October 30, 2006
In the first sentence of Geneva Overholser's On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto For Change she writes:
Journalism as we know it is over.
This week at the Huffington Post she fairly begs for citizen help, but read my italicized sentence to understand why she and the mainstream media folks are adrift:
Please meet me there, oh fellow citizen of this unsettling time, at my immodestly named Manifesto, and check out those Action Steps. Typical of us legacy-media types, we haven't quite gotten our site interactive yet, but we will, very soon. We'll be posting progress along these various paths. We'll need your views on the action steps we've thought of, and your suggestions for others. I hope you'll join us.
Geneva, the problem isn't that the legacy-media types haven't quite gotten their site interactive yet, but that they have not gotten their minds interactive yet. And I am afraid your manifesto is in some ways clueless.
Yes, it does a good job at defining the woes as in this sentence:
Don Hewitt, until recently of 60 Minutes, has said that when he got into the business as a young producer, the ethic was "Make us proud." Today, it's "Make us money."
To me the problem with the manifesto is that it grew out of a gathering of the bishops of the high church of journalism with a couple of dissidents like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, but mostly it was the elite, saying things like "journalists need to reinvent their social contract with the public."
But then in its 50 or so action steps under the Role of Public, it lists these five bullet points:
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pressure colleges to require civics education
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push for more courses in news literacy, First Amendment
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support news media in schools
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expand Sunshine Week activities, move from annual to greater frequency
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create and distribute field guides for news consumers
As I said clueless. Look at them. They are all top down, dictates from bishops using words like: pressure, push, support, expand, create, distribute. Here is an insight I posted earlier this week from blogger Glenn Reynolds:
the secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do, rather than trying to get them to do what you want to do.
I have just started reading a MacArthur Foundation report that addresses participatory culture in education. Every K-12 educator should read it, but for our purposes and for Geneva's read this from The Future of Independent Media as excerpted in the report:
The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course.This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.
I don't want to finish by just being critical. That's too easy. I want to provide a suggestion. The LA Times has sent a team of reporters to investigate the changing media landscape. A good idea. Here is another. Kick a group of journalists out of the newsroom and tell them to get 100 percent active in the participatory culture. Join MoveOn.org, write for Wikipedia, hang out in MySpace and Facebook, get an avatar at Second Life, sell stuff at eBay and make videos for YouTube. Do it all with passion, not as a dispassionate observer. Then come back to the newsroom and figure out how being a member of that participatory culture relates to you as a journalist, or using the words of the Newspaper Next folks, as an information provider.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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