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我正在读Philip Meyer的“The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”； 将会在相关的题目上写一系列短文。这一篇暂且谈一下书中的“影响力模型”（the infulence model）。
作者在介绍这个模型之前讲了一个小故事：Knight Ridder报业集团在1986年获得了七个普利策奖。消息传出后，集团的股票立刻下跌。业内解释说，他们得的普利策奖太多了；花在这些得奖项目上的钱本来应该进入盈利的。
集团内的人不是这样看的。“我们不是在经营新闻，甚至不是在经营信息。我们经营的是影响力”，作者引述了Hal Jurgensmeyer的观点。在这个模型中，报纸生产两种影响力：社会影响力和商业影响力。社会影响力是不出售的；而商业影响力，对读者消费行为的影响，是用来出售的。后者就是广告，报纸五分之四的收入来源。
作者接下来论证社会影响力是商业影响力的基础；而前者的基础是优秀的新闻素质。社会影响力的大前提是：报纸是社区信息交流的主要渠道。正是这个大前提在过去的几十年里慢慢消蚀着；报纸的前途变得难以预测。
作者调用了大量数据来支持他的论述。这个“影响力模型”，在我的直觉上，对美国的报业是一个比较贴切的描述。许多资深报纸的确恪守他们的社会价值观。不过近些年来，许多报纸的股权转化甚大，对经营上造成了相应的影响。我将在后面的文章中讨论这一点。这里想借这个模型来对照一下中国大陆的报刊媒体。
大陆报业的主要收入也是广告（靠政府资助的报纸基本边缘化了）。美国的广告业经过多年的发展，对广告的效果有深入的研究，要求很苛刻。大陆可能还没有进入到这个阶段。不过广告市场的细化是个大趋势。Google（new technology!）在这上面做得就很成功。广告收入当然是依赖报纸的发行量的。作广告的商家很快就会学会考察报纸的“真实”发行量、阅读率、读者人群分布的。Meyer特别强调了报纸的公信力对广告收入的影响。公信力一词对大陆报业可能有些勉为其难了。因为从行政调控的时期起，他们的公信力就是可以出售的。是的，大陆报业的社会影响力如今仍然与行政干预暗通款曲。推波助澜是透支了的影响力。少数新闻界人士会努力传递良知，艰险地与政治擦边。倒是专业化的报刊可以积累下一些影响力。大众媒体的新闻素养正面临巨大危机。
没有真正的社会影响力，发行量是一个比较飘渺的概念。而社会影响力不是可以炒作出来的。西方资深报纸的影响力是建立在明确的价值观之上的：维护信息自由开放地流通是民主社会的基石——媒体承担这个责任和荣耀。大陆的报业没有这种根基。它的社会价值观在很长一段时间会是模糊的，不仅是政治的原因，而且是社会文化的原因。更何况气势汹汹的数字媒体正在争夺有限的大众注意力。
这是围绕Philip Meyer的“The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”的讨论的系列之三，但这一篇在很大程度上超出了该书的内容。
我在上一篇中提到该书对Allen Neuharth的微妙态度。这几天顺手翻了一下Neuharth的自传，发现Neuharth本人也颇以“作秀才能”自得（Neuharth:"I am a better showman than salesman")。看来倒不是Meyer在玩弄春秋笔法。我本来计划用系列之三来讨论华尔街对journalism的影响，临时决定还是用这一篇的内容先作一个铺垫。
里根总统在USA TODAY发刊五周年上致词说：“你们带领整个［新闻］行业走向二十一世纪”。总统先生大概只是在赶场子。在1987年的时候，没有人知道二十一世纪的新闻业会是什么样子。USA TODAY代表了报业在二十世纪后期对社会文化变迁和新技术的发展作出的调整和适应。
其时，电视和流行文化已经改变了大众的阅读习惯。资讯变得丰富，生活节奏加快。USA TODAY一反传统报纸长篇赘述的风格，大量采用简洁明快的短篇报道；在版式上首先使用众多的色彩、图片和图表加强视觉冲击。因为USA TODAY的这种大众化快餐路线，很多业内人士讥讽之为“McPaper”（“Mc”取自麦当劳，McDonald的词头）。但在USA TODAY诱人的色彩和飙升的发行量的号召下，讥讽者纷纷变成了仿效者。
USA TODAY不仅使用了先进的印刷技术、最早使用计算机排版，而且第一个用卫星通讯把要付印的版式传输到世界各地的印刷厂去，极大地提高了时效性。
Gannett集团的巨大新闻网络和财力使得USA TODAY的发行成为可能。Neuharth的眼光和魄力把它实现。而新技术的运用进一步促进了它的成功。
在USA TODAY领导的这个潮流的背后，却是报纸的进一步商品化。
在美国历史上，报纸一直以言论自由的载体自居和自励。报纸的经营者常常承载太多的社会责任感，把自己的价值观念注入到报纸中去。现代的新闻价值观是要把观点和事实剥离，让读者作自己的判断。USA TODAY的简短报道正是向这个方向作出的努力，也符合二十世纪后期以来话语权分化的社会潮流。USA TODAY更是频频使用市场调查的反馈来调整报纸的内容，使之更适应读者的口味。历史上那种精英文化辐射的模式，正在变成迎合大众市场的消费模式。
话语权分化的趋势在互联网的年代更加明显。居高临下的无冕之王不得不接受大众的审视。
到今天为止，Wikipedia.org在“Journalism scandals”下罗列了40条重大丑闻，多数采自近几年。当然我不能确定Wikipedia在这个栏目上的准确度。但其中的华盛顿邮报的Janet cooke、纽约时报的Jayson Blair、USA TODAY的Jack Kelly等事件都是广为人知的了。新闻业的素质是否真的下滑了是个很复杂的问题，我们留到以后来讨论。这里显然的一个因素是新闻业的透明度增加了。有问题的报道一般会很快在网上受到批评；而它的影响也会很快通过互联网扩张。大众，以前只是被动的读者，现在开始参与到新闻的生产当中来了。（大家可能会联系中文网络的现实。我觉得blogs在美国的新闻和政治中已经有相当的影响；这和国内的情况可能相差甚大。）
耐人寻味的是为什么这个时期的旗手是草莽出身的Neuharth，而不是Sulzberger、Graham、Bingham之类的老字号。在一个大众传媒的时代，美国报业之精英文化的没落是不可避免的了，对大众来说倒未必是件坏事。
[系列之一］报业的影响力模型
[系列之二］Allen Neuharth的作秀才能
这是围绕Philip Meyer的“The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”的讨论的系列之二。
美国的报业从1960年代开始上市。报业和华尔街的合作实在是一件很有意思的事情。华尔街起初对报业不感兴趣。从上世纪下期起，报业就像是一项夕阳产业：读者人数逐年下降，赖以为支柱的广告收入不断被电视等新兴领域所侵蚀。而报业的经营也与普通领域不同，不可预测因素太多。一件丑闻可以破坏一个企业。1990年代后期新闻纸成本的暴长对整个行业打击甚大。因为广告业深受商业周期的影响，报业在长期上也有增长／衰落的周期性。报纸企业常常是由优秀的报人推动的。华尔街对于怎样理解这些人没有一个公式——他们常常把社会责任置于金融效益之上。话虽这么说，报纸的长期利润是很可观的。20～40％的利润率是常有的事，远远高于制造零售业。有这么好的现金流，为什么还要上市呢？
对报纸来说，上市是一个在管理上现代化、制度化的过程。多数美国报纸是由家族企业成长起来的。家族企业的权力交接经常会成为关系生死存亡的事件。企业上市则迫使管理制度化，以制度化来保证权力交替后的正常运行。而且美国的税法遏制家族企业积蓄大量现金，他们只好扩大经营或分散股权。当然有人不是因为这些原因上市的。Gannett就是最大的例外，而它的执行者Allen H. Neuharth已经成了一个经典。
Neuharth是穷小子出身，二战时在巴顿将军的手下当过兵。战后受大兵法案（G.I. Bill）之惠读了大学。1952年，Neuharth在家乡创建了一份报纸。报纸很快就倒闭了。他远走他乡，从Knight集团的基层记者做起，一路进入管理高层。1963年，Neuharth转身投入了小一号的Gannett集团，因为Knight集团仍然是一个家族式企业，他不可能进入最顶层；而Gannett给他提供了机会。
Neuharth在Gannett的第一个大手笔是创建了表现非凡的Florida TODAY，后来更是创建了头号的全国性大报USA TODAY。但Gannett的基本发展策略是兼并和收购。Gannett上市的目的正是在于扩张。
1967年的Gannett还是一个小型的报业连锁集团，缺少扩张的资本。通过上市筹募公共资金，Gannett得到了他们需要的金融杠杆，此后一发不可收拾，成为行业的一号巨无霸。这个进程正是在Neuharth的领导下展开的。
Neuharth的收购对象是在中小市场有垄断地位的区域性报纸。这是一步极富深意的战略。上市公司发展的首要条件是保证投资者的信心。而如前所述，报业运营先天就有周期性。几年的兴衰周期，间杂着各类的突发事件，对报纸企业是家常便饭，对华尔街的分析家们的紧张神经却是无法承受的噩梦。股东们看的是季度财政报告，不是主编们头脑中的社会影响力。正是Neuharth向金融界展示了报业的利润所在。他创造了无一季度负增长的神话。
Neuharth的做法是有计划地把成本转移到不同的时间段，使得收支在长期上形成平稳的曲线。在繁荣的时期增加基础建设、扩大新闻覆盖和增员；在衰退的时期做相反的事情。因为Gannett的报纸主要占据中小市场，没有同行竞争，也少受工会和印刷成本等因素的影响。Neuharth后来说，控制这些垄断性的中小报纸是最容易的管理工作。
Philip Meyer在他的书中把Neuharth的做法称为作秀才能（showmanship）。Meyer是Knight Ridder集团的人，对Neuharth的看法大概有点复杂。
Gannett集团的发展过程是现代金融运作进入报业的经典案例。最近Knight Ridder，美国第二大报业集团，被McClatchy收购就隐现着金融家的活动身影。然而更深一层的问题是journalism，新闻业的素质和质量。我将在下一篇讨论华尔街在其中的影响。
[系列之一］报业的影响力模型
http://rl.rockiestech.com/node/78
这是围绕Philip Meyer的“The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”的讨论的系列之五。报业进入华尔街的金融齿轮是一条不归路。一时间财气冲天，长期上很可能加速了传统报业的死亡。个中原委，容我慢慢道来。
有网友针对系列之四评论说，普利策奖可以扩大读者群，从而扩大利润，所以普利策奖和利润是不矛盾的。这个推理很清楚，但与现实是有差距的。
问题之一：读者多不等于利润多。如果广告收入不能跟进，报纸卖的越多，亏损越多。因为报纸的售价不能覆盖采编和印刷成本。
问题之二：普利策奖可以提高报纸的声誉，但一般不会扩大读者群。经过几代人的发展，大多数报纸在本地市场已经是独家垄断，早已不是开发市场的阶段。所以报纸不是从同行手里竞争读者，而是背向电子媒体挽留日益减少的读者。
Meyer在书中就举了问题之一的例子。
Gannett集团在1985年收购了德美因的一家报纸。当时该报的发行覆盖了整个爱荷华州，但主要广告收入来自德美因地区。Gannett砍掉了德美因以外的发行，削减了外地的办事处；于是利润从10％跳增到了25％。
该报的社长Chales Edwards后来评论说：这些事情，一件两件，不见得一定影响报纸的质量；但是加起来，对报纸的影响是深远的。过了一段时间后，我们就再也没有了以前的那种［报道］能力和资源了。
对照我的系列之四——这是对商业利润的追求损害了报纸质量的典型例子。
McClatchy的老总Gary Pruitt也对围绕财务报表的运营方式很有微词：
在经济下滑的时期，新闻覆盖度降低了，报纸也变糟了……餐馆在不景气的时候不会改变饭菜的口味。汽车厂在萧条的时候不会降低汽车的安全性。服装商不会偷工减料。如果他们这么做的话，我们不会再买他们的东西［……］经济好转了也不会买。为什么萧条的时候报纸就可以搀水呢？
Pruitt说此番话的同时是表明他们维护报纸质量的态度。但他并没有涉及到报业远景上的真正问题。
美国报业在二战后有过一度辉煌。但读者群消亡的趋势在近几十年不曾逆转。广告份额也在不断下降。有些报纸已经有了可观的网上广告收入，但是网上广告对行业下滑的大势有多少影响还很难讲。而且报纸的网上业务不再有传统的垄断优势。
换句话说，在影响力和收入下降的大势下，报纸怎样保证利润呢？
大企业集团依托规模搞多样化是一条重要的路子。但这不影响平面报纸的传统业务的盈利。技术进步可以降低成本。这一项已经起了重要作用，但进一步降低成本的空间已经很有限了。现在被压缩的是管理和采编成本，也就是慢性的质量萎缩。
由于报业的垄断地位和历史上培养起来的用户忠诚度，如果质量有轻度下滑或售价微量上调，用户市场在短时期内不会受到什么影响。这是在消耗企业的历史品牌积累，就是所谓的“收割模式”，我们中国所说的“杀鸡取蛋”。这种情形可以持续一段时期，等到触犯了用户的心理底线的时候，就是危机爆发、蛋尽鸡亡之日。Thomson集团在1980年代起就演示了这一路线；后来无法收拾，在2000年把旗下的报纸悉数抛售（只有两家除外）。
然而报业一直利润丰厚，即使行业下滑，还是有利可图，为什么一定要狠压成本呢？这正是上市公司的悲哀。华尔街的金融链中的每一个环节都想要赚钱的。一个利润率一直在20～40％的行业，怎么可以安于6~7%呢？报业的退路已经断了。
简单的回顾：美国报纸已经在快速商品化；精英的理想主义在消亡；在华尔街金融机器的压榨下，一些企业正在走上收割品牌的路子。当然如果真的到了企业的末日，局内那些人也已经装满了钱袋；谁来收拾残局就不得而知了。
下一回我将转入报业的社会功能的分析。
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欢迎批评指正，Rockies' Lounge at http://rl.rockiestech.com
[系列之一］报业的影响力模型
[系列之二］Allen Neuharth的作秀才能
[系列之三］美国报业之精英文化的没落
[系列之四］华尔街不相信理想，或者主编的眼泪
这是围绕Philip Meyer的“The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”的讨论的系列之六，也是最后一篇。
Meyer掌握有大量的资料和数据。他自己罗列了书中前十章的重要分析结论。我在此逐条抄译如下：
－受读者信任的报纸比其它同行运营得好；
－报纸靠把持商家和顾客之间的信息流通渠道而赢利，这个渠道上报纸不再是独家垄断；
－广告市场持续细化。在新一轮竞争中，受信任的媒体仍然有一定优势；
－影响力很难量化。社区的亲和力和信任是其重要的组件；
－报导的准确度促进报纸的受信任程度。这个效果部分是直接的，但主要是通过所报道事件的知情人来实现的；
－易读的报纸在市场渗透率上高于难读的报纸。但二者丢失市场的速度是一样的；
－在既有的编辑力量下，对内容和形式的调整不产生什么实效（按：这是针对美国的报纸，他们已经被市场调整了三百年了）；
－公众不重视句法拼写的准确程度；
－人手充裕的报纸要经营得好一些；
－在有市场竞争的情况下，华尔街会支持新闻报道的质量。它对来自新的媒体形式的竞争认识迟缓。
总的来讲，此书的一个主要结论，也是一个正面结论，是报纸的质量和利润是有一定关联的。Meyer试图在这个基础上强调报业的未来战略重心应该放在质量上，并用最后一章来讨论在职业教育、业务标准、行业操行规则等方面的具体操作。这个根据过去归纳出来的结论对形势迥异的未来是否适用的确是一个大大的问号。即便是当前，这个“关联”也不等于因果关系。质量好的报纸未必在市场竞争中获胜。
让我们快速回放一下历史。从现代民主的产生到电子时代之间的几百年里，报纸是唯一的社区信息枢纽。信息自由传播的重要性在民主的进程中深入人心，新闻业成了一个受美国宪法第一修正案保护的特殊行业。在现实社会中，各类利益群体从来都不遗余力地追求对报纸的控制。在这个意义上，历史上的著名报人披洒着英雄的气息。Meyer在书中也充满敬意地回忆“黄金时代”的“哲人王”们（John Knight, Katharine Graham, Jim McClatchy, etc.），认为他们的报纸的重要影响力来自于他们的社会责任感。
那么报纸的社会功能究竟是什么？
1）采集和广播重要的社区信息；
2）传递市场信息（商业广告等）；
3）对公共事务的公告、协助、讨论和监督。
显然，这些功能与报纸绑结在一起是传播技术的原因——印刷术是大众传媒在历史上的唯一选择。所有这些社会功能现在都可以由电子技术来承担；还可以实现得更好。正是互联网使得克林顿的“拉链门”事件比尼克松的“水门事件”的新闻报道容易了许多倍。互联网也已经显示了增强新闻报道及时性、准确性和全面性的机制。
所以报纸要死就死掉吧。真正重要的事情是它所承载的社会功能继续得到实现。如何实现是社会组织的问题，是检验人们创造力的问题，是见证这个时代的英雄风采的时机，是进行中的历史。
像Tim Porter说的，Meyer这本书的题目是挽救信息时代的“journalism”，而不是挽救报纸。“journalism”是个什么东西呢？中文中没有直接对应的词语，大陆新闻界的理解谬误很多。这里的“journalism”是指新闻行业，包括新闻报道的生产过程、专业素养和职业精神，缺一不可。
～～～～～～～～～～～～～
欢迎批评指正，Rockies' Lounge at http://rl.rockiestech.com
[系列之一］报业的影响力模型
[系列之二］Allen Neuharth的作秀才能
[系列之三］美国报业之精英文化的没落
[系列之四］华尔街不相信理想，或者主编的眼泪
[系列之五］谁在收割美国的报纸？
我在系列之二和之三谈到了曾是精英世界的美国报业如何进入华尔街，报业的经营如何进一步商品化。华尔街是一个不同的世界。报纸编辑们更注重社会影响力；而华尔街只关心一件事：利润。
一份早期的报告明确无误地传递出这个信息：“Gannett集团的运作，在生活、呼吸和睡眠中都透露着利润； 而且会随时为了利润舍弃普利策奖”。（The Wall Street Transcript: "Gannett's management lives, breathes, and sleeps profits and would trade profits over Pulitzer Prizes any day."间引自Allen Neuharth自传。）是的，利润高于普利策奖，代表神圣的社会责任心的普利策奖。
所以近年来一个争论的焦点就是对利润的追求是否损害了新闻报道的质量；我将在系列之五深入这个问题。Rick Edmonds在一篇2002年的文章中指出，报业的主要持股人是一些长期投资者。“股神”巴菲特对华盛顿邮报的长期战略的支持仍为人所津津乐道。但这不能否认投资者对报业管理层决策的影响，甚至不能否认其中的短期影响。
我在系列之二提到过Gannett讨好投资者的作法；报业的经营不仅是长期性的，而且有周期性的。一个私有企业可以不重视特定阶段的财务报表，而上市的公司却没有什么选择的空间。所以在2001年美国经济萧条的时候，众多报社纷纷压缩开支和裁员， 以Knight Ridder集团尤甚。当集团政策执行到下属的圣何塞水银报，报社的社长（出版人）Jay Harris愤而辞职。
Harris认为这种无视新闻质量的紧缩已经背离了报纸的核心价值观念、影响到报纸的长期发展；他的辞职是对这种商业化趋势的抗议。此事引起了巨大反响。美国报纸编辑年会（ASNE）特别邀请他在闭幕宴会上讲演。
Harris说：
“我的辞职是由于商业策略上的一个重大分歧，以及长期以来公司的价值观和重心是否迁移了的一个同样重大的分歧。这里我想强调我辞职不仅仅是出于对新闻编辑上的忧虑，尽管对采编队伍和新闻覆盖度裁减的前景的确让我很担忧。我辞职是因为我担心整个报纸受到的破坏——包括新闻和商务两个方面的——还有我们削弱的能力无法应对硅谷社会赋予的巨大责任［……］
“我在KR的这些年中，公司签发的第一个价值观声明提到，‘我们的企业既是一项实业，又是公众的信任’。像我在辞职信中所说的，我担心KR的重心正在从承担公众的信任，向实业方面日益偏移。”
尽管Knight Ridder报业集团在规模上仅次于Gannett，而且威名素重，它在华尔街却倍受困扰。原因之一是KR在上市的时候以单一的股票形式公众发行，它的股份逐渐集中到了几家大的金融公司手中，股东权重。其它上市的报纸企业多用双层股权结构，管理层把持了有投票权的股份，从而保持了决策的相对独立性。
今年三月，Knight Ridder终于在股东资本的迫使下，出售给了同行中崛起的McClatchy。合并后的集团将在削减重叠的经营上节约大笔开销。但McClatchy同时把KR原来32家报纸中的12家拆开拍售。
许多头面人物向公众保证这些报纸企业们会全力确保新闻报道的质量。但我们知道，对于他们的保证，我们无处购买保险。
参考资料：
1. Philip Meyer, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age”. University of Missouri Press, 2004
2. Rick Edmonds, "Who owns public newspapers companies and what do they want?" http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=13004
3. Jay Harris' speech, http://www.asne.org/kiosk/archive/convention/2001/harris.htm
4. San Jose Mercury News, "Knight Ridder sold to McClatchy", Mar. 13, 2006. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/14084153.htm
～～～～～～～～～～～～～
欢迎批评指正，Rockies' Lounge at http://rl.rockiestech.com
[系列之一］报业的影响力模型
[系列之二］Allen Neuharth的作秀才能
[系列之三］美国报业之精英文化的没落
技术和网络颠覆了传统的传播模式。遍地开花的blogs顽强传递出“主流媒体”之外的声音。在我们这几年见证了美国草根媒体的力量之后，国内开始出现了一些有意思、有意义的实验。
一个是毛向辉等开始的“草莓传播”（memedia.cn）。他们自己的介绍如下：
草莓，就是“草根媒体”拉。看似“草芥”的人民，如今丝丝缕缕地联系在一起，用思维串联起“社会大脑”，群体智慧和声音形成巨大张力，“牵一发而动全身”，真会产生神奇而不可思议的变革。
Memedia，来自Me/Meme/Media 三个词的组合。”Me”是我，每个人。 “Meme”是“媒母”，是信息范畴的传播因子，”Media”，不用说了是“媒体”，正在被撕裂的一个旧事物。
Memedia会提供好玩的东西，中立的东西，多样的东西，让我们一起玩起来…
另一个是闾丘露薇等的“一五一十部落” （my1510.com）。他们：
“希望能够透过这个平台，来推广公民记者的概念。透过web2.0的互动，让博客和传统媒体之间能够产生一个良性的互补。”
当方舟子“拔剑四顾心茫然”地感叹“科学为何在中国没有市场”时，我评论说：科学不是没有市场，而是常常搭错了车。因为中国大陆是一个扭曲变形的市场，以传媒领域尤甚。
新一轮的网络媒体实验，最大的意义是在于大众寻找自己的声音；或许，在这个过程中，德赛两先生可以在挣扎百年后安置下来。
这将是个刺激而挑战的实验。希望能看到商界进一步的参与。也呼吁大家都来努力，促进网络开放内容的传播——清洗和抵制政治流毒，给健康的社会进步扩大空间。
同时向有兴趣的朋友推荐一本Dan Gillmor的“We the Media : Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People”。此书使用“协作共创－非商业共享”协议发布，在O'Reilly有开放全本。洛基开放文化实验室开了一个开放图书项目（ http://rl.rockiestech.com/node/342 ）：有愿意参加翻译的朋友，可以一起来做。
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[http://rl.rockiestech.com]
洛基开放文化实验室，使用开源方法来推动社会文化进步
节选自First Monday 2001年的老文章，全文见http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/。
欢迎翻译：）
Restructuring the Publishing Value Chain and the Publishing Industry
There are a number of structural changes that are taking place in the publishing industry. The 1980s and early 1990s were a troublesome time for those concerned with diversity in publishing. We saw the rise of national bookstore chains and the increased homogeneity of offerings from one bookstore to another in the retail marketplace. In publishing, there seemed to be a trend to blockbuster bestsellers that crowded out a much larger and more diverse range of works. It appears that fewer mid-list or niche books are being published, and those that are published are staying in print for shorter and shorter periods of time. There are lots of reasons for this. In brick-and-mortar-based bookselling, display space is at a premium. Publishers pay inventory taxes on warehoused books that they haven't sold. Large inventories of unsold books are a liability. The problem of inventories was aggravated by changes in tax and accounting practices, instigated by decision in Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue [24].
Network-based bookselling (Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Borders Online, and a host of other players) is putting all publishers on a somewhat more equal footing as far as finding readers. There's an infinite amount of virtual "display space" available, and books can become visible to potential purchasers in new ways through searching or recommender systems [25]. A university press or small publisher can be as accessible as a major commercial publisher, or nearly so, through these Web sites. At least in theory, author self-publishing (the ultimate "small press") becomes more practical as these kinds of sales outlets are combined with electronic delivery (eliminating the up-front investment in producing physical books and arranging for order fulfillment), though there are still a number of barriers to this [26]. In the past few years we have seen the emergence of a large number of digital "vanity presses" to serve authors who don't want to take the final step to full self-publishing but who cannot find traditional publishers or don't want to work with traditional publishers. These self-publishing services often provide the authors with greater control and much more generous royalties than traditional publishers.
The major problem with self-publishing or vanity publishing is still finding readers, particularly when the quality of the offerings through these channels is so variable (and often poor) [27]. Self published or vanity published non fiction books probably have the advantage over other materials like fiction or music if they are to be discovered by searching content or reviews. Returning a work of non-fiction in response to a query about coffee growing in South America is likely to be less subjective and easier to assess than a piece of music that is claimed to "sound like" John Coltrane or to appeal to Coltrane fans. Some self-published books can find at least some audience without the need for expensive advertising campaigns. There are still, of course, questions of authority and quality, but there are ways of at least partially addressing these concerns through reviews and recommender systems. Online bookselling using truly massive inventories of traditionally published works has been a great success with readers, though many of the companies involved are not yet profitable. The weaknesses of this model are the need (and cost and delay) of delivering the physical goods that are purchased, and the limited ability to browse (partially compensated for by the availability of tables of contents, reviews, reader comments, images of covers, sample chapters, and other surrogates). The success of author self-publishing, or digital vanity publishing, seems less clear, with perhaps a very few exceptions.
These trends should at least in theory lead to the publication of a greater diversity of books and a greater visibility of this diversity to the book-buying public - though hard data supporting these claims is still scarce. And as long as these electronic booksellers are delivering physical books, there's still the problem of keeping material in print. Network-based bookselling helped to address the problem of making a wider range of material available to readers; digital books will address the problems of inventory and delivery.
The cost of keeping material "in print" electronically for delivery or print on demand is small (although the tax and accounting implications have yet to be fully resolved, as far as I know), at least until the material must negotiate a format and standards transition, at which point an investment is necessary. Out-of-print material also seems to be coming back into print for electronic delivery through the efforts of tiny niche companies such as Boondock Books, as well as major players like Bell and Howell Learning Systems (formerly UMI) or Netlibrary. If it becomes possible to keep a bigger backlist alive for sale electronically without paying tax on it as inventory and having to treat it as an accounting liability, then the development of a market in these electronic materials will again reshape publishing in complex ways. While it will help publishers to make more works available for the long term, it may create new problems for authors. Authors who got return of copyright for their works when the publisher took them "out of print" will be out of luck in the new digital world of delivery on demand. They can remain in limbo forever, making pennies in royalties from the occasional electronic sale. Because of this, new contracts between authors and publishers are now often framed in terms of a specific length of time, rather than an indefinite period until a work goes out of print, and such terms are a hotly contested area of negotation.
There are also some fascinating social questions about the nature of authorship and audience here as we think more broadly about digital books, as opposed to electronic distribution of print books. For example, what are the reader expectations about updating published work? Is an author ever really "finished" with a book (other than perhaps a novel) in a world of electronic distribution? Recent attempts to translate printed reference works such as the Electronic Encyclopedia Britannica to the network environment are already encountering these issues, particularly reader demand for continuous updating of articles [28]. We are also seeing a series of experiements that create dialog between the author and his or her readers, either following the initial publication of a work in digital form [29] or as a part of a more extended publication "process" [30]. Similar experiments have also been conducted in electronic journal publishing.
A great deal of money is at stake in restructuring distribution channels. For a mass-market printed book, about half of the retail price goes to parties "downstream" from the publisher, that is retailers and wholesalers [31]. There's also the cost of accepting returns, an unusual and costly book industry practice under which a bookstore can return unsold books to the publisher for a refund. Internet-based bookselling and, later, digital book delivery will eliminate this cost. For Internet-based booksellers, there's still a lot of cost in obtaining and delivering the printed book, though the aggregate cost chain from publisher to consumer is reduced. Sales of digital books eliminate most or all of these costs, depending on the marketing model and how many intermediaries remain active in the sales chain [32].
As relationships among publishers, consumers, and retailers change, and sales, shipping, and delivery costs become much smaller with network sales and electronic delivery, the changing economics will mean greater profits to publishers or electronic retailers, larger royalty shares to authors, and even reduced prices to consumers [33]. We can expect to see major struggles around how the newly available dollars are divided, particularly in author-publisher relationships (where some of the major publishing houses are now offering very generous royalty percentages to their authors for digital publications) and with the growing alternatives of self-publishing and a multiplicity of upstart small publishers putting pressure on the large established industry players. There will clearly be a reconsideration of what value publishers add for various kinds of authors, and what authors should be willing to pay for that value. One of the most fascinating questions will be how the level of public recognition that an author enjoys relates to the potential value that a publisher offers. In addition, new claimants are emerging to demand a share of the revenues from the restructured e-book distribution chain. For example, Gemstar, which has made it clear that it wants to control not only reading devices but also the retailer services that offer content to these readers, speaks of collecting 10-20% of the revenue from e-books licensed to Gemstar reading devices.
We should be mindful that e-book readers are not just for books; they are for newspapers and magazines as well, where the daily or weekly printing and distribution of "disposable" paper is a very large cost. If these e-book readers permit newspapers to eliminate paper, printing, and delivery costs for large numbers of subscribers, this will have a big impact on profit margins.
The used book market has always annoyed publishers (and sometimes authors as well), because they don't receive any revenue from these sales due to the first-sale doctrine. For most types of books this isn't enough money to worry about, but there are a few niche markets where resale by book purchasers represents a significant economic impact for publishers, such as textbooks, where perhaps 20% of the sales are in the used market. Publishers do many things today to keep the used textbook market at bay, such as releasing new editions of popular textbooks every few years. Electronic delivery, in conjunction with technological control of content, could wipe out these resale markets overnight and yield significant revenue opportunities [34]. We can expect these types of books to be early targets for transition to digital forms, not only because of the enhancements that the digital medium offers the author for more effective communication, but for economic reasons as well.
Finally, e-books promise another kind of restructuring in the publishing markets. In general, publishers do not know their customers; a complex chain of wholesalers and retailers serve as intermediaries. Retailers accept cash, further contributing to the anonymity of readers. Publishers sell very few books direct to readers in the print world. In a world of e-books, particularly where there may be few cash transactions, publishers may get to know and track the behavior of their consumers for the first time. Certainly network-based retailers will be able to track their customers better because few will be anonymous. We may see more direct purchasing from publishers. Network digital book retailers may actually pass transactions through to publisher servers (along with purchaser identity information), or may simply report this information while supplying the books to readers directly from retailer servers. There may be compelling reasons why one wants to register ownership of an e-book with the publisher [35]. One can even imagine downloading a new e-book and having that e-book provide its publisher with an inventory of the other e-books stored in one's personal library. Another important point to recognize is that digital rights management systems can report actual viewing usage, which is a very different thing than purchase patterns.
The privacy implications here are substantial, particularly if one is skeptical about the confidentiality of the records of transactions with publishers and booksellers in a world where many more such records exist and may even be remarketed or sold as assets [36]. Recently there have also been a number of attempts by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to obtain book purchasing habits, the most notorious perhaps being Ken Starr's pursuit of records of Monica Lewinsky's purchases at Kramerbooks in Washington D.C. There have been others dealing with purchase records for books detailing methods of manufacturing drugs, for example [37]. Libraries have been skeptical of legal protections for a long time, even though library circulation records have been protected under various state laws. Best practices in libraries keep circulation records for books only until borrowed items are returned; most libraries do not maintain a record of books that have been borrowed and returned, and thus cannot make such records available even under subpoena.
Again, the culture of books may be a bit different, and may give rise to stronger commitments by publishers and retailers to protect consumer privacy, and even ultimately to support strong legislation protecting this privacy. All of the same issues apply to music as it comes to be marketed across the network - but people are likely to be far less concerned with the privacy of their listening habits than of their reading habits.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/
[我们现在都面对一个如何持续获取专门的知识的问题。有网络和编程工具的发展，是不是在技术上可以实现方便的知识积聚共享了呢？工具不是瓶颈。瓶颈是人的创造力和组织能力。下面是和啄木鸟的ZoomQ讨论的通信。]
假设这个讨论的起点是寻求一个针对共同兴趣的、有效的知识共享和交流的平台。
让我们把技术层的实现和社会层的模型分开来看。那么社会层的模型就很清楚的映出了Henry Oldenbourg的影子。他老人家1665年的“Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London”就是这样一个平台，提供了对一个共同兴趣（科学）共享交流的最有时效的、能够联系整个社区的工具。这是学术期刊的起源。期刊印刷品是当时传播技术的极限。Oldenbourg的一个重要贡献是提供了区分“信息”和“知识”的办法——就是“同行评议”（peer review），已经成为现代科学的一个核心组件。
我们今天这个论题仍然面对这两个问题：传播和认证。
今天网络的发达已经要完全颠覆印刷术年代的技术模型，传播成本极度降低。一个人登上互联网，的确会被海量的信息淹没。没有处在正确地方的信息只是廉价的信息。然而知识和技术的生产和认证仍然是一个昂贵的过程，而且会永远昂贵下去——因为这是人类社会最高级的产品。
所以这个讨论首先要找到一个可行的社会层模型（以大家的才智，技术层的实现总会找到办法的）。
作为个人，要找到对路的获取信息和知识的渠道，依赖于一些基础的社区设施（infrastructure）：教育和学术体系、技术团体，和他们的出版物。不幸的是，学术体系和传统正是当代中国的软肋。知识的认证是行业社区的最重要的功能，用红色公章来替代造就了一个巨大的劣质工程。你们讨论的这种“社会化”方式，由同行自发的来执行认证功能，是一条正确的路子，也是现代科学一路走来的路子。而认证办法是后互联网时代信息分层的关键。
所以这个讨论实质上指向了未来学术／技术刊物的出版模式。
让我以学术期刊为例。现在的网络传播允许同行以远远超前于期刊的速度交流研究成果。这样从Oldenbourg时代开始的对传播和认证的“绑结”不再合理。传播中出现“已认证内容”和“未认证内容”并行的情形——未来的学术刊物应该发展出相应的管理机制。
我们讨论的是同一种机制。
这条路子本质上是一个社会工程，应该紧密结合专业社团来运作。对于特殊的程序员群体，“公章社团”失职，自发的民间社团是完全可行的。早年的科学本来就是民间行为。这其中非盈利的出版方式和商业模式都有机会。
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
from tom paine to blogs and beyond
readers well. Many, however, had little concern for what we
now call objectivity. Papers had points of view, reflecting the
politics of their backers and owners.
Newspapers have provoked public opinion for as long as
they’ve been around. “Yellow journalism” achieved perhaps its
ugliest prominence when early media barons such as Joseph
Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst abused their consider-
able powers. Hearst, in particular, is notorious for helping to
spark the Spanish-American War in 1898 by inflaming public
opinion.
As the Gilded Age’s excesses began to tear at the very fabric
of American society, a new kind of journalist, the muckraker,
emerged at the end of the 19th century. More than most jour-
nalists of the era, muckrakers performed the public service func-
tion of journalism by exposing a variety of outrages, including
the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel
conditions in workplaces. Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the
Cities), Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company),
Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and Upton Sinclair (The
Jungle) were among the daring journalists and novelists who
shone daylight into some dark corners of society. They helped
set the stage for the Progressive Era, and set a standard for the
investigative journalists of the new century.
Personal journalism didn’t die with the muckrakers.
Throughout the 20th century, the world was blessed with indi-
viduals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the
moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose
weekly newsletter was required reading for a generation of
Washington insiders. As Victor Navasky wrote in the July 21,
2003 issue of The Nation, Stone eschewed the party circuit in
favor of old-fashioned reporting:
His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury
himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congres-
sional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time
prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed
paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line,
3
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
4
from tom paine to blogs and beyond
effect. Edward R. Murrow’s reports on CBS, most notably his
coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil poli-
tics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism.
The news hegemony of the networks and big newspapers
reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Journalists helped bring
down a law-breaking president. An anchorman, Walter Cron-
kite, was considered the most trusted person in America. Yet
this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost
money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their
prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded)
mandate to perform a public service function in their communi-
ties. The networks were sold to companies such as General Elec-
tric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News
divisions were required to be profit centers.
While network news may have been expensive to produce,
local stations had it easier. But while the network news shows
still retained some sense of responsibility, most local stations
made no pretense of serving the public trust, preferring instead
to lure viewers with violence and entertainment, two sure rat-
ings boosters. It was an irresistible combination for resource-
starved news directors: cheaper than serious reporting, and com-
pelling video. “If it bleeds, it leads” became the all-too-true
mantra for the local news reports, and it has stayed that way,
with puerile celebrity “journalism” now added to the mix.
America has suffered from this simplistic view of news.
Even in the 1990s, when crime rates were plummeting, local TV
persisted in giving viewers the impression that crime was never a
bigger problem. This was irresponsible because, among other
things, it helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that has
stripped away crucial civil liberties—including most of our
Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches
and seizures—and kept other serious issues off the air.
As the pace of life has quickened, our collective attention
span has shortened. I suppose it’s asking too much of commer-
cial TV news to occasionally use the public airwaves to actually
inform the public, but the push for profits has crowded out
5
we the media
depth. The situation is made worse by the fact that most of us
don’t stop long enough to consider what we’ve been told, much
less seek out context, thereby allowing ourselves to be shallow
and to be led by people who take advantage of it. A shallow citi-
zenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an
informed one.
At the same time, big changes were occurring in TV jour-
nalism, and big newspaper companies were swallowing small
papers around the nation. As noted, this didn’t always reduce
quality. In fact, the craft of newspaper journalism has never
been better in some respects; investigative reporting by the best
organizations continues to make me proud. And while some
corporate owners—Gannett in particular—have tended to turn
independent papers into cookie-cutter models of corporate jour-
nalism, sometimes they’ve actually improved on the original.
But it’s no coincidence that three of the best American newspa-
pers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Washington Post, have an ownership structure—voting control
by families and/or small groups of committed investors—that
lets them take the long view no matter what Wall Street
demands in the short term. Nor should it surprise anyone that
these organizations are making some of the most innovative use
of the Internet as they expand their horizons in the digital age.
It was cable, a technology that originally expanded broadcast
television’s reach in the analog age, which turned television
inside out. Originally designed to get broadcast signals into hard-
to-reach mountain valleys, cable grew into a power center in its
own right when system owners realized that the big money was
in more densely populated areas. Cable systems were monopo-
lies in the communities they served, and they used the money in
part to bring more channel capacity onto their systems.
The cable channel that changed the news business forever,
of course, was Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN).
We’ve forgotten what a daring experiment this was, given its
6
from tom paine to blogs and beyond
subsequent success. At the time it was launched on June 1,
1980, many in the media business considered CNN little more
than a bizarre corporate ego trip. As it turned out, CNN
punched a hole in a dam that was already beginning to crumble
from within.
Even if cable was bringing more choices, however, it was
still a central point of control for the owner of the cables. Cable
companies decided which package of channels to offer. Oh,
sure, customers had a choice: yes or no. As we’ll see in
Chapter 11, cable is becoming part of a broadband duopoly that
could threaten information choice in the future.
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.
7
we the media
The commercial online world was in its infancy in those
days, and I couldn’t resist experimenting with it. My initial
epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985. I’d been
using a word processor called XyWrite, the PC program of
choice for serious writers in those days. It ran fast on the era’s
slow computers, and had an internal programming language,
called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly
capable. One day I found myself stymied by an XPL problem. I
posted a short message on a word-processing forum on Compu-
Serve, the era’s most successful commercial online service. A day
later, I logged on again and was greeted with solutions to my
little problem from people in several U.S. cities and, incredibly,
Australia.9
I was amazed. I’d tapped the network, asking for help. I’d
been educated. This, I knew implicitly, was a big deal.
Of course, I didn’t fully get it. I spent the 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
9
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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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from tom paine to blogs and beyond
The people making this news were in the audience. Howard
Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk
radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phe-
nomenon. Both mediums, he told me, reach out to and connect
with “a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream
media.” Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column14 for the
Post in addition to his regular stories and column.
Talk radio wasn’t, and isn’t, just about political anger, even
if politics and other issues of the day are the normal fodder. The
genre has also become a broader sounding board. Doctors offer
advice (including TV’s fictional “Frasier Crane”), computer
gurus advise non-geeks on what to buy, and lawyers listen to
bizarre legal woes.
Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future
of news. In the mid-1990s, not long after I moved to California,
a mild but distinct earthquake rattled my house one day. I lis-
tened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took
calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-the-
spot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices.
t h e we b e 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.
14
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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.
29
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
31
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 wil