When I was at Davos (OK, I’m place-dropping), I sat in on a brainstorming about how to keep the connections we make there alive the rest of the year. It’s hard. Davos is a safe world: Those who are invited there with you are there for a reason and so it’s much easier to strike up a conversation and exchange a business card than it is down off the mountain. It was hard to figure out how to extend that.
But lately it has occurred to me that Facebook gives us each our own Davos. We have control over or identities and communities. We befriend people we know. We use it to make new connections. It feels remarkably similar. Just without the snow. And Bono.
I just learned via the Media Guardian podcast, while “running” this morning, that my friend Tom Loosemore, who helped guide the BBC into the future and who on the side helped create the constituent-empowering They Work for You, has left Auntie to go to OFCOM, the British media regulator, where he’ll work on the idea of public-serving publishing (PSP) — that is, a publicly supported internet.
If a country were to take taxes to support work on the internet — and I’m not saying it should — I don’t think it should follow the old broadcasting model of creating content and a closed network to distribute it. I don’t pretend to understand the thinking that has gone into PSP. And American that I am, I would be leery of creating taxes to support internet activities, which in turn gives government and political control over internet activities (see: meddling in public broadcasting and broadcasting as well). I also think the market is doing a magnificent job exploring and exploiting the internet’s potential.
But having issued those caveats, this got me thinking: If there were to be a publicly supported effort such as this, what is missing? If you’re going to do this, then I’d say it would be God’s work to help create infrastructure and open platforms to help sustain the people’s creativity, which is already blooming. So what could that be?
* An open advertising infrastructure. Yes, I know that sounds antithetical to public-serving and -supported publishing. But the goal is to create the means to make anyone’s creativity sustainable, on merit. Creating an infrastructure, a platform, also scales far better and lasts much longer than revenue from a tax. If more creation can be supported independently, that benefits both the creators and society.
* An open government infrastructure. Make all government information and actions open to public scrutiny. Turn us loose and we call become reporters. Old powers would despise this. That’s just the point. Rather than waiting for us to file freedom-of-information requests, just free the information.
* An open education infrastructure. I’ll write more about this soon, but I keep coming back to the idea that the next institution to explode — after media, advertising, consumer companies, politics, and government — is the academe. This will have profoundly disruptive implications for both education and research. But why shouldn’t educational institutions — especially publicly funded ones — follow the lead of MIT and other universities and put their curricula online? And wouldn’t it be ducky if there were a good, standard infrastructure for doing so and even for joining in with other online students? And, of course, why shouldn’t we all be able to create courses to share?
* An identity system? No, ID cards are already controversial enough. Scratch that.
* Authoring tools? The market is doing a damned good job with that.
What else?
In any case, I’ll watch with great interest what Loosemore does at his new gig and I wish him luck.
Sicko is near-great documentary that will and should have a profound impact on the election and on public policy. If no president can fix our health care and insurance mess in this country and no politician can coalesce public opinion, maybe he can.
Moore is — for Moore — practically deft and subtle as he exposes the hell we’re all in with our insurance coverage. I was impressed that, all in all, he let the stories tell themselves and he left his 2×4 in the closet. Of course, he can’t miss the opportunities to snicker and act incredulous; he has to ham. But he knows that he has a powerful message and that he doesn’t need to amp it up. And keep in mind that he’s attacking only one head of this hydra: insurance. There’s much else that’s a mess about our health care system.
I do think, though, that Sicko would have been stronger if it has been more journalistic — that is, more complete and, yes, balanced. Moore extols the virtues of the national health systems in Canada, the UK, France, and, as we all know by now, Cuba. Watching all those well-cared-for Canadians, I had a relapse of a recurrent urge to move north. Though he goes to waiting rooms and debunks some myths about the wait for care — at least in those rooms — no one would deny that these systems, too, have their problems; just read the British press about its National Health Service. On balance, his argument is still valid — all the more valid, I’d say, if he’d have dealt with those yes-buts we’re bound to hear. I know, Moore would say he isn’t making journalism, it’s advocacy. I say the line is blurred and whatever you call it, an argument will have more impact if it has the discipline to answer the hard questions.
I can think of many other movies that had an impact on the culture — you can list a dozen that affected American thinking about race — and that affected public opinion — name your anti-war movies from the Vietnam era — but I’m not sure I can think of a movie that tries to have such a direct effect on policy and legislation.
My suburban theater was jammed last night with plenty of people who surely vote Republican; I’m in a minority out here. They left sharing rave reviews. I’ll bet that Sicko will be a hit on two scales: gross and impact.
And Moore is using the web to extend that impact. A few weeks ago, he asked people to share their horror stories with us:
Here’s a guy who says he couldn’t get his broken hand fixed because he didn’t have insurance or $400 and so now it’s mangled — “waaaa, but I guess that’s the state of things in America.”
Here’s a very simple video from a woman who couldn’t get insurance, try as she might, and who reacts to the heart-rending stories of others responding to Moore (in particular, this woman with MS here and here):
At a screening for the 11 of 900 health care lobbyists who showed up, Moore says he wants the voters to demand universal health care from the candidates and he wants people to speak up and support Rep John Conyers’ universal health-care bill. The audio’s messed up but this is the essential Moore platform:
And here, Moore goes to testify on Capitol Hill. It’s more than a movie. It’s a campaign.
So I checked the iPhone availability chart, just for curiosity, and didn’t see a single place where it’s sold out. Did that mean all those people were fools to sleep out and wait hours? I report, you decide.
I had a fascinating day yesterday thanks to being with my son and trying to see the day through his eyes. It started with a most enjoyable few hours with Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and their new friends at Union Square Ventures about Facebook and much more. Then I dragged Jake to a meeting at a newspaper about blogs.
What hit me is that he was seeing a world that values innovation most. And then he saw a world that valued tradition most. (And I’m saying that with the slightest disparagement. Those traditions were what drew me to the business; I wanted to be part of such an institution and tradition.) So now the two need to meet. At least the traditional is trying to find innovation. And some argue that the innovative need to bring forward the appropriate traditions. This is where I live
I was just wondering this morning about the thousands of iPhone lusters who were probably stopped from meeting their hunger because they’re imprisoned in an existing mobile contract. Voila: Here’s a marketplace for people to offload their old contracts and phones.
The irony is so thick you could spread it on a bagel: In Today’s Times, Tom Friedman writes about living our lives in public thanks to the bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters who can watch our any, if not every, move and tell the world about it. Of course, the column itself is not in the public. It’s behind the wall. Anyway, Friedman tells a story he told at the Personal Democracy Forum (columnists, like bloggers, are good recyclers):
Three years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston’s Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me — I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: “Excuse me! I was here first!†And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: “I know who you are.†I said I was very sorry, even though I was clearly there first.
If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: “Miss, I’m so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?â€
Why? Because I’d be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cellphone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter — entirely from her perspective — and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant, thinks-he-can-butt-in-line behavior. Yikes! . . .
“The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by,†writes Seidman. “In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind, and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present.†So the only way to get ahead in life will be by getting your “hows†right.
I’m going at this from a different perspective in a post I’ll be putting up soon about the positive aspects of living life in public.
On the wall at the Guardianista group on Facebook, of which I am a proud member, Stephen Brook reports this:
I quote from today’s Evening Standard media diary: “An explanation for the Guardian’s new obsession with Facebook: editor Alan Rusbridger has just joined the social networking site. Rusbridger has acquired 18 friends, most of whom are inevitably Guardianistas. Elsewhere on Facebook, Guardian hacks have formed their own online group, where they have been grumbling about the paepr’s redesigned website. Guardian online chief Emily Bell replied: ‘I would bet my boots the NYT won’t have a Facebook page with their own employees describing their output as shite.’ Indeed.”
To which the Guardian’s director of digital content, Emily Bell, adds:
Evening Standard Gets Media Diary Stories from Facebook Wall
Lee-Anne Goodman of Canadian Press just alerted me to video of anchor Mika Brzezinski trying to burn the script for a Paris Hilton story, protesting that it should not be the lead and then shredding it. Now that’s journalism.
Just posted over at PrezVid Chris Dodd’s call on voters to take their cameras and go up to their senators and representatives and ask them about supporting the Dodd amendment, which calls for starting the pullout from Iraq in 30 days. Then he wants them to put the videos up on YouTube.
I am delighted to tell you that I’ve received a MacArthur Foundation grant at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism to start the News Innovation Project. Its first work will be to hold a meeting this fall to gather practitioners and best practices in networked journalism — cooperative, pro-am efforts to gather and share news.
So I would be grateful if you would leave comments here with examples of what you think is working in networked journalism: cooperative efforts by local newspapers and TV stations, new ventures that enable the community to gather news, people who do this well, and tools that are working. I’m working with David Cohn, who covered this topic in the blog at Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net. Thanks to him, we have a pretty good list of what’s happening. But, of course, there’s more going on than, we know, so please pass the word and clue us in.
When I first applied for this grant, my goal was to evangelize the idea of networked journalism (nee citizen journalism). But in the meantime, we’ve seen such a blossoming of these efforts that we now believe the best contribution we can make is to share and extend best practices.
Before everyone gets here for the meeting, David will have written up reports on what these practitioners have done. That, of course, will be on the web for all to read and add to. This way, we can dig right in during the meeting and quiz some of these practitioners — each representing different sorts of efforts — on what works and what doesn’t and what they need to do what they do better (including what others in the room can offer them). At the end of the day, I hope to lock folks in rooms — bloggers with newspaper people, newspaper people with new ventures — and not let them out without returning with new things to do together, ways to push toward new experiments. And then David will followup and report on those efforts after everyone leaves and gets to work.
The reason for all this is that I firmly believe that networked journalism is one — not the only but one — answer to the question of how journalism can be sustained even as the old business models of news and media shrink and shift. We also believe that technology and networking now allow us to join together as never before to gather more news, cover more parts of our communities, involve more people, even investigate investigate deeper. This isn’t about saving journalism. It’s about growing journalism.
The second effort of the News Innovation Project will be to hold another session on new business models for news. More on that later.
Unfortunately, our space — physical space — will be limited at the school. So I don’t think I’ll be able to open this to all comers. Of course, I wish we could. But we will do everything online: before, during, and after. And we’ll do everything we can to bring in everyone’s wisdom, experience, questions, and help wherever they are.
So please let me know who you think is doing great things in networked, cooperative, pro-am, innovative journalism.
I’ll send you to a web site as soon as we have more details. Thanks. (And thanks to John Bracken and MacArthur.)
