I'm going to be live blogging Dan Gillmor's appearance via Skype in my Digital Media Strategy course here at Johns Hopkins. I'll include questions where I can, but I'm paying attention as well as blogging, so forgive any lacking information...
Note: these are quotes from Gillmor, as close as I can report them in real time. I'm not using formal quotation marks - so please assume a certain degree of paraphrasing.
5:43 - People do want to be part of helping communities, virtual or otherwise, know things they need to know, and people will collaborate like this. Traditional journalists should be doing more of this, not ignoring it, which is what they've done.
5:47 - I want to see all journalism meet a good standard, and I want to see things that appear in community based media meet the standard of factual truth and other things.
5:49 - The standards that are going to really matter are going to be the ones that are held by the people who in the last half century have let themselves become passive consumers of media and journalism who are going to have to turn themselves into active users of media and demand better. Supply doesn't worry me; demand does. We have terrible demand for quality of media.
5:54 - Clay Shirky, whose work I hope you're including in your class, sent me a note the other day that I thought was really just amazing. He was talking about that crazy situation in Colorado with the balloon boy, which there are lessons on so many levels from that one. What he said was that fact checking by journalists of all stripes is declining. But after the fact checking is rising. And that was really interesting and incredibly insightful point. What that gets to is this notion where we have to start off skeptical. We have to start off understanding whoever got it first quite possibly got it wrong, and the context is going to mean everything.
5:57 - Clay Shirky did a brilliant essay a few months ago about what was happening [with declining news organizations]. It was the best explanation - the best context - of what he and a lot of other people collectively have been saying that I've seen yet. In fact, I was jealous because it was so good - Clay really framed it beautifully. And that piece got probably over a thousand inbound links already. It is setting a standard for what people know. Is that, in the end, more valuable than 100 random posts or Tweets by people who want to say "media is dying"? Its arguable that what he did has much more value, but this is something we're going to have to sort out. At the moment, the put it up first crowd is winning the page view battle.
6:03 - If you go to the supermarket, and that best selling newspaper which sells more than the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post put together with an article about Obama's alien love child, we're pretty sure that's wrong. We're pretty sure from experience that the supermarket tabloids are kinda frothy bullshit. And we go outside and we put fifty cents or a dollar into the machine for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and we're fairly sure that its not bullshit - even though they get things wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. Again, we're going to be developing this over time.
6:06 - Slate and Salon are very traditional publications, they just happen to be on the web. They're magazines.
6:09 - There are different ways to describe the open source piece of [open source journalism] but one that is kind of being used widely has been called crowd sourcing - asking people in a community online to help report a story. In fact, Josh Marshall does that all the time, asking his readers for help in looking into things. I don't think there is any dispute that that can work. People are still figuring out how to do it well. People are still wondering what's the line between an appropriate request to an audience for help and one that gets into that area that I described earlier as sort of pure Tom Sawyer approach - they do all the work and your fence gets painted, and you get all of the benefit from it. When there is some value for everyone, I think it is great. We haven't seen this used in the kinds of ways that this could go really deep.
I'll give you an example of the kind of thing I'd love to see happen. About two years ago, if you follow the stock market and business issues, the Wall Street Journal wrote a lot about scandals with companies that were issuing stock options to executives and the timing of the grant dates of the stock options was really suspicious. In many cases, the dates of the stock option grants was when the stock was at its lowest during the quarter or during the year. The Journal, with the help of a mathematician at Yale, showed that the odds that these were coincidences were almost zero. This was not coincidence, they were being backdated, and that's like stealing from shareholders. When its not disclosed, its against the law.
What if the Journal had put up a thing that said here are instructions of how to look into this in your community; here's a calculator where you can put in the numbers and we can see if its a coincidence for that company. We could have done that for every company in America, and figured out how widespread this was - and we still don't know. We can do that with all kinds of questions if you pick things that a lot of people can answer one relatively simple question, or do one little bit of homework, and then aggregate the responses, you can come up with some pretty spectacular things.
Another example is something the Bakersfield California newspaper has done. They put up a map and said "tell us where the potholes are," and now they have a big pothole map. There are not enough journalists to drive the streets and locate all of the potholes, but there are enough people.
Another kind of open source journalism that is done a little bit here and there is the whole idea of putting just a community bulletin board online. Again, this does not have to be a business. My old neighborhood in California had a mailing list on Yahoo, just for our neighborhood of about three hundred houses, where people regularly posted things that I would call journalism. For example, when one day the tap water got cloudy int he nieghborhood, and a bunch of people said yeah, ours is cloudy too. Now, this is something a local newspaper would never have done, but one of the poeple in the nieghborhood called the city utilities department and said "what's going on," and the utilities department said we're just doing a repair, its not dangerous, and here's a website explaining what we're doing. Please tell everybody in your neighborhood. That's open source journalism.
When there's breaking news about somebody that's famous, or a major issue, one of the places turn to first is Wikipedia, and that's for very good reason because what goes on there in breaking news is often some of the best background you'll find on any top. Yes, Wikipedia has flaws, and some pretty serious ones. But while there is a chance that what you'll see may have an error at that second, the point of Wikipedia is not the place to stop - its a pretty bad place to stop, but a great place to start.
6:21 - There is no silver bullet to fix the business issues [of traditional journalism].
6:22 - I think the possibilities now, for a more diverse and vibrant and valuable ecosystem of news and information - I think the possibilities for that are growing, not shrinking. I tell my students here that I'm jealous of them, and I'm serious. There has never been a more open world to them. It has nothing to do with the career ladder that I jumped on. But it has never been so open to be creative. No one says this is going to be easy. Its going to be really hard. But its so early in this process, in this change. And that's why I'm optimistic, because we're already seeing hundreds, thousands of experiments. And most start-ups in new industries or reconfiguring ones - most startups fail. But the volume of experiments is amazing to me. The fact that there is no barrier to entry in digital media is incredibly exciting to me because it means we may see tens or hundreds of thousands of experiments.
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