Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 9

Facebook: Constitution before statutes

Constitution of America, We the People.

The Facebook Oversight Board is now open for cases and I look forward to seeing the results. But I have the same question I’ve had since the planning for its creation began, and I asked that question in a web call today with board leadership:

What higher principles will the Board call upon in making its decisions? It will be ruling on Facebook’s content decisions based on the company’s own statutes — that is, the “community standards” Facebook sets for the community. 

The Board says it will also decide cases on the basis of international human rights standards. This could mean the board might find that Facebook correctly enforced its statute but that the statute violates a principle of human rights, which would result in a policy recommendation to Facebook. Good. 

But there remains a huge gap between community statutes and international human rights law. What is missing, I have argued, is a Constitution for Facebook: a statement of why it exists, what kind of community it wants to serve, what it expects of its community, in short: a north star. That doesn’t exist. 

But the Oversight Board might — whether it and Facebook know it or not — end up writing that Constitution, one in the English model, set by precedent, rather than the American model, set down in a document. That will be primarily in Facebook’s control. Though the Oversight Board can pose policy questions and make recommendations, it is limited by what cases come its way — from users and Facebook — and it does not set policy for the company; it only decides appeals and makes policy recommendations. 

It’s up to Facebook to decide how it treats the larger policy questions raised by the Oversight Board and the cases. In reacting to recommendations, Facebook can begin to build a set of principles that in turn begin to define Facebook’s raison d’être, its higher goals, its north star, its Constitution. That’s what I’ve told people at Facebook I want to see happen. 

The problem is, that’s not how Facebook or any of the technology companies think. Since, as Larry Lessig famously decreed, code is law, what the technologists want is rules — laws — to feed their code — their algorithms — to make consistent decisions at scale. 

The core problem of the technology companies and their relationship with society today is that they do not test that code and the laws behind it against higher principles other than posters on the wall: “Don’t be evil.” “Work fast and break things.” Those do not make for a good Constitution. 

But now is their chance to create one. And now, perhaps, is our chance. I didn’t realize that every Oversight Board case will begin with a public comment period. So we can raise issues with the Board. Indeed, community standards should come from the community, damnit, or they’re not community standards; they’re company standards. So we should speak up. 

And the Board will consult experts. They can raise issues with the Board. And the Board can, in turn, raise issues not just for Facebook but, by example, for all the technology companies. That discussion could be useful. 

Imagine if — as I so wish had been the case — the Board had been in operation when Twitter and Facebook decided what to do about blocking the blatant attempt at election interference by the New York Post and Rupert Murdoch in cahoots with Rudy Giuliani. The Board could have raised, addressed, and proposed policy recommendations based on principles useful to many internet companies and to the media that love to poke them. 

Regulators could also get involved productively more than punitively. I was a member of a Transatlantic Working Group on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression, which recommended a flexible framework for regulation that would have government hold companies accountable for their own assurances, requiring the companies to share data on usage and impact so researchers and regulators can monitor their performance. This, in my view, would be far better than government trying to tell companies how to operate, especially when it comes to interference in free speech. But government can’t hold companies accountable to keeping promises if there are no promises to keep. A Constitution is a promise, a covenant with users and the public. Every company should have one. Every company should be held accountable for meeting its requirements. And the public discussion should revolve around those principles, not around whether Johnny is allowed to use a bad word. 

I make no predictions here. The Board could end up answering a handful of picayune complaints among tens of thousands of possible cases a week and produce the script of an online soap opera. Facebook could follow the letter of the law set down by the Board and miss the opportunity to set higher goals. Media, experts, and the public could be ignored or worse could just continue to snipe instead of contribute constructively. 

But I can hope. The net is young. We — all of us — are still designing it by how we use it. 

The post Facebook: Constitution before statutes appeared first on BuzzMachine.

The end of applause

The pandemic has killed clapping.

In the abstract, applause is stupid: You hit yourself, but only when in the company of others hitting themselves, to show approval.

The end of applause occurred to me as I watched recent events: Apple’s latest product announcement sans clapping geeks and sycophants (revealing its true aesthetic as just another infomercial); the US Open with tepid, sitcom-like clap-tracks where cheers would have been; the Democrats’ intimate and audience-free YouTube convention — which I wrote about here; and Sarah Cooper’s opener for Jimmy Kimmel’s show. I’m in awe of Cooper anyway, but watching her monologue, I marveled at the courage of a comedian telling jokes without the immediate feedback of laughter, applause, and cheers: without an audience, or at least one that could be heard. YouTubers find this normal; old farts, strange.

Applause is binary: it is or it isn’t. To put this in McLuhanesque terms, hands are a medium with but one message at a time. Hands can hit each other. Hands can pound a table. (The first time I ended a presentation in a German board room, they started banging on the table and I thought, ‘Oh, hell, I’ve just pissed off a bunch of angry Germans,’ only to realize this was deutsch for applause.) Hands can also silently show a thumb or a finger or a fist. The hand was the medium allowed to an audience.

Jay Rosen famously talks about “the people formerly known as the audience,” his heuristic to get us to think about the change in the relationship of journalist or media with the public, who are no longer passive recipients and consumers of the commodity we call content but who now have a voice.

Voice brings substance, nuance, complexity. That richer message can be expressed on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, forums, comments. It’s not easy to listen to voice. Media do not know how to listen to us. It’s a lot easier to reduce people to the noise of a crowd — applause, cheers, chants — or to numbers in a poll — red v. blue, black v. white, 99% v. 1%, pro v. con. Mass media abhor any voice but their own.

The internet abhors being silenced. It will burst around any barrier to enable its users to be heard another way. Donald Trump may have tried to ban TikTok and silence Sarah Cooper — as the Chinese government tries to ban American platforms and silence its citizens — but both will fail. People will find their voices elsewhere.

Even so, media will still insist on trying to agglomerate the voices on the net into binary buckets, reductionist headlines, and shallow hot takes. I despise headlines that declare, “Twitter hates…” or “Twitter loves…” or “Twitter goes nuts over…” as if there were one social voice, Twitter, and our only role in it is to contribute to a single, monolithic bottom line of collective opinion. In writing those takes, media people ignore the essence of what social media enable: individual voices. This is how media failed to provide a place for #BlackLivesMatter; social media had to.

But social media companies are not blameless in this attempt to reduce the voices of their users to applause or boos. I also abhor “trending” features on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, for they seriously misrepresent the experience there. Many years ago, when I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg for a book, he said that no two people on earth see the same Facebook. That is true, too, of Twitter — and the internet, for that matter — unlike old media. So to say — as The New York Times’ Kevin Roose tries to, using Facebook’s own data — that this story or that is the most seen on Facebook is to elevate something few people see into something more important than it is, as Casey Newton explains. It is like saying all of America — or half of America — is under the sway of Fox News when, in fact, only about 3 million people (1 percent of the country) watch in prime time. In my social feed, I see very few of the topics that are trending and I see next to none of the poisonous right-wing stories media fret about because I and my friends are neither hip nor nazi.

The late Columbia professor James Carey famously wrote that the press exists not to transmit information but instead to provide ritual — that is, a confirming view of ourselves, like a mass (the Catholic kind, not the media, marketing, or manufacturing kind). The picture that the press paints of us is distorted. The view that the press presents of our life in social media is false. The net finally allows us to be heard as more than the sounds of hands clapping and yet we are still reduced to poll numbers or trending topics or ersatz applause. And so, I do not regret the passing of applause in the pandemic. I await the sound of the voices we can now hear instead.

There is much work yet to do to help us hear each others’ voices. As I’ve said before, until now, the net has been built just to speak, not to listen. I celebrate that speech, the voices too long not heard in mass media. But we need many more tools to help us discover voices and messages worth listening to, to better represent the nuanced public conversation, to convene us into true conversation. It will come, in time. Until then, learn to enjoy the absence of applause, the silence.

The post The end of applause appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Attacks on the People’s Press

Donald Trump’s war on TikTok in U.S. and Rupert Murdoch’s on Facebook in Australia are not being seen for their true import: as government attacks on the people’s press, on freedom of expression, on human rights. 

In Australia, Facebook just said that if Murdoch-backed legislation requiring platforms to pay for news is enacted, the company will stop media companies — and users — from posting news on Facebook and Instagram.

Who is hurt there? The public and its conversation. The public loses access to its means of sharing and debating news. Never before in history — never before the internet — has everyone had access to a press; only the privileged had it and now the privileged will rob the people of theirs. Without the people’s press, we would not have #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #OccupyWallStreet and the voices of so many too long not heard. This is a matter of human rights. 

The Australian legislation is a cynical mess. It is bald protectionism by Murdoch and the old, corporate press, requiring platforms to “negotiate” with guns to their heads for the privilege of quoting, promoting, and sending traffic, audience, and tremendous value to news sites. It is illogical. Facebook, Google, et al did not steal a penny from old media. They competed. To say that Facebook owes newspapers is a white plutocrat’s regressive view of reparations; by this logic Amazon owes Walmart who owes A&P who owes the descendents of Luigi’s corner grocery who owes a pushcart vegetable vendor on Hester Street. Facebook owes news nothing. 

This is a case of outrageous regulatory capture on Murdoch’s part. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about news and informed democracy. He, more than any human being alive, has been the scourge of democracy in the English-speaking world. The Australian legislation aims to give money only to large publishers, like Murdoch. If Facebook makes good on its threat and bans news, then the news business as a whole will suffer but the largest players in the field, who have brand recognition — i.e., Murdoch — will gain market share over smaller and newer competitors. Murdoch will be even freer to spread his propaganda. This is an attempt by the old press to impose a Stamp Tax on the new. Facebook is right to resist, just as Google was when Spain imposed its Stamp Tax on links (and Google News left the country). 

Now to Trump’s war on TikTok. This, too, is a matter of freedom of expression. TikTok is, to my mind, the first platform to begin to make us rethink media and the line separating producer and audience, for TikTok is a collaborative platform where people do not just comment on each others content but create together. It is the one social network that Trump and his cultists have not managed to game. It is the platform that has enabled Sarah Cooper and countless citizens to mock Trump. So he hates it and wants to abuse his power to kill it. 

If TikTok goes because of government fiat, so goes Sarah Cooper’s ability to criticize the man who killed it. What could be a clearer violation of the First Amendment? Why is no one screaming this? It’s because, I think, the old press still thinks the meaning of the “press” is a machine that spreads ink. No. The internet is the people’s press. It is a machine that spreads power. 

Keep in mind that none of these platforms was built for news and their lives would all, frankly, be easier without it and the controversy and advertiser repellant it brings. Facebook was built for hookups and party pix. The people decided to use it to share and discuss news. Twitter was built to tell friends where you were drinking. The people decided to use it to share what they witness with the world, to discuss public policy, and to organize movements. Google was built to find web sites, not news, but it added the ability to find news when the people showed they wanted that. YouTube was built to stream silly videos. The people decided they would use it for everything from education to news. TikTok was built to lip-sync music. The people decided they would use it to mock the fool in the White House. 

In every case, media could have built what the platforms did. They could have provided people a place to share what they witness and discuss public issues; instead, they provided dark, dank, neglected corners in which to comment on the journalist’s content. They could have provided a place for communities to meet, gather together, to share, to assemble and act. They did not. They could have provided a place for creators to collaborate but instead they care only about their own creation. News media blew every opportunity. Their publics— their readers, viewers, listeners, users, customers — went elsewhere to take advantage of the power the internet offered them. Platforms shared that power with the public. Publishers did not. The platforms owe the publishers nothing. The publishers owe their publics apologies. 

Now, of course, cynical Murdoch and his media mates found an ideal foil in Mark Zuckerberg because, these days, nobody likes Mark, right? Why is that? In part, of course, it’s because Mark is incredibly rich and not terribly telegenic and because he cannot control the bucking bronco he is riding. But it is also because of media’s narrative about him: that he is suddenly the cause of societal ills that have been around since man learned to talk. Please keep in mind when you read media stories about Facebook that even if subconsciously, reporters are writing from a position of jealous conflict of interest. Murdoch, more than any publisher this side of Germany, has sicced his troops on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the internet, which they believe has robbed them of their manifest destiny and dollars. 

Necessary disclosure: Facebook has funded projects related to disinformation and news at my school, some of them reaching an end. I receive nothing personally from Facebook or any technology company, other than free drinks at the conferences they hold to help the news industry. I am accused of defending Facebook, though Facebook does always not make it easy to defend and I’m often critical of it. What I am defending is the internet and the power it gives citizens at last. What I am defending is the people’s press. 

I would like to hear First Amendment lawyers and scholars in the U.S. and human-rights advocates the world around defend the people’s press from attacks in the Philippines, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Hungary, Turkey, Belarus, Brazil — and in the United States and Australia. 

None of this is new. Every time there is a new technology that enables more people to speak, those who controlled the old technology — and the power it afforded — try to prevent the people they see as interlopers from sharing that power. It happened when scribe Filippo de Strata tried to convince the doge of Venice to outlaw the press and the drunken Germans who brought it to Italy. Princes tried to grant printing monopolies to allies. Popes and kings and autocrats of late banned and burned books and the people who wrote them. England had the Stationers Company license and censor authorized publishing. Charles II tried to close coffeehouses to shut off the discussion of news in them. American newspaper publishers tried to have new radio competitors banned from broadcasting news. Each time, eventually, they lost. For speech will out. 

Teapot and lid. Left side is marked “America: Liberty Restored” and right side is marked “No Stamp Act.” 2006.0229.01ab.

The post Attacks on the People’s Press appeared first on BuzzMachine.

The YouTube convention

Tragic circumstances forced them into it, but the Democrats created the first democratic convention, the convention for citizens.

It is the YouTube convention, with all the intimacy and directness the medium of the age demands: click on Michelle Obama and she speaks directly to you and no one else: not to a cheering crowd, the mass; not to delegates who are included through patronage and politics, to the exclusion of everyone else. YouTube is one of the mechanisms of the public conversation the internet provides and the Democrats had to learn how to use it.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump pines for the roaring crowd, the now extinct kind of convention that was an institution of television and mass media: the really big show, the firepit for enthusiasm and anger and, in its dying breath, authoritarian adulation. Now who’s going to sit home in front of a laptop chanting “Lock her up!”? Fools, that’s who.

The internet is far from finished. In this early phase, it has been built to speak — so, at long last, voices too long not heard in mass media finally have microphones of their own. I celebrate that. But the net has not yet been built to listen, to converse, to cooperate. TikTok, just a toy still, is the first net tool I’ve seen that’s designed for public collaboration, for taking someone else’s sound or video and responding or reinterpreting. It’s a start. It also befuddles Donald Trump as TikTok is not built for fanning hatred; this is why he hates it. On the prior net, on YouTube, in newspaper comments and forums, in Facebook and Twitter, what passes for conversation is reaction. And so this Democratic YouTube Convention will be an unfinished artifact of a transition out of Gutenberg’s age of hot text and McLuhan’s age of cool television, out of the primordial internet into the age of whatever’s next. [You can tell I’m working on a book.] This event is not a conversation, not yet. But moving down from the rostrum to the humble webcam forced the Democrats to speak eye-to-eye, at a human level, and to find something to say that is worth listening to. That can be the start of conversation.

The YouTube convention doesn’t supersede just the hoary delegates in the hall but also news media there: television and print. I say this, too, is a good thing. In years past, news organizations wasted huge money on institutional and individual ego, sending 15,000 journalists to “cover” the conventions where nothing happened that was not known and scripted. It was a show of access — of savvy, as Jay Rosen would say. The pols and the journalists put on shows for each other, not for the nation. The journalists and pols got to be inside and the rest of us were left out. They danced, pranced, pontificated, prognosticated, and predicted and never listened to us, the public. Now that’s over. Good riddance.

The Democrats have missed a few beats. I wish they put every single speech into their site and YouTube channel so we each could remix and share our own conventions the morning after. David Weinberger calls these Citizen Cuts. I wish they had invited YouTube videos from citizens to talk about the issues and expectations we have — messages produced by citizens, not producers. But still, it’s a start.

The post The YouTube convention appeared first on BuzzMachine.

The history of print, media & journalism in 45 minutes

Here is a video I made for all our incoming students at the Newmark Journalism School about the history of media and journalism. In years past, I’ve had the high honor an opportunity to brainwash the entire incoming classes in orientation, giving them some context, history, and theory of journalism. It is usually a string of all-morning discussions. But what with COVID, it was decided that this year, staring at my face for three hours straight would be inhuman, and so I recorded the substance of each session as a video for later discussion.

In this one, I start with movable type and cover a half-millennium of history, up through the creation of the newspaper, steam and the penny press and mass, the telegraph and broadcast.

I made other videos about the business of journalism and the role and goals of the journalist that I’ll post later.

The post The history of print, media & journalism in 45 minutes appeared first on BuzzMachine.

A few pandemic pivots

Here’s an update on an impressive pandemic-inspired pivot by Samir Arora’s Sage, the company I wrote about at the start of the year that is building what I hope is a next phase of the net: a expert-based web.

When the pandemic hit and travel was all but shut down I worried particularly about two friends’ businesses because each was centered on travel. One is Samir’s Sage, which was starting its expert network with expertise about destinations — hotels, restaurants, places. I’ll tell you how he reacted in a moment.

The other was Rafat Ali’s Skift, which covers the travel industry and built its business around in-person events: a double whammy. I interviewed Rafat for the Newmark J-School’s leadership program about the painful decisions he had to make to keep the business alive. I think you’ll find it informative. Since we had this conversation, Skift shifted to offer a daily news subscription service and Rafat now says “subscription-first is the path forward for us.”

Now to Samir and Sage. He has made his career building tools to support creation: When he was developing an early web-authoring tool, NetObjects Fusion, he gained much valuable experience using it to help my friend Rick Smolan put together his amazing A Day in the Life of America project. Glam, Samir’s later company, was inspired by putting together networks of bloggers to build their businesses; I blogged about that 13 years ago. His latest company, SagePlus for Experts, which I wrote about here, was about to go public with tools for experts in travel and food to build their online presences and businesses with networks around them.

Then: COVID.

Before the shutdown, Samir had been introduced by William Morris Endeavor to celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, who got excited about using Sage to build his digital presence — across books (he has one upcoming), restaurants, and events — and to amplify the voices of experts not heard in mainstream media.

In the pandemic, Samuelsson started working with celebrity chef and food philanthropist José Andrés on relief for communities and restaurant workers. Samuelsson’s CEO, Derek Evans, called Samir about a dozen weeks ago asking him to extend the Sage platform to handle charitable projects and contributions: a campaign management system. In no time, Samir’s team volunteered to make it happen and on July 18, they went public with a platform for Harlem Serves Up. In 24 hours, it handled an amazing $100,000 in contributions.

This became Project Bento, an end-to-end platform for campaigns, which now include also Black Businesses Matter; Hand in Hand, a Daniel Boulud Fund; and the Project Bento Fund, which in turn gives money to Citymeals on Wheels and World Central Kitchen, in addition to funds to support restaurant workers. As of this writing, the team has raised $5.1 million in donations to charities and to create meals. Individual donations go 100% to the charities.

So now the Sage platform has more capabilities. It already had the mechanisms for experts to be invited, invite others, and build online presences and apps with multiple business models. Now, because of Samuelsson, the platform has the means to support not-for-profit campaigns and contributions from large sponsors and individuals.

That work done, Sage is turning back to its launch. Now it will include not just travel experts but also authors, entertainers, and experts in other fields, verified by humans. I had wanted Samir to move past travel because the web needs to build mechanisms and institutions to discover and verify and support expertise: to pay for their work. That, as I said in my last post, is what I think the net needs next: platforms not just for speaking “but also for listening and finding that which is worth listening to, from experts and people with authority, intelligence, education, experience, erudition, good taste, and good sense.”

I will never say there is a silver lining to the dark and deadly cloud COVID has because of the venal negligence of the current American government. But I am impressed at the good people create in times of need: Samuelsson and Samir saw a need and built it.

The post A few pandemic pivots appeared first on BuzzMachine.

The time is now, cable news

I wrote this in preparation for joining Pete Dominick on his podcast today to talk about the need to schedule a daily show in prime time. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Joy Reid would finally take over Chris Matthews’ 7 p.m. time slot on MSNBC. As of the moment, nothing is official. So Pete and I went ahead with the discussion and I’m posting this:

What television should look like every day

My friend Pete Dominick and I have been banging the same drum over and over on social media and on his podcast: It is time — it is long overdue — for MSNBC and CNN to immediately devote at least one daily show each to the voices of African-Americans and other communities too long ignored. The reasons are many:

The most important story in this nation is racism and its unending impact. That is reason for a show.

The election this fall — the most critical election in more than a century — will be determined particularly by these voters, lead by African-American women. They must not be taken for granted by the Democrats, by fellow liberal voters, by candidates, or by cable news. They and their issues must be heard. That is reason for a show.

The lack of representation in American newsrooms — print, broadcast, online — is chronic and criminal and reparations need to be made. That is reason for a show.

The public has for too long not heard the voices of black Americans and that is why the mortal danger of living while black and the story of police violence and murder is a surprise to no African-American and to too many white Americans. That is reason for a show.

Brilliant voices in politics, civil society, education, science, the arts, and every sector of society are Black and Latino, LGBTQ, differently abled, immigrant and Muslim. That is the best reason for many a show.

Pete has been calling on both MSNBC and CNN to do better because he watches and appears on both.

Here I’ll focus on MSNBC because I watch it now pretty much every waking hour. I will also focus on Black voices because their issues are urgent. The network has a group of brilliant African-American people on its air, led by Joy Reid, whose show is better than any other at finding and booking people not seen elsewhere.

But they are all relegated too often to weekends, odd hours, and guest shots when they should have the prominence and due respect of a home in prime time. The moment Chris Matthews left his 7 p.m. timeslot, I expected MSNBC to give that time to a Black host: Joy Reid. I cannot understand why the network did not do that immediately.

I am not suggesting that one host will solve the problem. The weight of representing this huge part of America, of telling uncomfortable truths, of holding uncomfortable conversations should not fall on one person’s shoulders. This effort should bring many of the voices MSNBC already has — and many new voices — into a one show and many shows.

Let me name just some of names seen on MSNBC in addition to Joy Reid: Tiffany Cross. Eddie Glaude Jr. Maya Wiley. Yamiche Alcindor. Karine Jean-Pierre. Jonathan Capehart. Trymaine Lee. Al Sharpton. Malcolm Nance. Rashad Robinson. Eugene Robinson. Eugene Scott. Shermichael Singleton. Joshua Johnson. And where the hell have Jason Johnson and Elie Mystal been? Now is the time for their trenchant voices to be heard.

Some combination of those people in at least one show a day seven days a week — and then heard across every show on the network (starting at 8 every morning, please) — would be a start.

Now that television has learned that anyone can be on TV via a webcam from their homes, there is no longer an excuse to depend on a booker’s short list of people the network already knows well who can don a suit and get into a studio at any hour. Now TV can reach out and hear from new people everywhere, representing no end of diverse communities. The goal should be to radically diversify the voices heard.

And goals should be set. At the instigation of on-air host Ros Atkins, the BBC established its 5050 Equality Project, prodding shows to measure their performance in bringing women on the air with a goal of reaching parity with the population: 50 percent. At the Newmark J-School, we’ve signed on to the project and will bring further measures of diversity to the sourcing we teach our students. I would hope MSNBC and CNN would set their own goals.

I also hope they would be willing to be held accountable to these goals. I’d like to see the networks publish lists of their paid contributors and guests. I’d like to see them get so damned good at this that newspapers across the country do likewise.

Now is the time. It is long past time.

The post The time is now, cable news appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Journalism school: Why now?

Some of our amazing, innovative Social Journalism alumni from the Newmark J-School at CUNY are holding a Zoom call tonight to talk about the program and the work they’ve done because of it.

Given the state of the nation — and world — we have seen an upsurge in interest in #SocialJ and so we’ve just reopened admissions for the fall. Social Journalism could not be more relevant to the times.

I’ve spoken with some prospective journalism students lately who ask me whether this is the time they should come to school, or whether they should defer. My answer: If you wait a year, I think you’ll kick yourself.

In my life — and that’s a long time — I have never seen such a coming together of profound forces for change in society as we witness today. Systematic racism is exposed in glaring light no one can ignore any longer. That is for one thing because of the disproportionate and deadly burden on communities of color brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. And that is because police abuse is evident for all to see — not so much because of media’s cameras but because of the lens of the public, victims and witnesses, who can now share what they endure. It is thanks to the courage of a 17-year-old young woman who recorded the murder of George Floyd and posted it on Facebook that ignorance of police violence is no longer possible.

At the same time, of course, news media are challenged to their core. That is no reason to move away. That is a reason to move in. For as I tell our students every fall, it is their responsibility to reinvent and rebuild journalism, to take everything we teach and question it: How did we get here? Why do we do things this way (follow the money; follow the power)? What is the goal and reason of journalism? What are the ways we can now do it better?

Good God, if you want to change the world as a witness and participant, now is the time to do it.

Yes, it’s a tough time to go to school, as classes might start online or be interrupted. But when better to learn skills and confidence than in challenging times? Our students now will come out with untold resilience, with a need to be creative, with an ability to find new solutions, with strong motivation for their work. Lord, we need all that in the news business.

In Social Journalism, we — my brillant colleage Carrie Brown and the faculty she gathers in this program she directs — teach that journalism is not an industry with factories manufacturing a product called content to monetize with a commodity called attention. We teach that journalism is a service. I often teach the words of James Carey: “Republics require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places.” After a half-millenium of control by the gatekeepers of media, society is finally beginning to relearn how to hold a conversation with itself. So I redefined journalism and its mission: to convene communities to respectful, informed, and productive conversation. That’s what we do.

All our #SocialJ students select a self-defined community (not a mythical demographic like “millennial”) and first observe, listen to, empathize with, respect, and reflect the needs of that community before deciding what journalism can bring given all the new tools we have. See here a glimpse of the phenomenal, innovative work done by last year’s graduates.

We are heretics who are unafraid of examining how journalism can and should be advocacy for communities, for justice, for fairness, for science, for listening. Now is that time for that journalism, social journalism.

So come hear our alums talk about their experience (I’ll put up a link to the video here afterwards). It’s not a sales session. It is an event we long planned to show off their work. But given the intersection of circumstances — the challenges in society, the changes in prospective students’ lives, the reopening of our admissions — it’s a good time to hear what they have to say. (We will also have an information session for the school for veterans coming up on June 25 at 11 a.m. ET — sign up here.) Even if you don’t come to Newmark, if you are thinking of coming to school to come to journalism, my advice is that the time is now.

If you have questions, let me know. DM @jeffjarvis at Twitter.

The post Journalism school: Why now? appeared first on BuzzMachine.

The last stand of the old, white man

This piece was solicited by Ireland’s The Journal, asking essentially what the hell is happening in America. They first published the views of people of color, then ran mine yesterday.

What we are witnessing now in America is the last stand of the old, white man. 

Four years ago, when speaking to groups outside the United States, I would apologize for Donald Trump. It got a laugh, until it didn’t. As an American, I must still apologize for what Trump has done to my country and what my country has done to the world by electing him. As an old, white man, I must confess it is people like me who got us here.

America’s paradoxes have come home to roost. Ours is a nation of freedoms built on the slavery and undervalued labor and lives of black people. Ours is a nation of equal opportunity that exploits the inequality of people of color and immigrants, of the poor. 

The nation’s systemic racism has always been there, of course, but it becomes sorely evident in times of crisis. The COVID pandemic has disproportionately harmed communities of color — killed them — because as a group they have worse health care. Many of them are the “essential workers” doing thankless jobs, exposed to the virus every day. Many are poor people who cannot afford to lock down at home; they must work to eat. Too many of them lost their jobs. In my city, New York, they disproportionately live in crowded housing and must take long rides on contaminated subways to work and when they get sick the hospitals in their communities are underfunded and overcrowded. 

Once it became clear that people of color and old people were COVID’s primary victims, calls came to reopen the economy, as if to say: These people do not matter. 

And in the midst of that crisis, once again, a black man, George Floyd, was murdered by police for the crime of being black. Any African-American can tell you that they and particularly their young men live in peril every day of a white person calling the police on them for shopping, eating, walking, even bird-watching while black — and that the arrival of police can, as in the case of George Floyd, be a death sentence. 

This everyday danger became evident with social media and the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #LivingWhileBlack. It was not evident in mass media because those communities and their stories were sinfully underrepresented in newspapers and their newsrooms. And so, as an old, white journalist and editor myself, my confession continues. 

I was raised in the sixties and I feel as if I am reliving them — with reruns of political turmoil, racial strife, riots, police abuses, even a rocket launch — and we have learned no lessons in between. 

As a child of those sixties, I was raised to believe in a colorblind America, in the great melting pot. I did not learn until much later how wrong and racist that presumption was: that the nation would reach racial harmony once the others acted like us, like the white majority (although we would do everything not to let them). 

Soon, by 2050, the white majority in America faces the reality that it will become the white minority and that scares them. The most frightened are the uneducated, old, white men who hold privilege and power and realize how tenuous that hold is because it is based on what they had in the past — who they are — rather than what they contribute to the future — what they can do. These are the people who formed the concrete core of Trump’s so-called base. They exploited an unrepresentative democracy designed to protect slave states — in the institutions of the American Electoral College and Senate — to get Trump elected, to get old and white men to rule the Senate, and to fill our courts for a generation to come with their judges. It will take generations to undo their damage and even if we do, we’re only back at square one: at an America still undergirded by systemic racism. 

The author and Professor Ibram X. Kendi argues in his book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” that the opposite of a racist is not someone who claims to be not a racist but instead someone who fights racism, who is anti-racist. We need to become anti-racist in every American institution, starting with the political. 

In this election, I first supported Sen. Kamala Harris. I was ashamed to see how political media all but erased her candidacy, for she is African-American and a woman. Then I supported Sen. Cory Booker, who is black. Then I supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is a woman. Now I am supporting former Vice President Joe Biden, who is an old, white man. He’s a good man. I pray for his election.

The only way Biden will win is if African-American women and men, Latinas and Latinos,  the disenfranchised and the educated of this country come out to vote and fight for this change. He cannot take these constituents for granted. As Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., just said on TV, the scale of Biden’s response must meet the scale of the problem. 

He must promise them a new America — not a return to any old America. He must offer a nation truly, finally built on freedom, opportunity, and equality with institutions — government, education, health care, employment — that right systemic wrongs. As an old, white man, I must learn how to share, to give up my power and privilege to those who have been deprived of them. 

I pray for the president who follows Biden to lead this work, to finally end what we have now: the tyranny of the privileged, entitled, scared, angry, racist, fascist, old, white man, Donald Trump and those he represents.  

The post The last stand of the old, white man appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Mark Zuckerberg: Now is the time for your Oversight Board

Like Mark Zuckerberg, I defend freedom of expression. Two days ago, I wrote this post about the value of hearing many voices, about history’s lessons regarding the protection of speech.

But Donald Trump’s unfettered use of Facebook to sow division and encourage violence is not a matter of freedom of expression. There is no requirement that Facebook be his platform for noxious speech. This is a question of what Facebook stands for and what Mark Zuckerberg stands for. As I have asked before, what is Facebook’s North Star? Why does it exist?

Now is the moment for Facebook to convene its new Oversight Board — or for that board to convene itself to deliberate the issues raised and standards required to address this challenge. I don’t care that the systems and bureaucracy are not in place. This is urgent. Get on Zoom. If this independent Board does not meet on this issue of all issues, then why does it exist?

The Board has 20 smart and experienced members: leaders in freedom of expression and human rights, a former prime minister, a former Guardian editor (my friend, Alan Rusbridger), a Nobel prize winner. I would make a bad member of the Board (I was not asked) for if I were there I would be doing just what I am doing here: arguing in public for a public discussion at this critical time to deliberate Facebook’s public responsibility.

The Board isn’t necessary to do that. Facebook’s employees are starting to rise up to make their dissent heard. Zuckerberg can decide on his own or with the help of his Oversight Board, his employees, his users, and the public. But he can no longer not decide.

What is that decision? Perhaps to illustrate the choice it’s easier to take this out of the high-minded realm of freedom of expression and democracy, for that is where the company trips over itself. If Facebook did not exist tomorrow, we would find other ways to express ourselves.

Instead, try thinking of Facebook as a dinner at Mark Zuckerberg’s house. Let’s say that Donald Trump shows up. Donald starts insulting the other guests, shouting that he will bring violence down upon the heads of people who criticize him; blaming the troubles in this country on the Chinese; insulting African-Americans by insisting racists like them; attacking the journalists in the room, shouting that they’re all fake and enemies of the people. What is the host to do — and Mark Zuckerberg is undoubtedly the host? I would expect a host to ask rude Donald to leave. What are the guests to do? I would leave and never return.

So I repeat: Why does Facebook exist? Does it not have a vision for a better neighborhood, a connected world? How does it ever get there if it does not set an example? Does it have no norms of respectfulness? I don’t mean its statutes, its community standards; I mean an ethic, a moral foundation.

In disclosure, Facebook has contributed to my school to undertake various activities, including supporting others’ work around disinformation (I receive nothing personally from Facebook). I advocate that the news industry should work with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other technology companies because I do not believe we can go our own way anymore; that is the path to obscurity. I defend the platforms against ill-conceived regulation for I worry about its impact on the net and our freedoms there. I think of myself as a defender of speech and thus a friend of the internet. Others call me a friend of the platforms. OK, then, friends tell friends when they’re screwing up. I’ve done that before and I’ll do it now.

Facebook: It is time to listen to friends and foes and reconsider what you are here to do. It is time to stop hiding behind freedom of expression, especially as Donald Trump threatens that very freedom. It is time to have the courage to stand for something. What do you stand for?

I was glad that Medium killed an ill-informed post about COVID by an armchair epidemiologist. I support Twitter’s decisions to begin to add warnings to, not promote, and add fact-checking to Donald Trump’s tweets. Those are just starts, but they are starts. I will not let Google off the hook, for YouTube has much to do as well.

Facebook needs to take a stand against Donald Trump’s racism, incitement, and lies. It cannot stand apart any longer. Our nation is burning. Yes, I am saying this now that it’s my nation on fire. Should I have raised my voice sooner and louder when other nations burned: Myanmar, the Philippines? Yes.

What do I want Facebook to do? Not much, actually. I don’t think Facebook should necessarily kill Trump’s account, for Zuckerberg has a point that citizens should see what their head of state is saying. I don’t think the internet is media nor do I believe that Facebook is a publisher or editor responsible for his words; I say it’s pointless to fact-check Trump. What I do want is for Facebook to separate itself from his vile behavior. Facebook should say: We do not agree. We do not approve. We say this is wrong.

If it does not, by its silence and with its power, it endorses what Trump is saying and becomes his willing agent — every bit as much as when a major newspaper quotes Trump’s posts and tweets without telling its users when he is lying and calling on his racist allies, and every bit as much as Republicans enabling him for their ends.

Trump attacked women and you did not protest. Trump went after immigrants and you did not stop him. Trump came for African-Americans and you stood back. Now Trump is coming for you, technology companies. He is attacking Section 230, the best protection we have for the freedom of expression you all say you hold dear. Will you stand up for that and your users? That should be easy. Will you then stand up for your users who are women and immigrants and African-American? What will you stand for?

The post Mark Zuckerberg: Now is the time for your Oversight Board appeared first on BuzzMachine.