The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media.

While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised remarks to a fellow panelist during a taping at the Fox News Channel, bloggers and members of listservs immediately began debating whether the remarks signaled, or should signal, a generational shift.

To its credit, The New York Times did tackle the issue of the shifting political landscape in the African American community. Yet, in a move that called into question the piece's credibility, the reporter chose not to quote any African American sources on the subject, opting instead to rely on the expertise of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign manager and a white professor from Emory University.

The last assured us that harsh words from Jesse Jackson would in no way cause the African American community to turn its back on Obama and then went on to recount an anecdote that left you wondering what it had to do with the Jackson-Obama flap.
"He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone," The Times told us.

Over on the web, the response, if you knew where to look, gave much greater insight into what people in the African American community were actually thinking. " The 32-year-old blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this on his blog:

My Dad is gonna kill me. But here's Jesse -- on Fox News no less -- telling some other dude that he'd like to cut Obama's nuts out. Nice. I'm not even sure this hurts Obama in anyway. Even Jesse's own son condemned him. There is a certain strain of the civil-rights era that really just needs to have a Jack and Coke and call it a day. It's not that we aren't grateful. We so really are. But this is getting embarrassing...

Both accounts agree that Obama was not hurt by Jackson's remarks. However, it struck me that reading the mainstream media was sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation strangers were having about you while reading the web was very much like having an important conversation that you are fairly certain no one else is bothering to listen to.

Neither provides the public with the entirety of the information it needs to understand what's at stake and to make informed decisions. And both remind you of how disengaged we can be from each other in this country.

It was that disconnect that the New Yorker got caught up in when it attempted to take on some of the erroneous ideas people have about the Obamas. The problem, as many pointed out, is that it's very difficult to satirize a community you don't have much contact with.

With newspaper and broadcast staffs still between 75 and 85 percent white and the country's population a little over 30 percent people of color, it's not a surprise that there is a disconnect between the journalists and those they cover. Nor is it a surprise that people of color are using the web to create a more robust and nuanced conversation. The trick is going to be in finding a way to bring our separate conversations together, no matter the medium.

McLarin does not base her argument on the fact that a Princeton and Harvard University graduate, married to a man with the political savvy to come from behind to be the presumptive Democratic nominee, is not likely to be guilty of such a political misstep. Nor does she argue that someone who has spent decades of her life navigating the racial fault lines is not likely to step on a cultural landmine by spewing racial epitaphs.

Her argument is more basic, at least to many African Americans.

"When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody 'whitey?'" she asks, before pointing out that despite what the rumor implies, African Americans just don't have a large and widely agreed on vocabulary of names used to disparage white people. The exception, as has been pointed out, can be found in old media from the late 1960s and 1970s, such as "The Jeffersons."

Given, as I have repeatedly pointed out, we continue to live in a largely segregated society and our online habits seem to be only driving us deeper into our niches, it's not surprising that behavior seen on an old sitcom could be used to fuel a rumor meant to torpedo a current day presidential candidate.

I thought about this at the Knight News Challenge Conference a few weeks ago when Jay Rosen was talking about The Daily Me versus The Daily Us. The Daily Us would presumably give us insight into our shared problems and shared dreams. Sitting in a room so far from my neighborhood, a place where for some the only work available is filling your shopping cart up with cans and bottles fished out of the trash cans, I wondered, really wondered, if we know enough about each other to even have an idea of what our separate dreams and problems might look like, let alone be a point where we consider those dreams and problems shared.

Despite talk of the digital divide, the Internet, where it's free to post, as long as you have the time and a computer, is supposed to be the great equalizer, the place where your we can learn about each other's dreams and problems.

The difficulty is that we have to actually be curious enough to surf for those sites that will provide a glimpse into the worlds and thoughts of our neighbors. It's obvious from my posts that I don't think enough of us, including myself, take the time.

Today, instead of complaining, or hectoring, or otherwise pointing out our shared failures, I'm going to list a number of sites I enjoy. And, in the weeks to come, I will be posting interviews with the bloggers from those sites. My hope is that as I introduce you to new sites and new bloggers, you will return the favor. Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, I do believe one of our shared problems is our continued ignorance about how we live, and, clearly, about how we talk.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Stereohyped

Angry Asian Man

Too Sense, Race, Politics and Hip-Hop

Racialicious

Jack & Jill Politics

There are more, but that gives you a start.

Pangia Day, as it came to be called, took place on May 10th at 18:GMT, 11 am PDT, at official sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro. Sponsored by Nokia, Pangia Day included films produced with video cameras from mobile phones the company gave out to filmmakers around the world.

The overall films, which ran the gamut from heart wrenching to the lighthearted, were punctuated with shorts that had people across the globe describe their interpretation of a simple human emotion.

Love was demonstrated by a couple dancing in Uganda, a boy giving his mother a flower in Mozambique, a mother kissing her child in India and two girls arm in arm in Guatemala. The simple concept, which included ruminations on sorrow, fear and dance, was a rich and visual reminder that no matter our race, our country, our age or our class, we do all experience the same range of emotions, making it in some ways the most affecting part of the day.

Watching such a diverse group of people reacting to one set of emotions made me wonder what would happen if we tried a similar experiment in this country. But, instead of having it revolve around a shared emotion, what if we built it around a shared experience?

With the presidential election, just as the primary before it, sure to touch on all the fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography, perhaps that would be the perfect national event to build a national Pangia Day around.

In 2000, African American and older Jewish voters said their complaints were largely ignored when they said their votes were negated by faulty ballots and suspect screening at polling places across Florida. In 2004 there was a great deal of talk about the youth vote and some dismissive talk about the black vote. In the end, pundits said the youth vote disappointed and the black conservative vote surprised. All this, we heard through the filter of the mainstream media.

Just as we saw the surprising and the universal with Pangia Day, our own experiment with Election Day might astonish us with what we have in common and tickle us by illustrating our national eccentricities. Now that we have identified the national event to build Pangia Day around, we would also do well to take a page out of the original event and show the results on one day around the country.

Just as we need an event around which to build global understanding, so do we need to build national understanding. Let Pangia Day be a model.

Things were different in the black blogosphere.

It wasn't just that the black interest sites carried the coverage, it was also that many included rich texture and context in which to look at the fatal shooting of an unarmed man in New York City.

The blog Too Sense reprinted an excerpt from the magazine ColorLines, that found that the majority of people killed by the New York City Police department between 2000 and 2007 were African American.

Over at Stereohyped, Lauren Williams wrote about a University of Chicago study that looked at the role race played in an officer's decision to shoot at suspects.

"Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites)," she quoted the report as saying.

She included a link to the Stereotyping and Prejudice Research test which allows individuals to see how they would do if they had to decide whether to shoot or not.

Over at Jack and Jill Politics concern was raised that verdict was a sign of things to come.

"That's my concern with the Sean Bell verdict. With violations being punished less often and less harshly within the department, and these cops facing no consequences for pumping 50 shots at three unarmed black men, things will only get worse," they wrote.

Even Bossip, a blog devoted to celebrity news devoted a couple of posts to the verdict.

The lack of coverage outside the black blogosphere did not go unnoticed on Too Sense, a blog that uses the tagline Race, Politics and Hip-Hop.

"Can't help but notice that the luminaries of the progressive blogosphere are completely silent on the Sean Bell verdict. Nothing from Drum, Yglesias, Marshall, Atrios, Klein and on and on," wrote dnA.

A few days later, dnA posted a response to that post from Kos, who essentially said that while police brutality is an important issue, it's not an issue that speaks to his expertise or his audience.

"But for this blog, unless it touches upon electoral concerns, it's generally not going to get covered. That has nothing to do with whether it's "important" or not, and more to do with me covering what personally interests me most and is geared towards what my audience expects. Police brutality and unequal justice are both important issues, but not within my scope of expertise. I'd rather let people who know those issues better discuss them and I can focus on the stuff that I know best," he wrote in an excerpt posted on Too Sense.

Fair enough, but as more and more people move to getting their information from the blogosphere, the disparity of coverage around the Sean Bell verdict, and its underlying issues, is another warning sign that soon we in this country will literally not be on the same page.

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission, the seminal report that laid some of the blame for the riots that swept the country in the early and mid-1960s on an all white news media, all of us need to think about the societal ramifications of staying within our sphere of interest.

The movie Race to Execution makes a similar argument, noting that once the jury composition tips in favor of white men, the chances it will deliver a the death penalty verdict rises dramatically.

In this case, the Harvard Professor based her assertion on the results of the test she designed that measures your automatic reaction to images of diverse people and positive and negative words. According to her research, almost 90 percent of white people demonstrate a bias against African-Americans, https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.

Many people, Banaji said, are not even aware they harbor these negative perceptions. "Are those people (who participate in the studies) bad? "No. . . . These names before us (in the tests) or these faces before us are going to pull from our gut thinking that's biased," she said, according to the Concord Monitor account of her testimorny.
While Banaji was testifying in a death penalty case, it obviously made me think about journalism.

Only days before Williams wrote about Banaji's testimony, she and other black bloggers had taken exception to what they considered the disparity of treatment given to Sen. Barak Obama and Sen. John McCain at the combined newspaper editors and publishers convention.

"At the American Society of Newspaper Editors annual meeting yesterday, moderators Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, of the Associated Press, offered McCain a selection of sweets, as well as coffee with cream and sugar. Oh, and a standing ovation. From a room full of reporters. Guess who didn't receive similar treatment?" Williams wrote in her daily blog, http://www.stereohyped.com.

In fairness, each of the three presidential candidates spoke at the conference and the setting for each was slightly different. It should also be noted that the mixed crowd included publishers and editors, and not everybody rose to their feet for McCain. However, to some, McCain was perceived to have received preferential treatment.
At that same conference, ASNE released the result of its annual census that measures the percentage of journalists of color working at the country's daily newspapers.
While this year the census showed a fractional uptick in the percentage of journalists of color, from 13.43 to 13.52 the actual number of people of color working in the industry dropped by almost 300.

Each year the release of the census reawakens the call for the nation's newspaper staffs to mirror the nation's population. To put that in perspective, people of color now account for 34 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S. census also tells us that the majority of people living n this country live in segregated neighborhoods, meaning that the media tends to define what we learn about each other. The problem with that is that content audits performed by the Maynard Institute and other organizations consistently show that people of color are overrepresented in stories about crime, entertainment and sports and underrepresented in stories about business, lifestyle and everyday life.

Banaji's work helps us understand that try as we might, we still cannot compensate for any latent biases we all most likely carry. Williams reminds us that our audience is watching closely.

BET tested the waters with two experiments. One involved fashion/entertainment and the other involved politics. Neither resulted in a flurry of posts, such as the ones MTV receives when it puts out a call for videos.

What makes this interesting is that by all accounts African American males are not only early adapters, but also the mobile technology has a high rate of penetration in that community. So the failure to post cannot be blamed on the digital divide of either race or class.

In some ways this reminds me of newspapers and ad agencies first forays into Spanish language content. Both industries simply translated their product directly from English to Spanish, without taking into account cultural differences. Since then, most businesses have learned that much can be lost in translation and you have to tailor the product for the audience.

The question arises, is this happening here, and are we missing a valuable opportunity to look at how the web can bring us closer together.

Part of the genius of this current time period is that technology is being invented to do one thing and then used to do another. Think of the USB flash drive. Originally invented for data transfer between computers, now commonly used by friends to swap their music collection, circumventing the music industry's old business model.

Now that we know what African American males are not doing with mobile technology, perhaps the time has come to learn what they are doing with it. At the least, the ensuing discussion will be interesting and it very well may yield new models of spreading news that we would not otherwise have thought of.

Would love to hear from you if you have any insights and/or answers.

It was hard not to be excited listening to all the technologists talking about the latest advances that will allow us to get news to once isolated people in Africa and India using mobile phones and other technology. Once again, it was driven home that no longer is the price of a computer a barrier to digital participation. The ubiquitous cell phone, as common in my neighborhood as the bikes people use for transportation, is now allowing us to get news to people all over the world.

Yet for all the talk about reaching other countries, there was very little talk about reaching people in my neighborhood. Ordinarily I would be annoyed, but not surprised. It's not news that so far the new media is not shaping up to be any more inclusive than the traditional media. In fact, some might argue that traditional media at least has a recognition for the need for diversity.

But this time I was a truly disappointed. Given that the talk around this year's election is the importance of the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the youth vote and that questions of class have cut through the entire election, I thought this might be the conference where we would get wind of some projects arming the young men in my neighborhood with the latest mobile technology so they could report on the election from the front lines. You need to know what going on so you know what to do, one of the speakers said. Well, how as journalists are we going to know what to do if we continue to fail to find out what's going with large segments of our community?

Perhaps I went to the meeting with a national version of Global Voices dancing in my mind. Not to be. And what a shame. Given the political commentary on blogs from Too Sense to Racialicious, it would not be hard to convene a group of bloggers of color around the election, or just about any other issue facing this country.

So I left excited and disappointed. Excited because I see how easy it could be. Disappointed because I saw how little progress has been made in reaching the totality of our communities.

As for the confusion, when I looked around the room I had a hard time making sense of the demographics. Again, it wasn't the lack of racial or ethnic diversity. I went in there expecting that. I also went in expecting that a meeting billing itself as a combination of computation and journalism might have an equal number of technologists and journalist. Not so much. The handful of journalists in the room were far out numbered.

So, just as I left wondering how we are really going to know what's going on in this country if we don't reach out to all the residents in our various communities, I also left wondering what happens to the craft of journalism if journalists abdicate responsibility for the technology that will drive the craft into the future.

While I was there, several people either asked me directly or raised the issue of diversity in online social networks during panel discussions. I think what they were really talking about is how to burst their social bubble and actually create a social network.

A network, particularly on the hyperlinked web, suggests to me a vast series of connections that naturally lead you away from your comfort zone and into the home of those you might never encounter in your
everyday life.

A social bubble, on the other hand, may still be a large place, with multiple connections, but those connections never truly take you outside of your sphere. You may, in fact, meet people you don't know, but you won't meet people you don't know much about. In many ways, our online social bubbles are simply recreating our analog experience.

So, how do we break out of our sphere? Here were a couple of the problems poised and the advice given.

Trying to recruit interns of color for web based projects? Contact the local chapters of the ethnic journalism organizations and ask them to put out the word on the listserv. Ask them to not only find students, but also help you identify local blogs written by students and adults of color.

Once you are able to bring some interns of color onto your organization, listen to them. You may hear ideas that don't make sense to you right away. Probe. Those very well may be the ideas that help you break through to new audiences.

Treat your interns well. Their experience will be your biggest selling point. Help them feel like valued contributors and they will pass the word on to their social bubble. As the two merge you will be on the verge of creating a true social network.

Need to get some ethnic or racial group with which you have no ties to contribute to a city wide blog?

First look into the community and see if there are people who are already blogging. Go out in the community not with the goal of finding people to immediately serve your goals, go out with the goal of discovering that community's needs. Get to know people. Who are the natural leaders? Who likes to talk about the issues of the day? Find those people, develop a rapport and let them see the value of working with you to get out the word on their community.

There's a big difference between a social bubble and a social network, but it's not difficult to get from here to there -- once we truly recognize the value of moving outside of our sphere.

The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace.

At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know-
how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds us of the fallacy of that premise. African Americans used the web and alerted the world to what was going on in a small town and in a largely overlooked state.

True, there are still some significant hurdles for entry into a fully wired world. However, they are largely socio-economic. I once asked someone how many white homes in Appalachia have Internet access. Turned out not a lot. The digital divide is real. It's class, not race, that makes the difference.

The Jena 6 story also reminds us that while the Web may be a place where anyone with access and an idea can voice his or her opinion, it does not mean that every opinion gets the same amount of attention. Think of how quickly word spread about "Memo Gate" and how long it took the outside world to pay attention to Jena 6.

So, that leaves us with the question of whether this new technology is opening up our world or allowing us more time to hibernate in the comfortable corner of the world that reminds us of ourselves.

That is something I look forward to exploring as I look at diversity in an online world. I hope you'll help me so that together we can think this through.