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Busy-ness: three days, three conferences

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s a journalist now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roberts is to pager as Bush is to scanner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newspaper comments: Forget anonymity! The problem is management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the media biz, iPad 2010 = CDROM 1994

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I’m having flashbacks these days, and they’re not from drugs, they’re from the rising chorus of media-industry froth about how Apple’s forthcoming iPad is going to save the business of selling content.

Let me be clear: I love what I’ve seen of the iPad and I’ll probably end up with one. It’s a likely game-changer for the device market, a rethinking of the lightweight mobile platform that makes sense in many ways. I think it will be a big hit. In the realm of hardware design, interface design and hardware -software integration, Apple remains unmatched today. (The company’s single-point-of-failure approach to content and application distribution is another story — and this problem that will only grow more acute the more successful the iPad becomes.)

But these flashbacks I’m getting as I read about the media business’s iPad excitement — man, they’re intense. Stories like this and this, about the magazine industry’s excitement over the iPad, or videos like these Wired iPad demos, take me back to the early ’90s — when media companies saw their future on a shiny aluminum disc.

If you weren’t following the tech news back then, let me offer you a quick recap. CD-ROMS were going to serve as the media industry’s digital lifeboat. A whole “multimedia industry” emerged around them, complete with high-end niche publishers and mass-market plays. In this world, “interactivity” meant the ability to click on hyperlinks and hybridize your information intake with text, images, sound and video. Yow!

There were, it’s true, a few problems. People weren’t actually that keen on buying CD-ROMs in any quantity. Partly this was because they didn’t work that well. But mostly it was because neither users nor producers ever had a solid handle on what the form was for. They plowed everything from encyclopedias to games to magazines onto the little discs, in a desperate effort to figure it out. They consoled themselves by reminding the world that every new medium goes through an infancy during which nobody really knows what they’re doing and everyone just reproduces the shape and style of existing media forms on the new platform.

You can hear exactly the same excuses in these iPad observations by Time editor Richard Stengel. Stengel says we’re still in the point-the-movie-camera-at-the-proscenium stage. We’re waiting for the new form’s Orson Welles. But we’re charging forward anyway! This future is too bright to be missed.

But it turned out the digital future didn’t need CD-ROM’s Orson Welles. It needed something else, something no disc could offer: an easy way for everyone to contribute their own voices. The moment the Web browser showed up on people’s desktops, somewhing weird happened: people just stopped talking about CD-ROMs. An entire next-big-thing industry vanished with little trace. Today we recall the CD-ROM publishing era as at best a fascinating dead-end, a sandbox in which some talented people began to wrestle with digital change before moving on to the Internet.

It’s easy to see this today, but at the time it was very hard to accept. (My first personal Web project, in January 1995, was an online magazine to, er, review CD-ROMs.)

The Web triumphed over CD-ROM for a slew of reasons, not least its openness. But the central lesson of this most central media transition of our era, one whose implications we’re still digesting, is this: People like to interact with one another more than they like to engage with static information. Every step in the Web’s evolution demonstrates that connecting people with other people trumps giving them flashy, showy interfaces to flat data.

It’s no mystery why so many publishing companies are revved up about the iPad: they’re hoping the new gizmo will turn back the clock on their business model, allowing them to make consumers pay while delivering their eyeballs directly to advertisers via costly, eye-catching displays. Here’s consultant Ken Doctor, speaking on Marketplace yesterday:

DOCTOR: Essentially, it’s a do-over. With a new platform and a new way of thinking about it. Can you charge advertisers in a different way and can you say to readers, we’re going to need you to pay for it?

Many of the industry executives who are hyping iPad publishing are in the camp that views the decision publishers made in the early days of the Web not to charge for their publications as an original sin. The iPad, they imagine, will restore prelapsarian profit margins.

Good luck with that! The reason it’s tough to charge for content today is that there’s just too much of it. People are having a blast talking with each other online. And as long as the iPad has a good Web browser, it’s hard to imagine how gated content and costly content apps will beat that.

You ask, “What about the example of iPhone apps? Don’t they prove people will pay for convenience on a mobile device?” Maybe. To me they prove that the iPhone’s screen is still too small to really enjoy a standard browser experience. So users pay to avoid the navigation tax that browser use on the iPhone incurs. This is the chief value of the iPad: it brings the ease and power of the iPhone OS’s touch interface to a full-size Web-browser window.

I can’t wait to play around with this. But I don’t see myself rushing to pay for repurposed paper magazines and newspapers sprinkled with a few audio-visual doodads. That didn’t fly with CD-ROMs and it won’t fly on the iPad.

Apple’s new device may well prove an interesting market for a new generation of full-length creative works — books, movies, music, mashups of all of the above — works that people are likely to want to consume more than once. But for anything with a shelf-life half-life — news and information and commentary — the iPad is unlikely to serve as a savior. For anyone who thinks otherwise, can I interest you in a carton of unopened CD-ROM magazines?

Public Enemy and the Washington Post: The correction as folk art and viral meme

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A week ago the Washington Post ran the following correction:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

You don’t need to be much of a hiphop expert (I’m certainly not) to know that the Public Enemy song in question, “911 Is a Joke,” predates the attacks of 9/11/2001 (it was released in 1990) and has nothing to do with them.

The Post’s error made it look ignorant and silly — like having to say, for example, “An article incorrectly reported that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a Central European folk tune. The song is actually by Queen.” But it was the straight-faced solemnity of the correction’s wording, juxtaposed with the amusement so many readers felt as they clicked on its URL, that transformed this little footnote into something bigger.

Within a couple of days, the Post’s correction had gone viral (a post from Leor Galil at TrueSlant traces the path of dissemination). It inspired an outpouring of mocking imitations on Twitter, all marked with the hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections. Here is a sample of some of the feigned cluelessness I chortled at last weekend:

MoreAndAgain: Having a baby by 50 Cent will not actually make you a millionaire

BlackCanseco CORRECTION: Despite the song, it not only rains in Southern California, it apparently snows, too.

jsmooth995 George Clinton has assured us his roof remains intact, and he takes fire safety quite seriously

phontigallo: 2Pac’s “I Get A Round” was not about the life of a bartender.

I’m not sure whether the realms of newsroom practice and pop culture have ever collided so absurdly. (Although I do recall that, once upon a time, as legend has it, New York Times style required the paper’s music critics to refer to “Mr. Loaf,” for Meat Loaf, and “Mr. Vicious,” for Sid. The former, according to the Times, is apocryphal, but the latter seems to be real.)

There was another kind of collision here: between the informal populist free-for-all online and the stiff back of old-fashioned newsroom impersonality. It would have been a lot harder for the Twitterers to make fun of the Post if, instead of having that starchy correction to parody, they’d instead read a low-key blog post by the reporter (and/or editor) responsible for the goof, saying something along the lines of “Wow, we really messed that one up — here’s how it happened. We’re really sorry.”

But no; the newsroom must wear its tie. And so instead of dialogue we have silence on one side and ridicule on the other. #washingtonpostcorrections ended up as a sort of game of the dozens in which only one of the parties played along; the other didn’t even seem to realize the game was on.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman writes about this story at Columbia Journalism Review, tracing the hashtag’s origin back to Twitter user @phontigallo — Phonte (Phonte Coleman), a member of the Grammy-nominated hip hop group Little Brother.

AOL, SEO mills, and the newsroom

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News this morning is that AOL is going down the path already cleared by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content, and getting into the business of commissioning small content “piecework” based on consumer interest as gauged by search queries (and advertiser interest as gauged by keyword prices).

In other words: if you know people are searching for “how do I fix a flat tire?”, you crank out a quick web page, SEO it up, and sit back. As long as you make a little more cash from the search ads on the page than you spent on the writing, you’ve got yourself a business model. It’s an “automated story factory,” as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD puts it.

1957TypingPool1This sweatshop approach to content creation is, of course, anathema to old-fashioned writers and editors. It raises all sorts of disturbing questions about the advertising cart leading the editorial horse (as PaidContent suggests). It holds no appeal to me, personally. It is the polar opposite of what most bloggers do: For the most part they remain — as I argued in Say Everything and as the most recent Technorati survey continues to show — motivated by their own interests and passions, not by the fleeting prospect of fame or revenue.

And yet, as my knee jerks instinctively against the “crank out just-good-enough content” approach, I also start to wonder, why isn’t some enterprising old-media company doing something like this to support its newsroom? If this is the way advertising revenue works on the Web today, why not exploit it for yourself? Why let the AOLs and Demand Medias own the pie? If there are advertising vs. editorial issues to be navigated, why wouldn’t traditional editors and publishers want a say in how they’re resolved?

This is the sort of thing I was imagining when I wrote, earlier this year, that media companies should start from the revenue side in order to figure out new models for supporting the socially important but economically imperiled work of journalism.

Certainly, the New York Times or Time magazine aren’t going to want to sully their brands with such stuff — but why not create a new down-market brand owned by the same company?

Most freelance writers have, for their own survival, always resorted to a parallel strategy: they do high-paying but not always fulfilling work part of the time so they can do work that they enjoy but that doesn’t necessarily pay the bills the rest of the time.

While SEO-driven piecework doesn’t pay well per page, collectively it appears to generate real profit. That money can go to fill an entrepreneur’s wallet, but it could also fund journalism. Maybe that’s what Tim Armstrong plans at AOL: let the generic junk pay the salaries of old-fashioned journalists he’s hiring. Why wouldn’t the owner of an old-line newsroom do the same thing? Why haven’t they done so already?

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan connects the dots: AOL et al. are finding ways to make money from those search visitors that newspaper companies have lately been dismissing as worthless.

Miscellany of the moment

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  • Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the different kinds of mistakes journalists can make? Do weigh in over there and help us sort out this epistemological puzzle!
  • Andrew Leonard had a fine take on the Duran Duran guy’s complaint that easy access to the musical past devalues the present and inhibits innovation:

    But rather than worry about whether the Internet is exerting a baleful influence, I think we just need to make our peace with the fact that every new technology creates a different space for cultural practice. Duran Duran without cable television or a high-end production studio is simply unthinkable. Recording technologies enabled the commodification of musical performance on a mass basis. Networked computers have crippled the profitability of that commodification. The adventure is ongoing.

    Perhaps the digitally-enabled overhang of the cultural production of previous generations is a heavy burden. But I guarantee you that those artists who do break free of its restrictions, and can come up with something interesting to say, will be easier to find and easier to enjoy than any pioneers of any previous era were.

    Nick Carr’s is worth reading too:

    Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

    Carr seems a little bummed about that price, but I’m more sanguine: Our culture had swung way too far in the direction of artist worship anyway. Less fetishization of the purchased object and the personality who produced it is fine with me.

  • Megan Garber’s piece in CJR on the Pacific garbage patch story funded by Spot.us and appearing in the NYTimes sparked an extended debate in the small but vocal world of new-media journalism punditry. The framing of Garber’s piece, in particular the headline, positioned it as a critique of Spot.us for failing to “deliver” a New York Times piece of sufficient quality. But the body of the piece made the far more useful argument that the garbage-patch reporter, “Garbage Girl” Lindsey Hoshaw, shone far more brightly in the daily blog she produced than in the relatively conventional Times feature.

    To me, it looks like Hoshaw gave the Times what it doubtless asked for in terms of fairly impersonal feature writing. The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — the blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.us model.

    Hoshaw’s postmortem is worth reading in full, but this comment stands out:

    And the most rewarding part of the Spot.us project was getting to meet some of the donors in person before I left, listening to their ideas, writing to them on my blog from the middle of the ocean and emailing them when the story came out to celebrate our success.

    I had images of my readers’ faces in my mind while I was at sea and it kept me accountable. These were real people not some unimaginable group called “the public.” I knew their names and I’d met with some of them in person. They were tangible and I thought, “what would Alex think if he knew I blogged on behalf of the ship or that I wasn’t diligent about taking photos at every opportunity?”

    (Full disclosure: I was one of many people who kicked in a small donation via Spot.us to fund the garbage story.)

The “millions of results are useless” myth

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While we’re on the subject of the value of search…

Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s provision of millions of results means it’s doing a poor job of serving it’s users.

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“I searched for ‘the real William Shakespeare,’ ” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I got five million results. That’s useless.”

We hear this one all the time — and it gets Google’s value precisely wrong. When Google came along in the late ’90s we already had search engines, like AltaVista, that provided millions of results. Google is the antidote to the millions-of-results problem. All of Google’s value — and the reason that Google originally rose to prominence — was that it solved this problem, and got columnists like me to rave about its value while it was still a tiny startup company.

Let’s do that “real William Shakespeare” search. Right now I actually get 15 million results. Who cares? Nobody ever looks past the first, or at most the second or third, page of results. And Google’s first page of results on this query is not bad at all. Many of the top links are amateur-created content, but most of them provide useful secondary links. As a starting point for Web research it’s a pretty good tool. If you fine-tune your query to “Shakespeare authorship debate” you do even better.

Yes, it’s true that the Google search box is less useful with generalized product and commercial searches (like “London hotels”), where the results are laden with ads and fought over by companies armed with SEO tactics. Google has all sorts of flaws. But it’s time to bury the old “millions” complaints. They’re meaningless. And Auletta’s willingness to trot them out doesn’t give me much hope for the value of his new book.

Why “junk traffic” isn’t so junky

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I’ve been reading Ryan Chittum’s recent posts at Columbia Journalism Review about the whole Murdoch/WSJ “We’re seceding from Google” flap.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.