Category: Gigaom

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.

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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

The vast quantities of information we reveal about ourselves as we move around the internet and interact through social networks — what some have called the “data exhaust” of our lives, from GPS co-ordinates to the emotional signals sent by our Facebook (s fb) likes — is a treasure trove of information for anyone engaged in surveillance, whether it’s governments or the companies whose services we use to post all that information. But that same kind of behavior is also a powerful tool for allowing dissident movements to rise up against their oppressors.

That’s the lesson I took away from an excellent piece published on Medium by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who specializes in researching the effects of social media. Her work helped show just how crucial social media was in helping to foment what became the “Arab Spring” movements in countries like Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.

Social tools empower dissidents

Tufekci, who is Turkish by birth, talks about visiting her homeland during the increasingly violent demonstrations there against the government of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan — and in particular, she talks about how Twitter (s twtr) in particular became a crucial source of information for protesters and would-be protesters, since the traditional media in Turkey refused to cover the demonstrations, out of fear that the government might retaliate against them.

“After each volley of tear gas, protesters would pull out their phones and turn to social media to find out what was happening, or to report events themselves. Twitter had become the capillary structure of a movement without visible leaders, without institutional structure. Without even a name.”

As Tufekci has noted in her research and publishing about social-media use during the Arab Spring uprisings, tools like Twitter and Facebook don’t create dissent, but they can definitely help connect dissidents with each other — and they can reassure those who are thinking about dissent that others share their feelings and are also willing to act. This can cause what she calls an “information cascade,” which can help movements tip over into open rebellion more easily.

One big double-edged sword

Of course, all of that activity can also be seen — and blocked, or used as evidence — much more easily as well. Oppressive regimes use Facebook pages against those they wish to target, and try to block information (as Venezuela appeared to be blocking violent images of demonstrations in that country from Twitter’s website recently). And they can even send text messages like the rather Orwellian one sent to Ukrainian dissidents recently, stating simply: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass riot.”

But these tools are the quintessential double-edged sword, as Tufekci notes in her piece (which is entitled “Is the Internet good or bad? Yes”). They provide plenty of information to governments, but they also empower those who use them:

“Yet the more we connect to each other online, the more our actions become visible to governments and corporations. It feels like a loss of independence. But as I stood in Gezi Park, I saw how digital communication had become a form of organization. I saw it enable dissent, discord, and protest. Resistance and surveillance: The design of today’s digital tools makes the two inseparable. And how to think about this is a real challenge.”

It’s not 1984 or Bentham’s Panopticon

Tufekci also makes what I think is an important point: everyone likes to think of today’s political and digital environment as Orwellian, because it enables ubiquitous surveillance of a kind that seems similar to 1984 — the NSA and other agencies spying on everyone, recording phone calls, etc. Others choose to see it as a version of philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” in which everyone is surveilled without knowing by whom or when, and therefore no one misbehaves.

But in reality, the sociologist says, what we have is unlike either of these fictional inventions (Bentham actually tried to build a prison using the panopticon model but it never opened). Surveillance tools aren’t just being used by an oppressive government like Oceania, but by companies as well — and in many cases users are volunteering for that surveillance because it brings them benefits of some kind.

But at the same time, Tufekci argues it is undeniable that the very same tools that can be used to keep tabs on our every movement allow dissidents to organize and find like-minded citizens. Does that make all the surveillance and other negative aspects worth it? Perhaps not — but at least it helps to level the playing field. As one Turkish parent put it in talking about her children and the web:

“They were right and we were wrong. We didn’t understand our kids. None of this would be possible without the Internet. The Internet brings freedom.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Richard Engel, NBC and Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Thomas Leuthard

Venture investor Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz doesn’t have many media investments, apart from small stakes in sites like Pando Daily, Talking Points Memo and RapGenius — but that hasn’t stopped him from holding forth on Twitter about his views on the industry, a process that includes an often passionate back-and-forth with critics of his views. In the latest instalment of this manifesto, Andreessen looked at what he believes is holding the existing media industry back.

In the first part of the series, the former Netscape Communications co-founder talked about why he is fundamentally optimistic about the future of journalism (although perhaps not the future of traditional media entities). In the second part he talked about ways that new media entities can make money online, and in the third he gave some examples of companies that he thinks are doing it well — including VICE Media, The Atlantic and Wirecutter.

Part 4: Things & ideas in journalism business, probably/arguably counterproductive to twin growth of quality journalism + quality business.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

Bloated cost structure

On Tuesday, Andreessen listed off some of the reasons why he thinks most traditional media companies have not been able to make the transition from print to digital, or at least not as smoothly as they might have. First on the list: “Bloated cost structure left over from monopoly/oligopoly days. Nobody promised shiny HQ tower, big expense accounts, lots of secretaries!”

Judge’s ruling: This one might seem a little unfair, since hardly anyone has a shiny headquarters (most have sold them and moved to much less impressive digs) or lots of secretaries. But the part about a bloated cost structure is arguably still true, even after waves of layoffs — and a big part of that cost structure is things like pensions, which Andreessen mentions in his next post:

2 Unions & Pensions: Useful once, but now impose structural rigidity in rapidly changing environment. Everyone with equity = better model.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

Staying married to objectivity

Next, Andreessen mentions the principle of objectivity, which he says is “still relevant for some, but broad journalism opportunity includes many variations of subjectivity.” In the days before World War II, Andreessen argues, subjectivity was the dominant model for newspapers — as he describes it, “lots of points of view battling it out in marketplace of ideas.” Objectivity as a guiding principle for all media, he argues, was “an artifact of new monopoly/oligopoly structures; necessary to ward off antitrust; embraced by reporters.”

The VC added in follow-up tweets that “many stories don’t have two sides; describing with point of view can even be better” — a comment that echoes journalism professor Jay Rosen’s repeated criticism of false balance, or what he calls The View From Nowhere. David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has argued that “transparency is the new objectivity.”

Judge’s ruling: Andreessen is right when he says that objectivity, often held up as an inviolable tenet of journalism, is a relatively recent invention. Early newspapers were incredibly lop-sided in their political and social viewpoints, since many of them were owned by rich proprietors who had an agenda they wanted to promote. The risk, of course, is that not everyone will read every perspective, which could leave some with a distorted picture.

The Chinese wall and too much defense

Next, Andreessen mentions the “Chinese wall” that many media entities maintain between the business side and the editorial side. This approach is flawed, he says: “No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works.” Many businesses, Andreessen argues, manage to balance incentives and conflicts and can still “hold the line on quality.”

There are intermediate points between “holier than holy” and “hopelessly corrupt” that don’t equal warped coverage and do work as business.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

The venture capitalist then accuses media outlets of spending most of their time and effort on “playing defense and protecting the old” as opposed to a strong offense or inventing the future. In the long run, he says, this approach leads to almost certain doom. Even newspapers that are now making a go of things in digital “would be much better off today if [they] had shifted resources/focus harder/sooner,” Andreessen says.

Judge’s ruling: The division between business and editorial did serve a purpose in the old days of newspapers, in order to prevent the desires of advertisers infecting the purity of the journalism. But Andreessen is right that Chinese walls are expensive. As for his point about newspapers playing too much defense and not enough offense, he is 100 percent correct on that one, as Digital First Media CEO John Paton would no doubt agree.

Too much competition?

His final point is that the industry in North America at least suffers from an excess of competition, in the sense that too many general news organizations — from newspapers to TV networks — are chasing the same market. More than 15 full-scale national news entities in the U.S., he says, along with international players, “consolidation [is] required.”

NYT, WSJ, WP, LAT, CT, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, NPR, Reuters, AP, CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, FT, Guardian, etc + all online co’s too many general orgs.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

Judge’s ruling: Andreessen has a point that there are a lot of national and international news entities chasing the same group of readers or viewers — and there are a lot of new online startups entering the field as well. But would it be any better if those groups were consolidated so that one or two owners controlled TV networks and newspapers and radio stations, and their online equivalents? This is one area where I’m not convinced. What’s wrong with competition?

In his last point, which requires no judging, Andreessen notes that these are all “business challenges/opportunities that can be rethought, addressed, fixed” if the industry wants to and puts its collective mind to it. And he closes with a quote from legendary baseball manager Tommy Lasorda: “Nobody said this f***ing job would be all that f***ing easy.” But even though it is hard, the Netscape founder said, “it can be done, and it is worth doing.” Amen to that, sir.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of All Things Digital

When Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield was building an online game several years ago, he and his team of designers and developers built their own hacked-together IRC-based replacement for instant messaging and email as a way of getting things done. After he shut the game down last year and was looking for something else to do, Butterfield decided his workflow software was worth refining, and the result is Slack, which launched to the public today.

If there’s one market that is filled to the brim with competitors — even more so than consumer photo-sharing apps — it has to be workflow or collaboration services. There are large, project-management style suites like Basecamp (which 37signals announced it is now focusing on full time), as well as HipChat, Microsoft-owned Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter, along with half a dozen others like Asana.

On top of that, many companies and teams use a variety of other services to accomplish the same thing, whether it’s Skype or Google Hangouts. So what makes Butterfield think that he can beat all of these competing solutions? He says no one is approaching the problem in the same way that Slack is — namely, by integrating as many different information providers and pipelines as possible.

“There are three basic types of message: One is a person writing to another person, another is someone trying to send a file, and the third is computers sending you a message — like you have a new follower on Twitter or someone commented on your post. We figured if we could get all three of those kinds of message in one place, there was a chance to build something that would be the one app you have open all the time.”

One ring to rule them all

Butterfield says the need for something like Slack is shown by how quickly adoption has grown: the service launched as a beta “preview” last August, and did no marketing or media relations of any kind, but has continued to grow at double-digit rates week after week for six months. One of the company’s venture backers, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, said: “Growth like this is not something we have seen before. Enterprise software growing 50-80% per month based entirely on word of mouth is unprecedented.”

Butterfield says he didn’t want to build a project-management tool like Basecamp because that inevitably involves philosophical issues about how projects should be managed — instead, he just wanted to put together a single communications tool that would pull in as many different sources of potentially useful information as possible for teams, whether it was chat or automated crash reports.

Slack, which has both an iOS app and an Android app as well as a Mac app, allows team members to easily track messages from co-workers but also to see status reports from across the company, by connecting to tools like SVN, Github, MailChimp, Crashlytics, Heroku and JIRA — things that would otherwise have likely remained in a separate silo or service. An API allows for almost any other service or tool to be integrated into the system as well, Butterfield said.

“We see a lot of people switching from Hipchat or Campfire, but we see an even larger number — an order of magnitude more — coming from nothing. Either it’s a jumble of different services or just email or just Skype, or maybe this group has IRC, this other one uses Hangouts — it’s like a hodgepodge. There is no one service where all the communication goes.”

Ambient awareness of your colleagues

The problem that arises when teams within a company don’t use the same tool, Butterfield says, is that information becomes hard to find, since there is no single repository of all the important data. Teams using Slack “get this kind of ambient awareness of what people are doing. So, for example, the engineers can see what people are tweeting about us, so when we say they’re complaining about this or that they actually take you seriously.”

Butterfield says Slack’s adoption curve is growing faster than Flickr did at any time during its history pre-Yahoo, and is also growing faster than many other workflow-related startups such as Github. The Slack founder said he doesn’t track things like installs or signups because those metrics are “bogus,” but the app is now being used by a wide range of companies from startups like BuzzFeed and Square to large companies like Citrix and Expedia.

True real-time workplace collaboration is something of a holy grail, Butterfield says, in the sense that companies keep promising it will arrive but it never really does — and so teams continue to use email even though it is broken, or mash together various pieces of software to try and make something that works. “There’s a 30-year legacy of broken promises around collaboration, from Lotus Notes on,” he says. “But I feel like now the world is ready for it.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Creatas

Everyone seems to have an opinion about what’s wrong with the news business — whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times for journalism, whether paywalls are the answer, and so on — and that includes high-profile venture investor Marc Andreessen, who unloaded some of his thoughts on Twitter on Wednesday. While Andreessen isn’t actually involved in the media industry directly, he had some interesting thoughts about it, so I collected some of them here (there’s also a Storify collection that includes these and others).

Andreessen started by saying that he’s more optimistic about the future of the news industry than anyone he knows, and that he expects it to grow dramatically over the next couple of decades. Then, he launched into a series of tweets about how the journalism business is being disrupted by its transformation from a series of monopolies or oligarchies into a much more open and competitive market.

Starting point: I am more optimistic/bullish about future of news industry over next 20 years than almost anyone I know. Will grow 10x-100x.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

Analyzed as a business, the news industry is going through a fundamental restructuring and transformation, for worse AND for better.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

The main change is that news businesses 1946-2005 were mostly monopolies and oligopolies, and now they’re not. Wrenching change for anyone.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

On this, Andreessen is right on the money: in the good old days of “mass media” — which at least some people believe was a historical anomaly, based on demographics and the lack of a cheap distribution technology like the internet — newspapers and TV stations were effectively monopolies, with control over the channels of distribution. That in turn gave them the ability to limit the amount of content that users got, and also made them a preferred avenue for advertising. But all that has changed, as Andreessen noted.

(1) Distribution going from locked down to completely open, anyone can create & distribute, no $ premium for control of distribution.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

(2) Formerly separate industries colliding on Internet. Newspaper vs magazine vs broadcast TV vs cable TV vs wire service, now all compete.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

(3) Market size dramatically expanding–many more people consume news now vs 10-20 yrs ago, many more still in 10-20 yrs. Big, big deal.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

The first and second of these factors drive prices down, Andreessen argued, while the third drives the potential addressable market for news up — and while most people in the industry are focused on the decline in prices and the increase in competition, Andreessen said they should be more focused on the third factor. Even if costs can’t be cut by as much as they seem to require given lower revenues, he said, the massive expansion in the potential market should make up for that.

After a number of commenters asked what this might mean for local news, since the market for it is restricted geographically much more than national or international news, Andreessen said that he didn’t think there was ever much of a market for local news, but this was disguised by the ability of local newspapers to make money from classified ads, real estate, Sunday grocery fliers and other methods. Most people, he said, just weren’t that interested in local news — something that the failure of AOL’s Patch seems to help support.

When it comes to investigative or other forms of journalism, Andreessen said that in the grand scheme of things the cost of that kind of resource isn’t very large at all — perhaps only $20 million a year or so in total in the U.S. — and that this could easily be supported by philanthropism of the kind that supports ProPublica, along with crowdfunding and other methods of revenue generation. Andreessen said this would also serve to tie the fortunes of a media outlet directly to their readers.

In other comments during the same discussion, Andreessen said that he doesn’t think paywalls are going to work for many media companies, because they “penalize most loyal customers” and are therefore very tricky — another point I think he is correct on. However, he said charging for access to specific targeted information such as business news, the way the Wall Street Journal and newer ventures like Jessica Lessin’s The Information do, makes a lot of sense (Andreessen said he is a big fan of The Information).

Andreessen also said that he believes the online advertising industry and the media industry have both pushed that business down to the lowest common denominator, and argued that it should be possible to come up with premium advertising that would help pay the bills for content businesses — something that outlets like Vox are also betting (or hoping) will be the case. The biggest problem with many media companies, he suggested, was that they blame their customers for not wanting to buy, instead of blaming what they are selling.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of All Things D

Everyone likes to point to the New York Times as the model for a news outlet with a successful paywall or online-subscription model, but as the authors of Columbia University’s report on “Post-industrial Journalism” noted last year, there is only one New York Times — just as there is only one Wall Street Journal. The only real lesson that these publishers have to teach other news outlets when it comes to paywalls is: “Too bad you aren’t the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.”

Among the smaller players, however, some interesting lessons are emerging about what makes a subscription model work. For me at least, one of the most compelling is that your ability to build and maintain a strong connection to your community is crucial — and the example of Holland’s massively successful crowdfunded news site De Correspondent is a case in point.

Just to recap, De Correspondent is a site founded by two former staffers at Holland’s NRC Handelsblad — an offshoot of one of the country’s leading national dailies — who were dissatisfied with their employer’s weak attempts at adapting to the world of online journalism and decided to strike out on their own. They launched a crowdfunding effort that raised an eye-popping $1.7 million, with more than 19,000 signing up for an annual subscription.

Crowdfunding $2 million per year

According to an update in a recent post at Fast Company, the newspaper now has a total of almost 30,000 subscribers who are paying five Euros a month (about $6.84). That means even if it were to stop growing its subscriber base right now, De Correspondent would still be pulling in almost $200,000 every month from subscribers, or more than $2 million every year.

That wouldn’t seem like much if you were running a newsroom the size of the New York Times or Washington Post, of course, but as media analyst Ken Doctor points out in a recent piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, the costs of a digital-only media startup are substantially lower than they are for established entities — which helps explain why so many people are starting them.

De Correspondent also has a 5-percent profit cap, with the rest of its revenues reinvested into the site, and publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth said the site is already in the black. “If 40 percent of our members don’t renew in September, we will still survive,” he told Fast Company.

Not just readers, but contributors

One of the key principles behind De Correspondent is that the news outlet and its community of readers are two parts of one thing, not just a seller on one side and a consumer on the other. In a telling detail, the Dutch news outlet doesn’t even refer to its reader comments as “comments,” but instead calls them “contributions” — unlike many news sites, which completely ignore and/or downplay comments or reader feedback. Said co-founder Sebastian Kersten:

“The whole platform, we are building that around the dialogue rather than the monologue that it is usually. You as the journalist are the conversation leader.”

As the Fast Company piece notes, a recent editorial meeting was held in a public cafe at a local cinema museum, and each writer is responsible for hosting one get-together a month where readers can come and learn about a topic and/or interact with other subscribers and journalists. Those kinds of real-world events are an important factor in building a community as well — which helps explain why so many media companies are expanding into running conferences.

The connection to and relationship with readers is further reinforced by the fact that De Correspondent subscribers can subscribe to individual writers, and each writer gets their own area to respond and engage with readers. Beacon, a crowdfunded platform for journalism that launched last year, is pursuing a similar type of approach — readers subscribe to a single writer, but those payments help support the entire stable of authors across a range of subjects.

Readers decide who succeeds and who fails

That connection with readers is also crucial for sites like The Daily Dish, the standalone site launched by former Daily Beast and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan. By the end of last year, the Dish had pulled in close to $800,000 from subscribers — and in a recent update, Sullivan said that he got close to $500,000 worth of renewal income in just the first two weeks of January. The site has 34,000 paying subscribers and is profitable, he told me in a recent interview.

As I tried to point out in a post last year comparing Sullivan with Amanda Palmer, the alternative musician who crowdfunded an album to the tune of over $1 million on Indiegogo, the crucial element of what both are doing is the connection they have built — and work hard to maintain — with their readers and/or fans.

That’s not to say other things don’t help with paywalls, such as having a valuable niche the way that outlets like the Financial Times and The Economist do — and some startups with paywalls that did have relatively strong connections to their community, such as Matter and NSFW, have not succeeded. But without some strong connection to your readers, you will almost inevitably fail.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni

When Montana blogger Crystal Cox lost her defamation case in 2011, the decision was greeted by a chorus of cheers from journalists, who were quick to argue that Cox wasn’t a journalist in any real sense of the word, and therefore didn’t deserve any protection from the First Amendment. An appeals court for the Ninth Circuit has disagreed, however: on Friday, a panel of judges overturned the original decision and said that Cox was in fact entitled to protection.

The implications of this ruling go beyond just a single defamation case. It’s another link in a chain of decisions that are gradually helping to extend the principle of free-speech protection beyond professional journalism to anyone who is publishing information with public value — and as such, it helps shift the focus away from trying to define who is a journalist and puts it where it should be: on protecting the practice of journalism, broadly defined.

Legislators who have been trying to design a “shield law” for journalists have been doing their best to specify who should be protected from government interference, but as journalism professor Jay Rosen and others have argued, it is the content itself that requires protecting, not some specific group of professional journalists who are able to fill in the correct checkboxes.

First Amendment protection is open to all

The First Amendment question was crucial to Cox’s case because under U.S. law, journalists are held to a higher standard when it comes to defamation, in the sense that an accuser has to show negligence — in other words, that the accused deliberately printed something they knew was false — and also has to prove damages. The original trial judge decided that Cox wasn’t entitled to this higher standard of protection because she didn’t meet his test for who qualifies as a professional journalist. As he described it:

“The record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law.”

The appeals court rejected this interpretation, however, and took a considerable amount of space in their decision (PDF link) to point out that the free-speech clause of the constitution is intended to cover *anyone* who happens to be saying something of public concern (as defense attorney Eugene Volokh argued in a paper he wrote about the history of the First Amendment), regardless of whether they fit some arbitrary picture of who should qualify as a “professional journalist.”

The Ninth Circuit ruling said that while the Supreme Court has never explicitly said whether a higher standard of proof should be available to anyone beyond the professional media, it has repeatedly refused to give greater First Amendment protection to members of the institutional press. As the higher court put it in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: “We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.” The appeals court added:

“The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others’ writings, or tried to get both sides of a story. As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is unworkable.”

It’s not about who qualifies as a journalist

What makes this case particularly interesting is that — as David Carr pointed out in the New York Times, and Kashmir Hill noted in Forbes — Cox isn’t even close to being what most would consider a professional journalist: she engaged in what amounts to an extended online vendetta against the complainant, an executive with a refinancing company, by setting up websites aimed at discrediting him, and engaged in all sorts of other conduct that most journalists would likely consider reprehensible.

Despite her behavior, however, the appeals court still found that Cox was entitled to protection by the First Amendment because what she was writing about was “a matter of public concern.” And as legal blogger Venkat Balasubramani notes in a post about the case, whether we agree with her tactics is largely irrelevant — if her accuser actually was engaging in the kind of misconduct she alleged, it was in the public interest for her to write about it.

While Balasubramani said that the decision of the Ninth Circuit marks a victory for “the pajama-clad blogger community,” it’s actually a victory for anyone who chooses to publish something that has broad public value — in other words, journalism — regardless of whether they fit the standard description of a professional journalist.

Whether Congress likes it or not, that means it helps extend First Amendment protection to non-journalists who are publishing important information, including sources like WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange. And therefore it’s ultimately a victory for what Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has called “the networked fourth estate.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Jan-Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / Vlue

There have been a rash of internet hoaxes lately — including a fake Google protester, a made-up tweet from Paris Hilton and a fictional conversation between a “reality TV” producer and an irritating passenger on an airplane. As a New York Times story points out, most of these were spread by social media and fuelled by credulous reports from a number of media outlets. Media critics have rightly argued that this is a problem, driven at least in part by the speed of online media.

Obviously it would be nice if more media outlets checked such reports before they repeated them. But are reporters and bloggers the only ones with any broader ethical responsibility? What about those who engage in hoaxes? What is their responsibility as members of what Yochai Benkler — of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society — has called a “networked fourth estate?”

A responsibility to correct the record

Elan Gale, a producer of the “reality” TV show The Bachelor, was the architect of the hoax conversation involving a woman theoretically named Diane, to whom he allegedly wrote passive-aggressive notes on airplane napkins as he live-tweeted the entire episode. In a Twitter debate on Monday night that included Tow Center fellow Alex Howard and me, Gale argued that he had no responsibility whatsoever to correct the record once he realized that some people believed his story was true.

In a nutshell, Gale said he is just a fun-loving writer who enjoys playing Twitter pranks and/or creating what he called “performance art” like the airplane incident, and it’s not his job to point out when people — or media outlets — are taking his words seriously rather than dismissing them as satire. Gale said he assumes that his Twitter followers know he routinely makes things up, and therefore they are “in on the joke.” And what about those who aren’t? They’re on their own.

There’s no question that — as Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab put it in the New York Times piece — the fast pace of online media often means outlets wind up simply pointing to things instead of actively trying to determine whether they are true (another reason why I wish someone would expand Snopes into a full-fledged media entity). And it should be noted that it’s not just new media like BuzzFeed: the New York Times itself mentioned the Gale incident on its travel blog, although that post appears to have been deleted.

We are all media now

BuzzFeed says it tried to reach Gale via Twitter to confirm the story, and updated it as soon as it had more information. And there is undoubtedly pressure on such sites to run a salacious piece first rather than waiting to check, since the traffic rewards can be remarkable — as Gawker’s “viral content” specialist Neetzan Zimmerman pointed out during a recent debate with founder Nick Denton on the merits of checking stories rather than just running with them.

But I would argue (and did argue during my Twitter debate with Gale) that since each of us is effectively a member of the media now, whether we like it or not, it’s incumbent on the sources of such erroneous reports to point out that they are engaging in fiction, rather than leaving everyone to their own devices.

Josh Stearns of Free Press pointed out recently that the rise of networked journalism requires a new ethical approach, one that applies not just to journalists but to anyone involved in what Om has called the “democratization of distribution.” Part of Gale’s argument is that he is just a joker, and no one was harmed by his story, and that’s true — a fictitious conversation on airplane isn’t a world-changing event, and likely no one’s life was altered by his hoax. But that’s hardly the point.

The larger point is that we are all in this thing together now, this distributed and networked media ecosystem, and we should act like it. That means checking things before you retweet them, and not going off on witch hunts if you are on Reddit after a bombing, and other things as well. But blaming “the media” for getting it wrong is no solution either any more. We are all the media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo

We’ve written many times about how social media and what Om likes to call the “democratization of distribution” have changed the way that journalism works in a digital age, and how various media players — from The Guardian to NPR’s Andy Carvin — have made the practice of “open journalism” one of their guiding principles. But there is probably no better example of this new form of journalism at work than Brown Moses, an otherwise unremarkable British man who has become the go-to source for information about weapons in Syria.

To describe someone in that way would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago: how could a 34-year-old unemployed man sitting in the front room of his British flat — with no prior training in weaponry, no experience in the Middle East, and no command of Arabic languages — become an expert in that kind of specialized intelligence?

And yet, as two recent feature pieces on Brown Moses (whose real name is Eliot Higgins) describe, that is exactly what he has done (Higgins mentioned on Twitter that he has been employed for much of the time he has been doing the blog, and did his work in his spare time). According to the New Yorker:

“It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

A journalist by any other name

One of the most fascinating things about Brown Moses from a journalistic point of view is that he is completely self-taught, and gets no income from what he does — he appears to be motivated purely by curiosity, and a desire to get the truth out where everyone can see it, something that is a fundamentally journalistic impulse. And yet he has no training as a journalist, and probably wouldn’t qualify as one even under the broadest interpretation of a recent U.S. “shield law” aimed at protecting journalists.

Higgins also talks at length about how one of his guiding principles is that his work must be done in the open, and be as transparent and collaborative as possible — an approach that I would argue too few traditional media outlets take towards their journalism. As the New Yorker describes it:

“Rather than make rivals of other bloggers analyzing Syrian videos, Higgins linked to their work. He used Storyful, an ‘open newsroom’ tool that enables multiple contributors to conduct an investigation based on evidence gleaned from social media, and drew on the knowledge of munitions experts, chemical-weapons inspectors, and civilian opposition activists inside Syria.”

A kind of role-playing game

As described in both the New Yorker and a similar feature at Huffington Post, Higgins started out as a commenter on various news sites who became fascinated by the violence in the Middle East, and started a blog partly because he wanted to win arguments with his fellow commenters. A somewhat obsessive man who used to spend hundreds of hours playing various online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, Higgins soon turned that energy towards identifying weapons in videos posted to YouTube.

Within about 18 months, after viewing several hundred videos a day posted by various rebel groups and other sources — which he verifies through a combination of first-hand research in Jane’s Digest and other publications, along with a growing network of experts, both in the Middle East and elsewhere — Brown Moses had become an indispensable resource for everyone from aid groups to New York Times writer and former Marine CJ Chivers. As the Huffington Post piece describes it:

“I saw the U.N. got the Nobel Prize for Syria,” says one expert, referring to the United Nations-backed Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, who declined to be named on account of his own work with the international body. “I think Eliot has done a lot more for Syria than the U.N.”

A model of crowdsourced journalism?

Kristyan Benedict, the campaign manager of Amnesty International, told the New Yorker that her organization has staff members monitoring videos from Syria, but said Higgins “just gets there quicker than a lot of established research outlets have been able to.” And all of this is done from the front room of his flat in Leicester, which doubles as his young daughter’s playroom: the New Yorker described lace curtains, toys stacked against a wall and a gold-foil balloon from his young daughter’s recent birthday.

Moses — who took his name from an old Frank Zappa song, and used to use a portrait by Francis Bacon of Pope Innocent X as his Twitter avatar — has had a series of part-time jobs, working as a data-entry clerk at Barclays bank and managing inventory for a company selling women’s underwear. He set up a crowdfunding campaign earlier this year that raised about $10,000 in less than a month, but apart from that he derives no income from his work (something his wife seems to think is more than a little unfair, given how much other organizations and media outlets rely on his research).

Could Higgins be a model of what crowdsourced journalism, or at least crowdsourced verification, looks like? Many see him as just that — Yasmin Green of Google told the New Yorker that she and her colleagues have been “having discussions about how you scale Brown Moses.” For his part, Higgins says he thinks others can be taught to do what he does: “I played a lot of role-player games. Believe me, there are a lot of obsessive people out there who could probably put their passions to a more productive use.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Facebook / Brown Moses and Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

By now, most Twitter users are probably aware that the news they get from the network isn’t always 100-percent accurate — especially in the case of breaking news such as the Boston bombings, when chaos reigns and information is scarce at best. Some news outlets have gotten a lot of mileage out of a recent study by a group of information scientists that supposedly shows “Almost everything you read on Twitter about the Boston bombing was a lie,” as one blog put it. But is that really surprising? Not when you think about it — nor does it necessarily invalidate Twitter as a source during breaking news events.

The study, which was done by a group of researchers from IBM Research Labs in Delhi, India and published in September — and picked up recently by Smithsonian magazine, VICE and The Daily Dot — looked at close to 8 million tweets surrounding the events in Boston. The scientists found that 29 percent of the most viral messages were inaccurate and/or contained fake or spam-related content such as the “donate $1 for every retweet” message from one account, or the tweet mourning for a Sandy Hook runner who never existed.

Even traditional sources are flawed

Of the remainder of the 8 million tweets, the researchers said that more than 50 percent consisted of “generic opinions and comments” (although it’s not clear how they defined that category) while just 20 percent contained accurate, factual information. “So much for getting your information from Twitter,” said The Daily Dot, which called the network “one of the least accurate sources” and said its signal-to-noise ratio, “which can be low on a normal day, is lower still during crises.”

The main thing this statement ignores, of course, is that the signal-to-noise ratio of everything is lower during a crisis like the Boston bombings — and that includes major network news channels such as CNN (which got several things wrong), as well as the channels of information coming directly from the police and other authorities. That was also incredibly flawed, as anyone who listened to and/or retweeted things from the police scanner discovered before too long.

If even the authorities can’t be sure what is happening in the aftermath of such an event, how can we possibly expect Twitter to be any different? If anything, the fact that 20 percent of the tweets collected by the researchers were true seems like something worth celebrating rather than criticizing — and even that leaves out the “generic opinions and comments” the scientists ignored, many of which may have also been accurate, or contributed in some way to the sense of the event.

Be skeptical of everything, not just Twitter

As we’ve tried to point out before — and as others such as Reuters media writer Jack Shafer have also noted — breaking news has always been a chaotic event, information-wise. It’s just that most of that information chaos has historically occurred inside newsrooms or at police headquarters or inside a hospital, with journalists and others filtering the information before it is released. That’s both a good and bad thing, but in any case it no longer exists: news, like water, now finds its own path, without the help of journalists or anyone else.

Is that a bad thing, given how much misinformation circulates during such events? Perhaps. The IBM researchers note that one of the big problems with Twitter during events like the Boston bombings is the creation of fake and spam accounts that take advantage of such a tragedy — and there’s no question that muddies the waters. But is it really that serious a problem if people believe for a short time that retweeting a message will send $1 to bombing victims?

And even the researchers own graphs show that the accuracy of the information on Twitter improves rapidly over time, with the worst misinformation present only during the first few minutes. As time goes by, a more accurate picture starts to appear, which is just what you would expect. Should you be wary of information on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of such an event? Sure — but the real lesson is that you should probably be wary of almost any source of information after such an event, including the police and the mainstream media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / DonSkarpo

Is objectivity in journalism a false idol, one that leads media outlets like the New York Times into error rather than truth? Or is it the only protection against a future of partisan media yelling at each other and preaching to the converted? Those were the stakes that emerged in a conversation on Saturday between Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald and New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller.

The debate took place in the pages of the Times, in the spot normally occupied by Keller’s column, under the heading “Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?” (a headline that sparked a critical response from journalism professor Jay Rosen, who called it clickbait). As Keller noted in his preamble, one of the most compelling questions about the future of journalism — apart from how it will pay for itself — is whether “objective” journalism is an outdated concept.

Many new-media theorists and observers (including me) argue that transparency is the new objectivity, as David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center put it in an excellent essay some time ago — in other words, that disclosure about one’s viewpoint trumps the traditional attempt to pretend that a journalist or media outlet has no viewpoint. As Weinberger noted, objectivity is a trust mechanism that you focus on when your media platform doesn’t support hyperlinks.

Keller: Objective journalism is more credible

Keller opened the debate by saying that the new form of journalism Greenwald represents is opinionated and activist-oriented, but that this is not always the best way to produce good journalism — and compared objectivity to the impartiality that is demanded of judges:

Keller: “Journalists in this tradition have plenty of opinions, but by setting them aside to follow the facts — as a judge in court is supposed to set aside prejudices to follow the law and the evidence — they can often produce results that are more substantial and more credible.”

The obvious implication was that Greenwald’s style of advocacy journalism is less substantial and less credible. But the Guardian writer — who is leaving to join a new venture funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar — wasn’t about to let that accusation go, saying the objectivity model “has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession,” such as accepting what official sources say without challenging it.

Greenwald also said that a rigid devotion to the principle of objectivity produces a “here’s what both sides say” formula — something Jay Rosen has called “the view from nowhere,” which arguably fails to give readers a meaningful understanding of what is happening with issues like torture. Greenwald argued that disclosure of one’s viewpoint is a far better approach:

Greenwald: “The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who do not, because the latter category is mythical. The relevant distinction is between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective assumptions and political values and those who dishonestly pretend they have none or conceal them from their readers.”

Greenwald: Disclosures provide transparency

As an example, the Guardian writer said he only found out after the Gulf War that New York Times foreign correspondent John Burns was favorably disposed towards the U.S. invasion, and would have liked to have known about his position when he was reading Burns’ coverage of it, instead of finding out after the fact. Keller, however, argued that the discipline of impartiality was important in order to prevent distortion of the news:

Keller: “Once you have publicly declared your ‘subjective assumptions and political values,’ it’s human nature to want to defend them, and it becomes tempting to omit or minimize facts, or frame the argument, in ways that support your declared viewpoint.”

Greenwald countered that reporters who “hide their opinions” would be far more likely to manipulate their reporting and not be discovered by readers. And he noted that — despite Keller’s criticism of entities like WikiLeaks and their agenda-driven activity — the New York Times has been guilty of far worse behavior:

Greenwald: “It wasn’t WikiLeaks that laundered false official claims about Saddam’s WMD’s and alliance with Al Qaeda on its front page under the guise of ‘news’ to help start a heinous war. It isn’t WikiLeaks that routinely gives anonymity to U.S. officials to allow them to spread leader-glorifying mythologies or quite toxic smears of government critics without any accountability.”

Are advocacy and fairness mutually exclusive?

Keller stuck to his defense of impartiality, which he said was a “worthwhile aspiration, even if it is not perfectly achieved.” And in what appeared to be the core of his argument against Greenwald-style journalism, the former NYT executive editor argued that journalism which comes from a position of advocacy is inherently less useful:

Keller: ‘I believe that in most cases [impartiality] gets you closer to the truth, because it imposes a discipline of testing all assumptions, very much including your own. That discipline does not come naturally. I believe journalism that starts from a publicly declared predisposition is less likely to get to the truth, and less likely to be convincing to those who are not already convinced.”

In a nutshell, Keller seemed to be arguing that activist or agenda-driven journalism is by definition lopsided and unfair, and results in a future where partisan platforms like Fox News are talking in “echo chambers” to those who already agree with their beliefs. Greenwald, however, said that journalism from a specific perspective and fairness or accuracy are not mutually exclusive:

Greenwald: “My view of journalism absolutely requires both fairness and rigorous adherence to facts. But I think those values are promoted by being honest about one’s perspectives and subjective assumptions rather than donning a voice-of-god, view-from-nowhere tone that falsely implies that journalists reside above the normal viewpoints and faction-loyalties that plague the non-journalist and the dreaded ‘activist.’”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Xavier Gallego Morell