Here’s my talk to the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt before the Book Fair there, in which I argue that books are tools for making publics and now that we all have presses publishers must ask how they can play a role in helping us make publics — and how they can protect our tools of publicness.
I’m having trouble setting the width of the player, so go to the “more” link and you can watch the videos. Read the rest of this entry »
Oy. I should be writing a book right now and not responding to the zillionth linkless attack on the ills of the blogosphere, this time from NPR’s outgoing ombuds, Alicia Shepard, who blames the “dark side” and “lousy job” of the blogosphere for NPR’s own admittedly unclear (not to mention wrong-headed, in my view) memo forbidding staff from so much as stepping near the Jon Stewart Restoring Sanity rally. She does so without linking to a single blog … except mine. Sorry, blogosphere, I guess I’ve single-handedly lowered your standards.
Shepard acknowledges that management’s memo failed to say that NPR would cover the rally and then she gets all high and haughty that people wondered whether it would. That fails a pretty basic test of journalism: does the story answer the obvious questions? And if it doesn’t, who’s to blame for confusion, pray tell?
She includes in her litany of blog dastardliness my argument that NPR is forbidding journalistic curiosity. She doesn’t attribute or link to that opinion, nor to any of the other probably equally out-of-context smears she alleges. In our low standards of the blogosphere, we think that’s a sin for it robs the reader of the chance to judge for herself.
Shepard doesn’t really address the many other quite legitimate questions NPR’s Papal bull also raises in the fetid mind of the blogosphere. The fact that NPR felt obliged to put Stewart’s rally off limits to its staff but didn’t feel it necessary to issue such an order for Glenn Beck’s rally does obviously raise the presumption that NPR staffers would be interested in the former and not the later — ergo, NPR staffers are liberally inclined. (I have no problem with that, only that it is masked under NPR’s Shroud of Turin Objectivity.) Shepard merely repeats and accepts the company line without real discussion of it. She doesn’t deal with the journalistic questions I raised, only repeats the cant of freshman journalism seminars about objectivity:
But at the end of the day, they have to be professional – and that means avoiding actions that create the perception that they are taking sides in political controversies, including elections.
If you really mean that, then you should follow Washington Post ex-editor Leonard Downie’s vow of voting chastity and order that staff may not cast ballots. For that is taking sides. Except it’s done in private. So it doesn’t create perceptions. That, then, is what this entire episode is really about: perceptions, the PR in NPR.
“She sees her job as explaining NPR to listeners, and listeners to NPR,” says Shepard’s network bio. I’d say she does the former and not the latter. Shepard’s term is about to end (note my restraint, please, in making further comment on that event). NPR: I’ll repeat: Love ya. But please, please this time give the public a representative who sees it as her job to represent the public, not management and the Priesthood of The Way It Has Always Been Done, Amen.
: UPDATE: NPR CEO Vivian Schiller’s response to the kerfuffle is more intelligent and nuanced than Shepard’s. But it still comes down to the same bottom line: appearances.
We live in an age of “gotcha” journalism where people troll, looking for cracks in our credibility. We need to err on the side of protecting our journalism, our journalists, and our reputation. While the credibility and trust that attaches to the NPR brand depends principally on the quality of our news reporting, it can be easily undermined if our public conduct is at odds with the standards we seek to uphold as a news organization.
NPR has told its staff they may not attend the Stewart/Colbert rallies in Washington at the end of the month. I think they’re terribly wrong here, following the journalistic worldview Jay Rosen calls the view-from-nowhere to its extreme and forbidding employees to be curious.
Or as I tweeted: So I guess NPR reporters aren’t allowed to be *citizen* journalists.
Oh, I understand the argument: NPR reporters are supposed to be objective and express no political opinion and do nothing political. I went to J-school, too. And we could argue the point as if in a freshman seminar. I say this is merely a lie of omission, telling reporters to *conceal* their viewpoints and making listeners guess where they’re coming from (the audience knows that can’t be nowhere).
Of course, it’s amusing that NPR had to backpedal and explain why a similar memo didn’t go out about Glenn Beck’s rally. That, the network explained, is because Beck’s was overtly political. Oh, come on, we’re not that dumb. It’s because NPR people are not Beck people. NPR people are Stewart people. They have a sense of humor. Oh, and they’re liberal. No guessing needed.
And that’s OK. It’s time for reporters to be open and honest.
But my real problem here is, again, that NPR is forbidding its employees to be curious. There’s a big event going on in Washington. It could — just could — be the beginning of a movement mobilizing the middle. But NPR people are not allowed to even witness it, to go and try to figure it out, to understand what’s being said and why people are there. No, they can do that only if they are *assigned* to do that. Otherwise, it might seem as if by merely showing up they might have a forbidden opinion.
Gasp.
In its effort to be hyperjournalistic NPR is being unjournalistic. Journalists, properly empowered, are curious. They want to know things. NPR is telling them not to ask questions.
And there’s something more. A few years ago in Washington at the Online News Association confab — which this year, it so happens, is being held the same time as the Stewart rally [coincidence? or liberal journalistic conspiracy?] — I was on a panel back in the good ol’ days when we all still yammered on about “citizen journalists” and a newspaper person came the mic in tears — I swear — saying, “I’m a citizen, too.” Right, I said. So act like one. Citizens are involved in their communities, part of their communities, so they can understand and serve those communities. Journalists tried to separate themselves from their communities (and opinions) and that is much of the reason why journalists lost touch with how to serve them. It is time to get off the fucking pedestal and return to the streets. And the Washington Mall.
I suggest that NPR journalists should protest this order from above. Use social media, folks, and have an opinion about opinions … or at least about curiosity. Start a Facebook page. Start a Twitter meme. Use all those new tools your bosses are teaching you to tell your bosses about this new world you should be part of.
More: Michael Calderone reprints a Washington Post memo that says employees are allowed to watch the rally from the sidelines. Does that mean they’re not allowed to talk to people there? And the New York Times advises staff to avoid such events. Ridiculous. It’s as if the people they serve and cover have cooties.
MediaWeek, under its new boss, Michael Wolff, asked a bunch of us what we’d advise the New York Times Magazines’ new boss to do. Here was my full answer:
Their Q: The New York Times Magazine has a new editor, Hugo Lindgren. If you could make one suggestion for how he could improve the Times Magazine what would it be?
My A: Ask me whether I care. I don’t pick up the magazine. I do read stories out of it when I see links and discussion. The magazine — like the newspaper — is unbundled. Or to pick another metaphor: its content is atomized, and then some of the free atoms find their way into new molecules not through editors’ packaging but through readers’ recommendations.
Other real (read: standalone) magazines at least have some worldview and community of shared interest gathered around them. The Times Magazine has a weaker identity and weaker ties; it’s not a magazine so much as a slick paper on which to print more Times stories.
So why have a magazine? Slick advertising. So I’d put the reporting where it belongs — in the paper — and let the fluffy speciality magazines with good endemic ad categories — fashion, travel, home — take over.
Or here’s another idea: Turn the magazine into a curation of great content of the week from the web. Become a molecule-maker.
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger asked for help with his view of the fourth estate’s separation (outside the U.S.) into three sub-estates: legacy media, public media, our media (my wording). My response:
Pardon my metaphors:
I had a bunch of public broadcasters from Sweden at my school last week. They’re quite successful—audience is up; marketshare is up—and so it may be difficult for them to feel the urgency of the winds of change and move with them. I suggested that we are only beginning to feel the storm (/metaphor) and I argued that if we are coming out the other side of what some Danish researchers call (metaphor) the Gutenberg Parenthesis then our concepts of media and our consequent cognition of society will change profoundly over years yet to come.
In her amazing history of Gutenberg’s influence, Elizabeth Einstenstein argues that it took 50 years for books to come into their own and not merely copy the scribes and another 50 years or so for the impact of the press to become clear. The Gutenberg Parenthesis team argues that we are entering a period of confusion as great as the one Gutenberg caused. Granted, we are operating in internet years, not Gutenberg years. Still, we’ve only seen the beginning. And so I asked the Swedes to pull back and consider their role more broadly.
So I urged the Swedes to think of media as the essential tool of publicness and one that is no longer mediated. And so in their role of being publicly supported (but not — I’ll grant to them and to the BBC their fig leaves — tax-supported) then I suggested the best thing they could do is to enable and protect the voice of the public. They could curate, train, promote, and collaborate with new people using new tools in new ways, for example. They could establish platforms that make that possible and networks that help make it sustainable. They could see it as their role to support a lively, healthy ecosystem and all of its members, including not only the new kids but also the struggling legacy media (by that view, I’ve long argued that the BBC should make it its mission to use its powerful megaphone to promote and support the best of journalism and media in the UK, no matter who makes it; that is a public good).
All of which is to say that I think your trilogy-view of media today is correct but temporary. We are still in the phase when the printers are copying the scribes’ fonts and content. New wine, old skins. We are also still in a phase of separating the old-media folks from the new-media folks, the public from the private, and for that matter, the media (the journalists) from the public. I think those distinctions must melt away when we move past the stage of copying the copyists and invent entirely new forms.
We see content as that which we make. Google sees content everywhere. Twitter creates content even Twitter doesn’t understand yet (our useless chatter has real value as a predictor of movies’ success). Blippy creates a transparent marketplace for stuff. Google Goggles with Foursquare and Yelp and Facebook and Google Maps and the devices we carry that are always connected and location-aware and us-aware force us to rethink our definitions of both local and news. The Guardian turns data into news by collaborating with the people formerly known as its audience. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
So I don’t think we’re yet at a stage of stasis where we can find three estates out of the fourth estate and count on the tensions among them to support a new dynamic of media.
Overlaying this view, I think we are entering a phase in the economy in which industries — filled with closed, centralized corporations that own their means of production or distribution — are replaced by ecosystems — filled with entities that must collaborate and cooperate and complement each other to find efficiencies and through those efficiencies profitability and sustainability. So the idea that your three sub-estates will compete won’t be sustainable; they will have to specialize and then collaborate and as that occurs there may still be separations of roles — e.g., creator v. curator, platform v. network, local v. national — but they are new separations.
What you are identifying is the start of an atomization of media. But I see those atoms reforming into new molecules. (/metalphor)
Roy Greenslade airs his internal struggle over journalists getting closer to business in a very interesting post reacting to former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, who says that it was a mistake to separate editorial and ad sales people. Says Greenslade: “I understand the Reeves argument but I remain queasy about journalists acting as advertising sales reps. And it is an aspect of entrepreneurial journalism that gives me pause for thought.”
I responded in the comments:
Roy,
This all sounds well and good–the high moral stand–but I’ll ask you the question I am often asked: How is the journalist going to eat?
Last week, Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent.org, told my CUNY entrepreneurial journalism class that when he started, he was a one-man operation and if it was going to be sustainable he had to sell ads. PaidContent grew. He hired reporters. He hired sales people. But he was still was very much in charge of the business–the sales staff’s boss–and knew well that he had to be loyal first to his journalistic credibility, and value. So, he told my students, he turned down some ads that weren’t relevant to his readers. Of course, he built a wonderful service, highly respected, and sold it to the Guardian.
Institutional, industrial journalists are too used to the idea that codes and walls will protect their morals. No, they must be their own protectors. The same conflicts and interests exist for everyone in a news operation and everyone must guard against corruption or the asset loses its value. Indeed, I believe that by teaching journalists that business itself is corrupting, we became terrible stewards of journalism and that is one of the key reasons journalism is in the fix it’s in.
Today I am disturbed to hear journalistic entrepreneurs–e.g., hyperlocal bloggers–who disdain business and sales. For they will perish just like the dinosaurs who once employed them. They are responsible for their own sustainability. I believe we must teach those skills to journalists and that is why I started the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism to train both students and professionals.
Roy, when the journalists are in charge of the journalistic enterprise–when they are founders or are key, strategic managers of that enterprise–they can and must navigate the conflicts you outline and I’d argue they are in a better position to do so–if they are qualified in business. Whether or not they sell the ad, the conflict and choices are the same.
I learned this lesson when I started Entertainment Weekly in an industry full of standards and codes and walls and even so found my managers (editorial as well as business) trying to profoundly corrupt the enterprise for the sake of business ends and I did not have sufficient business cred to fight them down. Codes and walls turn out to be translucent and leaky moral condoms; false comfort.
Let’s also remember what our boss, Alan Rusbridger, says about the history of newspapers: It was advertising that freed us from ownership by political forces; it supported independence.
Also remember that every hack trying to get a story onto Page One–or onto the list of most-emailed on the wall of the Telegraph newsroom–is responding to the marketplace, that of readers. And I think that’s a healthy influence (so long as the journalist isn’t slavishly following that carrot but knows to add value). We separated ourselves from the noisy room and the noisy world at our peril; we thought ourselves above it all but we became strangers in our communities because we thought we were high and mighty.
So, Roy, I think your queasiness comes from years of being taught that tomatoes are poison so, even if it’s not true, you’re bound to gag on the first bite. I say that running the business needn’t be corrupting and is, indeed, empowering. The key for us as educators is not to have students avoid the conflict but to teach them how to face it and make the right decisions. That is why I teach entrepreneurial journalism.
Last night, I went to CBS to record an interview with Katie Couric about the Rutgers tragedy, privacy, and technology.
Couric asked me the same question a half-dozen ways — old reporter’s trick; I’ve used it; I teach it — trying to get me to give her the answer she wanted: that the internet makes this different, that this is a teaching moment, and that we should give our children instruction about the dangers of the internet. I wouldn’t agree that technology makes the essence of this story and its sin different. The lesson is the same as it has always been: the Golden Rule. The sin could have been committed with a Kodak camera or a telephone or a letter, for that matter.
I do agree that the internet adds speed and reach and permanence to a mistake — that, as someone has said, it is a tattoo. But what this story really brings out is a timeless ethic of privacy (which is how I am framing the topic in Public Parts): Privacy is the responsibility of the person who receives information about someone. Once you know something about me, the weight lies with you as you decide how to use that information, whether to spread it, in what light. That came as close as I would to what Couric was aiming for and so this is the clip that made it onto the show.
I also said society bears responsibility in this story. That today anyone would still feel shame about being revealed as gay — full stop — and then would make such a tragic decision is our failing. I told Couric that the gays and lesbians who have summoned the courage to leave their closet and privacy behind to stand before the homophobes — saying, “Yes, I’m gay, you have a problem with that?” — are the heroes who used their publicness as a weapon against bigotry. I made clear to her that I am not suggesting people should be forced out of their closets. But I do believe that the people who have chosen to leave have operated under an ethic of publicness. If the weight of the ethic of privacy lies with the recipient of information — you know information about me — then the weight of the ethic of publicness lies with the originator of information — I know something and must decide whether it would be of benefit to others to share it.
As I left, I tried to tell Couric that media too often look at technology and change and see only danger. This is how the invention of the Kodak camera was treated in the 1890s. More than 500 million people choose to share on Facebook because they see benefit in it and more do so on Twitter and in blogs and YouTube…. Media constantly looks at the edge, the dark edge, jumping on a story such as this to seek out the perils technology brings. Couric protested that they do lots of stories about good things in technology. Every time Steve Jobs does anything, we cover it, she said. But that’s not understanding its value, I argued. I urged her to do a story in which young people who use and understand Facebook explain it to their elders.
We can’t pretend to give young people lessons in the internet if we don’t understand how they see it. For example, I’ve learned lately that young people use Facebook’s Wall to hold conversations in public while people my age use it — with media reflex — as a place to publish or broadcast. Same platform, different uses, different worldviews, different impact. When I was in Berlin talking about publicness and privacy, Renate Künast, head of the Greens in Parliament, said she talked to a young person who took a cooking course instead of an a computer course because in the latter “what the teachers wanted to teach me was something I learned five years ago.” We have things to learn from children about the future, for the future is theirs and they’re building it right in front of us.
But in enduring morals and ethics — the Golden Rules — we parents remain the teachers and I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for teaching and our children enough credit for learning well. Those rules pertain no matter the medium or the technology in which human interaction occurs. The Rutgers story is not a tale of technology creating tragedy. It is a story of human tragedy.
Very troubling news about Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian blog pioneer known online as Hoder: He received a prison sentence of 19.5 years in Iran for being an “anti-revolutionary blogger.”
I’m personally heartbroken. I first met Hoder online when I happened upon his blog as he announced that another Iranian blogger, Sina Motalebi, had been arrested. Sina, who is now working for the BBC in London, just emailed me, by coincidence, when I asked below about the idea of publicness. Sina had announced in public on his blog that he had been summoned to the police. Hoder blogged it. I did. Many others did. He believes that public attention helped get him out of prison and enabled him to escape the country.
Hoder’s story is much more complicated. When I met him online, he was in Canada, where he’d become a citizen. Some gave him credit for starting the amazing Iranian blogosphere; others don’t. He has always been controversial. He was critical of the Iranian regime. He went to Israel and made friends (and lost friends) there — which is one of his so-called crimes: “cooperation with hostile states, propagating against the regime, propagation in favor of anti-revolutionary groups, insulting sanctities, and implementation and management of obscene websites.” Then, just as suddenly, he turned the other way and started supporting Iran’s government and even its right to have nuclear weapons. He asked me to link to posts that made such statements. I was over my head in Iranian politics as I heard other online expats criticize him. I wasn’t sure what to do.
Then Hoder mysteriously returned to Iran. Some say he’d been given assurances that he’d be OK. Others say that he is caught in a power struggle. Again, I know too little. He was arrested two years ago. His family stayed silent in hopes that things would work out. That’s why I said nothing.
But now he has been sentenced. No matter what his opinions were or what opinions you may have had about him, that doesn’t matter now. We should all be outraged, loudly outraged. For — as I said when Hoder told me about Sina’s arrest — a blogger, one of us, has been arrested and imprisoned for what he has said. If anyone should stand up for the right of free speech of a blogger it should be us, bloggers.
What to do? Ethan Zuckerman suggests we pressure Canada to pressure Iran for his release. On the Media reports (when there were still rumors that Hoder could have received the death penalty) that Iran does not recognize dual citizenship. The Canadian government is protesting:
“We are deeply concerned about the news of this severe sentence,” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said. “If true, this is completely unacceptable and unjustifiable.”
“No one should be punished anywhere for simply exercising one’s inherent right to freedom of expression,” he said, adding that “Iran must release him.”
Mr. Derakshan’s views and ways may not be to everyone’s liking – he doesn’t fit neatly as either a state propagandist or an agitator for democracy. But free speech is often inconvenient; indeed, that is one of the reasons why free people should be agitating for his release.
: Here is my original post announcing Sina’s arrest as reported by Hoder. (Please ignore the damned spam links in my archives; I don’t know how to clean them up.)
There’s no “why” there. That’s the problem with The Social Network. It neither explains nor even ascribes motives to Mark Zuckerberg—no vision, no strategy, no goals.
The movie quickly admits that money doesn’t matter to Zuckerberg. So why did he build Facebook? The Social Network offers no answer, except perhaps that an outsider wanted in, but that doesn’t begin to explain what he has accomplished and why; that’s nothing but simplistic prime-time plotting. The script says nothing about him wanting to connect the world or bring communities elegant organization. It doesn’t care. For this is a movie about tactics, not strategy, about people doing hard things to each other. Elsewhere, that’s just called business.
The movie violates privacy, smears reputations, makes shit up—just what the internet is accused of doing, right? Oh, it’s entertaining, in a dark way, as much as watching the pillorying of witches used to be, I suppose. For The Social Network, geeks and entrepreneurs are as mysterious and frightening as witches. Its writer, Aaron Sorkin, admits as much in New York Magazine. “He says unapologetically that he knows almost nothing about the 2010 iteration of Facebook, adding that his interest in computer-aided communication goes only as far as emailing his friends.” Sorkin himself says, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Making shit up.
New York’s Mark Harris knows, in an aside at least, what this movie is really about. “The Social Network can be seen as a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media.” Except it’s not really old media that’s spitting but neonew media. Sorkin is a member of the Young Curmudgeons’ Guild, joining Gladwell, Carr, Anderson, Rowan, Morozov, and Lanier. Old media resists change. These guys want to deny the internet credit for it.
The Social Network understands obnoxious old-money (the cartoon-colored, Zuckerberg-suing Winklevoss twins), obnoxious new-money (Sean Parker, though David Kirkpatrick says in Vanity Fair that he is “both more complex and more interesting”), and the pretentious intellectual (a fantasy of Harvard’s then-President, Larry Summers). And it thinks it understands victims (Facebook cofounder and former Zuckerberg friend Eduardo Saverin). I met Saverin once, in a panel put on by an ad network, which Saverin patronized on Facebook’s behalf and which served just the kinds of tacky ads Zuckerberg didn’t want for his company because he knew the value of cool and he had a much bigger vision than Saverin had. That’s likely why Saverin had to go; whether The Social Network knows it or not, it makes that clear. It’s just business. And as for the Winklevii, they didn’t invent crap. Ideas, especially obvious ones, are worthless; every entrepreneur and geek knows that execution is everything. Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t invent crap, either, but he did execute. That’s business.
The Social Network doesn’t understand entrepreneurs and geeks, or at least not the one here. So it turns him into an other. It makes him weird. It portrays Zuckerberg as—let’s be blunt—Aspergery: blinkless, humorless, heartless, incapable of being *cough* social or of having *cough* friends. I’ve met Zuckerberg four or five times, most lately interviewing him for Public Parts. I don’t know him. Maybe nobody does. But I can testify at least that he has charm. He does smile. He tells jokes. And he has a vision.
Zuckerberg understands the structure and motives of friendship even though The Social Network calls him friendless. In a flash during the deposition scenes that make up its narrative spine (perhaps because only lawyering could make coding look exciting), the movie gives us an anecdote—based on a true story, as it turns out—about the Harvard art class Zuckerberg didn’t attend in his sophomore year as he was inventing Facebook. Here is Zuckerberg telling the story in 2007: He posted to a web page the images of the art he should have studied, sent an email to his classmates offering a “study guide,” and watched as they distilled the essence of each piece. The punchline: Not only did Zuckerberg ace the final but the prof said the class as a whole did better than usual. I saw that as a perfect tale of social collaboration, a lesson in wikithink. The Social Network called it cheating. And right there lies the movie’s disconnect—not between Zuckerberg and friendship but between the movie and the new world it can’t comprehend but pretends to portray.
The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous (or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed) masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making (“We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”).
The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.
I know my risk here. I’m putting myself again in the position of defending the internet, just as David Kirkpatrick is making himself Facebook’s apologist. Maybe we’re both hypnotized by the Zuckerberg charisma Sorkin cannot see. Maybe we’ve been hanging out with business people so long we cannot see the Greek tragedy in it. Maybe. Though if all you want is a tale of hard-nosed business leading to human drama among geeks, you could film the story of Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or—coming soon to a theater near you—Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
In Zuckerberg and Facebook—and the internet—I see a far bigger and better story than the one Sorkin delivers. As research for Public Parts, I happen to be reading the wonderful book, The Gutenberg Revolution, by John Man, which digs through scant records to try to understand what drove the man who used technology to disrupt an old world and enable people to create a new one. Gutenberg was a technologist, secretive and controlling. He was a businessman (one of the early capitalists who created one of the early industries, really). He drove tough bargains. He was competitive. He was accused by the Dutch of stealing someone else’s idea. Oh, and he apparently broke up badly with at least one woman, Man says. In the hand of a Sorkin scribe of the day, I imagine Gutenberg would only be a weirdo: We don’t trust what he’s doing to our world, we don’t understand it, so we don’t like him.
You’re going to see The Social Network. You should. It’s well-crafted. But as you watch, I urge you to look at what it says not just about Mark Zuckerberg but about us, us geeks. I look forward to the discussion.
: AND: I’m amazed by the meme I see in comments here but especially in those at HuffingtonPost: It’s not a documentary, so it’s ok to make shit up. An odd defense. Sorkin et al don’t put a caveat up at the start of the film. They make a movie about a man named Mark Zuckerberg starting a service called Facebook. They didn’t film it at Schmarvard. I don’t buy that.
I’m reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I’d like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won’t go into great detail in this list because I’m eager to hear your thoughts. Here’s my opening bid:
* Publicness makes and improves relationships. To make connections with people, you need to be open and share. When you decide not to be public, you risk losing that connection.
* Publicness enables collaboration. That’s the beta lesson: When you open up your process, you invite people to help you improve what you’re doing. It is also, of course, the lesson of open-source.
* Publicness builds trust. Secrecy doesn’t.
* Publicness kills the myth of perfection. That is, when we open our process, we are showing our faults and are no longer held at every moment to the myth of perfection that has come to rule our industrial-age processes.
* Publicness disarms taboos. Publicness was the daring weapon gays and lesbians used to tear down their closets. I’m not saying that people should be forced out of their closets; that is their choice. But I am saying that when they do, it faces down the bigots who made homosexuality a taboo; it disarms them.
* Publicness grants immortality. (Note to Andrew Keen: That’s a joke.) Publicness at least grants credit and provides provenance for ideas and creation.
* Publicness enables the wisdom of the crowd. If we all keep our information, knowledge, ideas, and lessons to ourselves, we lose collectively.
* Publicness organizes us. Cue Clay Shirky. Speaking and assembling go hand-in-hand as rights. When we stand up and say who we are, we can find others like us and do things together.
* Publicness protects. This will be controversial but the knowledge that one’s actions could be public have an impact. That’s why I’m not against cameras on Times Square to thwart the next bomber.
* Publicness is value. This is an argument I’ll make that what’s public is owned by the public — whether that’s governments’ actions or images taken in public space — and whenever that is diminished, it robs from us, the public.
Mind you, this is not the chapter about privacy. I am addressing the value — and, a greater challenge, the definition — of privacy elsewhere.
Here I’m interested in hearing why you are public when you are and what you get out of it. I’d like to hear what else you would like people, companies, and governments to make public and how that would bring benefit.
It’s kinda touching that Rupert Murdoch’s loyal lieutenants are trying to entertain the boss by starting an old-fashioned newspaper war (old-fashioned modifies newspaper). But it’s also ever-more revealing of their worldview.
And of course, the best way to declare a war is to declare it over and claim victory. “Nationally, there’s no contest now,” Robert Thomson, editor of the Wall Street Journal, said, according to the AP, “We’re more than twice as big as The New York Times. They’re not a serious competitor.” The AP goes on to tell us that the “Journal sold an average of about 2 million copies nationwide on weekends compared with the Times’ 900,000.”
OK, but that’s half the story. It’s more like 10 percent of the story. For now shift to the future, the web, and comScore tells us that in July, The Times reached 43.6 million people online vs. the Journal’s 16.1 million. By the time you add in pass-around readers for the paper and de-dupe the same readers for print and online, those numbers might change, but the moral to the story doesn’t.
The New York Times has roughly two and a half times more readers than the Journal. That translates to two and a half times more influence, two and a half times more relationships, a two-and-a-half-time bigger brand.
Murdoch has been willing to lose tens of millions of dollars on his New York Post for one reason: he wants a “bully pulpit” (his words.) He has certainly turned FoxNews into just that. So its kind of sad, if you’re feeling empathetic, that his Journal is losing so to The Times. That’s why Thomson doth protest too much.
That is the price of the pay wall. It may be a price worth paying. The New York Times is, of course, piling up bricks for its wall now. But off in the open field, no bricks in sight, stands Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger with 37 million readers online wondering whether he could soon run the largest newspaper site in the world.
Now I argue these days that brands are no longer magnets; they become labels when you find content through search, algorithms, and peers’ links. Murdoch cut off the algorithms when he pulled his Times of London out of Google News just as he put it behind the wall. That was not a business decision but an emotional but. But I’m even willing to stipulate that his pay wall could work — work in the sense that he gets satisfactory revenue (whatever the definition of that is) from readers rather than from advertisers.
But the real price is growth. It won’t grow. I see that not as victory in the war for the biggest bully pulpit — for the bragging rights to talking to more people. I see that as surrender.
Today we at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism are announcing the founding and funding of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.
The Center, which I’ll direct, received $3 million each from the Tow and Knight foundations, in addition to earlier funding from the McCormick, MacArthur, and Carnegie foundations and CUNY. We will:
* Establish the country’s first MA degree in entrepreneurial journalism for our students and also offer certificates in the field for mid-career professional journalists.
* Continue our research in new business models for news, following on our work last summer in the new ecosystem of local news.
* Help create new enterprises in news. More on that later.
This all flows from an essential optimism about the future of journalism. We just have to build it. That’s why I’ve been teaching entrepreneurial journalism — with seven students’ businesses in development now with a total of $100,000 in seed funding — and why we are expanding that into a degree and certificate program to prepare journalists to start and run businesses and make journalism sustainable. That’s why we will continue to bring concrete specifics to the discussion about new business models for news. And that’s why we will help create those businesses in and out of the school. We will also help lead the movement to teach journalists to be entrepreneurs at other schools. And we have other plans.
I’m grateful to the The Tow Foundation for giving us the challenge grant that led to today and to the Knight Foundation for pushing us to elevate our ambition. I’m grateful to the McCormick and MacArthur foundations the Carnegie Corporation for funding work that paved the way for the center. And I’m grateful to my CUNY colleagues — Dean Steve Shepard, Associate Dean Judy Watson — for having the vision to support this work.
