(The following column first appeared in PR Week (subscription required).)
My friend David Weinberger, an author and deep thinker, once updated the famous Andy Warhol line for the era of the blog. Weinberger said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.”
Fame is double-edged, of course. So an addendum: In the future, everyone will face public vilification.
In this Contra Costa Times story, “Judge seals files in MediaNews trial,” you’ll find a priceless and all-too-true line:
“Newspapers believe the public should know about everything, unless it is information about newspapers,” Shulman said.
The traditional media business is beginning to show signs of transparency, but only beginning. This case is a great example of how corporate media behave: like corporations.
Bob Cox, in ‘The best test of truth’, makes the case that free speech, one of America’s core values, should be one of our chief cultural exports in an often hostile world. It’s an eloquent essay.
He makes one small error, though, when he says the right to free speech “does not extend to shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater…”
It does if the theater is actually on fire.
Bloggers get up close and personal with the arrival of the former prime minister of Iran in Harvard Square, Cambridge:
The Secret Service agents were on high alert. Numerous agents emerged from the cars and surrounded the front of the hotel, with guns drawn, sweeping back and forth over the crowd that quickly came to attention. Imagine a few dozen electified organic farmers, Cambridge moms, hotel guests and Harvard Square morning tourists.
Khatami was in a middle vehicle sandwiched between other SUVs. He himself was sandwiched between two Secret Service agents. When a deep ring of vehicles and agents was established around him, protecting a corridor into the hotel entrance, he was wisked out of the car and into the hotel. Nothing was visible except the top of his black turban.
Blogger Jim Moore got the call on this and posted it — along with more from an eyewitness — on his blog.
I’ve been sitting in the Atlanta airport for the past several hours in an airline lounge, where the TV is tuned to a “news” network that has been droning on incessantly about a college-cafeteria shooting in Montreal.
But wait: There’s breaking news — a hostage situation in Chicago! Then it’s back to Montreal.
Are these real stories? Sure. But in a world where dozens are being left dead on the streets of Iraq every day, where Congress is busy “debating” further encroachments on our liberties, where so much that is serious is being ignored — why is a shooting in a college such a dominant story?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course.
The New York Times discusses “The Lonelygirl That Really Wasn’t” but skirts the ethical questions — including the fact that the site in question was deceiving people, and that the creators plainly hope to make money on the people they’ve deceived. Isn’t that — at least as much the smart forensic work that exposed the lie — the more important story?
The San Antonio News Express quotes Dallas Morning News Editor and President Robert W. Mong Jr. as follows:
“Revenues at major metros in the last five or six years have been fairly flat,” Mong said. “Our news staff is the largest in the Southwest and we went through an involuntary reduction in October of 2004. Now we have decided to get the staff more in harmony with the revenues. We’ll still come out of this with the largest and most experienced staff in the region.”
Translation:
“Despite major cost-cutting, including canning a bunch of folks two years ago, we’re still not sufficiently profitable for the executives who run our parent company, who take their orders from Wall Street. So we’re getting rid of a bunch more folks, except this time we bought them out. Everyone else is cutting, too, so we’ll still have the biggest staff in the region. So shut up and enjoy our diminished product.”
Reporters and editors snicker when they hear PR-ish statements like Mong’s from politicians and other business people. The ones left at the Morning News probably aren’t chuckling this time, though.
If any business should speak directly, it’s the journalism business. But it’s just another enterprise where corporate-speak substitutes for clarity.
Wired News notes the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with Birth of the Blog, an observation that blogging got its biggest boost with that tragedy. Indeed it did.
The attacks and their impact on media were integral to my 2004 book, We the Media.
I was in Africa when the attacks occurred, and followed the news from afar. Here’s some of what I wrote in the book:
As noted in an earlier posting, the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. As the foundation noted, we intend to
develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover everything that can possibly be reported on a Congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen reporters. The site will include in-depth biographical and political information on candidates, audio and video archives, campaign finance profiles, first-person reports, links to articles, etc. This project is designed to serve as a model for possible nationwide implementation in hundreds of districts in 2008.
Here are some specifics:
The working title of this initiative is “Political transparency by the people, for the people,” and the goals are several-fold.
First: In a competitive congressional district — namely California’s 11th district — we hope to create an online repository of every scrap of information about the candidates, issues and campaign.
Second: We will pick an element of this data collection — the advertising — and add value through further reporting and analysis.
Third, and most important: We will use what we learn to create a template for the 2008 election and beyond.
The Repository
We plan to collect the following (and more):
Citizen Efforts
We will try to assemble the best-ever collection of audio and video from the candidates. For example, we will encourage citizens to attend public campaign events and videotape what candidates say. We also hope to collect videos of semi-public appearances such as fund-raising events. In addition, we will ask people (starting with the candidates themselves) to record and submit all broadcast/cable advertising. We’ll ask for scans of print ads, including mailers sent to people at home. (Note: It is possible that the campaign staffs may provide us with some of this material. We’ll encourage such cooperation with the project.)
Website
The material we collect will be posted online. The site will be designed, built and initially maintained by the students in an online journalism class (J298) this fall at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. Assisting the students will be co-instructors Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, and Bill Gannon, editorial director at Yahoo!, as well as Scot Hacker, webmaster at the journalism school.
Analysis
We anticipate that media organizations and political activists will find the data valuable for coverage and campaign activities. But we also hope that voters, students and others will make use of it for a variety of other purposes, and that they (and, if possible, the candidates themselves), will participate in the conversations.
The Berkeley students will also look at the advertising in depth. Specifically, we hope to deconstruct it for the voters, grading it for truth and fairness.
Template
After the election, we’ll analyze the project’s accomplishments to date and also its drawbacks. Then we’ll assemble what we hope will be a working model for people to use in upcoming elections.
Staff
We plan to hire an in-district coordinator for approximately two to three months. His or her principal task will be to organize citizen journalists; work with campaign staff and other interested parties to help ensure completeness of the data repository; and, after the election, help debrief the organizers (and public) about what worked and what didn’t.
The in-district coordinator will ideally be a resident of the district. He or she must be independent politically.
Nonpartisan
This project is nonpartisan. It is designed to help voters of all persuasions.
Summary
Keep in mind that this will be a work in progress from the very beginning. It isn’t just likely to change; it’s guaranteed to change as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
We believe this project has terrific potential. We have major advantages — including a great group of students; a budget that allows us to hire an excellent on-the-ground person in the district; and a desire to help improve American politics in a small way this year that could pay big dividends in the future.
As Ellen Miller, president of the Sunlight Foundation, wrote in her blog, “Imagine citizens taking video cameras to fundraising events, or house meetings, or conversations with senior citizens and then posting them all on a single website. Imagine combining that with first-person reports, links to articles, data bases on campaign financing, video archives of past statements, etc. etc.”
We hope you’ll imagine it with us, and suggest ways to make it work better.
LA Times: Lonelygirl15’s revelation: It’s all just part of the show. After amateur sleuths uncovered apparent links between the Creative Artists Agency and the official lonelygirl15 MySpace page, a statement claiming to be from “The Creators” was posted on the lonelygirl15 website late Thursday. It read in part:
“Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story — A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the Internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience.”
The entertainment industry is not known for its ethical behavior. This is just one more example.
It’s also another demonstration of the skepticism we must increasingly bring to the media we encounter. People like the ones behind this stunt make it hard to trust anything we find online, at least until we have some reason to believe its authenticity.