The Changing Ecology of News Media: Saturday, 9 am – 11 am.
by admin | November 14, 2009 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
The Changing Ecology of News Media
Saturday, 9 am – 11 am.
Good morning! This panel, moderated by Yale ISP’s Chris Anderson, will explore the changing ecology of news media.
How do peer production models work and how well do they perform
traditional journalistic functions? How does a networked public sphere
operate and how does it provide salient information, quality information, and
set agendas for deliberation and discussion? How do digital media change the
relationship between journalists and end users, and the way that news is
gathered, produced, reported, and discussed? How are the profession of
journalism and the professional values traditionally associated with it
changing as a result of digital media?
Jack Balkin, Faculty Director, Knight Law and Media Program, Yale Law
School.
Democratic theory as it pertains to journalism. What is the consequence of journalism. Three points: What is democracy and how does it related to journalism; what is the function of newspapers and what will happen to its functions; and third, that the way that newspapers produce public goods is gone with the wind.
The kind of newspapers you want to have is related to what kind of democracy you want to have. In some versions of democracy, it is not necessary that people be well informed, only that, in some cases, it is enough to have interested groups and we do not need a public sphere. Call this an elite version of democracy. Elite Democracy. Division of labor and theory. In this version, the changing new media ecology is not very important—only that the elite now know how to use new media to correct and check their opponents. Internet-related media are actually pretty good
On the other hand, if you vision of democracy is participatory, the changing new media landscape is more of a problem. It allows political junkies to focus on things they care about. Civic republicans—worry about distraction and being dumbed down, tend to be culturally elitist. They face the horse to water in terms of getting the public to engaged the politics. The new media ecology is, by in large, bad news for civic republicans. It gives the chance to people to tune out further. Objective visions of journalism will increasingly be displaced by the party press. Alexander Middle John thought radio would be the great democracy, no. Civic republicans have so many bad experiences with new media, they now tend to reflexively oppose them. Civic republicans will level the same criticque no matter what the new media ecology looks like.
Liberal pluralists are happy with the gains of pluralism but scared of the loss in power in the new media ecology.
Cultural democrat: the point of public discourse is to allow people to participate in cultural forms that shape those individuals. Cultural democrats love the new media ecology. What some see as people tuning out, cultural democrats see as people moving to participate in the interests that pertain to them.
Clay Shirky, Graduate Interactive Telecommunications program, NYU.
I want to tell a story in the landscape of new media: David Weiner, an early proponent of blogging, and Nissenholtz, New York Times had a bet: would there be more traffic from the New York Times or from the blogs, according to the AP list. In 2007, it looked a little bit like a tie. The third candidate that won was Wikipedia, which took over during those five years.
In 1768, Brittanica emerges with the breakthrough though that you do not need to trust an individual author, you can trust an institution providing a collective editorialship. Britannica says that the allegiance of authority can be transferred to a brand, to an institution, to properly vet the encyclopedic product. This was revolutionary in its time. That the market was trustworthy enough to vet continent. It took over in history in longevity and its continuity. The lost socks problem. Britannica has become a different encyclopedia than it was in 1760s, yet it remains the same thing, a continuity.
The unentered third candidatein the bet between Weiner and Niseenholtz failed to recognize was Wikipedia. It was a rematch of 1760s that emerged as trusting the process, not the institution. People trust Wikipedia, why? More is up for grabs, including the nature of authority. When you look at the CNN craven and almost useless coverage of the June coverage of Iran: Iran events have meant turn on not CNN but Wikipedia, twitter for the last six months.
The associated press just this year includes Wikipedia as its news competitor. This in five years after, in 2004, Wikipedia came a news outlet after the Tsunami. If you need to find someone in New York City but with no location where would you go? The information booth in Grand Central. Wikipedia is that booth now.
I’m not arguing that Wikipedia, Google, and twitter that use algorithmic authority do NOT replace traditional institutional authority. Now it is using their content, and a displacement of their monopoly on the idea of authority. The slide “people need trusted news institutional brands” is shown that the public is waiting for us. That the presenter of that slide is out of ideas.
Athority has a second component besides trustworthiness. Authority is to be wrong and not be blamed when you are wrong.
If I were start a news business today, I would work on a news business that did not work on generating new contents, but instead to have an research and an implementation componenns. The research would ask to ask “what do people trust when they trust algorithmic authority”? And the institutional component…..
Michael Schudson, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
A quasi-utopain vision of journalism’s future. I’m not a civic republican, but a liberal pluralist of some sort. Algorithmic authority may be a new form of authority but it does not displace the others. Two days ago the internet gave me a diagnosis, and my doctor confirmed it by telephone. We even have old-fashioned moral authority. The pope has a job. The leaders in our universities do no longer appoint faculty, but subdivide it among experts. The Downie repot is you don’t like it. The Downie-Schudson report is you do.
My brightest vision of the society is liberal and pluralist, and not wildly democracy. I believe in competence and expertise. I believe there will be a role for it journalism for a long time to come. So what are the grounds for my optimism.
1. We can do better in journalism because the bar has not been set too hard. There is remarkable achievement in journalism today, dogged and systematic research. Even so, the 40,000 journalists that write news for journalism is most often trivial and redundant. Journalism before the 1960s was narrowly focused, almost empty and uncritical, blind to minorities. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, it began in about 1965. One anecdote: Barbara Rowan, business editor of the Washington post, that when he came into the field in 1966, that major advertisements were directed from the newsroom. The business editor was there to make the advertisers happy. Payola was acceptable at Christmas time.
2. The competitive news environment, other things equal, is better than a monopoly news environment, which has been the case mostly for the last half century. Now competition is possible, but is not incompatible with cooperation. The voice of San Diego, philanthropy funded five years old, is well known, not because of the web sites, but through cooperative arrangements with local radio and television. The digital era lowers the entry barrier to covering local news. Reporting for the public and not just for the newsroom can be done in the course now.
3. There is a growing availability of relevant data that makes first-class journalism possible throughout the country . this reduces the cost of journalism. Databases of government earmarking information are available. Lev Manovich, the database is to the more new media it to the narrative of the Victorian age. That is wrong, databases have not displaced narratives, but it is very interesting, that they are both in use now. It’s not only the DNA testing but the databsase that gives it statistical predictivity. Database journalism began not with tGoogle but with data gathering institutions in the 1970s. These developed in part thanks to the rights oriented ethos of the 1960s. in now returns as aftermath and aftershock in the present database era. Television whatever its weaknesses, presumes a public-ness, and this helps. The Kennedy/Nixon debates are often criticized but it was the first time that two candidates faced each other on the stage, and a stage accessible to the entire country.
Today’s stage include bloggers, citizen journalism, and often Washington based non-profits that mushroomed in the 1970s. Human rights watch, 1978, has more foreign correspondents than all but a handful of news organizations. Inside the government, reform legislation in the 1970s and 1980s, including campaign finance disclosure reports, and the inspector general reports, on the corporation of public broadcasting exposes, that have revealed the prejudicial decisions making –all these are available to the journalists or any other member of the motivated public. None of these were available before the 1978 general inspector’s act.
Where do you get your weather news? You are getting tit from the national government weather organization, built in 1870s, but newspapers will be leaner and smaller. Many online journalist services, with a few employees, it may enhance public television, and may benefit from NGO and public interest organizations. Moreover it will use databases.
4. Funding can come from every sources. The value of government funding is important. Government funding means government control. Is this or is it not a public broadcasting recording. The government funding does not mean you cannot speak what you want.
5. Journalism is an obsession; information is an obsession. It partly works because
there are thousands of obsessives out there.
Pablo Boczkowski, Northwestern University, Dept. of
Communications
An introductory example from Buenos Aires where I do news ethnography. A picture of the snake that swallowed the elephant from the Little Prince. But it is also a graphical representation of the use frequency of his site, which peaks between 8 am to 5 pm. News consumption happens at work. This means a new time and place for the consumption of news. This fact challenges us to rethink the when/where/how/and why of news consumption. I study three stages of research: phase I, production; phase II: product: and II: consumption.
Three dimensions of news consumption: news consumption is relatively routine; it occurs mostly in the domestic space and outside of the time of work; and sociability, news is embedded in social relations. But what happens to this convention when it turns out, in fact, that news consumption takes place at work?
The first visit takes place before the start of the work day, with a coffee mug before work begins. Everyone has their own routine, usually scanning one or two or three sites, and click on a handful of stories.
The subsequent visits happen during the day. They, on the other hand, are not systematic but are driven by particular interests. They are special interest information driven. Most people look at the homepage online. Most people browse or skim, they don’t read. Mostly consume, few contribute. Only two of 63 interviewed admitted to having commented on news sources. News consumption is dominated by the readable web, not the writable web.
Now people can work at an office space or at home. If you work in an office space, they feel a small amount of guilt, and news consumption usage is down. Yet, when they go home, they tend to avoid the computer at home because they associated the computer with work.
How do social relations affect conventional pre-broadcast news consumptions. Nothing has changed. People consume news to have something to have something to conversation with their peers. The water cooler or the lunch conversation is the site of conversation exchange. People tend to avoid politically and culturally sensitive topics. Interestingly, if your conversations tend to be with your coworkers, and your conversations tend to be non-political, then your news inclination tends toward non-political news.
Will people pay for news? No.
If most news consumption is online and in homepages, people will not pay for that. They may pay for specialized content. Also, political impact: avoidance of sensitive topics drives people away from conversation about current affairs. Three, consumer-drive reform: citizen journalism, pro-am reporting, etc., are feasible only for a relatively small segment of the public. Two standard deviations of the population on both sides are very interested in the debate, and will contribute to it, but they will never represent an appropriate cross-section of the public. The average consumer does not make the prospects for consumer-driven news high.
Jeff Jarvis, Graduate School of Journalism, Knight New Media Program, CUNY.
Algorithmic authority has 107 hits. News business models for journalism can be reviewed.
We need to question the assumptions of the industrial era of the means of production and distribution of news consumption and production. If we break out of those, news becomes a process, not a product. When we understood news as a process, we get beta-think: this thing is unfinished, help us finish it. It is a statement of humanity and humility, even from Google. The conventional news industry does not have that thinking style. The half-baked blog post requires admitting not only what you know, but what you don’t know, and asking for more. Thus stating what you don’t know is the novelty. The other is inviting collaboration.
The article is no longer the atomic unit of news. You can have topic pages. You can have other things. Hyper-local news is a start, but a hyper-individual news streams, and how do we embed ourselves in streams and extract ourselves to figure out the larger picture.
Structure:
1. the link economy vs. the content economy. The content economy, post Gutenberg, uses the content as value. The content with no links is of no value in the link economy. The link economy has two values: not content and aggregation, it’s creation of the content and creation of the public. It demands that you make everything open. If you’re not open, you won’t be found. If forces specialization: do what you do best and link to the rest. Be local, in Cincinnati, and link to the rest. It is upto you to figure out what you are going to do. Google is the model, not the enemy.
2. Distributed v. Centralized. “if the news is that important, it will find me.” It is the new way of the news word. The audience is our distributor; Clay’s audience is his distributor and is his publisher.
3. Ecosystem v. Institution: at CUNY, we found bloggers who were bringing 100,000 to 200,000$ of revenue in cities of about 50,000, which may be the new model. If a paper dies, what replaces it? Not a single product, but an ecosystem of many, some for-profit, nonprofit, some for volunteerism, that is not institutional. The future of news is entrepreneurial, not institutional.
4. This leads network v. corporation. Networks versus companies, they may co-exist and constitute themselves.
5. Collaborative vs. owned. Owned is over. It is dead. Journalism is an act, not an event. The value of transparency is great. Sue Gardner, of Wikipedia, calculated the value of the edits to be conservatively per hour and came to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. It is non-monetary news. That is what is happening to economy. This leads to a new economic viability of journalism. The Gren Bay team whose team is owned by its fans.
The journalist may be an organizer. The X-Prize: what are our problems? 1. Engagement. Being of the community is enabling the community as a platform and as a network to give what it needs. 2. Effectiveness to marketers and to advertisers. Google does not sell scarcity, it does not charge on a limited number of searches. 3. Efficiency. The marginal cost of journalism and new news is zero. The community will work beautifully. Perfectly? No. The base beginning is not what journalists create, but what the community shares with itself, and then journalists curate, find authority, and educate.
Q&A:
Chris Anderson: “the internet makes most things about journalism better and easier, except form making money. But we need to figure out the business model—we will be OK.” I think the panel would disagree with that.
Clay: it is harder to understand what journalism is. But it does not make it more expensive to let journalism work. The edges of journalism are incredibly blurry.
Jeff: to preserve pre-existing institutions, and to preserve revenue lines.
Pablo: the internet has made it more difficult for journalism to ignore the public. Now, they can no longer ignore the public; the public is more visible.
Michael: newsrooms are obsessively busy. I cannot understand how you can constantly update your stories. I see certain values in constantly posting., you’re getting feedbacks. But there may be a frenetic minus.
Q. Peter Shame, Ohio State: Clay said transparency is accountability is not algorithmic authority but participatory authority? It seems to me the old boss is now the new boss.
Jack Balkin: the old boss will not be the new boss, but there will be a new boss. So google is now incredibly powerful, but powerful in a different way than CBS or ABC or twentieth-century newspapers. It is a mistake to claim that paritipation is decentralized and barrier to entry is lower, and then to include that they are subject to less external ontrol. Piracy for example is one obvious example.
Schudson: in the journalism school, we assume that the nature of journalism is central to the distribution of power. But in the law school, I think it is not so. Will health care to pass has less to do with the news media than the politicians and law makers, these are powerful sites that remain.
Q. George Brock, City University in London: To summarize: the rival claims ofo different forms of collective intelligence. To speak in defense of the activity formerly known as editing. Journalism as an activity can be done by many in many ways. But editing remains.
Shirky: ProPublica started off by opening it up to the news media, but a pretty high percentage of the people that can be David Broder already are David Broder.
Q. Jennifer: I think that Yale is a fantastic place to have this conference in that New Haven is becoming a capital of hyper-local journalism. Government 2.0 plays, journalism citizen resources, and other informational sources and tools are available. What other tools are enabling journalists, or what would you like to see?
Clay: The set of tools that I would like to see would put information into the narrative model, into the public story. We need tools that help people tell stories that benefit the public. Otherwise, the well-coordinated special interests will benefit as they did in the 1970s with the rise of the sunshine laws, which in large part benefited the special interest lbbists.
Q. After you take all the MSN reporting out of Wikipedia, there is no bricks in the mortar. It is frequently information that has been paid for by a business model that is now dead.
Jack: Information for a public good will be under-produced in open markets, and are thus in need of support. The New York Times, which now has fewer profits, will turn into something different, called the new New York Times that, like peer organizations, wil need to be subsidized to produce this information necessary to sustain the public ecosystem in question. What mechanisms will make up for the loss in the conventional business model? It is, as Clay and Jeff are saying, not only a distribution mechanisms, but a production mechanism itself. ProPublica are placing articles now in the New york Times.
Pablo: a 24 hour to a 24 minute shift of speed. It’s not only bet practices but worst practices.
Clay: Wikipedia is definitely learning from worst practices, and is constraining new policies on living biographies entries.
Q. Is now a time for a licensed profession?
Clay: let them have licenses, like a certificate, a minimum standard of quality, or to prevent people to participate. It would be impossible to protect against uses.
Michael: I think it is a symbolically bad idea.
Jack: it would probably be illegal in the first amendment law. But whether there is any benefit in the creation of a trade organization. But it is important for the state not to recognize or to indirectly subsidize them.
Q. Linda: Pablo, is this exacerbating the digital divide, in that so many do not have a computer? And to the journalism professors, what is the ethics standards of journalism—can the new media ecology help us move away from the journalism of assertation? Can it help us mature ethically?
Pablo: Digital divide is an important question. There may in fact be a deepening of the digital divide in how news is consumed. However, in developing countries, there is some for whom it helps. Being able to read a newspaper and to be seen with a newspaper builds unseen cultural capital in developing country communities.
Chris: Ethnic media in the US print news has seen some benefit. Ethnic news audiences stand to benefit in the reading of print media, in part because they don’t have a computer.
Questions: Fred Dewey, CEO of Cachingal.com. Voluntarily to contribute to content they support, and we divide up the support dprovided among use traffic patterns. We hope that people will individually fund those communities that help. Is this a viable revenue model?
Question: Tom Hermann, Yale business economics in the press: I’ve noticed what seems to be an alarming hoaxes on financial news organizations. Unlike Wikipedia, a tremendous amount of harm can be done in 30 seconds, and how to correct it. How do we deal with this? And how is doing work on this now?
Clay: Absolutely. But I have not yet seen good numerical data because hoaxes are tricky. It is hard to get the denominator for the changing numerator. Yet other things being equal hoaxes get through more easily. Yet sociopaths can saturate the media environment. There are no sociopaths need do not march on the sidewalk with a sign. No one does that now. Third, fact checking is down. But after-the-fact checking is way, way up. We definitely need more research.
Michael: a student mistake, a hoax? The fox news slogan as “fear and balance.” I’m struck by how rapidly everything is changing. The most important thing for journalism research is humility. Where it is going, I really do not know.
