Could a pope getting respect on atheist blogs make co-operatives his weapon for fighting poverty?

25/03/2013

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . A co-operative movement launched by the Vatican, Co-operative media 'business model', Fair pay for garbage collection, Keiretsu-cooperative, Pope Francis's promise to the poor, Recology

Might co-ops help to correct Rupert Murdoch’s delusional prediction and become Pope Francis’s silver bullet?

Might co-ops end the reign of press barons like Rupert Murdoch and become Pope Francis’s silver bullet?

It began as a lament about the disposal of a mountain of spring weeds, the conversation that got us thinking about the new Vatican leader’s inaugural promise to ‘embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest,’ and his wish expressed elsewhere to see ‘a church that is poor and for the poor.’ He sounds remarkably like someone on an Occupy soapbox. But unlike members of that well-meaning but chaotic movement, he has a massive organisation behind him to help point followers in the right direction.

We have been astounded by the evidence search engines supply of wide interest in a Christian spiritual figure among so many typically secular intellectual institutions – The New Yorker, for instance – and stretching as far as blogs like one called Non-Prophet Status declaring, ‘Why this atheist is (tentatively) optimistic about Pope Francis’. Soon, he could win a popularity contest with the Dalai Lama, among non-believers.

There was even a surprise for us close to home. Though there have been no Catholics among our blood relations for three generations, one scrupulously apolitical member of our family about the same age as the pontiff, and paying close attention, insisted last week that the papal mission was doomed. ‘Because,’ he explained, ‘most of the world is poor and always will be. As he won’t be able to make any difference to the impoverished far outnumbering everyone else, why choose certain failure?’

While we considered that opinion, a question occurred to us: what single lever could Pope Francis choose to concentrate on, to prove the pessimists wrong? What might be his equivalent of the Lone Ranger’s silver bullet?

Unexpectedly, an answer suggested itself not long after we heard from a grizzled, kindly Greenlander living on the edge of San Francisco about his reason for being incensed by an argument with his local garbage collector. This rubbish-disposal engineer, on his weekly round, had haughtily spurned, then left behind, several giant plastic bags into which the Greenlander’s neighbours had taken pains to squeeze a towering weed-pile. No bags, he said. Nothing but greenery.

When the Greenlander appealed for mercy — an exception made for neighbours who were still newcomers, the haul-away man said it was time that they learnt the rules. No, the Greenlander said later, shaking his head, the smelliness of the work did not excuse the man’s unfeeling intransigence. ‘Don’t you know how much money these garbage guys make? A fortune!’

The next person to enter the conversation filled in some fascinating details. He said that the average income of a rubbish collector working for Recology, the dominant garbage company in the region, is $80,000 – or roughly twice the salary of the average American schoolteacher or policeman. Though we have not, so far, been able to check the precise accuracy of that number, we suspect that it is correct, or nearly so, because it was part of a case handled by our informant, a lawyer with a good memory.

We thought this salary fair, and said as much. Imagine the stench for mile after mile, working on a trash-collecting truck in summer heat! But then came a bigger – and even more welcome – shock. Recology is entirely employee-owned. Historically, its workers had ancestry in common with Pope Francis. This cooperative’s website says :

Our company’s roots have always been in recycling and employee ownership.

[…]

The original Bay Area garbage men, or “scavengers”, came to San Francisco from Italy in the late 19th century. At that time, scavenging in San Francisco was a disorderly and inefficient business. Hundreds of independent collectors competed for business. The 1906 earthquake and fire temporarily improved business, but did little to bring order to the chaos of garbage collection.

The website boasts that Recology has an outstanding record for innovation, and one item on the list it offers as proof suggests a startling interest in the radical 1960s Arte Povera (art from poverty) movement in Italy:

The world-renowned Artist in Residence Program in 1990 allowing local artists to find materials in our processing facilities to create art.

… Anyway, we were, as we said, reminded by this chat of Pope Francis committing himself to helping not merely the indigent but ‘the weakest, the least important, …’. Could there be a better salve for the lowly status of garbage-collecting than a bank balance honestly earned through joint ownership?

Post-Gutenberg began as a spinoff of a paper setting out a detailed proposal for saving journalism from the machinations of press barons like Rupert Murdoch through a ‘keiretsu-cooperative’ – owned by workers and customers.

Pope Francis, being a Jesuit, a member of the religious order famous, for centuries, for being frighteningly intelligent, would know about the remarkable success of huge cooperatives in, for instance, Switzerland. He would certainly stand a far better chance of pushing a new cooperative movement than any blink-and-you-miss-it blog like ours, or any of the pundits making the case for employee ownership on newspaper sites often, but to little avail – so far.

How Swiss audience inclusion and a certain sort of nudity might be the key to success for post-Gutenberg media

03/03/2013

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Switzerland, The future of publishing . Diccon Bewes, Extreme democracy, Nudism, post-Gutenberg 'business models', Swiss democracy, Swiss Watching, Swissinfo.ch Public Council

Diccon Bewes, a member of Swissinfo.ch’s five-man Public Council

Naked hiking is alarmingly popular, even in winter … Public nudity is not a trauma in Switzerland. Many Swiss bathing areas have FKK (Freikörper-kultur or free body culture; that is, nudist) sections … It’s still not on the German scale, where you never know when the next naked person might appear. Have a picnic in the wrong section of Munich’s English Garden and you’ll never eat another Scotch egg.

Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money, Diccon Bewes, (2010)

The dispenser of advice on hazardous unclothing, Diccon Bewes, has written the wittiest, most elegantly informative and indispensable manual on today’s Switzerland for English-speaking foreigners. His whirling outline of Swiss history at the start of his book is spliced into an account of a winding walk chosen for historical associations, which gives a reader mnemonic imagery for its highlights. Bewes knows better than to frighten the Swiss, restraining what the glowing review in the Zurich paper Tages-Anzeiger called ‘typically black English humour.’

Yet encoded in his skipping prose is the style of such unforgettable thought-capsules, in 1066 and All That — the unsurpassed (1930) parody of history text-books – as, ‘[King] Alfred noticed that the Danes had very long ships, so he built a great many more much longer ones, thus cleverly founding the British Navy.’ This is specially admirable in a practical guide so astute at gauging what outsiders need to know to survive in a place where English is missing even from multilingual train announcements and museum placards, that every new visitor touching down on a Swiss tarmac could use a Bewes-on-CH (Confoederatio Helvetica) mobile app spun off from Swiss Watching.

Now, that overview of the visible talents of Diccon Bewes has nothing to do with boosting Swiss tourism or expatriation. What we outside CH need from him even sooner than instant cultural decoding is something else – a detailed, step-by-step education from a quasi-insider in how the Swiss make extreme democracy work, or what Beppe Grillo and the Occupy movements must do to realise their dreams. Specifically, it is media of the Gutenberg era baffled by — and resisting the transition to — post-Gutenberg inclusiveness who most need his assistance. As we have said before –

Techno-optimists are sure that our egalitarian internet that brought you to this blog will flatten power structures in organisations, both online and offline, and usher in an age of extreme democracy. Cynics say that they are wrong. Whisper to them tentatively about, for instance, reorganising the media to make readers and viewers part-owners and managers, and they will roar at you, “Ridiculous! Disastrous! It could never work!’

You must then reply in calming tones, ‘True, if you do it like California, but not if you copy Switzerland.’

So, how exactly do you copy CH? Few English-speakers have either Bewes’s hands-on experience of working with Swiss colleagues inside Switzerland – his home for the last eight years – or gift for cross-cultural explanation, backed by a degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

What would make his counsel particularly valuable to future-focused media people is his experience as the English-language specialist on the five-man Publikumsrat or Public Council of Swissinfo.ch – the internet adjunct of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) founded in 1999 that specialises in news about, and of special interest to the Swiss, and crisply-written features that illuminate foreigners. All this, every day, is translated into ten languages.

The style of government that makes Switzerland the world’s most democratic democracy is replicated in organisations of every size and kind in CH – including its many businesses run as cooperatives, two of which make the list of the world’s top twenty-five in sales.

The Publikumsrat gives Swissinfo’s editors and journalists detailed feedback on their choice of subjects as well as on the way these are tackled. It makes suggestions for new topics. It also defends Swissinfo from its detractors. More than once, in the last ten years, it has led campaigns to protect it from accountants wielding budget-slashing axes – inspiring ‘Save Swissinfo!’ petitions from as far away as New South Wales, in Australia.

Post-Gutenberg has been browsing on the Swissinfo site for three years. The experience of reading there has been hugely surprising – nothing like the teasing love-letter to CH that Swiss Watching’s tone suggests, but equipping Swiss-bashers with ammunition. Its coverage of the most embarrassing, even humiliating, topics for the Swiss is frank enough to suggest that, more than a mere pastime, nude hiking in glacial cold could be a metaphor for … well, the naked honesty in the conversational style of the Schweizerdeutsch, the German-speaking Swiss who dominate the population. In our experience, they express themselves freely and with graphic precision on almost any subject, even chatting to strangers (unless these are identified as journalists, a reviled profession in CH), as long as they respect basic standards for civility and friendliness.

Part of the reason why Swissinfo’s coverage of topics is startlingly direct is that there is no room for subtle and idiomatic expression in any text that has to scan as well, in the language of its composition, as in its Portuguese, Chinese and Russian versions. Of course, this is also true of the work of the BBC World Service – but the unflinching Schweizer style does seem to make for extra-bluntness.

Readers of this blog can wander over to Swissinfo.ch and see for themselves. We have been stunned by some reports there on the Nazi Gold scandal – in part of which Swiss banks were accused of conspiring to deny descendants of Holocaust victims access to their families’ Swiss bank accounts, or about academic studies blaming lax gun control policies for Switzerland ranking, with America, at the top of the statistics for gun-related suicides. Far from any cover-up, there is a relentless succession of articles quoting critics of gun ownership. This is especially brave in a country in which every referendum on the subject shows the Swiss refusing to be weaned off weapons ownership. (We cannot conceive of a cowardly Swissinfo blackout of news about press reform, if this had the attention of Swiss government leaders.)

Forthrightness – and audience involvement, through the Publikumusrat — could make Swissinfo a model for news coverage in the UK and US, where, as one poll after another shows, public trust in the media has never been lower.

Until recently, the point of having Swissinfo was to help Swiss nationals living abroad stay sufficiently well-informed to make the best possible decisions when they vote remotely in referendums and elections. This part of its charter is no longer as important as demystifying Switzerland for foreigners, because free online editions of so many Swiss newspapers give Swiss expatriates the facts they need.

But doing a good job of serving Swiss voters abroad meant that the information the site supplied had to be politically neutral, or carefully balanced across the spectrum of political opinions. That this approach has not changed, even after Swissinfo’s staff and budget were each cut back last year by roughly a third, only adds to the attractions of the site – since, as this blog has underlined in the past, the reading public prefers to be served news undistorted by politics.

The British press ignores this preference. Both during and since the Leveson hearings on press ethics, one editor after another insisted – invoking time-hallowed tradition as frantically as the Catholic Church fighting for respect, in recent weeks — that political slanting has always been part of its lifeblood.

Though mockers of the Occupy movements keep insisting that extreme democracy could never be either practical or realistic, Switzerland, the über-democracy, is proof to the contrary. With its tiny population of not quite 8 million, CH can boast of being not just one of the world’s richest countries but the one at the very top of economists’ table for individual wealth – per (adult) capita.

Here is some food for meditation from Swiss Watching’s chapter titled ‘Ask the audience’:

Walking through the centre of Bern means running the gauntlet of clipboard-thrusting pen holders wanting your name. These aren’t charity muggers desperate for your cash … And the papers are not futile petitions that will be delivered to the government without any prospect of anyone taking notice. This is not Britain. This is Switzerland, where the people have power, and they use it. Collecting signatures is the first step towards a referendum, the basic tool of the direct democracy system. Don’t like a government decision? Then collect names to change it. Want to create a new law? Then collect names to initiate it. Hate minarets? Then collect signatures to ban them [ … ]

For outsiders, it’s hard to imagine how a country can function if every law and government action is subject to a government vote. For the Swiss, it’s hard to understand how any country can be run without just that. […] The Swiss people can initiate legislation or destroy it; they can force the government into new policies or reject decisions it’s already made. No one person or party ever has complete control – the people do. Forget China and North Korea; if any country deserves to be called a People’s Republic, it is Switzerland.

Private Eye on the death of literary culture

21/10/2012

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . Literary culture in Britain, Miriam Gross memoir, Private Eye as model for publishing in the future

How long before literature in print begins to seem as mysterious as cave paintings – its preoccupations and the culture around it approachable only by conjecture?

Readers who do not drop in here regularly – and some that do – might have read the last two entries on this blog with exasperated harrumphing and disbelief.

Professional book reviewers deserve to be going the way of the dodo? Get away with you! Publishing houses have been declining to publish manuscripts lauded by their own editors, that have even excited film consultants with a proven instinct for spotting bestselling and screen-friendly material? Codswallop! (That would be bull dookey, for Texans.)

O sceptics, here is substantiation from a source whose remorseless objectivity about its own world of print publishing and journalism has been praised by no less than Lord Justice Leveson, of the Inquiry – and which is not notably a lover of online publishing, even though it is organised and run in ways we think the best digital publishers will approximate closely in the future .

The extract is from a review of the memoir of a London book editor, Miriam Gross, An Almost English Life, Literary and not so Literary Recollections, in a late September issue of Private Eye (no. 1323) that we have only just seen, owing to one thing and another.

At any time over the past half-century it has been possible to earn a few pounds by writing an article on ‘the death of the novel’.

Just lately, what with the rise of the internet reviewers, E. L. James and celebrity memoirs, more alert commentators have been able to expand this topic to accommodate the death of literary culture per se.

[…]

The really surprising thing, in these circumstances, is the torrent of books about literary culture that continues to spring from the nation’s printing presses. Publishers from Tom Maschler down pop up to regale us with memories of their time in the trade.

[…]

Ms Gross, it has to be said, is the grande dame of her profession: a Jerusalem-born bluestocking, who arrived in England in 1947, married the late and very much lamented John Gross first time around, […] and was successively arts editor of the Torygraph [Texan trans.: The Daily Telegraph, traditionally the upmarket Tory paper] and books editor of its Sunday sister. […] On the other hand, to call this elfin volume – bulked out to 200 pages by the inclusion of some old Observer interviews – ‘the remarkable story of one of the great observers of our time’, as Alain de Botton does on the cover, is ever so slightly pushing it.

[…]

[O]f what, on this admittedly partial evidence, does ‘literary culture’ actually consist? Dare one say that the whole thing eventually betrays itself as a delightful private club, where all the members are simply wonderful and incompetence is habitually excused on the grounds that the defaulter is one of us: sad to contemplate here on its downward spiral … but, really, impossible to mourn.

Testimonial to the curious state of commercial publishing: literary young Lochinvars locked out despite high praise from gatekeepers

15/10/2012

Cheryll Barron . Artists writers and money, Cooperatives, E-books, Micropayments, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . Donkeyshott and Xuitlacoche, Financing unpublished and other unsupported literary talent, John A. A. Logan, Scotland's young literary Lochinvars, Sean Murray, The Adorata, The Survival of Thomas Ford

John A. A. Logan poised to evoke the touch of evil in The Survival of Thomas Ford – and below, less alarmingly, with his mother, Agnes Logan
Photographs by Alasdair Allen (above) and northern-times.co.uk

…

‘We sly women are the world’s only hope,’ said Jan, ‘And not just any old sly women either. You can forget about yer Jews and Protestants for starters. And of course any woman who dabbles in atheism.’

‘You get them, man,’ said Bathsheba. ‘It happens.’

[…]

‘Still in deep denial about the Counter-Reformation, yer Prods.’ Bathsheba beeped the horn again. ‘The most comically perplexed souls of all time, poor things.’ Beebeep. ‘The ne plus ultra of human… Of human whit? Thingummibob. Whit’s the word? Cartoonishness? Am I toasty warm? Get us the thesaurus.’

Jan found it in the glove compartment and gave it over.

The Adorata, Sean Murray

…

What is the point of thrillers – the noir kind, especially?

Er, … entertainment, do you suppose? you suggest drily, stifling a sardonic ‘D’oh!’

To which post-Gutenberg’s answer would be, but what is the point of this sub-genre of entertainment?

Yes, yes … we know, an absurdly ambitious question for a funny little blog.

But this hardly rules out suggesting a line of enquiry for an answer: might the point of blood-and-gore electrified by crackling suspense be to fight horror with horror? That is, neutralise real-life horror, shock and sadness, with the imagined and invented kind? Nothing supplies temporary relief for the agony of witnessing the suffering of someone beloved in extremis – helpless to do much to relieve it – as well as a story so powerful that it takes control of your brain and entire nervous system, whether read in snatches or all the way through.

Events of recent weeks have shown us that a well-written thriller violent and gripping in direct proportion to the unbearable, in actual life, works better than any other literary form – particularly for a reader who loathes violent films and literature, and often resents the manipulations of narrative suspense.

The book is set aside, and the reader feels inexplicably stronger and ready to face down the monsters again. Some process less akin to catharsis than to Freud’s idea of displacement is surely at work – which, in a Wikipedia definition,

operates in the mind unconsciously and involves emotions, ideas or wishes being transferred from their original object to a more acceptable substitute. It is most often used to allay anxiety …

The book – or rather, e-book — that worked this strange magic for us is The Survival of Thomas Ford, about which we learnt from a Twitter link by its author, John A. A. Logan, to a detailed history of the manuscript’s long string of rejections that we would call staggeringly unbelievable and absurd if we did not know it to be an impeccably accurate record of the state of conventional publishing in 2012. We began to watch John’s tweet stream after we found ourselves on the same side in an online debate about copyright in the age of the net; among the not-terribly-popular lobbyists for paying artists and writers for work in the age of e-pirating.

Soon, we were reading arresting sentences and sequences like these:

Jimmy sipped Coke and watched Robert out of an eye’s sly edge.

…

Robert believed that it was sometimes possible for the universe to overlook certain misdeeds, even serious ones. He had believed from an early age that the universe made errors, usually errors of omission. He believed, in fact, that Jimmy’s very existence was evidence of such an error.

If Jimmy was a vacuum, then Robert had been sucked in.

We registered something indefinably Scottish in the observations, the styles of expression, and marvelled at the absence of the too-familiar props in mass-market thriller-writing – glamourising brand names and settings – and clichéd ‘middle-class’ attitudes to people on less fortunate social rungs, or the reverse. A hospital cleaner, finding herself for the first time in an urban garden thinks,

This garden was like a machine for escaping the city.

After weeks of reading in tiny sips, for a lack of time, we reached a scene in which a father punishes his adult son for mistreating immigrant Polish bricklayers by flinging him into the mud with a feral twist that all but breaks his neck. Soon, there are characters bleeding from kitchen knives stuck in their sides and … For fear of the spoiler effect, we’ll stop there and say that we usually go to extremes to avoid sustained violence in any form, and were able to endure no more than a half-hour of The Silence of the Lambs. But we could not stop reading Survival.

John Logan is certainly not trying to be Muriel Spark, the grand priestess of modern Scottish literature, but as real life trouble intensified and spun out of control for us, we grew increasingly impatient with audio recordings of still gritty but tired recent books by Ian Rankin to which we had turned – because they were sitting on our library re-shelving cart – to make sure that we stayed fully alert on long driving expeditions on featureless roads. We longed to listen instead to the fresher writing voice and inspiration of the next chapter of the Logan thriller with its endlessly surprising perspectives and frequently excellent prose.

That last attribute is something John’s work has in common with other young Scots writers, too many of them unpublished, or self-published and unnoticed because of hair-raisingly nonsensical sagas of rejection – like his. The extract from a modernist — Barthian, Bellowish, (William) Burroughsian – novel by Sean Murray in the epigraph for this post came from a discussion of misogyny in the work of male novelists on Donkeyshott and Xuitlacoche, the domain of a blogger, Philip Hall, who has a head crammed with stimulating, cosmopolitan ideas. The guest-post on his blog spotlighting the Adorata remarked, ‘If your life depended on it, could you imagine Mailer creating a female character with a thesaurus stored in her car?’

In disembodied cyberspace, post-Gutenberg has had more than one encounter with these Scottish scribes — whose energy and dauntlessness recall ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west/Through all the wide Border his steed was the best …’. We have been honoured by bracing and uplifting encouragement from them – which might make our motives for writing this post suspect. Fear not. We have … ahem … credibility to protect, as obscure as we are, in this patch of the net.

Before we leave you to read a clip from John’s account of his well-deserved — but hard-won — success with publishing Survival as an e-book, we have a question. Can we — those of us who care about the absurdity of neither John nor Sean Murray finding a conventional publisher with conventional marketing muscle — do something to finance the efforts of writers suffering from the disappearance of editors capable of nurturing unpublished writers? Or sustaining the efforts of those who already have stellar publishing credits, but have run afoul of the salespeople promoted to über-gatekeepers at some of the most famous literary imprints?

We have made suggestions before, about how this might be done – using micropayments, something better than Kickstarter and a new way of organising publishing as a massively inclusive, subscriber-based ‘co-owned’ medium.

That post-Gutenberg — thousands of miles from Scotland, with no real-life acquaintance with any of these scarcely-known Scottish scribblers — should care so much about helping them find support surely means that something can be done, and soon.

Over, now, to John himself – although you will want to read his entire record of the death of common sense. The last page of Survival says that John has been published by Picador, Vintage and Chapman – all in the loftiest tier of the serious end of the book business.

… In December 2010, the literary agent phoned me for 90 minutes, to tell me he was sure a major publishing house’s editors had wanted to take my book, but then at the meeting with the sales dept the sales folk for this publishing house had said that I “reminded them of someone they had had high hopes for two years earlier but then had lost money on”. And that ended that house’s interest in the book.

A little later, the senior commissioning editor at another major UK publishing house wrote to say “I think John Logan is a hugely talented writer. I love books like this that have the pace and excitement of a thriller but the voice and emotional depth of a literary novel”. But again when it came right down to it, no sale!

Then my agent passed the book to a film consultant who worked with him. She told him my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford, was the best book she had read in that literary agency in the last 4 years. This was taken very seriously, as this film consultant had discovered Slumdog Millionaire as an unpublished manuscript and was responsible for it getting developed into a film …

Why attack ♯Leveson, our best chance to save real journalism?

05/09/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . Elie Wiesel, George Steiner, INFORRM, Leveson Inquiry, Reorganising the media for the 5th Estate, the 4th Estate, WIkipedia as a model for journalism

The coercion which the police state exercises on thought and art is indeed appalling. Yet the damage done may, in the final analysis, be no greater than that caused by the absolutism of the mass market. … The censorship which profit imposes on the media is as destructive, perhaps more so than that of political despotism.

George Steiner, My Unwritten Books, 2008

That Fleet Street editors are once again ganging up to attack the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and practices — concentrating their salvos, this time, on its as-yet-unpublished first report and recommendations – could turn out to be a great good thing.

Their aggression is inviting attention. It is giving everyone who cares about getting reliable news and facts undistorted by hidden agendas and special interests — for instance, the International Forum for Responsible Media (INFORRM) — a chance to remind the 4^th Estate that public opinion is firmly on the Inquiry’s side.

But, …

as the INFORRM blog warned, last week,

… there is an important case to be fought in the court of public opinion over the next couple of months. A careful eye needs to be kept on press attempts to distort and manipulate the arguments to support the self-interest of its proprietors.

The self-interest to which it refers is, of course, the profit motive. That is true despite the longstanding tradition in which most of those proprietors have supported newspapers losing money decade after decade, as if red ink were simply natural for them, as intrinsic as spots for leopards or nuclear scent for polecats. Hardly anyone needs to be told, any more, that the reason why these proprietors have long competed ferociously for the privilege of owning papers is because of the fantastic levers they are for piling up profits in other spheres, and buying political influence.

We have quoted those words of George Steiner in this post’s epigraph before and we will quote them again – as often as necessary. That is, until it becomes common-or-garden wisdom that, just as the Wikipedia has brought us closer to the ideal of what an encyclopaedia can be, we need to refine forms of collaborative journalism. It has to be universally understood that journalism at its best has to be divorced from the profit motive. Just as the excellence of the Wikipedia has no connection whatsoever to improving any corporate ‘bottom line,’ there is no reason why journalism has to be directly or indirectly wedded to it any more.

The reason why no leader at the head of any prominent newspaper has risen to post-Gutenberg’s challenge – ‘Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders‘ – is because they are beholden to the old system of organising the dissemination of facts. They are well-paid indentured servants of the profit motive, enshrined as the ‘advertising-based business model’ for running papers.

The best possible outcome of the Leveson Inquiry is not in the least complicated. It would be an evolutionary restructuring of journalism to restore as its fundamental and only raisons d’être:

the quest for truth

and

forcing transparency in the exercise of political power.

It is this parallel with the Wikipedia that matters. The co-ownership of media and various forms of collaborative operation, in the practice of journalism, are simply the most logical means to that end.

Until we reach it, passages like this — from The Sonderberg Case, an Elie Wiesel novella about the harm that Nazism inflicted on the Nazis’ own descendants – will seem depressingly unattainable:

Actually, I had discovered journalism well before working in the field. My uncle Meir, early on, considered it the finest profession … He ranked the committed journalist as the equal of writers and philosophers.

Audience jealousy of artists, part 2; & what this has to do with Sisyphus and rock ‘n’ roll

19/08/2012

Cheryll Barron . Artists writers and money, Cooperatives, Micropayments . Artists and money, Jankovics Marcell, Prometheus, Rollo May on the myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus

Stills from Jankovics Marcell’s ‘Sisyphus’ (1974)

[ part 1 is: here ]

And what about the collective memory of artistic creation? For every Prometheus and Sisyphus haunting scholars, how many of their former equals are barely stirring and covered in dust?

The Sonderberg Case, Elie Wiesel (2010)

Our screen shots from a short Jankovics Marcell animation, Sisyphus (1974) — a work of genius in nearly every frame — could be depicting the struggle to change the monetary terms on which artists make art. We would like, in this lifetime, to see that accursed rock stop and stay still, where it ought to. By that, we mean that some self-sustaining way of letting artists and writers keep up with plumbers must somehow be put into practice.

Presumably Marcell, a Hungarian, earned enough from licensing a giant US multinational to adapt his haiku-like video for a (comparatively crude and clod-hopping) tv advertisement to make the world a gift of his original, so that anyone can watch it, free. But only a sub-microscopic fraction of creators can afford such generosity.

We still shudder, remembering the relentless succession of hostile posts in the discussion on a newspaper site we quoted extensively the last time we wrote on this subject, last month. Artists have starved and suffered throughout history, ran the argument – if we have to dignify rants with that word. So what? … the ranters raged.

It is asking for nearly inhuman self-control, to suppress the vituperative and scatological reply that comes immediately to mind, on hearing that question. People all over the world were actual serfs for aeons, but then became merely virtual serfs – wage-slaves – a few centuries ago. Being a baby-making machine, year after year, and – as someone once put it, ‘tied by their tits’ to their broods – was seen, for most of humanity’s time on earth, as the unavoidable fate of women. If injustice could be defended merely by precedent, and by precedence extending to pre-history, how odd that we no longer accept chaining and whipping our fellow-beings like defenceless animals.

Poverty was once universally accepted as the inevitable lot of most scholars. The great 17^th century Dutch rationalist-philosopher Spinoza – whose idea of God, Albert Einstein said, was closest to his own — is known to have lived on porridge, groats and milk, or was certainly obliged to eat that diet more often than most of us would think endurable. Then someone invented tenure, and certainly in rich countries – even after years of budget cuts – few contemporary academics share the abject insecurity, at the level of penury, that too many artists among their fellow-citizens do.

We have returned to the subject not to say anything new as much as underline the importance of change – and because we forgot to mention, earlier, that thoughtful interpreters of Greek mythology consider the fates of Prometheus and Sisyphus to be allegories for the life of inventors and creators. What most of these theorisers have in mind, in drawing their parallels, is not money and financial survival but the interior, psychological struggles of creative people — and the punishment for extraordinary talent, in both stories.

This post ends with a semi-non-sequitur, an extract from an essay by Rollo May (1909-1994) – a disconcertingly perceptive, often poetic, writer on the psychology of workers at creativity’s coalface – for which our excuse is simply that we have been admiring the passage for a very long time.

It earns its hopefulness; is as far as possible from Pollyanna optimism. As May explains to the uninitiated in a terse footnote, ‘Sisyphus was a king of Corinth condemned by Zeus to roll a large stone ceaselessly up a hill.’ (Alternatively, as Nick Pontikis claims in an irresistible, fleshed-out version of the legend on his Thanasis blog – we are indebted to the stoical monarch for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.)

… Are we doomed to live in a world no one can make sense of? …

… Out of that … despair is born this myth which is new but eternally old, the only myth that fits this seemingly hopeless situation. This is the myth of Sisyphus. The one myth which … goes no place at all, seems to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in perpetual monotonous toil and sweat.

But that is to omit its crucial meaning. One thing Sisyphus can do: he can be aware of each moment in this drama between himself and Zeus, between himself and fate. This – because it is most human – makes his reaction completely different from that of the dark night of the mountain up which he rolls his rock …

… The myth of Sisyphus is sometimes interpreted as the sun climbing to its apex every day and then curving down again. Nothing could be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the sun. …

… [W]e face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. But out of this repetitiveness of breathing the Buddhists and Yoga have formed their religious meditation and a way of achieving the heights of ecstasy.

For Sisyphus is a creative person who even tried to erase death. He never gives up but always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; he is a model of a hero who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such capacity to confront despair we would not have Beethoven or Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Dante or Goethe of any others of the great figures in the development of culture …

Sisyphus’ consciousness is the hallmark of being human. Sisyphus is the thinking reed with a mind which can construct purposes, know ecstasy and pain, distinguish monotony from despair, and place the monotony – the rolling of the stone – in the scheme of his rebellion, the act for which he is condemned. …

Sisyphus … must have noticed in his trips some wisp of pink cloud that heralds the dawn, or felt some pleasure in the wind against his breast as he strode down the hill after his rock, or remembered some line of poetry to muse upon …

… [In t]he myth of Sisyphus … [w]e are required … to recognise our human state of consciousness in progress or without it, … with the disintegration of the world or without it. It is this that saves us from destruction when our little rules prove unavailing.

This is what led Albert Camus to conclude his essay on Sisyphus, ‘We must consider Sisyphus happy.’

… Rollo May does mention money in a passage before that extract, not in connection with artists who have too little of it, but showing us why their poverty so often elicits self-righteous scorn. He says, in a profoundly intelligent dissection of greed, focused on America, but applying widely on every continent:

There has been in America no clear-cut differentiation between right and wrong ways to get rich. Playing the stock market? Finding oil under your shack in Texas? Deforesting vast tracts of Douglas fir in the state of Washington? Amassing piles of money for lectures after getting out of prison as a Watergate crook? The important thing in the American dream has been to get rich, and then those very riches give sanction to your situation. The fact of your being successful is proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment.

[ part 1 is: here ]

Would the Nobelist Elinor Ostrom have agreed that women are naturally more cooperative than men?

12/08/2012

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives . Beatrice Moring, Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom, Howard Rheingold, Mahindra War Room, Natalie Angier, Nobel economics prize, Pauline Green, Phyllis Chesler, Women and cooperatives

Bukidnon women of the Philippines island of Mindanao — Hans Brandeis

Nordic Norwegian women Minnesota Minn Historical Society -- HL_norsksisters

Norwegian women:
Minnesota Historical Society

Are women instinctively more cooperative than men?

Annoyingly, post-Gutenberg cannot seem to get off the fence, on that question.

There is no equivalent, for the other gender, of Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman – a blood-curdling, too often accurate, book about the scope of this category of unkindness by a respected psychologist, Phyllis Chesler. On the other hand, women have never fashioned whole careers from bludgeoning each other, the way legions of men did for most of human history — serving both noble causes and evil ones.

Nor has highly organised, male-dominated aggression disappeared. Our eyebrows went shooting ceilingward when we discovered, the other day, that in the country proud to think of itself as the land of Gandhi, elite business school students gather as rapturously as American hipster-cultists at Burning Man for a contest in strategic capitalist thinking called the Mahindra War Room. Om mane padme … oh dear, … we thought.

We would like to know whether there is any substance in the idea that women involved in running organisations tend naturally to a more consultative and collaborative style. Should women be encouraged to lead in promoting cooperative ownership as the fairest and most engaging way to organise people working together, wherever coops make sense?

We care about the answer because we have been obsessed by coops for some time. As we explained in a February post, the internet — used as both frame and engine for cooperative organisations — could vaporise many of the handicaps and inefficiencies that plagued failed coops of the recent past. More than once, we have linked to an outline of a scheme for making readers and commenters co-owners of media – a collection of ideas marinated in 2009, then lightly grilled and put on the table in January of 2010.

We could all be witnessing the start of capitalism’s evolution into an array of highly motivated, updated cooperative workplaces. It hardly matters that beady-eyed commenters spotted the questionable logic in one specific comparison in an otherwise accurate Guardian piece, last week, on the growing enthusiasm for cooperatives: ‘Co-operatives and mutuals keep outperforming the UK economy’. A reader, @johnjm, remarked acidly: ‘Comparing co-operatives, which are largely in retailing, with GDP is spurious and arguably financially illiterate.’

If @johnjm is honest, he will concede that some eminent economists find the concept of GDP itself unsatisfactory. Scrolling down all the reader comments on that article by Greg Rosen does suggest that its premise — that a ‘cooperative renaissance’ is underway — is warranted. Growing numbers of us see coops — warts and all, without any expectation of being led to paradise on earth — as the shrewdest solution to the problem of the 1% that Occupy campaigners turned into high drama. Even if Rosen’s is a flawed comparison, it was intriguing to see these numbers side-by-side – and the next sentence rang deeply true:

While the real level of GDP in the UK in 2011 was 1.7% lower than in 2008, co-operative sector turnover has grown 19.5% over that period.

Some parts of the co-operative economy have been resilient for the past 40 years – but without public recognition.

That said, how are we to get more people to demand cooperative organisations? Could women hold the key to that galvanisation? If forced at gun point to guess either way, a few months ago, post-Gutenberg might have ventured, with cringing reluctance, that females are probably somewhat less adept at friction-free collaboration than men are (see Phyllis Chesler, above).

But lately, these scraps have come floating to the front of our mental screens — on eddies of serendipity:

• Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman ever to win the Nobel prize for economics (2009), made her name as a specialist in ‘examining the use of collective action, trust, and cooperation in the management of common pool resources’ – such as irrigation networks and fishing grounds — working closely with her husband, Vincent Ostrom.

Our introduction to this radical but self-effacing thinker came from Howard Rheingold’s new book, Net Smart. Like Howard, a cyberspace pioneer and writer, she stood out for putting her ideas into practice in her own life. Shortly after her death in June, he kindly answered our question about their brief acquaintance by explaining that they met at a conference in Bali, through another woman academic interested in the same subject …

… Charlotte Hess, whose work I had been following. In my research on cooperation theory (compiled at
http://cooperationcommons.com
) I had become familiar with the foundational work of Elinor Ostrom. Hess had co-authored with Ostrom a key paper on information as a common pool resource. […] Lin Ostrom, as everyone seems to call her, was gracious enough sit down with me and talk about our shared interest in informing policy decisions about common pool resources with real empirical research. Then, as she often did, Ostrom voiced her concern about all the decisions being made at the political level without a shred of knowledge of the significant body of scientific research about what worked and what didn’t work with commons governance issues. […] I came away […] understanding that I had met one of the few great people I had the good fortune to encounter in my lifetime.

• A paper by an economic historian, Beatrice Moring, ‘Female Networks and Cooperation in the Nordic Past’. She delivers an important reminder of how women once excelled at cooperative tasks – ‘[c]ommunal activity without payment, lasting one day or less, aimed at performing tasks needing many participants.’ She argues that after the industrial revolution, the specialisation and commercialisation of work destroyed strong and indispensable female networks which — in Finland, Norway and Sweden — had once milked cows, collaborated in weaving and making clothes, communal baking, and heavy-duty housecleaning.

Elinor Ostrom’s animating spirit, or what can be gleaned of it in an excellent obituary in The Economist, was in close sympathy with those toiling Nordic women:

[C]ollaboration was her watchword. Neighbours thrived if they worked together. The best-laid communal schemes would fall apart once people began to act only as individuals, or formed elites. Born poor herself, to a jobless film-set-maker in Los Angeles who soon left her mother alone, she despaired of people who wanted only a grand house or a fancy car. Her childhood world was coloured by digging a wartime “victory” vegetable garden, knitting scarves for the troops, buying her clothes in a charity store: mutual efforts to a mutual end.

• A light-hearted April 23 column by the science journalist Natalie Angier taking an extreme position also, incidentally, at the furthest extreme from Phyllis Chesler’s – and extended to include non-human females:

In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, longlasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turn out to be the basic unit of social life, the force that not only binds existing groups together but explains why the animals’ ancestors bothered going herd in the first place.

• A blog post about Elinor Ostrom by the president of the International Cooperative Alliance, founded in 1895 and representing 248 co-operative federations and organisations in 92 countries, according to the Wikipedia. And who did that turn out to be? Yet another woman – Pauline Green.

… Might these scraps amount to dots describing a larger, highly significant pattern – even if they do not quite add up to proving a greater female affinity and aptitude for working in cooperative organisations?

We have no idea. We would like to have asked Elinor Ostrom that question but, sadly, learnt of her existence too late.

Advice for Lord Justice Leveson from Lao Tse: how to shape the afterlife of the 4th Estate and assist the birth of its successor

25/06/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . Baron Igor Judge, Britain's progressive judiciary, Conflation of political partisanship with press freedom, Hugh Tomlinson's accreditation proposal, Ian Jack, INFORRM, Lord Justice Leveson's dilemma

[ On 10 July 2012, The Independent, a ‘liberal’ London newspaper, declined to publish a comment on press reform linked to this post. That polite comment is here. ]

Niklaus Manuel’s ‘Dance of Death’ (‘Totentanz’, 1516-1519) was a hugely popular theme as Gutenberg presses proliferated and the Renaissance was in full sway. It could have symbolised a coming-to-terms not just with death but the dying of old ways.

Presiding over an Inquiry whose conclusions will shape the afterlife of the British press – doomed to extinction by digital media and the new voices of the 5^th Estate – Lord Justice Leveson keeps reminding us of the contradiction in the difficult job he has been given. What mechanisms can he recommend to the government for the enforcement of ethical behaviour by the 4^th Estate without ‘imperilling the freedom of expression or our free press’? – as he put it during Tony Blair’s testimony in late May.

Post-Gutenberg would like to recommend a fragment of ancient Chinese philosophy as a frame for thinking about a solution to his quandary. Lao Tse reportedly said, in the 6^th century BCE,

If we wish to compress something, we must first let it fully expand.

Lao Tse

Rule-making can be seen as a sort of compression – in the sense of limiting, constraining and controlling. It is too soon for anyone, even the admirably wise men at the summit of Britain’s judiciary today, to draft rules for media being turned inside-out by the digital revolution. As perspicacious witnesses have pointed out, any new regulations that minutely specify what the 4^th Estate can and cannot do must inevitably pronounce on who should be considered a journalist. How can that be done when the profession’s boundaries are being obliterated by the arrival of the 5^th Estate?

It would be disastrous if the Inquiry were to lead to any blocking or impeding of this successor to the 4^th Estate. What the arrival of the 5^th Estate means for the press is that it has to share the megaphone it has so far had all to itself. This succession is directly in line with the evolution and improvement of democracy – something that people everywhere want dearly, a yearning that events like the Arab Spring have dramatised.

To watch the Leveson hearings is to see the presiding judge agonise over too many details that an unimpeded 5^th Estate will soon make irrelevant or outdated. They take up too much of his time, even when he understandably declines to deal with them in an Inquiry being criticised for taking on too much. As Dan Sabbagh noted in a good summing-up in The Guardian last week,

Leveson has so far showed little apparent desire to get into the question of the ownership structures of newspapers: when invited … to set a cross-media ownership limit that would force a Murdoch sale of the Sun or the Times, Leveson fought shy, “because that involves all sorts of competition issues which would require quite detailed analysis”.

Instead, Leveson went elsewhere to debate some practical solutions. The judge has been surprisingly consistent in the views he has espoused, taking the approach of testing out ideas periodically with witnesses he likes. Leveson is clearly sceptical of the PCC [Press Complaints Commission], telling Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in January that the body was not “really a regulator” but a “complaints mechanism” – and that it needed to be supplemented by another body, a new kind of court, “some sort of arbitral system” to cover libel and privacy claims – an imagined body that the judge said would be designed to be low cost – or to use a phrase he repeated many times “not make extra work for lawyers”. Its nearest analogue would be the industrial tribunals, or the arbitration system used in the construction industry.

Post-Gutenberg likes the way the judge is thinking about a replacement for the defunct and essentially toothless Press Complaints Commission. We would also be happy to see the criminalisation of a small set of completely unacceptable infractions, such as extraordinary invasions of privacy by phone hacking and other underhand means.

But instead of pointless brain-cudgelling about precisely what percentage of which communication medium newspaper conglomerates like Rupert Murdoch’s should be allowed to own, Lord Justice Leveson’s highest priority should be to open the way to the largest number of competitors for the 4^th Estate.

In other words, expand, don’t compress should be the principle guiding his recommendations to the government in September.

Check bad behaviour on the part of today’s media elite by maximising opportunities for the outsiders of the 5^th Estate to offer alternative presentations of facts and unfamiliar opinions, and to challenge and expose the biases and mistakes of every sort of media, new and old.

There is no shortage of good ideas for the democratic licensing of access to sensitive information by both professional and non-professional disseminators of facts. In a post a few months ago on the blog of the International Forum for Responsible Media (INFORRM), Hugh Tomlinson QC made an excellent suggestion about ‘benefits for public interest journalism of creating a category of “accredited journalists”’. These would be …

… a sub-category of those writing for publication [who] should be given specific privileges to assist them in their work. […] [P]rivileges should not be granted to journalists simply because they are employed to write or because they work for a media organisation. Neither should the privileges be granted to any “citizen journalist” who claims to be writing public interest stories. Rather, the privileges should be made available to those who pass through a gateway policed by a voluntary independent regulatory body and sign up to an enforceable code of responsibility. [post-G’s ital.]

There are new ways of organising and financing journalism that could use Lord Justice Leveson’s support – even if that only means he will be careful not to hobble the reorganisation of the media as, for instance, a set of cooperatives in which readers and viewers could be offered the chance to become co-owners. In recent months, proposals for setting up and running these have been increasingly detailed and specific. (See, for instance, the mention of Paul Smalera’s suggestions in ‘Why a keiretsu-cooperative is a gentle transition for old media …’.)

The mere existence of the Leveson Inquiry has already had salutary effects. To give a small but critical example, the moderation of comments in The Guardian’s popular comments sections has become far less trigger-happy. Commenters are not being censored quite so reflexively for opinions or factual posts that conflict with that newspaper’s views and political positions, or criticise its friends. Last weekend, it was heartening to see a post about the Inquiry itself opened for comments after months of prohibition on grounds that made no sense – and to be able to read contributions to the debate about Ian Jack’s illuminating comparison of Leveson with an earlier government investigation of press practices.

As for the Leveson hearings, per se, their radical transparency — with a presiding judge confident enough to muse aloud and react spontaneously to testimony — goes far beyond what many of us could even have imagined as a model of open government. (The best demonstration came an hour after this post: here). American lawyer friends looking on in awe tell us that nothing in the US system would permit Americans to copy the form of these proceedings.

Most amazing has been the discovery that the conduct of the Inquiry is characteristic of an exceptionally progressive judiciary. Utterly unlike the notoriously slow-moving and stodgy legal system wickedly satirised in Dickens’s creation, Jarndyce and Jarndyce — a court case that grinds on for generations – Britain’s top judges are not just acknowledging the implications of new communications media and adjusting to them, but doing so faster than the professionally nimble 4^th Estate.

Post-Gutenberg only recently came across a news report from the spring of last year about a speech in Israel by the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Igor Judge, who put Sir Brian Leveson in charge of this indescribably gratifying investigation into press culture and practices. He explained that in Malta, where he was born, one of his grandfathers owned and edited a tiny newspaper. His sympathy for the press’s problems is, in a sense, inbred. But he favours the transparency and inclusion that are more the defining characteristics of the 5^th than the 4^th Estate – even for keeping his own legal system honest:

His “fervent hope” was that new technology would make it easier for the media to be “present” in court, reporting the proceedings, and “the present trend of fewer and fewer reporters in every court would come to an end”.

In an apparent reference to “virtual” courts based on video-conferencing, Judge insisted that justice should be done “in a public forum to which the public, or the media, has access”.

He continued: “Technology must not lead to justice done in secret, or some form of hole-in-the-corner justice.“

Post-Gutenberg wishes to offer just more one scrap of advice to Lord Justice Leveson – who has invited everyone, however obscure, to contribute thoughts to his hearings: please do not allow political partisanship by the press to be conflated with press freedom. As we observed in a recent post in this spot, sanctioning political one-sidedness means licensing powerful media owners to be king-makers, with all the compromising wheeling and dealing that goes with that. It means condoning the skewed reporting of the facts so essential to the functioning of a genuinely democratic government.

With a fully licensed 5^th Estate in full cry, media conglomerates trying to run Britain, with lots of help from British prime ministers – or what the Economist appears to dismiss nonchalantly as the inevitable ‘proprietor problem’ – should be shown their proper place. And where would that be? If not oblivion, then as far below the salt as possible.

The lost wisdom of co-ops: a conversation about the key to future creative freedom for artists and inventors of every stripe

20/05/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . Harvard's Banyan project, john Naughton, Leveson - press regulation after Hackgate, Management Today, Mondragon, Nick Davies, Rules for sucessful co-operatives, Thomas Friedman, Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Lester, Tom Stites

All artists now want to work on terms they co-determine.
Photograph by MIL22.

Post-Gutenberg will occasionally be letting visitors eavesdrop on discussions between our colleagues – starting with the pseudonymous and gender-free Escargot and Mustrun, who are not quite ready to divulge any personal details, except in warning about their tendency to be over-earnest, humourless, and on occasion, dull. Not the best qualifications for bloggers, we agree, but we make do with what we have – or rather, who.

Mustrun: I see that on Sunday we linked to The Observer — to a sharp John Naughton column about the Facebook hype falling flat on Wall Street. Someone here dropped into a comment there a link to our Valentine’s Day post about snubbing Facebook and re-inventing social networking sites as co-ops.

Escargot: So that’s why our traffic numbers have gone zooming into outer space. We’re not used to thundering herds of visitors shattering the monastic silence in these parts.

Mustrun: Right. Co-op promoters are the slave trade-killers of tomorrow.

Escargot: Trying to be aphoristic again, are we? Don’t. That one’s as clear as mud.

Mustrun: Just saying. All the clever people were sure for over two millennia that slavery would always be with us. Anyone trying to abolish it was written off as a lunatic or idealistic fool.

Escargot: Oh. Quite. Last week that lovely Leveson Inquiry judge, more owly than we are, was asking eminent witnesses to suggest how to make the British press behave in the future, and be less hopeless at holding politicians to account. No one mentioned redesigning media organisations as co-ops, but it’s surely a solution whose day has come. Not to mention dead relevant.

Mustrun: You’re thinking of the Harvard journalism lab experiment? Something to do with an Indian tree that looks like a multi-limbed goddess on steroids?

Escargot: The Banyan Project, yes. It’s been building a prototype for doing online journalism as a cooperative enterprise, focusing on local news. The man behind it, Tom Stites, has exactly the right idea. We’ve quoted him on post-Gutenberg before.

Mustrun: We have? Well, you know me. Any subject not mentioned in a post header, or that I didn’t write about myself, does not register.

Escargot: [sighing inaudibly] So as usual, you want me to urp up what he said, to fill you in?

Mustrun: Leopard, spots; all in the hard-wiring – yes? … If you would, please, Scargo.

Escargot: [reads through imperceptibly gritted teeth] ‘A significant source of co-ops’ strength is the trustworthiness inherent in their democratic and accountable structure. … This is also an era of rampant mistrust of journalism, so co-op news sites’ trustworthiness has the potential to add value to what they publish. Further, the co-op form allows, or rather demands, that news coverage decisions arise from what a community’s people need … The web is inherently collaborative — just as co-ops are — and at the local level this creates the potential for civic synergy — ’.

Mustrun: Translation: co-ops and the internet were made for each other. Spot-on, in that long-winded Murrican way. He might add that it’s strange but true that large parts of the internet sit on top of ‘peer-to-peer computing’. But this Justice Leveson, … how is he supposed to go from applauding a fine example like Banyan – assuming he does any such thing – to persuading the media to try out co-ops? He’s hardly going to order them to alter what we’re supposed to call their ‘business model’.

Escargot: Right. Britain is not a dictatorship. But he might recommend that the government offer old or new media organisations tax breaks for setting up co-ops – in the oldies’ case, by reinventing themselves, or parts of their operations, as co-operative outfits.

Mustrun: You think journos would sign on? Remember that the majority so detest the idea of any change that they can’t even bring themselves to report that Nick Davies — the journo hero of the phone hacking saga — told Leveson that the press cannot be trusted to regulate itself.

Escargot: Mmmm. Some of them will sign on, certainly. More will as the idea loses its strangeness, I suspect. There are editors and journalists who’d leap at the chance co-ops could give them to set rules and policies collaboratively. Mainly, I suspect, the craft-focused ones — hoping, like artists and writers everywhere, that this net revolution really will get rid of hierarchies and gatekeepers.

You saw the Tom Friedman column celebrating some of that on the New York Times site yesterday – yes?… But then of course, many journos live not so much for the craft as for the clubbiness in the profession. And sort of think of themselves as football teams – the women just as much as the men.

Mustrun: Clipped Friedman for skimming, later. Journos are petrified of more democratic media organisations, especially of any plan that involves making room for outsiders — for more varied contributors and voices. I’m always asked the same nervous-Nellie question about posts on here like ‘Co-owning media is on the horizon …’. It’s this: will working in a media co-op mean that trained journalists get paid the same as bloggers and citizen-journalists?

Escargot: Oh, I’m asked that. All the time. No matter how many times we explain that the way a co-op works will depend on the particular set of rules its owner-members agree on, the journos and media managers revert to projecting their most paranoid fears onto any mention of co-operatives.

Mustrun: Someone ought to re-publish that superb Tom Lester article about co-ops in the disintegrating copy of Management Today you once disinterred from our archive. It’d make a terrific contribution to the new e-publishing collections of long-form journalism – with an introduction setting it in context, of course, and updated facts. Remind me of the year it was published?

Escargot: Imagine you proposing anything in long form, Musto. The owner of the world’s most attenuated attention span. The Lester piece — the cover date for the magazine says February 1979 — deserves every last gram of your praise.

Mustrun: Even text-grazers like me have to stop for a real meal, now and then. What he pulled off in that article is amazing. His subject was the failure of the Kirkby Co-operative in a depressed manufacturing town near Liverpool. Yet by the end of his dissection of how Kirkby was done in by badly-designed rules, you somehow feel hugely optimistic about a well-designed co-op’s chances of succeeding.

Escargot: Yes, yes, and yes. The piece partly answers the question of how journalists might be paid in relation to bloggers – not that we existed, then — by explaining the rules for profit-sharing in one of the world’s biggest and most brilliant co-ops. Mondragon, in the Basque country of northern Spain.

Mustrun: ‘Mondragon’ sounds like something in Lord of the Rings. Lester uses its exotic history — it was started by a Catholic priest in the desperate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War — to create a riveting context for a step-by-explanation of exactly how an individual could join a co-op and help run it.

Escargot: [ swipes over to scanned copy of the article in a tablet computer ] The ratios may have changed, but in 1979, Lester said that at least 30 per cent of a Mondragon co-op’s profits had to be put away in the collective reserve funds. Then, ‘the other 70 per cent is divided up among the members of the co-op according to a points system reflecting job status.’ … And of course, every member could help to decide the status of one job in relation to another.

Mustrun: But in addition to practical, nitty-gritty details like that, he tells about some of the lunacy that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the passionate idealism behind co-ops of the past.

Escargot: Mmmm. ‘No shortage of idealism,’ he says about Mondragon, ‘…but mixed with hard-headed realism.’

Mustrun: Yes, but noisy idealism has been the biggest enemy of co-ops. Makes sensible people mistrustful.

Escargot: Quite. If only people who believe in them and have the right skills – extroverts, unlike us – would just get on with setting them up with no fuss. The way, for instance, Tim Berners-Lee quietly invented this World Wide Web. What could be more idealistic than a way of communicating as powerful as this one, connecting the whole planet – but given away, free? A scientist silently beavers away in a lab in Geneva and without any self-advertisement, no speechifying whatsoever, changes the world.

Mustrun: Well, I really must, … you know …

Escargot: Right. Off you go, then.

Yes, cooperatives are idealistic … like marriage and parenting, and no, they do not have to be run like AA meetings

03/04/2012

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives, Social media and networking . Chuang-Tsu (Zhuangzi), Clickers for fast decision-making, Cooperatives in the post-hippie digital age, Elinor Ostrom, Howard Rheingold's Net Smart, Inner Chapters, Rules for running cooperatives

Cooperation or a Mexican standoff? Photograph and mise-en-scène by MIL22

When there is separation, there is coming together. When there is coming together, there is dissolution.

Chuang-Tzŭ (Zhuangzi), Inner Chapters,4th century BCE

[ trans.: Gia-fu Feng and Jane English ]

It is curious that anger about inequality is boiling over around the world precisely when we have new tools capable of taking us a long way towards a solution.

Yet disillusioned, battle-weary romantics who once joined some attempt to make democracy more democratic — or run a cooperative as an alternative to the Darwinian capitalism so adept at spawning plutocracies — have been telling us how they failed so gloomily that they could be competing for hopelessness with the Icelander Halldor Laxness and his Independent People.

Is it unreasonable to ask that, instead of justifying their pessimism, they collect and broadcast their thoughts about what they learnt from those failures and would do differently if they were to try again? And might they sit up and notice exactly what is possible with the new, democracy-friendly tools that could have helped them to avert disaster — if these had only been invented in time?

If paying attention, the nay-sayers might avoid the unfortunate misperception of cooperatives as cuddly, slow-moving, necessarily lovable ‘kumbaya’ institutions – as in a newspaper columnist’s suggestion last week that members of worker-owned coops might specialise in listening to each other as patiently and empathetically as people at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

… er, please, … no! … ideal co-owners are far more likely to be reading at their own pace – in most cases, fast and online — than attending in the same room to statements of each other’s positions on any issue. Or they might be watching a short video clip on the subject – in the information-gathering and debating prelude to making a decision.

As this blog noted six weeks ago, technology has made it possible for everyone to consider the same information simultaneously, and to spell out goals and policies crisply. The deciding in a cooperative could be done at – well, why not say, warp speed, and that hardly seems an exaggeration when you consider the spread of ‘clickers‘ linked to polling software, and mentioned on the front page of the New York Times last week as

… hand-held wireless devices with just a few buttons.

[…] In recent years, college students have been bringing clickers to lecture halls, where professors require their use for attendance, instant polls and multiple-choice tests. Corporate executives sometimes distribute the devices at meetings, and then show survey responses immediately on Power Point slides. Just two of many companies that make clickers have sold nearly nine million units, which typically cost between $30 and $40 apiece, in under a decade. One of the companies, Turning Technologies, sold 1.5 million in 2011 alone.

But clickers can now be found in […] churches, fire departments, cruise ships and health care providers [...] spreading the phenomenon of online crowdsourcing to off-line crowds. Fans of the devices say they are efficient, eco-friendly and techno-tickling, allowing audiences to mimic TV game-show contestants.

Do not, dear reader, mistake me for a neophile. I put off admitting digital innovations into my life until the penalties for resisting them are nipping at my heels – or a brother of mine has nagged me to distraction. I never forget that no matter how much more tools let us do today than we could yesterday, human nature remains the same at its core — fallible and perverse.

No technological wizardry has made it possible to hand over to robots the effort it takes to succeed at marriage, child-rearing, or working productively and in harmony with other people. All that calls for unceasing trial and error – and persistence, staring down disappointment and discouragement. I found a statement of this truth, twenty-five centuries old, browsing in my ravishing edition of the Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tsŭ’s Inner Chapters – for a reason to be explained in next week’s post.

‘When you wrack your brain trying to unify things,’ the passage begins,

… it is called ‘three in the morning’. What do I mean by ‘three in the morning’? A man who kept three monkeys said to them, ‘You get three acorns in the morning and four in the evening.’ This made them all very angry. So he said, ‘How about four in the morning and three in the evening?’ – and the monkeys were happy. The number of acorns was the same, but the different arrangement resulted in anger or pleasure. This is what I am talking about.

Empathetic listening could be a good guiding principle for some cooperatives, like the one the newspaper columnist has in mind. Other coops will want a different arrangement of acorns. It will all depend on the rules they make for running them.

I have yet to read Howard Rheingold’s latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online – but look forward particularly to seeing what he has to say in it about cooperation and collaboration, having glimpsed in this section his introduction to the ideas of Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009. He quotes her conclusion that

… ‘institutions of collective action’ were more likely to succeed when a small number of design principles were observed, and more likely to fail in the absence of these measures.

He lists her suggested principles, of which these struck me as most important:

Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
The right of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.

… Discussing suggestions like hers is exactly where the conversation about cooperatives needs to go next.

A triumph for cooperatives: customer-owned Swiss banks are thriving while their shareholder-owned rivals lick their wounds in disgrace

25/03/2012

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives, Switzerland, Switzerland's extreme democracy . Cooperatives in Switzerland, Direct democracy in Switzerland, Shareholder- vs. customer-owned banks in Switzerland, Success of cooperative banking in Switzerland

Though the Swiss seem to have a special knack for running cooperatives, there is new interest in this form of organisation in communities all over the world. Photograph by Amita Chatterjee

Everyone writing off cooperatives as impractical — or as artefacts of misguided ‘hippie’ idealism – will please read the article below, re-published with the permission of Swissinfo.ch, a section of Switzerland’s equivalent of the BBC.

The Swiss see cooperatives as building blocks of democracy. They are rightly proud of their own ‘extreme’ or ‘direct’ democracy — the subject of an earlier post here – based on the rigorous implementation of proportional representation, and are apt to shake their heads despairingly about the ‘winner-takes-all’ version of the system of government in other western democracies.

The Economist – which has a habit of sniffily referring to cooperative banks as ‘dull but safe’ – has cited two authorities confirming the wisdom of coops:

A 2009 study by the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, into the connection between financial stability and bank ownership also found that co-operative banks were much less likely to fail than those owned by private shareholders. That fits with earlier work done by staff at the IMF in 2007, who argued in a working paper that co-operative banks were more stable than their commercial counterparts.

23 March 2012

Crisis gives new life to cooperative banks

by Armando Mombelli, swissinfo.ch

——————————————————————————–

Sometimes seen as an old-fashioned business model, cooperative banks have succeeded in strengthening their position since the crisis in the financial sector.

The three main cooperative banks in Switzerland – the Raiffeisen, Migros and Coop banks – have been enjoying strong growth in the past few years.

“Until recent times, the banks had a stabilising effect on the economy. But in the past few years they have turned out to be a destabilising factor,” said Florian Wettstein, who teaches business ethics at St Gallen University.

“Growing international competition and pressure from shareholders have led to a logic of short-term profit with very negative consequences,” said Wettstein.

“We no longer talk about growth. What we want is bigger growth than last year’s or last quarter’s. At a certain point, this attempt defeats itself and we get speculative bubbles which burst sooner or later.”

The last such speculative bubble that burst in 2008 threw the financial sector into crisis and forced many countries to exert huge efforts to save banks in difficulty.

Even Switzerland was not spared: UBS, the number one Swiss bank, just missed going under thanks to massive intervention by the federal government and the country’s central bank.

“It is interesting to note that Swiss banks, in particular UBS, were not just caught up in this trend. They played a very active role on the international scene, throwing their traditional culture of caution to the winds,” noted Wettstein.

New management models

The crisis in the financial sector spread to the “real” economy and it is still negatively impacting on growth around the world. Governments have been studying new models of management and regulation of banking to avoid another major financial crisis.

Forbidding high-risk speculative ventures, separating investment banking from deposit management, limiting bonuses and various other measures have been examined by the Swiss government as well as others.

Government and parliament here have approved an increase in equity capital requirements for banks, higher than those enforced by other European countries. This measure has still been regarded as insufficient by many experts.

On the other hand, a business model that is sustainable and crisis-proof has existed for quite some time: it is the model of cooperative banks securely anchored in the local economy.

Since 2008, Raiffeisen, Migros and Coop bank have attracted thousands of customers and billions of francs away from the “big two”, UBS and Credit Suisse, whose credibility nosedived after the losses they took on the American market.

Last January, Raiffeisen almost completely took over Wegelin Bank, which had to shut down its activities when it found itself under investigation in the United States along with ten other Swiss banks accused of having helped thousands of American customers to evade taxes.

In February, Raiffeisen became the first bank to guarantee transparent financing of political parties and indicate it was in favour of the introduction of automatic exchange of information on bank deposits with European countries.

Several advantages

In difficult times for the financial services industry, this cooperative bank is showing itself particularly dynamic and willing to break with taboos like banking secrecy which no longer seem to have much of a future.

In the International Year of Cooperatives proclaimed by the UN, this fact may serve to renew interest in a business model often dismissed as old-fashioned – almost all the big cooperatives were founded more than half a century ago.

“Cooperative banks actually offer several advantages,” said the economist Hans Kissling.

“The main one is that they are not exposed to pressure from owners or shareholders, and so they do not go for big risks and excesses. Rather they pursue a long-term strategy in the interest of their members, who are also their customers.”

“Once shares are not involved, there is no danger of things like insider trading. Nor is there a danger of public takeover bids at their expense: attempted takeovers by other companies have to be approved by the members,” added Kissling, who is a former board member of a cooperative.

“And last but not least, capital does not drain from the company through payments of exorbitant dividends or salaries. It stays in the cooperative and gets used for new investments or to strengthen its equity.”

Democracy and solidarity

Tending as they do to democracy and solidarity, cooperatives almost always come out on top of the rankings for companies that enjoy the trust of the ordinary public.

This has not in itself been enough to stimulate growth in the sector: every year thousands of limited companies are founded in Switzerland, but only a handful of cooperatives are set up.

“The government should introduce tax breaks or create a special fund to promote the conversion of family businesses into cooperatives, for example on the death of the owner. Another option might be to introduce share certificates without the right to vote, which would encourage the capitalisation of cooperatives,” said Kissling.

In the Swiss banking sector, most of the potential for this kind of development would come from the cantonal banks, which several cantons hope to privatise eventually. Conversion of these into cooperatives instead of limited companies would help safeguard their original mandate.

In this way, almost half of the 20 principal Swiss banks could one day become cooperatives.

“Promotion of cooperatives should above all be anchored in the constitution, as it is in Italy,” maintained Kissling.

“This would not only serve to acknowledge the economic and social importance of cooperatives, but also to emphasise the long Swiss tradition of solidarity, which goes right back to the country’s roots.”

He recalls that the Swiss Confederation is called in German “Eidgenossenschaft”, which literally means “a cooperative of sworn allies”.

Armando Mombelli, swissinfo.ch

(Translated from Italian by Terence MacNamee)

[ Of course cooperatives -- being creations of imperfect human beings -- also have their flaws, and these are considered in a swissinfo.ch briefing on the topic. ]

Now, net-shunning Private Eye outranks even The Economist as Britain’s most popular current affairs magazine

05/03/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . Co-owned media, Education secretary Michael Gove, Ian Hislop, Leveson Inquiry, Lord Gnome, Non-partisan journalism, Private Eye magazine

Ian Hislop, who has been Private Eye's editor since 1986

Private Eye cover, 12 April 2008

All hail Private Eye, whose circulation grew by more than ten per cent last year, when so many famous names linked to old media were — are — howling about print meeting its doom.

All hail Private Eye, not least because, as far as I can tell, no one in mainstream media has, on this occasion. There have been no laurel wreaths from its rivals, no adulatory editorials or delving into the reasons for its astonishing success since the Audit Bureau of Circulations released the latest figures in mid-February – although the media section of one broadsheet did carry brief news items on the subject.

All hail Private Eye because, in spite of its (affectionate) marginalisation as a ‘satirical magazine,’ it looks as if it could be becoming Britons’ most reliable source of printed information about what is happening in the UK — or close to that. The trade publication Media Week anointed it ‘the leading news and current affairs magazine by issue in the country, nearly 18,000 copies ahead of The Economist,’ with the minor qualifier that ‘its rival title is published weekly.’ (That qualifier is probably meaningless, since I reckon that most subscribers would be delighted to buy it once a week.)

There is no reason to disagree with the Eye’s managing director, Sheila Molnar, who explained two years ago that ‘People always turn to us in times of trouble because they trust us. With the MPs’ expenses row and the banks, people trust Private Eye and what they read in it.’

Though the Eye has no digital edition and is virtually ignoring the internet, its pages are saturated with the fearless, irreverent, outsider ethos of the web and blogging world – most obvious in its ‘Street of Shame’ column. There, as its editor Ian Hislop told Lord Justice Leveson in January at the official Inquiry into press culture and standards, his writers concentrate on the foibles of the 4^th Estate — on

… stories about

journalists misbehaving. It tends to be anything from

making up stories, drunkenness, stealing stories from

each other, printing things that are totally and utterly

untrue, promoting each other for reasons that aren’t

terribly ethical, sucking up to their proprietors, being

told what to do by their proprietors, running stories

because their proprietors insist on it, marshalling the

facts towards a conclusion that they’ve already decided

on.

Private Eye’s robustness confirms these suspicions at post-Gutenberg about the secrets of media thriving in the transition to the 5^thEstate – in its case, with only token contributions to its operating budget from advertisers, which is why it cannot afford to give away its contents on the net:

It is strictly non-partisan

The political left, right and centre are all flayed with equal relish. As noted here last month, highly-placed apologists for a worrying shift in 4th Estate practices feel that there is nothing wrong with abandoning political neutrality – but a reader poll on the site of The Economist shows that this is, overwhelmingly, the very opposite of what the public wants.

It is – without fear or favour – supplying the uncomfortable, true facts indispensable to government by the people, or what we call democracy

It might just as well be called The Whistleblower Wire. It tackles malfeasance as no other publication does, across a staggering breadth of public life. A small sample: ‘Called to Ordure’ (parliamentary proceedings); ‘Medicine Balls’ (mainly, the National Health Service); ‘Signal Failures’ (the railway network); ‘The Agri Brigade’ (farming and food policies); ‘Rotten Boroughs’ (local government); ‘Music and Musicians’; ‘Keeping the Lights On’ (the law and lawyers); ‘Books and Bookmen’ (cronyism in book publishing).

It relies on its readers for its peerless investigative reporting

… and did so long before the internet came along with its promise of building reader ‘communities’. As Ian Hislop said in his Leveson evidence, his magazine

operates as a sort of club where people not only buy the

magazine, they write a lot of it, which is the principle

we work on. Broadly, the sources come from people

inside their professions, so the medical column, the

column about energy, the pieces in the back, a lot of

those are given by people directly involved.

None of its content is influenced by advertising

As it does not run on the advertising-centred business model for publishing — unlike virtually every other great name in print journalism — it has no need to court or bow to corporate panjandrums and satraps, and its articles are not distorted by their manipulations.

Its success underlines the undesirability of concentrated media ownership, as it has the extreme editorial independence only possible when a publication is not beholden to any single media mogul or proprietor trading favours, buying influence, or vulnerable to manipulation or blackmail

In some ways, Private Eye can be seen as an early prototype of the ‘keiretsu-cooperative,’ a model for post-Gutenberg publishing in which sites are co-owned with clubs of reader-contributors. Its Wikipedia entry lists no fewer than seventeen shareholders, and says that the magazine has never disclosed exactly who has contributed what to its capitalization and upkeep.

What is an instance of this magazine’s uniqueness and indispensability? The other day, when all the broadsheets reported that the education secretary, Michael Gove, had condemned the Leveson Inquiry for its ‘chilling effect’ on the media, they failed to explain why he was complaining so bitterly about an investigation initiated by his own leader, David Cameron, and in the same tirade, lauding Rupert’s Murdoch’s launch of the Sun on Sunday. They also offered not a single example of what noble journalism the Inquiry has supposedly been inhibiting — just as he failed to do.

Mystification over all that was beginning to make me feel mildly unhinged when the latest Eye arrived. There I discovered that the education secretary is married to — well, well, well, a journalist on the Times. And who owns the Times? Let us say, a certain Australian-born media mogul.

And, returning briefly to the subject of ownership … As diligent use of both inductive and deductive logic has yet to yield incontrovertible proof of his existence, I must reluctantly dismiss as speculation all hints to the effect that Private Eye does in fact have a proprietor — a reclusive individual writing occasionally under the rubric, ‘A Message From Lord Gnome’. The same goes for any suggestion that he is simply too shy or coy to (a) scotch rumours that his life’s ambition is to be more elusive than the putative Higgs boson particle, and (b), admit that he has no help from ghostwriters in recording his sublime meditations, as on the subject of the recent fate of bankers:

[W]here, we must ask, will this witchhunt end? Which other leading figures in the economic life of our country will be next to be hunted down, to be publicly humiliated, as their names are execrated across the land?

Why a keiretsu-cooperative is a gentle transition for old media — and how about saying, ‘an exaltation of bloggers’?

21/02/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Social media and networking, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . Cooperatives renamed, Edward Hadas, Facebook as a cooperative, Keiretsu-cooperatives as a halfway house, Paul Smalera

Parallel and convergent thinking about co-ownership

What’s in a name?

A lot, I suspect, when the subject is cooperatives.

Writers delete or tear up drafts, painters scrape paint off canvases that refuse to match the visions of a mind’s eye – and versions of co-owned enterprises, surely hundreds of thousands of them over the years, have ended up on some equivalent of the cutting-room floor.

But associations with failures of the past should hardly be allowed to stain the excellent solution cooperatives could be. Certainly not now, when – as noted on post-Gutenberg last week in a post about Facebook – the World Wide Web is proving to be a matchless engine for running them, and getting around the classic banes of collaborative ownership and administration.

What if our name for these organisations has become the chief enemy of their promise? Should we call them something else? Say, leaps – as in a leap of leopards, to convey a jump in the right direction for co-ownership and co-action? Peer-to-peer pods, anyone? Straightforwardly, collaboratives? Or just flats, perhaps, as shorthand emphasising that these are anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian and decentralised structures.

The next few years should see the evolution of specialised terms for variations of such online organisations – or simply net-related groupings – that meet different needs. I have for some time been fondly considering an exaltation of bloggers for our key-tapping multitude, in a nod to the seductive title of James Lipton’s book about collective nouns, An Exaltation of Larks.

Since last week, search engines have led me to others who think that Facebook should be turned into a cooperative – although there was little open support for this suggestion when it was first proposed under the screen name ‘postgutenberg’ last September in a comment beneath David Mitchell’s semi-serious call for the ‘nationalisation’ of the social mega-network. (That comment, too, was inexplicably censored by The Guardian, but I have a copy of the page as it was before the axe descended.)

A writer for Reuters, Paul Smalera, carefully set out the reasons why a collaboratively owned and run Facebook makes sense:

Why not share the company itself? It’s fine to talk about technology’s power to change the world if you’re the one who’s going to profit from it. But this isn’t really a change […] it should become a nearly one-of-a-kind company for the technology sector: a co-op.

[…]

Facebook wouldn’t be forgoing its fundraising if it abandoned its IPO and became a co-op. [...] In Facebook’s virtual community, its 845 million users could easily pay a small sum — say $5 in the U.S. and some locally adjusted equivalent in other countries — to become an owner. Some of that money would be used to buy out existing stock owners and set up the new management model — it would still have Zuckerberg as CEO with a management team, but with the same one vote that every other member has. Over time, if Facebook’s owners keep the cost of becoming a member as low as possible without in any way starving the site for cash, Facebook could even become the world’s first trillion-dollar company — just in a way no one has ever previously imagined.

He went on to give even more specific suggestions for how it might operate:

Facebook already offers voting tools, organization pages, recommendation links, polling, etc. With the help of a management team and committee structure, it would be pretty easy to let members assign themselves to committees and shape Facebook into the community they want it to be.

[…]

[T]hink of a sample proposal. Say a user wants Facebook to give 10 percent of its income to charity.

1. She creates a new page and persuades her friends to follow it. The page holds the pro and con discussions of the proposal.

2. After hitting a certain threshold of followers, the page makes the Revenue Committee agenda, where a subcommittee is assigned to study its feasibility and write a summary about the proposal’s impact on Facebook, including how it would affect the bottom line.

3. The committee then votes on the summary — if it’s approved, it goes into a general Facebook meeting, where the entire user base gets to vote. […]

Commenters on the Smalera piece were understandably pessimistic about the chances of Mark Zuckerberg handing over Facebook to its members. So was a colleague of his, Edward Hadas, in a critical but beautifully balanced consideration of his arguments a few days later. He concluded on an encouraging note:

[T]he limited success of the cooperative movement does not equate to a resounding triumph for its ideological opposite – the shareholder value cult. If profits were all that mattered for the economy, then more than a quarter of all American workers would not be employed by enterprises that function, often quite well, without profit motive – 17 percent by governments and another 11 percent by private, not-for-profit, organisations.

[…]

In organising the economy, greedy schemers and utopian dreamers are not the only alternatives. Like well-run government agencies and prudent shareholder-owned companies, well-designed cooperatives can be efficient servants of the common good.

The expectation of resistance to a pure cooperative explains why the keirestu-cooperative — first proposed two years ago for the evolution of publishing – does not entail starting a co-owned enterprise from scratch.

It lays out, instead, a scheme that amounts to a halfway house for old print media moving into the future. A newspaper publisher could experiment with sharing ownership of a segment of its site with readers paying small sums for their subscriptions or shares. This section would ideally be one in which readers already contribute most of the content today, in their role as commenters.

As part of the experiment, the co-owners would share any profits from advertising attracted to the trial site, which would give them an extra incentive to lure more readers and part-owners to it.

Setting up such a site – starting with software design and registering co-owners – would cost money. A newspaper publisher could share that, and the expense of site administration, by entering simultaneously into a funding partnership with, say, a book publisher catering to essentially the same audience.

That would make for a collaboration resembling the loose affiliations between firms that the Japanese call a keiretsu.

People who reject that word as too exotic need to know that it is easy to say – ky-ret-su – and should remember that there was a time when we were just as frightened of the word karaoke, which has since become as unremarkable as pizza.

The scheme is all. A keiretsu-cooperative by any other name would be fine by me – as long as someone, I mean, some few, are brave enough to try it out.

A better Facebook — or why cooperatives run on the web should work better than the old hippie kind

14/02/2012

Cheryll Barron . Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Social media and networking, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing . Albert Einstein, Cooperatives on the web, Deborah Orr, Einstein on 'Why Socialism?', Facebook as a cooperative owned by its users, Hippie cooperatives, Mark Zuckerberg as a social reformer, Michaeleen Doucleff, Nick Bilton

‘Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.’ When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat … [E]motionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centres of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs.’

‘Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker,’

Michaeleen Doucleff, The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2012

Digesting a grisly dissection of the bio-chemical effects of romance set to music in a financial newspaper told me that February the 14^th can only become a more diabolical conspiracy between commercial and scientific calculation.

No sooner had I slogged through the neuroscientific perspective on l’amour than I found an email message from Hewlett-Packard offering me a 50 per cent discount on printer ink with the coupon code ‘HPLOVE20’. The promotion was not stingy with fake sentiment: ‘Our adoration for you is lasting – this offer is not.’

And there you have the reasons why post-gutenberg.com would rather dedicate today not to courtship or its consequences but to the perfect potential marriage of means and ends that we have in the World Wide Web — for redesigning the way companies make money from social networking.

The plan for this Alternative Valentine’s Day was inspired by reading Deborah Orr’s thoughtful anti-Facebook protest in The Guardian last week:

“While the US was extolling the virtues of neoliberal corporatism […] Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the world wide web, and gifting it to the planet, for people like Mark Zuckerberg to exploit.”

And to make sure no one had missed the significance of what she said, commenters on her piece underlined its essence:

Not sure how many will realise that what Deborah is saying amounts to this:

(i) Tim Berners-Lee, while working as a research scientist in Geneva, gave us all the World Wide Web for nothing

(ii) Facebook users are giving the world information about themselves for nothing

(iii) Mark Zuckerberg came along and used Tim’s and everyone else’s generosity to everyone else to make a pile for himself.

1 extremely remarkable member of the 1% indeed.

When will the average Facebook user catch on?

That users are beginning to grasp the dimensions of the Facebook heist – in plain sight and with the full cooperation of its victims – is clear from newspaper articles elsewhere:

Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’

Nick Bilton

The New York Times

February 5, 2012, 11:00 am

SAN FRANCISCO — By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.

Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.

So all this leaves me with a question: Where’s my cut? I helped build this thing, too. Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties.

Some of Deborah Orr’s commenters – or at least one – thought the remedy for this injustice obvious:

[ lightly edited for repetition ]

[W]e need to start a movement to turn Facebook into a giant cooperative — in which the users make up the rules, and personal information is not sold to anyone.

[…]

Alternatively, …I have heard that a new, improved Mark Zuckerberg wants to be perceived as a force for good in society — and that he is clashing with the strictly business-oriented senior executives in his company over this…. If he’s serious, why not acknowledge that Facebook’s users supply the personal information about themselves that he has exploited to get rich — as Deborah Orr says — and that this is deeply wrong, …and flip ownership of his company over to Facebook’s members?

Lots of us had our first encounters with cooperatives in the 1970s — as places owned and run by early evangelists for whole-grain and organic foods that were hard to find anywhere else. Sometimes, those hairy hippies operated cafés where you could eat earnest, do-gooder sandwiches fringed with medicinal bean sprouts and tasting like specially aged damp sawdust.

Many such organisations disintegrated because of warring and secretive factions that did not always share what they knew; slow communication between members; the logistical difficulties that meeting in person often entailed, and confusion about aims and aspirations.

For cooperatives using these digital thingies we all have now, many of those problems would never arise. The new tools make it easy for everyone to see the same information, and to spell out goals and policies crisply. And, as the same commenter said.

To run an organisation designed as a cooperative, everyone involved could study complex new information together online, and decide questions at the blinding speed that, … for instance, … The Guardian’s opinion polls work on this very site.

Consider, please:

‘the scheme of social organisation which places the means of production of wealth and the distribution of that wealth into the hands of the community.’

That is a dictionary definition (Chambers) of what became a dirty word for many of us, because the idea was so corrupted in its execution. Yes, I mean, socialism.

But that was before this means of communicating and transparent decision-making was invented.

A hybrid between socialism and capitalism is what we need as a transitional scheme, and you can download a no-holds-barred exchange on that subject here (a free download: see the comments and response to them at the end, if in a hurry): The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for Post-Gutenberg Publishing
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1532173

Well alright, I’ll admit that those comments closely echo sentiments expressed on this blog. They might even have been made by the same tiresome blogger.

Cooperatives sound embarrassingly utopian. But they are the finest examples of socialism in action that we have. An earlier entry in this spot quoted an authority on the subject saying that in the U.S., capitalism’s Mecca, 13 million American already work for these organisations.

Some people react to philosophical nudges in that direction with a silence in which you can almost hear them thinking, ‘But who are you to propose evolutionary possibilities for business?’

Actually, nobody. But Albert Einstein anticipated this little difficulty. In a 1949 essay, ‘Why Socialism?’, he reached far back into history to analyse people’s reluctance to break out of well-established patterns, noting:

The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But, as he said in his conclusion,

[W]e should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Where is it engraved in stone that Facebook has to be owned by a wealthy 1 per cent enriched by the 99 per cent sharing their private information as unquestioningly as feudal serfs?

Approaching the keiretsu-cooperative: Nick Clegg, Jaron Lanier, and a bold move at Ladies’ Home Journal

24/01/2012

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . Diane Malloy, Jaron Lanier, Keiretsu-cooperative, Ladies' Home Journal, Nick Clegg, Professional rates for amateur writers, The Guardian's employee ownership poll. John Lewis economy

… Now and then, as in this week’s entry, post-gutenberg.com will spotlight signs that the keiretsu-cooperative — a structure for co-owning media — is an idea whose time has come …

Ladies' Home Journal: Art Deco cover, 1922

Media maidens venturing boldly into the future

That the Ladies’ Home Journal – an American magazine founded in 1883 – was still being published at all came as a bigger shock than reading about its plan for avoiding extinction. It is a title I have only ever seen mentioned in biographies of writers and political history, but it apparently has a circulation of over three million. A headline caught my eye: ‘A New Ladies’ Home Journal Written Mostly by Readers’.

Aha! I thought, could that signal an evolutionary leap in the treatment of ‘user-generated content’? Had I stumbled on the experiment in co-owned media that is long overdue, for some of us – as a first stage of true media reform?

No it is not, but that could conceivably be the next stage of the LHJ plan. From its March issue onwards, the magazine is to be filled with articles by amateurs paid at professional rates, whose facts will be checked by the editors. The publisher, Diane Malloy, explained that

research showed the magazine’s readers wanted more of their voices reflected in the content and to feel as if they belonged to a community.

If the LHJ were to go on to give readers a stake in the magazine, that would ensure far more passionate commitment and loyalty to their community.

Nick Clegg

A speech for the ages by Nick Clegg

Co-owned media got an indirect vote of confidence from Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister, in a 16 January speech more thoughtful than any set of utterances by a politician I have seen for a long time. What he proposed, addressing business leaders in the City of London– no less – is the most intelligent solution to the widening social inequality on which the Occupy movement has focused our attention. Somehow, that clear implication of what he said went largely unreported in media coverage of the event.

[W]e … need a better distribution of power within our economy.

… [I]t’s not just shareholder power that matters. Ultimately investors seek profits … Some enlightened shareholders might see the benefits of a well-rewarded workforce, but the people best placed to look after the interests of staff are staff. And that is what, so far, has been missing from this debate: ordinary people.

[W]e don’t believe our problem is too much capitalism: we think it’s that too few people have capital. We need more individuals to have a real stake in their firms.

Readers of this blog will know how closely aligned his conclusions are with ideas expressed here – in ‘Wanted: a brave newspaper for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders’, and ‘Co-owning media is on the horizon, and press coverage of the Leveson enquiry shows why we need this.’

In a speech last July, the P. M.’ s deputy took a stand against the unhealthy concentration of power in the media:

[D]iversity of ownership is an indelible liberal principle because a corporate media monopoly threatens a free press almost as much as a state monopoly does.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier comes to the right conclusion about paying for content — or rather, paying whom

A super-geek he may be, down to his last dreadlock, but Jaron Lanier inspects the classic positions and tenets of the geekocracy with a coolly objective eye. He advocates compensating the ‘ordinary people’ Nick Clegg mentioned, not — so far — as stakeholders, but as suppliers of ‘content’ that media moguls and their giant corporations, like Facebook, are exploiting shamelessly. He asked in the New York Times last week:

What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions? If all content were valued instead of only mogul content, perhaps an information economy would elevate success for all. But under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.

Obviously, the editors at the Ladies’ Home Journal – paying their readers the same fees for content as professionals – are shouting, not whispering, their understanding of the way media reform will now proceed.

Oxford Street branch of the John Lewis Partnership, 1936

An instructive poll for the Guardian

It was astonishing to see the results of a poll on the Guardian site related to the Clegg co-ownership proposal. Eighty-seven per cent of the poll-takers voted ‘yes’ in answer to a question referring to Britain’s most famous employee-owned company: ‘Would you like to live in a John Lewis style economy?’ That surely added up to endorsing a recommendation of such a structure for ownership of the Guardian itself, or some part of it — even if proposals made in the online paper’s comments section for experimentally co-owning bits of it with readers were censored more than once last year. Ahem.

Nick Clegg and his personal think tank appeared to have anticipated precisely such — erm, discouragement, when he suggested in the same speech,

… giving employees a new, universal “Right to Request” shares. Imagine: an automatic opportunity for every employee to seek to enter into a share scheme, enjoying the tax benefits that come with it, taking what for many people might seem out of their reach, and turning it into a routine decision …

In other words, no one would be censored or punished simply for asking an employer for a stake in a company… Still, well done, Gruan, for conducting that poll. Soon, you might almost be as brave as the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Will 2012 be the year of a great leap forward into media’s future — even at The New York Times?

30/12/2011

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . Co-owned media, Cooperatives, Gar Alperovitz, Jeff Jarvis, Media reform, post-Gutenberg publishing models, The New York Times, Tom Stites

Back to the future 1: barn-raising

Back to the future 2: the work of quilting bees -- Steven Heller

My new year will begin not with a resolution but a hope.

It has been a bit lonely, trying to persuade other people intimately acquainted with mainstream media to discuss specific proposals for media reform. But three short essays published in the last month – to which I am about to post links – show that I am in good company in suspecting that co-owning media with readers and viewers could be the most realistic route into the future. It is no longer quixotic to hope that the most rigid opponents of reform will give alternatives to the status quo a friendlier reception.

With any luck, I will soon be able to drop the subject of media restructuring from this blog because powerful media people persistently refusing to discuss it have, at last, picked up the torch.

My personal high-water mark for the media establishment’s resistance to the new dates from the spring of 2010, when I emailed a question to an editor near the top of The New York Times.

The press has been critical to the success of democracy as a form of government; how is it responding to its own democratisation, and how far would it be prepared to go on that road — voluntarily? If you could recommend the right person at the paper for these questions, I’d be immensely grateful.

Zzzzzzzzzing! … the editor’s reply came fast enough to set heads spinning:

I don’t know that anyone would have a specific opinion on this, at least not one that represented the Times in general. You might look to see if an editorial has ever been written about it. If not, I suspect your question doesn’t have an answer. [my ital.]

No search engine brings up any such NYT editorial. What that response was surely supposed to impress on me was that ‘our’ never having addressed the question meant that it was inherently unanswerable.

Which is patently untrue – but that was then, and I cannot believe that anyone with a senior role in running the newspaper would respond so loftily today. The subject of co-owned institutions is not apparently off-limits for the editors there, as it is for large numbers of their fellow-citizens. Nor do they automatically dismiss it as ‘socialism’, very nearly a term of abuse in much of the U. S. — a fact that has always struck me as a bit odd about a country that is not only the home of capitalism and Ayn Rand’s woolgathering about the ‘virtues of selfishness,’ but of cherished memories of communal barn-raising and quilting bees.

On 14 December, the NYT gave Gar Alperovitz, the author of America Beyond Capitalism, the chance to tell us, in ‘Worker-Owners of America, Unite!’:

[M]ore and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.

Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

Out in the blogosphere, these posts were waiting to be discovered:

In a 9 December entry on the site of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Tom Stites, the president and founder of the Banyan Project — which is building a model for web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative focusing on local news — asked: ‘Might the new web journalism model be neither for-profit nor nonprofit?’ He said, in part:

In this era of rampant deceptive business practices,[…] a significant source of co-ops’ strength is the trustworthiness inherent in their democratic and accountable structure.

This is also an era of rampant mistrust of journalism, so co-op news sites’ trustworthiness has the potential to add value to what they publish. Further, the co-op form allows, or rather demands, that news coverage decisions arise from the what a community’s people need rather than from today’s dominant approaches […] The web is inherently collaborative — just as co-ops are — and at the local level this creates the potential for civic synergy that could add still more value to co-op community journalism.

On 19 December, Jeff Jarvis, a new media expert, suggested that The New York Times should consider using a ‘reverse pay meter’.

As I ponder the future of The New York Times, it occurred to me that its pay meter could be exactly reversed. I’ll also tell you why this wouldn’t work in a minute. But in any case, this is a way to illustrate how how media are valuing our readers/users/customers opposite how we should, rewarding the freeriders and taxing—and perhaps turning away—the valuable users.

[...]

Imagine that you pay to get access to The Times. […] But whenever you add value to The Times, you earn a credit that delays the next bill.

» You see ads, you get credit.

» You click: more credit.

» You come back often and read many pages: credit.

» You promote The Times on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog: credit. The more folks share what you’ve shared, the more credit you get.

[ … and several other suggestions along these lines …]

He said in closing:

Readers bring value to sites if the sites are smart enough to have the mechanisms to recognize, exploit, and reward that value, which comes in many forms…

Regular visitors to post-Gutenberg.com will have noticed a striking overlap between the essence of the Stites and Jarvis schemes and the proposal for a ‘keiretsu-cooperative’ as the ideal structure for media of the future. (New readers will want to see: The Keiretsu-Cooperative: A Model for Post-Gutenberg Publishing.)

May this most welcome parallelism lead to actual change — soon.

In the meanwhile, Happy New Year!

A reply to Richard Stacy: the keiretsu-cooperative is at the opposite pole from a ‘walled garden’

12/12/2011

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, E-books, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . Amazon's Kindle Select, Anil Dash, Business models for e-publishing, Expert Labs, James Dyson, Keiretsu-cooperative, Kindle Direct Publishing, Richard Stacy, The Journal of Light Construction

A keiretsu-cooperative for Santas? Despite the mist, they were travelling too fast to ask

Since I posted this entry, Richard Stacy has written ‘A Futher Reply …’ well worth reading, and I have responded in his comments section, also explaining why post-gutenberg.com is unfortunately not open for commenting.

Richard,

I have enjoyed thinking about your answer. It has been impossible to discard this idea for a keiretsu-cooperative because practical people – including, as I am about to explain, a young technologist working for Barack Obama – keep telling me that it could just work.

First and quickly, some clarifications: the keiretsu-cooperative would let large conventional publishers collaborate to share the costs of setting up — or extending — a publishing and discussion site designed to attract the indie writers we call bloggers. To enlist the help of these bloggers and make the site a success, the large publishers would allow each of them to acquire a small financial stake. The stake could take the form of a subscription to the site. No one would be excluded from reading or looking at the site’s contents, so it would not be what you called, in the first, fast, version of your reply, ‘a walled garden.’ I mention this because it is a misconception that keeps cropping up elsewhere, but what I have in mind is at the other pole. Stakeholders would have just two important advantages over those who chose not to subscribe: (i) chances to participate in the management of the site and vote on decisions affecting it; (ii) a share of any future profits. You might not agree, but I do not see any of this as inconsistent with your vision of media being transformed from a collection of rigid and exclusive institutions to a process – since the keiretsu-cooperative would be flexible, mutable and inclusive, with porous boundaries.

Publishers could test co-ownership inexpensively by running an experiment in a comments section of an existing site.

It was never my ambition to be a designer of futuristic structures for publishing. This proposal for ways of injecting ‘plurality’ into the ownership of publishing simply grew out of observing for five years how much commenters contributing posts to a ‘liberal’ newspaper resented being censored — not for obscene or rude remarks, but for challenging in civil tones the paper’s vested interests, both the political and commercial varieties.

I wondered, when did we ever give newspapers the right to tell us what thoughts were acceptable? I found myself reading widely about the start of the social revolutions we know as the Renaissance, for which the newly-invented Gutenberg press acted as a fulcrum. My most startling discovery was that censorship was practically invented with printing. Of course that seemed obvious after a few moments’ reflection, but what it underlined, for me, was the extent to which control of the levers of mass communication – or what we call the media – can undermine democracy, even in societies proud of their tradition of licensing free speech.

Then I considered another question: what arrangement for running media could best accommodate a democracy’s need to give people the facts they must have to vote wisely?

I was pleased to find your paper for proof that someone in the business world has also been reflecting on today’s crisis in publishing with history for a lens. From a realm far removed from mine, you reached the identical conclusion: that today’s leaders in traditional media are failing to understand that ‘[P]ower and influence in the world that is now forming […] will have a tendency to exclude any forms of institutional interference, control or ownership.’

Another new media consultant, like you, surprised me by instantly grasping the logic of the keiretsu-cooperative. Anil Dash, a 36 year-old technocrat entrusted by the White House with leading Expert Labs – a non-commercial organisation helping Barack Obama to democratise governing by exploring ways of using digital tools to let citizens assist the government with their expertise – sent this reaction to the scheme:

This is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, since I’ve worked at a newspaper and helped making new publishing platforms online.

[…]

I have had far too many years in the trenches with the cynics and the naysayers and the slowly-failing publishers. But what I *love* about the idea is that it’s new, and provocative, and not the same old proposals we hear bandied about all the time.

A lot of the dialogue is dominated by the legacy issues of older publishers, and that makes it hard to propose relatively radical new ideas.

I think you accurately capture the motivations of all the parties involved, and I share your optimism that various parties would want to pay for participation.

He did have one reservation:

[W]here I struggle a bit … is in seeing an iterative path that gets us to this eventual keiretsu. I am not sure if we can make incremental steps, or if we have to start with this radical new point all at once, but I do think the former is a lot easier to get funded than the latter.

I do hope you’ll pursue this, though.

In last week’s entry in this blog, I mentioned that I was waiting to hear from another correspondent, ‘A’. I wanted to know whether it was ever part of his collaborative publishing plan to offer readers (not just editorial staff, early investors and managers) the opportunity to become stakeholders in the thriving specialist magazine, The Journal of Light Construction (JLC), that he developed with a few partners – and which has at the heart of its online site a lively forum for exchanging technical information. His reply said, in part:

The “readers” (more on that in a moment) of JLC were going to be the primary people offered ownership of the company (remember my mention of a DPO [direct public offering]?). After all, the company was really little more than a pot into which all of them had tossed their experience, know-how and money. How could it not be theirs to own?

Regarding the “readers” thing…this seems to be the biggest intellectual hurdle the old-media, Gutenberg folks have to overcome. Print, TV and most radio are a one-way, I’ll-give-you-what-I-want-to-give-you-when-I-want-to-give-it-to-you street, when the “customer’s” (more on that in a moment) need is to-have-what-I-want-when-I-want-it. From a business perspective you will note the potentially irresolvable dichotomy between media’s mission statement and that form of practice.

[…]

Regarding the “customers” thing, see the paragraph above…and note that the internet is a two-way street. The one-way signs no longer apply. Just as its advent revealed print in that realm is dead, so is “the customer.” There’s a community on that block, and they’re all in it together. So remember, look both ways before crossing.

No sooner had I digested that than an announcement from Amazon.com popped up in my email inbox. It was about Kindle Select, a new addition to its Kindle Direct Publishing enterprise for independent writers of e-books:

We’re excited to introduce KDP Select – a new option dedicated to KDP authors and publishers worldwide, featuring a fund of $500,000 in December 2011 and at least $6 million in total for 2012! KDP Select gives you a new way to earn royalties, reach a broader audience, and use a new set of promotional tools.

Here’s how KDP Select works:

When you make any of your titles exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, those with US rights will automatically be included in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library and can earn a share of a monthly fund. The monthly fund for December 2011 is $500,000 and will total at least $6 million in 2012.

[…]

How your share of the monthly fund is calculated:

Your share of the monthly fund is based on your enrolled titles’ share of the total number of borrows across all participating KDP titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

This is a very different proposition from the keiretsu-cooperative, but the schemes do overlap in giving writers a financial incentive – by way of micropayments – to participate in a type of collaborative publishing experiment. I am still making up my mind about the attractiveness of Select. Though I am on record as a fan of Kindle Direct Publishing, I do not like Amazon’s requirement that writers who join this new scheme give it exclusive rights, even for 90 days. I would be more attracted by a plan that gave writers some say in the running of Kindle Select. Amazon also tends to be stingy with information about how it manages its e-book publishing – refusing, for instance, to explain its system for ranking e-books in various categories.

I think you would agree, Richard, that plurality, transparency and accountability are the forces we want to see shaping publishing in the future.

But at least this news from the book retailing giant is proof of its continuing willingness to stick its neck out for a bold experiment. Google also experiments endlessly – promptly euthanising ideas that prove to be duds.

New media specialists like these do understand that adventurousness is the key to success. Old media institutions, as you point out, only feel safe making small, incremental changes. You and ‘A’ could easily be singing in two-part harmony on this point:

Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian has talked about involving “Our Readers” in producing “Our Product”. The problem is that news is no longer Alan’s product – it belongs to the people (he likes to call) readers and it doesn’t really live in fixed places (websites, newspapers) anymore, it lives in digital spaces (Google search terms).

As the oldies are more inclined to trust leaders in tangible, bricks-and-mortar businesses, they could do worse than consider the innovative appliance king, James Dyson. He was told by every vacuum cleaner manufacturer under the sun that his ‘business model’ for selling a dirt sucker without a dirt-collecting bag was unworkable – even if such a product could ever be designed and made to work. He and his engineers discarded thousands of prototypes on their way to success … of which I am now a sub-microscopic beneficiary. Last year, the 25 year-old Electrolux in my house was replaced by a yellow-and-purple Dyson with a look of R2D2 about it. It works like – yes, the dream with which James Dyson began.

I think it’s too soon to conclude, as you suggest, that ‘media may be becoming something that can’t actually be owned in a way which allows any form of monetary benefit’. If you mean, owned by a privileged few, or moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, I agree, but not if you mean, shared by a large, loosely affiliated group of citizens. How could you, or any of us, know? There simply have not been any experiments exactly like, or closely resembling, the keiretsu-cooperative – so far.

Here is a song I suggest that old media types might try singing together at their meetings about surviving the future (with apologies to Cole Porter):

Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night …
…
Experiment and you’ll see.

P.S. I almost forgot to say — by my definition, you are a blogger, just as you are a writer, in a part of your life – since I think of a blogger as being anyone who publishes unmediated texts on the internet, including comments on newspaper and other sites. ‘A rose by any other name,’ etc..

Co-owning media is on the horizon — and press coverage of the Leveson Inquiry shows why we need this

06/12/2011

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Cooperatives, Leveson Inquiry, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The 5th Estate in action . Alastair Campbell, Harvard's Nieman Lab, JLC, Leveson Inquiry, Media co-ownership, Nick Davies -- Guardian freelance, Restructuring media, Richard Stacy, The Journal of Light Construction, The New York Times

Panda drummer: who can speak?

Blindly they saw themselves and deaf they heard –

But who can speak of this?

–Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, 12^th c. A.D.

Persian trans. by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi, 1984

A stranger, someone astute and entrepreneurial, emailed me about a comment posted in a discussion about the future of journalism on the site of Harvard’s Nieman Lab. ‘I think you’re on the right track with your focus on the business-model issue,’ he said.

He was referring to an outline of a means for old media organisations to move into post-print publishing in a Networking Age in which readers want to be more than passive audiences – to do more than influence stage management and be free to perform themselves. I set out a scheme for turning readers into financial stakeholders or co-owners – experimentally, at first, on parts of newspaper sites – suggesting that this might be an ownership structure for the future.

The essence of the idea was that every subscription would also be a share or financial stake in prospective profits. It would be an inducement for each reader or viewer to help bring many more visitors to a site. It would both help the site owner to attract more advertising and – implicitly – reduce dependence on advertising, if the concept of subscription-stakes caught on and went viral.

‘I tried an experiment along the lines of the one you are proposing,’ my correspondent continued. ‘It was a tremendous success … as far as it went.’

I shall call this correspondent ‘A’, as he does not want more recognition for what he did than his fellow-experimenters. The link to wallets and handbags for their plan was so clear that it had venture capitalists salivating. The idea was to monetise a publication and online forum on building for professionals and amateurs – an offshoot of the Journal of Light Construction (JLC), a magazine now 24 years old that is also the marquee name for a popular trade show. You can tell that it is thoroughly up-to-the-minute from the table of contents, where the offerings can range from ‘Pouring Complicated Slab Foundations’ to ‘Promoting Yourself With YouTube’.

The Journal of Light Construction

The forum on the magazine’s website is divided by specialisations. Each section has its own moderator – and in an innovation I have seen nowhere else, the specialist’s name is posted prominently beside the category. When the combined on- and off-line components of JLC were on their way to becoming a publicly traded company roughly ten years ago, ‘A’ and his confederates introduced the possibility of making JLC’s contributors and employees co-owners. I do not yet know whether readers would also have been invited to become stakeholders. If ‘A’ sheds any light on that question after he reads this, I will include what he says here with any other details of the adventure and corrections of this account.

For the moment, it is enough to say that the idea of co-ownership so appalled the lead investment banker working on the public offering that the whole plan was scuppered. The points ‘A’ most wanted to impress on me were these:

Ownership can be transferred at any time. The trick is to have something worth transferring first. … There could be NGO funding possibilities from which a larger community trust with cooperative member ownership could emerge…

And that, strangely enough, is very close to the proposal for a ‘keiretsu-cooperative’. A publishing enterprise with a thriving community of reader-commenters could easily progress to sharing ownership of the commenting sites where readers already supply most of what there is to read or watch.

It would ask that many newspapers make just one more leap forward after this change announced by the New York Times last week, but already in place for some time on other digital news sites:

We have started using an improved comment section. It will put readers’ responses on the same page as the article, provide threading of comments so readers can respond directly to one another, and allow them to share their comments and those of others, to Twitter and Facebook.

To understand why readers want more than that, I recommend an excellent paper, ‘Gutenberg and the social media revolution,’ by a new media consultant, Richard Stacy**, which puts all these developments in their historical context, then offers a clear-sighted vision of the way ahead. Serendipity led me to it last week, when it came up with some Google links to my own site. His conclusion:

It is unlikely that power and influence in the world that is now forming will lie in the control of channel. Instead it will be vested in forms of community, which will have a tendency to exclude any forms of institutional interference, control or ownership.

He also said,

It is not that people are going to reject institutionalised trust, but the task of sustaining institutionalised trust is going to become much harder in the world of transparency brought about by social media.

I would welcome anything that reversed my own fast-diminishing trust in mainstream, 21^st-century journalism’s ability to live up to the ideals of the Fourth Estate – of which the highest are impartiality and rigorous self-scrutiny. To my dismay, most of the British media – not just the tabloids – have failed to report every important criticism of the media made in the hearings for the Leveson Inquiry, except for the sensational details of the phone hacking scandal.

Giving evidence last week, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s political adviser and communications director – that is, chief ‘spin doctor’ – did draw attention to some problems of the very greatest importance:

The. principle of the freedom of the press is always worth fighting for. The quality of that freedom however is questionable when the quality of so much journalism is so low, and when so few people – just a handful of men until now seemingly unaccountable to anyone but themselves and to anything but their own commercial and political interests – have so much say over the tone and nature of public discourse, and so much responsibility for the decline in standards. It is also worth fighting therefore – politicians, journalists and public alike – to change the press we have.

What he said before that at considerable length – about the collapse in standards – was not addressed in any press report of the Inquiry I have seen. A former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, said in his 2002 memoir about his career that it is the job of a political press officer ‘to act as a purveyor of half-truths to the nation’s journalists, but it is the business of the journalists to seek out the missing 50%.’

At least half of what Alastair Campbell said is true and his critique deserves intense scrutiny and wide discussion by the press – in public. It dovetailed perfectly with the testimony in the same week by Nick Davies, the freelance writer for The Guardian who broke the phone hacking story and pursued it with ferocious determination. He said unequivocally that the press can no longer be trusted to regulate itself.

Is a thorough airing of such opinions possible with today’s media ownership structure? Is it possible when the authority to disseminate the information people need in a democracy — to make decisions for the common good — is concentrated in so few hands?

Surely we need a new ‘business model’ – of which the keirestu-cooperative could be a very rough first draft – not just to accommodate readers in their wish to share the stage, but to protect our form of government?

______________________________________________________

** who has already posted a magnificent response to this piece on his own site. I shall be replying in next week’s blog entry – underlining some of his points and clarifying aspects of the keiretsu-cooperative that have been imperfectly transmitted (mea culpa). I will put that up sooner than next Tuesday if I can interrupt what I am writing off-line.

David Talbot drops serious clangers in his appeal for the resurrection of Salon.com, an e-publishing pioneer

11/10/2011

Cheryll Barron . 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . 4th Estate, 5th Estate, David Talbot, Joan Walsh, Kenny Lauerman, Mashable, New publishing business models, Open Salon, Pete Cashmore, Salon.com, Transition to online publishing

'The Great Grievance', an etching associated with the French Revolution, by an unknown artist

Salon.com is not actually extinct. It is just that its readership has declined precipitously, and no one talks about it any more – even though it is still capable of running first-rate pieces, like a report on Sunday about the indispensable Google Translate’s implications for multilingualism.

David Talbot is clever, likeable and tremendously enterprising. He deserved the towering pile of laurels that all but suffocated him and his fellow-Salonniers when they co-pioneered online journalism in the mid-1990s. I myself wrote a piece or two for him, at his invitation, in those early years. I enjoyed the typhoons they whipped up in reader reactions enough to sign on as a subscriber when the magazine slipped behind a pay wall a few years ago. It virtually disappeared behind it.

Not long after that, the e-zine lost David and its groove. I let my subscription lapse and forgot all about it. But into my email box, a few days ago, dropped a surprise announcement – at least, for me – that he was trying to revive the magazine. The message said that he was back as its über-manager, after stepping down as editor-in-chief around 2005.

Unfortunately, what I could glean of his strategy ignores – or gives only the faintest nod to — the rise of the 5^th Estate, the new media voices on the verge of eclipsing the once supremely authoritative 4^th Estate with which Salon.com evidently still identifies. A more realistic plan would at least experiment with giving readers a chance to share ownership of the publishing sites that they sustain with their eyeballs and clicks – as in, for instance, this proposal recognising that the philosophical DNA encoded in the term ‘4^th Estate’ belongs to the run-up to the French Revolution.

Instead, here is the gist of David’s email circular:

Dear Salon reader and Premium supporter:

I founded Salon 16 years ago […] For the first time in my life as a journalist, we — editors, reporters and critics — were in sole control of our work, not managers and corporate sponsors. […]

Now, six years after leaving Salon, I’ve decided to return as CEO, because I think the country needs a fighting, independent media more than ever. […]

I wanted you to know first because your previous support for Salon has meant a great deal to us — not just the money, but the sense of solidarity from your choice to become a Salon Premium member. […W]e are revamping and renaming Salon Premium. [ …]

We are adding many new benefits, amongst which are: opportunities to engage with writers and editors, magazine subscriptions, and if you choose, benefits from select marketers. […]

With the American people struggling to stay afloat in the Great Recession, and their hopes and well-being largely ignored by our political system, a free press is more vital than ever. We need an independent media to […] fight for the people. […]

I could be mistaken, but honestly do not see that getting many takers. What’s wrong with his appeal?

It’s the same old model. Reporters and editors perform on a stage. Readers pay to watch and listen. It ignores the new reality, which is that readers expect to have a chance to do star turns themselves. When I first visited the site a day or so ago, I found that a section of it, Open Salon, has since 2008 been dedicated to featuring readers’ blogs. I have been back twice. That might not be enough, but I have so far found no arresting or startlingly good – or simply startling – contribution, even though I remember that there were hundreds of readers with the requisite talent among the 100,000 paid subscribers the magazine once had.
Without a serious financial incentive – or at least, stake – in Salon’s revival and, ideally, voting rights in at least part of its running, why should anyone outside David’s small circle bother to post their best efforts on Open Salon? Its part of the site looks so strictly functional and dull that it could almost have a sign saying, ‘Makeshift Kiddie Corner’. Joan Walsh, the last editor-in-chief, said that OS would make the magazine’s ‘smart, creative audience full partners in Salon’s publishing future’. Her replacement, Kerry Lauerman, has promised, ‘We’ll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open.’ I hope to find my pessimism unjustified, when that veil drops, but from his tone, it does not sound as if the Salonniers plan anything more enticing than some equivalent of the old 4^th Estate offers of small cash prizes for ‘tastiest reader recipe’ or ‘best holiday snapshot’.
David’s appeal is addressed to ‘the American people’. Big mistake. Online readers are best addressed, for the most part, as citizens of the world. This part of his pitch sounds like the blinkered parochialism of George W. Bush. What do we expect now? The phrase ‘accelerated global conversation’ says it all. I found it here, in a piece reporting that,

[…[Pete] Cashmore, the soft-spoken chief executive of Mashable, the one-man blog he turned into a popular news site … appeared totally at ease [in his video interview.] … [W]ithin half an hour, an important measure of success was achieved. [Elie] Wiesel, who wondered aloud during the talk what might have happened if Moses — and also Hitler — had used social media tools to get their messages across, was trending worldwide on Twitter.
“It just shows the acceleration of the global conversation and that Mashable is a force online,” said Mr. Cashmore, whose company worked with the United Nations Foundation ….”

Worldwide. Global. United. Online. Surely those are the essential thoughts, not just for me but all of us – and the hour.

Why, I wonder, is David ignoring them?

Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders

05/09/2011

Cheryll Barron . Cooperatives, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . 5th Estate, An experiment in shared ownership of a part of a newspaper site, Business models for on-line publishing, Des Freedman, Fifth Estate, Ian Jack, Moving newspapers on-line, post-Gutenberg publishing experiment, post-Gutenberg publishing models

The phone-hacking scandal and the subsequent launch of a public inquiry examining not simply the ethics and regulation of the press but media ownership more generally […] provide a real opportunity to replace one form of media power – concentrated, unaccountable, privileged – with another form that holds elites to account, offers more than a token range of “legitimate” views on urgent matters of the day and represents British society back to itself. This will require a series of reforms to ownership structures and self-regulatory practices that are clearly not currently operating in the public interest.

What does it mean to ‘break up’ media power?

Des Freedman, The Guardian, 31 July 2011

How would you redesign the ownership of newspapers? How about starting here:

Last month, for example, 51 million individual users clicked into the Guardian site — a number that should please online advertisers.

Great! So what if the Guardian were to let us readers/commenters buy shares in the comments sections of its site?

– Reader commenting on:

At their best, newspapers became beautiful objects, I shall miss them

Ian Jack, The Guardian, 24 September 2011

Newspaper and other print media sites to which I have returned several times a day – or week, depending on what has been happening in my life – have had two things in common:

Unusually sharp and entertaining comments sections in site segments dedicated to topics that interest me.
A group of stimulating, well-informed debaters among the regular commenters, who often enter into extended wrangles – sometimes, not just with each other, but with the writer of an article.

Unfortunately, commenters tend to come and go unpredictably, then vanish altogether. And I have to start looking for a new equivalent of an online coffee shop.

But what if commenters were given some incentive to keep commenting on a particular site – for years at a time? Two years ago, thinking about what would make contributing posts irresistible to me, my conclusion was: money, and the feeling that I was helping to build a semi-permanent family of debaters. Without some form of payment – or the possibility of being paid in the future – posting frequently on newspaper sites becomes suspiciously like wasting time. I have found it hard to justify time spent commenting, even though joining online discussions has deepened and enlivened my understanding of all sorts of topics.

In January of last year, I outlined a scheme that a newspaper could run as an experiment in sharing ownership of a part of its site with reader-commenters. In a future entry in this blog, I will describe the reactions of particular publishing organisations to which I sent a link for my proposal. There were, broadly, five reasons for their reluctance to try it out:

‘Too new’ – the scheme diverges too far from their ideas about the future evolution of media.
Protectionism. The mistaken belief that the scheme would entail paying commenters at the same rates as professional writers and journalists. That is not what the proposal says at all. The idea is that the arrangement would work very broadly in the way insurance does: people contributing more or less equal sums into a pool of money from which disbursements would be made in accordance with merit and need.
Semantics. Interpreting the scheme as ‘socialism’. There is no precise counterpart for the proposed arrangement – certainly not in publishing, as far as I know. But to convey the idea of shared ownership I used the word ‘cooperative’—which unfortunately spells ‘hippie’ utopianism or bankrupt socialist idealism to many people. It says something else entirely to me. For nearly 20 years, I have been a member of a rural electricity cooperative founded 75 years ago by a group of farmers – after the local power company refused to put them on its network. This organisation runs so beautifully that my electricity bills have always been a small fraction of sums I have paid for the identical usage patterns in other places.
Fear of losing power. Most publishers of the print era cannot give up the idea of journalists and editors performing on a stage for readers – the audience down in the pit, which is where they would like them to stay. They cannot accept that technology has made it realistic for readers to want – indeed, expect – to share the stage with them, even if only in walk-on parts, in most cases, at the start.
Pessimism. Publishers cannot conceive of making a bigger pie – that is, expanding revenue, and even earning profits, with luck – through sharing ownership with reader-commenters. They can only imagine being forced to accept smaller slices of an unchanged or shrunken pie.

Here is a summary of what a test of a jointly owned site would involve for publishers and reader-commenters at the beginning:

As this is a scheme for helping print media to adapt for the arrival of the 5^th Estate, a publisher would have to initiate the experiment, inviting readers to become part of it.

The publisher would set a price for a subscription-cum-stake in the jointly owned site called, say, the Forum. Just one stake per reader. Site visitors who do not buy a subscription-stake would not be shut out from reading articles and discussions but could not, of course, share in any future profits.

The publisher would develop the software tools and infrastructure for the experiment – to collect and record subscription-stakes; run elections and referendums; develop apps, links to social networking sites, and so on – and, if the test site makes a profit from subscriptions and advertising, distribute it to stakeholders.

Both the publisher and readers would nominate a few reader-stakeholders for membership of the Forum’s (say,) eleven-member management board. All reader-stakeholders would elect six of these as their representatives. The other five board members would be appointees of the publisher from within its own executive and editorial ranks.

As noted above, the arrangement would work in roughly the way insurance does. Reader-stakeholders would pay more or less equal sums into a pool of cash. Payments from that pool would be made according to certain criteria. How would classes of subscription-stakes be established? Who would set the criteria? These – and all other rules for the site’s operation – would be proposed by the management board and then voted into existence by subscriber-stakeholders.

So setting rule-making in motion would be the first task of the management board, and the first job for reader-stakeholders after that would be choosing from among alternative rules proposed to them.

A publisher would not have to finance the experiment alone. A newspaper could, for instance, share the costs and administrative burden with a book publisher. Their partnership would resemble a Japanese keiretsu – or arrangement between companies with common or interlocked business interests.

The rationale for this scheme for shared ownership is set out in more detail here.

Any takers? Careful suggestions for refining and improving the experiment would be indescribably welcome, and will be given proper credit in a future post on this site.

Correspondence to postgutenberg@gmail.com, please.

post-Gutenberg

what comes next?

Category Archives: Cooperatives