Dan Gillmor at Columbia J-School

Here at Little Scraps of Paper, we're not quite ready to live blog events so, here instead is the transcription of the notes I scribbled on the back of my MetroNorth train schedule during Dan Gillmor's "Trends in New Media" lecture last night at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. This is a bit of a (perhaps not) quick (enough) notes dump. (All parentheticals and sentences containing "I" or "me" are my own thoughts):

J-School Dean of Students and new media guru Sree Sreenivasan described the old media/new media "sides" of the profession and then introduced Dan as someone who "created his own side."

Background
For those who aren't familiar with Dan Gillmor, he worked as a reporter at papers in Detroit, Kansas City, and Vermont before heading to the San Jose Mercury News where he covered technology "in the belly of the beast," as he described it, and was one of the paper's most prominent columnists.

I worked at The Merc's (neighboring little, non-union) sister paper, The Contra Costa Times, during the dot-com boom and even for a government reporter like me who had only a passing interest in tech, his column was a must read for understanding what was happening in that particular time and place.

Dan left the Merc to start Bayosphere, a Bay Area citizen journalism experiment which didn't work out quite as Dan had hoped. It's now part of the Backfence network and Dan has founded the Center for Citizen Media at UC Berkeley's J-School and Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Dan's talk
Dan started off by regretting that the lectern would get in the way of a real conversation, but it was billed as a lecture after all. (Also as part of the Hearst New Media Programs, there was a panel discussion last November including Craig Newmark and many other interesting folks).

Speaking of lectures...he said that the time of journalism as a lecture broadcast to a passive audience --"the people I call the former audience"-- is closing, to be replaced by the news story not as the end of the discussion, but only the beginning or middle. He admitted that "the implications are a little bit scary to me."

Earlier, he said that all these changes are "gonna be confusing and messy, but also a lot of fun."

Mentioned the recent news that McClatchy, which is buying Knight Ridder, will turn around and sell the Merc and the Coco Times, among others, to Dean Singleton's MediaNews. (MediaNews is infamous in Bay Area media circles for bare-boned operation of its Alameda News Group, including Oakland Tribune and a bunch of mostly East Bay dailies ).

Even before this news, The Merc and others are "tarnished institutions," but sale will have journos there "yearning for Darth Ridder," not-so-affectionate nickname for KR boss Tony Ridder.

Talked of Creative Destruction that's roiling the media business.

Heart of the lecture
Dan proposes abandoning the kind of capital "O" Objectivity that would have reporters call Neo-Nazis for comment on a story about the Holocaust. In its place, would be a set of core principals that would be aided by technology:

• Thoroughness - let people (readers, etc.) fill in the gaps of what pro journos don't know; link to reference and source material, even stuff that challenges your story. Make journalism more about being a guide than an oracle. Authority of guide increases the more and better sources they point to (courtesy of the hyperlink). Quotes Dave Winer as saying that if you send people away (to good places), they'll come back.
  
• Accuracy - possibilities include the strikethrough tag, like bloggers use, to show what was corrected; the AP's write throughs that go on the wires; Wikipedia model would address concerns about the historical record.
  
• Independence - Fully disclose any potential conflicts of interest on part of individual and the institution.
  
• Fairness - Be fair, but also write what's true and if the weight of facts are on one side, say so.
• Transparency - Again, disclosure and show people where and how you got your info.

Questions
Dan had mentioned that he doesn't consider himself a journalist anymore, someone asked why. He said that he is/will be asking big tech cos. for money for CitMedia and has investments in start-ups and so can't cover any of these things. But he did say, "I will commit some journalism from time to time."

Dan talked quite a bit about net neutrality, saying if we think media consolidation has been cause for concern up til now, wait and see what happens if greedy, control-freak cable and phone cos. get to run a tiered internet. Says innovation happens at the edge and that's what will suffer under the plan. Said Microsoft was in unusual spot in being on the side of the angels in this one, but that they and others who support neutraility are doing a lousy job of lobbying in Washington, DC.

A J-school student thanked him for raising the issue, mentioned that she had brought it up in a class and urged colleagues to sign petition for net neutrality but that professor said journos shouldn't sign petitions, should stay neutral. This cracked me up. I remember the orthodoxy of the school in this regard (I graduated in '97). Profs telling you not to vote to preserve objectivity. This goes back to Dan's example of the Neo-Nazis. It's a patronizing obsession with the "appearance" of objectivity that too often masks lazy, he-said/she-said reporting while the real story goes untold.

Trevor Butterworth said he agreed with Dan more than he thought he would, but took issue with his glorious portrayal of citizen media as the great democratizer of information. Brought up example of RFK Jr.'s pieces in Salon and Rolling Stone on dangers of mercury preservatives in kids vaccines that was refuted by credible science blogs, but that those blogs and others were drown out by the Huffington Post and others that took up RFK's issue. Trevor said there is a hierarchy in the blogosphere and asked what prevents the kind of populist media that a Goebels or Trotsky would love?

Dan said he wasn't sure of the facts in the case and would take Trevor's account at face value. (There's more to this, but that's for another post) Said he's not looking for "instant perfection" in citizen media, but that he saw a small victory in Trevor's story because at least he and likely many others did find information that challenged a main stream story, info. they might not have found in the past. Trevor completely disagreed.

Final word
In speaking briefly with Dan afterward he mentioned that he had wanted to mention Beyond Broadcast taking place in Cambridge, Mass. next month.

BTW: several attendees said they got word of the talk through Fred's blog. Cool to see the cross-pollination of interests.

Tags: [Dan Gillmor] [Citizen Media] [Columbia Journalism]

It can always get worse...and probably will

This is bad, but not surprising, news for my old employer, The Contra Costa Times. As far down as Knight Ridder bent over in its kow towing to Wall Street, it never got quite as low as Dean Singleton and his Media News chain.

I lived in Oakland and their Tribune was thin and weak and while I don't know the circ. figures, it's a testament to their poor coverage that the Chron, which hardly ever had more than passing coverage of the city, could be seen on far more door steps than the Trib. For those of us who left the CoCo Times thinking it couldn't get much worse, just watch what happens when Dean moves in.

Clarification: KR cut like crazy in a vain effort to help the stock price, BUT I didn't mean to imply that MediaNews has the exact same motivation in running a low-rent shop. They're privately owned.

How not to do product reviews

Reading TechCrunch yesterday I was reminded of a question I'd left in comments on an earlier post there about the Sonos music system.

Unlike the Sonos post, the BlogBurst one rightly included a disclaimer. My question on the Sonos post,

just curious, is the Sonos a loaner, did you get it free? Disclosure please…thanks.

...has gone unanswered, but I think it's particularly important since Michael Arrngton mentioned there that more gadget reviews are likely to come. He knows how to do disclosure, I hope and trust he'll apply it to gadget reviews, an ares where there's just been too many examples in the blogosphere and MSM of freebies and compromised reviews.

See Fred Wilson's take on the same Sonos system or Scoble on other goodies for how to lay it all on the table.

Sonos is smart to put their product in the hands of influential bloggers, but that move will do more harm than good to their brand and that of the blogger if readers have any reason to suspect that the review is less than fully open and honest.

Mom, dad, meet my new friends!

This is at once depressing and encouraging:

From the NYT, the Fox guy in charge of MySpace...

"wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants."

Depressing because...well, which will make people feel more pathetic: having Tom or some Speed stick as their only "friend?"

Encouraging because this is just the kind of stuff that will cause MySpace to fade a la Friendster. Not the concept, of course, just this iteration of it.

A top-down social network?

Visible Path is pitching itself as an enterprise-based social networking site, a concept which makes sense in some ways, for some people, but comes up short overall I think.

Unlike LinkedIn, the network would be paid for by your employer, for example, and based on existing relationships in that company. I can see why a company might benefit from this, but as the actual social networking "unit," what does it do for me? Not much, I'd think.

CEO Antony Brydon seems to be acknowledging as much in a classic, have-it-both-ways quote in this Business Week piece:

"The value in our case accrues to the enterprise, although it also accrues to individuals who comprise the enterprise."

So what happens when you leave that company? Is there any way to carry that "value" with you? Or does the company "own" your contacts. Sounds like having to leave your Rolodex behind for the next guy.

LinkedIn is far from perfect. In this TalkCrunch podcast, Michael Arrington asked LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman what happens after you build your profile. What's there to do? Why come back? I'm still not sure what the answer is. Seems like there's lots of fallow periods punctuated by occasional flurries of activity around job change, professional reference request, etc.

But at least that profile and that network is mine, no matter who I work for. This seems like a model much better suited to a world in which people change jobs and/or freelance often. Does a social network for the enterprise exist at the wrong granularity? Is there any way to import/export your existing networks? Don't know the answers (and even though I linked to it up top, I've been unable to get to their site) so I can't draw too many conclusions.

But as far as the concept goes, since the strength of the network would seem to derive from the enthusiasm and use of its members, I do wonder how "social" it can really be. I'll be interested to see how they do.

Market like a peasant...

So says Seth Godin. Hmm...how does this jibe with Tara Hunt's Pinko Marketing? Is it about everyone becoming a peasant or making sure no one is? Pinkos and peasants...the old schoolers are either laughing or crying. Maybe both.

Speeding up Starbucks

From Matt Richtel's "The Long Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order," in the Times about how people in California call-centers are taking remote drive-through orders for restaurants around the country:

"The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through."

As refined and efficient as Starbucks is in making and serving coffee, I wondered the other day as I was waiting for the woman in front of me to return her change to her billfold and her billfold to her purse and her purse to her shoulder, when they'll truly grasp this concept. The woman tried to slide over and out of my way (and the woman behind the counter could have made an effort to hand me my stuff from the counter), but every surface is so jammed with mints and CDs that there was nowhere for her to go.

A little extra counter space would speed things up mightely, I suspect. I know Starbucks is about lounging and relaxing and feeling unhurried, but it's also about me needing to grab my morning coffee and get to the office in a hurray.

Reading the fine print

I was watching this spot for Propel fitness water last night and admiring how the pictures of giant, colorful fruit draw you in as you see them transformed into sports themes (work-out balls, mountain bike trails, etc.) That's when the small print popped up and I felt like I'd been duped. It read: "Contains no fruit juice."

When shows get burned by branding

So Alias is coming back for one last hurrah. It was a great show that never jumped the shark so much as hopped around it. One of the things that took the show in that direction early on was due to its success.

It was cool when Sidney and Will drove neat old trucks (an old 4Runner and Bronco, respectively) that seemed like what their characters would drive. Then they arranged a product placement deal with Ford. Suddenly, supercool, globe-trotting spy Sidney Bristow went from driving a cool old 4Runner to a...Ford Focus? I know they can be cool and tricked out. My point is, no one would go from an old 4Runner to a new Focus. Doesn't seem natural for the character. Which, of course, it wasn't.

PBR on NPR

Funny to hear that very serious-toned guy whose job it is to read the names of the ususally bluechip underwriters of National Public Radio, talking about good ol' Pabst Blue Ribbon which has done well trading on its decidedly downscale image.

Newspapers - losing circulation, but gaining readers?

Clearly, not enough people are listening to Jeff 'newspapers just don't get the internet' Jarvis ;).