Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 55

Journalism's leaky condom

Roy Greenslade airs his internal struggle over journalists getting closer to business in a very interesting post reacting to former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, who says that it was a mistake to separate editorial and ad sales people. Says Greenslade: "I understand the Reeves argument but I remain queasy about journalists acting as advertising sales reps. And it is an aspect of entrepreneurial journalism that gives me pause for thought."

I responded in the comments:

Roy,

This all sounds well and good–the high moral stand–but I'll ask you the question I am often asked: How is the journalist going to eat?

Last week, Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent.org, told my CUNY entrepreneurial journalism class that when he started, he was a one-man operation and if it was going to be sustainable he had to sell ads. PaidContent grew. He hired reporters. He hired sales people. But he was still was very much in charge of the business–the sales staff's boss–and knew well that he had to be loyal first to his journalistic credibility, and value. So, he told my students, he turned down some ads that weren't relevant to his readers. Of course, he built a wonderful service, highly respected, and sold it to the Guardian.

Institutional, industrial journalists are too used to the idea that codes and walls will protect their morals. No, they must be their own protectors. The same conflicts and interests exist for everyone in a news operation and everyone must guard against corruption or the asset loses its value. Indeed, I believe that by teaching journalists that business itself is corrupting, we became terrible stewards of journalism and that is one of the key reasons journalism is in the fix it's in.

Today I am disturbed to hear journalistic entrepreneurs–e.g., hyperlocal bloggers–who disdain business and sales. For they will perish just like the dinosaurs who once employed them. They are responsible for their own sustainability. I believe we must teach those skills to journalists and that is why I started the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism to train both students and professionals.

Roy, when the journalists are in charge of the journalistic enterprise–when they are founders or are key, strategic managers of that enterprise–they can and must navigate the conflicts you outline and I'd argue they are in a better position to do so–if they are qualified in business. Whether or not they sell the ad, the conflict and choices are the same.

I learned this lesson when I started Entertainment Weekly in an industry full of standards and codes and walls and even so found my managers (editorial as well as business) trying to profoundly corrupt the enterprise for the sake of business ends and I did not have sufficient business cred to fight them down. Codes and walls turn out to be translucent and leaky moral condoms; false comfort.

Let's also remember what our boss, Alan Rusbridger, says about the history of newspapers: It was advertising that freed us from ownership by political forces; it supported independence.

Also remember that every hack trying to get a story onto Page One–or onto the list of most-emailed on the wall of the Telegraph newsroom–is responding to the marketplace, that of readers. And I think that's a healthy influence (so long as the journalist isn't slavishly following that carrot but knows to add value). We separated ourselves from the noisy room and the noisy world at our peril; we thought ourselves above it all but we became strangers in our communities because we thought we were high and mighty.

So, Roy, I think your queasiness comes from years of being taught that tomatoes are poison so, even if it's not true, you're bound to gag on the first bite. I say that running the business needn't be corrupting and is, indeed, empowering. The key for us as educators is not to have students avoid the conflict but to teach them how to face it and make the right decisions. That is why I teach entrepreneurial journalism.

The Rutgers tragedy and privacy and technology

Last night, I went to CBS to record an interview with Katie Couric about the Rutgers tragedy, privacy, and technology.

Couric asked me the same question a half-dozen ways — old reporter's trick; I've used it; I teach it — trying to get me to give her the answer she wanted: that the internet makes this different, that this is a teaching moment, and that we should give our children instruction about the dangers of the internet. I wouldn't agree that technology makes the essence of this story and its sin different. The lesson is the same as it has always been: the Golden Rule. The sin could have been committed with a Kodak camera or a telephone or a letter, for that matter.

I do agree that the internet adds speed and reach and permanence to a mistake — that, as someone has said, it is a tattoo. But what this story really brings out is a timeless ethic of privacy (which is how I am framing the topic in Public Parts): Privacy is the responsibility of the person who receives information about someone. Once you know something about me, the weight lies with you as you decide how to use that information, whether to spread it, in what light. That came as close as I would to what Couric was aiming for and so this is the clip that made it onto the show.

I also said society bears responsibility in this story. That today anyone would still feel shame about being revealed as gay — full stop — and then would make such a tragic decision is our failing. I told Couric that the gays and lesbians who have summoned the courage to leave their closet and privacy behind to stand before the homophobes — saying, "Yes, I'm gay, you have a problem with that?" — are the heroes who used their publicness as a weapon against bigotry. I made clear to her that I am not suggesting people should be forced out of their closets. But I do believe that the people who have chosen to leave have operated under an ethic of publicness. If the weight of the ethic of privacy lies with the recipient of information — you know information about me — then the weight of the ethic of publicness lies with the originator of information — I know something and must decide whether it would be of benefit to others to share it.

As I left, I tried to tell Couric that media too often look at technology and change and see only danger. This is how the invention of the Kodak camera was treated in the 1890s. More than 500 million people choose to share on Facebook because they see benefit in it and more do so on Twitter and in blogs and YouTube…. Media constantly looks at the edge, the dark edge, jumping on a story such as this to seek out the perils technology brings. Couric protested that they do lots of stories about good things in technology. Every time Steve Jobs does anything, we cover it, she said. But that's not understanding its value, I argued. I urged her to do a story in which young people who use and understand Facebook explain it to their elders.

We can't pretend to give young people lessons in the internet if we don't understand how they see it. For example, I've learned lately that young people use Facebook's Wall to hold conversations in public while people my age use it — with media reflex — as a place to publish or broadcast. Same platform, different uses, different worldviews, different impact. When I was in Berlin talking about publicness and privacy, Renate Künast, head of the Greens in Parliament, said she talked to a young person who took a cooking course instead of an a computer course because in the latter "what the teachers wanted to teach me was something I learned five years ago." We have things to learn from children about the future, for the future is theirs and they're building it right in front of us.

But in enduring morals and ethics — the Golden Rules — we parents remain the teachers and I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for teaching and our children enough credit for learning well. Those rules pertain no matter the medium or the technology in which human interaction occurs. The Rutgers story is not a tale of technology creating tragedy. It is a story of human tragedy.

The persecution of Hoder

Very troubling news about Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian blog pioneer known online as Hoder: He received a prison sentence of 19.5 years in Iran for being an "anti-revolutionary blogger."

I'm personally heartbroken. I first met Hoder online when I happened upon his blog as he announced that another Iranian blogger, Sina Motalebi, had been arrested. Sina, who is now working for the BBC in London, just emailed me, by coincidence, when I asked below about the idea of publicness. Sina had announced in public on his blog that he had been summoned to the police. Hoder blogged it. I did. Many others did. He believes that public attention helped get him out of prison and enabled him to escape the country.

Hoder's story is much more complicated. When I met him online, he was in Canada, where he'd become a citizen. Some gave him credit for starting the amazing Iranian blogosphere; others don't. He has always been controversial. He was critical of the Iranian regime. He went to Israel and made friends (and lost friends) there — which is one of his so-called crimes: "cooperation with hostile states, propagating against the regime, propagation in favor of anti-revolutionary groups, insulting sanctities, and implementation and management of obscene websites." Then, just as suddenly, he turned the other way and started supporting Iran's government and even its right to have nuclear weapons. He asked me to link to posts that made such statements. I was over my head in Iranian politics as I heard other online expats criticize him. I wasn't sure what to do.

Then Hoder mysteriously returned to Iran. Some say he'd been given assurances that he'd be OK. Others say that he is caught in a power struggle. Again, I know too little. He was arrested two years ago. His family stayed silent in hopes that things would work out. That's why I said nothing.

But now he has been sentenced. No matter what his opinions were or what opinions you may have had about him, that doesn't matter now. We should all be outraged, loudly outraged. For — as I said when Hoder told me about Sina's arrest — a blogger, one of us, has been arrested and imprisoned for what he has said. If anyone should stand up for the right of free speech of a blogger it should be us, bloggers.

What to do? Ethan Zuckerman suggests we pressure Canada to pressure Iran for his release. On the Media reports (when there were still rumors that Hoder could have received the death penalty) that Iran does not recognize dual citizenship. The Canadian government is protesting:

"We are deeply concerned about the news of this severe sentence," Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said. "If true, this is completely unacceptable and unjustifiable."

"No one should be punished anywhere for simply exercising one's inherent right to freedom of expression," he said, adding that "Iran must release him."

The Globe and Mail editorialized for his freedom:

Mr. Derakshan's views and ways may not be to everyone's liking – he doesn't fit neatly as either a state propagandist or an agitator for democracy. But free speech is often inconvenient; indeed, that is one of the reasons why free people should be agitating for his release.

: Here is my original post announcing Sina's arrest as reported by Hoder. (Please ignore the damned spam links in my archives; I don't know how to clean them up.)

The antisocial movie

There's no "why" there. That's the problem with The Social Network. It neither explains nor even ascribes motives to Mark Zuckerberg—no vision, no strategy, no goals.

The movie quickly admits that money doesn't matter to Zuckerberg. So why did he build Facebook? The Social Network offers no answer, except perhaps that an outsider wanted in, but that doesn't begin to explain what he has accomplished and why; that's nothing but simplistic prime-time plotting. The script says nothing about him wanting to connect the world or bring communities elegant organization. It doesn't care. For this is a movie about tactics, not strategy, about people doing hard things to each other. Elsewhere, that's just called business.

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The movie violates privacy, smears reputations, makes shit up—just what the internet is accused of doing, right? Oh, it's entertaining, in a dark way, as much as watching the pillorying of witches used to be, I suppose. For The Social Network, geeks and entrepreneurs are as mysterious and frightening as witches. Its writer, Aaron Sorkin, admits as much in New York Magazine. "He says unapologetically that he knows almost nothing about the 2010 iteration of Facebook, adding that his interest in computer-aided communication goes only as far as emailing his friends." Sorkin himself says, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling." Making shit up.

New York's Mark Harris knows, in an aside at least, what this movie is really about. "The Social Network can be seen as a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media." Except it's not really old media that's spitting but neonew media. Sorkin is a member of the Young Curmudgeons' Guild, joining Gladwell, Carr, Anderson, Rowan, Morozov, and Lanier. Old media resists change. These guys want to deny the internet credit for it.

The Social Network understands obnoxious old-money (the cartoon-colored, Zuckerberg-suing Winklevoss twins), obnoxious new-money (Sean Parker, though David Kirkpatrick says in Vanity Fair that he is "both more complex and more interesting"), and the pretentious intellectual (a fantasy of Harvard's then-President, Larry Summers). And it thinks it understands victims (Facebook cofounder and former Zuckerberg friend Eduardo Saverin). I met Saverin once, in a panel put on by an ad network, which Saverin patronized on Facebook's behalf and which served just the kinds of tacky ads Zuckerberg didn't want for his company because he knew the value of cool and he had a much bigger vision than Saverin had. That's likely why Saverin had to go; whether The Social Network knows it or not, it makes that clear. It's just business. And as for the Winklevii, they didn't invent crap. Ideas, especially obvious ones, are worthless; every entrepreneur and geek knows that execution is everything. Zuckerberg's fellow Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn't invent crap, either, but he did execute. That's business.

The Social Network doesn't understand entrepreneurs and geeks, or at least not the one here. So it turns him into an other. It makes him weird. It portrays Zuckerberg as—let's be blunt—Aspergery: blinkless, humorless, heartless, incapable of being *cough* social or of having *cough* friends. I've met Zuckerberg four or five times, most lately interviewing him for Public Parts. I don't know him. Maybe nobody does. But I can testify at least that he has charm. He does smile. He tells jokes. And he has a vision.

Zuckerberg understands the structure and motives of friendship even though The Social Network calls him friendless. In a flash during the deposition scenes that make up its narrative spine (perhaps because only lawyering could make coding look exciting), the movie gives us an anecdote—based on a true story, as it turns out—about the Harvard art class Zuckerberg didn't attend in his sophomore year as he was inventing Facebook. Here is Zuckerberg telling the story in 2007: He posted to a web page the images of the art he should have studied, sent an email to his classmates offering a "study guide," and watched as they distilled the essence of each piece. The punchline: Not only did Zuckerberg ace the final but the prof said the class as a whole did better than usual. I saw that as a perfect tale of social collaboration, a lesson in wikithink. The Social Network called it cheating. And right there lies the movie's disconnect—not between Zuckerberg and friendship but between the movie and the new world it can't comprehend but pretends to portray.

The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous (or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed) masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it's really just a drama about a man. But that's where it fails most. It can't begin to explain this man because it doesn't grok what he made—what he's still making ("We don't even know what it is yet," Zuckerberg says in the movie, "It's never finished").

The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn't like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds.

I know my risk here. I'm putting myself again in the position of defending the internet, just as David Kirkpatrick is making himself Facebook's apologist. Maybe we're both hypnotized by the Zuckerberg charisma Sorkin cannot see. Maybe we've been hanging out with business people so long we cannot see the Greek tragedy in it. Maybe. Though if all you want is a tale of hard-nosed business leading to human drama among geeks, you could film the story of Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or—coming soon to a theater near you—Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

In Zuckerberg and Facebook—and the internet—I see a far bigger and better story than the one Sorkin delivers. As research for Public Parts, I happen to be reading the wonderful book, The Gutenberg Revolution, by John Man, which digs through scant records to try to understand what drove the man who used technology to disrupt an old world and enable people to create a new one. Gutenberg was a technologist, secretive and controlling. He was a businessman (one of the early capitalists who created one of the early industries, really). He drove tough bargains. He was competitive. He was accused by the Dutch of stealing someone else's idea. Oh, and he apparently broke up badly with at least one woman, Man says. In the hand of a Sorkin scribe of the day, I imagine Gutenberg would only be a weirdo: We don't trust what he's doing to our world, we don't understand it, so we don't like him.

You're going to see The Social Network. You should. It's well-crafted. But as you watch, I urge you to look at what it says not just about Mark Zuckerberg but about us, us geeks. I look forward to the discussion.

The benefits of publicness

I'm reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I'd like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won't go into great detail in this list because I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Here's my opening bid:

* Publicness makes and...

Wrong battlefield

It's kinda touching that Rupert Murdoch's loyal lieutenants are trying to entertain the boss by starting an old-fashioned newspaper war (old-fashioned modifies newspaper). But it's also ever-more revealing of their worldview.

And of course, the best way to declare a war is to declare it over and claim victory. "Nationally, there's no contest now," Robert Thompson, editor of the Wall Street Journal, said, according to the AP, "We're more than twice as big as The New York Times. They're not a s...

The Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism

Today we at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism are announcing the founding and funding of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.

The Center, which I'll direct, received $3 million each from the Tow and Knight foundations, in addition to earlier funding from the McCormick, MacArthur, and Carnegie foundations and CUNY. We will:

* Establish the country's first MA degree in entrepreneurial journalism for our students and also offer certificates in the...

The real Facebook burglaries story

I did a little reporting to get the real story behind the reports of a Facebook burglary spree that supposedly used the service — right after its launch of Places — to find victims who were away on vacation. I emailed Nashua, NH detective Dan Archambault, who told me that only two of the cases involved Facebook and in each case, "one or two of the suspects were Facebook friends with the respective homeowners. They basically had access to the walls and could read that the families were away...

Germany's N word

Various German commenters in my prior post about my talk in Berlin are taking me to task because I dared hark back to World War II in a discussion of government-required identity cards and how that enables the state to monitor the people — and a discussion of the value of publicness and how that enables the people to monitor the state.

"I really don't think it it necessary to pull the 'Nazi-card,'" said one. "Please don't even in an article about Google make strange references to the Nazi...

Oh, those Germans

I was gobsmacked sitting on a stage in Berlin when the privacy commissioner for a German state erupted in an attack on Google—which, by the way, has the highest market penetration in Germany of anywhere in the world (97.4% there vs. 65.4% in the U.S.).

"As long as Germans are stupid enough to use this search engine," he spat, "they don't deserve any better."

This from Thilo Weichert, privacy maven for Schleswig-Holstein, brought to the stage, with me, by the Green Party for a discussion...