It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

Here's my first attempt for your review. Thank you. Lauren

The Internet, the News Ecosystem and the Rational Ignorant fool.

-- By LaurenKlein - 08 Nov 2009

Section I: The Anecdote

Let’s start with a personal anecdote circa 2004. I was a newbie journalist working for a local paper in a small, suburban town. It was an east coast paper and one of the oldest local rags, with a proud reputation for serving its community well. I was there for every endless zoning meeting. I bonded with the curmudgeon police chief and watched fire fighters serve heroically late into the night.

Then it came. The Internet. (Cue scary music.)

Of course it wasn’t overnight, but it kind of felt that way. And as one of Palfrey’s digital natives, I suppose I was relatively comfortable with and excited about the digital emersion. The editors, middle-aged local diehards, who had lived and worked in this town their whole life, however, only new one way to do things. You brainstorm, make some calls, report, write, file the story. Then wait to see the piece in the morning paper and hope the copy editors didn't insert a typo into the headline.

In the three years since I left the paper in 2006, it has changed ownership three times. It no longer stands alone, but it is part of a conglomerate of Connecticut newspapers. I forget who owns them now. Last I heard it was Hearst.

This concentration of ownership probably killed the paper because instead of local news, readers now get more reports about local news in Hartford. But at the time, the staff worried more that the Internet wouldn't let us do our jobs. Instead it was all about citizen journalism. Citizen Journalism? We bemoaned. Seriously? What about balance? How could a retired architect get the facts right about my zoning meetings?

Perhaps it was the atmosphere I was in, but I worried too. Though I intuitively understood that ease of distribution and peer to peer communication could better serve a community’s access to information, the changes implemented to “leverage the Internet” at our paper (i.e. stick what you wrote for the print publication online) didn’t seem to serve that end. I was confused about how the Internet would make for a better news ecosystem. I left journalism.

The story of The Stamford Advocate is ubiquitous. And as Eben pointed out during his class discussions, the news, music, and software industries — industries formed on the premise of content ownership —are reeling because the Internet demands a new flow of information.

“The end point is not that there won’t be news, but that there won’t be ownership,” he said in class.

Section II: The News Ecosystem in an Internet Age

We haven’t quite delved into the shape of this new “news ecosystem” in class but some of the arguments around copyleft and free software can help further refine how digital technology and the Internet impacts the shift occurring in the news industry and how citizens should be able to “consume” news.

There might not be journalism as we understand and consume it today, but there will be information that any citizen can access and comment on and use to affect political and social change. Information is power and understanding technology allows for the access and control of information.

The best of the world’s news information won’t come from the top down media. Perhaps curration models that integrate news articles, videos and commentary about one single event from around the world will be presented in one format so a news “consumer” can read and watch multiple accounts of the event without having to do the web search and hit each individual news site. Perhaps the echo chamber will disappear and you will read the New York Times story along side the Al Jazeera story along side the Chinese media account and decide they all got it wrong and incomplete. Or, that without each account, none of them could ever provide a complete narration.

Legacy news companies (Fox, CNN, New York Times company, etc.) aren’t comfortable with that because their revenue comes from ad sales and eyeballs. It’s sort of ironic and sad however, that news organizations would be so opposed to networked technology that aggregates information from multiple sources, since the news industry has always relied on the news network (AP, Reuters, BBC World Service) and these networks’ contacts of local stringers to gather information; particularly in a global context. Trying to beat the other news services and the demand to produce revenue only hurts their product: information. Perhaps RSS feeds and RSS Readers solve some of this problem for a news consumer, but perhaps there can be (or already exists) a more efficient manner with which to read and evaluate the news of the day from multiple sources.

Section III: Rational Fools

The information ecosystem in a digital age is messy. There will be no one to tell us how to think. We will not simply be able to escape behind one narrative of current events. Users must care and take responsibility for seeking and understanding the subtleties of information for themselves. Otherwise we risk becoming one of Dostoevsky’s rational ignorant fools. “Push” media relies on the rational fool. The Internet could allow us to emerge from that fog.

The role out of Data.gov by the Obama administration represents the services of a digital news ecosystem that allow citizens to be engaged and not just informed. This is certainly a dramatic change for the way things have been done. Instead of an average citizen waiting for the news delivery each morning or night — i.e. waiting for a newsman to tell them what to think and how to think — people will have to think about and look at the facts for themselves.

The information about our governments can flourish in a way it never has before.

In most stable democratic societies the average citizen now has the greatest opportunity to impact government and culture. (Perhaps cliché and utopian, but true.)Technology can literally code our law, and if we don’t take ownership, we’ll remain those rational ignorant fools Dostoyevsky despised so much. In order to do so, however, technology must be easy to understand and share. A mindset must emerge — and already is among a certain demographic of tech savvy, socially minded individuals — that controlling and understanding the technology that controls your information is paramount. That’s where our power and ultimately freedom in a digital age exists.

Authoritarian regimes have already developed sophisticated methods for pushing back on the Internet, see China, Iran, and Russia. The U.S. and other democracies are frankly not that far behind.

If we don’t take advantage and reconfigure the policies that allow for more free flows of news information, we might as well just stick what we wrote for the print publication on the Web site. It certainly makes life easier when you’re blissfully ignorant.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:

# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, LaurenKlein

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list