Dan Gillmor是美国草根媒体运动最重要的活动家之一。他在2005年开始全力推动“Grassroots Journalism”之前是圣何赛水银报的专栏作家。
刚看到闾丘露薇在“一五一十部落”介绍了一些“公民记者”的内容。其实Gillmor的这本“We the Media : Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People”是不应该错过的。他凭自己对技术的良好感觉和在新闻界多年的磨砺，对未来的大众传播作了系统深入的分析。所以在这里推荐一下。
正好Gillmor此书使用“协作共创－非商业共享”协议发布。我在RL的开放图书中挂一个项目，如果有人愿意翻译的话，可以直接在这里（ http://rl.rockiestech.com/node/342 ）运行。
英文全本在：
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License
Introduction
1. From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
2. The Read-Write Web
3. The Gates Come Down
4. Newsmakers Turn the Tables
5. The Consent of the Governed
6. Professional Journalists Join the Conversation
7. The Former Audience Joins the Party
8. Next Steps
9. Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust
10. Here Come the Judges (and Lawyers)
11. The Empires Strike Back
12. Making Our Own News
Chapter 1
From Tom Paine to Blogs
and Beyond
We may have noticed the new era of journalism more clearly
after the events of September 11, but it wasn’t invented on that
awful day. It did not emerge fully formed or from a vacuum.
What follows doesn’t pretend to be a history of journalism.
Rather, these are observations, including some personal experi-
ences that help illustrate the evolution of what we so brazenly
call “new media.”
At the risk of seeming to slight the contributions from other
nations, I will focus mostly on the American experience.
America, born in vocal dissent, did something essential early on.
The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment has many facets,
including its protection of the right of protest and practice of
religion, but freedom of speech is the most fundamental part of
a free society. Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the
choice of newspapers or government, he’d take the newspapers.
Journalism was that important to society, he insisted, though as
president, attacked by the press of his day, he came to loathe
what he’d praised.
Personal journalism is also not a new invention. People have
been stirring the pot since before the nation’s founding; one of
the most prominent in America’s early history was Ben Fran-
klin, whose Pennsylvania Gazette was civic-minded and occa-
sionally controversial.
There were also the pamphleteers who, before the First
Amendment was enshrined into law and guaranteed a free press,
published their writings at great personal risk. Few Americans
1
we the media
can appreciate this today, but journalists are still dying else-
where in the world for what they write and broadcast.
One early pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, inspired many with
his powerful writings about rebellion, liberty, and government
in the late 18th century. He was not the first to take pen to
paper in hopes of pointing out what he called common sense,
nor in trying to persuade people of the common sense of his
ideas. Even more important, perhaps, were the (at the time)
anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers. Their work, ana-
lyzing the proposed Constitution and arguing the fundamental
questions of how the new Republic might work, has reverber-
ated through history. Without them, the Constitution might
never have been approved by the states. The Federalist Papers
were essentially a powerful conversation that helped make a
nation.
There have been several media revolutions in U.S. history,
each accompanied by technological and political change. One of
the most crucial, Bruce Bimber notes in his book, Information
and American Democracy,3 was the completion of the final
parts, in the early to middle 1800s, of what was then the most
dependable and comprehensive postal system in the world. This
unprecedented exercise in governmental assistance should be
seen, Bimber argues, as “a kind of Manhattan project of com-
munication” that helped fuel the rise of the first truly mass
medium, newspapers. The news, including newspapers, was
cheaply and reliably distributed through the mail.4
For most of American history, newspapers dominated the
production and dissemination of what people widely thought of
as news. The telegraph—a revolutionary tool from the day in
1844 when Samuel Morse’s partner Alfred Vail dispatched the
message “What hath God wrought?” from Baltimore to Wash-
ington D.C.—sped up the collection and transmission of the
news. Local papers could now gather and print news of distant
events.5
Newspapers flourished throughout the 19th century. The
best were aggressive and timely, and ultimately served their
2
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readers well. Many, however, had little concern for what we
now call objectivity. Papers had points of view, reflecting the
politics of their backers and owners.
Newspapers have provoked public opinion for as long as
they’ve been around. “Yellow journalism” achieved perhaps its
ugliest prominence when early media barons such as Joseph
Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst abused their consider-
able powers. Hearst, in particular, is notorious for helping to
spark the Spanish-American War in 1898 by inflaming public
opinion.
As the Gilded Age’s excesses began to tear at the very fabric
of American society, a new kind of journalist, the muckraker,
emerged at the end of the 19th century. More than most jour-
nalists of the era, muckrakers performed the public service func-
tion of journalism by exposing a variety of outrages, including
the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel
conditions in workplaces. Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the
Cities), Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company),
Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and Upton Sinclair (The
Jungle) were among the daring journalists and novelists who
shone daylight into some dark corners of society. They helped
set the stage for the Progressive Era, and set a standard for the
investigative journalists of the new century.
Personal journalism didn’t die with the muckrakers.
Throughout the 20th century, the world was blessed with indi-
viduals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the
moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose
weekly newsletter was required reading for a generation of
Washington insiders. As Victor Navasky wrote in the July 21,
2003 issue of The Nation, Stone eschewed the party circuit in
favor of old-fashioned reporting:
His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury
himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congres-
sional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time
prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed
paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line,
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we the media
examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documenta-
tion of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the
public domain.6
A generation of journalists learned from Stone’s techniques.
If we’re lucky, his methods will never go out of fashion.
t h e co rp o ra t e e r a
But in the 20th century, the big business of journalism—the cor-
poratization of journalism—was also emerging as a force in
society. This inevitable transition had its positive and negative
aspects.
I say “inevitable” for several reasons. First, industries con-
solidate. This is in the nature of capitalism. Second, successful
family enterprises rarely stayed in the hands of their founders’
families; inheritance taxes forced some sales and breakups, and
bickering among siblings and cousins who inherited valuable
properties led to others. Third, the rules of American capitalism
have been tweaked in recent decades to favor the big over the
small.
As noted in the Introduction, however, the creation of Big
Media is something of an historical artifact. It stems from a time
when A.J. Liebling’s famous admonition, that freedom of the
press was for those people who owned a press, reflected finan-
cial reality. The economics of newspaper publishing favored big-
ness, and local monopolies came about because, in most com-
munities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of
any size.7
Broadcasting has played a key role in the transition to con-
solidation. Radio, then television, lured readers and advertisers
away from newspapers,8 contributing to the consolidation of the
newspaper industry. But the broadcasters were simultaneously
turning into the biggest of Big Media. As they grew, they
brought the power of broadcasting to bear on the news, to great
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effect. Edward R. Murrow’s reports on CBS, most notably his
coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil poli-
tics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism.
The news hegemony of the networks and big newspapers
reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Journalists helped bring
down a law-breaking president. An anchorman, Walter Cron-
kite, was considered the most trusted person in America. Yet
this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost
money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their
prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded)
mandate to perform a public service function in their communi-
ties. The networks were sold to companies such as General Elec-
tric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News
divisions were required to be profit centers.
While network news may have been expensive to produce,
local stations had it easier. But while the network news shows
still retained some sense of responsibility, most local stations
made no pretense of serving the public trust, preferring instead
to lure viewers with violence and entertainment, two sure rat-
ings boosters. It was an irresistible combination for resource-
starved news directors: cheaper than serious reporting, and com-
pelling video. “If it bleeds, it leads” became the all-too-true
mantra for the local news reports, and it has stayed that way,
with puerile celebrity “journalism” now added to the mix.
America has suffered from this simplistic view of news.
Even in the 1990s, when crime rates were plummeting, local TV
persisted in giving viewers the impression that crime was never a
bigger problem. This was irresponsible because, among other
things, it helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that has
stripped away crucial civil liberties—including most of our
Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches
and seizures—and kept other serious issues off the air.
As the pace of life has quickened, our collective attention
span has shortened. I suppose it’s asking too much of commer-
cial TV news to occasionally use the public airwaves to actually
inform the public, but the push for profits has crowded out
5
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depth. The situation is made worse by the fact that most of us
don’t stop long enough to consider what we’ve been told, much
less seek out context, thereby allowing ourselves to be shallow
and to be led by people who take advantage of it. A shallow citi-
zenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an
informed one.
At the same time, big changes were occurring in TV jour-
nalism, and big newspaper companies were swallowing small
papers around the nation. As noted, this didn’t always reduce
quality. In fact, the craft of newspaper journalism has never
been better in some respects; investigative reporting by the best
organizations continues to make me proud. And while some
corporate owners—Gannett in particular—have tended to turn
independent papers into cookie-cutter models of corporate jour-
nalism, sometimes they’ve actually improved on the original.
But it’s no coincidence that three of the best American newspa-
pers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Washington Post, have an ownership structure—voting control
by families and/or small groups of committed investors—that
lets them take the long view no matter what Wall Street
demands in the short term. Nor should it surprise anyone that
these organizations are making some of the most innovative use
of the Internet as they expand their horizons in the digital age.
It was cable, a technology that originally expanded broadcast
television’s reach in the analog age, which turned television
inside out. Originally designed to get broadcast signals into hard-
to-reach mountain valleys, cable grew into a power center in its
own right when system owners realized that the big money was
in more densely populated areas. Cable systems were monopo-
lies in the communities they served, and they used the money in
part to bring more channel capacity onto their systems.
The cable channel that changed the news business forever,
of course, was Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN).
We’ve forgotten what a daring experiment this was, given its
6
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subsequent success. At the time it was launched on June 1,
1980, many in the media business considered CNN little more
than a bizarre corporate ego trip. As it turned out, CNN
punched a hole in a dam that was already beginning to crumble
from within.
Even if cable was bringing more choices, however, it was
still a central point of control for the owner of the cables. Cable
companies decided which package of channels to offer. Oh,
sure, customers had a choice: yes or no. As we’ll see in
Chapter 11, cable is becoming part of a broadband duopoly that
could threaten information choice in the future.
f ro m o ut s i d e i n
During this time of centralization and corporate ownership, the
forces of change were gathering at the edges. Some forces were
technological, such as the microprocessor that led straight to the
personal computer, and a federally funded data-networking
experiment called the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
Some were political and/or judicial, such as Supreme Court deci-
sions that forced AT&T to let third parties plug their own
phones into Ma Bell’s network, and another that made it legal
for purchasers of home videotape machines to record TV broad-
casts for subsequent viewing.
Personal choice, assisted by the power of personal tech-
nology, was in the wind.
I got my first personal computer in the late 1970s. In the
early 1980s, when I first became a journalist, I bought one of
the earliest portable personal computers, an Osborne, and used
it to write and electronically transmit news stories to publica-
tions such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, for
which I was freelancing from Vermont. I was enthralled by this
fabulous tool that allowed me, a lone reporter in what were
considered the boondocks, to report the news in a timely and
efficient manner.
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The commercial online world was in its infancy in those
days, and I couldn’t resist experimenting with it. My initial
epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985. I’d been
using a word processor called XyWrite, the PC program of
choice for serious writers in those days. It ran fast on the era’s
slow computers, and had an internal programming language,
called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly
capable. One day I found myself stymied by an XPL problem. I
posted a short message on a word-processing forum on Compu-
Serve, the era’s most successful commercial online service. A day
later, I logged on again and was greeted with solutions to my
little problem from people in several U.S. cities and, incredibly,
Australia.9
I was amazed. I’d tapped the network, asking for help. I’d
been educated. This, I knew implicitly, was a big deal.
Of course, I didn’t fully get it. I spent the 1986–87 aca-
demic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which
in those days was at the heart of the Internet—then still a uni-
versity, government, and research network of networks—
without managing to notice the Internet. John Markoff of The
New York Times, the first major newspaper reporter to under-
stand the Net’s value, had it pretty much to himself in those
days as a journalist, and got scoop after scoop as a result. One
way he acquired information was by reading the Internet’s
public message boards. Collectively called Usenet, they were and
still are a grab bag of “newsgroups” on which anyone with Net
access can post comments. Usenet was, and remains, a useful
resource.10
CompuServe wasn’t the only way to get online in the 1980s.
Other choices included electronic bulletin boards, known as
BBS. They turned into technological cul-de-sacs, but had great
value at the time. You’d dial into a local BBS via a modem on
your computer, read and write messages, download files, and
get what amounted to a local version of the Internet and systems
8
from tom paine to blogs and beyond
such as CompuServe. You’d find a variety of topics on all of
these systems, ranging from aviation to technology to politics,
whatever struck the fancy of the people who used them.
Fringe politics found their way onto the bulletin boards
early on. I was a reporter for the Kansas City Times in the mid-
1980s and spent the better part of a year chasing groups such as
the Posse Commitatus around the Farm Belt. This and other vir-
ulently antiestablishment organizations found ready ears amid a
rural economic depression that made it easier to recruit farmers
and other small-town people who felt they were victims of
banks and governments. I found my way onto several online
boards operated by radical groups; I never got very deep into
the systems because the people running them understood the
basics of security. Law-enforcement officials and others who
watched the activities of the radicals told me at the time that the
BBS was one of the radical right’s most effective tools.11
rans o m-no t e m e d i a
Personal technology wasn’t just about going online. It was
about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expen-
sive ways. For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of
computer technology.12 But it was desktop publishing where the
potential for journalism became clearest.
A series of inventions in the mid-1980s brought the medium
into its new era. Suddenly, with an Apple Macintosh and a laser
printer, one could easily and cheaply create and lay out a publi-
cation. Big publishing didn’t disappear—it adapted by using the
technology to lower costs—but the entry level moved down to
small groups and even individuals, a stunning liberation from
the past.
There was one drawback of having so much power and
flexibility in the hands of nonprofessionals. In the early days of
desktop publishing, people tended to use too many different
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fonts on a page, a style that was likened, all too accurately, to
ransom notes. But the typographical mishmash was a small
price to pay for all those new voices.
Big Media was still getting bigger in this period, but it
wasn’t noticing the profound demographic changes that had
been reshaping the nation for decades. Newsrooms, never mind
coverage, scarcely reflected the diversity. Desktop publishing
and its progeny created an opening for many new players to
enter, not least of which was the ethnic press.
Big Media has tried to adapt. Newsrooms are becoming
more diverse. Major media companies have launched or bought
popular ethnic publications and broadcasters. But independent
ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credi-
bility: grassroots journalism ascendant.13
o ut l o ud an d o u t r a g e o u s
Meanwhile, talk radio was also becoming a force, though not an
entirely new one by any means. Radio has featured talk pro-
grams throughout its history, and call-in shows date back as far
as 1945. Opinionated hosts, mostly from the political right,
such as Father Coughlin, fulminated about government, taxes,
cultural breakdowns, and a variety of issues they and their lis-
teners were convinced hadn’t received sufficient attention from
the mainstream media. These hosts were as much entertainers as
commentators, and their shows drew listeners in droves.
But modern talk radio had another crucial feature: the par-
ticipation of the audience. People—regular people—were invited
to have their say on the radio. Before that, regular people had
no immediate or certain outlet for their own stories and views
short of letters to the editor in newspapers. Now they could be
part of the program, adding the weight of their own beliefs to
the host’s.
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The people making this news were in the audience. Howard
Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk
radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phe-
nomenon. Both mediums, he told me, reach out to and connect
with “a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream
media.” Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column14 for the
Post in addition to his regular stories and column.
Talk radio wasn’t, and isn’t, just about political anger, even
if politics and other issues of the day are the normal fodder. The
genre has also become a broader sounding board. Doctors offer
advice (including TV’s fictional “Frasier Crane”), computer
gurus advise non-geeks on what to buy, and lawyers listen to
bizarre legal woes.
Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future
of news. In the mid-1990s, not long after I moved to California,
a mild but distinct earthquake rattled my house one day. I lis-
tened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took
calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-the-
spot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices.
t h e we b e ra e m e r g e n t
As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far
more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except per-
haps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college cam-
puses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial ser-
vices such as CompuServe and America Online. But another
series of breakthroughs was about to move us into a networked
world.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology
that became the World Wide Web. He wrote software to serve,
or dish out, information from connected computers, and a
“client” program that was, in effect, the first browser. He also
11
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sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or
HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowl-
edge to publish documents as web pages that could be easily
linked to other pages anywhere in the world. Why was this so
vital? We could now move from one site and document to
another with the click of a mouse or keyboard stroke. Berners-
Lee had connected the global collection of documents the Net
had already created, but he wanted to take the notion a step fur-
ther: to write onto this web, not just read from it.
But there’s something Berners-Lee purposely didn’t do. He
didn’t patent his invention. Instead, he gave the world an open
and extensible foundation on which new innovation could be
built.
The next breakthrough was Mosaic, one of the early graph-
ical web browsers to run on popular desktop operating systems.
These browsers were a basis for the commercial Internet. The
browser, and the relative ease of creating web pages, sparked
some path-breaking experiments in what we now recognize as
personal journalism. Let’s note one of the best and earliest
examples.
Justin Hall was a sophomore at Swarthmore College in
1993 when he heard about the Web. He coded some pages by
hand in HTML. His “Justin’s Links from the Underground”15
may well have been the first serious weblog, long before special-
ized weblog software tools became available. The first visitor to
Hall’s site from outside the university came in 1994. He
explained his motivations in an email:
Why did I do it? The urge to share of oneself, to join a great
global knowledge sharing party. The chance to participate in
something cool. A deep geek archivist’s urge to experiment
with documenting and archiving personal media and experi-
ence. In college I realized that Proust and Joyce would have
loved the web, and they likely would have tried a similar
experiment—they wrote in hypertext, about human lives.
It was journalism, but I was mostly reporting on me. In the
early days, I wrote about the web, on the web, because few
12
from tom paine to blogs and beyond
other people were doing so. Once search engines and link
directories emerged, I didn’t need to catalog everything online.
So I enjoyed having a tool to map my thoughts and experi-
ences, and a chance to connect those thoughts and experi-
ences to the rest of the electrified English-speaking world!
What had happened? Communications had completed a
transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one-
to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a
medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one-
to-many, and many-to-many. Just about anyone could own a
digital printing press, and have worldwide distribution.16
None of this would have surprised Marshall McLuhan.
Indeed, his seminal works, especially Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man17 and The Medium is the Message,18 pre-
saged so much of what has occurred. As he observed in the
introduction to Understanding Media:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of frag-
mentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is
imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our
bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system
itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as
far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final
phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation
of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will
be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of
human society, much as we have already extended our senses
and our nerves by the various media.
Nor would it have come as a shock to Alvin Toffler, who
explained in The Third Wave19 how manufacturing technology
had driven a wedge between producers and customers. Mass
manufacturing drove down the unit cost of production but at the
cost of something vital: a human connection with the buyer.
Information technology, he said, would lead—among many
other things—to mass customization, disintermediation (elimina-
tion of middlemen), and media convergence.
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Perhaps no document of its time was more prescient about the
Web’s potential than the Cluetrain Manifesto,20 which first
appeared on the Web in April 1999. It was alternately preten-
tious and profound, with considerably more of the latter qual-
ity. Extending the ideas of McLuhan and many others, the four
authors—Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and
David Weinberger—struck home with me and a host of other
readers who knew innately that the Net was powerful but
weren’t sure how to define precisely why.
“A powerful global conversation has begun,” they wrote.
“Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing
new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a
direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter
faster than most companies.”
They explained why the Net is changing the very nature of
business. “Markets are conversations,” proclaimed their first of
95 theses with elegant simplicity.
Journalism is also a conversation, I realized. Cluetrain and
its antecedents have become a foundation for my evolving view
of the trade.
wri t i ng t h e w e b
The scene was now set for the rise of a new kind of news. But
some final pieces had yet to be put in place. One was technolog-
ical: giving everyday people the tools they needed to join this
emerging conversation. Another was cultural: the realization
that putting the tools of creation into millions of hands could
lead to an unprecedented community. Adam Smith, in a sense,
was creating a collective.
The toolmakers did, and continue to do, their part. And
with the neat irony that has a habit of appearing in this trans-
formation, a programmer’s annoyance with journalists had
everything to do with one of the most important developments.
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Dave Winer had written and sold an outlining tool called
“More,” a Macintosh application.21 He was a committed and
knowledgeable Mac developer, but in the early 1990s, he found
himself more and more annoyed by a trade press that, in his
view, was getting the story all wrong.
At the time, Microsoft Windows was becoming more pop-
ular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a
troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company. Trou-
bled, yes. But when the computer journalists persisted in saying,
in effect, “Apple is dead, and there’s no Macintosh software
development anymore,” Winer was furious. He decided to go
around the established media, and with the rise of the Internet,
he had a medium.
He published an email newsletter called “DaveNet.” It was
biting, opinionated, and provocative, and it reached many influ-
ential people in the tech industry. They paid attention. Winer’s
critiques could be abrasive, but he had a long record of accom-
plishments and deep insight.
Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the
Mac the ink it deserved. For its part, Apple made strategic mis-
takes that alienated software developers and helped marginalize
the platform. And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft’s
roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright law-
breaking, became dominant.
But Winer realized he was onto something. He’d found
journalism wanting, and he bypassed it. Then he expanded on
what he’d started. Like Justin Hall, he created a newsy page in
what later became known as the blog format—most recent
material at the top.
In the late 1990s, Winer and his team at UserLand
Software22 rewrote an application called Frontier. One collec-
tion of new functions was given the name Manila, and it was
one of the first programs that made it easy for novices to create
their own blogs. My first blog was created on the beta version
of Manila. Winer has suggested that traditional journalism will
wither in the face of what he helped spawn. I disagree, but his
contributions to the craft’s future have been pivotal.
15
we the media
o p e n s o urci n g t h e n e w s
The development of the personal computer may have empow-
ered the individual, but there were distinct limits. One was soft-
ware code itself. Proprietary programs were like black boxes.
We could see what they did, but not how they worked.
This situation struck Richard Stallman, among others, as
wrong. In January 1984, Stallman quit his post at the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He
formally launched a project to create a free operating system
and desktop software based on the Unix operating system that
ran on many university computers.23 Stallman’s ideas ultimately
became the foundation for Linux, the open source operating
system that brought fame to Linus Torvalds.24
The goal of Stallman’s work, then and now, was to ensure
that users of computers always had free software programs for
the most basic and important tasks. Free, in this case, was more
about freedom than about cost. Stallman and others in this
movement thought that the programming instructions—the
source code—of free software had to be open for inspection and
modification by anyone. In the late 1990s, as Linux was gaining
traction in the marketplace, and as many free software applica-
tions and operating systems were available, the movement got
another name: open source, describing the open availability of
the source code.25
Open source software projects are a digital version of a
small-town tradition: the barn raising. But open source projects
can involve people from around the world. Most will never meet
except online. Guided by project leaders—Torvalds in the case
of Linux—they contribute bits and pieces of what becomes a
whole package. Open source software, in many cases, is as good
as or better than the commercial variety. And these programs
are at the heart of the Internet’s most basic functions: open
source software powers most of the web server computers that
dish out information to our browsers.
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from tom paine to blogs and beyond
When the code is open for inspection, it’s safer to use
because people can find and fill the security holes. Bugs, the
annoying flaws that cause program crashes and other unex-
pected behavior, can be found and fixed more easily, too.26
What does this have to do with tomorrow’s journalism?
Plenty.
Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor who has
written extensively on the open source phenomenon, has made a
strong case that this emergent style of organization applies much
more widely than software. In a 2002 essay, “Coase’s Pen-
guin,”27 he said the free software style could work better than
the traditional capitalist structure of firms and markets in some
circumstances. In particular, he said that it “has systematic
advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the
object of production is information or culture, and where the
physical capital necessary for that production—computers and
communications capabilities—is widely distributed instead of
concentrated.”
He could have been describing journalism. In his essay, and
in the course of several long conversations we’ve had in the past
several years, Benkler has made the case that several of the
building blocks are already in place to augment Big Media, if
not substitute it outright, with open source techniques.
He told me that bloggers and operators of independent
news sites already do a respectable job of scanning for and
sorting news for people who want it. The editorial function has
been adopted not just by bloggers, but by a host of new kinds of
online news operations. Some peer-reviewed news sites, such as
the collaborative Kuro5hin,28 which describes itself as “tech-
nology and culture, from the trenches,” are doing interesting
journalism by any standard, with readers contributing the essays
and deciding which stories make it to the top of the page.
According to Benkler, only in the area of investigative jour-
nalism does Big Media retain an advantage over open source
journalism. This is due to the resources Big Media can throw at
an investigation. In Chapter 9, I will argue that even here, the
grassroots are making serious progress.
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we the media
In my own small sphere, I’m convinced that this already
applies. If my readers know more than I do (which I know they
do), I can include them in the process of making my journalism
better. While there are elements of open source here, I’m not
describing an entirely transparent process. But new forms of
journalistic tools, such as the Wiki (which I’ll discuss in the next
chapter), are entirely transparent from the outset. More are
coming.
An open source philosophy may produce better journalism
at the outset, but that’s just the start of a wider phenomenon. In
the conversational mode of journalism I suggested in the Intro-
duction, the first article may be only the beginning of the con-
versation in which we all enlighten each other. We can correct
our mistakes. We can add new facts and context.29
If we can raise a barn together, we can do journalism
together. We already are.
t e rro r t urn s j o u r n a l i s m ’ s c o r n e r
By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emer-
gent, grassroots journalism were in place. The Web was already
a place where established news organizations and newcomers
were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were
making it easier for anyone to participate. We needed a catalyst
to show how far we’d come. On September 11, 2001, we got
that catalyst in a terrible way.
I was in South Africa. The news came to me and four other
people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone.
Our driver’s wife called from Johannesburg, where she was
watching TV, to say a plane had apparently hit the World Trade
Center. She called again to say another plane had hit the other
tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon. We
arrived at the Port Elizabeth airport in time to watch, live and in
horror, as the towers disintegrated.
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from tom paine to blogs and beyond
The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom
Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give
talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to
Lusaka, Zambia. The BBC and CNN’s international edition
were on the hotel television. The local newspapers ran consider-
able news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied
with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other
news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment.
What I could not do in those initial days was read my news-
paper, the San Jose Mercury News, or the The New York Times,
San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, or any of the
other papers I normally scanned each morning at home. I could
barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to
Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was over-
whelming as people everywhere went online for more informa-
tion, or simply to talk with each other.
I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox over-
flowed with useful news from Dave Farber, one of the new
breed of editors.
Then a telecommunications professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called “Interesting
People”30 that he’d run since the mid-1980s. Most of what he
sent out had first been sent to him by correspondents he knew
from around the nation and the world. If they saw something
they thought he’d find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber
relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own
commentary. In the wake of the attacks, his correspondents’
perspectives on issues ranging from national-security issues to
critiques of religion became essential reading for their breadth
and depth. Farber told me later he’d gone into overdrive,
because this event obliged him to do so.
“I consider myself an editor in a real sense,” Farber
explained. “This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the
Net is sort of my wire service. My job is to decide what goes out
and what doesn’t...Even though I don’t edit in the sense of real
editing, I make the choices.”
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we the media
One of the emails Farber sent, dated September 12, still
stands out for me. It was an email from an unidentified sender
who wrote: “SPOT infrared satellite image of Manhattan,
acquired on September 11 at 11:55 AM ET. Image may be freely
reproduced with ‘CNES/SPOT Image 2001’ copyright attribu-
tion.” A web address, linking to the photo, followed. The picture
showed an ugly brown-black cloud of dust and debris hanging
over much of lower Manhattan. The image stayed with me.
Here was context.
Back in America, members of the then nascent weblog commu-
nity had discovered the power of their publishing tool. They
offered abundant links to articles from large and small news
organizations, domestic and foreign. New York City bloggers
posted personal views of what they’d seen, with photographs,
providing more information and context to what the major
media was providing.
“I’m okay. Everyone I know is okay,” Amy Phillips wrote
September 11 on her blog, “The 50 Minute Hour.”31 A
Brooklyn blogger named Gus wrote: “The wind just changed
direction and now I know what a burning city smells like. It has
the smell of burning plastic. It comes with acrid brown skies
with jet fighters flying above them. The stuff I’m seeing on
teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with
less convincing special effects. Then I’m outside, seeing it with
my naked eyes.”32
Meg Hourihan was a continent away, in San Francisco. A
cofounder of Pyra Labs, creator of Blogger, another of the early
blogging tools (now owned by Google), she pointed to other
blogs that day and urged people to give blood. The next day she
wrote, in part: “24 hours later, I’m heading back into the
kitchen to finish up the dishes, to pick up the spatula that still
sits in the sink where I dropped it. I’m going to wash my coffee
press and brew that cup of coffee I never had yesterday. I’m
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from tom paine to blogs and beyond
going to try and find some semblance of normalcy in this very
changed world.”33
Also in California that day, a little known Afghan-American
writer named Tamim Ansary sent an impassioned email to some
friends. His message was in part cautionary, observing that
while America might want to bomb anything that moved in
Afghanistan, we couldn’t bomb it back to the Stone Age, as
some talk show hosts were urging. The Asian nation, he argued,
was already there. Ansary’s email circulated among a widening
circle of friends and acquaintances. By September 14, it had
appeared on a popular weblog and on Salon, a web magazine.34
Within days, Ansary’s words of anguish and caution had spread
all over America.
Ansary’s news had flowed upward and outward. At the
outset, no one from a major network had ever heard of him. But
what he said had sufficient authority that people who knew him
spread his message, first to their own friends and ultimately to
web journalists who spread it further. Only then did the mass
media discover it and take it to a national audience. This was
the best kind of grassroots collaboration with Big Media.
In Tennessee, meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds was typing,
typing, typing into his weblog, Instapundit.com, which he’d
started only a few weeks earlier. A law professor with a
technological bent, he’d originally expected the blog to be some-
what lighthearted. The attacks changed all that.
“I was very reactive,” he told me. “I had no agenda. I was
just writing about stuff, because the alternative was sitting there
and watching the plane crash into the tower again and again on
CNN.”
He was as furious as anyone, and wanted retaliation. But he
warned against a backlash targeting Muslims. He said Ameri-
cans should not give into the temptation to toss out liberty in
the name of safety. He didn’t expect to develop a following, but
that happened almost immediately. He’d struck a chord. He
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we the media
heard from people who agreed and disagreed vehemently. He
kept the discussion going, adding links and perspectives.
Today, InstaPundit.com has a massive following. Reynolds
is constantly posting trenchant commentary, with a libertarian
and rightward slant, on a variety of topics. He’s become a star
in a firmament that could not have existed only a short time
ago—a firmament that got its biggest boost from the cruelest
day in recent American history. The day is frozen in time, but
the explosions of airplanes into those buildings turned new heat
on a media glacier, and the ice is still melting.
22
Chapter 2
The Read-Write Web
Technology that Makes We the Media Possible
I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It
was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Soft-
ware, had called to say there was something I had to see.
He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page
contained except for one button. It said, “Edit This Page”—and,
for me, nothing was ever the same again.
I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain
text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given
page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page.
I made a small change, clicked another button that said, “Save
this page” and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The
software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the
earliest weblog, or blog, applications.
Winer’s company was a leader in a move that brought back
to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee
envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the
1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed
an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your
web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a
decent site.
Writing on the Net wasn’t entirely new, of course. People
had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists,
forums, and newsgroups. Wikis—sites on which anyone could
edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn’t gained
23
we the media
much traction outside a small user community, in part because
of the techie orientation to the software.
What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created was a
breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not
just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead
simple.
Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could
all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the
first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone
with a computer and Internet connection could own a press.
Just about anyone could make the news.
About a year and a half later, on November 8, 2000, I was
sitting at my desk at the University of Hong Kong where I teach
part-time each fall. It was Wednesday morning in Hong Kong,
Tuesday evening in the United States, and I was immersed in the
U.S. elections muddle that left Americans unsure for weeks who
their next president would be.
The U.S. television networks’ news programming was
unavailable in the university’s Journalism and Media Studies
Centre, and local media weren’t spending as much time on the
story as I, an American abroad, might have liked. So I made do
with the tools I had—and I realized something that seems
obvious only in retrospect.
I found a National Public Radio streaming-audio feed and
listened to it. Meanwhile, I was visiting various web sites such
as CNN and key newspapers such as the The New York Times
for national perspective and my own San Jose Mercury News
for California and hometown coverage. I watched as the map of
blue states and red states changed, and drilled in on articles
about individual state races.
I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone
watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a news-
paper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied.
In effect, I’d rolled my own news.
It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest
component was my own tinkering to create my own news
24
the read-write web
“product”—a compilation of the best material I could find. It
was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do as the tools
become more sophisticated, but it worked.
My main focus in this book is on what happens when
people at the edges participate in the news-gathering and dis-
semination processes. Of course, I have to remind myself that
most people will remain—and I dislike this word—consumers of
news.
Yet even if that’s all they do, they can do it better than at
any time in history because technology gives them more choices.
(This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans,
believing they weren’t getting a fair perspective from the U.S.
media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War
and run-up to it.)35
The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one.
To understand the evolution of tomorrow’s news, we need to
understand the technologies that are making it possible. The
tools of tomorrow’s participatory journalism are evolving
quickly—so quickly that by the time this book is in print, new
ones will have arrived. This book’s accompanying web site
(http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) will catalogue new tools as they
become available. In this chapter, we’ll look more generically at
the fundamental technologies.
For people who simply want to be better informed, the
Internet itself is the key. We have access to a broader variety of
current information than ever before, and we can use it with
increasing sophistication.
For those who want to join the process, the Web is where
we merely start.
The tools of grassroots journalism run the gamut from the
simplest email list, in which everyone on the list receives copies
of all messages; to weblogs, journals written in reverse chrono-
logical order; to sophisticated content-management systems used
for publishing content to the Web; and to syndication tools that
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we the media
allow anyone to subscribe to anyone else’s content. The tools
also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile
phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). What they have
in common is a reliance on the contributions of individuals to a
larger whole, rising from the bottom up.
It boils down to this. In the past 150 years we’ve essentially
had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books,
newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph,
and telephone).
The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and
few-to-few communications. This has vast implications for the
former audience and for the producers of news because the dif-
ferences between the two are becoming harder to distinguish.
That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the
relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways
the designers didn’t anticipate. It’s always been this way in
media; every new medium has surprised its inventors in one way
or another.
At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow’s news are
fueling something emergent—a conversation in which the grass-
roots are absolutely essential. Steven Johnson, author of
Emergence36—a book about how rich, complex systems such as
ant colonies come to exist—explained it this way in a 2002
O’Reilly Network interview:37
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than
the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interac-
tion some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usu-
ally without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds
of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.
In no sphere is the whole more intelligent than the sum of
its parts than in digital networks, where the basic units are zeros
and ones—and where, as David Isenberg explained in his
pathbreaking 1997 paper, “Rise of the Stupid Network,”38 the
value soars when you move the intelligence to the edges and
away from the center. The Internet, in particular, is becoming
26
the read-write web
the environment in which the new tools function, an ecosystem
that is gaining strength from diversity. The Web, as it grew up
in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists
of all kinds used to great effect, and still do. But the larger
toolkit is part of an expanding, thriving ecosystem.
Let’s look inside that toolkit.
mai l l i s t s an d f o r u m s
Before weblogs we had mail lists, and they have not become less
important. As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber’s “Interesting
People” mail list is a news source of enormous value to his
readers. It is far from alone.
Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month
teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in
the rise of SARS. I wrote several columns about it in early 2003.
Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email
from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry
Niman, who had created several mail lists. One called SARS Sci-
ence, he said, “targets medical and scientific information on the
epidemic. Members include molecular biologists and scientists
from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well
as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses.” Many of the reporters
covering the outbreak also subscribed to this list. A second
mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease. I
joined both.
This sequence of writing about something and then hearing
from an expert in the field has been a common one for Net-
savvy journalists lately. But in a sense, journalists were late
finding out what nonjournalists had been doing for years.
At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering
just about every topic one can imagine. Mail lists differ from
blogs and standard web sites in at least three respects. First, they
serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community
27
we the media
can make the list private. Second, they tend to be narrowly tar-
geted, such as the SARS list. Third, they are “pushed” to sub-
scribers’ email inboxes. Some are moderated; most are not. The
key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a com-
bination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly inter-
ested lay people. This can be a potent combination.
In 2000, Yahoo! bought eGroups, a primary vendor of mail
lists, renamed it Yahoo! Groups,39 and now hosts thousands of
lists. It’s trivially simple to create a mail list.
Most mail lists have a small readership, such as the “Blog-
rollers” group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each
other about new postings they think might be especially note-
worthy for their peers. Some mail lists have enormous reader-
ships, such as Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” list.
Unlike mail lists, online forums, such as Usenet news-
groups, are open to all comers. Individual forums are hosted by
companies, user groups, activists, and just about any kind of
interest group one can name. Some are moderated, and many
are valuable for spotting trends and getting answers to specific
questions.
From a journalism perspective, mail lists and forums can
amplify the news. They can be an early warning. They can
simply be excellent background data. But their value should
never be underestimated.
we bl o gs
Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and
all.
Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space
between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in
the communications chain. To date, they’re the closest we’ve
come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web.
They were the first tool that made it easy—or at least easier—to
publish on the Web.
28
the read-write web
So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it’s an
online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chro-
nological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the
top of the page. As Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs, the
blogging software company acquired by Google in February
2003, has noted, weblogs are “post-centric”—the posting is the
key unit—rather than “page-centric,” as with more traditional
web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog
postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original
post, thereby allowing audience discussions.
Blogs run the gamut of topics and styles. One blog may be a
running commentary on current events in a specific arena.
Another may be a series of personal musings, or political
reporting and commentary, such as Joshua Micah Marshall’s
TalkingPointsMemo.com. A blog may be pointers to other
people’s work or products, such as Gizmodo, a site devoted to
the latest and greatest gadgets,40 or a constantly updated
“what’s new” by a domain expert, such as Glenn Fleishman’s
excellent Wi-Fi Networking News and commentary page.41
While some blogging software permits readers to post their own
comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a
significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the
comment feature. At the other extreme, the Slashdot weblog,
featuring news about technology and tech policy, is essentially
written by its audience.
What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is
voice—they are clearly written by human beings with genuine
human passion.
Blogs are, as New York University’s Jay Rosen puts it, an
“extremely democratic form of journalism.” On his PressThink
blog,42 a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the
evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why.
Here are the first three:
1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most
(not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market
economy.
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we the media
2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and
amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the
op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of ama-
teurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.
3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers
to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to
entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a soft-
ware program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you
there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to
“work” have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest
machine in the world (with the possible exception of the
international phone system.)
The nature of journalistic authority is shifting, he told me.
In a “bottom-up, chaotic system like weblog world, certain
sites are important without anyone designating that,” Rosen
said. Moreover, when the people formerly called the audience
are now participants, “that’s a different kind of relationship.”
Businesses have joined the conversation because blogs fill a gap.
A few years into the commercial Internet, companies discovered
the value of email for marketing and customer support, not to
mention internal communication. Then came the plague of
spam, which threatens email as a tool for external contacts.
Most corporate web sites, meanwhile, are like most annual
reports: static, stiff, and turgid, with the most revealing informa-
tion hidden in footnotes—sometimes to disguise the truth, not
tell it—and led by a “Letter from the Chief Executive” (or vacu-
ous mission statement) that appears to have been written by a
committee of lawyers and marketing people.
To the extent that even a business blog can bring informa-
tion to the audience—internal or external—with more style than
we tend to see on business web sites, enterprises will benefit. But
what brings people back to personal weblogs is their individual-
ized perspective.
30
the read-write web
Personal blogs also tend to be part of running conversa-
tions. One blogger will point to another’s posting, perhaps to
agree but often to disagree or note another angle not found in
the original piece. Then the first blogger will respond, and other
bloggers may join the fray. As tools are developed to help
people follow those discussion threads across different sites, the
cross-fertilized conversations will spread both in numbers and
complexity even more quickly than they do today.
To date, blogs have been a medium mainly for individuals,
though group blogs are proving to be a smart medium in some
circumstances. The most popular individual bloggers draw tens
of thousands of visitors daily. It’s safe to say that several mil-
lion people have at least tried blogging. How many do it regu-
larly is unclear, but the best bet is several hundred thousand.
The addition of audio, video, animation, and other multi-
media to weblogs has been an obvious move. But it’s taken
some time for these mediums to become part of the blogging
toolkit. Bandwidth (or lack thereof) is the main reason. But as
networks improve, we can take for granted that what technolo-
gists call “rich media” formats will infiltrate. (I’ve added audio
and video to my own blog, with limited success.)
Blogging software has evolved a great deal from the first
products of Dave Winer, Evan Williams, and other pioneers to
the genre. The most popular, as of this writing, are Movable
Type from SixApart;43 Radio UserLand,44 Live Journal,45 and
Blogger,46 but a number of competitors such as 20six47 have
emerged.
wi ki
Can absolute editorial freedom result in anything but chaos?
Yes, when it’s in a Wiki.
Ward Cunningham, who invented Wikis, defines them in
many ways, calling them composition systems, discussion
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we the media
mediums, repositories, mail systems, and chat rooms. “It’s a
tool for collaboration,” he writes. “In fact we don’t really know
what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating.”48
“WhatIs.com” (an online information technology dictio-
nary) defines them this way: “A wiki (sometimes spelled
“Wiki”) is a server program that allows users to collaborate in
forming the content of a Web site. With a wiki, any user can
edit the site content, including other users’ contributions, using
a regular Web browser.”
The crucial element is that any user can edit any page. The
software keeps track of every change. Anyone can follow the
changes in detail. As Cunningham so aptly puts it, all Wikis are
works in progress.
The Wikipedia, a massive encyclopedia, is the biggest public
Wiki, but far from the only one. There are Wikis covering
travel, food, and a variety of other topics. You can find a Wiki
category page on Cunningham’s site.49 One of the best exam-
ples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful
is the WikiTravel site,50 which brings together a variety of view-
points from around the world.
Wikis are going private, too. They’re increasingly used
behind corporate firewalls as planning and collaboration tools.
And entrepreneurs are even starting to form companies around
the technology, extending it for wider uses.
Wikis are making inroads on campuses as well. My colec-
turer at the University of Hong Kong set up a Wiki for our stu-
dents to use as a planning platform for the 2003 class project.
The project looked at a controversial proposal to fill in more of
the harbor for development. Students posted their outlines and
story proposals on the Wiki and used the site to flesh out the
ideas. Instructors could watch over their shoulders without
interfering except to offer guidance. The Wiki was perfect for
this task.
Their use in journalism, at least the traditional kind, is
almost nonexistent. But as Wikis become easier to use, they will
32
the read-write web
become a particularly well-suited tool to compile information
from disparate sources, collected by people in different physical
locations.
s ms
If weblogs are becoming the opinion pages and, sometimes, even
the newspages of the Net, short message services (SMS) are
becoming the headlines. For bulletins, there’s nothing better.
Think of SMS as instant messaging without being tethered
to a PC.51 SMS isn’t a product per se. It’s a service offered by
network providers that allows customers to send text messages
over their cell phones. About the only things that differ from
carrier to carrier are price and the kind of device a customer will
use.
SMS has been a staple of the information diet just about
everywhere where mobile phones have penetrated markets,
except in the United States. That is surely changing. Forward-
looking newspapers in the U.S., along with other kinds of infor-
mation providers, including companies that have time-sensitive
information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assort-
ment of SMS services. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s SignOn-
SanDiego.com, for example, offers SMS alerts on local news.
And I’ve signed up with United Airlines and American Airlines,
the carriers I use most frequently, to be notified if flights are
delayed.
Journalists can use SMS in any number of ways; again, this
is much more common outside the U.S. The first inkling among
journalists of China’s SARS epidemic came in an SMS from
sources inside the medical profession there. Was this signifi-
cantly different than simple phone calls in its fundamental
nature? Not really. But in a place where being overheard can
lead to big trouble, it’s much safer—as long as one’s messages
aren’t being intercepted—to simply send a quick SMS.
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Over time, perhaps the most important value of SMS will be
of the kind described by Howard Rheingold in his prescient
book Smart Mobs:52 a self-organizing information system in
which individuals and small groups tell each other important
news. Rheingold relates, among other examples, how citizens in
the Philippines used SMS to organize and overthrow a corrupt
government.53 On a more prosaic level, young people in coun-
tries with advanced wireless communications have used SMS for
social organization. We’re just at the beginning of this tech-
nology’s development. As networks and handsets improve, SMS
will give way to video messaging, with yet to be understood
implications.
Professional news people will need to be plugged into
tomorrow’s smart mobs, just as they must be plugged into today’s
informal organizations. This is already a natural state of affairs in
much of Europe and Asia, which lead the U.S. in the develop-
ment of wireless messaging; certainly it was for the Chinese jour-
nalist who received news of SARS via SMS. Technology moves so
quickly that before long it will also seem natural to the men and
women who enter professional journalism in America.
mo bi l e -co nn e c t e d c a m e r a s
Pictures are part of journalism, and most organizations employ
professional photographers. As cameras become just one more
thing we all carry everyday, everyone’s becoming a photogra-
pher. We haven’t begun to think through the societal implica-
tions of this fact, but the implications for journalism are serious.
Digital cameras are a staple of amateur photographers, and
well-financed professional journalists use high-end digital cam-
eras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos
quickly. Video is also going digital at a rapid pace. The size of
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high-quality digital cameras, still and video, is decreasing along
with the cost. Connecting them to personal computers for image
and video editing is simpler than ever, too. As broadband
Internet access becomes more common, quick publishing
becomes simple.
Now combine cameras with true mobility, and the ability to
instantly send an image to someone else or to the Web. This is
the world camera-equipped mobile phones are creating. The
images from early models were low resolution and lacked pro-
fessional quality, but even a bad picture can be newsworthy,
and the quality of phone cameras is getting better at a rapid
pace. Once again, it’s vital to remember technology’s rapid pace
of innovation and improvement to understand just how soon it
will be when most phones aren’t just equipped with still cam-
eras, but video cameras. Tomorrow’s mobile phones will be able
to send information and images to individuals and groups, and
publish to web pages in close to real time.
Keep in mind that public photos and videos are not new.
The beating of Rodney King captured on videotape is a prece-
dent for what’s coming. Citizens have been capturing videos of
tornados and other natural disasters for years as well, and cable
television caters to voyeurs with a variety of shows featuring
citizen-captured police chases, embarrassing moments, and the
like. News organizations have increasingly resorted to using
hidden cameras—an ugly trend, in my view, because only in the
most extreme circumstances, such as when someone’s life is in
danger, should reporters even consider such subterfuges.
We are only beginning to understand the consequences of
this technological development. There will be gross invasions of
privacy. The barring of mobile phones with cameras from
health-club locker rooms is a testament to the improper ways
people have already used these devices.54 But faster networks
and nearly ubiquitous cameras in the hands of average people
means that big events—the ones that have some element that
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can be captured on camera—will be seen, and captured, by sev-
eral or many people. Keeping secrets, moreover, will be more
difficult for businesses and governments. We’ll look at these
possibilities in the next chapter.
i nt e rne t “br o a d c a s t i n g ”
At one time, Internet Broadcasting was seen as the next big
thing, with individuals and groups spawning Internet radio and
news stations with the same ease they create weblogs and Wikis.
But the entertainment industry has all but killed the possibilities
of Internet radio, at least the kind with music, by persuading
copyright regulators in the U.S. to impose unaffordable royal-
ties on Net radio.
News radio via the Net is another matter entirely, and
there’s a big opportunity for people to create their own shows
featuring interviews, audio documentaries, and other formats in
which royalty-free content is the goal. Christopher Lydon, a
longtime professional journalist who has taken to blogging in a
big way, posted a series of superb interviews on his “The Blog-
ging of the President 2004”55 site.56 IT Conversations, a Net-
only program, has been posting interviews in various audio for-
mats along with transcripts.57
Web-based talk radio is another possibility, and it doesn’t
need to be expensive. Two staff members on Howard Dean’s
2004 presidential campaign created an Internet talk-radio pro-
gram by patching together some low-cost equipment. They
showed that anyone can do this, inexpensively and fairly easily.
Look for others to put all the pieces together in a coherent
package that anyone can use.
Internet video is a different matter. While the cost of pro-
ducing video news programming is dropping all the time, deliv-
ering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service
providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs
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can’t afford. This is where peer-to-peer networking may come
into play.
p e e r-t o -p e e r
Remember Napster, the music file-sharing web site? It started a
revolution with its file-sharing model, also known as peer-to-
peer (P2P). If one person had a particular song on his com-
puter, his Napster software would (if he allowed it to) tell a cen-
tral computer at Napster that the song was available. Then
other people who wanted the same song would check the Nap-
ster database, find who had the music, and log directly onto the
computer of the person who was offering the song.
This system, while having some legitimate (and therefore
theoretically legal) uses, was also a haven for copyright infringe-
ment. The music industry sued, ultimately killing the company.
What the industry could not stop, however, was the idea, and
other technologists filled the gap with increasingly sophisticated
file-sharing systems, some of which will be difficult to stop
because they’ll have no central points of control.
There are a number of reasons why P2P is important for
tomorrow’s journalism. One of the most prosaic is cost, because
P2P solves a serious problem: the more successful your web site
becomes, the more it costs you to keep it going. Internet service
providers charge web site publishers in several ways, but one
way is based on how much traffic your site receives and the
bandwidth required to serve the text, images, audio, and video
to viewers. Even a modestly successful video can create a huge
bill for the site owner. This is a unique situation in media his-
tory because in the past, the more successful you were, the lower
your marginal costs.
P2P solves this by spreading popular material around the
network. With technologies such as BitTorrent, a free software
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product, every downloader’s computer is also a content server.58
So the more popular you are, the less it costs, not the other way
around.
P2P is also valuable in a political sense. New P2P systems
under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity
that we’ve seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep
Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censor-
ship more difficult.
As we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, the entertainment media
barons of today utterly loathe P2P, at least the kind they can’t
control, largely because it can be a platform for copyright
infringement. I also believe they fear it because of its assistance
in democratizing media. Either way, they want to put a stop to
it. They must not be permitted to succeed, however, because in
the name of preventing copyright infringement, they are taking
away other rights—including our right to make what’s known
as “fair use” for quoting and personal backups—and they could
ultimately dampen or even wreck the possibility of grassroots
journalism talking hold.
t h e rs s re vol u t i o n
For people who want to “roll their own” news reports, nothing
may be more important for them to understand than a little
known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of
Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part,
for its growing success.
Early in the development of blogging software, programmers
baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands
for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndica-
tion capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to
have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the
content they care about. It’s spawning a content revolution that is
only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could
38
the read-write web
well become the next mainstream method of distributing, col-
lecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is
a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation—and
RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation.
Imagine your own “Presidential Briefing”—with only the
topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the
added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your
browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting.
So don’t think of RSS as just another technology abbrevia-
tion. “Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow’s informa-
tion—or at least some of it,” said Chris Pirillo, founder of
LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters.59
“RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should.
Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to
you on your terms.”
RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every
weblog software product. Create a blog, and you’re creating
RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But
traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its
value, too, and they’re creating RSS “feeds,” as the files are
called, of their own material.
If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog
or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I
can’t force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so impor-
tant: the user is in control.
The web site accompanying this book has links to a variety
of RSS-related software and how to use it. But let me offer an
example to demonstrate how simple it is to get it running. In my
own case, on a Macintosh computer, I downloaded and
installed NetNewsWire,60 a type of program known as a news-
reader or aggregator. NetNewsWire came with a large collec-
tion of RSS feeds to which I could subscribe with a couple of
mouse clicks. For several that weren’t included with the
software, subscribing was trickier. I had to find each site’s RSS
feed web address, copy it, and paste it into NetNewsWire’s sub-
scription chooser.
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Like other newsreaders, NetNewsWire has three “panes,”
much like most email programs. In the lefthand pane is a list of
sites I follow. I click on one of those site names, and the pane at
the top right of the screen shows the headlines from that site. I
click on a headline, and in the bottom-right pane I see a sum-
mary of the article or the entire piece, depending on what the
owner of the site has decided to provide. If I want to see the
original page or article, I need only double-click on the site
name or headline.
Because newsreaders pull together various feeds into one
screenful of information, they are incredible time savers. I can
pull the headlines and brief descriptions of postings from dozens
of blogs and other sites into a single application on my Mac. I
don’t need to go surfing all over the Web to keep an eye on
what all the people I’m interested in are writing. It comes to me.
The formatting and structure of an RSS feed tends to be
bare bones, making RSS a great way to make material available
on non-PC platforms such as smart phones and handheld orga-
nizers, as well as providing a way for web sites to syndicate con-
tent from one another. For example, I have an RSS reader on
my Treo 600, a combination phone and personal organizer. It
scoops up a bare minimum of material from the RSS feeds—just
the headlines and summaries—and provides a great service.
The extensibility of RSS creates some drawbacks. Many
weblogs expose only headlines and summaries to newsreaders,
requiring the user to click through to the source (the original
web site) to read the full text. The irony here is that the news-
reader actually undoes the idiosyncratic feel of many weblogs by
stripping them of visual elements such as layout or logos, as well
as eliminating the context produced by blogrolls (blog authors’
links to other weblogs) or the author’s biographical informa-
tion (and any advertising). The same drawback, or benefit,
exists with text versions of email newsletters.
Newsreaders also assign equal weight to everything they
display. So the headlines and text from Joe’s Weblog receive
roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, The
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New York Times. For some users, this will be entirely appro-
priate. But others will demand—and vendors will surely pro-
vide—more nuanced newsreading tools, with the ability to high-
light by topic, by writer, by metrics such as how many other
people subscribe to a particular blog (its popularity), or by other
parameters. The world is waiting for such creative approaches,
and RSS and related tools will make them possible. Nick Brad-
bury, who wrote the popular HomeSite HTML editor and site-
design tool, has taken the first steps in that direction with Feed-
Demon,61 a Windows RSS reader that creates a newspaper-like
view of RSS content; for better or worse, it controls display
details and takes layout flexibility away from the human reader.
As exciting as RSS has become in the personal weblog con-
text, its possibilities are much wider. Information from all kinds
of sources can and should be syndicated this way. The New
York Times makes some of its content available via RSS.
Microsoft, while slow to embrace weblogs, latched onto RSS
recently in a way that was useful and honored the spirit of the
community. The company is making available feeds of its
Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) articles, so a pro-
grammer can subscribe to MSDN rather than hunting through
the Microsoft site. Similarly, Cisco Systems has begun making
some material available via RSS. Several sites provide lists and
descriptions of what’s available, including NewsIsFree62 and
Syndic8.63
maki ng s e ns e o f i t a l l
If tomorrow’s journalism is an infinitely complex conversation,
keeping track of it will require an assortment of new tools going
well beyond RSS that will allow us to search for and organize
what we discover. A few have already arrived in what can only be
called “Version 0.5”—what techies call beta form: promising and
useful to a degree, but not quite ready for the average user.
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we the media
One that shows the way is Feedster,64 a web-based applica-
tion that indexes RSS files. I’ve found it useful for keeping track
of what some bloggers are saying about my own work. Feedster
has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through
discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls “Feedpa-
pers,” which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based
news and blog commentary.
Another is Technorati,65 which mines information about the
weblog world. It was designed by San Francisco technologist
Dave Sifry to fill a personal need. “I had been running my own
blog for about a year, and referrer logs [information about site
visitors and the pages they viewed on the site] weren’t enough,”
he said. “I wanted to know what people were talking about, and
what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared
about.” So he wrote some code to crawl the blogs and find out.
The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have
become a vital part of a larger ecosystem. But like mail lists,
blogs, Wikis, SMS, and the other tools of our journalistic future,
they are only tools. They must not be confused with journalism
itself. Certain values must remain: fairness, accuracy, and
thoroughness.
At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati
are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for
tomorrow’s news and information. They may enable “con-
sumers” of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversa-
tions and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even
truth, if they are willing to seek out sources from a variety of
viewpoints. We’ll look at this architectural potential in more
detail in Chapter 8.
More intriguingly, we have to ponder a world where many
kinds of devices connect relatively seamlessly, and where social
and business networks can be formed in an ad hoc way. The
spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will
occur—much more so than today—without any help from mass
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media as we know it. The people who’ll understand this best are
probably just being born.
In the meantime, even the beginnings of this shift are
forcing all of us to adjust our assumptions and behavior. The
people who make news, as we’ll see next, are at the forefront of
this adjustment.
43
Introduction
We freeze some moments in time. Every culture has its frozen
moments, events so important and personal that they transcend
the normal flow of news.
Americans of a certain age, for example, know precisely
where they were and what they were doing when they learned
that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Another generation
has absolute clarity of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And no
one who was older than a baby on September 11, 2001, will
ever forget hearing about, or seeing, airplanes exploding into
skyscrapers.
In 1945, people gathered around radios for the immediate
news, and stayed with the radio to hear more about their fallen
leader and about the man who took his place. Newspapers
printed extra editions and filled their columns with detail for
days and weeks afterward. Magazines stepped back from the
breaking news and offered perspective.
Something similar happened in 1963, but with a newer
medium. The immediate news of Kennedy’s death came for
most via television; I’m old enough to remember that heart-
breaking moment when Walter Cronkite put on his horn-
rimmed glasses to glance at a message from Dallas and then,
blinking back tears, told his viewers that their leader was gone.
As in the earlier time, newspapers and magazines pulled out all
the stops to add detail and context.
September 11, 2001, followed a similarly grim pattern. We
watched—again and again—the awful events. Consumers of
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news learned the what about the attacks, thanks to the televi-
sion networks that showed the horror so graphically. Then we
learned some of the how and why as print publications and
thoughtful broadcasters worked to bring depth to events that
defied mere words. Journalists did some of their finest work and
made me proud to be one of them.
But something else, something profound, was happening
this time around: news was being produced by regular people
who had something to say and show, and not solely by the
“official” news organizations that had traditionally decided how
the first draft of history would look. This time, the first draft of
history was being written, in part, by the former audience. It
was possible—it was inevitable—because of new publishing
tools available on the Internet.
Another kind of reporting emerged during those appalling
hours and days. Via emails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal
web journals—all nonstandard news sources—we received
valuable context that the major American media couldn’t, or
wouldn’t, provide.
We were witnessing—and in many cases were part of—the
future of news.
Six months later came another demonstration of
tomorrow’s journalism. The stakes were far lower this time,
merely a moment of discomfort for a powerful executive. On
March 26, 2002, poor Joe Nacchio got a first-hand taste of the
future; and this time, in a small way, I helped set the table.
Actually, Nacchio was rolling in wealth that day, when he
appeared at PC Forum, an exclusive executive conference in sub-
urban Phoenix. He was also, it seemed, swimming in self-pity.
In those days Nacchio was the chief executive of regional
telephone giant Qwest, a near-monopoly in its multistate mar-
ketplace. At the PC Forum gathering that particular day, he was
complaining about difficulties in raising capital. Imagine:
whining about the rigors of running a monopoly, especially
when Nacchio’s own management moves had contributed to
some of the difficulties he was facing.
x
introduction
I was in the audience, reporting in something close to real
time by publishing frequent conference updates to my weblog,
an online journal of short web postings, via a wireless link the
conference had set up for attendees. So was another journalist
weblogger, Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal, a soft-
ware magazine.
Little did we know that the morning’s events would turn
into a mini-legend in the business community. Little did I know
that the experience would expand my understanding of how
thoroughly the craft of journalism was changing.
One of my posts noted Nacchio’s whining, observing that
he’d gotten seriously richer while his company was losing much
of its market value—another example of CEOs raking in the
riches while shareholders, employees, and communities got the
shaft. Seconds later I received an email from Buzz Bruggeman, a
lawyer in Florida, who was following my weblog and Searls’s
from his office in Orlando. “Ain’t America great?” Bruggeman
wrote sarcastically, attaching a hyperlink to a Yahoo! Finance
web page showing that Nacchio had cashed in more than $200
million in stock while his company’s stock price was heading
downhill. This information struck me as relevant to what I was
writing, and I immediately dropped this juicy tidbit into my
weblog, with a cyber-tip of the hat to Bruggeman. (“Thanks,
Buzz, for the link,” I wrote parenthetically.) Doc Searls did
likewise.
“Around that point, the audience turned hostile,” wrote
Esther Dyson, whose company, Edventure Holdings, held the
conference.1 Did Doc and I play a role? Apparently. Many
people in the luxury hotel ballroom—perhaps half of the execu-
tives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and journalists—were also
online that morning. And at least some of them were amusing
themselves by following what Doc and I were writing. During
the remainder of Nacchio’s session, there was a perceptible chill
toward the man. Dyson, an investor and author, said later she
was certain that our weblogs helped create that chill.2 She called
the blogging “a second conference occurring around, through,
and across the first.”
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Why am I telling this story? This was not an earth-shaking
event, after all. For me, however, it was a tipping point.
Consider the sequence of news flow: a feedback loop that
started in an Arizona conference session, zipped to Orlando,
came back to Arizona and ultimately went global. In a world of
satellite communications and fiber optics, real-time journalism is
routine; but now we journalists had added the expertise of the
audience.
Those forces had lessons for everyone involved, including
the “newsmaker”—Nacchio—who had to deal with new pres-
sures on the always edgy, sometimes adversarial relationship
between journalists and the people we cover. Nacchio didn’t
lose his job because we poked at his arrogance; he lost it, in the
end, because he did an inadequate job as CEO. But he got a
tiny, if unwelcome, taste of journalism’s future that morning.
The person in our little story who tasted journalism’s future
most profoundly, I believe, was neither the professional reporter
nor the newsmaker, but Bruggeman. In an earlier time, before
technology had collided so violently with journalism, he’d been
a member of an audience. Now, he’d received news about an
event without waiting for the traditional coverage to arrive via
newspapers or magazines, or even web sites. And now he’d
become part of the journalistic process himself—a citizen
reporter whose knowledge and quick thinking helped inform my
own journalism in a timely way.
Bruggeman was no longer just a consumer. He was a pro-
ducer. He was making the news.
This book is about journalism’s transformation from a 20th
century mass-media structure to something profoundly more
grassroots and democratic. It’s a story, first, of evolutionary
change. Humans have always told each other stories, and each
new era of progress has led to an expansion of storytelling.
This is also a story of a modern revolution, however,
because technology has given us a communications toolkit that
allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and, in
theory, with global reach. Nothing like this has ever been
remotely possible before.
xii
introduction
In the 20th century, making the news was almost entirely the
province of journalists; the people we covered, or “news-
makers”; and the legions of public relations and marketing
people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing
and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions—call it Big
Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters
exhibit some of the phenomenon’s worst symptoms.
Big Media, in any event, treated the news as a lecture. We
told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn’t. You
might write us a letter; we might print it. (If we were television
and you complained, we ignored you entirely unless the com-
plaint arrived on a libel lawyer’s letterhead.) Or you cancelled
your subscription or stopped watching our shows. It was a
world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was
a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.
Tomorrow’s news reporting and production will be more of
a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between pro-
ducers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we’re
only beginning to grasp now. The communication network itself
will be a medium for everyone’s voice, not just the few who can
afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satel-
lites, or win the government’s permission to squat on the
public’s airwaves.
This evolution—from journalism as lecture to journalism as
a conversation or seminar—will force the various communities
of interest to adapt. Everyone, from journalists to the people we
cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their
ways. The alternative is just more of the same.
We can’t afford more of the same. We can’t afford to treat
the news solely as a commodity, largely controlled by big insti-
tutions. We can’t afford, as a society, to limit our choices. We
can’t even afford it financially, because Wall Street’s demands
on Big Media are dumbing down the product itself.
There are three major constituencies in a world where
anyone can make the news. Once largely distinct, they’re now
blurring into each other.
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Journalists
We will learn we are part of something new, that our
readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I
take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more
than I do—and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of
journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should
embrace this. We will use the tools of grassroots journalism
or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accu-
racy and fairness, will remain important, and we’ll still be
gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger
conversations—and to provide context—will be at least as
important as our ability to gather facts and report them.
Newsmakers
The rich and powerful are discovering new vulnerabilities,
as Nacchio learned. Moreover, when anyone can be a jour-
nalist, many talented people will try—and they’ll find things
the professionals miss. Politicians and business people are
learning this every day. But newsmakers also have new
ways to get out their message, using the same technologies
the grassroots adopts. Howard Dean’s presidential cam-
paign failed, but his methods will be studied and emulated
because of the way his campaign used new tools to engage
his supporters in a conversation. The people at the edges of
the communications and social networks can be a news-
maker’s harshest, most effective critics. But they can also be
the most fervent and valuable allies, offering ideas to each
other and to the newsmaker as well.
The former audience
Once mere consumers of news, the audience is learning how
to get a better, timelier report. It’s also learning how to join
the process of journalism, helping to create a massive con-
versation and, in some cases, doing a better job than the
professionals. For example, Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. “Insta-
pundit,” is not just one of the most popular webloggers; he
xiv
introduction
has amassed considerable influence in the process. Some
grassroots journalists will become professionals. In the end,
we’ll have more voices and more options.
I’ve been in professional journalism for almost 25 years. I’m
grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, and the position I hold. I
respect and admire my colleagues, and believe that Big Media
does a superb job in many cases. But I’m absolutely certain that
the journalism industry’s modern structure has fostered a dan-
gerous conservatism—from a business sense more than a polit-
ical sense, though both are apparent—that threatens our future.
Our resistance to change, some of it caused by financial con-
cerns, has wounded the journalism we practice and has made us
nearly blind to tomorrow’s realities.
Our worst enemy may be ourselves. Corporate journalism,
which dominates today, is squeezing quality to boost profits in
the short term. Perversely, such tactics are ultimately likely to
undermine us.
Big Media enjoys high margins. Daily newspapers in typi-
cally quasi-monopoly markets make 25–30 percent or more in
good years. Local TV stations can boast margins north of 50
percent. For Wall Street, however, no margin is sufficiently rich,
and next year’s profits must be higher still. This has led to a hol-
lowing-out syndrome: newspaper publishers and broadcasting
station managers have realized they can cut the amount and
quality of journalism, at least for a while, in order to raise
profits. In case after case, the demands of Wall Street and the
greed of investors have subsumed the “public trust” part of
journalism. I don’t believe the First Amendment, which gives
journalists valuable leeway to inquire and publish, was designed
with corporate profits in mind. While we haven’t become a
wholly cynical business yet, the trend is scary.
Consolidation makes it even more worrisome. Media com-
panies are merging to create ever larger information and enter-
tainment conglomerates. In too many cases, serious jour-
nalism—and the public trust—continue to be victims. All of this
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leaves a journalistic opening, and new journalists—especially
citizen journalists—are filling the gap.
Meanwhile, even as greed and consolidation take their toll,
those historically high margins are under attack. Newspapers,
for example, have two main revenue streams. The smaller by far
comes from circulation: readers who pay to have the paper
delivered at home or buy it from a newsstand. The larger is
advertising, from employment classifieds to retail display ads,
and every one of those ad revenue streams is under attack from
competitors like eBay and craigslist, which can happily live on
lower margins (or, as in the case of eBay, the world’s largest
classified-advertising site, establish a new monopoly) and don’t
care at all about journalism.
In the long term, I can easily imagine an unraveling of the
business model that has rewarded me so well, and—despite the
effect of excessive greed in too many executive suites—has man-
aged to serve the public respectably in vital ways. Who will do
big investigative projects, backed by deep pockets and the ability
to pay expensive lawyers when powerful interests try to punish
those who exposed them, if the business model collapses? Who
would have exposed the Watergate crimes in the absence of pow-
erful publishers, especially The Washington Post’s Katharine
Graham, who had the financial and moral fortitude to stand up
to Richard Nixon and his henchmen. At a more prosaic level,
who will serve, for better or worse, as a principal voice of a com-
munity or region? Flawed as we may be in the business of jour-
nalism, anarchy in news is not my idea of a solution.
A world of news anarchy would be one in which the big,
credible voices of today were undermined by a combination of
forces, including the financial ones I just described. There would
be no business model to support the institutional journalism
that, for all its problems, does perform a public service. Credi-
bility matters. People need, and want, trusted sources—and
those sources have been, for the most part, serious journalists.
Instead of journalism organizations with the critical mass to
fight the good fights, we may be left with the equivalent of
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introduction
countless pamphleteers and people shouting from soapboxes.
We need something better.
Happily, the anarchy scenario doesn’t strike me as prob-
able, in part because there will always be a demand for credible
news and context. Also possible, though I hope equally unlikely,
is a world of information lockdown. The forces of central con-
trol are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their
authority.
In this scenario, we could witness an unholy alliance
between the entertainment industry—what I call the “copyright
cartel”—and government. Governments are very uneasy about
the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point. Legal
clampdowns and technological measures to prevent copyright
infringement could bring a day when we need permission to
publish, or when publishing from the edge feels too risky. The
cartel has targeted some of the essential innovations of
tomorrow’s news, such as the peer-to-peer file sharing that does
make infringement easier but also gives citizen journalists one of
the only affordable ways to distribute what they create. Govern-
ments insist on the right to track everything we do, but more
and more politicians and bureaucrats shut off access to what the
public needs to know—information that increasingly surfaces
through the efforts of nontraditional media.
In short, we cannot just assume that self-publishing from
the edges of our networks—the grassroots journalism we need
so desperately—will survive, much less thrive. We will need to
defend it, with the same vigor we defend other liberties.
Instead of a news anarchy or lockdown, I seek a balance
that simultaneously preserves the best of today’s system and
encourages tomorrow’s emergent, self-assembling journalism. In
the following pages, I hope to make the case that it’s not just
necessary, and perhaps inevitable, but also eminently workable
for all of us.
It won’t be immediately workable for the people who
already get so little attention from Big Media. Today, citizen
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we the media
journalism is mostly the province of what my friend and former
newspaper editor Tom Stites calls “a rather narrow and very
privileged slice of the polity—those who are educated enough to
take part in the wired conversation, who have the technical
skills, and who are affluent enough to have the time and equip-
ment.” These are the very same people we’re leaving behind in
our Brave New Economy. They are everyday people, buffeted by
change, and outside the conversation. To our discredit, we have
not listened to them as well as we should.
The rise of the citizen journalist will help us listen. The
ability of anyone to make the news will give new voice to people
who’ve felt voiceless—and whose words we need to hear. They
are showing all of us—citizen, journalist, newsmaker—new
ways of talking, of learning.
In the end, they may help spark a renaissance of the notion,
now threatened, of a truly informed citizenry. Self-government
demands no less, and we’ll all benefit if we do it right.
Let’s have this conversation, for everyone’s sake.
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