Mediactive Read online

  Tools and Tactics for Trusted Creators: We’ll look at tools for creating media, and techniques for becoming a trusted source of information.

  Owning Your Online Presence: If you don’t define yourself in this increasingly public world, there’s a significant risk that others will define you. Moreover, you should create and maintain your own Web presence.

  Entrepreneurs Will Save Journalism, and You Could Be One of Them: Experimentation is the rule now, and it’s producing some great results; but traditional and new media organizations still have an opportunity to survive, if not thrive, in a mediactive world.

  Part III

  Law and Norms: The law applies in cyberspace, not just the physical world. Just as important, we all need to recognize that the law can’t and shouldn’t deal with some situations. Societal norms will need to evolve, too.

  Teaching Mediactivity: Parents need to understand all this, for their own sake and their childrens’. Schools and teachers will also play a key role. We’ll also look at why journalism educators, and journalists, should become leaders in this arena.

  A Path to Tomorrow: What tools and techniques need to be invented, or perfected, so that we’ll have the trusted information ecosystem we need?

  Epilogue: How this book came to be an experiment in mediactivity, and how I hope it will change for the next version.

  ***

  Who Is This For?

  I don’t really expect to persuade everyone to jump off the couch and become a mediactivist. That would be wonderful, but it’s not going to happen.

  If you are still sitting back in the cushions, though, maybe I can help you imagine the results of leaning forward and demanding something better than you’re getting, so that you’ll be better informed about the things that matter to you.

  If you’re already an active consumer, I hope to persuade you to take the next step and participate in the journalistic part of the mediasphere, even in a small way.

  If you’re a sometime participant, maybe I can persuade you to take an even more active role in your community’s information flow.

  We need one another’s help. The rewards are going to be worth the effort.

  Chapter 1

  Darwin’s Media

  The email arrived in early January 2010 via a colleague, who got it from his father, who got it from a mail list. It began, “Do you remember 1987….”

  The formatting and style were amateurish, and the tone just-folks. It went, in part:

  Thought you might be interested in this forgotten bit of information.........

  It was 1987! At a lecture the other day they were playing an old news video of Lt. Col. Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan Administration. There was Ollie in front of God and country getting the third degree, but what he said was stunning!

  He was being drilled by a senator, ‘Did you not recently spend close to $60,000 for a home security system?’

  Ollie replied, ‘Yes, I did, Sir.’

  The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience, ‘Isn’t that just a little excessive?’

  ‘No, sir,’ continued Ollie.

  ‘No? And why not?’ the senator asked.

  ‘Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir.’

  ‘Threatened? By whom?’ the senator questioned.

  ‘By a terrorist, sir’ Ollie answered.

  ‘Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?’

  ‘His name is Osama bin Laden, sir,’ Ollie replied.

  At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn’t pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn’t. A couple of people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued.

  Why are you so afraid of this man?’ the senator asked.

  ‘Because, sir, he is the most evil person alive that I know of,’ Ollie answered.

  ‘And what do you recommend we do about him?’ asked the senator.

  ‘Well, sir, if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth.’

  The senator disagreed with this approach, and that was all that was shown of the clip.

  By the way, that senator was Al Gore!

  Pretty alarming stuff, yes? Actually, no—because it’s fiction, in service of outright propaganda. Oliver North never said any of this in any Senate hearing. Neither did Al Gore. (I know because, among other things, I checked with the Snopes website, where reality rules. I’ll tell you more about Snopes in Chapter 3.)

  What was going on here? It’s simple, actually, as many of these kinds of emails tend to be. There were at least three plain goals: 1) Turn Oliver North, a right-wing icon of the 1980s, into a modern hero; 2) turn Al Gore, a born-again liberal, into a dunce; 3) use the fictional situation to promote the idea of preemptive military action and state-sponsored assassination. There’s an honest case to be made for 3), but this email’s fundamental dishonesty undermined that case for anyone who’d done the slightest homework.

  My colleague had made it clear in his forward that he was skeptical. But how many people along the chain, before it reached his inbox and mine, had taken it for granted?

  I don’t have to tell you about the information mess, of which that email is just one tiny but toxic piece of flotsam. In an era of media overflow, we’re swimming in the real and the unreal, and sometimes we wonder if we’ll sink.

  We won’t—or at least, we don’t have to. Sure, we find ourselves in a radically democratized and decentralized media culture that’s producing an overload of information, an alarming amount of which is deceitful or just mistaken. But as we’ll explore in upcoming chapters, this culture is also responding with important new tools and techniques for managing the flow and determining what’s real and what’s not.

  Moreover, even as some people are spreading garbage, whether deliberately or inadvertently, others are giving us genuine hope for a future that’s rich in trustworthy and timely information.

  Consider, for example, the Ushahidi project and co-founder, Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan lawyer living in South Africa. In the wake of the horrific 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ushahidi—originally created to track election news in Kenya—launched an interactive “Crisis Map of Haiti” to track events in the shattered island nation. Information came in from people on the ground via SMS, the Web, email, radio, phone, Twitter, Facebook, live Internet streams and other reports. Volunteers at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy’s “situation room” read the reports before mapping them, discarding items they considered unreliable.

  Who was this for? Anyone who needed or wanted it, but the Ushahidi team hoped, in particular, that the humanitarian community would use the map as a guide. That’s exactly what did happen. As a Marine Corps representative in Haiti texted to the organization, “I can not over-emphasize to you what Ushahidi has provided. Your site is saving lives every day.”

  Everywhere I turn these days I find people like Okolloh working to build and refine an information ecosystem we can use to make better decisions. Some are media creators. Others are helping us sort it all out. And many, like Okolloh, do a combination of both.

  To make the most of what they’re doing, each of us will need to recognize our opportunity—and then act on it. When we have unlimited sources of information, and when so much of what comes at us is questionable, our lives get more challenging. They also get more interesting.

  Information overflow requires us to take an active approach to media, in part to manage the flood pouring over us each day, but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we see. Being passive receivers of news and information, our custom through the late 20th century era of mass media, isn’t adequate in the new century’s Digital Age mediasphere, where information comes at us from almost everywhere, and from almost anyone.

  That anyone can include you and me, and our neighbors and their neighbors. Somebody created that propaganda email about
things Ollie North and Al Gore never said in the Iran-Contra hearings. Yet you, or I, or almost anyone we know, can create something as trustworthy as that piece of fiction was deceitful. That this door has opened to us is a powerfully positive and democratizing development. But anyone who steps through it needs to engage in a new kind of media literacy, based on key principles for both consumers and creators, which we’ll delve into starting in the next chapter.

  The time to work on this is right now. Our democratized 21st century media are a land of opportunity, and of peril. How we live, work and govern ourselves in a digital age depends in significant ways on how well we use those media.

  The next two chapters will offer practical and effective ways to understand the digital media landscape and to apply that understanding in our daily lives. First, though, let’s look back in time just a bit—some history will help us put today’s world into context.

  How Did We Get Here?

  It has taken millennia for humanity to produce democratized media. When early humans started drawing on the walls of caves, they created a lasting record of things that mattered. Stationary cave walls gave way to rock and clay tablets, which in turn were supplanted by papyrus and animal-skin documents, including scrolls. Early books—single editions created by scribes—came next, setting the stage for what I think of as Media 1.0: the printing press.

  Moveable type and the printing press, taking its early and most famous form as Gutenberg’s Bible, liberated the word of God from the control of the priests. This was humanity’s first profound democratization of media. Printing presses spread the words of individuals to many readers, in books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines and more. Regimes shook, and some fell. Civilizations changed irrevocably.

  When the telegraph first moved information over long distances at the speed of light, we’d hit a new turning point. Call it Media 1.5—the information moved from point to point but not directly to the people. This led to the next epochal shift.

  Broadcasting is Media 2.0: mass media traveling long distances instantaneously. The radio brought news and information, plus the sound of the human voice, with an immediacy that led to the rise of both the great and the wicked. Franklin Roosevelt did much to calm a troubled nation with his fireside chats, while Hitler used radio, among other media, to pull his nation into outright savagery.

  Television engaged eyes in addition to ears, adding the moving images of film to radio broadcasting’s immediacy. It was a huge shift (Media 2.5), but not as great as what was to come.

  The Internet is Media 3.0, combining all that has come before and extending it across the web of connections that includes everything from email to the World Wide Web. It is radically democratized media, in ways that we are only now beginning to understand well. But with this opening of what had been a mostly closed system, possibilities emerge, literally without limit.

  And it’s good thing, given what’s happening to traditional media.

  The Rise and Decline of Media Institutions

  The same technology advances that have given us Media 3.0 have been near-catastrophic, at least in a financial sense, for what we now think of as the journalism industry—the collection of powerful corporate producers of journalism that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in the past decade, reality has collided—hard—with the news business. Publications and broadcasts are hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

  What happened? The easy answer is that advertising disappeared. True, but too easy. Let’s look a little more deeply.

  The seeds were planted decades ago, when it became clear that newspapers and local television stations were becoming licenses to print money. The reason: The barrier to entry—the cost of presses and broadcast licenses, among other things potential competitors would need to enter those marketplaces—was too high. In the daily newspaper business competition was narrowing dramatically; by the latter part of the last century communities of any size with more than one newspaper were rare. So newspapers were monopolies, and local TV stations were oligopolies.

  Monopoly meant charging ever-higher prices, not so much to subscribers, but to the advertisers who had nowhere else to turn in their communities if they had something they wanted to sell to the widest possible customer base. Nowhere were profit margins higher than in classified ads, those one- or two-line notices that filled page after page in most papers. In fact, for most newspapers classifieds provided the number one source of profits.

  Wall Street loved the newspaper corporations, because monopolies are great fun for owners while they last; you can keep raising prices and no one can stop you. So when newspaper companies sold shares to the public, often to raise capital so they could buy up more papers, investors bid up the prices of the companies. The companies bought more and more papers: Profit margins kept soaring, and so did stock prices.

  As Wall Street and private owners alike demanded higher returns, in many (if not most) markets monopoly newspaper managers became complacent and arrogant, to varying degrees—it’s what monopolists tend to do. Rarely did managers care all that much about their communities; they were really just visiting on their way up the corporate ladders. The chief way they could please their bosses was to pull more profits from the local communities, by not just charging more for ad space, but also trimming back the budgets for journalism.

  One thing they trimmed was journalism that aimed to serve people on the lower demographic rungs. Over time, most large daily papers increasingly aimed their coverage almost solely at the top 40 percent or so of the communities they served, in terms of household income—because those were the people the advertisers wanted to target. So newspapers were losing touch with their communities as they chased profits.

  The Internet brought competition for the advertising dollars, as sites like eBay, Monster (jobs), craigslist and others gave advertisers a much lower price for a much better service. It didn’t take long for the classified advertising business to melt, and with it the main source of profits at most papers. It will never come back.

  Display advertising, meanwhile, was going through its own evolution. Newspapers depended mostly on big local merchants, notably department stores, for display ads. But economic forces led to consolidation of the retail marketplace—among other industries that tended to use newspaper ads heavily to reach consumers—and bang, another revenue source was gone for good.

  Television’s unwinding happened in different ways and at a different pace. TV is still a hugely popular medium and will remain so for decades to come, but the rise of cable and satellite gave viewers and advertisers more choices. These shifts were part of an upheaval for local TV, which at one time boasted profit margins that would make the greediest newspaper executive jealous. The effect of competition—and, I’m convinced, a relentless dumbing down of television journalism to the point that it was pure info-tainment—pushed audiences away.

  And as all these financial storms were brewing, mass media audiences were joining advertisers in exploring the Internet’s vast and diverse possibilities.

  Democratized Information to the Rescue

  The Internet didn’t just take advertising away from print publishers and advertisers—it also brought democratized information to all of us. Actual competition for journalism, not just revenue, began appearing. And here, too, the industry has been ill-prepared.

  As newspapers were coming apart at the seams, many traditional journalists began fretting that journalism itself was at risk. Who would do the journalism if the established business model died? How would the public be informed?

  The anguish and hand-wringing, of course, raised a couple of questions.

  First, by what standard had traditional journalists done such a sterling job that they were irreplaceable? To be sure, there had been some superb reporting over the years; the best journalism was as good as it had ever been. But some of our top reporters had helped lead America into a war started under false pretenses. And they’d almost entirely missed the bui
lding financial bubble that nearly ruined the nation. Newspapers increasingly focused on celebrity and gossip. They pretended to find two sides to every story, even when one side was an outright lie. Was this a craft that deserved our unreserved faith?

  Second, did the unquestionably hard economic times for the journalists’ employers mean that journalism itself would no longer exist if the employers disappeared? From my perspective, it seemed as though people working for traditional media companies were arguing that their enterprises had some near-divine right to exist. Not in the universe you and I inhabit!

  I’m an optimist. I and others like me see renewal amid the destruction. We don’t worry so much about the supply of news and opinion, though we do recognize that a shifting marketplace for information—from monopoly and oligopoly to a new, competitive mediasphere—will be messy.

  Count on this: Tomorrow’s media will be more diverse, by far, than today’s. We can imagine, therefore, a journalism ecosystem that’s a vital part of our expanded mediasphere and vastly healthier and more useful than the monocultural media of recent times—if we get it right. That we means all of us. Remember, Digital Age media are broadly distributed and participatory—broadly democratic.

  For sure, we’re headed for a time of abundance, at least in quantity. In that abundance we’ll have plenty of quality, too, but it’ll be more difficult to sort out. To assure a continued supply of quality information, we have to address the other side of a classic economic and social equation: demand for information that’s reliable and trustworthy. That’s up to you and me.