UPDATED

As everyone knows, the nation’s scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers have all gone into hibernation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This has given the Federal Trade Commission the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear.

This week, the commission is holding a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? — the purpose of which is “to explore how the Internet has affected journalism.”

The agenda — bizarrely available only in PDF format; would someone at the agency who has a clue kindly tell the public-affairs people that it’s okay to post such things in HTML? — suggests great breadth. Speakers include old-guard media barons like Rupert Murdoch and budding barons like Arianna Huffington, but also many of the traditional and new-media folks whose names show up again and again in places like Jim Romenesko‘s Poynter blog. It’s an impressive list (and, disclosure, includes a bunch of friends as well as two university colleagues).

You’ll also note, however, that the schedule assures little depth. The time slots are arranged in a rapid-fire manner, with keynote-ish speakers having no real time to offer much more than their standard-issue talking points. Panels are even more lickety-split, with nine members in 90 minutes; let’s see, that’s about 8 minutes each plus introductions and no audience Q&A, or 6 minutes each if you want to (very briefly) include the audience.

The event comes under the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning. Here’s its mission:

The Office of Policy Planning assists the Commission to develop and implement long-range competition and consumer protection policy initiatives and advises staff on cases raising new or complex policy and legal issues.

One of the Office of Policy Planning’s primary roles involves competition advocacy, submitting filings supporting competition principles to state legislatures, regulatory boards, and officials; state and federal courts; other federal agencies; and professional organizations. The Office also organizes public workshops and issues reports on cutting-edge competition and consumer protection topics, addressing questions of substantive antitrust law, industry-specific practices, and significant national and international policy debates.

In addition to the Office of Policy Planning, several offices throughout the Commission, including the Bureau of Competition’s Office of Policy and Coordination and the Policy Studies unit within the Office of the General Counsel, also provide policy advice.

This has what to do with journalism, exactly?

Ah, we learn more in a Federal Register Notice (also PDF-only, naturally). The notice observes, in a promising start, that the Internet has created unparalleled possibilities.

The commission could have stopped there, and not bothered to hold the workshop. It could have recognized that we’re in the early days of a transition from one set of business models (most of which have not been very competitive) to an emerging, hyper-competitive sphere. There’s never been more reason for optimism than there is today, given the massive amount of journalistic and business experimentation going on all around us.

But the commission staff has much to fret about, spurred in large part by the incessant whining of the newspaper industry in recent times. (Could it also have been influenced by the fact that the FTC chairman is married to a Washington Post reporter columnist? No, this obviously had absolutely no bearing on anything.) The commission has discovered that the advertising model which once supported many kinds of journalism has eroded. Quoting several economists, the workshop notice says “public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.”

Market failure? What about the market failure — which as far as I can tell never got any attention from a succession of FTC people during the past half-century — of the monopolies and oligopolies created by media organizations during that period? The public affairs journalism was, for the most part, a modest spinoff of the extortionate advertising prices they charged when they had near-absolute market power to charge anything they wished. Only when there’s real competition does the FTC get interested.

The commission, inevitably, is asking for opinions on whether federal taxpayers should subsidize journalism more directly than the indirect subsidies of low postal rates for print; giveaways of publicly owned airwaves (spectrum) to broadcasters; the odious “Newspaper Preservation Act” granting partial antitrust immunity to community newspapers, etc. Several of the speakers are surely going to rise to that bait with a loud Yes. (Believe it or not, meanwhile, the commission is asking if Congress should give journalism-related businesses even more antitrust immunity. Good grief.)

There’s only one subsidy that makes sense, only one that wouldn’t put government meddling squarely into the practice of journalism, an inevitable result of the direct subsidies being pushed by well-meaning but misguided media thinkers. It’s not on the agenda, however.

Taxpayer-assisted infrastructure — especially the postal system and low rates for sending publications — helped create the newspaper business, and enabled a lot of other commerce. Bring forward that logic to high-speed Internet access for all Americans, and enable the 21st Century communications infrastructure for all competitors.

As it is, we’re moving toward a market failure of frightening proportions, as the telecom industry clamps down, or threatens to, on people’s ability to use Internet connections as they see fit. We’re moving toward a media business consolidation that would terrify make any real champion of open markets: a cable-phone duopoly.

The Federal Communications Commission has jurisdiction over telecom, and is looking at the issue. But when it comes to how journalism will thrive in (not just survive) the Internet age, this should be high on any list of competitive issues of interest to agencies that push for competitive markets.

The word “broadband” is nowhere to be found in the FTC’s planning document. Coming from an agency that says it wants to promote competition, that speaks volumes.

UPDATE: Geoff Cowan and David Westphal write that governments support journalism to the tune of more than $1 billion a year, and note one particularly targeted form: legal advertising that goes to dominant print organizations. (They also claim that it’s a common myth that there’s no government support for media, but they don’t cite anyone of prominence who’s saying that.) They are all in favor of continuing government assistance, more so that I am, but at least they strongly urge that it remain content-neutral, something that I strongly doubt could happen if direct subsidies ever happen.

It’s Monday morning. America is getting ready to sharply escalate the war in Afghanistan. The health care system careens toward collapse, with legislation pending that may well make problems worse. The global economy may be in much worse shape than most people had imagined.

Yet what’s the Story of the Day? It’s the minor car accident of a celebrity golfer who — this makes “journalists” really angry — chooses to exercise his constitutional rights by not talking with the police until he’s good and ready, if ever.

Journalists bemoan the fact that the public doesn’t take them seriously anymore. Then they turn around and show why.

More than seven weeks since it ran an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake. Shameful.

Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and now one of the Washington Post’s assemblage of conservative columnists, bemoans today what his headline writer calls “journalism’s slow, sad death.” It’s yet another paean to the demise of monopoly/oligopoly media that, at its best, did perform occasional acts of public service. (Like so many pieces of its ilk, the column complains, among other things, that all those bloggers and other Internet news sites are living off the work of actual reporters; but the column contains no actual reporting other than a visit to a museum of journalism.) He writes:

Professional journalism is not like the buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value.

It wasn’t economic progress, but technological progress, that did in the buggy-whip industry. Did anyone ever mourn it, much less miss it, other than the people it employed and the communities where they lived?

Journalism’s social value is real. But the social value of the journalism business? Of the professional class of journalists that rose to claim white-collar, insider status and abused it so royally?

I suspect that what Gerson really misses is the subservient lapdog the Washington press corps, with a few honorable institutional exceptions, became during the early part of this decade.  And what, for example, is the social value of his own newspaper’s continuing refusal to acknowledge, much less correct, an egregious error on the editorial page that employs him?

My disgust with American newspapers grows with every such woe-is-us piece. They complain and complain about what we’re losing, and howl at the moon over the flaws of what’s emerging, even as they so often fail at remotely living up to their own proclaimed standards.

In my last posting, “That Hallowed Standard of Accuracy: Oops“, I deconstructed, at perhaps tedious length, a column by a Tennessee editorial page editor, Tom Bohs, who got so many things wrong in a piece that briefly discussed me and my work. The errors included misspelling my name and the name of a university with which I was once affiliated, and those were emblematic of the pure sloppiness and incoherence of the overall piece.

My name and the university’s have been corrected in the online column. But there is not even a hint that anything was wrong before — a correction method that holds ethical transparency in contempt –and none of the other points was addressed.

What kind of standards do these news organizations have? They don’t seem close to the allegedly professional ones Bohs and Gerson claim for their craft’s traditional members.

For years I’ve argued that we need to keep the good things that newspapers and the (vanishingly few) good broadcast journalism outlets do in the course of their work. We do need good journalism, but it’s increasingly clear that we’ll have a lot of it from the new entrants in the digital media ecosystem.

As for the old guard, I’ve just about given up caring. Their organizations are committing slow-motion suicide. Maybe the people left in the business, apart from the few serious innovators, lack the imaginations and/or talent, or are so overworked by corporate bosses that they can’t even try. But I’m not sure anymore what we’d really lose if their organizations all died tomorrow.

(UPDATE: Since I posted this on Nov. 24, the two misspellings in the newspaper column discussed below have been corrected, without a hint (in the online version, anyway) that there was ever a mistake in the first place. The other inaccuracies and questionable information remain in place.)

My heart goes out, at least a little, to Tom Bohs, editorial page editor of the Jackson Sun in Tennessee. He is undoubtedly wishing he’d spent a little more time on a column he published this week.

His piece, entitled “Citizen journalist, pick your beat.” featured some standard, boilerplate stereotypes — such as people with mobile-phone cameras who contribute what they shoot to “real” media organizations like, uh, the Sun — with just the barest effort to acknowledge the enormous variety and in some cases quality of non-traditional offerings that are diversifying the media ecosystem. Overall, the column comes off as yet another semi-informed member of the old guard wishing he could turn back the clock. No big deal.

So why am I feeling some sympathy for Bohs? It’s because of his column’s final four paragraphs, which may well have earned him a spot in the Irony Hall of Fame, or at least the Media Criticism wing.

Bohs wrote:

To give you a little perspective, however, the guy who folks say invented modern citizen journalism is former San Jose Mercury News journalist Dan Gilmour. He was a technology columnist for the newspaper which operates deep in the heart of Silicon Valley. He allegedly wrote the first newspaper online blog. Then he wrote a book about citizen journalism titled ‘We the Media.’ Then he got out of the news business.

I’m not sure what that means. Today, Gilmour runs an operation called the Center for Citizen Media at UC Berkely. I guess he figured with all these citizens running around doing his job, he needed to find a new line of work, teaching them to do his former job – for free.

As the news business continues to evolve at the mercy of technology, citizen journalism is going to play a major role. Here is a simple guideline to help you evaluate what you read on the blogs and forums, chats and tweets. It is a guideline old school journalists still live by: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

I hope our new era of citizen journalists adopt the standard, as well.

Oh, my, where to begin…

• I don’t know which folks say I invented modern citizen journalism. I’m not one of them. I’ve definitely been among the many people who’ve worked to help it happen, and to make it as good as possible for everyone involved.
• My last name is spelled Gillmor, not Gilmour.
• I “allegedly wrote the first newspaper online blog”? (Copy editors: All blogs are online.) Not sure what the “allegedly” is all about, except possibly to suggest some faint unseemliness or false claim. Who’s alleged to have said it, anyway? Mine may well have been the first blog by a daily newspaper journalist, but that’s all I’ll claim.
• Aha, a true fact: I did write We the Media.
• No, I didn’t then get out of the news business. I started what turned out to be an ill-fated Bay Area news site, Bayosphere, which was definitely part of the news business. I started the Center for Citizen Media (see below for current status), one of the purposes of which was to help extend the news business. I’ve invested in and/or advised a number of enterprises — some for-profit and some not-for-profit — that have been deeply involved in the news and information sphere. I’ve been a paid speaker or consultant for several newspaper companies, and wrote occasional columns for the Financial Times (which I trust Bohs will concede is part of the real News Business) and still contribute periodically to other publications. My current position at Arizona State University is all about the news business: working with students studying journalism, business and other disciplines to help them create what we hope will be some of tomorrow’s lasting local-information enterprises. I’m more in the news business than I ever was as a columnist for a California newspaper.
• The Center for Citizen Media still exists, but is mostly dormant at this point. It was affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley (that’s Berkeley with an “e” between the “l” and “y”), as well as Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is now affiliated with Arizona State. I haven’t been affiliated in any way with UC Berkeley for almost two years at this point, though I’m still fond of my former colleagues and students.
• At no point in my work on citizen journalism have I pitched it as a replacement for traditional journalism. From the beginning I’ve said it would be a great addition, in its myriad forms, to the ecosystem, and competitive only in some spaces. I’ve also said, again and again in talks and in public writing, that while I hoped citizens would help traditional news organizations by participating in community journalism, I was and remain flatly opposed to business models that assume citizens are offering nothing but free labor for others to monetize.
• Who’s running around doing my old job as a business and technology journalist? Lots of people, including traditional journalists and online-only creative types whose work has greatly increased the amount and in many cases the quality of tech information. Some bloggers are doing it for little or no money, for lots of reasons — they may be in the business; they may be building their brands; they may just love to cover a small niche — while other online journalists are making serious money at it, building important and well-funded new media organizations. The very last thing I figured when I co-taught a course at Berkeley was that I needed the job because citizen journalists had priced me out of the market. (When Bohs says “I guess”, that’s a point I won’t argue.)
• The news business is clearly being affected by technology. It is not at the mercy of technology. Journalists will continue to do journalism, using the evolving tools of the trade in enterprises that adapt to change, long after newspapers have faded from the scene. The only news people at the utter mercy of technology are the ones who have given up on themselves.

And now we come to Bohs’ stern advice — preceded, to be fair, by an acknowledgment that citizen journalism is here to stay — to all those who need to decide what to make of what they find online. Follow the lead of the pros, he says: Don’t trust it unless you’ve checked it out.

Bohs could have checked out everything he said about me and got so absurdly wrong, even without picking up the phone and calling. He could have used that new-fangled Google thing, where typing in “Dan Gillmor” — or even “Dan Gilmour” — returns links to dangillmor.com (the top one with the correct spelling, third on the list for the one Bohs used), where I lay out in some detail exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few years and am doing now, with links to the blogs where I’ve been saying what I actually believe about journalism and its future, not what other people may claim (or imagine) I’ve said. Even my Wikipedia entry, which has some small inaccuracies, has my current gig listed correctly.

This is why Bohs, who clearly cares about journalism, surely must have had a sinking feeling in his gut last night or this morning when he discovered his mistakes. I hope he’ll turn that into a renewed dedication to the principles in which he says he believes.

My colleague Steve Doig captured a truly bizarre chart broadcast today on Fox News. Add the numbers to understand why.

The photo at left is from the back cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It exemplifies much of what can be right with American journalism, and some of what’s wrong, too.

The part to celebrate, of course, is CNN’s decision to highlight some eminently praise-worthy people. Yes, there’s an element of cliche about it — running the show in Thanksgiving — but so what? If we can’t give thanks for (some of) the people who deserve it on our best holiday, when can we?

The best part of the program, at least from the promos and articles about the people being honored,  is that they’re “regular folks” doing out-of-the-ordinary things. (Military personnel seem to be ineligible for these awards, which is an odd omission, but the honorees are certainly impressive in their own right.) You can find instructions on the website on how to donate your own time and/or money to various causes championed by the honorees. All in all, CNN is doing something good for the world with this event.

But look again at this image. Who’s that towering over the honorees? Why, it’s Anderson Cooper, the host of the program. Apparently he and his network are the real heros.

Look, I know this is about promoting an event. And I  know that Cooper is the face people will recognize.

But the way this is framed tells the story of network “journalism” today — a celebrity-infused system that conflates news readers with the people they cover.

Anderson Cooper may well be a fine journalist. I can’t really say, as I’ve given up on CNN and the other U.S. “news” networks for anything but stenography for the rich and powerful, fluff and, occasionally, breaking news where the events tell their own stories.

If Cooper is a indeed good journalist, or even a respectable one, this image should make him cringe. And someday, sooner than later, he should say so out loud.

The Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project has launched the Online Media Legal Network (OMLN):

a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

This is a valuable initiative. It will help many more people than the individuals who receive assistance from volunteer lawyers and law students in specific cases.

One of the common misconceptions in digital media over the past few years has been the notion that bloggers may be somehow exempt from the laws that apply to other forms of publishing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The laws aren’t only about defamation, though that’s where the biggest threats to independent journalists can be found — in part because the independents don’t have legal teams at their disposal. Some plaintiffs have sued or threatened to sue largely to shut down criticism, not because they’ve actually been defamed, and just the threat of a lawsuit is often enough to shut down legitimate speech.

There are lots of other legal issues you need to think about if you publish on the Web, including fair use, freelance agreements, setting up businesses and the like. The new network will help with those issues, too, among others.

The CMLP has lined up an impressive collection of lawyers and law clinics for this initiative. They all deserve thanks as well.

(Note: I’m a CMLP co-founder and advisor.)

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he’s involved.

A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn’t get critical mass and is being closed.

Now they’ve announced Peer News’ more important move — a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community.

Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching — they aim for early 2010 — based on deep research: “talking to a lot of people in the industry about journalism and how we might be able to have an impact, listening and learning as much as we can.”

I’m one of the people Pierre has talked with, but I’m not privy to the details of the new venture. In a conversation last evening, he did say this will be service combining professional journalists and citizen journalists in “a commercial model that hasn’t been tried yet.”

Tantalizing, no? Let’s focus for a second on the word “commercial,” because Pierre and team are going for something that seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor for local news startups, the notion that they can and should be profitable. Not-for-profits are springing up in various places, and while Pierre is happy to see them he also believes it’s essential to find solid for-profit models for sustainable media.

One message is for the local newspapers: Watch out. Pierre has analyzed the Hawaii media market and sees enough advertising money is going toward journalism in Honolulu “to fund a high quality operation” — but clearly not the kind that dominates the revenue stream today, namely the local newspapers.

Peer News will operate in the leanest possible way compatible with doing solid journalism and community information. It will involve social media in a big way as well. (The Omidyar Network, the investing and charitable arm of Pierre and his wife, Pam, has been deep into socially valuable media for a long time. Count on them bringing what they’ve learned into Peer News.)

Plainly, the Hawaii launch is a test bed, in part. If it works, expect more local versions in other places.

Peer News is looking for a founding editor. My advice has been to find someone local, if at all possible, but especially to find someone excellent. If you’re interested, here’s where you can find out more.

One of the people who’ll be talking to editorial candidates is Howard Weaver, a former vice president of news at McClatchy. Howard has been consulting with Peer News and offers some perspective on his own blog, including this:

I’m interested for a lot of reasons, but I’d sum it up this way: the new venture intends to demonstrate that a digitally native, technologically fluent web organization can profitably serve targeted readers who want sophisticated journalism focused on local civic affairs.

Maybe Pierre and his team have cracked part of the code for sustainable digital journalism. Maybe not. But the fact that they’re going to try, with some serious resources behind the effort, is great news.

So I’m looking forward to following the progress of Peer News. So should anyone who’s interested in the future of journalism.

(Note: The Omidyar Network was a seed funder of my long-ago Grassroots Media (Bayosphere) project. It lost money.)

YouTube Direct is a platform to let online content providers, especially news organizations:

embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease. News organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand.

Essentially this lets anyone create the equivalent of CNN’s iReport operation. It’s a smart move by YouTube, and a welcome one in many respects.

But it’s the equivalent of iReport in another way that’s just as unfortunate as the original: no compensation for the video creators apart from a pat on the back.

In fact, it’s worse than that. Look at the terms of service at Channel 7 in Boston, one of YouTube’s partners, which include the following:

(W)hen you submit or post any material, you are granting us, and anyone authorized by us, a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, transmit, sell, exploit, create derivative works from, distribute and/or publicly perform or display such material, in whole or in part, in any manner or medium, now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose. The foregoing grant shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such posting or submission, including, but not limited to, rights under copyright, trademark, service mark, patent or other intellectual property law under any relevant jurisdiction.

As far as I can tell, none of the partners has even suggested an intention to pay anyone for what they submit. Which makes the tool a giveaway for the creator — and a windfall for the collector, not to mention YouTube, which cements its position in online video.

But there’s a silver lining. YouTube has open-sourced the platform. This means someone could add a feature the system desperately needs. I wrote about it a few months ago in this post.

To repeat what I said then, we need better ways:

to reward creators when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip.

Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I’ve seen so far, namely a real-time auction system.

The sites currently promoting citizen journalists’ work don’t offer anything of this sort, as far as I can tell. This isn’t to say I don’t like those sites, which include NowPublic and Demotix, because I like them a great deal. But someone needs to go further.

How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I’d imagine, would go like this:

Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the journalist, minus a cut to the auction service.

The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less.

Eventually, someone will do this kind of business — which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it’s sooner than later.

This is worth working on, and fast, before the news industry decides it has found a nifty way to make money on other people’s work.