I’m going with Lulu, a company that understands the changes in media. This is a self-publishing service — an operation that takes my work and turns it into books that can be sold, by me and by anyone else who wants to sell them.

Some background: Last fall, when I started serious work on the book part of this project, I was under contract to the publisher that brought out We the Media a few years ago; we parted company in January. At which point, my literary agent — the beyond-terrific David Miller of the Garamond Agency — started looking for a new publisher.

My former publisher was fine with Creative Commons, as proved by the fact that we did the first book that way. But as David told me at the outset of the new search, I was likely to limit the potential field because I had one non-negotiable requirement: The book will be published under a Creative Commons license. In this case, as with We the Media, the kind of Creative Commons license would say, essentially, that anyone could make copies of the work for non-commercial use, and if they created derivative works, also only for non-commercial purposes, those works would have to be made available a) with credit to me and b) under the same license.

The principle was simple: While I want my writing to get the widest possible distribution, if anyone is going to make money on it I’d like that to be me, my publisher and my agent.

Almost a decade after Creative Commons was founded, and despite ample evidence that licensing copyrighted works this way doesn’t harm sales, book publishers remain mostly clueless and/or hostile. As David explained to editors, the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.

That logic persuaded no one in New York (not that we got that far in most cases — more about that below). And to my genuine if not major regret, the Creative Commons roadblock forced me to turn down a deal from a publisher that would have been perfect for this project had I only been writing a book and nothing more.

Two points: First, and most obviously, if a principle means anything, you stick by it when doing so is inconvenient, not just when it’s easy. Second, this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.

To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.

Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.

That ecosystem is evolving at an accelerating rate, and the people who have had specific roles in the one that prevailed in the past — authors, literary agents, speaking agents, editors, publishers and others — are going to have to change with it. Some get this and some don’t, but I’m happy to say that the people I work with directly at this point are definitely in the getting-it category. (I’ll talk much more about this broader context in an upcoming post.)

Meanwhile, I’m having terrific conversations with the folks at Lulu. They aren’t the only outfit of this kind around, by any means, but I like the way they see their own part of the emerging ecosystem.

Incidentally, had I signed with a traditional publisher, the book would not have reached the marketplace for a year, most likely, if not even later. With Lulu, it’ll be available this summer.

Rejections

Editors from big publishing houses have a habit of rejecting books in what they must believe is a kind way. They say something to this effect: “It’s really interesting and we like Dan a bunch, and while it isn’t for us we’re sure it’ll find a great home with someone else.”

Please, folks. Any competent author would prefer this: “We didn’t like it, and here’s why….” Honest criticism is more helpful.

One reason several editors did offer was a bit surprising. An editor wrote, echoing several others, “The main problem that people had was that they felt that they knew much of the information that Dan was trying to get across…”

Wow. You mean that people who read and publish books for a living already know the value of deep and thoughtful media use? Uh, one of the major motivations for this project is the ample evidence that way too many other people don’t know this.

In my days as a newspaper reporter, I learned that the only audience that really counts is your editor. It  was a reality in the world of highly concentrated media, but no more. Any serious writer needs a good editor, but people who become your audience — and if you do it right, your collaborators — are the ones who really count.

Another reason for saying No had the ring of actual truth: The publisher’s publicity and marketing people “felt that the major media would avoid the book because of the criticism of their techniques.” One reason I’m writing it…

Lulu

It was after I turned down the New York publisher’s offer that I contacted Bob Young, Lulu’s founder and CEO. Bob also started Red Hat, one of the first companies to prove that it was possible to make money with open-source software by providing services, and he’s been an ardent supporter of ensuring that what we call “intellectual property” involves as many choices as possible.

Bob had told me about Lulu several years earlier, and in that conversation he’d suggested it would be a good fit for me someday. Now, we both thought, this might really be the time.

He put me in touch with Daniel Wideman, who runs what Lulu calls its new “VIP Services” for established authors making the move to this kind of publishing. Daniel said he very much liked what I was trying to accomplish in this new project, and we had several further discussions. In the end it was clear to me that this would indeed be a good fit.

So here we go. I’ll be letting you know how all this works, by which I mean many of the details of the process.

Back to work…my to-do list has just gotten a whole lot longer. But it’s my list this time.

Chapter 3

Tools and Techniques for the Mediactive Consumer

Now that we’ve considered some principles, let’s get practical and put those principles into practice. The key is going deeper into the news, leveraging that skepticism and curiosity and common sense toward that moment when you can say to yourself, “Ah, I get it.”

What’s involved? Mostly an adventurous spirit; remember, this is about exploration.

Among other things, you need to:

• Find trustworthy sources of information
• Vet sources you don’t already have reason to trust
• Join the conversation(s)

As always in this book, what follows is far from comprehensive. Rather, it’s a surface-level look at an almost infinitely wide and deep topic. Look for many more specifics and examples at the Mediactive website.

Finding the Good Stuff

At first glance, my daily media routine may sound time consuming: I look at a few news-organization websites, including the home pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal among traditional media, clicking through to articles of particular interest. I periodically glance at headlines in Google Reader or a similar service, collected from a variety of sources, traditional and new, on a variety of places and topics I’ve designated. I scan my email for items—articles, blog posts, videos, data and the like—that friends or colleagues might have flagged. I keep an eye on several Twitter lists, and check to see what a few Facebook friends are discussing. If there’s breaking news I care about, I check back with sites I consider authoritative or at least reliable.

Actually, all of that doesn’t take too long. I used to spend more time reading a couple of newspapers each morning and watching the news in the evening. But I’m vastly better informed now.

I don’t believe everything I read or hear, because I apply the principles in Chapter Two. And when I need to be absolutely sure about something, I dig deeper.

Given the relatively short time that we’ve been living in a digital-media world, it’s common wisdom to say we’re in the earliest days of figuring out how to sort through the flood of information that pours over us each day, hour, minute.. But while there’s certainly plenty of room for improvement in attitudes, tools and techniques, it’s getting hard to count the ways we already have of being better informed.

I use a variety of tools and methods each day. The main ones are my brain, and instinct, applying the principles of Chapter 1 through a variety of filters and tactics.

• The most essential filters are people and institutions I’ve come to trust. In the days of overwhelmingly dominant mass media, we had little option but to give some trust in those sources, even though we learned that they were deeply flawed institutions that, too often, led us grossly astray or failed to address vital matters, global to local. But they also did, and continue to do (though less and less these days), some of the most important journalism. They’d have held more trust if they’d been less arrogant, more transparent and even slightly conversational with their audiences. But there’s real value, even now, in understanding what a bunch of journalists, including editors, believe is the most important news today in their own communities.
• Aggregation has become an absolutely essential filter: someone else’s collection of items I might find interesting. There’s machine aggregation and human aggregation, in various combinations. For example:
  • Google News, relentlessly machine-based, isn’t bad as a zietgeist of what journalists around the world believe is important (or was important in the past 24 hours or so), but Google’s almost religious belief in computer programming has detracted from the service’s usefulness.
  • Yahoo once was the leader in aggregation, because it understood the value of human beings in this process. It’s still quite good, though it’s been slipping.
  • Topical aggregation is rising in importance and quality. You can often find a topic-specific collection. I’m a fan of TechMeme for aggregating what’s hot in the tech world, in part because Gabe Rivera, its founder, has clearly seen a vital role for human input.
• Search has always been useful, but now it’s vital. Yahoo and Google offer excellent news-search systems, letting you use keywords to flag stories of interest. When you settle on searches you find useful, you can scan the results for items you may want to check further. My searches are for things like digital media, entrepreneurship (which I teach) and many other topics of interest to me.
• Bloggers are some of my best purely human aggregators. The ones with expertise in a particular domain, plus the energy to keep on top of the news, have become valuable brokers in my news consumption. If you’re not following the work of bloggers who go deep into areas you care about, you’re not well informed, period.
• Twitter has become a must-have alert system. The best “tweeters” keep up a flow of headlines—the 140-character limit on tweets doesn’t allow for much more—that have links to the deeper look into what they’re flagging. Probably the most exciting development in the Twitter ecosystem is precisely that: It’s becoming an ecosystem in which others are creating tools to make it more useful. I’ll talk more about how I publish using Twitter in Chapter 5.
• An essential tool for keeping track of everything we aggregate is RSS, or really simple syndication. It’s been around for more than a decade, and from my perspective only grows in value despite some suggestions that it’s fading in importance. If you don’t know what RSS can do, you should learn, and we’ll point you at the Mediactive website to some ways to learn more.[1]

Those are only a few of the ways you can find reliable news and information, of course, and the techniques are in many ways still somewhat primitive, especially in the aggregation field. Later in this book I’ll discuss the need for much better combinations of human and machine intelligence; for example, when communities can do more than simply recommend according to popularity, we’ll have vastly better ways to understand what’s happening in the world.

Even as we have more and more ways to find the “good stuff,” as it were, there’s a problem: We’ve also never had so many ways to find things that are useless, or worse.

What could be worse than useless? Information that’s damaging if you act on it, that’s what. So we’re going to spend some time on how to avoid falling for things that are either wrong or the category we might call “dangerous if swallowed.”

A Trust Meter

The first defense is our innate common sense. We all have developed an internal “BS meter” of sorts, largely based on education and experience, for dealing with many of the daily elements of life—including older kinds of media, from the traditional news world. We need to bring to digital media the same kinds of analysis we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information.

We know, for example, that the tabloid newspaper next to the checkout stand at the supermarket is suspect. We have come to learn that the tabloid’s front-page headline about Barack Obama’s alien love child via a Martian mate is almost certainly false, despite the fact that the publication sells millions of copies each week. We know that popularity in the traditional media world is not a proxy for quality.

When we venture outside the market and pump some quarters into the vending machine that holds today’s New York Times or Wall Street Journal, we have a different expectation. Although we know that not everything in the Times or Journal news pages is true, we have good reason to trust it more than not—considerably more.[2] )

Online, any website can look as professional as any other (another obviously flawed metric for quality). And any person in a conversation can sound as authentic or authoritative as any other. This creates obvious problems in the trust arena if people are too credulous.

Part of our development as human beings is the creation of what we might call an internal “BS meter”—a sense of understanding when we’re seeing or hearing nonsense and when we’re hearing the truth, or something that we have reason to credit as credible. Let’s call it, then, a “credibility scale” instead of a BS meter. Either way, I imagine it ranging, say, from plus 30 to minus 30, as in the figure above. Using that scale, a news article in New York Times or Wall Street Journal might start out in strongly positive territory, perhaps at 26 or 27 on the trust meter. (I can think of very few journalists who start at 30 on any topic.)

Now consider a credibility rating of zero. I tell myself, “I have no reason to believe or disbelieve what I’m hearing. So I’m going to simply discount it and move on.” This says nothing about the material beyond an absence of information about and/or experience with the creator.

On my mental scale, it’s entirely possible for someone to have negative credibility, sometimes deeply negative. For example, an anonymous comment on a random blog starts off in negative territory. If the comment is an anonymous attack on someone else, it’s so far in the hole as to be essentially irredeemable, say minus 26 or 27. Why on earth should we believe an attack by someone who’s unwilling to stand behind his or her own words? In most cases, the answer is that we should not. The random, anonymous commenter—whether on a random blog or a traditional news site—would have to work hard even to achieve zero credibility, much less move into positive territory. (More on that below.)

Conversely, someone who uses his or her real name, and is verifiably that person, earns positive credibility from the start, though not as much as someone who’s known to be an expert in a particular domain. A singular innovation at Amazon.com is the “Real Name” designation on reviews or books and other products; Amazon can verify because it has the user’s credit card information, a major advantage for that company (disclosure: I own some Amazon stock). Almost invariably, people who use their real names in these reviews are more credible than those who use pseudonyms. More on this below.

Checking it Out

In late 2009 a journalist in Tennessee wrote a shallow and ill-informed column about citizen journalism. He discussed me and my work for several paragraphs and got almost everything wrong, including a) misspelling my name; b) mis-identifying my current academic affiliation; c) claiming I’d left the news business when I stopped writing a column; and a number of other things. He capped this cavalcade of  mistakes by advising everyone looking at citizen journalism to do what “real” journalist do: to check things out before believing them. I nominated him for the (nonexistent) Irony Hall of Fame (Media Wing).

The experience reminded me, not for the first time, that the news field would greatly improve if every journalist was the subject of this sort of poor journalism — there’s nothing like being covered to understand how flawed the craft can be.  It also highlighted two issues you need to consider when you want to guage the quality of the information you’re getting. One is simple accuracy; in this example, the misspelled name and wrong employer were egregious. The other is the choice of topic and the slant of the reporting; the Tennessee columnist wanted to promote his own craft while slamming something he considered inferior.

Factual errors are part of the journalistic process. They happen, and and in a deadline-driven craft we can understand why. But when errors are blatant and careless, they call into question everything else the journalist does. Worse, when they’re not corrected promptly and forthrightly, is the message of arrogance they send to the audience.

Of course, you can’t check everything out yourself. (You can and should, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 4, be careful about what you create in your own media.) But when you’re looking into something where being wrong will have consequences, and if you are unsure of the source of the information, you have every reason, even an obligation, to check further.

Crap Detection

Howard Rheingold, an author and friend, has been at the forefront of understanding the digital revolution.  In a terrific 2009 essay called Crap Detection 101[3] (riffing off a long-ago line from Ernest Hemingway[4]) he wrote about some of the ways to check things out. Here’s a key quote:

The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Learning to be a critical consumer of Webinfo is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles….

Fortunately, tools are far more powerful today than they were a decade ago; the bad news is that too many people don’t know about them. In recent years, as so many more people have started to rely on the web for such vitally important forms of information as news, medical information, scholarly research, investment advice, the lack of general education in critical consumption of information found online is turning into a public danger. No, Bill Gates won’t send you $5 for forwarding this chain e-mail, the medical advice you get in a chat room isn’t necessarily better than what your doctor tells you, and the widow of the deceased African dictator is definitely not going to transfer millions of dollars to your bank account. That scurrilous rumor about the political candidate that never makes the mainstream media but circulates as email and blog posts probably isn’t true. The data you are pasting into your memo or term paper may well be totally fabricated.

There are innumerable crap-detection tools and techniques, and people who work hard to help you understand what’s real and what isn’t. Here are a few of my favorites. (As always, we’ll have a much longer list, broken out by topic area, on the Mediactive website.)

Detecting Accuracy

1. Snopes.com. This site is all about confirming or debunking the stories that race around the Internet every day. Look around Snopes, and be amazed. UrbanLegends.about.com, a site run by the New York Times, is also helpful for sorting out paranoid nuttiness from truth.
2. FactCheck.org, a political fact-checking site, and its FactChecked.org companion site for students and teachers, help you sort through a few of the political claims tossed around our republic. Your best bet, I’d suggest, is to assume that everything you see in a political advertisement is at best misleading, especially if it’s an attack on a candidate or campaign.
3. QuackWatch.org is invaluable for debunkery of, you guessed it, bad information about health.
4. In the experimental category I’m a fan of MediaBugs.org (another project on which I serve as an advisor). Scott Rosenberg, with the help of people like you, is compiling a database of journalistic errors—and whether or when the mistakes are corrected. If he can  get enough buy-in from journalists at all levels in his early experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, this could become a national resource of note.

Detecting Slant

1. SourceWatch.org. The Center for Media and Democracy, which leans left politically, has created an invaluable collection about the organizations that seek to persuade us to buy or believe.
2. Mass media consistently misrepresent science. Ben Goldacre, a British doctor, writer and broadcaster, runs Bad Science[5], where he routinely demolishes crappy reporting in the media. If you follow his work you’ll more easily spot bad science reporting yourself.
3. Newtrust.net. Fabrice Florin’s project, aimed at persuading communities of readers to grade reports based on a variety of criteria, is a promising approach. I encourage you to join and add your own knowledge to the database. (Note: I’m an advisor to the project.)

Again, this is the briefest list. The key point is that the more something matters to you—the more you have at stake—the more you need to investigate further.

Risks, Statistics, Lies

Asking yourself whether something makes sense is especially relevant in understanding risk. Journalists have been, as a trade, beyond negligent in explaining relative risks. Local television news has been almost criminal, for example, in its incessant hyping of crime even during times when crime rates were plummeting, helping persuade people that danger was growing when it was in fact shrinking. While the individual crimes and victims were all too real, their overall significance was grossly overstated. And legislators, all too happy to “do something” in response to media-fed public fears, often pass laws that do much more aggregate harm than good.

Medical news reports, moreover, tend to vary from ill-informed to downright crazy; the unwillingness of a significant portion of the American population to get vaccinated for the H1N1 flu, based on little but paranoid rumors and media reports, is downright scary. Panic is often the greatest danger, because it leads to bad responses, and when the media fuel panic they are doing the greatest of disservices.

Statistics are a related problem. Too few people understand statistical methods or meaning. If you hear that such and such product or substance is linked to a 50 percent rise in some low-incidence disease, you need to also understand that the likelihood that you’ll get that ailment remains vanishingly small.

These are issues of slant, not accuracy. But they have everything to do with our understanding of the world around us.

Above all, rely on common sense. Always start with that. That first bit of  skepticism can save you a lot of pain later on.

Sidebar: The Wikipedia Question

In May 2009, the Irish Times reported a story that made journalists everywhere cringe. The article, entitled “Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries,” began[DG1] :

A Wikipedia hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world. The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March. It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.[6]

Hoaxes are not new in journalism, but the Wikipedia haters, who are vocal if not all that numerous, were thrilled with this one. It gave them another reason to attack the online encyclopedia.

Certainly the site’s relatively open nature was instrumental in the student’s ability to pull off the hoax in the first place. But a closer examination, including a long note to readers by the Guardian—one of the publications that fell for the hoax—suggested a different lesson. In fact, as Siobhain Butterworth, the newspaper’s “readers’ editor,” observed, Wikipedia community performed well in a) discovering the lie and 2) fixing the article:

Wikipedia editors were more skeptical about the unsourced quote [than newspaper editors who printed obituaries based on the false information]. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful – the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again.

Still, the invented quote was widely used — by people who should have known better. In the Guardian, there was apparently no citation, even to Wikipedia, which would have been a tipoff in the first instance.

As the Guardian’s Butterswoth also noted:

The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.

That applies to everyone, not just journalists. Wikipedia’s own policies call for all information to be traced back to authoritative references, and articles are routinely flagged when they lack such references:

Content should be verifiable with citations to reliable sources. Our editors’ personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here.[7]

I say this again and again, to students and anyone else who’ll listen:

Wikipedia is often the best place to start — but the worst place to stop.

It’s the best place to start because you’ll often find a solid article about a topic or person. It’s the worst place to stop because that article might be wrong in some particular. A 2005 article in Nature magazine, comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, only muddied the issue, and not because it didn’t conclusively resolve the question of which is more accurate. The point here is that you should not assume the particular fact you check at a particular moment is true.

But every decent Wikipedia article has something at the bottom that should also appear on newspaper articles online: a long list of links to original or at least credible outside sources including news articles. And every Wikipedia article has a record of every change, down to the smallest detail, going back to the day it was first created.

Moreover, Wikipedia articles of any depth have “meta” conversations about the articles themselves, where the editors discuss or argue among themselves about the quality of the information going into the article and often about the credentials of the editor who’s making the latest changes.

Yes, use Wikipedia—and lots of other sources. Just understand its limitations, and advanages. And if you see something that’s wrong, fix it. More on that in Chapter 4.

Anonymous versus Pseudonymous

As the 2008 presidential campaign wound down, a Fox News TV report relayed a variety of negative attacks on Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, from members of the presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign staff. Palin denounced the attackers—all of whom demanded, and were granted, anonmyity by the news channel—as cowards.

No matter what you think about Palin in general, she was right to be angry. The Fox report was a perfect example of why anonymous critics should not be taken seriously — in fact, why they should usually be flatly disbelieved.

Anonymous sources are one of professional journalism’s worst habits. Their constant appearance in media, especially newspapers and broadcast news outlets that ought to know better, turns otherwise respectable institutions into gossip mongers and invites audiences to doubt what they’re being told.

Ombudsmen at the Washington Post and New York Times have scolded their colleagues not just for their incessant use of anonymous sources but also the journalists’ flouting of internal policies banning what they’re doing. It makes no difference, apparently, because the anonymice, as media critic Jack Shafer calls them, just keep on appearing.[8]

Shafer notes that he’s no absolutist on these things, understanding that in some kinds of situations anonymous sources are vital. We learned about the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program against Americans because someone spilled it to the New York Times (though the newspaper unaccountably held the story for a year before publishing it). But we also “learned” — the quotes are deliberate — from the same paper that all kinds of terrible things were happening with regard to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction via anonymice: lies laundered through the newspaper by an administration that was hell-bent to create a case for war.

One of the more ridiculous ways news organizations pretend to be more transparent about an inherently opaque practice is to offer reasons, as explained by the sources, as to why they can’t allow themselves to be identified by name. Occasionally it makes sense, as the Times’ reader respresentative noted when a Good Samaritan at a New York assault didn’t want his name published because the assaliant was still at large. But Hoyt was too much the gentleman when he termed “baffling” a story in which a source was granted anonymity “because he was discussing drug-testing information.”[9]

I have a rule of thumb. When a news report quotes anonymous sources I immediately question the entire thing. I’m skeptical enough about spin from people who stand behind their own words, but downright cynical about the people who use journalist-granted anonymity to push a position or, worse, slam someone else.

When someone hides behind anonymity to attack someone else, you shouldn’t just ignore it. In the absence of actual evidence, you should actively disbelieve it. And you should hold the journalist who reports it in contempt for being the conduit.

New media are a wider world of anonymous and semi-anonymous claims and attacks. The blogger who refuses to identify himself or herself invites me to look elsewhere, unless I’m persuaded by a great deal of evidence that there’s good reason to stick around. And, as I said earlier, the anonymous commenters on blogs or news article deserve less than no credibility on any BS meter; they deserve to start in deep-minus territory. Where would I put the attacks on Palin? Well, given the sources (Fox and the anonymous people launching these verbal grenades), I’d start slightly below zero and wait for some evidence.

Pseudonyms are a more interesting case, and can have great value. Done right, they can bring greater accountability and therefore somewhat more credibility. Content management systems have mechanisms designed to a) require some light-touch registration, even if it’s merely having a working email address; and b) prevent more than one person from using the same pseudonym on a given site. This isn’t as useful as a real name, but it does encourage somewhat better behavior, in part because it’s easier to police. A pseudonymous commenter who builds a track record of worthwhile conversation, moreover, can build personal credibility even without a real name (though I believe real names are almost always better.)

Ultimately, as we’ll discuss later, conveners of online conversations need to provide better tools for the people having the conversations. These would include moderation systems that actually help bring the best commentary to the surface, ways for readers to avoid the postings of people they found offensive, and community-driven methods of identifying and banning abusers.

For all this, I want to emphasize again that we should preserve anonymity, and appreciate why it’s vital. Anonymity protects whistleblowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous.

But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments.

Talking With Journalists (of all kinds)

More and more print journalists are posting their email addresses in the work they publish. They are acknowledging their role in a broadening, emergent media ecosystem, recognizing that news is becoming a conversation instead of a lecture. (Broadcast reporters, for the most part, aren’t nearly so willing to join conversations; their loss.)

Mainstream journalists are congenitally thin-skinned; insecurity seems almost a precondition to employment in traditional newsrooms. This has always been a notable irony, given that the journalism business routinely shoots people off their pedestals, typically after helping install them there in the first place. So when you contact a journalist, you’re likely to get him or her to listen if you’re polite; attack mode is almost always the wrong approach.

The best modern journalists do want to listen, and sometimes they even want your help. In Ft. Myers, Florida, the local newspaper asked its readers for help on a local story involving the water and sewer system. The readers responded, and the newspaper was able to do much better journalism as a result.

Josh Marshall, creator of Talking Points Memo[10] collection of political and policy blogs, has done much of the best work in this arena. He regularly asks his readers for help poring through documents or asking questions of public  officials. (In a later chapter I’ll describe how journalists could do this as a matter of routine, and the kinds of results we might get.)

The recently launched ProPublica.org investigative site, meanwhile, has asked its users to add their expertise in a variety of ways. Its 2009 “Stimulus Spot Check”[11]—a deeper look at whether and how states were using road and bridge construction money from the federal economic stimulus package enacted earlier in the year—was assisted by dozens of volunteers from the site’s ProPublica Reporting Network.[12] The professional journalists obtained a random sample of the approved projects and asked the volunteers to help assess what had happened.

If you live in a community with particularly smart media organizations, you may be able to join them in a more formal way. American Public Media’s Public Insight Network[13], best known for its work in Minnesota and the upper Midwest, has signed up some 70,000 people who’ve agreed to be sounding boards and sources for the journalism created by professionals (and ultimately, one hopes, the citizens themselves).

The New Media Watchdogs

In Chapter 1 we noted the sad state of media criticism in traditional circles and the heartening rise of online media criticism. We should do more to make it an integral part of mediactivism.

Some of the best and most ardent online criticism is coming from political partisans. Sites such as Media Matters for America are earning big audiences with its dedication, as the site proclaims, “to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”[14] The site’s stated bias helps us understand its reports, which strike me as some of the most thorough of their kind. While Media Matters is prone to hyperbole in interpreting the facts, as far as I can tell it rigorously checks those facts.

People and organizations with grievances about the way they’ve been covered have better options than ever before. It’s increasingly common for companies and public figures to tell their side of stories on their own sites. Intriguingly, the Obama White House embarked on a campaign of its own media criticism early on, specifically taking on Fox News as a propaganda machine, not a “real” journalism organization. Whether a president should be arguing with individual news operations is a separate issue, but I welcomed the administration’s effort to explain to Americans what people paying attention had already learned.

Bigger media organizations have legions of critics. (You can even find a long Wikipedia article devoted solely to criticism of the New York Times.[15]) Yet even in smaller cities and towns, you’re likely to find someone (ideally, several people) blogging about local media. Remember the credibility scale, of course, when you read the critiques. But do read them, and decide as the facts shake out which ones are worth continuing to read.

Some might argue we have too much media criticism in a world where bloggers are constantly on the attack against what they perceive, often accurately, as inadequate journalism. But one of the healthier aspects of the rise of bloggers as media watchdogs has been the way journalists have had to start developing thicker skins—not ignoring their critics but also not reacting with the pure defensiveness of the past. Professionals are still sensitive about all this. Happily, at least a few have started listening, and are talking back on their own blogs, Twitter streams and elsewhere.

What drives traditional journalists especially crazy is being attacked unfairly. (Pot, meet kettle…) Comment threads under big media articles, which are so often unmoderated wastelands of  evil spewings from apparent sociopaths, become Exhibit A for journalists who don’t want to participate in conversations with readers. So the bias, even today, is to stay away from genuine contact with audiences. While media people are joining some conversations, they’re still avoiding genuine discussion of their own failings.

We need even more media criticism, at every level. This especially includes the new media critics, who make their own share of mistakes and are as likely to misinterpret reality as any editorial writer. You can usually find the best responses of blog posts, videos and other such commentary right underneath the original critiques.

Bloggers often have skins as thin as any traditional journalist’s, and some have a tendency to respond to even mild critiques with the kind of fury that only makes themselves look worse. But bloggers also have an instant feedback mechanism that traditional media people rarely use: the comments. You almost never find a mass-medai journalist participating in the comments on his or her organization’s website. Bloggers do tend to participate on their own sites, and on Twitter and other forums.

A project I’ve been working on, called MediaCritic, aims to aggregate various kinds of media criticism in a way that we hope will help you find the best of this genre, from media of all kinds about media of all kinds. As of this writing we’re about to launch an “alpha”—or very early—version of the website, which will use RSS and Twitter searches and feeds, augmented by human curation, to look at what some of America’s best critics are saying about the media they’re using. We’re also working on local versions of the project, the first of which is launching in the Phoenix area.

Escape the Echo Chamber

One of the great worries about the Internet is the echo chamber effect: the notion that democratized media have given us a way to pay attention only to the people we know we’ll agree with, paying no attention to contrary views or, often, reality.

This is no idle worry. But the same digital media that make it possible to retreat into our own beliefs gives us easier ways to emerge, and engage.

A key principle in the first chapter was the idea of going outside your comfort zone. As I  said then, this has several, related facets:

1. Learn from people who live in places and cultures entirely different from your own.
2. Listen to the arguments of people you know you’ll disagree with.
3. Challenge your own assumptions.

You need to be somewhat systematic about the first and second of those points, but also opportunistic. While I make it a point to read political blogs written by people who make my blood boil, and read journalism from other parts of the world, I also make the best possible use of that elemental unit of the Web: the hyperlink.

Even the most partisan bloggers typically point to the work they are pounding into the sand. If a left-wing blogger writes, “So and so, the blithering idiot, is claiming such and such,” he links to the such and such he’s challenging—and you can click that link to see what so and so actually said. Contrast this with what happens when you watch, say, Fox News on televison. The TV set, at least today’s version, doesn’t come with links; and clearly the Fox journalists don’t want you consider world views other than their own.

The link culture of the Web is part of the antidote to the echo chamber. But you have to click. Do it, often.

If you do, there’s a good chance you’ll discover, from time to time, that you either didn’t have a sufficiently deep understanding of something—or that what you thought was simply wrong. There’s nothing bad about changing your mind; only shallow people never change their minds.

I engage in a semi-annual exercise that started more than a decade ago, when I was writing for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper. I kept a list in the back of a desk drawer, entitled, “Things I Believe”—a 10-point list of topics about which I’d come to previous conclusions. They weren’t moral or ethical in nature. Rather, they were issue-oriented, and about my job as a business and technology columnist. Every six months or so, I’d go down the list and systematically attack every proposition, looking for flaws in what I’d previously taken for granted.

For example, one longstanding item on my list was this: “Microsoft is an abusive monopoly that threatens innovation, and government antitrust scrutiny is essential.” From 1994 until I left the Mercury News in 2005, I continued to believe this was true, though a shade less so by the end of that period than at the beginning and during the software company’s most brutal, predatory era. Conditions have changed. Given the rise of Google and other Web-based enterprises, not to mention the huge telecommunications companies, I’ve definitely modified my views; Microsoft is still powerful and sometimes abusive, but it’s not nearly the threat it used to be. (No, I don’t make my list public, though I talk about many of its points in my blog from time to time, which is almost the same thing.)

Consider creating just such a list of “givens” that you will challenge on a regular basis. This is especially vital when it comes to political beliefs. My basic political grounding combines elements of liberal, conservative and libertarian doctrine, and I vote according to a collection of issues, not remotely by party. But I’m constantly reassessing.

The late Carl Sagan, in a wonderful essay called “The fine Art of Baloney Detection,” put it this way:

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.[16]

[2] The Journal’s editorial page is famous for its indifference to facts that contradict its world view and, sadly, too often resorts to abusing truth in its strident advocacy.[2]  See, for example, http://www.slate.com/id/2092439/

[3] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?blogid=108&entry_id=42805

[4] http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/65aug/6508manning.htm

[5] http://www.badscience.net/

[6] http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0506/1224245992919.html?via=mr

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars, last accessed December 4, 2009.

[8] http://www.slate.com/id/2195078/

[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinion/22pubed.html

[10] http://talkingpointsmemo.com

[11] http://projects.propublica.org/spotcheck/

[12] http://www.propublica.org/special/reportingnetwork-signup

[13] http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/publicinsightjournalism/

[14] http://mediamatters.org/p/about_us/

[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_New_York_Times

[16]http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/W/Jonathan.D.Wren-1/The%20Fine%20Art%20of%20Baloney%20Detection.htm

Today I’m starting to post chapter drafts of the Mediactive book. (Here’s everything I’ve posted so far.) Remember, this is a draft, not the final version, though my editor and I believe we’re fairly close. Feel free to chime in with ideas about what I’ve missed and especially what I have gotten wrong, or send email. The chapter begins after the jump.

In the last year of the first decade of the 21^st century, reality hit the news business with a powerful thud. To the legions of pessimists, especially those who held jobs in traditional media companies, reality could be interpreted only as a catastrophe. The jobs were disappearing as journalism’s and publishing’s business model, which had been in jeopardy for at least a decade, crumbled in an accelerating and—because journalists love to talk about themselves—highly visible way.

Despite years of warnings and ample time to do something about the shifting nature of media from an analog to digital world, news organizations had decided to milk their former monopolies and oligopolies for all the money they could extract—and now the milk was running short. Media companies were still running operating profits, some quite healthy at that, but many had gone as deeply into debt as a mortgage borrower in Las Vegas, and the bills were too steep to pay. And even the media companies that had been cautious about debt were facing a perfect storm, with advertising revenues and circulation declining at a scary rate, and little or no prospect of a major comeback in either category.

This was bad enough. Worse, the doomsayers claimed, journalism itself was at risk. Who would do the journalism if the business model died? How would the public be informed?

All this anguish and chest-thumping, of course, begged these questions:

First, by what standard had traditional journalists done such a good job that they were irreplaceable? Given the well-documented failures of journalists in recent times, the notion that we should imbue great trust in their work was absurd on its face. There had been some superb reporting, to be sure, but a craft that a) helped lead the nation into a war started under false pretenses; and b) almost totally missed the financial bubble hardly deserved our unreserved trust.

Second, did the unquestionably hard economic times for their businesses mean that journalism would no longer exist if those businesses disappeared? Again, the question was founded in arrogance. Journalists working for traditional media companies were arguing that their enterprises had some near-divine right to exist. They never did.

The optimists in all this drama see something else afoot. We don’t worry about the supply of news and opinion, though we do recognize that a shifting marketplace for information—from monopoly and oligopoly to a new, competitive mediasphere—will cause massive turmoil. We recognize that we’ll lose some of the journalism we’ve had in the past, at least in the near term.

But we see a million experiments emerging from the wreckage, experiments in journalistic content and business models alike. This is wonderful news. Tomorrow’s media will be more diverse, by far, than today’s. We can imagine, therefore, a journalism ecosystem — a vital part of our expanded mediasphere — that is vastly healthier and more useful than the monoculture media of recent times.

There will always be a need for conscious efforts to make information better—more trustworthy and reliable—but the Digital Age, democratizing the media, at least guarantees we’ll have an abundance of it.

Yet to assure a continued supply of quality information, we have to address the other side of a classic economic and social equation: demand. And to put it mildly, our demand today isn’t so great. In fact, it’s downright crappy.

Unless we all demand something better than we’ve been getting, we will get more of the same sludge that now dominates the world of news. I have nothing against entertainment. But information that doesn’t help us make better decisions about our families and our communities leaves us short-changed.

Mission Statement

My goal for this project—the book you’re reading, along with the accompanying website, mobile app, and other initatives—is to help you become what I call mediactive.

I’m asking you to use the media you once merely consumed. In an era of democratized media, you can do so—and by doing so will make an enormous difference.

I’m asking you to take some responsibility for knowing more of what’s real and what’s fantasy—because the consequences of “knowing” things that are false can be catastrophic.

I’m asking you to participate in media, in ways ranging from being a more nuanced reader all the way—if you decide to push it—to becoming a journalist in your own right., Of course, infinite gradations of participation lie in between; you can occupy any wavelength on that spectrum you like at different times.

Think of Mediactive as a “user’s guide” to democratized media. For this we don’t require a hyper-detailed how-to book like the great “Missing Manual” volumes from this publisher—the kinds of guides that tell you how to wring every bit of value from specific hardware and software products or services.

Although I’ll offer lots of specific suggestions for being mediactive, the more lasting message behind them will be more important: principles and guidelines for being savvier consumers and creators alike. Once we get the principles straight, the rest is mostly tactics.

Don’t get the idea that this is some kind of stern lecture about how you must do this or that or else you’re a bad person. Nor is this an “eat your (insert vegetable you loathe) because it’s good for you” exercise. We’re talking about doing something that’s often fun, if you have the slightest curiosity about the world, and downright useful the rest of the time.

Ah, time. You can expand your horizons. You can expand your knowledge. But time is the one thing we can’t expand, even though we can use it more efficiently. The most vital element of this is to rethink your basic attitudes about media; that won’t take any extra minutes or hours out of your day, and will actually make the ones you do devote to your media more productive. But as with anything, the more active you become, the more time you’ll need to set aside for it. And if you follow the principles in this book, you’ll know what value you’re getting for your time.

At the end of this chapter I’ll tell you more about how I’ve organized the mediactive project, including a description of what I’ll cover in upcoming chapters. Before we look at the individual trees, however, let’s step back and look at the forest they inhabit.

An Extremely Brief History of Media

It has taken millennia for humanity to produce democratized media. When early humans started drawing on the walls of caves, they created a lasting record of things that mattered. Stationary cave walls gave way to rock and clay tablets, which in turn evolved to papyrus and animal-skin documents, including scrolls.[1] Early books—single editions created by scribes—came next, setting the stage for what I think of as Media 1.0: the printing press.[2]

Moveable type, in the form of the Gutenberg Bible, liberated the word of God from the control of the priests—and humanity had seen its first profound democratization of media. Printing presses spread the words of individuals to many readers.  Regimes shook, and some fell. Civilizations changed irrevocably.

When the telegraph moved information over long distances at the speed of light, we’d hit a new turning point. Call it Media 1.5. The telegraph’s effects were more disruptive than transformative, but they led to the next epochal shift.

Broadcasting was Media 2.0: mass media traveling long distances instantaneously. The radio brought news and information, plus the sound of the human voice, with an immediacy that led both to the rise of the great and the wicked. Franklin Roosevelt did much to calm a troubled nation with his fireside chats, while Hitler used radio, among other media, to pull his nation into outright savagery.

Television added vision to radio’s voice, combining broadcasting’s immediacy with film’s visual intensity. It was a huge shift (Media 2.5), but not as much as what was to come.

The Internet is Media 3.0, combining all that has come before and extending it in the web of connections that includes everything from email to the Web (and Web 2.0 at that). It is radically democratized media, in ways that we are only now beginning to understand well. But with this opening of what had been a mostly closed system,  possibilities emerge literally without limit.

Democratization Means Participation

The tools for creating news have come increasingly into everyone’s hands. The personal computer that I’m using to write this book comes equipped with media creation and editing tools of such depth that I can’t begin to learn all their capabilities. The device I carry in my pocket boasts Web browsing, email, video recording and playback, still-camera mode, audio recording, text messaging, GPS location sensing, compass headings, and much more; oh, and it’s a phone, too.

If creating media is now a trivial task, the other half of democratization springs from how media is seen by others.

With traditional media, we produced something, usually manufactured, and then distributed it; we put it in trucks or broadcast it to receivers in a one-to-many mode.

With new media, we create things and make them available; people just come and get them. In the new system, “distribution” is all about making sure that the people we have called consumers can find what we’ve created.

Even as media democratization turns people from mere consumers into potential creators, something else is happening. Some of those creators are becoming collaborators, because so many of the new tools of creation are inherently collaborative. We have only begun to explore the meaning, much less the potential, of this reality.

Media saturation requires us to become more active even if we remain consumers, in part to manage the flood of data pouring over us each day, but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we see. Anyone creating media that serves the public interest or conveys news needs to understand what it means to be journalistic, as well as how to make it better and more useful.

This adds up to a new kind of media literacy, based on key principles for both consumers and creators. The principles overlap to some degree, and they require an active, not passive, approach to media.

Journalism Business Woes, and Opportunities

The mass media of the 20th Century were based on control: monopolistic and oligopolistic control not so much of content but of the revenues that made it possible to produce the most widely distributed content. Broadcasters got exclusive rights to use the publicly owned airwaves, so three broadcast networks in the U.S.—perhaps only one in many other countries—along with their local affiliates held sway over local TV and radio media. Newspapers became monopolies in many communities due to a confluence of factors, not least of were two major barriers to entry:, the cost of publishing and advertisers’ preference for the channel that reached the broadest possible audience.

Newspaper proprietors are whining today that they’re giving away what they’ve been charging for all these years. This claim is basically false. For the past half-century, they’ve subsidized relatively meager circulation (readers who buy the newspaper) with monopoly-based advertising, typically to the tune of 80 percent advertising revenues to 20 percent circulation revenues. Now that advertising is moving online in a competitive market, advertisers are moving to non-news sites and paying a small fraction of what the former monopolies charged them.

Because we’ve become accustomed to a media world dominated by monopolies and oligopolies, we still tend to imagine that just a few big institutions will rise from the sad rubble of the journalism business. That’s not where it’s going, at least not anytime soon. We’re heading into an incredibly messy but also wonderful period of innovation and experimentation that combines technology and people who push ideas both stunning and outlandish into the world. The result will a huge number of failures, but also a large number of successes.

One of the failures was mine. In 2005 I helped launch an experimental local project, and made just about every mistake in the entrepreneur’s goof-kit. But I’ve also invested in several new media enterprises. I co-founded a site with a media component—users telling each other about where they were traveling plus advice on what to do once they got there— that worked well enough to be bought by a big company. I’m also involved in several emerging enterprises as an advisor.

I can’t begin to list all of the great experiments I’m seeing right now. I’ll be doing more of that on the Mediactive website, which is where such things belong. (I’ll explain why later in this chapter.)

What’s important is the breadth and depth of the innovations we’re already seeing— even now before the traditional media have disappeared. The experiments and startups range from not-for-profits doing investigative reporting to data-driven operations at the hyper-local level to aggregators to any number of other kinds of enterprises.

In one journalistic arena in particular, new media have pretty much replaced the old: technology. The widening array of coverage, some of the best focusing on narrow audience and topic niches, has not only superseded the magazines and (shallow) newspaper coverage of old, but is deeper and fundamentally better. Not all topics will lend themselves to this kind of transition, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 6, but there’s every reason to believe that many of today’s weakly covered topics and issues will enjoy better journalism in the future.

For the past several years I’ve been working in a journalism school to bring entrepreneurship and the startup culture into the curriculum. We’ve encouraged students in a variety of programs, not just journalism, to team up and create new kinds of community-focused information products and services. Several have landed funding to take their ideas further, and all have shown the kind of potential that tells me we’ll get this right in the end. I am envious of my students, and I tell them so; they and a million like them around the world are inventing our media future, and the field is wide open for them in ways that I could not have imagined when I started my own career.

Trust and Reliability

The expanding and diversifying media ecosystem poses some difficult challenges alongside the unquestioned benefits. A key question often asked is: in this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we live, work, and govern ourselves in a digital age depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to rethink, or at least reapply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

These norms exist in the form of principles as much as practices, and they are now essential for consumers and creators alike. They add up to a 21^st -century notion of what we once called “media literacy,” but the older concept largely missed the emerging methods of participation that are becoming such a key element of digital media. (This is only one reason that we should seek a replacement for the expression “media literacy”—because it connotes something that has become quaint to the point of near-irrelevance.)

Trust and credibility are not new to the Digital Age. Journalists of the past have faced these questions again and again, and the Industrial Age rise of what people called “objective journalism”— allegedly unbiased reporting—clearly did not solve the problem.

We don’t have to look very far, or very far back in history, to note some egregious cases. The New York Times’ Jayson Blair saga, in which a young reporter spun interviews and other details from whole cloth, showed that even the best news organizations are vulnerable. Fox News still maintains a slogan of “fair and balanced” —two falsehoods in three words. The Washington press corps, with dismayingly few exceptions, served as stenographers for the government in the run-up to the Iraq War. And so on.

But the credibility problem of traditional media goes much deeper. Almost everyone who has ever been the subject of a news story can point to small and sometimes large errors of fact or nuance, or to quotes that, while accurately written down, are presented out of their original context in ways that change their intended meaning. Shallowness is a more common media failing than malice.

In the traditional news world, even though we understood the prevalence of minor errors in stories, even by reputable journalists, we also understood that, by and large, the better media organizations get things pretty much right. The small mistakes undermine any notion of absolute trust, but we accept the overall value of the work.

Most traditional media organizations try to avoid the worst excesses of bad journalism through processes aimed both at preventing mistakes and—when they inevitably occur—setting the record straight. Yet too many practitioners are bizarrely reluctant to do so. As I write this, it has been 10 weeks since the Washington Post published an editorial based on an absolutely false premise, which I documented in my blog and passed along to the paper’s ombudsman (who, bizarrely, is not expected to comment on what the opinion pages do, only the “news” pages); the editorial page has neither corrected nor acknowledged the error, an outrageous failure of its journalistic responsibility.

As noted, the new media environment is rich with potential for excellence. But it is equally open to error, honest or otherwise, and persuasion morphs into manipulation more readily than ever.

Consider just a few examples:

• The 2004 U.S. congressional elections were notable in many ways, not least in the widespread adoption of blogging and other conversational tools by candidates, staffs, and supporters. But in South Dakota’s U.S. Senate race, the campaign of Republican challenger John Thune paid two local political bloggers whose work influenced the state’s major newspaper; not until after the election, which Thune won, was their paid role widely known.
• Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, among other major companies, have been caught compensating bloggers and social networkers for promoting the firms or their products without disclosing their corporate ties. The stealth marketing, also called “buzz marketing,” caused mini-uproars in the blogging community, but a frequently asked question was whether these campaigns were, as most believe, just the tip of an influence iceberg. Meanwhile, other companies have created the blogging and social networking equivalents of the “advertorials” we find in newspapers, compensating people for blogging, Tweeting and the like and not always providing adequate disclosure. Federal regulators have been sufficiently alarmed by these and other practices that they’ve enacted regulations aimed at halting abuses; unfortunately, as we’ll see later, they’ve gone way too far.
• President Barack Obama has been the target of mostly shadowy, though sometime overt, rumors and outright lies. They range from the laughable to the truly slimy. What they have in common is that during the election campaign they were plainly designed to poison voters’ attitudes in swing states. During Obama’s presidency they are designed to discredit his authority among a large swath of the American people. The people behind these campaigns have succeeded to a degree that should scare every honest citizen; a nontrivial percentage of Americans believes Obama is a Muslim and originally a citizen of Kenya. If the latter were true, which it is not, Obama would be disqualified from holding his office.
• On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter sock puppets—people posting under pseudonyms instead of their real names, and either promoting their own work or denigrating their opponents, sometimes in the crudest ways. As with the buzz marketing, it’s widely believed that the ones getting caught are a small percentage of the ones misusing these online forums. Sock puppetry predates the Internet, and has never gone out of style in traditional media, but it’s easier than ever to pull off online.

Craig Newmark, founder of the craigslist online advertising and community site, famously says that most people online are good and that a tiny percentage does the vast majority of the harm. He is undoubtedly correct. Yet that doesn’t solve the problem.

In a world with seemingly infinite sources of information, trust is harder to establish. But we can make a start by becoming better informed about what we read, hear and watch.

Supply Side: Watching the Watchers

One of most serious failings of traditional journalism has been its reluctance to focus critical attention on a powerful player in our society: journalism itself. The Fourth Estate rarely gives itself the same scrutiny it sometimes applies to the other major institutions. (I say “sometimes” because, as we’ve seen in recent years, journalists’ most ardent scrutiny has been aimed at celebrities, not the governments, businesses, and other entities that have the most influence, often malignant, on our lives.)

A few small publications, notably the Columbia Journalism Review, have provided valuable coverage of the news business over the years. But these publications circulate mostly within the field, and can look at only a sliver of the pie.

To be fair, the news media do cover each other to some degree. But most of that coverage focuses on reporting related to corporate maneuvering and profiles of stars—a worthy topic, but not sufficient to meet the public interest. Only very occasionally do journalists for major media organizations drill in on each others’ successes and failures as journalists. When they do it, they tend to do it well; it is unfortunate that they don’t try more often.

Apart from raw market mechanisms and the legal system’s bludgeon of libel lawsuits—both providing, sadly, only flawed countermeasures to poor journalism—we have had a largely unaccountable press. But new media tools are pulling down some walls and helping to create the possibility of deeper accountability outside legal frameworks. Bloggers and Web-only publications are providing some of the toughest and best work of this kind.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports with enormous depth and is singularly persuasive in showing how American journalists have continually botched even basic duties when it comes, for example, to covering the debate over government electronic surveillance. In Los Angeles, lawyer and blogger Patrick Frey (”Patterico”) relentlessly tracks and critiques—sometimes, like Greenwald, with over-the-top language—the Los Angeles Times’ coverage, particularly political stories. Both of these writers make clear their political leanings, left for Greenwald and right for Frey; readers refract that information through their own lenses to make their own decisions.

These two writers are among legions of people who have taken up media criticism, not as their primary occupation but as a part of what they do in their daily lives. When they care about something, they care about the journalism covering that topic—and now they have a way to discuss what they’ve seen.

Their work is diffuse, and therefore not always easy to find—a natural aspect of the Web’s distributed nature. But their work is essential, and I hope you’ll consider adding your learning and your voice to their number.

More thorough, robust media criticism, and conversations built around it, will serve us all better.

It’s Up to Us, Not “Them”

In mid-to-late 2009, if you were paying even the slightest attention to the legislative debate over America’s messed-up system of health care, you heard again and again about “death panels.” These were the shadowy governmental bodies that opponents claimed would decide your fate if the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted just about any major shifts away from the current system. Tens of millions of Americans believed this, and many still do.

But if you were paying sufficiently close attention, you came to realize that the death panels were outrageous lies. They’d been concocted by opponents of pretty much anything the president and his fellow Democrats might propose.

The death panels lost their power in the public mind for several reasons. First, the charge was so inflammatory that some traditional media organizations did something unusual: they stopped simply quoting “both sides” of an issue that had a true side and a false side, and reported what was true. Not all media organizations did this by any means, and some continued to promote the falsehoods.

But the issue was significant enough, and the consequences alarming enough if the charges had been true, that many people spent the extra time it took to figure out what they could trust. The public, by and large, learned the truth. And the health-care debate shed at least one flagrant deception.

We need to do this more often.

The 20^th-century’s era of media monopolies and oligopolies encouraged us to be mere consumers. We were expected to sit back and accept what they were being told. We turned over our essential skepticism, especially about the actions of powerful institutions at all levels,  to media organizations that in many cases came to treat journalism as a form of entertainment. We loaned our trust to people who too often didn’t earn it.

It was always a bad idea to be a passive consumer, even when there was little choice. Our current media-saturated age offers us some new openings as well as new responsibilities, at the very least being more active (and informed) as media consumers. We can’t afford to be entirely passive, not in a time when the consequences of being misinformed are so potentially serious to our personal lives and to our society’s future.

We have no real choice in any case.

Our democratized 21^st-century media lay out before us a land of opportunity, and of peril. When we have unlimited sources of information, and when the Big Media organizations relentlessly shed their credibility in the face of economic and journalistic challenges, life gets more confusing.

We need to break out from the passive consumer role and become active users of media: hands-on consumers and creators. This won’t only be good for society, though it certainly will be. It’s the right approach because we’ll all be better off individually.

Above all, hands-on mediactivity is satisfying, and often fun. Once you get used to checking a variety of postings on various topics and following the many threads of arguments to reach your own conclusions — not on everything, of course, but on the issues that you care about the most — you’ll have trouble waiting for the next break in the day when you can do it again. Meanwhile, traditional sources of information will start to feel disappointingly predictable.

The Mediactive Project: Walking the Talk

As noted earlier, the book Mediactive is a sliver of a much larger project. I’ll be posting everything in the book on the Mediactive.com website, but my goals go well beyond the physical volume you’re either holding in your hand or reading online.

Book and Web

Even in this era of fast-to-market production methods, with print-to-order publishing becoming one of the ways we make and sell books, the versions we print on paper, bind between covers, and ship to customers has some added permanence and stability.

So it made sense to put in the physical book the kind of material that doesn’t change very quickly. While the tactics we might use to achieve something might vary from year to year, based on what tools are available, the principles don’t change much, if at all.

The material that does evolve fast, including tools and techniques, makes much more sense on the website. And that’s where you’ll find most of it.

Topics of Coming Chapters

Here’s what we’ll discuss along the way:

• Principles of Media Consumption. These include: Be Skeptical; Exercise Judgment; Open Your Mind; Keep Asking Questions; and Learn Media Techniques.
• Tools and tactics for exercising skepticism, using judgment and generally following those principles.
• Principles of Media Creation: Be Thorough; Get it Right; Insist on Fairness; Think Independently; and Be Transparent.
• Tools for creating media, and techniques for being more trusted.
• Why everyone needs to be a publisher about him/herself: If you don’t define yourself, others will define you in this increasingly public world. In particular, you should create and maintain your own Web presence.
• Why journalism still matters: What traditional media organizations could still do to survive; what some new organizations are doing to experiment our way to the future; and how our fellow media participants are joining the larger ecosystem in more intriguing ways. For people who aren’t journalists but who may occasionally commit a random act of journalism, which is to say almost everyone, what should you do when you encounter something newsworthy? Also: my rules for any news organization.
• Law and Norms: Freedom of speech has always come with legal caveats, and you need to know some basics. Equally important, we all need to recognize that the law can’t and shouldn’t deal with some situations. Societal norms will need to evolve, too.
• Why parents and teachers need to understand all this, and how they can push educational institutions to do a better job. Journalism educators should also become leaders in this arena. Sadly, traditional news organizations missed an opportunity by not doing it.
• A look ahead: What tools and techniques need to be invented, or perfected, so that we’ll have the trusted information ecosystem we need? They include human-machine reputation systems; aggregators that give humans more say in what’s reliable; and much more. Also: Why entrepreneurship is a key to the future of journalism and all media.

Who is This Project Not For?

If you have been spreading the notion that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in Africa, this book is probably not for you. Correspondingly, if you promote the belief that George W. Bush was complicit in a U.S.-led plot leading to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this book is probably not for you. Ditto if you believe that Biblical writings are equally plausible as evolution in explaining humanity’s presence on Earth.

Who is This For?

I don’t really expect to persuade everyone to jump off the couch and become a mediactivist. That would be wonderful, it’s not going to happen.

But if you are still sitting back in the cushions, maybe I can help you imagine the results of leaning forward and demanding something better than you’re getting, so you’ll be better informed on the things that matter to you.

If you’re an active consumer, I hope to persuade you to take the next step and participate in the journalistic part of the mediasphere, even in a small way.

If you’re a sometime participant, maybe I can persuade you to take an even more active role in your community’s physical or virtual information flow.

We need each others’ help. The rewards are going to be worth the effort.

[2] I lived in Silicon Valley too long, and tend to put version numbers on things. I’m in Career 3.4 at the moment, for example.

All Chapter Drafts

And, once again, I hope you’ll help.

A few years ago I wrote a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, suggesting that we were on the verge of an evolutionary leap. Amid the democratization of media tools and access, I said, the lecture mode of journalism was giving way to conversation; and that stemmed, in part, from the simple fact that the audience always knows more than the person telling the story.

This evolutionary shift is still in its relatively early days. We are in a period of immense disruption, especially notable in the demolition of the business model that has paid for most traditional journalism for the past half-century or so.

Like everyone else, journalists have always been publicly preoccupied with their own situation. Unlike almost everyone else, they’ve owned a higher podium and a louder megaphone.

So we’ve been bombarded with angst, recriminations and, lately, panic emanating from an industry in jeopardy — a business that can no longer rely on the monopoly and oligopoly profits that spun off some occasionally brilliant journalism during the industry’s fattest era.

But look around. The messy process of reinvention is well under way.

Not a week goes by without a new announcement of an experiment in journalism. Today’s news regards a project, featuring finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn and her husband, aimed at helping local news reporting find a business model. Good luck to them — and the thousands of other folks who are working on these problems.

Last week’s news was from an Aspen Institute conference where a high-powered group of folks publicly agonized about the future of journalism. From a distance, the highlight looked to me to be the New Business Models for News project from Jeff Jarvis and company at City University of New York.

More recently it was GrowthSpur, a consultancy created by digital media pioneer Mark Potts and some colleagues, and aiming to “provide tools, training, services and ad networks that will help local sites grow and become successful businesses.”

And True/Slant; Huffington Post; Journalism Online LLC; Spot.US; EveryBlock (sold to MSNBC); and countless others (including our terrific media-entrepreneurship students at Arizona State University) who are proving out Clay Shirky’s observation: “Nothing will work, but everything might. Now’s the time for lots and lots of experiments.”

So I’m declaring victory, albeit early, on the supply side of the equation. Democratized media are giving voice to everyone who has something to add to the emergent global conversation, and the same tools are enabling smart people to experiment with sustainability models for tomorrow’s news and information. We will have plenty of quality news and information — though sorting the good stuff from the sludge will be just one of the huge issues we’ll have to deal with as we move forward into this new era. And, of course, we’ll need to help people creating that supply do a better job at all levels.

But that doesn’t solve what may be a bigger issue: crappy demand.

We have raised several generations of passive consumers of news and information. That’s not good enough anymore.

The media of today and tomorrow require us to become active users. And that’s a prime focus of this new project, Mediactive, the title of this website and an upcoming book. (Here’s the early chapter outline.)

My publisher, as with We the Media, is O’Reilly Media, the only company of its kind that truly gets this stuff. We’re going to be experimenting, in part, with the very nature of what a book is in a Digital Age.

Indeed, this entire project is about experimentation. Some of what we try will not work. Some of it will. But in the end, I hope to have created a solid user’s guide to news and information, for people who realize that they have to take some responsibility for knowing what they’re talking about.

Being active users of media is not an “eat your spinach because it’s good for you” exercise. It’s definitely good for us, but it’s also interesting and/or fun — and in the end truly satisfying.

As with We the Media, I’m not working in a vacuum. Lots of other people are thinking about these questions and trying to come up with answers, too. As always, we’re in this together.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn’t imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn’t be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

This is very much my strategy with this book/website, though the things that change rapidly will change mostly here on the site, not in the printed version.

How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

What this means is that unless a very different model evolves, ebooks can never become the dominant version of content sold by book publishers. It means that ebooks will always be priced to sell, but sold as an afterthought, not as the primary version of a work. It means that the need for blended e plus p models will evolve, in order to take advantage of all the great qualities of ebooks, while providing the financial support and structure that print offers. It means that consumer ebooks, as a stand-alone version of an intellectual property, must fail.

This is a valuable lesson in book economics — 20th Century book economics, that is.

The key words in Schnittman’s piece (or at least the short portion I’ve quoted) are “huge advanced needed to buy books” — an assumption that we may need to challenge as the financial ecosystem of books, not just the distribution chain, evolves over time.

The huge advances themselves seem unsustainable. That’s a good thing, because they warp the marketplace.

Moreover, it’s unclear why publishers alone are expected to cover authors’ costs given that, at least in the case of much non-fiction, authors make money in ways other than selling books — namely consulting and speeches, among other things. Why shouldn’t the various parties in this ecosystem (a word I use deliberately) collaborate to sell books and other services and share revenues? Complex, sure, but worth it in the end.

If Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood folks can create directors’ cuts of their movies, why can’t journalists do the same — and more? Why can’t they keep updating and improving some of their own works?

They can, if they get past the publication or broadcast metaphors from the age of literally manufactured media, where the paper product or tape was the end of the process.

This is not just about newspapers or broadcasts. It’s about books, too — about any of the media forms that are making the transition into the Digital Age. This project, in particular, will be my own attempt to put this notion and others into practice.

***

We accrete knowledge in real life. We learn a little more about something. We factor that new information into a new understanding of the larger topic.

This maps to the way the Web works. On the Web, the best explainers accrete audiences and authority, as they attract more and more readers and inbound links. 

Because of the manufacturing model, traditional journalism has done things a different way. The process has been to create a new story each time there’s a bit more information about a person, topic or issue, and either a) expecting audiences to have enough background to understand why this turn of the screw matters; or b) add some background information that attempts to bring the reader/viewer/etc up to speed.

This is inefficient — for the journalists and for the audience. But in an online world, we can easily do better.

We can do it by creating ownership of articles, and beyond that, of topics — and then adding (and subtracting) from the original as new information comes to light. (Jeff Jarvis put it well in his piece last year when he wrote: “The building block of journalism is no longer the article.”) 

Some models are already available. Consider Wikipedia, where every version of the article — and I mean everything, down to the version where someone added a comma and hit the save button — is available to anyone who wants to see it. You can even compare adjacently edited versions side by side.

In the real world, how might this work?

Let’s say I’m just starting to understand the role of financial tools called “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) in the current financial meltdown. And suppose that the New York Times had done a detailed explainer of CDOs. (I can’t find one, but perhaps they did.) Now comes the important part: Let’s further suppose that the Times has been updating that article on the Web to reflect new events — in addition to writing current news stories (and archiving them next to the original) and creating a huge link directory. The newer stories have lots of new details, only the most central of which make it back into the updated original story.

The Times has gone part of the way in this direction. Under the umbrella of Times Topics you’ll find a huge aggregation of articles that have appeared in the paper, including this page on CDOs. 

What you won’t find is what I’d like to see as well: the original uber-explainer — call it the baseline copy — and then the current, updated version one to see what’s changed. Or maybe I want to see them mashed together, with the changes highlighted using colors for additions and strike-throughs for deletions. 

The average reader would probably go to updated Big Topic story, starting and ending there for the moment. Then, when new journalism appeared about CDOs, he or she woulkd  more likely background to understand the nuance. 

The idea isn’t new, really. The Associated Press and other wire services have used what’s called the “write-through” forever — adding new information to breaking news and telling editors what’s new in the story.

***

As noted above, I raise this point because it’s the approach I’m taking to this project. I’ll be adding material from blog posts into publicly viewable chapter drafts. 

The chapters will keep changing even after a book is published, though it’s way too early to know how often, if at all, a new version of a book will be printed. Given the rapid progress in the publish-to-order world, it may be mroe often than I’d imagined.