Tag Archives: journalism

Why Old Media and Social Media Don't Get Along

Earlier today I did a brief drop in phone interview on CPAC’s Goldhawk Live. The topic was “Have social media and technology changed the way Canadians get news?” and Christoper Waddell, the Director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Chris Dornan, Director of Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger School of Public Affairs were Goldhawk’s panel of experts.

Watching the program prior to being brought in I couldn’t help but feel I live on a different planet from many who talk about the media. Ultimately, the debate was characterized by a reactive, negative view on the part of the mainstream media supporters. To them, threats are everywhere. The future is bleak, and everything, especially democratic institutions and civilization itself teeter on the edge. Meanwhile social media advocates such as myself are characterized as delusional techno-utopians. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Indeed, both sides share a lot in common. What distinguishes though, is that while traditionalists are doom and gloom, we are almost defined by the sense of the possible. New things, new ideas, new approaches are becoming available every day. Yes, there will be new problems, but there will also be new possibilities and, at least, we can invent and innovate.

I’m just soooooo tired of the doom and gloom. It really makes one want to give up on the main stream media (like many, many, many people under 30 have). But, we can’t. We’ve got to save these guys from themselves – the institutions and the brands matter (I think). So, in that pursuit, let’s tackle the beast head on, again.

Last, night the worse offender was Goldhawk, who tapped into every myth that surrounds this debate. Let’s review them one by one.

Myth 1: The average blog is not very good – so how can we rely on blogs for media?

For this myth, I’m going to first pull a little from Missing the Link, now about to be published as a chapter in a journalism textbook called “The New Journalist”:

The qualitative error made by print journalists is to assume that they are competing against the average quality of online content. There may be 1.5 million posts a day, but as anyone whose read a friend’s blog knows, even the average quality of this content is poor. But this has lulled the industry into a false sense of confidence. As Paul Graham describes: “In the old world of ‘channels’ (e.g. newspapers) it meant something to talk about average quality, because that’s what everyone was getting whether they liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. Consequently, print media isn’t competing against the average quality of online writing, they’re competing against the best writing online…Those in the print media who dismiss online writing because of its low average quality are missing an important point. No one reads the average blog.”

You know what though, I’m going to build on that. Goldhawk keeps talking about the average blog or average twitterer (which of course, no one follows, we all follow big names, like Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly). But you know what? They keep comparing the average blog to the best newspapers. The fact is, even the average newspaper sucks. The Globe represents the apex of the newspaper industry in Canada, not the average, so stop using it as an example. To get the average, go into any mid-sized town and grab a newspaper. It won’t be interesting. Especially to you – an outsider. It will have stories that will appeal to a narrow audience, and even then, many of these will not be particularly well written. More importantly still, there will little, and likely no, investigative journalism – that thing that allegedly separates blogs from newspapers. Indeed, even here in Vancouver, a large city, it is frightening how many times press releases get marginally touched up and then released as “a story.” This is the system that we are afraid of losing?

Myth 2: How will people sort good from low quality news?

I always love this myth. In short, it presumes that the one thing the internet has been fantastic at developing – filters – simple won’t evolve in a part of the media ecosystem (news) where people desperately want them. At best, this is naive. At worse, it is insulting. Filters will develop. They already have. Twitter is my favourite news filter – I probably get more news via it than any other source. Google is another. Nothing gets you to a post or article about a subject you are interested in like a good (old-fashioned?) google search. And yes, there is also going to be a market for branded content – people will look for that as short cut for figuring out what to read. But please people are smarter than you think at finding news sources.

Myth 3: People lack media savvy to know good from low quality news.

I love the elitist contempt the media industry sometimes has towards its readers. But, okay, let’s say this is true. Then the newspapers and mainstream media have only themselves to blame. If people don’t know what good news is, it is because they’ve never seen it (and by and large, they haven’t). The most devastating critique on this myth is actually delivered by one of my favourite newspaper men: Kenneth Whyte is his must listen-to Dalton Camp Lecture on journalism. In it Whyte talks about how, in the late 19th and early 20th century NYC had dozens and dozens of newspapers that fought for readership and people were media savvy, shifting from paper to paper depending on quality and perspective. That all changed with consolidation and a shift from paying for content to advertising for content. Advertisers want staid, plain, boring newspapers with big audiences. This means newspapers play to the lowest common denominator and are market oriented to be boring. It also leaves them beholden to corporate interests (when was the last time the Vancouver Sun really did a critical analysis of the housing industry – it’s biggest advertisement source?). If people are not media savvy it is, in part, because the media ecosystem demands so little of them. I suspect that social media can and will change this. Big newspapers may be what we know, but they may not be good for citizenship or democracy.

Myth 4: There will be no good (and certainly no investigative) journalism with mainstream media.

Possible. I think the investigative journalism concern is legitimate. That said, I’m also not convinced there is a ton of investigative journalism going on. There may also be more going on in the blogs than we might know. It could be that these stories a) don’t get prominence and b) even when they do, often newspapers don’t cite blogs, and so a story first broken by a blog may not be attributed. But investigative journalism comes in different shapes and sizes. As I wrote in one of my more viewed posts, The Death of Journalism:

I suspect the ideal of good journalism will shift from being what Gladwell calls puzzle solving to mystery solving. In the former you must find a critical piece of the puzzle – one that is hidden to you – in order to explain an event. This is the Woodward and Bernstein model of journalism – the current ideal. But in a transparent landscape where huge amounts of information about most organizations is being generated and shared the critical role of the journalist will be that of mystery solving – figuring out how to analyze, synthesize and discover the mystery within the vast quantity of information. As Gladwell recounts this was ironically the very type of journalism that brought down Enron (an organization that was open, albeit deeply flawed). All of the pieces of that lead to the story that “exposed” Enron were freely, voluntarily and happily given to reports by Enron. It’s just a pity it didn’t happen much, much sooner.

I for one would celebrate the rise of this mystery focused style of “journalism.” It has been sorely needed over the past few years. Indeed, the housing crises that lead to the current financial crises is a perfect example of case where we needed mystery solving not puzzle solving, journalism. The fact that sub-prime mortgages were being sold and re-packaged was not a secret, what was lacking was enough people willing to analyze and write about this complex mystery and its dangerous implications.

And finally, Myth 5: People only read stories that confirm their biases.

Rather than Goldhawk it was Christopher Waddell who kept bringing this point up. This problem, sometimes referred to as “the echo chamber” effect is often cited as a reason why online media is “bad.” I’d love to know Waddell’s sources (I’m confident he has some – he is very sharp). I’ve just not seen any myself. Indeed, Andrew Potter recently sent me a link to “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline.” What is it? A peer reviewed study that found no evidence the Internet is becoming more ideologically segregated. And the comparison is itself deeply flawed. How many conservatives read the Globe? How many liberals read the National Post? I love the idea that somehow main stream media doesn’t ideologically segregate an audience. Hasn’t any looked at Fox or MSNBC recently?

Ultimately, it is hard to watch (or participate) in these shows without attributing all sorts of motivations to those involved. I keep feeling like people are defending the status quo and trying to justify their role in the news ecosystem. To be fair, it is a frightening time to be in media.

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

And I refuse to lie. It sucks to be a newscaster or a journalist or a columnist. Especially if you are older. Forget about the institutions (they’ve already been changing) but the culture of newsmedia, which many employed in the field cling strongly to, is evolving and changing. That is a painful process, especially to those who have dedicated their life to it. But that old world was far from perfect. Yes, the new world will have problems, but they will be new problems, and there may yet be solutions to them, what I do know is that there aren’t solutions to the old problems in the old system and frankly, I’m tired of those old problems. So let’s get on with it. Be critical, but please, stop spreading the myths and the fear mongering.

Today in the Globe: Facebook's Political Reach

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I have the following piece published in the Globe and Mail today. It isn’t going to further endear me to Michael Valpy (who is already not impressed with me)… but felt another perspective on the issue was needed. He, like many traditional columnists, is not a fan of social – or digital – media. Indeed, he has argued it is destroying our country’s social cohesion and democracy. Those familiar with me know I feel differently . By allowing us to self-organize, connect to one another and to our politicians, social media is enabling a different and very powerful type kind of social cohesion and democratic expression.

I respect Valpy a lot and hope we get a chance to sit down and talk social media at some point. Given our collective interest in journalism and statements like this, it feels like it would be fruitful for both of us. Hopefully it will happen.

Facebook’s Political Reach

Yesterday, Michael Valpy posted an interesting piece about a Nanos poll showing Canadians – including younger Canadians – question how much influence political Facebook groups should have on any government.

The problem with the piece lies in the headline: “Facebook forums shouldn’t sway government, young Canadians say.” It suggests that online activism – or social media in general – isn’t credible with the public. This, however, isn’t what the poll showed. Indeed, the poll says little about the credibility of Facebook, particularly compared to other forms of political activity. It does, however, say a lot about social media’s dramatic growth in influence over the past five years.

Critically, the poll didn’t compare forms of political activity. If one had done a similar poll asking whether Canadians believe a demonstration should sway the government, or if direct action – such as when Greenpeace hung a banner from Parliament – should alter government policy, would the numbers have been dramatically different? I suspect not. Governments have electoral mandates – something Canadians broadly agree with. Most political activity, both on and offline, is designed to shape public opinion and ultimately, people’s decisions at the ballot box. That is a threat influences government.

Consequently, it may not be the medium that matters as much as the number of people involved. Do people believe the government should pay attention to a 1,000 person rally? Likely not. Should they pay attention to a 10,000 person Facebook group? Likely not as well. But at a certain point, with large enough numbers, almost any medium matters. Would people think that the government should reconsider a policy in the face of 10-million-person petition? Or a five-million-person Facebook group? Possibly. What about a 500,000-person march? Even this might prompt respondents to reconsider their response.

Ultimately, the Globe article jumps to a negative interpretation of Facebook too quickly. This is understandable in that traditional news organizations are still coming to grips with social – and digital – media. But by allowing us to self-organize, connect to one another and to our politicians, social media is enabling a different and very powerful type kind of social cohesion and democratic expression.

More interesting is how split Canadians appear to be over political groups using Facebook “to share ideas, information and to help mobilize their activities” (30 per cent have a positive view, 30 per cent have a negative view and an enormous 40 per cent are undecided). Here is a technology few Canadians knew existed five years ago, and it is already viewed favourably by a third of Canadians as a way to engage with political groups. As people become more familiar with these online activities I suspect comfort levels will rise, since many people often don’t initially understand or like new technologies. This survey shows us online political organizing is moving into the mainstream – perhaps even more mainstream than a protest or a petition.

So should Facebook influence the government? The prorogation debate shows it already can. But do people believe Facebook should be less influential than other (more traditional) forms of political activity? In this, the survey reveals very little. Indeed as Nik Nanos, the pollster who conducted the survey, adds at the end of the piece (and in contrast to the title): “we still haven’t come to grips with what [Facebook groups] really mean.”

The Next News Media Metaphor – The Sports Team

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Many things going on that I want to talk about… Excited about working on Mozilla Drumbeat, a project the Mozilla Foundation that is getting ready to launch. Open Data stuff at the City of Vancouver (some new things are afoot). Watching (in the background) In the Loop – amazing, hilarious and dark. But, for now ruminating on my conversation today with Mathew Ingram (currently of the Globe, soon to be with GigaOM) and an interview I did with a Ryerson Journalism Review writer on the future of media and newspapers.

One of the things that struck me about newspapers is that their conundrum is even greater than we think. Mathew and I were talking about how the “magic” and “mystique” of the newspaper has disappeared. There was a time when we could pretend that columnists in the Globe actually had 300,000 or 400,000 (saturday) readers. But this was in an era when we couldn’t actually measure readers. We pretended (and still do) that each newspaper got read, sometime multiple times.

It reminds me of the memorable opening scene from Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It by Ken Auletta and below described by Erick Schonfeld:

The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of a his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t.

The internet is has fucked with the magic of newspapers. And that’s scary for anyone who grew up under the old model. Forget about the advertising (that’s the part google messed with). What about the simple ego bash and job justification crisis of suddenly being able to see exactly how many readers looked at your piece and how long they chose to stay. And what about discovering that that number is nowhere near what you’ve been telling yourself for years.

The era of collectively lying magic is over. The average globe weekday circulation is 330,145, the Star’s is 446,493 and the Post’s 209,211. How many of those papers got read? Half? (the morning was too busy, kids had early practice, didn’t have time for a coffee break today, no one grabbed it from the airport lounge or hotel room). Of the remaining papers, most readers skim the paper and maybe read one or two of their favourite columnists plus a news story or two that really catches there eye. In short I suspect most columnists maybe get read, in print, by 60K people. But we don’t know, cause there are no good metrics.

Online, the world is different. The editors know who is getting read and who isn’t. No ifs, ands or buts. Suddenly your value to the newspaper (financially) becomes very clear, very fast. Valuable columnists and reporters attract what website people call “uniques” (e.g. a unique person visiting your website – each unique visitor may click on several articles and thereby generate a number of pageviews). Advertisers care about the unique visits, since 100,000 different people seeing an ad is worth a lot more than one person clicking around the site 100,000 times and seeing their add over and over again.

And what attracts lots of unique visitors? The same things as what drives everything else on the internet. Reputation and thus… brand. The most successful writers (or, er… bloggers) are those that people wake up everyday saying… I want to read her! This is even more true today where there is SO MUCH content being created most readers simply cannot separate the noise from the signal (even with twitter, which is probably the best tool). So having a strong brand is essential. This should be a good news story for newspapers and media companies since they have established brands and so, in theory, should have a leg up on bloggers like me.

The problem is – I suspect – that the brand that matters doesn’t solely or even primarily reside with the newspaper. People need someone to connect with – a newspaper is a nice filter, but it offers no connection, no intimacy. The personal brand of columnists and journalists will likely become equally, if not more important than the newspaper.

But this doesn’t mean newspapers are dead. Just that they need to be sure they know how to manage talent in an era where that talent’s brand is more and more important.

And we have a model for that. Sports teams.

For years Sports Teams have had to increasingly co-manage their own team (media platform) brand with the brand of the players (writers). The rise of the sports superstar has altered how sports franchises work in much the same way they may the newspaper biz.

So the bad news is, the talent is going to consume more of the value generated by news organizations. The good news is threefold. First, good newspapers have always managed talent – so there is some skill and process already in place around this. Second, newspapers now have real tools by which to measure their columnists. Who’s being read and who isn’t? Essentially, every managing editor should pick up a copy of Moneyball stat. A good newspaper is going to have its senior talent – its stars, if you will. But it also needs to have a mix of people on the second and third line it is grooming for later – in case a star gets injured or, is simply too expensive to justify.

Finally, there is a larger and deeper talent pool to draw from. Not only are there the local papers and a number of niche community papers to look at, there are an army of bloggers (many of us aren’t that good, but what we lack in talent we make up for in sheer numbers). And successful bloggers come with established audiences and the advantage of maturing in the online world and not the “magic” pre-internet media environment. They are used to looking at the hard numbers of pageviews and unique visitors. The opportunity to write more seriously, get mentored, and access a platform that can deliver more eyeballs will be tempting to anyone who writes well.

But I suppose none of this is that shocking. In a world where human capital is increasingly the most important asset and where personal brands are more easily established, maybe every organization is going to look more and more like a sports franchise.

Using a media bias tool to calculate our political "drift"

Nicolas T. sent me a cool link to Fairspin, a website where readers rate the bias of news articles.

This is the type of site that works better the more people who use it – the larger the readership the more likely the bias measurement will reflect that of the population’s. Indeed this is the sites biggest challenge – it could be taken over by readers of a certain political stripe who over rate the news bias against them, discrediting the sites ranking system.

Looking over the site I got an additional thought. The Vancouver Sun and/or the Globe and Mail sometimes have an editorial from 50 or 100 years ago. This got me thinking that it might be interesting for a site like this is to take random stories that were rated on the site and put them back to users in 2, 5 and 10 years. The reason to do this is to see if readers in 10 years rate the bias differently then they do today. This might give us an additional read to see how what is perceived as “right” and “left” evolve over time.

Open Source Journalism at the Guardian

crowd sourced A few months ago I wrote a piece called the Death of Journalism which talked about how – even if they find a new revenue model – newspapers are in trouble because they are fundamentally opaque institutions. This built on a piece Taylor Owen wrote called Missing the Link about why newspapers don’t understand (or effectively use) the internet.

Today Nicolas T. sent me this great link that puts some of the ideas found in both pieces into practice. Apparently, in the wake of the MP expense scandal in the United Kingdom, the Guardian has obtained 700,000 documents of MPs’ expenses to identify individual claims. Most MPs probably imagined they can hide their expenses in the sea of data, for what newspaper could devote the resources to searching through them all?

No newspaper could, if by “newspaper” you mean only its staff and not its community of readers. The Guardian, interestingly, has taken on this larger community definition and has crowd sourced the problem by asking its readers to download and read one or a few documents and report back any relevant information.

What makes this exciting is it is one example of how – by being transparent and leveraging the interest and wisdom of their readership – newspapers and media outlets can do better, more indepth, cheaper and more effective journalism. Think of it. First, what was once an impossible journalist endeavor is now possible. Second, a level of accountability previously unimaginable has been created. And third, a constituency of traditional (and possibly new) Guardian readers has been engaged – likely increasing their loyalty.

Indeed, in effect the Guardian has deputizing its readers to be micro-journalists. This is the best example to date of a traditional (or mainstream) media institution warming (or even embracing) at least a limited concept of “the citizen journalists.” I suspect that as institutions find ways to leverage readers and citizen journalists and that the lines between journalist and reader will increasingly blur. Actually it will have to.

Why is that?

Because for the Guardian model to work, they had to strike an agreement (a bargain – as Clay Shirky calls it) with their community. I don’t think anyone would have been satisfied to do this work and then simply hand it back to the Guardian without the right to access their work, or the work of other micro-journalists. Indeed, following the open source model, the guardian has posted the results for every document read and analyzed. This means that the “raw data” and analysis is available to anyone. Anyone of these micro-journalists can now, in turn, read the assemblage of document reviews and write their own story about the MPs expenses. Indeed, I’m willing to wager the some of the most interesting stories about these 700,000 pages will not be written by staff of The Guardian but by other parties assessing the raw data.

So what does that make the Guardian? Is it a repository, a community coordinator, an editorial service…? And what does it make those who write those stories who aren’t employed by the Guardian? Caring about, or getting caught up in these terms and definitions is interesting, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that journalism is being reinvented and this is one compelling model of why the new model can tackle problems the old one couldn’t even contemplate.

Structure of Scientific Revolutions vs. The Black Swan (Journalism remix)

I’ve just finished Thomas S. Kuhn’s classic 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” For those unfamiliar with the title, it is the book that gave us the important and oft over-used term: “paradigm shift.”

I won’t pretend it was an easy to read. Written in a classic academic style, what is a fascinating topic and set of ideas struggles to shine. However, don’t hear me blaming the author for this… it is both that the book comes from another era, and that it springs from a cannon of academic writing that simply doesn’t seek to be as penetrable outside a certain community.

That said, I did enjoy it immensely. One reason is that I once again lucked out and ended up reading it at the same time as another book – Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s The Black Swan – that despite being on a different topics and written 45 years later, dovetails nicely.

Paradigm shifts are black swan events. They can be hard, if not impossible to predict. They can arise because of the appearance of a single unforeseen data point (a black swan in a world where all swans were previously believed to be white) and they overthrow systems that we have become overly, comfortably, complacent and reliant on. Finally, although paradigms shifts are rare, because they force us to see the world in an entirely new way they have a disproportional and possibly even unparalleled, impact.

I often like to refer to Schopenhauer’s three stages of truth: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Both Taleb and Kuhn’s books play on this theme. For Taleb, our problem is that we can’t see or predict the changes in our world. We expect that we can predict them and that they’ll arrive in a nice orderly – or bell curve distributed – manner.

They don’t.

Despite the mental image we have of history (and our lives), history doesn’t crawl. It moves it fits and starts. Oscillating between long steady states and sudden change. We often believe the steady states will last forever, and when change comes we trivialize it and then fight it, until it becomes the new steady state, at which point, we come to believe it was always that way.

This is also Kuhn point. Look at how he sees paradigm shifts as being important for both the science and politics changes:

Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environmental that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by growing sense, again restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution…

…The parallel has, however, a second and more profound aspect upon which the significance of the first depends. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favour of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all. Initially it is crisis alone that attenuates the role of political institutions as we have already seen it attenuate the role of paradigms. In increasing numbers individuals become increasingly estranged from political life and behave more and more eccentrically within it. Then, as the crisis deepens, many of these individuals commit themselves to some concrete proposal for the reconstruction of society in a new institutional framework. At that point the society is divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one. And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails. Because they differ about the institutional matrix with which political change is to be achieved and evaluated, because they acknowledge no supra-institutional framework for the adjudication of revolutionary difference, the parties to a revolutionary conflict must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force. Though revolutions have had a vital role in the evolution of political institutions, that role depends upon their being partially extrapolitical or extrainstitutional events. (Kuhn, Pages 92-93 of the 3rd edition)

If you don’t think the world operates this way, just look as far as the news industry.

When Shirky says revolutions are times when “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place” he is paraphrasing Kuhn. Journalism is already dividing into camps, those defending the old, and those seeking to figure out what the “new” will be.

But despite all the discussion, we are still very early on in the debate. How do I know? Because we haven’t even begun to shed the old paradigm? The entire debate about journalism, what it is, how it should be practiced and what makes it good or bad is still being largely being evaluated and adjudicated by the old matrix. When journalism finally gets saved I suspect it will be because it will be, in part, radically redefined – a redefinition affirmed and made possible by the establishment of some new institutions, organizations and/or processes. (That’s what my post on the death of journalist was seeking to do).

So yes, we’ve left the ridiculed phase (that lasted 20 years), but we are still early on in the violently oppose phase. All thos unhappy journalists are angry because they may be the midst of a paradigm shift, and that means much like Newtonian physicists confronting Einstein’s theory of relatively everything, absolutely everything they believed in, fought for, taught and lived. is probably going to get redefined and altered beyond recognition. It will still be there, but it will forever be understood differently.

That’s a scary thought. But it is fun one as well, filled with possibility. Which is why Kuhn and Taleb are fun to read together.

Treating the web as an archive – or finding the financial crisis' ground zero online

Most often when people think of the web they think of it as a place to get new information. Companies are told they must constantly update their website while customers and citizens look for the latest updates. But because the web is relatively new, it is strongly biased towards digitally displaying and archiving “new” information.

What happens when the web gets older?

One possibility… it could change how we study history. Again, nothing is different per se – the same old research methods will be used – but what if it is 10 times easier to do, a 100 times faster and contains with a million time the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other websites readily available to be searched the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible.

Consider this piece in the New York Times published on November 5th 1999. It essentially defines ground zero of the financial crisis:

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one anothers businesses.

The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress.

”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

Here is what may be the defining starting point of the financial crisis. The moment when the tiny little snowball was gently pushed down the hill. It would take 10 years to gather the mass and momentum to destroy our economy, but it had a starting point. I sometimes wish that the New York Times had run this article again in the last few months, just so we could get reacquainted with the individuals – like Larry Summers – and political parties – both – that got Americans into this mess.

Indeed, as an aside, it’s worth noting the degree by which the legislation passed. 90 votes to 8 in the senate. 362 votes to 57 in the House. There was clearly a political price to pay to vote against this bill. Indeed, it fits in nicely with the thesis Simon Johnson outlined in his dark, but important, piece The Quiet Coup:

“…these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector”

Still more fascinating is how accurately the legislation’s detractors predicted it’s dire consequences. Check out Senator Dorgan’s comments at the time:

”I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ”I wasn’t around during the 1930’s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980’s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Or Senator Wellstone’s:

‘Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,” Mr. Wellstone said. ”Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.”

And of course, it worth remembering what the legislation’s supporters said in response:

Supporters of the legislation rejected those arguments. They responded that historians and economists have concluded that the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks. The new law, they said, will also give regulators new tools to supervise shaky institutions.

”The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,” said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.”

What is most fascinating about this piece is that it shows us how the financial crisis wasn’t impossible to predict, that it didn’t come out of nowhere and that it could have been eminently preventable. We simply chose not to.

It also goes back to the type of journalism that I believe we are missing today and that I wrote about in my post on the Death of Journalism. Here is a slow moving crisis, one that is highly complex, but not impossible to see. And yet we chose not to “see it.”

This, I believe, has to do with the fact that today, much of our journalism is gotcha journalism (or what Gladwell refers to as mysteries). It looks to finding the insider or the smoking gun that will bust open the story. I suspect that in a networked world – one of increased complexity and interconnectedness – finding the smoking gun is irrelevant. For an increasing number of stories there simple is no smoking gun. There are whole series of cascading action that are what Galdwell calls open secrets. Our job is to “see them” and painstakingly connect the dots to show how our decisions are allowing for the scary and unpredictable event – the black swan event – to become a near certainty.

What the above article shows me is that while the very tools and forces that make these scary events more likely – the internet, globalization our interconnectedness – they may also make the the open secrets easier to identify.

How an old media drudge's actions explain the death of newspapers

Taylor and I have received a lot of link love, comments, and emails since posting the piece Newspapers’ decline is a sign of democracy not a symptom of its death, but one commentator has been the standard bearer in the defense of the traditional newspaper: copy editor and blogger for the Baltimore Sun John McIntyre.

John and I are are involved in a healthy debate over the future of newspapers. In addition to commenting here at eaves.ca, he’s written two critical piece on his own blog. What is most interesting however is that while John disagrees with us in his comments and blog, his actions demonstrate our point. Democracy is better served by the rise of the internet – even if that comes at the cost of the physical newspaper. Why? Because our audiences are better served – and informed – by observing (and participating) in our debate.

Consider our exchange in the abstract. Here are two differing perspectives (mine and John’s), which would never share the pages of even his newspaper. Not only are they directly engaged with one another, but we link to one another – sending readers to one another! We may disagree, but the act of linking requires us (and asks our readers) to acknowledge and engage the other.

But consider too, the very practical. The centerpiece of John McIntyre’s attack on our post was his claim that the US constitution does protect the freedom of the press. In countering our assertion that “Newspapers are not a precondition for democracy—free speech is” John argues that:

“The Constitution does in fact protect newspapers. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Or of the press. Newspapers. Over the past couple of centuries, the legal understanding of the press has been expanded to include, for example, broadcast. But it is clear in the text that the authors of the Bill of Rights foresaw a need to protect the press — what we could now understand as organized journalism — in specific language beyond the protection of the individual right.”

But this is actually a misreading of the constitution. The term “the press” wasn’t referring to newspapers or claiming that they are necessary for democracy (or that even journalism is for that matter). It was stating that Americans have the freedom of expression both in speech and in writing. In this manner, the constitution could have said “abridging the freedom of speech, or of blogs, or word documents, or PDFs.” Indeed, it was one of John’s own reader’s (slugwell) that supplied the legal analysis from Princeton University that confirmed his misinterpretation:

“Despite popular misunderstanding the right to freedom of the press guaranteed by the first amendment is not very different from the right to freedom of speech. It allows an individual to express themselves through publication and dissemination. It is part of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression. It does not afford members of the media any special rights or privileges not afforded to citizens in general.”

This back and forth – this focusing of the argument, the identification of errors and misunderstandings – is physically impossible in the traditional newspaper, and for reasons of culture and pride, remain rare in online editions. And yet, this is what makes blogs so compelling to their readers. Readers are able to learn more, dive deeper and participate in the evolving product (there is no final product on the internet). Alternatively, if they aren’t interested (as many readers of both John and my blog probably aren’t) they move on.

In his second post, John decries Wikipedia because “it advises its readers not to rely on the accuracy of its entries.” At least it advises its readers! But John himself benefited from (or was victim to) the very forces that make Wikipedia trustworthy – others came to point out the errors of his analysis. This is, paradoxically, what makes Wikipedia so trustworthy (and the Baltimore Sun less so – their retractions and errors are printed discretely, away from the prying eyes of readers). Even as he decries “new media” he enjoys and takes part in its benefits.

But let me finally return to this notion of respect. I don’t agree with John, but I respect him – which is why I link to and write about him. More importantly, I think we agree on more than we disagree. John states that he was responding to “a Canadian blogger’s post rejoicing in the death of the newspaper.” Let me concede that our tone sometimes makes it seem we are gleeful about the decline of newspapers, this is not the case. Let us be clear, Taylor and I aren’t celebrating the death of the newspapers. While we take issue with the industry’s argument (and hubris) that they are a precondition or necessary for democracy, anyone who reads our piece, Missing the Link will note this line:

“However, unlike the work of our techno-utopian contemporaries, our critique should not be seen as a jubilant celebration of a dying industry. Traditional media has served society well, and with the right attitude and adjustments, could continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

As avid newsreaders and commentators, our problem is with how newspapers – and the news industry in general – has been profoundly unimaginative, blind, angry and reactionary towards new technology and possibilities. Our goal in bursting bubbles is to focus the debate on what’s possible and what’s next. Above all, we want news writers to once again talk about how they can better serve the public, not on how the public should serve them.

Print Media: Nostalgia is not a growth model (or, on why being online is better than than paper)

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Two years ago Taylor and I wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review (which they opted not to publish) critical of Kuttner and the CJR’s faith in the print-hybrid model for media.

After having it sit on our hard drives all this time we are putting it up for reading and commenting. It is, sadly, more or less as relevant today as it was when we wrote it. Here is a link to the full version of Missing the Link: Why Old Media Still Doesn’t Get the Internet.

And here’s another of my favourite passages, (written before the arrival of the kindle!):

Print Media: Nostalgia is not a growth model

Mostly, it is baby boomers who are nostalgic for newsprint, and they are not a growth industry. Sure, there are some, younger, holdouts. But these are generally students of the Columbia Journalism School, not those they hope to write for. Yes, the texture of a newspaper is nice – but the newspapers can’t afford to print and distribute them and, so far, you’ve been unwilling to pay a premium for it.

More seriously, media traditionalists often cite two examples— incidental reading and ideological objectivity—to explain why physical newspapers will and should remain the main distribution channel for print media. However, the purported value of physical newsprint simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Scanning the pages of a newspaper is indeed a virtue. It exposes readers to articles they might not seek out, broadening their range of news and opinion. However, this process is no different from what happens online. Links, aggregators and email steer readers to a far broader range of articles than they could conceivably imagine by simply flipping through a newspaper. Indeed, the internet enables this incidental reading better than newspapers. Take the BBC website, where any given article has links to related pieces both across the internet and in different sections of the site. A political article might cause a reader to click on a link to a related piece in the Science/Nature or Africa sections. Once there, they are confronted with an array of ‘incidental’ headlines. The tunnel syndrome argument simply doesn’t hold weight.

The other oft-cited example of the value of newspapers is that they prevent readers from falling into self-selected ideological silos. The argument follows that, when left to their own devices, innocent readers will gravitate towards the poles of their ideological bias. What they need, and should pay for, is a physical entity that provides them with a limited, but ‘healthy’, range of information.

This argument ignores the fact that many newspapers operate as ideological poles themselves. The New York Times clearly favors the left whereas the Wall Street Journal appeals to the right. More importantly the internet, unlike print media, provides tools to overcome these silos. Not all content delivered through an aggregator will be consistent with a reader’s perspective (indeed, one can imagine a customized aggregator that specifically targets news pieces that challenge its readers). More importantly, the internet gives readers the freedom (and safety) to select content from a broader range of perspectives. Most liberals wouldn’t be caught dead with an issue of the National Review in their hands, and when was the last time you saw a pinstriped Wall Streeter reading the Nation? But thousands of liberals read the Corner (the group blog of the National Review). This is because the ease, speed and anonymity of the web stimulates exploration that the physical world prohibits. In addition, many posts are written in response to other pieces, to whom they inevitably link (imagine the Nation sending readers to National Review!). Neither traditional nor New Media can single handedly mediate or resolve political difference, but at least New Media links the poles to one another, rather then creating isolated playgrounds where pundits can safely take shots at one another.

While sometimes seen as nostalgia, these arguments are simply a proxy for a deeper set of concerns felt by elites who fear the day the unkempt masses are finally freed to choose and read what they will. Controlling your customer has a never proven to be a sustainable business strategy, and for a business deeply concerned with freedom, it is disturbingly anti-democratic.

This piece is pulled from a longer piece we wrote called Missing The Link: Why Old Media still doesn’t get the Internet.

Background on Missing the Link

Two years ago the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) hosted a panel (audio available here) with Steven Rattner, Jim Brady, Amanda Bennett, Jill Abramson, and Robert Kuttner (with Nicholas Lemann moderating). The purpose was to discuss an article the CJR had commissioned Robert Kuttner’s to write on the future of print media where he essentially argued that the then status quo of print-digital hybrids would ensure newspapers’ survival.

The CJR however, interested in the perspective of bloggers, invited my colleague Taylor Owen to write a response. We ended up collaborating and wrote Missing the Link: Why Old Media Doesn’t get the Internet.

Ultimately we ended up writing a much longer piece, one that was critical of Kuttner and the print-hybrid model. In addition to the CJR we got a couple of sniffs from some other print journals/magazines (Wired for example) but they eventually could not get it published.

Ironically, we were more concerned with getting published (in print or digitally) than simply releasing it on our blogs. Part of this had to do with the piece’s length, but, if we are really honest with ourselves, we got trapped in an institutional mindset and began thinking like priests, not entrepreneurs. Eventually we got busy with other exciting projects and forgot about it (except for this op-ed we wrote in the toronto star).

Two years later the piece could do with some updating but sadly it is just as salient, if not more so, today as it was then. So we are pulling it out of the C drive and sharing it. Better late than never.

Of course, we aren’t devoid of our desire for a better channel. If anyone out there (Slate? Huffington Post?) finds the piece interesting and knows a home for it – print or digital – we would be happy to update it. Mostly, we just want it read.

Here again is a link to the full version of Missing the Link: Why Old Media Still Doesn’t Get the Internet.