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Why MediaBugs won’t take the red or blue (state) pill

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We’re excited about the expansion of MediaBugs.org, our service for reporting errors in news coverage, from being a local effort in the San Francisco Bay Area to covering the entire U.S.

But with this expansion we face an interesting dilemma. Building a successful web service means tapping into users’ passions. And there’s very little that people in the U.S. are more passionate about today than partisan politics.

We have two very distinct populations in the country today with widely divergent views. They are served by separate media establishments, and they even have their own media-criticism establishments divided along the red and blue axis.

So the easiest way to build traffic and participation for a new service in the realm of journalism is to identify yourself with one side or the other. Instant tribe, instant community. Take a red-state pill or a blue-state pill, and start watching the rhetoric fly and the page views grow.

I’m determined not to do that with MediaBugs, though it’s sorely tempting. Here’s why.

I don’t and can’t claim any sort of neutrality or freedom from bias as an individual, and neither, I believe can any journalist. Anyone who reads my personal blog or knows my background understands that I’m more of a Democratic, liberal-progressive kind of person. This isn’t about pretending to some sort of unattainable ideal of objectivity or about seeking to present the “view from nowhere.”

Instead, our choice to keep MediaBugs far off the red/blue spectrum is all about trying to build something unique. The web is already well-stocked with forums for venting complaints about the media from the left and the right. We all know how that works, and it works well, in its way. It builds connections among like-minded people, it stokes fervor for various causes, and sometimes it even fuels acts of research and journalism.

What it rarely does, unfortunately, is get results from the media institutions being criticized. Under the rules of today’s game, the partisan alignment of a media-criticism website gives the target of any criticism an easy out. The partisan approach also fails to make any headway in actually bringing citizens in the different ideological camps onto the same playing field. And I believe that’s a social good in itself.

It would be easy to throw up our hands and say, “Forget it, that will never happen” — except that we have one persuasive example to work from. Wikipedia, whatever flaws you may see in it, built its extraordinary success attracting participation from across the political spectrum and around the world by explicitly avowing “a neutral point of view” and establishing detailed, open, accountable processes for resolving disputes. It can get ugly, certainly, in the most contested subject areas. But it seems, overall, to work.

So with MediaBugs, we’re renouncing the quick, easy partisan path. We hope, of course, that in return for sacrificing short-term growth we’ll emerge with a public resource of lasting value. The individuals participating in MediaBugs bring their own interests and passions into the process. It’s the process that we can try to maintain as a fair, open system, as we try to build a better feedback loop for fixing errors and accumulate public data about corrections.

To the extent that we are able to prove ourselves as honest brokers in the neverending conflicts and frictions that emerge between the media and the public, we will create something novel in today’s media landscape: An effective tool for media reform that’s powered by a dedication to accuracy and transparency — and that transcends partisan anger.

I know many of you are thinking, good luck with that. We’ll certainly need it!

Crossposted from MediaShift Idea Lab and the MediaBugs Blog

What if the future of media is no “dominant players” at all?

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The New Yorker’s John Cassidy recently concluded a skeptical review of the finances of Gawker Media (which I caught up with late) — a piece somewhat ludicrously headlined “Is Nick Denton Really the New Rupert Murdoch?” — by asking the following question:

Can Gawker Media (and other blogging outfits such as the Huffington Post) translate their rapid audience growth into big streams of revenue and profits, thereby becoming dominant players in the news-media business? Or will the established players, which now have sizeable online arms as well as other sources of income (and costs), ultimately come out on top? Therein lies the future.

“The future” has been lying “therein” over and over for the last 15 years, yet it never seems to turn out that way. This kind of thinking drives me nuts — it’s always a zero-sum battle for dominance. (Can the scrappy little new guys grow so powerful that they’ll replace the big old guys? Or will the lumbering big old guys survive and “ultimately come out on top”?) And it always misses the point.

There are many other imaginable scenarios. Here’s the one I think is most likely.

Denton’s Gawker, Huffington Post, and similar-scale ventures won’t “become dominant players.” But those that husband their resources and play their cards smartly will survive, continuing to grow and to figure out the contours of the new media we are all building. They’ll be active, important players, without “dominating” the way the winners of previous era’s media wars did.

Meanwhile, “the established players” will fall into two groups. Many will collapse under the weight of their legacy costs and dwindling revenues, as so many are already starting to. Others will survive by figuring out, in time, how to cut costs while expanding their online reach.

The survivors in the second group will find that they can be profitable and do good work, but they will hardly have “come out on top.” In fact, as companies, they will come out looking much more like Gawker Media and Huffington Post than today’s Time Inc. or New York Times Company.

(The other factor here is that new “dominant players” may enter from other quarters — just look at the investments AOL and Yahoo are making in content. But I think they’ll find dominance elusive, too.)

In other words, this is a future with no small group of “dominant players,” but maybe a much broader spectrum of modestly successful players. This is because, in a world awash in content, the media business is never going to be as profitable as it was in a world of scarce content. It will be sustainable, but it won’t support the sort of monopoly profits that made it so attractive for seekers after dominance, you can check this website to find more info

It is also a world where there are no more Rupert Murdochs, which would come as a relief.

This outcome is almost entirely inconceivable to New York media insiders and to the reporters whose job, like Cassidy’s, is to cover their world.

The rest of us should cross our fingers and hope that…therein lies the future.

When campaign spending is anonymous, reality gets slippery

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I still get both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on paper, and every morning I have the opportunity to compare their front pages, and thereby, their world views. Increasingly, it looks like the US’s two weightiest national papers are presenting fundamentally different pictures of the world to their readers.

Friday offered a particularly striking contrast: Both papers led with stories about campaign finance.


If you read the Times, you came away with the impression that the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobby, was blowing out the gaskets this cycle. The chart accompanying the Times’ lead story identified the Chamber as “The top non-party spender” in the election, having spent $21.1 million, an amount raised largely from “a relatively small collection of big corporate donors” who have been able to remain anonymous.

Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal, the lead story painted a vastly different picture: “Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays,” the headline reads. “The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections,” according to the Journal, with a war chest of $87.5 million. The Times chart, by contrast, has AFSCME spending only $7.9 million.

There are any number of possible explanations for this discrepancy. I’m no campaign finance expert, but I assume it has to do with different sourcing; different definitions of “outside group” and “independent” or “non-party” status; different timespans aggregated in the totals; and no doubt other factors.

Observant readers will note that each paper’s version of this story neatly maps to the ideological positions their critics have assigned them. Blue-state liberals are outraged that the Supreme Court has allowed business to pour anonymous millions into this election cycle; red-state conservatives have long believed that business cash is only a necessary counterweight to the mighty electoral power of union dollars. The Times and the Journal are both playing the roles their opponents have cast them for in this partisan drama.

Still: campaign spending is one of those matters of fact that we ought to be able to nail. Somebody is the biggest “outside spender” in this cycle — either it’s a union, or it’s some conservative lobby like the Chamber of Commerce. Or it’s some anonymous group. Which raises the question of how either paper can make a claim to knowing who the top outside spender is in the elections, since it seems pretty clear that astroturf groups flush with unmarked bills are flooding these elections with unprecedentedly huge sums that no one has been able even to begin to count.

In order to argue about this picture with any confidence, you need data. You need to know who is spending what. And of course that is the problem with this election cycle: Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn our already highly inadequate campaign finance rules, we voters don’t have even the most basic information about who is spending how much on the elections.

You can argue that “money is speech” from now till doomsday. We aren’t anywhere close to the stage of having the important discussion of how we actually restrict this kind of spending. All we’re saying is: surely the American people have a right to know who is buying its lawmakers.

Right now this demand comes from the left, but I have a feeling we might hear a little more of it from the Tea Party types after this election, when they see how effectively all that corporate cash deep-sixes their hopes of dynamiting the status quo.

As Frank Rich points out in his column today, the Tea Party’s angry populists are in for a rude surprise when they discover just how completely the candidates they aim to elect are owned by deep-pocketed contributors:

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates.

Those candidates were bought with unmarked bills. This campaign money is now as hard to trace as the mortgage dollars that two years ago blew up the economy and that are now jamming the works of the foreclosure machine.

How can you even begin to claim to have fair elections or an honest government without transparency in political spending? Why should the right to free political speech also cover the right to anonymous political speech by the million-dollar-load? Until we repair this colossal breakdown of our system, we’ll be stuck in the 2010 cycle’s banana-republic mode.

UPDATE: For another slice of campaign-finance reality, read Greg Sargent’s Washington Post piece:

According to data from the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, conservative groups that have spent significant sums have plowed nearly $75 million in undisclosed donations alone into this election. By contrast, liberal groups have spent under $10 million…

Thanks for the memories! Why Facebook “download” rocks

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At Open Web Foo I led a small discussion of what I called the “Social Web memory hole” — the way that social networks suck in our contributions and then tend to bury them or make them inaccessible to their authors. It was a treat to share my ideas with this crowd of super-smart tech insiders, though I did have to spell out the Orwell reference (ironic nod to 1984, not joke about memory leaks in program code!).

What I heard was that this problem — which I continue to find upsetting — is most likely a temporary one. Twitter, I was assured, understands the issue and views it as a “bug.” Which is encouraging — except how many years do we wait before concluding that the bug is never going to be fixed?

Meanwhile, the same weekend, Facebook had just introduced its new “download your information” feature. Which is why, at this moment of Wall Street Journal-inspired anti-Facebook feeding frenzy, I want to offer a little counter-programming.

I do not intend to argue about whether Facebook apps passing user IDs in referrer headers is an evil violation of privacy rules, or just the way the Web works. There are some real issues buried in here, but unfortunately, the Journal’s “turn the alarms to 11” treatment has made thoughtful debate difficult. (This post over at Freedom to Tinker is a helpfully sober explanation of the controversy.)

So while the Murdoch media — which has its own axes to grind — bashes Facebook, I’m here today to praise it, because I finally had a chance to use Facebook’s “Download Your Information” tool, and it’s a sweet thing.

I have been a loud voice over the years complaining that Facebook expects us to give it the content of our lives and offers us no route to get that content back out. Facebook has now provided a tool that does precisely this. And it’s not just a crude programmer’s tool — some API that lets developers romp at will but leaves mere mortals up a creek. Facebook is giving real-people users their information in a simple, accessible format, tied up with a nice HTML bow. What you get in Facebook’s download file is a Web directory that you can navigate in your browser, with all your posts, photos and other contributions, well-presented and well-organized.

In my case, I don’t have vast quantities of stuff because I haven’t been a very active Facebook user. The main thing I do on Facebook, in fact, is automatically cross-post my Twitter messages so my friends who hang out on Facebook can see them too. Twitter, of course, still has that “bug” that makes it really hard for you to access your old messages. But now, I actually have an easily readable and searchable archive of my Twitter past — thanks to Facebook! Which, really, is both ironic and delicious.

Here’s what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the Download feature in a Techcrunch interview:

I think that this is a pretty big step forward in terms of making it so that people can download all of their information, but it isn’t going to be all of what everyone wants. There are going to be questions about why you can’t download your friend’s information too. And it’s because it’s your friend’s and not yours. But you can see that information on Facebook, so maybe you should be able to download it… those are some of the grey areas.

So for this, what we decided to do was stick to content that was completely clear. You upload those photos and videos and wall posts and messages, and you can take them out and they’re yours, undisputed — that’s your profile. There’s going to be more that we need to think through over time. One of the things, we just couldn’t understand why people kept on saying there’s no way to export your information from Facebook because we have Connect, which is the single biggest large-scale way that people bring information from one site to another that I think has ever been built.

So it seems that Zuckerberg and his colleagues felt that they already let you export your information thanks to Facebook Connect. Again: True for developers but useless for everyday users, unless and until someone writes the code that lets you actually get your data — which is what Facebook itself has now done.

I think this means Facebook is beginning to take more seriously its aspiration to be the repository of our collective memory — a project that Zuckerberg lieutenant Christopher Cox has rapturously described but that Facebook has never seemed that serious about.

I still have questions and concerns about Facebook as the chokepoint-holder of a new social-network-based Web. I’d really rather see things go in the federation direction that people like Status.net, Identi.ca and Diaspora are all working on.

Still, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. It’s a fact of Web life today, and so its moves towards letting users take their data home with them deserve applause.

What I’d like to see next is an idea that came out of that Open Web Foo session: As we turn Facebook and other social services into the online equivalent of the family album, the scrapbook and the old shoebox full of photos, we’re going to need good, simple tools for people to work with them — to take the mountains of stuff we’re piling up inside these services and distill memorable stories from them.

The technologists in the room imagined an algorithmic way to do this — some version of Flickr’s “interestingness” rating, where the service could essentially do the work for you by figuring out which of your photos and posts had the most long-term value.

I’m sure there’s a future in that. My vision, as a writer, is something simpler: a tool that would let us easily assemble photos and text and video from our Facebook troves and turn them into pages that tell stories from our own and our friends’ lives. Something like Storify, maybe. I think we’re going to need this, whether from Facebook itself or from a third-party app developer.

That “cloud” we’re seeding with our memories? Let’s make it rain the stories of our lives.

UPDATE: Om Malik has some insights into some of the other companies involved in the Facebook-shares-your-ID story. And if you want to play with FB’s “Download” tool, you’ll find it in Facebook under Account –> Account settings –> Download your information.

How to turn a paper of record into a website of record

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Last week Arthur Brisbane, the new public editor of the New York Times, posted an illuminating exchange between a reader of the paper and one of its top editors.

The reader asked: What’s with the way stories change all the time on the website? “How does the newspaper of record handle this? I read something, and now poof, it’s gone without a trace.”

Jim Roberts, the paper’s associate managing editor, responded: “We are constantly refining what we publish online.” He added that the paper often”uses the final printed version as the final archived version that stays on the Web.” But not always! There are “many exceptions.”

The headline over the column reads “Revising the Newspaper of Record.” But what the exchange reveals is that, right now, there is no record of the newspaper of record. The Times is revising its copy online all the time. No doubt the vast majority of these “refinements” are trivial or uncontroversial. But some of them are likely substantial. (Here was one right on the edge that was filed at MediaBugs.) If I understand Times policy correctly, when a change fixes an outright error, it is supposed to be marked with a correction notice. But there’s no record of these changes, so the Times could be cutting corners here and we’d never know.

When I raise this issue I sometimes hear back some variation on “What’s the big deal? Wire services change their copy all the time. Newspapers have always revised stories from edition to edition. How’s the Web different?”

I’ll tell you how: When newspapers change a story from the early to the late edition, the early edition is still out there for people to read and compare. When you change a Web page, the older version disappears, unless you take active steps to save it.

That, of course, is precisely what the Times — along with every other news outlet that’s committed to accountability — ought to do. Whenever a published story is changed, the paper should make the previous versions available to its readers. (I’ve outlined this idea here, written about it more here, and there’s now a WordPress plugin to demonstrate it in action.)

Let the world see the changes. This is all published, public material; there’s nothing to hide. With this one change to its publishing practices online, the Times can make good on the promise of the old “paper of record” moniker and become a website of record — while giving itself real freedom to keep improving the stories it has already posted.

Here are some potential objections, and my responses:

(1) What about actual errors that you’ve corrected? Unless they’re libelous and there’s some legal need to take them down, you can leave the errors visible behind a “revised version link” — while clearly marking them as errors that have been corrected. This is the most foolproof way of keeping your correction process transparent and trustworthy. When material is removed for legal reasons, a note can indicate that.

(2) Why provide so much excess material to readers? Aren’t we all drowning in too much information already? You can hide the previous versions behind links, the way Wikipedia (or our WordPress plugin) does. Most readers will ignore them — except every now and then when they notice that something’s changed and they want to see why. The Web has more than enough “space” for this data; it’s all just files on disk drives or data in databases.

(3) What you ask for makes sense, but it’s a ton of work to make that sort of change on a website as complex as a major newspaper’s! Right. Sure. I don’t expect this to happen tomorrow. But it’s worth beginning to plan now. I’m firmly convinced that this is an essential “best practice” for trustworthy news publishing online. It will happen, eventually. Why not get the ball rolling?

UPDATE: Mahendra Palsule pointed me to his account of a situation last month where the Wall Street Journal’s modifications to live stories made it look as if it might have scrubbed a controversial quote from a story (though it hadn’t done that at all). In comments there, Zach Seward of the Journal’s online team mentions that the paper is discussing the revisions-display idea. Maybe a little healthy competition will get this practice adopted!

The Web Parenthesis: Is the “open Web” closing?

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Heard of the “Gutenberg parenthesis”? This is the intriguing proposition that the era of mass consumption of text ushered in by the printing press four centuries ago was a mere interlude between the previous era of predominantly oral culture and a new digital-oral era on whose threshold we may now sit.

That’s a fascinating debate in itself. For the moment I just want to borrow the “parenthesis” concept — the idea that an innovative development we are accustomed to viewing as a step up some progressive ladder may instead be simply a temporary break in some dominant norm.

What if the “open Web” were just this sort of parenthesis? What if the advent of a (near) universal publishing platform open to (nearly) all were not itself a transformative break with the past, but instead a brief transitional interlude between more closed informational regimes?

That’s the question I weighed last weekend at Open Web Foo Camp. I’d never been to one of O’Reilly’s Foo Camp events — informal “unconferences” at the publisher’s Sebastopol offices — but last weekend had the pleasure of hanging out with an extraordinary gang of smart people there. Here’s what I came away with.

For starters, of course everyone has a different take on the meaning of “openness.” Tantek Celik’s post lays out some of the principles embraced by ardent technologists in this field:

  • open formats for freely publishing what you write, photograph, video and otherwise create, author, or code (e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript, JPEG, PNG, Ogg, WebM etc.).
  • domain name registrars and web hosting services that, like phone companies, don’t judge your content.
  • cheap internet access that doesn’t discriminate based on domains

But for many users, these principles are distant, complex, and hard to fathom. They might think of the iPhone as a substantially “open” device because hey, you can extend its functionality by buying new apps — that’s a lot more open than your Plain Old Cellphone, right? In the ’80s Microsoft’s DOS-Windows platform was labeled “open” because, unlike Apple’s products, anyone could manufacture hardware for it.

“Open,” then, isn’t a category; it’s a spectrum. The spectrum runs from effectively locked-down platforms and services (think: broadcast TV) to those that are substantially unencumbered by technical or legal constraint. There is probably no such thing as a totally open system. But it’s fairly easy to figure out whether one system is more or less open than another.

The trend-line of today’s successful digital platforms is moving noticeably towards the closed end of this spectrum. We see this at work at many different levels of the layered stack of services that give us the networks we enjoy today — for instance:

  • the App Store — iPhone apps, unlike Web sites and services, must pass through Apple’s approval process before being available to users.
  • Facebook / Twitter — These phenomenally successful social networks, though permeable in several important ways, exist as centralized operations run by private companies, which set the rules for what developers and users can do on them.
  • Comcast — the cable company that provides much of the U.S.’s Internet service just merged with NBC and faces all sorts of temptations to manipulate its delivery of the open Web to favor its own content and services.
  • Google — the big company most vocal about “open Web” principles has arguably compromised its commitment to net neutrality, and Open Web Foo attendees raised questions about new wrinkles in Google Search that may subtly favor large services like Yelp or Google-owned YouTube over independent sites.

The picture is hardly all-or-nothing, and openness regularly has its innings — for instance, with developments like Facebook’s new download-your-data feature. But once you load everything on the scales, it’s hard not to conclude that today we’re seeing the strongest challenge to the open Web ideal since the Web itself began taking off in 1994-5.

Then the Web seemed to represent a fundamental break from the media and technology regimes that preceded it — a mutant offspring of the academy and fringe culture that had inexplicably gone mass market and eclipsed the closed online services of its day. Now we must ask, was this openness an anomaly — a parenthesis?

My heart tells me “no,” but my brain says the answer will be yes — unless we get busy. Openness is resilient and powerful in itself, but it can’t survive without friends, without people who understand it explaining it to the public and lobbying for it inside companies and in front of regulators and governments.

For me, one of the heartening aspects of the Foo weekend was seeing a whole generation of young developers and entrepreneurs who grew up with a relatively open Web as a fact of life begin to grapple with this question themselves. And one of the questions hanging over the event, which Anil Dash framed, was how these people can hang on to their ideals once they move inside the biggest companies, as many of them have.

What’s at stake here is not just a lofty abstraction. It’s whether the next generation of innovators on the Web — in technology, in services, or in news and publishing, where my passion lies — will be free to raise their next mutant offspring. As Steven Johnson reminds us in his new book, when you close anything — your company, your service, your mind — you pay an “innovation tax.” You make it harder for ideas to bump together productively and become fertile.

Each of the institutions taking a hop toward the closed end of the openness spectrum today has inherited advantages from the relatively open online environment of the past 15 years. Let’s hope their successors over the next 15 can have the same head start.

Hey Zuck! Hollywood just hacked your profile

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You know those Facebook phishing hacks — the ones where someone gets control of your account and sends phony messages to your friends? “I’m stuck in London! Send money quick!”

I kept thinking of that phenomenon as I watched The Social Network this weekend. Because what filmmakers Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher have done to their protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is the moral equivalent of this sort of identity theft.

They have appropriated Zuckerberg’s life story and, under the banner of fidelity to “storytelling” rather than simple documentary accuracy, twisted it into something mirroring their own obsessions rather than the truth. They transform Mark Zuckerberg’s biography from the messy tale of a dorm-room startup’s phenomenal success into a dark vision of a lonely geek’s descent into treachery.

The Social Network takes the labyrinthine and unique origins of Facebook at Harvard and turns them into a routine finger-wagger about how the road to the top is paved with bodies. Sorkin apparently isn’t interested in what makes his programmer-entrepreneur antihero tick, so he drops in cliches about class resentment and nerd estrangement.

In order to make it big, Sorkin’s Zuckerberg has to betray his business-partner friend (Eduardo Saverin). Why is he hungry for success? Sorkin has him wounded by two primal rejections — one by a girlfriend, the other by Harvard’s fraternity-ish old-money “final clubs.” The programming whiz-kid doesn’t know how to navigate the real-world “social network” — get it? — so he plots his revenge.

Many thoughtful pieces have already discussed the movie, and I don’t want to rehash them. I agree more with my friend David Edelstein’s take on the film’s cold triviality than with the enthusiastic raves from other quarters. Go read Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Jarvis for definitive critiques of the film’s failure to take even the most cursory measure of the real-world phenomenon it’s ostensibly about. Here’s Lessig: “This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite.” Over in Slate, Zuckerberg’s classmate Nathan Heller outlines how far off the mark Sorkin wanders in his portrait of the Harvard social milieu. (Obsessive, brainy Jewish kids had stopped caring about whether they were excluded from the almost comically uncool final clubs at Harvard long before my own time there, and that was quite a long time ago by now.)

It’s Hollywood that remains clubby and status-conscious, far more dependent on a closed social network to get its work done than any Web company today. The movie diagrams the familiar and routine dynamic of a startup business, where founders’ stakes get diluted as money pours in to grow the company, as some sort of moral crime. (That may explain why — as David Carr lays it out — startup-friendly youngsters watch the film and don’t see the problem with Zuckerberg’s behavior, while their elders tut-tut.) Again, this is a Hollywood native’s critique of Silicon Valley; movie finance works in a more static way.

It’s strange to say this, since I am not a fan of Facebook itself — I prefer a more open Web ecology — but The Social Network made me feel sorry for the real Zuckerberg, notwithstanding the billionaire thing. He’s still a young guy with most of his life ahead of him, yet a version of his own life story that has plainly been shaped by the recollections of people who sued him is now being imprinted on the public imagination.

At least Orson Welles had the courtesy to rename William Randolph Hearst as “Charles Foster Kane.” This isn’t a legal issue (John Schwartz details why in today’s Times). But, for a movie that sets itself up as a graduate course in business ethics, it is most certainly a giant lapse of fairness.

In New York, Mark Harris described the film as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” but I think it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail. The Web, of which Facebook is the latest popular manifestation, has begun to move us from a world in which you must rely on reporters and screenwriters and broadcasters to tell your story to one where you get to present your story yourself. (And everybody else gets to tell their own stories, and yours too, but on a reasonably equal footing.) The Social Network says to Zuckerberg, and by proxy, the rest of us who are exploring the new-media landscape: “Foolish little Net people, you only think you’re in control. We will define you forever — and you will have no say!”

In other words, The Social Network embodies the workings of the waning old order it is so thoroughly invested in. It can’t be bothered with aiming to tell the truth about Zuckerberg — yet it uses his real name and goes out of its way to affect documentary trappings, down to the concluding “where are they now?” text crawl.

The movie’s demolition job on the reputation of a living human being is far more ruthless than any prank Zuckerberg ever plotted from his dorm room. For what purpose? When a moviemaker says he owes his allegiance to “storytelling,” usually what he means is, he’s trying to sell the most tickets. I guess that to get where they wanted to go, Sorkin and Fincher just had to step on a few necks themselves.

Mutating books, evolving authors

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The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy and sobering piece this week about how the rise of the e-book is altering the landscape of the publishing industry. It was not, on the surface, a happy picture for authors:

The digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers. Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

The Journal piece focused on fiction writers, but the implications are similar for nonfiction authors like me. Whenever a wave of change sweeps through an industry, the old ways of making money tend to dissipate faster than the new ways coalesce. There is much wringing of hands. People panic. As a veteran of the newspaper industry I feel like I know this movie pretty well by now.

I also know this: when you do creative work, you are not owed a living. Few things are more ludicrous than a writer with a sense of entitlement. It would be wonderful if the pie available to reward authors were growing rather than shrinking. But we live in an era blessed with an abundance of opportunities to publish — and a relative scarcity of time to consume the products of publishing. Gluts make prices collapse. There’s no way an e-book can or should cost anything like what a paper book costs. Maybe volume will make up some of the difference — but, plainly, not yet.

I don’t see the point in hand-wringing. But I still plan to write long-form non-fiction and hope to earn at least some portion of my living doing it. So I’m going to do my damnedest to try to understand the changing publishing environment and figure out the smartest way for an author to navigate it. Id rather adapt and evolve than gripe my way to extinction.

To that end, I’m beginning a self-education program in the world of electronic book publishing. I know by some measures I’m coming to this absurdly late. Then again, I was worried when I started this blog in 2002 that I was late to that party, too.

So help me out. What are your favorite sources of information about e-books and e-readers? Do you just read about them as part of your wider intake of tech and gadget news? Or are there dedicated sites, publications and bloggers who you rely on?

I’m aware of the venerable Teleread. I’ve been enjoying Tim Carmody’s thoughtful posts at Wired and the Atlantic. I’ll read all the think pieces about “the future of the book” by writers like Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly that come along. Any other useful sources out there I should know about?

I’ll collect my findings and report back!

Technorati’s survey: head-scratchers and brand-y swill

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I don’t think I’ve ever taken Technorati’s annual blogger survey before, but the company’s annual reports have usually been a useful source of information, so when I got an email inviting me to respond I took a few minutes to do so.

I began to think something was off when I saw this question:

WordPress’s hosted service at WordPress.com, which has gazillions of users, is free. I host my own blog using the WordPress.org open-source version. I do pay an ISP for server space, so maybe that’s considered “a paid third-party hosting service,” but boy is this confusing! Meanwhile, it’s 2010 — how many people handcode their own HTML? Isn’t it, like, statistically insignificant?

On to the next head-scratcher:

Um, my Twitter account is linked to my blog. Like a horde of other bloggers I use a widget to display my tweets on my blog. But like so many other bloggers I don’t feed my posts automatically into Twitter, because Twitter works better when you actually speak as a person. So there’s no accurate way to answer this question.

Then there was this:

The question’s wording presupposes that the respondent is blogging anonymously, which is just plain weird, since most bloggers identify themselves.

This question began to suggest where Technorati’s head was at.

It turned out that the survey was heavily focused on the role of “brands” in blogging, which is usually a signal that somebody somewhere has dollar signs in their eyes.

“Has a brand ever approached you…?” How exactly would a brand do that? Have brands grown mouths and legs?

I’m usually courteous but I guess I snapped.

An experiment with Storify

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Storify is a new service for building on-the-fly curated “stories” out of disparate elements like Tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook postings and so on. It’s in beta now; I gave it a whirl just now. I’m embedding my first Storify story here.

I couldn’t figure out how to add my own text other than the summary at the top; it would have been nice to weave the quoted tweets together with my own words.

I also couldn’t figure out how to use Storify to edit the story after I saved it.

I assume these are on the “features” list somewhere!

UPDATE: As you can see I have now figured out how to do both these things. Memo to interface designers: some of us actually find text labels more useful than naked icons… Still, can’t complain too loudly here. Storify is pretty easy to use!