Boiled Down Response to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer Inanity

… and also a response to Connie Schultz, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reader rep, and the estimable Judge Richard Posner:

• Pure content theft (an example of which can be found here, and here) is already illegal under existing copyright law. No further legal change is needed. Sue away.
• Connie Schultz is so deliberately vague about what laws she would actually change (she wants to be able to “sue Web aggregators who post such significant rewrites or summaries that readers to their sites lose any interest in reading the original stories”) that, given that laws to prevent the theft of online material already exist, one can only assume she wants to be able to selectively sue people who discuss, add value to, comment on or link to other news stories. Indeed, its arguable that Josh Marshall and TPM regularly do what Schultz decries — “post significant rewrites or summaries” of news stories. The fact that he is beloved by the chattering classes and would never be sued demonstrates the perils of selective enforcement.
• In short, Schultz, Posner, and others want to dramatically narrow the definition of fair use.
• The reporting of news, insofar as it serves a public function, has a higher standard of acceptable fair use than non-public content (like music, or art.) News is only “publicly valuable” insofar as it becomes part of the stream of actions, debates, and discussions that are necessary for democracy to function. Therefore …
• The standards governing the fair use of news content should, if anything, be broader than they are now, not narrower. But its perfectly fine for them to remain just as they are. Original reporting should not be built on the back of stifling conversation.

Google, and the Problem of “Two Democracies”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Google over the past few weeks, partly because I’m working on a project this summer on the future of news reporting, and partly just because there has been a lot of stupid crap said and written recently about the role of Google and the “link economy” in the production and dissemination of news. And a lot of this, in turn, ties into issues of public policy– specifically, the changes in laws and regulations that might reach down into the very guts of the web. In the next few paragraphs, I want to  examine the relationship between Google, linking, democracy, and gathering news by positing two principles, a proposition, a caveat, two (big) conundrums, and conclude by pointing the way to some of the best forward thinking on this topic.

Here we go:

Principle One: Google is not “the web” — but its complicated. Back in the days of the Ma Bell monopoly, was At&T the equivalent of the U.S. telephone system? Obviously not. The “system” was really a series of interconnected cables, phone lines, local utility offices, operator switches, headsets, and human beings (like operators and telephone repairmen) in which AT&T was a dominant player. That dominance, however, made things complicated; many of the rules, technologies, systems, and even the methods by which telephones were used stemmed, in large part, from the way that AT&T, over its history, interpreted the telephone system and what it was for. Obviously, there were limit cases — AT&T could not have unilaterally decided that telephones were really best used for hitting robbers over the head, and marketed themselves as a home protection service. But given those limit cases (what scholars of science and technology call “affordances“),  individuals, companies, scientists, and the government had a fair degree of room to shape the system they were operating on top of. At least for a while.

This isn’t a case, however, of “powerful companies determine how technologies get used, and it’s all a conspiracy.” Rather, there is a second principle at work here– what the same science and technology scholars call “black boxing.” The term actually comes out of computer science, and basically means that, at some point, a cluster of complex infrastructures become “black boxed.” They become seen as unproblematic and unified in a way in which they might not have been originally. Problematizing these unitary systems is called “opening the black box.” The example that has always made the most sense to me here is the idea of a car– for most of us, our car is a “black box”; it’s a unitary device that we ride to work and don’t think about much. Except, of course, when it breaks down; then we start to think very hard about the different objects that make up the black box, mostly so we can figure out how to fix them.

If we put these two concepts together– affordances and black boxing– and apply them to Google and them to the internet, here’s what we get. By deeply understanding and leveraging certain affordances of the internet, Google became the dominant company of the early 21st century digital economy. Along the way, partly because of its’ market and cultural dominance, and partly because it understood the world wide web so well, out notions of “the internet” and “Google” got packaged together in one black box. These days, its hard to disentangle the two; its hard to open that black box.

Newspaper executives are trying, though, and that’s what we’ve been watching over the past year or so. And that’s why it seems to frustrating, futile, and odd to so many people.

This Moment in Media History …

Love it or hate it, this is what we’ve got.

We’ve Been Living Through a Twitter Revolution for the Last 10 Years

[Josh Breitbart repointed me to this article, which I actually quoted in my dissertation. I got tired of wading through all the expired Indymedia.docs security certificates, so I just reposted it here. "It is a message that older media ignore at their own peril." (December 1999)

One of the reasons I've grown so skeptical of hearing about a Twitter revolution is that I've been reading about it for 10 years. Differences in scale and general accessibility, sure, as well as smaller and better technologies. And obviously, whats going on in Iran has globe shaking consequences with the possibility of real death. So differences in drama, too perhaps.  But beyond that? Not much different in the underlying infrastructure. Or in the  way technology is being used. It's past time we stopped talking about digital revolutions like they happened yesterday. We've been living though one for the past ten years. It's time to stop trying either to hype it, or debunk it, and start trying to figure out what it means.]

—

News you can use from the little guys

Tom Regan

Christian Science Monitor

from the December 09, 1999 edition

http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1999/12/09/p12s1.htm

- An amazing thing happened during the World Trade Organization meeting last week. In an end run around traditional media, the Internet became the key player in dispersing information to a world hungry for details about the events in Seattle.

Several dozen small organizations used the Internet to publish and broadcast “alternative” coverage of the week’s events.

As Dean Paton’s excellent piece in last Friday’s Christian Science Monitor (page 3) points out, while traditional media sources are often like slow-moving, ponderous “elephants,” these new broadcasters are more like “mosquitoes” – fast on their feet, they can swarm an event with dozens, if not hundreds, of “correspondents” with camcorders, digital cameras and voice recorders, often provoking those “elephants” to expand their coverage in order to keep up.

But the showdown between traditional media and the new media in Seattle also provided a glimpse of what lies ahead for journalism in the new century. It is a message that older media ignore at their own peril.

In a world where young people use the Internet as their primary news source, it’s no surprise to find that the servers at the Independent Media Center, which was set up to provide a working space for the “mosquitoes,” were straining to deal with the numbers of people visiting the center’s Web site (www.indymedia.org). And remember, the visitors to these sites were aware that the information being provided to them was coming from groups with a definite point of view.

But that leads to a further discussion of the word “alternative.” The fact of the matter is that people who really wanted to learn about the WTO, and why it upsets so many people, were far better served by these small independent sites than they were by the traditional media, particularly television.

While big broadcasters like CNN and Fox focused almost exclusively on the confrontation between protesters and police, especially the first couple of days, the independent sites provided in-depth papers and research about the WTO, not to mention some fascinating discussion groups where people from both sides of the issues argued the trade questions back and forth for days.

But even on the issue of covering the protests, the independent groups were often ahead of the elephants, providing edgy, fresh, dramatic video of the events, compared with repeated footage of a couple of incidents and interviews with establishment talking heads that the network and cable-news operations favored.

So what is the lesson in all this for traditional media?

Last month at Comdex in Las Vegas, one commentator talked about the need to DYOB – destroy your old business. Only companies who are prepared to DYOB will truly flourish in an increasingly digital age.

For traditional media, this doesn’t mean abandoning traditional principles like objectivity or researching a story. But it does mean learning to work in a new medium in a new way, even if it sometimes means abandoning the old medium.

If not, it wouldn’t be surprising for one or two of these “independent” media centers to develop into a major media source, especially if they continue to function on the sort of “open source” reporting model seen in Seattle.

After all, the open-source movement is reshaping the business world. Who says it couldn’t happen to us in the media as well.

I’ll make this unusually short …

It’s done. Email me if you want a copy and can’t wait for the eventual book .

Dissertation, Chapter One (for download)

In advance of tomorrow’s Bar Camp News Innovation – Philadelphia I wanted to take this opportunity to put the introductory chapter of my dissertation online for public download. Since my entire research project was centered around analyzing changes in news production and news collaboration in Philadelphia, I thought the #bcniphilly would be a good moment to debut the finished product.

I’m expecting that tomorrow is going to be an energized day in which lots of people get really excited about the future of news. Good. The future of news needs a little (ok, a lot) of optimism and excitement. This chapter (and by extension, the entire dissertation) isn’t a downer, per. se., but I think it does document just how hard it is to make the kind of changes in the news production ecosystem that a lot of the participants in BCNIPhilly will be dreaming of.  Which, I hope, will only encourage them to discover new ways to make the transformations they seek.

Chapter One is available here as a pdf at the end of this post. Once the dissertation is finally, officially, 100% done (as in “deposited,” which it must be by May 14th so I can graduate) I will be sending out an email to folks so they can get a copy of the whole 350 page monster, assuming that anyone ever would want to read such a thing.

See folks tomorrow at the Bar Camp.

—

CHAPTER ONE: ANALYZING LOCAL NEWS PRODUCTION IN A PERIOD OF TRANSITION

THE CROSSROADS

In August of 2000, a hoary political institution—the Republican National Convention (RNC), assembling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—met a new kind of media network. As the national Republican Party descended on the city in the summer of 2000, its delegates were met by hundreds of convention protesters carrying cell phones, video cameras, and old fashioned pencils and paper notebooks, all calling themselves reporters, and all networked into a website that displayed reports from the street protests as news broke.  Growing out of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, and expanding to several other American and European cities in the months that followed, these Philadelphia protester-reporters identified themselves as members of Philadelphia Independent Media Center (Philly IMC, or “Indymedia.”) and promised their readers overtly biased political reporting, by amateurs, directly from the scene of anti-RNC protests. As the political protesters clashed with Philadelphia police on the Convention’s second day — “thousands of roving demonstrators and helmeted police faced off in intersections around the city yesterday afternoon,” the Pittsburg Post Gazette wrote, “trading blows at some junctures, while in Center City several delegate hotels locked their doors … as the two sides sparred for control of the streets,” –amateur Indymedia journalists did more than simply comment on the drama as it unfolded. They were instrumental in documenting it online for a mass audience.  The Indymedia volunteers were amongst the first group of digital activists to directly pose the question of who counted as a legitimate journalist in an era of low-cost, digital information gathering and distribution.

Six years later, at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a few of the radical reporters that had first stormed the journalistic barricades during the 2000 Republican Convention sat down with local bloggers, newspaper editors, cable TV executives, and new media thinkers to plot a future for local news coverage. The pace of the changes buffeting journalism, changes that first announced themselves in dramatic fashion during coverage of the 2000 Convention, had only accelerated in the intervening half-decade since the RNC. “Do-it-yourself journalism” was no longer a practice confined to political radicals and occupational anarchists– it had manifested itself as part of a “war-blogging” revolution, a “mommy-blogging” revolution, a YouTube revolution, a MySpace revolution, a Flash Mob revolution, a “hyperlocal citizens’ media” revolution, and in hundreds of other trends that lacked only a catchy moniker. Perhaps more ominously, the first signs of deep economic distress inside the news industry had begun to filter out of Philadelphia; in late 2005 the Knight-Ridder news chain, which owned both daily newspapers in Philadelphia (and had, for decades, posted profited double-digit profit margins) announced it was breaking itself up and selling its multiple media assets. In the face of the citizen media explosion and these distant economic rumblings, the Annenberg meeting was nothing like the 2000 occupational uprising that saw radical journalists eviscerate the “lackeys of the corporate press” and professional journalists snidely dismiss their scruffy, decidedly non-objective challengers. Instead, participants in the oddly titled “Norg’s conference” came together, in their words, “in a spirit of cooperation … to save local news in Philadelphia.” The Norg’s conference was one of the first meetings to explicitly raise the question: could traditional journalists and the new crop of professional-amateur hybrids work together in order to improve local journalism?

On February 22, 2009, three years after the Norg’s conference, a decade after the earliest meetings to plan a “global Indy Media news network,” and twelve years since the first newspapers in Philadelphia went online, the journalistic center finally collapsed. Philadelphia Media Holdings, the local ownership group that had purchased the city’s two leading news institutions—the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News— amid much hope, goodwill, and optimism, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The news was first broken by a local blog,  analyzed breathlessly on Twitter, and reported (hours later) in lengthy, accurate depth by the bankrupt newspapers themselves. While both the Daily News and the Inquirer continued their daily print ruins, and while local ownership was quick to insist that the filing was little more than an “organizational restructuring,” it was hard not to see the bankruptcy as one of the closing acts in a twelve year transition from an old to a new media system. Perhaps the citizens of Philadelphia overheard, in these developments, the dying gasp of an old world; perhaps they caught the cries of a new one. Perhaps they barely noticed, or simply shrugged.  The bankruptcy of the Philadelphia newspapers was one of the first events to raise the question: would local newspapers—and indeed, institutional news providers or all kinds—survive the combination of digital tsunami and the economic crash? If they didn’t, would it matter?

Whatever the ultimate meaning of the signal moments highlighted above– moments of confrontation, cooperation, and collapse– this dissertation is a chronicle of this time of transition, as filtered through the struggles, joys, and stories of a single city. Historians of early print culture label the period between the invention of the printing press by Guttenberg in 1439 and the year 1500 the incunabula, or “cradle”; a time when metal typography was designed to mimic the calligraphy of script, when monks wheeled printing presses into their scriptoria, and when the Abbot Johannes Trithemius would first valorize the work of hand-copying in his book “De Laude scriptorum” and then rush to have his work printed en masse.  Scholars of digital journalism lack a wonderful Latinate word like incunabula. Nevertheless, we may be living in a similar transitory period.  Attempts to understand this transition, to “grasp it with both hands,” and then to analyze it in a rigorous, focused, and empirical way take up the bulk of the pages that follow.

To add structure to the admittedly difficult task of compiling a “history of the present,” this dissertation focuses on three primary questions: how is the authority of local journalism changing?  How is the work of local journalism changing? Are changes in both the work and authority of journalism leading local journalists to collaborate across institutional boundaries; are changes in work leading to an increased “working together” on the part of various professional groups and institutionalized and deinstitutionalized media makers? Trying to answer these three questions, I argue, will give us an insight into shifts in media production that transcend the specificities of the present age. Scholarship that analyzes moments of “in-between-ness,” periods between the collapse of one system and the emergence of another, is rare. Through an examination of journalist authority, work, and collaboration, this dissertation aims to document one of these liminal historical moments.

Read the Rest of Chapter One [pdf]

My Own Institutional Battle With Google News (circa 2004)

The Gist for the Twitter Generation: The difference between my NYC Indymedia conversations with Google in early 2005 and the AP’s back and forth with Google in 2009 are instructive. In essence, the radical Indymedia network did everything it could to get aggregated by the monopolistic corporate search engine Google. We were worried that Google wouldn’t index us because of our politics or because they wouldn’t understand what we were doing. We had to fight to get on Google’s list, we thought we belonged on their list, and we wanted Google to “steal” as much of our content as they possibly would.  The AP, on the other hand, would love to return to the days when a website like NYC Indymedia wouldn’t have shown up (even occasionallly) in any index of what’s authoritative news, or what constitutes “journalism that matters.” They still haven’t gotten used to the idea– even after having 7 years to think about it– that ordinary people can occasionally be journalists, and that these people would want to give a bunch of their journalism away for free.

Now, the rest:

In all the recent brouhaha about the AP’s saber rattling at Google and Google News, the comment that struck me the most was this one from AP Senior Vice-President Sue Cross. “One goal of The A.P. and its members, [Cross] said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are ‘the original source or the most authoritative source’ not a site that copied or paraphrased the work.”

This whole situation reminded me of my own  battle with Google News, one that took place more than 5 years ago. It’s a very different battle than the one the AP was fighting, though. At the time, I was working for the citizen journalism website  NYC Indymedia, which was probably at its institutional height. In early 2004, those of us with the Indymedia network (which was actually kind of like the AP insofar as we were a news sharing coop made up of local member organizations) first noticed Google News. We quickly decided we wanted our own radical journalism websites included in the Google News index– we thought that what we were doing really was journalism, and we thought that Google News would provide a useful cultural “certification” of the fact that ordinary people could occasionally be journalists. In December 2004, a volunteer with the Michigan Indymedia shared some bad news with the rest of the network:

Subject: suggestion: michiganimc.org
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:25:43 -0400

I would like to suggest the Michigan Independent Media Center for Google News. please let me know more.

—

Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 14:12:54 -0800
From: Google News
Subject: Re: [#16123069] suggestion: michiganimc.org
To:

Hi,

Thank you for your note. We apologize for our delayed response. We have reviewed http://michiganimc.org but cannot include it in Google News at this time. We do not include sites that do not have a formal editoria review process. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.

Regards,
The Google Team

3/19: Denver and Seattle Link Roundup

In Seattle:

The early, early reviews of the “new” Seattle P-I are in, and the thumbs are down. Glenn Nelson calls it a “ghost town”: Chuck Taylor writes that, as of mid-day, “the top story at the new online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as it has been for at least 12 hours, is a photo of a cute puppy and a headline and blurb that link to a six-sentence blog item about adopting that and other puppies.” Seattlest says, basically, “give ‘em time,” and sure enough, by early evening ET, a new story pops up on a Starbucks meeting.

I agree its early; that said, Hearst’s seeming inability to figure out what it was doing in Seattle forestalled valuable transition time.

In terms of content– by my own count (and I admit, I still need to totally figure out Seattle P-I’s feed system) my RSS feed for the “local news” section of the online PI has racked up one item all day. My Seattle Times feed? 41 stories.

But, as I said, it is early.

Meanwhile, in Denver

Westword continues to own the In Denver Times story (shows what an alt-weekly with a paid staff can do). They snag a really informative interview with Steve Foster, managing editor of the not yet website. For me, the most interesting part of the interview was this exchange where Foster questioned the total applicability of a non-profit model by invoking– sports.

In Denver, sports coverage is a big thing. I have personal doubts that non-profit models should be used to produce sports news. Non-profit news organizations should be providing good government coverage, good investigative reporting — and as big a sports fan as I am, and as much of my career has been devoted to sports coverage, for a non-profit to be producing that, I don’t think it’s for the good of the community that’s supporting it. Sports coverage in particular to me is part of a for-profit model. And I believe that, at least in the city of Denver, to provide in-depth local coverage, it has to include sports.

Read that and the rest of the conversation here.

Denver and Seattle: Let the Experiments Begin

The gist for the Twitter generation:

Seattle P-I is taking the core of its former newspaper staff, along with the big guns of the Hearst Corporation, and trying to build a Huffington Post-in-Seattle website with a lot of commentary and linking out and a bit of added original reporting. They are counting on  online advertising revenue to build a working business model. In Denver Times is taking the core of its former newspaper staff, without the backing of a big newspaper chain, and trying to rebuild a webbier version of the Rocky Mountain News through a subscription / donation model.

Now, the full post:

Going back and reading my doctoral research after I’d put it away for a little while, it strikes me as a remarkably depressing piece of work. And why not– the subtitle is “the unraveling of metropolitan journalism.” Given the time period in which it was researched and written (2006-2009), there’s almost no way it couldn’t be anything but the story of something– basically, the journalism industry as we’ve known it– ending.

There are hints of hope, of course: the first days of Indymedia in Philadelphia represent the earliest hint of some of the distributed reporting models we hear so much about, as do the conversations Philly Future and some of the remarkably successful local blogs. In particular, I think that the Philly NORG initiative was something of a “born too early” test run for the conversation that is going to happen in Philadelphia if and when one or both of the newspapers shuts down, or goes all online, or something else.  With any luck, the fact that the conversation has already begun will leave the folks in Philly in a better place if / when they have to start it again.

But … the good people of Philadelphia have suffered enough from my endless microscope trained entirely on them. This is not to say I’m leaving the City of Brotherly love behind, just that they’ll have company. Because one of the things that happened yesterday, March 16, was that we saw the simultaneous emergence of two institutionally based re-imaginings of local journalism in two different cities, Seattle and Denver.  By noting the fact that these are institutionally-based re-imaginings, I want to emphasize that a ton of experiments in news journalistic practices have already begun in Seattle, Denver, and elsewhere.  Indeed, the best coverage of the planned launch of In Denver Times came from the website of the Westword, the local alt-weekly. But the Denver and Seattle developments strike me as important because they mark an attempt by two already organized groups (the Hearst Corporation in the case of the online only Seattle P-I and a cohesive group of ex-Rocky Mountain News staffers in the case of Denver) to put the rethinking of journalism into practice. In short: we should expect more of them than we do of the early experiments because they’ve got some combination of money, personnel, training, and organizational support.

The way I see it, these are natural petri dishes in which to watch the changes in local journalism, because both products aim to be online only, and both are in fairly mid-size big cities that still have a newspaper. So you can compare the Seattle P-I.com and In Denver Times to each other, but you can also compare them to the Denver Post and the Seattle Times, respectively.  In short, there’s a lot to look at here. Let’s get to work.

How to Celebrate a Distributed Dissertation?

With Wordle, of course:

There. Now you don’t have to read it.