MediaShift

Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:26:21 -0800

Every year Locus Magazine, "The Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field," publishes a year-in-review of the genre. This summation always includes a rundown of the circulation of the remaining speculative fiction magazines, sometimes referred to as the "pulps" because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they used to be printed. In their heyday there were dozens of pulps -- ranging from the mystery to science fiction genres -- with circulations of 100,000 or more. But the medium steeply declined through the '80s and '90s, with magazine circulations for all the publications plummeting to well below six figures.

By the 21st century and the advent of the web, most of these once-great magazines -- Amazing Stories, Argosy, SF Age -- had died off, leaving only three speculative fiction magazines struggling to stop hemorrhaging readers: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The figures displayed in this year's Locus Magazine roundup were, as usual, not promising. Analog, the best performing of the three, had fallen to a paid circulation of 27,399, while Asimov's dropped 5.2% to 17,581. But the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction saw the sharpest decline -- 11.2% from the previous year -- to a paid circulation of 16,489. Countless science fiction convention panels and online message board topics over the last decade have tried to pinpoint the cause of such catastrophic declines and learn how to stop them. Such discussions often lead to at least one person predicting the eminent death of the short fiction magazines, always seen lurking just around the corner.

But these publications began experiencing turbulence well before the proliferation of the web, so it's apparent that their problems are in many ways different than the ones currently plaguing the newspaper industry -- a medium that thrived until it was suddenly met with vibrant competition from the web. But science fiction magazines are struggling to stay relevant in the Internet age.

Brave New World

Gordon Van Gelder worked in book publishing before taking over as managing editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (typically referred to as F&SF) in 1997, a position he kept even after he bought the publication in 2000. F&SF began publishing in 1948, making it one of the oldest of the pulp digests (Analog launched a few years earlier, in 1930).

In a phone interview, I asked Van Gelder how editors reacted once it became obvious that the web would become a major force in publishing.

"When I was the editor and Ed Ferman was still publisher, we saw the first big webzine rolled out," he said. "It was called Galaxy Online, I think. It came out January 1999; it was the first highly touted online zine, and I don't even think it lasted two months. It had real money behind it, supposedly. It had real professionals, and it came and went in the blink of an eye. And I remember Ed Ferman talking to me about what we needed to do online, and it was clear that he didn't know. I didn't know."

And like most print editors these days, he still doesn't know. Speaking to him, it was evident that he felt some frustration with the subject. Unlike newspapers and most other magazines, which mostly profit by selling advertising space, the short fiction digests make most of their revenue off copies sold -- think of them as miniature mass market paperbacks -- and so Van Gelder is even more nervous than most editors about giving away too much content for free online.

"It's so weird to talk about, because it's sometimes frustrating," he said. "The web is still so new, it's still complicated, and I adore it. I do what I can with it, but it drives me nuts, also."

The magazine has taken some perfunctory steps to court new media, most notably by sending review copies to selected bloggers, launching a blog on its website, and offering some of its archived fiction online for free. But Van Gelder told me he has sent review copies to bloggers only "three or four times" and that the site's blog is barely updated even once a month. Even the free fiction is only up for a month before being removed again, thereby draining away any potential that new readers could find the magazine via a search engine.

Van Gelder explained that his approach so far to the web has been scattershot, though some authors have figured out how to harness its power.

"I've been watching individual authors [promote online] and the three that have been successful at it are John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross," he said. "They immediately grasped what the Internet was about and they figured out that it makes much more sense to give stuff away and cause viral marketing than anything else. And it's worked great for them. In all three cases, though, they're writers whose work is very accessible to people who do spend a lot of time online. And you're not hearing about the people who have tried these things and the attempt flopped."

Online Forums Thrive

Sheila Williams, who has worked for Asimov's Science Fiction for more than two decades and became editor a few years ago, claimed that the Internet "has not affected our sales in any way negatively." Instead, she said, the downward trend can be ascribed to changes in distribution -- both how and where the magazines were displayed in newsstands and book stores -- which have effectively cut off the digests at the knees over the years.

Both Asimov's and Analog (along with mystery pulps Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine) are published by Dell Magazines, a company perhaps best known for its puzzle magazines. In fact, outside critics often complain that Dell has let its fiction magazines fall by the wayside because it has concentrated its focus on crossword puzzles and Sudoku.

One area where the remaining short fiction magazines have thrived is through their online message boards; for instance, Asimov's has an extremely vocal forum community. But the editor said that despite this large surge in science fiction fans, very little of the discussion on the boards is about the genre or the contents of the magazine.

"The forum is great," Williams told me. "We have one of the most active forums in existence for the science fiction publications. But mostly they get on there and argue politics; we call it the basement. There's a section at the bottom that consists of a big chunk that's very conservative and a big chunk that's very liberal and they go at it tooth and nail. And they hardly ever talk about the stories. There are a handful of dedicated readers that talk about the stories, but they are the minority. What I have seen in the past in the '70s and the '80s, there were dozens of letters coming in a month. We don't get the letters anymore. I think back in the '80s we had more correspondence coming in on the stories than I see in the comments on the forum."

Like F&SF, Asimov's has dipped its toes into the new media pool, often releasing its non-fiction or award-nominated stories online. Williams also mentioned diving into the magazine's decades worth of archives for content to place exclusively on the Net, and the staff has recently begun to experiment with podcasts, something that Williams said she wants to do more frequently. She asserted that the magazine has begun to expand through e-book sales, both with Fictionwise and Amazon's Kindle. Though she didn't offer specific sales figures, she did say that Asimov's often ranks high within the magazine category for the Kindle.

John Scalzi's Method

While speaking with these two editors, they both frequently cited the opinions of blogger and novelist John Scalzi. The science fiction writer is widely known for his success in using the web -- most notably his popular blog, The Whatever -- to promote his books. Scalzi has been outspoken on his blog about the state of science-fiction magazines, sometimes sharply criticizing their marketing strategies.

Scalzi told me the web wasn't really the main problem for the surviving pulp publications.

"The problems with the pulps -- the big three -- has very little to do with the advent of the web, though they could have done a much better job of positioning themselves when the web was younger," he said. "I think the major thrust of their problem has been that all the pulps have seemed to be content to work with what they have in terms of subscribers and readers, as opposed to being very active about acquiring new readers."

It's this constant state of defense, he said, that made them more vulnerable once the web had matured and publications across the board began to face increased competition online. Like Williams, Scalzi attributed much of the decline in speculative fiction magazines to changes in newsstand distribution, but noted that other publications had still managed to thrive despite these changes. The sci-fi mags, he argued, did not adequately adapt to the new landscape. He compared it to America Online in the '90s when it quickly began losing its market dominance.

"And then people started migrating to the web, and AOL started doing a bunch of me-too initiatives," he explained. "It was member retention. They were like, 'Look we're doing this too, so you don't have to leave us.' Eventually people went 'Yeah, there's other stuff out here, and it's cheaper or it's free or it's more interesting,' and they leave anyway. What eventually happens with those retention efforts is that perhaps they delay the inevitable for a little while, but eventually the inevitable is inevitable. It eventually comes."

And now that the economic recession means nearly all media outlets will have to struggle to bring in revenue, Scalzi said it may be too late to save the medium -- or at least save the print magazines.

Publishing Science-Fiction Online

Over the past year, Scalzi has been involved in two projects that are attempting to profit by publishing short fiction online -- Subterranean Magazine and Tor.com. Both sites fall under the umbrellas of print book publishers -- Subterranean Press, an indie company, and Tor, one of the largest publishers of science fiction. They have so far used the free content on their sites as a form of branding for their book authors. By paying for and posting quality fiction and non-fiction for free (they've published both by Scalzi) they are essentially acting as loss leaders to attract science-fiction fans into their communities.

Though Scalzi seemed uncertain whether this strategy would ultimately work, he said that it would take a long-term investment before such an endeavor could become a success. He noted that most publishers who tried to launch profitable short fiction e-zines in the past have failed because they expected immediate returns.

"When you start a new magazine you work on the assumption that the first five to seven years you're going to be in the red," he said. "Because you're building an audience, you're building a subscription base, you're building advertising, so that 10 years down the road you're making money and it becomes a profit center...Now the question is, has anybody done something similar to that? Because everybody thinks that you put a website up and then suddenly it's going to be brilliant and everyone will link to it and it's going to make tons of money in advertising. That's just wishful thinking."

In this sense, he argued, if the print science-fiction magazines are going to manage to survive in the current climate, they can no longer just dip their toes into the water -- it's sink or swim.

When I brought up both Tor and Subterranean to Van Gelder, he didn't hesitate to acknowledge that these sites may be where the industry is heading.

"It's probably going to be a successful strategy; it's the only strategy that's worked in the last 10 years for launching a new magazine," he said. "If it winds up in the future that every magazine is funded by a book publisher, then it's not the worst thing in the world. And it could be that that's really the future of the digest magazines, or fiction magazines in general. I don't know, because I don't think we've figured everything out yet."

What do you think? Is there a successful way for science-fiction magazines to survive in the digital age? How? Should they transition online completely or publish in print and online together? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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Burmese Blogger Sentenced to 20 Years For Reporting on Protests

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:23:14 -0800

In many countries, you have to commit a serious crime to be sentenced to 20 years in jail, but in Burma this can happen just for using the Internet.

There are almost 69 cyber-dissidents in jail worldwide, yet Burma's Nay Phone Latt has become the first blogger to receive such a lengthy prison term. His crime? To have informed the outside world about the military junta's brutal crackdown during pro-democracy protests in September 2007.

A Rangoon court judge sentenced Nay Phone Latt to two years for violating Article 505 (b) of the Criminal Code (which criminalizes defamation of the state), three years and six months for violating Article 32 (b) of the Video Act, and 15 years for violating Article 33 (a) of the Electronic Act. In total, Latt was sentenced to over 20 years in prison.

Nay Phone Latt is the pen name of Nay Myo Kyaw, 28, the owner of two Rangoon Internet cafés. Latt also kept a blog describing the hardships of daily life in Rangoon and the obstacles faced by young Burmese people in criticizing the government since the September 2007 protests. Latt is also a youth member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the opposition party led by the detained Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San Suu was elected prime minister in 1990, but Burmese generals have yet to acknowledge her victory; the military government has kept Aung San Suu under house arrest since 2003.

Latt was arrested in Rangoon last January while in possession of a video banned by the military government. Charged in July, Nay Phone Latt has since been detained at the infamous Insein Prison, where he has been denied basic medical care.

Extremely Harsh Punishment

Nay Phone Latt's mother, who was not allowed to attend the trial inside the prison, said: "I was expecting him to get 10 to 12 years in prison at the most. I never imagined he would get this much. The authorities have been excessively cruel with him." According to Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association, the blogger's lawyer himself was jailed for criticizing the special court's procedures.

Burmese bloggers regard Nay Phone Latt as an inspirational figure -- a person who contributed greatly to the 2007 "Saffron Revolution" by showing the world digital photos of the massive anti-government demonstrations and the brutal crackdown that followed. According to the BBC World Service, his blog provided invaluable information about events within the locked-down country during the uprising.

This extremely harsh punishment is seen as an attempt by the military junta to set an example and intimidate those who use new technologies to circulate information not currently controlled by the Burmese Censorship Bureau. According to Global Voices:

A year after thousands of monks took to the streets of Burma's towns and cities to protest against the tyrannical rule of the military junta [and photos of them] were broadcast across the world via the Internet, the junta has shown that it will not tolerate any semblance of critical opinion being voiced over the World Wide Web."

Irrawaddy magazine, a Burmese news organization operating in exile, said the current crackdown is also intended to silence legal efforts to ensure fair trials for dissidents now appearing before judges in closed court sessions.

Internet Under Control

Burma, which is on Reporters Without Borders' list of Internet enemies, is described as "one of the world's least-connected countries" with a rate of Internet penetration that does not even amount to 1% of the population, according to the International Telecommunication Union. The network is regulated by the state military's Censorship Bureau, which controls the only two available ISPs in the country. It blocks access to large numbers of news websites as well as international messaging services, including Hotmail and Yahoo. Connection speeds remain the biggest obstacle to Internet access -- downloading a single article can take an hour. To help Burmese Internet users get around official state censorship, overseas Internet users often send proxy lists to small networks of trusted local bloggers.

From the end of August to mid-October 2007, Burma experienced its biggest uprising since the 1988 student demonstrations, in which 3,000 died. Thousands of Buddhist monks, joined by students and activists, took to the streets to protest against deteriorating living conditions.

In response to this so-called "Saffron Revolution," the government shut down all Internet connections in a deliberate attempt to isolate the country and prevent any witness accounts from reaching the outside world. During these two weeks of blackout, the Internet was only accessible a few hours a day and all cyber cafés were closed. The only news source available to Burmese citizens during this time was satellite TV or foreign radio stations.

According to an Open Net Initiative December 2007 report on Burma:

The shutdown of Internet connectivity was precipitated by its use by citizens to send photographs, updates and videos that documented the violent suppression of protests in Burma, information that contributed to widespread international condemnation of the Burmese military rulers' gross violations of human rights.

Far From the World's Eyes

One year ago, thanks to the information sent out by Burmese bloggers, news of the crackdown circled the globe. Since then, the world's attention has shifted, and the regime has resumed its crackdown on dissidents.

Philip Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights Labour Advocates, told Al Jazeera that "post [Cyclone] Nargis, the international community's attention has moved elsewhere so we're seeing a larger crackdown all over Myanmar, with student leaders, monks, and even senior lawyers working for the NLD being thrown in jail."

Strong condemnations worldwide

However, Nay Phone Latt's extremely harsh sentence, as well as the arrest of other dissidents and lawyers, has again sparked outraged reactions worldwide. The U.S. State Department recently called for the release of four detained defense lawyers. U.S. President George W. Bush has nominated Michael Green, a former top adviser on Asian affairs, as special envoy and policy chief for Myanmar to increase pressure on the country's military government.

The foreign ministers of the 27 European Union countries have deplored the lack of progress in Burma since the violent repression of peaceful protests last year, and the European Union stated on Monday that it would consider Burmese elections scheduled for 2010 to be illegitimate unless the ruling military junta first frees all political prisoners -- particularly Aung San Suu Kyi.

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association have launched a campaign calling for the release of Nay Phone Latt. In a press release, they have asked "for bloggers all over the world to demonstrate their solidarity with Nay Phone Latt by posting his photo on their blogs and writing to Burmese embassies worldwide to demand his release."

Lucie Morillon is the Washington, DC, director of Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organization. She covers press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad and is a spokesperson for the group. She also handles advocacy work with Congress and has appeared on CNN, ABC and has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications. Reporters Without Borders strives to obtain the release of jailed journalists and cyber-dissidents and supports an independent media and the free flow of information online. Morillon is the free-speech correspondent for MediaShift.

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How Newspapers Can Increase Their Google Juice

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:06:40 -0800

There isn't much difference between what appears in a small newspaper's print edition and online. Many photographs make it online that don't make it to print, and the AP stories are usually a widget feed from the AP. However, in order to maximize search engine traffic and the reader's satisfaction, newspapers need to rethink their approach to online content.

Online marketing specialist Mitch Joel knows how to get Google hits. Dubbed the "rock star of digital marketing" by Marketing magazine, he is an expert at helping websites get a bigger hit of Google juice, i.e.: making the website attractive to the search engine and therefore bringing in more traffic. Google itself recognized his talent, inviting Joel to its corporate headquarters, the Googleplex in Mountain View, to explain the ins and outs of online marketing to companies like Wal-mart, Costco, Sears, and Sephora.

In a recent post on his website, Joel took pity on newspapers and offered some advice on how they too could lift their Google hits with 10 Things Every Newspaper and Magazine Website Must Do. I asked Joel, via email, why he cared about newspapers.

He said:

I have a passion for the publishing industry. I see so many indications of how they can succeed online and it saddens me to see most of them sticking with 'the way it has always been.' Also, I write a twice monthly business column called, "New Business -- Six Pixels of Separation" for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun.

ONLINE STORIES SHOULD NOT MIRROR PRINT

Recently, 50 C-level newspaper executives met at a closed door summit held by the American Press Institute to discuss "concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value." Joel said that tackling that issue was like "boiling the ocean."

Joel suggests that, better than boiling the ocean, newspapers can solve those problems by making small, incremental changes to build their community. He lists ten such changes newspapers can make, including:

1) Link Journalism -- Newspapers get lots of links in, but rarely, if ever, link out. Search engines like sites that link out; it also provides a better user experience.
2) Formatting -- Break up large blocks of text with bold and /or italics, and use bullet points.

3) Tagging -- Give the reader an idea of what the story is about before they read it.

4) Blog Directory -- Promote bloggers, make them feel an allegiance to the newspaper or at least an appreciation.

5) Cross Promote Effectively -- Be smart when using a URL in the newspaper. Don't just point to the generic newspaper URL, be specific.

6) Unique Web Address -- See above, but keep the URL simple.

7) Highlight Your Contributors -- Let readers peek behind the curtain of the newspaper wizard. If local bloggers are proficient, link to them.

8) Comments -- Allow story commenting. Demand that reporters respond to readers.

9) Correct Mistakes -- The online newspaper should be an ever-changing record of the news.

10) Collaborative Filtering - "If you liked this... then you might want to read this..."

This is basic stuff to anyone who blogs. But newspapers are still learning these tricks. Why are they lagging behind?

The problem is that most newspapers use their online edition as an electronic version of the traditional newspaper "morgue." In the "old days" of print newspapers, the morgue referred to a newspaper's library of clippings, retained for research purposes. Today, newspapers have done away with morgues, instead simply shoveling all that published text online. They stick to this model because they fail to grasp three key differences between the world of print and the world online.

First, newspapers aren't used to the idea of "community." The only community to which newspaper reporters are commonly exposed consists of friends, family, sources and one another. Except for sources, this "community" rarely includes much diversity of opinion. Bloggers, meanwhile, understand that they are writing for a community that is worldwide in scope, often built from a collection of strangers.

Second, reporters don't think of what they do as a conversation. Newspapers report the news to readers, but they aren't designed to encourage readers to respond. Newspaper publishers organize their websites with similar thoughts in mind. Many don't allow story commenting because it requires staff time to monitor or approve comments and conversation is discouraged. Compare this to the reader engagement commonly found on blogs, where feedback is immediate and very often unfiltered.

Third, bloggers know that reaching out to engage other bloggers in the conversation is essential to growing traffic. In contrast, newspapers won't see a huge spike in circulation from a single story in the same way that a blog might if the writer hits a sweet spot.
Links, tags, bullet points, blogroll, and comment love all play an important part in building a blog following. Not seeing the benefit of an engaging website, most newspapers are content to let their websites exist as nothing more than static mirrors to their print editions.

SHOVELWARE PREVENTS GOOGLE JUICE

These are all doable at most newspaper websites. Why aren't newspapers doing these things?

The overwhelming majority of newspapers depend on "shovelware" to create their websites. Shovelware is slang for software programs that make it easy for the same story that appears in print to appear online. For example, at our newspaper, we use NewsEditPro to create a text file; the text file is approved for publication and placed in a Quark document for the print edition. Shovelware makes it hard for newspapers to use any of Mitch Joel's tips. But hard is not impossible.

There's an important word in that last paragraph: "text." Text makes it to the online edition. Graphics are usually left out, but, when they are included, they aren't searchable. This is another problem with simply putting a printed story online untouched.

Let's say our newspaper prints a story with the headline "Final Tuneups" about the Western Kentucky University basketball team, the Hilltoppers. In the print edition, a nice accompanying graphic illustrates that this story is about the Hilltoppers. When the story goes online, the headline remains a vague "Final Tuneups," but the graphic is left out. Google juice = zero. If a basketball fan wanted to search our website for stories about the team or their opponents, they likely wouldn't use the search term "Final Tuneups."

A better online edition headline would read "WKU Hilltopper Basketball Final Tuneups." Google juice = much better. Better yet? "WKU Hilltopper Basketball Meets Bellermine." Four out of five words are keywords: WKU, Hilltopper, Basketball, Bellermine.
But since newspapers use the online edition as their archives, this usually isn't done. It should be. Instead, newspapers continue to use the same headlines online that appeared in print, despite the headaches that this could cause search engines.

It's not necessary to boil the ocean to make effective changes in the online edition of a newspaper. But it does require a change in the way publishers view the online edition. Stop seeing it as the official archival record of the newspaper. Leave that for the digitized library or microfilm, or hopefully Google. Instead, think of the online edition as something living, that readers will want to use. The online edition should be as search engine-friendly as possible.

As Mitch Joel says, "It takes nothing to do this stuff -- except resources and time." I would add: It takes an attitude change.

Mark Van Patten isn't as smart as he thinks he is. He has compensated by surrounding himself with smart people. As a result, he in his 38th year of working at small newspapers, starting on the street as an ad sales rep and working his way up to publisher. Currently, Van Patten is general manager of the Daily News in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He blogs, Twitters, Flickrs, Diggs, Stumbles, Tumblrs, and Woopras his way through the web and is Linked-in. He blogs at MarkVanPatten.com for business and GoingLikeSixty.com for fun.

Photo of man floating on Dead Sea with newspaper by Kevin Lim via Flickr.

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Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:29:16 -0800

Bands do it. Filmmakers do it. President-elect Barack Obama made an artform out of it. "It" is crowdfunding, getting micro-donations through the Internet to help fund a venture. The question is whether crowdfunding can work on a larger scale to help fund traditional journalism, which is being hit by the twin storms of readership and ad declines at newspapers and the economic recession.

Two experiments in crowdfunding, Spot.us and Representative Journalism, are testing the concept at the local level. Spot.us allows freelance journalists to pitch story ideas and get funding from the public in the San Franciso Bay Area, while Representative Journalism (or RepJ) is running a test in Northfield, Minn., funding one full-time journalist to cover that community.

[Full Disclosure: I am on the advisory board to RepJ and, like Spot.us, have also received a grant from the Knight Foundation.]

Spot.us is the brainchild of journalist David Cohn (a.k.a. Digidave), who worked on NYU professor Jay Rosen's groundbreaking NewAssignment.net citizen journalism project and helped research the chapter on crowdfunding in Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing book. Cohn won a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for Spot.us, and writes about the project on MediaShift Idea Lab, the sister blog to MediaShift where Knight grantees write about their projects. Here's how Spot.us works:

1. Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.

2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.

3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).

4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.

5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.

The site officially launched last Monday, but had already funded three stories through a simple wiki set up beforehand. Cohn told me that the challenge for Spot.us isn't so much the technology as it is the fundraising, something that is new to him as a journalist. He said that Spot.us is just one possible alternative business model for journalism.

"I never try to sell Spot.us as a silver bullet that will support a whole news organization," Cohn said. "But I do see it helping a news organization so they can do something beyond their regular means. They can strive for excellence, but it won't support day-to-day reporting. It has its limitations...Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that's worth sustaining with their own money. The second shift is with reporters who have to realize they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public."

Unlike Spot.us and its piecemeal approach to crowdfunding per story, RepJ takes a longer term outlook by hiring a full-time journalist to work for a local community or cover a specific issue. Leonard Witt, communication chair at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, came up with the idea for representative journalism and got a $51,000 grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation for the trial project in Minnesota. Witt believes that a community or interest group could raise $100 donations (or $2 per week) from 1,000 people to support a journalist who covers their locale or issue for a year.

Witt has yet to test this donation model; he's first trying to get his initial representative journalist, Bonnie Obremski, more ingrained in the community in Northfield, Minn.

"We are dealing with a total Northfield population of just 17,000," Witt told me via email. "We have to literally weave together an information community of members willing to pay for high quality journalism. So we have to work on three fronts: 1) we have to provide high quality journalism; 2) we have to get the community to know our journalist; and 3) the community has to feel that their membership in the community and the news and information it produces has value worthy of their financial support."

Crowdfunding Bloggers

MoveOn.org pioneered getting small donations to pay for political advocacy campaigns, and Barack Obama raised small donations from millions of people in the '08 campaign. And independent bloggers and online journalists have for years been asking their audience to help support their work through small donations. Political bloggers such as Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan, and tech blogger Jason Kottke have raised thousands of dollars from online fundraisers in the past. And freelance reporter/blogger Chris Allbritton financed a trip to cover the Iraq War in 2003 by raising nearly $15,000 from his readers, and wrote dispatches on his Back to Iraq blog.

Allbritton was able to finance a drastic change of beats, going from being a media and technology reporter to becoming a foreign correspondent covering war zones in the Middle East. By supporting his trip to Iraq, Allbritton's readers helped him gain steady work as a freelance correspondent to Time magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Daily News. Now, he is a Knight fellow at Stanford University on a year-long quest to see if the reader-supported model can work at an institutional level.

When I contacted Allbritton for this story, he was amused at the term "crowdfunding" and noted that its advocates might not realize how expensive foreign reporting really is -- especially in a war zone. Even with nearly $15,000 for his Iraq stint, Allbritton quickly went through the funds in just one month because of the high cost of being a foreign correspondent in Iraq. "There was no guarantee that more moneys would be forthcoming from an already tapped audience," he said. "Trust me: You don't want to suddenly find yourself broke in Iraq."

Even so, Allbritton was amazed that he could go cover a war at the behest of his audience, without approval from any editor or news organization.

"I didn't have to ask anyone's permission or check with anyone," he said. "I was relying on my own judgment. It was an amazing sense of freedom to do stories and explore things that I thought were really interesting. That said, it also carried a great sense of responsibility. I mean, when you're at a newspaper or magazine, you have an editor or two to answer to. Now, I had thousands of people watching me and I didn't want to let the donors down. I took that very seriously."

On a less serious subject -- satirical political blogging -- Ana Marie Cox was on the campaign trail covering John McCain for Radar Online when the magazine went belly up. She posted a Rate Card on her personal blog, asking her readers to support her coverage for the last week and a half of the campaign. For $10, you would get a personal thank-you email, and for $250, Cox would pose your question to a McCain advisor.

Cox was surprised that she raised more than $7,000 from her fans in just a few days.

"Words cannot properly convey my gratitude and amazement in the faith you people seem to have in a little Midwestern girl and her fondness for foul language, politics, and hard-luck stories -- not in that order," she wrote on her personal blog.

Still, Cox was quick to note that "due to the astronomical costs of traveling with a campaign, I am pretty sure that amount will run short of covering the trail through election day."

Not long after the pledge drive happened, Cox was picked up by the Washington Independent to continue providing reports from the McCain campaign.

Another blogger that recently started a crowdfunding drive is Jim Hopkins, a former USA Today reporter who writes the Gannett Blog as a watchdog to the newspaper chain and media conglomerate. For the past month Hopkins has been asking for $5 subscriptions from readers via PayPal, and raised nearly $1,500. But he had one particularly vexing problem: Most of his readers want to remain anonymous because they work for Gannett, so using PayPal would reveal who they are to him. To get around that problem, Hopkins set up a post office box to accept cash from them in the mail.

Hopkins told me he is trying to make money from Google AdSense ads, and is using online video to strengthen his appeal for funds.

"I had read that video is a good way to make an appeal because it's more emotional," he told me. "Until recently, my readers had not heard my voice or had a sense of who I was as a person. Just last week I figured out a cheap way to produce video, and people's reactions have been interesting. They said I might have come across as a mean, anti-management person, but the video made me seem more like a real human being. So if I used it as a fundraising tool it could result in more money coming in."

Hopkins is interested in using Spot.us to fund other story ideas, but he is worried that if he puts his pitches online, they could be scooped up by competitors.

"I have to think about ways to present my ideas without having them taken by someone else," he said. "That's an issue that Profnet has wrestled with for years; [it's a site] where a journalist presents a story to [potential] sources, but they have figured out a way around it."

Supporting Crowdfunding Operations

While an independent blogger or journalist might raise funds from readers directly, it's not something that comes naturally to most writers, who might have a gift for words but not business. That's where the "hub" idea makes more sense, and a platform such as Spot.us -- properly marketed -- could help connect writers with potential funders, and handle financial transactions. That hub model has worked at Kiva.org for funding entrepreneurs in the developing world; at DonorsChoose.org for matching charities to donors; as well as entertainment sites such as Sellaband for funding bands directly and IndieGoGo for funding films.

IndieGoGo launched at Sundance last January, and has raised more than $70,000, with more than 800 film projects posted on the site. Filmmakers pitch the public, and they can then micro-finance projects. IndieGoGo takes a 9% cut of all donations, and donors do not share in the proceeds from the film, instead getting quirky "VIP perks" such as film credits or trips to the set. IndieGoGo co-founder and head of marketing and strategy Slava Rubin told me one filmmaker who made a documentary about Iraq gave donors strips of a Persian rug that came from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.

Rubin thinks the crowdfunding model could work in journalism as long as the journalists can engage the right audience.

"If someone writes [a story about] corn in our energy supply, and they try to get money from people in Iowa, that could work," he said. "You need to be able to engage your audience. You have to be closely connected to your niche, and take advantage of the tools out there to engage that audience. There's Sellaband for music, and there are others, but you have to make a connection with the audience."

Cohn told me Spot.us would try to become sustainable by asking for donations to support the overall operation at the point of sale for story donations. He said that's been a successful strategy for Kiva.org, whose president told him that 79% of people giving money to entrepreneurs will give an extra 10% to cover the costs of Kiva.org's operation. Cohn also would like to get money from advertisers in new ways.

"[Someone like] Macy's could have a survey on our site, and Spot.us users can fill out a survey for them, and in return, they would get credit," he said. "So instead of Macy's giving money to a pitch, they would give it to users, and the users would decide where the money would go. I don't know if it's advertising, but it's a win-win -- the user gets real money to donate, the company gets a survey filled out. But that's in the future."

Wired contributing editor and "Crowdsourcing" author Jeff Howe told me that he was bullish on the crowdfunding model, because it takes much less effort to get someone to throw in a few bucks online than to do the free work of crowdsourcing. Howe thinks Spot.us has promise because of the low cost involved for freelance journalists.

"You just have to pay someone to write the piece, and as you and I know, a couple grand in our pocket will fund a week or more of reporting for us, and that's what the Spot.us model is," Howe said. "I'm really optimistic and hopeful for this as a model for journalism. We're in such disarray right now, where the music industry was in '02 or '03, because of changing mediums and a fickle audience."

One worry he did have was that journalism funders would expect a particular outcome from the story pitch -- and would get upset if the result didn't fit in their assumed world view.

"What you get with a newspaper is a convention to find the facts and write the story," Howe said. "I'm not sure how that convention changes with crowdfunding. I expect that the writers will come back with stories that the funders wanted to see. There's going to be an imperative -- unconciously or not -- to please the funders. And what we know of online communities is that they tend to gather around shared viewpoints and interests. Crowdfunding will work by tapping those communities and they are not disinterested, they will have an axe to grind. People who want you to investigate the local utility will already believe that the local utility is guilty of malfeasance."

What do you think about crowdfunding efforts by Spot.us and RepJ? Do you think micro-donations can support local freelance stories or a long-term journalist covering a particular community or issue? What potential conflicts do you see with these operations and how much could they help bridge the gap in the changing business model for traditional journalism? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Canadian Court Rules Linking to Libel Isn't (Necessarily) Libel

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:45:51 -0800

Linking to content is the essence of the online experience -- it's the "Web" in the World Wide Web. But there's a lot of legal gray area around linking, and surprisingly few court rulings providing guidance as to the circumstances when linking could result in liability.

A court in Canada has now weighed in on the question of liability under Canadian law for linking to an article that contains statements alleged to be defamatory. On the facts of the case, the court ruled that linking to an article containing defamatory statements does not, by itself, constitute defamation. As in the case mentioned in my last post, the litigation arose out of an election-related controversy.

Crookes Versus the World

The individual plaintiff in Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (B.C. Sup. Ct. Aug. 29, 2008) is Wayne Crookes, a Vancouver businessman who was involved with the Green Party of Canada in 2004. Crookes's involvement in and supposed "takeover" of the party was the subject of three articles on the Canadian-based Open Politics website and another on the (apparently now defunct) usgovernetics website. Claiming that the articles were defamatory, Crookes filed a lawsuit against Michael Pilling, the Canadian editor of the Open Politics site.

Some time later, Jon Newton, founder of digital news website p2pnet.com, wrote about the litigation on his website, including hyperlinks to the allegedly defamatory articles on the Open Politics and "usgovernetics" websites. Crookes responded by suing Newton as well. As will be discussed further below, Crookes also sued not only the Wikimedia Foundation but also Yahoo, Google and Domains by Proxy Inc., a domain name registrar, and numerous other parties for various actions (hosting, providing search results, etc.) relating to alleged defamatory articles and postings about Crookes.

Another Crookes target was widely respected Internet law authority Prof. Michael Geist. Crookes sued Prof. Geist for including a link to Newton's p2pnet site on his own website.

No Publication, No Liability

Crookes's underlying lawsuit against Pilling is awaiting trial, as are the cases against most of the other defendants mentioned above. However, in the case against Newton for linking to Pilling's articles, the court conducted a "summary trial" (a proceeding without a jury,) and ruled in favor of Newton, finding that creating a hyperlink to a defamatory statement does not, by itself, constitute a "publication" of the defamation.

"Publication," the communication of a defamatory statement to a third party, is a necessary element that must be shown to maintain a claim of defamation under Canadian law. (This is also the case under U.S. law.) In considering whether Newton's links to the articles constituted a "publication," the court drew an analogy to a footnote in a print publication, stating: "Where a footnote leads a reader to further material, that does not make the author who provided the footnote a publisher of what the reader finds when the footnote is followed." The fact that a reader can access the source more easily via a hyperlink than via a footnote in a print publication makes no difference, the court concluded:

Although a hyperlink provides immediate access to material published on another website, this does not amount to republication of the content on the originating site. This is especially so as a reader may or may not follow the hyperlinks provided.

The court also considered the entire context of Newton's links, noting that Newton had not published any defamatory content about Crookes on his p2pnet site nor did he reproduce any of the content from the articles Crookes claimed to be defamatory. Newton also made no comment on the nature of the articles to which he was linking. Consequently, merely providing links to defamatory content, the court concluded, did not make Newton liable for any defamation in the articles to which he linked.

Be Careful How You Link

Note well that the court did not say that there can never be any liability for linking to defamatory content:

I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not my decision that hyperlinking can never make a person liable for the contents of the remote site. For example, if Mr. Newton had written 'the truth about Wayne Crookes is found here' and 'here' is hyperlinked to the specific defamatory words, this might lead to a different conclusion.

So the ruling is fact-specific. Had Newton endorsed the statements in the linked articles, or added his own "color commentary" to them, the result might have been different.

By the way, the issue of whether the original statements in the articles to which Newton linked were, in fact, defamatory has not yet been decided; the trial in Crookes's lawsuit against Pillings of Open Politics, originally scheduled for October, has been adjourned.

What Result Under U.S. Law?

If Crooke's lawsuit had been brought in the U.S. under U.S. law, it might have been resolved in Newton's favor under the provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 of the Act says that providers and users of an "interactive service" cannot be held liable "as a publisher or speaker" for "information provided by another information content provider." Although there does not appear to be any opinion in the U.S. presenting precisely the same facts as those in Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been interpreted very broadly to protect both providers and users of interactive services from liability for defamation and other torts for "information" provided by third parties.

Canadian Court Used as Guidance in U.S.

One reason to care about the ruling of a Canadian court is that a U.S. court might look to a Canadian ruling for guidance on an issue where there is no binding rule under U.S. law. Canada is our close neighbor both geographically and legally -- both legal systems have their origins in the English common law system -- and it is not unusual to find courts in each system citing one another's rulings in subjects, such as libel and slander, where there is a common legal heritage.

An example of that can be found in the Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation ruling itself, where the court quotes extensively from another Canadian court ruling that, in turn, references several rulings of U.S. courts on an issue of defamation liability. So, if a court ruled that a similar lawsuit was not governed by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it might look to the reasoning in Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation to decide on the issue of linking as publication.

In fact, the result in Crookes v. Wikimedia Foundation is generally consistent with the result a U.S. court might reach applying Section 230: An online service provider or user is liable for its own statements, but not for the statements of others.

Getting Sued in Canada

Another reason to care about a ruling by a Canadian court is that a U.S. website operator or other service provider might well get sued in Canada by a Canadian plaintiff for allegedly defamatory statements made online, and either be forced to respond in a Canadian court or risk an adverse judgment. In fact, that's what happened here. Not only has Crookes sued the Wikimedia Foundation, it has also sued Google and Yahoo and other service providers on the grounds that they are responsible for various defamatory statements and articles about Crookes.

Canada does not have a law equivalent to Section 230 that provides a safe harbor from liability for these entities. In that respect, the results in the Crookes litigations against service providers may be critical to the development of Internet liability law in Canada.

Does a Canadian court have the power to hear a defamation lawsuit brought against the operator of a U.S.-based web service provider? In other words, does the Canadian court have jurisdiction in such a case? In Crookes v. Yahoo Inc., a Canadian appeals court upheld the dismissal of Crookes's claims against Yahoo for lack of jurisdiction, finding that Yahoo has no physical presence in Canada and that Crookes failed to show that allegedly defamatory statements about him posted on the GPC-Members newsgroup hosted by Yahoo had been read by anyone in Canada.

But other rulings by Canadian courts, such as the 2005 ruling in Bangoura v. Washington Post involving a defamation lawsuit brought in Canada against the Washington Post, suggest that a Canadian court would be willing to exercise jurisdiction over a U.S. website operator or other service provider under the right circumstances. That has happened in Australia, in Dow Jones v. Gutnick, where the Australian High Court upheld the exercise of jurisdiction over the Dow Jones Corp. for an online article that allegedly defamed an Australian businessman. (It is unclear whether the other U.S.-based defendants sued by Crookes have, like Yahoo, moved to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds, although Google has an office in Canada which might preclude it from making a motion similar to Yahoo's.)

One Final Note

Let us suppose that Crookes succeeded in obtaining a judgment against a U.S.-based service provider and sought to enforce that judgment in the U.S. Would a judgment rendered by a court in Canada be enforced by a U.S. court? A U.S. court might reject such a judgment on the basis that the First Amendment affords the speech of U.S. citizens greater protection than does the law of many other nations. To the extent that a judgment issued by a foreign court might violate the First Amendment rights of a U.S.-based defendant, a U.S. court might find that it is against public policy to enforce it. That important issue has been touched on in several U.S. cases but has not yet been answered.

Jeffrey D. Neuburger is a partner in the New York office of Proskauer Rose LLP, and co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications Practice Group. His practice focuses on technology and media-related business transactions and counseling of clients in the utilization of new media. He is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law teaching E-Commerce Law and the co-author of two books, "Doing Business on the Internet" and "Emerging Technologies and the Law." He also co-writes the New Media & Technology Law Blog.

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Nigeria Joins List of Countries Harassing Bloggers

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:00:18 -0800

On October 19, U.S.-based Nigerian blogger and journalist Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports was arrested by the Nigerian State Security Services (SSS) upon his arrival at Abuja airport. It was some days before the SSS announced that Elendu had been charged, first with money laundering and then sedition.

Yet another report claimed he was charged with sponsoring a guerilla news agency. The charges relate to his supposed involvement with the online news site Sahara Reporters which, together with Elendu's blog, is highly critical of both Nigerian President Yar'Adua and the government in general; both sites particularly criticize the government's response to conflicts between foreign oil companies drilling in the Niger Delta and local ethnic minorities.

Sahara Reporters recently drew official scrutiny after publishing photos of Yar'Adua's son holding a machine gun and playing with bundles of Nigerian money. Independent journalist Chidi Opara reported on his blog that the charges against Elendu were a ruse and that he was actually detained because he had discovered information that could be used against top politicians. In any case, we won't know the truth until Elendu himself is able to speak.

However, Sahara Reporters has strongly denied any connection with Elendu. According to a report in the Daily Independent in Lagos, "Elendu was being kept in inhuman conditions and tortured to either disclose the sources of the several embarrassing news reports on prominent political leaders in Nigeria." The Human Rights Writers Association (HURIWA) heard from Elendu's lawyer that the online journalist "was also being reportedly pressured into framing up some others."

Late on Thursday, October 29, reports began to appear that Elendu had been released and was receiving medical treatment. While this is excellent news for him and his family, the actions of the SSS and the Nigerian government are not what one would expect from a so-called democracy.

Governments Pressuring Bloggers

Jonathan Elendu is the first Nigerian blogger-journalist to be targeted by the government, but I doubt that he will be the last. He is, however, not the first African to be subjected to government pressure for his blogging -- Egypt and Morocco have both taken oppressive steps towards bloggers and activists using social media like Facebook and Twitter. Egyptian blogger and activist Kareem Amer is now in his second year of imprisonment for criticizing Islam and the government on his blog.

As I wrote in a previous post, Nigeria has a vibrant and well established blogosphere, often highly critical of the government. However, it is noteworthy that most Nigerian bloggers write and comment anonymously; Elendu is one of the few, including myself, who write under their real names.

Given the history of media censorship in Nigeria, the government's reaction is not surprising. I felt that such a response was just a matter of time and I wonder how other Nigerian bloggers will respond to the news that one of their own was kidnapped by the same government they had all criticized so vocally. The first blogging report of his arrest came from Nigerian Curiosity. In addition to providing an excellent analysis of the situation, Nigerian Curiosity has been instrumental in disseminating information -- partly because Solomon Sydelle has access to a relative of Elendu. Sydelle wrote:

There is enough fear in Nigerians when it comes to politics and standing up for what is right. We have suffered from Persistent Psychological Paralysis for long enough that a democratic president, in this case Yar'Adua, should not be party to further destroying national participation in what rightly belongs to the citizenry -- the freedom to express their concerns and ideas. After all, the Nigerian Constitution guarantees, as "Fundamental Rights" the freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of thought and conscience, and freedom from discrimination.

Although there has been a lively discussion on Nigerian Curiosity and a few other blogs, by and large the blogosphere has been unusually silent about Elendu. After a week, Nigerian Curiosity and fellow blogger Mootbox created a Facebook group Free Nigerian Blogger, Jonathan Elendu. However, a Facebook group is only as good as its members. After 5 days, the group still only has 59 supporters. Although supporters left messages on various Nigeria-related Facebook groups and pages, there had been relatively little response.

Criticism of Elendu's Reporting

The comments left on the Nigerian Forum, Nairaland (ranked in the top 10 Nigerian sites by Alexa) may explain the silence: Many see Elendu's writing as being sensationalist and unreliable, and do not consider his detention a worthy cause. To quote just a few comments:

"I prefer to call it imaginative journalism, because the standards of that publication are so low!"

"Their stuffs sometimes reflect publicity stunts, they also churn out unsubstantiated facts, which is sometimes caused by Jonathan Elendu's hallucination, what one of my role model Edgar Hoover calls mental halitosis."

"I think these guys are just 'sensational gangster-style' journalists. I thought I was over critical of the quality of Elendu's reportings until I read the views of other people. I can't substantiate this fact, but I believe Elendu is making money from the sensationalism...If you read his story about the Sokoto State government before and after his visit to the state (God knows what transpired during the visit, I hear journalists too collect brown envelopes) you will wonder where his objectivity lies."

"He also seems to be partisan in his views of the Nigerian politics. I suspect he might be on some politician's payroll going by his write ups"

Whether the above accusations are true or not, the fact remains that a blogger-journalist was taken into custody by the State Security Services as he arrived at the airport, denied counsel, interrogated, possibly tortured, and finally released after 11 days. Even after his release, officials have refused to return Elendu's passport, meaning that he cannot return to his home in Michigan.

Nigeria Turns Against the Media

His arrest is part of a culture of media censorship that has reigned for the past 30 years. Just last September, television station Channels TV was shut down by Presidential order after it mistakenly reported that he might resign due to ill health. This reaction was far too drastic; even if the station reported the details of the story wrong, surely a simple reprimand would have been a more appropriate response. In 2004 alone, there were 21 attacks against journalists in Nigeria. A commenter on Black Looks said:

Looking at the reasons behind the harassment and detention of journalists it is clear that their 'crimes' were reporting the truth such as election rigging, strikes, political disputes between the president and other members of government, or as in the case of Gbenga Faturoti of the Daily Independent, beaten almost unconscious for failing to turn off his mobile phone whilst in the Osun State Assembly. Altogether 21 journalists were victims of either the police or SSS in 2004 -- arrested, beaten, threatened, detained. Most were tortured. All were released without charge after a period of 24 hours to 1 week. In addition two radio stations in Anambra State were vandalized and staff beaten up and the offices of Insider Weekly and Global Star were also vandalized and staff arrested.

In 2005, a friend and well known political activist had his weekly newspaper column suspended. He was sure that the regime had pressured the newspaper to drop him due to his repeated criticisms of then President Olusegun Obasanjo.

I asked one prominent online individual who wishes to remain anonymous what he felt about the Elendu matter. His response speaks to both the fear and intimidation under which all Nigerians live as well as the suspicions about Elendu and the perceived bias of his reporting:

I can't really take a stand on the matter for two reasons:

(1) I live in Nigeria and I don't want them to arrest me.

(2) I live in a country where people can be arrested for telling the truth. That makes it hard to leap to the defense of someone who was arrested for telling lies. He shouldn't be detained without trial, but there are thousands of truly innocent people languishing in jail
and awaiting trial. Why support him and not them?

For Nigerian bloggers and online readers, the arrest of Elendu justifies their remaining anonymous -- how else can they safely return home? For those who are "out," the risk of returning is a heavy one. As for the Nigerian government, it will have to wake up to the fact that online media sites and citizen journalists -- many of whom live abroad -- cannot be intimidated and controlled in the same way as traditional media. As more Nigerians gain access to the Internet, more people will be in a position to challenge the repressive mindset of the military-influenced civilian leadership of the the last two presidents.

Sokari Ekine is an activist with a background in human rights in Africa. She presently works with The Global Women's Strike and Kabissa: Space for Change in Africa. Sokari blogs at Black Looks, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine and Niger Delta Solidarity Campaign, and is the African correspondent for MediaShift.

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Video Report from Jeff Pulver's Tel Aviv Breakfast Meetup

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:46:33 -0800

I thought I was going to a breakfast where people actually ate food. But food is hardly the top priority at a Jeff Pulver breakfast, where people are too busy pitching their latest ideas to investors, scoping out the competition, or scoping out the eligible singles on the market. Jeff is known for being one of leading innovators in voice-over-IP (VOIP) technology, but he now seems more excited to discuss some of his latest ploys for disrupting the old media with new Israeli-made technologies.

That's one of the reasons he keeps coming back to the "Silicon Wadi" (Wadi is Arabic for valley), the nickname for the Israeli coastal plain that boasts the highest concentration of high-tech companies in the world. Last Wednesday, nearly 150 people from the technology and new media worlds in Israel collided over cappuccino at the port of Tel Aviv. This is what happens when Jeff posts his breakfast plans to 4,997 of his closest friends on Facebook:

Links to some sites mentioned in the video report:

Jeff Pulver's Pulver.com
Work Light social media company

Intellect or Insanity blog

Mel Rosenberg's bad breath website

Jaron Gilinsky is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. Jaron is the founder and editor of Falafel TV, a breakthrough Middle East video cooperative. As a freelance video correspondent for Current TV, CNN World Report, and the New York Times, he has produced and directed scores of documentaries on a range of international topics. Jaron regularly posts his videos and articles on his personal blog.

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Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:17:13 -0800

During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after gathering a few thousand votes.

But in the weeks after it was removed, someone unearthed the still-present URL for the poll and linked to it at the conservative website, Free Republic. The site has become famous for sending hordes of readers to crash unscientific online polls, so much so that the act of doing so has been termed "freeping." In this particular instance, members of the Free Republic felt that the poll showed a sign of bias, and the poster linked to it to "provide them with a result they did not expect."

"Send this email to every non-liberal you know," the person wrote. "Let's get some balance into this survey group. This is the easiest vote you will ever make. It takes literally two seconds."

Predictably, the numbers on the poll in favor of Palin began to move up, but during the freep several liberal websites got wind of it. Typical of the blogosphere, the poll became a link-fest version of tug-of-war. Close to a hundred bloggers linked to it and liberals and conservatives began forwarding email chains to their friends asking them to vote (I actually received one of these emails less than an hour before I sat down to begin writing this article).

One of the bloggers who eventually linked to the poll was PZ Myers. An associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris, Myers is arguably the most popular atheist and science blogger on the Net. His blog, Pharyngula, is published as part of the Science Blog network (owned by Seed Media Group) and averages more than 50,000 readers a day. In recent months, he and a small group of other atheist bloggers have begun a constant and often-successful campaign to crash online unscientific polls, usually to counterbalance or push back against what they see as either anti-science or overly-dogmatic beliefs.

After Myers finds a poll dealing with religion or science on a news website, he'll provide a link to the site along with a pithy or mocking comment. "The Edmonton Sun asks, 'Should God be left out of the University of Alberta's convocation speech?'" he noted in one such post recently. "I should think so. They should also leave Odin, Zeus, and the Tooth Fairy out of it, unless it's to make a joke. Surprisingly, though, 67% of the respondents disagree with me so far. Will that have changed when I wake up in the morning, I wonder...?"

Why Poll Crash?

I spoke to the science blogger, and Myers told me that when he links to a poll he can typically swing the results by 10,000 to 20,000 votes in a particular direction. Indeed, within an hour after he linked to the Sun's poll, the results went from 67 percent of the respondents saying "no" to 91 percent "yes." Though he has participated in poll crashes dating back to over a year ago, he has only begun conducting them on a semi-daily basis within the last month and a half.

"It's a very popular thing with some people because they can flex a little itty bitty muscle, and a group going there and doing something shows we have some clout, a clout in expressing an opinion," Myers said. "There have been a couple places where the polls are so poorly done and so easily manipulated, and people go nuts; they write a script and send in hundreds of thousands of votes. Which is kind of cheating, but the whole point is that these polls are silly and useless anyway."

The bloggers' motivation in linking to these polls, he said, was, in essence, to delegitimize them. Because these polls are unscientific and therefore largely biased toward the demographic of the website on which they're posted, Myers argued that poll crashing makes it harder for people to use the polls simply to reaffirm their own biases.

"For instance, if I put a poll on my blog asking whether evolution is true, everyone would say 'yes' with just a few outliers," he explained. "If you put it on something like [Christian conservative group] Focus on the Family, everyone there will say 'no.' So the point is to show that these are highly prejudicial polls, they're sampling unscientifically, and they're really kind of worthless. And you can't use those results to say anything at all. I mean, what can you say about such a poll?"

But the inaccurate data isn't the only problem that Myers has with these polls; he also detests the poor construction of many poll questions and the limited answer choices given. It's not uncommon for him to link to a poll while issuing the caveat that -- due to the perceived inanity of the question or answers -- he doesn't know which choice his readers should pick.

In speaking to Myers, I learned that his averseness to these polls sometimes carries over to even their scientific counterparts. He argued, as have others, that media coverage of elections is much too poll-obsessed and that covering a campaign in such a way perpetuates misconceptions about why voters should choose a particular candidate.

"If you look at the major networks' coverage of the election, for instance, what you find is that they turn it into a horse race," he said. "All they report is who's ahead, who's behind and by how much. It is distracting and detracts from the coverage of the actual issues. So that's another reason to get in there and disrupt these polls: it's because the polls really don't matter. You shouldn't vote on whether someone is ahead or not. What you should be voting for is whether they have policies that you agree with."

Measuring Enthusiasm

I spoke to a few of the people responsible for publishing polls that Myers had crashed, and surprisingly there were no bitter feelings toward bloggers who deliberately try to skewer their results. In fact, both the people I interviewed said they welcomed such online participation. They argued that instances of poll crashes allowed them to gauge the level of enthusiasm for a particular issue.

Joel Schwartzbert, the director for new media for NOW, outright rejected the notion that the poll question on the website -- whether Sarah Palin was qualified to be vice president -- was somehow biased or leading. When the news magazine formulates each week's poll question, he said, it bases it on a pressing issue that has become part of the national conversation. In this particular instance, there had been a sizable amount of discussion during the Republican National Convention over Palin's qualifications for the position.

"As an example, during the Democratic convention, we asked people if they thought the party is unified," he told me. "So we did not pull this issue out of a vacuum, it was the most relevant and talked-about issue. When the convention ended, that poll was retired. We don't link to old polls, nor do we have an archive of old polls. So what people did was they found that poll sort of drifting in the vast outer space of the Internet, and looking at the source code found the URL, and that's what became viral. It did not even begin to become viral until it was formerly retired on our website."

To date, more than 50 million votes have been registered on the poll, both from constant freeping and from bots running rampant and falsely inflating the numbers. Eventually, NOW changed the poll to track a user's cookie so they could only vote one time per computer.

Because of this one poll, Schwartzbert said, both NOW and PBS as a whole have experienced traffic numbers that far surpassed previous viewership records by wide margins. And in attracting all that traffic, they were able to drive readers to other NOW content linked at the bottom of the Palin poll. In this respect, the poll was able to engage the online community and expose a much larger audience to more reputable and scientific information.

I asked the new media director about the unscientific nature of such polling and whether it could be misleading in displaying public opinion.

"I don't find any online polls to be accurate enough to be worthy of public broadcast," Schwartzbert said. "We do not announce these poll results on air. If we were going to announce them on air you can be assured that it'd be a scientific poll that'd be very official. We don't offer up these results to measure scientifically any demographics. The point of these polls and other polls is so that people can register their vote...And the poll engine has a way to generate enough excitement to look at our investigative reports, which are still very thoroughly vetted and meticulously fact checked and very scientific."

Schwartzbert said that people like polls in the same way that they like memes and lists, and part of using new media is understanding that "these other devices are a way to get people to come to your table. But you want to rely on your bread and butter, and, in our case, the video investigations are the meat of what we do, and what best serves our mission. So the poll is a way for people to express themselves and bring people to our larger core mission, which is to reveal what's going on in our democracy."

Trevor Kimball, editor for the site TV Series Finale, agreed that the polls are more a measure of online enthusiasm for a particular issue than anything else. His website focuses on television shows that are canceled or on the verge of being canceled, and a few months ago he published an article about talk show host Montel Williams making a comeback. Along with that article, he ran a poll asking whether Williams should bring back psychic Sylvia Browne onto his new show, a poll that was later crashed by Myers.

Kimball told me that poll crashing isn't an anomaly at TV Series Finale, but that when a website is dealing with hot button issues it should expect outside participation.

"We deal with a very passionate group of people," he said in a phone interview. "Only a few million people may watch a television show; when it's canceled, a lot of people feel very passionately about them. This happens even for television shows that, you know, most people might not even know exist or couldn't care less about. On somewhat of a regular basis someone will post a link to an article that we've done and a poll that we have done, and say, 'Hey, they're asking about this canceled show, go voice your opinion.' This kind of thing happens regularly."

Although he agreed that the polls were entirely unscientific, Kimball said that in some ways they are able to assess the level of "passion" for a particular issue or show. He compared poll crashes to reviews on Amazon; people usually feel more inclined to voice their opinions when they have a negative view of a person, product or idea. So in this one instance, the level of disdain for psychics -- whose supposed mental powers would no doubt be regarded as a product of superstition by an atheist like Myers -- outweighed the level of admiration.

Online Polls Are Fun, Not Science

Greg Laden began using his science blog to engage in online poll crashing around the same time as Myers; in fact, he didn't begin his own freeping until he noticed it on Pharyngula. Laden is an associate adviser with the Program for Individualized Learning at the the University of Minnesota. Though he and Myers share the same employer, they work at different campuses and, like Myers, he attacks the unscientific nature of these polls as being misleading.

"First of all, and this is the most important point, it's that these are not polls," Laden said. "Polling is a science, and polls work, and they work well. These are web widgets; it's no more a poll than what someone put up on Flickr is the Mona Lisa. And you put them on your blog because they're fun. Even CNN polls going back to the beginning of the Internet -- the first online polls were these CNN polls. That's how it all started really -- even they put it up to entertain their readers, to entertain the masses."

Though he agreed that the polls are a form of community engagement, he rejected the notion that they could somehow accurately measure how much enthusiasm or passion exists online about a particular issue. Instead, he said, the poll crashes are a key indicator that the blogosphere as a whole is trying to flex its muscles, and in doing so somehow assert its influence. He said many bloggers are moving beyond simple widgets to focuse on a new form of link crashing that results in an actual distribution of power: fundraising.

Crash Responsibly

Over the past few years, bloggers have continuously linked readers to pages where they could donate relatively small amounts of money to both campaigns and special interest groups. In effect, they are able to move large sums using a very grassroots strategy. Laden himself encourages readers to donate to causes, and, in doing so, he said that he is participating in a different form of poll crashing.

"It's similar, but in some ways scarier," he said. "Because when you're done with that, the recipient has a lot of money, whereas before you just filled out this poll and it was completely harmless. The money is powerful because you can do something with it. That's when bloggers have to sit back and say, 'We have to have some responsibility here.'"

Interestingly, Laden also argued that a blogger's responsibility even extends to poll crashing, in that it in some ways affects the level of discourse.

"People like to be part of a community that is a little organized but for the most part is an emergent self-fulfilling kind of thing," he said. "They like being part of the community. A lot of the people are complaining at the Sarah Palin rallies that people are screaming things like 'Kill the terrorist' about Obama. And experienced commentators who have been watching politics their whole lives are saying there is a crowd control issue with any rally that they have, and Palin is being irresponsible. And I think that kind of thing comes to play."

In this respect, he said, a blogger can be considered at least partially responsible if his followers conduct themselves irresponsibly when crashing these polls. Given that Myers himself has received death threats when a swarm of outraged people were directed his way by a recent campaign against him from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, he and others are no doubt aware of the havoc than can be wreaked by an unruly mob of semi-anonymous readers.

Note: Both NOW and MediaShift are independently produced for PBS. MediaShift recently added regular online polls, but they limit people to one vote per computer. Our newest poll on the home page is about poll-crashers.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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