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We the Media
Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People
by Dan Gillmor
Copyright © 2004 Dan Gillmor
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From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

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2
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The Gates Come Down

44

4
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The Consent of the Governed

88

6
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The Former Audience Joins the Party

136

8
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Trolls, Spin, and the Boundaries of Trust

174

10
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The Empires Strike Back

209

12
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Every culture has its frozen
moments, events so important and personal that they transcend
the normal flow of news
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Roosevelt died
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Kennedy’s assassination
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In 1945, people gathered around radios for the immediate
news, and stayed with the radio to hear more about their fallen
leader and about the man who took his place
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Magazines stepped back from the
breaking news and offered perspective
...
The immediate news of Kennedy’s death came for
most via television; I’m old enough to remember that heartbreaking moment when Walter Cronkite put on his hornrimmed glasses to glance at a message from Dallas and then,
blinking back tears, told his viewers that their leader was gone
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September 11, 2001, followed a similarly grim pattern
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Consumers of
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we the media
news learned the what about the attacks, thanks to the television networks that showed the horror so graphically
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Journalists did some of their finest work and
made me proud to be one of them
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This time, the first draft of
history was being written, in part, by the former audience
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Another kind of reporting emerged during those appalling
hours and days
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We were witnessing—and in many cases were part of—the
future of news
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The stakes were far lower this time,
merely a moment of discomfort for a powerful executive
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Actually, Nacchio was rolling in wealth that day, when he
appeared at PC Forum, an exclusive executive conference in suburban Phoenix
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In those days Nacchio was the chief executive of regional
telephone giant Qwest, a near-monopoly in its multistate marketplace
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Imagine:
whining about the rigors of running a monopoly, especially
when Nacchio’s own management moves had contributed to
some of the difficulties he was facing
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So was another journalist
weblogger, Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal, a software magazine
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Little did I know
that the experience would expand my understanding of how
thoroughly the craft of journalism was changing
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Seconds later I received an email from Buzz Bruggeman, a
lawyer in Florida, who was following my weblog and Searls’s
from his office in Orlando
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This information struck me as relevant to what I was
writing, and I immediately dropped this juicy tidbit into my
weblog, with a cyber-tip of the hat to Bruggeman
...
) Doc Searls did
likewise
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1 Did Doc and I play a role? Apparently
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And at least some of them were amusing
themselves by following what Doc and I were writing
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Dyson, an investor and author, said later she
was certain that our weblogs helped create that chill
...
”
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we the media
Why am I telling this story? This was not an earth-shaking
event, after all
...

Consider the sequence of news flow: a feedback loop that
started in an Arizona conference session, zipped to Orlando,
came back to Arizona and ultimately went global
...

Those forces had lessons for everyone involved, including
the “newsmaker”—Nacchio—who had to deal with new pressures on the always edgy, sometimes adversarial relationship
between journalists and the people we cover
...
But he got a
tiny, if unwelcome, taste of journalism’s future that morning
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In an earlier time, before
technology had collided so violently with journalism, he’d been
a member of an audience
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And now he’d
become part of the journalistic process himself—a citizen
reporter whose knowledge and quick thinking helped inform my
own journalism in a timely way
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He was a producer
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This book is about journalism’s transformation from a 20th
century mass-media structure to something profoundly more
grassroots and democratic
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Humans have always told each other stories, and each
new era of progress has led to an expansion of storytelling
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Nothing like this has ever been
remotely possible before
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The economics of publishing
and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions—call it Big
Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters
exhibit some of the phenomenon’s worst symptoms
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We
told you what the news was
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You
might write us a letter; we might print it
...
) Or you cancelled
your subscription or stopped watching our shows
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It was
a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable
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The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we’re
only beginning to grasp now
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This evolution—from journalism as lecture to journalism as
a conversation or seminar—will force the various communities
of interest to adapt
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The alternative is just more of the same
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We can’t afford to treat
the news solely as a commodity, largely controlled by big institutions
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We
can’t even afford it financially, because Wall Street’s demands
on Big Media are dumbing down the product itself
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Once largely distinct, they’re now
blurring into each other
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I
take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more
than I do—and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of
journalistic life
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We will use the tools of grassroots journalism
or be consigned to history
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Newsmakers
The rich and powerful are discovering new vulnerabilities,
as Nacchio learned
...
Politicians and business people are
learning this every day
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Howard Dean’s presidential campaign failed, but his methods will be studied and emulated
because of the way his campaign used new tools to engage
his supporters in a conversation
...
But they can also be
the most fervent and valuable allies, offering ideas to each
other and to the newsmaker as well
...
It’s also learning how to join
the process of journalism, helping to create a massive conversation and, in some cases, doing a better job than the
professionals
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k
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“Instapundit,” is not just one of the most popular webloggers; he

xiv

introduction
has amassed considerable influence in the process
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In the end,
we’ll have more voices and more options
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I’m
grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, and the position I hold
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But I’m absolutely certain that
the journalism industry’s modern structure has fostered a dangerous conservatism—from a business sense more than a political sense, though both are apparent—that threatens our future
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Our worst enemy may be ourselves
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Perversely, such tactics are ultimately likely to
undermine us
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Daily newspapers in typically quasi-monopoly markets make 25–30 percent or more in
good years
...
For Wall Street, however, no margin is sufficiently rich,
and next year’s profits must be higher still
...
In case after case, the demands of Wall Street and the
greed of investors have subsumed the “public trust” part of
journalism
...
While we haven’t become a
wholly cynical business yet, the trend is scary
...
Media companies are merging to create ever larger information and entertainment conglomerates
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All of this
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we the media
leaves a journalistic opening, and new journalists—especially
citizen journalists—are filling the gap
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Newspapers,
for example, have two main revenue streams
...
The larger is
advertising, from employment classifieds to retail display ads,
and every one of those ad revenue streams is under attack from
competitors like eBay and craigslist, which can happily live on
lower margins (or, as in the case of eBay, the world’s largest
classified-advertising site, establish a new monopoly) and don’t
care at all about journalism
...
Who will do
big investigative projects, backed by deep pockets and the ability
to pay expensive lawyers when powerful interests try to punish
those who exposed them, if the business model collapses? Who
would have exposed the Watergate crimes in the absence of powerful publishers, especially The Washington Post’s Katharine
Graham, who had the financial and moral fortitude to stand up
to Richard Nixon and his henchmen
...

A world of news anarchy would be one in which the big,
credible voices of today were undermined by a combination of
forces, including the financial ones I just described
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Credibility matters
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Instead of journalism organizations with the critical mass to
fight the good fights, we may be left with the equivalent of
xvi

introduction
countless pamphleteers and people shouting from soapboxes
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Happily, the anarchy scenario doesn’t strike me as probable, in part because there will always be a demand for credible
news and context
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The forces of central control are not sitting quietly in the face of challenges to their
authority
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Governments are very uneasy about
the free flow of information, and allow it only to a point
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The
cartel has targeted some of the essential innovations of
tomorrow’s news, such as the peer-to-peer file sharing that does
make infringement easier but also gives citizen journalists one of
the only affordable ways to distribute what they create
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In short, we cannot just assume that self-publishing from
the edges of our networks—the grassroots journalism we need
so desperately—will survive, much less thrive
...

Instead of a news anarchy or lockdown, I seek a balance
that simultaneously preserves the best of today’s system and
encourages tomorrow’s emergent, self-assembling journalism
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It won’t be immediately workable for the people who
already get so little attention from Big Media
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” These are the very same people we’re leaving behind in
our Brave New Economy
...
To our discredit, we have
not listened to them as well as we should
...
The
ability of anyone to make the news will give new voice to people
who’ve felt voiceless—and whose words we need to hear
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In the end, they may help spark a renaissance of the notion,
now threatened, of a truly informed citizenry
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Let’s have this conversation, for everyone’s sake
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It did not emerge fully formed or from a vacuum
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Rather, these are observations, including some personal experiences that help illustrate the evolution of what we so brazenly
call “new media
...

America, born in vocal dissent, did something essential early on
...
S
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Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the
choice of newspapers or government, he’d take the newspapers
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Personal journalism is also not a new invention
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There were also the pamphleteers who, before the First
Amendment was enshrined into law and guaranteed a free press,
published their writings at great personal risk
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One early pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, inspired many with
his powerful writings about rebellion, liberty, and government
in the late 18th century
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Even more important, perhaps, were the (at the time)
anonymous authors of the Federalist Papers
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Without them, the Constitution might
never have been approved by the states
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There have been several media revolutions in U
...
history,
each accompanied by technological and political change
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This
unprecedented exercise in governmental assistance should be
seen, Bimber argues, as “a kind of Manhattan project of communication” that helped fuel the rise of the first truly mass
medium, newspapers
...
4
For most of American history, newspapers dominated the
production and dissemination of what people widely thought of
as news
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C
...
Local papers could now gather and print news of distant
events
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The
best were aggressive and timely, and ultimately served their
2

from tom paine to blogs and beyond
readers well
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Papers had points of view, reflecting the
politics of their backers and owners
...
“Yellow journalism” achieved perhaps its
ugliest prominence when early media barons such as Joseph
Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst abused their considerable powers
...

As the Gilded Age’s excesses began to tear at the very fabric
of American society, a new kind of journalist, the muckraker,
emerged at the end of the 19th century
...
Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the
Cities), Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company),
Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and Upton Sinclair (The
Jungle) were among the daring journalists and novelists who
shone daylight into some dark corners of society
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Personal journalism didn’t die with the muckrakers
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One of my journalistic heroes is I
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Stone, whose
weekly newsletter was required reading for a generation of
Washington insiders
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He lived in the
public domain
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If we’re lucky, his methods will never go out of fashion
...
This inevitable transition had its positive and negative
aspects
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First, industries consolidate
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Second, successful
family enterprises rarely stayed in the hands of their founders’
families; inheritance taxes forced some sales and breakups, and
bickering among siblings and cousins who inherited valuable
properties led to others
...

As noted in the Introduction, however, the creation of Big
Media is something of an historical artifact
...
J
...
The economics of newspaper publishing favored bigness, and local monopolies came about because, in most communities, readers would support only one daily newspaper of
any size
...
Radio, then television, lured readers and advertisers
away from newspapers,8 contributing to the consolidation of the
newspaper industry
...
As they grew, they
brought the power of broadcasting to bear on the news, to great
4

from tom paine to blogs and beyond
effect
...
Murrow’s reports on CBS, most notably his
coverage of the wretched lives of farm workers and the evil politics of Joe McCarthy, were proud moments in journalism
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Journalists helped bring
down a law-breaking president
...
Yet
this was an era when news divisions of the major networks lost
money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their
prestige, fulfilling a longstanding (and now all but discarded)
mandate to perform a public service function in their communities
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, which saw only the bottom line
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While network news may have been expensive to produce,
local stations had it easier
...
It was an irresistible combination for resourcestarved news directors: cheaper than serious reporting, and compelling video
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America has suffered from this simplistic view of news
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This was irresponsible because, among other
things, it helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that has
stripped away crucial civil liberties—including most of our
Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches
and seizures—and kept other serious issues off the air
...
I suppose it’s asking too much of commercial TV news to occasionally use the public airwaves to actually
inform the public, but the push for profits has crowded out
5

we the media
depth
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A shallow citizenry can be turned into a dangerous mob more easily than an
informed one
...
As noted, this didn’t always reduce
quality
...
And while some
corporate owners—Gannett in particular—have tended to turn
independent papers into cookie-cutter models of corporate journalism, sometimes they’ve actually improved on the original
...
Nor should it surprise anyone that
these organizations are making some of the most innovative use
of the Internet as they expand their horizons in the digital age
...
Originally designed to get broadcast signals into hardto-reach mountain valleys, cable grew into a power center in its
own right when system owners realized that the big money was
in more densely populated areas
...

The cable channel that changed the news business forever,
of course, was Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN)
...
At the time it was launched on June 1,
1980, many in the media business considered CNN little more
than a bizarre corporate ego trip
...

Even if cable was bringing more choices, however, it was
still a central point of control for the owner of the cables
...
Oh,
sure, customers had a choice: yes or no
...


f ro m o ut s i d e i n
During this time of centralization and corporate ownership, the
forces of change were gathering at the edges
...

Some were political and/or judicial, such as Supreme Court decisions that forced AT&T to let third parties plug their own
phones into Ma Bell’s network, and another that made it legal
for purchasers of home videotape machines to record TV broadcasts for subsequent viewing
...

I got my first personal computer in the late 1970s
...
I was enthralled by this
fabulous tool that allowed me, a lone reporter in what were
considered the boondocks, to report the news in a timely and
efficient manner
...
My initial
epiphany about the power of cyberspace came in 1985
...
It ran fast on the era’s
slow computers, and had an internal programming language,
called XPL, that was both relatively easy to learn and incredibly
capable
...
I
posted a short message on a word-processing forum on CompuServe, the era’s most successful commercial online service
...
S
...
9
I was amazed
...
I’d
been educated
...

Of course, I didn’t fully get it
...
John Markoff of The
New York Times, the first major newspaper reporter to understand the Net’s value, had it pretty much to himself in those
days as a journalist, and got scoop after scoop as a result
...
Collectively called Usenet, they were and
still are a grab bag of “newsgroups” on which anyone with Net
access can post comments
...
10

CompuServe wasn’t the only way to get online in the 1980s
...
They turned into technological cul-de-sacs, but had great
value at the time
...
You’d find a variety of topics on all of
these systems, ranging from aviation to technology to politics,
whatever struck the fancy of the people who used them
...
I was a reporter for the Kansas City Times in the mid1980s and spent the better part of a year chasing groups such as
the Posse Commitatus around the Farm Belt
...
I found my way onto several online
boards operated by radical groups; I never got very deep into
the systems because the people running them understood the
basics of security
...
11

rans o m-no t e m e d i a
Personal technology wasn’t just about going online
...
For example, musicians were early beneficiaries of
computer technology
...

A series of inventions in the mid-1980s brought the medium
into its new era
...
Big publishing didn’t disappear—it adapted by using the
technology to lower costs—but the entry level moved down to
small groups and even individuals, a stunning liberation from
the past
...
In the early days of
desktop publishing, people tended to use too many different
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we the media
fonts on a page, a style that was likened, all too accurately, to
ransom notes
...

Big Media was still getting bigger in this period, but it
wasn’t noticing the profound demographic changes that had
been reshaping the nation for decades
...
Desktop publishing
and its progeny created an opening for many new players to
enter, not least of which was the ethnic press
...
Newsrooms are becoming
more diverse
...
But independent
ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credibility: grassroots journalism ascendant
...
Radio has featured talk programs throughout its history, and call-in shows date back as far
as 1945
...
These hosts were as much entertainers as
commentators, and their shows drew listeners in droves
...
People—regular people—were invited
to have their say on the radio
...
Now they could be
part of the program, adding the weight of their own beliefs to
the host’s
...
Howard
Kurtz, media writer for The Washington Post, believes that talk
radio predated, and in many ways anticipated, the weblog phenomenon
...
” Kurtz now writes a blog-like online column14 for the
Post in addition to his regular stories and column
...
The
genre has also become a broader sounding board
...

Talk radio gave me another mini-epiphany about the future
of news
...
I listened as a local talk station, junking its scheduled topics, took
calls from around the San Francisco Bay Area, and got on-thespot reports from everyday citizens in their homes and offices
...
Relatively few people were online, except perhaps on corporate networks connecting office PCs; college campuses; bulletin boards; or still-early, pre-web commercial services such as CompuServe and America Online
...

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext technology
that became the World Wide Web
...
He also

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we the media
sparked the development of Hypertext Markup Language, or
HTML, which allowed anyone with a modest amount of knowledge to publish documents as web pages that could be easily
linked to other pages anywhere in the world
...
BernersLee had connected the global collection of documents the Net
had already created, but he wanted to take the notion a step further: to write onto this web, not just read from it
...
He
didn’t patent his invention
...

The next breakthrough was Mosaic, one of the early graphical web browsers to run on popular desktop operating systems
...
The
browser, and the relative ease of creating web pages, sparked
some path-breaking experiments in what we now recognize as
personal journalism
...

Justin Hall was a sophomore at Swarthmore College in
1993 when he heard about the Web
...
His “Justin’s Links from the Underground”15
may well have been the first serious weblog, long before specialized weblog software tools became available
...
He
explained his motivations in an email:
Why did I do it? The urge to share of oneself, to join a great
global knowledge sharing party
...
A deep geek archivist’s urge to experiment
with documenting and archiving personal media and experience
...

It was journalism, but I was mostly reporting on me
...
Once search engines and link
directories emerged, I didn’t need to catalog everything online
...
The printing press and broadcasting are a oneto-many medium
...
Now we had a
medium that was anything we wanted it to be: one-to-one, oneto-many, and many-to-many
...
16
None of this would have surprised Marshall McLuhan
...
As he observed in the
introduction to Understanding Media:
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is
imploding
...
Today, after more than a century of electric
technology, we have extended our central nervous system
itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as
far as our planet is concerned
...


Nor would it have come as a shock to Alvin Toffler, who
explained in The Third Wave19 how manufacturing technology
had driven a wedge between producers and customers
...

Information technology, he said, would lead—among many
other things—to mass customization, disintermediation (elimination of middlemen), and media convergence
...
It was alternately pretentious and profound, with considerably more of the latter quality
...

“A powerful global conversation has begun,” they wrote
...
As a
direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter
faster than most companies
...
“Markets are conversations,” proclaimed their first of
95 theses with elegant simplicity
...
Cluetrain and
its antecedents have become a foundation for my evolving view
of the trade
...
But
some final pieces had yet to be put in place
...
Another was cultural: the realization
that putting the tools of creation into millions of hands could
lead to an unprecedented community
...

The toolmakers did, and continue to do, their part
...

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from tom paine to blogs and beyond
Dave Winer had written and sold an outlining tool called
“More,” a Macintosh application
...

At the time, Microsoft Windows was becoming more popular, and the hype machine was pronouncing Apple to be a
troubled and, perhaps, terminally wounded company
...
But when the computer journalists persisted in saying,
in effect, “Apple is dead, and there’s no Macintosh software
development anymore,” Winer was furious
...

He published an email newsletter called “DaveNet
...
They paid attention
...

Winer never really persuaded the trade press to give the
Mac the ink it deserved
...
And Windows, with the backing of Microsoft’s
roughhouse business tactics that turned into outright lawbreaking, became dominant
...
He’d found
journalism wanting, and he bypassed it
...
Like Justin Hall, he created a newsy page in
what later became known as the blog format—most recent
material at the top
...
One collection of new functions was given the name Manila, and it was
one of the first programs that made it easy for novices to create
their own blogs
...
Winer has suggested that traditional journalism will
wither in the face of what he helped spawn
...

15

we the media

o p e n s o urci n g t h e n e w s
The development of the personal computer may have empowered the individual, but there were distinct limits
...
Proprietary programs were like black boxes
...

This situation struck Richard Stallman, among others, as
wrong
...
He
formally launched a project to create a free operating system
and desktop software based on the Unix operating system that
ran on many university computers
...
24
The goal of Stallman’s work, then and now, was to ensure
that users of computers always had free software programs for
the most basic and important tasks
...
Stallman and others in this
movement thought that the programming instructions—the
source code—of free software had to be open for inspection and
modification by anyone
...
25
Open source software projects are a digital version of a
small-town tradition: the barn raising
...
Most will never meet
except online
...
Open source software, in many cases, is as good
as or better than the commercial variety
...

16

from tom paine to blogs and beyond
When the code is open for inspection, it’s safer to use
because people can find and fill the security holes
...
26
What does this have to do with tomorrow’s journalism?
Plenty
...
In a 2002 essay, “Coase’s Penguin,”27 he said the free software style could work better than
the traditional capitalist structure of firms and markets in some
circumstances
...
”
He could have been describing journalism
...

He told me that bloggers and operators of independent
news sites already do a respectable job of scanning for and
sorting news for people who want it
...
Some peer-reviewed news sites, such as
the collaborative Kuro5hin,28 which describes itself as “technology and culture, from the trenches,” are doing interesting
journalism by any standard, with readers contributing the essays
and deciding which stories make it to the top of the page
...
This is due to the resources Big Media can throw at
an investigation
...

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we the media
In my own small sphere, I’m convinced that this already
applies
...
While there are elements of open source here, I’m not
describing an entirely transparent process
...
More are
coming
...
In
the conversational mode of journalism I suggested in the Introduction, the first article may be only the beginning of the conversation in which we all enlighten each other
...
We can add new facts and context
...
We already are
...
The Web was already
a place where established news organizations and newcomers
were plying an old trade in updated ways, but the tools were
making it easier for anyone to participate
...
On September 11, 2001, we got
that catalyst in a terrible way
...
The news came to me and four other
people in a van, on the way to an airport, via a mobile phone
...
She called again to say another plane had hit the other
tower, and yet again to report the attack on the Pentagon
...

18

from tom paine to blogs and beyond
The next day our party of journalists, which the Freedom
Forum, a journalism foundation, had brought to Africa to give
talks and workshops about journalism and the Internet, flew to
Lusaka, Zambia
...
The local newspapers ran considerable news about the attacks, but they were more preoccupied
with an upcoming election, charges of corruption, and other
news that was simply more relevant to them at the moment
...
I could
barely get to their web sites because the Net connection to
Zambia was slow and trans-Atlantic data traffic was overwhelming as people everywhere went online for more information, or simply to talk with each other
...

Then a telecommunications professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, Farber had a mailing list called “Interesting
People”30 that he’d run since the mid-1980s
...
If they saw something
they thought he’d find interesting, they sent it along, and Farber
relayed a portion of what he received, sometimes with his own
commentary
...
Farber told me later he’d gone into overdrive,
because this event obliged him to do so
...
“This is a funny form of new newspaper, where the
Net is sort of my wire service
...
Even though I don’t edit in the sense of real
editing, I make the choices
...
It was an email from an unidentified sender
who wrote: “SPOT infrared satellite image of Manhattan,
acquired on September 11 at 11:55 AM ET
...
” A web address, linking to the photo, followed
...
The image stayed with me
...


Back in America, members of the then nascent weblog community had discovered the power of their publishing tool
...
New York City bloggers
posted personal views of what they’d seen, with photographs,
providing more information and context to what the major
media was providing
...
Everyone I know is okay,” Amy Phillips wrote
September 11 on her blog, “The 50 Minute Hour
...
It has
the smell of burning plastic
...
The stuff I’m seeing on
teevee is like some sort of bad Japanese Godzilla movie, with
less convincing special effects
...
”32
Meg Hourihan was a continent away, in San Francisco
...
The next day she
wrote, in part: “24 hours later, I’m heading back into the
kitchen to finish up the dishes, to pick up the spatula that still
sits in the sink where I dropped it
...
I’m

20

from tom paine to blogs and beyond
going to try and find some semblance of normalcy in this very
changed world
...
His message was in part cautionary, observing that
while America might want to bomb anything that moved in
Afghanistan, we couldn’t bomb it back to the Stone Age, as
some talk show hosts were urging
...
Ansary’s email circulated among a widening
circle of friends and acquaintances
...
34
Within days, Ansary’s words of anguish and caution had spread
all over America
...
At the
outset, no one from a major network had ever heard of him
...
Only then did the mass
media discover it and take it to a national audience
...

In Tennessee, meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds was typing,
typing, typing into his weblog, Instapundit
...
A law professor with a
technological bent, he’d originally expected the blog to be somewhat lighthearted
...

“I was very reactive,” he told me
...
I was
just writing about stuff, because the alternative was sitting there
and watching the plane crash into the tower again and again on
CNN
...
But he
warned against a backlash targeting Muslims
...
He didn’t expect to develop a following, but
that happened almost immediately
...
He

21

we the media
heard from people who agreed and disagreed vehemently
...

Today, InstaPundit
...
Reynolds
is constantly posting trenchant commentary, with a libertarian
and rightward slant, on a variety of topics
...
The day is frozen in time, but
the explosions of airplanes into those buildings turned new heat
on a media glacier, and the ice is still melting
...
It
was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software, had called to say there was something I had to see
...
I don’t remember what the page
contained except for one button
...

I clicked the button
...
Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page
...
The
software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the
earliest weblog, or blog, applications
...
Berners-Lee
envisioned a read/write Web
...

Writing on the Net wasn’t entirely new, of course
...
Wikis—sites on which anyone could
edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn’t gained
23

we the media
much traction outside a small user community, in part because
of the techie orientation to the software
...
They said the Web needed to be writeable, not
just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead
simple
...
We could
all write, not just read, in ways never before possible
...

Just about anyone could make the news
...
It was Wednesday morning in Hong Kong,
Tuesday evening in the United States, and I was immersed in the
U
...
elections muddle that left Americans unsure for weeks who
their next president would be
...
S
...
So I made do
with the tools I had—and I realized something that seems
obvious only in retrospect
...
Meanwhile, I was visiting various web sites such
as CNN and key newspapers such as the The New York Times
for national perspective and my own San Jose Mercury News
for California and hometown coverage
...

I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone
watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper in the United States
...

In effect, I’d rolled my own news
...
It
was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do as the tools
become more sophisticated, but it worked
...
Of course, I have to remind myself that
most people will remain—and I dislike this word—consumers of
news
...

(This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans,
believing they weren’t getting a fair perspective from the U
...

media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War
and run-up to it
...


To understand the evolution of tomorrow’s news, we need to
understand the technologies that are making it possible
...
This book’s accompanying web site
(http://wethemedia
...
com) will catalogue new tools as they
become available
...

For people who simply want to be better informed, the
Internet itself is the key
...

For those who want to join the process, the Web is where
we merely start
...
The tools
also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile
phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs)
...

It boils down to this
...

The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and
few-to-few communications
...

That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the
relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways
the designers didn’t anticipate
...

At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow’s news are
fueling something emergent—a conversation in which the grassroots are absolutely essential
...
And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots
...


In no sphere is the whole more intelligent than the sum of
its parts than in digital networks, where the basic units are zeros
and ones—and where, as David Isenberg explained in his
pathbreaking 1997 paper, “Rise of the Stupid Network,”38 the
value soars when you move the intelligence to the edges and
away from the center
...
The Web, as it grew up
in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists
of all kinds used to great effect, and still do
...

Let’s look inside that toolkit
...
As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber’s “Interesting
People” mail list is a news source of enormous value to his
readers
...

Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month
teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in
the rise of SARS
...

Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email
from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry
Niman, who had created several mail lists
...
Members include molecular biologists and scientists
from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well
as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses
...
A second
mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease
...

This sequence of writing about something and then hearing
from an expert in the field has been a common one for Netsavvy journalists lately
...

At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering
just about every topic one can imagine
...
First, they
serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community
27

we the media
can make the list private
...
Third, they are “pushed” to subscribers’ email inboxes
...
The
key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a combination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly interested lay people
...

In 2000, Yahoo! bought eGroups, a primary vendor of mail
lists, renamed it Yahoo! Groups,39 and now hosts thousands of
lists
...

Most mail lists have a small readership, such as the “Blogrollers” group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each
other about new postings they think might be especially noteworthy for their peers
...

Unlike mail lists, online forums, such as Usenet newsgroups, are open to all comers
...
Some are moderated, and many
are valuable for spotting trends and getting answers to specific
questions
...
They can be an early warning
...
But their value should
never be underestimated
...
The blog is the medium of both, and
all
...
To date, they’re the closest we’ve
come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web
...

28

the read-write web
So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it’s an
online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the
top of the page
...
Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog
postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original
post, thereby allowing audience discussions
...
One blog may be a
running commentary on current events in a specific arena
...
com
...
41
While some blogging software permits readers to post their own
comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a
significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the
comment feature
...

What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is
voice—they are clearly written by human beings with genuine
human passion
...
” On his PressThink
blog,42 a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the
evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why
...
The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most
(not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market
economy
...
Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and
amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the
op-ed page
...

3
...
With the weblog, barriers to
entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a software program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you
there
...
)

The nature of journalistic authority is shifting, he told me
...
Moreover, when the people formerly called the audience
are now participants, “that’s a different kind of relationship
...

A few years into the commercial Internet, companies discovered
the value of email for marketing and customer support, not to
mention internal communication
...

Most corporate web sites, meanwhile, are like most annual
reports: static, stiff, and turgid, with the most revealing information hidden in footnotes—sometimes to disguise the truth, not
tell it—and led by a “Letter from the Chief Executive” (or vacuous mission statement) that appears to have been written by a
committee of lawyers and marketing people
...
But
what brings people back to personal weblogs is their individualized perspective
...
One blogger will point to another’s posting, perhaps to
agree but often to disagree or note another angle not found in
the original piece
...
As tools are developed to help
people follow those discussion threads across different sites, the
cross-fertilized conversations will spread both in numbers and
complexity even more quickly than they do today
...
The most popular individual bloggers draw tens
of thousands of visitors daily
...
How many do it regularly is unclear, but the best bet is several hundred thousand
...
But it’s taken
some time for these mediums to become part of the blogging
toolkit
...
But as
networks improve, we can take for granted that what technologists call “rich media” formats will infiltrate
...
)
Blogging software has evolved a great deal from the first
products of Dave Winer, Evan Williams, and other pioneers to
the genre
...


wi ki
Can absolute editorial freedom result in anything but chaos?
Yes, when it’s in a Wiki
...
“It’s a
tool for collaboration,” he writes
...
”48
“WhatIs
...
With a wiki, any user can
edit the site content, including other users’ contributions, using
a regular Web browser
...
The
software keeps track of every change
...
As Cunningham so aptly puts it, all Wikis are
works in progress
...
There are Wikis covering
travel, food, and a variety of other topics
...
49 One of the best examples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful
is the WikiTravel site,50 which brings together a variety of viewpoints from around the world
...
They’re increasingly used
behind corporate firewalls as planning and collaboration tools
...

Wikis are making inroads on campuses as well
...

The project looked at a controversial proposal to fill in more of
the harbor for development
...
Instructors could watch over their shoulders without
interfering except to offer guidance
...

Their use in journalism, at least the traditional kind, is
almost nonexistent
...


s ms
If weblogs are becoming the opinion pages and, sometimes, even
the newspages of the Net, short message services (SMS) are
becoming the headlines
...

Think of SMS as instant messaging without being tethered
to a PC
...
It’s a service offered by
network providers that allows customers to send text messages
over their cell phones
...

SMS has been a staple of the information diet just about
everywhere where mobile phones have penetrated markets,
except in the United States
...
Forwardlooking newspapers in the U
...
, along with other kinds of information providers, including companies that have time-sensitive
information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assortment of SMS services
...
com, for example, offers SMS alerts on local news
...

Journalists can use SMS in any number of ways; again, this
is much more common outside the U
...
The first inkling among
journalists of China’s SARS epidemic came in an SMS from
sources inside the medical profession there
...
But in a place where being overheard can
lead to big trouble, it’s much safer—as long as one’s messages
aren’t being intercepted—to simply send a quick SMS
...
Rheingold relates, among other examples, how citizens in
the Philippines used SMS to organize and overthrow a corrupt
government
...
We’re just at the beginning of this technology’s development
...

Professional news people will need to be plugged into
tomorrow’s smart mobs, just as they must be plugged into today’s
informal organizations
...
S
...
Technology moves so
quickly that before long it will also seem natural to the men and
women who enter professional journalism in America
...
As cameras become just one more
thing we all carry everyday, everyone’s becoming a photographer
...

Digital cameras are a staple of amateur photographers, and
well-financed professional journalists use high-end digital cameras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos
quickly
...
The size of

34

the read-write web
high-quality digital cameras, still and video, is decreasing along
with the cost
...
As broadband
Internet access becomes more common, quick publishing
becomes simple
...
This is
the world camera-equipped mobile phones are creating
...
Once again, it’s vital to remember technology’s rapid pace
of innovation and improvement to understand just how soon it
will be when most phones aren’t just equipped with still cameras, but video cameras
...

Keep in mind that public photos and videos are not new
...
Citizens have been capturing videos of
tornados and other natural disasters for years as well, and cable
television caters to voyeurs with a variety of shows featuring
citizen-captured police chases, embarrassing moments, and the
like
...

We are only beginning to understand the consequences of
this technological development
...
The barring of mobile phones with cameras from
health-club locker rooms is a testament to the improper ways
people have already used these devices
...
Keeping secrets, moreover, will be more
difficult for businesses and governments
...


i nt e rne t “br o a d c a s t i n g ”
At one time, Internet Broadcasting was seen as the next big
thing, with individuals and groups spawning Internet radio and
news stations with the same ease they create weblogs and Wikis
...
S
...

News radio via the Net is another matter entirely, and
there’s a big opportunity for people to create their own shows
featuring interviews, audio documentaries, and other formats in
which royalty-free content is the goal
...
56 IT Conversations, a Netonly program, has been posting interviews in various audio formats along with transcripts
...
Two staff members on Howard Dean’s
2004 presidential campaign created an Internet talk-radio program by patching together some low-cost equipment
...

Look for others to put all the pieces together in a coherent
package that anyone can use
...
While the cost of producing video news programming is dropping all the time, delivering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service
providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs

36

the read-write web
can’t afford
...


p e e r-t o -p e e r
Remember Napster, the music file-sharing web site? It started a
revolution with its file-sharing model, also known as peer-topeer (P2P)
...
Then
other people who wanted the same song would check the Napster database, find who had the music, and log directly onto the
computer of the person who was offering the song
...
The music industry sued, ultimately killing the company
...

There are a number of reasons why P2P is important for
tomorrow’s journalism
...
Internet service
providers charge web site publishers in several ways, but one
way is based on how much traffic your site receives and the
bandwidth required to serve the text, images, audio, and video
to viewers
...
This is a unique situation in media history because in the past, the more successful you were, the lower
your marginal costs
...
With technologies such as BitTorrent, a free software

37

we the media
product, every downloader’s computer is also a content server
...

P2P is also valuable in a political sense
...
Repressive governments want to keep
Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censorship more difficult
...
I also believe they fear it because of its assistance
in democratizing media
...
They must not be permitted to succeed, however, because in
the name of preventing copyright infringement, they are taking
away other rights—including our right to make what’s known
as “fair use” for quoting and personal backups—and they could
ultimately dampen or even wreck the possibility of grassroots
journalism talking hold
...
And they can thank the bloggers, in large part,
for its growing success
...
This syndication capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to
have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the
content they care about
...
It could
38

the read-write web
well become the next mainstream method of distributing, collecting, and receiving various kinds of information
...

Imagine your own “Presidential Briefing”—with only the
topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the
added ability to drill down for details
...
RSS does the heavy lifting
...
“Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow’s information—or at least some of it,” said Chris Pirillo, founder of
LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters
...

Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to
you on your terms
...
Create a blog, and you’re creating
RSS
...
But
traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its
value, too, and they’re creating RSS “feeds,” as the files are
called, of their own material
...
I
can’t force it on you
...

The web site accompanying this book has links to a variety
of RSS-related software and how to use it
...
In my
own case, on a Macintosh computer, I downloaded and
installed NetNewsWire,60 a type of program known as a newsreader or aggregator
...
For several that weren’t included with the
software, subscribing was trickier
...

39

we the media
Like other newsreaders, NetNewsWire has three “panes,”
much like most email programs
...
I click on one of those site names, and the pane at
the top right of the screen shows the headlines from that site
...
If I want to see the
original page or article, I need only double-click on the site
name or headline
...
I can
pull the headlines and brief descriptions of postings from dozens
of blogs and other sites into a single application on my Mac
...
It comes to me
...
For example, I have an RSS reader on
my Treo 600, a combination phone and personal organizer
...

The extensibility of RSS creates some drawbacks
...
The irony here is that the newsreader actually undoes the idiosyncratic feel of many weblogs by
stripping them of visual elements such as layout or logos, as well
as eliminating the context produced by blogrolls (blog authors’
links to other weblogs) or the author’s biographical information (and any advertising)
...

Newsreaders also assign equal weight to everything they
display
...
For some users, this will be entirely appropriate
...
The world is waiting for such creative approaches,
and RSS and related tools will make them possible
...

As exciting as RSS has become in the personal weblog context, its possibilities are much wider
...
The New
York Times makes some of its content available via RSS
...
The company is making available feeds of its
Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) articles, so a programmer can subscribe to MSDN rather than hunting through
the Microsoft site
...
Several sites provide lists and
descriptions of what’s available, including NewsIsFree62 and
Syndic8
...
A few have already arrived in what can only be
called “Version 0
...

41

we the media
One that shows the way is Feedster,64 a web-based application that indexes RSS files
...
Feedster
has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through
discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls “Feedpapers,” which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based
news and blog commentary
...
It was designed by San Francisco technologist
Dave Sifry to fill a personal need
...
“I wanted to know what people were talking about, and
what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared
about
...

The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have
become a vital part of a larger ecosystem
...
They must not be confused with journalism
itself
...

At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati
are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for
tomorrow’s news and information
...
We’ll look at this architectural potential in more
detail in Chapter 8
...
The
spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will
occur—much more so than today—without any help from mass

42

the read-write web
media as we know it
...

In the meantime, even the beginnings of this shift are
forcing all of us to adjust our assumptions and behavior
...


43

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The Gates Come Down

A peculiar silence reigned in most major newspapers and TV
networks the first few days after Trent Lott, celebrating fellow
Republican Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday in late
2002, seemed to wax nostalgic for a racist past
...
S
...
The nation would be better off if Thurmond had won, Lott said
...
ABC News mentioned it
...
And that was about all we heard from the
major media
...

The flow of outrage and information was complex
...

Liberal bloggers, such as Joshua Marshall on Talking Points
Memo,67 were early to sound off, but several conservatives also
chimed in
...

A few days later, the story that didn’t go away was running, full-bore, in the national media
...
In the end,
no one was surprised when Lott, under enormous pressure,
resigned as majority leader
...
Weblogs claimed “their first
scalp,” said card-carrying establishment conservative John Podhoretz in his New York Post column
...
Call them sources
...
But however we describe them, we all must recognize that the rules for newsmakers, not just journalists, have
changed, thanks to everyone’s ability to make the news
...
They see the news media’s traditional hierarchies reflecting their own centralized, top-down
model, with distinct control points
...
Executives deal with reporters when necessary
...

It’s an industrial age model: manufacturing news
...
If markets
are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors have
noted, then journalism—the information people need to manage
their lives—will increasingly be part of those conversations
...
Information is an
ocean, and newsmakers can no longer control the tide as easily
as they once did
...


45

we the media
First, outsiders of all kinds can probe more deeply into
newsmakers’ businesses and affairs
...
And it’s never been
easier to organize like-minded people to support, or denounce, a
person or cause
...

Second, insiders are part of the conversation
...
It gushes, through firewalls and other barriers,
via instant messages, emails, and phone calls
...


s p re ad i ng t he w o r d
As noted earlier, modern communications have become history’s greatest soapbox, gossip factory, and, in a very real sense,
spreader of genuine news
...
He could stand on the corner and rant, or
post a sign, or write a newsletter, or pen a letter to the editor
...
The autonomous linking machine—consisting of
people who care enough to spread the word, plus new tools
such as RSS, which widely disseminate what they write—
launches into action
...

Even before the Web rose to prominence, the online world
was making companies pay attention
...
News of the “Pentium bug,” a
math-calculation flaw in a version of the Pentium processor,
first spread via Usenet before it was picked up in the popular
press
...
“Our immediate lesson
46

the gates come down
was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that
medium [the Internet] and that that medium was going to get
more and more important at setting opinions,” an Intel executive told the CNET news service in 1999
...
In early 2004, with great
fanfare, including a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi announced a
“free songs” promotion
...
But someone noticed a flaw in the bottle design
...
Once upon a
time that information would have remained within a small community of people, but in the Internet age, that information was
almost instantly available to anyone with an Internet connection in the form of a document titled “How to never lose Pepsi’s
iTunes giveaway
...
If someone knows something in one place, everyone
who cares about that something will know it soon enough
...
The repressive government, accustomed to controlling the news, at first
didn’t allow the medical community to tell anyone what was
happening
...
And the
word was grim: people were sick and in some cases dying from
a particularly virulent form of pneumonia
...
70
Once SARS became a household word and panic began to
set in, SMS became a medium of choice for the government, too
...
71
Now add “moblogging” and its kin to the equation—the
use of camera-equipped mobile devices by just about everyone,
in a world where we must assume that people are constantly
taking pictures in public places
...
What
will happen when 10 average citizens aim their phones at the
stars and zap the images they take to their friends or to web
sites? Still images are only the beginning; video cameras will
become part of our phones soon enough
...
And for the
people who live in the public eye, that eye will never blink when
they’re outside of their homes
...
Camera phones and other carry-everywhere photographic and video devices may give people powerful tools to
prevent crime; as CNN reported in 2003, a 15-year-old boy
snapped a camera-phone picture of a would-be abductor,
helping the police find the man
...

As of early May 2004, it was still unclear who took the digital photographs of Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu
Ghraib prison, but their escape into the public sphere was
already seen as a negative pivot point not just in the conflict but
in the world’s view of America
...

We are a society of voyeurs and exhibitionists
...
Imagine Rodney King and Abu Ghraib times a
million
...
Soon they will have to assume they’re being caught
on digital video
...
But everyone who works, or moves around,
in a public place should consider whether they like the idea of
all their movements being recorded by nosy neighbors
...

It’s worth reflecting how events of the past would have
looked had tomorrow’s technology been available at the time
...

Our memories of that awful day stem largely from television:
videos of airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center, the
fireballs that erupted, people falling and jumping from the
towers, the crumbling to earth of the structures
...
The big networks stopped
showing most graphic videos fairly quickly
...

We also learned, second-hand, that people in the airplanes
and Trade Center towers phoned loved ones and colleagues that
awful day
...


t rut h s q uad
In September 2002, Microsoft posted a semi-bogus web page
advertisement featuring a winsome young woman, identified as
49

we the media
a freelance writer, who’d supposedly switched from a Mac to a
PC
...
A commenter on the Slashdot
site73 discovered and reported that the picture of this supposed
freelancer was from a Getty Images archive
...
A
Microsoft PR man, weaving around some direct questions from
me, said: “It was a mistake that it was posted, and Microsoft
took it down as soon as it came to the attention of the Windows XP marketing team
...
”
I suggested at the time that people might be making too
much of the half-fake nature of the ad
...
But when Apple’s PC-to-Mac converts were apparently
all real, including their pictures, Microsoft’s phoniness was all
the more obnoxious
...
Slashdot’s readers, members of a powerful online community, got on the case
...
And they deserved
much of the credit for the story coming out in the first place
...
The earnest
pamphleteer can now do more than challenge something
...
Combined, this becomes an
impossible-to-ignore force
...
In the mid-1990s,
McDonald’s Corp
...
The fast-food behemoth took two activists to court in London, arguing that the
company had been libeled by their pamphlets
...

One of the most useful aspects of McSpotlight was its brilliant deconstruction of McDonald’s marketing materials
...

The McSpotlight rebuttals appeared on the other side
...
The
company was trying to extract money from a stone, however, so
after its enormous legal bills, it had lost a serious financial
battle
...
The McSpotlight court case and web site
revealed a multinational giant that, at the very least, had an
occasional deficit in ethics
...

McSpotlight didn’t fold with the end of the trial
...

The tobacco companies, another widely criticized multinational industry, also felt the weight of web-based documentation
in the mid-1990s when the University of California, San Francisco created the Tobacco Control Archives, an assortment of
documents that antismoking forces have found valuable in their
war against the industry
...
Only later did the power of the new
medium become clear, he said, when antismoking forces elsewhere started using the material in their own campaigns
...
“It allows people
like me—kind of detail nerds—to make the resources available,
fairly inexpensively and in however much depth we want
...
Government officials are as secretive as companies, perhaps more so
...

The site’s home page declares its mission is “rescuing knowledge, freeing information
...
In a
journalistic coup, Kirk put Big Media to shame in April 2004 by
using the Freedom of Information Act to get the military’s
photos of America’s Iraq war dead—the moving and dignified
pictures of flag-draped caskets that other media hadn’t thought
to request
...
In his 1914 book Drift
and Mastery,78 Walter Lippmann warned that civilization was
becoming so complex that “the purchaser can’t pit himself
against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to
make the bargain a fair one
...
Users of appliances and devices, whose inner
workings were once trade secrets and inaccessible to consumers, have been tapping that power
...
It was a DishPlayer, attached to
my Dish Network satellite system
...
Unsurprisingly, Dish Networks wasn’t especially
interested in telling me how to do it
...
The Web—and discussion groups in particular—was my
go-to source
...
(I also found
instructions on other bulletin boards where users had posted
warnings to avoid instructions that hadn’t worked for some
users—advice I took; the instructions I ultimately followed came
with a warning that the upgrade might fail if I wasn’t careful,
but others posting to the board agreed the fix would work if
done properly
...
The hacking phenomenon—and I
use the word “hacking” in its most benevolent sense—has
expanded into the world of gadgets and everyday tools
...
And
they’re doing it by informing each other, in an open source manner that brings the community’s best minds to bear on common
problems
...
It took no time for the iPod
mavens to run tests and discover functions that Apple hadn’t
mentioned in its product literature
...
It’s going to be
taken apart soon, but we first ran Diagnostic Mode on it
...
”
As a journalist who frequently uses a digital recorder for
interviews, this was interesting news for me
...

Apple may have thought it was keeping future plans to itself
(though that’s debatable), but it couldn’t keep smart people
from figuring things out for themselves or from broadcasting
what they discovered
...

In the old days, we’d learn of those defects if we encountered
one, if the manufacturer told us, if the defect was sufficiently
major to warrant news coverage, or if the government ordered a
recall
...

One of the more notable examples of learning about unauthorized things over the Internet has been the tinkering of automobile electronic systems, a trend automakers universally dislike
...
“Much to the chagrin of the
automobile manufacturers and in spite of tight security, computer hackers have been able to reverse-engineer the code for
most engine controllers within just a few months of the code’s
appearance,” wrote Warren Webb, technical editor of EDN
Access, a trade magazine
...
” And people doing the
hacking tell others what they’ve done
...
82
Now the automakers have a legitimate concern, especially if
the hackers disable smog-control systems or introduce some
behavior that might make the car unsafe
...

Banning such information sharing—sometimes through the use
of obnoxious copyright lawsuits—is tantamount to giving manufacturers unprecedented control over customers
...
They are risking their businesses
...
83 He told me companies should be doing everything they can to support and
encourage the “lead users”—people like me with my DishPlayer—to find flaws in products and improve them
...
When your
customers offer their expert assistance, the smart move is to say
Thanks
...

In his research labs, University of Tokyo Professor Ken
Sakamura has been experimenting with tiny chips that contain
short-range radios, embedding them in various products and
other items
...

Someday, he told me, everything will have these ID tags, and
we’ll be able to get vast amounts of information about what we
touch and buy
...
Or
a bottle of pills could tell us whether the drug would pose risks
if taken with another drug we’ve been prescribed
...
Using what is
essentially off-the-shelf technology, he’s equipped a handheld
55

we the media
computer with a wireless Internet connection and a bar-code
scanner that he uses to scan products in stores
...

Suddenly, far more than the price is available
...
Was a shirt made by slave labor? Did the can of
processed food come from a company with a record of poisoning streams in its factories’ backyards? Did the company
have a reputation for being good to employees and the environment? Smith likes to show a supermarket scan he once did of a
cereal box
...
That might be interesting information to
someone hyper-allergic to that ingredient
...
’”
Now add location to this notion
...
They used publicly available data and
combined it with location-based software in the phones
...
It’s possible because all kinds of data
and metadata (information about information) is now escaping
into the wild
...
But the positive uses are also evident
...
Lebed was a stock market player,
one of many in the bubble days of the late 1990s whose recommendations of shares online helped fuel price rises before the
crash
...
Famous
analysts on Wall Street issued absurd recommendations to buy
stocks—including some they considered dogs privately—that
then plummeted
...
He
was a New Jersey teenager who, under false names in Internet
chat rooms, made hundreds of thousands of dollars by touting
various shares
...
As Michael Lewis
noted in The New York Times Magazine, it was never really
clear whether he was doing something flat-out illegal or just ethically questionable
...

It’s still rampant
...

The problem for the average person entering this cyberworld, as
I discuss at greater length in Chapter 9, is distinguishing
between truth and falsehood
...

For honorable public companies, some of the worst
dilemmas arise in forums where people discuss stock prices and
corporate financial performance
...
But even in these forums you can find nuggets of
useful information
...

Companies should monitor these discussions carefully, of
course, even when there’s no obvious participation by corporate officials
...

57

we the media
Almost everyone on these systems uses a pseudonym
...
At least insiders
posted more frequently before companies started going to court
to get the names and addresses of—depending on one’s view—
whistle blowers or revealers of trade secrets and other confidential information
...
But courts are
beginning to tell companies they can’t require the identification
of anonymous chat-room posters unless there’s some actual evidence of libel
...
What if, instead, trade secrets are simply a vestige of a dying era? With few exceptions, I’d suggest that the more
transparent a company is, the more likely it will succeed in a networked world
...
But Doc Searls’s shot at
the Segway, inventor Dean Kamen’s two-wheel scooter that won
so much publicity when it emerged from a massive rumor mill,
was well-deserved
...
So it
annoys me that he and his crew were so deeply secretive about
the thing, even though I know secrecy is pro forma in the
invention business
...
And now that it’s out, there still isn’t
...
We haven’t been talking about it
...


58

the gates come down
And I’ll guarantee you this: the most original uses for this
original machine will be ones Kamen didn’t imagine when he
created it
...
Maybe the discussion boards, far from
being a threat, are a boon
...
In fact, the best examples are
support forums hosted by the sellers of products in which designated staff members participate and postings are not censored,
except in cases of obvious libel or deeply offensive language
...
A spokesman told me
the company’s technical people participate indirectly in the online
news chatter, letting webmasters know when there’s misinformation on their sites
...

In an article explaining the surprising showing by Howard
Dean in the early stages of the 2004 presidential campaign, Ed
Cone, a journalist in North Carolina, made some telling observations that apply far more widely:
Television, radio, print and mail can create awareness and
desire for a product
...
But the lesson of Dean’s campaign is that the Web is
not for micromanagers
...
Properly done, you won’t be
able—or want—to control it
...
In his important book, The Transparent Society,90
59

we the media
David Brin suggested that privacy is becoming a relic of a pretechnological time
...
Our only recourse, he suggested, was to turn the same
tools back on the watchers, to create what would amount to a
détente in which we all reserved some dignity
...

Even so, regular people are beginning to discover ways to
redress the balance
...
S
...

Thanks to new technologies, he got a taste for himself
...
It would gather vast
amounts of data on individuals by collecting and linking records
from financial, driving, criminal, court, medical, and other databases
...

Civil libertarians picked up and amplified a column by Matt
Smith from the December 3, 2002 San Francisco Weekly, an
alternative newspaper
...
and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness
...
Neighbors Thomas E
...
Galvin, 56, at 12
(+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V
...
”
Gilmore took it a step further
...
92 He
also urged people with access to databases containing information on Poindexter and other privacy invaders to expose it as an
example of what would go wrong with Total Information
Awareness
...
“It looks like members of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) development team at DARPA don’t
like the lime-light
...
However the Google cache still had all of
the bio’s cached, so I have put copies on my Web site
...

Was this Total Information Access, judo-style? Not entirely
...
But in the
future, they will understand that looking over shoulders is no
longer the sole province of the spies
...


wat ch i ng j o u r n a l i s t s
What industry is traditionally among the least transparent? Journalism
...
But the public is demanding
more transparency in our own field, and is doing some reporting
of its own when we fail to respond in satisfying ways
...
Generally, the blogging community is not shy to go after newspapers,
magazines, and broadcasters for real and imagined offenses
against fairness and accuracy
...
We are not accustomed to being scrutinized
the way we scrutinize others, however healthy it is that we are
...
The Times’
appropriately scathing internal analysis of the mess, the “Siegel
Report,”95 revealed a horror show of missed communications
and lax management on top of plainly corrupt behavior by Blair
himself
...
Eventually, and in large part
because of Rosen’s prodding, the document reappeared online
...
The idea was to follow individual
reporters’ political coverage on web sites, relentlessly tracking
errors and omissions and exposing them to the world
...
) This is a piece of tomorrow’s journalism, and we in the business should welcome the feedback
and assistance that, if we do it right, becomes part of a larger
conversation
...
Here are just three
of the many, many questions/issues that come immediately to
62

the gates come down
mind (and as you’ll see, I’m not alone in wondering these
things):
1) Who’s doing the watching? A self-appointed “watcher”
is an antagonist in most cases, convinced before he/she starts
posting criticisms that the journalist in question is getting
things wrong, whether due to incompetence or animosity
...

Paul Krugman has a cadre of online critics who make my
own look benign
...

Much of what they say is incorrect
...

2) Will journalists who do participate in the online discussion of their work—and many will be forbidden to do so by
their organizations, probably for legal reasons—hit the law of
diminishing returns?
I recall the quasi-religious debates over the OS/2 operating
system back in the early and middle 1990s
...
Once in a while
I’d post a note in a Usenet discussion where something I’d
written was either being misinterpreted or had been seriously
twisted
...
I quickly learned that I had time for correcting outright mistruths and not much else
...
)
3) Why should anyone trust what critics say any more than
what the journalist says? An assertion that a journalist has a
fact wrong is not, in itself, true
...

Do we need Truth Squads watching the Truth Squads? There
are, amazingly, sites that deconstruct the anti-Krugman stuff
...

None of these issues means that Web watchers are a bad
idea
...


63

we the media
This prompted Donald Luskin, an investment officer and a
prominent Krugman debunker who writes an entertaining and
frequently instructive economics and policy blog96 to write:
“Wouldn’t it be nice for journalists like Dan Gillmor if everyone
who disagreed with their pronouncements just sent friendly little
emails and let them decide how and whether to respond? How
unseemly that, instead, some of us have become ‘organized
Truth Squads
...
”
I responded on mine:
First, I welcome comments on this blog, and have had some
lively debates with some fairly angry critics here from time to
time; Luskin could have posted a copy of his remark right on
this page, but that would have contradicted the implication
that the only good feedback is happy-face e-mail
...
) Second, I’ve been arguing for some
time that the little guy needs to get active and organized to
have a chance against Big Everything (including Big Media)
...


I’m having some second thoughts about the comments feature, for many reasons that I’ll discuss in Chapter 9
...
Will we
ever be entirely transparent? Not likely
...


64

the gates come down

t urni ng t h e t a b l e s
We’ve seen how modern communications give anyone who
cares the tools to learn more—far more—about people and
organizations that in the past tried to ration the news
...
But newsmakers need to embrace this new
reality, not fight it
...
They can use the same tools, in fact, to bring their
message to the outside world, and to improve the way they communicate internally, as we’ll see in the next chapter
...

However, I strongly believe that they are a positive trend
because they encourage openness instead of paranoid secrecy
...


65

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Newsmakers Turn the Tables

On January 9, 2002, reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of
The Washington Post sat down with U
...
Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld
...

Rumsfeld said he understood from Secretary of State Colin
Powell that he, Rumsfeld, was at the end of the interview trail:
“He said you’ve talked to everybody in the world on this
...

They asked a series of questions, probing deeply into what
Rumsfeld had thought, said, and done in those days
...

How do we know? Because immediately after The Washington Post series appeared later that month, the Department of
Defense posted a transcript of the interview on its DefenseLink
web site
...
Moreover, anyone who
wanted to see which small pieces of the interview had made it
into the newspaper could also do that
...

Why this practice? It’s to make sure that the full context is
available, according to a Rumsfeld aide
...
First, assuming the
transcriptions are accurate (and sometimes they are not),98 they
provide valuable history for anyone who cares and not just context for the interview itself
...
Third, the process
helps keep reporters on their toes
...
Our little priesthood, where we essentially have had the final word, is unraveling
...


Newsmakers have always possessed a certain leverage in the
give and take with the press
...
Moreover, in a
world where too many reporters serve as little more than stenographers, newsmakers can create and hold onto the agenda
...
Many will do just that
because they continue to live in a world where all interactions
with the media that can’t be controlled are by their definition
hostile
...

The point has Cluetrain-ish echoes—that markets are conversations
...
But the bottom line is a change, for
companies, for politicians, and for other newsmakers brave
enough to get it
...
But
its inherent messiness will open communications in ways that
will benefit everyone, assuming it’s done correctly
...
What made them work in the first
67

we the media
place—news flowing through a select group of heavily
controlled mass-media conduits, mainly television—is still very
much alive and largely in control of how most citizens perceive
the news
...
News and commentary from the
edge of networks, from average people who want to be part of
the conversation, from bloggers to activists, are facts of life for
the newsmakers
...


Newsmakers of all kinds—corporate, political, and, I’d argue,
journalistic—need to listen harder, and in new ways, to constituents of all kinds, whether voters, customers, or the general
public
...
Marketing and customer service no longer work as simple lectures
...
Using weblogs and
other information tools such as discussion forums, companies
can engage customers, suppliers, and employees in a dialogue in
which everyone learns from each other
...
For example, a well-targeted approach to a weblogger
who’s become an expert in a given area may be more effective
than a magazine ad
...
In the
emerging world of Internet-enabled communications, obfuscation and lies will work even less well than before
...
McDonald’s may have won the McSpotlight libel
trial, but I hope and trust that the company will, in the end, be a
better—not just craftier—corporate citizen as a result of this and
68

newsmakers turn the tables
other citizen action
...

Making this shift in thinking will feel, at times, like threedimensional chess
...
Now
add the varying communication tools—email, weblogs, short
messages, syndication via Net-based tools such as RSS—and you
get a sense of the new landscape and its complexity
...
I hope business people and politicians, in particular, will use them for the
right purposes, and not to mislead and deceive
...

Consider the case of Phil Gomes, a public-relations professional
in the San Francisco Bay Area
...
He was told to handle media relations and
industry analysis for a suite of programs that ran on IBM’s AS/
400 midrange computers, which had a huge market presence
and were known as sturdy and reliable machines
...
Some
of the AS/400 customers, then representing 90 percent of the
customer base, were worried that they might be left behind
...
Gomes and his client
needed to understand what they were saying
...
“Thus, I was able to then
bring that intelligence back to the client and tune communications accordingly
...
”
Did Gomes’ employer fully appreciate his effort? Not
exactly
...
‘Oh,
jeez,’ they’d say
...
’”
More recently, Gomes has become one of the betterinformed PR-industry observers of blogging and other new
media
...

There’s a knee-jerk tendency in the corporate communications
field to treat every new online media development as the next
CB radio instead of fully exploring it
...
Technologies such as RSS have given
companies new ways to monitor what’s happening
...
100 He uses the Feedster service (discussed in Chapter 2),
which searches for mentions of ActiveWords
...
Every half hour,
NewsGator checks with Feedster for anything new
...
e
...

70

newsmakers turn the tables
When I respond to a blogger, he/she is thrilled, and typically writes more about us, and tells his/her readers that we
are great people, responding to users and customers and the
net leverages all the time
...

My total involvement in this process once the query is done
is almost zero
...

If you assume that bloggers really are “intelligent human
agents”, then this model is sensational as you don’t have to go
look for anyone or anything; it comes to you
...
Now anyone
can get it at almost no cost
...
It’s loaded with information, too much of
which is hidden or disguised in an effort to minimize problems
and maximize what’s going right
...
The least interesting feature of a corporate site, with
few exceptions, is the typical “Letter from the Chief Executive,”
a content-free missive that does nothing to reveal the character
either of the company or its leader
...

“Blogging is an opportunity for Public Relations, not a
threat,” wrote public-relations pro Tom Murphy on his PR
Opinions blog
...

Your customers can read the actual thoughts and opinions of
your staff
...
”
71

we the media
When Groove Networks Ray Ozzie explains something on
his blog,102 the reader is gaining insight into the CEO’s way of
thinking, not just the company’s products
...
He’s not
pitching Groove so much as explaining what he’s thinking about
on matters relating to the company and its ecosystem
...
That article, he
said, was one reason why “people are discovering why compartmentalized security such as that implemented by Groove is so
important moving forward,” he wrote
...
Only because Ozzie already had some
credibility was this effective, since there’s an element of hyperbole in his message
...
The pitch fit the
context of the posting
...
It didn’t have to lead
directly to more sales to be useful
...
He can post quickly
and without limits on length
...
It lets me feel
like I’m part of that conversation, and when I get calls and
emails, there’s confirmation that I’m part of the conversation
...
“It’s been a very busy past few months,” he emailed
me in early 2004
...
At this point, knowing how effectively RSS works, I know that when I start posting again—even
if it’s only once in a blue moon—I won’t have to regenerate the
audience from scratch
...
”
A more recent executive recruit to the blogosphere is Mark
Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks franchise in the National
Basketball Association
...
com, a Net company acquired by Yahoo!), Cuban
became famous as the demonstrative sports team owner, though
he’s also kept investing in the technology and television arenas
...
(He also needed a copy editor, but most bloggers do
...
He responded almost
immediately
...
This was one
way to get the facts out
...
I think everyone with any awareness of the Internet from a business perspective is aware of blogs
...
That creates a Catch 22 that I’m sure most don’t
think is worth the risk
...
Being in sports is different than just being in
business
...
They might write about a company once a quarter at
most
...

q: What else should I have asked you about the new world of
communications?

a: It’s not a new world
...
This is just a content management system,
verticalized for diary entries
...
Whether or not
it’s a long-term impact, I have no idea
...
Even better, in many cases, are blogs
and other materials from people down the ranks
...
Why not let them communicate with the
public, too?
A growing number of smart companies understand why this
is a good idea
...
Macromedia programmers and product managers contribute to a variety of blogs
...
Macromedia also
aggregates its blogs onto one page for convenience and allows
anyone to read them
...
In May
2004, Bill Gates touted the advantages of blogs and RSS in a
speech to corporate chief executives
...
” Walking the talk,
74

newsmakers turn the tables
the company allows hundreds of staffers to blog on personal
sites
...
They’re putting a distinctly human face on what they do, and use videos, audio, and
text conversations to augment basic text blogs
...
)
The public sector can use these techniques, too
...
107 He’d encountered weblogs at a conference in California and was intrigued by
what they might represent
...
So he bought 100 licenses for Radio Userland, one of
the major weblog software packages, and offered one to any
state information technology (IT) people who wanted to start a
blog
...
His own blog gave him
better visibility among the IT workers who read it from around
the state
...

Of course, it’s not as simple as just telling an executive (or
having the executive volunteer) to write a blog, or offering blogs
to others in the organization
...

Even in an era of openness, governments, companies, and
other big organizations still have trade secrets
...
That’s why companies and governments
have strict email policies, nondisclosure agreements, and other
measures to prevent valuable inside information from migrating
into the wrong hands
...
)
Sometimes what you can’t post outside the firewall—where
the public can see it—is fine to post inside
...
Utah’s IT blogs
were for the IT workers only, and they served their purpose
...
“You have to decide how comfortable
you are with people being candid,” he says
...
Some organizations don’t like that
...
108 In a comment he posted on my blog, he said:
“Others will either figure it out, or will lose the benefits of
participating in the marketplace
...
Not every company will figure this out,
but Microsoft is uniquely positioned to really take advantage
of the new conversational marketing
...
That’s quite
unlike other places I’ve worked
...
But as
one of the company’s louder critics, I can say with certainty that
its willingness to let employees have this conversation with the
public is a smart move for marketing and PR purposes
...

After companies decide blogging is a good idea, they have
to come up with a corporate policy that includes what
employees can say and how they can say it
...
Finally, and most
importantly, the leader of the organization has to be committed
to the process
...

In 2003, Scoble posted a manifesto for corporate bloggers on
his own blog
...
Here are several of the better ones:
76

newsmakers turn the tables
— Tell the truth
...
Nothing but the truth
...
You might as well
...

— Post fast on good news or bad
...

Same if something good comes out about you
...
The trick to building trust
is to show up! If people are saying things about your
product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds
...
Even if you have Bill Gates’ favorite
product people will say bad things about it
...
Don’t try to write a corporate weblog
unless you can answer all questions—good and bad—
professionally, quickly, and nicely
...
Why? Because the mainstream press is cruising weblogs looking for stories and
looking for people to use in quotes
...
People trust
stories that have quotes from many sources
...


Skilled professions may be the most ideal for this kind of
communication
...
Most started
out simply because the author enjoyed writing about the law
...

Ernest Svenson, a New Orleans lawyer, didn’t have marketing in
mind when he started his blog,110 but it’s been modestly helpful
there, too, he told me, generating referrals and requests for bids
on services
...

77

we the media

t h e ce l e bri t y b l o g
Wil Wheaton is not, repeat not, Wesley Crusher
...

He’s proud of it
...
A once notorious Internet discussion group
was called “alt
...
wesley
...
die
...

In 2001, the Pasadena resident launched a weblog,111 in
part to “undo a lot of the misconceptions directed toward me
because of the character I played on Star Trek,” he said
...
It tells you a lot about who he really is: a thoughtful and
intelligent family man, with a bent toward geekiness and political activism
...
And Wheaton has established a new kind of connection with his audience
...
And think of it
as the evolution from the celebrity as a manufactured product to
the celebrity as something more genuine in a human sense
...
It’s helped people get to know
him, as opposed to the Star Trek character
...
)
Wheaton was no fan of the Hollywood system that creates
stars and spits them out after using them
...
“I’d struggled so much as an actor, and felt like I
was running out of time to be a successful actor,” he said
...
I started writing about
that, the ups and downs, mostly downs—what it’s like to be
someone whose first half of life is being famous, and the second
half, being famous for being famous
...
“I’m cynical about entertainment press,” he said
...
It’s basically an extension
of the studio publicity machine
...

And while the trade press won’t beat up on popular actors,
Wheaton said, “they’ll beat up on me all the time because I’m a
minor celebrity
...
”
He recalled an Entertainment Weekly story about blogs
...
In the grand scheme I could care
less
...
But everyone in the entertainment
industry read it
...
”
“In a situation like mine, having a blog is useful,” Wheaton
said, “because it allows me to get my story out
...
The blog has spawned one book, Dancing Barefoot,112
and another was on the way in early 2004
...

(Disclosure: Wheaton’s new publisher is also the publisher of
this book
...
)
Wheaton has been using computers much of his life
...
He’s also taken up some causes
dear to the hearts of many in the tech community, such as
reform of the copyright system that has been tilted so drastically
toward copyright holders and against customers and users
...

Writing a weblog like his carries a responsibility
...
Lots of his readers “feel they know me, which is
weird,” he said, citing an email that had just arrived when we
spoke in mid-2003
...
” As
Wheaton recounts the story, the couple was on a Santa Barbara
street as it began to rain
...
“She grabbed
the umbrella, closed it, and said, ‘Let’s walk in the rain,’” he
recalled
...
It was definitely sappy
...
”
Wheaton’s online correspondent wanted him to understand
something: “He said, ‘We read this for your honesty, and if we
find out this is being written by some clever writer, we’ll all feel
betrayed
...

“That’s really good advice
...
Yet in the past few years, the PR industry
has graduated from mere cluelessness to only a semi-conscious
understanding of the Internet’s possibilities
...
I have a
more charitable view of the industry, and suspect there are
plenty of PR pros who see the possibilities in entering this new
era in a smart way
...
In my “Dear PR People” letter on my
weblog, I offer the following simple guidelines:
80

newsmakers turn the tables
Make sure your clients have a ton of information on their
Web sites
...

Don’t bury the PR contact information so far inside the
website that no one without an advanced degree in Library
Science can find it
...
Maybe there’s a more logical place for
such information, but wherever you put it, don’t hide it
...
Now, unless someone has some news or a
pitch aimed specifically at me—and I mean me alone—I no
longer want even email due to the spam plague
...

Even if a company doesn’t want to create a weblog, it absolutely should create RSS feeds of its major news
...

On April 2, 2002, networking giant Cisco Systems’
“News@Cisco” PR operation created RSS feeds of its press
releases
...
Microsoft has
RSS feeds aimed at developers
...

If public-relations people start creating RSS feeds of
releases, journalists and the public at large could see the material they want, and the PR industry would be able to stop
blasting huge amounts of email to people whose inboxes are
already over-cluttered
...
In 2002, Jon Udell, an Infoworld
columnist, described (in his blog, of course) a communication
he’d like to receive: “Hi, I’m [NAME], [CTO, Architect,
Product Manager] for [COMPANY] which does [PRODUCT
81

we the media
OR SERVICE]
...
If this information is
useful and relevant, our RSS feed can be found here
...
By some estimates, somewhere between 15
and 30 percent of legitimate email is now blocked by spam filters
...

Thank goodness for RSS, said Chris Pirillo, publisher of the
LockerGnome newsletters
...

There’s a right way to do RSS, and a distinctly wrong way
...
Apple Computer, for example, has an
RSS feed of its press releases
...
Stupid
...
In the pane of the
newsreader that contains the body of the message, you see the
album cover and some details about the song
...


f i ne -grai n p i t c h i n g
In April, 2001, Apple Computer’s public-relations agency got a
request from a blogger, Joe Clark, who wanted to interview
someone inside the company about the Macintosh operating
system
...
Frustrated by the negative response,
Clark posted the email exchange on his site, which in turn
prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the agency’s regional
vice president
...

82

newsmakers turn the tables
To be fair, this was 2001, before weblogs were well-known
...
” Others call it “nanopublishing”—small sites, run by one or very few people, focusing on
a relatively narrow niche topic
...
According to Azhar, a niche
blogger in this context is “a teenage boy who drives the mobilephone purchase decisions of his group of teenage friends; or the
London yoga practitioner who has 60 or 80 fellow yogi readers
on his blog, and who influences their yoga-related purchasing
...

For example, people in the Wi-Fi wireless networking arena
have learned that at least two weblogs—Glenn Fleishman’s WiFi Networking News, which I discussed earlier, and Alan
Reiter’s Wireless Data Web Log116—are as important to their
readers as any print publication
...
In fact, they’re better than any print publication I’ve
seen
...
In
the world of baby strollers, a southern California woman named
Janet McLaughlin moves markets
...
McLaughlin—better known to her followers as Strollerqueen—has attained celebrity status in the
underground world of stroller watchers and gained outsize
influence on new buyers
...
’ She has
referred so many customers to two West Coast stroller stores
that they both periodically offer ‘Strollerqueen discounts
...
It’s part of the
83

we the media
small but growing collection of sites run by Nick Denton, a
financial journalist turned entrepreneur
...
Rojas, who has since moved to another
niche blog, Engadget,119 said companies did pick up on what he
was doing, though “it took a few months to really get noticed
(except for Microsoft, they picked up on Gizmodo within days
of our launch)
...
I do get a lot of press
releases that aren’t relevant to Gizmodo, that’s mainly because
I made the fool mistake of registering for CeBIT America [a
giant trade show], so now I get all sorts of “enterprise application” bullshit
...
Most of the fodder for Gizmodo comes from trawling my trusty newsreader a million
times a day, with the rest coming from tips from readers (who
I supposed could be PR people in disguise
...

I’d have to say, though, the PR people who do contact me
seem smarter and more respectful than those who barraged
me back when I was at Red Herring
...
But
overall, my experience with PR people has been pretty positive, and those I’ve dealt with seem to be taking Gizmodo very
seriously as a technology news outlet
...


Denton thinks blog pitches are ideal for “marketers who are
inclined toward a PR-centric word-of-mouth strategy
...
Without the resources to hire an
expensive PR agency, the bicycle maker might look online for
“the 15 people most influential in writing about bicycles and
extreme sports—to identify who writes about this stuff, who’s
listened to [by the Web community] and who spreads memes,”
and approach those bloggers for coverage
...

As noted, the blogging world has spawned services designed to
help bloggers—and others—keep track of things
...


s o me rul e s fo r n e w - w o r l d p r
and marke t i n g
I’m always glad not to be doing PR or marketing
...
And never mind the chore of
dealing with journalists
...
Listen hard, because people outside your organization may
know things you don’t
...

2
...
Start a
weblog, or 10 weblogs, from inside the company
...
Get the CEO to post, too
...

85

we the media
3
...
After you’ve listened and talked, take the next
step and turn on the comments feature in your weblogs so
customers can post back
...
Set up discussion groups, but don’t censor
them except to remove libelous, obscene, and totally offpoint postings
...
Syndicate your information to the widest audience in the
most efficient way
...

5
...
Make sure your web
site has everything a journalist might need
...
If journalists can find it, customers
can, too
...

6
...
When your CEO or other top official
gives an interview, transcribe it and post it on the web site
...
If an article about you is unfriendly, link to it
anyway (because other people will find it even if you pretend it doesn’t exist) but also post a reply
...
Aim carefully at people who really care
...

(Use Google, Technorati, Blogdex, and Feedster, not just
Nexis and clipping services
...
Then make sure you keep these
people well-informed
...


86

newsmakers turn the tables
8
...
When a
major news outlet or serious blogger posts something inaccurate, respond immediately
...
Send an email to bloggers who have pointed
to the errant item, and tell them about your response
...

9
...
Congratulate
them publicly when they offer a great suggestion, and do it
again when you put it into effect
...
Tell the world—and the
person who told you—how much you appreciate the
assistance
...
Experiment constantly, because risk is a part of growth
...
As Esther Dyson
says, “Always make new mistakes
...
17, 2004, Ben Chandler won a special election to the
U
...
Congress
...

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, author of the Daily Kos
weblog,120 was ecstatic
...
It was a
mauling,” he wrote late that evening as the results became clear
...
From the cash, to the volunteers
on the ground, to the good vibes
...
The California activist/
blogger, an ardent Democrat whose blog had become one of the
must-read sites for political junkies, was applauding not just a
chipping away at the Republican House majority
...
Blogs did more than lead cheers
...

The previous month, Chandler’s campaign had made what
turned out to be an astonishingly smart bet
...
A $2,000 investment,
using the then nascent Blogads online ad agency,121 had turned
into some $80,000 in contributions, mostly in small (around
$20) amounts, from around the nation
...
122
88

the consent of the governed
The voices from the edges of the political system—average
people with real-life concerns, not just the big-money crowd—
had been heard
...
Big Media and the forces of centralization retained a
dominant role during this period, to be sure
...
It takes the right combination of circumstances and candidate, as Chandler showed, to
win elections
...

Just as the tools of emergent journalism are giving businesses new ways to organize and market, they are helping to
transform political life into a virtuous feedback loop among
leaders and the governed
...
And even though governments are not doing enough to
take advantage of technology to serve their constituents, they
will inevitably see the value in doing so—for financial reasons, if
nothing else
...
The
emerging form of bottom-up politics is bringing civic activity
back into a culture that has long since given up on politics as
anything but a hard-edged game for the wealthy and powerful
...


89

we the media

bus i ne s s as u s u a l
For all the obvious value of Net-based politics, it isn’t going to
overturn the status quo overnight
...
And
by all evidence, the 2004 campaign season showed that big
money and media were still largely holding sway
...
And even Dean, who used the Net brilliantly to raise
money in mostly small, sub-$100 donations, turned around and
used much of that money to buy television advertising
...

Exhibit B was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s winning campaign
for governor in California, when incumbent Gray Davis was
ousted from office in the October 2003 recall election
...
Schwarzenegger did have popular
appeal, and the recall campaign got its start online, but in the
end, the pitch was to an electorate that—sadly, but typically in
modern America—didn’t care about the candidate’s paucity of
experience and qualifications, or his refusal to offer any specifics on what he’d do if elected
...


90

the consent of the governed
Exhibit C, George W
...
Bush raised several hundred million dollars, most coming from the wealthy elite that had put him into
power in the first place
...
It seemed
that late 20th century politics, a time when choosing our political leaders was little more than a television show where voters
were nothing more than consumers, still had some serious legs
...
As far back as the early 1980s, the radical right was using
bulletin boards to keep people in touch and to spread its message
...
He proposed “electronic
town halls,” a concept that apparently stemmed from his
founding and running of Electronic Data Systems
...
“Had Perot been using today’s pervasive
technology and literate base (of supporters) would he succeed?”
wondered Peter Harter, a former Netscape executive who wrote
a law-school thesis on the subject in 1993
...
” Yet
Perot had still shown the way for subsequent campaigns
...
“Tens
of thousands of Filipinos converged on Epifanio de los Santas
Avenue, known as ‘Edsa,’ within an hour of the first text
91

we the media
message volleys: ‘Go 2EDSA, Wear blck
...

Estrada fell
...
”
In 2000, America saw the first serious demonstration of the
Internet as a fund-raising tool
...
4 million
online in his campaign against George Bush
...
Internet fund-raising had become just one more arrow
in the political quiver
...
In that year, Tara Sue Grubb, a resident of North
Carolina’s Sixth Congressional District, decided to challenge the
long-term Republican incumbent, Howard Coble, who hadn’t
had a serious opponent in years
...
She had no
money or visibility, but she had the passion of Netizens who
were fighting for fairer copyright laws
...
They found her, via weblogs
and email
...
Ed Cone, a magazine tech
writer and part-time columnist for the News & Record, a
leading North Carolina newspaper, introduced Grubb to software developer Dave Winer, who helped her set up a weblog
...
News of her campaign hit Slashdot,
bringing thousands of visits to her weblog, plus some money for
her campaign fund
...

It would have been poetic justice if blogs and Grubb’s
engaging energy had carried the day
...
Coble won overwhelmingly, though for the first time in
years he’d had to sweat just a little
...

92

the consent of the governed

e l e ct i ng a pr e s i d e n t
There is wide consensus that smart use of the Net was a principal reason for the election of Roh Moo Hyun as president of
South Korea in 2002
...

Roh also attracted the interest of an online publication that
hadn’t even existed when his predecessor was elected
...
com, an online newspaper written mostly by its readers,
had achieved a strong following for its tough, skeptical
reporting in a nation where the three major newspapers—all
conservative and accounting for some 80 percent of all daily circulation—had ties to the government and rarely rocked the
boat
...
It was absolutely no coincidence that
Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication,
snubbing the three conservative newspapers
...
)
In 2004, the Legislature impeached Roh
...
In an April legislative
election, voters decisively voted into power a party allied with
Roh, and by all accounts the Internet activists again played an
enormous role
...
Enough people were online, and for the first time they
had the tools to seriously shake things up themselves
...
It’s worth
spending some time understanding how this happened, why it
happened, and what lessons we can learn
...
As Howard Dean’s campaign manager during the candidate’s rise and fall, he wanted to change that
...
He was a self-professed
techno-junkie who attended San Jose State University in the
heart of Silicon Valley and had developed close ties to the tech
industry
...
(I first encountered him in Iowa in 1988 when I was
covering U
...
Rep
...
He was Gephardt’s deputy campaign manager
...
Trippi, McMahon & Squier, a consulting firm, had handled Dean’s Vermont gubernatorial races,
and as much by coincidence as anything else it fell to Trippi to
manage what just about everyone understood as the longest of
long shot runs for the presidency
...
He’d also started reading political weblogs
and was intrigued by their authors’ knowledge and fervor
...
He struck
a powerful chord with several activist groups, including those
who opposed the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy and
others who’d concluded that the Democratic establishment was
little more than a watered-down version of the Republican
Party
...
”
94

the consent of the governed
The candidate’s initially lonely stance against the war
brought him condemnation from the right and disdain from
many in his own party
...
And for the first time, they had easy-to-use
ways of finding each other and reaching out to others
...
Scott Heiferman, Meetup’s
founder, had never expected politics to be one of the service’s
markets
...
But like so many other things in our new world,
people out at the edges of the network had their own ideas and
acted on them
...

Trippi and his boss had been watching it all with some fascination, but they weren’t sure where the action would lead
...
But
they didn’t fully grasp how quickly the grassroots were shooting
skyward
...
By several accounts, Dean truly got the power of the Net
that day
...

The first was a candidate who energized people
...
Maybe most important, Trippi said, was “understanding
95

we the media
how not to kill it,” meaning the effectiveness of grassroots activists, and knowing not to impose—at least not at first—the traditional command and control system on which campaigns have
operated for so long
...
But the
profound insight in the campaign’s Net-working—which raised
huge risks along with the opportunity—was trusting people out
at the edges to almost literally become the campaign, too
...
“We don’t have a clue
...
”
Trippi assembled a smart, dedicated staff for the online
operations
...
Karl Frisch moved from California after rejuvenating the
state Democratic Party’s once lifeless web site
...

Early in 2003, Mathew Gross, an environmental studies
graduate and author in Utah, was contributing to a popular proDemocratic (and largely pro-Dean) blog called MyDD
...
He
made his way to Vermont and talked his way into Trippi’s office
where he stammered about his goals
...
“You’re hired,” Trippi shot back
...
”
Gross’ campaign blog became a template for others to
follow
...
It linked to
other pro-Dean blogs
...
Comments on blogs often attract trolls, people
96

the consent of the governed
whose purpose is to disrupt an online forum, not make it better
...
A genuine community had formed, and people
were watching out for each other
...
But the self-reinforcing forum helped
create the campaign in the first place
...
Perhaps this was inevitable; after all, candidates are supposed to take stands, and voters then can make
decisions about whom to support
...
That process wasn’t prominent in the Dean enterprise
...
In
fact, Dean would have been wise to do more blogging himself in
order to make his thought process more transparent
...

Trusting the outside campaigners included risks
...

(Reporters who have covered companies with cult followings—
people who post incessantly in online discussion forums—know
the routine
...
) It’s one thing to be told of
a mistake, but another to be harangued by followers of a cause,
97

we the media
however well-meaning, who end up harming their own movement
...
He was soundly attacked even by his
own fellow Dean-folk and promptly issued an abject apology
...
Mostly through small donations, Dean’s
campaign raised millions via the Net
...
They did, and
Dean got a new burst of positive publicity in addition to the
funds
...
But
after he made some big mistakes and his campaign imploded,
common wisdom held that the “Internet thing” had been just
another bubble-like event
...
The absurdity of this should have been obvious
...

I cannot emphasize the money angle strongly enough
...
Trippi, who took a great deal of abuse for the failure of
the Dean candidacy after being forced to leave the campaign in
February 2004, pointed out that Dean’s sole shot was to capture the nomination at the start
...


98

the consent of the governed
Moulitsas, of Daily Kos fame, makes a strong case that the
McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform law of 2002, which
looked like a bad deal for Democrats, actually spurred his
party’s increasingly effective Net fund-raising
...

McCain-Feingold banned soft money, making small donations from average citizens far more important than before—
donations that the Republicans were especially adept at getting
from a better-organized grassroots network
...

Some people on the political left are convinced, meanwhile,
that the Net is a progressive antidote to talk radio, which is now
dominated by the right wing
...

Yet there may well be reasons to think that the Net is better
suited to progressives
...
Republicans are also a party
of centralization—thoroughly in bed with Big Business and all
too happy to use government power to regulate the most private kinds of behavior
...
There’s more genuine
debate, I sense, in the left-wing blogs than on right-wing blogs—
more willingness to allow comments, for one thing
...
”
99

we the media

o p e n s o urce p o l i t i c s
I have no doubt that the 2004 campaign will be seen, in retrospect, to have shown the first glimmerings of open source politics
...
People all over the
world work on small parts of big open source software projects
that create some of the most important and reliable components of the Internet; people everywhere can work on similarly
stable components for a participatory political life in much more
efficient ways than in the past
...
Perhaps the
most intriguing idea, from an open source perspective, was an
experiment by MoveOn
...
129 This left-of-center nonprofit was
formed during the Clinton impeachment drama—“Censure the
president and move on,” was the mantra that launched one of
the Net’s most powerful political organizations
...
The 15
finalists were an incredible display, not just of activist sentiments but of the power of today’s inexpensive equipment and
software for making videos
...
Tools that were once the preserve of Big
Media were now in the hands of the many
...
Whether one agreed with the ads or
found them appalling, they compared well, at least in terms of
impact, with spots by the pros
...

100

the consent of the governed
Open source politics was integral to the Dean campaign,
which relied on open source programmers who flocked to the
cause and wrote software that ran the campaign’s online
machinery
...

Members of an unaffiliated group called Hack4Dean, later
renamed DeanSpace,131 contributed tools including socialnetworking software designed to connect volunteers
...
Zack Rosen, one of the programmers, later received
venture-capital funding from a California firm that looks for
public-interest investments
...
Initially, the
goal was to create an analogue to Yahoo! Groups, the online
service that lets nontechies set up mailing lists, but to aim its
functions strictly at political campaigns
...
Unless an organization is committed to hiring full time
engineers to do Web development, the only and most frequent solution is to pay tons of money hiring firms to provide
proprietary ‘black box’ Web application products
...

We want to create a much cheaper, open, and powerful
option for these kinds of services
...
This is a much more efficient and productive way to
do this kind of development
...
The Chandler campaign in Kentucky was
just the start
...
For example, every candidate, or at least campaign, will
have a weblog or something like it
...
In most
cases, there will be little difference
...
All insurgent campaigns, and some incumbents, will raise
most of their money online
...
If I were running a political campaign of any size, I would be asking my candidate’s supporters to
send in their best ideas and home-brew advertisements
...
For example, SMS messaging will be in the toolkit for
local political operatives who want to make sure a candidate’s
supporters make it to the polls, remind voters with SMS to
make sure they remember to vote, and send a car if a voter
needs a ride
...


a ch angi ng r o l e f o r j o u r n a l i s t s
Professional journalists, by and large, seemed baffled early on
by the edge-to-middle politics Dean was using to his advantage
...

102

the consent of the governed
But once the media grasped what was happening, the coverage emerged
...
Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo
and Moulitsas’ Daily Kos, among many others, offered better
context than just about anything the wire services were delivering
...

And the Command Post,132 originally created to cover the Iraq
war, was a superb collector of all things political
...
The issues of our
times are too complex, too nuanced, for the major media to
cover properly, given the economic realities of modern corporate
journalism
...
Television
news operations, especially at local stations, tend to ignore the
issues and politics outright
...
This is a golden opportunity for
citizen activists to get involved, to help inform others who do
care about specific topics
...
“The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the
world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach
consensus,” wrote Joi Ito, an entrepreneur and blogger, in an
essay entitled “Emergent Democracy
...
“If your goal is debate and discussion, a network of blogs
is a more powerful medium than a single blog with lots of
readers,” Cameron Barrett, who was Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign blogger, and who then moved to the Kerry campaign, commented in my blog
...
”

103

we the media
We need both
...
If you care deeply
about health care, for example, start a weblog covering the candidates’ views on the subject
...
Then link to
news articles that a) contain candidates’ statements, b) offer
context to the topic, and c) can help your reader understand the
overall issue better
...
You will have
done a service
...
If
enough people join the process, we’ll have a flood of valuable
information
...
That’s where Big Media organizations can help
...
We can list blogs by category and,
when warranted, by bias of the author
...
We should, of course,
ask our audience for assistance in all of this
...

One of the best examples of this very thing is the British
Broadcasting Corp
...
To assist average people in
being activists, the BBC has created a web-based platform that
combines data on issues with tools citizens can use to push their
own agendas in the public sphere
...
I’ll talk more about this
pathbreaking project in Chapter 6
...
Governing
is political, by definition
...
How this will occur is still a bit foggy,
because a true deployment of e-government is many years away
...

To date, e-government has largely consisted of static web
pages offering information to taxpayers, businesses, and other
constituents of governmental services
...
It’s the standard top-down approach
moved to the Net
...
For evidence, visit the remarkable “Earth
911,”136 a site created by an environmental activist that has
become indispensable to citizens and governments alike
...

That citizen is Chris Warner, who’s been working at this
project for about 15 years from his home base of suburban
Phoenix
...
If you visit the home page and type in your Zip
Code, you’ll find local data for that community from a variety
of federal, state, local and corporate sources
...
Thousands of government employees, from a variety
of agencies, send their information to Earth 911
...
In other

105

we the media
words, what they’ve created is a highly centralized core with a
thoroughly decentralized data-collection system that feels utterly
local to the citizen looking for information
...
News organizations have started using Pets 911 on their
web sites, a trend Warner is thrilled to support
...
The possibilities are almost endless
...
“We want it to be plagiarized
...
”

Going from the bottom up, from average citizens to the power
centers, is a considerably more difficult, but potentially more
rewarding, endeavor
...
This doesn’t have to resemble
the use of institutional voice-mail systems, where costs are literally shifted to the caller (assuming the caller’s time has some
value, as is always the case)
...

When I renew my car registration every year, I do it through
the California Department of Motor Vehicles web site
...
What do I save? The cost of the stamp
and envelope, for one thing
...

106

the consent of the governed
What’s missing from the DMV site, and from just about
every other government site I can name, is any sense that a
bureaucrat has the slightest concern for what the citizen thinks or
knows
...
The simplest example is a suggestion box—
a real one, where people in government listen to the citizens
...

For the briefest time after September 11, there was a
glimmer of precisely this
...
S
...
It asked the public for “Your Ideas to
Counter Terrorism
...
Here’s why
...
But they’re facing a decentralized opponent
in a kind of combat known as “asymmetrical warfare”—in
which one side is big and powerful by traditional measures
while the other side is small, decentralized, and able to leverage
technology in horrific ways
...
But we need to find ways to bring the nation’s collective energy and brainpower to bear on the threat
...
Tapping the power
of everyone is the best approach
...
It’s designed to let various levels of governments share
information quickly and securely, and on an ad hoc basis when
necessary
...
What it does not do, at least not yet, is solicit information from average citizens
...

107

we the media
John Robb, who served in a U
...
Air Force special operations unit and later ran an Internet research firm, helped me
understand asymmetry and its consequences in the wake of the
attacks
...
140
Among his suggestions: “Build a feedback loop that greatly
expands on the Pentagon’s suggestion box but also narrows
down the individual questions
...
We need a feedback loop that can filter up
knowledge and insight
...
”
Note the direction of the information, from the bottom to
the top—or, more accurately, from the edge to the middle
...
“Our foreign service and military
units don’t have enough Pushtu speakers,” he wrote just prior to
the U
...
invasion of Afghanistan, referring to one of that Asian
nation’s dominant languages
...
S
...

Why not tap them for expertise in real-time?” How? By giving
soldiers satellite phones to call Pushtu speakers who could serve
as translators
...
Bioterrorism, in fact, may absolutely
require them
...
LaPorte, a public-health expert at the
University of Pittsburgh, has proposed an “Internet civil
defense” using the power of networks to help neighbors watch
out for each other
...
Authorities would instantly know what was happening
...
Sure, it could be used fraudulently, but the risks would be outweighed by the rewards
...
By disseminating reliable, trusted information, the
system might prevent panic
...


When the stakes are this high, and the threat this different,
we should be looking for the best ideas wherever they originate
...


109

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Professional Journalists Join
the Conversation

In October 1999, the Jane’s Intelligence Review, a journal
widely followed in national security circles, wondered whether it
was on the right track with an article about computer security
and cyber-terrorism
...
In
hundreds of postings on the site’s message system, the technically adept members of that community promptly tore apart the
draft and gave, often in colorful language, a variety of perspectives and suggestions
...
The community had
created something, and Jane’s gratefully noted the contribution
in the article it ultimately published
...
It was an experiment,
one of the first blogs by a mainstream journalist
...
My readers, I realized, had become my
collaborators
...
com, a Korean online newspaper
...
“Every citizen’s a reporter,” Oh
wrote on February 22, 2000, as he announced the new site
...
”143
110

professional journalists join the conversation
What was happening? In an emerging era of multidirectional, digital communications, the audience can be an integral
part of the process—and it’s becoming clear that they must be
...

This is true by definition: they are many, and we are often just
one
...
If we don’t, our former audience will bolt
when they realize they don’t have to settle for half-baked coverage; they can come into the kitchen themselves
...
It may be painful for some of us, but I will argue that the
rewards are worth it
...

“More and more, journalism is going to be owned by the
audience,” said Jeff Jarvis, a prolific blogger who heads Advance
Publications’ Advance
...
“That doesn’t mean
there isn’t a place for pro-journalists, who will always be there—
who need to be there—to gather the facts, ask questions with
some measure of discipline and pull together a larger audience
...
The Internet is the first medium owned by the audience, the first medium to give the audience a voice
...
It is, rather, the best opportunity in decades to do even
better journalism
...
I hope we can survive what’s coming because I believe in
the mission of journalism and fear that serious investigative
reporting will diminish, and perhaps nearly disappear, if big
newspapers and other serious outlets wither; what blogger will
take on the next Watergate scandal the way The Washington
Post did?
111

we the media

t rad i t i o nal m e d i a ’ s o p p o r t u n i t y
When most Big Media companies consider having a conversation with their audience, they tend not to push many boundaries
...
There is no plausible excuse for leaving out contact information when the articles are posted on the Web
...

Bulletin boards don’t fully cut it, either
...
If the staff isn’t part of
the discussion, it’s just readers talking with each other—and they
can do that without the Times
...

Slate, the online magazine owned by Microsoft, has come
up with one of the most useful ways of handling readers’ input
...
Snippets from
comments are reassembled, with context from the editor plus
links to the original postings, in a coherent and entertaining
way
...

Web chats featuring journalists are a step in the right direction, but are once again only a step
...

My own experience may be instructive
...
In
most gatherings, I’m taking up the far-left data point on the
112

professional journalists join the conversation
intelligence bell curve
...

That’s one reason why my blog has been so helpful
...
This is interactive journalism
...
I was already putting my
opinions in the newspaper, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to put
them online in what amounted to a bunch of mini-columns
...
A reporter can
easily post items relating to her beat, the kinds of tidbits that
once made it into a “reporter’s notebook,” as well as news that
won’t make it into the paper for space reasons
...
No, I don’t tip off the competition when I
have a genuine scoop but, as a columnist, I’m usually talking
about things that are already known in a general sense
...
I consider it all, and the
resulting column is better for the process
...

Think of this as a form of open source journalism
...
Steve Outing, a longtime observer of online
news, as well as a blogger and columnist, wrote in late 2003 in
his “Editor and Publisher” magazine column that my blog has
helped give me a global reach instead of a local one
...

When readers first began commenting on my blog in mid2003, I didn’t know what to expect
...
I post an item
...

Someone responds to the first or second comment, and before
long, the people commenting are talking with each other, not
just with me
...
The blog does attract
its share of trolls (people whose aim in life seems to be to ruin
public discussions), but by and large the process works well
...
I
attribute this more to the innate conservatism of the Big Media
business than anything else
...
This hasn’t
been an entirely wrong-headed worry, but it is overblown
...
Not a week goes by without me getting a call from
someone in the business who’s thinking about doing a blog and
who wants to hear about the advantages and potential pitfalls
...
net keeps a comprehensive list of blogs by and
about journalists
...

The most successful blogs by professional journalists have
shared some of the characteristics that make any blog worth
reading: voice, focus, real reporting, and good writing
...
(Weintraub had an unfortunate run-in with Bee editors,
who now insist on editing his blog postings before they go out
on the Web
...
Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News,152 affiliated with The Providence
114

professional journalists join the conversation
Journal, offers perspectives on a variety of topics, many of
which are media-related
...
It’s a safe bet that most
working American journalists with web access visit Jim Romenesko’s Poynter Institute blog at least once a day; it has become
the water cooler for the profession
...
The format encourages informality and experimentation, not to mention the valuable interaction with the audience that makes coverage better
...

A smart approach here has been the “event blog”—a one-off
effort pegged to some major news event
...
153 On December 31, 1999, and January
1, 2000, SiliconValley
...
”
Breaking news is one of the great opportunities for using
these techniques
...
It’s partly a competitive issue, he wrote:
If we have a blog up and running within minutes of a big
story breaking, we cut Google and the [other] bloggers out of
the equation
...
We will open ourselves up
to the problem of people entering comments that later prove
untrue, but readers will learn to distinguish between the feedback—half of which is nonsense—and the work of the pros,
which, hopefully, will have a much smaller nonsense factor
...

There are risks in doing so, as CNN’s Kevin Sites discovered in
Iraq when CNN forced him to quit writing his blog
...
com
prefers to take a more structured approach to presenting the
news
...
CNN
...
”155 This attitude, a classic top-down approach to the news,
ended up hurting the network more than the correspondent,
who later went to work for MSNBC (which welcomed the
blog)
...

The case of Steve Olafson was more about what he was
writing than the fact that he was blogging in the first place
...

Using a pseudonym, he also published a blog that contained
political commentary—sometimes going after people he covered
as part of his regular job
...

But then the newspaper fired Olafson
...
The paper could have shifted him to another position or
disciplined him in some other way
...

Dennis Horgan, an editor at the Hartford Courant, wasn’t
fired, but he was ordered to stop posting commentary on his
blog
...
It is about professional expectations and, when they are ignored, as in this
case, the newspaper’s standards and public responsibilities are
compromised
...
It has language that directs that “an individual’s
interests outside the paper should not come into conflict with,
or create the appearance of conflict with, the staff member’s
professional duties at the Courant
...

I don’t accept that logic
...
158

We can applaud Toolan’s wish to keep high ethical standards, but where was the conflict of interest? I can’t see one in
this situation
...
Toolan was clearly
correct that there was no free-speech issue, however
...
(The paper
later attempted what looked like a clumsy compromise, giving
Horgan a web-only column that resembled a blog
...
159 The familyowned Spokesman-Review160 in Spokane, Washington, has
some excellent staff blogs but also makes a practice of pointing
to blogs written by people in the community
...

Rob Curley, general manager of World Online, runs both the
newspaper’s web site and Lawrence
...
In every way possible, they’ve
engaged the community
...

So has blogging
...
com—which is deliberately distinct from its newspaper parent—runs several blogs by members of the community
in addition to a blog written by one of the paper’s political
reporters
...
com, we intended
them to be fairly similar to what most think of when they
think of blogs
...
But that isn’t
what they’ve become
...
com have pretty much become columns on steroids
...
And
though the writers will respond to the readers several times a
day, they rarely post more than one new thing a week
...

Why I like them is because they feel so real to me—from the
language to the topics to the responses
...

More important than anything else, our blogs make
Lawrence
...
And that’s exactly what
we were after
...
No wonder
...


aut h o ri t y f r o m l i n k i n g , l i s t e n i n g
The most web-like activity is linking: pointing to other people’s
content
...
We
need to do more than that
...
If I have the choice of pointing to an equally good story on
my newspaper’s own site, I’ll naturally do so
...
No one from my company has ever suggested
I do otherwise
...

We in pro-journalism tend to do this on big projects when we
post things such as affidavits, interactive maps, and the like
...
We can learn more
from the bloggers about this
...
While online versions of news stories that have run
in the newspaper rarely link to competitors’ work, newspaper
bloggers have been more wide-ranging in pointing outside
...
Similarly, The New York Times’ “Times on the
Trail,”163 a column that looks like a blog but isn’t officially
called one, has sometimes been generous in outside pointers
...
Long gone are
the days when criticism was handled, except in extreme cases,
by just two publications of note, the Columbia Journalism
Review164 and the American Journalism Review
...
In early
2004, he took the Times, which he calls the “Dog Trainer,” to
task for its coverage of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s
conflicts of interest, including the judge’s hunting vacation with
Vice President Dick Cheney, an old friend, when the court was
hearing a pivotal case involving Cheney’s Energy Task Force
...
His correspondence with the Times got results
...
They have run a
front-page story about Justice Ginsburg’s speech to the NOW
Legal Defense Fund
...
Journalists find out much of what we print and broadcast from people
who tell us things—people like Patterico, who helped make the
news
...

After all, we’ve asked readers to write letters to the editor for a
long time, and we generally answer the phones when readers
call with tips or complaints
...

Some of the most important photos and videos in recent
news history were the product of amateurs; we can scarcely
imagine the second half of the 20th century without the gruesome Zapruder film of John F
...
More
recently, as video cameras have become popular, we have seen
what happens when average people captured important events
such as police beatings of suspects and approaching tornados
...

In each of those cases, the public was communicating
through the mass media; the amateur videos rapidly made it, as in
earlier events, onto CNN and the other major TV networks
...
But
120

professional journalists join the conversation
as more and more members of the former audience make and
capture the news, their contributions will be understood as essential to the news-gathering process at all levels
...
In February 2003, after the space shuttle broke up on
reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere, NASA put out a call to
anyone who had photographs that might help in the investigation of the accident, and thousands responded
...
170 It received hundreds, some of which it
posted in a photo essay that was both journalistically smart and
emotionally moving for viewers
...
It will
soon be a no-brainer, I believe, for every news web site to prominently post an email address to which people can send their pictures, whether from phones or personal computers
...
In this way, they can get the public accustomed to using the medium in this manner
...

Readers of the San Diego Tribune’s “Sign On San Diego”
online operation were an essential part of that city’s biggest
local story of 2003: the wildfires that raged through southern
California
...
Some used the
forums to create discussions aimed at the residents of a single
block in a suburb; neighbors were filling each other in on what
was happening
...
171
In addition to photos, news organizations can make it easy
for readers to send them tips through SMS (short text messages
121

we the media
on phones) addresses for various newsrooms (sports, local, etc
...
As more
and more people use mobile phones for messaging, this can be
another efficient way to get tips
...


My newspaper does the best job it can in covering local news,
but we can’t do it all
...
But I’m willing to bet there
are at least a few people in Sunnyvale who care deeply enough
about their school board’s activities that they could become
reporters in their own right
...

I’d like to see news organizations encourage “citizenreporting” by people who want to cover some broadly defined
aspect of community life
...
The legal
and even cultural questions are enormous; not least are how to
deal with accreditation (who’s a journalist, anyway?) and libel
(who’s responsible when a citizen reporter wrongly injures
someone’s reputation?)
...

Let me suggest some ways it might work
...
If that’s too much
extra effort, we could offer members of the community their
own weblogs
...

In the case of the Sunnyvale School Board and other local
bodies that deserve coverage, we might invite members of the
community to create blogs for that purpose
...
We’d obviously need disclaimers, pointing out that
the reporters didn’t work for us
...
Once the
blogs were established, the professional reporters would read
the coverage and, in many cases, learn about stories we might
otherwise have missed
...
Amateur blogs are already full of news and commentary
about the biggest issues of our day
...
The on-the-ground reporting
was coming largely from Iraqis they’d hired
...

There might even be some revenue potential for the established media in all this
...
172 Perhaps local newspapers or TV stations could sell advertising on readers’ blogs, or sell
the hosting service for a modest amount
...

There’s another good reason to try
...
But they may also
feel empowered to make a difference
...
”173

cas e s t ud y: pr o m o t i n g ,
t h e n re p o rt i n g , a c t i v i s m
No major journalism organization has done more to involve its
audience than the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
...
174 At its heart is a fairly daring
notion: equip the audience with some of the tools of political
activism
...

iCan was an outgrowth of both journalistic and political
considerations, project leaders told me when I visited London in
October 2003
...
For example, huge fuel-price protests in
2000, which led to turmoil on the British roads, came as a surprise, even though the issue had been boiling up on the Internet
...
Turnout was low, by British standards,
at about 60 percent
...

“We found some interesting things,” said Martin Vogel, the
iCan project codirector
...
With younger audiences moving away
from traditional media to new media, the BBC looked for a way
to use new media to foster political involvement
...
Local was especially important, because it’s where people feel the most impact
...
Journalists wrote guidelines and
instructions on everything from how to start a campaign to
dealing with troublesome neighbors
...

But iCan’s users, not the staff, are expected to write the
bulk of the guides as time goes on
...
“The
124

professional journalists join the conversation
job of the journalist, more than ever, is to be a filter,” said Tim
Levell, iCan’s editorial project leader
...
One was in the county of Cambridgeshire, an hour’s
train ride north of London that spans the demographic gamut
...
As in three of the other four pilot areas, a
journalist was dispatched from regular duties to focus exclusively on iCan
...

One of the first campaigns created by citizens was an initiative to curb schoolhouse bullying
...
Of everything iCan’s researchers imagined in their planning process, “we never modeled bullying as the first thing to
bubble up,” he said
...

iCan may or may not turn out to be a model for other news
organizations, but it’s a valuable experiment
...
To watch what people can do with such tools,
and to report on it, takes the process even further
...


cas e s t ud y: th e c i t i z e n r e p o r t e r s
Lee Pong Ryul had a day job in engineering at a semiconductor
company near Seoul, South Korea
...

Lee was an active “citizen reporter” for OhmyNews, the
online news service
...
This is an important experiment, and when I visited in the spring of 2003, it was
clear that the bet was already paying off
...
It had been credited with having
helped elect the nation’s current president, Roh Moo Hyun,
who ran as a reformer
...

If OhmyNews is a glimpse into the future, so is South
Korea—and that’s no coincidence
...
The Internet is an always-on part of
everyday life, not an afterthought
...

Even taxi drivers who don’t have time for newspapers have
heard of OhmyNews
...

Advertisers support both the web site and a weekly print edition, and the operation had been profitable in recent months, its
chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon Ho, told me
...
With a staff of about 50 and legions of “citizen reporter”
contributors—more than 26,000 had signed up when I met him,
and more than 15,000 had published stories under their own
bylines—Oh and his colleagues were creating real value in an
emerging journalistic reality
...
“We changed the concept of the reporter
...
Journalism was a credentialed and, in
Korea, a somewhat elevated position in society—bizarre as that
126

professional journalists join the conversation
sounds to readers in the U
...
, where we journalists enjoy
roughly the same public esteem as politicians and used-car
salesmen
...
”
The paper’s citizen reporters go into issues that the mainstream media haven’t covered, said Jeong Woon Hyeon, chief
editor
...
Postings work on a hierarchy corresponding to the place on the
page; the lower the headline appears, the less important or interesting the editors consider it
...

When OhmyNews started, the idea wasn’t entirely new
...
What was so different with OhmyNews was that anyone could sign up, and it wasn’t difficult to
get published
...
The real-people nature of the contributors lent
further appeal to the site
...
The company
issued temporary staff press cards so some of the more active
contributors could cover specific events
...
They
jockeyed with reporters from big newspapers, magazines, and
broadcast outlets for scoops in government and business, then
lobbied for the best possible display of their work
...
Its coverage of events such as the death of two schoolgirls, crushed by
a U
...
Army vehicle in an accident during the summer of 2002,
forced the hand of mainstream media, which was downplaying
the story
...


127

we the media
Oh’s rise from underground magazine writer to powerful
media figure had any number of ironies
...
Then there was the way he came to
realize that he should start OhmyNews
...
S
...
The school’s president was Pat Robertson, the evangelist
and right-wing political figure
...
In Robertson’s case,
part of his strategy was counteracting what he saw as a liberalbiased press, and so offered media courses through Regent
...
“But my
approach is quite different
...
Oh’s imaginary company was the
genesis of OhmyNews, and “I got an A+,” he said wryly
...
A 50-50 liberalconservative balance would be much better, he said
...
Each story had a link to a comments page
...

Sometimes the journalists replied directly on the comments
page
...

In previous writing jobs, Lee focused on family topics, often
mentioning his two daughters, because his political writings on
other online sites had gotten little or no response
...
Here, at last,
was a publication that reflected some of his views of politics and
society—and that was glad to publish what he wrote to a readership hungry for such information
...

Editors at the publication check spelling, he said, but not much
else
...

He certainly didn’t do it for the money
...
S
...
He got commensurately less for stories that ran lower on the page, and figures he
made between $50 and $100 a month in freelance payments—
not a pittance but hardly a fortune
...
“I don’t
think I’m qualified,” he said
...

OhmyNews’ ambitions aren’t limited to print
...
Someday, citizen reporters such as Lee will be contributing video reports, not just text, in a dazzling, multidirectional
sharing of information
...
Publications such as OhmyNews
will pop up everywhere because they make sense, combining the
best of old and new journalistic forms
...
So far, it’s a brilliant one
...
We’ve been fairly good at this in the past,
but technological changes are accelerating
...
The next generation of multimedia tools will give
journalists more options—and vex editors in the process
...
News organizations should issue a camera
phone and digital camera to every member of the staff and urge
people to shoot anything that even resembles news
...

We should be encouraging reporters to get audio and video
snapshots
...
But it
only makes sense to get a quick video of a scene, such as the
office of someone we’re interviewing; maybe it’ll go on the web
site with a little editing, but even if it’s unsuitable for general
consumption, it can remind the reporter of some physical details
for the actual story
...

Will this threaten the professional photographers who capture images so well for news organizations today? I hope not
...
But
we have to be ready to capture images when the pros aren’t
130

professional journalists join the conversation
around; even a poorly composed photo of a pivotal event is
better than no picture at all
...
They
will be publishing tools as well
...
177 The phones worked on the latest highspeed mobile data networks, enabling the reporters to file video
interviews from the field in real time
...
It’s not that the better
journalism schools lack technology or don’t know how to use it,
but rather they tend to serve such a conservative and slowmoving industry
...
Some of the best journalists I
know never took a course in the subject; then again, others
have
...

But we can’t allow them to crank out a new generation of
reporters, editors, photographers, and broadcasters who don’t
understand and appreciate how the profession has changed
...

It doesn’t surprise me that the students I’ve met, in guest lectures at U
...
universities and through my own experience
teaching a new media course at the University of Hong Kong for
five weeks each fall, are more open to this new style than most
faculties and deans
...
Teaching the use of tools is relatively
trivial, however
...
There’s a lot to be said for the traditional
liberal-arts education in that regard, and better undergraduate
journalism programs offer precisely that kind of education
...
He envisions a
journalism school that takes its inspiration from, of all places,
the Yale School of Drama, not from the quasi-science the information profession pushes in most universities
...

“One says, here’s how to study drama and become an actor or
director
...
” He wants NYU to replicate some of this
...
” One
idea is to attract students, some of whom are already professional journalists, who believe they know what kind of journalists they want to be—for example, a human rights reporter or a
music journalist
...
179 NYU provides some basic training, but the
focus is on creating a body of work that will be displayed on the
Web, complete with the student’s contact information
...
But in
this age of specialty blogs and publications—and at a time when
more people from other fields are joining news organizations as
specialist reporters—this approach is at least worth exploring
...
At a minimum,
journalism schools should insist that students understand
genuine interactivity, which is the basis for a conversation with
the audience
...

At Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism,
widely recognized as one of the best in the world, Rich Gordon,
formerly a reporter and editor with several major U
...
newspapers, including the Miami Herald, is an evangelist for the conversation and is practicing what he preaches
...
In all of those kinds
of classes, I talk about the unique capabilities of new media
...
I point them to interesting examples of this kind of journalism, including Weblogs,
discussion forums, ohmynews, photo blogs, etc
...

All that said, I think this quarter is the first one where I’ve
led a class that is focusing entirely on this subject
...
net (and Jeff Jarvis) to explore the proposition
that “hyperlocal citizens’ media” can help meet the information needs for a town or neighborhood
...
The major metropolitan dailies can’t afford to staff newsrooms in dozens or hundreds of communities this size, can’t zone the local section
enough ways to provide coverage at this level, and charge too
much for ads to get the kind of local merchant advertising
that would pay for journalists in these communities—and the
kind of advertising that people in these communities value as
useful information
...
But
even in places that have good community newspapers, there is
information that doesn’t make its way into print
...
After soliciting help from local residents and
organizations, they launched “goskokie
...
” Gordon said the students contacted local organizations and individuals there for assistance
...


a q ue s t i o n o f t r u s t
Using the tools of multidirectional journalism doesn’t mean we
have to cross ethical lines
...
When cyber-gossip Matt Drudge reported rumors of
investigations that Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, had been romantically involved with a former
intern, few responsible news organizations picked up the story
...
The old-fashioned publications and broadcasts that disdained the story were, it turned out, making the right call both
online and offline
...
)
No matter which tools and technologies we embrace, we
must maintain core principles, including fairness, accuracy, and
thoroughness
...
They are essential if
professional journalism expects to survive
...
We are obliged to be fair
...
Fortunately, it turns out that we’ll be even better
134

professional journalists join the conversation
equipped to maintain those principles if we listen and participate in the conversation
...
Bloggers who disdain editors
entirely, or who say they’re largely irrelevant to the process, are
mistaken
...
As noted, my readers make me a better
journalist because they find my mistakes, tell me what I’m
missing, and help me understand nuances
...

They are trained, mostly through long experience, to look for
what’s missing in a story
...
Sometimes they
can help us see that less is more: I can’t count the number of
times an editor of my column has suggested that a sentence is
unnecessary or inflammatory without purpose, leading me to
agree that its removal would strengthen the piece, not weaken it
...

We can help the new journalists understand and value
ethics, the importance of serving the public trust, and professionalism
...


135

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The Former Audience Joins
the Party

On December 10, 2003, thousands of Iraqis marched on the
streets of Baghdad to protest bombings by insurgents, violence
that had caused far more civilian than military casualties
...

But some local bloggers did not
...

Blogs, it turned out, became the best way to get the news about
an important event
...
His reports
were thorough and revealing, and his readership grew quickly
once word got around
...
“Many of my readers have confessed to me that they
check out my blog even before checking out news sites such as
CNN, BBC, etc
...
”
Zeyad’s reporting was just one more example of how the
grassroots have emerged, in ways the professional media largely
still fail to comprehend, as a genuine force in journalism
...
For the first time in modern history,
the user is truly in charge, as a consumer and as a producer
...
First are the
people who have been active, in their own way, even before
grassroots journalism was so available to all
...
Now they can write weblogs, organize
Meetups, and generally agitate for the issues, political or otherwise, that matter to them
...

I’m most excited about the second, and I hope larger, group
from the former audience, the ones who take it to the next level
...
In some cases,
these people are becoming professional journalists themselves
and are finding ways to make a business of their avocation
...
He and four
other small-business people sat down with President George W
...
It was another
in a series of Bush meetings with supporters of the administration’s policies
...

137

we the media
But what White House officials apparently didn’t know—or
didn’t care if they did know—was that Hammock, owner of a
small publishing company in Tennessee, was a citizen journalist
in his own right
...
182 There was no
breaking news, but rather a folksy kind of reporting
...

“He is definitely not a wonk, but he knows clearly what he
believes needs to happen for the country and its economy to
prosper,” Hammock wrote of Bush
...

Nor me, for that matter
...
One lesson was
obvious: excluding The Media from coverage no longer necessarily means much
...
To the annoyance of “official” members of the press
who attended the event, including me, the main sessions were
off the record
...
(In my blog, I later pointed to the unofficial coverage
...

These cases show the increasing futility of the expression
“off the record” in large groups or when dealing with nonprofessional journalists who aren’t steeped in the nomenclature of
what can be disclosed and what can’t
...
At another conference the
next autumn,184 Howard Rheingold was asked if the real-time

138

the former audience joins the party
feedback and commentary typified by the Nacchio blogging
might lead conference speakers to be less candid in such circumstances
...
”
The coverage of important events by nonprofessional journalists is only part of the story
...
This is one of the healthiest
media developments in a long time
...

One of the main criticisms of blogs is that so many are selfabsorbed tripe
...
But that’s no reason to dismiss the genre, or to minimize the value of people talking with
each other
...
Blogs can be acts of civic engagement
...
A case
in point is the work of Pamela Jones, a paralegal who runs a
blog called Groklaw,185 which has become probably the best
overall source of information about the legal battle between the
SCO Group, a software company, and the free software community
...

It has sued several companies, including IBM, and has threatened users of the Linux operating system
...
No professional
journalism organization has covered this enormously complex
case as well as Jones and a team of volunteers
...
In an interview on Linux
Online,186 Jones explained her motives:
All right, I said to myself, what can I do well? The answer
was, I can research and I can write
...
I decided, I
will just do what I do best, and I’ll throw it out there, like a
message in a bottle
...
Or someone out there would read
it and realize he or she had meaningful evidence and would
contact IBM or FSF [Free Software Foundation]
...
Because of my training, I recognize what matters as far as this case is concerned
...
That’s all I was expecting
...
I just wasn’t expecting thousands of readers everyday
...
” This was a crucial insight
...
This is another example
of a passionate nonexpert using technology to make a profound
contribution, and a real difference
...
However, in country after
country where free speech is not a given, the blogosphere matters
in far more serious ways
...


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If Iran’s famously repressive political system ever sees true
reform without suffering another violent revolution, the contributions of people such as Hossein Derakhshan will have played no
small role
...
A 20-something
expatriate who’d moved to Toronto after leaving Iran, he may
have been the first Persian-language weblogger when he launched
his site in December 2000
...

Emboldened, Hoder decided to help other Iranians set up
their own blogs
...
5, 2001, and wished 100 people could start blogging by
one year,” he told me
...
It was unbelievable
...
PersianBlog
...
Hoder estimated that more than
200,000 Iranian blogs had been created by early 2004, though
not all are written in Iran and many aren’t being maintained
...

The blogs are a cross-section of Iranian society
...
They are a communications network for a repressed people and speak volumes
about a regime that is struggling to control how modern technology is used by its citizens
...
China’s information minders discovered the power of
personal publishing some time ago and have been trying to keep

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we the media
the most widely listened-to voices—at least those critical of the
regime or who discuss forbidden topics—out of general circulation
...

Stopping truth is difficult, though
...
Bloggers and some journalists around the world protested his jailing; he was released after 23 days and moved to
Europe
...

Those of us with First Amendment protections in the U
...

shouldn’t get too smug
...
Secrecy has become
the norm in the halls of power, and big companies, notably in
the entertainment industry, have been asserting “intellectual
property” rights that take big whacks out of free speech
...

Yes, technology has made it possible for millions to speak
freely and be heard, many for the first time
...


no np ro f i t com m u n i t y p u b l i s h i n g
The Melrose Mirror is not a weblog
...
“The World Wide Web is not for couch
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the former audience joins the party
potatoes,” the Mirror says on its Welcome page
...
”
The Mirror was founded in 1996 to serve the community of
Melrose, Massachusetts
...
The site isn’t much to
look at, especially when compared to glitzy commercial news
sites
...
But this is true grassroots stuff, filled
with articles and pictures that give its readers a distinct sense of
place along with plenty of useful information for their lives and
community
...

MIT created the web-based software, also called SilverStringer,190 to make community publishing easier
...
“SilverStringer software has been
used pretty much around the world by seniors, teens, and children,” said Jack Driscoll, visiting scholar and Editor in Residence at the Media Lab and advisor to many of the groups using
the software
...
By far the biggest installation is operated by the La
Repubblica newspaper in Italy; its “Kataweb” online affiliate191
uses SilverStringer to help publish some 4,200 online school
newspapers
...
More than 300 children
from 90 nations have worked on Junior Journal in the last five
years
...
Each story has three editors, sometimes as many as
five
...

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we the media
“One kid wrote about a multinational corporation,” he
said
...

They checked this out
...
The kids did the homework”—and ended up toning down the piece
...
One young reporter wrote a review
with a stanza that contained some offensive content
...

Few Big Media people will see these kinds of community
publications as competitive
...
First, it shows people that they can do it themselves
...
There’s also an
unmistakable vitality to the Melrose Mirror and Junior Journal
that is missing from much of journalism today
...
At
the least, this style of journalism adds needed voices
...
“We’re
broadening the definition of news as seen through the perspective of average people who have life experience, something to
share
...
”

al t e rnat i ve m e d i a f l o u r i s h e s
Oddly, perhaps, America’s so-called “alternative press” has not
used the Net very well
...
This may be due, in part, to consolidation in that
industry leaving many alternative papers in the hands of just
two companies, Village Voice Media and New Times Media
...
So a new
kind of alternative media has arisen on the Net, above and
beyond blogs
...
194 The project was founded in 1999
by a group of antiglobalization activists who wanted to cover
the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in ways traditional media would not
...
With a newsletter and web
site, Indymedia drew a large audience—and a heavy-handed
visit from the FBI that brought the group considerably more
attention
...
By mid-2003, it had dozens of affiliates
in the United States and around the world
...
Deploying digital cameras, laptops, and Wi-Fi, Indymedia reporters—a self-assembling
newsroom—captured the events brilliantly
...
In particular, he said, the independent journalists revealed several cases of police brutality that the major
media had missed
...
But it has an uneven track record in ways that make traditional journalists uncomfortable, in large part due to a lack of
editorial supervision
...
195 Much of what the site publishes is solid, occasionally
path-breaking journalism; but, as with all advocacy reporting, a
reader is well advised to maintain a skeptical eye
...
Amy Goodman and her colleagues are demonstrating new media’s technical leaps, often with on-the-fly innovation, while producing material with real impact
...
Getting material out of the country wasn’t simple, she said; at one
point she asked passengers on Australia-bound planes to carry
out CDs with compressed video programming, and the proprietor of an Australian Internet café then forwarded the programming to the organization’s New York headquarters
...
S
...
So he found some software that broke 80-MB
video reports into smaller chunks, which he and colleagues dispatched from different cafes back to New York
...
The Web is
chock-full of great information, she said, but most people don’t
have access to computers
...
But all Democracy Now!
programming, radio and video, is available via web “streams,”
which allow a user to watch or listen to the show without
downloading massive files first
...
Whenever possible, the programs bring people to the
Web so they can find more information, such as additional
video footage, extended interviews, and supporting documents,
on the subject at hand
...

One of my favorite independent news sites is written and
edited entirely by its readers
...
Users

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the former audience joins the party
vote on what they like, and the voting moves stories up or down
the page
...

Another kind of self-organizing newsroom came powerfully
to life during the 2003 Gulf War
...
Their goal was to gather every
bit of data they could find about the conflict, including news
stories, and post it all as fast as possible
...
S
...

If I
...
Stone, the hero of an earlier age of independent journalism, were around today, I have no doubt that he’d be a big
fan of—and maybe a contributor to—the Center for Public
Integrity,198 an organization that’s finally getting the public
acclaim it deserves
...
Its
Washington-based reporting has become one of the best investigative journalism operations you’ll find anywhere, and that
includes the investigative units of the major newspapers and TV
networks
...
S
...
The center also distributes its
information in print
...
No mainstream journalism organization has done as good a job
...
“No traditional news organization would
ever do that
...

If Big Media declines, public-spirited foundations and wealthy
individuals may increasingly see organizations such as the
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we the media
Center for Public Integrity as one of the only ways to empower
an informed citizenry
...
In February, 2004, Wikipedia,200 one of the world’s
most comprehensive online reference sites, created and operated
by volunteers, published its 500,000th article
...

Wikipedia is one of the most fascinating developments of
the Digital Age
...
It is a model of participatory media quite unlike any
other, and is a natural extension of the Web’s capabilities in the
context of journalism
...
Why? Because almost
anyone can be a contributor to the Wikipedia
...
(Only serious misbehavior gets people banned
...

It defies first-glance assumptions
...
Surely flame wars over article content will stymie good
intentions
...
Right?
Well, not necessarily
...

Wikipedia uses the Wiki software described in Chapter 2
...
It keeps
track of every change
...

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the former audience joins the party
When it works right, it engenders a community—and a community that has the right tools can take care of itself
...
When anyone can edit what
you’ve just posted, such fairness becomes essential
...

Urban planners and criminologists talk about the “broken
window” syndrome, said Ward Cunningham, who came up
with the first Wiki software in the 1990s
...

Similarly, Wikipedia draws strength from its volunteers who
catch and fix every act of online vandalism
...

This isn’t to say that disagreements don’t occur, or that
Wikipedia works perfectly
...
There are
metapages—discussions of Wikipedia entries—where people
debate, sometimes viciously, about what should go into the
entry
...
But some
debates are ultimately intractable
...
But he’s been working on a
mediation and arbitration system that will let members of the
community decide, for example, if someone should be banned
from posting, a rare occurrence
...
He
estimates that another 1,000 or so are regular contributors
...

One upcoming project is a “Wikipedia 1
...
This raises intriguing questions
...
Now,
I wouldn’t base a major decision on what I read in this or any
other encyclopedia
...
But my experience tells
me that the Wikipedia community does its homework, at least
when it comes to subjects about which I have some deeper
knowledge
...
They work
because everyone can do their part
...
When you remove
the barriers to changing things, you also remove the barriers to
fixing what’s broken
...
”

Wikis strike me as an almost ideal journalistic tool under the
right circumstances
...
It’s a worldwide travel guide written entirely by contributors who either live in the place they’re covering or have spent
enough time there to post relevant information
...
I’ve compared the data to my real-life experience in
several places and found it to be accurate
...
They can live behind a firewall and can be protected by

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the former audience joins the party
passwords
...
Its chief executive, Ross Mayfield,
has journalistic notions as well
...
” The project wasn’t off the ground as of this writing,
but Mayfield made eminent sense when he described it (on a
Wiki, of course) as follows:
Public Record is an independent self-organizing resource that
tracks the issues and influencers of the 2004 presidential campaign
...
An opportunity exists to provide a resource
for citizens, by citizens, to strengthen our civil institutions
...
But what if there was no print?
Obviously, print persists and competition drives more than
commerce
...

Primarily based upon a wiki, Public Record allows any
public citizen to contribute to construction of a website at any
time, a tool that fosters trust by giving up control
...

Wikis allow a larger portion of the citizenry to participate in
the open source movement by allowing contributions through
horizontal information assembly (in contrast to vertical information assembly only available to programmers)
...
But with the
appropriate backing from one or more major media organizations—and an appropriate amount of editing (or policing, if you
will)—this could be a serious journalistic resource
...
“Pay or go to jail
...

Only one online journalism organization in the world can
spend $100 million a year based on that model
...
The gifted amateurs who abound in the personal journalism world will continue to do great work, but some people will want to make a
living at it, or at least supplement their income
...

Advertising, as you’d expect, is one potentially workable
model
...

For most blogging and other personal journalism, the return
on investment—assuming the author wants some, and however
it’s calculated (time and/or money)—comes with an enhanced
reputation
...
Susan Mernit, an Internet/
media consultant, posts frequently to her personal blog203 on a
variety of related subjects
...

Of all the emerging business models, one of the most promising fits into the category of “nano-publishing,” as some are
calling the genre
...

Gawker204 is a weblog devoted to news and gossip about New
York City and its gossip-heavy industries
...
Fleshbot206 covers erotica
...
C
...

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Denton (who, of course, has a blog208) is a former print
journalist, who worked for such publications as the Financial
Times, where he was a well-regarded correspondent
...
Before he moved to the
weblog world, he cofounded Moreover,209 which gathers news
and headlines from across the Web
...

Denton and his colleagues are now pushing the boundaries of
nano-journalism by making the most of the Net’s simple publishing tools and low cost, as well as the advantages that accrue to
those who exploit new models
...

Early on, Gizmodo generated revenue by sending readers to
Amazon
...
210 But Gizmodo has become so popular that it’s now drawing advertisers
...

Denton and his team are playing a smart demographic game
by exploiting niches that are too small to aim a magazine
...
Clearly, we’re looking at a major
shift in publishing models
...
They won’t lure all the readers or advertisers
away, but they could be among the many new alternatives that
carve away some of the most coveted readers and advertisers
...
He launched Weblogs Inc
...


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we the media
Weblogs Inc
...
There’s
room for both approaches, but Calacanis will probably attract a
more entrepreneurial type of blogger
...
The blog
writer takes the first $1,000 in revenue each month, splitting
additional revenue 50-50 with the company
...
jointly own the contents, and a blogger who
departs can take a copy of all postings
...

The site launched in the fall of 2003
...
Calacanis said he was
looking to have 100 blogs by the end of 2004, and have each of
them generate $1,000 to $2,000 a month in revenue
...
The revenue-sharing model has given some
bloggers a small but worthwhile income
...
Copeland boasts several notable successes, including, as noted in Chapter 5, the
special-election congressional campaign in Tennessee, where
Democrat Ben Chandler saw a 20-1 return on ads placed on
political blogs
...
D
...
He’s not enamored of some of the gambling sites his advertisers are promoting
...
” Early on, he posted a notice that said he
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the former audience joins the party
wasn’t vouching for the services or products being advertised,
only that they were legal
...
He explained further:
As distasteful as it may be to see these ads in the early days of
a new medium, a reader can find much more risqué, questionable advertising in the back pages of any alternative weekly
...
Until
that day arrives, I’m reluctant to turn down paying advertisers out of some effete sense of propriety
...
“Freelance writing also bolsters one’s
credentials, but regular blogging or frequent online dispatches
seem to be the best ways to validate one’s authority in a chosen
topic,” he said
...
But bloggers and other online journalists have
brought the concept into the modern age
...
Probably the bestknown example of this is Andrew Sullivan, a magazine writer
whose blog215 was one of the first to solicit readers’ money via
pledges, somewhat akin to the methods of public radio and television stations
...
In an appeal to his Internet
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we the media
readership, he wrote, “Send me money, and I’ll go to Iraq and
cover the war
...
He also set a precedent that I hope will become far more
common in coming years
...
Upon his
return to the U
...
that fall, he heard the war drums beating from
Washington and decided he should go back to Iraq to cover the
conflict he knew was coming
...
From October through December, he raised just $500
...
Over the course of three days he raised another
$2,000
...
In all, some 342
readers kicked in about $14,500
...

A blogger has to pick a topic and stick to it, he told me;
most blogs are too unfocused
...
The war was tailor made for that kind of thing
...
People trusted him
from his earlier work or were willing to take a chance, and they
contributed
...
0 web page
...

A key to Allbritton’s relative success in this venture has
been his relationship with readers, not just the ones who paid
and got postings by email earlier than people who simply went
to the web site
...
“Readers were good about sending me
roundups of the day’s news,” he said
...
Sometimes the comments were
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the former audience joins the party
downright mean and wrongly accused him of lying about what
he was seeing, but other readers jumped to his defense
...
He certainly wasn’t the last
...
They sent him more than $4,000, and his on-theground reporting was some of the finest that came out of the
early and perhaps pivotal presidential nominating contest
...
But if you’re in the political game or
even care about politics, Marshall’s blog is both addictive and
required reading
...
But we’re on the verge of a time
when people can bring serious alternatives to the public and get
paid for what they do
...
Success will come to those operations that make
themselves required reading, listening, or viewing
...


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Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Next Steps

In the mid-1990’s, just as the World Wide Web was gaining
popularity, I was sure that the Internet would become a powerful force in our lives
...

I didn’t anticipate online experiments such as Feed, the pioneering but now defunct online magazine that had an edginess
bloggers later incorporated, or group-edited sites such as
Kuro5hin, where the audience writes and ranks the stories and
then adds context and ideas as they discuss them
...
So I won’t
try to predict the shape of the news business and how it will be
practiced a decade from now
...

My assumptions rest on two guiding principles
...
The second is rooted in the very nature of
technology: it’s relentless and unstoppable
...


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next steps

l aws and o t h e r c o d e s
As we’ve already established, the mass media in the latter part
of the 20th century was organized, for the most part, along a
fairly simple, top-down framework
...
They received
information from a variety—but not too big a variety—of
mostly official and sometimes unofficial sources
...
Alternatives did exist, particularly when desktop publishing came on the scene
...

Technology and an increasing dissatisfaction with mass
media have created the conditions for a new framework
...
These trends take the shape of laws, not the kind
enacted by governments but the kind imagined by scientists and
acute observers of society
...
More than any other, Moore’s Law
is the key to understanding today’s reality and tomorrow’s
possibilities
...
It’s been true
since Moore came up with the notion in the 1960s, and the pace
of improvement looks set to continue for some time to come
...

Moore’s Law is about exponential change: it doesn’t take long
before you’ve increased power by thousands-fold
...
You
and I use many computers each day: the microprocessors, also
called microcontrollers, are in computers, handheld devices,
alarm clocks, coffee makers, home thermostats, wristwatches,
and automobiles
...

Not only are we embedding brains into everything we touch,
but we’re adding memory to everything, too
...
And now,
with modern communications—wired and wireless—we’re connecting devices that are more and more powerful
...

Devices for collecting, working with, and distributing data are
becoming smaller and more powerful every year
...

Moore himself has been somewhat surprised at how long
Silicon Valley’s engineers have kept his law not just alive, but
vibrant
...

Next, consider Metcalfe’s Law, named after Bob Metcalfe,
inventor of the Ethernet networking standard that is now ubiquitous in every personal computer
...
That
is, take the number of nodes and multiply it by itself
...
If there’s only one fax machine in the world, it’s
not good for much
...
The more
people with fax machines, the more value there is in the network—a utility that greatly exceeds the raw numbers—because
each individual user has many more people to whom he can
send faxes
...
So,
increasingly, is each new mobile phone that can send and
retrieve Internet data
...
When billions or even trillions of people and things are
connected, the value of the network will transcend calculation
...
Reed noticed that when
people go online, they don’t only conduct one-to-one communications, as they would with a telephone or fax machine
...

According to Reed’s Law, groups themselves are nodes
...
Here, factorial means that you take the number
of groups, and every integer less than that number all the way
back to one, and multiply all of those numbers together
...
The number of group nodes factorial is a very,
very, very big number
...
But they make sense intuitively, and
more and more they make sense in a practical way: the more the
Net grows, the more valuable and powerful it becomes
...

The people who’ll invent tomorrow’s media are not in my
age bracket
...
In a decade, Rheingold observed: “The 15-year-olds today in Seoul and Helsinki,
who are already adept at mobilizing media to their end, will be
25
...
”
What does this mean for news and journalism? As the technologies of creation and communication grow more powerful
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we the media
and become smaller, and ultimately become part of the fabric of
life, we’ll have vastly more raw data
...


cre at i ng t h e n e w s
There’s no longer any doubt that personal publishing of various
stripes is becoming a major trend
...
”223
If you added in the under-18 population, no doubt the numbers
would rise significantly
...

The tools of creation are now everywhere, and they’re getting better
...
Digital video is becoming so cheap that anyone with
the requisite talent can make a feature film for a fraction of what
it once cost
...

The Web can’t compete today—and may not compete in
our lifetimes—with live television for big-event coverage
...
But for just about everything
else, it’s ideal
...
In an
introduction to a session at a 2004 blogging conference,225 he
described it this way:
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next steps
Since the invention of the video tape recorder, most content
delivered via television is created offline and prepared well in
advance of its broadcast slot
...
” And so the program sits in a
queue, waiting to be distributed
...
Or
...
Since big files take a long time to download, a day’s
worth of downloading should be time enough
...
It’ll “just
be there” in the morning
...
S
...
Soon, said Larry Larsen, multimedia
editor at the Poynter Institute, location will be one of the data
points
...
“If the bulk
of that includes violent crimes,” he wrote me, “I’m out of
there
...
You still need to know some HTML to make a blog
work
...


The reporter of the future—amateur or professional—will be
equipped with an amazing toolkit
...
Rheingold’s smart mobs are morphing into a news team of unparalleled reach
...

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation
...
They
serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that
happens around them
...


The gargoyles in the novel aren’t journalists in Stephenson’s
vision
...
In a sense, the gargoyles
are web-cams with brains
...
There’s too little respect for
the journalistic function when people see it as “a primitive substitute for having web-cams everywhere
...
”
The sifting process will be handled both by people and
machines
...
But the role of automated tools will grow
...
People can create their own news reports from a
variety of sources, not just the ones in their hometowns, which

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next steps
typically have been dominated by a monopoly local newspaper
and television stations that would have to dig deeper to be
shallow
...
The sheer volume of information deters all but the most
dedicated news hunters and gatherers
...
New kinds of Big Media are emerging in this category,
including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
...

I’ve been a fan of Google News229 since it launched in
“beta” form (it was still beta as I wrote this) in early 2002
...
The search
engine “crawls” various news sites—designated by humans—
and then machines take over to display all kinds of headlines on
a variety of subjects from politics to business to sports to entertainment and so on
...
It’s an effective glimpse into what’s big news on the
Web right now, or at least what editors think is big
...
One click and the user gets a list,
sorted by what Google estimates is relevant or by date, of all stories on a given topic
...

A useful element of Google News is called Google Alerts, a
service that lets users create keyword searches, the results of
which are sent by email on a regular basis
...


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we the media
Another Google News drawback, as of this writing, was a
refusal to acknowledge news content from the sphere of grassroots journalism
...
This underestimates the value of the best blogs
...
He saw the site as “complementary” to what
newspapers do, but this seemed to understate its potential
...
But it has the potential to turn into the
virtual front page for the rest of us
...
MSNBC, the
company’s partnership with General Electric’s NBC News unit,
is a classic news site—big, heavy, rich with content
...
Now Microsoft is
making Google-like experiments in news, too, with its
“Newsbot,”230 the early tests of which closely resemble Google
News
...
As Kristie Heim reported in the San Jose
Mercury News on March 24, 2004, it is being designed to keep
track of what readers have already seen, but with refinements
...

In looking at the major web companies’ moves, I’ve been
most impressed with Yahoo!’s direction
...
In early
2004, Yahoo! folded RSS into the service, letting users select
feeds from weblogs and other sites and add them to the
MyYahoo! news page
...


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next steps

s ynd i cat i o n t a k e s o f f
Let’s revisit RSS
...

Here’s an example
...
Each posting consists of a headline and
some text
...
In other words, RSS describes the structure and some of
the content of a particular page
...
Today, RSS readers are fairly
primitive, but that will change in coming years
...
The inherent possibilities seem nearly endless, including the ability to follow conversations in much more
detailed ways
...
Surprisingly,
Google, which owns Blogger, a company that makes blogging
software, hadn’t done any of this
...
Mountains of
data are being created every day by RSS feeds and other structured information, and smart entrepreneurs and researchers are
creating tools that I believe will become an integral part of
tomorrow’s news architecture
...
By
April 2004, he was tracking more than two million blogs, with
thousands coming online every day
...

Technorati’s tools are basically semi-canned queries that go
into a giant, constantly updated database that Sifry likens to a
just-in-time search engine
...
It also lets users rank people and
their blogs and blog topics not just by popularity—the number
of blogs linking to something—but by weighted popularity,
determined by the popularity of the linking blogs
...

My blog had about 2,100 incoming links the last time I checked
...
But if someone who has a dozen incoming links
today gets six more, that’s an enormous relative change, and
Technorati will probably flag it
...

The idea behind Technorati might be called the Google
Hypothesis: link structure matters
...
This information
can then be filtered in a variety of ways
...
” Type in the URL of a weblog (or an individual
posting), and the engine shows a list of weblogs pointing to that
URL, sorted by time of linking or by “authority”—the “most
popular” linking weblog is ranked first
...

(Imagine what this would look like displayed graphically as a
web of links
...
)
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next steps
In addition to the Cosmos, the Technorati data can also be
expressed as ordered lists
...
Though Technorati’s algorithms are simpler
than Google’s, Technorati can offer the blogging community
what Google offers news junkies with the Google News site:
timeliness
...
Google looks at links and
documents to get its Page Rank, Sifry explained, but Technorati
adds two things: time of posting and the fact that with blogs,
the postings are typically more personal than institutional
...

As of March 2004, Technorati’s services included NewsTalk (“News items people are talking about”), BookTalk (“The
books people are talking about”), and Current Events (“Conversations going on around current events”)
...

But these are only the start of something much more interesting
...
Machines are talking to
each other on our behalf
...
API stands for “applications
programming interface,” a term used by tech people to explain
how to hook one piece of software to another
...
Think of the phone jack in your wall as
an API that allows you to connect your phone to the phone network
...

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we the media
Software development relies on APIs
...
They don’t have to reinvent the proverbial wheel each time they write software, and they help ensure a
vibrant ecosystem on whatever programming platform they’re
using
...
Most blogging software also has APIs
...
According to programmer and blogger
Erik Benson,232 “A web service is basically a system that lets web
sites talk to each other, sharing information between each other
without the intervention of pesky humans
...

When Google233 and Amazon,234 and Technorati235 (among
others) offer APIs into their data, they’re not offering us the
entire database the way the U
...
government does with, for
example, census data, much of which can be downloaded and
massaged at will
...
But their willingness to do this means we can build, using web services, entirely
new kinds of queries—and learn new things—with just a little
bit of expertise
...
Another extraordinarily
interesting application is Valdis Krebs’ analysis of people who
buy books about politics with a right or left slant, and how little
overlap there is among people who buy those books
...
Long before Technorati started watching conversations
170

next steps
about books, Benson had created AllConsuming,238 which
combined four web services to watch and highlight the books
bloggers were discussing
...

These technologies will be part of future news dissemination systems
...
For example, I would like to be able to
track news of innovative applications for my Treo smartphone
...
If someone in the group I trust posts
an item about the Treo, I want to know about it, of course
...
I want software that tracks not just the top-level item,
which in this case could be a news story or blog posting or SMS
response, but how the conversation then takes shape about the
item across a variety of media
...
Today, this is impossible except in a laborious and
time-wasting way
...
240

o kay, but wh o s e “ i n f o r m a t i o n ”
d o yo u t rus t ?
Among the missing components in this hierarchy is a way to
evaluate a person’s reputation beyond the crude systems in place
today
...
In a sense,
Google is already a reputation system: Google my name and
you’ll discover a lot about me, including where I work, what
I’ve written, and a lot about what I think about various issues—
171

we the media
and what some other people think of me (not all flattering by
any means)
...
But it’s
important to note that the majority of blogs tracked by Technorati have nobody linking to them
...
No matter who you are, you probably know something about a topic that’s worth paying attention to
...

Any topic you can name will be more easily tracked this way
...
Now multiply the potential throughout other
fields of interest, professional and otherwise
...

The tools are being built now
...


d i no s aurs a n d d a n g e r s
The technology tells us we’re heading in one direction, but the
law and cultural norms will have something to say about the
process
...
All else being equal, it might be headed
toward extinction
...
If today’s Big Media is a dinosaur, it won’t die off

172

next steps
quietly
...

Meanwhile, one of the valuable artifacts of modern journalism is a commitment—however poorly kept at times—to
integrity
...
Are traditional values compatible with this new
medium? The questions of integrity and struggle for control are
potentially deadly flies in the ointment of tomorrow’s media
...


173

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Trolls, Spin, and
the Boundaries of Trust

In the spring of 2001, almost no one was surprised to hear that
several Hollywood studios had been setting up phony web sites
to create buzz for new movies
...

The exposure of the deception again brought to focus a
reality of the modern age: for manipulators, con artists, gossips,
and jokesters of all varieties, the Internet is the medium from
heaven
...
Anyone with a computer or a cell phone can post in online forums
...
Special effects make
even videos untrustworthy
...


cut and p ast e , r i g h t a n d w r o n g
The spread of misinformation isn’t always the result of malice
...

Until recently, people would clip a news article from a
paper or magazine
...
Now
we just copy it digitally and send it along
...
Sometimes the cutting
removes relevant information
...
Both practices can
prove harmful, but the latter is downright malicious
...
Schmich had written a wry version of a graduation speech she’d give if asked—“Wear sunscreen,” her commencement address began
...
(I must
have gotten a dozen emails quoting it
...
Poor man
...
”242
Far more troubling was the case of Avi Rubin, a computer
scientist and official election judge in the 2004 Maryland primary, who had been fiercely critical of electronic voting
machines
...
243 His words were then
taken out of context, he told me several weeks later, by supporters of the flawed machines
...

I’ve had material misquoted or misrepresented on a number
of occasions
...
In the same column, a spokesman for two softwareindustry trade groups was quoted as admitting his organizations might be making wildly inflated guesses about how much
175

we the media
software is being illegally copied
...

A week later, after the column had been sent out by the
Knight Ridder Tribune wire service, I got a call from an earnest
woman at the Business Software Alliance
...
She wanted
me to know that no one there could possibly have told me that
the software industry was making up its piracy estimates, as my
column suggested
...

There was a pause on the other end of the line
...
It turned out that someone had sent her an email containing the offending quotes, but without the column’s introductory line that said, “News stories we’re unlikely to read,” a
missing piece that led to more than one misunderstanding
...
She reported that email was flying
around Microsoft and her PR firm, with various executives
insisting they weren’t the unnamed sources in my piece
...
Musing about this episode later, I wrote:
“Actually, the worst part is that Bill Gates interrupted his
speech to world leaders in Switzerland to call and offer me $10
million (plus stock options) to stop writing this column and
become the editor of the column he writes for The New York
Times syndicate
...
” Happily, neither did anyone
else, this time
...
And, as
my case suggests, be careful of satire; some people are just too
dense to get it
...
Kerry and
Fonda, in a photo that turned out to have been doctored, were
shown “together” at a 1970s rally protesting the Vietnam
War
...

Moreover, the incident was only the latest demonstration of
a truly pernicious trend of modern fakery
...
245 This is why publications that print
these kinds of photos are subjected to withering criticism, as
was National Geographic when it moved one of the Egyptian
pyramids in a cover photo
...
246
Nothing, in a journalistic sense, justifies blatant deception
...
For example, simple cropping can remove someone who was in the original picture or it
can highlight an important element in the image
...

Even more worrisome is the increasing use of doctored
video
...
The growing field of “product
placement”—putting brand-name products into TV shows and
movies—is moving closer to the news process, and that should
disturb everyone
...

An element of trickery has been present for years in news
programming
...
But CBS
News, for one, took this to another level in 1999 when Dan
Rather’s newscast, anchored from Times Square, included digitally created billboards advertising products
...
247 This
isn’t deception on the scale of Jayson Blair, who made up fictitious stories in The New York Times, but no responsible news
organization should ever insert things into a report that are not
really there
...

These techniques are made to order for the Internet, where
lies spread quickly and can do enormous damage before the
truth catches up
...
But they are not foolproof technically because
hackers can consistently defeat such schemes, and they would
encourage copyright restrictions even more onerous, and therefore more damaging, to grassroots media and scholarship than
the ones currently in place
...
He’d sold the
stock short, in effect betting that the price would plummet, and
made almost $241,000 before he was caught
...
248

178

trolls, spin, and the boundaries of trust
His offense was egregious
...
The Internet bubble was fueled, in no small
way, by this kind of behavior—and not just online
...
I have some sympathy for small investors who lost big
in the bubble, and contempt for the people who knowingly
touted absurdly overpriced stocks
...

Yet the investment forums can be a source of incredibly
good information, too
...
Sometimes a particularly bright amateur analyst
spots something relevant the pros have missed
...

In doing homework, one of the most crucial exercises is to
consider the source
...
We don’t pick a random bystander and assume he’s an
expert on, say, nuclear power
...

Internet gossip monger Matt Drudge doesn’t practice what
I’d call respectable journalism (and, to be fair, he doesn’t call
himself a journalist), but I respect him for this much: he signs
his name to everything he posts
...
Kerry, you may recall, was dogged in early February by a rumor of an extramarital affair, a “scandal”—for
which there was absolutely no evidence and which was flatly

179

we the media
denied by everyone supposedly involved—that got its legs after
Drudge published it on his web site
...
And we could weigh the allegations in the
context of the writer’s previous work
...
One
of the Net’s great features, the ability to remain anonymous, can
also be one of its chief defects
...
They have good reasons
...
And there are excellent reasons for
keeping one’s identity hidden
...
Someone holding unpopular political views in a small
town that leans strongly in one direction may want to discuss it
with others of like mind
...
More than anyone, political dissidents in nations where such behavior can be life-threatening
deserve the protection of anonymity when they need it
...
In one now famous example in 2004, a software glitch
at Amazon
...
A New York Times story250
showed a remarkable willingness on authors’ part to excuse
their deceptions as just another marketing tool
...
I worry
what will happen when this book is published
...
Will they trash me on Amazon? No
doubt
...
Can I do anything about
it, assuming they don’t libel me? Probably not
...
“You’re welcome to remain anonymous,” I said
...
A casual reader might wonder why you
want to be anonymous
...
”251
He had it partly right
...
In the absence of a foundation for his comments, he
hadn’t earned anyone’s trust
...
There was none in this case
...
It seemed
that he or she was also posting comments, using a different
name but similar (and in some cases identical) language, on a
blog about intellectual property sponsored by the University of
California-Berkeley journalism school
...
We checked the Internet addresses from which the comments had been posted; they were identical
...
Not only was this person refusing
to be identified, but he or she was trying to make it seem as
though a posse was patrolling our blogs to show us the error of
our ways when, in fact, it was just one person on both
...
253
181

we the media
As we discussed in Chapter 8, advances in technology are likely
to bring us better ways to gauge and, in effect, manage reputations and verify a commenter’s bona fides without exposing his
or her actual identity to the world
...
But it
ultimately isn’t the answer
...

At the moment, my favorite solution is not the most practical: if everyone had a blog or other kind of web site, they
could include a link as a kind of digital signature
...
Again, I would do nothing to stop anonymity on the Internet
...


t ro l l s and o t h e r a n n o y a n c e s
Grassroots journalism has more problems than deciding
whether anonymous posting is a good or bad idea
...

Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, and their colleagues at Slashdot have
been dealing with trolls for years
...

They’re constantly combing the Web for interesting information—articles, news stories, press releases, and mailing list
postings—and recommend the material to Slashdot’s tiny
182

trolls, spin, and the boundaries of trust
editorial staff
...
Then the editors sit back to watch what happens, and so
do hundreds of thousands of other people
...
The average item generates about 250 comments
...
Moderators, themselves selected on the basis of their participation in
other discussions, rate the quality of the postings, and readers
can adjust the results so they see everything or, as most do, a
subset of the more substantive comments
...
It’s a constant annoyance, Bates told me, but part of the
price of doing business
...
A troll is a time thief
...
That is what makes trolling
heinous
...
They do not believe what they say, but
merely say it for effect
...

Someone may be insufferable, infuriating, fanatical, and an
ignorant idiot to boot without being a troll
...
Only the crudest, most obvious, forms of
trolling can be identified so easily
...
254
183

we the media
User registration on comment systems, with a name and
verifiable email address, can be a deterrent to trolls
...
Ignoring
him is usually the best answer
...
Not everyone has a right to
speak on everyone else’s site or be part of everyone else’s
conversation
...

Wikipedia accurately describes this, in the context of public
relations, as “putting events or other facts, especially of those
with political or legal significance, into contexts favoring oneself or one’s client or cause, at least in comparison to opponents
...
”
In the physical world, I always try to ask myself what a
person I’m interviewing has to gain from doing an interview
...

But spin takes some insidious routes to the public
...

Some smaller newspapers are known to print them verbatim, as
if a reporter had actually done some reporting and writing
...
Local TV stations are handed video
releases, often including fake “reporters” interviewing officials
from the company or government agency that wants to get its
news out, and too often stations play all or part of these mockeries of journalism
...
255
Online spin varies from the relatively harmless, and even
amusing, to more ethically challenged methods
...
After one group of Google bombers got “miserable
failure” to point to George W
...
”256 Sooner or later, Google
will either prevent this kind of thing or risk some of its own
credibility
...
The entertainment-industry copyright defender who
made such a point of critiquing my blog was, in effect, spinning
not just me but my audience as well
...

Just before the January 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, I
got an email from someone telling me, in a fairly breathless way,
about a product due to be announced at the show
...
He pointed me to several pages, including one
that had a picture of the gadget (some gear for networking multimedia at home) and another where the company’s chief executive had essentially confirmed the product’s existence on a
product support forum
...
“Consider this a
small example of tomorrow’s journalism today,” I wrote
...
Now you
know, too
...
My guess, based on some follow-up
checking, is that this wasn’t spin but a tip from someone who
really thought he was giving me a scoop
...

Some online spin is obviously deceptive, as Adam Gaffin
discovered
...
257 A 2003 forum thread talked about
a fictional company in a soap opera holding a “Sexiest Man”
contest
...
Gaffin got suspicious and checked the
Internet address from which “dixie” was posting, and discovered it originated at a Washington-based firm, New Media
Strategies, a company that offers, according to its web site,
online word-of-mouth marketing to create buzz about products
and brands
...
Let me repeat, New Media Strategies sucks
...
” (The item had moved down to the
second page by late April
...
259 I do want to suggest that just one such episode, if it’s caught and then stirs up any degree of irritation
online, can be a lasting blemish
...
Unfortunately, not everyone can catch
such acts
...
In many cases, the best solution is to ensure an open conversation among informed readers because they’ll collectively
inform each other
...
“We can Fact
Check your ass,” Layne said
...

Case in point: Kaycee Nicole created a blog to talk openly
about life, illness, and loss
...
Thousands of people visited her blog in
2000 and 2001
...
They researched her illness, looking for a way to make her better
...
Then she sickened again and finally
succumbed to her leukemia
...
A relatively small but relentless
group of Net denizens unraveled the tale of anguish and discovered a hoax
...
They checked their
findings with each other
...

What this group accomplished was, in a sense, investigative
reporting
...
They were
strangers who, for the most part, only knew each other online
...
262
Fact-checking is a just one tool a community can bring to
bear
...
In the summer of
2003, David Weinberger and I discovered other community benefits
...

We opened the site to allow anyone to add a word plus an
explanation of why it should be there
...
We’ve had to prune
heavily
...
We removed the offending post,
thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who let us know how the
page had been misused so foully
...

We’d surely seen the downside of the Net
...
As Weinberger noted after our dust up
with the rogue coder: “It’s as if the Internet is not only selfcorrecting about matters of fact but also morally self-correcting:
A bad turn is corrected by several good ones
...
This assumes, of course, that users of online
journalism trust Big Media in the first place
...

Unlike many Americans, and in spite of some media scandals, I have substantial faith that major newspapers try hard to
be accurate and fair
...
That doesn’t mean I assume that everything in it is true,
though I do assume the paper has done its best, and that there
are institutional mechanisms in place to correct something if it’s
wrong
...
(Even after the Jayson
Blair mess, I’d say the same thing about The New York Times
...
One
of these days, someone is going to break through the security of
a major media web site—the Journal or the Times or CNN—
and post some “news” that turns out to be absolutely false
...
264
This act, which I consider more a certainty than a possibility,
will change the news media’s trust equation, at least for a time
...


p l ai n o l d com m o n s e n s e
Being a reporter involves some basic practices
...
If I link to something
intriguing on my blog but don’t know whether it’s true, I offer
that caveat
...
If the fact in question didn’t come from a source I trust,
I check it out
...

They need a hierarchy of trust
...
I trust what Doc Searls tells me on
his blog more than what a random blogger says on a page I’ve
never seen before
...
We’ll be
figuring this out in the next few years, and I’m confident we’ll
get better and better at it
...
When they see things
that promise a measurable impact on their lives—such as a news
story that persuades them to sell or buy something expensive—
they should verify the claim before reacting
...


190

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Here Come the Judges
(and Lawyers)

Brock Meeks was way ahead of most of us when it came to
understanding the power of the Internet as a journalism tool
...
He called it CyberWire Dispatch, and for the next several
years, he regularly scooped the major media on story after
story
...
He
was, by most accounts, the first Internet journalist to be sued for
libel
...
266 Meeks did pay his lawyers,
including several noted First Amendment specialists who
donated the vast majority of their time
...

The Meeks case was a warning shot of sorts
...
Law applies online and
off, and people who intend to practice grassroots journalism
need to keep that in mind
...
Far from it
...
To abuse a famous cliché, I’m not a
lawyer and I don’t intend to play one on these pages
...
(This book’s accompanying web site, http://
wethemedia
...
com, includes links to legal sources
...
Libel is only one, and it applies
not just to people who call themselves journalists but also to commenters in chat rooms
...


d e f amat i o n , l i b e l , a n d o t h e r
nas t y s t uf f
I’m fairly sure I’ve been personally libeled
...
I haven’t sued
anybody, though
...
I may be wrong in my opinions or my
interpretation of facts, but I try hard not to get basic stuff
wrong, and when I learn I’ve made a mistake, I correct it
...
A blogger who commits libel may have to face
the consequences
...
In 1997, Internet gossip maven
Matt Drudge quoted unnamed sources who claimed that Democratic operative, author, and former Clinton White House aide
Sidney Blumenthal had committed spousal abuse
...
But
Blumenthal sued him for defamation of character
...
According to various press accounts, Blumenthal paid some $2,500 in travel expenses for a Drudge lawyer
...

As noted in Chapter 9, I don’t care for his style or willingness to publish rumors so readily, but I’m troubled by the fact
that he was sued in the first place
...
” Blumenthal’s lawsuit may have been understandable—the
charge was disgusting and could have been a disaster for his
career—but anyone who cared to know learned quickly that the
story was bogus
...
In the end, however offensive
Drudge’s original posting may have been, the case advanced
journalistic freedom
...

Marburger
...
Though he doesn’t claim to
be an expert about Internet law, he offered some advice that
applies to all kinds of journalists, including cyber-reporters
...
“If it’s affordable and you can get it,” he said,
“you need insurance
...
” In this category, he said, are lawyers, doctors, and government officials,
along with companies
...
The risk is going to be higher
...
”
Publishing on the Web appears to have had its advantages
in this regard
...
But as Marburger noted,
“Sometimes your reader can be your plaintiff, too
...
He’s somewhat more
sanguine about the prospects for bloggers, at least for most of
them, because blogging tends to be more about opinion than
reporting
...
“It’s hard
to libel via punditry
...
”
What’s more, well-known bloggers tend to write about
“public figures,” people who must meet a much higher standard to prove libel
...

In any event, most bloggers probably don’t have enough
money to make it worthwhile to sue, assuming, of course, that
winning monetary damages is the plaintiff’s goal
...

That’s why Reynolds called himself “an insurance agent’s
dream”—that is, adequately insured for any trouble
...
“It is to guard
against having someone sue me into bankruptcy out of spite or
to shut me up
...
Balkin,

194

here come the judges (and lawyers)
Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and director of the Information Society Project at Yale
Law School
...
”
“This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels
they themselves write,” Balkin continued
...
Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from
letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper
...
Commenters on Internet forums have had more trouble
...

Policies on how to deal with such requests vary among
Internet service providers
...
More honorable ones won’t; they’ll tell the subscriber in order to give him
time to challenge a subpoena
...

But civil-liberties groups have asked judges, sometimes successfully, to apply a tough standard in these cases
...
There was no

195

we the media
doubt that the messages were inflammatory, alleging corporate
malfeasance, but the question was whether they rose to a level
at which the company had a legitimate defamation case
...
In early 2003, the clinic won an important ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco
...
In addition, he wrote,
Nymox had to show that the postings in question had actually
damaged the company
...
But
he noted that it was essential to consider the context of the message, not just its content:
The statement was posted anonymously on an Internet message board
...

Nymox has made no effort to trace any injury to the doorstep of this posting
...


He granted John Doe’s motion to quash the subpoena, allowing
Doe to remain anonymous
...
At the same time, the antiNymox poster in this case didn’t rate anyone’s sympathy on an
ethical basis because the postings were crude at best
...
The
judge, striking an appropriate balance, said there’s no right to
defame and damage others under a cloak of anonymity
...


196

here come the judges (and lawyers)

j uri s d i ct i o n
If I call the judges of the High Court of Australia some of the
most obtuse people on the planet, do I need to cancel my next
trip Down Under? Possibly, because one or more of them may
decide that I have defamed them by offering such an opinion
...
S
...
S
...
Astonishingly, the High Court agreed
...

To say that defamation occurs where something has been read,
as opposed to where it was posted, is an invitation to forumshopping—and abuse by plaintiffs
...

In 1994, the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton
hauled the owners of a Milpitas, California, adult-oriented computer bulletin board to the heart of the Bible Belt and prosecuted them on obscenity charges
...
The owners of the online service were convicted and sentenced to prison terms
...


197

we the media
Now we have to ask if the most repressive nation could set
our standards
...
Yahoo! got a U
...
court to say the
order was invalid, but in the end the online service shut down its
European auction sites altogether—a business decision, the company said
...
That’s absurd
...

Does that sound paranoid? It’s not, because dictators have
already recognized the usefulness of restrictive laws to stifle or
silence critics
...
He was acquitted
and deported, but at serious financial cost to his publication and
to the practice of professional journalism in a nation that needs
more, not less, serious reporting
...
The alternative is an
increasingly balkanized Internet
...
What an American would then see on a given web site
would not be what a person from France sees even when both
type in the same web address
...

First, is such zoning an altogether bad idea on a multicultural
planet? After all, newspapers such as The New York Times and
The Wall Street Journal have national and international editions
...

Second, is zoning simply inevitable? I hope not
...


e mai l and f re e s p e e c h
Intel Corp
...
Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi, the company argued, was trespassing on its computer servers
...
The court’s decision, by only a 4-3 margin, will have
important free-speech implications
...
The ruling did not endorse what he did, but said that Intel
couldn’t use inappropriate laws to keep out Hamidi’s speech
...
But this case
was never about spam, and Intel had technical ways to handle
Hamidi’s missives without resorting to a legal position that
veered into an attack on speech itself
...
“He no more invaded Intel’s property than does a protester holding a sign or shouting through a
bullhorn outside corporate headquarters, posting a letter
through the mail, or telephoning to complain of a corporate
practice,” wrote Justice Kathryn Werdegar in the majority
opinion
...
What
mattered, in the end, was that the court majority couldn’t be
persuaded that Hamidi was doing any real harm beyond what
was protected by free speech
...
Yet cheating is rampant in our society
...
Corporations see cheating as a business tactic
...
The
current attitude toward cheating seems to be: “What’s acceptable is what you can get away with
...

The infamous Jayson Blair, formerly of The New York Times,
lied and plagiarized his way to fame, then ruin
...

A culture of cut-and-paste is made to order for the Net,
where an almost-anything-goes attitude prevails
...
But when people
routinely pass off the work of others as their own, it goes too
far
...
But
web journalists have done it, too
...
In 2002, popular blogger Sean-Paul Kelley publicly apologized for lifting Iraq
war–related material from other sources
...

Even so, his credibility took a hit, at least temporarily
...
Search tools such as Google, and more targeted tools for educators such as the “Turnitin” software275
(which compare student papers to a vast database of published
writings on and off the Web), have been effective
...
But ethical behavior and the law say roughly the following: if you use
someone’s work, even a small amount, you should give him
credit, and you can’t legally copy more than what’s acceptable
in a “fair use” context; that is, a short quotation
...

Wendy Selzer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), urges caution in comparing copyright
infringement and plagiarism in the first place
...
Quoting a
large portion of “the heart” of a copyrighted work with attribution might be ethically OK but legally infringing; and vice
versa, taking a short quote without attribution might be fair use
but ethically questionable
...
”

We may never be able to precisely define fairness, but we all
know what cheating is
...


co p yri gh t s a n d w r o n g s
One of most pernicious trends in recent times has been the
application of property rights to almost all things digital
...

One is trademarks: the words, phrases, logos, and other
things that help define a brand
...

201

we the media
According to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse,276 an organization sponsored by the EFF and some prominent law schools,
including Harvard and Stanford, trademark complaints are
fairly common today
...
U
...
law bans
“bad faith intent to profit” from such activities
...

It’s hard to object when a trademark holder wants to stop
someone from trying to piggyback on its brand
...
com domain, which had been registered by a third party
...
com,” an online attack on my newspaper,
the San Jose Mercury News, and its contents
...
For the
same reason, we’d most likely be laughed out of the U
...
courts
if we sued to take away the domain
...
It might order the domain-name registrars to
hand the offending web address over to us because WIPO’s mission is not about freedom of expression
...

WIPO, despite claims of neutrality in its arbitration process, has shown a strong bias toward handing over disputed
domains to the holders of trademarks
...


202

here come the judges (and lawyers)
Some of WIPO’s decisions have stretched logic, to put it
mildly
...
com” monikers be turned over to the trademark-holding
companies that complained
...
com, the case examiner noted the growth of web sites used
in this way and wonders if such a domain name is “plainly disassociated” from the company that’s complaining about the use of
its name in this way
...
Adoption of it in the
Domain Name is inherently likely to lead some people to
believe that the Complainant is connected with it
...
279

Confused? I suspect that the average 10-year-old could tell the
difference
...
But decisions like these are not just illogical; they’re hostile to concepts that are just as deserving of protection as property rights—freedom of speech, for one
...


Sometimes a site will imitate the entire look and feel of another,
and then try to use it for commercial gain
...
But when the purpose is satire, the situation is hazier
...
280
Since the Times wasn’t running column corrections—under an
evolving policy, it was leaving them to the writers to include
them (or not) in their columns—the fake page was filling what
the National Debate’s author, Robert Cox, perceived as a hole
in the Paper of Record’s content
...

The satiric content, while biting, was a useful exercise in media
watchdogging
...

The Act allows copyright holders to tell Internet service providers that copyrighted works are being infringed, and the ISP
must take down the allegedly offending pages unless the owner
of that site says he’ll fight in court (more on the DMCA in
Chapter 11)
...

The result of the threats was predictable
...
So
the National Debate had more readers than ever, and the Times
looked like a heavy, hardly the response the newspaper might
have envisioned
...
And the Times ultimately changed its internal
policy for dealing with a columnist’s factual errors by requiring
columnists to put corrections in subsequent columns
...
Publish a page
and anyone can link to it, right? Well, not always
...
I would be very unlikely to
link to a site I considered harmful, such as a site advocating violence
...
Where we draw the line on such matters tends to be a
personal and professional decision
...

But that assumes I’m allowed to make the link
...
In 1997, Ticketmaster, the event-ticketing company, sued Microsoft because
Microsoft’s city-guide company was linking deep into the Ticketmaster site, straight to the page describing the event, rather
than routing people through Ticketmaster’s virtual front door
(the homepage)
...

What made the case strange was Ticketmaster’s unwillingness to use technology better; it’s not difficult to block someone
from deep-linking into a site
...
Of
course, this begged a question: why was Ticketmaster unhappy
at having business directed its way? Ticketmaster’s explanation
that it had a right to control access by insisting all visitors start
from their front page never washed with me
...
Reimerdes, and it takes some explaining
...
The standard was developed to prevent
205

we the media
people from playing DVDs on devices that hadn’t been authorized for playing them
...
The
software encryption code used to keep the files from being
cracked was called CSS, which stood for Content Scrambling
System
...

Johansen said he wanted to play his DVDs on computers running the Linux operating system, for which there were no authorized DVD players
...
The studios panicked because their absolute control over DVD playback had been compromised
...
Johansen was
charged with violating copyright law and was acquitted by a
Norwegian court
...
He was acquitted again
...
By posting the DeCSS code on the 2600 web site,
and by linking to other sites containing the code, the movie
companies said Eric Corley, the magazine’s editor, was violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for making technology that could be used to circumvent copyright protections
available to others
...

In a series of rulings starting in 2000, a trial court in New
York, and later the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, upheld the
notion that while code is speech entitled to First Amendment
protection, “functional” code has a second-class status, and
therefore can be banned because of unlawful uses it might
enable, even if there are lawful uses
...


206

here come the judges (and lawyers)
They’ve posted it in the haiku form of poetry and a variety of
other formats that, no doubt, could be ruled illegal but which
demonstrate the essential illogic of the ruling
...

Second, and even more alarming, the courts agreed that
even linking to the offending code—that is, posting a hyperlink
to a web page containing the code, even one outside U
...
jurisdiction, was also violating the law
...
283
The potential stifling effect of this ruling is obvious should
copyright holders choose to pursue it
...
Was I a more “legitimate” journalist than
Corley? The court effectively made that distinction, but it was a
frightening one
...
I can
imagine that there will be a lot of litigation over the intent of
the press, and a lot [of] reporters in court
...
But the potential remains, with another danger
lurking
...
We are creating a division that

207

we the media
a) doesn’t exist and b) should chill all so-called “legitimate”
journalists
...
His lawyers, including attorneys from the EFF,
pointed out that, given the widespread dissemination of the
code, it was hardly a trade secret anymore
...
285
Score one for common sense
...
It goes to the heart of the Internet and technology
...


208

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

The Empires Strike Back

The promise was freedom
...

The Internet, some of us believed early on, would be a
largely unregulated sphere where boundaries would not
matter—where, for good and bad, individual freedom would be
the paramount condition
...
So early Netizens can be forgiven for assuming that different rules applied because, for a time, they did
...
The Internet—
the first many-to-many medium—was going to liberate us from
the tyranny of centralized media and the rancid consumerism
that says we are merely receptacles for what Big Business,
including Big Media, wants us to buy
...
Consumers would become true customers
...

But the clampdown has begun
...

They include the usual suspects, namely government, big
telecommunications companies, and what I call the copyright
cartel of entertainment companies
...

209

we the media
Could these increasing restrictions impinge on grassroots
journalism? They could indeed, and we will have to fight to
keep our freedoms
...

What follows is a description of the most serious threats,
and what we might do, individually and collectively, to counter
them
...
For example, several times during 2003, the government of China flipped a
switch, figuratively speaking, and indiscriminately turned off
access to thousands of weblogs
...
com
(a leading blog-hosting site) from being read by web users inside
the country
...
Saudi
Arabia has pervasive controls, according to a study by Jonathan
Zittrain and Ben Edelman of the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard Law School
...
Nor is filtering the only infringement
...
287
210

the empires strike back
Truly free access to information—the word “free” is used
here in the context of “freedom,” not cost—implies an ability to
send and receive information without being tracked
...
288
Under the Web’s original architecture there was no way for
anyone to know you’d visited a web site or what you’d done
there
...
Stanford law
professor Lawrence Lessig, concerned about the privacy implication of cookies, said that rather than naming the technology
something “sweet and happy like ‘cookies,’” they should have
named it what it was: “Network Spy
...
But like all
such technologies, they have their good points
...

Without cookies, my personalized Yahoo! page would not exist
...
Site developers, meanwhile,
found them invaluable for marketing and ease-of-use purposes
...

Cookies become a more serious privacy problem when you
consider a real-world situation
...
(Hidden cameras, becoming more ubiquitous, may change this equation
...
As a result, people’s private data has become a commodity to be bartered to the highest bidder, or to anyone
wielding a subpoena
...
Lessig related the time he set up a Morpheus peer-to-peer server so people could freely download
copies of his lectures
...

Fearing the wrath of the entertainment industry, the administrators had assumed illegal acts because of the presence of the technology, even though they were actually thwarting an entirely
legal use of the software
...

Spam blacklists run by volunteer organizations have been
adopted widely, causing the mail of innocent users—who
happen to be using an Internet service provider that also has a
spammer using the same system—to disappear into a black hole
...
But it’s a disturbing trend when good intentions
lead to the widespread blocking of content that is objectionable
only to a narrow subset of those who’d receive it
...
The inevitable result will be Internet
zoning
...


t h e co p yri g h t c a r t e l
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power
to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing
for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to
their respective writings and discoveries
...
) But, it’s safe to
say that today’s situation has perverted the Founders’ intent, and
it looks as though the situation could get much worse
...
Originally intended as a bargain between creators and the rest of us, it has become an instrument of harsh,
absolute control
...

By law and tradition, copyright laws gave rights to users of
a copyrighted work, not just to the work’s creator
...
This is the notion of “fair use”—to use a small portion of another’s work as part of a new work
...
But the
forces of control have moved the line
...

But the whole point of fair use is to define a zone of use that
copyright holders don’t specifically authorize, and may even
oppose, but which is legal anyway
...
The
author’s skittish publisher, fearing lawsuits from copyright
holders even though use of such quotes would plainly have
fallen under fair-use guidelines, decided it wasn’t worth the
trouble to get permission; hence, the book was published
without all the lyrics she wanted to use
...
We’ll come back to this crucial point later in
this chapter
...
“Limited times” were first defined as 14 years but have been
progressively extended by Congress at the behest of copyright
holders such as Disney
...
By amazing
coincidence, copyright terms seem to get extended every time
Mickey Mouse comes close to entering the public domain,
which means that nothing is going into the public domain anymore
...

They’re stealing from our common heritage in order to protect a
few valuable works
...

If the rules and enforcement regimes that apply today had
been applied in the 1930s, Walt Disney might never have been
able to create Mickey Mouse, which was a derivative work
based on other people’s creations
...
But his work had entered the public domain,
and new art was the result
...


e ye o f t h e be h o l d e r
There are many ironies in the current copyright debate
...
But it’s also a shame to see an industry that has
fought so honorably to maintain First Amendment protections,
without which it could not itself survive, now leading a charge
that threatens other people’s speech
...
And the people whose businesses are threatened
always try to stop progress
...
“The Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they
had one hundred percent control over who could get into the
theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had zero
percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and
tune into a recording of them performing,” he told me
...

It wasn’t the only time
...

Only by the narrowest margin in the Supreme Court, in a crucial 1984 decision, did Americans preserve the right to tape a
TV show and play it back later
...
After all, a digital
copy of something doesn’t degrade the way analog copies, such
as a copy of a videotape, do in just a couple of generations
...

But the industry has cleverly, though wrongly, framed the
argument as “stealing” versus “property rights
...
Ideas are different than physical
property, and they have been treated distinctly through our history
...
If I have a copy of your
song, you still have the song
...
But there has always been some infringement, and
copyright holders have lived with it as part of their overall bargain with society
...
They had the ear of Congress—largely a result of large campaign donations plus a bias
toward property rights over all other rights—and in 1998, they
persuaded federal lawmakers to pass the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that was said to bring copyright
policy into the digital age and that respected the rights of users
and producers
...
293 It
tipped the balance toward copyright holders far beyond anything they’d enjoyed before
...
It’s even forbidden to tell people how they
can do such things, as Jon Johansen, the Norwegian hacker of
DVD encryption code, and Eric Corley, the publisher who dared
post it, discovered to their dismay
...
Scholars have faced
legal threats for publishing research about the weak security
protections the entertainment companies have used on their
material
...
295
A printer company has used the DMCA to sue the maker of an
inexpensive replacement cartridge
...


ch arm and t o u g h n e s s
No one could sum up the issue from the entertainment
industry’s perspective better than Jack Valenti, longtime head of
216

the empires strike back
the Motion Picture Association of America and point man for
the copyright lobby
...

According to Valenti, everything flows from the principle that
Hollywood wants to make its customers happy, and the Internet
could be one of the greatest vehicles for making people happy
...
”
It sounded so, well, reasonable
...
And he was adamant that
technology in the future—including personal computers—will
have to be modified to prevent people from making unauthorized copies
...
In each case,
negotiations with technology and consumer-electronics companies will have to produce a mutually agreeable result, he said
...
This was the “broadcast flag”297—
the practice of marking digitally broadcast material to prevent
unauthorized copying
...
Of course, even the
right to copy at home is merely a rule, and you can be sure the
entertainment companies will try to circumscribe even this level
of customer freedom
...

217

we the media
The next problem Valenti identified was what the entertainment companies call the “analog hole
...
Machines translate
digital content into what our eyes and ears see and hear as video
and audio
...
The industry is
looking for technology—and laws—to make it impossible and
illegal to do this
...
The movie industry watched what happened in the
music business and got scared
...

The entertainment companies are now demanding that technology companies restrict the capabilities of devices at the
outset
...
The
Broadcast Flag is one such step in a dangerous direction
...
In 2002, a California congressman
proposed legislation that would legalize this corporate intrusion; so far, thankfully, it hasn’t gone very far
...

Here’s an example: it is currently illegal to copy a snippet of
video directly from a DVD to use as part of another work
...
If we need permission or have to
pay, simply to quote from other works, scholarship will be only
one casualty
...
The only possible way for entertainment companies to
enforce their copyrights will be to track what individuals purchase and how they use it
...
Anyone with a sense of history should fear such a system
...

For example, if every amateur journalist had to ask permission
before quoting from a copyrighted work or was forced to pay
for each quotation, most wouldn’t bother
...

Sadly, it isn’t just the movie and music companies that are
taking this stance
...
They are supporting
a system that mocks the First Amendment, on which they rely
for their very existence; publishing, after all, is built on a foundation of free speech
...
301
Then again, intellectual consistency rarely survives financial
threats, perceived or real
...

Publishers are worrying more about the effect illegal distribution might have on the bottom line than they are considering the
incredible possibilities in exploiting (in the best sense of the
word) the potential
...

219

we the media
Here’s one more way the entertainment industry’s goals
could put a severe crimp on tomorrow’s journalism
...
Internet service providers charge based
on the amount of traffic your site receives and the amount of
bandwidth it takes to serve your content to the people who
want to see it
...

Now remember that the entertainment industry hates peerto-peer technology because it doesn’t control it
...
The entertainment industry has
also launched a platoon of lobbyists to persuade Congress and
regulators to put the clamps on other peer-to-peer technologies,
and it’s going after people who use them
...
Even if all it accomplishes is to force peer-to-peer services to individually track what is sent and where, it will send a
chill over the kind of grassroots journalism that has been so
vital to freedom in authoritarian nations
...


t h e t e ch i nd u s t r y s e l l o u t
A few years ago, policy watchers talked about the war being
waged between copyright protection and innovation
...
The news from the front is
220

the empires strike back
not good for the people who depend on technology to produce
tomorrow’s news
...
Intel, the giant
maker of computer chips, has its fingers all over the Broadcast
Flag technology that the FCC has mandated
...
It did so during the
DVD negotiations years earlier, when Hollywood demanded a
Content Scrambling System that led to severely restricted uses
for DVDs—a system that an Intel insider later acknowledged
had caused PC users real problems
...
Here’s how Cory Doctorow
put it:
When Microsoft shipped its first search-engine (which makes
a copy of every page it searches), it violated the letter of copyright law
...

When Microsoft shipped its first CD-ripping technology, it
broke copyright law
...

Copyright law changes all the time to reflect the new tools
that companies like Microsoft invent
...
Microsoft has
shown its willingness to go head-to-head with antitrust people
to defend its bottom line: next to them, the copyright courts
and lawmakers are pantywaists, Microsoft could eat those
guys for lunch, exactly the way Sony kicked their asses in
1984 when they defended their right to build and sell VCRs,
even though some people might do bad things with them
...
303
221

we the media
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s answer has been to build Digital
Rights Management—the more appropriate term is “Digital
Restrictions Management”—into just about everything it makes
...
You might be allowed to view something on multiple devices, or just one
...
You might not be able to print
a text document, and so on
...
The mantra of DRM-believers is that
they are enhancing security and protecting intellectual property
...

Even Apple has jumped aboard the DRM train, though not
with the same zeal Microsoft has shown
...
The
DRM scheme, instituted because the music industry demanded
it, gives Apple users more freedom to copy songs among different devices than we saw in prior DRM schemes
...
An iTunes Music Store customer can listen
to the songs on five computers, but managing authorizations
can be a hassle
...
304

Microsoft, Intel, and several other major technology companies
are now working on a “Trusted Computing” initiative, putatively designed to prevent viruses and worms from taking hold
of people’s PCs and to keep documents secure from prying eyes
...
The premise of these systems is not trust; it’s mistrust
...
”
He went on:
222

the empires strike back
[Trusted Computing] provides a computing platform on
which you can’t tamper with the application software, and
where these applications can communicate securely with their
authors and with each other
...
The music industry will be able to
sell you music downloads that you won’t be able to swap
...
All sorts of new
marketing possibilities will open up
...
Anderson wrote:
The potential for abuse extends far beyond commercial bullying and economic warfare into political censorship
...
First, some well-intentioned police force will get an order against a pornographic
picture of a child, or a manual on how to sabotage railroad
signals
...
Then a litigant in a libel or copyright
case will get a civil court order against an offending document; perhaps the Scientologists will seek to blacklist the
famous Fishman Affidavit
...
In the West, a court might use a confiscation doctrine to
“blackhole” a machine that had been used to make a pornographic picture of a child
...
305

The Trusted Computing moves bring to mind a conversation in early 2000 with Andy Grove, longtime chief executive at
Intel and one of the real pioneers in the tech industry
...
If trends continued, I suggested, he’d someday need Hollywood’s permission
...
Several years later, amid the copyright
industry’s increasing clampdown and Intel’s unfortunate leadership in helping the copyright holders lock everything down, I
asked him if I’d really been all that paranoid
...


t h e e nd o f e n d - t o - e n d ?
A key design goal of the original Internet was called the “endto-end principle
...
In other
words, use the network to get the zeros and ones back and forth
with as little interference as possible, and let people using PCs,
servers, and other devices do everything else
...
Reed, one of the people credited with the notion, described it
this way:
Communications systems should not implement functions that
can be implemented by their users
...

It’s been the experience in the Internet design community
that many functions that are thought to be “network” functions or capabilities are possible to implement in the form of
protocols among users or user applications
...

Similarly, when you are forced to think about problems
such as spam in an end-to-end way, you start to realize that

224

the empires strike back
the problem with spam cannot be solved in the “network”—
instead it is a problem among users of the network, and must
be solved there
...
The network
cannot understand the details of our individual desires; the
end-to-end principle says it should not even try
...


In a world where we may end up with one, two, or at most
three broadband telecommunications providers in any given
community, the end-to-end principle is in serious jeopardy
...
The attempt failed
...
Such a regime would have been a
disaster for the unimpeded flow of information
...
Unfortunately, today’s regulatory and political power brokers lean in the wrong direction
...
Otherwise, they threatened, they
wouldn’t provide broadband data connections to U
...
households
...
The FCC gave U
...

regional phone companies the right to control access to any new
high-speed data pipes they built, even though they were told
they had to keep sharing, for the time being, their copper lines
...
307
The cable and phone companies have shown again and
again that they abuse their power
...
But they used to be regulated monopolies
...

The big telecom carriers, which have been too slow to actually build out their own broadband infrastructures, don’t like it
when others use their tactics
...
Unsurprisingly,
the phone and cable companies have been lobbying state legislatures to forbid this practice, and in several states it’s now illegal
for municipalities to be Internet service providers
...
S
...
I doubt they’d dare to stamp out
speech they don’t like
...

Cisco Systems, the company that sells the equipment used to
direct Internet traffic around the Internet, is happily offering
telecommunications companies the tools to create these walled
gardens
...

According to Amnesty International, the technology is used to
firewall their citizens from certain content
...
308
226

the empires strike back
Even without overt discrimination, market power distorts
choices
...
Yahoo! content
receives preferred placement on subscribers’ homepages
...

“It’s not an on-off thing,” Yale Braunstein, professor in the
School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley, told me
...
”
News-article text will always be a relatively quick download
...

This is why Walt Disney Co
...
309 Disney’s co-signers included Microsoft and several
public-interest groups that are normally not on the side of either
of those companies
...

The cable-TV industry responded to the letter by noting,
accurately, that Microsoft was hypocritical to be decrying the
kind of anti-competitive tactics for which it had become notorious over the years
...

At the moment, the cable giants have an even greater incentive to rig their systems than SBC does
...
Comcast, now by far the biggest
American cable operator, has many ownership interests in
content
...
If you replace ownership with exclusive
contracts such as SBC’s deal with Yahoo!, you’ve achieved the
same result
...
The threat is still more theoretical than real, at
least in the United States
...

Of course, the mass media, buried in a conflict of interest, is
also ignoring the current threat posed by growing ownership
concentration
...
The TV network news shows all but ignored their corporate parents’ lobbying to extend media consolidation while the rules were
pending
...
The answer is to separate content from delivery in such concentrated markets
...
But if you can’t
find it, or if there are artificial barriers to seeing content on it,
diversity means nothing
...
She, the head of a technology company, then declared
an oath of fealty to the copyright industry
...
Fiorina vowed that HP will use every method at
its disposal to help copyright holders block unauthorized use of
their content
...

Well, here’s my oath: the HP laptop I bought a couple of
months ago is the last product I’ll buy from the company until it
228

the empires strike back
remembers some of the other principles of its founding and success, such as customer empowerment
...
The
problem is that the Microsofts and Intels and HPs think first of
their customers in the entertainment industry, and second of
their customers in the real world
...
How? Here are three things anyone can and
should do:
•

Write and call your elected officials, not just in Washington
but also in state capitals, because Hollywood and its allies are
working at all levels of government to control information
...
The
Electronic Frontier Foundation311 is just one of many that
hire lawyers and lobbyists to counter the armies of professionals doing the copyright industry’s bidding
...


•

Use your power as a customer
...
When you attend a
concert of an independent artist, buy her CD there
...


Hackers are coming to the rescue in some respects
...

Technologists are now building “overlay networks”—systems of running encrypted (scrambled) and anonymized data
over other networks and then making the data look like normal
communications
...
But the positive impact would be real, too
...
If all
229

we the media
traffic is indistinguishable, notes Doctorow, then the only
answer is to pull the plug and shut everything down
...
This book, for example,
is being published under a Creative Commons license that permits people to download it freely from the Internet, but not to
sell it (more on this in Chapter 12)
...
313 Maybe it should be a buildout of networks using fiber and wireless technologies
...

We could also build fiber-optic lines (or systems combining
fiber and wireless) to everyone, filling in the “last mile”—connecting our homes to the high-speed “backbone” lines linking
geographic regions—that has been so underserved
...

At the very least, we must have rules—and yes, that means
hard-nosed regulation and enforcement—ensuring that the cable
and phone companies cannot discriminate against any content
...
Why? Because
230

the empires strike back
the FCC may truly be moving toward a rational policy on how
to regulate—or, in this case, deregulate—the airwaves
...
Since the
1930s, the United States has licensed specific parts of the spectrum—the airwaves that carry radio, TV, cellular calls, police
and emergency communications, and more—to government
agencies and private companies, based on the principle that
spectrum was scarce and we had to apportion a dwindling
resource
...
They say, persuasively, that spectrum is essentially limitless if we use it right—that is, with
modern radios and transmitting devices that make yesterday’s
interference problems go away
...
What he
said in a speech in 2003 shows that he grasps the spectrum issue
and the opportunity it may present to spur genuine competition
in broadband
...
“I believe the commission should continuously examine whether there are market or
technological solutions that can—in the long run—replace or
supplement pure regulatory solutions to interference
...

There’s plenty of evidence that innovation would explode if
the FCC frees up more unlicensed spectrum
...
Or maybe, as I’ll discuss shortly, the spectrum is even more open for innovation
than most people suspect
...
Even as they
hold their noses and support the cable/phone broadband
duopoly in the short term, they’re also pushing for the emergence of competition from other sources including innovative
new wireless technologies
...

If the FCC does the right thing with spectrum, while local
governments deploy lots of fiber, the phone and cable companies can have their wires because then the monopolists won’t
have the power to abuse what they own, not when competition
has arrived to provide an alternative
...


t h e e nd o f s c a r c i t y ?
What if the scarcity of the airwaves turns out to be an artifact of
history and outmoded technology? If scarcity can be overcome,
the implications are both exciting and disruptive—we will see a
cornucopia of communications that foreshadows woes and
opportunities for some of our biggest telecommunications companies
...
Reed told me that the FCC’s fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete
...
He holds a Ph
...

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he
taught computer science and headed the Laboratory for Computer Science’s Computer Systems Structure Group
...
He’s been involved in the technical details of the Internet
for several decades, and lately has been a consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher
...

The current regulatory regime that allocates spectrum “is a
legal metaphor that does not correspond to physical reality,” he
told me
...
“Radio waves pass
through each other,” Reed said
...
”
In the early days of radio, the equipment could easily be
confused by overlapping signals
...

The second way that reality defies the old logic is what happens when you add wireless devices to networks
...

“In principle, the capacity of a certain bandwidth in a certain physical space increases with the number of transceivers in
a given space,” he said
...
317
Yes, he said, this is counter-intuitive
...

But if he and others in his camp are right, we have a lot of
work ahead to fix a hopelessly broken regulatory system
...
At the same time, the consequences for some of the most
powerful companies in our economy may be grim because they
are based on economic scarcity
...


233

we the media
Reed wants the FCC to open up some spectrum for the new,
more open wireless networks, giving entrepreneurs a new public
space in which to innovate and create value for the rest of us
...

Software is a key, perhaps the key, to the future Reed envisions
...

To get the full multiplier effect, he said, we need devices
with fairly generic but powerful hardware components
...
The military has been using
these devices, called “agile radio,” for some time; civilian availability is getting closer as costs come down
...
I’m talking about free
speech
...
That regulation took an ugly turn in the spring of
2004 as the FCC, egged on by an election-year Congress,
slammed huge fines on broadcasters in what was surely the most
direct attack in years on free speech
...
If that is not true, there’s no reason to regulate speech
in this way
...


234

the empires strike back
The worst direction for the FCC to move right now, Reed
said, is to keep giving or auctioning spectrum to “monopoly
owners” that won’t use it efficiently
...

“We need to do for spectrum,” he said, “what the Internet
did for the network
...
Yet sometimes we are transformed, and media can be
at the center of how we see these changes
...
None, for our purposes, matters more
than perspective
...
Boccaccio’s Decameron, published in 1353, was among the
earliest works of literature to propose that a point of view was
crucial to understanding
...
The Vatican’s monks,
who controlled publishing, were helpless with the onslaught of
this new technology
...

The Internet is the most important medium since the
printing press
...
When anyone can
be a writer, in the largest sense and for a global audience, many
of us will be
...
But we have to try, and

236

making our own news
nowhere is that more essential than in that oldest form of information: the news
...

Blogs and other modern media are feedback systems
...
On the Internet, we are defined by what we know
and share
...


My goal in this book has been to persuade you that the collision of journalism and technology is having major consequences for three constituencies: journalists, newsmakers, and
the audience
...

Journalists are beginning to get it
...
No longer
...

However, I’m still not convinced that Big Media is doing
the most important thing: listening
...
I see progress, but not enough
...
Nor have they used the tools that would help them deal
with the public, including the news media, more effectively
...
A few politicians have tapped the power of
the grassroots, and more are doing it all the time
...
They’ve grasped the dangers, such as the fact that everyone can have a very public say
about what newsmakers do; it’s hard to keep secrets and harder
237

we the media
to stonewall effectively
...

Yet I’m most gratified at how the “former audience,” as I
call it, has taken these tools and turned its endless ideas into
such unexpected, and in some cases superb, forms of journalism
...
We’ll be wrestling with
these issues for decades, but I’m confident that the community,
with the assistance of professional journalists and others who
care, can sort it all out
...
The Net should be the ally of thought and nuance, not a
booster shot for knee-jerk reaction
...
It must demand more, and
be part of the larger conversation
...

Sometimes, I fear that it won’t be allowed to occur
...
These tools have roots in networks that
encourage innovation
...
Yet the forces of central control—
governments and big businesses, especially the copyright cartel—
are pushing harder and harder to clamp down on our networks
...
The danger in this is massive, but the public remains
all too oblivious, in part because Big Media has failed to cover the
story properly
...

I’ve no doubt that technology will eventually win because it
is becoming more and more ubiquitous
...


238

making our own news

a cre at i ve com m o n s
More than once during this project, I’ve been asked if my passion for openness includes the contents of this book
...

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, some people believe I
am against copyright
...
I believe it should be a sensible bargain that gives
creators of new works the fruits of their labor, while providing
society with the more important fruits of a robust debate, the
ability to innovate and create new works based on old ones, and,
ultimately, the benefits of the public domain itself
...
I loathe its abuse
...
Equally luckily, I
have a publisher that gets the point and is willing to be part of
an exercise most other publishers would flatly reject
...
You’ve seen the standard copyright notice,
which says, “All Rights Reserved
...
”318
So here’s what my publisher and I have done with this
book
...
As noted in Chapter 11, the current
copyright term is the life of the author plus 75 years, an outrageously long period that doesn’t give authors any serious additional incentives even as it denudes our vital public domain
...
Free in this case does not
mean the right to reprint it for resale
...
Naturally, I’d
prefer that you buy it
...
But even if we’re wrong and suffer financially because
of it, we’re willing to take the chance
...
First, I believe in copyright and want to support it—but in the right way
...
Locking down heritage means locking out vital
innovation, and I don’t want to be one of the people who turns
reasonable protections into absolute control
...

Consider what happened with Lawrence Lessig’s latest, which
he and his publisher put under a Creative Commons license
...
Someone else
turned it into a Wiki
...
We’ll have a web site, of course, but I’m hoping that’s just
the beginning
...
Every day, it seems,
there’s been a new web site or news event that shows how
quickly the shift is occurring
...
This is one reason why we’re creating a living, breathing web site (http://wethemedia
...
com)
that keeps a close eye on the changes, with constant updates
about innovative new tools and major events
...

This may be the end of the book, but the conversation continues—and it’s as much about your interests as mine
...
Most of all, I hope I’ve persuaded you to take
up the challenge yourself
...
Now, if you have something worth
saying, you can be heard
...
We all can
...


241

Epilogue and Acknowledgments

On the afternoon of March 10, 2004, I posted a draft of the
Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book on my weblog
...
I also asked whether I’d missed any crucial topics, or whether they knew of some perfect anecdote that absolutely had to be included
...
One of the first emails alerted me to an
incorrect web address, which I fixed immediately
...

Others suggested I amplify certain points, or asked why I
discussed a particular topic, or that I slow down the narrative
...

The ideas I’ve been discussing in We the Media became integral to the reporting and writing of the book itself
...
But I can say now,
without any fear of contradiction, that this process has worked
...


o ut l i ne and i d e a s
My version of open source journalism got off to a rocky start
...
My inbox overflowed
...
I’d moved all the suggestions into
a separate folder in my mailbox, but several months later, when
I looked for them, they were gone
...
Disappeared
...
Either way, I was horrified; I’d not only lost some of the
excellent ideas, but I also hadn’t thanked everyone who made a
suggestion
...

I was able to reconstruct some of the messages from an
older backup and some saved replies I’d sent
...
Consider this my apology to all of you who are in
the latter category
...

One of the most thoughtful early notes was from Tom
Stites, an old friend, and an editor who once hired me and later
became one of my touchstones in journalism
...
I lead with this alarmist statement because as I understand what you’re describing only a
tiny elite engages with political/news blogs; democracy needs
a *tomorrow’s journalism* that reaches and activates a broad
audience
...

The sad truth is, most people are passive consumers of news
who, because of the insider jargon blogs tend to be written in,
couldn’t decipher most blogs even if they signed on; the segment of the citizenry that are savvy and proactive newsseekers is very small, and I don’t expect that to change much
...
I wish I had, too, because it would have simplified matters
...
In a blog posting of his own he concluded:
“Bloggers are not journalists, we are information seekers, information builders and knowledge makers
...
”319 Fair enough, I thought, but then
again, this book is about journalism, not the overall blogosphere
...

I received suggestions on books to read, people to interview, paths to follow
...
I’ve used it in presentations and in this book
...
When I saw relevant
news stories I pointed at them, and posted my own observations about these micro examples of macro trends
...


d raf t s and o t h e r p o s t i n g s
Before embarking on this project, I chatted with David Weinberger
...
He’d done it in an entirely open way by
posting chapter drafts on which his audience could comment
...
Weinberger
was, in effect, posting nightly builds of his book
...

“Don’t do that,” he warned me
...
Posting chapter drafts was a fine idea, he thought,
but not every single change he was making
...

245

we the media
A couple of days after posting drafts of the Introduction
and Chapter 1 of my book, an email arrived from Stephen B
...

“If you’re interested,” he wrote, “I made the effort to comment
...
322
Waters hadn’t just made an effort
...
In his summary at the end, he wrote: “The time is right
...
But your book deserves to be better than this
...
I called him up
...
He’s a computer
geek who came back to his family’s newspaper business
...
He loves the blogosphere and what it can do
...
Waters took his virtual blue
pencil to every chapter I posted
...

I also heard from some people whose work I’d mentioned in
the book
...
This was
exactly what I’d hoped for, and I was thrilled with the result
...
But are there fewer errors than there might
have been? Unquestionably
...

My experience was, in a sense, a test of the next version of
journalism
...

I believe it can work for almost anyone
...
Because I lost some mail, as noted earlier, I can’t thank
everyone individually
...
) But those whose messages I didn’t lose (including several who offered only pseudonyms) include: Paul Andrews, Nick Arnett, Alfredo Ascanio,
Jerry Asher, Kevin Aylward, Phil Baker, Alessio Balbi, Peter
Basofin, Bill Baur, Morten Bay, Andrew Beach, Michael Bean,
Tim Bishop, Charles Brownstein, Buzz Bruggeman, C
...
Bryan
III, Scott Burki, Kevin Burton, Brian W
...
O’Brien, Mike Owens,
Evan Orensky, Andrew Orlowski, Olav A Øvrebø, Nigel Parry,
Angela Penny, Ralph Poole, Matt Prescott, J
...
Rangaswami,
Wayne Rasanen, Celia Redmore, William Riski, Cormac Russell, Jason Salzman, Rob Salzman, Gary D
...
Scott, Linda Seebach, Bill Seitz, Ben Silverman, Some
Random Humanoid, Kathleen Spracklen, Steve Stroh, Glenn
Thomas, Fons Tuinstra, Manolis Tzagarakis, Mike Banks Valentine, Ed Vielmetti, Taylor Walsh, Jonathan Weaver, Joshua
Weinberg, Dan Weintraub, Alex Williams, Phil Wolff, Jay
Woods, Jim Zellmer and Ethan Zuckerman
...
I tend
to learn more (or at least as much) from people who think I’m
wrong than people who think I’m right, and when they offer
reasons I pay close attention, even if we continue to disagree
...

So many people were generous with their time
...
) Among
the people who have helped me understand this process,
through conversations, formal interviews, and/or correspondence, are: Marko Ahtisaari, Chris Allbritton, Chris Anderson,
Azeem Azhar, Jeff Bates, John Perry Barlow, Cameron Barrett,
Yochai Benkler, Krishna Bharat, Shayne Bowman, Wes Boyd,
Nick Bradbury, Yale Braunstein, Dan Bricklin, John Brockman,
Buzz Bruggeman, Thomas N
...
D
...
Marburger, John
Markoff, Kevin Marks, Cameron Marlow, Joshua Micah Marshall, Katinka Matson, Ross Mayfield, Brock Meeks, Nicco
Mele, Jerry Michalski, Bill Mitchell, Bryan Monroe, Craig Newmark, Chris Nolan, Andrew Odlyzko, Oh Yeon Ho, Steve
Outing, Ray Ozzie, John Paczkowski, Dale Peskin, Chris Pirillo, Lee Raine, Mitch Ratcliffe, David P
...
Waters,
David Weinberger, Mike Wendland, Kevin Werbach, Wil
Wheaton, Evan Williams, Chris Willis, Phil Windley, Dave
Winer, Leonard Witt, Zayed, Jim Zellmer, Jonathan Zittrain,
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, and several who chose to be anonymous
...

I interviewed some of these people first for columns that ran
in the San Jose Mercury News (some material from which
appears in this book) and at SiliconValley
...

If my good and talented colleagues thought I was crazy to try
this, they were kind enough not to say so
...

249

we the media
Thanks to Esther Dyson, Daphne Kis, Christina Koukkos
and their colleagues at Release 1
...
Some of the material from
that article is in this book
...
D
...
As noted,
Stephen Waters (the newspaper editor in New York state)
pushed me to work even harder
...

Howard Rheingold’s insights and encouragement have been
immeasurably helpful
...

Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly
Media, publisher of this book, constantly impresses me with his
rare combination of intellect and generosity of spirit
...
I struck out in New York despite the efforts
of a fine literary agency
...

Allen Noren, an editor at O’Reilly and accomplished author
in his own right, shepherded and edited this book
...
He constantly challenged me to make this a better book, and if it is, he deserves
much of the credit
...

Noriko Takiguchi is a never-ending well of calm and joy
...
She makes me sane
...


250

Web Site Directory

20six: http://www
...
co
...
50minutehour
...
activewords
...
allconsuming
...
kokogiak
...
amazon
...
html/102-2039287-6152169
American Journalism Review: http://www
...
org/
Back to Iraq: http://www
...
com/
Jack Balkin: http://balkin
...
com/
BBC iCan project: http://www
...
co
...
benkler
...
com/
Berkeley Intellectual Property Blog:
http://journalism
...
edu/projects/biplog/
BitTorrent: http://bitconjurer
...
blogads
...
blogger
...
bopnews
...
boingboing
...
boston-online
...
bushin30seconds
...
publicintegrity
...
chillingeffects
...
cluetrain
...
cjr
...
campaigndesk
...
command-post
...
cptech
...
creativecommons
...
curry
...
cyberjournalist
...
dailykos
...
deanforamerica
...
deandefense
...
deanspace
...
defenselink
...
democracynow
...
nickdenton
...
markme
...
drudgereport
...
earth911
...
edventure
...
eff
...
engadget
...
fair
...
fcc
...
bradsoft
...
asp
Feedster: http://www
...
com/
Fleshbot: http://www
...
com/
Free Software Foundation: http://www
...
org/
Gawker: http://www
...
com/
Dan Gillmor’s blog:
http://weblog
...
com/column/dangillmor/
Gizmodo: http://www
...
com/
GNU Project: http://www
...
org/
Go Skokie: http://goskokie
...
philgomes
...
googobits
...
google
...
google
...
google
...
groklaw
...
gulker
...
links
...
rexblog
...
blogspot
...
com/weblog/
Dennis Horgan: http://denishorgan
...
megnut
...
indymedia
...
interesting-people
...
ipoding
...
itconversations
...
ito
...
jrsummit
...
kataweb
...
orgnet
...
html
Kristof Responds:
http://forums
...
com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/
editorialsoped/opedcolumnists/kristofresponds/
Kuro5hin: http://www
...
org/
Lawrence Journal-World: http://www
...
com/
Ken Layne: http://www
...
com/
Sheila Lennon blog: http://www
...
com/blogs/shenews/
Lawrence Lessig: http://www
...
org/blog/
LiveJournal: http://www
...
com/
LockerGnome: http://www
...
com/
Donald Luskin: http://www
...
com/
Macromedia: http://www
...
com/mxna/index
...
net/
Janet “StrollerQueen” McLaughlin: http://www
...
com/
McSpotlight: http://www
...
org/
Meetup: http://www
...
com/
Melrose Mirror: http://toy-story
...
mit
...
thememoryhole
...
blogspot
...
msdn
...
msn
...
moreover
...
moveon
...
natterjackpr
...
my
...
com/rss/
254

web site directory
National Debate: http://www
...
com/
NetNewsWire: http://www
...
com/
News
...
news
...
newsisfree
...
newmediamusings
...
nytimes
...
rootnode
...
php?sid=26
Nieman Reports: http://www
...
harvard
...
contenu
...
com/
Online Journalism Review: http://www
...
org/
Ray Ozzie: http://www
...
net/blog/
Pacific News Service http://news
...
org/news/
Patterico: http://patterico
...
pets911
...
pewinternet
...
timporter
...
pjnet
...
reed
...
theregister
...
uk/
Alan Reiter’s wireless blog: http://reiter
...
com/
Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit): http://www
...
com/
John Robb: http://jrobb
...
org/
Jim Romenesko: http://poynter
...
nyu
...
salon
...
weblogs
...
weblogs
...
shirky
...
signonsandiego
...
media
...
edu/
Six Apart: http://www
...
com/
Slate Fraywatch: http://fray
...
msn
...
smartmobs
...
microsoft
...
socialtext
...
spokesmanreview
...
net/
Ernest Svenson: http://www
...
net/
Tom Standage site: http://www
...
com/
Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic: http://cyberlaw
...
edu/
Andrew Sullivan: http://www
...
com/
Syndic8: http://www
...
com/
Talking Points Memo: http://www
...
com/
Technorati: http://www
...
com/
Technorati Developers Center:
http://www
...
com/developers/index
...
nytimes
...
library
...
edu/tobacco/
Tron Project: http://tron
...
u-tokyo
...
jp/
Turnitin: http://www
...
com/
Jon Udell: http://weblog
...
com/udell/
Urban Legends: http://www
...
com/
UserLand Software: http://www
...
com/

256

web site directory
Siva Vaidhyanathan: http://www
...
edu/classes/siva/
Erich Von Hippel: http://web
...
edu/evhippel/www/cv
...
opinionjournal
...
washingtonpost
...
washingtonpost
...
hypergene
...
php
Weblogs Inc
...
weblogsinc
...
sacbee
...
oreilly
...
wilwheaton
...
com/cgi/wiki/
WikiTravel: http://www
...
org/
Phil Windley: http://www
...
com/
Dave Winer’s Scripting News: http://www
...
com/
Wonkette: http://www
...
com/
WordPirates: http://www
...
com/
World Intellectual Property Organization: http://www
...
org/
Yahoo Groups: http://groups
...
com/

257

Notes

introduction
1
...
edventure
...
cfm?Counter=8648145
...
I’m convinced Nacchio was perfectly capable of annoying the audience all

by himself
...
He told me:
“Now, normally, a blog entry like this would take a day or so to
ripple outwards, but because this was such a wired crowd and,
frankly, because Nacchio’s talk was so dull, a lot of people were
catching up on their blog reading during the talk, and even
people not reading were near people who were
...


chapter 1, from tom paine to blogs and beyond
3
...
Bimber also observes that the Founders based their new nation essentially

on information
...

The Federalist papers, newspapers, and other writings were the beginnings
of the world’s first information-based society
...
Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (1998) observes the remarkable

similarities in rise of 19th-century telegraph networks and the modern
Internet, including stock market bubbles, absurd predictions, and, in the
end, the rise of an enormously powerful tool for communications (http://
www
...
com)
...
Nation magazine, July 21, 2003
...
In the early 1970s, big newspaper companies persuaded Congress to pass a

“newspaper preservation” law that limited antitrust enforcement
...

My company, Knight Ridder, enjoys the fruits of several such Joint Operating Agreements, as they’re called
...
The nation
would be better off if the law was repealed
...
Direct mail has also pulled advertisers away in large numbers, notes

Stephen B
...

“In 1979 they rejiggered the rates to begin to suck up advertising to keep
postponing until the next elections a day of reckoning because of a bloated,
expensive labor force,” he wrote me
...
It still is the case
...
I rely on somewhat fading memory, not archives, for the details of my

XyWrite programming-assistance story
...
Usenet newsgroups live on today in many forms, including “Google

Groups” (http://groups
...
com)
...
Left-wing groups were also using these systems to organize, but from my

observations at the time, not as effectively
...
The MIDI standard (http://www
...
org) revolutionized music, and con-

tinues to do so
...
For example, see the Pacific News Service (http://news
...
org/

news/)
...
Howard Kurtz column: http://www
...
com/wp-dyn/nation/

columns/kurtzhoward/
...
Justin Hall: http://www
...
net
...
Being available worldwide isn’t the same as being seen worldwide
...
shirky
...
html), Clay Shirky observes that in a system
such as the blog arena, “where many people are free to choose between
many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate
amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome
...
The
very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a
power law distribution
...

17
...

18
...

19
...

20
...
cluetrain
...

21
...
scripting
...

22
...
userland
...


262

notes
23
...
gnu
...

24
...
It’s important to recognize, as Torvalds gladly does, that Linux derived from Stallman’s original
vision
...
Stallman and others in the free software movement strongly object to the

“open source” terminology
...
fsf
...

26
...
But “security through obscurity” is
plainly not a workable answer, either
...
Coase’s Penguin: http://www
...
org/CoasesPenguin
...

28
...
kuro5hin
...

29
...
kennesaw
...
shtml), persuasively argues that blogs and other bottom-up journalism are doing what
advocates of “public journalism”—the idea that journalists have an obligation to further civic discourse and improvement—have been pushing for
years, with limited interest from professional journalists
...
” See the essay by blogger Tim Porter, who delves deeply into
these subjects, for more on this notion (http://www
...
com/firstdraft/
archives/000246
...

30
...
interesting-people
...

31
...
50minutehour
...
htm
...
Gus,” the Brooklyn blogger: http://www
...
com/~gus/ran/0109/

010911
...

33
...
megnut
...
asp?which=2001_

09_01_archive
...

34
...
salon
...
html
...
The Guardian, one of the most prominent national newspapers in the

United Kingdom, offers thoughtful, hard-hitting journalism from a slightly
left-of-center perspective
...
This happened to most serious newspapers,
but The Guardian’s traffic boost came in large part from Americans
...
S
...
I leaned in favor of the war, but I was appalled
at the lack of nuance in American journalism during a time when about
half the population opposed the war
...
Scribner, 2002
37
...
oreillynet
...
html
...
David Isenberg’s “Rise of the Stupid Network”: http://www
...
com/

misc/stupidnet
...

39
...
yahoo
...

40
...
gizmodo
...

41
...
com
...
Jay Rosen’s PressThink: http://journalism
...
edu/pubzone/weblogs/

pressthink/
...
Six Apart: http://www
...
com
...
Radio UserLand: http://radio
...
com
...
LiveJournal: http://www
...
com
...
Blogger: http://www
...
com
...
20six: http://www
...
co
...

48
...
com/cgi/wiki
...
Cunningham’s Wiki categories: http://c2
...

50
...
wikitravel
...

51
...
S
...

52
...
Rheingold’s Smart Mobs web site continues to follow this evolution: http://

www
...
com
...
See The Washington Post’s coverage of banned camera phones at http://

www
...
com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49274-2003Sep22
...
Blogging of the President: http://www
...
com
...
Full disclosure: I’ve been a guest several times on the program
...
IT Conversations: http://www
...
com
...
BitTorrent: http://bitconjurer
...

59
...
lockergnome
...

60
...
ranchero
...

61
...
bradsoft
...
asp
...
NewsIsFree: http://www
...
com
...
Syndic8: http://www
...
com
...
Feedster: http://www
...
com
...
Technorati: http://www
...
com
...
For considerably more detail on the Lott incident, see the case study from

the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (http://blogs
...
harvard
...
Blogger Mickey Kaus
(http://slate
...
com/id/2075444&#darkmatter) says some well-timed
emails from a Democratic political operative played a role, though this is
less clear
...
Talking Points Memo: http://www
...
com
...
CNET quotes Intel executive on Pentium bug: http://news
...
com/2009-

1001_3-224567
...

69
...
macmerc
...

70
...

71
...
http://

www
...
co
...
html?=rss
72
...
cnn
...
abduction/
...
Slashdot: http://slashdot
...
Slashdot user exposes Microsoft PR trick: http://apple
...
org/apple/

02/10/14/1232229
...

75
...
mcspotlight
...

76
...
library
...
edu/tobacco/
...
Memory Hole: http://www
...
org
...
Greenwood Pub Group, 1914
...
One site’s instructions on upgrading digital video recorder: http://

echostaruser
...
com/dpclone
...
iPoding: http://www
...
com
...
EDN Access story on auto codes: http://www
...
net/ednmag/

index
...

82
...
dinancars
...
S
...

83
...
mit
...
htm
...
Tron Project: http://tron
...
u-tokyo
...
jp
...
Marc Smith: http://research
...
com/~masmith
...
CNETAsia: http://asia
...
com/newstech/communications/

0,39001141,39127700,00
...

87
...
nytimes
...
html?ei=5070&en=84cb0288bed4667a&ex
=1083211200&pagewanted=print
...
Doc Searls on the Segway: http://doc
...
com/2001/12/

05#theSecrecyGame
...
The Marketing of the President, 2004,” Baseline Magazine: http://

www
...
com/article2/0,3959,1410983,00
...

90
...

91
...
sfweekly
...
html/1/index
...

92
...
org/tia-eyeball
...

93
...
darpa
...

94
...
org/

Romenesko
...
The New York Times report on Blair incident: http://www
...
com/

committeereport
...

96
...
poorandstupid
...


chapter 4, newsmakers turn the tables
97
...
defenselink
...
html
...
The assumption of accuracy is not automatic, and the Pentagon severely

compromised its credibility in April 2004 in a similar circumstance
...
washingtonpost
...
html), the Defense Department “deleted
from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H
...
” Woodward provided his own transcript
...
Phil Gomes blog: blog: http://www
...
com/blog
...
ActiveWords: http://www
...
com
...
Tom Murphy blog: http://www
...
com
...
Ray Ozzie blog: http://www
...
net/blog/
...
Mark Cuban’s Blog Maverick: http://www
...
com
...
John Dowdell’s MX Blog: http://www
...
com/jd/
...
Macromedia aggregated blogs: http://www
...
com/mxna/index
...

106
...
msdn
...

107
...
windley
...

108
...
weblogs
...

109
...
weblogs
...
html#a2357
...
Ernest Svenson’s Ernie the Attorney blog: http://www
...
net
...
Wil Wheaton blog: http://www
...
net
...
O’Reilly, 2004
...
Cisco’s RSS feeds: http://tools
...
com/newsroom/contactSearch/jsp/

syndicationSearch
...

114
...
infoworld
...
html#a383
...
NUblog: http://www
...
nu
...
Alan Reiter’s wireless blog: http://reiter
...
com
...
Janet “Stroller Queen” McLaughlin: http://www
...
com
...
The Wall Street Journal, Sept
...

119
...
engadget
...


chapter 5, the consent of the governed
120
...
dailykos
...

121
...
blogads
...

122
...
wired
...
html
...
Perseus, 2002
...
Meetup: http://www
...
com
...
At a dinner in Vermont while I was visiting the campaign, an old friend of

Dean’s (and mine; I lived in Vermont for almost 15 years until the mid1980s) turned to me as I was describing my positive impressions of the
Dean Internet activities and said, “But Howard’s such a Luddite
...
Another person
at the table offered, “But he learns fast
...
Dean’s official blog site: http://blog
...
com
...
Dean Defense Forces: http://www
...
org
...
Dean campaign spam story by Declan McCullagh: http://news
...
com/

2100-1028_3-5065141
...


267

we the media
129
...
moveon
...

130
...
bushin30seconds
...

131
...
deanspace
...

132
...
command-post
...

133
...
Local TV covered the

recall and the candidates’ positions with surprising fervor, perhaps due to
the actor’s star power
...
Joi Ito’s “Emergent Democracy” paper: http://joi
...
com/static/

emergentdemocracy
...

135
...
siliconvalley
...
shtml
...
Earth 911: http://www
...
com
...
Pets 911: http://www
...
com
...
DefenseLink: http://www
...
mil
...
Note some parallels here with journalism (and other institutions being

affected by the Internet)—threats to all kinds of centralized power structures from the edges, where technology gives disproportionate capabilities
to individuals
...
John Robb: http://jrobb
...
org
...
Maney column in USA Today: http://www
...
com/tech/columnist/

2001/10/24/maney
...


chapter 6, professional journalists join the conversation
142
...
org/

features/99/10/07/120249
...

143
...
com/articleview/article_

view
...

144
...
nytimes
...

145
...
nytimes
...
html
...
Slate Fraywatch: fray
...
msn
...

147
...
washingtonpost
...

148
...

149
...
net blog list: http://www
...
net/cyber-

journalists
...


268

notes
150
...
sacbee
...

151
...
opinionjournal
...
Sheila Lennon blog: http://www
...
com/blogs/shenews/,
153
...
You can find the
hurricane coverage, or some of it, in the nonprofit Web Archive: http://
web
...
org/web/20010307020840/http:/www
...
com/special/
bonnie/0828dispatches
...

154
...
net/printsthechaff,
155
...
ojr
...
php,
156
...
houstonpress
...
html/1/index
...
Dennis Horgan blog: http://denishorgan
...
The Nieman Reports back issues are, perversely, available only as PDFs:

http://www
...
harvard
...
pdf,
159
...
Minnesota Public Radio (http://www
...
org)

looks like it will lead the way, with a variety of programs designed to bring
listeners into the process
...
Spokane Spokesman-Review: http://www
...
com
...
Lawrence Journal-World: http://www
...
com
...
White House Briefing: http://www
...
com/wp-dyn/politics/

administration/whbriefing/
...
Times on the Trail: http://www
...
com/pages/politics/trail/
...
Columbia Journalism Review: http://www
...
org
...
American Journalism Review: http://www
...
org
...
Patterico: http://patterico
...

167
...
His impact was no less real in any event
...
com/archives/002026
...

168
...
org/weblogs/
pjnettoday/archives/000172
...
If we don’t do this, I think the unfiltered, weblogtype model of journalism will overtake traditional media with its sheer
energy and we will lose a powerful way of informing the public about critical issues in our democracy
...
NASA asks public for shuttle photos: http://www
...
nasa
...
html
...
BBC call for people’s photos: http://news
...
co
...
stm
...
Sign On San Diego Fire Coverage: http://www
...
com/news/

fires/weekoffire/index
...

172
...
salon
...

173
...
hypergene
...
php
...
BBC iCan: http://www
...
co
...

175
...

176
...
But the indications are that the potential is there
...
S
...
ibrattleboro
...

From my distant perspective, iBrattleboro consistently covers important
events and issues that the newspaper all but ignores
...
BBC uses 3G phones: http://www
...
net/news/000793
...

178
...

179
...
nyu
...

180
...
J
...
Lasica reported on it in
Online Journalism Review: http://www
...
org/ojr/lasica/1032910520
...


chapter 7, the former audience joins the party
181
...
blogspot
...

182
...
rexblog
...

183
...
siliconvalley
...
shtml
...
Rheingold’s comment came at the PopTech (http://www
...
org) gath-

ering in Camden, Maine
...
Groklaw: http://www
...
net
...
Jones interview: http://www
...
org/people/pj_groklaw
...

187
...
com/weblog
...
See “Iranian Journalist Credits Blogs for Playing Key Role in His Release

From Prison,” in Online Journalism Review: http://www
...
org/ojr/glaser/
1073610866
...

189
...
media
...
edu:9000
...
SilverStringer: http://silverstringer
...
mit
...

191
...
kataweb
...

192
...
jrsummit
...

193
...
nytimes
...
html
...
Indymedia: http://www
...
org
...
Google News does post some flagrantly biased stories from other sources,

however
...
Democracy Now: http://www
...
org
...
Command Post: http://www
...
org
...
Center for Public Integrity: http://www
...
org
...
In focusing more on public affairs–oriented sites in this section, I don’t

want to slight any of the more topical online journalism being done
...
CNET’s News
...
news
...
theregister
...
uk), a British-based site that is both smart and sassy in
its coverage
...

200
...
wikipedia
...

201
...
wikitravel
...

202
...
socialtext
...

203
...
blogspot
...

204
...
gawker
...

205
...
gizmodo
...

206
...
fleshbot
...

207
...
wonkette
...

208
...
nickdenton
...

209
...
moreover
...

210
...


The connection was clearly stated on the Gizmodo site, however, so at least
there was full disclosure
...
”
211
...

212
...
: http://www
...
com
...
Blogads: http://www
...
com
...
New Media Musings: http://www
...
com
...
Andrew Sullivan blog: http://www
...
com
...
Chris Allbritton’s Back to Iraq: http://www
...
com
...
Talking Points Memo: http://www
...
com
...
Moore’s original paper on the subject is on Intel’s web site at: ftp://

download
...
com/research/silicon/moorespaper
...

219
...
com
...
html
...
As Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro noted in their important 1999 book,

Information Rules (Harvard Business School Press), Metcalfe’s Law relies
on what economists call “network externalities
...

221
...
reed
...
html
...
I’m particularly indebted to Howard Rheingold for his observations, in

conversations and his writing, which have helped clarify my own understanding of the power of these various laws
...
Pew report on online content production: http://www
...
org/

reports/toc
...

224
...
curry
...

225
...
law
...
edu/

bloggerCon/2004/04/09#a1119
...
Andrew Grumet has been experimenting with video as RSS “enclosures,”

delivered to a desktop (or other device) as needed
...
law
...
edu/tech/bitTorrent for more information
...
Advertisers saw this potential long ago
...

228
...

229
...
google
...

230
...
msn
...

231
...
my
...
com/rss/
...
Erik Benson blog: http://erikbenson
...

233
...
google
...

234
...
amazon
...
html/

102-2039287-6152169
...
Technorati Developers Center: http://www
...
com/developers/

index
...

236
...
kokogiak
...

237
...
orgnet
...
html
...
AllConsuming: http://www
...
com
...
GoogObits: http://www
...
com
...
In April 2004, Technorati launched a preliminary version of a service that

went part of the way toward making the conversation visible
...
It was launched first on BoingBoing
and became an instant hit
...
As David Weinberger says, updating the Andy Warhol aporism: “In the

future everyone will be famous for fifteen people
...
Schmich column about the Vonnegut episode: http://

www
...
com/news/columnists/chi-970803cyperspace
...

243
...
com/judge
...

244
...
com: http://

www
...
com/photos/politics/kerry2
...

Ken Light, who took the original Kerry picture used for the
composite, discussed the incident on the DigitalJournalist site:
http://www
...
org/issue0403/dis_light
...

245
...
As Paul Martin Lester, communications

professor at California State University at Fullerton, observes (http://
commfaculty
...
edu/lester/writings/faking
...
The faking of photographs, either
through stage direction by the photographer or through
darkroom manipulation, unfortunately, also has a long tradition
...
Consequently, their impact has been
diminished by charges of photographic faking
...
However,
computer technology puts photographic faking on a new level of
concern as images can be digitized and manipulated without the
slightest indication of such trickery
...
Columbia University journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan has com-

piled a page of doctored photos: http://sree
...
html
...
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting report: http://www
...
org/activism/

cbs-digital
...

248
...
sec
...
htm
...
Matt Drudge: http://www
...
com
...
The New York Times, February 14, 2004: “Amazon Glitch Unmasks War

of Reviewers
...
For the full exchange between me and “George,” visit the posting: http://

weblog
...
com/column/dangillmor/archives/001675
...

252
...
berkeley
...

253
...
This is a valid concern
...
Forum and blogging software is improving, however, and it’ll
soon be more difficult for a spammer’s software to effectively scrape email
addresses off comment postings
...
Ward Cunningham goes far beyond simply defining trolls
...
com/cgi/
wiki?TrollDefinition
...
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk site covered the drug-

benefits controversy in some depth: http://www
...
org/
archives/000446
...

256
...
usatoday
...
htm
...
Boston Online: http://www
...
com
...
Adam Gaffin’s recounting of the “dixie wrecked” situation: http://

www
...
info/cgi-bin/forum/gforum
...

259
...
”
260
...
kenlayne
...

261
...
This article from The Guardian gives the impression that the term is

274

notes
uniquely mine, which it isn’t—either by origination or by frequency of use
...
’ I think that should get me the recursive metablogging medal
of the day
...
”
262
...
rootnode
...
php?sid=26
...
WordPirates: http://www
...
com
...
In 1998, The New York Times’ public site was hacked, and the front page

changed, but the changes were blatantly the work of people who were
making an anti-Times point, not trying to pull off another, more serious
kind of stunt
...
CyberWire Dispatch archives: http://cyberwerks
...

266
...
That was a no brainer to
accept in the settlement, as any story I would write about him he would
know of well before 42 hours because I’d be calling him to ask him questions
...

267
...
” The standard is higher for public figures, who have to show that the writer had reckless disregard for
whether the statement was true
...
Anthony York wrote a detailed summary of the Drudge-Blumenthal case in

Salon: http://dir
...
com/politics/red/2001/05/02/blue/index
...

269
...
blogspot
...

270
...
blogspot
...
html#105723343690170641 for Balkin’s entire analysis
...
The Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic’s files in the Nymox case: http://

cyberlaw
...
edu/about/cases/nymox
...

272
...
economist
...
cfm?story_id=1489053
...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped Hamidi, archived many

of the relevant documents: http://www
...
org/Spam_cybersquatting_abuse/
Spam/Intel_v_Hamidi/
...
See Mark Glaser’s Online Journalism Review coverage of plagiarism on the

Net: http://www
...
org/ojr/glaser/1050584240
...

275
...
turnitin
...


275

we the media
276
...
chillingeffects
...

277
...
wipo
...

278
...
cptech
...

279
...
wipo
...
html
...
National Debate’s The New York Times “corrections” page: http://

www
...
com/other/NYTCorrections
...

281
...

282
...
You’ll also find some unintentionally hilarious “linking
policies” by corporate sites
...
The EFF archived this and related cases: http://www
...
org/IP/Video/

MPAA_DVD_cases/
...
Mark Lemley comment in Salon: http://dir
...
com/tech/log/2000/08/18/

decss_trial/index
...

285
...
eff
...
html
...
New Scientist story on China’s blocking of blogs: http://

www
...
com/news/news
...

287
...
law
...
edu/filtering/
...
Europe’s data privacy laws are much stricter
...

289
...
findarticles
...
jhtml
...
Penguin Press, 2004
...
See Siva Vaidhyanathan’s blog: http://www
...
edu/classes/siva/
...

292
...
Universal (“Betamax”) case:

http://www
...
org/Legal/Cases/sony_v_universal_decision
...

293
...
copyright
...
pdf
...
Ed Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor, was threat-

ened with legal action if he gave a talk about how easy it would be to
break open an experimental music industry file format
...
cs
...
edu/sip/sdmi/
...
Russian software company acquitted (CNET): http://news
...
com/2100-

1023-978176
...

296
...
com
...
html
...
FCC broadcast flag ruling: http://hraunfoss
...
gov/edocs_public/

attachmatch/FCC-03-273A1
...

298
...
It’s due at least as much to a reduction in the number
of releases and the overall lower quality of music being promoted today, as
well as incredibly high prices
...
unc
...
pdf) by professors at
Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina concluded
that file sharing has no obvious impact on sales—and that it may actually
help promote the music
...
Wired News’ coverage of Berman’s legislation: http://www
...
com/

news/politics/0,1283,54153,00
...

300
...
law
...
edu/institutes/bclt/drm/papers/cohendrmandprivacy-btlj2003
...
Cohen, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; and the more recent “The New Surveillance” (http://papers
...
com/sol3/papers
...

301
...
washingtonpost
...
” I’ve
shown this quote to people on many occasions, and the universal response
has been sheer disbelief at Schroeder’s statement
...
Congress is moving closer to outlawing peer-to-peer outright, and the

entertainment industry keeps suing everyone in sight
...

303
...
net/2004/01/27/protect_your_

investm
...
And indeed, Apple has taken things away
...
I fully expect that Apple will continue to
do this
...
Full Ross Anderson analysis of trusted computing: http://

www
...
cam
...
uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq
...

306
...

307
...
siliconvalley
...
htm
...
See Infoworld’s coverage: http://www
...
com/article/04/02/02/

HNchinacensor_1
...
It’s more acceptable to use the Napster defense if
you’re a big company, apparently
...
http://cyberlaw
...
edu/lessig/blog/archives/121002%2002-52%2000-

185
...

310
...
Indeed, it’s crucial to recognize that the content users create is more
important than what Hollywood creates, especially as we contemplate the
architecture of future networks
...
firstmonday
...

311
...
eff
...

312
...
creativecommons
...

313
...


In the 1950s, America’s state and local highways were well-developed
...
Today, the reverse is true: the long-distance
data highways, the “backbone” networks, exist in abundance
...
Big telecom carriers say they’ll provide these connections only if we allow them to control the content that
flows on those lines
...

314
...
fcc
...

315
...
fcc
...
html
...
David Reed’s home page: http://www
...
com/dpr
...

317
...
reed
...
html
...
A growing body of work is now available under Creative Commons

licenses
...
org for more details
...
Elwin Jenkins’ posting: http://microdoc-news
...
html/1
...
Chris Gulker blog: http://www
...
com
...
Perseus Books, 2002
...
Microsoft Word was both useful and infuriating
...
If there
was a serious alternative, I’d use it
...
(Amazingly, they advised against saving
the files in Microsoft’s own format
...
He asked for samples of the corrupted files and said he’d try to figure out what was wrong
...

Nonetheless, his query was another example of how the new world of
information works: he, at least, was paying attention to what was going on
in the online world, because it affected his product
...


279

Index
Numbers
2600 (hacker magazine), 206

A
Abu Ghraib prison, photos of prisoner
abuse by Americans, 48
accuracy, maintaining in interactive
journalism, 134
ActiveWords application, 70
activism
BBC assistance with iCan
project, 104, 123–125
combating government invasions of
citizens’ privacy, 59
grassroots journalism as tool
for, 137
advertising
anti-Bush commercials on
MoveOn, 100
Blogads, 88, 154
Google AdWords program, 154
newspaper revenue from, under
attack from new media, xvi
supporting personal
journalism, 152
Afghan-American writer, Tamim
Ansary, 21
aggregators, 39, 167
agile radio, 234
airlines, SMS services offered by, 33
airwaves
deregulation of, consequences for
communications
companies, 233
end of scarcity of, 232
regulation of, 231–232

Allbritton, Chris, 155
AllConsuming web service, 171
alternative media, 144–148
problems of Indymedia due to lack
of editorial oversight, 145
Amazon
API for its software, 170
authors writing (supposedly) customer book reviews, 180
Americans abuse of Iraqi prisoners in
Abu Ghraib prison, 48
anarchy in news, undesirability
of, xvi
anonymity on the Net, 180–182
benefits of, 180
credibility and, 181
hazards of, 180
preserving value of, 195
Ansary, Tamim, 21
APIs (application programming
interfaces), 169–171
Apple Computer
iPod, hackers finding undivulged
feature of, 53
RSS, use of, 82
trade press and, 15
weblogs, misunderstanding of, 82
appliances and devices, online
information about, 52
asymmetrical warfare, 107
audience
becoming active users of news, 238
in charge as consumers and
producers, 136–140
alternative media, 144–148
business models for personal
journalism, 152–157
citizen journalists, 137–140

281

we the media
audience (continued)
evolutionary and revolutionary
effects, 140
nonprofit community
publishing, 142
Wiki media, 148–151
consequences of collision of journalism and technology, 237
invitations by journalists to
contribute, 120–123
BBC, iCan project, 123–125
ethical standards,
maintaining, 134–135
new technologies, using, 130
OhmyNews
...
, 194
Balkinization weblog, 195
Balz, Dan, 66
Barrett, Cameron, 103
barriers and secrecy, breakdown
of, 59
BBC (British Broadcasting
Corporation), 104
3G mobile phones, use of, 131
iCan project, 123–125
BBS (electronic bulletin boards) (see
bulletin boards)
Benkler, Yochai, 17
Benson, Eric, 170
Berners-Lee, Tim, 11, 12, 23
Bharat, Krishna, 165
Big Media, xiii
accuracy and fairness,
maintaining, 188

augmenting or replacing with open
source technologies, 17
controlling new media with government help, 172
correcting misinformation on blogs
or web sites, 104
desktop publishing and, 10
new kinds emerging, 165
online conversations, risks of, 189
quality reduction in reporting to
boost profits, xv
bioterrorism, 108
BitTorrent, 37
Blogads, 88, 154
Blogbot search tool (Microsoft), 167
Blogger, 20, 167
blogrolls, 40
Blogspot
...

anti-Bush commercials on
MoveOn
...
, 153
soliciting money from
readers, 155–157
business-to-business publishing, 153
Buying of the President, The, 147

C
cable and phone companies
cable television, 6
refusal to share access to high-speed
data lines, 225
vertical control over data transport
and content, 225
Cable News Network (see CNN)
Calacanis, Jason McCabe, 153
California Insider political blog, 114
camera phones, 26, 35
news organizations, use of, 130
privacy issues with, 35
camera-equipped mobile devices
filming of police misconduct in
Rodney King case, 49
spreading news with, 48
car-defect reports, 54
CBS News, 178
celebrity blogs, 78–80
cell phones (see mobile phones)
censorship
peer-to-peer (P2P) technology
and, 38
(see also government)
Center for Public Integrity, 147
CEO blogs, 72–74
Chandler, Ben, 88
Channel 9 blog, 75
Charlotte Observer, “Dispatches from
along the coast”, 115

chat rooms, 85
discussions of stock prices and corporate financial
performance, 56
cheating by using others’ work, 200
mechanism to catch violators, 200
Chinese government
restrictions on Internet
freedom, 210
suppression of citizen weblogs, 141
Cisco Systems
“News@Cisco” PR operation, 81
tools to create walled gardens, 226
citizen journalists, xvii, 137–140
alternative media, 144–148
business models for personal
journalism, 152–157
nonprofit community
publishing, 142
Wiki media, 148–151
citizen reporters, 125–129
fact checking by, 187
citizenship
reinforcement with modern
communications, 89
weblogs as acts of civic
engagement, 139
Clark, Joe, 82
Clark, Wesley, 103
classified advertising, competition of
new media for, xvi
client, 258
client/server technology, 11
Cluetrain Manifesto, 14
CNN, 7, 116
Coble, Howard, 92
collaboration tools, Wikis as, 32
Comcast, 225
ownership interests in content, 227
Command Post, 103
coverage of 2003 Gulf War, 147
comments (reader), posting on
weblogs, 29
communication network, value of
(Metcalfe’s Law), 160
communications
means of, 26
new tools for, 69
transformation of with emergence
of web, 13

283

we the media
community publishing,
nonprofit, 142
companies
improving products with expert
assistance from
customers, 55
learning to use new communication
tools, 70
online forums discussing stock
prices and financial
performance, 57
participating in discussion boards
about their products, 59
RSS feeds of major news, 81
threatening American freedom of
speech, 142
tobacco companies, web-based documentation on, 51
CompuServe, 8
computer security and cyberterrorism, 110
computer technology, media
production and, 9
conservatism of modern journalism
industry, xv
considering the source, 179
consolidation of media companies, xv
consumers, getting in-depth
information on
products, 52
consumers of news (see audience)
content
control by telecommunications
companies, 225
discrimination by cable and phone
companies over material
they don’t control, 226
licensing under Creative Commons
license, 230
Content Scrambling System
(CSS), 206
content servers, downloaders’
computers as, 38
content-management systems for web
publishing, 25
conversations
journalism as, 14, 132
markets as, 14
personal weblogs participating
in, 31
cookies, 211

Copeland, Henry, 154
copyright, 201–204
anonymous defenders of on the
Net, 181
comparing infringement with
plagiarism, 201
“copyright cartel”, xvii, 212–214
correcting abuses of, 239
Creative Commons
Copyright, 230, 239
customers engaging in political
activism against, 228
Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, 204, 206
digital watermarking of photos and
videos, 178
DVDs, unauthorized playback
of, 206
forbidden linking and, 205–208
infringement by peer-to-peer sharing of music files, 37
tech industry sellout, 220–224
corporate journalism
history of, 4–7
inability to adequately cover political issues, 103
corporate web sites, nature of, 30
corporate weblogs, 71–77
Craig’s List, competitor for traditional
newspaper revenues, xvi
creating our own news reports, tools
for, 164–166
Creative Commons Copyright, 230,
239
credibility, anonymity and, 181
crime prevention through use of
camera-equipped mobile
devices, 48
Cryptome web site, 61
CSS (Content Scrambling
System), 206
Cuban, Mark, 73
Cunningham, Ward, 31
Curley, Rob, 117
Current Events service
(Technorati), 169
customers
exchanging information about
products, 52–55
Apple iPod, 53

284

index
automobile electronic
systems, 54
DishPlayer, 52
manufacturer control over, 54
power to become politically
active, 229
customer-written book reviews,
Amazon, 180
CyberJournalist
...
, 201
refusing to buy from companies that
abuse, 229
fairness, maintaining in interactive
journalism, 134
Farber, Dave, 19
FCC
curbs on free speech, 234
freeing up more unlicensed
spectrum, 231
phone company control of highspeed data pipes they
build, 225
Spectrum Policy Task Force, 231
Feedster service, 42, 70, 167
few-to-few communication, 26
online, 161

file-sharing model (peer-to-peer
(P2P)), 37
filtering Internet content, 212
financial forums, companies going
after posters of allegedly
defamatory material, 195
financial reporting, Wall Street
demands on Big Media, xiii
Fiorina, Carly, 228
First Amendment rights, 140
code and, 206
jurisdiction for Internet material
and, 197
Fleishman, Glenn, 152
Fleshbot weblog, 152
forums, online, 28
free software
definition of, 258
development of, 16
source code, open, 16
free speech, 140
boosting with deregulation of the
airwaves, 234
defamation and libel issues for
Internet content, 192–196
email and, 199
threatened in America by government and big
companies, 142
fringe political groups on electronic
bulletin boards, 9
Frontier application, 15
fund-raising on the Internet, 98–99
fundraising on the Internet
Ben Chandler, campaign for U
...

Congress, 88

G
Gaffin, Adam, 186
Gates, Bill, 74
Gawker weblog, 152
General Electric, NBC News
unit, 166
Gilmore, John, 60
Gizmodo weblog, 83, 152
revenue sources, 153
Goodman, Amy, 146
Google
API for its software, 170

286

index
Blogger company, 167
Page Rank, 169
as reputation system, 171
searching for plagiarizers, 200
Google AdWords, 154
“Google bombing”, 185
Google Hypothesis, link structure
matters, 168
Google News, 165–166
Google Alerts, 165
refusal to acknowledge news from
grassroots journalism, 166
removal of Indymedia from its
listings, 145
GoogObits web service, 171
Gordon, Rich, 133
gossip mongering on the Internet, 179
government
American freedom of speech,
threats to, 142
efforts to restrict free
information, 238
information lockdown through alliance with entertainment
industry, xvii
new media, attempts to
control, 173
Philippines, role of technology in
bringing down (2001), 91
privacy invaders, turning tables
on, 60
repression, countering with citizen
weblogs, 141
restrictions on grassroots
journalism, 210
spying on citizens with modern
technology, 60
tools of better governance, 105–
109
Utah’s IT blog, 75
web-based documentation on, 52
grassroots journalism
capitalizing on technological
innovations, 160
emergence of ethnic media with
desktop publishing, 10
ethical concerns with veracity and
deception, 173
legal decisions on legitimacy of
journalists, 207

online media that serve as news
sources for others, 137
peer-to-peer (P2P) technology
and, 38
problems with trolls, 182–184
reporting on September 11, 2001
events, x
reporting on September 11, 2001,
events, 18–22
tools of, 25
Groklaw weblog, 139
Gross, Matthew, 96
group blogs, 115
group nodes, factorial, 161
“groupware tool set”, 101
growth of technologies, laws
governing, 159–162
Grubb, Tara Sue, 92
Guardian, The, 262
Gulf War (2003), coverage on
Command Post, 147

H
hackers, divulging unauthorized
product information on the
Web, 53
hacking
Apple iPod music players, disclosure of recording
feature, 53
definition of, 258
improving electronic products or
software, 53
Hall, Justin, 12
Hamidi, Kourosh Kenneth, 199
handheld devices, 26
Hartford Courant, 116
Healing Iraq weblog, 136
Hewlett-Packard, pledge to support
copyright holders, 228
hidden cameras, use by news
organizations, 35
high-speed data access in the U
...
,
future of, 226
Hoder (Iranian blogger), 141
Homeland Security Information
Network, 107
Horgan, Dennis, 116
Hourihan, Meg, 20, 29

287

we the media
Houston Chronicle, 116
HTML
definition of, 258
development of, 12
editing tools for, 23
Hypertext Markup Language (see
HTML)
hypertext technology, invention
of, 11

I
iCan project (BBC), 104, 123–125
images, doctored, 177
digital watermarking as remedy
for, 178
Indymedia (Independent Media
Center), 145–148
information
evaluating trustworthiness of, 171
free access to, 211
free flow of, 238
lockdown by entertainment industry and government, xvii
movement around the Internet,
tracking of, 212
new architecture for, 42
tracking with APIs and web
services, 170
information technology (IT) blogs,
Utah state government, 75
instant messaging, SMS as, 33
Instapundit weblog, 194
InstaPundit
...
S
...
com, 125–129
updating journalism
education, 131
legal advice for, 193
legitimacy of, copyright infringement and, 207
making readers/listeners/viewers
part of the process, xiv
misusing work of others, 200
new communications technologies,
using, 130
political, changing role for, 102

289

we the media
journalists (continued)
professional, successful weblogs
by, 114
watching, 61–64
Journal-World, 117
Junior Journal, 143
jurisdiction, 197–199
increased efforts to zone Internet
content, 198
nations, 198
repressive communities, giving
to, 197
Justin’s Links from the
Underground, 12

K
Kerry, John, 177, 179
Google bombers and, 185
King, Rodney, 35
Kirk, Russ, 52
Krebs, Valdis, 170
Kuro5hin (news site), 17, 146

L
Lascia, J
...
, 154
law and cultural norms, hindering
development of new
media, 172
Lawrence
...
Reimerdes, 205
linking structure
importance of, 168
reputation evaluation with, 172
Linux, 16, 258
local communities, information needs
of, 133
Locke, Christopher, 14
Lott, Trent, 44

M
Macintosh (see Apple Computer)
Macromedia, employee participation
in blogs, 74
mailing lists, 27–28, 259
Manila application, 15
manipulating images to mislead
viewers, 177
manufacturers, attempts to control
information flow to
customers, 54
manufacturing technology, effects on
producers and
consumers, 13
many-to-many communication, 26
online, 161
Marburger, David L
...
, legal battle against
online activists, 50
McLaughlin, Janet, 83
McLuhan, Marshall, 13, 100, 108
McSpotlight web site, 51
media
blurring of news producer/consumer distinction, 26
creation of less expensive through
computer technology, 9
media companies, consolidation
of, xv
media revolutions in U
...
history, 2
media transparency, trend
toward, 61–64
Meeks, Brock, 191
Meetup web site, 95
Melrose Mirror, 142
Memory Hole web site, 52
messaging (see SMS)
metadata, dispersion of, 56
Metcalfe’s Law, 160
microprocessors, 160
Microsoft
Blogbot search tool, 167
bogus advertisement of Mac-to-PC
convert, 49
employee bloggers, 74
Robert Scoble, 76
MSNBC, 166
Newsbot, 166
NewsJunkie, 166
RSS feeds of MSDN articles, 41
Slate online magazine, 112
suit by Ticketmaster over deep
links, 205
Windows, emergence as dominant
operating system, 15

MIDI standard, 261
misinformation spread with online
media, 174
misquoted or misrepresented
material, 175
mobile phones
camera-equipped, 35
privacy issues with, 35
real-time field video interviews,
recording, 131
sending text messages over, 33
SMS messaging, used to expose
SARS epidemic, 47
“moblogging”, 48
money raised for political elections
(see fundraising on the
Internet)
Moore’s Law, 159
Mosaic web browsers, 12
Motallebi, Sina, 142
MoveOn
...
com, 96
MyYahoo! news page, 166

N
Nacchio, Joe, x
“nano-publishing”, 152
Napster, 37
National Debate web site, 204
national security, Total Information
Awareness program, 60
NBC News, partnership with
Microsoft, 166
NetNewsWire, 39

291

we the media
new media, hindrances to
development, 172
New Media Musings weblog, 154
New Times Media, 144
New York City, news and gossip
weblog, 152
New York Times, The
copyright infringement case against
web site, 204
newyorktimes
...
com, 93
online, OhmyNews
...
com, 93, 110, 125–129
Olafson, Steve, 116
one-to-many communication, means
of, 26
one-to-one communication, means
of, 26
online discussions of the work of
journalists, 61–64
online forums, 28
online services, early days of, 8
open source journalism, 113
Kuro5hin news site, 146
SCO case against free software
community, 140
open source politics, 100
open source software, 16
definition of, 259
for non-profit organizations, 101
open source software programmers,
volunteer efforts in Dean
campaign, 101
operating systems
APIs, 170
definition of, 259
free, development of, 16
overlay networks, 229
Ozzie, Ray, 72

P
P2P (peer-to-peer), 37, 259
Homeland Security Information
Network, 107
targeted by entertainment industry
for copyright
infringement, xvii
“page-centric” web sites, 29
participatory political life, 100
PC Forum, x
peer-reviewed news sites, 17
peer-to-peer (see P2P)
Pentium processor (Intel), flaw in, 46
Pepsi iTunes giveaway, 47
Perot, Ross, 91
Persian-language weblogs, 141

personal computers, 7
personal digital assistants (PDAs), 26
personal journalism
business models for, 152–157
advertising support, 152
nano-publishing, 152
niche business blogs, (Weblogs,
Inc
...
Bush, 2004 reelection
campaign, 91
Howard Dean, 2004, xiv, 59, 89,
94–99
John Kerry, 2004, 177, 179
John McCain, 2000, 92
Ross Perot, 1992, 91
South Korea, 2002, 93

The Buying of the President
2004, 147
tracking for 2004, Public Record
Wiki, 151
press releases as news, spin and, 184
PressThink blog, 29
privacy
camera-equipped mobile phones
and, 35
cookies and, 211
invasion by American
businesses, 211
photographing of events in public
places and, 49
as relic of pre-technological
time, 59
producers and consumers, effects of
mass manufacturing on, 13
products
customer exchange of information
about, 52–55
Apple iPod music players, 53
automobile electronic
systems, 54
DishPlayer video recorder, 52
customer information about, indepth data, 55
improving with expert assistance to
companies from
customers, 55
interoperating through APIs, 169
mentions of by bloggers, tracking
with Feedster, 167
professions, weblogs by, 77
public journalism (see citizen
journalists; citizen reporters;
grassroots journalism)
public life, new rules of, 45
public message boards (Usenet), 8
public places, events photographed
in, 48
public relations (PR)
business use of blogging for, 71–77
new technologies, use by
industry, 80–82
rules for using new media, 85
video press releases as stain on the
profession, 184
public service function of
journalism, 3

294

index
“public trust” of journalism,
subsumed by financial
demands, xv
public-health sphere, use of new
communication tools, 108
publishing
desktop publishing, emergence
of, 9
personal, 162
pump-and-dump schemers,
manipulating stock
prices, 179
purchasers, finding out more about
products, 52

Q
Qwest telephone company, x

R
radical political groups, use of
electronic bulletin
boards, 9
radio
Internet, copyright regulations
on, 36
talk radio, development of, 10
radio waves, interference and, 233
radios, software-defined, 234
ransom-note media, 10
Rather, Dan, 178
reader comments on weblogs, 29
Really Simple Syndication (see RSS
syndication)
Reed, David P
...
F
...
S
...
C
...
, 153
Weinberger, David, 14, 244
Weintraub, Dan, 114
WhatIs

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