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Can we retire the “echo chamber” now?

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There’s so much to reassess today. Here’s one relatively small — but to me, interesting — thing.

For the past eight years, beginning with the Florida recount and ending with Sarah Palin’s last-ditch culture war, we’ve heard about the intense partisanship of the divide between red and blue. And one common idea about that divide has been the notion that the Web has helped create it, with its “echo chamber” effect. We have become a nation of “confirmation bias” addicts; we only read what we already agree with; we construct our own reality according to our close-minded beliefs. And that is why America is so angry, so split, so impossible to govern.

If that were true, then how did the most Web-enabled presidential campaign in history lead to such an overwhelming, incontestible outcome?

We’ve now had an election that was — whether you choose to call it a “landslide” or not (I do) — not close at all. We had “rednecks for Obama” and “Obamacon” neoconservatives for Obama and Republican loyalists looking up in the voting booth and saying to themselves, “Oh my god, I’m voting for Obama.” We had the most potentially divisive candidacy in our lifetime — an African American liberal from an urban Northern state running on a peace platform! — produce a victory that was won with an almost shocking degree of calm and respect.

Obama himself and his campaign deserves most of the credit for this, of course. But perhaps we can also reserve a little mental space for a reevaluation of our assumptions about the role the Web plays in our political discourse.

It hasn’t been my practice to post writing from my new book here (it’s just a fuzzy draft right now!), but this is a short passage from a discussion about the “echo chamber” argument that I think is pertinent:

Yes, American politics had grown bitterly polarized in the 2000s. But were the angry arguments on the Web the cause of those divisions? More likely, they simply mirrored profound disagreements among the American people about the impeachment of President Clinton, the contested outcome of the 2000 election, the Bush administration’s tactics in its war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq. What kind of media environment that accurately represented the political pysche of the American population would not bristle with rancor under the pressure of such events?

Today, we have at least an opportunity to begin to reduce that rancor and rebuild a national consensus. We have the first president in ages who can legitimately claim a mandate and work with a Congress of his own party. And I think we will see that the Web has a part to play in fashioning such a consensus. It doesn’t have to be a force for division; using it as such is a choice, not a technologically determined inevitability.

Andreessen’s newspaper advice echoes Grove’s, a decade ago

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We’re moving into the endgame for newspapers today, though the industry hasn’t quite reached the Kubler-Rossian stage of acceptance.

Yesterday the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it was abandoning daily print publication. In Portfolio, Marc Andreessen proposes that other newspapers follow suit and finally give up on print:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business — shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The Intel reference here is an oblique reference to Andy Grove’s famous comment to the ASNE that the newspaper industry had three years to adapt or die.

That was in 1999.

Andreessen’s advice makes total sense in many ways — it would be fascinating and worthwhile for at least one major newspaper publisher to try it. This sort of turn-your-company-on-a-dime idea is part of the Silicon Valley ethos. But I just don’t see it happening.

Hard though it no doubt was, it’s still a lot easier for a hardware company like Intel to retool its fabs and its engineers to produce a different kind of chip than for a newspaper company to retool its reporters and editors to produce a different kind of media product.

Shutting off the presses at the New York Times, or any other major newspaper publisher, would make the company an “internet-only company.” But it wouldn’t make it an Internet Company, in the larger sense. You’d still have a newsroom full of people used to doing things a certain way, proud, with good reason, of that way, and suspicious of change. It’s much easier to build a new company from scratch than to transform an existing one into something new.

But the bigger problem isn’t psychological, it’s financial. I base my views on a decade of experience at Salon, trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenues. It turns out that the hardest part of this massive and inevitable industrial transition is not reconstituting high-quality journalism in a new media environment. That’s only mildly hard. Top-notch journalists will always seek to do top-notch work.

The really tough part — the part that to this day remains unsolved — is figuring out how to support those top-notch journalists with the salaries and benefits they are accustomed to, and often deserve. (That’s not even taking into account the loss of jobs on the printing and distribution side. But they are disappearing eventually no matter what.) The problem today is not much easier than it was when we started Salon in 1995: Look at Politico — an online success d’estime that still earns 90 percent of its revenue from a niche print product.

Newspaper companies are clinging to their dwindling print profits because they can’t yet see a way to keep anything close to their current pay scale and benefits in an online-only world. And the hardest pill for the industry to swallow is that there may not be any way to do that.

Internet companies pay top dollar to their engineers, not their “content producers.” There is no shortage of reasonably high quality content on the Web, much of it produced for free or little pay. Of course blogs and “user generated content” can’t replace the collective output of the nation’s journalism professionals today. But they offer plenty of alternatives, and enough occasions on which they surpass the pros (or expose the pros’ failings) to keep readers occupied, and sometimes satisfied.

As Bruce Reed wrote in Slate last year during the Hollywood writer’s strike, “There is no such thing as a writer’s market. With or without subsidy, words are always in surplus, and it’s always a reader’s market.”

No amount of handwringing will change that. If newspapers are really going to take the leap Andreessen proposes, they will have to do it while simultaneously restructuring their deals with their employees and mandating painful cuts that nobody wants to accept. Which is why I don’t think they will do it at all.

Ironically, of course, those jobs will vanish anyway. As I wrote in June, I think the newspaper-company ships are doomed to sink, and individual journalists will have to find their own individual lifeboats and routes to shore. The sooner they start, the better.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Potts thinks “Newspapers haven’t even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue” and an exclusively online operation could rake in more money. I don’t know; I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not so easy. Alan Mutter says the magic multiple is 3 — newspapers would have to triple their current online revenue to break even.

Twitter’s link-sharing limits

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One of the main things that I do on Twitter these days, and that the people I follow do, is share links. Sharing links is one of the primal activities on the Web. It was one of the first things people did once they started building Web pages; it was one of the two driving forces behind the rise of blogging (the other was unedited self-expression).

Twitter was built for people to share “status messages” — the answer to the “What are you doing?” question — but most of the people I follow don’t use it for that very much. They use it to comment on news events and to share links they like. Because of this disjunction between original design and “street use,” I find that Twitter gets only one thing about sharing links right — and pretty much everything else wrong.

What it gets right is immediacy. Twitter is fantastic when there’s a breaking story and you want to see what links people are handing around. It’s a much speedier way to tune in to what’s happening (Senator Stevens — guilty!) than RSS feeds or reloading a news site’s front page.

But Twitter privileges “now”-ness over everything else. You can’t tag your links. You can annotate them only if you can say what you wish in under 140 characters (actually, under 140 minus the length of the URL). You can’t even see what the actual URL is, most of the time, since people use URL-shorteners to save space. There is really no other way to say this: For a service that is so widely used to share links, Twitter really sucks at it.

Delicious has long offered the best combination of features for simple link saving and sharing (it’s got space for annotations and a spiffy new interface). You can use Delicious to “follow” (subscribe to) specific tags, but not, as far as I can tell, to follow specific users. (If I’m behind on Delicious’s feature set, enlighten me!) You can use Delicious-generated RSS feeds for that, but we’re getting pretty far afield — nothing remotely approaching Twitter’s simplicity.

So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.

Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.

Reports of blogging’s death are…

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Just in time for me to include somewhere near the end of my book, there’s a little wavelet of argument out there suggesting that blogging is, well, over.

From Paul Boutin in Wired comes the simple form of the argument: Blogging’s no longer hot. The cool kids are all playing with Twitter and Facebook. The blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Boutin seals his case by reference to Jason Calacanis’s much-ballyhooed retreat from his blog to a mailing list. Boutin somehow buys Calacanis’s public rationale — “He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters” — which sounds great until you think, uh, couldn’t he have just turned off the comments?

Then there’s Robert Scoble, who now reserves his blog for longer essays and can be found in many other spots on the Web distributing links and videos and tweets. Scoble’s choice seems perfectly sensible to me; he is a restless early adopter and experimenter, but he’s not exactly abandoning his popular blog.

Boutin’s piece betrays a nostalgia for what it explicitly refers to as a “golden age” of blogging, which apparently occurred circa 2004 and was led by people like Calacanis and Scoble. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my book research it’s that each of us locates blogging’s “golden age” in whichever era it was that we discovered the phenomenon. For me, it was probably 1998, when I found my job as Salon’s technology editor incomparably enriched (and also assisted) by the first flowering of the tech and web-design weblog movement. For many others, it was the early days of Blogger in 2000-2001, or the explosion of political blogs and “warblogs” post-9/11.

There were, in other words, at least three — and probably several more — waves of bloggers preceding Boutin’s version of a “golden age,” each of which felt they were discovering something new. (See Rebecca Blood’s “law of Weblog history.”) And, inevitably, after our personal “golden age” experiences, whenever they were, we tend to get disillusioned. Some will gravitate entirely away from blogging; others achieve some peace with it despite its limitations and problems. I guess Boutin is somewhere in that cycle now.

I share his distaste for the way that the commercialization of the Technorati Top 100 has turned a certain type of blogging into a rat race, but I don’t see that as having ruined blogging for the rest of us. Nor do I see a phenomenon with tens if not hundreds of millions of participants as dead. Of course the Silicon Valley early-adopter crowd has moved on — that’s what they’re supposed to do, once something they pioneered has gone mainstream. Boutin, meanwhile, is now a full-time blogger at Valleywag. Perhaps that dismal gig is what’s got him so down.

A broader epitaph not so much for blogging itself but for the promise blogging made of widening our democratic discourse comes from Nick Carr (on his, er, blog, of course). Carr writes about the changes since he started blogging in 2005: apparently in that distant halcyon time, Technorati could be reliably used to track discussions in the blogosphere, but now, Google does a better job. Google Reader, too, has supplanted Bloglines as the RSS reader of choice for many (me, too). Back in 2005 the Web was “centrifugal,” pulling us away from centers of gravity, but today, as Google becomes the center of so many Web services, the medium has once again become “centripetal,” Carr argues. He is smart enough to admit that centrifugal forces remain — enterprising sites and bloggers that still employ “deliberately catholic linking” — but says they’re weaker than the centralizing forces.

“For most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place. Indeed, statistics indicate that web traffic is becoming more concentrated at the largest sites,” Carr writes.

I recall reading identical passages a decade ago, when the first flush of Web novelty had worn off and the portals were taking over. Then, as with Carr’s observation today, we were told that the Web’s innovative days were over, its disruptive potential was used up, and the big media conglomerates were back in charge. At that moment, you could still count the number of weblogs on your fingers (and maybe toes); Google hadn’t even been founded yet.

I continue to bet on the flexibility of the Web as a platform for personal expression that will keep mutating and surprising us. Blogging has been a central part of that phenomenon for a decade. Of course it will continue to evolve. But I don’t see it diminishing in importance.

Consider the case of Merlin Mann, whose excellent 43 Folders blog rose to stardom during Boutin’s “golden age.” Mann’s experience made an effective case study for how a blog could grow from a personal obsession to a profitable small business, but over time he grew disenchanted with much of what “pro blogging” had become. As he wrote last month:

the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Mann didn’t just go off in a corner and sulk; he decided to reinvent his blog, transforming it from “personal productivity” coaching to a broader theme of helping creative people think about how to focus on what’s important to them. Kottke wrote a bit about Mann’s changes here.

I’ve come to enjoy Twitter, and made my peace with Facebook, and I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who will prefer to use these services rather than start a blog. But as long as blogging remains a form that can absorb the energy of people like Merlin Mann and serve as a creative outlet for millions of others, I will treat all reports of its demise as unreliable.

Or maybe, as Matthew Ingram Seamus McCauley suggests, Boutin was just trolling.

UPDATE: Two useful comments (from Twitter):

Paul Kedrosky: current wired piece by paul boutin about death of blogs is silly. only reason 30-author blogs exist is because of ad bubble. that’s over.

Anil Dash: Dear tech blogosphere: Paul Boutin blogs for a living in a competitive market, and just said you should stop blogging. Guess why he said it?

It should be noted that Dash’s “The Blog Cycle” is an authoritative description of the “golden age” phenomenon I described above.

Sullivan’s new blog manifesto

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Andrew Sullivan’s essay “Why I Blog,” in the new Atlantic, is a valuable meditation on the act of blogging from one of the key figures in the story of the rise of the political blogosphere. (It echoes a lot of what Sullivan wrote in a blogger “manifesto” back in 2002 — now available, as far as I can tell, only on the Internet Archive.)

It’s not surprising to find Sullivan focusing on the provisional, in-the-moment nature of a blogger’s work: of all the prominent political bloggers, he has charted the most extended voyage of partisan transformation, from a belligerent supporter of President Bush post 9-11 through disillusionment with the botched Iraq war and its accompanying moral failures to a current pro-Obama stance.

Sullivan describes blogging as “writing out loud,” a form that “exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before”:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

I think it’s important to say that Sullivan offers blanket declarations about the nature of blogging that really ought to be understood as descriptions of his particular mode of blogging. The picture of blogging Sullivan paints is very much one from the perspective of a writer trained as a print journalist. Nothing wrong with that; I’m in the same boat. But blogging is, as Sullivan says, an enterprise of the individual, and individual experiences are all over the map — many, almost certainly the majority, very different from his, yet no less valid.

Another point Sullivan makes is that bloggers are actually more accountable than their conventional-journalism colleagues, not less — because “there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness” in the give-and-take of email or comments or linked-back posts.

So permit me to point out one sloppy error in “Why I Blog” — Sullivan’s description of Slate as “the first magazine published exclusively on the Web.” Sullivan also wrote for Salon, and he pairs Salon and Slate later in the piece, so I’d guess the error was careless rather than malicious. Still, let the record show that Salon published its first issue, “exclusively on the Web,” a full eight months before Slate — Nov. 1995 as opposed to mid-1996. (Here’s a piece I wrote back then making fun of some of what Slate editor Michael Kinsley had to say about the Web, which he plainly didn’t understand.) And Salon wasn’t the first, either, anyway. Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman were publishing Feed for about six months before us. Hotwired, for that matter, launched a full year earlier than Salon. All were professional online-only “magazines” that paid their writers and sold ads. No doubt there were others I’m forgetting.

This really is the sort of mistake that fact-checkers are paid to prevent — trivial in one sense, but self-perpetuating in another, because the next time some fact-checker wants to know who published the first online magazine, they’ll cite this Atlantic piece as an authority.

As Sullivan puts it:

Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup.

Sarah Palin vs the media filter

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One of the themes of the book I’m working on is the whole notion so many bloggers have had that the media represent a “filter,” and blogging allows it to be bypassed. Not an idea that’s original to me — you betcha! — but one that is entwined with the whole subject I’m covering.

So you know that my ears perked up in the vice-presidential debate last week when Sarah Palin said:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard. I’d rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

She hit the same point again on Fox on Friday, discussing her disastrous performances with Katie Couric:

I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.

And here she is again in William Kristol’s column today:

She doesn’t have a very high opinion of the mainstream media… She described the debate on Thursday night as “liberating,” and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, “getting to speak directly to the folks.”

It’s fair to say, I think, that “bash the MSM and yearn to speak directly to the folks” is now at the front of Palin’s deck of talking-point index cards, right up there with “maverick.” Before diving in for a look at this rhetoric, a caveat: It may ultimately be impossible to try to read Palin’s words here, as elsewhere, too closely. Like some smudged-out ancient scroll, her text is simply too corrupted in too many ways to support a confident interpretation. Still, her animus against the “filter” is no coincidence, and bears scrutiny.

A filter can be a highly useful thing. Most of us value the idea that the news media will boil down a torrent of information into something manageable. But filters can distort a signal, and they can malfunction: they can filter out something we want, or include something we don’t want. So we need filters, but we don’t always trust them.

Some of the earliest blogs viewed themselves as filters of the Web (Michael Sippey called his proto-blog Filter, or later Filtered for Purity); their idea was a curatorial culling of tidbits found during Web wanderings. (The tradition is upheld today by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.)

But there’s also a long tradition among bloggers of viewing blogs as the antidote to filters. In this view, the media are literally an unreliable middle-man who must be cut out. The media filter will get your age wrong or mangle your words or just not tell your story in the way you think it should be told. Now that anyone can publish, you don’t have to take this lying down. So today we have public figures like Mark Cuban blogging, putting his own statements and thoughts directly on the record.

Now comes Palin, trying to join this parade. The problem is, your typical ranter against the evil ways of the media filter is someone who has been covered for some time and has built up a critical mass of resentment at factual errors or misquotes.

But Palin? Who’s filtering her? She has spent her month as a major-party vice presidential candidate without holding a single press conference. She has submitted to a number of interviews that you could count on the fingers of a single hand, and still have fingers left over. Yet she has the chutzpah to gripe that she would happily “speak directly to the folks,” but the darned media filter keeps getting in her way!

No, Palin’s problem isn’t too much filter — it’s not enough signal.

Obviously Palin’s preference is for a media channel in which no one will interrupt her talking points or challenge her on a stumble or a lie. She longs for some sort of combination of blogging’s directness and the Olympian remoteness of a broadcast medium that brooks no challenge. “Let me talk to you without the filter,” she says, “but I won’t take questions.” Every politician would love that — but nearly all accept that they’re not going to get it.

Alas for Palin, we have not yet devised that ideal communication method which would bypass media filters and miraculously convey her vision directly directly to the American people via, say, telepathy (or even speaking in tongues). There simply is no such thing as “speaking directly to the American people” without also having the “mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard” right afterwards.

They did so right after that very debate that Palin said she “liked” for its directness, so go figure. It’s here, I think, that the unreadable-text problem grows insurmountable. For Palin, what we really need isn’t a filter but rather a text-unscrambler.

In any case, the spirit of blogging is all about mixing it up, posting and counterposting and dealing with critical comments. You get to “speak directly” — but so does everybody else. It’s not the equivalent of having no press conferences at all; it’s like having a continuous press conference in which everyone, officially credentialled or no, gets to ask questions. It would be fascinating to see Palin try speaking that directly.

Mediashift’s Simon Owens reports on my blog book

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Earlier this summer, Simon Owens asked me if I’d give him an interview for his blog about the book I’ve been working on. I was happy to oblige. Then it turned out he took the piece to the PBS Media Shift blog, which he contributes to, and there it is, today — a little introduction to the project, a couple of interesting tidbits I’ve dug up, and a little perspective from Rebecca Blood to boot.

Here’s a bit:

Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.

“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”

Thanks to Simon for the piece. I’ve now got rough drafts of more than half of my chapters, and am racing frantically to meet my deadline, which is before the end of the year. If I’m scarce round these parts, you know why.

Oh yeah, I also see that I’d better update my author photo when I get the chance!

Spinspotter’s campaign against bias targets the wrong problem

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Plenty of Web startups begin with a good idea and fail because it’s just plain hard to build software well, and Web sites are tricky beasts, and getting users isn’t easy. Then there are the startups where the trouble isn’t with execution; it’s with the initial idea. The company has simply set out to solve the wrong problem.

I have to say that Spinspotter, which debuted at Demo today, looks like it’s in that latter category to me. This is a site that uses an algorithm to detect what it defines as bias or “spin” in news coverage. (Here’s coverage from the Times, the Journal, and BusinessWeek.)

The pitfalls and perils in getting an effort like this to work in any sort of way that doesn’t evoke titters are legion. But let’s not even bother with that part of the debate. (Businessweek offers a list of the six criteria, which include everything from too much passive voice to too much “reporter’s voice.”) The real issue here is that the very idea of SpinSpotter is wrongheaded.

Is having a computer program scouring news articles and underlining each appearance of what it defines as bias going to improve any journalist’s work, or any reader’s understanding of the news? If Spinspotter succeeds in redlining every appearance of what it considers “bias” from the news, surely the resulting gelded coverage — deprived of any trace of anyone’s voice, echoing with what Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere” — will no longer be of interest to any reader more human than the Spinspotter code.

There is plenty of room for Web sites and services that enable us to better sort fact from fiction, to help us think about what coverage is fair and what is duplicitous, to figure out who we might want to trust and who we might want to distrust among our media sources. But the helful site needs to start by asking those questions — not by simply exhorting its users to “Find bias and tear it a new one.” (The slogan makes me all warm and nostalgic for the blogosphere’s old promise of “we can fact-check your ass.”)

The complaints about “bias in the media” today do not emerge in a vacuum. It’s not as if there were some platonic ideal of news, an attainable and perfect “objective news reporting” standard that our reporters and editors just need to sweat a little harder to achieve. The frequent accusations of bias you hear today, from every point on the political spectrum, are a symptom of the extreme divisions in our political system and our nation.

Journalists are human beings. “Objectivity” is not within their capacity. Bias will always be charged. Sometimes it will come as a result of genuinely shoddy journalism, where reporters have slanted coverage unfairly based on their own prejudices; sometimes it will come as a result of shoddy news consumption, where a reader just doesn’t like the facts that a reporter has presented because they conflict with his world view. Spinspotter promises both “wisdom of the crowd” style voting and human “referees” to build checks and balances into its system. But I suspect these will just end up either recapitulating the left-right fusillades that already fill the political blog-comment-sphere, or reproducing the “view from nowhere” bromides that satisfy no one.

SpinSpotter’s design starts from an assumption that there is some abstract and definable concept of “bias” independent of our own relative perspectives. But we all encounter the biases in the coverage we read through the lens of our own pre-installed biases. And so what? Every act of journalism is biased! We can’t and shouldn’t set out to eliminate bias from journalism, not only because it is impossible but because it is unwise. Instead, we should expect journalists do a better job of being fair and accurate and passionate in their quest for the truth as they see it. We should help readers find the journalists they trust and question the ones they don’t. And we could all use help finding our way through this new era when there is little boundary left between the one group of journalists and the other of readers.

The real problem with our media in this decade has not been too much bias. The problem has been that too often our most influential journalists have not stepped forward to call out official lies. We have suffered from a surfeit of “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism, which is a poor substitute for anyone’s truth. The Spinspotter-style effort to eliminate “bias” ultimately leads down the road to more of that ritual, not less.

Spinspotter’s home-page rhetoric crows, “The truth is back in town”…”Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news”…”take back the truth” — as if the truth were some golden residue left behind once you have stripped off all the layers of bias you can find. But I think that, even if Spinspotter could somehow perfect its algorithms and unerringly remove all the human perspective and “reporter’s voice” from the articles it points at, you’d find there’s nothing of any value left.

Clearly not self-promotional enough

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On the recommendation of BoingBoing, I hied myself over to check out Polymeme, a new news-aggregator site that collects top stories based on clusters of links from expert blogs. (From what I can see it appears to be kin to Techmeme and Memeorandum.)

Polymeme looks interesting. The funny thing is, the first thing my eye landed on on the home page tonight was a headline that read: “Self-Promotion Becomes a Prerequisite for Online Journos.” Hmmm, that sounds similar to that post I wrote a few days ago about rustling up readers. Then I read the text under the headline and realized, wait a minute, this is that post I wrote a few days ago about rustling up readers. I made Polymeme before I even knew it existed. I’ve got this self-promotion stuff down!

Only, on second look, wait a sec: there’s no link to my blog, and no attribution of my words. How’d that happen? The link is actually to a post Dan Gillmor wrote at PBS. Dan quoted a paragraph from me; that graph is featured on Polymeme. (I imagine the Polymeme front page will change at some point soon, but here’s a permalink page with the same excerpt and more links.)

Well, the main thing is, the ideas in my prose are now out there. Glad to see my little contribution propagating. But I guess I could still use a little work on the self-promotion angle…

Essential skill: The art of rustling up readers

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I saw this on Twitter today from Jay Rosen:

Publishing used to be the barrier. Now that publishing is easy, getting your stuff picked up, linked to is an essential skill.

Jay was responding to a question from Howard Rheingold, who asked:

Skills for digitally-savvy journalists: RSS, map mashups, widgets, Twitter (video goes without saying). What else?

I read Jay’s answer and had two thoughts. One, this is absolutely right. Two, it is an insight that most working journalists today — at least those who are working for some newspaper or broadcast outlet or magazine, as opposed to those who have already lighted out for the online territories — are occupationally blind to.

They cannot see this because, all their working lives, the business of gathering their audience has been handled for them. Whether you are a brilliant journalist or a total hack, you get accustomed to assuming that you have a lot of readers because you are gifted and wonderful and creative. Whereas, in truth, whether you are in fact gifted and wonderful and creative, or not (and you? you are — of course you are!), you have those readers because you work for some company that has supplied them for you.

In other words, most journalists confuse what they have inherited ex officio with what they have earned through their own talent and sweat. It’s comforting but fundamentally unrealistic. (See Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody for more on this.)

This privilege disintegrates out on the Web once you leave the protective umbrella and traffic supply of a media company. For instance, this little blog used to be associated with Salon.com. In its previous incarnation as part of the Salon Blogs program, it got a significant amount of traffic off Salon’s home page. That was great — but it didn’t have much to do with the quality of what I was producing. (I suppose if I had raved like a lunatic or begun to peddle miracle cures, David Talbot or Joan Walsh would eventually have spoken up.)

When I left Salon the blog became an independent entity. Of course its traffic declined. I could have poured my energy into posting round the clock and promoting the blog — maybe I should have! I’d certainly have had fun. But I’ve been writing books instead. That challenge, at this point in my life and career, feels like it’s pushing me harder and teaching me more. And it’s a living. So the blog is a side effort, and I’m content, for now at least, with its being a poky little personal blog that people who are interested in my work can follow.

So the blog goes along day by day with a few hundred page views (measured for real, conservatively) or maybe breaks a thousand or two on a good day, and I’m fine with that. But then every now and then somebody I don’t know decides to promote something I’ve written on some high-traffic Web crossroads — and suddenly, blam, the traffic goes through the roof. For instance, last week I posted my thoughts on Sarah Lacy’s book. My regulars read it (or not), and I moved on. A week later, some kind soul posted a link to this review over on Y Combinator’s Reddit-style “hacker news” feed, and, blam, thousands of people were reading it –or, you know, at least loading it in their browsers.

Thank you to whoever did that. Writers are always grateful for readers.

This is the way the Web works. If this (or any) blog were my primary focus, I’d be out there rustling up readers for it, because that’s what you have to do. I think a lot of journalists still see this as a grubby, low, self-promoting activity that is beneath them. Of course, it can be done in a grubby way (and often is) — but that’s true of everything. Writing headlines is, after all, another form of the art of rustling up readers. It can be done with style and flair; it can be done crudely and effectively; it can be done clumsily and stupidly. But it must be done. There is no alternative.

Watching how Salon’s home page drove traffic to all its stories through the years depending on the quality of the headlines we wrote taught me to respect this art. The business of publishing a book and figuring out how to get it noticed taught me even more not to look down on it. It is, as Jay said, an essential skill for any journalist who does not already have some guaranteed audience in the back pocket. Those guarantees are increasingly rare — for entry-level folks, they’re virtually non-existent. Relying on them might be even more painful than learning some new tricks.