At the Aspen Institute FOCAS event, where we presented our CUNY New Business Models for News, there came to be an unspoken debate – that is, an idea thrown out but never really engaged – about whether there is a crisis in news and journalism.
I now say that there isn’t a crisis. That’s not what I used to say. Indeed, one of my mistakes in this debate has been accepting the assumption that there was one and allowing the debate to start there: “How are you going to save journalism from the scourge of your damned internet?”
Instead, the discussion should start here: “Look at all the new opportunities there are to gather and share news in new ways, to expand and improve it, to change journalism’s relationship with its public and make it collaborative, to find new efficiencies and lower costs and thus to return to profitability and sustainability.”
One’s view on the question determines one’s response and its level of desperation or optimism.
To generalize unfairly, those who say there is a crisis – most often, those whose legacy institutions are fading – are often known to react by:
* Looking for others to blame for the purported problem – Google, bloggers, aggregators, craigslist, et al (which is to say, not taking responsibility for their own role in it);
* Trying to preserve their past (expecting newsrooms to be supported, unchanged, by some manna from the market – paid content being only the latest prayer);
* Seeking protection from government (antitrust exemptions) or the law (copyright extensions);
* Demanding tribute (saying they are entitled to get paid because what they do is worth so much);
* Giving up (talking about abandoning growth by building walls or shifting to not-for-profit and begging for charitable support).
Those who say there is not a crisis (for- and not-for-profit entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors) instead tend to:
* Look to innovation (collaboration, algorithms, data, streams) to create new ways to make news;
* Look to entrepreneurship to sustain journalism (in blogs and networks);
* Be open to new ways to define journalism;
* Irritate the legacy people by not seeing the crisis they see.
So if we’re looking for an original sin in this saga, I’ll confess that mine has been viewing news from the perspective of the old controllers rather than from that of the community (the people formerly known as the audience), the inventors, and the entrepreneurs. At Aspen, it was Sue Gardner, head of the Wikimedia Foundation, who made me see this as she talked about the wonders that have been done with news on Wikipedia, which no one could have predicted. Being open to such new possibilities is key to building news’ new future.
There are so many reasons to be optimistic about the future of news:
* The audience for news is only growing online.
* The audience isn’t an audience anymore. News is becoming more and more collaborative as witnesses share what they see and communities join together to create news.
* Those who make news are more accountable to their publics.
* News is opening up to more diverse voices and perspectives.
* News is becoming far more specialized and targeted, which is to say that it can give deeper service to more communities.
* New technology – and freedom from the limits of the old means of production and distribution – allow the reinvention of the form of news, organized around streams, topics, ideas, and concepts still being imagined.
* News is more efficient thanks to the link – do what you do best and link to the rest – and specialization. That is what makes it more sustainable.
Some – but not nearly enough – of this optimism is inherent in the future we imagined in the New Business Models for News Project. We used the financial lingua franca and assumptions of the present world – CPM advertising, page views per user, even the concept of a page and a site – because that made it easier to describe what can follow and made our vision of sustainable news more credible. We were criticized for being too optimistic about audience penetration and ad rates.
But I think we were not nearly optimistic enough. We have to leap past the idea that news is a collection of pages worth 12 views per user per month (or, quoting Martin Langeveld, 0.5% of time spent online). News shouldn’t be a site we force people to come to but, as Google’s Marissa Mayer said at Aspen, we have to find ways to insinuate news and its value into anyone’s – her words – hyperpersonal news stream. We shouldn’t create sites but instead create platforms that enable communities to share what they know and need to know, with journalists contributing value – reporting, editing, aggregation, curation – to their ecosystem. We should build and assume much greater engagement and define engagement not as consumption but as creation. We must value that creation (and not consider it merely a reaction to what we do). We should forecast much greater relevance and thus value for both the market and the marketer.
We should set the bar way higher. And that is the real problem with letting the discussion start with the pessimism, depression, and desperation of the perceived crisis among the past’s players, who aren’t inventing the future. It limits the possibilities.
Like priests looking for someone to sacrifice, Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, and Steve Yelvington have been on the lookout for the sin that led newspapers astray. For Mutter, it’s not charging; for Buttry, it’s not innovating; for Owens, it’s tying online dingies to print Titanics (my poetic license); for Yelvington, it’s inaction.
But I think Owens hit on it when he wrote this: “I realized I needed to flip the expense/revenue picture upside down. Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue.”
Right. In other words, the sin was not running a business. It was not creating a sustainable P&L.
Newspapers have been too busy trying to protect specific budget lines that protected specific interests – the size of the newsroom, the ego expressed in gross revenue that yields stock performance and salary bonuses, the size of unionized staffs (up or down), the rules that governed advertising relationships even as they disappeared. They made preservation their mission.
What they should have done instead is rethink the bottom line: How is journalism going to be sustainable in new business realities?
Said Owens: “In a market where the newspaper newsroom might cost $10 million, I knew how to make $1 million online, or even $2 million, but I didn’t know — and still don’t — how to make $10 million. So if I can make a million online, why do I need operate a $10 million newsroom, especially given the greater efficiencies of online publishing?”
He built a realistic budget based on new business realities. Now picture news executives across the country hitting themselves on the head saying, “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?” They should have. But to do so would have required them to completely tear apart their businesses. Witness Detroit, banking, retail, advertising, insurance, and every other industry undergoing upheaval – nobody wants to do that.
Just as the bloggers linked above took their share of blame, so will I. Owens suggests that the problem with tying old and new operations together. At Advance, where I worked for a dozen years, we created separate online companies, which had some benefits: enabling the sites to build what was right for online (that is, interactivity), creating real value for advertising (rather than throwing in online as value-added), creating smaller and differently skilled staffs. But it also created problems: sites that were dependent on newspaper content, rivalries that killed collaboration and limited the responsibility anyone would take for the future. In the end, everyone needed to rethink what they were creating and what value it had, how they were creating it, how they related to their communities, and how the business could be run. But I didn’t see that happening anywhere in the industry. Everywhere, I saw people looking for someone to blame and somewhere to hide. I don’t put all the blame on the individuals because that’s how companies and industries operate.
Individuals who want to succeed in this upheaval become entrepreneurs. That’s what Owens – and many others – are doing. That, I’ve come to see, is the basis of the future of news.
In our New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, we threw out the old business assumptions with the old business. That’s why we tried to answer the tough question people were asking: What happens to journalism if the paper disappears? (their implied answer was that journalism does, too). What we came up with was one entity being replaced by well more than 100 entities – 1,000 entities, perhaps – each run according to new opportunities and needs, each smaller, each contributing real value, each sustainable (some very profitable; some choosing no profit). Everyone in this ecosystem has to think about running a business rather than preserving one.
Someone else looking for sinners is James Murdoch, whose MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival excoriated the BBC for bigfooting the news market in the UK and the government for enabling it and for regulating everybody else. I agree with him to an extent, this extent: that profit, in his words, will make journalism sustainable, independent, and innovative.
Except I doubt that this sustainable, independent, and innovative journalism will necessarily come from Mr. Murdoch’s father’s business and its cohorts because they are the ones that even today are trying to maintain the scale and models for their old businesses rather than inventing new ones. Look, instead, to the entrepreneurs who are starting over and rethinking the business from the bottom up, as Owens is.
In today’s Daily News, David Hinckley and Talkers’ Michael Harrison speculate that when Howard Stern’s Sirius XM contract is up, he could use the internet to start his own broadcasting company.
Indeed, he could. Technology makes it possible: We could listen to him – and watch him – on the internet, on our iPods, and even now on our web-enabled phones. There’s no longer a need for a distribution network.
The numbers could be impressive. Stern brought an estimated 6-8 million listeners to Sirius. I’ve talked with a measurement company that did a study on his impact on satellite and concluded that a majority of users were there and paying $12.95 a month because of him. So say that half those people – 3.5 million – would pay half that much – $6 – to get Stern anywhere and on-demand. That’s $252 million. Absurd? OK, so charge $1 a month; that’s $42 million (though at a lower price, the volume would surely increase). Add in a little ad revenue but not much, judging on the crap accounts Sirius has been getting. Marketing? Stern doesn’t need it because his audience is his agency. And Stern doesn’t need to share any of that with Sirius XM. His only cost is his staff and bandwidth. Ah, but you say, he made a reported $500 million for his five-year Sirius contract. But I believe some of that came in equity and as a shareholder, I can tell you that isn’t doing so well. The point is, who’s going to sniff at tens of millions of dollars a year? If it doesn’t work, the risk is minimal. So why not?
Hinckley’s point is that the internet enables Stern to have complete freedom, control, and ownership, which is ideal for a control freak like Stern.
Would I pay for Stern? I already do; he’s why I subscribed to Sirius. I’m just unhappy that I can’t get him on-demand on my iPod and iPhone.
Irony that I’m endorsing paying for content when I scoff at news organizations charging? No. I’ve long said that we do and will pay for unique performances – and Stern is unique. News is information, a commodity once known; that’s what makes it hard to charge for. Mere opinion is abundant. Performance has value, in music, in comedy, or even in news.
Who else would I pay? Jon Stewart could charge (though we’d get less time and he probably has higher cost). My list pretty much ends there. How about you?
The newspaper industry should be sobered by Martin Langeveld’s calculations, based on the Newspaper Association of America’s misplaced bragging about Nielsen internet data, that only about a half one one percent of time spent online is spent on newspaper sites.
It is clear that if journalists want to be supported – let alone have impact and influence and find their days worthwhile – they need more people to spend more time with news. I believe they should be doing the opposite of what is being suggested in many quarters: clamping down controls to try to fight aggregators and search engines, threatening to build pay walls, consolidating content into destinations they’d have to work harder to get people to visit.
Right now, news organizations should be trying to reach more people and engage with them more deeply. They should seek hyperdistribution.
Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities.
In my presentation at the Aspen Institute on CUNY’s New Business Models for News Project, I listed some of these opportunities, even though we didn’t build them into our first models because we wanted a conservative base case. Next we are building blow-out models incorporating these means, many built on the principles of the link economy:
* Reverse-syndication. We suggest that the new news organization (NNO) we envision in our ecosystem can create highly targeted content that can be distributed on the sites of other members of the network. So, for example, a new news org could create voting guides for every state assembly member and all the hyperlocal bloggers in the state could offer them to their readers. This content could carry both metro and hyperlocal advertising sold by and benefiting both sites. It is in the NNO’s interest to help these bloggers succeed. Thus they should collaborate on creating and distributing everything from news to calendars to functionality.
In the link economy, value is created by he who creates content and she who delivers audience. So in this networked ecosystem, large players and small will find ways to mutually create and share in more value.
* The embeddable paper. Once you embrace hyperdistribution, then you’ll find new and simple ways to get readers to become distributors. In this post I suggested that we should enable any content to be placed in YouTube-like players that carry brand, advertising, states, and links.
Lo and behold, Silicon Alley Insider just made it possible to embed its stories on this blog or anywhere. In fact, you don’t need to follow that link above; you can read the story below (and I imagine it won’t be long before there’s an ad there, along with the Insider’s branding, links, and data collection).
* API The New York Times has an API (application programming interface) enabling developers to incorporate its headlines, driving traffic to NYTimes.com. NPR and the BBC have APIs that enable others to use more content; as public broadcasters, their goal is simply broader distribution. The Guardian’s API offers full content but requires developers to join its ad network. Thus the Guardian wants to get its journalism into the fabric of the web, as they put it, and support it at the same time. Fingers crossed that it works.
* Specialization. One-size-fits-all news was a product of our means of production and distribution and a very small number of topics aside, that just won’t cut it anymore. Whether by geography, interest, or community, news must become far more specialized. In the link economy, this is how content rises in search to be discovered and it is how value is added with advertising.
Specialization sounds like a way to decrease, not increase audience but with the efficiencies specialization enables, many more publics can be served more deeply and each is bound to be more engaged. In our New Business Models for News projections, we ended up – to our surprise – with an equivalent number of journalists working in our hypothetical ecosystem when compared with the legacy newsroom, but these journalists were all covering much more specialized topics in much greater depth, creating more journalism for more communities than before. Specialization becomes a way to grow.
* Social engagement. In our NewBizNews models, we projected 12 page views per user per month because this is in line with existing news sites and thus, a conservative assumption. But it’s also a shameful assumption.
Local news networks that are truly a part of communities – owned and operated by their communities – will surely have much higher engagement. The fact that Facebook – which brings communities elegant organization, just as newspapers endeavor to do – gets hundreds of pageviews per month per user should be a lesson and model for news networks.
If news organizations – pardon me – asked what Google, Facebook, Twitter, and craigslist would do, they would define themselves as platforms more than content creators and controllers. They would act as networks rather than destinations. Once again, this gives them not only distribution and engagement but efficiency.
I have stood in and before no end of conferences when I or someone else recalls what that student said in The New York Times said a year ago: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Waiting for her to come to our site won’t work – and it especially won’t work if, once a peer links her to our site, she finds a wall. No, we have to take news to her.
At Aspen, Google’s Marissa Mayer told the assembled news machers that they have to find ways to insinuate their content and value into our own hyperpersonal news streams. In other words: This ain’t about getting people to come to your home pages anymore.
You can bet if Mayer is thinking this way, so is Google and so it will find ways to consolidate information about sources across these new means of distribution. It’s still in Google’s interest to tap the tree for Googlejuice. So I say we cannot waste a moment finding more ways to get more people to distribute and engage with news.
The Associated Press is refusing to sign for credentials under the conditions put on control of game coverage by the SEC. OK, I think what the SEC is doing is silly, too, especially now that every damned fan in the stands can tell the world what’s happening in a game via blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and whatever comes next.
But isn’t the AP being a tad hypocritical?
Isn’t a game content and isn’t the SEC trying to assert control over that content the way the AP is threatening to assert control over news? What’s the difference between a score or a play – the very definition of hot news, no? – and a fact coming out of a press conference or news event? It’s all just information and information, once known, is a commodity that is best distributed now via the conversation. Neither institution can stop anyone with an ear from saying, “Did you hear?” And if they were smart, but they’re not, they’d figure out how to take advantage of that free marketing.
Line by line, newspapers’ businesses are falling apart as they shrink and become less efficient for advertisers against the competition and reach of online. Consider:
* Coupon giant Valassis abandons newspaper distribution for the postal service in three more markets. Says Crains: “The move represents the acknowledgement that newspaper circulation is on the decline and advertising clients want to continue to reach as many people they can in markets with shrinking newspaper coverage.”
This is significant for two reasons: First, consider that a primary reason papers are reducing frequency but maintaining print editions a few days a week is that they can still make money by distributing coupons and circulars. Second, readers value those coupons. I’ve told the story before of my time as Sunday editor of the NY Daily News when we regained coupons after a strike and circulation jumped more than 100,000 – that is, those readers were buying ads, not news. So this becomes a vicious cycle: the more papers shrink, the more value they lose and the more value they lose the more they shrink.
Coupons and circulars are media and they merely use newspapers as distribution vehicles. When they can be distributed online, for free, then the distribution business will fade away.
* Next, newspapers are starting to lose movie listing ads. That advertising used to be content with value – like, say, home and job ads – but now that value can be delivered online, for free – next to a ticket sales opportunity – online. There go a few more dollars and a bit more value.
* Newspapers were smart to start an online company to serve their ghoulish but lucrative line of business in death notices, Legacy.com. But now it has a competitor in Tributes.com. And I wonder how long either of them can continue to convince people that they need an obit service when any web page will do.
None of these, in and of itself, is a killing blow to papers. Just three more dull blows to the kidney.
I made one error: the new news organization’s editorial staff after three years is 46; total is 90.
Bob was nice enough to plug my book. Now I’ll plug his, The Chaos Scenario. I just bought a copy. He’s doing lots of neat things publishing it, offering it first on Kindle, offering earlier adopter pricing on the paperback (it increass $1 every Monday), and then coming out with independent distribution in stores. Because he has an nice widget enabling purchase, I’ll embed it here:
Twitter announced a geolocation API today and it set my mind to spinning with implications that I tweeted like a Gatling gun:
* For news, it would be possible to verify that witnesses reporting what they see are where they say they are. Twitpics can be geotagged.
* Local news organizations should build apps to track surges of activity around any address. Could be a news event. Could be hipsters congregating (telling one where hippness happens).
* News orgs could also use it as a reporting tool: the fabled pothole report via Twitter.
* A hyperlocal blog could set up a feed of your neighbors’ tweets all around town.
* Over time, the geoTwitter enables what I’ve been thinking of as the annotation layer atop the real world: diners create simple reviews of a restaurant simply around location, anyone annotating any location.
* I wonder about the commercial applications: subscribing to tweet ads near me.
The live web, the social web, and the geo web come together.
Now there are caveats aplenty. Foursquare is similar and hasn’t yet burned up the world and neither has Google Latitude. Laptops need geolocation. There are privacy concerns that may stop people from switching on geolocation (the default is off). There are dangers; geolocation could have made tweets from Iran more credible but also more perilous for the authors. I wonder why Twitter is choosing to erase geo data after time; this diminishes the value of the annotation layer.
But still, a simple API like this can make the mind spin. Now combine geoTwitter with my recent obsession, Google Wave, and imagine how live and collaborative content can be enhanced with geography. Or add geography to Marissa Mayer’s vision of the hyperpersonal news stream. The possibilities are endless.
We presented our CUNY New Business Models for News at the Aspen Institute and on the web yesterday. I’ve been sitting in meetings nonstop, so I haven’t had the chance to read all the reaction yet. But so far, we’ve met our goals: to get these models and specifics discussed and to inform that discussion.
After I presented yesterday, someone around the august Aspen table said the one thing we can be assured of is that the models are wrong. Exactly. We want you – people with experience and knowledge – to come in and give us new information to better inform the models and discussion. TechCrunch, for example, questioned our penetration numbers and I think they’re right to. That is precisely the kind of debate we need to be more specific and more realistic.
Our models are a hypothetical look at the ecosystem that will grow after a major metro market loses its paper, an ecosystem populated by hyperlocal sites, some form of new news organization(s), a framework that enables networks to form to maximize value, and publicly supported journalism. They use the lingua franca of the current business – CPMs, pageviews per user… – because we found it easiest to understand the structure this way, but we certainly hope that we will move past those old assumptions.
The way to move past is to encourage innovation and investment and we hope that we are showing the potential for sustainable news businesses, platforms, and networks.
What we need to do now is move past the crowd in Aspen to the bloggers, journalists, entrepreneurs, technologists, and investors who will build this new world using tools that exist and inventing new ones and building new value through new relationships. So we will present and discuss our work back in New York in a few weeks (sorry for the delay, but that’s one side effect of my surgery). There we hope for more discussion on the specifics of the models.
Here at Aspen, the most inspiring idea I have heard came from Google’s Marissa Mayer, who went past the old web to imagine what’s next: not hyperlocal news sites but hyperpersonal news streams. Of course, we see the start of that in Facebook and Twitter. Mayer emphasized to the media folks at Aspen that they must go to where the people are and not expect the people to come to them (“if the news is that important, it will find me”). How does news become part of my stream?
Mayer – like me – has also been talking about what comes after the article: the topic page that covers a story as an ongoing process rather than as a finished product. Add this to our hyperpersonal news streams – and to the news potential of Google Wave – and the biorhythm and source of news changes fundamentally.
So does the business. In our models, we forecast 12 pageviews per user per month knowing that is shameful – against the hundreds that Facebook gets – but it is, sadly, the industry norm. Mayer’s vision is sure to create far greater engagement – more traffic, more advertising opportunities; far greater targeting – and far higher ad rates and value; and far greater revenue.
We need to change the fundamentals of news, not just a few revenue lines.
Also here at Aspen, I was amazed and impressed to hear newspaper owner Dean Singleton tell some of us that his Salt Lake City paper has bought a realty agency and will list homes for a flat fee of a few thousand. Yes, the paper undercuts other agencies’ listings businesss. But, hey, the agencies have pretty much abandoned newspapers and newspapers still have readers and the ability to market homes in print and online. In Salt Lake’s case, the paper will send buyers – rather than sellers – to agencies that advertise.
When I worked in the newspaper industry way back at the start of the consumer web, I tried to convince papers to just this: to get into the real estate business to get homes into the listings and to get access to listings data. I thought I was going to be killed. But I believe that this was an inevitability.
Singleton’s move is the ecommerce strategy we presented in our models made substantial and real. We talked with the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel about their sales of wine, hangers, and hats. Selling homes is certainly bigger ticket. It monetizes the relationship papers have with readers in a new and smart way.
The third idea of note I’ve heard in Aspen is one Craig Newmark raised in a discussion of the need to build trust in the news. He suggested that he would pay someone to fact check a story he reads in the paper. In a sense, this is just Spot.US pushed later in the process of news: rather than underwriting the reporting of a story, you underwrite the verification and editing. What do you think of the idea? Would you contribute to fact-checking particular news stories?
When Craig said this, I also imagined an auction marketplace for editing. What if I could take a blog post I wrote and could hire someone for a fee to fact-check it for me? Yes, you often do that for me. But wouldn’t it say a lot for a post or an article if you knew that the author had hired help to make sure it was right?
While I’m at it, I’ll take this one step farther: We need an outlet to perform more immediate media criticism, fact-checking, and disinformation-checking – not just thumb-sucking about the state of media but specific checks. Take a look at the ABC (Australia’s) Media Watch. I want that in the U.S. What The New York Times did tracking down the malevolent meme about federal death panels for grandma is what we need all the time.
So what if we had better mechanisms to check news before and after it is “done” and distributed?
Much of the rest of the discussion at Aspen is what you’d expect given the crowd: a fair amount of fear and protection. But I’m heartened that much of what we discussed in our models became part of the discussion here: a presumption that, even if papers don’t die (as was our starting point) there are and will be hyperlocal blogs and networks and new news organizations and frameworks to support them. Now we need to build and support them.
The most important single number we presented in Aspen was not a projection but a present reality: In our research, we found hyperlocal bloggers bringing in $100,000 and even up to $200,000 in ad revenue and we believe that can be optimized by at least 50 percent with the creation of metro, local, and ecommerce networks and with better training, technologies, and efficiencies.
There are bloggers who want to serve their communities and unemployed journalists who want to continue reporting for their communities and communities need more information. So we want to help by doing research and proposing needs and perhaps inspiring investment, invention, training, and the creation of networks and platforms.
Where others see problems (failing newspapers), we see opportunities and needs.
: LATER: Somewhat related: Jim Cramer says he’d short media companies, that journalism businesses aren’t working, that magazines are doomed, and that private equity companies should have called reporters before calling their employers.
Here is the presentation, which uses new software from Prezi. Just click within the screen once the presentation starts and you will advance to the next screen.
The Guardian asked me to write a column about the transparent life and my writing about my prostate cancer. Here it is:
* * *
In the company of nudists, no one is naked and there is nowhere to hide. In this space and on my blog, I have been arguing that with the internet, we are entering an age of publicness when we need to live, do business and govern in the open. So I was left with little choice when I learned I had prostate cancer. I had to blog it.
So far, no regrets. Oh, one troll tweeted that in my blog post, I had merely used my cancer to plug my book (which, by the way, is entitled What Would Google Do?). But my Twitter friends beat him up on my behalf. I got emails pushing nutty cures on me – yes, there is cancer spam – but Gmail’s filters killed them for me. And I have had to be mindful not to bring my family into my glass house; my transparency shouldn’t necessarily be theirs.
But it has all been good. On my blog, on others’, in Twitter, and in email, I received an instant and lasting shower of good wishes and some good advice about my choice of surgery. My brothers in malignancy have shared their experiences with generous candour. I even inspired a few of them to blog their own stories. They joined me in urging men to have the PSA blood test that revealed my cancer.
After my blog post sharing the diagnosis was republished last week in the Guardian, I heard from Emma Halls, chairman of the UK Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, who said the disease affects almost as many men as breast cancer does women, but it gets less funding and little attention.
That stands to reason. We men don’t like talking about penises – certainly not when they malfunction. Discussing one’s incontinence and impotence post-surgery – both temporary, we hope – well, it doesn’t get much more transparent than that. It’s one matter for me to disclose my business relationships, politics, religion, and stock ownership on my blog’s “about” page; it’s another to do this.
So I think I’ve become about as transparent as a man can. I am living the public life. There are dangers here. I risk becoming merely a medical and emotional exhibitionist. And I know I have violated my own privacy to an extreme.
But I think we need to shift the discussion in this era of openness from the dangers to privacy to the benefits of publicness. It’s not privacy that concerns me, but control. I must have the right and means to keep my disease secret if I choose.
By revealing my cancer, I realise benefits, and so can society: if one man’s story motivates just one more who has the disease to get tested and discover it, then it is worth the price of embarrassment. If many people who have a condition can now share information about their lifestyles and experience, then perhaps the sum of their data can add up to new medical knowledge. I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish.
Collectively, we will use the internet’s ability to gather, share and analyse what we know to build greater value than we could on our own. That is the principle of transparency that I want companies and governments to heed: that openness in their information and actions must become their default, that holding secrets only breeds mistrust and robs them and us of the value that comes from sharing.
I believe this openness at the source will become a critical element in a new, linked ecosystem of news, as institutions and individuals will be expected to provide maximal information on the web. Such open intelligence also allows an unlimited number of watchdogs on those in power, helping to bring about a new, collaborative – and ultimately, I hope, more effective and efficient – system of journalism.
So for me, transparency is a necessary ethic of the age. That is why I used my medium, my blog, to share my prostate cancer. If I believe in the value of publicness, how could I not?
