Chapter 4
Journalism’s Evolving Ecosystem Think of this chapter a relatively brief but important digression. One goal is to persuade you that we still need journalism, no matter who’s going to do it. I also want to suggest, in the process, that we’re going to have to expand our understanding of the media and journalistic ecosystems, because many more of us are participating—and all of us can participate—in this new world of media and information. Let me reassure you, as I did in the introduction, that I’m not trying to turn you into a journalist. But I will, in later chapters, urge you to be a contributing member of the media ecosystem, not just a consumer, and in ways that provide useful, trustworthy information to others. For now, though, let’s use the words “journalism” and “journalist” to explore the part of the overall media ecosystem that we all want to be useful and trustworthy. Let’s start by asking a question I hear all the time: Who is a journalist? You’ve already guessed, I hope, that this is the Wrong Question. Here’s the right one: What is journalism? This is more than semantics. Asking the question in the right way has real-world implications. The language of so-called “press shield laws,” for example, aims to protect whistle-blowers and the journalists whom they tell about government or corporate wrongdoing. But as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, these laws could offer false comfort by narrowly defining what a “journalist” is and leaving out a huge range of people and institutions that effectively practice journalism nowadays. The goal should be to protect the act of journalism, as opposed to the people declared to be journalists. I hope we can agree that the New York Times is journalism. Ditto BBC News. Sometimes they get things wrong—even badly wrong—but they do journalism. I also hope we can agree that the “Blah Blah Blah” blog (actually, there are quite a few blogs with that name!) and the YouTube video of “Nat and Foxy disco dancing” are not journalism. They may be 52 Mediactive interesting to their small audiences, and we should celebrate the fact that someone is trying to be creative. But they’re not journalism. If we dig deeper into new media, the answer starts to get complicated. Some of what appeared on my former neighborhood email list was journalism; most wasn’t. But consider the Talking Points Memo collection of blogs, founded by Joshua Micah Marshall. They’re online only, and they have a politically left-of-center world view, but they are so unquestionably journalism that they’ve won a George Polk Award, one of the craft’s truly prestigious honors. Consider also Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration Treasury Department official who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, writes a brilliant blog about policy and many other things. He does something that surely looks like journalism: commentary informed by knowledge. Or take what happened during a Christmas Day blizzard in 2009: people posted local road conditions and information about where stranded travelers could hunker down with local families. Even if that can’t be called journalism in a traditional sense, it’s certainly more useful to a family in a sedan on the side of the road, using a phone that has a Web browser, than any roundup story by a news organization. Thanks to the Digital Age tools available to all of us, many institutions never known for journalism are now contributing information with powerful journalistic impact. These almost-journalists include the Council on Foreign Relations and some advocacy organizations that do deep research and present it with care, including the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. Any one of us can, and many of us will, commit an act of journalism. We may contribute to the journalism ecosystem once, rarely, frequently or constantly. How we deal with these contributions— deciding to make one; what we do with what we’ve created; and how we use what others have created—is complex and evolving. But this is the future. Citizen Journalism Defines Its Future When I wrote We the Media in 2004, I was confident that citizen journalism would become an essential part of the ecosystem. Nothing I’ve seen leads me to believe otherwise. But the genre has a long way to go. What is citizen journalism, specifically? There’s no single definition, just as we can’t restrict traditional journalism to what people do in newspapers. There are a thousand examples (and we point to them all the Dan Gillmor 53 time on the Mediactive blog), but the important thing to recognize is the sheer variety, in format, style and intent. Remember, we are talking about what is journalism, not who’s a journalist. As I’ll discuss in this chapter, citizen journalism and citizen media in general have drawn increasing attention from investors and media partners. Foundations, too, have stepped up to fill at least some of the perceived and real gaps in news, and have put millions of dollars into initiatives of, by and for the people. It has also been heartening to watch traditional media organizations, big and small, begin to understand why they need to play a role in this arena. The vast majority of newspapers now have staff blogs, which is a good start, and as noted in Chapter 3 a few forward-looking organizations are inviting their audiences to participate in the actual journalism. But Old Media continues to be behind the curve, and I don’t see that changing much. What is unquestionably changing, at an accelerating pace, is the take-up by people everywhere of the professionals’ tools of trade. In one area, photojournalism, a transition of unprecedented magnitude is well under way. “Spot News” Becomes Citizen Journalism People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations for just as long. But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft that helps inform the rest of us about the world we live in. That craft has never been more vibrant, or more vital. But the ability to make a living at it is crumbling. The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem: They can’t possibly compete in the mediasphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, many (if not most) of the pros will find themselves fighting a losing battle to save their careers. Let’s do a little time travel. An old-fashioned movie camera captured the most famous pictures in the citizen-media genre: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Abraham Zapruder, the man pointing the camera that day in Dealey Plaza, sold the film to Life Magazine for $150,000— over a million dollars in today’s currency. 54 Mediactive In Dealey Plaza that day, one man happened to capture a motion picture—somewhat blurred but utterly gruesome nonetheless—of those terrible events. Zapruder’s work, by any standard we can imagine, was an act of citizen journalism, even though the term did not exist back then. Now note what media tools people carry around with them routinely today—or, better yet, what they’ll have a decade from now. And then transport yourself, and those tools, back to 1963. Dozens or hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza would have been capturing high-definition videos of the assassination, most likely via their camera-equipped mobile phones as well as single-purpose digital cameras and video recorders. They’d have been capturing those images from multiple perspectives. And—this is key—all of those devices would have been attached to digital networks. If the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology had been in use back in 1963, several things are clear. One is that videos of this event would have been posted online almost instantly. Professional news organizations, which would also have had their own videos, would have been competing with a blizzard of other material almost from the start—and given traditional media’s usually appropriate reluctance to broadcast the most gruesome images (e.g., the beheading of the American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq), the online accounts might well have been a primary source. And think about this: We’d also soon have a three-dimensional hologram of the event, given the number of cameras capturing it from various angles. Which means we’d probably know for sure whether someone was shooting at the president from that famous grassy knoll. In the future, government commissions will still issue official reports, but the documents will be created with much more input from citizens, who, because of digital media tools, are playing increasingly direct roles in governance as well as elections. The prospect of actually making policy, or at least having an impact on it, can offer a serious incentive to be a citizen journalist. Another famous picture of our times is the single image that we will most remember from the July 2005 bombings in London. It was taken by Adam Stacey inside the Underground (London’s subway), as he and others escaped from a smoky train immediately after one of the bombs exploded. The production values of the image were hardly professional, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear. Dan Gillmor 55 In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot at every significant event. It might well be you, and you should be prepared for the moment when you are in that position, which I’ll discuss in the next section. How can people who cover breaking news for a living begin to compete? They can’t possibly be everywhere at once. They can compete only on the stories where they are physically present—and, in the immediate future, by being relatively trusted sources. But the fact remains that there are far more newsworthy situations than pro photographers. In the past, most of those situations were never captured. This is no longer the case. Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be—and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways. To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive. Remember, there was once a fairly healthy community of portrait painters. When photography came along, a lot of them had to find other work, or at least their ranks were not refilled when they retired. Professional portrait photographers, similarly, are less in demand today than they were a generation ago. But portraits have survived—and thrived. The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread. You can be a part of it, and I hope you will. Advocates: The Almost-Journalists Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news aren’t the only places where deep investigative journalism is to be found. Nonpartisan think tanks and not-for-profit organizations do a lot of it. For example, the “Crisis Guides” published by the Council on Foreign Relations provide remarkably detailed coverage of global political crises—the council’s report on the genocide in Darfur is a great example. As the judges of the Knight-Batten Awards said of the council when honoring its work, “This is an institution stepping up and honoring the best of journalism. It’s filling an absolutely articulated need.” Others are also helping to fill this need, even if what they’re doing isn’t, strictly speaking, journalism. Call them the advocates. Journalism at its most basic level is a combination of two essential tasks. The first is reporting: gathering information via research, 56 Mediactive interviews, etc. The second part is telling people what you’ve learned: writing (in the broadest sense, including video, audio, graphics and more) and editing. So, by these notions, what famous journalism organization has done some of the best reporting about the United States Government’s Guantanamo Bay prison? That’s the place where the United States holds the people the government has declared to be terrorists, a prison where prisoners have been in many cases tortured and, until recently, held without access to the legal system. With a few exceptions, notably at the McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau and the New York Times, the people who’ve done the best reporting on this scandal have not, for the most part, been working for major media outfits. They’ve been working for that famous journalism organization called the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, the ACLU—a passionate advocate for the Bill of Rights—has done prodigious work to uncover the truth about America’s actions in creating this extra-legal system. And on the ACLU’s “Rights in Detention” sub-site, you’ll find a huge amount of information—and advocacy—about this topic. As my Salon.com colleague Glenn Greenwaldobserved in 2008: It has been left to the ACLU and similar groups (such as the Center for Constitutional Rights and Electronic Frontier Foundation) to uncover what our Government is doing precisely because the institutions whose responsibility that is—the “opposition party,” the Congress, the Intelligence Committees, the press—have failed miserably in those duties. Now consider Human Rights Watch, whose mission is “Defending Human Rights Worldwide.” This is another advocacy organization that does superb reporting on the issues it cares about. Its report on Saudi Arabian domestic workers, for example, is an exhaustively researched document on some troubling practices. This is incredibly fine reporting. Smaller advocacy organizations are becoming more active in this sphere, too. The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona think tank named after conservative patron saint Barry Goldwater, hired an investigative journalist in 2009. Since then, Mark Flatten has produced several noteworthy “watchdog” reports on local government matters. Recall the public-knowledge trajectory an organization like the ACLU had to follow in the past. It would do painstaking research on topics like Guantanamo, and then issue reports. When a new report was released, the organization’s researchers or public relations people would Dan Gillmor 57 contact reporters at, say, the New York Times and hope that the newspaper would write a story about it. If the national press ignored the report, no matter how powerful the content, the information would reach only a tiny number of people. The ACLU still works hard to get its reports covered by the Times and other national media organizations. The traditional media retain a powerful role in helping the public learn about important issues. But advocates have new avenues, which they are learning to use more effectively. They’d be even more effective, I believe, if they applied the principles of journalism to their work—principles I’ll be discussing in detail in the next several chapters. The productions by the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and many similar advocacy organizations are what I’m calling “almost-journalism.” Their reporting is superb, but what they produce tends to fall just a shade short of journalism—not always, but often enough that this caveat is necessary. Are they part of the media? Yes. They are absolutely in the media field now, because they are using the tools of media creation to learn and tell stories, and to make those stories available to a wide audience. These organizations and countless others like them—small and large, local and international—are part of the media ecosystem. With just a little extra effort, they could be part of the journalistic ecosystem too, in ways that go far beyond their traditional roles. The area where they fall the shortest is the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word, and we’ll spend some time on it in an upcoming chapter. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you, b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand, and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us. Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. The best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they’ve been fair in reflecting opposing or diverging views and ideas. By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments. At the very least, they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides’ arguments. (That’s sides, not side; almost everything has more than two sides.) Of course, transparency is essential in this process, and for the most part we get that from advocacy groups. The ones we can’t trust are the ones that take positions that echo the views of their financial patrons. The think-tank business is known for this kind of thing, as we’ve seen earlier, and it’s an abysmal practice. 58 Mediactive As the traditional journalism business continues to implode, the almost-journalists will come to play an increasingly important role in the media ecosystem. With traditional journalism companies firing reporters and editors right and left, the almost-journalist organizations have both the deep pockets and the staffing to fill in some of the gap—if they can find a way to apply fairness and transparency to their media, whether it’s designed to inform or to advocate. Like everything else, this notion gets serious pushback. Ethan Zuckerman notes that Human Rights Watch competes for foundation funding with actual journalism organizations such as his own Global Voices Online project. He also says that helping the almost-journalists doesn’t solve the question of who will pay for journalism, but rather shifts it one level away from the reader/viewer/listener. I can’t dispute what he says, but I still think NGO-almostjournalism is worthy of the public’s careful attention. Ultimately, this conversation is about who deserves to be listened to. New York University professor Jay Rosen defines it elegantly. In a talk he gave to budding French journalists, he said: Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” If “anyone” can produce media and share it with the world, what makes the pro journalist special, or worth listening to? Not the press card, not the by-line, not the fact of employment by a major media company. None of that. The most reliable source of authority for a professional journalist will continue to be what James W. Carey called “the idea of a report.” That’s when you can truthfully say to the users, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” Or, “I was at the demonstration, you weren’t, let me tell you how the cops behaved.” Or, altering my formula slightly, “I interviewed the workers who were on that oil drilling platform when it exploded, you didn’t, let me tell you what they said.” Or, “I reviewed those documents, you didn’t, let me tell you what I found.” Your authority begins when you do the work. If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned. Your Contribution to the Journalism Ecosystem Many of the people who were near the famous Minnesota bridge collapse in August 2007 followed an instinct to run toward the bridge, not away from it, so they could capture videos and still images of the Dan Gillmor 59 wreckage. Within hours, hundreds of photos had been posted to the Flickr photo sharing site, and dozens of videos were on YouTube. As I write this in late December 2009, I’m watching the latest citizen-journalism videos made with mobile phones at anti-government protests in Iran. It has taken genuine bravery for these people to stay on scene during the mayhem and tell the world what they’re seeing. I don’t want to suggest that everyone reading this book is going to commit regular acts of journalism. Most of us won’t, and that’s fine. But as I noted earlier, I do hope you’ll be thinking about being ready if that moment arrives. What should you do when you witness something that may be newsworthy? Let’s assume, for the moment, that you’re carrying a mobile phone with a camera in it. First, get the picture or video, if you can do so safely. If it’s risky, understand the risks and make a decision accordingly. Second, know what you can do next. The modern instinct, if you don’t have your own blog or other site of your own, is to post it on a photo or video site, or to send it to CNN. Maybe we should rethink several current assumptions in this process. People have been putting themselves in harm’s way to “get the picture” for as long as cameras have been around. Some—the professional photojournalists—have been paid for it, but others have not. I question the ethics of news organizations that invite submissions from the public without doing their utmost to warn non-paid shooters away from risks. It’s one thing for a news channel staffer to get videos inside the hurricane, but quite another to urge the same from a resident who’d be safer remaining indoors. I also question the ethics of news organizations that assume, as many do, that the work of the citizen journalist is something the company should get for free. I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical, it’s also unsustainable in the long run, because the people who give freely of their time won’t be satisfied to see mega-corporations rake in the financial value of what others have created. Not every person who captures a newsworthy image or video necessarily wants to be paid. But many do, and right now, for the most part, their compensation is a pat on the back. Eventually, someone will 60 Mediactive come up with a robust business model that puts a welcome dent into this modern version of sharecropping. Stacey’s picture in the London Underground was widely distributed—it was published on the front pages of many newspapers— in part because he put it out under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone the right to use it in any way provided that they attributed the picture to its creator. There were misunderstandings (including at least one use by a photo agency that apparently claimed at least partial credit for itself), but the copyright terms—I’ll explain Creative Commons more fully in the Epilogue—almost certainly helped spread it far and wide in a very short time. Beyond licensing, we need new market systems to reward citizen photographers. Some startups are positioning themselves as brokers, including a service called Demotix. As I’ll also discuss later, we need to take the next step to a real-time auction system. A few news organizations have adapted, and are finding ways to reward citizen creators in tangible ways. Bild, the German tabloid, asks people to send in their own pictures, and pays for the ones it publishes. This is an important part of our future. You Can Participate in Other Ways Again, I don’t expect you to suddenly decide to become a journalist. I do hope you’ve gained, in the past few chapters, a deeper appreciation for the craft and the people who practice it honorably. Maybe you’ll be one of them from time to time. Even if you never commit a single act of journalism, though, it’s important to understand that being literate in today’s world means more than just smarter consumption, however actively you do that. Being literate is also about creating, contributing and collaborating. In the Digital Age, participation is part of genuine literacy. As Jay Rosen said, your authority begins when you do the work. Remember that as you read the next few chapters, where we’ll look at what this means, and how you can participate—at whatever level feels best to you. Part II: Introduction Chances are you’re already creating media. If you have a Facebook account, you’re a media creator—at least in the sense I’m talking about here. If you send emails to more than one person at a time to let them know about interesting things, or participate in any kind of online forum, you’re a media creator. If you post photos or videos anywhere online, you’re a media creator. If you do any number of things with the digital tools at your disposal, count yourself in the creative ranks. Using media actively this way, in contrast to consuming it passively, as was the norm in the last half of the 20th century, means more than being a better consumer. The Digital Age brings us new opportunities to be fully literate—and the creative act is an essential part. The chapters in Part II will help you make the most of being an active user of the media that the Digital Age has thrust upon all of us. As I’ve said earlier in this book, I’m not expecting you to become a journalist. But I’ll strongly suggest, even at the risk of being a little pushy, that you learn the principles of journalism. This will bring you enormous benefit, especially in understanding our messy media landscape. These principles are also useful, of course, if you are going to make your own media at any level. They’re useful, that is, if you are trying to help other people understand their world (or yours) a little better—and if you want them to trust what you say. They’ve provided a bedrock for the best news and information from the folks who get paid to provide it, and they’re just as helpful for you and me. Whatever the level of your contribution to the new media landscape, even it it’s just among friends, it’s good to think about some issues beyond the obvious ones, such as whether to blog or just use Facebook. I want to help you understand why I believe you need your own presence on the Internet beyond just a Facebook page, and a few of the wrinkles to consider in establishing your own presence in cyberspace. I’ll also try to fit your creative activity into the overall landscape of tomorrow’s information ecosystem, and offer some ideas on how it’ll evolve. Hint: It’s going to be messy, but also exciting. The chapters in this part of the book present options for creating media that range from the simple to the quite sophisticated. If you’re not 62 Mediactive very far along, and a chapter goes beyond what you want to know, just skip ahead to the next chapter. But mark your place—after you’ve been active for a while you might very well want to come back and read about the next steps. I certainly hope you will.