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Archives for April 2010

Busy-ness: three days, three conferences

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If you want to hear from me over the next few days and you are in the Bay Area, you have a bunch of opportunities.

Friday I’ll be presenting at Stanford Law School’s conference on “The Future of News: Unpacking the Rhetoric” (as I wrote here). I look forward to unpacking a lot of rhetoric there; my suitcases are full and I definitely would like to travel more lightly. Seriously, there’s a great lineup there and I don’t think it will be the usual vague rehash of tired old tropes.

Saturday, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp SF. I’m thrilled about this, partly because I love WordPress, partly because I’ve had a great time at the two previous WordCamps I’ve attended, and partly because I’m talking about blogging’s place in our culture and WordPress’s place in the history of blogging (which I really didn’t get deeply into in Say Everything) — and after all this time I still love talking about this stuff.

Sunday, I’ll be at Journalism Innovations III and RemakeCamp, speaking about MediaBugs as one of a gazillion fascinating projects in journalism that people will be presenting there.

Come on down if you can, and definitely say hi if you do!

Who’s a journalist now?

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For as long as we humans have been online we have been arguing about how being online changes the nature of publishing and journalism. So these days, when I hear people arguing about who qualifies as a journalist, or whether bloggers are journalists, I usually yawn. I wrote this five years ago (during one of Apple’s previous campaigns against a blogger):

A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. “Are telephone callers journalists?” “Are typewriter users journalists?” “Are mimeograph operators journalists?” Or, most simply, “Are writers journalists?” Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.

When I was invited to the event that’s happening at Stanford Law School on Friday — “Future of Journalism: Unpacking the Rhetoric” — my knee jerked a bit along these lines. But I soon got the sense that this would be a more valuable and less superficial conversation than most of them have been.

So I’ll be there, Friday, along with a whole bunch of people more expert than I am, fielding discussion of the statement: “Everyone is a journalist now.” (Which, in that form, I think is simply, patently untrue, but with a little adjustment — to, say, “Now (almost) anyone can do journalism” — becomes pretty defensible.)

All this, of course, was before the whole affaire Gizmodo, which, as if on cue, has thrust our noses right into this little matter..

I have my own thoughts on the topic. But before I deliver them, I also want to hear from you. Which corners and angles of this discussion are most interesting to you? Should we care about the label “journalist”? If so, how do we distinguish the person in that role? Is it about employment, or accreditation, or what you do, or the size of your audience, or a particular set of ideals? What about shield laws and access to press conferences or White House briefings? Is this argument worth having? What does society gain by having “journalist” be a static role that only a small number of people qualify for? Can society gain something else by opening up the qualifications — and is there a cost?

Come to think of it, there really is plenty to talk about.

Roberts is to pager as Bush is to scanner

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Way back in ancient times, a decade ago, I wrote a piece for Salon that mentioned the widely circulated anecdote about President George H.W. Bush (the elder) casting a wondering gaze at a supermarket scanner. The tale had legs during the 1992 election cycle because it echoed a sense in the electorate that Bush was out of touch with the common people who were then suffering through a miserable recession.

I believe Bush was indeed out of touch. But my reference to the tale evoked several outraged emails from readers who accused me of perpetrating an urban myth. Bush had been treated unfairly by this news meme (Snopes.com has the details), and I had repeated the injustice.

I learned a couple lessons from the experience. One was to redouble my efforts as a journalist to question received wisdom. The other, more important lesson was that the knowledge my readers were going to send (and sometimes hurl) my way was invaluable. (Or, in Dan Gillmor’s famous phrase: “My readers know more than I do.”)

I thought of all this recently as I encountered the latest transmutation of the Bush/scanner meme. Yesterday The Huffington Post picked up a report on a law blog that made out Chief Justice Roberts to be a technological naif who had to ask, in the middle of an argument, “what’s the difference between email and a pager?”

I read the original blog post. Then I read the comments. Then I read the link to the original transcript of the argument that a commenter had helpfully provided. And I concluded for myself (you might feel otherwise, but I doubt it) that — however much Roberts may be more radical a conservative than I would wish — he’s not an idiot, and he had a reasonable basis to ask the question.

The self-correcting online feedback loop works a lot faster today than it did 10 years ago, and a lot more openly (we didn’t have comments on Salon back then). The “Roberts doesn’t know what a pager is” meme ought, by rights, to have been stopped in its tracks. It will be very interesting to follow its course in coming weeks and months. Past experience suggests that, despite having been arrested early on on the web, it will now be amplified on cable and in print and have a long half-life in our collective psyche.

MediaBugs: day one, and widgets

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MediaBugs.org logo

Yesterday we went live with our public beta of MediaBugs. If you find something in any news report in the SF Bay Area that you think needs correcting, come on down and file a bug report!

We got some coverage from Mallary Tenore at Poynter.org, who talked with journalism experts on errors and corrections like Scott Maier and Craig Silverman (a project adviser); Megan Garber at Nieman Lab, whose piece walked through the tale of our first corrected bug; and Tracey Taylor at Berkeleyside. We’re grateful for the attention.

MediaBugs is on Twitter as @media_bugs if you want to follow us there.

You’ll also find, at the bottom of this and every post on this blog, a link that says “Report an error.” This is a demo of how MediaBugs works as an embedded service. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to go to another site to report an error on a page you’re already reading, right? You should be able to report the error in situ — in place. We’ll be offering this to media partners and anyone who has a website that covers Bay Area news. The code is pretty simple. Give it a spin!

Newspaper comments: Forget anonymity! The problem is management

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This New York Times piece Monday reflects a growing chorus of resentment among newspaper website managers against the “barroom brawl” atmosphere so many of them have ended up with in the comments sections on their sites.

They blame anonymity. If only they could make people “sign their real names,” surely the atmosphere would improve!

This wish is a pipe dream. They are misdiagnosing their problem, which has little to do with anonymity and everything to do with a failure to understand how online communities work.

It is one of the great tragedies of the past decade that so many media institutions have failed to learn from the now considerable historical record of success and failure in the creation of online conversation spaces. This stuff isn’t new any more. (Hell, this conversation itself isn’t new either — see this Kevin Marks post for a previous iteration.) There are people who have been hosting and running this sort of operation for decades now. They know a thing or two about how to do it right. (To name just a few off the top of my head — there are many more: Gail Williams of the Well. Derek Powazek of Fray.com. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon’s Table Talk. Caterina Fake and her (ex-)Flickr gang.)

The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.

If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?

Comment spaces need supervision — call them hosts or moderators or tummlers or New Insect Overlords or whatever you want, but don’t neglect to hire them! These moderators need to be actual people with a presence in the conversation, not faceless wielders of the “delete” button. They welcome newcomers, enforce the local rules, and break up the occasional brawl — enlisting help from the more civic-minded regulars as needed.

Show me a newspaper website without a comments host or moderation plan and I’ll show you a nasty flamepit that no unenforceable “use your real name” policy can save. Telling Web users “Use your real name” isn’t bad in itself, but it won’t get you very far if your site has already degenerated into nasty mayhem. The Web has no identity system, and though the FBI can track you down if the provocation is dire enough, and if you get editors mad enough they can track you down, too, most media companies aren’t going to waste the time and money. So you’ll stand there demanding “real names,” and your trolls will ignore you or make up names, and your more thoughtful potential contributors will survey your site and think, “You want me to use my real name in this cesspool? No thanks.”

No, anonymity isn’t the problem. (Wikipedia seems to have managed pretty well without requiring real names, because it has an effective system of persistent identity.) The problem is that once an online discussion space gets off to a bad start it’s very hard to change the tone. The early days of any online community are formative. The tone set by early participants provides cues for each new arrival. Your site will attract newcomers based on what they find already in place: people chatting amiably about their lives will draw others like themselves; similarly, people engaging in competitive displays of bile will entice other putdown artists to join the fun.

So turning things around isn’t easy. In fact, it’s often smarter to just shut down a comments space that’s gone bad, wait a while, and then reopen it when you’ve got a moderation plan ready and have hand-picked some early contributors to set the tone you want. If I were running a newspaper with a comments problem, that’s how I’d proceed. Don’t waste your time trying to force people to use their real names in hope that this will improve the tenor of your discussion area; build a discussion area that’s so appealing from the start that it makes people want to use their real names.

Why didn’t newspapers do this to begin with? I think part of the problem is that a lot of them had only the vaguest rationale for opening up comments in the first place. Maybe some consultant told them it was a good idea. Or it looked like the right thing to do to the young members of the Web team, and the front office said “Go ahead and play, kids, just don’t spend any money.” And the comments got turned on with no one minding the store and no clear goal in mind, either on the business side or in the newsroom.

So, media website operators, I suggest that you ask yourselves:

When you opened up comments, was it really about having a conversation with the readers? Then have that conversation! Get the editors and reporters in there mixing it up with the public. Sure, there will be problems and awkward moments; there will also be breakthroughs in understanding.

Maybe, though, no one was ever really serious about that conversation. Maybe the idea was to boost ad impressions with an abundance of verbiage supplied gratis by the readership. In that case, stop complaining about the flame wars and accept that the more abusive your commenters wax, the more your crass strategy will succeed.

Whatever you do, remember that as long as you’re thinking “What’s wrong with those people?” and “What did we do to deserve this?” you’re not taking responsibility for a problem that, I’m sorry to say, you created yourselves.