Category: Four pillars

Following on from comments on my last post, and at least in some part influenced by what I’d had bouncing around my head when I wrote this in 2006 (to do with Gresham’s Law and information), I’d like to spend a little time thinking about news as a commons, its damage and its repair.

If we consider news to be a commons, then, taking a leaf out of Clay Shirky’s book, we could think of news publishing tools and techniques slightly differently. We could think of them as ways to damage the news commons, and to repair the news commons.

What damages the news commons? Lies, inaccuracies, errors, omissions. How can we make sure that the news commons suffers the least damage? By ensuring, in turn, that the cost of repairing the news commons is at least as low as the cost of damaging the news commons.

Shirky made this point in the context of wikis originally, but I think it has merit in the context of news and the dissemination of news. Which leads me to thinking this way: if the tools and techniques used to disseminate news are such that the cost of repair is as low as the cost of damage, then the quality of the news disseminated will improve.

In other words, the cost of stopping a lie from spreading must be as low as the cost of spreading the lie in the first place; the cost of publishing a corrected text must be as low as the cost of publishing the error-strewn text in the first place.

Dave Winer, some years ago, regularly used the phrase “River of News”, usually in the context of RSS, if memory serves me right. Tools like Twitter, when used with techniques like snurl, already provide rivers of news, but usually in the context of the news publisher rather than the news topics. Search tools like Summize then convert that into topic-based tributaries. But by definition these are streams of information without the notion of damage or correction.

So what would happen if we had wiki-based newspapers? I’ve seen cursory attempts; I think there’s a lot more to come. Am I right in thinking that MSM tools and techniques are fundamentally asymmetrical in this respect, the cost of repair is far higher than the cost of damage, so damage increases over time.

Why would I say this? Two reasons. One, errata, error and omission correction, retractions. These things tend to be tucked in somewhere in the bowels of a paper, while the actual errors and omissions make the premium slots. Two, if you take something like the manuals and policy handbooks in most organisations, the reason they never get used is they’re usually out of date. And why are they out of date? Because the ‘cost of repair” is too high.

The manuals and guides and policy handbooks migrated into wiki space. In a wiki, there’s no place to hide the error or the correction.

So is it time for wikinews? Where does it exist already? Where does it work well, where does it fall down?

Views?

My brother pinged me about this story today: To Infinity and Beyond. It’s about a 12-year-old autistic boy and his father carried out to sea and triumphing over the elements in miraculous ways. It’s a feel-good story. I happened to read it early this morning, before I went to work, and for sure I felt good as I went to work. Why not? It’s a good story. It’s a great story.

I like good news. I like stories that lift my spirit. I like stories about human endeavour and relationship and commitment and character and covenant and faith.

I must thank CNN as well for bothering to carry the story, against the grain as it were.

Talking about news, there were a couple of incidents over the last few weeks that have intrigued and even perplexed me. Most recently, there was the short-term 75% drop in United Airlines’ stock price based on Bloomberg carrying a six-year-old story in error, as reported here in the Washington Post. A few weeks before that, Bloomberg accidentally published an obituary of Steve Jobs, then immediately retracted it.

Why am I intrigued, even perplexed? Simple. Before the web, I’d accepted, at least in part,  the universal “truth” that people seemed to prefer bad news to good; I’d rationalised this on the basis that news editors believed this “truth”, and in an MSM world, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result.

I’d also understood, personally as well as anecdotally, that the same thing was true about reputation: Negative stories travelled faster and further than positives. And this I’d rationalised away by thinking it was about human nature and risk aversion, negative stories were calls to action, that sort of thing.

Despite all this, I’d somehow expected something different when it came to the web. I’d expected a Linus’s Law to take effect on news and stories, that given enough eyeballs all “information” bugs would be shallow. For some reason this doesn’t happen; at least, it doesn’t happen as quickly as I would expect it to.

Just something I’m trying to think through. Suggestions? Views? Advice?

Golf aficionados amongst you have now been hearing me extol Camilo Villegas for some time now, the healthiest “product” ever to come out of Medellin. He’s just won his first PGA title a few minutes ago. You’re going to hear a lot more about him in the majors next year. He’s extraordinarily fit, he’s young and talented, he’s willing to take risks, and he has an amazing touch on or near the green. And he’s great to watch.

You heard it here.

There’s a not-so-quiet battle going on during the US election, one that is going to get harder and grittier as the days go by. On the face of it, it’s a battle between “Mainstream Media” (or “MSM”, as it gets called) and “New Media” (principally the blogosphere, flickrworld and twitterverse).

I think that the battle can be framed differently. It’s not really between MSM and New Media, it’s between MSM and Citizen Media. That’s an important distinction; the debate is about the ways in which humans gather the news, validate the facts, edit the stories and then publish them; it is less about the tools used and more about the process; and when it comes to the process, it is more about the values and ethics that drive the editing and publishing process than anything else.

The treatment of the Edwards story is an example of what I’m taking about. The treatment had nothing to do with the technology used, and everything to do with MSM mores and habits and ways of doing things.

In every economy, in every market, in every firm, there are ways in which information is collected, validated, ratified and published. There are people involved in the collection, validation, ratification and dissemination. There are tools and techniques involved, conventions in use. All bound together by sets of values.

Now we come to Enterprise 2.0, a term that is many things to many people. There was a time when I thought I knew what it was, a time long since past. Forgive me if I don’t even attempt to define it; suffice it to say that Enterprise 2.0 is something to do with the way information flows around an organisation, allowing people to make decisions, inform others of those decisions, prioritise resources as a result, execute on the decisions, monitor the outcomes and report on them.

For the past seven or eight years, I’ve had the privilege of watching the equivalent of the MSM-Citizen Media battle within organisations, and it’s been fascinating. Here’s a sampling of the questions that have been intriguing me:

How does something become “fact” in an organisation, particularly when that something has to do with figures and achievements? What are the conventions used to report on these facts and figures? Who knows what these conventions are? How do the conventions get changed? Who changes them?

Reporting and monitoring responsibilities in organisations tend to gravitate, quite naturally, towards the audit/control function that is “centrally” associated with the resource in question: Finance deals with matters financial, HR deal with matters human-resource-related, and so on and so forth.

As Michael Power has covered so beautifully in The Risk Management of Everything, the audit explosion continues to proliferate, to a point where, paraphrasing the author, valuable yet vulnerable professional opinion is overshadowed by process minutiae and small print.

This Risk-Management-Of-Everything growth is taking place at the same time as the Battle-Between-Professions, something that Andrew Abbott has expounded excellently on. And all this is happening while the Future of Work is being shaped, while the Modern Firm is being established, while Enterprise 2.0 is being birthed.

So there’s turmoil. A lot of turmoil, as people within and without the firm jockey for position. And what do they use to jockey for position?

Reports.

Statements of “fact”.

Statements of “figures”.

“MSM” statements.

You know something? MSM statements are easier to game than Citizen Media statements. You can only tell that MSM statements are “naked” when the tide goes out; when it comes to Citizen Media statements, they tend to be naked all the time.

That’s the real revolution in the making, when the process of monitoring and reporting within the organisation switches to Citizen Media-like behaviour.

Just a thought, as I laze on a Sunday evening.

[An aside: Why didn’t I include Facebook and MySpace and social networks in general in the “citizen media” definition? I thought hard about it, but decided not to; I felt there was a need to distinguish between those aspects of new media that supported reportage, and those that did not. Somehow I find it easy to associate blogs, flickr and twitter with reportage; that ease disappears when I try and extend it to social networks.]

I love the Web. I love Twitter. I love the way elections are becoming sources of entertainment. Take a look at this:

Little known fact Palin

Now that is viral.