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Why the Daily, Murdoch’s “tablet newspaper,” will be DOA

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When I first heard the phrase “iPad newspaper” — shorthand for Rupert Murdoch’s not-so-secret-any-more new project — I puzzled over its oxymoronic implications. Forget about the, you know, iPad/paper contradiction and think about the business. Murdoch is reportedly spending $30 million on this thing. Could that possibly pay off with a product that’s tethered to a single, new platform? Puzzled, I tweeted, “Will they stop me from reading it on my desktop?”

Apparently, the answer is yes. The Guardian writes that this new publication will feature “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence” (funny, that’s pretty much how David Talbot described Salon when we started it!) and tells us:

According to reports, there will be no “print edition” or “web edition”; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices. With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

Now, these “reports” (and the Guardian) may be unreliable here; we won’t know for sure till Murdoch unveils his product. But taking these rumors at face value, it sounds like Murdoch intends to deliver his latest news baby into a tablet-only world. A Monday column by David Carr confirms the report and adds some detail: The publication is to be called The Daily, and it will, apparently, be just that: “It will be produced into the evening, and then a button will be pushed and it will be ‘printed’ for the next morning. There will be updates — the number of which is still under discussion — but not at the velocity or with the urgency of a news Web site.” Wonderful! Slower news — and at a higher price.

First, let’s give Murdoch credit for what’s intelligent about this plan. It’s smart to ditch the original “legacy” of paper and the more recent legacy of website publishing — to build something fresh for a new platform rather than do the old shovelware dance. And it’s smart to jump in relatively early, to snag users when the tabula is still rasa.

For Murdoch, I have to imagine there is also something personal about this project. I’m sure he is furious that he has so far failed to extend his record of success and dominance, unbroken in other media, into the digital world. The iPad must look to him like his latest, best, and perhaps last chance to do so, after the humiliating embarrassment of his MySpace investment and the apparent trainwreck of the Times UK paywall.

But how likely is it that any significant number of people will pay $50 a year (or a bit less, assuming a subscription discount) for what is likely to be an above-average but hardly essential or irreplaceable periodical? It’s not as if iPad users have no existing sources of online news, innovative delivery mechanisms for information, or a shortage of stuff to read. iPad users love their browsers; the device is great for reading the free Web.

Murdoch will need more than half a million people to pay that fee to cover a $30M budget (less if he can sell ads), so maybe the thing will work. I’ll bet against it, though, assuming it’s as the Guardian and Carr describe it. I’ll base my bet on the same logic that I’ve long articulated about why paywalls are a bad idea (the problem is not with the “pay” but with the “wall”).

Why do people love getting their news online? It’s timely, it’s convenient, it’s fast — all that matters. Murdoch’s tablet could match that (though it sounds like it may drop the ball on “timely” and “fast”). But even more important than that, online news is connected: it’s news that you can respond to, link to, share with friends. It is part of a back-and-forth that you are also a part of.

Murdoch’s tablet thingie will be something else — a throwback to the isolation of pre-Web publications. Like a paywalled website, this tablet “paper” will discourage us from talking about its contents because we can’t link to it. In other words, like a paywalled site, it expects us to pay for something that is actually less useful and valuable than the free competition.

It’s possible, of course, that the creators of Murdoch’s tablet publication will try to turn it into a true interactive project — where interactive doesn’t mean “buttons you can click on” but rather “people you can interact with.” If they’re smart, they’ll try to build a community within their walls. But that’s a very difficult goal to achieve even if you embrace it wholeheartedly. At big media companies like News Corp., this idea is more often an afterthought than a priority.

Much more likely, the Murdoch project will make the same mistake so many big-media-backed digital ventures have made before. It will assume that its content is so unique, its personality so compelling, its information so rich that readers will regard it as essential. Yet even if it is a really good digital periodical — and it might be! — it is hard to imagine what News Corp. can do to make it that essential, in a world awash in news and information.

(Carr reports that “Initially, there will be a mirror site on the Web to market some of its wares outside the high-walled kingdom of apps.” I’ll bet that over time this mirror site will either grow to be the “real” Daily, as editors realize the free numbers dwarf the pay numbers, or they will pull up the drawbridge completely to try to force a few more customers to pay. It’s Slate 1998 all over again! Will we get Daily umbrellas?)

Now, I know a lot of my friends in journalism are rooting for Murdoch here because they see the pay-for-your-apps iPad model as a deus ex machina that will intervene to save the threatened business model of the old-school newsroom. (Carr’s column weighs the pros and cons here well.)

If you’ve read this far you know I think that’s unlikely. I also think it’s undesirable. On this, I stand with Tim Berners-Lee — who did the primary work in creating the Web two decades ago.

I followed the coverage of Murdoch’s venture around the same time I read Berners-Lee’s great essay on the 20th anniversary of the open Web., I’ll let him have the last word:

The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

UPDATE: Sam Diaz at ZDNet shares my skepticism. I originally avoided writing here about the angle turning up suggesting that Steve Jobs was personally involved in the NewsCorp Daily project and had loaned Murdoch an engineering team; it appeared to be super-thinly sourced. Diaz agrees. We’ll all know soon enough.

In the meantime, let me take gentle issue with the concern both Diaz and Carr raise about the size of the Daily staff. Diaz asks: “Can a team of 100 reporters covering everything from Hollywood to Washington really dig in deep enough to produce the type of content worthy of that paid subscription?” Short answer: If 100 can’t, then 500 couldn’t, either. Carr: “How do you put out an original national newspaper every day with a staff of only 100?” Short answer: You don’t try to cover everything, but you cover what you do cover so originally and engagingly that people can’t resist.

Come on, people: 100 journalists is a huge newsroom as long as you’re not trying to be a “paper” — er, “tablet” — of record. If anything, it’s too big. The key, of course, lies in who those 100 people are, and how you deploy them. The problems with the Daily don’t lie in how much Murdoch is spending or how many bodies he’s hiring, but rather with some of the central premises of the project.

“Your map’s wrong”: Zuckerberg lights out for the territories

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It’s hard to think of a more meaningful recent exchange in the tech-industry world than the moment onstage at Web 2.0 last night when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg turned to conference organizers John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly and told them, “Your map’s wrong.” (I was sorry not to be there in person! I went to the first several Web 2.0 conferences but have recently tried to reduce conference attendance in an effort to Get Things Done instead.)

Zuckerberg was referring to a big map on the wall behind him that charted the conference’s theme of “points of control.” Battelle and O’Reilly had aimed to provide a graphic display of all the different entities that shape and limit our experience online today. It’s a useful exercise in many ways. But Zuckerberg argued that it was wrong-headed in describing an essentially closed system.

Here’s the full exchange, which you can watch below:

ZUCKERBERG: “I like this map that you have up here, but my first instinct was, your map’s wrong.”

BATTELLE: “Of course it’s wrong, it’s version one.”

ZUCKERBERG: “I think that the biggest part of the map has got to be the uncharted territory. Right? One of the best things about the technology industry is that it’s not zero sum. This thing makes it seem like it’s zero sum. Right? In order to take territory you have to be taking territory from someone else. But I think one of the best things is, we’re building real value in the world, not just taking value from other companies.”

Now, of course it’s in Zuckerberg’s interest to make this argument. And it would be disingenuous to maintain that Facebook isn’t engaged in some real direct competition with the other big Net-industry players today. As Tim Wu’s new book reminds us, the cycle of communications-technology innovation runs in a regular pattern in which innovators become monopolists and monopolists exact their tolls. Facebook, like its predecessors, is likely to proceed accordingly.

Nonetheless, I think Zuckerberg’s larger point is profoundly right. He found a way to remind us of something that was true when I started creating websites 15 years ago and that’s still true today: It’s still early in this game, and the game itself continues to grow. The portion of the online realm that we’ve already invented is still a mere fraction of the total job of creation that we’ll collectively perform. There is more world to come than world already made.

I find that I regularly need to remind myself of this every time I’m thinking of starting something new. When I started the Salon Blogs program in 2002 I worried that we were late arrivals to that game. Blogs had been around forever — I’d been reading them for five years! We shouldn’t forget that at the time of Google’s founding in 1998, search was considered old hat, a “solved problem.” Similarly, Facebook itself could have seemed a johnny-come-lately five years ago, coming as it did on the heels of Friendster, Orkut and MySpace.

The Net is still young and what we do with it and on it remains an early work in progress. The “uncharted territory” still beckons those who enjoy exploring. And it may be that one secret of Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s success is that they aren’t losing sight of this truth as they plunge into the technology industry’s crazy scrum.

Here’s TechCrunch on Zuckerberg’s interview. And here’s the full video, linked to start at the 52:30 mark where the map discussion occurred:

Is Daily Beast really losing $10 million a year?

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I watched the mini-circus of media coverage that accompanied Friday’s announcement of the Newsweek/Daily Beast merger, and joined in the name mashup fun (I favor the Daily Week). Like a lot of people, I also scratched my head: Lashing two money-losing operations together doesn’t seem all that smart.

But one question kept nagging me. Everyone was pegging Daily Beast’s annual losses at $10 million. I spent a good number of years helping manage the budget of a Web news operation that resembles the Daily Beast’s in many ways (though, even at the height of the dotcom bubble, we never had a Tina Brown-sized salary to pay). And $10 million is an awful lot of money to lose on a digital-only outfit with essentially no distribution costs and a parent company (IAC) to handle the back end.

I mean, it’s possible to imagine burning through that kind of money on a company with 70 employees. It helps if (a) you have no revenue and (b) you pay people lavishly, throw tons of parties, give everyone an outsize travel budget, and spend a fortune on marketing — all of which Brown is entirely capable of.

Still, a loss of $10 million? I wanted to know where that number came from.

I spent some time over the weekend looking around, and as far as I can tell, this figure has only one source, in a Wall Street Journal story that ran last month:

The Daily Beast is expected to lose about $10 million this year, said a person in the know; executives say it’s on a pace to be profitable in two years.

So all we have behind this much-bruited-about number is a single anonymous “person in the know,” who might be the Daily Beast’s accountant or might be Tina Brown’s hairdresser. (Meanwhile, those “profitable in two years” predictions are not worth the breath required to utter them; every money-losing media company has a plan to be profitable in two years.)

Yet the Beast’s $10 million loss has now graduated from this thinly sourced ballpark figure to become received wisdom in the business press. Saturday it turned up in a New York Times piece:

It is an epiphany Mr. Diller most likely came to after seeing no other alternative for eventually turning a profit from The Daily Beast, which is losing on the order of $10 million a year.

I’d be curious to know where the Times piece got its hedged “on the order of” figure. Is it just repeating the Journal’s number? If it was independently sourced, why no mention of that? If the story used some back-of-the-napkin reckoning to arrive at the figure, shouldn’t we see it?

There’s no question that reporting on the finances of an outfit like the Daily Beast isn’t easy; execs will never voluntarily share unflattering numbers. (If you look at the SEC filings of Daily Beast parent IAC, you don’t get much help; Tina Brown’s fiefdom is not broken out on a separate line.) Despite reporting directly from within the belly of the Beast, media-reporting star Howie Kurtz, who recently left the Washington Post to join Brown’s outfit, offered no help in his own lengthy piece on the merger.

Still, we all could do better when casually throwing numbers like this around unless they are better documented. I’m sure the Daily Beast is losing a nice chunk of change, but it’s not at all clear to me that anyone outside the place has a clue whether that number is $5 million, $10 million or more.

Now that Brown’s losses are going to be mixed up with Newsweek’s, of course, figuring out who’s responsible for any ultimate profit or loss will become much more difficult, even from inside the organization. Brown will get to keep busting budgets for a spell and will no longer bear sole responsibility for the bottom line.

This sort of responsibility dilution was one of the reasons AOL’s savvy management sold out to Time Warner a decade ago — a merger that looked dubious to me from the get-go. I get the same whiff of fear and train-wreck from the Daily Week — only, this time around, the stakes are a lot lower.

E-book Links, November 7-12: NY Times’ e-bestsellers; e-book biz in billions; e-ink in color

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  • Kindle 3: e-book readers come of age [Nate Anderson, Ars Technica]: "Now that standalone e-book readers like the Kindle have hit mass market prices (the new WiFi-only Kindle is a mere $139) and have turned into high-quality reading machines at last, the question is what's lost and what's found in the move to e-books? Or, to put it another way, does it really matter that I can no longer smell my books?"
  • Color E Ink to Be Sold in Hanvon E-Reader [NYTimes.com]: "E Ink screens have two advantages over LCD — they use far less battery power and they are readable in the glare of direct sunlight. However, the new color E Ink display, while an important technological breakthrough, is not as sharp and colorful as LCD. Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations."

WSJ’s Obama-shakeup overreach: Why I think the paper’s wrong, and why it matters

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When I talk about the state of corrections in today’s news media I use the phrase “circle the wagons” a lot. It’s meant to evoke the defensive reflexes that kick in when a news organization perceives it’s under attack. Too often, circling the wagons is the default reaction in the newsroom when readers raise questions about coverage.

The advantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it buttresses the institutional facade of authority, and these buttresses hold up well as long as the reader lacks the time or interest to pay close attention. The disadvantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it is prone to crumble when the reader looks too closely.

In this post, I am going to look very closely at one such incident. So be warned: we’re heading deep into some weeds.

Last week MediaBugs received an error report about an election-eve story in the Wall Street Journal. The story’s headline announced “Pressure Builds on Obama to Shake Up Inner Circle,” but, our error reporter pointed out, the article failed to provide any quotes of actual people urging Obama to shake up his inner circle. We sought a response from the Journal, and when we didn’t get one, we made a little noise about it.

MediaBugs finally got a response from the Journal Thursday. I would characterize it as a circle-the-wagons response, and I’m going to dissect it and the story it references to see what we can learn.

[Read more…]

Times’ slippery slope for online revisions

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Earlier this week I was reading the NY Times’ Media Decoder post about my friend and former colleague Joan Walsh’s announcement that she was stepping down as Salon’s editor to write a book. (The estimable Kerry Lauerman replaces her.)

So I’m reading along, and I see that her new book is going to be titled Indecisive:

Hmm. Joan’s a pretty smart editor and writer, and somehow Indecisive is just not the kind of book title I would expect her to end up with. Doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels.

A little later I saw a message from Joan on Twitter reporting that, indeed, the Times report was wrong — the title of her book, which is going to be about how the politics of fear are hurting the U.S., is, in fact, Indivisible. Which makes much more sense: it’s pleasantly allusive and clearly related to the subject matter.

Several hours later, the Times blog post had been revised to reflect the correct title:

But this change has occurred without any notice whatsoever on the copy.

There are two ways of viewing this practice. One is, who cares? It’s the Web, you can change stuff any time you like. Why shouldn’t the Times go ahead and use this malleable medium in a malleable way?

The other is to say that we’re now practicing journalism in an environment that lets us change text at will, and as a result, we need to be extra careful about maintaining accountability for what we post.

Looser practices in this area, like Slate’s now-closed 24-hour “window” for making changes to stories, remain common. The Times itself appears to have chosen a variation of this approach, one that sounds arbitrary and inconsistent as articulated last month by associate managing editor Jim Roberts:

Particularly in the realm of breaking news (but also in the realm of features, enterprise projects, and in this case, advance obits), we are constantly refining what we publish online. Articles grow as we learn more information, and sometimes change direction if the news dictates. Often what gets into the printed paper (where space is much more finite) is a tighter edit on what we publish online.

… Because our editing and publishing systems for print and the Web are intertwined, we often (but not always) use the final printed version as the final archived version that stays on the Web, the theory being that this version of the story has all the accumulated wisdom of our editing process in place. There are many exceptions to this, particularly developing news stories that continue to be updated through the night, well beyond the deadline of the print edition.

In other words, as Roberts explains it, each story the Times posts on the Web is an “iterative” work-in-progress, undergoing a process of “constant refinement” until it congeals into a (sort of) final form for print — but said form can still keep changing, too. So the Times-on-the-Web is always subject to change, and there appears to be no clear line separating “changes that require a correction” from those that don’t that editors can draw and readers can understand. (Compare the Times’ handling of the Walsh error to the humble Galleycat publishing blog, which saw fit to put a correction line on its updated post.)

I predict this policy will last only until the next major blow-up, when readers call foul after observing some particularly sensitive Times story get “refined” in an unaccountable manner, and Times editors wake up to the reality that this policy undermines their own traditions of paper-of-record accountability.

The answer is plain, as I’ve been arguing for some time now: The Times and other papers should preserve their freedom to improve stories while simultaneously retaining their readers’ trust by exposing the “history” of revisions to every story they publish. This can be done in a manner that’s unobtrusive. Once it’s coded into the publishing platform, it requires zero additional work on the part of editors and reporters. It just makes sense.

And here’s why it’s important: When your publishing tools let you change posted content without leaving a trail, and your publishing culture doesn’t strictly limit or control journalists’ ability to make those changes, they will be tempted, sooner or later, to try to hide substantial and important mistakes. This is only human. No newsroom — even one as careful as the Times — can assume that its denizens are exempt. The solution is obvious: deliver writers from temptation, and track changes for readers.

Wall Street Journal pushes trumped-up Obama shakeup story, stonewalls questions

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Right before the election last week the Wall Street Journal ran a story that suggested the Obama administration was suffering a veritable collapse, with top Democrats demanding Obama reshape his entire administration. Great story — only there wasn’t a single quote, sourced or anonymous, backing up the headline and lead.

MediaBugs has been working this one, but with no response from the Journal to date. A blog post by my colleague Mark Follman explains the situation:

Just ahead of last week’s election the Wall Street Journal reported that “high-level Democrats” were calling for President Obama “to remake his inner circle or even fire top advisers” in the face of an imminent drubbing at the polls.

But an error report on MediaBugs flagged a conspicuous problem with the story: It contained no evidence supporting the claim in its headline and first paragraph. Not a single one of the eight people quoted in the piece called for Obama “to remake his inner circle” or “fire top advisers.” (Read the story here.)

Over the past week we contacted the Journal five times seeking a response to the error report. We emailed a reporter, a managing editor and a general address designated for reporting errors to the newsroom. We also called the phone number listed with corrections info in the print edition. We haven’t received any response.

[read the rest at our MediaBugs blog]

It’s normal in journalism to move right past this sort of thing — to shrug our shoulders, write these distortions and problems off as the province of yesterday’s fishwrap, and forget about them. At MediaBugs we’re going to try something different: to establish a record, public and relatively permanent, of this kind of incident. Whether the Journal ultimately provides an explanation or not, we think this will be valuable, for both journalists and the public.

Survey: News websites across US botch error reporting, corrections

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Over at MediaBugs, we’ve just published the second of our surveys of correction practices — this one nationwide. The results confirm the pattern we found in our first, Bay-Area-only study: Most news websites make it hard for readers to report errors and find corrections. Here are the gory details.

Interestingly, the cable news networks have the best overall record — a better one than newspapers or magazines. There’s one exception, however: the Fox News website is entirely lacking in any corrections-related content or information: no way to find out if they fixed something and no way to tell them they got it wrong. Apparently, over at Fox, they get everything right all the time, so why worry about this stuff?

As a result of what MediaBugs found in our first survey, we made a point of incorporating information about the error-correction practices of each media organization right in the MediaBugs interface — you can find it as part of each listing on our Browse by Media Outlet page.

If you’re involved in running one of these websites, have a look at MediaBugs’ best practices page — and know that repairing these problems really isn’t that much work.

If you’re a reader or user of these sites, consider taking the step of telling them about that page: assuming they haven’t buried their email address!

E-book Links, November 1-5: Borrowers and lenders; Stephen King and Kevin Kelly; No no, NaNoWriMo!

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  • Steal this book: The loan arranger [Glenn Fleishman, The Economist]: "Amazon.com says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto."
  • Ebook restrictions leave libraries facing virtual lockout [Guardian, The Long Good Read]: "Publishers have now threatened to prevent libraries from accessing ebooks. It’s a move described by one library boss as 'regressive' at a time when they are trying to innovate as they fight for survival. But the Publishers Association (PA) claims that 'untrammelled' remote lending of digital books could pose a 'serious threat' to publishers’ commercial activities. That is why it has just announced a clampdown, informing libraries they may have to stop allowing users to download ebooks remotely and instead require them to come to the library premises, just as they do to get traditional print books – arguably defeating the object of the e-reading concept."
  • The Trouble with E-Readers [David Pogue, Scientific American]: “You won’t be giving a well-worn e-book to your children. But you won’t be giving one to your friend, either; you can’t resell or even give away an e-book. It doesn’t seem right. Why shouldn’t you be able to pass along an e-book just the way you’d pass on a physical one? You paid for it, haven’t you?”
  • Stephen King: Why E-books Aren’t Scary [Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal]: “Q: How much time do you spend reading digitally? A: It's approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell's ‘Faceless Killers’ and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.”
  • Tech Book: PW Talks to Kevin Kelly [Publishers Weekly]: "I’m thinking about what remains of a book when you take away paper. I’m pretty sure there’s something there—that the concept of a book exists outside of paper. The issue, though, is not how people are going to enjoy books. The issue is more about business models. For readers, this is the best time in history. There’s never been more selection, more media types, or quality books. There’s never been more backlist books available. This is a high point for readers. For publishers, though, it is a low point, as their businesses are in transition. But I’m very optimistic, because in my research, money follows attention. Wherever attention flows, money follows. So, I have no doubt that if it is screens that are getting attention, money will flow to screens."
  • Better yet, DON’T write that novel [Laura Miller, Salon.com]: Laura shrinks in horror from National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”). "Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let's face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built."
  • A Genre Is Born [Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print]: "Teen Paranormal Romance" category at B&N elicits end-of-civilization fears. "In fixating on a particular category of books — whatever its merits may be — the critics lose sight of the bigger picture: young people are developing a passion for reading, and of paper books, no less."

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