Geodog

Berkeley Cybersalon: Journalism vs. blogging = Yawn

Sylvia Paull has a gift for getting smart people together, and tonight's Berkeley Cybersalon was evidence of that. The panel she put together on journalism and blogging included John Markoff from the NYT, bloggers
Jory des Jardins and Lisa Stone from Blogher, journoblogger Steve Gillmor, and analyst Joshua Greenbaum. She made a very curious choice for moderator, neoconservative Andrew Keen, who recently made a stir in the blogosphere with his defense of elitism, and who, judging from his blog, seems to be attempting a Camille Paglia-like rise in the neoconservative movement by finding them a new whipping boy, in this case Web 2.0 utopians. It is not often someone that partisan can be a good moderator -- but in his case we didn't get the chance to find out if he could or not. As interesting and talented as the panel were the bloggers and journalists in the crowd -- during the course of the evening journobloggers Dan Farber of ZDNET and Scott Rosenberg of Salon, Tom Foremsky of SiliconValleyWatcher, newly minted blogger Alan Saracevic of the SF Chronicle, blogger Mary Hodder, soon to be former blogger Dave Winer and not yet blogging local editor Becky O'Malley of my beloved Berkeley Daily Planet, were heard from. Unfortunately, the result of all this brainpower assembled under one roof for a couple of hours was, in the end, a yawn. Sylvia's gift for getting people together isn't matched with skills at moderating group discussions, and she hijacked the moderator's position midway through the discussion, and the conversation scattered into a series of random non-sequiturs. Tonight's Berkeley Cybersalon ended up being reminiscent of a badly led graduate seminar with a bunch of really bright people mostly talking to themselves, trying to score points off each other, or trying to impress the professor, instead of having the focused discussion I had hoped for.

The evening started of with Sylvia Paull pointing out all the important people in the audience, a practice which I find elitist, implying as it does that the other people in the audience aren't worth introducing, and ironic, given the topic of tonight's conversation. To be fair to her, it may just be her way of trying to introduce people to each other, but I find it distasteful.

The first (prepared) question went to the panel, about the role of elitism in the media, and it generated some thoughtful and thought-provoking responses. Joshua Greenbaum and Lisa Stone talked about the dual meaning of the word elite, closed club vs. expert. Greenbaum said that in the sense of expert, everyone in the room is an elitist, and big media is elitist, of course. It has to be, and we want to have sources of information that are expert, and we want expert processes for gathering and disseminating information. Stone talked about the difference between the two as being like Daddy (mainstream media) and Mommy (blogs) fighting -- big media requires limited number of people to work together to get news out daily -- the blogoshpere has great tools for distributing work, but the two are more alike than different. She has more details on her blog. Steve Gillmor pointed out that he has written for both, and he doesn't see a significant difference between them at the end of the day. "Some say blogs don't have editors -- wrong, we have thousands of editors who fact check our ass every day". John Markoff talked about his training as social scientist in power structure research. He spent his time as a scientist connecting the dots of power, and believed that power resided in institutions. But now the institutions of big media are under lots of pressure. As a funny aside, he noted that he thinks he knows who his audience is -- 45 or older people who read newspapers, including a significant fraction that thinks they run the country (as opposed to the folks who read the WSJ who really do run the country). Markoff also posed an interesting question, coming from a self-described former internet utopian. He pointed out that internet technology has flourished at a time of the greatest concentration of wealth in our history, and people say the net is democratizing influence, but he can see little evidence of that. Has participation in the political process increased? Not that he can see. "Everybody has a voice, yes, but does that mean that more people participate?" Harking back to the works of Herbert Marcuse, he wondered if the internet is a substitute for sex in the original Marcusian paradigm of institutionalized desublimation of libidinal energies supporting the status quo. I found that a really interesting question, but unfortunately no one followed up on it. Jory des Jardins talked about the joy of blogging after being in the magazine business "blogging allows me to write about what I want to write about."

The next prepared question went to the crisis of big media today, and wether it was a result of online media? There was a wide consensus that big media is in an economic crisis, brought on by pressure to improve profits by Wall Street, and by eroding profits from Craigslist and other online advertising. Someone had an interesting point about mentality of "everything always free". What happens to the economics of information when for $19.99 a month, people feel they have the right to all the information on the planet, no matter what it costs producers to produce it, or what intellectual property rights have been embodied in it? Later, Steve Gillmor opinioned that while the business model what currently screwed up, finding the right information has never been more valuable. He argued that what is coming is the inversion of the search engine model -- instead we will be signalling the people who have products information about our interests. There was less consensus about what other crisis media was in. Markoff asserted that while profits are down, there are fewer columns, stories are shorter, the writing is a little bland, but circulation hadn't changed that much. By contrast Lisa Stone spoke about her work with American Lawyer in bringing in better content from legal bloggers. She thought there was a crisis of quality, and that users were looking around for better quality.

Then the discussion got interrupted by Paull, who popped up in the back of the room with a microphone and called upon to the moderator to cut off one of the panelists, and when he failed to do so, did so herself, and took over the moderator role. She called upon Dave Winer to speak, and he started haranguing Markoff about having promised to write some story about Winer 6 years ago, and not doing so. After letting Winer go on and on, she walked around the room Sally Jesse Raphael style, calling on random people to make comments. Some people had some interesting things to say, but most of them didn't talk to each other's points, so that was the end of organized, focused discussion. There were some interesting tidbits:

• Dan Farber talked about blogging having brought the means of production of information to the hands of the people, but that we still need to develop mechanisms for reputation and filtering.
• Jory des Jardins and Lisa Stone talked about the popular success (and hinted at the financial success) of Blogher. They have launched a community effort with 60 editors, they are covering issues like single motherhood in depth, issues which are not being covered anywhere else. Women's voices being heard -- telling stories about themselves (they might be interested in Madeleine Kahn's new book). Blogs are creating experts of everybody. They also pointed out advertising-wise that women do most of the consumer buying in our society.
• Adina Levin, visting from Texas, talked about the practical power of citizen reporting and connecting citizen to citizen during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
• Markoff had a couple more funny asides. He revealed that Becky O'Malley had been his first editor, and talked about growing up reading IF Stone, whom he called the first blogger.
• Alan Saracevic plaintatively noting that the economic model is falling apart for journalists and bloggers. We need some way for journalists, however defined, to have enough financial support to write.

Towards the end of the evening, there was an extraordinary exchange between Andrew Keen and Scott Rosenberg. Keen reprised the argument from his weekly standard article, defending traditional elite media from the Web 2.0 barbarians at the gate. From his article:

the danger of the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization calling for the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. ... Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. ... The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. ... Traditional "elitist" media is being destroyed by digital technologies. Newspapers are in freefall. Network television, the modern equivalent of the dinosaur, is being shaken by TiVo's overnight annihilation of the 30-second commercial. ... The purpose of our media and culture industries--beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people--is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century.

I don't think that Keen's argument holds water, and it seems like a red herring at best -- complaining about digital media and the democratization of the means of production is like complaining about the effect of the advent of the steam engine on horses, or parents complaining about the music their children listen to, but Scott Rosenberg, who in my personal encounters with him has always seemed extremely level headed, stood up and gave a great and impassioned defense of the need for and value of self-expression, both as the fulfillment of human need that is valuable for itself, and as the motivation for everything from technological progress to great literature. It was a great mini-speech that I can't do justice to here, not having an article to crib from, but that moved me and brought a round of applause from the audience.

So there were lots of smart people, and lots of interesting little moments, but at the end of the night I walked out with a sense of disappointment for what could have been. With those panelists and that audience, I would much rather have discussed:

• John Markoff's question as to whether increased ability to publish leads to increased participation in the political process (and if not, why not, and how can we fix it).
• Dan Farber's question of how to build new mechanisms for reputation to help people select content and decide how much to trust it.
• Alan Saracevic and everybody else's question of what kind of economic and business models exist or can be created to finance anybody, Journalists or Bloggers, working full-time to create content.
• My related question of how to create new and interesting ways to filter and sort through content, now that the cost of gathering and distributing information isn't the primary filtering mechanism.

Instead, we ended up with the tired old fight that some never tire of rehashing: Journalists vs. bloggers. Perhaps entertaining for some, but for me, it was as Shakespeare expressed himself once "a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

Full size photos of the CyberSalon on Flickr. Other people's impressions: Scott's report sounds similar to mine, while panelist Steve Gillmor had a very different reaction.

Posted by Geodog at March 19, 2006 09:22 PM | TrackBack