Mediactive

If you’re near Boston next Friday, consider attending the new Online Media Legal Network’s Spring Conference: Journalism’s Digital Transition. Great lineup, important topics.

Politico, the website devoted to all things political, almost certainly got pwned by scam artists Friday when it posted an unverified memo — a probable hoax — about health care. It’s an embarrassment for journalists who fall for fakery, but these kinds of things do happen.

What doesn’t usually happen is how Politico dealt with its inadequate journalism. And the case brought back memories of another, more significant mess: the “Rathergate” affair of 2004; more on that below.

It’s obvious, if you read the non mea culpa posted by Political’s White House editor, Craig Gordon, that his organization didn’t check the memo’s authenticity before putting it online, and only pulled it down after Democrats complained. But instead simply apologizing forthrightly, he basically said a) Politico now couldn’t verify anything about the memo’s authenticity; b) but it seemed real (as if that’s an excuse; c) and besides, the Democrats were probably doing what the memo said they were doing anyway.

Then comes his conclusion, a howler for a journalist:

“In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar ‘doc fix,’ maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.”

Except that “leave it out” is not synonymous with “publish it and then take it down if we learn later that we can’t verify its authenticity” — or is this the news standard for news organizations boasting a co-founder who serves on the Pulitzer Prize governing board?

The standard Politico has applied here, is, of course, “truthiness”: Because they want it to be true, it’s close enough.

To be more fair to Politico than the publication may deserve, the memo seemed to many others like something some Democratic aide, somewhere in Washington, might have written, perhaps as a draft. This helps explain why so many journalists took the bait and became part of the vast spin machine that so defines our nation’s political press.

As Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellantoni reports, the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder had the honor to apologize for posting without checking. The Hill, a publication with apparently more traditional principles, got the memo but decided not to run it at all.

Remember, just a few years ago the journalism and political worlds went appropriately berserk when CBS’ 60 Minutes II team ran a story about George W. Bush’s “service” in the Air National Guard. The report was based, in part on memoranda that CBS not only couldn’t prove were authentic but which were at best highly questionable as to their authenticity. The journalism was awful; CBS and its people took a deserved hit to their reputations. Sadly — and I use that word partly because the journalists involved had long and outstanding records for doing great work — the people who made the mistakes held fast to the notion that they’d done nothing wrong.

It’s obvious, based on the verifiable record, that Bush got strings pulled to avoid Vietnam service and then all but ducked out on his duty. And it may turn out that some Democrat’s fingerprints are on the health care memo. In both cases, the journalism was lacking, and the journalists’ response even more so.

Politico is widely considered a new gold standard of political reporting. That worries me.

I’m speaking next week at the Guardian’s “Changing Media Summit” conference in London, and answered a Q&A the media company has posted on the conference website. Reprinting here:

Which media companies, business and delivery models and platforms do you consider to be sustainable and which ones will go to the wall?

I’m not nearly smart enough to tell you which companies will survive. As a (very) small shareholder in the New York Times Co., and an angel investor in several online startups, I certainly hope they’ll be among the ones that last.

But some early outlines — emphasis on “early” — are beginning to emerge.

Media companies that persist in the industrial model of media, especially those reliant on advertising subsidies for content that has no basic relationship to what advertisers are trying to sell, are in the most jeopardy. Apart from the simple fact that advertising is being separated from content for excellent reasons, the industrial-age notion of distribution has been upended. Rather than creating content, and then publishing it on paper and putting it in trucks (or broadcasting via expensive towers or satellites), what we do now is create content and make it available; people come and get it. Only those media creators who understand the new dynamic have a chance at surviving the upheaval.

In the journalism sphere, I have no doubt whatever that we will replace the monopolies and oligopolies with a much more diverse and therefore more sustainable ecosystem. The enterprises will include for-profit and not-for-profit companies; and sole proprietorships and large businesses. The business models will range widely, and will be the winners from among the thousands of experiments now under way.

Those who can turn themselves into ecosystems in their own right — think Google, Twitter, etc. — will be major winners if they can become the center of ecosystems in which others innovate. When the Guardian and New York Times offer APIs to their media, they show they understand this imperative.

What does the global media industry ten years from now look like?

This will depend, in part, on how governments respond to the media and technology changes. If governments (urged on by law enforcement, big traditional media and especially back-facing copyright interests) restrict the ways we can use technology, we could easily see the Internet turned into a newer and only slightly more useful version of television.

If, on the other hand, governments allow technology and innovation to flower, we will see a media industry that dwarfs the current one in size, at least in terms of the number of people who are participating. All media will be social to one degree or another. Since information is increasingly a core feature of all products and services, media will be an even larger global industry.

What projects are you currently engaged in on a day to day basis and how are these helping to change the face of the media and technology industries?

I am spending my time on a variety of projects. The main one has been creating a digital media entrepreneurship program at Arizona State University in America, a project aimed at bringing an appreciation of the startup culture into the journalism curriculum. We believe students will be inventing many of their own jobs, and want to help them do so.

I’m also continuing my long-term work on citizen media and citizen journalism. In addition, I’ve invested in or co-founded several consumer Web companies, and have new projects in the wings. Finally, I’m finishing a new book called Mediactive, a challenge to those who create and consume media to take more responsibility for what they — and we — know.

Who do you admire in this space? Who’s inspiring you? Who’s pushing the boundaries and how?

I’m inspired by so many people that I have trouble naming just a few. But I’ll start with my students, and the students I’ve met at other campuses in America and around the world. I tell them I’m jealous of their opportunities, because they will invent the future of media and journalism.

Allow me to offer a tip of the hat to the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger. He is a leader of exceptional talent and vision.

And what can we expect from you at the Changing Media Summit 2010?

You can expect me to listen much more than I talk, though of course I’ll discuss the things I know best. I see this summit as a wonderful learning opportunity and aim to take full advantage.

Nora Young hosts CBC Radio’s “Spark” program, and we chatted the other day about Apple and its controlling ways.

UPDATED

In the weeks since Apple announced the iPad tablet computer, the news industry and the people who watch it have been talking breathlessly about the device’s potential to help restore happier financial times to struggling journalism organizations, particularly newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the best example is a NY Times story entitled “With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday,” with this quote (from an anonymous source, of course):

Steve (Jobs) believes in old media companies and wants them to do well,” said a person who has seen the device and is familiar with Apple’s marketing plan for it, but who did not want to be named because talking about it might alienate him from the company. “He believes democracy is hinged on a free press and that depends on there being a professional press.”

This is laugh-out-loud stuff, for all kinds of reasons, not least the hilarious notion that Steve Jobs believes in a free press. This is the CEO of a company that practically defines the words “secretive” and “paranoid” — a company that took bloggers to court for daring to report on what sources from inside Apple have told them about upcoming products; the threat to business journalism from that case, which thankfully Apple lost, was real and scary.

Steve Jobs believes in old media, all right, as long as he can absolutely dictate the terms under which old media sells (or, to be more precise, rents) its material through the Apple orifice called the iTunes Store. The music industry discovered to its dismay that Apple’s one-price-fits-all model — not to mention Apple’s control over customer information (including addresses and credit-card numbers) — was good mainly for Apple. (To be fair, the Times story did note, amid the fawning over the iPad’s media potential, that Jobs is, as the story said, a bully.)

The App Store, through which Apple requires iPhone application developers to sell their offerings, has its own restrictions. Apple doesn’t regulate prices, though it still disintermediates developers from their customers. The bigger issue is that Apple insists on approving every app that can be sold through the store, in an approval process that is always opaque and sometimes capricious.

In recent days, Apple took its control-freakery to a new level. It unilaterally banned some iPhone apps that, in Apple’s view, were too risque for its customers, including several that depicted skimpily dressed women. The company’s excuse was that some customers found the material “objectionable,” and of course Apple wanted to make its customers comfortable and happy.

Never mind that Apple still sells pretty much the same kinds of items through big publishers like Time Warner and Playboy. That’s mere hypocrisy, however blatant.

News organizations often produce material that people find objectionable. Photographs and videos of dead people in war zones and disaster aftermaths are vital to understand the scope of such events, and they are deeply upsetting to view. Publishers and broadcasters and, more recently, digital-media providers have put them out anyway. They have every right to do so, and often an journalistic obligation.

Apple, in the role of distributor, has every right to decide what people can sell via its online store. This is not the issue.

Now, journalism organizations obviously don’t have to create apps for the iPad or iPhone. They can make their material available via Web browsers.

But Apple won’t let Flash run on the iPhone or, it says, the iPad. While HTML5 will solve some of these issues, that new standard is early in its evolution. Meanwhile, it’s clear, news organizations believe (with some experience selling apps for the iPhone) that the user experience will be better with an app, not to mention the possibility of charging money for what they produce (though they’ll be giving Apple a cut of every transaction).

Ultimately, I believe, the most important issue is whether news organizations should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions like the ones Apple has been making about content in all kinds of ways. I say they should think hard about it, and answer either in the negative or insist on iron-clad contracts with Apple that prohibit the hardware company from any kind of interference with the journalism, ever. (As Dave Winer asked in a Twitter posting today, “Thought experiment: What happens to the Engadget app when they run a leaked Apple announcement?” (UPDATE: And Wired quotes the Washington Post (a piece from Monday Note) with another worrisome scenario.)

Understand, this is not about whether tablet computers are a good thing. They are. They will be a wonderful addition to the way we consumer and create media (more so the former, I’d guess), and I have no doubt that the iPad, like other Apple products, will set a new standard for ease of use and, in some ways, utility. (I’m a happy user of a Mac computer, for which Apple doesn’t restrict application developers’ ability to write software.)

But I watch with amazement as newspaper people drool over the iPad as some kind of industry savior. They’re putting far too much trust in a company that doesn’t deserve it.

John Darnton is a good novelist, and was a superb journalist in a long career at the New York Times. Now he’s curator of the Polk Awards, one of only a couple of journalism prizes that means anything. (Journalists have a tedious tendency to give themselves prizes, more so than any other business I can name.)

The Polk awards have been ahead of the game in recent years. Two, notably, have recognized that journalism has moved squarely into the Digital Age, even though most of the kinds of journalism achievements that win big prizes — notably investigative reports — continue to be done by organizations willing to spend serious money and devote serious time to the efforts.

The first pathbreaker, which falls into the category of organization-based media that happens to live on the web in this case, went to Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo in 2007. The one making waves this year, and the more relevant here, went to the still-anonymous person who captured the video images of the death Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iranian election protests early last year.

Darnton, interviewed by Mediaite, an online publication, offered left-handed compliments to the Neda video — making it entirely clear that he doesn’t really believe average people (as opposed to journalists with years of experience) have much to offer beyond bystander status. From the column by Willard C. Rappleye Jr.:

“(Darnton) does take umbrage, though, against the term ‘citizen journalist.’ ‘If you’re walking down the street and somebody collapses in front of you and somebody else runs over and administers CPR because they happen to know it, and saves the victim, you wouldn’t go home and say you saw somebody saved by a citizen doctor. You’d say you saw someone saved by a bystander who happened to know CPR. Right? ‘Same thing here. I like to call them bystanders — not journalists. Just good bystanders.’”

I’ve long since stopped taking umbrage when people don’t get it. But to hear stuff like this from someone with Darnton’s track record is dismaying.

He clearly does not understand — or if he does, he deeply regrets — that journalism is no longer the province of the people like himself, who rose on well defined career tracks through a business that was comprised mostly of big monopoly organizations or a few members of an oligopoly, businesses that achieved their economic power due to conditions that no longer apply.

He does not get that journalism is an ecosystem, and that it is becoming more diverse over time.

The regular people who capture important videos and pictures — or who blog authortitatively what they’ve seen, etc. etc. etc. — are not journalists. But they have committed acts of journalism, profoundly important acts of journalism. That is their role — or more accurately one of their roles — in the ecosystem, and it’s becoming at least as important as any other role including the one played by the people who do it for a living or for a few freelance dollars.

Just as reporter shield laws (assuming we should have them) should protect journalism, not the people who are accredited or licensed to be journalists, in these awards — and in everyday life — it is the act of journalism we should be celebrating.

Darnton’s instincts are sound. And his wish to recognize the values of great journalism is absolutely correct. But I hope he’ll expand his field of vision. And I hope he’ll join those of us who are working on ways to help those people he relegates to bystander roles become even more active and knowledgeable participants in the journalism sphere.

Citizens who commit acts of journalism: Instead of semi-sneers, they deserve our support in every possible way.

UPDATED

NY Times Public Editor: The Olympics? Don’t Tell Me: “‘Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?’ asked Ken Waters of Phoenix. Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men’s downhill before NBC showed the event. ‘This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news,’ Gooch said. ‘There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live. Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience.’”

Good. Grief.

The fact that the ombudsman of the New York Times needs to explain to readers why his newspaper reports actual news as it happens — and Olympic results are actual news — is a depressing commentary on our nation’s entertainment-driven culture.

NBC bought U.S. TV rights to the Olympics, and NBC has chosen not to present live coverage. It wants to put the high-profile events on at night in the U.S. when it can score the biggest audience. It’s entirely about money, as the Olympics are in a general sense at this point.

But to suggest that real news organizations should defer to NBC’s greed is beyond idiotic. It’s pathetic.

Mr. Waters of Phoenix and Mr. Gooch of Harrisonburg, and others like them, need remedial education in at least three respects. First, they need to understand that news organizations are in business to report news. Second, no one is forcing them to look at the Times website in the first place.

And, third, remember: The spoiler here is NBC, which wants you to live in a fantasy world. Blame the entertainment moguls there, not real journalists, if you learn who won an event before NBC deigns to show it on TV.

Any news organization holding back on news because entertainment consumers want to live in their fantasy worlds deserves utter contempt. As a (very small) shareholder in the New York Times Co., I’m glad to see that America’s best newspaper has the right standards in this regard.

UPDATE: Several commenters have defended the notion that news organizations have some kind of duty to hold back their reports or put reports on pages where news viewers won’t have to see the reports. One commenter, who says he’s a journalism school graduate, even suggested a “civic function” in such a method. This is head-slappingly strange logic (as I responded):

To suggest there’s some kind of civic function in asking news organizations to withhold breaking news of an entertainment event (I agree the Olympics are entertainment more than anything else) is bizarre. There is no civic value in two corporate media giants colluding to help one of them make enough money to justify its overpayment for TV rights. NBC has absolutely no interest in performing a civic function; its entire motivation is the bottom line.

Your idea of “timeliness” is equally odd. No one is preventing you from structuring your news the way you want to. If you prefer not to learn about news events until later in the day, or tomorrow or next week, you have an easy way of doing this: Don’t read, listen to or watch news reports until you’re ready to learn what’s happened. You will also need to stay away from the water cooler and conversations with friends and colleagues who don’t share your desire to learn about the outcome of ski races only when a giant media corporation deems it most profitable.

I watched the skiing last night on NBC. The network severely edited the race, ignoring the runs of roughly half of the top seed (first 15 racers) because the women crashed or were otherwise deemed uninteresting to the American audience by the NBC entertainment editors. It inserted a vast number of commercials into what little of the event it decided to broadcast. This is the civic virtue you want to reward? Please.

More than 4 months since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Sad, pathetic, among other things…

(Here’s another excerpt from my upcoming book.)

Throughout my print-journalism career, I worked hard to stay at the edges of organization charts—the lower edges. I had opportunities to run several publications, but in the end I decided that my best role at the time was reporting, writing and (as a columnist) being an advocate. I admire many of the editors I’ve known, and have had some great bosses. But I’ve steered clear of the hiring and firing role, and—though I ran the business affairs of a group of musicians in an earlier career—I never had to make a payroll in the print media business.

Most traditional journalists have also been insulated from the business side of journalism, but not because they’ve chosen to steer clear of it—others have steered them away. Management requires them to keep away from the advertising department, as if they’d get a terminal disease if they had much contact.

This separation of church and state, as we journalists called it with such hubris, came from good motives: not to allow the advertisers—the main customers of the newspaper, if the people who supply the most revenues are the main customers—to dictate or, allegedly, even influence news coverage. This separation was always something of a fiction, given publishers’ and broadcasting station managers’ business duties and influence over the people who worked for them, but it did serve a purpose.

Unfortunately, ivory-tower isolation had more than one downside. In particular, it served, especially during the monopoly and oligopoly decades, to insulate journalists from any semblance of reality about the industries in which they worked. So when the financial underpinnings started getting shaky, more than a decade ago, the journalists were too willing cover their eyes and ears and pretend nothing was wrong. And, later, when reality arrived, layoffs and staff buyouts gathered momentum, and news organizations started getting sold to even greedier owners, the journalists suspended belief as the new owners promised they had “no plans” for further cutbacks.

My experiences on the business side of life, both early in my adulthood and more recently as co-founder of a failed startup, investor, and co-founder of a successful startup, persuade me that one of 20th century pro journalism’s cardinal flaws has been the church-state wall. By all means, tell advertisers (and mean it) that they don’t run the news operations. But a journalist who has no idea how his industry really works from a business perspective is missing way too much of the big picture.

If I ran a news organization today (or a journalism school), I’d insist that the journalists understood, appreciated and embraced the new arena we all inhabit—and that emphatically includes how business works. They’d understand the variety of financial models that support media, especially the organization they worked for, and would be versed in the lingo of CPM, SEO, and the like. I would not ask journalists to grub for the most page views, a new trend that tends to bring out the worst in media, but would very much want them to know what was happening in all parts of their enterprise, not just the content area.

Facebook Privacy Settings for Young Teens-and their Parents: This is a smart and comprehensive posting, and worth a look from parents who are wondering how to help their kids navigate social media.