Presentation to the Aspen Institute on technology and the newsroom

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine.com)

July 2004



I’ll skip over the obvious changes I have seen technology bring to the newsroom in my career: captured keystrokes, digital editing, wysiwyg design, wireless transmission, improved deadlines. That is yesterday’s news.

The important developments in technology affecting the newsroom today are all happening outside the newsroom, bringing change from the outside in.

I’ll quickly focus on five broad areas…

I will emphasize first and foremost the advent of citizens’ media because I believe it is nothing less than revolutionary for news.





Forget Gutenberg.

I say that the most important invention in media was the remote control, for it gave the audience control. Add the cable box, the VCR, TiVo, the iPod, the Internet -- all embraced because of the control they gave consumers.

Now add tools that allow citizens not just to control content but to create and distribute it.

Add weblogging.

Weblogging is the product of history’s easiest, cheapest publishing tool attached to history’s best distribution network.

It brings the power of the printing press and the broadcast tower to the citizens.

It destroys the barrier to entry to media.

As Jay Rosen of NYU says, “Now, the readers are writers and the writers are readers.”

Citizens are creating their own media and even media companies – witness Nick Denton’s Gawker Media; one political blogger set to make $150,000 this year; other bloggers starting to make a living as entrepreneurs. I depressed the hell out of a magazine columnist who was thinking about coming to blogs when I told him who his competitors were. “You mean I’m competing with people making $2,000 a month?” he gasped. “No,” I said. “You’re competing with people who are doing this for free because they love it.”

It’s happening in text now but it will happen in TV and radio next because the equipment is good and cheap; the editing tools are getting better and cheaper (I use a $90 camera and $99 software to create video commentaries); distribution is finally about to be cheap and ubiquitous; and the TV industry itself is starting to disassemble as cable networks start broadband channels. TV will explode.

But weblogs are exploding first.








This changes our fundamental relationship with our public in many ways:

+ First, the people we used to call the audience finally have a voice. And it is our turn to listen. But I would say we’re not – yet.

+ Second, they are correcting us. As early blogger Ken Layne famously said, “We fact-check your ass.” That is good for us. Note the relationship of bloggers to The New York Times’ public editor, Dan Okrent, who has responded to bloggers’ complaints and gotten high marks – at least outside The Times – for it. Note last week’s explanation by the Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief of his mistaken claim that Paul Bremer did not give a farewell address to the Iraqi people; he credited bloggers with pressuring him to do so. See, too, how the LA Times succumbed to a surprised and cynical blogger’s pressure to fairly criticize a liberal Supreme Court justice as it had a conservative judge – a success story for listening. This will be good for our credibility.

+ Citizens’ media tears down the authority of big media and establishes the authority of the audience. That’s not as ominous as it sounds. Whom are you going to believe when it comes to recommendations for a new phone to buy, or a book, or a babysitter? Fellow consumers. Citizens.

+ We can look upon citizens’ media as competition. I say its wiser to cooperate. In the relationship I’m trying to establish with town bloggers in our markets, we will (1) promote each other, (2) share content, (3) bring them into our ad network, expanding our reach and underwriting their efforts. On a far different scale, shouldn’t we all be reading weblogs by Iraqis to compare and contrast to our coverage of events there? Shouldn’t we be quoting them for their unique perspective?

+ They are providing us with new sources of news, information, and diverse viewpoints. At Advance, we are working, slowly but surely to use citizen bloggers to help us achieve the newspaper nirvana of hyperlocal coverage, building our primary competitive strength – our localness – and building our audience and then, we hope, bringing in the holy grail of hyperlocal advertising, the pizzeria who never could afford to advertise with us.

+ Weblogs provide us with diverse viewpoints – at home or in Iraq. Note Pew’s finding that during two-thirds of consumers liked the Internet because of the ability to get news from many source; half valued the ability to get different points of view from news and government outlets. With the commoditization of news, perhaps viewpoint is a key asset. I say that is the key lesson of the success of FoxNews: The people haven’t gone to the right; they are going to a source of news that’s more interesting and we must give them credit for being able to truly judge what is fair and balanced. And if we stick our noses up at FoxNews, we reject our public. That is dangerous.

+ We can look upon citizens’ media as the ultimate focus group: They tell us what they care about, what really matters to them. Compare the top headlines on our front pages with the stories that get the most links on Technorati or Blogdex and you may question our news judgment. Are our reporters getting story ideas from blogs and forums?

+ Weblogs are essentially social; we bloggers love community; we love the conversation.

Before I appeared on a panel at the Online News Association, I asked my blog readers what I should say and one of them, cartoonist, adman and blogger Hugh MacLeod, replied:

“Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as ‘things,’ rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A … brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won't (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.”





It’s so obvious I won’t dwell on it. But an important impact of technology on the news business is, of course, that we can get the news faster from more sources.

+ For example, we’re using digital photography and now the people are. We will get major news photography from witnesses. Are we prepared for that? Are we inviting people to share the news. (It’s how Gawker gets its news.) Do we have the technical means to accept it? How do we vet it and incorporate it in our reports?

+ During the Iraq war, of course, we saw instant reports via satphones from our reporters-as-witnesses. This raises issues we’re all quite familiar with: Instant news bypasses editing and does not have the luxury of waiting for the fuller story to emerge.

We value speed. Should we also fear it? Should we present news differently so the audience is better equipped to know the difference between a report of a mobile biological lab and confirmation of it?






We as consumers no longer wait for news to come to us. News waits for us to come get it. News is constant. It’s wherever, whenever we want it.

This is thanks to:

+ The Internet

+ Automated news services (GoogleNews, AP on Yahoo)

+ Mobile devices (I check GoogleNews on my Treo)

+ The promise of ubiquitous high-speed access (I’ll then be able to watch TV on my Treo). So are we ready to offer bandwidth-smart content? Can our newsrooms gather and produce it? Are we all unimedia in a multimedia world?

+ RSS (a new means of delivery for content; I’ll explain that later if anyone wants)

This changes news consumers’ habits, the expectations of consumers for what we deliver, and the way we deliver it.

We have all found online that noon – lunchtime – is the new prime time of news. But we don’t deliver our products then.

We also are finding, again, that consumers are going to more and more sources of news. This is how The Guardian became such a big brand in the U.S. Should we be linking to those sources for them?






Now when you want information, where is the first place you go?

Google, of course.

You search.

And then you link.

News and information is no longer about us feeding them. It’s about me getting what I want when and where I want it. That should change the way we offer news.





Sometime ago, on my weblog, I wrote about the post-Internet newspaper: How would you design a news product from scratch today? (http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_09.html#004722)

+ For example, wouldn’t it make sense to banish background from the story to a link? It’s numbing reading the same background over and over and it’s unnecessary (and when it is necessary, it’s usually inadequate).

What else?

+ Should we lead with the news everyone already knows or should we lead with our key strengths: Our localness, our original reporting, our viewpoints, our perspective?

To quote Carly Fiorina in the conference readings: “They don’t need us any more for access to information. They need us to add value, to add perspective that they don’t see, to add understanding that they don’t have.”

+ Shouldn’t we link to and perhaps summarize other sources of news? If that’s what the audience wants, why don’t we help them?

+ Shouldn’t we present the news from various viewpoints?

+ Let’s find ways to give the audience a voice, include them in our product, engage in the conversation

+ We should take the lessons of user interface and user behavior to all news products: how we organize our news, how we trim stories of show-off paragaphs to save readers’ time.

+ Finally, we need to recognize that the essential element of news and information is no longer the newspaper or the channel and no longer even the page or the show, it is the story or the post – news has gone molecular. So we need to organize our news that way, taking people directly and permanently to the elements of news they want.





The most profound change technology is bringing to journalism and to the culture has nothing to do with silicon or software. It is, instead, a weltanschauung accepted among the current generation and expected of us, the last generation.

It is a culture of transparency.

Transparency has its roots in many technologies:

Of course, weblogging is all about transparency: Bloggers tell the world about – and are often called upon to defend – their opinions and interests, their mistakes and temptations, and even their lives.

This movement believes that open-source software works better because the wisdom of the crowds, to borrow the title of James Surowiecki’s new book. The process must be transparent.

And this generation, to our consternation, believes that information and intellectual property want to be free and open: transparent, in another sense.

But it’s not all about theft. This is the gift economy, in which we share our experience and information and talents with others in the expectation that what goes around will come around.

This is a extremely social movement – not a movement of geeky loners.

This movement craves conversation – two-way conversation when for so long have worked only one-way. Are we listening and responding?

It craves community and we need to ask ourselves whether we see ourselves as members of the community or still above it.

It is a culture built around merit but it is also essentially egalitarian: Nobody knows whether you’re a dog on the Internet, but they do know whether you’re a genius. It is a movement of populism and democracy: See how weblogs are ready to revolutionize even Iran. Hell, see democracy in action in the influence of blog links in a Google search.

Liberté Egalité Fraternité: to the blogs, comrades.

This is also a movement of frankness. That is the root of flame wars: People say what they think. They confess their bias. They expect us to.

So this culture of transparency expects us to be transparent. And haven’t we always expected those we cover to be transparent? Haven’t we demanded openness, frankness, honesty, and hearing of the politicians and business people and civic leaders we cover?

It is our turn to open the shades, to reveal our process and prejudice, to engage in the conversation, to join in the community… to be transparent. Shouldn’t we, of all people and professions, be the most transparent?