Top Five Week Two Hundred Eight
- Royalty settlement?
House passes bill to lower Net radio rates - Debates 2.0
Many ways to follow prez debates online - AP dropped
Spokesman-Review drops pricey AP feeds - Social NPR
Adds social networking features, open APIs - IconDial
Free ad-supported Net calls; will it last?
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Project: Report
Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube?
Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.
While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.
Pulitzer Center calls for citizen journalists to cover forgotten stories for Project: Report
It’s an unmistakable sign that the site is growing up, struggling to become something more than a repository of funny videos of cats falling off of things while still maintaining the community vibe that’s made it so popular. Project: Report aims to motivate people outside the established news media — the ordinary people that make up the bulk of YouTube viewers — to take up reporting. The contest is open only to non-professional journalists; even frequent freelancers are excluded under the rules, although journalism students are encouraged to compete. The idea of using a payment incentive to encourage quality reporting may mean that YouTube soon won’t just have an army of citizen journalists but an army of quality citizen journalists (or semi-pro journalists), interested in telling stories rather than just passing along comic moments.
The Rules
Project: Report is a three-round contest for aspiring journalists to dip into video reporting. For the first round, contestants are asked to create a short video profile of someone in their community. YouTube partnered with the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit that supports international independent journalism and uncovering underreported stories. The Center’s journalists will judge the entries and choose 10 semi-finalists.
In the second round, those 10 will compete to tell local stories with global impact. Five second-round winners will go on to tell the story of an under-represented community — with an added twist. According to the YouTube press release, “Each of the finalists will be provided with two additional Sony videocameras to give to members of the group they are reporting on, so that they can participate in the telling of their own stories. The reporter will then use this footage and integrate it into the telling of the story of five minutes or less.” Rounds two and three won’t be judged by professional journalists, but rather put to a popular vote by the YouTube community.
Winners in each round receive video technology prizes from Sony. First round winners also get to participate in a journalism conference hosted by the Pulitzer Center, while second round winners will get one-on-one mentorships with a professional journalist as they head into round three. Finally, the grand prize winner also gets a $10,000 grant to travel abroad and will get to work the Pulitzer Center on an important global story.
Pulitzer Center executive director Jon Sawyer sees the contest as the first step toward fulfilling YouTube’s potential to showcase “serious” reporting.
“The Pulitzer Center works to raise the quality of American journalism, and part of that is to keep attention on important news stories,” Sawyer told me, “To that end, we created a channel on YouTube, where we now have about 50 or 60 videos up. They’re getting good traffic; we put one video about Iraq on YouTube, an 8-minute serious piece, and it’s got more than 300,000 views. It demonstrates that, even without any advertising, people are interested in serious journalism on YouTube.”
More Than Accidental Reporters
Project: Report is the brainchild of YouTube news & politics manager Olivia Ma and political director Steve Grove, who have long touted the site’s potential for more substantial reporting. Through Project: Report, they hope YouTube can become a home for a form of journalism rarely seen in the online video world: longer form story-telling. Until now, YouTube reporting has largely been confined to the “citizen with cameraphone at the right place at the right time” variety. That’s largely the brand of amateur journalism that traditional media has tried to tap into with its various overtures to the cameraphone set — including CNN’s iReport and Fox News’ U-Report.
YouTube’s earlier journalism projects likewise focused on the accidental journalist. YouTube launched one of its first such projects in 2007 with a video asking Iowans who brought cameras to their state caucuses to send in coverage of the event.
“That wasn’t really a focus project, more of a ‘If you’re out there and happen to be shooting video, then send it to us,’” Grove told me. “This is more robust and focused, something targeting an audience that wants to delve deeper and really tell a story in much more the way that a journalist would.”
YouTube’s Steve Grove and Olivia Ma announce the start of Project: Report
Grove prefers to avoid the term “citizen journalist,” noting that the contest is aimed at people whose interest in reporting news goes beyond just showing up with a camera but extends into telling a compelling story. He prefers to refer to entrants as “aspiring journalists,” noting that the contest targets journalism schools.
Finalists receive support from Pulitzer Center journalists with the goal of creating winning entries that could pass muster both with YouTube viewers and any traditional media outlet — and narrowing the gap between professional and citizen journalists.
Most online journalism contests aimed at non-professionals have generally focused more on content than technique, promoted by advocacy groups asking for works about a certain issue or arguing a particular point of view — like Sunshine Week’s Monthly Essay Awards through Helium. In contrast, Project: Report is more about learning the tools of journalism.
Not the Nine O’Clock News
It isn’t the first time that YouTube has been used for journalism, but it does seem to be the first time that the Internet video site has moved to get into the game itself. It follows similar moves by YouTube’s parent company, Google, to dip toes into journalism with its extensive election coverage page and the addition of comments on Google News stories.
Although YouTube is fostering and encouraging journalism, Grove doesn’t see the site as competing with traditional journalism outlets.
“This isn’t a case of YouTube getting into the journalism business,” he said. “We don’t have editorial control over the content. It’s not like we’re setting up the YouTube news bureau. It’s more about empowering people to use technology. It’s our responsibility to highlight and serve users by connecting them.”
Although Project: Report is an independent endeavor originating from YouTube, Google spokesperson Kate Hurowitz pointed to it as an example of how Google products are becoming a platform for citizen journalism.
“Our focus [at Google] is on organizing information and making it accessible and useful,” she said. “We’ve created a number of easy-to-use tools, including the voter information page and My Maps, that are making it easier for users to find news and information. Rather that thinking of these tools as journalism per se, it might be more accurate to think of them as helpful tools for citizen journalists.”
Others agreed that, while journalism is a booming trade on YouTube, key differences exist between it and traditional news outlets.
“This shows that YouTube can engage in a network-type function, but instead of the old ‘pushing out’ function, it can empower people to create their own programming,” said David Perlmutter, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas.
Perlmutter is encouraging students in his new media and politics class to enter the contest.
“YouTube allows that expression because it contains interactivity,” he said. “TV networks are declining in terms of viewership. When I was a kid, there was just ABC, CBS, PBS and some Japanese monster movies on UHF. Everyone watched the same things, but today it’s fractured. There are only a few shows, like ‘American Idol,’ that everyone sees. People are recognizing that YouTube can be more than a repository of random bits of entertainment.”
But Why a Contest?
Focusing on the cash prize, it’s easy to be skeptical that a contest is the best format to encourage journalism. Mark Hopkins of Mashable predicted an outcome with “one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.” Hopkins suggested that the prize money could better be spent in seeding various smaller documentary projects. That’s something that Current TV has done well over the past few years.
While YouTube could sponsor more reporting through smaller, individual grants, there’s always the problem of getting people to watch them. Grove pointed out that it’s precisely the contest format that gets entrants more exposure.
“One of definitive things about YouTube and online communities is that the wisdom of crowds is a great signal for content,” he said. “Great videos rise to the top based on what viewers think, not what people behind the screens here at YouTube think. Not having a popular vote wouldn’t be true to the YouTube spirit. The popular vote helps get people inspired to view the videos. It will require journalists to use the web how it’s supposed to be used, using interactivity to promote their work.”
Whether YouTube will hold similar contests in the future depends in part on the response to Project: Report, but Sawyer and Grove are optimistic. So far, over 205,000 people have already viewed the contest’s call-out video posted on the Pulitzer Center’s website.
New Media Bytes blogger Shawn Smith wrote that the real value in Project: Report could be in connecting citizen reporters to their local media outlets. Those outlets, looking for their next star reporter, would do well to check out prospective journalists’ abilities on YouTube. That increased visibility could be a real boon to aspiring journalists in a tough job market.
What do you think about Project: Report? Do you think YouTube can become a home to more polished semi-pro journalism? How might local news outlets work more closely with YouTube to motivate people to produce stories for them as well? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Mike Rosen-Molina is a Northern California freelance reporter and an associate editor for MediaShift. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley schools of journalism and law, he has worked as an editor for the Fairfield Daily Republic and as a managing editor for JURIST legal news services.
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Digging Deeper
Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?
As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter’s head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly’s PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. And on the local level, there’s a new crowd-funded effort from Spot.us, Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to fact-check local political mailers in San Francisco.
While these sites have grown in name recognition and popularity over the past few months, they still lag behind the efforts of partisan groups who fact-check the media themselves at Newsbusters.org (for conservatives) and Media Matters (for liberals). A scan of web traffic, as measured by Compete.com, and links from the blogosphere, as measured by Technorati, shows how far the non-partisan efforts lag behind the partisan ones:
Newsbusters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 472,489 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 67
Google News mentions: 79
Media Matters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 312,728 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 47
Google News mentions: 58
FactCheck.org
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 277,555 unique visitors (up 1,000% in the past year)
Technorati rank: No. 89
Google News mentions: 1,254 (though this includes syndicated stories by FactCheck)
PolitiFact
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 87,602 unique visitors
Technorati rank: None (2,560 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 190
Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
Compete.com traffic: N/A
Technorati rank: None (2,357 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 171
Interestingly, the non-partisan sites receive a greater number of Google News mentions, indicating that more established news sources are citing them. But the non-partisan sites also have to struggle to break through the clutter of so much media banter and political talking heads on TV around the issue of who is lying and who is truthful in political discourse.
Bill Adair is the Washington bureau chief at the St. Petersburg Times and editor of PolitiFact, which just won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. Adair says that political journalists have been handcuffed by the idea that being fair means reporting what both sides say in a campaign, withoutcalling out politicians for falsehoods.
“Political journalists — myself included — have been too timid about fact-checking in the past because we were afraid we would be criticized for being biased,” Adair said via email. “But facts aren’t biased. Now, we are finally calling the balls and strikes in the campaign the way we should have in the past.”
Can Non-Partisan Sites Break Through?
So how can FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog get more notice from confused voters? FactCheck.org started in late 2003, is now syndicated on the Newsweek website, and includes a blog called The FactCheck Wire and weekly video reports. PolitiFact is just a year old, but now includes many ways for people to get their “Truth-O-Meter” reports: widgets, RSS feeds, twice-weekly emails and an iPhone application. The Post’s Fact Checker blog includes Pinocchio nose ratings for falsehoods and asks the audience to help in fact-checking.
Reviewing these sites, I wondered whether pointing out factual errors would really lead the candidates to change their ways or stop lying. Adair said it wasn’t up to non-partisan sites to do that.
“Newspapers run our items in their papers,” he said. “So there are plenty of opportunities for people to see our work. If the candidates are still making exaggerations and telling falsehoods, that’s between them and the voters. Our job is not to get politicians to stop lying. Our job is to inform voters. After that, it’s up to the voters.”
Right now, though, it’s the partisan fact-check sites that are getting more traction and are more popular among bloggers who link to them. Adair doesn’t believe that they will win the trust of a broader public, however.
“I think partisan fact-checking sites will always have their biases questioned,” he said. “The best fact-checking comes from non-partisan journalistic sources.”
Adair said that PolitiFact is “completely transparent” and includes sources to back up its stories as well as author archives for people to check. But there is no personal information for the writers that might point to how they’ve voted in the past, or if they’ve volunteered for political campaigns. FactCheck.org states clearly that its publisher accepts “NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.”
But does such transparency and dedication to neutrality matter to the public? They are becoming less enthralled with the work of traditional journalists — who they suspect as being biased — and like to go to partisan sites for political news online.
“I think that the fact checkers are useful, in so much as the public actually cares about the facts,” said Shaun Dakin, CEO and founder of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry to stop robo-calls from candidates. “The bottom line is that most of the electorate sees the day-to-day campaigning through their own rose-colored glasses. Most Democrats think McCain is lying. Most GOP voters think Obama is a loser with no experience. Every day they see the election through those frames…Unfortunately, it is an echo chamber — particularly on the Internet.”
Robert Steele, a journalism professor at DePauw University and senior faculty at the Poynter Institute (which also owns the St. Petersburg Times), said that the fact-checking of politicians’ statements goes back to the work of the late Carole Kneeland in the ’80s in Texas. Steele thinks the various non-partisan sites do have a challenge in breaking through the media clutter online.
“It’s hard to keep up with the candidates’ statements and their ads, especially when there’s so much puffery and some outright lying by the candidates,” he said via email. “And then there is the ‘viral’ nature of the Internet (and to some degree talk television and talk radio) that rapidly passes along falsehoods. The key to successful fact-checking efforts is creating a rigorous process for research that can work quickly in this white-hot media environment. I do believe the good fact-checking sites make a difference, especially the ones that have credibility based on their independence and their skilled work.”
Getting Local
While the fact-check sites are focused very closely on the national campaigns, who’s watching the local races? The new Spot.us site is an experiment in “crowdfunding” journalism run by Knight News Challenge winner David Cohn, who writes for MediaShift’s sister site, Idea Lab. Spot.us recently helped raise $2,500 for the sites Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to run a non-partisan series of stories fact-checking local political mailers in San Francisco.
Michael Stoll, the project director for the non-commercial Public-Press.org site, told me that Newsdesk.org’s Josh Wilson had a longtime interest in doing election ad fact-checking so it was a good fit for them to work together on it. Stoll hopes the site’s new “San Francisco 2008 Election Truthiness” series will go beyond mailers and include ads in other media.
“Our first trial run we’re focusing on the deluge of paper that stuffs our mailboxes and gets hung from our doorknobs in the weeks preceding the election,” Stoll said via email. “We’ll also try to capture radio, TV and Internet broadcast ads. In addition, we’ve already started picking apart the partisan, paid arguments in the voter-information booklet that the city distributes to every voter. All these ads are fair game.”
Stoll says their reports will be featured on local public radio station KALW and likely in print with the San Francisco Daily Post. Despite this cross-platform outreach, it’s unclear how interested the public will be in such a project. Stoll says that the journalists writing the reports will be vetted for partisanship or any hidden agendas, and will include biographies saying where they’ve worked and whether they have been activists for political causes before.
“I think that while it’s unrealistic to have a large percentage of San Francisco voters reading this online with only viral promotion and no marketing budget, we would hope to get several thousand readers on each story this fall,” he said. “We also want to generate significant buzz in key constituencies, such as the campaigns themselves, because part of the point of fact-checking is to send a signal to advocates on all sides that there are independent watchdogs keeping track of their perhaps exaggerated claims and counterclaims.”
As newspapers and magazines cut back on their own staff of fact-checkers, will these local and national online fact-checking sites help bridge the gap? Barbara Kelley, a journalism instructor at Santa Clara University, said the various sites might help fact-check political statements — but might also be used as a crutch by hamstrung news organizations.
“We shouldn’t NEED outside fact-checking sites,” Kelley told me via email. “I worry that if there is a cadre of these outside sites, it might give reporters and news organizations a get-out-of-jail free card and/or enable lazy reporting, as in: ‘Well, I can just report what so-and-so says on the stump without getting into the validity of what he or she says. After all, if it’s wrong, FactCheck.org will do the digging and correct it.’…It also puts too much of a burden on the ordinary news consumer who doesn’t have the time, energy or savvy to root things out on the Internet all day, as you and I do.”
When the Toronto Star recently interviewed FactCheck.org’s director Brooks Jackson, he said that he would really prefer for news organizations to do the fact-checking we expect from them so he can get on with his life:
It’s definitely ruined my fishing season once again. This is not the way I had planned to spend my semi-obscure retirement years. When’s it all going to end?…What would really be nice is if other news organizations would do what the St. Pete Times and Washington Post are doing, and put us out of business. I’ve been saying for a long time it ought to be an embarrassment to any news organization that we exist. Isn’t this a core First Amendment responsibility? I think so.
As news organizations continue to cut back on fact-checkers, there’s little chance they can be counted on to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. Perhaps non-profit sites like FactCheck.org and crowdfunded efforts like Spot.us will help bridge the gap. But it still remains to be seen if they can work in concert with other political coverage at traditional media sites.
“Can [fact-check sites and mainstream media] work in tandem? I think they absolutely should,” said Kelley. “But that also can bring problems. There was a Boston Globe piece that referenced Obama talking about McCain’s plan to privatize Social Security and how the recent stock market collapse could have affected current retirees. Then the article quoted FactCheck.org saying Obama was wrong because McCain had proposed this plan only for those born in 1950. The article left it at that — without getting into any of the nuances, so Obama’s statement was dismissed as non-factual, but the point of what he was saying was missed.
“Finally, how many fact-check sites will reporters rely upon? You have to wonder where the sites themselves get their info — do they go back to original transcripts? Multiple sources? And also, which ones will become the arbiters of truth? Will it be like relying only upon the New York Times or AP to tell us what’s going on in Washington or Iraq? I guess what I’m saying is that, like soup kitchens, fact-check sites address crucial problems, but the real issue should be why we need them in the first place.”
Further Reading
Campaign Check at the San Francisco Chronicle
CNN Political Ticker’s Fact Check entries
How Fact-Checking Took Center Stage in 2008 Campaign at Editor & Publisher
Fact-checking Web sites are good news in a muddy presidential race at the Columbia Missourian
Fact-Checking FactCheck.Org on Obama and Guns at National Review Online’s Campaign Spot
Fact check at the Anchorage Daily News’ Alaska Politics Blog
My Day with Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org at the Moderate Voice
Policing the Pols at American Journalism Review
What do you think? Are non-partisan fact-check sites helping you figure out who is telling the truth in political ads? Or do you prefer the partisan sites? How do you think this kind of fact-checking will be handled in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
UPDATE: Just as my story was posted, I noticed a raft of conservative sites and blogs attacking FactCheck.org’s impartiality on a few issues. The National Rifle Association took issue with FactCheck.org’s report debunking the NRA’s attack ads on Obama. The NRA said that FactCheck.org was buying into Obama’s spin and that FactCheck.org’s funders, the Annenberg Foundation, actually has a stake in this issue:
Just last year, FactCheck’s primary funding source, the Annenberg Foundation, also gave $50,000 to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence for “efforts to reduce gun violence by educating the public and by enacting and enforcing regulations governing the gun industry.” Annenberg made a similar grant for $100,000 in 2005.
While FactCheck.org says it is transparent and non-partisan, I think it is taking the same stance as traditional media by expecting people to believe that on its face. They will need to be much more open about the people who are running the site, their own voting records and whether they have been involved in any political activity before.
But of course fact-check sites are going to be attacked by partisans no matter what findings they have. The same conservative blogs that are knocking FactCheck.org now have also been happy to praise the site’s reports that debunk lies by Obama in his ads.
UPDATE 2: FactCheck.org director Brooks Jackson, who is becoming used to partisan attacks from both sides of the aisle, responded to the NRA broadside in an email to me:
Looking over the NRA’s lame response to our article it’s apparent why they wouldn’t talk to us beforehand and didn’t contact us afterward. They attack us for receiving some funding from the Annenberg Family Foundation, which also has given money to the Brady campaign. That was news to us, so we dug in. Annenberg Foundation also gave $12.25 million to the Ronald Reagan Library, $3.1 million to the George H.W. Bush Library, and $14.6 million to the conservative Hoover Institution. That’s their pattern. [The NRA] likes to ignore evidence that shows them wrong.
We get flayed by zealots and partisans on both sides all the time, when we challenge their theology. You should see the stuff that comes in by email. We read everything. If people are just venting, we don’t respond. A lot of it is anonymous anyway. If somebody shows us that we have made a mistake, we correct it and do so transparently. If somebody we have mentioned in a story just wants to argue, we will consider posting their objection alongside our article, provided that a responsible official signs it and if it is civil and engages on the facts at issue.
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Top Five Week Two Hundred Seven
- Raja Petra Kamarudin
Malaysian blogger sentenced to jail without trial - Palin hack suspect
David Kernell has apartment searched by FBI - T-Mobile G-1
First phone with Google Android unveiled - CBS Eyemobile
Takes on CNN iReport with iPhone app - Comcast throttling
Admits to FCC that it targeted BitTorrent
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Blog History 101
Scott Rosenberg Traces the Blogosphere’s Origins
In July of last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Happy Blogiversary,” claiming that it had officially been 10 years since the blog was born. The writer cited Jorn Barger, owner of a site called Robot Wisdom, as the first blogger. After all, it was Barger who first coined the term weblog in 1997, a word that would be later truncated into the monosyllabic blog.
But Scott Rosenberg wasn’t convinced. A co-founder of Salon.com and former technology editor for that site, Rosenberg knew that several online destinations that preceded Barger’s site still met the technical definition of a blog — a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order — including Dave Winer’s Scripting News and Ric Ford’s Macintouch. By the time that Journal article was published, Rosenberg had already been kicking around the idea of writing a book on the history of blogs for some time.
“I was on tour for my first book, Dreaming In Code, in 2007,” he told me recently. “I was out in Portland and I was with Matt Haughey, the guy who started Metafilter and an early blogger himself…He’s a smart guy full of interesting ideas and he just offhandedly said that nobody has really written the history of blogging. Having just written one ambitious and difficult book, I said, ‘Yeah, nobody has, and nobody will.’”
Famous last words. And the Wall Street Journal article only stoked the flames; Rosenberg soon became even more convinced that such an historical account was necessary, both for the tech-savvy community and the laymen who only stumble across oblique references to blogs in more mainstream news outlets. He finally approached his agent with the idea in late 2007, half expecting it to be shot down.
“When I started blogging at Salon in 2002, I thought, ‘We’re too late for this blogging thing, we missed the boat.’ I thought that blogging had happened already,” he explained. “For this book, one of my concerns was that it might be difficult to sell because blogging history is ancient history in [Silicon] Valley. And here in the Bay Area, blogging is certainly an important thing, but it has been partially eclipsed by social media. So I was a little worried how this would fly.”
But his agent went for it, and he spent the next several months writing a proposal for the book, fleshing out the direction he wanted to take and how he would conduct research. His agent approached Crown, the publisher of his first book, and a few days before Christmas 2007 the company officially made an offer on the project.
The Evolution of Blogging
Speaking with Rosenberg about his book, I felt like we were discussing evolutionary biology. Rosenberg’s research goes beyond highlighting the earliest blogs, and slowly pieces its way through the primordial ooze of the Internet, tracing a line of websites in the early 1990s that first began taking on blog-like characteristics.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”
As with most web innovations, the blogosphere moved forward in fits and starts before exploding across the Net, creating a quick succession of firsts — the first person to get fired because of something written on a blog; the first first blog to receive a major journalism award, etc. Rosenberg sees it as his job to examine the myriad turning points in the medium, exploring how they affected the practice of blogging and led to further innovations in the field.
To do this, he interviewed over 100 bloggers, traveling to blog conferences and other online media meet-ups. Rosenberg uses these first-person accounts to detail how the bloggers pioneered new methodologies of online journalism and how they handled the unforeseen hurdles that often sprouted up like weeds. As blogging became more widespread, practitioners often faced the same ethical and practical scenarios that have plagued mainstream journalists for years.
H2.Recognition as a Legit News Source
While discussing pivotal breakthrough moments in blogging history, our conversation eventually turned to Joshua Marshall, founder of liberal political website TalkingPointsMemo. Marshall recently won a George Polk Award for his reporting on the firing of several U.S. attorneys — he is the first blogger to have won the award. Marshall first reached prominence several years ago after exposing controversial statements made by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond’s racial segregation platform. Before speaking to Rosenberg, I had assumed — incorrectly — that TalkingPointsMemo first broke that story.
“I should say to begin with that this is one of the valuable things for me to do,” Rosenberg told me. “You go dig into these stories like the Trent Lott story, which I go into great detail in the book. It turns out to be really complicated. Josh is credited, and deservedly so, for playing a very important part in that story. But he didn’t break the story.
“It was more like ABC News had actually reported on the story, but then it just disappeared and dropped off the media map. And then Josh Marshall, with the help of some other bloggers, started beating the drum on it and said, ‘Wait a minute, this really is a story.’ He started digging up tidbits to show that what Lott had said was actually something that he had been saying over and over through the years; it wasn’t this bizarre slip. He put that together, and then five or six days later, the Big Media picks it up again, and it becomes a story.”
This incident highlights the often-contentious relationship that has bubbled up between the mainstream media and the blogosphere, one in which words like “curmudgeons” and “amateurs” are bandied about in haphazard jabs as bloggers clamor for legitimacy in the 24-hour news cycle. Several traditional journalists had mocked Marshall, for instance, when he first began reporting on the U.S. attorney firings, only to later apologize when the controversy ended up being newsworthy.
The Original Pioneers
When it comes to the history of blogging, few are more knowledgeable than Rebecca Blood, the first person to attempt to write a comprehensive article on the subject. Her essay, “Weblogs: a history and perspective,” approaches the issue from the point of view of an insider who has been immersed in the blogosphere since almost the beginning.
Written and published in 2000, the essay begins by listing a number of bloggers who emerged in the late 1990s. This was before the advent of Web 2.0. and the ready availability of free blogging software, meaning that most of these early web writers had to create their sites from scratch.
“I was one of the original bandwagon jumpers,” Blood told me. “People at this point consider me to be one of the original bloggers, but from my perspective I came late to the party. The original blogs started in 1997 and that’s when I became an avid reader. At that time, you could read all of them every day; there were just a handful.”
She described this first group as a close-knit band of web enthusiasts, a herd of filters whose sole focus was to find interesting pages online and then post links to them. It was in this Wild West of the web — when the tech bubble was quickly approaching the popping point — that three main factions emerged, each scrambling to gain legitimacy.
Besides bloggers, “There were two other groups of people at the time who were producing online work,” Blood said. “There were the journalers and the zinesters; both preceded the weblogs, really.”
I pointed out that online journalers were usually considered bloggers, to which she refuted, “They weren’t blogs; they were a completely separate community. They had a different form where they would put one entry on a page and then you’d have to click on a link to go to the next entry. It was as if they had transferred a print journal to the web.”
She explained that it was often the zinesters, who wrote for and published online magazines, called ezines, who looked down upon the early bloggers. Their argument — that they spent hours crafting publishable prose while the bloggers merely linked to the content of others — is still repeated today by mainstream media critics.
“But the bloggers, those who were doing it, really did think what we were doing was important,” Blood said. “We were filtering the web for people. We were pointing to things we thought were interesting. It’s kind of ironic, given that there are so many weblogs now. When we started, we were creating signal to noise — we were trying to pull out the good stuff on the web. But now, of course, there are so many weblogs that they just contribute to the noise. It’s impossible to even read all the good ones in a day much less read all of them.”
Most early bloggers, including Blood, hadn’t expected how widespread this noise would become — or rather, how many millions of blogs would sprout up after free software became widely available. Though Blood predicted that the medium would gain in legitimacy and popularity, she thought these gains would only be reflected in growing readership.
“I stopped making these predictions years ago when all my predictions were wrong,” she told me. “When we were doing it back then, I honestly never envisioned the expanse of the blog universe. I thought that those of us who were blogging would gain larger and larger audiences over time, until we had sort of a mainstream-sized readership. It never occurred to me that everybody would want to blog, that instead of 150 blogs with 10,000-people sized audiences, there would be millions of blogs. That’s completely backwards of what I expected. So as much as I was a pioneer, I was still thinking in old media terms.”
Bloggers Ignorant of Their Past
I asked Rosenberg to compare his book project to Blood’s essay; in what ways would his work expand on hers? He explained that her piece was written from the perspective of someone immersed in the field, what he called “primary source material.”
“On one level, I think her account is very much of its time and place and shaped by her experience up to that point,” he said. “In fact, I interviewed her a few months ago. I sat down and talked to her about all the changes between then and now. A big difference is that my book is an attempt to write for a wide readership, just as ‘Dreaming in Code’ is an attempt to write about software development for people outside the software world…It’s a little bit of a different approach than Rebecca’s post because a lot of it centers around profiles of people whose stories represented some particular aspect of blogging, or some problem that blogging brings up.”
But though the book — tentatively titled “Say Everything” and scheduled to come out next summer — will be written to engage a non-tech savvy audience, Rosenberg hopes that it will have a certain appeal to already-converted web evangelists. These very online media enthusiasts, he has found, are often clueless as to their medium’s origins.
“Because I think that the technology industry and the web community are often a little bit ignorant of their own past,” he said. “I found this writing about software development in ‘Dreaming in Code.’ A lot of programmers are really smart people, but then a lot of them know shockingly little about their own field. It’s a cliche but a line of great merit, the one about ‘if you don’t know the mistakes of the past, you’re doomed to repeat them.’”
Given the almost daily news stories spurring heated debate over blogger ethics — Gawker’s reprinting of Sarah Palin’s hacked emails, for example — such a book could help people put today’s ecosystem of bloggers and journalists (and blogger/journalists) into a better historical context.
Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com.
Photo of Rebecca Blood by Sebastian DeLaOsa
Filed under Citizen Journalism, Weblogs
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