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.

What we can learn from the new iPhone launch

Yesterday, Steve Jobs launched the new version of the iPhone. The move was met with the usual fanfare and hoopla that accompanies such announcements in the world of techies and Apple afficionados. But the move also contained a lesson for those of us in the news business.

Many traditional newspeople take a look at news on the Internet and recoil. They see flash and snark and gossip and... well, not a lot that looks like the journalism they have long revered. And maybe they're right about what they see. The problem, though, is that they're seeing what is here today, not what will be there tomorrow.

Apple launched the next generation iPhone because the first version wasn't good enough. In the tech world, this isn't considered failure. It's business as usual. Every product goes out the door as "v1". Companies then learn from real-world use of their product what works and what's lacking. They go back to the drawing board, tweak, and launch v2. And so on. Internet Explorer, for example, is on v7. So is iTunes. Microsoft Word is at least v11.

The key to having faith in the ability of the Internet to deliver the news we care about lies in having faith that technology evolves. You might not be able to do everything you want to today. But you will be able to tomorrow.

Photo courtesy of chakote. Creative Commons license

Before you can find, you must first let go

AdvertisingAge's 3-minute video roundup today features Newsweek senior staff writer Johnnie Roberts telling the audience at last week's "Future of Media" panel that everyone at the magazine, editorial and business alike, is descending on this year's gaggle of interns, hoping they'll reveal the secret to making social networking work--presumably because Newsweek folks think that's the key to making the Internet work for magazines.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. It is encouraging that editors and biz folk are reaching out to the younger, and perhaps savvier, folks in this biz, instead of trying to figure it all out on their own.

But what's wrong with the picture is a bunch of senior staff hoping to find a goose laying a golden egg -- the idea that the key to survival is to find something out there and bring it in here and then, boom, you're done.

The paradigm is wrong.

Yes, there's plenty of good stuff out there. But traditional news organizations will never be able to leverage it effectively until they first let go of outdated ways of thinking about news. You can't stuff new tools into old ways of thinking and expect that they'll work.

Andre Gide once said, "In order to discover new lands, you must first be willing to lose sight of the shore." In order to find the future of news, traditional newspeople must first be willing to say goodbye some of the things they know and hold sacred. Ideas that were entirely appropriate in the old world--on the old shores, if you will--but either won't work or are actually counter-productive in the new one.

The idea, for example, that news must be delivered seriously. That you can't have a voice, a personality, a point of view in your writing. The idea, for example, that you always have to write authoritatively, as if you know the score, never sharing with your audience the parts you do understand and the parts you don't. The idea, for example, that news is broadcast. We tell you. You listen. Rather than a conversation.

It will only be in letting go of those things that don't work, that traditional newspeople will be able to begin the journey to the new shores. And it will be hard. Because they will have to let go of the old long before they grasp the new. They will have to spend days, weeks, months, even years perhaps, bobbing in confusing seas, not really getting it, feeling horribly off balance. The exact anathema to what traditional newspeople like to feel.

And yet, they are entirely capable of it, if they only allow themselves to give it a shot. For what, after all, is digging up a story than that very experience? The starting out, not really getting it, not being able to see the story, but just continuing, continuing, continuing, asking more questions, and gathering more information, until finally the picture becomes clear. We do this every day in our reporting. We simply must find the courage to do it in our business as well.

Photo courtesy of tiarescott

On the Web, content is not enough

MediaBistro's FishBowl NY blog recently teased former MTV head honcho Michael Wolf about a YouTube video entitled "Help Me Find a Job." But in doing so, they missed some of the more interesting things he had to say.

Specifically:

"Traditional media companies don't understand that, on the Web, content is not enough, that it's about tools and applications, and it's about functionality that you can give the user, versus just content."

I recently interviewed the editor of RunnersWorld.com, dubbed this year's best online magazine by the American Society of Magazine Editors. He told me that the areas of the site that get the most traffic were the discussion forums (not surprising) and the Training Log. The what? The Training Log. A simple application where users can track each run taken, distance, time, even the specific pair of shoes they wore. Runners are data nuts, he told me. They loved the tool because it offered them an easy way to track their performance.

So the main traffic driver was not some six-piece investigative report on doping practices by elite runners. Or a comparison of the best running gear. Or even a heart-warming profile of a runner who had overcome some great adversity.* It was a tool, a fairly simple one to build at that, that was useful to readers on a daily or weekly basis.

In Silicon Valley, we call this "build once, sell to many." You build a software product and then sell it to millons of people. That's how you make money. In the case of the Training Log, you're actually "selling" to the same reader over and over, since it's something they return to continually. (And, of course, "selling" here means "enticing to return." The actual selling is to advertisers--the selling of all those ad impressions generated by return visits.)

Individual stories are more like custom projects. You build once and sell once, since few readers will return to a story they've already read.

I'm not saying, of course, that newspapers shouldn't run stories. That, after all, is the purpose of the news business. But to make money, newspeople need to think beyond only doing stories. It's a new way of thinking, maybe one that's hard for some newspeople to wrap their minds around. It was never something on journalism's radar screen before, because it wasn't something the old technology--ie: paper--could do. But the new technology--the digital world--can. So now, savvy newspeople will be the ones who think in terms of tools in addition to stories. Who create useful tools readers will come back to again and again. Traffic, after all, drives revenue. And revenue is the key to survival.

* I'm making these up.

How to think about the new Slate Group

The New York Times reported today that the Washington Post Company has created a new business unit, The Slate Group, to develop new Internet properties. Slate.com EIC Jacob Weisberg is heading the organization, which today includes Slate; Slate V, the magazine's new video unit; The Root, an online magazine the Washington Post created for black Americans; and The Big Money, a business site to launch later this year.

Journalism observers will doubtlessly start stumbling over themselves to dissect the move, trying to figure out why the Washington Post thinks this is a good idea, what Weisberg's going to do, and what the secret sauce is going to be. Others will probably jump on it immediately, tearing the idea down and writing its obituary before it's even started.

Someone with an innovation mindset will look at this differently.

-- This is great news.
It's going to take thousands of experiments to discover the forms of journalism that are going to be successful at attracting and retaining readers going forward. Experiments cost money. We should be grateful for each and every dollar invested. Thank you Washington Post Company.

-- The Slate Group is not going to find the answer.
Anyone who expects that The Slate Group will go into their kitchen, mix up their ingredients, and come out with the winning recipe that's going to save all our butts doesn't understand how innovation happens. It takes numerous iterations to figure out the successful design of any new product. Look how many evolutions of the personal computer it took to get from the Apple Lisa to the powerful tools we have today. Same with cellphones. Remember those brick telephones we had in the late '80s? Not exactly the kind of thing everyone and their grandmother would want to carry around, the way they do today.

-- The Slate Group is going to find some answers.
Any time you run an experiment, you learn useful information. The Root probably knows a bunch of things today about what works--and what doesn't work--in building an audience among African Americans, that it didn't know, and maybe no one knew, before it launched this past January. Similarly, The Slate Group will learn a ton about online journalism by throwing up its sites and seeing what works. (And yes, of course, they already know a lot. Slate.com has been hugely successful. But there's still tons more to learn, to ensure the future of journalism.)

Hopefully, The Slate Group will share their learnings with the rest of the journalism community. The competition mindset still prevails in our business. Everyone wants to hold their cards close to their chest. But as I've written before, this is no time for hoarding learnings. We're in a race for survival. On the one side are the slowly dying newspapers. On the other are the innovations in the new medium. We want the innovators to figure out the new system before the old one dies. Sharing learnings accellerates innovation and will make it more likely we'll cross that line before newspapers collapse completely.

Think like a designer

The people who figure out the future of news are going to have to think like innovators or, alternatively, like designers.

An old Fast Company article I clipped long ago and came across recently cited two key designer qualities that probably don't come naturally to most newspeople but that will be essential for figuring out the future:

-- There are no perfect solutions
"The work style in conventional companies is to seek the perfect answer. That's inefficient and slow. Designers 'try it, prototype it, improve it'--and move on."

Similarly, newspeople aren't comfortable with the old "throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks." We're trained to get it right. Get it fast, of course, but get it right. When it comes to figuring out what new forms of journalism are going to attract and retain readers, however, we need to toss that mindset out the window. Instead, experiment. Accept that about 70% of your experiments will flop. Get over the idea that a newsperson should never be wrong in public and instead get used to the fact that your flops will all be public. But your flops will also help you move forward, faster. You'll quickly learn what works and what doesn't--knowledge you can use to inform your next experiment. Which leads to the next point.

-- Don't wait for the proof
"Traditional companies reward those who 'prove that something actually operates or that something must be.' Design shops reward those with the foresight and courage to act on what 'might be.'"

Same as above. Have a reasonable intuition about something that might attract or retain readers? Give it a shot. After all, it's the Web. It doesn't take a huge amount effort to throw something up. And if it doesn't work, it's just as easy to take it down.

From "The Business of Design," by Bill Breen, Fast Company, April 2005

Photo courtesy of Craig Anderson

Cathie Black's not worried

"As long as we're smart, and we're open minded, and we're all change agents, I think we're going to be fine."

-- Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines
speaking in San Francisco, January 17, 2007

(a bit out of date, yes, but I just listened to this for the first time)