Does the internet hold an inherent political worldview? Does this medium have a message? I wondered that after I read BBC correspondent Justin Webb arguing that the American left had lost its way and its means.
“The worlds of entertainment and news (which used to pipe a vaguely leftwing message into the nation’s homes) have been blown to bits by technological changes which render them powerless,” he wrote. “The Democrats need a message and a new way of communicating that message to a mass audience. They have neither.” That made sense: mass media were perfect for the old, populist left, but they are mass no more. And the next media phenoms - cable news and talk radio - turned out to be the right vehicles for US conservatives. They used these niche channels to hammer home their angry arguments and fight back at what they saw as the liberal hegemony of mass media (and Hollywood).
So what, I wondered then, is the political nature of the latest medium, the internet? When I started blogging in 2001, I was puzzled by the apparently disproportionate number of libertarians around me, until I came to see that perhaps they had found a home in a medium that enables and celebrates individual liberty.
But perhaps it’s not that simple.
Then I argue that the internet is none of the above.
In the last few years, newspapers around the country have been testing the waters of the seldom-restrained, often scrappy world of Web-based journalism by setting their reporters loose to write their own blogs.
Last week, the experiment backfired for The Los Angeles Times. The newspaper suspended the blog of one of its columnists after it was revealed that he had posted comments on the paper’s Web site and elsewhere on the Web under false names.
Well, that’s like saying that The New York Times’ experiment in journalism backfired with Jayson Blair. This isn’t about blogging as a form. This is about journalists being afraid to deal with people, eye-to-eye.
It continues trying to make blogs look new, different, and scary:
The incident has underscored the difficulties that can arise when a newspaper gives free rein to staff writers on the Web.
Well, same goes for reporters talking on radio or TV or in speeches or in bars. Maybe they should travel around all the time with an editor.
The Philadelphia Inquirer — which finds itself publishing at Ground Zero for change in the newspaper business — runs an op-ed package today about whether we need newspapers. The conclusion is obvious and I state the obvious (nonregistration copy here):
Do we need newspapers? No. Do we need news and journalism and an informed democracy? Of course we do. But paper? Why? Too often, I hear editors pleading to save newspapers and newsrooms as their status quo is threatened by plummeting circulation, imploding advertising, impatient shareholders, multimedia youth and the Internet. Everyone is to blame for newspapers’ pickle, it seems, but the newspapers themselves.
Yet perhaps the era of newspapers as we now know them is simply over. Especially since broadcast killed competitive newspapers, they have become one-size-fits-all vehicles that cannot possibly be all things to all people; they may be convenient, but they are also inefficient and shallow compared with the depth of the Internet. Newspapers are inevitably stale next to broadcast and online. They are inefficient advertising vehicles for highly targeted sales - classifieds and very local retail. Newspapers are terribly expensive to produce and distribute in a marketplace where your competition is free.
If you are a publishing executive or journalist, your reaction to that harsh reality may be to hold on for dear life to the old ways, which is what I have seen some newspaper people do, until now - until it could be too late for them. Or your reaction can be to see this as an opportunity to gather and share news in entirely new and often better ways thanks to new technologies that reduce the cost of distribution, speed up production, allow relevant targeting of both content and advertising, and, most important, allow the people we used to call the audience - you - to join in and help inform your neighbors.
I go on to tell the story of the norgs meeting in Philadelphia, where journalists and bloggers got together to try to reinvent the news organization of the very near future.
Richard Stengel, head of the National Constitution Center, argues the obvious — that we need journalism, especially locally, to watch government — but still concludes:
Newspapers are no longer just on paper. They are virtual. The distinction between what people read on paper and what they read on a screen is an increasingly irrelevant one. Newspaper companies must realize that. Does it matter whether you read a great columnist online, or on your BlackBerry, or on paper? It is about the information, the reporting, and the writing - not the medium in which it is delivered.
Hugh Hewitt praises paperless news and blogs and doesn’t do much for the old echo-chamber argument, pushing the notion that liberals are the ones holding onto the old press (huh?) and recommending only his conservative friends. His piece would have been stronger if he hadn’t tried to make paper liberal and online conservative.
Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.
I picture Philly-guy Atrios opening up his morning Inquirer and doing a spit-take.
Save the Internet is a campaign to protect net neutrality, “the internet’s First Amendment,” which means, in David Weinberger’s words, “that the people who provide connections to the Internet don’t get to favor some bits over others.” To do otherwise is just bad business.
The age of business models built on scarcity and on keeping your customers from doing what they want to do is over. Now we just have to make sure that Congress doesn’t try to keep it on artificial life support.
Maurice says that Google’s new syndication protocol, which I asked about yesterday, is an indication that Google is putting a gate in the wall around its garden to enable queries into its data. That would be good. But what it really should allow is not just queries into but scraping of its data for that data is our data that we put there in services like Google Base. Why do I care about this? So that new services can come along and aggregate distributed posts — classified ads, listings, reviews, whatever — wherever they are on the internet, in blogs, in other still-closed services, or in open blogs. Now that Google is trying to become a repository of our data, that should be open to the world to aggregate and analyze as Google aggregates others’ data. The Golden Rule of the Google Age should be: Scrape unto others as you would have them scrape unto you. I hope that’s what the new syndication protocol does but I’m still not sure.
Glenn Reynolds writes a good paper on libel and bloggers from both a legal and a cultural perspective. Wish it were in HTML but the PDF is here.
Also, see the list of legal actions against bloggers maintained most helpfully by Eric Robinson of the Media Law Research Center. And while we’re at it, here’s my recent Comment is Free post on libel law in the age of the internet. I’m working with folks who are trying to put together a web site that gives you the top 10 things you need to know to stay out of court; stay tuned.
My take on LA Times reporter/blogger Michael Hiltzik’s use of pseudonyms to comment on blogs in defense of his real self is that this is more than catching Hiltzik doing something silly and schizo.
This reveals a more fundamental issue in the relationship of mainstream news to blogs and interaction: Journalists have lost the ability to interact as people. Sometimes it’s a matter of alleged journalistic prissiness, a misguided attempt to maintain objectivity or whatever we call it now. Sometimes it’s a matter of corporate policy, rules that try to keep reporters from speaking except when edited. And sometimes it’s a matter of personal weirdness, an inability to face people directly. Another symptom of the disease — which I complain about here — is reporters sending emails to bloggers and demanding that their comments be off-the-record. Reporters, mind you, should be the last people on earth asking to be off the record.
The bottom line: Journalists who are afraid to speak as themselves in public. They thus separate themselves from the public they serve: scared of us or feeling superior to us, but not among us in any case. That is a mistake and an insult.
Now I was recently speaking with a journalist who reminds me that reporters and their institutions are larger, more visible, and juicier targets for attack than others. If you write about the Middle East enough, you get gun-shy seeing your name in forum posts or blog posts or emails. I get that.
But, still, here’s Hiltzik choosing to enter into a conversation with the public — the act of blogging is precisely that — but then pulling back to refuse to interact with honestly, at eye level. It’s an act of lying and of cowardice.
He complains that others online hide behind anonymity. And I agree with him in my general mistrust of the anonymous. But he doesn’t get to hide behind that. He has a byline and a podium and he can’t dash in and out of the closet, try as he might.
I would not fire Hiltzik. He screwed up and made an ass of himself. That is punishment enough. But let his story be a lesson to other journalists: The first level of transparency in your dealings with the public is identity. Stand behind what you say.
Dell, on the hand, did not fare as well. The company is still growing, to be sure, but not as fast as the overall market. During the first quarter, Dell’s worldwide shipments grew by 10.2 percent. That was still enough to keep the company in first place with 18.1 percent of the overall market. Perhaps most alarmingly for Dell, US growth for the quarter dropped under 1 percent [from almost 9 percent - ed]. At least the company’s increased focus on Asia and other non North American markets is paying off, as its international shipments grew to 23 percent vs. the overall market figure of 16 percent.
To this day, I get emails almost daily — in addition to blog links and blog comments — from poor souls who have had their own tales of Dell hell. It is a serious problem that will continue to cause problems for the company.
To all the nice folks who send me email asking for help: I wish I could but I am the last person to have any connection at Dell. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do except sympathize… and recommend a Mac.
“Conventional wisdom, it’s an enemy at a time like this,” said Beth Comstock, president for digital media and market development at NBC Universal, part of General Electric. “In media today, I don’t think there is a single rule that can’t — and frankly, probably shouldn’t — be broken.
“This isn’t just about driving growth,” she added. “It’s about staying in business.”
Preach it, sister.
But at this same confab, there was a wake-up call to newspapers, from consultant Gordon Borrell. If they are not careful, they will soon lose not only their monopolies but their top perches in their markets:
Mr. Borrell discussed a new report from his company showing that local television stations more than doubled their Internet ad revenue last year compared with 2004, to $283 million from $119 million. And, he predicted, the figure would climb to $410 million by the end of 2006.
But ad revenue last year for Web sites operated by local newspapers totaled $2 billion, according to the report, or more than nine times what the Web sites of the local TV stations took in….
… “All media are in flux, and flux is a great time to institute change.”
As an example, Mr. Borrell cited the Web site operated by WRAL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., that is owned by the Capitol Broadcasting Company. The ad revenue for the site (www.wral.com) exceeds the ad revenue for www.newsobserver.com, the Web site operated by the leading local newspaper, The News and Observer, published by the McClatchy Company.
CORRECTION: Just got email from Chris Hendricks, head of online for McClatchy, forwarding a note from Borrell, saying he was misquoted by The Times. Borrell said the station has more traffic according to Nielsen data than the paper — not revenue.
Well, what does this news about the Opie & Anthony deal do to CBS’ suit against Howard Stern, which complains about him promoting satellite radio even after they’d allowed it:
For three hours each weekday, Opie and Anthony would do a cleaner version of their usual show — one acceptable under broadcast standards — for the CBS audience, produced in the Midtown Manhattan studios of WFNY (92.3 FM), a CBS station. That portion of the show would also be heard on XM.
After that show, the two hosts — whose real names are Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia — would travel to XM’s studios nearby for two additional hours of the show, unrestrained. As part of the deal, Opie and Anthony would be allowed to use the end of the CBS show to plug their satellite program, said the executives, who were granted anonymity because the negotiations are still under way.
