Mediactive

I love the Hacks/Hackers Unite idea — getting journalists and programmers and designers together to identify good ideas and hack them together. And I was considering attending this weekend’s event in San Francisco until I saw the agenda:

bringing together journalists and media makers with hackers and designers to build the killer media app for the iPad and other tablet devices. This event will be both a coding development camp and a journalistic boot camp. Teams of hacks (content creators) and hackers (developers and designers) will cooperate to tell develop media applications for the iPad and tablets that help inform, enlighten and tell stories for the public good. You can also build tablet-based tools for journalists.”

I’d have attended except that organizers are ignoring a crucial reality: the violation of journalistic principles inherent in participating in a closed ecosystem that the vendor, not the journalists, will control. Apple, and Apple alone, gets to decide if the journalism apps the hackers create for the iPad — and the journalism they contain — are acceptable. And that’s unacceptable.

Some of the ideas people have posted for the weekend development — and they’re quite creative — must assume Apple’s approval of what they do, a risky assumption given the company’s capricious and opaque rulings about what can be on devices running the iPhone OS. Other ideas, relying on the still-unfinished HTML5, seem not to realize that developers the iPad browser forfeit some of the iPad’s key hardware value, e.g. output from various sensors, because Apple won’t allow browser applications full access to the device’s capabilities.

There’s a sop to “other tablet devices” in the event description. But that’s not very realistic given that Apple forbids development of iPhone OS apps using any tools but the ones it provides — for practical purposes, obliging people developing for the iPad and those other devices to do everything twice, using different tools and even languages. The effect, as Apple intends, is to persuade people to develop mobile apps only for Apple devices.

Here’s where I’m focusing my thinking about tablets and outside-the-box journalistic ideas:

Tomorrow morning I’ll be at the Google I/O conference. Rumors abound that Google may unveil a prototype of an Android tablet. It would be easy enough; essentially, it means putting the Android phone OS on a bigger screen, as Dell is planning to do sometime this year. Android is open-source; Google’s restrictions (or mobile carriers’) have relatively easy workarounds, and the main point is that Google doesn’t decide what apps can use what device features or which apps developers can sell.

I will be working on a tablet-based app or two in the coming months, including something I hope to sell or give away as part of the Mediactive project. But there’s no way I’ll let Apple decide if what I’m doing is allowed. This means I’ll focus my efforts on Android and any other tablet OS that doesn’t force me to ask permission.

On Saturday, I’ll head down to the Maker Faire in San Mateo. What’s that about? From the Maker Faire website FAQ:

Our mission at Maker Media, a division of O’Reilly Media and home to MAKE Magazine, Maker Faire and the host of other inspirational and instructional Maker Media brands, is to unite, inspire, inform, and entertain a growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. We call these people “Makers.” 

I wish I could unite the Hacks/Hackers folks with the Maker Faire people. Journalists definitely need to work with programmers. I suspect they need to work even more with the Makers of the world who dream way, way, way outside the boundaries that companies like Apple are creating. Ask permission? These folks laugh at the very notion.

UPDATE: See the comments, where an organizer of the Hacks/Hackers event response.

Bruce Tognazzini: Apple & the Dark Cloud of Censorship. In the grand scheme of things, men like William Randolph Hearst, who had a propensity for involving the United States in the occasional war as long as it would sell newspapers, was far more influential and far more dangerous than Steve Jobs. However, Steve Jobs is not even a journalist. He just makes really, really good paper. What’s going on here is unprecedented.

Apple is displaying the cowardice so in vogue among large corporate entities today, instantly swayed by any pressure group that wants to feign outrage, holding to the most bland, dumbed-down, middle-of-the-road content in order to avoid upsetting anyone about anything. This is the traditional position of, for example, network TV broadcasters, but not Apple, and certainly not Steve Jobs.

I think it’s arrogance, not cowardice. But it’s an outrage either way.

UPDATED

The New York Times, after noting that Apple reversed its arbitrary banning of an editorial cartoonist’s iPhone app, reports that an association representing cartoonists is lobbying for the company to change its rules for humorous, politically charged apps..

I think we need a cartoon for this. It would show the cartoonists storming the gates at Infinite Loop in Cupertino, with the editors and reporters at their newspapers nowhere in sight as they refuse, almost universally, to address the larger issue of turning over their journalism to a capricious owner of an ecosystem in which they have no control.

Maybe Mark Fiore could create it. He knows the issue intimately.

UPDATE: Or maybe not. As Molly Wood notes, Fiore “resubmitted his app, which is now ‘accepted.’ I wish he’d told Apple to shove off.” Me, too.

UPDATED

A few days ago, following up on questions I’ve asked a number of other news organizations about their relationships with Apple, the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro put a query to his bosses — and, unlike me with any traditional news company (including his), got an answer.

Here’s the operative quote from his story today, entitled “App rejected? There’s a rule for that” –

So, can Apple remove news organizations’ apps for their content? Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti wrote that “this is our understanding”; National Public Radio’s Danielle Deabler agreed but said NPR saw no evidence that Apple wanted to do such a thing. Publicists for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and USA Today declined to comment or did not reply to e-mails.

We now have confirmation from two of America’s most respected news organizations — the Post and NPR — that they willingly participate in a distribution/access ecosystem where the company that owns it can remove their journalism from that system for any reason it chooses.

I suspect that the spokeswomen for the Post and NPR have technically violated the terms of their companies’ developers agreements with Apple even by saying that much. Which is, of course, part of the problem.

Anyway, kudos to Pegoraro, who has shown more spine than his colleagues at other news organizations. From all appearances, they’re just hoping this will all go away. It won’t.

UPDATE: At the International Symposium on Online Journalism today in Austin, I asked three panelists — from NPR, the New York Times and the Guardian — about this issue. Only NPR’s Kinsey Wilson responded, and he was more forthright than I’ve heard anyone be from any media company so far.

The situation is “not ideal,” he acknowledged. No news organization, he assumes, has the individual leverage with Apple to insist on contract terms that should be standard for people who believe in their journalism.

NPR, based on Wilson’s other panel comments, is creating what sounds like a multi-platform strategy: creating a back-end system that can feed to any platform. All smart news organizations are trying to move this way.

UPDATED

It’s been more than a week since I asked a number of news organizations, chiefly the New York Times, to answer a few questions about their relationships with Apple. Specifically, I asked the Times to discuss what has become at least the appearance of a conflict of interest: Apple’s incessant promotion of the newspaper in pictures of its new iPad and highlighting of the Times’ plans to make the iPad a key platform for the news organization’s journalism, combined with the paper’s relentlessly positive coverage of the device in news columns.

In addition, I asked the Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today — following up on a February posting when I asked why news organizations were running into the arms of a control-freakish company — to respond to a simple question: Can Apple unilaterally disable their iPad apps if Apple decides, for any reason, that it doesn’t like the content they’re distributing? Apple has done this with many other companies’ apps and holds absolute power over what appears and doesn’t appear via its app system.

Who responded? No one. Not even a “No comment.” This is disappointing if (sadly) usurprising, but in light of other news this week it’s downright wrong.

UPDATE: A Times PR person emailed, 11 days after I first contacted the company about this, that the paper is “not going to comment.” Still no word from the others or, more recently, the Washington Post.

Yesterday, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Laura McGann had a story that should give pause even to Apple’s biggest fanboys and girls inside the news industry. In a post entitled “Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police,” she wrote of the newly minted Pulitzer winner in the cartooning category:

In December, Apple rejected his iPhone app, NewsToons, because, as Apple put it, his satire ‘ridicules public figures,’ a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which bars any apps whose content in ‘Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.’

My disdain for Apple’s tactics grows with almost week — and I’ll be saying more about that in a separate posting — but Apple isn’t the issue here. This is about journalism integrity, and the absolute lack of transparency America’s top news organizations are demonstrating by blowing off a totally reasonable question that these news people refuse to raise in their own pages to any serious degree. (The Times’ refusal to discuss its wider relationship with Apple is even more discouraging, and I’m getting close to selling my small stock holding to demonstrate my disgust with an organization I once absolutely revered.)

I was glad to see Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum pursue this yesterday when he wrote, “It’s Time for the Press to Push Back Against Apple.” Will anyone? The early signs aren’t encouraging.

In a Tweet today, Publish2‘s Scott Karp asked, “Do you think news orgs should refuse to create apps for iPad/iPhone?” It’s the right question.

The answer is a qualified no. While I won’t personally want to participate as a journalist in an ecosystem where one company controls content in this way, I can understand why others might — but any self-respecting journalist would want to have absolute, in-writing guarantees that Apple could not in any way interfere with the journalism.

I see no sign of this. And I’m disgusted with journalists who participate in this system or ignore its implications, or both.