Tag: bloggers

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The Objectivity Myth

Old Media Needs an Opinion

Journalists are objective. Bloggers are not. The two have been duking it out since the dawn of the Internet age. Journalists think objectivity will save their jobs and bloggers know that is nonsense. Old media is not irrelevant, but they are digging themselves into a hole. Let me explain.

First, understand that journalism has never been objective. Newspapers first emerged as political publications funded by partisan parties and read by the top of society’s pyramid. Then in a move to both democratize media and increase profits, newspapers dropped their prices and attracted multitudes of immigrants and workers as subscribers in order to sell those eyeballs to eager advertisers.

That should sound similar to today’s content farm with one big exception – newspapers were written by an elite group of thought-leaders (and still are), and so the power to create and distribute information remained in the hands of just a few.

Fast-forward a century, give or take a few decades, and you have the media industry that politics and technology built. But now the Internet has given everyone the opportunity to create and distribute information. No longer is news controlled by large media conglomerates, but by anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation.

On the Internet, we have largely admitted that individual and institutional objectivity is impossible. Not even Google tries to offer impartial news results when you search, preferring instead to offer up “the most articulate and passionate people arguing both sides of the equation,” says Google News’ founder, Krishna Bharat. Today we trust algorithms to deliver objectivity since humans cannot.

Objectivity is null on the web because the reader can always self-verify and fact-check themselves. That is what the proliferation of information is there for. You will be tracked. “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links,” technologist David Weinberger argued back in the day. “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Fair enough if you have the time to click on all of those links, but none of us do. Not to mention transparency often stifles meaningful dialogue. Nevertheless and despite my own bias on it, transparency is just as useful as objectivity in holding individuals and companies accountable, and as a big bonus, it doesn’t require you to act like an impartial noob.

Now, here’s what’s important.

The real reason newspapers can’t transition online is because they’re holding onto the veil of objectivity as the reason for their relevance. Readers, in turn, cry foul because they know objectivity is unreasonable, and instead uphold the virtues of new media. Then everyone declares traditional media is dead.

Sad face.

The thing is, objectivity is irrelevant, not news organizations. Rule number one in running a business is to determine the value you provide to your customers. A newspaper’s value doesn’t lie in it’s impartiality, so it’s ridiculous that traditional media continues to place those virtues on a pedestal. The traditional news model is not outdated, but journalists’ ideologies are.

Why do news companies continue to praise impartiality? Well, the veil of objectivity did allow newspapers to have a successful advertiser-subscriber model. And being profitable subsequently allowed newspapers to fund long investigations that readers came to rely on. So media organizations often confuse their business model, objective reporting and actual good journalism – that is, investigative reporting, news that is highly crafted and cared for, and that continuous sifting and winnowing for the truth at all costs.

A journalist doesn’t ask “Why? What? How?” because they’re impartial. They ask because they care. They ask because they have passion for the topic. They ask because they want to uncover injustices, right wrongs and make a difference.

There’s no reason why the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times should insist on objectivity as superiority. It has nothing to do with the actual amazing content they provide day in and day out.

The real travesty is not the loss of impartiality then, which never existed anyway, but the fact that without big profits, there are no big budgets, and no big investigations. Only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C., for instance. Can we keep our politicians accountable through our computer screens if a smaller and smaller number of people show up in real life?

No, we cannot. Nor can we uphold fair labor practices or ensure financial rigor at banks or keep up with everything else that’s important to our society. Blogs don’t have big budgets either. So journalists and bloggers both end up having to pander to page-view journalism, which serves advertisers alone (witness the devolution of media).

Here’s what the New York Times and the rest should do. Let go of objectivity. It’s elitist, it’s unattainable and it’s not important. Talk about real benefits. Charge for access and load up on advertisers to make mad money and deliver mad value.

It’s okay to have an opinion. In fact, it’s what makes us human.

Categories
Politics

The Rise of Transparency and the Fall of Dialogue

When Republican Governor Scott Walker recently sought to eliminate collective bargaining rights, it was less about Wisconsin’s budget deficit or labor unions themselves, and more of a thinly veiled attempt to destroy the Democratic party. That’s because labor unions are one of the few organized groups that can counter-balance large companies in the money department when campaign time rolls around. Without the backing and support of labor unions, the Democratic party would be in trouble.

Walker’s actions weren’t unjustified however, nor representative of solely the Republican party. Today’s elected officials align themselves with their political party over their constituents, and find it more beneficial to abide by the party line than to compromise. That’s because the need for transparency necessitates every comment be combed through with a fine-toothed analysis thereby crippling what was once known as the world’s greatest deliberative bodies.

“Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War,” argues UW-Madison professor William Cronon in the New York Times. “Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.”

But Walker didn’t create partisan dysfunction; he only lit its fire. Transparency is the real culprit, and while yes, transparency is a mechanism to keep officials accountable, it is also an enabler of partisanship.

C-SPAN was the first to flip on the light of accountability. “After C-SPAN went on the air, the cozy atmosphere that encouraged both deliberation and back-room deals began to yield to transparency and, with it, posturing,” argues George Packer in The New Yorker. “The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to cooperate across the aisle.”

Today, bloggers are the ones that carry transparency’s torch in the name of open government. “Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media,” says Packer. “News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington.”

Transparency has become the enabler for what The Daily Beast’s Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz calls an “era of sound-bite warfare on steroids.” Partisan organizations now exist whose sole aim is to discredit public officials and craft previously benign remarks into incendiary blows. Sound-bite snippets are volleyed up and copied into the broadcast and blogger media while these organizations claim that they “make their research transparent,” and are thus able to escape culpability on the denigration of our political system.

Senior Senator Lamar Alexander (Republican) describes the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” No longer do the right and left sides speak to or even look at each other. No one is actually even in the governing chamber when their colleagues stand up. And whereas Senators in the seventies would have lunch together, if a Republican joins a lunch full of Democrats today, their identity is kept a secret to protect their reputation. Trust is non-existent, and the tradition of politics – that of “substantive, thoughtful and moderate discussion” – is swept aside.

Massive demonstrations around Wisconsin’s Capitol led to the eventual block of Walker’s legislation – hey, don’t mess with a Sconnie – but most protesters understood they weren’t marching for the right to retain collective bargaining, but against the pure ego-centric, heavy-handed idiocy that is Scott Walker. They were marching for the right to have a conversation. Wisconsin’s Democartic Senators went so far as to flee the state and hide out in Illinois to stall the passing of the bill.

“Walker doesn’t negotiate. Whether it’s with state workers or Democratic lawmakers, he wouldn’t come to the table,” State Representative Joe Parisi said. “And that’s the problem.” So the Dems decided not to show up either. Instead, both parties talked to the press as if media were meditator, and the bloggers and media did what they do best, reducing an issue to one remark versus another and one party against the other.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t reported that both sides – Republicans and Democrats – came to march around the Capitol. And lest we forget, during the winter in Wisconsin, that is an especially big deal.  It wasn’t reported that the demonstrations were peaceful and respectful. And it wasn’t reported that demonstrators showed up to talk to each other when our politicians would not.

Categories
e-Commerce

Why E-Commerce Needs to Stop Aggregation and Start Getting Social

Most of us would agree that the internet is biased towards social connection, yet many e-commerce or f-commerce experiences are not. In the olden days, bazaars weren’t only about consuming “stuff,” but were a social space to meet up with friends and exchange information.

Today, instead of a peer-to-peer economy, we have relationships with our brands. We don’t learn what’s happening in our world, but instead learn how much smaller the new iPad is.

The mom blogosphere in particular has risen to fill that void, up to a point. Bloggers and readers exchange ideas, rumors and facts that matter to them, but companies quickly co-opt the majority of well-intentioned blogs to sell more stuff instead of creating more social value. Ultimately, such actions have degraded blogs to what we have today: a list of product features and giveaways.

Companies do this because of their inability to embrace nuance, being solely dedicated to the dollar. You can see this play out in how companies structure themselves. Many companies create an e-commerce site that is simply an inventory list with no social value whatsoever. This means that many other companies can then take advantage of those sites because they don’t offer anything except a price on a product. So those other companies rise up another level of abstraction and become a search engine or aggregator, which creates even less value than before.

What we’re seeing now, as a result of the recession, is that you can’t just keep abstracting how you make money at a higher and higher level. Indeed, each time we distance ourselves from the most basic of human interactions – that is, a face-to-face conversation – the more dangerous it is for our economy.

Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues Jeffrey Hollender.

And many would argue it was just that kind of speculation – or abstraction – that got us into all of our financial problems in the first place.

For e-commerce and f-commerce, this means an opportunity to pivot to new models by combining commerce with community to replicate the peer-to-peer economy, where value isn’t limited to dollars and point of sale, but expands to include the concept of sharing and access just as it would in real life.

Ultimately, that is what every e-commerce site should be doing – not attempting a relationship between brand and customer, but enabling connections and conversations between customers.

Which even in this age of social media, very few companies do successfully.