Tag Archives: Fifth Estate

Stieg Larsson, 5th Estate forerunner, marginalised as a media critic

. The 5th Estate in action . , , , , , , , ,

As a storytelling campaigner, Stieg Larsson puts Ayn Rand in the shade. Never mind that there was a time when only the Bible outsold her Atlas Shrugged. Though their diametrically opposite political affiliations would have made them furious about being mentioned in the same sentence, I suspect that they would have been equally enthusiastic about the possibilities of post-print publishing. Would they have had an easier time with the layout software I am still learning to use? Reader: please be patient with my M. C. Escher-esque menus and attempts at tables of contents as I await answers from helpers.

We of the 4th Estate, offspring of the Gutenberg press, are certainly using the internet. Nearly every print newspaper has a web site. But we are doing our best to downplay the shift in power to our successors in the 5th Estate, when we should – surely – be reorienting publishing to reflect it, to the last serif and pixel.

Networked individuals are becoming an independent source of social and political accountability – a Fifth Estate […]. The crowd has become an independent power – even independent from the press.

Until last month’s interview in Spiegel Online, practically no ranking newspaper or magazine had ever mentioned the 5th Estate or William Dutton, the founding director of the Oxford Internet Institute*, which has a celebration planned for its tenth birthday later this month. Those are his words – published in a 2007 paper – I have quoted in that clip. Although his term for the power shift is short, snappy and a perfect encapsulation of the internet’s implications for journalism and publishing, the mainstream media persist in referring instead to the rise of ‘the blogosphere’ – with its connotations of unwashed and unlettered barbarians at the gate. That is a remarkable mischaracterisation, considering that the most distinguished professionals who care about social justice – and many of those who do not – are present somewhere on the net.

4th Estate faces are also being averted from the most important reason why 50 million readers around the world have made Stieg Larsson and his Millennium Trilogy a posthumous publishing sensation. He was writing closely fact-based social and political criticism – set in Sweden, but applicable everywhere – cleverly disguised as Scandinavian-noir thrillers.

Last year, in a New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani did briefly mention that Mikael Blomkvist, the hero of the series, is driven by ‘a moral imperative […] to slash away at the tentacles of governmental, corporate and judicial corruption that he sees strangling the country.’ But most of her paragraphs focused on a single character, the beguiling, computer-hacking vigilante and anti-heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Just as I was, in my initial reaction to Larsson’s saga, Tim Parks – writing in the New York Review of Books in June – was most struck by its implications for sexual politics. Only near the end of his essay, almost as an afterthought, does he say that it is ‘the ingenuousness and sincerity of Larsson’s engagement with good and evil that give the trilogy its power to attract so many millions of people.’

Respected old media commentators have chosen to overlook what Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner for three decades, points out in Stieg and Me:

The Millennium Trilogy accuses the media of gradually abdicating their responsibilities towards society throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Investigative journalists had turned away from social problems, and financial journalists treated CEOs like rock stars …

That was the Larsson message that most impressed me, because of events dominating the news, when – with a belatedness that would do Rip van Winkle credit – I finally discovered who he was. In July, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had caught my eye when I raced into my library to find something to listen to on a car journey of seven hundred miles. I was stunned by the parallels between the targets of his wrath and the lesson for us all at the heart of the London phone hacking scandal: you cannot be paranoid enough about the abuse of power at the top. As William Dutton would put it to Spiegel, in discussing the internet’s usefulness for initiating political movements,

We can see that, for example, in the scandal over Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World — which is absolutely stunning stuff. There had been rumors for years over people hacking into private voicemail, but no one had seriously examined the issue. The media had become too entangled with politicians…

A few days earlier, David Carr concluded a stirring NYT column on the subject by observing that, on the net,

… social media had roamed wild and free across the story, punching a hole in the tiny clubhouse that had been running the country. Democracy […] has broken out in Britain.

A long hop and skip from Fleet Street, Larsson’s career and his stories add up to recursive confirmation of the 5th Estate’s power to give a voice to those shut out by its predecessor; people who might have something important to tell us.

Denied a place in a Swedish journalism school, according to two chroniclers of his career, he was forced to enter publishing as ‘a graphic designer’. Eva Gabrielsson says that even after he was allowed to make journalistic contributions at the Swedish news agency that employed him for twenty years, he was repeatedly rejected as a fully-fledged journalist with the explanation that ‘Stieg Larsson cannot write’. She hints that his refusal to give up came from his identification with the grandparents with whom he spent his early childhood, who did not meekly accept being marginalised as poor rural folk.

He co-founded Expo, an activist magazine that hobbled along on a shoestring budget, to get the stories he thought important into the world. Though major media – certainly in the English-speaking world – have failed to react to what he revealed about their failings, then and now, his books have let him say what he felt needed saying without their help.

Larsson died of brutal overwork that had led him to neglect his health, and perhaps of the exhaustion peculiar to lonely, extended struggles for causes with insufficient moral or financial support.

Surely the vast audience his work found after his death can – and must – help to ease the path of excluded writers like him.

Restructuring media for the 5th estate would be a good start. My own tentative proposal for an experiment in re-arranging media ownership was written after a rare Whitehall mandarin with a practical streak judged the scheme workable – if a bit outlandish, at first glance – and sent me to the Oxford Internet Institute. He guessed – correctly – that I would find sympathetic listeners in that spot. You can read, at no cost, not just about the scheme, but frank commentaries on it from four publishing luminaries here, as well as a summary, on this very site.

The proposal is crying out for help with refining its details. Reports from readers of anything closely resembling it being tried out – or that have been attempted elsewhere – will also be welcome. Messages to postgutenberg@gmail.com, please.

Cheryll Barron

* … admittedly, one reason for this failure could be summed up in the reaction to news of the OII’s existence from an American friend who was a student at Magdalen in the 1980s: ‘Is there really an Oxford Internet Institute? They were still working on plumbing and electricity when last I checked.’ To which the director’s swift response – after I pasted the remark into a note to him – was: ‘Thanks, but we were the first university with a printing press.’

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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 5th 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.