text:
(New York) Time(s) machine: Jill Abramson's integrated newsroom laboratory
New York Time(s)Machine :: Did you know that New York Times integrated newsroom is a product, at least in part, of a months-long study by Jill Abramson, last year? In an unusual move, she stepped aside for 6-months to focus on digital operations and strategy. It seems like a good idea that she took the time to prepare herself in this way for the duties of executive editor, which she will assume in early September, writes Earl Wilson, public editor, New York Times.
[Bill Keller:] We really want this to be one newsroom, and it is part of the way there, not all of the way there. ... There is still a digital rhythm and a print rhythm, and they don't feel synchronized.
By the way, when asked whether the temporary shift meant that he might be retiring early, Bill Keller answered, "No."
Continue to read Stephanie Clifford, mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
Tags: New York Times Bill Keller digital newsroom integrated newsroom Jill Abramson print newsroom
In the absence of ... female voices: 88-minutes inside New York Times "Page One"
Business Insider :: The absence of female voice in the main narrative of Page One: Inside the New York Times, the new documentary that spends a year following the NYT, is notable -- which stars David Carr, Brian Stelter, Tim Arango, Bill Keller, and media editor Bruce Headlam -- particularly considering this month's news that Jill Abramson will be taking over as the paper's first female executive editor.
[Glynnis MacNicol:] ... a 88-minute documentary about the most important paper in the world during, arguably, the most important period the industry has ever undergone, that features no women power players at the paper of record does get tedious
Continue to read Glynnis MacNicol, www.businessinsider.com
Tags: New York Times Bill Keller Brian Stelter Bruce Headlam inside Page One Tim Arango
A bone of contention? - Why Bill Keller stepped down as New York Times executive editor
New York Magazine :: Keller's columns infuriated some members of the newsroom, especially the Times' media desk, who felt that the executive editor should be a kind of impartial honest broker. Times media editor Bruce Headlam and media columnist David Carr had an intervention with Keller to explain how his columns were hurting their ability to cover the industry.
[Bill Keller:] Even though I knew I would cause a certain amount of consternation in the building, I decided that was okay because it was worth having a conversation about this.
Then, last month, Keller wrote a column critical of Twitter, calling it the enemy of contemplation." Inside the Times, the column set off more alarms. Social-media staffers complained that Keller was signaling that he didn't like Twitter even as the paper was trying to encourage reporters to embrace the new tool.
Bill Keller stepped down as Times executive editor, but why?
Continue to read Gabriel Sherman, nymag.com
Tags: Huffington Twitter Arianna Huffington Bill Keller Bruce Headlam David Carr Huffington Post media desk New York Times
Time machine 2006: The United States of America vs. 'New York Times' editor Bill Keller
New York Magazine :: Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat on a couch in the Oval Office of the White House, three feet from President George W. Bush, and listened. For a meeting without historical precedent, the president of the United States had called the Times to the White House to personally try to prevent a state secret from appearing in print—an exposé of the National Security Agency's efforts to monitor phone calls without court-approved warrants that the Times had held back on for over a year.
After stiff pleasantries, Bush issued an emphatic warning: If they revealed the secret program to the public and there was another terrorist attack on American soil, the Paper of Record would be implicated.
"The basic message," recalls Keller, "was, 'You'll have blood on your hands.' " Afterward, Sulzberger and Keller stood outside the White House. Undaunted by the president's logic and his threats, Keller told Sulzberger, "Nothing I heard in there changed my mind." Sulzberger agreed.
Continue to read the original article by Joe Hagan, nymag.com in 2006
Tags: New York Times Bill Keller George W. Bush Oval Office
Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms
New tools are at their most powerful, Clay Shirky says, once they're ubiquitous enough to become invisible. Twitter may be increasingly pervasive — a Pew study released yesterday shows that 13 percent of online adults use the service, which is up from 8 percent six months ago — but it's pretty much the opposite of invisible. We talk on Twitter, yes, but almost as much, it seems, we talk about it.
The big debates about Twitter's overall efficacy as a medium — like the one launched by, say, Malcolm Gladwell and, more recently, Bill Keller, whose resignation from the New York Times editorship people have (jokingly, I think?) chalked up to his Twitter-take-on column — tend to devolve into contingents rather than resolve into consensus. An even more recent debate between Mathew Ingram and Jeff Jarvis, which comparatively nuanced, comparatively polite) ended with Ingram writing, "I guess we will have to agree to disagree."
But why all the third-railiness? Twitter, like many other subjects of political pique, tends to be framed in extremes: On the one hand, there's Twitter, the cheeky, geeky little platform — the perky Twitter bird! the collective of "tweets"! all the twee new words that have emerged with the advent of the tw-efix! — and on the other, there's Twitter, the disruptor: the real-time reporting tool. The pseudo-enabler of democratic revolution. The existential threat to the narrative primacy of the news article. Twetcetera.
The dissonance here could be chalked up to the fact that Twitter is simply a medium like any other medium, and, in that, will make of itself (conversation-enabler, LOLCat passer-onner, rebellion-facilitator) whatever we, its users, make of it. But that doesn't fully account for Twitter's capacity to inspire so much angst ("Is Twitter making us ____?"), or, for that matter, to inspire so much joy. The McLuhany mindset toward Twitter — the assumption of a medium that is not only the message to, but the molder of, its users — seems to be rooted in a notion of what Twitter should be as much as what it is.
Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we're wondering why heated debates about Twitter's effect on information/politics/us tend to be at once so ubiquitous and so generally unsatisfying…the answer may be that, collectively, we have yet to come to consensus on a much more basic question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech?
Twitter versus "Twitter"
The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn't matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to insist on categorizing our communication, drawing thick lines between words that are spoken and words that are written. So libel is, legally, a different offense than slander; the written word, we assume, carries the heft of both deliberation and proliferation and therefore a moral weight that the spoken word does not. Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final.
And speech, while we're at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual. A conversation will end, yes, but it is not the ending that defines it.
Those characteristics give way to categories. Writing is X; speaking is Y; and both have different normative dimensions that are based on, ultimately, the dynamics of power versus peer — the talking to versus the talking with. So when we talk about Twitter, we tend to base our assessments on its performance as a tool of either orality or textuality. Bill Keller seems to see Twitter as text that happens also to be conversation, and, in that, finds the form understandably lacking. His detractors, on the other hand, seem to see Twitter as conversation that happens also to be text, and, in that, find it understandably awesome.
Which would all be fine — nuanced, even! — were it not for the fact that Twitter-as-text and Twitter-as-conversation tend to be indicated by the same word: "Twitter." In the manner of "blogger" and "journalist" and even "journalism" itself, "Twitter" has become emblematic of a certain psychology — or, more specifically, of several different psychologies packed awkwardly into a single signifier. And to the extent that it's become a loaded word, "Twitter" has also become a problematic one: #Twittermakesyoustupid is unfair, but #"Twitter"makesyoustupid has a point. The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It's its own thing, a new category.
Our language, however, doesn't yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn't yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.
We might deem Twitter a text-based mechanism of orality, as the scholar Zeynep Tufekci has suggested, or of a "secondary orality," as Walter Ong has argued, or of something else entirely (tweech? twext? something even more grating, if that's possible?). It almost doesn't matter. The point is to acknowledge, online, a new environment — indeed, a new culture — in which writing and speech, textuality and orality, collapse into each other. Speaking is no longer fully ephemeral. And text is no longer simply a repository of thought, composed by an author and bestowed upon the world in an ecstasy of self-containment. On the web, writing is newly dynamic. It talks. It twists. It has people on the other end of it. You read it, sure, but it reads you back.
"The Internet looking back at you"
In his social media-themed session at last year's ONA conference, former Lab writer and current Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet's news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.
The Journal's readers were confronted, in other words, with text's increasingly implicit mutuality. And their "whoa, it's human!" experience — the Soylent Greenification of online news consumption — can bring, along with its obvious benefits, the same kind of momentary unease that accompanies the de-commodification of, basically, anything: the man behind the curtain, the ghost in the machine, etc. Concerns expressed about Twitter, from that perspective, may well be stand-ins for concerns about privacy and clickstream tracking and algorithmic recommendation and all the other bugs and features of the newly reciprocal reading experience. As the filmmaker Tze Chun noted to The New York Times this weekend, discussing the increasingly personalized workings of the web: "You are used to looking at the Internet voyeuristically. It's weird to have the Internet looking back at you…."
So a Panoptic reading experience is also, it's worth remembering, a revolutionary reading experience. Online, words themselves, once silent and still, are suddenly springing to life. And that can be, in every sense, a shock to the system. (Awesome! And also: Aaaah!) Text, after all, as an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds. Entire schools of literary criticism have been devoted to that assumption.
And in written words' temporal capacity as both repositories and relics, in their power to colonize our collective past in the service of our collective future, they have suggested, ultimately, order. "The printed page," Neil Postman had it, "revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical and relevant criticism." In their architecture of sequentialism, neatly packaged in manuscripts of varying forms, written words have been bridges, solid and tangible, that have linked the past to the future. As such, they have carried an assurance of cultural continuity.
It's that preservative function that, for the moment, Twitter is largely lacking. As a platform, it does a great job of connecting; it does, however, a significantly less-great job of conserving. It's getting better every day; in the meantime, though, as a vessel of cultural memory, it carries legitimately entropic implications.
But, then, concerns about Twitter's ephemerality are also generally based on a notion of Twitter-as-text. In that, they assume a zero-sum relationship between the writing published on Twitter and the writing published elsewhere. They see the written, printed word — the bridge, the badge of a kind of informational immortality — dissolving into the digital. They see back-end edits revising stories (which is to say, histories) in an instant. They see hacks erasing those stories altogether. They see links dying off at an alarming rate. They see all that is solid melting into bits.
And they have, in that perspective, a point: While new curatorial tools, Storify and its ilk, will become increasingly effective, they might not be able to recapture print's assurance, tenacious if tenuous, of a neatly captured world. That's partly because print's promise of epistemic completeness has always been, to some extent, empty; but it's also because those tools will be operating within a digital world that is increasingly — and actually kind of wonderfully — dynamic and discursive.
But what the concerns about Twitter tend to forget is that language is not, and has never been, solid. Expression allows itself room to expand. Twitter is emblematic, if not predictive, of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the notion that, under the web's influence, our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. "Chaos is our lot," Clay Shirky notes; "the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures." One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us. And so the digital sphere calls for a new paradigm of communication: one that is discursive as well as conservative, one that acquiesces to chaos even as it resists it, one that relies on text even as it sheds the mantle of textuality. A paradigm we might call "Twitter."
Photos by olalindberg and Tony Hall used under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: Regular post Bill Keller Brian Stelter Clay Shirky conversation discourse Gutenberg Parenthesis Jay Rosen Jeff Jarvis Mathew Ingram Neil Postman orality print text textuality Twitter Zeynep Tufekci
Meet the new boss: Jill Abramson's NYT ascent and its potential impact on the digital side of the Times
The New York Times will have a new leader in the newsroom. Jill Abramson will replace Bill Keller, who is moving to a writing job at the paper.
I'm sure Times Kremlinologists are already developing their theories about the move and its timing — let the #______MakesYouStupid jokes begin — but from our perspective, we're most interested in the impact the new leadership will have on the Times' digital strategy. Keller's eight years in the top job have witnessed the complete disruption of the traditional business model for American newspapers, but the Times' brand equity, market positioning, and quality have all given it a major advantage over its peers.
The Times has invested heavily in digital initiatives in the Keller era — I don't have numbers to back this up, but I suspect their investment has been greater than any other American news organization. But that makes sense, since the Times has more to gain from the web's easy distribution model than any other newspaper whose content is more tied to geography. The Times has national and global appeal, and fits perfectly with a medium that lets Times journalism reach that broad audience. From its large digital news operation to its massive adoption of blogs to its R&D Lab, the Keller era leaves the Times about as well positioned for a webby future as any of its peers.
A pro-digital mindset has never been unanimous among Times leadership, which has obvious and deep roots in print culture. The recent hubbub over Keller's Twitter column was only the most recent iteration of the internal conflict. Maybe you remember two years ago, when a few Times reporters livetweeted a Times digital staff meeting, which led to a backlash from editors and other staffers?
Well, today, the announcement of Abramson's ascent was semi-livetweeted by @nytimes, the newspaper's recently humanized 3.2 million-follower Twitter account — Instagram photos and all.
We can only guess what Jill Abramson's promotion will mean for the Times' digital strategy — but to the extent that she's carved out an outward-facing identity on the subject, it's been notably pro-web. It was Abramson who took time away from her editing gig last year to immerse herself in the Times' digital operations, which Keller said was Abramson's initiative. (That move began on June 1, one year ago yesterday, and was supposed to last six months. The Times press release on the move quotes Arthur Sulzberger as saying: "Over the past year, she has immersed herself in our digital strategy and led the effort to fully integrate the newsroom." So it would seem elements of the immersion lived on past the six-month span.)
Last fall, Abramson told New York she wanted to build incentives for staffers to become more web-oriented. "When you have a front-page story," she said, "everyone is like, 'Wow, great story!' I'd like to get to a place where the celebration when something goes on the home page is as pronounced."
Jennifer Preston, former Times social media editor, chimed in after today's announcement: "For all of you wondering about Jill Abramson and the Web? Jill gets it. And she's fearless. We're lucky." She added "Jill has always been highly supportive of our real-time Twitter publishing/curation efforts."
And for those looking for more tea leaves to read, check out Abramson's two most recent Talk to the Newsroom features, both from 2009, where she hits on some webby subjects. You won't find much revelatory — no secret web strategies lying in wait for the right moment. Like the Times' staff, we'll all have to wait and see how she shapes the Times' digital transformation.
Tags: Regular post Arthur Sulzberger Bill Keller Jill Abramson New York Times New York Times R&D lab Twitter
New York Times: Jill Abramson to replace Bill Keller
New York Times :: Jill Abramson, a former investigative reporter and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, will become the paper's executive editor, succeeding Bill Keller, who is stepping down to become a full-time writer for the paper. Dean Baquet, the paper's Washington bureau chief, was named a managing editor
Thursday, June 2,2011 - 10:36 am EDT
Continue to read Jeremy W. Peters, www.nytimes.com
Tags: New York Times Bill Keller Dean Baquet Jill Abramson The New York Tiems
This Week in Review: What Twitter does to us, Google News gets more local, and making links routine
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news.
Twitter on the brain: Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller got a rise out of a lot of folks online with one of the shortest of his 21 career tweets: "#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss." Keller revealed the purpose of his social experiment this week in a column arguing, in so many words, that Twitter may be dulling your humanity, and probably making you stupid, too. Here's the money quote: "But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity."
This, as you might imagine, did not go over particularly well online. There were a couple strains of reaction: Business Insider's Henry Blodget and All Twitter's Lauren Dugan argued that Twitter may indeed be changing us, but for the good, by helping make previously impossible connections.
Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick of Techdirt countered Keller by saying that while Twitter isn't built for deep conversations, it is quite good at providing an entry point for such discussion: "What you see publicly posted on Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the conversation iceberg," Tsotsis said. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, defended Twitter's true social nature, and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci gave a fantastic breakdown of what Twitter does and doesn't do culturally and socially.
Two of the most eloquent responses were provided by Nick Bilton, one of Keller's own employees, and by Gizmodo's Mat Honan. Bilton pointed out that our brains have shown a remarkable ability to adapt quickly to new technologies without sacrificing old capacities. (Be sure to check out Keller's response afterward.)
Honan made a similar argument: Keller, he said, is confusing the medium with the message, and Twitter, like any technology, is what you make it. "If you choose to do superficial things there, you will have superficial experiences. If you use it to communicate with others on a deeper level, you can have more meaningful experiences that make you smarter, build lasting relationships, and generally enhance your life," Honan wrote.
Google gets more local with news: Google News unveiled a few interesting changes in the past week, starting with the launch of "News near you." Google has sorted news by location for a while now, but this feature will allow smartphone users to automatically get local news wherever they are. ReadWriteWeb's Dan Rowinski explained why newspapers should be worried about Google moving further onto their local-news turf, and GigaOM's Mathew Ingram criticized newspapers for not coming up with like this themselves.
Poynter's Jeff Sonderman, on the other hand, said Google's feature is still in need of some human curation to go with its algorithmic aggregation. That's an area in which local newspapers can still dominate, he said, but it'll require some technological catchup, as well as a willingness to get over fears about linking to competitors.
Another change, not publicized by Google News but spotted by the folks at Search Engine Land, was the addition of an option to allow users to filter out blogs and press releases from their results. This raised the question, what exactly does Google consider a blog? Google told Search Engine Land it relies on a variety of factors to make that decision, especially self-identification. Mathew Ingram ripped this classification, and urged Google to put everything that contains news together in Google News and let readers sort it out. (Former Lab writer Zach Seward wrote about the problems with Google News' blog label back in 2009.)
Fitting linking into news' workflow: A discussion about linking has been simmering on Twitter on and off over the past few weeks, and it began to come together into something useful this week. This round of the conversation started with a post by web thinker and scholar Doc Searls, who wondered why news organizations don't link out more often. In the comments, the Chicago Tribune's Brian Boyer suggested that one reason is that many newspapers' CMS's and workflows are print-centric, making linking logistically difficult.
CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson responded that the workflow issue isn't much of an excuse, saying, as he put it on Twitter: "At this point 'linking' has been around for twenty years. The fact that this is STILL a workflow issue is almost worse than not caring." This kicked off a sprawling debate on Twitter, aptly chronicled via Storify by Mathew Ingram and Alex Byers. Ingram also wrote a post responding to a few of the themes of resistance of links, particularly the notion that information on the web is inferior to information gained by old-fashioned reporting.
British journalist Kevin Anderson took on the workflow issue in particular, noting how outdated many newspaper CMS's are and challenging them to catch up technologically: "It's an industrial workflow operating in a digital age. It's really only down to 'that's the way we've always done it' thinking that allows such a patently inefficient process to persist." Publish2′s Scott Karp gave an idea for a solution to the CMS mess.
AOL's continued makeover: Another week, another slew of personnel moves at AOL. PaidContent's David Kaplan reported that AOL is hiring "a bunch" of new (paid) editors and shuffling some current employees around after its layoff of hundreds this spring. Overall, Kaplan wrote, this is part of the continued effort to put the Huffington Post's stamp on AOL's editorial products.
One of the AOL entities most affected by the shifts is Seed, which had been a freelance network, but will now fall under AOL's advertising area as a business-to-business product. Saul Hansell, who was hired in 2009 to run Seed, is moving to HuffPo to edit its new "Big News" features. In a blog post, Hansell talked about what this means for HuffPo and for Seed.
Meanwhile, the company is also rolling out AOL Industry, a set of B2B sites covering energy, defense, and government. But wait, that's not all: AOL's Patch is launching 33 new sites in states targeting the 2012 election. The hyperlocal news site Street Fight also reported that Patch is urging its editors to post more often, and a group of independent local news sites is banding together to tell the world that they are not Patch, nor anything like it.
Reading roundup: As always, plenty of other stuff to get to this week.
— We mentioned a Pew report's reference to the Drudge Report's influence in last week's review, and this week The New York Times' David Carr marveled at Drudge's continued success without many new-media bells and whistles. Poynter's Julie Moos looked at Drudge's traffic over the years, while the Washington Post disputed Pew's numbers. ZDNet's David Gewirtz had five lessons Drudge can teach the rest of the media world.
— A few paid-content items: A Nielsen survey on what people are willing to pay for various mobile services, Poynter's Rick Edmonds on The New York Times' events marketing for its pay plan, and the Lab's Justin Ellis on paid-content lessons from small newspapers.
— A couple of tablet-related items: Next Issue Media, a joint effort of five publishers to sell magazines on tablets, released its first set of magazines on Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor expounded on the iPad as the "missing link" in news' digital evolution.
— Columbia University announced it will launch a local news site this summer focusing on accountability journalism, and the Lab's Megan Garber gave some more details about what Columbia's doing with it.
— The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner had an interesting conversation with Slate's David Plotz about Slate's aggregation efforts, and in response, Reuters' Felix Salmon made the case for valuing aggregation skills in journalists.
— This weekend's think piece is a musing by Maria Bustillos at The Awl on Wikipedia, Marshall McLuhan, communal knowledge-making, and the fate of the expert. Enjoy.
Tags: Regular post AOL AOL Industry Bill Keller blogs CMS Drudge Report Google News Huffington Post intelligence linking location location-based news News Near You newspapers Patch Seed This Week in Review Twitter workflow
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, NY Times Feud at Logan Symposium
BERKELEY, CALIF. -- I am at the 5th Annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium, a gathering of the top investigative journalists that happens each year at University of California at Berkeley. Lowell Bergman, a professor at the school and former "60 Minutes" producer and longtime investigative journalist, brings together an invite-only crowd of journalists, technologists, academics and more. The title of the conference is "Leaks, Laws & Lies" and will include a live Skype call with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.
(You can see previous coverage of post Logan Symposiums by PBS MediaShift here.)
My goal was to live-blog the Symposium, but due to issues with Internet access, I was only able to take quick live notes, which I'm now posting on MediaShift. The highlight of the first day of the conference was the appearance via Skype of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, who is under house arrest in the U.K. A panel called "The War on WikiLeaks included representatives from the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel, all news outlets that worked with and published the leaks from WikiLeaks, including the Afghan War Logs, Iraq War Logs and international cables from the U.S. State Department.
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller at one point was asked why he had described Julian Assange in such a critical way in a story after posting the leaked material. Keller said he had never met Assange and that his description of Assange came from what reporters told him. Later, Assange joined the panel via Skype, and the warmth quickly left the room. None of the panelists wanted to ask Assange a question, until Keller attacked Assange for saying that the U.S. media didn't care about what happened in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Assange looked over the panel from a large projection screen, almost like a world leader via satellite.
Below are my detailed notes of what people said on that panel, and the intro before the panel. These are not exact quotes but are paraphrases of what the principals said. I also took some videos of some of Assange's answers, and will posting the best of those as well.
Intro from Lowell Bergman
Lowell Bergman, UC Berkeley: Our investigative reporting program is totally privately funded, so Jerry Brown can't slash our budget.
People in our audience are from Latvia, Japan, Germany, the widest group we've had, with people who've won Oscars, Pulitzer Prizes. Not just journalists but also financiers, law enforcement, faculty, students, and even PR flacks.
David Logan passed away but his sons are here...I learned that David Logan was a man of many interests, from a jazz afficianado, he had Picasso drawings and he eventually funded the chair at Berkeley for me to teach here. We also have investigative journalism fellowships here.
Six months ago I got a grant from Knight for a study about collective work in investigations that's being done by a former fellow. For the next year and a half, we're going to do a study on collective investigative reporting, create a guide and set up standards and procedures for how to work together. We'll talk more about collaboration on the WikiLeaks panel.
Non-profits can't afford legal counsel so we have an active group helping them. Hewlett Packard found information about journalists including John Markoff of the New York Times. He sued and won a quarter million dollars, and he gave us $100,000 to give out a Markoff Award, with a drawing of John on it. We give it out to our low maintenance supporters. This year the winners are Bob Bishop, and Herb and Marion Sandler.
Something new for us: We'll have a series of talks about WikiLeaks, along with a videotape we produced with Julian Assange. He was here last year, and can't be here this year, obviously. We did send an invitation to Bradley Manning but he can't make it. We'll have two brief talks, Julian's tape and then the panel, and if we can pull it off, Julian will be on his way back to his residence, he will try to get there in time by the end of the panel, and will join us by Skype. And will be on during lunch to answer questions.
Julian is not really a source. He's a new kind of person, with a new kind of vocation. We all need to do a lot of thinking about it. He's not a source, and he's not a legacy journalist. He's an advocate and that's not rare among journalists these days.
Bradley Manning is being held without charges and is in solitary confinement in conditions that are close to torture. Daniel Ellsberg, who's in Hawaii and can't be here, was indicted under the Espionage Act, but was only saved because they broke into his office. Today a liberal administration is holding him under bad conditions and no one is protesting it. Those are my blunt observations of what is going on. And the leaks continued.
Mark Feldstein, author: This is a Cliff's Notes of the history of leaks. Thomas Jefferson even leaked information himself. President Buchanan leaked information about President Polk. The only time it related to national security was in World War II when the Chicago Tribune wrote that the U.S. broke a secret code, but it wasn't really a threat to national security. In the atomic era the government started using the Espionage Act from World War I to prosecute leakers. Newspapers self-censored themselves at the request of the government.
Jack Anderson, a syndicated columnist, was the WikiLeaks of the '40s and '50s, and his column went out to 1,000 newspapers, so it was hard to censor it everywhere. Anderson would have news conferences and hand out documents to make sure newspapers didn't miss it. He was a seasoned journalist and could handle himself better than Julian Assange. The White House plotted to kill him by poison. He blackmailed the White House, to make them back off. Assange is not quite that sophisticated.
Then came the Pentagon Papers in the '70s and Nixon and his administration tried to stop them, and turned it into a cause celebre. Now we have WikiLeaks, with national security documents able to be disseminated in a click of a mouse.
Larger lessons? All administrators want to control the agenda, exaggerate harm, want to stop the leaks. None have come to grips with the fact that the biggest threat to national security is not the press, not leaks, but mistakes by government policy. Leaks are as old as apple pie and that's why they'll continue.
Julian Assange Video
Julian Assange: The U.S. government is saying that any form of collaboration between a source and investigative journalists is espionage. That's why the New York Times is saying they were not collaborating, but that we're just a source. But the truth is that it was a collaboration. The grand jury is investigating espionage and the White House is pushing an angle that collaboration between journalists and sources is illegal. We all know how investigative journalism works. You call up a source, meet them at a cocktail party and get information.
That interpretation will result in making government completely unaccountable to investigations. You'll hear Bill Keller of the New York Times say they work hand in glove with the government. I do say that news organizations and journalists must understand their role to hold government and other powerful people to account. It's not to be popular or be a propagandist for organizations.
People say to me, "I could never do what you do." I have fears just like all of you do. The key to courage is simply understanding what the risks are and taking actions accordingly. And not being scared to challenge and see whether the risk is correct.
Panel: The War on WikiLeaks
Moderator: Jack Shafer, Slate
Panel: David McCraw of the New York Times, Holger Stark of Der Spiegel, Bill Keller of the New York Times, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Hudson Institute, Nick Davies, Guardian.
Shafer: WikiLeaks has served as a valuable archive for documents and insight into many secretive groups like Scientology, Rand Corp. and others. I'm hoping to run the most incendiary panel and discussion of the symposium.
Nick Davies of the Guardian: I heard about Bradley Manning being arrested. The most interesting story was all the documents. I found these chat logs on Wired, with someone purporting to be Bradley Manning says he finds near-criminal back deals all over the world. That it should be seen all over the world. It's breathtaking and horrifying. As a reporter, it sends shivers down your spine.
I set out to find someone at WikiLeaks to tell their story. I made contact with people all over the world, and wanted to get in touch with Julian Assange. I found out he was flying into Brussels to make a speech, but was afraid of arrest. He figured it was a high profile place where he wouldn't be grabbed. I talked to him in the European Parliament building. So how could I convince him to give me the story, someone in the mainstream media? There was a physical threat to him.
This is a very political landscape, but we can reduce that if we create an alliance to give Julian power he didn't have. The New York Times came up as part of that alliance because it would help to have the most powerful newspaper on our side. I hooked up with Julian, and he is wonderful and strange. He was crashed out at 3 pm after a flight from Australia, I woke him up and talked to him for 6 hours. Julian could see the value and wanted to talk about the possibilities.
He agreed to give information to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel in four packets. The Afghan War Logs, the Iraqi War Logs, the diplomatic cables and something that hasn't been published yet. How to get it? I left with nothing, Julian created a website and gave me a password made by the logos on napkins. That was the crown jewels in the journalism world.
Bill Keller, NY Times: Julian Assange has had his revenge, because we have to show up for an unlimited number of panel discussions. I'm going to skip my time and believe that the most interesting part will be the Q&A.
Holger Stark, Der Spiegel: We're actually still in touch with Julian Assange, unlike the other news organizations. We published in September 2010 an interview with him, and he was very angry because people said he was acting like a dictator. I spent a weekend with him discussing many things, and we are still going through another project with WikiLeaks. I've been asked how much WikiLeaks changed journalism. It has changed journalism and brought a revolutionary thing to journalism with an anonymous dump of documents and something no one has done before. But journalism has changed WikiLeaks more than WikiLeaks has changed journalism.
They used to post everything they found on the Internet. Last summer he planned to dump the entire Afghan War Logs with all sources online. We all told him it was irresponsible, you can't do that, and he agreed to change that. When we published the Irag War Logs, we realized they had to be redacted. When we published the cables, he let the publishers decide what to publish. It was handed over to the media.
WikiLeaks is much more a journalism organization than it was before.
David McCraw, NY Times: There are circumstances when the press can break the Espionage Act. It's a complicated topic. If the government was secretly monitoring every mosque in the U.S., it might help national security but it also might not be legal and should be exposed. There's a very high standard that needs to be met with the First Amendment and Espionage Act before we can show that the press has broken that act. The system does in fact work.
We understand there's a responsibility and there's a way we should do this. The prosecution understands they shouldn't prosecute newspapers that are publishing this. There hasn't been a single prosecution of a news organization under that act.
Q&A with Panel
Shafer: Julian was listening in on his cell phone. I'll ask a softball question to Bill Keller. We all know that publications will work with the government before publishing sensitive information.
Keller: With the Afghan War Logs, the government didn't want to work with us at all because they didn't want to legitimize what we were doing. We allowed them to argue why we shouldn't publish them and wanted to get their reaction before publishing. They did, with caveats, make a statement about their relationship with Pakistan. When it got to the cables and the State Dept., they were prepared to be more engaged. We offered them the opportunity to make the case that we shouldn't publish them at all, or question the theme of the documents. The scale of the document is without precedent, but the process was typical. We offered the State Dept. the chance to comment before publication.
It was a series of stories that ran over two weeks. They knew which documents we had, we told them the subject and allegations we were making. There were three categories of documents, and types of discussions: the easy calls to redact names of dissidents and sources; on the other end, stories that would be embarrassing but we didn't think that would prevent us from publishing; and then things in between where we had lively discussions. We went along with the administration's argument sometimes but not always.
We made editorial judgments on all the stories, and if Julian Assange says it's a collaboration with government, he can say that. He gave us a large amount of information, we agreed to an embargo date and that was it. He didn't see the articles, he had no input into the journalism we did. So in my view it's not a collaboration with him or with the government. We gave the government a chance to have their say.
Shafer: Gabriel, can you make the argument that the public doesn't have the right to know?
Schoenfeld: Yes, in some cases, journalists should not publish how to create an anthrax bomb. In one case someone published how to create an atomic bomb, but most of that information was in the public domain. My argument with Bill Keller is that I think the government does have a case against the leakers causing issues with national security.
An argument broke out between Nick Davies and Gabriel Schoenfeld. Here's a video of that exchange:
Shafer: Holger, play press critic for me. How did Der Spiegel cover this? What was the focus?
Stark: Sure, I will. We were interested to see how the U.S. government would respond. The U.S. government didn't want to put pressure on the press but all on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. We'll see that in the next weeks and months, they'll try to show that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic enterprise. How did we look at the documents? Not much differently than the other news organizations did. Maybe we published a bit more that would be a scandal in the U.S., about a task force that was set up to capture and kill leaders in Afghanistan. That's something we don't have in the German army, so we investigated those things more. We invested a lot of research into what Hillary Clinton was doing to collect intelligence at the UN.
Shafer: Bill, you describe Assange as smelling like he hadn't bathed in days. Do you have anything to add to that? Is that any way to talk about sources? That won't encourage more people to be sources, will it?
Keller: The fourth packet of information won't come to us, we know that. By the time I wrote that piece about Assange, it was an attempt to describe what we did and why we did in narrative form. It could have been written like a master's thesis, but it had some snippets of color. I never met Julian Assange, we only had phone conversations. I reported from what our reporters told me in their reporting. That was only one small part of the article I wrote.
He was also the story and was a public figure, and is a complicated public figure. I don't presume to make any bumper sticker statements about him.
Q: How do you think you would handle new leaks, and what effect will new copycat WikiLeaks-type groups have?
Keller: We could set up drop boxes of information. There's now OpenLeaks, and Al Jazeera has set up a dropbox but nothing has come along. We had a lot of time with introspection and second guessing, and we think we handled it right.
McCraw: There are always concerns about authenticity. The security firm from Bank of America wanted to dump fake documents to WikiLeaks, so we have the same concerns we had before with info from a plain brown envelope. Every time we had a discussion about this.
Keller: There has been a big effect of WikiLeaks documents in North Africa. There was an effect in Tunisia, which sparked other protests. We can argue whether that has been good or bad, but it has had an impact on the street.
Stark: We have a duty to publish these things, the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world and it's the role of democracy to publish them.
Q&A with Julian Assange
Here are videos I shot of some of the Q&A that happened between the audience and WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.
Q: What was in the fourth packet?
Q: How well did the media cover the leaks?
Julian Assange on how the U.S. media doesn't care about the world.
What will happen for future sources of leaks?
True Grit Panel Intro
Michael Isikoff: I've gone from an old print guy to network broadcast correspondent, and have had culture shock. I'm on NBC News and pitch stories to various shows, sometimes with success. I sold "The Today Show" on a story about a possible presidential candidate, and they bought it and were going to do it, and we had a back and forth about the script. A producer wanted some changes, and was ready to run it, and then I got a message. "I haven't been able to get to it because Lindsey Lohan fell down." I thought it was a joke but it wasn't, and "The Today Show" went to DefCon 3!
I was an ink-strained wretch with Newsweek for years. Newsweek was sold and I was looking for a job and took a job with NBC News, and they put out a release saying Isikoff will be a multi-platform journalist. I had no idea what it meant or how to do it. The best explanation I heard was from a cameraman, who said, "You want to get on 'The Nightly News' you might at best get about 2 minutes, that's like being above the fold on a front page. And then everything else is where you put out the information. You write a text piece, you put documents online and web extras, and put them all online. It's the multiplier effect.
Does it work? I have no idea. On a couple occasions it seemed to work. We did a piece on the 10th anniversary of the U.S.S. Cole. It worked fine, we had a piece on broadcast, and on the web I got some newly declassified documents about the bombing. I did a story recently on Anonymous, the group of computer hackers, who shut down MasterCard and Visa in defense of WikiLeaks last year. I had someone on Anonymous willing to come on camera to explain how they work, describing how they got onto a secure service. I had a web piece that was supposed to go with it, it was all teed up. The web extra was ready to go live, and I emailed the source and told him to watch 'Nightly News' and he emailed back and said, 'I know, I've already read it online.'
It appeared that Anonymous had penetrated the NBC web system to read the post before it had been gone live! But it wasn't really the case, because someone had actually posted it early online. It's all interesting, and fun, but whether it works are not is another question. Today we Twitter, we blog, we gab on TV, but in the end it comes down to producing valuable and important content. In our brave new world, it's about content, content, content -- that's the only thing people will remember.
I'll be back at the Logan Symposium tomorrow to cover a panel on collective work and another on non-profit investigative journalism.
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.
Tags: Legacy Media NewspaperShift TVShift bill keller investigative journalism julian assange leaks logan symposium lowell bergman new york times uc berkeley wikileaks
This Week in Review: Navigating the Times' pay-plan loopholes, +1 for social search, and innovation ideas
Putting the Times' pay plan in place: If you read last week's review, the first half of this week's should feel like déjà vu — lots of back-and-forth about the wisdom of The New York Times' new online pay plan, and some more hand-wringing about getting around that plan. If you want to skip that and get to the best stuff, I recommend Staci Kramer, David Cohn, and Megan Garber.
The Times launched its pay system Monday with a letter to its readers (snarkier version courtesy of Danny Sullivan), along with a 99-cent trial offer for the first four weeks and free access for people who subscribe to the Times on Kindle. Times digital chief Martin Nisenholtz gave a launch-day talk to newspaper execs, highlighted by his assertion that the link economy is not a win-win for content producers and aggregators.
Meanwhile, the discussion about the paywall's worth rolled on. You can find a good cross-section of opinions in this On Point conversation with Ken Doctor, the Journal Register's John Paton, The Times' David Carr, and NYTClean creator David Hayes. The plan continues to draw support from some corners, including The Onion (in its typically ironic style, of course) and PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff. Former Financial Times reporter Tom Foremski and Advertising Age columnist Simon Dumenco both made similar arguments about the value of the plan, with Foremski urging us to support the Times as a moral duty to quality journalism and Dumenco ripping the blogosphere's paywall-bashers for not doing original reporting like the Times.
And though the opposition was expressed much more strongly the past two weeks, there was a smattering of dissent about the plan this week, too — some from the Times' mobile users. One theme among the criticism was the cost of developing the plan: Philip Greenspun wondered how the heck the Times spent $40 million on planning and implementation, and former Guardian digital head Emily Bell wrote about the opportunity cost of that kind of investment. BNET's Erik Sherman proposed that the Times should have invested the money in innovation instead.
A few other interesting thoughts about the Times' pay plan before we get to the wall-jumping debate: Media consultant Judy Sims said the plan might actually make the Times more social by providing an incentive for subscribers to share articles on social networks to their non-subscribing friends. Spot.Us' David Cohn argued that the plan is much closer to a donation model than a paywall and argued for the Times to offer membership incentives. And Reuters' Felix Salmon talked about how the proposal is changing blogging at the Times.
PaidContent's Staci Kramer said the Times is fighting an uphill battle in the realm of public perception, but that struggle is the Times' own fault, created by its way-too-complicated pay system.
The ethics of paywall jumping: With the Times' "pay fence" going into effect, all the talk about ways to get around that fence turned into a practical reality. Business Insider compiled seven of the methods that have been suggested: A browser extension, Twitter feeds, using different computers, NYTClean and a User Script's coding magic, Google (for five articles a day), and browser-switching or cookie-deleting. Mashable came up with an even simpler one: delete "?gwh=numbers" from the Times page's URL.
Despite such easy workarounds, the Times is still cracking down in other areas: As Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan noted, it blocks links from all Google sites after the five-articles-per-day limit is reached. The Times also quickly (and successfully) requested a shutdown of one of the more brazen free-riding schemes yet concocted — NYT for a Nickel, which charged to access Times articles without paywall restrictions. (It also established a pattern for unauthorized Twitter aggregators and bookmarklets: You're fine, as long as you don't use the Times' name.)
So we all obviously can crawl through the Times' loopholes, but should we? A few folks made efforts to hack through the ethical thicket of the Times' intentional and unintentional loopholes: Times media critic James Poniewozik didn't come down anywhere solid, but said the Times' leaky strategy "makes the paywall something like a glorified tip jar, on a massive scale—something you choose to contribute to without compulsion because it is the right thing" — except unlike those enterprises, it's for-profit. In a more philosophical take, the Lab's Megan Garber said the ethical conundrum shows the difficulty of trying to graft the physical world's ethical assumptions onto the digital world.
A possible +1 for publishers: Google made a big step in the direction of socially driven search this week with the introduction of +1, a new feature that allows users to vote up certain search results in actions that are visible to their social network. Here are two good explainers of the feature from TechCrunch and Search Engine Land, both of whom note that +1′s gold mine is in allowing Google to personalize ads more closely, and that it's starting on search results and eventually moving to sites across the web.
The feature was immediately compared to Facebook's "Like" and Twitter's retweets, though it functions a bit differently from either. As GigaOM's Mathew Ingram noted, because it's Google, it's intrinsically tied to search, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. As Ingram said, it's smart to add more of a social component to search, but Google's search-centricity makes the "social network" aspect of +1 awkward, just as Buzz and Wave were. To paraphrase the argument of Frederic Lardinois of NewsGrange: if your +1′s go into your Google Profile and no one sees them, do they really make a sound?
All this seems to be good news for media sites. Lost Remote's Cory Bergman said that if they essentially become "improve the SEO of this site" buttons, media companies will be pretty motivated to add them to their sites. Likewise, Poynter's Damon Kiesow reasoned that +1 could be a great way for media sites to more deeply involve visitors who arrive via Google, who have typically been less engaged than visitors from Facebook and Twitter.
Shrinking innovation to spur it: This month's Carnival of Journalism focuses on how to drive innovation, specifically through the Knight News Challenge and Reynolds Journalism Institute. Most of the posts rolled in yesterday, and they contain a litany of quick, smart ideas of new directions for news innovation and how to encourage it.
A quick sampling: City University London and Birmingham City University j-prof Paul Bradshaw proposed a much broader, smaller-scale News Challenge fund, with a second fund aimed at making those initiatives scale. J-Lab Jan Schaffer said we need to quit looking at innovation so much solely in terms of tools and more in terms of processes and relationships. British journalist Mary Hamilton and Drury j-prof Jonathan Groves both focused on innovation in training, with Groves proposing "innovation change agents" funded by groups like Knight and the RJI to train and transform newsrooms.
Also, University of British Columbia j-prof Alfred Hermida opined on the role of theory in innovation, Lisa Williams of Placeblogger advocated a small-scale approach to innovation, and the University of Colorado's Steve Outing had some suggestions for the RJI fellowship program.
The mechanics of Twitter's information flow: Four researchers from Yahoo and Cornell released a study this week analyzing, as they called it, "who says what to whom on Twitter." One of their major findings was that half the information consumed on Twitter comes from a group of 20,000 "elite" users — media companies, celebrities, organizations, and bloggers. As Mathew Ingram of GigaOM observed, that indicates that the power law that governs the blogosphere is also in effect on Twitter, and big brands are still important even on a user-directed platform.
The Lab's Megan Garber noted a few other interesting implications of the study, delving into Twitter's two-step flow from media to a layer of influential sources to the masses, as well as the social media longevity of multimedia and list-oriented articles. A couple of other research-oriented items about Twitter: a Lab post on Dan Zarrella's data regarding timing and Twitter posts, and Maryland prof Zeynep Tufekci more theoretical exploration of NPR's Andy Carvin and the process of news production on Twitter.
Reading roundup: Plenty of other bits and pieces around the future-of-news world this week:
— New York Times editor Bill Keller wrote a second column, and like his anti-aggregation piece a couple of weeks ago, this piece — about the value of the Times' impartiality and fact-based reporting — didn't go over well. Reuters' Felix Salmon called him intellectually dishonest, Scott Rosenberg called him defensive, and the Huffington Post's Peter Goodman (a former Times reporter) said Keller misrepresented him.
— A few notes on The Daily: Forbes' Jeff Bercovici said it was downloaded 500,000 times during its trial period and has 70,000 regular users, and a study was conducted finding that it's more popular with less tech-savvy, less content-concerned users.
— Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton talked about transforming newspapers at the Newspaper Association of America convention; he summarized what he had to say in 10 tweets, and Alan Mutter wrote a post about the panel. The moderator, Ken Doctor, followed up with a Lab post looking at how long, exactly, newspapers have left.
— I'll send you off with Jonathan Stray's thoughtful post on rethinking journalism as a system for informing people, rather than just a series of stories. It's a lot to chew on, but a key piece to add to the future-of-news puzzle.
Image of a fence-jumper by like oh so zen used under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: Regular post +1 Bill Keller Carnival of Journalism engagement ethics Google influence innovation James Poniewozik journalism New York Times news NYT for a Nickel opportunity cost original reporting paid content paywall paywall jumpers power law research social search This Week in Review training Twitter two-step flow
NY Times Defends WikiLeaks Collaboration, Metered Pay Wall
"All the News That's Fit to Print" is both the slogan of the New York Times and the title of the most recent installment of the Kalb Report, a monthly media discussion put on by George Washington University in D.C. Given its title, the overflow audience at last night's discussion between Marvin Kalb and Times executive editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet might have expected to hear more about the paper's long history in the printed word.
But in spite of the moderator's repeated attempts to talk up the front page, the "wild web," as Kalb described it, kept creeping in. Keller and Baquet explained how the Internet has -- and will continue to -- change America's newspaper of record.
Changing Strategy
To begin with, Keller said its famous motto, which has been printed on the front page of every edition since October 25, 1896, is no longer entirely accurate.
"The slogan," as he called it, "harkens back to a day when the aim of the newspaper was to be comprehensive." Now it is simply "an aspiration, or a mindset."
Keller pointed out that, for many years after it was founded on September 18, 1851, the Times would print items as seemingly mundane as the comings and goings of ships in New York Harbor. Information like that is now relegated to trade newsletters or specialist websites.
All of these publications are now to some extent competition for the Times. While Keller sees the Wall Street Journal as his primary competitor, he is also keeping his eye on websites that have a niche focus. Last night, he specifically mentioned both the politics-centric reporting at Politico and the opinion-driven coverage at the Daily Beast.
The race is "not just for the stories," according to Keller. "The Huffington Post and places like that are competing with us for talent," he said, alluding to the recent defections of a Times' business editor and economic correspondent to the progressive news and aggregation site.
"They're competing with us a lot in the field of innovation," Keller added. "I don't regard the Huffington Post as an extremely aggressive competitor in national reporting, but the way they do social media is pretty instructive."
Rise of Metered Pay Wall
While the Times is taking user engagement cues from the Huffington Post, it is taking a page from the Financial Times when it comes to business models.
Like HuffPost, NYTimes.com attracts hundreds of millions of readers. Keller said the Times has made a "tidy sum" from advertisers trying to reach its 50 million unique visitors each month. But with a much larger news team -- Keller put the current headcount somewhere between 1,100 and 1,500 -- the Times' digital ad revenues are not enough to offset losses from declining print ads and circulation, which has fallen to about a million subscribers per day.
To make up this difference, the Times is planning to end unlimited access to its website. Like the Financial Times, Keller said that "later this year" NYTimes.com will implement a metered pay wall. That would allow casual users to read articles on the site, but charge frequent visitors if they are not already subscribers to the print newspaper.
"People who use the New York Times website as their newspaper," he said, "should pay a little something for it."
Keller's statement seems simple enough, but it is a profound departure from the way newspaper companies have viewed their websites in the recent past. And, because of the Times' size and stature in the American media landscape, its change of heart will likely have a profound effect on the web strategies of other newspapers around the country.
Working with WikiLeaks
Kalb's pointed questioning seemed to suggest the view that the Times' decision to collaborate with WikiLeaks has degraded the definition of, and standards for, journalism organizations. Keller and Baquet, the DC bureau chief, both pushed back hard against this notion.
"The New York Times became the enabler of WikiLeaks by publishing a lot of stories based on the cables WikiLeaks provided. And when I use the word 'enabler,'" Kalb emphasized, "I'm not using that in a positive way."
WikilLeaks is not a journalism organization, according to Keller. "They are an advocacy group," he said. "You can call them a vigilante group," he added.
And, Keller pointed out, they didn't need the support of the Times to throw American diplomacy into disarray. "They would have published it to a website available to anybody who wanted to look at it and the information would have circulated through the blogosphere in a day."
Baquet was more forceful in his defense of the controversial collaboration. "There is no question that WikiLeaks added tremendously to the understanding" of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, he said.
Baquet said questions about if the Times was "behaving in an arrogant way, flaunting its ability to publish this stuff, enabling WikiLeaks," missed the point.
"To me the most unimaginable and arrogant thing the New York Times could have done," Baquet said, "was to have this stuff, look at it and say, 'This is interesting. Let's have an ethical debate. Let's put it back in the computer. And let's go have lunch.'"
Regardless of their objections with the source -- and Keller, as he's done before, again expressed his distaste for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange by association -- the Times felt obligated to share information it had received.
The web has not only upended the Times' motto and business model and forced it into unusual sourcing arrangements, it has also enabled new editorial experiments and collaborations.
"It's a particular malady of the journalist that we jump right to the negative," Baquet said, "but the reality is that the rise of the Internet and newspapers is the greatest thing that has hit us since sliced bread."
For those outlets that can still afford to do it, the web has opened new opportunities in international reporting. Keller was eager to talk about the paper's thorough reporting of the ongoing protests in Egypt.
Keller also highlighted an innovative series from 2008, Kremlin Rules. The stories were translated into Russian and posted on one of the country's most popular blogs to elicit comments, which were then translated back into English before each article was published in the Times.
"The Russian readership enriched our stories about Russia," Keller explained.
In addition to collaborations with Russian bloggers, the Times has worked with NYU and non-profit newsrooms like ProPublica. During the question and answer session after the discussion, I asked Keller if readers and media watchers should expect more projects and partnerships from the Times in the future.
"Yeah, I think so," he said. "These days we're in an era of experimentation and -- as long as we can be persuaded that we can undertake an experiment without putting the credibility of the paper at risk -- we're game to try it."
Corbin Hiar is the DC-based associate editor at MediaShift and climate blogger for UN Dispatch and the Huffington Post. He is a regular contributor to More Intelligent Life, an online arts and culture publication of the Economist Group, and has also written about environmental issues on Economist.com and the website of The New Republic. Before Corbin moved to the Capital to join the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program at Mother Jones, he worked a web internship at The Nation in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @CorbinHiar.
Tags: Business Global View Legacy Media NewspaperShift World View bill keller dean baquet kalb report marvin kalb new york times nyu paid content propublica
This Week in Review: WikiLeaks' new rivals, Ongo's aggregation play, and Demand Media makes a splash
Playing WikiLeaks Whack-a-Mole: Ever since WikiLeaks broke through into the public's consciousness last summer, observers have been predicting that its functions would be replicated by other organizations, both within and outside traditional journalism. We've seen signs of that for a couple of months, but the movement toward leakiness got a few big boosts this week with the launch of a leak submission system by Al Jazeera and the news that The New York Times is considering one of its own.
Al Jazeera started off with the release of the Palestine Papers, and the Palestinian Authority responded by blocking the new site. The Times' executive editor, Bill Keller, said his paper's looking at something along the lines of Al Jazeera's system, and a group from the CUNY Graduate School is also launching Localeaks, which allows leakers to submit leaks to any one of more than 1,400 local newspapers in the U.S. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange told the Associated Press that he's up to 20 media partners and is hoping to triple that number in the next few months.
A couple of writers weighed in with thoughtful takes on these developments: Mathew Ingram of GigaOM suggested that leakers might still prefer WikiLeaks because it allows them freedom from relying on only one organization's view of the documents, since WikiLeaks works with numerous competing news outlets. In a particularly insightful piece, Raffa Khatchadourian of The New Yorker expounded on the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional media alternative to WikiLeaks, focusing on the two organizations' ties to societal conventions: "accountability limits the Times, but it also offers it protections—protections that WikiLeaks at the moment does not enjoy because, among other things, there is not enough public consensus on what it is and stands for."
That chasm between the culture of the Times and WikiLeaks was vividly manifested this week with the Times' publication of an essay by Keller about his paper's dealings with WikiLeaks, painting a less-than-flattering picture of Assange. (The Daily Beast and Yahoo News have good summaries of the piece.) WikiLeaks denounced the article, and Gawker's John Cook found Keller's insults off-putting, especially given the service Assange has done his paper. Cook also pointed out the degree to which the Times worked with the U.S. State Department in releasing the cables, a practice that's probably quite at odds with Assange's theory of radical transparency.
Ongo's paid aggregation plan: Few topics are hotter in the future-of-news world than aggregation, except perhaps for the ongoing quest to find a way to make money off of news online. So when a startup combines both, like Ongo is doing, people are going to pay attention. The service, launched this week by eBay/Skype/PayPal alum Alex Kazim, offers aggregated news from several major news outlets for fees starting at $6.99 a month. Kazim told paidContent that he's targeting users who graze among numerous news sites and value a sharp user experience more highly than the content itself.
The instant reviews weren't exactly enthusiastic. Mashable's Lauren Indvik said that Ongo's slim selection of news outlets will likely leave users getting only a fraction of their daily news via Ongo — something they may not be willing to pay for. (Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times made a similar argument.) Zee Kane of The Next Web said Flipboard, Feedly and Google Reader all provide similar services, and they're all cheaper and better. Lost Remote's Cory Bergman compared Ongo with Hulu's model, but noted that Hulu's product (entertainment TV) is scarcer and more highly demanded than Ongo's product (online news).
GigaOM's Mathew Ingram had the harshest criticism, arguing that no one who knows how to use RSS will have any reason to use Ongo. "Ongo seems like yet another Hail Mary pass aimed at trying to rewind the clock and impose scarcity on media content, and one that will likely fail just as quickly as others have," he wrote.
But there is one group of people who have quite a bit of faith in Ongo — newspaper executives, particularly those from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Gannett, all of whom have invested in the company. The Times, of course, is planning an online paid-content plan of its own, which The Wall Street Journal reported it will begin rolling out next month. According to the Journal, the Times' current plan has an iPad/web bundle costing more than twice as much as a website subscription alone, leading Reuters' Felix Salmon to wonder why the Times seems to be planning on pushing readers away from its iPad app.
Wall Street's warm welcome for Demand Media: Demand Media, the most prominent of the "content farms" that have drawn so much criticism over the past year or so, had an extraordinarily successful initial public offering on Wall Street this week, with first-day trading pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion Wednesday — higher than The New York Times Co. itself. That had to sting quite a bit for the Times, especially considering that, as Rafat Ali reported and The Wall Street Journal confirmed, the Times had almost bought Demand a few years back.
Demand's trading was driven by a lot of enthusiasm — exemplified by Keith Richman at Advertising Age — about the efficiency and profitability of its business model, but its detractors are still loud, too. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici mocked some ridiculous Demand articles and found that one was plagiarized, and The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner told journalists why they should care: Demand is "a company that works every day to lower the standards of online content, that devalues the skills of reporting and writing, and that removes any incentive for original thought in exchange for quantity and speed."
Someone else who signaled its displeasure with companies like Demand this week: Google, on whom much of Demand's business model rests. In a blog post, Google's Matt Cutts explained the shift in the company's antispam efforts toward a content-farm crackdown. Lauren Kirchner called spammers "tapeworms" for Google, but at Business Insider, Ben Elowitz argued that Google and Demand have a mutual (and mutually destructive) advertising-based relationship. Demand's Richard Rosenblatt, meanwhile, insisted that Cutts' post wasn't about Demand, and that the two companies have a healthy, "synergistic" relationship.
Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan imagined what a Demand Media edition of The New York Times' website might look like, then urged news companies to both news coverage and "answers coverage" like the content farms — only a bit smarter.
Olbermann's exit: When MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann ended his eight-year run hosting Countdown on Friday, it wasn't entirely unexpected — MSNBC suspended Olbermann in November for his contributions to Democratic candidates, touching off a simmering debate about objectivity and journalism. As The New York Times reported, Olbermann's exit was weeks in the making. Though its exact cause wasn't clear, Yahoo's Michael Calderone threw out a few possible reasons why Olbermann might have left.
In the wake of his departure, there was a bit of talk about Olbermann's place within the past decade of journalism: Lehigh j-prof Jeremy Littau said Olbermann's angry voice didn't fit the times anymore, though the Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch made a similar point in a more positive vein, suggesting Olbermann left because he had accomplished his mission giving voice to the appalled journalist and citizen. And Dave Winer urged Olbermann to now go directly to his audience, using the web to circumvent the traditional he just left.
Apple's subscription struggle: Apple's clampdown on publishers' hopes for subscriptions for the iPhone and iPad continues to ripple through the media world. French analyst Frederic Filloux has a fantastic breakdown of the situation, explaining why publishers (especially smaller ones) are so upset and why they could take their app development elsewhere. ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus said the subscription plans would be good for consumers and publishers, but cautioned that it would put much of the business under Apple's control.
A few individual publishers' iPad developments: PaidContent gave us details of The Guardian's evolving plans for an iPad app, new publisher Nomad Editions launched four tablet-only magazines, and oh yeah, apparently Rupert Murdoch's coming out with some daily tablet-based news publication next week.
Reading roundup: A lot of big stories this week, so I'll go light on the ephemera:
— Last week's conversation (summarized nicely by David Cohn) about journalism education spilled over into this week. Tech pioneer Dave Winer provided this week's big idea with a great post on educating the "journo-programmer" (published in condensed form at the Lab). Among his ideas: Teach aggregation, get away from the hackathon model, and just start doing it. PBS MediaShift profiled a innovative journalism program with which Winer is affiliated — Jay Rosen's Studio 20 at NYU.
— On the media literacy front, Paul Bradshaw, a j-prof at City University London and Birmingham City University, wrote a fantastic guide to verifying information online, focusing on content, context, and code.
— And in case you were wondering just what the heck is going on with the web right now, uh, The Oatmeal has you more than covered.
Tags: Regular post aggregation Al Jazeera Apple Bill Keller content farms Demand Media Google iPad subscriptions Julian Assange Keith Olbermann leaks New York Times Ongo paid content search spam subscriptions Wikileaks
#NiemanLeaks big takeaway? Even post-WikiLeaks, context still key
The Nieman Foundation's Secrecy and Journalism conference last week set out to tackle a lot of questions, but perhaps none were as big as the central one posed to attendees: What should journalism's role be in this new environment of distributed leakers, massive databases, and citizen reporters.
The answer most of the panels seemed to reach, however, might be a comforting one: Provide the context and texture behind the data, while vetting sources for accuracy and agenda. Not too different from what journalist have always been supposed to do — but now the tools, sources, and audience have come together to allow for a much richer, deeper form of reporting than has ever been possible.
We've summed up and posted video and liveblogs from each of the conference sessions. But after sifting through it all, here are my five key takeaways from the discussion.
Data needs context
While Julian Assange initially relied on radical transparency as a tool to spur change, he quickly learned that crafting a narrative around the raw documents produced a much more dramatic result. Even The New York Times' Bill Keller acknowledged WikiLeaks has "evolved." The new leak revolution begins looking more and more like the old guard, even as it collaborates with them.
Beware secrecy's hard liners
The U.S.'s classification system may or may not be broken, as CJR's Clint Hendler suggested in one panel — but it definitely has quirks, shortcomings, and fallibilities. As Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, put it: "It's important not to take too seriously what the government says is and isn't classified. It's a game."
Vet, vet, vet
Whether dealing with Deep Throat, a whistleblower, or a shadowy international band of hackers, journalists need to look at their sources critically, questioning the source's agenda as well as ensuring the material is authentic. As Keller noted, The New York Times has treated WikiLeaks as a source, not a partner. Just because the form of the source has changed doesn't change the fundamental relationship. And as an added warning, note Walter Pincus' admonition that almost all of the "new" sources that approach him are simply wrong.
WikiLeaks hasn't (yet) established a new order
With technology — particularly technology under siege — distributed tends to win over centralized, and there are already new organizations popping up all over hoping to take WikiLeaks' mantle. The more fundamental point, however, is that similar leaks have been driving much of journalism in the United States and around the world for decades — meaning there may be less new and different about WikiLeaks than there is familiar to any good investigative journalist.
The hard work is just beginning
Despite all the opportunities and changes occurring, the basic grunt work of investigative journalism is still boring, tedious, and, particularly at the local level, critical to serving as an effective watchdog for democracy.
Tags: Secrecy and Journalism Themes Bill Keller Clint Hendler journalism Julian Assange New York Times Nieman Foundation NiemanLeaks secrecy Walter Pincus Wikileaks
This Week in Review: Taking sides on WikiLeaks, the iPad/print dilemma, and the new syndication
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The media and WikiLeaks' uneasy coexistence: The current iteration of the WikiLeaks story is about to move into its fourth week, and it continues to swallow up most future-of-journalism news in its path. By now, it's branched out into several distinct facets, and we'll briefly track down each of those, but here are the essentials this week: If you want the basics, Gawker has put together a wonderful explainer for you. If you want to dive deep into the minutiae, there's no better way than Dave Winer's wikiriver of relevant news feeds. Other good background info is this Swedish documentary on WikiLeaks, posted here in YouTube form.
The big news development this week was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's release from British jail on bail Thursday. As blow-by-blow accounts of the legal situation go, you can't beat The Guardian's. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is trying to build a conspiracy case against Assange by connecting him more explicitly to Bradley Manning's leak, and Congress heard testimony on the subject Thursday.
— The first WikiLeaks substory is the ongoing discussion about the actions of the legions of web-based "hacktivists," led by Anonymous, making counterattacks on WikiLeaks' behalf. Having gone after several sites last week (including one mistakenly), some activists began talking in terms of "cyber-war" — though GigaOM's Mathew Ingram cautioned against that type of language from all sides — and were urged on from jail by Assange. NYU professor Gabriella Coleman gave a glimpse into the inner workings of Anonymous, and they also drew plenty of criticism, too, from thinkers like British author Andrew Keen. Media consultant Deanna Zandt offered a thoughtful take on the ethics of cyber-activism.
— The second facet here is the emergence of Openleaks, a leaking organization formally launched this week by WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg as an alternative to Assange's group. As Domscheit-Berg explained to several outlets including Forbes, Openleaks will act as a more neutral conduit to leaks than WikiLeaks, which ended up publishing its leaks, something Openleaks won't do. Wired compared it with WikiLeaks' rejected 2009 Knight News Challenge proposal, in which it would have functioned primarily as an anonymous submission system for leaks to local news organizations. Openleaks won't be the last, either: As The Economist noted, if file-sharing is any guide, we'll see scores of rivals (or comrades).
— The third story is the reaction of various branches of the traditional media, which have been decidedly mixed. WikiLeaks has gotten some support from several corners of the industry, including the faculty of the venerable Columbia School of Journalism, the press in Assange's native Australia, and Northeastern j-prof Dan Kennedy and numerous other British and American professors and journalists, both in The Guardian. But it's also been tweaked by others — at the Nieman Foundation Thursday, New York Times editor Bill Keller said that if Assange is a journalist, "he's not the kind of journalist that I am."
Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald ripped what he called the mainstream media's "servile role" to the government in parroting its attitudes toward WikiLeaks, then later argued that the government's prosecution of WikiLeaks would be a prosecution of investigative journalism in general. Arianna Huffington also chastised the establishment media, arguing that they're just as much establishment as media. Likewise, Morris' Steve Yelvington listed five reasons the media hasn't shown outrage about the government's backlash against WikiLeaks, including the point that the segment of the American mainstream media concerned about national issues is a shell of its former self.
— All of this provided plenty of fodder for a couple of conferences on WikiLeaks, Internet freedom, and secrecy. Last weekend, the Personal Democracy Forum held a symposium on the subject — you can watch a replay here, as well as a good summary by GRITtv and additional videos on the state of the Internet and online civil disobedience. Micah Sifry offered a thoughtful take on the event afterwards, saying that longings for a "more responsible" version of WikiLeaks might be naive: It's "far more likely that something far more disruptive to the current order — a distributed and unstoppable system for spreading information — is what is coming next," he wrote.
And on Thursday, the Nieman Foundation held its own one-day conference on journalism and secrecy that included keynotes by the AP's Kathleen Carroll and Keller (who distanced himself from Assange but defended The Times' decision to publish). If you want to go deeper into the conversation at the conference, the #niemanleaks hashtag on Twitter is a good place to start.
Will the iPad eat into print?: The iPad news this week starts with the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute, which released a study that suggests, based on survey data, that iPad news apps may cut into newspaper subscriptions by next year. There's a ton of other interesting data on how iPads are being used and how users are comparing them to print newspapers and newspaper websites, but one statistic — 58 percent of those who subscribe to a print newspaper and use their iPad for more than an hour a day planned to cancel their print subscription within six months — was what drew the headlines. Alan Mutter said publishers have to like the demographics of the iPad's prime users, but have to wonder whether developing print-like iPad apps is worth it.
Several news organizations introduced new iPad apps this week, led by CNN. Poynter's Damon Kiesow talked to CNN about the rationale behind its photo-oriented multitouch design, and MocoNews' Ingrid Lunden looked at why CNN might have made their app free. Steve Safran of Lost Remote liked the app's design and sociability. Also, the New York Daily News launched a paid (though cheaper than the New York Post) app, and Harper's added its own iPad offering as well.
Meanwhile, Flipboard, the inaugural iPad app of the year, launched a new version this week. Forbes' Quentin Hardy talked to Flipboard's CEO about the vision behind the new app, and The Wall Street Journal wrote about innovative iPad news apps in general. The Washington Post's Justin Ferrell talked to the Lab's Justin Ellis about how to design news apps for the iPad. In advertising, Apple launched its first iPad iAd, which seems to be essentially a fully formed advertisement app. One iPad app that's not coming out this week: Rupert Murdoch's "tablet newspaper" The Daily, whose launch has reportedly been postponed until next year.
Looking ahead to 2011: We're nearing the end of the December, which means we're about to see the year-end reviews and previews start to roll in. The Lab got them kicked off this week by asking its readers for predictions of what 2011 will bring in the journalism world, then publishing the predictions of some of the smartest future-of-news folks in the room.
All of the posts are worth checking out, but there are a few I want to note in particular — The AP's Jonathan Stray on moving beyond content tribalism ("a news product that refuses to provide me with high-quality filtering and curation of the rest of the world's information will only ever be an endpoint"), NPR's Matt Thompson on instant speech transcription ("the Speakularity"), tech pioneer Dave Winer on adjusting to the new news distribution system ("That's the question news people never seem to ask. How can we create something that has a market?"), and a couple of paid-content predictions on The New York Times and by Steven Brill (who has skin in the game).
The prediction post that generated the most discussion was NYU professor Clay Shirky's piece on the dismantling of the old-media syndication system. GigaOM's Mathew Ingram expanded on the idea, connecting it explicitly to Google News and the Associated Press, and asking, "In a world where the power to syndicate is available to all, does anyone want what AP is selling?" USC's Pekka Pekkala explained why he sees this as a positive development for journalists and niche content producers.
As if on cue, Thomson Reuters announced the launch of its new American news service, one that seems as though it might combine traditional news syndication with some elements of modern aggregation. Media analyst Ken Doctor gave some more details about the new service and its deal with the Tribune Co., and Gawker's Hamilton Nolan was skeptical of this potential new direction for newswires.
Reading roundup: A few good pieces before I send you on your way:
— First, one quick bit of news: The social bookmarking service Delicious was reportedly shutting down, but a Friday blog post seemed to indicate it may live on outside of Yahoo. Here's a short ode from Mark Luckie at 10,000 Words and a list of alternatives from Search Engine Land.
— At the London Review of Books, British journalist John Lanchester has written an essay making a case for why and how the newspaper industry needs to charge for news online. Anti-paywall folks aren't going to be crazy about it, but it's far from the stereotypical revanchist "Make 'em pay, just 'cause they should" pro-pay argument: "Make the process as easy as possible. Make it invisible and transparent. Make us register once and once only. Walls are not the way forward, but walls are not the same thing as payment, and without some form of payment, the press will not be here in five years' time."
— A couple of close looks at what news organizations are doing right: The Atlantic's web transformation and tips on multimedia storytelling from NPR's acclaimed Planet Money.
— A North Carolina j-prof and Duke grad student came together (!) to urge news organizations to incorporate more of the tenets of citizen journalism. They have a few specific, practical suggestions, too.
— British journalist Adam Westbrook gave his goodbye to mainstream media, making a smart case that the future lies outside its gates.
— Finally, Jonathan Stray, an AP editor and Lab contributor, has a brilliant essay challenging journalists and news organizations to develop a richer, more fully formed idea of what journalism is for. It may be a convicting piece, but it offers an encouraging vision for the future — and the opportunity for reform — too.
Tags: Regular post 2011 activism aggregation Anonymous Associated Press Bill Keller Clay Shirky CNN Flipboard iAd iPad iPad apps Julian Assange news app design Openleaks print Reuters secrecy syndication Thomson Reuters Wikileaks
Bill Keller on how WikiLeaks has evolved, the NYT reporting process, and threats to national security
Bill Keller's keynote speech at the Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age conference garnered a lot of attention Thursday after the New York Times executive editor made a notable distinction between himself and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: "I don't regard Julian Assange as a kindred spirit. If he's a journalist, he's not the kind of journalist that I am."
Keller's talk was a broad discussion of the Times' handling of WikiLeaks documents, from parsing files in the computer-assisted reporting unit to conversations with lawyers and officials in the U.S. government. But Keller also took time to address some of the criticisms of the Times' working with WikiLeaks. On Thursday, our Michael Morisy summarized Keller's speech for the Lab, and here is the full video which includes the Q&A. We've also included the archived liveblog of the talk with commentary from Twitter.
Tags: Secrecy and Journalism Themes Bill Keller conferences New York Times Nieman Foundation secrecy Wikileaks
Bill Keller: WikiLeaks isn't my kind of news org, but they have evolved
During a wide-ranging conversation on government secrecy and the relationship between The New York Times and WikiLeaks, Times executive editor Bill Keller was asked whether he'd be bothered if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were charged under the Espionage Act, as Senator Joe Lieberman recently suggested.
"Let me back into that question," he said. "I don't regard Julian Assange as a kindred spirit. If he's a journalist, he's not the kind of journalist that I am."
He said, though, that in some ways WikiLeaks has shifted in the direction of traditional journalism and away from the style of its earlier publications, which were largely just data, unredacted and without comment.
"They have moved to becoming an organization that is leaking out the documents in a more journalistic fashion," he said. "I don't think they've become my kind of news organization, but they have evolved."
Keller spoke at the Nieman Foundation's one-day conference on secrecy and journalism Thursday, where WikiLeaks was a common topic of discussion.
Strange bedfellows in a "new era"
Whatever reservations Keller has about Assange-as-journalist, The New York Times has been at the forefront of getting the organization's materials to the public — as well as helping shape, at times indirectly, WikiLeaks' own editorial policies even as the Times worked to decide which materials it would publish of the hundreds of thousands of available documents.
Keller took on critics of the Times' publication of WikiLeaks' documents, saying their critiques generally fell into three broad categories:
The leaks don't contain any new information. "Ninety-nine percent of news doesn't greatly impact our understanding of the world," Keller said. "News generally works by advancing our knowledge by inches. For those that follow foreign policy, these documents provide nuance, texture, and drama. For these that don't follow these stories closely, it allows them to learn more and learn in a more lively way."
The leaks disclosed confidential informats or endanger international relationships. "In the end, I can only answer for what my paper has done, and I believe we have behaved responsibly" in editing the material, he said. And to the latter point: "Foreign leaders will continue to talk to us. It's the way of power to brag."
The collaboration compromised the Times' impartiality and independence. "Wikileaks does not take guidance from The New York Times," Keller said, while noting that the Times was actually cut out from direct access to the leaked State Department cables, partially as a result of articles the Times had published.
But despite differences between the newspaper and the organization, Keller said that the paper still provided leadership for the international press on how to handle the material and the organization providing it. He said that "in most cases" the international papers, such as Der Spiegel and the Guardian, followed The New York Times' guidance and what materials to release or not to release, occasionally differing on materials of particular interest to a certain country (such as the Merkel cables with the Germany's Der Spiegel). WikiLeaks itself has also followed many of the Times' suggested redactions.
"Wikileaks, having been castigated for the first two rounds of document dumps, basically said that this time around they would take the redactions we gave them," Keller said.
The vetting process
Keller also detailed the process by which The New York Times vetted and processed the vast amounts of information, saying that the Times and other news organizations had now finished publishing all the major stories based on the documents they expected to write.
"The first thing we would do is talk with the lawyers about if there's a legal problem with using this material and, if so, is there a way around it."
The Times then vetted the cables with reporters familiar with similar secret documents and quickly decided the trove was genuine.
The Times' computer-assisted reporting team dumped the database into a searchable format, bringing in reporters and professionals to search for interesting keywords to begin reporting. "No news organization claims to have read all of those documents," he said.
Reporters then dove into and developed deeper stories based on the cables, occasionally sharing interesting segments with their colleagues overseas.
The New York Times performed "common sense" redactions on the material, removing names of low-level informants and other sensitive material
The New York Times took its redactions to the U.S. government, occasionally taking feedback and redacting information it felt would needlessly endanger lives.
"We then basically agreed on a schedule where day one would be Pakistan day and day two would be Russia day, something like that," Keller said. "We rolled out on that schedule, and we agreed to give WikiLeaks the documents we intended to publish on each day's stories, with our redactions."
Throughout it all, however, Keller said the Times kept a very clear view of what WikiLeaks was and was not in its reporting. "What I have said from the very beginning of this is WikiLeaks is a source, not a partner. The Guardian was kind of a partner in this, because we swapped data and thoughts back and forth saying, 'Hey, look at this table.' There was none of that back and forth with WikiLeaks."
Tags: Secrecy and Journalism Themes Bill Keller ethics Julian Assange New York Times Nieman Foundation secrecy Wikileaks
#Niemanleaks on Thursday: After WikiLeaks, a flood of new questions
While WikiLeaks' recent document dumps have answered questions large and small (How many civilians have been killed in Iraq? Does Muammar al-Gaddafi prefer blondes or brunettes?), the organization's controversial brand of journalism has raised a lot more questions that scholars, working journalists and legal systems around the world are just now beginning to tackle. The Nieman Foundation is hosting "From Watergate to WikiLeaks: Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age," at which speakers ranging from The New York Times' executive editor Bill Keller to The Washington Post's Walter Pincus will offer their insight into how the rules are changing.
Here are a few of the questions we've seen raised, and where you might begin to figure out some answers tomorrow. If you won't be in attendance, check back here Thursday morning for the live video stream, or watch #niemanleaks on Twitter.
Is WikiLeaks journalism? What does that mean when everyone can blog, Tweet and share instantly with an audience around the world?
Check out the 2:30 p.m. (EST) panel, "Secrets 2.0: Exploring Entrepreneurial Answers to Journalistic Obligations," which will feature the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison, Basetrack's Teru Kuwayama, the New York Times' Aron Pilhofer and others who are helping answer that question through innovative approaches to what journalism is, while pushing back on the notion of what it isn't. For example, Knight News Challenge winner Basetrack pairs professional war correspondence with the thoughts and reactions of U.S. Marines and their families, who are also blogging their experiences. The Sunlight Foundation, on the other hand, takes massive data sets and made them more accessible and useful, often leaving it up to the reader to connect the dots in creative new ways.
What should we make on all the legal and political pressure being put on WikiLeaks and other news organizations? Should the law dictate how and what is reported, and where do you draw the line on either side?
The "Prosecuted, Banned, Blamed: Reporters Push Boundaries as a Voice of Public Accountability" panel at 10:00 a.m. features a global perspective from current and past Nieman Fellows, including Stefan Candea, who helped map out Romania's complex web of political and media ownership, as well as fellows from Chile, Cambodia, and South Africa. It will be moderated by the Nieman Foundation's Stefanie Friedhoff.
For a more local perspective, head to "Whither the Gatekeeper? Navigating New Rules and Roles in the Age of Radical Transparency." It'll feature The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, Clint Hendler from Columbia Journalism Review, Maggie Mulvihill from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and Danielle Brian from the Project on Government Oversight. It'll be moderated by Nieman Reports' Melissa Ludtke.
So in the end, what's changed post-WikiLeaks?
The conference's keynotes will tackle the big question of what changes between media and their sources as those sources can increasingly go direct to the audience with their message. Kathleen Carroll executive editor of the Associated Press, will discuss freedom of information in the digital age at 9:10 a.m., while the Times' Bill Keller will address secrecy, national security, and the press at 1:15 p.m.
Tags: Secrecy and Journalism Themes Basetrack Bill Allison Bill Keller inhouse Julian Assange Kathleen Carroll New England Center for Investigative Reporting New York Times Nieman Foundation Nieman Reports secrecy Sunlight Foundation Teru Kuwayama transparency Walter Pincus Wikileaks
Wikileaks: The media industry's response
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has been online and publishing leaked documents and data since July 2007. Prior to this week, I wouldn't have hesitated in initially referring to it as "whistle-blowing website Wikileaks" and getting in a definition of what the site does and how it works.
Writing this afternoon though, that bit of exposition feels a lot less necessary. Last Sunday's coordinated publication of the Afghanistan war logs by Wikileaks, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel has catapulted the small, independent organisation – and it's director Julian Assange – into an entirely new realm of public notoriety.
This post is a round-up of some of the media industry's responses to the biggest leak in US military history.
On Monday the story took up the first 14 pages of the Guardian, 17 pages of Der Spiegel, and numerous lead stories in the New York Times.
Too much, too soon, writes Slate's media commentator Jack Shafer.
By inundating readers with Assange's trove, the three news organization broke one of the sacred rules of journalism: If you have a big story—especially one based on a leak like this one—drip, drip, drip it out to your audience rather than showering them with it. The reader can absorb drips better than torrents.
Ultimately, more time, and care, was needed, says Shafer: "There was too much material for the newspapers and magazines to swallow on such a short deadline."
His assessment echoes that of BBC College of Journalism director Kevin Marsh, who reports on Assange's press conference at the Frontline Club on Monday.
[W]hat was danced around (…) was how much the three news organisations were able to verify and test the documents – and, crucially, their exact provenance – to which Wikileaks gave them access. In the way they would if they were dealing direct with their own assessable sources.
How much did they know about the source or sources of the document pile? His/her/their motivation? Track record? What was not there and why not? What was incomplete about what was there?
This matters. A lot. Especially if Wikileaks is to become – or has already become – a kind of stateless brokerage for whistleblowing.
NYU's Jay Rosen also picks up on the 'no-fixed abode' quality of Wikileaks, calling it the "world's first stateless news organisation":
If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to "location" it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world's first stateless news organization. I can't think of any prior examples of that (…) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system.
According to Assange, Wikileaks, which is sort-of based in Sweden due to the country's extremely progressive freedom of information laws, does "not have national security concerns" and is "not a national organisation." He frequently claims the site's loyalty is to truth and transparency. Writing for the Telegraph, Will Heaven (whose piece may smack ever so slightly of sour grapes), questions the idea that the organisation has no political agenda.
Wikileaks is a website with no political agenda, its founder Julian Assange would have you believe. So I'm puzzled by today's "Afghanistan war log" story. It doesn't strike me – or many of my colleagues – as politically neutral to feed such sensitive information to three Left-leaning newspapers: namely the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Even more puzzling that Wikileaks would choose, very deliberately, to contravene its own mission statement – that crowdsourcing and open data are paramount.
It was Nick Davies of the Guardian with whom the possibility of this kind of publication was first discussed by Assange. The Guardian team threw everything but the kitchen sink at their run on the material, with all the interactive and data know-how we have come to expect of them. Editorially, they focused on bringing to light the abhorrent disregard for the lives of civilians detailed in parts of the logs but largely covered up by the military.
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents (…)
Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians. The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.
Media commentator Jeff Jarvis asked Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger if he thought the newspaper should have started Wikileaks itself, to which Rusbridger responded that he felt it worked better separately. Jarvis claims that the joint publication effort showed that the future of journalism lay in "adding value":
If you don't add value, then you're not needed. And that's not necessarily bad. When you don't add value and someone else can perform the task as stenographer or leaker or reporter — and you can link to it — then that means you save resources and money. This means journalists need to look at where they add maximum value.
There were plenty of journalists in attendance when Assange appeared at the Frontline Club again on Tuesday night, this time for an extended discussion with both press and just the plain curious.
"We are not an organisation for protecting troops," he told the audience. "We are an organisation for protecting human beings."
To that end, Wikileaks held back 15,000 of the 92,000 documents contained in the archive because, the organisation claimed, they had the potential to put the lives of civilians and military informers in Afghanistan at risk.
But on Wednesday morning the Times alleged that:
In just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, the Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to US forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names. US officers recorded detailed logs of the information fed to them by named local informants, particularly tribal elders.
The backlash against Wikileaks and its director gathered steam on Thursday when New York Times editor Bill Keller strongly criticised the organisation in an email to the Daily Beast for making so much of the material available without properly vetting it.
In our own publication, in print and on our website, we were careful to remove anything that could put lives at risk. We could not be sure that the trove posted on WikiLeaks, even with some 15,000 documents held back, would not endanger lives. And, in fact, as we will be reporting in tomorrow's paper, our subsequent search of the material posted on WikiLeaks found many names of Afghan informants who could now be targets of reprisals by the insurgents (…)
Assange released the information to three mainstream news organizations because we had the wherewithal to mine the data for news and analysis, and because we have a large audience that would take this seriously. I think the public interest was served by that. His decision to release the data to everyone, however, had potential consequences that I think anyone, regardless of how he views the war, would find regrettable.
Wikileaks has acted grossly irresponsibly in the eyes of some press organisations, but it has been lauded by others as a pioneer for both its commitment to increasing transparency – and in doing so encouraging reform – and for its approach to publicising the logs and trying to achieve the maximum amount of impact for material that people have risked a great deal to expose. From the Editorsweblog:
Getting media outlets involved early was a way to make sure that there was comprehensive coverage of the information. Wikileaks is not trying to be a news outlet, it wants to get the information out there, but does not intend to provide the kind of analysis that a newspaper might. As Nick Davies told CJR, agreeing to release the information simultaneously let each of the three newspapers know that they had an almost exclusive story in which it was worth investing time and effort. And as Poynter noted, its exclusivity caused competitors to scramble and try to bring something new out of the story.
Whichever side of the fence you fall on, it is difficult to deny that the method of the leak marks a significant change in the organisation's relationship with the news media and in the role the industry has to play in events of this kind.Similar Posts:
White House seeks to advise reporters over Wikileaks Afghanistan release
True/Slant: How WikiLeaks protects itself
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to speak in London tomorrow
CNN: Wikileaks editor on why it posted video of Reuters journalists' deaths
MPs' expenses data will be officially released Thursday but how much will be edited out?
Tags: The Guardian bill keller Jay Rosen Kevin Marsh Wikileaks Der Spiegel afghanistan war logs Newspapers Jeff Jarvis Journalism Politics Press freedom and ethics the frontline club Investigative journalism Alan Rusbridger the New York Times
This Week in Review: Facebook circles the wagons, leaky paywalls, and digital publishing immersion
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week's top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Should Facebook be regulated?: It's been almost a month since Facebook's expansion of Open Graph and Instant Personalization, and the concerns about the company's invasion of privacy continue to roll in. This week's telling example of how much Facebook information is public comes courtesy of Openbook, a new site that uses Facebook's API to allow you to search all public Facebook updates. (Of course, you'll find similarly embarrassing revelations via a Twitter search, but the point is that many of these people don't know that what they're posting is public.)
We also got another anti-Facebook diatribe (two, actually) from a web luminary: danah boyd, the Microsoft researcher and social media expert. Boyd, who spends a lot of time talking to young people about social media, noted two observations in her first post: Many users' mental model of who can see their information doesn't match up with reality, and people have invested so much time and resources into Facebook that they feel trapped by its changes. In the second post, Boyd proposes that if Facebook is going to refer to itself as a "social utility" (and it's becoming a utility like water, power or the Internet, she argues), then it needs to be ready to be regulated like other utilities.
The social media blog Mashable has chimed in with a couple of defenses of Facebook (the web is all about sharing information; Facebook has normalized sharing in a way that users want to embrace), but the din has reached Facebook's ears. The Wall Street Journal reported that the issue has prompted deep disagreements and several days of discussions at Facebook headquarters, and a Facebook spokesman said the company is going to simplify privacy controls soon.
Meanwhile, tech investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon posited that Facebook is going to use its web-wide Like button to corner the market on online display ads, similar to the way Google did with text ads. Facebook also launched 0.facebook.com, a simple mobile-only site that's free on some carriers — leading Poynter's Steve Myers to wonder whether it's going to become the default mobile web for feature phones (a.k.a. "dumb" phones). But The New York Times argued that when it comes to social data, Facebook still can't hold a candle to the good, old-fashioned open web.
Are iPad apps worth it?: The iPad's sales haven't slowed down yet — it's been projected to outsell the Mac, and one in five Americans say they might get one — but there are still conflicting opinions over how deeply publishers should get involved with it. Slate Group head Jacob Weisberg was the latest to weigh in, arguing that iPad apps won't help magazines and newspapers like they think it will. He makes a couple of arguments we've seen several times over the past month or two: App producers are entering an Apple-controlled marketplace that's been characterized by censorship, and apps are retrograde attempts to replicate the print experience.
"They're claustrophobic walled gardens within Apple's walled garden, lacking the basic functionality we now expect with electronic journalism: the opportunity to comment, the integration of social media, the ability to select text and paste it elsewhere, and finally the most basic function of all: links to other sources," Weisberg says. GQ magazine didn't get off to a particularly encouraging start with its iPad offerings, selling just 365 copies of its $2.99 Men of the Year iPad issue.
A few other folks are saying that the iPad is ushering in fundamental changes in the way we consume personal media: At Ars Technica, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps notes that the iPad is radically different from what people say they want in a PC, but they're still more than willing to buy it because it makes complex computing simple. (The term Forrester is using to describe the tablet era, curated computing, seems like a stretch, though.) Norwegian digital journalist John Einar Sandvand offers a similar take, saying that tablets' distinctive convenience will further weaken print newspapers' position. And the Lab's Josh Benton says the iPad could have an effect on the way we write, too.
Slipping through the Times' and WSJ's paywalls: New York Times editor Bill Keller gave an update late last week on the plans for his paper's much-anticipated paywall — he didn't really tell us anything new, but did indicate the Times' solidified plans for the wall's implementation. In reiterating the fact that he wasn't breaking any news, though, Keller gave Media Matters' Joe Strupp a bit of a clearer picture about how loose the Times' metered model will be: "Those who mainly come to the website via search engines or links from blogs, and those who only come sporadically — in short, the bulk of our traffic — may never be asked to pay at all," Keller wrote.
In the meantime, digital media consultant Mark Potts found another leaky paywall at The Wall Street Journal. Potts canceled his WSJ.com subscription (after 15 years!) and found that he's still able to access for free almost everything he had previously paid for with only a few URL changes and the most basic of Google skills. And even much of that information, he argues, is readily available from other sources for free, damaging the value of the venerable Journal paywall. "Even the Journal can't enforce the kind of exclusivity that would make it worth paying for — it's too easy to look elsewhere," Potts writes.
Another Times-related story to note: The paper's managing editor for news, Jill Abramson, will leave her position for six months to become immersed in the digital side of the Times' operation. The New York Observer tries out a few possible explanations for the move.
Going all-in on digital publishing: Speaking of immersion, two publishers in the past two weeks have tried a fascinating experiment: producing an issue entirely through new-media tools. The first was 48 Hour, a new San Francisco-based magazine that puts together each issue from beginning to end in two days. The magazine's editors announced a theme, solicited submissions via email and Twitter, received 1,500 submissions, then put together the magazine, all in 48 hours. Several who saw the finished product were fairly impressed, but CBS's lawyers were a little less pleased about the whole '48 Hour' name. Gizmodo had a Q&A with the mag's editors (all webzine vets) and PBS MediaShift and the BBC took a closer look at the editorial process.
Second, the Journal Register Company newspaper chain finished the Ben Franklin Project, an experiment in producing a daily and weekly newspaper and website using only free, web-based tools. Two small Ohio newspapers accomplished the feat this week, and Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore took a look inside the effort. What she uncovered should be an inspiration for people looking to implement change in newsrooms, especially ones that might be resistant to digital media. A quote from the daily paper's managing editor sums it up: "When we started out, we said, 'We're going to do what? How are we going to do this?' Now we're showing ourselves that we can operate in a world that, even six months ago, used to be foreign to us."
Reading roundup: This week, I've got two developments and a handful of other pieces to think on:
— Yahoo bought the online content producer Associated Content for $100 million this week. News business analyst Ken Doctor examined what this deal means for Yahoo (it's big, he says), and considers the demand-and-advertising-driven model employed by Associated Content and others like Demand Media.
— If you follow NYU professor Jay Rosen on Twitter, you've heard a ton about fact-checking over the past couple of months. A couple more interesting tidbits on the subject this week: Fact-checks are consistently the AP's most popular pieces online, and Minnesota Public Radio has unveiled PoliGraph, its own fact-checking effort.
— Poynter's Rick Edmonds compares two of the more talked-about local news startups launching this summer, Washington D.C.'s TBD and Hawaii's Honolulu Civil Beat. He's got some great details on both. Poynter also put together a list of 200 moments over the last decade that transformed journalism.
— If you're up for a quick, deep thought, the Lab's Josh Benton muses on the need for news to structure and shrink its users' world. "I think it's journalists who need to take up that challenge," he says, "to learn how to spin something coherent and absorbing and contained and in-the-moment and satisfying from the chaos of the world around us."
— And once you're done with that, head into the weekend laughing at The Onion's parody of newspapers' coverage of social media startups.
Tags: Uncategorized 48 Hours magazine Apple Associated Content Ben Franklin Project Bill Keller danah boyd Facebook factchecking Honolulu Civil Beat iPad iPad apps Jacob Weisberg Jill Abramson Journal Register Co. Mark Potts mobile Web New York Times Open Graph paywall privacy TBD Wall Street Journal Yahoo
This Week in Review: Gizmodo and the shield law, making sense of social data, and the WSJ's local push
Apple and Gizmodo's shield law test: The biggest tech story of the last couple of weeks has undoubtedly been the gadget blog Gizmodo's photos of a prototype of Apple's next iPhone that was allegedly left in a bar by an Apple employee. That story got a lot more interesting for journalism- and media-oriented folks this week, when we found out that police raided a Gizmodo blogger's apartment based on a search warrant for theft.
What had been a leaked-gadget story turned into a case study on web journalism and the shield law. Mashable and Poynter did a fine job of laying out the facts of the case and the legal principles at stake: Was Gizmodo engaged in acts of journalism when it paid for the lost iPhone and published information about it? Social media consultant Simon Owens has a good roundup of opinions on the issue, including whether the situation would be different if Gizmodo hadn't bought the iPhone.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, came out most strongly against the raid, arguing to Wired and Laptop magazine and in its own post that California law is clear that the Gizmodo blogger was acting as a reporter. The Citizen Media Law Project's Sam Bayard agreed, backing the point up with a bit more case history. Not everyone had Gizmodo's back, though: In a piece written before the raid, media critic Jeff Bercovici of Daily Finance said that Gizmodo was guilty of straight-up theft, journalistic motives or no.
J-prof Jay Rosen added a helpful clarification to the "are bloggers journalists" debate (it's actually about whether Gizmodo was engaged in an act of journalism, he says) and ex-Saloner Scott Rosenberg reached back to a piece he wrote five years ago to explain why that debate frustrates him so much. Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that the Gizmodo incident was just one in a long line of examples of Apple's anti-press behavior.
Bridging the newsroom-academy gap: Texas j-prof Rosental Alves held his annual International Symposium on Online Journalism last weekend, and thanks to a lot of people's work in documenting the conference, we have access to much of what was presented and discussed there. The conference site and Canadian professor Alfred Hermida devoted about 20 posts each to the event's sessions and guests, so there's loads of great stuff to peruse if you have time.
The conference included presentations on all kinds of stuff like Wikipedia, news site design, online comments, micropayments, and news innovation, but I want to highlight two sessions in particular. The first is the keynote by Demand Media's Steven Kydd, who defended the company's content and businessmodel from criticism that it's a harmful "content farm." Kydd described Demand Media as "service journalism," providing content on subjects that people want to know about while giving freelancers another market. You can check summaries of his talk at the official site, Hermida's blog, and in a live blog by Matt Thompson. The conference site also has video of the Q&A session and reflections on Kydd's charisma and a disappointing audience reaction. The other session worth taking a closer look at was a panel on nonprofit journalism, which, judging from Hermida and the conference's roundups, seemed especially rich with insight into particular organizations' approaches.
The conference got Matt Thompson, a veteran of both the newsroom and the academy who's currently working for NPR, thinking about what researchers can do to bring the two arenas closer together. "I saw a number of studies this weekend that working journalists would find fascinating and helpful," he wrote. "Yet they're not available in forms I'd feel comfortable sending around the newsroom." He has some practical, doable tips that should be required reading for journalism researchers.
Making sense of social data: Most of the commentary on Facebook's recent big announcements came out last week, but there's still been plenty of good stuff since then. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb published the best explanation yet of what these moves mean, questioning whether publishers will be willing to give up ownership of their comments and ratings to Facebook. Writers at ReadWriteWeb and O'Reilly Radar also defended Facebook's expansion against last week's privacy concerns.
Three other folks did a little bit of thinking about the social effects of Facebook's spread across the web: New media prof Jeff Jarvis said Facebook isn't just identifying us throughout the web, it's adding a valuable layer of data on places, things, ideas, everything. But, he cautions, that data isn't worth much if it's controlled by a company and the crowd isn't able to create meaning out of it. Columbia grad student Vadim Lavrusik made the case for a "social nut graph" that gives context to this flood of data and allows people to do something more substantive than "like" things. PR blogger Paul Seaman wondered about how much people will trust Facebook with their data while knowing that they're giving up some of their privacy rights for Facebook's basic services. And social media researcher danah boyd had some insightful thoughts about the deeper issue of privacy in a world of "big data."
The Wall Street Journal goes local: The Wall Street Journal made the big move in its war with The New York Times this week, launching its long-expected New York edition. The Times' media columnist, David Carr, took a pretty thorough look at the first day's offering and the fight in general, and Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan liked what he saw from the Journal on day one.
Slate media critic Jack Shafer said the struggle between the Journal and the Times is a personal one for the Journal's owner, Rupert Murdoch — he wants to own Manhattan, and he wants to see the Times go down in flames there. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis stifled a yawn, calling it "two dinosaurs fighting over a dodo bird."
Along with its local edition, the Journal also announced a partnership with the geolocation site Foursquare that gives users news tips or factoids when they check in at certain places around New York — a bit more of a hard-news angle than Foursquare's other news partnerships so far. Over at GigaOm, Mathew Ingram applauded the Journal's innovation but questioned whether it would help the paper much.
Apple and app control: The fury over Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore's proposed iPhone app has largely died down, but there were a few more app-censorship developments this week to note. MSNBC.com cartoonist Daryl Cagle pointed out that despite Apple's letup in Fiore's case, they're not reconsidering their rejection of his "Tiger Woods cartoons" app. Political satirist Daniel Kurtzman had two of his apps rejected, too, and an app of Michael Wolff's Newser column — which frequently mocks Apple's Steve Jobs — was nixed as well. Asked about the iPad at the aforementioned International Symposium on Online Journalism, renowned web scholar Ethan Zuckerman said Apple's control over apps makes him "very nervous."
The New Yorker's Ken Auletta also went deep into the iPad's implications for publishers this week in a piece on the iPad, the Kindle and the book industry. You can hear him delve into those issues in interviews with Charlie Rose and Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
Reading roundup: We had some great smaller conversations on a handful of news-related topics this week.
— Long-form journalism has been getting a lot of attention lately. Slate's Jack Shafer wrote about longform.org, an effort to collect and link to the best narrative journalism on the web. Several journalistic heavyweights — Gay Talese, Buzz Bissinger, Bill Keller — sang the praises of narrative journalism during a Boston University conference on the subject.
Nieman Storyboard focused on Keller's message, in which he expressed optimism that long-form journalism could thrive in the age of the web. Jason Fry agreed with Keller's main thrust but took issue with the points he made to get there. Meanwhile, Jonathan Stray argued that "the web is more amenable to journalism of different levels of quality and completeness" and urges journalists not to cut on the web what they're used to leaving out in print.
— FEED co-founder Steven Johnson gave a lecture at Columbia last week about the future of text, especially as it relates to tablets and e-readers. You can check it out here as an essay and here on video. Johnson criticizes the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for creating iPad apps that don't let users manipulate text. The American Prospect's Nancy Scola appreciates the argument, but says Johnson ignored the significant cultural impact of a closed app process.
— Two intriguing sets of ideas for news design online: Belgian designer Stijn Debrouwere has spent the last three weeks writing a thoughtful series of posts exploring a new set of principles for news design, and French media consultant Frederic Filloux argues that most news sites are an ineffective, restrictive funnel that cut users off from their most interesting content. Instead, he proposes a "serendipity test" for news sites.
— Finally, if you have 40 free minutes sometime, I highly recommend watching the Lab editor Joshua Benton's recent lecture at Harvard's Berkman Center on aggregation and journalism. Benton makes a compelling argument from history that all journalism is aggregation and says that if journalists don't like the aggregation they're seeing online, they need to do it better. It makes for a great introductory piece on journalism practices in transition on the web.
Tags: Uncategorized Apple Bill Keller blogging censorship context data Demand Media Facebook Foursquare Gizmodo International Symposium on Online Journalism iPad iPhone iPhone apps ISOJ 2010 Jeff Jarvis Johnson journalism Ken Auletta Kindle long-form journalism Matt Thompson media law New York Times news design privacy research Rupert Murdoch shield law social data Steven Johnson Steven Kydd text Wall Street Journal