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January 23, 2005
Three hours later…
Big Bri has posted an eerie Boston snow-at-midnight photo. FreckleGirl shows what it means to dig out a car. And Trevor and his pals are just nuts :) (Thanks to Boston Online for the links.)
Squashed Philosophers boils ’em down for you. None of that bothersome reading or thinking required! (Thanks, Staci.)
Here are some people reflecting on the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference:
Rebecca Mackinnon. Snippet:
…the interests of the people communicating on the web will drive the evolution. But if this “interest” largely represents the interest of middle-class, white, affluent, early adopters, we are in danger of creating a feedback loop that would become less and less inclusive of people who were not in on the conversation at the beginning. Some of us are looking at ways to broaden the global conversation with such projects as Global Voices and the Digital Divide Network.
John Palfrey. Snippet:
We started this event — and an associated little firestorm — by broaching the topic of credibility on the web. It was something, we thought, that both journalists and bloggers ought to have a role in working on. Over the past two days (January 21 and 22, 2005), we made some progress in that direction. But not frankly all that much progress. We’re certainly a long way from a shared set of principles, or a code of ethics, or even an understanding of how they could come about. (Personally, I think that there are already norms in the blogosphere that result in credibility, that such norms will continue to come from the bottom up, that those norms will be undergirded by accountability to one another, and that that will work, but I might be wrong. And this notion did not come up at the event.)
Jay Rosen. Snippet:
“The forces of denial are in retreat.” Which is simply my impression–an educated guess, really–about where the mainstream journalism world is, right now, on matters of blogging, journalism, Internet, and trust. For a very long time, the mainstream press has denied that it needs to change any of its ideas about journalism in order to survive and prosper on the new platform. Adapt what you’re doing now? Sure. Journalists knew they had to do that. Transfer it to the new platform? You bet; lots of transferring would be needed. Preserve “traditional” values? Yes, journalists thought it was important to conserve what was valuable about journalism. Re-purpose content online? Of course. But…
Dave Winer. Snippet:
…the real accomplishment may be that now we better understand who we are, having had a chance to take the same side, even though we’re so different. For example, I came to admire John Hinderaker, of Power Line, even though our politics are opposite. We have deeper values that bind us. Same with Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia guy. Again, we’re opposites in the way we create text but we’re both advocates for the same idea, people doing it for themselves.
Zephyr. Snippet:
One model of journalism … says that the journalists are good reporters because they are not from the community. A stranger makes a better journalist than a friend; the best journalist is detached. When people get excited about citizen journalism (people including myself), we get excited about news – information and framing – coming from a much wider group of storytellers, but also a group that reflects and is the community – the jury of the 1500s.
But I can’t fit this into a box — truth seeking mechanisms are not only about truth, they are also…about the act of witnessing itself.
Jon Bonne. This is what the conference looks like filtered through the eyes of a food blogger. Snippet:
No dis to the Harvard Faculty Club, but I was finding it pretty hard to drink their wine last night – a Chilean cab sauv that was pretty much all oak and blackberry, with that vegetal underripe thing lurking in the background and nothing else. Even one of their servers acknowledged, sotto voce, that it was kinda nasty.
(Jon blogs about the substance of the conference here.)
Sources:
Transcripts and audio
Dave’s conference blog aggregator
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Technorati tag
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Transcript and audio of my dinner talk
Technorati tag: bjc
So, Gov. Schwarzenegger has killed his first real person. To me, that makes the case that if we’re going to have actors as leaders, they at least ought to be good actors.
Why? Empathy.
January 22, 2005
David Berlind posts the raw material behind his journalism. Cool!
I gave the after dinner speech to the conference. The incredible SJ has posted a rough, unedited transcript. (I haven’t read it yet.) I talked about three separate topics: tags, philosophical ethics, and blogging. Now Ben Walker has posted an mp3 of it. (Thanks Ben and SJ.) [Note: The link to the mp3 is the new one. There is also now a RealAudio streaming version.) [Technorati tags: webcred tags]
We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met hostility?)
Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he’d lose tons of contributors.
I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It’s neutral when we stop arguing about it. But who is the “we”?
Jimmy responded that he’s concerned to make the community that supports Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil rights. E.g., you can’t be banned just for disagreeing with someone politicallly.
I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it’s definitely white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. “We’re in over 50 languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There’s a certain kind of diversity that’s hard to achieve just because of where pepole live.” He points out that USB article in the US version is a “fantastic, clear article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic.” He says they’re trying to reach out to people. “I’m very interested in reaching out to the Arabic community. We’re trying to reach out but it’s difficult.”
Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.
Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don’t know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to professionals.
Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. “How do you batten down the hatches against that?” Jimmy says: We try to think of problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. “The community’s already scaled much larger than I ever imagined.”
Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will have some original reporting. It’s going to have to be high-quality, he says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.
Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” and suggests that that’s a good motto for this conference.
Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about a government official posted on an anonymous blog.
Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn’t publish it without checking it out. E.g., the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos, and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you follow the same rules.
Jay Rosen says he wouldn’t run it.
Dave Winer does run items he hasn’t checked out. He asks himself if he thinks it’s true, and asks himself what he’s basing it on. He also tells his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.
Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn’t enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you’d have to get comments.
John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn’t go with anything that’s anonymous.
Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn’t. The change to the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who think they’re sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don’t think we’re journalists at all.
Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue things cause harm.
Ethan says that I’m being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies and it gets indexed. [Yes. It’s not identical to water cooler talk, but it’s more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn’t. But those responsibilities aren’t the same as journalists…although we can learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g., disclosure.]
Jay: I’m trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual certainty.
Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they’re revenues are based on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution back to you. People say “Gee I wish we had your Google power.” We got that power because people are copying our content.
Jim Kennedy: In concept, it’s kind of neat. I’m worried about what sort of abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who thought they had a right to it. And it’s more of a problem for images and video.
Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses…Your model doesn’t depend on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn’t apply to you. But it does to newspapers.
Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.
Jim: It’s an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.
Jay: In five years you’ll change.
Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what he’s written?
Jim: I don’t disagree with you. We just don’t have a mechanism for it.
Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. “I don’t know if it hurt sales, but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic.”
Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask how people still make money doing it, we can’t talk well together. (Dave says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)
Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says journalists don’t recognize the damage because they can always get at the content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon journalists to demand this.
Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now he’s thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about alternative business models.
Jay points to an article about The Guardian’s reasons for making the archives permanently available.
Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages, and they could sell advertising.
Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We’re just stuck between models for a while.
[Technorati tags: bjc]
Here is a policy from GoDaddy, a domain registrar:
QUESTION: Why is GoDaddy.com blocking people in certain countries from accessing its site?
ANSWER: GoDaddy.com actively blocks the following countries from using our services due to U.S. government policies:
Cuba
Iran
Iraq
Libya
North Korea
Sudan
SyriaThe U.S. Department of State has declared the governments of these states to be sponsors of international terrorism
How screwed up is this? Bush’s inaugural address told us we are the purveyors of liberty. That must mean that we want these oppressive governments to fail so that their people can be free. Yet, according to GoDaddy’s interpretation, we are to deny those citizens the instruments of their liberty. As Hoder says:
I wonder whether this is what president Bush considers standing with a nation for their freedom. Who else is using these websites other than mostly secular, freedom-loving Iranian youth?
By the way, in a press release on Jan. 12 GoDaddy boasts: “Go Daddy has found its SSL Certificates reaching into virtually every corner of the globe, with new orders coming daily from Europe, Australia, the MidEast, South America and Japan.” Well, not every corner.
[The link is from the irc for webcred: webcred at irc.freenode.net. See Hoder‘s bloggage.]
On Friday, the pivotal moment for me was when Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia replied to Jill Abramson of the NY Times. Jill was reminding us how expensive it is to maintain overseas reporters, an expense bloggers can’t bear. There were a number of replies about how bloggers could reduce that expense, but Jimmy took a different tack. The Encyclopedia Britannica is a $350M operation, he said, but Wikipedia is kicking its butt without having a single employee.
Some of the media folks jumped on this, saying that the Jimmy is underestimating the value of their operations. Jimmy replied that of course the existing media couldn’t be replaced except by something that offers more value. Jimmy wasn’t crowing and he certainly wasn’t threatening. He was pointing to the success of the Wikipedia as a cautionary tale.
I don’t blame the media folks who reacted negatively. First, it’s a human reaction. But more important, I think it’s a sign of the cognitive gap between us; we’ve made progress in understanding one another, but we’re now at the point where the misunderstandings are so deep that they’re easier to ignore than to confront.
So, here’s the cognitive gap that I see: The media folks (generalizing) still think that the important effect that blogging is having on them — and they do believe it’s having an effect — comes from bloggers who are sorta kinda journalists. But that’s a tiny percentage of the blogosphere. The truly disruptive effect of bloggers comes from the rest of the blogosphere that doesn’t think of itself as journalistic at all. We’re not the farm team for Big Media. We’re a different ballpark entirely.
In fact, we’re not a ballpark at all, of course. The other big gap between us is easy to state but hard to explain: The media is owned. The blogosphere isn’t. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It’s ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.
Something like that. [Technorati tags: bjc blogs]
January 21, 2005
Jeff Jarvis leads a spirited discussion.
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