That old bit about glass houses

Here's the second nugget worth considering from Howell Raines piece on Romanesko in Portfolio. (The first nugget was here.)

He notes that, "The fogies are in an uproar about the internet's glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in Romanesko's old bathrobes."

Then adds, "Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe... counsels us to ignore the 'journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation.' We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be...."

I agree. Traditional journalists have to be careful about getting all up in arms about the current state of reporting online. It's that old line about glass houses. There were plenty of transgressions from the canon when news came in paper form. It's just that there wasn't an efficient mechanism to identify them and hold the culprits up for scrutiny.

Photo courtesy of lisachamberlin. Creative Commons license.

The demand is not plummeting; it was never there

Howell Raines' mildly interesting piece on Jim Romenesko in the current issue of Portfolio is probably not worth the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but it does have a couple of nuggets worth reflecting on. I bring them to you here.

The first is Raines' observation that "it's not technology per se that's killing newspapers; it's plummeting demand for quality information."

I would propose that the demand for quality information is not plummeting. Rather, that it never was there to begin with. Technology has made it possible for readers to go elsewhere for the things they actually were seeking in newspapers. That is the phenomenon that is being revealed here.

We don't really believe that readers bought newspapers because they wanted the latest news from city hall, do we? If we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that readers bought newspapers for the sports scores, the stock quotes, the TV and movie listings, maybe even the comics. The news? No. The news was simply a freebie thrown in with the other stuff customers were actually buying.

Readers were also buying newspapers--and reading the news--for other reasons that had nothing to do with the content itself, nothing to do with any desire to consume "quality information. Reasons like:

-- The desire to feel connected to the community

-- The desire to feel on top of what's going on in the community

-- The desire not to look stupid at the next cocktail party

In the design world, we call these "affective" attributes, the word "affect" being a stand-in for "emotional." Affective attributes are those that generate specific emotions or feelings in a person using a product. Not everyone who bought an iPhone did so because they thought it was the most useful and beautiful cell phone out there. Some bought it because they wanted to look cool, hip, down with the latest. Some bought it because they wanted to feel like they were on the cutting edge. Some bought it because they were afraid of missing out on something special.

Many purchase decisions are driven by these kinds of factors, rather than the practical value of the object in question. Exhibit A: Killer muscle cars that don't actually run all that well. The "quality" in the information? That's like the medicine in the cough syrup. No child who ever agreed to slurp down cough syrup did it for the medicine. They did it for the cherry flavor.

This might sound depressing, but it should be encouraging. Because it offers the key to the solution: Figure out what your readers really want from you--whether it's the sports scores or the desire to feel connected, or both, probably--and then figure out how to deliver the news so that the reader gets those things they're actually looking for.

And accept that there never was, and probably never will be, any meaningful demand for quality information. Except among a tiny minority of news junkies, and those of us in the business. Sure, when something like the domestic wire-tapping story or the Walter Reed scandal come to light, people are interested. But on a day-to-day basis? Really, they're more interested in the sports scores. And the stock quotes.

Photo courtesy of Yogi. Creative Commons license.

When is a blogger not a blogger?

A New York magazine article from last October* trumpeted "blogger" Laurel Ptak's coup in nailing a gallery curating gig. A while back, Ptak, a photographer by passion, designer by trade, and apparently inveterate Web surfer, had noticed how many amazing photographs she was discovering tucked away in various nooks and cranies of the Internet. Wanting to help others discover these works of art, she decided to use a blog as a way to collect them all in one place and share them with whoever might be interested.

As things sometimes happen in the blogosphere, Ptak's project gained a following. And where a following develops, big shots eventually take notice. So last year, Higher Pictures, a Madison Avenue gallery founded by a former exec at Magnum Photos, invited Ptak to curate a show.

New York breathlessly reported on the feat. A blogger, it exclaimed, curating a show! A real live show! It observed this was a rising trend. "Shows curated by bloggers," it said, were becoming increasingly common. Ptak was part of a growing breed who have "translated blogging success into the realm of real-world galleries."

None of this is inaccurate. Technically. But the framing is all wrong. Which is problematic. It's this wrongheaded framing that is making many in the traditional media struggle with understanding what digital media is all about. And until we understand the online world correctly, we can't move into it effectively.

New York magazine framed Ptak as blogger. The piece seems to marvel at the fact that a blogger, one of those great unwashed masses who sit at their keyboards and alternately pontificate about world happenings and navel-gaze about the flotsam of their own lives... it seemed to marvel that one of those people could have made it into the rarefied world of New York art galleries.

And yet, this is wrong. Ptak is not a "blogger." She's a photographer, a designer, an artist, a curator, who decided to use the Internet as her medium for creating her own gallery. And in leveraging these tools, gained notice. She did the same thing a physical-world gallery owner would have done. Just using different tools.

"If I wanted to start a gallery, I would not have the resources to do it," Ptak told ARTINFO.com (the online home of the group that publishes such magazines as Art+ Auction and Modern Painters), "but the tools that I use to make iheartphotograph.com are completely free, totally modest. Blogs open the door to a lot of people to participate in the conversation about art and to be able to find an audience."

So here's my suggestion: Let's start getting more thoughtful about flinging around the term "blogger." It's both loaded on the one hand and used to refer to so many different things on the other as to have lost the specificity that we communicators strive for. It's as if we called anyone who used a building for something "buildingers." A gallery owner wouldn't be a "gallery owner," they'd be a "buildinger." A bakery wouldn't be a "bakery," it'd be a "buildinger." A florist wouldn't be a "florist," it'd be a "buildinger." Doesn't make much sense, does it?

So let's stop thinking of blogs as a product, and instead recognize them for what they are: a tool used for myriad purposes. And instead of thinking of people who use blogs as "bloggers," let's think of them as what they are: "people who use blogs." In Ptak's case, let's call her a photographer and curator who uses a blog to exhibit photographs. In Josh Marshall's case, a reporter and commentator to report on politics. Hey, even Perez Hilton... call him what he is: a gossip-monger.

* The magazines stack up, and I get to them when I can.

Paradigm shifts always provoke resistance

When Copernicus suggested that the Earth traveled around the sun, people freaked out. When people began to suggest that the Earth was round rather than flat, people freaked out. Today people are freaking out when it's suggested that oil won't last much longer.

Any time new ideas, new approaches call into question something previously held sacred or provoke radical re-evaluations of previously seemingly inviolable world views, people freak out. They resist. They come up with millions of reasons why the new approach is wrong, misguided, or downright crazy. If possible, they'll even try to burn you at the stake.

It's natural, of course. Having one's world view taken away from one is enormously disorienting. Dizzying. Downright scary, especially if your livelihood depends on it.

This is what is happening in mainstream media today. Yes, there are some people who get it and are moving boldly into the new (unknown and uncertain) digital future. But many are resisting. That's simply par for the course when a paradigm shift is taking place. The paradigm shift that says newspapers, in their current incarnations, may no longer be necessary. That the canon reporters followed for most of the last 100 years may no longer be the best rules to follow.

It's unfortunate, of course, that these changes can't happen gradually, that we can't slowly evolve from the old newspaper institution into fully developed new digital forms, so that traditional newsfolk can see that much of what they hold dear about journalism isn't going to disappear. But unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Science does not progress linearly, the late Berkeley professor Thomas Kuhn wrote in his seminal 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, it progresses via "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions"--paradigm shifts--in which "one conceptual world view is replaced by another." Kuhn was talking about science, but he could just as easily have been talking about technology. And in technology, he could have been talking about what we are witnessing in the world of media today.

A violent shift is taking place in the world of journalism today. Resistance, as I tell my never-left-mainstream-media friends, is futile. The best hope to make it through the revolution is dive in, try to understand it from within, and help influence the direction it takes.

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How Dan Rather could have kept his job

It's been four years since the flawed "60 Minutes" report on George Bush's National Guard service and Dan Rather's subsequent ignominious separation from CBS. But the incident still holds important lessons for newspeople today. Namely: Rather and his team tripped up not because they weren't doing good journalism, but because they were using the "old world" rules in a "new world" game. And it bit them in the proverbial patootie.

In the old world, investigative reporting went something like this: Get a hint of something juicy, spend months tracking it down, all the while holding your cards close to your chest to prevent competitors from finding out what you're up to and, dang it all, scooping you on your own story. Next, get your ducks in a row, double-check your piece, and then release it to the world in one fell swoop. Make a spectacular splash, and don't forget to take a victory lap so your journalism peers can genuflect in the face of your total awesomeness.

Because let's admit it, part of what motivates journalists to do kick-butt investigative reporting is to reap kudos from their peers. Don't get me wrong. Many reporters absolutely do care about the subjects they investigate. And for some, exposing wrongdoing is, in fact, their only motivation. But for many others, part of what keeps them slogging through the long, lonely, and distinctly unglamorous days of investigative reporting are visions of the recognition they will receive down the road. And not just reporters. What editor doesn't, after all, take into account "Pulitzer potential" when deciding whether to greenlight a story that will take one (or two) of their warm bodies out of the daily grind for the indeterminate future?

But here's the problem with playing the old game in the new world: Get one thing wrong, and you'll get skewered. Maybe even lose your job.

This didn't used to be a problem. Not because investigative reporters didn't make mistakes. They almost certainly did. But the difference is that reporters enjoyed what some today might call a special advantage: They owned the printing presses. Mechanisms for bringing their errors to light in any meaningful way simply didn't exist. No public commons existed for readers to get together and start bringing collective weight to things that seemed off. Like, "Hey, that thing you said about that boat was wrong. It doesn't use the XYZ motor. It uses an ABC motor." And, "Yeah, you're right. My dad had one of those when I was a kid. I remember him complaining that he wanted the XYZ motor, but it couldn't fit." And, "Indeed, I worked in a boat shop, and our customers used to ask for the XYZ motor, and we had to tell them they couldn't get it."

With the Web, all that changes. With the Web, everyone enjoys the special advantage. Errors no longer escape scrutiny. Just the opposite. Mistakes get analyzed and magnified six ways to Sunday. In the new world, reporters simply can't get away with the things they got away with before.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "60 Minutes" team knowingly had doubts about the documents which cast shadows on Bush's National Guard service. They purportedly consulted with independent experts to verify the documents' authenticity. All well and good. That's standard journalistic practice. And in the old world, that was probably good enough. In the new world, however, it's not even sufficient.

The difference is in the confidence rate. Let's say the experts' assessments give you an 80% confidence rate that what you have is kosher. The experts' credentials are impeccable, and they say they are reasonably sure that the documents are legit. But they're not 100% sure. With the amount of information at their disposal, they say they can't be 100% sure, only 80%. In the old world, 80% might have been as good as you could get. There wasn't an efficient mechanism to reach 100% confidence. So 80% was good enough, and you legitimately went out the door with that.

In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. How? By putting the material out to the world and letting the crowd respond.

At the 2006 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, new media thought leader Dan Gillmor suggested that "60 Minutes" could have saved itself buckets of headaches if, sometime during its investigation, it had simply posted portions of the documents online and asked for help verifying their authenticity. Given the amount of totally random, yet holding-a-piece-of-the-proverbial-elephant regular folk who weighed in after the fact (typewriter enthusiasts, a guy who was a Navy clerk in the early '70s, a former Air Force personnel specialist), it seems reasonable to believe that CBS could have determined the documents were, in fact, suspect--long before their report went on air.

So this is the point: In the old world, an 80% confidence rate was perhaps as high as you could get. You could get away with going out the door with an 80% confidence rate. In the new world, however, you often can get to 100%. We didn't have the tools before. We do now. So a journalist today has no excuse for not using the tools at their disposal to achieve that 100% confidence rate.

"But what about our scoops?!" some will protest. "If we post to the world what we're working on, we'll lose our scoops."

Hmm. I see what you're saying. Here are some thoughts:

-- It's possible that Rather and crew could have gotten the help they needed without tipping their hand. Simply post a portion of the documents and see what people say.

-- It's more likely, however, that they would had to have been more forthcoming. Online audiences only get involved when they feel invested in the person/site asking for their help. It's hard to feel curious, much less invested in something if a reporter/website only offers a blind shred of something. It's much easier to feel invested if there's a big hullaboo going on.

So yes, in leveraging the new tools to try to get to 100% confidence rate about the veracity of their stories, reporters are more likely than not going to have to tip their hands about what they're working on. This is a bad thing only if your goal is to get scoops rather than to bring the truth to light. And given that prioritizing a scoop over getting to the truth can bite you in the butt, as it did "60 Minutes," it's increasingly going to be in every reporter's interest to go for accuracy, scoops be damned.

The good news is that scoops aren't going to mean as much in the future as they did in the past. Newspaper scoops were important in two-newspaper towns. When as a reader, you're only getting your news once a day, you want to subscribe to the newspaper that's not a day behind. Online, however, all sites get everything more or less immediately. Maybe there's a lag of a few hours between when one site breaks something and others confirm it. But a few hours doesn't mean much to readers. (Most are not spending their waking hours waiting for the next big news item. They do have lives....) Scoops are not going to drive reader preferences. Much more important are going to be things like accuracy, how well the site helps the reader understand the significance of the things it covers, how engaging the writing is, and how easy the site is to use. Scoops? Pshaw.

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On the Web, your readers are users

"In print, your customers, the people who buy your newspaper, are readers. But when they consume your content online, they become users."

This from Khoi Vinh, the New York Times website's Design Director, who spoke at the most recent Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

It's an important concept. It's easy to look at the Web, see words and pictures, and assume that the people who visit your news website are looking for the exact same experience they have when they read your newspaper. Ie: "Tell me, newspaper people, what's going on in the world." In fact, however, they're not. The difference in the user's expectations is based on the tool.

Pick up a piece of paper, and your brain tells you: "This is a piece of paper. There are a few things you can do with this. You can read what it says. You can make notes on it (and share those notes with anyone to whom you physically hand the paper). If you really want to, you can fold this up into a paper airplane." But that's it.

Approach a computer, however, and your brain tells you, "You can use this to do a jillion things. Play a game. Give it information and get information back (eg: Orbitz). Post information for anyone in the world to see. Create a map. Etc... Oh, yeah, and you can read stuff too."

So when a reader approaches your news site, their brain is a priori telling them they should expect to have some control over the stuff on the screen, and they should be able to participate in what's happening there. A fundamental principle of design (any design: the design of buildings, tools, doorknobs, as well as computer interfaces) is: "If your user has certain expectations about how things will work, and you don't meet those expectations, you will lose your user."

Which means newspeople need to think differently about the stuff they put on their websites than the way they think about the stuff they put in their hard-copy newspapers. As I wrote previously, on the Web, content is not enough. You need to give your user control and ways to participate.

Image courtesy of b_d_solis. Creative Commons License

Time to Face the Facts: Newspapers weren't really all that great

At a cocktail party last night, a guy I met, a former reporter, raised one of the most common objections to Web-based news: "Sure there's a lot out there," he said. "But a lot of it is crap."

I hear mainstream media folks making this point all the time. But here's what bugs me about it: It assumes that everything that appeared in newspapers in the past was quality journalism. As in: "The problem with Web-based news is that, while some of it is good, a lot of it is crap. Don't we owe something more to the public, something like the fine journalism that has always been produced by newspapers?"

The thing is, a lot of what has appeared in newspapers has been crap. Don't you agree? Whenever I hit the road in the States, I always pick up local newspapers. From Idaho to Arkansas, Texas to Illinois, I'll always grab a copy of any local newspaper I come across. Not just the big ones. All of them, from the tinsy tiniest to the biggest of the big. For no reason other than sheer curiosity. I want to learn what's going on across the country. And even more, how people think and view the world. Nothing will give you greater insight into a community than what they cover in their local newspaper and how they write about it.

Based on those perusals, I can confidently claim the following: A lot of newspaper reporting and writing sucks. Sure, the topics they cover are important: The goings-on of local governments, new business deals, even local sports. But do most newspapers write about those things in compelling ways? No. Let's be honest. A lot of the stories appearing in newspapers across the country are either painfully amateurish or mind-numbingly formulaic. And as for the "investigative journalism" journalists worry will be lost in the digital era, the "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted...", if we're honest about that too, most newspapers don't do a whole bunch of it on any kind of a regular basis. Really. I challenge you to pick up any random newspaper in the country today (other than the biggie of the bigs), leaf through its pages, and try to find a single article that genuinely is holding some institution accountable or calling into question--in a meaningful, not just a taking-down-dictation kind of way--something being done by someone in power. Nine out of ten times, you're not going to find it.

So here's one more sacred cow that many newsfolks need to let go of: This idea that the demise of newspapers will be a terrible thing because newspapers have been performing such an important public service. They haven't. Or, at least, they haven't been performing it in such a powerful and consistent way that the service can't be similarly delivered digitally.

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