Media + Politics + Power

That our “age of information” has brought about an epochal change in the business of gathering and distributing news is a tired refrain. Ever since going to journalism school in 2007, I’ve personally endured the lamentations of grizzled reporters over the “collapse of the newspaper industry,” the “dwindling of ethical standards in the press,” the “near extinction of investigative journalism,” and many, many other old world virtues set aflame upon the pyres of the new media.

My reactions to these complaints have always been mixed. As a former Army officer who once dreamed of a career as an intrepid reporter for a major mainstream publication, they’ve been a source of anxiety. As a Generation Y-er, whose coming of age straddled the years when online life became mainstream – I remember vividly the time before cell phones and personal computers – they’re a poignant starting point for comparing the world of information scarcity in which I grew up with the world of plenty that exists today.

But the assigned readings of the last two weeks have helped me to view the now-familiar gripes about yesteryear’s dying news model in a new light. That is, they’ve given me hope. The readings themselves, and especially the lively discussions they’ve prompted in class, have laid bare a severe generation gap between the youth who’ve embraced new media and those who can’t seem to let the old ways go.

Several pieces in particular have convinced me that not only is there a future for a aspiring journalists in a world without traditional publications but that it’s a bright one.

Clay Shirky’s March 2009 blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable sums up the point nicely. “Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Shirky writes. “What we need journalism.” Shirky argues that just like Gutenberg’s printing press upended the Vatican’s centuries-old monopoly on information distribution, launching a revolution that lasted 300 years, the Internet is doing something similar today. According to Shirky, in the coming years, powerful institutions will forfeit their control of information to individuals.

Two other readings capture the spirit of Shirky’s ideas by offering ways that journalists might expect to stay relevant and make a living in this new ecosystem.

The first is Kevin Kelly’s article 1,000 True Fans, which provides a framework through which artists – writers included – can make a perfectly decent career for themselves by capitalizing on “The Long Tail.” The idea is that building a small fan base of a mere 1,000 online followers, who are loyal enough to pay for your work, will help subsidize your artistic pursuits in the short term so that you can garner a larger audience in the long term.

The next is Susannah Breslin’s blog post The Numbers of Self-Publishing Long Form Journalism, which tells Breslin’s story of self-publishing a 10,000 word article she wrote about the porn industry that was rejected by several big-name publishers. The article, published at no cost and available to everyone for free online, was a huge success. Breslin was able to further burnish her journalism creds and even receive donations for the piece from admiring readers.

Bottom line, what I’ve taken away from this block of readings is this idea: The former familiar features of the news business – city newspaper monopolies, broadcast network cartels and the tyranny of the Establishment’s editorial filter – are antiquities that deserve to be smashed. Their smoldering ruins will yield the opportunity to build a newer, better, fairer kind of journalism.

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I’ve chosen to evaluate a Wikipedia article on the German town of Bamberg, an old and beautiful provincial city in northern Bavaria where I lived for almost five years. As a U.S. Army officer, I was stationed in Bamberg from 2003 to 2007, and I came to know the city intimately. In fact, as an adult, Bamberg is the place I’ve called home longer than anywhere else.

Until this week, I had never actually read, or even looked at, the Wikipedia article for Bamberg. Overall, the article contained some useful information about the town. It had facts and descriptions that synched well with my casual knowledge of the history, geography and culture of the place. However, I was extremely disappointed in the article’s presentation, namely its sourcing and readability.

In what follows, I present an itemized evaluation of the Wikipedia article “Bamberg.”

First things first. Let’s cover the good stuff.

Comprehensiveness: I was impressed with how much information the article contained about this relatively small – but not insignificant – city of 70,000 people. It captured well the religious and cultural history of the town, including its importance as a papal outpost, its brief role as the center of the Holy Roman Empire, its use as a center of political organizing by the Nazis in the 1930s and its current notability as a premier beer-producing center (with one of the highest concentrations of micro-breweries in the world, relative to its size). Ample attention is also paid to Bamberg’s historic churches and castles, some of which are more than a thousand years old. I did have one problem with the comprehensiveness: The article says very little about the presence of thousands of American troops stationed on a key U.S. military base just outside the town center. “Bamberg is home to nearly 7,000 foreign nationals, including over 4,100 members of the United States Army and their dependents,” the article reads, but says nothing more about how important that presence is to the economy of the city and surrounding region or about its role during the Cold War.

Neutrality: Little is controversial about Bamberg, save, perhaps, for the U.S. military presence there. Except for the aforementioned lack of information about this, I saw no reason to give poor marks for neutrality.

Formatting: The article adequately follows the Wikipedia Manual of Style, although some small tweaks could serve to bolster the site’s standardization with other similar articles.

Illustrations: The photos of Bamberg in this article do great justice to the medieval beauty of the city. However a nice old map of the town center would be a welcome addition.

Now for the bad.

Sourcing: This article has almost no sourcing, forcing me to question the accuracy of much of what is written. There are a mere eight sources cited – in an article of some 4,000 words – half of which are questionable at best. One is a German government site with municipal statistics. Two are books: one on 18^th century witch trials, another on Adolph Hitler. Two websites, one for a local brewery and another about the main castle in town, are cited. Finally, two 100-year-old encyclopedia entries and one reference to the online Jewish Encyclopedia are mentioned. Based on what I’ve seen of the standards used on other sites, this page should be flagged for sourcing.

Readability: Much of the article was written poorly, using awkward phrasing and even incorrect grammar. In some places, it reads as if it were translated literally from the German language. Consider this sentence: “Bamberg is one of the few cities in Germany that was not destroyed by World War II bombings because of a nearby Artillery Factory that prevented planes from getting near to Bamberg.” Or this one: “By the changes resulting from the Reformation, the territory of this see was reduced nearly one half in extent.”

A little cleanup here – and everywhere mentioned – would go a long way.

At the house in New Orleans where I grew up, a 15^th Edition Encyclopedia Britannica takes up an entire bookcase in the living room. My parents bought it in 1985 when I was five years old, and I relied on it for homework assignments until I went away to college. Today, the entire set – close to 30 heavy books – sits in the same forgotten bookcase under a decade and a half of dust: They haven’t been opened in years.

I discovered Wikipedia late, in 2005. Before that, in college, I’d had a free online subscription to Microsoft Encarta, and later, in the Army, I would have had little use for what information the nascent Wikipedia provided. However, today I count myself as an avid Wikipedia user, a dabbling editor, and a diehard fan.

For that reason, Andrew Lih’s book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, was an illuminating read. Lih boils down the history, culture, technical aspects and controversy that are part of the Wikipedia story in a way that ordinary users can understand. His book covers the unlikely founding of the project from a spinoff of an early conventional online encyclopedia called Nupedia to the eighth most visited site on the Internet. Through characters like founder Jimmy Wales, early project manager Larry Sanger and legions of dedicated Wikipedians we learn about Wikipedia as not just a website, but an idea that has changed the very way we define knowledge.

On the whole, Lih catalogues well the evolution of Wikipedia from an editor/administrator standpoint: creating stubs, protected pages and watch lists as well as tools that have improved Wikipedia over the years like software bots, the dot project, and 3RR (the “three revert rule.”) Lih, as a high priest of Wikipedia himself, also has his finger on the cultural pulse of the project. He outlines the five pillars, the core principles (“Neutral Point of View,” “Verifiability,” and “No Original Research”), and the mantras (“Be bold.” “Ignore rules.”) that spring from the hacker spirit handed down by tech luminaries like Richard Stallman and have become guiding philosophies in the Wiki community. We even learn of the nuances of various cultural offshoots of Wikipedia through anecdotes from Germany, Japan and China.

Lih vividly conveys the sheer scope and lightning growth of this global phenomenon by contextualizing it in the now familiar Web 2.0 refrains of “trusting users as co-developers” and “harnessing collective intelligence.” Those ideas are on full display in Lih’s comparisons of Wikipedia’s millions of contributors to the success of ant colonies in building networks and schools of Piranhas in pooling individual energies. “Wikipedia could not have grown so quickly,” Lih writes, “without a good mix of both stigmergic effects (picking up on changes in the environment) and explicit communication channels.”

There are some shortfalls in the book. Lih’s prose leaves something to be desired and he spends too long dwelling on the esoteric technical background of how a Wiki works. The final “Wikied” afterword of the book, written collectively online by Wikipedians, is just a rehash of the preceding nine chapters and comes across as gimmicky.

My one big takeaway from this book is something I have always been acutely aware of: Just like any media, reliance on Wikipedia as a source of information requires certain savvy. Nothing there should be taken at face value. Lih makes clear that for all of Wikipedia’s benefit to society it has been a disruptive force, too. A small number of malevolent members of the community – trolls, vandals, and sock puppets – have discredited the honest work of millions, making Wikipedia dangerous ground for journalists, academics and students alike.

In every newsroom I have worked in and in every class at the Kennedy School, citing – or even using – Wikipedia has been grounds for penalization. That seems right in principle. But I also find it difficult to remember a time when Wikipedia didn’t exist, when all I had was an ever-aging Britannica that presented its own inaccuracies.

Steven’s Levy’s book, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives,” is, in the author’s words, a story about David becoming Goliath. From the halls of Stanford, where Google’s eccentric founders began their quirky startup, to its gigantic corporate headquarters at Mountain View, “In the Plex” follows the progression of Google through its improbable 12-year world-changing odyssey.

Levy begins appropriately in Palo Alto in the mid-90s, where Larry Page (the brilliant programmer) and Sergey Brin (the conscience and vision of the company) began plotting their future…and ours. He takes us from the uncertain and unprofitable early years of an Internet search company desperate for venture capital to the development of AdWords (an advertising scheme) that would make Google a billion-dollar company overnight. Through Google’s subsequent rapid ascendency we learn about the harrowing weeks preceding its IPO, about its unique Montessori-influenced corporate culture – “Don’t be evil” – and about the limitless vision of Google’s executives and growing army of engineers, who clobbered the competition with massive data centers, glitzy software applications and an ever-improving search algorithm.

However, for all its success, somewhere along the way Google’s size and wealth become a liability. The bureaucracy necessary to run a 20,000+ person corporation stifles innovation, causing many employees to leave for smaller, brasher startups. Industry titans like Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple feel slighted by Google’s aggressive maneuvering into browsers and mobile phones. Public trust is eroded by its foray into China and by privacy-threatening applications like Buzz and Wave. But most recently and worst of all, Google fails to recognize and capitalize on the social media tidal wave.

In recent years, two dueling narratives have come to define Google’s place in public life. One is that of an innovative company that has made invaluable contributions to society: delivering the world’s knowledge at the click of a mouse in addition to giving us Gmail, Google Earth, Google News and many other near-magical applications. Another is that of an ambitious, cynical bully that will stop at nothing to crush competition despite its claim to 70% of worldwide search and an eye-popping $28 billion in annual revenue. Levy deftly shows us that both narratives are true, reminding us that there is always an unpleasant side to progress. In the case of Google we learn that the greater the glory, the uglier the fallout.

It’s an irony Google knows well, as recent government efforts to curb the company’s power demonstrate. The most well known case concerns Google Books, a project to digitize and make searchable every book every written. Google Books quickly drew the scrutiny of authors, publishers and others on legal and financial grounds, who called for exclusion from Google Books any works not in the public domain. The showdown continues to raise moral and policy questions about just how comfortable we are as a society with one company holding so much information.

Some have begun to ask whether Google has become so necessary to modern life that it should be either broken up or regulated as a public utility. Indeed Google is as important to today’s economy as the railroads were a century ago, when government began to regulate them as a utility. “Law, opinion, and policy made an increasingly sharp distinction between businesses that operated in, by, and for the market and those – such as railroads and municipal utilities – that were ‘affected with public interest’,” wrote Morton Keller in his 1990 book Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933. He writes that “the scale and importance of the American rail network, the variety and complexity of interested groups, and the character of its regulatory milieu were unique. No industrial trust matched the railroads’ size, wealth, and political power.”

Reading this, it’s not difficult to see the comparison. Google now provides our mail, our maps, our entertainment, our windows on the world. It’s even creating tools to “to provide earlier detection and coordinated response to pandemics and other disasters.”

As Google continues to learn, grow and occupy an ever greater position in our lives, what will our response be?

“Here Comes Everybody,” published in 2007, delivers much more than its title promises. Using simple language and colorful anecdotes, Shirky takes the reader on a supercharged ride through the chaotic, fast-evolving ecosystem of the Web over the last 20 years by exploring the impact of digital innovation on the human urge to organize. The Web we all know emerges as a sort of wondrous Willy Wonka landscape of unlimited opportunity, with complicated technical concepts and decades of sociological research made accessible to the layman (ie. me).

Shirky’s thesis is simple: The Internet – particularly social media – is changing the world by collapsing the transaction costs necessary to build and manage large groups. As a result, ordinary people are experiencing an unprecedented ability to both unleash the creative potential of millions of collaborators and challenge authority through collective action. (Everyone has an inner Che, and this book spoke to mine.)

Throughout the book, Shirky highlights the major technological innovations with which we’ve now all become familiar – Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Flickr, Meetup, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter (still in its infancy when the book was published) – and reveals how each one of those tools has wrecked the traditional institutions of power in society. He presents Wikipedia as one of the most important intellectual achievements in human history, Meetup as the modern world’s version of social organizations like the rotary club, and blogs as a kind of “journalism +” where, for the first time, a two-way conversation is taking place between content creators and content consumers. Barriers to the increasingly challenging ability of people to share, cooperate and engage in collective action have effectively dissolved, Shirky writes, leaving the implications that that development will have on society are still unclear.

The most shocking and interesting part of “Here Comes Everyone” is Shirky’s claim that our modern tools are not just making the way we previously lived our lives easier or better, but that they are fundamentally remaking who we are. In one memorable passage, Shirky reminds readers of his generation that it wasn’t so long ago when the great technological hope for humanity was atomic energy and the space age. But as it turned out, the truly revolutionary technologies were the transistor and the birth control pill. The reason, Shirky writes, is that while the former were just better versions of the same technology, the latter, like Gutenberg’s printing press, changed the way we behave.

This is a bold, sweeping statement, but one that’s hard to refute. From a technological standpoint alone, in one generation, we’ve gone from buying DVDs at BestBuy, reading “real” newspapers, and meeting friends through school, work or church, to streaming Netflix, consuming content from Twitter feeds, and reuniting with friends on Facebook. Four years ago, smartphones didn’t exist. Today they are the norm.

Beyond the technology, however, and because of it, people are seeing direct democracy become a reality. Communications costs have collapsed, dramatically expanding personal connections and individuals’ knowledge of the world. Contributing money to political campaigns, organizing lobbying groups with millions of members and sparking national revolutions seems absurdly easy now. Shirky is an unabashed cheerleader of this brave new world. To him, all of the successes of this new way of life (and even the many many failures like dead-end open source innovations) are a net force for good.

But there is an unsettling side to these developments, too. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon – even though I am undeniably enthusiastic about the future the Internet promises to deliver – I can’t help shake the idea that some of the institutions we’re losing will hurt more than help. Specifically, I’m talking about journalism, an industry that has been disproportionately affected by the Internet’s success. While I applaud the rise of platforms that have allowed citizen journalism and blogging to triumph, there may still be unforeseen consequences in the erosion of a professional class of experienced editors and investigative reporters. I get Shirky’s argument that the journalism of yore was inefficient, often unable to strike the right balance in covering what was newsworthy. But the reasonable filtering of content by experienced editors is something I’m just not ready to let go. (The media columnist Michael Wolff has called such statements, particularly when made by organizations like the New York Times, “self-serving crap.”)

Maybe I’ll come around, begin seeing things Shirky’s way. After all, that’s largely what “Here Comes Everybody” is all about: the wonder – but also the pain – of building a new world order.