You don’t have to be a supporter of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief who’s been charged with sex crimes in New York City, to be appalled at some of the journalism about this case. Sadly, you can find a prime example on the website of the normally high-minded Center for Public Integrity, a totally damning piece by John Solomon based on lurid new allegations from two unnamed sources “familiar with the investigation.”

The sources insisted on anonymity, Solomon reports, “because of the ongoing investigation….” What in the world does that mean? Nothing: It’s an empty non-excuse for refusing to stand behind their own words.

Here’s my take. These sources are almost certainly in law enforcement. I believe they are almost certainly trying to solidify the public perception of Strauss-Kahn as a criminal scumbag, and do this so thoroughly that almost anyone serving on any jury will come into the trial with a predisposition to find him guilty — and that his defense lawyers, knowing that this is the case, will go with a plea bargain.

I don’t doubt that Solomon has reported faithfully what he was told. That doesn’t make any of it true. Nor do I doubt that Solomon and his editors trust these sources. There’s no reason why you should, since they won’t stand behind their own words.

I’m no fan of Strauss-Kahn, nor of the French media’s habit of glossing over ugly behavior among the people — almost all men — who rule government and business. He may well have done this crime. But I’m sticking with innocent until proved guilty.

I’ve been a longtime fan of, and have contributed to, the Center for Public Integrity. That won’t change. But as I’ve said privately to a friend in the organization, I believe this piece was way below the center’s standards.

I’m writing an occasional online column for the Guardian, one of the great English-language media organizations. The latest piece, “The Web’s Weakest Links,” implores creators of online content to link to original material, not the rewrites that have become so common by so-called “aggregators” that (in my view) do a disservice to everyone but themselves. Quoting myself (very briefly):

So, the next time you link to something, check it out a bit more. If it’s just a summary of someone else’s original reporting or analysis, take the extra few seconds to link to the original. Let’s all raise our linking standards, and give credit where it’s genuinely due.

I’ve just signed a site license with a journalism school for the e-book. We worked out a sliding scale of payments. The university will pay a discounted rate from the list price for the first 40 copies. For each copy beyond that, up to 250, the rate will be lower yet. And after 250, the license will be free for anyone else at the university who wants to download the book.

This is a good deal for both sides. The school gets a deeply discounted book. I get some cash. If more schools sign up for this kind of thing, I could end up making a non-trivial amount of money.

Why should the schools pay? Because they are engaged in a business arrangement in which they sell courses to students and assign this book as part of that arrangement. The Creative Commons license I’ve used to publish Mediactive allows copying at will for non-commercial purposes, but universities using the book in classroom settings are, in fact, engaged in a commercial activity even if the universities are not-for-profit entities themselves.

My agent, David Miller, says he’s heard of major publishers doing site licenses for books. He hasn’t heard of self-published authors doing it this way. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, of course — but it’s definitely new to me! (I continue to learn new things about the publishing business with this project, which is one reason I’m doing it this way…)

If you are teaching journalism (or anything else) and are interested in using this book, please get in touch to discuss a site license. They book isn’t expensive even at its list price, but there are even better deals for bulk orders, especially e-book bulk orders.

By the way, I’m working with several colleagues on lesson plans for Mediactive. They’re coming along nicely and will be available, if all goes well, by mid-summer or so. We have a few nifty ideas in mind for this part of the project, so stay tuned.

In 2005, intending to innovate, the Los Angeles Times published a “Wikitorial” — an editorial from the paper in a wiki that allowed readers to make changes. The idea was interesting. The execution was a classic in news organization stupidity, because after putting up the piece the news people went home for the night. Naturally, some bad folks took over, and early the next morning they’d thoroughly polluted the thing. One image that found its way onto the wikitorial was an infamously disgusting photograph. Down came the page, and that was that.

The LA Times learned the wrong lesson. Rather than giving up the experiment, it should have tried again.

The failed LA project comes to mind in the wake of the Wall Street Journal’s launch of a WikiLeaks-like experiment, a site called SafeHouse. The page pitches these bullet points:

• Help The Wall Street Journal uncover fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing.
• Send documents to us using a special system built to be secure.
• Keep your identity anonymous or confidential, if needed.

Uh, not really, at least on the second and third points.

Security experts immediately poked holes in the site security. And the site’s Terms of Service contain what might be termed a “Get Into Jail Free Card” — reserving “the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others.”

Unlike the LA Times, the Journal isn’t abandoning the experiment and seems to be working to fix at least some of the site’s flaws. That’s good news, even though I’d still advise any whistleblower to steer clear of this for the moment, not least because the notion of trusting a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch is, well, problematic even if one might trust (as I would) many of the Journal’s lower-level editors.

Which raises the larger question in any case: While I tend to believe that every news organization should have a drop-off point for documents from whistleblowers, there’s always going to be a question of how much a leaker should trust any private company on which a government can exert pressure, apart the issue of whether the company itself can always be trusted. Remember, the New York Times has frequently felt obliged to ask permission from the U.S. government before publishing a variety of things.

Still, these experiments are worthwhile. But it’s going to take some time before we can call them successes in any respect.

This post is part of the Carnival of Journalism, a monthly collection of blog posts on a related topic curated by David Cohn. Our assignment this month was to talk about a failure, in our personal or professional lives, for which we are responsible and from which we learned lessons.

Only one? There have been so many…

However, in this context — the emergence of a 21st Century journalism culture — this is a pretty easy call. I’m resurrecting a 2006 letter I wrote to an online community that didn’t work out. It was called Bayosphere, and its demise was a fairly high profile event at the time, for all kinds of reasons. (The site is off the air, though a friend and I are working to resurrect at least part of it, so that it exists for anyone who might want to see it even now.)

It was a difficult letter to write, but it had to be written. The main reason was that the people who’d been part of that project — almost all volunteers — deserved to know what had happened. The other main reason was the recognition that entrepreneurship is about many things, but above all, as my friend and colleague CJ Cornell says, it’s about owning the process and the outcome.

Here’s that letter, dated January 24, 2006 (with updates at the end):

A little over a year ago, I left the San Jose Mercury News to pursue my passion for what we’ve come to call “citizen media” — the idea that anyone with something to say could use increasingly powerful and decreasingly expensive tools to say it, potentially for a global audience.

I left what I considered one of the two or three best gigs in the entire newspaper industry. But having published We the Media — and seeing first-hand the application of bottom-up communications in all kinds of arenas, especially journalism — I knew it was time to devote my full energies to this emergent phenomenon.

I learned some things last year, about media, about citizens, about myself. Although citizen media, broadly defined, was taking the world by storm, the experiment with Bayosphere didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.

I erred, in retrospect, by taking the standard Silicon Valley route. I was trying to figure out how to make this new phenomenon pay its own way out of the gate, just as the traditional, still deep-pocketed media, super-energized entrepreneurs and legions of talented “amateurs” — a word I use in the most positive sense here — were starting to jump seriously into the fray.

In February, Michael Goff joined Grassroots Media as my business partner. Michael is smart, energetic and creative, and had a long track record in the media business including founding Out magazine, launching Microsoft’s Sidewalk city guides, leading MSN as general manager, and as CEO of a tech investment partnership and a wireless company. He’d just finished leading the volunteer team in Haiti for Bill Clinton’s AIDS Initiative.

We talked constantly about what might work with all the changes in the media sphere, and within the company’s specific mission to support citizen journalism as a viable business while providing for its investors and employees. We blocked out the options and considered, among other things:

• Consulting for newspapers and media entities;
• Trade publishing for journalists and editors making the transition;
• Publishing our own citizen media-driven sites;
• Running conferences and education programs;
• Creating an advertising network;
• Creating an affiliated network of blogs and bloggers;
• Selling “picks and shovels” — a platform of tools for citizen journalist collaboration;
• Creating a self-tagging system for bloggers to use in disclosing bias and tracking stories.

In the end, we opted for publishing. One reason was that I was keenest on the basic journalism mission. Another was that we figured we could best leverage our strengths, including my already successful blog. We decided to put up a site that would serve effectively as a test bed, to see if it would work and, perhaps, become a model for other things of its kind.

We envisioned Bayosphere as a place where people in the San Francisco Bay Area community could learn about and discuss the regional scene, with a focus on technology, the main economic driver. My tech and policy blogging would be an anchor, hopefully attracting some readers and, crucially, some self-selected citizen journalists who’d join a wider conversation.

The evidence strongly suggested early on that this was not likely to be a viable publishing venture for some considerable period without partnerships to bring in both readers and contributors. But long discussions with potential partners — including several whose participation would have been game-changing in a journalistic and business-model sense — didn’t pan out. (It will be an exciting day when one or more of those folks tries a citizen-driven media venture.)

Even so, Bayosphere attracted quite a bit of traffic, and some heartening effort on the part of some citizen journalists. I’m grateful to them for trying. But as is obvious to anyone who’s paid attention, the site didn’t take off — in large part, no question about it, because of my own miscues and shortcomings. My friend Esther Dyson says, wisely, “Always make new mistakes.” Did I ever. But I learned from them, and from what did work. Here are some of the lessons:

• Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a “pledge” that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist — including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we’re convinced it was at least useful.
• Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one’s own words and the overall quality of what’s said.
• Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site’s purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn’t do nearly a good enough job in this area.)
• A framework doesn’t mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.
• The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills — which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.
• Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)
• Though not so much a lesson — we were very clear on this going in — it bears repeating that a business model can’t say, “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.
• On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I’d cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.
• Although the participants — citizen journalists and commenters — are essential, it’s even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They’re looking for the proverbial “clean, well-lighted place” where they can learn or be entertained, or both.
• If you don’t already have a thick skin, grow one.

A more personal lesson also emerged: As an entrepreneur, let’s just say I wasn’t in my element. The relentless focus on a single, limited project for long periods of time, combined with the inevitable compromises inherent in for-profit decision-making, turned out not to be my best skills. For almost 25 years I’d thrived on the constant deadlines and competition of journalism. So I assumed I’d easily handle the pressures of trying to create a business from scratch while also keeping my reporting and writing skills intact and helping other people join in. In reality, I was unprepared for what proved to be an entirely different kind of pressure, and didn’t handle it nearly as well as I’d expected. I allowed myself to get distracted, moreover, by matters that were not directly relevant to the project.

During the summer, Michael and I realized that it was unlikely that we would land a key distribution deal in the immediate future, and without that we weren’t finding the kind of business model for Bayosphere that justified raising more money beyond the seed financing. We had business ideas that might well have been funded, but they were not first and foremost aimed at boosting the citizen-journalism field, which was and remains my overriding goal. In September, we stopped spending our investors’ money, and sustained Bayosphere ourselves on a relatively bare-bones budget from our own funds, putting in our own time.

We’ve never lost sight of this, however: A more democratized media is crucial our common future — grassroots ideas, energy and talent. I believe this more than ever, as do Mitch Kapor and the folks at the Omidyar Network, who provided seed funding for the project. Their work is changing the world for the better, and I admire them.

As the Bayosphere project was playing out last fall, I concluded that I could do more for the citizen journalism movement by forming a nonprofit enterprise, a “Center for Citizen Media” where I could put my skills and passion for the genre to better use — looking at lots of disparate elements and connecting the dots. (And as a friend accurately remarked when I told him not long ago about my planned shift toward the nonprofit arena, “Well, you’ve always struck me a more of a dot-org kind of guy than the dot-com kind.”)

As mentioned, the dots I’m connecting include Bayosphere. We are talking with several folks who are interested in bringing the site under their own wings, as part of operations whose proprietors Michael and I respect. No promises here: But if we can keep Bayosphere going in a good way we’ll work hard to make that happen.

I share the disappointment of some of our citizen journalists. And I respect their skepticism; we encouraged it, after all. It’s definitely no fun to have disappointed folks (starting with Michael and our investors, and myself). Still, I owe those of you who participated and visited my thanks for being part of the experiment.

The shift in how we communicate and collaborate, how we learn what’s going on in our world, has barely begun. Predicting the future is for other people, but I’m optimistic that we’ll collectively figure this out. So now it’s back to work, with the help of old and new friends and colleagues. What could be better than that?

Looking back at this letter, I have several updates. First, the Center for Citizen Media existed primarily during my three-plus year fellowship at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. While I was there, and also teaching part-time at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, I understood that the citizen-media phenomenon was racing ahead in fabulous ways and that the real leaders of that movement should be the people doing it day to day.

Second, the tools are getting vastly better and easier to use. A startup in this arena is no longer as much as hostage to opaque software and technical skills; with many projects, you can do 90 percent of what you need with off-the-shelf tools. Still, even though you don’t need to be a programmer to work on a digital media startup, you absolutely need to know how to have a conversation with a programmer, because that last 10 percent can be the difference between things working or flopping.

Third, the value of community is even clearer now — and community building skills are one of the least common and most valuable assets for any startup in this space.

Most important in a personal sense, I didn’t end up forsaking entrepreneurship, after all. I’ve invested in and advised a number of new-media startups. I was a fortunate co-founder of another, Dopplr, which Nokia acquired several years ago. (Of course, the startup that failed is the one where I had direct operational responsibility, and the one that didn’t fail was run brilliantly by other co-founders; there may be, ahem, a correlation.) And, of course, I’ve been working to seed entrepreneurship into the academic world in an experiment at Arizona State University.

I count the failure of Bayosphere as one of the most important learning experiences in my life — so far, at any rate. It was not fun. But things turned out for the best, in all kinds of ways.

We’d just finished watching a DVD of “The Social Network” on the evening of May 1. Routinely, we checked the news online before getting ready for bed — and learned that America had finally caught up with Osama bin Laden. Like every other American for whom Sept. 11, 2001 is seared into memory, I had a sense of relief and satisfaction that this epic murderer hadn’t died of old age in some sanctuary.

I also reflected, as I watched a streaming broadcast of BBC News on my computer, on the continuing evolution in news over the past decade — accelerating changes in the ways we experience and participate in the flow of news and information in a digital age.

What’s changed most since 2001 are the spread of wireless data communications and the rise of robust social networks, but the outlines of where we were headed were clear even then. The 9/11 attacks brought emerging possibilities fully to the surface, as I wrote in my 2004 book We the Media.

By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emer­gent, grassroots journalism were in place. The Web was already a place where established news organizations and newcomers were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were making it easier for anyone to participate. We needed a catalyst to show how far we’d come. On September 11, 2001, we got that catalyst in a terrible way.

I was in South Africa. The news came to me and four other people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone. Our driver’s wife called from Johannesburg, where she was watching TV, to say a plane had apparently hit the World Trade Center. She called again to say another plane had hit the other tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon. We arrived at the Port Elizabeth airport in time to watch, live and in horror, as the towers disintegrated.

Had I been there today, I’d have gotten more than a phone call. I’d have been pulling information from the Net via a mobile device that could provide everything from voice to video. And I’d have been checking my Twitter feed.

For plenty of people in 2011, the news of bin Laden’s death came via Twitter and Facebook, currently the most powerful social networks around. Indeed, rumors spread widely on Twitter before President Obama’s official announcement. But Twitter for me (and Facebook for many others) was a value-adding system once the basic facts were known. I relied, as I increasingly do in breaking news events, on the people I follow on Twitter to provide links to the best coverage from traditional media, as well as links to a variety of other sources.

The best traditional media organizations did their jobs in the usual way as the bin Laden story became the story of the day. They covered the immediate news, found compelling video — the crowds in front of the White House were a favorite — and interviewed experts for perspective.

Back to 2001:

The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to Lusaka, Zambia. The BBC and CNN’s international edition were on the hotel television. The local newspapers ran consider­able news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment.

What I could not do in those initial days was read my news­paper, the San Jose Mercury News, or the The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, or any of the other papers I normally scanned each morning at home. I could barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was over­whelming as people everywhere went online for more informa­tion, or simply to talk with each other.

Now here’s real change. We no longer subscribe to those newspapers (apart from the Chronicle and Times on Sundays), because we get most of our newspaper journalism online. The reason is that broadband has become much more widespread and robust, even though it’s lagging in the U.S. compared to the rest of the developed world. The fiber backbones are reaching everywhere now.

I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox over­flowed with useful news from Dave Farber, one of the new breed of editors.

Then a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called “Interesting People”30 that he’d run since the mid-1980s. Most of what he sent out had first been sent to him by correspondents he knew from around the nation and the world. If they saw something they thought he’d find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own commentary. In the wake of the attacks, his correspondents’ perspectives on issues ranging from national-security issues to critiques of religion became essential reading for their breadth and depth. Farber told me later he’d gone into overdrive, because this event obliged him to do so.

“I consider myself an editor in a real sense,” Farber explained. “This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes out and what doesn’t…Even though I don’t edit in the sense of real editing, I make the choices.”

Dave Farber still makes these choices on the IP list. It’s still a must-read source of news and wisdom for me and the legions of people who continue to follow this particular wire service.

The value of this service — we now tend to call it curation and aggregation — wasn’t as clear a decade ago as it is today, however. We are overwhelmed with information today, vastly more so than in 2001. As I discuss in my new book, Mediactive, one of our most pressing issues is how we deal with that flood of data. Dave Farber is a curator and aggregator. The people I follow on Twitter, especially in special lists I’ve created for people I consider experts in specific fields, are another curated and aggregated space.

One of the emails Farber sent, dated September 12, still stands out for me. It was an email from an unidentified sender who wrote: “SPOT infrared satellite image of Manhattan, acquired on September 11 at 11:55 AM ET. Image may be freely reproduced with ‘CNES/SPOT Image 2001’ copyright attribu­tion.” A web address, linking to the photo, followed. The picture showed an ugly brown-black cloud of dust and debris hanging over much of lower Manhattan. The image stayed with me.

Here was context.

It took almost no time for the Net to tell us about the various satellite images from Pakistan, showing the bin Laden compound and its surroundings.

Back in America, members of the then nascent weblog commu­nity had discovered the power of their publishing tool. They offered abundant links to articles from large and small news organizations, domestic and foreign. New York City bloggers posted personal views of what they’d seen, with photographs, providing more information and context to what the major media was providing.

“I’m okay. Everyone I know is okay,” Amy Phillips wrote September 11 on her blog, “The 50 Minute Hour.”31 A Brooklyn blogger named Gus wrote: “The wind just changed direction and now I know what a burning city smells like. It has the smell of burning plastic. It comes with acrid brown skies with jet fighters flying above them. The stuff I’m seeing on teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with less convincing special effects. Then I’m outside, seeing it with my naked eyes.”

If Twitter and Facebook took on more of this function in 2011, that reflected the immediacy —  the ease of use and especially the social context — of these new services, which didn’t even exist in 2001.

In one sense, the rise of these social networks is a step back. Facebook and Twitter are private companies with their own agendas. While they are superbly engineered tools that provide users fantastic capabilities, what we put into those services is, in the end, owned by those services. Our words and pictures and videos are only part of what we put in; the social connections are even more important, and we don’t own those when we live in others’ universes.

We would have had a much different media experience a decade ago if AOL or Microsoft had succeeded in what they were trying to do in the 1990s: Make our online experience a universal walled garden. Facebook, more so than Twitter, aims to be precisely that in this new era. If we allow that to happen, we will literally be turning over a significant part of our history to a private company that operates in its own best interests, not ours.

The promise of the Internet was flowering in 2001. We saw only the possibilities and the immense freedom of this emerging sphere for communications and collaboration.

The vision we shared then is in some real jeopardy today. Governments and private companies scheme to wrest control from us at the edges of the networks and pull it back into the center, where it manifestly should not belong. They may win.

A decade from now, we’ll surely experience another major event with newer media we cannot even imagine today. I hope we’ll be using tools that renew the Internet’s promise — technologies and policies that honor a simple notion, of genuine freedom to learn, create and collaborate.