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Chapter 1: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

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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 experiences 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 Franklin, whose Pennsylvania Gazette was civic-minded and occasionally 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 can appreciate this today, but journalists are still dying elsewhere 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, analyzing the proposed Constitution and arguing the fundamental questions of how the new Republic might work, has reverberated 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.

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The Corporate Era

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But in the 20th century, the big business of journalism—the corporatization 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 consolidate. 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 , 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 financial reality. The economics of newspaper publishing favored bigness, and local monopolies came about because, in most communities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of any size. [7]

Broadcasting has played a key role in the transition to consolidation. 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 effect. Edward R. Murrow's reports on CBS, most notably his coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil politics 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 Cronkite, 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 communities. The networks were sold to companies such as General Electric and Loews Corp., which saw only the bottom line. News divisions were required to be profit centers.

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From Outside In

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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 decisions 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 broadcasts for subsequent viewing.

Personal choice, assisted by the power of personal technology, 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 publications 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.

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 CompuServe, 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 academic year on a fellowship at the University of Michigan, which in those days was at the heart of the Internet—then still a university, government, and research network of networks—without managing to notice the Internet. John Markoff of

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Ransom-Note Media

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Personal technology wasn't just about going online. It was about the creation of media in new and, crucially, less expensive 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 publication. 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 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 credibility: grassroots journalism ascendant. [13]

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Out Loud and Outrageous

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Meanwhile, talk radio was also becoming a force, though not an entirely new one by any means. Radio has featured talk programs 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 listeners 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 participation 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.

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 phenomenon. 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 column [14] 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 listened 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.

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The Web Era Emergent

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As the 1990s arrived, personal computers were becoming far more ubiquitous. Relatively few people were online, except perhaps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college campuses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial services 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 sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowledge 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 further: 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 graphical 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 specialized 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:

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Writing the Web

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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 technological: 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 transformation, a programmer's annoyance with journalists had everything to do with one of the most important developments.

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 popular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company. Troubled, 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 influential people in the tech industry. They paid attention. Winer's critiques could be abrasive, but he had a long record of accomplishments and deep insight.

Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the Mac the ink it deserved. For its part, Apple made strategic mistakes that alienated software developers and helped marginalize the platform. And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft's roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright lawbreaking, 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.

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Open Sourcing the News

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The development of the personal computer may have empowered the individual, but there were distinct limits. One was software 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 Massachusetts 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 applications 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.

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 unexpected behavior, can be found and fixed more easily, too. [26]

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Terror Turns Journalism's Corner

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By the turn of the new century, the key building blocks of emergent, 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.

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 considerable 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 newspaper, 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 overwhelming as people everywhere went online for more information, or simply to talk with each other.

I could retrieve my email, however, and my inbox overflowed 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.

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Endnotes

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1. Cambridge University Press, 2003
2. Bimber also observes that the Founders based their new nation essentially on information. An informed electorate was necessary to self-government. The Federalist papers, newspapers, and other writings were the beginnings of the world's first information-based society.
3. Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet (1998) observes the remarkable similarities in rise of 19th-century telegraph networks and the modern Internet, including stock market bubbles, absurd predictions, and, in the end, the rise of an enormously powerful tool for communications (http://www.tomstandage.com).
4. Nation magazine, July 21, 2003.
5. In the early 1970s, big newspaper companies persuaded Congress to pass a "newspaper preservation" law that limited antitrust enforcement. The law let competing newspapers merge their advertising, printing, and circulation staffs while maintaining separate newsrooms and publishing two papers. My company, Knight Ridder, enjoys the fruits of several such Joint Operating Agreements, as they're called. If there was ever a justification for this law, which is doubtful, the Net makes it less justifiable now. The nation would be better off if the law was repealed.
6. Direct mail has also pulled advertisers away in large numbers, notes Stephen B. Waters, publisher of the Rome Sentinel in upstate New York. "In 1979 they rejiggered the rates to begin to suck up advertising to keep postponing until the next elections a day of reckoning because of a bloated, expensive labor force," he wrote me. "The advertising dollar has gone to Direct Marketing, not radio and television. It still is the case."
7. I rely on somewhat fading memory, not archives, for the details of my XyWrite programming-assistance story.
8. Usenet newsgroups live on today in many forms, including "Google Groups" (http://groups.google.com).

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Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web

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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 Software, 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 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.

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Mail Lists and Forums

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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 Science, 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 can make the list private. Second, they tend to be narrowly targeted, such as the SARS list. Third, they are "pushed" to subscribers' email inboxes. Some are moderated; most are not. The key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a combination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly interested 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 "Blogrollers" group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each other about new postings they think might be especially noteworthy for their peers. Some mail lists have enormous readerships, such as Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.

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Weblogs

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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.

So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it's an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological 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:

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Wiki

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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 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 dictionary) 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 examples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful is the WikiTravel site, [50] which brings together a variety of viewpoints 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 colecturer at the University of Hong Kong set up a Wiki for our students 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.

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SMS

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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 information providers, including companies that have time-sensitive information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assortment of SMS services. The San Diego Union-Tribune's SignOnSanDiego.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 significantly 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.

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 countries with advanced wireless communications have used SMS for social organization. We're just at the beginning of this technology's development. As networks and handsets improve, SMS will give way to video messaging, with yet to be understood implications.

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Mobile-Connected Cameras

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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 photographer. We haven't begun to think through the societal implications 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 cameras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos quickly. Video is also going digital at a rapid pace. The size of 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 professional 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 cameras, 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 precedent 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.

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Internet "Broadcasting"

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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 royalties 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 Blogging of the President 2004" [55] site. [56] IT Conversations, a Net-only program, has been posting interviews in various audio formats 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 program 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 producing video news programming is dropping all the time, delivering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs can't afford. This is where peer-to-peer networking may come into play.

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Peer-to-Peer

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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 computer, his Napster software would (if he allowed it to) tell a central computer at Napster that the song was available. Then other people who wanted the same song would check the Napster 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 infringement. 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 history 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 product, every downloader's computer is also a content server. [58] So the more popular you are, the less it costs, not the other way around.

P2P is also valuable in a political sense. New P2P systems under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity that we've seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censorship more difficult.

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The RSS Revolution

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For people who want to "roll their own" news reports, nothing may be more important for them to understand than a little known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part, for its growing success.

Early in the development of blogging software, programmers baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndication capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the content they care about. It's spawning a content revolution that is only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could well become the next mainstream method of distributing, collecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation—and RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation.

Imagine your own "Presidential Briefing"—with only the topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting.

So don't think of RSS as just another technology abbreviation. "Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow's information—or at least some of it," said Chris Pirillo, founder of LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters. [59] RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should. Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to you on your terms."

RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every weblog software product. Create a blog, and you're creating RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its value, too, and they're creating RSS "feeds," as the files are called, of their own material.

If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I can't force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so important: the user is in control.

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Making Sense of It All

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If tomorrow's journalism is an infinitely complex conversation, keeping track of it will require an assortment of new tools going well beyond RSS that will allow us to search for and organize what we discover. A few have already arrived in what can only be called "Version 0.5"—what techies call beta form: promising and useful to a degree, but not quite ready for the average user.

One that shows the way is Feedster, [64] a web-based application that indexes RSS files. I've found it useful for keeping track of what some bloggers are saying about my own work. Feedster has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls "Feedpapers," which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based news and blog commentary.

Another is Technorati, [65] which mines information about the weblog world. It was designed by San Francisco technologist Dave Sifry to fill a personal need. "I had been running my own blog for about a year, and referrer logs [information about site visitors and the pages they viewed on the site] weren't enough," he said. "I wanted to know what people were talking about, and what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared about." So he wrote some code to crawl the blogs and find out.

The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have become a vital part of a larger ecosystem. But like mail lists, blogs, Wikis, SMS, and the other tools of our journalistic future, they are only tools. They must not be confused with journalism itself. Certain values must remain: fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness.

At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for tomorrow's news and information. They may enable "consumers" of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversations and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even truth, if they are willing to seek out sources from a variety of viewpoints. We'll look at this architectural potential in more detail in Chapter 8.

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Endnotes

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1. TheGuardian, one of the most prominent national newspapers in the United Kingdom, offers thoughtful, hard-hitting journalism from a slightly left-of-center perspective. In the weeks before the 2003 Iraq war, the site saw a big increase in visitors. This happened to most serious newspapers, but TheGuardian's traffic boost came in large part from Americans. What were they looking for? No one is absolutely certain, but Simon Waldman, who runs TheGuardian's online operations, told me he believed many of the American visitors were looking for something they couldn't find in the U.S. press: a different perspective from the relentlessly pro-war coverage they were seeing at home. I leaned in favor of the war, but I was appalled at the lack of nuance in American journalism during a time when about half the population opposed the war.
2. Scribner, 2002
3. Steven Johnson interview: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/22/johnson.html.
4. David Isenberg's "Rise of the Stupid Network": http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html.
5. Yahoo Groups: http://groups.yahoo.com.
6. Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.com.
7. Wi-Fi Networking: http://wifinetnews.com.
8. Jay Rosen's PressThink: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/.
9. Six Apart: http://www.sixapart.com.
10. Radio UserLand: http://radio.userland.com.
11. LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com.
12. Blogger: http://www.blogger.com.
13. 20six: http://www.20six.co.uk.
14. Wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.
15. Cunningham's Wiki categories: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory.
16. WikiTravel: http://www.wikitravel.org.
17. Instant messaging is also one way people spread news, mostly in the U.S., but SMS is much more global and destined, as devices become more mobile, to be

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Chapter 3: The Gates Come Down

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A peculiar silence reigned in most major newspapers and TV networks the first few days after Trent Lott, celebrating fellow Republican Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday in late 2002, seemed to wax nostalgic for a racist past. Lott, then majority leader of the U.S. Senate, recalled Thurmond's presidential campaign in 1948, a race in which he called for the preservation of segregation. The nation would be better off if Thurmond had won, Lott said.

It was an outrageous assertion, but barely noticed at the outset. ABC News mentioned it. The Washington Post had a story but buried it. And that was about all we heard from the major media. But the silence didn't last, because Lott got a taste of tomorrow's media: the swarm of webloggers, emailers, and other online journalists who are changing some long-established rules.

The flow of outrage and information was complex. [66] But the bottom line was that webloggers and other online commentators, far more than mainstream journalists, kept the story of Lott's remarks alive despite the major media's early disinterest. Liberal bloggers, such as Joshua Marshall on Talking Points Memo, [67] were early to sound off, but several conservatives also chimed in. In some cases, bloggers were almost as outraged by Big Media's inattention as by the senator's statements and initially weasely expression of regret for his remarks.

A few days later, the story that didn't go away was running, full-bore, in the national media. Even President Bush was obliged to denounce Lott, a key congressional ally. In the end, no one was surprised when Lott, under enormous pressure, resigned as majority leader.

While bloggers could not have brought down Lott on their own had Big Media not taken up the story, the Lott debacle was, by all accounts, a watershed. Weblogs claimed "their first scalp," said card-carrying establishment conservative John Podhoretz in his New York Post column.

Call them newsmakers. Call them sources. Call them the subjects—and sometimes, in their view, the unwilling victims—of journalism. But however we describe them, we all must recognize that the rules for newsmakers, not just journalists, have changed, thanks to everyone's ability to make the news.

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Spreading the Word

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As noted earlier, modern communications have become history's greatest soapbox, gossip factory, and, in a very real sense, spreader of genuine news. At one time, an individual with an issue had few options. He could stand on the corner and rant, or post a sign, or write a newsletter, or pen a letter to the editor. Today, if his argument is sufficiently moving and/or backed up with facts, the tools at his disposal can make it a global phenomenon. The autonomous linking machine—consisting of people who care enough to spread the word, plus new tools such as RSS, which widely disseminate what they write—launches into action. And how the word does spread.

Even before the Web rose to prominence, the online world was making companies pay attention. In 1994, Usenet, the system of Internet discussion groups, helped teach a lesson to Intel, which makes most of the processors that are the central brains of personal computers. News of the "Pentium bug," a math-calculation flaw in a version of the Pentium processor, first spread via Usenet before it was picked up in the popular press. At great expense financially and to its reputation, Intel had to replace many of the flawed chips. "Our immediate lesson was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that medium [the Internet] and that that medium was going to get more and more important at setting opinions," an Intel executive told the CNET news service in 1999. [68]

A decade after the Intel debacle came another relatively trivial, but still revealing, example. In early 2004, with great fanfare, including a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi announced a "free songs" promotion. Buyers of Pepsi could look at the underside of the bottle cap and, about one out of three times, win a free song download from the Apple iTunes music web site. But someone noticed a flaw in the bottle design. He or she figured out how to tilt the unopened bottle just so and discover whether the bottle contained the code for the song. Once upon a time that information would have remained within a small community of people, but in the Internet age, that information was almost instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection in the form of a document titled "How to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway." [69] And there was nothing Pepsi could do about it. If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that something will know it soon enough.

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Truth Squad

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In September 2002, Microsoft posted a semi-bogus web page advertisement featuring a winsome young woman, identified as a freelance writer, who'd supposedly switched from a Mac to a PC. The page was entitled "Mac to PC: Mission Accomplished, Convert Thrilled," and was a response to Apple's "Switch" (from PCs to Macs) campaign. A commenter on the Slashdot site [73] discovered and reported that the picture of this supposed freelancer was from a Getty Images archive. [74] The Associated Press's Ted Bridis then scoped out the rest of the story, which was, of course, not the one Microsoft had been floating. A Microsoft PR man, weaving around some direct questions from me, said: "It was a mistake that it was posted, and Microsoft took it down as soon as it came to the attention of the Windows XP marketing team. Microsoft regrets any confusion it may have caused."

I suggested at the time that people might be making too much of the half-fake nature of the ad. After all, the people who pitch products in TV and print advertisements are usually actors. But when Apple's PC-to-Mac converts were apparently all real, including their pictures, Microsoft's phoniness was all the more obnoxious.

What made the incident stand out was the way the untruth unraveled. Slashdot's readers, members of a powerful online community, got on the case. They were the first to show that something wasn't kosher with the Microsoft page. And they deserved much of the credit for the story coming out in the first place.

The accumulation of data is a powerful research tool for anyone who wants to drill deeper into an issue. The earnest pamphleteer can now do more than challenge something. He can build an online encyclopedia of detailed information on any topic and keep expanding it—a vibrant archive and organizing tool that others use and augment. Combined, this becomes an impossible-to-ignore force.

And it's been happening for some time. In the mid-1990s, McDonald's Corp. faced some angry online citizens and never quite figured out what to do about them. The fast-food behemoth took two activists to court in London, arguing that the company had been libeled by their pamphlets. The activists counter-sued, and then created the path-breaking "McSpotlight" web site [75] to support their side in what became the longest-running such court case in British history—a trial that became a referendum on the McDonald's empire and its sometimes unseemly actions around the world.

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Looking Deeper

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If customers exchanging information wasn't a big enough change, consider the new category of self-organized customer information erupting around us.

In his research labs, University of Tokyo Professor Ken Sakamura has been experimenting with tiny chips that contain short-range radios, embedding them in various products and other items. In his Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory, [84] he scans them and links the product identification to a database with much more information, including the product's history. Someday, he told me, everything will have these ID tags, and we'll be able to get vast amounts of information about what we touch and buy. For example, a head of lettuce could tell us where it was grown and whether the farmer used pesticides. Or a bottle of pills could tell us whether the drug would pose risks if taken with another drug we've been prescribed.

Marc Smith, a Microsoft researcher, [85] has offered another glimpse of the future with his "Aura" system. Using what is essentially off-the-shelf technology, he's equipped a handheld computer with a wireless Internet connection and a bar-code scanner that he uses to scan products in stores. His computer then connects to a server that collects data from Google and other sources, and shows him the results on the handheld screen.

Suddenly, far more than the price is available. Data about the product, and its maker, is available in a far wider information ecosystem. Was a shirt made by slave labor? Did the can of processed food come from a company with a record of poisoning streams in its factories' backyards? Did the company have a reputation for being good to employees and the environment? Smith likes to show a supermarket scan he once did of a cereal box. The top item in Google reveals that the maker had at one point recalled the product because a significant ingredient wasn't on the label. That might be interesting information to someone hyper-allergic to that ingredient. If every object can tell a story, Smith said, "One of the more profound stories is `If you eat me I will kill you.'"

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Bubble, Bubble, Tout and Trouble

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The name Jonathan Lebed doesn't mean much to people anymore, but it should hang on the wall of every corporate public-relations executive's office. Lebed was a stock market player, one of many in the bubble days of the late 1990s whose recommendations of shares online helped fuel price rises before the crash. He was hardly alone in manipulating the market. Famous analysts on Wall Street issued absurd recommendations to buy stocks—including some they considered dogs privately—that then plummeted. Lebed didn't travel in such elevated circles. He was a New Jersey teenager who, under false names in Internet chat rooms, made hundreds of thousands of dollars by touting various shares. He ended up settling with securities regulators, who allowed him to keep much of his loot. As Michael Lewis noted in The New York Times Magazine, it was never really clear whether he was doing something flat-out illegal or just ethically questionable. [87]

Companies should remember is that this kind of activity—and much worse ways of playing the system—hasn't gone away. It's still rampant.

But it's part of a wider phenomenon: the ability of anyone to join in a global dissection of corporate behavior and finances. The problem for the average person entering this cyberworld, as I discuss at greater length in Chapter 9, is distinguishing between truth and falsehood. The problem for the subject of the discussion—the newsmaker—is bigger.

For honorable public companies, some of the worst dilemmas arise in forums where people discuss stock prices and corporate financial performance. The urge to boost the value of one's own portfolio, or to spread information that helps depress the price and make short-selling more lucrative, is too obvious to ignore. But even in these forums you can find nuggets of useful information. Journalists who cover companies and fail to monitor such places are guaranteed to miss relevant data.

Companies should monitor these discussions carefully, of course, even when there's no obvious participation by corporate officials. Most do, and for the same reasons the journalists watch the discussions—to learn something—but also to see if people are spreading misinformation or worse.

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Swarming Investigators and Spies

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In breaking down barriers and secrecy, our weapons have several edges. In his important book, The Transparent Society, [90] David Brin suggested that privacy is becoming a relic of a pre-technological time. Preserving old-fashioned privacy was impossible, he said, because modern technology would overwhelm us with its snooping power and the collection of vast amounts of data. Our only recourse, he suggested, was to turn the same tools back on the watchers, to create what would amount to a détente in which we all reserved some dignity. I don't believe it will happen this way because governments and large organizations will never permit citizens to have the same access to their inner sanctums and methods that they insist on having to our personal and professional lives.

Even so, regular people are beginning to discover ways to redress the balance. Witness the case of former U.S. National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who helped dream up the grotesquely invasive " Total Information Awareness" program. Thanks to new technologies, he got a taste for himself.

Total Information Awareness, you may recall, was the Bush administration's data-mining program, designed to ferret out suspicious activities by potential terrorists. It would gather vast amounts of data on individuals by collecting and linking records from financial, driving, criminal, court, medical, and other databases. Poindexter, the former rear admiral and Iran-Contra scandal figure from the 1990s, was in charge of putting this program together.

Civil libertarians picked up and amplified a column by Matt Smith from the December 3, 2002 San Francisco Weekly, an alternative newspaper. [91] The column, wrote Net activist John Gilmore, "points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone +1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare (+1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 (+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions—decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American."

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Watching Journalists

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What industry is traditionally among the least transparent? Journalism. We have been a black box, and have become only slightly more transparent in recent years. But the public is demanding more transparency in our own field, and is doing some reporting of its own when we fail to respond in satisfying ways.

Jim Romenesko's Poynter Institute media blog, [94] the first and still the best of its genre, has become a water cooler not just for journalists but for people who observe journalism. Generally, the blogging community is not shy to go after newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters for real and imagined offenses against fairness and accuracy. For journalists, who are among the most thin-skinned people around, this trend has been something of a shock. We are not accustomed to being scrutinized the way we scrutinize others, however healthy it is that we are.

Even The New York Times was forced to pull down its veil in 2003, when the infamous Jayson Blair's journalistic cons become one of the newspaper's worst scandals. The Times' appropriately scathing internal analysis of the mess, the "Siegel Report," [95] revealed a horror show of missed communications and lax management on top of plainly corrupt behavior by Blair himself. But the Siegel Report appeared briefly online and then disappeared, prompting Jay Rosen at New York University to ask what had happened to it. Eventually, and in large part because of Rosen's prodding, the document reappeared online.

In early 2004, amid political reporting that many in the blogosphere found wanting, a suggestion emerged to improve journalism in general. The idea was to follow individual reporters' political coverage on web sites, relentlessly tracking errors and omissions and exposing them to the world. I commented in my own blog, and on Rosen's PressThink site, where the notion first got some traction:

I like the idea that people are watching what I say and correcting me if I get things wrong—or challenging my conclusions, based on the same facts (or facts I hadn't known about when I wrote the piece.) This is a piece of tomorrow's journalism, and we in the business should welcome the feedback and assistance that, if we do it right, becomes part of a larger conversation.

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Turning the Tables

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We've seen how modern communications give anyone who cares the tools to learn more—far more—about people and organizations that in the past tried to ration the news. What's more, once someone finds out something, she can spread the word globally. But newsmakers need to embrace this new reality, not fight it.

They should also realize that they are far from helpless in the new era. They can use the same tools, in fact, to bring their message to the outside world, and to improve the way they communicate internally, as we'll see in the next chapter.

These changes are, at the least, disconcerting on all sides. However, I strongly believe that they are a positive trend because they encourage openness instead of paranoid secrecy. And in the end, like it or not, they're inevitable.

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Endnotes

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1. For considerably more detail on the Lott incident, see the case study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/2004/03/08). Blogger Mickey Kaus (http://slate.msn.com/id/2075444&#darkmatter) says some well-timed emails from a Democratic political operative played a role, though this is less clear.
2. Talking Points Memo: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com.
3. CNET quotes Intel executive on Pentium bug: http://news.com.com/2009-1001_3-224567.html.
4. MacMerc on how to win the Pepsi iTunes giveaway: http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/1270.
5. The primary source for this section is a translation from a book by Chinese journalist Zhang Shumei, who played a key role in these events.
6. Hong Kong government's use of SMS: The Guardian, April 3, 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,928906,00.html?=rss
7. Camera phone abduction story: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/08/01/camphone.abduction/.
8. Slashdot:http://slashdot.org
9. Slashdot user exposes Microsoft PR trick: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/02/10/14/1232229.shtml?tid=109.
10. McSpotlight: http://www.mcspotlight.org.
11. Tobacco Control Archives: http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/.
12. Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org.
13. Greenwood Pub Group, 1914.
14. One site's instructions on upgrading digital video recorder: http://echostaruser.manilasites.com/dpclone.
15. iPoding: http://www.ipoding.com.
16. EDN Access story on auto codes: http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA46067.
17. A company called Dinan (http://www.dinancars.com) sells software upgrades for the BMW line, removing a governor that limits top speed in the U.S. Although I can't see why this is needed—and can imagine many improper uses—BMW's Big-Brotherish settings are also annoying.

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Chapter 4: Newsmakers Turn the Tables

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On January 9, 2002, reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of The Washington Post sat down with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The journalists were working on a series of articles about the hours and days immediately following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—"the best serious history we can do of these 10 days," they told the secretary.

Rumsfeld said he understood from Secretary of State Colin Powell that he, Rumsfeld, was at the end of the interview trail: "He said you've talked to everybody in the world on this."

The two reporters were indeed prepared for their session. They asked a series of questions, probing deeply into what Rumsfeld had thought, said, and done in those days. Their homework was, in a word, exceptional.

How do we know? Because immediately after TheWashington Post series appeared later that month, the Department of Defense posted a transcript of the interview on its DefenseLink web site. [97] Anyone who cared to know about the journalists' interviewing style could see it firsthand. Moreover, anyone who wanted to see which small pieces of the interview had made it into the newspaper could also do that. It turns out that the Defense Department posts every major interview with Rumsfeld and his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

Why this practice? It's to make sure that the full context is available, according to a Rumsfeld aide. What she didn't say—but didn't have to—was that posting these interviews serves a multitude of purposes for the department. First, assuming the transcriptions are accurate (and sometimes they are not), [98] they provide valuable history for anyone who cares and not just context for the interview itself. Second, if an interviewer writes or broadcasts a story that doesn't reflect the substance of the interview, or outright misleads the audience, the department can point to the transcript in its own defense. Third, the process helps keep reporters on their toes.

It will also make journalists uncomfortable. Our little priesthood, where we essentially have had the final word, is unraveling. But as software people say, that's a feature, not a bug.

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Learning by Listening

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While it's possible to learn something from a focus group, or a scientific survey, those techniques don't add up to listening. Consider the case of Phil Gomes, a public-relations professional in the San Francisco Bay Area. [99] About two years into his career, his agency put him onto an account dealing with enterprise software. He was told to handle media relations and industry analysis for a suite of programs that ran on IBM's AS/400 midrange computers, which had a huge market presence and were known as sturdy and reliable machines. The software firm was looking into rewriting its software to run on computers running the Unix and Windows operating systems. Some of the AS/400 customers, then representing 90 percent of the customer base, were worried that they might be left behind.

Gomes found a "listserv" (an online mailing list) for users of the software in question where they were creating their own news report, in effect, by conducting well-informed discussions about the product, gaining knowledge that once might only have come from a journal or a user group. Gomes and his client needed to understand what they were saying.

"By monitoring this list, I gained an incredibly rich perspective on what the customers' needs, concerns, and decision-making processes were," Gomes said. "Thus, I was able to then bring that intelligence back to the client and tune communications accordingly. Were it not for the perspective the list offered, the company might have pursued the communication of the open systems strategy so vigorously that the AS/400 customers (who were never in any danger of losing support) might have felt like stepchildren."

Did Gomes' employer fully appreciate his effort? Not exactly. Some of his supervisors "did not see much value in me subscribing to these lists and monitoring the discussions. `Oh, jeez,' they'd say. `Gomes is in his chatrooms again.'"

More recently, Gomes has become one of the better-informed PR-industry observers of blogging and other new media. He's written useful papers and weblog postings on the topic, but said he's been greeted by "some degree of disdain. There's a knee-jerk tendency in the corporate communications field to treat every new online media development as the next CB radio instead of fully exploring it."

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Blog It

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The average corporate web site has much in common with the average annual report. It's loaded with information, too much of which is hidden or disguised in an effort to minimize problems and maximize what's going right. To that end, particularly in the case of companies with problems, it seems designed to thwart the casual visitor who wants to look deeply into the enterprise and its doings. The least interesting feature of a corporate site, with few exceptions, is the typical "Letter from the Chief Executive," a content-free missive that does nothing to reveal the character either of the company or its leader. Creating an impression of openness isn't the same as actually being open.

"Blogging is an opportunity for Public Relations, not a threat," wrote public-relations pro Tom Murphy on his PR Opinions blog. [101] Blogging provides a unique means of providing your audience with the human face of your organization. Your customers can read the actual thoughts and opinions of your staff. On the flip side, consumers increasingly want to see the human side of your organization, beyond the corporate speak."

When Groove Networks Ray Ozzie explains something on his blog, [102] the reader is gaining insight into the CEO's way of thinking, not just the company's products. The indirect trajectory of Ozzie's blog is what makes it so worthwhile. He's not pitching Groove so much as explaining what he's thinking about on matters relating to the company and its ecosystem.

On July 17, 2003, Ozzie posted an item about the poor security in wireless computing, linking first to an article he'd seen in the trade journal Infoworld as support. That article, he said, was one reason why "people are discovering why compartmentalized security such as that implemented by Groove is so important moving forward," he wrote. "The alternative is more than a bit frightening: Recognizing their valid concerns, would you allow your employer to `lock down' and remotely manage your home computer?"

I don't cite this posting because it's earthshaking information, but because it illustrates how one executive used this channel to talk about an important issue in today's computing world—security—while simultaneously making a subtle pitch for his own product. Only because Ozzie already had some credibility was this effective, since there's an element of hyperbole in his message. He addressed an issue and reflected a viewpoint—in his own words, not a PR person's. The pitch fit the context of the posting. It was relevant. It didn't have to lead directly to more sales to be useful.

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The Celebrity Blog

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Wil Wheaton is not, repeat not, Wesley Crusher.

Now in his early 30s, Wheaton isn't a bit sorry he played the role of the brainy but somewhat annoying teenager on Star Trek: The Next Generation back in the 1980s and early 1990s. He's proud of it. But some fans of the show utterly loathed the Crusher character. A once notorious Internet discussion group was called "alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die"—and the tone of the postings fit the newsgroup's title.

In 2001, the Pasadena resident launched a weblog, [111] in part to "undo a lot of the misconceptions directed toward me because of the character I played on Star Trek," he said. His online journal mixes intensely personal observations with commentary on modern life, politics, technology, and entertainment. It tells you a lot about who he really is: a thoughtful and intelligent family man, with a bent toward geekiness and political activism.

The blog has become Wheaton's portal into a new career as a writer. And Wheaton has established a new kind of connection with his audience. Call it the Celebrity Blog. And think of it as the evolution from the celebrity as a manufactured product to the celebrity as something more genuine in a human sense.

Wheaton's is highly personal. It's helped people get to know him, as opposed to the StarTrek character. (A personal observation: The Next Generation remains by far the best of the many series in the long-running franchise.)

Wheaton was no fan of the Hollywood system that creates stars and spits them out after using them. The blog has reflected that sentiment. "I'd struggled so much as an actor, and felt like I was running out of time to be a successful actor," he said. "I'd done lousy movies to support my family. I started writing about that, the ups and downs, mostly downs—what it's like to be someone whose first half of life is being famous, and the second half, being famous for being famous."

Nor is he a fan of the Hollywood trade press, to put it mildly. "I'm cynical about entertainment press," he said.

"I don't think the press on the whole is truly objective with researched, hard-hitting journalism. It's basically an extension of the studio publicity machine." When new films are released, there's lots of coverage, but hardly anything negative, because writers who express skepticism tend to lose their access in the future.

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Talking to the Audience

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What business needs to use from-the-edges technology most of all? Public relations. Yet in the past few years, the PR industry has graduated from mere cluelessness to only a semi-conscious understanding of the Internet's possibilities. To the extent that PR professionals view their jobs as only pretending to give out genuine information, what follows will not be useful. I have a more charitable view of the industry, and suspect there are plenty of PR pros who see the possibilities in entering this new era in a smart way.

It's astonishing to see how bad most corporate web sites are after all these years. In my "Dear PR People" letter on my weblog, I offer the following simple guidelines:

Make sure your clients have a ton of information on their Web sites. This should include not just press releases but also links to articles written about the client by other publications; bios and high-definition photographs of leaders and detailed information, including pictures (and videos) of products; and anything else you think might be useful.

Don't bury the PR contact information so far inside the website that no one without an advanced degree in Library Science can find it. I look for the "About the Company" page, then look for the "Press" page and then for the "Contact Information" page. Maybe there's a more logical place for such information, but wherever you put it, don't hide it.

I used to request email contacts instead of phone calls, faxes, and snail mail. Now, unless someone has some news or a pitch aimed specifically at me—and I mean me alone—I no longer want even email due to the spam plague. I want RSS. Even if a company doesn't want to create a weblog, it absolutely should create RSS feeds of its major news. This is not optional anymore; it's essential.

On April 2, 2002, networking giant Cisco Systems' "News@Cisco" PR operation created RSS feeds of its press releases. [113] The intended audience, said Dan Teeter, the engineer who set them up, was just about everyone from reporters to analysts to investors to partners to customers. Microsoft has RSS feeds aimed at developers. Slowly but surely, companies are learning.

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Fine-Grain Pitching

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In April, 2001, Apple Computer's public-relations agency got a request from a blogger, Joe Clark, who wanted to interview someone inside the company about the Macintosh operating system. Clark had written for tech magazines, and his now dormant NUblog [115] was an increasingly popular site, but the PR agency didn't know this. Frustrated by the negative response, Clark posted the email exchange on his site, which in turn prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the agency's regional vice president. The entire episode showed how fundamentally clueless Apple and its PR people were about a medium that was growing in importance.

To be fair, this was 2001, before weblogs were well-known. Clark, a tech writer and published author, was a relatively early player in what Azeem Azhar, a principal in 20six, a European weblog tool company, calls the "eBay-ization of media—everyone can be a buyer and a seller." Others call it "nanopublishing"—small sites, run by one or very few people, focusing on a relatively narrow niche topic. A niche blogger may lack the influence of a major publication. According to Azhar, a niche blogger in this context is "a teenage boy who drives the mobile-phone purchase decisions of his group of teenage friends; or the London yoga practitioner who has 60 or 80 fellow yogi readers on his blog, and who influences their yoga-related purchasing."

But they do make a difference.

For example, people in the Wi-Fi wireless networking arena have learned that at least two weblogs—Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News, which I discussed earlier, and Alan Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log [116]—are as important to their readers as any print publication. These sites provide the latest Wi-Fi news, along with highly informed commentary by their authors. In fact, they're better than any print publication I've seen.

The influence of effective bloggers transcends technology. In the world of baby strollers, a southern California woman named Janet McLaughlin moves markets. [117] While she doesn't earn a dime for her efforts," The Wall Street Journal

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Some Rules for New-World PR and Marketing

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I'm always glad not to be doing PR or marketing. Unless I was pitching something I genuinely believed to be important, I'd have trouble making the pitch. And never mind the chore of dealing with journalists.

But if I were doing this, given the tools now available, I'd offer to my boss or client the following rules for using tomorrow's media:

1. Listen hard, because people outside your organization may know things you don't. Keep an eye on chat rooms, discussion boards, email, blogs, and everything else from the edge, both outside and inside the operation.
2. Talk openly about what you're doing, and why. Start a weblog, or 10 weblogs, from inside the company. Explain, in plain English (or whatever your local language), what's going on inside the place. Get the CEO to post, too. Create internal blogs and Wikis behind the firewall.
3. Ask questions, because there will be people who are willing to answer. After you've listened and talked, take the next step and turn on the comments feature in your weblogs so customers can post back. Ask for help from your various constituencies. Set up discussion groups, but don't censor them except to remove libelous, obscene, and totally off-point postings.
4. Syndicate your information to the widest audience in the most efficient way. Create RSS feeds for everything useful to journalists and the rest of us, including press releases, speeches, blog postings, and other material.
5. Help out by offering more, not less. Make sure your web site has everything a journalist might need. This includes pictures, audio, video, charts, and plain old text—and make sure it's easy to find. If journalists can find it, customers can, too. That's a good situation, not a negative one.
6. Post or link to what your people say publicly, and to what is said about you. When your CEO or other top official gives an interview, transcribe it and post it on the web site. If it's an interview being broadcast, put the audio or video online as well. If an article about you is unfriendly, link to it anyway (because other people will find it even if you pretend it doesn't exist) but also post a reply.

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Endnotes

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1. The Washington Post interview with Donald Rumsfeld: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2002/t02052002_t0109wp.html.
2. The assumption of accuracy is not automatic, and the Pentagon severely compromised its credibility in April 2004 in a similar circumstance. According to The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28729-2004Apr20.html), the Defense Department "deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq." Woodward provided his own transcript. Will journalists and sources be posting dueling transcripts in the future?
3. Phil Gomes blog: http://www.philgomes.com/blog.
4. ActiveWords: http://www.activewords.com.
5. Tom Murphy blog: http://www.natterjackpr.com.
6. Ray Ozzie blog: http://www.ozzie.net/blog/.
7. Mark Cuban's Blog Maverick: http://www.blogmaverick.com.
8. John Dowdell's MX Blog: http://www.markme.com/jd/.
9. Macromedia aggregated blogs: http://www.markme.com/mxna/index.cfm.
10. Microsoft Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com.
11. Windley is now a consultant on enterprise computing (http://www.windley.com).
12. Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog: http://scoble.weblogs.com.
13. Scoble's "Corporate Weblog Manifesto" list: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html#a2357.
14. Ernest Svenson's Ernie the Attorney blog: http://www.ernietheattorney.net.
15. Wil Wheaton blog: http://www.wilwheaton.net.
16. O'Reilly, 2004.
17. Cisco's RSS feeds: http://tools.cisco.com/newsroom/contactSearch/jsp/syndicationSearch.jsp.

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Chapter 5: The Consent of the Governed

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On Feb. 17, 2004, Ben Chandler won a special election to the U.S. Congress. A Democrat in a race targeted by both major parties as a must-win seat in the House of Representatives, Chandler racked up a smashing 11 percentage point margin.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, author of the Daily Kos weblog, [120] was ecstatic. "This wasn't just a victory. It was a mauling," he wrote late that evening as the results became clear. "And we ALL made it happen. From the cash, to the volunteers on the ground, to the good vibes."

Moulitsas had reason to celebrate. The California activist/blogger, an ardent Democrat whose blog had become one of the must-read sites for political junkies, was applauding not just a chipping away at the Republican House majority. He was celebrating the role his and other blogs had played in Chandler's win. Blogs did more than lead cheers. They were vehicles for the "mother's milk of politics," namely money.

The previous month, Chandler's campaign had made what turned out to be an astonishingly smart bet. It took out advertisements on the Daily Kos and 10 other popular political blogs, most of which had a left-leaning stance. A $2,000 investment, using the then nascent Blogads online ad agency, [121] had turned into some $80,000 in contributions, mostly in small (around $20) amounts, from around the nation. Chandler was "in disbelief" that so many people outside the district cared, his campaign manager told Wired News the next day. [122]

The voices from the edges of the political system—average people with real-life concerns, not just the big-money crowd—had been heard.

Historians will look back on the 2002-2004 election cycle as the time when the making-the-news technologies truly came into their own. Big Media and the forces of centralization retained a dominant role during this period, to be sure. And blogs and other such communications tools didn't, by themselves, elect anybody; the implosion of the Howard Dean presidential campaign demonstrated their limitations. It takes the right combination of circumstances and candidate, as Chandler showed, to win elections.

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Business as Usual

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For all the obvious value of Net-based politics, it isn't going to overturn the status quo overnight. The consent of the governed had become a sick joke in the latter part of the 20th century, when "one person, one vote" morphed malignantly into "one dollar, one vote"—in which the dollars were spent on TV to appeal to the masses with increasingly truth-free attack ads. And by all evidence, the 2004 campaign season showed that big money and media were still largely holding sway.

Exhibit A was the spate of attack advertising that helped sink Howard Dean in the first contest for delegates, the Iowa caucuses. And even Dean, who used the Net brilliantly to raise money in mostly small, sub-$100 donations, turned around and used much of that money to buy television advertising. In a media world where TV still wields great power, and in a campaign season in which the Democrats had front-loaded to make the winner of Iowa and/or New Hampshire virtually unstoppable, he was only doing the rational thing.

Exhibit B was Arnold Schwarzenegger's winning campaign for governor in California, when incumbent Gray Davis was ousted from office in the October 2003 recall election. The actor's victory had almost nothing to do with grassroots activism and almost everything to do with a Hollywood-style, Big Media sales job by a candidate who happened to have a box office hit in the theaters. Schwarzenegger did have popular appeal, and the recall campaign got its start online, but in the end, the pitch was to an electorate that—sadly, but typically in modern America—didn't care about the candidate's paucity of experience and qualifications, or his refusal to offer any specifics on what he'd do if elected. He hid from serious journalists, substituting appearances with Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey, and almost laughed in the faces of newspaper reporters who tried to address the details of actual issues.

Exhibit C, George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, has been an even more pronounced version of the top-down, big-money affair from four years earlier, though his advisors did use the Net to some degree. Bush raised several hundred million dollars, most coming from the wealthy elite that had put him into power in the first place.

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What's New Is Old

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The use of online technologies to organize politically is hardly new. As far back as the early 1980s, the radical right was using bulletin boards to keep people in touch and to spread its message.

Ross Perot's 1992 run for president as an independent had one little noticed but important feature. He proposed "electronic town halls," a concept that apparently stemmed from his founding and running of Electronic Data Systems. The idea didn't go very far, in part because of Perot's mainframe-era understanding of technology: he understood central control, not true grassroots activity. "Had Perot been using today's pervasive technology and literate base (of supporters) would he succeed?" wondered Peter Harter, a former Netscape executive who wrote a law-school thesis on the subject in 1993. "Probably not, as he yanked power and authority away from his volunteers." Yet Perot had still shown the way for subsequent campaigns.

People at the network's edges—using mobile phones, not PCs—helped bring down a corrupt Philippines government in 2001, Smart Mobs [123] author Howard Rheingold wrote. "Tens of thousands of Filipinos converged on Epifanio de los Santas Avenue, known as `Edsa,' within an hour of the first text message volleys: `Go 2EDSA, Wear blck.' Over four days, more than a million citizens showed up, mostly dressed in black. Estrada fell. The legend of `Generation Txt' was born."

In 2000, America saw the first serious demonstration of the Internet as a fund-raising tool. Republican challenger John McCain raised the then unprecedented amount of $6.4 million online in his campaign against George Bush. McCain lost, but the lessons of his effort weren't lost on the next clutch of contenders. Internet fund-raising had become just one more arrow in the political quiver.

The 2002 elections were the first to see serious use of weblogs. In that year, Tara Sue Grubb, a resident of North Carolina's Sixth Congressional District, decided to challenge the long-term Republican incumbent, Howard Coble, who hadn't had a serious opponent in years. One of her top issues was Coble's obsequious kowtowing to the wishes of Hollywood's movie studios on the issue of copyright protection. She had no money or visibility, but she had the passion of Netizens who were fighting for fairer copyright laws.

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Electing a President

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There is wide consensus that smart use of the Net was a principal reason for the election of Roh Moo Hyun as president of South Korea in 2002. Running as a reformer, he attracted support from young people who deftly used tools such as short text messages (SMS) on mobile phones, online forums, and just about every other available communications technology in the nation widely considered to have the planet's best communications infrastructure.

Roh also attracted the interest of an online publication that hadn't even existed when his predecessor was elected. OhmyNews.com, an online newspaper written mostly by its readers, had achieved a strong following for its tough, skeptical reporting in a nation where the three major newspapers—all conservative and accounting for some 80 percent of all daily circulation—had ties to the government and rarely rocked the boat. Korean political observers agree that OhmyNews' journalism helped elect Roh. It was absolutely no coincidence that Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three conservative newspapers. (We'll look more closely at OhmyNews in Chapter 6.)

In 2004, the Legislature impeached Roh. But the Korean cyber-citizens had their say once again. In an April legislative election, voters decisively voted into power a party allied with Roh, and by all accounts the Internet activists again played an enormous role.

By 2004, American politics was approaching a tipping point. Enough people were online, and for the first time they had the tools to seriously shake things up themselves. And it was the Dean campaign that did the shaking. It's worth spending some time understanding how this happened, why it happened, and what lessons we can learn.

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Dean Meets Meetup, Blogs, and Money

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"Broadcast politics tells people they don't count," said Joe Trippi. As Howard Dean's campaign manager during the candidate's rise and fall, he wanted to change that.

Trippi's qualifications were unique. He was a self-professed techno-junkie who attended San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley and had developed close ties to the tech industry. He'd also been a long-time heavyweight political operative, having worked many local, state, and national political campaigns. (I first encountered him in Iowa in 1988 when I was covering U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt's first presidential contest. He was Gephardt's deputy campaign manager.)

In the latter half of the 1990s, Trippi worked both as a political and marketing consultant, the latter role mostly with technology companies. Trippi, McMahon & Squier, a consulting firm, had handled Dean's Vermont gubernatorial races, and as much by coincidence as anything else it fell to Trippi to manage what just about everyone understood as the longest of long shot runs for the presidency.

Trippi had been online for years, and lately he'd become a fan—and frequent denizen—of chat rooms, forums, and other online conversations. He'd also started reading political weblogs and was intrigued by their authors' knowledge and fervor.

Dean's rise to such a prominent national role was unlikely, and it stemmed initially from his politics, not the Net. He struck a powerful chord with several activist groups, including those who opposed the Bush administration's Iraq war policy and others who'd concluded that the Democratic establishment was little more than a watered-down version of the Republican Party. Dean more than compensated for his somewhat awkward campaigning style by offering a choice for, as he put it in a phrase borrowed from the late Minnesota Democratic senator Paul Wellstone, the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

The candidate's initially lonely stance against the war brought him condemnation from the right and disdain from many in his own party. But it galvanized activists who despaired that they were being ignored by the government and even their own party's leaders. And for the first time, they had easy-to-use ways of finding each other and reaching out to others.

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Cash Cow, and Catching Up

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The blog and web site in general had another, essential purpose: raising money. Mostly through small donations, Dean's campaign raised millions via the Net. In one classic frenzy, responding to a $2,000-per-plate fundraiser headlined by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Dean campaign blog urged supporters to counter the Republicans' one-evening, multimillion-dollar haul with a slew of small contributions. They did, and Dean got a new burst of positive publicity in addition to the funds.

By the fall of 2003, Dean soared to a huge lead in raising money and support among the Democratic rank and file. But after he made some big mistakes and his campaign imploded, common wisdom held that the "Internet thing" had been just another bubble-like event. Dean, the cynics said, was another Webvan. The absurdity of this should have been obvious. Were it not for the Net, an unknown former governor of Vermont would never have reached such heights in the first place.

I cannot emphasize the money angle strongly enough. The Democratic Party's front-loading of the presidential primary season—party leaders' determination to get someone nominated early and to keep insurgents out of the running—meant that there was only one way for an outsider like Dean to have a shot. Trippi, who took a great deal of abuse for the failure of the Dean candidacy after being forced to leave the campaign in February 2004, pointed out that Dean's sole shot was to capture the nomination at the start. The tactics almost worked.

Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame, makes a strong case that the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform law of 2002, which looked like a bad deal for Democrats, actually spurred his party's increasingly effective Net fund-raising. The Democrats' main fund-raising method prior to the law had been big "soft money" donations from wealthy benefactors, money that went into national party coffers, allegedly for basic party-building functions but actually to elect candidates.

McCain-Feingold banned soft money, making small donations from average citizens far more important than before—donations that the Republicans were especially adept at getting from a better-organized grassroots network. As Dean's coffers filled, mostly with small donations, it suddenly occurred to the Democratic national party that "we had this great machine, able to turn out small-dollar donations," Moulitsas said.

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Open Source Politics

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I have no doubt that the 2004 campaign will be seen, in retrospect, to have shown the first glimmerings of open source politics. What does that mean? Open source politics is about participation—financial as well as on the issues of policy and governance—from people on the edges. People all over the world work on small parts of big open source software projects that create some of the most important and reliable components of the Internet; people everywhere can work on similarly stable components for a participatory political life in much more efficient ways than in the past.

The Dean campaign is hardly the only example of people using the Internet to take action in innovative ways. Perhaps the most intriguing idea, from an open source perspective, was an experiment by MoveOn.org. [129] This left-of-center nonprofit was formed during the Clinton impeachment drama—"Censure the president and move on," was the mantra that launched one of the Net's most powerful political organizations.

The experiment was a contest staged in the spring of 2004, called "Bush in 30 Seconds," [130] in which MoveOn invited regular people to create their own anti-Bush commercials. The 15 finalists were an incredible display, not just of activist sentiments but of the power of today's inexpensive equipment and software for making videos. It was a demonstration of how personal technology had begun to undermine, as Marshall McLuhan had long since predicted, the broadcast culture of the late 20th century. Tools that were once the preserve of Big Media were now in the hands of the many.

Wes Boyd, MoveOn's cofounder, told me that he and his colleagues were deeply impressed by the passion and creativity that went into the "Bush in 30 Seconds" spots, as well as by their technical execution. Whether one agreed with the ads or found them appalling, they compared well, at least in terms of impact, with spots by the pros. "I'm excited about turning the broadcast medium back on itself," Boyd said.

Open source politics was integral to the Dean campaign, which relied on open source programmers who flocked to the cause and wrote software that ran the campaign's online machinery. After the Dean campaign shut down, some of the programmers moved to other campaigns, and some decided to work on new platforms for the future.

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A Changing Role for Journalists

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Professional journalists, by and large, seemed baffled early on by the edge-to-middle politics Dean was using to his advantage. The top-down hierarchy of modern journalism probably played a role because editors probably couldn't relate any better to the notion of a dispersed campaign than to the idea of readers directly assisting in the creation of journalism.

But once the media grasped what was happening, the coverage emerged. Big Media, and the candidates, also started to realize that some of the best political journalism was coming from outside their ranks. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Moulitsas' Daily Kos, among many others, offered better context than just about anything the wire services were delivering. It was no coincidence that Wesley Clark gave an in-depth interview to Marshall not long before jumping into the race. And the Command Post, [132] originally created to cover the Iraq war, was a superb collector of all things political.

What the third-party sites such as independent blogs showed was the value of niche journalism in politics. The issues of our times are too complex, too nuanced, for the major media to cover properly, given the economic realities of modern corporate journalism. Typically, even good newspapers devote at most two or three stories to candidates' views on specific issues. Television news operations, especially at local stations, tend to ignore the issues and politics outright. [133] Moreover, there are simply too many political races, from the local to national levels, to cover even if TV news stations cared. This is a golden opportunity for citizen activists to get involved, to help inform others who do care about specific topics. Maybe the masses don't care about all the issues, but individuals care about some of them. "The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus," wrote Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and blogger, in an essay entitled "Emergent Democracy." [134]

What would make a difference? It depends on what you want. "If your goal is debate and discussion, a network of blogs is a more powerful medium than a single blog with lots of readers," Cameron Barrett, who was Wesley Clark's presidential campaign blogger, and who then moved to the Kerry campaign, commented in my blog. [135] When your goal is message or top-down communication, then a few blogs with a lot of readers is more powerful."

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The Tools of Better Governance

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Politics doesn't stop when the elections are decided. Governing is political, by definition. The tools of many-to-many communications will transform government if politicians and bureaucrats cooperate and lead. How this will occur is still a bit foggy, because a true deployment of e-government is many years away. But the potential may be even more obvious than in campaigns.

To date, e-government has largely consisted of static web pages offering information to taxpayers, businesses, and other constituents of governmental services. The interactivity in such sites tends to be limited to filling out the occasional form or making an appointment. It's the standard top-down approach moved to the Net.

But it doesn't have to offer a substandard result, not when it's done right. For evidence, visit the remarkable "Earth 911," [136] a site created by an environmental activist that has become indispensable to citizens and governments alike. Phil Windley, the former state of Utah chief information officer, calls it a "public-private partnership that happened unilaterally"—that is, at the instigation of a single motivated citizen.

That citizen is Chris Warner, who's been working at this project for about 15 years from his home base of suburban Phoenix. Operating initially on a shoestring and now with contributions from companies and some government support, he and his team have collected under one virtual roof the most comprehensive array of environmental information you can find anywhere. If you visit the home page and type in your Zip Code, you'll find local data for that community from a variety of federal, state, local and corporate sources. Earth 911 is a clearinghouse that serves governments and people in their communities. Thousands of government employees, from a variety of agencies, send their information to Earth 911. Its staff massages the data and then arranges it so citizens can use it. In other words, what they've created is a highly centralized core with a thoroughly decentralized data-collection system that feels utterly local to the citizen looking for information.

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Endnotes

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1. Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com.
2. Blogads: http://www.blogads.com.
3. Wired News story by Chris Ulbrich on Chandler and blog advertising: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62325,00.html.
4. Perseus, 2002.
5. Meetup: http://www.meetup.com.
6. At a dinner in Vermont while I was visiting the campaign, an old friend of Dean's (and mine; I lived in Vermont for almost 15 years until the mid-1980s) turned to me as I was describing my positive impressions of the Dean Internet activities and said, "But Howard's such a Luddite." Vermonters, I discovered, were amused by the former governor's Net savvy, because he'd been reluctant, at best, to bring the most advanced technology into state government until well into his latter terms. Another person at the table offered, "But he learns fast."
7. Dean's official blog site: http://blog.deanforamerica.com.
8. Dean Defense Forces: http://www.deandefense.org.
9. Dean campaign spam story by Declan McCullagh: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5065141.html.
10. MoveOn: http://www.moveon.org.
11. Bush in 30 Seconds: http://www.bushin30seconds.org.
12. DeanSpace: http://www.deanspace.org.
13. Command Post: http://www.command-post.org.
14. The Schwarzenegger campaign was an exception. Local TV covered the recall and the candidates' positions with surprising fervor, perhaps due to the actor's star power.
15. Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" paper: http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html.
16. Cameron Barrett quote: http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010238.shtml.
17. Earth 911: http://www.earth911.com.
18. Pets 911: http://www.pets911.com.

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Chapter 6: Professional Journalists Join the Conversation

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In October 1999, the Jane's Intelligence Review, a journal widely followed in national security circles, wondered whether it was on the right track with an article about computer security and cyber-terrorism. The editors went straight to some experts—the denizens of Slashdot—and published a draft. In hundreds of postings on the site's message system, the technically adept members of that community promptly tore apart the draft and gave, often in colorful language, a variety of perspectives and suggestions. Jane's went back to the drawing board and rewrote the entire article from scratch. The community had created something, and Jane's gratefully noted the contribution in the article it ultimately published. [142]

I started my weblog the same month. It was an experiment, one of the first blogs by a mainstream journalist. But it proved to be the linchpin in my understanding that my colleagues and I—and my profession as a whole—were entering a new stage of development. My readers, I realized, had become my collaborators.

Four months later, Oh Yeon Ho and a small team launched OhmyNews.com, a Korean online newspaper. From the beginning, they assumed that their readers weren't just passive vessels for other people's work. "Every citizen's a reporter," Oh wrote on February 22, 2000, as he announced the new site. "Journalists aren't some exotic species, they're everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others." [143]

What was happening? In an emerging era of multidirectional, digital communications, the audience can be an integral part of the process—and it's becoming clear that they must be.

It boils down to something simple: readers (or viewers or listeners) collectively know more than media professionals do. This is true by definition: they are many, and we are often just one. We need to recognize and, in the best sense of the word, use their knowledge. If we don't, our former audience will bolt when they realize they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage; they can come into the kitchen themselves.

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Traditional Media's Opportunity

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When most Big Media companies consider having a conversation with their audience, they tend not to push many boundaries. For example, it astonishes me that some organizations still don't put reporters' (much less editors') email addresses at the end of stories. There is no plausible excuse for leaving out contact information when the articles are posted on the Web. A news operation that fails even this test is not remotely serious about engaging its audience.

Bulletin boards don't fully cut it, either. The New York Times' forums [144] frequently contain valuable insights, but it's doubtful that many (if any) of those ideas ever reach the actual journalists inside the Times newsroom. If the staff isn't part of the discussion, it's just readers talking with each other—and they can do that without the Times. Contrast the paper's forums with Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's "Kristof Responds" discussions, [145] a truly valuable addition to the paper's repertoire.

Slate, the online magazine owned by Microsoft, has come up with one of the most useful ways of handling readers' input. The "Fraywatch" page [146]—"What's happening in our readers' forum"—is a compilation of what Slate editors consider the most interesting comments posted by readers. Snippets from comments are reassembled, with context from the editor plus links to the original postings, in a coherent and entertaining way. This is useful journalism in its own right, even as it demonstrates the value of readers' contributions.

Web chats featuring journalists are a step in the right direction, but are once again only a step. The Washington Post's frequent online Q&A sessions, [147] in which reporters answer questions from readers, are a useful addition to the online operation, but they aren't the only kind of interactivity we must adopt.

My own experience may be instructive. Covering technology in Silicon Valley is a humbling but rewarding job. In most gatherings, I'm taking up the far-left data point on the intelligence bell curve. Of course, being the least knowledgeable person in the room has its advantages; I always learn something.

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Authority from Linking, Listening

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The most web-like activity is linking: pointing to other people's content. Newspapers and other journalism organizations have been learning to do a better job of this on their sites, offering pointers to articles and data that reside outside their sites. We need to do more than that.

On my blog, I frequently point at other news organizations' stories, including a local competitor, the San Francisco Chronicle. If I have the choice of pointing to an equally good story on my newspaper's own site, I'll naturally do so. But when the competition has done a better job than we have on a topic I care about, I'd be shortchanging my readers if I didn't take them to the best coverage. No one from my company has ever suggested I do otherwise.

I also point to sites of nontraditional journalists and, whenever possible, I post or point to the deepest source materials, such as transcripts and other data that provide more context. We in pro-journalism tend to do this on big projects when we post things such as affidavits, interactive maps, and the like. But the authority of a story increases with the links to the best original material from which it was derived. We can learn more from the bloggers about this.

Increasingly, I'm glad to say, news organizations are catching on. While online versions of news stories that have run in the newspaper rarely link to competitors' work, newspaper bloggers have been more wide-ranging in pointing outside. Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing" [162] on The Washington Post's site, which started in early 2004, was especially active in this regard, though he tended to ignore blogs in favor of establishment media. Similarly, The New York Times' "Times on the Trail," [163] a column that looks like a blog but isn't officially called one, has sometimes been generous in outside pointers.

We can also increase our credibility by listening to our online critics, and we're beginning to do just that. Long gone are the days when criticism was handled, except in extreme cases, by just two publications of note, the Columbia Journalism Review

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Asking the Former Audience for Help

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Inviting the audience to contribute isn't a new phenomenon. After all, we've asked readers to write letters to the editor for a long time, and we generally answer the phones when readers call with tips or complaints. In other words, some conversation has always taken place; we just need to have more.

Some of the most important photos and videos in recent news history were the product of amateurs; we can scarcely imagine the second half of the 20th century without the gruesome Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination. More recently, as video cameras have become popular, we have seen what happens when average people captured important events such as police beatings of suspects and approaching tornados. And it was amateurs who caught the most horrific images of the United Airlines 767 fireball as it crashed into the second World Trade Center tower on September 11, 2001.

In each of those cases, the public was communicating through the mass media; the amateur videos rapidly made it, as in earlier events, onto CNN and the other major TV networks. For the foreseeable future, this will continue to be the case because TV is our gathering place in national crises, because of the high bandwidth costs for offering video over the Web, and for the simple fact that mass media still reaches the biggest audience. But as more and more members of the former audience make and capture the news, their contributions will be understood as essential to the news-gathering process at all levels. [168]

We can still learn a thing or two from nonjournalism organizations. In February 2003, after the space shuttle broke up on reentry to the Earth's atmosphere, NASA put out a call to anyone who had photographs that might help in the investigation of the accident, and thousands responded. [169]

Then, in the weeks before the launch of the 2003 Iraq war, the BBC asked its audience for pictures having anything to do with the conflict. [170] It received hundreds, some of which it posted in a photo essay that was both journalistically smart and emotionally moving for viewers.

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Case Study: Promoting, Then Reporting, Activism

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No major journalism organization has done more to involve its audience than the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In November 2003, the BBC launched what may be the most thorough attempt yet to bring tomorrow's journalism to life with a project called iCan. [174] At its heart is a fairly daring notion: equip the audience with some of the tools of political activism. Then watch what they do and report on it.

iCan was an outgrowth of both journalistic and political considerations, project leaders told me when I visited London in October 2003. First, the BBC and other media organizations were missing big stories. For example, huge fuel-price protests in 2000, which led to turmoil on the British roads, came as a surprise, even though the issue had been boiling up on the Internet. The 2001 national elections in the United Kingdom were another major catalyst. Turnout was low, by British standards, at about 60 percent. One of the BBC's core missions is to help the electorate make informed decisions, and the service's leadership wanted to know what it could do better.

"We found some interesting things," said Martin Vogel, the iCan project codirector. For instance, the 40 percent of the electorate that didn't vote was "by no means apathetic" about the issues of the day, but rather unhappy with the candidates and policies being offered. With younger audiences moving away from traditional media to new media, the BBC looked for a way to use new media to foster political involvement.

So iCan aimed to create a platform to help citizen activists influence the system from the local level on up. Local was especially important, because it's where people feel the most impact. BBC journalists spent months pulling together a host of information aimed at citizen activists, including pointers to various resources on and off the Web. Journalists wrote guidelines and instructions on everything from how to start a campaign to dealing with troublesome neighbors. "We let people know they can do things for themselves," said Samanthi Dissanayake, a broadcast journalist who signed on for the iCan experiment.

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Case Study: The Citizen Reporters

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Lee Pong Ryul had a day job in engineering at a semiconductor company near Seoul, South Korea. In his spare time, he was helping to shape tomorrow's journalism.

Lee was an active "citizen reporter" for OhmyNews, the online news service. OhmyNews has shaken up the journalism and political establishments while attracting an enormous audience by melding 20th century tradition—the journalism-as-lecture model, in which organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't—into something bottom-up, interactive, and democratic. This is an important experiment, and when I visited in the spring of 2003, it was clear that the bet was already paying off.

The influence of OhmyNews, just four years old at the time, was substantial and expanding. It had been credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print journalism scene for years.

If OhmyNews is a glimpse into the future, so is South Korea—and that's no coincidence. It's a wired nation; more than two-thirds of households are connected to the Internet, most with high-speed links. The Internet is an always-on part of everyday life, not an afterthought. That deep digital pool has spawned some 21st century kinds of media, from complex, multiplayer online games to publications such as OhmyNews.

Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily. Advertisers support both the web site and a weekly print edition, and the operation had been profitable in recent months, its chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon Ho, told me.

He was a 38-year-old former writer for progressive magazines. With a staff of about 50 and legions of "citizen reporter" contributors—more than 26,000 had signed up when I met him, and more than 15,000 had published stories under their own bylines—Oh and his colleagues were creating real value in an emerging journalistic reality.

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Newsroom Tools

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Even as we invite the former audience into the process, journalists must first embrace the technology that makes collaborative reporting possible. We've been fairly good at this in the past, but technological changes are accelerating.

Writing on the Web would be simple if text was all that mattered. The next generation of multimedia tools will give journalists more options—and vex editors in the process. The advent of camera phones and small, high-quality digital cameras has given professional journalists great new tools that transcend the desktop. News organizations should issue a camera phone and digital camera to every member of the staff and urge people to shoot anything that even resembles news. In addition to the camera in my phone, which takes generally lousy pictures, I also carry a small digital camera that not only takes high-quality photographs but also 30-frames-per-second video with sound.

We should be encouraging reporters to get audio and video snapshots. I'm not suggesting that we turn reporters into videographers (not yet, anyway), because anything that distracts from the reporting mission in a big way will harm journalism. But it only makes sense to get a quick video of a scene, such as the office of someone we're interviewing; maybe it'll go on the web site with a little editing, but even if it's unsuitable for general consumption, it can remind the reporter of some physical details for the actual story. Similarly, audio clips can amplify a subject, giving a better sense of the person being interviewed; since reporters increasingly make audio recordings of interviews, there's no reason not to turn them into transcripts or extended excerpts to be posted online (and they should be whenever possible).

Will this threaten the professional photographers who capture images so well for news organizations today? I hope not. Their skills are far beyond mine and most other amateurs. But we have to be ready to capture images when the pros aren't around; even a poorly composed photo of a pivotal event is better than no picture at all.

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Teaching New Tricks

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Meanwhile, there is a gap in journalism education, an often hidebound institution in its own right. It's not that the better journalism schools lack technology or don't know how to use it, but rather they tend to serve such a conservative and slow-moving industry.

I confess to some skepticism about undergraduate journalism degrees in the first place. Some of the best journalists I know never took a course in the subject; then again, others have. Whatever your view of this endlessly debatable topic, the fact is that journalism schools are the main source of new staff. But we can't allow them to crank out a new generation of reporters, editors, photographers, and broadcasters who don't understand and appreciate how the profession has changed. The problem is actually more serious among faculties than students. It doesn't surprise me that the students I've met, in guest lectures at U.S. universities and through my own experience teaching a new media course at the University of Hong Kong for five weeks each fall, are more open to this new style than most faculties and deans. [178]

Interactive, online reporting and editing is becoming a staple of the curriculum. Teaching the use of tools is relatively trivial, however. Teaching students how to be relentlessly inquisitive with a sense of fairness and a genuine wish to inform the public is harder. There's a lot to be said for the traditional liberal-arts education in that regard, and better undergraduate journalism programs offer precisely that kind of education.

Jay Rosen at New York University makes a persuasive case for a new kind of journalism education, not just an updated understanding and practice of the trade itself. He envisions a journalism school that takes its inspiration from, of all places, the Yale School of Drama, not from the quasi-science the information profession pushes in most universities.

"The Yale Drama School has two halves," he told me. "One says, here's how to study drama and become an actor or director. The other side says, here's the Yale Repertory Theater and cabaret, and does productions." He wants NYU to replicate some of this.

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A Question of Trust

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Using the tools of multidirectional journalism doesn't mean we have to cross ethical lines. We have plenty to deal with already on that score, as the infamous Jayson Blair proved with his fabrications and plagiarism while reporting for TheNew York Times. When cyber-gossip Matt Drudge reported rumors of investigations that Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, had been romantically involved with a former intern, few responsible news organizations picked up the story. Drudge, we recognized, didn't have a sterling record for accuracy. The old-fashioned publications and broadcasts that disdained the story were, it turned out, making the right call both online and offline. (I'll talk more about this in Chapter 9.)

No matter which tools and technologies we embrace, we must maintain core principles, including fairness, accuracy, and thoroughness. These are not afterthoughts. They are essential if professional journalism expects to survive.

Even as we listen better to our former audience and converse more freely, we are still obliged to gather as many facts as possible. We are obliged to be fair. We are obliged to correct our mistakes. Fortunately, it turns out that we'll be even better equipped to maintain those principles if we listen and participate in the conversation.

And we still need editors. Bloggers who disdain editors entirely, or who say they're largely irrelevant to the process, are mistaken. [180] The community's eyes and ears on weblogs are fine for what they provide. As noted, my readers make me a better journalist because they find my mistakes, tell me what I'm missing, and help me understand nuances.

Good editors add their own experience in a different way. They are trained, mostly through long experience, to look for what's missing in a story. They ask tough questions, demand better evidence for assertions, and, ultimately, understand how this thing we call journalism comes together. Sometimes they can help us see that less is more: I can't count the number of times an editor of my column has suggested that a sentence is unnecessary or inflammatory without purpose, leading me to agree that its removal would strengthen the piece, not weaken it. They make my work better in different ways, and I would not want to see them disappear.

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Endnotes

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1. Jane's Intelligence Review thanks Slashdot readers: http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/07/120249.shtml.
2. OhmyNews: http://ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=04219&no=153109&rel_no=1.
3. The New York Times forums: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/readersopinions/.
4. Kristof Responds: http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/editorialsoped/opedcolumnists/kristofresponds/index.html.
5. Slate Fraywatch: http://fray.slate.msn.com/id/2099475/.
6. TheWashington Post live chats: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/.
7. As we'll discuss in Chapter 9, blogs and other discussion sites are constantly fighting a battle against trolls and spammers; it's an arms race, but I'm hopeful that we'll be able to keep far enough ahead of the bad guys to hold onto the value of the conversation.
8. CyberJournalist.net blog list: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.php.
9. Dan Weintraub blog: http://www.sacbee.com/insider/.
10. The Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web": http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/,
11. Sheila Lennon blog: http://www.projo.com/blogs/shenews/,
12. Like so many journalism organizations, the Charlotte Observer's excellent work has disappeared behind a pay-per-view firewall. You can find the hurricane coverage, or some of it, in the nonprofit Web Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20010307020840/http:/www.charlotte.com/special/bonnieu/0828dispatches.htm.
13. Tom Mangan blog: http://tommangan.net/printsthechaff,
14. CNN to Online Journalism Review: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1049381758.php,
15. Olafson fired: http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-08-08/hostage.html/1/index.html,
16. Dennis Horgan blog: http://denishorgan.com

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Chapter 7: The Former Audience Joins the Party

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On December 10, 2003, thousands of Iraqis marched on the streets of Baghdad to protest bombings by insurgents, violence that had caused far more civilian than military casualties. For all practical purposes, The New York Times and other major media outlets missed the march and its significance.

But some local bloggers did not. They'd been trumpeting the prodemocracy demonstrations for days prior to the event. Blogs, it turned out, became the best way to get the news about an important event.

Some of the most prominent coverage came from a blogger named Zeyad, whose Healing Iraq site [181] had become a key channel for anyone who wanted to understand how occupied Iraq (or at least that part of Baghdad) was faring. His reports were thorough and revealing, and his readership grew quickly once word got around.

"I was surprised that people would rely on my blog as a source of information together with news," he told me in an email. "Many of my readers have confessed to me that they check out my blog even before checking out news sites such as CNN, BBC, etc. What I find people more interested in is firsthand accounts of daily life in Iraq, and coming from an Iraqi they give it more credence than if it were coming from western journalists."

Zeyad's reporting was just one more example of how the grassroots have emerged, in ways the professional media largely still fail to comprehend, as a genuine force in journalism. Indeed, the grassroots are transcending the pallid consumerism that has characterized news coverage and consumption in the past half-century or more. For the first time in modern history, the user is truly in charge, as a consumer and as a producer.

This chapter focuses on two broad groups. First are the people who have been active, in their own way, even before grassroots journalism was so available to all. They are the traditional writers of letters to the editor: engaged and active, usually on a local level. Now they can write weblogs, organize Meetups, and generally agitate for the issues, political or otherwise, that matter to them. Once they know the degree to which they can transcend the standard sources of news and actually influence the journalism process, they'll have an increasing impact by being, more than ever before, part of a larger conversation.

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Citizen Journalist: Bloggers (and More) Everywhere

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On February 19, 2004, Rex Hammock was ushered into the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. He and four other small-business people sat down with President George W. Bush for a short discussion on economic issues. It was another in a series of Bush meetings with supporters of the administration's policies. This one, unlike previous sessions, was closed to the press.

But what White House officials apparently didn't know—or didn't care if they did know—was that Hammock, owner of a small publishing company in Tennessee, was a citizen journalist in his own right. On his way back to the airport that day, he wrote on his laptop computer a long and somewhat rambling essay that he soon posted on his weblog. [182] There was no breaking news, but rather a folksy kind of reporting. He wanted to report his impressions rather than discuss policy.

"He is definitely not a wonk, but he knows clearly what he believes needs to happen for the country and its economy to prosper," Hammock wrote of Bush. "I don't think the circular arguments regarding `what ifs' and `what abouts' interest him. Nor me, for that matter."

The blog posting, and the media coverage of what this citizen reporter had done in the absence of standard media coverage, became a mini-story in its own right. One lesson was obvious: excluding The Media from coverage no longer necessarily means much.

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, columnists at The Wall Street Journal, had learned this nine months earlier at the Journal's D (All Things Digital) conference in southern California. To the annoyance of "official" members of the press who attended the event, including me, the main sessions were off the record. Of course, that didn't stop any number of regular attendees from reporting in their weblogs what various speakers, including Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs, said. (In my blog, I later pointed to the unofficial coverage. [183]) The restrictions were lifted for the 2004 conference.

These cases show the increasing futility of the expression "off the record" in large groups or when dealing with nonprofessional journalists who aren't steeped in the nomenclature of what can be disclosed and what can't. Recall the incident I noted in the , when bloggers helped turn an audience against a telephone company CEO. At another conference the next autumn, [184] Howard Rheingold was asked if the real-time feedback and commentary typified by the Nacchio blogging might lead conference speakers to be less candid in such circumstances. In other words, the questioner wondered, would this kind of thing create a "chilling effect" on public discourse?

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Evolutionary and Revolutionary

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Americans, protected by the First Amendment, can generally write blogs with few consequences. However, in country after country where free speech is not a given, the blogosphere matters in far more serious ways. This is the stuff of actual revolutions.

If Iran's famously repressive political system ever sees true reform without suffering another violent revolution, the contributions of people such as Hossein Derakhshan will have played no small role. Derakhshan goes by the name Hoder. A 20-something expatriate who'd moved to Toronto after leaving Iran, he may have been the first Persian-language weblogger when he launched his site in December 2000. [187] By tweaking some settings in the Blogger software configuration, "I could post and publish in Persian"—something that hadn't been possible before, given the difficulties of using the Persian character set.

Emboldened, Hoder decided to help other Iranians set up their own blogs. "I published the simple step-to-step guide on Nov. 5, 2001, and wished 100 people could start blogging by one year," he told me. "Then just after one month, we already had more than 100 Persian weblogs. It was unbelievable."

Not as amazing as it would get, though. PersianBlog.com, a service created in 2002, grew to have more than 100,000 user accounts in less than two years. Hoder estimated that more than 200,000 Iranian blogs had been created by early 2004, though not all are written in Iran and many aren't being maintained. Again, what matters most is what the Net made possible: Iranians, who live in a repressive country with strict controls on media, were able to speak out and access a variety of news and opinions.

The blogs are a cross-section of Iranian society. Many focus on topics people are not allowed to freely discuss in the nation's media: relationships, sex, culture, and politics. They are a communications network for a repressed people and speak volumes about a regime that is struggling to control how modern technology is used by its citizens.

Repressive regimes certainly can, and do, silence individual voices. China's information minders discovered the power of personal publishing some time ago and have been trying to keep the most widely listened-to voices—at least those critical of the regime or who discuss forbidden topics—out of general circulation. A young Chinese woman writing under the pen name "Muzimei"—a blog featuring frank descriptions of her sexual exploits—lost her job as a columnist at a newspaper in Guangdong Province.

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Nonprofit Community Publishing

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The Melrose Mirror is not a weblog. [189] The web publication, updated the first Friday of each month, resembles a community newsletter more than anything else, but it's a fine example of tomorrow's journalism. "The World Wide Web is not for couch potatoes," the Mirror says on its Welcome page. "It's for people who care and share and are aware."

The Mirror was founded in 1996 to serve the community of Melrose, Massachusetts. It is edited by the Melrose Silver Stringers, a collection of senior citizens who've devoted their time and energy to community affairs. The site isn't much to look at, especially when compared to glitzy commercial news sites. It's not interactive. But this is true grassroots stuff, filled with articles and pictures that give its readers a distinct sense of place along with plenty of useful information for their lives and community.

The Mirror was the original testing ground for a project started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "News-in-the-Future" Consortium at the famous Media Laboratory. MIT created the web-based software, also called SilverStringer, [190] to make community publishing easier.

It worked in a big way. "SilverStringer software has been used pretty much around the world by seniors, teens, and children," said Jack Driscoll, visiting scholar and Editor in Residence at the Media Lab and advisor to many of the groups using the software. Besides the United States, countries where the platform has become the basis of grassroots journalism include Finland, Italy, Brazil, Thailand, Ireland, India, Mexico, and Costa Rica. By far the biggest installation is operated by the La Repubblica newspaper in Italy; its "Kataweb" online affiliate [191] uses SilverStringer to help publish some 4,200 online school newspapers.

Probably the best-known site using the software is Junior Journal, [192] which is run by children from around the world with no adult involvement apart from Driscoll, a former top editor at The Boston Globe, serving as advisor. More than 300 children from 90 nations have worked on Junior Journal in the last five years.

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Alternative Media Flourishes

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Oddly, perhaps, America's so-called "alternative press" has not used the Net very well. Alternative newspapers in particular have been somewhat slow to expand their mission to new media. This may be due, in part, to consolidation in that industry leaving many alternative papers in the hands of just two companies, Village Voice Media and New Times Media. [193] Some, though not all, have lost their edgier qualities. So a new kind of alternative media has arisen on the Net, above and beyond blogs.

One of the best known is the Independent Media Center, also known as Indymedia. [194] The project was founded in 1999 by a group of antiglobalization activists who wanted to cover the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in ways traditional media would not. Activists working at the center pulled together material from a variety of sources, including camera-equipped people on the streets who captured images of local police officers mistreating protesters. With a newsletter and web site, Indymedia drew a large audience—and a heavy-handed visit from the FBI that brought the group considerably more attention. Buoyed by the Seattle effort, the Independent Media Center spread its wings. By mid-2003, it had dozens of affiliates in the United States and around the world.

When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, protesters took to the streets of San Francisco, and by many accounts just about shut down the city. Deploying digital cameras, laptops, and Wi-Fi, Indymedia reporters—a self-assembling newsroom—captured the events brilliantly. "Indymedia kicked our ass," Bob Cauthorn, former vice president for Digital Media at the San Francisco Chronicle, told a group of online journalists in April 2004. In particular, he said, the independent journalists revealed several cases of police brutality that the major media had missed.

Overall, the Indymedia effort has produced some admirable results. But it has an uneven track record in ways that make traditional journalists uncomfortable, in large part due to a lack of editorial supervision. The Google News site removed Indymedia stories from its listings, the search company says, because of concerns about the deliberate lack of centralized editorial control over what individual contributors to the site posted there. [195] Much of what the site publishes is solid, occasionally path-breaking journalism; but, as with all advocacy reporting, a reader is well advised to maintain a skeptical eye.

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The Wiki Media Phenomenon

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The Wiki is a profoundly democratized form of online data gathering. In February, 2004, Wikipedia, [200] one of the world's most comprehensive online reference sites, created and operated by volunteers, published its 500,000th article. More precisely, one of the site's contributors published the article.

Wikipedia is one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age. In just over three years of existence it has become a valuable resource and an example of how the grassroots in today's interconnected world can do extraordinary things. It is a model of participatory media quite unlike any other, and is a natural extension of the Web's capabilities in the context of journalism.

On the surface, the notion is bizarre—and certainly will chill the typical professional journalist. Why? Because almost anyone can be a contributor to the Wikipedia. Anyone can edit any page. (Only serious misbehavior gets people banned.) Thousands of people around the world have added their expertise, voice, and passion, and new volunteers show up every day.

It defies first-glance assumptions. After all, one might imagine, if anyone can edit anything, surely cyber-vandals will wreck it. Surely flame wars over article content will stymie good intentions. And, of course, the articles will all be amateurish nonsense. Right?

Well, not necessarily. The open nature of Wikipedia has been its greatest resource, and it has emerged as a credible resource.

Wikipedia uses the Wiki software described in Chapter 2. To refresh, a Wiki allows any user to edit any page. It keeps track of every change. Anyone can follow the changes in detail. When it works right, it engenders a community—and a community that has the right tools can take care of itself.

The Wikipedia articles tend to be neutral in tone, and when the topic is controversial, will explain the varying viewpoints in addition to offering the basic facts. When anyone can edit what you've just posted, such fairness becomes essential.

"The only way you can write something that survives is that someone who's your diametrical opposite can agree with it," Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, explained to me.

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Business Models for Tomorrow's Personal Journalism

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"I have the perfect business model," an executive with BBC News' online operation once joked to me. "Pay or go to jail."

He was referring to the license fees—essentially taxes—TV owners in the United Kingdom must pay to the organization.

Only one online journalism organization in the world can spend $100 million a year based on that model. The rest of us have to find other ways to make this work pay. The gifted amateurs who abound in the personal journalism world will continue to do great work, but some people will want to make a living at it, or at least supplement their income. Some intriguing business models are emerging, as are variations on the open source method in which people scratch a journalistic itch for noncommercial reasons.

Advertising, as you'd expect, is one potentially workable model. Subscriptions may someday be another; so far, a tip-jar approach is the furthest that notion has gone.

For most blogging and other personal journalism, the return on investment—assuming the author wants some, and however it's calculated (time and/or money)—comes with an enhanced reputation. Glenn Fleishman's blog on wireless networking, noted in Chapter 2, isn't a moneymaker, but it burnishes his professional credentials as an expert. Susan Mernit, an Internet/media consultant, posts frequently to her personal blog [203] on a variety of related subjects. It's personal PR, and it's effective.

Of all the emerging business models, one of the most promising fits into the category of "nano-publishing," as some are calling the genre. Nick Denton's publications, for instance, target specific niches, and do so with style and quality. Gawker [204] is a weblog devoted to news and gossip about New York City and its gossip-heavy industries. Gizmodo, [205] also a weblog, covers electronic gadgets. Fleshbot [206] covers erotica. And a new gossip site, Wonkette, [207] covers the world capital of insider chat, Washington, D.C. More such blogs are coming.

Denton (who, of course, has a blog [208]) is a former print journalist, who worked for such publications as the

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New Business Models: The Tip Jar

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There's nothing new about sponsorships for creative works or journalism. But bloggers and other online journalists have brought the concept into the modern age. And where sponsors in earlier times tended to be wealthy patrons, today, journalists can use the Net to raise money more widely. Probably the best-known example of this is Andrew Sullivan, a magazine writer whose blog [215] was one of the first to solicit readers' money via pledges, somewhat akin to the methods of public radio and television stations.

I'm even more impressed with Chris Allbritton, a former wire-service staff writer turned blogger, who brought the concept into the modern age in 2003. In an appeal to his Internet readership, he wrote, "Send me money, and I'll go to Iraq and cover the war." They did, and Allbritton made journalistic history. He also set a precedent that I hope will become far more common in coming years.

Allbritton's historic trip started in 2002 when he spent time in Turkey and more than a week in northern Iraq. Upon his return to the U.S. that fall, he heard the war drums beating from Washington and decided he should go back to Iraq to cover the conflict he knew was coming. That October, he launched a site called Back to Iraq [216]—a blog on which he asked readers to send money. From October through December, he raised just $500.

He got lucky in February 2003 when Wired News, the online news operation, did a story about him and his seemingly quixotic quest. Over the course of three days he raised another $2,000. Then other media organizations wrote about him and his site traffic "went through the roof," he said. In all, some 342 readers kicked in about $14,500. Allbritton flew back to Turkey, snuck back into northern Iraq and, with some distinction, covered the conflict from there.

A blogger has to pick a topic and stick to it, he told me; most blogs are too unfocused. But to raise money this way, one needs to "find something that's controversial and hopefully polarizing. The war was tailor made for that kind of thing." He had a specific project, and specific dates. People trusted him from his earlier work or were willing to take a chance, and they contributed. In late 2003, Allbritton decided to go back yet again and set up a Back to Iraq 3.0 web page. When we talked, he'd raised enough to cover immediate expenses and was planning to supplement his stay with other freelance articles.

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Endnotes

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1. Healing Iraq blog: http://healingiraq.blogspot.com.
2. Rex Hammock blog: http://www.rexblog.com.
3. Blog postings from The Wall Street Journal "D" conference: http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001058.shtml.
4. Rheingold's comment came at the PopTech (http://www.poptech.org) gathering in Camden, Maine.
5. Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net.
6. Jones interview: http://www.linux.org/people/pj_groklaw.html.
7. Hoder's Editor:Myself blog: http://hoder.com/weblog.
8. See "Iranian Journalist Credits Blogs for Playing Key Role in His Release From Prison," in Online Journalism Review: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1073610866.php.
9. Melrose Mirror: http://toy-story.media.mit.edu:9000.
10. SilverStringer: http://silverstringer.media.mit.edu/.
11. Kataweb: http://www.kataweb.it.
12. Junior Journal: http://journal.jrsummit.net.
13. See The New York Times coverage at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/27/business/media/27PAPE.html.
14. Indymedia: http://www.indymedia.org.
15. Google News does post some flagrantly biased stories from other sources, however.
16. Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org.
17. Command Post: http://www.command-post.org.
18. Center for Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org.
19. In focusing more on public affairs-oriented sites in this section, I don't want to slight any of the more topical online journalism being done. Technology has been a prime example of how cyberspace, where speed is of the essence, can beat paper. CNET's News.com service (http://www.news.com) has been a stalwart of excellent tech coverage, as has The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk

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Chapter 8: Next Steps

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In the mid-1990's, just as the World Wide Web was gaining popularity, I was sure that the Internet would become a powerful force in our lives. But I didn't have a clue that services such as Google would emerge, or that weblogs and other personal media would play such a transformative role in my chosen craft.

I didn't anticipate online experiments such as Feed, the pioneering but now defunct online magazine that had an edginess bloggers later incorporated, or group-edited sites such as Kuro5hin, where the audience writes and ranks the stories and then adds context and ideas as they discuss them. I didn't imagine that blogs and other tools would come along to make writing on the Web almost as easy as reading from it. So I won't try to predict the shape of the news business and how it will be practiced a decade from now. But even if we can't make specific predictions, we can look forward and make some safe assumptions about the architecture and technology of tomorrow's news, and then consider what they suggest.

My assumptions rest on two guiding principles. The first is a belief in basic journalistic values, including accuracy, fairness, and ethical standards. The second is rooted in the very nature of technology: it's relentless and unstoppable.

Only one thing is certain: we'll all be astounded by what's to come.

As we've already established, the mass media in the latter part of the 20th century was organized, for the most part, along a fairly simple, top-down framework. Editors and reporters inside big companies decided which stories to cover. They received information from a variety—but not too big a variety—of mostly official and sometimes unofficial sources. Editors massaged what reporters wrote, and the results were printed in newspapers and magazines or broadcast on radio and television. Alternatives did exist, particularly when desktop publishing came on the scene. But the conversational aspect of the news we've been discussing in this book hadn't arrived.

Technology and an increasing dissatisfaction with mass media have created the conditions for a new framework. To understand this, we must first understand the technology and the trends underlying the collision of journalism and technology. These trends take the shape of laws, not the kind enacted by governments but the kind imagined by scientists and acute observers of society.

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Laws and Other Codes

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As we've already established, the mass media in the latter part of the 20th century was organized, for the most part, along a fairly simple, top-down framework. Editors and reporters inside big companies decided which stories to cover. They received information from a variety—but not too big a variety—of mostly official and sometimes unofficial sources. Editors massaged what reporters wrote, and the results were printed in newspapers and magazines or broadcast on radio and television. Alternatives did exist, particularly when desktop publishing came on the scene. But the conversational aspect of the news we've been discussing in this book hadn't arrived.

Technology and an increasing dissatisfaction with mass media have created the conditions for a new framework. To understand this, we must first understand the technology and the trends underlying the collision of journalism and technology. These trends take the shape of laws, not the kind enacted by governments but the kind imagined by scientists and acute observers of society.

The first law is named after Gordon Moore, cofounder of computer chip maker Intel. More than any other, Moore's Law is the key to understanding today's reality and tomorrow's possibilities.

Moore's Law says that the density of transistors on a given piece of silicon will double every 18 to 24 months. It's been true since Moore came up with the notion in the 1960s, and the pace of improvement looks set to continue for some time to come. There's no historical equivalent for this kind of change; humans are fortunate to do anything twice as fast or as twice as well even once, much less double that improvement again and again. Moore's Law is about exponential change: it doesn't take long before you've increased power by thousands-fold. [218]

As engineers shrink millions of transistors onto tiny chips, they can embed enormous calculating power—something akin to intelligence—into almost every electronic device we use. You and I use many computers each day: the microprocessors, also called microcontrollers, are in computers, handheld devices, alarm clocks, coffee makers, home thermostats, wristwatches, and automobiles. Most of these devices contain vastly more processing power than early mainframe computers.

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Creating the News

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There's no longer any doubt that personal publishing of various stripes is becoming a major trend. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that in mid-2003, slightly less than half of adult Internet users had used the Net to "publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online." [223] If you added in the under-18 population, no doubt the numbers would rise significantly. While much of what is considered publishing on the Net consisted of trading files, causing some doubters to downplay the survey, the bottom line was that there was an enormous and growing cadre of content creators, some of whom were creating news.

The tools of creation are now everywhere, and they're getting better. Musicians can get the near-equivalent of a big recording studio in a package costing only a couple of thousand dollars, or considerably less if they're willing to make some compromises. Digital video is becoming so cheap that anyone with the requisite talent can make a feature film for a fraction of what it once cost. The notion of writing on the Web is expanding to include all kinds of media, and there's little to stop it.

The Web can't compete today—and may not compete in our lifetimes—with live television for big-event coverage. The architecture just doesn't permit it. But for just about everything else, it's ideal. Adam Curry, who became prominent as a VJ on MTV and has since been exploring the blogosphere and even newer media, [224] envisions "Personal TV Networks" that use the Net in a more appropriate way to deliver video content. In an introduction to a session at a 2004 blogging conference, [225] he described it this way:

Since the invention of the video tape recorder, most content delivered via television is created offline and prepared well in advance of its broadcast slot. In many cases a program will have to be cleared through the legal department and be reviewed for network "policies." And so the program sits in a queue, waiting to be distributed. During this time the program could be distributed by bike messengers and still arrive on time when you would normally turn on your set as directed by TV Guide. Or . . . it could be distributed via the Internet. Since big files take a long time to download, a day's worth of downloading should be time enough. The download can take place at night, when usage of your network and pc is low and, most importantly, you aren't waiting for it. It'll "just be there" in the morning. [226]

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Sorting It Out

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The ability to get the news you want is the hallmark of a networked world. People can create their own news reports from a variety of sources, not just the ones in their hometowns, which typically have been dominated by a monopoly local newspaper and television stations that would have to dig deeper to be shallow.

Creating our own news reports is still a largely haphazard affair. The sheer volume of information deters all but the most dedicated news hunters and gatherers. But the tools are improving fast, and it won't be long before people will be able to pick and choose in a far more organized way than they do today. New kinds of Big Media are emerging in this category, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. But the opportunity for small media is enormous, too.

I've been a fan of Google News [229] since it launched in "beta" form (it was still beta as I wrote this) in early 2002. The brainchild of Krishna Bharat, it has become a popular, and I'd argue essential, part of the web news infrastructure. The search engine "crawls" various news sites—designated by humans—and then machines take over to display all kinds of headlines on a variety of subjects from politics to business to sports to entertainment and so on. The display is calculated to resemble a newspaper. It's an effective glimpse into what's big news on the Web right now, or at least what editors think is big.

A user who wants to be better informed on a particular topic can use Google News to drill deeper, which may be the most important aspect of the site. One click and the user gets a list, sorted by what Google estimates is relevant or by date, of all stories on a given topic. There's a great deal of repetition, but it can be eye-opening to see how different media organizations cover the same issue, or what different angles they choose to highlight.

A useful element of Google News is called Google Alerts, a service that lets users create keyword searches, the results of which are sent by email on a regular basis. But as of early 2004, the service didn't let you read the alerts in RSS (the syndication format I discussed in Chapter 2 and will look at again below), a serious drawback.

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Syndication Takes Off

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Let's revisit RSS. You'll recall that RSS is a file generated automatically by weblog and web site software, and increasingly by other applications, that describes the site's content for the purpose of syndication.

Here's an example. A typical blog consists of a homepage with several postings. Each posting consists of a headline and some text. The RSS "feed," as it's known, is a file containing a list of the headlines and some or all of the text from the postings. In other words, RSS describes the structure and some of the content of a particular page.

RSS feeds can be read by "aggregators" or "newsreaders," software that allows individuals to collect news from many different sites into one screenful of information instead of having to surf from one page to another. Today, RSS readers are fairly primitive, but that will change in coming years.

Some of the most exciting new work surrounding RSS is coming from fledgling companies such as Feedster, which mines RSS data and keeps track of bloggers' mentions of products, among other things. The inherent possibilities seem nearly endless, including the ability to follow conversations in much more detailed ways. As I was finishing this book, Microsoft quietly let it be known that it was planning "Blogbot," a search tool that sounded very much like Feedster and Technorati. Surprisingly, Google, which owns Blogger, a company that makes blogging software, hadn't done any of this.

The technologists looking at this field see rich lodes in RSS and other data created on blogs and web sites. Mountains of data are being created every day by RSS feeds and other structured information, and smart entrepreneurs and researchers are creating tools that I believe will become an integral part of tomorrow's news architecture.

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The World Live Web

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Dave Sifry, a serial entrepreneur, started Technorati in 2002. By April 2004, he was tracking more than two million blogs, with thousands coming online every day. Though many people abandon their blogs, the trend line is growing fast.

Technorati's tools are basically semi-canned queries that go into a giant, constantly updated database that Sifry likens to a just-in-time search engine. The service helps people search or browse for interesting or popular weblogs, breaking news, and hot topics of conversation. It also lets users rank people and their blogs and blog topics not just by popularity—the number of blogs linking to something—but by weighted popularity, determined by the popularity of the linking blogs. You can also see not just the most popular blogs, but the fastest-rising ones. My blog had about 2,100 incoming links the last time I checked. If I get 100 more, that's gratifying but not, relatively speaking, a huge change. But if someone who has a dozen incoming links today gets six more, that's an enormous relative change, and Technorati will probably flag it. Think of this as a "buzzmeter" for determining how fast a blogger—or a blogger's specific posting—is rising or cooling off.

The idea behind Technorati might be called the Google Hypothesis: link structure matters. Knowing who is linking to whom can take a seemingly random collection of weblogs and extract a highly structured set of information. This information can then be filtered in a variety of ways. The original Technorati application was the "Link Cosmos"—what Sifry called "an annotated listing of all weblog sources pointing to a site [blog] in recent time." Type in the URL of a weblog (or an individual posting), and the engine shows a list of weblogs pointing to that URL, sorted by time of linking or by "authority"—the "most popular" linking weblog is ranked first. Searching on any linking weblog will show its Cosmos as well, and so on. (Imagine what this would look like displayed graphically as a web of links. Inevitably, someone will offer such a tool.)

In addition to the Cosmos, the Technorati data can also be expressed as ordered lists. The Top 100 list, for example, shows the hundred most popular sites on the Web (whether weblogs or web sites such as Slashdot), based on the number of outgoing links from blogs. Though Technorati's algorithms are simpler than Google's, Technorati can offer the blogging community what Google offers news junkies with the Google News site: timeliness. Because the weblog world moves so fast, it's helpful to know when something was posted. Google looks at links and documents to get its Page Rank, Sifry explained, but Technorati adds two things: time of posting and the fact that with blogs, the postings are typically more personal than institutional. Combine all of this, he said, and you end up with a "World Live Web," a subset of the World Wide Web that gets at the actual conversation.

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Probing APIs and Web Services

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Few users of Technorati know, and fewer care, about something called the Technorati API. API stands for "applications programming interface," a term used by tech people to explain how to hook one piece of software to another. In effect, APIs are standards created to help ensure that one product can interoperate with another. Think of the phone jack in your wall as an API that allows you to connect your phone to the phone network. Anyone can make an RJ-11 plug, connecting to a wire that runs between your phone and the wall.

Software development relies on APIs. Operating systems have them so that independent software programmers can create applications, such as word processors, that use the underlying features of the system. They don't have to reinvent the proverbial wheel each time they write software, and they help ensure a vibrant ecosystem on whatever programming platform they're using. Technorati is one of a growing number of web companies, including Google and Amazon, to create and publish APIs for its software. Most blogging software also has APIs.

With these and other APIs, programmers are using a technology called "web services" to further change the basic rules of the information game. According to programmer and blogger Erik Benson, [232] A web service is basically a system that lets web sites talk to each other, sharing information between each other without the intervention of pesky humans." In a sense, humans have used the Web this way for years: type a query into Google, or buy a book on Amazon, and you're using a web service.

When Google [233] and Amazon, [234] and Technorati [235] (among others) offer APIs into their data, they're not offering us the entire database the way the U.S. government does with, for example, census data, much of which can be downloaded and massaged at will. They're offering a way to get specific information out of the databases in a structured way. But their willingness to do this means we can build, using web services, entirely new kinds of queries—and learn new things—with just a little bit of expertise. This may be beyond you and me, but programmers have already created some useful applications using APIs and web services, such as "Amazon Light," [236] which uses the Amazon API to turn the retailer's site into something more closely resembling a search engine. Another extraordinarily interesting application is Valdis Krebs' analysis of people who buy books about politics with a right or left slant, and how little overlap there is among people who buy those books. [237]

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Okay, but Whose "Information" Do You Trust?

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Among the missing components in this hierarchy is a way to evaluate a person's reputation beyond the crude systems in place today. A reliable reputation system would allow us to verify people and judge the veracity of the things they say based, in part, on what people we trust say about them. In a sense, Google is already a reputation system: Google my name and you'll discover a lot about me, including where I work, what I've written, and a lot about what I think about various issues—and what some other people think of me (not all flattering by any means). Technorati is also this type of system: the more people linking to you, the more "authority" you have. But it's important to note that the majority of blogs tracked by Technorati have nobody linking to them. This doesn't mean the blogs lack value, because there are people close to the bloggers who trust them. No matter who you are, you probably know something about a topic that's worth paying attention to. [241]

Someday, a person who is interested in news about the local school system, which rarely rates more than a brief item in the newspaper except to cover some extraordinary event, will be able to get a far more detailed view of that vital public body. Any topic you can name will be more easily tracked this way. Just in the political sphere, the range will go beyond school governance to city councils to state and federal government to international affairs. Now multiply the potential throughout other fields of interest, professional and otherwise. And when audio and video become an integral part of these conversations—it's already starting to happen as developers connect disparate media applications—the conversations will only deepen.

The tools are being built now. Look on the accompanying web site for this book, where we will maintain a comprehensive list along with links to the toolmakers.

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Dinosaurs and Dangers

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The technology tells us we're heading in one direction, but the law and cultural norms will have something to say about the process.

The media of the late 20th century was largely the province of big corporations. All else being equal, it might be headed toward extinction. But all is not equal in the halls of power and influence. If today's Big Media is a dinosaur, it won't die off quietly. It will, with government's help, try to control new media rather than see its business models eroded by it.

Meanwhile, one of the valuable artifacts of modern journalism is a commitment—however poorly kept at times—to integrity. The growth of grassroots journalism has been accompanied by serious ethical issues, including veracity and outright deception. Are traditional values compatible with this new medium? The questions of integrity and struggle for control are potentially deadly flies in the ointment of tomorrow's media. We'll look at them closely in the next several chapters.

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Endnotes

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1. Moore's original paper on the subject is on Intel's web site at: ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf.
2. In this 2003 CNET interview, Metcalfe talks about the genesis and future of Ethernet: http://news.com.com/2008-1082-1008450.html.
3. As Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro noted in their important 1999 book, Information Rules (Harvard Business School Press), Metcalfe's Law relies on what economists call "network externalities." This is the notion that the larger the network, the more attractive it will be to users in most cases—and the harder it will be for a new entrant in the market to get people to switch.
4. David Reed's own explanation of his "law" is on his site: http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html.
5. I'm particularly indebted to Howard Rheingold for his observations, in conversations and his writing, which have helped clarify my own understanding of the power of these various laws.
6. Pew report on online content production: http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=113.
7. Adam Curry: http://live.curry.com.
8. Curry's BloggerCon session introduction: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/2004/04/09#a1119.
9. Andrew Grumet has been experimenting with video as RSS "enclosures," delivered to a desktop (or other device) as needed. See http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/bitTorrent for more information.
10. Advertisers saw this potential long ago. In Hong Kong in 2000, a friend showed me a mobile phone that let him know if a nearby store was having a sale.
11. Bantam, 1991.
12. Google News: http://news.google.com.
13. Microsoft Newsbot: http://newsbot.msn.com.
14. MyYahoo! RSS: http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss/.
15. Erik Benson blog: http://erikbenson.com

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Chapter 9: Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust

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In the spring of 2001, almost no one was surprised to hear that several Hollywood studios had been setting up phony web sites to create buzz for new movies. The sites, supposedly run by fans, were just the latest version of some standard tricks in parts of the marketing world.

The exposure of the deception again brought to focus a reality of the modern age: for manipulators, con artists, gossips, and jokesters of all varieties, the Internet is the medium from heaven.

Technology has given us a world in which almost anyone can publish a credible-looking web page. Anyone with a computer or a cell phone can post in online forums. Anyone with a moderate amount of skill with Photoshop or other image-manipulation software can distort reality. Special effects make even videos untrustworthy.

We have a problem here.

The spread of misinformation isn't always the result of malice. Consider the cut-and-paste problem.

Until recently, people would clip a news article from a paper or magazine. They'd give or mail it to someone else. Now we just copy it digitally and send it along. But when we cut and paste text, we can run into trouble. Sometimes the cutting removes relevant information. On occasion, words or sentences are changed to utterly distort the meaning. Both practices can prove harmful, but the latter is downright malicious.

In one of the most famous cut-and-paste cases, a column by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich made its way around the Net as a supposed MIT commencement address by novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Schmich had written a wry version of a graduation speech she'd give if asked—"Wear sunscreen," her commencement address began. But somehow, as it spread far and wide, her name came off and Vonnegut's replaced it. (I must have gotten a dozen emails quoting it.) In August 1997, commenting on the case in a subsequent column, Schmich wrote: "But out in the cyberswamp, truth is whatever you say it is, and my simple thoughts on floss and sunscreen were being passed around as Kurt Vonnegut's eternal wisdom. Poor man. He didn't deserve to have his reputation sullied in this way." [242]

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Cut and Paste, Right and Wrong

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The spread of misinformation isn't always the result of malice. Consider the cut-and-paste problem.

Until recently, people would clip a news article from a paper or magazine. They'd give or mail it to someone else. Now we just copy it digitally and send it along. But when we cut and paste text, we can run into trouble. Sometimes the cutting removes relevant information. On occasion, words or sentences are changed to utterly distort the meaning. Both practices can prove harmful, but the latter is downright malicious.

In one of the most famous cut-and-paste cases, a column by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich made its way around the Net as a supposed MIT commencement address by novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Schmich had written a wry version of a graduation speech she'd give if asked—"Wear sunscreen," her commencement address began. But somehow, as it spread far and wide, her name came off and Vonnegut's replaced it. (I must have gotten a dozen emails quoting it.) In August 1997, commenting on the case in a subsequent column, Schmich wrote: "But out in the cyberswamp, truth is whatever you say it is, and my simple thoughts on floss and sunscreen were being passed around as Kurt Vonnegut's eternal wisdom. Poor man. He didn't deserve to have his reputation sullied in this way." [242]

Far more troubling was the case of Avi Rubin, a computer scientist and official election judge in the 2004 Maryland primary, who had been fiercely critical of electronic voting machines. He wrote a long article about his 2004 experience with the new machines, and while he maintained his strong objections to flaws in the process, he did make some positive remarks about the machines' potential. [243] His words were then taken out of context, he told me several weeks later, by supporters of the flawed machines. He forwarded me an email from a legislative aide in Ohio that confirmed the misimpression—whether it was inadvertent or deliberate wasn't clear—and he was trying hard to correct it.

I've had material misquoted or misrepresented on a number of occasions. The most telling instance took place in 1997 when I wrote a satiric column—labeled as such—"quoting" an unnamed Microsoft executive admitting to illegal business practices. In the same column, a spokesman for two software-industry trade groups was quoted as admitting his organizations might be making wildly inflated guesses about how much software is being illegally copied. Finally, I had a spokesman for the PC industry announce the end of the sleazy practice of showing video monitors in computer advertisements, but then, in small print, saying the monitor isn't included.

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New Ways to Mislead

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In early 2004, John Kerry's presidential campaign drew fire when conservative web critics—and several gullible newspapers—published a composite photograph of him and Jane Fonda, one of the right wing's favorite targets. Kerry and Fonda, in a photo that turned out to have been doctored, were shown "together" at a 1970s rally protesting the Vietnam War. [244] It was unclear who created the fake picture, but the willingness of many people to trust this picture spoke volumes about how easy it is to manipulate public opinion.

Moreover, the incident was only the latest demonstration of a truly pernicious trend of modern fakery. Photos are evidence of nothing in particular. [245] This is why publications that print these kinds of photos are subjected to withering criticism, as was National Geographic when it moved one of the Egyptian pyramids in a cover photo. Doctoring photos without clearly labeling them as such is a serious offense in most newspapers and news magazines. [246]

Nothing, in a journalistic sense, justifies blatant deception. But the line between improper doctoring and making an image better is less clear than we might like. For example, simple cropping can remove someone who was in the original picture or it can highlight an important element in the image. Photoshop and other image-manipulation tools give darkroom technicians, who once used various physical techniques to highlight some parts of photos and move others into the background, powerful new ways to alter images.

Even more worrisome is the increasing use of doctored video. It's now common practice for televised sporting events to feature advertising digitally inserted on, for example, stadium walls that are actually blank. The growing field of "product placement"—putting brand-name products into TV shows and movies—is moving closer to the news process, and that should disturb everyone. As the film Forrest Gump showed, we can put someone into a scene who wasn't there in reality; digital technology's steady improvements mean this will become trivially easy.

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Who's Talking, and Why?

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In 2000, Mark Simeon Jakob put out a phony press release that sent the stock of a company called Emulex into a free fall after credulous news organizations took it seriously. He'd sold the stock short, in effect betting that the price would plummet, and made almost $241,000 before he was caught. He pleaded guilty to a felony and was sentenced to prison. [248]

His offense was egregious. But how much did it differ from chat rooms and discussion boards that have grown so popular in recent years? Pump-and-dump schemers have worked these discussions for years, planting information and then selling or buying accordingly. The Internet bubble was fueled, in no small way, by this kind of behavior—and not just online. Famous Wall Street "analysts" were telling the public to buy shares in companies they were calling dogs in private emails to their colleagues. I have some sympathy for small investors who lost big in the bubble, and contempt for the people who knowingly touted absurdly overpriced stocks. But greed was everywhere, and small investors who were looking for something that was too good to be true violated common sense.

Yet the investment forums can be a source of incredibly good information, too. Sometimes disgruntled employees post insider tales that can be a warning of harder times to come for shareholders. Sometimes a particularly bright amateur analyst spots something relevant the pros have missed. To dismiss all online information out of hand is as foolish as ignoring it entirely—but the failure to do one's homework before making a serious decision may be the most foolish mistake of all.

In doing homework, one of the most crucial exercises is to consider the source. Good journalists know this as a matter of practice. We don't pick a random bystander and assume he's an expert on, say, nuclear power. And we'd laugh out loud at the notion of reading some anonymous Net posting and using it as the factual basis for an article — at least I would.

Internet gossip monger Matt Drudge doesn't practice what I'd call respectable journalism (and, to be fair, he doesn't call himself a journalist), but I respect him for this much: he signs his name to everything he posts. That probably didn't come as much consolation to John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Kerry, you may recall, was dogged in early February by a rumor of an extramarital affair, a "scandal"—for which there was absolutely no evidence and which was flatly denied by everyone supposedly involved—that got its legs after Drudge published it on his web site. [249]

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Trolls and Other Annoyances

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Grassroots journalism has more problems than deciding whether anonymous posting is a good or bad idea. For starters, consider the trolls.

Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, and their colleagues at Slashdot have been dealing with trolls for years. At Slashdot, subtitled "News for Nerds: Stuff that Matters," the readers do the heavy lifting. They're constantly combing the Web for interesting information—articles, news stories, press releases, and mailing list postings — and recommend the material to Slashdot's tiny editorial staff. Each day, the editors select a dozen or so of the best items, which they highlight on the Slashdot homepage with a short summary and hyperlink, and invite readers to comment online. Then the editors sit back to watch what happens, and so do hundreds of thousands of other people.

The initial summaries and links are the beginning of the conversation on Slashdot, not the end. The average item generates about 250 comments. Some generate far more. Moderators, themselves selected on the basis of their participation in other discussions, rate the quality of the postings, and readers can adjust the results so they see everything or, as most do, a subset of the more substantive comments.

The Slashdot team has had to keep tweaking the software that runs the Slashdot site, as well as the user-based moderation system, because of the trolls and vandals who try to clog the site with irrelevant or obscene postings, ruining the experience for others. It's a constant annoyance, Bates told me, but part of the price of doing business.

How do you know if a troll is on your site? The definition on Ward Cunningham's Wiki says it best:

A troll is deliberately crafted to provoke others with the intention of wasting their time and energy. A troll is a time thief. To troll is to steal from people. That is what makes trolling heinous.

Trolls can be identified by their disengagement from a conversation or argument. They do not believe what they say, but merely say it for effect.

Trolls are motivated by a desire for attention by people and can't or won't acquire it in a productive manner.

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Spin Patrol

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Journalists become accustomed to a process known as spinning. Wikipedia accurately describes this, in the context of public relations, as "putting events or other facts, especially of those with political or legal significance, into contexts favoring oneself or one's client or cause, at least in comparison to opponents. Newmakers and their PR legions have been spinning us since the media became a way to get information to the public, and we've been alternately falling for it or resisting it all this time."

In the physical world, I always try to ask myself what a person I'm interviewing has to gain from doing an interview. We need to recognize that motives play a part in what we're told, and we adjust our ultimate coverage accordingly.

But spin takes some insidious routes to the public. One of the worst forms is the media's lazy use of press releases as news. Some smaller newspapers are known to print them verbatim, as if a reporter had actually done some reporting and writing. Lately, video press releases have become a stain on both the PR profession and journalism. Local TV stations are handed video releases, often including fake "reporters" interviewing officials from the company or government agency that wants to get its news out, and too often stations play all or part of these mockeries of journalism. In March 2004, the Bush administration was properly chastised for sending out video releases to promote, in a highly political way, a drug-benefits bill Congress had passed a few months earlier. [255]

Online spin varies from the relatively harmless, and even amusing, to more ethically challenged methods. On the harmless side is "Google bombing," a method of connecting a word or phrase to a specific web site through the Google search engine. After one group of Google bombers got "miserable failure" to point to George W. Bush's biography page on the White House site, his supporters retaliated by connecting John Kerry's page to the word "waffles." [256] Sooner or later, Google will either prevent this kind of thing or risk some of its own credibility.

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Citizen Reporters to the Rescue

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Blogger Ken Layne [260] captured one of the online world's essential characteristics in a classic posting in 2001. "We can Fact Check your ass," Layne said. [261] When there are lots of citizen reporters scrutinizing what other people say, they have a way of getting to the truth, or at least shining light on inconsistencies.

Case in point: Kaycee Nicole created a blog to talk openly about life, illness, and loss. As she grew sick and lay dying, she created a community. Thousands of people visited her blog in 2000 and 2001. They comforted her—and each other—with messages of support and offers of help. They researched her illness, looking for a way to make her better. And Kaycee did get better, at least for a while. Then she sickened again and finally succumbed to her leukemia.

But on May 18, 2001, someone named "acridrabbit" posted a simple question on MetaFilter, a collaborative blog and news site: "Is it possible that Kaycee did not exist?" The query set off a furious controversy. A relatively small but relentless group of Net denizens unraveled the tale of anguish and discovered a hoax. They investigated court records. They checked their findings with each other. They did some of the best detective work you'll ever see.

What this group accomplished was, in a sense, investigative reporting. But they weren't professional journalists. They were strangers who, for the most part, only knew each other online. But combining the power of the Internet and old-fashioned reporting, they'd come together—first in sorrow, then in dismay that morphed toward anger—to scrutinize a situation and, ultimately, solve a mystery. [262]

Fact-checking is a just one tool a community can bring to bear. As in open source projects, combining all those eyes and ideas can create a self-righting phenomenon. In the summer of 2003, David Weinberger and I discovered other community benefits. We'd launched a small, noncommercial web site called WordPirates, [263] the purpose of which was to remind people how some good words in our language have been hijacked by corporate and political interests.

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A Flight to Quality?

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The flood of unreliable information on the Net could have the ironic effect of reinforcing the influence of Big Media, at least in the short term. This assumes, of course, that users of online journalism trust Big Media in the first place. Many do not.

Unlike many Americans, and in spite of some media scandals, I have substantial faith that major newspapers try hard to be accurate and fair. For example, I've been reading The Wall Street Journal for years, and I trust that the typical front-page news article in the Journal has been well reported, written, and edited. That doesn't mean I assume that everything in it is true, though I do assume the paper has done its best, and that there are institutional mechanisms in place to correct something if it's wrong. Those beliefs have carried over as, increasingly, I read the Journal online rather than in print. (Even after the Jayson Blair mess, I'd say the same thing about The New York Times.)

But Big Media, as it participates in the new conversation online, takes on risks that could hurt credibility even more. One of these days, someone is going to break through the security of a major media web site—the Journal or the Times or CNN—and post some "news" that turns out to be absolutely false. Maybe the story will announce wonderful news for some company, or terrible tidings, thereby giving the unscrupulous computer crackers, terrorists, or even politically connected malefactors a way to manipulate the stock market, cause panic, or steal an election. [264]

This act, which I consider more a certainty than a possibility, will change the news media's trust equation, at least for a time. Will it have long-lasting impact? Only if it happens repeatedly.

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Plain Old Common Sense

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Being a reporter involves some basic practices. When I see or hear about something I think may be worth reporting to my audience, I verify it, or quote credible people who should know, or go to the source (human or document). If I link to something intriguing on my blog but don't know whether it's true, I offer that caveat. Generally, I don't just repeat an anonymous posting. If the fact in question didn't come from a source I trust, I check it out.

Users of online information need to develop similar filters. They need a hierarchy of trust.

In my own hierarchy, I trust The New York Times more than a supermarket tabloid. I trust what Doc Searls tells me on his blog more than what a random blogger says on a page I've never seen before.

As noted earlier, we need better recommendation and reputation tools, software that lets us traverse the Web using recommendations from trusted friends and friends of friends. We'll be figuring this out in the next few years, and I'm confident we'll get better and better at it.

But for now, people need to take information on the Internet with the proverbial grain of salt. When they see things that promise a measurable impact on their lives—such as a news story that persuades them to sell or buy something expensive—they should verify the claim before reacting.

There are limits to this, but on matters where the personal stakes are sufficiently high, it's probably worth remembering the legendary admonition given by crusty old editors to green reporters: if your mother says she loves you, check it out.

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Endnotes

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1. Schmich column about the Vonnegut episode: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-970803cyperspace.column.
2. Avi Rubin article describing experience as polling judge: http://avirubin.com/judge.html.
3. The photo was debunked by the urban legends site Snopes.com: http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/kerry2.asp.
   Ken Light, who took the original Kerry picture used for the composite, discussed the incident on the DigitalJournalist site: http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0403/dis_light.html.
4. This is not a new phenomenon. As Paul Martin Lester, communications professor at California State University at Fullerton, observes (http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/faking.html):

   Photojournalism, photography that accompanies stories intended for newspaper and magazine readers, has a long and cherished tradition of truthfulness. The faking of photographs, either through stage direction by the photographer or through darkroom manipulation, unfortunately, also has a long tradition. As a result, Pulitzer Prize-winning images, photographs that have moved people to action, and pictures that have been hailed as beautiful humanistic documents filled with hope mud joy, have been questioned. Consequently, their impact has been diminished by charges of photographic faking. Such accusations are usually easily proven unsubstantiated and are the exception rather than the rule for photojournalism images. However, computer technology puts photographic faking on a new level of concern as images can be digitized and manipulated without the slightest indication of such trickery.

5. Columbia University journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan has compiled a page of doctored photos: http://sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html.
6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting report: http://www.fair.org/activism/cbs-digital.html.

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Chapter 10: Here Come the Judges (and Lawyers)

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Brock Meeks was way ahead of most of us when it came to understanding the power of the Internet as a journalism tool. In 1993, then a reporter for Washington-based Communications Daily, a trade publication, he created a pathbreaking email news wire. He called it CyberWire Dispatch, and for the next several years, he regularly scooped the major media on story after story. [265]

But Meeks, now an MSNBC correspondent, has another claim to fame—and this is one he'd just as soon not have. He was, by most accounts, the first Internet journalist to be sued for libel. For all practical purposes, Meeks won the case; he paid nothing to the Ohio company that sued him over his critical report about the company's business practices, though he did agree to notify the company before publishing anything else about it or the man who ran it. [266] Meeks did pay his lawyers, including several noted First Amendment specialists who donated the vast majority of their time. He was lucky, in a sense, because his case drew the attention of people who wanted to protect our rights.

The Meeks case was a warning shot of sorts. It was a reminder that while the Net is a medium that grants great freedom, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Law applies online and off, and people who intend to practice grassroots journalism need to keep that in mind.

This chapter isn't intended to scare anyone away from the Internet. Far from it. Nor should any reader consider this even remotely to be legal advice. To abuse a famous cliché, I'm not a lawyer and I don't intend to play one on these pages. If you need a professional answer to a legal question, please look elsewhere. (This book's accompanying web site, http://wethemedia.oreilly.com, includes links to legal sources.)

But it's important to consider some of the legal issues that have arisen in the online sphere. Libel is only one, and it applies not just to people who call themselves journalists but also to commenters in chat rooms. Other questions include copyright, linking, jurisdiction, and liability for what others say on your site.

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Defamation, Libel, and Other Nasty Stuff

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I'm fairly sure I've been personally libeled. That is, people have written plenty of unflattering things about me, the kinds of things that I would never, ever write about someone else without some extraordinarily credible sources. I haven't sued anybody, though. And after almost 25 years in journalism no one has sued me, either. I may be wrong in my opinions or my interpretation of facts, but I try hard not to get basic stuff wrong, and when I learn I've made a mistake, I correct it.

Online journalists are no less required to follow the law than anyone else. A blogger who commits libel may have to face the consequences. [267]

There has been at least one defamation suit filed against a prominent online journalist. In 1997, Internet gossip maven Matt Drudge quoted unnamed sources who claimed that Democratic operative, author, and former Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal had committed spousal abuse. Drudge's posting was false, and he corrected it in fairly short order. But Blumenthal sued him for defamation of character. In 2001, the case was settled. According to various press accounts, Blumenthal paid some $2,500 in travel expenses for a Drudge lawyer. In effect, Drudge prevailed, or at least didn't lose.

As noted in Chapter 9, I don't care for his style or willingness to publish rumors so readily, but I'm troubled by the fact that he was sued in the first place. After all, he did quickly retract the story and said of his source(s), "I think I've been had." Blumenthal's lawsuit may have been understandable—the charge was disgusting and could have been a disaster for his career—but anyone who cared to know learned quickly that the story was bogus. He also didn't count on conservative political groups offering to defend Drudge, thereby running up expenses on a case that was not going to be easy to win in any event, given the fast retraction and removal of the offending words from the Drudge Report site. In the end, however offensive Drudge's original posting may have been, the case advanced journalistic freedom. [268]

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Jurisdiction

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If I call the judges of the High Court of Australia some of the most obtuse people on the planet, do I need to cancel my next trip Down Under? Possibly, because one or more of them may decide that I have defamed them by offering such an opinion. Thanks to their ruling in a 2002 lawsuit, they have created a right to sue me on their home turf, under their own restrictive defamation laws, for what I've said on my blog and column, both of which are based in the U.S.

The case in question is about an article that appeared in Barron's, a Dow Jones weekly newspaper published in the U.S. A corporate executive in Australia didn't like what it said about him, so he sued in Australia, effectively arguing that Internet publication was like putting out a local newspaper in every jurisdiction. Astonishingly, the High Court agreed. [272]

The ruling was a blow to the open nature of the Internet. To say that defamation occurs where something has been read, as opposed to where it was posted, is an invitation to forum-shopping—and abuse by plaintiffs.

Jurisdiction questions have bedeviled the Net for some time. In 1994, the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton hauled the owners of a Milpitas, California, adult-oriented computer bulletin board to the heart of the Bible Belt and prosecuted them on obscenity charges. The bulletin board offered pornographic images that were not in violation of California standards, but a postal inspector's downloading of them to Nashville was deemed to violate his community's local standards. The owners of the online service were convicted and sentenced to prison terms. The prosecution was an abuse of the criminal justice system and a direct attack on First Amendment rights because it suggested that standards in the nation's most repressive communities could determine what the rest of us may read, hear, or view.

Now we have to ask if the most repressive nation could set our standards. French courts told Yahoo! in 2001 to block auctions of Nazi memorabilia. Yahoo! got a U.S. court to say the order was invalid, but in the end the online service shut down its European auction sites altogether—a business decision, the company said.

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Email and Free Speech

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Intel Corp., the giant Silicon Valley maker of the microprocessors that serve as the central brains of most personal computers, used a novel legal theory when it sued a former employee for sending anti-Intel emails to current employees. Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi, the company argued, was trespassing on its computer servers.

Intel overreached, the California Supreme Court said in 2003. The court's decision, by only a 4-3 margin, will have important free-speech implications. The court said Ken Hamidi wasn't legally trespassing on Intel's computers by sending unsolicited email because there was no harm to the company's systems. The ruling did not endorse what he did, but said that Intel couldn't use inappropriate laws to keep out Hamidi's speech. [273]

Predictably, Intel and its supporters raised the specter of massive spamming as they denounced the ruling. But this case was never about spam, and Intel had technical ways to handle Hamidi's missives without resorting to a legal position that veered into an attack on speech itself.

What was striking about the opinions, pro and con, was the way the justices struggled, unsuccessfully for the most part, to come up with apt metaphors. "He no more invaded Intel's property than does a protester holding a sign or shouting through a bullhorn outside corporate headquarters, posting a letter through the mail, or telephoning to complain of a corporate practice," wrote Justice Kathryn Werdegar in the majority opinion. But court dissenters likened his actions to breaking into the mailroom and delivering letters to 30,000 employees. What mattered, in the end, was that the court majority couldn't be persuaded that Hamidi was doing any real harm beyond what was protected by free speech.

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Misusing Other People's Work

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Harder to monitor, perhaps, is cheating. Yet cheating is rampant in our society. Some students see no problem with cheating in class. Corporations see cheating as a business tactic. And corporations and individuals routinely cheat on tax returns. The current attitude toward cheating seems to be: "What's acceptable is what you can get away with."

Traditional journalism has had its share of cheats recently. The infamous Jayson Blair, formerly of The New York Times, lied and plagiarized his way to fame, then ruin. More recently, USA Today revealed that star reporter Jack Kelly had fabricated some of the work that made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

A culture of cut-and-paste is made to order for the Net, where an almost-anything-goes attitude prevails. Cutting and pasting is not, by itself, a bad thing; quoting the work of others is a routine aspect of research, for instance. But when people routinely pass off the work of others as their own, it goes too far. Student cheating has drawn most of the attention in this category because it appears to be the most rampant violation. But web journalists have done it, too. In one case, a Canadian contributor to a technology news web site even copied material from my Mercury News colleague Mike Langberg; according to our coverage of the story in 2001, she was fired. In 2002, popular blogger Sean-Paul Kelley publicly apologized for lifting Iraq war-related material from other sources. In an age when some refuse to acknowledge what they've done even when caught, his willingness to take responsibility for his actions was refreshing. Even so, his credibility took a hit, at least temporarily. [274]

Cheating may abound, but the Net gives us a mechanism to catch the violators. Search tools such as Google, and more targeted tools for educators such as the "Turnitin" software [275] (which compare student papers to a vast database of published writings on and off the Web), have been effective.

People draw their bottom lines in different places. But ethical behavior and the law say roughly the following: if you use someone's work, even a small amount, you should give him credit, and you can't legally copy more than what's acceptable in a "fair use" context; that is, a short quotation. If you copy others' work and resell it, except in traditional ways, such as quoting from it for another piece, you may find yourself in court.

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Copyrights and Wrongs

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One of most pernicious trends in recent times has been the application of property rights to almost all things digital. Copyright law is the biggest problem, as we'll see later and in Chapter 11, but the issues extend to a variety of arenas.

One is trademarks: the words, phrases, logos, and other things that help define a brand. "Trademark law begins from consumer protection: trademarks, words and symbols that identify a source of goods are protected so that the public can rely on them as indicators of quality (or take warning to avoid a brand after a bad experience)," Selzer said.

According to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, [276] an organization sponsored by the EFF and some prominent law schools, including Harvard and Stanford, trademark complaints are fairly common today. One common complaint is the use of domain names "identical or similar to well-known marks" that are typically registered by so-called "cybersquatters" who want to capitalize on the traffic or sell back the name. U.S. law bans "bad faith intent to profit" from such activities. A second is outright copying of logos onto a site to suggest an "authorized connection" to someone else's better-known product or service.

It's hard to object when a trademark holder wants to stop someone from trying to piggyback on its brand. Few Netizens objected when The New York Times persuaded the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), [277] one of the organizations empowered to make such decisions, to give it the newyorktimes.com domain, which had been registered by a third party.

But suppose you found yourself looking at a web site called "mercurynewssucks.com," an online attack on my newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, and its contents. Barring libelous assaults or misrepresentations designed to confuse the public, such a site would be protected as a form of free speech. For the same reason, we'd most likely be laughed out of the U.S. courts if we sued to take away the domain. We'd probably have better luck, unfortunately, if we took our case to WIPO's headquarters in Switzerland. It might order the domain-name registrars to hand the offending web address over to us because WIPO's mission is not about freedom of expression. It is, in a fundamental way, the promotion of intellectual property rights.

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Forbidden Links and Other Outrages

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If the Web has a central function, it's linking. Publish a page and anyone can link to it, right? Well, not always.

Sometimes it's just a bad idea. I would be very unlikely to link to a site I considered harmful, such as a site advocating violence. If the link served a specific journalistic purpose, however, it's conceivable I'd include it, but even then I'd think long and hard first. Where we draw the line on such matters tends to be a personal and professional decision. Most of all, we need to think about it in terms of ethics and news judgment.

But that assumes I'm allowed to make the link. Several corporate spats have tested that assumption. In 1997, Ticketmaster, the event-ticketing company, sued Microsoft because Microsoft's city-guide company was linking deep into the Ticketmaster site, straight to the page describing the event, rather than routing people through Ticketmaster's virtual front door (the homepage). A judge ended up ruling that deep links were legal.

What made the case strange was Ticketmaster's unwillingness to use technology better; it's not difficult to block someone from deep-linking into a site. If Ticketmaster was so upset about Microsoft's action, all it had to do was stop the referrals. Of course, this begged a question: why was Ticketmaster unhappy at having business directed its way? Ticketmaster's explanation that it had a right to control access by insisting all visitors start from their front page never washed with me. [282]

A much more serious case of "forbidden links" was the case of Universal v. Reimerdes, and it takes some explaining.

When the DVD format was first being developed, the film studios, paranoid over copyright issues, and the cartel of companies that controlled the DVD format got together to create an encryption standard. The standard was developed to prevent people from playing DVDs on devices that hadn't been authorized for playing them. Owners of DVDs could copy the files containing the digital data, but they couldn't play them. The software encryption code used to keep the files from being cracked was called CSS, which stood for Content Scrambling System.

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Endnotes

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1. CyberWire Dispatch archives: http://cyberwerks.com:70/1/cyberwire/.
2. Meeks told me: "There was NO requirement on me to show him anything I was going to publish prior to publishing it. That was a no brainer to accept in the settlement, as any story I would write about him he would know of well before 42 hours because I'd be calling him to ask him questions." In addition, the agreement lasted 18 months, and in any event Meeks didn't write about the company again.
3. Blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds says: "To be libelous, a statement must be (1) a statement of fact, not opinion; (2) false; and (3) such as to materially injure someone's reputation." The standard is higher for public figures, who have to show that the writer had reckless disregard for whether the statement was true.
4. Anthony York wrote a detailed summary of the Drudge-Blumenthal case in Salon: http://dir.salon.com/politics/red/2001/05/02/blue/index.html.
5. Jack Balkin: http://balkin.blogspot.com.
6. See http://balkin.blogspot.com/2003_06_29_balkin_archive.html#105723343690170641 for Balkin's entire analysis.
7. The Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic's files in the Nymox case: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/cases/nymox.shtml.
8. See the Economist story on this case: http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1489053.
9. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped Hamidi, archived many of the relevant documents: http://www.eff.org/Spam_cybersquatting_abuse/Spam/Intel_v_Hamidi/.
10. See Mark Glaser's Online Journalism Review coverage of plagiarism on the Net: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1050584240.php.
11. Turnitin software: http://www.turnitin.com.
12. Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: http://www.chillingeffects.org.
13. World Intellectual Property Organization:

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Chapter 11: The Empires Strike Back

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The promise was freedom. And, for a time, freedom was the reality.

The Internet, some of us believed early on, would be a largely unregulated sphere where boundaries would not matter—where, for good and bad, individual freedom would be the paramount condition. After all, the Internet was a robust communications system; it could, in theory, withstand a nuclear attack. So early Netizens can be forgiven for assuming that different rules applied because, for a time, they did.

Cyber-liberty, we saw, would extend to culture and information in powerful, even unprecedented, ways. The Internet—the first many-to-many medium—was going to liberate us from the tyranny of centralized media and the rancid consumerism that says we are merely receptacles for what Big Business, including Big Media, wants us to buy. We were going to turn the world of "take it or leave it" into an informed global conversation. Consumers would become true customers. The governed would become "we, the people" participants in the political process.

But the clampdown has begun. Everywhere we look, the forces of centralization and authority are finding ways to slow—and perhaps halt altogether—the advances we've made.

They include the usual suspects, namely government, big telecommunications companies, and what I call the copyright cartel of entertainment companies. But, sadly, they also include some of the technology pioneers who once promised so much in the way of digital liberty.

Could these increasing restrictions impinge on grassroots journalism? They could indeed, and we will have to fight to keep our freedoms. The alternative could be a news regime that is dictated almost entirely by governments and mega-corporations—a situation worse than what we have today when Big Media already controls so much.

What follows is a description of the most serious threats, and what we might do, individually and collectively, to counter them.

So far, state intervention has tended to be more blunt than subtle when applied to grassroots journalism. For example, several times during 2003, the government of China flipped a switch, figuratively speaking, and indiscriminately turned off access to thousands of weblogs. The Great Firewall, already in use to block specific news and information sites the government didn't want its people to see (including my own newspaper's), was now preventing all manner of sites created on Blogspot.com (a leading blog-hosting site) from being read by web users inside the country. [286]

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Governments Get Nervous; Big Business Gets Nosy

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So far, state intervention has tended to be more blunt than subtle when applied to grassroots journalism. For example, several times during 2003, the government of China flipped a switch, figuratively speaking, and indiscriminately turned off access to thousands of weblogs. The Great Firewall, already in use to block specific news and information sites the government didn't want its people to see (including my own newspaper's), was now preventing all manner of sites created on Blogspot.com (a leading blog-hosting site) from being read by web users inside the country. [286]

China is far from alone in censoring political content. Saudi Arabia has pervasive controls, according to a study by Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. But government interference—such as stopping data traffic at arbitrary borders on the whim of a government or a company—is growing more common in general, not less, and it's not just in repressive regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia, but also in France and Singapore. Nor is filtering the only infringement. Law enforcement officials in the Western democracies, including the United States, are pushing for surveillance capabilities that would surely have a chilling effect on politically off-center speech. [287]

Truly free access to information—the word "free" is used here in the context of "freedom," not cost—implies an ability to send and receive information without being tracked. We're losing that ability swiftly, and the supreme irony is that American businesses, not governments, have been the prime privacy invaders when it comes to applying technology for everyday surveillance. [288]

Under the Web's original architecture there was no way for anyone to know you'd visited a web site or what you'd done there. But in the mid-1990s, Netscape developed "cookies," little files placed on users' computers that allowed the owner of a web site to track where visitors went, and when. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, concerned about the privacy implication of cookies, said that rather than naming the technology something "sweet and happy like `cookies,'" they should have named it what it was: "Network Spy."

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The Copyright Cartel

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Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

I won't go into the historical details of copyright law (Lessig's writings, in particular his book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, [290] are a good place to learn more.) But, it's safe to say that today's situation has perverted the Founders' intent, and it looks as though the situation could get much worse.

What's important to understand is how the very notion of copyright has changed since the Founders first enshrined it in the Constitution. Originally intended as a bargain between creators and the rest of us, it has become an instrument of harsh, absolute control. Balance has disappeared.

By law and tradition, copyright laws gave rights to users of a copyrighted work, not just to the work's creator. For example, scholars could quote from copyrighted works in order to create new works. This is the notion of "fair use"—to use a small portion of another's work as part of a new work. Fair use has expanded in recent times to include, among other things, making personal backups of software and time-shifting television programs (recording a show to watch it later). But the forces of control have moved the line. They believe fair use is something that can be granted only by the copyright holder if he or she (or it, in the case of a corporate holder) is willing to grant fair use—and the law, when new technology comes into use, increasingly supports their position.

But the whole point of fair use is to define a zone of use that copyright holders don't specifically authorize, and may even oppose, but which is legal anyway. Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the undergraduate program in communication studies in New York University's Department of Culture and Communication, tells the story of the author who wrote a scholarly book about country music but didn't quote any lyrics. The author's skittish publisher, fearing lawsuits from copyright holders even though use of such quotes would plainly have fallen under fair-use guidelines, decided it wasn't worth the trouble to get permission; hence, the book was published without all the lyrics she wanted to use. [291] To turn fair use into the exclusive realm of authorized uses is to remove fair use almost entirely. We'll come back to this crucial point later in this chapter.

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Eye of the Beholder

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There are many ironies in the current copyright debate. None is more notable than the fact that the industries now pushing for such absolute control got their start doing what they'd call "piracy" today. But it's also a shame to see an industry that has fought so honorably to maintain First Amendment protections, without which it could not itself survive, now leading a charge that threatens other people's speech.

Technological advances always threaten established business models. And the people whose businesses are threatened always try to stop progress. Cory Doctorow is an online civil libertarian and science fiction author who published two novels and also made them freely downloadable online the day they were in bookstores. "The Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had one hundred percent control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had zero percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing," he told me. The performers, in other words, wanted to prevent new technology from disrupting a successful old business model.

It wasn't the only time. In one of the most important recent examples, Hollywood tried to kill off the home video recorder. Only by the narrowest margin in the Supreme Court, in a crucial 1984 decision, did Americans preserve the right to tape a TV show and play it back later. [292]

The advent of digital technology terrified the entertainment industry, and for apparently good reasons. After all, a digital copy of something doesn't degrade the way analog copies, such as a copy of a videotape, do in just a couple of generations. And cyberspace threatened to be the world's biggest enabler of infringement because of how easy it is to copy and distribute materials over it.

But the industry has cleverly, though wrongly, framed the argument as "stealing" versus "property rights." In fact, the issue is nothing of the kind. Ideas are different than physical property, and they have been treated distinctly through our history. If I take your car, you can't use it. If I have a copy of your song, you still have the song. Infringement is wrong, and I don't defend it. But there has always been some infringement, and copyright holders have lived with it as part of their overall bargain with society.

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Charm and Toughness

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No one could sum up the issue from the entertainment industry's perspective better than Jack Valenti, longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America and point man for the copyright lobby. He was his typically charming self when I visited him in his Washington office in the fall of 2002. According to Valenti, everything flows from the principle that Hollywood wants to make its customers happy, and the Internet could be one of the greatest vehicles for making people happy. But the Net's potential is counterbalanced by major threats, and unlike previous methods of delivering movies to customers, the Net gives people new ways of "taking things that don't belong to them."

It sounded so, well, reasonable. But Valenti genteelly refused to answer a key question, namely how Hollywood thought it could protect its films and TV shows from being copied and distributed on the Internet while not infringing upon citizen's fair use rights rights (such as quoting from, not just time-shifting, programming) that are so vital to journalism and intellectual innovation in general. And he was adamant that technology in the future—including personal computers—will have to be modified to prevent people from making unauthorized copies.

Valenti, who said in early 2004 he'd step down from his post later in the year, named three main areas where the entertainment industry is looking for fixes — namely, the broadcast flag, the analog hole, and peer-to-peer file sharing. In each case, negotiations with technology and consumer-electronics companies will have to produce a mutually agreeable result, he said.

Only one had been negotiated with the tech industry, and the FCC enacted it in 2003. This was the "broadcast flag" [297]—the practice of marking digitally broadcast material to prevent unauthorized copying. Theoretically, home TV viewers would still be able to time-shift digital broadcasts, but they wouldn't be able to redistribute the shows they'd copied. Of course, even the right to copy at home is merely a rule, and you can be sure the entertainment companies will try to circumscribe even this level of customer freedom. And never mind that it's impossible to effectively prevent one kind of use—copying beyond the home—while fully permitting the in-home flexibility at the same time.

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The Tech Industry Sellout

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A few years ago, policy watchers talked about the war being waged between copyright protection and innovation. The lines were drawn: Silicon Valley was inventing new technology, and Hollywood wanted to control its use. The news from the front is not good for the people who depend on technology to produce tomorrow's news.

Slowly but surely, key members of the tech elite have evolved from being fiercely independent to being a lackey for the entertainment companies on some key issues. Intel, the giant maker of computer chips, has its fingers all over the Broadcast Flag technology that the FCC has mandated. This wasn't the first time Intel betrayed its own customers. It did so during the DVD negotiations years earlier, when Hollywood demanded a Content Scrambling System that led to severely restricted uses for DVDs—a system that an Intel insider later acknowledged had caused PC users real problems.

But no technology company has done more to curry favor with the copyright cartel than Microsoft, a company that (like many technology firms) repeatedly ignored copyright law in building its own powerful business. Here's how Cory Doctorow put it:

When Microsoft shipped its first search-engine (which makes a copy of every page it searches), it violated the letter of copyright law. When Microsoft made its first proxy server (which makes a copy of every page it caches), it broke copyright law. When Microsoft shipped its first CD-ripping technology, it broke copyright law.

It broke copyright law because copyright law was broken. Copyright law changes all the time to reflect the new tools that companies like Microsoft invent. If Microsoft wants to deliver a compelling service to its customers, let it make general-purpose tools that have the side-effect of breaking Sony and Apple's DRM [Digital Rights Management], giving its customers more choice in the players they use. Microsoft has shown its willingness to go head-to-head with antitrust people to defend its bottom line: next to them, the copyright courts and lawmakers are pantywaists, Microsoft could eat those guys for lunch, exactly the way Sony kicked their asses in 1984 when they defended their right to build and sell VCRs, even though some people might do bad things with them. Just like the early MP3 player makers did when they ate Sony's lunch by shipping product when Sony wouldn't. [303]

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The End of End-to-End?

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A key design goal of the original Internet was called the " end-to-end principle." Essentially, it states that we want to keep the intelligence out at the edges of the network and make the transportation of data as simple as possible in between. In other words, use the network to get the zeros and ones back and forth with as little interference as possible, and let people using PCs, servers, and other devices do everything else. In an email, David P. Reed, one of the people credited with the notion, described it this way:

Communications systems should not implement functions that can be implemented by their users. In particular, systems designers should work very hard to find or invent system designs that avoid putting specific user-oriented functions into inflexible infrastructure, by moving the implementation of those functions to the edges of the network where they are implemented as part of the user-controlled applications.

It's been the experience in the Internet design community that many functions that are thought to be "network" functions or capabilities are possible to implement in the form of protocols among users or user applications. For example, security can be implemented by end-to-end encryption and end-to-end credentials [that can't be forged], so that the network need not be secure at all.

Similarly, when you are forced to think about problems such as spam in an end-to-end way, you start to realize that the problem with spam cannot be solved in the "network"—instead it is a problem among users of the network, and must be solved there. It's still difficult, of course, but its difficulty is inherent in the conflict between the desire to allow anyone to contact us freely and the desire to be left alone. The network cannot understand the details of our individual desires; the end-to-end principle says it should not even try.

The positive value of the end-to-end argument is that it preserves the flexibility of the network to adapt to both new unanticipated uses, and new unanticipated implementation technology.

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Return of the Jedi Users

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At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in January 2004, Carly Fiorina, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, surrounded herself on a Las Vegas stage with some popular entertainers. She, the head of a technology company, then declared an oath of fealty to the copyright industry.

In coming years, HP will be selling consumer electronics such as PC-based home media centers, music players, digital TVs, and more. Fiorina vowed that HP will use every method at its disposal to help copyright holders block unauthorized use of their content. If HP also restricts customers' ``fair use" rights—the ability to make personal copies and quote from others' works—I guess that's someone else's problem.

Well, here's my oath: the HP laptop I bought a couple of months ago is the last product I'll buy from the company until it remembers some of the other principles of its founding and success, such as customer empowerment.

What I'm getting at here is the power of the customer. The problem is that the Microsofts and Intels and HPs think first of their customers in the entertainment industry, and second of their customers in the real world.

I'm also getting at the power of the customer to become politically active. How? Here are three things anyone can and should do:

• Write and call your elected officials, not just in Washington but also in state capitals, because Hollywood and its allies are working at all levels of government to control information.
• Contribute to organizations that defend your rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation [311] is just one of many that hire lawyers and lobbyists to counter the armies of professionals doing the copyright industry's bidding. Check this book's accompanying web site for a list of organizations and what they do.
• Use your power as a customer. Don't buy from companies that cheat artists and abuse fair use. When you attend a concert of an independent artist, buy her CD there. Again, there are more tips on the web site.

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A Deregulatory Rescue?

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Another wildcard has appeared, and it's the most exciting of all, because we might be able to give the monopolists what they're demanding and still have genuine competition. Why? Because the FCC may truly be moving toward a rational policy on how to regulate—or, in this case, deregulate—the airwaves.

The FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force [314] is looking for ways to update the regulation of this vital public resource. Since the 1930s, the United States has licensed specific parts of the spectrum—the airwaves that carry radio, TV, cellular calls, police and emergency communications, and more—to government agencies and private companies, based on the principle that spectrum was scarce and we had to apportion a dwindling resource.

This principle is based on old science, according to some of the best thinkers in the field. They say, persuasively, that spectrum is essentially limitless if we use it right—that is, with modern radios and transmitting devices that make yesterday's interference problems go away.

These thinkers may well have persuaded FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has been disturbingly willing to give the media, cable, and phone companies what they want. What he said in a speech in 2003 shows that he grasps the spectrum issue and the opportunity it may present to spur genuine competition in broadband.

"Modern technology has fundamentally changed the nature and extent of spectrum use," Powell said. "I believe the commission should continuously examine whether there are market or technological solutions that can—in the long run—replace or supplement pure regulatory solutions to interference." [315]

If Powell and his colleagues—and a Congress that tends to bow to the interests of well-financed corporations that have power and want to keep it—enact smart spectrum policy, all the sleazy machinations of the cable and phone monopolies won't matter.

There's plenty of evidence that innovation would explode if the FCC frees up more unlicensed spectrum. Look at what has happened with Wi-Fi, a brand-new technology and resultant industry that went from nothing to widespread deployment in just a few years using unlicensed spectrum. Or maybe, as I'll discuss shortly, the spectrum is even more open for innovation than most people suspect.

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The End of Scarcity?

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What if the scarcity of the airwaves turns out to be an artifact of history and outmoded technology? If scarcity can be overcome, the implications are both exciting and disruptive—we will see a cornucopia of communications that foreshadows woes and opportunities for some of our biggest telecommunications companies. David P. Reed told me that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.

Reed is no newcomer to the tech scene. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught computer science and headed the Laboratory for Computer Science's Computer Systems Structure Group. He was chief scientist at Lotus Development and Software Arts, two pioneering software companies, and worked at the now closed Interval Research, the Paul Allen-funded think tank in Palo Alto. He's been involved in the technical details of the Internet for several decades, and lately has been a consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher. [316]

Simply put, he said, we have to start looking at spectrum as an almost limitless commodity, not a scarce one.

The current regulatory regime that allocates spectrum "is a legal metaphor that does not correspond to physical reality," he told me. Why not? First, he said, the notion of interference has more to do with the equipment we use to send and receive signals than with the physics of radio waves. "Radio waves pass through each other," Reed said. "They do not damage each other."

In the early days of radio, the equipment could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.

The second way that reality defies the old logic is what happens when you add wireless devices to networks. I won't go into the details of Reed's argument, which you can find on his site, but he contends that you end up with more capacity—the ability to move bits of data around—than when you started.

"In principle, the capacity of a certain bandwidth in a certain physical space increases with the number of transceivers in a given space," he said. Yet the FCC regulates the airwaves as if the capacity was a fixed amount. [317]

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Endnotes

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1. New Scientist story on China's blocking of blogs: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993260.
2. Zittrain/Edelman study of Net-filtering by nations: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/.
3. Europe's data privacy laws are much stricter. Asia is relatively lax.
4. Lessig on Stanford's network police, from interview in Reason magazine: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1568/2_34/85701100/print.jhtml.
5. Penguin Press, 2004.
6. See Siva Vaidhyanathan's blog: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/. His 2004 book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books), is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the forces of central control are creating such havoc with creativity, innovation, and even freedom.
7. Supreme Court's ruling in 1984's Sony v. Universal ("Betamax") case: http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/sony_v_universal_decision.php.
8. Full text of the DMCA: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.
9. Ed Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor, was threatened with legal action if he gave a talk about how easy it would be to break open an experimental music industry file format. See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/.
10. Russian software company acquitted (CNET): http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978176.html.
11. Lexmark printer company sues ink cartridge maker (CNET): http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978176.html.
12. FCC broadcast flag ruling: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-273A1.pdf.
13. The music industry's difficulties are not due to MP3 file sharing, contrary to the propaganda. It's due at least as much to a reduction in the number of releases and the overall lower quality of music being promoted today, as well as incredibly high prices. Moreover, a deeply researched study (

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Chapter 12: Making Our Own News

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We tend to be bound by our past, even when we can imagine the future. Yet sometimes we are transformed, and media can be at the center of how we see these changes.

The Italian Renaissance gave Western civilization several crucial transformations. None, for our purposes, matters more than perspective. Painters such as Giotto di Bondone in the 1300s and Tommaso Masaccio a century later gave depth to what had been a mostly two-dimensional world of European art. Boccaccio's Decameron, published in 1353, was among the earliest works of literature to propose that a point of view was crucial to understanding.

Gutenberg's printing press brought forth a revolution that no one could have anticipated at the time. The Vatican's monks, who controlled publishing, were helpless with the onslaught of this new technology. After Gutenberg, the word of God was liberated from the Pope's doctrine.

The Internet is the most important medium since the printing press. It subsumes all that has come before and is, in the most fundamental way, transformative. When anyone can be a writer, in the largest sense and for a global audience, many of us will be. The Net is overturning so many of the things we've assumed about media and business models that we can scarcely keep up with the changes; it's difficult to maintain perspective amid the shift from a top-down hierarchy to something vastly more democratic and, yes, messy. But we have to try, and nowhere is that more essential than in that oldest form of information: the news. We will be blessed with new kinds of perspective in this emergent system, and we will learn how to make it work for everyone.

Blogs and other modern media are feedback systems. They work in something close to real time and capture—in the best sense of the word—the multitude of ideas and realities each of us can offer. On the Internet, we are defined by what we know and share. Now, for the first time in history, the feedback system can be global and nearly instantaneous.

My goal in this book has been to persuade you that the collision of journalism and technology is having major consequences for three constituencies: journalists, newsmakers, and the audience. The evidence seems persuasive that something big is happening.

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A Creative Commons

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More than once during this project, I've been asked if my passion for openness includes the contents of this book. It does.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, some people believe I am against copyright. I think highly of copyright as it was originally conceived. I believe it should be a sensible bargain that gives creators of new works the fruits of their labor, while providing society with the more important fruits of a robust debate, the ability to innovate and create new works based on old ones, and, ultimately, the benefits of the public domain itself.

I value copyright. I loathe its abuse.

Luckily, I have a way to express my views that both endorses copyright and uses it appropriately. Equally luckily, I have a publisher that gets the point and is willing to be part of an exercise most other publishers would flatly reject.

That vehicle, as I mentioned in Chapter 11, is called Creative Commons Copyright, an alternative copyright licensing system that allows the creator of a work to decide which rights he wants to reserve for himself, while allowing the public to build on his ideas. You've seen the standard copyright notice, which says, "All Rights Reserved." Creative Commons is a system of "Some Rights Reserved." [318]

So here's what my publisher and I have done with this book. First, we are explicitly setting the term of the copyright to be 14 years, which was the term when America's Founders first wrote a copyright law. As noted in Chapter 11, the current copyright term is the life of the author plus 75 years, an outrageously long period that doesn't give authors any serious additional incentives even as it denudes our vital public domain.

Second, we will publish the book on the Web and offer it for free from the day it's in the stores. Free in this case does not mean the right to reprint it for resale. It does mean the right to download and read it without buying the book. Naturally, I'd prefer that you buy it. My publisher and I believe we won't lose sales overall, that free downloading will create more, not less, demand. But even if we're wrong and suffer financially because of it, we're willing to take the chance.

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Day-to-Day Changes

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One of the challenges—and joys—in writing this book has been watching the velocity of technical change. Every day, it seems, there's been a new web site or news event that shows how quickly the shift is occurring. By the time this book is in stores, the map will look different. This is one reason why we're creating a living, breathing web site (http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) that keeps a close eye on the changes, with constant updates about innovative new tools and major events. And please remember to participate in the ongoing development of the site. This may be the end of the book, but the conversation continues—and it's as much about your interests as mine.

I hope that I've helped you understand how this media shift—this explosion of conversations—is taking place and where it's headed. Most of all, I hope I've persuaded you to take up the challenge yourself.

Your voice matters. Now, if you have something worth saying, you can be heard.

You can make your own news. We all can.

Let's get started.

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Endnotes

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1. A growing body of work is now available under Creative Commons licenses. See http://creativecommons.org for more details.

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Appendix : Epilogue and Acknowledgments

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On the afternoon of March 10, 2004, I posted a draft of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book on my weblog. I asked readers to let me know, preferably by email, if they noticed any factual errors. I also asked whether I'd missed any crucial topics, or whether they knew of some perfect anecdote that absolutely had to be included.

They responded. One of the first emails alerted me to an incorrect web address, which I fixed immediately. Another pointed out a mistake in a section about open source software.

Others suggested I amplify certain points, or asked why I discussed a particular topic, or that I slow down the narrative. The comments section of my weblog became a discussion about the book.

The ideas I've been discussing in We the Media became integral to the reporting and writing of the book itself. When I started, I didn't really know what to expect. But I can say now, without any fear of contradiction, that this process has worked.

Thank you, all.

Outline and Ideas

Drafts and Other Postings

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

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Outline and Ideas

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My version of open source journalism got off to a rocky start. In the early spring of 2003, I posted an outline of the book and invited comments by email. My inbox overflowed.

Then a small disaster hit. I'd moved all the suggestions into a separate folder in my mailbox, but several months later, when I looked for them, they were gone. Vanished. Disappeared. I still don't know if this was my doing or my Internet service provider's. Either way, I was horrified; I'd not only lost some of the excellent ideas, but I also hadn't thanked everyone who made a suggestion. Needless to say, I didn't have a current, local backup on my hard disk.

I was able to reconstruct some of the messages from an older backup and some saved replies I'd sent. But many were gone forever. Consider this my apology to all of you who are in the latter category.

But the comments I did manage to save, which arrived from all over the world, helped me firm up my ideas for this book.

One of the most thoughtful early notes was from Tom Stites, an old friend, and an editor who once hired me and later became one of my touchstones in journalism. He said, among other things:

If what you are describing is truly tomorrow's journalism, I fear that democracy is doomed. I lead with this alarmist statement because as I understand what you're describing only a tiny elite engages with political/news blogs; democracy needs a *tomorrow's journalism* that reaches and activates a broad audience. The blog elite I'm describing is not the business/government power elite but a highly educated, deeply curious insider group centered among the technologically proficient. The sad truth is, most people are passive consumers of news who, because of the insider jargon blogs tend to be written in, couldn't decipher most blogs even if they signed on; the segment of the citizenry that are savvy and proactive news-seekers is very small, and I don't expect that to change much.

Several readers wished I'd published the outline in a way that let them comment directly on it, in a Wiki or with comments enabled. I wish I had, too, because it would have simplified matters.

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Drafts and Other Postings

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Before embarking on this project, I chatted with David Weinberger. I'd enjoyed his second book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, [321] a thoughtful exploration of this medium. He'd done it in an entirely open way by posting chapter drafts on which his audience could comment.

Software developers have an expression called the "nightly build," which is the latest update of a program. Weinberger was, in effect, posting nightly builds of his book. I asked him how the process worked.

"Don't do that," he warned me. It was more trouble than it was worth. Posting chapter drafts was a fine idea, he thought, but not every single change he was making. Good advice, and we took it.

A couple of days after posting drafts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my book, an email arrived from Stephen B. Waters, publisher of the Rome Sentinel in upstate New York. "If you're interested," he wrote, "I made the effort to comment." Attached was a file containing Chapter 1 in Microsoft Word format, with the "Track Changes" feature turned on so I could see what changes and suggestions he'd made. [322]

Waters hadn't just made an effort. He'd torn the thing apart, picking at small and large problems he saw. In his summary at the end, he wrote: "The time is right. The subject is right. But your book deserves to be better than this."

After retrieving my ego from the trash, I thought about what he'd said. I called him up. In our conversation and subsequent emails, I learned something about him. He's a computer geek who came back to his family's newspaper business. He studied history. He loves the blogosphere and what it can do. He's a thoughtful man with good ideas, and on some important issues, he knew more than I did. Waters took his virtual blue pencil to every chapter I posted. I carefully looked at his suggestions and incorporated many of them.

I also heard from some people whose work I'd mentioned in the book. Several offered corrections or clarifications. This was exactly what I'd hoped for, and I was thrilled with the result.

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Acknowledgments

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First, thanks to the many folks who posted comments on my blog, called, or wrote in with suggestions, comments, and corrections. Because I lost some mail, as noted earlier, I can't thank everyone individually. (If you were among that group, please let me know and I'll add your name to the list when it goes online and in future printings and/or editions.) But those whose messages I didn't lose (including several who offered only pseudonyms) include: Paul Andrews, Nick Arnett, Alfredo Ascanio, Jerry Asher, Kevin Aylward, Phil Baker, Alessio Balbi, Peter Basofin, Bill Baur, Morten Bay, Andrew Beach, Michael Bean, Tim Bishop, Charles Brownstein, Buzz Bruggeman, C.R. Bryan III, Scott Burki, Kevin Burton, Brian W. Carver, Frank Catalano, David Cassel, Gilbert Cattoire, Guillermo Cerceau, Brian Clark, Joe Clark, Michael O'Connor Clarke, Michael Collins, Joyce Conklin, Jeff Danziger, Tom Dolembo, Dave Donohue, John Dougan, Stephen Downes, Amy Eisman, Greg Elin, Mark Federman, Sean Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dave Fletcher, Trip Foster, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Rhonda Geraci, Ward Gerlach, John Gilmore, Bernie Goldbach, Phil Gomes, greep, Chris Gulker, Steve Harmon, Tim Harding, Eszter Hargittai, Rodney Hoffman, Denise Howell, Ryan Irelan, Terri Irving, Joanne Jacobs, Elwin Jenkins, Nicholas Jenkins, Dennis Jerz, Morrie Johnston, Gordon Joseloff, Chris Kaminski, Rohit Khare, Susan Kitchens, Brian Krause, Tony Lacey, Geoff Langhorne, Larry Larsen, Leonard Lin, Hetty Litjens, Scott Love, Tristan Louis, Richard Lundquist, Zack Lynch, Mark McBride, Mike McCallister, Wayne Mercier, Jim Miller, Bill Mitchell, Neal Moore, Andrea Moro, Robert Niles, Maureen S. O'Brien, Mike Owens, Evan Orensky, Andrew Orlowski, Olav A Øvrebø, Nigel Parry, Angela Penny, Ralph Poole, Matt Prescott, J.P. Rangaswami, Wayne Rasanen, Celia Redmore, William Riski, Cormac Russell, Jason Salzman, Rob Salzman, Gary D. Sanders, Gary Santoro, Dan Scherlis, Trudy Schuett, Pam Schwartz, professor rat, Janet S. Scott, Linda Seebach, Bill Seitz, Ben Silverman, Some Random Humanoid, Kathleen Spracklen, Steve Stroh, Glenn Thomas, Fons Tuinstra, Manolis Tzagarakis, Mike Banks Valentine, Ed Vielmetti, Taylor Walsh, Jonathan Weaver, Joshua Weinberg, Dan Weintraub, Alex Williams, Phil Wolff, Jay Woods, Jim Zellmer and Ethan Zuckerman.

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Endnotes

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1. Elwin Jenkins' posting: http://microdoc-news.info/home/BloggerNews/2003/04/11.html/1.
2. Chris Gulker blog: http://www.gulker.com.
3. Perseus Books, 2002.
4. Microsoft Word was both useful and infuriating. The Mac version seems to have a severe bug that caused me and my editor no end of trouble. If there was a serious alternative, I'd use it. I note this because I posted a blog comment about the problems I was having, and related what Microsoft's technical support people had told me. (Amazingly, they advised against saving the files in Microsoft's own format.) My blog posting generated an email from one of the programmers at Microsoft who works on the Mac applications. He asked for samples of the corrupted files and said he'd try to figure out what was wrong. I sent the files but didn't hear back from him. Nonetheless, his query was another example of how the new world of information works: he, at least, was paying attention to what was going on in the online world, because it affected his product. I give Microsoft an A for this, even if I give its software a C-minus for its flaws.

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Appendix A: Web Site Directory

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1. 20six: http://www.20six.co.uk/
2. 50 Minute Hour: http://www.50minutehour.net/
3. ActiveWords: http://www.activewords.com/
4. AllConsuming: http://www.allconsuming.com/
5. Amazon Light: http://www.kokogiak.com/amazon/
6. Amazon's Web Services: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html/102-2039287-6152169
7. American Journalism Review: http://www.ajr.org/
8. Back to Iraq: http://www.back-to-iraq.com/
9. Jack Balkin: http://balkin.blogspot.com/
10. BBC iCan project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ican/
11. Yochai Benkler: http://www.benkler.org/
12. Erik Benson: http://erikbenson.com/
13. Berkeley Intellectual Property Blog: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/
14. BitTorrent: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/
15. Blogads: http://www.blogads.com/
16. Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/
17. Blogging of the President: http://www.bopnews.com/
18. BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/
19. Boston Online: http://www.boston-online.com/
20. Bush in 30 Seconds: http://www.bushin30seconds.org/
21. Center for Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org/
22. Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: http://www.chillingeffects.org/
23. Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com/
24. Columbia Journalism Review: http://www.cjr.org/
25. Columbia Journalism Review's "Campaign Desk": http://www.campaigndesk.org/
26. Command Post: http://www.command-post.org/
27. Consumer Project on Technology: http://www.cptech.org/
28. Creative Commons: http://www.creativecommons.org/
29. Adam Curry: http://live.curry.com/
30. CyberJournalist: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/

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