social technologies

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

Trackers: Fitbit vs. Withings Activité Pop

November 21, 2015 Leave a Comment

I’ve decided that I’d like to start learning about wearables, in particular some kind of activity tracking watch. As I began looking I didn’t have any specific use cases in mind, so part of what I was researching was what I actually wanted out of this kind of a device.

I pretty quickly centered in on the Fitbit Charge HR and the Withings Activité Pop (affiliate links), which are, usefully, the same price, at $150. I’ve bought both and am hoping that Amazon lets me return whichever one I decide against.

Right now it’s a dead heat, though each device has very different strengths and weaknesses. After about a day of using each device and its app, here’s what I’ve learned about the pros of each one:

Fitbit Charge HR

Premium feel. The band is textured on the outside and very soft on the inside, and the clasp is built just perfectly, with a notched rubber slider to keep the loose end in place. The Withings strap feels a little cheap—though you can replace it with any standard 18″ watch strap.
Smaller, more comfortable. Having a band around your wrist is less distracting than a big watch face. The band wraps around my (small) wrist evenly.
Heart rate tracking. I’ve been trying to figure out how much I need this. It was really great to actually see what my heart rate was on a run and in a yoga class; for yoga in particular I had never tracked my activity beyond recording the amount of time I spent in a practice. (Results: my heart rate was steadily high for longer than I thought, but it didn’t spike to a “cardio” level as much as I had expected.)
Sophisticated app. The Fitbit app allows you to designate certain segments of your activity as “workouts” (so your run is counted as one workout even if you ran, then walked, then ran some more). It also has a sophisticated goal system that allows you to designate a target weight and choose from “easy,” “medium,” and “hard” lengths of time to get to that weight; it then calculates how many calories you can eat given your activity level on a given day. Withings has a goal function but it’s not that nuanced.
See your stats in the dark. The digital display lights up so it’s visible at night. You can tell what time it is if you wake up in the middle of the night, or check your heart rate if running pre-dawn.
Get more stats from the device. The band itself gives readings for the time of day, the date, how many steps you’ve done that day, distance, heart rate, calories, and flights. (Withings gives you the time of day, time of an alarm you set, and your % progress toward your daily step goal.) You can also set it to vibrate if you get a phone call and display the contact name or number of the call—very useful if you keep your phone on vibrate most of the time but don’t always have it in your pocket. (But: if I keep my phone with me for music and GPS tracking when I run, do I really need to have all that info on my wrist, too?)
Useful for yogis. As I mentioned, because you can track heart rate, you can track something like the caloric impact of your yoga practice—and how that impact varies across different sessions, classes, or teachers. It also integrates with Mindbody Connect, the app used by many yoga studios to schedule classes; it means you can review your stats for your past classes all in one place in the Mindbody app.
Water intake. You can manually log when you drink water to keep track of your hydration levels. (There is also a Thermos water bottle that tracks this for you automatically, with reminders to take a sip.)
Slightly less ridiculous name. I mean really.

Withings Activité Pop

Analog, stylish, simplified. The traditional analog face is much more professional and dressy than the sporty Fitbit. It only shows the time (hours and minutes), your % of daily step goal reached, and, with a double-tap, any alarms you have set. There are unlimited options for bands. I can see myself wearing this to the office and to nice dinners and marathon days singing in church where the Fitbit would feel a bit odd.
Waterproof. It seems that there is a heart rate/watersports tradeoff with the Fitbit and Withings watches—you can’t have both. It’s great to know that I can use this watch to track swimming, and I don’t have to take it off for a quick shower after a run.
No charging. You have to charge your Fitbit for 1-2 hours every few days. The Activité Pop uses a regular watch battery that just needs to be replaced a few times a year.
Better Apple syncing. Fitbit won’t sync with the Apple Health app (though there are now some third-party apps I haven’t yet explored that will facilitate that). That means that I need to go to a completely separate app to get data like my weight, flights climbed, etc. The Withings app does it all in one place.

One of the big things I’ve realized is that it’s not just the functionality and features of the device that are important; it’s also the functionality and features of its app, and which other apps it will integrate with. I wasn’t really thinking about that when I launched into looking at the devices, but it’s really brought home how important apps are to our physical experiences now. Both the Fitbit and Withings app are very rich, and I haven’t yet gotten a sense of which better serves my needs. So, more to come!

In the meantime, do you have any experience with either of these devices? What do you think?

Filed Under: digital devices, iphone, product reviews, 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

Charging for the News

February 10, 2009 Leave a Comment

Last night’s Daily Show included an interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the recent Time cover story “How to Save Your Newspaper.”

Isaacson practically got laughed off the stage with some of his old-fashioned ideas, but they’re actually ones that I’ve come back around to recently.

It all revolves around the idea that one of these days we’re going to wake up and realize that professional journalism is a) crumbling before our eyes, and b) the foundation of a stable democracy. Don’t believe me? Look! A big stone tablet at the Newseum in DC even says so:

Professional journalism is crumbling before our eyes because we refuse to pay for it. I refuse to pay for it. Remember the New York Times’s venture “TimesSelect?” When we all thought paying for just the op-eds and the sports section was ridiculous, and so they quit trying? And when was the last time you bought a print paper? Jon Stewart may have admitted that holding a print newspaper in your hand is just more satisfying, but I doubt that many people under the age of 25 would agree with him. It’s these trends that are leading to the massive layoffs at the Times, at the Globe, at the Tribune, at NPR…the list goes on.

Of course, citizen journalists are all the rage right now, from CNN’s i-report to bloggers on every topic to people who digg or del.ici.ous or Share stories. I think those folks and these media add a lot to journalism that was lacking before. I just don’t think that they’re a viable replacement for professional, paid journalists.

That’s what it comes down to: paying the guys to go to Baghdad (as Isaacson said), who spend years digging into Madoff’s past, who cover the beleaguered state of our crumbling urban schools. Stuff that might be missed by the i-Reports, stuff that takes more hours in a day than a part-time blogger has to devote pro bono. Whether or not the journalists are paid through large, authoritative institutions, they need to be paid.

We need to start getting used to that idea, and we need to figure out how to pay them. (Because even I am not going to pretend that paper newspapers are going to make a comeback.)

Isaacson actually brought up a good idea that I’ve been thinking about for a while: microcharges. It’s like iTunes–you can pay a tiny fee per article that you read online. So you don’t need to pay $14.95 a month or whatever–you pay for how much you use, but in small enough increments that it doesn’t hit you where it hurts each time you click.

Jon Stewart countered that news articles are different from music in that you’re much less likely to go back and consume that content again and again, though. It’s a good point. Is it enough to keep people from buying?

My hope is that we realize how valuable professional journalism is before it’s gone altogether. My sense is that the crux moment is coming: will we recognize it and suck up the price when it’s here?

Update:
Disagreement: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html

Filed Under: digital publishing, publishing, social technologies

Newspapers Are Not Dead

March 1, 2008 1 Comment

An NPR piece* the other morning about the future of newspapers got it wrong. The contributor, a nostalgic newspaperman, was mourning the apparently imminent demise of the medium, retelling his young son’s reaction to the latest round of newsroom layoffs. “Why are you surprised, dad,” he asked, “Why would I read a newspaper when I can find something on the internet, on Google, on blogs, or in a newspaper online?” So sad, the contributer noted, with this new generation will come the end of the newspaper.

The mistake here matters much because it’s one the newspapers themselves are making, the very one that actually threatens their future.

The commentator’s son, the commentator, and the newspaper establishment, have conflated the concepts of what a newspaper does, and what a newspaper is. And unlike Jack Sparrow, I’m more interested in the “does” part.

Let’s handle “is” first, though. I think that sales (and production) of hard copy newspapers will absolutely plummet in the next five or ten years. I don’t know anyone my age who prefers leafing through enormous pieces of dirty paper to try to find the end of that front page article, rather than clicking “Next.” And how do you even read the New York Times without the “most emailed” box? That’s the first place I go after I read what’s above the fold (“above the scroll?”). The only advantage of the printed paper is that you can do the crossword properly. But after reading maybe a third of the articles, if you’re being generous, you throw the whole pile of paper away–!! Unacceptable to our green (pun intended) minds. I think many of us will enjoy newspapers in the future the way we enjoy quality, old-school throwback items now. “Oh wow, a record player! Remember those? Let’s hook that thing up and find some of my parents’ LPs.”

For a while there will still be printed papers in corporate lobbies and in the subway and on the steps of staid suburban homes. But yes, Mr. Newspaper Man, this is going away. It’s just more convenient to read it all on the iPhone. (Even the newspaperman’s son said he was still reading newspapers online!)

Thus, onto what a newspaper does.

A newspaper finds, reports (mostly in writing), and selects the day’s news for us, under a particular brand. This, I argue, needs not go away. We actually need it now more than ever.

But by clinging to the hard copy culture of the newspaper–and even though the paper is available online–newspapers as a whole (not just hard copy) risk becoming obsolete in the next decade.

My morning and lunchtime routine consists of checking my personal email, reading the blogs that feed into my Google Reader, and checking out a few articles on the Times. More and more I feel a little impatient with the NYT. Why couldn’t it just RSS feed its leading article so I don’t have to go to a whole new site to get my branded, edited news?** Bah.***

Okay, okay, so the NYT is catching on. They have blogs. Some good ones, at that. Some, not so good. I’ve criticized the editorial board’s attempts before. Here’s why it matters. Blogs can’t be the NYT’s ancillary material. They need to be its new format.

Every column, every article, every space (“front page,” “above the fold,” “center column,” “Friedman,” “Dowd,” “Friedman and Brooks, and also Collins but only if it’s been posted in the last two hours OR is in the top ten most emailed”), needs to be feedable. I need to be able to choose which feeds I want. I want to be able to get “all the news that’s fit to click” without ever going to the NYT’s home page.

“All”? But I thought you just said I’d be choosing which feeds I want. So if I only want sports feeds, I’ll miss the front-page headline, right?

Well, this is where the “select” part of a newspaper’s job comes in.

I have too many feeds coming into my reader as is. If I’m going to be having all of these newspaper feeds in there too, I need someone to pick and choose them for me–still based on my preferences (“Friedman and Brooks”), but with some common human sense thrown in about other stuff I might be interested in and other stuff I should be interested in.

Tah dah! Isn’t that in some sense what a newspaper does already? Prove your worth, editors, by editing. Send me, say, five articles a day that you think I should be reading, but that I haven’t signed up for. So I can get the top travel story even though I haven’t signed up for the travel feed (so that I don’t get ALL the travel articles EVERY day), if you think it’s worthy. Please do this! I need you to.

This way, the top stories get fed to everyone, regardless of their usual individual preferences, but all the niche audiences still get their niche stories fed to them too. And if you get really procrastinatory on a Friday afternoon at work, there’s always more on the site, because then you actually feel like going there. Isn’t that sort of the way a newspaper works now, in an analog version?–usually we only read top stories and maybe drill down to some things that interest us individually, and then only read the rest when we have time? Only now it comes to me, I don’t have to go to it.

Anyway, this is only one vision of what newspapers could do to not just stay in the game, but to keep owning the game. They need to come up with new ways of getting us their content (the “most emailed” box is a great example of a great success). Their newsrooms, companies, and brands don’t need to fall away; they could become stronger. Newspapers aren’t dead, my friends. Despite their soon-to-be-archaic name, if they figure out and own this technology shift, they’re only just beginning.

——

* Which I now can’t find, hence no link and no way of checking if I remembered the piece accurately–sorry.
** Probably something to do with advertising dollars, which makes sense. You can’t see the ads on a feed. But Reader’s brilliant new gizmo for your links bar obviates that problem. You just click the link on your browser toolbar and it takes you through your blog posts one by one, at the blog’s site–so you see it just as the blogger set it up, ads and all. It could stand to be perfected–for now you can only hit “next” and it would be nice to be able to pick and choose from amongst your unread posts, but it’ll get there.
*** Call my generation lazy. I call us obsessed with efficiency.