Dave Winer is Part of the Problem

Dave Winer appears to think that journalism isn’t so much a job as a hobby, something that can be done by volunteers in their spare time. And as for those saps once drawing a paycheck providing the information vital to a democracy, Winer pretty much says,  “Get a real job.”

In Winer’s world, volunteers will fill the void left by the demise of the current journalism business. As evidence, he points to the success of Wikipedia. Why just look, a bunch of scrappy volunteers put together an encyclopedia that the professionals could not achieve; ergo, volunteers can do the same for news.

Wikipedia is great. So is the rise of citizen journalism. I say let a thousand such flowers bloom. But Winer’s notion that volunteer labor is an adequate replacement for what we risk losing in journalism is not just dumb, it’s detrimental.

Remind me where Wikipedia gets the vast majority of its information. Remind me of Wikipedia’s central tenet for its citations and references. Ah yes it’s coming back to me:

“Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published sources”

How does Mr. Winer think these “reliable, published sources” come about? Some sort of news parthenogenesis? Perhaps once the elves are done in the shoemaker’s shop they hustle over to the now-shuttered newsrooms to bang out a few column inches.

Published and reliable sources come from people with jobs who work hard and deserve a reward for their work. The volunteers in his example are primarily aggregators of existing information produced by working people. As far as I can tell Wikipedia produces little original content in what we’d call the news realm and what little it does produce is often suspect.

“Witnessing events,” the phrase Mr. Winer fixes on, is only a small part of good journalism. The most important journalism provides context and analysis of what is witnessed, and does so in a rigorous, systematic and neutral fashion.  That’s a job, not a hobby.

Mr. Winer further wastes our time piling on the paper publishers for their failings. Yes, newspaper executives have been complicit in the demise of newspapers. Yes Sam Zell and his ilk deserve massive wedgies or worse for their greed and incompetence. This is hardly an original observation. (Season 5 of The Wire was what, three years ago?)

But Mr. Winer then proceeds to repeat the newspaper barons’ most egregious sin: making journalists pay for the problems in journalism.

It goes like this. Newspapers lose money because they lost advertisers and readers. Executives responded by cutting costs, slashing newsrooms to the bone. The predictable result was a decline in the quality of the news. Readers noticed this, became ex-readers, and soon the papers were in a death spiral. Where was the original sin? Treating a revenue problem as a cost problem, executives attacked the sole source of true value in the entire operation: the journalists.

In his, “don’t worry, volunteers can do it” line of thinking, Mr. Winer engages in a variation of this mistake and poisons the well for anyone trying to salvage value in journalism.

Look, if we want to find ways to make journalism work we must first recognize that journalism is work—work that deserves commensurate reward.

Let’s say you’ve had it with the bumbling news executives and prefer a nonprofit model for news (an area where I’ve worked for almost 20 years). First order of business is to pitch the value of your journalism to potential donors or subscribers. But if they think like Mr. Winer, potential donors will say, ‘Gee, I read somewhere that volunteers can do that journalism stuff for us, why should I pay for it?’

Here’s one reason why, and she sits in our DPI-659 class each day. Carlotta Gall dedicated a decade of her life to covering Afghanistan and Pakistan during wartime. She regularly risked her life and even saw her photographer lose his legs to a landmine on an assignment.

Quick survey: how many of you are going to do that as a volunteer, you know, in your spare time?

Even if you would (and bless her, Carlotta’s dedication is such that she probably would) you couldn’t. Work like that (yes, work) requires resources beyond an individual’s capacity. There are approximately a gazillion such examples in journalism today, and as important and exciting as bloggers, citizen journalists and others are they will not fill that void as volunteers.

The more Mr. Winer perpetuates the false notion that journalism is not deserving of a paycheck the more he undermines those working toward a solution.

Mr. Winer, you’re not part of the solution. You’re part of the problem.

 

Wikipedia’s Battle of Blair Mountain entry: the struggle continues.

 

I’m now a budding Wikipedian.

I’ve evaluated the entry for the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The little-known 1921 conflict was part of the violent struggle to organize labor in the coal-mining region of West Virginia, where I grew up. Blair Mountain interests me because it is beginning to attract more attention from labor historians and because the mountain itself is threatened with demolition by the controversial mining practice known as mountaintop removal.

(Yes, I know we were supposed to stick to noncontroversial topics but, hey, I’m a journo. It’s just how we roll.)

Another element that attracts me is that the very first citation in the article refers us to a piece of fiction, Chuck Kinder’s Last Mountain Dancer. Now, I know Chuck and I love his book. (Interesting tangent: Chuck inspired the hard-partying character Grady Tripp played by Michael Douglas in Wonderboys.) But I also know Chuck’s work is wildly inventive fiction and not intended as a historical reference. More appropriate references are included later on in the article, but first impressions matter.

The background and the description of the 5-day march and battle are overly detailed and bog down. As noted on the discussion page, much of this background is covered in other Wikipedia entries on the coal wars. The article cites questionable casualty figures and has been flagged for review due to concerns about neutrality. A pro-union bias shows most clearly in the section on “legacy.” A historiographic approach, comparing different interpretations of this period in history would better serve the reader, as would a clear acknowledgement that casualty figures are in dispute.

The article briefly mentions that the Blair Mountain battle site is under consideration for listing on the NPS National Register of Historic Places, but the article gives us no context for this. The reason this is interesting is because the entire mountain ridge—site of the battle and repository of artifacts—might soon be blown apart and reduced to rubble in the pursuit of coal if pending mining permits are approved. The dispute over the proposed NPS listing has been widely covered by local and national press, including the Charleston Gazette, PRI’s Living On Earth, NPR, and the New York Times.

The article would also benefit from links to accounts of recent reenactments of the miners’ march, which attracted hundreds of demonstrators and had a pronounced impact on the political dispute over how surface mining should be regulated. In the first reenactment marchers were attacked by a group of surface mining supporters. Former Congressman Ken Hechler, a man then in his 80s, was kicked and pushed to the ground. This episode and another march reenactment this summer were widely covered by local and national press and could easily be referenced.

The article includes a couple of nice historical photographs but no map. This would be very helpful, as would an illustration that shows the movement of miners and coal company forces during the conflict.

In The Plex or How Steven Levy Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Borg

In just a little more than a decade, Google has gone from curiosity to household name, from outsiders poking at the system to the company that defines the system itself. The scrappy, loveable startup guys became a global behemoth with Big Brother overtones. In other words, according to Newsweek and Wired writer Steven Levy, Google has succeeded. And for an access-hungry writer like Levy, nothing succeeds like success.

Levy clearly got good access to the famously media shy men and women of Mountain View. He seems to have interviewed nearly every important player in Google’s development, and there are good doses of quotes from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (It is difficult, at times, to know what material comes from Levy’s own interviews and what was gleaned secondhand from other media sources.) The result is a detailed (sometimes excruciatingly so) insider account of how Google grew from Stanford lab to startup to the industry standard for search. We also learn a bit about how a search engine company came to make phones, provide email, maps and myriad other services and products. What we don’t learn much about is why all this really matters.

Levy’s subtitle promises “how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives.” He delivers on the first two. Levy shows us how Google’s unorthodox approach to business and the internet developed from a free-thinking, “question authority” mindset that puts data and pragmatism a the center of every mission. The company’s nearly manager-less method is sure to become a classic case study in enabling innovation. Levy’s contribution to our understanding of this is commendable. He also walks us through the process that allowed Google to crack some of the web’s central challenges: how to organize information and how to monetize it.

But in laying all this out Levy seems to have fallen for his subjects. Yes, Larry Page’s “PageRank” system for analyzing web traffic and organizing information is brilliant. But do we really need to hear Googlers go on and on about what geniuses they are? And, yes, Google’s advertising model was a major innovation. But in Levy’s estimation it’s on par with Nobel-wining work. Really? Levy’s biography slides into hagiography by chapter 3, and we no longer trust him to deliver on the third and most important part of his book’s subtitle, which is how Google “shapes our lives.”

Levy lets much of his information spill out in a largely uncritical flow, organized by little more than chronology: “Google did this great thing, then this great thing. Then engineer so-and-so said these were really great things Google has done.” Ok, I’m exaggerating, but Levy seems to have put little effort into analysis. We’re left with an info dump and not much insight into which pieces of information matter. He hasn’t organized the information well. In a book about a company whose raison d’etre is organizing information. (Ahem.)

In Levy’s telling, any criticism of a Google action is muted; a distant murmur about “privacy concerns” comes across as the buzzing of gnats. We hear repeated references to the paranoia, dimwittidness and alleged duplicity of those concerned about electronic privacy. But we never hear directly from privacy advocates nor do we get a fulsome exploration of the arguments they make, except as viewed from Mountain View.

Levy does a better job of explaining the antitrust allegations against Google (which are once again in the news) but he couches it all as a business challenge for Google to overcome. There’s little in here about why the antitrust matter is of concern to consumers. Again, the “how it shapes our lives” part is pretty slim.

Maybe it was the repeated references to the Googler’s love of sci-fi, but as I read about the massive mountains of information Google’s compiled my mind kept drifting back to the Borg.

Fans of Star Trek (TNG) know that what made the half-machine, half-organism uber-villains so skin-crawlingly creepy was the Borg’s relentless steamrolling of individuality. The Borg swarmed through galaxies, sucking up the collective knowledge of entire civilizations, growing more powerful with the information in its hive mind. Sound familiar?

The comparison’s a bit over the top, sure. But I’m not the only one to draw the parallel. How do I know? I googled it.

Here Comes One More Review of Here Comes Everybody

By Jeff Young

I bought this book in the Harvard Bookstore’s section labeled “Technology” but author Clay Shirky, a New York University professor, is more social animal than technologist.  His main interest is how people use communications technology once it has become so widespread that it is, in his words, “invisible.”

Shirky’s strength is his ability to make visible the underlying mechanisms of social organization at play in seemingly unconnected phenomena: protests in Belarus, gatherings of stay-at-home moms in the American suburbs, the birth of Wikipedia, and the unlikely recovery of a stolen smart phone in New York. Shirky relays these examples (and many more) in lively, engaging summaries that point out the various ways that people are applying the organizing strengths of the internet.

Belarusians use social technology to organize “flash mob” style protests against their repressive government, then document and publish (via the net, of course) any heavy-handed police reaction.

The mothers use an organizing service called Meetup to overcome the isolation of suburban parenting. In doing so they are not only helping to reverse the decline in what Robert Putnam calls “social capital” in the US, they also serve as an example of the rampant experimentation underway with new communications services.

Wikipedia succeeded with input from many rank amateurs after its predecessor–the now-forgotten Nupedia–failed in the hands of recognized experts. Shirky calls this a result of the “mass amateurization” of roles once held by professionals and also an example of “love as a renewable building material.” (More on that in a bit.)

And then there’s the stolen phone. Shirky opens the book with this amusing story of a tech-savvy guy who makes it his mission to get back his friend’s phone. At every step of the story we see things happening that were simply not possible before the availability of the net and its various tools for connecting people.

The phone thief is identified by her online activity with the stolen phone. Strangers offer advice and comments (online) on how to deal with the theft. Mass media start to take notice of this petty theft thanks to the web traffic about it. Eventually the protagonist brings public pressure (the public being his online audience) on both the phone thief and the police.

The main thing Shirky sees at play here and throughout the book is that internet communications have broken the cost barriers to organizing people. In pre-internet days there was a fairly firm limit to organizational size and structure that had to do with the costs of managing connections between people and sharing the necessary information, what Shirky calls the “transaction cost” of organizing. Post-internet, those costs are greatly diminished, if not gone altogether.

“Some threshold of transaction cost for group coordination was crossed,” Shirky tells us, and organizing people for myriad tasks from silly to the sublime “went from inconceivable to ridiculously easy.“

It’s tempting to think that we already knew that. It’s already cliché to remark that the internet has changed everything. But what Shirky’s pointing out here is not just the change but the actual method of change, the principles at play. And once you grasp those, you begin to see just how profound the changes really are. You also realize that we are just beginning to see the full manifestation of those changes and the challenges they bring to established institutions from business to government and even churches.

For the most part, Shirky focuses on positive aspects of this change. New business models arise, protesters are empowered to take on corrupt governments, and volunteers band together to create wonderful new services like Wikipedia.  That’s all good and well. But at times I felt as though he was blind to the possible downsides. Yes, volunteers made Wikipedia possible but will volunteers somehow magically make up for the work of reporters displaced by the turmoil in media? (Just to use one rather self-serving example, ahem).  And are people really likely to “come together to do big things for love,” as Shirky puts it, or will they continue to do the petty, mean things people generally do, only on a larger scale?

Mr. Shirky momentarily shook my generally cynical outlook. But then I perused the comments section on a few stories at my workplace, Living on Earth, where we do a lot of reporting on climate change. I saw the internet trolls at work trying to dismiss the reality of a warming planet (many of them no doubt well funded by fossil fuel interests). My usual gloomy point of view soon returned.

Finally, I found reading a book about the internet a strange experience. The author’s giving us the many reasons publishing is doomed but at the same time I’m thinking, “I’d never read this material in this depth if it were presented on the internet.” There’s something about a book that allows us to absorb the depth and context and understand big issues, even if the big issue is the internet, and how it’s making books obsolete.

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