journalism

On journalists' & pundits' attitudes about new media: It's the privilege, stupid!

3 October 2010 - 11:47am | Laura Scott

For years now we've seen people entrenched in, married to, paid by or validated by old media attack new media, "those bloggers," Twitter, Facebook … the Internet in general. It's been fading lately as publishers especially have started to embrace and integrate new media into their publishing strategies. But there are still holdouts, many of whom seem not just ignorant but willfully ignorant.

Malcolm Gladwell's weak dismissal of "weak ties"

Gladwell's New Yorker article was the buzz on Twitter. One excerpt:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

…proving that old media journalists are as adept as anyone in the straw-man rhetorical technique.

Gladwell's main argument seems to cling to the notion that things like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s could not have happened in new media. The thing is he seems to think that this is a notion that all of us "evangelists of social media" cling to. His is a rant against ghosts and phantoms to make a point, not an investigative exercise.

I love Gladwell's books, especially Blink. But this column is more an expression of his attitude towards social media rather than an insight into social media. It's a tract for dismissal, not a lesson towards understanding.

In a Guardian article on Gladwell's thoughts, journalist Tim Adams, who, by the way, describes us all as "insects":

The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them.

…does end up revealing a truth behind Gladwell's views:

The New Yorker, for which Gladwell is a stellar correspondent, sees itself as the spiritual home of a kind of reading and writing and engagement that could seem threatened by the attention overload and surface concerns of online skimming. I spoke to Gladwell a while back about his use of computers: he never spent much time on the internet, he said: "I run out of things to look up really quickly."

So Gladwell in fact doesn't even know much about social media, doesn't have a use for them, and doesn't even find the internet of much use. Obviously he's not interested in what other people might have to say. Why would he? He has his saying machines (The New Yorker, his books, his occasional appearances on television). What could anyone possibly offer to a man on top of the literary heap?

So why would Gladwell even bother to take on a subject of which, he admits, he knows little? Because he's a writer for The New Yorker, and that in itself makes his views relevant? I not only like Gladwell, I love The New Yorker (as a subscriber for years). But his taking on social media strikes me as hubris at best, enabled by the blindness of privilege.

Real Time Privilege with Bill Maher

On Real Time with Bill Maher [warning: heavy Flash site] this past Friday, we were treated to the entertainment of Professor Cornell West, journalist and former political flack Joe Klein, and Bill Maher ruminating over why people would want to "share" — i.e., blog or use Twitter or participate on Facebook — as if that were some great mystery.

And mystery it is to these privileged gentlemen.

At one point, Arianna Huffington, who, along with comic actor David Cross rounded out this evening's panel, makes the point that social media can be used for good or ill. She runs through several examples of people using social media for good:

Maher: But most of it is bullshit.
Huffington: Not at all!
Maher: Oh come on! See, this is my problem with Facebook, is this kind of stuff, to me, makes sure no one will ever read a book again, because they just don't have time, because it's so easy to spend all your time, [mimics texting on a handheld] "I took a shit and ate a banana." And that's posting on Facebook and 8 people go "I like that" and "I did, too" and it's — Betty White, I mean I love Betty White said it right when she said, "Now that I know what it is, it sounds like a huge waste of time!"
…
Huffington: But the same people, the same people who are doing that now would probably have spent seven hours sitting on the couch watching bad television and you would not be complaining about it. Self-expression is the new entertainment. Some self-expression is trivial and some self-expression is great. But it's no different than watching bad tv.
…
West: But it's still narcissism on the one hand. You got narcissism on the one hand, all the forms of narcissism, [gestures with other hand] you got the courage to be empathetic, sympathetic, concerned about the plight of others, sensitive to the pain of others.
Maher: Why is it that this generation, though, wants to share everything?...
Cross: Because you can get famous….
Maher: You mean like Tia Tequila?
…
Klein: …The difference now is that, because of these technologies, it's in everybody's face….

—transcribed from second video embedded on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-maher-elections-2010-tea-party-big-tent_b_747795.html

Maher is a pig-headed, but entertaining, boob. Klein is a Washington insider. But I expected West to know better. At one point in the same episode, he observes:

Rahm Emanuel exemplifies contemporary cynicism and old-fashioned arrogance in American politics.

And yet, in his broad-brush dismissal of all of us who don't get to appear on talk shows, he expresses his own brand of cynicsm and old-fashioned arrogance towards people who express themselves online. He, Klein and Maher all seem blind to their own privilege as media celebrities. Their privilege is that old media have granted them camera time and space in print.

What these men did not ask is why they themselves feel the need to share. And why their motivations would be any different than the motivations of the unwashed masses who are not privileged by old media but are newly empowered by publication technologies that bypass the old media scarcity controls.

And yet, when there's blame to go around….

It seemed this past several days that everywhere on the old media we were presented with talking heads wringing their hands over the tragic Rutgers student suicide after being outed and mocked by his roommate and dorm neighbor … and how Facebook is the problem. The best response I've seen on this is from Anil Dash:

It's important to note that blaming technology for horrendous, violent displays of homophobia or racism or simple meanness lets adults like parents and teachers absolve themselves of the responsibility to raise kids free from these evils. By creating language like "cyberbullying", they abdicate their own role in the hateful actions, and blame the (presumably mysterious and unknowable) new technologies that their kids use for these awful situations. Somehow, when I was frequently cross-dressing or wearing makeup or identifying as queer as a high schooler, I was still able to be threatened with violence, even though my tormentors had no mobile phones or laptop computers. (I will point out, for nerd cred, that I was the first person in my school to bring a mobile phone or laptop to class.)

I was thinking of this obliquely when Jose Antonio Vargas asked me a bit about my perspective on Hollywood's take on social media as exemplified by the new Facebook film. Despite my own misgivings about many of Facebook's social impacts, I still think old media as exemplified by the Associated Press and the film industry has a concerted agenda to demonize new media and social media [emphasis added –LS], and Facebook and its creators bear the brunt of that in The Social Network. There's also the ugly reality that coining bullshit words like "cyberbullying" will sell papers or page views. I put it more broadly in the Huffington Post piece:

The movie is written in the abstract, based on what they feel Facebook, and the social Web, represent. It's exoticism. It's the 1940s, when you had a white actor in yellow-face play a Chinese character, you know? Those foreigners talk like this, and it's why they're inscrutable and evil.

And for my own straw-man argument….

These denigrators of new media and defenders of old media would say to tall this, But we are trained professionals! We have the special insights to determine what's important! Who wants to hear about what you had for breakfast?

While there are many people in journalism and media who understand what the new media are about, it does seem that all to often these attitudes are held and expressed and get a ton of exposure … not because their views are particularly insightful, but rather by the simple fact they have the privilege of mass publication via the old media. They are still louder than the rest of us, and need to keep reminding us of this, as if that were validation in and of itself. Why being louder somehow makes them better than the hoi polloi is not clear. Why do they feel the need to keep doing this? Maybe Cornell West had it right: narcissism.

Or maybe it's something more generally shared by all of us: wanting our voices of hope/concern/anger/fear/despair/delight to be heard in an increasingly bustling, insecure, unstable, chaotic world.

--
Photo credit: David Cosand, Creative Commons

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Will Variety and Hollywood Reporter paywall gambit pay off?

17 September 2009 - 11:20am | Laura Scott

Yes, subscription membership revenue models can pay well, but only if you can get the subscribers. So when I read that Hollywood Reporter and Variety are going for the paywall model, I wonder if they're missing something. Writes Nikki Finke on Deadline Hollywood:

I've known that Variety spent 6 months intensely studying all its options. Now toppers Neil Stiles and Brian Gott have decided to go to a paid strategy right after the first of the year. That means the website will no longer be free. So online and print content will both be subscriber-based. Exactly which combination of content and services will be offered has yet to be determined. But this is being done in recognition of the sad fact that, ever since Variety pulled back that paywall in 2006 (back when all that mattered was traffic numbers at the expense of subscription dollars), the trade has lost a ton of money. Meanwhile, sources tell me that The Hollywood Reporter is about to dump its daily print version. The date considered was October 16th, but now that's been moved back. So this means THR will pursue a paid web-only strategy for its content.

The thing is that Hollywood of all industries is a community, with gossip, rumors, insider tips, deal-makers, wannabees, and a very insider, insular, provincial social graph, often colored with a healthy dose of cynicism. What better place to leverage community participation in a trade publication?

This wouldn't preclude Variety from setting up freemium approach, with a paywall around their hottest news. But maybe they could build some traffic by leveraging the open source tools out there to build an online community. It's a tough pond with plenty of sharks, but if anyone has an advantage, it's the industry insider Variety.

Or maybe not.

Comments on the Deadline Hollywood post are interesting.

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No, Google is not a monopoly

5 April 2009 - 10:47am | Laura Scott

First, some context

Henry Porter, an opinionator granted a regular podium by the Guardian, has written a bit of a rant claiming that we're victims of Google, a "monopoly."

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

The article is full of these kinds of claims, all largely based on what seems to be either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Web, or a lack of understanding of the word "monopoly."

The core of Porter's ignorance, willful or not, is revealed in this statement:

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is true only if you think that things exist on their own, and that their relationships to you, their relationships to each other, do not exist, or are not worth looking at, let alone making available for use -- let alone making relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Google provides a means of finding relevance in that sea of stuff out there on the Web. It's like a mega-index of the "book" of the Web. That relevance was largely hidden from us before search engines. To find relevance, one had to ask friends, browse libraries, analyze the Dewey Decimal System, dig up Yellow Pages, rummage through desk drawers to find that one tidbit of information you want right now.

That is hardly "nothing."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Thomas Jefferson was also against a strong judiciary, which in hindsight sounds pretty foolish, imho. But Jefferson aside, there's no indication that what newspapers are in function -- delivery systems for filtered information -- is not going anywhere. It's just the newspaper industry, and the infrastructure and market that enabled the paper to be printed, that is going away. News is still happening. It's just that how we're getting it is changing.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

I don't like how US-owned search engine companies are going along with the Chinese Government's restrictions on the Internet, either, but let's be clear: It's the Chinese government that is censoring the Internet. Google is going along with it, along with much of the rest of the American economy, let's face it. This is about corporate collaboration with government constraints on what we consider "American values," and not about a Google monopoly or how Google is anything but pretty darned typical these days.

Now in many ways Porter is like many other people who have enjoyed the privilege of being given a special podium from which to pontificate and opinionate, who is upset that the market is shifting such that people who haven't been given such privilege are able to not only publish, but actually find an audience for what they publish.

How dare they? "Those bloggers!" is the cry we've heard over and over, often while pointing to the most outrageous or inane examples as cases-in-point -- ignoring that the vast majority of people "in print" also tend to produce an abundance of useless, inane, erroneous, misinformed information as well.

Until search engines, the only filtering agent people had was the editorial board of the local paper or the book publisher or the magazine. Now our filtering agent reaches beyond those sources -- although those sources, when right, get the most relevance -- to include others, including people who never went to journalism school, and never were given a paycheck by a media conglomerate. Oh the humanity!

So now Google is the dominant search engine, and thus potentially is a huge influencer in what sources we can find to be relevant to our needs, wants, desires ... to our lives. Such power Google has!

But is Google a search engine monopoly? Really?

Remember in the '90s? What was the dominant search engine then? Yahoo. Microsoft, with all its market dominance on the desktop, really was having trouble competing.

Google pushed Yahoo aside. How? By providing better search results. You searched Yahoo and got some good results and lots of spam and pr0n. You searched Google and got better results.

Relevance was the ticket to Google's successful insurgence. And relevance is why Google still dominates.

Relevance is a commodity. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. Relevance is not even a scarce commodity. There's always more relevance. Better relevance.

Want to defeat Google? Build a tool that gives better results. In other words, be more relevant than Google.

Yes, Google has a magnificent physical infrastructure worth a crapload of money.

But even in these hard economic times, there are plenty of craploads of money out there to build a new tool to defeat Google. It wouldn't even take a huge crapload of money, as craploads of money go, since server infrastructure costs are going down.

No, the scarcity is in the innovation. The imagination. The engineering to guide what that crapload of money would build.

Microsoft has been trying and failing, and nobody can accuse Microsoft of being short on craploads of money.

It's the relevance that Google has, and it has it only ephemerally. All it will take is a tool with more relevance, backed by a relatively small crapload of money, to whittle at Google's market dominance, or even knock it off of your default home page. Maybe it will be a new search engine. Or a new social media paradigm. Or something we haven't even imagined yet.

All we know is that we don't know what it's going to be like just a few years from now. Blaming Google for that is like blaming the weather vane for this afternoon's rain shower.

Hat tip to Dave Winer and others for Tweeting the Guardian link.

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News and the internet (regarding the sad spectacle of the monkey clinging to the apple in the jar)

21 May 2007 - 10:20pm | Laura Scott

It really is painful to watch, in a way, how prominent members of the old-school news media complain about the internet. Today it's Robert J. Samuelson, who writes:

If the Internet permanently crashed tomorrow, I'd be thrilled.

I kid you not.

When I joined The Washington Post as a reporter in 1969, hardly anyone I knew in the news business considered it a business. We belonged to a craft, a calling or maybe a profession. We didn't worry about the industry's "business model," a term we'd never heard. Economic realities occasionally intruded, usually involving salaries (always too low). But mostly we blissfully ignored the proposition that newspapers aimed to make money. We condescendingly thought that the moneymaking people—advertising salesmen, managers—toiled so that we could pursue our higher purpose, which was to inform the public.

This comes from an award-winning business journalist. Color me naive, but isn't it obvious that a print publication with a cover price, paid subscriptions and loads of advertising is a business? The nature of the business may be changing, what with financial speculators trying to squeeze more and more juice from the melon, but it has always been a business. Right? Right?

We've been disabused of our naiveté and arrogance. All our business models (for newspapers, magazines, network news) are now in retreat, if not rout. The Internet is stealing our audiences and our ads. Few of us imagined ourselves as heirs to textile or steelworkers, disemployed by new competition and technology. But we are.

This, I believe, is a conflation of issues. The internet is bringing a new reality to newspapers (and all other media), but in this age of predatory Wall Street speculation in the news industry, I don't think the layoffs can be laid at the feet of a new technology.

How does a medium "steal" audiences? Especially when newspapers are right here in that new medium? It's not like there's no money in the internet. Why is it that web ventures are able to monetize their websites but newspapers fail at it so terribly? And why do old media folks then demonstrate the bad manners of blaming the messenger? --I mean, if they notice at all.

In Ad Age today, Simon Dumenco has an answer:

Who or what is really killing print? Craig Newmark? Blogs? YouTube, maybe? The internet in general? Or any of the other usual suspects?

Nah, print is killing print. More specifically, a handful of half-wit overlords at many -- if not most -- big print-media companies are killing print.

We see evidence of this every day.

An internet-company executive I know says of his vague and mysterious job: "I create value." That's an M.B.A.-enabled, blowhardy thing to say, of course, but he means it -- and when he says it, it occurs to me new-economy guys like him are at dead odds with many print-media executives these days, who seem to specialize in destroying value, even as they pay lip service to the "convergence of traditional and electronic media."

It's like watching a monkey thrash around, unwilling to let go of the apple in the jar.

So what's happening here, really? Perhaps it's that our taste for news is changing, and the old guard are unwilling to come along.

[Aside: Personally I think the real tragedy is what's been happening in television "news." In the end, Samantha Bee may have the best take. Who knows -- maybe as video penetration and integration in the web increases, we'll see the internet start to do to television news what it has been doing for print: Make it better.]

This kind tectonic economic and cultural shift and resulting backlash is happening across the board. And even small-scale ventures are affected. Look at what has happened at JPG Magazine. I just have to shake my head at how some people just don't get it. As Molly Holzschlag notes:

As soon as I began reading what happened regarding JPG Magazine, I knew that here was even more evidence of my long-held belief that the room for inauthentic, manipulative voices in our wired culture is becoming very small.

And while the internet has provided avenues for alternative means of finding and evaluating information, it's not the internet's fault that old, comfortable oligarchies and would-be manipulators are feeling the pinch as conversations replace PR broadsides. We all know, or should know, that it's not the internet itself that's the issue, it's what people do with it that matters. And forget the gloom and doom voices crying that the sky is falling. The real excitement, in my book, is that, in the end, it's what people can do using the internet that is our greatest hope to make the world just a little (or a lot) better.

Back to Molly:

Authenticity is not a flaw, nor should it be seen as an “act” of transparency. This is courage. These are actions that just might help save the world.

I have always stated that the Web gives the masses the potential to do just that, and it is clear that we can, via our communities and social networks, improve ourselves and gain more enlightened global perspectives that are based in truth and forgiveness rather than lies and manipulation. Idealistic? You bet. Optimistic, well, yes, but it’s not like I believe that this won’t take a very long time or that it will be a successful endeavor. I just feel it terribly, terribly important that we all realize what’s going on. The testing of boundaries and breaking them are part of this shift toward a world where honesty will truly be the best policy. Breaking those boundaries will cause pain and bruising for us all as we go through it, but go through it we must or the chance to better ourselves as individuals and society at large might pass us by.

Indeed.

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