On Journalism and Principles

Thirteenth in the News Commons series.

I grabbed the spottedhawk.org domain after hearing Garrison Keilor read this passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself over Leo Kottke improvising on guitar:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Most of what I do is in deficient obedience to Whitman’s spotted hawk. Including this blog.

Early in this millennium, when it was as easy to blog as it later was to tweet, I blogged constantly. The stretch from 1999 to 2007 was blogging’s golden age, though we didn’t know it at the time. (My blog from that time is archived at weblog.searls.com.) My blog then was a daily journal, and in a literal way that made me even more of the journalist I had always been.

On that career side, I was also employed for all that time by Linux Journal. My name was on its masthead for twenty-four years, from 1996 to 2019. When LJ was sold at the end of that stretch, I left as editor-in-chief. After that, I was the host of FLOSS Weekly on the TWiT network. Both were paid gigs, and when the FLOSS Weekly gig ended last December, so did my long career in journalism.

And maybe that happened just in time, because journalism has since then acquired a taint. In this past weekend’s  Cornerstone of Democracy newsletter, Dan Gillmor sources Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo on the topic:

I guess I would say that as journalists our core mission is fundamental honesty with readers. That means always telling readers the truth, an accurate story as nearly as we are able to uncover it and understand it, as well as being transparent with the values, commitments and core beliefs we bring to the work we do. We believe in always being fair to everyone and everything we write about. Fairness is really only another permutation of accuracy. Balance is a construct applied after the fact that is often as not at odds with accuracy. A belief in democratic republicanism or civic democracy has always been at the core of what we do. It’s central to what stories we choose to focus on, it’s a value structure that permeates our organizational approach to what we do. I can’t speak for everyone at TPM. But as founder and still a guiding light, I think our understanding of what journalism is or should be is inextricably connected with democratic republicanism/civic democracy. I don’t think I would say we’re activists for democracy. But to me being on the side of civic democracy is inextricably connected to what we do and who we are. We’re on the side of civic democracy as much as we’re on the side of journalism.

I don’t want to label other journalists. But to the extent many other journalists don’t operate in this way, or understand their job this way, it’s because they work for publications whose business models simply aren’t compatible with this approach to journalism. What we now commonly call “both-sidesism” is rooted in the business structure of most contemporary journalism, specifically the need to have purchase across of wide ideological spectrum of the population.This is especially so in large corporate journalism because the need for scale and advertiser buy-in really requires that access to all parts or most parts of the political spectrum. In a hyperpolarized political culture when one side veers off the democratic rail that inevitably pulls a lot of that kind of journalism with it. I see that as fundamentally a structural reality. This goes back many decades, long before the current moment. It was more workable in a different political climate. But in this one that’s how it works. Journalists think they’re following core journalistic principles. But it’s driven really by business models.

That’s why now I just call myself a writer. Or a photographer.† Unless it’s to write a book (which typically pays little or nothing), to be a paid journalist today requires frequent or constant production of “content.” But I’d rather yawp, like I am now, here, or over at ProjectVRM, TrunkLine (a blog on infrastructure), or Customer Commons (which will in the next year become more important than everything else I’m doing).

All three of those involve work, but don’t pay. Same goes for serving as Chief Intention Officer of Kwaai.ai, a commuity of 600+ volunteers working on personal AI. (Check it out. Good stuff going on there.)

But before I give up on the journalist label, let’s ask Perplexity.ai* to answer What is the purpose of journalism? Here’s the answer I just got:

Based on the search results, the primary purpose of journalism can be summarized as follows:

To provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society. This is considered the central purpose of journalism.To inform the public about current events, issues, and developments happening in their communities and around the world.To serve as an independent monitor of power and act as a watchdog over those in positions of authority.To provide a forum for public criticism, debate, and compromise on important issues.To convey context and help citizens understand the significance of events.To set the tone for public discourse and help define community goals and values.To empower citizens to make informed decisions about their lives and society.To facilitate democratic processes by educating voters and inspiring civic engagement.To support commerce by creating awareness about products and services.To drive cultural transformation by connecting people to communities and ideas beyond their immediate surroundings.

Journalism is considered essential because it helps citizens navigate their lives, make important decisions, and participate effectively in democratic societies. It serves as a crucial source of verified information in an increasingly complex world, helping to separate fact from fiction and provide context to current events.

Is that what journalists are doing today? Was it ever? Really? All of it?

I don’t know. Mostly journalists write stories. If you’ve read Where Journalism Fails, or Stories vs. Facts, you know I think the story-telling imperative has its own problems.

Back in the early ’90s, when I was doing PR for a hot Silicon Valley startup, I asked a top reporter at one of the tech magazines why he didn’t want to see my client’s brilliant and charismatic marketing director. The reporter said, “He abuses the principle of instrumentality.” When I pressed the reporter to expand on that, he explained that everyone involved knows that reporters are used as instruments by whoever spins them. The “principle of instrumentality” is about knowing, and trying to ignore, the simple fact that journalism is instrumented in many ways. While Josh Marshall talks above about the instrumenting of journalism by business models, in this reporter’s case, it was by the persuasive charisma of a strong personality who wanted positive coverage.

I realized then that I wasn’t being hired at the same magazine, or at any publication before Linux Journal (and I pitched many) was that I didn’t want to be an instrument. More specifically, they all wanted me to write about what I called “vendor sports.” “Apple vs. Microsoft,” for example.  I wanted to write about interesting stuff without favor to anybody or anything other than what seemed right, important, fun, or just interesting. Vendor sports wasn’t it for me. Nor was any of the other usual stuff. Linux was a cause, however, so I worked to make my Linux Journal writing as non-evangelical as possible, though I did get credited with helping put both Linux and open source on the map.

Was I a journalist while working as an editor there? I suppose so, given that my work hit at least some of the ten items above. At least I thought of myself that way.

A difference today is that we are all both digital and physical beings. Here in the digital world (where I am now), anybody can publish anything, on many different platforms, including their own if they’re geeky enough to make that work. According to the Podcast Index, there are 4,262,711 podcasts right now. Instagram has over two billion users. Says here there are over three billion blog posts published every year, and over six hundred million active bloggers. (I suppose I am three of them.) The same piece says “Over 90% of blog posts receive zero traffic.” Many of those blogs are faked-up, of course, but it’s still clear that the world of online publishing is a red ocean, while Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and the like are more like small rivers or bays than one blue ocean. (Links in that last sentence go to my tiny presence in each. I’m also still on Xitter and Linkedin, for what those are worth.)

So now I’m thinking about what principles, old and new, work in the digital media environment and not so much in the old analog one.

Here’s one: We’re past the era of “What’s on.”** Unless it’s a live sport or some other kind of scheduled must-see or must-hear event, you can catch it later, on your own time.

Here’s another: We don’t have to fill time and space with a sum of “content.” Really, we don’t. Yes, it helps to have a schedule and be predictable. But it’s not necessary. Especially if you’re being paid little or nothing.

Here’s another: The challenge now is building and maintaining an archive of facts, and not just of stories. I’ve written about this elsewhere in this series. Go look it up.

Another:  Try to grab as many of those facts as you can before and after they turn into stories or don’t. This is what calendars are for. Even if nothing comes out of a meeting or an event that appears on a calendar, it’s good to know that something happened. And to archive that as well.

I also believe both of those principles are easiest to apply in local contexts, simply because there is a relatively finite sum of facts to work with locally, and facts still matter there. (Scott Adams tells us they don’t in the wider world. And he has a case.)

This is one reason I’m embedded in Bloomington, Indiana. We’re working on all that stuff here.

† My photos here and here on Flickr have about twenty millon views so far. The last peak was five thousand on Sunday. The top attraction that day was this shot of Chicago I got on a cross-country flight between Phoenix and Boston in 2011. That one photo has logged 26,159 views so far. All my photographs are CC-licensed and free to use, which is why over 4,000 of them are in Wikimedia Commons, a library of images used in Wikipedia. So thousands of those (it’s hard to tell exactly how many) end up in Wikipedia. Many more accompanying news stories, such as this one from Lawrence, Mass, this one from a power plant, this one from a lithium mine, and all these from Chicago. And I put none of them in either Wikimedia Commons or Wikipedia. Other people do that. I just put the photos out there. Meanwhile, this blog maxed at a little over 300 views one day last week, but usually gets a dozen or so. My old blog ran at about five thousand a day, and sometimes ten times that many. To bring this back to a theme of this post, while I do a lot of photography, I don’t think of myself as a photographer. I take pictures. And I write. And I talk some. All for the same purpose: to be useful, and to make stuff happen. Good stuff, hopefully.

By the way, the bird at the top is a juvenile red-tailed hawk. There is no one species called a spotted hawk, so this one will have to do. I shot this bird a couple of months ago, perched on a 480-volt line in the alley behind our house in Bloomington, Indiana. I was looking to hear a barbaric yawp, but he, or she, failed me on that one.

*I first asked ChatGPT 4o and got a cliché’d answer with no sources. Perplexity gave me a longer answer, just as cliché’d, but with eight sources. For fun, go ask both and see what you get. Try Claude and Gemini too. No two will be the same. Some will be better, some worse.

**I’ve written about this, but haven’t published it yet. Stay tuned.