The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers

From Yesterday’s Prejudices Today review:

Operators invented shorthand codes, including GA for “go ahead” that are very similar to the abbreviations many of us use today, and anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a flaming “RTFM, stupid!” will sympathize with some of the hazing new operators were subjected to.

which is not to say that I agree with Jayson’s “Professional journalism is becoming an unnecessary institution”, by any means.
(admission: didn’t read the whole thing, it was too long for me)

> Rather than disparage citizen journalism, why not help it along?

yes please. Where is the organization that cit-j practitioners can join, for assistance? SPJ is out for obvious reasons, there’s no membership category in IRE, no lexis-nexis access…

(Please don’t say “the Media Bloggers Association” since – last I checked – they explicitly _refrain_ from placing any ethical strictures on their members, beyond “members should be nice to each other”.)

I offer an analogy to another common confusion that I believe offers insight into exactly why you here this kind of drivel. Some people are wont complain incessantly about the degradation of language we see in e-mail and instant messages. Usually there’s some “villian to blame” and I catch a whiff of disapproval.

The crux of their misunderstanding is a matter of understanding the economics. When messages were expensive (in both time and resources), the importance of a clear message was paramount. Today, messages are cheap. It makes sense that there is less value in their exacting construction. Nothing is making people lazy or stupid, economics is removing the impetus for such exacting communication.

If I were publishing a print article, writing a book, or sending a letter, it should be clear and well written. If not, I risk the receiver not understanding my message and potentially requiring a response and additional correspondence. Similarly, a mistake in a print article can’t be readily corrected and can be costly in terms of reputation. Mistakes in books are lasting as well.

In this scenario, one can see that quality communications is a must. Thus, in the realm of the press journalists have in the past performed an absolutely critical role. When news could not travel as fast as it now does, a journalist collected and distilled the situation and reported it. Without the press, people were not informed and bias flourished in the lack of comprehensive coverage.

Originally, print was the most effective method available to accomplish this. A time followed when messages got cheaper. Journalists began striving more to aggressively provide “stories”. As the value of a journalist’s work dropped, competition increased.

Today, you generally find most people have a distrust of the independence of the media juxtaposed against attacks on “amateurs” from people who are heavily invested in “professional” journalism. Sadly, I fear that many professional journalists have succumbed to the vain but all too common belief that they have much more to offer than most amateur journalists. When messages were expensive, and print was the only effective medium, this was true. Even in broadcast news this was critical.

In the real world, messages no longer need to be comprehensive. Reports from various sources can be transmitted, linked, and aggregated automatically and with a statistical form of democracy never before achieved. The expense of miscommunication is low and the latency of response is virtually nonexistent.

With such a system, traditional, professional journalism offers very little. Why send a journalist to a war zone when we get posts from there? Why investigate Chinese censorship when information is leaking out of every seam? What kind of integrity can you offer in the world of commercialized media (where objectivity and a paycheck rarely go together)?

At one time, journalists used the resources allocated to them to safeguard objectivity, inform the public, and disseminate news quickly. An individual would then evaluate the information given them to make decisions.

The modern reality is that information is dissiminated more efficiently and understood cooperatively in ways that print journalism can rarely provide. Newswires are more expensive, closed, and troublesome than simple RSS aggregation. Direct access to sources without the limitation of fitting on a page gives freedom. There are no sponsors to offend. There is no incentive to compete but rather to cooperate. With this cooperation comes value that a research team, some reporters, and editors cannot provide on the the same scale.

Essentially, Professor Freedman is mistaking the methods of journalism–distilling raw material into a cogent, unbiased, and balanced report–with the purpose of journalism–to keep the public informed and ensure balanced coverage.

In this vein, many journalists have been disturbed by the blogsphere because it tends to communicate news so quickly and also because agreement is often reached so quickly that they mistake it for a bias. Essentially, the blogosphere can reach consensus in a matter of hours with a complete log of source materials, comment logs, and aggregated/syndicated publishing.

Those with misunderstandings the purpose of journalism and the methods of modern citizen reporters often are dismissive in this way. It’s ironic that the roots of Rhetoric, public communication, and even their profession lie in the very process that they are dismissing.

There is not much that citizen journalists have left to degrade in professional journalism. There are too many reporters with “institutional sanction” and hidden agendas for the generally uninformed to trust a “finished product” as anything more than a persuasive vehicle at best and propaganda at worst. Citizens no longer have anything to gain from the “mediating intelligence” of good professional journalism. Those with the ability to sift out the news do it on their own. Those without the ability get lost in the rabble of “professionals” with agendas–as indicated by the widespread impression of “the media” as an outlet for control of the populace rather than a source for critical decisionmaking information.

Rather, a social framework of citizen journalists, new technology, and vigorous publishing of “raw material” is an effective way to provide the same function as now devalued professional journalists used to provide.

It’s a matter of incentive, professional journalism in our commercialized society puts journalists on the wrong side of the fence. Suggesting that those paid by third parties to report potentially on those third parties in an unbiased manner is naive in the extreme. The citizenry are the only people left with the incentive to be unbiased and independent. Technology has empowered them and given them the means to communicate news (if sometimes ineffectively and boorishly).

Say what you want about “the mob”, the economics of millions looking out for themselves eliminates more bias and sources more intelligence than most professional institutions can muster anyway. Professional journalism is becoming an unnecessary institution in a connected and globalized world.

Professor Freedman will have to join the club eventually, I guess.