- As columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, veteran
Silicon Valley reporter Dan Gillmor has covered the bubble, boom, bust
and continuing evolution of the tech industry for over a decade. Along
the way, he has become an increasingly influential voice in exploring how
technology changes media -- and how it changes us in the process.
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- In his new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism
by the People, for the People, Gillmor chronicles the social and economic
impact of weblogs, wikis, mobile technology and other networked phenomena
on the business of news. Are bloggers journalists? Will phonecams kill
the video star? Do more voices add up to more truth in media? Can you really
trust everything you read on an RSS feed? Wired News spoke with Gillmor
while he was on the road in Europe.
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- Wired News: In We the Media, you point to the events
surrounding Sept. 11 as a turning point in media history. Why?
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- Dan Gillmor: The fabled "first draft of history"
-- the part journalists had pretty much reserved to ourselves -- was now
dispersed more broadly, and in a way that was suddenly much more obvious
and meaningful. The audience was helping to write that first draft, in
something close to real time, adding first-person accounts and nuance to
what the professionals were doing.
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- WN: How has free speech in America fared since then?
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- Gillmor: Wonderfully well if you look at the tools, which
have become more powerful and easier to use -- and especially well when
you note the growing number of blogs, videos and other grass-roots media.
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- Not so well when you look at the way governments are
using fear to clamp down on the release of information that clearly should
remain public, or keeping a lid on speech in more traditional ways.
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- Also not so well when you see how Hollywood and its cohorts
in the copyright cartel have continued to press, all too successfully,
for restrictions on what people can do with the technology that makes all
the grass-roots speech possible.
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- WN: How has this affected what we refer to as "conventional
media" -- the big business of television, newspapers, periodicals,
radio and corporate news websites?
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- Gillmor: It's disruptive to business models, which is
always terrifying to people in high-margin businesses. While the ability
of anyone to be a journalist -- and attract an audience -- is noteworthy
in itself, the serious threat is a financial one. And not because of digital
copying or other such stuff. It's the erosion of the advertising model
that has supported journalism for so long.
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- Today, eBay is by far the largest classified advertising
business in the world. Craigslist is surely having an impact on classifieds
as well. There are lots of nimble, smart new competitors for all of the
various revenue streams of newspapers, magazines and even TV (which has
a big problem with devices like TiVo, which make 30-second ads disappear).
We are high-margin businesses, and we're up against folks who want the
money but don't want to bother with journalism.
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- WN: What role do blogs play in all of this?
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- Gillmor: They have joined the journalism ecosystem. It's
more symbiosis than rivalry. I disagree with Big Media partisans who feel
blogs are irrelevant, and with blog promoters who see the demise of professional
journalism.
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- WN: How did you see some of the issues in your book play
out at the Democratic Convention? What sorts of trends and activity patterns
do you anticipate as the November elections approach?
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- Gillmor: Bloggers became pets for the Big Media. You
could almost see the establishment journalists petting bloggers like poodles
and cooing, "Oh, good bloggers, aren't you cute!" (Apart from
the ones who put on body armor and said, "Omigod, these pit bulls
are dangerous!") It'll take a few more conventions -- and a time when
blogs aren't a novelty -- for everyone to sort this out.
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- WN: What's the downside to all of this? What potential
ill effects? Should there be a code of ethics for bloggers and self-proclaimed
"citizen journalists" just as there is for news media professionals?
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- Gillmor: It's hard to know what's true online. We've
evolved a fairly good BS test in the analog world: I know the supermarket
tabloid story about George Bush's latest Martian love child is almost certainly
false. But one website looks as good as another, and some people perversely
believe -- and can then spread easily -- anything they see online.
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- The opportunity for outright fraudulent behavior is also
greater, with Photoshopped pictures, phony press releases, pump-and-dump
chat room schemes and the like. Again, the lies can spread at the speed
of light and rumor.
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- WN: Your book chronicles an expansive trend -- more people
having access to tools that make their voices heard. But it also explores
a correspondingly restrictive trend in copyright-law enforcement, and conflicts
between technologists and large media conglomerates over the changing process
of content ownership and distribution. Where are those contrasting trends
going from here?
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- Gillmor: I'm worried, because the forces of centralization
are winning almost all of the legal and political fights so far. Note the
state attorneys general letter to the P2P folks -- full of misinformation
and bizarre interpretations of reality, but part of the copyright cartel's
war on all forms of media it can't control.
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- The problem, as Lawrence Lessig and others have noted,
is that absolute control is contrary to what users/customers must have
-- for example, to retain both some level of freedom and the ability to
create new works that quote from older works. I hope this comes out right
in the end, but I'm not counting on it at the moment.
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- Technology will be impossible to fully control, but bad
laws can make it dangerous to use.
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- WN: You took some of these lessons to heart in developing
this book, didn't you?
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- Gillmor: We posted the full outline on my blog, inviting
comments. I got quite a few (and, to my dismay, lost many in an e-mail
glitch that was probably my own fault). Then we posted draft chapters online,
and again got some great feedback.
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- WN: What are some of the new economic models that have
begun to emerge?
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- Gillmor: Hyper-granular models where we track every use
of every bit of data strike me as dangerous to privacy and freedom. I don't
see any truly new solutions. Subscriptions still work. So does advertising.
Perhaps patronage will return on a larger scale, or compulsory licensing
will adapt to the new era. Or maybe enough people will voluntarily pay
for what they use. I'm less confident of that.
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- WN: Is journalism -- and our access to truth -- better
or worse off now than it was before the changes you describe in this book?
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- I won't be the one who really figures this out. Someone
who's 5 years old and growing up in Helsinki or Seoul is more likely to
do that than anyone my age or a generation younger. She's going to understand
journalism in a way I literally cannot comprehend today. I just hope to
be around long enough to grasp it.
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