I didn’t realize how affected I have been by the trauma of COVID-19 until today, when the death toll in America passed that of 9/11, when the cumulative stress of seeing medical workers suffer and scientists wonder and politicians bungle piled too high, when I found myself snapping for no good reason, when the pain of uncertainty returned.
On 9/11, I was at the World Trade Center, feeling the heat of the jets’ impact, seeing lives lost, overcome by the debris of the towers’ fall, barely surviving — because I didn’t step two feet this way or that — and witnessing my mortality in the moment, the result of my bad decision to stay and report … for what? for a story.
Now that moment of mortality is every day, fearing the wrong moment in a grocery story or touching a surface or rubbing a nose will do any of us in, jeopardizing ourselves, our families, our communities. It is 9/11 in slow-motion, repeated every day for everyone: a morning that will last a year or two; evil groundhog day.
One of my last trips into Manhattan before the shutdown was to Bellevue Hospital, to the World Trade Center Health Program, where I finally went after many years of denial to have them prod my body and memory. I thought it would be therapeutic. It was more bureaucratic, to certify me for treatment that doesn’t really exist for my two cancers (both lite: prostate and thyroid, each on the List), for my heart condition (atrial fibrillation, not on the List), for respiratory issues (sleep apnea; I’ll get a machine), and — here was my surprise — for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Me? I’m fine. Just fine. I have been for 19 years, not just coping but always cognizant of my privilege, having survived the day and prospered since, lucky to have my family and home and work.
And then, 19 years later, comes COVID-19 (as if numbers were self-aware of their irony) to remind me again of my fragility, my mortality.
I am still fortunate and know that well. I live out in the country with much social distance around me. I have a wonderful family and thanks to my wife am safe at home. I have a rewarding job working with dedicated deans and teachers who want nothing more than to help our students not just weather this crisis but learn from it and become wiser and more resilient for it. Thanks to the internet, I can keep my job and income and my connection with the world. I am privileged still.
I look at the numbers on charts, deaths and death rates daily, and think we are not doing a good job of seeing the humanity in them. The so-called president acts as if losing 100,000 or 200,000 people is a job well-done and deserving of credit. His flags are not at half-staff; never. The news is just beginning to fill with the names of the lost, the stories of their lives buried under slopes on charts. So many of the first we lose are selfless medical workers, gone for no reason, gone because of our feckless government’s denials. God knows how the doctors and nurses do this, facing the mortality of so many, including themselves, every moment. God bless them.
I am not them. We do not have to be among them. We do not have to be if we pay attention and stay inside and don’t breathe the wrong air and touch the wrong thing and scratch our eyes at the wrong moment and hang on until science — blessed science — gives us a vaccine. I bury myself in science. That is where I find hope.
But we are vulnerable. We always are, always have been, always will be. It’s just that most of the time, we manage to ignore that fact.
Especially us New Yorkers. Our city is so strong: The center of the fucking universe, as I delight in telling students and visitors, a fortress of spirit and will, intelligence and effort. But here it is again, under attack, brought down and brought silent this time by a mere virus for which we — the nation — were criminally unprepared.
And so my anger does me in. I cannot bear watching him on television every fucking night, that tower of ego and unself-aware fragility exploiting the vulnerability and suffering and his citizens and spewing falsity and hate and ignorance to his cult. That is too much to bear. I am ashamed of my own life’s field, media, for giving him this platform, for not calling his lies until they are spread like a virus across the land, for failing to diagnose the disease that he is. This depresses me.
But writing this is its own form of self-indulgence, I must confess. I haven’t shared emotions like this since some long-gone anniversary of 9/11. For I was healing or healed, I thought. But now I see my weakness again. The emotions are bare.
I told the psychiatrist at Bellevue (a phrase I use with no irony) that I saw few lasting effects of 9/11 on my psyche. I became phobic about bridges and there are many I will not cross. I find my emotions can well up at the most idiotic moments, when a manipulative twist in a TV show or even a goddamned commercial can peel me back and reveal my gooey center. But all that’s not so hard to control. I just find the nearest tunnel or a shorter bridge and shake my head to wave off the storytellers’ manipulation of my heart.
Yet today that is harder. The emotions are rising again. I wouldn’t name them fear. I’d name them apprehension and worry and anger and stress and empathy for the numberless and nameless who go before us, too soon.
So there. Nineteen years ago, when I started blogging after that day, I found it helpful to share so I could connect with others and learn I was far from alone. That act itself — linking with people here, online — changed my perspective of my career, of journalism, of media, of society. It taught me that properly considered my life and profession should not have been about writing stories but about listening and conversing; that is what I believe now. That gave me a new career as a teacher.
Now I don’t tell my story so much as I confess my weakness in case someone reading this feels the same: vulnerable but fortunate, worried but wishing, just uncertain yet not alone.
This post has been translated into Spanish here and Italian here.
In this novel crisis, we in media and online need to shift much of our attention away from trying to eradicate disinformation (and how’s that going?) to spend more of our time and resources once again finding and amplifying good information — authoritative information from experts.
That is why I am maintaining and immersing myself in my COVID Twitter list of 500 epidemiologists, virologists, physicians, researchers, NGOs, and selected specialist journalists. I have been taking in their conversations with each other and the public, learning every hour, privileged to be able to ask questions, witnessing science in action; it’s that and only that that gives me hope. Through those experts I get a better view of our new reality versus any bro’s contrarian thumbsucking in blog posts or New York Times columns or in mindless TV location shots in front of poke bars that — guess what? — have no business. More on all that in a minute.
Of course, I’m not suggesting an end to fact-checking and fighting disinformation. First Draft, Storyful, fact-checkers worldwide, and news organizations aplenty have that well in hand, or as well as anyone can these days. But the flavor of disinformation has changed; the target has shifted; the enemy is different. As First Draft’s founder and my leader in all such things, Dr. Claire Wardle, said in a video conference with journalists the other day, much disinformation these days comes not from malicious actors but from the well-meaning ignorant. Ignorance is our foe.
That is why we need the experts. That is why we need to put our effort behind finding them, listening to them, learning from them, and amplifying what they have to say. That is media’s job № 1.
Cable TV news is doing a decent job, I think, of getting experts on air to answer questions — authorities such as Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security; Dr. Peter Hotez, professor at Baylor; Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of Penn; Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness; Andy Slavitt, former Obama ACA head. My primary complaint is that, TV being TV, they fill too much time with meaningless, repetitive location shots, coming back to an empty deli or Times Square a dozen times in a day or standing in front of the soon-to-be mass hospital at Javits Center where there’s no reporting to be done. Stop.
I want to see that time filled instead with more voices of science. I want to see TV do what it does best: make stars, stars of experts, scientists, doctors — the people we should trust and listen to, not pontificators or certain politicians at podiums. I can recommend many more scientists from my list. Here are some examples:
Devi Sridhar, chair of global health at the University of Edinburgh, has been a brilliant and outspoken critic of UK policy who can explain anything in the crisis with crystal clarity. Watch her from two years ago predicting precisely predict what we are now enduring:
"Our biggest health challenges are interconnected."
Here is Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a lead researcher on the NIH effort to create a vaccine and an excellent explainer on Twitter.
Also from the UK (which I recommend because we need international perspectives) here is scientist Mike Galsworthy explaining with concise clarity and a simple notebook why Boris Johnson’s herd immunity strategy was dead wrong.
It looks like UK govt messed up Covid-19 modeling… and are now backtracking hard. https://t.co/Jw0pWuhbKg
Dr. Florian Krammer of Mt. Sinai, who has delighted scientists with his work on COVID-19 serology (which can lead to a test to see who is over the disease);
Dr. Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist who is super at making graphic explainers of virology;
Dr. Jeremy Faust of Harvard and now publisher of an authoritative COVID newsletter, Brief19;
Kai Kupferschmidt, a science journalist who has been good on the topic;
Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown;
Lisa Jarvis (no relation), a reporter at Chemical and Engineering News;
Dr. Rob Davidson is the frontline ER physician who challenged Vice-President Pence and who gives us messages, exhausted, after his shifts.
They are all sharing directly with us on Twitter; what a privilege to be able to read them. That is but a small sample of the 500 experts I follow. You could follow each of them or better yet subscribe to my list (I get nothing out of it but the knowledge that you’ll help spread good information). Twitter, to its credit, decided they wanted to expedite verification (that is, the anointing of checkmarks) of these experts and so they came to me for help and I’ve been trying to guide some of them through the process, still ongoing.
One caution: What passes in tweet-length conversation in the midst of a constantly changing situation is science in progress. That is to say, there are no answers and conclusions, but there is information and data, and there are important questions. And that would be OK for most people. But Trump. I retweeted a report of very incomplete information about one doctor’s experience giving a few patients a malaria drug and antibiotic — worth looking at, the doctors in my feed said; no more. Then Trump trumpeted this as practically a cure, causing doctors to scream and a run on the medicine. I was properly castigated by someone on Twitter for tweeting such a small study and he was right to the extent that I should have added the context that it was small and nowhere near conclusive. You might wish for the days of gatekeepers — reporters — to add that context, but we’re leaving that era. I welcome hearing so much information directly from so many experts and practitioners. In this age of more open information, the public will have to learn to deal with incomplete data. You might call what’s needed media literacy, except media often do an idiotic job of reporting the progress of science (“Wine will kill us!” “Wine will save us!”). I call the solution simply education.
Now let us compare and contrast how certain media have dealt with — that is, spread or ignored — expertise. Some media have been wonderful. The Atlantic immediately put its excellent COVID coverage — for example this well-documented policy proposal from two renowned doctors and an ongoing project tracking how many Americans have the disease — outside its paywall. Some followed the example, making COVID coverage free; some haven’t. For God’s sake, if there were ever a moment when journalists should see reporting as a public good, if there were ever a moment when we should do everything we can to eradicate ignorance so we help eradicate this threat, this is it! Before you start poor-mouthing about tough times — which we all now share — know that it was The Atlantic’s decision to go outside its paywall that motivated me to subscribe. Sometimes doing good is its own reward; sometimes, there’s a bonus.
I also want to single out Medium for praise. As a platform, it does not choose what is posted there. Among the God-knows-how-many posts that went up recently was an absolutely awful festival in willful ignorance and hubris from a so-called growth hacker who thought he could do better with epidemiological data than untold experts around the world. To quote:
I’m quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal.
Scores of experts in my Twitter list went properly berserk over his conclusions, — a biology professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Carl Bergstrom, decrying every paragraph. It spread for a time via Fox News fools and others. (I could insert a rant here about Fox News and Rupert Murdoch killing people and democracy, but let’s just stipulate that for the time being.)
But then Medium took the piece down.
UPDATE: Medium released this statement about the takedown:
“We’re giving careful scrutiny to coronavirus-related content on Medium to help stem misinformation that could be detrimental to public safety. The post was removed based on its violation of our Rules, specifically the risk analysis framework we use for ‘Controversial, Suspect, and Extreme Content.’ We’ve clarified these rules to address more specific concerns around the evolving public health crisis. We’ve also taken steps to point readers to credible, fact-checked pieces on Medium and elsewhere on the web, and to remind readers that Medium is an open platform where anyone can write. We’re assessing the situation daily and making adjustments as necessary.”
Bravo for Medium. Yes, I wish Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al would do likewise. The differences are clear: Medium is a platform for content while social media provide platforms for conversation; social media carries exponentially more items to monitor. Facebook says, and I agree, that it would make a bad arbiter of truth. Fine. But I do want to see especially Facebook grow a spine and decide what does and does not fit in the community it has built. Denying informed science and endangering lives belongs in no community. Besides tamping down the bad, I also want to see Facebook, like Twitter, do everything possible to amplify science and sense.
Yes, there are idiots out there and idiots who believe idiots and who don’t want to believe science. But we will go mad trying to save them all from their ignorance; we are too busy to focus on them. I say we must concentrate now on those willing, wishing, and needing to learn, which I firmly believe is most of us. We do that by helping them pay attention to science and facts and helping them ignore the idiots.
You’d think that concentrating on the evidence produced by experts would be easy at a publication still controlled by editors, as opposed to a technology platform. But I cannot understand why The New York Times is publishing some of what it has published lately, fully in its control.
Take, for example, this op-ed by David Katz, which like the post Medium took down takes a contrarian position that this pandemic really isn’t as bad as it seems, implying we are overreacting. Once again, countless experts in my Twitter list went nuts over this. They were particularly amazed that The Times chose to give over its precious space and its invaluable distribution and imprimatur not to an epidemiologist or a virologist but to someone who is well-known for defending sugar and acting as a California walnut ambassador and creating a discredited nutrition rating system (all of which The Times could have found, as I did, in a simple Google search). Could The Times have found no one more knowledgeable about the disease? I could suggest 500 people. Here Yale’s Dr. Gregg Gonsalves takes it apart:
So right. In choosing that author and that op-ed and passing on others who know so much more, The Times is — I’ll repeat Gonsalves’ words —exercising “denigration of expertise, when we need it most, prizing generalist knowledge when specifics matter.”
And it gets worse with — surprise, surprise — Bret Stephens, who took the same contrarian path, questioning the experts and their “models” — yes, he put “models” in scare quotes. He based his arguments in great measure on a piece by John P.A. Ioannidis — which I had already seen the expert doctors in my Twitter list excoriate. Here is a very polite takedown of Ioannidis’ theories by Harvard’s Dr. Marc Lipsitch, who concludes: “Waiting and hoping for a miracle as health systems are overrun by Covid-19 is not an option. For the short term there is no choice but to use the time we are buying with social distancing to mobilize a massive political, economic, and societal effort to find new ways to cope with this virus.”
And then there is Tom Friedman’s latest column, in which he echoes the challenges of the contrarians: “Is this cure — even for a short while — worse than the disease?’’ He all but gives the back of his hand to the epidemiologists who are informing policy, calling what they offer — with scare quotes — “group think.” Good Lord. Theirs is not the opinion of a goddamned coffee klatch. It’s science, based on data and experience — which is more than any columnist has. Friedman hides behind the classic excuse of the journalist: “I am not a medical expert. I’m just a reporter.” Translated: We’re supposed to ask dumb questions — just questions — on behalf of the dumb public. No! Our job is to go to the experts to help make the public smarter. Amazingly, Friedman goes on to favorably quote both Katz and Ioannidis from The New York Times. Talk about an echo chamber! Talk about “group think”!
Gonsalves tweeted again, about this Times hat trick, and I must quote it all:
Expertise. We will live or die by expertise: by science, by evidence, by experience, by knowledge, by data. Hot takes will kill us, whether they are Donald Trump’s (‘I have a good feeling about the drug’) or a tech bro’s (‘I know data’) or New York Times’ columnists’ with their scare quotes (‘are “group think” and “models” good? we’re just asking’).
In journalism, we are never experts. It is our job to find experts and give them voice for the public, adding questions and context where helpful. But thank goodness, I don’t need the journalists to stand in the way. I can go straight to 500 amazing, brave, brilliant, experienced, knowledgeable, dedicated, and caring experts thanks to the internet.
Imagine, just try to imagine what it would be like to weather this very real-world crisis without the internet. Then imagine all the ways it can help even more. And stop, please stop claiming the net is broken and makes the world worse. It doesn’t. In this moment, be grateful for it.
What we need most right now is expertise. Thanks to the net, it’s not at all hard to find. I spent a few hours putting together a COVID Twitter list of more than 200 experts: doctors, epidemiologists, academics, policymakers, and journalists. It is already invaluable to me, giving me and anyone who cares to follow it news, facts, data, education, context, answers. Between social and search, good information is easy to find — and disinformation easy to deflate and ignore.
Through that list and elsewhere on the net, I am heartened to see how generously and quickly experts are sharing information with each other: asking for data on presenting symptoms, or emergency room experience in Italy and China, or information on how long the virus stays active on various surfaces. The net will help them do their jobs more effectively and that will benefit us all.
On social media, I have watched citizens connect, gather, and mobilize to press authorities and companies to act responsibly (well, except the ones who are never responsible). CUNY students used hashtags and petitions to hold a virtual protest or march — or very nearly riot — to insist that our classes go online. It worked.
Online, we can thus see the shaping of public policy occur in public, with the public, in full view, and with complete accountability. On social media, we the people get to lobby for what matters most urgently to us in this crisis: availability of free testing, help for workers over companies, paid sick leave. I am confident that without the collective voice of the concerned public online, the powerful would have been much slower to act.
In the coming weeks — months?— of social distancing, we will feel isolated, anxious, bored, stir-crazy; we will need to reach out to the people we cannot touch. The net — yes, Facebook and Twitter — will enable us to socialize, to connect with friends and family, to find and offer help, to stay connected with each other, to stay sane. How invaluable is that! Imagine having only the telephone. Imagine a crisis without the relief of humor, without silly social memes.*
Of course, it is the net and all its tools that empower us to work at home, to keep the economy moving in spite of shutting the physical presences of most every business, to keep many — if too few — people employed. Imagine the value of the economy during a pandemic without the net.
It is the net that also allows us to buy from Amazon — even if we go overboard with everything good and use this power to hoard toilet paper.
The internet is doing just what it should do: connect people with information, people with people, information with information. It enables us to speak, listen, assemble, and act from anywhere. It is just what we need today.
I have been upset lately with some people claiming that the net is broken. This often comes from technologists who helped build the net we have, who go through some sort of Damascene conversion, who then claim that the net is breaking society, and who ultimately argue that they are the ones to fix it — fix what they helped break in the first place. What boundless, self-serving, privileged hubris.
I was going to write a screed about the damage these dystopians can do to the freedoms the net brings us, and I probably still will. But then news overtook my attention and I decided instead that this is the moment to remind us of the gift the net is, how much we depend upon it, and how grateful we should be for it. So much attention in media and government lately goes to what is wrong on and about the net, blaming it for our human shortcomings. But I repeat: It is wonderfully easy to find good information from experts in this moment and it is easy to ignore the idiots. What’s been wrong is that we have been paying too much attention to those idiots. Hell, we elected one president. No, I don’t blame the net for that. I blame old, mass media: Fox News and talk radio. You want to hold someone responsible for the mess we are in? Start there.
So now let us turn our attention to how to improve — not fix — the net and, more to the point, how we use it. We need more mechanisms to find and listen to expertise and authority. We need better means to listen to communities in need and communities too long ignored by Gutenberg’s old, mass media. We need to develop models for supporting sharing of reliable information and continually educating people. There is much work to do.
Is the net perfect? Of course, it is not. I’ll remind you that when movable type was introduced, it was used to print lies and hate, to bring the corruption of indulgences to scale, to seed nationalism, and to fuel peasant uprisings and massacres, the Thirty Years War, and perhaps every Western war since. Did print break society? No, it let society be what society would be. Did we ever perfect print? Of course not. Could we imagine life without it? No.
Martin Luther called printing “the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.” Well, I’d say God outdid herself with her next act.
At the end of an exceptional first week for our new program in News Innovation and Leadership at the Newmark J-school, the students — five managing editors, a VP, a CEO, and many directors among them — said they learned much from teachers and speakers, yes, but the greatest value likely came from each other, from the candid lessons they all shared.
When I first proposed this program about four years ago, I suggested it should offer a smorgasbord of courses to be taken at will. Then I was fortunate enough to recruit Anita Zielina, the ideal news executive, to create and run it. She said (nicely) that I was wrong and that the program had to revolve around a tight cohort of students sharing their education together. She was so right. This week, I watched this group build trust, respect, and empathy — and a common store of knowledge and insight … as well as exasperation.
Next Saturday in Philadelphia, the Tow-Knight Center at Newmark, will take part in the first meeting of an international gathering of product leaders in the news business. Our involvement grows out of one of a handful of communities of practice my colleague Hal Straus has been running for a few years, bringing top product, audience, commerce, and talent-and-inclusion executives in New York together to share — and sympathize — with each other. Aron Pilhofer at Temple and Damon Kiesow at Mizzou generously offered to include us in a collaboration to build a national product organization whose aim is to answer the question, “How do we make news organizations more audience-oriented, data-driven, and product-focused?” In short, how do we save the news business?
These people — like the Social Journalism students I wrote about so proudly last month— are our innovators. They will be our leaders. But they are frustrated by the state of the business and, of course, now and then by their bosses. They see the imperative for change; they have ideas; they are eager to run. But where? What frustrates them — and, in fairness, their bosses — is that the solutions are not evident and thus finding them requires risk, experimentation, failure, and investment of capital we do not have, capital we can acquire these days only from others who bring their own goals and agendas. Does this mean it may require letting some institutions burn to the ground so a radically new journalism can be built from the ashes?
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Gutenberg and the birth and long progress of printing toward its eclipse in our age of digital data and connectivity. And so this morning I came across an article by Otto Fuhrmann, a book and Gutenberg historian and former director of graphic arts at NYU, in the 1926 edition of the Gutenberg Gesellschaft Jahrbuch (Gutenberg Society Yearbook). He wrote about the New York Club of Printing House Craftsmen in a lovely evocation on the value of sharing in our field, which we used to call printing.
“The times are not so far distant when every foreman or executive jealously guarded his technical ‘secrets’, in the mistaken idea that by doing so he would make himself indispensable to his employer,” Fuhrmann writes.
So it was quite natural that the younger element should find out that a business can be run without secrecy, as long as the essential facts are recognized and dealt with. A friend working in a competitor’s shop did not cease to be a friend just because his employer did not like the other employer. And the men [sic*] who had the same or similar problems to meet in the actual running of their employers’ businesses found that an exchange of views and ideas benefitted them without hurting their employers.
It is true that employers first frowned upon the very idea to have their foremen meet other foremen…. However this prejudice is gradually disappearing, in the same measure as the spirit of cooperation and fair dealing, instead of the old method of slamming a competitor, is growing. Naturally, a large city like New York was the best place in which to inaugurate the craftsman idea, and it succeeded as it deserved.
Indeed.
Fuhrmann attributes its success in part to “a gradual change in business ethics that has taken place in the last 15 years.”
This change is signified by the word “service”. It meant, fundamentally, a complete change from the old standpoint of the producer or seller that the customer had to take the goods as they were offered, or do without them. The technique of advertising became more refined, and instead of forcing goods on an unwilling customer it became a fine art, all over the business world, to find out what a customer wanted and to satisfy his desires…. Developed to the n-th degree, “service” today often means anticipating the client’s wishes…
There is nothing new. I have been arguing for years that we should see journalism not as the manufacture of a commodity — content — but instead as a service. Here is Fuhrmann in 1926 arguing the same for printing. And that is the argument made by product people (though I’ll contend that their self-anointed label is a misnomer, for their craft is all about understanding customers’ needs and desires so as to serve them; they don’t make products so much as they serve people).
Fuhrmann notes that he is writing about his craft in a time of deep disruption. The Linotype had been patented only 40 years before. Rotary presses and dry stereotyping came about the same time. Paper made from pulp came not long before. Thus the business of publishing changed greatly, becoming a mass medium. In the shop, all these technologies spread and robbed the craftsman — whose heritage was in centuries of hand composition and hand presses — of their sense of control of their art.
The increasing mechanization tended to lower the skill and to narrow the range of the individuals in the printing business. It came to the point where specialization made it hard to find good all-around craftsmen. So it can be seen that the time was ripe and the background prepared for an attempt to bring the essential factors in our industry together for frank discussion and study of their problems.
What was needed, says Fuhrmann, was for executives to have a full understanding of every technology of the industry — “he must know enough about paper, engraving, electros, binding and finishing processes” — and perspectives from other fields. “That calls for real men of no mean calibre; and, of course, the man with the greatest fund of knowledge and resourcefulness will be the most successful one.”
And so, the club. According to Fuhrmann, monthly meetings began with dinner and entertainment to provide “a good antidote against the tension and the strain of business work and furnish a background for good-fellowship.” The building of a cohort, in our modern tongue. “We particularly lay stress upon the educational feature,” with guests and lectures. And they had an annual dinner dance. (There’ll be no dancing in Philadelphia.) The club, together with other trade associations — the New York Employing Printers’ Association and the Typographical Union — operated well-equipped schools for compositors’ apprentices and “a training course for foremen in the science of modern business management,” with employers “glad to pay the entire amount of tuition, knowing that the benefit to the foremen would ultimately redound to the firm many times over.”
And so, we attempt the same today in our rapidly changing field with meetings and communities of practice and training of journalists and managers. The difference is that from 1926, printing qua printing grew, tremendously so. Its methods and means changed significantly, which had considerable impact on the product and the profession. But it was still printing.
Today, we are leaving the business of printing and text, of content and publication, even of authoring and storytelling. But, let’s be honest, we still refuse to admit it. So the solutions talked about in classes and conferences are all incremental, aimed at getting bosses and boards to allow us to change what we have done enough to keep doing it, to save what we knew rather than start on what we don’t yet know.
Stop. Stop the presses.
The death of the newspaper has been often foretold. Yes, they are still around us. But I must ask to my Twitter peril, are they better off dead than in the hands of hedgies who milk every last drop of ink, sweat, and blood from the end of the diminishing tribe of (pardon me) craftsmen of our field? Are we better off if they die so newspapers and magazines and broadcast channels are not reinvented but journalism can be?
I take full blame myself for not being radical enough in seeking new definitions of journalism. But even that confession is hubristic. For perhaps these definitions are not new but only new to us. Perhaps they should come from other fields — anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, design, philosophy — to help us envision an entirely new service to the public and its conversation. We who have the luxury and privilege of time and salary in universities should reach out to other fields to seek new expressions of society’s goals and problems and new ways to meet them using the new tools at hand.
So when all the young leaders we are gathering above who are eager to run and ask “where?” we should be ready not with answers, for we do not have them, but with audacious suggestions: Try here, try there. Try using the tools of the net and data and listen to the public we serve in new ways. Try understanding how people make decisions individually and together (even against their self-interest) and how to improve what they decide. Try listening to, valuing, and serving the people and communities who were long ignored and left unserved by our old industry, mass media. Try using the tools of connectivity to enhance the public conversation. Try new measures of value based not on our products but on how we help people improve their communities and lives.
And when they try and fail — as they must — we should offer support, convincing their bosses and boards or new funders that there is promise in this direction or that, but only if we explore. Along this journey — which I believe will be long, generations or even centuries long — we need to provide the means to bring together these brave new leaders not just to teach them what we know (so they may challenge it) but also to enable them to teach each other, to share.
* I will apologize for the sexist language of the period and then leave it unchanged and unremarked upon as it presents a picture of a past.
The net is yet young and needs to learn from its present failures to build a better infrastructure 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.
Here is a preview of one nascent example of such a system built on expertise from Samir Arora, the former CEO of Glam. Samir and I bonded a dozen years ago over the power of networks, when he came to my office to show me one history’s ugliest Powerpoint slides, illustrating how open networks of independent blogs at Glam bested closed systems of owned content in a media company. I had been beating the same drum. Glam later imploded for many reasons, among them the change in the ad market with programmatic networks and investor politics.
Next Arora quietly set to work on Sage, a network of experts. It’s not public yet — he and his team plan to open it up in the first or second quarter — and it’s a complex undertaking whose full implications I won’t fully understand until we see how people use it. But as before, I think Arora is onto an important insight.
He started with a manageable arena: travel and food — that is, expertise about places. That topic made it easier to connect what someone says with a specific destination, hotel, or restaurant; to compare what others said about these entities; and to judge whether someone was actually there and spoke from experience as a test of credibility and accuracy.
I’ve begged Arora to also tackle news but watching him grapple with expertise — at the same time I’ve watched the platforms struggle with quality in news — it becomes apparent that every sector of knowledge will need its own methodology. Sports can probably operate similarly to travel. Health and science will depend on accredited institutions (i.e., people with degrees). Culture will be sensitive to, well, cultural perspective. International affairs will require linguistic abilities. Politics and expertise is probably oxymoronic.
Sage began with 100 manually curated experts in travel. Asking the experts to in turn recommend experts and analyzing their connections yielded a network of 1,000 experts with opinions about 10,000 places. Then AI took that learning-set to scale the system and find 250k experts and influencers with their judgments about 5 million places. 250k is a lot of sources, but it’s not 1.74 billion, which is how many web sites there are. It’s a manageable set from which to judge and rank quality.
I probably would have stopped there and released this service to the public as a new travel and restaurant search engine built on a next generation Google’s page rank that could identify expertise and control for quality and gaming. Or I’d license the technology to social platforms, as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has been talking about finding ways to present expertise in topics and Facebook is in constant search for ways to improve its ranking.
But Arora did not. His reflex is to create tools for creators, going back to his cofounding of NetObjects in 1995, which built tools to build web sites. At Glam, he bought Ning, a tool that let any organization build its own social network.
So, at Sage, Arora is creating a suite of tools that enable an expert who has been vetted in the system to interact with users in a number of ways. The system starts by finding the content one has already shared on the web — on media sites, on Instagram or Pinterest, on YouTube, on blogs, in books, wherever — allowing that person to claim a profile and organize and present the content they’ve made. It enables them to create your own channels — e.g., best sushi — and their own lists within it — best sushi in L.A. — and their own reviews there. They can create content on Sage or link to content off Sage. They can interact with their users in Q&As and chats on Sage.
Because Arora is also reflexively social, he has built tools for each expert to invite in others in a highly moderated system. The creator can ask in contributors who may create content and curators who may make lists. Sage is also going to offer closed networks among the experts themselves so they will have a quality environment for private discussions, a Slack for experts. So creators can interact with the people they invite in, with a larger circle of experts, with the public in a closed system for members and subscribers, or with the public at large.
And because the real challenge here is to support creativity and expertise, Sage is building a number of monetization models. You can link to your content elsewhere on the web with whatever business models are in force there. You can offer content for free. You can set up a subscription model with previews (the meter) and one-time purchase (an article or a book). You can sell access to an event: an online Q&A, an individual consulting session, an in-person appearance, and so on. And you can sell physical products — a cookbook, a box of hot sauces — directly or via affiliate arrangements. Plus you can accept donations at various tiers as a kind of purchase. Note that Sage will begin without advertising.
I hope this platform could place where newly independent journalists covering certain topics could build an online presence and make money from it.
All this is mobile-first. Experts can build content within Sage, on the open web, and — if they have sufficient followers — in their own apps. The current iteration is built for iOS with Android and web sites in development. (Since I live la vida Google in Android, I haven’t been able to dig into it as much as I’d like.)
Users will discover content on Sage via search on topics or by links to experts’ channels there.
After starting with restaurants and travel, Sage is expanding into culture — reviews of books and movies. Next comes lifestyle, which can include health. News, I fear, will be harder.
So what is expertise? The answer in old media and legacy institutions was whatever they decided and whomever they hired. In a more open, networked world, there will be many answers, yours and mine: I will rely on one person’s taste in restaurants, you another. The problem with this — as, indeed, we see in news and political views today — is that this extreme relativity leads to epistemological warfare, especially when institutions old (journalism) and new (platforms) are so allergic to making judgments and everyone’s opinions are considered equal. I am not looking for gatekeepers to return to decide once for all. Neither do I want a world in which we are all our own experts in everything and thus nothing. Someone will have to draw lines somewhere separating the knowledgeable from the ignorant, evidence from fiction, experience and education from imagination and uninformed opinion.
Will Sage be any good at this task? We can’t know until it starts and we judge its judgments. But Arora gave me one anecdote as a preview: About 18 months ago, he said, Sage’s systems sent up an alert about a sudden decline in the quality and consistency of reviews from a well-known travel brand. Staff investigated and, sure enough, they found that the brand had fired all its critics and relied on user-driven reviews from an online supplier.
This is not to say that users cannot be experts. As Dan Gillmor famously said in the halcyon early days of blogs and online interaction: “My readers know more than I do.” In aggregate and in specific cases, he’s right. I will take that attitude over that of an anonymous journalist quoted in a paper I just read about foundations requiring the newsrooms they now help support to engage with the public:
The people are not as knowing about a story as I am. They haven’t researched the topic. They haven’t talked to a lot of people outside of social circles. I read legal briefs or other places’ journalism. I don’t think people do that. It can become infuriating when my bosses or Columbia Journalism Review or Jeff Jarvis tells me I’m missing an opportunity by not letting people tell me what to do. I get the idea, you know, but most people are ignorant or can’t be expected to know as much as I do. It’s not their job to look into something. They aren’t journalists.
No. Expertise will be collaborative and additive. That is the lesson we in journalism never learned from the academe and science. Reporters are too much in the habit of anointing the one expert they find to issue the final word on whatever subject they’re covering: “Wine will kill us!” says the expert. “Wine will save us!” says the expert. As opposed to: “Here’s what we know and don’t know about wine and health and here is the evidence these experts use to test their hypotheses.”
What we will need in the next phase of the net is the means to help us find people with the qualifications, experience, education, and means to make judgments and answer questions, giving us the evidence they use to reach their conclusions so we can judge them. Artificial intelligence will not do this; neither will it replace expertise. The question is whether it can help us sift through the magnificent abundance of voice and view to which we now have access to help us decide who knows what the fuck they’re talking about.
