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.

                          

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.

                          

Today in my multimedia journalism class, the anniversary packages gave us incredible material to review. Phenomenally talented producers and storytellers pulled out all the stops to create some incredible pieces of work from which we can admire and learn from for that pure, arbitrary stance. But as we go through them one after the other, it starts to blur and the common methods and techniques stand out and the content wears and even becomes thin and repetitive as the same angles, the same devices, the same contrivances keep showing up. They become cliche.

Let’s really think about what we do here as a collective culture. Some stories are perennials and some are annuals. I have seen first hand in many editorial meetings the editors’ calendars come out and the anniversaries get plugged in, big and small. We have to come up with new angles on them all the time, some are quite a stretch.

For the decade edition of the 9/11 anniversary, folks have been planning for a year or more. I’ve been in a lot of those meetings too. These packages are like the monster wedding, and the journo bridezillas have been sweating and fretting over every detail from the napkin rings down to the boutonnieres for months on end. 9/11/2001 is their big day and all their wall-to-wall coverage is going to walk down the aisle after all the build up and expectation. There will be tears, right where they should be. Formula, expected, a sure thing.

And at what cost? How many hours and dollars went into these projects and packages and specials? How could that effort, skill and talent have been applied on pressing and current issues with deep significance and meaning to the whole society? While we covered a circus of politics that plays daily in the tents we raised just for them, how many journalists could have done more to inform rather let pols and pundits wag on? Could we have our national spending, deficit and budget debate covered with such artistry? Would we have understood healthcare reform better if half the effort from 9/11′s anniversary been spent there? Or the Arab Spring? Or something about the watchdog of democracy or whatever?

But those are hard stories to tell. Anniversaries of death are easy pickings. And we’ve gone all out on this one every single year leading up to this big bang, just a look through major foreign media is a gut check with how heavy handed we are.  We can all tell ourselves that it is what the people want, because that’s what we think, and we’ll get re-enforced by the people who look and talk about it. We’ll say with long faces that we’re performing a service and stepping in with rather than setting the conversational agenda with our bombardment. We’re playing to the crowd.

And then the big industry and corporate PSAs and viagra ads will roll. And we’ll count up the ratings and page views and copies sold. We’ll cash in on the anniversary of tragedy. Because that’s what the business end of our business has become. That’s what the seasonal hackneyed editorial and traffic drivers have driven us to, the business model of the annual back to football sections, or the memorial day content for the appliance sales. And I can’t help it, these are the times when it gives me a bad taste in my mouth. This isn’t saving democracy, it is playing on people’s fear and grief.

This is a significant event and a big story, no doubt.  And I’m sorry for what happened on 9/11. I was a part of it. I have deeply painful and conflicted emotions about it. But no matter how close or far or what you lost on that day, you all know that fear and terror and death and loss happen in small and big ways all over the world all the time. Bad things happen, terrible things happen, tragic things happen.

It isn’t the tragedy though, but how we react after the tragedy that defines us.

                          

A fantastic Op-Ed by Krugman today:

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

via Republicans Against Science – NYTimes.com.

Let’s now turn to the last interview given by Dr. Carl Sagan, the man who popularized science for a generation:

In the Bible, the rainbow is a sign from God, a promise that he won’t send other disasters to the world. After a few thousand years, we know that the rainbow is caused by the refraction of light in moisture in the air, a prism effect. You can make one with a garden hose.

You can’t run a 21st century technology based nation and economy with belief systems from the 8th century B.C. This is completely unacceptable and patently irresponsible.

It is equally irresponsible that news editors and reporters do not mention this right up front in their reporting of these kinds of comments. It isn’t an opinion page thing, it is a fact checking thing. These are facts.

And no matter what these candidates believe in, the facts need to be spelled out in context with the quotes if journalism wants to be taken seriously. Hiding behind bias, objectivity and odd ethics is no way to go forward. It just creates more misinformation and hinders the progress of the craft and industry.

And in these cases, it actually threatens the lives of every living thing on the planet.

                          

I saw the tweet about click through and take pictures and NG would mail you artifacts if you played their game Mission Expedition | Expedition Week- National Geographic Channel. But I didn’t think they’d be real, actual artifacts. And then I saw the sponsor banner link for Ancient Resource.

Ancient Resource is the name that Gabriel Vandervort does business as. Vandervort is a former documentary producer and writer, having worked on programs that aired on the History Channel.

Vandervoort claims on his site that his inventory comes from old collections that were brought into the U.S. prior to the UNESCO conventions.

These items come from years of collecting and study. Many of my pieces have been purchased at auction (single items, or as lots). I also buy old collections and museum deaccessions. I never purchase or export items from forbidden countries such as Egypt, Mexico, Greece, Iraq, Italy or Turkey. All such items have come from old collections brought into the USA prior to 1969 and the UNESCO conventions.

National Geographic has come under a great deal of criticism from the archaeological community for how it deals with treasure hunting. The black market trade in stolen and looted antiquities is only surpassed in global value by the trades in drugs and arms, it rivals human trafficking.

                          

For those of us who have been around long enough, we know this free vs. paid thing has been around since we started going online. Some newspaper sites actually started out under the marketing and circulation departments, given away for free to try to boost subscriptions. People in the business and in the newsroom just couldn’t figure out what was right. Paid subscriptions are the basis for setting print ad rates, after all. You have to sell papers if you want to make money on ads

Most journalists think it is ok to pay for news. Because they are the ones who have been paying for it all along. But they don’t actually stroke the checks. Their top editors or publishers do. They buy news services and syndicates as an expense. I used to work at a news service, and I consult with them, so I know that business.

And that’s why I recognize that the business model of the paywall for subscribing to the nytimes.com online is actually a twist on the business model and rate schedule for the New York Times Syndicate news and feature service. I used to see their bills.

The metered reading system is a twist on pay-per-use or scale-of-distribution metering models that news services price themselves at. You buy the content service, but you pay more or less based upon your ability to leverage that news product into your own profit – basically, the higher your paper’s circulation, the more you pay.

That actually can be right-sized by expense in a business. Newspapers and other news organizations (there is an AP broadcast service) can offset the expense of wire subscriptions by writing them down as expenses to achieve certain discounts. But, the pricing structure is odd and kludgy, and it always has been. It is also very secretive. Rates and schedules of rates for services are kept very close to the vest.

Does it make sense to individuals? You subscribe to the AP wire for your organization or for yourself at http://www.apnewstracker.com/ . But would you? Many subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal are underwritten as business expenses. Subscriptions to financial wires are business expenses for brokerages. Subscriptions to real time sports news is a business expense for gambling institutions. The bulk of the business for Lexis-Nexis comes from legal firms — and also libraries who pass through the cost of subscription to the content to end users through fees, taxes or tuition, much in the same way AOL passed along the cost of their AP subscription to dial up customers back in the 90s.

But how does a normal consumer monetize the expense of the general newspaper at the rates the Times is putting into use? Newspapers are retailers of wholesale syndicated electronic news content – they package the generic, fungible commodity as a store brand with their label and put it on their shelves. The Web, which has killed middle men in all long supply chain businesses, removes the need for that delivery and packaging service. So why should you pay the service rate when you expect to get it wholesale?

Once again, there is a price point that people have settled on for the value of a day’s news. That’s the starting point for the consumer market.

                          

Why did newspapers forget about single copy sales in online business plans?

There’s a bit of magic in single copy pricing. People have bought today’s paper to get today’s news for centuries. It is a comfortable value that has settled itself in the mental accounting of consumers and circulation departments.

Online, a single copy model would be buying a day pass to a site that would give access to all content published on that date. It would have to be offered at a price less than a paper copy — let’s say something like 50 cents a day and $1.50 Sundays — but would contain more value because you would not only get more content through the day, but you would also have access to the issue forever without having to store a copy of the paper.

Having something like Times People or another community back end, the person who logged in could manage their account to buy passes when they have time and interest to read, watch or interact. Instead of being metered or penalized for using more, this kind of management could encourage more use. As people add up single copies, they can be migrated to subscription. It is just cookies and user management, not really sophisticated programming.

The magic of iTunes involved finding the right price point for a single song download, but selling singles is really an old idea – as old as playing records on a jukebox or buying a 45 at the record store.

We’ve talked about charging for single articles and we think about page views, but people think about newspapers as an issue, and that means today’s news. That’s a unit of sale, a portion that people have always bought.

I’ve wondered about why magazine publishers don’t use personalization to create a customized delivery system or a personalized subscription – Say I subscribe to National Geographic, and when I log into the site, I have an option to order up a single copy of Traveler, or I can get 3 issues of Traveler, 3 issues of Explorer, and 6 issues of Adventurer.

The key is using the user backend service platform, like Netflix has done so successfully. But do newspapers really prioritize service in their business strategy, or do they still rely on shady subcontracting practices for carriers and distributors, not unlike getting child laborers to hawk papers at 5 am a hundred years ago during their so-called golden age?

The only site that I can think of offhand that offered a day pass was Salon.com, and they were never really a newspaper. You got free access to the day’s content by watching a really big interstitial ad. That’s a lot more like preroll strategy or sponsorship avails like we see at Hulu.

I don’t think this is as hard as everyone is making it. The answer may be as simple as not forgetting what the news business is, how customers have always perceived it, and finding the right price point for the experience and service. But that would require a hard realization that maybe, just maybe, the user experience and service in the news business isn’t that great to begin with – and that’s where the vulnerability really lies. It may be why sites like craigslist can pummel old monopolies with more attention to service and community.

                          

You’re expendable.

I don’t care if you are a manager or the smallest cog in the machine, you need to know how every part of that machine works to cover your ass. Either so you can do those jobs if the need arises, so you can cover for people who don’t show up, or so you don’t cost the organization and your colleagues their time to help you get your job done… or most importantly, so you can figure out to make it better yourself. Not just complain to people who can make it better for you or hire people who can figure out how to get it done. Because if you can’t do it or figure it out yourself, you’re expendable.

I work primarily with communicators, journalists, those types. This colors my perception. There’s a reason why those old editors have been laid off, they may be great at their job and important to the process, but honestly, they’re resistors in a circuit and replaceable skill sets. There are people who can edit and produce in the new digital workplace. If an editor needs a producer to actualize their great judgement and skills into sellable product, that costs my workflow time and a half. I can find an efficiency there, your maintenance cost is too high for the return on your value. If judgement and ideas are all you have, and you can’t make them a reality, your vision is trapped and at the mercy of someone else. You’re expendable.

You’re a writer or photographer or a great designer. Hi – you’re talent. Even if you crap diamonds, you’re still a product that some producer sells and you can be replaced with someone who craps rubies or emeralds. You’re expendable. If you are good enough and you get big enough to flip the balance where your manager is your agent or broker and not your supervisor or director, you’ve figured it out and you’ve become a producer. You hire people to do the jobs for you. And those people are expendable.

This is why coders win, always. This is why smart CEOs know their business inside and out and aren’t just professional managers who jump company to company. This is why media people who don’t learn new skills are vulnerable. This is why self-learners innovate and people who have passion always seek to do new things. This is why all the real people know the Winklevoss twins are douchebags and Mark Zuckerberg is the real deal… real creators have more than one idea, and they figure out how to make their ideas reality. The Winklevii are expendable.

This is what entrepreneurial journalism is all about. And if you can’t do it or figure out how to do it, get the hell out of the way before you get run over. You’re expendable.

                          

MythBusters should be in and Jersey Shore, out.

At least that’s what students at Metro Early College High School say.

Students from the Northwest Side school discussed high-schoolers’ attitudes toward math and science education in a town-hall setting yesterday. They would choose the science-based show on the Discovery Channel over the MTV reality show about eight housemates spending their summers together.

“Among my friends dork is not used as a derogatory term,” said sophomore Madeleine Varner. “You have to be really smart to be successful in this global economy.”

via Science ‘dorks’ see need | The Columbus Dispatch.