We the Media

The Importance of writes "Tech columnist (for the San Jose Mercury News) Dan Gillmor is a journalist who gets it. You may not always agree with every detail of his reporting, but he clearly has a deep understanding of what is important and what is not in the technology world. And, because he is a trained writer, he knows how to explain it well. Of course, he'll probably end up most famous for what he doesn't know, as in his self-proclaimed mantra: "the readers know more than I do." In large part, his new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, is about what happens to journalism when technology reveals the truth of Gillmor's mantra."

The main focus of We the Media is the ongoing revolution in journalism, but it is much broader than that. It is about media and communication in general. It is a report in mid-2004 on many of the predictions that Marshall McLuhan made in the 1960s and 70s about how technology will change the way we communicate for good and ill.

It's actually somewhat difficult to write, precisely, what the book is about. Gillmor has taken a diverse range of subjects from technology, to politics, and law, from blogging to broadcast and spread spectrum, and combined them into a compelling and provocative narrative. The ideas come fast and furious, but Gillmor's writing talent keeps the reader on track. In fact, there are so many concepts discussed that there really is not enough room to summarize them all in this review.

Instead, it is probably easier to talk about who the book is for. Gillmor sets it out in his introduction: journalists, newsmakers and the people formerly known as "the audience."

Journalists

Very simply, We the Media should be required reading in journalism schools for students and professors. I'm serious. If you're a publisher, editor, or an actual breathing reporter, and you want to get up to speed on what is happening to your profession, you need to read this book.

Revolutionary shifts don't usually happen overnight, and the one in journalism that Gillmor describes didn't either. He briefly sketches a progression of changes from revolutionary era newspapers and pamphleteers to the increasing centralization of corporate media behemoths in the 20th century. However, there is a day he can point to when the latest shift became pretty obvious. That day was Sept 11, 2001. That was the day that personal media, through email lists and websites, became an important way for the story to get out.

Personally, I was at a public television conference in Wisconsin. Many of the attendees were journalists for local PBS affiliates. Connected to the net in the conference room, I was getting news through Slashdot because most of the major media websites were down, and the broadcast news was simply playing video of the attacks over and over. Soon, many of the other attendees were also checking Slashdot for links to and mirrors of the news gathered by Slashdot's readers. That may not seem like a big deal, but as Gillmor relates, similar things were taking place in many other net forums. The importance of these alternate news sites has continued (you're reading this aren't you?).

Because the whole book is about journalism, it is a bit hard to pick out more highlights, but Gillmor does begin his chapter on "Professional Journalists Joining the Conversation" with a Slashdot anecdote concerning Jane's Intelligence Review thanking the Slashdot community for pointing out the flaws in a proposed article on cyberterrorism back in 1999. Actually, much of what Gillmor is talking about is basically how journalists can be more like Jane's - working with and taking advantage of the fact that the audience knows more than the publication.

Newsmakers

If you are a politician, CEO or advisor to similar, you should probably read this book as well. In many ways, journalists are middlemen, connecting those making news with those who want to learn the news. One of the things technology is enabling is the ability of newsmakers to connect directly with their audience in many ways. Of course, as Gillmor documents, many businessmen and politicians don't really understand how to communicate through this new medium properly. Nevertheless, there are lessons that can be learned from the mistakes as well as some positive examples of those who've used new technologies successfully.

The People Formerly Known as "The Audience"

Basically, everybody who comments down below this review is participating in it. You're not simply an audience; you're co-authors of this review. What I'm writing here is only a starting point for the conversation. If you're interested in becoming a more active participant, in learning more about the role the once-passive, now-proactive audience is playing in creating, editing and filtering media, then you probably want to read this book too. We're all journalists now.

Free As in Speech (and Beer)

The book has an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Creative Commons license. The digital text isn't available on the web yet, but should be very soon. Expect a profusion of formats, audio versions, translations, and wikis to follow. One thought of mine is that classes of journalism students should be regularly given an assignment to keep the book up-to-date.

We the Media also has a weblog, which will be a good place to keep track of the book as it develops. Just because a book has been published doesn't mean it has finished changing.

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You can purchase We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

"you're co-authors of this review."

If you haven't read the book? That's the problem with most blogs. Everyone's opinion is not news.

Re:"you're co-authors of this review."

I think that you are right in that the most important thing about getting news (or any information) is to separate the facts from people's perceptions of things. This is an inherently difficult task because everyone communicates only what they perceive. The great thing about /. in particular is that the moderation system helps to promote opinions or comments that are factual or insightful in some way. Everyone still is responisible for filtering the opinions of others so that they can form their own more informed opinion.

Re:"you're co-authors of this review."

Hmmm.

Insightful is clearly a mass perception thing - or at least, something can be individually insightful for N people. Hence a mass can determine if something is (in the large) seen as insightful.

On the other hand, just because a whole pile of people in a non-random sample population agree that something is factual doesn't actually make it factual or even necessarily more likely that it will be factual.

Moderation is interesting, but meta-moderation was one of the steps (and I'm sure things will continue to evolve) to address the weaknesses in basic moderation. Obviously, moderation is no Panacea.

One thing professional news sources can contribute is professional-grade investigative research, proper referencing and citation, along with providing identifiable reporters, employers, etc. thus allowing one a chance to ascertain whose self-interest might be being served, to assess the quality of the research and to evaluate the evidence. Bloggers rarely follow such a rigorous method.

On the other hand, with the Internet starting to affect the pace of modern news reporting (plus competition and cost cutting and media consolidation), the net effect may be *less* research, less validation, less formal citation, more op-ed pieces disguised as news items (very common today), and less verifiability, identifiability, and accountability overall in the news industry. That's a sad state of affairs, but it seems to be the way the world is going.

Re:"you're co-authors of this review."

"One thing professional news sources can contribute is professional-grade investigative research, proper referencing and citation, along with providing identifiable reporters, employers, etc. thus allowing one a chance to ascertain whose self-interest might be being served, to assess the quality of the research and to evaluate the evidence. Bloggers rarely follow such a rigorous method."

Actually, professional news sources rarely seem to be rigorous. The exception is magazine articles which usually seem to have been researched and have appropriate references and citations. Newspaper articles are rarely more than either an opinion or a summary. Television is worse, in that it's usually a summary of an opinion.

I think the difference is the longer publication time means they stop trying to compete on "faster" and instead focus on "better".

Re:"you're co-authors of this review."

Blogs are going to change the world. Example:

OLD, TIRED MEDIA: "The Associated Press reported that Saddam Hussein was captured yesterday by American forces."

NEW, EXCITING MEDIA: "omg like kos reported that he saw on chris's blog that john trackbacked to mike's journal where he read about bob's girlfriend's brother's cousin who was like watching Fox News (fair and balanced my ass! lol) and they said something about saddam i dunno current music: brittney cleary - im me current mood: corpulent"

Notice the synergy of information and the ease by which information propagates throughout the blogosphere.

Read more about it!

If you are a politician, CEO or advisor to similar, you should probably read this book as well.

Well, first they should learn to read.

Re:Read more about it!

Difficult to do with their heads stuffed up their asses.

ugh

Personally, I was at a public television conference in Wisconsin. Many of the attendees were journalists for local PBS affiliates. Connected to the net in the conference room, I was getting news through Slashdot because most of the major media websites were down, and the broadcast news was simply playing video of the attacks over and over.

Go back and read through the comments in those stories. Most, if not all of the 'news' was simply people who were watching TV and typing at what they heard. Not only that, the amount of incorrect news both on Slashdot and on the major media outlets that day was understandably quite large. Slashdot just gave people who weren't there a way to talk and theorize about what was happening. TV was still the best place to get info that day. Slashdot wasn't.

PDFs available

You can get PDFs of the entire book from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index. csp [oreilly.com].

Re:PDFs available

#!/usr/bin/sh

for x in 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
do
wget http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/ch$x.p df
done

wget http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/epilog ue.pdf

wget http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/endnot es.pdf

Cut and paste. Speech output

wget -c `wget -q -O- http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/ | grep pdf | sed 's%^.* href="%%;s%".*$%%;s%^%http://www.oreilly.com%'`

pdftotext -raw ch00.pdf - | festival --tts

digital text is available

The digital text isn't available on the web yet

Yes it is, here: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/ [oreilly.com]

McLuhan wasn't exactly right.

The medium isn't the message, per se. The message is the message. It doesn't really matter with what edium a message is transmitted; information is information.

This was reinforced recently by the blogsters at the Democratic Convention. Few said anything of consequence. That what they transmitted was using new media didn't matter. Crap is crap.

And as such, I don't think I can agree with Gilmour; while September 11 showed that personal media could be an important infotransmission tool, July 2004 showed that it's overrated, and that we still need professionals.

Crap is crap

I agree, crap is crap. Professional news media will always have a place because they employ trained writers. I'll read a blog for fun, or because I know the blogger personally, or because I have an intense interest in a specific blog topic. But if I'm reading hard news or human interest pieces, I am *not* going to entertain an unfocused run-on stream of thought -- which is what many bloggers write.

More importantly, with a professional news organization, I know who I am dealing with. Too many online entries -- from blog postings to product reviews -- are not authenticated. I know who the editor is of my local newspaper and I know the corporation and politics of the company who owns the newspaper. I'll take that over Joe Schmoe because I don't know which axe he's grinding.

and a horse is a horse, of course, of course...

Is professional training all it takes to get your respect?

I find that most professional news organizations (in my country, the USA) are trying to do whatever they can to push their agendas while also insinuating that they are impartial. It's downright duplicitous, and whats worse is that there are people who believe that their facts are totally true.

Most of the time you don't see this kind of thing in blogs, and I think the fact that the writers aren't professional journalists, and therefore aren't trained in the subtle art of fact-misdirection is one reason why. But you're right about the unverified stuff. There's no telling what you're getting with a blog.

I'd trust the average blog about as much as the average professional news agency, but for different reasons. In either case, a particular instance would have to earn my respect before I'd believe them above other sources.

Re:McLuhan wasn't exactly right.

This was reinforced recently by the blogsters at the Democratic Convention. Few said anything of consequence. That what they transmitted was using new media didn't matter. Crap is crap.

Okay, so what did the professionals say that was of consequence? Was there any consequential news that came out of the DNC? Were there earth-shattering announcements that were overlooked by the bloggers that people with a professional mindset managed to convey?

If so, then there is some support for your position, though the fact that it's posted to slashdot gives it a Moderation of Ironic +/- 1. I do agree that the medium is less important than the message, but your arguments about the DNC don't support that proposition. At least, not without additional supporting details.

And as such, I don't think I can agree with Gilmour; while September 11 showed that personal media could be an important infotransmission tool, July 2004 showed that it's overrated, and that we still need professionals.

I didn't get the sense from the review that he was saying there will be no more need for Professional journalists. Rather, I was getting the sense that Big Media can no longer make proclamations from the top of the mountain and just let them flow through uncontested. Instead, it's an increasingly 2-way communication, and the smarter professionals will pay attention.

=Brian

Re:McLuhan wasn't exactly right.

You're both right, really. take for example the presidential debate (i think it was nixon and kennedy, not completely sure) which was the first to be broadcasted both on TV and Radio. Radio listeners thought nixon won, tv watchers thought kennedy did. So while the medium isnt the message per se, it can affect perception of the message, which is nearly the same.

Now that would be an interesting change!

I studied Journalism in college, and I don't recall a single instance where we were taught to consider an audience with more education and experience than the reporter. Matter of fact, everything seemed to boil down to taking a complicated story and making it understandable by the average reader. It wasn't purposely arrogant, but you can imagine how the result would parallel condescension.

That methodology worked better when I studied (in the 80's), but today's plastic surgery-riddled TV boneheads don't have a clue.

Re:Now that would be an interesting change!

...and the "plastic surgery-riddled TV boneheads" probably don't write a single scrap of news, either.

I'm currently a professional technology writer/editor and my mandate is still to boil down and synthesize complex topics and make them readable, understandable, and as engaging to readers as possible. I don't see how anybody could find fault in that.

What sense does it make to consider an audience with more education and experience than the reporter? Why on earth would those people read the article?

Fans of the Web and the Internet at large love to repeat over and over how it's going to revolutionize everything. Maybe it is -- but for some reason, that always seems to boil down to knocking somebody off some perceived pedestal. "Oh that guy doesn't know anything, he made this mistake here and I bet twenty other people on the Internet can point out others." Great. But the Internet isn't revolutionizing anything here. There have always been people who say things like that, and there's even a name for them: armchair critics. Their presence does not take away the need for well-informed, insightful, accurate, and well-written journalism.

Journalism as a "conversation" or a "seminar" sounds really nice and new-agey. If that always worked, I guess it would be pretty great. As a counter-example, I could give Slashdot. If a cacophony of voices is all you really need to get your information, why is everyone always yelling "RTFA"?

Re:Now that would be an interesting change!

But see, put on your analytical cap for a second, and consider the author. He writes about technical issues, but he's not one who develops in the field. In fact, I'd venture to say that his audience is quite narrow, being mainly restricted to the people who have an interest in the technology field.

Ever read an agribusiness periodical? I often don't have a clue what they're talking about. Am I a proficient enough reporter to be able to grasp the issues after research, and write a story? You bet. But the farmer in the field, and the guy in the seed store would still know more than I do, and if I make a mistake, they'd nail me on it quickly.

Your training, as most "journalism" (a term I despise, actually) programs do, focused on the mass-media side of things. The arrogance that exists, and you now see stems from the idea that the media is a) omniscent, and b) totally objective. Neither is true. Once you jettison those two dated notions, you can get down to real quality reporting. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you can't paint the full picture of a story with the information you have available. "Journalists" seem awfully reluctant to do that. So they reach and draw conclusions that can't be supported (gotta answer the "why" question, even if you don't know). If you do that too often, and your readers have a clue, you won't have a job very long.

Reminds me of a Despair.com poster

None of us is as dumb as all of us. [despair.com]

News source diversity is a good thing

As long as opinion is not the dominating factor of the news item.

All of the big media conglomerates seem to have an agenda to obtain/maintain viewership.

Some go for a demographic (ie. - conservative or liberal). Some go for the sensational (Horrible tragedy narrowly averted by patriotic quadriplegic albinos).

For those willing to sift through the personal biases, having a large source of new items is good to discern the actual facts more easily.

Like the story a ways back on the eBay scammer who was also discovered to be fraudulently claiming death benefits (donations).

Revolution in media?

Oh yeah, you mean the fact that the media and Hollywood and virtually all forms of mainstream communication are all very liberal biased? Oh, no? Then maybe I'll RTFA.

We need less bias

The problem with the media is too much bias. The "news-as-entertainment" problem still ranks high on my list, but it's the outright political bias that drives me nuts the most.

I am not a conservative, nor am I a Republican. But I can still see the bias in the media. The mainstream news in particular has a distinct Democrat/liberal bent. This is hard to see if you're a Democrat/liberal, and you'll probably vehemently deny it exists, but if you're not a liberal or Democrat, you can plainly see it.

Heck, even a lot of liberal Greens can see it, just because the blackout of any news on Nader and the Green Party. That party decided the 2000 election, but the media acts as if it were irrelevant to the 2004 campaign coverage.

When I mean bias, I don't mean obvious blatant bias that any numbskull can see. I mean a subtle bias in the stories presented, adjectives used, body language by anchors, etc. But sometimes that bias is obvious, as when the media was having orgasms over the Clark candidacy last year. That last what, all of two weeks?

Here's a subtle bias as an example. Mrs. Kerry is a millionaire. Mr. Cheney is a millionaire. Both once had strong corporate ties, but no longer do. Yet which one will the media portray as having a corporate war chest? Which one is more often mentioned being a millionaire? Which one is more often mentioned as having corporate ties?

I am not claiming that this bias is intentional. But with 90% (IIRC) of news reporters registered Democrat, they've constructed themselves a world isolated from the real one. While the owners of the media tend to be Republican, those that actually report the news are not. If you ran across a news outlet that consisted of 90% Republican (or Libertarian or Green) reporters, you would expect those skewed numbers to produce a strong bias. So why don't you expect the same when the news outlets are all 90% Democrat?

Computer writing != journalism

IAAJ. I do features. I speak some Arabic, and another European language, get on well with most kinds of people, have an ability to live with uncertainty, and am getting used to judging when a situation becomes hairy. I've won a couple of awards in the US.

How has blogging changed my life? Not one iota. Most information I still get face to face, or on the phone. Many of my sources are computer illiterate. If you want to know where the bodies are buried, go there. You never forget the smell. The one good thing I can say about the technical revolution is that I can post stories unedited on my own website, taking up as much space as I like.

Scools?

Very simply, We the Media should be required reading in journalism schools for students and professors.

Journalists go to schools?

Imagine the courses!

JRN 100 The Five W's: George W. Bush Stinks, George W. Bush has Cooties, George W. Bush is Mean, George W. Bush is Dumb, and George W. Bush is a Blue Meanie Dumb Cootie.

JRN 200 Casting Aspersions: Learn which adjectives to use when describing the idiotic George W. Bush and the brave genius patriots who correctly despise him.

JRN 250 Rumors - Gateways to Truth: A newspaper is nothing without rumors. Learn to tell whoppers and fool people for fun and profit.

JRN 300 Context is Your Enemy: Students will understand which facts to leave out of stories and how to present events out of order. This is a writing-intensive course.

JRN 350 The Dreaded Tech Beat: Learn to cope with things you do not understand at all by making your writing buzzword-compliant.

JRN 400 Sports - Journalism's Crowning Achievement: Hype and fluff are the indespensible tools of the Sports Reporter. Students will learn to use a thesaurus to seem intelligent when discussing trivia about games.

JRN 450 Science Sucks Ass (course prerequisite JRN 350): In this advanced course students will learn to misquote scientists, construct non sequitur arguments, miss the point, and bring their own prejudices to their stories.

JRN 500 (Capstone) Bias: Students will wear shoes with different thickness soles to learn about slanting. Course ends with field trip to cattle ranch to watch real B.S. being made.

Trained?

Since when are writers "trained"? Don't you mean "talented" or "intelligent"? You can't train someone to be a good writer, anymore than you can train someone to be a good artist.

Audio available

I have started to read the book aloud. If you are interested in listening and/or participating please see my weblog entry [niallkennedy.com].

Converting to an Audio Book

Niall Kennedy [niallkennedy.com] has started a project to convert to book into an audio book like AKMA did with Lessig's Free Culture [disseminary.org]. Unfortunately, AKM Adam [seabury.edu] is a Ph.D., Rev., and author. Niall Kennedy is a junior at UC Davis. AKMA was about to get some high profile people from the blogsphere to record chapters including Dave Winer and Doug Kaye. Niall Kennedy has to date, only recorded the intro himself. Who knows, maybe Niall's project will grow legs and evolve into something like free-culture.org [free-culture.org].

Dan Gillmor is a simple moralist

I used to read the San Jose Murky News and Dan Gillmor's column.

On any business issue, he generally comes down on the side of some idealist vision of 'fairness', and supports a gov-force solution to the problem.

In short, Gilmor is generally a socialist in his outlook.

His tech insights aren't much better, IMHO.

Lew

Read the book!

here [oreilly.com]