BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: publicness

  • Publicness bibliography

    11 comments on Publicness bibliography
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    A few of you asked for my bibliography of sources for my research on publicness. Here are some key books so far (I don’t mean to show off with the German entries; I’ll be lucky if I can dig into them but I hope to try). Dates (usually) refer to first publication. This does not include many newspaper articles (many great ones from the NYTimes at the turn of the last century), blog posts, and online essays.

    Arendt, Hannah; The Human Condition; Chicago; 1958

    Benkler, Yochai; The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom; Yale; 2006

    Bok, Sissela, Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation; Vintage; 1983

    Brin, David; The Transparent Society; Basic Books; 1998

    Calhoun, Craig; Habermas and the Public Sphere; MIT; 1992

    Cayley, David; The Origins of the Modern Public, a series of CBC Radio’s Ideas; 2010.

    Cowan, Brian; The Social Life of Coffee: The emergence of the British coffeehouse; Yale; 2005

    Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean Martin; The Coming of the Book: The impact of printing, 1450-1800; Verso; 2010 (third edition)

    Franzen, Jonathan; How to be Alone; Picador; 2002

    Girouard, Mark; Life in the English Country House; Yale; 1978

    Gould, Emily; And the Heart Says Whatever; Free Press; 2010

    Habermas, Jürgen; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society; MIT; 1989 (originally published as Strukturwandel der Öffentllichkeit, 1962)

    Habermas, Jürgen; Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research; Communication Theory 16, 2006

    Jackaway, Gwenyth L.; Media at War: Radio’s challenge to the newspapers, 1924-1939; Praeger; 1995

    Kirkpatrick, David; The Facebook Effect: The inside story of the company that is connecting the world; Simon & Schuster; 2010

    Lane, Frederick S., American Privacy: The 400-year history of our most contested right; Beacon; 2009

    McKeon, Michael; The Secret History of Domesticity; Johns Hopkins; 2005

    Mills, C. Wright; The Sociological Imagination; Oxford

    Münker, Stefan; Emergenze Digitaler Öffentlichkeiten: Die sozialen median im web 2.0; Suhrkamp; 2009

    Munson, Eve Stryker, ed.; James Carey: A critical reader; University of Minn.; 1997

    Nissenbaum, Helen; Privacy in Context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life; Stanford Law Books; 2010

    Postman, Neil; Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the age of show business; Penguin; 2005 (20th anniversary edition)

    Potter, Andrew; The Authenticity Hoax: How we get lost finding ourselves; Harper; 2010

    Prosser, William L.; Privacy; California Law Review, August 1960

    Rosen, Jay; What Are Journalists For?; Yale; 1999

    Scharr, Peter; Das Ende der Privatsphäre; Goldmann; 2007

    Sennett, Richard; The Fall of Public Man; Norton; 1974

    Shirky, Clay; Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age; Penguin; 2010

    Simons, Martin; Von Zauber des Privaten: Was wir verlieren, wenn wir alles offenbaren; Campus; 2009

    Solove, Daniel J.; Understanding Privacy; Harvard; 2008

    Spacks, Patricia Meyer; Privacy: Concealing the eighteenth-century self; Chicago; 2003 (A surprising gem)

    Starr, Paul; The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications; Basic Books; 2004

    Vaidhyanathan, Siva; Naked in the ‘Nonopticon’; The Chronicle of Higher Education; February 15, 2008

    Veyne, Paul ed.; A History of Private Life (five volumes); Belknap Harvard; 1987

    Warner, Michael; Publics and Counterpublics; Zone Books; 2002

    Warren and Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890

    Westin, Alan F.; Privacy and Freedom; Atheneum; 1967

    Wilson, Bronwen and Yachnin, Paul; Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, things, forms of knowledge; Routledge; 2010 (affiliated with the Making Publics project

  • There is no hot news. All news is hot news.

    41 comments on There is no hot news. All news is hot news.
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    The most dangerous defensive tactic parried by legacy news organizations today is their attempt to claim ownership of “hot news” and prevent others from repeating what they gather at their expense for as long as they determine that news is still hot. It is a threat to free speech and the First Amendment and our doctrines of copyright and fair use. It is a threat to news.

    The old companies — NY Times, Advance, Gannett, Belo, McClatchy, Scripps, AFP, AP, Washington Post, et al — are lining up against the new companies — Google and Twitter — on hot news as they file briefs in the TheFlyOnTheWall.com case. I’ve just read both briefs and will give you highlights in a moment.

    Hot news also makes an ominous appearance in the Federal Trade Commission’s thinking about rescuing legacy news companies as it proposes a constitutionally abhorrent doctrine of “proprietary facts.” And hot news is a factor in the dissemination of Rolling Stone’s story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which the Times’ David Carr writes about today, scolding Time and Politico for reproducing the story because RS hadn’t (and because it was so hot).

    Hot news refers to a 1918 case, INS v. AP, in which one wire service — barred from transmitting news from Britain in the war — rewrote the others’ news for its clients three time zones away. It was cited in the Fly case, in which brokers — Barclays, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, et al — complained that the web site repeated its analysts’ recommendations. Now news companies want to use hot news to restrict aggregators and others; Google and Twitter are trying to cut them off at the pass.

    Hot news is ridiculously obsolete. What’s hot today? As Tom Glocer, head of Thomson Reuters, said, his news is most valuable for “miliseconds.” Hot news limitations should be repellant to journalists, even desperate ones, because every journalist builds on the facts revealed by others. It should further be repugnant to them as it constitutes a form of court-supervised prior restraint. Hot news restrictions would be suicidal to news organizations — even though they foolishly think it would protect them — because it would restrict everyone’s ability to spread the news via links and send journalists audience. Hot news should worry every citizen because the free flow of information is vital to a democracy.

    The architecture of news and media — how it is gathered and shared — has changed utterly since 1918 … and 1998. That’s what makes the Rolling Stone story instructive. McChrystal’s quotes leaked and spread instantly, having significant and instant impact on news and the affairs of state. The fact of the quotes was hot news indeed. As I asked four days ago, under hot news, would the magazine have been able to prevent others from repeating these facts? Ridiculous, no? Because Rolling Stone did not publish its own story online and because it was so hot, Politico and Time published PDFs of it — even though Time is a party to the Fly brief — which Carr perhaps rightly scolds them for. But maybe he should also scold Rolling Stone for not recognizing the importance of its news and recognizing the opportunity in sharing it. Once Rolling Stone did put the story on the web, the other publications linked to it. The link economy works when given a chance. So does the First Amendment.

    “Once facts are made public,” says the Google-Twitter brief, “they belong to the public.” Once McChrystal’s quotes were known, they were part of the democratic dialog. To restrict us — anyone — from repeating them is to steal from the public. (That is a key argument in my next book.) “The reporting of truthful information,” says the brief, “is one of the most protected forms of speech under the Constitution…” These parties aren’t just fighting about old and new media. They are fighting about the nature and value of the public sphere.

    The two briefs illuminate the worldviews of the two camps all too clearly. The legacy companies’ brief argues that hot news is “necessary to protect the news industry’s incentive to gather and report news….” It complains about “free riders” who may repeat their news at lower cost. “One of the greatest concerns among news originators,” they say, “is inexpensive technology that allows easy aggregation of news.” The legacy companies nowhere even acknowledge the economic value of links to their news.

    The news companies complain about newspapers going bankrupt, not acknowledging that fate came as the result of high debt and mismanagement. They even have the balls to whine that news is a “low-margin business under economic pressure” (though not long ago, it was a high-margin monopoly). They say they are not going after occasional use of others’ facts — since they all do it — but instead the “systematic” (read: computerized) gathering of their news. They do not acknowledge the tools — robots.txt — that allow them to cut off aggregators. It’s an intellectually disappointing, morally weaselly attempt to get anticompetitive aid from the courts while blithely ignoring the profound constitutional implications for news and the democracy.

    The Google-Twitter brief issues many calls to the importance of free speech and news in a democracy that only a few years ago the news organizations would have been saluting. It cites a 1991 case, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, in which the court said that “[t]he first person to find and report a particular fact has not created the fact; he or she has merely discovered its existence.” Thus even competitors “remain free to use the facts contained in another’s publication to aid in preparing a competing work.” Says the brief: “Central to Feist is the rejection of the notion that ‘sweat of the brow’ can itself create intellectual property rights. ‘The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”‘” Hot news, they argue, “attempts an end-run around the Copyright Clause.”

    Google-Twitter remind the court that news organizations all use each others’ facts: TV stations repeat newspapers’ reporting without attribution and now newspapers do the same to TV. Indeed, the brief says Feist establishes that “the freedom to use facts — even to “free-ride” on facts gathered by others through great effort — is constitutionally protected. Friend Spencer Reiss just told me how he moved mountains to cover Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in time for a hard Newsweek deadline only to find that his editors in New York got what they needed from TV. That is our news ecosystem; it’s not new, only bigger and faster.

    “In a world of modern communications technology,” the Google-Twitter brief says, “where anyone with a cell phone may disseminate news throughout the world even as it is occurring, the notion that a single media outlet should have a monopoly on time-sensitive facts is not only contrary to law, it is, as a practical matter, futile.” They worry that news organizations would pay sources not to cooperate with competitors and that judges would become “super-editors” determining the hot time period of, in their example, news about the Times Square bombing.

    Worse, even the fear of litigation would “chill the lawful dissemination of important news by fostering uncertainty among news outlets as to how long they must ‘sit’ on a story before they are free of a potential ‘hot news’ claim.” During last week’s damaging storms in the New York area, I saw a Long Islander complain that by keeping its news behind a wall, Newsday was ill-serving the safety of its community. Says Google-Twitter: “Breaking news may involve a threat to public health or security, but the district court’s opinion, if affirmed, would stifle the dissemination of such crucial facts — a particularly dangerous outcome in circumstances where the time-sensitive nature of the event is the precise reason why the facts should be widely disseminated as quickly as possible.” If Newsday has a better forecast than a competitor, could it keep the fact of a warning of danger to itself?

    In the U.S. and Europe, news organizations are trying to extend copyright and limit fair use but the Google-Twitter brief is eloquent in objection. “Under Feist, this Court has repeatedly confirmed that facts must remain in the public domain, free from any restraint or encumbrance.” It quotes another case: “[A]ll facts — scientific, historical biographical, and news of the day … may not be copyrighted and are part of the public domain available to every person.” Another: “[R]aw facts may be copied at will. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.” Another: “[A]llowing the first publisher to prevent others from copying such information would defeat the objectives of copyright by impeding rather than advancing the progress of knowledge.” Do news organizations truly want to oppose the progress of knowledge?

    Says the Google-Twitter brief: “The modern ubiquity of multiple news platforms renders ‘hot news’ misappropriation an anachronism, aimed at muzzling all but the most powerful media companies. In a world of citizen journalists and commentators, online news organizations, and broadcasters who compete 24 hours a day, news can no longer be contained for any meaningful amount of time.” This fight sn’t just about a few huge companies. This fight is about our rights.

  • The importance of provenance

    14 comments on The importance of provenance
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    News, like art, requires provenance.

    I tweeted that today, joining in a conversation between Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen as they tried to understand how the Washington Post could quote only unnamed complainers in its McChrystal story. Tweeted Jay: “We’re supposed to trust it because the Washington Post ran it. And that’s the problem. It gives us no other grounding for trust.” In the Post’s view, then, its brand provided all the provenance needed: it was the source for trust. But in our view, we expect to know where these opinions came from. We want to go to the source.

    Provenance is becoming more important in many fields I’ll outline in a moment. Why? Because it’s possible. And because it’s possible, it becomes expected. The link enables provenance: click here to see the source. The web enables provenance: search here to find out where this came from. The link economy requires provenance: link to support journalism at its source. The link ethic demands provenance. Period.

    The journalistic and conversational ethic of provenance I’ve learned especially in blogs is that one must link to one’s sources…
    * So I show my work and so you may judge and understand it accordingly.
    * So the reader may judge my sources: “Don’t take my word for it,” the link says, “click and see for yourself.”
    * So the reader may dig deeper; provenance is also a service.
    * So the source gets credit.
    * So the source may find value in the traffic I send, through ads or relationships or however she likes (if the source is smarter than Rupert Murdoch and realizes there is value in those people to click to come).
    * So we then support original journalism. (This is one reason why Google News now looks for citations to find the originator of a story: to give us a better source and give the source better support.)
    * So the journalist proves that she added real reporting and real value rather than merely rewriting press releases.
    * So the news organization may save money and use journalists for higher valued work (do what you do best and link to the rest).
    * So the news organization may save money through collaboration.
    * So responsibility is taken. I will trust what I read more if I know who says it; anonymity devalues trust — for the source who hides behind it and for the journalist who takes the easy route through it.

    In content, as creation becomes overabundant and as value shifts from creator to curator, it becomes all the more vital to properly cite and link to sources and even to add value to those links, explaining why the click is worth the time and encouraging people to take the trip. Good curation demands good provenance.

    But the new importance of provenance affects much more than journalism. It affects any company providing a product. See Rob Walker in today’s New York Times Magazine on our desire — he hopes — to know where our gadgets are made so we do not contribute to poor working conditions in Asian factories. This trend follows the same need in the fashion industry to demonstrate a move away from sweatshops (one of my entrepreneurial journalism students, Jenni Avins, is making a site and a business out of following the source of what you wear at Closettour.com). When it comes to products, we want to know:
    * where it was made,
    * by whom,
    * in what conditions,
    * using what materials,
    * causing what damage,
    * traveling what distance,
    * with whose assurances of quality,
    * with whose assurances of safety.

    During the rash of dangerous products coming out of China, we want to know the provenance of everything from dog food to dry wall to know about its safety.

    The transparent marketplace made possible by the internet reduces companies’ ability to profit through opaque pricing — we can always find the cheapest. So companies will increasingly need to compete on ethics. That will require that they open up their sources, supply chains, factories, and businesses so we may judge them. Given two equal products — two toilet papers — the provenance of the one — our ability to know where and how it was made — may give it the competitive edge. But we won’t take the company’s word for it — any more than we should take the Washington Post’s. We’ll demand that they show us. Publicness (I’ll argue in my book) becomes an asset.

    But provenance can also be a mark of higher value. When we know where the grapes come from, we may pay more for the wine made from them. Jersey tomatoes, everyone knows, are worth more than Florida’s (ya gotta problem with that?).

    Provenance is, of course, becoming more important in politics and government. We want to know the source of a politician’s funding and the influences on her. We want to know who created an earmark so we may hold them accountable.

    Provenance has always been expected in the academe but now citations empowered by links have even greater value — not merely to give credit but to give students the opportunity to explore and learn on their own.

    Finally, in a remix culture, one way to share credit and value is to link back.

    This is why editors at the Washington Post and everywhere else must learn that it’s no longer good enough to think that the buck can stop at them, that they can be the validators of trust, that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about where their news comes from. This is why we, the readers, must get better at accepting and valuing the results of more openness and be proficient at judging sources for ourselves. This is why companies must understand that they will be expected to open up their processes.

    Provenance is no longer merely the nicety of artists, academics, and wine makers. It is an ethic we expect.

  • The myth of the opinionless man*

    22 comments on The myth of the opinionless man*
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    The problem in the cases of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal and ousted Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is not that they had opinions. Of course, they had opinions. Indeed, we should damned well want them to have opinions. If they each only accepted what they were told without doubts and complaints, without discrimination, they’d each be be very bad at their jobs, wouldn’t they?

    The problem is not that those opinions were reported. Publicness — transparency, openness, authenticity, honesty — is good. It should lead to more trust. But here it didn’t. It led to public disgrace. Why?

    The problem, then, is our myth of the opinionless man*.

    I don’t think that is society’s myth. We all know better than to believe that men have no beliefs — because we are all merely men* with beliefs of our own.

    No, the opinionless man is an institutional myth, a fiction maintained by news organizations, political organizations, governments, businesses, churches, and armies. The opinionless man is meant to be an empty vessel to do the bidding of these hierarchies. But opinions and openness about them subvert hierarchies. Or to translate that to modern times, via the Cluetrain Manifesto, links subvert hierarchies. This is the age of links. So hierarchies: beware. One opinion leaks out of the opinionless man and it is shared and linked and spread instantly. The institutions treat this revelation as a shock and scandal — as a threat — and they eject the opinionated men. That is what happened to McChrystal and Weigel.

    In my thinking for my book on publicness, I keep trying to look at such fears and offenses and turn them around to ask what they say not about the scandalous but instead about the scandalized — about us and about our myths and realities.

    Former Washington Post editor Len Downie was the self-drawn archetype of the opinionless man. He famously refused to vote, thinking it somehow made him immune from opinions and their corruption of his journalism. That heritage is what led to Weigel’s ejection from the Post. But as Liz Mair argues (via @jayrosen_nyu), it’s ridiculous to assume that Weigel should accept and agree with everyone and and everything he encountered on his beat covering conservatives. He should be skeptical. Isn’t that a reporter’s job? And what is the source of that skepticism but opinions? We want to know.

    Mayhill Fowler wrote a superb HuffingtonPost piece — inspired by McChrystal and her own experience in the Obama campaign — about journalism as a dance of seduction and betrayal. The corrupting temptation isn’t sex or beauty or wealth or even fame but access. Her perspective is so valuable because she came to journalism and politics as an outsider and maintained that perspective.

    Michael Walsh, however, speaks for the institutions as he blows his vuvuzela until he’s red-faced warning of the dangers of such openness:

    But the most important thing to emerge from this mess is the notion of privacy, that there is a difference between on and off the record, and it simply must be observed unless freedom of speech — and thus of thought — is irrevocably chilled. For decades, reporters have observed the distinction between what is meant for public consumption and what is spoken of behind closed doors. The principle is not only enshrined in journalism, but in the government: “executive privilege,” however at times abused, is vital to the decision-making process, and freewheeling (if often “offensive”) conversation and characterizations are part of that process. If we have arrived at a point where we literally have to watch every word we speak, than we are no better than North Korea or the former East Germany. Somewhere, Gen. McChrystal is smiling…

    Still, the days when “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail” are long gone, and in cyberspace any utterance, no matter how “private,” is now potentially public — and potentially career-ending. That’s the real lesson from the Weigel flap: in the war of ideas in cyberspace, truth is no longer the first casualty. Trust is.

    Whoa, boy*. I think exactly the opposite: that privacy for government and those who cover it is exactly what we do not need, exactly what we are working to eliminate with sunshine and publicness. Journalists should have been the ones opening the drapes on those dark rooms but they didn’t because they were seduced by their invitations in. So outsiders are forcing them open. Hurrah. Privacy is what protects the tyrants of North Korea and East Germany. Transparency is what kills them.

    So if we want more transparency — and I believe that we, the people, do even if they, our institutions, often do not — then we must stop going along with the myth of the opinionless man and the scandal of the opinionated man. We should celebrate openness and honesty whenever they manage to break through. We should recognize that — to reform Walsh’s bottom line — transparency leads to trust. We should remind our institutions — government and the journalists who are supposed to cover them — that we expect them to judge and we will respect their actions more if we understand their judgment.

    The institutions’ myth of the opinionless man is what is behind their disdain for the internet and its inhabitants — us. Don’t you hear it all the time: Oh, the internet is filled with nothing but opinions, as if opinions — our opinions — were worthless. But opinions and the arguments about them — and, yes, the facts needed to win those arguments — are the basis of decision-making in any organization and in society itself. Opinions are the soil of democracy. Publicness is the sunshine that lets it grow. (/metaphor)

    What we’re witnessing in these cases is more than a mere two-day kerfuffle. We are witnessing small evidence of a cultural shift away from the privacy, secrecy, and control that empowered and protected institutions in a centralized, mass society to new cultural norms of publicness. That publicness grants us independence from the powerful; it wrests control from their hands. That is why we are grappling so with questions of privacy and publicness. (That is some of what I am trying to grapple with in my book.)

    Alan F. Westin’s influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom expresses the view of the prior era: “The greatest threat to civilized social life,” he says in his gravest possible terms, “would be a situation in which each individual was utterly candid in his communications with others, saying exactly what he knew or felt at all times.” Well, hasn’t he just described the internet? There we see our emerging social norm of publicness. There we see the war of the private and the public. It’s about more than Facebook photos.

    Jürgen Habermas idealized the emergence of the (bourgeois) public sphere of rational discourse in the 18th century as a counterpoint to government authority and he lamented its eventual corruption by media and commercialization. I will argue in my book that perhaps now, in our post-institutional age, we may see his public sphere emerge after all. It’s not going to look idealized for it is built on discourse — on internet opinions — and to those accustomed to the neatness of control by government and media, that looks messy. But if we have faith in our fellow man* then we can at least hope that out of this discourse, rationality may emerge.

    In such discourse, the opinionless man is silent. I’d rather hear him.

    * You needn’t supply your rant about how I should not use the word “man.” I’m using it unapologetically — well, except for this footnote. I’m using it because there’s nothing wrong with the word man but moreso because if you take every instance of the word “man” in this post and replace it with “men and women” or “persons” or “humans” it would result in awkward English and lose cultural reference. Besides, in this case, we happen to be talking about two men. And I am one myself. I’m unapologetic about that.

    : LATER: Matthew Yglesias on having no opinion as make-believe.

  • WWZD?

    22 comments on WWZD?

    Zappos division 6pm.com screwed up and then manned up, making a mistake that capped all prices at $50 but honoring the sales and losing $1.6 million. The company blogged about it — apologizing, even — and then Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tweeted about it. The king of customer service — whose book, Delivering Happiness, is coming out in only two weeks — set the bar high for screwing up publicly.

    : I note that the original 6pm post was on May 21 and Hsieh’s tweet was today, the 23rd. Hmmm. Thinking they wanted more PR to make the mistake pay off.