user-based content, pt. 2

Comic from picturesforsadchildren.com. Sometimes they have punchlines!

Not to bum everyone out (too late!), but panels 2 n' 3 have a point. From Internet World Stats, here are some interesting findings on internet penetration around the globe. Of particular note are the statistics comparing the top 47 countries to the rest of the world - the differential there is staggering. For all the talk about how digital media is revolutionizing and democratizing the media landscape, and how it provides a new sense of connectivity, these statistics are a stark reminder that even web 2.0 is divided into haves and have-nots. Even in the digital age, journalists need to be constantly asking themselves what stories aren't getting told, and what groups are disenfranchised by the media.

open-source journalism, and why it sucks

As online media becomes an increasingly acceptable reference source for news, reporters - both in paper and other mediums - have strugged to adapt. this story is a pretty good example of the bumps in the road we're seeing as the news industry struggles to figure out a method to incorporate sources like wikipedia in a streamlined, accurate manner. I don't envy these journalists - as online media affords people a greater degree of anonymity, fact-checking and attribution takes more time. Combine this fact with the rise of the instant news cycle, and you have a lose-lose situation for reporters. You can't ensure instant turnaround time and accuracy without increasing the resources available to reporters - and seeing as how the industry isn't exactly in a state of abundance right now, I suspect most newsrooms are having to make some decisions as to what's more important: getting it first or getting it right.

Maybe I shouldn't be making excuses for journalists, though. It's deeply troubling that wikipedia editors - unpaid volunteers - caught the lack of attribution for the fake quote twice, while papers such as the Guardian ran it without question. Like it or not, mainstream media is going to have to learn some lessons from more amateur editors, particularly when it comes to screening online information for accuracy. The perception of established media being more objective than online media is one of the few advantages newspapers hold over emerging models - squandering that would not be in the pape's best interests.

One potential solution to this problem is the concept of "open-source journalism" - allowing articles to essentially be peer-reviewed by readers before being published in a final form. The concept was put into practice waaaay back in '99 with a collaboration when an article on cyberterrorism from Jane's Intelligence Review was submitted to the readers of tech news website Slashdot for review before publishing. The readers tore it a new one, and the article ended up being rewritten - with commenters being paid for their critiques.

Admittedly, the model has certain strengths. Exposing a story to multiple perspectives and critiques will make for a stronger, fuller story, and as Fitzgerald and Wikipedia editors proved, amateurs can often provide insights that more traditionally trained journalists might not catch. However, there are some glaring weaknesses in this model that cast a lot of doubts on the model's ability to serve as a bridge between more traditional and new forms of media.

For starters, the exposure to multiple perspectives can be something of a double-edged sword - while the peer review aspect of open-source journalism can help to counter a single reporter's biases, it also can also influence an article in a negative way by subjecting it to the biases and opinions of others. Because online media (and especially political websites) cater to people's individual interests, you'll often find user communities that form based on very similar opinions and viewpoints. This raises some key doubts in my mind as to the effectiveness of open-source journalism via the internet - if you put a story up for revision based on the comments on either of the two websites I just posted, I doubt you'd have a particularly objective story by the time you were done.

Other issues with the open-source model are readily apparent as well. While user-driven revision may catch more errors made by journalists, it also increases the amount of time needed to put out an article. With today's instant-news pace, there's often barely time for even one edit, let alone multiple revisions (maybe this is a good thing, though - while it's probably impossible, slowing down the news cycle would allow for better understanding and filtration of truly important stories). Finally, the internet is a vastly different place than it was in 1999. The online news sphere is its own separate entity at this point, not a training ground for the final draft in the newspaper. Posting an article online is synonymous with publishing it, and you don't publish something you expect to further revise.

Open-source journalism just has too many gaping flaws for it to seriously be considered as a new way to adapt to online sourcing, that much is clear. But the questions and concepts behind the idea are ones that need to be addressed: online media provides a larger platform for users and readers to help and shape the news that's getting reported. Whatever method helps news organizations harness this potential will be a dominant force in the years to come.

PLACEHOLDER

Alright. I hate to slack off already, but I was planning on finishing my blog post after getting back from My Bloody Valentine (!!!) in Seattle, but the show just wiped me out. I'll have it up first thing in the morning. Cheers!

user-based content pt. 1

On the way down to My Bloody Valentine last night, a friend of a friend and I got into a discussion about online media. It was mostly about what the future of web content is going to be. If web 1.0 (I hate these terms) was static information being presented to you (like, say, an encyclopedia), and web 2.0 is the progression to "bottom up" production, with users beginning to supply, dictate and shape content, what will web 3.0 look like? 1The other dude thinks it's going to be completely decentralized media, with hubs being focused around individual people's profiles a la facebook or myspace. I think dude could not be more wrong.
In my last post, I briefly mentioned the inherent dangers of building media models that are built on user-generated content. It's true that there are plenty of emerging models that are using this model to a lot of benefit - Youtube is probably one of the greatest examples of this, as are wikileaks and wikipedia. However, while these sites may have featured articles or videos, there's a difference between providing information and entertainment, as these sites do, and providing news. For starters, these sites have no responsibility to filter content for the most relevant stories of the day - which is a good thing, because the sheer volume of content would render that almost impossible.

For user-based news models, it's clear that people are still figuring how to incorporate it within traditional news formats. CNN's iReport, for example, does some interesting things with user-based content, but with a lot of clips, people still seem to be operating under the assumption that iReport is just another video blog service.

That's not to say that getting people's feedback isn't important - one of the basic rules of Journalism is voices from the community are absolutely essential. The BBC has done a pretty good job of using the web to obtain community voices, I feel - at the bottom of their article on swine flu, for example, you find this:

Are you in a country which has confirmed the virus? Do you know someone who has been affected by the outbreak? Are you a health worker in one of the affected countries? Tell us your experiences by filling in the form below.

A selection of your comments may be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below.

The result of which, is this - great, compelling articles that wouldn't have been possible without contributions from the greater public.

What CNN and the BBC are doing aren't that different, really; it's just that CNN lets us see the unfinished product, most of which will never make it on air. It's an interesting experiment, but whether it's effective or not is up for debate - I say no, because we don't get to see the whole process - see what system CNN uses for selecting clips that will air. What's also interesting to me is that both organizations apply filters to the information.

I think it's easy to understand why the aforementioned dude had it wrong about web 3.0 when you look at the BBC and CNN models - even for sites that tout lines such as "you report. No bias. No bull.", there's still a degree of filtration going on there. As the information landscape becomes increasingly saturated as a result of the speeding up of information cycles and an increase of user-generated content, I think there's going to be a reaction to that. I suspect that while the role of journalist in the role of arbiter of information has diminished, people will still look to news outlets to sort and aggregate the significant stories of the day - the public just doesn't have the energy or time to do so on their own.

1 It's interesting to note that the web eras, for lack of a better term, have really been defined by the technology that's available to them. The CEO of Netflix gave this definition of the separate web movements at a 2006 tech conference:

"Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0." -http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3959

Also worth noting was the founder of Yahoo's definition: You don't have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium…the distinction between professional, semi-professional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications." I'll be exploring that, and delve deeper into the impact of user-generated content on news in the next post.

Huh. Been a while, hasn't it?

It almost seems inevitable that this thing has come back to life - things have changed so dramatically in the media landscape in the past year. Before, when I tried to start this thing, it was half-hearted; I've always been a little leery of blogging and the sense of self-indulgence that comes along with it, but now, chronicling the events that are going on now (and dissecting them, and possibly predicting what comes next) seems more urgent - like we have to figure out what's going on before it's too late. That's probably a little, um, self-indulgent though.

At any rate, the signs were probably already there a year ago, but now they're pretty much impossible to ignore. Whether or not the decline of print media is a good thing is certainly up for debate at this point - and it's an issue that this blog will be exploring - but first, before we delve into that realm, let's look at one of the major alternatives to print media that's arisen in the past few years - blogging itself.

A pretty decent introduction to blogging is conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan's piece in the Atlantic entitled "Why I Blog". Sullivan argues that blogging changes the media game (which it does) due to a few particular inherent characteristics.
First is the idea of hyperlinking. Here's an example: in print media, readers would have to rely solely on my summary and interpretation of Sullivan's piece. With blogging (and the internet in general), it takes very little effort to provide access to primary reference documents.

Next is the idea that blogs occupy a different temporal space than traditional print media, or at least operate on a different cycle - blogs are able to react on a much quicker basis than a paper, for obvious reasons.

Finally, Sullivan argues that with blogs, the barriers between writer and reader are much more permeable, as comment features allow for much more potential dialogue (and scathing critique) between journalist and reader than traditional media models.

These three major features, combined with other factors, make blogs a pretty alluring new media form. One can argue that the way they function serves as a "democratization" of media - anyone can have a blog, and by providing easy access to primary reference sources and giving instant feedback, part of the power of journalist as "gatekeeper/arbiter" of information is somewhat transferred to the greater public. As Sullivan puts it,

"The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production."

Journalism shouldn't always look like a conversation, however. While blogging is now pretty much a necessity to media (I can't think of any major news outlet that doesn't have an online presence now), in its current form, it supplements and supports - it doesn't replace.

A perfect example of the shortcomings of blogging would be one of its supposed strengths - hyperlinking. In an almost parasitic fashion, blogs rely on hyperlinks as story starters - most blogs either synthesize other people's information or post reactions to it, (sort of like this blog - oops!) but they don't do the research themselves. When print media dries up, so do the primary sources - and without the links, the blogs don't have a lot. It's true that there's nothing stopping from bloggers from doing the research themselves, but with the near-instant pace of online media - where getting it first is more important than getting it fully - that idea doesn't seem compatible with current trends.

Other issues with blogging include the pitfalls of user-generated content when it comes to journalism - I think I'll explore this more in future posts, but there's an underlying danger in shifting the power dynamic to the reader - just like how media shouldn't be accountable to corporate or special interests, I also think that the journalist shouldn't be beholden to public opinion, in some cases.

These are just some of the issues that surround blogs as a medium - some of these can probably be attributed to the fact that blogging is still relatively in its infancy - it'll be interesting to see how it develops and what the infrastructure surrounding it will look like. We've barely begun to scratch the surface of how new media models are changing the media landscape, but future posts will explore this more - this post was intended solely as a primer, a reminder that the way I'm exploring this ISP holds certain strengths - and limitations.

Radio On - A Primer

I think the toughest thing about starting this blog will probably be the amount of freedom I've been given.  When you're exploring a subject as horrendously huge as mass media, it's somewhat daunting to just be set free to do whatever you want.  But that's how people do it in real life, don't they?  Out of millions and millions of ways to get their information - television, newspapers, blogs, word of mouth, you name it - we somehow make our decisions and set up our filters to listen to just a few.  

I'm already rambling.  I have no idea how to start this.

I think I will get into why I am specifically interested in radio in the next post.  To kick this whole blog thing off, I think I will discuss one of my favorite songs ever.  I could probably write a paper on this song, and the way I have grown up with it, and the things that I have discovered and continue to discover about it with every listen, but this isn't a music blog, it's a radio blog.  So I will try not to digress too much.

Here is what I remember about "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.  It is one of the first songs I ever heard that gave me a "driveway moment" - those times when you arrive at your destination but find yourself unable to go inside, enthralled by whatever is on.  I had heard the song before - my younger brother had played it for me before on a tape, but I dismissed it as "dumb", beginning a long-standing and agonizing tradition of my younger brother being clued in to stuff before I was.  Anyway.  I heard the song again when I was sixteen and going home from something, maybe school or work or a friend's house, but that isn't really important.  What is is that I was going home, listening to the college station, when "Roadrunner" came on.  I pulled into the driveway, but I didn't want to leave the car.  After the song ended, I went inside and played my dad's Story of the Clash Volume 1.  It sounded better.    Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville sounded better too.  I put on Moby's Play.  It sounded worse.  I thought about "Roadrunner" the whole time these albums were playing, and I turned it around in my head.  I distinctly remember at this point thinking, "All I know is that something very, very important just happened to me."

Here is what the Wikipedia entry tells me about "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers.  It is derived directly from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", except for "Roadrunner" only uses two chords, D and A, as opposed to the VU's three.  The first version of the song was recorded with John Cale; the next two with Kim Fowley, and the final version (the most commercially successful) with Beserkley Records head Matthew King Kaufman.  Kaufman stated that "Roadrunner took 3 minutes-35 seconds for the performance, about another 30 minutes to dump the background vocals on, and another 90 minutes to mix it."  That brings us to a running total of approximately two hours, three minutes and thirty-five seconds.  That's all it took to create song #269 in Rolling Stone's the 500 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time; the song that inspired Cornershop's #1 single "Brimful of Asha"; the song that Greil Marcus said was "the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest."

Here is what I can tell you about the Wikipedia entry for "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.  The best part of the article is the third paragraph of the "Origins of the song" section:

"Former bandmate John Felice recalled that as teenagers he and Richman 'used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Massachusetts turnpike.  We'd come up over a hill and he'd see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed.  He'd see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn't see it.'" 

 At its best, radio does exactly what Jonathan Richman does with this song - it explores and seeks truth in situations where it isn't readily apparent or neglected, and then it shares that truth.  It turns us into wide-eyed, breathless believers.  Like Richman himself sings, "don't feel so alone now/got the radio on".