From the Boston Globe today:

Blagojevich a distraction for Democrats
Former governor’s retrial complicates campaigns in Ill.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Alexi Giannoulias had planned to talk jobs. The Democrat in a tight race for President Obama’s former Senate seat wanted to take the opportunity to say his Republican opponent had helped wreck the nation’s economy.

Reporters, though, only wanted to talk about the ousted Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a newly convicted felon who is expected to be retried on some counts.

The unfinished business of the Blagojevich trial poses a major new hurdle for Illinois Democrats, who are already facing a difficult election season. Despite hopes that Blagojevich’s trial would wrap up well before the November vote, a retrial could begin as soon as this fall, in the final weeks of campaigning.

Blagojevich’s saga will keep diverting attention from the pocketbook issues Democrats want to talk about as they try to keep Obama’s old seat…

Hmm. Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Media continues to distract Democrats with Blagojevich
Journalists’ pandering threatens democracy in Ill.

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I just re-read Jay Rosen’s piece on objectivity as persuasion more slowly than I did the first time. It’s like watching a master carpenter bang nails. Beautiful.

Jay’s post is #6 in a series. Jay tells me he has at least one more. So far, he’s written 15,000 words … and his commenters have written 96,000. (That second number seems way too high, but it’s based on my copying and pasting the comments (plus Jay’s integrated roundups) into a text editor. My clerical skills are poor, however.)

For Too Big to Know, I’ve written a section (which means I’ll probably be unwriting it tomorrow) taking these six pieces as an example of one type of long-form writing on the Web … or, more exactly, web-form writing. At the end of the discussion, I list advantages and disadvantages of Jay’s webby version of long-form argument versus standard, book-length, printed long-form arguments. In abbreviated form:

Advantages

1. The argument assumes a natural length.

2. The ground the argument covers is more responsive to the ground itself. Readers will point out neglected areas that the argument requires the author to talk about.

3. The work becomes embedded in a loose-edged discussion that more naturally reflects the messy, intertwingled nature of topics.

4. Readers are given fewer reasons to get off the bus midway. When Darwin writes in Chapter Four of On the Origin of Species that “He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory,” he’s opening the door and inviting passengers to get off. If Darwin had published in a webby way, he would have discovered unanticipated objections, and he would have been able to meet at least some of them.

5. Ideas get out to their public far faster than the old write-in-private, publish-in-public model.

6. The ideas more successfully escape the grasp of the author so that they can change the world.

7. Readers are more involved in the long argument the author used to be having with himself.

8. The author’s authority gets right-sized. Simply seeing the author engage with readers through comments tells the great percentage of readers who do not leave comments that the author recognizes that her/his words need defense, that her/his authority goes no further than the worth of the ideas.

9. We can see some of the effects of the writer’s words rippling through the culture.

Disadvantages

1. Some people don’t like to work this way.

2. Some arguments work better rhetorically if they are presented all at once.

3. Some ideas won’t do well commercially if developed in public for free. Note, though, that it’s not clear that our assumptions here are correct. Cory Doctorow, among others, has succeeded commercially, as well as in the impact of his ideas, by giving away online access to his books even as he sells hardcopies.

4. The published book is a traditional token of expertise and achievement. They look mighty impressive arrayed on one’s bookshelf.

5. It is harder for us to know what to believe, because more voices are present and in contention.

(By the way, these forms of argument are not mutually exclusive. Both and many more as well are present simultaneously on the Net. On the other hand, traditional long-form arguments posted on the Web inevitably become embroiled in web-form arguments, and thus are not unchanged.)

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I talked with a journalist today about Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows. It’s a good book to which I have complex reactions, which I’ll save for another time. But I found that I kept calling it “The Narrows.” In part this is because my brain focuses on vowel patterns. But it’s also a bit ironic, since part of my reaction is that if the Net is the shallows (a brilliant title, by the way), then the old media that Nicholas romanticizes was the narrows: narrowing the richness of shared experience to a manageable trickle.

If the choice is between the shallows and the narrows — and, it’s important to remember that that is not the choice — it’s not so clear which to prefer.

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I was listening this morning to an NPR Morning Edition story by Allison Aubrey about a study that found that if mice drink lots o’ joe, they’re less likely to suffer from little tiny cases of Alzheimers. It was a fine piece, but to a large degree because it spent most of its time undoing the very reason that the story was on the air. The story’s pitch was: Coffee prevents Alzheimers! The bulk of the story was: In mice! Maybe! Other studies on humans are provocative but inconclusive! There are other factors! We don’t know! Maybe! Mouse study isn’t really all that significant!

On the one hand, it’s admirable that NPR spent so much of its time getting us past the headline. On the other hand, isn’t it a little bit depressing that we need to be told over and over again that scientific studies rarely are conclusive about big points and biological correlations? Are we still that unschooled in the scientific method that 450 years after the birth of Francis Bacon (and a thousand years after Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, if you want to get technical about it) we need a refresher course in science’s nervous stepwise progress every time the media report on a scientific study? Apparently, yes.

Then, as if NPR were thinking exactly the same thoughts, the very next piece (by Alix Spiegel) was about how a tiny study got turned into a cultural meme:

In the spring of 1993 a psychologist named Francis Rauscher played 10 minutes of a Mozart Piano Sonata to 36 college students, and after the excerpt, gave the students a test of spatial reasoning. Rauscher also asked the students to take a spatial reasoning test after listening to 10 minutes of silence, and, after listening to 10 minutes of a person with a monotone speaking voice.

And Rauscher says, the results of this experiment seemed pretty clear. “What we found was that the students who had listened to the Mozart Sonata scored significantly higher on the spatial temporal task.”

The story tracks how this modest research among a tiny, non-random group led to a small industry of Mozart for Babies CD’s, the state of Georgia distributing free Mozart CD’s to every newborn, and even death threats against Rauscher for having the temerity to report that she did not observe the same beneficial results from listening to rock and roll.

Why did this basically insignificant study generate so much interest?

It’s probably a couple of things, Rauscher says. Americans believe in self-improvement, but also are fond of quick fixes. And as Rauscher points out, parents care desperately about their children.

Sure. But that’s missing the primary cause in the sequence of events:

The first call came from Associated Press before Rauscher had even realized that her paper was due to be published. Once the Associated Press printed its story the Mozart Effect was everywhere.

“I mean we were on the nightly news with Tom Brokaw. We had people coming to our house for live television,” Rauscher says. “I had to hire someone to manage all the calls I had coming in.”

The headlines in the papers were less subtle than her findings: “Mozart makes you smart” was the general idea.

Americans may have embraced the Mozart-makes-babies-smart meme because we love our poor dumb babies so much, but we got the idea from the AP and the rest of the media that followed AP’s lead. The media played on American’s love of babies, self-improvement, and quick fixes to serve up exactly what we wanted to hear.

So, I’m willing to acknowledge that we have a stupidity gene that causes strong conclusions to wipe out the reasoning that led to them. But the media are supposed to be helping us to get past our natural tendency toward blunt-edged thinking. Instead, over and over it dangles juicy conclusions in front of us, appealing to our fear of disease and our urgent desire to give our babies the competitive edge they need to crush lesser babies whose parents do not love them as much. The good science reports — like this morning’s on caffeinated mice — dangle exciting conclusions in front of us but then explain why we shouldn’t have gotten so excited by them. The bad ones — most of them — play upon the fact that for some reason, we seem unable to remember how science actually works…and then reinforce that forgetting, over and over.

By the way, I wonder if one other reason we forget how science works is that we are taught about the scientific method by performing experiments in school that establish known results. When the lima beans kept in the dark don’t grow, we’re told that the experiment worked because it proves that lima bean sprouts need light. The teacher doesn’t mention that maybe it was because that side of the jar happened to be in the path of hostile bacteria or that the distribution of the beans was not sufficiently randomized. Only many years later is it broken to us that the scientific method is more about eliminating false hypotheses than proving positive causation.

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I write this as someone who is personally thin-skinned about being corrected. I don’t mind being wrong about big things, like, say The Meaning of It All, but I seem to have some bad ego mojo wrapped up in having it betrayed that I generally don’t know what I’m talking about.

Nevertheless, I’ve been admiring Scott Rosenberg’s series of posts about trying to get the Wall Street Journal to correct a misspelling of an author’s name. Start here, then read this, then this, as Scott opens the issue up, from a small error to some much larger thoughts.

I gave a talk a couple of days ago in which I put onto the same slide Steven Levy and Jay Rosen. Steven in Wired wonders why publishers don’t automatically update ebooks with corrections. Jay has been arguing that the Sunday morning news shows have an ethical obligation to fact-check their guests afterwards. In both cases, the media are acting as if publishing something locks it the way printing it on paper does.

It’s actually quite amazing that we don’t yet have normal, expected ways for online journalistic media to correct errors, the way the word “sic” denotes that an error was in the original text being quoted, or the way many bloggers put errors into strikethrough font once they’ve been discovered. What is the standard way that online news media express and correct errors? Why isn’t there an answer to that question 15+ years into the history of the Web?

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I am at the Norwegian national broadcasting company’s meeting. 1,500 people from all sides of the company. The day opens with someone who seems to be fulfilling the role of jester — a woman dressed in a flamboyantly orange dress, eliciting laughs and applause, including by lifting her skirts and sticking Michael T. Jones’ head into her bosom. (Jones, Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, is there as the morning keynoter). The comedian introduced a woman who seemed to deliver a poem — the morning has been in Norwegian so far — and now, after offering Jones another head boob, the morning begins. In other words, so far just another boring American-style conference.

Jones begins by saying that he only has questions, not answers. Publishers seem uncomfortable with the Net, he says, even though they’ve always dreamed of enabling everyone in the world to see their content. He points to StateOfTheMedia.org from Pew. (Joseph Pew said, when asked what he would do as president, ” Tell the truth and trust the people,” which Jones recommends as an approach to most of life.) The site shows that since 1980, the viewership of the evening news in the US has halved. Broadcasters ask where the audience went and how to get them back, which is the wrong question, he says; they went away by choice and you can’t force them back.

Jeffrey Cole at Annenberg surveys what people are doing online, over time, across multiple countries. Only a third of the people would strongly care if their daily offline newspaper went away. 30% of Americans read the news everyday online. Things have changed, and that they changed so quickly means that people didn’t like how things were. It’s like opening up the door of a prison, he says.

Rupert Murdoch is very concerned that the Net is destroying the news and publishing business. His solution is to charge for it, but it puts him in awkward position: He has to show it to you so you’ll want to buy it, but take it away from you so you’ll pay for it. That’s up to him. But it’s hard to do because so much of the news comes from wire services and is available in multiple papers. Jones says he’s glad Murdoch is charging because it’s an experiment, but is skeptical that if people aren’t reading newspapers, they will once they have to pay for it.

Thomas Jefferson thought information was the best way to improve life. “The information of the people at large can along make them safe…” [I need to look this up because I suspect "info" doesn't mean in that quote what it sounds like today. Later: I looked it up. It seems that "the information of the people" meant education, not information in our current sense.] Everyday there are 1B Google searches. There are 1.3B email users worldwide. There are 1.4B people online. 2B youtube videos are watched daily. [Wow, twice as many as searches.] 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute. More people are watching YouTubes than broadcast television. Even so, only 22% of the world uses the Internet. “Everything you think is good about the Internet hasn’t happened to most people yet. But it will.” Probably through mobile phones.”What is the Internet? It’s a thing you see on a mobile phone.” Or so it will be for most people.

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Eric Schmidt told Michael that that’s the company’s reason for existence, and it makes money just so it’s able to acccomplish it. That’s why they translate, do text to speech, “I think it’s a very noble thing. I think Jefferson would be proud.”

Michael talks about the quest to organize info. He was on a yacht with 6 bedrooms. In each room, the books were color coordinated with the decor. “I thought a person from Google should never be exposed to that, because that’s organizing information stupidly.” Then he shows a Google Earth view of all the ships in the world. (Michael came out of Google Earth.) You can zoom in and get info about each. Or, all the airplanes in flight. Or 100M stars. They have a feature now that lets you place the oil spill anywhere on Earth so you can get a sense of its size. Another feature maps the home towns of the allied soldiers who have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; click and you can see their story. Michael’s point is that these sort of tools do something that traditional media doesn’t, contextualizing and providing impact. “Info can be used to shape society.” It’s not Google’s job to do the shaping, he quickly adds. They are just the toolmaker.

He says he was asked to predict 50 yrs ahead, so he looked to 50 yrs ago for a hint. What he saw were Cessnas and Mini-Coopers. Fifty yrs later, they’re the same. That’s because people don’t change that much. But every component part is different. Everything is always changing: growing or dying.

Some change is like a pendulum swinging back and forth; that’s not real change. Instead he points to the drunken walk algorithm: If you walk with a steady sized pace but make random turns, the distance you’ll walk to get from here to there is the length of your stride times the square root of the number of steps. A lot of nature does random walks. It takes 30,000 yrs for a helium atom to get from the center of the Sun to the edge, but then only 9 mins to get to earth in a straight line. When things change wildly, it means the things that are changing are not the important part of the thing (like collars changing on shirts). When you make plans, you want to look for the things that are not changing. [I think I missed part of this. I'm jetlagged.]

Four rules of innovation Michael gives when talking within Google. 1. Info is only useful when it can be understood. (He credits Muriel Cooper.) 2. Things can get better by being simpler. (Bruno Munari) E.g., iPod doesn’t have a speaker or a way to add or delete music. And 40% of the users of Google Earth have never tilted it. 3. “To create, one must first question everything.” (Eileen Gray) 4. “Success can only be achieved with a kind of pioneer spirit and the repeated use of three tools: failure, introspection and courage.” (Soichiro Honda.) People interpret failure incorrectly. Embrace failure as an experiment that gives you data to try the next experiment. As an example, Google’s speech recognition isn’t all that good, but because of the feedback, it gets better. Likewise, you can train their translation software.

How to solve the great problems of the publishing industry? 1. Please users. 2. Please customers. (Advertisers are the customers.) 3. Ask the right questions. 4. Accept change. 5. Embrace failure. 6. See the essence. Be sure you’re solving the right problem.

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Dan Gillmor got an offer from a publisher for his “Mediactive” book (“a user’s guide to democratized media”), but the publisher wouldn’t agree to publish it under a Creative Commons license. So, he’s self-publishing it at Lulu. He’s doing this on principle, but also for pragmatic reasons:

… the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.

Of course, Dan’s motive is not primarily financial:

…this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.

To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.

Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.

Dan reports that the folks at Lulu.com (where — product placement alert — you can get a copy of my young adult book, My $100 Million Secret — are being helpful and creative about supporting books in the new ecosystem. Plus, it’ll be available at Lulu this summer, instead of the year it would have taken to get it onto shelves via the traditional route.

Since Dan is one of the most admirable people around, It would be fun as a community to make his book a success in every way, from spreading its ideas to selling a whole bunch of copies…

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Mediabugs has a live beta up for reporting errors in media reports, initially in San Francisco. The site hopes that media will eventually put “Report an error” links into their online articles, as Scott Rosenberg (one of the folks behind Mediabugs) has started doing at his Wordyard blog.

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Clay Shirky has given us a surprising number of Internet myths. And by this I mean not falsehoods but the opposite: Broad, illuminating ways of making sense of what’s going on. For example, Clay’s post about the power law distribution of links in the blogosphere (based on research by Cameron Marlow) changed how we view authority, fame, and success in the Web ecosystem, and provided the structure within which Chris Anderson could point to the Long Tail. And Clay’s Ontology Is Overrated made clear that a change in how we categorize our world affects very real power relationships; that essay was highly influential, including on my own Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Clay’s new post — The Collapse of Complex Business Models — gives us a broad way of understanding why those who used to provide us with content will not be the ones who give us content in the future…and why they cannot fathom why not.

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Pew Internet has released its contribution to Pew’s annual report on the state of the news media.

My take on the results: Online users generally want news, but we don’t much care where it comes from. 71% of us get our news online, but only 35% of us have a favorite site. Of those 35%, only 65% check it every day. And only 18% of us are willing to pay for online news (a percentage that includes those of us who already do pay). Most of us which would switch sites if they began charging.

The report casually describes our activity as “grazing,” which I’d push back on. My guess is that often we’re going to news sites because someone we know or someone we read has linked to the site. We’re more like bees than like sheep, darting out of the hive when one of our co-bees does an interesting enough little dance.

Anyway, it’s the usual great work by Pew. Thanks, and thanks for posting it for free.

Brilliant, gorgeous piece by Jay Rosen that asks a simple question. Jay takes an investigative piece by David Barstow that he admires. In it, Barstow writes about the Tea Party movement: “It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.” Jay asks: Why doesn’t Barstow say that that narrative is false to the point of psychosis? Read what Jay makes of this …

[Later that day:] I’ve had a little back and forth with Jay about this in email, particularly about the journalists’ defense that readers can be counted on to know that the “impending tyranny” idea is false. I don’t buy that defense, and neither does Jay. It means that journalists get out of having to state the truth – there is no impending tyranny – because they can rely on readers agreeing with their own point of view. And we can be quite certain that this is what’s going on because (as Jay points out), if the journalists thought there was any credibility to the claim that Obama is imposing tyranny on us, that would be a far larger story than the Tea Party story in which the claim is embedded. So the journalists get to have their point of view and not have to state it…which makes objectivity into a pretense.

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After watching President Obama at the Republican Caucus, it’s clearer than ever that press conferences need to go the way of press releases. They are just too constricted for the opportunities and temper of the new connected age. The reporters are too interested in getting headlines, and would rather appear fair and balanced than chase down the truth. We do better, it turns out, when the President is questioned by people who can acknowledge that they really, really disagree with him.

So, what do we replace press conferences with? Or, more realistically, what can we supplement them with?

We know that Question Time in the British Parliament works well in Britain. But, it’d be good for democratic reasons to open it up to The People. Also, why should you have to disagree with the President to press him on an issue?

The problem, of course, is deciding who among us gets to ask a question. So, how about if questions were awarded to people who participate in particularly constructive ways , on any side of an issue, in the comments section of the White House blog (once comments are allowed)? This would be a mighty incentive for engaging civilly in the comments section.

But, then we’d need a way to decide who to pick. If it’s done algorithmically (e.g., have two buttons: I like this comment and I disagree with this comment), it can be gamed. If it’s done by human editors at the White House, it’s subject to charges of favoritism. So, how about if two or three known and respected people in their communities were chosen to select questioners from among the commenters; these people would represent different political views. New selectors would be chosen for each Presidential Q&A session.

Obviously, I don’t know exactly how to do this. But, in the Age of the Web it seems clear to me that we need to supplement press conferences with forums that replace objectivity with transparency, timidity with passion, and professionals with all of us.

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…The Republicans are better at questioning the President than you are.

I learned more about both sides of the issues than I have by listening to official press conferences. Getting neutrality out of the way seems to help when the issues are by nature contentious. Having the media mediate puts into the middle a force that (a) fears that taking up the opposition’s side too strongly will look like partisanship, and (b) is looking for “news,” i.e., headlines. It turns out that getting to hear the back-and-forth of the groups that have skin in the game can be better than inviting in a skinless third party.

Of course, it helps that not only is our President articulate and informed, he tries to engage substantively and accords his opponents appropriate dignity. And it’s to the Republican’s credit that they invited him in, gave the session enough time, and treated him civilly.

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Ethan Zuckerman has yet another fabulous post, this one about how false reports about a supposedly impending earthquake in Ghana swept through social media. Fascinating and informative. As always.

The Knight Foundation, which runs its own contest to grant awards for innovation in media, has published a roundup report and analysis of such competitions.

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I just listened to a report on the BBC news about a woman in Chicago who had to wait three months to go to a doctor after discovering lumps in a breast and an armpit. She had just started a new job and her medical insurance didn’t kick in until she was off her probationary period. Then, once she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went bankrupt trying to pay her portion of the 80:20 coverage. Worse, her doctors had to keep asking the insurance company for permission to do a test or a procedure.

Frankly, I was embarrassed for my country.

[NO SPOILERS AHEAD] The penultimate episode of Monk begins with a murder at the PalgroveBirthing Center. The setting is tangential to the plot (that doesn’t count as a spoiler, does it?), but the show nevertheless included a bit of dialogue in which the center’s head (Ed Begley, Jr.) carefully explains that midwives are not nurses, and help ensure healthy home births. It’s all put very positively — a defense of Certified Professional Midwives — and is so obviously extraneous that it makes you wonder why it was inserted. I wonder if Ed Begley agreed to take the tiny role on condition that the show insert the midwifery product placement. (This is the guess also of our midwife daughter, whose site, btw, is under construction.)

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Derek Barry blogs Jay Rosen‘s keynote at the Media140 in Sydney. Jay gave his ten commandments (in the form of tweets) for press in the age of the Internet.

(Jay apparently noted my post on transparency and objectivity, which Derek looked at and thought was “ironically anonymous.” I never considered that this blog looks anonymous, since I flog my books, have a disclosure button at the top, and list my twitter handle, but I can see how it would seem that way. I think I’m too shy/neurotic to fix it, though.)

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There are two new-ish Radio Berkman interviews up: Me talking with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about his book that argues that we are in danger of forgetting how to forget, and Russell Neuman on learning from the past of the media.

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WLEX-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, an NBC affiliate, has turned its news site into a blog. It actually contains news produced independently of what goes out on broadcast. Very very interesting. It’s a different way of slicing the news, with much debt to Dave Winer’s river of news idea, and it’ll be fascinating to see how and in what ways it’s useful and how it changes our idea of what news should be.

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CNN’s breaking news service on Twitter (cnnbrk) has 2.7M followers. Here are all of its posts since August 24, a month’s worth:

Legally insane killer who escaped in Washington state has been captured, authorities say http://bit.ly/tEJTU7:03 PM Sep 20th
Man in terror probe charged with making false statements http://bit.ly/q1Cc01:03 AM Sep 20th

FBI agents raid the home of Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado resident, questioned in an alleged terrorist plot in the U.S. http://bit.ly/GYX4310:37 PM Sep 19th

Source: Man at center of terror probe admits al Qaeda ties http://bit.ly/BmGqB #terror6:11 PM Sep 18th

Lab tech arrested in killing of Yale graduate student, police say http://bit.ly/65bPt7:31 AM Sep 17th

Arrest imminent in Yale student killing, authorities say http://bit.ly/PKZTI5:54 AM Sep 17th

More resources being brought to New York in connection with terror probe that triggered raids this week – http://bit.ly/Kh47I1:13 PM Sep 16th

Election board: Karzai has more than 50 percent of Afghan presidential vote; irregularities still being examined – http://bit.ly/SdjnP9:33 AM Sep 16th

Iraqi man who threw his shoes at then-President Bush released from jail on good behavior http://bit.ly/10AmVr #Iraq3:51 AM Sep 15th

Police: Missing Yale student case is a homicide http://bit.ly/38zdz38:27 PM Sep 13th

Mayor: Blagojevich fundraiser told police he overdosed before death http://bit.ly/MED8U3:34 PM Sep 13th

FBI source: Serial bank robbery suspect arrested http://bit.ly/Nbght9:20 AM Sep 13th

Key Blagojevich player is dead, ex-governor says http://bit.ly/ntZnr5:11 PM Sep 12th

Shuttle lands in California http://bit.ly/DbsDg #shuttle #nasa #discovery7:56 PM Sep 11th

Anti-abortion activist shot dead, Michigan officials say – http://bit.ly/td8lF10:44 AM Sep 11th

Sources: Coast Guard incident a ‘training exercise’ http://bit.ly/1NvjKr9:39 AM Sep 11th

Coast Guard confronts boat as Obama visits Pentagon, police scanner reports say shots fired http://bit.ly/Qh9AO9:13 AM Sep 11th

Former Taiwan president convicted on corruption charges http://bit.ly/FAAhn #Taiwan3:17 AM Sep 11th

Mexican hijacking has ended peacefully; all passengers, crew safe, Mexican authorities say. http://bit.ly/2Stkq3 #mexicocity3:19 PM Sep 9th

At least 5 suspects taken into custody after hijacked plane lands at Mexico City airport – http://bit.ly/2Stkq3 #mexicocity3:09 PM Sep 9th

Crew held in hijacked commercial jet at Mexico City airport; passengers freed – http://bit.ly/LZWxM #mexicocity3:02 PM Sep 9th

Source: Key Senate Democrat proposes dropping public option from heath-care reform http://bit.ly/JJ0eo10:10 AM Sep 7th

3 found guility of plotting to blow up planes on flights between Britain, U.S. and Canada. http://bit.ly/JgZmt9:32 AM Sep 7th

Sudanese woman who wore pants escapes lashes, but faces fine http://bit.ly/gVysu6:55 AM Sep 7th

Suspect arrested in Georgia killings http://bit.ly/2Qgdn6:52 PM Sep 4th

Indonesia quake death toll at 25, could rise, agency says http://bit.ly/1bPSiF9:00 AM Sep 2nd

6 dead in #Indonesia after 7.0 magnitude #earthquake http://bit.ly/dyTYB5:03 AM Sep 2nd

Pres. Obama remembers Ted Kennedy as “champion for those who had none; soul of Democratic Party; lion of U.S. Senate.” http://bit.ly/3FmLyq11:42 AM Aug 29th

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s body arrives at Boston church for his funeral, with President Obama set to deliver the eulogy. http://bit.ly/2zWSWv9:52 AM Aug 29th

The Los Angeles County coroner rules Michael Jackson’s death a homicide – http://bit.ly/1xVyAH #michaeljackson1:45 PM Aug 28th

August deadliest month for U.S. military in Afghanistan since 2001 invasion — 46 dead http://bit.ly/3Cvzor8:50 AM Aug 28th

Author Dominick Dunne dies http://bit.ly/9BmES #dominickdunne4:00 PM Aug 26th

Kennedy to be buried at Arlington Cemetery, Defense Dept. official says – http://bit.ly/XCurP #kennedy11:10 AM Aug 26th

Sen. Edward Kennedy died Tuesday night after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. He was 77. http://bit.ly/WiZXA12:25 AM Aug 26th

Chris Brown sentenced to 5 years probation in Rihanna assault #rihanna http://bit.ly/jpJ8w4:21 PM Aug 25th

33 die in Afghan car bomb incident http://bit.ly/snREp11:38 AM Aug 25th

Justice Department asks prosecutor to examine legality of CIA interrogations http://bit.ly/N3Eql #cia #torture2:07 PM Aug 24th

Breakdown:

Total: 38
terrorism: 9
death: 20
Countries mentioned: US, Afghanistan (3), Taiwan, Mexico, Britain, Indonesia, Canada
Plain old crime (non-terrorist): 11
Percentage of tweets that contain actual news: 28.95%

I grant that there’s some subjectivity (=total subjectivity) in deciding what’s actual news. Nevertheless, Google News Timeline will show you at least some of the other events that happened during this month. And this query at Google News will list the 6,600 articles CNN.com posted during the past month, of which these 38 are not the most important, except by some radical redefinition of importance, of news, and of CNN’s dignity.

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Clay Shirky is giving a lunchtime talk at the Shorenstein Center, which may be a joint event with the Berkman Center.

p>The commercial structure of the newspaper industry means that it’s not enough for them to run at a profit. Advertisers had been forced to overpay because there weren’t other waysto reach people for display ads or coupons. This gave the newspaper enough capital to do long-term investigation; mere profitability wouldn’t have allowed this.

The advertisers were overcharged and under-served. That is, they couldn’t influence coverage.

Neither the overpaying and the underserving is true of the current market. The new market is efficient and so the price of advertising plummets. “We may be seeing advertising priced at its real value for the first time in history.” And if you want to sell a bike, you don’t go to the people who print news and crosswords; you go to Craigslist. As Bob Garfield says (says Clay), it turns out that people will go to sites that do nothing but post ads.

The news is now disaggregated and is re-forming itself around actual user desires. The aggregation is going from server-side to client-side. “The decision about what to bring together in a bundle” is made by the consumer, not the producer.

We should worry about echo chambers, although it turns out that people are interested in serendipity. But people are not interested in the omnibus approach. The number of people going to the NYTimes home page is going down because people go straight to the article. The bundle is put together more by other readers.

None of this will be reversed by increasing the commercial viability of printed newspapers.

“This doesn’t mean all newspapers go away. It does mean a lot of them go away.” “Newspapers will play a less significant role in accountability than they have in the past, which leaves us with a giant hole.” A big problem: Every town of 500,000 or less “sinks into endemic civic corruption” because no one is watching.

He refers to how a story in the Boston Globe went worldwide not because of the Globe but because its audience passed it around. “The public created itself.” “The penumbra of reuse around the article created an enormous amount of its value.” An article on a similar topic (priest pedophiles) in the early 1990s didn’t spread the same way, because the forward-and-recommend infrastructure didn’t exist.

If there were a pay wall around the later article, it would have forestall its effect and value. First, “We need the public good of accountability journalism.” Some newspapers are trying to get an anti-trust exemption to establish a pay wall for the sake of the public good. But that will destroy the village to save it. We should be looking at ways of balancing the cost of producing good journalism and the public good that comes from reuse.

There are three ways to create things accessible to the public. Private companies. NGOs. Social/peer production where people get together and do it. #3 had been confined to picnics, etc. Now it’s becoming a big part of the ecosystem. E.g., Pro Publica. Wikileaks. Open source. “The Internet makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain…and social models much, much easier to sustain.” “We’re seeing a re-balancing of the landscape” where all three of these modes of production will be operating. We want experiments across all three of these.

Also, we don’t want to replace newspapers. Newspapers have a single point of failure problem because they do 85% of accountability journalism. We don’t need a single point. We need someone who does 5% and then repeat that 15 times. “It’s a shift from one class of institutions to an ecosystem as a whole.”

Clay says he wants to distance himself from the utopians and optimists. “I think a bad thing is going to happen.” People don’t take seriously that things may get a lot worse for a while. He doesn’t think there’s any way to get out of the coming of public corruption. Between the printing press and the Treaty of Westphalia there were a long 100 years when people didn’t know what to think. “Our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough … and hasten its end.” But there’s not simple and rapid alternative to 20th century newspapers, in part because what held papers together was “so crazily contingent.”

“I believe that newspapers are irreplaceable in their production of accountability journalism.” Some think we should therefore spend whatever we have to in order to replace them. Others say we should be “transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of overlapping models of accountability journalism.” “The next step needs to be vast and varied experimentation.”

Q: Alex Jones: I don’t agree that newspapers are ready to be abandoned. In the priest pedophile story you cite, the Catholic Church was brought to heel by the viral information but also by the institutional power of the Globe. As you imagine this future, do you see in this array of smaller entity an institutional power that can bring institutions of power to heel?
A: Not in any simple way. That is the great weakness of the experimental trough: No one news org has that sort of power. Hard news is cross-subsidized by people who buy the paper for the coupons. But the front page has institutional power. The media has lost its force in almost all cases. The question is: Can news gather a public the way newspapers have done? The optimistic face is: We don’t know yet, but it’s there. The pessimistic: The ability of media to bring institutions is fading with the mass audience. I don’t know enough about the economics of converting newspapers to nonprofits.

Q: How about magazines?
A: They’re essentially non-profits. The New Yorker has operated at a lost throughout most of its history. The amount of journalism done by non-NPR radio is very small. Magazines are subsidized by billionaires. “The way to get around the problem with the media model is to have lots of models.”

Q: The revenue base is shrinking but it’s also much easier to acquire information.
A: That’s why we need lots of overlapping 5% reporting. The last time we had a big push for transparency — Watergate — it created K Street: You now knew how people voted, so lobbyists could get paid for effects. “It’s not enough to make the data available. We also have to make the public able to assemble and act on the data.”

Q: What’s the model for something like Pro Publica, which is not reaching the ordinary joe?
A: In the past, city hall news generally wasn’t front page. We think readers of newspapers read the whole thing. But it was cross-subsidized. It’s never been that all citizens care about all news. Pro Publica is reaching elites, and the question is whether it’s giving them what they need. “The real danger is that our political life is organized around geography, but the Web not so much.” The midpoint between nation and neighborhood is hard to do on the Web. Web stories are either hyperlocal or spill across all borders. Pro Publica isn’t well suited to regional reporting. The media markets and the political markets overlapped, but not any more. The trough will be worst at state and county levels.

Q: How does The Economist fit? They’re growing.
A: The one big exception is to the sharing model is financial news. A pay wall damages general news and benefits financial news, because people want to act on that news before they share. The Financial Times’ online audience is 1% of the Times. I don’t believe the Economist, FT and WSJ model is applicable to the general news.

Q [bill mitchell]: As you describe your three models — commercial, public, social — what in each of them really holds value for the public at large. What might they pay for, whether in donations, contributing their own journalism, etc.?
A: The core of the value is the set of the values accuracy and timeliness, but also shareability. General news has more value the more people know about it. People contribute unexpectedly. E.g., SETI. People donate not just because they wanted to help but because they got a cool screensaver. NPR tote bags say “I’m paying for your radio.” The power of that type of mockerhood is under-estimated. 6-8% of NPR listeners contribute, which might be enough to keep a newspaper alive, doing something (but not all of what it used to do).

Q: The story on Randy Cunningham required figuring out how to take the database of info and turn it into a story. Who’s going to do this?
A: Richard Hackman [sp?] says that groups are no good at writing. E.g., Wikipedia’s writing isn’t its strong point. Amanda Michel at OffTheBus found out that most people can’t be David Broder. Instead, she had hundreds of people crowd-sourcing data, and then gave it to a writer. She had a professional-amateur fusion. “No one is smart enough to get it right, which is why we need lots of experimentation.”

Q: The NYT says it has 800K readers who have been with them for 2 yrs, and they pay $700/year. Is that sustainable?
A: No. Someone suggested that newspaper rename their obit column as “Reader countdown.” Many newspapers pursuing a pay wall are only trying to stave off the Web.

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Journalism at its best is a way to uncover and communicate the truth, subject to all the usual human limitations. But journalism’s fundamental form, the story itself, brings a special temptation to manipulate the truth for economic or aesthetic reasons. The temptation is resistible to varying degrees, depending on the type of story (the temptations are greater for feature stories than for hard-core reportage of the day’s events), the nature of the journal, and the standing of journalist. Nevertheless, the temptation is there, built into the form itself.

The very idea that there’s a story is itself a temptation. Maybe the story is on Facebook addiction or the rise in incivility. A journalist who goes back to her editor and says, “Nope, no story there” has disappointed the editor who now has to find another story to fill the hole in the paper newspaper or to feed the maw of the online publication. Not a big deal; it happens all the time. But if it’s fifth consecutive time that the reporter says there was no story there, it’s getting to be a problem. If it’s the reporter who has suggested the stories in the first place, as is often the case at many publications, she will be judged a failure because she’s wasted her time and gummed up the editor’s planning.

It’s not like it’s supposed to be in science, where a failed hypothesis is as valuable as a proved one, even though of course every scientist would rather discover that a new compound cures cancer than that it doesn’t. A failed hypothesis in the world of journalism is a story that won’t run, that won’t bring in readers, that won’t give businesses a page on which to place an ad. There are real prices to stories failing to pan out. Reporters are thus tempted to make the story work.

Even when the hypothesis of a story is true, journalists almost always reach a place in the story where they know what they want their interviewees to say. An interview is requested of a particular person to provide the “some experts disagree” statement or the “the implications of this are vast” verbiage. If that person doesn’t provide it, someone else will. Depending on the stage of the story, the interviewee may spark interest in a side issue or an approach the reporter hadn’t considered…resulting in someone else being called to provide the other side or the amplification.

This happens at some of stage of the story even when the topic is interesting no matter what storyline it takes. For example, the death of Pat Tillman is interesting because it is instantly symbolic: Football star turns down a life of fame and wealth in order to defend his country, and dies a soldier’s death in Afghanistan. Beyond the basic reportage the day that it happened, it was bound to inspire journalistic stories. A reporter could enter with an open mind. Even so, she’ll enter with an open mind looking for an angle, which is to say, looking for a story. Is it a relatively simple narrative of an inspiring patriot who gave his life to support his ideals? Or was there “more” to it? That search for the “more” isn’t simply a hunt for unknown truths. It’s a search for a narrative that reveals the simple surface to be a veneer from which we will learn something unexpected. The reporter may have no idea what the more is, but once she gets a hint of it, she’ll be on it, and the narrative itself — if not personal ambition — will carry her forward. Maybe Tillman wasn’t as virtuous as we thought. Maybe his death wasn’t as straightforward as we were told. Maybe his story was of a life fulfilled or of a life wasted or of a life more complex than we’d thought. Maybe it’s about the government’s cynical use of him, or of the media’s own eagerness to find a hero. But something will emerge. And as it emerges, it gathers its story around it, and the reporter is off looking for the voices who will play certain roles in the story. Why? Because the story demands it.

At the very least, the temptation journalistic stories is that of all story-telling, the basic way we humans make sense of our world. Stories, not just in journalism, are about the gradual revealing of truth. The surface wasn’t as it seemed. The ending was contained, hidden, in the beginning. What looked continuous was in fact disruptive. Stories have a shape, and story-tellers fit the pieces into that shape. There’s nothing wrong with that, except in an environment where there’s economic and social pressure to produce a story. Then the temptation is to get the pieces to fit. And that can corrode the truth.

So can the simple fact that stories tend towards closure. They end. They’re done. Some circle of understanding has been drawn and closed, tip to tip. The story says, simply by ending. “This is what you needed to know.” There can often be truth in that, but there is always falsity in it. The world, its events, and its people escape even the best of stories.

Stories are not going away from journalism, just as they’re not going away from history, biography, or how we talk about our day over dinner. They’re fundamental. Stories are how we understand, but they also inevitably are constructions, incomplete, and organized around a point of view. All stories are temptations. Journalistic stories have their own special and strong temptations because of their economics and because of the nature of the medium in which they’ve been embodied. Now those economics and that medium are changing, diminishing the old temptations but creating new ones:

::: Because we are increasingly turning to publications that explicitly take a stand, the temptation to include false views for “balance” is diminished. But, the preference for partisan media creates a new temptation: To over-state, in order to attract attention. [Guilty as charged!]

::: The old medium limited the length of stories, forcing unnecessary trimming except in very special circumstances. The new medium has infinite space so that stories can be right-sized. But it turns out that prolixity discourages on-line readers, so the new temptation is toward brevity. It’s not clear if that’s an expression of an impatience that’s always been with us or if the new medium constitutes a new temptation.

::: The old medium’s inability to embed links encouraged journalists to try to encapsulate the world in a single column of text. The new hyperlinked medium can tempt authors to gloss over points and contradictions because they’ve put in some links, putting the burden on readers who are (usually) lazier than the writers.

::: The economics of the old medium tempted publications to appear valuable by being a reliable source of the single truth. While they of course have encouraged discourse on controversial topics, their bread and butter have been stories that “get it right” and thus serve as a stopping point for belief. Stories are the bulwark of authority, and authority is the currency of the old journalistic economics. The new medium now can include as many stories as we want, from as many different points of view, connected by curators above the stories and by hyperlinks within the stories. The story no longer has to tell the whole truth. It’s just one of the stories. But, while that’s true of the ecosystem as a whole, the old temptation to be a single-source truth shop exists for individual online publications, whether they’re commercial or personal.

Now, the form I’ve adopted for this essay, which is itself a type of story-telling, is one of balance: Old temptations matched by new temptations. It’s a form that aims at inspiring trust: “See, I’m presenting both sides!” And that itself can be corrosive. Indeed, in this case it is. While the old temptations are being replaced by new ones, the locus of truth is moving decisively from individual stories and publications to the network of stories and publications. The balancing of temptations misses this most important change. The hyperlinked context of stories creates not only new temptations to go wrong, but a greater possibility for going right.

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This morning on NPR, Mara Liasson wrapped up her coverage of President Obama’s health care speech by saying something like: It’s unsure whether the speech will have the effect Obama wants, but if it does, it won’t be because of its soaring rhetoric but because of the details he gave.

Are you sure, Mora? Are you sure that being inspired has no effect on political decisions? Is that why you dismissed the importance of public speech, of words, of vision? Was that a fact-based observation? Or was it perhaps because you feel you have to deny that you personally were so excited by President Obama’s speech that you felt that old thrill going up your leg, and that when he read from Ted Kennedy’s letter you teared up? Just like so many of us? Just like me? In any case, I thought it was a shame to end coverage of a beautiful, inspiring, moving speech with an explicit denial of the importance of what made it not just important, but great.

Next up on NPR’s coverage was a report on the Supreme Court deliberations about exactly how obscenely corporations can pollute our democracy — merely pornographically or the full auto-erotic asphyxiation stranglehold — in which we heard the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court casually say “Are we being asked to allow the government — Big Brother — to…” The quote is approximate, but not the apposite reference to government as Big Brother. Does Justice Roberts really think the government when it regulates behavior is necessarily totalitarian? Yikes.

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I’ve just sent out the August 18, 2009 issue of JOHO, my newsletter. (It’s completely free, so feel free to subscribe.) It’s all new material (well, new-ish) except for one piece.

[Tags: joho newsletter technodeterminism news journalism media cluetrain ]

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The NY Times has a terrific article about Media Cloud, a Berkman Center project (hats off to Ethan Zuckerman, Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, among others) that will let researchers track the actual movement of ideas through the mediasphere and blogosphere.

Data about concepts! What a concept!

[Tags: berkman media blogs memes research media_cloud ]

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1. The court has rejected Charlie Nesson’s basic defense of Joel Tenenbaum’s sharing of music files. The case is going to jury which may levy the same sort of insanely excessive fines as in the Jammie Thomas-Rassert trial. I hope Charlie’s team can convince the jury that the fines and the entire process are so onerous and disproportionate that the RIAA has been abusing the court system. Of course, IANAL, and IANAOTJ (I am not on the jury).

2. Barnes and Noble has launched its e-book software. It runs on iPhones as well as on PC’s and Mac’s. I’m having trouble finding which formats it supports, but judging from its Open dialogue, not PDF, .doc, .html, .mobi, or text. It does support .PBD books.

After a very very quick session playing with it, it seems quite competitive with the Kindle, and because I’m running it on my Mac and not on the little piece of crippled hardware I bought from Amazon — the Kindle is just barely adequate as a reader, and is still overpriced by more than 100% in terms of its value, imo — having the use of a keyboard and a mouse is a big step up. And, unlike the Kindle, you can use whatever fonts you have on your machine. Still, it’s only incrementally better than the Kindle’s software (again, on a quick look), not a great leap forward for readers.

One of B&N’s big advantages is that it’s hooked into Google Books, enabling you to download public domain books that Google has scanned in. You do this by searching for a book on the B&N site and noticing the “free from Google Books” label. Be sure to sort by price; otherwise B&N lists the for-pay versions first. If B&N wants to be aggressive in this space (= succeed), it should create an easy-to-find section that lets you browse Google’s free books. Get us using the ereader and then sell us the copyrighted books. (If B&N has such a section, I couldn’t find it quickly enough.)

BTW, I presume (and thus may be wrong) that Google did a special deal with B&N to enable this. If so, I find it worrisome. If Google is going to be granted a special right to scan in books without fear of copyright reprisals, it will be the de facto national e-library, discouraging others from undertaking similarly scaled scanning projects, and thus should be making its public domain books equally and maximally freely available. IMO.

2a. [Later that evening:] B&N stores are now providing free Wifi. Yay!

3. Apple is not permitting the Google telephone service into the Apple App store, thus simultaneously and inadvertently making the case for Zittrainian generativity.

4. [Later that day]: On the happy front, Google has open-sourced an implementation of Wave.

[Tags: copyright copyleft books e-books google libraries everything_is_miscellaneous charles_nesson jonathan_zittrain law fair_use amazon kindle b&n ]

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The AP has announced it is going to use an automated system to monitor the use of AP content on the Web, looking for copyright violations. The empire is fighting back. From the press release:

The Associated Press Board of Directors today directed The Associated Press to create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used.

I think there are three possible broad-stroke outcomes:

1. The AP takes an enlightened and generous view of copyright protection and its terms of use, encouraging people to link to and cite its stories, and saving its angry face for commercial thieves, wholesale infringers, and other scum. The AP remains a major source of news, fulfills the social mission of the newspapers who are its members, and our culture is better off for it.

2. The AP’s automated system is set on a hair trigger. The AP protects its copyright so well that no one ever hears from it again.

3. The AP acts inconsistently. It sends scary letters to teenagers who copy three paragraphs about the Jonas Brothers and sics lawyers on a professor teaching a course on media studies. No one understands what the AP is doing, so we all get scared and hate it.

To start with, it’d be great if the AP’s copyright warnings didn’t just tell people what they can’t do, but also told them what they can do, and encouraged us to re-use the material as much as possible. On the other hand, since one of the aims of the new system (according to the press release) is to facilitate the use of pay walls, I expect we’ll see more of the AP’s content making itself irrelevant.

[Tags: ap media journalism free copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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[Note 1.5 hrs after posting this: Ethan Zuckerman has just put up a superb post on this topic. I suggest you read that instead of this.]

Jillian York of the Berkman Center explains the current confusion about the NY Times’ rather casual suggestion (in a blog post) , based on an accusation in a tweet from Omid Habibinia, that Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder) has been an agent for the Iranian government, basically ratting out pro-democracy bloggers. The NY Times has now gone meta on the accusation, saying it only reported it because it’s a sign of the discord and distrust, etc., etc. But it’s still a dangerous charge to propagate. Jillian wants to know why we’re blaming the NY Times blogger and not Habibinia.

I’ve got enough blame in my backpack for both. But I do think that since the NY Times trades on its credibility, it has a greater responsibility. When the NY Times reports a rumor, it not only amplifies the rumor, it inevitably adds credibility to it. That’s just the way it is, and, it’s also how the NY Times wants it.

(I wish I could track down the article I read today about the difficult the human brain has in unlearning bad info even after it’s been shown to be bad. The article talked about the increase in the belief that Iraq had WMDs after it was shown that it did not.)

[Tags: iran nytimes journalism media hoder ]

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Link. (The video embeds my slides, but (1) they get more and more out of order in this YouTube; they were in the right order when I actually presented them. 2. My font got lost somewhere in the translations, and so there’s a fair bit of mis-sizing, text overflows, etc.) (I posted about one of the ideas in the talk (transparency as the new objectivity) here.)

[Tags: pdf09 transparency media politics e-democracy e-government e-gov everything_is_miscellaneous newspapers media ]

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A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge.

Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.

You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. The objectivity of the reporter is a stopping point for reader’s inquiry. That was part of high-end newspapers’ claimed value: You can’t believe what you read in a slanted tabloid, but our news is objective, so your inquiry can come to rest here. Credentialing systems had the same basic rhythm: You can stop your quest once you come to a credentialed authority who says, “I got this. You can believe it.” End of story.

We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success. So, during the Age of Paper, we got used to the idea that authority comes in the form of a stop sign: You’ve reached a source whose reliability requires no further inquiry.

In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.

In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

In short: Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can. [Tags: objectivity transparency journalism media knowledge epistemology jay_rosen science everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I was live on the Jeff Farias show on Monday. You can hear it here. (I start at around the 88th minute.)

We talked for half an hour, at first about Cluetrain and then about some of the stuff in Everything Is Miscellaneous. I haven’t listened to it, but I enjoyed it.

Also, this week a Swiss newspaper, Sonntags Zeitung, ran an interview with me about cloud computing. That one is a bit more problematic. It’s a brief Q&A, boiled down from 20-30 minutes of talk, although it does not mention that. Inevitably, there are some places where I disagree a bit with the impression my abridged answers leave. That’s what happens. But it also has me saying some things that I’m quite sure I didn’t say. One in particular I feel a need to correct. The interview has me stating that it takes 4-5 times more computing power to deal with encrypted traffic (such as email) than with unencrypted. Not only don’t I know how much more computing power it takes, I know that I don’t know. So, I want to here put on “the record” that that estimate is unsubstantiated, and that I’m quite sure that that’s not what I said.

The journalist did offer to let me see the interview before he ran it, but I declined, primarily because, through a mutual misunderstanding, I thought I was only contributing an idea or two to an article — not a dedicated Q&A — about cloud computing.

[Tags: media cloud_computing ]

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Sam Bayard of the Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Center has posted an explanation of the legal issues around TechCrunch posting some of the content of the email stolen from Twitter’s founders background.

It seems different to me than when people posted internal messages from Diebold, because there was a clear public interest in the reliability of voting machines. I’m trying to bracket out the sense that Twitter is one of us, but I’m failing. The whole thing makes me feel icky.

Tags: twitter techcrunch diebold privacy media

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NOTE: The 50 copies are gone. Took about an hour.

I’m trying an experiment with a business model I like to call a reverse referral fee. Here’s how it works…

You click on a link that lets you download a copy of Brad Sucks’ latest album, Out of It. The album of wonderful music is yours for free in every sense. (Share it! Please!) But, I’m going to pay Brad for each copy downloaded, at a bulk rate he and I have agreed on.

This offer is good for the first fifty people who download it. After that, you can buy a copy on your own. Of course, Brad also makes his music available for free (in every sense), but don’t you want to support a truly webby, big-hearted musician who’s giving us his talent free of copyright, studios, and DRM? Doncha?

So, if you want to be one of the fifty, click here for your free-to-you-but-not-to-me copy of Brad Sucks’ Out of It.

[Tags: bradsucks music drm copyright copyleft business_models everything_is_miscellaneous ]free ]

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A few years ago, I sat next to an AP photographer on a press bus as he deftly photoshopped an image he’d just taken. I asked him if he was allowed to do that, and he said the rule was that he could do anything with Photoshop that he could have done in a darkroom.

I thought of him when I saw the NY Times’ embarrassed retraction of a photo essay it had published. It turns out that the photographer had “digitally manipulated” the photos without telling his editor. Unfortunately, the NYT removed all of the photos, rather than keeping them up with the metadata that the digital manipulation had gone beyond editorial guidelines, and without telling us what those guidelines are. For all photos are manipulated. The photographer frames them, decides on what to focus on and how much of the photo should be in focus, etc., and then completes the manipulation in the darkroom, whether it’s analog or digital. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the fallacy of photographic realism that Susan Sontag warned us against.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the NYT’s guidelines are and then hold a contest to see who can create the most deceptive photo while staying within those guidelines?

Scott Rosenberg, a founder of Salon and the author of a terrific new history of blogging (Say Everything), provides us with reflections on what could be one of the entries, based on stories he did for the San Francisco Examiner and Wired about the photographer Pedro Meyer. Really interesting. (Embarassingly, Scott cites me at the very end.)

[Tags: photography realism journalism media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Terry Heaton has yet another excellent entry in his continuing series on the media r/evolution. This one is on the news as a process — never done, never entirely right.

I’ve been thinking for the past few days about the news as a network. I’ve been finding that the network view of institutions is helpful because it lets you think about the ways in which the odd properties of The Network, and especially the Web, may be getting applied to those institutions — how those properties fit and don’t fit, and what that means for how those institutions can and should interact with the Net. In fact, at the moment I’m thinking about that as the organizing principle of a talk I’m giving at the Open Gov Innovations conference in a couple of weeks.

Terry’s process view of the news is helpful because it reminds us that a news story is messily spread over time, with many hands touching, and thus contradicts the ol’ writing-boom-published timeline of yore. Nah, the news is always in process. Dave Winer’s river of news is another useful metaphor, capturing the flow of news that we care about.

Metaphors are not exclusionary, so I also like the network idea. The river of news as it flows past us is part of a continuing process, which has shape and some persistence because it is a network. And I think the news is a network pretty much fractally: A hyperlinked news story is embedded in a network of links. Stories are slices through complex webs of ideas, with connections through the river of time and the semantic space of causality and influence. A collection of stories (what we used to call a “newspaper” or a “nightly news show”) is a web of related pieces — related by chronology but also by cross-commentary and references. Reporters rely on networks of people. Readers read within networks of people and ideas. The events themselves that the news “covers” are so deeply enmeshed in networks of history and culture that the very notion of a “story” is now suspect.

There are at least three problems with networks of news. 1. Networks can be lazy; they are so sprawling and full of goodies that there’s some type of focused work they may not get around to. 2. Networks lower the barriers to social gravity, so that we can be irresistibly attracted to people who are like us. (Ok, so opposite magnetic poles attract, and thus my metaphor has failed. Damn!) 3. We know how to turn hard objects into money, whereas it’s way harder to figure out how to make networks of news economically sustainable.

But the networking of news feels to many of us like the news assuming a more natural, authentic shape, freed from the rectangle of paper into which it has been force fitted for so long.

[Tags: news journalism media jeff_jarvis michael_arrington nytimes ]

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Jeff Jarvis has a terrific, provocative post about the narcissism of newspapers in which he discusses a number of myths. The discussion afterwards is also really inte)resting. Here’s the comment I posted there (with a minor edit or two, all of which can really be reduced to the title of this post:

Terrific post and discussion. Thanks, Jeff.

May I add one more, related, myth to your collection, Jeff? Here goes: That it’s possible to cover the day’s events.

This is just a different way of putting your formulation “One man’s [sic] noise is another man’s news.” But I think it’s worth calling out since the promise of sufficiency is a big part of traditional newspapers’ promise of value to us: “Read us once in the morning, and after going through our pages, you will know everything you need to know.” (Do radio stations still make the ridicule-worthy “Give us 8 minutes and we’ll give you the world?” claim.) Yeah, no newspaper would ever maintain that claim seriously if challenged — they know better than their readers (or at least they used to) what they’re leaving out — but it’s at the base of the idea that reading a paper is a civic duty. The paper doesn’t give us everything but it gives us enough that reading one every day makes us well-informed citizens.

The notion that newspapers give you your daily requirement of global news — which works out to wondering, along with Howard, if there is such a thing as “news” — seems to me to be as vulnerable as the old idea of objectivity. Like objectivity: (1) It’s presented as one of the basic reasons to read a newspaper; (2) it hides the fact that it’s based on cultural values; and (3) it doesn’t scale well in the age of the Net.

Ultimately, this myth is enabled – as so many of the myths of news and knowledge are — by paper. Take away the paper and the newspaper doesn’t become a paperless newspaper. It becomes a network. That’s what’s happening now, IMO. From object to network … and networks are far far harder to “monetize” (giving myself a yech here) than objects.

(By the way, this is what I was trying to ask in the question I horribly botched at PDF. Sigh.)

[Tags: newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous objectivity ]

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Ethan is once again knowledgeable and provocative, this time about what it takes for a coup to get some attention in this country. He compares the media’s interest in Honduras’ institutional coup (as a guy called it last night on The News Hour) with the almost complete ignoring of various coups in Africa.

Ethan concludes (but read the whole thing):

So why does Honduras get the Iran treatment, while Niger is ignored like Madagascar? Proximity? Strategic importance? (though Niger’s got massive uranium reserves – you remember yellowcake, right?) It’s not population – Niger’s roughly twice the size of Honduras. Expectation? Perhaps we’re sufficiently accustomed to African coups (Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea in the past year) that Niger’s not a surprise.

Or perhaps all the pundits are still trying to figure out which one’s Nigeria and which one’s Niger…

Ethan conspicuously leaves out racism — the soft racism (as that ol’ phrase President George W. Bush once put it) of not knowing, not caring, and not bothering to develop a narrative.

(By the way, be sure to click on the link in the quote from Ethan. It leads to one of The Onion’s funniest videos ever.)

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman africa niger honduras racism media ]

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Steve Myers at Poynter has a good story about NPR’s crowd-sourcing Dollar Politics project. One element of it was a request for help identifying 200 people who attended a Senate hearing, some percentage of whom were lobbyists.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous media crowdsourcing npr ]

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Frank Rich: Yes. But someone is going to have figure out how to pay for it. I suspect it will be figured out. There are always these fears during dislocations.

Karen Tumulty: It’s a terrifying time for traditional newspapers, but there are models that work. E.g., I watch Marcy Wheeler’s thermometer.

Dan Gillmor: I’ll channel Clay Shirky. The cost of experimentation has gone to just about zero. There are thousands of experiments, including in business models. We need even more.

Scott Simon: We need to be open to social media. Journalists tend to get jaded. People are now their own editors. A tweeter in Iran said “Tell all your friends: You are the media.” I think that’s true, but there’s work to be done to recreate the best values of journalism all over again.

Rich: We’re so obsessed with new media. Let 1,000 tweets bloom in Iran, but we forget that people are still repressed. The happiness with Iranian’s use of social media has led us to distort the coverage.

Simon: With social media you can overhear people talking with one another, in a way that is very hard with traditional reporting.

Gillmor: The issue of verification can be pretty slippery. We’re having to relearn media literacy. We have to be skeptical of everything … including the NY Times. But we also have to learn how to be not equally skeptical of everything. I’m not worried about supply but we have pretty crappy demand…people who grew up as passive consumers. It’ll take work on our parts, as former consumers and now users, to figure out what to trust.

Tumulty: You may wobble on line but ultimately you get to what the truth is because so many people demand it.

Rich: The people in this room are obsessed with this stuff. We want to find out what’s really going on. But a lot of people, especially those who aren’t upper middle class, don’t have the time.

Andrew Rasiej: People weren’t waiting for the journalists to get news about Iran. The NYT is old by the time it’s printed, especially since now we can sometimes go to the source of the news. It’s not a business model.

Gillmor: Yes. We’re not going to have gatekeepers like before. We now tell one another story. But this is so new. We need to get reputation combined with this.

Rich: But there’s only so much we can absorb. We saw home radios consolidate. Some conglomerate will want to have a big brand, and they’ll set the brand. I think there will be a consolidation. There will always be a component that seeks out minority views…

Gillmor: I don’t see that. The only conglomerate that worries me the is duopoly of the cable and phone companies.

Rich: We’re saying the same thing.

Gillmor: That’s a different kind of consolidation that we’ve seen…

Rich: With the same effect, and from the same people.

Tumulty: We should worry about the Google consolidation. SEO distorts the way you frame things

Simon: Journalism has to make the case for why it’s its own ism. There are left and right invesetigative journalism sites. A real news org sometimes upsets its audience.

Rich: How do we get people to eat their spinach? A lot of people want only celebrity news. That’s always been true. Does this new structure make it easier to have the masturbatory news that they want?

Gillmor: For the first time it’s easy to go deep. Even if it’s celebrity culture, the act of going deeper is instructive to some percent of that group. If we can increase the small percentage of people who create news, that’ll make a big difference.

Rich: People who watch ESPN are not going to start following Iran. And the paradox of the last decade: The whole growth of the new media occurred during a time when the Prez sent us to war on a fiction. Even though some of the fiction came from the NYT, the Prez got away with it. Even though people had more news sources, they were susceptible to a propaganda campaign.

AR: But Gonzalez might still be the attorney general…

Rich: Small potatoes compared to swallowing the war propaganda.

Gillmor: Traditional media still have enormous sway, and it was moreso 5 yrs ago. This isn’t an overnight transition. You’re right that that was a catastrophe. The traditional media walked in lockstep with deceptive people in DC. It’s going to take some time. It’s also instructive that the Guardian web site became enormously more popular because English-speakers wanted the other sides.

Simon: One of the hopes for new media is that it’s easier to be interested in both sports and politics and crocheting.

Gillmor: Traditional media were about producing, creating, distributing stuff. That’s not what we do online. We create it. We make it available. People come and get it. That’s really different. Viewers of Fox don’t have a link to what the other side says. Right wing blogs have links to the people they’re criticizing. If we can encourage people to click that link, people can see there are multiple facets…

Tumulty: But the people who land on that blog are not open to persuaded. The Net reinforces people in their beliefs.

Rich: People didn’t want to believe that Sadam didn’t have WMDs. We shouldn’t assume we’re automatically in a Renaissance.

Simon: There’s a still lot to be said for people seeking out variety. I think they’re not going to be satisfied with narrowcasting.

[I stood on line to ask a question and thus missed some live bloggage. There was a long discussion about the value of covering live events, for which there still seems to be demand.]

Q: [me] What’s the future of the idea of coverage? Coverage implies a value-free decision that we know is value-full, and it doesn’t scale well. [I had to say this twice because I didn't put it well]
Rich: We’ll keep providing it so long as people want it.
Me: I’m suggesting it’s going the way of objectivity: a value no longer valued.
Rich: Papers have never pretended to offer full coverage.

[The session ran over; I had to leave before it ended.] [Tags: media journalism pdf09 ]

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I’m embarrassed to say that it’s been years since I’ve read Newsweek, so I may be the last to have noticed, but Newsweek is no longer a news magazine.

I picked up the June 16 issue somewhere for free — on a shuttle flight, I think — and thumbed through the offbeat, humorous, human-interest features, only to find myself at the back cover. Important note: I grabbed it because Stephen Colbert was advertised on the cover as “guest editor,” although except for a couple of funny essays, I don’t think that actually affected the content.

Newsweek and Time used to be your way to catch up on the week’s news. They covered the news. This particular issue of Newsweek made no such attempt. Rather, it had a theme: Iraq. The articles, in a 27-page section called “Features” (in a 68-page issue) included a photo essay, an essay on “how we’ll know we’ve won,” speculation on how we might commemorate the war, and articles on video games, West Point grads who are worried they’ll miss the war, families disrupted by deployments, Canada’s attitude towards conscientious objectors, soldiers who love battle, and a backgrounder on Iraq vs. Iran. Some of these were interesting articles, but they weren’t news of the week’s happenings.

As for coverage of events outside of Iraq: None…unless it made it into one of the fun sections, like the humorous quotes of the week.

The rest of the issue reads like blog posts: opinions, reviews, provocative essays, bright little snippets.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Coverage is one of those big, ingrained ideas that actually make little sense — like objectivity, except coverage makes much less sense than that. Newsweek’s problem is that now that it’s lost its news-in-a-capsule medicinal prescription, will people take the weekly dose, since it’s now competing with the monthlies (The Atlantic, Harpers, etc.) and even with the Sunday magazine that comes with your newspaper?

I doubt it. But it’s not like I have a better idea. With news now spreading at the speed of typing, would anyone today start a magazine that reports on what happened last week? Newsweek is right to decide that rather than attempting coverage it will focus on being interesting. The problem is that there’s an over-supply of interesting now, and it is likely to remain a buyer’s market.

[Tags: journalism media news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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David Isenberg questions the veracity of the Wall Street Journal’s report about Iran using Nokia equipment to do deep packet inspection. Interesting on its own and also as yet another example of smart bloggers raising journalism’s bar.

[Tags: iran david_isenberg citizen_media journalism media ]

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