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Spitzer in bloggerland

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Eliot Spitzer, a guy I went to high school with, has been making headlines for a few years now. In a decade that has seen a retreat from progressive politics across the board, he’s picked up the tools available to him as New York State attorney general and used them creatively and effectively to represent the interests of ordinary citizens. His investigations and prosecutions in the securities, mutual funds and insurance industries have exposed longstanding practices by which insiders profit at the expense of the public they ostensibly serve.

In a better world, the bodies that are supposed to be the watchdogs in these areas would be doing their jobs. Since they haven’t been, Spitzer’s investigations have represented the public’s last line of defense.

I haven’t agreed with every position Eliot has taken in his career (for instance, I don’t support the death penalty), but there isn’t any other Democratic politician out there right now who has been more effective at fighting the self-dealing, cronyism and plundering of the public good that characterize Bush-era business.

Today, in what was a long-expected move, Spitzer announced that he’s running for governor of New York in 2006. And he announced it on a page labeled “Eliot’s Blog” — that appears to be a real, functional weblog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Eliot — I think you’ll like it.

Unhand that blogger!

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One of the first things you learn as an editor is that your concept of “fair use” tends to be very different from the concept held by lawyers representing owners of intellectual property — and that weirdly different rules apply in different realms. (Song lyrics, for instance, are policed far more furiously than, say, lines of dialogue from a movie.)

In the latest instance of something that any news organization would consider “fair use” arousing the ire of corporate attorneys, veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who’d long followed the saga of Jeopardy wiz Ken Jennings, has drawn the wrath of lawyers from Sony. Kottke had posted an audio clip of Jennings’ loss, then took it down after he heard from the lawyers, and replaced it with a transcript. The lawyers were still not happy — although they don’t seem to have gone after the Washington Post for publishing something quite similar. Maybe the thinking is, Kottke isn’t a “journalist,” he’s “just” a blogger. If so, then we’re in for a bumpy ride, because the old line between journalists and non-journalists is now written in invisible ink, the border’s unguarded, and hordes are streaming across.

Bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, Britt Blaser and others are starting to call for a kind of legal aid society for bloggers. Fine — but I’m confused: a decade ago, an organization was founded to help protect individual rights in cyberspace. It even has a project called Chilling Effects specifically dedicated for this sort of problem. Wouldn’t that be a good place to begin? Kottke — call the EFF! Or even better: EFF, call Kottke! I don’t know exactly how this sort of situation fits into the EFF’s current mandates, but at the very least it’s a good starting point. And surely if there is an effort to build an organizational structure to handle this sort of thing in the future it makes sense to try to do so under the EFF umbrella rather than starting from scratch.

Bonus link: Eugene Volokh’s op-ed on balancing journalist’s rights and the public’s right to know in a world where everyone’s a journalist.

Blogging can be hazardous to your paycheck

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I took some heat from the attendees at Supernova earlier this year for my skepticism about the whole bloggers-in-corporate-America thing. Yes, there are examples, mostly in the tech industry, of smart, energetic bloggers (and blogging execs) who have brought a human face to their companies, and who serve as corporate ambassadors to the blogosphere. Grand — it’s a smart move for both the individual bloggers and the companies. Someday, you might even see this model spread. But beyond the confines of an industry like software — in which many of the individual workers are highly skilled, highly paid, mobile and relatively confident of their own re-employability — it will happen a lot more slowly than the rhetoric at blogging conferences these days suggests.

Outside of the tech industry, and a few pockets here and there like law and medicine and library science, blogging remains an inscrutable anomaly, less likely to be seen by an employer as a PR plus than as an HR nightmare. Corporate America is still, outside of a few islands of enlightenment (and pragmatism in the face of a chaotic world), all about control — controlling the message, controlling costs, controlling the employee’s life to the extent that the company is able. (It’s the same spirit our “CEO President” is bringing to his current reorg.)

Here are two recent examples illustrating my point, from opposite ends of the power hierarchy. Mark Cuban — the wealthy dot-com mogul who now blogs and owns his own basketball team — is about as independent and autonomous as bloggers come. If anyone can blog without fear of reprisal from his industry, it’s someone like him, right? But here he is, getting fined for a blog posting. This is the appalling, outrageous post that raised the NBA’s ire. I’m a total sports ignoramus, but as far as I can tell, Cuban wasn’t supposed to raise a public complaint about his league’s idiotic decision to hold its opening day on Election Day because — well, why, exactly? Is it just, like, unsportsmanlike? Did Cuban violate the league’s omerta? In any case, so much for transparency, conversations and all the other blogosphere values.

But Cuban’s punishment is pretty trivial compared with the plight of sometime Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti, who got fired for posting pictures on her blog that only the Taliban could find offensive. Now, Simonetti’s case has gotten a lot of attention, and it’s certainly possible she’ll be able to turn her ex-employer’s stupidity to her advantage. But losing your job is no fun, and whatever the outcome of her saga, her company threw down a gauntlet to all her former colleagues: Blog at your own risk — we’re watching your every step.

So it’s not just newspaper workers who are being told their employment precludes them from having the right to keep an online journal. It’s people in all walks of life. And it’s not just the people at the bottom of the pyramid who meet resistance. There’s a deep and strong unwillingness in the business world to give up habits of secrecy and control. Maybe it’s just inertia. But I don’t see these walls toppling easily, or without a big fight.

Two good things

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J.D. Lasica and others have begun building Ourmedia, a/k/a Open-Media.org, “an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media” — “a place where people can share works of personal media and have them stored forever — for free.” It’s a work in progress right now, but the basic notion of an accessible and reliable (thanks to the Internet Archive) repository for “grassroots media” — “digital stories, photo albums, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, children’s tales, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films” — makes wonderful sense. There’s a wiki here for people interested in contributing.

Rebecca McKinnon, a fellow at the Berkman Center who describes herself as “a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger,” has sparked the formation of Bloggercorps. The nonpartisan group’s mission is “Matching bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started.” Here’s more info.

Bloggercon, belatedly

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Bloggercon III was great. I barely had time to digest everything I took in because I was flying off on a long-planned trip the next morning. Here are some notes.

My session was on Journalism: I talked for about ten minutes, outlining some basic things that I think bloggers can learn from professional journalists and vice versa.

What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

Then I just opened the mike, which is the custom at Bloggercon, where there are no speakers — just “discussion leaders.” We didn’t get trapped in the “Is blogging journalism?” rathole, thankfully; and I think we are now well past the stage of simply re-fighting the old holy war between bloggers and pros, which was never as heated as press accounts had it, anyway. Journalists cast every new phenomenon in horse-race terms — who wins? who loses? — because that’s such a fundamental news template. But I think the smarter participants in both camps, and the many of us who have feet in both camps, or wear hats with multiple insignia, now well understand that this ought to be a win/win game.

I was too busy moderating to take decent notes, but the entire audio for the session is now online (along with other Bloggercon sessions) at Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations site, and there’s tons of others who did take notes.

Staci Kramer wrote it up for OJR (those are my bullet points quoted anonymously). There are also good posts about the event from Rebecca McKinnon, Claude Muncey, Barnaby, and Colin Brayton, who posted a a big picture of me that shows just how tired I was… (Note to Colin: if I was edging away from you after our brief conversation it’s because it was late in the day, I was trying to hit the road — my kids were waiting at home!)

Most interesting idea aired at the session (and apologies that I can’t remember whose idea it was — step forth and remind me so I can give you credit): Perform a controlled experiment in which readers take in the work of a number of journalists covering a controversial issue or election who are striving to be “objective” but who actually have a point of view that they do not disclose (i.e., they are normal human beings). The readers will try to guess the writers’ sympathies based on the “objective” work. Can journalists really hide their views? Or, as some critics maintain, can we always tell which side they’re on, anyway?

It is, as Dan Gillmor suggested, a great idea for a thesis. Only you’d also somehow have to control for the biases and sympathies of the readers making the calls. This “objectivity is impossible” thing cuts in all directions. There is no alternative to being human. (Unless you’re, er, a marsupial or something. But then you’re probably not worrying about the nature of journalism.)

UPDATE LATER: That was indeed conference host and organizer Dave Winer who proposed the great “controlled experiment” idea. Thanks for that. Could someone — Poynter? Columbia Journalism School? NYU Journalism School (Jay?) — now put up a little money, or assign it to a class, to make it happen?

Also — more good notes from the session over at John Adams’ blog.

(Fwd) Re: Election fraud!

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My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here’s my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:

There’s no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.

When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it’s the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that’s worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.

But elections are messy exercised in democracy — there’s no such thing as a perfect one. There’s always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. (“Vote early, vote often” was not a joke in Daley’s Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)

The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.

My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they’re not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here’s the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)

There’s a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now — the “I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll pass it on anyway” meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.

The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side’s version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying “fraud!” at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we’re in for trouble.

We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including — no, especially — the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election’s outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won’t leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.

The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn’t. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it’s still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.

Voting

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I voted this morning with a big crowd of my fellow citizens of Berkeley. Tonight, I’ll be working in the newsroom, as I have on each election night from 1980 on (with the exception of 1984, when I worked for a weekly). (We’re citizens! We’re journalists! There’s no conflict — imagine that!)

None of those contests has remotely compared to this year’s — not just in the level of partisan emotion, something that has caused so much tsk-tsking from the punditry, but in the sheer level of involvement. (My Berkeley neighbor and colleague Andrew Leonard feels the same way.)

And it’s not just that an unusual number of my friends and colleagues are out volunteering in get-out-the-vote efforts; it’s that everyone I talk to says the same thing — they’re amazed at the number of their friends and acquaintances who are out volunteering.

“Getting out the vote” has always been a bipartisan goal in theory but, sadly, a highly partisan issue in fact. You’ll note that nearly all of the election-day disputes center on Democrats trying to boost turnout and Republicans trying to reduce participation. You can draw your own conclusions.

The Net is, of course, one big element in this election’s high level of involvement. Here on this little blog I’m quite pleased and proud that, though my own strong preferences in this election have long been clear, those of you who’ve chosen to participate in the comments have for the most part presented honest and vigorous arguments from both sides. When I hear people complain about the blogosphere promoting a one-sided echo chamber, this debate stands as a simple counterargument. Thanks to all who have tossed in their words — particularly, thanks to those who’ve challenged my views.

Nobodies business

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I want to pick up a few threads I’ve been collecting and meaning to post about but haven’t had time for till now.

Let’s start with Matthew Klam’s New York Times Magazine cover story on bloggers from a couple of weeks ago. As a group portrait of a handful of high-profile political bloggers it was, I thought, a good read, and reasonably accurate, based on my own impressions of some of the people covered. But this passage jumped out at me and screamed for comment:

“In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogs that succeed … are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice.”

This passage crystallized the fundamental and profound divide between most professional journalists and most bloggers. “Most of them, nobody reads.” Now, even the world’s most neglected, forlorn and unpopular blog has at least one reader — the author. So Klam’s first message to these bloggers is, “You are a nobody.” But in fact most of the millions of not-terribly-well-known blogs on the planet do have a handful of readers: friends, relatives, colleagues, the person who staggered in the door from a Google search and stuck around.

“Everyone’s famous for 15 people.” Not a new concept (here’s a reference from 1998), but still a valuable one. And one that continues to elude most journalists, who can’t lay aside their industry’s yardstick of success long enough to understand what’s happening on the Web today.

For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find.

Many of these blogs do not meet the definition of “journalism,” but who is Klam, and who are we, to say that they are not “successes”? Who are we to discount the human significance of untold numbers of personal stories and thoughts and ideas communicated to handfuls of readers — to dismiss this vast dialogue as the chatter of “nobodies”?

(David Weinberger has a similar reaction here.)

Of course there are blogs and bloggers who judge their enterprises according to the traffic yardstick. Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek column even suggested that some bloggers are beginning to become what is known indelicately in the Web industry as “traffic whores”: “The low road is a well-trodden path to big readership.” As some bloggers try to turn their pastime into a business or a livelihood, this is inevitable.

Unlike Levy, though, I’m less worried about the occasional “ankle-biting” blogger who grows hoarse-voiced in hope of page-views — and more impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online.

This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic. This much was known as early as the mid-’90s, when we began to see that, though the top 20 Web sites may have dominated the traffic claimed by the top 100 Web sites, the top 100 Web sites still commanded only a fraction of the Web’s total traffic. This was a new world.

What’s happening today is that, thanks to Google and RSS and other technologies still aborning, that world is beginning to get organized, and as it becomes better organized it can’t help becoming more economically significant.

Here’s where I’d bring in Wired editor Chris Anderson’s now justly celebrated “Long Tail” piece. Anderson takes a look at consumer behavior patterns on Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, and other “big catalog” services online. These services restore back catalogs and “mid lists”; they restore a nearly infinite number of oldies into circulation. Individually, these works have minuscule demand; collectively, they’re huge:

“Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail.”

People don’t get this yet, Anderson writes: “We assume…that only hits deserve to exist” — just as we assume that if you don’t have a big circulation, “nobody” reads you.

Anderson’s piece focuses chiefly on the entertainment industry, but the principle is a broader one. If you want to keep climbing the ladder from blogs to the entertainment industry all the way up to the global economy, the next piece to read is James Surowiecki’s little essay on “the bottom of the pyramid,” which talks about the vast economic opportunity in creating products for the planet’s teeming billions of poor customers. (“Though developing nations don’t have much money on a per-capita basis, together they control enormous sums.”)

There’s an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?

Bloggercon ahoy

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I spoke at the first Bloggercon last year and enjoyed it. Missed the second one last spring. Dave Winer asked me to moderate a discussion at the next one, on Nov. 6 at Stanford, and I was game. The topic is the next phase of the continuing dialogue on blogging and journalism. The previous discussions led by Ed Cone and Jay Rosen set high standards I’ll aim to match.

I’ve been a pro journalist for 20 years but I’ve always been on one fringe or another — first, as a writer for an alternative weekly; then, as a theater critic on the “wrong” coast, writing for the underdog afternoon paper here in San Francisco; then, as a migrant from the print world to the Web, here at Salon; most recently, as a pro editor turned blogger. Since I started my publishing career in my teens cranking out mimeographed Diplomacy and Dungeons & Dragons magazines in my basement, the new world of self-publishing makes me feel right at home.

I’ll do my best to steer us out of the shallow familiar waters (is blogging journalism? Of course! Much of the time, anyway) and toward what I feel are the more challenging questions about journalists’ and bloggers’ symbiotic relationship. I’ve tried to lay some of them out here. Feel free to join the discussion over on the Bloggercon site, or at the event, or right here.