What he said ...

Rob Fishman's blog on the Huffington Post is called "Old Dogs, New Media: Why J-School Apps Are Up." His comments about J School and "new media" and the demise of the current industry model are achingly familiar:

Of course, no one should blame Columbia for teaching the old ways. As has been painfully evident over the past year, no new model for journalism yet exists. Where one can fault the J-School -- and by extension, journalism as a whole -- is in its superficial embrace of "new media," understood at 116th Street as a crash-course in web design as an addendum to the regular curriculum. "New media" -- those chilling words that induce in anyone over 30 a bone-chilling sweat -- is like the Emperor's new clothes: we all pay lip service to Macromedia Flash, .html coding and RSS feeds, but no one has any real conception of how they might "save" journalism.

Jeez, it sounds a whole lot like what I've been saying—and hearing from fellow grad students—at school these days. Replace the word "Columbia" with the appropriate institution's name ... .

But Fishman doesn't explain why grad school applications for journalism schools are up. And neither can I. I can tell you my reasons for applying — I decided that a practical degree made more sense than one based in theory (I started in Communication and bailed), and figured I'd get more writing and editing work if I have a journalism M.A. after my name. Not a particularly uplifting narrative, is it?

So, if any journalism graduate students are reading this, tell me: Why did you apply to a graduate program in journalism, given the imminent demise of the reporting industry?

Fair Use and AP

The Associated Press is attempting to enforce fair use tenets by tracking illegal use of its content and will "pursue legal and legislative actions" against its improper distribution.

Industry commentator Art Brodsky sees this as an ill-thought-out attempt to stop aggregators from using AP content without adequately reimbursing the content provider. He says the days of news organizations (i.e., newspapers) being the gatekeepers of information are over. The Internet has made that model obsolete.

Brodsky questions that fair use is even the issue here. Rather, he sees AP's announcement as yet another fight between the old, centrally controlled media model and the new, distributed network model. It's an economic fight, a fight for control, but it's not truly a legal battle, he contends.

This is highly reminiscent of the tussle between Gatehouse Media and the Boston Globe/New York Times over news aggregation and we know how that ended—with a whimper. (See my Jan. 30 post, "Fair Use vs. Coporate Greed," below.)

Rather than invent a new business model, the news industry seems to be fighting over the limited revenues available to Internet content providers, but no one seems to know how to address the central problem: if content is free, who can afford to provide it? The problem with establishing a legal precedent with regard to what's digital copyright infringement and what's not is this: users are impatient with anything that stands in the way of accessing information on the Internet quickly and for little—or no—cost. When providers make access costly, either in time or actual money, users will go elsewhere or do without.

Case in point: One of Brodsky's links took me to the Washington Post's site, which I could view only if I signed in. Since I didn't want to jump through their hoops (and it was FREE!), I never did look at that link.

Addendum: Read Maureen Dowd's take on it all.

4-21-09 Techdirt talks about Google and iParadigm's case.

Colbert and the demise of newspapers

Colbert "interviewed" the Newspaper Association of America's lobbyist and managed, in five minutes, to express why print is dying:
1. the general public doesn't seek knowledge, but wants to be diverted and entertained
2. people want speedy gratification/entertainment
3. they want what news they tolerate learning about for free
4. the news industry doesn't know how to change its business model.

Take a look.

Hobby journalism? Or: Why I like to be paid for work.

Just 26 years ago, I was a technical writer at Boston University's Academic Computing Center (now renamed the Office of Information Technology). I was out of school only six years, earning the equivalent of about $55,000 (adjusted for inflation). But I didn't really love writing and updating user manuals and teaching markup language skills to thesis-writing grad students, so I cashed in my IRA and took more than a few years off to pursue other interests — but that's another story.

Anyway, fast-forward to 2005: I got a part-time editing job for a weekly staff and faculty newspaper. My co-workers were great, the pay was not much and the work was mind numbing. So I enrolled in CU's graduate program in journalism, to formalize my qualifications as a writer and editor. Last fall, a magazine internship at a niche publication reinforced my conviction that magazine editing is the place for me.

Except: The publication had layoffs the second month I was there.
Except: They reduced the size of their print product — that is, they reduced content.
Except: The line between advertising and editorial got murkier and murkier — that is, advertisers frequently were sources for story background and quotations.
Except: The Web version of their product wasn't subsidizing print costs — that is, advertising on the Web and in print was down, another effect of the economic implosion.
Like newspapers, magazines are struggling to survive.

Last week, the day after The Rocky Mountain News closed its doors (swiftly followed by the announcement of a subscription-only hyperlocal Web site that may debut in April), the J School held a colloquium on "The Future of Journalism Education." Several faculty spoke on the topic, part of a larger discussion about changing the curriculum to prepare students for a swiftly changing world in which print is no longer the default. The faculty members had differing opinions on the state of the news biz, but they all agreed that the curriculum must be reformulated to provide technological know-how so that students can participate in the Web-based information revolution.

Here's the Cliff Notes version: Journalism students will learn to blog, tweet, socially network and code our own Web sites in html and CSS and Java (modern-day markup languages, oh joy). We'll research, interview, write, fact check, edit and post self-produced stories, podcasts, videos, audio files and digital photos on personal Web sites that have been designed using graphical user interface precepts and optimized for search engines. We'll create a brand for ourselves, pursuing our own beat or specialty in innovative ways that will draw lots of traffic to our sites, increasing our marketability.

Except: How will our sites be distinguished from the other 11-million-and-growing Web sites on the Internet?
Except: How will we newly minted journalists afford Internet access, computers, digital recording and photography equipment and software upgrades, while doing hours and hours of unpaid work to establish our reputations?
Except: How will any of this translate into making a living doing journalism?

At this point, I'm not wondering about marketability, I'm wondering what journalists can do to create a new business model that can sustain our profession.

Which brings me to recent blogs by Clay Shirky and Steven Berlin Johnson, each of whom muses about the post-newspaper, post-print media world. They say we're only in the beginning of a Web-based news age that is chaotic, unpredictable and not yet financially sustainable. They say we should abandon attempts to rescue the old newspaper model and embrace the unknown.

Shirky: "The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model."

Johnson: "... we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone."

Great, but what do the thousands of unemployed journalists (and about-to-graduate journalism students) do in the meantime? Yochai Benkler, writing in the New Republic, looks at a few examples of what seem to be self-sustaining Web news businesses. Of the three blogs, I find this the most useful, most relevant to journalists and the shortest (a real plus in Blog Land).

Benkler: "Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model--be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica--to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided in the networked public sphere."

But no matter what Shirky, Johnson or Benkler say, the plain truth of the matter is this: Right now there's no successful new (or old) business model —Web, print or iPhone-based — that pays living wages to increasingly large numbers of journalists for newsgathering, editing, writing and publishing.

I'm learning the craft just in time to practice it for free, as my new hobby. Tech writing is sounding more attractive by the decade.

The perils of interactivity

Tuesday I went to a talk put on by BoldeReach, a Boulder-based women's charitable organization that supports groups that provide services to women and children in need. While listening to the talk, I realized that some of what the speaker described relates to current digital journalism practices and concerns. So I decided to write about it here on my graduate-student-in-journalism blog.

The talk was presented by Revi Sterling, a PhD candidate in technology, media, and society at CU's ATLAS (Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society) Institute. Sterling worked for 10 years at Microsoft, where she eventually was part of a team whose purpose was to write new programs for the poor and disenfranchised (my words, not hers). She said that eventually she realized that writing killer apps for the third world wasn't gonna do it. Computers can't help people who lack adequate food or shelter, or can't read and write. So she came to ATLAS to pursue her doctorate, researching how to develop appropriate technology to help women in developing countries.

Sterling found that much of sub-Saharan Africa has community radio that serves as the main news and entertainment media for areas that have few other amenities. Since telephones are rare, and cell phone service not yet available, the radio is a one-way medium and mostly broadcasts male voices and perspectives. Because she focuses on gender-related use of technology, Sterling wanted to provide women a way to participate in community radio, enabling them to voice their presence in society. Her solution was to work with Kenyan women's work collectives, to design and use devices that hold up to 30 minutes of a voice recording, which is then transmitted to the local community radio station.

The women who have access to the device are now able to respond to programs aired on the radio, or provide news items for broadcast. There are some interesting parallels between their new-found radio interactivity and our Web interactivity, particularly with regard to citizen journalism and public commentary.

How do the radio stations determine what is fact and what is gossip? Have there been cases of misrepresentation, error, or libel? Is anyone responsible for checking the facts or correcting misstatements? Or, like with the Web, is one lousy error replicated so quickly and widely that it’s next to impossible to eradicate?

Does the fact that most of the women are readily identified, rather than anonymous, dissuade them from spreading lies or rumors? If that is so, should we reconsider the anonymous nature of Web blogs and comments?

Who determines what is important information and what is not? Sterling asserted that 80 percent of the women’s “broadcasts” are used, and the 20 percent that is not used is generally uninteresting content such as songs. How does she know that? The editors are mostly male broadcast technicians—are they accountable to the women, whom they may never meet? How does this relate to editing and censoring of Web comments?

Lastly, the delay between uploading the women’s content and broadcasting it can be up to a week. If timeliness is intrinsic to new-ness, at what point does comment become old hat, stale, BORING?

No answers, just more questions! I’d be intrigued to see if any lessons can be learned from the Kenyan women’s experiences that speak to some of our Web communication difficulties, or vice versa.

But Wait! There's more ...

For a totally other take on the GateHouse story, go here.

Fair Use vs. Corporate Greed

I should be hiking Sanitas, instead of ruminating on journalism’s narrow escape from a legal ruling on fair use as it applies to the Web. But because I’m a J School grad student who’s learning digital news practices, I’m composing a new blog instead … (violins will play here when I learn how to upload audio to my blog).

On Monday, GateHouse Media and the New York Times Co. settled out of court rather than have a judge rule in their copyright infringement case. GateHouse had charged NYT with infringing on original content published on the Web as part of GateHouse’s “Wicked Local” sites, and scraped by the NYT’s competing Boston.com site. Since scraping is the basis for all aggregators, the outcome of this suit was a nail-biter for the big players in the aggregation business, particularly Yahoo and Google, Huffington Post, Politico, and the like.

But aggregators aren’t competing with original material sites — in fact, it might be argued that aggregators help the sites they link to by bringing them users who might not otherwise visit. In this case, however, Boston.com competes directly with “Wicked Local.” In fact, that was the crux of the complaint—that by scraping “Wicked Local” headlines, Boston.com was competing with “Wicked Local” by using WL’s own material.

A former Bostonian, I remember the days when the precursors to “Wicked Local” were several locally produced, 12-page weeklies that reported on town meetings and school district doings for the small suburbs that surround Boston. Over the years, these were bought out by larger companies that bought more local weeklies, etc., and eventually were bought by Liberty Media, which is now GateHouse Media.

Some complicating factors: it’s not clear that “Wicked Local” didn’t get traffic from Boston.com’s links to the originating site; and it’s really puzzling that GateHouse didn’t install software that precludes aggregators from scraping, as many sites do to protect just this sort of “poaching.” In fact, that’s one of the remedies that the agreement they struck stipulates. GateHouse will install software to bar their material from aggregators, and NYT will honor that barrier.

Probably both sides in this dispute saw that a legal ruling could severely cramp money making for everyone concerned, which is why they came to an agreement the day they were due in court. For now, aggregators can continue with business as usual— combing the Web for news and posting the headlines and first sentences of each original story, along with a link to its source, on their aggregation site. And the media conglomerates can wring more money from their Web businesses by pushing the limits of ethical journalistic practice.

So is it journalism that benefited here, or Big Business? Can we even separate the two?

My antidote for today’s exposure to the greed that infects our industry is a self-prescribed walk in the sunshine.

Pooper Scooper: Confusing Gossip with News

The Web was rife today with headlines about Caroline Kennedy's reasons for withdrawing from consideration for the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. The Huffington Post showed Kennedy's picture sandwiched between a head that implied nefarious misdeeds might be afoot:

NY Times: Kennedy's Bid Derailed by Housekeeper and Tax Problems

and another head that said:

Time: Ted Kennedy's Inner Circle "Furious" About Caroline's Senate Bid Withdrawal.

The articles were fairly tame, if confusing and confused, accounts of the possible reasons why Kennedy is no longer in the running. The NYT gave its headline's claim a cursory mention: the article said nothing of substance about housekeepers or tax problems. And TIME magazine's story of "fury" was a big yawn.

Later in the day, HuffPo moved the story to its front-page banner, which blared "New York Fiasco," coupled with a timeline that gives the history of Kennedy's interest in the position and the political whisperings about the likelihood of her getting it. Somewhere in all that, an unnamed source was quoted as saying, "reporters are starting to look at her marriage more closely"—but it was left up to your imagination as to what that might mean.

I'm troubled by the coverage, both by the HuffPo and the New York Times. It lacks journalistic precepts of fairness, neutrality or even credibility. The headlines are misleading, if not downright spurious. They are written to attract rubberneckers who are fascinated by possibly glimpsing an American aristocrat's fall from grace.

The stories the headlines reference were mostly unremarkable—mundane, even—except when reporters quoted unnamed sources whose comments are no better than idle speculation. To imply that Kennedy has something to hide about her marriage is not pertinent to this story. Even if there is marital discord, does that have any bearing on this? Hinting at it changes the focus of the story from "Why has Kennedy withdrawn from consideration?" to "Is this rich and famous woman unhappy in love?"

The influence of the entertainment industry on journalistic practices is nothing new. And the Kennedys have long been fodder for both hard and entertainment news, which in this case have been combined, hard and entertainment news in one scandalous story! The HuffPo and the New York Times attempted to reach two different audiences with this story: political junkies who want to know why Kennedy is out of the picture for the Senate seat and who's the likely next candidate, and those who love reading People Magazine's endless coverage of the rich and famous, whose lives are filled with tragedy and epiphany. The media did a disservice to journalistic ethics in the process.

Web-based coverage made this conflation possible. Articles from the New York Times and the New York Post—strange bedfellows, indeed—were quoted in the HuffPo's breathlessly updated timeline. Links to the full articles revealed strangely voyeuristic coverage by even the so-called "serious" publication, whose editors seem to have forgotten what they ever learned about ethical journalistic practices.

Not until I turned on NPR did I find a measured journalism worthy of the name. Reporter Nicholas Confessore (who co-wrote the NYT story on Kennedy) explained to NPR what are the differences between what Kennedy's camp said, and what the New York governor's camp said. The discussion then turned to who are the likely candidates for the Senate seat, and what experience they each would bring to the job. No gossip, no speculation, no gloating. And no compromising of journalistic ethics to broaden the story's appeal.

What's Old is News Again

As a child of the 60s and 70s, I'm feeling it's "deja vu all over again," to quote Yogi Berra. Much of what was said by Dianne Feinstein, and then Obama, referenced Kennedy and King. Intentional and purposeful, bringing back memories of social activism, ideals of equality and equability, tolerance and striving to improve our country. 

The coverage I heard was split between streaming from AP/MSNBC and then watching ABC's TV coverage. AP's pundits' comments were sexist and ignorant. "These are the only men who know what Obama is going through." "We thought the crowd was loud for Jimmy Carter, but listen to them roar for Bill Clinton ... and his wife, Hillary, who will have a place in the Obama administration." 

Excuse me? How about these are the only PEOPLE who know what Obama is going through. And how do the pundits know WHO the crowd roared for? Maybe it was for Hillary, not Bill, Clinton. Or both of them. Needless to say, these pundits are men.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, on the other hand, notes that there's a huge accolade for The Clintons. She doesn't assume it's for Bill rather than Hillary. Maddow acknowleges that both of the Clintons are important public figures.

Our society has a short memory. People argue that discussing racism shouldn't be necessary, that to move forward we need to stop using the progressives' language of the 60s and 70s. But if male reporters in our national media still perceive the world through the lens of gender stereotypes, then I doubt that we can abandon efforts to consciously address racism, ageism or sexism. 

Precisely the opposite, in fact. So much of what our nation is facing we faced 30 and 40 years ago and thought we could resolve in the next decade or two. Energy issues, social justice issues, controlling nuclear proliferation — thousands of young and old people worked hard to address the problems associated with theses issues ... and then the nation's focus shifted towards celebrity and status worship during the Reagan era and beyond. I wonder: if we hadn't lost our focus in the 80s and 90s, perhaps we wouldn't be scrambling to regain our momentum now. 

But here we are, invoking the ideals of Camelot, with Feinstein saying, "In that spirit we pledge ourselves to unity and renewed call to greatness." And Rick Warren praying that we all strive  towards a purpose-driven life. 

Obama set the tone of urgency, addressing us as citizens, emphasizing our responsibility to participate in democracy. "We remain a young nation, but it's time to set aside childish things ... Greatness must be earned ...  For us our forebears sacrificed. We must begin again the work of remaking America ... We must restore the vital trust between a people and their government."

Lowery's final invocation brought it full circle, sounding an updated version of the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement, and finishing with a 60s Baptist minister's rhyming refrain, so reminiscent of Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson.  

This time, I hope, we don't let up until we do achieve the changes that this country — and the Earth — needs.

Defining Friends on FB

Ethical behavior preoccupies my thoughts these days. Yeah, I have my first assignment for the class that is the reason I started this blog space, about journalistic ethics. But I also encounter ethical problems in everyday activities. Like FaceBook, for example.

Last fall I had a voicemail from a former high school classmate, asking me to come to our 35th high school reunion. This was not someone I'd been close to, but I had attended schools with her from 5th grade-on. We were more than acquaintances. And I decided to respond to her via FB.

The upshot of this is that we "friended" each other. My mistake, mea culpa. Because if you have fewer than 50 FB friends (which is my case), you can't avoid knowing about every change and "thought" that they have and post to their page. And her posts started to annoy me, just as her behavior in high school had annoyed me. And I hated high school, partly because the preoccupations that still concern this classmate were the dominant HS culture. In fact, the only reason I had considered attending the reunion was mostly that I could spend time with my BFF and she and I could go, and then be bitchy about it later. (Or maybe forever.) And I'd shed my middle-age spread recently, so ... You know.

But why would I want to go to a reunion for an experience I detested? DOH. So I refused the invitation when it arrived via snail mail, and after a few more weeks, I un-friended the high school classmate.

Phew! It felt great! I was able to act on my real feelings. She wouldn't ever notice (I reasoned), because we aren't friends in real life, and she had so many FB pals that one less wouldn't make a difference.

Except: Two days ago, I got a friend request from my un-friended HS classmate. She was "confused," she said: weren't we friends?  For about five minutes I hesitated. What would it cost me to FB-friend her again? Principles instilled in me about good manners and politeness said I should accept her request and gracefully make up an excuse —that is, LIE —about inadvertently un-friending her I don't know how that happened oh my isn't that weird thank goodness you caught it of course we're friends ...

But we're not. And I don't want to be. Because "friend" as denoted by FB terminology has little meaning, doesn't mean I have to compromise my personal definition of the word. So I choose to accept as friends those people who are actual, true friends whom I communicate with in Real Life, not those people who I would never, ever, spend time with nor seek out to be friends with if I had met them for the first time only last week. 

So I ignored the request, because my only FB choices were accept, ignore, or report for abuse. (The last choice, of course, doesn't apply to this situation.) I'd prefer to send a "No, thanks, not interested" response. Wouldn't that be the truly ethical way to respond to people's requests that you don't wish to accept, rather than ignoring them? ... which is a coward's way out. I don't like being a coward. It doesn't feel ethical. 

success! first assignment is due Jan. 23, musings on digital journalism's ethical challenges.