This article was originally published on Salon on June 21, 2010.

CNN’s headlines reveal … something

This article was originally published on Salon on June 20, 2010.

Seeking real freedom of choice in a technology ecosystem where vendors are exerting more and more control

I’m not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period.

This is why, for more than a decade, I’ve been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple’s personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today.

So why am I about to migrate to Linux (aka GNU/Linux)? Because Apple is pushing me away, and because I value some principles, perhaps almost religiously, that affect other decisions.

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells — and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has “made mistakes” in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The “enlightened dictator” is fiction. And dangerous.

I realize that I won’t persuade the many people who prefer to live in gated communities, believing they can leave any time they wish. But switching costs will only get higher over time for those who choose to live in the Apple ecosystem.

As noted, I’ve been happy in the relatively free Mac world. But given the slowing pace of Mac OS development, there’s reason to believe Apple is mostly milking Mac OS users. Will it phase out serious PC development? Or will it eventually move its command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac? Apple says it’s committed to the Mac’s future. I’m not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player. (I’m a believer in tablets, and am planning to put my money there on the Android OS when tablet manufacturers adopt it in tablet-sized formats.)

So I’m looking for options in the personal-computing part of my life. Windows is one, of course, and Windows 7 is a truly fine piece of work by Microsoft’s recent operating-system standards, leagues better than Vista. But it’s impossible to fully trust Microsoft given its own history, not least its long and ever-deepening alliance with the control freaks of the Copyright Cartel, the commercial music, video, software and publishing industries.

That leaves, for practical purposes, Linux, which is freely available and not controlled by any one company. Volunteers around the world, who value freedom of choice and the ability to modify what they use, have created an ecosystem of their own — software based on the concept that you, not Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, should have control over what you own.

Linux is anything but a walled garden. It’s almost nothing but choice, with all the good and bad that comes with it. Linux comes in all kinds of flavors. For now, I’ve settled on Ubuntu as the OS most likely to be in my own future. The Ubuntu project, founded by Mark Shuttleworth, appeals to me for many reasons, not least the project team’s devotion to making the software easy to use.

Linux runs on many kinds of PCs. The Mac may be a wonderful combination of hardware and software, but the hardware is definitely lagging these days. I’ve purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad X201, a laptop that strikes me as the ideal balance of portability and power. It’s much lighter than my MacBook Pro, yet has a great set of hardware features that Apple can’t seem to provide in its own laptops despite their high prices. (Example: The ThinkPad has a reader for flash-memory cards.)

Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s latest version, called “Lucid Lynx,” won’t run properly yet on the X201. The machine is just too new, and has some hardware Ubuntu doesn’t yet support. I’m assured this will change in the relatively near future, but Ubuntu’s lack of support for such a popular computer is an example of how much progress the project, for all its immense value, needs to make.

Meanwhile, Lucid Lynx is running nicely in a “virtual machine” on my MacBook Pro. I’ve been testing a variety of applications that could replace the Mac software I’ve come to rely on, though in some cases I can’t easily find adequate replacements (such as the blog-posting software I’m using to create this post).

I’m planning to make this transition slow and systematic. And I’ll be blogging periodically about the process. These postings won’t be aimed at geeky folks, but rather at others like me who believe in true freedom of choice in a world where powerful institutions are trying to lure us — or force us — into their walled gardens.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 15, 2010.

Eroding newspaper business models represent markets that are working, not just failing

More than one speaker at today’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism has used the expression “market failure” to describe the eroding business model of local newspapers. Perhaps they’ve picked up on the FTC’s Federal Register Notice describing the purpose for this months-long initiative, in which economists say that “public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.”

There’s some truth in this, even though it’s far too early to assume that current trends will lead over the long term to less trustworthy information in the public affairs realm. (I believe the opposite, but the jury’s definitely out on this.) Framing the issue this way also buys into the mythology that we had a Golden Age of Journalism with ample public affairs reporting; even the biggest daily newspapers rarely covered governments outside several core jurisdictions in their markets.

For the privileged few journalists who lived in that era’s once-warm embrace, and especially for their employers, professional life was almost perfect — because that was an era of fabulously profitable monopolies and oligopolies. The public affairs journalism was real, and sometimes brilliant work that made a huge difference in local and national affairs. But relatively speaking to the available financial resources, it was a typically a modest spinoff of near-absolute market power the journalism companies boasted in the communities they claimed to (and sometimes did) serve.

But there’s another way to look at the media marketplace of those days. And from several other perspectives it’s safe to say that current trends amount to the overdue correction: that the pined-after Golden Age was in key ways itself the era of market failure.

If you were a local business that wanted broad reach into the community, you essentially had to pay the extortionate and always-rising display advertisement prices newspapers charged or the equally extortionate broadcast rates local TV affiliates could command. If you were an individual trying to sell a car or household item or rent out a spare room, you paid absurdly high prices for classified ads.

If your neighborhood or community or issue didn’t interest the newspaper, it might as well have been banned from the community agenda. And if you had something to say, and wanted the community to hear or read it, your options were to pray you could get a letter to the editor published, or an even-rarer Op-Ed piece, or put out fliers around town. If you tried starting a competing newspaper, you’d often find yourself at the untender mercies of Big Media companies that would squash you like a bug. Forget about starting a competing TV or radio station; the local frequencies were owned by people who never lost their licenses no matter what they did.

That was market failure, too. For everyone but the monopolists and oligopolists, the market was grossly inefficient and nearly impossible to change.

Impossible, that is, until the barriers to entry dropped. In print, desktop publishing was the first crack in the dam, but it didn’t fully open the market. That only happened when the Internet came along — when eBay and Craigslist and Monster and Google and a host of other nimble companies created Internet advertising alternatives that monopolists couldn’t begin to match; and when a zillion content-based start-ups started finding better ways to tell people the things they needed or wanted to know.

The FTC is the principal federal government agency charged with promoting competition in American commerce. I don’t recall that it paid much attention to the inefficient, uncompetitive markets we had during the dominant days of newspaper monopolies and cozy, government-protected broadcasting.

So why, when the market finally opens up to competition at a variety of levels, is it suddenly time to fret so urgently about a market failure in journalism?

As I said yesterday, I’d like to see the nation invest in powerful, open broadband infrastructure for every home and business in America — to give our 21st century communications and commerce a leg up in world competition. Even if that doesn’t happen,  but assuming the telecom duopoly doesn’t get to decide in a granular way what we can do online, the explosion of creation and innovation should tell us that we’re far too early to pronounce the death of journalism.

It could all go wrong. But at the moment, it seems to me, these markets are starting to look more like successes than failures.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 14, 2010.

With an open, robust data infrastructure, entrepreneurs will take care of the rest

In 1791, James Madison penned a short essay that foretold a long, and ongoing, financial involvement by government in journalism. Madison said, in part:

Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty, where these may be too extensive.

The following year, partly in response to Madison’s advice, Congress passed the Post Office Act of 1792. One of its key provisions — in what, looking back, was a pivotal development of a robust and free press in America — let newspaper publishers mail papers for extremely low prices. It was an outright subsidy, for a social purpose.

The goal wasn’t to give newspaper owners a special deal because they were nice people (many were not) or would support government positions (many did not). It was to help ensure that knowledge and commerce would spread as quickly, and as widely, as possible. The First Amendment generally forbade interference in what people could publish; the Post Office law provision helped make it financially feasible to ensure that other people could receive and read what was published.

By all historical accounts, the 1792 law worked. It was central to the rise of the nation as a society based on knowledge.

More than two centuries later, portions of the American journalism business — newspapers, in particular — have fallen on hard times that may, in many cases, be terminal. And we’re hearing a chorus of calls for a taxpayer bailout of the industry, on the grounds that their journalism plays such a vital role in society that taxpayers should subsidize it directly.

Some of most ardent pleas to that effect have come in front of the Federal Trade Commission, which embarked late last year on a series of workshops/hearings on journalism’s future. In the way it’s framed the issue — “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” — and the selection of people who’ve appeared, the FTC has given too much attention to the fearful interventionists, and an insufficient hearing to optimists who’d like to give markets more of a chance. A staff “discussion draft” of earlier workshops has drawn fierce criticism from Jeff Jarvis and others, reasonably in my view, for offering the briefest of nods in the direction of genuine innovation amid much heavy breathing about proposals to comfort dinosaurs.

Count me among the optimists who a) prefer to let markets go further along their disruptive path; but b) do so in the context of government intervention that would promote broader economic and social progress. So when I appear as a panelist tomorrow, I’ll offer two related messages:

First, direct subsidies for journalism are the wrong way to go, even dangerous. But we absolutely could use the kind of indirect help — taxpayer-funded deployment of high-capacity, wide-open broadband networks — that would be an analogue to the early American postal subsidies, and then some. This would be essential infrastructure, aimed at beefing up all 21st Century commerce and communications, including but not limited to journalism.

Second, if we got serious about broadband in this way, entrepreneurs would almost certainly come up with the journalism, including a variety of business models to augment or replace today’s, that would provide the public good we all agree comes with journalism and other trustworthy information.

To be fair, some of the subsidy advocates say they don’t want to prop up newspapers per se, though some of their remedies would do just that; others are less shy, and their explicit goal is to save newspapers.

I love newspapers. I worked in them for almost 25 years. But I’m not itching to bail out a business that is failing in large part because it was so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition. With a few exceptions, the newspaper industry essentially deserves to die at this point.

***

The broadband build-out that I and some others advocate would actually reduce government involvement in the journalism business if we did it right. Indeed, government influence, beyond the postal subsidies, has been a common thread in our history.

That’s inevitable in some ways. Governments play major roles in the success or failure of all kinds of enterprises. How corporations and not-for-profits do business, and which ones pay which taxes, are decided by lawmakers.

Journalism organizations have enjoyed their share of special treatment. Intervening via the mail, as noted above, was the linchpin. A few decades after the Post Office Act of 1792, Alexis De Tocqueville traveled around the states to research his pathbreaking volumes onDemocracy in America. He observed how widely knowledge had spread in a largely rural nation. The essential instrument of this, he explained: “The post, that great instrument of intellectual intercourse, now reaches into the backwoods.”

By the mid-1800s, says Bruce Bimber in his book, Information and American Democracy , our postal system became the most dependable and comprehensive in the world. It was an unprecedented exercise in governmental assistance, Bimber argues — “a kind of Manhattan project of communication” that helped fuel the rise of the first truly mass medium.

The key word in that Bimber quote is “communication.” Communications have always helped fuel commerce, learning and a variety of social interactions, well beyond the things we call journalism.

But support for media (and not just what now seems like traditional journalism) has been a long-running reality, not least because news proprietors had plenty to say about who got elected and re-elected. Even in the 20th Century, favorable mail rates helped countless magazines and newsletters stay solvent. Some did a lot better than that; the rise of the Time Inc. magazine empire was aided immeasurably by the fact that it could mail its publications at a cost to the publisher that barely began to cover the actual cost to the system. (In the 21st Century, Time’smaneuvering to ensure its own favorable rates, at the expense of publishers of smaller journals, made some economic sense but also had a odiously anticompetitive aspect.)

Newspapers have enjoyed other special federal and local advantages, meanwhile. One of the most flagrant special-interest favors in U.S. history has to be the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, in which newspaper publishers persuaded Congress and the Nixon administration to give the industry an exemption from antitrust laws. I spent more than a decade at a company that was helped by this law, so call me, too, a recipient of government largesse.

The gifts aren’t just federal. In many states, newspapers get special tax treatment, notably exemption from sales taxes. Last year, for example, the state of Washington cut newspapers’ main business taxes by 40 percent (to the same rate enjoyed by Boeing and timber companies, the state’s most powerful industries). As the University of Southern California’s Geoffrey Cowan and David Westphal observed late last year: ” Federal and state governments forego about $890 million a year on income and sales tax breaks to the newspaper industry, most of it at the state level. The actual figure is probably much higher because many states don’t report tax expenditure details.” Moreover, they wrote, public notices have been a huge revenue boost over the decades for newspapers, not to mention smaller favors like the placement of newspaper vending machines and boxes on public streets.

Print publications haven’t been the only beneficiaries of government favors. The gifts to the newspaper and magazine businesses are dwarfed in recent times by what broadcasters carved away from the taxpayers: namely free use of the public’s airwaves. Local TV broadcasters, in particular, took advantage of this windfall, worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the decades, to make money at a rate that made even newspaper shareholders envious. The unenforced “public service” requirement for all broadcasters has led to local TV “news” becoming a cesspool of violence, celebrity gossip and trivia that would have to improve to be mediocre; local newspapers are only now becoming as lousy as local TV news has been through its entire history.

So even though I personally find the direct-subsidy idea abhorrent for all kinds of reasons, I have to recognize that we’ve done a lot of it in the past. But poor policies don’t have to be the rule, do they?

***

The Federal Trade Commission’s most significant mandate is to promote competition. Strictly speaking, we might speculate that the 1792 Post Office Act and monopolization of first-class mail deterred competition from other entities in the postal-delivery market. There was a vital public value in what we did, however, and its outcome reminds us of a more recent federal endeavor with high relevance to our broadband data future: the Interstate highway system.

In the 1950s, America’s state and local highways were relatively well developed. What the nation decided it needed, and what corporate America couldn’t begin to provide, was a robust system of long-distance roads.

With data, the reverse is true: the long-distance data highways, the “backbone” networks, exist in abundance. What we really need now is better local conveyances, the ones running to and into our homes. Big telecom carriers say they’ll provide these connections — that is, theymay provide these connections if they feel like it — only if we allow them to control the content that flows on those lines.

Imagine if we’d given the interstates to corporations that could decide what kinds of vehicular traffic could use them. If you want to worry about a threat to the journalism of tomorrow, consider the power being collected by the so-called “broadband” providers right now.

If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money in ways that could help journalism, let’s make that benefit a byproduct of something much more valuable. Let’s build out our data networks the right way, by installing fiber everywhere we can possibly put it. Then, let private and public enterprises light it up.

And at that point, we can step back and allow real competition to reign, not the phony facsimile that passes for broadband in American today, a broadband future that the carriers have loudly proclaimed their intention to control at every level. I’m not minimizing the difficulty of making this work; what I’m describing would come with many complications. But this is worth doing, because we simply can’t trust our future to the cable-phone duopoly or the relatively weak competition we’ve seen from wireless providers.

The FTC can’t do much on its own about making sure broadband works the right way. That’s partly the Federal Communication Commission’s job. But it’s really the job of Congress, which keeps failing so spectacularly at almost everything else it touches these days.

But the FTC can offer policy recommendations, and sometimes Congress actually listens. So I hope the commission will push for the kind of progress the nation’s founders had the wisdom to see. Let’s create the conditions that help ensure a market of ideas and business models, based on one of the principle America stood on in its early days: widespread contributions and access to knowledge, as a foundation of the future.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 9, 2010.

The top California Republican candidates are a reminder of the tech industry’s less-admirable values

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who won their primary races to become California’s Republican candidates for governor and U.S. senator, came to great public visibility — and wealth — in the technology world. They represent elements of a Silicon Valley culture that was most evident during the bubble years of the late 1990s.

The culture had evolved by then. Getting rich was always a motivation for people in the tech industry, but so was innovation and competition that could be fierce yet fair.

Whitman, at least, knew how to run a company. She was a strong leader at eBay, a company that innovated in many areas as it became by far the largest service of its kind.

Like some other big tech companies of the era, however, eBay also resorted to over-the-top tactics to stifle competition. In 2000, itpersuaded a federal judge in California that Bidder’s Edge, a company that offered price comparisons across multiple auction sites, was “trespassing” on its servers — a ruling that threatened “the very foundations of the Web,” according to some of America’s top cyber-law experts. (An appeal was dropped in a settlement, and a California Supreme Court decision in a different case appeared to contradict the district judge’s ruling.)

But my chief recollection of Whitman was her participation in the culture of greed that overcame Silicon Valley. While she was CEO of eBay, her company sent lots of business to Goldman Sachs. Goldman put her on its board of directors, “paying her an estimated $475,000 for little more than a year of part-time service” and — in a practice known as “spinning” — it gave her “insider access to the initial public offerings of hot stocks worth millions,” according to California Watch’s recent round-up of the Whitman-Goldman ties. (Whitman has denied any connection between her eBay role and Goldman’s offering her IPO stocks at insider prices.)

Now, I agree with Whitman and her defenders who say it’s absurd to blame her for Wall Street’s hugely cynical, and in some cases probably illegal, manipulations during the housing bubble of the last decade; she was on Goldman’s board for only 15 months, after all, and that stint ended in 2002. It’s all the other stuff of that earlier era– especially the spinning — that speaks to her personal values.

One of her defenses has been that, well, the spinning didn’t bring her much money (about $1.8 million, which later went back to shareholders in a lawsuit settlement) in the context of the enormous personal wealth her eBay holdings had provided, as if it’s OK to do something unethical as long as the relative numbers are small. And in April, she told the AP that she wouldn’t do it again, but called the practice part of the “normal course of business” of the era.

That’s the point: Spinning was normal for all too many of Silicon Valley’s hotshots back then. It was also cynical and outrageous, part of the dismal value system of the time that went, roughly, “What’s acceptable is what you can get away with.”

Fiorina, for her part, was part of an ascendant valley culture of a different kind. She wasn’t as terrible a CEO of Hewlett-Packard as her critics maintained, but her pay certainly dwarfed her performance. The board had ample reason to force her out in 2005, and her platinum parachute of more than $20 million made more than a few admirers of the old HP gag even though it had become (and remains) a too-standard practice in corporate America.

For those who remembered the old HP, Fiorina’s tenure was marked most dismally by her  dismantling of something core to the valley. This was a vision and practice called the “HP Way” — a corporate culture created by the founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, who believed and acted as though employees and communities were as important as shareholders and executives. More than a few of the companies that rose in the valley in the wake of HP’s pathbreaking success held some or all of these notions as foundations, too.

Fiorina didn’t start the process of ending the HP Way, but she pretty much finished it. Even if she’d been a good CEO in other ways, that part of her tenure will remain her most lasting contribution — and not a positive one.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 5, 2010.

We would remember the terrorist attacks differently if we communicated then the way we do now

(Updated)

The Tweet scrolled by yesterday almost before I spotted it:

@ruthannharnisch NYT’s Nick Bilton wonders what we would have learned from the inside of Sept 11 2001 events if social media had been widespread. #pdf10

Unpacking: Twitter user Ruth Ann Harnisch, attending the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, was quoting  the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, lead writer of the newspaper’s Bits Blog. In a panel discussion he’d speculated, if I understood the Tweet correctly, about how we’d remember the Sept. 11 attacks if social media had been more ubiquitous back then.

I’m not sure that the overall impact of the day would have been all that different, except in one hugely important way: Some of the victims would have told the world what was happening to them in the moments before their deaths, or for those who escaped the Twin Towers and Pentagon, their rescues.

Social media are more than online services. In big, visible events, mobile technology is an essential element.

Recall, passengers and flight attendants aboard the planes, and people in the Twin Towers, were using mobile phones that terrible day to make voice calls to their loved ones and colleagues. Today’s mobile phones come with cameras, still and video, and those cameras are connected to wireless digital networks that run at increasingly high speeds. (Here’s anexploration, from my old blog, of the  implications for photojournalism.)

At least some of the people in peril that day would have used social media tools — Twitter, video uploads, etc. — to show us their peril, and their last few moments on Earth. Those highly personal stories would have become not just a part of history, but would have spread fast that very day and given an even more viscerally human immediacy to the violence.

I wonder if America’s reaction would have been different. I was halfway around the world at the time, but just like most Americans I felt an instant bewilderment combined with blood lust. Would the personal images and videos — not just of planes exploding into towers but of some of the victims’ last seconds as the Twin Tower floors gave way underneath their feet, or the last seconds aboard Flight 93 or the planes heading for the towers or Pentagon — have heightened the blood lust? If so, then what?

Videos of these sorts would also become a part of a different kind of history: the forensic record. Take yourself back a bit further, to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In Dealey Plaza that day, one man, Abraham Zapruder, wielding a movie camera (using film; remember film?), captured the horrific sequence. Today, in such an event, we’d have dozens or hundreds of videos; tomorrow, they’d be high-definition. (As I wrote in my photojournalism piece, we would almost certainly know for sure whether someone was shooting from thegrassy knoll, among other things.)

Social media in the more standard way we use it today would have been swamped on both of those days. We would not just be watching TV, though we’d all have the TV on in our homes and offices or wherever. We’d be talking with others online, with friends and others we follow whose perspective and wisdom we’ve come to value. On 9/11 and the days after, I went from blogs to news sites to mail lists and personal e-mails, looking for understanding. Today, I’d be following and joining conversations, seeking not just knowledge but community.

UPDATE 1: A number of commenters here and elsewhere, starting withScott Rosenberg (a friend and a Salon co-founder), have correctly noted that there already was online community back in 2001. I certainly didn’t mean to imply otherwise; in fact, I’ve been participating in a variety of online communities since the early 1980s.

But online conversation had not permeated our culture anywhere near to the extent that they have now, and a number of the tools and services that we now take for granted — mobile phone video cameras; YouTube; Twitter and so many others — hadn’t yet arrived on the scene.

UPDATE 2: Several people are appalled by the my reference to “blood lust.” I’m certain most Americans felt some serious rage at first, and then took some deep breaths. My immediate fury was tempered by all kinds of other emotions, including the fear that America would make some horrible decisions — including a headlong abandonment of civil liberties — and said so in my newspaper column that ran the next morning. I wish I hadn’t been right.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 3, 2010.

Zuckerberg’s evasions about FB’s evolving privacy policies raise new questions about the company’s intentions

Some of the tech-world buzz today is about Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s astonishingly poor showing onstage at this week’s Wall Street Journal conference, All Things Digital. Make no mistake: His fumbling, rapid-fire, sweat-drenched appearance was probably the most cringe-inducing at the D gathering since Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, then CEO and president of Yahoo, spent many minutes several years agofailing to explain what business Yahoo was in.

On Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg repeatedly ducked some fairly simple questions about Facebook and its notoriously evolving privacy policies — rules and default settings that have led many, including me, to mistrust the company and its intentions. In fact, his fast-talk evasions deepened my sense of unease.

What attracted much of the notice, especially from media covering the event, was his extreme perspiration, which more than a few commentators called Nixonian. (This is a reference to a TV debate Richard Nixon held with John F. Kennedy in 1960 when they were running for president; Nixon’s sweaty, shifty appearance in the first-ever event of its kind is widely seen as one of the reasons he lost the election.)

The Nixon comparison is, of course, a big stretch — and it distracts from the much more serious issues.

For one thing, Zuckerberg’s panic attack — which is the most charitable explanation I can come up with — raised more than a few questions about his fitness as CEO of one of the biggest companies on the Web and, increasingly, one of the most important companies on the planet.

The “he’s young, give him a break” folks have half of that right. He’s young, just 26 years old, and has the obvious smarts (and a solid senior team) to get his P.R. efforts in better shape. But give a break to someone who wields such influence? Not likely.

I don’t know Zuckerberg personally. Several people I know well, and who know him well, say he’s deeply thoughtful about what he and his talented team at Facebook are creating. And his admission of having said and done regrettable things when he was a much younger college student — Facebook was founded at Harvard, where he was an undergraduate — was at least a sign of some self-awareness.

But I absolutely do not trust him or his company’s intentions. Facebook’s P.R., and Zuckerberg’s recent statements on privacy, claim a deep concern for users’ privacy. Their actions tell a different story. Repeatedly, Facebook has expanded the user data and postings it makes public by default, as this compelling visualization by IBM’s Matt McKeon shows. The evidence suggests that the company’s policy is to push and push the boundaries, roll back when enough people complain, and then keep pushing.

This is worrisome enough. But consider, among many other Facebook aims, its goal to essentially own personal identity on the Web — identity that you use to sign into all kinds of other sites. If Facebook becomes the default user ID for the Internet, it will have a power that no single company should own, period.

Facebook’s legions of fans, and most of its users, plainly find this line of thought silly. They keep signing up and using the service for more and more of their activities. They may regret their info-promiscuity someday, but maybe Zuckerberg is right that people really don’t care, and maybe there will be no consequences for not caring. Although we all need to cut each other some slack about the foolish things we all say and do, especially when we’re young, I’m also convinced we need zones of genuine privacy, and that we should not turn over our Web presences to a single company, even one we might trust. (I’ll be writing more about this in an upcoming post.)

For now, when I watch Facebook, I hear echoes of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, when the standard of behavior changed. What was acceptable was what you could get away with. That’s a corrosive way to do things.

This article was originally published on Salon on June 2, 2010.

Media and technology coverage that looks beyond the gloom to ways we can create better, more trustworthy content

I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit this site often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging here. In coming months I’ll be writing about topics I know well, such as media and technology — and especially the growing intersection of the two fields.

Thanks to the work of people in Silicon Valley and its offshoots around the world, media have become significantly more democratized in recent years. Democratization, in this sense, is about participation and access: Increasingly, we can all create media, and with digital networks we can find what people create.

The impact of this shift is in its early days. Traditional journalists, watching their monopoly and oligopoly business models crumble as a result of technology’s impact, see little but gloom. I worry about what we’ll miss in this devolution, at least in the short term, but I see little but opportunity.

I see opportunity partly because of the work I do at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. At the school’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, we’re aiming to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to journalism education — and to help students realize they can (because they may have to) invent their own jobs.

I see opportunity in the countless experiments in media and journalism under way around the world. In company cubicles, labs, garages, dorm rooms, labs and so many other places, people are inventing the future by testing ideas about content, conversation and ways to pay for it. We willget this right in the end.

To get it right, however, we will need to go beyond the experiments. We need to persuade people to use media, not just consume it, in ways that many folks are not doing today. We need to persuade content creators of the advantages of doing things in ways that will be trusted; and we need to persuade the consumers-turned-users of media to demand better quality and trustworthiness than we’ve settled for in the past. Those are my goals in a new book, Mediactive, that will appear later this summer. I’ll be talking a great deal about these topics here.

My writing here comes with a complication. I have co-founded several companies, one of which flopped and another of which was sold last year to Nokia. I’ve invested in several others, and advise others. I’m on the board of two journalism-related nonprofits and co-founded another.

Salon’s editor in chief, Joan Walsh, and I have discussed this at length. I will avoid writing about any enterprise in which I have a financial stake, and disclose — in addition to my full disclosure page at my personal website — anything that we think might be relevant in this regard. This may get tricky at times, I realize. But my goal will be transparency.

I’m jazzed about working with the great people at Salon and the community it has created. I’ll always keep in mind what I learned well over a decade ago when I started writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s newspaper: My readers know more than I do.

So tell me what you know, and we’ll keep learning together.

The following article originally appeared on Salon on June 2, 2010.