bottom up change

One nice thing about going to conferences like the Personal Democracy Forum is that you learn about organizations doing interesting work that you may not have heard about before.  This was the case for me with the New Organizing Insitute (NOI).  NOI trains progressive activists in online organizing tactics and they just completed one of their “Campaign Bootcamp” sessions.  The progressive movement has had an edge in the use of the internet in political organizing in recent years, and groups like NOI make progressive dominance online more likely in the future.  I am not aware of a conservative counterpart to NOI, but if anyone knows of it (or them), please let me know.

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.