Here’s my Guardian column this week, on the new architecture of news via links:
The fundamental architecture of news has shifted - again. We’ve already seen that news organisations’ exclusive hold on distribution and content creation has dissolved. But now it appears that their pre-eminence as news gatherers is also challenged, especially during breaking news events. So during big news stories, what is the role of the journalist now? To link, it seems.
There has been no better illustration of this shift than the Virginia Tech shootings, in which witness-reporters on campus used their available tools - blogging, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, mobile phones, wi-fi - to tell their stories as they occurred.
In most cases, the students’ intended audience was not the world but instead their families and friends, who did not come to them with journalistic expectations of completeness, verification, and identity. Their audiences knew them, and the news they sought was simply, “I’m OK, Dad.” Yet because the media had not yet sent their flocks of news vultures to Virginia, they depended on these witness-reporters to give us their accounts and their colour. As was discussed in last week’s MediaGuardian, the students resisted the crush of reporters coming to vet their tales and claim exclusive bits of life and death. Their stories were already there for all to see, with little need for journalists. What was big media to do, then? Link.
But the students were not the only ones who were media-savvy. So was the murderer. Many decried NBC’s decision to air his “multimedia manifesto,” as the network’s anchor called it. But I disagree. NBC should have revealed the worst of his rants to inform a needed debate about America’s laws on insanity, privacy and guns, laws that allowed this deranged man to be at large. It is not journalism’s job to be safe and popular but instead to tell us uncomfortable truths. Besides, the murderer’s videos could just as easily have been posted to YouTube or his blog; NBC was their gatekeeper only by chance. The next time, a network won’t be there to protect us from ugliness, to sanitise the world for our protection. And is that journalism’s job, anyway, when reality is only a link away?
I am also struck by the inevitability that, come the next major event, the news we see from witness-reporters will be delivered from the scene, live. The technology exists today. You can broadcast live on the internet via UStream.com. It’s even possible to broadcast live from a mobile phone. So what happens when a dozen witnesses stream reports over the internet as the news occurs? What does big media do when there is no time to vet and verify? They’ll have to issue caveats. And link.
In the midst of the Virginia Tech story, I was at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas, where two talented video bloggers - Zadi Diaz, of JetSet, and Amanda Congdon, ex of Rocketboom - both refused the title “journalist” because of the baggage it brings, the expectations and demands. They don’t want to be on that side of the gate. They insisted - not unlike the Virginia Tech witness-reporters - that they are merely doing their own thing. They just want to be linked.
And that is how journalism will surely expand into new areas of coverage - hyperlocal, niches, specialities: News organisations can no longer afford to own, employ, and control - to vet, verify, and sanitise - everything that happens. The only way they can expand is to work cooperatively with witness-reporters, community members, experts, people who publish on their own, finding and sending readers to the best and most reliable among them. How? Via the link.
About a week ago, Facebook made noises about launching classifieds and now MySpace has made a deal to take on job ads. This is the next stage of the classified meltdown. Stage 1: They move from newspapers to new services, like Craigslist and Monster, online. Stage 2: They move into communities like Facebook and Myspace. Phase 3, yet to come: They are distributed, no longer in a centralized marketplace, and technology brings them together.
Demonstrating that the very thing that made publishing privileged — presses — are now just a commodity and a cost center, the Telegraph is jobbing its printing out to competitor News Corp. in the UK, improving the quality of its output and reducing its investment. Smart move. Presses aren’t what make you special anymore.
After returning from the National Association of Broadcasters/Radio Television News Directors Association convention in Vegas, I have been haunted by the size of the infrastructure of the industry. The convention center was packed — blimp hangar after blimp hangar and the lots inbetween and meeting rooms all around — with salaries and equipment devoted just to filling a little screen a few minutes a day. Look at the video below — not yet; wait until I tell you — and you will see thousands of salaries walking around — and, of course, they represent a tiny fraction of a percent of the people who work in TV, just those who are sent to conventions in Vegas. There are thousands more like them at home. That will be the death of TV: the unbearable weight of its infrastructure. (I talked about the media infrastructure implosion here and I calculated the savings of a new world of TV practically free of infrastructure here.)
At an RTNDA panel, my pal, panel star Michael Rosenblum, lectured executives and stars of local TV news about this implosion. There was no lighting and so my video of him sucked even more than my usual video (proving the point of the pros, I suppose, and making them smug in their belief that better pixels equal lifetime jobs). And so I put his words on top of random images from the floor of the convention, just to show the number of people, the salaries, the weight of it. Over to you, Michael:
But, of course, it’s not just about the infrastructure of staff and equipment but of culture. Now see a San Francisco anchorman from WPIX TV complain, predictably, about quality and hear Michael’s response (again there was no lighting — as the anchorman pointed out — and my video sucks, but you can get the substance of it; think of this as a transcript with sound, a podcast with wallpaper):
Now go to Michael’s blog as he reacts to my wishful and surely and sadly wrong suggestion that the end of the age of the anchor may be at hand — anchors like that guy. He calculates the real cost of Katie Couric’s $14-million-per-year salary:
The whole concept of ‘anchor’ is a complete waste of time and money.
Where did this come from, this notion of the ‘anchor’?
People seem to believe that the ‘anchor’ gives the newscast some kind of credibility.
After all, we call it, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.
Credible?
Yet…
We don’t call it, The New York Times with Tom Friedman, but the New York Times still seems to be pretty credible. And we certainly don’t pay Tom Friedman $14 million a year!
That is a nice sum, $14 million (let the number roll around your tongue for a minute), a year, to work 22 minutes a night, reading what someone else has written for you. By the way, in every other journalistic endeavor we would call that plagiarism. Only in television do we deign to call it ‘journalism’.
There is a rationale that these people somehow earn their pornographic salaries.
Bullcrap!
What they do instead is strip the true journalistic assets of any newsroom, whether it is local news or network, because that $14 million has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the budget of the news division. How many local news operations work with old equipment, broken vans, ancient editing decks and a skeleton staff so that they can pay the ‘anchors’ their insane salaries?
In short, Katie is infrastructure. Along with all that equipment and those executives and those studios. Michael suggests a better use for the money that buys all that infrastructure: reporting.
Newspapers are fairly simple. You get a bunch of reporters. Pay them a decent salary. You give them pads and pencils. You say, ‘here’s your pencil, there’s the door, see you at 6′and they go off and find stories. Works pretty well. (That is why TV news gets its stories from the newspapers, and not the other way round).
We could build a TV newsroom based on a newspaper. We could, for argument’s sake, take 100 great journalists, give them small HD camcorders and laptops and say ‘here’s your camera, there’s the door, see you at 6, and send them all over the world. They could upload their stories and feed them to a web site, 24 hours a day. Refreshing all the time. With text and video and sound… Live and podcast and VOD.
Pretty cool.
Really kind of a digital model for journalism for the future, don’t you think?
And it would not cost all that much.
Let’s say we paid each of our 100 reporters, $140,000 a year. That’s a pretty good salary. You would attract a lot of talent. Real reporting talent.
Where would you get the money from?
Well, let’s take the $14 million you’re paying Katie Couric and guess what… you’re there.
What, really, do you think gives you better journalism?
And then get rid of some of that unnecessary equipment and layers of production and management and imagine how much more you could spend on journalism. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit in 22 minutes a day. But to hell with those 22 minutes. Feed the web with reporting.
If you get rid of the presses and the trucks and the broadcast towers and the headquarters buildings and the fancy equipment and the old-time stars, if you kill the infrastructure, you are left with more resources for journalism — and savings in the face of reduced revenue in a suddenly competitive marketplace — and the bottom line is a and more efficient and sustainable business.
Infrastructure is the enemy of journalism.
Ah, but you say, what about editors and correspondents? If they’re vital, they’re not infrastructure. If they are not vital, then they are merely expenses and you must get rid of them.
I envision the meeting at NBC News and MSNBC when they got the first debate of the campaign and met to decide what to do about it. Anything new since the last time? ‘Naw,’ they say. ‘When’s lunch?’
Not much is new. Besides YouTube. And MySpace. And the explosion of weblogs. And the spread of easy video editing tools. And podcasts. And iTunes. And the distributed media marketplace. And the incredible power of Google and its search and ads. And the implosion of old TV. And competition for cable from the internet. Naw, not much. You’d think they would have sat around that mahogany table and wondered what new they could do in this new media world. But, no, they decided to do things the way they always had done them.: They restricted use of the video from the people’s debate because they thought they could. Poor, sad, extinct, old sods.
So when Ad Age asked MSNBC for tomorrow’s edition about its antiquated media rules for the debate video, the network’s response:
In an e-mail, an MSNBC spokesman said, “The entire debate is available for all to view and link to on MSNBC.com.”
Where it’s hidden inside the bowels of an old network site. And, actually, it’s not even findable: I can’t see a reference to “debate” or “democratic” on the home page tonight. Neither is it truly linkable; each debate Q&A does not have but should have a permalink. And it’s certainly not embeddable so that bloggers could spread the video and the debate (and MSNBC’s brand). And, Lord knows, it’s not remixable! And so the people say, to hell with it, let’s just put it up on YouTube around those old farts. (Crossposted from PrezVid)
I often watch the video podcast version of Australian Broadcasting’s Media Watch mainly because I’m amazed that the format works. Who’d think that media criticism, especially of print and even of online, could work on video? But it does, thanks to the tough attitude of the host, Monica Attard — I expect to see her come out in leather and studs some week — and to their entertaining conceit of having different people voice the clips they’re talking about, with attitude. Even its slogan is cheeky: “everyone loves it until they’re on it.” ABC Radio, too, has pretty good criticism and reporting in the Media Report, which is also available as a podcast. I have Aussie media on the mind because I’m talking at Murdoch’s Carmel confab of his worldwide editors this week. But even aside from that, I enjoy checking in with Australian media — as I do UK media, of course, on the Media Guardian podcast — because it’s interesting to see our parallel issues around the globe.
This week’s Media Watch has a great segment — with the best collection of examples I’ve ever seen — on unfortunate adjacencies of content and ads on TV and especially online. I pulled put two segments together here:
Note, too, that this is one of the inherent problems with contextual advertising. No machine will ever truly understand the context. Better to talk to people than around content, eh?
It’s undeniable that pros prefer phoners. Partly it’s because the phone is fast, and most senior-level reporters today learned their craft when the phone was really the only channel available. Also, it’s because a good reporter can capture an extra bit of color by listening to an interviewee’s voice and tone. But mostly, it’s because reporters hope to use the conversational environment as a space in which to prod, wheedle, cajole and possibly trip up their interviewee.
Any reporter who doesn’t admit this is lying, either to his listener or to himself. Phone conversations have the additional advantage of (usually) leaving no record, giving journalism’s more malicious practitioners a chance to distort without exposure, and its lazier representatives an opportunity to goof without fear. (I have no reason to believe Vogelstein is either. But in his email to Calacanis, which the reporter later posted himself, Vogelstein explained his preference by saying, “Email leaves too much room for misinterpretation. You can’t hear the tone in someone’s voice.†And that just sounds disingenuous coming from someone who earns his living writing text — unless Vogelstein has reinvented himself as a podcaster while I wasn’t looking.)
Why are we hearing about more interviewees shunning the phone? As Winer argued and Dan Gillmor argued and I agree, too many journalists get too much stuff wrong, and self-defense is a reasonable concern, given the likelihood of misquotation, out-of-context quotation and factual error.
The pros are going to keep lining up to explain why the phone interview is superior, but I haven’t yet seen a persuasive argument. On a BusinessWeek blog, Heather Green says she prefers reporting by phone or in person because “a conversation allows me to do followup questions.†Gee, I’ve done tons of email interviews, and nearly all of them involved followup questions. But what’s most revealing here is the misunderstanding (Green isn’t unique here, it’s widespread) of how blogging works.
Blogging is a conversation. That’s not a metaphor — it’s a simple fact that this story itself illustrates: Calacanis and Winer and Vogelstein and Gillmor and Green and many others have been having one such exchange (and now I’m chiming in too). To argue that the amongst-blog conversation doesn’t allow followups is ridiculous; if anything, our blog conversations have too many followups — and they have a hard time finding a graceful ending (though that optimist David Weinberger finds positive value in this lack of closure).
But in the online conversation, the reporter doesn’t get the last word. And the reporter doesn’t get to filter which parts of the conversation are available to the public. No wonder journalists want to stick with the phone. But I think it’s going to keep getting harder for them to get their sources to take the calls.
One blogger said I was issuing a dictum against phone interviews. No, I was just saying that it’s the interviewee, not the interviewer who gets to issue dicta now.
So Joe Biden is flagrantly violating MSNBC’s rules prohibiting internet use of the debate. He’s posting videos of himself and other candidates from the network at YouTube and, in turn, embedding them at his Head to Head virtual debate — which is exactly what MSNBC should be doing and allowing us to do (see my suggestions below). And, by the way, if MSNBC posted the clips on YouTube, they’d do a better technical job of it and their logo wouldn’t be all schmutzig. Will MSNBC go after Biden for stealing his own words and putting them on YouTube for us all to see? Watch this space:
Come on, NBC, do the right thing. Free the debates. Release them for our use under Creative Commons.
I sent email to Steve Capus, president of NBC News, yesterday and have heard nothing back yet. Here’s what I asked:
Steve,
First, it was a pleasure meeting you on the RTNDA panel.
* Why did NBC News put a no-internet restriction on the debate video? What is the rationale?
* Would NBC News consider Prof. Lawrence Lessig’s call for the networks to make debate video available under an open Creative Commons License?
* I’d be grateful if you’d address the question of whether MSNBC owns this debate or whether it should be the property of the American citizenry in this election.
* Is the company going to demand that the clips that have been put up on video-sharing services be taken down and will it send cease-and-desist notices to bloggers who embed them?
thanks much
I also asked Arianna Huffington what their policy will be with the HuffingtonPost/Yahoo/Slate online debates. She said they are deciding in a meeting on Friday and she’ll let us know immediately. I’m also asking the other networks what their policies will be.
Free the debates! Free the debates! Free the debates!
If MSNBC had any sense, which it doesn’t, it would have taken every one-minute answer from last night’s ping-pong debate and put them up on YouTube themselves. Then, today, we’d be able to watch each one without feeling as if we were trying to count cars on a speeding train. And, more important, we’d be able to comment on them and embed them in our blogs. We’d see which clips are the most popular, the most talked about. We’d get a new sense of what the electorate thinks, which itself would be news. If NBC also made the video files available, we’d see the post-debate commentary not from the same old made-up faces on the networks but from the people who matter, the voters: us. MSNBC would be part of the conversation, in the thick of it, which is exactly where it should want to be. Instead, the network is acting like the bratty and unpopular rich kid who takes him marbles and harumphs home, ruining the game for everyone.
But it’s happening without MSNBC, of course. There are already loads of clips up on YouTube, put there by dastardly copyright thieves, in NBC News’ view, or by engaged voters and viewers, in my view. And as much as I’m busting them for not doing the internet right, I have to believe that even MSNBC won’t have the bad sense to try to pull those clips and send cease-and-desists to the citizens who are sharing moments from our own democratic debate. (Quick, somebody put a leash on that lawyer!)
The net result, though, is that the discussion is happening on YouTube and on blogs but not around MSNBC, thanks to the network’s rules and to the fact that its clips are not linkable or embeddable and are chosen by producers instead of voters. A true case of cutting off the nose.
The side effect is that the clips are on YouTube but they are not on othernetworks‘ newssites. So you could have them promoting MSNBC today along with the viewers but because MSNBC insisted on NO internet usage whatsoever, they’ve given up millions of dollars worth of free promotion and branding. Foolish.
It’s not too late to fix this, though. NBC could put the clips up on YouTube right now (later, they could do this on their new embeddable service). And they could announce right now that they will follow Larry Lessig’s advice and release the next, Republican debate under an open Creative Commons license requiring attribution and links back to the networks’ site. They could say they’re doing this in the interests of stimulating the democratic discussion. But the truth is, it’d just be smart business. If they did that, I have no doubt that they’d get more traffic and more attention and out of that, more money. Instead, they’re only engendering the animus of the voters and viewers online.
Just to show solidarity with the YouTube gang of thieves, I’ve embedded clips of the two funniest moments from the debate over at Prezvid.
The Democratic debate on MSNBC is like a game of Pong: 60 seconds “answers,” bang, bang, bang. I’m a fast talker and this is exhausting me. I tried to watch the thing on MSNBC.com but instead got stories about Hugh Grant throwing baked beans and an two Indian chickens with seven feet plus about six commercials. They have links to the debate online, but no debate. Apparently, NBC doesn’t think the internet and its millions matter.
: I got email from an NBCU vice-president, who refused to go on the record, I don’t know why. So I can’t tell you what he said. But I’ll tell you what I said back:
Well, why don’t you break that chain?
I am trying very hard to watch it online now and I’ll be damned if I can find the way. You want to send me the link?
And this is not just about watching. It is about remixing, commenting. What makes NBC think it can own this debate? That is offensive hubris. It is downright undemocratic, unAmerican. You want to mean what you say? Then open up the debates for us all to use. Now.
If it’s so “regrettable,” then change it. You can. Do it. Get on the phone with Capus and I’ll announce it and praise you for the move.
My comments are on the record.
It’s painfully clear that NBC doesn’t understand the internet and its role in in.
: I see in the comments that some can watch the debate on the internet. I have reinstalled every bit of software and can’t. They are making it damned difficult.
: The Washington Post has been liveblogging the debate at The Fix.
: AFTERWARDS: It all went by so fast, what I most want is the opportunity to watch the bits that went by in 60-second flashes with commentary from the people. That is why I want this on the internet with many perspectives.
: HERE’S what I wish NBC would have done with the debate online:
* Make every 60-second answer a separate video so we can watch and actually absorb them.
* Put everything up on YouTube so we can embed them in our blogs with our commentary.
* Enable us to download and remix the questions and answers so we can compare and contrast them.
* Create a page that has all the questions and answers organized so we can see what every candidate, Democratic and Republican, has to say.
A properly pissed off birdie forwarded me NBC News’ restrictions on tonight’s presidential debates, which are many and lead off with this: “internet use is not permitted.”
I think that’s ridiculous and so I sought to find out why they would do this. I called Joe Alicastro, producer of the debate for MSNBC, who was on site. I asked him why they were restricting use of the material on the internet. He twice didn’t answer and said “that’s our policy.” I said I know that’s their policy. I asked why. He would not answer.
I asked whether he thought the Amerian people had a right to this debate since it is our election. He said that “the American people have ample opportunity to view the debate on MCNBC and two North Carolina stations.”
Shameful. What makes NBC think it has the right to own the democratic discussion in this country?
Alicastro specifically said that we could blog the event — thank you — but could not use video. Hmmm. What do you have to say about that, bloggers? Fellow journalists?
Then Alicastro got pissed off himself and said that I had “not made an appointment for an interview” and “grabbed his cell phone number” (given to me by his colleagues at the company) and then he ended with “byeee” and hung up.
I have put in a call with Steve Capus, head of NBC News, with whom I served on a panel at the Radio Televison News Directors Association last week — where he and we discussed the wonders of the internet and remixing and discussing. I’ll ask Capus the same question: Why?
And let’s repeat Larry Lessig’s call for the parties to insist that the debates be open for use on the internet — but us, the people.
Here, for your amazement, are the myriad restrictions MSNBC put on what they think is their — but is truly our — debate:
USAGE RULES FOR USE OF AUDIO OR VIDEO OF MSNBC MATERIAL RULES FOR “THE SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES DEBATE” FROM MSNBC:
(The following rules apply to all media organizations that are not part of NBC)
News organizations, including radio, network television, cable television and local television may use excerpts of “The South Carolina Democratic Candidates Debate” subject to the following restrictions (internet use is not permitted):
1. An unobstructed onscreen credit “MSNBC” must appear during each debate excerpt and remain on screen for the entire excerpt.
2. Each debate excerpt must be introduced with an audio credit to MSNBC.
3. No excerpt may air in any medium until the live debate concludes at 8:30 pm ET.
4. No more than a combined total of 2 minutes of excerpts may be chosen for use during the period from the end of the live debate (8:30 pm ET) until 1:00 am ET on Friday, April 27. After 1:00 am ET, Friday, April 27, a total of 10 minutes may be selected (including any excerpts aired before 1:00AM). The selected excerpts may air as often as desired but the total of excerpts chosen may not exceed the limits outlined.
5. No excerpts may be aired after 8:30 pm on Saturday, May 26th. Excerpts may not be archived. Any further use of excerpts is by express permission of MSNBC only.
6. All debate excerpts must be taped directly from MSNBC’s cablecast or obtained directly from MSNBC and may not be obtained from other sources, such as satellite or other forms of transmission. No portions of the live event not aired by MSNBC may be used.
A feed of MSNBC’s telecast of the debate will be provided (details below), additionally limited audio/video mults will be available on site in the media center.
