With that in mind, I wanted to write a practical post. Five simple things that increase my productivity. Before the list begins a disclaimer: The only way to increase productivity is to do things. You can be equipped with every tool out there – but if you don’t focus it won’t help. As my friend Cyrus says “Being a good writer is 3% talent, and 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”

What tools save you time?

TEXT EXPANDER

Do you write a lot of emails? Do many of them have the same elements? Do you run an organization and sometimes you need to do reach out to various people but you don’t want to mass email people (lame?). Do you write a lot of html and would love some shortcuts? Check out Text Expander. This original tool came to me via Amy Gahran, bless her soul,  and has been a life saver. It even keeps track of how much it estimates its saved you. To date for me: 92 hours (estimating that I type 400 characters a minute). It also has an auto-correct tool that fixes common typos. Lucky for me, my typos are never common.

Jing

This tool comes via Kara Andrade and Erik Sundelof. Jing is a screencast tool which is incredibly useful if you work with a remote team building and managing a website. If you’ve ever had a phone conversation with a web developer about a bug,  you’ll know that communication is hard. You’ll ask them to get on the computer so they can see what you see. But you are never 100% sure if what you are saying translates. All that goes away with Jing. Now take a quick screencast of what you are seeing and upload that to screencast automatically and then share the link. Boom – you and your team are on the same page. No need to schedule a conference call, no worries about miscommunication.

xPad

It is as cool as it sounds. The xPad is the ultimate notebook. Do you take notes on your computer? Do you use Microsoft Word to save those notes. If so – please stop reading this right now and slap yourself. Microsoft Word is a horrible way to take notes. It is clunky, big files, slow to open, slow to close and worse yet – doesn’t easily transfer online (people that cut and paste word documents into a WYSWIG editor are a pet peeve.) For a long time I just had an internal system of using TextEdit (Rich Text Documents). It worked okay. I’d keep one blank document open at all times (note taking) and save important ones. Luckily Joy Mayer, a fellows Missouri Reynolds Fellow told me about xPad. I have not needed to open up Text Edit since. The xPax stays open. I can create a new internal document in seconds. Rename it whenever, delete it and flip between notes in a breeze. If you have tons of Word documents or any other kind of documents clouding your desktop this is your solution.

Rapportive

This little plugin helps you know who you are talking to. If you are like me and you get an email from somebody new one of the first things you do is Google them to get the details. Rapportive does that for you. Right there in your inbox they’ll search for related social media accounts on LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, and more. Forget searching to find out who this person is – it’s already in front of you. Related but not as practical: Gist.

Grease Monkey

Grease Monkey is the script that fathered all scripts. First: If you don’t use Firefox, stop reading this and slap yourself.

If you do use Firefox, are you using it to its full potential? Maybe not. Download Grease Monkey and then search through the seemingly endless add-ons. The important thing here is not to get lost in the sea of possibilities. Instead think about a problem you already have in your browsing experience. Maybe you want a better way to find the latest news. Then go to Grease Monkey and search news. You can see already there are more tools here than one person could use. But – I promise that picking the right one will save you a TON of time and energy.

So there you have it – these are just five tools that I use on a regular basis that have probably saved me countless hours. More than 92 at least

ON GENERATIONS

One personal thread to the last three weeks of my life is a continuing fascination of generational theory. I’ve never blogged about this here (I put these thoughts on my side/lazy blog) but the story goes like this.

I am on the cusp of generations. I am either the youngest of Generation X or the very oldest of the Millennials. I prefer to think of myself as the later, a leader of a new generation. But the fact is, I am older than the heart of the Millennial generation (who are still in high school or entering college).

To put this in concrete terms: I am old enough to remember watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island and young enough to remember seeing Power Rangers after school. But I was never in the age demographic that these shows were aiming for. I was either too young to understand (Giligan’s Island) or too old to care (the appeal of Power Rangers dropped off after 13). Another example would be Kurt Cobain – a cultural signifier for Gen X. When he died I was 12. Too young to really understand the cultural significance. At the same time – it impacted my early teen years. Younger Millennials only know of Kurt Cobain in a historical context. In contrast, while I was in high school Brittany Spears blew up. I was young enough to live the historical significance, but too old to enjoy it. Her appeal was to teeny-boppers ie: younger (true) Millennials, not old-fart Millennials like me that had been tainted by Pearl Jam.

The point of this generational ramble – every generation has its own signifiers. Some of them small, some of them big (see “On Television” section)

At the Aspen Institute event there were only two people under 30 years old at the table. I am not a big believer in the old vs. new media debate. I think it is lazy thinking and it’s even lazier to pit this in terms of age.

But I did feel a potent disconnect between the way I envisioned some of the issues and how they were being discussed. This could be simply because I run a small nonprofit whereas the other attendees ran organizations you may of heard about called “NPR” “PBS” “The Washington Post” “The FCC,” etc. Another reason could be because there is a gap between the older empowered generation and the younger upcoming generation. The signifiers of media for me have been different than the signifiers for this group in power. A perfect case in point would be Napster and Friendster (My thoughts in audio at Poytner).

Generations In The Desert – Journalism

One interesting person I met began talking to me about the Torah. At first I was internally rolling my eyes. Yes, my last name is Cohn – but I’m more of a cultural Jew (think Woody Allen, Jon Stewart). I am not religious. But I can appreciate a humanist interpretation of the story this individual told. So here we go: From Torah to Media in three paragraphs. Note: I don’t really know the details of the religious story so if this interpretation has no merit – call me out.

When God led the Jews out of Egypt it was originally going to be a two week trip. Instead God led the Jews through the desert for 40 years. An odd thing if you think about it. Earlier in the story God caused the plagues and parted the Red Sea and now this God wouldn’t perform some miracle to swoop up the Jews to someplace with air conditioning? No, he left them in the desert with flat bread.

The humanistic interpretation is that an entire generation who had only known life as slaves had to live and die before the Jews could truly move on. This generation had a slave mentality and the memories of their time in Egypt needed to live and die in the desert before the Jewish people could move to the holy land as a new people.

And that’s when it became relevant.

I’ve said before that professional journalists, in one interpretation, can be thought of as a diaspora. Their “home land” in newspapers has been compromised. If there is a promised-land for media, considering generational theory, it might be that this transition we are in will last much longer. I joked that unless I live to be as old as Moses (120) I won’t live to see the dawning of this new digital age. I am doomed to be part of that cusp generation that must wander in the desert with the elders who remember something long passed and can’t settle into something new. Meanwhile acting as a steward and trying to head north to a new land with a younger generation to take over for me.

To be fair and a side note: I am not suggesting that newspapers or reporters from newspapers have a “slave mentality.” The role newspapers played historically was important, noble and meaningful. But it is gone and dated.

It still leaves us with the question, however, of what is that “something new”?

I don’t propose to know – but I am increasingly convinced that journalists need to remain open even if that means the “profession” of journalism never returns and the loaded word “journalism” is replaced with something else. This could be the case but it wouldn’t stop this “new land” to have people who take upon the responsibility of informing their communities.

In other words – In the future we may not even call it journalism – but if it serves the same functions then I will be satisfied. Furthermore, I’d feel as though my generational role, to act as a steward of something during a tough time in the desert, would be a well fought battle.

ON TELEVISION

An example of a quick thought: Bill Kling from American Public Media mentioned some statistic that predicts by 2014 over 70% of people will view television content online.

The catch, of course, is that once it becomes more than 50 percent they aren’t watching television content online – they are watching video online. There is a BIG difference.

This figure may be high – but it is a growing trend. I personally haven’t had a working television in years. Neither do many of my friends. For me television is similar to a telephone land line (which again many people under 30 don’t own). If you have a cell, it makes no sense. With Netflix, Hulu and more coming online – a working TV becomes a burden. A giant box in the corner collecting dust.

This would be a continuation of our move from an industrial age to an information age. If newspapers think they got hit by the digital transition – just wait till the shift to online television happens. Broadcasting journalism has a higher overhead and, from my view, is even less open to participation.

Relevance: See media signifiers.

Re-cognizing your life and taking stock

In a time of momentous life changes one cannot help but turn their head and peer back at where they’ve been.

In the last few months I’ve gotten engaged (hooray!) and I’ve made plans to move to Missouri for an academic fellowship at the Reynolds Institute of Journalism that will let me continue my work with Spot.Us.

The first of these events is permanent. The second will be for an academic year, but is certainly a life experience. I’ve never lived outside of the coasts or a major metropolitan city.

Recently upon a trip to Los Angeles (born and raised) I watched home videos of my childhood. Then, for technical purposes, I browsed every single blog post I’ve written since 2005. From my moving to NY, my freelancing, getting into Columbia j-school and graduating, the passing of my grandparents, the start of Spot.Us and more.

All of these things lead to where I am today and yet sometimes I still can’t believe it. I recently uploaded a video of me at 23 year’s old living in San Francisco. I was a year out of U.C. Berkeley and still very much an urban beatnik/hippie. From the age of 19 to 25 I could seldom be seen without a brown beanie, brown jacket and wearing the one pair of brown shoes that I owned. I am still very much that person. I care not for style – I go with practicality and utility.

And yet there are parts of that young person which have faded. At one point in my life I was a  talented musician (that video doesn’t really show it). I would play guitar at least an hour or two a day. I recorded roughly two albums. I played the drums in various bands. All that slowly disappeared the day I moved to NY. I am not sad about the fading of my musical life. I still play from time to time. But the spark in me that needed to play daily is gone.

I’m on my way now to the Aspen Institute for the Knight conference on news and information for communities where last year Madeline Albright was a speaker among others. Now I’m rubbing my head thinking – what can I offer. And yet when I publicly confess feeling out of my league I’m assured by friends and colleagues that I indeed have something to offer.

Life is a gas.

My intellectual fascination with the distribution of information in a digital age does create a bit of a narrative. Still, I never would have predicted any of this when I first got turned on to journalism (story behind that here). If I’m honest, I wrote a majority of my rhetoric honors thesis while stoned living in a studio apartment in Berkeley (edited it sober of course). In the last two to three years, following that same intellectual curiosity,  I’ve had the opportunity to travel across this country. Even weirder I am given the opportunity to speak my mind on a subject I believe is important to myself, my community and communities across the world to people who, without patting myself on the back too much, seem to care what I think.

And life continues.

I have no idea what awaits me while I’m in Missouri. I know my passion remains with the organization Spot.Us and the idea of making the process of journalism participatory and transparent.

Sometimes I feel like great progress is being made both for the organization and the movement (I will go ahead and call this a movement). Other times I feel drained and concerned that it is all for nothing. That the industry will find a way and that the journalism industries’ main concern has nothing to do with journalism but its own survival.

And so for now. I eat, I pray and I love (HA! I hate shit like that).

Meanwhile I’m trying to do double-duty since it’s a busy week at Spot.Us starting off with a great piece from Investigate West on the cruise industry and impacts on the environment.

You can follow along!

P.S. Aspen is beautiful

I know this because Erica Smith knows this. These numbers are arrived via her site Paper Cuts which she started as a non-scientific way of estimating newspaper layoffs.

Here’s the nut graf: Eight months into 2010 and we are still shy of 2,000 layoffs or buyouts. Now, if there were ever a number you’d want to see lowered, it’s this. But it does raise an eyebrow.

This is a dramatic shift. I thought maybe it was a mistake so I contacted Erica, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, to see if it was accurate and if she had any thoughts. Her quote below.

Either I’ve gotten back at tracking them down or, more likely there’s no more meat on the bone. There’s not much bone left either. The only cutting left seems to come from outsourcing and consolidating. Granted, there are several black pins on the map [for 2010] — those are “unknown” markers — but not enough (I hope) for 14K.

I do expect I’ll be adding more layoffs in the next two months, though. A few details are coming out on Gannett’s consolidation plans. Here at the Post-Dispatch, our “no-layoff” guarantee ends Sept. 28; I don’t see that ending with punch and cookies. And as more fiscal years come to an end, more papers are going to be looking at their budgets and making cuts … somewhere.

I don’t know what the drop in cuts signifies. It could be a good thing (newspapers are bouncing back – unlikely) or as Erica notes – it could mean they’ve cut down to the bone and there is nothing left to tighten. Either way this is something to note. Something has shifted.

I do not think we hold our tech blogs to high enough standards. I think we let them take us on cult of personality rides and we get infatuated. Today I am a total back-seat tech-writer. As I read various tech blogs I find myself wondering how I would cover issues. I have lots of praise but also constructive criticism for the current tech blog scene. Since people often ask me what sites I follow to stay on top of things I figure a post like this will let me rant and answer that question.

Disclaimer: I’m focusing on organizations that cover technology. If this list were to include tech pundits or individuals (Kottke, Laughing Squid, Rough Type, etc) it would be much longer. I am also excluding sites that cover the cross-section of technology and media (Nieman, MediaShift, Buzzmachine, PaidContent, etc). This is not an exhaustive list. It’s tech-blogging 101 for those that need to be introduced.

So without further adieu – my list of tech blogs and their vibes.

Read Write Web

Right now Read Write Web is the New York Times of tech blogs. This isn’t just because they have a syndication deal (which they do) but because RWW provides a sense of analysis that other tech blogs don’t. I recently met Richard MacManus, the founder of RWW, who confirmed that their emphasis was on context rather than speed. This may seem counter-intuitive in a world of speed and constant updates, but it is what separates them and as a reader I appreciate it and trust them more than most tech blogs because of it.

Wired

It’s hard for me to objectively describe Wired. Not that objectivity is the goal, but I worked there for the first year out of college and it is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. As a result, thinking about Wired gives me warm fuzzies and I know first hand how much love and attention goes into the editorial process. As a result this is a go-to source of tech news. It is for many people because Wired is one of the first sources of tech news. For some, like my father, Wired isn’t a news source – it’s a cultural touchstone. It represents the tech revolution itself.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is guilty of the cult-of-personality. You cannot separate organization from Mike Arrington who has shaped it from the ground up. This is not a bad thing. Mike has a strong personality and he knows it. His importeur is all over TechCrunch. So whenever I read TechCrunch (which from what I can tell values speed over context) I have to put on my Mike Arrington goggle filters. That said, TechCrunch pushes boundaries in reporting and that is why I love following them. They have mastered the art of respectfully changing an article based on reader comments. At one point they even tried to kill embargoes for their site. I am sure it didn’t work – bu that kind of radical thinking shows the role that techblogs can have and that’s why TechCrunch is notable. They are not afraid to push boundaries while covering technology.

Mashable (Updated from Comments)

The truth of the matter is – I love some of the PEOPLE at Mashable (Vadim Lavrusik and Tamar, etc) but I DON’T like Mashable. In fact, it comes to mind as a tech blog who I wish would step it up.  First: In tone and ethos it comes off way too much like MTV. Everything is very flashy, glitzy, etc. It makes an old man like me have seizures. More important: They are a tech company disguised as a news site. They write how-to’s, lists, digg-bait, etc. As a result they have a dog in the tech-race that they are covering. I think all tech blogs have a dog in the race to some extent – but none more obviously so than Mashable IMHO. I like their content when I’m in a certain mood. But if I’m not in that mood – it can actually irk me.

Venture Beat

I like Venture Beat because it is straight and to the point. Follow the money. This is the Wall Street Journal of tech blogs. I’ve known a few writers who have worked here over the years and I think they do a good job of following the industry. It’s also interesting to note that like GigaOm this blog was started by a tech reporter from a newspaper. Today in journalism we talk about entrepreneurialism and personal branding. These tech blogs are living proof of why.

GigaOm

Similar to Venture Beat this is an example of a tech reporter who owned his beat and turned that into owning his own media company. That is admirale and has a larger lesson for the journalism industry. In fact, GigaOm is becoming more and more of a general purpose destination. They cover everything from the environment and media, but with a tech spin. They also do a good job of letting you know the individual writers including Mathew Ingram (one of my all time favs).

Engadget/Gizmodo

In truth I am not an Engadget or Gizmodo fan. My interest in technology is rarely gadgets or gizmos. These two sites occupy the same space in my mind. The recent iPhone 4 kerfuffle was notable. I think these blogs tend to be caught up in shiny new play things and that is not interesting. It’s straight consumerism. They might as well be printing catalogs for Apple and other companies. Just my anti-consumerism two cents.

Business Insider

I’ve been following Business Insider back when it was called Silicon Alley Insider. One of the defining things about this site is it’s New York attitude and approach to covering technology. They are distinctively not caught up in the hype machine that can be silicon valley. I love this about them. They also BLEW ME AWAY with their investigation on Facebook. Talk about holding a company’s feet to the fire.

Lifehacker

I love this site for thinking out of the box. This shows you how technology can improve your life on a very practical level. Whereas Venture Beat is all about following the money, this site is about following the practical uses for your everyday life. For that, it is invaluable.

Search Engine Land

I’m including this as an example of a niche tech site. There are tons of these (some of the best cover specific sites like All Facebook). They are fantastic when you want to dive deep. Search is arguably the most important online industry and this is a great blog to follow it. I also recommend John Battele’s Searchblog if you want the go-to independent blogger source and for many of these niche topics the independent blogger who covers the beat is just as insightful as the niche organization.

Silicon Valley Watcher

The last on the list Silicon Valley Watcher does an amazing job of staying very personal (Tom Foremski) but with an air of professionalism. It’s just a good read. No final analogy (although I think Tom’s time at the Financial Times is reflected in this blog.

So what is your favorite source of tech news and how do you describe it?

——–

As many a reader know, I love drawn out analogies. Here are some of my favorites.

• Journalism bloggers as musicians
• The Community Dream Team: Tech versions of the 1994 Basketball Dream Team. Lawrence Lessig was the Larry Bird of my Internet Dream Team.
• Cities as relatives (I will soon include Columbia Missouri to the list of “my three cities”).
• Community journalism as baseball and as a social gathering.

Inherent to this mindset is the ability to acknowledge missteps and pivot. There are countless things I believe we’ve done right (pats self on back) but there are other things where we made the best guesses we could and upon failure have to pivot. Recently Spot.Us made one big pivot and is openly thinking about how to dance around two remaining problems. Before we analyze those, let’s get to the good news (pats self on back again, rewards reader with cute kitten photo).

Community-focused sponsorship continues.

We have another community-focused sponsorship, this one made possible by Clay Shirky (how cool is that!).

In this sponsorship we are asking the community questions about objectivity and journalism. Not only do we reward your time by giving you control over a part of our budget, but we will release answers to these questions so that we all may become smarter and learn about what the Spot.Us community thinks about this subject.

Community-focused sponsorships was also a notable entry at the Knight-Batten awards and we’ve created a sponsorship package to help spread the word. Next step is an affiliate program. If you help us sell a sponsorship, you’ll get the commission. Interested? Contact David at spot dot us.

Editorial highlights

Just about every week we complete a reporting project and publish a handful of blog posts. Some of the recent victories include…..

• The LA Times imitates Spot.Us reporting:

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. If that is true, then the LA Times gave Spot.Us a huge kudos recently. Our ongoing investigation into the UC Regents found that one regent has invested lots of money into private educational institutions. The LA Times followed up our reporting, giving a small nod to the original investigation – without really giving full credit. In a separate email the LA Times reporter did admit that our reporting inspired his column. The Spot.Us community can collectively pat itself on the back for that one.

• Our most dynamic collaboration ever – covering the Johannes Mehserle trial

This week we published the 40th post in our coverage of the Johannes Mehserle trial. Mehserle, a former Bart police officer, was found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant. What was unique and interesting for Spot.Us about this project was the number of partners that participated. Our pitch  had seven different organizations taking part including, Oakland Local, New American Media, California Beat, KALW and The Bay Citizen. In another era each organization would have hired its own reporter and provided competitive (and perhaps overlapping coverage). Through Spot.Us we were able to create a ethos of Co-opetition. We hope to see more pitches like this in the future and our hat is off to these organizations who were able to pull it off

• The Treasure Island Investigation

Our partners in crime the SF Public Press put out a print product recently with an exhaustive spread on Treasure Island. It’s a fantastic look at development in SF from several angels and will be adapted and republished by Shareable.Net this week.

• Tons of new pitches.

There are more new pitches than we can highlight. They range in topic from Native American issues in Minnesota to recycling in Champaign-Urbana, homelessness in California and beyond. Check out all the new pitches. You can fund them through our community-focused sponsorships. Taking a quick questionnaire can create $5 for the pitch of your choice!

Lessons Learned and Missteps

• Expansion isn’t clean

A careful observer of Spot.Us would have seen this coming and may have even noticed the change last week. We have removed the networks on Spot.Us. Where we used to say we were based in SF, LA, Seattle, Minnesota and expanding – we are now open to anyone with a good local/regional pitch in the United States.

As I noted in a previous post in June:

From the start, I thought Spot.Us would expand a la Craigslist: Pick locations, create sub-domains and let people aggregate around them. Certainly San Francisco and Los Angeles have worked like this. We always have about five active pitches in both locations at any given time. Seattle however, might not be that way. I fear I’m viewed as an outsider ….

But that shouldn’t stop me from expanding. Especially not when I am getting very solid pitches from around the country.

Related – it makes little sense for me to tell a good pitch from Illinois or Alamo Texas that they can’t put their pitch up until we find a handful of other pitches in their region (which might be mediocre).

As of last week the sub-domains at Spot.Us have been removed. Trying to convince people in a specific region to use the site, while stopping others from using it because they aren’t in the right region is not the best use of our time or energy.

So the lesson here is really one about internal expectations and external realities. While in my minds’ eye it still makes sense for Spot.Us to expand region-by-region I don’t see this happening anytime soon. This is not the end of the world. In some respects I find it freeing. In the end Spot.Us is a platform, not a news organization. Opening up the platform is a positive endeavor, especially considering the vast majority of pitches so far have been successful. The major misstep then is not making this change sooner. The challenge going forward is finding a different organizing mechanism so that people can find pitches that are relevant to them as quickly as possible on our search page without expecting those pitches to be grouped geographically.

• Letting go isn’t easy

Related to the misstep above is a larger phenomena. Put bluntly I was a smothering Jewish mother (trust me, I know what these are like). I think I clung to the “babyness” of the Spot.Us project instead of letting it go free. It’s natural for anybody who starts something to hold onto it and fear releasing it into the wild. I’ve tried to avoid that – but  I’m afraid I’ve put Spot.Us into a tough position of wanting it to expand but also being protective over the pitches that are uploaded into the site.

There are some pitches I felt very comfortable rejecting. The best example was a pitch from a Seattle fortune teller that was going to read people’s future via the Internet and published on Spot.Us. I feel justified in saying “that’s not for us.” As a nonprofit – we have a mission to fund local/regional reporting.

At the same time – this tension hasn’t always been easy to negotiate. Some pitches we get exist in a much more difficult space. The tension exist between a site where the founder (David Cohn) should have authority over what pitches are included and a site that is truly open, but still filters out pitches that don’t meet our mission (like fortune telling). I am not 100% sure how we will negotiate that tension. For the immediate future it will be a site where I filter pitches. I will not be filtering pitches based on “credentials” but rather the topic of the reporting and the earnestness and eagerness of the reporter. Ideally Spot.Us and its community board members will be able to come up with a system whereby pitches can be accepted and/or rejected not at the whim of my decision but that of the community and its representatives.

In conclusion

Spot.Us continues to push forward.  We’ve had some missteps and some beautiful moments. I suspect both will happen in the future as well. The beauty of all this continues to be that we do both in public and that it is only with the public’s participation that either can happen. This remains an experiment in transparency and public control over the process of journalism. It will continue to be such an experiment as we move forward.

The First Chapter

The first post on this topic hinged on the idea that transparency is necessary for public participation in journalism.

This Wikipedia quote puts it bluntly. The argument for transparency then isn’t ethical so much as practical. It’s a second order argument. The process of journalism must be transparent if we expect people to participate in a meaningful way. This assumes, however, that we want people to participate.

If we can reason that participation in journalism is ethical and transparency is necessary for participation to occur, it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

Which means the next step is to examine the base of this syllogism: There is an ethical argument for participation in journalism.

The Goal of Journalism

What is the purpose or goal of journalism? In philosophy I might pose this as, what is journalism’s Telos — its purpose, aim, end and/or design.

The reason this question (and blog post) is important is that if you look at the current understanding of ethics in journalism you can see that it is more along the lines of a professional code than an ethical debate or analysis. Public accountability is mentioned in many of the existing code of ethics. As is the rightful dissemination of information to the public. But in almost all of these cannons of journalism the public is acted upon and is rarely an actor.

When I ask what is the goal of journalism I am not interested in the journalism industry or a journalism company. The goal for both of which would be the same for any industry (protecting itself as an economic good) or company (increasing revenue).

The tagline for my blog is “journalism is a process, not a product,” and that continues to be my rallying cry. Too often our ethics, ideas of success and end goals are determined by journalism as a product, industry or company. I am more interested in the process of journalism. What is the end goal for an act of journalism?

Now here I have to posit a question: If an act of journalism is committed but never published, is it an act of journalism?

Many people don’t know this, but I used to be a musician. I’ve actually recorded at least two albums. But I never promoted my work. So if a work of art is not shared, is it art? What is the distinction between art and hobby? Related: If an act of reporting occurs but is not shared, is it journalism? What is the distinction between journalism and journaling?

I ask this question because it gives me the platform to pose a possible end goal of journalism — to inform. Journalism, which is a tricky thing to define, is the process of collecting, filtering and distributing information that has meaning. One caveat of course is that the information is non-fiction (true and accurate).

If we take away the “distributing” of information we no longer have the process of journalism. It is the final step in the process because it is the final Telos of journalism — to inform our fellow human beings. Size of the audience aside, journalism is fundamentally a process of education. But when we look at the conversation about journalism, those two words are most often coupled around journalism education (journalism schools) and rarely about how the two endeavors are intimately tied.

Informing is Participatory

So the goal of journalism is to inform people about events in the world. This is fundamentally a social act and would remain the goal of journalism if we lived in a democracy, republic or any other kind of society.

Historically speaking, the “participation” of journalism consumers was to consume. That is a form of participation, but not necessarily the kind that I wan to justify. If it were, this blog post could have been much shorter: “We can justify transparency in journalism because people need to be able to read it!”

The kind of participation that I want to argue for is more engaging. Members of the public are not participating by the sheer act of be informed, but they are self-informing. It’s the difference between roads that make public transportation possible and roads that make all forms of transportation possible.

Why Individual Participation is Ethical

And herein lies the base of this whole thought process. It comes down to the individual. It is the individual, as part of a collective, that journalism seeks to inform. The individual should be actively participating in the dissemination of information for several reasons:

1. On a utilitarian level, they will become more informed and help inform more people. If the good of journalism is to inform, then letting more people participate will inform more people. Similarly, the mission of roads is to enable travel/transportation, not to safeguard public transportation. (There could be unintended consequences, of source, such as pollution.) The mission of journalism is to inform, not to safeguard journalism companies. A network has infinity more connections and that requires active participation and self-informed informants.

2. They have a moral right as an individual to participate to the extent that they do not hinder others from participating. (See individualism).

Anti-climactic?

So, to review:

• Transparency is required for well-informed participation to happen.
• Participation is needed because….
• Journalism’s end goal is to inform other people.
• More people participating in the process of journalism means more people being informed.
• Combine this with individual rights and …

The journalism industry has a moral obligation to make the practices and processes of journalism more transparent so that the larger citizenry can participate.

Behind the lack of climax

Perhaps I could have shortened this blog post. I made every attempt to go step-by-step and lay out my line or reasoning.

Why?

Too often our discussion of participatory journalism, citizen journalism, etc takes an industry or company view. Either citizen journalism is good or bad because of its relationship to a bottom line.

Slighter better arguments are that participatory journalism is good/bad because of its quality (or lack of).

What I’m suggesting is that participation in the media is a net positive because of its intrinsic value.

If one can make an ethical argument for participation in journalism and that transparency is necessary for participation to occur, then it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

For a long time I’ve had a post inside of me dying to get out. A few months ago I was invited to speak at the International Symposium of Journalism with Dan Gillmor, Ethan Zuckerman and Jan Schaffer. The presentation I gave is here. I got a great chuckle from the second and third slides.

But there was one slide which almost made me re-do the entire presentation. Because it struck me as something worth exploring. It was slide seventeen on “Transparency” seen below.
This quote comes from Wikipedia.

“For well-informed participation to occur, it is argued that some version of transparency, e.g. radical transparency, is necessary, but not sufficient.”

Perhaps it stood out to me because of the “necessary, but not sufficient” which flashed me back to logic class when I was a philosophy undergrad. For whatever reason – I dwelled on it.

I’ve dedicated the majority of my career to two things in this order: Increasing participation in journalism and increasing transparency in the process of journalism. Something I’ve zenned out on recently is how connected the two are and how we often treat them as mutually exclusive.

I’d argue that we need transparency in order for journalism to become more participatory. How can we expect people to participate in the process of journalism if that process is opaque? Only a fool dives into muddy water.

If one can make an ethical argument for participation in journalism and that transparency is necessary for well-informed participation to occur, then it follows that there is an ethical argument for transparency.

Which means the next topic should be “An Ethical Argument for Participation in Journalism.”

Now a confession: It’s late at night and I’m tired. In fact, the only reason I started this post is because I can’t sleep. Perhaps now that I’ve started this thread, I’ll count some ZZ’s. But you, dear reader, can help me. What is the ethical argument for participation in journalism as you see it?

It seems having a camera is as essential to a modern protest as the bongo drum probably was at my father’s protests in the 60′s (sorry dad, was that a low blow?). Independent media is the glue of a movement and in some cases – a moment.

Last Friday in the aftermath of the Johannes Mehserle trial Oakland Local, The Bay Citizen and myself (representing Spot.us) met up at Tech Liminal to cover Oakland’s reaction.

Tech Liminal is great. Susan Mernit and I have used it several times now for various events. It is located just 3-4 blocks away from where protesters were gathering after the verdict was announced. There is lots to write about this from the perspective of new media. It was an adrenaline filled night where various organizations and groups working together to produced fantastic coverage. I played the smallest of roles, but was honored to be there.

But that’s not what I want to write about here. Instead, I want to write about the ethos of the event itself. About race, riots and the media.

Before 8:00pm the event was very safe. There were people of all ages – children and the elderly. There was tension, to say the least, but it was maintained.

After 8:00pm the demographics and mood shifted. After the sun went down, that shift became more radical.

At the same time, however, I could not (and will not) refer to it as a “riot,” although that might be a technical term to describe it. When I picture I riot, I imagine utter chaos. Physical danger in every direction and no group cohesion. I picture a large and sprawling bar fight. April 29th – 1992 in Los Angeles (where I grew up) was a riot. But what happened last weekend was not a riot. It was much too civil and directed.

At no time did I feel threatened by looters. I’m not complaining about this – just noting it. There was anger and there were acts of violence – but they were not chaotic. They were directed at either local businesses or the police. While this may seem obvious – you must consider the potential chaos that could erupt at a protest-turned-looting. If two of the wrong people bump into each other – it could easily turn into a riot. At least – that’s how I imagine soccer match riots start. But even at this scene I don’t think any two participants could have bumped into each other to cause a fight – except a protester and a police officer. All bystanders had peaceful relations with all other bystanders.

Which brings us to the awkward media gaze. This was not a chaotic event – it was staged. As one friend put it – this was a flash mob of violence. The protesters played their role. The police knew their lines and the looters knew their ques. And the whole thing was staged for the media.

“Media” of course is broadly understood. It was interesting to see the blurred lines between protester and media producer. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, had a recording device of some sort.  It seems having a camera is as essential to a modern protest as the bongo drum probably was at my father’s protests in the 60′s (sorry dad, was that a low blow?). Media is the glue of a movement and in this case – the glue of a moment.

The best existential moment for me was when a trash can was set on fire. At that time a dozen photographers, including myself, moved in to take pictures. The trash can was the celebrity of the night and we were no better than paparazzi capturing a photograph of Brittany Spears with a shaved head.

The arsonist knew this would grab attention and photos. I suspect this is part of the reason it was done. And let’s be honest – part of the reason so many media folks were there was to capture that photo (and others).

The whole thing wreaked of a cycle that did not lead to anything other than insurance claims and extra hits on a website.

As one protester put it to me in the later hours of the night, after everything calmed down – “we are like analog watches in a digital age.” The looting is an act of protest and violence – but even those participating know it is not lashing out at those people the protesters wanted to reach. I would be hard pressed to find a community activist who would argue that the best use of somebody’s night during the protest would be to set a trash can on fire or loot the Footlocker. Nor do I believe the looters thought this.

There is no conclusion to this post. No great revelation – just an observation and an ugly feeling that is left in my gut when I think about this event.

Perhaps some day I should write a longer post about race and my relationship to what is arguably the defining conversation of our country. I went to public schools in Los Angeles where being white made me a minority. It was an eye opening experience and one that, now in my late 20′s, I want to take the time to reflect on.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

• In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
• Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
• An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.