The history of print, media & journalism in 45 minutes

Here is a video I made for all our incoming students at the Newmark Journalism School about the history of media and journalism. In years past, I’ve had the high honor an opportunity to brainwash the entire incoming classes in orientation, giving them some context, history, and theory of journalism. It is usually a string of all-morning discussions. But what with COVID, it was decided that this year, staring at my face for three hours straight would be inhuman, and so I recorded the substance of each session as a video for later discussion.

In this one, I start with movable type and cover a half-millennium of history, up through the creation of the newspaper, steam and the penny press and mass, the telegraph and broadcast.

I made other videos about the business of journalism and the role and goals of the journalist that I’ll post later.

A few pandemic pivots

Here’s an update on an impressive pandemic-inspired pivot by Samir Arora’s Sage, the company I wrote about at the start of the year that is building what I hope is a next phase of the net: a expert-based web.

When the pandemic hit and travel was all but shut down I worried particularly about two friends’ businesses because each was centered on travel. One is Samir’s Sage, which was starting its expert network with expertise about destinations — hotels, restaurants, places. I’ll tell you how he reacted in a moment.

The other was Rafat Ali’s Skift, which covers the travel industry and built its business around in-person events: a double whammy. I interviewed Rafat for the Newmark J-School’s leadership program about the painful decisions he had to make to keep the business alive. I think you’ll find it informative. Since we had this conversation, Skift shifted to offer a daily news subscription service and Rafat now says “subscription-first is the path forward for us.”

Now to Samir and Sage. He has made his career building tools to support creation: When he was developing an early web-authoring tool, NetObjects Fusion, he gained much valuable experience using it to help my friend Rick Smolan put together his amazing A Day in the Life of America project. Glam, Samir’s later company, was inspired by putting together networks of bloggers to build their businesses; I blogged about that 13 years ago. His latest company, SagePlus for Experts, which I wrote about here, was about to go public with tools for experts in travel and food to build their online presences and businesses with networks around them.

Then: COVID.

Before the shutdown, Samir had been introduced by William Morris Endeavor to celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, who got excited about using Sage to build his digital presence — across books (he has one upcoming), restaurants, and events — and to amplify the voices of experts not heard in mainstream media.

In the pandemic, Samuelsson started working with celebrity chef and food philanthropist José Andrés on relief for communities and restaurant workers. Samuelsson’s CEO, Derek Evans, called Samir about a dozen weeks ago asking him to extend the Sage platform to handle charitable projects and contributions: a campaign management system. In no time, Samir’s team volunteered to make it happen and on July 18, they went public with a platform for Harlem Serves Up. In 24 hours, it handled an amazing $100,000 in contributions.

This became Project Bento, an end-to-end platform for campaigns, which now include also Black Businesses Matter; Hand in Hand, a Daniel Boulud Fund; and the Project Bento Fund, which in turn gives money to Citymeals on Wheels and World Central Kitchen, in addition to funds to support restaurant workers. As of this writing, the team has raised $5.1 million in donations to charities and to create meals. Individual donations go 100% to the charities.

So now the Sage platform has more capabilities. It already had the mechanisms for experts to be invited, invite others, and build online presences and apps with multiple business models. Now, because of Samuelsson, the platform has the means to support not-for-profit campaigns and contributions from large sponsors and individuals.

That work done, Sage is turning back to its launch. Now it will include not just travel experts but also authors, entertainers, and experts in other fields, verified by humans. I had wanted Samir to move past travel because the web needs to build mechanisms and institutions to discover and verify and support expertise: to pay for their work. That, as I said in my last post, is what I think the net needs next: platforms not just for speaking “but also for listening and finding that which is worth listening to, from experts and people with authority, intelligence, education, experience, erudition, good taste, and good sense.”

I will never say there is a silver lining to the dark and deadly cloud COVID has because of the venal negligence of the current American government. But I am impressed at the good people create in times of need: Samuelsson and Samir saw a need and built it.

The time is now, cable news

I wrote this in preparation for joining Pete Dominick on his podcast today to talk about the need to schedule a daily show in prime time. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Joy Reid would finally take over Chris Matthews’ 7 p.m. time slot on MSNBC. As of the moment, nothing is official. So Pete and I went ahead with the discussion and I’m posting this:

What television should look like every day

My friend Pete Dominick and I have been banging the same drum over and over on social media and on his podcast: It is time — it is long overdue — for MSNBC and CNN to immediately devote at least one daily show each to the voices of African-Americans and other communities too long ignored. The reasons are many:

The most important story in this nation is racism and its unending impact. That is reason for a show.

The election this fall — the most critical election in more than a century — will be determined particularly by these voters, lead by African-American women. They must not be taken for granted by the Democrats, by fellow liberal voters, by candidates, or by cable news. They and their issues must be heard. That is reason for a show.

The lack of representation in American newsrooms — print, broadcast, online — is chronic and criminal and reparations need to be made. That is reason for a show.

The public has for too long not heard the voices of black Americans and that is why the mortal danger of living while black and the story of police violence and murder is a surprise to no African-American and to too many white Americans. That is reason for a show.

Brilliant voices in politics, civil society, education, science, the arts, and every sector of society are Black and Latino, LGBTQ, differently abled, immigrant and Muslim. That is the best reason for many a show.

Pete has been calling on both MSNBC and CNN to do better because he watches and appears on both.

Here I’ll focus on MSNBC because I watch it now pretty much every waking hour. I will also focus on Black voices because their issues are urgent. The network has a group of brilliant African-American people on its air, led by Joy Reid, whose show is better than any other at finding and booking people not seen elsewhere.

But they are all relegated too often to weekends, odd hours, and guest shots when they should have the prominence and due respect of a home in prime time. The moment Chris Matthews left his 7 p.m. timeslot, I expected MSNBC to give that time to a Black host: Joy Reid. I cannot understand why the network did not do that immediately.

I am not suggesting that one host will solve the problem. The weight of representing this huge part of America, of telling uncomfortable truths, of holding uncomfortable conversations should not fall on one person’s shoulders. This effort should bring many of the voices MSNBC already has — and many new voices — into a one show and many shows.

Let me name just some of names seen on MSNBC in addition to Joy Reid: Tiffany Cross. Eddie Glaude Jr. Maya Wiley. Yamiche Alcindor. Karine Jean-Pierre. Jonathan Capehart. Trymaine Lee. Al Sharpton. Malcolm Nance. Rashad Robinson. Eugene Robinson. Eugene Scott. Shermichael Singleton. Joshua Johnson. And where the hell have Jason Johnson and Elie Mystal been? Now is the time for their trenchant voices to be heard.

Some combination of those people in at least one show a day seven days a week — and then heard across every show on the network (starting at 8 every morning, please) — would be a start.

Now that television has learned that anyone can be on TV via a webcam from their homes, there is no longer an excuse to depend on a booker’s short list of people the network already knows well who can don a suit and get into a studio at any hour. Now TV can reach out and hear from new people everywhere, representing no end of diverse communities. The goal should be to radically diversify the voices heard.

And goals should be set. At the instigation of on-air host Ros Atkins, the BBC established its 5050 Equality Project, prodding shows to measure their performance in bringing women on the air with a goal of reaching parity with the population: 50 percent. At the Newmark J-School, we’ve signed on to the project and will bring further measures of diversity to the sourcing we teach our students. I would hope MSNBC and CNN would set their own goals.

I also hope they would be willing to be held accountable to these goals. I’d like to see the networks publish lists of their paid contributors and guests. I’d like to see them get so damned good at this that newspapers across the country do likewise.

Now is the time. It is long past time.

Journalism school: Why now?

Some of our amazing, innovative Social Journalism alumni from the Newmark J-School at CUNY are holding a Zoom call tonight to talk about the program and the work they’ve done because of it.

Given the state of the nation — and world — we have seen an upsurge in interest in and so we’ve just reopened admissions for the fall. Social Journalism could not be more relevant to the times.

I’ve spoken with some prospective journalism students lately who ask me whether this is the time they should come to school, or whether they should defer. My answer: If you wait a year, I think you’ll kick yourself.

In my life — and that’s a long time — I have never seen such a coming together of profound forces for change in society as we witness today. Systematic racism is exposed in glaring light no one can ignore any longer. That is for one thing because of the disproportionate and deadly burden on communities of color brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. And that is because police abuse is evident for all to see — not so much because of media’s cameras but because of the lens of the public, victims and witnesses, who can now share what they endure. It is thanks to the courage of a 17-year-old young woman who recorded the murder of George Floyd and posted it on Facebook that ignorance of police violence is no longer possible.

At the same time, of course, news media are challenged to their core. That is no reason to move away. That is a reason to move in. For as I tell our students every fall, it is their responsibility to reinvent and rebuild journalism, to take everything we teach and question it: How did we get here? Why do we do things this way (follow the money; follow the power)? What is the goal and reason of journalism? What are the ways we can now do it better?

Good God, if you want to change the world as a witness and participant, now is the time to do it.

Yes, it’s a tough time to go to school, as classes might start online or be interrupted. But when better to learn skills and confidence than in challenging times? Our students now will come out with untold resilience, with a need to be creative, with an ability to find new solutions, with strong motivation for their work. Lord, we need all that in the news business.

In Social Journalism, we — my brillant colleage Carrie Brown and the faculty she gathers in this program she directs — teach that journalism is not an industry with factories manufacturing a product called content to monetize with a commodity called attention. We teach that journalism is a service. I often teach the words of James Carey: “Republics require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places.” After a half-millenium of control by the gatekeepers of media, society is finally beginning to relearn how to hold a conversation with itself. So I redefined journalism and its mission: to convene communities to respectful, informed, and productive conversation. That’s what we do.

All our students select a self-defined community (not a mythical demographic like “millennial”) and first observe, listen to, empathize with, respect, and reflect the needs of that community before deciding what journalism can bring given all the new tools we have. See here a glimpse of the phenomenal, innovative work done by last year’s graduates.

We are heretics who are unafraid of examining how journalism can and should be advocacy for communities, for justice, for fairness, for science, for listening. Now is that time for that journalism, social journalism.

So come hear our alums talk about their experience (I’ll put up a link to the video here afterwards). It’s not a sales session. It is an event we long planned to show off their work. But given the intersection of circumstances — the challenges in society, the changes in prospective students’ lives, the reopening of our admissions — it’s a good time to hear what they have to say. (We will also have an information session for the school for veterans coming up on June 25 at 11 a.m. ET — sign up here.) Even if you don’t come to Newmark, if you are thinking of coming to school to come to journalism, my advice is that the time is now.

If you have questions, let me know. DM @jeffjarvis at Twitter.

The last stand of the old, white man

This piece was solicited by Ireland’s The Journal, asking essentially what the hell is happening in America. They first published the views of people of color, then ran mine yesterday.

What we are witnessing now in America is the last stand of the old, white man. 

Four years ago, when speaking to groups outside the United States, I would apologize for Donald Trump. It got a laugh, until it didn’t. As an American, I must still apologize for what Trump has done to my country and what my country has done to the world by electing him. As an old, white man, I must confess it is people like me who got us here.

America’s paradoxes have come home to roost. Ours is a nation of freedoms built on the slavery and undervalued labor and lives of black people. Ours is a nation of equal opportunity that exploits the inequality of people of color and immigrants, of the poor. 

The nation’s systemic racism has always been there, of course, but it becomes sorely evident in times of crisis. The COVID pandemic has disproportionately harmed communities of color — killed them — because as a group they have worse health care. Many of them are the “essential workers” doing thankless jobs, exposed to the virus every day. Many are poor people who cannot afford to lock down at home; they must work to eat. Too many of them lost their jobs. In my city, New York, they disproportionately live in crowded housing and must take long rides on contaminated subways to work and when they get sick the hospitals in their communities are underfunded and overcrowded. 

Once it became clear that people of color and old people were COVID’s primary victims, calls came to reopen the economy, as if to say: These people do not matter. 

And in the midst of that crisis, once again, a black man, George Floyd, was murdered by police for the crime of being black. Any African-American can tell you that they and particularly their young men live in peril every day of a white person calling the police on them for shopping, eating, walking, even bird-watching while black — and that the arrival of police can, as in the case of George Floyd, be a death sentence. 

This everyday danger became evident with social media and the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #LivingWhileBlack. It was not evident in mass media because those communities and their stories were sinfully underrepresented in newspapers and their newsrooms. And so, as an old, white journalist and editor myself, my confession continues. 

I was raised in the sixties and I feel as if I am reliving them — with reruns of political turmoil, racial strife, riots, police abuses, even a rocket launch — and we have learned no lessons in between. 

As a child of those sixties, I was raised to believe in a colorblind America, in the great melting pot. I did not learn until much later how wrong and racist that presumption was: that the nation would reach racial harmony once the others acted like us, like the white majority (although we would do everything not to let them). 

Soon, by 2050, the white majority in America faces the reality that it will become the white minority and that scares them. The most frightened are the uneducated, old, white men who hold privilege and power and realize how tenuous that hold is because it is based on what they had in the past — who they are — rather than what they contribute to the future — what they can do. These are the people who formed the concrete core of Trump’s so-called base. They exploited an unrepresentative democracy designed to protect slave states — in the institutions of the American Electoral College and Senate — to get Trump elected, to get old and white men to rule the Senate, and to fill our courts for a generation to come with their judges. It will take generations to undo their damage and even if we do, we’re only back at square one: at an America still undergirded by systemic racism. 

The author and Professor Ibram X. Kendi argues in his book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” that the opposite of a racist is not someone who claims to be not a racist but instead someone who fights racism, who is anti-racist. We need to become anti-racist in every American institution, starting with the political. 

In this election, I first supported Sen. Kamala Harris. I was ashamed to see how political media all but erased her candidacy, for she is African-American and a woman. Then I supported Sen. Cory Booker, who is black. Then I supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is a woman. Now I am supporting former Vice President Joe Biden, who is an old, white man. He’s a good man. I pray for his election.

The only way Biden will win is if African-American women and men, Latinas and Latinos,  the disenfranchised and the educated of this country come out to vote and fight for this change. He cannot take these constituents for granted. As Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., just said on TV, the scale of Biden’s response must meet the scale of the problem. 

He must promise them a new America — not a return to any old America. He must offer a nation truly, finally built on freedom, opportunity, and equality with institutions — government, education, health care, employment — that right systemic wrongs. As an old, white man, I must learn how to share, to give up my power and privilege to those who have been deprived of them. 

I pray for the president who follows Biden to lead this work, to finally end what we have now: the tyranny of the privileged, entitled, scared, angry, racist, fascist, old, white man, Donald Trump and those he represents.