The contents of this document were downloaded from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/ I have combined the individual HTML and PDF files into this one large file. The PDF was then converted to text format using pdftotext from the xpdf package. No changes have been made. -- John Goerzen 8/6/2004 We the Media Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor Copyright (c) 2004 Dan Gillmor. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O'Reilly Media books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. Editor: Allen Noren Production Editor: Mary Brady Cover Designer: Emma Colby Interior Designer: Melanie Wang Printing History: July 2004: First Edition. The O'Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. We the Media and related trade dress are trademarks of O'Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O'Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit [1]http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. ISBN: 0-596-00733-7 [C] References Visible links 1. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ Contents Introduction ix 1. From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond 1 2. The Read-Write Web 23 3. The Gates Come Down 44 4. Newsmakers Turn the Tables 66 5. The Consent of the Governed 88 6. Professional Journalists Join the Conversation 110 7. The Former Audience Joins the Party 136 8. Next Steps 158 9. Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust 174 10. Here Come the Judges (and Lawyers) 191 11. The Empires Strike Back 209 12. Making Our Own News 236 Epilogue and Acknowledgments 243 Web Site Directory 251 Glossary 259 Notes 261 Index 281 v Introduction We freeze some moments in time. Every culture has its frozen moments, events so important and personal that they transcend the normal flow of news. Americans of a certain age, for example, know precisely where they were and what they were doing when they learned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Another generation has absolute clarity of John F. Kennedy's assassination. And no one who was older than a baby on September 11, 2001, will ever forget hearing about, or seeing, airplanes exploding into skyscrapers. In 1945, people gathered around radios for the immediate news, and stayed with the radio to hear more about their fallen leader and about the man who took his place. Newspapers printed extra editions and filled their columns with detail for days and weeks afterward. Magazines stepped back from the breaking news and offered perspective. Something similar happened in 1963, but with a newer medium. The immediate news of Kennedy's death came for most via television; I'm old enough to remember that heart- breaking moment when Walter Cronkite put on his horn- rimmed glasses to glance at a message from Dallas and then, blinking back tears, told his viewers that their leader was gone. As in the earlier time, newspapers and magazines pulled out all the stops to add detail and context. September 11, 2001, followed a similarly grim pattern. We watched--again and again--the awful events. Consumers of ix w e the media news learned the what about the attacks, thanks to the televi- sion networks that showed the horror so graphically. Then we learned some of the how and why as print publications and thoughtful broadcasters worked to bring depth to events that defied mere words. Journalists did some of their finest work and made me proud to be one of them. But something else, something profound, was happening this time around: news was being produced by regular people who had something to say and show, and not solely by the "official" news organizations that had traditionally decided how the first draft of history would look. This time, the first draft of history was being written, in part, by the former audience. It was possible--it was inevitable--because of new publishing tools available on the Internet. Another kind of reporting emerged during those appalling hours and days. Via emails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal web journals -- all nonstandard news sources -- we received valuable context that the major American media couldn't, or wouldn't, provide. We were witnessing--and in many cases were part of--the future of news. Six months later came another demonstration of tomorrow's journalism. The stakes were far lower this time, merely a moment of discomfort for a powerful executive. On March 26, 2002, poor Joe Nacchio got a first-hand taste of the future; and this time, in a small way, I helped set the table. Actually, Nacchio was rolling in wealth that day, when he appeared at PC Forum, an exclusive executive conference in sub- urban Phoenix. He was also, it seemed, swimming in self-pity. In those days Nacchio was the chief executive of regional telephone giant Qwest, a near-monopoly in its multistate mar- ketplace. At the PC Forum gathering that particular day, he was complaining about difficulties in raising capital. Imagine: whining about the rigors of running a monopoly, especially when Nacchio's own management moves had contributed to some of the difficulties he was facing. x introduction I was in the audience, reporting in something close to real time by publishing frequent conference updates to my weblog, an online journal of short web postings, via a wireless link the conference had set up for attendees. So was another journalist weblogger, Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal, a soft- ware magazine. Little did we know that the morning's events would turn into a mini-legend in the business community. Little did I know that the experience would expand my understanding of how thoroughly the craft of journalism was changing. One of my posts noted Nacchio's whining, observing that he'd gotten seriously richer while his company was losing much of its market value--another example of CEOs raking in the riches while shareholders, employees, and communities got the shaft. Seconds later I received an email from Buzz Bruggeman, a lawyer in Florida, who was following my weblog and Searls's from his office in Orlando. "Ain't America great?" Bruggeman wrote sarcastically, attaching a hyperlink to a Yahoo! Finance web page showing that Nacchio had cashed in more than $200 million in stock while his company's stock price was heading downhill. This information struck me as relevant to what I was writing, and I immediately dropped this juicy tidbit into my weblog, with a cyber-tip of the hat to Bruggeman. ("Thanks, Buzz, for the link," I wrote parenthetically.) Doc Searls did likewise. "Around that point, the audience turned hostile," wrote Esther Dyson, whose company, Edventure Holdings, held the conference.1 Did Doc and I play a role? Apparently. Many people in the luxury hotel ballroom--perhaps half of the execu- tives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and journalists--were also online that morning. And at least some of them were amusing themselves by following what Doc and I were writing. During the remainder of Nacchio's session, there was a perceptible chill toward the man. Dyson, an investor and author, said later she was certain that our weblogs helped create that chill.2 She called the blogging "a second conference occurring around, through, and across the first." xi w e the media Why am I telling this story? This was not an earth-shaking event, after all. For me, however, it was a tipping point. Consider the sequence of news flow: a feedback loop that started in an Arizona conference session, zipped to Orlando, came back to Arizona and ultimately went global. In a world of satellite communications and fiber optics, real-time journalism is routine; but now we journalists had added the expertise of the audience. Those forces had lessons for everyone involved, including the "newsmaker"--Nacchio--who had to deal with new pres- sures on the always edgy, sometimes adversarial relationship between journalists and the people we cover. Nacchio didn't lose his job because we poked at his arrogance; he lost it, in the end, because he did an inadequate job as CEO. But he got a tiny, if unwelcome, taste of journalism's future that morning. The person in our little story who tasted journalism's future most profoundly, I believe, was neither the professional reporter nor the newsmaker, but Bruggeman. In an earlier time, before technology had collided so violently with journalism, he'd been a member of an audience. Now, he'd received news about an event without waiting for the traditional coverage to arrive via newspapers or magazines, or even web sites. And now he'd become part of the journalistic process himself--a citizen reporter whose knowledge and quick thinking helped inform my own journalism in a timely way. Bruggeman was no longer just a consumer. He was a pro- ducer. He was making the news. This book is about journalism's transformation from a 20th century mass-media structure to something profoundly more grassroots and democratic. It's a story, first, of evolutionary change. Humans have always told each other stories, and each new era of progress has led to an expansion of storytelling. This is also a story of a modern revolution, however, because technology has given us a communications toolkit that allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and, in theory, with global reach. Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before. xii introduction In the 20th century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or "news- makers"; and the legions of public relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions--call it Big Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters exhibit some of the phenomenon's worst symptoms. Big Media, in any event, treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it. (If we were television and you complained, we ignored you entirely unless the com- plaint arrived on a libel lawyer's letterhead.) Or you cancelled your subscription or stopped watching our shows. It was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable. Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between pro- ducers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satel- lites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public's airwaves. This evolution--from journalism as lecture to journalism as a conversation or seminar--will force the various communities of interest to adapt. Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their ways. The alternative is just more of the same. We can't afford more of the same. We can't afford to treat the news solely as a commodity, largely controlled by big insti- tutions. We can't afford, as a society, to limit our choices. We can't even afford it financially, because Wall Street's demands on Big Media are dumbing down the product itself. There are three major constituencies in a world where anyone can make the news. Once largely distinct, they're now blurring into each other. xiii w e the media Journalists We will learn we are part of something new, that our readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do--and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should embrace this. We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accu- racy and fairness, will remain important, and we'll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations--and to provide context--will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them. Newsmakers The rich and powerful are discovering new vulnerabilities, as Nacchio learned. Moreover, when anyone can be a jour- nalist, many talented people will try--and they'll find things the professionals miss. Politicians and business people are learning this every day. But newsmakers also have new ways to get out their message, using the same technologies the grassroots adopts. Howard Dean's presidential cam- paign failed, but his methods will be studied and emulated because of the way his campaign used new tools to engage his supporters in a conversation. The people at the edges of the communications and social networks can be a news- maker's harshest, most effective critics. But they can also be the most fervent and valuable allies, offering ideas to each other and to the newsmaker as well. The former audience Once mere consumers of news, the audience is learning how to get a better, timelier report. It's also learning how to join the process of journalism, helping to create a massive con- versation and, in some cases, doing a better job than the professionals. For example, Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. "Insta- pundit," is not just one of the most popular webloggers; he xiv introduction has amassed considerable influence in the process. Some grassroots journalists will become professionals. In the end, we'll have more voices and more options. I've been in professional journalism for almost 25 years. I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had, and the position I hold. I respect and admire my colleagues, and believe that Big Media does a superb job in many cases. But I'm absolutely certain that the journalism industry's modern structure has fostered a dan- gerous conservatism--from a business sense more than a polit- ical sense, though both are apparent--that threatens our future. Our resistance to change, some of it caused by financial con- cerns, has wounded the journalism we practice and has made us nearly blind to tomorrow's realities. Our worst enemy may be ourselves. Corporate journalism, which dominates today, is squeezing quality to boost profits in the short term. Perversely, such tactics are ultimately likely to undermine us. Big Media enjoys high margins. Daily newspapers in typi- cally quasi-monopoly markets make 25­30 percent or more in good years. Local TV stations can boast margins north of 50 percent. For Wall Street, however, no margin is sufficiently rich, and next year's profits must be higher still. This has led to a hol- lowing-out syndrome: newspaper publishers and broadcasting station managers have realized they can cut the amount and quality of journalism, at least for a while, in order to raise profits. In case after case, the demands of Wall Street and the greed of investors have subsumed the "public trust" part of journalism. I don't believe the First Amendment, which gives journalists valuable leeway to inquire and publish, was designed with corporate profits in mind. While we haven't become a wholly cynical business yet, the trend is scary. Consolidation makes it even more worrisome. Media com- panies are merging to create ever larger information and enter- tainment conglomerates. In too many cases, serious jour- nalism--and the public trust--continue to be victims. All of this xv w e the media leaves a journalistic opening, and new journalists--especially citizen journalists--are filling the gap. Meanwhile, even as greed and consolidation take their toll, those historically high margins are under attack. Newspapers, for example, have two main revenue streams. The smaller by far comes from circulation: readers who pay to have the paper delivered at home or buy it from a newsstand. The larger is advertising, from employment classifieds to retail display ads, and every one of those ad revenue streams is under attack from competitors like eBay and craigslist, which can happily live on lower margins (or, as in the case of eBay, the world's largest classified-advertising site, establish a new monopoly) and don't care at all about journalism. In the long term, I can easily imagine an unraveling of the business model that has rewarded me so well, and--despite the effect of excessive greed in too many executive suites--has man- aged to serve the public respectably in vital ways. Who will do big investigative projects, backed by deep pockets and the ability to pay expensive lawyers when powerful interests try to punish those who exposed them, if the business model collapses? Who would have exposed the Watergate crimes in the absence of pow- erful publishers, especially The Washington Post's Katharine Graham, who had the financial and moral fortitude to stand up to Richard Nixon and his henchmen. At a more prosaic level, who will serve, for better or worse, as a principal voice of a com- munity or region? Flawed as we may be in the business of jour- nalism, anarchy in news is not my idea of a solution. A world of news anarchy would be one in which the big, credible voices of today were undermined by a combination of forces, including the financial ones I just described. There would be no business model to support the institutional journalism that, for all its problems, does perform a public service. Credi- bility matters. People need, and want, trusted sources--and those sources have been, for the most part, serious journalists. Instead of journalism organizations with the critical mass to fight the good fights, we may be left with the equivalent of xvi introduction countless pamphleteers and people shouting from soapboxes. We need something better. Happily, the anarchy scenario doesn't strike me as prob- able, in part because there will always be a demand for credible news and context. Also possible, though I hope equally unlikely, is a world of information lockdown. The forces of central con- trol are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their authority. In this scenario, we could witness an unholy alliance between the entertainment industry--what I call the "copyright cartel"--and government. Governments are very uneasy about the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point. Legal clampdowns and technological measures to prevent copyright infringement could bring a day when we need permission to publish, or when publishing from the edge feels too risky. The cartel has targeted some of the essential innovations of tomorrow's news, such as the peer-to-peer file sharing that does make infringement easier but also gives citizen journalists one of the only affordable ways to distribute what they create. Govern- ments insist on the right to track everything we do, but more and more politicians and bureaucrats shut off access to what the public needs to know--information that increasingly surfaces through the efforts of nontraditional media. In short, we cannot just assume that self-publishing from the edges of our networks--the grassroots journalism we need so desperately--will survive, much less thrive. We will need to defend it, with the same vigor we defend other liberties. Instead of a news anarchy or lockdown, I seek a balance that simultaneously preserves the best of today's system and encourages tomorrow's emergent, self-assembling journalism. In the following pages, I hope to make the case that it's not just necessary, and perhaps inevitable, but also eminently workable for all of us. It won't be immediately workable for the people who already get so little attention from Big Media. Today, citizen xvii w e the media journalism is mostly the province of what my friend and former newspaper editor Tom Stites calls "a rather narrow and very privileged slice of the polity -- those who are educated enough to take part in the wired conversation, who have the technical skills, and who are affluent enough to have the time and equip- ment." These are the very same people we're leaving behind in our Brave New Economy. They are everyday people, buffeted by change, and outside the conversation. To our discredit, we have not listened to them as well as we should. The rise of the citizen journalist will help us listen. The ability of anyone to make the news will give new voice to people who've felt voiceless--and whose words we need to hear. They are showing all of us--citizen, journalist, newsmaker--new ways of talking, of learning. In the end, they may help spark a renaissance of the notion, now threatened, of a truly informed citizenry. Self-government demands no less, and we'll all benefit if we do it right. Let's have this conversation, for everyone's sake. xviii Chapter 1 Chapter 1 From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond We may have noticed the new era of journalism more clearly after the events of September 11, but it wasn't invented on that awful day. It did not emerge fully formed or from a vacuum. What follows doesn't pretend to be a history of journalism. Rather, these are observations, including some personal experi- ences that help illustrate the evolution of what we so brazenly call "new media." At the risk of seeming to slight the contributions from other nations, I will focus mostly on the American experience. America, born in vocal dissent, did something essential early on. The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment has many facets, including its protection of the right of protest and practice of religion, but freedom of speech is the most fundamental part of a free society. Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the choice of newspapers or government, he'd take the newspapers. Journalism was that important to society, he insisted, though as president, attacked by the press of his day, he came to loathe what he'd praised. Personal journalism is also not a new invention. People have been stirring the pot since before the nation's founding; one of the most prominent in America's early history was Ben Fran- klin, whose Pennsylvania Gazette was civic-minded and occa- sionally controversial. There were also the pamphleteers who, before the First Amendment was enshrined into law and guaranteed a free press, published their writings at great personal risk. Few Americans 1 w e the media can appreciate this today, but journalists are still dying else- where in the world for what they write and broadcast. One early pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, inspired many with his powerful writings about rebellion, liberty, and government in the late 18th century. He was not the first to take pen to paper in hopes of pointing out what he called common sense, nor in trying to persuade people of the common sense of his ideas. Even more important, perhaps, were the (at the time) anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers. Their work, ana- lyzing the proposed Constitution and arguing the fundamental questions of how the new Republic might work, has reverber- ated through history. Without them, the Constitution might never have been approved by the states. The Federalist Papers were essentially a powerful conversation that helped make a nation. There have been several media revolutions in U.S. history, each accompanied by technological and political change. One of the most crucial, Bruce Bimber notes in his book, Information and American Democracy,3 was the completion of the final parts, in the early to middle 1800s, of what was then the most dependable and comprehensive postal system in the world. This unprecedented exercise in governmental assistance should be seen, Bimber argues, as "a kind of Manhattan project of com- munication" that helped fuel the rise of the first truly mass medium, newspapers. The news, including newspapers, was cheaply and reliably distributed through the mail.4 For most of American history, newspapers dominated the production and dissemination of what people widely thought of as news. The telegraph--a revolutionary tool from the day in 1844 when Samuel Morse's partner Alfred Vail dispatched the message "What hath God wrought?" from Baltimore to Wash- ington D.C.--sped up the collection and transmission of the news. Local papers could now gather and print news of distant events.5 Newspapers flourished throughout the 19th century. The best were aggressive and timely, and ultimately served their 2 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond readers well. Many, however, had little concern for what we now call objectivity. Papers had points of view, reflecting the politics of their backers and owners. Newspapers have provoked public opinion for as long as they've been around. "Yellow journalism" achieved perhaps its ugliest prominence when early media barons such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst abused their consider- able powers. Hearst, in particular, is notorious for helping to spark the Spanish-American War in 1898 by inflaming public opinion. As the Gilded Age's excesses began to tear at the very fabric of American society, a new kind of journalist, the muckraker, emerged at the end of the 19th century. More than most jour- nalists of the era, muckrakers performed the public service func- tion of journalism by exposing a variety of outrages, including the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel conditions in workplaces. Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the Cities), Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) were among the daring journalists and novelists who shone daylight into some dark corners of society. They helped set the stage for the Progressive Era, and set a standard for the investigative journalists of the new century. Personal journalism didn't die with the muckrakers. Throughout the 20th century, the world was blessed with indi- viduals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose weekly newsletter was required reading for a generation of Washington insiders. As Victor Navasky wrote in the July 21, 2003 issue of The Nation, Stone eschewed the party circuit in favor of old-fashioned reporting: His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congres- sional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, 3 w e the media examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documenta- tion of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain.6 A generation of journalists learned from Stone's techniques. If we're lucky, his methods will never go out of fashion. t h e co r p o r a t e e r a But in the 20th century, the big business of journalism--the cor- poratization of journalism--was also emerging as a force in society. This inevitable transition had its positive and negative aspects. I say "inevitable" for several reasons. First, industries con- solidate. This is in the nature of capitalism. Second, successful family enterprises rarely stayed in the hands of their founders' families; inheritance taxes forced some sales and breakups, and bickering among siblings and cousins who inherited valuable properties led to others. Third, the rules of American capitalism have been tweaked in recent decades to favor the big over the small. As noted in the Introduction, however, the creation of Big Media is something of an historical artifact. It stems from a time when A.J. Liebling's famous admonition, that freedom of the press was for those people who owned a press, reflected finan- cial reality. The economics of newspaper publishing favored big- ness, and local monopolies came about because, in most com- munities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of any size.7 Broadcasting has played a key role in the transition to con- solidation. Radio, then television, lured readers and advertisers away from newspapers,8 contributing to the consolidation of the newspaper industry. But the broadcasters were simultaneously turning into the biggest of Big Media. As they grew, they brought the power of broadcasting to bear on the news, to great 4 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond effect. Edward R. Murrow's reports on CBS, most notably his coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil poli- tics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism. The news hegemony of the networks and big newspapers reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Journalists helped bring down a law-breaking president. An anchorman, Walter Cron- kite, was considered the most trusted person in America. Yet this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded) mandate to perform a public service function in their communi- ties. The networks were sold to companies such as General Elec- tric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News divisions were required to be profit centers. While network news may have been expensive to produce, local stations had it easier. But while the network news shows still retained some sense of responsibility, most local stations made no pretense of serving the public trust, preferring instead to lure viewers with violence and entertainment, two sure rat- ings boosters. It was an irresistible combination for resource- starved news directors: cheaper than serious reporting, and com- pelling video. "If it bleeds, it leads" became the all-too-true mantra for the local news reports, and it has stayed that way, with puerile celebrity "journalism" now added to the mix. America has suffered from this simplistic view of news. Even in the 1990s, when crime rates were plummeting, local TV persisted in giving viewers the impression that crime was never a bigger problem. This was irresponsible because, among other things, it helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that has stripped away crucial civil liberties--including most of our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures--and kept other serious issues off the air. As the pace of life has quickened, our collective attention span has shortened. I suppose it's asking too much of commer- cial TV news to occasionally use the public airwaves to actually inform the public, but the push for profits has crowded out 5 w e the media depth. The situation is made worse by the fact that most of us don't stop long enough to consider what we've been told, much less seek out context, thereby allowing ourselves to be shallow and to be led by people who take advantage of it. A shallow citi- zenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an informed one. At the same time, big changes were occurring in TV jour- nalism, and big newspaper companies were swallowing small papers around the nation. As noted, this didn't always reduce quality. In fact, the craft of newspaper journalism has never been better in some respects; investigative reporting by the best organizations continues to make me proud. And while some corporate owners--Gannett in particular--have tended to turn independent papers into cookie-cutter models of corporate jour- nalism, sometimes they've actually improved on the original. But it's no coincidence that three of the best American newspa- pers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, have an ownership structure--voting control by families and/or small groups of committed investors--that lets them take the long view no matter what Wall Street demands in the short term. Nor should it surprise anyone that these organizations are making some of the most innovative use of the Internet as they expand their horizons in the digital age. It was cable, a technology that originally expanded broadcast television's reach in the analog age, which turned television inside out. Originally designed to get broadcast signals into hard- to-reach mountain valleys, cable grew into a power center in its own right when system owners realized that the big money was in more densely populated areas. Cable systems were monopo- lies in the communities they served, and they used the money in part to bring more channel capacity onto their systems. The cable channel that changed the news business forever, of course, was Ted Turner's Cable News Network (CNN). We've forgotten what a daring experiment this was, given its 6 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond subsequent success. At the time it was launched on June 1, 1980, many in the media business considered CNN little more than a bizarre corporate ego trip. As it turned out, CNN punched a hole in a dam that was already beginning to crumble from within. Even if cable was bringing more choices, however, it was still a central point of control for the owner of the cables. Cable companies decided which package of channels to offer. Oh, sure, customers had a choice: yes or no. As we'll see in Chapter 11, cable is becoming part of a broadband duopoly that could threaten information choice in the future. from outside in During this time of centralization and corporate ownership, the forces of change were gathering at the edges. Some forces were technological, such as the microprocessor that led straight to the personal computer, and a federally funded data-networking experiment called the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Some were political and/or judicial, such as Supreme Court deci- sions that forced AT&T to let third parties plug their own phones into Ma Bell's network, and another that made it legal for purchasers of home videotape machines to record TV broad- casts for subsequent viewing. Personal choice, assisted by the power of personal tech- nology, was in the wind. I got my first personal computer in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, when I first became a journalist, I bought one of the earliest portable personal computers, an Osborne, and used it to write and electronically transmit news stories to publica- tions such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, for which I was freelancing from Vermont. I was enthralled by this fabulous tool that allowed me, a lone reporter in what were considered the boondocks, to report the news in a timely and efficient manner. 7 w e the media The commercial online world was in its infancy in those days, and I couldn't resist experimenting with it. My initial epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985. I'd been using a word processor called XyWrite, the PC program of choice for serious writers in those days. It ran fast on the era's slow computers, and had an internal programming language, called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly capable. One day I found myself stymied by an XPL problem. I posted a short message on a word-processing forum on Compu- Serve, the era's most successful commercial online service. A day later, I logged on again and was greeted with solutions to my little problem from people in several U.S. cities and, incredibly, Australia.9 I was amazed. I'd tapped the network, asking for help. I'd been educated. This, I knew implicitly, was a big deal. Of course, I didn't fully get it. I spent the 1986­87 aca- demic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which in those days was at the heart of the Internet--then still a uni- versity, government, and research network of networks-- without managing to notice the Internet. John Markoff of The New York Times, the first major newspaper reporter to under- stand the Net's value, had it pretty much to himself in those days as a journalist, and got scoop after scoop as a result. One way he acquired information was by reading the Internet's public message boards. Collectively called Usenet, they were and still are a grab bag of "newsgroups" on which anyone with Net access can post comments. Usenet was, and remains, a useful resource.10 CompuServe wasn't the only way to get online in the 1980s. Other choices included electronic bulletin boards, known as BBS. They turned into technological cul-de-sacs, but had great value at the time. You'd dial into a local BBS via a modem on your computer, read and write messages, download files, and get what amounted to a local version of the Internet and systems 8 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond such as CompuServe. You'd find a variety of topics on all of these systems, ranging from aviation to technology to politics, whatever struck the fancy of the people who used them. Fringe politics found their way onto the bulletin boards early on. I was a reporter for the Kansas City Times in the mid- 1980s and spent the better part of a year chasing groups such as the Posse Commitatus around the Farm Belt. This and other vir- ulently antiestablishment organizations found ready ears amid a rural economic depression that made it easier to recruit farmers and other small-town people who felt they were victims of banks and governments. I found my way onto several online boards operated by radical groups; I never got very deep into the systems because the people running them understood the basics of security. Law-enforcement officials and others who watched the activities of the radicals told me at the time that the BBS was one of the radical right's most effective tools.11 ransom-note media Personal technology wasn't just about going online. It was about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expen- sive ways. For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of computer technology.12 But it was desktop publishing where the potential for journalism became clearest. A series of inventions in the mid-1980s brought the medium into its new era. Suddenly, with an Apple Macintosh and a laser printer, one could easily and cheaply create and lay out a publi- cation. Big publishing didn't disappear--it adapted by using the technology to lower costs--but the entry level moved down to small groups and even individuals, a stunning liberation from the past. There was one drawback of having so much power and flexibility in the hands of nonprofessionals. In the early days of desktop publishing, people tended to use too many different 9 w e the media fonts on a page, a style that was likened, all too accurately, to ransom notes. But the typographical mishmash was a small price to pay for all those new voices. Big Media was still getting bigger in this period, but it wasn't noticing the profound demographic changes that had been reshaping the nation for decades. Newsrooms, never mind coverage, scarcely reflected the diversity. Desktop publishing and its progeny created an opening for many new players to enter, not least of which was the ethnic press. Big Media has tried to adapt. Newsrooms are becoming more diverse. Major media companies have launched or bought popular ethnic publications and broadcasters. But independent ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credi- bility: grassroots journalism ascendant.13 o u t l o u d an d o u t r a g e o u s Meanwhile, talk radio was also becoming a force, though not an entirely new one by any means. Radio has featured talk pro- grams throughout its history, and call-in shows date back as far as 1945. Opinionated hosts, mostly from the political right, such as Father Coughlin, fulminated about government, taxes, cultural breakdowns, and a variety of issues they and their lis- teners were convinced hadn't received sufficient attention from the mainstream media. These hosts were as much entertainers as commentators, and their shows drew listeners in droves. But modern talk radio had another crucial feature: the par- ticipation of the audience. People--regular people--were invited to have their say on the radio. Before that, regular people had no immediate or certain outlet for their own stories and views short of letters to the editor in newspapers. Now they could be part of the program, adding the weight of their own beliefs to the host's. 10 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond The people making this news were in the audience. Howard Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phe- nomenon. Both mediums, he told me, reach out to and connect with "a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream media." Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column14 for the Post in addition to his regular stories and column. Talk radio wasn't, and isn't, just about political anger, even if politics and other issues of the day are the normal fodder. The genre has also become a broader sounding board. Doctors offer advice (including TV's fictional "Frasier Crane"), computer gurus advise non-geeks on what to buy, and lawyers listen to bizarre legal woes. Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future of news. In the mid-1990s, not long after I moved to California, a mild but distinct earthquake rattled my house one day. I lis- tened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-the- spot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices. t h e we b e r a e m e r g e n t As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except per- haps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college cam- puses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial ser- vices such as CompuServe and America Online. But another series of breakthroughs was about to move us into a networked world. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology that became the World Wide Web. He wrote software to serve, or dish out, information from connected computers, and a "client" program that was, in effect, the first browser. He also 11 w e the media sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowl- edge to publish documents as web pages that could be easily linked to other pages anywhere in the world. Why was this so vital? We could now move from one site and document to another with the click of a mouse or keyboard stroke. Berners- Lee had connected the global collection of documents the Net had already created, but he wanted to take the notion a step fur- ther: to write onto this web, not just read from it. But there's something Berners-Lee purposely didn't do. He didn't patent his invention. Instead, he gave the world an open and extensible foundation on which new innovation could be built. The next breakthrough was Mosaic, one of the early graph- ical web browsers to run on popular desktop operating systems. These browsers were a basis for the commercial Internet. The browser, and the relative ease of creating web pages, sparked some path-breaking experiments in what we now recognize as personal journalism. Let's note one of the best and earliest examples. Justin Hall was a sophomore at Swarthmore College in 1993 when he heard about the Web. He coded some pages by hand in HTML. His "Justin's Links from the Underground"15 may well have been the first serious weblog, long before special- ized weblog software tools became available. The first visitor to Hall's site from outside the university came in 1994. He explained his motivations in an email: Why did I do it? The urge to share of oneself, to join a great global knowledge sharing party. The chance to participate in something cool. A deep geek archivist's urge to experiment with documenting and archiving personal media and experi- ence. In college I realized that Proust and Joyce would have loved the web, and they likely would have tried a similar experiment--they wrote in hypertext, about human lives. It was journalism, but I was mostly reporting on me. In the early days, I wrote about the web, on the web, because few 12 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond other people were doing so. Once search engines and link directories emerged, I didn't need to catalog everything online. So I enjoyed having a tool to map my thoughts and experi- ences, and a chance to connect those thoughts and experi- ences to the rest of the electrified English-speaking world! What had happened? Communications had completed a transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one- to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one- to-many, and many-to-many. Just about anyone could own a digital printing press, and have worldwide distribution.16 None of this would have surprised Marshall McLuhan. Indeed, his seminal works, especially Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man17 and The Medium is the Message,18 pre- saged so much of what has occurred. As he observed in the introduction to Understanding Media: After three thousand years of explosion, by means of frag- mentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man--the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Nor would it have come as a shock to Alvin Toffler, who explained in The Third Wave19 how manufacturing technology had driven a wedge between producers and customers. Mass manufacturing drove down the unit cost of production but at the cost of something vital: a human connection with the buyer. Information technology, he said, would lead--among many other things--to mass customization, disintermediation (elimina- tion of middlemen), and media convergence. 13 w e the media Perhaps no document of its time was more prescient about the Web's potential than the Cluetrain Manifesto,20 which first appeared on the Web in April 1999. It was alternately preten- tious and profound, with considerably more of the latter qual- ity. Extending the ideas of McLuhan and many others, the four authors--Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger--struck home with me and a host of other readers who knew innately that the Net was powerful but weren't sure how to define precisely why. "A powerful global conversation has begun," they wrote. "Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter--and getting smarter faster than most companies." They explained why the Net is changing the very nature of business. "Markets are conversations," proclaimed their first of 95 theses with elegant simplicity. Journalism is also a conversation, I realized. Cluetrain and its antecedents have become a foundation for my evolving view of the trade. writing the web The scene was now set for the rise of a new kind of news. But some final pieces had yet to be put in place. One was technolog- ical: giving everyday people the tools they needed to join this emerging conversation. Another was cultural: the realization that putting the tools of creation into millions of hands could lead to an unprecedented community. Adam Smith, in a sense, was creating a collective. The toolmakers did, and continue to do, their part. And with the neat irony that has a habit of appearing in this trans- formation, a programmer's annoyance with journalists had everything to do with one of the most important developments. 14 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond Dave Winer had written and sold an outlining tool called "More," a Macintosh application.21 He was a committed and knowledgeable Mac developer, but in the early 1990s, he found himself more and more annoyed by a trade press that, in his view, was getting the story all wrong. At the time, Microsoft Windows was becoming more pop- ular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company. Trou- bled, yes. But when the computer journalists persisted in saying, in effect, "Apple is dead, and there's no Macintosh software development anymore," Winer was furious. He decided to go around the established media, and with the rise of the Internet, he had a medium. He published an email newsletter called "DaveNet." It was biting, opinionated, and provocative, and it reached many influ- ential people in the tech industry. They paid attention. Winer's critiques could be abrasive, but he had a long record of accom- plishments and deep insight. Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the Mac the ink it deserved. For its part, Apple made strategic mis- takes that alienated software developers and helped marginalize the platform. And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft's roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright law- breaking, became dominant. But Winer realized he was onto something. He'd found journalism wanting, and he bypassed it. Then he expanded on what he'd started. Like Justin Hall, he created a newsy page in what later became known as the blog format--most recent material at the top. In the late 1990s, Winer and his team at UserLand Software22 rewrote an application called Frontier. One collec- tion of new functions was given the name Manila, and it was one of the first programs that made it easy for novices to create their own blogs. My first blog was created on the beta version of Manila. Winer has suggested that traditional journalism will wither in the face of what he helped spawn. I disagree, but his contributions to the craft's future have been pivotal. 15 w e the media open sourcing the news The development of the personal computer may have empow- ered the individual, but there were distinct limits. One was soft- ware code itself. Proprietary programs were like black boxes. We could see what they did, but not how they worked. This situation struck Richard Stallman, among others, as wrong. In January 1984, Stallman quit his post at the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. He formally launched a project to create a free operating system and desktop software based on the Unix operating system that ran on many university computers.23 Stallman's ideas ultimately became the foundation for Linux, the open source operating system that brought fame to Linus Torvalds.24 The goal of Stallman's work, then and now, was to ensure that users of computers always had free software programs for the most basic and important tasks. Free, in this case, was more about freedom than about cost. Stallman and others in this movement thought that the programming instructions--the source code--of free software had to be open for inspection and modification by anyone. In the late 1990s, as Linux was gaining traction in the marketplace, and as many free software applica- tions and operating systems were available, the movement got another name: open source, describing the open availability of the source code.25 Open source software projects are a digital version of a small-town tradition: the barn raising. But open source projects can involve people from around the world. Most will never meet except online. Guided by project leaders--Torvalds in the case of Linux--they contribute bits and pieces of what becomes a whole package. Open source software, in many cases, is as good as or better than the commercial variety. And these programs are at the heart of the Internet's most basic functions: open source software powers most of the web server computers that dish out information to our browsers. 16 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond When the code is open for inspection, it's safer to use because people can find and fill the security holes. Bugs, the annoying flaws that cause program crashes and other unex- pected behavior, can be found and fixed more easily, too.26 What does this have to do with tomorrow's journalism? Plenty. Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor who has written extensively on the open source phenomenon, has made a strong case that this emergent style of organization applies much more widely than software. In a 2002 essay, "Coase's Pen- guin,"27 he said the free software style could work better than the traditional capitalist structure of firms and markets in some circumstances. In particular, he said that it "has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the physical capital necessary for that production--computers and communications capabilities--is widely distributed instead of concentrated." He could have been describing journalism. In his essay, and in the course of several long conversations we've had in the past several years, Benkler has made the case that several of the building blocks are already in place to augment Big Media, if not substitute it outright, with open source techniques. He told me that bloggers and operators of independent news sites already do a respectable job of scanning for and sorting news for people who want it. The editorial function has been adopted not just by bloggers, but by a host of new kinds of online news operations. Some peer-reviewed news sites, such as the collaborative Kuro5hin,28 which describes itself as "tech- nology and culture, from the trenches," are doing interesting journalism by any standard, with readers contributing the essays and deciding which stories make it to the top of the page. According to Benkler, only in the area of investigative jour- nalism does Big Media retain an advantage over open source journalism. This is due to the resources Big Media can throw at an investigation. In Chapter 9, I will argue that even here, the grassroots are making serious progress. 17 w e the media In my own small sphere, I'm convinced that this already applies. If my readers know more than I do (which I know they do), I can include them in the process of making my journalism better. While there are elements of open source here, I'm not describing an entirely transparent process. But new forms of journalistic tools, such as the Wiki (which I'll discuss in the next chapter), are entirely transparent from the outset. More are coming. An open source philosophy may produce better journalism at the outset, but that's just the start of a wider phenomenon. In the conversational mode of journalism I suggested in the Intro- duction, the first article may be only the beginning of the con- versation in which we all enlighten each other. We can correct our mistakes. We can add new facts and context.29 If we can raise a barn together, we can do journalism together. We already are. terror turns journalism's corner By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emer- gent, grassroots journalism were in place. The Web was already a place where established news organizations and newcomers were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were making it easier for anyone to participate. We needed a catalyst to show how far we'd come. On September 11, 2001, we got that catalyst in a terrible way. I was in South Africa. The news came to me and four other people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone. Our driver's wife called from Johannesburg, where she was watching TV, to say a plane had apparently hit the World Trade Center. She called again to say another plane had hit the other tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon. We arrived at the Port Elizabeth airport in time to watch, live and in horror, as the towers disintegrated. 18 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to Lusaka, Zambia. The BBC and CNN's international edition were on the hotel television. The local newspapers ran consider- able news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment. What I could not do in those initial days was read my news- paper, the San Jose Mercury News, or the The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, or any of the other papers I normally scanned each morning at home. I could barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was over- whelming as people everywhere went online for more informa- tion, or simply to talk with each other. I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox over- flowed with useful news from Dave Farber, one of the new breed of editors. Then a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called "Interesting People"30 that he'd run since the mid-1980s. Most of what he sent out had first been sent to him by correspondents he knew from around the nation and the world. If they saw something they thought he'd find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own commentary. In the wake of the attacks, his correspondents' perspectives on issues ranging from national-security issues to critiques of religion became essential reading for their breadth and depth. Farber told me later he'd gone into overdrive, because this event obliged him to do so. "I consider myself an editor in a real sense," Farber explained. "This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes out and what doesn't . . . Even though I don't edit in the sense of real editing, I make the choices." 19 w e the media One of the emails Farber sent, dated September 12, still stands out for me. It was an email from an unidentified sender who wrote: "SPOT infrared satellite image of Manhattan, acquired on September 11 at 11:55 AM ET. Image may be freely reproduced with `CNES/SPOT Image 2001' copyright attribu- tion." A web address, linking to the photo, followed. The picture showed an ugly brown-black cloud of dust and debris hanging over much of lower Manhattan. The image stayed with me. Here was context. Back in America, members of the then nascent weblog commu- nity had discovered the power of their publishing tool. They offered abundant links to articles from large and small news organizations, domestic and foreign. New York City bloggers posted personal views of what they'd seen, with photographs, providing more information and context to what the major media was providing. "I'm okay. Everyone I know is okay," Amy Phillips wrote September 11 on her blog, "The 50 Minute Hour."31 A Brooklyn blogger named Gus wrote: "The wind just changed direction and now I know what a burning city smells like. It has the smell of burning plastic. It comes with acrid brown skies with jet fighters flying above them. The stuff I'm seeing on teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with less convincing special effects. Then I'm outside, seeing it with my naked eyes."32 Meg Hourihan was a continent away, in San Francisco. A cofounder of Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger, another of the early blogging tools (now owned by Google), she pointed to other blogs that day and urged people to give blood. The next day she wrote, in part: "24 hours later, I'm heading back into the kitchen to finish up the dishes, to pick up the spatula that still sits in the sink where I dropped it. I'm going to wash my coffee press and brew that cup of coffee I never had yesterday. I'm 20 f r o m tom paine to blogs and beyond going to try and find some semblance of normalcy in this very changed world."33 Also in California that day, a little known Afghan-American writer named Tamim Ansary sent an impassioned email to some friends. His message was in part cautionary, observing that while America might want to bomb anything that moved in Afghanistan, we couldn't bomb it back to the Stone Age, as some talk show hosts were urging. The Asian nation, he argued, was already there. Ansary's email circulated among a widening circle of friends and acquaintances. By September 14, it had appeared on a popular weblog and on Salon, a web magazine.34 Within days, Ansary's words of anguish and caution had spread all over America. Ansary's news had flowed upward and outward. At the outset, no one from a major network had ever heard of him. But what he said had sufficient authority that people who knew him spread his message, first to their own friends and ultimately to web journalists who spread it further. Only then did the mass media discover it and take it to a national audience. This was the best kind of grassroots collaboration with Big Media. In Tennessee, meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds was typing, typing, typing into his weblog, Instapundit.com, which he'd started only a few weeks earlier. A law professor with a technological bent, he'd originally expected the blog to be some- what lighthearted. The attacks changed all that. "I was very reactive," he told me. "I had no agenda. I was just writing about stuff, because the alternative was sitting there and watching the plane crash into the tower again and again on CNN." He was as furious as anyone, and wanted retaliation. But he warned against a backlash targeting Muslims. He said Ameri- cans should not give into the temptation to toss out liberty in the name of safety. He didn't expect to develop a following, but that happened almost immediately. He'd struck a chord. He 21 w e the media heard from people who agreed and disagreed vehemently. He kept the discussion going, adding links and perspectives. Today, InstaPundit.com has a massive following. Reynolds is constantly posting trenchant commentary, with a libertarian and rightward slant, on a variety of topics. He's become a star in a firmament that could not have existed only a short time ago--a firmament that got its biggest boost from the cruelest day in recent American history. The day is frozen in time, but the explosions of airplanes into those buildings turned new heat on a media glacier, and the ice is still melting. 22 Chapter 2 Chapter 2 The Read-Write Web Technology that Makes We the Media Possible I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Soft- ware, had called to say there was something I had to see. He showed me a web page. I don't remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page"--and, for me, nothing was ever the same again. I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, "Save this page" and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest weblog, or blog, applications. Winer's company was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site. Writing on the Net wasn't entirely new, of course. People had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists, forums, and newsgroups. Wikis--sites on which anyone could edit any page--also predated weblogs, but they hadn't gained 23 w e the media much traction outside a small user community, in part because of the techie orientation to the software. What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple. Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press. Just about anyone could make the news. About a year and a half later, on November 8, 2000, I was sitting at my desk at the University of Hong Kong where I teach part-time each fall. It was Wednesday morning in Hong Kong, Tuesday evening in the United States, and I was immersed in the U.S. elections muddle that left Americans unsure for weeks who their next president would be. The U.S. television networks' news programming was unavailable in the university's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and local media weren't spending as much time on the story as I, an American abroad, might have liked. So I made do with the tools I had--and I realized something that seems obvious only in retrospect. I found a National Public Radio streaming-audio feed and listened to it. Meanwhile, I was visiting various web sites such as CNN and key newspapers such as the The New York Times for national perspective and my own San Jose Mercury News for California and hometown coverage. I watched as the map of blue states and red states changed, and drilled in on articles about individual state races. I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a news- paper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I'd rolled my own news. It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest component was my own tinkering to create my own news 24 t h e read-write web "product"--a compilation of the best material I could find. It was a pale imitation of what we'll be able to do as the tools become more sophisticated, but it worked. My main focus in this book is on what happens when people at the edges participate in the news-gathering and dis- semination processes. Of course, I have to remind myself that most people will remain--and I dislike this word--consumers of news. Yet even if that's all they do, they can do it better than at any time in history because technology gives them more choices. (This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans, believing they weren't getting a fair perspective from the U.S. media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War and run-up to it.)35 The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one. To understand the evolution of tomorrow's news, we need to understand the technologies that are making it possible. The tools of tomorrow's participatory journalism are evolving quickly--so quickly that by the time this book is in print, new ones will have arrived. This book's accompanying web site (http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) will catalogue new tools as they become available. In this chapter, we'll look more generically at the fundamental technologies. For people who simply want to be better informed, the Internet itself is the key. We have access to a broader variety of current information than ever before, and we can use it with increasing sophistication. For those who want to join the process, the Web is where we merely start. The tools of grassroots journalism run the gamut from the simplest email list, in which everyone on the list receives copies of all messages; to weblogs, journals written in reverse chrono- logical order; to sophisticated content-management systems used for publishing content to the Web; and to syndication tools that 25 w e the media allow anyone to subscribe to anyone else's content. The tools also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). What they have in common is a reliance on the contributions of individuals to a larger whole, rising from the bottom up. It boils down to this. In the past 150 years we've essentially had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books, newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph, and telephone). The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and few-to-few communications. This has vast implications for the former audience and for the producers of news because the dif- ferences between the two are becoming harder to distinguish. That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways the designers didn't anticipate. It's always been this way in media; every new medium has surprised its inventors in one way or another. At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow's news are fueling something emergent--a conversation in which the grass- roots are absolutely essential. Steven Johnson, author of Emergence36--a book about how rich, complex systems such as ant colonies come to exist--explained it this way in a 2002 O'Reilly Network interview:37 Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts . . . And yet somehow out of all this interac- tion some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usu- ally without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up. In no sphere is the whole more intelligent than the sum of its parts than in digital networks, where the basic units are zeros and ones--and where, as David Isenberg explained in his pathbreaking 1997 paper, "Rise of the Stupid Network,"38 the value soars when you move the intelligence to the edges and away from the center. The Internet, in particular, is becoming 26 t h e read-write web the environment in which the new tools function, an ecosystem that is gaining strength from diversity. The Web, as it grew up in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists of all kinds used to great effect, and still do. But the larger toolkit is part of an expanding, thriving ecosystem. Let's look inside that toolkit. m a i l l i s t s an d f o r u m s Before weblogs we had mail lists, and they have not become less important. As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mail list is a news source of enormous value to his readers. It is far from alone. Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in the rise of SARS. I wrote several columns about it in early 2003. Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry Niman, who had created several mail lists. One called SARS Sci- ence, he said, "targets medical and scientific information on the epidemic. Members include molecular biologists and scientists from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses." Many of the reporters covering the outbreak also subscribed to this list. A second mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease. I joined both. This sequence of writing about something and then hearing from an expert in the field has been a common one for Net- savvy journalists lately. But in a sense, journalists were late finding out what nonjournalists had been doing for years. At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering just about every topic one can imagine. Mail lists differ from blogs and standard web sites in at least three respects. First, they serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community 27 w e the media can make the list private. Second, they tend to be narrowly tar- geted, such as the SARS list. Third, they are "pushed" to sub- scribers' email inboxes. Some are moderated; most are not. The key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a com- bination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly inter- ested lay people. This can be a potent combination. In 2000, Yahoo! bought eGroups, a primary vendor of mail lists, renamed it Yahoo! Groups,39 and now hosts thousands of lists. It's trivially simple to create a mail list. Most mail lists have a small readership, such as the "Blog- rollers" group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each other about new postings they think might be especially note- worthy for their peers. Some mail lists have enormous reader- ships, such as Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list. Unlike mail lists, online forums, such as Usenet news- groups, are open to all comers. Individual forums are hosted by companies, user groups, activists, and just about any kind of interest group one can name. Some are moderated, and many are valuable for spotting trends and getting answers to specific questions. From a journalism perspective, mail lists and forums can amplify the news. They can be an early warning. They can simply be excellent background data. But their value should never be underestimated. weblogs Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and all. Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in the communications chain. To date, they're the closest we've come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web. They were the first tool that made it easy--or at least easier--to publish on the Web. 28 t h e read-write web So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it's an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chro- nological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the top of the page. As Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs, the blogging software company acquired by Google in February 2003, has noted, weblogs are "post-centric"--the posting is the key unit--rather than "page-centric," as with more traditional web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original post, thereby allowing audience discussions. Blogs run the gamut of topics and styles. One blog may be a running commentary on current events in a specific arena. Another may be a series of personal musings, or political reporting and commentary, such as Joshua Micah Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.com. A blog may be pointers to other people's work or products, such as Gizmodo, a site devoted to the latest and greatest gadgets,40 or a constantly updated "what's new" by a domain expert, such as Glenn Fleishman's excellent Wi-Fi Networking News and commentary page.41 While some blogging software permits readers to post their own comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the comment feature. At the other extreme, the Slashdot weblog, featuring news about technology and tech policy, is essentially written by its audience. What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is voice--they are clearly written by human beings with genuine human passion. Blogs are, as New York University's Jay Rosen puts it, an "extremely democratic form of journalism." On his PressThink blog,42 a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why. Here are the first three: 1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today's journalism comes out of the market economy. 29 w e the media 2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it--as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of ama- teurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it. 3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a soft- ware program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to "work" have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.) The nature of journalistic authority is shifting, he told me. In a "bottom-up, chaotic system like weblog world, certain sites are important without anyone designating that," Rosen said. Moreover, when the people formerly called the audience are now participants, "that's a different kind of relationship." Businesses have joined the conversation because blogs fill a gap. A few years into the commercial Internet, companies discovered the value of email for marketing and customer support, not to mention internal communication. Then came the plague of spam, which threatens email as a tool for external contacts. Most corporate web sites, meanwhile, are like most annual reports: static, stiff, and turgid, with the most revealing informa- tion hidden in footnotes--sometimes to disguise the truth, not tell it--and led by a "Letter from the Chief Executive" (or vacu- ous mission statement) that appears to have been written by a committee of lawyers and marketing people. To the extent that even a business blog can bring informa- tion to the audience--internal or external--with more style than we tend to see on business web sites, enterprises will benefit. But what brings people back to personal weblogs is their individual- ized perspective. 30 t h e read-write web Personal blogs also tend to be part of running conversa- tions. One blogger will point to another's posting, perhaps to agree but often to disagree or note another angle not found in the original piece. Then the first blogger will respond, and other bloggers may join the fray. As tools are developed to help people follow those discussion threads across different sites, the cross-fertilized conversations will spread both in numbers and complexity even more quickly than they do today. To date, blogs have been a medium mainly for individuals, though group blogs are proving to be a smart medium in some circumstances. The most popular individual bloggers draw tens of thousands of visitors daily. It's safe to say that several mil- lion people have at least tried blogging. How many do it regu- larly is unclear, but the best bet is several hundred thousand. The addition of audio, video, animation, and other multi- media to weblogs has been an obvious move. But it's taken some time for these mediums to become part of the blogging toolkit. Bandwidth (or lack thereof) is the main reason. But as networks improve, we can take for granted that what technolo- gists call "rich media" formats will infiltrate. (I've added audio and video to my own blog, with limited success.) Blogging software has evolved a great deal from the first products of Dave Winer, Evan Williams, and other pioneers to the genre. The most popular, as of this writing, are Movable Type from SixApart;43 Radio UserLand,44 Live Journal,45 and Blogger,46 but a number of competitors such as 20six47 have emerged. wiki Can absolute editorial freedom result in anything but chaos? Yes, when it's in a Wiki. Ward Cunningham, who invented Wikis, defines them in many ways, calling them composition systems, discussion 31 w e the media mediums, repositories, mail systems, and chat rooms. "It's a tool for collaboration," he writes. "In fact we don't really know what it is, but it's a fun way of communicating."48 "WhatIs.com" (an online information technology dictio- nary) defines them this way: "A wiki (sometimes spelled "Wiki") is a server program that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a Web site. With a wiki, any user can edit the site content, including other users' contributions, using a regular Web browser." The crucial element is that any user can edit any page. The software keeps track of every change. Anyone can follow the changes in detail. As Cunningham so aptly puts it, all Wikis are works in progress. The Wikipedia, a massive encyclopedia, is the biggest public Wiki, but far from the only one. There are Wikis covering travel, food, and a variety of other topics. You can find a Wiki category page on Cunningham's site.49 One of the best exam- ples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful is the WikiTravel site,50 which brings together a variety of view- points from around the world. Wikis are going private, too. They're increasingly used behind corporate firewalls as planning and collaboration tools. And entrepreneurs are even starting to form companies around the technology, extending it for wider uses. Wikis are making inroads on campuses as well. My colec- turer at the University of Hong Kong set up a Wiki for our stu- dents to use as a planning platform for the 2003 class project. The project looked at a controversial proposal to fill in more of the harbor for development. Students posted their outlines and story proposals on the Wiki and used the site to flesh out the ideas. Instructors could watch over their shoulders without interfering except to offer guidance. The Wiki was perfect for this task. Their use in journalism, at least the traditional kind, is almost nonexistent. But as Wikis become easier to use, they will 32 t h e read-write web become a particularly well-suited tool to compile information from disparate sources, collected by people in different physical locations. sms If weblogs are becoming the opinion pages and, sometimes, even the newspages of the Net, short message services (SMS) are becoming the headlines. For bulletins, there's nothing better. Think of SMS as instant messaging without being tethered to a PC.51 SMS isn't a product per se. It's a service offered by network providers that allows customers to send text messages over their cell phones. About the only things that differ from carrier to carrier are price and the kind of device a customer will use. SMS has been a staple of the information diet just about everywhere where mobile phones have penetrated markets, except in the United States. That is surely changing. Forward- looking newspapers in the U.S., along with other kinds of infor- mation providers, including companies that have time-sensitive information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assort- ment of SMS services. The San Diego Union-Tribune's SignOn- SanDiego.com, for example, offers SMS alerts on local news. And I've signed up with United Airlines and American Airlines, the carriers I use most frequently, to be notified if flights are delayed. Journalists can use SMS in any number of ways; again, this is much more common outside the U.S. The first inkling among journalists of China's SARS epidemic came in an SMS from sources inside the medical profession there. Was this signifi- cantly different than simple phone calls in its fundamental nature? Not really. But in a place where being overheard can lead to big trouble, it's much safer--as long as one's messages aren't being intercepted--to simply send a quick SMS. 33 w e the media Over time, perhaps the most important value of SMS will be of the kind described by Howard Rheingold in his prescient book Smart Mobs:52 a self-organizing information system in which individuals and small groups tell each other important news. Rheingold relates, among other examples, how citizens in the Philippines used SMS to organize and overthrow a corrupt government.53 On a more prosaic level, young people in coun- tries with advanced wireless communications have used SMS for social organization. We're just at the beginning of this tech- nology's development. As networks and handsets improve, SMS will give way to video messaging, with yet to be understood implications. Professional news people will need to be plugged into tomorrow's smart mobs, just as they must be plugged into today's informal organizations. This is already a natural state of affairs in much of Europe and Asia, which lead the U.S. in the develop- ment of wireless messaging; certainly it was for the Chinese jour- nalist who received news of SARS via SMS. Technology moves so quickly that before long it will also seem natural to the men and women who enter professional journalism in America. mobile-connected cameras Pictures are part of journalism, and most organizations employ professional photographers. As cameras become just one more thing we all carry everyday, everyone's becoming a photogra- pher. We haven't begun to think through the societal implica- tions of this fact, but the implications for journalism are serious. Digital cameras are a staple of amateur photographers, and well-financed professional journalists use high-end digital cam- eras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos quickly. Video is also going digital at a rapid pace. The size of 34 t h e read-write web high-quality digital cameras, still and video, is decreasing along with the cost. Connecting them to personal computers for image and video editing is simpler than ever, too. As broadband Internet access becomes more common, quick publishing becomes simple. Now combine cameras with true mobility, and the ability to instantly send an image to someone else or to the Web. This is the world camera-equipped mobile phones are creating. The images from early models were low resolution and lacked pro- fessional quality, but even a bad picture can be newsworthy, and the quality of phone cameras is getting better at a rapid pace. Once again, it's vital to remember technology's rapid pace of innovation and improvement to understand just how soon it will be when most phones aren't just equipped with still cam- eras, but video cameras. Tomorrow's mobile phones will be able to send information and images to individuals and groups, and publish to web pages in close to real time. Keep in mind that public photos and videos are not new. The beating of Rodney King captured on videotape is a prece- dent for what's coming. Citizens have been capturing videos of tornados and other natural disasters for years as well, and cable television caters to voyeurs with a variety of shows featuring citizen-captured police chases, embarrassing moments, and the like. News organizations have increasingly resorted to using hidden cameras--an ugly trend, in my view, because only in the most extreme circumstances, such as when someone's life is in danger, should reporters even consider such subterfuges. We are only beginning to understand the consequences of this technological development. There will be gross invasions of privacy. The barring of mobile phones with cameras from health-club locker rooms is a testament to the improper ways people have already used these devices.54 But faster networks and nearly ubiquitous cameras in the hands of average people means that big events--the ones that have some element that 35 w e the media can be captured on camera--will be seen, and captured, by sev- eral or many people. Keeping secrets, moreover, will be more difficult for businesses and governments. We'll look at these possibilities in the next chapter. i n t e r n e t "br o a d c a s t i n g " At one time, Internet Broadcasting was seen as the next big thing, with individuals and groups spawning Internet radio and news stations with the same ease they create weblogs and Wikis. But the entertainment industry has all but killed the possibilities of Internet radio, at least the kind with music, by persuading copyright regulators in the U.S. to impose unaffordable royal- ties on Net radio. News radio via the Net is another matter entirely, and there's a big opportunity for people to create their own shows featuring interviews, audio documentaries, and other formats in which royalty-free content is the goal. Christopher Lydon, a longtime professional journalist who has taken to blogging in a big way, posted a series of superb interviews on his "The Blog- ging of the President 2004"55 site.56 IT Conversations, a Net- only program, has been posting interviews in various audio for- mats along with transcripts.57 Web-based talk radio is another possibility, and it doesn't need to be expensive. Two staff members on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign created an Internet talk-radio pro- gram by patching together some low-cost equipment. They showed that anyone can do this, inexpensively and fairly easily. Look for others to put all the pieces together in a coherent package that anyone can use. Internet video is a different matter. While the cost of pro- ducing video news programming is dropping all the time, deliv- ering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs 36 t h e read-write web can't afford. This is where peer-to-peer networking may come into play. peer-to-peer Remember Napster, the music file-sharing web site? It started a revolution with its file-sharing model, also known as peer-to- peer (P2P). If one person had a particular song on his com- puter, his Napster software would (if he allowed it to) tell a cen- tral computer at Napster that the song was available. Then other people who wanted the same song would check the Nap- ster database, find who had the music, and log directly onto the computer of the person who was offering the song. This system, while having some legitimate (and therefore theoretically legal) uses, was also a haven for copyright infringe- ment. The music industry sued, ultimately killing the company. What the industry could not stop, however, was the idea, and other technologists filled the gap with increasingly sophisticated file-sharing systems, some of which will be difficult to stop because they'll have no central points of control. There are a number of reasons why P2P is important for tomorrow's journalism. One of the most prosaic is cost, because P2P solves a serious problem: the more successful your web site becomes, the more it costs you to keep it going. Internet service providers charge web site publishers in several ways, but one way is based on how much traffic your site receives and the bandwidth required to serve the text, images, audio, and video to viewers. Even a modestly successful video can create a huge bill for the site owner. This is a unique situation in media his- tory because in the past, the more successful you were, the lower your marginal costs. P2P solves this by spreading popular material around the network. With technologies such as BitTorrent, a free software 37 w e the media product, every downloader's computer is also a content server.58 So the more popular you are, the less it costs, not the other way around. P2P is also valuable in a political sense. New P2P systems under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity that we've seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censor- ship more difficult. As we'll discuss in Chapter 11, the entertainment media barons of today utterly loathe P2P, at least the kind they can't control, largely because it can be a platform for copyright infringement. I also believe they fear it because of its assistance in democratizing media. Either way, they want to put a stop to it. They must not be permitted to succeed, however, because in the name of preventing copyright infringement, they are taking away other rights--including our right to make what's known as "fair use" for quoting and personal backups--and they could ultimately dampen or even wreck the possibility of grassroots journalism talking hold. t h e rs s re v o l u t i o n For people who want to "roll their own" news reports, nothing may be more important for them to understand than a little known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part, for its growing success. Early in the development of blogging software, programmers baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndica- tion capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the content they care about. It's spawning a content revolution that is only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could 38 t h e read-write web well become the next mainstream method of distributing, col- lecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation--and RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation. Imagine your own "Presidential Briefing"--with only the topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting. So don't think of RSS as just another technology abbrevia- tion. "Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow's informa- tion--or at least some of it," said Chris Pirillo, founder of LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters.59 "RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should. Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to you on your terms." RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every weblog software product. Create a blog, and you're creating RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its value, too, and they're creating RSS "feeds," as the files are called, of their own material. If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I can't force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so impor- tant: the user is in control. The web site accompanying this book has links to a variety of RSS-related software and how to use it. But let me offer an example to demonstrate how simple it is to get it running. In my own case, on a Macintosh computer, I downloaded and installed NetNewsWire,60 a type of program known as a news- reader or aggregator. NetNewsWire came with a large collec- tion of RSS feeds to which I could subscribe with a couple of mouse clicks. For several that weren't included with the software, subscribing was trickier. I had to find each site's RSS feed web address, copy it, and paste it into NetNewsWire's sub- scription chooser. 39 w e the media Like other newsreaders, NetNewsWire has three "panes," much like most email programs. In the lefthand pane is a list of sites I follow. I click on one of those site names, and the pane at the top right of the screen shows the headlines from that site. I click on a headline, and in the bottom-right pane I see a sum- mary of the article or the entire piece, depending on what the owner of the site has decided to provide. If I want to see the original page or article, I need only double-click on the site name or headline. Because newsreaders pull together various feeds into one screenful of information, they are incredible time savers. I can pull the headlines and brief descriptions of postings from dozens of blogs and other sites into a single application on my Mac. I don't need to go surfing all over the Web to keep an eye on what all the people I'm interested in are writing. It comes to me. The formatting and structure of an RSS feed tends to be bare bones, making RSS a great way to make material available on non-PC platforms such as smart phones and handheld orga- nizers, as well as providing a way for web sites to syndicate con- tent from one another. For example, I have an RSS reader on my Treo 600, a combination phone and personal organizer. It scoops up a bare minimum of material from the RSS feeds--just the headlines and summaries--and provides a great service. The extensibility of RSS creates some drawbacks. Many weblogs expose only headlines and summaries to newsreaders, requiring the user to click through to the source (the original web site) to read the full text. The irony here is that the news- reader actually undoes the idiosyncratic feel of many weblogs by stripping them of visual elements such as layout or logos, as well as eliminating the context produced by blogrolls (blog authors' links to other weblogs) or the author's biographical informa- tion (and any advertising). The same drawback, or benefit, exists with text versions of email newsletters. Newsreaders also assign equal weight to everything they display. So the headlines and text from Joe's Weblog receive roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, The 40 t h e read-write web New York Times. For some users, this will be entirely appro- priate. But others will demand--and vendors will surely pro- vide--more nuanced newsreading tools, with the ability to high- light by topic, by writer, by metrics such as how many other people subscribe to a particular blog (its popularity), or by other parameters. The world is waiting for such creative approaches, and RSS and related tools will make them possible. Nick Brad- bury, who wrote the popular HomeSite HTML editor and site- design tool, has taken the first steps in that direction with Feed- Demon,61 a Windows RSS reader that creates a newspaper-like view of RSS content; for better or worse, it controls display details and takes layout flexibility away from the human reader. As exciting as RSS has become in the personal weblog con- text, its possibilities are much wider. Information from all kinds of sources can and should be syndicated this way. The New York Times makes some of its content available via RSS. Microsoft, while slow to embrace weblogs, latched onto RSS recently in a way that was useful and honored the spirit of the community. The company is making available feeds of its Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) articles, so a pro- grammer can subscribe to MSDN rather than hunting through the Microsoft site. Similarly, Cisco Systems has begun making some material available via RSS. Several sites provide lists and descriptions of what's available, including NewsIsFree62 and Syndic8.63 making sense of it all If tomorrow's journalism is an infinitely complex conversation, keeping track of it will require an assortment of new tools going well beyond RSS that will allow us to search for and organize what we discover. A few have already arrived in what can only be called "Version 0.5"--what techies call beta form: promising and useful to a degree, but not quite ready for the average user. 41 w e the media One that shows the way is Feedster,64 a web-based applica- tion that indexes RSS files. I've found it useful for keeping track of what some bloggers are saying about my own work. Feedster has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls "Feedpa- pers," which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based news and blog commentary. Another is Technorati,65 which mines information about the weblog world. It was designed by San Francisco technologist Dave Sifry to fill a personal need. "I had been running my own blog for about a year, and referrer logs [information about site visitors and the pages they viewed on the site] weren't enough," he said. "I wanted to know what people were talking about, and what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared about." So he wrote some code to crawl the blogs and find out. The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have become a vital part of a larger ecosystem. But like mail lists, blogs, Wikis, SMS, and the other tools of our journalistic future, they are only tools. They must not be confused with journalism itself. Certain values must remain: fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness. At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for tomorrow's news and information. They may enable "con- sumers" of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversa- tions and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even truth, if they are willing to seek out sources from a variety of viewpoints. We'll look at this architectural potential in more detail in Chapter 8. More intriguingly, we have to ponder a world where many kinds of devices connect relatively seamlessly, and where social and business networks can be formed in an ad hoc way. The spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will occur--much more so than today--without any help from mass 42 t h e read-write web media as we know it. The people who'll understand this best are probably just being born. In the meantime, even the beginnings of this shift are forcing all of us to adjust our assumptions and behavior. The people who make news, as we'll see next, are at the forefront of this adjustment. 43 Chapter 3 Chapter 3 The Gates Come Down A peculiar silence reigned in most major newspapers and TV networks the first few days after Trent Lott, celebrating fellow Republican Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday in late 2002, seemed to wax nostalgic for a racist past. Lott, then majority leader of the U.S. Senate, recalled Thurmond's presi- dential campaign in 1948, a race in which he called for the pres- ervation of segregation. The nation would be better off if Thur- mond had won, Lott said. It was an outrageous assertion, but barely noticed at the outset. ABC News mentioned it. The Washington Post had a story but buried it. And that was about all we heard from the major media. But the silence didn't last, because Lott got a taste of tomorrow's media: the swarm of webloggers, emailers, and other online journalists who are changing some long-established rules. The flow of outrage and information was complex.66 But the bottom line was that webloggers and other online commen- tators, far more than mainstream journalists, kept the story of Lott's remarks alive despite the major media's early disinterest. Liberal bloggers, such as Joshua Marshall on Talking Points Memo,67 were early to sound off, but several conservatives also chimed in. In some cases, bloggers were almost as outraged by Big Media's inattention as by the senator's statements and ini- tially weasely expression of regret for his remarks. A few days later, the story that didn't go away was run- ning, full-bore, in the national media. Even President Bush was 44 t h e gates come down obliged to denounce Lott, a key congressional ally. In the end, no one was surprised when Lott, under enormous pressure, resigned as majority leader. While bloggers could not have brought down Lott on their own had Big Media not taken up the story, the Lott debacle was, by all accounts, a watershed. Weblogs claimed "their first scalp," said card-carrying establishment conservative John Pod- horetz in his New York Post column. Call them newsmakers. Call them sources. Call them the sub- jects--and sometimes, in their view, the unwilling victims--of journalism. But however we describe them, we all must recog- nize that the rules for newsmakers, not just journalists, have changed, thanks to everyone's ability to make the news. Most of today's politicians and business people, and virtu- ally all powerful institutions, accumulated their status and authority in a different era. They see the news media's tradi- tional hierarchies reflecting their own centralized, top-down model, with distinct control points. In this model, public rela- tions and marketing departments deal with the press and the public. Executives deal with reporters when necessary. News is controlled from within the organization and managed when out- side forces intervene. It's an industrial age model: manufacturing news. It still works, to some degree, but it's less and less effective. If markets are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors have noted, then journalism--the information people need to manage their lives--will increasingly be part of those conversations. Newsmakers need to understand that the swirling eddies of news are not tiny pools on the shoreline. Information is an ocean, and newsmakers can no longer control the tide as easily as they once did. So they must face at least three new rules of public life. 45 w e the media First, outsiders of all kinds can probe more deeply into newsmakers' businesses and affairs. They can disseminate what they learn more widely and more quickly. And it's never been easier to organize like-minded people to support, or denounce, a person or cause. The communications-enabled grassroots is a formidable truth squad. Second, insiders are part of the conversation. Information no longer leaks. It gushes, through firewalls and other barriers, via instant messages, emails, and phone calls. Third, what gushes forth can take on a life of its own, even if it's not true. spreading the word As noted earlier, modern communications have become his- tory's greatest soapbox, gossip factory, and, in a very real sense, spreader of genuine news. At one time, an individual with an issue had few options. He could stand on the corner and rant, or post a sign, or write a newsletter, or pen a letter to the editor. Today, if his argument is sufficiently moving and/or backed up with facts, the tools at his disposal can make it a global phe- nomenon. The autonomous linking machine--consisting of people who care enough to spread the word, plus new tools such as RSS, which widely disseminate what they write-- launches into action. And how the word does spread. Even before the Web rose to prominence, the online world was making companies pay attention. In 1994, Usenet, the system of Internet discussion groups, helped teach a lesson to Intel, which makes most of the processors that are the central brains of personal computers. News of the "Pentium bug," a math-calculation flaw in a version of the Pentium processor, first spread via Usenet before it was picked up in the popular press. At great expense financially and to its reputation, Intel had to replace many of the flawed chips. "Our immediate lesson 46 t h e gates come down was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that medium [the Internet] and that that medium was going to get more and more important at setting opinions," an Intel execu- tive told the CNET news service in 1999.68 A decade after the Intel debacle came another relatively trivial, but still revealing, example. In early 2004, with great fanfare, including a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi announced a "free songs" promotion. Buyers of Pepsi could look at the underside of the bottle cap and, about one out of three times, win a free song download from the Apple iTunes music web site. But someone noticed a flaw in the bottle design. He or she figured out how to tilt the unopened bottle just so and discover whether the bottle contained the code for the song. Once upon a time that information would have remained within a small com- munity of people, but in the Internet age, that information was almost instantly available to anyone with an Internet connec- tion in the form of a document titled "How to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway."69 And there was nothing Pepsi could do about it. If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough. Consider a far more profound example, a case with true life-or-death implications: the SARS epidemic that began in the Chinese province of Guangdong in November 2002. The repres- sive government, accustomed to controlling the news, at first didn't allow the medical community to tell anyone what was happening. But in early February 2003, the news began to leak out anyway, not through newspapers or television or official announcements, but through SMS, or short messaging through mobile phones, a modern form of word-of-mouth. And the word was grim: people were sick and in some cases dying from a particularly virulent form of pneumonia. That led to some news coverage, probably much earlier than might have hap- pened had the people not literally taken news delivery into their own hands.70 Once SARS became a household word and panic began to set in, SMS became a medium of choice for the government, too. 47 w e the media Hong Kong authorities used it to attempt, not very successfully, to dampen unfounded rumors that were spreading on the Internet.71 Now add "moblogging" and its kin to the equation--the use of camera-equipped mobile devices by just about everyone, in a world where we must assume that people are constantly taking pictures in public places. Newsmakers, especially Hollywood stars and other celebri- ties, already loathe the "paparazzi" photographers who follow them around and snap pictures in unguarded moments. What will happen when 10 average citizens aim their phones at the stars and zap the images they take to their friends or to web sites? Still images are only the beginning; video cameras will become part of our phones soon enough. The paparazzi have better cameras and are better picture-takers, but the swarms of amateur paparazzi will satisfy most of the public's insatiable hunger for news about their favorite celebrities. And for the people who live in the public eye, that eye will never blink when they're outside of their homes. That, of course, is a relatively trivial example of what's coming. Camera phones and other carry-everywhere photo- graphic and video devices may give people powerful tools to prevent crime; as CNN reported in 2003, a 15-year-old boy snapped a camera-phone picture of a would-be abductor, helping the police find the man.72 These devices will also greatly accelerate the way we document history. As of early May 2004, it was still unclear who took the dig- ital photographs of Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, but their escape into the public sphere was already seen as a negative pivot point not just in the conflict but in the world's view of America. Even if the military and the Bush administration had wanted to keep the near-torture covered up, once the photos had been taken and started to make their way around, their wider distribution was almost inevitable. We are a society of voyeurs and exhibitionists. We can argue whether this is benign or repugnant, but when secrets 48 t h e gates come down become far more difficult to keep, something fundamental will have changed. Imagine Rodney King and Abu Ghraib times a million. Police everywhere must already wonder if they are being taped. Soon they will have to assume they're being caught on digital video. This has obvious benefits, such as curbing police misconduct. But everyone who works, or moves around, in a public place should consider whether they like the idea of all their movements being recorded by nosy neighbors. We may not be able to choose between the benefits of ubiquitous cam- eras and their drawbacks. It's worth reflecting how events of the past would have looked had tomorrow's technology been available at the time. Let's apply that to the horrific events of September 11, 2001. Our memories of that awful day stem largely from television: videos of airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the fireballs that erupted, people falling and jumping from the towers, the crumbling to earth of the structures. Individuals with video cameras captured parts of this story, and their work ended up on network TV as well. The big networks stopped showing most graphic videos fairly quickly. But those pictures are still on the Net for anyone who wants to see them. We also learned, second-hand, that people in the airplanes and Trade Center towers phoned loved ones and colleagues that awful day. What would we remember if the people on the air- planes and in those buildings all had camera-phones? What if they'd been sending images and audio from the epicenter of the terrorists' airborne arsenal, and from inside the towers that became coffins for so many? I don't mean to be ghoulish, but I do suggest that our memories would be considerably different had images and sounds of that kind ricocheted around the globe. truth squad In September 2002, Microsoft posted a semi-bogus web page advertisement featuring a winsome young woman, identified as 49 w e the media a freelance writer, who'd supposedly switched from a Mac to a PC. The page was entitled "Mac to PC: Mission Accomplished, Convert Thrilled," and was a response to Apple's "Switch" (from PCs to Macs) campaign. A commenter on the Slashdot site73 discovered and reported that the picture of this supposed freelancer was from a Getty Images archive.74 The Associated Press's Ted Bridis then scoped out the rest of the story, which was, of course, not the one Microsoft had been floating. A Microsoft PR man, weaving around some direct questions from me, said: "It was a mistake that it was posted, and Microsoft took it down as soon as it came to the attention of the Win- dows XP marketing team. Microsoft regrets any confusion it may have caused." I suggested at the time that people might be making too much of the half-fake nature of the ad. After all, the people who pitch products in TV and print advertisements are usually actors. But when Apple's PC-to-Mac converts were apparently all real, including their pictures, Microsoft's phoniness was all the more obnoxious. What made the incident stand out was the way the untruth unraveled. Slashdot's readers, members of a powerful online com- munity, got on the case. They were the first to show that some- thing wasn't kosher with the Microsoft page. And they deserved much of the credit for the story coming out in the first place. The accumulation of data is a powerful research tool for anyone who wants to drill deeper into an issue. The earnest pamphleteer can now do more than challenge something. He can build an online encyclopedia of detailed information on any topic and keep expanding it--a vibrant archive and organizing tool that others use and augment. Combined, this becomes an impossible-to-ignore force. And it's been happening for some time. In the mid-1990s, McDonald's Corp. faced some angry online citizens and never quite figured out what to do about them. The fast-food behe- moth took two activists to court in London, arguing that the company had been libeled by their pamphlets. The activists 50 t h e gates come down counter-sued, and then created the path-breaking "McSpot- light" web site75 to support their side in what became the longest-running such court case in British history--a trial that became a referendum on the McDonald's empire and its some- times unseemly actions around the world. One of the most useful aspects of McSpotlight was its bril- liant deconstruction of McDonald's marketing materials. Using web frames, an online display technique, the site showed McDonald's public-relations message on one side of the screen. The McSpotlight rebuttals appeared on the other side. McDonald's officially won the trial, or at least a portion, in part because British libel laws are tilted toward plaintiffs. The company was trying to extract money from a stone, however, so after its enormous legal bills, it had lost a serious financial battle. And, crucially, the company took a beating in the court of public opinion. The McSpotlight court case and web site revealed a multinational giant that, at the very least, had an occasional deficit in ethics. More people knew about that record after the trial than before. McSpotlight didn't fold with the end of the trial. It expanded its mission even as the trial was proceeding to include a wider look not just at McDonald's, but multinational corpo- rate behavior. The tobacco companies, another widely criticized multina- tional industry, also felt the weight of web-based documentation in the mid-1990s when the University of California, San Fran- cisco created the Tobacco Control Archives, an assortment of documents that antismoking forces have found valuable in their war against the industry.76 Stanton Glantz, a UC San Francisco professor who's been studying the tobacco industry and its con- tributions to political candidates, said the university's librarians solved several problems by posting the material on the Web, thus getting the material to people who wanted it while saving time for university personnel. Only later did the power of the new medium become clear, he said, when antismoking forces else- where started using the material in their own campaigns. 51 w e the media The Web is "a very important development," he told me in 1996, not long after he'd created the archive. "It allows people like me--kind of detail nerds--to make the resources available, fairly inexpensively and in however much depth we want." And it's allowed more and more activists to shine a light on material that powerful institutions would prefer to hide. Gov- ernment officials are as secretive as companies, perhaps more so. Which is why we should thank people such as Russ Kirk for his Memory Hole site,77 a growing archive of important material. The site's home page declares its mission is "rescuing knowl- edge, freeing information." It achieves its goal brilliantly. In a journalistic coup, Kirk put Big Media to shame in April 2004 by using the Freedom of Information Act to get the military's photos of America's Iraq war dead--the moving and dignified pictures of flag-draped caskets that other media hadn't thought to request. The repositories continue to expand, and they're moving an information imbalance closer to equilibrium for everyday citi- zens, not just for activists and scholars. In his 1914 book Drift and Mastery,78 Walter Lippmann warned that civilization was becoming so complex that "the purchaser can't pit himself against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair one." The knowledge equation has unquestionably shifted back towards the purchaser, and the power is following. Users of appliances and devices, whose inner workings were once trade secrets and inaccessible to con- sumers, have been tapping that power. A couple of years ago, I wanted to upgrade the hard disk on a video recorder I use at home. It was a DishPlayer, attached to my Dish Network satellite system. The original drive held 17 gigabytes, storing roughly 12 hours of video, and a new 40 gigabytes drive was on sale at the local electronics store for about $120. Unsurprisingly, Dish Networks wasn't especially interested in telling me how to do it. And there were no tradi- tional sources either, such as printed hobbyist magazines devoted to upgrading DishPlayer recorders, or newsletters that 52 t h e gates come down explained how to fire up the various diagnostic modes using the remote. The Web--and discussion groups in particular--was my go-to source. I found solid instructions online,79 gave them a try, and, voila, I had a 30-hour storage system. (I also found instructions on other bulletin boards where users had posted warnings to avoid instructions that hadn't worked for some users--advice I took; the instructions I ultimately followed came with a warning that the upgrade might fail if I wasn't careful, but others posting to the board agreed the fix would work if done properly.) What I did was minor-league tinkering compared with what others are doing every day. The hacking phenomenon--and I use the word "hacking" in its most benevolent sense--has expanded into the world of gadgets and everyday tools. People who want to improve what they've bought are studying how things work, whether the products are traditional electronics or things with a software component, and these customers are making adjustments--hacks, as they're known--that either make the products better or change their nature entirely. And they're doing it by informing each other, in an open source man- ner that brings the community's best minds to bear on common problems. In early May 2003, Apple Computer released a new series of iPod handheld music players. It took no time for the iPod mavens to run tests and discover functions that Apple hadn't mentioned in its product literature. "Well," a report began on the iPoding site,80 "we couldn't wait so we went to the local Best Buy and picked up a new Gen 2 15 GB. It's going to be taken apart soon, but we first ran Diagnostic Mode on it. It has a recording feature! There is also a test for LINEIN that does recording too." As a journalist who frequently uses a digital recorder for interviews, this was interesting news for me. But the point was that it was news, period, and it was broken by the people who 53 w e the media used the device most ardently, not by the company that made it. Apple may have thought it was keeping future plans to itself (though that's debatable), but it couldn't keep smart people from figuring things out for themselves or from broadcasting what they discovered. The process has something in common with the car-defect reports that eventually make their way back to manufacturers. In the old days, we'd learn of those defects if we encountered one, if the manufacturer told us, if the defect was sufficiently major to warrant news coverage, or if the government ordered a recall. Now we learn about them from user groups and from the Internet. One of the more notable examples of learning about unau- thorized things over the Internet has been the tinkering of auto- mobile electronic systems, a trend automakers universally dislike. Earlier auto enthusiasts tinkered with carburetors and manifolds; now they tinker with software code. "Much to the chagrin of the automobile manufacturers and in spite of tight security, com- puter hackers have been able to reverse-engineer the code for most engine controllers within just a few months of the code's appearance," wrote Warren Webb, technical editor of EDN Access, a trade magazine.81 "By adjusting the control-system parameters, hackers can defeat the California-emissions controls and increase automobile performance." And people doing the hacking tell others what they've done. A quick web search will turn up dozens of sites where people share their knowledge of various tweaks, such as how to boost horsepower.82 Now the automakers have a legitimate concern, especially if the hackers disable smog-control systems or introduce some behavior that might make the car unsafe. For the most part, however, the people doing the hacking are learning ways to make car engines and other systems more efficient and reliable. Banning such information sharing--sometimes through the use of obnoxious copyright lawsuits--is tantamount to giving man- ufacturers unprecedented control over customers. Which, of course, is something they want to have--but they are risking 54 t h e gates come down more than just customer unhappiness if they push the control too far. They are risking their businesses. Eric Von Hippel, business professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks businesses should encourage some level of hacker behavior, not shun it.83 He told me compa- nies should be doing everything they can to support and encourage the "lead users"--people like me with my Dish- Player--to find flaws in products and improve them. Just as journalists should not be threatened by a more knowledgeable audience, companies should not be threatened by smart cus- tomers who care enough to make products better. When your customers offer their expert assistance, the smart move is to say Thanks. looking deeper If customers exchanging information wasn't a big enough change, consider the new category of self-organized customer information erupting around us. In his research labs, University of Tokyo Professor Ken Sakamura has been experimenting with tiny chips that contain short-range radios, embedding them in various products and other items. In his Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory,84 he scans them and links the product identification to a database with much