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Yet what we know about blogging is that it is highly decentralized and while parts of the network will certainly be organized by Nick and Jason’s companies many projects have to take root for a richly varied media to thrive. Their ethics are important examples, but they must not be the rule.
The economics of a blog-based media—though I don’t advocate a blogs-only approach at all, but for sake of the argument will use the phrase here—are susceptible to lightweight infrastructures, as well. For example, Bill Gross has introduced what, to today’s media giants, is surely a frightening level of transparency in his startup search engine company. He shows how much revenue is collected daily. A collective effort to produce civic journalism can operate in the open and everyone involved can see the economic progress they are making. If you can show individual contributors, such as editors, writers, photographers and videographers that they are helping to create something big, they will work for very little in exchange for a small share of ownership—Wired proved this, without providing any accountability whatsoever, in the mid-90s—and a significantly increased level of editorial control.
I’ve been reading Christopher Alexander’s four-volume The Nature of Order, which is about creating a living architecture (buildings, not information technology). There’s so much to his work that it would be impossible to summarize (though it is by his publisher here), but the richness of the living designs he uses as examples throughout the book are the result of real craftspeople working over long periods of time to produce structures that engage people, enhance their lives and enable their work, spirituality and pleasure through its interaction with them. As I think about the journalistic structure awaiting catalysis, it seems that the thing will begin simply and become incredibly deep or complex, even when they are simple, because they are full of life. Fractal would be the pop cultural way of describing it, but that discounts the importance of managing—architecting—what will be built.
As Jay Rosen has written, journalism is a kind of religion staffed by believers. What is wrong with a committee to oversee the entire range of blog ethics is that it immediately becomes a rigid infrastructure, a kind of theology instead of the living spiritual process that Alexander describes in living architecture. The current diverse and contentious debate is a source of liveliness that can prevent a new journalism from taking on the stultifying sameness of the mass media. Layers of journalistic experience, ethical decisions and business experiments can add up to something greater, something alive. We ought to accept that mistakes will be made and learn to live with a process that is ever-improve through debate. So, no committee, but a metalogue should be organized and we should begin to record the lessons learned, the ethical lapses and successes. If we can embrace some uncertainty, we might just pull off something extraordinary.]]>
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Microsoft's blogging tool
<![CDATA[Since everyone else is talking about it, here’ s what I had to say over at the Herring.]]>
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Just hold it in
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A day after World AIDS Day, when Africa began an “abstain or die” campaign to convince people not to exercise their biological imperative because funding isn’t available to distribute condoms and other preventative technology to stop the spread of AIDS, we learn the federal government is lying to and scaring kids in U.S. abstinence programs. According to the Washington Post:
Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.
Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
The report also found kids are instructed about the consciousness of a fetus that establishes personhood almost at conception, that sweat can pass the AIDS virus (so much for heavy petting!) and that women who get abortions are more prone to suicide (they’re not).
I don’t think anyone will simply abstain from physical contact and, frankly, if our kids aren’t exploring one another’s bodies even a little bit (“If you cop a feel, you’re getting a handful of AIDS!”) they are going to be very unhappy adults. It’s ludicrous to suggest that young Americans, along with the entire African sub-continent just abstain from having sex. The reasonable thing to do would be to provide prophylactics and real education designed to let people decide for themselves based on the facts whether or when they want to have sex.
The Bush Administration may not enjoy a good lay, but almost everyone else does, and the Bushies have to come to terms with that reality if W doesn’t want to leave a legacy of increasing AIDS infection. Though, perhaps they do, since it seems to be their opinion that it serves people right for their decadent lifestyles.]]>
<![CDATA[If this is a growing economy, why are the signals so mixed. Having celebrated a slight decrease in unemployment—as if the holidays don't usually create short-term work for a lot of folks—unemployment claims jumped ahead of schedule, because sales aren’t living up to expectations. Retail sales show all the signs of a very mediocre year-end for physical retail as more buyers turn to the Net to avoid lines, but there’s no real growth because the cost of stuff from much of the world is higher due to the lagging dollar (weighed down by our trade and federal deficits). Only luxury retailers, who benefit from the rich getting far richer in relation to the rest of us, are having a notably better Christmas sales. Factory orders are up only because of Defense Department purchases of fighter aircraft (buying Boeing at $33 was a good idea).
This is the Bush economic program in action. With Bushies already lobbying to push the pathetic John Snow out of the Department of Commerce in favor of an even greater toady, it will only get worse. We’re getting what we voted for, folks. In a word: Reamed.]]>
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The good Rev. AKMA has a few words on the temptation to transgress and the value of personal choice.
The argument that intrigues me most is the suggestion that the subsidy creates a questionable “temptation to transgress” — that’s a beautiful point, and I’m attracted to it for heavy theological reasons. Still, what kind of commercial relationship doesn’t entail such a temptation? What relationship of trust doesn’t involve a potential temptation? And what online relationship doesn’t entail potentially corruptive elements? Am I working on this topic, perhaps, thinking that I can win some hot links out of the discussion, or out of the hope that Marc Canter will recommend my twenty readers as a sound investment for Marqui’s next round of subsidies?
I wonder about the creation of temptation being evil. I know it was represented that way in the Bible, but we create choices for ourselves all the time and if capitalism is about anything it’s about creating and making choices. It seems to me that the choice about how to treat the sponsorship is where the ethical line will be crossed or not. I mean, for example, that I believe most of us here, were we employed at Google would have quit before we censored our news aggregator in order to reach a Chinese reader, leaving no one any choices other than the approved one. Marqui put no conditions on the sponsorship other than that it establishes a certain periodicity for mentioning the company, and it is up to us how we do that. I intend to write variations on “Thanks for the sponsorship, check them out so they see the value in continuing to sponsor this blog, decide for yourselves,” as, indeed, I just did.
What we’re seeing is some diversity in the way people are going to do it. I think it’s good that we see diversity in even a little experiment like this. Rather proves the individuality of blogs. Not everyone will do the right thing, but some will—I believe I will—and the whole experiment will not be a failure if one person or five prove to be corrupted by money, which is an interpretation of AKMA’s argument. Comes down to choices of and by one.
Or, to put it another way, in the Lemur we trust.]]>
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Thanks, Marqui
<![CDATA[Okay, it's Thursday and this is the first of my weekly postings thanking Marqui for its sponsorship of this blog. I appreciate that they can get behind the wide-ranging subjects that I talk about and I hope you’ll check out their communications management system for the enterprise, because it would be great to have the checks keep coming.]]>
<![CDATA[Lots of good stuff floating around the issue of collaborative editing, which I wrote about yesterday….
Steve Outing has a long and thoughtful piece at Editor & Publisher on the various civic journalist projects going on in newspapers. I particularly like his subhead “It takes a village, and an editor.”
Colin Brayton chimes in at theredactor (The Red Actor, but in this case, the condensed name is most fitting):
Editors are just people trying to figure out what other people need and want to know, and filtering raw data accordingly. We strive to give as full a picture as possible so you’ll turn to our rag first, but it’s an ideal, not really an achievable goal. Really, in the fifteen minutes you have to absorb news, you don’t want everything, you want the important part. And some parts will be more important to some people than they will to others. Still, the more input into the system, the closer we can get to all the news that’s fit to print. That’s why I set up a del.icio.us blog as a model for collective brainstorming for our little operation. No one uses, it of course: We are small enough to just yell things across the room, and journos are a bunch of Luddites, but I find it very useful and try to leverage it to expand my own consciousness of what’s going on, anyhow.
OhMyNews, the Korean citizen journalism company that has become the fifth largest media source in the country is mentioned by several folks. They pay a few bucks for most articles and a professional staff of 38 (only 15 edit full time while the others research and write features) edits and places the stories on sites and on television. OhMyNews is making its first profit this year—all of about $325,000, but that’s remarkable given it was invented from whole cloth. It’s the model we’ve had in mind for Correspondences.org for a long time, though we found out about OhMyNews after we launched, but, so far, the Google ads aren’t even covering the hosting costs….
OhMyNews works because of the selectivity Colin describes, it lends clarity in the midst of the action, which is why every redaction is a value judgment that needs to be considered carefully before and after the fact, so that the process improves. Simply throwing more people at the challenge of covering the news isn’t sufficient to create useful information that people can use in their decision making.]]>