Would Google’s new glasses keep an eye on things?

Posted on June 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Google’s launch of its dazzling Internet-connected eyewear, which it calls Glass, has been so understated that it’s tempting to mistake this wearable computer for just another cool plaything from Silicon Valley.

I think that would be wrong. Glass—its progeny, its successors, its imitators–is a very big deal, in my view, as big as anything that has come along since the PC and the World Wide Web a generation ago.

It’s not that Google’s eyeglasses are more powerful than today’s smartphones. At the moment Glass apparently does less, since the range and precision of instructions it recognizes are confined to what the wearer can convey through gestures, taps and limited speech.

What matters, big time, is that Glass layers a real-time Internet presence onto users’ normal visual fields—onto their everyday, curbside awareness, their routine comings and goings.

Glass looks like a pair of spectacles and works like a phone; what the user sees is a display that’s perched above the usual band of vision. That display accommodates a continuing crawl of Internet-fueled communications—text, images and sound.

Glass gets access to your world, it sees what you see. It can draw from your social networks, Internet queries, calendar, dining preferences, the bottomless resources of the Web, to furnish you with multiple levels of information and intelligence—customized for you—to inspire your choices and shape your life.

True, the technologically adept already get that via smart phones by heedlessly stroking at their tiny screens. But Glass promises a brazen and routine simultaneity of experience, an ability to interact seamlessly with the here and now without losing rich Web-enabled connectivity—just as having the radio on never meant you couldn’t talk with a friend.

That’s the good news. Now the rest. For starters, Glass can record and transmit pictures and sound. It is, as privacy expert Shaq Katikala puts it, “a phone in front of your eyes with a Continue reading →

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When ideological warriors join the news business: The Koch conundrum

Posted on June 5, 2013 | 6 Comments

News and opinion parted company fairly late in the history of journalism, a split usually dated to the mid-19th century advent of steam-powered presses, paper mass-produced from wood pulp, and a revenue model based on consumer advertising.

Together, those developments meant size mattered. And big circulation was easier to achieve if news was presented without ideological topspin, so that people of different beliefs could read the same accounts without having their feathers ruffled.

Until then, political alignment had been a driver of newspaper journalism, and it has remained integral to magazines, documentaries and other media. But for the burgeoning metro press, opinion came to be deplored as an impurity, an ideological contaminant—and the language of ethics was thus hitched to the wagon of commercial calculation, not for the last time.

Still, keeping opinion from sullying fact is a duty U.S. journalists take seriously, to a degree that civilians find surprising. Reporters are trained in a discipline that encourages them to present current realities in ways that keep their own opinions out of sight and, they hope, out of the reader’s mind.

True, there’s a bogus element to this. Stories can’t be told, or even conceived, without judgments about what matters, and those judgments reflect the values of individuals and of the institutions they operate in. So even if, in the traditional paper, the newsroom chief and the opinions editor didn’t compare notes, they did breathe the same air and, ultimately, were held to the standards of the same bosses and owners.

Still, the success of a news organization depended in part on its reputation for independence—from the town fathers, from its advertisers, even from its owners.

That brings us to the media ownership issue of the moment: the possibility that Charles and David Koch, reputedly the country’s most open-handed funders of libertarian causes, will buy all or part of the Tribune Co. Along with 23 broadcast and online properties, Tribune has eight regional newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times (the country’s fourth-biggest paper), Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Hartford Courant and Hoy, the No. 2 U.S. Spanish-language sheet.

The brothers are estimated to be worth $34 billion each, making them the fifth- and sixth-richest men on earth. Their privately held Koch Industries is primarily in energy and chemicals, and its holdings range from pipelines to manufacture.

The Koches are intensely active in the public sphere as warriors for the libertarian cause, having endowed university chairs for free marketeers, given generously to the Cato Institute, the prestigious Beltway think tank, and bankrolled Americans for Prosperity, which helped create Tea Party-related groups. They also contributed to the campaign in Wisconsin against Continue reading →

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Sources under siege: The need to protect the flow of news in the digital age

Posted on May 26, 2013 | 1 Comment

This is adapted from a talk I gave to the annual conference of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen, May 20, 2013, in Los Angeles.

Last year I was asked to prepare a presentation for an investigative reporting symposium that’s held every year at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

My assignment was to offer an overview of the state of investigative reporting in the USA.

This was a time when the country was, in principle, on the declining end of the anti-terrorism panic that gripped the nation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. National leadership had changed too, and the country was now led by an administration that was winding down the two wars the government of George W. Bush had begun, and had essentially repudiated the war in Iraq.

The president himself, Barack Obama, was well-read, well-spoken, and well-educated. He had spoken approvingly of greater cooperation with the press, greater support for open government, and greater tolerance for whistleblowers within government.

Hence, what I found was surprising. Among the practitioners I interviewed there was widespread, almost unanimous, agreement that the climate for tough, investigative reporting had worsened dramatically under the Obama administration.

Part of that had to do with the industrial transformation the US media were, and are, undergoing. That transformation has weakened many news organizations—especially the once-pivotal regional press. They are left with neither the financial muscle nor the editorial will to conduct lengthy in-depth projects and to pay the lawyers who may be needed to protect from reprisals the reporters who carry out those projects.

Nor is there confidence among the media that the emerging news-consuming public has the appetite its elders once had for such journalism.

The subject I want to talk to you about today is a less-apparent dimension of this more difficult environment for investigative reporting (which is merely the more glamorous term for what we really recognize as accountability journalism.)

This dimension concerns the vulnerability of sources.

Sources are more vulnerable than ever before, thanks in part to the same technological marvels that we associate with the digital revolution.

The media have been slow to recognize the potential exposure of their own sources as a problem, not just for their news operations, but for the larger purposes that journalism is supposed to serve. Continue reading →

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Beyond the Marathon media mess: Is worse to come?

Posted on May 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in Midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years before smart phones. With electricity out in much of the downtown, people we passed had turned to a decades-old news source: They huddled around the open doors of parked cars and listened to the radios.

It was a different era, a full generation before the ferocious media firestorm ignited by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings was even thinkable.

With this terrorism incident, whole new constellations of digital age channels were commandeered by thousands of independent originators of comment, speculation, factual reports, pictures, and sounds. Their cascades of reporting reached audiences directly, and engulfed even the most powerful news media in a tidal flood of urgent raw news that gatekeepers had no choice but to sift, reject, ignore, pursue, or publish.

The result, judged by customary standards of care and veracity, was a mess.  Legacy media, desperate to keep current with trending online reports, got the number of Boston victims wrong, fingered innocent people as suspects (including a missing college student who, it turned out, had been dead for weeks), relayed falsehoods, reported arrests when there hadn’t been any and a third bombing that never happened, and, for a time, stoked a rancid climate of fear and foreboding well beyond what a measured appraisal of the facts would warrant.

Not good.

So what lessons might we draw? Here are a few.

First, covering breaking news is one thing; reporting in real time is something else entirely. Continue reading →

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Peephole journalism: What are the limits?

Posted on April 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they’re speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it OK to make those tapes public?

That question came up during the 2012 campaign. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told a roomful of Florida donors that 47 percent of their compatriots would never vote Republican because they were, essentially, parasitic layabouts who had been bought off by government stipends.

A recording of his talk to a private gathering was made by a bartender and made public by Mother Jones magazine. It confirmed the image of Romney that the Democrats had been peddling, as an arrogant, aloof plutocrat who looked down his nose at the working class voters his electoral success depended on.

Did that disclosure intrude on the privacy that Romney and his listeners assumed? Unquestionably.

But was that intrusion justified? Did it give voters a unique chance to hear a candidate who, apparently speaking his mind, uncorked a foul brew of contempt and condescension for nearly half of his fellow countrymen?

I thought so, and although I found the privacy invasion regrettable, I was convinced what it revealed, and what might not have been heard otherwise, made the intrusion justified. Mother Jones and reporter David Corn performed a public service.

I’m not so convinced by the most recent controversy that Corn and the magazine have stirred up with secret recordings of another big league politician.

Earlier this month, Mother Jones reported that the Senate minority leader,  Mitch McConnell, had huddled with campaign aides in Louisville, Ky., to plot his  2014 re-election strategy. According to a clandestine video of their Feb. 2 meeting , the politicos were feasting on the candidacy of film star Ashley Judd, Continue reading →

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Two cheers for the news ombudsman

Posted on April 9, 2013 | 1 Comment

Word that The Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.

As Reuters’ redoubtable press critic Jack Shafer observed: “If there has been any protest — organized or piecemeal — against The Post for retiring the ombudsman position, I’ve missed it. I’ve witnessed greater reader noise after the cancellation of a comic strip from the Post.”

It’s no surprise that news ombudsmen, whose job is to investigate reader complaints and share their findings publicly, have never been beloved by publishers or, for that matter, by journalists. Companies don’t normally pay to be embarrassed, and few professionals welcome being pilloried publicly for their mistakes. Ombudsmen do both.

But it’s a little surprising that the public cares so little that a major news organization is killing off its marquee contribution to the closest thing this country has to media self-regulation. After all, when they’re doing their job—as the Post’s ombudsmen often have—these are people who make a serious, Continue reading →

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So who’s paying all those unpaid journalists?

Posted on March 26, 2013 | 5 Comments

 

 

People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.

What happened was that The Atlantic Magazine, a marquee name in the world of words, approached a well-established freelancer named Nate Thayer and asked him about “repurposing” work he’d done for an online site, NKNews.org. The Atlantic was interested in a 1,200-word rendering of a longer article of Thayer’s pegged to ex-basketball star Dennis Rodman’s bizarre visit to North Korea.

When Thayer asked about terms, the magazine indicated it wasn’t proposing to actually pay him, at least not in cash money, but noted that its website reached 13 million readers per month, suggesting that exposure on that scale is worth a lot.

Thayer wasn’t persuaded. He replied: “I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children.”

Word of the affair zipped around the Internet, triggering a flood of comment. The Atlantic apologized “if we offended him”—the way institutions apologize without contrition—and in the aftermath, dozens of other journalists chipped in their own tales of the wretched treatment and soup-kitchen pay they get, even from flourishing websites.

(It’s not much consolation to point out that for the most part, they still get something, unlike say professors. The latest indignity from publishers of academic journals, it seems, is to make writers pay them to have articles posted online. For junior college faculty—who need not only to publish but to be cited by other scholars in order to qualify for advancement—the threat of being kept offline is like having their careers held for ransom. And incidentally, they get no money from print publication either. Not a dime.)

Getting back to the Thayer affair, the arguments over rights and wrongs pivoted on fairness, on the demise of professionalism, on the benefits of a higher profile, on the long-term consequences of underpayment on the volume and quality of significant journalism.

But I want to drag another consideration into the foreground: If the publications aren’t paying for the journalism they publish, who is?

I mean, all labor incurs costs. Somewhere in our marvelous market system, those costs are being covered. Somebody’s paying to feed Nate Thayer’s kids, even if The Atlantic won’t.

So we meet, once again, the insidious problem of hidden subsidy, one of the most perplexing ethical problems of journalism in the Internet age. Continue reading →

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