ or ‘boss’ anywhere in the body of my piece.” Headline to his article:

Meet the New Bosses
News: After crashing the gate of the political establishment, bloggers are looking more like the next gatekeepers.

Glover’s interview is not one of the ones you can find in the Mother Jones compendium: Interviews with Bloggers, Politicos, and Netizens on Politics 2.0. Why would that be? Explained here.

“No, we did not set out to debunk politics 2.0,” explains Mother Jones co-editor Monika Bauerlein at another must read post in comments (July 1.) “We did set out to debunk some hype that we saw within that universe.” (That’s a change—but a welcome change—from what had been a position denying any such intent; thus, my italics.) More:

No, we are not the victims of a rogue press agent. We approved the press release. It is a work of marketing, which doesn’t make it bad or false or “from another planet,” but which does mean that it highlights elements of the package that are assumed will get people’s attention and get them to look closer. The closer look is what’s intended; a press release is a tease, not a summary.

“And yes, there is similar ‘revolution-or-snake-oil’ framing in the heads and deks for the package.”

MoJo blog replies. What is Jay Rosen For? by Josh Harkinson. I thought this part revealing.

[Rosen is] writing from the perspective of an avid blogger who is familiar with the ins and outs of the Politics 2.0 world (I think) and doesn’t seem to realize that some of our readers, especially of the print magazine, are not. People with less exposure to that world need to understand the big questions at play—What’s the deal with this grand Politics 2.0 talk?—before they will see a reason to read about it. So we use that question as a starting point and then flesh it out with more nuance.

Yes, the big questions…. Perhaps that’s why in the print edition of Mother Jones the cover package is entitled, “Politics 2.0 smackdown.”

Points to Mother Jones for engaging with the blogosphere. And here.

Monika Bauerlein comments at the Huffington Post version:

Jay, thanks for spreading the word about our package—we’re delighted you’re helping get the word out. And when folks actually read it, they’ll see that it’s a pretty wide-ranging exploration of how technology is transforming politics, how politics is transforming the netroots, and lots of other questions. Why you’ve gone on a crusade to take this down as some sort of fake exercise in myth-busting (or why myth-busting would be a bad thing, especially for progressives, anyway) is a mystery to us, but feel free.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, former NPR ombudsman, now with the Committe of Concerned Journalists, emails. “Seems to me that we need to find a way to bring the public into the act of journalism in a more effective way than we have thus far.”

Here’s what I love about blogging: you ring people up with a question, they drop by to answer you. Shel Holz, ace PR-in-the-Web-age blogger, (“Shel, help me out here…”) in the comments:

Jay, that was exactly what you were supposed to do. Were I the flack who sent out the release (a questionable tactic in the blogosphere to begin with), I would be gratified to learn that it had motivated you to seek an interview. And if the interview had gone the way you described, I would spend a sleepless night wondering if the client was worth the billables. One wonders how much time the client has spent learning how to talk to the press (or bloggers), all the more distressing given she is a member of the press herself. This suggests nothing about the rightness or wrongness of Mother Jones’ point of view on Politics 2.0, merely its approach to addressing those who responded as desired to its outreach efforts.
Thanks for asking.

Micah Sifry in The Nation, Sep. 2004, The Rise of Open-Source Politics.

Micah Sifry in the comments defends his statement at the MoJo blog, “there are no gatekeepers anymore.” Clara Jeffrey at the MoJo blog contests Sifry on the “cream rises,” calling him naive to think that. Blogger Hubris 3.0 by MoJo reporter Daniel Schulman warns us: “The egalitarian blogtopia Sifry knows and loves is changing—and not always for the better.”

Mike Cornfield emails:

They swung their counter-establishment bat at the already flimsy (straw hombre) idea that the Internet will bring about a democratic revolution. A lot of interesting quotes tumbled out, mixed in with some not so interesting ones and a lot of facts and factoids. For what it’s worth, I was pleased to be among the many interviewed, and they quoted me accurately and excerpted me fairly. But I didn’t see anything extraordinary in the contents, positive or negative.

Off the shelf pressthink will do that for ya.

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice: “Rosen’s reaction to the Mother Jones piece is in a way reacting to our whole culture being enmeshed in the Hollywood idea of ‘high concept’: where things are painted in simplistic, starkly contrasting, immediately recognizeable terms.”

Clara Jeffery hits the blogs for some dialogue with those who linked to my post: “As the editor of Mother Jones, I would ask only that you and your readers take a look at the package itself, and not just Rosen’s windy and self-promoting screed.”

In These Times from 2006, Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?

Matt Stoller emails: “[Reporter Daniel] Schulman sent me questions about the slippery line, ethically speaking, of bloggers working for campaigns. I emailed him and asked him to google ‘blogger ethics panel’, and he didn’t get the point. There are lots of conflicts of interest in politics and journalism, the internet just makes them transparent. This is actually much more consequential for old political figures whose conflicts of interest are now on display than it is for bloggers, who are accountable directly to their audience (nothing keeps you on your toes like having thousands of people shouting at you every day).”

Schulman in the Mother Jones article, “The New Bosses.”

Moulitsas has been on paternity leave and didn’t respond to interview requests. When I emailed Townhouse list owner Matt Stoller to talk about this story, Stoller replied tersely: “Google ‘blogger ethics panel.’” (A running blogosphere joke, the query brings up various tales of mainstream media hypocrisy.) Then he posted my email on MyDD as the inaugural message in a series he calls, simply, “Annoying Email.”

Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones replies in the comments:

Much of your argument against our Politics 2.0 package presupposes that the extremes of thought on net politics—“revolutionary” or “irrelevant”—do not exist. I will grant that people who are truly informed on the subject don’t hold black and white views, but the rhetoric that they and the press employ frequently comes off as, totally unambiguous, and results in a mistaken impression that things really are that simple. It is thus unfair to say that we are setting up two straw men. The straw men are already there. Yes, knocking them down is easy, but it’s also a way to, in the process, explore a lot of interesting issues raised by politics 2.0 with more complexity and nuance.

I like that: the straw men are already there; heck, let’s use ‘em! Josh also reminds me that Mother Jones has had a web site since 1993 and is “edited and written these days mostly by Gen-X. kids.” Never heard of a young curmudgeon? I know quite a few.

Posted by Jay Rosen at June 27, 2007 5:04 PM Print

Monika: I'm conversing....Your "it's obvious" is pure bunk. So by all means join the argument.

Okay Josh. Now we're seeing at least some movement, intellectually speaking.

So I take it you are joining Clara Jeffery in denying that any debunking tone or purpose is in evidence in the framing and presentation of the Mojo 2.0 package?

Or did you feel the question was unworthy of an answer?

Or would you like to take a pass given that she's your boss and all...? (Understandable.)

I ask because you have introduced a different purpose with this explanation:

Our "idea," in short, is have a bunch of people talk about their ideas. It's not revolutionary, but it's very Web 2.0, and it differs from the I'm-an-expert-so-let-me-tell-you-how-it-is approach that bloggers have come to expect and loathe in the print world.

Couple of corrections.

Expert? Who said you should pretend you're the experts? I didn't. You're thinking in extremes again-- claim no authority (just debunk) or claim all authority (The expert.) Life isn't like that, Josh. Chait never says in his article, "now that I've studied it, I'm the expert."

But he does say: here's the part about the Netroots that's real, and here's the part I find truly revolutionary, even though the revolution hasn't come yet, and here's where my understanding of them and their understanding of themselves depart.

He did that work. You could have, in your own ways, but you didn't. You can keep interpreting that as my call for your "single" all-embracing view if you like, but that's really isn't what I mean at all. You are way, way off.

That there might be something that isn't balloon-popping on the one hand or a pre-emptive and arrogant claim to expertise on the other-- that is the idea you may need to absorb.

Now if your plan really was to have a bunch of informed and interesting people talk about their ideas on politics and Web 2.0, which is a valid approach, then maybe we can see where the package got into trouble.

For what you are saying to readers with this notion is: we respect the knowledge and insights of our survey of people so much (and frankly, we're so proud of our interviewing skills in drawing them out...) that we're basically going to let them talk and listen really, really well because they--not us--are a richly informative crew when it comes to the Web and politics.

If that was your approach, to present Mother Jones as the debunker of the Digerati, stripping away the hype they peddle and letting readers in on all the ironies the Netheads and Web consultants don't talk about (which is definitely the tone of the package despite Carla's deluded denials) this decision was a critical mistake, for it undermined your other idea and led you away from the work you would have had to do in order to complete a good "listening to smart people" package. Like putting together a serious glossary rather than clowning your way through it.

Mother Jones challenges the Politics 2.0 "revolution", the actual slogan under which your work went out, should have read "Mother Jones explores the complex landscape of Politics 2.0 with some of the world's best guides."

But... and here we come to the contradictions at the heart of this little episode... that isn't the stance you wanted to take. Doesn't feel tough enough. Non-dramatic. It lacks that savvy sheen print journalists like to have on the surface of their work. Your desire, I believe, ran counter to your concept.

Your desire was to be the proud myth-busters, the ironists, the "check" on blogger and Netizen zeal ("and what of the glorious Netroots?...") the crap-detectives, and so even though your editorial intent was to listen to geeks (among others) you couldn't help jeering at them to puff yourselves up. Thus: "are we just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

These are exactly the moves I criticized in my post.

One more thing, Josh... about "are we just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?" Where in the package did you answer that question?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 28, 2007 3:52 PM | Permalink

Elizabeth: In my view the main reason there has been no debate since my post, or a very low quality one, is that, according to the Mother Jones editors and writers, there was no attempt to debunk going on, it is not a "theme" of the package and it is not there in the tone of the package, either.

Whereas from my point of view there was such an attempt, and it was quite manifest, to the point of being obvious-- and not only to me, but to other intelligent, informed readers who encounter the work. You can find them in the comment thread here and at Huff Post.

You wanted to ask if this phenomenon lives up to its hype, and in the main (with some exceptions) you feel it doesn't, though there are some promising, even exciting things going on. Because the genre requires it, you also supplied your paraphrase of what "the hype" around the subject is. And these passages are the worst, the most tendentious in the package.

I would add that among those who found "puncturing the hype" the theme and major selling point of your package was your own public relations person, who asked me to write about it after informing me of what was so distinctive in your approach: Mother Jones challenges the Politics 2.0 "revolution."

That you continue to treat this announcement as if it descended from another planet is... strange. Very strange. Your PR person read the same package I read and came to the same conclusion I did about the intent: "to question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype...." (Her words.)

On Monday you can either ask Jay Harris to fire Venture Communications for badly distorting your work, or you can ask yourself: why did they stress hype-busting as the theme? Possibly because it was plainly there?

Of course it is not just the press release. It is there in the tone, framing and presentation of the package overall. If you are trying to reduce all of that to "the marketing" (someone else did it!) that just won't work. You are not the victims of a rogue press agent. The press release touts what you yourselves wanted to tout, and that is why I wrote about it.

In addition to that, I believe Mother Jones editors and writers feel quite strongly that this debunking was needed. They made it clear in the package and they have made it ever more clear since. But for some reason--which remains unexplained--they continue to insist that no such thing happened; no debunking spirit, no debunking tone, no debunking intent.

These denials are not credible. It's fascinating to me that MoJo'ers apparently think I am the only one picking up that message from your package, and that if you can discredit me the message will go away.

Since MoJo's intent to debunk--puncture the hype--is the starting point for my criticism, and Mother Jones editors and writers do not accept it, there is no starting point for debate. That will remain the case, even if this thread goes on. As Josh Harkinson said, "I feel his critique is, on its face, kind of silly." So do the co-editors.

Josh also accused me (in this thread) of not reading the package before I wrote about it, which was incorrect. He dropped vague hints that Huffington Post was killing comments from MoJo people in order to stifle debate, which was incorrect. He said that passages praising the interviews you did were added to the Huffington Post version after our exchanges at PressThink, which was incorrect. (They're identical in both versions) And he said I didn't respond at all to requests for an interview, which was incorrect. He also told HP readers to expect a blog post "in minutes" and that was incorrect. It turned up hours later, with an incorrect time stamp. And all that is why I told him he was losing his grip. That is why I used the word "meltdown."

About none of those errors has Josh said a word.

Truth is, I still don't know why MoJo felt it was so important to debunk the political web in the framing and presentation of its Politics 2.0 package, though I tried to find out. Particularly because in the interviews you conducted (which, again, I praised as a wonderful tour of the subject) you find almost none of the extreme claims that make for such happy balloon-popping.

On the whole, the people you talked to do not say, "the revolution has come and it is going to be a glorious dawn for democracy." That is not their perspective. In fact we don't know who says things like that because you never bothered to tell us.

To take one example, who says the blogosphere "looks like America?" You tell us it doesn't (and I agree, it doesn't) but who says it does? And if it is so important to ask if the Politics 2.0 revolution lives up to the hype, why isn't it important to explain where the hype is coming from, what it says, and who buys it? Why do I get to read snarky passages about "true believers" but not the names of those believers?

My answer: because you are not writing about actual people who are true believers and what they actually say and feel. You are advertising that you are not among them, and for that purpose is doesn't matter who they are.

That's why debunking "the myths" is so lame as an editorial strategy. It gets you off the hook. "The myths" are so prevalent, why try to find any evidence for them? In fact, the myths are another form of hype-speak. Yours.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 12:42 AM | Permalink

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Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

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National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

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Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Jay--
Much of your argument against our Politics 2.0 package presupposes that the extremes of thought on net politics--"revolutionary" or "irrelevant"--do not exist. I will grant that people who are truly informed on the subject don't hold black and white views, but the rhetoric that they and the press employ frequently comes off as totally unambiguous, and results in a mistaken impression that things really are that simple. It is thus unfair to say that we are setting up two straw men. The straw men are already there. Yes, knocking them down is easy, but it's also a way to, in the process, explore a lot of interesting issues raised by politics 2.0 with more complexity and nuance. You don't seem to disagree that we do that in the interviews (you don't really get into most of the reported pieces--have you read them?), but you simply object to the framing.
So let's look at your specific objections. You write:

Reality is elsewhere. That’s my problem. Here’s what Phil de Vellis said.

Ok, so you seem to be saying that nobody will actually come out and say, "There are no gatekeepers." Well, you're wrong. Don't take my word for this one, just look at Micah Sifry's comment, posted a few hours ago in our blog. His verbatim quote is: "There are no gatekeepers anymore." Gosh, looks like that goes against your argument. As the reporter who did the bulk of interviews for this package, I was told such things all the time. Very smart people do believe, for example, that the netroots will usher in a new era of progressivism unseen since the New Deal. On the flip side, people like Grover Norquist are total skeptics. He told me: "What would our friends at MoveOn point to as sort of a success? Getting people all exercised in writing naughty emails, naughty words and sending them to congressman may make you feel better, but does it change the world?" I shouldn't really have to spell this out for you, Jay, but, anyway, there it is.

I'm sorry that you didn't find our analysis up to snuff with TNR. Not much I can say there except that we are not TNR, thank God. As for the fact that we crusties in the print biz have just woken up to the Internets, you might want to consider that Mother Jones has had a website since 1993, has employed bloggers for years, and is edited and written these days mostly by Gen-X kids, among them myself and Clara. Oh wait, but that might not fit your frame.

Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones Magazine

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at June 27, 2007 8:12 PM | Permalink

I should be packing for a flight to Israel tomorrow, instead I'll wade in for a bit.

I totally defend my saying "There are no gatekeepers anymore." The definition of a gatekeeper is someone who keeps other people out of a room, or in this case a conversation. When anyone with access to the internet can join the conversation, in what sense do we still have gatekeepers? Phil de Vellis made a video, put it on YouTube, and we the people who make up the social web, or what my hero Yochai Benkler calls "the networked public sphere" spread Phil's video for him, to the point where 300,000+ people had viewed it before a single old media journalist decided to cover it.
One can argue that when you go from a world with one "Great Mentioner" (Russell Baker's term for the makers of conventional wisdom in Washington punditry) to a world of the Gang of 500 (Mark Halperin's updated version of the press pack) to a world where something like 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 political bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers sift the day's news and opinion and bubble up the most interesting stuff from obscure sites onto the big hub sites, that we just now have 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 gatekeepers instead of one or 500. I suspect that is what Phil means when he says "There are still gatekeepers. There are just a lot more of them, and new ones all the time." But when you have a world with thousands of "gatekeepers" and new ones rising all the time, it sounds like such a porous (and gloriously democratic) system that the word "gatekeeper" scarcely seems appropriate anymore.

I was pleased to see Mother Jones devoting so much space to "Politics 2.0" and of course delighted to be quoted and cited for having written, earlier than most, about "open source politics." I have friends at Mother Jones and so it pains me to criticize them. But, like you Jay, I smell a lot of defensiveness from a magazine that, once upon a time, thought of itself as fighting for a more open society. It really dismayed me to see them take such a jaundiced view of how the internet is affecting politics, considering that you probably can't point to any other development in the last ten years with as much promise for opening up the political process to more diverse voices, fostering more accountability, and engendering more transparency from powerful institutions. Oh well. So it goes.

Posted by: Micah Sifry at June 27, 2007 9:44 PM | Permalink

Jay, that was exactly what you were supposed to do. Were I the flack who sent out the release (a questionable tactic in the blogosphere to begin with), I would be gratified to learn that it had motivated you to seek an interview. And if the interview had gone the way you described, I would spend a sleepless night wondering if the client was worth the billables. One wonders how much time the client has spent learning how to talk to the press (or bloggers), all the more distressing given she is a member of the press herself. This suggests nothing about the rightness or wrongness of Mother Jones' point of view on Politics 2.0, merely its approach to addressing those who responded as desired to its outreach efforts.

Thanks for asking.

Posted by: Shel Holtz at June 27, 2007 10:55 PM | Permalink

re:"I totally defend my saying 'There are no gatekeepers anymore.' The definition of a gatekeeper is someone who keeps other people out of a room, or in this case a conversation. When anyone with access to the internet can join the conversation, in what sense do we still have gatekeepers?"

Micah,

That doesn't seem to be true... My impression was that somebody sort of *lets you in*... when it comes to joining the *relevant* conversation. The significant discussion tables (such as this one) are moderated, for the most part.

Delia

P.S. And I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, just that you generally don't just walk in as you please...

P.P.S. oh... and putting something on a blog, or video clip etc. and waiting for somebody to "discover" it and bring it into the relevant conversation seems to be like hoping you are going to win the lottery... (for the vast majority of people, it's the wrong place to put your money). D.

Posted by: Delia at June 27, 2007 11:35 PM | Permalink

Delia--

Fair enough. But having worked the "slush pile" at The Nation magazine many years ago as a young editor, and seen perhaps one out of 500 or more manuscripts that came in over the transom make it to publication, I can tell you the entry points to the political conversation are far far more open online in the blogosphere than in print media.

Micah

Posted by: Micah Sifry at June 27, 2007 11:55 PM | Permalink

Josh: You did a lot of reporting but in the end you had no ideas with which to make sense of the Net in politics, so instead you popped some balloons. Now you seek to defend that as your "idea." Balloon popping (sorry, straw man toppling to use your terms...) leads to nuance!

It does?

To me it is worth more comment that Clara, editor in chief, denies that the package is done in any myth-busting style. Incredibly--meaning, her statement is not credible to me--she said that debunking wasn't a strong theme of the package; it's not a good characterization of the tone; it wasn't our intent, etc. Several times she said this.

I wonder: do you agree with that?

The point is not that you should "be like" Jonathan Chait or the New Republic. Please don't. Here is a writer who looked at the phenomenon and instead of knocking over straw men (your term, not mine) set himself the far harder task of assessing what was actually different in national politics because of the rise of the Net and the movement sometimes called the Netroots.

This task you and your package declined.

If I understand what you are saying in your comment above, you do "grant that people who are truly informed on the subject don't hold black and white views" but sometimes they let slip a remark that sorta sounds like they do and once in a while you talk to someone who really does make breathless or utopian statements; so it does happen.

But, you also said, you know that these sloppy, unwisely categorical statements do not represent very well what informed people actually believe, and so when publicized result in a "mistaken impression that things really are that simple."

Nonetheless you said you feel entirely justified building a story line around them because... this is where I need a little help... because...because it's easy! Right. Okay. Pre-fabs, they snap right in!

I'm pretty sure I agree with you, so that's the good news.

I said nothing about your age or which generation you belong to, nor did I deny that MoJo has a significant presence on the Web. I said you were printing press progressives, and in my view (not yours, I'm sure) you are. You prefer not to have to deal with the people your magazine calls "the online masses." Printing press progressives is a reference to your attitude, not your age.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 28, 2007 1:45 AM | Permalink

Hands down my favorite part of the Mother Jones package is the derisive glossary of terms they provided, The Digerati Code. You get not a two-fer but a three-for with this beautifully designed Dodge Savvy.

1.) Because it's a joke glossary, not a real one, only half serious, you don't have to do the exacting work of fully understanding what these terms mean in use and explaining it to the uninitiated without prejudice. You get a huge break that way. When you go derision it makes things a lot easier.

2.) Because it's a joke glossary, with many of the terms played for laughs ("broadcast politics: using elite white male journalists and pundits to get your message out...") you can attitudinize all over and freely express your suspicion of the Digerati, which is good clean fun.

(And, as I said, you don't have to figure out how to concisely explain broadcast politics, a pattern less visible before the Net because it was more naturally the order of things.)

3.) If anyone makes the mistake of taking the glossary seriously, and tries to criticize you, like I am doing now, well, it's obvious they missed the point, which was simply to have fun with some definitions of these wacky Internet terms. Not everything has to be serious all the time, right?

Right! And that's why I love the combo. It swings. It plays offense and defense equally well. You get by with a cursory job in defining key terms that might help readers understand Politics 2.0, you can have fun making fun of the Digerati, and it's a joke text so critics get stuffed.

Brilliant, MoJo! I know some of you disagree with me but I think it's these small features that add up and become the signature on the package.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 28, 2007 2:09 AM | Permalink

Micha,

The points of entry may be more open but they don't seem to deliver the same thing (so it appears that we are NOT comparing equally effective ways of getting a message through): a more useful way of looking at things may be the level of difficulty in getting the message published -- in print versus online -- times the
level of effectiveness in becoming part of the relevant conversation.

Delia

P.S. And online may still win (if not right now, maybe soon...). But this may be not because the new system is better at getting valuable information to become part of the relevant conversation, it may just be because the old system keeps weakening...

Jay,

I agree with you that they just framed it wrong (well, could have been much better...) and as a result got less serious issues under consideration and made it more difficult for their readers to look at what's really going on.

Posted by: Delia at June 28, 2007 8:21 AM | Permalink

“edited and written these days mostly by Gen-X. kids.”

Gen-X "kids"? Gen-Xers are beginning to show a little gray around the temples these days. Either the "kids" editing the web site are post-Gen-X, or they're Gen-Xers still wallowing in their immaturity.

Posted by: Andrea at June 28, 2007 8:47 AM | Permalink

Delia:

Read Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks." Or watch this video of his keynote at PdF this year: http://pdf.blip.tv/file/237315/

I'm sorry if you can't see his slides very well, but it's the single best synopsis of how our emerging networked public sphere is improving on the old mass mediated public sphere.

Posted by: Micah Sifry at June 28, 2007 9:55 AM | Permalink

MJ hasn't undated what to call the younger generation. Gen X is the one-size-fits-all term for anyone younger than a Baby Boomer. I've heard the term Gray Generation floated for 20-somethings now, a terrible label--but then aren't all labels that reduce complexity to the equivalent of how e.e. cummings described the Reader's Digest, to which he once applied for a job: 8 to 80, anyone can do it, makes you feel good.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 28, 2007 9:57 AM | Permalink

Man, what a circle jerk this is. You guys really can't tell yourselves enough how important you are, can you? A little skepticism, well-documented at that, and you freak out like the whole facade is crumbling. Bloggers knock "MSM" columnists for Washington insiderdom, yet they take money from political campaigns and expect everyone to admire their honesty, even when they fail to disclose. Something smells here, and it ain't the burning down of the printing presses.

Posted by: Kevin Dean Nicewanger at June 28, 2007 9:58 AM | Permalink

You know something, Kevin, you really don't get it. It isn't about how important we are, not for the vast majority of us. It's about how to bust information out of the frame of pressthink and get what we really need to make informed choices for our democracy. Packaged so tightly now, it's impossible to do any free thinking or inquiry in traditional forms. We're just doing what communities are supposed to do--cooperate, make helpful suggestions, share information and ideas, learn, keep open minds, etc etc. It sounds like you've made up your mind about what this enterprise is about--that says more about what YOU value than what we do.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 28, 2007 10:59 AM | Permalink

Well... it's certainly *different*... whether or not it's an improvement (when everything is taken into consideration) appears to be a value judgment. There are also a whole lot of things that are just unknown -- I find the hero-guru system to be a terrible way of getting to the truth of what's really going on.

I'm going to try to be much gentler this time, but isn't there a different kind of corruption when it comes to the blogosphere? well.. the prominent people involved with this (and not just some bad apples, something systemic that distorts the information that reaches the public)?

Posted by: Delia at June 28, 2007 11:47 AM | Permalink

The overwhelming sense I get from all this is simply this: Mother Jones disappoints by addressing a serious topic and getting lazy with it. Then they get defensive and claim that it wasn't intended to be treated as serious journalism in the first place.

Sorry, but no. If it's not intended to be taken seriously, then why did MJ devote so much time and space to it? If they did want to be taken seriously, then why the joke glossary?

In short, it sounds to me as though they wanted to have it both ways -- they can call it serious journalism if it suits them, but they can fall back and disclaim that if they need to do so. That's the sort of behavior you'd expect from MAD Magazine, perhaps... or from a teenager taking a true/false test, and writing down a capital T with a horizontal line through it.

It's too bad, really. The subject deserves serious attention -- more than it apparently got from Mother Jones.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

Posted by: Daniel in Brookline at June 28, 2007 12:55 PM | Permalink

Jay--
You write:

The extreme arguments on both sides are not so much a story line for the package as a starting point. It would be one thing if we spent all of our space parading the most extreme views on the subject. Then maybe that would be our story line. As it stands, the package consists of four main stories and 27 interviews with experts in the field. If you actually sift through the thing, especially online, you will get a nuanced picture of politics 2.0 and quite a few ideas and theories about its future.

You also write:

The point of the package was not to provide a single analysis on the meaning or impact of Politics 2.0. In fact, I think it is deeply ironic that you take us to task for not living up to the analytical rigor of others in the print world. What we have done is allow people in the field--actual bloggers, actual professors, actual online political consultants--to weigh in themselves, and we're allowing anybody to comment on their thoughts at the end of each article and interview online. Our "idea," in short, is have a bunch of people talk about their ideas. It's not revolutionary, but it's very Web 2.0, and it differs from the I'm-an-expert-so-let-me-tell-you-how-it-is approach that bloggers have come to expect and loathe in the print world. I fear that if we had opted for the latter, you'd simply be caviling over that instead.

And how dare you say that I prefer not to have to deal with the online masses? Quite frankly, I would love it if the more Netizens wrote about our package, positively or negatively, or came to our blog and told us we were stupid. The silent treatment is coming from some of the major blogs, and not from us at this point. Or from you. And for that, I thank you.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at June 28, 2007 1:33 PM | Permalink

Expecting Mother Jones to be open to the new, that which is outside their realm of authority, is like expecting an earthworm to become a weatherman. "...promoting groupthink, punishing dissent..."? Oh, irony. The magazine's culture has always been one of rule making above all. The petulant tang of Mr. Harkinson's defense of this undertaking of his is tiresome. Let the dead bury their dead.

Posted by: Curt at June 28, 2007 2:13 PM | Permalink

I think I detecting something here.

"Quite frankly, I would love it if the more Netizens wrote about our package, positively or negatively, or came to our blog and told us we were stupid. The silent treatment is coming from some of the major blogs, and not from us at this point."

Perhaps the frame that so provoked Jay is really a cry for help to get more of an audience.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 28, 2007 2:19 PM | Permalink

Jay--I'm not going to get into an argument with you here because it's obvious that you're interested in sounding off, not having a conversation. (If this is about not setting up "fake alternatives" and "off the shelf bipolar hype-speak," then why the bipolar hype-speak? "They saw the Internet and freaked. This can't be real. Recovering their bravery, they decided to debunk it." Really measured and constructive.)

Micah and everyone else, thanks for wading in here. Micah, you guys do great work over at techpresident, and you personally have done terrific work in this area for a lot longer than most of the people who now claim to be experts. I respect and appreciate your disagreement, and the beginning of a response is at our blog. One point that I felt should be made over here as well:

What puzzles me a little bit is this sense that Mother Jones is in some way apart from, or new to, online journalism. (We're in San Francisco, for chrissakes!) We had the very first website of any national magazine (back in 1993), as well as one of the first political blogs (Peter Coyote's dispatches from the 1996 Dem convention are still online somewhere if you dig deep enough, not to mention our "Bush Files" blog back in 2000/2001.) We were doing original journalism on the web when most people were still calling it cyberspace and we're in the middle of a major expansion in this area, as part of an effort to reimagine the way journalism is done BOTH in print and online. We have nothing to fear from the medium; we're part of it, and happily so. But just as we will shine a critical spotlight on Democrats and progressives--no matter whether we share many of their values--we'll be skeptical and critical in this universe. We make no claim to having the answers, but we believe asking questions is almost always good.
Let me just quote the intro to our package, which pretty much sums up both our enthusiasm and our skepticism: "Open-source politics has the potential to fundamentally change the way we govern ourselves--to fulfill the democratic promise that Web 1.0 pioneers dreamed of before they grabbed for the IPO brass ring. It also has the potential to become exactly what Web 1.0 turned into—a delivery system where most of us are mere customers. To get a sense of what's hype and what's real, we surveyed bloggers, politicos, and all manner of netizens."

In other words: There's a lot of promise and a lot of peril here, a lot of good stuff and some bad. We set out to explore, reflect, and join a debate that is very much ongoing online. What's so weird about that?

(And Daniel, if you have a moment, it'd be great if you stopped over to look at the package yourself--right now you have heard Jay's version of it, and I'd love to know if you still think we got lazy after you see it.)

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at June 28, 2007 3:27 PM | Permalink

I refer you back to the line that Monika quotes from our intro: "To get a sense of what's hype and what's real, we surveyed bloggers, politicos, and all manner of netizens." There is no contradiction between that and challenging the "politics 2.0 revolution" or asking "Are we just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?" (see one piece that addresses that in the link). They are valid questions, for all the reasons I've enumerated, and they are answered, in many ways, in the pieces and interviews in the package. If you are really interested in learning more, read the pieces. And then if you still have problems, you can quibble with the points that people make. But I don't think you can have a conversation about "framing" without talking about the actual content of the pieces. It's like accusing a newspaper of writing a sensationalistic headline without having read the story.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at June 28, 2007 4:52 PM | Permalink

Josh: I read all the pieces (the major ones three or four times) and all but two of the interviews before I started my post. I know you were concerned about that.

Basically the pieces said little to me (thin, little added value, lots of recycling old episodes); the interviews and excerpts from said a lot (so I praised them in the first paragraph); and the packaging, introduction and framing spoke loudly.

As Mike Cornfield, one of your sources said, about the articles. " I didn’t see anything extraordinary in the contents, positive or negative."

Jeffrey Dvorkin, former NPR ombudsman, now with the Committe of Concerned Journalists, wrote me a note about this piece:

Seem to me that we need to find a way to bring the public into the act of journalism in a more effective way than we have thus far. As MSM pays lip service to acknowledging that the public may be more than an empty vessel where their offerings can be received, and at the same time a new generation of computer literates appear to be garnering time and space for their ideas, the mass of citizens appears left out.
A new role for media, especially MSM, which hopes to be relevant in this age, would be to help give the citizens the critical tools they need to participate in a more engaged way in the act of committing journalism.

More than letters-to-the-editor, more than “have your say” on the BBC, and even more than having an ombudsman (!), we need to encourage MSM to bring citizens inside the journalistic process and to participate… webcasting editorial meetings, having public reps on boards, handing over the airwaves to the public in a meaningful way, asking the public to give their editorial input to stories BEFORE they get published… well you get the idea.

Otherwise the outflow of energy and creativity away from journalism will just continue and the ability of the citizens to make informed decisions about their own lives becomes just another discussion point in the academy.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 28, 2007 5:14 PM | Permalink

I've read most of the interviews. They seem to hitting pretty hard--as are the lead-in lines from the landing page--how Internet participation in politics will be the purview of a small group of smart, savvy, activists (however you want to define that politically or from a behavioral point of view) with Internet access and knowledge. This does not translate into smooth-talking geeks, but by raising that as the black-and-white of the issue from an editorializing point of view, you seem to be making the case that in fact is what they are. Whoever read the interviews seems and editorialized for MJ on this seems to have made up his/her mind(s) that's how these folks need to be framed and labeled. So you're not exactly just doing a round-table forum--not when you're commenting like that.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 28, 2007 5:15 PM | Permalink

I've heard the term Gray Generation floated for 20-somethings now, a terrible label--but then aren't all labels that reduce complexity to the equivalent of how e.e. cummings described the Reader's Digest, to which he once applied for a job: 8 to 80, anyone can do it, makes you feel good.

Posted by: David at June 28, 2007 5:32 PM | Permalink

I've read the articles and interviews, which admittedly I wouldn't have if Jay hadn't linked to them.

I agree with Jay about MoJo's hyperbolic straw men (Josh's term) pitch. I agree with Josh that the articles and interviews managed to scratch below the shallow balloon popping (Jay's term) promised in MoJo's ad hook. Which brings me back to Jay's question: Why the shallow, hyperbolic, black and white straw men in the first place?

My first concern was the use of the term blogosphere and blogs. We really need to come up with a more descriptive language. Imagine writing an article about the "print media" which consists of newsletters, tabloids, dailies, weeklies, monthlies, porn, etc. Leaving the impression that tens of millions of bloggers are Markos Moulitsas or Glenn Reynolds wanna-bes is just misinformation about the social phenom.

I think the What's Hype? cutout is a good contrast to The Digerati Code (which is awful and it would be nice if someone from MoJo just said, "Yeah, we blew it there.").

I did wonder, as I read this part from Daniel Schulman's Meet The New Bosses, if he experienced any sense of irony while composing it:

As bloggers attain power and influence, they will undoubtedly find themselves subject to the same withering scrutiny they've bestowed on other powerful people. And they won't take it quietly....

"There was quite a nasty reaction to my op-ed," says Glover. "I've been surprised at how thin-skinned bloggers can be. You compare that with how they treat the mainstream media and how they'll go after them and attack them, but when anything at all is said about the blogosphere, they go off half-cocked."

Posted by: Tim at June 28, 2007 5:50 PM | Permalink

A recommendation for MoJo's editors ...

When refering to Politics 2.0, perhaps it would be better to refer to the online participants as the pundisphere.

You don't seem to have caught on to that term and probably should if you plan on more stories on this topic.

Posted by: Tim at June 28, 2007 7:27 PM | Permalink

"She did, however, say that taking two extreme-ified claims and discovering that the truth is somewhere in the middle was a “perfectly standard” treatment in journalism."

It's also an enormously popular logical fallacy called the False Dilemma. It should probably be updated to include the derivative, media generated Fallacy of the False Middle.

Posted by: JM Hanes at June 28, 2007 9:43 PM | Permalink

Thanks, Tim.

I think we're going to have to put MoJo reporter Josh Harkinson as well as MoJo editor Monika Bauerlein in the "debunking wasn't on our mind, and isn't a theme of the package, so I don't know what you're talking about, I really don't...." category, joining editor Clara Jeffery.

Truly interesting, considering how right there on the surface the message is.

How do we explain it? Any theories as to what this denial by three MoJo's is all about?

Or, to put it more neutrally, what accounts for this difference in perception, where they see no attempt to debunk and to others--especially me--it is quite apparent, an unconcealed part of the frame and a major chord in the overall tone?

Monika says she is puzzled by all the confusion about MoJo's intentions.

There's a lot of promise and a lot of peril here, a lot of good stuff and some bad. We set out to explore, reflect, and join a debate that is very much ongoing online. What's so weird about that?

Nothing is. What's weird is not being able to hear any "let's bring the dreamers down to earth and remind them what politics is all about..." purpose in the writing that framed the whole package:

Can there be such a thing as open-source politics? True believers promise a marriage of freewheeling pluralism and the technological tools to share and refine its goals and strategies. Bottom-up organizing, they promise, will trump top-down messaging; "from many, one" will actually mean something again.
It sounds really appealing. But we live in San Francisco, and saw what happened the last time the tech Kool-Aid was passed around. Innovation was quickly co-opted by the money sloshing about, a sock puppet told us it made perfect sense to ship bulk pet food around the country by air...and, well, you know the rest.

Not only do we have to be wary of the geeks and vcs trying to sell us (literally) on MyDemocracy, but ultimately these are politicians we're talking about—creatures of spin, beholden to many, sincerity challenged, and risk averse. Who says that "listening to the netroots" is not just another "listening tour"?

And what of the glorious netroots?...

What's weird is being unable to hear any debunking going down in mocking lines like these:

The halls of power will belong to whoever can tap the passion of the online masses. That kid with a laptop has Karl Rove quaking in his boots. And if you believe that, we've got some leftover Pets.com stock to sell you.

Remember there was no special attempt at hype-busting, myth deflation or debunking in this package, according to the editors, though the headline on the press release invited us to "question if the Politics 2.0 revolution really lives up to its hype," rather than, say, "Politics 2.0: A lot of good stuff and some bad." That's weird, too..

Theories at to what's going on here?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 28, 2007 10:01 PM | Permalink

Jay, again I think they *did* frame it wrong (that they could have done much better in that respect) but I'm wondering if everybody would have gotten more out of the "after matter" if it would have just been *suggested* that they do a follow up article that explores the subject more in depth... instead of telling them just how wrong it all was...(that's done and over with) D.

Posted by: Delia at June 28, 2007 10:32 PM | Permalink

Theories? I'm not sure this would qualify as a theory. Call it a reaction, or a SWAG.

When I read the initial MoJo defenses (not explanations), it seemed they were proffering the first rule of journalism (usually attributed to The Economist's Geoffrey Crowther) "simplify, then exaggerate."

C'mon Jay, what could be simpler than dichotomous straw men? Heck, Josh isn't even taking credit for the simplification: "... the rhetoric that [people who are truly informed on the subject [that] don't hold black and white views] and the press employ frequently comes off as totally unambiguous, and results in a mistaken impression that things really are that simple."

Wait ... mistaken dichotomous straw men? Totally unambiguous? With so much room, this story writes itself!! And it's all their fault! It's their rhetoric!

Now comes the hype (exaggeration): watch us debunk the new generation of evil capitalist dot com geeks (or in this case, dot pol) before the inevitable bubble bursts!

What I don't get is how that enables MoJo to "explore a lot of interesting issues raised by politics 2.0 with more complexity and nuance."

If they really are interesting issues, why the simplify and exaggerate? Didn't I come for the debunking? Is this a bait and switch? Sounds like it:

Yes, knocking them down is easy, but it's also a way to, in the process, explore a lot of interesting issues raised by politics 2.0 with more complexity and nuance.

So, it's really not (I guess) simplify then exaggerate journalism but rather setting low expectations with simplify then exaggerate headlines. Anything that even appears "complex" or "nuanced" after that has got to be deep.

Right?

Posted by: Tim at June 29, 2007 12:22 AM | Permalink

Lets' face it. Nobody is immune to spin. This whole thing started with a PRESS RELEASE, right? Those people are paid to spin, and this is how it's done these days. You want to sexy up a story? Provoke. I want to quote from an e-mail response I got to a letter I wrote disagreeing with the way the author made an argument:

"Yeah, I'm no doubt guilty of judging the actions of others by what I personally like; but then again, you kind of have to get into that snarky frame of mind to write a column sometimes."

And here I think you might have it. MoJo is no different from other established entities: We were the authority challengers before you guys were a twinkle on a silicon chip; we're print; we're trained professionals. We don't like you and your unfamiliar methods. You'll flame out, mark our words.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 29, 2007 9:22 AM | Permalink

Yeah, I think we're getting there.

I like "simplify, then exaggerate." Do you have a better source for that, Tim?

But here it's "simplify, then exaggerate, then debunk the cartoon images you created in step one." As you said.

I also like this from a reader of the Huffington Post version, which went up last night.

I suspect as you do that Mother Jones began their research with that highly polarized, rather juvenile article concept in mind--juvenile because it reflected a simplistic world view, white/black, a pre-adult reality based on concept rather than living. When content didn't fit concept, instead of throwing concept overboard and running with a potentially great piece (as you mention), they stuck with their outmoded concept.

Another idea: one of the simplified, ultra-exaggerated notions that pro journalists tend to fall in love with and make part of their religion (not all but a lot of them) is skeptic v. cheerleader, with one of those terms a term of contempt and the other of course high praise. (You can swap "true believer" for cheerleader and it's the same device.)

If you don't want to be a cheerleader, then you have to be a skeptic, right? If you advertise what a skeptic you are, then everyone will know you're not a cheerleader. If someone criticizes our way of being skeptical, or what we said when we were trying to point to our skepticism, well, that's because they wanted us to cheerlead; but we must inform you, Sir, that we will never, ever give up our skepticism-- we're journalists, not cheerleaders!

Genuine skepticism in journalism is a good thing, a healthy thing, a virtue, a discipline. But formulaic skepticism, and skepticism where learning is light, is not only a bad thing, but a self-deluding bad thing because the criticism that might allow for correction is itself assimilated into the skeptic vs. cheerleader frame.

I wrote about this in two earlier posts, one of newsroom religion:

In the daily religion of the news tribe, ordinary believers do not call themselves believers. (In fact, “true believer” is a casting out term in journalism, an insult.) The Skeptics. That’s who journalists say they are. Of course, they know they believe things in common with their fellow skeptics on the press bus. It’s important to keep this complication in mind: Not that journalists are so skeptical as a rule, but that they will try to stand in relation to you as The Skeptic does.

Emphasis added. It's also explored in "When I’m Reporting, I am a Citizen of the World.”

Mother Jones found that their sources (an excellent mix) were better at being skeptical about the glorious dawn of democratic revolution via Web than the MoJo editors and reporters were. (Not surprising, the sources have to deal with the realities of political life online.) But if the sources are the better skeptics, what role does that leave for the journalists?

Cheerleaders? No, no way. We have to be even bigger skeptics. Authority challengers for the "new bosses." But this "bigger" skepticism is a cartoon image. It isn't based on knowledge drawn from life, but the formal requirements of an image. That's why every time they refer to "true believers" and the like, they never reference anyone in particular. There is no particular referent for that, except the rituals of journalism itself.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 10:04 AM | Permalink

Jay, this is sounding more and more like beating on a dead horse... If they did a shabby treatment of a worthy subject, why not go into great detail about how it could have been much better? (it seems that that would be a lot more interesting and useful to read) D.

Posted by: Delia at June 29, 2007 11:03 AM | Permalink

Can't we just do it the easier way, which is don't read it if you're bored? I really hate having you edit my blog for me.

The rituals, framing tricks and avoidance tactics described here are very generally seen in journalism today; they are not the property of one MoJo package. I have an interest in puzzling them out, and describing them carefully. If you don't, that is fine, normal, and all part of blogging.

About one of your earlier questions, isn't there corruption in the blogosphere we ought to concern ourselves with even if MoJo didn't go a great job in illuminating it... I'm a trifle concerned that this post, criticizing a progressive magazine, has been linked to by Instapundit on the right, Joe Gandelman of The Moderate voice in the center, but not a single link from the left. Fortunately I have the Huffington Post to get it out there, but it is curious.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 11:25 AM | Permalink

re: "simplify, then exaggerate" source

I think the best I can come up with online is Bill Emmott.

re: "simplify, then exaggerate, then debunk the cartoon images you created in step one."

How 'bout, "simply, then exaggerate, then debunk the cartoon images you created, then deny the cartoon images were important (or even played a role) and accuse your critics of being true believers (or partisans) for questioning your framing."

Posted by: Tim at June 29, 2007 11:57 AM | Permalink

I think it's simple, what's going on. It's a point of view most easily seen in old style marketing (and journalism and politics): Game the consumer, admit no culpability. (Culpability, mistakes, actually admitted would kill my authority, which is more important than learning.)

Anyone with an intro to literature class under their belt (or with a functioning bullshit detector) knows that 'debunking' was the motif for the issue. And yet all of the Mother Jones people engaging in this discussion deny it. I think they honestly believe, that a) we hoi polloi are not, and can never be, equal partners in the process, and b) if they deny it enough, somehow we will eventually just...believe them.

The weirdest thing to me, however, is how they don't know that _most_ if not all of the people criticizing their decisions regarding this package would be _very_ gratified by their listening to us. If did so, they would show they had learned something about the topic. (You know, like how by interviewing a cop you could learn something about crime, even though the cop is not a journalist?) That is the whole point of this medium, I believe, what attracts me to it: Argument is the road to knowledge. Without the destination, it's all ego.

Frankly, I would even prefer it if they just said outright, "Social media is crap and you all suck." At least they'd be making an honest stand. Pretending they weren't doing what they did might work for a philandering politician (though less and less I think and hope), but it just _won't work_ in this context.

But unidirectional, authoritarian habits are very hard to break.

Posted by: Curt at June 29, 2007 1:06 PM | Permalink

Alright,then! let's do this the easy way: you come across like a sore loser who was pissed that they didn't include you among the interviewees, went out and *asked* them to interview you and then raised hell because it didn't turn out the way you wanted...

P.S. As to my "editing your blog", I was trying to help you out of this vicious circle but... keep spinning around! -- what do *I* care?

P.P.S. As to the other question, that's very serious stuff! and it seems to go way beyond linking or not linking to things... definitely worth talking about!(if we are still in talking terms...) D.

Posted by: Delia at June 29, 2007 1:10 PM | Permalink

Delia - You're sounding like a bit of a brat yourself . I think he had a very cogent analysis and certainly doesn't need Mother Jones to interview him to assert his authority. This blog is about an analysis of pressthink. That's what he did and what we're commenting about. If it seems to be covering similar ground, well, that's because we're starting to come to a consensus through a sort of Socratic method. If you're bored, then don't read. I'm finding this very stimulating and useful.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 29, 2007 1:24 PM | Permalink

I didn't know anything about the series until it landed in my inbox. I felt they had a great range of people and certainly didn't feel left out. Nor was there any need to talk to me considering who they had.

As far as the interview, you have your facts all wrong. I did not request it. It was Carla Jefferey who suggested we talk by phone when she found out I was writing about this package. The press person said to holler if I had any questions, so I sent some questions and asked if she could help me get answers. That's how I got passed along to Carla. 'Twas I who interviewed her as a source for decision-making at Mother Jones, not her interviewing me as a "left out" source for Mother Jones, which is simply your fantasy.

If I want to examine something in microscopic detail, way beyond your tolerance level, and the tolerance level of 85 percent of my readers... I will; and you should realize that this is exactly what's great about blogging, and why you love it, if you love it.

"Argument is the road to knowledge." I agree with this, Curt. And that is why I think the traditional journalist's evaluation of opinion, as a derivative good, is wrongheaded and misleading. For it is argument that causes us to look for information.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 1:30 PM | Permalink

ok, looks like I was wrong (but that's the impression I was getting after seeing you go at it for so long mentioning Mother Jones at every turn) and yes I'm afraid I've reached my tolerance level on the topic...

P.S. I hope you are going to talk about the other issue (corruption of the blogosphere) soon -- I think it would be great if you did a separate article on it... I hope you don't perceive it as "editing your blog," it's just a suggestion and something I'd really like to see... D.

Posted by: Delia at June 29, 2007 1:48 PM | Permalink

I hope you'll address.... is not editing my blog.

Telling me to halt my examination because it's beyond your tolerance level and go on to something more constructive... that is editing my blog.

I am sure the difference is clear to you.

This is from the Huffington Post thread, where they have a new comment system in place.

It widens the frame...

Jay, I know that your focus is on the press, but I think that this topic could be opened a little broader, to talk about how the blogs etc. have had an effect on the left in general.
Since Ronald Reagan was elected, the US left has been either a) basically radical (e.g., Mother Jones) or b) Reagan-lite (e.g., James Carville). Neither has really been effective in promoting progressive causes. Now there's something different from either of those two, and it's making progress.

Mother Jones is a long-standing institution on the left, a magazine that has for decades stood outside the MSM (and explicitly against right-wing media). But one of the things that makes the lefty blogosphere interesting is how little of the established left-wing institutions, people, and attitudes of the post-1980 political landscape have been part of its rise. (In fact, one of the points working in Left Blogistan's favor in its conflicts with Right Blogistan is the fact that the righties keep pounding at the same 1980s-1990s stereotypes about lefties, many of which do not apply to lefty bloggers--if your enemy refuses to learn about you, you have a little advantage.)

But to take an obvious example, people like Markos have wasted no bandwidth defending Rep. Jefferson as a victim of the white power structure on his bribery charges. There's a common-sense attitude that if you're caught with $90,000 in marked bills in your freezer, you're probably not innocent. This is markedly different from many leftists I knew in the 1990s, who would automatically have taken Jefferson's side in order to strike a blow for the oppressed.

Mother Jones is part of an older left-wing journalistic movement, and they are being displaced as public voices by people who do not automatically agree with them. Just like their colleagues at places like the Washington Post, they see the status quo being upset, and however much they'd deny it, they liked the status quo just fine.

I think she is very much on the right track. I wrote her back...

As you indicated, I think we have to go to generational factors, the history of the New Left and the counter-culture, the baby boomer generation in journalism, as well as politics... and you have to know the specific history of Mother Jones itself, the institution, along with the people who still have hold of it, and the new people who are trying to inherit it, along with the whole life and times of the alternative press in San Francisco, out of which MoJo was born.

Because all these factors are there, quietly pulsating in their decision to go to with derision and balloon-popping amid high-concept prose as MoJo's shining "edge" on the subject.

I just wanted to know why they went that way.

But... I failed to find out (though I went to the source for the decision) and this is what my post is about. I think the reason I don't know yet is precisely that so much background went into it: MoJo's response not to the Web but to a new crowd of producers on the Web is conflicted and tentative, relying on "stock" themes, precisely because the cross-currents are so deep at that particular institution.

And it's not just Mother Jones. I think the confusion is global: what's alternative about the self-identifying alternative press now?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink

Um, didn't I say that?

The alternative press of MoJo is still alternative; it's just got some new potential friends. The problem I think is the "amateur" nature of the blogosphere. Journalist, perhaps rightly, feel that they've put lot of time and effort into their careers and learned from the veterans. Now that anyone can publish, they feel their profession is being damaged. They don't seem to see that a lot of that damage is self-inflicted and that the cream rises to the top in the blogosphere just like it does in the hard-copy world.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 29, 2007 3:00 PM | Permalink

And that's why it's important to read Clara Jeffery at the MoJo blog contesting Micah Sifry on the "cream rises," and calling him naive to think that. (Sorry to interrupt your utopia, but....is the tone, and this is when she is trying to be respectful to Micah.)

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 3:05 PM | Permalink

Then see Blogger Hubris 3.0 by Daniel Schulman, a new post at the Mojo Blog, which also takes issue with Sifry.

MoJo decided to dig into an already extant scandal or sideshow (take your pick) involving a "secret" mailing list among top lefty bloggers.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t disrupt the sanctity of Stoller's semi-secret blogger thinktank for the heck of it. I did so because I thought it was worth raising an episode that occurred last summer, when Kos appealed to list members to "starve" a particular story of "oxygen," one that was damaging to his friend and business associate Jerome Armstrong. As TNR's Jason Zengerle noted at the time, the episode seemed “just another case of politics as usual.” It also seemed a bit hypocritical, given that the spirit of blogging, at least as I understand it, is about transparency and accountability, not about squelching unfavorable stories.
Sifry calls my piece an “indictment of all progressive bloggers” and “humbly” suggests that my "attitude towards online journalism and blogging could use an update.” While I fully acknowledge that I have a lot more to learn about the brave new world of online journalism, politics, and activism, I would suggest, just as humbly, that the egalitarian blogtopia Sifry knows and loves is changing—and not always for the better.

What do I mean by a balloon-popping bent? "The egalitarian blogtopia Sifry knows and loves is changing..." and Mother Jones found out!

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 3:23 PM | Permalink

while I am loving coversation, I want to remind everyone that we are still wayyyyyyy too focused on blogs here. there may be 70 million of them, but there is a whole world of online politics beyond the blogs.

that is the point I was making in my Techpresident post, "No More Blog, Blog, Blog."

Posted by: alan rosenblatt at June 29, 2007 5:51 PM | Permalink

Mother Jones co-editor Monika Bauerlein comments at the Huffington Post version:

Jay, thanks for spreading the word about our package--we're delighted you're helping get the word out. And when folks actually read it, they'll see that it's a pretty wide-ranging exploration of how technology is transforming politics, how politics is transforming the netroots, and lots of other questions. Why you've gone on a crusade to take this down as some sort of fake exercise in myth-busting (or why myth-busting would be a bad thing, especially for progressives, anyway) is a mystery to us, but feel free.

Bonus snark! "We have been digital journalists since the days when you were selling 'civic journalism' to newspaper editors. What was your URL in 1993?"

My reply:

In 1993 I could read Mother Jones' site but I could not easily write my own posts in my own editorial space online, a situation that favored Mother Jones and other capitalized publishers. So to answer your question I did not have a url then. Blogging software was invented in the summer of 1999, so your question actually provides good illustration for what a "printing press progressive" is all about, and what has changed with the rise of the read-write Web.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 6:28 PM | Permalink

Too Funny. I had a url back then on Prodigy where I posted commentary and opinion. Does that mean I was a digital journalist, a digital citizen journalist or smooth-talking geek back then?

Posted by: Tim at June 29, 2007 7:54 PM | Permalink

"For it is argument that causes us to look for information." Absolutely. I think it's most productive, however, when all parties to the argument are prepared to change their minds, should they get new information or a new way of thinking about it. In this discussion (here and elsewhere I've read), the Mother Jones crew unfortunately does not seem capable of or interested in the possibility of altering course. Hey. In that way they're very much like the Bush administration! (Insert abbreviation indicating audible laughter.)

Posted by: Curt at June 29, 2007 9:02 PM | Permalink

The MoJo'ers are kinda in meltdown mode at Huffington Post at the moment (10:20 pm EST.) Go here and read forward 10 posts.

Current link scoreboard shows more than 25 incoming links to one-way Mother Jones from its critic Rosen, and zero outbound links from the printing press progressives to me. That caused them to scramble to put a post up linking to my criticism, which isn't there yet. I am sure it will be a doozy.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 10:20 PM | Permalink

re:"I hope you'll address.... is not editing my blog.

I am sure the difference is clear to you."

Again, I didn't "tell you what to do" -- I simply agreed with you that... *I* have personally had enough of this topic the way it has been going (in other words, if this is ALL that's being offered, *I*'m out of here...for *now*...)

But this shouldn't be any problem whatsoever since you've got so many others that are still listening...

As to the other topic, I said I was *hoping* you would talk about it soon, maybe have a separate article on it (so your discussion, with the others, would not be interrupted by this)--I have no idea what could have made you think that I was "telling you to halt your examination" or anything of the kind...

P.S. This is getting a lot more complicated that it needs to be: IF you end-up doing that article on corruption in the blogosphere I'll definitely read it! and could probably participate in a discussion on the topic forever... (well, pretty much...) D.

Posted by: Delia at June 29, 2007 10:43 PM | Permalink

Josh Harkinson

This comment was originally posted by Elizabeth, Mother Jones' Managing Editor, but it was removed from HuffPost. I sure hope this does not have anyting to do with HuffPost's affiliation with Rosen. . .

Jay, One question for you (from MoJo's managing editor): You obviously care about the content of our coverage, enough to devote a fair chunk of time critiquing it after the fact. So why, then, did you not respond to us when we asked you for an interview? We wanted to include you as this package took shape. Our reporter, Josh Harkinson, identified dozens of key folks to interview to prep us, to get insiders' takes to inform our coverage, and yet you didn't respond to our staff's repeated inquiries for an interview. You chose not to be part of the dialogue, I wonder, why? That you have this impassioned response, great; that you chose silence when we asked for your input, well, that's just a shame. [posted 8:57 pm on 06/29/2007]

jay_rosen

Josh: I'm not sure what Elizabeth means by repeated requests, and it's certainly possible that there were some I missed. I checked my email seaching for "Mother Jones" and I did get a request to be interviewed from senior editor Dave Gilson on April 13. He asked for this week. I responded to him and said: busy this week, how about next week? My email shows no further contact after that. Not a complete record, but it's all I have. I get a lot of requests for interviews and I'm sorry if I can't recall what happened to this one. But to say I didn't respond, as Elizabeth did, is again incorrect. [posted 10:37 pm on 06/29/2007]

I'd say we've gone beyond meltdown mode. Should be interesting to read the Josh/Elizabeth/Dave response.

Posted by: Tim at June 29, 2007 10:57 PM | Permalink

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 10:59 PM | Permalink

Yep, broken.

I also enjoyed this, another untrue statement.

PS--please see our blog http://www.motherjonesblog/mojoblog in a few minutes for links to Rosen's piece.
Reply | Favorite | Flag as abusive | posted 9:14 pm on 06/29/2007

It's been two hours and nothing.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 29, 2007 11:14 PM | Permalink

Going back to Shulman's "The egalitarian blogtopia Sifry knows and loves is changing..."

Whereas I agree with him about outsiders crashing the gates and becoming insiders with secret email lists ... egalitarian blogtopia was debunked 4 years ago in a much better article by Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.

Posted by: Tim at June 29, 2007 11:32 PM | Permalink

Interestingly, both Huffington Post and Mother Jones are sponsors for the upcoming Yearly Kos.
Both of their logos are on the Yearly Kos website.

Posted by: MayBee at June 30, 2007 12:42 AM | Permalink

Posted by Josh Harkinson on 06/29/07 at 6:36 PM

What time zone is that!!! Assuming that's Pacific, it's still a 3-4 hour delay.

I share Josh's confidence that you can handle it.

Good night, Jay!

Posted by: Tim at June 30, 2007 1:22 AM | Permalink

Too funny. It was posted around 10 pm Pacific, 1 am EST. So maybe he's got the time he started writing it on there.

That's it for me too. ' Night blogistan.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 30, 2007 1:28 AM | Permalink

I'm really tired of this, but I don't want you to be left with the wrong idea, so here's my last comment on this (if this doesn't clarify it, I doubt anything would... so I'm going to have to let it go...):

re:"Jay, this is sounding more and more like beating on a dead horse... If they did a shabby treatment of a worthy subject, why not go into great detail about how it could have been much better? (it seems that that would be a lot more interesting and useful to read) D."

as I already told you, at that point I thought you needed help out of a vicious circle... but even then *I didn't tell you what to do*: I simply told you what it looked like to me and *suggested* a change of focus... while staying on the topic you have chosen (something that would read, at least to me and I assumed I wasn't the only one that saw it that way -- I may have been, I don't know --, more like a dispassionate exploration of the topic and less like bashing Mother Jones to no end).

Posted by: Delia at June 30, 2007 9:54 AM | Permalink

Thanks for the assistance in trying to stop the train wreck. You did your best.

Two comments at Huff Post by a young-ish journalist on his way to Columbia J-School (here and here) say it better than anything I or the MoJo editors said. I really think Adam Weinstein nailed it.

At the core of most of your arguments has been this idea of reclaiming media from the stodgy, ossified dogmas of the elite journalism professional and offering the people a greater say in what's news. No one's against such a progressive, pluralist idea - in theory. In practice, however, people don't want raw information - they want news. They want story. They want drama. They want tension. And that means dichotomies, sometimes false ones. Give the MoJo staff credit for having set up such a dichotomy, only to dispel it with the testimony of their interviewees. They did exactly what my editors would have expected me to do. Grab a reader, pull her in by playing on her expectations, then entertain and inform her by showing all the subtleties in the terrain.

Credit given.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at June 30, 2007 10:42 AM | Permalink

Interesting point from Adam Weinstein, and generally true. People love to be told stories. One might argue, however, whether they should always get stories or get the stories they expect. That's one of the problems with framing. Setting citizen journalism up as another entry in the dot.com, for example, is a very false analogy. One has nothing with the other. Doesn't it matter what kind of dichotomy one sets up? Isn't there a more interesting way to frame this story? If I had been MoJo, I would have wondered if this weren't the next evolution in the progressive movement, found a different narrative. Instead, they went with the cynicism of our times to grab people. I think that's the problem I have--the negativity.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 30, 2007 12:27 PM | Permalink

Clara Jeffrey:

Rosen, I might add, was called maybe a dozen times and asked to participate in this package, but never returned a call—so what’s up with his ‘tude now? And what’s up with an NYU J-School prof not understanding the difference between a press release and reported pieces? And fisking a press release? Doth protest too much, and so forth.

and ...

But Rosen, who criticizes us for setting up straw men only to go overboard in setting up his own (”Printing press progressives”? plz that *#&% is *tired*) is not trying to engage in a constructive critique. He’s trying to brand himself as the “old media just doesn’t get it” guy, which is, like, so 2000.

...the "we've been on the web since 1993," "we blog," and the whole salaried tenured professor thing is really starting to catch my attention.

There's this sense of an online radicalism appeal to authority against stodgy academic ivory tower type who doesn't return our calls to counter "printing press progressives."

Theories?

Posted by: Tim at June 30, 2007 3:08 PM | Permalink

You say: "The MoJo'ers are kinda in meltdown mode at Huffington Post at the moment"

Obviously that was what you were going for, I guess? Why not, instead, answer the questions we ask, rather than skirt around them for your own message reinforcement? I posted my question only to have it deleted, which hopefully won't happen to this one.

And what you didn't include from the j-schooler's comment you laud above was this:
"When you meet people you disagree with in person, would you call them "thin-skinned and hysterical" or say they've "lost their grip" then, or are such comments strictly products of the Internet's great liberalizing influences on opinion and information?"

Because all of this posturing is really possible only in this kind of forum. If I call you up on Monday, and ask, again, why you didn't return any one of our staff's more than a dozen phone calls requesting an interview--during the week, and on the exact day, you told Dave Gilson was convenient--would you (assuming you answer or return my call) start calling me names and shaming me as hysterical? Or would you refuse to answer my question as you have thus far?

Because I really just want to know. Were you too busy? Did you feel the idea didn't have merit? Maybe so. But certainly now you seem to have plenty of spare time, and obviously the content is important to you. And please don't respond by saying, I just didn't get the message, because that's crap. And if it's true, it's a lousy excuse and it tells us you only engage within the confines of the blogosphere.

Why avoid becoming part of the conversation only to lambast it later? Ironically, that Monday-morning quarterbacking is the beef folks have with media--that journalists poke their nose into an evolving situation and pass judgment in writing before the proverbial ink is dry. Well, in this case you, the 2.0 blogger, are worse that the MSM journalist.

Answer the phone, your emails, whatever, become part of the story that involves you. Just think, if you had, the package might be even have met some of your failed expectations, and wouldn't we all benefit from that? And also if you had, your criticism now would have credibility.

As it stands, to me you are just the blogger who was too busy to bother.

Posted by: Elizabeth Gettelman at June 30, 2007 4:57 PM | Permalink

Ms. Gettelman,

You sound very angry. That's too bad. This discussion, from my point of view, has been very illuminating and could have been more civil if it hadn't escalated on both sides. Nonetheless, could you please answer why not getting a message is a lousy excuse for not answering it? That one really escapes me.

And let's say Mr. Rosen did participate in MoJo's package. Would that have changed your framing of the story. I dare say it wouldn't; which means, this whole thread would still have happened. You don't seem to feel that the exigencies of marketing your package are flawed in any serious way--it's what everyone has to do to get attention, is what I understand the argument to be. Well, I would just like to say that by planting a lot of false ideas about online activism, journalism, crowd sources, and so forth--like we're another bubble in the dot.com boom/bust, even though it's not about money for the most part (could that be your S.F. gaze toward Silicon Valley clouding your judgment? or some kind of second coming--does do damage. It plants the idea in people's mind that they should be very skeptical of both fanaticism and corruption instead of just curious, and in our cynical age, that's like driving a stake through the heart of more participation. Take some responsibility!

Posted by: Ferdy at June 30, 2007 5:34 PM | Permalink

Ferdy,
I am less angry than frustrated that Jay wouldn't engage with us when we were formulating our stories. Might it have changed the tenor of our coverage? Maybe. We did interviews well in advance precisely so we could infuse some open-sourciness into this package, as limited as that opportunity was given the print medium. All of the editors read dozens of transcribed interviews in order to focus our coverage, so, yes, I think it might have.
And if it didn't, or even if it did, yes, we would likely still be having this debate, which I am thankful for. I don't question many of the facets of the exchange, re the marketing of the issue, the nuances of the content. We can talk about what is flawed, what are the "false ideas" you mention, I am happy to engage. I was merely focusing on a specific question for resolution sake.
And why do I say not getting a message is a lousy answer? Because not responding to repeated messages and emails, when you know the content of the inquiry, well, that is vexing given his stake in the matter.
Bottom line, as a print pub, we are limited in the ways we can engage those in the know pre-publication. We want dialogue before, during and after, and we work hard to get it. Glad we are having these conversations now, I hope they continue. And I hope that such voices will make themselves heard prior to the presses as well.

Posted by: Elizabeth Gettelman at June 30, 2007 6:24 PM | Permalink

Obviously, I don't know what happened prepublication between MoJo and Mr. Rosen. However, I am very happy, too, that these conversations, however fraught, are happening. I hope the hurt feelings and defensiveness will slowly evaporate so that we can help each other out. I find framing to be a serious problem in journalism, one that cuts the picture to fit rather than expanding to encompass the subject matter. I hope MoJo and other quality publications will rethink their SOP and stretch to meet a world that's moving quickly in other directions.

Posted by: Ferdy at June 30, 2007 8:11 PM | Permalink

MoJo Blog comment:

Just to clarify ... the position of Adam Weinstein and Mother Jones is that the structural biases of media are necessary for good journalism: "conventions of essayistic journalism"?

http://www.rhetorica.net/bias.htm

Posted by: Tim at June 30, 2007 9:11 PM | Permalink

I was out at the beach with my son all day.

I was on academic leave this year, Elizabeth, and consumed with launching NewAssignment.Net, and as a result doing a lot less blogging. Because I was on leave, I am not in my NYU office to answer the phone, so that is why I didn't answer. Most people call me on my cell or at home office, which is why I try to arrange interviews by email, as I did in this case. I frankly don't remember what happened with returning the messages. Do you remember why Dave Gilson didn't get back to me? Maybe I was just overwhelmed with a new project (Assignment Zero.) I didn't remember the email exchange with Gilson until someone said MoJo tried to contact me and I searched my email. Upshot: I didn't try to avoid the interview and I (obviously) didn't try to complete the interview.

As unsatisfying as they are, those are the facts as I recall them.

The notion that I lack standing to criticize your work because I didn't respond to those messages I do not accept. Your frustration, yes, I can well understand that.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 12:15 AM | Permalink

Danny Glover, Beltway Blogroll columnist for National Journal, who was asked to write for the Mother Jones package, writes about the reactions, and the package....

The negative reaction from bloggers is pretty consistent with my quote in the article "Meet The New Bosses": "I've been surprised at how thin-skinned bloggers can be. You compare that with how they treat the mainstream media and how they'll go after them and attack them, but when anything at all is said about the blogosphere, they go off half-cocked."
Unfortunately, nothing else I said in a lengthy conversation with reporter Daniel Schulman made it into print, including the fact that I disagreed with his very thesis -- that an elite group of mafia-type bosses in the liberal blogosphere controls lesser bloggers and intimidates traditional power brokers.

Many bloggers, including at least one quoted by Schulman, have challenged the would-be bosses of the left blogosphere. And while this blog is dedicated to the proposition that blogs have and are gaining power, I also have noted that they have only as much power as the establishment is willing to cede -- at least until Election Day, when influential bloggers can redirect the "power of the people" to a new establishment.

All of which is to say that there is no Boss Tweed of the blogosphere, and I don't think there ever will be.

As I told Schulman, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos and his cronies may want great political power (despite their protestations to the contrary). They may even grab it one day and ultimately be corrupted by their absolute power. But the open, democratic nature of the online world will leave the door wide open for Kos 2.0 -- the Anti-Kos -- to fill the populist vacuum and become the thorn in the side of the new bosses...

Ironically, Mother Jones actually offered the "Meet The New Bosses" assignment to me, but I declined because I've cut back on freelance work (too many obligations at my day job and my own side project, AirCongress). I'll just say that it would have been quite a different article if I had written it -- or it would have been killed because I disagreed with the pre-determined thesis.

The point Jay Rosen of PressThink made about the "writing and framing" of the article -- the tone, in other words -- is a legitimate criticism.

That said, once again bloggers are going off half-cocked against a mainstream publication that decided to take a critical and important look at the work they do....

The rest.... So according to Glover, the parts of his interview that disagreed with a pre-determined thesis, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," somehow didn't make it in, which wouldn't be a big problem if the interview with Glover had been included in the package. But it wasn't.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 1:10 AM | Permalink

Jay--Can we all take a deep breath? There are substantive disagreements here, but when we start berating people for "errors" like a blog post shows up within hours, not minutes... who knows, and who cares, why that is?

I responded to your point about debunking over on Huffpost. No, we are not the victims of a rogue press agent. We approved the press release. It is a work of marketing, which doesn't make it bad or false or "from another planet," but which does mean that it highlights elements of the package that are assumed will get people's attention and get them to look closer. The closer look is what's intended; a press release is a tease, not a summary. (And I know someone who knows more about PR than I do will disagree with this--that's my understanding, but I'm sure there are other views.)

And yes, there is similar "revolution-or-snake-oil" framing in the heads and deks for the package. As I argued over on Huffpost, setting out polar ways of viewing something and then exploring the territory in between (point-counterpoint, thesis-antithesis, etc.) is a very ancient and in my view useful pattern of human thinking and debate (there are others, and they are useful too, and it doesn't mean we actually experience reality in those extreme ways (talking about "black" and "white" doesn't mean we don't see the world as mostly shades of gray). In other words, "revolution or snake oil" doesn't mean the answer is likely to be 100 percent one or the other. It means that these are two ways of looking at the topic in question, and the interesting stuff starts when you get the shades of gray.

So no, we did not set out to debunk politics 2.0. We did set out to debunk some hype that we saw within that universe. If a progressive blogger critiques the more annoying tendencies of the Democratic Party, maybe with some polemical language, does that mean she is aiming to take down the very idea of a Democratic Party? Hell no.

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 1, 2007 1:48 AM | Permalink

I took my deep breath Thursday.

Elizabeth, outraged, asked me why in the world I would say, "you're losing your grip" to one of your writers, so I told her. Now you complain that I went into too much detail. You guys are hard to please.

Finally, someone takes responsibility for what was in the press release. Thank you.

So no, we did not set out to debunk politics 2.0. Well Danny Glover (are you going to try to discredit him too?) just suggested you had a pre-existing thesis that political bloggers were the new bosses, behaving a lot like the old, and you ignored what he said that didn't fit the thesis. Wouldn't that suggest at least a little bit that there was an intention to debunk?

We did set out to debunk some hype that we saw within that universe. If that is the case, why didn't you tell us who is spouting this hype, where it can be found, what it says, and why didn't you link to it? As I said earlier: why do I have to read about true believers without finding out who they are?

We do have a substantive disagreement. I think "revolution or snake oil" is a terrible way of framing this subject. I don't care that it's been done a zillion times before, it's still terrible. I think it is lazy, ill-considered, cheap, dumb, and well below the standards you ought to be setting as an editor. It leads you to think you "have" the story when you all you have is a schema. In general, a truth-avoiding approach.

You think it is just fine: useful, rational, conventional in journalism for good reasons. A truth-telling approach. Solid. Reusable.

In my view its main virtue for journalists is that it puts them "in the middle" between opposing extremes, and they try to convert that rhetorical position--an artifact of their story-telling strategies--into credibility with an audience. Editorial triangulation. Weak.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 2:32 AM | Permalink

I'm skeptical of this claim that MoJo engaged in dialectics, at least in any serious way. But let's give it look with Crashing The System, which is the closest of the four in the package:

Thesis / Antithesis:

Syntheis:

Open-source politics has the potential to fundamentally change the way we govern ourselves—to fulfill the democratic promise that Web 1.0 pioneers dreamed of before they grabbed for the ipo brass ring. It also has the potential to become exactly what Web 1.0 turned into—a delivery system where most of us are mere "customers."

Did I get it right?

Posted by: Tim at July 1, 2007 3:18 AM | Permalink

Jay writes:

I tell you what, Jay, if you will respond to the question I raised yesterday at HuffPost and the MoJo blog, then I will respond (again, in several of these cases) to each point you raise above. That question is: why, in your blog posts on this, did you choose to engage in the type of framing that you supposedly despise?

Please cross post to our blog, if you don't mind, so that our readers can also get an answer. Or I'll cross post it for you if you'd prefer.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 5:15 AM | Permalink

Josh: I generally don't respond to "so's your mother!" posts, and I won't be responding to yours. Respectfully, I feel your critique is, on its face, kind of silly.

But I did link to your post. It's at the top of After Matter, my links section, because I want people to read it.

You own your errors; if you wish for them to stand that is your choice, and I will respect that too.

Cheers.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 11:40 AM | Permalink

At Huff Post, jayrayspicer writes:

Being skeptical of things that are prima facie goofy is not compelling journalism. At least, not to me or Jay. Maybe we're just tired of getting marketed to that way. Web 2.0 is compelling drama because it's a big societal change we're living thru. It doesn't have to be eschatological to grab us.

This bring up a point for the Mother Jones people to contemplate. Part of the reason I called them printing press progressives is precisely this "grab the reader" marketing tactic that's been in place in the magazine biz for many many years, where it is perfectly acceptable--and seen as effective--to exaggerate, engage in hype, use extremes to pull people in, promise more drama than the resulting journalism delivers, and there won't be any cost in credibility for use of these tactics, which--according to legend, but not data--people "want."

It's a kind of game. But maybe, possibly, the game's sustainability was a product of the print era-- you know, few speakers, many listeners?

"This is just our marketing; everyone loves marketing. You know, marketing, a lil snake oil and some circus to lure 'em in, and leave with less than you promised. Marketing?"

Marketing itself is changing because of the Web. Your inherent right to "grab" and sell with something different than the contents may--I say may--be in doubt.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 1, 2007 12:32 PM | Permalink

"So's your mother" posts? Where did your mother come into this? It was a "kettle calling the teapot black" post. And also, you really can't say that you are doing the same thing I've done by not responding. I was, in fact, the very first person to respond to this thread, and I've been responding to your subsequent comments at all hours of the morning and night for days now. And you don't owe me one comment in our own blog after all that?

That you feel this way is all the more sad when, over here, you are continuing to raise issues about minutia like the accuracy of the time stamp on my blog post. If that's where we're going to have to leave it, then so be it. I think it says a lot about your own thin skin, though, as well as your commitment to real dialogue.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 1:10 PM | Permalink

Josh: "And also, you really can't say that you are doing the same thing I've done by not responding."

Huh? Jay never said that. Again, incorrect.

Josh: "And you don't owe me one comment in our own blog after all that?"

Josh, neither you nor Clara have responded to my questions at your blog. In fact, you haven't responded to any questions on your own blog post, something Jay has done here and at HP.

Josh: "minutia like the accuracy of the time stamp"

I don't think it's minutia when you promise at HP a post at your blog "in a few minutes", it doesn't show up for 3+ hours and its "posted" (past tense) timestamp is back dated from the time it actually was posted.

To be completely honest, your style of dialog isn't helping your credibility.

Posted by: Tim at July 1, 2007 1:59 PM | Permalink

Jay says he's not going to respond because my post is "kind of silly." I'd said in my Mojo post that I had hesitated to respond to him with a blog entry on our site because I felt his argument was "kind of silly." But making that comparison is not fair for the reason I point out above.

It strikes me that you are just trying to score points with the time stamp thing. The time listed was probably when I started writing the blog. I did spend several hours on it, which was longer than I'd intended. I most certainly did not alter the time post to make it look like I'd written it faster. Why would I want to do that? And given that the whole thing took place late on a Friday evening, when almost nobody was reading HuffPost really does make the whole thing irrelevant.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 2:22 PM | Permalink

Tim,

I've just written a response to your comments on our blog, as you'd asked. It's not that I'm not interested in talking about these things, it's just that I've been preoccupied with responding to Jay.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 2:46 PM | Permalink

Josh,

Here's what I've been able to absorb from "this multi-day, Ulysses-length scuffle".

Jay asks (paraphrasing), what's with the faux myth-antimyth hype in the press release and (as Monika finally concedes) "framing in the heads and deks for the package." I think it infuses the package deeper from reading it.

Initially, MoJo denies the faux myth-antimyth hype debunking exists or is part of the package.

I think progress has been made in the discussion to where we can (if we want) discuss the importance of faux dialectic myth-antimyth hype debunking's role in journalism's structural biases - or as Clara called it, "the conventions of essayistic journalism."

I'm not trying to score points with the time stamp thing, but point out why it might be more important than minutia. I certainly accept your explanation for why the time stamp is what it is. In fact, that's the same guess Jay provided here.

I don't think the "so's your mother/kettle-teapot" "kind of silly" discussion has much potential. I understand that you want an explanation "question about why [Jay] is accusing us of setting up straw men, only to do so himself."

If I understand your question, the straw man is calling MoJo "printing press progressives." Is this part of the answer?

Part of the reason I called them printing press progressives is precisely this "grab the reader" marketing tactic that's been in place in the magazine biz for many many years, where it is perfectly acceptable--and seen as effective--to exaggerate, engage in hype, use extremes to pull people in, promise more drama that the resulting journalism delivers, and there won't be any cost in credibility for use of these tactics, which--according to legend, but not data--people "want."

Posted by: Tim at July 1, 2007 2:55 PM | Permalink

I responded at MoJo and it's waiting approval. I also wanted to point out here that I thought Josh's response at MoJo was great and well worth reading!

Posted by: Tim at July 1, 2007 3:40 PM | Permalink

It is not a legitimate answer. It ignores my main point, which is that the blog world often does the same thing (and Jay himself did it in his framing of the HuffPost entry). So, ipso facto, to define "printing press progressives" in that way is simply wrong.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 3:44 PM | Permalink

Thanks for the props, and for the comment on our site. For some reason, it still hasn't posted there. Please let me know if there's some glitch that is preventing this from going up, and I'll do what I can to make sure it appears there. Our site is not pre-screened in the way of HuffPost, so I'm not sure why it's not showing up yet.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 5:04 PM | Permalink

When I posted the comment, I got an M-T page that I was a first time commenter, my comment would be approved and there was not reason to repost. That's a M-T "feature". Jay's been struggling with it here as well.

BTW, where I criticized the style of your dialog, I want you to know that you're racking up HUGE dialog-credibility-points. Props to you and MoJo for getting out on the comment threads and inviting the discussion back onto your blog.

The gist of the comment, and you're welcome to wait until it appears at MoJo Blog, was ...

re: webcasting editorial meetings

May not work for all (or any) MoJo meetings. I can only can offer S-R as an example to consider how MoJo might adopt/adapt.

re: How do you define citizen rep, and how would you suggest those people be chosen?

Excellent questions! MoJo can set their own criteria/qualifications. I can only offer as examples for MoJo to explore and adopt/adapt: Minnesota News Council and Washington News Council as well as a good article from John Hamer and Stephen Silha.

I didn't grok the Stanford student workers living wage connection to citizen journalism, but I did appreciate the link to the story!

Posted by: Tim at July 1, 2007 5:23 PM | Permalink

Tim,
I've noted on our blog that our M-T problems are preventing your post from appearing at the moment, and I've linked to it here. Once it goes up on our site, I'll weigh in some more. I think it's a good subject. Thanks.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 1, 2007 5:57 PM | Permalink

Somewhere, up, up, up the scrollbar this discussion primarily centered on creating two opposing straw men. Great point. I get sick and tired of every story about politics or change or whatever having two set sides juxtaposed against one another.

The other point is that the really ISN'T about technology. It isn't about a bunch of geeks who are suddenly interested in politics. It's about strategy.

The concept of 'technogeeks entering the political arena' is false. Heck, television is technical. If you've ever purchased editing equipment then you know what I mean.

Posted by: Jonathan Trenn at July 1, 2007 8:32 PM | Permalink

I agree with Tim that on engaging in the online debate, Mother Jones should get major applause, for taking the argument to multiple sites and conducting multiple conversations across those sites, while conducting the debate on their own blog, all of this at all hours (as Josh said) with different voices for the same unified case, and always urging attention to the journalism itself, the reporting in the entire package, back at Mother Jones.

That's editorial participation in the online debate their journalism joined. I don't use the word props, but I use the term points.

And I would definitely say, Josh, that piling up these points, as Mother Jones has done, is not what a printing press progressive would do.

Trying to debunk Politics 2.0 and not realizing that's what you were doing is. Assuming online the right to hype and "grab" under the necessary marketing and conventional headline writing provisions of the classic Print Magazine Act and its laws of operation... may be a bad move on your part. In fact, a lot of people in marketing are coming around to that view. You should check it out.

And... I think you're right in pointing out another thing: you personally, showed up for this discussion, and were the first poster, advertising your interest in the conversation your magazine's package provoked. I think it is to your great credit and the magazine's great credit that you were there, first, arguing back. And that two editors, Elizabeth and Monika, joined you. I don't think reasonable people in the blogosphere could ask for more on the "engage in the online debate" category.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 12:16 AM | Permalink

Jay--Thanks for the points. I guess on the marketing stuff I'd say that our goal was not to leave you with *less* than we promised, but more--to offer up, as I said earlier, a teaser highlighting some provocative points, and asking people to join us in the exploration of the territory in between. I can see how that will turn some people off, especially those who have been living and breathing all this stuff and have seen the headline version of the debate before. There is always that danger of engaging some people and losing others.

I'd also say that, as Josh et al. have pointed out, this provoke-to-engage approach is not much different from what you're doing in the headline to your own post, printing-press progressives running scared from the Internet and all. But I think we've all had a good run with this argument by now, and I'm not trying to restart it. Let's leave that for another day...

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 2, 2007 2:26 AM | Permalink

Uh huh. Then I won't tell you what I think of your, "you do it too, everyone does it" line of attack.

The debate continues in the comments at Daniel Glover's Beltway Blogroll column, where the MoJo's ers rack up even more points for 'sphere engagement and yet continue their stonewalling style about any intention to debunk.

The trouble is: Glover's undismissable on this one.

Daniel Schulman says: pre-determined thesis? Impossible, and insulting. Monika Bauerlein says "Dan Schulman is too good a reporter to go into a piece with a predetermined conclusion." Impossible!

But Glover sticks to his guns. How does he know? Because he heard the pitch for the piece himself when Mother Jones asked him to take it on as a freelancer, and he saw his views conveniently ignored when they didn't fit the thesis.

I was a bit surprised that after our lengthy telephone conversation, however, that the only useful insights you took from me were that bloggers were mean to me because I wrote something critical of them. I gathered from an e-mail I received from the fact-checker before the story appeared that indeed you were only using that one comment from me. I told her that I never would have granted an interview had I known that's all you wanted from me. She said she would express that concern to you and her editor.
I don't begrudge you the judgment to use what you found most useful from our interview. But considering the tone of your piece, I was surprised that you ignored my point about Kos not being a leader of a new establishment -- or, as the title of your piece says, a "boss." You asked me specifically about him and other A-list bloggers, and I disagreed with your thinking on that point. You pressed me about it further when I disagreed, and I still disagreed.

Glover's interview is not one of the ones you can find in the Mother Jones compendium: Interviews with Bloggers, Politicos, and Netizens on Politics 2.0. Why would that be?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 10:20 AM | Permalink

Jay--Glover's interview is not part of the politics 2.0 package because we did not do an *interview* with him; we asked him to write a story. Turning a conversation with an editor about a possible story into a published interview would have been ugly and unethical. He would have made a great interview, though, as would a lot of other people--that list, as you can see from the breadth of opinions expressed, was not built on the basis of who might agree with some premise.

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 2, 2007 1:40 PM | Permalink

Hmmm. Are you sure?

Danny Glover thinks you had an interview with him. He recounted his "lengthy" conversation with Mother Jones reporter Daniel Schulman. He says they discussed Schulman's story on the New Bosses. He says a fact checker contacted him to check quotes. He says he never would have agreed to an interview if he had known that all you wanted was "bloggers were mean to me because I wrote something critical of them." And he says all this in a comment thread in which you participated!

See for yourself:

I was a bit surprised that after our lengthy telephone conversation, however, that the only useful insights you took from me were that bloggers were mean to me because I wrote something critical of them. I gathered from an e-mail I received from the fact-checker before the story appeared that indeed you were only using that one comment from me. I told her that I never would have granted an interview had I known that's all you wanted from me. She said she would express that concern to you and her editor.

Also in a note to you he says:

I also think, based on my interview with Daniel, that he was less skeptical of the thesis than I would have been, but that's just my opinion.

So....?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 1:49 PM | Permalink

Daniel Glover emails...

I don't know if I was interviewed for the "Politics 2.0" package per se, but yes, Daniel Schulman definitely interviewed me by telephone for his article. As I recall, we spoke for more than 30 minutes. I have e-mails from him and the fact-checker (plus a quote in the "Meet The Bosses" article and his own acknowledgment of the interview in his comment at Beltway Blogroll) that will confirm it if necessary. Maybe Monica sees that story as different from the package as a whole because the only thing Daniel and I discussed were bloggers, but that strikes me as a bizarre technicality to embrace.
After I declined to write the story, Clara Jeffery said whoever Mother Jones ultimately assigned the story to might "pump [me] for information," and that did indeed happen. I have explored at Beltway Blogroll, the NYT op-ed chart and other forums many of the subjects covered in Daniel's article. He acknowledged that MJ's work was inspired at least in part by my reporting. I spoke with him by telephone, and I voluntarily e-mailed him additional information after the interview because I thought the story was a good one for someone to write, and I wanted to help even though I didn't have time to do it myself. I still believe the story was worth doing, and Mother Jones did a fine job overall.

As for why my interview wasn't published with the rest of the interviews, I found that a bit unusual myself. But I would hope that MJ just picked the best of the interviews and others were not published along with mine. I think my comments that challenged the thesis should have been included in the article, but I'm not too concerned that my entire interview transcript wasn't published.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 2:57 PM | Permalink

Hi Jay,
I can't speak to the conversations held between MoJo editors and Danny Glover, since I wasn't privy to them. I can speak to my own conversations with Monika and Clara, as we discussed the story that would become “Meet the New Bosses.” As Monika noted in her comments over at Beltway Blogroll, I was quite skeptical of some of the issues that were raised during our initial chat – to be clear, though, ideas were not being foisted on me, we were basically having a brainstorming session. Among other things, I was skeptical about the significance of last summer's Townhouse flap, which in some quarters was raised as evidence that Kos was somehow controlling the discourse in the lefty blogosphere. I didn't and don't buy this. Nor did I find anything nefarious about the existence of a private e-mail list used by certain bloggers, consultants, and activists to talk strategy and tactics. I did find it an interesting example of how the liberal blogosphere, or a subset of it at least, is becoming more sophisticated, coordinated, and beginning to build up its own infrastructure, intellectual and otherwise. (As Mathew Gross, a blogger who's now working for Edwards told me: "It's a very conscious effort to build a power structure. These are people who are not just blogging, but who are thinking very sophisticatedly about what the Republicans did for 20 years to get to the point of being able to dominate the cultural discourse.") I also found it interesting that Kos' reaction to an unfavorable story was not unlike one you might expect from a seasoned politco -- "starve it of oxygen" – and I note that in my story.

As for my interview with Glover -- Monika erred when she noted above that we didn’t interview Glover -- we did indeed have a long and wide-ranging discussion, and I wish I could have included more of his comments in my story. As I noted yesterday on his blog, I particularly wish I included his point that "the open, democratic nature of the online world will leave the door wide open for Kos 2.0 -- the Anti-Kos -- to fill the populist vacuum and become the thorn in the side of the new bosses." I do recall asking Glover about the notion that the blogosphere is leaderless -- this topic came up in other interviews, as well -- and while I don't remember his exact response, I believe he said that while some bloggers command bigger followings than others, no single blogger is setting the agenda so to speak. I agree and you'll notice that I don't suggest otherwise in my story, (nor will you find the words "gatekeeper" or "boss" anywhere in the body of my piece). If Glover is now suggesting that Kos is not a leader of sorts among liberal bloggers -- *a* leader, not *the* leader mind you -- I plainly disagree with him. Anyway, he did register his objections – that he was only quoted on the reaction to his Times op-ed -- with our fact-checker who passed them along to me. I in turn raised this with my editor.

Lastly, allow me to explain why my interview with Glover was not included with the rest of the interviews published on our site and excerpted in the magazine. No vast printing-press-progressive conspiracy there, I’m afraid. My interviews were conducted separately from the others, since I was exploring a narrow topic within the politics 2.0 phenomenon and not asking the same type of questions our other interviewers were. In addition, many of my interviews included information that was imparted to me on background or off the record, so it was not be possible to provide full transcripts, nor did I want to risk confidential info finding its way into a transcribed interview. So that’s why you’ll find no interview with Glover – or other sources for my story, unless they were conducted separately by another interviewer – in our online package.

You seem intent on believing that I went into this with a preconceived notion and wrote a piece that conveniently conformed to that notion, and, while I assure you that’s not the case, I fear that whatever I say won’t dissuade you from your own predetermined version of events.

Best,
Daniel Schulman
Mother Jones

Posted by: Daniel Schulman at July 2, 2007 3:00 PM | Permalink

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. What I meant was that Clara's conversation with Danny was not an *interview*, and that we did not have him on the list of people that a group of reporters was interviewing as part of the forum-like part of the package--in other words, the part that led to the excerpts set apart in the print version, and the full Q&As in the online version. (He would have made a fine addition to that list). Many other people who were interviewed by individual reporters for individual stories in the package--as another example, look at Josh's piece on conservatives trying to create a right-wing MoveOn) were also not part of the Q&A project, simply because we didn't have unlimited time. Apologies for misphrasing this, especially to Danny.

By the way, Danny, we'd still love to have you write something for us on this topic--no matter what your take. Drop me or Clara a note if that's a possibility.

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 2, 2007 3:05 PM | Permalink

Thanks for that explanation, Daniel, which is very helpful, and interesting in that it shows how many folds and layers there are to the subject. So there was an interview with Glover but it was sort off on its own track.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 3:13 PM | Permalink

On another matter: “Pre-determined thesis" was Glover's language, Daniel. I did not use that term.

I said there was in the project as a whole an intention to debunk that overrode the sensuous facts and framed the findings poorly.

And an example of that is your comment on this bit of framing:

Meet the New Bosses

After crashing the gate of the political establishment, bloggers are looking more like the next gatekeepers.

Daniel: "Nor will you find the words 'gatekeeper' or 'boss' anywhere in the body of my piece."

That to me is evidence of a high concept headline not justified by the reporting found under it. Boss is more debunkey. Crashing the gates led to new gatekeepers, more debunkey.

I think the political blogosphere has leaders. Kos would certainly be one. I do not think they resemble political bosses, and that such a device actually short-circuits people's interest in what these new kind of leaders are like. Because it says to readers: you already know the type.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 3:32 PM | Permalink

No problem, Jay. Yeah, the interview was done just for that specific story, though, as Monika notes above, a Q&A with Danny Glover on the open source phenomenon in general would have been an excellent addition to our package. He's a really smart guy who's been covering this stuff for a while now.

You know, I have to say, Jay, I think I've learned a lot from this whole debate (not just on Press Think, but elsewhere as well). I'm used the style of journalism where if a reader has a complaint or a comment they can send a letter to the editor, cross their fingers, and hope it sees the light of day. (Particularly in magazine journalism a writer like myself may then be given space to respond, essentially giving the writer the final word). That's all changing now, for the better (which is not to say it's not scary to open yourself up to criticism and engage). We really have bloggers to thank for changing the dynamic between the press and the reading public and for bringing more transparency to the reporting process. Thank you for offering this venue and for engaging in this debate, which really has opened my eyes.

Posted by: Daniel Schulman at July 2, 2007 4:02 PM | Permalink

Glover (where individual comments don't have permalinks):

"I've been surprised at how thin-skinned bloggers can be. You compare that with how they treat the mainstream media and how they'll go after them and attack them, but when anything at all is said about the blogosphere, they go off half-cocked."

...

That said, once again bloggers are going off half-cocked against a mainstream publication that decided to take a critical and important look at the work they do.

As an editor, I think putting that context from our conversation into your piece would have improved it and perhaps appeased your critics (then again perhaps not because of the knee-jerk phenomenon among too many bloggers -- and journalists). [my emphasis]

Uh huh.

... and later ...

Of course, bloggers probably would have reacted just as hostilely to anything I wrote because that's what they do.

I love it when journalists defend themselves and their trade by pointing out the plurality of "the media" and that stereotyping them ("MSM") is a bad thing and only makes you dumber about what they do (which is true).

I guess hostility and going off half-cocked with knee-jerk reactions are something else that should be left only to the "professionals."

Posted by: Tim at July 2, 2007 5:08 PM | Permalink

I must be missing your point, Tim -- or you're missing mine. I don't believe either bloggers or journalists should be "going off half-cocked with knee-jerk reactions" about the other.

Posted by: Danny Glover at July 2, 2007 7:16 PM | Permalink

about the other, Danny? If that was your point, then yes, I missed it.

Here's my point: "going off half-cocked with knee-jerk reactions" isn't "what [bloggers] do" anymore than it's "what [journalists] do."

But then, you already knew that, didn't you?

Posted by: Tim at July 2, 2007 8:12 PM | Permalink

Yes, when journalists criticize bloggers, many of them go off half-cocked ... and journalists do the same thing when the roles are reversed. Neither should do it; both should listen and think seriously about whether the criticisms are warranted. If the criticisms are faulty, they should defend themselves with civility rather than hostility. If the criticisms are on the mark, heed them and change.

Still not sure what you're point is, though. You sound like you think you caught me in some inconsistency, but if you were a regular reader of Beltway Blogroll, you would know that I have criticized both bloggers and journalists for sniping at each other and too rarely thinking before reacting so they could see the benefits that "the enemy" brings to the table.

Posted by: Danny Glover at July 2, 2007 8:35 PM | Permalink

Danny, I agree with your comments here.

You agree with me that "going off half-cocked with knee-jerk reactions" isn't "what [bloggers] do"?

I get that some bloggers, some of the time do that. Some more that others.

I agree that some journalists, some of the time do that. Some more that others.

Do you agree with me that "that's what bloggers do" and "that's what journalists do" as a sweeping generalization and indictment is inaccurate?

I'm sure I cannot be clearer about this.

Posted by: Tim at July 2, 2007 8:52 PM | Permalink

Monika Bauerlein

I guess on the marketing stuff I'd say that our goal was not to leave you with *less* than we promised, but more--to offer up, as I said earlier, a teaser highlighting some provocative points, and asking people to join us in the exploration of the territory in between. I can see how that will turn some people off, especially those who have been living and breathing all this stuff and have seen the headline version of the debate before. There is always that danger of engaging some people and losing others. [my emphasis]

I wanted to combine that with this:

Several editors, including Suzanne Daley, who just became national editor after a stint as education editor, noted that they must keep two kinds of readers in mind. "One is an expert on whatever subject we are writing about, someone who will read this story no matter what, but who will be highly judgmental. ... The other is your basically curious person, but without a lot of time, who is, in my mind, the real challenge. He or she might read the story. But it has to hook them. The game in my head is: Okay, how do we write this so that it is accurate and has weight, but is still fun to read for someone who really doesn't care much about say, college dorms or tutoring?"

So, besides the marketing, heads and deks, is this what happened to The Digerati Code? Less accurate, more fun?

Posted by: Tim at July 2, 2007 11:04 PM | Permalink

I just want to highlights these very truthful words from Daniel.

I can easily recall the years when, if a reporter got three letters and five phone calls about a series of articles she would say to me, in all seriousness, "that one got a lot of reactions."

Daniel:

I'm used to the style of journalism where if a reader has a complaint or a comment they can send a letter to the editor, cross their fingers, and hope it sees the light of day. (Particularly in magazine journalism a writer like myself may then be given space to respond, essentially giving the writer the final word). That's all changing now, for the better (which is not to say it's not scary to open yourself up to criticism and engage).

It's not that journalism has been totally transformed on the Web. The difficult of doing it well has hardly changed at all! But the situation in which professional journalism happens is a different situation because of the Web. This affects everything the people formerly known as print journalists want to do.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 11:21 PM | Permalink

Interesting move...

Mother Jones enters its derisive definition as the correct one for Open Source Politics in Wikipedia and asks readers to improve it.

Open Source Politics

Open-source politics, or Politics 2.0, is the idea that social networking and participatory technologies will revolutionize our ability to follow, support, and influence political campaigns. Forget party bosses in smoky backrooms — netroots evangelists and web consultants predict a wave of popular democracy as fundraisers meet on MySpace, YouTubers crank out attack ads, bloggers do oppo research, and cell-phone-activated flash mobs hold miniconventions in Second Life. The halls of power will belong to whoever can tap the passion of the online masses, according to this idea.

Josh Harkinson at Mojo Blog: "If I had to guess, I'd say a Google search of the term will soon yield the popular view of the idea over anything a magazine writer has had to say."

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 2, 2007 11:37 PM | Permalink

Tim--I do agree with Daley that we should keep those two kinds of readers in mind, except that it's probably more like 500 kinds of readers--expert, lay, and all shades and gradations in between, since most of us know a lot about some things and nothing about others (and I'm not always sure I know which is which).

But the thing is, does it have to be either-or--fun *or* accurate? Is that, as it were, a fake alternative? The Digerati code was intended to be a bit of satire. It rang wrong to you, and others, and humor is a pretty idiosyncratic thing--I think Corddry is a lot funnier than Colbert, but I'm in a minority there. Is "accuracy" the right way to evaluate satire, which essentially lives on hyperbole and exaggeration?

On the other hand, there were more "straight" pieces in the package (the Hype box for example) that were, I hope, both accurate and entertaining. And isn't that part of what we are all hoping to see as media/the press/whatever evolves--a move away from the idea that if something is Accurate and Important, it has to read like homework?

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 3, 2007 12:54 AM | Permalink

I really like how MoJo thinks it should define what open source journalism is on Wikipedia. Do you think that they should have worked with some of their collaborators on Politics 2.0, whose opinions they thought were so important and serious in their package, to create this definition? No, they want to ask everyone in the blogosphere--including all that dross Clara Jeffrey complained of having to wade through--to do it. We're your friend, they seem to be saying. It seems pretty clear to me that they want to be one of the new Bosses. This may have more to do with their framing of the story than anything else. If they set up a dichotomy that there, in fact, could be new Bosses, then they lay groundwork for stepping into that role.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 3, 2007 9:51 AM | Permalink

In regard to their interactions with each other, Tim, no it is not a sweeping generalization or an inaccurate indictment. I cannot think of a time (though perhaps there are one or two) when bloggers have criticized journalists or vice versa and a blog swarm or rash of anti-blog screeds in the MSM hasn't ensued.

Only "some" bloggers/journalists may be involved in these spats, but the point is that it happens almost every time. If it only happened every now and then and I were using those rare occasions to support criticisms of my own, well, that would be a sweeping generalization. But that view is not supported by the history of confrontations between bloggers and the MSM.

They are getting along better these days than two or three years ago because more bloggers and journalists are seeing how they can work together. But when one says something critical about the other, the latent hostility between them quickly resurfaces in a way that is readily apparent to readers.

That's just my opinion, though. You seem to have a different perception, and maybe you have good reasons for it. I'd like to hear what they are specifically. Maybe I've missed situations where bloggers and journalists have criticized each other and the end result wasn't attack, attack, attack -- and they actually listened to each other.

I do think this Mother Jones episode may be the first. The folks at the magazine at least seem to be listening to some extent, even as they defend the substance of their reporting.

Posted by: Danny Glover at July 3, 2007 9:58 AM | Permalink

This is kind of an interesting interview with NYT columnist David Carr:
http://www.ontherecordpodcast.com/pr/otro/default.aspx

He says: "I think influence is the only metric where blogs really come up roses." He mentions Romenesko and Gawker as two such influencers. FYI: found the link on Romenesko.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with Carr, but it's interesting given this discussion.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 3, 2007 11:16 AM | Permalink

I once called them two tribes converging on the same piece of ground. (BloggerCon I, 2003) The ground was journalism on the Web. The tribes were the bloggers and the journalists. There was going to be conflicts. They were going to be mixed up in each other's business. There was no way around that.

To prevent war, I thought we should start calling it shared territory, right from the start. The bloggers own a piece of journalism, I said, and the journalists are going to start blogging. That's different from "let's work together." Shared territory means bloggers vs. journalists is over. Should be over. That was my take, anyway.

Two tribes converging on the same ground. The imagery I used was the opening scene of Gangs of New York by Martin Scorcese.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 3, 2007 1:10 PM | Permalink

Ferdy,

Isn't that how Wikipedia works? It differs from Brittanica in that the editing and collaboration mostly takes place after the post goes up, not before. And I don't see how it follows that linking to a Wiki entry on the definition makes us the new bosses. I'd say it does the opposite by allowing anyone to take control of the term. Heck, people could edit out every single reference in the Wiki to Mother Jones if they wanted to. It's my view that Wiki presents an interesting model for citizen journalism in this sense. It's not exactly the same as the stuff Jay is talking about--it's more citizen editing, really--but it does allow non-journalists to "frame" the news and the ideas in the news in their own way. The NYT Mag piece on Sunday got at this quite well, I thought. I'd highly suggest checking it out if you haven't.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 3, 2007 1:21 PM | Permalink

Your view of Wiki isn't the same as mine, apparently. I've been more involved in the scientific stuff there, where collaboration begins before the post and continues as the area of expertise is expanded. Those basically are the only types of Wiki posts I consider anything near authoritative for reference purposes, and never use Wiki as anything but a vague starting point for subjects about which I have no familiarity. You see, even though I'm a blogger, my interest in accuracy is extreme. Since your Politics 2.0 package has been under intense scrutiny, I would have thought you'd be a little more circumspect about taking your unilateral definition and proposing to make it an encyclopedia entry, however malleable you think those entries are. Many people in the blogosphere are not as rigorous as I am and will link to it as the definition. I think you know that, or am I just being too suspicious.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 3, 2007 1:33 PM | Permalink

To get a sense of the way Wikipedia typically works outside the scientific realm, please read the story in NYT Magazine, which I link to at Mojo here. Wikipedia is set up as an online community where people collaborate and talk on the actual Wikipedia site. A good number of the most authoritative entries are written by high school kids with no formal training the the subject, who are working entirely based on Googling things. The editing by others, which is extensive, takes place after the initial post debuts. (In fact, if you look at Wiki's page for new users, it tells you something along the lines of "be ready to be mercilessly edited by others"). It very often happens that a Wiki entry starts as partisan and then becomes more objective as people with opposing views add edits. That's why it's so cool. And that's why I want to see what happens with the OSP definition there, where the wiki world at large (and not bloggers or journalists) will decide what OSP should mean, and even if the term is useful and deserves to stay up.

Posted by: Josh Harkinson at July 3, 2007 2:08 PM | Permalink

I think it's an interesting experiment, Josh, and I wish you well with it. I'm not convinced it won't end up being as half-baked as many of the other entries on Wiki, but at least we can see what the online denizens have to say, if anything.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 3, 2007 2:15 PM | Permalink

I think for the sake of clarity you should know that my blog is for my personal interest--film--but I've been in academic editing for a long time as a full-time career.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 3, 2007 2:21 PM | Permalink

Danny,

In regard to their interactions with each other, Tim, no it is not a sweeping generalization or an inaccurate indictment. I cannot think of a time (though perhaps there are one or two) when bloggers have criticized journalists or vice versa and a blog swarm or rash of anti-blog screeds in the MSM hasn't ensued.
...
That's just my opinion, though. You seem to have a different perception, and maybe you have good reasons for it. I'd like to hear what they are specifically. Maybe I've missed situations where bloggers and journalists have criticized each other and the end result wasn't attack, attack, attack -- and they actually listened to each other.

I do have a different perception. I see a lot of media criticism in the blogosphere and the large majority of it is ignored by "professional" journalists (ProJos). That's not a normative statement. I'm not suggesting that ignoring all or most of the media criticism in the blogosphere is a good or bad thing. I'm just pointing out that a small amount of that criticism results in conflict.

Of the small amount of criticism that gets noticed, some results in attack-attack-attack and some doesn't. For example, I found the Lileks controversy interesting for it's lack of controversy ... but maybe because both bloggers and journalists saw Lileks as "one of us."

I've read withering criticism on Tim Porter's blog and am not aware of an attack-attack-attack response. Same is true of many journalism-crit and academic blogs I read.

But I do agree with you that "going off half-cocked with knee-jerk reactions" about the other happens, and happens more frequently than I would like.

Posted by: Tim at July 3, 2007 8:35 PM | Permalink

Monika Bauerlein,

But the thing is, does it have to be either-or--fun *or* accurate? Is that, as it were, a fake alternative?

Absolutely fake. It can be fun and inaccurate. It can be no-fun and inaccurate. It can be no-fun and accurate. It can be fun and accurate.

The Digerati code was intended to be a bit of satire. It rang wrong to you, and others, and humor is a pretty idiosyncratic thing--I think Corddry is a lot funnier than Colbert, but I'm in a minority there. Is "accuracy" the right way to evaluate satire, which essentially lives on hyperbole and exaggeration?

Oh, it was satire! OK, then why not add a </satire> tag to the end of it?

And isn't that part of what we are all hoping to see as media/the press/whatever evolves--a move away from the idea that if something is Accurate and Important, it has to read like homework?

I think "Accurate and Important" can be Interactive and Enjoyable as the media/the press/whatever evolves. I'm not sure that's the same as entertaining or infotaining, but I am sure that what projos consider infotaining is often NOT Accurate and Important.

Posted by: Tim at July 3, 2007 8:47 PM | Permalink

"Hands down my favorite part of the Mother Jones package is the derisive glossary of terms they provided, The Digerati Code." That's me earlier.

If anyone makes the mistake of taking the glossary seriously, and tries to criticize you, like I am doing now, well, it's obvious they missed the point, which was simply to have fun with some definitions of these wacky Internet terms. Not everything has to be serious all the time, right?
Right! And that's why I love the combo. It swings.

Monica, recently:

The glossary remains my favorite feature. I think it's brilliantly dismissive and if you don't like it, even more so.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 3, 2007 10:20 PM | Permalink

It's very hard to tell why a blogger didn't do something that isn't done several hundred times a day, in the sense that many, many posts are not linked to, so I don't know. And since no one owes PressThink a link, it's a little ridiculous to ask.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 6, 2007 8:46 AM | Permalink

Not really. You said that it's ridiculous to ask because you can't expect a link, yet clearly you expected a link and are dismayed it hasn't happened. I think you should ask them why they have been ignoring this discussion when the right-leaning blogs have not.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 6, 2007 10:27 AM | Permalink

In that department I expect nothing. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a link. But I may still think it's reasonable to point out that none have come in, and let people make of it what they will.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at July 6, 2007 11:00 AM | Permalink

I disagree. You're implying some kind of a blindness to criticism of their own kind, perhaps even something intentional in their omission. This isn't good journalism. We can't "make of it" anything without a real answer, and that only comes from asking.

Posted by: Ferdy at July 6, 2007 11:18 AM | Permalink

I think that based on the quality of your blog and especially based on previous history of the issue it is quite normal to expect to be linked to... (not in the sense of feeling *entitled* to get links -- just a logical continuation of what's been going in the past)

P.S. And you may well have been right earlier on when you thought it was curious and it may have something to do with corruption...

re: "About one of your earlier questions, isn't there corruption in the blogosphere we ought to concern ourselves with even if MoJo didn't go a great job in illuminating it... I'm a trifle concerned that this post, criticizing a progressive magazine, has been linked to by Instapundit on the right, Joe Gandelman of The Moderate voice in the center, but not a single link from the left. Fortunately I have the Huffington Post to get it out there, but it is curious."

Posted by: Delia at July 6, 2007 11:45 AM | Permalink

Thanks for raising the question. We found it surprising too. It is possible, of course, that not one of the major progressive bloggers thought any part of the package or the interviews worth looking at.

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 6, 2007 5:36 PM | Permalink

By the way, and sorry for picking up on this so late, but Tim, you mention the Minnesota News Council. I'm very supportive of that sort of dialogue, and I actually walked the walk on this one--I was on the Council for years and served as a vice president. Call me Your Eminence ;-}

Posted by: Monika Bauerlein at July 8, 2007 6:57 PM | Permalink

Well, Your Eminence, that makes you a rare and precious commodity among journalists. Certainly a bright shining light of hope in comparison with Jay's previous assessment:

The News Council is a dead letter. I was at a meeting of journalism bigwigs recently, which included Steve Lovelady, Dan Okrent, Lou Boccardi (former head of the AP, who was part of the Dan Rather truth commission) and others; the news council came up. The reaction was instant revulsion. That's always been the reaction. Okrent was familiar with the history; but I don't think he ever wrote about it.

It's not a subject on which you can have rational discourse with most American journalists. They consider it a step on the road to licensing, or just a bad idea. A hundred times I have heard the reasons why the National News Council didn't work and had to die. But that doesn't explain why in its place there had to be... nothing.

That decision--to replace it with nothing--was a critical moment in the life and times of the American press, but the consequences did not show up until much later.

The consequences are showing themselves now.

Posted by: Tim at July 8, 2007 7:34 PM | Permalink