Category: Gigaom

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

Media-industry watchers (including us) often tend to focus on how the web and social tools are disrupting existing forms of media and journalism by competing with them, or offering alternatives to traditional outlets and voices. But the democratization of both content production and distribution that was brought about by the social web can be even more powerful when it helps to fill in the gaps where traditional media doesn’t go — either because it doesn’t want to, or because it can’t.

Turkey is one example of that phenomenon at work: citizen journalism of many different kinds became extremely important as a source of unbiased reporting during the recent demonstrations against the government there, in large part because the local media weren’t doing it.

Stepping in to fill a gap

Another good example of this a little closer to home is a one-man operation called Jersey Shore Hurricane News, which was recently profiled by the Nieman Journalism Lab. Much like the celebrated British blogger known as Brown Moses — who transformed himself from an unemployed accountant into a crucial source of information about weapons being used by terrorists in Syria — this New Jersey site is the work of one man with little or no background in media or journalism who felt compelled to be of service.

“The man behind the updates was Justin Auciello, the founder and sole operator of Jersey Shore Hurricane News. It’s a Facebook-only news outlet with over 200,000 followers, most of them concentrated in a few counties of New Jersey. Auciello has been building up this following since just before Hurricane Irene hit in 2011. He has no particular background in journalism; by day, he’s an urban planner and consultant.”

As Nieman writer Caroline O’Donovan describes, Auciello started posting photos and information about hurricanes affecting the Jersey Shore on Facebook, and the page has gradually developed a devoted following of more than 200,000 people. An urban planner and consultant, Auciello said that he enjoyed the interaction with residents of the region — whom he asked for photos and news submissions after he broadened the site to include news about things other than just hurricanes — and they came to rely on him.

Serve the community’s needs

What I find fascinating is that Auciello didn’t set out to create a new-media entity, or to compete with existing media providers: he saw a need that wasn’t being filled by existing outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New Jersey Network, and he chose to contribute his efforts to the community. All of this is in his spare time, for no pay. And he is as concerned about verification and reporting the truth as any professional journalist — if not more so — saying:

“I generally will not publish anything about a car accident unless I know if there was an injury, because generally the first thing people ask is, are people injured? And that’s a common, 100 percent natural question. You really don’t want to leave unanswered questions, which, in my opinion, always lead to speculation, and that leads to rumors.”

At this point, according to the Nieman Lab, the Jersey Shore Hurricane News relies on Facebook for distribution and brings in zero revenue, although Auciello has received a grant from a New Jersey recovery fund set up to help the area rebuild after Hurricane Sandy, and he has been thanked by the White House for his service to the community. He is trying to expand his media operation through a partnership with a local public-radio station and also thinking about moving to the web instead of relying on Facebook.

Like Joey Coleman, who set up his own community-funded reporting operation in a small town in Ontario, Canada because he thought it wasn’t being well served, Auciello is a great example of someone who saw a need and decided to fill it — and thanks to the web and digital media, was able to do so. Perhaps this truly is a “golden age for journalism,” as some have argued.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of On The Pier Photography and Flickr user Christian Scholz

It’s tempting to see world-changing companies as the product of one person’s singular vision and willpower — not only does it make things easier to understand, but it caters to our love of the solitary genius, the Einstein or Jobs who sees the world revealed in a flash of insight. But the reality is often very different: in most cases, it is filled with the kind of messy human chaos that is often left out of such stories, and Twitter’s rise to glory is a great example.

An excerpt from NYT writer Nick Bilton’s book about the company’s messy birth reinforces the fact that something we now take for granted — that Twitter has become a massively influential media company, one that is planning a public offering that could be worth as much as $20 billion — is so incredibly unlikely that it almost seems like an accident, or rather a chain reaction of accidents, each one more unpredictable than the rest. As Bilton says:

“In the Valley, these tales are called “the Creation Myth” because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasional back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain some exaggerations, Twitter’s is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them.”

Tripping, falling, stumbling — all the way to success

It has been said that the next big thing always starts out as a toy, a statement that is a kind of capsule version of Clay Christensen’s disruption theory, and Twitter certainly falls into that category: for the first two or three years of its life, if not longer, it was dismissed as an irrelevant tool for nerds and narcissists to share what they were having for lunch. But as Bilton’s description makes clear, it was also a fluke that the service even got started in the first place, let alone succeeded and became a multibillion-dollar entity.

Take the place where Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey reportedly came up with the idea for the service as an SMS-style status update (his original choice for a name, as detailed in a sketch he made, was Stat.us). South Park in San Francisco doesn’t just have dingy, beaten-up playground equipment, as Bilton notes — it is far more popular with homeless people and drug addicts than it is (or was) with CEOs or startup founders. It makes a garage look good.

“For many in Silicon Valley, this playground is hallowed ground. It was here, one breezy day in 2006, according to legend, that Jack Dorsey ordered burritos with two co-workers, scaled a slide and, in a black sweater and green beanie, like a geeked-out Moses on Mount Sinai, presented his idea.”

So what was the most crucial factor in Twitter’s early success? Was it that early staffer Noah Glass, who was later forced out of the company, came up with a catchy name after a frenzied search through the dictionary? Was it that Blogger founder Evan Williams, whose other business making podcast software was going nowhere fast, needed to find something new to focus on? Was it that Twitter fit in so well with the anarchic social atmosphere at South by Southwest, which at the time was the hottest geek conference around?

Chaos and openness is better than a bad plan

It was all of these things and then some. Even in the early days, what struck me most about both the service and the company was that it seemed to consistently be able to snatch success from the jaws of defeat — just when you thought it was going down for good, after the umpteenth server failure or some high-school-yearbook style upheaval in the executive suite, it came back stronger than before. Users complained bitterly about the downtime and then when it came back they used it even more.

In some ways, it almost seems like the world — or at least certain tech and media-obsessed parts of it — wanted something like Twitter to exist, and were determined to somehow will it into being, despite all the repeated screw-ups and bumps in the road along the way. Users took a simple service that (I would argue) even its founders didn’t really understand completely, and turned it into something that changed the very fabric of the way the world communicates with itself. And not just about TV shows, but about even more important things like revolutions and wars and social phenomena of all kinds.

If there’s one lesson that comes from Twitter’s messy origins and chaotic upbringing, it is that you can do as much damage to an idea by trying to force it into a specific mold as you can by letting it breathe and evolve on its own. It may have been an accident that Twitter was so open and free of constraints in the beginning — something the company tried hard to reverse after it got rid of Williams and started cracking down on third-party developers — but without all of that chaos and confusion, I’m not sure Twitter would exist at all.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stephen Brace and Shawn Campbell

Among the pieces of conventional wisdom that get trotted out whenever the subject of the newspaper industry’s decline comes up, one of the most popular is that the internet is the main culprit: in some cases, it’s the entire internet, and in some cases it’s specific web services like Craigslist. But while the democratization of distribution and the atomization of content have definitely accelerated the decline, journalism professor George Brock argues that newspapers have been on a slippery slope for some time, and that what journalism is going through is a natural evolution rather than a disaster.

Brock — who runs the journalism program at City University in London, England — makes these points in a book he recently published, but also laid some of them out in a blog post entitled “Spike the gloom — journalism has a bright future.” Everyone has a favorite example of the decline of the industry, he says, such as the sale of the Boston Globe for 97 percent less than it sold for two decades ago or the massive rounds of layoffs that continue to sweep through the business.

Newspapers are not the same as journalism

It’s certainly easy to find that kind of evidence of doom, but I think Brock is right when he argues that “this picture of deterioration is one-dimensional, incomplete and out of date,” and that journalism is flourishing if you know where to look. Among the key points he makes in the post:

Journalism is always reinventing itself: Journalism “is forced to re-invent itself at regular intervals” and always has done so, Brock says, whenever the changing context of economics, law, technology and culture shifts the ground beneath it. “Re-invention and experiment are the only constants in journalism’s history.”

Newspapers are not the same as journalism: Journalists confuse the two, says Brock, but the golden age of newspaper journalism in the second half of the 20th century “was, in reality, a long commercial decline. British national papers reached their peak total circulation in the early 1950s.”

Television killed more papers than the internet: More papers were killed off by the arrival of television “than have ever been closed by competition from the internet,” Brock says. The internet made things worse, and helped kill classified ad revenue in particular, but “the decline of print began before the internet was built.”

Demand for news is strong and growing: Newspapers may not be benefiting, but the demand for news remains strong, says Brock. “What has imploded is the effectiveness of the business model of large, general-interest daily papers which require news reporting to be cross-subsidised by advertising revenue.”

Journalism is doing just fine thanks

Brock goes on to say that some big journalism brands will be able to adapt and some will not — and meanwhile, some of what he calls “the insurgents of news publishing” will go on to become the giants of the future. Among those insurgents, he says, are sites like Talking Points Memo, The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — the latter of which is following a familiar pattern of disruption by starting with something that is seen as trival or outside the norm and then gradually building on that and moving further into the mainstream.

In many ways, Brock’s arguments are similar to those advanced by Business Insider founder Henry Blodget in a post about how we are in a “golden age for journalism” — a phrase that Arianna Huffington has also used a number of times to describe the innovation that is occurring in online media. Even New York Times media critic David Carr described the current environment that way during a Q & A last year in Toronto, saying Twitter and other forms of citizen journalism are having a largely positive impact, despite their flaws.

And Brock’s point about BuzzFeed is a good one as well: while the site has been widely criticized for being infantile and/or irrelevant, and many mainstream journalists have scoffed at the idea that it could become anything but a place for cat GIFS, the company is profitable and growing rapidly, and founder Jonah Peretti says it is investing heavily in both breaking news and long-form investigative journalism — something few if any traditional media entities are doing.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu, Will Steacy and Flickr user Monik Marcus

If it wasn’t already obvious that the U.S. government is targeting journalists as part of its ongoing war on leaks, it should be fairly clear now that Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald’s partner has been detained for nine hours in a British airport and had all of his electronics seized by authorities looking for classified documents like the ones Greenwald got from former CIA contractor Edward Snowden. More than anything, this kind of behavior highlights the value of having a stateless, independent media entity such as WikiLeaks.

And if that wasn’t enough, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has written about an almost unprecedented effort by British authorities to force the newspaper to stop reporting on the government’s surveillance of its citizens — including the seizure and destruction of hard drives at the newspaper’s offices and warnings about future action if the reporting continues. Rusbridger said the paper will continue its work, but will do so from the U.S. As he described it:

“And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest.”

A pattern of journalistic harassment

Moving to the U.S. may not be much of an alternative, however, given the American government’s recent behavior. U.S. authorities have said that Britain took the action they did against Greenwald’s partner, Brazilian resident David Miranda, without any direction from the Obama administration — under Britain’s Schedule 7 anti-terrorism law — although the U.S. government did acknowledge that British authorities gave them a “head’s up” about the detention and search. But should we believe this, knowing that senior security officials have routinely lied about their activities?

Given what has happened with Snowden, it’s entirely believable that the Obama administration asked Britain to take such action, or at least suggested that it would be grateful if it occurred. What’s especially depressing is how quick some defenders of the U.S. security apparatus were to argue that it was Greenwald’s own fault his partner was treated in such a way — as though targeting the families of journalists for unreasonable search and seizure should be considered routine:

https://twitter.com/joshuafoust/status/369549055572987905

As the Free Press and others have pointed out, the detention is just part of a much larger pattern of harassment that has been directed at journalists by the U.S. government over the last year — a pattern that includes veiled threats of prosecution against Greenwald and other journalists who have been involved in leaks, as well as the ongoing quasi-legal measures it has been taking against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks is already a media entity

While the idea of WikiLeaks as a media entity is not universally accepted, I and others have argued that it deserves to be thought of in that way: journalism professor Jay Rosen has called it the “first stateless news organization,” and Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler has made a persuasive case — both in his writings and in testimony at the Bradley Manning trial — that WikiLeaks is a crucial part of what he calls “the networked Fourth Estate.”

The Guardian hard drive shredding scandal demonstrates why it is necessary to publish early publish often and publish globally.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 20, 2013

Even Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor who has had a somewhat contentious relationship with both Assange and WikiLeaks, has told me that he believes the WikiLeaks founder should be given the same protections as any journalist, and that the attacks on the organization are a serious threat to freedom of the press.

“I would regard an attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks’ publication of these documents as an attack on all of us, and I believe the mainstream media should come to his defense. You don’t have to embrace Julian Assange as a kindred spirit to believe that what he did in publishing those cables falls under the protection of the First Amendment.”

Although WikiLeaks is arguably a media entity in its own right, it also benefits from forming partnerships with existing media players — as it has in the past with The Guardian, the New York Times and others — just as Edward Snowden saw it as valuable to reach out to Greenwald instead of just publishing the NSA documents he had on some random website. Traditional media outlets and journalists not only have a brand value and an existing audience, but they can help put things in context and make their meaning more obvious.

We need Anonymous for journalism

As the U.S. government and others not only put more pressure on the original whistleblowers in such cases — the Bradley Mannings and the Edward Snowdens — but also continue to ratchet up the pressure on the journalists who assist them, it becomes even more important to have some kind of entity like WikiLeaks that can act as a central outlet for such leaks, a place that is theoretically out of reach of U.S. control (if such a thing is even possible).

Even if WikiLeaks isn’t the best candidate for this kind of entity, either because of Assange’s personal behavior or his management style — or both — there arguably needs to be something similar. Perhaps a group like the hacker collective Anonymous — a diffused and leaderless movement that shares a common goal — but for journalistic documents might work. Or a combination of Anonymous and the file-sharing outlet Pirate Bay, where leakers can send their information and know that it will not fall into the wrong hands. Media outlets have tried to create such entities but mostly failed.

Having that kind of stateless, leaderless entity might make it harder for governments to make any headway by attacking individual journalists like Greenwald or even individual leakers. In some ways, it’s unfortunate that such a thing needs to exist at all, but even if we look only at what has happened over the past year, that case has arguably been made. Now all that is required is the motivation and the means to create it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Carolina Georgatou, Jan-Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / Rob Kint

Maybe it’s the rash of newspaper sales recently — including the acquisition of the Washington Post by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the sale of the Boston Globe to local businessman John Henry — but there seems to be a renewed interest in assigning blame for the rapid decline of the newspaper business, and one name tends to get the majority of the criticism: namely, Craigslist, the free classified-advertising service that some say killed newspapers.

In a recent piece for The New Republic, for example, Alec MacGillis accuses Craigslist founder Craig Newmark of hypocrisy for helping to put together an ethics guide for journalists, a project that Newmark has been working on — and also helping to fund personally — for some time now, along with the Poynter Institute. The New Republic writer argues that this kind of commitment is pretty rich coming from the guy whose service allegedly killed newspapers by sucking the lifeblood out of the print advertising market.

The internet killed newspapers, not Craigslist

MacGillis seems even more incensed by the fact that Craigslist used to make money by charging for the posting of adult services, although what that has to do with anything isn’t really clear (the company shut down its adult listings section in 2010). Perhaps the point is that the site took money away from entities who produce valuable journalism and other beneficial pursuits — which would make sense if it wasn’t for the fact that most newspapers produce plenty of their own disposable and low-brow content, and have since before the internet came along.

“Ethics for journalists! How wonderful. Are those ethics different than the ones that allow one to make $36 million per year on prostitution ads, thereby making it easier to give away for free the classified listings that were a major source of newspaper revenue? Just checking.”

Leaving that part of his case aside, MacGillis’s argument that Craigslist killed newspapers is absurd, and always has been: as anyone who has followed the industry knows — and as Dan Mitchell points out in a piece at SF Weekly — the printed newspaper business has been decimated by the disruptive effects of the internet itself, and the unbundling of the tasks that a newspaper traditionally performed, something Clay Shirky, Emily Bell and Chris Anderson did a good job of outlining in their “post-industrial journalism” report last year, and something disruption guru Clay Christensen has also described.

Was Craigslist a part of this phenomenon? Of course it was. Newmark’s site, which he set up to make it easy for his friends and neighbors to post items they wanted to sell, took advantage of the internet and the social web to become a huge force in classified advertising, and there’s no question that had an effect on the advertising that went to newspapers. But Craigslist wasn’t the only online provider of free ads, by any means, nor was it the only disruptive force that ate into newspaper ad revenue — the entire internet arguably falls into that category, including a little company called Google.

Craigslist is just a scapegoat

The same problem appears in a new study from NYU’s Stern School of Business, which looks at Craigslist’s impact on the newspaper industry and concludes that it siphoned more than $5 billion from the classified advertising market over a period of years — which, according to the study, caused newspapers to implement a range of steps including boosting their subscription prices and putting up paywalls. But just as MacGillis does, the study looks at Craigslist in a vacuum, as though it was the only site on the internet that had any kind of disruptive effect on newspapers, which clearly isn’t the case.

The reality is that the decline of print advertising rates and the resulting effect on newspaper revenue would likely have occurred with or without Craigslist, driven by the explosion of webpages and ad providers and the advertising industry’s increasing desire to focus on digital markets, not print-based ones. And those factors were arguably compounded by the newspaper industry’s focus on dumping commodity news content onto the web without approaching it as a separate market, the way web-native providers did.

Blaming Craigslist for the death of newspapers is like blaming Napster for the decline of the record industry: it makes for a convenient scapegoat, especially when the members of the market that has been disrupted don’t want to focus on how their own mistakes and ignorance helped push them off the cliff.

This post was updated on Thursday to reflect the fact that Craigslist used to charge for adult services but has since shut down that section of the service.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zarko Drincic and Shutterstock / Feng Yu

(This was written by my middle daughter Meaghan, about the online surveillance of my three children I engaged in when they were younger)

This post is the final entry in a series of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years — in this post, my daughter Meaghan writes about her reaction to my surveillance. Part one in the series is here, part two is here and part three is here.

Last week, my dad wrote here about his experiences keeping an eye on me and my sisters while we were online, using keystroke-recording software, what amounts to “Facebook stalking,” and also following all three of us on Twitter and Tumblr. As a result of it all, he’s received a lot of feedback, most of which seems to be split essentially down the middle. Some people think what my dad did was the right thing — that watching over us on the internet was the responsible thing to do as a parent in this day and age — but others haven’t been so supportive.

In response, my dad and I both thought it would be a worthwhile idea for me to provide an account of my feelings about him “spying” on me.

For one thing, I don’t think spying is really the right word for what he did. Dad never hid his surveillance from me; he asked for my usernames and urls on various websites, and talked to me about what he was seeing. Which — as is to be expected for a twelve-year-old girl speaking to her father — often led to some embarrassing conversations, and I admit the rebellious teenager in me resented it.

Privacy is a tricky thing to define

Conversations and resentment like that are hard to avoid for parents. But when I was a frequent user on GaiaOnline, and even as I discovered Tumblr, I was always aware that my dad was paying attention. He’d check up on my Tumblog every so often, and if my url had changed, he’d ask me, and I’d give it to him. I rarely felt that I needed to hide my online activity from him (though I suppose I never really tried).

That said, however, I do understand where some of the backlash is coming from. Some parents are very strict about keeping an eye on their kids in regard to cellphone usage, visiting with friends, and dating, which can sometimes backfire on them. Alternately, some parents are not nearly as diligent, and they believe that freedom will keep their children on the straight and narrow of their own volition, which can also have unforeseen repercussions.

The concept of online privacy is a difficult one — even governments are still debating it and trying to pin it down, and it’s no different when it’s in the home. It’s understandable to see what my dad did with my sisters and I as a huge breach of trust, and as an invasion of our privacy. Definitely, there are facets of my online life and experiences I’ve had — or wanted to have — that I would have preferred to experience without my father’s supervision. And there have been times where I lamented that “my life is over,” and “you’re the worst, I hate you, get out of my life,” when my dad came to talk to me about what I was doing.

On the other hand, I think having him supervise — and knowing that he was supervising — helped me not only to stay out of trouble and behave appropriately for my age, but also fostered a certain amount of critical thinking about why my dad worried about some of the things I did.

A Panopticon phenomenon

It became something of a Panopticon surveillance phenomenon: by not knowing when my dad was watching, I policed my own behaviour and came to better understand what was good or bad, and why. It left me feeling much better about my experiences online knowing that my dad was there not only keeping me out of trouble, but also keeping an eye out for trouble that might be targeting me. I know that I never added any strangers on MSN or AIM or anything like that, but if I had, there would have been no worry in my mind that any predators or strangers could have taken advantage of me.

Having my dad watching me online never left me feeling like I was unable to do anything, and certainly nothing was ever blocked or password-protected. It wasn’t that I had my dad looking over my shoulder physically as I surfed the internet. The intent behind it was clear, at least to me: “Make mistakes and learn from them.”

I was invited to create my own borders on the internet, and it led me to make a lot of better choices than I might have otherwise. I found a community of writers that fostered my talent and put me on the path to cultivating a hobby I enjoyed. Through that, I found another community of fans that take part in the appreciation of books, movies and television shows that helped me to further my writing hobby. Being able to write my own rules when it came to the internet while still having the guiding hand of my father behind me allowed me the space to find what I was really looking for online: companionship.

All in all, my dad’s surveillance of my internet activities has not impacted me negatively in the slightest. I don’t know what my online experiences would have been like if my dad had been completely missing, or too involved in them — I do know that I appreciate what he’s done for me and my sisters. In a way, it almost feels like it’s a specific kind of affection: that my dad cares enough to find out what I’m doing online, but also cares enough that he trusts me to make the right decisions without hurting myself. I think that shows a level of parenting most children would be happy to have.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock users Lightspring, Denis Vrublev and Sergey Nivens

This post is the third of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part one is here, part two is here and the final instalment is here.

In the first two installments of this series, I talked about how I started eavesdropping on our two younger daughters’ behavior online — out of a somewhat misplaced desire to protect them from a variety of imagined dangers — and how I learned something about them along the way, despite misgivings about my surveillance activities.

Our youngest daughter proved to be even more of a revelation in some ways, both because of the way the social web has evolved since I started my family spying program about a decade ago, and because of how her reaction to my monitoring made me rethink what I was doing.

In many ways, the evolution of our daughters’ use of the web has been a kind of microcosm of the broader changes in the internet over the past decade: When I started paying close attention to what our oldest was doing online as a teenager (she is 24 now), it was primarily instant messaging — which now seems like an ancient relic of the web, thanks to the rise of texting and apps like SnapChat or Instagram — as well as some websites where you could play rudimentary games or do puzzles. So a simple keystroke-logging program allowed me to eavesdrop quite easily on most of her activity.

The rise of Facebook and the social web

By the time I started monitoring our second-oldest daughter and her online behavior as a teenager (she is now 19), she spent some time on websites with games or jokes, but she also started to spend a lot more of her time with sites and services that were more like prototypical social networks: virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel, where the engagement with other users was far more important than the actual surroundings or the simplistic games that were played — and sites, like Gaia Online, that offered the ability to write interactive fiction with others who were passionate about the same topics.

In much the same way, we’ve seen the internet evolve from being just a series of static websites through the dawn of what used to be called “Web 2.0” or the interactive web, to the rise of full-fledged — and globe-spanning — social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Interestingly, all three of our daughters have used Facebook (which started to become popular just as our oldest reached teenager-hood), but their usage waned substantially as they grew older — and it is also a much smaller focus for our youngest daughter than it was for our other two at the same age.

In some ways, they seem to see Facebook as almost a necessary evil, like email is to an older generation, rather than something they want to spend a lot of time on for their own purposes. My colleague Eliza Kern has written about this phenomenon, which I think is fairly widespread with younger users.

Facebook gives way to Tumblr and Twitter

If our middle daughter started the trend in our family of being more interested in sites with a social element rather than just games or other activities, our youngest continued it — beginning with sites like Club Penguin as a child, and then moving on to Facebook and others as she became a teenager. What was interesting about her use of the web, however (as opposed to the usual teenager behavior like texting) was how quickly it started to center around Tumblr and Twitter, and how that more or less stymied my attempts to monitor her online activity the same way I had with her older sisters.

While keystroke-logging software worked with a one-on-one IM conversation, it was of no real use for texting (I didn’t really investigate whether there were similar tools for phones, because that seemed a little too draconian even for me) and it didn’t help much with trying to keep an eye on what she and her older sister were doing on Tumblr or Twitter either. All I got was a mess of text without any kind of reference point for who or what they were talking to or about, which didn’t help much.

And so I did what I’m sure plenty of other parents have done in a similar situation: I more or less gave up on the automated snooping and turned to stalking, by friending them on Facebook and following them on Tumblr and Twitter. The difficulty there, of course, is that following someone is a very difficult thing to keep hidden from the person you are following — it becomes obvious as soon as you do it, unless you create a secret account under a pseudonym just for the purpose, which seemed like a lot of effort to go to.

I decide to stop stalking my kids

My daughter’s response to this was fairly predictable: She hated the idea that I was somehow looking over her shoulder while she interacted with her friends and other fans of the TV shows she talked about on Tumblr and Twitter, and I’m sure she felt much like I did when my parents would sit in the dining room and watch my friends and me trying to have a party in the living room — like a giant wet blanket had been dropped on her online life, smothering any chance of spontaneity. When I asked her to change her online name because it seemed a little offensive, she rolled her eyes and complied, but I could tell I had crossed a line.

Both her response and that of her older sister — who also spent most of her time on Tumblr, live-blogging Teen Wolf and Doctor Who and other favorite shows with an online community of fans — somehow made me feel worse than I had felt before, when I was just anonymously snooping on my daughter’s IM conversations. The idea that even my virtual presence on Tumblr or Twitter might prevent them from being able to express themselves or interact with their friends (some of whom they have never met) in an authentic way made me feel like I was robbing them of one of the most powerful features of the social web.

I had become increasingly concerned over the years about the broader invasion of privacy that my monitoring represented, and had also come to the conclusion that all of my surveillance was achieving very little — since it didn’t actually help me understand what they were going through or where potential trouble spots might lie.

But it was the interference with their development as fully functioning social human beings (whatever that means in an online context) that really gave me pause, and finally made me step back from all of my monitoring.

Now I am back to crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, like most parents have done since the beginning of time.

Monday: One of my daughers talks about what it was like to have a snooping parent.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Flickr user Gabrielle Colletti and Shutterstock / ollyy

After seven years with Twitter as a part of the social-media ecosystem, we’ve become pretty accustomed by now to the idea that the service functions as a real-time news platform — a cross between a social network and a news-wire staffed by millions of volunteer journalists, reporting on everything from a revolution in Egypt to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Was there a turning point when Twitter stopped being just a plaything for nerds and started becoming a journalistic entity? Co-founder Jack Dorsey says there was: the day an airplane crash-landed in the middle of the Hudson river in 2009.

Dorsey, who famously sketched out the idea for Twitter in 2000, talked to CNBC as part of the network’s recent documentary entitled “The Twitter Revolution,” and described it as the moment when the world started looking at the service as a potential news source rather than just a tech startup with a funny name. “It just changed everything,” he said. “Suddenly the world turned its attention (to us), because we were the source of news — but it wasn’t us, it was this person in the boat, using the service, which was even more amazing.” You can hear more from Dorsey about creating the experience of Twitter at our RoadMap conference in November in San Francisco.

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A sea change in the way the news works

Those comments from Dorsey resonated with me personally, because the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 was definitely a turning point in the way that Twitter was perceived by the traditional newspaper journalists I was working with at the time. Some of us had already begun to see the service as a powerful way of connecting with readers around our work, but few had seen the potential for Twitter to become an actual source of news — a way for the “sources to go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has put it.

Even before the Hudson landing, there had already been a few incidents where Twitter had shown a glimpse of that potential: a rash of fires in California, an earthquake in China, and so on. But for whatever reason, the airplane rescue captured the imagination of many more people — journalists and otherwise — perhaps in part because it was such a miraculous event. And the photographer who took the iconic photo, Janis Krums, inadvertently became the prototype of the Twitter-enabled “citizen journalist.”

Over the next two years, Twitter became a larger and larger force not just in the delivery of traditional news but the actual creation of news — in the sense of those “random acts of journalism” that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has talked about, like the one in which a computer programmer in Pakistan live-tweeted the U.S. special forces attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And by 2011, Carvin would be using Twitter as a crowdsourced real-time newsroom to report on the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere (he has given the Smithsonian the iPhone that he used to do a lot of his Twitter curation).

A megaphone for the world to use

To reinforce that point, in another clip from the CNBC special, Bahraini activist Maryam Al-Khawaja talks about how Twitter has changed the way that dissidents in her country and elsewhere in the Arab world get their message out and connect with others who can help them or who are fighting similar battles:

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The CNBC documentary has other segments as well, including one that follows Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to the gym for his workout, and a look at how social media affected the environment around a high-profile rape case in Torrington, Conn. — but for me, the comments from Jack Dorsey about Twitter’s role in the media just reinforced how far we have come in such a short time.

In many ways, the transformation that was triggered by that photo of Flight 1549 is still underway. Twitter is struggling to figure out what that means for it as a company, and also how it will deal with the conflicts between its own interests in doing business around the world and the restrictions that some countries want to place on the freedom of speech that it allows. But there is no question that, for better or worse, it has changed the way the news works forever.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Vlad Star

This post is the second of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part one is here, part three is here and the final instalment is here.

When parents stoop to spying on their children, it’s usually because they are afraid something terrible is happening that they don’t know about — and often they turn out to be right. In my case, I chose to do it partly as a way of learning how to use the tools and partly as a kind of research project into my own children and their online behavior. And I learned a lot.

In the first part of this series, I talked about how reviewing some keystroke-logging software in the early 2000s — designed primarily for businesses to monitor their employees at work — lured me into eavesdropping on my three kids over the course of a decade, using a variety of tools that at times made me feel like I worked for the National Security Agency.

Tracking the online behavior of our first daughter didn’t reveal all that much, apart from the usual teenager angst, but things were somewhat different with our second daughter — in part because she was a different person, obviously, but also because the way she used the internet was different.

As I tried to point out in my first post, I am well aware of the ethical quandary that I dove into when I started this monitoring process, and if I wasn’t already aware of it when I started, I was regularly reminded of it whenever I brought the topic up with friends and fellow parents. Many of them accused me of acting like the secret police, and of not trusting my daughters enough — and yet, at the same time, I thought I could see in some of them a secret jealousy of my abilities, since they all felt the same parental desire I did: namely, to watch over our children in every way possible.

The dawn of the social web

Our first daughter was kind of an experiment, since I was new to the tools available, and the social web was also relatively new: there was no Facebook yet, and no Twitter, and blogs were only just becoming popular with a small group of hardcore nerds. LiveJournal was fairly prominent — although my daughter didn’t really use it — but the really big deal, especially for teenagers, was instant messaging via AOL and MSN Messenger and ICQ (anyone remember them?). As far as my oldest was concerned, that was the entire internet.

Apart from one brief mention of marijuana experimentation at a friend’s party, trolling through my daughter’s IM conversations and emails via the aforementioned keystroke-logging software didn’t produce much of interest. There were no secret messages to older men arranging to meet them at a shopping mall, or any of the other bogeymen that parents have been taught to fear when it comes to the internet. And of course, the fact that it was boring was very reassuring.

Our second daughter used instant messaging a fair bit, and I continued using the keystroke-logging program for that purpose, as well as some other tools that pulled in email, etc. But as she moved into her teenage years, she started to spend less time on instant messaging and on childish websites playing silly games, and more time on another category of sites that I had never heard of before: sites that when I look back on it were like early prototypes of social networks — but aimed exclusively at teenagers rather than broadly targeted ones like Facebook or MySpace.

Habbo Hotel and Gaia Online

Habbo Hotel was one example of this phenomenon: a site that used cheesy eight-bit graphics from some old handheld computer game to create a world where residents of a giant hotel could set up their own rooms for a variety of purposes — including music, games, or just chat — and then invite people into their rooms and interact with them. At one point, Habbo (which was owned by a Finnish company) was a huge internet traffic story, and my daughter and her friends spent hundreds of hours a month on it. In some ways it was the Facebook of its day.

The hard part for me and my NSA-style surveillance program was that Habbo also proved to be very difficult to effectively monitor using most of the tools I had — except maybe the one that took random screenshots at regular intervals, which used up a lot of resources (my brother-in-law actually blocked Habbo Hotel at the router level so that his teenaged children wouldn’t go there, and eventually had to shut the internet off at night because they still managed to find a way around his block).

The most interesting aspect of my daughter’s internet use was the amount of time she spent on a site called Gaia Online, which as far as I could tell was devoted to games and socializing primarily around Japanese anime TV shows. But my keystroke-logging program picked up something fascinating after awhile, which I admit I wasn’t expecting: My middle daughter, who hadn’t really shown any interest in writing for school purposes, was spending hours every day writing interactive fiction on Gaia Online — long and involved, emotionally complicated stories based around characters from anime shows.

An unexpected insight

Gaia Online was one of the first sites I came across that engaged in this kind of interactive fiction, where one writer would start a story and then others would add to it or take it in a different direction — or suggest different plot twists for the original author. This is almost exactly what Wattpad does now — the Toronto-based startup financed by Khosla Ventures allows authors (including some prominent ones like Margaret Atwood) to upload unfinished work and get feedback from readers.

The upshot of all this was that my snooping revealed not so much the questionable behavior I had been afraid of finding, but a whole side of my daughter that I had never really expected to find — a side that voluntarily spent hundreds of hours writing fiction and interacting with friends around that fiction. And while my daughter hasn’t become a famous writer (yet), she still carries on this behavior today, only now it occurs on Tumblr and is based around TV shows like Doctor Who and Teen Wolf. In a sense, this has helped to shape how she interacts with media as an adult, which I find fascinating.

This revelation made me feel even more torn when it came to my surveillance of her: On the one hand, I still felt bad for invading her privacy — something we have talked about since she stopped being a teenager — but I was also grateful in a sense for being able to discover this other side of my daughter, one that was filled with talent and a love of language and creativity. Does that make it worth all the snooping? That’s hard to say. I wouldn’t really wrestle with that question directly until I started to apply the same surveillance approach to our third and youngest daughter.

Tomorrow: How — and why — I decided to stop snooping on my kids.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Vlad Star and Shutterstock / noporn

This post is the first of four stories about my experiences snooping on my kids and their online behavior over a period of years. Part two is here, part three is here and the final instalment is here.

This isn’t an easy thing to admit, but I felt a secret twinge of shame when I was reading the recent leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program — the one that allows them to index all the phone calls of suspected threats, scoop up emails and other internet traffic, and even reportedly listen in on real-time voice and text chats. Why? Because I have either used or tried to use similar types of tools (on a much smaller scale, obviously) to snoop on, creep, stalk and otherwise digitally eavesdrop on the behavior of my children over the past decade or so.

While the tools may have changed over the years, and the websites and mobile apps and social networks they used have also evolved — from simple instant messaging and gaming through virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin, all the way to Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr — the ethical and social dilemma remains the same for many parents I think.

The NSA and its defenders have argued that what the agency does is justified — even though it may technically be against the Fourth Amendment — because it allows them to identify potential terrorist threats to the U.S. I made a similar argument to myself about the surreptitious monitoring of my daughters’ online activity: namely, that by doing so, I was helping to identify potential threats to them in the form of drug abuse, poor relationship decisions and other hazards of teenage life. Was I right to do so? To be honest, I’m not sure.

Invasion of privacy or parental right?

I do know one thing: when I casually mentioned to a friend and fellow parent several years ago that I was spying on my then-teenaged daughter while she was on the internet — capturing instant messaging logs, reading emails, even at one point using “keystroke logging” software to track what she typed — my friend was not supportive at all. Instead, she was horrified. How could I do this, she asked, when it was such an invasion of my childrens’ privacy?

At the time, I made the same argument that legions of parents before me have probably made, which is that my children really have no expectation of privacy while they are under my roof. In a sense, I figured they were subject to my laws rather than those of the Constitution — within reason, of course — and if I believed that invading their privacy was what was required in order to keep them safe, then I figured I should be entitled to engage in whatever behavior I saw fit. Shouldn’t I?

The hard part about all this, however, is that there’s a lot more involved than just reading your child’s diary or picking up the extension in the living room to try and eavesdrop on a call they are making from the basement. Although I have stopped snooping on my three daughters — since the oldest is now 24, our middle child is 19 and the youngest is almost 16 — I expect that there is so much technology out there that will allow you to track their every click and status update that you could (as I did) find yourself getting sucked far deeper into monitoring than you ever intended to go.

When I look back at it now, after almost a decade since I first began monitoring their online activity, I can see a number of lessons, some of which are more obvious than others. And I can see how in some ways it was a mistake, but in other ways it showed me things about my children — worthwhile, valuable things — that I would never have learned otherwise. And what’s also interesting is how different all three have been in a number of ways: in their use cases for the internet, in the technologies they chose, and in how all that affected my own approach to eavesdropping on them.

Keystroke capture meets teenager

My interest in all this got triggered in the early 2000’s, when I decided to do a review of some software that allowed anyone with access to a computer to capture the keystrokes of a user and store them in a file for viewing later. The software was targeted at employers, but parents were also a potential market — as an alternative to earlier “gatekeeping” software such as Net Nanny, which could be used to block certain websites from young children.

At the time, my oldest daughter — who was then about 13 — had been spending a lot of time talking with friends using Microsoft’s Instant Messenger, and I thought the software would allow me to eavesdrop a little bit on her conversations while also reviewing the software. I installed it as directed (it was just a driver that loaded before the keyboard driver, and stored all the information sent via the keys) and soon I was reading all of my daughter’s chat conversations.

For the most part, this was incredibly boring, I’m happy to say. Our daughter wasn’t the kind of troubled child who cried out for internet monitoring, so there was nothing outlandish like plans to meet up with some 35-year-old in Detroit. There was a lot of talk about boys and homework, and TV shows or books she liked. There wasn’t even any sign of “cyber-bullying,” which had become a big topic of conversation in the media, and which a niece of mine had been subjected to during her teenage years (another reason I was curious to try out the software).

A permanent loss of trust?

The only thing remotely interesting that turned up was a conversation about smoking pot one night at a friend’s party. Since 13 seemed a little young to be encouraging that kind of behavior, my wife and I had a little chat with our daughter about the wisdom of that kind of activity — without telling her how we found out about it — and that was pretty much the end of it. Eventually, I stopped looking at the emailed chat logs that the software forwarded me (it would send them based on certain word triggers as well) and went back to not paying much attention to what my daughter did online.

After the discussion with my friend and fellow parent who was shocked about my invasion of our daughter’s privacy, I did tell our kids that we had ways of looking over their shoulders online (without going into too much detail) and that we wouldn’t hesitate to use these powers if necessary. Better to be vague, I thought, so that they wouldn’t know what we were capable of — another echo of the NSA’s approach.

Obviously, my daughters’ emotional turmoil and fondness for certain bands isn’t even remotely comparable to the dangers of terrorism, but the parallels with what the NSA does (and what American citizens allow it to do in their name) still seem pretty strong to me. I believed that what I was doing was justified because I wanted to protect my daughters from themselves — but in the end, I decided that the loss of trust was actually much worse than anything I was theoretically saving them from. Is there a lesson for the NSA in there?

Thursday: My surveillance program continues with our middle daughter, and I discover something unexpected about her.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring and Shutterstock / Denis Vrublevski

While in New York this week for a GigaOM event, I had coffee and lunch with a number of media-industry insiders and observers, including Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky – two people I think are among the smartest media analysts in the business. And one thing that kept coming up is what I have chosen to call the “barbell problem” for media, and specifically for newspapers: in other words, the feeling that while both ends of the journalism spectrum are probably going to be fine, the middle is getting squeezed to the point where its future is uncertain at best.

So the New York Times, for example, is going through the same kind of uncertainty and upheaval as the rest of the industry – having to lay off staff, cutting costs, selling assets. But while the paper’s paywall and other measures may not totally fill the gap caused by erosion of advertising revenue, the NYT has enough resources to not only survive but do well. Likewise, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal will probably survive and prosper, along with some other large brands.

Some prominent journalism brands will likely be fine

This is exactly why Shirky and his coauthors on the recent “Post-Industrial Journalism” report from Columbia specifically excluded any discussion of the Times from their analysis of the future of journalism. As Shirky described it, it’s like the average driver measuring themselves by looking at someone who races on the Formula One circuit. Practically speaking, there are very few meaningful lessons other newspapers can learn from the New York Times.

That’s one end of the barbell. The other end is the ultra-small, hyper-local newspaper – the daily or even weekly broadsheet that serves a small town or region, where the disruptive forces of the Web haven’t made themselves felt as strongly and local shopping flyers are probably still a pretty good business. This is the kind of newspaper that billionaire Warren Buffett is buying up – the kind that still has a lock on a local market. Paywalls may work well here because of the lack of compelling alternatives.

And what’s in the middle? Everything else – medium-sized papers like the Miami Herald or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Globe, as well as most of the larger metro papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. What does their future look like?

Many of these papers have been trying to make paywalls work, but for most the results appear to be fairly lackluster at best – even the Boston Globe, which is far from the worst newspaper in a medium sized market, has attracted just 28,000 subscribers after more than a year. Its owner the New York Times has put it up for sale and may get less than $100 million for it, and that’s after removing the single most damaging part of the business from the equation – namely, the paper’s $200 million or so in pension obligations.

What happens to the news that doesn’t pay?

Those pension obligations are one of the biggest mill-stones around the neck of traditional media entities. And the bottom line is that even with some reader support, as Rosen and I discussed, these papers are going to have to shrink dramatically or come up with new forms of revenue, which is why the Washington Post is experimenting with what has come to be known as “sponsored content” (something we’ll be talking about more at paidContent Live on April 17)

In a recent post at Slate, writer Matt Yglesias responded to the somewhat fatalistic tone of coverage around the recent Pew report on the state of the media by arguing that as news consumers, we are better off now than we have ever been, thanks to social media and other forces. And it is easy to see how that is the case for certain topics and certain parts of the world – but as Dan Mitchell pointed out in a rebuttal to Yglesias, it isn’t the case for much local coverage of things like municipal affairs and public-policy topics.

So what happens to that kind of coverage as newspapers shrink and even die? If all the things that have subsidized that kind of journalism have been removed – the car ads and travel writing and so on – all these papers are left with is the kind of content that advertisers aren’t interested in and readers don’t want to pay for. What then? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are interesting publicly supported models, but how scalable are they? Is every state or region going to have one?

Will some form of “citizen journalism” be able to fill this gap – whether it’s local bloggers or some kind of automated Twitter feed etc.? Perhaps. Will newspapers use outsourced services like Journatic or even robot journalists like Narrative Science? In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of these, and possibly other things we haven’t even thought of yet. At this point, the answers are a whole lot murkier than the questions.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Jan-Arief Purwanto

There’s been a lot written over the past few years about the future of the news industry — how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players like the New York Times and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls. But a new manifesto from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.

The authors of the Tow report are well known to anyone who pays attention to the future of journalism: Clay Shirky is a journalism professor and author of books like “Here Comes Everybody,” C.W. Anderson is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island and a frequent commentator on media and cultural theory, and Emily Bell is the former head of digital at The Guardian newspaper and now director of the Tow Center. The paper — which Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has done a nice summary of — is a combination of analysis of the current situation, philosophical statements about the nature of the problems facing the industry, and recommendations for how to adapt.

“[This paper] is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry any more. There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.”

Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists but the archive is gone.

Continue reading “The Tow Center report”