Category: Uncategorized

I would engage much more deeply with our city paper’s website if 1) a long-time subscriber like me didn’t have to pay again to use the archive, which feels unfriendly to one’s best customers, and 2) the writers of the most thoughtful and well-written letters to the editor were given guest blog spots for a month or two, greatly extending the range of voices on the site.

Michiana Chronicles archive with 465 essays in full text and two years of audio.

WVPE Listener Commentary audio archive. [Or, at the WVPE home page: Click on Programs > Audio Archive]

Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations directory with links.

Six radio essays by Eileen Bender: Political Pin — Lame Duck Citizens — Fillibuster — Petition — Children’s Books — Inauguration Tales

Needed: a taxonomy of the many kinds of links that could then help us explore their differing value for users and their various roles in civic and other collaborative work.

For example, in his article on Matt Drudge’s linking skills, David Carr links to sites with a stake in the practice of linking rather than, say, to writers with ideas about how linking works. He uses the web’s linking power to point to examples, then, rather than to enter explicitly into a sort of a conversation, underway for several years, about his topic.

His article does link and does have a place in the useful history of writing about how linking works. But his own linking practice in this piece (possibly dictated by his employer, the NY Times) suggests, perhaps attracts or even helps to shape, an audience more likely to feel informed about the topic than to engage in its development. If so, then Carr’s links may quietly support the authority of the paper and neglect the collaborative possibilities that are already alive in the topic.

That’s a very quick example, I hope, of taxonomy at work: seeing the types, then considering the value of their differences. This is a small extension of yesterday’s posting on Carr’s piece. Earlier today on Twitter, @Chanders @harrisj and @markcoddington were stirring on this topic of linking.

Send them away, send them all away… The logic of sending people away from your site, as practiced by the Drudge Report.  David Carr explains their success this way:

A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.

I’ve lived the Drudge effect. Over a decade ago, I was working at Inside.com, a media news site, and wrote about a poll that had taken place on one of the presidential candidates’ planes that seemed to suggest a liberal bias among the campaign press. Mr. Drudge liked it, for obvious reasons. Our servers melted as we stood back in wonder, staring at what the linked economy meant and how one guy in a fedora seemed to know something we didn’t. He still does.

Via Jay Rosen, who is probably quoting his partner Dave Winer in this tweet: “People come back to places that send them away.”

In 2005, Winer wrote:

Now the fundamental law of the Internet seems to be the more you send them away the more they come back. It’s why link-filled blogs do better than introverts. It may seem counter-intuitive — it’s the new intuition, the new way of thinking. The Internet kicks your ass until you get it. It’s called linking and it works.

People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.

Winer also refers to this older formulation of the matter.

Carr’s article displays the sometimes not-very-ambitious approach to linking of some newspapers. The NY Times always links to other articles by the same author, no matter the topic, so that’s there at the start. But in the body of the article, we see five links to sites that have sought large audiences, such as the Washington Post–in other words, examples. But his article is about linking as a strategy, a topic that has been addressed for years in the blogosphere and elsewhere. No links to that region here, however. So the Times takes a pretty mechanical view of linking in this piece, linking to people and organizations, not to concepts in collaborative development. Yet isn’t the heart of the web not mechanical links to organizations but the movement of concepts to and fro? In other words, if you link to the wrong thing, the static thing, you prove that you’re not getting it. Not getting the living web.

More than 49,000 people tell Facebook that they will attend Saturday’s class-related metro protest in Brazil.

The powerful love the silence of others, and the powerful love to listen. On 5/11/11, Freedom ♡ (@tweets4peace) writes:

“#childhoodmemories Probably before learning my abc I knew I couldn’t say a word about Syrian politics or Assad family.” [ http://is.gd/2CPHcX ]

And this:

“Families have been asked to go into the streets as homes are searched. Also many state security are situated on top of the buildings. #syria” [ http://is.gd/5gK7fE ]

Emily Bell on “the live updating stream of thought and reaction” that is available to most of us: http://wp.me/pZdr6-2j @EmilyBell

This “live updating stream of thought and reaction” matters as it hooks into lives, groups, and institutions. http://t.co/zUlaEWa @EmilyBell

Schools in a democracy should teach citizens how to create “little messages that matter” in this way.

Žižek on the ongoing commercialization, that is, destruction, of the Open Web, where “Everything thus becomes accessible, but only as mediated through a company which owns it all.” Via @evgenymorozov. Some, such as Dave Winer, call this the creation of a silo or walled garden.

I notice that the Guardian’s editorial this week celebrating 190 years of the paper’s existence manages to stay calm about what to call these people who participate in new ways in the work of informing others. In the last paragraph, the writer acknowledges that in this time of industry revolution, the names change, necessarily, as roles change, calling “users” those who an earlier generation of journalists would have called “readers” and noting that whatever their name they are not so interested in the largely passive role that papers customarily assigned their readers. Still calm, the editorial writer asserts a string of core journalistic values that are unchanged by the upheaval in news distribution, and then the writer quickly and quietly names the more deeply revolutionary fact: that journalism is finding within its grasp “the ability to amplify, celebrate and harness other voices” that would previously have found no audience and no civic use.

The passage itself:

In March the Guardian was read by the largest audience in its history – more than 49 million unique users, as Scott didn’t call his readers. He thought of his paper as a pulpit. Readers today are less taken with sermons. Technology has revolutionised the way news is distributed – but also the ability to amplify, celebrate and harness other voices. The next 10 years – between now and our bicentenary – will see even more rapid and radical changes in the media. It is good to pause and reflect that the things that matter most – truthfulness, free thought, honest reporting, a plurality of opinion, a belief in fairness, justice and, most crucially, independence – do not change.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has been refining his claims for the new journalism in a series of speeches over the last few years, including one in which he describes a new “joint authority” that no doubt owes its power to the traditional skills of professional journalists, the tools that create opportunities for worthy acts of independent reporting as well as collaboration by tens of thousands of non-professionals, and the additional value that can be created when the professionals help amplify and perhaps even guide that reporting alongside their own.

In “What I Think I Know About Journalism,” Jay Rosen’s 25th anniversary reflection on what he’s learned about his field, the fourth point keeps calling me back. I notice the tightly worded section title, where similar phrases represent very different meanings. That means we can’t think our way through the problems of journalism today, which are also society’s problems, without attending to the precise meaning of words. How we say it, how we think it, matters. We’ll need to be at our best to work it through. He begins:

[#4] Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

So, information—facts—made public: we misunderstand how this process works. “Making facts public” seems like putting a few coins on the counter at the store, a simple transaction in which the coins mean about the same thing for one person as for another. They—coins, facts—just move about, and sometimes they are here and sometimes they are somewhere else, and they are simple. But that’s not right, Rosen’s section title suggests. Handing over facts as if we were conducting a simple transaction will not turn a herd made up of consumers into a public made of citizens. Something more transformative must take place.

Perhaps the facts must be tested and transformed as they pass through the digesting intelligence of the citizens; perhaps the citizens must be challenged and transformed by their encounter, if it is deep enough, with the facts; perhaps people must abandon their private lives and risk becoming members of an active community. Rosen’s 4th item suggests that mechanical understandings of journalism and the public sphere fail because they do not reflect how information actually works in a transformative fashion in our lives, when things are going well. It’s not a mechanical process.

It is a challenging one, he suggests in his first two paragraphs (“There’s a reason why … ‘… out of the loop.’”), because a glut of information is difficult for a person to handle, and competing perspectives battle it out for our attention rather than for our understanding. Much of what we see is meant to gather ratings from us rather than inquire into truth with us.

In the third paragraph, the long quotation from Lasch makes a fuller sketch of the process by which people in community actually can, and sometimes do, think and learn together. That’s the goal, but it can’t be achieved through mechanical transactions:

In The Lost Art of Argument, Christopher Lasch said we should invert the usual order of information and debate. “We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually understood as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of information. Otherwise, we take in information passively– if we take it in at all.”

In the comments, Bob Calo provides another Lasch quotation, from Revolt of the Elites. Lasch tries to explain the alienation of the citizen, now largely just a consumer, I imagine. If you can’t participate meaningfully, why bother digesting the mass of information?

In the “age of information,” the American people are notoriously ill informed. The explanation of this seeming paradox is obvious, though seldom offered: Having been effectively excluded from public debate on the grounds of their incompetence, most Americans no longer have any use for the information inflicted on them in such large amounts.

If everybody is right here, then the role of our best institutions, such as journalism, higher education, local government, and so forth, should be to help people engage. To engage with people in ways that our fellow citizens would find useful, as Rosen says, so they—we—engage back. I think in an early Rebooting the News Rosen spoke of the role of journalism being to help people participate in their own democracy. That insight is lurking here too.

So “making a public” is an activity far more involving than simply placing a coin on a counter or a newspaper on the doorstep. When we get it right, readers become “the people formerly known as the audience,” and chances are that more and more of those people come to understand why citizenship grows more interesting when it is more than reading the paper and occasionally voting or shooting the breeze in a coffee shop or on a blog. For a member of a healthy public, there is much active and interesting work to be done. Journalism, rightly practiced, helps create a public and get us there.