This pre-internet installation was and remains a vital consideration in the future of media. It has been supposed for a long time that communication and media technologies allowed people who already knew each other to improve existing relationships. Alternatively, broadcast media were used to send corporate-owned messages to the ‘masses’. There has been very little in the understanding of communities and how they are built and morph through media. To date, due to the expense of entry to creating content for media communication technology, most middle class people have been limited to the telephone – and that form is one-to-one rather than the one-to-many formats offered by social media. This installation’s first day shows how people who did not know each other were able to create conversations and relationships – even for a short time.
People in the video respond a certain way because they realize people in the other location can actually see them. This created an ‘event’. In the 21st Century, when everything that happens in public locations could readily and easily be posted to the web, are we seeing a change in everyday public behaviors due to the fact that we are aware, more than ever before, that someone might be posting our actions? From music concerts to classrooms, from traffic accidents to natural environments, people are creating ‘events’. The greater questions are how have we as a community become the public entity we are creating, and what impact does this have on how we relate to each other. What has made people immediately reach for their cell phone to take a picture when something happens? This is a stage of history we’ve never faced before.
While we have come through an era where “the medium is the message,” we have moved on from this. The medium is still the technology. The message today is found in the resonance of community. One is not the other. In fact, the irony as stated by Steve Harrison in his essay on this particular video (found in HCI Remixed), is key. Separation does in fact, invite a connection. If we believe that human beings seek resonance with each other, eliminating some of the barriers to finding that resonance through disrupting the accepted norms of relationships and community will in fact deliver us to new ways of ‘seeing’ each other. Through these new ways of discovering resonance we will be able to grow an international array of communities. The international would relate not just to geographical space, but also class space. We have a media which will offer everyone an opportunity to find resonance of community with the homeless, the traditional-media famous, and their neighbor.
The new buzzword in social media appears to be Influence. According to conferences, some marketers it’s what people want. To influence others.
This is a mistake. It demonstrates a very shallow, one-sided view.
(cartoon from xkcd.com)
Talk to most people in social media for example, and they’ll tell you the truth. What they’re doing is looking for, and responding to resonance, not influence.
What all of us seek in social media is Resonance.
The influence part happens afterwards.
In social media, you can’t influence someone unless they want to be influenced.
Guess what… if traditional media had understood the need to find real resonance with its market, it wouldn’t be in the situation it is today.
Resonance. It’s what creates meaning. Just like the rice here.
Let’s confirm who professional journalists are: People (trained or not), paid to produce content under the mastheads of traditional news outlets.
Let’s confirm what they’re supposed to do: This is a tricky one. No matter how many times I have asked, and how many people, across Australia, the USA and the UK, nobody can give me a core definition of journalism. Maybe it’s a secret. A magician’s code. Part of the smoke and mirrors used to convince everyone they’re worth being paid for over anyone without a mogul. Professional journalists promote their work as a noble art, one that demands a rigor most can not attain. With prompting, a professional journalist will usually agree you need training, you need balance, fairness, fact collection and analysis.
In a conversation I had on Twitter with people in Australia following the Twitter’s Impact on Media and Journalism mini-conference (actually a 2-hour seminar of sorts), Brad Howarth, a professional journalist who was attending says journalism will not be “harmed or replaced by Twitter.” Another Australian, Renai Lemay, followed his presentation at the same conference with a post for ZDNet where he likens his role as a professional journalist to a knight, protecting the honour of a “great lady of noble birth” and describes Twitter as a “playground for pleasure of journalists.” Somewhere to reconnect with the audience. While Renai seeks to support Twitter’s role, he demonstrates a very Lipmann-esque view – it’s still them and us, and being able to play amongst the great unwashed is a novel way of “cutting the fat out of journalism.”
Bringing it to the US, last night, on Lou Dobbs’ show on CNN, the Face Off segment featured a rather strange topical area of ‘Social Networks & Journalism: Is traditional media obsolete?’, Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University held the same line as Renai. He described citizen journalists as “acting like deputies … it’s just like we used to use eyewitnesses.” In what was supposedly a debate (which Dobbs pointedly remarked at the start he hoped would be won by Professor Thompson), Micah Sifryn, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum began well by saying “anyone can commit and act of journalism.” However he followed that up by agreeing with Lou Dobbs that it “takes more than just holding up your mobile phone and filming stuff and then putting it online to be a journalist.”
Oh really?
My issue is that all of this is either a. focused on the media used for journalism rather than what journalism actually is, or b. garbled propaganda nonsense.
Let me be clear. For those who don’t know me, I was a traditional, paid journalist for 15 years. I then moved to Public Relations, and then into teaching journalism, marketing, PR, event management and advertising at college. Happily, I’m back in traditional professional journalism myself, as the Boulder Startup Examiner for Examiner.com. (I make enough for a cup of coffee a week). I’m even currently undertaking graduate research in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at CU in Boulder (on social media communities), and I TA on the Intro to Journalism and Intro to Advertising classes. I’m a co-founder of a startup which will enable people to create more content and make better connections online. I’m pretty well engaged on all fronts.
And my question is thus: If traditional, professional journalists (those I’ve identified above) want to say what they do is different to what is able to be done by anyone else, I believe they have to say what makes it so, in order to be understood. So let me help you professionals out. The book, Elements of Journalism, authored by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel, provides 10 elements of journalism. They are:
1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
3. Its essence is discipline of verification.
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant.
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
10. The rights and responsibilities of citizens to be media literate.
But I’m questioning these traditional elements. While the 10th Element only appeared in this text in 2007 as a direct response to the power of Web 1.0, I believe it’s time to entirely redefine the concept of journalism. To strip it back and challenge the notion of what it is – a notion that has root in the medium, not the craft. All of the above elements of journalism reflect a somewhat Lipmann-esque attitude. But at last in the 21st Century, John Dewey really gets a turn. At journalism’s very core is one thing – communication. So I’ve developed a new definition of what journalism is:
Journalism is communication through any means that enables two things – a. the transmission of factual information about all factors that make up society, and b. validation, authentication and discussion of opinions, beliefs and commentary.
In the past, given the limited and expensive range of tools open to people, journalists were defined as a separate group of people. Training in the media they worked in, and how best to ‘do’ journalism to communicate messages were the focus. But those constraints have left us. The best journalism does not rely on the old elements – nor the old media. It doesn’t rely on training, or a paypacket.
Will journalism still exist when the moguls move onto more profitable ventures? Yes. Is it noble and necessary for democracy? Yes. Does it need defending? No (from what?). Is it the realm of the few? No, not any more. It’s not Twitter that is changing it. It’s Web 2.0. All social media. It’s going to be even greater when even more people are creating the content. That’s democracy.
I felt compelled to do it. Boulder is a wonderful town, with a fantastic tech community of people. It’s a really big community, for a small town. It’s exciting, vibrant and smart. It’s full of incredible people. And they’re all doing their own thing.
We’re all working with a similar environment. We see lots of familiar people every week, and there are lots of tech events focused on the community. But we have different lives, experiences and industries. There are lots of people here I’ve never met – and when many of those people are ones I’ve heard of and I know have heard of me in our ’small’ community, that’s disappointing. We have a wealth of things to draw on that don’t get any focus, simply because there’s no professional journalism covering it.
So that’s what I’m trying to do with my Examiner role. I’m treating it as I would a professional journalistic venture. It’s not personal (that’s what my blog’s for). It’s actual journalism. The way I used to do it. It’s amazing how you never forget. And I’m really enjoying it.
I’m putting together a plan of writing one article a week on five different topic areas. (Let’s see how my time management works with that!) Today’s topic area was Women in Tech. I’ll be writing on that once a week. And today’s story relates to how women who work in Boulder startups simply don’t seem to have the same networking opportunities the men of Boulder do. A pretty self-evident post, I thought. I got to interview some wonderful women (another bonus of working on Examiner is chatting with local startups I’ve never run across, or have only met briefly!). I said to Tara and Grace I wanted to focus on women in Boulder startups. It wasn’t their idea, it was mine. And they came to the party. We had a lovely chat over coffee last week. I recorded the chat, and I wrote the piece.
It seems to have hit a bit of a nerve with some people in various elements of social media, and I couldn’t be happier. I believe the article is respectful of Boulder, the community and both men and women. If you read beyond the headline (as any journalism school will explain, the headline is just the foothold into the story) you get a balanced view of women in startups here in Boulder.
I invite you to read the article yourself, and leave a comment. I now know I’ll definitely be covering women in startups in Boulder every week. Because it’s a great topic, obviously close to my heart. And nobody else covers it.
By now even your grandma knows about the race to a million. Ashton Kutcher, old-media celebrity turned digital insider with various multimedia projects and Twitter groover challenged CNN to a race to a million followers on Twitter.
And after a nice little campaign, last night he won.
It was really fun to see the video of him crossing the victory line. He was really, truly excited. That’s impressive.
What’s more impressive is that Ashton (I can call him by his first name, ‘cos you know… we’re both Twitter sluts ) decided to use the opportunity to do two things:
First, promote the charitable cause (Malaria No More). He got a bank cheque made out in readiness for the win, and showed it up close on U-stream. He is knowledgeable and focused on his charitable work. (Granted, in his excitement over his win the splashing of champagne on a bank cheque for that amount of money is a little… well… off).
Secondly, and more importantly, he made the race into a statement about the democratization of media. About the power of the people. About ‘big media’ no longer determining who gets attention. Ashton repeatedly says that the revolution is happening. That we can change the world. We own the tools to create the content, consume the content and connect with each other. Anyone who can get to a computer with the internet is playing in the same playground as CNN – and they no longer have a guaranteed audience. And old media can just *suck it*.
Some naysayers and skeptics doubt that Ashton truly represents the ‘little guy’ in this equation (after all he’s a movie star right?). For example, Mark Glaser, otherwise known as @Mediatwit said: “This was NOT about the little guy at all. It was about a celeb getting little guys to follow him. If a real nobody got 1m that would be big.”
What Mark’s missed is that a key part of Ashton’s victory rant was his comment that ‘Hey, you can unfollow me. And that’s cool.’ Ashton gets that’s what happens. That’s what this is about. Six hours after he logged off last night, he was recording a segment on Oprah and said these things again … and again. Let’s not forget he’s also always talking directly to the Twitterers sending him messages. He’s authentic, transparent, on the ball and insightful. (So’s his dearly devoted wife, but that’s another post.)
So while the focus on playing tag for Followers on Twitter gives a bad impression and certainly doesn’t reflect the overall scheme of things in social media, the goal and opportunity for further influence created by Ashton and the point he’s made are undoubtedly positive in ways no other old media celebrity could achieve. He’s gained my respect, and the respect of other commentators. And I’ve never actually been a fan of his at all.
Now if only he’d teach all those other celebrities. You know the ones who need to get rid of their clueless PR hoons and tweet real conversations with other real people …. Are you listening Hugh Jackman? Oh that’s right… no you’re not.
Twitter is a curious beast. It has morphed as it grows, due to the community of people who use it. And in researching the online social sphere for my graduate thesis, there are some key aspects of how people use Twitter that are indicators to how this is going to go.
Twitter is a tool used by a community. The tool of Twitter is no different to any other tool. The tool of Twitter exists as an infrastructure, and becomes what it is because of how the community uses it. Just as a knife can be defined as a weapon because people sometimes kill very effectively with it, so Twitter is a community because people interact on it.
Over time we’ve seen Twitter move on from being a post-modern, Web 1.0 Facebook-style status update of ‘what are you doing’. That whole status update thing had the whole broadcasting ethos of me! me! me! It was about telling the world about me and not really caring that much about what everyone else thought of it.
But Web 2.0, and beyond has seen Twitter’s ‘what are you doing’ develop to people actually asking each other ‘what are *you* doing’? And ‘doing’ for the Twitter community now really means ‘thinking’ and ‘wanting’ and ‘needing’ and ‘hoping for’, etc.
The community online uses social media to really connect with each other. To connect with people who you feel an affiliation with, or can learn from, or just feel close to. Not to broadcast.
And this is why I’ve stopped following Guy Kawasaki.
I’m sure Guy is a nice guy (sorry). He’s done a lot of good stuff, written some books that people rave about and stuff. He also gives a good party by all accounts. He certainly believes he’s extremely influential, and some other people do too.
so where’s the problem? A while back on Twitter @Guykawasaki was really him. He’d tweet stuff and interact with people. But as time has gone on, Guy’s Twitter account has morphed – much like most of Twitter. However, I’d argue the morphing that Guy has sought has been detrimental to his personal brand, and non-reflective of where the community of Twitter is heading. He’s introduced ghost twitterers, for which has received a lot of criticism – and he doesn’t seem to get what the issue with that is. He spends a lot of time on Twitter defending himself over this (it gets tiring). He’s also focused on the numbers and believes that putting out what he terms “good content” (ie: links to stories and ‘interesting things’ on the web that he has located and simply aggregates, not that he’s created) is all Twitter needs to be.
All of this means the stream of “Guy Kawasaki” really is about as authentically Guy Kawasaki as the fake accounts of myriad celebrities. When I started following Guy, that wasn’t the case.
And Guy, the fact is we use Twitter differently. I’m into conversation. Looking at my stats, I tweet an average of 13 times a day, and 70% of those are @ tweets. Connections and personal resonance is my focus. I’m not as into the numbers as you and all those traditional marketers and journalists and old-school bloggers with ‘number of eyeballs’ perceptions are. I have a relatively large number of followers and am extremely happy about that because it gives me the opportunity to talk with lots of different people, find out what they’re doing, how I can assist them, and vice versa. (To clarify: I gain followers in the old-fashioned way. No 3rd party tools, or requests for follows being broadcast. You won’t see me tweeting about my following as being a big thing for me.)
I’m interested in people individually. And I sincerely believe that’s where the future of online communication lies. Not in trying to elevate your own name by broadcasting what you think is ‘good content’ (no matter who created it), but by having conversations with people, everywhere. We’re not living in a Web 1.0 environment any more.
So time will go on and Twitter will continue to morph. I feel old school. The general real life community has heard of Twitter. People talk about “getting a Twitter” (which is strange phrasing to me). Mainstream traditional media is not only covering Twitter but is getting stories from its community.
The thing that’s driving everyday people to Twitter though, is not to just receive traditional mass media. The thing the people want is connections with other people, and real life celebrities such as Ashton, Demi and Kevin are using Twitter to connect with their fans. They have conversations with them. Really. That’s why they’re coming. That’s why Twitter’s growth is 30% a month. Connecting individually with resonance is everything.
I do wish people would stop analysing the ‘death of print’ and focus on the future of journalism. There are so many traditional media with stories like the nicely titled “Is democracy written in disappearing ink” which attempt to say journalism will die along with the traditional formats. While I like the title, the answer if obviously “only if you guys want it to!”
Suck it up people. Democracy is alive and well, and professional journalists have never had a better opportunity to tell all the stories they need to tell. The web gets rid of all your publishers, advertisers… financial concerns which could be seen to impact on your ‘professionalism’. If your primary focus is to make money, then I’m putting it to you that democracy doesn’t sit well with that.
If the key to democracy is myriad voices gaining exposure, then democracy has never been better served.
So now the can of worms is opened. As expected, newspapers are closing. Many print journalists are inexplicably in shock. Their next paid employment may well include the words, “do you want fries with that?”
And that, truly, is devastating.
But we still have new people entering schools, wanting to be journalists. Play with me here:
Let’s say we have a new intake this year. They’ll be trusting us for the next four years to prepare them for employment. Beyond fast food. And so the question for educators is specific. What are the best journalism schools teaching now? What should they be teaching?
Be specific! I’m not interested in opinions that simply state “they need to be prepared for the web.”
Here’s a few of my views. We need to:
a. Teach the very real and vital aspects of the role of journalism, its values and role.
b. Equip students with these values as paramount, above and beyond the role of the media they work in. We need them to see the media they work within never compromises or changes their values as journalists.
c. Move away from teaching print media with a concentration on newspapers as the standard, and instead move towards the web as the standard media format.
d. Continue to teach content creation for broadcast and radio, and print magazines. And equip every student for a start in any of those formats.
e. In their first semester, teach students about the real possibilities of independent blogging, microblogging, podcasting and vlogging and insist they do all of them.
f. Instill in them all an awareness and practice of newsgathering and research in a new media environment.
The print edition of the Rocky Mountain News has hit the newsstands for the last time. It’s no secret that I have little time for those who are crying over the death of print. In fact, I believe that journalism has never had better opportunities than right now.The money in media has not just ‘disappeared’. It’s still there. The only difference is that now the playing field is opened up and the best will get their hands on the dollars – instead of it being limited to the few who could afford the cushioning luxury of an established masthead.
If established mastheads had moved effectively online, then their brands would survive. I firmly believe that in any business if the market likes your product then you survive. And media are no different. Do a good job, meet market need, and you survive.
The Rocky tried to go online, but all they did was degrade the quality and credibility of their brand in the process. They did a Web 1.0 operation and faked a bit of Web 2.0 by including unmoderated reader comments on everything from murders to the weather. The Rocky added absolutely nothing to the print edition by going online. All they did was further deplete the paid for market.
And that’s not a bad thing. Print newspapers are about the most environmentally unsound yet ‘accepted’ standard thing here in Colorado. I find it completely ridiculous that there are environmental reporters who are crying over the death of the newspaper. But I digress… (as usual)
The Rocky Mountain News online masthead is still up for sale, along with its archives. And it’s the only thing that would be worth buying anyway. So if I had the money, this is what I’d do:
1. Spend money on a relaunch of the Rocky online. Brand it as the community news source it built its reputation on.
2a. Run a couple of workshops for the public on how to be a part of the new Rocky, including how to contribute stories (in either text, video, audio or all of them).
2b. Invite the community to contribute news stories to be edited and considered for publication.
3. Vet the contributions as they come in, and invite contributors to make adjustments as needed.
4. Invite the most vocal, opinionated people to write regular paid columns.
5. Trawl the web to add value to the articles posted (and aim to do it with every story) – by linking to relevant educational sites, background info, interactive elements, etc. This includes other newspapers/sources. It means journalism really gets to be transparent, credible, authentic. You know, all that stuff it should always have been.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until I’m purple in the face – the future of journalism is social. And involving the community to contribute to their own news source means democracy and the essential recommendations of the Hutchins Commission in the 1940s will be enabled far better than it ever was before.
That’s why this is an exciting time for journalism. The only sobbing I’m doing is over the traditional journalists that don’t see it.
In preparation for our move to the USA I’ve been cleaning out my books.
I’ve come across one I picked up years ago in a second-hand bookstore for the bargain price of $2.50, called ‘Writing for Television’ by Arthur Swinson. The book was published in London in 1955 – yep, when TV was but a babe.
Published 1955
The first paragraph of the book’s Foreward features the sentence, “…so far, in this country, no book has been written to my knowledge, seriously attempting to analyse [television's] nature or to assess its impact. No full-length investigation has been carried out on the question of whether it is merely a new method of disseminating information or, in some aspects, a new artistic medium.”
Parallels? I thought. And yes, there were lots.
Certainly, there’s a parallel between this take on television and traditional media’s embracing of online around the year 2000 - repurposing content from print formats for the web, in the same way radio and theatre scriptwriters wrote for television consumption in the 1950s.
A true medium for the serious writer?
An even more familiar resonance, however, is explored in Chapter 1: ‘The Nature of Television: Is it a True Medium for the Writer?’ Here Swinson considers whether television is a “cold, mechanical medium” (p.2) because it lacked a live audience. Swinson reveals his television writing colleagues believed television wasn’t as good a medium because there was no feedback, no response. There was “no thrill” compared with live theatre.
What a surprise. Writers who were used to writing for theatre and were now trying to write for television found the new medium unsatisfactory. They say “it offers no scope for the serious writer.” (p.4)
In his book, Swinson disagrees with them and believes television has promise of being an incredibly impactful medium becasuse of the sheer size of audience it can reach. However he still considers television only as being a new medium to deliver the same content already being produced (in radio or theatre), simply to a wider audience.
A format shift.
Of course we now know that television is a medium unlike any other. In it’s relatively short existence compared to other formats it’s had an unprecedented role in society. And what we see on our ‘boxes’ looks very different to what first appeared in the 1950s. Television grew up.
And that’s the same mistake many traditional media outlets are making with the ‘growing up’ of online. At first, re-purposing content for online was satisfying enough. But that was the infancy of online media. And it’s not what it looks like today.
Online media has opened the doors to all sorts of writers. Swinson quotes Hemingway in saying “there is all the difference in the world between a serious writer and a solemn writer – and a good many of the solemn category work under the delusion they belong to the serious.”
Could traditional media journalists, in their dismissive, “we’ve had a masthead for xx years and know what we’re doing” pouting attitude to non-masthead bloggers perhaps be reflective of the solemn rather than the serious?
I’ll invite you to consider Swinson’s words on page 6 (see, we didn’t have to read much of his book, did we?) to conclude:
Let us say that such a man is one who writes not only to entertain or tell a story, but because there is something definite he wants to say; who employs whatever medium he choses (sic) on the highest level his powers will allow him.
Swinson, a man before his time, could just have easily been writing about blogs.
Awesome ethical debate q today in Principles of Advertising class "Ads equal freedom of speech" Great thing to consider. Thanks @adprof! 1 hour ago
Are you a mom-blogger who used to be or is homeless? Willing to be interviewed for my research/thesis? DM me (and RT) please. :) 2 hours ago
@sarahewelch I agree. It beats Fear Factor. Add the startup in there and it's Race Around the World as well. No wonder I'm tired. :) 2 hours ago
And let's add to the draft read an entire book, write another 2page paper, groceries, dinner and supervise kid homework. Grad School Momma! 3 hours ago
) decided to use the opportunity to do two things:
