Start of #webcredtrans buffer: Fri Jan 21 23:40:13 2005 rep from ALA speaking thanked the Macarthur foundation with a grant that's supporting a widespread study on internet and credibility when we think about establishing credibility, this is not a new idea for librarians information literacy skills - we've been teaching them to users for yearss, even before the internet looking forward to a couple of interesting days, opportunity to listen and learn john palfrey - head of the Berkman Center, our first moderator thank everyone for being here. 4 degree, unbelievably cold outside also want to thank thhe people participating from afar - whether commenting on the blog (constructively or not) also thanking people who've written on other blogs, thanking people on IRC, listening to the webcast, inviting people to tomorrow's open session thanks to everyone for goodwill, energy and good humor apologies for people's blackberries, given the volume on the associated mailing lists three quick things: why is the Berkman Center/Harvard Law interested in this topic how did we get to this room and this group of people introducing the team responsible for the first session Berkman - curious but quite wonderful think tank based at Harvard Law group of people who study, teach, activists online dedicated to a free and open internet. we teach at HLS, run events like this and the open conferences like bloggercon three main clusters that define our work: law and technology with respect to innovation - like this event - how does new technology create avenues for new generativity Jonathan Zittrain writing a major paper on generative platforms second - law and technololgy with respect to democracy this conference is about democracy with a small"d" - how do weblogs and other technologies allow more people to share their voices how do large players, soverign governments bliock certain modes of expression points to Rebecca Mackinnon, Zephyr Teachout, EthanZ as nonlawyers involved with Berkman finally, creativity how did this come about - conversation with Shorenstein we'll have more on bloggers vs. journalists, but seems there are real issues here not much actual dialogue between groups not enough common ground despite rancor leading up to this conversation, hoping we can move to some sort of common ground I have no idea whether we will get there so that's why we're here as Berkman, but also some perspective on how this came about transcription: it is now being announced that ethanz rockz if you are on the IRC, ethanz is taking questions and introducting them into the discussion (not true quite yet, as I'm transcribing. In the meantime, talk to rmack) rebecca mackinnon - former cnn bureau chief, evil cyborg she's the major person responsible for the conference RMack will take two minutes to introduce some of the online discussion [RMack speaking] as a monty python fan, favorite comment this week: "your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" major concern from the blogosphere that we're going to be imposing standardson blogger. outcry. Our country is badly divided - this becomes clear in the comments within the blogs people with strong political views looking for ways to use online, participatory media to share their views other points made - linking. Does linking to something differ from quoting someone? If you link to someone is that the same as endorsing it? If you link to a blog from your site or blogroll that has libel, are you responsible for it? If your comments are filled with insinuations that someone is a CIA op, are you responsible for that information taking root? Questions about bloggers and advertising, bloggers and conflict of interest, journalists and conflict of interest A couple of interesting quotes, before we move onto Jay Rosen "Focusing on bloggers and journalists is like focusing on importint drugs from Canada. Thje real issue is what's wrong with drugs in the US, what's wrong with journalism in the US. (From a quote - not a literal transcription on my part,) The difference between establishing credibility in a group and individual web credibility jpalfrey - brief intro to Jay Rosen idea for this conference - very flat structure. some structure, though a few people to "lead off" with 5-10 minute talks. Also, a pair of papers commissioned. Jay will speak, Dave Winer (scripting.com) and Bob Giles (Nieman FOundation) will respond Only thing I will correct for is repetition - if you repeat yourselfd, I wilkl move us on Jay Rosen - professor at NYU. bio is online, linked from webcred blog Jay Rosen participated in Bloggercon 1 - virtually everyone pointed to Jay Rosen as the "voice" of Bloggercon 1 Following Jay's work on PressThink, former shorenstein fellow - has been "raging against some machine" for a long time. Woke up some morning and realized the future he'd been envisioning was here. A prophet of this sort of convergence [Jay Rosen] (putting pressthink up on the screen in the conference room) summarizing key ideas in bloggers vs. journalists is over asked by Jpalrey and Berkman to write this felt like I'd screwed up the subject before, thought I would untangle it now A peacemaking document that is also a troublemaking document the peacemaking part is in the title what the title means is that the war should be oiver the cartoon dialogue that has developed between the two we don't need it, it's not a great way to proceed. Nor is it very accurate makes for good feature stories and great blogposts, b v. j doesn't help us understand where journalism is going where is citizen journalism going? journalists v. bloggers is over - doesn't mean we won't fight anymore, that it's all peace and love ought not to see these things as adversaries, enemies, opposites look at what happened the last month and the tsunami story - obvious that blogs and citizen journalissm have some role in jouranlism key ideas - has been, and is ongoing, a power shift from producers of media to "people formerly known as the audience" terms like consumer, reader, not really that accurate shift from producers to users, mostly because of internet loss of soverignity in the press loss of exclusive control areas exclusively under domain no longer solely under journalism because of this power shift, lot of pressure being put on mainstream journalisms key ideas ideas should be under close focus, scrutiny. conditions resembling a crisis in journalism objectivity as an ethical touchstone is faltering in mainstream journalism. it doesn't provide the kind of guidance that it once did... problems of finding a believable voice keep growing. part of the reason we're having this conference - and who is here - blogging is very well adapted to the world where this shift in power is taking place. well adapted to a world where there are multiple centers of power blogging is well-adapted to two-way dialogue, as opposed to one-way dialogue. and of course it is organic to the www, and is itself one of the artefacts of the internet. that's why these two things are butting up against one another rebecca blood - weblogs and journalism exist in shared space no one is leading that space since we have to get used to existing in that same media space - competing for same scarce media attention - both talking about the news and reaching users I also try to argue that the press, the institution of the press, for which the shorenstein center is named is seperating from this other big institution - the media - and is moving around in this social space the press may be based in the nonprofit world, away from the entertainment media some of the press is shifting into pub lic hands institution of the press used to overlap entirely with the media now has shifted, andd nonprofit world owns a piece people in politics, activists own a piece biggest challenge for pro journalists is living in a shared media space have to coexist with bloggers talking about them , fact checking them have to share the press with the public rearranging the ideas of journalism to account for this is a big thing journalism was built for a one to many world, a world that is disintegrating products of a professional world that is slowly passing most of the ideas we teach young journalists, that we defend, weren't created to explain the world we live in, but to limit liability, and protect us from attacks and criticisms defensive ideas that have worked well for the mainstream press for 40, 50 years are now working against mainstream journalists 2 points to wrap up journalists are slow to understand why they owe a debt to blogs and bloggers those that are developing the tools and protocols, pushing forward the ideas and practices of web journalism, are for the most part indep authors, bloggers, writers on the web. the art of linking - winer - the experts are bloggers tapping knowledge around the web - bloggers news as conversation: bloggers bloggers are developing the platform journalists will one day occupy to wrap up - when I first came to bloggercon in 2002, I was very new, had just started pressthink, and I learned something remarkable at a conference like this: the majority of readers had become online readers. today, 2-3 years later, today, the majority of employees at the nyt feel they are working for a traditional paper. that's the gap we're living with today haven't adapted to the world we're actually living in the foreign correspondents get it - before the 'net it took 3 weeks for their articles to arrive at the local gov't offices in a diplomatic pouch. they realize they're actually working for an online paper with a printed edition, not the other way around. [jpalfrey] - thanks for hard work under aggresive deadline first respondent - dave winer, who needs no introduction... :-) dave winer defies introduction can't call him a technologist, blogger - more than all these things prometheus of blogging charlie nesson calls him "socrates" came back from christmas in 2002 to meet Dave: just me and dave in an empty building (dave - "let me tell you about law, technology and democracy") and it's beena wild ride since then one of the key things of berkman is to build technologies in the space dave built a blogger server for people with harvard.edu addresses 600 people have started blogs has transformed how we commujnicate at Berkman has not brought us "credibility" - it's been a wild ride. Huge debt to Dave [dave winer] accustomed to conferences where you don't prepare and jsut speak your miund prepared a speech for this - available on the blog jeff jarvis invented jay rosen brough him to bloggercon 2003 someone came to us from the land of ink who was enthusiastic about what we were doing jay was enthusiastic, got what we were doing this is a group that feels like they're on the ascendant captures the spirit really well hard to see us as being versys anything I can speak for most if not all bloggers we have never woken up saying "how do we get rid of journalists" If anything, we've worked hard to bring in (trad journalists) instead, we're trying to get them in if you want to understand the blogger mentality... we want to bring you in! we want you to use our tools, we want you to make the world a better place. if you cut to our core, we're like mr. smith goes to washington into truth and justice... and maybe that can act as a reminder to the pfessionals that somewhere deep inside of yoru coe is that same passion. that's the thing that unites us, the bond that we share... let's look at this as a way that we can help eachother. God konws we have much bigger problems tosolve than who gets to survive the bloggers v. journalists [debate] I think that where this sort of adversarial neess comes from is, that journalists need to define some sort of boundaries: we're here, and the rest of the world is there. one way to get around this is to really seriously adopt some practices in blogging: full transcripts of every interview that you do ...[one way for bloggers to cope with the lack of those boundaries] I think a journalist looking at this situation will see bloggers as a threat. most articles about blogging have seen it as a threat to journalism... can you really write about blogging when your points of view is from there? but there is also the optimistic, positive thing: we can combine all our views and get some sort of triangulation about what's going on. [coming up... bob giles] [bg] my perspective comes fro a lifetime of newspaper jourmalism. thinking abou blogging, the internet, and our communities: weve never though of it as adversarial. the news communitie reluctance to embrace new ideas... is embedded in the institutional culture of the newspapers and broadcast ofrgs for which we work... jan schafer can tell you stories about the troubles she had directing a civic journalism course... when the neiman founcation published a report in 2003 that focused on blogging, the idea was that htis was an idea that needed to be explained a part of the processs of having it adopted/adapted in various news orgs. the fact is that mainstream news media are a stable insdustry, and very slow to be able to effectively graft onto their main business new ideas. the discussion a few minutes ago about the NYT... suggests how long it takes for corporate news orgs to adjust [an] idea, and think about how it fits into their larger mission. [referring back to jay r's last comments] the thinking is always, how does this help us make money? how does this help us connect with our communities? I'm delighted that ed cone is here, b/c I think his paper in greensboro is doing some very innovative work in finding how to use blogging as an effective, transparent open-sourcing methodology of connecting with communities. I hope one of the outocmes of this meeting will be inspiring more newsrooms to think creatively... and to make the compelling case for why we need to make the investment for technology and newsroom time and resources to make [all this] work [opening for comments from the audience] [john garfunkel:] I guess i should respond, since I put the first respose to jay's post today... I will agree on some common ground that the peopld eveloping the www are software techonlogists. and I'm one of them: I'm a software engineer by profession. we're developing ways that people are interating with ideas. this is an important book (The Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, by lawrence lessig) ... I think it is very convenient of you to trust the NYT (when it says that bloggers covere the tsunami better than the media) when at other times you do not trust them I also brought up two dichotomies, the press v. critics of the press; and blogs v. "wingers", the not very good blogs. and last, you said professionalism is slowly passing -- I'd like to hear mre evidence of that! those are my short comments. -- [ Dorothy Zinberg: ] I think it's interesting that the first two questios are coming from observers (on the outer ring of the room) and not from the participants. How would someone who perfceives that she's writing for an ink paper start thinking she's writing for a blog, and vice-versa? answer: I think once you start writing for an online paper, every other paper is closer, or as close to the reader than your paper. so all of your competitors are one click away... also, every one of your readers is a writer. So not only can they talk back, but every reader is connected horizontally to other readers, not just to you [through a letters-to-the-editor colun?[\ and the third thing is, in web publishingm it isn't really accurate to say there's no editor but rather the editing takes place after pulication. the people online are your editors. I read today on pressthink : something about PR bloggers blowing the Ketchum public relations story. in the few days since I posted that, lots of bloggers have chimed in saying "hey! I *did* blog about that! what do you mean, saying no PR bloggers wrote about this?" well, that's part of the process. I had to incorporate that into what I did. but the main thing is that on the net, power is different. Power. people have a lot more power than you learned in journalis school. and dealing with people who are suddenly empowered, vis-a-vis you, is difficult it's embarrassing to think that after 20 years they have to rethink what they're doing... or even acknowledge that this is going on. [note that Lee Rainie knows more than anyone else on earth about this shift in power...] [but now: Jeff Jarvis] jj: buzzmachine.com: I agree with what Jay was saying. however at the first bloggercon, you had the image of the strets of new york, two gangs approaching one another. there will always be lines, you'll still have choices to come over... but now they are distinct. and there is as you say a tension. so where is that tension, competition beneficial to both? is it too soon in some ways to say "the war is over, and we'll all hug", or is there still reason to keep the tension alive, to make both better? how does the tension help? [Lee, then Chris Lydon, then Ed Cone] [meanwhile, jeff? has blogged that Michael Powell has resigned as chair...] [Lee R] it's not just foreign correspondents who are aware of this new power. anyone who covered the last campaign is aware that their ass is going to be fact-checked. the other idea that jay has develoe in other contexts that is a deep reality in both commuinties is that trust and credibility is a social process... I just tlaked to a friend fro Korea. I asked how Koreans in this ubiquitous broadband universe decides what's true or not... the nswer is they cut and paste lots of text among friedns in online communities... and this decision is a coinversation that people are colmfortable engaging in. we also see this in health communities... the omnipotent doctor in a previous age, dealing with a passive patient. is now dealing with an active e-patient that goes out and discovers lots of detail, and is only satisfied with treatment until new kinds of credibility-enhancing mechanisms come into play. the notion that these univerrses are at war touches on an undrelying change that is more fundamental. [moderator] if you want to see the way that the internet could make a really hyper change to society, go to korea... 70% broadband connectivity, which shames the rest of us. [chris lydon] I don't want to be a troublemaker... [you always are -mod] but I want to pick up on dave winer's line that bloggers are really evangelists: I think there's a kind of cosmlogical, almost theological dimension to this thing, and I want to spell it out a briefly as I can. one of the main reasons i like the internet is that it's oe of the most wonderful metaphors for god. it's not god, but has godly qualities: omnipotent, all-knowing, invisible, accessible to each and everyone of us... it's a much better metaphor for god than what used to exist, which was the New York Times. It used to be something like the memo of what god thought for the day. it used to be 8 columns, now it's 6... I think chastity of the priesthood correlates to objectivity of journalis, and ther ewas virtually a sacramental meeting of the front-page editors who would go into a solemn ritual about what god wanted us to know about the cosmos on this day, jan 3, 1492, or whatever it was. when you think about the internet as a model of information, it is vastly larger and vastly better! you look on the technorati page (e.g.) and you see a million editors, not just section eds of the nyt or a million bloggers... [eventually it will be 10 billion] and you can see what actually people think is interesting, is going on; what people are truly excited about we're approaching a much more satisfying metaphor for what a big understanding would be it is something like the protstant information, in which people's unmediated access to the truth, or participation in th emysteries of nature and the divine spirit, have been democratized and opened up. and a lot of the phony claims, artificial pyramids of authority, have been destroyed. I'd say I'm not claling for religious war either, but let's say these are radically different architectures of implementation... we've discovered that every person is a priest. every one is a child of god... every person is in touch with information. there's no system of the pope's closest to god, then there are the cardinals, then the monks, then us... [Ed Cone, edcone.com] it's ironic, I was going to say *exactly* what he said. since he got in all the god an dreformation stuff, I'll bring it back to ocmmon ground. 'm a pro journalist, and I didnt' understand blogging until I got a weblog. I thought i understood it, profiled dave winer for WIRED... until I got a ewblog and started blogging, I didn't understand what it meant [mod: at least look up the word 'deuce' before you do] I'm not a visionary, I'm a reporter and write.r so let me report on some comon ground that has emerged in my hometown in NC. I'm a contributing columnist to the newspaper, giving me a nice insid/eoutside relationship with them. They've been receptive in listening to some of my ideas; there's an editor of the paper, Lex Alexander who's a blogger, so he got it early. but the Aha moment really came recently when a local paper who's an editor-in-chief, got online and started blogging. there's a lot of common ground [in media culture...] if you go to commongrounds, there are reports from this week's county meeting in guildford, NC... the newspaper covered the meeting... they convered it well, but focused on a specific issue, economic development. another blogger covered it too, and focused on other issues. the paper has space constraints, and have to focsus on a limited amount of what happened. the reporter can now go to his own weblog, and linnk to [the other blogger's] comments and doesn't even have to write it. there are other bloggers who want tnothing to do with the paper [see greensboro101.com, blog meetups] they see themselves as correctors, editors, potential competitors... also at my stie there's a long email from Jon Robinson explaining why we're thinking about the wrong stuff re: this conflict. there's no shortage of hype about this confluence... I'd like to deflate that hype. we [the people of Greensboro? pro journalists? Jon Robinson, a lot fo folks who are blogging down there] are interested in pushing this forward, working together. there is this tendency to say 'you haven't done it yet... nobody's making money, so it's a failure' I'm conflicted in all kinds of troubling wys, but there's no conflict in my mind b/t being a pro journalist *and* a blogger. [next: jan shafer] On tension: I'm troubled by the framing there are parallel universes here that occasionally overlap, but there's a huge 'so what' factor here about whether one is a journalist or not. what will news look like? what do people need to know in a democracy? where will i find what I didn't know before? who will connet the dots for me on big issues/ who will ask the missing questions for me? I think both Journalism and journalism are hugely failing in this task [and by journalism I include blogging, not to be demeaning...] the real tension is, How do we design ways to give people what they need to know? will it look like a linear blog feed? I don't think so... Will it look like an inverted pyramid story? I also don't think so [both inefficient] I'm troubled that the focus here is still on us against them... where us is "I" as in "I blog", and not about our users. the meta question is, what will news be in the future? [mod: is this about the people writing it, or the people receiving it? and how does that effect what each of us is doing?] [RMack:] just to key off of jan, I really wanted to bring the conversataion to a similar direction, which is a common point here : blogging at the moment is still very primitive compared to the potential of interactive online participatory media might be... what kind of systems do we need to build to create, not only an informed citizenry, but what is missing from the current way blogging [and journalism] is technically done? what else should we be trying to build that isn't there right now? the more participatory our media gets, and the more audience, or what used to be the audience, drive our reporting... how does this change what people do or should know? there are a lot of things americans need to know about what is going on [and what america is doing] in the rest of the world... but my editors always figured our audience wasn't interested in having me report these things. as we become more participatory, sometimes you have to tell people stuff they don't want to hear, but you need fto find a way to get this heard. in this participatory feedbakc, do you create more and more of these communities that are hearing only what they want to hear... how do you balance that tension? the other thing is I'd like to hear is: what seems to be working best and why? [specifically wrt trust and credibility] [next up; dan gillmor] [he had one of the most productive preconference contributions: re: his TAFT post] DG - I have two quik points., I wanted to say sth about Chris's religion point I'm thinking of it more in the every day sense: the NYT is the trade journal of the rich and powerful, and the blogjournal/sphere is the trade journal of us.l we need to understand how to live our lives in a democratric society, where good information is crucial for us to understand our neighbors, to understand our lives when the newspaper can't. IT's a neew way to gather information that no longer goes through [the same] funnels so that people who are not in the Rolodex are now part of the source process. to RMack's point, one thing we desperately need is a way to track conversations. we have these incredible conv's cgoing on, but to thread them in any sense is very difficult. I would really love a tool that lets me do that, and in addition create my own feeds based on reputation systems, whereI can say " on this subject, I want to see these three people and any three people they name..." . [pause : anything on IRC chat that needs bringing up?] [ethan: calling in a question from Hoder.] Hoder; internet and blogs are incredible in closed societies like iran. it's the most trusted source in iran, even more than state tv now. (points to a poll he posted on his site of what sources people in iran trust) http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/012114.shtml (more than reformist papers and state tv) --- This morning there was a post about objectivity faltering in traditional media... I would say that in terms of fairness, getting facts right rather than promoting an agenda -- should remain an important goal in primary news reporting. that's not what we do on powerline; we mainly do comentary. but we rely on primary news sources for accurate reporting of the news! that's what bloggers and comenters have to rely on. we all know that objectivity is never perfect; editiorial judgment enters into every sentence. but that's not new. I think very soon we'll see the internet version of papers seen as the principal version... I would hate to see people doing primary reporting online abandon those principles. [Jeff J:] who do you think today is doing a good job? and what would the NYT have to do to convince you they were doing it? [Hinderaker] 1) hard to say... 2) the main thing they lack is diversity... and this seeps into their coverage. the best thing they could do is show a real comitment to diversity. Daniel Okrent wrote a column a few weeks? ago asking, are we [the NYT] a liberal newspaper? of course we are! [that was Hinderaker before JJ as well] [now DWiner] There's a reason why we're asking people to look away from objectivity, b/c that leads to not dicslosing who you are. so the NYT, which you acknowledge as liberal, would do us a great service by giving us a dossier of what each writer wrote... so we could see what their track record is like. why don't they show us what school each person went to? --- I don't agree with dave entirely, but he's made av ery ood point. I do agree with john [hinderaker] about the objectivity of journalism: that you , like a juror, suspend your own judgment when writing about something you are measured against your ability to do that, and held accountable to that. Accountability: one of the greatest things that the blogosphere cna bring to trad journalism. I don't agree with Dave [W] that who you are is important. [not] when it comes to improving ainstream credibility. but he has a very strong point that they should be accountable for how they came to the decisions they did, and why they made them. I think the blogosphere will provide accountability: it will be legitimate to call journalists on the carpet to explain why they made the choices they did, why they led with this and not that. the issue of who the journalist is isn't the point... that will just be used to discredit people. but journalists can be asked to explain why they chose the things that they did. it will not be the only way, but it will be the core way, the ore accountable fact, used to carry on that conversation in a different kind of way. [mod: I want to make sure we keep this thread going] [that was Alex Jones?, shorenstein dir] [Faye, Bob, Judith] Faye Anderson : I wnt to talk about credibility, and john's point about diversity. bloggers have a big advantage over journalists since we have links ot our primary sources, we have our bio on the site... I'm not a thinker, like ed, I'm an activist. for many years, I was a republican activist... when I lived in dc, the wash times was [believe it or not] the paper of choice. there's certinly no diversity of opinion in that or the WSJ for that matter. but what is really fueling the growth of blogs is really credibility: on the left, the concern about media concentration, and corporate media (runup to war in iraq) not challenging the administration. the "lame"-stream media, with perceived bias given to so many blogs, some of which I read... the political divisions framing this conversation has underscored the importance of credibility... and citizen journalsitss have an advantage b/c we are fairly transparent. [Bob Giles] I'd like to refer to ojbetivity as a process of verifying information, and the way mainstream bloggers seek to do this is by verifying their sources as Alex is suggesting... . [...] . I think any time you talk about accountability, you talk about who the authorities are who hold people accountable [whether it's the NYT or the minainstream media in Iran] and it's difficult to say there's a metric for objectivity. there's always some possible other point of view. leading up to the war in iraq, you could say a satellite photo is pretty objective, but we could see that how different the analyses of a photo were... I think one of the ways of approachig objectivity is to see what the range of opinions are on a given topic. at times we see a vast divergence of opinions on a topic, that's when you know very little of this will be objective; on the other hand, if many many newspapers w/many different perspectives say 'its very cold in boston', we can guess it's pretty objective. if we get ways to identify when this is diverging and converging... [jeff j] the truth is you want to tell the truth. I think we have to recognize the change in media as a whole. when you have a one-newspaper town, that outlet is important. when you have three outliets, those outlets are important. they are still important, but the diversity issue we see is not of a particular projduct, but of the medium. and in th emedium, kin the whole, any town has access to all the world's medium. and in /that/ we find diversity... that's where this medium is really going. the yoke here (thank goodness) passes from the journalims school to the masses. [hoder, via IRC] without free media, public discourse does not happen. espcially in iran, people do not know about things if they are limited to official media. hoder spoke specifically as weblogs as cafes, windows, and bridges. one of the interesting things to think about is, in a setting where discussios are not open to debate or question, your results are very different from one in which that is the primary objective. [EdCone] In greensboro already, we have people coming to a new blog, and saying 'yeah, you're opening this town square, but you'll just be feeding us the same old pap as always' and the response is generally 'then start your own blog!' I think we've often fallen into the trap of thinking about the "audience" as separate here [and we should avoid that] ... objectivity is a process, but also a metric. newspapers also use rhetoric to tell us what we should find interesting and on the internet there is a surge of interest in taking back this power to decide what we find interesting. back to contention: maybe we are contending along certain axes maybe an economic tension, a tension over who is Best At Telling The Truth, and a tension over reputation. --- [Jon Bonne, from MSNBC] I hate this argument about a battle over objectivity. I want to go back to Alex Jones' comment about journalists functioning as jurors: you put aside biases and function as delineated process. Then after the fact, journalists should be accountable to how we do our jobs, why we made choices that we did... i Don' Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good thing. But I also want to put a bid in here for the notion of a news org as protector. I think of this in corporate terms: there are big corporsations out in the world, with a lot more money than news orgs, and a lot more lawyers who would ove to take this process to rip apart a story that castigates them. whenever we come back to this, I wonder who is supposed to be there, to protect us from being consistently assailed form people with more power and more money. [Xiao Qiang] I also have doubt about bloggers vs journalists. just think about how many 10s of millions of bloggers are out there, and [how many fewer] journalists my motherinlaw writes a blog about her grandsonn every day. nothing to do with what other journalists do. but sometimes she will link to comments she's intersted in other than bloggers and journalists, should we think of the blogosphere? the collective effect of how information diffuses in the blogosphere like my motherinlaw, who [might] suddenly link to a political [post] *that* is my question. ... [Jim Kennedy, AP] [Director of strategy for AP, in fact ^^] This is really about the people, and the people's right to know. error: 104 (Connection reset by peer)) I heard jay rosen say once that the linear path from opinions to information was completely disruptive now we have people coming in from the opinion end... we have not just facts and ap stories, but lots of opinion. how does the user, the public who needs to know, sort out all that?' Is this technological, as Dan suggests, or something that we have to do? A trust network that we have to create? [Bill Buzenberg ] I want to describe breifly public insight journalism. we've created big databases about our audience, and we query them about all kinds of things. they give us some great information that we pass on to news analysts, who give that to reporters. we had a big story we wanted to do on the edu. gap, minority students not doing as well as white students in Minnesota. we set up a poll on our site, and queered our network sent out [thousands] of emails then we get back that information, we go through it that becomes part of the sotyr it also became part of a town meeting we had wwith 200 people there and [many people] from the school board. so basically we're using the audience, which knows far more about the subject than we do... we now have a source as wide as the state. we tap in to the blogosphere; but there are lots of people out there who are not writing, and that's what we're trying to tap into . [mod: Bill B. blew me away with the kinds of things they're doing there with interactive journalism] [extension to 12:10. Dan Gillmor:] we need to expect a bit more from what we've traditionally called the audience. parsing this stuff... it's no longer going to show up on their doorstep in a nice, easy, and convenient way, and in a way that so many folks are skeptical of at this point. In the toolset category, how do we make that less time-consuming to figure out? [mod: one of the final goals from my point of view is, a research agenda...] [Dave Sifry] let me come in on sth jim said, and david and dan too, maybe moving slightly away from objectivity. to me the relevant thing when I read the media is about trust. do I trust the person I'm listening to or reading, or watching tv? knowing that there are fact checkers, that there's an editorial board, that there's an attempt to be objective helps me trust an org or a newspaper more. but also I can see what the bloggers are saying; if I watch what they do over time, and also what are other people saying about the, thatgives me a huge amount of information about whether I can also trust those people. That's wehre it really meshes in terms of common ground. the NYT isn't going away b/c anyone can have a printing press, or their own blog. there is a whole lot of trust in everything the NYT does, even when they screw up. sometimes I run across a blogger who's a nut, and they may not be wrong... but it means I"m going to take [anything] they say with an extra grain of salt. [Robert Cox, nationaldebate, and the MBA] on objetivity: as someone who is not a journalist or part of academia or any institution... as just a guy with a blog, my thoughts about objectivity is that the people writing have to provide access to those they're doing storeis about. my view of objectivity isn't so much left or right bias, but about "they know where their bread is buttered" and they can't afford to write/say certain things. as a blogger I' I've had to experience being subjected to various legal threats from the NYT and got to talk to various people at the NYT off the record... I had the opportunity to blog about [certain things] but I didn't, because I anted to continue to know about what was going on. [David Weinberger, probably the most disclosed guy I know] [oops, wasn't raising his placard] [Jane Singer] At the UIowa, giving an academic perspetive. I think it's true that the audience is going to have to do more work. how do we enocourage members of the audience to search out ideas they do not agree with? journalism at its best encourages or pushes people to see things they don't agree with that motivates them in different directions? How do I avoid channeling myself in very narrow directions... [Andrew Nachison]?? I have mostly questions: going off of Jay's paper and his comments, how does this relate to credibility? is the quest to discover how mainstream media can be more creible? or how it can interface with bloggers in a more credible/meaningful way? it seems to me that going back to jay's paper, if you accept this notion that there's been a cataclysmic transformation, a change in powe relationship... this bloggers vs media conversation needs to evolve to sth else, where media comes to look upon bloggers as "us". I don't think this is about credibility, objectivity... it's about respect. and focusing on why you do what you do, whether you're a journalist or a blogger. [mod - what is the series of threads b/t what journalists and bloggers do, that leads us to a place where people who are feeling overwhelmed ... find more trust] AN - I don't htink the point of journalism is to create credibility... I think the point is to create a better world. and one can do that credibly or not... [RMack] I think that if you're pursuing short-term credibility, you' re often [hampered by traditional media]... In pakistan, things that are going on there, things that editors were really wary of reporting on too much, since the US after 9/11 didn't want to see too much about afghan casualties... there was in fact a memo regarding what could be reported on from afghanistan. but the point is, what was really going on was a ratings war b/t FOX and CNN... as ratings shifted, that meant that viewers of one found that source more credible than the other. and this was related to the source telling people what they wanted to know [and not telling them things they didn't want to.] a really important question is, are you pursuing short-term credibility too exclusively [and ignoring truth or balance in the process] in the blogosphere, likewise, are you creating communities that are very credible b/t one another, but are not in fact dealing with facts that are [unpopular in those communities] ... [final group: susan, chris lydon, xx] [Susan tifft] I come from a trad background, worked at TIME. Now at Duke. I want to pick up on things Dan and Jane said... I'd guess the average age here is 40... this younger generation have very little concept of [what we learned in journalism school]; when we talk about expecting more from the audience, there has to be some kind of education about this. last semester, I asked each of my students to adopt a blog about the election... kind of like adopting a pet rock it actually began to hone their ideas of what was credible/objecting/fair/balanced [as they also followed mainstream media] and at the end of it they learned a lot. but as rebecca said, how can we prevent people from just tuning in to what they agree with? ... [Jeff J] the diversity of voices is great; thta's a misinterpretation of the medium we link to things with which we disagree to show we disagree with it! [Alex?] * jonl is now known as jonl_away the homes that link more directly to blogs, that have broadband, etc, are more informed than those that are not. the most info-abundant people were more aware of opposing points of view. heavy information seekers : 15-25%. the people who are most self-selecting are the least information-engaged. (sorry, 15-25% of the general adult American population) [this is all referencing 1 or 2 studies, uncited] [mod - the study supports Jeff's take on this.] .. [Chris Lydon] there's a real conversatoin her,e not b/t bloggers and journalists, but b/t the blogosphere and the world of journalism. we're just not well informed! 70% of people thought Saddam knocked down the Twin Towers. He didn't! And the NYT never told the people, 'there's this urban myth that's really leading the country astray' the goal of journalism is ... wisdom, and saving the planet. that's what I love about the internet, b/c it's about everyone taking omre responsibility, everybody doing more... feeling something and just doing it! [dave winer] bravo chris, more of that I think we need to do more... bug list.s s* "why did we delete Howard Dean's candidacy?" etc. here we are, a grup of people who care about news. what are we going to do, talk about theories, or examine what went wrong? [Jay Rosen] thakns to everyone who read and comented on my apepr. Bill was saying the MPR is learning how much their audience knows, and how to tap into that - that is a BIG change for american post-war journalism, founded on the idea that the audience is the people whoh /lack/ knowledge. Bill wants to do the opposite; that's a really big idea. The thing that's different about technology today doesn't have anything to do with the issues raised here. Of course we want people to step outside their beliefs. That's not objectivity, that's intellectual integrity. but it used to be that quality information came from good processes, skill, talent. but today we're realizing that it's the quality of the connection with people [with sources] that determines quality of information. existing orgs have put all their effort into making information 'quality' but you'll have quality information if you are connected to quality people. [mod - I'll hand the last word to Jonathan Zittrain] [the reason I'm turning it over to Jonathan is he's the best synthetic thinker I know, and there are lots of common grounds ew have to find... I hope coming out of this we'll have a series of possible roadmaps for the next two days.] [He's now the only one standing between you and lunch :-) ] JZ - I'll bet a lot of us are thinking about how to summarize this session right now, especially those reporting for a newspaper who have to write up a story about it, ... I know there was a lot of hype leading into this conference a /lot/ of hype for me I konw the media likes to write a lot about itself... but I've actually been thinking a little about law, since I"m about to start teaching torts on monday, and thinking like I'm a lawyer. it struck me that lawyers are both officers of the cout - cardcarrying members of the status quo - whose job it is to nip at teh status quo, to challnge it, depending on what role they're asigned at a trial. And I wonder if that's not what journalism is meant ot be, too; a duty to change the system and a license to practice it. law is actually in a crisis right now, and since lawyers don't accrue billable hours by talking about it, they unlike their more intellectual counterparts don't talk about it much... but I think we're developing an almost bloglike form of law, where we have firms such as jarvis and winer, where they put their reputations on the line for change they believe in... Here things are unlike law, where there is no space for amateurs. pressure ofrm amateurs means pressure from people who do it because you love it... Why am I taling about all of this? I think there's some sense that journalism is similarly ill right now. both in terms of not properly setting an agenda for people, and as going down the items of the agenda, not speaking truth. / and just as I claim that law matters, since that's what means putting people into jail at times, news matters, since people turn to the news to frame their opinions of where we stand in the world, and what we should do about it. dave winer says we know saddam didn't knock down the twin towers... do I know that? how do I know? If the person with two watches knows the time better than a person with one, here we have a world with thousands of watches, and some watches are pegged to other watches, so it's hard to know how many independent watches there are, and you're trying to figure out what time it is! People will have to discern from duplicitous and multiplicitous sources... that's why there has been so much talk about technology. if we have gone to all this trouble to design this huge map, that is problematic precisely because it is so big [ref to legend about a king who wanted a one-to-one map of the entire world] by the end of the day we may have an answer... at least we will be slightly less polite and more real to one another, which is good. we want to make the neterpreise of words annd representaitons about reality better, and figuring out how to do that -- is there some shared vision that can come about so that we can arrive at a better representation of reality [it must be summarized, or else the summary would end up as long as this session itself/...] people are excited about blogs, excited about journalism, and I at least woul dlike it not to be the pattern of CB radio, where the US went on a bizarre fascination with CB radio, and though it was the gateway to the New Thing... I think this is more than that. But I don't know if ifve years from now we will see it this way, and whether collectively we will find a way to harness [this potential] [mod - Judith Donath from the Medial Lab will be speaking during lunch... starting in 10 min or so there's also a geek dinner w/dave winer tomorrow night] [mod talking] new people have joined us: joe trippi... charlie nesson, founder of the berkman center and miles! flying this morning from florida to here. I'm going to get out of the way and turn it over to judith donath. [early work with e-postcards a bit over 10 years ago... written much about the social net] part of why we've asked her to be the lunch speark is that we're dealing with disruptive technologies. she's one of the finest people working right at the juncture b/t theory and practice [JD] thank you very much! when I was reaing all the blog entreis this week i was thinking this is the most intimidating audience I've ever spooken to so since it's after lunch, it's like speaking to the lions ater thek ill... time for a siesta talk [she hopes :)] it's not only journalists and bloggers who need to establish cred people need to establish cred in all kids of ways animals too a lot of what I look at is the nature of identity. I've gotten very intersted in framing it in terms of signaling theory this came out in the world of econ especially in Thorsten Veblen about why people waste so much money on excessive displays. more work has fcoem out of bio Why do peacocks have such enormous taoils? and moose antlers so heavy and detrimental to their health? the naswers had to do with th efact ... [the accepted understanding:] that these things are signals *because* they are costly if you can afford to give off such a costly signal, you must be stronger than the others... in the world in general, and certainly in the world of journalism a lot of what we're interested in knowing is a hidden quality (are you a nice person/ would you be a good boyfriend/ what do you really think of me?) bue we have to rly on a perceivable signal that is related to the quality we're after. the way your eyes shift when you speak to me, what I've herad from someone else.. then we have to undrestand how they relate to the quality we care about [this gets into semiotics... where animal behaviors don't relaly go] but I'll talk about here more how these qalities relate to the underlying signals. there's a lot of complex underlying game theory analysis... but in general, if sth is less costly for the signaller to give, it will be fairly honest with assessment signals, where the signals are very expensive, [the signals themselves] that's where you get that cost. but for instance the words that say "I love you" is a signal.. doesn't exactly tell you what my internal state is, but it tells you something. it's not completely expensive to give that signal, but there are other signals whose quality is given by convention, particularly via reputation: in the world of animals there is also reputation. sparrows have pecking orders; lots of them have black status patches on their chest. they get a lot of respect if they've been able to grow this status badge, but it's a a conventional signal, not really status. if you paint a signal on a sparrow, he will be able to hang out with all the other sparrows... but somehow after an hour or so, someone will probe him... and once they realize that one of their own is wearing a fake badge of status, they will attack him mercilessly until they kill him. [cheering, Alright, yeah! from a few audience members] it's the nature of justice. [JZ - it wasn't that the sparrow was weak, it's that it LIED about it!] [Judith again] right, exactly. So: what do the webs of links among bloggers really moean? how do these start to build the reputation and credibility system that would start to produce repercussions for not being [truthful] I'm going to differentiate b/t bloggers and journalists: I think for a lot of the credibility issues, a single-paper town journalist is a lot like a blogger, and different form a journalist working in a big city paper. certainly the question Dave Winer has brought up a few times, is hat do you want to know about a writer? does knowing a lot about a writer give you a real sense of [his] credibility? Another question is: with the sparrows, they had to have the energy to go and attack the [faking] one. there's not only a cost to keeping the signal itself honest, but there's also the cost of being a receiver. it takes a lot of effort or time to monitor thatn. It can be dangerous.. if you're a frog singing a song, and a lady frog goes out to listen to that, and listens for a long time, she can be eaten by a predator. In the blogosphere, do other people care enough to put a lot of time into analysing [other blogs]? how much time am I really going to put into researching their backrounds, reading their entire history? So we eant to ask, i there a way of making something I can look at at a glance, so that there can be other people, who are more of a journalistic elite who are going to pay that cost [and others can just observe the results] one of the things you have with a traditional structure is that the journalistic board risks *its* reputation on its employees reputation so they're highly motivated to check the reputation of their writers. What's the benefit of doing this (for other bloggers?) certainly it's not just a benefit to their opponents who would just sit there saying 'you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong' when will we form collectives of bloggers, who will decide together what is credible in their universe? right now when people attack you, there's so much goin gon online, it's har to tell when that's noise, and when it is something really credible [as a complaint] one other thought to leave you with: what are the roles of names and anonymity, and when do we want to know more about the people [who are right] I came across while preparing for this talk people writing about life in Iraq there's one who writes about daily life in Baghdad, bombing outside her window, now they're out of heat, of kerosene... but this is incredible, she's anonymous; there's no reason for us to believe she's in iraq. [so some say] what are these things really saying? would her use of a real name be more of a signal that she really isn't there? [since she's writing things that would be so unacceptable] or is her level of detail an indication that she is there? identifying the signals that help you really understand are important for measuring credibility, at a time when we're seeing such upheaval in the form of news and opinion. [mod - pehaps 10-15 min of comments] [talk about bloggers and journalists; is it different in either zone?] [jon bonne] I have a feeling we're getting to more of this, and will keep circling back to it over the next 36 hrs or so there is certainly an argument for 'showing your feathers', but I keep questioning what the limits of that are. it's one thing if you stand alone as an individual and say what you like, but: when you work with others... if you need to try to convince confidential sources you're worth talking to, when you have private earnings statements, etc ... I think every journalist has revealed portions of their background and credentials to sources at times... but I think if you put everything online, saying "here's who I am, this is what I believe, I'll keep answering any questions you have..." There are people tracking these things. Politically we've seen people or companies decide a) I don't talk to them anymore, and b) they don't get to say anything about me anymore. if you work within a corporate construct, you are bound by the fact that you are their goto person for [your sources] , so if you [alienate them], either your company losese its sources, or you lose your job, or both. [mod - how much do *you* disclose?] [jb] I disclose more now on my personal blog, only b/c its useful in providing context and my experiences specific to food, and in some cases repoting I don't disclose as much at MSNBC, b/c in pat that's how we do tihngs: we don't have massive space for disclosure. I'm sort of agnostic onj whether we should or not. I think that anyone who visits me at MSNBC can find everything else I've done; whether it's at MSNBC, on my blog, on the web sometime after 1996... * jonl_away is now known as jonl just b/c I don't happen to have it in the agline for a story, doesn't mean that people don't have access to it. [jeff j] you're right jon, thinking about the institutiona dn how you're going to have access. but then, how does a reader konw to trust you unless they know your background. and how do you trust them to konw all that and assimilate it? this was a listserv discussion... I'm sorry I don't know who it as with. I gave an example that when I writea bout the first amendment and Howard Stern, it's relevant to konw that I"m a Stern fan. ...my sister is a Presbyterian minister, and a good scotch-drinking one at that... but the real thing that came out of the discussion is, well ah! Consider it a conversation. "Oh, you listen to howard stern! you must be a godless [xXx]" "No, I listen to howard stern every day, and I go to church every week!" The whitehouse similarly can have this kind of nyah-nyah conversation with reporters... [Dave Sifry] Judith: terrific prsentation. I found that a lot of the things you said were very interesting. I love the idea of the signaling model, and the econ of signaling. let me just talk about anonymity, accountability, and pseudonyms. [Salam Pax, ... who is this guy? is he really Baghdad Blogger? is he a CIA plant?] andl, yes he is real, and he is now writing a column for the Guardian. one thing I've found really interesting was, having your full name out there w/multiple ways of finding and investigating a person is always a good thing. when you choose specifically to not reveal that information, like in a whistleblower case, which I think is apefectly valid case for pseudonyms... where you're afraid of retribution or Saddam's men killing you the level required to trust that source goes way way up. in the end it took, I think Paul Butan?, who did a bunch of investigative reporting and said "this is a real person, I'm not going to tell you who he is because his life is in danger" I think the larger issue is, people yell a lot about anonymity; I'm not sure anonymity is necessary, but what's more relevant is, if you have a pseudonym, and also accountability. the problem with anonymity is the lak of accountability, so anybody can say anything and just disrupt the conversation. but if you have acountabilit, I'm watching the things you say over time and there are other things to gain from that. That's where the Salam Pax case was so transformative for me wrt blogging. when you remove that context, "Hi, I'm David Sifry, you can look me up in the phonebook... and find out that I am a real person and I own my blog" the level of trust becomes harder to achieve, but it can still be achieved. [Jimbo Wales] The thing that I found most interesting in what she had to say, was looking at these issues in a game-theoretic contexst. I just want to thorw in here the way the wiki model works and address the same issues of credibility and objectiity at Wikipedia, there is basically no disclosure of who people really are; most people just write under their username. It's not that people rae anonymous, it's just that noone cares. The wiki model, in which the writing takes place, is very different from the model of the blog if you want your writing to survive, you have to write in a fairly neutral manner. if you don't, someone else is going to come along and change it. Over time, we get a certain credibility and authority over the fact that everything in Wikipedia has been reviewed and moderated by a couple dozen people. You can think of this in this way : disclosure of who you are, revelaing information about whether your Episcopalian or not, is one way; Organizat5ional authority, like reading the front page of the new york times, [is another way] but now the wiki way is another process, a collaborative review process, which is a third way. [mod - is there a clear model in wikipedia for how bloggers should think about journalism?] [jw] I think one thig bloggers could do is to have group blogs, where the individual osts are not just individual posts, but they rae edited by any member of the group. This would help to *lose* that individual role, where you can say I don't know or care who wrote this, but I do know that the 35 people who work on this blog to change or edit things are all very high qualtiy bloggers. [mod - I know dave winer has very strong thoughts on this score...] [dave winer] yeah, if you approach blogs from a wiki standpoint, that 's the way you would do it. but blapgs are inverted: the readers of lbogs themselves become bloggers, and they model themsevles on the primary blog they were reading before. if you ask somebody "which blog begat you", they can usually answer that question. there was a site, blogtree I think, which formalized that, and it turned out to be gtrue true* and then authority sort of radiates down the tree, from the root of your local tree down through the levels.. you get the authority without having to do anything premeditated... but it's the opposite of wikis. [last word - jane? jay as well?] [jane singer] I just have some problem with your baing my credibility about what you know about me rather than on what I say or what I think... [jay rosen] there's a very famous article from the 1950 Social Control in the Newsroom abot how a nesroom has to grab new recruits, and keep them in line, keep them from screwing up and ther ason young journalists have to be controlled that way is what judith said -- the enormous reputation of the instuitution has been created by thousands of people over hundreds of year. it's tooo reisky to give to a group of people and let them do what they want. but you DO want thse people to enefit from this resource. When you start at the oston lobe, you benefit from this huge resource you didn't have any hand in creating. up to now, we've een concerned about whether individual journalistss would RUIN the web of trust. now we have to worry about whether they contribute to *creating* trust, which is something we haven't considered before. These people will have new responsibility, but also have the capability of adding to that [trust] asset. relationships in the newsroom will change. there are relationships of trust among journalists within a news org that will also come under pressure. that's where the problem is in lettering individual journalists blog... [mod - one thing that didn't come up this morning was money] [then ethan, zephyr, jonathan, and judith] [jon garfinkle] (using ethan's microphone) [ethan - I want to be firm that I do NOT imply that linking equals endorsement [here] :) ] garfinkle - I want to address the question that was very much on people's mind in the runup to this converence: the birds are able to tell what's foul or fair. the Q is, whether the blogger community, of both readers and writers [not every reader is a writer] can figure this out. active bloggers have a fervent audience, who says these guys can do no wrong [even when there is evidence to the contrary] in the press, there is an institution that says, "60 minutes screwed up! we don't want to go there" bloggers have been criticized [in this regard] and have suffered. [dave winer: "oh, come on!"] [?] I don't htink it's inherent in blogging, but I do think it's often the case that they often do research via Google. I immediately wen to my bio for this conference [when it went up] since I don't have such a big footprint in Google there was some good stuff.. but there was also some anonymous text which he quoted and attributed to me... which actually belonged to my friend who shared that blog with me and that text will now be associated with me [in google] for all time . [...] [zephyr] somebody mentioned the jury model.. I really enjoyed your talk, judith to think about the ways that bloggers are witnesses... we've dealt with the confidential informant: when can the informan speka/ when are they only used as background? how are non-conf. informants judged? there's a special treatment given to informants who say something surprising in the heat of a trial... there's a sense in the blogosphere that b/c some [statments] are immediate, [they] are more tru. true* when will we decide on norms of who can or shouldn't be trusted? [JZ] It sounds to me as though we started with credibility... Judith steered it towards reputation and how you present yourself how you paint yourself what spot you mark on your bosom... but then Jane pointed out that reputation can't be the whole game I gather that means both getting it right (aspiring to produce a set of words related to reality) and when you make a mistake, publishing a retraction when you get it wrong [in an RSS feed, for isntance, you send it out and can't get it back] I actually want to leave a question, is there a third step to this: not just what you say and what you do, but how you live? I wonder, among the people identifying a full-time journalists here... who have said proportionally far less than others... is that part of how professional journalists live is not to hold forth so much except through a byline or package or tv/radio in that sense it's almost more about what you don't do than what you do... not registering for political parties, not only keeping it private, but not registering, so that they don't associated with one or another. I take it they might also turn down parties that they don't feel comfortable going to [or conferences! -mod] I wonder how much reporting entails standards that mean you're living your life differently, as with priests... [mod - religion is everywhere] [judith: last word?] judith - I think a lot of thse issues came up with identity and credibility. bringing it a little bit back to the ?? side, it matters how easy it is to say something : it's very easy for me to say I'm a singer-songwriter on my site in tems of signalling that's a very cheap, conventional signal. are these times when we say we want people to announce their affiliations, when this is not really credible, especially considering what's being left out? Those are the things people want to know and the kinds that are unlikely to be conveyed through [a simple disclaimer] There are exceptions: people spending a long time to build up a sepraate identity/reputation... but in general, those ar things people aren't very willing to get rid of. And finally, I think Zephyr's point is a good one; thinking that there's suspicion of certain things as thought -- there's a writer named Irving Goffman, who talked of "expression given" and "expression given off" the former, what was intended, and the latter, what was actually perceived by others but given any of these signals, what we're trying to get at is some underlying quality that's not actualy perceptible; what are the mechanisms by which people observe these? does Episcopalian bring out a particular prototype? Democrat? Radical? does the food we like or the things we have said... what does the picture people have formed in their minds, given these signals [look like]? Sort of like writers for the economist: they are sort of [neutral], empty I thnk that's probably something useful for us to consider here: we like to think the more we know about someone the more we understand what they're saying. but really it's the more we THINK we know the more we THINK we understand... so the more information we have, the more likely we are to make a big mistake when we really don't understand. [break!] [reconvening in 5 minutes] [post break] Journalistic credibility has been declining for some time and now there is great diversity in who owns the business. and in who the business supports - such as journalists. what I think is unmistakably true, as jay rosen said today, is that the blogosphere is on the ascendancy. we're at a point where it is taken very seriously, but exatly how this is going to unfold, we don't really know. One of the things we're going to try to get at, I hope: is what institutional journalism is going to address as it becomes more... "bloggeristic". There are representatives of some of the largest journalistic institutions in tihs room. they have not xpoken much so far. they are moving forward in an area that isgoing to include some o fhte things, some of the efforts and values that the blogosphere is now ionerering. this ground is being broken,as jay said, not by the journalists but by the bloggers; that doesn't mean that it is all going to belong to them. It seems to me that they're giving institutional journalists the opportunity to take what's being offered to them and do something with it. they have th emoney, the existing infrasctructure, the brand. they can take these tools, and rebuild that infrastructure, rebuild that credibility, to help them stay in existence. they are going to be fighting for their lives -- they all are right now. I want us to be looking at the quetios, how can the mainstrem adopt blogging in a way that does not compromise them or the blogosphere. The issues of transparency and accountability is one of these [big issues]/ I think Bill B. created a model that is a new one - an institutional entity, which, though it's not a commercial one, is a traditional one. I feel for us, the mainstream traditional jourmalism world, the one I come from, [needs to know]: what can I use and what should I not use... without blowing orselves up in to something we're not, without beoming corrupt. for the blogosphers the question is how are they going to repond to this world, which is being carved out if it hasn't been already, by institutional journalists. Do they become institutional journalists themselves? What does that mean to the values of the blog, if anything? I want to work out these things not so abstractly, and get to these points of tension, in terms of journalistic practice and points of integrity so to begin with, we have Bill Mitchell here from the Poynter Institute we're going to hear from him, and then a couple of respondents from a different perspective (Dave W and ?) but I hope what we're going to spend our time on is being more expliit about what the future is going to be, and how these two entities, the blogosphere and traditional fjournalims, will end up reshaping eachother... Bill, why don't you take off? [Bill Mitchell] Thanks, I'll do my best to be explicit. Raher than summarize this paper Bob Steele and I have put together, I want to summarize some of the discussions around the table today. 1) is there something we can do collectively, to enable us to achieve better representations of reality? In that context, I'd like to get to three questions: for the sake of this discussion, let's think about ethics not as a list of rules but more as a way the work gets done. the way the publisher interacts with the audience and vice-versa. If journalism is becoming a conversation and not a lecture, it becomes more a relationship and less a contract. What does it take for a relationship to survive? There need to be some articulated terms beyond simple disclosure, and respect for that agreement in the day-to-day relationship. What kind of promises do parties in this relationship care most about? And I look particularly to my librarian friends, not just the bloggers and ournalists in the audience. We've already had a fair discussion about that, and are fairly satisfied that it's not the whole game. I wonder in fact if transparency might not be an analog conept. [21|14:29] [[extension cord trouble? 2min hiatus while lappy finds new outlet if anyone transcribes the audio for these 2 minutes, let me know]] [21|14:32] [karen schneider talking] Karen Fisher[?]'s postings last week: One in particular struck me. "Communities can hold feet to the fire..." It's very interesting for a librarian to see this... I hear a lot about the begninning of the information tranaction wher news is gathered... I represent the other end. I was working at a small library in new york when we received a large check from our assemblyman? and we used it to buy our first internet computer. we set up one-half-hour sessions when you could use the computer. this is a town that has One public internet-access computer available to the public, available for forty one-half hour sessions [each week] when you're asking users to do more work, to do a lot of the leg work, how is a user on a half-hou session each week going to be able to do that? any ethical framework needs to address the needs of the people that you're ultimately serving. And I'm pleased by how many journalists today have talked about that... and I realize as journalists how much we share in common in our professions. Any ethical framework fo rinforamtion needs to be informed by the way it moves through time and space and is transfomred in a veyr lossy way. information has a way of growing legs, walking away from you, and becoming very different things. it starts on a blog, is pushed through aggravators^B^B^ aggregators (maybe that could be a new word :) (audience laughs) recoded, reprocessed, put into dbs where it could be taken out of context. But I think we can't rely on transparency b/c there is no metadata tagging to link that transparency back I love dan gillmor, and he said today that the audience is going to have a lot more of the work and I come from a profession where the code is that the users should do a lot *less* of the work. that MPR is doing a lot of community [interaction] is very exciting... information and people need their advocates, and I hope that doesn't get forgotten. If I as a librarian could assign any homework for today, it would be for you to go to the Digital Divide Netowrk and read what Andy Carvin has to say. The majority of people don't read blogs, don't use the internet... As my sister says, "what are these globs you keep talking about?" as for the student, teacher and librarian (re the tsunami) trying to sift through all of this information... [we need to consider their task] [jon bonne] I'm going to pick and choose bits and pieces: to bill mitchell's point of finding out not just disclosure but evne engaging in a conversation about uilding trust in relationships, he talked in his paper about bloggers... I wondered why this shouldn't apply as well to news organizations, to give some insight into the porcess: why things get pulished, who writes them, what decisios get made, whether the right decisions get made and better ones could be made in the future. conceptually, that's all very good. there's a couple notes of caution. going back to this notion of a relationship b/t the producer and a usre of information, if you will the relationship is inevitable. one of the things we're evolving towards is some sort of undertsanding that the relationship is good. It's also worth remembering that relationships can be manipulative: as you want to answer questions, you should be wary of the possibility of people who have agendas to keep you from putting things out [in whatever format] will not simply come ranting at you, but may be much more subtle; the quietly organized letter-writing campaigns to members of congress... you can't dismiss it, but there are larger and not necessarily good motives behind how these relationships get manipulated. just b/c a newpaper gets inundated with tons of questions about why they couvered a certain company a certain way, it could just be the company employees, someone sitting behind the green curetain manipulating controls... [or other people in town complaining] one other point: going to Karen Sch 's point about undrestanding your users the process of understanding ths notion that the relationship needs to be defined but can also have external detriments to it... I think that it's difficult to think that a news org [specifically] can serve all its users equally well by definition, if you're doing good journalims, someone's going to lose. So I think again as we talk about relationsihps with the end user... it's worth keepingi n mind that the users vary users include people you speak well of, people you speak ill of... part of the pro-journalists role has always been to know that bad things happen, and even if the people doing the bad thing are powerful, and try to jump in and say 'were also readers' it's not intended to be a zero-sum game. one of the things we're going to have trouble dealing with is how to achieve that fairness while acknowledging that not everyone can win. [next: tom rosenstiel] [from the Comm. of Concerned Journalists: ] one thing I have to say as an idea: I think a lot of the issueas about what will make blogs creidble and ho journalistm will adapt and learn from the atis no t actually that complicated. that is* and elite members of the blog community (I hate to say it, but you will form elites like any other group) will form agreements to what those standards are. and the marketplace a few years after that will prove some of them right; some blogs will be popular and considered very crdible, that you think are awful. I have three small points by way of background... first: there's a sense in which the norms and codes of journalism came down from Mount New York Times from Moses Salzberger one day... that's not th way it happened. the norms of journalism evolved over the past 200 years... it's not as codified or as monolithic as it looks. the culture did stultify in journalism, and did get disconnected from its audience in large part b/c it became so focused on technique -- journalism was what journalism did. that's not where it started and not where it will end up, but whe you look voer the last 30 years, it will seem like its own unified time, with its own strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, if you look at the data, the public thinks the press is increasingly market-oriented... that media orgs are in it for the money, and individual [pundits] for self-aggrandizement. They may not watch, but that's not where the credibility loss is. the third thing is that commercialism changes everything. when money comes into play with blogs, that will change anything. We could be having this discussion in 1925, talking about radio.... and radio didn't end up where it looked like it was going. when money comes into play, this will all change. [- to that point, some people sya that when money comes into blogs, they will be able to replace traditional expensive blogging.. going out and producing news] [Alex - my question for you is, blogging could act as a substitute for seomthing like FOX news with its expensive reporting. you say you go out and do this harrowing report every year on the State of the News. What do you see in the state of the news that reflects how blogging could be used as a vehicle ?] [TR] I think Tom had the right start: using blogging to increase exposure of journalists to their audience the more blogging can intrude on the newsroom, the better off we will be journalism 101: journalism provides society with a plumb line, tells us where the facts are. to do that, you need reporters that go and find things out, do digging, run between places... and give people an end-product that is their best available version of what was there that day. This is very different from blogs... the risk is that if we can't monetize this[research] enough, we'll have to shrink our nesrooms way down. It's not the blogs that are the risk there, they are going to help us reconnect and do the things that Jay and I and a lot of people have been thinking about for 10 years, for 15 years. The threat is that there will not be enough subsidy to sustain this. [Jill Abramson, NYT] Juts to make things real, to sustain a [news office] in Baghdad, I wonder if anyone here knows what that would cost I wonder if my blog colleagues know what this costs... [Dave Winer] that's a silly questoin. asking bloggers what this costs is silly if you want to tell us what it costs, that's fine... but there are bloggers in Baghdad! that's your competition, that's what you have to deal with [JA] But I think there is real value in having an office in baghdad... a tremendous public service, just to keep a group of jounralist safe, equipped, with drivers... $1 million dollars over the past year. that doesn't even factor in language classes, etc so that journlaists can speak [more effecively] and they go out all the time, out there, just to bear witness; there's a public service in that. and I don't think that's what bloggers are doing there I'm just making real tom's point that keeping the infrastrcuture real and vibrant, covering the perspectiv from iraq, the war... [Dave W] First of all, I want to thank you. b/c we're finally getting some blood flowing in this room] I heard the same conversation in 1981 form the manufacturers of parallel computers "we will always need huge staffs in the glass plaaces b/c the users can't be trusted with thehyir on data" 2-3 years later, thye were gone; b/c they were wrong. [JA = I'm hardly talking about glass palaces; I'm talking about public service] DW - well, I stick with the analogy... Rick K - well, don't, that's not fair. What Jill is NOT saying is that there's no place for bloggersin iraq.. what we're aying to you is, that part of what's necessary inth coverage of Iraq expoensive in coverag of human and dollar costs, is what a group of pro journlaists can bring to the story that plus what the whole new world of blogging can brig to a story - that's better! DW - so why did she ask the question she did? she directed it at the blogosphere!! JA - I'm asking... because Rick knows how expensive it is, I'm just curious if the world konws what it costs. RK - I'm just telling you that we need as much information... and you can't get what [you get] from the networks -- the ability to get in there and move about she's not trying to exclude anybody she's trying to get you to udnerstand that to get anybody in therei n a detailed, structured wa, is very expensive. [Jeff J] Last year, let me tell yo, there's a blogger named Zayed?... I sent him a camera. he went to cover a protest against antiterrorism... they were great photos. he put them up on his blog, they got posted all around. the WEekly STandard put up these photos. The NYT didn't cover that demonstratoin. why? b/c it was "unseen" well, at that point there were only 4 blogs in Baghdad. Dan Rather, when [...] said "oops, we made a mistake!" should have said "good, let's fix it" the Times should have said "good, let's work together to try to get MORE information and MORE facts..." rather than trying to ghettoize people and say "they're not professional" JA - we're not trying to ghettoize anyone... JJ - so Why did you shake your head!? What was wrong with the story? JA - well, I know the story... [he wasn't in Fallujah? hard to hear] ... [Alex - I'd like to ask that we maintain a certin level of civility ] [Dan gillmor] there's been an ongoing situation ther e[in iraq] where al ot ofjournalists have been getting their information from local folks there are a lot of journalists there, but... I'd like to see an experiment where journalists give laptops to these people they're seeing, and to have a symbiotic relationship that would be more visible to people outside the bureau and give us a more nuanced view of what's happening, if we start to ask the people who have lived their all their lives to be part of the distribution process. [Alex - Dan, let me ask you, you've been a longtime trad journalist, you're now devoting yourself to what you call grassroots? journalism. what would a blog from a big organization like the NYT look like?] DG - I'd like to see a blog from some of the people the Times is looking to for its locl content, people who have lived there all their lives, translators... AND I'd like to see the times give a hand to them and say "we're not vouching for this content, this is from the people here... [but we're trying to broaden the dialogue to include more than the traditional reporters]" [JA] I think this gets at the root of what this conference is about: that we are trying to get away from the NYT tradition of not publishing anything where it could not vouch for its authenticity... [laughter] [RickK? - I think what Jill is saying is not that it is always correct, but that it is always accountable [through] the person who submitted the story...] [Dave Weinb] There is a very small range of vocabulary you're allowed to use to express nuanced belief - alleged, said to, reportedly... I know this is a big part of the brand of the NYT at all, restricting this vocabulary but it greatly reduces the capacity for voice. I want to suggest some [technical] changes: things like linking bylines to pages about the authors allowing reporters to blog on the site [not requiring them...] allowing links to pages off of your site letting [us] talk on occasion around topics showing ups what others are saying [I would *love* to see what bloggers are saying about what you've posted] letting us organize the site the way *we* want; I know the front page is an important part of your value, but... allowing us to manipulate your metadata... to let us pull out what is interesting to us reputation systems, recommendation systems, whatever is useful to us... making it incredibly easy for us to aggregate. I konw this is one of the things that is valuable to you, since there's money in that... one more thing that osme of you are doing: on occasion, write your drafts in public. there's a long-form article you're writing; write your draft, let us comment, let us suggest stuff... those are some rally straightforward things you can do. [Edcone?] Thanks to your ciruclation dept... I wouldn't be living in NC if we couldn't get the NYT to our driveway every day. Here's what I'd like to see: the NYT reporting from Fallujah was really, really great. [but it was] just bumped down to #2 [on my list] last week. The report of an ambush in Iraq last week; the details were incredible the detailed sophistication of the ambush, everything belied all the storiees we were told about this "ragtag insurgency"... A week later, that email was a front-page story in the News and Record. The N&R looked at a site that had a blog, and said "wow, that's really amazing." what did the N&R do? They checked out, used their journalistic chops, that Nick ? was who he said he was (the marine reporting on it) they used their strength as a credible journalistic org to vet and publish it. It was in some ways more creible, b/c it was in print; it had the fporce of the media establishment behind it... and to go to a point that Bill and Dan have made: I want to see the NYt use its resources to gather more info from more sources and vet them and bring them to me. [alex j - you've raised a very intersting question... should the blog have posted information about whether or not the [source] was real?] [what if there had been no authentication, just an anonymous post?] I wouldn't have run it... [DW - wouldn't have run it either] It would depend on the credibility of the blogger... Fascinating too, to me, was that the N&R ran the [entire] email. I don't know if the NYT is ready to do that, but if you have time to check out the facts... [Ethan speaking for two people, himself and IRC] I think in the future we're going to have the direct american voice, and a whole slew of raw unfiltered voices... AS william gibson says, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. As for very hard work, getting people in subsaharan africa blogging... there aren't a lot of them. there aren't a lot of people in the [Congo] writing about what's going on there. I *love* professional journalists.; I love that there are budgets to send people out to the DRC[?], to get stories that we really cannot get any other way. until we get [to a world where hundreds of people there are blogging from cell phones] while there are a lot of blogs breaking original material, there are significantly more commenting on existing material. especially in international blogs. [hoder] [missed much of this --Ed.] blogs are bringing back the early promise of journalism:they want to change things the way they think is right. [journalism was originally designed to change things; now they are reduced to reporting things as they happen] [jay rosen] that's one thing bloggfers have the freedom to do: be activists. they also have the freedom to use their blogs as platforms for opinion. neither is necessarily what weblogging is about, weblogging could be lots of things. I don't think there's anybody in or outside of this room, who think blogging is going to replace traditional media. There are hundreds of people debunking this and I haven't found one who is really bunking. We know that we're dependent on the news media, bloggers are parasitic on the news. and it's expensive... we know that too. the NYT, my understanding is that its budget is $180M for 1200 people. the blogosphere isn't going to come anywheere close to that. we know that. Second thing: I don't care when the NYT blogs; from my point of view, the later the better; I won't have that competition; I don't really care. BUT the first reporter who realizes that a weblog is a great tool for drawing knowledge IN form the people the way reporters are supposed to do, and creates a reporter weblog that is strictly about the gathering of knowledge, is going to make a name for his/herself, be an example for everyone in journalism, breaking stories nobody else has, and doing it al from a weblog, there will be no opinions in there. They're gooing to be outside the major metropolitan areas... When we learn how to do it -- I'm not saying we know how to do it -- that person's going to become famous. And it's going to happen. [Alex - I think the fellow next to you, the Socrates of journalism... has said *to my face* that journalism is over!] [Dave W] I never said that... If I did say it... [[joke - someone said "Dan Gilmor always says my readers are smarter than I am". Gillmor responded "They _KNOW MORE_ than I do", which got a good laugh]] there's always a gap between what's heard and what's said. I don't have a stake in journalism stopping or continuing... I"m passionate about nes, and want more information, and want it to be avalable to everybody if there's a way to do it, then I support that. But I don't support, as Jay just told, that we need $180M for the NYT to have a staff of people and tell them, you need to go there and do that... the cost of publishing has just been going down inexorably. It's called Moore's Law, and it's been dropping every year you can't get away from it. "we will always be using mainframe computers" "we will always be publishing with desktop [presses]" ... now web publishing has made everything so much less expensive, you CAN'T depend on [maintaining a budget for such newsrooms] . [..] . The funding/support for such newsrooms is unravelling, and that is going to be a major topic today. [agreement by Jeff J] [Alex] - If this happens, I think something incredibly important for our democracy will have disappeared. Traditional journalism is going batshit trying to figure out how to survive. Maybe, David, blogging, some of the mechanisms you suggest would be helpful -- I don't think that threatens what the NYT does. [Jan Schaefer] we're talking bout blogs as the end game here... I hope theyr'e not! they're just the beginning... because they're a very inefficient way to get information. But it seems to me we should be working in both the blogging and journalims world towards a bette end-product and the better endproduct might be meaningful commentayr and meaningful [conversations] operhaps through better links.. my ideal for doing this would be through a mindset rather than a skillset if you will, and a mindset for harvesting information to [use] the expertise in your community... you would seek participation that would check and balance your story not only did you get the story right, but did you get the right story? you would try to [identify] "did I get it right" and it seems to me that's a paradigm that applies both to mainstream journ. and to the blogging world. [Rick Kaplan] I want to get at your view that mainstream journ is somehow threatened by the blogs or doesn't want them around... we don't have a program starting that doesn't have a blog. we use bloggers and our newsshows sometimes even involve blogging. when I was listening to your suggestions before [david w] I was thinking, we do all that... though even microsoft doesn't give you the ability to staff a blog the way you wish. then again, when someone says that A-Rod gets a new $7M contract, it doesn't do any good for 7 out of 8 journalists to get that worng. we really highly prize anything that has our name on it... we do protect our brands, our names... everyone in our bureaus, in baghdad or anyhwere else, have a great deal of input. and if we don't let them blog, it's because wer really do want to do a lot of cfact-hecking on anything before letting it go out on a blog that would have MSNBC's name on it... we don't want ot have 15 mistakes pointed out on a piece that we're doing on a blog... it just muddies the brand. I htink the greatest thing in the world is the increas in blogging... and that all these attempts to organize - you know, it's not going to work. you're not going to have federal licenses [like TVs have licenses] when I was listening to people talk about "maybe some blogs could get together and [check one another]" there's just going to be infinite blogs, that'll be great! that's what's going to save my butt, save th eNYT's butt. there will be more people to collaborate. we're looking for ways to collaborate with the blog world in a huge way... and we do want to keep a separation b/t what is blogging and straight / uninvolved / traditional journalism we do want to keep a wall b/t them, b/c at some point people are going to want to know, "what's the straight line?" there are a thoushand/million/infinite number of opinions on the blogosphere and that's where I think the NYT would like to be the arbiter of [the plumb line], to be the place that [people] come to to get a sense for which blog is kinda on the straight and narrow. I will tell you that we work undre an assumption: we believe [Jill does, CBS does] there is no room in the public's mind anymore for an honest error. any kind of wrong will be seen a illegal, as an attempt at wrongdoing. nobody makes honest mistake anymore. they're all planned, preconceived, felonious mistakes. so we are brutally careful with everything that we do. one day you're going to have to live undert hat umbrella too. Going forward, the idea that you are energizing thr ocuntry --you rae -- we are -- you are that's going to save our country in the end, b/c we are needed. there rae things we can bring to the table (strange, dangerous places you can't get to) and there are places you can get to that we can't. during the tsunami, we ran 19,000 video clips from citizens that sent them around the world. I don't care how rich you are, you won't have enough Euros to shoot 19k video clips... [alex - so rick, is the line you draw b/t commentators for MSNBC and SCarborough, etc... but a journalist for MSNBC canont?] [rick k] no, we let journalists blog. we don't let them do their drafts [online] because, once you correct it, how are you going to tell the 15 million people who saw it you made a mistake? [Jimmy wales] I've been waiting ever since she commented on how much a news bureau costs I wanted to say that 5 yrs ago, if I sat before this or any other group, and we discussed the EBrittanica (1986: budget of 15M) and I said, I'm gonna get a whole bunch of people on the internet to write an encyclo, you would have said you're crazy, it will cost M and M of $ but it didn't cost that much; we did it. I don't thnk you can say blogging is never going to replace this... I think it's very unlikely the biz model of the NYT is sustainable over the next 20 years. I hope I'm wrong about this too, but it may be a fact. [JA] I don't know if you point about the britannica is valid or invalid... I don't know if five years ago I would have though it were possible or impossible. if hte iz model is as you predict, and there isn't going to be ap aying audience for the kind of wideranging global emprical reporting that the NYT or other mainstream news orgs do now, the point tI was makinga bout the ost of or Bahad buereau is that I feel that would be a tragic loss, real public service value... [JWales] it's only a tragic loss if it isn't replaced by something far better... [???,msnbc?] - You don't really konw what you're talking about. [JW] - thank you, that was very helpful [???]- have you ever been in a place like Baghdad? it's not fair to say that [JW] - it's not about fair or unfair... as the world changes, people organize themselves... [??] - and you're saying the NYT will just sit there and do nothing as this changes? [JW] - Oh, you can adapt -- IBM adapted and survived thd death of the mainframe, it's just not doing what it did 20 years ago. [Alex] - will the new model be a replacement, or will it be a variation on what's there today? [??] - we just don't want to be cavalier about predicting that kind of demise. [Alex] - I think it's interesting to look at Cable news (and how it's replacing or not replacing network news) [?x - powerline] what is the coolest tool in creating trust? linking to source data every time we refer to economic data, we linnk directly to the source; when we quote a speech, we both excerpt quotes, but we also link to the original, so the readers can see the entire ething. I think a fundamental change or the mainstream media, instead of seeing th e internet version of a paper as the stepchild - well, ew also make it available on the net -- start taking advantage of that medium to make it better than the original. if Paul Krugman wants to refer to economic data, he should link to it! I think there are some important columnists who, if they had to link to their data, would go out of business or change their ways. I don't see any reason why the[se journalists] shouldn't link to their data [which is often available in the Public Domain] there's no reason they can't do as pros what we do as amateurs. This not only gives greater reliability, but demonstrates a different attitutde towards your readers. See for yourself! dont take our word for it! go to the source... Instead of editors saying "take it from us". [Susan Tifft] I just want to bo gack to baghdad and people in iraqon the streets reporting hat was happening to them. people in baghdad for the WSJ wrote a long email letter home to her friends about how hard it was to geather news in baghdad, how she was under house arrest... and other reporters were too. many readers of the WSJ wrote in to say she wasn't a credible journalist, was biased... I think mainstream journs should be able to write these pices; the are very powerful. In a sense she was writing a LiveJournal... at the time, afriend of mine, an editor of a major newspaper, said "you know, in my day, that would have made it into the paper" and Abe Rosenthal, a long time ago, said the best story -- he wanted to find a way to get in to the NYT the kinds of stories journs would tell one another at cocktail parties when they got together, not limited by the straightjacket of convention that some of us [know?] has outlived its usefulness. that's a case where the writer was plumb, and the newspaper was not. [alex - I want to give everyone a chance to speak... ] [faux-Ed-Cone?] I think what we're ultimately talking about is the wintess and the importance of the narrative. in the way that one person can tell a story photographically, in text, what hae you. i hink when ed was describing how a paper took hat beganb as a witness acct and vetted it, put it online... there is inevitably a role for that in journalism [that=objective facts] there's also a role for narrative, tying threads together this notion that reporters are stenographers, just thying things to gether, isn't right... ther eare news orgs where journalists run down a story, tracking down the bad guy, and not just verifying that X said Y said Z said. admittedly there may not be as much activist jounralims [today] but I think there is a role for all these things. [Alex - I agree there's a place for bad guy/good guy. I think that objective journalis doesn't mean you avoid that.. it means you acknowledge [that's what you're doing] ] [Joe Cox] re: linking to NYT stories, that's already availabe, through things like Technorati, or [Mimia Random?] I would say if you're not going to do it, it doesn't bother me, b/c someone else will. Going back to sth else people said: at the DNC, all these people pulled something together Dave had something, and Rick had it do, Dave had something on CNN... there are somethings where bloggers and news orgs work together well. [Dave Sifry] we may have fallen into a false journ/blogger dichotomy. let's get back to... what happens whe we get from 6 million to 60 million [bloggers] how can we motivate trust? I'm a blogger, but continue to read the NYT eery single day b/c I know they're putting al ot of time and effort into something approaching objectivity and I know there's a huge # of other people also watching and catching them. The same thing w/other bloggers. to me what's relevant is the power of many: the wisdom of the group. doesn't always mean the group is right, but if we can build systems, the media, with all the time and effort and monye it puts into this has a treemendous role to play. sometimes bloggers break stories... but how do we make sense to the guy or gal who has fifteen minutes in his day. to me that is the fundamental problem, and I don't think we've solved it yet. [trippi]] it's clear the media and bloggers can't replace one another. we've been really looking into ways to [collaborate]; it wasn't just the 19k film clips; I was reading this guy from malaysia witnessing the use of offroad vehicles, in a daybyday blog about what it was like to try to get by along roads washed out... places we couldn't have sent reporters to, frankly you wouldn't waste the resources, but they were amazing stories. It seems to me a lot of stuff going on with blogs has always been there. consider ohio: the debate whether or not the election was stolen. before the blogosphere, there were all kinds of dsicussion about Illinois, whether Joe K bought or not that eleciotn. we never had a way to see how many Americans had a disagreement or worried about it, the main thing we did was witness the blogosphere, see our blogging... that's what we as mainstream media do best. get to the documents, get the guys and sources, better than anyone else. It's clear there ought to be some melding, some synergy... I don't know how the NYT does that. who the hell are these guys who write all the columns? why not once a week, pick out a great blog column, and run that in the paper? [chris lydon] I want to remind you tha part of the game here is: build this trust; particularly at this point in our history. I've been sitting here looking at that picture up behind david sifry, and thinking it's a hilarious commentary on what we're talking about a photograph of john f kennedy in the oval office entitled The Loneliest Job in the World it was taken by George Tames?, the institutional photographic Times presence in Washington and he'd taking the [first-class stamp phoneo] at that time and he was ushered in to the oval office, and knew the pres pretty well... he saw the president leaning over a table, a NYTimes laid out... and the president said to him, "Where the Christ does this Crock get the crap he puts in this column of his?" * the funny thing was that Crock was a [prize-winning columnist] who won the pulitzer prize for writing about [Kennedy??] so there was a funny circularity in this. Liberate the media from the mass! We don't need to defend the mass media... we need to train them to spend more than 15 minutes a day, David; we've got to train them to think for themselves. we've meanwhile got a tremendous machine to realize this; we've got to reach for it! [Cameron?] Technology hits different industries at different times there was a time when the Times was going to give laptops to its reporters and send them out to do stories, and later synthesize them into a single report... when tape recorders were small enough that Dave Isay[??] realized he could give small tape recorders to subjects [kids in cities] to do their own recordings... and he won a number of awards doing this, since he got interview he could never have gotten himself. This kind of synthesis is possible; it didn't destroy the institution of public radio, or NPR... [Ethan for Hoder] Specifically to Jill and Rick : about the conversation of having pro journalism in the field: why are the people who are out in the field in the middle east, why are so few arabic speakers? how can they expect to undretsand what is going on locally without cultural knowledge/ ? Compare this to reporters who learn persian to go and write articles in persian! and then send reports back... should we be doing more to give people going into these countreis such skills? [Jill A] - I'd say we should have more people going into these countries who are native speakers... we use a blend of local journalists and pors working with our journs at the bureaus... to be honest we'd love to find more arabic speaking pro correspondents. Alex - it's interesting he raised this, b/c one of the luxuries of th eNYT is that it frequently will send a correspondent to school for a year to do nothing but learn the language [and culture? -ed]... ] JA - the problem with the urgency of nes in the middle east is that you don't have the time to do that...] Rick K - our lead journalist in the area is fluent in arabic... RMack - while you have locals who know the local language and culture, they can't contextualize it in a way that makes sense to the audience] do pakistani reporters konw enough about what the people back home know and don't know to write articles that will make senes to them? [Alex - quick 5 min break] [for cell phones, bathrooms, etc] [Mod] new subject we're talking about the issue of money in a more explicit way "the new business model" and what this means for blogging standards Jeff J is up.... and Rochelle? has just joined us. [[yikes! JJ is climbing into th emiddle of the big rectangle of tables... --Ed]] [JJ] I actually don't want to blather at first. I want you to blather at me. my background: media man by day, blogboy by night. I want to energize journ and keep it healthier. we agree about that. let's figure ot ow to do that better. there are ec problems with journalism. [looking at boston.com online] I wrote blog blather about economics of blog ojurnalism. theyr'e bad, we know 1st : classifieds, toilet. retail rev, not looking good. upfront costs going u, audience goin down [?] then I wrote a bunch of questions: there are issues of ethics etc from one medium to the other which we should think about I'm wrong about this list, but we can correct it... I saw gillmor and others added in to say the ethics of journalism, thouroughness, accuracy, transparency, fairness, independence, accountability. ethics of blogs: not a code placed on the, but the ethics of the community by its actions. Transp, conversation, humanity, the link, immediacy. this led to a list of questions: now I'm going to call on you. the idea is, that the busines sof journalims is changing. there are new opps out there, how do we improve both, how do we imrpove our society doing this? 1st: how are e going to use citizen's media? to give us more news, info, viewpoints. [buzz b/] welll.. editors are busy, etc , you set up a skunkworks and do that. databases don't cost a lot to build. I don't htink htis is a huge cost area, only talking economics, but it is change in thinkinlg i think the idea has been restated a few ties around the table, the audience has more or better information than we do. then you have to think aobut getting that into the oournals themelves. we call them analysts -- they take in 600 emails, work on it, get it to the journalists that day. here's what we've got, three things we didn't know have the journalists use that in a report htat evening. [JJ : tsunami... how does citizen's media help jounrlims become more diverse, broadly defined?] [??] [hinderaker] they have been pretty selective about who they wanted to hire (trad media0)... so we're eating their pie. [JJ] rick K, you know blogs better than ayone what advantage does it give you in a business sense? RK - you can chart the growth in one's tv audience as one's blog grows. if you look at those people who have blogs in their carreerrs; some networks started blogging before others. you can chart their growth from 0 audience to 2 million viewers based on how much attention they gave to their blogs. I'm tellin gyou, I don't understand whhy any of you don't realize that -- only a fool would not realize that the blogs are the thing that's going to reenergize -- we have spent Years chasing viewers away by covering shark attacks, by covering innocent murders, tabloid stories of the day... ew've rhased our readers, our viewewrs away, ecoming irrelevnat to all kinds of people. the average cable universe is 2-3M people. if you think that's significant in this country amongh the people who care about the news, that's ridiculous. the only way we'll recover our franchise is if our [audience base] grow[s], and we're working with you... we're all journalists; you can't ctually prove you're not a ournalist, since there's no card to prove you rae. if you pay attention to blogs, and the people at home understand, they care what I want, they care what I say, they even put us on... they give us time! attention time! then you will see your network grow. jeff j - I have to admit what I'm thinking right now is, I wish I were blogging that :-) [to gillmor] there's the fog of war, there are people on the ground getting these new stories; they've got to figure out their sources, and all sorts of things. but first a potluck (??) on news : how should they [bloggers? readers?] be retrained? [dan g] I think they'll have to recalibrate their BS detctors. we have good ones for the old world: the tabloid headline about Bush's newest alien love child is probably false, and the piece in the Times is probably true. but one of the problems among many is that any random website can look as good as any other website. we're going to be working this through for a long time. we're going to hvae to tell people, "be skeptical"' I hope we don't gt to the point where every old reporter tells every young reporter, "if your mother says she loves you, check it out "... [JJ] healthcare journalism - (to hinderaker) is this the kind of skepticism that is going to help, or hurt readers? [JH] we intended to select what seemed interesting, and put out within hours something that was read by millions. the world is full of smart people, and what the Net gives us is a way to reach out to them... if I didn't know about the internet, I would look at that and say, "wow, there's a lot of power there we have to mobilize" [zephyr jumps in] gaming is a big deal now. someone sent me a ink I didn't check about 50% of women in the country being into gaming. skepticism is fun! and its a crude form of a game... and it's incredibly profitable, the more intense and skeptical you make the game. [Rick K] - it doesn't have to be a story as *large* as dan rather. on any number of subjects a lot smaller than that... we have gotten a lot of really great leads about stories we have gotten off of, things we couldn't keep track of... all of a sudden, ew have another couple hundred thousand researchers. [JJ] now be brutally honest with us here: how hard was it for you to learn that? there's an old school of thought that we know what's true and others don't [RK] - I can't think of any incident... I think if I had said "let's take some blogs and just put them live on the site", it would meet with some push back... but we love blogs and use them all the time. [and you had me on 4 times on new year's eve, thanks a lot!] it's a busy night... but the truth about our interest in blogging is shown by the fact that we hired joe trippi. JJ - there is retraining in the newsroom [however] I know some of the fools who don't see the power of blogs, and I think you could help train them to do this. [bill mitchell] I think there may be al