Cit Media

(This posting first appeared as a guest column in PR Week.)

The university where I’m co-teaching a course this semester is one of several in the nation currently engaged in a ritual that comes around to all such institutions from time to time: finding and hiring a new journalism dean. These searches will, I hope, engender some even broader discussions.

The Digital Era has upended business models for traditional media and has created vast new opportunities for creating better journalism. But it hasn’t, so far, sparked enough of something we also need: a broad rethinking of journalism education itself.

I’m not attacking traditional methods. They served reasonably well in a time when professional journalists delivered “the news” via a somewhat limited number of outlets in any given place or about a given topic.

In an age of media saturation - when we are all becoming creators of media, using technologies that, in turn, help us become digital collaborators on work of various kinds - the traditional methods no longer suffice. Many J-schools fully recognize this; few have fully adapted to it.

The same issues apply to PR and advertising education, which are often housed in schools of journalism and communications. But those industries have been considerably more innovative, as pros, than journalism in recent years. I have little doubt those fields’ leaders are making their needs clear to educators.

Lots of journalism programs still teach courses like “Beginning Newswriting” or some such thing as part of the core curriculum. How vital is that, especially when personal audio and video are becoming at least as much a part of the storyteller’s toolkit as text? I’m not certain.

In some online educational mini-courses for would-be citizen journalists that I’m helping prepare for a journalism-oriented foundation, we’re not focusing on the how-to. We’re looking at core principles: accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, independence, and transparency. Exploring those, it seemed to me, was the most important first step.

Those principles and related skills are among the ones people will need to be media literate in a media-saturated world. I’d like to see every student take a basic media course at every level of education - not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.

What would it include? Skepticism, for starters: Children need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real. (Of course, in today’s timid and authoritarian society, teachers who try to help students think for themselves may be pilloried as radicals; this doesn’t help.)

J-schools will need especially to incorporate the conversational-media shift into their work. I hope they’ll become leaders in training would-be professionals on how to engage the audience in journalism, to help communities (of geography and interest) have broad and deep conversations about their futures.

New journalists will have to be entrepreneurs in coming decades. Can the J-schools teach product development in a Web world - and not lose sight of the journalistic principles and practices so vital to a self-governing society? Is there an alternative?

The Sunlight Foundation’s Congressional Web Site Investigation Project is under way:

Though no law requires them to do so, members of Congress maintain official Web sites at taxpayer expense to provide their constituents and the general public with relevant information about their work in Washington on our behalf.

Do these Web sites cut through the bewildering array of information available online about the Legislative Branch, making it easier for you to find relevant information about a member’s official acts and publicly required disclosures? Do they contribute to government transparency?

The Sunlight Foundation asks you to exercise citizen oversight and find out if we are getting our money’s worth from these congressional Web sites.

Consider helping out.

(Note: The foundation is funding one of our projects.)

(On Saturday, Feb. 24, at the Beyond Broadcast conference in Cambridge, Mass., I’m helping to put together a workshop about the future of public-access television — the channels on local cable systems that carry locally generated programming, generally by non-professionals. Jason Crow, access coordinator at Cambridge Community Television, is co-leader of the workshop.

I think it’s time to phase out public-access TV and replace it with something more attuned to the Internet Age, and I wrote a blog posting to that effect. Jason has his doubts about this, to put it mildly, and has interjected some comments in my posting.

See it below (and on the Beyond Broadcast site). We hope it will help spark a much broader conversation this weekend.)

DAN GILLMOR
Day and night across America, cable television systems devote one of their channels to programming known as “Public Access” — shows created by people in the communities the cable companies serve.

The programs range from interesting and useful to dull and dreadful. That’s what you’d expect from material created by people who aren’t media professionals. (Which is not to say that the pros create only great things themselves, of course.)

Good to bad to ugly, public access cable TV has given voice to people who had something to say. Using the cable companies’ production facilities and distribution, these folks have been able to make themselves heard by anyone who cared to watch and listen. Public access, by almost any standard, has been a valuable addition to the local media scene.

Valuable, but outdated: It’s time to phase out public access — but in a way that brings us even better publicly created news and entertainment.

The cable companies don’t like it. They have to spend money to provide it, dollars they’re much rather send to their bottom lines and shareholders. It costs bandwidth they’d rather use for other programming.

JASON CROW
The telephone companies trying to enter the business like it even less. They have been working in Washington — lobbying for legislation and revised FCC regulations — and in state capitals for permission to abandon many of their public interest obligations.

DAN GILLMOR
When cable systems were essentially the only game in town for video news and entertainment, their desires carried less weight against the public-interest value of public access. But in the age the Internet and more competitive media, the balance has shifted.

I’m not suggesting that we let the cable companies simply walk away from their community obligations. But there’s a fine way to give them relief from the burden of public access while increasing the number of public voices on matters of community interest.

Let’s make a deal with them, as follows:

1. In five years, cable systems will be free to abandon public access programming in every way. They won’t have to provide production facilities or channels.

JASON CROW
Wow, what you’re suggesting is a big giveaway to the cable and telephone companies. Remember, cable companies pay rent for use of public rights of way. At its core, public access TV is a result of a return on the use of public land. According to the National Cable and Telecom Association, cable companies pay 2.8 billion per year in franchise fees – rent for use of public land. These franchises pay the rent for hundreds of public access media center buildings, grant money for equipment, require universal buildout and provide analog channel and digital spectrum allocation.

Should we really give back those facilities and anywhere from 1-9 channels in over 1,000 communities across the United States? In addition there are dozens of institutional networks already operating, many interconnected, many with dark fiber we could harness as bandwidth. You are suggesting giving back the one of the largest public interest networks in the world, built on the ideals of free speech and civic participation.

DAN GILLMOR
2. In the meantime, they will use those production facilities and public-access personnel — who’ll need some retraining — to help members of the community learn modern media production techniques. Those techniques will focus on a Web model of content, not a broadcast model.

JASON CROW
I propose a “United Stations” movement that includes networking all of the stations into one solid network. There are many implications to this:
a. The largest cable network in the world;
b. Sharing of resources - curriculum, best practices;
c. Single marketing entity – dissolve the negative stereotypes;
d. Share programming (there is tons of good stuff out there).

We need to combine efforts for a net-based, many-to-many media with cable, one-to-many playback– more a Current.tv distribution model, with user submissions, voting, feedback, comments and the best get played on the channels.

DAN GILLMOR
Let’s look at the various constituencies of public access, and see who gets what under such a deal.

Cable companies: Over time, they get out of an obligation they meet grudgingly in most cases.

Public access employees: They effectively get a five-year employment guarantee, plus retraining in a field that is in many ways the future of media.

The public (the most important constituency): We get a vast array of new programming of all kinds, from a cadre of newly trained citizen media creators. Maybe cable systems will want to put some of it on their channels, or maybe not. But the Web makes it unimportant whether they do or not.

JASON CROW
What about those people who don’t have access to broadband?

DAN GILLMOR
Keep in mind that at least some public-access operations are already doing such things. For example, Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television offers a variety of classes with a distinctly Web-ish tint in many cases. Consider the session entitled “ZIP DOCS: 021XX” — the purpose of which is to “map the Cambridge community with video” using such tools as Google maps as well as standard video techniques. Cool stuff, and a major part of the future.

JASON CROW
We’ve offered podcasting and videoblogging classes in the past as well. We suggest our community members tag their content “cctvcambridge” in YouTube and Blip for redistribution on our drupal-based web community. I would suggest taking a look at the other progressive institutions around the US. For instance, DeProduction manages Denver Open Media, a public access tv web community that allows user to upload video, rank it, comment on it and get it on the cable channels.

DAN GILLMOR
We need much, much more of this.

Public access television was a good answer for its time. But the era when it was so needed is coming to a close.

Let’s create a legion of citizen media people who do solid, honorable work for the medium of the future: the Net.

JASON CROW
Let’s not abandon 30 years of building infrastructure and creating human connections with municipal leaders. We don’t have to reinvent the system, just adapt it to new technologies. There are great citizen journalists on the web like Lisa Williams who benefit from her Selectmen meeting being broadcast on her Government Access channel. She posts excerpts to her placeblog via YouTube. Let’s follow this example and work together to create a United Stations movement.

Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney:

Having found their leaker, the feds dropped the subpoena against the reporters. But a number of journalists, lawyers, and ethicists in the First Amendment Industrial Complex weren’t happy to learn that Williams and Fainaru-Ward weren’t the free-speech martyrs they imagined them to be.

First, a disclosure: I’m on the board of the California First Amendment Coalition, which has taken a stance defending the reporters. I was never entirely comfortable with this, but the federal government’s efforts were beyond heavy-handed. On balance, I agreed that the threat to journalism was substantial.

Now that we know who the leaker is — and that this soon-to-be-jailed lawyer publicly said the case against his clients should be dropped because the leaks had poisoned the jury pool – the Chronicle’s actions look a whole lot less noble. The paper is getting hammered by readers and critics, and I agree with some of the critics.

The newspaper not only got in bed with someone it knew to have an agenda readers would have found highly relevant — totally undisclosed, of course, by the paper — but it stayed silent when that person used the media to lie through his teeth. There’s no moral ambiguity; what the Chronicle did, by omission, was wrong.

There should be plenty of soul-searching going on inside the Chronicle right now. Sadly, if this story in Editor & Publisher is any indication, nothing of the kind seems to be happening.

I criticized JetBlue yesterday for missing an opportunity in its customer-relations debacle of recent days. The company’s failure to use its website smartly, I said, was a missed opportunity.

Today, JetBlue has posted a video by its CEO, David Neeleman, apologizing again for the mess — and offering a “Customer Bill of Rights” that will go a long way toward restoring trust.

Take a look at jerryrobertsandfriends.org, created in the wake of the bizarre goings-on at the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, where the owner has been firing people right and left — and suing journalists who write what she claims are unfair stories about her actions:

Amid the ongoing exodus of dozens of professional journalists from the News-Press, the paper’s owner has filed a flurry of legal threats, claims and lawsuits against people who dared to speak out or report about what was happening in the newsroom.

In response, a group of prominent local attorneys formed the Lawyers Alliance for Free Speech Rights, to help level the playing field for journalists who found themselves bludgeoned by legal attacks by Ampersand Publishing, owned by billionaire Wendy McCaw.

The site has a link for donations. Consider one.

The AP reports: XM and Sirius to combine; hurdles loom, and says:

It’s too early to say what the deal will mean for subscription prices. The merger could bring down the cost of providing service, but at the same time give the company more pricing power as the only U.S. satellite radio provider.

No, it’s not at all too early to say what this means. Of course it will bring higher prices.

Neither company has turned a profit yet. No matter what the combined entity — which will almost surely be approved by a federal government that doesn’t enforce antitrust anymore — can save in costs, it’s guaranteed to hike prices at some point.

The question, then, is whether that matters. It does, but not in the long run.

The audio business is rapidly shifting to something that falls in between radio and old-fashioned record players or CDs. We are moving around with the music we want to hear, and listening to Internet radio at home. About the only thing missing is the live information we need or want right now.

One of the few things I listen to on the radio is traffic reports. Even there I’ve moved most of my listening to the 511.org service, where I dial 511 on my mobile phone and instruct it, using voice commands to give me traffic conditions on the freeway I’m about to use.

What’s left? Live news that I really, really want to hear, such as major breaking news.

I still have antitrust qualms about this merger, but not the kind I’d have had a year or two ago. The Net and audio progress makes the issue much less troubling than it was.

Technorati Tags: MediaBusiness

The New York Times, running an interview with David G. Neeleman, the beleaguered chief executive of airline JetBlue, reports that “JetBlue’s C.E.O. Is ‘Mortified’ After Fliers Are Stranded” in last week’s snowstorms. Neeleman’s words to the Times are indeed abject in their regret, and forceful in his intention to turn around a situation that may have hurt his company badly.

Yet there’s not even a hint of this combination of apparently genuine regret and determination on the airline’s website. Not on the home page, where you might expect to find a heartfelt message from the management. And not even on the page you find via the home-page link so matter-of-factly named Operational Interruptions, which is a simple explanation of what’s going on and what passengers can do (not very much) to contact a human being at the carrier.

The news media aren’t the only venue for telling the airline’s new story, or shouldn’t be. The place where a lot of disgruntled customers are heading right now is the website.

By not using the site the way they’re using the traditional media, Neeleman and his colleagues at JetBlue are missing a major opportunity.

The online magazine spiked has a story entitled “Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’?” in which a writer asks some reasonable questions but then undermines herself with — at best — incomplete reporting. She writes, in part:

Much was made of a study conducted by Nature magazine at the end of 2005, which found that Wikipedia was about as accurate in covering scientific topics as was Encyclopaedia Britannica. According to the survey, based on 42 articles reviewed, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while the average entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica contained three. Of eight ‘serious errors’ the reviewers found, including misinterpretations of important concepts, four came from Wikipedia and four from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

However, soon after this report was published, Encyclopaedia Britannica published a damning response accusing Nature of misrepresenting its own evidence. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to Encyclopaedia Britannica were, in fact, not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles examined were not even in Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has been reported that the study was poorly carried out and its findings were laden with errors; one publication accuses Nature of ‘cooking’ the report (6).

Yet hundreds of publications jumped on the Nature story, echoing the argument that Wikipedia (based on collective intelligence) was as good as Encyclopaedia Britannica (based on professional knowledge). Jim Wales, founder of Wikipedia, continues to cite the Nature survey in his defence when quizzed about the accuracy of information on Wikipedia.

Several issues:

First, there’s no link or even a footnote pointing to the Nature report. Nor is there a link to the Britannica response, which as the story notes disputed the findings. (The reporter’s footnoted evidence of Nature’s errors is a story by a publication that has been deeply and consistently skeptical, if not downright hostile, to Wikipedia.)

And, given her damning of the publications that “jumped on” the Nature story, it’s utterly bizarre that she didn’t point to Nature’s reply to Britannica’s objections, which included a point-by-point response.

No one says Wikipedia doesn’t have its flaws. It has plenty. And Nature’s methodology, and its original headline, did leave something to be desired. But its response was thorough, and the fundamental points it raised essentially held up.

But when the reporter fails to point to any of the relevant material, she does readers no favors. Given that more than 10 months had passed since the magazine’s full replies, the missing links undermine the entire article.

(Note: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a member of this center’s board of advisors, and I’m an investor in his separate for-profit company.)

Chicago Reader: The Public Sentiment Machine. Not long ago a letter to the editor required three things: time, an idea, and the ability to put it into words. All three impediments have been swept away. Once American bedrock, today a letter to the editor is often a chunk of computer-generated boilerplate.

This practice indicts almost everyone involved: the organizations that gin up semi-phony public sentiment; the letter “writers” who cut and paste what they’re told to say; and the newspapers that print the letters without serious due diligence.

Yet it’s easy to see how they slip through, and not so easy to know how to stop them.

Maybe the newspaper editorial-page editors should work with a school of journalism (or computer science department, or both) to create a search-and-discover engine with the sole purpose of finding these things before they appear in the papers. There would be some human involvement, but a lot of this could be automated.

If I were an editorial page editor, I’d start a special column devoted solely to naming the readers who send these cut-and-paste letters. It might cause people to reconsider.