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Analysis: The Rise Of Open Media
from the future-of-information- dept.
What's the future of media? What are all the rumblings about struggling online media?
Pundits and gossips and entrail-readers were asking one another (and me) these questions last week. It was a nervous few days, the jitters touched off by announcements of layoffs at Salon and NBC and CBS.com and by the near death experience of the strange crime-news site APB News.com, which dismissed its staff, then brought some back unpaid in an attempt to keep publishing.
Was all of this a watershed moment for new media? The ubiquitous analysts were warning that in the wake of the NASDAQ panic, money for new sites was drying up. Maybe old-time journalism could rebound, after all? Maybe these hordes or raucous digital pests would finally get their comeuppance, or even better, go away completely. Maybe the media universe would right itself.
Dream on. If there is a central idea that conventional media have willfully failed to grasp, it's that the future of information belongs to Open Media, even when AOL/Time-Warner gets its lawyers and lobbyists lined up. The meaningful distinction isn't old-versus-new, it's open-versus-closed.
What exactly characterizes the Open Media? Open Media sites embrace interactivity; they reflect ideas, commentary and information from a wide range of sources, especially their readers. They were shaped by the distributed architecture of the Net. Their agendas and political philosophies are rarely static, but continuously evolving, a gift of interactivity. Each reader becomes a highly-wired researcher and reporter, foraging for information. Stories can be reported originally, but most often stories are posted from other sources or posted and readers are given links. Links are a universal signature of an Open Media site, a way to use Net architecture to maximum advantage. Revenue comes from advertising or other sources, because the information itself is always -- always -- free.
Open Media are ascending all across the information spectrum. Closed Media -- newspapers, evening newscasts, even pay-per-use news websites -- have been in decline for years, facing aging audiences, shrinking revenues and marginalization by ferocious (and usually free) competitors. Open vs. Closed, shared vs. proprietary - these conflicting impulses have divided Net users for years, the Linux challenge to Microsoft being one of the more dramatic examples. Now that conflict is intensifying throughout media.
There was considerable if short-sighted rejoicing in old media offices with the spate of so-called "new media" problems. Conventional media has been battered for years now by new competing technologies like the Net, abandoned by younger consumers, struggling to re-define itself. There was more than a little glee in reports that new media was bleeding as well.
"For some people, online journalism is a path to interactive enlightenment and economic liberty," gloated the New York Times. "But to the puritans of the old media world, Web journalists are apostates who have confused liberty with license and whose delusional disregard for profit can only end in self-immolation. It was hard for the puritans not to act smug last week."
What an interesting statement. When exactly did "disregard for profit" become a journalistic liability as opposed to an ethical standard? And who conferred on mainstream journalism -- as greedy, non-interactive, incestuous and elitist an institution as exists in American public life -- this high moral ground?
The reasons for the smugness extended beyond the layoffs. Media watchers also cited Slate.com's struggles to become viable (it's massively subsidized by Microsoft and promoted on MS sites from MSN.com to MSNBC, and is still struggling for audience) and they were obsessively monitoring the super-hyped launch of Inside.com, a mega-media gossip and news site from a company that actually calls itself "PowerfulMedia, Inc."
You can check out this lavishly-funded site for yourself (www.inside.com), but all you really need to know is that its readers get to vote on what Inside.com considers most critical; the daily media "Power Index," which tracks whether Sumner Redstone of Viacom is gaining on Michael Eisner or Ted Turner on any given day. Part of Inside.com is free, but that's a lure. The part with the supposed original reporting is subscriber-only. This anomaly -- charging money in an environment where the volume of information grows by the hour and the price steadily drops -- is both arrogant and astonishing.
What was most interesting about last week's New York Times sneer was its focus on the rather few Web sites familiar to journalists. With perspective-narrowing narcissism, the Times described Slate as "the online magazine with probably the highest profile in online journalism?"
Slate - interesting though it can sometimes be - is actually one of the lowest profile sites on the Internet - except for New York or Washington journalists. They tend not to notice mailing lists, messaging systems or the countless individual sites far from media consciousness. Thus when Slate or Salon hits trouble, media pundits instantly conclude that online journalism must be failing. That's a big mistake.
"So who's winning?" asked the Times, "the puritans or the apostates? It may be too soon to tell, but certainly last week's upheavals were enough to try a Web journalist's soul." This bizarre framing of the issue -- a win/lose battle between worthy traditionalists and whacked-out rebels -- is silly, but it helps explain conventional journalism's problems in coming to terms with its favorite story: itself.
Mainstream media are fascinated with themselves. No story is more interesting than the people who publish or broadcast it. The press can't stop writing about itself, launching whole new publications -- Brill's Content magazine, Inside.com, much of Slate -- to chronicle its heroes, power-brokers and adventures. The media have a bizarre and shrinking geography in the 21st Century, despite the fact that we are all in the midst of an explosive information revolution. They pay rapt attention to certain aspects of life in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. No place between gets much attention unless a terrorist blows up a building, a plane crashes,or a river floods its banks. If you gather information on the Net, of course, your experience couldn't be more different, since you're connected to new kinds of journalists located in all sorts of places - college campuses, the bowels of companies and governments (as opposed to the executive suites), private homes in "flyover" land, foreign countries, hi-tech environments. The agenda is stunningly different. And there isn't much interest in the people who run media or their daily power standings.
How did the traditional media, once a populist, working-class information medium, fall so totally, even suicidally, in love with themselves? Or waste so much money and time chronicling their own comings and goings while missing so completely the real economic and cultural boundaries emerging between old and new forms of information distribution? Sometimes it seems that the real competition isn't between purists and renegades but between Narcissistic (and thus Closed) versus Open Media.
This narcissism is harmful because it shrinks the creative universe of media workers and disconnects them from the new global conversation taking place online. Open Media operate in striking contrast, thanks in part to the distributed architecture that makes up the Net's infrastructure. Instead of handfuls of editors closeted in offices dictating agendas, successful online media tend to be highly interactive, informal, diverse, often amateurish, yet quick, newsy and, therefore, useful.
Open Media can't claim anything close to perfection. These sites are often hostile, chaotic, and unreliable. But they're open in the most literal sense -- online, anybody with a computer and a modem can be a journalist and use the open protocols of the Net. In the techworld, people bring one another news, links, URL's, and information obsessvively -- the most basic definition of a journalist and of journalism -- and in a never-ending stream.
The architecture of the Net -- designed mostly for research -- was designed to be open. The architecture of conventional media, designed mostly to sell information, has been closed for generations. This has caused the widening rift between the two cultures that plagues the so-called "traditionalists" to this day.
When journalism comes online, the first mistake most editors and producers invariably make is to replicate the closed forms they know -- as Slate did when it tried to charge customers to subscribe. One of the first Web sites run by mainstream journalists -- its editor is Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic, Slate became synonymous in many traditionalist's minds with Web journalism. It was the first and only site many reporters visted regularly, then and now. And the fact that it didn't have to break even or attract large numbers of readers -- Bill Gates made it clear that Slate had years, if not forever, to succeed financially -- gave it further license to practice traditional journalistic values rather than confront the Net's raucous interactivity. Slate never really had to come to terms with the Net -- it had a gazillion dollar safety net anyway. As a result, the magazine has always had a sort of grafted-on quality to it, although it has grudgingly become more inter-active.
Open Media have thrived on very different principles -- they offer decentralized, digitally-empowered media populism. Why are the conventional media so hobbled with it comes to grasping this?
Until the l960's, journalism was a distinctly unglamorous profession, a working-class, blue-collar alternative to civil service jobs or manual labor. But as the Boomers went off to college in increasing numbers, and encountered social struggles like the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements, journalism began attracting a different sort of practitioner. It became a more elite profession. People who go to Harvard and Yale tend to believe that what they're doing is important, at least in part because they're doing it. Being a journalist, producer or magazine editor was suddenly fashionable.
And as information became a valuable commodity and entertainment a global, multi-billion dollar industry, media executives became more visible and powerful. The media industry itself became a huge story, especially as entertainment, news, information and popular culture began overlapping. Conventional media coverage of pop culture is either tepid, or still ghetto-ized in the back sections of magazines and papers. Landmark evolutions in new media culture -- gaming and animation, for example -- aren't yet considered culture at all in the traditional press.
Journalism has paid dearly for this endemic myopia. Many of the smartest, best-educated reporters in America seemed not to notice that an information revolution was bearing down on them like a tidal wave.
Even as the net spawned thousands of new kinds of sites -- including this one, started not coincidentally far from coastal media encampments -- the traditional press continued its focus on itself. Successful new media sites seemed more likely to spring up in places like Holland, Mich., or Portland, Ore., than in New York, L.A. or Washington. Rather than embrace new technologies, much of media began sounding alarms about them, from pornography to addiction. On the Net, Open media offered sites, reporters and commentary drawn from increasingly far-flung sources on an ever-widening variety of topics.
Closed media have at best only a vague sense of this transformations.
In a medium where amateur news and information sites routinely draw hundreds of thousands of hits a day, Slate was unable to get more than a relative handful of people to pay a modest subscription fee despite the movement of tens of millions of people online, and sooned abandoned the idea of charging readers. In fact, many "old media" sites on the Web, from Slate to Washingtonpost.com, remain subsidized media, a luxury rarely afforded new or Open Media. If Microsoft hadn't been so generous and rich, Slate would have folded long ago. In any other context, in fact, it would be considered a disaster. In the surreal world of media narcissism, it's failure somehow becomes virtue, even a triumph.
Salon, also founded by conventional journalists (in this case mostly from San Francisco) was always livelier and more Net-savvy than Slate, and is a different, more complex story. From the first, Salon established itself as a digital bastion of culture and literacy, which also understood interactivity. As good as the site can be -- its technology coverage is often outstanding -- one gets the sense that it has failed to grow creatively. The magazine seems stuck, almost marginalized, long on attitude but short on new ideas. Selling criticism, cultural and political commentary and point-of-view in a medium driven by cheap and plentiful information is rough.
That doesn't mean that Salon won't survive, or even prosper, despite the recent layoffs, but that it may have to reinvent itself. In media, this often seems the hardest thing for pulications to do, online or off.
Now, as those sites seem more and more like early prospectors overrun by a Gold Rush, there is no more meaningful distinction between "old" and "new" media. Almost every major paper, magazine and TV network has a Web site, and their reporters and producers continually cross-over frome one form to the other, as do their consumers.
On the Internet, there is no workable definition of what a journalist is. That's a good thing. Anybody who sees him- or herself as a journalist becomes one, which is the way it ought to be and, in fact, used to be. The kind of press conceived by Jefferson and Paine had much more in common with the present-day Internet than with the corporatized behemoths dominating the mainstream media. The press was always meant to be open, "point-to-point" in the Net sense, individualistic and outspoken. Journalism was never meant to be an exclusive elite, and the Net has re-democratized it. Online journalism may be adolescent and chaotic, but it is freer, more diverse and participatory than its offline predecessors. And a hell of a lot more fun and interesting.
Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people write and gather information on Web pages, sites, Weblogs, mailing lists and messaging systems. They post stories, start topics, engage in discussions and debates. By New York Times standards, they don't count as journalists. But they are the personification of the new journalism, and of its rebirth. The fact that they are practicing journalism in the most literal sense is precisely what's causing problems for the conventional media -- online or off -- still organized around outdated and nonsensical models of information dispensing.
These amateur journalists offer information on everything: weather, quilting, sports, movies, music, politics, and, of course, technology itself -- the seminal story online. Sometimes their coverage is brilliant, sometimes dreadful, just like old-style journalism. One Slashdot editor e-mailed me a list of just a few of the sites he visits regularly for news about software. These sites are bad news for traditional media practitioners -- newsy, teeming, useful, vibrant, telling examples of the ferociously interactive, information-stuffed open media mushrooming all over the Web. [His sites: cpureview.com; rootprompt.org; kuro5shin.org; macrumors.com; macnn.com;ompages.com].
On such Open Media sites -- there are thousands devoted to diverse topics ranging from teen women (www.chickclickers.com) to sports topics to music, TV, movies, consumerism, books, politics and Star Wars. Readers spot and suggest and link to stories continuously. Information moves in several directions -- top-down, laterally, and bottom-up. Readers have access to the reporters and editorial figures on the Web site. Through story ideas and discussion forums they have a say in how the site operates. And they are truly heard -- no Open Media site would last long otherwise -- in opposition to the pretend interactivity of Closed Media ("E-mail Peter Jennings. He wants to hear from you!")
Open Source is, of course, different, a technical term that applies to the sharing of software, not to media or culture. But it has far-reaching implications that go beyond code. OS was a significant, prescient idea. Like Dorothy in the final moments of the "Wizard Of Oz," OS pulled back the curtain on the biggest story in the world - the rise of computing technology, which is making information cheaper and more available by the hour. And transforming media.
Any successful media site of the future has to begin with that understanding, since it affects news consumers so directly. People in significant numbers won't pay for access to general news sites that charge for information. Nor should they have to. They will, however, regularly visit sites that organize some of the vast amounts of information now available online. And they especially value the opportunity to contribute -- to comment on articles, posts and features, and to contribute links, ideas and pieces of their own.
The media are dramatically affected by (and quite vulernable to) the wave of openness, much of it architectural rather than political, which OS helped fan. Open Media are not only the wave of the future, but the hot information commodity of the present. Open media are the only media that can thrive in the 21st Century, that can connect with young consumers, incorporate new information technologies, draw large numbers and make money in the Digital Age. Unlike traditional media, they don't have to adapt to the Net. They literally grew out of it.
Open Media sites grasp that online, news is organic, continuous, participatory. Open Media editors can be plenty autocratic, and they make lots of decisions. But they make more of those decisions in the open, and readers are taken much more genuinely into account.
Open Media aren't uninterested in profit - quite the opposite. Their advocates, understanding how new technologies operate, have simply perceived a radically different priniple with which to make money - by sharing information rather than controlling it.
Proprietary sites on the Net have particular problems with this idea. As Slate learned early on, and as Inside.com will learn soon enough, it's difficult to charge money in an environment awash in timely information available for free. Closed media -- online or on paper or on cable or on the airwaves -- try to set agendas rather than permit agendas to be set by others. They don't trust their consumers to really participate, and aren't willing to share the power such an ethic requires. Instead they project an outdated image: a formal, rigid environment occupied by people holed up in offices, preoccupied with increasingly irrelevant formats.
Like The New York Times, they don't seem to grasp that the very definitions of media are really changing. Until last year (when she tired of the workload), a housewife in Akron created a free-coupon/quilting Web site that drew more than a half-million visitors a day.
In the 21st century, Closed Media can't compete either economically or creatively with the vibrant culture of open information sites. When a handful of editorial instincts compete head-on with tens or hundreds of thousands of editorial instincts, the rabble may just win every time.
Open Content (Score:3)
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Compared with Usenet (Score:3)
I remember back in the Usenet glory days. It was like watching an amplified intelligence. Something would happen involving some topic, somebody would post something about it, and immediately (in usenet terms), people were all over it: reporting other instances, disecting and analyzing. I especially liked watching things like Urban Legends migrate around the country, and various reports popping up in the folklore newsgroups as the mainstream media picked them up.
To me, that's what the New Media ought to be in it's finest instance - totally decentralized, a billion eyeballs all on an equal basis. It was also self-selecting - you decided what news was important or interesting to you. You didn't get your news on a plate.
Slashdot is like this a little, at least in the area of the eyeballs and the analysis. It suffers the bottleneck of editorial picking and choosing of the topics, but it has the advantage of an attempt to reduce the noise level in the discussion by moderation. (Anybody notice an ongoing pattern of attack meta-moderation recently?)
...phil
Brevity is Godliness (Score:3)
No doubt I could have written it shorter, but we thought it was important to go into some history here, even though it strains some attention spans..But it isn't just about cost..People are willing to spend money in different contexts for information that is useful to them. So are advertisers. The larger point made in this post is true though..The closed media model works less and less well in an environment where the price of information is dropping and the availability of information is going up...People have always been willing to pay for useful information, the change here is that it's free.But new media like the Industry Standard, which has a print and e-component is making a lot of money, and charging as well. It isn't insider info, but useful info. Big distinction.
Leopards and spots.. (Score:3)
I find this a bizarre post.. To write about open media is hypocritical, because it's about open media? How precisely is one to write about an interesting subject if you can't write about it..I'd say this is a case of a leopard who hasn't thought this through..Now that we are deeply into non sequiturs..But let's get past Jon Katz for a sec..Do you think the column is right? Wrong? Flawed? Why so tough to not personalize a non personal subject?
Internet Media Lacks Credibility (Score:3)
Deserved or not, "closed media" has credibility and the users of "closed media" trust the reporters and editors to root out the facts.
I'm no fan of conventional media, I work for a huge broadcasting conglomerate, and they do almost everything wrong when it comes to reporting the news.
"Open media" sources must be checked out for errors, omissions, and bad information. In the "open media" there is no one to do this except the individual user. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because there are so many sources of information, but a curse since many users take what they read online at face value without doing any background research. Other users want to check out the information, but do not have the skills to root out the facts like someone with newsgathering or editorial experience.
Personally, I wouldn't cry many tears if "closed media" went away in favor of "open media", but in order for this to happen, users must become skilled in self-editing or online sources will never attain the necessary level of credibility.
Maybe he really is a bot after all (Score:3)
Open media == free? (Score:3)
Now, Kat'z argument is that closed media has to be purchased, open media is free.. well wait a minute there Jon.. I can walk into my neighborhood coffee shop and pick up a newspaper and read it with my coffee in the morning... without paying a cent. I can also walk to my desk in the morning and read similar news on the web. I do not pay for the content in either of these cases. I can also read the newspaper at home, where I pay a small fee for delivery, content and the physical medium on which it is printed, OR I can walk over to my desk and read similar information on a web page. I pay for my internet access... I pay a fairly signigicant amount per month for the delivery of this content and arguably for the electronic medium on which it is printed.. and the company makes money off me with ad revenues. I don't see so profound of a philosophical different as Mr. Katz between Open and Closed media.
So quit trying to create more memes, do some research, actually give us some CONTENT.
Thank you,
//Phizzy
Open Media? (Score:3)
there is no difference (Score:3)
So CNN is closed media. CNN relies upon advertising revenue to fuel its content and stories. It's supported by "corporatism"
/. is now supposedly "open media".
So what does it matter if one directly functions off of user feedback and commentary, or if the user feedback and commentary is more subtle?
/. directly functions off of the users reading the site, CNN functions off of determining the content that people would like to see and trying to show as much of an unbiased opinion based on the content available in the world and tracking "readership" to determine how much time to alot to a subject and what spot to give to that content.
Open, Closed, it's all the same. Just in different ways.
The real problem: banner revenue is down (Score:3)
Combined with this is the fact that both the stock market and the venture capitalists have lost patience with money-losing dot-coms. I just ran an automated screen on a list of dot-com stocks, scanning for money-losers without enough cash to last another year. (This will go up on Downside.com [downside.com] in a few days.) Essentially all the money-losers have seen their stock go way down. It wasn't like that last year. From an investment perspective, the "dot-com/grab market share and don't worry about profitability" thing is over. Only the ones that have a business model that makes money will survive.
Highly-wired (Score:3)
Sounds like my graduate school days, where to keep up with my research, my teaching, and my classes, I was snorting coke, popping speed, and guzzling coffee like it was good beer. Of course, when the weekend came around I would be so wound up that I would start drinking beer like it was coffee just to slow down my shaking. Somewhere along the line I found myself with a diploma and no marketable talents. But now I have found my calling in the new Open Media. Jon, once again you've changed my life.
Flame on
Won't you ever learn? (Score:3)
Why he insists on preaching to the choir like this is beyond me...although in deference to the newspapers (not this NY Times article in particular) all the recent stats show that they are not losing their audience to online news, only network TV news is suffering. That's because most newspapers are loaded with a lot of important, factual stories that continue to captivate those who want to know what's going on in the world, whereas network news is nothing more than ratings-driven entertainment with a thin veneer of content on top. CNN, MSNBC, et. al (on cable) are also not being hurt by the millions of people who are reading news online for the same reason.
Jon has a point (Score:4)
Turn on your local news station one night and grab a stop-watch. It's funny, but also sad, to compare the length of time they spend talking about themselves with the length of time they spend on news. You will more than likely find that your local news station spends more seconds saying things like "LIVE! LATE BREAKING! CHANNEL 7 NEWS!!" than it spends talking about the story.
Jon, Jon, Jon. (Score:5)
I think it's time you stop, now that you've just compared the Open Source/Closed Source movement with media. Step back, realize that not everything is related to this little political movement, (quite like the 60's movement, anyway). Then attack the issue again (which I'm going to do here).
In Time (this week or last, I can't remember) it was said that the Salon example was a foreshadowing of the state of new media - fired because the number of hits to the article wasn't high enough. It's almost like the TV-isation of journalism - just like TV anchors can be fired for not attracting viewers, 'net writers can be fired for not attracting readers (and thus ad hits). That doesn't happen in a traditional media format. I gets my subscription to Time, I reads the articles. You don't selectively browse a magazine, or read just parts "because you like the author". (Some people do, but that usually defeats the purpose - you bought the magazine, so at some point most people read it all). And nobody fired a magazine author for not being popular enough. That would manifest itself in other ways - writer isn't interesting, writer writes horribly. After a time, you get to know the regular columnists, whether or not you always agree with what they say.
The model of the new journalism is the model of the TV - getting rid of authors because their ratings aren't high enough, trying to attract eyeballs for advertising. It's not about openness. My static copy of Time is more vaulable to me than any article on Slashdot, simply because it's a well-thought out piece that's not incomplete without feedback (like this forum). And there's always a letters to the editor section.
[Insert good closing here...]
Slashdot columnist concludes slashdot is best!!!!! (Score:5)
Strangely, the stock price of andover.net failed to react to this ringing endorsement of Slashdot by Slashdot.
Jon, the fact that /. editors get their news from "Open" media means damn-all, because where do these places get their information from? By and large, "Closed" media. How many links do you get from Slashdot to the New York Times in a typical week? And how many going the other way? To me, that says that people still want to know that their media is coming from actual journalists, with fact-checkers, standards, and all the other desperately "OLD" standards that stop, to take a wild example, stories about GNOME and KDE being integrated from being posted while they're about a quarter baked.