Peace out, Print!

I’m a great admirer of Elaine Showalter’s scholarly contributions, and I certainly do hope her new book will start some conversations about whether women have been underrepresented in the canon of fiction.

That said, it’s unfortunate that conversations about women’s contributions to non-fiction aren’t drawing the same kind of mainstream media attention. That’s not because an equivalent book hasn’t been written, either: my quickie Internet search came up with a very recent one, last year’s Women in American Journalism: A New History by University of Colorado journalism professor Jan Whitt.

Perhaps that’s because non-fiction has long been a boys’ club, despite the disproportionately large numbers of women receiving a formal journalism education. Since the late 1970s, women have made up a only a third of the full-time journalism workforce, despite that they comprise two-thirds of journalism school students nationally, according to the Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Women, of course, are in large part to blame for their own (self) exclusion from the genre. Looking around my own journalism M.A. program here at the University of Missouri, I see most of my talented female friends specializing in magazine editing and design — NOT in writing. The fact that so many of them will become editors is particularly ironic, given that it doesn’t seem to translate to them promoting women writers on women’s turf — that is, in women’s magazines.

Take a look at this year’s National Magazine Award finalists for feature writing and profile writing. Although a whopping two out of the ten nominees are women, NONE of the nominated stories appeared in women’s interest magazines. (That’s in contrast to Esquire and GQ’s two nominations each.)

In an especially ironic twist, your other featured guest on Thursday’s show, Sarah Thornton — an accomplished journalist by any measure — was profiled in Vogue last October in a piece that seemed to spend more space analyzing her toenail paint color, her designer label clothing, and her “uncanny youthfulness and vitality” (imagine, at age 43!) than to her incisive new book, Seven Days in the Art World.

So back to the Showalter-inspired question of whether female writers are similarly underrepresented in the non-fiction canon. (Or at least, the question of whether the topic will be afforded real estate in the mainstream conversation.) The answer: when they muster up the courage to give themselves the prominence and respect they deserve.

In this case, Stoltz was referring to Clay Shirky’s March 15 post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” a piece that many are already calling a seminal piece on the rise and fall (and ultimate triumph) of the newspaper industry.

Shirky — NYU professor; contributor to Wired, the NYT, the WSJ, and Harvard Business Review; author of last year’s  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations — is no slouch in the world of New Media-crit himself.

My Synopsis of “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”

Back in the 90′s, newspaper publishers made all the wrong assumptions about the Internet. They thought walled content, copyright law, micropayments and traditional advertising models would ensure that their digital transition would be angst-free, and moreover, just as profitable as print. When reality didn’t bear out that way, they continued repeating these beliefs like deluded cult members, banishing those who dared dissent “into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.”

But fast-forward to 2009: clearly, that kind of “enthusiastic grasping at straws” has resulted in the industry’s utter financial collapse, i.e. the “unthinkable” in the post’s title. Shirky blames the industry for its initially willful and prideful ignorance, which morphed into desperate mythmaking. But really, the fault is universal: in demanding reassurance that its valued institutions would remain intact, the public has been complicit in the masquerade. Shirky points out that:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Fortuitously —and, Shirky takes pains to emphasize, utterly accidentally — in the print model, advertisers had subsidized the high costs of doing journalism. But when the Internet came along, poof! went that commercial bankrolling of public service (and whoomph! went the bloated corpse of newspapers hitting the ground).

Get over it. Here’s Shirky’s bottom line: Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Breathing new life into the latter will require nothing less than a complete paradigm shift, Shirky points out. It won’t happen overnight, and won’t happen at all unless we not learn to live with the discomfort of uncertainty — and along with it, the promise and hope inherent in unbridled experimentation. And if we don’t?

“Save society,” Shirky muses, should prove to be a pretty effective rallying cry.

Broader Implications of the Piece

Shirky’s tough love is actually a much-needed jolt of optimism (let’s embrace our freedom from the institution of newspapers, and its opportunity for innovation, rather than bemoan it), but I’m not sure I would throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, I’d argue that newspapers are more relevant than ever: in the undifferentiated mass of information that confronts us daily, they’ll serve as a credential, a mark of authority.

When all the reporters have been issued their pink slips, there will still be editors minding the flagship institution — akin, perhaps, to a historical society’s board of directors. Funded philanthropically, they’ll preserve their institutions’ legacy by repositioning themselves as The Arbiters of Credibility — after all, isn’t that what editors (being the smartest and most discerning among us) have always done?

Functionally, this would work out as newspaper brands “endorsing,” or vetting, the most credible and analytical of user-generated/blog content (perhaps in the form of aggregation; perhaps by licensing their logo). Not all citizen journalism is created equal, and they’re the perfect ones to set the standards.

We’ll see. In the wise (and apparently gymnastics-ready) words of 1980s supergroup Asia, only time will tell.

As always with persuading people to adopt new ideas, it’s all in the pitch, and I think Preston is really on to something. At first glance, the term “voluntary subscriptions” may sound meaningless, cryptic, or a sucker’s game. (After all, the content’s already free.) But by creating a commodity (i.e., a value-added subscription) out of what is essentially a donation, it communicates to the readers that they would be getting something for kicking in some bucks — which, of course, they would.

Here’s how it would work: The site’s creators would post a secure link (via PayPal or Kachingle) on their homepage — through which readers could set up a recurring donation of, say, $5 or $10 per month. Alongside this link, of course, would be an explanation of the benefits of doing so.

And what, pray tell, are those? As a “subscriber,” you, dear reader, would be given a more prominent forum in which to post your responses to the site’s stories, plus maybe something tangible, like a beautiful print of the Seattle skyline.

As a local-blog consumer myself, I immediately thought, would this be valuable to me? Well, the Seattle skyline print is in the tried-and-true NPR coffee mug vein, but I think the former is an irresistible offer, given the contentious nature of local politics and citizens’ hard-wired desire to chime in on the debate du jour.

The alternative, of course, is to pitch donations as an act of goodwill, whereby you, dear reader, would get the blissful psychic reassurance that your valued news sites would continue to exist  — as well as being able to enhance your own social status by announcing your philanthropic acts (however small) on a platform like Facebook. (For the record, I still think that could work for younger readers who use their social networking profile pages as a means of identity.)

But Preston knows there’s another pitch involved, too: persuading WSB’s creators that pushing the “voluntary subscription” concept and payment link wouldn’t scare off their readers. It would be easy enough to appeal to their pragmatic side — as in,hey, guys, the days of free-flowing ad revenue are rapidly diminishing, so what’s Plan B? — but instead, he appeals to… wait for it… their journalistic values (gasp!).

How? Getting an additional source of revenue from readers, he points out, would make WSB’s editorial content less subservient to the necessarily self-interested demands of its advertisers. And in these troubling days of disappearing newspapers, he notes, that kind of insurance will be critical as blogs start to pick up the duty of investigative reporting. (Note: I’m not saying WSB ordinarily kowtows to their advertisers, but realistically, every ad-supported publication has to deal with the issue to some extent or another.)

And who knows? Maybe readers would start to see the value of that editorial independence, too. After all, it seems to work pretty well with NPR listeners (and they just get a silly coffee mug).

KnightPulse, the Knight Foundation’s online discussion forum, brings us an interview this week with new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. The segment centered on the direction of NPR in the midst of the current economic downturn, and Schiller, the former head of New York Times.com, conveyed an optimistic outlook for the public radio network, citing the “loyalty and devotion” of its 25 million NPR listeners and the network’s continuing push to digitize content and create a stronger cohesion between the network and its 800 member stations.

As for all the buzz about “hyperlocal” news? “I don’t think anyone’s doing it very well,” Schiller said. “The landscape is wide open.” And though she doesn’t say so overtly, Schiller’s comments about strengthening the partnerships between NPR and its member stations seemed to hint that the company would take a bigger leadership role helping those stations innovate and distribute local news content more effectively.

-Emily Sussman

Used judiciously, however, first-person narrative actually does the reader a service. By inserting himself into a story, the writer is coming clean that that events he depicts might reasonably been presented — or have unfolded, even — in an entirely different way had another journalist taken it on instead. Of course, I’m not talking about war reporting or baseball games, or any other subjects whose stories play out entirely outside the reporter’s act of reporting. But in the case of profile writing and, as Bill Wasik  points out below, especially with investigative stories that require undercover reporting, good journalism is equally constituted by the frank disclosure of personal circumstance as it is by facts.

“In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. In the pages that follow [Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person, ed. Bill Wasik] you will find fifteen such literary proxies who, at great personal risk, have braved the perils of the Bush Era and returned to tell their tales. Many of them ventured undercover; all of them worked without the supervision of a guardian publicist. What distinguishes most of the dispatches collected here is what might be called the radical first person: in each case the individual consciousness of the writer is paramount. The reader thereby becomes privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.” (B.W.)

This week’s show (definitely worth a listen) was near and dear to the topic of the Information Valet Project: it centered around the sorely needed monetization of news sources. Specifically, the panelists discussed the New York Times‘ new initiative to feature hyperlocal blogs on the NY metro areas, expressing deep cynicism that the effort would result in anything remotely involving dollar signs.

At first — being an ardent optimist about independent journalists picking up the local news slack from compromised or absent newspapers — I blanched. Then I did some more reading on the subject from the most credible source I could find: Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab. Here’s my comment, which I posted on the site’s blog.

This was a great show, but I’ve got more info to add to the conversation about the NYT’s efforts to incorporate “hyperlocal” blogs into their online offerings. They do, in fact, have monetization on the brain.

The following is an article from Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab—which is self-described as a “collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” NJL interviewed Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at the NYT, and here’s how he thinks of the blog concept. (Full article is available at http://neimanlab.org)

“What’s going on here? It turns out the Times’ ambitions in this field are bigger — and, in another sense, smaller — than they might appear from the two sites that debuted on Monday with a full-time reporter at the helm of each. The long-term business model, Schachter said, could involve distributing a local-blogging platform to people in other communities who would start their own sites without any Times reporters or editors at all. They might pay the Times to license the platform or share revenue from a Times-run advertising network that’s under consideration.”

I applaud the Times for thinking of monetization, but it’s disturbing to think they would sell their logo to just anyone willing to pay. That said, it could lend serious credibility to blogs that ARE picking up the slack from dying newspapers — West Seattle Blog comes to mind.

As a grad student who’s about to face a career in online entrepreneurial journalism, I’m not worried about monetization. The tide will turn, but not without the NYT leading the way. Just like the WSJ, the Times has the kind of valuable content that is worth charging for. NOW. No gimmicks (e.g., TimesSelect), no licensing to hacks. Otherwise, the brand gets tarnished.

Not incidentally, the full quote [cited during the show as "Information wants to be free"] is:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

(Stewart Brand speaking at the first Hackers Conference in 1984)

In theory, yes. But in real life, only my landlord and my grocery store have business models in place for collecting my dwindling dollars.

I know I’m not alone in relying on blogs like TechCrunch or EatSleepPublish to keep me up-to-date professionally, or in feeding my intellectual curiosity with the free online version of the New York Times Book Review and its kin. And while I’m grateful for the knowledge-service they provide, that’s all I can do: be (passively) grateful. The sites’ producers don’t even ask me to chip in, let alone provide a sidebar widget that would enable me to compensate them.

Which is where the elephant comes stomping into the room. As in, if I’m not paying for it — and, by extension, nobody else is either — how on earth can these enterprises keep churning out content?

But maybe I should stop overanalyzing and go with the (free) flow. In a Time cover story last week, the venerable Walter Isaacson says what most of us have been thinking for a long time: “if [even the NYT] doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it.”

Far from lulling us into complacency, however, Isaacson’s article serves as an urgent call to arms. His point is that a free press isn’t — and moreover, shouldn’t be — literally free.

“Those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system,” Isaacson tells the freeloading masses. He’s got tough love for the news orgs, too: “Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.”

Point taken. But how will this paid-content paradigm shift come about? The categorial dissing of micropayments is still fashionable these days, but Steve Outing of Editor and Publisher isn’t throwing the baby out with the bath water. In last Tuesday’scolumn, Outing extolled the industry-saving potential of the California-based startup Kachingle — a system that sprinkles a user’s chunk of change over various websites in direct proportion to how much that user visits (i.e., values) those sites.

The logistics are user-friendly: someone would purchase, say, a $5 monthly Kachingle account, then go about his daily consumption of online content. Thanks to a combination of algorithms and user agency (that is, if he liked a particular site enough to click its Kachingle medallion-widget), the funds in his account would be distributed to the hard-working providers of his web diet. (See more specifics of Kachingle on Outing’s post.)

Outing pitches Kachingle as a kind of universal subscription to web content. “Just as online users currently pay… a monthly fee for all the music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they’ll also pay a monthly fee for all the news and blog content on the Web.”

I heard co-founder Cynthia Typaldos discuss Kachingle on a conference call last week, and it was hard to argue with her logic: take the “micro and mental transaction costs” out of the micropayment model, and people will be more inclined to pay for the content they value.

But here’s the (potentially) million-dollar proposition: participation in Kachingle is voluntary, and a site’s content would still be free to non-Kachinglers. (Sort of like NPR, as Outing reminds us.)

Essentially, Kachingle will enable me to thank Jason Preston of EatSleepPublish by taking him out for a (virtual) sandwich, and, while I’m at it, maybe spring for a soda for the NYT Book Review.

But is this too big a leap of faith for the Land of Free?

Well, I can concede that Preston’s got to eat in order to keep up his strength to write his blog, and that Joyce Carol Oates needs a cool drink in the midst of her doggedly prolific literary career. And when I let my dollars follow my rationale, everyone’s happy: my content providers get real-world sustenance while I get the assurance that the sites I depend on will still exist when I wake up for my fix tomorrow.

But that’s not all I get. If goodwill and reciprocity are today’s recession-era status symbols, then I’m about to flaunt my bling. I can see it now: everyone from my Facebook friends to the visitors to my personal blog doing a double take when they see I have a caring, philanthropic side — as evidenced by the fact that I carry my “Kachingling” wallet with my virtual self.

Not only that, my trail of Kachingles will help substantiate my very identity. When I Kachingle a site like EatSleepPublish, I’m providing irrefutable evidence that yes, I am someone who cares about the future of publishing in a freeloading world. Similarly, a teen who boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of celebrity gossip might want to Kachingle Perez Hilton to show her friends how she gets her scoops. (Don’t panic if you’re a closeted Perez fan: you can change the privacy settings to hide or show which sites you’ve Kachingled.)

I don’t know about Mr. Isaacson, but I’m not feeling foolish. At the very least, I’ll be off the hook when he sees me nudging — er, Kachingling— his paradigm shift along.

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser had a great cautionary post last week about the dangers of professional and/or personal overreliance on any one sharing-is-caring 2.0 platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. [I'll refer to these types of sites here as 'SN/UGC' for Social Networking/User-Generated Content.]

In today’s unpredictable climate of spend-venture-capital-cash-now, find-revenue-later SN/UGCs, Glaser advises, it’s folly to put all your information eggs in one basket.Better to spread your (virtual) self across a number of platforms, so if “your” SN/UGC tanks or becomes a capricious master, you won’t feel like your (real) self is lost at sea, too.

The piece provides a good “I got burned” anecdote from a Facebook user who found herself socially stranded after her account was abruptly revoked by the site’s powers-that-be. And though she doesn’t bring it up, I presume other “deliquent” users might have an even bigger reason to worry: what a wounded Facebook admin plans to do with their information, post-banishment.

For a look at more proactive web users, Glaser interviews professional bloggers and developers who say they stay vigilant not to rely on SN/UGCs to host or promote their unique content.

“I believe in building your own community and keeping control of the content you work hard to create,” says video blogger Cali Lewis, explaining why she’s reluctant to stake her business on Facebook, despite its powerful social-viral capabilities.

“You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” adds tech blogger Chris Pirillo. “If [a given social networking site] changes one component or policy, you could be out of business… Never invest too much time and attention into one platform or another.”

What could fix this (apparently) broken trust?

Money might be a start. Lewis says she would be willing to pay a user fee for a SN/UGG like Twitter— presumably because along with it would come the assurance that her content and information would stay secure.

Makes sense. In real life, we pay for services because, well, they’re worth paying for. A transaction that involves money is the real-world assurance of accountability.

Further listening/reading:

On Trust
John Sutter and Jason Carroll: “Fears of Impostors Increase on Facebook,” CNN.com, pub. 2.6.09.
KBIA News: “Under the Microscope: The Fall of JuicyCampus.com” 2.5.09

On SN/UGC stability:
Simon Hooper: ”Facebook Turns Five… But Can It Survive?“ CNN.com, pub. 2.4.09.
David Cohn: ”What Is and Isn’t Important to Learn: Lessons from Friendster,” from DigiDave.org, pub. 2.3.09

Some of these were fairly big omissions. Like Brinkley’s failure to acknowledge the existence of New Century Network, that well-intentioned but ill-fated effort in the mid-90′s to aggregate the online presence of the major news publishers.

And some was just faulty reporting. Like a gaffe on whether it was the Justice Department or Congress that was originally responsible for exempting certain same-city newspaper consolidations from antitrust laws.

But perhaps Brinkley’s gaffes say more about the current dismal state of web information search and delivery than about his reporting skills. [Note: I don't know whether Brinkley did his reporting for the column on the web or not, so for the sake of this argument, I'll use myself as an example.]

Let’s say I’m doing web research for my own “future of journalism” piece. And let’s say I want to know whether there’s been any sort of unified effort on the part of newspapers to bundle and charge for their online content. So I type in the following search terms together:

Newspapers/Collaboration/Charge/Content.

Pretty basic. But that’s the point. I don’t know what I’m looking for specifically, so I can’t be explicit.

So what do I come up with? Ideally, results that would include a mention of NCN. But I find myself staring down more than 1.5 million hits — none of which, browsing through the first five or so pages of Google’s results, look all that promising as far as leading me to anything concrete.

Sure, I could sit for hours thinking about better search terms to input. Or dive right into the first (remotely promising) hit, hoping it’ll lead me down a yellow brick road to some meaningful information. But either way, I know my afternoon’s as good as gone.

Which made me long for a sophisticated information search service — something that delivered a relevant, credible, streamlined yet comprehensive package of search results from a database of trusted news sites. Something that would have understood the robust content of my full research query (perhaps I could have told it I was looking for any and all examples of past collaborations) and delivered it to me accordingly, either in one piece or as a series of periodic updates.

I’m not sure how soon that “something” is coming down the pipeline. (If only I could think of the right search terms to track down that info!) But would that be something I’d be willing to pay for, say, in the context of the IVP?  If it saved me from embarrassing gaps in my research — you bet.