Open Access and "false" History

A Russian perspective. From the St Petersburg Times.

[Dmitry]Medvedev’s commission “for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests” is headed by presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, who will control which documents remain classified and which ones are opened to the public. There are many reasons to be concerned that the documents most essential to an open and honest study and discussion of Russian and Soviet history will remain locked up.

Interesting stuff here.

Obit: fact checking

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.

It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.

But is this true?


From the Irish Times.

No Relation Gets Worried About Democracy

Banker or Journalist? Now there's a game to play.

According to Bloomberg journalist Albert R. Hunt, people should be as concerned about the fall of newspapers as they are the fall of the banks. He says that society without a tough media is not democracy. He even mentions the French government's proposition to subsidise newspapers and the dangers it might bring. He cites a Harvard researcher who estimates that "about 85 percent of the news people get is initially generated by newspapers" and that most scandals are revealed by professional hacks who have the time and the means to investigate.

From The Observers.

Wikipedia: trust comes via someone else, it's called social transparency

Good luck.

We are pleased to announce the release of our first research prototype of a social dynamic analysis tool for Wikipedia called WikiDashboard.

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

Check this out.

Provisional text: two

Leaving aside for a moment that the Kindle’s very name is weirdly evocative of book burning, consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle—convenience, selection, immediacy—we’re losing something too. The printed word—physically printed, on paper, in a book—might be heavy, clumsy or out of date, but it also provides a level of permanence and privacy that no digital device will ever be able to match.

In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

From Urbzen.

Provisional text: another way of saying doubt democratized...

One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional.

The truth is out there. And changing.


From Nick Carr.

Broadband for all, Comprehension for some?

"Today we are way beyond the view that broadband is a niche product, it is an enabling and transformational service and therefore we have to look at how we can universalise it," he said. "We have to ensure that fairness and access for all is more than a soundbite in a manifesto."

As well as getting the technology into every part of the UK, he said the government must improve the population's media and digital literacy so the 40% who could get broadband, but choose not to, will be able to sign up.

Lord Carter today, getting us ready for his "Digital Britain" report, published soon. Just a thought but isn't literacy:

...the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to read, write, listen, and speak. In modern contexts, the word refers to reading and writing at a level adequate for communication, or at a level that lets one understand and communicate ideas in a literate society, so as to take part in that society.

So will the "improvement" of digital literacy involve more than getting 40% of people to sign up for broadband; will it perhaps also be about the ideas that are promulgated digitally: the ability to question - then read, write, listen and speak about - the information sea that is out there? Isn't digital literacy less about rebooting the server, and more about making trust choices in content? Just a thought.

More Memoir Doubt: Angel at the Fence

This is part of a long New Republic post on December 25.

The battle over Angel at the Fence is part of a larger struggle for control over the Holocaust narrative. Scholars like Waltzer and Lipstadt are disturbed by the media blitz pushing Herman's story to the masses. "My hair is standing on edge," Lipstadt told me. "He has instrumentalized the Holocaust. This is the worst possible thing you can do on so many levels." To them, selling the Holocaust as Hollywood kitsch sanitizes its horrors. "It makes it nice," Lipstadt says. "I just wait to hear in the movie for the violins."

Salomon, the movie producer, disagrees. He believes that the mass appeal of Herman's story is precisely what makes it so important to be told. "The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America," Salomon said. "Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done."

From the New Republic. On Saturday, December 27, Berkley Books announced that it is canceling publication of Angel at the Fence.


And here's today's NYT update:

This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.

The Democratisation of Doubt '08

Keynes via Robert Skidelsky.

The basic question Keynes asked was: How do rational people behave under conditions of uncertainty? The answer he gave was profound and extends far beyond economics. People fall back on “conventions,” which give them the assurance that they are doing the right thing. The chief of these are the assumptions that the future will be like the past (witness all the financial models that assumed housing prices wouldn’t fall) and that current prices correctly sum up “future prospects.” Above all, we run with the crowd. A master of aphorism, Keynes wrote that a “sound banker” is one who, “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way.” (Today, you might add a further convention — the belief that mathematics can conjure certainty out of uncertainty.)

But any view of the future based on what Keynes called “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to “sudden and violent changes” when the news changes. Investors do not process new information efficiently because they don’t know which information is relevant. Conventional behavior easily turns into herd behavior. Financial markets are punctuated by alternating currents of euphoria and panic.

From the NYT.

TV Guide

Jon Stewart for news; Newsnight for comedy.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Final Edition Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Journalism & Poignancy - one result of the democratisation of doubt

More sense from Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog.

Chris Satullo, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote a poignant farewell column this weekend. He’s leaving the paper to work for the public station, WHYY.

I leave a business that seems to have lost both the will and the way to support the craft of journalism it once burnished to a fine sheen.

It’s a business that, in its pig-headed insularity, authored some of its own woes - but now is being swept helplessly along by the cascading changes of a Gutenberg moment. The Internet is changing our world as definitively as the printing press changed Europe - and more rapidly.

In my time, newspapers - and the journalists who worked for them - have made some mistakes. We embraced a priestly elitism, failing to explain ourselves clearly to readers or to confess frankly our mistakes of judgment. We were slow to respond when people, money and power flowed to the suburbs, slow to grasp the game-changing implications of the Web (though catching up now).

We screwed up plenty. At the same time, though, we did some splendid, useful things for the Republic.

That’s the pesky paradox of it: While we could at times be as arrogant as our critics claimed, we were more ethical and adept than they would ever admit.

Here's the thing about so much of the hand-wringing despair of journalists: how few times do the readers and audiences of "news" get a shout? How often does the behaviour of readers get noticed, or noted? And, if you know any print journalists, how many times have you heard them say: "I don't care about what our readers think?"


The democratisation of doubt extends to doubting the word of journalists - of course: it's out there, one contrarian click away.


More specifically British gloom here:

In 2002, 12.8m national newspapers were sold daily on average in the UK. This year it was fewer than 11m and in 2013 it will be slightly above 9m, according to Enders Analysis, the media research specialist.

Lost in the Information Sea: 130,000 inflatable breasts

What an excellent piece of viral marketing.

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.

Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

From WA Today in Australia.

Is Citizen journalism any stronger when it confronts power?

The question that is not answered in Jeff Jarvis's paean to the eyes and ears and writing and photographing skills of the citizen journalist is how can its rapidly increasing members hold power to account in ways that we as consumers of news and information will trust?

The former editor of the New Statesman wrote this on Saturday:

British journalism is dangerously weak. It veers between hysteria (the "I'm so angry because" school of commentary) and stenography. What is the point of the media if it does not see its primary task as gathering information to hold power to account? Investigative journalism takes time and money. One can count on the fingers of perhaps two hands the serious practitioners, many of whom rely on whistleblowers.

And this:

A few years back, when I was a full-time political journalist, I had a chat with a colleague who had just become a government information officer. It was one of those periods when Fleet Street was taking pot shots at Tony Blair, and I asked my friend how it felt to be embattled. He laughed, saying he had been shocked to find out how little reporters - let alone the public - knew what was going on in Whitehall. "I reckon on any given day you'll be lucky to find out 1%."

John Kampfner's piece reminded me of an extract in Lance Price's The Spin Doctor diaries.

In April 2001 making his chauffer-driven way back from election planning at Chequers (the British Prime Minister’s country residence) the BBC journalist turned New Labour press officer Lance Price had an experience he subsequently revealed in 2005. The experience, despite changes in fashion over the past seven years, sums up our contemporary approach to political news rather well. It also helps to define another part of the swampy news landscape that we now journey across.

“On the way back in the car to Downing Street Sally [Morgan], Pat [McFadden] and I have to listen to Five Live on medium wave, because the radio in the fancy Lexus Philip [Gould, Labour’s pollster] had laid on for us would pick up any FM station over 90.0 because apparently they don’t exist in Japan! So the driver said, anyway. They were running a thirty-minute discussion on our choice of ‘Lifted’ by the Lighthouse Family as our campaign song. The guests on Five Live, all music-industry insiders, were dismissive, saying it was safe and bland, etc. They had a Labour MSP [Member of the Scottish Parliament] on, Frank McSomething-or-other who has a collection of CDs running into thousands, who agreed, and said that ‘those people down at Millbank’ [headquarters of the Labour party] probably thought it was good music. We had a laugh about it and agreed that if ‘Lifted’ was a drink it would be Jacob’s Creek; if it was an item of clothing it would be Gap chinos; if it was a car it would be a Ford Mondeo; and if it was a politician it would be Tony Blair. ”

Today Mr. Price would undoubtedly be chauffer-driven from Chequers in a Lexus hybrid car (or be cycling a discrete fifty metres in front of it), and if he wasn’t listening via digital radio to a Radio Four analysis of the curious music Playlists on Gordon Brown’s new IPod, he would be reading something unpleasant on Guido Fawkes’ politics blog via his IPhone (ok, his Blackberry). The surface consumer detail is unimportant (though not to the sea of interpreter journalists, the commentator, columnist and sketch writer): the larger point, that all news, however it is constituted and then distributed (other than the football scores) is now apparently beyond objectivity: everything from a political speech, through the theme song used by a political party in an electoral campaign, to a Hurricane in New Orleans and the state of Al Quada in Afghanistan, is reducible to mass “discussion” and “analysis” thus interpretation - be it by Price’s “music-industry insiders”, or, as happens more frequently, by phone-in pundits, or media-trained polemicists and the guinea-fowl of malleable focus-group organizers.

Of course this process is most marked online, where the news and the comment is fodder for us - the commentators, the “Fisking” bloggers, the simple factual correctors, the Googling Aggregators, and the very, very angry.


In this information sea how does the Twitter news, and citizen journalism (based on empirical eye-witness evidence, or just made up), create some kind of epistemological foundation? Is it, in fact, by being linked to, or published by, other kinds of non-citizen-based journalism? And if so, what kinds of journalism? And can citizen journalism hold power to account any better than Kampfner's view? Will Twitter out-fox the heirs of Lance Price?

Mumbai and the New News Media Orthodoxy

The Mumbai media triangulation:

The country’s broadcasters were summoned Friday by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to deal with charges that the live saturation coverage had helped the terrorists. At the same time, however, traditional media were criticized as too slow and inaccurate by legions of “citizen journalists” using Internet services such as Twitter and photo site Flickr.

From Variety magazine.



Phase one: Creating celebrity terrorism, getting it wrong, being too slow - or too fast - aiding the bad guys, pumping out propaganda.


Phase two: media experts criticizing the first drafts of a 24/7 news culture for any of above reasons. Golden Ages remembered.


Phase three: journalistic self flagellation as usual, but with no regard to how we as consumers of news & context feel cheated by more messenger shooting. Trust levels diminish ever further; doubt democratized a little more.


Phase four: revisionism.


Phase five: more articles about the death of newspapers.


And then there is the handing over of the baton view:

The last mass-news story was 9/11, packaged from a distance. The 7/7 attacks on London and the 2004 tsunami then brought the perspective of witnesses via their cameras. The Sichuan earthquake and the Mumbai attacks brought the urgency of Twitter. The next news story will be seen live and at eye level.

Ever since I survived the 9/11 attacks, and later saw the coverage the world saw - smoke spied from rooftops miles away - I have made sure to always have a camera with me, as the view of the story from the ground was so different from that seen on TV. Now I carry a mobile phone that can capture and broadcast text, photos and video immediately. If I'd had that then, the image I would have shared would have been the image I most remember - not of smoke and helicopters, but instead of black tear-tracks on the face of an African-American woman covered in the grey dust of destruction. Such will be our new view of news: urgent, live, direct, emotional, personal.

Jeff Jarvis, from the Guardian.

Mumbai: making judgments

It is not that the information sea has failed in its coverage of the Mumbai tragedy, but making judgments of trust about the veracity of the reporting is especially difficult.

Anger at the media for their coverage of the terror attacks in Mumbai is apparent on the blogosphere. For one, the mainstream media appears to have taken the approach of “shock and shake”, as opposed to verifying rumors before reporting them. But the nation appears glued to their television sets, as it is probably the most “live” source of information at this point in time.

Read some of the comments here: this is the democratisation of doubt. Increasingly the fissure between what is happening, and how it is being reported locally, regionally, nationally, globally (and commented upon by experts, locals, and all of us) becomes part of the story.


Not that in war truth is the first casualty, but that in live events such as now, broadcast and posted globally, the foundations of authenticity are visibly shaky. How do we trust in this environment?






Pictures via The Guardian.

Digitally Divided; thinking about the "Internet For Everyone"

When the web got going, and Wired was the Bible, there was a lot of revolutionary talk. But few of the revolutions were exactly about equality; they were about empowerment as long as you owned a $2000 laptop. In 1994 I sat in his office and asked Nicholas Negroponte what I would need - as an internet savvy journalist - to come and study at his MIT Media Lab, and in particular the Lab's News in the Future group. He listed a series of programming languages, and nothing at all about media: he offered little hope that I'd ever get it, ever understand the future of media. I felt deflated. But not as deflated as when trying to convince old school journalists back at home about the impact the web, and the wired world, was going to have on media, music, politics, pornography (both, all)...you name it the web was going to change it, I said.

Yeah, right.

The traditional journalists I spoke to thought: geek; the Geeks (who already got it, and had the programming languages) thought wannabee geek, and the nascent muscular technocracy best symbolised by Wired co-founder, John Battelle, treated us confused but enthusiastic in the middle folks with the kind of contempt last seen at the Battle of Saratoga. Here's Battelle, now a super-online publishing grise, in action on his blog last week, it's always been like this:

The part that people don't yet fully understand [this week] is that "vertical ad networks," at the end of the day, are still ad networks. Ad networks are a vital part of the online media ecosystem. They provide publishers with additional revenue on inventory that isn't otherwise fulfilling higher CPM sponsorship programs, and they provide direct-response marketers with additional reach at cost-efficient rates. Vertical ad networks offer a bit better targeting because they focus on a smaller set of sites.

While vertical ad networks may improve efficiency for direct-response advertisers, who determine success based on some variation of cost-per-click, they are not solving the needs of brand advertisers. Ultimately, vertical ad networks serve advertisers and will compete with everyone else who serves DR advertisers, from Google to the other ad networks. The excitement over "vertical" ad networks will erode as CPMs on those networks chase the DR metrics.

My point is that even at the dawn of the web, it had the capacity (as practical medium, and evolutionary metaphor) to divide us all. We atomised. We personalised. We dived in...or we stood by the shore...or we closed our eyes. We invented new language, and we stayed ten minutes ahead or five years (but usually neither) That process of atomisation is now so marked that almost any analysis of the the digital world becomes an immediate argument. There's almost nothing we can agree on - not blogging, twitter, the future of search, libraries, journalism or privacy.

Times change: everyone gets it now (this is irony, of course): we are at best a series of social networks. The Google Generation doesn't know anything else. But somewhere in the middle of this huge shift (it's a kind of digital Long March - now there's a online game to build) in just about every facet of life (from phone communication to the way we make friends, or a living; education, politics & travel) we have uncovered massive flaws in our social assumptions. Our old social networks have eviscerated - largely because our belief systems are now so personal - patchworks of ideas and ideologies based on our relationship to education, work, technology, gaming, books, place...we trust very little but ourselves these days.


I was going to blog about this, the "Internet For Everyone" project, launched yesterday in the USA. The objectives are interesting:

Survey after survey shows American broadband quality and access falling perilously behind countries in Europe and Asia. Getting everyone connected to an open Internet should be a national priority. Click on your state below to learn more about Internet access in your area.

America is the birthplace of the Internet, and home to many of its greatest ideas and innovators. But since Internet access became publicly available, we have failed to deliver its tremendous benefits to everyone. As a result, millions of Americans still stand on the wrong side of the "digital divide." And the damages -- economic, social and political -- are beginning to show.

Since 2001, the United States has fallen from fourth in the world in broadband penetration to 15th in the world today. While American consumers face high prices and few choices, many of our European and Asian counterparts have achieved the goals of universal deployment and competitive markets. Returning to the top of international rankings would translate into millions of new jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in increased economic activity for the United States.

What I'm grasping at is the layer-caking of our views. I'm trying to juggle a world in which Paul Dacre is humbugging for timeless values while others call for the British Regional Press to be subsidised; Obama has an e-mail mailing list of 10 million and the co-founder of Blogger is post-blogging, almost.


I think the British Museum's decision to hold an exhibition about Babylon and - in particular - the Tower of Babel, makes perfect sense. But how do we make sense of the disparities between people? More to the point how do we create social networks that bridge the vast epistemological divides between people that once would have agreed on most things. This really is the democratising of doubt.

First drafting of the second draft of History 2: Georgia "Not acting defensively"

The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

From the NYT.

First drafting of the second draft of history: Bush "unlucky" & "battered"

Like fish?

"One of the things that has been conventionally done is to compare George W. Bush to Harry Truman, both of whom had upon leaving office dismal approval ratings and of course as it is well known by now, Harry Truman's reputation has, by virtually every account, not only improved, but I would say escalated nearly to the top of the list of greater American presidents," Kellerman added.

CNN gives us a sneak preview of the historians' take on Bush.

Blog on Blogging is almost in Latin and the Quill used to write it is just a tad acidic for these times

In the US "shock-jock" populist talk radio of the Howard Stern school has overwhelmingly been rightwing and partisan regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans occupy the White House. We have nothing so vicious (or vacuous) here. Indeed, the dominant BBC is often criticised for being culturally liberal as well as politically nihilistic, sometimes rightly so.

The Guardian's Michael White takes a punt at explaining the InfoWeb and Web Logs in the wake of Hazel Blears claiming that bloggers could be nihilsts.


Here's another extract:

Jon Cruddas, a Portsmouth comprehensive school boy, who has moved up in the world far enough to have been a Downing St aide, now MP for Dagenham, is always banging on about the white working class being excluded from New Labour's multicultural meritocracy.

Chris Hughes anyone?


Why not?


Or this, which is the best answer of all.

More echoes from the Trust Anti-Chambers

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

Victor Davis Hanson from his variation on the "The End of Journalism" published in the National Review Online.