Isabel Walcott’s new blog runs the second great dog-and-Internet cartoon from The New Yorker… [Tags: IsabelWalcott NewYorker]

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When I was in London a couple of days ago, I went to a hole-in-the-wall place — a counter upstairs, some tables in the basement — for breakfast. The menu outside identified an “omelette breakfast”: omelette, bake beans, grilled tomatoes. Here’s roughly my conversation with the man behind the counter:

Me: Omelette breakfast, please.

Man: Wha’?

Me: An omelette.

Man: Marmelade toast?

Me: (Thinking he was asking if I want marmelade toast with it) Yes, please.

Man: Right.

Me: That’s meatless, isn’t it?

Man: Marmelade toast?

Me: No, the omelette.

Man: Marmelade?

Me: Om-e-lette. The omelette breakfast. Omelette, beans, tomato…

Man: Oh, omelette.

My omelette breakfast came with a side of marmelade toast. Delicious.

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Jeff Jarvis has taken some heat for writing:

Too much of journalism is turning this way today: If we nitpick the facts and follow some rules some committee wrote up, we’ll be safe; we’re doing our jobs. No, sir, our job is to get more than the facts. Anybody can get facts. Facts are the commodity. The truth is harder to find. Justice is harder to fight for. Lessons are what we’re after.

I think Jeff is right, although this is embedded in a particular case where the facts happen to be in debate, and I (very likely) went wrong. I want here to skip the particularities of the case not just because I was very likely wrong (although that doesn’t hurt) but because I think the more general point is generally right, in two ways.

First, I think most of us agree that facts by themselves aren’t enough. Unless we’re looking things up in an almanac, we want facts assembled into stories. Now more than ever. I don’t know about you, but more and more, I read newspapers through weblogs. I find out about stories by reading someone’s recommendation or critique of them. And I think that’s a good way to read. Social reading is the new sitting alone in a bathtub.

Second, Jeff was speaking informally, I’m sure, when he said that “anyone” can get the facts. Obviously, some particular facts are hard to dig up. Some are a pain in the tuchus to unearth but you know exactly how to get them (digging up birth records), and some require months of foot-numbing research and Yoda-like intuition (“All the President’s Men”). Some are mired in Louisiana muck, emotion, and political ambition, like the facts in the Russert case that Jeff and I were originally commenting on. So to say facts are commodities (as I have said before) is not to say that they are all equally easy to come by. But once they’ve been disclosed, they become commodities in the sense that they are low-margin entities and I don’t much care where I get them. If I want to know who Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court or who won the Sox game, there are a gazillion places I can find out. And tomorrow there will be a gazillion + 100.

This matters insofar as newspapers still consider their value to be the reporting of facts. I think some papers are being forced further into this belief because of the “onslaught” of bloggers. That seemed to me to be the position of John Lloyd of the Financial Times yesterday at the Accountability conference. He defended the news media’s traditional turf by talking about objectivity vs. opinions. I took him to be saying that opinions are easy but facts are hard, and newspapers do the hard and skilled work of fact-finding. Yes, they do. But having done that, the facts then become commodities. Our shared concern is who is going to do this if newspapers can no longer afford to pay reporters. (As far as opinions being easy goes: Yes, but interesting opinions are not commodities.)

Maybe enough citizen journalists will become skilled reporters that we don’t need professional newspaper reporters. But we shouldn’t let the promise of citizen journalism distract us from the evident fact that another key value of the news media has already devolved to the citizenry: We’re already providing the editorial judgment on which the media so pride themselves. I no longer look at the front page of the NY Times to tell me what’s important. I look at it to see what people like the editors of the NY Times think is important. I’m finding the news that matters through the Internet recommendation engine: Blogs, emails, mailing lists, my aggregator, websites that aggregate and comment on news, etc. With the growth of social filtering and whatever some genius in a garage is inventing, the Internet is only going to get better at this. While we wonder if and how citizens will replace reporters, citizens are rapidly replacing editors.

(Note: If you want to argue that some facts are not commodities even after they’re disclosed, I’ll accept that because you probably have some great examples in mind. But such non-commoditized facts are, I believe, too rare to build a newspaper business model on.) [Tags: media journalism facts accountability JeffJarvis JohnLloyd FinancialTimes]

Thomas Crampton of The International Herald Tribune was also on the Accountability panel and has blogged how blogs are different from journalism. You’ll be happy to know that neither the word “irresponsible” nor “pajamas” shows up in his list :)

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Tom PlasticBag Coates blogged about how he found his father who’d gone missing for 28 years. Excellent. One of the commenters wrote:

“Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry”

Tom comments:

Sounds fine, doesn’t it? Except that ‘Barry Scott’ isn’t a real person – he’s a marketing vehicle for a brand called Cillit Bang and his weblog is a barely disguised viral marketing platform for the product.

As Tom said last night at dinner, it’s like getting a warm personal message from Ronald McDonald.

Tom has the full story here… [Tags: marketing TomCoates]

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Jane Nelson of the Kennedy School of Gov’t at Harvard leads a plenary panel on “Collaborative Governance: The new Accountability?” Panelists: Achim Steiner, dir. general of the World Conservation Union; Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of Civicus (World Alliance for Citizen Participation, an international allliance of civil society organizations).

Steiner: Why are we trying to reinvent accountability since we just invented it? There are 500 transnational ecological treaties. He cites Simon Zadek, founder of Accountability: If accountability concerns the civilizing of power, then those who hold power will seek to crush it. Citizens feel as powerless as always. Accountabilities are created without consequence: No one has been held accountable by a court for invading a country on false pretenses. The Millennial Development goals will come and go without anyone being held responsible. The systems we have at our disposal are unable to cope with the challenges. We can’t rely on the ambassadors in NY. What do we do? The forces that shape the world are less and less controlled by governments. We need to empower citizens to hold powers accountable.

Naidoo: Why is collaborative governance importance now? Because the world is in crisis. Formal leadership isn’t stepping up to it. The current trends of structural inequality are a catastrophe. We need to beware of the word “partner” because the term is too often used where there is no equality of partnership. We need to acknowledge the power differentials. And, he says, NGOs need to adopt a code of ethical conduct. (He pays ironic tribute to the conservative American Enterprise Institute for fighting NGOs, including on their website NGOwatch.org.) “Perform or Perish” already holds NGOs to accountability, although that’s not nearly enough, he says. The accountability debate ought to be connected to the idea of democracy. Finally, he urges that the developing world be brought into this discussion.

Nelson asks if there are any positive examples. Steiner replies that the diamond mining initiatives have been fairly successful. The Global Reporting Initiative. The Forest Stewardship Council has created a certification program so end-users can buy wood from environmentally sustainable forests; it is catching on.

Naidoo says we have to accept and work with the existing framework, but we also need to challenge the macro institutions.

[Tags: accountability ngo]

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