Have to love this: English atheists - upset over an inflammatory (in many senses of the word) ad campaign on buses to warn nonbelievers of the hellfire of damnation - used the internet to raise money to buy ads on those same buses to assure the public that there’s probably no God, so “now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” They used the Guardian’s Comment is Free to kick off the campaign and hoped to raise 5,500 pounds but ended up raising 135,000. It’s very MoveOn: using the web to organize and raise money and then use old media.
: LATER: Just as I posted this, I saw that the Times of New York covered the story, giving the atheists even more bang for their buck.
I ran out of time this morning before I had a chance to praise Jack Shaffer’s piece about newspapers’ failure to invent the web and reinvent themselves. Talk about burying the lead: His best lines came in his kicker:
From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.
As Adrian Monck points out, this is really just another chapter in the ongoing soap opera about the culpability of journalists for the state of journalism today.
Shafer is inspired by Pablo Boczkowski’s 2004 book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers and I have in my hand his thick and thoughtful 2001 dissertation on the topic. He chronicles attempts by papers to figure out and adapt to new media as it (they) emerged, including the creation of NJ.com’s Community Connection, which I lead and which died soon after Pablo wrote his treatise. It was one attempt among many to figure out the internet. And it’s one of the indictments against my tenure in online newspapers, for it was an attempt to be too controlling over the creation of communities. In my book, I quote Clay Shirky and Mark Zuckerberg as I learned that newspapers don’t create communities but might be lucky enough to serve them.
So there were many attempts by papers to adapt. There were many mistakes. Mine were among them. And so - to address Shafer and Monck - the question remains whether newspapers tried hard enough. Shafer says they may have tried but they barked up wrong trees.
I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying. That’s not true. It’s a willful misinterpretation. If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall - and I’m not sure I do - it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.
For every honest attempt to change that Shafer and Boczkowski talk about, I saw many more efforts to avoid and even torpedo change: newspaper editors and executives who told me that it was not their job to help this internet thing, to share content with the internet, to link to anyone else on the internet, to interact with readers on the internet, to rethink their procedures because of the internet, to teach new skills because of the internet, to promote the internet, and on and on. I saw too many direct attempts to subvert the future. That’s where the fault lies.
So Shafer’s quite right that newspapers failed because they couldn’t think past seeing the web as an extension of their past - they insisted in seeing the internet in their own image. But there’s more to the story.
A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.
But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.
Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:
When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.
The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.
There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.
: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.
I don’t intend to quote every review What Would Google Do? gets but I can’t resist this one from Michelle
Archer in USA Today, short and sweet:
Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis’ treatise on how — and why — companies should think and act like Google brings to mind several trite words from the world of literary criticism: eye-opening, thought-provoking and enlightening.
There’s something for everyone in What Would Google Do? For newbies still struggling to comprehend the Internet, Jarvis puts it in context. For floundering industries, Jarvis suggests reforms via Google’s philosophy or strategies employed by entities such as Facebook and About.com. And for people and groups hoping to launch the next big Google, Jarvis takes a page from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: Make something useful, help people use it and then get out of the way.
: Craig Newmark, a humbler man than most, quotes the review but takes out the reference to himself.
I was going to start a collection of the letters to readers that newspapers are publishing these days explaining every cutback and consolidation and where surviving features are moving to save paper and money because the times are tough, you know. But there are too many such letters.
Here’s one sample from the Advertiser in Louisiana. What’s scary about it is not what the paper says but what a customer says in the comments:
The article says “newspapers are not going away”, well The Daily Advertiser is. I’ve spent thousands advertising in The Advertiser over the the last eight years and have noticed a dramatic decline in returns from those ads. I quit advertising altogether last summer. People just don’t read the hard copy of The Advertiser any more.
Gulp.
Rather than telling readers what they’re not doing anymore and where they’re moving this and that - here’s where you’ll find that vital Sudoku and horoscope! - it might be better for papers to say what they are doing.
How about just saying: If it’s local, it’s here, if it’s not, it’s not.
And how about saying: If you want depth and currency and conversation and more, go online.
Among the great benefits - yes, benefits - of the internet for newspapers are opportunities to find new efficiencies. Do what you do best and link to the rest is one. Share is another. Newspapers have always been bad at sharing. That’s why they never managed to start a consortium to work together online (RIP NCN). That’s why they each spent a fortune buying custom computer systems even though they all did the same thing - because they thought they were special.
Now they’re learning to share because they have to. The AP has a roundup of what they’re doing with a sidebar I hadn’t seen before listing their efforts so far (to which I’d add the New York area newspaper consortium): There are content-sharing networks in Ohio among eight papers, Maine among five, Florida among four, Texas among two, the Washington area among to, in addition to the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times sharing a capital bureau and Mcclatchy and the Christian Science Monitor sharing international bureau stories.
That used to be the case with blogging when it first started. Every other post (including mine) was about blogging. Blog blog blog blog.
If you want to get out ahead of the curve when the next new social writing phenomenon happens, be the one who never writes about it.
Herewith, I put myself behind the curve. And of course, now I’ll tweet about this blog post about twittering. Jane, stop this crazy thing.
LATER: Nice exchange in response to this on Facebook (which might as well be Twitter, so it’s still morally the same):
Eric Effron : It’s only natural, though. I suspect that when people first got telephones, they talked a lot about…telephones!
Steve Safran: Agreed. My parents still talk about how wonderful it is they can email.
Lamar Graham: My mother still calls to tell me she sent me an e-mail.
Steve Safran: I get that too, but I have a feeling it’s just a Jewish mother’s way of saying “why haven’t you answered it yet?”
The Guardian’s Anna Pickard issues a rousing endorsement of online friendships on Comment is Free:
The friends I’ve made online – from blogging in particular, be they other bloggers or commenters on this or my own site – are the best friends I now have. And yet, when I say this to people, many times they’ll look at me like I’m a social failure; and when surveys like this are reported, it’s always with a slight air of being the “It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world!” item last thing on the news. Some portions of my family still refer to my partner of six years as my “Internet Boyfriend”.
Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.
For me, and people like me who might be a little shy or socially awkward – and there are plenty of us about – moving conversations and friendships from the net to a coffee shop table or the bar stool is a much more organic, normal process than people who spend less time online might expect.
Depending on the root of the friendship, on where the conversation started, the benefit is clear – you cut out the tedium of small talk. What could be better?
See also Leisa Reichelt’s seminal post on ambient intimacy. And also my column in the Guardian on how constant connection will change the nature of friendship. And here’s what I said in the last chapter of my book on the larger impact of Google and the internet:
I believe young people today—Generation Google—will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. . . .
Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of teens and tweens used social networks—they are essentially universal—and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via Facebook, never more than a degree or two apart.
I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. We will behave with this knowledge in the present. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns.
Today, our circles of friends will grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I don’t think so. Friendship finds its natural water level—we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar rule says we end up with 150 friends. I think that could grow. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. It’s about good friends.
Fred Wilson - bless his heart - blogs on my book, saying nice things (”It’s a good read, perfect for a flight. It’s not too dense, full of great quotes and insights. I’m enjoying it.”) and he pulls out one of the ideas that fascinates me most, one I’m thinking about writing on again: publicness.
It starts with Catarina Fake telling how she and Stewart Butterfield made a fateful and wise decision when they started Flickr and “defaulted to public.” Then Fred retells the story I have in the book of Mark Zuckerberg and his Tom Sawyer moment in an art class: how public interaction helped an entire class. Next, Fred quotes a commenter who had a similar story about a class working through problems in front of the entire class (though the school stupidly requiring killing the product of this work).
Here’s the lovely irony: Because Fred discusses this publicly and because he has wonderful discussions o his blog, there are more good ideas and viewpoints: a debate about whether Facebook is really public because we can control and restrict our publics here; discussion about competition and secrets; opinions about the foolishness of erasing knowledge; more talk about the value of secrecy vs. execution; a neat thought about the positive pressure of publicness; how publicness - being first to an idea shared in public - can lead to thought leadership.
The double irony for me is that the book itself isn’t public yet. Fred shared a bit of it in public and that is what lead to this discussion. I can’t wait for it to be public - though, of course, books are only so public since they are sold. We’ll be putting some of the book online - I need to talk with the publisher this week about what exactly that will be - and I hope we’ll test the limits of the benefits of publicness.
On the Dallas Morning News opinion blog today, the paper brags about what sets its letters apart from online discussion: identity. They quote a frequent letter writer named Chris (irony: no last name given) who says:
There was a statement in this guide whose importance is understood by far too few. Maybe it should have been entered in bigger and bolder lettering. The statement went as follows:
“There is no shortage of online forums where people can make up facts and throw bombs. But in our published letters to the editor, people sign their names and publicly stand behind their opinions.”
In a free society, opinions without sources reflect poorly on both writers and readers. This fact, along with the feedback that hard copy journalism has concerning government at all levels, constitute a valuable rationale for the necessity, existence and continuation of such journalism.
I’m not sure I can parse that last sentence into anything approaching clarity. But the point of the rest is clear: identity is good.
But then there’s a comment left by one PaulC (no last name, either), who argues:
Really?
“In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the
Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects
anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission,
decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required
the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. . . .
Justice Steven’s opinion for the Court note that arguments favoring
the ratification of the Constitution advanced in the Federalist Papers
were published under fictitious names. Justice Stevens said “quite
apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her
ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her
identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be
personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her
message simply because they do not like its proponent.” Stevens
concluded “Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a
pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of
advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of
the majority. “
Each is right. I have long said here that I give more credence and value to the opinions of those who stand by those opinions with their names, as I do here. But there is a place for anonymity in political discourse (and in whistleblowing and under repressive regimes).
For a proposal I’m writing, I want to compile key stats that show the state of the news business (at least the incumbents, plus a view of demand). Here’s what I have. Do you have other stats that reveal the state?
Bad news…
• Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008—twice the fall of the S&P 500—wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.
• Since 1994—and the release of the commercial web browser—newspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%.
• Viewership for network evening news continues to decline, to 23.1 million in 2007, according to Nielsen. The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA.
• Since 1994, newspaper print advertising revenue fell on an inflation-adjusted basis by 10% (from $34,109 million in 1994 dollars to $42,209 million in 2007 dollars, says NAA).
• Since 1994, the number of newspapers in America fell from 1,548 to 1,422, according to NAA.
• In 2008 alone, 15,586 newspaper jobs were lost, according to the Papercuts blog.
• In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers.
• 54% of Americans do not trust news media, according to a Harris survey. A Sacred Heart University survey says only 20% of Americans believe or trust most news media.
• Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never.
• In 2008, the American Society of Newspaper Editors took “paper” out of its name.
Good news…
• But newspaper online site audience has long since surpassed print circulation, reaching 69 million unique users in fall 2008, according to NAA.
• And the total online news audience is about 100 million—more than half total U.S. internet users—according to ComScore.
