Story in CJR on weblogs, credibility and Jayson Blair

Very interesting but the author obviously has not read McLuhan and does not understand what the Internet has done, by in large.

We are engaged in a conversation in a village. We are a community. We were not observers. We were participants. We are not ‘users’. We are ‘cool’… in a McLuhanisque and not hip sense.

It’s great to see B2I make the CJR — folks outside of journalism may not realize it’s importance. So I am glad for Chris!

But I still don’t understand how the Times (my home page and now delivered right to my doorstep here in Cowlumbus Ohio… we ain’t all yokels west of the river ‘-) decided to end toe-tapping (or whatever it’s called) because people had the Internet…. maybe I missed something on my readthru. Oh well… At least Chris has a job!!

(…and it’s in the Village and not in Times Sq :-)

Interesting piece — some really neat

points in there, and I liked his historical

sweep. Didn’t know that stuff about the

origins of paid-for reports! But he didn’t

seem to grasp the idea that although the

readers paid for Chris to go to Iraq, the

news wasn’t limited to them, as it would

have been back in the 18th century; the whole

point about the Internet is its global reach.

Indeed, an interesting point of contact

here would have been the open-source

movement — where a bunch of people donate

their valuable time in coding, bugchecking,

and documenting, so that everyone worldwide

can have free software, even if they

themselves haven’t donated or contributed

to it. That sort of social contract is at

least as illustrative of what’s going on

with B2I and other blograising initiatives.

By the way, I’ve invited Jay to pop in and interact with readers of his story about the interaction between journalists and readers. It’s a highly recursive idea, and I hope he goes for it.

By the way, my job at NYU is adjunct assistant professor, teaching Digital Journalism, in case anyone was wondering. For the moment, it’s for the fall semester only.

With the election of Ronald Reagan, my

employer, LA County Probation Dept. had its

budget cut in half. At the time I was in a

Master’s program toward a degree in Juvenile

Corrections. Realizing that this idea was a

dead-end street, I switched majors. One of

the classes I took was an Introduction to

Journalism, something I’m still interested

in. At the time, the Gannett machine was

buying up independent rags with a vengance.

It didn’t take me long to recognize the

direction of the class - everyone was begin

encouraged to write in the same style,

complete with the requisite grammar. Other

forces made it necessary for me to stop my

studies in the middle of that semester.

Now that all the national media is of one

voice (the company line), I’m glad those

outside forces took me out of that class. I

shudder to think that I’d be sounding like

everyone else. To that end, I unabashedly

offer ISBN 0-595-26165-5 at Amazon.com to

those who would like to read something a

little bit different.

I was very glad (and still am) to be able to read my news from people who are there on the ground in Iraq. I feel like I have a better sense of what is going on by reading the accounts from people like Chris and the soldier bloggers I read. Mainstream media gives out the Official Story that comes via press release. A person can go to several big-name sources and get the same story, frequently with the same wording. I don’t feel like I am getting the whole story, but just that part which someone else feels I should know. Things that are too controversial are not printed for fear it would upset the administration or the all-powerful advertisers. Journalism like Chris’ write the unvarnished truth that you cannot find anywhere else. It allows a person to read between the lines of the Official Story. I hope that this new trend of journalism continues to grow. I don’t like to think that the information flow is being censored by those with power and influence. I want the truth, the whole truth, ad nothing but the truth. Chris brought us that. We were able to learn many things never touched on by mainstream media. Through him we were allowed a view into the lives of the people who were directly affected by the war and how they felt about it. It was raw and uncensored. It was truth. That is what I look for when I read the news. Thank you Chris for taking the journey for all of us. You risked life and limb to get the real story, the story behing the story. We appreciate your efforts. Good job.

Well, it turns out I have read McLuhan (did a master’s thesis on him, in fact) and I think I know what he meant by the Global Village, and can certainly see how the Net helps bring that about. Jim asks: How does the Internet force the Times to end the dubious practice of the “toe touch?” It doesn’t, directly. My point was that the Internet is part of—a big part of—a culture of scrutiny, transparency and interaction with the public, which the Times cannot escape. That climate is what puts an end to the toe touch.

What I was trying to do in this article is say that the Internet is giving rise to an “interactive age,” which affects all media and all media professionals—whether they do hip Net journalism or traditional dead tree journalism—by empowering the audience and changing observers into participants. It’s a classic McLuhan-like observation.

Clive: I could have made more of the open source parallel, yes. I did, however, write this: “Here you have a journalist collecting his own mini-public, a few thousand people on the Web, who then send him to report on events of interest to the entire world, via a medium that reaches the entire world.”

Back-to-Iraq, I might also have mentioned, participates in what is sometimes called the “gift economy,” so different from the exchange economy that Microsoft and MSNBC take for granted. Here is an article on it noting that “the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code” are a prime example of the “gift culture” in action. So, I would say, were the contributors to Chris Allbrittons’s Iraq venture. Cheers, people.

http://futurepositive.synearth.net/stories/storyReader$223

Does anyone know how to email the author of http://ishtartalking.blogspot.com/ ? I admire the writing, but it hasn’t been updated for awhile, and I can find no way on the site to email the person…

It is hard to tell who of today’s minds will be well thought of in 500 years. (Pepys sure didn’t like Shakespeare - “…the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life” - Sep 29, 1662) But I suspect Marshall McLuhan will be one of those. Good to see Chris is consorting with folks who recognize genius! ;-)

To further illustrate the ‘gift’ economy, this site itself is made possible by the MovableType software.

Another point on the basic themes, a lot of the feedback Chris got while he was in Northern Iraq was personal — watch out and be careful kinda stuff. I never cared if someone took potshots at Dan Rather but this style of journalism tended to make all of us personally attached. It really is a ‘word of mouth’ activity. Part of this comes from being a small group. Part comes from the interractive nature of the group.

Lawrence Lessig says he gets much of his real knowledge and ideas from reading blogs. The blog aspect may be more important than the hired-intelligencer aspect. I thought the Times reporter in downtown Bagdad gave some of the most compelling descriptions of the final days of the active fighting… but he had no blog so I didn’t integrate him into my life and don’t even remember his name. (Too bad, it was Pulitzer class coverage.)