The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Jeff Jarvis

• A range of words heard today:
• Resistance
• Concern
• Curiosity
• Enthusiasm
• “Journalism is broken”
• Who agrees?
• Are citizens the fix?
• A recurring theme: control
• Journalists as the gatekeepers of information
• Journalists as verifiers
• Blurred lines
• What value do journalists add to news?
• Another theme: teaching
• Journalists
• students
• audience
• Technology needs to be easy to use
• Community: It’s all about bringing it back to the level of people
• Respect/listening/disrespect
• Do journalists respect their public?
• Does the public respect journalists?
• Business
• Touched upon only slightly in the discussions
• “I’m a visitor, and I’m grateful that you had me over.”

Jay Rosen

• When I got involved in public journalism, it started with an
  observation of mine that was shared by a number of others: it’s summed
  up with the word “disconnect” — there’s a perception of disconnect
  between the press and the public
• Many causes for the disconnect, many symptoms, caused concern
• We tried to operate on the sense of duty and conscience —
  “experimenting as many peopl ein the movement were doing” — an
  “attempt to reform the official press”
• Talk to people more; use a citizen’s agenda
• All an effort to get professional journalists to reach across the divide
• During that time, I always thought it was about journalists and
  getting them to change. It dawned upon me to change citizens to change
  and move toward the press.
• Blames himself for lacking the imagination to come to that
  citizen-focused approach, but also says that they also didn’t offer
  grants for citizen-focused efforts
• Now it’s citizen focused: they’re talking to each other, talking
  to the press, starting their own papers/web sites/radio stations/TV
  channels
• It’s no longer “Are you going to reach out?” but “What are you going to do under the current conditions?”
• The spread of not only technology, but ideas, has led us to this point in public journalism
• It’s
  one more chapter in a very long — 300 to 400 years — history of the
  enfranchisement of people: to speak freely, to own property, to worship
  freely, to move freely. “That’s what self-publishing is: it’s
  enfranchisement of people in the media.”
• The point is not that everyone will do so, it’s that everyone has the opportunity to do so, if they want.
• The idea is that people can handle the world themselves. “They are competent to understand the world. “
• Invoked Whitman and Jefferson
• Lew Friedman is our resident researcher: a social scientist that
  asks questions that journalists normally wouldn’t, and knows how to
  apply tests that they wouldn’t

Lew Friedman

• “I am a sociologist, and I play one on TV.”
• It’s how I see the world
• We’re in a world that consists of networks and institutions
• The world that Jeff and Jay have described is a world of networks. Anyone that can connect can join, and it’s a fluid world.
• Institutions are different: they’re filters of knowledge, talent
  and power. A set of people, rules and professional routines. The press
  is an institution. It has become systematically disconnected from the
  public.
• The problem: networks may be extremely open, but they may also be
  extremely fragmented. People can connect, but there can be ways that
  they can connect that make little difference.
• Power Laws: those that have more, get more.
• The world of web sites mirrors the network world and the world of
  publishing. There’s a concentration of power. Jeff said that it wasn’t
  true in the blogpshere: he’s right and he’s wrong:
• Right: A blogger doesn’t have to have all the readers — just
  enough to support what s/he is doing. New knowledge can be formed where
  ideas keep ideas and people out.
• Wrong: The blogosphere — populated largely by people like
  myself: the symbolic analyst class — people who produce and analyse
  symbols and interpret them for other people. We work at jobs more
  privileged than other people. We need the institution of the press to
  make sense of the world, to distill it. Not everyone knows about blogs.
• Journalism: “a conversation of democracy”
• A sphere in which many people talk amongst themselves, and in a smaller degree, to the world at large
• My hope: to find the relationship between the two spheres.

Every time I hear talk of spheres, I am remind of Gideon Strauss, who talks often of spheres and “sphere sovereignty”.

• Hoder: Question to canadian bloggers — why aren’t blogs as popular in Canada as they are in the US and UK?
• David Akin: It’s not that — it’s that it isn’t a big story among Canadian journalists
• Jim Elve: It’s the fact that we have 10% of the population of the
  US. The market is smaller, so getting x hits here is like getting x
  times 10 hits in the US

• Gil: For a long time, a lot of us have been trying to create a
  vigorous public square — with a bazaar of info with a lot of vendors
  that retained a civility. We now see fragmentation of the media where
  consumers are choosing their vendor based on whether that vendor
  supports their world view. Isn’t blogging a further fragmentation
  rather than part of a solution to create a public place?
• Jay: Blogging in and of itself does not solve any problems. It’s
  a matter of what happens when you “sow seeds on fertile ground”. It’s
  what happens when you empower people. It’s the further evolution of the
  media. 3 million people decided that they wanted a page so that the
  whole world could see. Fragmentation? Echo chamber? Yeah. I’m tired of
  it too, and it happens everywhere. The blogosphere is an elite.because
  its people have the skills to use it.
• Jeff Jarvis: To turn it around, fragmentation is about control.
  Fragmentation is people getting what they want means that. It’s bad
  news for big media. It’s a good thing for consumers.
• Marti
  Stephenson: Technology has allowed the people to become the press. We
  have been accused of hogging the spotlight. One thing I learned: we
  know more together than we know alone. One concern: a danger that
  blogging become a facility for people to react than come together — to
  fall victim to the same problems that befell media. Invoked James Cox
  from Dayton, Ohio. Are bloggers simply saying “my opinions are right,
  and I’m going to tell you what they are” or are they conversing and
  learning? We must keep true to those roots that keeping people talking
  and learning from each other is what’s important.
• Nikhil
  Moro: There seems to be confusion between our understanding of blogging
  and participatory journalism. Blogging is a tool of participatory
  journalism, but blogging is not journalism — you cannot define a large
  group of readers…
• Jeff: Not true — a mass audience is not
  the point. You can do journalism and serve only 10 people. It’s no
  longer the mass market as a mass of niches.
• David Akin: Isn’t journalism a process?
• Jeff Jarvis: If it informs the world, it’s journalism.
• David Akin: The root words of journalism is “journal”. It’s a
  regualr, repeated process. Why do bloggers want to be called
  journalists? Readers decide who journalists are.
• Jay Rosen: The title “journalist” gets you access. Oftentimes,
  information is witheld from the general public and made available to
  members of the press. I don’t try to define blogging as journalism in
  the abstract, but on a situational basis. It’s not so simple as a yes
  or no question.
• David Akin: We had an interesting discussion. Is Michael Moore a journalist? Is Bill O’Reilly?
• Unknown person: Is a journalist accountable? Is a blogger
  accountable? Journalists have all kinds of written self-policing
  mechanisms — do bloggers?
• Lew Friedman: What was journalism but people writing on
  broadsheets in coffeehouses. That evolved into the press as we know it
  today. If people read you, you’re a journalist. There is a certain
  sense that there are institutions that have resources and credentials
  and are held accountable to certain standards of truth. That, in some
  sense, is the line separating journalistic institutions from bloggers.
  Bloggers are not accountable to the same rules even thought they speak
  in the same public sphere as journalists. This isn’t necessarily bad —
  it speaks to the public right to free speech. The blogosphere expands
  the public sphere and therefore citizen’s right, which I think is
  marvelous. The public is that space in which citizens come together and
  make the rules.
• Jay Rosen: Reputational capital divides the institution of the
  press from the bloggers. A new blogger starts with zero reputational
  capital, but a new journalist at the Globe and Mail inherits the reputational capital built up from the Globe’s
  long existence, even though s/he has not yet contributed to that
  reputation. Bloggers can build up their reputational capital — but in
  a way that’s different from the way traditional sources get theirs.
• Len Witt: many of us have cast blogs as an “evil empire”, a “screaming rabble”. It’s no more evil than a town hall meeting.
• Marti Stepehenson: Bloggers have the same relationship to their
  readers that traditional journalists do. You can have the best public
  service blog in the world, but if it doesn’t create conversation,
  you’re in the same boat we were 15 years ago.

• Jack Rosenberg: Are weblogs about the public sphere, or small groups?
• Jay Rosen: They are about the public sphere when they ask the big
  questions. They widen the group of participants in the discussion of
  matters of the nation.
• Lew Friedman: The fragmentation of the public sphere is not the
  fault of weblogs: the media institutions and parties are not holding
  people together anymore. Public journalism in “the old days” was about
  building and sustaining public participation.

• Len Witt: This conversation was all possible because of a weblog.
• Jay Rosen: Thos eof you with weblogs had better write about this conference, otherwise you’re not doing your job!

Hossain “Hoder” Derakhshan

• Weblogs show the world the real Iran, the Iran that we don’t see in mainstream news
• They promote freedom in speech in a closed society
• Hoder points out that Iran is not as closed as Saudi Arabia
• Blogs have helped foment political activism:
• Challenged president of Iran re: censorship of the Internet —
  bloggers asked, using journalists at Davos as their proxies, what he
  was going to do about it
• Helped bring news of the situation in Iran to the outside world
• Blogs are building social bridges — bridges between:
• Generations
• The sexes
• Politicians and their constituents — one of the six or seven VPs of Iran has a photoblog and even moblogs cabinet meetings!
• Politicians and young people — a poltician took a letter from
  bloggers directly to the president, got a direct answer and blogged it
• MacKinnon: Hoder, you downplayed your role in bringing blogs to Iraq.

Melinda Robins

• Taught civic journalism in Ethiopia
• What
  does it mean to teach journalism in a country at the bottom of the
  economic ladder, where editors can be  harrassed and harmed by the
  government?
• Civic journalism, in a small way, can help — the news is not
  what the president said today. It’s “why are there thousands of
  families livign on the streets?” Why are the journalists not talking to
  these people?
• Lack of Internet access in Ethiopia — maybe 50,000 people out of the 70 million population. Not a viable place for blogging
• BlogAfrica — which Ethan Zuckerman is involved with — more
  focused on more economically developed countries (South Africa,
  Namibia, etc) and the “African diaspora”

Nikhil Moro

• We know who coined the phrase “electronic commons” — Lawrence Lessig — and we also know who refuse to participiate in it
• “How
  many people in the world today really have not enough on their plates
  already, in terms of problems, to make the internet a part of their
  lives?”
• Basic issues: it’s tricky to talk philosophy with people who are still dealing with issues of survival
• (India doesn’t fully count: in many ways, it’s a major high-tech player)
• How many people have access?
• 80% of America
• 6% of India
• Lack of access is caused by:
• Censorship
• Refusal to build infrastructure
• Culture — not everyone holds the same values dear. Freedom of
  expression — Moro references Emerson — is not a core value for
  everyone.
• He tells a story about the Human Affluence Index — measured
  by a quiz, one of whose questions is “Do you have a dining table and do
  you use it?” In India, the tradition, rich or poor, is not to have a
  dining table, but to eat on the floor.
• The internet has the potential to flatten the differences in freedom of expression
• Should it promote simple freedom of to say what one wants, or should it be specifically used to promote social good?
• Postmodern belief is that there cannot possibly be freedom of
  speech, as it’s a product of what you were taught (he expresses doubt
  that the postmodern thinkers will ever produce a solution)

Terry Thielen

• Works in places that are “undergoing democratic transition”
• Many of these places lack the infrastructure — even roads are hard to come by
• Lack of education
• We may take civic participation for granted here — the concept
  is foreign to places coming out from under dictatorship. Town hall
  meetings are new to them.
• The internet can be useful for mobilizing people there, but
  you’ll reach only the elite groups. You need other means, which in her
  experience is radio.
• Was
  pleasantly surprised to find that Jamaica has a sophisticated media
  environment and a number of strong civic journalism programs, an
  exception in
  the developing world (they’re in a much better league than Haiti or
  Bosnia)
• Example: Jamaica has a CrimeStoppers program just like ours
• Two national dailies publish study guides and other educational
  materials every week — good business (creates the next generation of
  readers) and good citizenship
• Roots FM: brings potential employers on the air to talk about opportunities, potential employees to promote themselves

Chris Waddel

• Asked by an old boss from Columbia why he’s teaching globalism
  to a class in community journalism in Anniston, Alabama. Such a
  question was expected from a New Yorker: “New York, is after all, an
  island.”
• The heartland is the starting point for a lot of big-city journalists and where a lot of American news is made
• The Iraq war affects the heartland: the soldiers overseas would
  normally be their firefighters, police and other members of the
  workforce. What happens across the globe has effects in the heartland.
  Globalism affects middle America.
• Noted that papers have huge budgets to cover the Masters Tournament and the Superbowl
• My favourite part of the New York Times (“We actually get it in
  the heartland”) after the magazine is the travel section. He can fly
  anywhere ion the world more cheaply from Atlanta than his old boss can
  from NYC.
• In
  his paper, the best letters to the editor get highlighted; the best
  letter writers are invited to a steak dinner with a special guest
  speaker (this past year: Russian reporter who covered the story about
  the Forbes editor murdered in Russia)
• Seven Fulbright scholars in the university down the street
• University has an international house with 70 foreign students
• Involvement with the Southern Center for International Studies’ television program, The Angry World

Rebecca MacKinnon

• Interest in how weblogs can help people in a country find out and connect with people in an another country
• Before
  weblogs, you’d either have to have friends in that country or hear news
  reports. Now, weblogs are a new source of info. Cites the example of
  the Saudi Arabian blog, The Religious Policeman.
• Jeff Jarvis: The are journos who can’t get out of the “green
  zone”. There’s coverage in weblogs that could not exist in mainstream
  journalism and without hte effort of citizen journalists.
• Talk of incorporating blogs and talk radio in 3rd world countries
• David
  Akin: One of the stories we’ve been following for the past 3 – 4 years
  — how tech companies have been promoting tech in developing countries.
• Terry Thielen: “There’s infrastructure and there’s
  infrastructure.” In Haiti, which is mountainous country, the cell phone
  towers help keep the diaspora in touch (they make lots of calls). The
  real infrastructure problem is roads. Even where you can get tech, who
  can repair it? With radio: 15% of the budget is for actual radio
  equipment — the rest is for inverters, generators and anything to
  produce the power. Eevn if you can get the telecom infrastructure in
  place, you need skilled people, and as soon as people get skills, the
  skip town.
• Jay Rosen: Rebecca, last winter, we talked about a blog called North Korea Zone, a blog with information from insiders from North Korea. Another
  idea was that you could be a guide to similar sites. How hard has it
  been to get information? Have returning travellers from North Korea
  been able to provide info?
• As background, she sought out Jay’s advice abotu setting up a
  weblog of info on North Korea. many frustrations with covering it as a
  traditional journalist.
• Less success than she had hoped with getting info from
  businesspeople and aid workers in Korea — fear of not being allowed in
  or criticism
• Snags:
  China started blocking TypePad, South Korea has been blocking TypePad
  to Blogger. Moved North Korea zone to an indie site running Moveable
  Type.
• Len Witt: In many places in the world, the internet
  infrastructure isn’t there for us to reach them. “We need to know more
  about the rest of the world than the rest of the world needs to know
  about us.” We (newspapers) need to bring the world to our readers.
• Terry Thielen: There is a need to train journalists from the developing world here, to train them. It brings the world to us.
• Chris Waddel: The Fullbright brings 500,000 international scholars to the US. Don’t know how many of them are j-students. We should also be concerned about the lack of bandwidth here at home.
  Blogging is one way to solve the problem, but we can’t rely on one form
  of communication: newspapers and other media can also play a role.
• Commenter: The state department brings in foreign journalists to
  meet with media organizations and universities — great exchange of
  information
• Melinda Robin: We have immigrants in all our communities, and I
  feel that journalists have missed them as sources of global information.

“Building social capital…that’s what blogging and public journalism are all about.”

(Missed the first bits of this session, dealing with getting the
luggage — one bag of clothes, one accordion — that American Airlines
lost last night back into my grubby paws.)

Mary Lou Fulton

• Demonstration of how the Northwest Voice site is put together; demonstration of content-management system
• Trying
  to keep the site open to all contronutors: interesting quandary when
  local businesses want to contribute content. They set ground rules,
  saying that local businesses should write about their area of expertise
  without turning it into straight advertising
• Akin: We need more disclosure about where the money comes from
  with blogs. For instance, it’s well-known that the advertising branch
  of the Globe and Mail pays my bills.
• Problem with journalism is that it’s made people feel unimportant and ineffectual. The goal of the Northwest Voice is to change that
• Northwest Voice is built using iupload, made by a company located in Burlington (a satellite town of Accordion City)
• “There’s a sense of ownership” with the Northwest Voice — people see themselves in it.
• The stories may be personal, but accountable: you can write about your kid, but we let the readers know that it’s your kid
• “The problem with being a gatekeeper is that you’re keeping people out, not letting people in.”

Jan Schaffer’s rebuttal

• “Jeff and I have a lot of common ground…I’ve just invited him to be on my board of directors.”
• Jarvis is plagiarizing from the civic journalism playbook by viewing
  news as a conversation — civic journalism has been doing this before
  blogs.
• Just as town hall meetings are now considered passe, blogging will someday be considered passe
• Shouldn’t aspire to add links, but add meaning and context. Otherwise, you’re just making more noise.

Q&A

• Comment from audience: blogs will find their niche and not
  replace other forms of journalism, but complement them and find their
  own place, just as TV did not eliminate radio.
• Rebecca
  MacKinnon: What about the tools, which lower the barrier of entry to
  publishing? Blogging tools make it so you don’t need to know web design.
• Schaffer: The bar is high, for people with no English skills or
  no writing or grammar skills. It’s a niche for people who can write and
  who have the confidence. America is increasingly made up of minorities,
  who will not have the language skills to blog. Plans to teach people
  how to use Dreamweaver and other tools to create interactive content —
  interactive maps, games, web pages and the like

(I call bullshit. It’s much tougher to create web pages without
blogging tools, and interactive maps, media and games take a lot more
effort — I know, I used to be a multimedia developer. As for
immigrants, a good number of them speak much better English than the
local-born.)

• Artvoice.com audience member: How do we incorporate blogging into what we do (indie TV)?
• Lewis Friedland points:
• Remember, public journalism is not about self-expression, but about solving problems.
• Blogs are subject to power laws.
• The structure of the blogosphere as a whole, with some
  important exceptions, is not all that different from the “he said she
  said” horse-race mentality of big media
• Jarvis: “power laws” are the old way of thinking. You have to be big to survive. The mass market is dead, it’s abotu niches now.

Neil Heinan

• “I’m the dinosaur…I’m the manual typewriter in this group.”
• With We the People/Wisconsin: US’s oldest civic journalism project
• “I understand the power of the camera-equipped cell phone, but we’re still struggling with that in Madison, Wisconsin.”
• “Dragging the citizens to the candidates”
• Will forego the moderator in the next set of political debates and just have them talk to each other
• Want to have the candidates answer citizen’s emailed questions
• Want to make the questions posed to candidates “fair”: “Fairness…which is as far from the blogosphere as you can get.”
• Still trying to get citizens to talk to each other, face to face.
  “As valuable as computer-to-computer is,” the idea of citizens talking
  to each other and to candidates running for office is something valuable
• Shortcoming: we have traditionally cut out young people from the
  process. Active attempts at fixing this: inviting middle-school
  minority students intot he newsroom
• Some input from web-based participatory journalism
• Here as an old-school practitioner, trying to incorporate the online innovations.

Jeff Jarvis

• “As Rosen rebutted Kinsella, Jarvis shall now rebut Schaffer”
• It is mainstream media that is useless, narcisstic and niche
• “Forget Gutenberg. The most important media invention is the remote control.”
• Blogging is the new remote control
• The readers are now writers
• The people we used to call an audience now have a voice.
• Advice to editors: The first thing you should do is not write the blogs, but read them
• Bloggers do it because they care
• Blogging is complementary:
• “It is news? Yes, I say it is.”
• “Is it journalism? Yes, I say it is.”
• With the commoditization of news, viewpoint becomes important
• If we stick up our noses at Fox News (or the Guardian, for that matter), we are ignoring the people
• Citizens’ media gives the audience authority
• Blogs are essentially social — this is a community
• Equated “audience” with Doc Searls’ interpretation of “consumer”:
  “It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating
  ‘content’ and crapping cash.”
• Blogging establishes a culture of transparency
• It’s an egalitarian meritocracy. It’s about frankness and democracy. Liberte, fraternite, egalite!
• The grammar of information is changed: we search. We link. We no longer wait for the news; it waits for us to come to it.
• Re-designing news: News is not the article or the channel, but the story or the post.
• Johnathan Miller, head of AOL: 60 – 70 percent of AOL’s spends their time on reader-created content
• “Don’t worry about all the geeky tools” — new tools will appear that will only make things easier
• Andrew Sullivan: “This happens only once in a lifetime. You don’t
  stumble across a new medium every day.” Jarvis: “I say ‘amen’.”

And I say “Amen” too! A well-done, passionate, articulate and fiery rebuttal to the previous speaker.