Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.
So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.
Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.
What a story: AIG is dragging its feet on medical insurance payments for injured Iraq war contractors.
I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)
Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:
First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.
It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”
Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”
Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.
You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.
Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)
I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I even tried to sell a t-shirt from the classifieds in the back of the book in the late 70s (Linda for First Lady; got a cease-and-desist).
While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.
But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.
Would I pay? Maybe. A little.
*How often do you print? Me: I’ll go a month without turning on the printer at home, maybe twice a week at work, usually to pass something around for review and copyediting.
Count on the blogosphere to remark on interesting errors. Here’s the blog reaction to the MSBNC host or producer whose mic was open as Bobby Jindal was strolling into the shot for the Republican response to the president’s address to Congress last night. It is output from a Google blog search feed.
Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.
When Barack Obama sent a thank-you text message to supporters—on his way to the victory speech—saying he couldn’t have done it without us, I thought that was nice to address us first. I replied “You’re welcome, buddy. Keep us involved.”
Wired Obama supporters have been thinking a lot about how the power of his online communities might be harnessed to do some good beyond getting him elected.
What would you think about bringing public hearings into the online world? It wouldn’t have to be exactly like Capitol Hill hearings. Hearings have taken to the road for a long time, but they tend to keep to the same formal rules.
A different kind of supplementary input might be put in place so that testimony could be given via one of the live video services, in shorter chunks, and by a different class of witnesses—more ordinary citizens, more front-line experts, fewer heads of agencies and heads of interest groups. (The higher you climb on the title ladder, the less you learn about what’s happening and the more you learn about what the establishment wants you to think is happening.) It would be less formal than hearings held in Washington, but more official than a town hall.
Live commentary on the testimony could be mined not just for reaction to the testimony but also for ideas. It could shape the direction of the hearings in real time.
I don’t believe anybody thinks Joe citizen should vote to decide things like how to fix the economy. But swarms do one thing very well: they ferret out the important, consequential bits of an issue, situation or conversation. When this happens in real time, we’re saying “Yes, more of that, please. Now.” We’re like players in a game of hide the thimble, telling the hunter if she’s hot or cold, closer or further away from the prize, or the essence of a thing.
If our representatives in government take the trouble to listen, and if they are canny about it, they’ll use that power to navigate the issue terrain.
Later: Brian Solis pens a good roundup of Obama’s use of social media during the campaign and and floats ideas for using it for governing. The stat that popped out at me:
YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000, with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for 110 million views.
While the ratio of Obama-to-McCain subscribers was about 2:1, the video posting ratio was more like 5:1. So, it’s not just that the McCain campaign was stuck in the 20th century in terms of thinking of the electorate as an audience; McCain supporters thought of themselves as the audience.
—but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”