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.

Ari Melber from The Nation wrote a very interesting post over at Personal Democracy Forum about Condoleezza Rice’s recent confrontation with several students at Stanford.  If you haven’t seen Rice’s defensive scolding of these students yet, here it is, video courtesy of Stanford student Reyna Garcia:

I won’t go too far into analyzing Rice’s remarks.  Whether or not this was a “Frost/Nixon moment,” it was very revealing.  For a good account of how disturbing Rice’s comments are, see this piece by Scott Horton, which Melber links to in his post.  What I want to focus on is just how effective these students were at provoking Rice to get off message.  There’s a powerful lesson here for journalists–professional and citizen alike.

Ari Melber is a journalist and blogger who understands the changing dynamics of his business and the power of the internet.  I’ve interacted with him several times on Twitter, and I’ve been impressed at how he engages with the progressive social media community.  Like Ana Marie Cox, he uses the internet as a feedback loop between the world of professional journalists and the world of bloggers, twitterers, and citizen journalists.

In any case, Melber’s post at PDF gets at something very important in the Rice moment at Stanford:

The seven-minute clip quickly drew 150,000 views, shot up to the top of Rice videos on YouTube, and jumpstarted traditional media coverage. Blogs pounced. Law professor Jack Balkin, who runs an influential legal blog, banged out a quick analysis of the claim that an act isn’t torture if “Bush ordered it.” The Washington Post ran an item about how the “riled” former secretary of state was “caught on tape” giving a “finger-wagging” torture defense to students. Online radio host Cenk Uyger picked up the clip with a YouTube commentary, “Condi Rice Pulls a Nixon,” that drew over 100,000 views. The next day, Keith Olbermann devoted a segment to broadcasting and discussing Garcia’s video on MSNBC.

Melber accurately draws a direct line from George Allen’s “macaca” scandal a few years ago to the latest furor over Rice’s comments.  (Incidentally, I’m proud to say that S.R. Sidarth was a student of mine when I was a TA at the University of Virginia–the course was “Democracy”.)  I’m convinced that this kind of journalism will and should increase rapidly in the near future.  S.R. Sidarth’s videotaping of George Allen calling him “macaca” was the “aha” moment when we realized the power of citizen journalism to get at the truth behind the layers of facade that politicians frequently hide behind.  Reyna Garcia’s video of Condoleezza Rice has taken citizen journalism a step further by possibly catching a former high level administration official revealing complicity in a crime.

Why is citizen journalism like this so powerful?  I think one answer is that citizen journalists don’t have to worry about their future careers as journalists nearly as much as the professional journalists do.  In other words, professional journalists frequently have to worry about access.  They don’t want to anger public officials and powerful people too much by being too aggressive, because they know that if they cross certain lines these people will stop talking to them.  For instance, I saw Andrea Mitchell on “Hardball” the other night, and she was making a very implausible argument that Rice’s statement was not a “Frost/Nixon” moment.  It seemed pretty clear to me that Mitchell was trying to stay on Rice’s good side.  But citizen journalists don’t have this problem because we’re not worried about future access.  We have the opportunity to be as aggressive as we want.  After all, there probably isn’t going to be any possibility of future access anyway.

I say “we” tentatively because I’ve dabbled in citizen journalism (see my take on the tea party protest and this hearing with Eric Holder).  I haven’t yet had the chance to interview powerful people.  Yet, I think the model that Melber has presented of the feedback between bloggers, citizen journalists, and the major media outlets is instructive.  The lesson I’ve learned from Reyna Garcia’s video and Melber’s post is that if I ever have the opportunity to interview political elites for this blog, I’m going to try to ask questions that the mainstream media is freqently too deferential to ask.  And I’m going to bring a video camera.

As my friends know, I’ve become addicted to blogging.  I knew this would happen, which is part of the reason why I resisted starting a blog for years, for the fear that it would eat up all my free time.  Well, that is pretty much happening, and I’ve been enjoying every minute of it.  But every now and then I step back and ask myself, “Why am I spending so much time doing this?”  Today was one of those days.

This line of thought started while I was having lunch today with a friend and colleague from the Obama campaign at the outdoor fish market in Washington DC.  I told her that I was thinking about going to Europe this summer, but money was kind of tight.  And even more important: how would I blog regularly if I was traveling in Europe taking in all the sights???  Now, I admit that there is something very wrong about this reason for not wanting to visit Europe.  It’s not as if there are no bloggers in Europe, or internet cafes.  But I have been wanting to move to DC for the summer to do freelance writing and blogging on the political scene.  Crazy, right?

Anyway, my friend asked me what I liked about blogging.  My reply was that it was a creative outlet and it gives me a reason to go to events and talk to people I might not ordinarily talk to.  I’m a political and news junkie, so it’s a more productive use of my time than simply consuming news all the time.  And finally, I am fascinated by the ways that politics, government, and the media are changing right now, in part due to President Obama and his administration, and in part due to developments in technology.

Well, those are my own personal reasons for enjoying blogging.  But is there any other point to blogging besides the enjoyment bloggers take in commenting on whatever they’re interested in?  I started thinking more about this after reading Jeff Jarvis’ post, “Journalists: Where Do You Add Value?” at his blog BuzzMachine.  He writes:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

This isn’t only a good question for journalists.  It’s also a good question for bloggers to ask themselves.  Maybe some bloggers don’t care much whether they are “adding value” (by the way, I hate that phrase) but I think that any blogger worth reading should care.  I’ve never liked the attitude of novelists that says, “I don’t care what my audience thinks, I write for my own artistic satisfaction.”  If you’re a writer, you must care what your audience thinks.  It’s the same as any form of communication, unless you are content to be communicating with yourself.

So, what is the point of blogging?  I don’t have any well-thought-out answers to this question right now.  Clearly, a lot of us enjoy reading blogs for a variety of reasons.  But is there anything beyond enjoyment?  I think that Jarvis has good advice for bloggers in addition to journalists: “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

Via Yglesias, the columnist Rosa Brooks announces her departure from the LA Times and makes a solid case for public financing of journalism.  It’s worth reading.

Increasingly, it looks like newspapers are on the way out unless they make some dramatic changes.  Yglesias is skeptical that public funding is necessary to save newspapers, but I’m more sympathetic to Brooks’ view.  The future of journalism is hard to predict, but I see the newspaper business fading fast.  Either newspapers will become nonprofit organizations, or they will disappear.

Some fans of new media may think that it’s not a problem if newspapers disappear because blogs will replace them.  But as much as I love blogs, I have my doubts about the idea of bloggers and freelancers replacing the service that professional journalists have provided for the public.  For instance, if you look at some of the most popular political blogs today, very few are doing investigative reporting because it’s so expensive.  As Yglesias points out in a very interesting post about Twitter, online media just doesn’t have the power to generate much revenue.

It’s true that Talking Points Memo’s Muckraker has been able to pull off investigative reporting, but it’s not a very large operation, and its audience is necessarily limited to the internetigentsia.  This is not to say that TPM’s influence is limited, as Josh Marshall and his team proved during the U.S. Attorney scandal.  By the way, that was a wonderful smack-down of certain condescending fools in the traditional media who like to make fun of bloggers.  The point is, unless TPM and other blogs like it invent a breakthrough method of generating much more revenue, their capacity for the kind of reporting that journalists have traditionally done is going to remain very small.

I see blogs playing an important role in the future of journalism, and that role will be defined in the near future.  But replacing newspapers?  No.  In the immortal words of Charles Barkley, I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

Politico has an insightful piece out today about how the White House is trying to engage local and non-traditional media to get its message out.  Apparently, senior advisors are feeling like they are not getting substantive coverage by the major media outlets.  I would have to agree with that assessment, and I fully support the president’s efforts to further empower the new media.

Now, where did I put my invitation to meet with the president along with other liberal bloggers?