Capitalistic journalism

As an entry in this month's Carnival of Journalism, participants are supposed to offer thoughts in reaction to an essay by Michael Rosenblum about whether journalists can be capitalists. (The specific wording from his piece is “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist? If so, how? Or why not?")

The short answer -- and this is not meant to be flippant -- is they already are. While some non-profit news models are emerging, the vast bulk of U.S. journalism is done by capitalistic enterprises. History records for us the names of people who were effective capitalists and also journalists: Hearst. Pulitzer. Gannett. McCormick. The Chandlers. The Knights. The Ochs-Sulzberger family.

At the heart of Rosenblum's assertions is the assumption that "there is an instinctive aversion to the idea of making money amongst most journalists." He unfolds the argument from that point with a withering attack on some supposed financial sensibilities of journalists, and the negative result that he believes this has on the field.

I don't mean to turn this into an attack on his work, but the essay seems to be conflating the idea of "capitalist" to "person who earns a sufficient level of income" and from there sets up a false divide. In a formal sense, the capitalist is the owner of the means of production; certainly the various press barons mentioned earlier were that. They were also journalists in that as publishers they helped establish -- or flat-out dictated -- the editorial direction for their newspapers. And in filling the dual role they made LOTS of money.

Some journalists still make a lot of money; in a recent column Bill O'Reilly bragged about being a "1 percenter" and network news anchors' contracts come with seven-figure annual salaries. But the reason most journalists don't reach that stratum is not, as Rosenblum contends, because they fear making money or think it would taint them. It's because they are the labor in the capitalist-labor equation, and the returns to labor as wages tend to be lower than the return to capital. What's fair and equitable for each goes back at least to Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and is largely beside the point for this discussion.

That's because the question "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?" sets out a false dichotomy. There is no natural, philosophical or structural reason the two roles have to conflict. Liebling's adage about the power of the press belonging to those who own one is demonstrably false these days. The low barriers of entry to online publication, in fact, make it ever easier for the journalist as a humble scribe to control (if not own) the means of production, and in that sense be both the capital and the labor in the equation. That's largely what the CUNY program that Rosenblum mentions means to address.

The real question is to what degree the work of journalists can be scaled up to a point that offers substantial earning potential, because scale is the source of big paydays. An author who sells hundreds of thousands or millions of books becomes a wealthy person indeed. But the writers who we think of as journalists tend not to produce at that scale.

Nonetheless, we are in an era where it is possible to distribute high quality content to a vast audience very inexpensively, though the very cheapness of the distribution platform and ubiquity of the content make monetizing it more difficult. We are also in the era of what Chris Anderson has dubbed the Long Tail, meaning finding and profiting from niche audiences is more feasible than ever before.

These factors combine to mean that journalists -- those who report and write the stories -- have more and better opportunities to work independently outside of institutions and make a living at it. Institutional journalism, with the journalists as employees of the enterprises rather than owners of them, will continue. Fewer jobs are found in this milieu now than a generation ago, but that doesn't mean they all are gone. And those working as independent journalists will take up a greater proportional share of the field.

Can we call them capitalists? As long as they manage to be fairly compensated for their work, does it really matter?

The new "walled gardens"

In the early days of life online, the way people got there was through services that were closed to all but registered (and paying) users who were able to interact only with each other. Among these early services were Compuserve, Prodigy and the one that eventually became most ubiquitous, America Online (AOL).

These were popularly known as "walled gardens," a metaphor for their being nice places to visit but with limited territory to explore. Beyond the walls lay the Internet, a vaster but far less organized region of cyberspace.

An interesting article by Justin Peters that I read just today (yes, still catching up on a two-month-old issue of CJR, even though the newer one came in the mail yesterday) says that today's mega-social-media sites -- Facebook, notably -- are trying to become like those original walled-off places.

Peters, however, has a different metaphor that struck me as particularly apt. Facebook, he wrote,

"offered people the cruise-ship version of the Internet—a slick, brightly colored destination for social activities and bonhomie, safely apart from the unfamiliar surrounding waters, a service-oriented environment where you can lean back and enjoy the attentions of your very own information valet. You could leave the ship, but there’s no need to—friends, information, activities, they’re all already there, and if they’re not they’ll be there soon.

"A few caveats apply. You can’t steer the ship. You can’t see how it works. You can’t suggest destinations or routes, and you’re not likely to cruise beyond your comfort zone. You can’t easily meet people who aren’t already like you. If something goes wrong, you’re not allowed to fix it; if you’re displeased with the service, nobody will listen to your complaint."

The problem with this, Peters notes, is that these destination sites seek for people to come to them, and stay with them almost exclusively, as the central feature of their online lives. They endeavor to keep the rest of the Internet -- the part where they can't make any money by collecting user data to be monetized -- outside the realm of user experience.

It's worth a read.

New media provide path to legacy reporting

This morning I woke to the news that the iconic company Eastman Kodak, which is based in my hometown of Rochester N.Y., was entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy re-organization. I found this news, as I'm finding progressively more of my news, through Twitter.

But more important than where I learned it through is where I learned it from. The first tweet I saw shortly after 6 a.m. was actually a link to a follow-up story to the main news announcement, and came from the local daily, the Gannett-owned Democrat and Chronicle. (Side note: if the paper had been delivered on time, I probably would have learned the news from it in hard copy; I was reading Twitter news on my iPad because of the late delivery. Inability to get my paper on time is an ongoing problem, but I digress.)

Working my way back through the Twitter stream were more posts from legacy organizations linking to coverage on their websites. The local PBS affiliate. A local AM radio news station. The New York Times. The first of them to appear actually came from The Wall Street Journal, conveniently re-tweeted about 1 a.m. EST by a former student who now works for NBC News. Intermixed among these reports were tweets from individual local journalists whom I follow, including an on-Twitter conversation that took place about 3 a.m. between a local news producer and the executive editor of the D&C about getting copies of the paper delivered to the TV newsroom.

It was an interesting into-practice exercise in something I'd been thinking about just 12 hours earlier, when I finally got around to reading an article from the November/December issue of Columbia Journalism Review. The essay by Dean Starkman critiques the popular advocacy of journalism's evolution into a non-institutional, loosely networked form and says that news institutions still have value and are worth preserving. Starkman's essay -- which is subtitled "The limited vision of the news gurus" -- is basically a long take-down of what he calls the "Future of News consensus" (FON for short) and its advocates, notably Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. (He's especially critical of Jarvis.)

I actually have been following the work of all four of Starkman's targets for some time. In the past few years I have been to events where I have seen all of them speak, and even was on a panel with Rosen a few years back. And I like a lot of what they say, and use some of their writing and ideas in some of my teaching about the evolution of journalism. I especially like to tell students about Shirky's notion that "everything might" provide the journalism we need -- i.e., that 20 new and innovative ways of creating the news that each provide 5 percent of what the current system does might actually be more valuable than One Big Thing to replace the broken print newspaper model.

I also think Starkman is being a little hyperbolic, and polemical, in the way he presents their views, which he repeatedly summarizes as FON.

But I also think Starkman is essentially on point when he says it's wrong to be dismissive of the value of institutional news organizations and their ability ability to provide valuable public-interest reporting, and when he says that it is naive to think that all of the information we need as a society will organically bubble up from a network in which anyone and everyone can supply information to the whole world. Or that such a news system will have the cohesion and understandability to make it useful to citizens . "Gatekeeping" has become almost a dirty word in the world of networked news prognosticators. But to me, it is just another word for distillation of a chaotic mass of information into a meaningful form that is valuable to the readers.

A couple of years ago, a friend from another institution wrote a blog posting predicting that soon he would get all the news he needs from Twitter. I kind of rolled my eyes at that one.

Now I do find myself getting a lot of news through Twitter. But not, as noted at the top, from Twitter. Even when the tweet is by a friend, or even by a stranger whom I've chosen to follow, there often is a legacy source behind that shortlink that's where the news is really from.

In that, Starkman's self-described neo-institutional model addresses something that matters. He closes his essay with the thought that "rebuilding or shoring up institutions is going to take some new, new thinking, but it can be done." He's right.

Old school way to teach new media

The first lesson in a brand new multimedia presentation course our department is offering was a success, using a very old school form of media. Soon, we'll be getting into blogging, video, social media and all of the other tools and techniques endemic to a course such as this. But for the first exercise on Day One, the students used what was probably the first medium they ever used in a classroom back in pre-school or kindergarten: wax crayons.

I can't claim the lesson was wholly original, as I got the idea from a syllabus from another teacher's multimedia writing course and modified it somewhat. But it was an interesting -- not to mention playful -- way to get some points across.

The lesson started with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, and his notion that "the medium is the message" (along with his famous cameo with Woody Allen from Annie Hall). The students then wrote answers -- in crayon, on plain paper -- to a question about multimedia presentation.

After that, they were asked to reflect on the impact of the medium on the message: how writing in crayon colored (pun intended) what they produced. And that's when it got interesting.

Several students noted -- correctly, of course -- that a message written in crayon would not be perceived as serious. Others mentioned the practical, logistical limitations of the medium: that they wrote slower, and larger, and therefore used fewer words. One said something I hadn't anticipated -- that the inability to erase affected the final output. Another really good point, especially in the context of being used to writing with word processors that allow immediate deletion of any errors.

Nearly all of them wrote in multiple colors, even though no instruction was given to do so. I pointed out that it would be almost as easy to create a word-processed document in multiple colors with the font-color button -- but people seldom do. This became just another way to illustrate that the medium of crayons affected the presentation of the message.

Overall, a successful first class, and hopefully a good omen for the rest of the course.

Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, originally posted at http://pedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/505

What I Learned at the Journalism Interactive Conference

Ways in which technology offers myriad opportunities to reinvent journalism dominated the conversation at the recently concluded Journalism Interactive conference, held at the University of Maryland on Friday and Saturday.

The discussion about new technological tools in social media, search, presentation (e.g. data visualization software), and other innovations went beyond the all-to-typical “gee-whiz” hype about these tools I’ve seen in many past conferences to really emphasize how to teach students to use such technologies effectively to create better journalism. The usual earnest intonations from assorted speakers about how “teaching the fundamentals is still important” were heard, of course – but they seemed less out of place than I have sometimes thought in the past.

In fact, at many conference sessions I’ve attended, statements about the importance of fundamentals seemed to be almost lip service when juxtaposed with implications that unless students are learning every new technology that comes along and using every gadget that comes out then they can’t be effective journalists in the 21st century. This conference reflected a better balance of the ideas: new tools allow stories to be told in new ways, yes, but the storytelling matters even more than the platform or device with which it is told. And unless the information is accurate, verified, contextual and of interest to the reader, all the technological whiz-bang in the world is meaningless. Good writing still underlies effective media presentation.

That said, it was impossible to escape the message that students must be far more savvy about two things: the inner workings of the technology that is transforming journalism, and an understanding of business. The conference had many in-depth discussions of both topics.

With regard to technological skills, several industry professionals said they have had internships and even full-time jobs available for which they could find no qualified candidates because the jobs required an understanding of scripting languages, website development tools, and the like. Knowing about analytics for audience metrics, and how to use tools such as metadata to make information stand out to audiences, is a critical skill, for example.

The journalists themselves don’t have to be highly skilled programmers, these professionals said. But if they are going to work in the growing field of multimedia presentation they need to know more than just how to use applications for word processing, image editing and social media. They need to do some of the coding for the interactive web and mobile presentations themselves and also need to be able to speak capably with those high-level programmers who make the presentations come to life. “We live in a digital world and programming is the language of that world,” Associated Press director of interactive media Shazna Nessa said in one session.

As for business skills, the idea of entrepreneurship was raised repeatedly – from students developing their own businesses to being “intrapreneurs” who help the organizations they join become more innovative and adaptable to the changing world around them. More generally, students entering the commercial world need more business acumen and an understanding of topic such as accounting and finance that comprise the vernacular of business, several presenters said.

Conference presenters from an assortment of backgrounds – working professionals, consultant and academics themselves – all said there was a need for more interdisciplinary work. Journalism and communication programs should be collaborating, especially, with business schools and computer science departments on their campuses.

A couple of other random thoughts:

• Data visualization, or visual representation of large amounts of numerical and textual data, is going to be a much more significant aspect of information presentation (journalistically and otherwise) in the near future. A simple example of this are “word clouds” created by the popular Wordle site; more sophisticated examples can be found at the Associated Press’s experimental Overview project.
  
  
• Developing content with mobile devices in mind also is becoming more important at an increasingly rapid pace. Predictions are that smartphones and tablet computers likely will be the main way most people access online content in just a few years.
  
  
• Conference organizers deserve major props for a really thought-provoking event that featured many terrific presenters with highly valuable insights – most of whom were also entertaining and engaging. A real standout in this regard was the Innovative Storytelling panel featuring Shazna Nessa of AP, Mark Luckie of the Washington Post and Richard "Koci" Hernandez of University of California - Berkeley. Panels and presenters this good aren't all that common at conferences such as this, and overall it made for a fantastic experience.

Random thoughts from social media conference

Spent a long but fruitful, and enjoyable, day at the second Social Media and Communication symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology, one full of catching up with old friends/colleagues and gathering some interesting take-aways on the state of communication and journalism.

The featured speaker was NYU professor Clay Shirky, author of the books Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. His central message was how the interactive, collaborative tools afforded by the Internet today are fostering social change by enabling relevant communities to self-organize and apply collective intelligence to social problems. Such collaborations make use of what he called cognitive surplus -- time people have to work together productively in virtual arrangements -- in the book of the same name.

Two of his examples were related to collaborative problem-solving of a couple of very high-end, "out there" mathematical questions via the route of mathematicians sharing ideas about potential solutions via blog posts and comments. In one case, the series of posts and comments was reconfigured into a paper sent to an academic journal and accepted on the basis of its ideas. But the journal editors ran into a stumbling block with it because whomever submitted it didn't identify an author. Well, there was no one author (or even two or three), which presented a problem from the academic editor's frame of reference.

Shirky extended the example to say that it illustrates how print publishing, which for most of its history has facilitated and sped up the sharing of ideas, is now in many cases an impediment to it ... because of the cultural mindset embedded in print and its publishers.

One of the most interesting things he said (in my view at least) was that tools don't get socially interesting until they are technically boring, by which he seemed to mean when they became commonplace and mundane. This is the point he says we are at now with Internet collaborative tools but one we reached only recently. But only because we have reached that point can we use the tools for socially interesting results such as the math problem examples he gave. The most valuable outcomes of using the tools are the ones no one can anticipate or expect, he said a couple of different times.

Another interesting panel featured several journalists talking about what they are looking for in terms of relevant skills for working in modern newsrooms. Included were senior editors from Messenger-Post Newspapers, City Newspaper, The Minority Report (which serves the Rochester area African-American community), the Democrat and Chronicle and WXXI television. A special guest panelist was Tom Callinan, a former top editor of the D&C and other Gannett papers who recently retired from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Callinan opened the panel by telling the audience, largely students, that a mindset oriented toward change was one of the most valuable assets they could bring to the job. But what was interesting was how quickly the conversation evolved into discussion of core journalistic values still being critical, including accuracy, inquisitiveness, solid ethics, strong writing skills, an understanding of news (as apart from opinion and infotainment), and passion for the work.

The importance of good writing -- meaning writing that is free of clutter, bias and errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation -- repeatedly came up. Yes, it's important to be able to work across platforms and tell stories in different ways that take advantage of the characteristics of modern multimedia tools, including social media. But what gives the work meaning and impact is adhering to all of the traditional characteristics of good solid journalism.

Other featured panelists at the event -- who offered opening and closing keynotes, respectively -- were Pam Moore of Zoom Factor and Maggie Fox of Social Media Group. Both of them focused on the impacts of social media on marketing, business and advertising.

But truly the best part of the day was the reunions with a number of old friends, mostly former work colleagues from the Democrat and Chronicle, some of whom are still working there and others (like Tom C.) who have moved along to other positions. Some of us managed to gather for a reunion photo. Networking is usually the best part of nearly any conference I attend, and this was no different.

Photo caption (L to R): Cynthia Benjamin, Jack Rosenberry, Patrick Flanigan, Bob Finnerty, Tom Callinan, Sebby Wilson Jacobson.

Earthquake news traveled virally

So, we had an earthquake today. I didn't feel it. I think I was out driving around; it happened at 1:51 p.m. EDT and I was driving home around then. I'm assuming with the mildness of the quake's impact in Upstate New York, being in a moving car would obliterate any chance of feeling it.

My first inkling that an earthquake had occurred was when my wife said something about a friend texting her (and a bunch of other people in a texting group) asking whether any of them had felt it happen. That was about an hour after the quake hit.

My next instinct was not to turn on the TV, as I might have in the past, but to jump on the computer to see what people were saying about it on Facebook and Twitter. The first such entry I saw was from a former student who works in Washington, DC -- not far from the epicenter -- who had FB and Twitter entries with references to the HuffPo website's coverage of the event (which he didn't much like). Another friend who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, still relatively close to the quake's location, had a Facebook post about it. Several Rochester area friends mentioned feeling things shake as well.

Another friend from eastern Pennsylvania, who now teaches at a college there but is originally from California, had at least a couple of dozen Twitter observations about the differences between West Coast quakes he had experienced and this one. He also provided my absolute favorite social media news tidbit with the observation "I was able to pinpoint the epicenter pretty quickly based on descriptions and known locations of tweeters. Took me about a minute."

Now, that's some social media based reporting.

It wasn't until about 4 hours later that I turned to legacy media for news about the quake, and even then I didn't turn on the TV or navigate to a news website. Rather, I looked at the AP news app on my iPad, which had a nice summary story as typical of a wire service. I looked at USA Today's coverage through its iPad news app also. Thus I augmented the first-person reports I had read with the professional coverage that had the "official word" on magnitude of the quake, along with details from a wide range of areas affected by it (from South Carolina to New England to Ohio).

I suppose I'll read about it in tomorrow's print edition of the local paper, too, but that will most likely be a version of the AP story I already have read, augmented by comments from local people whom I don't know. Hearing from people whom I do know is more worthwhile to me, and social media have allowed me to do that already.

Put another way, Twitter and Facebook told me most of what I needed to know, from trusted sources who experienced the event. (To paraphrase Jay Rosen's framing of journalistic authority: they were there, I wasn't, I let them tell me about it.) The AP story was a nice follow-up and I appreciated having the immediate access to it that the mobile app gave me.

Most significantly, both the viral distribution of individual experiences and the professional summary have a role to play in coverage of events such as this. Today's experience was a nice microcosm of that.