NEWS FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
Here Comes 'We Media'
Tech-Savvy Readers Want In on the Conversation
In 1999, Jane's Intelligence Review, the journal widely followed in national security circles, wondered whether it was on the right track with an article about computer security and cyberterrorism. The editors went straight to some experts — the denizens of Slashdot, a tech-oriented Web site — and published a draft. In hundreds of postings on the site's message system, the technically adept members of that community promptly tore apart the draft and gave, often in colorful language, a variety of perspectives and suggestions. Jane's went back to the drawing board, and rewrote the article from scratch. The community had helped create something, and Jane's gratefully noted the contribution in the article it ultimately published.
It boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do.
The episode demonstrates something that many journalists have yet to discover: in an emerging era of multidirectional, digital communications, the audience can be an integral part of the process. Call it "We Media." Journalism is evolving away from its lecture mode — here's the news, and you buy it or you don't — to include a conversation.
Interactive technology — and the mostly young readers and viewers who use and understand it — are the catalysts. We Media augments traditional methods with new and yet-to-be invented collaboration tools ranging from e-mail to Web logs to digital video to peer-to-peer systems. But it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. And the evolution of We Media will oblige us all to adapt.
For one thing, the people and institutions we cover are learning new tricks to get out their own message — and they ultimately will force us to be more accurate and nuanced in our reporting. Why? Because transparency goes both ways. Just ask Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of The Washington Post, who interviewed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on January 9, 2002. Soon after the Post ran a series of articles on events in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Defense Department posted a transcript of the entire interview on the DefenseLink Web site (www.defenselink.mil/news/ Feb2002/t02052002_t0109wp.html). Reading the entire interview illuminates how well prepared the reporters were, and how they went about their task. Whether it's to add context or to counter misrepresentations, this is a practice more public officials — and well-known people generally — will undoubtedly take up.
Some of the audience will jump in with both feet, meanwhile, to be journalists themselves or help shape what journalists do. Others will simply want better information. Traditional journalism organizations should be helping the former audience become part of the process.
In my own case, I've found that my readers definitely know more than I do, and, to my benefit, they share their knowledge. At a technology conference last March, a telecommunications chief executive groaned onstage about his troubles. I noted this in my Web log, which I was updating from the audience via a wireless network link. Soon I (along with Doc Searls, another journalist-blogger), got messages from a reader in another city. The reader included hyperlinks to an authoritative Web site showing how the executive had sold stock worth more than $200 million while his company was suffering. We both immediately posted this information. Some in the audience were soon reading our blogs, and the mood toward the CEO seemed to chill. Talk about real-time feedback.
The readers themselves are coming up with excellent journalism, via their own Web logs, mail lists, and other content. Glenn Fleishman's wireless technology blog (80211b.weblogger.com/) is one of the best sources of information on the topic, regardless of medium. In the days and weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, telecommunications professor Dave Farber's "Interesting People" e-mail list (www.interesting-people.org) brilliantly reflected his correspondents' perspectives — ranging from national-security issues to critiques of religion, followed by critiques of what he was sending out — and became essential reading for its breadth and depth.
Evolving electronic gear will keep blurring the lines. Camera-equipped mobile phones are going to create all kinds of interesting new views, for example. One of these days, we'll see 500 photographs of some major event in Tokyo, all e-mailed to a Web site from people's phones.
Emerging techniques will raise new issues. We'll have to find ways to deal with important questions of accuracy, trust, ethics, and law. The forces of central control, meanwhile, are not sitting by quietly in the face of the challenge. They're trying to rein in the Internet's interactivity, to turn it into little more than glorified television. And the business model for interactive news is deeply uncertain.
But We Media is coming. Check that: It's here.
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