Chapter 11
A Path to Tomorrow So, what’s missing? As we move into the next generation of news and trustworthy information, what tools, techniques and business models need to be invented or perfected? What attitudes need to change in the general public? The list is too long for one book. But here are some of the most important “next steps” I can name right now: Create community-based networks of trust, using reputation as an essential component. Improve the tools of discovery and context, via aggregation and curation. Make the topic the primary focus of reporting, with dynamic “articles” that advance understanding through successive iterations as new information becomes available. Find and catalog the best ideas, techniques and tools, and then connect them with people who can bring them to a wider public. Get policy right on copyright and broadband. Eliminate subsidies, direct and indirect, that favor one type of media business over another. Develop payment systems that reward creators in all parts of the new media ecosystem. Make critical thinking and media literacy part of education’s core curriculum. Do away with almost all journalism prizes, and bring the ones we want to keep into the 21st century. Work toward a national consensus on identity and accountability that encourages people to stand behind their words and to cut each other slack for past foolish acts and remarks. 160 Mediactive Continue the conversations. Let me expand on some of these. Topics and Baselines, Not Stories If Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood folks can create directors’ cuts of their movies, why can’t journalists do the same—and more? Why can’t they keep updating and improving their own published works? Actually, they can, if they can get past the publication and broadcast models from the age of literally manufactured media, where the printed paper product or recording tape was the end of the process. This is not just about newspapers or television and radio broadcasts. It’s about books, too—in fact, about any of the media forms that are making the transition into the Digital Age. The Mediactive project represents my own attempt to put this notion and others into practice. In life, we accrete knowledge. We learn a little more about things as we go along, and we factor that new information into a new understanding of the larger topics. This model maps to the way the Web works. On the Web, the best explainers accrete audiences and authority, as they attract more and more readers and inbound links. As mediactive knowledge accretes, you’ll find it in updates to the Mediactive website. Because of its manufacturing model, traditional journalism has done things in a different way. The process has been to create a new story each time a bit more information about a person, topic or issue becomes available, and either to expect audiences to have enough background to understand why this turn of the screw matters or to add some background information that attempts to bring the reader/viewer/ listener up to speed. This is inefficient, both for the journalists and for the audience. But in an online world, we can easily do better. One way to do it better: Create topic articles that are dynamic, with successive iterations adding (and subtracting) from the original as new information comes to light. This isn’t a new idea—Wikipedia, after all, is precisely about this kind of approach, as I noted when I wrote about it in 2005—but it’s gaining currency. (Jeff Jarvis put it especially well in his blog, BuzzMachine.com, when he wrote: “The building block of journalism is no longer the article.” Jay Rosen and Matt Thompson, in a panel at the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive conference, greatly Dan Gillmor 161 expanded on this notion when they examined what they called the “future of context,” and created a website for it.) Some models are already available. Consider Wikipedia, where every version of each article that is written—and I mean everything, down to the version where someone added a comma and hit the save button—is available to anyone who wants to see it. You can even compare edited versions side by side. In the real world, how might this work? Let’s say I’m just starting to understand the role of financial tools called “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) in the 2008 financial meltdown. And suppose that the New York Times had done a detailed explainer of CDOs. (I can’t find one, but perhaps it did.) Now comes the important part: Let’s further suppose that the Times has been updating that article on the Web to reflect new events, in addition to writing current news stories (and archiving them next to the original) and creating a huge link directory. The newer stories have lots of new details, only the most central of which make it back into the updated original explainer. The Times has actually gone part of the way in this direction. Under the umbrella of “Times Topics” you’ll find a huge aggregation of articles that have appeared in the paper, including a page on CDOs. What you won’t find is what I’d like to see as well: the original uber-explainer—call it the baseline copy—and then the current, updated version so you can see what’s changed. Alternatively, it might be nice to see them mashed together, with the changes highlighted using colors for additions and strike-throughs for deletions. (You also won’t find, inexplicably and inexcusably, an element that would vastly improve a Times Topics page: links to journalism other than the newspaper’s own stories.) The average reader would probably go to the updated Big Topic story, starting and ending there for the moment. Then, when new journalism appeared about CDOs, he or she would have more useful background to understand the nuances. Again, as noted above, this idea isn’t all that new. In fact, wire services understood it a long time ago. The Associated Press and others have long used what’s called the “write-through”—adding new information to breaking news and telling editors what’s new in the story. Now, by adapting this to the Web, we can tell everyone. Updating Updates and Corrections Not only can we tell people what’s new, but we can (and should) tell them what we’ve gotten wrong. I’ve noted in earlier chapters that a 162 Mediactive key part of transparency is telling our audiences about our mistakes and fixing them quickly—but that’s not all we can or should do. As we update our baseline stories (and anything else we publish), we can show our audience what’s changed. Scott Rosenberg, author of several books about the Internet, is among several people to suggest that a software industry technique called “versioning” become a normal part of journalism. Scott, a friend who has worked with me on several projects, started pushing this after Politico. comexcised a highly relevant tidbit from a story and then pretended that what it had removed—an admission of how insider journalism, Politico’s stock in trade, actually works—wasn’t important in the first place. He wrote: Any news organization that strives to present a version of reality to its readers or users must come to grips with the fact that reality is always changing. Print publications have always taken daily, weekly or monthly snapshots of that reality, and everyone understands the relationship between the publication date and the information published under it. Radio and TV offer a closerto-live reflection of the ever-changing news reality, but until the Web’s arrival their content was so fleeting that the new update pretty much obliterated the old version of any story. The Web changes all of this. It is both up-to-the-minute and timeless—ephemeral and archival. This offers newsrooms a fundamentally different opportunity for presenting timely story updates while honoring and preserving the record of previous versions. Sadly, not a single news organization I’m aware of has yet taken advantage of this opportunity. The nearly absurd irony is that journalism organizations already do this—internally. Every editing system of any sophistication saves copies of previous versions of articles or other content. What none of them do, save Wikipedia, is to give the audience access to all previous versions. Like Scott Rosenberg, I consider this a no-brainer that nevertheless will take years to catch on, if it ever does. If you have a WordPress blog or a Drupal site, or have created a wiki using the standard MediaWiki software, you’re in luck. There are plug-ins (or modules, which are essentially the same thing) for WordPress and Drupal that will expose your changes the way Wikipedia does. What none of these do, however, is give you the best kind of view into what’s changed. If you use Microsoft Word and collaborate on Dan Gillmor 163 documents, you’ve already seen the “Track Changes” feature that gives you a great view into what’s changed (and who’s changed it, in collaborative settings). What we need most is a Web-based Track Changes feature—and, beyond that, a way to see how documents have changed over time in a more visual way. There’s a terrific opportunity here for Web developers. A related issue is corrections, which after all are one of the ways we update our work (assuming we’re honest about correcting our mistakes). In Chapter 8, when I said what I would do if I ran a news organization, I wrote about creating a service to notify online readers, should they choose to sign up for it, of errors we’ve learned about in our journalism. Users of this service could choose to be notified of only errors we deemed major, or all errors, however insignificant we believed them to be. While I’d offer this service for more general updates as well, it strikes me as especially critical for mistakes. By implementing such a system, we could help prevent new viewers from seeing incorrect information. We could also do our best to ensure that people who read incorrect information will learn that it was wrong—and that we cared enough to fix our errors. Jack Shafer, Slate.com’s media writer, has been offering this service in a technically crude way for some time. At the bottom of his column you’ll find this offer: Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a “Press Box” correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Harman in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. See? This isn’t all that difficult! Think Tank Corporate R&D operations try to pick winners while making relatively “safe” bets. This is the inverse. Imagine a small team of, for lack of a better word, “connectors.” They’ll identify interesting ideas, technologies and techniques—business models as well as editorial innovations. Then they’ll connect these projects with people who can help make them part of tomorrow’s journalistic ecosystem. Where will these projects come from? Everywhere: universities, corporate labs, open-source repositories, startups, basements, you and me. 164 Mediactive Part of this is about connecting dots. I take it for granted—based on my own experiences and observations over three decades—that a large percentage of those journalistically valuable ideas, technologies and techniques will come from projects whose creators have no journalistic intent. The experiments are taking place inside and outside of companies, inside and outside the news industry (mostly outside), in Silicon Valley and out in the larger world. Who can help the connectors spread innovation into the larger ecosystem? Among others: Traditional news organizations. This isn’t to suggest they should not invest in some internal R&D (though most do little, if any). However, I would suggest that they devote a bigger part of that spending to buy or license other people’s innovations. Investors outside the journalism business. Angel investors and venture capitalists think “entertainment” when they think about media. They may be willing to place some of their high-risk, high-reward bets on projects that meet community information needs if they can be persuaded that they are based on serious business models. Non-media enterprises. More and more corporations and nonprofits of all stripes are creating media. If they can help support innovations that also serve journalistic purposes, everyone wins. If they can be persuaded of the value of applying journalistic principles to what they produce, so much the better. Foundations. Some are spending a great deal of money now on new projects, but they’d get even more leverage by supporting the connectors. Individual (or small-team) media creators who can invest only their time. An essential part of the connectors’ role would be to identify open-source and other such projects that regular folks or small teams can put to good community-information use. What distinguishes the connectors? First, they’ll understand technology at a reasonably deep level. It’s not necessary to be a programmer, but it’s vital to know how to a) ask the right questions of the right people, b) recognize cool technology when they see it, and c) have a sound sense of the difference between cool and useful. Second, they’ll need to appreciate journalism’s essential role in society, and how the craft is changing. This means understanding Dan Gillmor 165 fundamental principles, of course, but also the need to turn journalism from the lecture mode of the past to the conversational mode it needs to become. Third, they’ll need a broad array of contacts in the technology, business, education, philanthropic, investor and other sectors—and the ability to have intelligent conversations with any of them. Finally, they’ll need to be evangelists, selling all these people not just on the need to combine great ideas with journalism, but also the need to take risks in new areas. The catalyzing opportunities here are fairly amazing, if we pull this off. It’ll require a team effort in the end, but it’s definitely worth the effort—because the payoff for journalism could easily dwarf the investment. Trust, Reputation and More In an era where we have nearly unlimited amounts of information at our fingertips, one of the key issues is how to separate the good from the bad, the reliable from the unreliable, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, the useful from the irrelevant. Unless we get this right, the emerging diverse media ecosystem won’t work well, if at all. I’ve long believed that we’ll need to find ways to combine popularity—a valuable metric in itself—with reputation. This sounds easier than it is, because evaluating reputation is enormously complex. But whoever gets this right is going to be a huge winner in the marketplace. What do we mean by reputation? In this context, many things. If someone points to a news article, for example, we have to consider reputation at many levels. Among these: What “media outlet”—traditional, blog, whatever—is behind the article? If it’s The Economist, the reputation starts at a high level. If it’s Joe’s Blog, and I have no idea who Joe is or what he has been doing for the past few years, the reputation starts (much) lower. What is the reputation of the writer/video-maker/etc.? I generally give a high rating to New York Times reporters, but reputation can vary within organizations: I can name a few Times reporters who’ve wrecked their credibility with me over the past few years. 166 Mediactive I gave you more detailed exploration of techniques for gauging trustworthiness and reputation in Chapter 3. Detached measurement of reputation is incredibly hard, though, and currently the tools for measuring are at best crude. In a world of emerging digital tools, however, there are glimmerings of hope. I’ve been begging people at eBay for years—to no avail—to make people’s reputations as buyers and sellers portable. By that I mean people should be allowed to create a badge of some kind, with some real data behind it, that they can post on their own work, with the data made available in a granular way. Of course, your eBay reputation is not an exact proxy for your general trustworthiness, as a person or as an information creator. For one thing, we know that people are constantly gaming eBay’s system. For another, how you behave in buying and selling goods online doesn’t necessarily predict how you’ll behave in other situations. Still, it may be a useful thing to know. Your Karma at Slashdot is another useful metric. So are the individual users’ contributions in the collaborative filtering at the Digg and Reddit websites for rating the news. Useful, but clearly not sufficient by themselves to let you make big decisions about someone’s overall integrity. Combine a bunch of reputation systems, though, and you’re getting somewhere—and a world of interactive data suggest at least the possibility of finding a way to blend various measures into something that is more useful than what we have today. Fix the Pulitzers The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America’s premier journalism awards, took useful steps into the modern age in 2008 and 2009, mainly by welcoming online-only entries. They opened the awards to people like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, among many others who’d been excluded in the past due to an anachronistic system that had admitted only print entries. We should celebrate that progress. But the new rules didn’t begin to address the more fundamental issues about how journalism is changing—and they raised the question of whether journalism prizes should exist in the first place. Let’s answer the second question first. In general, journalism prizes should not exist. No other profession (or craft) gives itself as many awards as journalism. Anyone with a byline or identifiable broadcasting Dan Gillmor 167 face or voice almost can’t help winning something just by staying around long enough. Worse, many of the awards are sponsored by the people journalists cover, and some of those come with cash awards, raising all kinds of issues about integrity. When I’m the czar of all journalism, I’ll do away with almost every journalism prize. Since neither will happen, I suggest that we make the very top awards more meaningful for the digital era. Here’s some of what I said to the Pulitzer Prize Board when it asked me to answer some questions and offer my own suggestions about how the prizes should recognize changes in technology and journalistic practices: Q: In creating the Prizes, Joseph Pulitzer wanted to “elevate” the profession of journalism. In his era, better journalism meant better newspapers. How could we further his goal today, given the makeup of news media and their challenges? A: Become the top prizes for journalism of any kind. Do away entirely with the distinction between newspapers and other media. There’s no real alternative. Q: Should the nature of the “newspaper” be redefined as multimedia journalism grows and practices change? If so, how? For example, should we include entirely online newspapers? And what should we do with things like videography and its impact on visual journalism? A: You can’t define your way out of this dilemma, except in one sense. You can define what you mean by “great journalism,” and what you mean by “elevating the craft.” Beyond that, everything should be fair game. Q: Should we re-examine and possibly revise the Prizes’ journalism categories? If so, how? For example, should we have a separate category for large multimedia packages? Should we reconsider the idea of circulation size as a basis for category definition—at least in some cases? A: I’d revise the categories in some fairly dramatic ways, but I would not make separate categories for media formats, for the reasons I mentioned above. I would, however, add several areas where the Pulitzers could elevate journalism in a big way. Here are just three: 168 Mediactive
- The digital space has many characteristics, but one is that the journalism we create doesn’t disappear into birdcages or pay-per-view databases. Stories and projects can accrete influence, and be timely long beyond the traditional periods. This is especially important when we recognize that the manufacturing process of journalism—create something and send it out, period—becomes obsolete in due course. Some ideas that take this into account: a. We’d all benefit from a prize celebrating relentless journalism over time that led to long-term solutions of big problems; this would require a rule change to look back more than 12 months. b. Along those lines, why not recognize reporting that was ahead of its time? Whenever a major national or international crisis becomes obvious, such as the current credit and housing meltdowns, we can always look back and find examples of prescient journalism that was essentially ignored at the time. If you made that single addition to the prizes, you’d be making a huge advance. c. And what about journalism that has evolved? I’m working on a book that will live and evolve mostly online, and I guarantee it’ll be vastly better in five years than it will be the day it’s officially published for the first time. I can show you things that have been updated over time, and which now are as good as journalism can be, even though they were, early on, shadows of what they’ve become.
- I’d also find ways to recognize more of the finest work by small entities that do brilliant coverage of small communities of geography or interest. Beat reporting doesn’t fully cover what I’m talking about here, but it’s the closest you have now. (I’m not talking about separate prizes for big and little organizations, however.)
- I’d create a prize for innovation in journalism, recognizing an advance by someone who used the collision of media and technology to create something new and valuable to the craft. Put all of this out for public comment, by the way. You’ll be amazed at the great ideas others will have. Dan Gillmor 169 Q: Should we re-evaluate the kind of journalism we honor and the entries we encourage? For example, do we sometimes foster journalism projects and packages that lack relevance to everyday lives? A: Of course you do, but that’s the nature of giving prizes. I don’t have a great antidote for the bigness impulse. I would try to tweak the rules and judging to favor things that genuinely lead to a better world. I don’t have any obvious ways to achieve this, of course…. Q: Should the Board itself be changed? Should we alter the mix of journalists and academics? Should we expand the Board’s total size? (The Board now has 17 voting members, 4 of whom can be non-journalists. The dean of the journalism school and the Pulitzer administrator are non-voting members of the Board.) A: Yes, change the board, in significant ways if you adopt any of the ideas I’ve suggested. (It seems large enough now.) The current board members are superb representatives of the 20thcentury manufactured-newspaper model of journalism, and people of that stature and accomplishment should remain part of the mix. But I’d include some very different kinds of folks, who may have a wider vision of the craft. Get Policy Right As the business model of journalism has fractured, some big news organizations, their corporate parents and a host of well-meaning observers have latched onto an alarming, anti-capitalistic notion: government (read: taxpayer) help. In 2009 and 2010, the Federal Trade Commission held several workshops entitled “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?,” whose stated purpose was “to explore how the Internet has affected journalism.” This seemed to indicate that the nation’s scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers had all gone into hibernation, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. How else could the FTC have the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear? The FTC justified its intervention in a Federal Register Notice that observed, in a promising start, that the Internet has created unparalleled possibilities. The commission could have stopped there, and not 170 Mediactive bothered to hold the workshop. It could have recognized that we’re in the early days of a transition from one set of business models (most of which have not been very competitive) to an emerging, hypercompetitive sphere. But the commission staff and many speakers found much to fret about, spurred in large part by the newspaper industry’s incessant whining. (Could it also have been influenced by the fact that the FTC chairman is married to a Washington Post opinion writer? No, this obviously had absolutely no bearing on anything.) Chief among the threats was the erosion of the advertising-based business model. The FTC notice, quoting several economists, asserted bizarrely that “public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.” Market failure? What about the market failure—which, as far as I can tell, never got any attention from a succession of FTC people during the past half-century—that resulted in the the media monopolies and oligopolies that dominated that period? Their public affairs journalism was, for the most part, a modest spinoff of the extortionate advertising prices they charged when they had near-absolute market power to charge anything they wished. Only when there’s real competition, it seems, does the FTC get interested. We do not need government subsidies aimed specifically at journalism. That’s not to say taxpayers should stay entirely clear of Internet deployment; in fact, a policy leading to widespread, open broadband access for all Americans is the single place where government intervention in media makes sense, with free speech implications as well as financial ones. As noted earlier in this volume, we should remember the indirect subsidies of low postal rates for print publications, giveaways of publicly owned airwaves (spectrum) to broadcasters, the odious “Newspaper Preservation Act” granting partial antitrust immunity to community newspapers, and a variety of other special favors the news business has received over the years. Some of those were targeted directly at news organizations; others were more general and defensible. On the table now are such fixes as changing the copyright laws to make life more difficult for online aggregators, changing antitrust laws to give journalism-related businesses even more antitrust immunity, direct subsidies and more. All are terrible ideas. There’s only one subsidy that makes sense; only one that wouldn’t put government meddling squarely into the practice of journalism—an inevitable result of the direct subsidies being pushed by well-meaning but Dan Gillmor 171 misguided media thinkers. It’s a subsidy for bandwidth: getting true broadband Internet access to as many people as possible, as some other nations in Europe and Asia have done. The precedent in this case is the right one. Taxpayer-assisted infrastructure—especially the postal system and low rates for sending publications—helped create the newspaper business, and enabled a lot of other commerce. Let’s bring that logic forward to the early 21st century, and enable high-speed Internet access for all Americans, and a communications infrastructure for all competitors. Networking Market Failure Looms As it is, we’re moving toward a market failure of frightening proportions in digital networking, as the telecom industry clamps down, or threatens to, on people’s ability to use Internet connections as they see fit. We’re moving toward a media business consolidation that would terrify any real champion of open markets: a cable-phone duopoly. This brings up the topic of network neutrality: the idea that carriers should not discriminate against one content provider in favor of another. All Internet service providers already manage their network traffic in some ways, such as spam filtering. One reason I worry about new rules enforcing neutrality is the law of unintended consequences. If we allow the carriers to make special deals to favor the content of companies that pay more for special access to end users, rather than letting you and me decide what we want to use, we’re heading for major trouble. The danger signs are growing that we’re moving fast toward a world where the carriers cut deals with favored providers. They’ve made it clear that they want to do that, and they insist they have the right. If they win this battle, you can write off the kind of robust and diverse media/journalism ecosystem we’ve been discussing in this book— because upstarts will tend to be frozen out by the mega-players. This is why it was so worrisome when Google and Verizon, the huge phone and Internet company, announced in August 2010 some principles about network access that could, if enacted, be the end of any hope of network neutrality. They paid lip service to net neutrality, but then offered several caveats. Neutrality would apply only to the “wireline” portion of the Internet, such as DSL and cable connections, and only to what we have now. Their proposal would, they said, promote the expansion of new services that would go beyond anything we have today. Supposedly, these 172 Mediactive new services could not be designed to be end runs around net neutrality; they would have to be genuinely new. What’s the problem, then? It’s this: We cannot trust Verizon or other carriers, or Google for that matter, to follow through in ways that are truly in the interest of the kind of open networks the nation needs. If Google CEO Eric Schmidt was telling the truth when he said his company’s overwhelming focus will remain on the public Internet—for example, promising that YouTube will remain there—that’s great. I have no reason to disbelieve him, and Google’s track record to date is strong on this issue. But plans change, managements change, and corporate strategies change. Meanwhile, Google and Verizon went backwards in a big way, arguing that data services provided by mobile-phone companies shouldn’t be subject to neutrality rules, given the constrained bandwidth on current mobile networks. As Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University in New York and an expert on all things Internet, explains: “That’s a huge hole, given the growing popularity of wireless services and the recent suggestion by the [FCC] that we may not have a competitive wireless marketplace.” For Verizon’s part, the acceptance of what sounded like fairly serious neutrality rules on current wire-line networks was welcome. But I see the rest as a Trojan Horse. Verizon and other carriers have every incentive, based on their legacies, to push network upgrade investments into the parallel Internet, not the public one. With one exception, the carriers have all but abandoned their push to bring to the U.S. the kind of wired-line bandwidth that other nations— Japan, South Korea, France and Sweden come immediately to mind—enjoy. Verizon has all but stopped building out its fast fiber-optic network to homes, leaving Comcast as the provider that is most ardently boosting connection speeds via its cable lines. (Even Comcast’s fast speeds are nothing special next to what carriers in those other nations have provided, not to mention initiatives elsewhere as the U.S. falls further behind.) So when Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said “We have to be flexible,” my immediate thought was “Uh-oh.” The right way forward is to have sufficient bandwidth that all of us, citizens and corporations alike, can do pretty much anything we choose using public networks—a true broadband infrastructure is the basis for all communications. Instead, the game is on by powerful corporations to create a parallel Internet that’s just another version of television. Let’s hope they won’t get away with it. Dan Gillmor 173 Reward Systems A fierce and fascinating debate broke out over the cover photo on Time magazine’s April 27, 2009, print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture of a glass jar semi-filled with coins, for a story on Americans’ newly frugal ways in the wake of the financial meltdown. The amount was much less than what big magazines normally pay for cover art, and that made a lot of professional photographers furious. They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and parttimer peers—especially the ones capturing breaking news events—should start agitating for some better marketplaces than the ones available today. As I noted in Chapter 4, I’m not a fan of a system that tells people they should be contributing their work to profitable corporations for nothing more than a pat on the back. The freelance system of the past was inefficient. If you had a great picture, your options were limited. But as the Time photo suggests, the marketplace in the Internet era has changed irrevocably. Someone with a camera (probably part of a phone) almost always will be in a position to capture relevant still photos and/or, increasingly, videos of newsworthy events. We’ll have more valuable pictures, not less, and production values will take second place to authenticity and timeliness. This is also becoming more and more the case for what journalists call “feature photography.” As anyone who spends any serious time on Flickr already knows, amateur photographers are doing incredible work. Few of them can match the consistent quality of what the pros do, but they don’t have to. Every one of us is capable of capturing one supremely memorable image. Whatever you’re looking for, you can find it on Flickr or other photo sites, including the stock-photos service where Robert Lam listed the picture that ended up on Time’s cover. According to a conversation thread on the Model Mayhem photo community site, which includes some strenuous objections from pro photographers, Time paid Lam $30 for the photo. It does strike me as absurd that a huge magazine with huge circulation can get an image like Lam’s for so little money. But that was his choice, and it was Time’s choice to take advantage of the low price he was asking. Just as some people gladly take the New York Times’s absurdly low pay when their freelance articles make it into the paper’s news and op-ed pages, some photographers gladly sell their work for peanuts to Time. They have their own reasons, which can range from getting valuable exposure—so they can (try to) charge more for subsequent work—to not 174 Mediactive needing the higher rates that staffers and more famous people can demand. This gets trickier, it seems to me, when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time, and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip. Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I’ve seen so far—namely, a real-time auction system. How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I’d imagine, would go like this: Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the photographer, minus a cut to the auction service. The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less. Eventually, someone will do this kind of business—which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it’s sooner rather than later. For print, an auction system is also needed, but the timeliness is less critical. A British startup is planning, as I write this, to launch a service called “Newsrupt,” aimed more at editors than reporters. I hope it’s the first of many such ventures. Identity, Accountability I said earlier that I strongly encourage people to use their real names in online conversations. But I do recognize the need for anonymity in certain situations, and I would never support the toofrequent calls for its outright banning. My reason for preferring real names is accountability. The quality and trustworthiness of what we say and do is enhanced by our willingness to be accountable. There are middle grounds between absolute name verification and anonymity. Online, we can use pseudonyms—made-up names—that are attached to a single e-mail address. Many online comment systems insist on registration using this method. Dan Gillmor 175 After all, who are you? Actually, you are many people, at least in the sense of how you deal with others in your life. You show one part of yourself to your family. You show another to your colleagues at work. And you show still another to your friends outside of home and work. The systems for pseudonymity are still crude, though, and subject to gaming by spammers and others who want to pollute our experiences. They need to improve. We also need to create online identities for commercial purposes— identities that guarantee merchants that we can pay but that shield all other information from being sucked into their computers. The technology exists to make this possible, but it hasn’t been put into the marketplace in any consistent or robust way. Media Literacy I discussed this in the previous chapter, but I’ll make the pitch again: We need, in America and the world, to ensure that children grow up with the kinds of media skills they mostly don’t have today. Then we need to make those skills part of a general lifelong learning process. The principles I outlined in Chapter 2 are a good place to start. But we should not stop with helping people become better consumers; it’s essential, as I’ve said repeatedly in this book, to focus on the creation side of the equation, too. Those skills should add up to something larger: critical thinking. The way to have an informed citizenry is by having citizens who think for themselves. Continue the Conversation We’ve reached the end of this book, apart from the epilogue. But we’re nowhere near the end of the conversation we all need to have, and continue, about our media future. I hope you’ll stop by Mediactive.com. Tell us about resources you’ve discovered that will help us all, and join the conversations we’re having there about these issues. More importantly, have these conversations where you live. I hope what you’ve read here will spark a few of them.