Tag Archives: Alan Rusbridger

The components of the next media ‘business model’ are ready: dewy-eyed newcomers, not media’s Old Guard, will do the essential assembly and testing

. Cooperatives, Micropayments, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , ,

august 2013 lolling nymphs circular balcony DSCF1026

The old classic forms for media are broken: their replacements are coming from young explorers open to the magic of possibility and experimentation - photographs of the Villa Borromeo: MIL22

The old classic forms for media are broken: their replacements are coming from young explorers open to the magic of possibility and experimentation
– photographs of the Villa Borromeo: MIL22

Though Larry Page, the Google co-founder, has a thatch of grey hair, we know he is still only forty-one. His baby face reminds us that he was twenty-five in 1998, when he hatched a search engine with Sergey Brin. We also know that Jimmy Wales was thirty-five when he launched the Wikipedia in 2001, and Jeff Bezos a mere thirty at the founding of Amazon.com in 1994.

So, why are we looking to today’s old media leaders to reshape the way we get news and commentary through them? Google, Wikipedia and Amazon — three inventions that have made done more than any others to re-shape the habits of those of us who used to be called bookworms — should have made it pointless for anyone to expect the big names in print media, whose chiefs are nearly all middle-aged or old, to build the bridge to future economic survival for their enterprises.

Three identifiers of the most promising scheme for publishing – called a ‘business model’ – look more practical and likely than ever:

Some form of collective ownership and management – which, for some new publishing groups, would mean replacing the old idea of ‘reader subscriptions’ with small ownership stakes for audience members who want a say in drafting rules and setting policy.

Consultative decision-making on strategic and policy matters helped by free, ‘sharable’ software tools designed to streamline collaboration — the kind being developed by New Zealand’s Loomio cooperative (the most sophisticated of which might include software tailored to deal with particular kinds of conflict).

Vast aggregations of micropayments making up the financial lifeblood of media collectives – from selling access to certain kinds of information or entertainment (though most of this would be free); or in-payments for the privilege of stakeholding, and outpayments when there are profits to be distributed.

Most of the worker-bees driving the creativity at Loomio and the micropayments innovator Flattr are decades younger than the old media leaders in continental Europe interviewed last week by The Guardian about their struggle to adapt for digitisation. The limit of bold and adventurous thinking by these appears to be a subscription club – similar to the plan described by Mario Calabresi, editor-in-chief of Italy’s La Stampa , in which most of its offerings would continue to be free …

… while holding back some premium content in order to be able to offer more in-depth information to those who want it. Around this premium content we are building a club-like structure, which brings together our keenest readers and offers them exclusive tools with which to understand the world.

Club, yes; but stake, no – and that is surely a mistake. Giving readers the chance to own a financial stake, even a small one, in drawing more traffic to a media site would encourage more of them to linger to chat with other readers – regularly log on to comments sections, treating them like virtual pubs or coffee-shops for relaxing sessions of teasing, information-sharing, debating and flirting anonymously and pseudonymously as well as in the prosaic guise of being, as on Facebook, simply themselves. One commenter on the Guardian survey of European papers had the media enterprise of the future exactly right:

ringodingo

13 June 2014 11:03am

… Newspapers, tv etc have to accept that media is now two-way.

So Guardian etc should become more like a social media site?

To an extent they already involve the readers with the comment threads.

Or, as the 2010 paper that this post-Gutenberg blog extends said, if we may be forgiven for the unpardonable sin of quoting ourselves:

New communication technologies have created a karaoke world. … Practically no one is content any more to be just a spectator, reader, passive listener or viewer. Audience participation as well as the right to talk back – which includes non-expert reviewing of works or performances by trained and seasoned professionals — have become absolutely essential.

That La Stampa understands this is clear. Calabresi said:

We are drawing on user-generated content, seeking to unite and integrate it with our quality journalism. On social networks we are working to increase reader engagement in order to make them key players in the debate on our content.

He sounds remarkably like The Guardian’s own editor, Alan Rusbridger, telling an American interviewer that

We are putting our commentators in the same space as all our readers and letting them fight it out. … [R]eally, in this community of Guardian readers, there are a lot of intelligent, well-versed people actually traveling. So let’s open it up to them.

But those are just words, mere sentiments, at present. Until they are offered a financial stake and the possibility, some day, of sharing in any profits, those readers contributing comments and reporting to ‘opened up’ papers are simply supplying unpaid labour. Not, in our view, an operating scheme with much of a future.

When will some newspaper like La Stampa or The Guardian test the idea of sharing ownership and decision-making on a strictly experimental section of its site – as this blog has suggested before, more than once? They might take a cue from the adventurous ‘skunk works’ at the Harvard Business School testing online education.

One European interviewed by the London newspaper about the digital future, Stefan Niggemeier – an ex-Spiegel staffer who has worked both as an editor and publishing innovator — is part of a group of twenty-five German investigative journalists playing with financial schemes that do not rely on advertising: ‘We want to see if there’s a way of establishing a non-advertising-based model. Whether it will work, I don’t know, but I know it’s right to try it, even if it fails.’

Rusbridger is sixty. Niggemeier and Calabresi are both in their mid-forties. Even they might not be young enough to translate proposals and hypotheses into media’s clicking and whirring fully operational future.

The spies among us: when will The Guardian and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, connect Facebook’s spying to the Snowden leaks — on the paper’s front page?

. 4th Estate moves . , , , , , ,

Secret, shadowy tunnels into our lives

Secret, shadowy tunnels into our lives
– photograph by postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

Long live the special relationship! Week after week, in its continuing co-leakage with Edward Snowden of documents about government spying, The Guardian, a British newspaper, is dishing up an unparalleled feast of examples to illustrate the use of ‘disconnect’ as a noun — as in, ‘their problem is a reality disconnect’ — classified by the Oxford English Dictionary as American English.

When will this newspaper and its otherwise admirable editor, Alan Rusbridger, acknowledge, in the same front page stories — such as last weekend’s about Britain’s GCHQ and America’s NSA storing intimate images from Yahoo webcams —

 … that the governments are only copying or helping themselves to vast stores of private data about us that companies have been amassing – for profit? 

… that any organisation collecting vast stores of such information about us – whether commercial or governmental – is at the heart of the problem?

Like some tragic accident victim whose brain hemispheres can no longer communicate, The Guardian cannot bring itself to integrate into its Snowden coverage these statements — published on the newspaper’s own site, on 24 February — by Ian Brown, associate director of Oxford University’s Cyber Security Centre:

Facebook has built its $173bn market valuation around profiling its users and showing them targeted adverts. It has refused to allow users to subscribe with money rather than personal data. […]

The business models of internet giants such as Facebook and Google are crucial to the future of privacy.

What is the proper order of blame for smashing the last vestiges of our privacy? This was beautifully set out in the first paragraph of a column last week by Joe Nocera in The New York Times, an occasional partner of The Guardian’s in publishing jets from the Snowden fount of horror. If pressed for time, dear reader, just read its last sentence:

We are fast approaching a privacy crisis in the United States. Google, Facebook and other big Internet companies collect information about us, which they deploy in the service of advertisers. Big data brokers, like Acxiom, have developed sophisticated tools that allow them to know almost as much about us as we know about ourselves; they then sell that data to all kinds of companies that want to learn everything from our habits to our health, from our sexual orientation to our finances. The digital age has made it easy to collect medical data, which is supposed to be protected under federal law. Huge data breaches at big retailers like Target have made it seem unsafe to use credit cards. And I haven’t even mentioned the Edward Snowden revelations about the massive data collection by the National Security Agency.

Next, we recommend reading an excellent interview in Salon with Julia Angwin, who has just published a book about the privacy crisis that draws on her years of scoop-laden reporting on this subject for The Wall Street Journal:

Both Silicon Valley and the government had a problem and they both came to the similar conclusion that the answer was collecting vast amounts of personal data. From the commercial side it turned out that the way to get advertisers interested in the Internet was to offer them incredible insights on the people that they were advertising against. And on the government side it was: If we collect a lot of information we can find these terrorists.

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is these two things converge. […] Commercial data has become a honeypot that government likes to dip its hand into.

Are attitudes changing about privacy?

I think that the Snowden revelations have made it clear how intertwined government and commercial surveillance are. Before, maybe it wasn’t as obvious to people that the information that Google had accumulated was also being accessed by the government.

… Finally, those of us like one friend of post-Gutenberg’s playing dim in refusing to acknowledge the risk that stores of information, once collected, can change hands – should consider what one commenter noted, with perfect accuracy, beneath the Ian Brown contribution to The Guardian:

Snaga

24 February 2014 9:37am

It is a known fact that [Facebook and other companies] harvest whatever data they can about the user, and do so for their own corporate gain.

It is also now an established fact that security agencies can get hold of that data, and use it for whatever they believe to be in the interests of national security.

Remember, information can always acquire powerful new manipulators. Only last week, in Britain, the National Health Service was lambasted beneath headlines like this one: ‘Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers’.

… As we have asked before, might The Guardian’s dogged refusal to connect commercial spying to security agency surveillance have anything to do with that newspaper’s invasive monitoring of its own readers – with the same surveillance software tools?

Spooky yarn-spinning: just how did the Guardian and New York Times get the surveillance story back-to-front?

. 4th Estate moves, Culture after Gutenberg . , , , , , ,
Snowden surveillance saga: leaving the tech giants out will be remembered as clickbait-shaped storytelling with a touch of the surreal -drawing by Martin Disteli (1802-44)

Snowden surveillance saga: leaving the tech giants out will be remembered as clickbait-shaped storytelling with a touch of the fantastic
– drawing by Martin Disteli (1802-44)

… or why most editors and writers specialising in technology see no actual scoop in the Snowden leaks …

Sometimes the person dancing backwards and in high heels – famously, Ginger Rogers, compared with her dance partner Fred Astaire – is a man. In this instance, he is the writer and new media entrepreneur Michael Wolff. With a set of super-sensitive manoeuvres that Ginger would have envied, he wickedly added his voice last week to the revelation that the ‘surveillance business model’, not exactly news, has been mistaken by some newspapers for a creepy invention of government spooks bent on invading our private acts and communications.

His ostensible topic was a book published earlier this month about a 1971 break-in by activists that revealed the spine-crawling extent of FBI surveillance under that agency’s notorious founder, J. Edgar Hoover, who ran it from 1935 to 1972. The inside story of the break-in had already been told in another book, Wolff said, eleven years ago. He was briefly puzzled by the huge attention paid to its forty-year old subject in recent weeks in headlines of the two old print stars of the Snowden saga. ‘Earlier this month, The New York Times, Guardian and other media outlets “revealed” the identities of several people who burgled the FBI in 1971,’ was how Wolff’s s Guardian sub-editor encapsulated his gently sardonic amazement. Wolff himself described how the answer came to him, as follows:

[W]hy, 11 years later, was I reading about this as though, mirabile dictu, the lost secrets of the past were suddenly being revealed and now making headlines everywhere? … In the age of Snowden, revelations about government spying are not just hot stories, but suddenly part of a vast new narrative canvas and moral tale. … [I]t is apparently possible to ignore what is known – even in the age of Google – and, when convenient, reposition it to be new and useful again. … There is not just a new age of political activism, à la Edward Snowden, but also of story telling activism.

Quite, and successful storytelling activism makes irresistible clickbait that works even better when it becomes outrage that goes viral when the audience confuses the story with other – justified – targets for anger. At post-Gutenberg, we have had irritable email from dear readers, including two Americans, in which a complaint about our refusal to be impressed by the Snowden narrative has billowed into a polite rant about U.S. military actions and policy – the use of drones at all, or against poor countries, nuclear testing, Guantanamo, and so on – as if the correspondent had never met the idea of a non sequitur.

Let us be clear: post-Gutenberg is chilled to the viscera by the thought of all military weapons, used by anyone, for any reason – and has the identical reaction to any mention of torturing prisoners.

The real surveillance story’s only connection with all that is the use by the UK and US governments of the same tools invented and deployed by large US companies. As Andrew Leonard wrote in Salon last summer in ‘Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together,’ expanding on a genuine Wall Street Journal revelation about free surveillance software available to anyone to use:

By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state.

And not just in the narrowest, Big Brother, government-is-watching-everyone-all-the-time sense of that term. Hadoop is equally critical to private sector corporate surveillance. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix — just about every big player that gathers the trillions of data “events” generated by our everyday online actions employs Hadoop as a part of their arsenal of Big Data-crunching tools. Hadoop is everywhere — as one programmer told me, “it’s taken over the world.”

… In the past half-decade Hadoop has emerged as one of the triumphs of the non-proprietary, open-source software programming methodology that previously gave us the Apache Web server, the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser. Hadoop belongs to nobody. Anyone can copy it, modify, extend it as they please.

… They’re all in it together. The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.

… Hadoop quickly secured the critical mass of cross-industry support necessary for an open-source software program to become an essential part of Internet infrastructure. Even engineers at Google chipped in, although Hadoop, at its core, was basically an attempt to reverse-engineer proprietary Google technology.

People reading those extracts might wonder why Hadoop and not Snowden was the surveillance sensation of 2013. Two answers — aside from the plain truth, verifiable by five seconds spent typing the appropriate search terms into a Google box, that Hadoop has been snapped up enthusiastically by both The New York Times and The Guardian for spying on their readers:

• In the way traditional media work, writers who understand technology do not get much of a hearing from the editors at the top, who specialise in politics. The technology writers usually work for sections that cover business and, or, science. In other words, they are treated as incomprehensible boffins or wonks.

Why, demanded one irate friend, an American poet, didn’t they and post-Gutenberg – who has also served as one of those gnomes — tell everyone else about government surveillance if we knew all about it long before the Snowden hooha? Erm, well, we did … We distinctly remember confessing to him, years ago, our anxiety about email being read by eyes for which it was not intended, including those of spooks. And, quickly noting his sceptical reaction, we realised what he was only thinking but others, equally oblivious but less tactful, had stated bluntly: ‘You’re being paranoid.’

• Being able to pin information about technology to a face, a personality, an identity, and ideally – drama — humanises it. That can suddenly magnetise people who usually ignore it for good reasons: it is complex, and learning about it and the culture and ambitions of Silicon Valley consumes attention they would rather focus elsewhere. But because they do not really understand it – even though some political editors, like Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian, have a hobbyist’s deep fascination with the ‘mechanics’ of their devices and the net – they are easily misled. Think of the millions who really believe that Steve Jobs invented the computer revolution, or that Al Gore had something to do with the birth of the internet.

To reach Joe and Jane Everyone and work them into a tizzy, news of our subjugation to the ‘surveillance business model’ had to be delivered to them as visions of nightmares about a totalitarian state — fronted by the ghostly and bespectacled clever-boy-next-door visage of Edward Snowden, the high drama of his secret-stealing and travails as a fugitive.

Not so much activism as storytelling activism, just as Wolff says.

But the extent of yarn-spinning always gets out, eventually, and diminishes trust in the media. As we keep repeating on this blog – tiresomely – because that trust should not be sacrificed to clickbait, another way of financing and structuring media has to be found – and soon.

In the shift ‘from God to Google’ our security spooks – and the ‘business models’ of newspapers – can hardly risk becoming technology dinosaurs

. 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives . , , , , , ,
Cartoon displayed with the kind permission of Peter Schrank, whose gorgeous, incisively impish web site banishes all woe

— screen shot, with the kind permission of Peter Schrank, whose gorgeous, incisive, impish web site banishes all woes

‘[P]eople who attack the security services for gathering information will be the first to ask “why didn’t they know?” when someone gets through the cracks and blows up a bus. What Greenwald, the Guardian, the NYT and others have been close to saying is that journalists are as, if not more, able to decide on public interest and safety [as] the state and its security. That is a vast claim which cannot be made with confidence.’

– Alastair Campbell, former journalist and director of communications for the British prime minister: from a lecture to be delivered by him at Cambridge University on 20 November 2013

If newspapers like The Guardian were working on the evolutionary successor of the ‘business model’ they run on today – we mean, showing the way to becoming net-based media jointly owned with reader-subscribers – they would have no need to fan public hysteria with one-sided reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks about spooks and surveillance. This entry on post-Gutenberg points to some of the information they might be giving their readers if, unlike The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, they were dedicated to journalism uncorrupted by partisan politics.

But hysteria-fanning and hyping create ‘clickbait’, today. Technically, that means writing sensationalist tabloid-like headlines to lure internet surfers into spending time on newspaper web sites. Sadly, clickbaiting is also shaping the coverage beneath headlines – skewing decisions about the stories chosen and the way they are tackled so extremely that, last week, a reader-commenter referring to The Guardian as ‘the left-wing Daily Mail’ actually seemed on to something.

‘Intelligence agencies exist to steal secrets,’ as The Economist noted in September. ‘Much of the brouhaha around the disclosures by Edward Snowden… misses that fact.’

256px-Manneken_Pis_(crop)

History will either judge Snowden and his helpers in the media as incontinent, supercharged versions of the Mannekin Pis or as heroes saving the world. The question no one seems to be asking is this: would we want our spooks to be stuck in the age of typewriters and land lines tied to walls – or keep up with every sort of capability that digital tools are putting in our hands? For instance, the various kinds of software that let blessed, indispensable – if not exactly saintly — Google, as well as the social media giants like Facebook and countless other corporations, monitor what we do round the clock, if they so choose.

Other subjects badly in need of attention:

@ Hypocrisy about the right to keep secrets – anti-transparency — in the extraordinarily influential culture of Silicon Valley. Its technology crusaders are rightly credited – or blamed – for popularising the ‘information wants to be free’ movement wrecking every form of artistic copyright and demanding transparency of governments and other authorities.

It would make no sense for the British government to prosecute Alan Rusbridger and his Guardian for publishing the Snowden leaks – as The New York Times is worriedly imagining — because Silicon Valley ‘libertarianism’ is so close to becoming conventional wisdom. Yet how many of us outside the technologists’ mecca know about ‘the Silicon Valley handshake’? This is the routine requirement that their visitors, suppliers, collaborators and other outsiders sign contracts protecting secrets – so-called ‘non-disclosure agreements’. Often, according to Eric Goldman — a professor of cyberspace law — companies demand signatures for ‘one-way NDAs that protect only information they disclose (not information they receive).’

@ Deciding whether we want companies – including newspapers – to spy on us, and how we can make it easy to deny them permission to gather information, at no risk. As recorded last week, The Guardian – railing ad nauseam about spooks — is oddly tongue-tied about corporate surveillance. The explanation for this is surely the potential embarrassment of having to admit the true extent of the newspaper’s own monitoring of its readers’ behaviour. Some readers are collecting clues. As one of them, @ElDanielfire, reported in a comment last week,

When I sign into the Guardian I get the following message:
This application will be able to:
•Read Tweets from your timeline.
•See who you follow.
[…] It’s not much different to the NSA …

Onora O’Neill, a down-to-earth philosopher — specialising in justice, public trust and accountability – who is also a member of the House of Lords (Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve) commendably unaffiliated to any political party, is one of the few sounding this particular alarm. ‘Insofar as [government spies at the NSA and GCHQ] collect content, I might be … worried,’ she said recently, ‘but by the same token I would worry equally about Facebook, who collect content, and in particular a lot of personal content.’

@ The staggering drop in crime in many parts of the world, ‘from Japan to Estonia,’ in which there could be a hopeful parallel for anti-terrorist surveillance. In a riveting collection of articles on the subject in July, The Economist speculated about the reasons why ‘the crime wave that began in the 1950s is in broad retreat’. Among its statistical revelations is the 64 per cent drop in the number of violent crimes in the largest American cities since 1990. The car-theft count in New York fell from 147,000 in 1990 to 10,00 last year.  One article suggested that ‘the biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved,’ and mentioned that

The advent of DNA testing, mobile-phone location and surveillance cameras—which have spread rapidly, especially in Britain—have all increased the risk of getting caught.

Secret services do not and probably could not publish — verifiable — statistics about the effectiveness of their work. But if monitoring stops terrorists and other baddies the way ‘neighbourhood watch’ programmes do suburban crime, and nosy gossips have done for centuries in small towns and villages, you might imagine that both the good and evil in government surveillance could be discussed without distortion by clickbait-driven headlines and text.