Luncheon Keynote

Transcript for the 2003 James K. Batten Symposium & Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Monday, September 15, 2003
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

Tom Kunkel, Dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland: Thanks, Jan, I’m delighted to be here for a lot of reasons—and please do continue with your coffee and dessert and we’ll get into it. One of the things I do want to say first is—No I’m not going to acknowledge everybody in the room that needs acknowledgement or we’ll be here too long—but I do want to acknowledge my friend and colleague, Eric Newton, Journalism Initiatives Director of the Knight Foundation, without whose support, emotional and financial, J-Lab would not be possible and this—the Batten initiative lunch, the awards, would not be possible. Eric, thank you very much. Much appreciated and glad you could be with us.

[Applause]

I also want to say that this is one of those occasions that just makes me feel good for a lot of reasons. One is, it’s important. I think everybody—I know I’m speaking to the choir here, but I think everybody who’s been involved in our industry appreciates that journalism needs to figure out how to really use and capitalize new media in a way that we haven’t yet. We need to do it from a financial standpoint, but I think we need to do it from a social standpoint, a cultural standpoint, and frankly, a democratic standpoint, because this is where the world is moving. And if we’re not moving with them, then we’re not helping things. In fact, we’re hindering things. As I said, I know I’m speaking to the choir here, but it’s one of the reasons that we’re so thrilled to have Jan bring J-Lab to Maryland, because it’s a mission that we believe in, and it’s so important. I’m also delighted because I was one of those people.

I know there are a number in the room who were privileged to know Jim Batten, a really special person and talented journalist and a mentor to many of us, and I know that Jim is somewhere in a better place, looking down, very pleased with what is going on in his name today. I’m also delighted because our speaker, Dan Gillmor was coming to the Merc just about the time I was leaving. Even though we were sort of ships in San Jose Bay there, we have much in common and many friends in common, not least of which Bryan Monroe who’s here, the chair of our J-Lab board, the Mercury was deciding that this was something that they wanted to own. Jerry Ceppos, the editor at the time, and David Yarnold talk about if we were 100 years ago and we were in Detroit, you would’ve wanted your paper to be the one that documented what was happening in the auto industry and the way it was going to revolutionize the world, and what that meant for your community. They made a conscious decision that that was how they were going to position the Mercury, and Dan was in the vanguard of that happening and remains so today; so it’s especially apt that he is with us today, and I am so pleased. And I will get on to the introduction. He said don’t read the full bio, so I will just say Dan Gillmor is technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily paper. He also writes a daily, Web-based column for siliconvalley.com, a knightridder.com site that is an online affiliate of the Merc. His column runs in many other U.S. newspapers, and he appears regularly on radio and television. He has consistently been listed by industry publications as among the most influential journalists in his field. That he is, and he’s a very nice man to boot. And he’s really smart, so listen up, people. Here’s Dan Gillmor.

[Applause]

Dan Gillmor: Thank you all. I’m really honored to have been asked to do this. I was given strict instructions not to have slides, because you have had enough of that, and I do have some notes I want to refer to. First of all, I want to congratulate the winners and runners-up and everyone who is involved in this awards competition. It was first-rate stuff, and actually I got a lot of material this morning for the book I’m working on, so this is a great trip already. I’m a little bit spaced out, forgive me, because last week I was in South Africa and got back Saturday to California—airplane stuff—and then came back here Sunday. I know this is planet Earth, but that’s about as far as I can get on the time zone.

So, let me just explore with you a few ideas about where I think we’ve come and where I think it may be going. I won’t spend a lot of time talking at you, because I’d really be interested in your questions and getting to those as quickly as we can. So, basically, what I wanted to just lay as kind of groundwork for where we are and where we’re going. Here’s where I think we’re heading, and just normal trend spotting suggests this is probably true. We’re going to have ubiquitous networks—electronic networks that connect everyone and everything. That’s going to bring lots of new choices for the readers and viewers and listeners of journalism. Key thing, though, is anybody can publish as you all know, and that these are pretty powerful new tools coming along to let us do these things, whether we’re big organizations or just one person.

Something we have not thought too much about is that the empowerment of what I’ve been calling, the former audience, the people who are now part of the process. We heard some of that this morning, and I think that’s totally true that the people out at the edges of the network are now feeding stuff into the middle, which we have been, and we better pay attention to. It also empowers the institutions, the newsmakers, the people we cover in ways that journalists probably should recognize and keep in mind, and, of course, nobody has the faintest idea how to make any money at it, but nothing new there. In fact, I remember when—this was about ‘93—I had just seen the browser for the first time, the Web browser, at the University of Illinois, and I was still in Detroit doing Internet stuff. And I went to a journalism education conference and had a little video of the browser and showed it to people and talked about the Internet a lot. And the head of research, Bernard Ridder came up to me and said, “Let’s have a beer.” And he said, “So, how big an opportunity is this? And how big a threat?” Those were the right questions then. They’re still the right questions, and we still aren’t completely sure about the latter.

I’ve had a few epiphanies along the way on how news making and news consuming (although I hate the word “consumer,”) is changing. One of the times that struck me the most strongly was in November of 2000. I was teaching for about a month in Hong Kong, which I do every year, and it was Wednesday morning there—Tuesday night back here, and you may recall there was kind of an odd election going on in the U.S. And I just was sort of amazed because there was obviously no CNN, or CBS, or any American broadcast in the media study center at school, at the University of Hong Kong, so what I did was to roll my own news report. I got the NPR audio feed, streaming audio, and then I was refreshing pages from CNN, a couple of newspapers, and drilling in on individual stories. I realized I was probably getting a better report than anyone watching television in the United States. It was more complete. I rolled my own news. That was one moment that I thought was an interesting thing. I was thinking there was this convergence going on of the old-media, new-media thing, but then there was this thing that—it’s not an original concept—but this we media, where it’s all of us working. And basically, this is getting more powerful with each new, big event that occurs where people spot it.

Sept. 11, 2001, I was actually at the same conference in South Africa two years ago when that happened, and part of a party of American and other journalists doing workshops in Africa. And we continued the itinerary that we were doing there and went up to Zambia the next day, and we couldn’t go home and we thought if we don’t continue, we’d be idiots. And the time there, I could watch the TV news in the hotel, but I was finding the most important stuff I was getting was from a mailing list, which was run by a guy named Dave Farber, a professor of telecom at the University of Pennsylvania. He has this list he’s been running for about a decade, 15 years, and it’s basically anything that he thinks is interesting. He sends it out to people he thinks are interesting people, and for the following week while I was out of the country I couldn’t get to most Web sites in the U.S.; they were just overwhelmed. But Dave was sending stuff, things mostly coming from his readers with all sorts of viewpoints and things from outside the U.S., in particular, people saying, “Well, here’s how it looks to us out in this part of the world,” and on and on. And there was, I remember, one of a satellite image you click through to lower Manhattan just covered with this cloud of smoke, which I hadn’t seen on any television that whole time, and the Weblog people really got into gear at September 11. That was the time I thought Weblogs came into their own in a powerful way, because it was about human beings experiencing something, and telling what they were seeing and what they were doing, and pointing at other people and other things.

One of the interesting bottom-up journalism things that happened during that period was: an Afghan-American man who lived in the Bay area, San Francisco area, sent an e-mail to a friend saying, “I’m from Afghanistan and you guys are going to do something, but you better know what you’re getting into. Because if you, you know, you talk about bombing to the Stone Age, we’re already there. Understand the country.” Well, this bubbled around in mailing lists for about a week, and suddenly it appeared on a Weblog, a prominent one, and then in Salon, the online magazine. And by the end of the following week, this guy had been on every major American news broadcast. Something interesting had happened there, and we’re seeing more of that now. We heard about some of that today, but that was another one of those events when I thought, “Hmm, something is kind of shifting.”

More recently, last December, one conservative columnist said that Weblogs claimed their first scalp, and this was Trent Lott. I don’t quite agree with that, but it was important what happened, because as most of you who watched that note, the major media kind of let the story go. They heard, in fact, reported it way down in the story that he was waxing nostalgic for a segregationist era, which was pretty bizarre. And yet it didn’t occur to anybody in the big media that this was kind of an amazing thing for this guy to say. The Webloggers kept that alive—and there were some right-wing ones and some left-wing ones—and they were beating on this for about a week before the big media picked it up more. Weblogs didn’t bring down Trent Lott but they helped keep a story alive long enough that other media which do read Weblogs said, “Hmm, gosh, there really is a story there. We’d better pay attention.”

In February I saw more of that with the break up of the space shuttle. There was a sort of running commentary Weblog that I found that day that pointed to a satellite image of the debris field. It was a weather satellite that actually had picked up the debris field, and I didn’t see that on TV either. And there was a mailing list that someone sent me to—there was someone who worked at NASA who speculated that day about four hours later: “I believe the large object was the left wing, and it probably struck the left wing, and it probably was during role reversal. The left wing was struck by external tank debris,” and talking about what he thinks might have happened. Now, this isn’t particularly journalism, but it was a hell of a good lead for journalists and for people who were paying attention to follow. So, it was someone with real information saying what he knew and helping everyone find out something. The basic thesis is that journalism, which has been a lecture—we say, “Here’s the news” and we sell it. You buy it or you don’t; that’s it. You know, we might write a letter to the editor, we might print it. If it’s TV, we’ll ignore you, but—well, unless you send it to lawyers. Now, that’s the lecture mode, and I’m pretty sure we’re turning into something between a conversation and a seminar, elements of both. We tell you what we know. If we’re good, we ask you first to help us. You tell us if you think we’re right, we talk about it, and then we move on to keep the thing going, and to learn more, and to tell more, and help each other. It’s pretty messy, and that’s going to be one of the problems, which I’ll get back to.

But one of the foundation principles of new journalism, as the man from Minnesota said: “My readers know more than I do.” They just do. By definition. Collectively, my readers know more than I do, especially in Silicon Valley, where you’ll write about Tech in Silicon Valley. Trust me, your readers know more than you do, and they’re not shy about letting you know when you’re making a mistake. But this is true for every journalist on every beat, and I would defy anyone to find a case where that is not true. The readers, by definition, have more facts and nuance at their command, collectively, than we do individually. That’s not threatening. That’s a huge opportunity for us.

I’ll tell you an anecdote about readers knowing more that was another one of my little epiphanies: At a conference in March 2002 in Phoenix called PC Forum, the then CEO of Qwest, the big phone company, was onstage whining about how hard it was to run his monopoly. There was a wireless network, and I put into my Weblog, “Joe Nacchio is whining about how hard life is.” I got an e-mail from a guy in Florida, who’s following my Weblog from Florida saying, “You don’t know the half of it,” and he points me to a page on a financial site, showing all of Joe’s stock sales in the past year or so. And while Joe’s company’s stock had been going down the tubes, Joe had been selling off several hundred million dollars worth of stock. That struck me as relevant, and I didn’t know about it, so I put a little note in the Weblog saying, “And, by the way, Joe Nacchio,” and so on. I tipped my hat to the guy from Florida and there was another Weblogger doing the same. Well, people in the room—we guess about a third of the people there—were online with their laptops, and at least a few of them were amusing themselves by reading what we were posting. But the mood toward Nacchio kind of chilled. Esther Dyson, who runs the conference, said later that she was sure that this was our doing. I think Joe was perfectly capable of annoying the crowd all by himself, but if we had any impact, that’s interesting, but what was really important, and the thing that struck me was that we had this process. Here we are in Phoenix, sending out these instant reports. A guy in Florida shoots relevant detail to us. We put it in our Weblogs, and send it back out again, and we’re all better informed as a result. So, that struck me, again, as “Wow, something’s going on.”

We have this new world coming along of these reporting and distribution tools that get more powerful by the day, and all of these new digital everything. The thing that Weblogs—I won’t dwell on Weblogs, because people are already getting bored with them—but the thing that Weblogs brought, and this is so important, is that when Tim Berners-Lee created HTML and the Web, he meant that to be a read-write medium, not just a read-only medium. It became kind of read-only before the tools were there to write on the Web as easily as you could read from it. But the importance of a page where you have this Web page, and there’s a button that says “Edit this page,” and you edit it in the browser, and then, boom, it’s published. That’s what is important about Weblogs, most of all, is that it’s the writable Web, not just the readable Web. Reminder quickly of tech progress and why we’re going to have this ubiquitous communications, and Moore’s law is just not slowing down. The law is the doubling transistor density on Silicon roughly every 18 months, which basically translates into more power in smaller spaces. But there are semi-equivalents to Moore’s law in other areas. All of the things we touch are getting smarter. The phone I carry around is as smart as a PC was 15 years ago, or as powerful. Companies sell disk drives that big that hold four gigabytes of data. So, we’re getting to the point where not only is everything smarter and more intelligent, but it’s also going to have memory, remember everything it sees. Bandwidth is getting better, and the phone companies are doing their best to throttle it back, but eventually we will have good bandwidth. And there’s a more than additive effect of all of these changes. It’s something close to multiplying, though no one really knows, and when everything and everyone is connected, powerful consequences that we do not understand—I certainly don’t know where that’s going to hit. I have ideas, but I don’t think any of us in this room has a fundamental clue where it’s going to be.

I want to talk a little bit about one of the tools that we’re just beginning to use in journalism in this country, but people around the world have gotten on to it long ago, and that’s SMS—short messages on portable devices. This is a really big deal, and if you haven’t read Howard Rheingold’s book called Smart Mobs, I recommend it. He’s one of the most forward-looking people in the technology area, and his book talks about what happens when people out at the edges communicate in these ad hoc quick networks and what happens then. The Philippines Revolution had a lot to do with Smart Mobs coalescing. Some very ugly things have happened as a result, including that Miss World violence in Nigeria, when a message went out to people saying, “this columnist has done something that offends Islam; let’s do something about it.  But we should be thinking about using these to do better things for our readers.

In South Africa last week, I encountered a great commercial use of it.  A bank is sending an SMS to your phone every time you use your credit card. It’s a very smart idea, especially when there’s been a fair amount of fraud in the field. I’d like to know. I’d like to get a message when I use my credit card, just in case someone else does. It’s an interesting thing, and it’s not news, particularly, but we can think about using the same sort of technologies for our purposes, and the tools and toys of all this are getting better and better. One of the things I like is I get to play with new stuff. Nokia has a phone with thumb typing, but it looks like it’s going to work pretty well. You can carry now a portable satellite uplink in a suitcase, only a hundred thousand dollars, which, in ten years, may be a thousand, may be five hundred. Moore’s law means it gets cheaper too, not just smaller and better. Some questions that arise from all of this is, like “Well, does everyone really want to be plugged in all the time, getting bombarded with information?” I know I don’t. In fact, one of the things I like about airplanes is that, so far, nobody can get me up in the sky, but we need, as journalists, to be providing for people who do want to be plugged in and hearing things all the time. Will it create a bunch of lookalike news feeds? Maybe. But I think, again, if we take advantage of all of the knowledge out there at the edges, and help organize it in some way, we can prevent that. And a big question is: “How do we help people find it because the tools are not very good right now?

The newer tools I want to recommend everyone start thinking about in this area: one of them is called RSS, and that stands for many things, but my favorite is “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s in XML-file format that basically says, “here’s this page,” and it puts it out in a format that an application that’s not a Web browser can actually parse and get the headlines and the content. This is a really big deal, because it means you can follow multiple sites with one little news-reading piece of software. It should be in every phone too. It’s actually ideal for this sort of use. I don’t want to dwell on it, but if you don’t know about RSS and you’re doing online journalism, find out quickly, because I think it’s the best thing that’s come along in a long time. There are even special search tools for this now.

Some of the things that I’ve been excited about are news organizations really involving audiences, and it’s not just news organizations that I’ve understood this. When the shuttle crashed, NASA put out a call for any video or photos that anyone had and set up a file transfer Web site—It’s not a Web site, but an FTP-incoming—and said “Send them here. We want to see anything you’ve got, because we want your knowledge to help us figure out what happened here.” Now, news organizations should’ve seen that and said, “Ooh, good idea. We can do that too.” In fact, the BBC did, just before the Iraq war broke out. They said, “Send us your pictures that relate to this,” and they put up a site with some powerful images from people who were either sending loved ones off to fight and maybe not come back, to people in the Middle East talking about what’s happening there. It was quite important.

And there’s a new phenomenon that I’m still not totally clear on the concept of multimedia Weblogs. People taking snapshots from their mobile phones, which has been going on for years in other countries and only just happening here. We are so backward on mobile communications in America, it’s bizarre. But, New Year’s Eve last year, a guy in Japan set up a site. He said, “Take a picture with your phone; send it to this address. The subject line will be the caption, and it’ll go automatically onto the Web.” So you might ask, “Well, gee, what’s the point of that?” Well, the point, I think, for news is that we ought to be prepared as [news] organizations for big events in our communities and have something ready to go. If there’s an earthquake in the Bay Area, I hope that the Mercury News and Knight-Ridder will be ready with a Web site that says, “Send your pictures to this place,” and especially with a mobile phone. Now, if the power’s out everywhere, there’s a problem, but the point is that the readers become part of the journalism process. Nothing really new there, because viewer video has been on networks for years, but now it’s much more distributed. Not everyone carries a video camera all the time, but over time, everyone will have a phone with a camera, and eventually, it’ll be a video camera. So everyone will carry a video camera all the time. Leaving aside the pretty serious problems of privacy and other that this raises, there is some potentially interesting journalism aspects.

Another question that comes up through all this is, “Well, what do we trust? What do we believe in, in all this bottom-up media?” And it’s a good question. We’re going to have to develop some hierarchies of trust and need tools to evaluate and figure out who we believe in and who we don’t. Now, I hope that major media that I like today will survive this transition, so I can still have something institutionally to trust. But individuals have developed reputations in my journalism viewing and consuming who have no affiliation with big organizations, and I do trust them. One of the things about the Weblog and the participatory journalism areas, there’s a lot of self-correction that goes on, a lot of self-policing, I guess. When someone posts something that’s just wrong, people say, “That’s just wrong.” And if it’s someone who’s honest, they’ll correct it and so there’s a self-policing—Ken Lane, a newspaper guy in Los Angeles, said, “We can fact-check your ass,” which is his way of saying what the Webloggers can do with each other.

One thing we haven’t talked about a lot in journalism is these tools are just as good for the newsmakers as for us. Let me give you an example: Last year, when the Washington Post did that enormous series by Woodward and Dan Balz of the events right after September 11. They interviewed everybody including Bush, Rumsfeld, everybody, and at the end of January, when the stories had run in The Post, the Pentagon posted the full transcript, all many thousands of words, of the interview with Rumsfeld on the Pentagon Web site, on the DefenseLink. That was not something most people noticed, but I think that was an important event for journalists, because it added nuance. It provided the Pentagon with a way of saying, if they didn’t like how the story came out, say, “Well, here’s what he said, you judge for yourself.” People we cover can start using these tools, too. They can start saying, “Well, here read it,” and we can be doing it too. Corporate communications are starting to figure this out, too. One of the problems I’ve had with the Weblog and the comments is that sometimes the PR person will drop a comment without noting that they’re flacking for a company, saying, “Oh, isn’t this great?” I don’t know how to stop that.

The thing that I think is so important about all this bottom-up journalism is how it’s helping revive people’s sense of their own ability to make a difference in this huge place, this huge country, and democracy and economy. One reason the Howard Dean campaign has succeeded so well so far is that they basically had this powerful movement front, out at the edges, of people who just wanted to be helpful, who wanted to talk about the guy, who had no connection at all to the center, to the campaign. The really important thing that the people in Burlington, Vermont did was to not try to control it, just to encourage it, but not even attempt to control it. They have this conventional hierarchy in the campaign, but they also have this enormous reservoir of support outside of people who were organizing it themselves. Their people have declared themselves the campaign chairmen in states where Dean has no staff. Now, there may be a problem when they do put staff in those states, but the thing that I’m so interested in is that Joe Trippi, who is Dean’s campaign manager, who I knew back in ‘88 when he was working for Gephardt, is a geek through and through and loves this stuff, and had the wisdom to ask, “So, what’s going on in Austin, Texas?” We have no idea, but we’re going to find out. And they arrive in a place where people have set up these meetings and drummed up thousands of people to come and cheer for the guy that they had nothing to do with, except to say thank you. So, it’s changing politics, too. If people start recovering a sense that they can make a difference in this political system, then this will be really interesting.

The BBC is working on a project that I think that may be the most forward-looking of all, and they’re launching some pilots this fall. I’m going to go over and try and be there when they do it for this book I’m doing, because I think that this may be a breakthrough. They’re fundamentally trying to help set up a system that lets people make impact on issues that they care about, whether it’s geographically or by some topic, and they want to use it to help guide their coverage. They’re going to give people tools to be active politically and then watch what happens, and when they watch what happens, that will help them know what to report on. If this thing works, it’s a major deal and I hope that people here will copy it. This is assuming the BBC gets its funding next year, when they’re up for their ten-year funding.

One of the things I worry about in this society is this concentration of media, and that’s why I’m excited about what ‘s going on in the participatory journalism. Contrary to what Michael Powell says, it’s really dangerous. We need to be having more voices, not fewer voices, and we need more voices that have some reach. If 95 percent of people get their information from three sources, or two, or one, that’s not a good sign. So, I still love big media, because big media do important work, and I don’t want to see big media disappear. Some of the people who write Weblogs think this is the best chance in history to kill us. I hope we don’t die in conventional media, because we have a real public service function. And I don’t know who’s going to have the combination of deep pockets where necessary, which will include lawyers where necessary, and expertise developed over time, and passion for doing this. I don’t know if the collective community can pull this off without some organization, some institution that survives this. Whether anyone can make money, I don’t know.

There’s an online newspaper in Seoul called OhmyNews that I visited, and 80 or 90 percent is written by just average people. They call them citizen reporters and pay them poorly, but they aren’t doing it because they are making a living at it. They have a full-time staff of about 50. Ninety percent of what’s in there, though, is from the citizen reporters. These people helped elect the new president there. The first interview he gave, following the election was to them, not the big three dominant newspapers. In fact, they just set up a broadsheet weekly, and it’s quite successful, and they’re making money. Another publishing model is with someone in New York, a friend named Nick Denton calls Nano Publishing, which is Weblogs that are so niche-targeted that maybe they’ll get tiny bits of advertising and other revenues to make it worth doing. That model is cheap. And then my current favorite is the tip-jar method. A guy named Chris Albritton went back to Iraq. He said, “Send me money, and I’ll go to Iraq and cover the war,” and people sent him money—about $14,000—and he went back and did a pretty good job. Through all this, the thing that I want our companies to do is engage in the community more. I think that the people talking to us is so important, and people telling me when I’m full of crap. It’s not fun, but I tend to learn more from people who think I’m full of crap, than from people who don’t. We really have to get rid of the old idea that we know everything—not that we really ever believe that anyway—but we have to welcome participation from people out of the edges. It doesn’t mean we don’t exercise an editorial control here and there, but we should let people talk, and we should certainly listen.

Now, the big problem—one of many big problems—lurking out at the edges of this new medium is wrapped up in the intellectual property land grab that’s going on right now. Hollywood fundamentally sees the Internet as a big television where they send it, we consume it. Actually, it is interactive. There is another button that says, “Buy, spend money,” and they’re winning all of the wars here in Washington. They have laws on intellectual properties that are draconian. It is unbelievable to me that the penalty for having a single song on your computer can be as much as $150,000. This is for petty theft. Infringement is not technically theft; it’s a different thing, but think of the disproportion that this represents. These guys are just hurting everybody. They are stealing. They talk about the people stealing. Hollywood took the public domain from the public domain, twenty years’ worth of work that was supposed to be in the public domain by now. In fact, they keep extending theirs. There’s this amazing coincidence: Every time Mickey Mouse threatens to enter the public domain, the copyright term gets extended. It’s an incredible coincidence. I just don’t know how that happens, but it may have something to do with Disney spending a lot of money here. This is bad stuff. They want to exert total control over all digital material. The copyright agreement that we have is that you can’t have absolute control, because you won’t have anything new in the way of art or literature or science, and these things, so we have to pay attention. The rest of the world is tending to follow the U.S., although everyone now goes in this leapfrog game, to see who can make it worse. I’m concerned about it, because I think we could end up at a time when new entrants really just need permission from some culmination of governments and copyright owners before they can do anything. They want to put controls on computers and other devices, so that nothing they don’t want to be copied can be copied. This kind of thwarts the whole purpose of technology, and we’re really at risk here of losing a generation or more of innovation and innovation from journalists, not just others. And if that happens, there’ll be more power in the center, less power out at the edges in the community, and I don’t think we’d like the result of that if that does happen. I think we’d be in real trouble.

There are these three scenarios I’ve been working on. One is this total lockdown. You need permission to do anything, like the Soviet Union. I just saw an ad for a copier that says—this would’ve been the dream of the people running the Kremlin in 1983—because it basically said it will prevent copying anything you don’t want copied. And, you know, of course, they did register Xerox machines back then.

Another scenario which I don’t like anymore is total anarchy, where new media undermines the business model of everything that today’s journalists are doing. I think that’s also a possibility. I don’t think we would like that result if it happened, because I don’t think I want to live in a world where I have to sort through nothing but Weblogs and SMS to find out what’s happening. Then, I think there’s the final one, which is the best of both worlds, where it’s this “virtuous circle,” as they say, of feeding each other, and we stand on each other’s shoulders in journalism. We always have, always will, and I just see this as a new part of the bigger puzzle. So, that’s the basic thoughts I’ve had on this, and I want to appeal to all of you.

I’m working on a book on this. The current working title is Making the News, and on my Weblog, I actually have posted the full outline. I thought I should at least walk the talk on this, and I ask people, “So what do you think?” I had lots and lots of great suggestions, and, in fact, probably one chapter is going to be: “What happened as a result of doing that?” I hope the result is good. If it’s bad, the book will probably not ever come out, but what I found was things I would never have thought of have come in to me, and I’m going to use some of it in the book. They don’t get to vote on what’s in the book. The editor and I get to vote, but they get to tell me what they think, and I get to thank them and be able to use some of it, and I hope this is going to be a process we do more. Probably of all of the ideas here, I’ve thought of one percent, so I’m looking for a lot more. With that, I would love to answer any questions anyone has. Thanks.

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J-Lab helps journalists and citizens use digital technologies to develop new ways for people to participate in public life with projects on innovations in journalism, citizen media, news games, interactive stories, entrepreneurship, research, training, and publications.

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J-Lab is a center of American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

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