Someone Who's Bullish on the Future of Journalism

"I'm sitting here at LaGuardia feeling absolutely bullish about the state of journalism."

Whoever said that has to be off their rocker, no?

Well, not exactly. David Cohn is an ambitious twenty-something journalist who's been hacking his way toward the future of news future. He's currently leading spot.us, a massive experiment in seeing if crowdfunding* can be used as a model to fund journalism. Previously, he teamed up with new media thought leader (& NYU J-School prof) Jay Rosen on New Assignment.Net, another project to explore potential new models for journalism. And before that, for those looking for traditional journalism cred, he wrote for Wired, SEED, and, yes, even the New York Times.

In a post on his DigiDave blog today, Cohn wrote that the reason he's feeling so bullish is because of the massive number of experiments going on, right now, to invent the future of news. (See his post for some examples.) "The answers are out there," he wrote, "in every startup (journalism focused or otherwise), community, blog, micro-blogging, micro-financing and CMS on the web."

How does that work, you ask? What does it mean that "the answers are out there in every startup?"

This is standard innovation practice. This is how Silicon Valley works. Thousands of players dive in, all with good ideas about how to make a particular industry work. They put their ideas in play, and, out there, in the market, and over time, the ones with legs emerge. But the ones that don't ultimately succeed also contribute. Because others learn from their experiments. They learn what works and what doesn't. They get new ideas for something new to try.

"What we need right now is 10,000 journalism startups," Cohn wrote. "Of these 9,000 will fail, 1,000 will find ways to sustain themselves for a brief period of time, 98 will find mediocre success and financial security and two will come out as new media equivalents to the New York Times."

I agree. This, simply, is how we are going to find the future. And we will find it. Through experimentation and trial & error. Eventually we will find the future. It will look nothing like what we know journalism to be (which is why those startups Cohn mentions can seem so baffling to traditional journalists). But we will get there.

* DEFN: "Crowdfunding": Getting the public to pay for your project.

The industrial purveyors of consensus

Just read this description of the traditional media by HuffPo Off-the-Bus project coordinator / PressThink blogger / NYU j-school prof Jay Rosen:

...the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news...

Indeed, that's how it was.

One-to-many, because newsfolks owned the delivery channels. They controlled what went into their channel. From them (the one) to the many (everyone in the community).

Today, of course, the fact that anyone can publish has transformed the situation in one that the tech world calls many-to-many. Anyone can broadcast (the many) to everyone else (the other many).

"Consensus-is-ours" because the printing press owners, ie: the journalists, decided what the narrative was, what the interpretation was, thereby creating the illusion of consensus.

With myriad voices online, the illusion has been shattered. There is no consensus anymore. There is no single narrative. There is no single interpretation.

To some traditional journalists, the myriad of narratives and interpretations is confounding. They assume that those differing viewpoints are driven by agenda. Because if there were no agenda, there would be objective reporting. And, they believe, objective reporting generates a single, consensus view of what happened and what it means.

And yet, that's not what it means at all. Anyone who's seen "Rashamon" can tell you that. The illusion of objectivity was a by-product of the fact that there was only a single channel through which to tell a story. The fact that there now are myriad channels (myriad viewpoints) doesn't mean that no one's objective. It only shows what we've always known: There are myriad ways of recalling and interpreting the same event.

The "one-to-many, consensus-is-ours" world was certainly an easier place to live. Readers didn't have to do so much work, and journalists could go to be certain they'd gotten the story "right." The new world requires more work of readers and more confidence, or at less attachment to being perceived as an authority, on the part of journalists. But just because it's a harder place to live, doesn't mean it's wrong.

Photo courtesy of David Silverline. Creative Commons licence.

Four ways of looking at Mayhill Fowler

You know Mayhill Fowler. She's the Bay Area woman who notoriously splashed Barack Obama's private "bitter" voters comments across the Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" blog -- setting off a furor in journalism circles about on-the-record and off-the-record quotes and about the long-held rule of identifying oneself as a journalist. People in traditional journalism might have thought Fowler "learned her lesson" after the incident, given the vitriol and diatribe launched her way by professional commentators. But apparently she didn't. Or, alternatively, perhaps she didn't believe there actually was a lesson to be learned. Because two months later, she was at it again.

Fowler is the person who launched Bill Clinton's evisceration of Todd Purdum and his Vanity Fair article on the former prez into cyberspace. You know, the audio of Clinton calling Purdum "sleazy", "slimy", and a "scumbag." The comments quickly made it into the mainstream media, provoking yet further examination and excoriation of Fowler's methods.

Those in the traditional media were outraged that Fowler wasn't "playing by the rules." She didn't identify herself as a reporter. She reported comments a source might reasonably have thought were off-the-record. One NPR journalist even asked whether what she was doing was "fair."

But this is the wrong way to think about Fowler and what she did.

These are the kinds of comments made by people who can't see how the world has changed. The're tantamount to GM asking whether it's fair that Toyota isn't using oil to power its vehicles.

So how should we think about Fowler's behavior?

-- If you're a politician: There is no off-the-record anymore
"Off the record" was an informal agreement between those who spoke and those who had the capability to publish or broadcast what was spoken. Now that anyone has the ability to broadcast anything, no one -- not only politicans, but also ex-husbands, former bosses, dubious retailers -- can be sure that their questionable behavior will not be thrown up on the Web for millions, from Auburn to Zimbabwe, to view. They used to say, "Don't put anything in email that you wouldn't want displayed on the jumbo monitors in Times Square." The new rule might be -- for politicians and private citizens alike: Don't do or say anything, anywhere that you wouldn't want showing up on YouTube.

This isn't a sign of anything that's changed in journalism. It's a sign of how the larger world has changed. When anyone can publish or broadcast anything to the world, nothing can be guaranteed to be kept out of the public sphere.

-- If you're a professional journalist: This is a good thing
Stop thinking about Fowler's posts as "bad journalism," and start thinking about them more like leaked documents. As a journalist, you're not allowed to go into a company or government office and steal documents. But it's kosher if an employee gives them to you. Similarly, if someone with access to a publishing platform posts useful information that you, as a professional, could not have ethically obtained, it's fair game.

Don't compare Fowler to yourself and berate her because she doesn't follow the same rules as you. She's an amateur, not a professional. So think of her more the way you'd think of a private blogger who wrote on their public blog that a veep in their company was embezzeling millions. If their revelations can be substantiated, all the better that this stuff comes to light.

-- If you're a professional journalist: You still need to follow the rules
Just because a blogger is operating by other rules doesn't mean the old rules go out the door for the professionals. In fact, not only is it all the more important for the professionals to adhere to them, they also become a competitive advantage. Subjects will increasingly evaluate individual reporters based on their personal reputations and will increasingly choose to do business with the ones who have proven themselves to be fair and ethical.

-- If you're Jay Rosen: Stop trying to defend Mayhill Fowler's work
NYU J-school professor (and author of one of our favorite blogs, PressThink) Jay Rosen directs HuffPo's Off the Bus project. Per Rosen, Off the Bus has 2,500 contributors, which Rosen calls "citizen journalists." I eschew the term; it's flopped around so much it doesn't mean anything. I call the people contributing to "Off the Bus": "Random people who happen to be places, see or hear interesting things, and are motivated to share them with the world in text, audio, and/or video via the 'Off the Bus' site."

The above description is not meant to disparage. I don't mean to imply that, just because someone is not a capital-J "journalist," that what they have to share isn't newsworthy, that their observations aren't interesting, or that they can't produce compelling copy, audio, and/or video. But I do think we need to be precise about the phenomenon. Calling them "journalists" confuses the issue because we do have certain attributes we associate with journalists, and these people are not necessarily exhibiting those attributes. So call them contributors; I'm good with that. But not journalists. Not yet, at least.

Similarly, Rosen should stop trying to defend Fowler as if she were an actual journalist. He should stop because he simply doesn't need to. Let me back up a second. After the Clinton broo-ha-ha, Rosen wrote the following to Politico's Michael Calderone:

“This wasn't an interview where the former president sat for questions with Mayhill Fowler. It was a shouted question at a rope line.... Would it have been better if she said, 'Mr. President, I'm Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus and I write about the campaign...'? In the interest of full disclosure, I guess it would be. But in the press of the moment I can understand why she didn't.”

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this explanation feels disingenous. What Off the Bus is doing is an experiment, an experiment in gathering news in new ways. Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting I think Off the Bus tells its contributors not to identify themselves. Rather, when you're working with 2,500 amateurs in the fast-paced world of a presidential campaign, you can't possibly expect that they're going to master traditional journalism practices and then follow them to-the-letter, even if you do have guidelines you've asked them to follow (which Off the Bus does, per Rosen's email to Calderone).

If I were Rosen, I'd simply say the following: "Off the Bus is an experiment in gathering news using 2,500 motivated amateurs. We do our best to instruct them in traditional journalistic practices, but we don't necessarily use their adherence to those practices as a criteria for deciding whether to publish their reports. At this point, we believe we are performing a greater public service by sharing the valuable facts, quotes, and insights they are gathering than in withholding material because it wasn't obtained according to traditional journalistic standards. In the long term, we will use the learnings from this experiment to innovate new ways of newsgathering that hopefully will strengthen the practice of journalism."

I'm fine with that. I don't think it's a big deal that Off the Bus is prioritizing scoops over traditional journalistic practices. It's the Wild West out there. We're all trying to figure out the future. But transparency is key. Just tell us what you're doing, why, and how, and we'll be good with it. And that's why Rosen really should simply call it like it is, rather than trying to shoehorn the new stuff they're doing into the old frameworks.