Category: Gigaom

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

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

Bloated cost structure

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

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

Staying married to objectivity

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

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

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

The Chinese wall and too much defense

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

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

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

Too much competition?

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 11, 2014

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

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

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of All Things Digital

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

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

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

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

One ring to rule them all

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

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

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

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

Ambient awareness of your colleagues

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Creatas

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

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 5, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of All Things D

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

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

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

Crowdfunding $2 million per year

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

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

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

Not just readers, but contributors

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

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

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

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

Readers decide who succeeds and who fails

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni

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

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

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

First Amendment protection is open to all

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not about who qualifies as a journalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A responsibility to correct the record

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

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

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

We are all media now

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

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo

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

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

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

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

A journalist by any other name

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

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

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

A kind of role-playing game

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

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

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

A model of crowdsourced journalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even traditional sources are flawed

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

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

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

Be skeptical of everything, not just Twitter

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / DonSkarpo

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

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

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

Keller: Objective journalism is more credible

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

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

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

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

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

Greenwald: Disclosures provide transparency

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

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

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

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

Are advocacy and fairness mutually exclusive?

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

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

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

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

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Xavier Gallego Morell

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