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For all of the upheaval and turmoil that the internet has created in the media industry, and the explosion of new formats and birth of new companies like BuzzFeed and Vox and First Look Media, there are some things that have remained almost impervious to change, and one of those is the “homepage.” Even some digital-only news sites have opted for something not that far removed from the traditional newspaper or magazine homepage, with a curated selection of stories chosen by editors, or a chronological blog style.

Is that really the best we can do? Melody Kramer doesn’t think it is — or at least she would like people to think a little more outside the box, as it were. A former digital strategist at National Public Radio, she developed a devoted following via the Social Media Desk blog she set up for NPR on Tumblr and has since left for a job with a federal government skunkworks called 18F (she also has a newsletter in which collects all sorts of fascinating things).

In a recent post on Medium, entitled “64 Ways to Think About a News Homepage,” Kramer enlisted a number of friends, many of whom have nothing to do with the news business (which in itself is kind of an extension of a recurring feature she does, called “How Do You Get Your News?,” in which she interviews people from outside the news industry about how they get their news). And each suggestion is illustrated with what appears to be the actual hand-written or hand-drawn version of that idea.

The result is fairly crude, like someone videotaped a whiteboard session over a few beers with some smart friends. But for me at least, the value isn’t in any one single idea — since there is no “silver bullet” answer to what a homepage should be — but more in the approach itself, which tries to forget everything we knew about a news homepage and come up with better or different ideas about how we could organize information. Here are some of the themes that jumped out at me when I read the post:

Customization: One concept that connects many of the ideas in Kramer’s post is personalization. So, for example, one idea is to turn a news homepage into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” kind of story, in which readers choose which threads to follow and the story is ultimately constructed by them through those choices; another idea sees the homepage as a “treasure map” that lets readers pick different spots to dig or drill down into a topic; and a third lets readers choose how much time they have and how much they want to know about a story, and then tries to deliver that.

Other views: Some of the ideas Kramer’s group mentioned are clearly an attempt to get out of the so-called “filter bubble,” in which we spend too much time focused on topics or stories that are already of interest to our social network. So one proposal is for a homepage that allows a reader to see the news through someone else’s eyes; another would show news that was read or shared by people far away from the user; and a third proposes that the homepage be set up to show news that surprises the reader (although it’s not clear how it would do that, unless it knew you very well).

More depth: A number of the ideas in the list seemed to be oriented around the kind of market that Vox was set up to serve — namely, a market of readers looking for more depth and context and background for the stories that are flowing past them all the time. So one idea would have a homepage where each story came with links to background articles, stories on a similar topic, etc. (probably the closest to a traditional news-site approach), while another would have each story include links to the sources the reporter used to put the story together, and background articles he or she used.

Some of the ideas suggested by Kramer’s group, like the one that recommends background links for each piece — or the one that would allow users to zoom in and out to see the broader context for an issue-based story — are at least close to what traditional digital and print news outlets are doing, or trying to do. But some are refreshingly bizarre, like the one that suggests a homepage where the selection of news is driven by some action the reader takes, like a “spin the wheel” kind of approach; or the one where news reading becomes a game and if you don’t win then you lose your “life” and have to come back later.

Many of these are unworkable, or ill-advised, or just plain loony — but what I admire about them is that they are trying to rethink what it means to even have a homepage at all. Why do we do it the way we do? What is good and bad about that? Kramer also mentions some existing sites that are trying to do this in one way or another: so, for example, Quartz’s homepage is basically its email newsletter of headlines, and Mashable’s homepage is entirely driven by algorithms.

Reading through Kramer’s post, I couldn’t help but think about when I worked at a newspaper and was on a task force devoted to rethinking the home page: I suggested that the site have three home pages — one where it showed you what stories the editors thought were important, one where it showed you stories that the site knew you might be interested in (based on its knowledge of your behavior) and one where you could see what other readers liked, based on what they clicked on or shared or commented on.

At this point, we have plenty of sites that give us the first of those, some that try to give you the second now and then — and social media has more or less taken care of the third one, although it is still too cumbersome for many people to use regularly as a news-discovery engine. Even after a decade and a half online, media outlets still have a long way to go before they really reinvent themselves.

Almost every week, it seems, we have a new case in which social platforms and media outlets — which are increasingly becoming the same thing, in many ways — are faced with a difficult choice: Should they post that video of someone being beheaded, or some other horrible thing? Or should they save users and viewers from seeing it by never publishing it, or taking it down? In the most recent case, YouTube chose to remove a video of a Jordanian pilot being set on fire by ISIS, while Fox News published it.

The argument in favor of not publishing such videos — or taking them down when they are posted on a platform like YouTube — is fairly obvious: Namely, that it’s horrific, and many people will be offended by seeing it, especially the family and friends of the victim. Also, these videos are essentially recruiting tools for ISIS, and so many argue that by publishing them, Fox News and others are aiding the enemy.

Assuming these things are true, what justification could there be for arguing that media outlets should publish them, or that YouTube and Twitter and Facebook are wrong to remove them? At the risk of agreeing with Fox News, I think there are a couple of good reasons. One is that there’s a public interest in allowing free speech, even speech we disagree with or find abhorrent. In fact, the real test of our commitment to this principle is whether we defend someone’s right to say offensive things.

Freedom of speech

One common response to the free-speech argument is that platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook are private companies, and therefore they don’t really have any commitment to uphold free speech, because the First Amendment only applies to actions taken by the government. But this doesn’t really hold water for a number of reasons: for one thing, freedom of speech is a principle many believe is worth upholding even when it doesn’t apply to government — that’s why there were “Je Suis Charlie” marches.

Also, media outlets like the New York Times are private companies just the same as Facebook is, and yet most people see these traditional media entities as having a public duty to freedom of information and free speech. So why doesn’t YouTube have the same duty? Why do we complain when the New York Times hides important information, but we don’t see it as a breach of social responsibility when Facebook takes down pages with information about Syrian chemical weapon attacks?

There’s a clear risk to handing over much of our free-speech rights to private platforms like Facebook, or even Twitter — a risk that critics like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices have written about. How do we know what they are removing, or why? You may agree with their decision to not show a beheading video, or to filter Google searches so that “How do I join ISIS?” doesn’t come up, but what else are they hiding from you for your own good?

A duty to be informed

But free speech isn’t the only reason why I think we should be pressuring YouTube and Facebook not to remove this kind of content. The second reason was summed up well by former journalist Sylvie Barak — when I asked on Twitter whether such videos should be banned. She (and several others) argued that it is our duty as citizens to be as informed as we can be about the behavior of groups like ISIS, especially when we are committing significant military resources to fighting them:

https://twitter.com/sylviebarak/status/563005701707292672

Piers Morgan made essentially the same argument in a post he wrote about why he forced himself to watch the video of the Jordanian pilot being set on fire: he said he felt it was necessary in order to fully appreciate the barbaric nature of ISIS — something he said wouldn’t be accomplished by just reading a description of the incident. A writer with the Times of Israel made a very similar case in a piece she wrote.

My friend Andy Carvin wrote a post recently in which he talked about wrestling with the issue of whether to link to or embed this kind of content — something he ran up against during his time reporting on the Arab Spring uprisings. Such behavior is horrific, he said, and yet there are dozens of cases in which media entities have made the decision to show similar things: naked children running from U.S. napalm attacks on Vietnam, for example, or American soldiers dead on a beach.

The argument in these cases is that there is a social duty that trumps the digust such images produce: that people need to see this kind of behavior in order to appreciate what is happening in the world — either what is being done to our citizens by others, or what we are doing to someone else. Isn’t that a duty that should apply to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube as well as the New York Times? And if not, why not? If you want to see the video in question, there’s a Fox News version here.

If you’ve been following the Brian Williams story over the past few days, you know that the formerly respected NBC News anchor was caught in a lie recently: a rather large one, in which he has repeatedly talked about being in a U.S. Army helicopter when it got shot down during the Iraq war in 2003, something that apparently never happened. This has sparked much debate in media circles about whether Williams has lost — or deserves to lose — his place at the peak of American journalism. But he lost that place a long time ago.

When Williams took over as NBC News anchor in 2004, he was widely seen as one of the modern successors to legendary TV newsman Walter Cronkite, and in fact by 2010 some were arguing that Williams was the country’s premier TV anchor, and had earned the trust of millions. Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman said that despite the rise of the internet and the 24/7 news cycle, Williams remained relevant and was the “Walter Cronkite of the 21st century.”

In reality, of course, the NBC anchor and other lesser-known TV personalities had already lost a lot of their god-like image even by 2010, and they have lost even more since. Not because of personal peccadilloes or false memories like the one Williams is accused of manufacturing, but because there are so many other sources of real-time news available now — just as we no longer have to rely on one or two newspapers, we no longer have to look to a single anchorman to be the “voice of the people” or to filter news events for us.

Anchormen are everywhere

I tried to make the same point when Walt Mossberg left the Wall Street Journal in order to continue running what became Re/code with Kara Swisher (which switched from being owned by the WSJ to being owned by Comcast). “Who is going to be “the next Walt Mossberg?” people asked. The short answer is no one — or rather, everyone.

If I want to find out what’s really happening in Iraq or anywhere else, I and many others are going to look to dozens or even hundreds of different news sources, including the videos and photos and other social-media reports of people who are directly involved — or at least more involved than a TV anchorman who flies into the country and stays at the Hilton, so he can do a news report in front of a palm tree with a flak jacket on.

Venrock partner and media investor David Pakman made a related point in a recent blog post entitled “Brian Williams and Abundance Vs. Scarcity in Media,” about the Williams’ scandal and how it might affect NBC: In effect, he said, NBC is being hoisted by its own petard, because it put so much of its faith (and money) into a single individual as the face of its news brand. That kind of approach might have made sense when news and media were scarce, he says — in other words, before the internet came along — but it no longer works at a time when trusted news and information sources are everywhere.

“NBC chose, in a scarcity-based media world, to build their entire news brand around him. And now he has significantly tarnished this brand. This will have a real economic effect on NBC as a result. Brands built in the age of scarcity take significant risks when they use celebrities (or any one individual) to act as a proxy for their products.”

Maybe Williams will come out of this incident looking a bit more humble — a bit more human, a little more flawed. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, while many criticize the internet and the social web for their flaws when it comes to accurate reporting of the news, you could argue we were actually worse off when a single individual like Brian Williams or Walter Cronkite was seen as infallible. And our trust in the New York Times certainly seemed misplaced at one point when it misled us about the cause of the Iraq war.

If there’s an “It Girl” in the online-media space right now — a single company that sums up the current landscape and the current mood, for better or worse — it would have to be SnapChat. The four-year-old company is the platform everyone wants to be seen with, whether it’s Vice News using it to post a 10-minute documentary on Bitcoin, or Madonna featuring a video from her new album.

But what exactly do media companies get out of this arrangement? Is it a potential share of future revenues (since SnapChat has no actual revenues)? Is it exposure to new users, and especially the much-sought-after millennial generation? And are those returns going to be worth it, or are they building another house of cards on someone else’s land?

The big story right now is SnapChat’s new Discover feature, which launched last month with partners like Vice, CNN and Yahoo News, and more expected in the near future (BuzzFeed, which you might think would be a natural fit with the somewhat ephemeral nature of SnapChat content, reportedly backed out of a deal, citing creative differences). Media companies both large and small have been jockeying to be part of the new offering.

More eyeballs and clicks

And what is the payoff? Everyone who has talked about their decision to play ball with SnapChat mentions the platform’s reach, how it has more than 200 million active users (and reportedly growing quickly) and how they are trying to expand their audience. And the engagement levels are apparently off the charts, according to some media execs: One told Digiday that “I can’t tell you what the numbers are, but they’re f***ing incredible.”

The publishing executive quoted by Digiday didn’t specify what exactly was so incredible about SnapChat’s numbers, but presumably it was some combination of number of users and the time they spent with the media company’s content. In an era when the attention span of some web readers is measured in tenths of a second, anything more is worth celebrating.

So what if users are showing up in droves and clicking on those video links or text stories or photo galleries? SnapChat says that it is planning to offer advertising within the Discover content, and that it’s going to be good enough that it will generate revenue for everyone, including the content creators. But do we have any way of knowing whether that’s true? Not really. And are any readers being driven back to the actual websites of the content companies themselves? No one knows.

A full-fledged media entity

For a dystopian — but arguably not inaccurate — perspective on where this all could be leading us, check out John Herrman’s recent piece at The Awl on how the internet’s future appears to be much like TV: in other words, a cheap and cheerful attention factory designed to monetize eyeballs as efficiently as possible, regardless of the inherent value of the content. And chat apps are where the attention is.

“The only apps that people use in the way publications want their readers to behave — with growing loyalty that can be turned into money — are basically communications services. The near-future internet puts the publishing and communications industries in competition with each other for the same confused advertising dollars, and it’s not even close.”

If you had suggested even six months ago that SnapChat was going to become any kind of savior for media, you would have been laughed out of the room or committed somewhere for psychiatric observation. The service was known — if it was known at all — as a dodgy startup founded by a bunch of dude-bros, whose platform specialized in messages that self-destruct. It was widely seen as a “sexting” app and nothing more.

Fast forward to now, and SnapChat has become a full-fledged media entity: in addition to the ephemeral messaging that it launched with, it now has Discover, as well as SnapChat Stories, which are collections of photos and videos that users can share. The company has even launched its own original series, called “Literally Can’t Even.” And the service is apparently working with AT&T to find popular video stars from YouTube to create content.

Owning the game

Much like Twitter, SnapChat’s growth and expansion is a great example of a saying based on the disruption theories of Clay Christensen — that the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy. In the war for attention, SnapChat and other services are clearly winning, and traditional media companies seem to be losing. So it makes sense to play ball with them, in order to learn from them, and hopefully convert some of those ephemeral users into loyal readers or even potential customers.

This is the rationale behind BuzzFeed’s project, known as BuzzFeed Distributed, in which a team produces content of various kinds — photos, videos, text, cartoons — just for the specific platforms they appear on, whether it’s SnapChat and Instagram or Facebook. And there’s no question experimenting is good, and the principle of “promiscuous media” (as Fusion’s Felix Salmon has called it) has a lot going for it.

At the same time, however, the risk with SnapChat is the same as it is for media companies who play ball with Twitter or Facebook: Namely, that the main beneficiary of this deal is the platform itself, since it is the one that reaps most of the revenue and the attention, and theoretically the trust relationship that goes along with them. And they control not only the ball but the field, and the umpires, and the stadium — and they can change the rules whenever they want to. It’s awfully hard to win at a game like that.

I’ve been fascinated with the work of British investigative blogger Eliot “Brown Moses” Higgins for some time now, in part because he is a classic example of how someone with the right skills and motivation can use the social web to function as a journalist with little or no professional training. Last year, Eliot created a site called Bellingcat to build on the work that he and others have done, and now the team has launched a project designed to crowdsource a real-time picture of military activity in Ukraine.

Higgins and Bellingcat have been working on identifying and cataloguing movements of armored vehicles, troops and other activity in and around Ukraine ever since Russia started interfering in that country and then subsequently annexed the Crimean peninsula. In one of the site’s major efforts to date, it used social media and various other tools such as Google Earth to help confirm that Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was taken down by Ukrainian separatists armed with a BUK M1 missile launcher.

Real-time verification

The site did this in much the same way that Higgins (whom I consider a friend) was the first to confirm that the Syrian government had used cluster bombs against its own people in a series of attacks. By correlating images and video clips — which in many cases were posted by militant groups themselves — with locations from Google Earth and other sources with data about the area and military hardware, Higgins was able to establish how the attacks occurred, and the types of weapons involved.

For the Ukraine project, Bellingcat has created a real-time database of Russian and Ukrainian military movements, with photos and geographical location information, and has opened that database up for anyone to contribute to. For verification, the team is using its own expertise as well as a service called Checkdesk, a live-blogging platform that was started by social-technology group Meedan and won a Knight Fund challenge last year. And the data behind the project is all being hosted publicly through a site called Silk, which allows anyone to see, embed and potentially even modify the data.

As a blog post at Bellingcat describes, the project was jump-started with the data that Daniel Romein put together while trying to confirm when and how Flight MH17 was attacked. But Bellingcat team member Veli-Pekka Kivimäki says the site didn’t want to just post a photo or location every time there was a new confirmed sighting of troops or vehicles in Ukraine — it wanted to create a database that would grow and evolve with each new piece of information.

In an email message, Eliot said the project brings together a bunch of things he has been trying to do:

“By using Checkdesk, we hope to build a community of open source and social media investigators, helping them build their skills and knowledge by participating in a live, on-going project. We’re collecting, verifying, and presenting the information in an as open way as possible.”

Live updates and an open database

Using Silk as a data platform means the information about military activity and identification of vehicles and weaponry can be continually updated, Higgins said. And because of the way Silk works, anywhere the representations of that data are embedded via the platform — whether as maps or diagrams or tables — will automatically be updated with new information when it is added.

“There’s already a lot of people working on collecting and geolocating these videos, so we know there’s plenty of information out there already, it just needs to be collected in one place,” Higgins said, and the Bellingcat project is a way of doing that. As Kivimäki says in the site’s blog post, the hope is to “build a large data set that can be mined to make entirely new discoveries.” So, for example, a group of vehicles was seen travelling towards the Donetsk region, and similar vehicles were seen travelling through Ukrain later the same day — were they the same ones, or a different convoy?

The data hosted in Silk is broken down into three categories: Sightings contain links to whatever media is available — whether it’s photos or video — along with data like location, type of equipment, etc. These can also be grouped. Another category is equipment, which contains a list of the different kinds of weapons and vehicles that have been seen or confirmed. And the “unique units” category collects specific items that have been conclusively identified, via licence plate or other ID.

Checkdesk will be used to bring together a lot of the information already shared and discussed on Russian vehicles in Ukraine, and enable the information to be reviewed and verified openly. We also hope that by making the process as open as possible we encourage our readers to participate in the discovery and verification process, giving them the opportunity to learn about verification and giving those who already have experience verifying content chance to share their knowledge.

No one seems to like web comments any more, at least not in the traditional media anyway. Websites like Reuters and Re/code and Popular Science and Bloomberg have gotten rid of them, and plenty of media insiders have been cheering this movement on, since they see comment sections as cesspools full of trolls. So it’s nice to hear someone like Guardian digital editor Aron Pilhofer say killing off comments is a “monumental mistake.”

In a talk at the News:Rewired conference in London, Pilhofer — who used to run the digital team at the New York Times, before joining the Guardian last year — said that many traditional newsrooms are failing to take full advantage of the web’s ability to create a two-way relationship with readers, and that this is a crucial element of what journalism has become in a digital age. As he put it:

“I feel very strongly that digital journalism needs to be a conversation with readers. This is one, if not the most important area of emphasis that traditional newsrooms are actually ignoring. You see site after site killing comments and moving away from community – that’s a monumental mistake…. readers need and deserve a voice. They should be a core part of your journalism.”

Truly open journalism

Pilhofer talked about how the Guardian looks at its audience, which is as a partner in its journalism, through projects like Guardian Witness — a site where readers can suggest story ideas and also become involved in the reporting of them — which emerged from its repeated experiments in “crowdsourcing.” For the British paper, the concept of “open journalism” as a dialogue between reporters and readers has been a central part of its mandate under outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

The fact that I agree whole-heartedly with Pilhofer probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading me over the past few years: I’ve argued repeatedly that real and ongoing engagement with readers — which involves more than just a passive “Here’s our content, please click on it” kind of relationship — is a crucial part of what journalism is now, in part because this trusted relationship with readers is the only real asset that media companies have left to monetize.

Projects like Guardian Witness are the kinds of things that all media companies should be doing more of, Pilhofer said, because reader engagement is “a huge resource we are largely ignoring” as an industry. That’s the bottom line: not so much whether a newspaper or news site has comments or not, but whether it is trying to reach out to its readers in any real way and make them part of its journalism. Or are they just a click factory?

All readers matter

Whenever I try to make this point, someone inevitably says that of course they want to have a relationship with their readers, but comments aren’t the way to do it, because they are just a cesspool of bad behavior — and/or because the people who post in the comments aren’t their real readers, as Bloomberg editor Joshua Topolsky argued in an interview about the site’s redesign and why it has no comments:

“You’re really talking about less than one percent of the overall audience that’s engaged in commenting, even if it looks like a very active community. In the grand scheme of the audience, it doesn’t represent the readership.”

This is a classic response to comments: “Those people aren’t our real readers, so we can afford to ignore them, and pay attention only to the people who choose to be on the social networks that we frequent, like Twitter and Facebook.” But what about the people who don’t want to have their comments tied to their identity on Facebook — or the readers who choose not to belong to those social networks at all? They in effect become second-class citizens, whose opinions or input aren’t wanted or valued.

Comments can have value

On top of that problem, the readers who are on those networks still have to seek out the commentary on the stories they are interested in discussing. Tools exist to pull responses from Twitter and Facebook back into a comment section on a news site, but few publishers use them. It seems that most would rather outsource their commenting — and by extension, their relationship with their readers — to these third-party networks.

But comments are unfixable, right? Or at least, without spending huge amounts of time and resources on them. That’s the most common response when anyone proposes that they not be killed off. But some sites have shown that it is possible to improve them without an enormous resource commitment: Digiday wrote recently about how comments at Salon improved dramatically once someone started to pay attention to them, and took a few obvious steps to try and encourage good behavior.

Comments aren’t the ultimate expression of community or a relationship with readers by any means. Social networks are also very powerful tools in different ways. But if you can’t figure out how to engage with your readers and build a community of some kind on your own website — around your own content, on your own platform — how can you expect any of your readers to take your commitment to that relationship seriously?

Not surprisingly, the announcement by veteran political blogger Andrew Sullivan that he is retiring from active duty sparked a firestorm of blogging-related responses (including one from me) in which many argued that the days of the lone blogger are over — just like the days of the cowboy or the polar explorer. Technology analyst Ben Thompson begs to differ, however: he says his site is doing better than ever, and that his success is proof that a subscription-based model for publishing works.

I’ve written about Thompson a number of times before, because I think his attempt to build a business around just his writing is an interesting one: he launched his site, Stratechery, in April of last year as a fairly unknown blogger — certainly not someone who was a household name, even in tech circles — with a tiered “freemium” subscription plan based primarily on long, analytical blog posts.

Within about six months, he had over a thousand subscribers paying him $100 a year for access to his newsletter (the shorter daily posts on the website are free). That meant an annual revenue run-rate of about $100,000 — enough to make it a living, along with some speaking and consulting, and tentative proof that a “thousand true fans” model like that envisioned by Wired editor Kevin Kelly could actually work on a practical basis.

Niche readers will pay

In a response to the “blogging is dead” meme that was triggered by Sullivan’s announcement, Thompson says that he just passed the 2,000-subscriber mark, which means he now has a revenue run-rate of about $200,000 a year (the “churn” rate, or the rate at which subscribers drop off, is less than 10 percent he said). And this proves a niche model that serves a specific interest group will work, Thompson argues — as well or better than a model that relies on mass advertising revenue.

“I am, of course, acutely aware that there is a tradeoff when it comes to the subscription business model: by making something scarce, and worth paying for, you are by definition limiting your number of readers. Stratechery, though, serves a niche, and niches are best served by making more from customers who really care than from milking pennies from everyone.”

In fact, Thompson argues — and I agree — that Sullivan’s own success proves this case: in less than a year, the Daily Dish blogger managed to convince more than ** subscribers to contribute money, and by last year was pulling in close to $1 million in revenue solely from subscriptions. That may look sad compared to the revenues of a site like BuzzFeed or Vox, but it’s an amazing success for a small team with a single blog.

The core of Thompson’s argument is that the more niche and targeted your content is, the better off you will be with a subscription model (The Information, started by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin, is another good example). Sites like Vox have to go broad, he says, but that ultimately means that advertising revenue is your only option, and making that work requires hundreds of millions of pageviews (unless you go after a very specific topic niche like Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber does), or a site like Search Engine Land.

The barbell effect

In a sense, the blogging world — or even the world of online publishing as a whole — has bifurcated to create what I call a barbell effect: sites or even publications like newspapers that are huge and broad and have powerful brands will likely succeed, because they can make advertising work. And those that are small and targeted (either by topic or by geography) will likely also be fine. Everything in the middle, however, is in for a world of pain, and in most cases will not survive.

Vox’s Ezra Klein and BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith may argue that size and scale is the only route to success, says Thompson, but that isn’t the case — there is room for the one-man (or woman) blogger as a lifestyle business as well:

“I almost feel compelled to note that my conclusion – and experience – is the exact opposite of Klein’s and all the others’: I believe that Sullivan’s The Daily Dish will in the long run be remembered not as the last of a dying breed but as the pioneer of a new, sustainable journalism that strikes an essential balance to the corporate-backed advertising-based scale businesses that Klein (and the afore-linked Smith) is pursuing.”

Not everyone will be able — or will even want to — put in the kind of work required to maintain such a site, as Thompson admits. After all, Sullivan’s departure didn’t come because his model wasn’t working, but because he was simply worn out. But for those who do want to pursue this individual model, the Stratechery blogger argues that the potential for them to do that, and to be successful at it, is larger than it has ever been.

As we’ve described here a number of times, one of the biggest disruptions in the media industry has been on the distribution end — the actual creation of journalism and other content has also changed, but even more important is the shift from media outlets controlling the channel (newspaper, magazine, TV network) to relying on outside platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google for distribution. And that has brought with it a host of challenges, including ethical ones around how free speech and freedom of the press are handled by platforms that have no journalistic motivations whatsoever.

This is the landscape that Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, recently tried to outline in a speech to journalists in Britain given in honor of Hugh Cudlipp, former chairman of the Daily Mirror newspaper group. In a nutshell, Bell — the former head of digital at The Guardian — argues that both sides, social platforms and journalists, need each other more than they think.

Rise of the tabloid web

As Bell points out, most newsrooms — even the slow-moving, traditionally-focused ones — have come to realize that they need to understand and take advantage of the social sharing that platforms like Facebook provide, because that is how content works now. Everyone wants to “go viral.” In a sense, the web is encouraging everyone to think like the editor of a tabloid newspaper like the Daily Mirror.

“Today, the new newsroom has optimisation desks, to make stories work better on social media, data scientists who analyse the information about story performance to tell journalists how to write headlines, produce photographs and report stories which will be ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ more than others. It has aggregation desks, which scour the web to find news that ordinary people have posted for a wider audience.”

Control has been lost

The problem — as Bell outlined in a similar lecture last year at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — is that journalists and media companies no longer have any control whatsoever over what happens to their content once they publish it. Proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter and Google are now the power brokers who determine who sees your story and when, and their decisions are made for reasons that may have nothing to do with the journalistic quality of your content.

“We are seeing unimaginably large new entities, which get their size from publishing not just a selected number of stories but everything in the world. Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.”

As publicly-traded companies with a bottom line to look after, these platforms have their own interests to protect, Bell says — and that means they may be less than inclined to support or defend principles that journalists take for granted, such as free speech or freedom of the press. While Twitter makes a point of challenging court orders and fighting government requests for the blocking of content, and Google has also been known to do this, Facebook seems more than happy to remove content, in many cases without notice.

As Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out on a number of occasions, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become the new public square, except it isn’t public at all — it’s more like a shopping mall, where private security can have you removed at will. Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon made a similar point in her book Consent of the Networked, about how much of what we consider free speech has been taken over by private corporations. Says Bell:

“Google and Facebook are magnitudes larger and richer than any other entities, and more influential in terms of reach than any press company in history. Until now though, the default position of participants in the sharing economy, with the exception perhaps of Twitter, has been to avoid the expensive responsibilities and darker, more complex aspects of hosting the free press.”

We need each other

As an example, Bell points to Google handing over personal information about members of WikiLeaks to the U.S. government, something she calls “a chilling reminder of either how little Google understands what supporting free speech means or its naked dishonesty.” No serious news organization would ever do such a thing she says, and it calls Google’s trustworthiness as a platform into question (Google has since said that it tried to alert those users to the government’s secret court order, but was prevented from doing so).

It’s not just Facebook and Google that Bell is concerned about. There are other issues that the democratization of journalism brings up, she says — issues that were highlighted in two recent cases: one in which Jordi Mir filmed a French police officer being shot after the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and another in which Ramsey Orta filmed a New York police officer choking Eric Garner.

“Mir and Orta are not journalists, but they were sources. They were not on the staff of any newspaper or agency; they were not paid a salary; they had had no training; they were not members of any union, they have no added protections that might be afforded to the press [but] we have a responsibility towards them in both a broad and specific sense. They might not be journalists but they are part of our ecosystem of news.”

The bottom line, Bell says, is that journalists and technology companies or social platforms need to work together to figure out how to handle the atomized, networked and democratized media environment we all find ourselves in. It’s not enough for Facebook or Google to say they aren’t journalistic organizations and therefore they don’t have a duty to consider things like free speech — they are functioning as journalistic tools, and they have a larger responsibility to society as a result.

“Journalism needs a lot more journalists who are technically proficient, and the new gods, the platform companies, social networks and search engines, need to hire a lot more technologists who are proficient in news. Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us… we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop.”

As it has grown from being a media laboratory in which Jonah Peretti experimented with viral content into a full-fledged media entity worth close to a billion dollars, BuzzFeed has had to amend some of its previous practices — including the use of images with little or no attribution, something it was heavily criticized for in the past. As part of this growing-up process, the company has now come out with a new editorial standards and ethical practices guide that lays out what staff can and can’t do.

The guide was put together by BuzzFeed’s executive editor for news, Shani O. Hilton, over the past few months. But Hilton made it clear the document was a collaborative effort involving the company’s entire editorial staff, as well as outside experts who were consulted on various questions of journalistic ethics. And the site decided to publish it, she said, because it wants to be transparent with its readers.

“BuzzFeed has the opportunity to help shape a new set of standards for a new generation of media. We are offering these standards to our staffers and to our readers as a first attempt at articulating the goal of merging the best of traditional media’s values with a true openness to the deep shifts in the forms of media and communication. We are making this document public to keep BuzzFeed’s writers, reporters, and editors accountable to our readers.”

Separate standards for Buzz

Although the document applies to all the members of BuzzFeed’s editorial staff, some elements of the standards it describes are different for specific sections, Hilton says in her post announcing the new guide. The site separated its work into three content units last year: Buzz refers to the kind of listicle or GIF-driven post that the site became known for in its early years, Life is dedicated to posts about lifestyle topics, and News is where the more serious political or investigative content appears.

So, for example, the guide says that BuzzFeed News staffers “should refrain from commenting in a partisan way about candidates or policy issues” and are not allowed to donate money or volunteer for political candidates. BuzzFeed Life and Buzz staffers, however, are allowed to “express personal views on policy in a non-partisan way” and to volunteer for candidates — unless they decide to write about a political topic, in which case they have to abide by the same rules as a News staffer.

As is common with the standards and practices at most mainstream media entities, BuzzFeed’s guide notes that reporters should never share drafts of a story with a source before publication or give them quote approval, should only use anonymous quotes in extreme circumstances and after checking with an editor first, and should not accept freebies — including travel — or compensate sources for their stories or quotes. One section that might be unique to BuzzFeed is the one that talks about not taking selfies with celebrities:

“Selfies are fantastic and you should take them as often as possible with friends and loved ones. But when celebrity visitors come to a BuzzFeed office, please don’t ask for photographs unless the staffer who brought them in has checked that it’s okay. BuzzFeed News reporters should use good judgment when taking images with their subjects.”

Editorial vs. advertising

One other interesting element of the new standards guide is the section that talks about the separation between editorial staff and those who do custom-content production for BuzzFeed’s advertising unit, including its BuzzFeed Motion Pictures operation. While some traditional media entities such as Conde Nast have blurred the line between editorial and advertising by getting editors to work on both, BuzzFeed says the so-called “Chinese wall” between these two sides of the operation is firm.

“BuzzFeed relies deeply on the trust of our readers that we are bringing them accurate reporting, great entertainment, and useful service — and so we maintain a strict and traditional separation between advertising and editorial content. The work of reporters, writers, and editors is entirely independent of our ad salespeople and their clients. Ad creatives report to the business side of BuzzFeed, not to editorial.”

Editorial staffers “should never discuss a story about a company with a business-side staffer who works with that company,” the document states, and anyone who works on the business side of the site who wants to talk about editorial content “may communicate them only to the editor-in-chief.” While the company says it encourages staffers in editorial to collaborate with staffers in video or on the tech or data side of the company, “edit staffers must never collaborate or contribute to content that is part of an ad campaign.”

The standards guide doesn’t talk specifically about the attribution of images, which became a controversy in 2012 after complaints from Reddit and other sites that BuzzFeed was taking images and re-using them without proper attribution. Hilton said that this topic would be dealt with in a future update. But the document does say that all information used in news stories must come from a “verified source,” and that plagiarism is forbidden: “To plagiarize is to trick the reader. Nothing may be copied, pasted, and passed off as one’s own work, including press releases.”

BuzzFeed political writer Benny Johnson was fired last July after a couple of anonymous bloggers pointed out numerous examples in which he had plagiarised material from other websites and news outlets. In a response to the New York Times, editor-in-chief Ben Smith said that while BuzzFeed might have had different standards when it began as an experimental project, it intended to hold itself to much higher standards. The document Hilton has put together is clearly part of that effort.

One other area in which BuzzFeed has changed its practices after much criticism is the area of deleting old posts: last year, the site was widely criticized for removing more than 4,000 posts in a mass deletion effort that founder Jonah Peretti said was intended to clean up items that didn’t make sense any more or were broken in some technical way. But many journalists saw it instead as an attempt to erase history, and Smith later said that the process was handled badly because the site didn’t think through the implications.

The new standards document says “editorial posts should never be deleted for reasons related to their content, or because a subject or stakeholder has asked you to do so.” Posts can be unpublished in some cases if they go up early due to a mistake by an editor, but even if the post is based on incorrect information, it should not be removed but instead should be updated or corrected, or disclosed to be false.

Historically, new-media ventures haven’t triggered the same kind of frenzied stampede of venture investors as other online businesses, in part because their profitability and scalability remains very much in question, but the last six months have seen an almost unheard-of amount of money pouring into media companies. It’s not like anyone is buying them for $22 billion, the way Facebook did with WhatsApp, but there’s no question that some very large — and potentially risky — bets are being placed on the future of media.

The latest deals were announced on Wednesday by Mashable, which said it has closed a new round of financing worth $17 million — bringing the total amount it has raised to $31 million — and Business Insider, which has pulled in $25 million from a group of venture investors, bringing its total investment backing to almost $60 million.

Traditional media buys in

One interesting thing about both announcements is that the lead investor is a traditional media entity: in the case of Mashable, it’s the venture-capital arm of Time Warner, the magazine conglomerate spun off by its parent last year, and in Business Insider’s case it’s German media giant Axel Springer, which owns a number of leading German newspapers. Here’s a list of the major deals that have closed in just the past six months:

Vice: Raised $250 million from A&E Networks for 10 percent of the company in August of last year, plus another $250 million from the VC fund Technology Crossover Ventures, both of which valued the company at about $2.5 billion. Vice has over 1,000 employees and is adding more foreign reporters at a fairly rapid pace, and expanding its video operations. It is also one of the leaders in the “native advertising” market, with a custom-content unit that creates branded content for advertisers.

BuzzFeed: Closed a $50 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in August last year, theoretically valuing the company at close to $1 billion. BuzzFeed now has almost 1,000 employees — including its L.A.-based video unit, known as BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, run by Ze Frank — and plans to invest in opening more foreign bureaus. Like Vice, it also has a large custom-content advertising operation.

New players on the field

Vox: Closed a round of $46 million from a venture-capital group led by a fund called General Atlantic, which values the company at close to $400 million. Until it invested in Vox, General Atlantic — which invests on behalf of a trust set up by **, the reclusive co-founder of the Duty Free Shopping empire — had never made a media investment. At the time, a partner in the fund said:

“We think we are at an inflection point. For the next five years, you are going to have the next generation of media platforms emerge. There are parallels to cable in the ’80s. There is going to be a huge amount of value creation.”

Business Insider: Just closed a $25 million funding round led by Axel Springer, the German media giant that owns popular daily newspapers such as Bild and Die Welt. Business Insider, which has about 200 staff, says it plans to hire about 100 more and expand into video, and a source also told the Wall Street Journal that the company was profitable last year. Business Insider says it has the highest traffic of any business or finance-oriented site in the U.S., with 35 million unique visitors per month.

Mashable: Just closed a $17 million financing round led by Time Warner Investments. Mashable says it will hire 100 new employees and is expanding into video. The Time Warner connection is particularly interesting because there was a widespread rumor in 2012 that Mashable was going to be acquired by CNN. Whether this investment is a stalking horse for a full acquisition remains to be seen. Mashable told the Wall Street Journal that its revenue in the past year grew by 45 percent.

Gawker: Although it isn’t an equity financing — since founder Nick Denton clearly wants to retain control — Gawker is in the process of raising $17 million in debt financing to pay for its planned expansion, including further investment in its Kinja discussion platform and mobile, as well as a new office planned for the Flatiron district in New York. Unlike most of its competitors, Gawker makes a substantial amount of revenue from affiliate links, which Denton says pulled in $10 million last year.

But can they scale?

As I tried to point out in a post late last year after the BuzzFeed and Vice financings were announced, there is still a rather large unanswered question about this influx of venture-capital funding into new media: Can these ventures scale to a point where they can justify all that investment? Both Vox and Business Insider make a point of talking about their content-management systems (which Vox calls Chorus and BI calls Viking) but having a CMS doesn’t necessarily make you a tech company.

When it comes to showing that they can scale to a size that would theoretically make them a competitor for existing major-media brands, only Vice has arguably achieved that, with a business that covers news on a global level, produces entertainment and drives a lot of advertising revenue, all based on a valuable millennial audience.

At the same time, however, advertising is also part of the problem. For the most part, these companies are still fundamentally identical to old-media companies in some crucial ways: for example, while they may have lower distribution costs because they are online, they still have to employ the most inefficient value-creation engines ever invented — namely, human beings. And their businesses are still driven primarily by advertising, which is going through almost as much upheaval and disruption as the media business itself. And the stakes have just gotten exponentially higher.

If you mention social-media platforms like Twitter or Facebook in the context of political uprisings in places like Turkey or Ukraine or Egypt — or even the Occupy movement in the United States — the person you’re speaking to will likely either a) agree that they can be very powerful tools, or b) argue that they are just sound and fury, signifying nothing, and have had no real effect on the outcome of these movements. But the truth is actually much more complex, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has spent her career studying the effects of such social platforms on political behavior.

In a paper published in the Journal of International Affairs, Tufekci looks at this question in detail, based on her observations of and interviews with protesters in her native Turkey and elsewhere. And her conclusion is that while social platforms can have a positive impact on the ability of dissidents and alternative political movements to organize and communicate — as she has described in previous articles looking at social tools and political “tipping points” — they can also have negative effects.

A crucial information source

The benefits are obvious when looking at uprisings like the “Arab Spring” in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, or the political events leading up to the more recent Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Tufecki says. In the latter case, social media became a crucial source of news, in part because the traditional media in Turkey weren’t covering the demonstrations for fear of upsetting the government. And in Egypt, mobile phones and blogs became the tools of a protest movement that ultimately helped unseat the government:

“The advent of blogging and the rise of cheap cell phones with video cameras also created major changes as activists started acquiring, publishing, and circulating video evidence of the many grievances that made every day life difficult for citizens.”

By giving dissidents the ability to share this kind of information quickly, social tools such as Facebook (which was much more widely used in Egypt than Twitter) made it easy to connect groups of protesters and plan events. That kind of organizational feature can have a powerful psychological impact, Tufekci has said, because once people know that others share their beliefs or feelings about a movement it becomes easier to take collective action, something she calls an “information cascade.”

The landscape has changed since the Arab Spring, however. As the University of South Carolina professor and Harvard Berkman Center fellow notes in her paper, governments have more or less caught up to political protesters when it comes to social media. Twitter and Facebook aren’t just for nerds any more — they have become mainstream, and that means governments have figured out not only how to block them (or how to force Twitter and Facebook to remove content) but how to use them for their own social purposes.

“Many governments have developed methods to respond to this new information environment, which allows for fewer gatekeeper controls, by aggressively countering these new movements, often with a combination of traditional repression as well as novel methods aimed at addressing online media.”

A double-edged sword for dissidents

And that’s not the only problem: As Tufekci discussed previously in a post on Medium, the use of ubiquitous social tools by protest movements and dissidents is a double-edged sword: the fact that these tools make it so much easier to find like-minded individuals and organize them is a positive thing, because it allows a movement to grow and become effective much more rapidly, and to adapt to a changing environment.

At the same time, however, those same features may prevent protest groups from becoming as cohesive and robust as they need to be in order to survive over a long period of time. Old-fashioned political movements took years — or even decades — to develop and build an organization, and while that often meant that political change also took a lot longer to occur, the movements themselves were arguably more powerful.

“Digital technologies certainly add to protester capabilities in many dimensions, but this comes with an unexpected trade-off: Digital infrastructure helps undertake functions that would have otherwise required more formal and long-term organizing which, almost as a side effect, help build organizational capacity to respond to long-term movement requirements.”

In a sense, it’s probably fitting that social media would be a double-edged sword when it comes to political movements, since the internet as a whole has proven to be the same kind of thing: even as it facilitates piracy and arguably incites hatred and violence, it also promotes creativity and helps people in need find others who share their problems. We often want things to be either good or evil, but they rarely are. You can read Tufekci’s paper here.

There were a number of panels at the Web Summit in Dublin this week that talked about media and journalism, but the one that included VICE News, Time Inc. and Storyful was the discussion that has stuck with me — mostly because of a comment that Storyful founder Mark Little made about the paradigm shift that we’ve seen over the past few years involving real-time social media or “citizen journalism.” Among other things, Little said that “authenticity has replaced authority” when it comes to news, and especially what journalists like to call breaking news.

That makes for a great sound bite — you can tell that Little used to be a TV correspondent before he started the company — but what does it actually mean? For me at least, it means that many people (not all, of course, but many) are willing to pay more attention to sources of information that they believe are close to an event, rather than to traditional sources of sober, objective second-hand or third-hand information. In this scenario, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat are the platforms that stand to gain, and traditional media like newspapers or even television mostly lose.

This isn’t going to be the case in every situation, but when it comes to breaking news about a specific event, in the initial stages of that event attention is always going to flow to the sources that are closest to the action, even if — and this is the really important part — the “authority” or credibility of those sources is in question. As Little put it during the Web Summit panel:

“Now people can bypass us using a camera phone and a social network, and the means of production have been completely overturned. Now everyone out there is a creator of content, and our job is more as managers of an overabundance of content.”

Dial up the immediacy, dial down the authority

We’ve seen this happen time and time again, whether it’s during the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere, or in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. over the past couple of years. Even if the information is flawed and inherently untrustworthy — at least by the standard journalistic definition — people flock to it, share it, discuss it, and engage with it. It might not be the kind of behavior that media outlets would like to see, but it’s what happens. And it’s going to continue to happen.

This is an analogy I’ve used before, but it’s almost like people have two dials in front of them that they can use to filter or change the information they get: one of them says “speed” and/or “immediacy” on it, and the other one says “facts” and/or “authority.” And what many people do, using services like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, is dial the first one up as soon as something newsworthy happens.

Please read the rest of this post at Gigaom

Ever since the web was invented, newspapers and other media entities have had to continually expand their view of who their competition is: in the good old days it was other newspapers, and then TV, and then after the web it became other news websites, or maybe Yahoo or Google. But even now, their perspective on that competition may still be too narrow — as my friend Om has argued, they are competing with anything that captures a reader’s attention. And I would argue that they are competing with any service that fills an information need.

I started thinking about this again earlier this week, when a link to an old blog post by news developer Stijn Debrouwere showed up in my Twitter stream, posted and retweeted by multiple people. I couldn’t track down exactly where it came from, but I’m glad it appeared, because it reminded me of how much sense it made in 2012 when it was first published — and how much sense it continues to make.

Debrouwere’s essay was simply called “Fungible.” Fungibility is an economic term used to describe products or services that are interchangeable; in other words, if consumers don’t really care whether they get Product A or Product B, those two things are considered “fungible.”

What the web is doing to journalism, Debrouwere argued, is taking the things it used to consider its bread and butter and making them fungible in ways they never were before. That hasn’t just changed the business model for news or media companies, it has changed the expectations of their audience in some fundamental ways, ways that go beyond whether someone reads a news story on the web or in print.

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

Continue reading “Journalism biggest competitors are things that don’t even look like journalism”

I got a kayak for my 50th birthday a couple of years ago — a red, 14-foot Perception Carolina, in case you’re interested in the specifics, with two dry wells — and I’ve been paddling a lot around our cottage north of Toronto, but I hadn’t brought it down to the city before until this fall. I thought I would bring it and see if there was enough to do with it to make it worthwhile, especially since we live near where the Rouge River feeds into Lake Ontario.

I’ve biked down the lake-front trail near our house to the mouth of the Rouge many times, and across the bridge into Pickering and along the bluffs out to Frenchman’s Bay, and I would often see kayaks and canoes coming down the river, and wonder where they had been. So one day I strapped the kayak to our old car and headed over to the Rouge.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I paddled around the marshes at the mouth of the river for a bit and saw some swans and Canada geese, some blue herons and some white egrets, and then I headed up-river. Unfortunately, I had chosen to go just a couple of days after a big rainstorm, and the river was running quite hard — I was fighting the current the whole way, and after about 45 minutes of hard paddling I could go no further. The ride back to the mouth of the river took me about 15 minutes.

The next time I went, it hadn’t rained for a week or so, and the river was about three feet lower at least — I could see the muddy water-line on the trees and bushes along the bank. Since I didn’t know how fast it would be going, I decided to put the kayak in at Glen Rouge campground, which is just north of Highway 401, off Kingston Road.

I carried it down to the water and dropped it in, and it was an easy paddle of 30 minutes or so down to the mouth of the river — so easy that after I got there, I decided to paddle all the way back up again. I saw more herons and egrets, and even saw a deer at one point in the woods. The most amazing part was that as soon as I got out of sight of the highway, I felt like I was out in the woods in the middle of nowhere. The banks of the ravine were so high I only saw one or two houses.

At one point, I saw a ruined old chimney and fireplace standing right near the bank, made of fieldstone and probably close to a hundred years old — whatever building it used to heat was large and two stories at least. I read that around the turn of the century, someone had tried to sell lots near the river to wealthy settlers, but didn’t sell many and eventually the land was taken over by the province.

Next to the chimney there was a sort of structure made of sticks tied together at the corners, with industrial-size plastic wrapping for walls and a ceiling. I got out to take a look, since the owner didn’t seem to be around, and inside was a cot and some boxes. Outside was a pot hanging from a tripod of sticks over a fire — and hanging from a wire near the chimney (which was tied to the structure) was a small crossbow. Obviously someone was living there, but I left before they returned.

I’ve been back a few times since, and the river is such a peaceful spot. And once when it was calm, I paddled out into Lake Ontario itself and followed the shore all the way out to Frenchman’s Bay and back again.

Since the weather was so beautiful in September, a friend who kayaks with a group out of Harbourfront in downtown Toronto asked me if I wanted to come for a sunset paddle with some of the group — and of course I said yes. We took the boats out into the harbour and across to the Toronto Islands, which I hadn’t been to since I was in my 20s. We paddled into the inland waterway that runs through and around the islands (there are about a dozen of them) and then back across the harbour just as the sun was setting.

It was such a great trip that when my friend asked me if I wanted to go for a longer paddle the next day, I said of course. I showed up at 10 a.m. and we left in a group of 15 or so, and paddled west along the shore through the Western Gap near the island airport, then turned north and paddled into the old Ontario Place grounds, and followed the waterway in and around some of the old buildings like the Cinesphere (where they used to show the first IMAX movies) and back out to the harbour.

After paddling back into the harbour, we went across to Ward’s Island, one of the largest of the islands, and pulled our boats up on the beach and headed inland to a small cafe there for a sandwich and some coffee. It was a beautiful spot — and then it was back into the boats and out around the eastern end of the island.

We paddled up the entire length of the Leslie Spit — a man-made promontory that sticks out into the lake near the end of the Don Valley Parkway — and turned around when we got to the lighthouse at the end. Everyone with a sailboat or any other kind of boat seemed to be out on the lake, which isn’t surprising since the weather was so gorgeous.

Then we came back down the side of the island and into the inland waterway again, and paddled in and around all of the islands, watching people sitting on their sailboats at the marina, or walking and biking around the laneways on the island. After seeing some swans near the island amusement park, we paddled back out the mouth of the inland waterway and across the harbour back to the boat-rental place. We were out for almost seven hours, and probably paddled about 25 kilometres or so.

All in all, it was a pretty amazing September for kayaking, and I’m glad I brought my boat down to the city — I’ve seen far more of Toronto’s rivers and lakes and islands than I ever knew existed.

Update: Years after I originally wrote this, I did a bit more research and found out where the chimney I saw came from, and also why the mouth of the Rouge River has so many little channels and dead-ends to it, unlike most river mouths. As Larry Noonan described in this piece, it turns out that an eccentric entrepreneur named Cecil White had a dream around the turn of the century that he called “Venice of the North,” which involved creating a paradise of beaches and estate homes along the Rouge River, complete with a Venice-style canal system and a small artificial lake.

White bought 700 acres or so, hired architects and started work, and he financed the project by building and selling homes along the river. At one point, according to a number of reports, there was a hotel on the side of the river called the Cowan Hotel, and the chimney is all that remains of it. White excavated the start of some canals and channels at the mouth of the river, and then came the stock market crash and the Great Depression, and the project stopped. He eventually raised some money and started it up again, but then the Second World War put a stop to development.

White got one more try when Highway 401 was built, which increased demand for homes near the Rouge River, but then he passed away. His wife continued the project, until Hurricane Hazel hit in 1954, and water levels in the valley rose so high they swept parts of the buildings and plenty of other material downstream, where it piled up against the bridge across the mouth of the Rouge. Eventually the bridge collapsed and all of construction materials and White’s dreams of a Venice of the North were swept out into Lake Ontario. The land near the river was expropriated by the province so that no one else could build there and now it’s part of Rouge Valley park.

A friend of a friend found an old newspaper inside the wall of a house he was renovating — not an uncommon thing to find, since many people used them for insulation. But this one is really old: it’s a copy of The Globe (a newspaper published in Toronto) from February, 1864. That’s three years before Canada even officially became a country. It was very stiff and damaged by what appeared to be water, but I was still able to make out most of the text on the front page at least.

One interesting thing is that there are ads all over the front page — for things like steamship travel, houses for rent, and new technology like the steam engine and “self-adjusting spring skates,” whatever those are. One steamship company was offering passage from New York to London: a first-class cabin cost $80, a second-class cabin was $50 and steerage was just $30.

Interestingly enough, most of the items on the front page aren’t what we would consider news stories but are letters from abroad, written in a personal style and frequently with little news at all — one reprinted from the London Telegraph is probably over 1,000 words and mentions that Montreal has a population of more than 75,000 and is therefore “the most populous city in British North America.” It also mentions (no doubt playing to the home-town crowd) that “the assertion that the British provinces are anxious to join the Union is baseless and absurd.”

There’s also a notice to the public of “an imposter, wearing the dress of a Roman Catholic priest… he is a drunken vagabond — an Irishman.” And another notice mentions the wonderful new technology of “coal oil” lanterns, describing how people were endangering their eyesight by reading or darning by the light of the fire or a shared candle, and how with this new technology, “each house can have for the same expense a light exceeding half a dozen candles.”

When it comes to ads, in addition to the steamship advertisements, there are ads for spectacles, boots and shoes, live hogs and furniture — but the largest ad stretches the length of the page vertically and is for “Dr. Hoofland’s German Bitters,” which the ad says is “not a rum drink but a highly concentrated vegetable extract” that will “effectively and most certainly cure all diseases rising from a disordered liver, stomach or kidneys.” It then lists the symptoms of these diseases as:

“Constipation, Inward Piles, Fulness or Blood to the Head, Disgust for Food, Sour Eructations, Sinking or Fluttering at the Pit of the Stomach, Swimming of the Head, Hurried and Difficult Breathing, Fluttering at the Heart, Dots or Webs before the Sight, Deficiency of Perspiration, Sudden Flushe of Heat and Constant Imaginings of Evil”

The ad also goes on at some length about how other bitters are “compounded of cheap whiskey or common rum,” and that this class of bitters “has caused and will continue to cause hundreds to die the death of the Drunkard.” And it recommends that Dr. Hoofland’s be used specifically for “delicate children… suffering from marasmus, wasting away, with scarcely any flesh on their bones.” One bottle, the ad says, and “they will be cured in a very short time.”

There’s also a large ad about an estate auction to be held at a law office on King Street “in pursuance of a Decree by the Court of Chancery of Upper Canada, at twelve of the clock noon.” The lots to be sold include one at the corner of Queen Street and William Street with “a Blacksmith’s Shop and a small frame Dwelling House” which are being leased for “24 pounds per annum.”