Category: Gigaom

Social networks and platforms like Facebook (s fb), Twitter (s twtr) and YouTube (s goog) have given everyone a megaphone they can use to share their views with the world, but what happens — or what should happen — when their views are violent, racist and/or offensive? This is a dilemma that is only growing more intense, especially as militant and terrorist groups in places like Iraq use these platforms to spread messages of hate, including graphic imagery and calls to violence against specific groups of people. How much free speech is too much?

That debate flared up again following an opinion piece that appeared in the Washington Post, written by Ronan Farrow, an MSNBC host and former State Department staffer. In it, Farrow called on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to “do more to stop terrorists from inciting violence,” and argued that if these platforms screen for things like child porn, they should do the same for material that “drives ethnic conflict,” such as calls for violence from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Jihadist group known as ISIS.

“Every major social media network employs algorithms that automatically detect and prevent the posting of child pornography. Many, including YouTube, use a similar technique to prevent copyrighted material from hitting the web. Why not, in those overt cases of beheading videos and calls for blood, employ a similar system?”

Free speech vs. hate speech — who wins?

In his piece, Farrow acknowledges that there are free-speech issues involved in what he’s suggesting, but argues that “those grey areas don’t excuse a lack of enforcement against direct calls for murder.” And he draws a direct comparison — as others have — between what ISIS and other groups are doing and what happened in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, where the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis was driven in part by radio broadcasts calling for violence.

In fact, both Twitter and Facebook already do some of what Farrow wants them to do: for example, Twitter’s terms of use specifically forbid threats of violence, and the company has removed recent tweets from ISIS and blocked accounts in what appeared to be retaliation for the posting of beheading videos and other content (Twitter has a policy of not commenting on actions that it takes related to specific accounts, so we don’t know for sure why).

The hard part, however, is drawing a line between egregious threats of violence and political rhetoric, and/or picking sides in a specific conflict. As an unnamed executive at one of the social networks told Farrow: “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

In a response to Farrow’s piece, Jillian York — the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation — argues that making an impassioned call for some kind of action by social networks is a lot easier than trying to sort out what specific content to remove. Maybe we could agree on beheading videos, but what about other types of rhetoric? And what about the journalistic value of having these groups posting information, which has become a crucial tool for fact-checking journalists like British blogger Brown Moses?

“It seemed pretty simple for Twitter to take down Al-Shabaab’s account following the Westgate Mall massacre, because there was consistent glorification of violence… but they’ve clearly had a harder time determining whether to take down some of ISIS’ accounts, because many of them simply don’t incite violence. Like them or not… their function seems to be reporting on their land grabs, which does have a certain utility for reporters and other actors.”

Twitter and the free-speech party

As the debate over Farrow’s piece expanded on Twitter, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci — an expert in the impact of social-media on conflicts such as the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and the more recent demonstrations in Turkey — argued that even free-speech considerations have to be tempered by the potential for inciting actual violence against identifiable groups:

It’s easy to sympathize with this viewpoint, especially after seeing some of terrible images coming out of Iraq. But at what point does protecting a specific group from theoretical acts of violence win out over the right to free speech? It’s not clear where to draw that line. When the militant Palestinian group Hamas made threats towards Israel during an attack on the Gaza Strip in 2012, should Twitter have blocked the account or removed the tweet? What about the tweets from the official account of the Israeli military that triggered those threats?

What makes this difficult for Twitter in particular is that the company has talked a lot about how it wants to be the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” and has fought for the rights of its users on a number of occasions, including an attempt to resist demands that it hand over information about French users who posted homophobic and anti-Semitic comments, and another case in which it tried to resist handing over information about supporters of WikiLeaks to the State Department.

Despite this, even Twitter has been caught between a rock and a hard place, with countries like Russia and Pakistan pressuring the company to remove accounts and use its “country withheld content” tool to block access to tweets that are deemed to be illegal — in some cases merely because they involve opinions that the authorities don’t want distributed. In other words, the company already engages in censorship, although it tries hard not to do so.

Who decides what content should disappear?

Facebook, meanwhile, routinely removes content and accounts for a variety of reasons, and has been criticized by many free-speech advocates and journalists — including Brown Moses — for making crucial evidence of chemical-weapon attacks in Syria vanish by deleting accounts, and for doing so without explanation. Google also removes content, such as the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” video, which sparked a similar debate about the risks of trying to hide inflammatory content.

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What Farrow and others don’t address is the question of who should be left to make the decision about what content to delete in order to comply with his desire to banish violent imagery. Should we just leave it up to unnamed executives to remove whatever they wish, and to arrive at their own definitions of what is appropriate speech and what isn’t? Handing over such an important principle to the private sector — with virtually no transparency about their decision-making, nor any court of appeal — seems unwise, to put it mildly.

What if there were tools that we could use as individuals to remove or block certain types of content ourselves, the way Chrome extensions like HerpDerp do for YouTube comments? Would that make it better or worse? To be honest, I have no idea. What happens if we use these and other similar kinds of tools to forget a genocide? What I think is pretty clear is that handing over even more of that kind of decision making to faceless executives at Twitter and Facebook is not the right way to go, no matter how troubling that content might be.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Aaron Amat

It’s been a number of months since there were any new revelations based on the massive trove of top-secret NSA surveillance documents that former security contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he left the service, but the Washington Post came out with a big one on Saturday: according to files that Snowden provided to the newspaper, NSA agents recorded and retained the private information of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans — including online chats and emails — even though they were not the target of an official investigation.

According to the Post‘s story, nine out of 10 account holders who were found in a large cache of intercepted conversations were not the actual surveillance target sought by the NSA, but in effect were electronic bystanders caught in a net that the agency had cast in an attempt to catch someone else. Many were Americans, the newspaper said, and nearly half of the files contained names, email addresses and other details. Although many had been redacted or “minimized,” almost 900 files still contained unmasked email addresses.

“Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.”

As the paper explains, the NSA is only legally allowed to target foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant from a special surveillance court — a warrant that must be based on a reasonable belief that the target has information about a foreign government or terrorist operations. The government has admitted that American citizens are often swept up in these dragnets, but the scale with which ordinary people are included was not known until now. The NSA also appears to keep this information even though it has little strategic value and compromises the privacy of the users whose data is kept on file.

Are you an American who writes emails in a language other than English? You are a foreigner to the NSA w/o rights. http://t.co/Xl9VpoAnKZ

— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) July 6, 2014

The Post story describes how loosely NSA agents seem to treat the theoretical restriction on collecting information about American citizens: participants in email threads and chat conversations are considered foreign if they use a language other than English, or if they appear to be using an IP address that is located outside the U.S. And there is little to no attempt to minimize the number of unrelated individuals who have their information collected:

“If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply ‘lurked,’ reading passively what other people wrote. In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people. The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers.”

The Snowden documents come from a cache of retained information that was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — despite the fact that for more than a year, government officials have stated that FISA records were beyond the reach of the rogue NSA contractor, according to the Post. The paper said it reviewed about 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

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Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Leuthard

The New York Times has been gradually shutting down some of its blogs over the past year or so, including its environmentally-focused Green blog, and this week the newspaper company confirmed that it plans to shut down or absorb at least half of its existing blogs, including its highly-regarded breaking news blog, The Lede. As the Times describes it, the plan is not to get rid of blogging altogether but rather to absorb and even expand blogging-related skills and approaches within the paper as a whole. But will something important be lost in the process?

Assistant managing editor Ian Fisher told Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon that the newspaper is going to continue to provide what he called “bloggy content with a more conversational tone,” but that it will appear throughout the paper’s website, rather than in specific locations called blogs. While high-profile brands like Bits and DealBook will remain, other smaller blogs will be shut down or absorbed into the sections of the paper that fit their topic — although Fisher wouldn’t say which specific blogs were destined for the boneyard.

A blog is just an “artificial container”

As far as the reasoning behind the move is concerned, Fisher mentioned a number of things in his Poynter interview, including one technical reason: namely, the fact that the Times‘ blog software doesn’t work well with the paper’s redesigned article pages — and Times staffer Derek Willis suggested there were other technical benefits in a discussion on Twitter. But Fisher also said that many of the blogs didn’t get a lot of traffic, and that not having to fill a specific “container” with content would free up writers to spend their time doing other things:

“[Some blogs] got very, very little traffic, and they required an enormous amount of resources, because a blog is an animal that is always famished… [and the] quality of our items will go up now, now that readers don’t expect us to be filling the artificial container of a blog.”

As Willis pointed out during our Twitter conversation, blogs are — from a technical perspective at least — just one specific kind of publishing format, with posts that appear in reverse chronological order. But for me at least, this is a little like saying that a sonnet is just a specific way of ordering text, featuring iambic pentameter and an offset rhyming scheme. Obviously not every blog post is a poem, but there is something inherent in the practice of blogging (if it is done well) that makes it different from a story or news article.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer once said that the essence of a blog is “the unedited voice of a person,” and I still subscribe to that view. Blogging has grown up to the point where even something like The Huffington Post is described by some as “a blog,” which effectively stretches the meaning of the term beyond all comprehension. But it’s more than just a reverse-chronological method of publishing, or the fact that you include embedded tweets or a Storify, or even that you link to other sites — although it includes all of those things.

Absorbing can also mean weakening

When it’s done properly, as Lede writer Robert Mackey often did, it’s a combination of original reporting, curation and aggregation, synthesis and analysis, and an individual voice or tone — and all of that done quickly, and in most cases briefly. As Brian Ries of Mashable argued during a discussion of the Times‘ decision, the problem with trying to absorb the blogging ethos into the paper as a whole is that not all of those skills are going to be present in every writer.

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This reminds me of when newspapers started to absorb their web units into the larger editorial structure. In the early days, the web was a separate operation — in some cases even in a different building, as it was with the Washington Post. The best part about this arrangement was that it allowed those who worked online to develop their own practices and to some extent their own ethos. When those units were absorbed, some of that was watered down or even lost completely, as editors and writers more focused on print took precedence. That arguably retarded the progress of those papers towards a more digital-first future.

In the end, I think that while the motivation behind killing off blogs might be the correct one — that is, a desire to get away from the format as a specific destination and find a way to get everyone to experiment with blog-style writing and reporting, regardless of where they work — the risk is that the latter simply won’t happen. In other words, some of the momentum that having a blog gives to the skills I mentioned above will be lost, and along with it some of the innovation that blogging has brought to the Times.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Shutterstock / Alex Kopje and Rani Molla

A shockwave hit the media industry in May, when an internal “innovation report” prepared for New York Times executives leaked to BuzzFeed. The report makes for fascinating reading, in part because it is a snapshot of a massive media entity that is caught in the throes of wrenching change, unsure how to proceed. But while it contained many things of value, it glossed over one of the most important factors for the paper’s success — and that is whether the content itself, the journalism that the New York Times produces, needs to change.

This question came up recently in a post by Thomas Baekdal, an author and media analyst. In it, Baekdal made the point that the “quality journalism” the innovation report continually refers to — the bedrock, foundational value of the New York Times — is never questioned. In other words, it is assumed that the journalism itself is fine as is, and all that needs to happen is that the paper has to do a better job of marketing it and engaging with readers around it. But is that true? Baekdal says:

“This is something I hear from every single newspaper that I talk with. They are saying the same thing, which is that their journalistic work is top of the line and amazing. The problem is ‘only’ with the secondary thing of how it is presented to the reader. And we have been hearing this for the past five to ten years, and yet the problem still remains. There is a complete and total blind spot in the newspaper industry that part of the problem is also the journalism itself.”

Not just what kind of journalism, but how

Baekdal’s point isn’t that the New York Times produces bad or low-quality content, but just that the paper should be questioning how it reports and writes that content, and whether it meets the needs of the market — just as it is questioning whether its current business model and/or industrialized printing process meets the needs of the market. It’s not a trivial question, but it doesn’t really appear anywhere in the innovation report, at least not in any depth.

This argument got some support this week from an interesting participant: Martin Nisenholtz, the former head of digital operations for the Times — the man who not only started the paper’s website in 1996, but later drove the acquisition of About.com and other innovative efforts on the digital side. In a blog post, Nisenholtz defended Baekdal, and also provided a fascinating glimpse into what could have been an alternate future for the New York Times.

Nisenholtz, now a consultant and journalism professor, describes an interview that Henry Blodget gave to the creators of the Digital Riptide project (a group that included Nisenholtz). The former NYT executive said that one of the things he liked the most about Blodget’s interview was how optimistic he was about the future of journalism in the digital age — in large part because there is so much more of it than ever before, and much of it is of fairly high quality:

“We are awash in news from an almost infinite number of global sources, much of it of very high quality. For this reason, news providers can no longer force their readers to “eat spinach.” Instead, they need to work hard to entice readers with relevant and interesting content, structured for easy access. In a world of almost unlimited choice, the reader is king.”

The Times is no longer alone

As Nisenholtz suggests, that reality is the primary challenge the New York Times is facing: not just that it has to de-emphasize print and adapt to digital, or do a better job of engaging with readers around its content (although it very much has to do all of those things) but that it has to somehow grapple with the fact that it is no longer one of a privileged few — a tiny number of exalted media and journalism producers with a one-way pipe directly into the homes of readers, and therefore a large share of a kind of information oligopoly.New York Times building logo, photo by Rani Molla

Now, the Times is just one player in a vast and differentiated media landscape — one that makes the previous era look like the Pleistocene Age. Not only does every traditional publisher now have access to the exact same market that the NYT does, but there are a host of new and more nimble players with the same access: dedicated news apps like Circa or Yahoo’s news digest, mobile readers like Flipboard and Zite, and digital-only publishers like BuzzFeed and more recent entrants such as Vox. Many of them do journalism in a completely different way. Nisenholtz’s view from 20 years ago is even more appropriate now:

“My feeling at that time (and today) was that ‘quality’ was – in large part – a function of the user experience, and that – particularly in the dial-up world of the mid-90s – Yahoo was doing that best for exactly the reasons that Baekdal outlines. Putting a newspaper on the web seemed very limiting.”

The competing product that is good enough

Many of those who work at the New York Times (and other legacy media organizations) no doubt console themselves by thinking that while their newer, digital-only competitors may be more technologically savvy, their product — i.e., their journalism — is inferior. And that may even be true in some cases. But as any student of disruption theory knows, the most dangerous competitor isn’t the one whose product is better than yours, it’s the one whose product is good enough.

For many readers — especially those who only want to get a brief update about what is happening in the world, or who want news that is tailored to them in some way, or news that has more of a point of view — will likely look to other outlets, even if the objective “quality” of the Times‘ journalism is arguably better. This is the point I think Baekdal is making when he says that newspapers like the Times take more of a supermarket approach to journalism than their competitors. The market’s needs have changed, and it’s not clear whether the Times can change quickly enough to meet them (although apps like NYTNow and features like The Upshot are interesting experiments, and the Times deserves credit for trying them).

In addition to his thoughts on the state of digital media, Nisenholtz also describes a fascinating moment 20 years ago that could have changed the face of online media: as he describes it, when his digital team asked for financial resources to start the website, he also asked for a small sum to finance a “skunk works” research lab to experiment with the web — but his request was ultimately denied. At one point, Nisenholtz says, one member of the team even suggested that the Times should buy Yahoo (he says “we would probably have screwed it up,” but I’m not sure he could have done a worse job than a series of a Yahoo CEOs have).

Imagine what might have happened if the Times had started that lab when the web was young — what innovations could it have developed? What new directions could it have found for all that high-quality journalism? And now, the paper struggles to catch up to a market for digital news that may be permanently out of reach.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Getty Images / Mario Tama, as well as Rani Molla and Flickr user Abysim

Twitter (s twtr) hasn’t been having a very good time of it lately: turmoil in the company’s executive ranks — including the recent departure of the chief operating officer and the head of Twitter’s media unit — has raised concerns about deeper issues and the service’s lackluster growth. But the real-time information network has other fires to put out as well, including a fear that the company’s global and financial ambitions may be stifling its previous commitment to free speech.

Twitter recently suspended the account belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after the group — which claims to represent radical Sunni militants — posted photographs of its activities, including what appeared to be a mass execution in Iraq. The service has also suspended other accounts related to the group for what seem to be similar reasons, including one that live-tweeted the group’s advance into the city of Mosul.

So far, the company hasn’t commented on why it has taken these steps, but the violent imagery contained in them could well be part of the reason — that and specific threats of violence, which are a breach of Twitter’s terms of use. Others have suggested that the company might also be concerned about a U.S. law that forbids any U.S. person or entity from providing “material support or resources to” an organization that appears on the official list of terrorist groups.

It’s not as though the action against ISIS comes in a vacuum either: in recent months, Twitter has removed or “geo-censored” tweets in Turkey, Ukraine and Russia at the request of governments in those countries. Twitter obviously has to deal with the law in the countries in which it does business — but every time it takes such a step, it engages in a little more censorship, and each time it loses a little bit of the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party” goodwill it built up during the Arab Spring.

(Twitter does sometimes restore the content it blocks: on Tuesday, the service restored access to tweets and accounts in Pakistan that it blocked at the request of the government there, saying: “We have reexamined the requests and, in the absence of additional clarifying information from Pakistani authorities, have determined that restoration of the previously withheld content is warranted”).

Who decides which accounts to censor?

Part of Twitter’s problem is that it doesn’t want to be seen as a tool for terrorist groups, and yet its decision to police this kind of behavior forces it to make choices about whose speech is appropriate and whose isn’t — so the al-Shabaab account has to go, but the Taliban can continue to have an account, and Hamas (which is categorized as a terrorist organization by many groups and governments) was able to post what many saw as a specific threat of violence directed towards Israel during the attacks on the Gaza Strip last year, and Twitter didn’t appear to mind.

But the larger issue is that whether or not accounts like ISIS are posting troubling or disturbing — or even politically sensitive — images and other information, there’s arguably a public interest in having them continue to do so. As Self-trained British journalist and weapons expert Brown Moses has pointed out a number of times, images and videos posted by such militant or even terrorist groups provide an important physical record of what is happening in these countries, and also allow journalists like Moses to verify events. Removing them, as Facebook has done with pages related to Syrian chemical-weapon attacks, makes it harder to do that.

Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior noted in a piece she wrote for Al Jazeera last year — about a similar move to suspend an account belonging to the Somali militant group al-Shabaab — that one of the other frustrating things about Twitter’s moves in these kinds of cases is that the company provides very little transparency about what it is doing or why. For the most part, the only response is a standard disclaimer about how Twitter doesn’t comment on specific accounts or users.

Twitter may be more focused on building up its user base and satisfying the desires of the financial community or the investors in its stock, but that doesn’t mean it can ignore the other elements of its business — and that includes its alleged commitment to maintaining an environment for free speech.

Fans of Silicon Valley’s version of “Game of Thrones” got a front-row seat to a shake-up in Twitter’s executive suite this week, in which the company’s chief operating officer Ali Rowghani was ousted and Chloe Sladden — head of the media unit that has been a big driver of Twitter’s success with TV networks — also left. Somewhere between the backroom intrigue and the cheerful public-facing tweets of support for those departed executives is the source of Twitter’s real challenge: Namely, what does the company want Twitter to be?

But we already know what Twitter is, you protest! It’s a lightweight, real-time information network or platform that allows users anywhere to post things of interest and reach a potential audience of millions. Within that description, however, lies a multitude of experiences — a hall of mirrors in which my version of Twitter is nothing like your version, and nothing like that of the person sitting next to you on the train or the airplane, or at the basketball game.

Is Twitter for connecting dissidents in Ukraine or Turkey with their supporters in other countries, and for speaking truth to power? Yes. Is it for people who want to live-tweet their dissatisfaction with the Oscars or House of Cards or Game of Thrones or the World Cup? Yes. Is it for celebrities who want to reach out to their fans to correct some horrible rumor? Yes. And it is many other things in between.

Who is Twitter intended to serve?

Even those descriptions fail to capture the variations of Twitter usage: some users — in fact, close to a majority of users — never tweet at all, or have tweeted only once. For them, it is a consumption mechanism, or maybe just another source of noise. A smaller group of users (many of them in the media or marketing field) create the vast majority of the content on Twitter, and use tools like Tweetdeck to manage the streams, and complain bitterly (as I have) about the lack of filters and features to help them tame the ocean of information.

Which of these markets is the one that Twitter needs to focus on or amplify? It’s not clear that anyone at Twitter even knows the answer to that question — and I can’t blame them, because it’s a difficult one. As freelance tech analyst Ben Thompson noted in a recent post at his blog Stratechery, a big part of Twitter’s problem is that it was too successful too quickly, before it even realized what it was:

“The initial concept was so good, and so perfectly fit such a large market, that they never needed to go through the process of achieving product market fit… the problem, though, was that by skipping over the wrenching process of finding a market, Twitter still has no idea what their market actually is, and how they might expand it. Twitter is the company equivalent of a lottery winner who never actually learns how to make money.”

According to a number of reports, one of the reasons Ali Rowghani was ejected (and won’t be replaced) is that CEO Dick Costolo wanted to bring control of the product under his purview, rather than the COO’s. Twitter also recently hired a new director of product, former Google Maps executive Daniel Graf, presumably to try and get some traction with users and improve the lackluster growth numbers that investors seem concerned about. Last year, Costolo projected Twitter would have 400 million users by the end of 2013, and it has about 250 million.

A revolving door of product chiefs

As Thompson and others have pointed out, one of the most crucial factors for a tech or consumer-facing company is product-market fit. Twitter has spent years now trying to get that right, and in some ways it seems to be farther from its goal than it has ever been. Co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams tried to shape the product and was ousted, then co-founder Jack Dorsey was supposed to help, then came Michael Sippey. Along the way there have been aborted features like the “Dick bar” and multiple redesigns that are supposed to appeal to new users but appear to be simply irritating the loyal and not attracting anyone.

And while Twitter’s numbers fail to impress, newer services that connect people quickly and easily and focus on short messaging — from WhatsApp and Instagram to Snapchat and Whisper — are rocketing skyward growth-wise. This is not lost on Costolo, one source told Business Insider: “When you talk to Dick about messaging, he’s like, ‘Sigh, that should have been us.’”

The media team that Chloe Sladden built up was supposed to be the savior of Twitter, because it brought in large media companies as partners for second-screen type deals like the Olympics with NBC or the Oscars. And reaching out to celebrities to get them to tweet was designed to appeal to users who just want to follow a few high-profile accounts and see what they are doing. But many of the things that were done in the name of both of those efforts — large images, auto-play videos, and so on — have made the service less appealing for others.

Stranded between many worlds

So at this point, Twitter is caught between two (or more) worlds: The catering to media entities and celebs doesn’t seem to have produced enough traction compared to other players like Facebook to make it worthwhile, and there hasn’t been enough of a focus on tools or design features for hard-core users to keep them loyal. In some ways, the company is failing to serve any of its theoretical markets very well — and that includes advertisers, at least until acquisitions like MoPub start to show that they can help solve that particular problem.

As a longtime fan of Saturday Night Live, I can’t help but think of an ancient skit in which a husband and wife are arguing over whether a new product is a floor wax or a dessert topping. “It’s both!” the cheerful salesman (played by Chevy Chase) exclaims. The joke, of course, is that if it’s a good floor wax, it’s probably not going to be a very good dessert topping, and vice versa.

In the same sense, the things that make Twitter useful to advertisers and large media companies and celebrities aren’t necessarily the things that are going to appeal to Turkish dissidents or free-speech advocates or even just fans of the kind of quiet link-sharing that Twitter used to be known for, rather than the stream of frenzied hashtag and multiple-photo blasting that it has become.

Increasing the pressure is the fact that Twitter is a public company, and it has to show the kinds of growth in both users and revenue that can justify its vast market value — something it has so far failed to do — and the public markets are not known for their patience. Not only that, but as previous social-media superstars like MySpace have shown us, the road to short-term market acceptance can also be the road to long-term irrelevance. Best of luck, Dick.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier as well as Shutterstock / noporn and Shutterstock / Anthony Corella

The term “citizen journalism” gets thrown around a lot, used to refer to everything from people tweeting in crisis zones to high-school students covering city-council meetings. But for me at least, one of the people who best epitomizes that term is the blogger Eliot Higgins, better known by his nom de plume Brown Moses — a man who took an aptitude for painstaking research and used it to turn himself into one of the leading sources of information about the conflict in Syria.

I’ve written about Higgins before, and described his somewhat miraculous transformation over the past couple of years, from an unemployed accountant to a pioneering war blogger — one whose research is relied on not just by aid groups and government agencies in Syria but is praised by established journalists like New York Times war reporter CJ Chivers and others. But I was reminded again of how amazing his story is when I interviewed him on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy last week.

A case study in citizen journalism

Before we started the interview, Eliot — a fairly unassuming-looking man of 35 who lives in Leicester, England — described how he started blogging about Libya and Syria when violent attacks against innocent citizens flared up in both countries. And as information about those attacks, including the use of banned chemical weapons and other devices, swept through the blogosphere and through social media, Higgins decided to focus on proving or disproving these reports. So he began to accumulate as much physical data as he could about the attacks.

Some people — even trained journalists — might have looked at a few newsgroups or Facebook pages or YouTube videos, but Higgins went much further: at one point he was watching and cataloging information from as many as 150 YouTube videos every night, posted by eyewitnesses to attacks as well as by militant groups themselves. His presentation at the journalism conference showed how he isolated landmarks and compared them to Google Earth imagery (something Andy Carvin also did during the Arab Spring demonstrations and their aftermath) and also how he verified weaponry based on serial numbers and other markings, working with a rapidly expanding group of fellow investigators and bloggers.

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Over the course of a year or so, Eliot was able to prove not only that certain weapons were being used — including chemical weapons and what are called “barrel bombs” — but he also used his mapping and calculation skills to show that in some cases rebel groups were in control of much more sensitive areas than had been reported either by government agencies or the mainstream press. In other words, he didn’t just prove or disprove facts or information that were already in the public domain, he broke news about the conflict. And all from the couch in his flat.

Higgins told the audience in Perugia that he is working on setting up a company or foundation that he hopes to launch soon, which will specialize in the kind of open-source research he has been doing — much of which has been recently done in partnership with Storyful, a user-generated content verification service, and its Google Plus-based “open newsroom.” He has also been working with a number of media outlets and journalistic entities to help reporters and editors become better at the kind of skills he uses in his research.

All open source and publicly available

For me at least, one of the biggest strengths of what Higgins does is that it is all effectively open source — he publishes or makes available all of the videos and facts and assumptions that his conclusions are based on so that anyone can check them, unlike some traditional media organizations who rely anonymous government or military sources in the region and often don’t provide much objective evidence for their conclusions so others can verify them.

But more than anything, Eliot is living proof not only of the idea that the tools of journalism are now available to anyone, but that the skills and functions that used to be included in that term are effectively being disaggregated or unbundled. Just as the eyewitness reporting part of a journalist’s job can be done by anyone, the fact-checking or research function that backs up this reporting can be quite easily done by someone who is smart, methodical and motivated like Eliot Higgins — or like the staff at Storyful, or Andy Carvin (who is now at First Look Media).

In other words, the barriers to entry have effectively been demolished. And just as we have new entities like Vox or 538 aimed at explaining the news, we now have people like Higgins creating new verification engines for proving or disproving the facts behind some of the news. The media ecosystem is growing and adapting.

This doesn’t mean that traditional reporting is no longer valuable, obviously, or that existing media entities with their foreign-reporting staff should be replaced by unemployed accountants working from their flats. What it means is that the practice of journalism is being expanded and broadened — and in some cases that is creating valuable new ways of doing the same things we have always done, but cheaper and more quickly. In my opinion at least, traditional media outlets and journalists shouldn’t see that as a threat, but rather as an opportunity.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Augsburger Allgemeine

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:

[protected-iframe id=”62ae527950b52a4b4cc3a73f21b54740-14960843-8890″ info=”//storify.com/mathewi/the-value-of-social-engagement-with-gautham-nagesh/embed?header=false” width=”100%” height=”750″]

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.

[tweet 456109032169046016 hide_thread=’true’]

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.

[protected-iframe id=”c5e95920b62a47f588cd8cd80198ec9a-14960843-8890″ info=”//storify.com/mathewi/comments-may-be-broken-but-they-still-have-value-a/embed?header=false” width=”100%” height=”750″]

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