Qed

Josh Cohen | Google’s vision for the future of journalism

Josh says in his interview with the Guardian:

“There is a lot of high-quality information out there…Not only journalism, but blogs and other services. And our task is to bring this information to the reader. So ask yourself: Is Twitter journalism? I don't know. But there is no question that it is part of the dialogue.

Is there an algorithm for quality? Are Google working on such an idea, I’m betting they are.

via Josh Cohen | Google’s vision for the future of journalism | Technology | The Guardian.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism

Amusing blog post on the perils of blogging which I think illustrates a couple of things about the blogsphere. The lack of editorial oversight implicit in the system obviously produces problems now and the speed of propagation is a friend to the headline. Less obvious is the role of “a thousand eyes” in correcting any obvious falsehoods. Its a form of quality control, one mind and a pair of eyes might not see a problem if there is one, but scrutinise something with a million critical minds and if there’s a problem there is a much better chance of someone spotting it. Obviously this form of oversight can work well for high volume content but getting it right before something goes live is still a better option IMO.

Clearly the system is evolving and as news continues to shift to a decentralised shared environment away from the rigid structures of the past, more issues are bound to arise from the lack of pre-publication editorial oversight. Sites that depend on their credibility will have to move to address the problem or lose their audience. Sounds very much like journalism 101 needs an editor.

WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism.

Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content | Slashdot

This is tech humour, it mightn’t appeal to many but I’ve lifted a few gems to lighten the mood a little

presidenteloco writes

Dear Mr Murdoch

If you don’t want to be hyperlinked to, you might consider not putting your content on the worldwide web.

interkin3tic says:

You have to look at it from his perspective.

Basically his perspective is “Someone else has money. I want it.” …

Not the best perspective by my standards, but he has many times more money than I do, so who am I to say he’s a F*#@#ing idiot.

gslavik offers this brief analysis -

Media companies want Google to pay, not us (consumers). Because you can charge Google $X (where X has 7 digits) whereas to get consumer money, you have to produce a useful product.

Whereas fuzzyfuzzyfungus wants to hand Rupe a box of tissues…

Oh; but the poor baby wants it both ways: He wants google to index his stuff, and pay him for the privilege of indexing his stuff.

GaryPatterson stands up for Australia -

Murdoch is not an Australian – he gave up his citizenship as soon as it hindered his US interests….On behalf of Australians everywhere, I’m sorry that he’s your problem now.

ivoras maintains there is a win-win solution:

There’s a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this – Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It’s really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).

Cytid is obviously a punter -

Rupert is something else…I bet he thinks the dewey decimal system “steals” content from libraries by classifying and categorizing books.

HangingChad on the other hand seems resigned to a life without Rupert -

Gosh, what tragedy. Guess we’ll just have to suck it up and get by without their relentlessly negative hate spew.

Don’t let the search engine door hit you on the way out bunghole.

But Screwmaster has an ulterior motive. He thinks Google has much more important things to do…

Google’s spider really has better things to do than index Fox News … for example, my great aunt Betty’s second cousin’s daughter’s wedding photos.

All of them perfectly good and reasonable suggestions! Perhaps I should print them out and mail them to Mr Murdoch. I’m feeling so generous I might even put a stamp on the envelope

Slashdot News Story | Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content.

Welcome | News21 | Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education

In the US even as the mainstream media thrashes around in its death throes people are still turning to media production as a means of expressing themselves and seeking to do so in sophisticated and innovative ways. Take a look at News 21.

Welcome | News21 | Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.

War 2.0 – day 2

Hugh White talked about new media from a long term historical perspective, questioning whether “new media” is really a major gamechanger when it comes to prosecuting war. On feature that emerged in Hugh’s short talk that is overlooked in the new media landscape is the role of broadcast mass media and the difference between what’s knowable from available sources of information and what’s inescapable.

This ties into a similar difference between active and passive media consumption. In an active mode, a person might seek out information or data to fit a certain parameter. In this mode data is selected or discarded according to its relevance to the task at hand. Perhaps someone is looking for dinner recipe or doing research on a school project.

In the passive mode, our criticality is less active. Browsing YouTube is an obvious example, but so too might be social networking via Facebook where there is no specific agenda directing the use of the media. TV is of course another such example.

So (according to Hugh) what’s inescapable in terms of public knowledge still carries far more weight in political terms than the simple fact that some knowledge might exist. This idea seems to have some merit in terms of common sense because while we might indeed be able to find out things about the war in Afghanistan that aren’t necessarily on the front page of a newspaper or in a TV bulletin, unless we know the information is available, we are unlikely to search it out.

Of course obscurity is no guarantee that information or data that might have serious political information will always remain virtually unknown but it does raise the question of just who will take on the role of informing the public when the existing authoritative sources collapse. And in such a void, how will the public be able to make informed choices about the truth of any such information. Is viral marketing (or similar) the answer?

In discussing the role of the media generally with regard to war and the potential of media to exert influence over the political agenda, Sebastian Kaempf explored the symbolic representation of war in the media with a particular focus on the US military’s role in the the battle of ideologies.

With particular regard to “the war on terror”, he described the Pentagon’s media campaign as “perception management” striving to portray Iraq and Afghanistan as “costless” wars which avoid spilling blood, are humane and surgical, and only involve killing the “other”. Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the other hand avoid a direct confrontation with the US and its allies, preferring instead to engage in a media war where they seek to counter the information agenda of the Pentagon with such deliberately provocative images such as the beheading of captives and the aftermath of US bombings thus effectively putting bloody death back into the US public sphere.

PART 3

Two journalists made interesting presentations, one from Paris via Skype which underlined the web2.0 twist to the conference. Not only was Sophie McNeil about 10 hours behind, she was also jet lagged following her sudden relocation to Paris. Sophie’s skype presentation was at times marred by the technology but despite the technical glitches Sophie manage to convey some of the issues confronting a video-journalist in areas of armed conflict. She described her documentary style as observational, implying perhaps less interaction with her environments. This more passive approach may well be due to some of the constraints imposed by the multi-disciplinary roles a modern VJ must perform however it is seems reasonable to point out that in most cases she is probably assisted by some sort of local handler who speaks the language and allows her to acquire her material without the minute by minute journalistic intervention that might otherwise take place.

Sophie’s ideas about the need to balance embedded sources with on the ground investigative material is obvious and it begs the question why so few of her colleagues fail to pursue such an obvious line of inquiry. She also made a good point about the advantage organisations such as Al Jazeera derive from their embrace of alternative news sources, such as mobile phone material. This point was also mentioned by Paul McGeough who observed that mobile phones are often the first source of information available to a journalist in war zones.

However, the technology that powers almost instant worldwide communications for journalists, drives their impressive acquisition tools and enables local users to collect uncensored media also exposes the people in any subsequent media story to possible repercussions at home, a point Sophie was keen to emphasise. Given all the pressure and stress that a video journalist has to operate under in a war zone, it seems hard to imagine them doing the same job for thirty years.

Paul McGeough, a five time Walkley award winner and former editor of the SMH spoke passionately about the demise of quality journalism which he acknowledged is partially self inflicted. His address echoed the sentiments Andrew Keene with concerns about accuracy, context and historical perspective that come with the Web2.0 version of news. In retrospect it is easy to see the missteps that have created the current problems for newspapers, but the future has now arrived. Despite the problems plaguing old media players like newspapers, Paul’s observations about the need to physically bear witness as a basic requirement for journalism continues to resonate. Adopting new media platforms ( as exemplified by Sophie) is surely a requisite part of that notion.

As with other similar debates about the future of journalism, it is sometimes hard to see how the traditions of truth telling with the craft of building narratives and representing stories from areas of conflict can survive in the new media landscape but perhaps it is just a simple matter of believing that such things are too important to disappear, so a way must emerge.

A final thought or two
In the context of war, conflict is driven as much by ideology as anything else. The new information age creates an additional front for players to contest. Historically the relationship of the mass media and its impact on war has changed over time. In some instances the power of the press has been beyond the control of the state but in the modern age, not only is the public media space a battleground for competing players seeking to undermine the “message” of the other, it is also the case that some of the new Web2.0 media tools subvert the capacity of players to control the message in the first place.

Podcasts of the conference are now available.

The news you have to pay for

Ok let’s try this idea. You have a business, its core activity consists of people stringing a few words together based on information received. They, the stringers-of-words, do this stringing thing regularly and they also spend more than the average amount of time reading other stringers-of-words. Then there is a certain accumulated body of knowledge that goes with this activity. All up, its something that’s probably worth money to somebody.

Now do you, a fully paid up member of the public, think you should pay for these words strung together with some care and or ability? Why should you? Libraries exist, you can get words AND pictures for free in a library. And if you think about it, the content in a newspaper is pretty cheap on a per word basis. Then there’s TV, its free and the radio, its free too. Now don’t split hairs and tell me that you need to buy a TV to watch one or that both need electricity because that’s not really the point, except it might be but that’s later. For the time being, you can get free TV and radio content, you can even get free PRINT content. I can pick up free magazines and newsletter everywhere, some of it I need to actually tell people I don’t want it so desperate are they for my eyes to consume their words.

Right, I think we have established that as far as consumers are concerned, a lot of media is now free. Free as in no need to pay every time you want to access it. But some of it isn’t. There’s pay-tv for example and then there are the movies, there are books that you can buy as opposed to borrow and of course there are newspapers. These things people pay money for because by and large they are better than the stuff you don’t have to pay for, the old adage you get what you pay for and so on.

So you might want to watch the live telecast of Amazonian Fighting Fish battle it out for global supremacy and you can afford a few dollars a week so pay-tv is on your shopping list. Personally, I don’t really care for Amazonian Fighting Fish. I just like the news and current affairs. It’s boring information some of the time but strangely we have evolved this thing called government which also makes the news. The government is BIG, they can use force to make people do stuff they don’t want to and they can take money off people to pay for other stuff so keeping an eye on the government is probably a good idea. Certainly the early proprietors of newspapers thought so, hence this rather quaint notion of the press as some sort of watchdog on the activity of government. Notice here that big business escapes attention, its all about the role of Government.

But why should anyone take it upon themselves to be so unselfish, to go to all the trouble to uncover facts about the state just so they can tell me and others like me what the government is up to, and do it for free? Interesting question don’t you think?

Now in the past, before the death-of-journalism, such activities were paid for by businesses that made money by selling advertising which appeared along side this vitally important job of watching the government, ie government can’t be trusted and by the way buy a new car. Uh yeah. Why should I pay for that? I mean, let’s just examine this idea for a moment. Keeping across the role of government, ok, good idea, see above. Buy a new car, well don’t we have this little problem with carbon and isn’t oil running out and aren’t there enough cars on the road and why do I need a car to drive to work when a thousand other people are doing the same thing as me. I think you understand where I’m going with this but I’ll spell it out.

The information sources that exercise their right to scrutinise and criticise the government are biased. The bias is so blatant it almost can’t be believed, but such is the power of a big lie that most people don’t even question it. The media is about delivering messages to you, the so-called public. One message that almost completely escapes censure is that we must have the economic system we currently have. It might be an economic system that produces marked inequality or destroys our environment but these consequences are never attached to the underlying economic order. The bad things that happen just happen, if everyone is going to have a new car and the latest designer thingymajig, well we need an ECONOMY and it has to GROW.

Where are the watchdogs? Those caring sharing souls who are so keen to spill the beans on the reckless excesses of the state? Not interested! And the businesses running these media outlets, the corporations that make billions out of these messages, do you really think they’re interested? Seriously?

So the next time someone tries to tell you that you need to pay them so they can keep telling you that about all the bad things the state does and why you just have to have that holiday at the South Pole, it might be worth your while to stop for a moment and ask yourself what else is going on. There might be a whole different world of information out there that you might never know about because it isn’t in the best interests of the media to tell you. Or you could just trust them I suppose, after all not just anybody can string a few words together.

As a complete aside, its just occurred to me that there are some parallels here with the picture theory of representation, hmmm.

What is required?

Apparently “what’s required for serious — which is to say expensive-to-produce — journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee.”

That’s according to the Tim Rutten on the LA Times. Nothing like self interest to bring out the rhetorical best in a journalist – “Unless that imbalance is reduced, all but a few quality papers will disappear. For its part, Congress needs to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival.”

The notion of the free market apparently doesn’t apply to journalism because it so damn essential to a functioning democracy (like the US). Tim adds – “American papers had combined revenues of $34.7 billion from the advertising in their print editions last year” – I reckon that little number has got more to do with Tim’s opinion than any crap about the mythical fourth estate. Any bets that the government will give in to the monopoly capitalist? No? Didn’t think so, what a farce!