Reading the above post and watching the short clip, another voice — independent from me — is helping illustrate why the occupy movement is the shark that corporate journalism jumped in 2011.

Transparency is killing old-school journalism. Old school journalists aren’t really becoming more transparent, despite all the consulting, advice and the movement of society using online and social media to be more open and sharing. But regardless of the journalists, the rest of the world is becoming more transparent because the Internet gives us all the ability to share and be heard. Against this context of so many voices and so much information, it becomes painfully obvious when the news media is getting it wrong.

In the instance of the occupy movement, which was instantiated and is organized online and is essentially a prolonged meetup of many intersecting social media spheres of concerned citizens, the record is transparent online and completely accesible. There are lots of voices. There are lots of people watching. They’re all detecting that the mainstream corporate-owned media are not covering and have not covered this movement in any accurate way. It is even more obvious that many outlets are acting obtuse or misinforming or outrightly attacking it.

Other journothinkers are in agreement that transparency is the new objectivity, and more and more are coming around. For a long time, it seemed only Jay Rosen and I were talking about it. For years, I’ve been counseling the journalism establishment to becoming more transparent and asking them how they reconcile the ideological and philosophical conflicts in their ethic of objectivity – which is impossible to achieve and corrupt in all modes of practical implementation.

Journalists have to lie to themselves to be able to say they are objective, and they lie to their readers. You can’t be in the trust business when you start your conversation on this premise.

The old school journalist world view:

1. First, journalists said the Internet was a fad.
2. Then they said it wasn’t as good as traditional media.
3. Then they blamed it for killing their business.
4. Then they said it killed the truth and you don’t know who to trust online.

Surprise, this is the reality:

1. The Internet is a massive technological innovation, an impetus for a paradigm shift that has completely changed forever the means of production and access to the means in communication and interaction. It is a classic manifestation of Marxian revolution theory.
2. Producers of content on the Internet have a wide spectrum of quality that correlates to the population of the world that uses it. But the best have risen to the top in meritocracy of traffic, and challenge traditional media who were slow to adapt and are failing.
3. The Internet is a technology. It doesn’t kill anything unless it is used by an animate life form for that purpose. People used the Internet to rebel against the business of journalism because they were dissatisfied with the service it provided them. They did this by creating their own journalism. Now they occupy that niche.
4. The “truth” that old school journalists lament passing is the truth – the world view – of the old, white, rich establishment that has owned mass media for two centuries. While it was comfortable for them because of their ideological indoctrination, it is not, and has never been, a truly objective or accurate depiction of the world as it is.

In the online space, the old school journalism voice stands out like one that is increasingly out of tune with the rest of the society. It speaks for power, not for the people.

It is a business built to cater to advertisers, a business that views people as product: viewers or readers, eyeballs to be delivered to a paying customer. Since that advertising online has failed journalism, journalism has no idea how to deal with people. In abandoning low-price classified ads, the newspaper stopped working with the people of their communities in business transactions. Now, only a few, very large and wealthy businesses buy space in the paper. Since television has always been priced highly, now the media only cater to affluence.

As everyone else becomes transparent, we can eventually tell what the non-transparent look like from their silhouette. The tools of research and discovery are more available, the Internet gives people the ability to give themselves access to the information that the gatekeepers formerly had exclusive access.

Is it any wonder that congress convened hearings to try to figure out how to save journalism in the digital age? Because their business depends on them controlling the version of reality through their relationship with the establishment media. Is it a surprise that political advertising is now the lifeblood of the journalism industry? As more and more people cut the cord and don’t subscribe and then learn how to use the net and program new tools and platforms, they take into their hands the means to change and enable all those new voices to be heard.

And that’s the transparency that’s killing old-school journalism. It is a death of a billion clicks.

                          

On Saturday, presidential candidate Herman Cain made this statement: “There are too many people in the media who are downright dishonest.” Do you agree with that statement?

Agree	Disagree	N/O
64.0%	19.3%	16.7%

National Telephone Poll of 1,179 Registered Voters / 11.06.11 / Margin of Error +/- 3%

Poll Position Crosstabs – Cain-Media

                          

The link above, to Jay’s PressThink blog, contains his transparent accounting of the story behind the spurious and specious story that James O’Keefe is trying to present as a “truth.” It also features the embedded video by O’Keefe.

First, my full support and admiration go to Jay and Clay, friends and colleagues, both of whom I deeply respect for their intellectual honesty and efforts to promote intellectual honesty among journalism students at NYU. The industrial mindset in journalism has never needed a deeper examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the entire field than right now. This is perhaps even more critical than the new digital skills and technology we teach, for these skills and tools must be applied with new methodologies and we must consider the deeper implications of the paradigm shift. It fundamentally changes what journalism itself is and the role it plays in the society writ large.

Second, I truly admire the high road Jay takes and applaud him for it. As one who challenges my classes and regularly offends my students and peers as I try to shake their foundations into examining their thinking and be critical of the thinking of others in our space, I would not back down from this in a second and my response would not nearly be as thoughtful or measured. Jay reveals the specious premise to the story and clearly shows there is nothing scandalous here at all. I too have suffered attacks, and anyone who fights in this space will eventually face someone who tries to discredit or silence them. Bravo.

Third, attacking intellectual honesty in journalism and education in this fashion is an assault on us all and the greater purpose journalism and education seek to address. The deeper implication of this kind of action is to discredit the critical voices in the space. Seeking to discredit and shame the process of critical thinking by calling it liberal — as if that in and of itself is a dirty word, we do have colleges of liberal arts and sciences after all — is preposterous. Mr. O’Keefe shows his own myopia in not understanding the Socratic dialogue or Hegelian dialectic in its natural environment, the halls of the academy.

Finally, nothing depicted here is shameful, what is embarrassing is how it is clumsily framed as shame by the sting operation and how they self identify as true journalists. Despite the sensationalist approach and editing, no one is really caught doing anything remotely inappropriate or saying anything incorrect or inaccurate. There is no liberal elite media conspiracy to expose, the context of the comments show Rosen and Shirky exposing their students to critical thinking that they will recognize themselves among the elite — in terms of their dedication to the pursuit of journalism and also their devotion to the consumption and processing of raw information and news at the highest level before disseminating it to a wider audience. They are not economically elite, they are elite in their situational awareness as being successful in their profession would require.

That O’Keefe and his operators think this is somehow scandalous shows why they actually fail — quite literally — at journalism school. They wouldn’t be able to pass the class, for they are not intellectually honest enough to recognize the material the professors are covering and discussing. It has absolutely nothing to do with their own personal political views, it has to do with that their strict adherence to their agenda closes their minds to accepting what reality in fact depicts, and instead their false consciousness dominates their perception. It is impossible to be a journalist as such, you can only be a propagandist for one ideological perspective… which is what James O’Keefe is recognized as by serious and thoughtful students of journalism.

                          

the button associates the piece of content with a specific analytics-like dashboard page that cleanly displays the credibility meter and spiders out to other services for more meta data. this really also needs to be a bookmarklet and browser plugin so browsers can use it on sites that don’t participate.

each participant in the system has their own profile page that openly reveals their own credibility. upon agreeing to participate, the user self identifies a few qualities to get their initial weighting. as they participate, their credibility adjusts and have opportunities to further refine their profile. another analytic dashboard tracks their credibility.

the rubric or algorithm is going to be very complicated. we need to account for tracking comments and conversation across multiple social platforms, traffic and analytics, media bugs and corrections, conflicts of interest, slant, fact checking, sourcing and all they entail. the dashboards and interface have to be models of elegant visualization design and focused on ultimate usability and experience.

second phase is building it out as an advertiser credibility network and ultimately a spam stopper. i’d love to go as far as considering a heuristic or intelligence tool to make sense of comments.

the value proposition has to be an open, embeddable software as a service powered by a community dedicated to accuracy, accountability, honesty, safety openness, and respect. our mission is to provide a means of identifying and categorizing content on those terms. more nuanced than a like, more numerically layered than a dig, it creates a folksonomy based upon content not as categories or keywords, but on our mission’s core values. with open apis, it is not a walled garden of comments or a forum for debate, but a twitter of linked numerical information that spiders down into all the connected dots.

i think we can do it. i think we have to do it. i think it’s django.

what do you think?

                          

The war in Iraq was a crime based on fraud. It was the first bunco scheme that qualifies as an international war crime. It was an unnecessary war of aggression, sold by thieves and con-men to a too-credulous American public that had been told for the previous 30 years that all politics was a shuck, and that the very principles of self-government made you a fool and a rube. The bloody irony was that internalizing those things made us the biggest suckers of all.

via Troops Leaving Iraq 2011 – We Are Not Leaving Iraq, and It Is Never Leaving Us – Esquire.

few are the days that i don’t reflect upon what it was like to be in a newsroom watching the drums beating in the run-up to our invasion of iraq.

i followed foreign media and saw hans blix saying there were no weapons of mass destruction. american journalists scoffed at the foreign media. i begged for a more critical eye. i watched colin powell testify in front of the U.N. and show satellite pictures of supposed mobile weapons factories that looked like an aerial shot of a stuckeys truck stop. i refused to sign the petition to support judy miller when she was jailed for protecting her anonymous source. i didn’t gloat (much) when the source turned out to be dick cheney who played her like a fiddle. i was yelled at and intimidated and threatened everywhere for my interpretation of what was happening. i saw fear grip us and make us insane.

but i wasn’t effective. no one could have been. we were going, no matter what. and we went. and we bombed them to hell and back. and we embedded journalists, hundreds of them who wanted to be our generation’s ernie pyle (whose photo hung on the wall near my desk). i remember a thanksgiving party with a friend, he told me he was going to cover it. i asked him why? he had small children, a wife? why risk it for this? he could have assigned someone else, but he had to have it. and he never came back.

the stories we filed weren’t much, honestly. and i think even the people who went, when asked honestly, once they get over their you don’t know what it was like nobility and all that, will tell you, we didn’t tell the american people much about what they really needed to know until it was far too late. we didn’t really know ourselves.

we killed, as a nation. we bled, as a nation. we orphaned children and a created a generation of battle scarred veterans. we put the war on a credit card, and gave the borrowed money to shameless profiteers and private contractors who rebuilt what we destroyed needlessly and we stuck our future with the bill, plus interest, so we could take away their health and education to balance our budget later. we didn’t sacrifice for the common good, because there was no good here. we rationalized it to ourselves. we lied, to cover up our own shame of the lie.

i cried when my brother was deployed. i hated that he had to go in harm’s way for a lie. and i cried again when he came home in one piece, but to a life that was wrecked and an infant son who was struggling and neglected.

we declared mission accomplished, but it never seemed to end. there were no weapons, but we deposed a dictator, who we once supported, but we weren’t nation building, because our president campaigned that nation building wasn’t a good foreign policy. and the people weren’t happy with us as liberators. they wanted us out. we surged our troops and order came, because the mission was actually rounding up young iraqi men and putting them in confinement. our soldiers and sailors were policemen and prison guards. and the only stories we told were along the lines of how many people blew up in a car bomb that day. over and over again. day after day. the same story.

and few are the days that i don’t wish i didn’t have to walk miles in the woods to restore the karma, the charity i am compelled to do to pay back the balance i owe for my own small part in it. because my conscience haunts me. because it was my job. because it fed and sheltered my family. it will haunt me. forever. it was wrong. everything about it was wrong. morally, strategically, economically, everything about invading iraq was wrong. everything.

the foreign media, the ones who said there were no WMDs, also said if the US invaded Iraq, it would be the end of our economy and our role in the world. and they were right, both times.

someone asked me what i was so mad about on the anniversary of september 11. i said i missed sitting on the capitol steps and watching the sun set. i’m ashamed of what we did, how we acted. i’m ashamed to tell my children, who have lived their entire lives during this war, what we did and why we did it.

the terrorists won. my nation, the nation i loved, died in the shock and awe as we bombed iraq. it was shocking, and awful. and i will never, ever, forget what we did and who we once were… before we gave it all away.

                          

A new research report from the Pew Research Center reveals that while Americans get their local news from a variety of different sources, they far undervalue their local paper as a major source of that news. Authors Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell, Kristen Purcell and Lee Rainie write:

In all, the data in a new national survey show that the majority (64%) of American adults use at least three different types of media every week to get news and information about their local community—and 15% rely on at least six different kinds of media weekly.

The most interesting statistic lies in the mixed messages that people send about their local newspaper. While 69 percent of Americans claim that losing their local newspaper would have no impact, their reading habits show that people rely on print and online papers for 11 out of 16 major news topics. The authors write: “In other words, local TV draws a mass audience largely around a few popular subjects; local newspapers attract a smaller cohort of citizens but for a wider range of civically oriented subjects.”

via Freakonomics » Pew Study: People Undervalue Their Local Newspaper.

Here is my comment on this post, which is currently awaiting moderation.

Without going into the syllogistic leap where you say the research is about local papers, and then you quote a statistic about online newspapers which could be local or out of market, I’d instead ask you to consider another issue in newspaper publishing. 60 percent of newspapers are generally composed of advertising content.

At the profit apex for corporate-owned newspaper publishing in the late 90s, classified advertising was responsible for between 4o and 50 percent of total industry revenue. This content, generated and consumed by people in the local community, was perhaps even more relevant to the product’s consumers than fungible commodity newswire content or the few short anecdotal pieces of content that were originally produced by any paper’s small metro reporting staff.

Even though the primary vertical categories were jobs, homes, and used cars, classified advertising content was people-centric instead of institutional-centric. It was an ocean of small transactions that connected people to the product, creating a comprehensive forum. It also provided a financial investment of a community that offset the financial sway of major advertisers who could afford large run of paper or display ads. Those advertisers, such as department stores, themselves have since contracted through mergers and acquisitions until only a few huge players survive. Big box chain stores have squeezed out locally owned businesses as well during this period, until only a few advertisers remain and many simply use the paper to circulate insert ads that are preprinted. The newspaper helped destroy it’s own value and customer base as it helped these businesses gain the footholds in their communities.

These companies were once the only operators in the local marketplace who could afford to capitalize infrastructure necessary to bring in information and distribute it widely. The value of that business proposition has been greatly diminished now that any person can access electronic information directly, and has no need for someone else to transcribe and print it or broadcast it to them.

It is important to understand that newspapering is a very different business proposition than local television or radio, if only because of the price point and barrier to entry to advertise on each platform is radically different. Regardless, many media companies in both print and broadcast now rely heavily on political and advocacy advertising for solid revenue — which is often in direct ethical conflict with the editorial news product that shares space with it. Also, in the online space, publishers and managers early on resorted to using third-party advertising networks that offered scale, which effectively brokered the space of the product. The advertising seen in these online networks is frequently of the lowest common denominator, has little or no relevance to the local consumer, and can even at times be hostile and untrustworthy.

Finally, the aggregate philosophy of publishing and broadcasting that drove the editorial selection and judgement of the past fifty years depended not only upon syndication of comics and features that are no longer geographically hindered by distribution systems, but also offering stenographic and list information such as police blotters, transactions, community calendars, and fire calls among others as a community service. As these organizations have become more transparent and self publish in the online space, the need for a middle stage distribution mechanism has vastly diminished. Local blogs and social media have empowered people to tell their own stories, which bubble up to public awareness as people share them online with friends talking along an Internet fencepost. These people are no longer disenfranchised or distanced from their ability to tell their own stories, in their own words.

This leaves newspapers as a vehicle for distributing corporate news and information that is largely divorced and of little value to the community or the people who live in it. Instead, what passes for news is what the wealthiest and most powerfully connected people can deliver to the pages of a paper, which are wrapped in the opinions and biased analysis of a legion of syndicated columnists. It is a bloated diet of information that leaves communities obese and yet informationally malnourished and susceptible to making decisions about their lives and purchasing goods that are not needed or of significant value.
To say that the market undervalues the local newspaper requires a much stronger premise. This is a woefully juvenile thesis and completely unsubstantiated on the grounds you present.

                          

guardiannews.com is looking for a creative interactive designer to join our interactive team to develop our site and online brand. In this role you will participate in and lead interactive projects, bringing fresh ideas on their architecture, design and delivery.

You will support and maintain the interactive content and technology on guardiannews.com developing ways to enrich our interactive presence on the web and social sphere using a variety of programming languages. You will thrive in a creative and technically accomplished environment and enjoy the challenge of coming up with technical solutions for cutting-edge designs.

Based in New York, you will have extensive experience as an interactive designer having designed and delivered a portfolio of web products and services both professionally and personally. You will have a good understanding of the role of online news and have a stong voice on the web and demonstrate engagement with the online community. You should also have a demonstrable interest in current affairs and an understanding of the editorial aims and values of the Guardian.

via Jobs at GNM.

That should be the baseline for getting into grad school today. You should be ready to rock, so we can start working on rocking the world from the day you step on campus.

Other academic disciplines require that you have a thesis question in mind before even applying to grad school.  Yes you come there to learn, but you come there to create.  You bring research to the world.  Having a thesis means you come in with something to prove.

We’re in the middle of a revolution. This is no time to train cogs for an industrial machine that is breaking down before our eyes. It isn’t the technology that is breaking it, it is imploding from within.

Now is the time that great thinkers should come to the academy to think about what we’re doing, where we’re going and why we should do what we do. If ever a subject of study needed studying, it is ours, now. We need theory and methodology discussions so badly, and all we seem to be doing to is trying to slap digital skills in front of everything we do in the industry and in the academy — without thinking for a minute about why we even do what we do. We drift from new thing to the next new thing, and bounce around words like convergence and SEO and anything else you care to name like we’re seriously considering them. All of the innovation in our industry is coming from outside – and outside journalism. We are reactive, not proactive. We echo, we do not create.

You shouldn’t come to grad school to get a job and grad school — in theory — shouldn’t be geared to get you a job. You should come to get an education, and an increasingly higher education. You should come to learn and teach and study. Because that is what it is really about. The academy is a temple of intellect where we better ourselves, because when we are better, we better our world.

We must be pioneering. We must create as much knowledge as the knowledge we disseminate. And our students need to hold up that bar with us, because that’s what the deal is supposed to be.

I want someone with these qualifications to have to choose between going to work at the Guardian or coming to study with me. I want it to be a hard choice, and I want it to be a no-lose decision.  I don’t want someone to come to learn from me just so they can get a job in some media company.

Is that too much to ask? I only ask, because it was what was asked of me when I started grad school. And I didn’t just accept it as a fact of life, it was a life I wanted. More than anything else, more than any job. And I still do.

                          

Mangaging technology for production and distribution of media content is a critical component to the success of any small or large business in a very dynamic market area. This course is a broad survey that highlights several aspects of relevant technology from the perspective of the media entrepreneur.

Overall, the objective of the course is to invest the media entrepreneur with a deep understanding and appreciation for the role technology plays in each and every area of a media business. The course should offer a substantial experience for the student that wishes to take a hands-on approach to focus in information technology or operations from a senior level. But, the course is also necessary for all students who will act as entrepreneurs or in an entrepreneurial environment where technology is a necessity in all levels of operating a business in the media marketspace.

                          

I’ve been talking about this movement for five weeks, because that’s when it started and I saw it start because I was watching it via Twitter. And as I’ve talked, lectured, blogged, tweeted, and posted about the event, my angle has been on how corporate media has ignored the story or covered it with a stunningly overt and largely unaddressed bias/objectivity problem.  The media and telecommunications industry is the fourth largest private segment of the United States economy. While loudly discussing how critical their role is to holding government accountable, the “objective” media is not at all objective about covering criticism of the marketplace where their own stocks are traded. And that marketplace of the 1% of wealthiest Americans is dangerously intertwined and more powerful than the government of the people, and by the people. Here follows a lengthy excerpt of the piece:

In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys 52 news outlets each week to produce a weekly study of news coverage.

The study released Wednesday showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage last week, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.

Some protesters have assailed news media outlets for scoffing at their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some have also carefully courted attention from those outlets.

“They insist on their story being told, even as they’re arguing about just what the story should be,” the media critic James Rainey wrote in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times. Mr. Rainey suggested that reporters resist the urge to make instant judgments about what the protests represent: “Sometimes the most courageous story is the one that says: I haven’t seen this before. I’m not sure what it means. I don’t have a clue where it is going.”

The populist main message of the occupy movement is actually quite clear to anyone who can see it with an open mind, particularly one that has not been deafened by three continuous decades of ‘free’ market trumpeting. The occupiers are trying to show everyone who hasn’t realized it yet that the so-called ‘free’ market is not free at all, it is rigged by the wealthiest participants, who have successfully used it and co-opted the government into plutocracy that is actually acting in kleptocratic ways, taking taxpayer money into corporations that don’t in turn pay taxes.

These very few people have used their wealth to influence the political process to deregulate certain segments, consolidate competition into monopolistic entities and subsidize certain industries, change tax codes to help them retain more of that money, and then use their influence to thwart any chance of a political or civic action that could threaten the accumulation of that wealth.

This is not only done through the campaign financing process (reform of which is a clearly stated goal of the occupy protesters) but also through very successful use of major corporate media platforms. Let’s just link to a google search of “Wall Street Journal scandal” to put a nail in the the ‘liberal media’ straw man so we can move on productively. I’ll let you the reader figure out just how pervasive, powerful, and completely unethical Rupert Murdoch’s media enterprise — the largest in the United States — is. It is pretty clear.

But even if they aren’t peddling their influence to candidates as the News of the World did in the U.K., all U.S. news media are completely dependent upon a divisive political process. Talking deeply and legitimately about campaign finance reform and the ultra wealthy would be literally attacking the richest and best customers.

Television news media on cable and broadcast cannot survive without political advertising revenue. And that’s all there is to that. 2012 will be a record year in political ad spending at a time when core media platforms are absolutely being destroyed by new media platforms. In much of the same way we only cover bombing body counts or protester arrests, all journalism stories on campaign finance reform talk in big, generalist terms that have little meaning to real citizens, and all of these stories start and stop with the obscene amounts that candidates raise. They never go the next step to tell the citizens the ultimate beneficiaries of these huge campaign war chests are their companies. The people used to own a great deal of the newspaper media without realizing it, their purchasing of classified advertising was the 42 percent revenue buffer that kept the super wealthy advertising customers from holding so much financial influence over that platform of critical, in-depth journalism.

But that bird has flown and, really, this is all old news to the Internet community that has been talking about this and calling for action and looking for solutions and changes for years. Many members of that community are holding an extended and protracted and diverse IRL meetup on Wall Street and elsewhere around the nation. Glenn Beck isn’t there and there are no organized, big money underwriters taking people to protest in busses. But, citizen media is there, and has been from the start. This time, a short quote from the piece:

The spike in news media coverage is significant because, among other reasons, it may lend legitimacy to the movement and spur more people to seek out protest information on Facebook and other Web sites.

I beg that the data calls for a different interpretation, Brian. Here’s my rewrite:

The lag in news media coverage is significant because, among other reasons, it shows how their legitimacy is becoming more questionable as they grow out of touch with the people they claim to serve while serving the wealthy and powerful that the occupy movement is protesting, having gotten their information from trusted friends on Facebook and other independent and objective Web sites.

See what I did there? But, hey, some nameless, uncredited, and therefore unaccountable editor (who may have gotten some stock options way back when) is probably going to cut that down for ‘clarity.’

P.S. Thanks, Brian. It’s a good piece.

                          

Americans spend just a fraction of online time with news compared to social media | Poynter..

The above link by my friend and sometimes editor Steve Myers at Poynter points out some great research by Nielsen about our online habits. We spend more time socializing online than we do with the news online.

That’s no surprise. We do this in our offline lives too. Even my great grandmother only watched the nightly news for 30-60 minutes a day or read the paper in the morning for less time than that. But she spent hours with me playing checkers and talking and doing things.

So now we do more things on the Interwebs, so why shouldn’t we spend more time with our friends and families near and far than we do with journalism. It doesn’t make us less aware. And the framing of these kinds of conversations tends to suggest _ even in the research level_ that there is some shallowness applied to spending our time socializing than reading important news.

But the big thing wrong about that inference is that the news of my loved ones’ lives is very, very important to me. Social media is all about sharing news and information that matters on scales small and large. We talk about events of the day at lunches and around the family dinner table and at happy hours and everywhere else people meet. We share our stories of what happened to us and what we’ve experienced. Online or on the phone or on a letter or in person, we are all people connecting to each other in different ways but doing the same things.

All of it is news to us. And it comes from the most trusted sources, our friends and family. This shouldn’t be news to news people.