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
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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
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readers well. Many, however, had little concern for what we
now call objectivity. Papers had points of view, reflecting the
politics of their backers and owners.
Newspapers have provoked public opinion for as long as
they’ve been around. “Yellow journalism” achieved perhaps its
ugliest prominence when early media barons such as Joseph
Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst abused their consider-
able powers. Hearst, in particular, is notorious for helping to
spark the Spanish-American War in 1898 by inflaming public
opinion.
As the Gilded Age’s excesses began to tear at the very fabric
of American society, a new kind of journalist, the muckraker,
emerged at the end of the 19th century. More than most jour-
nalists of the era, muckrakers performed the public service func-
tion of journalism by exposing a variety of outrages, including
the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel
conditions in workplaces. Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the
Cities), Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company),
Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and Upton Sinclair (The
Jungle) were among the daring journalists and novelists who
shone daylight into some dark corners of society. They helped
set the stage for the Progressive Era, and set a standard for the
investigative journalists of the new century.
Personal journalism didn’t die with the muckrakers.
Throughout the 20th century, the world was blessed with indi-
viduals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the
moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose
weekly newsletter was required reading for a generation of
Washington insiders. As Victor Navasky wrote in the July 21,
2003 issue of The Nation, Stone eschewed the party circuit in
favor of old-fashioned reporting:
His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury
himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congres-
sional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time
prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed
paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line,
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examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documenta-
tion of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the
public domain.6
A generation of journalists learned from Stone’s techniques.
If we’re lucky, his methods will never go out of fashion.
t h e co rp o ra t e e r a
But in the 20th century, the big business of journalism—the cor-
poratization of journalism—was also emerging as a force in
society. This inevitable transition had its positive and negative
aspects.
I say “inevitable” for several reasons. First, industries con-
solidate. This is in the nature of capitalism. Second, successful
family enterprises rarely stayed in the hands of their founders’
families; inheritance taxes forced some sales and breakups, and
bickering among siblings and cousins who inherited valuable
properties led to others. Third, the rules of American capitalism
have been tweaked in recent decades to favor the big over the
small.
As noted in the Introduction, however, the creation of Big
Media is something of an historical artifact. It stems from a time
when A.J. Liebling’s famous admonition, that freedom of the
press was for those people who owned a press, reflected finan-
cial reality. The economics of newspaper publishing favored big-
ness, and local monopolies came about because, in most com-
munities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of
any size.7
Broadcasting has played a key role in the transition to con-
solidation. Radio, then television, lured readers and advertisers
away from newspapers,8 contributing to the consolidation of the
newspaper industry. But the broadcasters were simultaneously
turning into the biggest of Big Media. As they grew, they
brought the power of broadcasting to bear on the news, to great
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effect. Edward R. Murrow’s reports on CBS, most notably his
coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil poli-
tics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism.
The news hegemony of the networks and big newspapers
reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Journalists helped bring
down a law-breaking president. An anchorman, Walter Cron-
kite, was considered the most trusted person in America. Yet
this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost
money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their
prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded)
mandate to perform a public service function in their communi-
ties. The networks were sold to companies such as General Elec-
tric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News
divisions were required to be profit centers.
While network news may have been expensive to produce,
local stations had it easier. But while the network news shows
still retained some sense of responsibility, most local stations
made no pretense of serving the public trust, preferring instead
to lure viewers with violence and entertainment, two sure rat-
ings boosters. It was an irresistible combination for resource-
starved news directors: cheaper than serious reporting, and com-
pelling video. “If it bleeds, it leads” became the all-too-true
mantra for the local news reports, and it has stayed that way,
with puerile celebrity “journalism” now added to the mix.
America has suffered from this simplistic view of news.
Even in the 1990s, when crime rates were plummeting, local TV
persisted in giving viewers the impression that crime was never a
bigger problem. This was irresponsible because, among other
things, it helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that has
stripped away crucial civil liberties—including most of our
Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches
and seizures—and kept other serious issues off the air.
As the pace of life has quickened, our collective attention
span has shortened. I suppose it’s asking too much of commer-
cial TV news to occasionally use the public airwaves to actually
inform the public, but the push for profits has crowded out
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depth. The situation is made worse by the fact that most of us
don’t stop long enough to consider what we’ve been told, much
less seek out context, thereby allowing ourselves to be shallow
and to be led by people who take advantage of it. A shallow citi-
zenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an
informed one.
At the same time, big changes were occurring in TV jour-
nalism, and big newspaper companies were swallowing small
papers around the nation. As noted, this didn’t always reduce
quality. In fact, the craft of newspaper journalism has never
been better in some respects; investigative reporting by the best
organizations continues to make me proud. And while some
corporate owners—Gannett in particular—have tended to turn
independent papers into cookie-cutter models of corporate jour-
nalism, sometimes they’ve actually improved on the original.
But it’s no coincidence that three of the best American newspa-
pers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Washington Post, have an ownership structure—voting control
by families and/or small groups of committed investors—that
lets them take the long view no matter what Wall Street
demands in the short term. Nor should it surprise anyone that
these organizations are making some of the most innovative use
of the Internet as they expand their horizons in the digital age.
It was cable, a technology that originally expanded broadcast
television’s reach in the analog age, which turned television
inside out. Originally designed to get broadcast signals into hard-
to-reach mountain valleys, cable grew into a power center in its
own right when system owners realized that the big money was
in more densely populated areas. Cable systems were monopo-
lies in the communities they served, and they used the money in
part to bring more channel capacity onto their systems.
The cable channel that changed the news business forever,
of course, was Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN).
We’ve forgotten what a daring experiment this was, given its
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subsequent success. At the time it was launched on June 1,
1980, many in the media business considered CNN little more
than a bizarre corporate ego trip. As it turned out, CNN
punched a hole in a dam that was already beginning to crumble
from within.
Even if cable was bringing more choices, however, it was
still a central point of control for the owner of the cables. Cable
companies decided which package of channels to offer. Oh,
sure, customers had a choice: yes or no. As we’ll see in
Chapter 11, cable is becoming part of a broadband duopoly that
could threaten information choice in the future.
f ro m o ut s i d e i n
During this time of centralization and corporate ownership, the
forces of change were gathering at the edges. Some forces were
technological, such as the microprocessor that led straight to the
personal computer, and a federally funded data-networking
experiment called the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
Some were political and/or judicial, such as Supreme Court deci-
sions that forced AT&T to let third parties plug their own
phones into Ma Bell’s network, and another that made it legal
for purchasers of home videotape machines to record TV broad-
casts for subsequent viewing.
Personal choice, assisted by the power of personal tech-
nology, was in the wind.
I got my first personal computer in the late 1970s. In the
early 1980s, when I first became a journalist, I bought one of
the earliest portable personal computers, an Osborne, and used
it to write and electronically transmit news stories to publica-
tions such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, for
which I was freelancing from Vermont. I was enthralled by this
fabulous tool that allowed me, a lone reporter in what were
considered the boondocks, to report the news in a timely and
efficient manner.
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The commercial online world was in its infancy in those
days, and I couldn’t resist experimenting with it. My initial
epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985. I’d been
using a word processor called XyWrite, the PC program of
choice for serious writers in those days. It ran fast on the era’s
slow computers, and had an internal programming language,
called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly
capable. One day I found myself stymied by an XPL problem. I
posted a short message on a word-processing forum on Compu-
Serve, the era’s most successful commercial online service. A day
later, I logged on again and was greeted with solutions to my
little problem from people in several U.S. cities and, incredibly,
Australia.9
I was amazed. I’d tapped the network, asking for help. I’d
been educated. This, I knew implicitly, was a big deal.
Of course, I didn’t fully get it. I spent the 1986–87 aca-
demic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which
in those days was at the heart of the Internet—then still a uni-
versity, government, and research network of networks—
without managing to notice the Internet. John Markoff of The
New York Times, the first major newspaper reporter to under-
stand the Net’s value, had it pretty much to himself in those
days as a journalist, and got scoop after scoop as a result. One
way he acquired information was by reading the Internet’s
public message boards. Collectively called Usenet, they were and
still are a grab bag of “newsgroups” on which anyone with Net
access can post comments. Usenet was, and remains, a useful
resource.10
CompuServe wasn’t the only way to get online in the 1980s.
Other choices included electronic bulletin boards, known as
BBS. They turned into technological cul-de-sacs, but had great
value at the time. You’d dial into a local BBS via a modem on
your computer, read and write messages, download files, and
get what amounted to a local version of the Internet and systems
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such as CompuServe. You’d find a variety of topics on all of
these systems, ranging from aviation to technology to politics,
whatever struck the fancy of the people who used them.
Fringe politics found their way onto the bulletin boards
early on. I was a reporter for the Kansas City Times in the mid-
1980s and spent the better part of a year chasing groups such as
the Posse Commitatus around the Farm Belt. This and other vir-
ulently antiestablishment organizations found ready ears amid a
rural economic depression that made it easier to recruit farmers
and other small-town people who felt they were victims of
banks and governments. I found my way onto several online
boards operated by radical groups; I never got very deep into
the systems because the people running them understood the
basics of security. Law-enforcement officials and others who
watched the activities of the radicals told me at the time that the
BBS was one of the radical right’s most effective tools.11
rans o m-no t e m e d i a
Personal technology wasn’t just about going online. It was
about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expen-
sive ways. For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of
computer technology.12 But it was desktop publishing where the
potential for journalism became clearest.
A series of inventions in the mid-1980s brought the medium
into its new era. Suddenly, with an Apple Macintosh and a laser
printer, one could easily and cheaply create and lay out a publi-
cation. Big publishing didn’t disappear—it adapted by using the
technology to lower costs—but the entry level moved down to
small groups and even individuals, a stunning liberation from
the past.
There was one drawback of having so much power and
flexibility in the hands of nonprofessionals. In the early days of
desktop publishing, people tended to use too many different
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fonts on a page, a style that was likened, all too accurately, to
ransom notes. But the typographical mishmash was a small
price to pay for all those new voices.
Big Media was still getting bigger in this period, but it
wasn’t noticing the profound demographic changes that had
been reshaping the nation for decades. Newsrooms, never mind
coverage, scarcely reflected the diversity. Desktop publishing
and its progeny created an opening for many new players to
enter, not least of which was the ethnic press.
Big Media has tried to adapt. Newsrooms are becoming
more diverse. Major media companies have launched or bought
popular ethnic publications and broadcasters. But independent
ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credi-
bility: grassroots journalism ascendant.13
o ut l o ud an d o u t r a g e o u s
Meanwhile, talk radio was also becoming a force, though not an
entirely new one by any means. Radio has featured talk pro-
grams throughout its history, and call-in shows date back as far
as 1945. Opinionated hosts, mostly from the political right,
such as Father Coughlin, fulminated about government, taxes,
cultural breakdowns, and a variety of issues they and their lis-
teners were convinced hadn’t received sufficient attention from
the mainstream media. These hosts were as much entertainers as
commentators, and their shows drew listeners in droves.
But modern talk radio had another crucial feature: the par-
ticipation of the audience. People—regular people—were invited
to have their say on the radio. Before that, regular people had
no immediate or certain outlet for their own stories and views
short of letters to the editor in newspapers. Now they could be
part of the program, adding the weight of their own beliefs to
the host’s.
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The people making this news were in the audience. Howard
Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk
radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phe-
nomenon. Both mediums, he told me, reach out to and connect
with “a bunch of people who are turned off by the mainstream
media.” Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column14 for the
Post in addition to his regular stories and column.
Talk radio wasn’t, and isn’t, just about political anger, even
if politics and other issues of the day are the normal fodder. The
genre has also become a broader sounding board. Doctors offer
advice (including TV’s fictional “Frasier Crane”), computer
gurus advise non-geeks on what to buy, and lawyers listen to
bizarre legal woes.
Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future
of news. In the mid-1990s, not long after I moved to California,
a mild but distinct earthquake rattled my house one day. I lis-
tened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took
calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-the-
spot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices.
t h e we b e ra e m e r g e n t
As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far
more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except per-
haps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college cam-
puses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial ser-
vices such as CompuServe and America Online. But another
series of breakthroughs was about to move us into a networked
world.
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology
that became the World Wide Web. He wrote software to serve,
or dish out, information from connected computers, and a
“client” program that was, in effect, the first browser. He also
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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
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other people were doing so. Once search engines and link
directories emerged, I didn’t need to catalog everything online.
So I enjoyed having a tool to map my thoughts and experi-
ences, and a chance to connect those thoughts and experi-
ences to the rest of the electrified English-speaking world!
What had happened? Communications had completed a
transformation. The printing press and broadcasting are a one-
to-many medium. The telephone is one-to-one. Now we had a
medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, one-
to-many, and many-to-many. Just about anyone could own a
digital printing press, and have worldwide distribution.16
None of this would have surprised Marshall McLuhan.
Indeed, his seminal works, especially Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man17 and The Medium is the Message,18 pre-
saged so much of what has occurred. As he observed in the
introduction to Understanding Media:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of frag-
mentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is
imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our
bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system
itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as
far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final
phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation
of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will
be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of
human society, much as we have already extended our senses
and our nerves by the various media.
Nor would it have come as a shock to Alvin Toffler, who
explained in The Third Wave19 how manufacturing technology
had driven a wedge between producers and customers. Mass
manufacturing drove down the unit cost of production but at the
cost of something vital: a human connection with the buyer.
Information technology, he said, would lead—among many
other things—to mass customization, disintermediation (elimina-
tion of middlemen), and media convergence.
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Perhaps no document of its time was more prescient about the
Web’s potential than the Cluetrain Manifesto,20 which first
appeared on the Web in April 1999. It was alternately preten-
tious and profound, with considerably more of the latter qual-
ity. Extending the ideas of McLuhan and many others, the four
authors—Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and
David Weinberger—struck home with me and a host of other
readers who knew innately that the Net was powerful but
weren’t sure how to define precisely why.
“A powerful global conversation has begun,” they wrote.
“Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing
new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a
direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter
faster than most companies.”
They explained why the Net is changing the very nature of
business. “Markets are conversations,” proclaimed their first of
95 theses with elegant simplicity.
Journalism is also a conversation, I realized. Cluetrain and
its antecedents have become a foundation for my evolving view
of the trade.
wri t i ng t h e w e b
The scene was now set for the rise of a new kind of news. But
some final pieces had yet to be put in place. One was technolog-
ical: giving everyday people the tools they needed to join this
emerging conversation. Another was cultural: the realization
that putting the tools of creation into millions of hands could
lead to an unprecedented community. Adam Smith, in a sense,
was creating a collective.
The toolmakers did, and continue to do, their part. And
with the neat irony that has a habit of appearing in this trans-
formation, a programmer’s annoyance with journalists had
everything to do with one of the most important developments.
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Dave Winer had written and sold an outlining tool called
“More,” a Macintosh application.21 He was a committed and
knowledgeable Mac developer, but in the early 1990s, he found
himself more and more annoyed by a trade press that, in his
view, was getting the story all wrong.
At the time, Microsoft Windows was becoming more pop-
ular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a
troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company. Trou-
bled, yes. But when the computer journalists persisted in saying,
in effect, “Apple is dead, and there’s no Macintosh software
development anymore,” Winer was furious. He decided to go
around the established media, and with the rise of the Internet,
he had a medium.
He published an email newsletter called “DaveNet.” It was
biting, opinionated, and provocative, and it reached many influ-
ential people in the tech industry. They paid attention. Winer’s
critiques could be abrasive, but he had a long record of accom-
plishments and deep insight.
Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the
Mac the ink it deserved. For its part, Apple made strategic mis-
takes that alienated software developers and helped marginalize
the platform. And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft’s
roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright law-
breaking, became dominant.
But Winer realized he was onto something. He’d found
journalism wanting, and he bypassed it. Then he expanded on
what he’d started. Like Justin Hall, he created a newsy page in
what later became known as the blog format—most recent
material at the top.
In the late 1990s, Winer and his team at UserLand
Software22 rewrote an application called Frontier. One collec-
tion of new functions was given the name Manila, and it was
one of the first programs that made it easy for novices to create
their own blogs. My first blog was created on the beta version
of Manila. Winer has suggested that traditional journalism will
wither in the face of what he helped spawn. I disagree, but his
contributions to the craft’s future have been pivotal.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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