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We the Media
We the Media (Hard Cover) Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People

By Dan Gillmor

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
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We may have noticed the new era of journalism more clearly after the events of September 11, but it wasn't invented on that awful day. It did not emerge fully formed or from a vacuum. What follows doesn't pretend to be a history of journalism. Rather, these are observations, including some personal experiences that help illustrate the evolution of what we so brazenly call "new media."
At the risk of seeming to slight the contributions from other nations, I will focus mostly on the American experience. America, born in vocal dissent, did something essential early on. The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment has many facets, including its protection of the right of protest and practice of religion, but freedom of speech is the most fundamental part of a free society. Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the choice of newspapers or government, he'd take the newspapers. Journalism was that important to society, he insisted, though as president, attacked by the press of his day, he came to loathe what he'd praised.
Personal journalism is also not a new invention. People have been stirring the pot since before the nation's founding; one of the most prominent in America's early history was Ben Franklin, whose Pennsylvania Gazette was civic-minded and occasionally controversial.
There were also the pamphleteers who, before the First Amendment was enshrined into law and guaranteed a free press, published their writings at great personal risk. Few Americans can appreciate this today, but journalists are still dying elsewhere in the world for what they write and broadcast.
One early pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, inspired many with his powerful writings about rebellion, liberty, and government in the late 18th century. He was not the first to take pen to paper in hopes of pointing out what he called common sense, nor in trying to persuade people of the common sense of his ideas. Even more important, perhaps, were the (at the time) anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers. Their work, analyzing the proposed Constitution and arguing the fundamental questions of how the new Republic might work, has reverberated through history. Without them, the Constitution might never have been approved by the states. The Federalist Papers were essentially a powerful conversation that helped make a nation.
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The Corporate Era
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But in the 20th century, the big business of journalism—the corporatization of journalism—was also emerging as a force in society. This inevitable transition had its positive and negative aspects.
I say "inevitable" for several reasons. First, industries consolidate. This is in the nature of capitalism. Second, successful family enterprises rarely stayed in the hands of their founders' families; inheritance taxes forced some sales and breakups, and bickering among siblings and cousins who inherited valuable properties led to others. Third, the rules of American capitalism have been tweaked in recent decades to favor the big over the small.
As noted in the , however, the creation of Big Media is something of an historical artifact. It stems from a time when A.J. Liebling's famous admonition, that freedom of the press was for those people who owned a press, reflected financial reality. The economics of newspaper publishing favored bigness, and local monopolies came about because, in most communities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of any size. [7]
Broadcasting has played a key role in the transition to consolidation. Radio, then television, lured readers and advertisers away from newspapers, [8] contributing to the consolidation of the newspaper industry. But the broadcasters were simultaneously turning into the biggest of Big Media. As they grew, they brought the power of broadcasting to bear on the news, to great effect. Edward R. Murrow's reports on CBS, most notably his coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil politics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism.
The news hegemony of the networks and big newspapers reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Journalists helped bring down a law-breaking president. An anchorman, Walter Cronkite, was considered the most trusted person in America. Yet this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded) mandate to perform a public service function in their communities. The networks were sold to companies such as General Electric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News divisions were required to be profit centers.
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From Outside In
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During this time of centralization and corporate ownership, the forces of change were gathering at the edges. Some forces were technological, such as the microprocessor that led straight to the personal computer, and a federally funded data-networking experiment called the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Some were political and/or judicial, such as Supreme Court decisions that forced AT&T to let third parties plug their own phones into Ma Bell's network, and another that made it legal for purchasers of home videotape machines to record TV broadcasts for subsequent viewing.
Personal choice, assisted by the power of personal technology, was in the wind.
I got my first personal computer in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, when I first became a journalist, I bought one of the earliest portable personal computers, an Osborne, and used it to write and electronically transmit news stories to publications such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, for which I was freelancing from Vermont. I was enthralled by this fabulous tool that allowed me, a lone reporter in what were considered the boondocks, to report the news in a timely and efficient manner.
The commercial online world was in its infancy in those days, and I couldn't resist experimenting with it. My initial epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985. I'd been using a word processor called XyWrite, the PC program of choice for serious writers in those days. It ran fast on the era's slow computers, and had an internal programming language, called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly capable. One day I found myself stymied by an XPL problem. I posted a short message on a word-processing forum on CompuServe, the era's most successful commercial online service. A day later, I logged on again and was greeted with solutions to my little problem from people in several U.S. cities and, incredibly, Australia. [9]
I was amazed. I'd tapped the network, asking for help. I'd been educated. This, I knew implicitly, was a big deal.
Of course, I didn't fully get it. I spent the 1986-87 academic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which in those days was at the heart of the Internet—then still a university, government, and research network of networks—without managing to notice the Internet. John Markoff of
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Ransom-Note Media
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Personal technology wasn't just about going online. It was about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expensive ways. For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of computer technology. [12] But it was desktop publishing where the potential for journalism became clearest.
A series of inventions in the mid-1980s brought the medium into its new era. Suddenly, with an Apple Macintosh and a laser printer, one could easily and cheaply create and lay out a publication. Big publishing didn't disappear—it adapted by using the technology to lower costs—but the entry level moved down to small groups and even individuals, a stunning liberation from the past.
There was one drawback of having so much power and flexibility in the hands of nonprofessionals. In the early days of desktop publishing, people tended to use too many different fonts on a page, a style that was likened, all too accurately, to ransom notes. But the typographical mishmash was a small price to pay for all those new voices.
Big Media was still getting bigger in this period, but it wasn't noticing the profound demographic changes that had been reshaping the nation for decades. Newsrooms, never mind coverage, scarcely reflected the diversity. Desktop publishing and its progeny created an opening for many new players to enter, not least of which was the ethnic press.
Big Media has tried to adapt. Newsrooms are becoming more diverse. Major media companies have launched or bought popular ethnic publications and broadcasters. But independent ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credibility: grassroots journalism ascendant. [13]
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Out Loud and Outrageous
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Meanwhile, talk radio was also becoming a force, though not an entirely new one by any means. Radio has featured talk programs throughout its history, and call-in shows date back as far as 1945. Opinionated hosts, mostly from the political right, such as Father Coughlin, fulminated about government, taxes, cultural breakdowns, and a variety of issues they and their listeners were convinced hadn't received sufficient attention from the mainstream media. These hosts were as much entertainers as commentators, and their shows drew listeners in droves.
But modern talk radio had another crucial feature: the participation of the audience. People—regular people—were invited to have their say on the radio. Before that, regular people had no immediate or certain outlet for their own stories and views short of letters to the editor in newspapers. Now they could be part of the program, adding the weight of their own beliefs to the host's.
The people making this news were in the audience. Howard Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phenomenon. Both mediums, he told me, reach out to and connect with "a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream media." Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column [14] for the Post in addition to his regular stories and column.
Talk radio wasn't, and isn't, just about political anger, even if politics and other issues of the day are the normal fodder. The genre has also become a broader sounding board. Doctors offer advice (including TV's fictional "Frasier Crane"), computer gurus advise non-geeks on what to buy, and lawyers listen to bizarre legal woes.
Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future of news. In the mid-1990s, not long after I moved to California, a mild but distinct earthquake rattled my house one day. I listened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-the-spot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices.
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The Web Era Emergent
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As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except perhaps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college campuses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial services such as CompuServe and America Online. But another series of breakthroughs was about to move us into a networked world.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology that became the World Wide Web. He wrote software to serve, or dish out, information from connected computers, and a "client" program that was, in effect, the first browser. He also sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowledge to publish documents as web pages that could be easily linked to other pages anywhere in the world. Why was this so vital? We could now move from one site and document to another with the click of a mouse or keyboard stroke. Berners-Lee had connected the global collection of documents the Net had already created, but he wanted to take the notion a step further: to write onto this web, not just read from it.
But there's something Berners-Lee purposely didn't do. He didn't patent his invention. Instead, he gave the world an open and extensible foundation on which new innovation could be built.
The next breakthrough was Mosaic, one of the early graphical web browsers to run on popular desktop operating systems. These browsers were a basis for the commercial Internet. The browser, and the relative ease of creating web pages, sparked some path-breaking experiments in what we now recognize as personal journalism. Let's note one of the best and earliest examples.
Justin Hall was a sophomore at Swarthmore College in 1993 when he heard about the Web. He coded some pages by hand in HTML. His "Justin's Links from the Underground" [15] may well have been the first serious weblog, long before specialized weblog software tools became available. The first visitor to Hall's site from outside the university came in 1994. He explained his motivations in an email:
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Writing the Web
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The scene was now set for the rise of a new kind of news. But some final pieces had yet to be put in place. One was technological: giving everyday people the tools they needed to join this emerging conversation. Another was cultural: the realization that putting the tools of creation into millions of hands could lead to an unprecedented community. Adam Smith, in a sense, was creating a collective.
The toolmakers did, and continue to do, their part. And with the neat irony that has a habit of appearing in this transformation, a programmer's annoyance with journalists had everything to do with one of the most important developments.
Dave Winer had written and sold an outlining tool called "More," a Macintosh application. [21] He was a committed and knowledgeable Mac developer, but in the early 1990s, he found himself more and more annoyed by a trade press that, in his view, was getting the story all wrong.
At the time, Microsoft Windows was becoming more popular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company. Troubled, yes. But when the computer journalists persisted in saying, in effect, "Apple is dead, and there's no Macintosh software development anymore," Winer was furious. He decided to go around the established media, and with the rise of the Internet, he had a medium.
He published an email newsletter called "DaveNet." It was biting, opinionated, and provocative, and it reached many influential people in the tech industry. They paid attention. Winer's critiques could be abrasive, but he had a long record of accomplishments and deep insight.
Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the Mac the ink it deserved. For its part, Apple made strategic mistakes that alienated software developers and helped marginalize the platform. And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft's roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright lawbreaking, became dominant.
But Winer realized he was onto something. He'd found journalism wanting, and he bypassed it. Then he expanded on what he'd started. Like Justin Hall, he created a newsy page in what later became known as the blog format—most recent material at the top.
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Open Sourcing the News
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The development of the personal computer may have empowered the individual, but there were distinct limits. One was software code itself. Proprietary programs were like black boxes. We could see what they did, but not how they worked.
This situation struck Richard Stallman, among others, as wrong. In January 1984, Stallman quit his post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. He formally launched a project to create a free operating system and desktop software based on the Unix operating system that ran on many university computers. [23] Stallman's ideas ultimately became the foundation for Linux, the open source operating system that brought fame to Linus Torvalds. [24]
The goal of Stallman's work, then and now, was to ensure that users of computers always had free software programs for the most basic and important tasks. Free, in this case, was more about freedom than about cost. Stallman and others in this movement thought that the programming instructions—the source code—of free software had to be open for inspection and modification by anyone. In the late 1990s, as Linux was gaining traction in the marketplace, and as many free software applications and operating systems were available, the movement got another name: open source, describing the open availability of the source code. [25]
Open source software projects are a digital version of a small-town tradition: the barn raising. But open source projects can involve people from around the world. Most will never meet except online. Guided by project leaders—Torvalds in the case of Linux—they contribute bits and pieces of what becomes a whole package. Open source software, in many cases, is as good as or better than the commercial variety. And these programs are at the heart of the Internet's most basic functions: open source software powers most of the web server computers that dish out information to our browsers.
When the code is open for inspection, it's safer to use because people can find and fill the security holes. Bugs, the annoying flaws that cause program crashes and other unexpected behavior, can be found and fixed more easily, too. [26]
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Terror Turns Journalism's Corner
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By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emergent, grassroots journalism were in place. The Web was already a place where established news organizations and newcomers were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were making it easier for anyone to participate. We needed a catalyst to show how far we'd come. On September 11, 2001, we got that catalyst in a terrible way.
I was in South Africa. The news came to me and four other people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone. Our driver's wife called from Johannesburg, where she was watching TV, to say a plane had apparently hit the World Trade Center. She called again to say another plane had hit the other tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon. We arrived at the Port Elizabeth airport in time to watch, live and in horror, as the towers disintegrated.
The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to Lusaka, Zambia. The BBC and CNN's international edition were on the hotel television. The local newspapers ran considerable news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment.
What I could not do in those initial days was read my newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, or the The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, or any of the other papers I normally scanned each morning at home. I could barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was overwhelming as people everywhere went online for more information, or simply to talk with each other.
I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox overflowed with useful news from Dave Farber, one of the new breed of editors.
Then a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called "Interesting People" [30] that he'd run since the mid-1980s. Most of what he sent out had first been sent to him by correspondents he knew from around the nation and the world. If they saw something they thought he'd find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own commentary. In the wake of the attacks, his correspondents' perspectives on issues ranging from national-security issues to critiques of religion became essential reading for their breadth and depth. Farber told me later he'd gone into overdrive, because this event obliged him to do so.
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Endnotes
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  1. Cambridge University Press, 2003
  2. Bimber also observes that the Founders based their new nation essentially on information. An informed electorate was necessary to self-government. The Federalist papers, newspapers, and other writings were the beginnings of the world's first information-based society.
  3. Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (1998) observes the remarkable similarities in rise of 19th-century telegraph networks and the modern Internet, including stock market bubbles, absurd predictions, and, in the end, the rise of an enormously powerful tool for communications (http://www.tomstandage.com).
  4. Nation magazine, July 21, 2003.
  5. In the early 1970s, big newspaper companies persuaded Congress to pass a "newspaper preservation" law that limited antitrust enforcement. The law let competing newspapers merge their advertising, printing, and circulation staffs while maintaining separate newsrooms and publishing two papers. My company, Knight Ridder, enjoys the fruits of several such Joint Operating Agreements, as they're called. If there was ever a justification for this law, which is doubtful, the Net makes it less justifiable now. The nation would be better off if the law was repealed.
  6. Direct mail has also pulled advertisers away in large numbers, notes Stephen B. Waters, publisher of the Rome Sentinel in upstate New York. "In 1979 they rejiggered the rates to begin to suck up advertising to keep postponing until the next elections a day of reckoning because of a bloated, expensive labor force," he wrote me. "The advertising dollar has gone to Direct Marketing, not radio and television. It still is the case."
  7. I rely on somewhat fading memory, not archives, for the details of my XyWrite programming-assistance story.
  8. Usenet newsgroups live on today in many forms, including "Google Groups" (http://groups.google.com).
  9. Left-wing groups were also using these systems to organize, but from my observations at the time, not as effectively.
  10. The MIDI standard (http://www.midi.org) revolutionized music, and continues to do so.
  11. For example, see the Pacific News Service (
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Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web
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Technology that Makes We the Media Possible
I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software, had called to say there was something I had to see.
He showed me a web page. I don't remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page"—and, for me, nothing was ever the same again.
I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, "Save this page" and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest weblog, or blog, applications.
Winer's company was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site.
Writing on the Net wasn't entirely new, of course. People had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists, forums, and newsgroups. Wikis—sites on which anyone could edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn't gained much traction outside a small user community, in part because of the techie orientation to the software.
What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple.
Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press. Just about anyone could make the news.
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Mail Lists and Forums
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Before weblogs we had mail lists, and they have not become less important. As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mail list is a news source of enormous value to his readers. It is far from alone.
Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in the rise of SARS. I wrote several columns about it in early 2003. Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry Niman, who had created several mail lists. One called SARS Science, he said, "targets medical and scientific information on the epidemic. Members include molecular biologists and scientists from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses." Many of the reporters covering the outbreak also subscribed to this list. A second mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease. I joined both.
This sequence of writing about something and then hearing from an expert in the field has been a common one for Net-savvy journalists lately. But in a sense, journalists were late finding out what nonjournalists had been doing for years.
At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering just about every topic one can imagine. Mail lists differ from blogs and standard web sites in at least three respects. First, they serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community can make the list private. Second, they tend to be narrowly targeted, such as the SARS list. Third, they are "pushed" to subscribers' email inboxes. Some are moderated; most are not. The key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a combination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly interested lay people. This can be a potent combination.
In 2000, Yahoo! bought eGroups, a primary vendor of mail lists, renamed it Yahoo! Groups, [39] and now hosts thousands of lists. It's trivially simple to create a mail list.
Most mail lists have a small readership, such as the "Blogrollers" group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each other about new postings they think might be especially noteworthy for their peers. Some mail lists have enormous readerships, such as Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.
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Weblogs
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Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and all.
Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in the communications chain. To date, they're the closest we've come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web. They were the first tool that made it easy—or at least easier—to publish on the Web.
So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it's an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the top of the page. As Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs, the blogging software company acquired by Google in February 2003, has noted, weblogs are "post-centric"—the posting is the key unit—rather than "page-centric," as with more traditional web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original post, thereby allowing audience discussions.
Blogs run the gamut of topics and styles. One blog may be a running commentary on current events in a specific arena. Another may be a series of personal musings, or political reporting and commentary, such as Joshua Micah Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.com. A blog may be pointers to other people's work or products, such as Gizmodo, a site devoted to the latest and greatest gadgets, [40] or a constantly updated "what's new" by a domain expert, such as Glenn Fleishman's excellent Wi-Fi Networking News and commentary page. [41] While some blogging software permits readers to post their own comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the comment feature. At the other extreme, the Slashdot weblog, featuring news about technology and tech policy, is essentially written by its audience.
What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is voice—they are clearly written by human beings with genuine human passion.
Blogs are, as New York University's Jay Rosen puts it, an "extremely democratic form of journalism." On his PressThink blog, [42] a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why. Here are the first three:
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Wiki
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Can absolute editorial freedom result in anything but chaos? Yes, when it's in a Wiki.
Ward Cunningham, who invented Wikis, defines them in many ways, calling them composition systems, discussion mediums, repositories, mail systems, and chat rooms. "It's a tool for collaboration," he writes. "In fact we don't really know what it is, but it's a fun way of communicating." [48]
"WhatIs.com" (an online information technology dictionary) defines them this way: "A wiki (sometimes spelled "Wiki") is a server program that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a Web site. With a wiki, any user can edit the site content, including other users' contributions, using a regular Web browser."
The crucial element is that any user can edit any page. The software keeps track of every change. Anyone can follow the changes in detail. As Cunningham so aptly puts it, all Wikis are works in progress.
The Wikipedia, a massive encyclopedia, is the biggest public Wiki, but far from the only one. There are Wikis covering travel, food, and a variety of other topics. You can find a Wiki category page on Cunningham's site. [49] One of the best examples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful is the WikiTravel site, [50] which brings together a variety of viewpoints from around the world.
Wikis are going private, too. They're increasingly used behind corporate firewalls as planning and collaboration tools. And entrepreneurs are even starting to form companies around the technology, extending it for wider uses.
Wikis are making inroads on campuses as well. My colecturer at the University of Hong Kong set up a Wiki for our students to use as a planning platform for the 2003 class project. The project looked at a controversial proposal to fill in more of the harbor for development. Students posted their outlines and story proposals on the Wiki and used the site to flesh out the ideas. Instructors could watch over their shoulders without interfering except to offer guidance. The Wiki was perfect for this task.
Their use in journalism, at least the traditional kind, is almost nonexistent. But as Wikis become easier to use, they will become a particularly well-suited tool to compile information from disparate sources, collected by people in different physical locations.
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SMS
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If weblogs are becoming the opinion pages and, sometimes, even the newspages of the Net, short message services (SMS) are becoming the headlines. For bulletins, there's nothing better.
Think of SMS as instant messaging without being tethered to a PC. [51] SMS isn't a product per se. It's a service offered by network providers that allows customers to send text messages over their cell phones. About the only things that differ from carrier to carrier are price and the kind of device a customer will use.
SMS has been a staple of the information diet just about everywhere where mobile phones have penetrated markets, except in the United States. That is surely changing. Forward-looking newspapers in the U.S., along with other kinds of information providers, including companies that have time-sensitive information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assortment of SMS services. The San Diego Union-Tribune's SignOnSanDiego.com, for example, offers SMS alerts on local news. And I've signed up with United Airlines and American Airlines, the carriers I use most frequently, to be notified if flights are delayed.
Journalists can use SMS in any number of ways; again, this is much more common outside the U.S. The first inkling among journalists of China's SARS epidemic came in an SMS from sources inside the medical profession there. Was this significantly different than simple phone calls in its fundamental nature? Not really. But in a place where being overheard can lead to big trouble, it's much safer—as long as one's messages aren't being intercepted—to simply send a quick SMS.
Over time, perhaps the most important value of SMS will be of the kind described by Howard Rheingold in his prescient book Smart Mobs: [52] a self-organizing information system in which individuals and small groups tell each other important news. Rheingold relates, among other examples, how citizens in the Philippines used SMS to organize and overthrow a corrupt government. [53] On a more prosaic level, young people in countries with advanced wireless communications have used SMS for social organization. We're just at the beginning of this technology's development. As networks and handsets improve, SMS will give way to video messaging, with yet to be understood implications.
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Mobile-Connected Cameras
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Pictures are part of journalism, and most organizations employ professional photographers. As cameras become just one more thing we all carry everyday, everyone's becoming a photographer. We haven't begun to think through the societal implications of this fact, but the implications for journalism are serious.
Digital cameras are a staple of amateur photographers, and well-financed professional journalists use high-end digital cameras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos quickly. Video is also going digital at a rapid pace. The size of high-quality digital cameras, still and video, is decreasing along with the cost. Connecting them to personal computers for image and video editing is simpler than ever, too. As broadband Internet access becomes more common, quick publishing becomes simple.
Now combine cameras with true mobility, and the ability to instantly send an image to someone else or to the Web. This is the world camera-equipped mobile phones are creating. The images from early models were low resolution and lacked professional quality, but even a bad picture can be newsworthy, and the quality of phone cameras is getting better at a rapid pace. Once again, it's vital to remember technology's rapid pace of innovation and improvement to understand just how soon it will be when most phones aren't just equipped with still cameras, but video cameras. Tomorrow's mobile phones will be able to send information and images to individuals and groups, and publish to web pages in close to real time.
Keep in mind that public photos and videos are not new. The beating of Rodney King captured on videotape is a precedent for what's coming. Citizens have been capturing videos of tornados and other natural disasters for years as well, and cable television caters to voyeurs with a variety of shows featuring citizen-captured police chases, embarrassing moments, and the like. News organizations have increasingly resorted to using hidden cameras—an ugly trend, in my view, because only in the most extreme circumstances, such as when someone's life is in danger, should reporters even consider such subterfuges.
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Internet "Broadcasting"
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At one time, Internet Broadcasting was seen as the next big thing, with individuals and groups spawning Internet radio and news stations with the same ease they create weblogs and Wikis. But the entertainment industry has all but killed the possibilities of Internet radio, at least the kind with music, by persuading copyright regulators in the U.S. to impose unaffordable royalties on Net radio.
News radio via the Net is another matter entirely, and there's a big opportunity for people to create their own shows featuring interviews, audio documentaries, and other formats in which royalty-free content is the goal. Christopher Lydon, a longtime professional journalist who has taken to blogging in a big way, posted a series of superb interviews on his "The Blogging of the President 2004" [55] site. [56] IT Conversations, a Net-only program, has been posting interviews in various audio formats along with transcripts. [57]
Web-based talk radio is another possibility, and it doesn't need to be expensive. Two staff members on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign created an Internet talk-radio program by patching together some low-cost equipment. They showed that anyone can do this, inexpensively and fairly easily. Look for others to put all the pieces together in a coherent package that anyone can use.
Internet video is a different matter. While the cost of producing video news programming is dropping all the time, delivering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs can't afford. This is where peer-to-peer networking may come into play.
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Peer-to-Peer
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Remember Napster, the music file-sharing web site? It started a revolution with its file-sharing model, also known as peer-to-peer (P2P). If one person had a particular song on his computer, his Napster software would (if he allowed it to) tell a central computer at Napster that the song was available. Then other people who wanted the same song would check the Napster database, find who had the music, and log directly onto the computer of the person who was offering the song.
This system, while having some legitimate (and therefore theoretically legal) uses, was also a haven for copyright infringement. The music industry sued, ultimately killing the company. What the industry could not stop, however, was the idea, and other technologists filled the gap with increasingly sophisticated file-sharing systems, some of which will be difficult to stop because they'll have no central points of control.
There are a number of reasons why P2P is important for tomorrow's journalism. One of the most prosaic is cost, because P2P solves a serious problem: the more successful your web site becomes, the more it costs you to keep it going. Internet service providers charge web site publishers in several ways, but one way is based on how much traffic your site receives and the bandwidth required to serve the text, images, audio, and video to viewers. Even a modestly successful video can create a huge bill for the site owner. This is a unique situation in media history because in the past, the more successful you were, the lower your marginal costs.
P2P solves this by spreading popular material around the network. With technologies such as BitTorrent, a free software product, every downloader's computer is also a content server. [58] So the more popular you are, the less it costs, not the other way around.
P2P is also valuable in a political sense. New P2P systems under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity that we've seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censorship more difficult.
As we'll discuss in Chapter 11, the entertainment media barons of today utterly loathe P2P, at least the kind they can't control, largely because it can be a platform for copyright infringement. I also believe they fear it because of its assistance in democratizing media. Either way, they want to put a stop to it. They must not be permitted to succeed, however, because in the name of preventing copyright infringement, they are taking away other rights—including our right to make what's known as "fair use" for quoting and personal backups—and they could ultimately dampen or even wreck the possibility of grassroots journalism talking hold.
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The RSS Revolution
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For people who want to "roll their own" news reports, nothing may be more important for them to understand than a little known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part, for its growing success.
Early in the development of blogging software, programmers baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndication capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the content they care about. It's spawning a content revolution that is only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could well become the next mainstream method of distributing, collecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation—and RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation.
Imagine your own "Presidential Briefing"—with only the topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting.
So don't think of RSS as just another technology abbreviation. "Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow's information—or at least some of it," said Chris Pirillo, founder of LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters. [59] RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should. Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to you on your terms."
RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every weblog software product. Create a blog, and you're creating RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its value, too, and they're creating RSS "feeds," as the files are called, of their own material.
If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I can't force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so important: the user is in control.
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Making Sense of It All
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If tomorrow's journalism is an infinitely complex conversation, keeping track of it will require an assortment of new tools going well beyond RSS that will allow us to search for and organize what we discover. A few have already arrived in what can only be called "Version 0.5"—what techies call beta form: promising and useful to a degree, but not quite ready for the average user.
One that shows the way is Feedster, [64] a web-based application that indexes RSS files. I've found it useful for keeping track of what some bloggers are saying about my own work. Feedster has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls "Feedpapers," which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based news and blog commentary.
Another is Technorati, [65] which mines information about the weblog world. It was designed by San Francisco technologist Dave Sifry to fill a personal need. "I had been running my own blog for about a year, and referrer logs [information about site visitors and the pages they viewed on the site] weren't enough," he said. "I wanted to know what people were talking about, and what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared about." So he wrote some code to crawl the blogs and find out.
The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have become a vital part of a larger ecosystem. But like mail lists, blogs, Wikis, SMS, and the other tools of our journalistic future, they are only tools. They must not be confused with journalism itself. Certain values must remain: fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness.
At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for tomorrow's news and information. They may enable "consumers" of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversations and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even truth, if they are willing to seek out sources from a variety of viewpoints. We'll look at this architectural potential in more detail in Chapter 8.
More intriguingly, we have to ponder a world where many kinds of devices connect relatively seamlessly, and where social and business networks can be formed in an ad hoc way. The spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will occur—much more so than today—without any help from mass media as we know it. The people who'll understand this best are probably just being born.
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Endnotes
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  1. The Guardian, one of the most prominent national newspapers in the United Kingdom, offers thoughtful, hard-hitting journalism from a slightly left-of-center perspective. In the weeks before the 2003 Iraq war, the site saw a big increase in visitors. This happened to most serious newspapers, but The Guardian's traffic boost came in large part from Americans. What were they looking for? No one is absolutely certain, but Simon Waldman, who runs The Guardian's online operations, told me he believed many of the American visitors were looking for something they couldn't find in the U.S. press: a different perspective from the relentlessly pro-war coverage they were seeing at home. I leaned in favor of the war, but I was appalled at the lack of nuance in American journalism during a time when about half the population opposed the war.
  2. Scribner, 2002
  3. Steven Johnson interview: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/22/johnson.html.
  4. David Isenberg's "Rise of the Stupid Network": http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html.
  5. Yahoo Groups: http://groups.yahoo.com.
  6. Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.com.
  7. Wi-Fi Networking: http://wifinetnews.com.
  8. Jay Rosen's PressThink: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/.
  9. Six Apart: http://www.sixapart.com.
  10. Radio UserLand: http://radio.userland.com.
  11. LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com.
  12. Blogger: http://www.blogger.com.
  13. 20six: http://www.20six.co.uk.
  14. Wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.
  15. Cunningham's Wiki categories: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory.
  16. WikiTravel: http://www.wikitravel.org.
  17. Instant messaging is also one way people spread news, mostly in the U.S., but SMS is much more global and destined, as devices become more mobile, to be the headline service of the Digital Age.
  18. Perseus, 2002
  19. Rheingold's Smart Mobs web site continues to follow this evolution: http://www.smartmobs.com.
  20. See The Washington Post's coverage of banned camera phones at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49274-2003Sep22.
  21. Blogging of the President: http://www.bopnews.com.
  22. Full disclosure: I've been a guest several times on the program.
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Chapter 3: The Gates Come Down
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A peculiar silence reigned in most major newspapers and TV networks the first few days after Trent Lott, celebrating fellow Republican Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday in late 2002, seemed to wax nostalgic for a racist past. Lott, then majority leader of the U.S. Senate, recalled Thurmond's presidential campaign in 1948, a race in which he called for the preservation of segregation. The nation would be better off if Thurmond had won, Lott said.
It was an outrageous assertion, but barely noticed at the outset. ABC News mentioned it. The Washington Post had a story but buried it. And that was about all we heard from the major media. But the silence didn't last, because Lott got a taste of tomorrow's media: the swarm of webloggers, emailers, and other online journalists who are changing some long-established rules.
The flow of outrage and information was complex. [66] But the bottom line was that webloggers and other online commentators, far more than mainstream journalists, kept the story of Lott's remarks alive despite the major media's early disinterest. Liberal bloggers, such as Joshua Marshall on Talking Points Memo, [67] were early to sound off, but several conservatives also chimed in. In some cases, bloggers were almost as outraged by Big Media's inattention as by the senator's statements and initially weasely expression of regret for his remarks.
A few days later, the story that didn't go away was running, full-bore, in the national media. Even President Bush was obliged to denounce Lott, a key congressional ally. In the end, no one was surprised when Lott, under enormous pressure, resigned as majority leader.
While bloggers could not have brought down Lott on their own had Big Media not taken up the story, the Lott debacle was, by all accounts, a watershed. Weblogs claimed "their first scalp," said card-carrying establishment conservative John Podhoretz in his New York Post column.
Call them newsmakers. Call them sources. Call them the subjects—and sometimes, in their view, the unwilling victims—of journalism. But however we describe them, we all must recognize that the rules for newsmakers, not just journalists, have changed, thanks to everyone's ability to make the news.
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Spreading the Word
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As noted earlier, modern communications have become history's greatest soapbox, gossip factory, and, in a very real sense, spreader of genuine news. At one time, an individual with an issue had few options. He could stand on the corner and rant, or post a sign, or write a newsletter, or pen a letter to the editor. Today, if his argument is sufficiently moving and/or backed up with facts, the tools at his disposal can make it a global phenomenon. The autonomous linking machine—consisting of people who care enough to spread the word, plus new tools such as RSS, which widely disseminate what they write—launches into action. And how the word does spread.
Even before the Web rose to prominence, the online world was making companies pay attention. In 1994, Usenet, the system of Internet discussion groups, helped teach a lesson to Intel, which makes most of the processors that are the central brains of personal computers. News of the "Pentium bug," a math-calculation flaw in a version of the Pentium processor, first spread via Usenet before it was picked up in the popular press. At great expense financially and to its reputation, Intel had to replace many of the flawed chips. "Our immediate lesson was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that medium [the Internet] and that that medium was going to get more and more important at setting opinions," an Intel executive told the CNET news service in 1999. [68]
A decade after the Intel debacle came another relatively trivial, but still revealing, example. In early 2004, with great fanfare, including a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi announced a "free songs" promotion. Buyers of Pepsi could look at the underside of the bottle cap and, about one out of three times, win a free song download from the Apple iTunes music web site. But someone noticed a flaw in the bottle design. He or she figured out how to tilt the unopened bottle just so and discover whether the bottle contained the code for the song. Once upon a time that information would have remained within a small community of people, but in the Internet age, that information was almost instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection in the form of a document titled "How to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway." [69] And there was nothing Pepsi could do about it. If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough.
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Truth Squad
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In September 2002, Microsoft posted a semi-bogus web page advertisement featuring a winsome young woman, identified as a freelance writer, who'd supposedly switched from a Mac to a PC. The page was entitled "Mac to PC: Mission Accomplished, Convert Thrilled," and was a response to Apple's "Switch" (from PCs to Macs) campaign. A commenter on the Slashdot site [73] discovered and reported that the picture of this supposed freelancer was from a Getty Images archive. [74] The Associated Press's Ted Bridis then scoped out the rest of the story, which was, of course, not the one Microsoft had been floating. A Microsoft PR man, weaving around some direct questions from me, said: "It was a mistake that it was posted, and Microsoft took it down as soon as it came to the attention of the Windows XP marketing team. Microsoft regrets any confusion it may have caused."
I suggested at the time that people might be making too much of the half-fake nature of the ad. After all, the people who pitch products in TV and print advertisements are usually actors. But when Apple's PC-to-Mac converts were apparently all real, including their pictures, Microsoft's phoniness was all the more obnoxious.
What made the incident stand out was the way the untruth unraveled. Slashdot's readers, members of a powerful online community, got on the case. They were the first to show that something wasn't kosher with the Microsoft page. And they deserved much of the credit for the story coming out in the first place.
The accumulation of data is a powerful research tool for anyone who wants to drill deeper into an issue. The earnest pamphleteer can now do more than challenge something. He can build an online encyclopedia of detailed information on any topic and keep expanding it—a vibrant archive and organizing tool that others use and augment. Combined, this becomes an impossible-to-ignore force.
And it's been happening for some time. In the mid-1990s, McDonald's Corp. faced some angry online citizens and never quite figured out what to do about them. The fast-food behemoth took two activists to court in London, arguing that the company had been libeled by their pamphlets. The activists counter-sued, and then created the path-breaking "McSpotlight" web site [75] to support their side in what became the longest-running such court case in British history—a trial that became a referendum on the McDonald's empire and its sometimes unseemly actions around the world.
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Looking Deeper
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If customers exchanging information wasn't a big enough change, consider the new category of self-organized customer information erupting around us.
In his research labs, University of Tokyo Professor Ken Sakamura has been experimenting with tiny chips that contain short-range radios, embedding them in various products and other items. In his Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory, [84] he scans them and links the product identification to a database with much more information, including the product's history. Someday, he told me, everything will have these ID tags, and we'll be able to get vast amounts of information about what we touch and buy. For example, a head of lettuce could tell us where it was grown and whether the farmer used pesticides. Or a bottle of pills could tell us whether the drug would pose risks if taken with another drug we've been prescribed.
Marc Smith, a Microsoft researcher, [85] has offered another glimpse of the future with his "Aura" system. Using what is essentially off-the-shelf technology, he's equipped a handheld computer with a wireless Internet connection and a bar-code scanner that he uses to scan products in stores. His computer then connects to a server that collects data from Google and other sources, and shows him the results on the handheld screen.
Suddenly, far more than the price is available. Data about the product, and its maker, is available in a far wider information ecosystem. Was a shirt made by slave labor? Did the can of processed food come from a company with a record of poisoning streams in its factories' backyards? Did the company have a reputation for being good to employees and the environment? Smith likes to show a supermarket scan he once did of a cereal box. The top item in Google reveals that the maker had at one point recalled the product because a significant ingredient wasn't on the label. That might be interesting information to someone hyper-allergic to that ingredient. If every object can tell a story, Smith said, "One of the more profound stories is `If you eat me I will kill you.'"
Now add location to this notion. During the SARS crisis of 2003, a Hong Kong mobile phone company created a system to alert people if there had been any cases of SARS in the building they were about to enter. They used publicly available data and combined it with location-based software in the phones. [86]
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Bubble, Bubble, Tout and Trouble
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The name Jonathan Lebed doesn't mean much to people anymore, but it should hang on the wall of every corporate public-relations executive's office. Lebed was a stock market player, one of many in the bubble days of the late 1990s whose recommendations of shares online helped fuel price rises before the crash. He was hardly alone in manipulating the market. Famous analysts on Wall Street issued absurd recommendations to buy stocks—including some they considered dogs privately—that then plummeted. Lebed didn't travel in such elevated circles. He was a New Jersey teenager who, under false names in Internet chat rooms, made hundreds of thousands of dollars by touting various shares. He ended up settling with securities regulators, who allowed him to keep much of his loot. As Michael Lewis noted in The New York Times Magazine, it was never really clear whether he was doing something flat-out illegal or just ethically questionable. [87]
Companies should remember is that this kind of activity—and much worse ways of playing the system—hasn't gone away. It's still rampant.
But it's part of a wider phenomenon: the ability of anyone to join in a global dissection of corporate behavior and finances. The problem for the average person entering this cyberworld, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 9, is distinguishing between truth and falsehood. The problem for the subject of the discussion—the newsmaker—is bigger.
For honorable public companies, some of the worst dilemmas arise in forums where people discuss stock prices and corporate financial performance. The urge to boost the value of one's own portfolio, or to spread information that helps depress the price and make short-selling more lucrative, is too obvious to ignore. But even in these forums you can find nuggets of useful information. Journalists who cover companies and fail to monitor such places are guaranteed to miss relevant data.
Companies should monitor these discussions carefully, of course, even when there's no obvious participation by corporate officials. Most do, and for the same reasons the journalists watch the discussions—to learn something—but also to see if people are spreading misinformation or worse.
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Swarming Investigators and Spies
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In breaking down barriers and secrecy, our weapons have several edges. In his important book, The Transparent Society, [90] David Brin suggested that privacy is becoming a relic of a pre-technological time. Preserving old-fashioned privacy was impossible, he said, because modern technology would overwhelm us with its snooping power and the collection of vast amounts of data. Our only recourse, he suggested, was to turn the same tools back on the watchers, to create what would amount to a détente in which we all reserved some dignity. I don't believe it will happen this way because governments and large organizations will never permit citizens to have the same access to their inner sanctums and methods that they insist on having to our personal and professional lives.
Even so, regular people are beginning to discover ways to redress the balance. Witness the case of former U.S. National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who helped dream up the grotesquely invasive " Total Information Awareness" program. Thanks to new technologies, he got a taste for himself.
Total Information Awareness, you may recall, was the Bush administration's data-mining program, designed to ferret out suspicious activities by potential terrorists. It would gather vast amounts of data on individuals by collecting and linking records from financial, driving, criminal, court, medical, and other databases. Poindexter, the former rear admiral and Iran-Contra scandal figure from the 1990s, was in charge of putting this program together.
Civil libertarians picked up and amplified a column by Matt Smith from the December 3, 2002 San Francisco Weekly, an alternative newspaper. [91] The column, wrote Net activist John Gilmore, "points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone +1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare (+1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 (+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions—decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American."
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Watching Journalists
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What industry is traditionally among the least transparent? Journalism. We have been a black box, and have become only slightly more transparent in recent years. But the public is demanding more transparency in our own field, and is doing some reporting of its own when we fail to respond in satisfying ways.
Jim Romenesko's Poynter Institute media blog, [94] the first and still the best of its genre, has become a water cooler not just for journalists but for people who observe journalism. Generally, the blogging community is not shy to go after newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters for real and imagined offenses against fairness and accuracy. For journalists, who are among the most thin-skinned people around, this trend has been something of a shock. We are not accustomed to being scrutinized the way we scrutinize others, however healthy it is that we are.
Even The New York Times was forced to pull down its veil in 2003, when the infamous Jayson Blair's journalistic cons become one of the newspaper's worst scandals. The Times' appropriately scathing internal analysis of the mess, the "Siegel Report," [95] revealed a horror show of missed communications and lax management on top of plainly corrupt behavior by Blair himself. But the Siegel Report appeared briefly online and then disappeared, prompting Jay Rosen at New York University to ask what had happened to it. Eventually, and in large part because of Rosen's prodding, the document reappeared online.
In early 2004, amid political reporting that many in the blogosphere found wanting, a suggestion emerged to improve journalism in general. The idea was to follow individual reporters' political coverage on web sites, relentlessly tracking errors and omissions and exposing them to the world. I commented in my own blog, and on Rosen's PressThink site, where the notion first got some traction:
I like the idea that people are watching what I say and correcting me if I get things wrong—or challenging my conclusions, based on the same facts (or facts I hadn't known about when I wrote the piece.) This is a piece of tomorrow's journalism, and we in the business should welcome the feedback and assistance that, if we do it right, becomes part of a larger conversation.
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Turning the Tables
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