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Fifteen years of epochal pronouncements

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In 1994 Louis Rossetto cranked up HotWired and believed he was ushering in the professionalization of the Web. It was time to rout all the anarchists and the hackers and the amateurs who thought the Internet was all about self-expression (and them). “The era of public-access Internet has come to an end,” he declared. He didn’t mean that the public would no longer be able to access the Internet, of course; he was drawing an analogy to public-access TV. Just as that once-promising avenue for citizen media had been eclipsed by the pros of the cable world, so, he reasoned, the Web would similarly leave the amateurism of its youth behind.

Nick Carr believes this is still going to happen, but many of us today understand that the opportunity the Web affords all of us to add to it lies at the heart of the medium’s identity. It’s not some minor feature of the medium’s youth that will be sloughed off as maturity arrives. It’s not some incidental efflorescence of excess creativity that will vanish once the laws of supply and demand kick in. It is what makes the Web tick. You can try to ignore that, and use the Web as a mere replacement for paper and trucks, but why bother? You will lose your readers and your future.

I thought of all this as I read reports today of Rupert Murdoch’s pronouncement that “The current days of the internet will soon be over.” Phrased that way, the prediction makes it sound like the end times are near. But the only apocalypse in sight, I’m afraid, is that of the old-line news industry, if it insists on pursuing dead-end subscription models for general-interest Web products.

There is money to be made on the Web for the providers of information, but it will never be made by locking away generic news and opinion articles and charging subscription fees to access them. Cutting your content off from the rest of the Web in this fashion robs it of its Webbiness. It’s like a movie producer in the 1930s saying, “Hey, let’s make talkies!”, but then turning off the sound in the theaters.

Murdoch, and any other publisher who shuts the gates, may well boost his bottom line in the short term. But in the medium term and beyond he is simply guaranteeing the slow decline and ultimate irrelevance of his publication. This is painful for journalists and media execs to hear, but they need to hear it — just as, back in 1994, Rossetto needed to hear that no, actually, “public access” was exactly what the Web was all about.

Mark Penn’s fuzzy pro-blogging stats

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I did a lot of digging around in the numbers around blogging for my book, so I’m on alert when I read a piece like Mark Penn’s look at pro blogging in the Wall Street Journal, which is getting lots of attention this morning. A little skepticism is definitely in order.

Here’s the nub of hard numbers in Penn’s piece:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s.

Where do these numbers come from?

“20 million bloggers” links to a 2008 report from Emarketer that costs $695 if you actually want to know how they got their numbers (I confess I haven’t made the investment).

“1.7 million profiting” links to a promotional page for BlogWorld Expo that cites no source at all for its data.

“452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income” is drawn from a Mediabistro rewrite of numbers from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports. Technorati’s are the longest-running and most valuable, and consistent, series of blogging studies over time, but like any study’s numbers, they can be easily misrepresented: here, Penn relies on them for the datum that bloggers who reach 100,000 uniques a month can earn $75K a year. But if you read the source, you find this:

The average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

In other words, the $75K average is skewed by a handful of outlier successes, but the great majority of bloggers who get 100,000 uniques/month earn more like $22,000. Here, the median is far more relevant than the average. Penn, of all people, knows this.

Later on, Penn’s piece cites other sources, including a Pew study and this iLibrarian post which references a 2008 study by an outfit called BIGResearch. The BIGResearch study particularly flummoxed me as I was researching my book, and in email correspondence with a company representative I got to the root of the oddness of their numbers: Their study defined “blogger” as, basically, anyone who writes or reads a blog. That’s one way to muddy the waters!

The methodology of Penn’s piece seems to be: gather as many numbers as you can and don’t worry about the fact that they are from many different sources at different times using different methodologies and even differing definitions of what it means to “be a blogger” — just toss them all together and start drawing conclusions. Those conclusions, in turn, seem to be based on a misapprehension that bloggers are by definition opinion writers. Many are, to be sure; but many others — particularly in the “pro blog” world Penn focuses on — concentrate on becoming expert sources in a particular area, or informational services, or link reviews.

My suggestion to Penn (who — full disclosure — I briefly worked for, decades ago, during my college years, when he was starting his company): You should commission a real study of blogging, using real sampling techniques, and share the results with the world. No one has done this yet that I’m aware of. You know how to do it! And we’d get a lot better information than this crazy-quilt pastiche of mix-‘n’-match stats.

UPDATE: Penn has posted an addition to his column that goes into more detail about the numbers. “I was surprised at how few studies there are on this,” he writes, “and I believe there definitely should be more. So perhaps in the future I will do some original research, but for this piece we took the best we could find and referenced every number so people would know where they came from.”

Every blog post a “request for comments”

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One of the points I make in Say Everything is that the reverse-chronological format that blogs use is embedded in the DNA of the Web from early high-profile uses in places like Tim Berners-Lee’s first website at info.cern and in Marc Andreessen’s NCSA What’s New page.

Today’s NY Times op-ed page features a great piece by Stephen D. Crocker that explains the history of the Request For Comment or RFC — the format the architects of the Internet used to promote the development of the open, extensible, cross-platform standards on which the Net as we know it today was built. RFCs were pragmatic and humble; the proponent of some new standard for computers to work with one another would put it out in public — at first, before the network itself provided an easier means of circulation, in snail mail — and take in critical comments and suggestions for improvements.

You could see this practice as the genetic foundation for the comments that today are a feature of nearly every kind of page published on the Web. Just as blogging’s reverse-chronological sequencing has its basis in the earliest structures of web pages, Crocker lets us see that the practice of adding a comments thread to blog posts can also be traced back to the early history of the Net.

In this sense, every blog post is, in its way, a “request for comments.”

What’s in a middle initial?

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One of the first things I learned as a rookie reporter was to ask everyone I interviewed how to spell their names and what their middle initials were. Who cared about the middle initial? Mostly, nobody. But obtaining it, the reasoning went, was a sign — to both the interviewee and, later on, your readers — that you cared about the details and could be trusted to get them right.

I still care about details and aim to spell names right. Mostly, I don’t bother with middle initials any more. Still, I take note when I see a Web writer who does. So I perked up while I was reading a breezy but lengthy piece titled “Die, Newspaper, Die” by
Mark Morford, a columnist at SFGate, the Web site of the foundering SF Chronicle. In his piece, Morford attempts to sum up the latest round in the Web’s discussion of post-newspaper journalism. He comes down on all sides at once, but with a definite leaning towards the value of the old pros, the sort of reporters who still bother to ask for middle initials:

In the howling absence of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility — what’s the new yardstick for integrity?

Alas, if including middle initials, and getting them right, is one of those yardsticks, Morford comes up short. For some reason, in referring to Steven Johnson — the widely known writer, founder of the pioneering Feed magazine and more recently Outside.in, and author of a currently much-discussed post on the new journalism ecosystem — Morford calls him “Steven P. Johnson.”

Now, getting a middle initial wrong could happen to anyone. But in Steven’s case, the man’s URL — at stevenberlinjohnson.com — includes his middle name. Morford even links to it.

A tiny thing, no doubt. But in a column whose title is “Notes and Errata,” it really made me wonder how much of that “100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility” is left to salvage.

Berkeley J-School’s Chronicle panel: The horse-and-buggy set’s lament

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[Warning — long post ahead! This happens when one has a transcontinental flight during which to blog.]

A panel at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism that I attended yesterday evening was titled “The SF Chronicle in Transition.” “Transition,” here, is plainly a euphemism; the title ought to have been “The Chronicle In Extremis,” and the mood was that of a wake.

There is plenty of cause for communal handwringing in the face of the wrenching cutbacks and shutdowns that are plaguing newspapers across the U.S. and that most recently have threatened the survival of our major Bay Area daily, which has reportedly been losing its owner, the Hearst Corporation, $50 million a year, and looks likely to cut its staff by half if owners and unions reach an agreement. If not, Hearst has threatened to shut the paper down, leaving this city without a major daily newspaper. (It’s hard to believe that Hearst would simply write off its huge investments in the Chron, however; the threat sounds more like a negotiating tactic than a serious option.)

The panel offered a by now familiar litany, a mixture of wrongheaded cliches with legitimate fears. Heard, for instance, was the old canard that giving up newspapers for the Web means we won’t ever stumble on things we didn’t know we were interested in. (In fact, hugely popular sites like Boing Boing or Kottke.org have professionalized the generation of serendipity, and our Twitter friends feed us as varied a diet of links as we choose to feast on.) Here was the routine complaint about rudeness and “uninformed shouting” in comments forums. (A brief shouting match between one member of the crowd at the Berkeley event and the editor and publisher of the Berkeley Daily Planet — from what I could hear, about whether a writer had been censored — was as rude and off-topic as anything I’ve seen in a newspaper comments section.)

Beyond the usual Web-bashing lay some realistic worries about how we’ll get our local news and who will perform the public-interest watchdog role if newspapers vanish. “We’re in for a real dangerous period where there’s no one watching the store,” Lowell Bergman, the veteran investigative reporter, predicted.

[Read more…]

Obama’s hard words

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“No drama Obama” found his drama this morning in the best possible way. Given the weight of expectations on his shoulders today, this wasn’t a foregone conclusion. I’m not sure exactly how one rises to such an occasion, how one finds the words to fit such times, but for me at least, our new president did.

One clue I realized as I listened to Obama’s words: this speech, stern in many ways and uningratiating by design, stuck to hard nouns and verbs. There was little flowery rhetoric. The sentences had weight not by being heavy but by being solid. In that solidity, I heard the cadences of Whitman and Melville, American voices full of rough power rooted in the experience of nature and the effort demanded by the settling of the land.

In speaking of “the risktakers, the doers, the makers of things,” Obama found words that could encompass both the laborers who have represented the old school of the Democratic Party and the entrepreneurs and digital innovators who represent its newer supporters. In telling us to it was time to “put away childish things,” he may have been referring to the bitter divisions of the past decade, the political squabbling that has diverted so much precious energy and time. “Childish” might well describe the stupidity of the Clinton impeachment drama; but — painful though it may be for many of us to accept — it might also refer to the passion for a settling of accounts with the malefactors of the Bush administration that so many of the new president’s supporters share. We’ll have to see, over time, exactly how Obama defines this “new era of responsibility.”

There was a roll-up-our-sleeves quality to the whole address that was sober without being grim. I’ll want more time to digest the whole thing. Right now, I’m left with the picture of Malia, the president’s older daughter, pulling out her own digital camera to take a picture right as the TV camera was trained on her. It was a little pointer to the future, a gesture for a new generation that will be taking charge of its media in ways we can’t yet imagine.

“Write it yourself” is Jay Rosen’s sharp advice to the new president. He means, “Write that new White House blog yourself” — but also, in that moving-finger-writes way, write the whole story, the big drama of the next four years, yourself. Really, it’s what each of us needs to do.

From Village Voice to blogosphere

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Louis Menand’s account of the early history of the Village Voice in this week’s New Yorker concludes with the following observation:

More than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere — whose motto might be “Every man his own Norman Mailer” — and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium.

Menand has it about half-right, I’d say. What was blogospheric about the Voice? For one thing, the way its writers were free to speak their minds, and to squabble with each other in public, in the pages of their own publication. These spats were part of the theater of the thing, and other publications looked down their noses at them. Also, decades before the term “MSM” had been coined, the Voice (in its Press Clips column) pioneered the sort of aggressive take-down of conventional journalism’s missteps that’s a blogging staple today.

But the Voice plainly wasn’t the blogosphere. It was too small, for one thing, too parochial. It did only a tiny bit of “what the Internet does” today, in terms of both quantity and variety. It was a newspaper: Its writers got paid, and there were editors, and you had to send them clips and a resume if you wanted your stuff published.

That’s what I did. As a young freelance journalist fresh out of college, I got my first break, my first pro byline, from M. Mark at the Voice’s book review section. She liked a piece I submitted — not well enough to run it, but enough to toss me a book to review. It was an experience I remain thankful for. But it had absolutely no similarity to what I’d do if I were 22 today, with the opportunity to publish open in my browser.

Menand is right, though, about the romance part. The belief that the form of journalism could stretch to contain a far wider spectrum of creative self-expression than the newsroom oldtimers were attempting incubated at the Voice. I inherited it from my college-newspaper mentors and carried it through my career. In the 1970s and ’80s this approach still had a renegade quality; today it is pretty much the norm, from blogs to the New York Times.

Can conservatives report?

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Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:

What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.

I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)

But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?

Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.

Google Blog Search loses its bearings

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Many serious bloggers rely on Google Blog Search to provide regular reports on who’s linking back to them. The blogging tool I use, WordPress, even uses Google’s blog search to feed a little window on the blog dashboard. (This is the listing it shows for this blog.)

The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read. So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard. This completely messes up the utility of Google’s search for me — and, from what I see posted by other serious bloggers, many other users.

Google’s whole expertise and reputation lies in the sorting of search results, so I’d hope and think that the company would pay close attention to this issue. But so far the only public comment I can find from Google itself about this problem is this post by Jeremy Hylton last month. Apparently Google Blog Search used to index only the content in the blog’s RSS feed, but now indexes the whole web page. Hylton says Google ” may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name.” Since (for instance) every installation of WordPress uses such a search this is not a minor issue; it is, for many of us, the central use of the service.

Hylton says Google’s working on a fix. In the meantime, the company might do a little more outreach so that it doesn’t face the general perception that its service is simply broken, which is how it feels now.

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan in comments below suggests that Google has focused on serving users doing general subject searches rather than bloggers searching for “who’s linking to me.” I’m sure that’s right. But the bloggers are the ones creating the content — they ought to be served well too. See Danny’s Searchengineland post for more info on the changes that Google made that resulted in this situation.

If newspapers were gone tomorrow

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For those still following the small-picture “death of the newspaper industry” tragedy while the much larger “collapse of the global economy” unfolds around it, there is a worthwhile exchange unfolding between Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer (starts with Jeff here, Dave answers here, Jeff responds, Dave replies).

It’s all food for thought but I want to highlight an analogy Dave raises today, which has, I think, a great clarity:

Imagine a group of doctors knew that all hospitals and pharmacies were about to shut down. What would they do? Might they do something to make sure their client’s health needs were at least partially attended to?

The same would presumably apply to many other professions, whose services are in some way necessary for life: police, fire, bus drivers, garbage collectors.

We’re often asked to believe how noble the profession of news is — now that is about to be tested in a whole new way. Are we just supposed to cry for this industry and throw our hands up and wait for the collapse before starting to put it back together, or would they like to help while they’re still here?

What’s valuable about this analogy is that it reminds journalists that they are actors in this drama, not victims. Victimhood is written deeply in the culture of the newsroom. It’s always the fault of the guys with the green eyeshades, or the publishers, or the advertisers, or even the readers.

Well, at this point, it hardly matters whose fault it is. Many of these ships are going down fast. If you’re a journalist who cares about the field as a vocation in the old sense (something to which you are called, and to which you feel a responsibility), if you believe that an informed public is a prerequesite for a functioning democracy, then think about Dave’s question. I am.

One of my formative professional experiences was working on the San Francisco Free Press in 1994. When the Newspaper Guild called a strike against the Examiner, where I worked, and the Chronicle (a strike over the jobs of truck drivers!), the Guild decided to publish a strike paper. We published a few editions on paper, but we posted daily on the Web. (The Well still has it up.) We did it partly because it was fun, but partly because we felt a responsibility to our community to keep providing it with news and information. That responsibility remains, whatever happens to the business model of the newspaper industry.