The Guardian asked me to write a column about the transparent life and my writing about my prostate cancer. Here it is:
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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?
* The latest Guardian Media Talk USA podcast is up. David Folkenflik, NPR correspondent, and John Temple, ex editor of the Rocky Mountain News and now a damned fine media blogger, and I talk about the AP, the TechCrunch/Twitter affair, and news as charity. I also interview Josh Cohen, product manager of Google News.
* Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and I recorded the inaugural edition of This Week in Google (TWiG). You can watch it in video here and listen to the podcast here. We discuss all kinds of things: Apple (AT&T) blocking Google Voice; the importance of Google Wave and the live web; the AP (again); Gmail getting rid of that damned “on behalf of”; Microsoft Office (finally) going into the cloud. Great fun.
I wish I could embed both of them here (hint, hint) but go take a listen and please subscribe.
My Guardian column this week expands on an idea I discussed here, about viewing charity to news organizations as collaboration in the news ecosystem. The kicker: “Charity is likely to be a contributor to the future of news. So will volunteer labour in the form of bloggers and crowdsourcing. But we still need a business model for news. News still needs to be profitable to survive. It’s not a church.”
In the midst of the UK’s MP expenses scandal – and as Gordon Brown’s government teeters, with nudges over the edge from The Guardian itself – the paper asked its columnists and then its readers to reform, even reinvent government. The results are in and are fascinating.
Tom Clark’s writeup in today’s paper service is quick to point out that this is a survey of Guardian readers with their baggage in their left hands. But that makes it even more surprising that, for example, 70% say they do not support demographic quotas as a means to configure Parliament. They want to change voting and the structure of Parliament and they want a constitution. May I recommend a First Amendment?
What’s exciting about this is that it turns the usual discourse around, shifting from complaining about government to doing something about it, taking responsibility. After the destructive comes the constructive.
: Speaking of…. See also Kevin Anderson’s report from the Deutsche Welle conference on the need for journalists to focus more on solutions than problems. More here.
: And see Lloyd Shepard’s tweet: “sheesh. when voting is a process of elimination, you know democracy’s in trouble. this is how people end up supporting arsenal”
My Guardian column this week reports on my weeks’ experiment of reading The New York Times and Wall Street Journal only on my Kindle. I’m still reading The Times that way, though I think I prefer the iPhone for that and will likely switch. When the Journal raised its price from $9.99 to $14.99, I canceled. Snippet:
…The reader works wonderfully for books. But it also tries to turn a newspaper into a book, starting us on the first page of the first story and nudging us through its awkward user interface to proceed a page-turn at a time through the entire product, as we used to on paper. The digital among us, however, no longer read news in this way. Online, we search and link and flit and explore. We are in control of the experience, not some editor somewhere.
Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. . . .
We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop’s value is lessened but the value of links grows. . . .
But in news, neither the device nor the form matters nearly as much as the information and its timing. This requires that publishers unleash their news on every device possible. But no single gadget will be their saviour. None will bring back the good old days – if they were that – of news and the world delivered in neat little packages we paid for.
The second edition of the Guardian MediaTalkUSA podcast is up, with On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone and The New York Times’ David Carr having at it, plus interviews with Craig Newmark and Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, plus news from PaidContent. Enjoy (I hope).
The Guardian’s first American podcast, Media Talk USA, just debuted. Warning: I’m the host. In the first monthly episode, I interview Arianna Huffington and I’m joined in the studio for a spirited discussion with Jay Rosen of NYU and Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal. Plus, Paid Content reports on U.S. media news. Here’s what I said about it at the Guardian site:
We need it on this side of the water because American media do not get the depth of coverage that UK media enjoy (or don’t) from Media Guardian and its competitors. CNN’s Reliable Sources concentrates mostly on politics and media. Public radio’s On the Media is quite good but tends not to worry about the latest news. I blogged sometime ago that I wished OtM would take on more current news but its cohost, Brooke Gladstone, told me that wasn’t what they were about. “If that’s what you want, start your own show, Jeff,” she said. So here we are.
And there is more than enough news about the news to cover and dissect. Listeners in the UK might be wise to look at the wave of destruction overtaking US newspapers as the canary in the coal mine. Over-leveraged news companies are going bankrupt; huge swathes of newsrooms are being wiped out; newspapers are starting to die and more will follow. TV and radio stations will find themselves in similar straits. Advertising is in for more upheaval than they dare to imagine. But on the other hand, entrepreneurs and investors across the country and popping up with new businesses and new business models for news and media. At Media Talk USA, we will jump off the news to examine the state and fate of media with a variety of provocative guests.
My Guardian column this week, under that headline, comes out of an interview I did with Huffington for the first edition of the Guardian Media Talk USA podcast (which you can listen to now; follow the link). The column got trimmed for print, so I’ll paste my draft after the jump.
The Guardian is launching its first US podcast, an American rendition of its wonderful Media Talk show, and I’m proud (and nervous) to say that I’m presenting it, as they say. Here’s the home page for the Media Talk USA, which will be broadcast podcast monthly from the studios of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. The premier episode features Jay Rosen of NYU and PressThink and Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal in a lively discussion and an interview with Arianna Huffington, plus news from PaidContent. We even have a Facebook group. And what would a Guardian venture be without a Twitter feed? A preview snippet here.
My Guardian column this week is on the New York Times’ hyperlocal experiment with mentions of CUNY’s involvement, Patch, and Barisatnet. Snippets:
The New York Times is embarking on a test of blogging in two neighbourhoods and three towns around New York. So far, there’s nothing remarkable in that: another attempt by a newspaper to grab for the elusive golden fleece called hyperlocal – the ability to serve readers and small advertisers in highly targeted geographic niches. But what is new in this effort is that the Times is trying to create a platform to help others – not staff reporters, but community members – make journalism. A wall just fell. . . .
All these parties must collaborate, not compete. They must create complementary content that fills out their local news worlds so that each of them adds value and stands out for it. Writing the same story everyone else is covering does not do that; it never did. They also should work together to create a framework that supports all of the sites commercially – that is, an ad network – and promotionally – that is, with links.
The days of one news organisation owning a town and its news are over; no one can afford to do that any more. Instead, if these experiments succeed, they will do so by collaborating to create a new network – a new ecosystem – of local news.
Their work is vital because I believe such structures will be the building blocks of the future of news – of what will replace or at least supplement the services that will disappear as regional and city newspapers shrink and die. And die they will. In the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe, metropolitan papers and their over-leveraged owners are in dire trouble. We have little or no time to decide what can and will succeed them. These efforts around New York are attempts at an answer. Whether they will grab the fleece at last, it’s too soon to say. I’ll let you know.
The Guardian just announced that it is releasing all its content through an API as well as making available many different data sets through a data store, all of which can be mashed up into others’ sites and applications. They join other organizations – the BBC, National Public Radio, and The New York Times – in releasing APIs; notes that it’s the creme of news that sees the wisdom in APIs. The Guardian’s offers more than headlines: articles, video, galleries, everything. It also adds one more important element to its offering: a business model, creating an ad network for users of the API.
Upendra Shardanand, my partner at and the founder of Daylife, has been saying for a few years that APIs are the future of distribution. The Guardian says its API will put its content “into the fabric of the internet.”
The moment that led to the title of my book – when I told publishers to ask what Google would do – came when I was trying to convince a roomful of them to think distributed, to stop believing that their brands were magnets sufficient to attract their entire audience, to go to where the people are, like Google.
The reflex of publishers – the few who agreed – was to think of distribution in terms of widgets (the trend that never was). They also produced RSS feeds, though limited. Note that a few weeks ago, the Guardian also shifted to full-text feeds (I asked about the business impact of this and they told me that there seemed to be none as traffic continues to rise).
Now APIs take distribution to its logical – if unknown and sometimes frightening – limit. Now I could build an application around the news of at least these four outlets – and, with Daylife, headlines from and analysis from thousands more. In the case of a Guardian story, you may read it via my application and not go to the Guardian’s site. Isn’t that insanity? Isn’t that what publishers are complaining about with aggregators? Actually, no, aggregators display only headlines and give links; this is worse if you’re trying to protect your content and traffic to your site. But that’s the old, centralized mediamind way to think. In the new, distributed world, you want to be where the people are. The frightening part has been that once you release your content as data, you lose control of the display, branding, data collection, and revenue. That’s why the Guardian is trying to add its advertising business model – because it wants to release everything; it wants its content to be used all around the web. This is the new distribution.
News organizations already lost control of packaging, whether they all knew it or not, when most of us most days come to content not through carefully designed home pages but through search and links and now Facebook. The media brand is less a destination and a magnet to draw people there than a label once you’ve found the content, wherever and however you found it. So the more places you can find it, the better.
: Disclosures: I should have added that I write and consult for the Guardian and, again, I’m a a partner at Daylife.
My Guardian column this week is a condensation of some of the discussion here about the LA Times’ online revenue equalling the paper’s total editorial payroll and what that could mean for the digital future of news:
So in the LA Times revelation, I see hope: the possibility that online revenue could support digital journalism for a city. The enterprise will be smaller, but it could well be more profitable than its print forebears today and – here’s the real news – it would grow from there. Imagine that: news as a growth industry again.
