I must point to this wonderful “debate” between Andrew (The Cult of the Amateur) Keen and David (Everything is Miscellaneous) Weinberger from the Wall St. Journal online. Read the whole thing. It’s really quite enlightening.

Thank you, David.

In what I view as the smartest move to date by any local media company, Fisher Communications of Seattle has purchased Pegasus News of Dallas. I know both groups, and I can’t think of a better marriage than this.

Fisher is run by some very smart people these days. Colleen Brown, CEO, and Rob Dunlop, Senior VP Developing Media, have a clear vision of tomorrow, and this acquisition proves they’re on the right track. Pegasus is run by Mike Orren, the smartest guy I know when it comes to hyperlocal data acquisition and running a website as a direct marketing tool.

But here’s what’s so incredibly visionary about this deal: not only will Fisher use the Pegasus platform to enhance its online offerings in the markets it currently serves, including Seattle and Portland, but they will also be able to build franchises in any market they choose. Pegasus currently serves the Dallas market, so Fisher has now opened shop another major market. This is smart and a profound statement of clarity as regards the ability of anybody to create any form of media anywhere these days.

In making this deal, Fisher has announced to the world its intention to develop more along the lines of an internet pureplay company than a Media 1.0 company using all its resources to expand its market reach. Brilliant!

Here’s the press release. Here’s Mike’s announcement to his users.

Fisher is a company to watch. My hat’s off to them.

(Transparency: Fisher is an AR&D client.)

Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on the subject, has an excellent status report on the state of citizen media that’s well worth the read. A portion:

We’ve come a long way. There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape. And, most important, there’s a flood of great ideas.

But we have a long, long way to go. We need much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain — and some notable failures are discouraging. Dealing with the issues of trust, credibility and ethics is essential; as are more tools and training, including a dramatically updated notion of media literacy.

Dan gives ten points, each of which are their own “story.” Must read, IMO.

The announced closing of Backfence has brought about some refreshing and much-needed discussion on the subject of hyperlocal news and the web. This is an important discussion, because a lot of companies are looking to hyperlocal as the salvation of their business model. But the concept is misunderstood and, as a result, carries a false promise for mainstream media.

Backfence, with 13 sites and $3 million in financing couldn’t build the audience or the revenue streams necessary to generate a return on the investment. Judging by the reaction from the web community, Backfence suffered from poor design, insufficient feet on the street, poor choices for locations, or it was simply ahead of its time. When web businesses shutter, there is no lack of analysis from the web community.

But in this feedback, there are some real gems for those who are pursuing hyperlocal as a strategy for their company.

Let’s begin with Jeff Jarvis and comments to his entry at Buzzmachine:

The biggest challenge facing local news organizations today is figuring out how they can gather more and produce less. That is, how can they help other people produce, so the news organizations have something worth gathering?

After trying one of everything in hyperlocal, I’ve come to believe that this will happen only by combining those various models — so people can join in however they want to — and by answering the questions: How much news will members of the community create and share? What do they need to do that? What motivates them? How can local news organizations enable and encourage them?

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social. It will work by gathering, not producing.

But I still don’t know whether it will work. We need to do a lot of development and experimentation.

In the comments to this post, Mike Orren of Pegasus News proves once again that he’s one of the smartest people around when it comes to hyperlocal efforts. I would advise anyone considering such a venture to pay attention to what Mike says. One of his “truths” is that data is what brings people to hyperlocal sites, and many traditional news people are hung up on other types of content. And building databases is a lot of work.

Our site has neighborhood maps of no more than a few miles radius with stories, events and garage sales plotted. Part of the way we do that is by mining city and school district sites for news in areas where there are no content partners or bloggers to work with.

It ain’ glamorous, but if there’s a temporary road closing near you, it’s news. And you can’t wait/depend on someone in that community to blog it.

Where it gets cool though is that these trivial, government-supplied neighborhood stories, mixed with a little search engine mojo, become breadcrumbs for folks who come in the door, comment on what you got right/wrong, and then start contributing regularly with real narrative reporting.

I won’t kid you — that’s a slow process. And it takes a real farmer to cultivate that kind of participation. The seeding with “release” type news has to continue, because without a flow of content, there’s no frequency and without frequency, today’s item written by a member of the community won’t be read or responded to–Meaning they won’t be repeat contributors and you won’t have a business.

There is also some wonderful discussion over at TechCrunch, only from a slightly different perspective. Here’s an example from the comments:

To some extent, you have to wonder just how interested people are in reading about the town’s little league championship, what happened at the church BBQ on Saturday went and what was decided at the last City Hall meeting. I would argue that the future of news and information distribution is more likely to be hyper-targeted than hyper-local. That is, most people, faced with increasingly little free time, have very specific interests and would probably be most receptive to services that enable them to efficiently and accurately aggregate news and information about those interests. Obviously, there are services like this out there and I think they’re more likely to have long-term success than services which are focused on very narrow local topics.

Both of these threads are well worth the time to read. Follow the links, too, and you’ll have a pretty good understanding of where people stand on the topic.

One problem in analyzing such efforts is the natural tendency to view success or failure in absolute terms. Backfence was only a failure in its pre-defined business goals, but that doesn’t make the effort itself right or wrong. It could just as easily be that the business goals were off-the-mark. Investors want a return, after all.

Hyperlocal is a currently popular theme among mainstream media companies with visions of increasing their reach/frequency numbers by pulling in suburban or outlying users. Advertisers in those communities, the thinking goes, will want their goods and services positioned within such a framework. The trick, of course, is to create “content” without spending a lot of (or any) money by building an attractive user interface that enables citizens in those communities to make the content themselves.

There are two big problems with most hyperlocal efforts.

One, we get hung up on content when content isn’t the problem. The question is how do you make money in a disintermediated, distributed media paradigm? Experiments in hyperlocal media don’t fail because of content; they fail, because they can’t deliver the promise of sustainable revenue. It is the advertising paradigm that’s the real problem, not how to make more or “hyperlocal” content that such advertising will support.

I’ve seen sales people salivate over the idea of creating a “page” or “section” or “channel” that will deliver an audience that traditional ad models can serve. While it’s true that some advertisers is suburb A will want to put ads in a web platform that serves suburb A, the numbers just aren’t big enough to justify the expense, because the ad model requires a BIG audience in order to deliver ROI. I know there are exceptions and that I’m making a generalization, but we simply have to start thinking differently about this.

This is why I keep harping on organizing the local web and building databases of knowledge at the local level rather than trying to make another content play. Google (the hyperlocal winner) has proven that advertisers will pay a premium for actual business leads, but that has never been a part of mass marketing. How we put advertisers together with users is the key, and “news content” isn’t the only way to do that.

Jeff Jarvis is absolutely correct when he states that network dynamics provide the revenue key for tomorrow, but that key will be more about direct marketing or micro marketing than anything resembling the old reach/frequency model. And Mike Orren is spot-on when he states that “little crumbs” of data ARE news at the hyperlocal level.

Two, in terms of building sites that appeal to “local” people, we simply cannot begin with revenue assumptions. In fact, I would argue that this guarantees business failure right out of the box, because the whole business of local advertising is evolving. How on earth can we create a business plan based on revenue when we don’t know what that revenue play will be? We simply must have the courage to move forward to build audience before we tackle monetizing that audience. If we do this, we’ll build things differently, because we’ll approach the process differently.

This is the flaw of the Newspaper Next recommendations, which begin the brainstorming process with revenue goals. This is entirely backwards, and it’ll produce the same kinds of “return” that the Backfence effort produced. Again, it’s the mass marketing paradigm that’s being disrupted by the personal media revolution, not the distribution of “content.”

I believe strongly that niches are where it’s at downstream and that the long tail is the economic model for tomorrow’s media, so I very much like the “idea” of hyperlocal. But really, folks, Google is the hyperlocal model and their global mission ought to be our local mission — to organize our community’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

We owe Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, founders of Backfence, kudos and thanks for the vision and effort that went into the project. Now let’s learn and move forward.

This is my review of Andrew Keen’s book, the cult of the amateur, how today’s internet is killing our culture. It is a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality.

Let’s get something straight up front: our culture is most certainly evolving. Hell, it’s been the subject of this blog and my writing for the past five years. I say this, because Keen represents the (wonderful) world of pragmatism, which is the epitome of the modern culture. Hence, it’s understandable that he would view the internet as killing HIS world. That said, I think the subject needs an airing, and Keen is trying to give us that. The problem is that his prose is so filled with condescension and venom that it’s nothing more than emotional weeping. And if you took all of that out of the book, it would be about ten pages long.

I’m serious when I say the book is a tough read. It’s tough, because the mind’s search for substance is always confronted by extremism, emotion and haughty disdain for anybody who doesn’t meet his professional “standards” or think as he thinks. I can’t count the number of “Holy Craps” I uttered while working my way through the pages. And I think this is a big problem for a man who’s trying to ask some legitimate questions.

Here are just a few of my objections to Keen’s form of argument:

In the very beginning of the book, he says what it is, “It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.” He paints the problem as pragmatism versus the pejorative “digital utopians.” Whether he’s on YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia or another other place with a Web 2.0 tilt, he searches for the most outrageous examples to make his point.

Folks, if we’re going to have a discussion about this, we need to find some common ground on which to argue. I can show examples from each of those places that are the opposite of the riff-raff that Keen finds, so what’s the point of such extremism?

Ignorance. Egoism. Bad taste. Mob rule. In other words, these are things opposing voices wish to enable. How absurd. He’s fond of the old saw about monkeys and typewriters, often referring to those of the participatory age as such. Again, how do you argue with a man who’s calling you an ignorant, egotistic, boorish monkey? And more importantly, how does one with a reasonable mind listen to the arguments of one who uses such prose?

My biggest complaint with the book, however, is its black/white, win/lose, right/wrong, all-or-nothing perspective. In this he fails his argument and belies his own ignorance. His is the extreme view, not the views of those he labels utopians. I know many of the people he attacks in the book, and not one of them has ever expressed the cultural significance of the digital age from such an extremist stage.

Was Michael Powell being utopian when as FCC Chairman he stated that “application separation” was the single most important paradigm shift in the history of communications and that it would change things forever?

Jeff Jarvis has apparently agreed to debate Keen online, but it’s not a debate that’s winnable. Keen is so extreme, that his assumption of the middle is yanked far over to his end of the balance beam, so where is one to go to bring it back? He even throws in the sexual predator issue to support his fear mongering. What, I ask you, does that have to do with the personal media revolution? As if Keen’s love of rules and regulations has ever protected children from such.

“The cult of the amateur” is nothing more than a can of neatly stacked red herrings, and that doesn’t make for a debate at all.

A dear old friend of mine wrote this week expressing concerns similar to those stated in the book, so I want to try and discuss Keen’s central focus — that the personal media revolution will destroy Hollywood, the professional press and the advertising industry, thus collapsing our economy. To get my full take, you’d have to read everything that’s available in the archives of this website, especially the essays. I have no utopian views of the future, although I believe I have a little more faith in people than does Keen.

He believes the mainstream press and its methods for gathering and presenting the news is worth saving. This assumes that it’s dying, which it is not. It may seem like it from Keen’s perch, but just because something “could” happen doesn’t mean that it’s “going” to happen. Is the professional press worth saving? Of course, and who would argue otherwise? Its absolute grip on information, however, is not worth keeping, because today’s press is all about corporate greed and making money.

The public intuitively knows this, which is why Gallup’s annual measurement of trust in the institution of the press has been steadily sinking for decades. So the press is being reformed from without. What’s wrong with that?

Keen argues that his “cult of the amateur” is killing the copyright industry. Again, this assumes an all-or-nothing scenario, which I just don’t buy. What is under attack is Hollywood’s absolute grip on defining and nurturing the arts, because, again, it’s all about money. How is Hollywood, for example, about creativity, when the best it can do is produce sequel after sequel. Same with the publishing and music industries. The quickest path to profit is to repeat the blockbuster, but in so doing, it weakens all of the arts.

As to the economic argument, we all need to be momentarily concerned, because the copyright industry is America’s largest export. We entertain the world, which is why the industry maintains such favor on Capitol Hill. But again, this is purely a matter of big corporations who control all of entertainment in the name of profit. It has nothing to do with talent, creativity or Keen’s favorite, taste. Let me quote Powell again, “I have no problem if a venerable institution disappears tomorrow, as long as that value is distributed elsewhere in the economy.”

So it is about money, and it is about it being shifted away from institutional power to other places in the economy, namely the pockets of new power players. This may be a concern for professional institutions, but it is not a direct concern for our economy. Keen directly challenges Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” as economic mumbo-jumbo and cites examples of bloggers along the long tail that aren’t making any money. He then uses this to make the case that advertising will collapse absent a mass marketing paradigm and that the professional press will collapse, because nobody will pay the bills.

This is hogwash. Advertising, like media, is an institution undergoing change. The road may be rough, but it is not going to collapse. And there is tremendous money to be made in the information business, although perhaps not in the manner that Keen prefers.

He views the aggregation of content as theft and evil, and he routinely insults the integrity of young people, making sweeping statements about their eyeballs being drawn to what he views as nonsense instead of traditional forms of entertainment.

I have always been concerned that forms of entertainment are our biggest export, but this is a question that’s bigger than Keen’s use of it. We really have to decide as a nation if this is truly in our best interests.

Let’s go back to the last big cultural change, the time when modernism first came on the scene. Those of the ruling elite at the time shouted similar themes, essentially that the worship of rationalism and the human mind would replace the worship of God (through the Roman church). However, modernism didn’t destroy faith; it simply helped us evolve as human beings and move our faith from that which is blind to that which is understandable. In the same way, postmodernism questions the ruling elite of today and demands that we rethink assumptions. It will no more “kill” modernist views of the press than modernism killed premodernist views of religion.

So it’s not an all-or-nothing thing, and we shouldn’t approach it with a spirit of fear.

Keen is obsessed with the idea of truth, and that the road to truth is through science and study. Professional experts, in his view, come closer to truth than those who haven’t followed that which has come before, and this explains his indignation toward anyone who might claim gifts or inherent skill or talent. This is textbook modernism.

The postmodernist, however, looks around and sees institutional failure, which is the price of living in the culture that Keen wants to save. The postmodernist sees the American dream as reserved for the few or the fortunate, because the modernist culture protects its haves. Follow the numbers. With every year that goes by, the gap between the haves and the have-nots increases. Wealth is in the hands of the relative fewer, and pomos ask if this isn’t really a failure.

Technology that was created to serve the institutions now is in the hands of everyone, so yes, depending on your perspective, there is very much a cultural war underway. Media is only the most visible aspect, but every institution is threatened.

Since I first began writing about this, a quote by Leonard Sweet (hardly a digital utopian) has graced the top of my pages: “Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: reinvent yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change.”

Andrew Keen would rather die than change.

Dan Gillmor points to a rather remarkable example of oxygen deprivation caused by living atop one’s own pedestal. The issue, really, is who has the “right” to be a critic (of films or books).

The story goes back to a New York Times article about bloggers and literary criticism. This led to a unbelievable piece of elitist bigotry this weekend by Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel. Take a look:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

This isn’t really about the art of criticism as much as it is a defensive and emotional response to the threat of J. D. Lasica’s “personal media revolution.” It’s the kind of pathetic and gut-wrenching wailing that must have echoed across the tar pits, as thousands of creatures were sucked into the vortex of change.

Like a great many so-called professionals (I say “so-called,” because there is no licensing body that grants status to journalists, darn it) who are watching their world crumble, Schickel makes the case that his elegant mind — and the great minds of others — is what gives his criticism legs, and then he makes the most egregious statement of all:

We do not — maybe I ought to make that “should not” — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

This, in Schickel’s mind, is what bloggers do, and in making this kind of statement, he proves that he’s really just reading into a mirror. Prejudice? Stupidity?

I can see the vast sea of unwashed masses racing to Schickel’s work to learn at the hand of such a master.

The problem is that those who live on an “elite” pedestal can only write down to those below. In this sense, the professional press has been separating itself from its audience for decades. You see, people like this aren’t really writing for a mass audience; they’re writing to impress each other.

Three years ago, I wrote that the RTNDA was “asleep inside the box” and took them to task for not paying attention to what seemed obvious (to me anyway) as important issues. Here’s some of that entry:

If the organization representing radio and television news directors won’t look at reality, how on earth can news people expect their corporate owners to do so? By ignoring the truths of a worrisome future, audience fragmentation, disruptive innovations, shrinking or closing newsrooms, newspapers providing video, clear warnings from business analysts, citizen journalism, viewer distrust, and other issues directly impacting the industry, the RTNDA is guilty of, to be kind, public masturbation, and in so doing, it does a disservice to its members that borders on malfeasance.

As you can imagine, this didn’t win me a lot of friends.

I hope I’ve mellowed a bit, but the message seems to have resonated (or perhaps life has intervened), because the opening session was a vigorous discussion of new media with a lot of great insight, a bit of outsight, and a cast of characters (self included) that wouldn’t have even been recognized at previous gatherings. This is to the credit of the organization and especially the work of Lane Beauchamp, Chip Mahaney and others, who’ve organized an event filled with kinds of things we really need to be talking about. Better late than never, and my hat’s off to Lane, Chip, Angie and the whole gang.

I’ll leave the analysis of the opening session to others, but the message was clearly one of change. Most on the panel called it “evolutionary.” I used the word “revolution,” and the inimitable Michael Rosenblum said we need to burn old media to the ground.

I was star struck being with Amanda Congden (disclosure: I’ve been in love with her for years. Sadly, she brought her boyfriend with her) and Zadi Diaz. Zadi is on her way to web stardom, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more pleasant person. It’s always fun to be on a stage with Michael, and Miles O’Brien was simply the best moderator I’ve ever worked with.

Miles lost his anchor job with CNN a week ago, and it will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s now thrust into a world where the stories that matter (to people) occur — chief technology correspondent. He’s a sponge right now, but mark my words, he will lead that network (or another) into coverage of how technology is empowering the people formerly known as the audience.

Do yourself a favor and go read the reaction by Jeff Jarvis to the New York Times’ attempt to boost Tim O’Reilly for his proposed “rules” for bloggers. It’s a spot-on analysis that I won’t attempt to reproduce with my own words.

In a nutshell, O’Reilly wants the blogosphere to behave, and Jeff rightly calls this dangerous.

This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone — they’ll do us the favor — can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do. And if I don’t, you can judge me accordingly. Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: If I libel or defame you on the streetcorner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. But I don’t put up another badge on my fence saying I won’t libel you. I just don’t. That’s how the world works. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and more controllers?

The New York Times, of course, promotes the idea, because they would be well-served with a blogosphere that was forced to play by their rules.

Here’s the thing about blogs that most big-time media observers miss: while there are a few who rise to mainstream audience levels, the vast majority of blogs are just personal observations about this or that. If you don’t know that, you’ve never been to MySpace, and you certainly don’t have a MySpace account. Every MySpace user has a blog, and you’d be amazed at the number of people there who make entries. We’re going to give these people a set of behavior rules?

You see, this is all about big media’s obsession with the need to control what they view as a media threat. It may be a threat, but as Jeff and Doc note, the web is a place, and we don’t need artificial special rules to bring it in line with institutional life.

I’d never heard of this guy until Doc Searls wrote about his new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. I’ve ordered the thing, because it’s important for me to read this stuff, even though I can tell you it’s all bullshit.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Amanda Chapel, aka Strumpette, interviewed Keen (”interview” is perhaps too generous…”worship” would be better) and posted parts of it on her blog.

CHAPEL: Your book sounds like a total refutation of the premise and proposal that is the Cluetrain Manifesto. As Cluetrain is accepted as bible, that would make your book heresy! Your thoughts?

KEEN: Yes, my book is in the heretical tradition of modern dystopian writers like Huxley & Orwell as well as contemporary American cultural critics such as Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell and Neil Postman. Cluetrain established a biblical orthodoxy around the four C’s: “community”, “citizenship”, “customer” and, most ludicrously of all, “conversation”. What it tries to do is displace the ethical and cultural truths that have traditionally defined our civic life — and replace them with the feel-good language of public relations. At the ideological heart of Cluetrain is the absurd cult of the amateur with its denial that real “truth” or “expertise” can ever exist.

…CULT OF THE AMATEUR is not a book written for Web 2.0 radicals. Instead, it was authored for mainstream Americans — parents, business people and educators — who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of “citizen media” like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft. These are issues that have a significant impact on real people’s lives and need to be publicly discussed and debated.

To which Doc, one of the authors of Cluetrain, responded.

Good God. Where to begin?
Well, not only did Cluetrain contain no “four C’s”, but neither the words “citizen” nor “citizenship” appear anywhere in the original website or the book.
While Cluetrain certainly has an ideological heart, it’s not “the cult of the amateur”, or the cult of anything.
And while I don’t yet know which “ethical and cultural truths” Andrew is talking about, I’m damn sure Cluetrain’s authors would never hope to replace them with “the feel-good language of public relations”. Which we crapped on rather forcefully…

I predict that Mr. Keen will sell a lot of books, because there’s a lot at stake here, and he’s “tickling the ears” of those who wish things to stay exactly as they are. The mainstream press will give him all the publicity he needs to sell books and make money, and that’s really what this is all about.

I agree that the Modern culture is under attack, but who’s to say it doesn’t deserve it or need it. What exactly is Mr. Keen trying to protect? The 20% of the population with 80% of the wealth?

Damned amateurs!

And many people create, because it’s their life, not their livelihood (thank you, Harry Chapin). Ask funtwo if he feels slighted because 15 million people have seen his rendition of the Canon in D. Does he deserve a seat at Mr. Keen’s table?

I’m sorry, but the real tip-off about the foolishness of this book is its title. Calling amateurs a “cult” is an insult of the highest order, and Mr. Keen should be ashamed of himself. What about amateur astronomers, huh? They’re robbing the pros of all their glory, so why not attack them, too?

The biggest mistake all critics of the personal media revolution make is the assumption that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not, and we shouldn’t buy the books of people who try to make it so.

This book will no more derail the Cluetrain than any other self-serving diatribe from the status quo. The only train wreck here is Andrew Keen.

Jay Rosen is a friend and colleague and a brilliant man. The launch yesterday of Assignment Zero, the first project of his creative effort to combine professional and amateur journalists, is both timely and historic. NewAssignment.net is a blending of some of the most amazing new and old media minds, but it is Jay’s vision that is pushing the journalism envelope with the project.

The most refreshing thing about the whole deal is the almost playful spirit associated with those involved. It’s not that this isn’t terribly serious, for it is, but every person admits that this is being made up as it goes along. And let’s face it; we first learned how to do that in kindergarten, so why shouldn’t there be a little joy? The goals are great journalism and insight into how professionals and amateurs might work together. The path? Well, that’s open to discovery.

In the end, one hopes that the birthing process will deliver something — perhaps not all, but at least part — of what free people might be able to accomplish by working together with a common purpose. The first assignment is crowdsourcing, and the resultant story will be published in Wired. I, for one, can’t wait.

And as I always must do, I want to remind everybody that the possibilities for such cooperation are even more significant at the local level than at the national or global level. This is yet another reason why entry into the Media 2.0 space is a necessity for all local media companies.

Alex Rowland doesn’t blog as much as he used to (or should — take that, Alex), but when he does, it’s usually a worthwhile read. This morning he writes about the vanity of sharing your life online, or is it more than that?

Many do these things for fame and self-aggrandizement, but I think the reason for most share their lives is that the simple act of sharing information for most humans is a very pleasant activity.

I think this is an evolutional trait of human beings. We are genetically programmed to enjoy the process of passing along experience and information to others. The web has just enabled this to become a much larger part of many people’s lives. It’s magnified the pleasure of sharing because you can share with so many people at the same time. It’s more subtle and less sinister than fame, but actually more powerful.

It gives me great hope for the future of our emerging civilization.

Me too, Alex. Me too.

I don’t normally do this, but this clip from YouTube so grabbed my heart this morning that I thought I’d share it along with a little commentary. There are two points here for media observers:

One, this is the real value of YouTube and “the problem” for the industry that has had a lock on the video niche for a half-century. I suspect that on this Valentine’s Day, many thousands of people will be touched by little Andrew. As of this writing, the video has been viewed 53,878 times. Let’s see what that is by day’s end. While all the publicity about YouTube centers around big media getting screwed, the users of the site keep populating it with items like this.

The second point is that the song in the video is by Akon, a Universal/Motown recording artist. It’s either playing on the radio or on a CD or MP3 in the car. That Andrew’s parents have now “recorded” the boy singing along with the copyrighted song is a violation of copyright law. A lawyer could argue that it’s a music video for which the artist, writer, band, studio and record company were not compensated.

And I suspect that I am, technically, complicit in breaking the law by sharing this copyrighted work here. This is the absurdity of the law in the digital age and why we need to re-write the thing.

So, whether you’re alone or not on this Valentine’s Day, enjoy Andrew singing Akon’s version of “Lonely.” He really gets into it about 2 minutes into the tune, so hang with it.

Jeff Jarvis gives props to WKRN-TV this morning in a post about the New York blogosphere.

Following in the footsteps of WKRN in Nashville, WNBC in New York plays host to a meetup with local bloggers and Sree Sreenivasan — who just moved over from WABC to head a new technology push — talked about it at length on the air this morning.

The station covered the event (which they should have) and offered viewers a pretty interesting survey that you can take it yourself.

New York’s first Blogger Summit was held in Studio 6A at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, known to many as the home of the Conan O’Brien Show. There, WNBC and the team of bloggers spent time talking about covering New York, its many niches, and the role “new media” plays in a world previously dominated by networks and newspapers.

The hope is that those bloggers will work with WNBC.com, trading news and information and giving additional exposure to big stories, both on blogs or on TV.

For example, if a blog gets a scoop on a big news story, WNBC would work with that blogger to report that story on television, giving more exposure to that blog. Also, if WNBC has video of a news event that might be interesting to a blogger, the blogger will have our blessing to post that video on their site.

I’m not sure I’d have positioned it exactly that way, but the station obviously felt it was the right path. Organizing the blogosphere isn’t so much about exploitation getting them to work with the station; it’s about the conversation and how supporting the conversation comes with a significant pay-back for the station. This is what WKRN has learned, and along the way, they’ve come to the exact position that WNBC is seeking.

This comes just a few weeks after The Washington Post announced plans for a blog directory and group blog (a “blortal”), Metroblogging DC. This, too, began with another meetup of bloggers. One of the bloggers involved in the group blog is David, who wrote with typical blogger skepticism in his inaugural post:

Generally, this is a good step from a media company the size and clout of the Washington Post, and seemingly, given their interest in feedback from the community of the bloggers, they are looking for a ‘best of breed’ directory when they launch (whenever that may be). It’s ambitious, but, it could be, a solution to a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist at this point, which is, the inability of the public to find relevant information on blogs in the DC Metro Area (regardless of content or focus). Advertising, however localized, is probably the major corporate reason for this push since, it’s been reported widely around the country, that the web (and sites such as Craigslist) are eating into a lot of the traditional revenue such as classifieds and smaller ads that newspapers usually rely upon. This is not to say the presentation of this upcoming site feature was disingenuous, but the reasons for even presenting this to the folks gathered was never fully disclosed.

I think it’s fabulous that local media companies are reaching out to the blogosphere, because the involvement with the local community will only make them better at what they do. We called WKRN’s aggregator “Nashville is Talking,” because the real mission of the station is to listen.

And that’s something we generally don’t do very well.

I love this “What the Duck” cartoon:

Truth #1: There will always be a need for professional video/photographs for traditional media.

Truth #2: What viewers/readers deem important is often far different than what we judge important (see below).

The Long Tail guru has an interesting way of stating a reality that those of us in the news business have known for a long time, that up close and personal “news” has value far beyond what journalists tag as important. This discussion is important as everybody scrambles for the “hyperlocal” market.

For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar.

Am I proud of this? No. But it’s true. And it explains why I’ve stopped listening to NPR (I can’t think of a worse way to wake up than to a news report that begins with the words “Another bombing in Baghdad…” when I know that one of the main reasons for the attack was to get covered by the international media in the first place. Plus it no longer counts as news to me.)

I call this the Vanishing Point theory of news.

There’s nothing new about this (it’s a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my “local” newspaper again when it covers my block.

This is why the “news” on mySpace is more compelling to young people than the news from 30-Rock, and it’s a cornerstone of Media 2.0. The disruption is all about people, folks, informed, empowered and enabled people who are taking matters into their own hands, not just because they can, but because they reject the manipulation that so often passes as “real” news. This is not to say that we are culturally irrelevant, but we need to find ways to relate what we know to the people at home and not just in our marketing.

To be the purveyor of hyperlocal news is a good thing, but our mission is more than simply providing information to smaller masses based on geography. Type of information that goes there is important, but our job is also about relating broader picture matters to the smaller groups as well.

I am really not a “told you so” kind of person, but the news that Backfence is having difficulty comes as no surprise. For the unenlightened, Backfence is a series of 13 “citizen journalism” sites in three metropolitan areas: Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. Funded by VC money, the model was touted by some observers as the way of the future.

Its downfall — if that’s what’s happening — should not be an indictment of hyperlocal citizens media, because there are plenty of other sites that are doing well (Baristanet, SunValleyOnline, Buffalo Rising, H2Otown, and one of my favorites, PegasusNews here in Dallas). It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.

This is why we built Nashville is Talking for WRKN-TV. It is an aggregator of the existing blogosphere and doesn’t try to be anything other than that. The community that has built up around it is pretty amazing, a little society that runs itself quite nicely and brings loads of benefits to the TV station along-the-way. WKRN’s plans go beyond what currently exists, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when all is said and done.

The existing blogosphere in any community has energy and life that can’t be duplicated by efforts from without. Bloggers write, because they have something to say. And people who have something to say will find a way to say it. What I don’t like about some citizen media sites is how hard they try to create a forum for people via their own model, reasoning that once the forum is in place, talented people will flock to it. People who have something to say already have their own forums, so efforts to duplicate this, I believe, come off as dry and lifeless.

Fred Wilson has a good summary of the “placeblogging” (this is the new term) phenomenon in his blog this week.

Like other observers, I’ve supported Backfence and the people who were trying to make it work. Nobody has a lock on where all this is going, and we’ve got to accept that some things will work and others won’t. Part of that, I think, is deciding what we mean by “works” and then building accordingly.

Media 2.0 is not Media 1.0, and the more we try to make it so, the quicker we’ll go down in flames.