A postmodern lesson in deconstruction

January 16th, 2012

A great many people (e.g. here, here, here) have commented about Tim O’Reilly’s dramatic question in response to a White House weekend blog entry about legislative efforts to stop online piracy. The blog entry/press release includes the assumption — as stated by the copyright industry — that legislation is needed to give them the power to control “their” intellectual property, because it’s harmed theirs and the nation’s economy. O’Reilly, however, isn’t so sure.

“In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?”

I wish to point out that this question is an outstanding illustration of the philosophical concept of deconstruction, a key process involved in postmodernism (to which this blog is dedicated). Deconstruction is the great threat to our hierarchically-driven culture, because it proves that much of it is based on unproven and self-serving assumptions, like the one to which O’Reilly is referencing. In the one-to-many media world, it was easy to get away with this, because the channels available to dispatch sweeping narratives was extremely limited. Today, that’s not true, and it’s only just begun. The essential function of a hyperlink is to practice deconstruction, and a culture armed with this ability will not sit still for anything resembling bullshit.

Respected observer and friend Jackie Danicki, Director of Social Comms for Weber Shandwick in New York, posted another assumption on Facebook yesterday. An article in her hometown paper began with this sentence:

“With the first drug-related warrant of 2012 under its belt, the Chillicothe Police Department continues to investigate drug crimes and work on making the city safer.”

This prompted Jackie to state, “How blindly these people accept and repeat the disproven idea that the war on drugs is making ANY community ‘safer’. Disgraceful.”

This is another postmodern example of deconstruction, and we’re going to see it more and more as The Great Horizontal advances. Can the public actually know more and better than it’s elected representatives? As the Wicked Witch once said, “Oh, what a world!” It’s what I call “The Evolving User Paradigm,” and it’s going to bite every institution in the rear end sooner or later. 21st Century businesses will be driven by the quality of their products and services to an increasingly hip public. You won’t be able to buy your way to the top by lobbing spit-shined horse droppings at “consumers.”

As Doc says via Project VRM, Caveat Venditor.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Networked World, Postmodernism | No Comments » |

A bluegrass miracle to start the new year

January 8th, 2012

A few days ago, something remarkable happened that I thought I’d share. It’s a testament to the wonder of hyperconnectivity for my generation. I think this kind of thing will only be experienced by those who’ve not grown up with the Web, so these kinds of stories will gradually disappear, but that’s just a guess. Here’s what happened.

Neal Lynch, the brother of a high school girlfriend contacted me via Facebook inquiring if I had been a member of the River City Singers from Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1960s. Facebook is the source of reconnections so plenty these days that this one would simply blend in with the others were it not for the fact that I’m able to pass it along to you. Neal lives in California, and the circumstances under which he contacted me are remarkable all by themselves, but The Great Horizontal — the connected culture we’re just beginning to know — is what made this possible.

I wrote back that I was indeed a member of that band, whereupon he sent me two photographs of myself and my two brothers playing our music in his basement. He was 12-years old at the time and shortly thereafter picked up guitar and has been playing ever since. The photos were made from old Kodak slides and are the only high-resolution, digital color pictures of the three of us playing together. The ONLY ones, and I’d never seen them before. These pictures blew my mind, because I was able to zoom in and closely examine facial expressions. The experience really took me back to when I was 18-years old. All that I am, I was back then. The experiences I’ve had in the last 47 years have shaped only what I do, but all that is really me — the gifts, the spirit, the emotions, the soul — can be seen in these pictures.

I sent copies to my two brothers and heard back from older brother Jim (the guitar picker). He told me that he was so blown away that all he could do was go sit in his back yard alone and think about our lives as a bluegrass band. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Words cannot express my appreciation for the way Life has engineered this and especially to Neal for contacting me. In the picture to the left, you can see me, as my daughter told me via Facebook, “lost in the music.” This is true, but “lost in the music” can also be a form of “hiding from everybody,” which took a big emotional toll on me over the decades that followed.

My two brothers and I are not close. The Vietnam War broke up our band, and we all went our separate ways. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life, because I really did and do love my brothers. That fact is inescapable when examining these pictures. We were really good, and to quote Marlon Brando, “I coulda been a contender.” Bluegrass is a music meant to be played, not just listened to. I haven’t had a banjo in many years, but this may inspire me to find something at a pawn shop. I’m playing an old Gibson Mastertone in the pictures. That instrument is worth a lot of money today.

This event in my life has reinforced everything I believe deeply about the enormity of this “second Gutenberg moment” in the history of Western Civilization. We may spit and snarl and fight it all the way, but this “Great Horizontal” is transforming everything about our culture. The more open we become, the harder it is for anybody to live a double life and to present bullshit as a cover story for one’s life. We have to rethink everything, and I envy those who are just entering adulthood, for life will be very different for them when they reach my age. The naysayers shout down change, usually because they have something to lose in terms of their position vis-a-vis everybody else.

I’m incredibly hopeful for tomorrow, because truth weighs far less than falsehood, and we’re all ridiculously overweight. That’s what my view of postmodernism is all about. These pictures have helped me in the ongoing journey to find my truth, and I am forever grateful.

Posted in Culture, LifeSlices, Networked World, Personal, Postmodernism, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

Dean Starkman and the FONers

December 26th, 2011

Back when Dean Starkman first struck out at those who present a view of the future of news (FON) other than his, I wrote a scathing retort but never published it. Others were saying the same things, and besides, I went after him for lazy intellectualism, which is always hard to prove. So I stayed home and let the FONers speak for themselves.

But wait! I’m a FONer myself, and now Mr. Starkman has struck out again, this time choosing to “interact” with one of his chief targets, Clay Shirky. Shirky had responded to his rant, so Mr. Starkman chose to engage Shirky and clarify his disregard for the FON crowd. After conceding four points that Shirky made, Mr. Starkman boiled his concern down to one simple thought – the story.

But all of this misses the point; the talk here is all about process and structure. I’m talking about great stories. As I said in the piece, I care about institutions only to the extent that they can produce them.

…I do kind of believe that newspapers must find ways to blah blah and whatever, but in fact I care far less about that than that they produce agenda-setting stories.

And this leads me to what seems to be a gaping hole in FON theory, and that is this: It doesn’t have any great stories, and, worryingly, it doesn’t seem to have any way to produce them.

There are many ways to go in response to this thinking, but let me state just three.

1. The problem with news in the future has nothing to do with content; it’s in how we get paid for making whatever content is required. News institutions aren’t really in the content business, they’re in the advertising business, so the argument about stories is irrelevant to the problem facing organizations that shoulder a free press responsibility.
2. “The story” is a product of production processes and schedules. Many of us have written about this extensively, myself included (News is Not a Story). I think I know what Mr. Starkman means by “the story” in the above, and it’s more about the process than the product. He’s speaking of delving into some heretofore untold or hidden narrative and bringing it into the light of day through good old legwork and other journalistic practices. Clinging to this, however, as a justification to strike out at the FONers is problematic, because the very process that Mr. Starkman holds dear is being disrupted by the next factor.
3. Communications is now horizontal and in real time. This completely destroys the top-down framework within which Mr. Starkman’s story paradigm works. He proposes that the world needs educated and experienced professionals to generate and follow-up on their leads, knowledge and suspicions, and to do it in such a way that follows the ethical and legal requirements of the profession. The results are then turned over to another even more educated and experienced group for vetting and final preparation before being dispatched to a large audience for maximum effect, thereby engaging with the issues of society. It’s neat. It’s ordered. It served us well for centuries. But the world itself has changed, and in a horizontal, real time communications paradigm, no feed is special.

Mr. Starkman is asking for a replacement for that concept within the new, and there isn’t any so far. I’m not sure there ever will be, due to factor number one. Moreover, I don’t think this is the only or even the preferred way for journalism to function by default, because it produces inertia and inefficiencies along with the occasional, “agenda-setting” story.

And if we’re really going to be honest, we must ask ourselves, too, if the hiding of the various facts that make up “the story” before it’s deemed ready to publish is really always necessary in a horizontal world. If the newsgathering process is made public, we can all participate, including those who can advance “the story” separate from the person or organization who first started the snowball on its downhill adventure. I realize this may not be applicable to every situation, and that there may be times when keeping quiet is necessary. In those cases, however, I believe the new culture will figure out ways to do it without breaking the bank.

Then there’s this: Mr. Starkman’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review — a highfaluting industry institution — is broken into two pages, presumably to play the old media game of page views. You won’t find anything similar among the FONers or their responses to Mr. Starkman. Not Mr. Shirky, not Jeff Jarvis, not Jay Rosen, not Mathew Ingram, not the host of others who fit the definition. This is itself a clue about tomorrow, for those who consume digital media are not unaware that the companies who practice such irritating tactics are merely raising the cost they have to pay for interaction. This won’t be tolerated forever. Scrolling is much more user-friendly than clicking.

The FONers know this. Mr. Starkman and those of his ilk either do not or don’t care.

Posted in Culture, Journalism, Networked World, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

Marketing in the Net

November 17th, 2011

One of the things I love about the Internet is the access it provides to utterly transparent, unvarnished and fully-rationalized crap. If you have a point-of-view — and who doesn’t? — then you can find both validation and nullification on the same good old Web. Sometimes, the validation is complete, while other times it’s very subtle and partial. Same with opposing viewpoints, but the beauty here is that when it’s complete nonsense, it’s an amazing and hilarious thing to behold.

One human being’s obvious truth is another’s crap, I guess.

Much has been written here over the years, for example, on the topic of authenticity. Among other things, it’s one of the new values of journalism. People want to hear from those directly involved in the story or to be taken as close as possible to the scene/source, so they can judge for themselves. Authenticity is also smart for 21st Century businesses, because in the network, it’s much more about what you do than what you say. That’s because the other participants in the market conversation — the people formerly known as the consumers — not only see through BS, but they’re capable of calling it out in such a way that others can see it. You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into, as Steven Covey says.

Which brings me to Lisa Barone, Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer of SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media. I don’t know Ms. Barone, and I can’t even remember how I found her piece at Blogworld. She’s a marketer, and the article is called Why Authenticity Is A Lie (Bad) Marketers Tell.

…What your customers want is the best version of you. The version of you that allows them to see themselves, where they want to be, and which helps them achieve their goals.

That’s what marketing is — Using yourself to show people their desired outcome. Even if that outcome is just your customer with a finally-working dishwasher.

As a marketer, you provide that experience by giving up the hokey authenticity act and creating a characterized version of yourself that exudes who your audience wants to be.

This is utterly astonishing to me. It’s trickery and manipulation. “What your customers want is the best version of you.” Huh? And if that best “version” is false, that’s okay — even desired — by customers, because a “characterized version” is better than the “hokey authenticity act.” Really? How does Ms. Barone know what customers want? Most marketers know a lot about what “works” for them but little about what people really want. This is gimmickry, all of it, and it’s a lame relic of the mass marketing fed industrial age.

What I love most about this is the authoritative nature of its advice. Marketing is defined as “using yourself to show people their desired outcome.” Right. Show white teeth instead of tooth decay. I get that. But it’s as if she’s quoting scripture in her effort to belittle authenticity. Hell, maybe what she’s talking about needs belittling, because if the best you can offer is this “authentic self” meme, I think you’ve missed the point on authenticity. We’re hyperconnected, in the network today. There is no (zero, zip, nada) demand here for messages that “show the desired outcome.” What people want is the truth, not sales pitches.

The advertising industry must be very, very careful about this kind of stuff, because anything that smacks of manipulation will have automatic and drastic consequences in the network. What’s proposed here is a very slippy slope, that the wearing of masks is acceptable in a horizontal world. I don’t object to picking and choosing the best character traits, if that’s a choice, but the line must be drawn at pretending, and I’m not convinced that this is something companies can resist when it comes to profit.

This is not the old world where you can say one thing and do another, because the barriers to entry into the communications world are so low. Anybody can challenge anything, and as Umair Haque so brilliantly notes, in the 21st Century, it’s all about the product you produce, not what you say about that product.

Authenticity is the most misunderstood value of new media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that marketers have mistaken it for a hokey gimmick that makes their sophisticated gimmickry look good. Authenticity is hard for businesses who’ve spent lifetimes perpetuating “the best version of you,” because the unintended consquence is you end up believing your own crap. Hyperconnectivity exposes this, and the only option is to be real.

Insofar as sports is an analogue of war, marketing draws its language from the arenas, stadiums and fields of the world. Ries and Trout’s popular and influential books, Positioning, The Battle For Your Mind and Marketing Warfare suggest that sellers of anything are engaged in a real war with customers and potential customers. Likewise, John Man’s popular book The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan puts business leaders in the shoes of a barbarian conducting war on his neighbors. At stake in this analogue is money, big money gained through market share. It’s all there in black and white: kill your competition, enslave those you conquer, and live on with the spoils of victory. It’s the stuff of pride for anyone with an MBA.

There’s just one small problem that the world of Mad Men overlooked: unlike toy soldiers (or real ones) on a battlefield where one is defending the land and the other is trying to take it, this battlefield doesn’t belong to either, and the owner of the playing field today has the power to say, “Get lost!” When this happens, marketers are trained to ignore the signals, because they feel they have an inherent right — an entitlement, if you will — to play where they don’t belong.

This illusion is what’s being dismantled by technology, because, when given the choice of shutting down the battlefield, guess what? We do it with vigor.

It used to be that, if you had enough money, you could tilt the scales of believability in your favor. That was the gift of mass marketing, and it made a whole bunch of people rich. In today’s increasingly meritocratic culture, performance and product are what count, and this has only begun. “Marketing” is a dirty word in the network.

This is why authenticity is neither hokey nor a gimmick; it’s the narrow path to success in the 21st Century.

Posted in Advertising, Networked World | No Comments » |

Occupy is our Babel

October 7th, 2011

I would have tweeted this, but it’s too long. The Occupy Movement reminds me of this verse from Genesis 11 and the story of the Tower of Babel. Theologians have used it for centuries to help children understand why we speak different languages, but the word “language” has many meanings, including any manner of expressing thoughts.

God is the speaker:

“Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!

Come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.”

Fast forward to today, and substitute the status quo for “God.”

Now you have an idea of what lies ahead.

While we’re at it, I might as well ask where “the church” is in all of this? Do they come down on the side of the people or the institutions?

The answer might surprise us, but not really.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Economy, Networked World, Occupy, personal media | No Comments » |

The Network is people

July 11th, 2011

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the thinking of traditional media falls in the area of understanding the environment into which “media” is now consumed. An audience is an amorphous mass, but the network is individual people. Actors on a stage are aware of the presence of the audience, but the bright lights shining on the stage add to the illusion of the people in the seats as one great mass. Even at rock concerts with countless thousands present, the audience is still the audience, not individual people.

This is more important than you might think, for viewing the audience as the “audience,” allows the viewer to treat them as something other than people. Madison Avenue, for example, doesn’t consider the audience to which it pitches products to be people. Instead, they’re consumers, objects to be slain in a psychological war in which nobody really wins, except the lawyers and the corporations. The process dehumanizes both buyer and seller. This is the world of the industrial age.

Traditional media was born of the industrial age, but we’ve moved past that now. It’s called the “information age,” and while it’s uncertain how we’re all going to make money and survive without all those former industries and support structure, we can take comfort from the reality that people felt the same way when we moved away from agriculture and built our cities, too. I call this the postmodern age, the age of participation, where our defining paradigm is “I participate, therefore I understand.” This is beyond the modern age, which was fueled by a different paradigm, “I think and reason, therefore I understand.” One doesn’t fully supplant the other, but its central tenets are different.

Which brings me back to the network.

Information design guru Edward Tufte said something last year about the contemporary presentation of information that we should all heed. “Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things,” he said. “People do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.” I believe this is a core tenet of the network, and that its significance will only be realized far downstream, when writers have the luxury of history upon which to base their conclusions about what’s really happening today. Respect for this, therefore, is the key that unlocks all of the mysteries surrounding the disruptive innovations that are tearing apart the very fiber of the modernist culture.

Here are five unmistakable realities about the network, and each bears profound significance for our culture and those who do business within it.

• It’s all about individual people, and I can’t begin to state how important this view is to the success of any future endeavor. There is no mass anymore. You can make it appear as one to suit your desires, but you cannot expect it will behave as such. Moreover, if you do choose to treat the network as a mass, it will embarrass you for the attempt. This is because the Web is three-way communications, not two. Your “mass,” therefore, is accessible by anybody, not just you.
• That’s because the network is horizontal, meaning that it is individual people sharing and discovering alongside other individual people. Discovery is no longer the sole purview of “experts,” because the knowledge that gives them their expertise is increasingly spread across the varied spectrum that is the people.
• It forces a new level of publicness, which makes it much more difficult to be secret. Secrets are necessary when elites run things from atop everybody else (basic colonialism, the heart of the modern era), but not so in the Great Horizontal. Jeff Jarvis has written a book about this that is due out September 27th. I’ve preordered mine already.
• It exposes of all sorts of bad behavior, and this will function as a societal governor. Witness the current scandal for USAir, when one of its flight attendants had a passenger booted from the plane, because she took a picture of her name badge (“She was being disruptive,” says the airline). The woman was planning to write a letter of complain to the airline about what she felt was rude treatment her husband had received when he inquired of the flight attendant about the two of them sitting together. The pair was headed from Philadelphia back home to Miami after attending the funeral of his father and didn’t have seats together. The photographer published the account through the photo site Pixiq, and it has created a PR problem for USAir. Increasingly, the network will force good behavior, because bad behavior will carry with it a new form of public repercussion.
• Your personal brand is everything. I simply can’t stress this enough, and you need to take a mental trip downstream to fully understand why. The network is not a mass, it is individual, identifiable people, and those people can and should play a role in how each is perceived. This is not just an opportunity; it’s a personal and professional mandate, and the time to begin it is now. Already, sites like Klout are springing up to measure individuals within the network. This will only grow in its sophistication and potential. I believe so strongly about this that I advise media companies to “help” the brands of their employees, and that such should be an incentive for working with a mass media company.

I could go on and on, but the point is clear: it’s the rise of the individual and the deconstructing of the mass. Advertising, like everything else, will be individually-directed (it already is), and that will further impact the ability of mass media companies to make a living the old-fashioned way.

And I think this is all terribly healthy for our Republic. My old business partner Sandra Seich — who created a remarkable personality profiling system — used to say that people miss the point when they speak of the Web as something other than “real life.” It’s more than real, she’d say, because people meet here at core, without the biases of the senses influencing them. These are replaced by other biases, those that are based on much deeper, more intimate knowledge. Which, she would ask, is more real?

I think that says a lot.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Networked World | No Comments » |

The Emerging Impotency of Mass Marketing

June 7th, 2011

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

The Emerging Impotency of Mass Marketing

I’ve struggled over the last few days with publishing this essay. The suggestion that an institutionalized hegemony such as mass marketing could possibly be collapsing is, I’m sure, laughable to many, and while I’ll admit to a certain proclivity towards the provocative, I don’t wish to be considered a loon. There’s no question that advertising is in disruption, but the extent to which that disruption impacts commerce isn’t really understood. Mass marketing is based on certain (often inflated) assumptions that can no longer be trusted, so our faith in it can’t be more than paper thin. This impacts media vastly more than anything that’s disrupting media content, for it strikes at the very core of our business. Along with our emerging networked world comes the very real threat (to some, blessing to others) that the marketing of the old is becoming impotent and no longer able to “move the rocks” that it once did. This is a remarkable occurrence, and one that will be the source of curiosity and commentary for years to come.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions, Networked World | No Comments » |

The diminishing power of sources

May 6th, 2011

The Great Horizontal is Jay Rosen’s new term for the era-shifting communications disruption that J. D. Lasica first termed the “Personal Media Revolution.” I like it. It’s the ability of everyday people to use the tools heretofore reserved only for deep pockets, whereby they can communicate back “up” to media and, of course, with themselves. So low are the costs for entry today that you’ve heard me say “everybody is a media company.”

This has, of course, brought out the worst in the journalism profession, because it is their ox that’s being gored by all of this. I’ve written many times about the arrogant presumption that “real” journalism is done only by the pros, and that this amateur “movement” is simply unreliable poppycock. The ultimate demonstration of this for me came at a gathering of media thinkers in Chicago a few years ago during which a video by NBC News anchor Brian Williams was played. He “welcomed” the group by warning of the dangers of the Great Horizontal, and he did so by referring to a blog about nasal hair. There was widespread chuckling in the room as Williams mocked the content of the blog, comparing it to the “real” stuff produced by professional journalists. I was embarrassed for Williams, although he thought he was making a valid comparison.

While journalists kick and scream, there’s something incredibly significant taking place as the hegemony of the industry is disrupted. Those who really run the news — the sources — are finding it increasingly difficult to realize the results of their manipulation. This can only be good for journalism, those who practice it, and especially for the culture itself. For too long, outsiders who know the rules have applied them to their best interests, and the result is a convoluted and confused system of ethics that serves not the industry but those who use the industry to get their way. All of that is changing — and will continue to change — as the Great Horizontal marches forward.

Whether it’s the ease of social media or the more complex local blogs, those who are getting into the game have a sense of mission-simplicity that is refreshing, passionate and oftentimes very raw. These people — like the rest of the people formerly known as the audience — view with transparency attempts to control, in any fashion, the way they think and present their thoughts.

In 1990, I was news director at KGMB-TV in Honolulu. I got a magazine (The Animals’ Agenda) in the mail from an animal rights organization that contained a section called “Activist Agenda.” This particular month’s was penned by Richard Krawiec (“a nationally-published freelance writer and author of the novel Time Sharing”). It was called “Dealing With The Media: Advice From A Journalist.” This article is a veritable “how to” of media manipulation, using the rules of objectivity and common sense. It’s smart.

Try to cultivate reporters who will take a real interest in your issues. Read local publications regularly and identify writers who cover animal topics. Keep those writers informed of your activities.

Think local. Why picket a traveling circus if there’s a terrible zoo in town?

Be visible. Cook vegetarian dinners for the homeless. Do street theater. A person dressed in a costume is inherently more interesting to the media than someone sitting at a booth. But don’t overdo the tactic to the point of looking like clowns.

Most of all, be realistic. Don’t expect the writer to produce a public relations release. Criticism is all right as long as it’s offered because you’re taken seriously.

Taken seriously. That’s the mission: to be moved from Hellin’s sphere of deviancy to the sphere of legitimate debate. It happens every day in the world of professional journalism, because people with an agenda know how the game is played. This may be what professional journalism prefers, but it’s not what journalism is really all about.

Wade Roush published an interesting article this week about the end of the embargo, another manufactured “rule” of professional journalism by which those with connections, those in the know can get the most bang for the buck out of their news releases. Embargoes come from “sources,” and Roush has never been a fan.

Frustration…has led a few organizations to attack the system. In 2008, notably, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington declared “Death to the Embargo” and said that henceforth his publication would work to undermine the system by agreeing to embargoes, then breaking them at random. They’ve done this with gusto, and Arrington’s campaign has worked. Embargo promises, at least in the business and technology space I cover, are now tissue-thin. If TechCrunch—now a division of AOL—doesn’t break the embargo on a given story, someone else emboldened by its example often will.

Ah, tech media, those scruffy newcomers to the game who don’t always (rarely?) play by traditional media’s rules. They, too, are a part of the Great Horizontal, for many — if not most — of them wouldn’t have launched had it not been for the low barriers to entry offered by technology today. After all, they invented the blog as a way to communicate online, and it runs circles around the portal method preferred by traditional media.

And blogs will continue to disrupt. The Nieman Journalism Lab offered another illustration of what’s happening with an article this week appropriately titled: A place for Homicide Watch: Can a local blog fill some of the gaps in Washington, D.C.’s crime coverage? Of course they can, and I believe that local blogs will be springing up like weeds over the next ten years as the Great Horizontal continues to move forward.

And one of the neat things about blogs and bloggers is that they don’t always play by the nice-n-neat rules of the professionals. They go straight to the street without the checks and balances that we take for granted and that we rationalize are necessary for a professional press. We’re learning that a lot of that is crap, and while I’ll admit that the chaos we face is a little disconcerting, maybe we need a little chaos to rid ourselves of a world where corporations and those with money can buy influence from the press (oh yeah) and those with smarts can manipulate their way in.

Posted in Blogging, Citizens News, Culture, Disruptions, Journalism, Networked World, Technology | 1 Comment » |

The Web Is Our Friend

February 20th, 2011

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

The Web Is Our Friend

We’re watching the world change before our eyes in the Middle East as everyday people are picking up the tools of new media to spread revolution against tyranny. Most of us “over here” see this as a good thing, although we fear the vacuum that might result. Good or not is an important question, because this idea that everyday people can connect so easily is at the core of everything that’s disrupting the media world today. If everybody is a media company then the media is everybody.

I’ve dedicated my life to the belief that the Web is a good thing for culture, and I teach that we’ve just begun to feel the ramifications of a genuinely hyperconnected world of human beings. I think it’s going to change everything we know, and if I had the money, I’d invest in that wager.

And so I think it’s appropriate for me, today, to take a trip back and explain why I think the Web is our friend. Insofar as Life moves us upward and onward, it’s important to know where our belief is, for only then will we be free to explore tomorrow.

Posted in Citizens News, Culture, Disruptions, Essays, Networked World, Postmodernism, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment » |

The ethics of hyperconnected media

January 19th, 2011

Most of you know that I teach media ethics at the University of North Texas. I do it to be around young people and their thinking, because it keeps me fresh. We should all be so lucky. The course is actually titled: Ethical Decision-Making in the Media, but I call it “Ethics for Journalism in a Networked World.” I do so, because they are different subjects, and the latter is what is required of anybody entering (or in) the field these days.

I’m writing about this today, because the question of ethics has been raised in the story of the firing of NPR’s Juan Williams over statements he made on his other job as a commentator on Fox News. An internal investigation by NPR resulted in one long-time employee resigning and an announcement that the network was reviewing its ethics policies. This has the usual head-scratchers scratching their heads. Poynter’s Kelly McBride wrote that NPR isn’t the only news organization in need of modern, realistic ethics guidelines for its journalists, and I agree. Why? Because things are changing.

Journalism is a profession rife with stars who get away with a lot. And in this new environment, stars tend to have more opportunities than ever, while newsrooms leaders don’t always have the resources to pay their stars enough money to lock them down exclusively or the time to manage their potential conflicts of interest and competing loyalties.

“The climate has changed a whole bunch,” Bill Marimow told me Friday in a phone conversation. Besides once being a senior news executive at NPR, he was editor of The (Baltimore) Sun and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“In some cases, people who were truly outstanding become almost like franchises,” said Marimow…

The problem with these kinds of dissections is that they cling to tradition as a guide. That’s evident when Ms. McBride gets into solutions.

I’ve no doubt that they will have significant discussions about how journalists uphold traditional standards while they thrive and stay relevant in the modern world.

It will be tough to write guidelines that allow the rock stars of journalism to pursue opportunity and extend their influence, while preserving their primary loyalty to one central newsroom. “They have to get the language just right,” Marimow said.

Here we have the essential conflict, and it’s why I’ve chosen to teach media ethics at the university. The conflict is between the individual and the stage (one central newsroom). Remembering for a minute that the stage is all about economics and providing an environment conducive to advertising — this is exactly what it is — here’s what I teach my students:

The stage is what matters to traditional media, the driver of its pursuit of “impartiality.” An impartial stage, after all, is home to all, including advertisers. This is no accident.

Journalistic ethics are all about the impartiality of the stage, not the individual journalists. Without an impartial stage, advertisers will bolt, so the decision is about business.

The people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA) expect an impartial stage. Why? Because we’ve told them it’s supposed to be that way. The problem is that people don’t believe it anymore.

Without a stage, there is no institutional wall of ethical protection. One, therefore, cannot pretend to be what one is not. This is the truth and the challenge of ethics in a networked world.

The stage says, “I am impartial.”

The individual says, “I’m trying to be fair.”

Artificiality is a curse in the Network.

Your personal brand is everything.

And so, I prepare ethical dilemmas based on scenarios where individuals have to make decisions based on their own brands, which is very different than learning to protect the artificial marketing of the stage. These people will go forward into the hyperconnected universe and do good, ethical work, and not because they follow a set of elitist canons that are in conflict with the culture. Why we cling to this as an industry is beyond me.

The biggest practical difference between one practicing journalism from a stage versus a personal brand has everything to do with the role of publisher-journalist. Business and journalism aren’t separate entities with those who run their own brands, and that’s where the ethical admonitions of industrial age journalism become impossible today. Conflicts of interest must be handled transparently and not be avoided altogether. This, I believe, is where NPR made its mistake.

Ironically, I find many of our old ethical beliefs to be in sync with today, things like accuracy, verification, and fairness. To these have been added, however, speed, transparency, and authenticity. We’re still discovering what all of it means, and until we get there, we’re going to have problems like Juan Williams or telling people that a congresswoman is dead when she’s not.

Meanwhile, let’s not be silent.

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