Month: April 2014

I should probably mention up front that this is going to sound like one of those “things were better in my day, young fella!” kind of discussions that old people like myself are fond of having, so if that isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to move on. The subject at hand is what us geezers used to call the “blogosphere” — which is now just known as the internet, or online media, or whatever you want to call it. On the one hand, it’s good that blogging has more or less become mainstream, but part of me still misses what the old blogosphere had to offer.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, but especially at those times when Dave Winer, one of the original fathers of blogging, writes about the necessity of having your own home on the social web — instead of a parcel of land given to you by one of the big silos — or when someone like blogging veteran Anil Dash writes a post like “The Web We Lost,” which I highly recommend. But it was a post from another long-time blogger, Dan Gillmor, that got me thinking about it this time.

Dan wrote about how some independent developers are working on tools that allow anyone to cross-post from their own blog to another site — such as Slate, where his post also appeared — and to pull comments from Twitter and other networks back to their site and display them along with local comments. These kinds of tools and their support for the “IndieWeb” is important, Dan argues, because:

“We’re in danger of losing what’s made the Internet the most important medium in history – a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks (that would be you and me) don’t need permission to communicate, create and innovate… when we use centralized services like social media sites, however helpful and convenient they may be, we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work.”

Blogging grew up — and changed

It isn’t until I see a post like Dan’s that I remember just how much has changed. When I started writing online in the early 2000s, individual blogs were the norm — blogs by people like Justin Hall and Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan of Blogger, and people like my friend and Gigaom founder Om Malik and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. At the time, Gigaom was just Om’s thoughts about broadband, and TechCrunch was mostly about Mike meeting (and in some cases offering a couch to) struggling entrepreneurs at his house in Atherton.

Part of what was so great about those early years of blogging was how chaotic it was — a flurry of posts linking to other bloggers (remember linking?), comment flame-wars, and endless discussion about the value of blog widgets like MyBlogLog or your Technorati ranking, or how to set up your RSS feed. Everyone was tinkering with their WordPress or Typepad to embed some new thing or try out a new theme, and there was a natural (if occasionally tense) camaraderie about it.

So what changed? Blogging grew up, for one thing — Om turned his blog into a business, and quite a successful one at that, and Arrington did the same and sold it to AOL. VentureBeat and Mashable and Read/Write and all the others did something similar, and gradually the line between blogging and regular media started to blur, although there are still flare-ups of the old “bloggers vs. journalists” dynamic from time to time. Meanwhile, plenty of individual bloggers got sucked into Twitter or Facebook and stopped blogging altogether.

Obviously, it’s good that more people have social tools with which to express themselves without having to set up their own blog and learn HTML, and there are still independent voices blogging on Medium and other sites. There’s also no question that the social element of Twitter and Facebook is powerful, and getting even more so. But I think we’ve given over much of the conversation to proprietary platforms that remove content at will, and control the data underlying the content we provide — and that is very much a Faustian bargain.

The unedited voice of a single author

Before I start sounding like a World War II veteran who has had a few too many, the other thing that I liked about the blogosphere was just how personal it was. Yes, that often meant someone was up in arms or foaming at the mouth about something — often topics that perhaps didn’t justify the level of outrage being displayed (yes, I’m looking at you, Mike) — but there was still that quintessential element of blogging as defined by Winer: namely, the unedited voice of a person, for better or worse.

That point came back to me when I was speaking with Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who recently launched his own membership-funded blog called Stratechery — written and edited and built solely by him, a kind of throwback to early bloggers like John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Jason Kottke, or Andy Baio of Waxpancake. Ben talked about how “there’s something really powerful about single-author sites that you don’t get anywhere else.”

This is also what appeals to me most about the approach that I think First Look Media is trying to take with its “magazines,” each powered by strong voices with expertise and opinions. But will they be diluted in the same way that Ben argues Nate Silver’s voice has been at the new FiveThirtyEight? Will Glenn Greenwald be as effective or compelling when he is managing a team of other writers? I don’t know. But that’s what I feel like we have lost from the old blogosphere days — that personal connection between a blogger and their readers.

I think (as I argued in a post yesterday) that this kind of connection is the most powerful thing, and potentially also the most valuable thing that digital media provides — I think it’s why we gravitate towards people like Greenwald, or Ezra Klein, or dozens of other brand names, and it’s why using social tools to connect with a community of readers is so important.

We’ve definitely gained a lot as blogs and other forms of digital media have become more commonplace: there are a lot more voices, and that’s good — and they are being listened to by more people. I don’t want to downplay that fact at all. But it feels as though we have lost the personal element, as everyone tries to build businesses, and we’ve allowed proprietary platforms to take over a huge amount of our interaction. So forgive me if I get a little wistful.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alex Kopje as well as Shutterstock / Marek Uliasz and Thinkstock / Alexskopje

If the launches of various new-media entities over the past year — from Beacon’s crowdfunding efforts and Syria Deeply’s topic-focused site to Ezra Klein’s Vox project and Jessica Lessin’s The Information — it’s that there is no end of experimentation going on when it comes to business models. But can a not very well-known blogger with no team behind them turn their writing into a successful freemium business? Technology analyst Ben Thompson is determined to try: he launched a new membership-based model on his blog Stratechery this week and I talked with him about what he is trying to do and why.

Thompson is a former business development and marketing manager with Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blog platform, and has also worked for Microsoft in a similar capacity. Over the past year, he has developed a following for his long and thoughtful posts about technology companies such as Box and Apple, and the strategic thinking (or lack of it) behind their businesses — and it’s that following that he is now trying to monetize.

Membership instead of just donations

Instead of a simple donation-style paywall, similar to what Andrew Sullivan has done with his site The Daily Dish (which has raised close to $1 million over the past year), Thompson has a series of membership tiers that are designed to offer different levels of experience and content, on top of the daily and weekly articles he writes for the site (which remain free). The tier that is $3 a month or $30 a year includes the ability to comment, a full RSS feed and a T-shirt, while $10 a month gives readers all of that plus a poster and access to a daily email of article links.

The ultimate tier of membership, which is $30 a month or $300 a year, gives readers all the things they get on the other levels, but also adds a private messaging function through an app called Glassboard, as well as email access to Thompson and “virtual and in-person meetups” — and a book of the drawings that he does for some of his posts. Thompson says he thinks one of the reasons he will succeed where others haven’t is that he has a better business model:

“Most of the ones that writers have set up have been terrible — they’re just leaky paywalls, and so they wind up being basically just donation-based. The thing I like about Andrew’s model is the focus on the individual… I think that’s right. But the business model basically devolves into a donation model.”

Reward tiers instead of just a paywall

By giving readers a series of rewards targeted to specific use cases — whether they are content-based or more community or interaction-based — Thompson said he hopes to get around some of the problems of paywalls. “The thing thing that bothers me about paywalls is that they punish your best readers, your biggest fans. I think freemium is a much better way to think about it…. the vast majority of people can consume it and never pay, but for those who really like what I have to say, they can pay and they get access to more.”

Thompson said he is also a big believer in the single-voice blog, and he is concerned that some of the newer entrants in the new-media world — such as Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site — have lost sight of what made them successful. Whereas every post and link that Silver used to publish had his voice and carried a certain brand expectation, Thompson said that identity is no longer as powerful because the site has broadened out into so many different topics.

“You see all these sites coming out that are basically just recreating the old newspaper or magazine model. It used to be when I saw a 538 link I would click on every time, because I knew what to expect — but that’s been diluted now. There’s something really powerful about single-author sites that you don’t get anywhere else.”

Less than a thousand true fans

Thompson, who said he has been thinking about this project for years, said that much of his inspiration for Stratechery came from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site, which is run more or less single-handedly by Gruber, and has become extremely successful with only a relatively small amount of advertising and sponsored content (Thompson points out that Gruber was one of the unsung pioneers of sponsored content in new media with his sponsored RSS feeds, which he introduced a number of years ago).

While Gruber has a big enough following that he can survive solely on advertising and doesn’t need to offer memberships, Thompson said he is trying to balance his new venture out by using a number of different monetization approaches: one is membership, another is sponsored content (each post has a sponsor mention at the bottom), he is launching a podcast that will contain advertising, and is also accepting speaking engagements and may do other personal events.

And while Kevin Kelly has written about the concept of “A thousand true fans” being all an independent artist needs to survive, Thompson said that based on his calculations about the combination of advertising — he says he is currently getting about 40,000 unique visitors a week — and memberships, he needs “significantly less” than a thousand subscribers in order to consider his site a success.

Other sites that have taken a membership approach include Techdirt, which started as the personal blog of founder Mike Masnick and has become a business — with much of the value derived from the commenting community on the blog, which businesses can tap into for market intelligence. Techdirt’s membership layer includes things like early access to posts and the ability to take part in special forum discussions, as well as personal time with Masnick.

Post and photo thumbnails courtesy of Thinkstock / Aquir and Flickr user Christian Scholtz

There are any number of paradigm shifts that are taking place in media and journalism thanks to the web, including a massive decline in advertising revenue and the related contortions that has forced on the media business. I don’t want to downplay those factors, but for me one of the most important changes of all is the one that journalism professor Jay Rosen summed up years ago when he referred to “the people formerly known as the audience” — that is, the change from a one-way broadcast model to a multi-directional social model of journalism.

In many ways, this shift — which Dan Gillmor also described in his book We The Media — has been the hardest shift of all for journalists and media outlets of all kinds to adapt to, even some of those who are supposedly “digital native.” Why? Because so much of what we think of as journalism has been one-way for decades, apart from throw-away engagement efforts like radio call-in shows, TV “streeter” interviews and the vast wasteland known as blog comments.

Teaching social journalism

That’s why I’m in favor of CUNY’s plan to offer a master’s course in “social and community journalism” as part of its journalism school program, which Jeff Jarvis wrote about recently in a post on Medium. As he describes it, the course would focus on helping young journalists develop the skills required to engage with readers or viewers or listeners — and not just through comments or Twitter, but through actual interaction aimed at improving their journalism.

“Journalism must shift from seeing itself primarily as a producer of content for masses to become more explicitly a service to individuals and communities. Content fills things; service accomplishes things. To provide a service with relevance and value requires knowing those you serve, and to do that requires building relationships with those people.”

At this point, the ubiquity of interactive tools like Twitter (s twtr), Facebook (s fb), Instagram and so on — not to mention just the web itself — means they are taken for granted, and therefore often wind up not being used to their full potential. Many journalists are convinced that posting links to their content on Twitter or Facebook is a good thing, because maybe it will result in clicks, but how many actually use those tools in a truly interactive way as part of the journalism they do?

This is part of the reason why I spend so much time looking at alternative methods, whether it’s the way Andy Carvin used Twitter during the Arab Spring or the way Reddit is trying to create tools for live-blogging of the news, and how communities like the Syrian War sub-Reddit are using them — or how Storyful can team up with blogger Brown Moses to do “open journalism” through a Google+ page.

All journalism should be open journalism

There are traditional journalists who are models of engagement, including people like New York Times columnist and foreign correspondent Nick Kristof or CNN host and former NYT media writer Brian Stelter. But in many cases, the best examples of engaging with a community seem to come from outside the world of traditional journalism — from people like Carvin, or former Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, or Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, or even VC Fred Wilson on his blog.

You can see some of the culture clash between traditional views of journalism and community-centered ones emerge whenever the topic of reader comments comes up, which is why I find myself writing about it so often, and defending the value they can have. The reaction to sites that get rid of comments or hand them over to Facebook is often about how terrible comments are — how they are filled with spam and trolls, etc. But the sub-text is usually about how journalists are too busy doing the important work of journalism to spend time actually talking to their readers.

This kind of position is easy to defend: After all, journalism is important, and wading through hundreds of dumb comments made by people who never even finished the blog post before submitting their thoughts seems like a waste of time. Maybe it’s better if people just posted things to Twitter or talked about your journalism on Facebook or wherever — why do you even have to be involved? You have many other important pieces of journalism to produce. Says Jarvis:

“The first skill we will teach in this new program is listening to a community, hearing and discerning its needs and then thinking about how best to help it meet those needs. The answer sometimes?—?often?—?will be reporting and content. But it can also mean connecting the members of the community to each other to share information themselves.”

Interaction makes for better journalism

The biggest single reason to engage (to use an over-used term) with readers or the people formerly known as the audience is that it makes your journalism better — maybe not right away, and maybe not in every case, but over the long term, hearing from readers improves your understanding of what you are writing about. And that applies to virtually every topic that is worth doing journalism on.

The other reason to do this is that journalism and media in general are becoming much more about person-to-person interaction and relationships, rather than person-to-institution or person-to-brand relationships. Do traditional journalism brands like the New York Times still have power? Of course they do — but individual brands within those institutions have much more than they used to, which is why writers like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher and dozens of others have left to carve out their own enterprises.

And if that future continues, and going directly to readers for funding becomes the norm — the way journalists like Andrew Sullivan and Jessica Lessin and the writers behind De Correspondent and Beacon Reader are doing — then a strong relationship with a community of readers and fans whom you engage with regularly isn’t just a recipe for good journalism, it could be a recipe for survival.

Because it seemed relevant, here’s a Storify of a conversation I had on Twitter with Wall Street Journal reporter Gautham Nagesh about the value of public interaction:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock/ Digital Vision, as well as Thinkstock / mangostock and Thinkstock / icompass

There are any number of paradigm shifts that are taking place in media and journalism thanks to the web, including a massive decline in advertising revenue and the related contortions that has forced on the media business. I don’t want to downplay those factors, but for me one of the most important changes of all is the one that journalism professor Jay Rosen summed up years ago when he referred to “the people formerly known as the audience” — that is, the change from a one-way broadcast model to a multi-directional social model of journalism.

In many ways, this shift — which Dan Gillmor also described in his book We The Media — has been the hardest shift of all for journalists and media outlets of all kinds to adapt to, even some of those who are supposedly “digital native.” Why? Because so much of what we think of as journalism has been one-way for decades, apart from throw-away engagement efforts like radio call-in shows, TV “streeter” interviews and the vast wasteland known as blog comments.

Teaching social journalism

That’s why I’m in favor of CUNY’s plan to offer a master’s course in “social and community journalism” as part of its journalism school program, which Jeff Jarvis wrote about recently in a post on Medium. As he describes it, the course would focus on helping young journalists develop the skills required to engage with readers or viewers or listeners — and not just through comments or Twitter, but through actual interaction aimed at improving their journalism.

“Journalism must shift from seeing itself primarily as a producer of content for masses to become more explicitly a service to individuals and communities. Content fills things; service accomplishes things. To provide a service with relevance and value requires knowing those you serve, and to do that requires building relationships with those people.”

At this point, the ubiquity of interactive tools like Twitter (s twtr), Facebook (s fb), Instagram and so on — not to mention just the web itself — means they are taken for granted, and therefore often wind up not being used to their full potential. Many journalists are convinced that posting links to their content on Twitter or Facebook is a good thing, because maybe it will result in clicks, but how many actually use those tools in a truly interactive way as part of the journalism they do?

This is part of the reason why I spend so much time looking at alternative methods, whether it’s the way Andy Carvin used Twitter during the Arab Spring or the way Reddit is trying to create tools for live-blogging of the news, and how communities like the Syrian War sub-Reddit are using them — or how Storyful can team up with blogger Brown Moses to do “open journalism” through a Google+ page.

All journalism should be open journalism

There are traditional journalists who are models of engagement, including people like New York Times columnist and foreign correspondent Nick Kristof or CNN host and former NYT media writer Brian Stelter. But in many cases, the best examples of engaging with a community seem to come from outside the world of traditional journalism — from people like Carvin, or former Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald, or Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, or even VC Fred Wilson on his blog.

You can see some of the culture clash between traditional views of journalism and community-centered ones emerge whenever the topic of reader comments comes up, which is why I find myself writing about it so often, and defending the value they can have. The reaction to sites that get rid of comments or hand them over to Facebook is often about how terrible comments are — how they are filled with spam and trolls, etc. But the sub-text is usually about how journalists are too busy doing the important work of journalism to spend time actually talking to their readers.

This kind of position is easy to defend: After all, journalism is important, and wading through hundreds of dumb comments made by people who never even finished the blog post before submitting their thoughts seems like a waste of time. Maybe it’s better if people just posted things to Twitter or talked about your journalism on Facebook or wherever — why do you even have to be involved? You have many other important pieces of journalism to produce. Says Jarvis:

“The first skill we will teach in this new program is listening to a community, hearing and discerning its needs and then thinking about how best to help it meet those needs. The answer sometimes?—?often?—?will be reporting and content. But it can also mean connecting the members of the community to each other to share information themselves.”

Interaction makes for better journalism

The biggest single reason to engage (to use an over-used term) with readers or the people formerly known as the audience is that it makes your journalism better — maybe not right away, and maybe not in every case, but over the long term, hearing from readers improves your understanding of what you are writing about. And that applies to virtually every topic that is worth doing journalism on.

The other reason to do this is that journalism and media in general are becoming much more about person-to-person interaction and relationships, rather than person-to-institution or person-to-brand relationships. Do traditional journalism brands like the New York Times still have power? Of course they do — but individual brands within those institutions have much more than they used to, which is why writers like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein and Kara Swisher and dozens of others have left to carve out their own enterprises.

And if that future continues, and going directly to readers for funding becomes the norm — the way journalists like Andrew Sullivan and Jessica Lessin and the writers behind De Correspondent and Beacon Reader are doing — then a strong relationship with a community of readers and fans whom you engage with regularly isn’t just a recipe for good journalism, it could be a recipe for survival.

Because it seemed relevant, here’s a Storify of a conversation I had on Twitter with Wall Street Journal reporter Gautham Nagesh about the value of public interaction:

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Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock/ Digital Vision, as well as Thinkstock / mangostock and Thinkstock / icompass

Every now and then, the war that traditional media entities seem to be continuously fighting over reader comments — where they should be placed, how they should be managed and even whether they should exist at all — erupts into the open. This time around, the spark was an announcement earlier this week that the Chicago Sun-Times has eliminated the ability for readers to comment, while it tries to think of a way to handle them that won’t result in “an embarrassing mishmash of fringe ranting and ill-informed, shrill bomb-throwing.”

The Sun-Times is just the latest to make this decision — some, confronted with the same choice, have ultimately decided not to have comments at all, or to allow Facebook to manage them. Popular Science was the most recent publication to do away with them entirely, a decision the magazine said was influenced by research that showed comments can negatively influence how readers perceive research. The Huffington Post, meanwhile, recently ruled out anonymity.

The consensus among many of those who vote against comments — including a number of bloggers like TechCrunch writer-turned-VC MG Siegler — is that they add virtually no value, and that anyone who wants to comment can turn to Twitter or Facebook, or publish a critical take on their own blog. In other words, comments are unnecessary. But I think this is fundamentally wrong.

Social media doesn’t fill the gap

I’ve argued here a number of times that comments have value, even if they are filled with trolls and flame-wars, and also that anonymity and pseudonymity also have value — even if outlets like the Huffington Post choose to attribute all of their problems to those features. There is a long tradition of pseudonymous commentary in the United States in particular, especially when it comes to politics, and even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to have loosened his views on whether “real identities” are required for some social activity.

As I tried to point out in a Twitter discussion about this topic with journalism professor Jay Rosen (who says he is agnostic when it comes to the subject of whether sites should have comments, but does have them on his own site), as well as Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab and a number of others — a conversation I have embedded below — I don’t think it’s enough to say that we can afford to do away with reader comments because Twitter and Facebook exist. In many ways, that’s just an abdication of responsibility.

It’s true that much of the commentary on blog posts and news stories occurs on Twitter and Facebook, and probably Instagram and Snapchat for all I know. And there’s no question that social tools have eaten into the market for old-fashioned blog comments — even at Gigaom, we’ve noticed a decline over the past few years, in all likelihood because people have moved to other platforms and comments are no longer the only method for providing feedback.

[tweet 456278382016094208 hide_thread=’true’]

That said, however, I think there are a number of risks involved in handing over the ability to comment to Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. As I argued in a separate debate with Scott Smith — who wrote a blog post arguing that we shouldn’t mourn the decline of comments — one of the dangers is that if your engagement with your readers occurs solely through these platforms, then they effectively control that relationship in some crucial ways. Smith argued that Facebook was “just the microphone,” but it is more than that: It’s the microphone, the hall, the electricity and even the town.

Doing a service for readers

Another risk is that journalists — who might be held to account for mistakes, or provided with additional useful information about a story or a point of view, which is one of the major benefits of two-way or multi-directional journalism — will cherry-pick the responses they wish to see on Twitter or Facebook, and miss others. It’s easy to say that you will follow up with everyone on every social platform, but it’s another thing to do so.

Not only that, but handing everything over to social networks also diminishes one of the other major benefits of having comments, which is that everyone can see at a glance which journalists are interacting and which aren’t — and what their responses are. Sure, you could find out all of that by searching Twitter and Facebook and every other platform, but it would take a long time. Why not provide readers with that ability in a single place, right next to the content itself?

Rosen and others argue that many bloggers and journalists respond via email, which is undoubtedly true. But there again, there is little to no transparency to those conversations (although some who use this method, including Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish, are good at publishing both the emails and their responses).

News orgs: I can understand killing comments for lack of resources (human/financial). But stop blaming commenters, OK? This is on you.

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) April 15, 2014

But for me, one of the biggest criticisms of doing away with comments is that too many sites are throwing the baby — and a potentially valuable baby — out with the bathwater, without trying to come up with a solution or spend any time fixing them. Anil Dash has argued that if a site has a comment section that is filled with trolls and bad behavior, the responsibility for that lies with the website owner, because he or she has failed to spend the time necessary to improve the environment there.

I should point out that I say all this as someone who is male and white, and therefore has likely never experienced the kind of flaming and outright abuse that women and people of color are often exposed to in comments. Writers like Quinn Norton and others have pointed this out, and they are right to do so. Moderation or even engagement in those kinds of threads can be a toxic experience, and I can understand why some might choose not to put up with it.

Why not try to improve them instead?

As I’ve pointed out before, there are a number of interesting experiments going on with comments, including the “annotations” that Quartz has — which appear next to the paragraph they refer to, and were inspired by the way that Medium handles comments, which can also be attached to an individual section. Comment-software maker Livefyre just announced a new version that adds much the same ability to websites, instead of lumping comments at the bottom of a page. Even the New York Times has experimented with something similar.

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There are a number of sites that have shown the potential value of comments — and not just individual blogs, like that of Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, but sites like Techdirt. Founder Mike Masnick has turned his often-turbulent comment section into the foundation of a true community, and one that not only provides feedback but is a crucial part of his membership-based business model. It wasn’t even that hard, he says. Gawker’s Nick Denton has bet the farm on Kinja, the discussion platform that turns every commenter into a blogger — and is even prepared to take commenters and turn them into paid staff.

For me at least, too much of the complaining about comment sections and the decision to do away with them seems to be driven not by the bad behavior in them, but by a lack of interest on the part of some journalists and media outlets ing engaging with readers at all — and the hope that if there are no comments, maybe there won’t be any way to see the mistakes or call them to account.

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Post and photo thumbnails courtesy of Flickr users Tony Margiocchi, as well as Jeremy King

Many traditional journalists seem to hate the term “citizen journalism,” for a variety of reasons — including the fact that it implies that anyone can engage in journalistic behavior, even if they don’t work for a mainstream media outlet or have professional training. But there is no question that this trend is an important and useful one, and one recent example is the work being done by a group called @140journos in Turkey, who have been crowdsourcing the verification of election results.

As Global Post describes it, the more than 300 volunteers behind @140journos — which was created in 2011 after a Turkish military incident that went uncovered by the media, and later gained notoriety during the demonstrations over the closure of Istanbul’s Gezi Park — not only tracked all of the local voting behavior during the election using social media, but have since spent hundreds of hours trying to verify the official reporting of the vote results.

“Twenty citizen journalists — who have day jobs ranging from radio hosts to chefs and engineers — gathered in a small room to collect, verify and tweet news alerts about polling stations, protests, and unofficial election results. Four people were ‘mining’ on social media — digging for stories that 140journos may have missed — while two designers created colorful infographics.”

Crowdsourced verification of poll results

Following the election, the members of @140journos have been using social tools and connections made through their own networks — as well as a public call-out on Facebook, Twitter and the group’s website — to gather original photos of ballot reports for every single one of Turkey’s almost 200,000 polling stations. They’ve compared these to official reports from the electoral council and found that in some cases the numbers don’t match.

According to Global Post, in just the first 48 hours, @140journos “documented 368 inconsistent polling numbers” in several thousand ballot reports from Ankara and Istanbul, and they are working on more. And they have opened this process up with a tool that allows anyone to compare official ballot results with photos from polling stations, which sounds a lot like the Guardian’s famous “MP Expenses” crowdsourcing project. Said @140journos co-founder Ogulcan Ekiz:

“We wanted to ask, what’s the power of social media? What if we open this to people and let them check their own ballot? It will be a moment for the Turkish public to check its own elections. This is the new thing.”

Some professional journalists might disagree, but that kind of behavior sounds a lot like journalism to me — and fairly useful journalism to boot. As I pointed out in an earlier post about Turkey, the value of social media as a journalistic tool becomes even more obvious when you see how it works in a country where the traditional media has failed to do its job properly.

It’s not surprising at all that such a country would ban Twitter and YouTube. This apparently caused difficulties for @140journos during their crowdsourced verification process, but they managed to get around the blockage by using VPNs and other tools (the Twitter ban has been lifted following a court decision, but the block on YouTube remains in effect).

Journalism as a communication project

What’s equally fascinating about @140journos is that many of them don’t even consider themselves to be journalists, or what they do to be journalism — or at least, they aren’t particularly concerned about using those labels or defining what they mean (unlike most professional journalists). As co-founder Engin Onder told the Nieman Journalism Lab:

“None of us on our team has any intention of being a journalist… it’s better to explore this stuff without knowing the journalism principles, because it’s not a journalism project, actually — it’s a communication project.”

This fits with my theory that some of the most important and interesting acts of journalism of the last few years have been committed by non-journalists, or at least non-professional journalists — including people like former NPR editor Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring (who called himself an information DJ and described Twitter as his newsroom) and Brown Moses, a British blogger who became a self-taught expert in the weaponry used by Syrian terrorists.

This doesn’t mean such acts should be seen as — or are even capable of — replacing traditional journalism, except perhaps in countries like Turkey, where it needs replacing. Instead, it is simply enlarging the practice and expanding its reach, and that is a good thing. For more on @140journos, see the Nieman Journalism Lab’s recent transcript of an interview that sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did with Engin Onder at a Berkman Center event at Harvard University.

Post and photo thumbnails courtesy of Thinkstock / triloks and Ogulcan Ekiz

Whenever the subject of “viral” content or clickbait journalism comes up — usually in a blog post or news story about either Upworthy or BuzzFeed, or one of their many imitators — there’s a tendency to blame the phenomenon on the internet, as though there was no such thing as clickbait-style journalism until the social web came along. But all the internet and social media have done is increase the supply, and probably the speed — that kind of content is as old as humanity.

Lapham’s Quarterly came up with some relatively ancient examples in a recent post entitled “Going Viral in the 19th Century.” At that time, it was commonplace for newspapers and magazines to include silly or amusing anecdotes, trivia, jokes and bad poetry as a way of lightening up the news. Newspaper editor Frederick Hudson was apparently driven to despair by these light-hearted items, which ran under headings like “Witticisms” or “Oddities.”

“These odds and ends, often undignified with bylines, offered distinctive servings of that history-is-weird feeling so beloved by the Internet these days. The columns often included racist overtones, sexist underpinnings, and were blithe about topics we now perceive as sobering, or sober about topics we find hilarious.”

Newspapers were there first

That description could just as easily be applied to a site like BuzzFeed or Gawker or Upworthy, I think — especially the much-criticized BuzzFeed tendency to use light-hearted methods to talk about serious topics, such as the post “The Story of Egypt’s Revolution In Jurassic Park GIFs.” But it’s clear that this isn’t something the internet invented, it has just applied more modern distribution techniques.

After a debate about “hamster wheel” journalism and how it drives journalists to seek pageviews above all else, Tim Marchman of Deadspin wrote a post criticizing the rush to brand every kind of new-media article as clickbait — as though more traditional forms of media didn’t care about generating interest or appealing to an audience using whatever means possible, including outright lies, half-baked theories and hoaxes, and emotional manipulation.

His example of an earlier form of clickbait came from the Lawrence Journal-World in 1922, which ran an article about a gang of hoodlums who reported attacked a man and stole one of his genitals, presumably “for an experiment in gland transplantation, perhaps for the purpose of rejuvenating some infirm or aged man.” The story was picked up by other newspapers as well, including the Fort-Worth Star Telegram and even the Ottawa Citizen. As Marchman put it:

“The word clickbait presents a tautology as a criticism. You published something, and want people to read it, too. Taken at face value, it’s less than meaningless — it’s self-negating [and] it’s moralistic, proposing a false binary between stories that serve the public interest and those cynically presented just because people will read them.”

Even Martin Luther went viral

Although Marchman doesn’t go into it, newspapers have what is probably the worst track record in the media world for coming up with hysterical and/or thinly-sourced journalism designed to inflame the passions of readers on various topics, including sexism, racism and other negative emotions — not to mention printing outright hoaxes, etc. without checking.

Anyone who has read some of the history of press baron William Randolph Hearst is probably familiar with the worst of that period in US journalistic history — a reputation that led to the phrase “yellow journalism” (which came from the Hearst papers’ use of a cartoon called The Yellow Kid to boost revenues, something that seems very BuzzFeed-like). British tabloids have arguably been even worse.

Author and Economist editor Tom Standage has written an entire book about the similarities between the media that we have now — i.e., the social kind — and the media we used to have centuries ago. In one chapter excerpted in the Economist, he wrote about how Martin Luther, the creator of the modern Protestant movement, essentially used the social media of his day (pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts) to spread his message as quickly and broadly as possible.

In other words, social media and its effect on journalism or the news industry isn’t really a new phenomenon created by the internet — it’s just that the internet has done what it does to almost everything, which is to make it easier to create, publish and spread than it has ever been before. And judging by the success of some of those outlets, many people seem to enjoy it.

Post and photo thumbnails courtesy of Shutterstock / mj007