digital publishing

Support a Free, Trustworthy Press in 2017

December 30, 2016 Leave a Comment

Cross-posted from Medium.

As you make year-end donations and think about which causes to support in 2017, I strongly urge you to consider setting up recurring contributions to organizations that support a free, vibrant, and trustworthy press.

Concerned citizens of all political persuasions will find plenty of causes in need of resources in the coming years of the new administration. But no cause can be well supported if the press does not report on it, and if citizens don’t trust that reporting. That’s why I believe that — above all — we need to support trustworthy journalism.

Our trust in journalism is under threat on a number of different fronts. Changes in technology and business models in the media industry have weakened mainstream newsrooms and strengthened outlets that pander to readers’ predetermined points of view. “New media” (a lumpy term in which I include social platforms as well as new web-based news organizations) have also presented an opportunity for individuals and groups on every point of the political spectrum to publish their views broadly, without the gate-keeping or fact-checking performed by the traditional media. Social media sites also create echo chambers in which our existing beliefs are reinforced rather than challenged. Meanwhile, on the political front, our president-elect repeatedly dismisses pillars of the mainstream media as “failing” and “dishonest,” obscuring truth and spreading confusion, and he has not hesitated to punish outlets when they publish something about him he doesn’t like. Many of his followers agree with this tactic: according to a Pew research poll held just before the election, only 49% of registered voters who supported Trump said that the freedom of news organizations to criticize political leaders was “very important.”

But to hold their government accountable, citizens do need to be well informed — and the sources of our information need to be seen as trustworthy by politically and socioeconomically diverse swaths of that citizenry. If I believe that a racially-motivated hate crime took place because I trust Vox and my neighbor doesn’t because they trust Breitbart, how can we hope to effectively petition our government to stop such atrocities?

This isn’t easy — there isn’t an obvious path forward that simply calls for some political will and some fundraising. Traditional news sources are struggling not just because right-leaning Americans have decided they’re dishonest; they’re struggling in part because they haven’t effectively met needs that social media sites do, and because they’ve stumbled over themselves while trying to find the right business models for the digital age. And more conservative new media outlets have cropped up in part because existing outlets, however strongly they believe in their journalistic ideals, have still failed to be relevant to a large swath of the population.

Meanwhile social media platforms and other news aggregators have distanced themselves from the truth-evaluation game in part because it opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about who gets to decide what truth and news even are — questions that weren’t even easy to answer when that gate-keeping was done by news organizations. (And, of course, such fact-checking and investigating, if done well, is expensive and time-consuming.) Traditional outlets have also floundered on this front, for example when they conflate “balanced” with “truthful” reporting.

But if we have no agreed-upon benchmark for measuring the truth, how can we agree on whether Vox or Breitbart is correct, on which outlet is more credible, on what facts are facts? Alt-right champion Mike Cernovich gleefully calls the resulting vacuum “postmodern” and sees it as an opportunity for a new national narrative; I see it as a deeply troubling mess whose solutions will have to be political, educational, and commercial at the very least.

Still, we can’t let the pursuit of perfect solutions be the enemy of good, solid action. To that end, here are some practical places I urge you to start:

First, support local and national commercial journalism by paying for subscriptions to the outlets you read or consume the most and that support traditional journalistic ethics, be they the New York Times, NPR, or the Boston Globe. (Even more localized news outlets cover issues such as school board matters, local ordinances, and infrastructure decisions that don’t often get covered by national media but have just as much effect on people’s lives.) Again, these more traditional news sources aren’t the be-all, end-all solution to the problem, but they’re certainly organizations that have the responsibility to tell truth to power. If we use them to educate ourselves, we need to empower them to do it as well as possible — and our dollars tell them that we as readers and customers are invested in that outcome.

Another way to communicate that investment is to hold these news organizations accountable when you see that they’re not doing a good enough job. The University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics has a great list of resources for registering complaints and concerns, including links to contact the public editors at major news organizations.

Next, donate to organizations that advocate for and support the free press, investigative journalism, and journalists:

ACLU — An organization fighting for freedom of the press and other first-amendment rights.
ProPublica — An independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) — Their First Amendment Forever Fund is an endowment built to fight for press freedoms. It’s a kind of meta version of their Legal Defense Fund, to which you can also donate directly, and which provides journalists with legal or financial assistance in the cause of defending freedom of speech and press, often to enforce public access to government records.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — It’s like the ACLU for the digital world, defending individual rights of expression and privacy online.

And finally, donate to organizations that support our own education as consumers of information:

Center for News Literacy — An initiative of the Stony Brook University Department of Journalism, the Center works to teach students and the general public how to read, interpret, and gauge the value of news reports and news sources. A recent, much-publicized study from Stanford showed how much difficulty young people have knowing what to trust online, and it would hardly be a surprise if the same were true of adults.

This is just a start. The issues with our media and with our government’s attitude toward it aren’t going to be fixed just by buying subscriptions or donating to advocacy organizations. We also need to remain ever watchful, creative, and demanding in the days — and years — ahead.

Filed Under: digital publishing, elections, politics, publishing, social technologies

What Surrounds the Gutenberg Parenthesis?

June 8, 2013 Leave a Comment

Today Rick Hornik (who clearly knows me well) sent me a link to this interview of the authors of the theory of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The theory posits that the age of print brought with it certain cultural anomalies which we now consider to be truisms and norms, but which are actually being called into question in the digital age, on a trajectory that is leading us back where we started before Johannes began puttering with movable type.

Reading the piece was great fun because I really like thinking about how wide, sweeping cultural trends ebb and flow, particularly those around orality and literacy, print and digital, and the ways that culture deals with information as a thing.

I did think the theory reductionist, though, in its classification of everything as either inside the parenthesis or outside of it. Reductive thinking can be powerful because it allows us to make connections and see patterns, but here are a few reasons it’s dangerous in this case:

We’re not just going in circles. Whether or not the internet is more medieval than the age of print, it’s not that we’re returning whole hog to the days of Chaucer. These guys talk about coming full circle; I think of the world in more Siddharthan (Buddhist?) terms as a spiral. We may be back in the same place in the circle, but we’ve moved up the helix: we are somewhere new. The danger of overlooking this is that we won’t recognize that while certain things are back again (a networked world, a world with messy authorship), some of today’s conditions are very different (the cloud, global brand recognition, a stock market, pharmaceutical companies’ in-house IP lawyers). For example, oral cultures were highly conservative because they dedicated their cultural muscle to remembering important things; literacy liberated the cultural mind to turn to more innovative activities; now with all of our information stored and immediately accessible, instead of returning to the old ways, we could get even more innovative as a society. (Walter J. Ong does a good job of capturing the sense of both returning to a preliterate culture and growing even more literate in the digital age in his classic Orality and Literacy). Finally, while it’s effectively jarring to call the print era merely a parenthesis, it’s misleading, because though it’s true that it’s just a temporary hiccup in time, it implies that other eras aren’t also temporary hiccups.
It’s not just medieval. Each of the periods we’re talking about here was internally differentiated. It’s become something of a cliché to talk about today’s world of the internet and ebooks as analogous to Gutenberg’s first days of print, but there’s meat to that comparison. The early days of print typography were a (fabulous) mess and they were about replicating what came before (handwritten manuscripts); the early days of the internet typography were a (fabulous) mess and they were about replicating what came before (printed [news]papers and books). Later, highly normalized days of print will perhaps be analagous to later days of the web, and they’ll be very different than what we have going on now, just as what we have going on now is very different than, say, 1998. If we are entering a medievalesque period now, that’s not to say that the internet always was or always will be medieval. And not all preliterate culture was medieval–that was only the last cultural era before Gutenberg came along. If you go much before 800 AD, you’re running into a very different society altogether. Maybe I’m just quibbling with the conflation of “preliterate” with “medieval.”
Value-laden language. You can’t escape this stuff, but it’s like we’re either judging the medievals (the Dark Ages!) or, in this piece, we’re judging the print era (lousy containers with their static content–let’s have a “restoration”!). I do admit that I enjoyed reading about a positive account of the medieval period for a change, however.

Digging into what made the medieval information culture tick was indeed the best part of the piece. I hadn’t thought of that medieval world as highly “networked,” specifically because it was so hierarchical and I think of networks as more democratic. But the part about how oral culture messes with authorship and how that’s similar to the way content operates on the web is very resonant. Certainly to some degree when copyright law came into being in the early 18th century it was in reaction to the rising needs of print culture; what this theory and this interview does well is to question whether that law is actually the obvious right thing or whether now we’ll need to grow out of it again.

But this is where the discussion comes in of whether we’re just traveling in circles or if there’s something linear and progressive about our cultural development as well. Our modern economy depends on granting rights to the creator of intellectual property, and not just in the media world: so are we moving to a place where all that will need to change? And if so is the pendulum indeed simply swinging back the other way, such that in a thousand years we’ll be building cathedrals again, instead of bazaars? Or will we find a new (and also temporary and parenthetical) Hegelian synthesis between the capitalist need to assign ownership and our increasingly dynamic network of living content?

Filed Under: digital publishing, economics, language, publishing, reflection, social technologies

Cultural Observations of an iPhone User

August 18, 2009 Leave a Comment

The advent of mobile devices not only allows us to be more connected, it shifts how we perceive activities like reading, and how we think of other devices, like computers. For example, two things I’ve noticed since becoming an iPhone addict:

Thing 1: When you read things on the iPhone that you used to read on your computer or in analog (a newspaper or a book, for example), you’re still perceived as doing something much more frivolous and distracted, like fragmentedly texting or obsessively checking email. You’re perceived as being unfocused on the world around you rather than focused on a piece of content. Tim and I noticed this once when he was reading a book and I was reading on the Kindle app, and he kept wanting to tell me to stop obsessively checking my email or something–and he had to keep reminding himself that I was actually engrossed in a Dickens novel.

Thing 2: My home computer has become much more fun, because much more of my stress-related email checking has moved to the iPhone, while use of my computer has basically degenerated into watching Battlestar Galactica DVDs (and writing the odd blog musing).

Filed Under: digital publishing, iphone

The Physical Book in 50 Years

May 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

Here’s a metaphor for how we’ll think of books in fifty years: like candles.

We use candles now to mark special occasions, for a sense of cozy old-school nostalgia, for atmospherics, for decor, and in a pinch for their original use when the power goes out. But most of the time, when you really want to get something done, you flip a light switch.

In the future, physical books will also be used to mark special occasions (they’ll be souvenirs) and to decorate your apartment and for atmospherics and nostalgia, and in a pinch when your computer or portable data device is on the fritz. But most of the time, when you’re really going to want to get something read, you’ll just turn on your Kindle/iPhone/magic-electronic-gizmo.

Filed Under: digital publishing, publishing

The Newer, Bigger Kindle

May 6, 2009 4 Comments

Okay, I’m going to put out there right now that Kindle’s newer bigger self is not going to work. I seem to be in the minority, so let me be clear about what I mean by that: It will not sell as well as the original-sized Kindle, and it is not the way of the future.

The ways in which it will be moderately successful are as follows: As an entrance into the Boomer market (i.e., people who find the iPhone and even the original Kindle too small). What’s going to hold it back here somewhat is the price. For folks who are already slightly skeptical about digital, $500 is a pretty big chunk of change. It will also be somewhat useful for folks who depend a lot on graphics–students who use textbooks, professionals who use manuals. For everyone named above, it’s an interim step backwards, opening up the market for more users to become comfortable with the technology that already exists.

It’s also a threat to Apple, because it’s an interim step in the direction of a new kind of laptop technology: something like this could be your new computer someday. Make it a touchscreen, with a touchscreen keyboard, and you could run a pretty full OS. Apple is already responding to this threat with their Mediapad. If the Kindle goes in this direction, that’s the one way that this thing will become a big player.

But I’m not sure Amazon is going in that direction because they seem pretty set on thinking of this as a *reading* device. And that’s the real problem. The media device of the future is going to have to be an all-in-one, like the iPhone is.

The all-in-one mindset is important for two reasons. First, portability: if the logic behind the Kindle is that you don’t want to carry around multiple books, then you also don’t want to carry around multiple devices, and you probably don’t want to carry around a big one. Portability is a key factor in mobile devices, and this Kindle just ain’t it. If you’re in the general market (not Boomer, not infographics-focused) and you wanted a digital reading device badly enough to pay that much money for it, you would have tried out the original Kindle, and by now you’d be used to it, and so why ever would you get something bigger?

Second, because we always want more functionality, not less. Why would I want to carry around a huge slab of computer that can only do one thing, when I could carry around something that could also act as a GPS, as a phone, as a Red-Sox-game-score tracker? I already expect more of my mobile devices. I think this is really important: if Amazon is trying to present a disruptive innovation (something that does less but reaches a broader market), they’ve got their price wrong. And if they’re just trying to present a new innovation, then they are just innovating by looking in the rear view mirror.

So fire away. Why am I wrong?

Filed Under: digital publishing

The New Role of Publishers

April 23, 2009 Leave a Comment

Umair Haque makes a fascinating point in his most recent blog post when he urges the New York Times to acquire Twitter in part to “help the NYT rebuild detailed information about people, products, services, and news.” In other words, the NYT becomes not just a source for information published by the NYT, but an aggregator of information provided by everybody.

What if that’s what publishers need to do today? Not just to provide content, but to help their customers share content between each other as well?

While some publishers are beginning to do this in a rudimentary way–OUP has a blog on which readers can converse through comments; HarperCollins has various reading groups–nobody has yet set this as their new business model.

You wouldn’t only have to have discussion forums; you’d have to have space for people to upload their own work and the capability for your editorial team to sort it and comment on it somehow, so readers know what their getting (after all, one of the most important functions of the editorial team is as gatekeeper to good information). But a lot of the work would just have to be automated.

Is this the world we’re heading to?