Exegesis
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
This is great. As a result of my recent posts and links to articles on Myanmar (or maybe they just ban all blogs,) my blog can no longer be accessed within the country. Here is the message that a friend sent to me:
ACCESS HAS BEEN DENIED
Access to the page:
http://dkreiss.blogspot.com
... has been denied for the following reason:
Banned site: blogspot.com
You are seeing this error because the page you attempted
to access contains, or is labelled as containing, material that
has been deemed inappropriate.
If you have any queries contact your ICT Co-ordinator or Network Manager.
Here is a great example of shoddy, one-source journalism posing as a straight news report, ala the Washington Times.
How hard can it be to maybe call up the Red Cross, or Amnesty, and maybe get their opinion on the US's human rights record, considering that they have been documenting the mistreatment of prisoners in American jails long before our little abuse scandal broke in the press.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Here is some great research from Cameron Marlow, graduate student at MIT and creator of Blogdex, on blogging and coverage in the mainstream press.
Second draft of the thesis is coming up on Friday, and is currently undergoing significant revision. It has not been fun trying to whittle all these thoughts and this theory down into a publishable 2,500 word journalistic piece.
My friend Amy, who works for Population Services International, steered me to this article in the Chronicle profiling their work.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
so, with things being busy here I have been away for a while, but alas, I have missed so much.
First, the wonderful offering from the Times about reporter Larry Rohter. His lawyers delivered an apology to the Ministry of Justice in Brasília "regretting any "embarrassment" the article may have caused" -- in the words of the Times -- in order to keep his visa.
Last time I checked, freedom of the press means freedom of the press, and the fact that the reporter apologized leads me to believe that the article was inadequately sourced, false, or gossip-mongering not up to the Times standards. The apology is ridiculous if the story is accurate, and to see the Times backing down is sad; if it is not accurate than Rohter and the editor who let it through should be fired. If the Times is in the business of filing reporter apologies about covering public issues and political leaders, than I question the veracity of their reporting.
If the story is accurate, than the Times should have stood its ground and made this a question of democracy. Here is a good synopsis of the incident from a freedom of the press angle, including a quote from Human Rights Watch.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Here is a good piece on blogging and the presidential election. They cite Pandagon.net, which has good political commentary and other random thoughts.
The article itself is the best I have come across in providing a general "newsy" description of some of the ways blogging is meeting and interacting with the mainstream press; all of which I have been consumed with for the last two months.
I cannot understand why John Kerry's campaign would take out full page biographical advertisements in the New York Times and SF Chronicle yesterday (these are just the two that i saw.)
a) the people reading newspapers regularly are not going to be swayed; studies show that people with more information on a candidate (ie: those who read the times and chronicle) are likely partisans to begin with.
b) if the idea is fundraising in two donor markets, then running a biographical ad is preaching to a choir. i find it hard to believe that readers of the times or chronicle are not familiar with kerry's bio, and his bio in and of itself is not going to motivate anyone well versed in the campaign to write a check.
I have written here before that the $25 million bio ad campaign was a mistake; this is as well. It strikes me that they are missing voters, or potential voters, who are looking for more statements on Iraq -- which is dominating the local political discussion right now. If he wants to do bio pieces, wrap it into Iraq. People already expect democrats to handle social issues better than the republicans, he needs to meet bush on foreign policy grounds.
An Open Letter to Nonprofits
I am thinking a lot lately about nonprofit organizations and digital communications technology like blogging. With my background in nonprofit development and management, I am particularly interested in how nonprofits can use communication tools like blogs to raise money, build a community of supporters, and get their message out.
There are not many nonprofit organizations I know of that use blogs yet it seems to me to be the easiest, most effective, and cheapest way to both raise money and build membership and engagement in organizations.
Consider a standard volunteer service organization, like one of the City Cares affiliates. They draw their volunteer base from a mostly young, professional demographic. What would it be like if their program managers and volunteers were blogging about volunteer projects as they happened, creating updates, and eliciting suggestions about new projects or needs in the communities they are serving? Not only would this increase the communication between people creating and managing the projects, but also tap the resources of volunteers in thinking about innovative and new ways to offer service.
Policy organizations like Sierra Club could create on-line communities though collaborative blogging where people talk about the issues, what is going on in their local communities, share best practices, etc. People could also stay abreast of policy as it happens, and what the organization is doing both in Washington and locally to advance the issues members are most concerned about.
The point to blogging is that it is more interactive than the e-mail newsletter, enables organizations to incorporate the resources of their supporters, and builds a community around an issue or an organization that will ultimately translate into more committed supporters – who often then become the donors essential to maintaining the work of the organization.
Too often development efforts fall into the “mass mailing” or happy hours categories. Both are fine, but I don’t want a mass mailing once or twice a year, I want to be engaged with an organization, learn about the work as it unfolds, and remain in touch electronically with the changes in policy and strategy. Happy hours are great, but that social networking should be available all the time on-line.
As the senior manager of foundation giving for New York Cares during the height of talk about and money for addressing the Digital Divide, I was able to see firsthand how just basic access to technology like computers (nothing fancy) vastly improved the services nonprofits could offer. Now it’s time to take that a step further and build a community around your efforts through communication tools like blogging. It’s free, easy, and will better inform people about your work. Now that businesses are jumping into it full speed ahead, I worry that the public service sector will be left behind.
The Dean campaign showed us how to convene a community and give participants a stake in the process – all of which translated into the dollars that are vital. I want to see nonprofits begin doing this as well, creating better informed and engaged members, enhancing fundraising, and improving the quality of the policy or service work.
The point is that nonprofit organizations, whether engaged in policy or direct service work, are briliantly positioned to convene communities around their issue. Too often we do not engage people enough in our work, but we need to start thinking about ourselves as playing this role. The effects will be stronger organizations, a more reliable fundraising base, and increased community support.
Sunday, May 09, 2004
I spent a couple of hours this afternoon working on a preliminary content analysis in anticipation of a larger study of how Iowa newspapers covered the Democratic primary campaign from 12/1/03-1/19/04. This is especially important, as Bush's recent campaign swing demonstrates, local news tends to treat candidates very differently than the Washington press corps.
So I spent some time with the Des Moines Register today looking at all of the Kerry and Dean campaign coverage from this time period, and here are the prelimary results:
Kerry had 20 articles during this period that could be said to be favorable, zero unfavorable, and 6 neutral/mixed.
Dean had 15 favorable articles, 18 unfavorable, and 12 neutral/mixed.
The categories are (somewhat subjectively) defined as follows:
Favorable: is where a candidate is covered outlining a policy position, hosting an event, delivering an attack, etc, without negative criticism from another candidate or commentary from a reporter that would offer a candidate an advantage.
Unfavorable: coverage of events, the inclusion of quotes or accusations, questioning of strategy or tactics, finances, or poll numbers that would disadvantage a candidate.
Neutral/Mixed: horse-race coverage that looks at polls, trading accusations, or with a balance of criticism from other candidates regarding a candidate's proposals. For instance the following article, Kerry defends stances on agricultural issues as attacks escalate, I coded as neutral/mixed because it offers a balance of favorable campaign coverage.
These categories mirror (albeit less methodically rigorous) those by Wayne Steger at DePaul University in Campaign Momentum in Press Coverage of Candidates in the ‘96 Republican Presidential Primaries.
See for yourself, you can find it here if you look under the "campaign files" link, which will provide all their articles on the candidate.
My two favorite articles so far:
Not-so-hot dogs throw a kink in Kerry backers' picnic plans
Dean team is messy; Kerry's eats well
Seth Finkelstein is enormously forthcoming in critique, commentary, and ideas around the thesis and blogging thus far; it is very much appreciated. He sent me a critique of notes that I had written from an interview with him a couple of weeks ago, which I was going to repost here but is up on his site now. Take a look at it.
That said, he had some comments in regard to the rough draft of my thesis that I wanted to reprint an edited version of here because they are interesting. As always, comments and feedback are welcome.
My writing is in quotation marks.
----
"September 11th, the build up to the Iraq War, and Howard Dean's presidential campaign created an explosion in self-publishing, commentary, and reporting on the Internet."
SETH: I wouldn't put Howard Dean in that list. I wouldn't say he created anything with regard to blogging, he just got a lot of PR for using the Internet for campaigning, not the same thing at all.
"All of this leads to audiences increasingly demanding participation in the creation and dissemination of news and information."
SETH: In my view, no - It leads to a lot of *chat*. Don't confuse it. There's a real big difference between the rock star, the business
manager, and the fan club. And the fan club suggesting song lyrics, is *not* revolutionary.
"But more importantly, they see new forms of participatory journalism like blogging enabling people to build networks for information-gathering, go deeper into stories, and cross-validate press statements by compiling many different sources for each story."
SETH: Build *how* - these "networks for information-gathering" tend to look like Big Media all over again.
"But the argument that all blogs have to have wide audiences or even provide original reporting to have an impact on communication seems reductive of the many different ways that Web-logs are actually read, and assumes that information flows in only one direction from the "gatekeepers of audience."
SETH: Well, basically *IT DOES* flow only in direction. In the sense that if the gatekeepers of audience decide to say something, everything else is a rounding error in terms of distribution.
I call this the "stringer" argument - that the little people are critical to feeding tips and stories to the big journalists. Yes, a
gatekeeper is only meaningful if there are attempts to pass through the gate. It's like saying that a populace is critical to the
existence of a ruler. Yes, indeed, being ruler over a dead country is pretty meaningless, that's a stock twist-ending story. You can't have a ruler without a populace to be ruled in the first place. The argument confuses the fact that ruler and ruled are both equal parts
of the *definition* of that relationship, with being *functionally* equal in that relationship.
Size is a *first approximation*. Yes, if you reach the President and the Pope, that's just two people, and typically that would be worth more than a million powerless couch potatoes. But the same problems of limited slots occur at every level of approximation. The President is not reading your blog. Neither is the Pope.
Communities have always formed. Regardless of how many people are listening to you blather in a bar, you are still communicating to a wider public.
"Whether this will usher in a new era of media production remains to be seen, but a new flow of communication that challenges the mainstream press's treatment of stories and then off-line politics had a precedent in the Trent Lott affair."
SETH: But it wasn't "new". It was standard-issue Beltway pundits plus some people acting as, basically, research assistants. It's not new to send some research to a journalist, and why-don't-you-run-THIS messages.
"And if the exchange between bloggers and journalists creates something new and meaningful, a better shared understanding among people and a wider spectrum of conversation, than new forms of digital communication available on-line have the potential to change how we get information and think about many of the issues of our times."
SETH: But that's a very small change, very different from the hype
I feel like some people would describe a journalist lightly rewriting a press release as "A participatory connection
involving the creation of news. In the New Era of We Media, the subjects become the objects, and the press release represents the
participation of the industry in the process of its own definition. The press release cannot exist without the press. It conveys information. It is part and parcel of the dynamic of coverage which is being redefined by action from the audience."
Who gets heard, to whom? The answers seem to be pretty much same-old-same-old. Yes, there's interesting changes throughout the
system, but these are comparatively small given that there's still just a few gatekeepers with the power to grant or deny a huge audience, and everybody else. Reciting the various tangents to this - maybe you're happy ranting on a street corner, you can send a tip to the gatekeeper, isn't it fun to chat with friends - does not change the basic point.
Saturday, May 08, 2004
Here is a rough draft of the masters thesis on blogging, which, per the Stanford journalism department, is meant not as an academic study so much as a published piece of magazine journalism.
This is the more “traditional” journalistic work; full interviews and commentary are available in my archives on the blog.
Please send comments, feedback, criticism, suggestions, whatever, as this is meant to be a work of collaborative journalism.
the other story in The New Yorker from last week, I love this because I am immersed in political forecasting right now and secretly suspect that there is a more amusing way to look at it all.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
In another example of the Bush administration's fine relationship with science, the FDA today voted against making Plan B, a morning-after pill, available over the counter, despite a panel of independent experts selected by the FDA voting 23-4 to approve it in December.
Destiny Lopez, Director of NARAL Pro Choice New York's Emergency Access Campaign is also my girlfriend, so support the work of NARAL, and help bring the fight over emergency contraception to the states.
Dr. Mizuko Ito, Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC, spoke today about “Media Mixes and Japanese Technoculture.”
Particularly interesting to me were her comments on emerging ways of legitimating amateurism. For instance, on a scale of cultural production, there are both amateurs and professionals who are producing content. For those who have been watching my blog, Jay Rosen, in an interview for my masters thesis, sketched out the idea of journalism as a practice, rooted in the relationship between a producer and an audience with information needs.
Looking at it from a more theoretical standpoint, Dr. Ito was talking about the new phenomenon of publishing amateur knowledge in network “ecologies” of information. Within this model, she was particularly interested in graduate students blogging, and she cites Danah Boyd’s work to me. As a graduate student myself, we seem to be in similar places in terms of our relationship to “publishing,” and professional reputations.
So the graduate student does not formally occupy the professional sphere, but still has the potential to produce active forms of knowledge through peer to peer networks of information made possible through digital media. This is the new ecology of knowledge exchange.
As younger generations emerge with a familiarity with these networks of cultural production, the question is where this will take us, and what are the implications for the professional model of authoritative knowledge production. I think that this amateur model, especially when focused on very specialized content, gives professional journalism a solid run for its money when you want to go deep into a topic.
She did not necessarily have an answer on where we are going with this, and neither do I. Only I see, and Dr. Ito was pointing in this direction as well, that there will be a new movement towards legitimizing amateur production, and new systems of reputation to add credibility to that sphere. For instance, sites like Technorati that enable you to see a blog’s “cosmos,” or network of incoming links, adds to our ability to access the reputation that blog, and links enable us to build that reputation.
Somebody should compile a list of blogs by graduate students organized around research area.
Here is a really interesting blog, Micro Persuasion, about blogging, participatory journalism, and how all of this is changing the practice of PR -- the field journalists love to hate.
I love the idea that PR has come to blogs -- John Kerry's folks were recently hiring for an "Internet Press Liaison." It tells you that as a form of communication, blogs have arrived.
John McManus, director of Grade the News at Stanford University, gave a talk yesterday to our graduate journalism program about the state of the news media and the "economic rationalization" of news that has evolved over the last twenty-five years.
Here are a couple of thoughts in response. And let me also say that I really respect his work, and think that sites like his should become the norm for monitoring the quality of local news in every city.
I take issue with John's notion that journalism should be a profession. I think that “journalism” is a practice, traced through the relationship between an author and an audience with information and discussion needs. There are professionals who practice journalism, just as there are nonprofessionals who practice journalism. Either way, journalism is found in communication between author and public. Sure there are professional norms, but those norms are based around human needs: ie verification, accuracy, etc. I think those needs are found in all human communication, and not exclusively the domain of journalists. At its heart journalism needs to remain a democratic practice, and that is a good thing.
That said, it seems like my colleagues and I are at a point where we are frustrated with entering the world of professional journalism. Everyone seems long on critique and short on answers. I was frustrated by the response to my question about "what to do?" Training journalists in “ethics” will not change the fundamental economic rationale behind news decisions. Implicit also in that view is the notion that journalists have some exclusive hold on “truth” that audiences cannot participate in. Second, without public subsidies for news being likely any time soon, the economic rationale of investor returns is not going to change. And unless people vote with their eyes, the quality of news is not going to change – which of course is what Grade the News is bent on doing.
So what to do? First, I think changes are already underway, and I welcome that. Newspaper readership is declining, local broadcast news still remains a force but more and more people are migrating on-line for information and conversation. Good, both should be jettisoned in their current forms. The professionals are being forced to open up a bit, and that will only increase. I think those that survive will somehow harness the openness of digital media. And that, I think, is the challenge for all of us. I am not sure how that will translate into paying jobs, but I think we are at very much of a transitional point in media.
Falling back on anachronistic platitudes of the historic role of the press, being sanctimonious about professional standards, or turning to the “Elements of Journalism” will not solve our problems as an industry. Nor should they. Somehow, we need to get away from the notion that the way we have historically done things is the way it must be done.
