Before Thanksgiving, CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism convened a meeting of three dozen journalists, technologists, librarians, entrepreneurs, and academics to discuss ways to scale fact-checking.
The event was born out a conversation with Craig Newmark, who helped fund it. Improving trust in the press and battling disinformation are among the causes he supports. There are fact-checking enterprises already doing good work — most notably, FactCheck.org and Politifact. Craig Silverman of Regret-the-Error fame, gave us a great presentation on the history and state of the art in fact checking.
But these find efforts and organizations can do only so much. And there are so many lies, distortions, and mistakes out there. So the question Craig and I discussed is how to scale fact-checking — and awareness about the need for it.
That led to the event. Here is my colleague Jeremy Caplan’s exhaustive Storify compiling tweets and more from the event. Craig’s takeaway is here. And here are my notes. After hearing the room, I came to see that facts face supply and demand issues.
* Supply of facts: We need more effort to get more government and business information made public in useful forms. There are organizations like The Sunlight Foundation, represented at the event, that are trying. But I believe we — especially journalists — should be campaigning to make government — as I argue in Public Parts — transparent by default and secret by necessity. More data made public is good for many reasons but one of them is simply increasing the supply of facts.
* Supply of disinformation: Jay Rosen argued that we are seeing a disturbing trend in “verification in reverse:” taking a fact and unmaking it, until people don’t believe it anymore. He cited the birthers and climate-change deniers as well as Mitt Romney’s much-fact-checked and debunked campaign commercial. He said there is a growing supply of “public untruths.” He argued: “Verification in reverse should be a beat… We have to start ranking public untruths by their seriousness and spread — we have to start IDing the ones that are out there and influencing public conversation, even though they’re already being fact-checking… We have to start acknowledging what’s going on with systematically distorting truth…”
* Demand for facts: Part of the challenge, the group said, is to increase the demand for fact-checking among journalists and the public — and maybe even politicians.
That leads to:
* Practices: The Washington Post and the Torrington Register Citizen began putting fact-check boxes on their stories. That, to me, is an incredibly simple way to open the opportunity for facts to be challenged and corrected and to make constant correction part of the process. What else can we do to bring fact-checking to the fore?
Also:
* Standards: Joaquin Alvarado, VP for digital innovation at American Public Media, threw out the challenge to begin standardizing how we store and present facts in media so we don’t have to waste effort and so there is an easy means to point the public to already verified information. This won’t be as simple as a spreadsheet; facts require explanation and examination. But Joaquin volunteered to get appropriate parties together to get a start on standardization.
* Tools. See Jeremy and Craig Silverman above for links to the neat tools some are creating, among them Truth Goggles, a project at the MIT Media Lab.
* Culture and education: CUNY might hold a next event on making facts fun. Sounds silly, I know, but many in the room believed that fact-checking needs to be made into a game. And Craig pointed out that some of the best fact-checking out there is done by Jon Stewart et al: truth as entertainment.
* Research: The New America Foundation is holding another event on fact-checking in December, concentrating on research about effectiveness of various methods: what works, what sticks? That is vital to make best use of the precious resources we have.
And finally, that leads to:
* Sustainability: Fact-checking is expensive. All the efforts above try to make it more efficient, by increasing the supply of facts, by getting more people involved, by creating tools, by adopting standards. This is where the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism gets involved: I believe that more transparency and more collaboration will help make for more efficient and sustainable journalism. We need to create and take advantage of existing platforms and then add journalistic value to them. We need to harness the care and energy communities already expend to share their own information. We need to help them do that.
More to come later. If I got anything wrong, correct me.
Sunday’s New York Times editorializes in favor of Do Not Track and other privacy legislation going through Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. Yet The New York Times itself makes much use of personal, private, and tracking information itself. Indeed, it requires tracking.
The editorial (my emphasis): “Congress should act on the F.T.C.’s recommendation to establish a system that would allow consumers to effectively opt out of all tracking of their online activities. There are other worthy proposals, including the administration’s call for limits on the collection of data about consumers online. Lawmakers have proposed about a dozen privacy bills this year alone. But with Congress stuck in a partisan rut, it is reassuring to see the F.T.C. at work.”
* If you subscribe to the print New York Times, the company will sell your name *and address* and other unspecified data to others. “If you are a print subscriber to The New York Times newspaper and subscribed either by mail, phone or online, we may exchange or rent your name and mailing address and certain other information, such as when you first subscribed to The New York Times (but not your e-mail address) with other reputable companies that offer marketing information or products through direct mail.” That’s not opt-in; it’s opt-out.
In Public Parts, I argue that privacy policies in old media have long been far worse than online. Magazines, newspapers, and other recipients of your media money have for years sold information about what you read and consume and who you are and where you live to large data-base companies and marketers. If a library or an online site did that, it would be shot. But The New York Times does that. Want to pass a law about that, Times?
* The New York Times requires that you use cookies. It decrees: “You will not be able to access certain areas of our Web sites, including NYTimes.com, if your computer does not accept cookies from us.” So what happens when Congress passes Do Not Track, Times?
In its explanation of cookies, The Times says: “Our registration system requires that you accept cookies from NYTimes.com in order to log in to our Web site. Cookies are not spyware, viruses or any other kind of malicious program. For best results, set your browser options to accept all cookies from NYTimes.com. You can use your browser options to clear the cookies later, if necessary.”
Precisely. You have many means now to get rid of cookies: You can turn them off, kill them at the end of every session or whenever you want, or open a private session (an “incognito” window in Chrome) that relays no data about you. Do Not Track is redundant. It’s political cynicism.
Oh, and The Times — which gathers more personally identifiable data about you than most any other newspaper — could not operate its paywall without cookies.
* Just like other online marketers, The Times uses cookies to target advertising. “The New York Times Home Delivery Web site also transmits non-personally identifiable Web site usage information about visitors to the servers of a reputable third party for the purpose of targeting our Internet banner advertisements on other sites. To do this, we use Web Beacons in conjunction with cookies provided by our third-party ad server on this site.” Would The Times outlaw this essential business behavior? This is how The Times earns its premium rates with branding advertisers.
* The Times hires a number of analytics companies to track your behavior, from the creepily named Audience Science to WebTrends for the web and from Localytics to the fluffily named Flurry for mobile.
* The Times logs what pages you see and uses that to recommend content.
* It logs your location if you use mobile applications.
* It allows third-party ad servers to place cookies on your computer and track your behavior.
Mind you, I do not object to any of these tracking behaviors. They are, in my opinion, necessary to pay for the content we get from The Times and The Journal and much of the rest of media. They are used to reduce noise, repetition, and irrelevant advertising and content. They are all-in-all harmless and have been demonized by privacy’s regulatory-industrial complex and now even by The Times. If The Times gets its wish and Do Not Track passes, enabling too many consumers “to effectively opt out of all tracking of their online activities,” then I fear we will get less content or more paywalls or both.
I also argue that media and marketing companies have done a godawful job of letting their customers know what information they were gathering and what they were doing with it and how consumers benefited. They long ago should have learned from Amazon, which reveals what it collects and what results and enables customers to see and control and correct that information (which also only gives Amazon yet more valuable data). So it’s their own damned fault they’ve been demonized, opening the door to the cynical pols and bureaucrats who proposed Do Not Track — and to their allies, such as The Times editorialists, who argue on the basis of nonspecific emotions rather than tangible facts about harm and consequences.
It is time for Twitter and its citizens to take back #OccupyWallStreet.
I say that with no disrespect to the efforts and sacrifices of the people who have taken the hashtag literally and moved into Wall Street and cities around the world, confronting the institutions — financial, government, and media — they blame for our crisis.
To the contrary, I say it’s time to carry their work back to our virtual society, where it began, to expand the movement so Michael Bloomberg and his downtown goombas and mayors and cops cannot think that they are able throw it away in a garbage truck; so banks cannot hope to return to their old ways; so media cannot think that it can dismiss #OWS as fringe (see the BBC and the FT each calling the movement “anti-capitalist” when many of us say the real goal is to reclaim capitalism from its crooks).
It is much bigger than the scores of occupants in each city. But that still raises the question of what “it” is.
That is where I believe Twitter can grow and give shape to the movement. There we can answer the question, What are we mad as hell about (should that be a hashtag debate: #why…)? There we can organize no end of irritants for institutions (we can play whack-a-mole with the banks’ rip-off fees and leave them as customers). There we can hold politicians to account.
Some have argued that #OWS will not grow up as a movement until it becomes an institution and has leadership and spokesmen and unified goals and messages and even candidates for office.
Heaven forbid.
#OccupyWallStreet, in my view, is anti-institutional in that it is fighting institutional power and corruption and in that it is not an institution itself. I believe the value of #OWS is that it enables us to say how and why we’re angry and to make the powerful come to us and beg us for forgiveness, not to join their games.
#OccupyWallStreet, the hashtag revolution, establishes us, the public, as an entity to be reckoned with. It is a tool of publicness.
So I support #OWS becoming less literal — let Michael J Bloomberg tear down the tents — and more amorphous, more difficult to define and dismiss and shut down.
#OccupyWallStreet started on Twitter and spread to the streets. Now it’s time come back online and spread further.
Why are you mad as hell? And what are you going to do about it? That is #OWS’ challenge to us all.
The Wall Street Journal today publishes excerpts from a debate among me, danah boyd, Stewart Baker, and Christopher Soghoian about privacy (and publicness). They had us write to specific lengths, so I was surprised that they didn’t publish the entire conversation, even online. So if you can bear more, here are my complete bits; I’ll let me fellow debaters post their own.
Privacy is important. It deserves protection. And it is receiving protection from no end of self-appointed watchdogs, legislators, regulators, consultants, companies, and chief privacy officers: an entire regulatory/industrial complex. Privacy is in good hands.
It’s publicness I worry about: our corresponding right and newfound ability to use this Gutenberg press we all now own—the internet—to speak, assemble, act, connect, and collaborate in a more open society. I fear that that if we over-regulate privacy, managing only to the worst-case, we could lose sight of the benefits of publicness, the value of sharing.
Our new sharing industry—led by Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Foursquare, blogs, and new services launched every day—is premised on an innate human desire to connect. Eight hundred million people can’t be wrong. That’s how many people use Facebook alone to post more than a billion artifacts of their lives every day. These aren’t privacy services. They are social services.
But the private/public discussion to date has focused almost exclusively on privacy and worry. New technologies that cause disruption have often led to collective concern about privacy. After the invention of the press, the earliest published authors fretted about having their thoughts associated with their names, set down permanently and distributed widely. The first serious discussion of a legal right to privacy in the United States did not come until 1890, spurred by the invention of the portable Kodak camera and the rise of the penny press. For a time, President Teddy Roosevelt banned “kodakers” from Washington parks.
Now we are at the dawn of the greatest technological disruption since the press and it brings corresponding concern. It is well to worry about what could go wrong so we may guard against it, to assure that companies and especially government do not surveil us to our detriment.
But I ask us to also recognize and guard the publicness our new tools empower. I hope we engage in another discussion about the principles of an open society: the right to connect, speak, assemble and act; privacy as an ethic; the call for our institutions to become transparent by default and secret by necessity (now it is reversed); the value of maintaining the public square; and the need to safeguard the people’s net from tyrants, censors, private control, and the unintended consequences of well-meaning but premature regulation.
Privacy has its protectors. What of publicness?
Part II:
Privacy legislation and regulation are awash with unintended consequences.
Germany’s head of consumer protection, Ilse Aigner, surely believes she is guarding citizens’ privacy when she urges them to exercise their Verpixelungsrecht, their so-called right to have photos of buildings taken from public streets pixilated in Google Street View. But she sets a precedent that could affect the free-speech rights of journalists and citizens. She diminishes the public square at the public’s cost.
The U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act says sites may not use information specific to a child under 13 without written (that is, faxed, scanned, or videoconferenced) parental consent. The result: Children learn to lie about their age. And young people are likely the worst-served sector of society online. That is a tragedy of lost opportunity.
The Do Not Track legislation making its way through Congress threatens ad tracking and cookies. This newspaper demonizes them as “intrusive” and “intensive surveillance.” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz denounces media that use them as “cyberazzi.” Though most of this data is anonymous. Taken too far, Do Not Track could devalue online media, resulting in less content, more pay walls, and a less-informed populace. The road to ignorance may be paved with good intentions.
Part III:
Stipulated: Anonymity, pseudonymity, and even nicknames need to be protected for the vulnerable, dissidents in danger, whistleblowers, and even game players, for the sake of their speech.
That said, real people and real relationships have proven to add value, accountability, and civility to online discourse.
Stipulated: The advertising, media, and sharing industries have done a dreadful job being open about what they track, why, and what benefits accrue to their users. The mess they’re in is much of their own making.
Even so, online tracking is being demonized in shrill fear-mongering (Chris’ is but one example), which doesn’t acknowledge that most of this data—unlike the consumer data bases of preinternet marketing—do not contain names and addresses. There is little discussion of harm or benefit, only vague fear.
Stipulated: We need to come together as one society to perform certain functions, such as voting and taxation.
But we are not a mass. The myth of the grand shared experience of media—all of us hanging on Uncle Walter’s every pause—was an unfortunate, half-century-long aberration. Democracy should be a cacophony of ideas and perspectives. Thanks to our new tools of publicness, we are regaining the power to create and find our own publics.
Identity can aid connections. Tracking can produce relevance. Personalization can reduce noise. These are benefits of the net.
The organizers of the End Malaria campaign are putting on one more push to sell the book they organized (at least $20 from every sale goes to buying nets) and so they suggested that the contributors post their essays as enticement that you’ll want to read more like (or better than) this. Here’s my contribution on betathink:
Voltaire was half right. “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” he said: The best is the enemy of the good. The best is also the enemy of the better. Striving for perfection complicates and delays getting things done. Worse, the myth of perfection can shut off the process of improvement and the possibility of collaboration.
That myth of perfection is a byproduct of the industrial revolution and the efficiencies of mass production, distribution, and marketing. A product that takes a long time to design and produce is sold to a large market with a claim of perfection. Its manufacturer can’t have customers think otherwise. The distribution chain invests in large quantities of the product and can’t afford for it to be flawed. Mass marketing is spent to convince customers it is the best it can be. Thus perfection becomes our standard or at least our presumption. But perfection is delusion. Nothing and no one is perfect.
The modern cure to Voltaire’s paradox—and a gift of the digital age—is the beta: the unfinished and imperfect product or process that is opened up so customers can offer advice and improvements. Releasing a beta is a public act, an invitation to customers to help complete and improve it. It is an act of transparency and an admission of humility. It is also an act of generosity and trust, handing over a measure of control to others.
Google vice-president Marissa Mayer tells the story of the launch of Google News. It was near the end of the week. No online product is ever released on a Friday (if it breaks, your Saturday is ruined). So the team had just enough time before the weekend to add one more feature. They were debating whether to add a function to sort the news by date or by place. They never got past debating. Come Monday, Google News came out as a beta (and stayed a beta for three years). That afternoon, Mayer says, the team received 305 emails from users, 300 of which begged for sort by date.
By admitting they weren’t finished, the company heard from customers what to do next. “We make mistakes every time, every day,” Mayer confesses. “But if you launch things and iterate really quickly, people forget about those mistakes and have a lot of respect for how quickly you build the product up and make it better.” Beta is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry.
Beta-think can benefit more than technology products. I see betas coming from companies in fashion, restaurants, even chocolate and automotive. I wish we’d see more beta-think—more innovation, experimentation and risk—from government, but bureaucrats and politicians are loath to admit imperfection. I also wish that education would operate under beta-think, encouraging learning by failure rather than teaching to a test and a perfect score of right answers. Beta-think can change how we think as managers. It can even change marriage (so much for trying to find the perfect husband or fix all his imperfections).
Beta-think opens an enterprise to the surprising generosity of the public. Look at the value users build in Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp and other services they control. Beta-think improves an institution’s relationship with its public. Making errors—and confessing and correcting them quickly—will enhance rather than diminish credibility. Once the fear of imperfection is taken out of the equation, innovation can flourish. Look at how Zappos improved customer service by letting employees make their own decisions (and mistakes). What does beta-think do to competitiveness? How can you show your hand to your rivals? That depends on where you see your real value: in keeping secrets from customers or in building strong relationships of trust by listening to and collaborating with them. Beta-think also brings speed. Even perfectionist Apple released its iPhone aware that it was incomplete, promising missing pieces in future updates.
Here’s the wonderful irony of beta-think: It says that we can make what we do ever-better because we are never done, never satisfied, always seeking ways to improve by working in public.
This essay, too, is a beta. It’s not perfect. I’m not done with it. So please come to www.buzzmachine.com/beta-think and help make it better.
Consider: I a matter of a year, the leaders of Italy, Greece, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia have all been ousted not in the normal course of governance and not at the polls. Who’s in charge there? In the Middle EAst, it’s the people, at last (but can they retain power?). In Europe, its bondholders and neighboring nations. Meanwhile, in Spain and the #occupywallstreet movements, disgruntled, disorganized citizens are making their voices heard. In Iceland they’re rewriting their constitution using Facebook.
What is becoming of our notion of nations?
In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Georges Papandreou’s short-lived threat to hold a plebiscite over the EU’s insistence of austerity as a condition of bail from fiscal jail set off a debate among the paper’s editor, Frank Schirrmacher; the esteemed political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and economic writer Rainer Hank.
Far be it from me to translate the language or its subtleties and ironies, but it’s clear that they are debating who’s in charge in Europe: government? bond-holders and bankers? the people? Hank notes that “the governments of Europe are under dual supervision.” He questions whether Europe is facing “dictatorship of the people versus dictatorship of financial markets” or a question of “democracy versus rule of law.”
At the same time I (tried to) read all that, Martin Gurri wrote a most eloquent review of and rumination on Public Parts (his son, Adam, happened to do likewise). Gurri père raises many thoughtful points about the value of publicness and its support of trust. I recommend reading both posts. But for purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on Martin Gurri’s trepidation about government. To quote:
In the existential struggle between the public and the old structures of authority, Jarvis is a participant, not an observer. At times, he makes it sound as if the public can bypass authority and strike out on its own. The larger argument of Public Parts, however, is that the conflict can only be resolved when authority regains the public’s trust by aligning its practices with those of the new information environment. Though optimistic in tone, Jarvis doesn’t directly venture an opinion about the cost of this transformation, possibly because he views it as inevitable. In the manner of a conqueror he proclaims, “Resistance is futile.”
It’s an easy guess that the collision with the public will transform the old institutions. The question is the social and political pain involved: whether the process will resemble gradual evolution or, as I suspect, an extinction event. (There are those who theorize that such a cataclysm has already struck the global economy.)
Because of their immense inherited weight, business and government have a vested interest in inertia. In this context, resistance may be futile in the long term, but rational for the moment. As an old government hand, I can attest to the accuracy of Jarvis’ portrayal of the bureaucracy – but he fails to note the profound emotional investment in existing institutions by the people who inhabit them. Even the most up-to-date bureaucrats, in my experience, will resist the advance of the public until retirement day.
Bending the massive structures of authority to the ideals promoted in Public Parts may well be impossible without a traumatic fracturing of the status quo.
And a traumatic fracturing of the state itself?
That is the question I want to raise here: Are we seeing such cracks begin to open before our eyes?
Is Europe’s crisis of economics and government structure — even of the legitimacy and power of government — a signal?
Is the Arab Spring and its ability to tear down government without a clear notion of what will be built in its place an opportunity to rethink government?
Is Iceland as a startup nation a legitimate effort to show that course?
Did Spain attempt to organize a revolution without organization?
Is #occupywallstreet an effort to reassert the authority of the people outside the structure of politics and government? (Some say they make a mistake not becoming overtly political with candidates and platforms. I am coming to believe they are right to stand outside government and demand attention and reform from that distance. Its platform perspective might be: ‘We don’t want to get any on us.’)
Will we question the idea of what a nation is? Are Greece and Italy still sovereign nations when bankers can overthrow their governments and neighbors can dictate the terms of governance? Are the hashtag rebels of Spain then the U.S. then other nations establishing a new society (albeit one even more unsure in its structure than Egypt’s and Tunisia’s next forms)?
Says Gurri Senior:
Particularly unsettling are the prospects for government. The extraordinary outcomes today demanded from politics, Paul Ormerod has shown, lie beyond the reach of human power. We simply don’t know how to “solve” unemployment or inequality. The more we expect to impose such outcomes on a complex world, the deeper our disenchantment will be. Transparency and citizen participation, in such circumstances, will only aggravate the friction between a triumphant public and its failed institutions. Modern government, outwardly so imposing, will be revealed in its nakedness to be a feeble and incapable organ, unable to rise to the hopes of the citizenry. The consequence is likely to be turbulence for every ruling principle, including liberal democracy.
Gurri might have begun wondering whether I went to far. Then he went even farther.
I’m going to try something: linking here to things I’m writing on Google+, because the conversation there tends to be lively and quick and because I want to keep a record of some of those interesting conversations here before they scroll down into oblivion. So…
* The Associated Press gets into the CIA’s social-media analysis operation, which only makes me think that we in journalism should have just such operations ourselves.
* Adding my experience with Reid Hoffman to the deserved attention he got today in The New York Times: Reid as an open human API.
Put your technician assignments online for customers to see so we can judge when we need to be home and so we don’t get mad at you for having to stay home all day.
Our internet went out after the storms in New Jersey. We were lucky: We lost big trees but they only scraped our house and didn’t take out lines. We lost power and heat but I managed to get the last hotel rooms in the area so we had warm beds. Our power was restored after about 36 hours (many around us in the state still don’t have it) and with power we also got our phone and TV back. But our internet didn’t return. Not so bad. Troubleshooting over the phone with my wife for an hour yielded nothing, so we were told we had to have a visit. But the storm damage was widespread and Verizon was going to take two weeks to come. Internet being lifeblood to me — imagine me Twitterless — I appealed for help to @verizonsupport and they quickly and nicely gave us an appointment after only a few days. That came yesterday.
We were told we were to be the first appointment of the day. So my wife didn’t go out to restock the refrigerator, which was high priority. She waited. She waited 10 hours for the technician to come.
When he came, he said that we weren’t first on his schedule; he had an install, and we know from the effort that went into ours that that takes time. Then his dispatcher inserted another appointment before us. That’s fine, of course. Things are crazy in New Jersey right now. We don’t mind waiting. We just want to know how long to wait.
So here’s my suggestion, Verizon: Go to the Apple store and see the screen that tells customers where they are in line. When you see you’re No. 6, you know you have time to duck out to Starbucks. Apple doesn’t guarantee an exact time — and I know you hate doing that. But Apple gives us enough information so we can know what’s going on and make our own judgments.
Now go to Continental Airlines, look up flight status, and see that they give fliers the complete stand-by list for seats and upgrades. You can see how many seats are open and how many people are ahead of you so you can judge your odds. Again, they give us information. There’s no reason not to. I wrote about this in Public Parts as a simple example of a company being more open. It improves our experience. It saves gate agents from getting the same anxious questions over and over. (I hope this nice practice isn’t lost in Continental’s merger with United.)
So, Verizon, why not open up and simply let customers see a list of how many appointments a technician has and even where they are so we can judge how long it would take to arrive. Give more information when it’s helpful — e.g., that installs take a few hours. When things change, send an update, just as airlines now send SMS or email updates on flight status. You’re a communications company; I’ll bet you can do that well. If we’d had that yesterday, my wife could have spent the morning outside the house (and I wouldn’t feel so guilty for being in New York all day).
When the technician arrived, he was very good and spent time solving our problems with the internet and TVs. He replaced our router.
That leads to another suggestion: Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to send us a router? We’d have had it before the technician came, which means you could have saved the expense of our visit at a really crushed time. Worst case: It wouldn’t have fixed the problem and the appointment would have stood; the only loss would be the shipping cost.
These might seem like minor irritations to customers. But so was Bank of America’s $5 debit card fee. And look what happened to them. In this post, I attributed the bank’s retreat to a young woman’s online petition. But others perhaps rightly credited #occupywallstreet with stirring up productive anger at the banks and winning this small but symbolic and gratifying victory against them at a time of low trust and high contempt for banks in this country.
Friendly advice: You and the other telephone and cable companies could be in a similar boat. No surprise to you that there’s pent-up anger about you. In Public Parts, I tell this story about Frank Eliason, who started Comcast’s @comcastcares — a model for the very helpful @verizonsupport (he later came to New York to work for a bank):
“He was candid about Comcast’s problems, with a rare sense of corporate humor. I watched him at a Salesforce.com event when he came onstage and said, “Customer service . . . . We’re well-known for service, aren’t we . . . . C’mon.” Pause for laugh. “We’re actually working very hard to improve the customers’ service.”
Now see Susan Crawford’s excellent piece for the Harvard Law and Policy Review, out this week, arguing that we are faced with a cable/phone duopoly over our internet access. It is a call to action for regulation of you. It is also, possibly, a focal point for anger about how we customers are imprisoned with our one or two choices.
So beware the seemingly small things — $5 debit cards, 10 hours of thumb-twiddling — can become rallying points for anger and organization against you. We, the community of customers, now have the tools to organize and be heard.
I’m grateful I got my appointment yesterday; thank you @verizonsupport. I’m grateful I got good service from your technician; thank you, Michael. I’m grateful to be using my internet connection at home right now to write this. I’ve also mellowed since Dell Hell. So I want to be helpful.
My helpful suggestion is: open up. If you know information that could be helpful to customers, share it — because now we have the tools that enable you to do that.
P.S. Yesterday was perhaps not the best day to notify us that our rates are going up.
At CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, we invited John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media, Journal Register, and Media News, and Justin Smith, CEO of Atlantic Media, to answer questions about how they are executing their digital first strategies. I interviewed them, digging down into revenue, costs, transition for staff, audience, and advertisers, and more. Here’s the full video:
Paton made it clear that digital first is a transitional strategy, not an end game. He said that at companies like Paid Content, he cannot ever imagine them having a digital first discussion because they obviously are already digital. But he has to transform his companies into digital companies. He talked about cost-cutting and efficiency; about how he is multiplying digital revenue; how he motivates sales people to sell digital; about digital journalism; and about the size of a digital company versus a print monopoly.
Smith — who also launched The Week magazine in the U.S. with a unique and successful strategy — came at many of these questions from the perspective a magazine that sells high value. So he is not only multiplying audience through digital. He is making Atlantic, more and more, into a digital marketing agency for his clients. On the one hand, he says, costs decline from paper to screen, but costs also increase as advertisers need and will pay for greater services. (I think we’ll find that even down to the local level, media companies will have to act like agencies, helping advertisers execute their own digital strategies …. more on that another day.)
In a time when much of the rest of the newspaper and magazine industries are moaning and mourning about their fate, these two executives are building a new future. They are optimists, as are we at Tow-Knight. They have reason to be as they begin to find successes on this difficult path.
Two good, anecdotal illustrations of the power that our tools of publicness give to us, the public.
* Bank of America customer Molly Katchpole collected 300,000 names in an online petition against the bank’s ripoff $5 debit card charge and beat down the behemoth. True, the banks have been guilty of greater ripoffs, but this is still a victory for the customers as a community over the corporation.
It’s one matter for individual customers to resort to blogs and Twitter (as I have) to get satisfaction from companies. It’s another for customers to be able to organize without organizations. Before the net, customers couldn’t have created their own instant network of protest. The net empowers them.
So now companies don’t just need to hire people to watch Twitter and blogs and put out fires. Now they have to fear that their abusive policies will become the subject of large-scale, instant protests. Any company whose business model still depends on holding us prisoner to its policies — banks, cable companies, telcos, airlines, insurance companies — had best learn a lesson.
* And bravo to the kid who recorded and posted the psycho rant of a high-school football coach in suburban Memphis. Yes, some might argue that the coach’s privacy was violated. I say ridiculous. The coach thought he could get away with abusing the children in his care behind closed doors, but now, thanks to a phone and the net, the children can fight back by making his abuses public. Even the coach appears to have learned a lesson.
On Tuesday, Nov. 1 at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, we’re holding an open conversation with two media executives who are building “digital first” futures for their print companies: John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media (and CEO of Journal Register and MediaNews) and Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media.
After they tell us what they mean by digital first and how they’re executing their strategies, we will drill down to the specifics about the impact on content, revenue, costs, staffing, and the transition. They are making their strategies work; we’ll ask how.
Full disclosure: I’m on Journal Register’s advisory board. I’m there because I’m excited to see Paton rescue newspapers by transforming them. I’m also an admirer of Smith since he launched The Week magazine with innovative models.
We plan on streaming and recording the event; links to come.
Nieman Lab’s Megan Garber wrote a brilliant post about the nature of books and conversation using as illustration a conversation about my book. It is, as Jay Rosen said, too good to summarize. So please do go read it.
I love Garber’s piece not just because she said that “90 percent of Morozov’s criticisms are wildly unfair,” referring to a so-called review of my book. I love it because Garber delivered the most serious criticism of my book to date:
The precise thing that makes idea-driven books so valuable to readers — their immersive qualities, the intimate, one-on-one relationship they facilitate between authors and readers — also make them pretty lousy as actual sharers of ideas. Books don’t go viral. And that’s largely because the thing that makes books lucrative to authors and publishers — their ability to restrain ideas, to wall them off from the non-book-buying world — is antithetical to virality. How can books be expected to share ideas when the very point of their existence is containment?
I wrote a book about sharing. But a book is a bad form for sharing.
The book, Garber said, is “designed to advance books within the marketplace, rather than the marketplace of ideas. It aims at publicity rather than publicness, at selling objects rather than propelling the arguments they contain.”
Garber is right. I’ve confessed my hypocrisy in writing both my books on other grounds: I didn’t make them digital, clickable, correctable, linkable…. I did it to get paid, edited, promoted, and distributed (though with the closing of Borders, that last function becomes less valuable). Garber points out as mitigation that I had shared my ideas about publicness on my blog before I wrote the book.
“The professor has been preaching publicness for years — at Buzzmachine, in his Guardian column, at conferences, on TV, on Twitter, on the radio, on his Tumblr. If you follow Jeff Jarvis, you follow Public Parts. You’ve seen his thoughts on publicness take shape over time. The book that resulted from that public process — the private artifact — is secondary. It is the commercial result of a communal endeavor.”
She’s being too easy on me. While I wrote the book, I did share and discuss many of the ideas in it on my blog. That can be a form of collaboration and peer review. But I didn’t do it nearly enough, as far as I’m concerned. I was so busy researching, writing, and editing the book that I neglected the blog.
As Garber notes, I say in Public Parts that I should try to make my next project — if I choose to undertake one — different.
At the end of Public Parts, Jarvis mentions that his next project may not be a book at all, but rather a book-without-a-book: a Godinesque series of public events held both in person and online. “The book,” Jarvis writes, “if there is one, would be a by-product and perhaps a marketing tool for more events.”
The book, if there is one. The book, a by-product. Imagine the possibilities.
I’m still working on what that could be. So let me begin the process and outline my early thinking here to hear what you think.
Start with Kevin Kelly’s 2006 essay in The New York Times Magazine arguing that authors would come to support themselves with performance — and John Updike’s appalled reaction to this “pretty grisly scenario.” I’m not suggesting that authors become merely actors after their books are done.
I’m suggesting, as Garber does, that talks, events, symposia, blogs, hangouts… — discussion with smart people in any form — should come before the book. The process becomes the product; the book (if there is one) is a byproduct.
To take an example: I’ve been wanting to explore the impact of one simple idea, that technology now leads to efficiency over growth. I wrote a post about one aspect of that here and here as well as here and here. The conversation was amazing in its intelligence, perspective, and generosity. It became even better when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham posted it to Hacker News with a challenge, asking what makes this revolution (digital v. industrial) different. Amazing replies ensued. It took me many hours to go through it all, taking many notes.
That made me decide to propose this topic as a talk to South by Southwest. If accepted, that will give me a deadline for research. But I want — no, need — more conversation in the meantime.
That leads me to an idea for a new business. I don’t really want to start it or run it; I just wish it existed so I could use it.
It is time to disrupt the conference and speaking businesses and give some measure of control back to speakers (also known as authors) and their publics (formerly known, as Jay Rosen would say, as audiences). I hope for a way to support the work of authors and thinkers — support it with conversation, attention, and collaboration as well as money.
So imagine this: Authors decide to hold their own event. If you have the brand and popularity of, say, Seth Godin (or, in the sales arena, Jeffrey Gitomer), you can gather a large roomful of fans without effort; each does. But folks like me don’t have their brand or promotional power. So let’s say I get together with another one or two authors and we propose an event in which we discuss what we’re working on.
Kickstarter would seem to be an ideal platform to find out whether there is sufficient demand to support such a gathering, at least to get started. If enough folks sign up, the authors can rent a venue: no risk. The startup I wish for would handle logistics for a fee. It could also be a platform for groups to get together, organizing conferences without conference organizers.
The event, in my view, isn’t speeches to audiences so much as conversations. The author needs to bring value: a presentation, a talk, a set of ideas or challenges. But it’s the conversation I crave, to develop and further challenge ideas and gather perspectives. The event could be streamed for a larger public. It could be videoed and shared online for continued exchange via blogs, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al.
Note that this isn’t about containing ideas but sharing them. That’s what Garber and I both want.
Is there a book? Why should there be? Because a book can memorialize the ideas and research that comes out of this process. It can bring the discipline that the form — and a good editor, like mine — can demand. It can spread the ideas yet farther — to the many more people who couldn’t be bothered joining in the process and the conversation. It can make the ideas last longer. (In Public Parts, I quote Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein pointing out that Gutenberg’s Bible turns out to be a much longer lasting repository of data than a floppy disk.)
If there’s a book, is it printed? The likelihood of that decreases by the day. So if it is just electronic, then it can change form, including video from the process; photos and graphics to illustrate points; and permalinks to any part of the book to support conversation on the net.
So now we arrive back that the book I apologized for not writing in WWGD? — digital, clickable, linkable, correctable, updateable, part of a conversation. There are issues: Conversations can be invaded by trolls. There’s no economic certainty. We’ll make missteps.
But can we get closer to Garber’s ideal? Well, we’ll know it when we see it. But if we try this route, we now have a standard to judge it against: the one Garber sets in her great post.
Our assumptions about information itself are shifting, reshaping “the news” from a commodity to a community, from a product to a process. The same changes that have disrupted the news industry will, inevitably, disrupt the book industry; Public Parts hints at what might come of the disruption. Books as community. Books as conversation. Books as ideas that evolve over time — ideas that shift and shape and inspire — and that, as such, have the potential of viral impact.
Can books go viral? Garber asks. Maybe, if they’re allowed to be more than books.
