bottom up change

Yesterday I attended a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University where Tsui Lokman presented “Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the Future of Journalism.”  One of the ironic things about living in Boston is that there are always fascinating talks being given at the local universities, but most people can’t ever go because of work.  I’ve lived here for nearly four years and I’m embarrassed about how infrequently I’ve attended lectures.  I used to live in the DC area, and I had the same problem there: people rarely go to the free museums or the free lectures around town because everyone has to work.

Since I have more free time right now, I’ve made a point to attend some lectures at universities in the area.  Lokman’s talk yesterday was fascinating in the questions that it raised about the future of journalism.  It was fairly abstract, but he nevertheless did a pretty good job connecting the philosophical questions to some of the current problems journalists and writers are grappling with in this very uncertain yet exciting time for the media.  And better than that, he actually had some suggestions about the way forward.  I want to make some brief remarks about this talk because it addressed one of the central themes of this blog–how individuals and grassroots associations are transforming the world through new technologies.

Lokman is a doctoral candidate at the Annenburg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  He was presenting some of the work he has done over the past year as a Fellow at the Berkman Center.  The thesis of his presentation was that because of the Internet, we need a new model for understanding how to judge the value of journalism, and Global Voices (GV) is an exemplar of an online news organization that is attempting to meet this new standard.  Global Voices is an online hub of international citizen reporting, or, to use its own self-description:

Global Voices is a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

There are several interesting features of GV.  First, it is truly global: there are stories from people who are writing on local problems from countries all over the world and content on GV is translated into over 15 languages.  This is rare in the blogosphere.  Second, GV wants to “aggregate, curate, and amplify” the work of citizen journalists online.  Instead of mere aggregation of bloggers who submit pieces, as other blogging communities do, GV has editors who select the most insightful pieces to then “amplify.”  That last feature is one of the more interesting aspects of GV, in my view, and one that Lokman seemed to view as an essential part of a successful new media strategy.

Getting back to Lokman’s talk, he argued that in the past, professional journalism has been primarily interested in the dissemination of information, and the standard for judging successful journalism was objectivity.  Reporters sought to get the facts right through source-checking and other methods, and the most successful journalists and news outlets were those that were viewed as providing objective information.  Reliable information was viewed as the gold standard for journalism because it was closely related to the needs of a democratic society–helping the public make good decisions.   But with the advent of the Internet and the rise of blogging, citizen journalism, and other ways that individuals are being empowered to create their own media, we need a different way of judging excellence in this new media environment.

Whereas objectivity was the highest norm of traditional journalism, Lokman argued that what he called “hospitality” must be the new standard for journalism today.  He uses this term literally, as in welcoming others into one’s space.  Why is this the new norm for journalism?  Although the Internet makes it much easier for more people to create their own media, and although we can hear from many more voices now than in the past, there is one major problem with blogs, etc.: there isn’t enough time in the day.  Or as Lokman put it, there is a “scarcity of attention.”  Media outlets and voices have exploded, but the amount of time we have to consume the news hasn’t changed.  As a result, we cannot effectively listen to the new voices that are telling their stories on the Internet.  And here is where Global Voices and its motto, “The world is talking.  Are you listening?” becomes salient.

Lokman believes that GV is a model for how future media entities might successfully do journalism because it takes hospitality seriously.  I’ll give one example of how GV attempts to achieve hospitality–this was not in Lokman’s talk, but I think it’s a good example.   Tomorrow President Obama is going to give a major speech to the Arab and Muslim world in Cairo, Egypt.  Suppose you were interested in getting an Egyptian perspective on what this speech means to the people of Egypt.  You might try to find an Egyptian blog, but more likely you wouldn’t even have time.  You’d likely just watch CNN and hope that they interviewed someone from Egypt.  But even if you were more ambitious, where would you go to get Egyptian news?  What about Egyptian blogs?  Which ones should you read?

This is where GV’s “amplification” of bloggers and citizen journalists in other nations becomes very useful.  Check out this piece on GV called “Egypt: Is Obama not Welcome?” by Eman AbdElRahman, an Egyptian blogger who is a contributor to GV.  AbdElRahman is an experienced blogger in Egypt who knows the Egyptian blogging community well.  As a result, she is well-positioned to find the most interesting accounts of Obama’s visit from citizen journalists and bloggers who are writing about this now.  And to deal with the time-constraints of the reader, she simply offers an overview of the general sentiment on the blogs and on Twitter before providing excerpts of some of the writers in Egypt.  AbdElRahman writes:

Forty-eight hours before US president Barack Obama delivers his much awaited speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds from Cairo University, the Egyptian blogosphere is almost unified by the same feeling. Bloggers are outraged by the massive and exaggerated preparations and precautions being taken by the Egyptian government to secure the visit, and most of them are doubting if the anticipated speech would usher any real change.

From the writers she highlights, we quickly gather that Cairo is basically going into “lock-down” mode for President Obama with schools and businesses closing.  We learn that President Mubarak will not even attend Obama’s speech at Cairo University.  We also learn that although there are high hopes that President Obama will address Egyptian concerns, such as the lack of democracy and the lack of progress on Middle Eastern peace, most writers are deeply skeptical that Obama will change anything.  AbdElRahman provides links to the sources of all of these authors so that the reader can explore more if they wish to.  But just the summary she provides is extremely valuable.

As this piece from Egypt demonstrates, Global Voices seems to come close to meeting Lokman’s “hospitality” standard in that it invites the best of the new bloggers and citizen journalists and amplifies their voices.  It also tries to make it easier for the reader to engage with these new voices by providing short excerpts of these writers.  In this way, the public is provided with an easy way to access the many perspectives that exist in this new media environment.

So does Global Voices exemplify what the future of journalism ought to look like, perhaps at least in outline?  Some members of the audience at the talk argued that GV has not been a success because it is not well-known.  There may be something to that.  Nevertheless, I think Lokman is onto something here.  GV does provide a very useful model of the way that news organizations might structure themselves in the future, especially when trying to capture the writing of the most insightful bloggers and citizen journalists out there.  I would caution, however, that objectivity is a value that we should keep in journalism, and it is at least as important as hospitality in the new media environment.  While it’s critical to amplify the voices of writers who are doing work outside of mainstream journalism, it is just as important that these writers try to adhere to the “old” practices of fact-checking in order to achieve the “old” value of objectivity.  Objectivity isn’t a value we can leave behind with new media, and Lockman’s talk suggested that we can get “beyond” objectivity (see the title).  We have to make space for more values, and I agree that hospitality is a good candidate.  Whether it is really a new value in journalism can be debated, of course.

I have been reading Philosoraptor longer than almost any other blog.  I think I started reading it in the summer of 2003, just a few months after it got started.  Before I even knew about the Daily Kos or Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Philosoraptor was my daily go-to for sharp political analysis from a philosophical perspective.  But mainly, the great thing about this blog is Winston Smith’s use of logic and humor to shred bad arguments and ridicule people who make a living spreading BS.

Anyway, as if to prove my point, Winston has been writing some very perceptive posts at his blog about the torture memos.  Sullivan doesn’t have anything on this.  Why?  Just check out the post, “Bybee Memo: The SERE is OK, Therefore Torture Is Ok Argument”.  Winston shows in a very brief post why Bybee is full of it when he argued that the SERE program proved that the interrogation methods used after 9/11 were not torture.  When we’re arguing about torture, the person you really want to talk with is a philosopher who understands logic and takes it seriously.

I can’t believe I just found out about this yesterday.  It’s funny, because I had actually thought about printing out the stimulus bill and blogging about it as I read the whole thing.  Aren’t you glad I didn’t?  Well, I fully support Steve Coll’s efforts here, and I’m going to become a regular reader of this blog.  I will report back on what he finds in his Talmudic study of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

By the way, Steve Coll is also President and CEO of the New America Foundation.