Unpacking My Library

Gorilla Suits and the Anti-War Movement (Updated Below)

  The Former Fringe
  Originally uploaded by Chanders.

Criticizing mainstream media coverage of political protests is like shooting fish in a barrel. People have been doing it at least since Todd Gitlin wrote The Whole World is Watching [PDF], and it's become common enough to spawn dozens of blogs and at least one media watchdog organization. Every once and in while, though, someone writes something that's so terribly bad, so truly awful, that one can't help but gripe about it. Alex Koppelman with Salon is the lucky man this week. In fact, his article about the January 27 UFPJ anti-war protest, "Protesting the war -- not just for giant puppets anymore!" was so bad, it made the friend who emailed it to me start ranting at her boyfriend in disgust. So congratulations, Alex-- you've even touched even the hard-bitten and cynical.

Lets get a few things straight right off the bat. I'll grant Salon that covering political protests isn't the easiest journalistic job in the world. Journalists thrive on a few types of stories-- stories that are spontaneous and unscripted, stories that are new, stories that involve elites, and stories that  bring to light the passionate nature of the human condition. Political protests combine the worst of all worlds in a way that drives journalists crazy. Obviously, something is going on that's serious enough to impel hundreds of thousands of people to get on buses and stand around in the cold for a few hours. But, all those people make covering the story so hard! And what's more, far from being orgies of spontaneity, most protests are incredibly scripted affairs. So here you are, Alex Koppelman, at the protest surrounded by all these hopeful people (which also pisses you off, because you're a journalist, which means you're also incredibly cynical) at an event your editor tells you is really important but which is just so damn boring.

And when journalists get bored, they get lazy. Which means they pull out the cliches, and dust off the old script they've written a thousand times before.

Here's Koppelman's money paragraph:

"Regardless of size, the protest felt different. The demographics of the crowd had changed. As opposition to the war in Iraq mounts, sparked by the president's decision to send 21,500 more troops, protesting against it has become mainstream. There were plenty of professional protesters in evidence Saturday, the kind for whom protests are a lifestyle choice, but there were also more yuppies, more families with small children, more older people and even a fair number of stylishly dressed young girls in North Face jackets and Ralph Lauren sunglasses. Just as important, the confused, off-topic rhetoric of so many past protests was noticeably muted."

There are two things going on here. For starters, this piece is incredibly poorly written. Koppelman dips into his reporters bag and pulls out every cliche in the book: the commies, the crazy dykes from Sarah Lawrence with the dirty signs, the man in the gorilla suit, the charging anarchists, the reefer (oh god, not the reefer!), and the Fletchers, from Harrisonburg, Va, presumably representative of the 99,500 or so people at the protest who weren't crazy druggies or from weird political sects.

Even worse than the poor quality of the article, however, is the way it reinforces the emerging media narrative about popular opposition to the current fiasco in the Middle East. Salon isn't alone in this regard; indeed, it's likely that Koppelman has read enough other press to pick up on the storyline without even knowing it. Here's a summary of story as it's being framed in the national consciousness:

"Once upon a time, a group of dirty Arabs flew some planes into some big buildings in New York. The American president rallied the American people to the defense of liberty and the homeland like the hero-cowboy he was, and everyone was united and happy, maybe for the first time in their lives. But then the president got carried away, and because Saddam wanted to kill his daddy, he decided he needed to kill Saddam first. And the American people, because they were: a) scared of the dirty Arabs; or b) tricked by the tricky President and his tricky advisors; or c) good hearted liberals who wanted to bring democracy and freedom to the dirty Arabs, all decided that invading Iraq was a great idea. (Of course, there were a few people who thought invading Iraq was a bad idea, but they were all dykes from Sarah Lawrence college wearing gorilla suits). But because the president wasn't very smart, and because we "won the war but lost the peace"; and because the Arabs were not only dirty but were ungrateful bloodthirsty barbarians who didn't appreciate our gift freedom, the war didn't go like people thought it would. Then, all the people who thought the war was a good idea realized in November 2006 that it was a bad idea, and opposition to the war became ... <drumroll please> ... mainstream."

OK, fine. Maybe this storyline, the "mainstreamization" of the anti-war movement will help the Democrats get a spine and end the war. But, it's just not true. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in the face of a seven month p.r. campaign of post-9/11 fear probably unprecedented in modern American history:

"59 percent of Americans said they believed the president should give the United Nations more time. Sixty-three percent said Washington should not act without the support of its allies, and 56 percent said Mr. Bush should wait for United Nations approval ... Three-quarters of Americans see war as inevitable, and two-thirds approve of war as an option. But many people continue to be deeply ambivalent about war if faced with the prospect of high casualties or a lengthy occupation of Iraq that further damages the American economy. Twenty-nine percent of respondents in the poll, which was conducted Monday through Wednesday, disapprove of taking military action against Iraq ... These worries may be taking a toll on Mr. Bush's support. His overall job approval rating is down to 54 percent from 64 percent just a month ago, the lowest level since the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ... More than anything, Americans remained concerned about the threat of Qaeda terrorism far more than any threat from Iraq ... In January, 59 percent of the public saw Al Qaeda as a greater threat to peace and stability than Iraq. Fifteen percent saw Iraq as the greater threat. In this week's survey, 28 percent saw Iraq as the greater threat, but 51 percent still perceived the Qaeda threat as more serious ... more information has not translated into greater support for war, which remains at 66 percent. A year ago, a CBS News poll recorded 74 percent in favor of military action against Iraq. The support level for war has held firm at two-thirds of Americans, but this majority breaks down on questions of timing and diplomacy."

Or so wrote the New York Times on February 14, 2003.

A month later, the war had started, and the rallying around the flag had begun. But the doubts were always there, and we need to remember: a third of the country has always opposed war in Iraq, not to mention the two-thirds who thought the way we were going about it was a bad idea.

And then, there was what happened the day after the Times took its poll. 500,000 people in NYC rallying against the war, on the coldest day of the year with no permit, throwing themselves against police barricades on 2nd and 3rd Avenue. 1.5 million in London. 2.5 million in Rome, and millions more in the rest of Europe and around the world.

But hey, maybe they were all wearing gorilla suits.

There's more here than "I told you so." The point of this little history lesson is just this-- sometimes, people are smart. Sometimes they know that their leaders are full of shit, and that they're being lied to. Sometimes, Alex Koppelman, they agree more with the communists and anarchists and wild-eyed radicals than they do with their own elected "leaders," even if this doesn't fit your lazy journalists script.

They knew it then. And they know it now.

---

UPDATE: Wow, I thought I sounded pissed off, but I've got nothing on this guy, who also wrote about the Koppelman article:

"Also, fuck Salon both for its choice of headlines when normal, mainstream, job-holding, non-puppet-waving middle class people like me and my wife were out marching three goddamn years ago and for quoting Wonkette as some sort of barometer on what’s worth complaining about ... Some days, despite my putative presence in its ranks, I wish the middle class would just get on with stuffing itself up its own corpulent ass and suffocating as it tries to choke out just one more foppish attempt at 'wry observation.'"

As NewAssignment.net Rides High, Questions About Localism

First, the good news: some big-time money is flowing into NewAssignment.net. Of course, "big-time money" is a relative term; compared to the budgets of most media organizations, $10,000 from the Sunlight Foundation and even $100,000 from Reuters is mere chump change. But as far as experimental online journalism projects go, its pretty good. As always, Jay has the complete round-up at his blog. It's also worth reading the announcement straight from the mouths of Reuters themselves, over at Huffington Post (his opening line seems a little late: "Without corrective action, we are in danger of the public losing faith in the fourth estate." Umm ... hello??? "in danger of losing??" Methinks the horse has flown the coop on this one.)

So regardless of the eventual success or failure of NewAssignment, it seems that the initial idea has gotten a lot of people in the industry excited. Of course, Rosen would be the first to note that NewAssignment is a niche website, at least for now. It can't-- and won't-- do everything.

One of the things I wonder if it will do, and I think it will not do, is cover what used to be called "local news." Most of the ideas about initial NA.net projects are national in scope-- "how family-friendly are America’s companies, really?" is one of story ideas, for example. National stories, of course, are a perfect way to make use of "network effects," i.e., the relatively easy ability of dispersed groups of people to get a handle on large-scale social phenomena by pooling their resources. But although I'm reassured by the fact that I know that NewAssignment.net isn't trying to do everything, I'm a little worried that the movement of the excitement and the money in such a national direction. After all, while journalism generally sucks everywhere, it sucks less on a national level than it does locally, if one can make such a blanket statement. I'd hate to see the energy of the online journalism world go only towards creating NewAssignment.net as the New York Times of the networked journalism world (though it would be great if NA became the New York Times of the networked journalism world, just as long as other things got a chance to grow as well.)

This is partly why I'm happy to see signs of stirring over on the Philly-NORG scene. A couple good emails have passed back and forth over on the (now public) Yahoo Group, and there are the early stages of both a wiki and a website, too.

I want to be clear, for what it's worth-- this post isn't an attempt to create some "us versus them" type scenario ... either we go local or we go national, we go NORG or we go N.A. Thats just dumb, especially considering that neither group is really trying to replicate the other (and of course that there are overlapping participants working within each group). I am trying to push the question of what models-- financial, journalistic, philosophical-- might work locally. What can NORGS, and other local journalistic projects, take from the NewAssignment experiment? And what will they have to leave behind? I think these are interesting questions, and tossing some ideas up against the rubber that is the quickly congealing NewAssignent model might be one way to ponder them.

---

OK, so a little more on localism while I'm on the subject. Check out the really informative conversation going on about hyperlocal media in the comments section of my posts on Typologies of Online Journalism. Kpaul from Indiana makes a point that I think relates to my previous bit, above: "don't count out the regional independents yet, though. A lot of us realize the need to do more serious journalism. We know that takes money, though. The trick is going to be in raising money through the existing sites (with our bake sale stories) while building a bond with the community. At some point (at least in my plan) there will be paid reporters, stringers, photogs, etc."

How to raise the money?  ... Another way in which comparison with NewAssignment (what from their model applies? What doesn't) might be useful.

Josh Wolf Case Adds New Twist to "Blogger as Journalist" Debate

I'd been passively following the Josh Wolf case over in San Francisco, largely through the excellent coverage provided by Indybay (did you know, as an aside, that Indybay was ranked #328 on technorati?? Thats pretty amazing for an IMC site. Indymedia.org is only ranked #750, and NYC IMC, the site I spend most of my time on, is ranked #8016). Wolf, for those who don't know, is an independent videographer who shot some pretty gripping footage of an anti-G8 protest in San Francisco in 2005. The Federal Government, a la Judith Miller, a la, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, is trying, through the grand jury process, to get Wolf to turn over unedited footage of alleged crimes that were committed during the protest.

I didn't realize, though, until Dan Gilmor pointed it out, that there's a potentially new twist to the Wolf case: that the Feds are basically trying to do an  end-run around the California shield law, under which Wolf would be protected as a journalist, by claiming that the case is a federal one because federal funding was used to pay for the police car damaged in the protest. As Gilmor notes, this would create a huge hole in most state shield laws. California has one of the better state shield laws in the country, and is something of a model for citizen journalists looking for legal protection.

This isn't the only interesting legal development in blog-land that Gilmor has noted recently. The Berkman Center and the Center for Citizen Media are funding a new initiative to "provide information, education, resources and tools to help address the challenges faced by citizen journalists."

And in another interesting  legal development for indy-media types, American Apparel has just sent a really nasty letter to Clamor Magazine, accusing them of "inaccuracies and accusing Clamor of shoddy and amateur journalism." An AA spokeswoman demanded, “if the article is not immediately removed online, along with a retraction and an [sic] public apology posted online and published appropriately, we will be forced to seek legal action in light of such gross, blatant, negligent and irresponsible journalism.” While the Clamor Magazine situation is somewhat different than these other cases, it does illustrate the hyper-litigious atmosphere currently dominating the journalism world. 

How these legal issues work themselves out is the other side to the knowledge and expertise issues I've been harping on recently. Professional power primarily stems  from two sources: the claim of jurisdiction over abstract knowledge and the autonomy to realize that knowledge in work. While expertise is developed via grad schools and networks, autonomy is hashed out in the political and legal arena. Once again we see an example of the fact that, while bloggers versus journalists may be over, there are powerful institutions that haven't gotten the memo.

Here's some interesting background information on an earlier legal case I was involved with in NYC in 2004 and 2005.

---

Now playing: "Party Hard," by Pulp.

"Actually Existing" Citizen Journalism Projects and Typologies: Part I

[This is a draft of something bigger, so reader feedback is highly appreciated.]

With all the buzz abut Jay Rosen's latest brainstorm, New Assignment.net, I thought it might be useful to take a step back and typologize some of the citizen's journalism projects that have either existed in the past and continue to exist today. There have already been some overviews of the types of CJ projects that could exist, along with some examples that flesh out the speculations, but it still might be interesting to look at what has existed, starting from the "beginning," more or less. Here goes:

I. The "personal" homepage.

The very first example of anything remotely approaching "citizen's journalism" that I can remember. Having started college in the mid-1990's, the technologically advanced amongst us soon had our own "homepages," provided to us on our school server space, which served as bulletin boards, rant space, and occasionally helped launch interesting personal and group projects. Some of the personal homepages linked to other web pages but there was very little political commentary on the early sites I remember: they were, indeed, personal web pages.

That's why I'd argue that the real forerunner of the homepage (and the great grand-daddy of the blog, since I also argue that the blog is descended from the homepage, below) is the 'zine. Many of the people who started homepages originally got their start in the DIY media world with 'zines: small-circulation, often intensely personal, usually photocopied publications that exploded onto the high-school and college scene with the advent of cheap laser printing and photocopy services in the late 1970's. Even with the explosion in blogging and other online media forms, zines are still around.

Drawbacks: Updating these sites was time consuming and took a bit of technological skill: you had to know html, for starters. Consequently, updates were (relatively) rare. I don't recall there been very much two-way communication besides email; basically, the equivalent of a digital "letter to the editor."

At the same time, however, these sites were some of the first digital forms that got people used to the entire notion of "putting themselves online." And because they were harder to update, they were actually a lot more graphically interesting than a many of weblogs we see today. They more resembled traditional print magazines in that sense as well.

II. Indymedia

People often forget that Indymedia emerged in 1999-- which, while only 7 years ago, is a generation when it comes to digital media forms (blogs, for instance, can be said to be about 3 or 4 years old, at least in their current form). The very first IMC was created in Seattle in November 1999, and broadcast photos, text, and video from the the WTO protests to the entire world. Soon, Indymedia sites began popping up in cities ahead of the large anti-globalization protests that were then sweeping the globe, and eventually, some cities decided that they wanted "permanent" IMC's.

The fact that Indymedia was dedicated to providing "real-time" information to readers as part of a larger anti-capitalist movement had several major consequences regarding its relationship to traditional journalism. First, the relaying of specific information from "newsworthy" events immedately brought Indymedia into a closer relationship with journalistic activity (the fact that IMC's were often, in their early days, doing a much better job of covering these protests than the mainstream media only added to the challenge. Second, Indymedia was grounded in a larger, much more radical critique of the corporate (and, I argue, the professional) press than many of the "citizen journalism" projects that came before it, or after it. While today we hear that most "bloggers don't want to replace" the mainstream media, I thin its arguable that many IMC's did want to do just that. Third, while we can trace personal homepages back to 'zine form, IMC journalism is more directly linkable to the tradition of "alternative media" and "alt. journalism" that has existed for hundreds of years, ever since the start of journalism itself. This puts it far outside the mainstream, even in the American blogging world in the U.S., blogging's political contours fall roughly within the spectrum of allowable political opinion as set by the domestic party apparatus, though concentrated at the fringes of this apparatus.There aren't many openly anti-capitalist bloggers in the U.S., for instance, which may party explain why Indymedia is linked to much more frequently from blogs in other parts of the world than by bloggers in the states.)

Fourth, there were several technical developments that allowed Indymedia to thrive. The most important was the creation of "active", the codebase that allowed anyone who wanted to to upload media to an IMC website. This obviously marked a dramatic improvement over the old "homepage" method of uploading content. There were also technological advances in digital journalism equipment, like cheap digital photography, for example. Finally, though, I'd argue that the existence of a powerful global protest movement did more to spur Indymedia on than any developments in technology.

III. Blogs

This is where many histories of citizen journalism start, with the emergence of the "blogging" movement, whose biggest growth occurred roughly between the attack on the World Trade Center and the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Once again, we see the combination of a new technology-- widely available, commercially produced blogging software-- and a political moment-- post 9/11 turmoil creating a new media form.

Blogging would become a shorthand term for much of the grassroots media and journalism work that has occurred since 2002, and as such, the term has become confused almost to the point of uselessness. At the same time, however, we must acknowledge that the notion of blogging "as journalism" has gained a cultural acceptance that has so far eluded previous digital media forms, like Indymedia, or successive media forms, like hyperlocal citizens media. Why might this be? Several explanations spring to mind: first, as already noted, blogs posed much less of an existential threat to traditional journalism than either Indymedia or hyper-local journalism; second, popular blogs  fell within the range of normal American political discourse, and, relatedly, bloggers were often seen as a rational and semi-respectable breed (and included some notable current and former journalists in their ranks); and, finally, there was a surge in the sheer number of blogs out there, a surge that was difficult to ignore.

In general, we can note three previous media forms that would intersect with and help create the blogging movement: the  'zine subculture; a largely de-radicalized variation of  Indymedia "citizens reporting" practices; and a form of punditry / commentary. The majority of blogs, as the much-discussed recent Pew Survey notes, resemble zines in their personal focus and small readership. At the same time, many of the most popular and referenced blogs practice punditry or political organizing. The second stream, so-called "citizens reporting" seems to have taken a winding journey from the world of small-scale, hyper-local journalism to the world of networked journalism.

We'll continue this journey in the second part of this analysis, looking at hyperlocal citizens journalism, "big-media" citizens journalism, and networked journalism.

Continue with Part II

--

I've decided to add a little more of a personal touch to this blog: at the end of my posts, I'll tell folks what song(s) were playing on my iTunes while I wrote it.

Currently playing: (appropriately enough) "DIY" (Peter Gabriel) from Peter Gabriel 2 (Scratch)

When things get so big, I don't trust them at all,
You want some control, you've got to keep it small.

More on "What Democracy Looks Like" from the AMC

As opposed to my somewhat incoherent note taking, Paul from Mediageek has posted a good summary and analysis of the media democracy panel.

From the post:

"All of the panelists directly addressed the challenges of making media that is responsive and accountable to communities, activists and organizers. There was critical discussion about the relationship of more radically grassroots projects to Indymedia as well as the liberal/progressive mainstream media that is primarily published by and for white middle-class progressives."

And Brownfemipower has a series of good observations of the AMC on her Woman of Color blog.

'Outsiders In': Yearly Kos, Boundary Lines, and Border Zones

Well, the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas got press attention that probably exceeded everyone involved's wildest dreams. Beltway Blogroll has the best press roundup that I've seen (Part One here, Part Two here.) It's a perfect political story, and a few possible journalistic frames include: nerdy bloggers leave the computer behind and venture into the real world, blinking in the glare of slot machines and dancing girls with conical metal brassieres; friendly faces are put to hitherto cryptic screen names; or, finally, formerly rambunctious and  angry outsiders are slowly absorbed into the Democratic Party establishment, leaving their radical views and integrity behind, but sacrificing the passion of youth for the power and cynical wisdom of middle age.

It's this last frame which has dominated coverage ... not surprisingly, of course, as its an old, old story (going back at least to the overthrow of the thuggish Titans by the Athenian gods, who then went on to become crackpot dictators in their own right). The "outsiders become insiders" frame actually was launched a few weeks ago with Matt Bai's article in the New York Times Magazine, but reached critical mass with Maureen Dowd's column and Adam Nagourney's write up.

Dowd: "As I wandered around workshops, I began to wonder if the outsiders just wanted to get in. One was devoted to training bloggers, who had heretofore not given much thought to grooming and glossy presentation, on how to be TV pundits and avoid the stereotype of nutty radical kids."

Nagourney: "They may think of themselves as rebels, separate from mainstream politics and media. But by the end of a day on which the convention halls were shoulder to shoulder with bloggers, Democratic operatives, candidates and Washington reporters, it seemed that bloggers were well on the way to becoming — dare we say it? — part of the American political establishment.

Mark Warner's$50,000 party was the icing on the cake for a lot of the mainstream press, and even my parents' local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, got in on the act. Wrote Dick Polman: "Moulitsas wrote recently that the party insiders can either work with the bloggers, "or get out of the way." Yet there's always the danger that the outsiders might wind up seduced and co-opted."

Even the normally indefatigable Jeff Jarvis seemed momentarily stumped by the whole affair (unless, of course, he was just rhetorically playing dumb). Notes Jeff:

"What is the line between insider and outsider? In one breath, you hear the attendees talking about taking over the party. In the next gasp, you hear them talk about supplanting both parties [...] So is this a party? A caucus of the party? A splinter from the party? A new party? A gathering of bloggers or media? A gathering of media or activists? A candy mint or a breath mint? Life is so confusing now."

The question of insiders versus outsiders isn't a new one for social scientists; indeed, it comes into play every time you have to define a population to study and then extrapolate that population from the "real world":  who, in other words, is in the group that we think is important enough to spend a few years studying, and what characteristics do they possess that differentiates them from everybody else?  One of the major sociological moves in recent years has been to deny that the boundary between inside and outside is self-evident, or, in fact, that it even exists at all.  Bruno Latour probably puts the point most provocatively, writing in his chapter "Outsiders In" from Science in Action that we must "leave the boundaries [between inside and outside] open and close them only when the people we follow close them.” Or, as Collins and Evans note in "The Third Wave of Science Studies," "one could say that the tendency to dissolve the boundary between those inside and those outside the community reaches its apogee in ‘Actor Network Theory’ [ANT], as first adumbrated by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Here even the boundary between human experts and non-human contributors to the resolution of conflict is taken away."

While there has been some retreat from ANT within sociologies of science in recent years, its notions about insiders versus outsiders are still enormously productive, in my opinion, especially when it comes to analyzing occupational, social, and political categories upended by the internet. The most provocative application of ANT to online journalism, for instance, comes from Turner, who argues that "the boundaries of journalistic practice have long been more porous than professional norms might suggest … [we need a theoretical model] in which the sociological concepts emerging in and around the study of science and technology can be usefully applied to other professions. These concepts make it possible to identify new sorts of journalists."

So, getting back to the Yearly Kos, its possible to argue that the boundary lines between "insider and outsider," "activist and operative," "rebel and party hack" aren't nearly as clear as Dowd, Nagourney, and, indeed, the Kossacks themselves, would like to believe. Instead of a sharply defined boundary line we might better imagine a thick, poorly defined "border zone" made up of proliferating hybrids, shifting social and occupational roles, and networks of expertise. To at least some degree, there is no important empirical difference between the outsider Kossacks and  the insider party establishment; or, at least, such a difference cannot be productively imagined by drawing sharply defined borders between the two.  (This, of course, begs the question as to whether there is some sort of "core" beyond either side of the border zone.)

We can't stop here, though-- because as we've seen, while the empirical and sociological utility of sharp lines might be questionable, there's still a rhetorical value to fixing your own borders, on the part of the social actors themselves. In other words: the Kossacks, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media-- all these groups find it useful to define themselves and others as insider or outsider, as part of "our" group or part of "the other guy's" group." This is where the  Bourdieuean notion of the field, distinction, and the "real as relational" can still be valuable, perhaps not as a description of actually existing social reality, but at least as the description of a rhetorical and "professional" strategy by which insiders are distinguished from outsiders.  And yet, the very fact that such categorical definitions find such little purchase in "actually existing" social life renders them supremely flexible and, indeed, potentially incoherent. This, I think, is what Jarvis is getting at when he writes of the Yearly Kos attendees that:

"they are the outsiders who want to be in and who decide who’s in and who’s out. When asked about whether Hillary Clinton would be welcome at his event, Kos said, “Oh, my God, no way!” Nagourney said she declined an invitation. The outsiders declare she’s in the wrong crowd so she’s out with them.

In other words, the insider / outsider rhetoric changes all the time, depending on who is talking, when, about whom. But the deployment of this rhetoric is both strategic and essential to the identity of the various social actors involved.

And of course, all this can apply equally to mainstream, professional, and online journalism, as I tried to get at in my discussion of the NORG movement in Philadelphia.

Embedded Knowledge in the Blogosphere

Interesting comment from Matthew Yglesias regarding the nature of knowledge in the blogosphere; in brief, blogging knowedge may not be journalistic knowledge, but it's often knowledge of another kind.  He makes the point with reference to ex-Clinton hack Mike McCurry's failure to "spin the blogosphere around" to his own paid views on the net neutrality issue. But sadly for him:

The blogosphere is full of people who know a lot about the internet and could handle a grown-up argument.

Bloggers may be experts, but not the kind of experts journalists are (if we can ever figure out what kind of experts they are):

One of the most neglected aspects of the blogosphere, in my opinion, is that precisely because it's (mostly) composed of people who aren't professional journalists, it's composed of people who are professional doers of something else and know a great deal about what it is they "really" do. Consequently, the overall network of blogs contains a great deal of embedded knowledge.

Journalism and the 'Impact' of Technology

Quick but important thought: journalism is not changing because new online technologies are impacting it; rather journalism is changing because it is under pressure from other occupational and social groups who are using new technology in certain ways to advance their interests.

Your tiny bit of insight for the day. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Lexis Nexis to Add Blogs

From CyberJournalist.net:

"LexisNexis is starting to integrate blog content into its databases. Blogs will be selected for inclusion based on editorial quality, the company says."

Fascinating. Implications include:

a) Content analysis of blogs just got a whole lot easier
b) there will be a whole new process of "structuring" and "ranking" of "important" blogs based on whether or not they make the list. New "boundary work" will be done ... will academic analysis of blogs start missing a whole lot of the blogosophere?? Wither technorati and truth laid bare? etc etc.

Update: Looks like cj.net got its story from the Lexis-Nexis website. Wish they'd linked to it. But that aside, there's some additional information there. Apparently, the service is in partnership with something called newstex:

"Unlike existing Web-based blog aggregation services, Newstex actually licenses influential blog content directly from independent bloggers and then takes in each carefully selected blog feed in text format and uses its proprietary NewsRouter technology to scan it in real-time."

Also, it seems that at least a few blogs are showing up as having been contacted by newstex, and that the aggregation includes "possible monetary pay out." Looks like they also were working with Pajamas Media back when it was called  Finally, John Quiggin raises a question as to what this means in terms of "creative commons licensing."

What technorati is saying.

Read it all: the plot thickens.

Participatory Journalism as a Two (or Three) Axis Field (Pt II)

Here's an example of what I mean:

The x axis represents that degree to which the form cultural production in question is an autonomous from politics, the economy, and the consumers of that culture. In this case it is worth contrasting the example of "pure science" with that of journalism in order to get a better idea what I mean. Science purports to be an extraordinarily autonomous field-- its producers answer only to other members of the scientific community, and research, which often requires an extraordinarily high level of investment, can take years and even then often fails in its goals. Journalism, on the other hand, produces a daily product that is (in the West) almost totally subservient to the economic field and the tastes of its audience (in fact, one of the major historical changes in journalism over the course of the late 19th to early 20th century was its shift from a dependence on politics to a dependence on the market.)

As we can see, therefore, the field of science lurks near the right of the x-axis while journalism sits to the left.

The y-axis represents the degree to which the professional knowledge base of the cultural field is closed ("jealous") or open ("generous"). Science, especially in its pure form, represents the one of the most closed of the culture producing disciplines, while journalism's knowledge base is much more open to outside penetration. As Michael Schudson has noted, "There is an insistence [within journalism] that J-school is entirely unnecessary, and there remains plenty of evidence that this is so." And some of the most famous journalists, historically speaking, have been writers of another sort-- like Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair.

The primary object of interest here is, of course, the field of online journalism, to which the other fields are added for the sake of comparison. Online journalism, which its "pro-am" or deprofessionalized ethos, is even more generous than traditional journalism. And online journalism, at least in its current form, is more autonomous that traditional journalism-- although some bloggers obviously feel some obligation to their readership, and others are tied closely to the political sphere, it would be foolish to argue that online journalism is less autonomous than the capital intensive projects that comprise most forms of traditional journalism. Despite these differences, these forms of journalism are much more similar to each other than they are, say, to science.

Key points:

*** Relationship between the various forms of professional journalistic closure and generosity, given the comments below and the expertise paradox identified by Schudson.
*** Historical movement within the axis-- trad. journalism moving towards a more closed form of knowledge; online journalism doing the same (??) or losing its autonomy(??).

By the way, its good to be able to find one of the earlier attempts I made to graph this all out back almost a year ago to this very day! Lets here it for keeping a journal.

---

PS: this line of thinking is almost entirely ripped off from

Eyal, "Dangerous liaisons between military intelligence and Middle Eastern studies in Israel" (Theory and Society, 2002)

Rose, "Engineering the human soul: Analyzing psychological expertise" (Science in Context, 1992)

Benson, "Field theory in comparative context: A new paradigm for media studies" (Theory and Society, 1999)

Participatory Journalism as a Two (or Three) Axis Field

Way too much background thinking to go into in this post for now; apologies,

But can we discuss mapping the participatory journalisitic field along two axes: autonomy of cultural production / jealous" or generous" nature of professional knowledge?

or three axes? :  autonomy from the political field / autonomy from the audience / "jealous" or generous" nature of professional knowledge?

Professions and Disciplinization

Does Foucault have anything to say about the professions that might be relevant to the study of journalism? Of course he does. Doesn't he always?

There are two Foucaudian streams to the analysis of the professions (for the record: it seems like Foucauldian analysis is currently the hot way to analyze professionalization, partly for good reasons, but partly for reasons that seem to have to do with academic faddishness).

• Professionalism / Professional Discourse as Discipline (Evetts 2003; Fournier 1999): Rather than looking at professions as an ideal type or at professionalization as a project, this strand looks at the discourse of professionalism as "a disciplinary mechanism" which allows "control from a distance through the construction of appropriate work identities and conducts."  Such an analysis, the authors argue, is useful when looking at the growth of professional discourse in occupations not normally thought of as professions (like journalism). While I wouldn't deny the validity of this line of thought, it seems less useful to me than ...
• Foucauldian pespectives on the emergence of "professional fields of expertise" and the relationship between fields of socially useful (and monopolized) fields of knowledge and professional power (Fournier 2000; Larson 1991). In other words, if part of the professional project depends on the monopolization and accreditization of knowledge, how are these fields of knowledge created? Analysts writing from this persective argue that such knowlege does not exist in relation to an observeable outside world; rather, "the core of the professional project is the constitution of disciplinary knowledge as representing or mirroring a 'naturally isolated' and self-contained referent object in the world." (Fournier 71)
  • Maintains the value of the professional project; does not deny the validity of neo-Weberian perspectives but adds to them.
  • Claim that this area not often studied in the sociology of the professions --> but it IS studied in histories / sociology of journalism, indeed, the emergence of journalism's  "constitution of disciplinary knowledge as representing or mirroring a 'naturally isolated' and self-contained referent object in the world" -- objectivity-- lies at the core of journalism studies.
  • Can then place these studies "within" Fournier's typology??

 

Radicals in the Professions: Does Anyone Remember this One?

So ... if a lot of what I've been writing about for the last few years can be described (on some level) as a "professional project," than can we assume that there are competing groups fighting over who gets to define themselves as "professional"? ... and that there are some groups who are trying to deprofessionalize, or at least reprofessionalize a certain occupational field? It seems so. If not, where's the struggle? Andie Tucher talks about how one of the outcomes of the self-mythologizing of the "bohemian brigade" was to exclude journalistis of a certain class status; Zelizer about how TV journalists managed to define themselves as the empowered retellers of the Kennedy assasination narrative (to the exclusion of amateurs / movie makers); Friedson notes how the professionalization of medicine excluded apothecaries, etc.

The problem is that, in most of the mainstream professionalization literature in sociology, there's very little about the groups that eventually ended up on the "outside" of the profession once all was said and done. Although the professional project is described (in one sense) as a struggle, in another sense, its also describing a somewhat "inevitable march" towards professional group  respectability. Or at least,  as much of this scholarship is historical, it comes off that way in hindsight once we get to the end of the story.

So, we have to look elsewhere for more deep thinking about the conflict I see going on here. Todd Gitlin, perhaps recaling his attendance at the 1967 SDS "Radicals in the Professions" conference, reccomended I check out the post-mortem scholarly exegesis of this phase of the student movement. Problem is, there's not much I could find. Here's what Google Scholar has to say; JSTOR isn't much better (though there's one hilarious review by a young Michael Schudson of a book called Professions for the people : the politics of skill.) Hmm.

So then a little bell went off in the back of my head ... wasn't there a section in my Fall 2003 Social Movements class about activist challenges to the "scientific establishment" and the catholic church? Sure enough, there is was, on Week Five-- "Movements and Non-State Institutions" (lets hear it for saving old sylabi!)  Francesca Polletta, who taught the class, also reccomended The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power by Kelly Moore. Ah!! Success!! There's also a bunch of stuff on the sylabus that I would have to track down, including what looks like a really important article by D.A. Snow (in a book that costs $95.00 [ick!] Here's what my class notes say:

"is it easier or harder to challenge state or non-state actors? lines of power being blurry in non-state institutions? ... Two analytical tactics: 1) How is protest within non-state institutions different? 2) They're not so different and understanding once can help with understanding the other ... 'mass defection.' etc. etc." "Focus to exclusively on the state. Snow's challenge is a very new one. Line of research is wide open."

Of course, what I'm talking about with the bloggers isn't really a social movement. So I'm looking at something that's not really a social movement, and thats not really journalism, intersecting with something thats not really a profession. Hmmm. (hint: this last comment may have something to do with the previous post below this one.)

The Struggle Over the Professional Project

McChris comments on my post "The Deprofessionalization of Journalism":

"I could certainly see how the rise of blogs, wikis, etc. actually catalyze a renewed professionalization of institutional journalism. Now that people read blogs highly critical of the media and controversies around figures like Dan Rather and Judy Miller raise questions about newsgathering, the profession could react by cranking up the discipline, raising the barriers to participate in news organizations. The institutional players will want to distinguish themselves from folks who don't write the news for fun."

I actually totally agree. In fact, I think what we will be witnessing over the next few years is a battle over the concept of the journalistic profession. One advantage to looking at the whole grassroots  / mainstream journalism phenomenon as a "professional project" is that it calls attention to the very real ways in which social groups struggle over the ability to define themselves as "professional people" (and their field as a "profession") with all the accompanying social advantages therin.

Just one off the cuff example of what I mean: the current battle over the journalistic shield law in the US Congress. Couldn't we view the law as being as much of an attempt  to more formally define the boundaries of the journalistic field as it is an attempt to enable journalists to keep confidential sources? Bloggers worry that the law will mean creating two-tiers of journalism. That may be exactly the point.

San Fran Smackdown-- Indymedia / Blogosphere Divide Rages on KRON Blog

[Update (7/13/05): This post is only a personal opinion on the KRON incident and doesn't claim to speak for Indymedia or NYC IMC]

Last weekend, as protests against the G8 raged in Scotland, Richmond, and San Francisco, a shouting match of another kind erupted on the pages of The Bay Area is Talking, a San Francisco blog run by local TV station KRON. According to its website, The Bay Area is Talking "is a blog devoted to the daily conversation that is news in the San Francisco Bay Area community. If it's being discussed in the Bay Area, we hope you'll find it here."  In other words, TBAIT is something of a meta-blog, run by KRON , which attempts to syndicate the best "citizens journalism" from the Bay Area.

The other party to the dispute was the San Francisco Bay Independent Media Center, about which most visitors to this blog are probably at least passingly familiar.  One key aspect of Indybay that may not be common knowledge to everyone is its posting policy, which reads: "Unless otherwise stated, all content contributed to this site is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint or rebroadcast. If you want to specify different conditions, please do so in the summary, including any © copyright statement. Please read our privacy and disclaimer statements before continuing."

So here's what happened. On the night of July 8th, TBAIT began to run photos and text descriptions of violent protests against the G8 that broke out in the San Francisco Mission district. At least a few, if not most of those photos were taken directly from Indybay. Wrote Brian of TBAIT:

"In this week in which citizen's journalism has received so much attention, there's another source for information on what went on Friday night ... It's called Indybay.org which appears to have offered real-time coverage of the protest with people using various wireless technologies to report in throughout the event." What then followed was a detailed recap of the protests, largely using media found on Indybay.

A few hours later, all hell broke loose.

At 3 am, "Janky" from Indybay posted this comment to TBAIT, noting that "you are not athorized to use these photos. A set are the ones that I have taken and I request that you take them down immediately." Janky then quoted the afformentioned IMC posting policy. [full disclosure: I know Janky personally, having met him as a colleague, first during the RNC and later at the Indyconference in Austin]  After a bit of uncertainty, Terry Heaton, a consultant to TBAIT, long-time blogger and blogging partisan asked:

"Janky, how is the purpose of IndyBay served by denying wider use of the journalism provided by your members? If, in fact, you are giving voice to those who wouldn't normally have a voice, why would you wish to limit that voice to a closed network?I think what you're doing is absolutely fabulous, and I wish you well, but I don't agree with an anti-capitalist group applying a rule of capitalism (limited use) to an otherwise outstanding mission. I think Brian is doing you a favor here, and I think you should reconsider." Terry's was only the first post in what became a lengthy debate about fair use, Indymedia, preching to the choir, capitalism, and citizens journalism. The whole debate is too complex to summarize here, though JD Lasica of New Media Musings tried with this rather-poorly worded (IMHO) post:

"Almost inconceivably, the Indy Media folks cried "copyright infringement," and KRON complied by taking down a photo. But why in the world would Indy Media want to restrict the widespread online distribution of such a newsworthy set of photos? What rank hypocrisy."

It was, of course, almost impossible for any blogger to resist: Indymedia, the anarchists defending the copyright of a set of online photographs, and not only that, once again, like all lefty-crazies, content to preach to the choir. At least, thats largely how it was framed on the one or two blogs to pick up the thread.

As a PhD student in the Columbia University Journalism Department who has worked with NYC Indymedia and whose research is on "citizens journalism" (an area that I explicity argue includes Indymedia) I supposed I'm either way to biased to talk about this ... or, in the spirit of the "end of objectivity," just the person to share my rambilngs. In believe in the second spirit, fortunately, so here I go ...

I think the dispute about "fair use," while possibly interesting to lawyers and somewhat relevant, is a red herring, at least for Indymedia and for most bloggers and researchers. The argument about fair use largely misses the point. What's really important here has more to do with the notion of a non-corporate alternative to the increasingly misnamed mainstream-media, what that means to Indymedia, what that means to many bloggers, and what that might mean to the "gurus" of the blogging world. Indymedia was founded in 1999 (an enternity ago in the world of the internet) as a specifically anti-captialist alternative to the corporate media. That whole notion of anti-capitalism is as much a part of Indymedia's DNA as the notion of "being the media." Or rather, as I've written elsewhere, Indymedia sees the two as inseperable: by facilitating individuals "being the media" Indymedia also facilitates "media justice," and, by extension, a radical critique.

Needless to say, this isn't the way many bloggers think, especially the people who have written the most about the blogosphere. As Lasica baldly puts it in his comments on the IMC-TBAIT dust-up: "[according to Indymedia] KRON = big media, therefore bad. Gimme a break." For many bloggers, the key to the blogosphere is not anti-corporate anti-capitalism; rather, its the facilitation of "citizen journalism," and the exact facilitator of that "citizen journalism" is not all that important. In other words, the corporate press can get into the citizen's journalism game too; in fact, this is the only way that the corporate press will survive. Many of the best-funded and most talked about "citizen's journalism" projects of the past year or so-- the Bayosphere (to a degree), the Northwest Voice , the L.A. Times ill-fated experiment with the wiki-world-- propose some merger between old and new media.

What's more, Indymedia implicitly advocates for an end to the mainstream media entirely, as part of its radically anti-corporate stance. The buzz in the blogosphere seems to be, on the other hand, that "citizens journalism" can supplement, though not replace, big media (this isn't a universal argument, though its rapidly becoming the "mainstream" one). For Indymedia, then, the position of what's called citizen's media within the capitalist system matters a great deal; what's more, Indymedia sees citizens media as something that can and should eventually replace big media. For most partisans of citizen's journalism, on the other hand, the focus lies on the position of the journalist, and the goal is to get the mainstream media to understand and eventually incorporate citizen's media into its structure.

They key quote in the entire debate is this one, from Terry Heaton: "Finally, we can argue legalities until the cows come home, but those arguments pale in comparison with the bigger picture. KRON is taking a huge risk with this venture, and I don't think it's possible to overstate that. We're so accustomed to howling at the moon that we don't know how to react when the moon finally says, "What do you want?" This "personal media revolution," as JD calls it, is a new thing. The institutional press will certainly try to "harness" the energy, but we all know that's impossible. In KRON, I submit, you have a group of people who understand this."

vs this, from "k"

"Brian, we have put years of effort, unpaid, volunteer effort in service of a political cause (which perhaps you cannot understand) into building indybay.org. now you want to come along, and your corporation now belatedly recognizing the power of "citizen" independent journalism, turn it to your corporate profit and advantage."

Who is right? Upon this question, I imagine, a great deal hangs.

Finally, I want to conclude by arguing that at least part of this dispute is based on mutual ignorance. While there have been multiple scholarly pieces on Indymedia, they are somewhat negelected in the blogosphere. To his credit, Lasica mentions Indymedia 23 times over the course of his blog; on the other hand, it comes up on PressThink only once and on the OJR site a few times at most. When you consider that Indymedia is one of the oldest and most consistant participatory journalistic endeavors this is somewhat surprising, and I can say for certain that Indymedia has noticed it.  One poster to TBAIT describes Indymedia as "constant updates all night long. And oh wait, this type of coverage has been happening for over 5 years now. [TBAIT is] profound? come on buddy."

At the same time, Indymedia has a lot more to do with regard to figuring out how its going to adjust to a world where citizens journalism has gone mainstream. Its no surprise that this conflict first reared its head on the left-coast-- they're always a little bit ahead. But sooner or later, this is a conundrum that will be faced by a lot of bloggers and a lot of IMC's. I know in NYC I might have jumped at the chance for the kind of exposure that KRON provided ... but now that I think about it, I don't know anymore. At the very least, NYC IMC is rolling out its own blogging experiment in the next few weeks, and interested folks should stay tuned to NYC Indymedia to see how it goes.

Diversity in the Blogosphere: What it Means and Why It Matters

A few months ago, the blogosphere saw what could be called its first diversity tempest. Spurred on by this post from Rebecca MacKinnon, a number of thoughtful bloggers spent about a month furiously debating why the blogosphere is so male and white.

MacKinnon heps run a project at Harvard called Global Voices Online. From its mission statement:

Global Voices is an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard.

Reading the debate, which quickly and unfortunately descended into a somewhat defensive back-and-forth about "affirmative action" and "political correctness" online, I started thinking once again about how far the whole blog concept has fallen from Subcommandante Marcos' and Indymedia's original hopes about what the internet would do to to communications:

In this sense, the world of contemporary news is a world that exists for the VIP's-- the very important people. Their everyday lives are what is important: if they get married, if they divorce, if they eat, what clothes they wear, or what if they clothes they take off-- these major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear for a moment-- when they kill someone, or when they die. For the communication giants and the neoliberal powers, the others, the excluded, only exist when they are dead, or when they are in jail or court.

Does anyone actually think that the blogosphere has done very much to change this? Most of the time, what I seem to find on blogs are just as bad as what it was that Marcos was railing against in 1998. Blogs may be open to a theoretical diversity of voices, but the vast majority of them are not only written by white men, but they're still concerned with the VIP's-- insidce the Hollywood / Washington beltway, still drawing on the mainstream media for their cues about whats important and whats not.

Of course, this problem-- and attempts to remedy it are as old as the hills. Just remember the Kerner Report, which back in 1967 wrote:

"By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed. Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls “the white press”—a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America."

The report made a pretty big impression, on the media if not America as a whole. Every year, RTNDA and ASNE release reports documenting diversity in the newsroom.  But are we paradoxically moving backwards in the blogosphere, under the guise of complete diversity, access, and freedom?

I wonder if there's a way to somehow "operationalize Marcos"-- turn his critique into a set of measurements through which to analyze the content of the blogosphere, or at least the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere?

Long Story About the Birth of Wikinews

Matthew Yeomans has published a long story about the birth of Wikinews. In a lot of ways it echoes the conclusions from my multi-website examination of 4 online journalism websites.

Grassroots Journalism Faces New Hurdles

As their reputations grow, grassroots, non-professional journalists are increasingly the target of legal and political harassment. Will the wide-open world of online journalism survive?

Over the past month, in two courthouses on opposite coasts, the first shots were fired in what is likely to be a long and dramatic “battle over blogging.” In the U.S. District Court for Southern New York, City lawyers were demanding that the New York City Independent Media Center, (NYC IMC) turn over publicly available documents relating to an animal rights march in 2002. And in California, Apple Computer had decided to subpoena three bloggers over their publication of trade secrets obtained from anonymous sources. The two cases ended differently, and both rulings ultimately skirted the fundamental question of whether traditional journalistic privileges were available to grassroots journalists in an era of online media. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that while bloggers and more mainstream journalists might be reaching an uneasy truce, the legal and political worlds are just starting to grapple with fundamental questions brought about by the onset of the digital era.

Two Courtrooms, Two Murky Rulings

The Indymedia subpoena arose from a civil suit in which New York City is a currently a defendant. In it, the City demanded voluminous information, including all of the NYC IMC’s news reporting, emails, and web pages relating to the 2002 World Economic Forum. Indymedia made three arguments in seeking to quash the subpoena: first, that the material sought was largely irrelevant to the case; second, that the City of New York could obtain the information it sought just as easily as NYC IMC; third, that a first amendment reporter's privilege protected the NYC IMC.

A US District Court judge agreed with NYC IMC that the material was of marginal relevance and also that the material was publicly available and thus obtainable by the City. Nevertheless, the judge did not directly address the question of reporters privilege, although he did not he dismiss the argument outright.

A second case in California that garnered wide publicity from the blogging community resulted in an equally murky outcome. According to LawBlog.com, “[California Judge] Kleinberg ruled in the Apple Computer, Inc. case that Monish Bhatia, Jason O'Grady and a third blogger with the pseudonym Kasper Jade were not protected by the First Amendment when they published trade secrets obtained from third parties about an unreleased Apple product code-named ‘Asteroid.’”

Based on the text of the judge’s ruling, UCLA Law Professor Eric Volokh concluded that the judge avoided the blogging question completely. “The judge did not deal with any possible subpoenas against the bloggers,” Volokh wrote. “He thus didn't decide whether bloggers are entitled to be treated the same as other journalists.”

Despite the uncertainty of the rulings, it seems certain that courts will revisit the questions raised by the Indymedia and Apple Computer cases again. In the meantime, though, battles being fought over basic issues of mainstream journalistic privilege could render the newer questions of digital privilege moot.

Grassroots Journalism and the Plame Case

Does a reporter have the legal right not to disclose his or her anonymous sources to a federal grand jury? Although many Americans, and even some journalists, might answer “yes,” the constitutional basis for the privileging of journalistic sources rests more on custom than on legal precedent. In the landmark case 1972 Branzburg v Hays, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 5-4 decision that there was no compelling constitutional basis by which a reporter could refuse to answer questions before a grand jury about sources. In the thirty years since Branzburg, the ability of journalists to shield anonymous sources has largely stemmed from both state “shield laws” and from a tacit “truce” between the news media and the government.

It now seems abundantly clear that the truce is over. Over the past two years, a number of journalists have been fined and imprisoned over their refusal to reveal their anonymous sources, the most well known of whom, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, now face up to eighteen months in jail for their refusal to divulge who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. According to many mainstream media commentators, the press is under the kind of sustained legal attack it has largely avoided in three decades since Branzburg.

The question of how internet journalism relates to the Miller / Cooper case has been largely ignored so far, although the issue is clearly on the minds of lawyers and judges as they struggle to define acceptable boundaries of source anonymity. In the March / April 2005 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Douglas McCollam reports that, during Miller and Cooper’s appeal of their sentence before the Circuit Court of Appeals, presiding judges seemed to struggle with the question of who would qualify for a reporter’s privilege. “If an Internet blogger was illegally leaked nuclear secrets and posted it on her Web site, would she be entitled to refuse to testify about her source? the judges wondered. Floyd Abrams [Cooper and Millers lawyer] soft-shoed a bit before conceding that, under the privilege he was seeking, she would.” McCollam wryly notes that, upon hearing Abrams’ answer, “a collective flinch rippled through the establishment media in the gallery.”

Fearful that the courts will conclusively strip away their constitutional protections, many media organizations have concluded that a Federal “shield law” represents their best defense against governmental harassment. Shield laws, or specific legislative protections for journalists, exist in many states though not a federal level. Shield laws may not offer much protection for grassroots journalists, however.. As Jacob Weisberg of Slate puts it, “there's a big problem with journalist shield laws, which advocates have yet to answer. How do you decide who is a journalist? If you create a privilege that applies to a group, someone has to decide who belongs and who doesn't.”

New York State, for instance, has conclusively decided who gets protection from its Shield Law: professional journalists, and professional journalists only. A professional journalist, accord to the New York law, “shall mean one who, for gain or livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, writing, editing, filming, taping or photographing of news … such person shall be someone performing said function either as a regular employee or as one otherwise professionally affiliated for gain or livelihood with such medium of communication.”

Any federal law that followed the lead of a majority of state laws in its definition of journalism would leave bloggers and other volunteer journalists out in the cold.

Wither the FEC?

Assuming that grassroots journalists survive the scrutiny of the courts and the state legislatures, another potential hurdle awaits. In mid-March, the online technology journal CNet published an interview with Republican FEC commissioner Bradley Smith under the headline “The Coming Crackdown on Blogging.” In it, Smith warned that the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law could soon force the FEC to start to regulate political activity on the internet. “In just a few months,” wrote CNet, “bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.”

After days of on- and offline turmoil, Democratic FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub took to the pages of CNet to tell bloggers to “chill out already.” “Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to ‘crack down’ on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated.” The very next day Senators McCain and Feingold issued a statement that noted, in part, that “the latest misinformation from the antireform crowd is the suggestion that our bill will require regulation of blogs and other Internet communications. This issue has nothing to with private citizens communicating on the Internet.”

Despite the confusion and accompanying denials, the Smith interview explicitly raised the question of how difficult it would be to draw a line as to what counted as internet journalism and what did not. “Blogging could also get us into issues about online journals and non-online journals. Why should CNET get an exemption but not an informal blog?” asked Smith rhetorically. “Why should Salon or Slate get an exemption? Should Nytimes.com and Opinionjournal.com get an exemption but not online sites, just because the newspapers have a print edition as well?”

An Uncertain Future

Almost every issue related to the future of grassroots journalism remains up in the air. There is no reason to assume that the internet publishing world that exists four years from now will be any less free than the one that exists today. At the same time, though, there is no reason to assume that it will inevitably be the same. As blogs and other forms of online reporting become ever more accepted by the mainstream, it would behoove grassroots journalists to remember that they are not the sole arbiters of their own destiny. Politics still exist, even in the brave new world of the internet, and so do courts, subpoenas, and regulatory bodies.  In the last five years, the world of journalism has changed dramatically. Some social systems, however, don’t change quite as quickly. The interaction between the rapidly shifting world of online publishing and the slower, more organically driven social system will do much to shape the future of journalism in the United States

Thinking About Participatory Journalism (Pt. 2)

Sorry about the delay in posting. If folks are interested in my thoughts from the Indymedia conference they can check out the Indypendent web site.

Anyway, here's an abstract of a new paper I'm working on:

---

“Participatory Journalism as Field? Between Empirical and Normative Approaches.”

ABSTRACT

Media scholars have increasingly begun to analyze the social space journalism as a field, that is, as a  “field of forces within which the agents occupy positions that statistically determine the positions they take with respect to the field, these position takings being aimed at either conserving or transforming the structure of relations of forces that is constitutive of the field.” (Bourdieu 2005, 30)  Nevertheless, to date, there have been few attempts to define alternative media as a field (for exceptions see Klinenberg 2005, Benson 2003), and at least one explicit warning not to (Atton). Nevertheless, while I agree with Atton that defining alternative media through the lens field theory would be unnecessarily restrictive, I contend that by narrowing the scope of our focus we can see participatory journalism as a field and can analyze it as such. In the proposed paper I begin to delineate the field of participatory journalism by situating it theoretically within alternative mediapsace and provisionally mapping its dimensions and its relationships to other social spaces.

I begin by unpacking the relationship between “participatory journalism” and accepted theoretical understandings of “alternative media.” I argue that, although participatory journalism is a distinct a social field “governed by its own ‘rules of the game’ and offering its own particular economy of exchange and reward” (Benson 1998, 465), its relationship to more diffuse types of alternative media has been under-theorized. While Couldry and Curran define alternative media as that media which, regardless of political orientation, challenges existing concentrations of media power (7), Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis define participatory or “open-source” journalism as “the act of citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.” (Bowman and Willis, 2003). Clemencia Rodriguez (2001) adds an additional wrinkle, writing that citizens media:

is a concept that accounts for the process of empowerment, concientization, and fragmentation of power when men, women, and children gain access to and reclaim their own media (Rodriguez 2003, 190).

After working through and situating these various definitions of alternative media, I examine ways in which traditional sociological methods (particularly those commonly used in empirical field research) can be both applied and adapted to the study of participatory journalism. I undertake a provisional examination of the boundaries of the participatory journalistic field, comparing the mission statements of four organizational participants in the field—Ohmynews, UK Indymedia, Wiki News, and The Northwest Voice-- and analyzing their journalistic output along four dimensions: level of participation, adherence to “journalistic” norms, ties to social movements, and networked authority (Marlow 2004). I conclude by resituating the participatory journalistic field within Rodriguez’s conception of citizens’ media, and argue that while traditional understandings of citizen’s media offer a somewhat less-than-satisfactory mode of comparative empirical research, they do provide a powerful normative yardstick upon which to measure the success, failure, and raison d’etre of participatory journalistic projects.

Mapping the Participatory Journalistic Field

How can we begin to draw a "map" of the participatory journalistic field? Here are some initial metrics:

1. Degree of "participatory-ness": How much do real "citizen journalists" actually contribute to the p.j. organization? For example, perhaps a web site has paid editors and uses citizen journalists as merely stringers or in a supplementary sense. Or, on the other hand, perhaps citizen journalists provide all of the  content, including the featured content.

2. Degree of "journalistic-ness": To what degree do p.j. organizations practice "journalism" in the traditional sense; i.e., do their writers go out, interview, dig thorugh documents, give eyewiteness accounts? Or do they simply link to other news that has been reported my the media already and discuss it?

3. Ties to social movements: Do what degree is a p.j. outlet tied to a social movement, and to what degree does it purport to be an "objective" reporter of news?

4. Authority: Need to do more thinking on this one. But there's been some interesting work done on blogging and authority (<a href=http://overstated.net/04/05/24-weblogs-and-authority>here</a> for example) and this would seem to be an important thing to figure out.

Rosen: Blogging vs Journalism is 'Over'

No better link than this one on the first day of this little blog. Jay Rosen of NYU writes: "Bloggers vs. journalists is over.  I don't think anyone will mourn its passing.  There were plenty who hated the debate in the first place, and openly ridiculed its pretensions and terms.  But events are what did the thing in at the end.  In the final weeks of its run, we were getting bulletins from journalists like this one from John Schwartz of the New York Times, Dec. 28: "For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs."

"The question now isn't whether blogs can be journalism.  They can be, sometimes.  It isn't whether bloggers "are" journalists.  They apparently are, sometimes.  We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward.  By "events" I mean things on the surface we can see, like the tsunami story, and things underneath that we have yet to discern."

I mostly agree; anyway, at least I think that the whole "bloggers vs journalists" debate was pretty silly. What Rosen doesn't talk about very much, though, is to what degree the mainstream media is still resisting this move. He also doesn't get into how online journalism that carries a distinct ideological bent  outside the normal left-to-right spectrum usually gets the shaft. For instance, there wasn't much about Indymedia  at the Harvard conference, even though it pretty much pioneered the concept of open publishing inside the U.S. But then again, isn't it run by conspiracy theorists, anarchists, and anti-semites? That must be the reason.