Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its final edition after nearly 150 years. Elsewhere, newspaper publishers everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia face equally grim prospects.
The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: "Openness and transparency isn't an end state. It's a process to get there."
It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.
Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.
What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.
Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)
There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.
It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.
Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:
Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--It was only a matter of time before the crazy guy in the front row blew up. He had been fidgeting in his seat all morning. All it took was for author Andrew Keen to bemoan the public's loss if more struggling newspapers bite the dust.
Left to right: Larry Lessig, Andrew Keen, Hal Varian, Tom Rubin, and Paul Cappuccio
(Credit: Charles Cooper)Then it was Mount Vesuvius in the flesh with Nutsy Fagin shouting from his seat about a tangled conspiracy involving Gary Webb and the CIA and journalistic cover-ups. If you don't recall, Webb was an investigative reporter who authored a series of 1996 pieces for the San Jose Mercury News, reporting on a CIA link to Nicaraguan drug dealers in Los Angeles. The paper later distanced itself from the articles, and Webb wound up dead from what the police said was a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
The outburst was the highlight of the day during an otherwise predictable panel discussion on the "future of professionally created content" down here at Stanford. Actually, a better promotional tagline would have been "Beat up on Andrew Keen Saturday. Come and get some."
Then again, this is old hat for Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. The book's marketing director purposely chose a title designed to antagonize the maximum number of people in Silicon Valley--and boy, did that wish come true. For a while, I was sure some locals would invite the media to witness Andrew Keen pinata parties where the assembled could take a whack just for the hell of it.
Keen's book offers an acerbic take on the Internet's impact on the larger culture--especially as it touches the wider world of media. Critics, who seized on the holes in his narrative, have dismissed the book as a transparent polemic. Well, Keen on Saturday was back in the belly of the beast. The guy's been doing the book circuit for the last year and has learned how to give as good as he gets. But halfway into this, I started mumbling the Rodney King line about getting along already. Why can't so many smart people move past this stale debate already? I was sure the controversy had exhausted itself. Apparently not.
So it was that Stanford gathered Keen alongside Larry Lessig; Hal Varian, a professor-turned-chief economist at Google; Tom Rubin, who is in charge of copyright legal policy at Intel; and Paul Cappuccio, the chief legal officer at Tim Warner, to consider the question.
As if they would shed new light.
Truth be told, this remains a debate primarily between the elites and for the elites. These folks are ready to talk this topic to death, though the forums often degrade into personal slugfests.
Saturday's face-off was little different. Lessig, who is fiercely smart and a professor of law at Stanford Law School, got skewered in The Cult of the Amateur, and this was payback time. He had fun pointing out mistakes in the book, which Lessig reminded the audience was "professionally produced content." And if it was so riddled with mistakes, what does that suggest about how the traditional system works? Yes, he allowed, many blogs are "crappy" but the professional world can be just as bad as that of the amateur. It's hard to dispute the good professor.
When the focus of the debate shifted, Lessig brought up a more provocative point: Is the golden age of newspapers, when journalists "could write the truth and not fear retaliation," over? I'm not convinced that's entirely the case, but the signposts point to trouble ahead. In the last several years, we've watched the increasingly flimsy line between church and state at many newspapers come under more pressure. Recall the Los Angeles Times' horrid profit-sharing arrangement with the Staples Center a few years back and the editorial rebellion it triggered. Since then, a succession of LA Times edit chiefs have struggled to contain the publishing moguls' cupidity and stupidity. I'm afraid they'll lose that fight.
Jeff Jarvis, who was not here, has written eloquently about how mainstream newspapers can redefine themselves in the Internet era. But is there enough urgency at old institutions like the LA Times or The New York Times to order a remake as digital companies where they become more of a platform for local news? Per Jarvis: "This means that the staff must change radically as roles evolve from producing content to organizing, enabling, and educating collaborative and distributed networks." That sounds like a sensible way to reverse a trend that very few people believe will be in the public interest. Not even the crazy guy in the front row.
- prev
- 1
- next
