So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging there, including many of the items I’d normally be posting here. My arrangement with Salon gives them exclusive access for one week to new posts, after which they’ll appear here — as always, under a Creative Commons license from this site.

Here’s my first post.

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.

To meet this need, I’ve gathered a range of portable applications one can run from a USB drive. This is version 1 and will develop based on use and suggestions. I chose the initial set with this criteria in mind:

• Meet the needs of media consumption or creation
• Open-source or freeware
• Familiarity and ease (when possible)

The how-to for setting up your own USB drive is below, but first, let me list the applications:

Platform:
PortableApps Platform – PortableApps.com offers an extremely useful foundation for portable software. It sets up your USB drive (or even an iPod) for installing and running other portable applications. It runs on Windows, but can be run on Linux and OSX via Wine. I started with the platform alone without other applications added. However, you can download the platform with lots of extras as well.
Consumption:
Firefox – Other browsers can be portable as well, but I chose Firefox for its universality.
Universal Viewer – This very handy app can view most document and image types and easily covers the doc, pdf and odt bases.
VLC Media Player – VLC plays both audio files and most video formats.
Creation:
Audacity – This covers simple audio editing.
GIMP – This image editor is an open-source alternative to Photoshop.
Inkscape – This vector image editor is a simple alternative to Illustrator.
KompoZer – Though not as robust as Dreamweaver, this web editor covers a lot of bases.
Notepad++ – This is a text editor that can also highlight code. It’s useful for quick edits to HTML and CSS files.
FileZilla – This is an open-source FTP client.
VirtualDub – I’m still sifting through portable video-editing options, but this one should suffice for now. Codec installations in general make adding a portable video editor a bit more involved.
Utilities:
Skype – Other IM clients are available as well. Skype offers voice and is well-saturated.
Eraser – A simple privacy utility for ensuring documents erased on a public machine are gone for good.

How to Set Up Your Field Journalist USB Drive:

1. You’ll need a USB drive. It doesn’t have to be extremely roomy for applications as the total install of the programs listed here only comes to 258 MB (give or take). However, you’ll want to have room for any files you’ll be working with, so extra gigs doesn’t hurt.
2. Download the PortableApps platform. Once downloaded, run the  file. It will ask for an install location. Here, choose the drive letter of your USB drive.
3. Once installed, PortableApps should launch. If not, view the files on your USB drive and double-click “StartPortableApps.”
4. Installing applications is fairly simple, though not immediately intuitive. You first need to download the application you want to install and the files can be found at the links in the list above. There are two ways to install depending on whether the application is customized for the PortableApps platform or not. Both are simple:
   
   To install an app customized for the Portable apps platform, go to “Options” and then to “Install a  New App.” Then, just select the file. Note: Files for the Portable Apps platform will carry the .PAF extension.
   
   To install any other portable app, first download and uncompress the file. This will usually yield a file folder with that application’s name. Take this folder and copy it into the PortableApps folder on your USB drive. After this, go back to the PortableApps program, select “Options” and “Refresh App Icons.” Your new application should now appear.
5. Your USB drive is now ready for digesting, managing and editing a range of media. If you want to customize, more portable applications can be found at PortableApps and Softpedia.

This is just the first version and I’m still exploring portable applications. I’m very interested in suggestions for applications you prefer to those on this initial list or programs that fill other gaps. If you know of similar projects for journalistic purposes, I’m very interested in that as well.

Photo via DavidRGilson’s Flickr stream.

Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.

Transom.org is produced by Atlantic Public Media and is a site for welcoming newbs into the world of public radio. In 2003, it was the first website to win a Peabody award and did so by offering great examples of audio storytelling and solid instruction on how to produce such stories.

HearingVoices.com is a series featuring the best of public radio. It hosts its own “Learn Radio” list with great links related to both storytelling and production.

SoundPortraits.org hosts a great Interview Checklist by David Isay. Its beauty is in its brevity and would make a great pre-game rundown before interviews until you get the hang of it.

The Teen Reporter’s Handbook at RadioDiaries.org is another great reference for getting started in audio. As well, Radio Diaries itself is a commendable project replete with good examples of citizen storytelling. The goal of the project is to find folks whose voices are rarely heard and get a recording device in their hands to begin a personal diary. Hosted documentaries include the voices of prisoners, unique teens and carnival retirees.

If you’re still hungry for digital storytelling links, McLellan Wyatt’s list will keep you busy for weeks.

Finally, check out Ira Glass on Storytelling. He gives an excellent breakdown between merely reporting and telling a story people want to hear:

The new WordPress app for Android has been released and it’s quite nice. While blogging from a phone still feels a bit limited, this app is a good option for blogging away from a machine.

The application integrates with self-hosted blogs and features tabs for managing comments, posts and pages. The screen for writing posts integrates with Android’s image gallery. (Here, it becomes an even greater travesty that Android doesn’t provide an easy way to take screenshots.) Once written, posts can be published or uploaded as drafts.

Also nice is the comment alert feature, allowing the user to get updates when new comments show up. If you require comment approval for new posters, this can free you from your machine and frequent dashboard refreshes.

In all, it’s nice to see this app taken seriously with bases well-covered in its initial version.

While there are multiple ways to host and charge for content online, drop.io offers a fairly simple option. Drop.io is a collaborative, file-sharing service that becomes interesting when you add its privacy options and real-time nature. In addition to file-sharing, drop.io offers the user a feature (appropriately named Paywall) to charge for uploaded content.

Many kinds of media creators can find benefit in a streamlined system for charging for files. Drop.io offers several use cases, which include the independent journalist who wants to charge for monthly access to an insider news service and the photographer who wants to sell high-resolution versions of his images. To this, I also see usefulness to the data journalist who wants to fund her document digging and visualization time by charging for curated data sets. As well, this could be an option for quickly selling that newsworthy photo you caught at the right place at the right time.

Drop.io has a thorough and well-done how-to on their site, but I’ll give the steps in broad strokes here:

1. Create a new drop on drop.io’s homepage. You have the option to add a file in this step and you’ll have to create an admin password.
   
2. Access Paywall and follow the setup instructions. This is done by appending your drop’s URL with “/admin/paywall/”.
   
3. Setup your Amazon Payments Business Account. Drop.io will take you to Amazon to set up a new account or you can use an existing one. One thing to note is that your Amazon Payments name will be visible to buyers. So, keep this in mind if there is a desire for anonymity/pseudonymity.
   
4. Finish by entering your Amazon Payments info and agreeing to terms.

It’s important to note that each site will take a cut from transactions. Drop.io takes 1% and Amazon takes 1-3% and some change based on payment method. As well, free accounts on drop.io go up to 100mb, but it’s $20/month to upgrade to 10gb.

All in all, I believe the simplicity of this approach allows for fast experimentation in terms of the kind of content an individual can sell.  For example, PaidContent.org began as a one-man trade newsletter by Rafat Ali. As well, the system could fit into the 1000 True Fans model being adopted by entrepreneurial media creators. This is ripe for creativity.

Chapter 5

Active Participation: Making Your Own Media

The tools of digital media creation are becoming ubiquitous, certainly in the developed world and increasingly on a global scale as well. They encompass such a wide variety of technologies and methods that I could spend this entire volume just talking about the ones you can use right now—and by the time you read this there would be new ones.

So in this chapter we’ll look in a high-level way at how to make your own media. As always, we’ll extend and amplify on the Mediactive website.

Tools and Techniques

Now that we are all able to create media, not just consume it, it’s useful to know the most widely used tools and techniques and understand why people are so excited about some of the emerging ones.

Our children are using most of these tools already, especially social networks. In Chapter 8 we’ll look at some of laws and cultural norms that moderate the use of these technologies, which like all tools can be used for good or bad purposes.

Simple Text: Mail Lists and Discussion Groups

In this day of video, audio, mashups, and all kinds of advanced media forms, we sometimes forget the value of plain old text. That can be a mistake, because text is easy to scan and, for most people, easier to create than linear media like video.

You don’t even have to be a blogger to use text to great effect in communities of all kinds. Even a simple mailing list can be a great way to keep people in touch, and to pass around valuable information. If you can pull people to your blog, it’s great for disseminating ideas, but often you’ll get more attention by posting a brief message to an appropriate mailing list already frequented by the people you want to reach.

There are thousands and thousands of mail lists, message boards and other kinds of systems of this sort. They exist for conversation and information, and can be amazingly valuable. They’re designed for easy participation. Some allow anonymous posting; others require a sign-up with a valid email address in order to deter bad behavior. Although some go even further and require each mail to be checked by a moderator, this kind of gate-keeping is rarely used anymore because it holds up discussion.

It’s fine to lurk, of course; in fact, a general rule on forums is that you should read for at least a couple days to get a sense of the culture and what’s acceptable to post. Ultimately, you’ll get the most out of these forums by joining in. The more you know about a topic, the more you can help others understand it, too. No matter who you are, you know more than enough about something to be a valuable participant.

Forums and mail lists are also simple to create yourself. It’s especially easy at big Internet sites like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.[1] If you don’t already have an account, just create one. Then create a group and you’re off to the races.

The limitations of running a group or mail list via Google or Yahoo become fairly obvious once you’ve spent enough time there. You can move up to more sophisticated forum software—there are literally dozens of products and services to choose from—but going this route does add several layers of complexity.

I’ve been on mail lists and forums of various kinds for years. Many have served distinctly journalistic functions. For example, our former neighborhood in a northern-California city—a few square blocks with several hundred homes—was served by a community website that offered basic information about the area. But the more valuable online information source was a Yahoo Groups message board where residents discussed local news. One day, someone posted a message saying that the tap water had gotten cloudy. Someone else noticed the same thing. Not too many hours later, we found out the scoop: according to a resident who called the city utilities department, repairs to the system were causing the cloudiness, but it was not at all dangerous to anyone’s health; the poster of this message also linked to a page on the city’s website explaining the situation.

This incident was not nearly important enough to have been of interest to the (formerly) big daily newspaper in Silicon Valley, my old employer. As far as I know it didn’t even make the weekly serving our town. But it was real, serious news in our neighborhood, just as other messages over the years letting folks know about local break-ins and vandalism.

Blogging

A blog is a series of updates in reverse chronological order, with the newest material at the top. That’s it.

But blogging is a term that encompasses any number of forms; it can be turned to a variety of purposes, as millions of people around the globe have discovered. Blogging has become one of the most preferred ways for people to post news, opinions and, yes, even what they’ve had for breakfast as they write from their basements in their pajamas.

Blogging providers and services abound. The “big 3” services for individuals are:

Blogger

A free hosting service owned by Google that’s probably the least flexible of the pack but also probably the simplest to use. Google let Blogger languish for a time, but it has been improving the service lately.[2]

WordPress

Currently my blogging software of choice. It has both hosted (free and paid) and self-serve options where you install the software on a computer that you or your Web hosting service own. WordPress has a large variety of “plug-ins” that let you extend and customize what you can post and how people can view and use it. [3]

TypePad

A mostly paid hosting service from Movable Type, a company that has focused more and more on the business market.[4]

The main thing to understand about any of these blogging services is its convenience. You can create a blog in about five minutes, and later on you can make it pretty much as simple or elaborate as you want.

If you have a passion for something, blogging is a natural outlet. The best bloggers have several things in common:

• They have a genuine, human voice. A blog is not a press release machine, or shouldn’t be.
• They invite conversation. This trait isn’t universal: some extremely popular blogs don’t allow comments, for reasons that seem appropriate to the people who run those sites. But I strongly advise that you not just allow comments but encourage them.
• They link out to other sources. They don’t just tell what the author knows or thinks, but points readers to useful material from others as well.

Should you write infrequent but long posts, or frequent but pithy ones, or something in between? My answer is—yes. Do whatever you feel is best, not what someone prescribes. (If you want to get lots of traffic, or visits from other people, then more frequent updates are generally a good idea.)

For years and years, the question has kept coming up: is blogging journalism? We may as well ask whether writing on paper is journalism. The answer, of course, is that most blogging is not journalism, but some blogging is. In short, blogs are tools to be used in any number of different ways. Let’s agree never to ask this question again, okay?

Sidebar: Terms of Service, Etc.

When you do pretty much anything online, you are confronted with a checkbox you must click in order to proceed. Almost everyone checks it, and almost no one reads the Terms of Service to which they’re agreeing.

My overarching goal in this chapter and book is to help you jump in and join the journalistic conversation, But you can’t ignore the legalities, especially if you’re planning to create media that may have a commercial aspect. Some people, including me, refuse to use certain popular sites because of restrictions they impose or how the sites might use the data posted there.

I strongly suggest that you do read the privacy policies and terms of service on the sites you use. I also hope that Internet services will liberalize their policies toward greater user privacy, freedom and re-use of what people post, such as promoting Creative Commons. It’s in the best interest of the sites’ owners, I believe, to protect privacy and promote openness; call me naïve, but I believe they’ll move more and more in those directions. I’ll talk in in several upcoming chapters about some of these issues.

Twitter (Microblogging)

The traditional media pick a Big New Thing in Technology all the time, and in 2009 it was Twitter.[5] This time, the traditional media got it right.

Twitter is a “microblogging” service that lets you post messages of up to 140 characters in length. That’s not as short as a typical newspaper headline, but it’s not long enough for more than a basic thought.

Yet the very limitation of Twitter—combined with absolutely brilliant positioning by the company—has turned it into what has aptly been termed the “nervous system of the Web.”  The flow of information on the service is diverse, of course, given the millions of users; but it’s also useful, not just entertaining.

Twitter users soon find that every event is first mentioned on the microblogs. They’re faster than the search engines, faster than mailing lists or forums, and frequently faster than well-known news sites (although they often spring from press releases and news flashes from more obscure news sites).

I use Twitter both as a creator and reader; it’s an essential part of my daily media. I use it as an alert system to get tips and early warnings, and to keep an eye on what people I respect think is important. I follow the “Tweets” (Twitter postings) of about 250 people and organizations. I’ve selected them carefully, looking for rich information from the relative few rather than a fire hose from the many. Most are involved in the media. I post frequently as well, and as of this writing have about 8,000 followers, a decent number but not remotely in the ballpark of the most avidly followed people or services.

The main reason Twitter has become so popular is that the people behind it—including Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger (see a pattern?)—have made the service the center of an ecosystem. They’ve made it easy for other people to build applications and services on the tweets of the millions of Twitter users, in all kinds of ways. (I’m an investor in one of the companies, called Seesmic,[6] that is part of this ecosystem. The most popular Twitter client application is TweetDeck.[7])

If you have a blog, you can use Twitter to build the audience by pointing to postings you think are particularly interesting. I don’t recommend tweeting about every blog post, because your Twitter followers may well grow tired of this kind of self-promotion when they can just as easily get an RSS feed from your blog.

In general, the best newsworthy Tweets contain hyperlinks to something else. When someone I follow because I like her work suggests I look at something related to her expertise and makes it sound interesting in her brief description, I tend to click through and check it out. I can’t overstate the value of Twitter when used in this manner.

Because of the 140-character limitation, Twitter has spurred the use of URL-shortening services such as bit.ly and is.gd, which shorten the Web address you submit to a Twitter-appropriate length. The use of these services has raised a number of questions, including the permanence of the links and how search engines will handle valuable links that actually send you to something else, as well as security questions.

Social Networks: More than Facebook

The week before I wrote this chapter, Facebook announced it had reached an amazing milestone: 350 million signups worldwide. You may well be one of them. So am I, though I don’t use Facebook to the extent that my students do to stay in touch with what their friends are doing.

Like Twitter, Facebook cleverly created an ecosystem. It encouraged third parties to use the Facebook software platform to create other products and services within the Facebook service itself, everything from posting pictures to sharing travel plans to playing online games, and on and on. You can spend a lot of time inside Facebook and get a lot out of the experiences.

Should you “friend” everyone who asks? That is, should you agree to share information with other people more or less indiscriminately? Definitely not. Most people online, as in the physical world, are good. But enough are not that you should be at least somewhat cautious in how you approach social networks.

You need to take privacy issues extremely seriously. After Facebook made what I considered a dramatic change in its policies, I decided to quit and start over (see sidebar). And as I’ll discuss in Chapter 8, privacy is at the core of what I hope will be changing norms in an always-connected age.

The rise of Facebook has been meteoric, but it’s hardly the only social network. MySpace has a huge number of users, and while it no longer has its former cachet it remains highly popular, especially when used for its primary purpose: music discovery and promotion. I don’t visit it much, but researcher danah boyd has observed that MySpace still is one of the most widely used networks, second only to Facebook.

Meanwhile, the very notion of a one-size-fits-all social network has led to well deserved skepticism, and some excellent ways to escape. Ning.com lets you create your own social network, with many of the best features of the big networks available out of the box. We use Ning for our university classes, to keep students informed of events in class. The best part of Ning is that you can make the network entirely private among its members, invisible to the outside world. (As we’ll discuss later, it’s always best to assume that anything you create online for someone else—anyone else—to look at may someday escape out to the rest of the world.)

Even blogging platforms are becoming more like social networks. For example, the people behind WordPress have created BuddyPress, an add-on that brings social networking capabilities to the blogging system. The value of this is that you can create a more cohesive community around your blog.

Sidebar: Why I Quit Facebook (but Rejoined)

I use Facebook for several reasons. One is to keep track of what’s happening in the planet’s largest social network, including what application developers and users are doing there. Another is that some of my friends — actual friends — are using the site. Facebook helps me stay in touch.

But when Facebook made a dramatic change to its privacy structure at the end of 20090, I concluded I could no longer trust the service, even with the limited amount of things I’ve said and done there since I got an account several years ago. I continue to admire the company’s accomplishments in many other ways, but this was a major change.

Why did I no longer feel safe and sound in the hands at Facebook? Even though some of the changes they made in their privacy settings are actually helpful, notably the ability to set privacy options for individual posts, the overall bias was troubling. As an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation concluded, the new settings were “clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.”[8]

Facebook’s extremely smart leaders know perfectly well that the majority of users are likely to accept these suggestions. Most people say yes to whatever the default settings are in any application, even though they should always be wary of the default precisely for reasons like this.

I wasn’t very happy with my Facebook situation in any case. Early on, I said yes to just about everyone who asked me to “friend” them, including people barely knew and some I didn’t know at all.

The privacy changes—and my continuing uncertainty, given the still- large number of pages you have to look at to modify your settings, a continuing confusion—made me realize I’d rather take fewer chances. So I’ve made a fairly drastic change.

I deleted my account. Then I started a new one.

Actually, I scheduled the old one for deletion, which is all Facebook allowed. The company figures, perhaps correctly, that some people will have made this decision rashly and wants to give them a way to reconsider. And it’s clearly in Facebook’s interest to avoid as many cancellations as possible for business reasons.

It wasn’t easy to figure out how to delete the account, which no doubt is part of the company’s strategy, too. If you go to your Settings page, the only option in this realm is to “deactivate,” not delete.

But a little searching on the site turns up this Facebook Group called “How to permanently delete your facebok account”[9] (more than 35,000 members) — which in turn reveals an actual delete-account form at still another Web address that Facebook doesn’t reveal in any prominent way, if at all.

After creating a new account, I checked the default privacy settings for new users. They’re pretty un-private, in my view, sharing way too much with people you don’t know. I systematically went through the various screens — Facebook makes this chore both annoying and obscure, perhaps on purpose — to ratchet down the settings to something I can live with.

We all know what is Facebook’s best interest: exposing to search engines and advertisers the largest possible number of pages by among the largest number of people willing to create stuff and make it all public. Marketers drool at what they can do at Facebook if the company will only let them, and Facebook’s entirely rational goal, like almost every other Internet company’s, is to make profits in almost any way it can. What’s in the corporate interest, however, doesn’t necessarily match what’s in my interest, or yours.

So I’m still at facebook.com/dangillmor—though my real Web homebase is dangillmor.com, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter—with just a few Facebook friends at the moment. I’ll be adding more, but not in any hasty way.

Audio: Podcasts and More

We are, in some ways, what we listen to. I love music, and I love the spoken word.

We’re in the early days of an audio revolution. Other digital media are also undergoing rapid change, but audio has a special nature of its own.

Whether you listen to the radio or podcasts or audio of other kinds, there is a special quality to listening. You are forced, in a good way, to use your imagination. When I listen to a news program on National Public Radio I am filling in gaps in my mind, visualizing the parts I’m not seeing.

Podcasting is the most important of the emerging audio methods, at least in the context of news and information. The easiest way to think of podcasts are as audio blogs: episodic, available over the Internet via syndication, and displaying the newest postings first. (I’d bet that most people find new podcasts through search and links from other sites, however.)

As with blogs, the variety of podcasts is enormous. The most popular podcasting delivery system, as with music, is Apple’s iTunes store[10], but you can find podcasts in many other ways as well. As with blogs, you can find services that will host your audio files on their computers, something I recommend for both audio and video. But you can also Web-host them yourself.

The software tools you need to create good podcasts come with every new desktop or laptop computer. Apple’s GarageBand software has podcast-specific features, for example. There’s also a huge amount of free or low-cost software available online[11] if you decide to get more sophisticated about your recordings.

To join the audio journalism movement, you should have a decent headset with a microphone for recording and playback at home or in the office. If you’re interviewing people in the field, you should consider buying a decent external microphone and audio recorder, although modern digital cameras usually let you record audio and video, and today’s smart phones can do what you need if you don’t mind not-so-great audio and picture quality.

Although an audio news show or segment—compiled material that someone edits before distribution—is considerably more complex to create than most blog posts, you don’t have to be an audio or news-radio pro to create a useful podcast. Sometimes a recording of a conversation is all you need; imagine talk radio, democratized. One of the most interesting podcast series around is called “Rebooting the News,” originated by blog pioneer Dave Winer and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen (both friends of mine), who ruminate—often with guests, including me on one occasion—on the state of news. Their weekly series, far from getting stale, has only grown more interesting over time.[12]

Visual: Photos and Videos

Sooner than later, almost everyone will be walking around with a camera capable of both still photos and video—the one in our mobile phones. It’s already getting difficult to buy a phone that doesn’t at least take photos, and video recording capabilities are becoming more common, too. Meanwhile, digital still and video cameras continue to sell by the millions, and their capabilities improve on the steady pace you expect from modern digital technology.

What kind of equipment should you use? I tend to agree with Chase Jarvis, who says “the best camera is the one that’s with you”—and has written a book and iPhone app, and created an online community, to reinforce this point.[13] Without the camera, there’s no picture or video.

If you take lots of pictures, you may well want to share some or all of them with others, not just keep them on your own computer. If so, look at online services such as Flickr, a Yahoo operation that takes in some 750 photos every second.[14] If you’re going to be a heavy user of Flickr and other such services, you’ll need to consider signing up for a paid account that gives you more storage and upload capacity.

If it’s ten times harder to create an excellent audio report than a piece of text, it may be another ten times harder, or at least more time-consuming, to create an excellent video. Even here, the ease of production is rapidly improving, and younger people who grow up with video as part of their routine media toolkit are showing older folks (like me) new tricks.

A video doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy, though. I tend to create videos for two main purposes: interviews and scene-setting. Neither is a full-blown production. Interviews are simple: Just set up a camera (and external microphone if you have one), and have at it. By scene-setting I mean using the video as a window into your subject. Suppose you’re interviewing a business person for a blog posting. You can shoot a quick video of his or her office, so your own audience can easily visualize the place you visited. This takes no special shooting or editing skills, but still has real value.

What should you do with the videos? Most people store them on someone else’s site, especially YouTube. There are good reasons to do this, notably the ease of uploading and the willingness of Google, which owns YouTube, to cover the considerable costs of making them available on the Internet. (Do keep a backup copy of everything you create.).  YouTube is so popular that as of the summer of 2009 people were uploading 20 hours of video ever minute.[15]

As with social networks and other tools, the most popular sites are not the only ones around. In fact, I still don’t necessarily recommend YouTube for videos, because YouTube, a Google service, hasn’t given users an easy way to make videos available under the Creative Commons copyright license I discussed in the introduction to this book. I do recommend Blip.TV for that purpose; the service specifically creates a default setting for Creative Commons licensing. (Flickr also has a Creative Commons option, one reason I recommend it.)

Mashups, APIs, Tagging and More

Stop reading for a second if you’re holding the printed edition of this book. Fire up your Web browser and look at the “Tunisian Prison Map” currently online at http://www.nawaat.org/tunisianprisonersmap. Click on any of the pointers in the map, and it will take you deeper into a repository of information about Tunisia’s human rights abuses. The map’s lead creator, Sami Ben Gharbia, pulled data from a variety of sources and used Google Maps to help illustrate what he found. It’s brilliant work, and in a good cause.

The Tunisian map is an example of a mashup—a combination of data and Web services that could not have existed before the Web 2.0 era. It relies on a technology called the Applications Programming Interface (API). APIs are used to make connections between different Web sites and services, by allowing one to interoperate with others.[16] The wall electric socket is, in effect, an API to devices that use electricity. As I noted in We the Media:

Software development relies on APIs. Operating systems have them so that independent software programmers can create applications, such as word processors, that use the underlying features of the system. They don’t have to reinvent the proverbial wheel each time they write software, and they help ensure a vibrant ecosystem on whatever programming platform they’re using.

You don’t have to know much technology to create your own mashup. Google Maps and its competitors let you put virtual pins on maps and then annotate them with your own information. Some news organizations have done just this; the Bakersfield Californian newspaper put up a map and asked readers to put in the location of potholes in the city streets. You could do the same in your own neighborhood (let your city government know, because they’re the ones who can fill the holes).

Mashups are fundamentally about data, but some of the best ones are also about visualizing the data. Numbers and dates and other such information don’t tell you much by themselves, but when you combine them with visual techniques they start to sing a tune we can all understand. One of my favorites in this genre is a video timeline of WalMart deployments across the continental U.S., with dots on a the map starting in a small city in Arkansas and ultimately spreading across the nation in a view that is unpleasantly reminiscent of an epidemic.[17]

The Web is loaded with excellent resources for creating mashups. We have a list on the Mediactive site, but I recommend starting at a site called, logically, Programmable Web,[18] which offers a great “how to” on creating your own mashup. It starts, “Pick a subject”—and goes into detail from there.

Content Management Systems

What if your Blogger.com or WordPress.com blog isn’t enough? What if you want to create a more sophisticated information site or service, offering community features and a variety of bells and whistles not available in typical blog software?

You may have just crossed over into the CMS zone.

CMS stands for content management system, and describes a variety of software and Web services that do what the name suggests: management of various kinds of content. There’s a CMS behind every major news site.

Content management systems typically combine two major components. The first is a database, usually a free (open source) package called MySQL. That’s where everything you create—postings, comments, pictures, etc.—resides. The CMS itself is software that a) helps you create the material that goes into the database; b) pulls data out of that database, and then creates Web pages for display on computer screens, phones and other devices; and c) helps you manage your website.

Actually, even hosted blogging software is a form of CMS, too. It just manages the content in a few specific ways, giving you less flexibility in return for greater ease of use (and ease of management for the company hosting the blogs).

Setting up your own CMS is not trivial. Unless you are technically adept, you should find a Web hosting company that will help you create your CMS, or hire someone, or both. Trust me on this.

You can choose among literally hundreds of CMS packages. Check the Mediactive website for sites that help you find and use a system that will fit your needs. Two systems of note are:

Drupal

Probably the best known open-source (free to download, use and modify), multi-purpose CMS (Joomla!, another CMS of this genre, has a large and passionate following as well; in fact, it’s more popular than Drupal in some places.). It’s a highly modular system: you can plug in all kinds of add-ons to tweak and customize your site. Drupal has a large community of users and developers, a big plus if you’re going to be making significant changes to the core features (you almost certainly will). But Drupal can also be an extremely frustrating system, partly due to that very flexibility. My own relationship with Drupal is very much in the love-hate category. You’ll find Drupal at http://drupal.org.

MediaWiki

We discussed Wikipedia in an earlier chapter. Did you know that the software used to run the site is freely available? It is, and it’s getting more powerful all the time. http://mediawiki.org, which hosts the software of the same name, is itself a Wiki, of course, and it offers downloads and thorough instructions on how to use it. Just because it’s a Wiki doesn’t mean you have to let anyone edit any page. You can allow only certain people to make changes.

Mobile, the Emerging Frontier

As I edit this chapter, Google has just announced its new “Nexus One” mobile device, combining phone, camera, Web, multimedia and lots more. (The company’s PR people are calling it a “super phone,” an exaggeration that should embarrass whoever thought it up.) Later this month, if all goes according to rumor, Apple will launch a tablet device that surely will include mobility in its core competency.

The explosion of highly sophisticated mobile devices is in a relative infancy, at least in the U.S. due to misguided telecommunications policies that have turned America into a second-rate mobile power compared with parts of Europe and Asia. But it’s reasonable to assume we’ll catch up.

Even now, the mobile revolution has changed pretty much everything we knew about our relationship to technology. The latest mobile devices have these characteristics:

• They’re always connected (in theory, at any rate). You can communicate wherever you are, in a variety of ways including text, audio, photo, video and more.
• They know where they are. Modern devices have built-in GPS, or global positioning within a few meters. Some also have compasses, so they know what direction their camera is facing. If you’re like me, the single most valuable mobile application I use is Google Maps.
• They are creating not just the data you designate, but a host of other information that (if you choose) is always attached to what you create. This means, for example, that if you take a picture and send it to, say, Flickr, the photo-sharing service automatically checks to see if there’s location information and, if so, puts the picture into a map.

Software developers are off to the races to come up with novel ways to use the capabilities of these devices. One of the most intriguing uses is what’s called “augmented reality,” in which you use the phone’s camera to look at your surroundings, and then have those surroundings annotated with whatever other people have posted online about the area—everything from the location (plus patron reviews) of your local steakhouse to the location of the nearest cardiologist, with turn-by-turn directions to both.

So far, smart phones have been most valuable as devices we use to get information. One of my favorite tests is to scan the bar code of an item in a store and then check, using the device’s various capabilities, where else it’s for sale in the neighborhood or online, and at what price.

You can easily imagine the journalism potential. For example, it would be trivial to map graffitti (or potholes or just about anything else) in your city, annotated with pictures. My students created a map and photo gallery of local art galleries during a Phoenix “First Friday Art Walk,” a monthly event when people from all over the metropolitan area converge on the downtown visual arts scene.

The latest and perhaps most intriguing use of the new mobile devices is combining location awareness with social networking. Not only have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and other social systems moved swiftly to these platforms, but a host of new services is emerging as well. Some, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, invite users to announce their location and then see what’s happening in the neighborhood, and who else is there.

By the time this appears in print, of course, we’ll have heard about dozens or scores of new mobile devices and applications, each promising (and possibly delivering) more than what came before. We’ll keep an eye on them on the Mediactive website, in the context of media creation.

As with social networking on PCs, and with all of the content you create, there are privacy issues attached to mobility—some that are much more troubling than anything we’ve encountered in the past. I’ll discuss this more in Chapter 8.

Community

One of the most important roles you’ll have in the new-media environment is creating and managing community. What you do in a socially mediated world is at least as much about community as what you produce on your own. The conversations you foster online, with more than one constituency of users, will help people understand what you’re doing, and will help you keep them involved.

Newspapers and broadcasters have failed miserably at creating community until very recently. They’ve barely even grasped the basics, in part because their traditional one-to-many model fostered institutional arrogance. Luckily, we can learn from people who jumped in early.

Robert Niles, who’s created a number of online services including the award-winning ThemeParkInsider.com, says tomorrow’s journalists will need to be community organizers — and you’ll need to understand that the people who pay the bills, not just the audience, comprise one of the communities you’ll need to organize and serve. This is true for the one-person effort or a larger one.

“Know what you’re doing online,” he says. “Embrace community organizing; create value for a community… and only you will find a community that will value you.

Morever, Niles says, the role of a community organizer doesn’t just imply taking stands. It almost demands that kind of effort, never losing sight of journalistic principles:

Embrace advocacy, but let it guided by smart reporting and thoughtful community engagement. That will be what distinguishes your site, and your community, from the many competing blogs and websites run by people who aren’t as capable as reporters, or as effective in community organizing. [1]

You’ll find lost of resources online about community creation. We’ll list a bunch of them online, but in the end you’ll need to recognize that the key is you: If you don’t take this seriously, you won’t be able to make it work.

Trolls and Breakage

One essential part of community management is preventing the kind of damage that bad folks can cause, and fixing it when they inevitably do. This is about more than keeping your software up to date with security “patches” and other preventive maintenance. It’s about the conversation, too.

If you’ve participated in online conversations in any more-than-casual way, you probably know how quickly they can turn wrong. Scary, ugly wrong.

There’s something about speaking anonymously that inspires people to misbehave. They’ll say things to each other that they wouldn’t dream of saying in person, partly because they’re not within physical reach.

In Chapter 10 I’ll propose a community user-management system that (as far as I know) doesn’t yet exist. It would discriminate—I use that word deliberately—among various kinds of members, giving the most credence to people who used verified real names and who had been rated highly by other credible members of the community. That doesn’t mean you’re helpless today in the face of the trolls.

Well-meaning people (including me) have suggested honor codes, blogger comment guidelines, and all sorts of other fixes. I’m skeptical of anything that we might try to impose on anyone, but I do believe we, as community hosts, have every right and even a duty to impose rules inside our own sites. Simply put, I don’t invite people into my home and then tolerate them spitting on the living room rug. You shouldn’t, either. And you should enforce the rules you set.

When I ran a community site in 2005 I consulted several friends about rules of the road for folks who wanted to join the community. They included Lisa Stone and her team at BlogHer.com,[19] who have created a thoughtful set of guidelines; I recommend you start there when coming up with your own. My own site’s guidelines borrowed from BlogHer and several other sites. The rules included:

In short, we aim here for civility and mutual respect. Beyond that, we encourage robust discussions and debate.

Members may be blocked from the site for vandalism, making personal attacks on other members, publishing others’ copyrighted material or for violating the guidelines and comments policy.

Offensive, inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate screen names are not permitted, and the use of these will be prevented through blocking of accounts. Members blocked for having an inappropriate name will be permitted to rejoin under a new name.

We also recognized that the rules weren’t the final word, and moreover that we couldn’t possible watch everything. So we added:

Remember, we need your help.

This is a community. If you see material that violates our site rules and guidelines, please contact us.

Please also make suggestions, on our forums or via e-mail, on how we might improve these terms and guidelines.

Comment moderation systems are becoming more sophisticated. And the best community sites police themselves to some degree: The users spot the bad stuff and help the site managers get rid of it. But even the best-run sites have problems dealing with the truly malevolent people. The Web still has its trolls and others who wreck things for sport. This is an arms race that won’t end anytime soon, but if the community is on your—and its own—side you can keep up.

It’s More than Technology

The most important element in your media creation is not the technology. The tools get cheaper and easier to use all the time. There’s scarcely any financial barrier to entry.

What matters is you. If you have the skills, or are willing to learn them, you can stand out from the avalanche of information that pours over us ever day. If you have the energy to pursue your media creation, you’ll get more done than someone who doesn’t care as much.

Most of all, if you have the integrity to do things right—to follow the principles that add up to honorable journalism—you can be a creator who makes a difference, whether it’s in your neighborhood or, perhaps, on a global scale.

[2] [2] http://www.blogger.com/

[3] http://wordpress.com

[4] http://typepad.com

[5] http://twitter.com

[6] http://seesmic.com

[7] http://tweetdeck.com

[8] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly

[9] http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

[10] PodcastAlley.com is another good podcast portal, at

[11] Audacity, an excellent free audio editor for users of Windows, Mac and Linux computers, can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[12] http://rebootnews.com

[13] http://www.thebestcamera.com/

[14] http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-09-22-facebook-photo-sharing-tagging_N.htm

[15] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html

[16] Programmable Web maintains a robust API directory at http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

[17] http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/

[18] http://www.programmableweb.com/howto

[19] http://blogher.org/community-guidelines

Chapter 4

Becoming a Trusted Creator: Principles

This chapter addresses people who want to go beyond purely personal or speculative blogs or occasional appearances on YouTube and the like. It’s for those who have become mediactive consumers and now want to apply those principles to their own creative work online, especially if what they’re doing has a journalistic component in any way. I’m not aiming to turn you into a professional journalist, but I do hope you’ll understand what the principles of journalism are (or should be) and how they apply to a broader media-creation sphere. The more journalistic the writer (in the broadest sense) wants to be, the more important these principles become.

Like the consumer principles in Chapter 2 — the bedrock on which these new principles rest—they add up to being honorable. In brief, they involve:

• Thoroughness
• Accuracy
• Fairness
• Independence
• Transparency

Transparency is the new principle in the list, and will be most difficult for traditional media organizations even though it’s relatively common among bloggers. In the end, however, it may be the most important of all.

You’ll notice, meanwhile, that I don’t list “objectivity” as a principle for creators of journalism. It’s a fine ideal in theory, but impossible in practice because no human being is truly objective. We can get closer to it now than we ever have before, in part because the Internet’s built-in collaboration makes it easier to find counterpoints to our own views and for our critics to find us (and then for us to respond). Author and Net researcher David Weinberger calls transparency “the new objectivity,” but I believe all of the principles in my list contribute to approaching the ideal of objectivity.

Let’s look at the principles in more detail. You’ll see that the blur into each other at times; just as the principles for media consumers overlap. A major focus in this chapter will be on transparency, something I’m advocating more and more ardently in all kinds of communication. As with the sections on principles for consumers, I’ll flesh out some of the tactics to live up these principles in the next chapter.

Thoroughness: Do Your Homework, and Then Do Some More

You can’t know everything, but good reporters try to learn as much as they can about a topic. It’s better to know much more than you publish than to leave big holes in your story. The best reporters always want to make one more call, check with one more source.

I had a rule of thumb as a reporter. I tried to tell roughly 10 percent of what I knew in any story. That is, I was so overloaded with facts and information that I had to be extremely selective, not to hide things but to illuminate what really mattered.

In Chapter 2, I said you need to ask more questions. Whether you’re asking to be better informed, or to inform others, the digital world gives us nearly infinite tools for reporting, defined here as the gathering of information. None of them replace old-fashioned methods such as making phone callsand, of course, in-person interviews. You can do shoddy research online or off, but the learning opportunities provided today by online communications and resources remove almost any excuse for lack of background knowledge.

Let’s spend a minute on the in-person interview. Some of my journalism education colleagues worry that students aren’t getting enough real-world interview experience, or what we used to call “shoe leather” — getting out of the office and onto the street — journalism. It’s not easy to ask a stranger for information, at least not for most people. It’s even harder to ask probing questions. There are only two questions you should always ask, right at the end: 1) Is there anyone else should I talk to about this? 2) What didn’t I ask that I should have asked, and what’s the answer?

With so much online now, and with search engines increasingly able to locate what we’re looking for, the hunt has changed, generally for the better. But it’s important to remember that not everything is online, even now. Journalists and students seem to believe the world was created around 1983, when some of the first news media databases went online. A lot of what we need to understand the world still sits in libraries, county courthouses, and the like, and we should remember that those dusty paper stacks and files have plenty of value. Google can’t digitize everything. Not yet, anyway…

You can find all sorts of excellent material online about how to do research, moreover. I’ll list a bunch of them on the Mediactive website, but take a look, for starters, at the University of Washington Library’s “Research 101” site and the excellent News University collection at the Poynter Institute.

A publication or broadcast, in the online sphere, is only one stage in the development of a story. It should be part of a continuum that recognizes we never stop learning. Knowledge is not a static end-point but rather an ongoing process.

Online, we can take our research into amazing new directions, in particular by inviting our audience to be part of the discovery process. We can tell people what we’re working on, and ask them for help. As noted earlier, “crowdsourcing” has bolstered journalists’ research on many levels, but it’s only one of a number of ways to improve our reporting.

New facts and nuances emerge after articles are published. One of Wikipedia’s best characteristics is its recognition that we can liberate ourselves from the publication or broadcast metaphors made familiar during the age of literally manufactured media, where the paper product or tape for broadcasting was the end of the process. We may not get it totally right collectively, and in fact humans almost never get anything entirely right, but we can get closer as we assemble new data and nuance. I’ll discuss this further in Chapter 7.

Accuracy: Nail It Every Time

Factual errors—especially those that are easily avoidable—do more to undermine trust than almost any other failing. Accuracy is the starting point for all solid journalism. While it’s understandable, given deadline pressures, that errors occur, it’s still disheartening even in long-form journalism — such as magazines with human fact-checkers — some major and silly mistakes make their way into articles.  And it’s stunning that professionals get things wrong when a simple Google check could have prevented the goof.

But accuracy rests on a bedrock of thoroughness, which takes time. It means, simply put: Check your facts, then check them again. Know where to look to verify claims or to separate fact from fiction. And never, ever, spell someone’s name wrong.

In my first daily-newspaper job I spelled the name of a company wrong through an entire article, and didn’t discover this until after publication. My mistake was simple: I got it wrong on first use as I wrote the story, and then, with the misspelling ingrained in my head, repeated the mistake every subsequent time. I didn’t go back and check. The next morning, my editor called me into a small conference room, pointed out the error(s)—the company’s owner had called the paper—and told me, “You’re better than this.” I felt about one foot tall. I abjectly apologized to the owner of the company, who took it with amazingly good humor, but I learned a longstanding lesson.

Getting it right means asking questions until you think you may know too much. Smart journalists know, moreover, that there are no stupid questions. Sometimes there are lazy questions, such as asking someone for information that you could have easily looked up; of course, asking a lazy question will not endear you to the person you’re interviewing. But if you don’t understand something, you should just ask for an explanation. I used to enjoy being the person at press conference who’d ask an obvious question that other reporters were too embarrassed to ask, for fear they’d seem ill-informed. I’d rather have someone snicker at me for being a newbie than to get something wrong.

When I wrote about technology, I frequently called sources back after interviews to read them a sentence or paragraph of what I planned to write, so they could tell me whether I’d succeeded in explaining their technical work in plain English. Usually I had it right, but sometimes a source would correct me or offer a nuance. This made the journalism better, and made my sources trust me more.

Accuracy online extends past publication. When you do make a mistake, you should obviously correct it. How to make corrections online is a new genre in itself. Here are several, in my order of preference:

• For significant errors and updates, correct in context, with a note at the top or the bottom of the piece explaining what has been changed, and why.
• For minor errors, such as a misspelled word, use the “strikeout” HTML tag to visibly put a line through the errant material and then add the correct word or words.
• Correct in place and, in a note on the item, link to a corrections page that explains what happened.

The one kind of correction I never advise is the one too often used: an in-place fix with no indication that anything was ever wrong in the first place. Again, remember that mistakes happen, but doing things honorably should always be the first order of business.

Fairness: Be Fair to Everyone

Fairness is a broader concept than accuracy or thoroughness. It encompasses several related notions:

• Even if you are coming at something from a specific bias or world view, you can be fair to those who oppose you by incorporating their views into your own work, even if simply to explain why you’re right and they’re wrong.
• Recognize that you can’t be perfectly fair, and that people will hear what you’ve said through the prisms of their own world views. It’s still worth trying.
• You can extend the principle of fairness after publication by inviting others to join the conversation.
• You can stress civility as the guiding principle for the conversation.

Why bother, especially if you don’t feel others are likely to reciprocate? First, it’s just the honorable approach. You want other people to deal with you in a fairly, especially when someone is criticizing what you’ve said or done. Do the same for them, and maybe they will take a similar approach even if they haven’t before.

Second, it pays back tactically in audience trust. The people who read or hear your work will feel cheated if you slant the facts or present opposing opinions disingenuously. Your reporting will be suspect once they realize—and they eventually will—what you’ve done.

How to be fair? Beyond the Golden Rule notion of treating people as you’d want to be treated, you can ensure that you offer a place for people to reply to what you (and your commentators) have posted. You can insist on civility both in your work and in the comments posted.

My rule when hosting a community is that we will be civil with each other even if we disagree on the issues. This can break down when someone joins a conversation under false pretenses. These can include some obvious behaviors, and others that are more subtle:

• Someone who is paid by some industry group or has an interest in its success, but who chimes in with opinions about matters of direct concern to the industry without revealing the connection or bias.
• Someone with ideological beliefs that influence his or her position in ways that go beyond a consideration of the facts and issues directly relevant to the position, but who presents the opinion as just the result of intuitive reasoning.
• Someone who has a history of unethically (perhaps even illegally) abusing the system in which he or she is participating for personal gain.

It’s important to expose the connections, if you detect them, while distinguishing the exposé from routine ad hominem attacks. Online community is hard work. as I’ll discuss in the next chapter, but it’s essential.

Another essential way to be fair is to use links. Point to a variety of material other than your own, to support what you’ve said and to offer varying perspectives.

Most of all, fairness requires that you hear what people are saying. Journalism is evolving from a lecture to a conversation, and the first rule of good conversation is to listen.

Think Independently, Especially Where Potential Biases of Your Own Are Involved

This is similar to the principle of independent thinking in Chapter 1. It can cover many habits, but independence of thought may be most important. Creators of media, not just consumers, need to venture beyond their personal comfort zones.

Professional journalists claim independence. They are typically forbidden to have direct or indirect financial conflicts of interest. But conflicts of interest are not always so easy to define. Many prominent Washington journalists, for example, are so blatantly beholden to their sources, and to access to those sources, that they are not independent in any real way, and their journalism reflects it.

Independent thinking has many facets. Listening, of course, is the best way to start. But you can and should relentlessly question your own conclusions after listening. It’s not enough to incorporate the views of opponents into what you write; if what they tell you is persuasive you have to consider shifting your conclusion, too.

I don’t believe it’s fair to demand independence of one’s own employer. Loyalty has its limits; I’d hope to speak out if an employer acted in grossly unethical ways, though I’d probably quit first. In general, however, we should expect that criticism of this kind is best done in person, behind a closed door. An organization decides its own level of public disclosures, and some internal criticism—especially the kind that might be fodder for a plaintiff’s lawyer—is unlikely to see sunlight.

This brings us to the truly new principle for tomorrow’s journalists: embracing much more openness than they’ve ever tried in the past.

Transparency: Practice and Demand It

This is essential not just for citizen journalists and other new-media creators but also for those in traditional media. The kind and extent of transparency may differ. For example, bloggers should reveal biases. Meanwhile, Big Media employees may have pledged individually not to have conflicts of interest, but that doesn’t mean they work without bias. They should help their audiences understand what they do, and why.

Transparency in the traditional ranks has scarcely existed for most of the past century. While journalists are more publicly open than many other industries in at least some ways, there’s a notable hypocrisy quotient. As we demand answers from others, we should look in the mirror and ask some of the same questions.
Scandal, for the most part, has forced open the doors to a degree. The Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times led the newspaper to describe in lurid detail what had happened. It also led to the creation of a “public editor” post, analogous to the position of ombudsman.

But openness goes only so far in Big Media. The Washington Post, one of America’s best newspapers in the past quarter century, flunked a major transparency test in 2009, as I’ll describe in the next section of this chapter. Unfortunately, the Post is in good, or at least typical, company. The journalism craft has been almost entirely opaque during the monopoly/oligopoly era of media. Some of the reasons for this made sense, including the legal ones (though lawyers are always too cautious, because that’s their job). Apart from an ombudsman blog and column and the occasionally revealing remarks Post people make in the scheduled online chats, the newspaper, like so many others, is almost completely opaque when it comes to how it operates.

The transparency question for the Post—for everyone creating media—boils down to something that may sound counter-intuitive but is actually logical: so long as you do an honest job as well as you can, greater transparency will lead readers (viewers, listeners etc.) to trust you more even while he believe you less. That is, they’ll understand better why it’s impossible to get everything right all the time.

Less belief but more trust

Transparency takes several forms. I strongly believe that news organizations have a duty to explain to their audiences how they do their journalism, and why. Even the organizations that claim to have no world view should be telling people much more about the “how” of what they do, because they’d help readers/viewers/listeners understand what it takes to do good journalism (assuming they actually do good journalism). It baffles me that an industry that wants to be perceived as better than the newcomers to the craft doesn’t grasp this, but it clearly doesn’t.

The “why” is more nuanced, especially for big organizations (at least in America). They could take a page from the newcomers, such as bloggers, the best of whom are much more open on this; their world views and motivations are typically crystal clear. And their audiences, even people who disagree with those world views, can refract their own understanding of the topics through those lenses.

The response I get when I say these things is typically along these lines: if journalists say what they think, they’ll call their objectivity into question. Well, I don’t believe in objectivity in the first place. And the public already perceives journalists to be biased, which of course they are—though I don’t believe this is the same as being unethical.

Bloggers, through their own relentless critiques, have also helped foster transparency in traditional media. However unfair bloggers’ criticism may often be, it has been a valuable addition to the media-criticism sphere.

Bloggers, too, need to adopt more transparency. Some, to be sure, do reveal their biases. That gives readers a way to consider the writers’ world views when evaluating their postings, and then make decisions about credibility. But a distinctly disturbing trend in some blog circles is the undisclosed or poorly disclosed conflict of interest. Pay-per-post schemes are high on the list of activities that deserve readers’ condemnation; they also deserve a smaller audience. As I write this, the Federal Trade Commission is about to enact strict (yet all too vague) new rules attacking marketers’ use of social media. The sentiment is fine, but the danger to speech is enormous. Yet the rules give traditional journalists much more leeway than the FTC extends to bloggers, is a poor message to send to media creators and the public alike. More on that later in this chapter.

Case Study: A Big Media Transparency Debacle

In late September 2009, an editor at the Washington Post “tweeted” the following on Twitter, the microblogging service that lets people post messages of 140 characters  or less: “We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not. But we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”

That tweet, along with another by Raju Narisetti, a Post managing editor, set off an internal row that has yet to be settled. The editors had joined the emerging conversation among journalists and audiences, but got slapped down for it. Higher-up Post editors banned Narisetti and others in the newsroom from online posts that could in any way reveal how they felt about the issues of the day. In so doing, the newspaper announced to the world that it was not going to participate in any meaningful way in the conversational future of news—a ludicrous and ultimately damaging move.

The newspaper’s action was intended to reassure readers of the organization’s desire to be perceived as objective, which the publisher defined in the traditional sense as not taking sides on the big issues of the day. It was laudable, in a way, but the move failed a larger and more important test. It undermined a brief ray of light into the newsroom’s mostly opaque activities. Rather than being transparent, a key principle for media creators in this new era, the Post chose pretense.

The Washington Post’s handling of its social-media policy didn’t concern just whether or not to tweet and blog. It brought up far deeper questions of how the newspaper wanted to present itself to the world. I exchanged calls and emails with the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, who quoted me briefly in the paper and at lenth in his column, though he ultimately disagreed with my conclusions.

An American conceit

I wish that U.S. news organizations, the Post among them, would drop the pretense of being impartial and of having no world view. There’s no conflict between having a world view and doing great journalism.

When I go to London I buy the Guardian and the Telegraph. Both do excellent journalism. The Guardian covers the world from a slightly left-of-center standpoint, and the Telegraph from a slightly right-of-center stance. I read both and figure I’m triangulating on the essence of (British establishment) reality. Even if I read just one, the paper’s overt frame of reference gives me a better way to understand what’s happening than if it pretended to be impartial. And—crucially—both newspapers run articles (and lots of op-eds) that either directly challenge their world views or, more routinely, include facts and context that run contrary to what the editors and proprietors might wish was true. Relentless journalism’s independence of thought means, in particular, being willing or even eager to learn why your core assumptions could be wrong.

The Post had a profoundly obvious world view during the run-up to the Iraq War: pro-administration and pro-war. The view was reflected principally in the fact that the little journalism it did questioning the war rarely if ever made the front page, as opposed to relentless parroting of war-mongering from Bush administration insiders. The evidence is overwhelming, and even Post journalists have admitted as much, though not in those precise words. I’m guessing that the newspaper’s editors, who can be as good as (or better than) anyone else in the field, would have done a better job of covering the opposing facts and views if the paper’s world view had been stated as a matter of policy, partly because the best journalists enjoy challenging conventional wisdom even when it’s from their own bosses.

When it comes to individual views and specifics about individual reporters and editors, I grant that questions of balance and independence get a bit more tricky. I’m not suggesting that the Post or anyone else put reporters’ tax returns online. But I would suggest that when their life circumstances or beliefs might be relevant to a reader, it’s acceptable and sometimes important to let the reader know. As one example, a religion reporters’ faith, as in what religion or sect he follows (or absence of faith, for that matter) seems relevant to me.

And I’d strongly suggest that while a random opinion or quip might be bothersome, letting journalists be human beings would have a better outcome in the end. Telling the staff to hide all opinions doesn’t cause readers to trust an organization more. It tells them the organizing is hiding something, because the audience isn’t stupid.

Opaque, and Scandalous

Media criticism can help expose transgression, of course. In March 2008, the New York Times ran an article, “Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” that blew the proverbial lid off one of the worst media scandals since the Times’ own Jayson Blair debacle years earlier. The paper’s David Barstow reported:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

The news programs, sadly, stonewalled the entire scandal. They didn’t respond, for the most part, to the Times report or even do much to change their own use of these conflicted experts. Stonewalling is what we should expect from the government, not supposedly responsible news organizations. As Glenn Greenwald, author and commentator on Salon, said later: “The outright refusal of any of these ‘news organizations’ even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon’s propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate.”

Nearly a year after Barstow reported this outrageous behavior, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism, one of five awarded to the New York Times in 2009. Unsurprisingly, the organizations Barstow fingered for their unethical conduct somehow neglected to mention his prize when they reported on the Times’ prizes, even while naming several of the categories in which the paper won. There’s always a shortage of shame in the news business.

Sidebar: Consumer Reports’ Integrity in Action

Consumer Reports is a publication that works hard to get things right. But its February 2007 issue ran a dramatically wrong review of children’s car seats—flawed due to poor testing methods—and seriously jeopardized the trust it had won from its readers.

The organization’s recognition of the problem was the best demonstration I’ve seen of a) owning up to one’s mistakes; b) figuring out what went wrong; c) explaining what happened; and d) putting into place policies to prevent future such messes.

And it was all done in a public way, with a systematic transparency that’s exceedingly rare in journalism.

Soon after the article—reporting that many car seats failed the magazine’s tests—came under challenge, it became clear that the tests themselves were flawed. The response from the magazine to its readers and the world was quick. It issued a retraction.

I subscribe to the CR online site. I got an e-mail, and a friend who gets the paper version got the same letter via mail, from Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the title’s parent. He apologized, sincerely. He explained what he knew so far about the error, apparently caused by an outside lab’s tests. He announced a further investigation. And he promised extraordinary efforts not to let it occur again.

In March 2007, the very next issue, CR posted a detailed online report titled “How our car seat tests went wrong.” The “series of misjudgments” described in the piece is remarkable. It was especially worrisome given the publication’s record. I don’t rely on CR for everything I buy, but I’ve learned to trust its overall judgment on uncomplicated consumer goods such as kitchen appliances, where I’m unlikely to spend much time on my own extra research. Were I the parent of small children, I might well have included car seats in that category.

The report explained everything about the tests in clear and unsparing language. It included justifiably angry comments from a car-seat maker and outside critics. It was self-criticism of the sort one almost never sees from a journalistic organization, blogger, or other media creator of any kind.

CR also posted a story called “Learning from our mistake,” a description of what it would do in the future. Among other things, the publication plans to bring outside experts into the process when creating complicated testing procedures (and already does that to a degree), to fix the way it works with outside labs, and to look much harder “when our findings are unusual.”

The last of those should have been second nature to the journalists and scientists at CR. After all, it’s famous for telling readers that when something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. In this case—observing- all those car seats fail the test—perhaps it was too bad to be true.

The magazine might consider opening its testing procedures in other ways. For example, it could create videos of the tests as they’re being conducted and post them online. Bring in the designated experts, by all means, but maybe some readers who are experts in their own way might spot something useful, such as an omission in the testing procedure or a valuable idea on how to improve it.

Bloggers, Come Clean

One of the most entertaining blogs in the tech field has been the “Fake Steve Jobs” commentary by author and magazine writer Daniel Lyons. His identity wasn’t known publicly during the blog’s early days. When it was finally revealed, a number of people recalled something else Lyons had written. As Anil Dash wrote on his blog in a posting called “Hypocrite or New Believer?”:

Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes’ November 2005 cover story “Attack of the Blogs”, a 3000-word screed vilifying anonymous bloggers who comment on companies in the technology industry. In 2005, I spoke to Lyons for the article, though the comments I made about both the efforts that have been made to encourage accountability in the blogopshere, as well as the many positive benefits that businesses have accrued from blogging, were omitted from the story. My initial temptation was to mark Lyons as a hypocrite. Upon reflection, it seems there’s a more profound lesson: The benefits of blogging for one’s career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.

I’m going with hypocrisy. (Though Lyons’ Fake Steve Jobs remains terrific, better in my view than his work at Forbes and, as of this writing, Newsweek.)

Lyons’ decision to admit who he was—after he was outed by a reporter who did sufficient legwork—was a victory for transparency in a sphere that is often more transparent than traditional media, but not always.

The online world is rife with conflicts of interest stemming from non-transparency. On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter so-called 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 an often odious practice called “buzz marketing”—paying or otherwise rewarding people to talk up products without revealing that they’re being compensated—it’s widely believed that the ones getting caught are a small percentage of the ones misusing these online forums.

Enforced Transparency

The Federal Trade Commission, with laudable goals, issued a document in late 2009 aimed at better disclosure, with penalties of up to $11,000 in fines for violations. Basically, the FTC is saying that if you have a “material connection” to a product or service you’re praising, you are an endorser who must disclose that connection.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But when you read the FTC’s ruling you get the sense of a government-gone-wild travesty. The system is unworkable in practice, which is bad enough. Worse, the rules are worryingly vague and wide-ranging. Worse yet, they give traditional print and broadcast journalists a pass while applying harsh regulations to bloggers (and others using conversational media of various kinds). Worst and most important, they are, in the end, an attack on markets and free speech, based on a 20^th-century notion of media and advertising that simply doesn’t map to the new era.

The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same.

The commission took pains in the uproar that followed the guidelines’ release to insist that no one planned to go after individual bloggers. Rather, the targets would be slippery marketers who were trying to pull wool over the eyes of consumers. This clarification was only modestly reassuring. Plans change, and the rules were written with such deliberate vagueness that I predict it’s only a matter of time before the FTC does chase after individuals it deems problematic.

Again, let’s be clear that the motives behind the FTC’s rules seem to be well-intentioned. I also loathe the odious practice of using bloggers and other online conversationalists as commercial sock puppets in a sleazy online word-of-mouth operation. Let’s also agree that disclosures are always better than hiding one’s affiliation with a company.

We already have laws against fraud. Let’s enforce those—first against the serious fraudsters, who keep getting away with it—before we even consider harsh regulations on speech.

Can Honor Prevail?

A few years ago, when I was working on my Bayosphere local media startup, my co-founder, Michael Goff, and I wondered how we could do more than simply encourage our citizen journalists to operate according to the best principles of journalism in their posts and participation. We came up with an idea that failed, like the overall site, but I still believe it had some merit.

The notion, which we called “Honor Tags,” was meant to be a system by which site participants could label themselves as “journalists,” “advocates,” or “neither” with clear definitions for the first two roles.  We hoped to persuade people to assess themselves and their own work, and we had in mind a second-level system by which others in the community could judge whether the tags were accurate. The idea was modestly praised by some as a potentially valuable system, and mercilessly ridiculed by others as utopian nuttiness. It faded all too quickly, and I’m sorry to say that when I let the domain name expire, it was grabbed by someone who put up a placeholder site with somewhat unsavory overtones.

The key value we hoped to instill, however, has not faded at all. If honor isn’t a part of how we do our work, we’ll forfeit any reason to be trusted.

This is why I sometimes despair at the rampant violations of their own standards at the media organizations I respect the most, such as the New York Times, where anonymous sources still get too-free reign. Yet it’s also why I nod happily when I see a news operation work harder to explain itself and its work, and why I grin at the many experiments aimed at adding transparency and accountability—elements of honor—to journalism at all levels.

I’m convinced the key will be community values, not the mushy, mass-media kind that settle with the lowest common denominator but rather with the norms we still say we crave, even if our media habits call that into question.

News providers of all stripes can announce their standards. If you’re one of them, you should do so and live up to them, admitting publicly when you fail. In the end, community members, doing commerce in the fabled marketplace of ideas, will enforce them.