The Obama administration has turned its “online town hall” events into a parody of what they were intended to be, which specifically were supposed to include a genuine effort to include questions from the citizens of this nation in an open process, not the bogus pre-selection system that is turning into an Obama trademark. Yesterday’s health care event, for example, included just three questions from online contributors (and only eight in all, notes the TechPresident blog) in an event that makes some of George W. Bush’s staged events seem almost spontaneous.
When called on this by White House journalists, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs responded with arrogance. He demonstrated not just contempt for the Washington press corps (which does often earn contempt) but also to the administration’s promises of openness and bottom-up accountability. A shabby performance, and worrisome if you care about how this White House will behave when its current public favor diminishes, as it surely will.
So when you watch one of these events in the future, be aware that there’s barely a shred of the give-and-take we were promised. This White House would rather rely, at least for now, on the kind of staging that previous presidents used so often, and which candidate Obama and many of his aides and supporters found so correctly offensive.
Inadequate journalism often leads to worse journalism. A case in point is Wired.com’s follow-up on a dubious Wall Street Journal story about alleged “deep packet inspection” (DPI) — an invasive digital surveillance method — on Iran’s mobile-Internet users.
Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the U.S.
The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.
Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S. government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the government to spy on internet users.
According to the Journal, Iranian officials have used deep-packet surveillance to snoop on the content of e-mail, VoIP calls and other online communication as well as track users’ other online activity, such as uploading videos to YouTube. Iranian officials are said to be using it to monitor activists engaged in protests over the country’s recent disputed presidential election, though the Journal said it couldn’t confirm whether Iran was using the Nokia Siemens Networks equipment for this purpose or equipment from another maker.
Nokia Siemens has denied that it provided Iran with such technology.
But similar technology is being installed at ISPs in the U.S.
The piece goes on at some length to discuss the reasonable concern about the threat posed by deep-packet inspection by ISPs, acting on their own initiative or for government-mandated surveillance.
But wait. The Journal’s weasel-worded original story itself (buried far down in the piece) acknowledges that the DPI may not be happening at all, at least not in the way the story strongly suggests or by the company it implicates. Read David Isenberg’s detailed explanations (here, here) to understand why the Journal story is so problematic.
Consider the sequence in the Wired follow-up:
1. Cite the Journal story and describe its contents with no hint that credible outside observers, such as Isenberg (a friend of mine), have major questions about its accuracy.
2. Add a sentence saying that the company accused of providing the gear to the Iran dictators flatly denies the report. (Don’t bother to mention that the only named source in the original Journal piece loudly denounced it on his own blog.)
3. Then pivot: Talk about US companies that are installing DPI equipment at ISPs, as if this proves the original point.
If Wired wanted to write about American ISPs using DPI — a topic that deserves wide attention — it shouldn’t peg the story to a Journal report that is so open to question, at least not without noting that people who understand the technology have raised serious questions about it.
Iran’s dictators are a murderous bunch; I have no doubt about that. Nor is there doubt that western telecom companies are selling dictators surveillance tools; they’ve been doing it for years — and in my view they are morally culpable in the misuse of those technologies. In the matter at hand, we don’t know for sure what’s going on.
For what it’s worth, I consider Wired’s Threat Level to be a normally credible and well-reported blog. But journalists should try harder to be careful on matters like this. Sloppiness in these circumstances can undermine our trust in everything else they report.
My new definition for “brazen” starts with a pointer to a column by Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, who says that “Tighter copyright law could save newspapers” — a tirade against online news aggregation that fails in logic and honesty.
Maybe her Cleveland readers know this, but you might not, and there’s no disclosure in the column (though you will find it buried in a Schultz bio on the Plain Dealer website): Schultz is married to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who is in a position to do something about her proposal. And if the column doesn’t qualify as lobbying, it’s awfully close. (UPDATE: My friend Jeff Jarvis discussed this issue in his blog post, where Schultz responded in the comments and drew this response from Jeff.)
Other people, notably Kathy Gill, have ably deconstructed some of the more egregious elements in Schultz’s piece. My own disgust with it is the sense of entitlement it reflects, from a journalist whose career rose in large part on the monopoly business model that enriched a few newspaper companies while ultimately impoverishing true public debate about important matters.
And a commenter on the column noted what appeared at the end of the column online, namely a list of links begging readers to send the story to the attention of friends and, ahem, online aggregators and social-networking sites, plus a permalink that further begs folks to link to the piece:
The entitlement Schultz expresses stems from her belief — also apparently irony-free — that newspapers have some fundamental right to survive, and her evidence of this is a (wonderful) series of articles by a Plain Dealer reporter that led to the ouster of a corrupt local sheriff):
(M)any of us wondered aloud how much longer newspapers could support this kind of journalism. It’s an anxiety that is graying hairlines in newsrooms across the country.
Journalists are not broken, but the business model that used to sustain the work we do is toeing the cliff. The Internet poses challenges we never anticipated. The question is: What will save us?
Her answer, relying on advice from brothers David and Daniel Marburger, respectively a newspaper lawyer and an Arkansas academic, would require a severe rewriting of copyright law. They’d let newspaper publishers and other content “originators” have sole rights to exploit the information, which sounds simple but is absurd on its face?
It’s not just impractical, given a world where we all have multiple ways to talk about what we’ve seen and multiple ways to find what others talk about. It’s also dangerous, because it would wound or wipe out much of what gives the Internet its journalistic value in the first place, namely linking and citation, which the the Marburgers call “unfair competition with unjust enrichment.”
To save newspapers’ monopoly profits, and to thereby save what’s left of newspaper journalism, these meddlers would severely wound journalism and crimp academic research — and create all kinds of other mischief in the public sphere.
Why? Because as newspaper journalists and editors have been doing for years, we all stand on each others’ shoulders in the creation of information that, at some point, becomes journalism. We observe. We discuss. We cite. We point. We quote. Then others pull together various pieces of this and we have news, commentary and more.
We are all “parasitic,” in the deliberately inflammatory word of the Marburgers and their credulous scribe. This is the very nature of how journalism and scholarship happen.
Schultz, whom I met several years ago and found intellectually impressive, shows none of that here. She demonstrates a shallow understanding of her own craft, and no grasp whatever about how a networked world can work for us all. As a former newspaper columnist, I’m embarrassed for her.
The cover price of a newspaper acknowledges that news has a value and a price worth paying. Yet that idea sometimes seems remote to a Web-savvy generation brought up to believe that their laptops offer a portal to a cost-free universe.
Cowell’s point is muddled by reality. He’s making the same assumptions — and mistakes — that newspaper journalists have been making for a long time now. They don’t realize that they’ve already been, for practical purposes, giving away what they produce.
Cowell doesn’t mention that the advertising is the most important part of the financial equation in paying for journalism, not the cover price. It has been so for as long as he’s been a journalist. The word “Advertise” appears three times on this Web page (and “Advertisements” once), but not in Cowell’s column.
In most newspapers ads overwhelm the circulation revenues, the money people pay for subscriptions and single-copy sales. Newspaper publishers have trained readers to assume that the news is all but free.
As many folks have noted innumerable times, the monopoly/oligopoly model of news, when advertisers had few if any choices, is gone. Newspapers can’t extract the kinds of fat, unjustified profits they once did from advertisers anymore, especially on the Web, so they model of using monopoly profits to pay for some journalism doesn’t work anymore. This is sad for journalists, and in the short run for the public, but it’s also reality.
Cowell compounds his error by referring to the “cover price” of a newspaper, which is itself hugely misleading in most cases. The single-copy cover price isn’t close to what most people pay for newspapers, because most who buy the printed edition do so with subscriptions that are deeply discounted from the cover price. True, the Times costs more from a news rack than most other papers, but people who subscribe pay much less than the news-rack price there, too.
None of this is to say that journalism, or at least the journalism business, isn’t in trouble. It is. Nor am I saying that journalism doesn’t have value. It does.
We subscribe to the Times at home, gladly, and will continue to do so. (I own some NYT stock, a tiny amount that keeps losing value.) But we don’t pay anything close to the cost of the journalism, and never have. The Times’ problem isn’t so much that people don’t understand the value of what it produces journalistically; it’s that the paper conditioned everyone to have this misunderstanding in the first place. Now that economic conditions have changed, it’s asking everyone to fix the situation it helped create.
One of the fun events at the Knight News Challenge conference at MIT this week has been spur-of-the-moment ideas for new projects, products and services. The project ideas are listed here — and the list is proof that good ideas are in surplus these days.
Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, and I came up with the following proposal:
Circuit Rider Project: Community accountability via circuit-riding forensic accountant.
Using Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix as a test bed and template, we will hire a forensic accountant. (Forensic accounting is to accounting as investigative journalism is to journalism.) He or she will dig into state and regional governmental spending, with the help of crowd-sourced tips from citizens and bureaucrats, to spot any malfeasance (and to prevent it by virtue of watchdog deterrent effect).
We will bring this person together with journalists and potential media partners — while making findings open to all — to promote coverage that members of the community will see and act on. This fills a growing gap in Arizona and, if this test works as envisioned, in other states, metro areas and non-metro regions.
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and Bill’s support means that we’re a lot more likely to try it. I’ll let you know if and how we proceed.
In an era where we have nearly unlimited amounts of information, one of the key issues is how to separate the good from the bad, the reliable from the unreliable, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, the useful from the irrelevant. Unless we get this right, the emerging diverse media ecosystem won’t work well, if at all.
I’ve long believed that we’ll need to find ways to combine popularity — a valuable metric in itself — with reputation. This sounds easier than it is, because reputation is an enormously complex problem. But whoever gets this right is going to be a huge winner in the marketplace.
What do we mean by reputation? In this context, we mean many things. If someone points to a news article, for example, we have to consider reputation at many levels. Among them:
What “media outlet” — traditional, blog, whatever — is behind the article? If it’s the Economist, the reputation starts at a high level. If it’s Joe’s Blog, and I have no idea who Joe is or what he’s (if the poster is a he) has been doing for the past few years, the reputation starts lower, much lower.
What is the reputation of the writer/video-maker/etc.? I give a generally high rating to New York Times reporters, but I can name a few who’ve wrecked their credibility with me over the past few years. This can vary even within organizations.
How about the sources of the information cited in the article or broadcast or whatever? When the Times quotes unnamed sources who have clear axes to grind, I actively disbelieve what the Times is reporting. When it quotes a person I believe to be generally trustworthy, I put it in a different place on my credibility scale. Too bad newspapers don’t use footnotes; and way too bad they are so reluctant to link on their websites to more directly relevant source material. Bloggers don’t have this problem.
Then there’s the reputation of the person recommending that I pay attention to the report. If David Weinberger suggests that I read something, I have much more reason to trust that it’ll at least be interesting, because I trust David so much, and this trust goes exponentially higher when he’s recommending something about which I know he has domain expertise.
Other reputations of interest in this sphere could include the collective reputation of the readers or followers of the publication or person. The readers of the Economist know a lot about a lot of things the magazine covers, and the fact that they pay the high subscription price tells me I should give the publication more of my trust.
Measuring reputation is another rub. It’s incredibly hard, and currently the tools for measuring are at best crude.
In a world of Web APIs and other emerging tools, however, there are glimmerings of hope. I’ve been begging people at eBay for years — to no avail — to make people’s reputations as buyers and sellers portable. By that I mean let people create a badge of some kind, with some real data behind it, and let them post that badge on their own work and make the data available in a granular way.
Your eBay reputation is not an exact proxy for your general trustworthiness, as a person or as an information creator. For one thing, we know that people are constantly gaming eBay’s system. For another, how you behave in buying and selling goods online doesn’t say how you’ll behave in other situations. But at the very least it’s a useful thing to know.
Your Karma at Slashdot are another useful metric. So are the individual users’ contributions in the collaborative filtering at Digg and Reddit. Useful, but clearly not sufficient by themselves to let you make big decisions about someone’s overall integrity.
But combine a bunch of reputation systems and you’re getting somewhere — and a world of APIs and interactive data suggest at least the possibility of finding a way to blend various measures into something that is more useful than what we have. At least I hope so.
Consider British Airways’ Metrotwin – London & New York, a site that has information about London and New York, the airline’s two most important cities. It’s the best evidence yet that all companies with a public presence — which is to say almost all companies, period — are becoming media companies in addition to their core businesses
At his New Media Education Summit, Richard Edelman, CEO of the PR company that bears his family’s name, made the key observation any business can boost its value by using new media. Among the projects he cited as evidence was Metrotwin, an Edelman client..
The site incorporates information of various kinds, including ratings, from various sources including users. I wonder if it can possibly attain any kind of critical mass. It seeks to serve a niche, but to do so in a deep way.
The site notably asks for contributors: “We are looking for people to become contributing editors. We will reward you with BA Miles.” Now that’s a reward capable of drawing people.
Call it social media, new media or just plain media. The state of media today is not as grim as you’ve been hearing.
That’s what I’m planning to tell the Edelman New Media Academic Summit tomorrow in Washington, where Richard Edelman and his team at the largest privately held PR agency in the world are continuing to break ground in their field. They’re hosting a group of educators from America’s journalism schools. The gathering’s purpose is to discuss
how companies, organizations and media effectively engage all their stakeholders through social media; to help academics inform their curricula with insights into the rapidly evolving communications landscape; and to identify the skills students need to pursue a career in the communications industry.
The students I teach leave our course with some understanding of this, or at least I hope they do. But it’s fair to say that schools of journalism and communication, which typically are the places that teach PR and advertising, are somewhat behind the curve when it comes to helping students take what they already know — social media participation — and apply it to the world of persuasion that they’re going to enter.
I told our panel moderator, Shelby Coffey, the former LA Times executive editor who’s now a Senior Fellow and Trustee at the Newseum in Washington, that my approach to the panel title, “The State of the Media: Today and Tomorrow,” would be slightly contrarian in that I don’t think things are as bad as so many people are saying, and I’m confident (though not certain) that we’re going to get this right in the long run.
So I’m going to say the following:
First, let’s not mourn newspapers and local news broadcasts, though they clearly are dying, at least in the forms they once took in a media era of monopoly and oligopoly. I don’t necessarily cheer this development. It’s clearly leading to some loss, at least temporarily, of journalism that has shown great value in the past. But I do celebrate the growing diversity of the news ecosystem, which will be more resilient and healthy than the relative monoculture of the recent past.
Second, as noted in the post below this one, we’re seeing a slew of experiments and development of new media forms and business models, accompanied by an entrepreneurial spirit — spurred in part by the demise of what we’ve had — that is truly new in recent times. We will surely have enough “content” in the future, and lots of it will be excellent content at that.
Third, all the great new journalism and information won’t matter if we don’t fix the even bigger problem. It’s not so much a supply problem but a demand issue going forward. We have created a lazy society when it comes to having trustworthy information, and our cultural laziness will lead us to even deeper ruin if we don’t turn the passive consumers of the past half-century into active users of media in the future. As noted here before, that is a major goal of the Mediactive project.
Finally, journalism and communications education needs to incorporate this shift into our core curriculum. In many respects, our students are way ahead of us, namely, as noted, their implicit understanding of social media. In our programs, and in others, understanding how to use media will be a skill that pays off during their entire lifetimes.
The recent panic over the demise of newspapers has led to a predictable flurry of omigod, now-what speculation. We’re being treated to one hype-filled piece after another about this or that startup or project that has the potential to save, revolutionize or do something really, really special to move us into the future of news and information.
Let’s take a deep breath, calm down and understand what’s going on here. There’s no way of knowing which of these worthy enterprises, products and projects — and hundreds or thousands more like them that already exist or will soon — will be around in a decade. The fact of their existence is what’s exciting, not their individual prospects.
We’ve become accustomed to a media world dominated by monopolies and oligopolies. So we — and especially the paid journalists who remain in the craft — tend to imagine that just a few big institutions will rise from the sad rubble of the journalism business.
That’s not where it’s going, at least not anytime soon. We’re heading into an incredibly messy but also wonderful period of innovation and experimentation that combines technology and people and pushes great and outlandish ideas into the real world. The result will a huge number of failures but also a large number of successes.
This is why I’ve grown more and more certain that we will not lack for a supply of quality news and information. This comes with two caveats. First, we need a solid supply of people who are willing to take some responsibility for getting quality news and information. Second, we can’t let government and/or big media take away the freedoms we now have to experiment.
Meanwhile, the next time you see or hear a story about this or that magic wand that someone is waving to save journalism, appreciate the entrepreneurial or technical or journalistic imagination that its founders have shown. But consider it just one small step along a long, long road to our future.
I’ve long believed that we’ll need to find ways to combine popularity — a valuable metric in itself — with reputation. This sounds easier than it is, because reputation is an enormously complex problem. But whoever gets this right is going to be a huge winner in the marketplace.
Consider British Airways’ 
