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Chapter 8 Chapter 8
Next Steps
In the mid-1990’s, just as the World Wide Web was gaining
popularity, I was sure that the Internet would become a power-
ful force in our lives. But I didn’t have a clue that services such
as Google would emerge, or that weblogs and other personal
media would play such a transformative role in my chosen craft.
I didn’t anticipate online experiments such as Feed, the pio-
neering but now defunct online magazine that had an edginess
bloggers later incorporated, or group-edited sites such as
Kuro5hin, where the audience writes and ranks the stories and
then adds context and ideas as they discuss them. I didn’t
imagine that blogs and other tools would come along to make
writing on the Web almost as easy as reading from it. So I won’t
try to predict the shape of the news business and how it will be
practiced a decade from now. But even if we can’t make specific
predictions, we can look forward and make some safe assump-
tions about the architecture and technology of tomorrow’s
news, and then consider what they suggest.
My assumptions rest on two guiding principles. The first is
a belief in basic journalistic values, including accuracy, fairness,
and ethical standards. The second is rooted in the very nature of
technology: it’s relentless and unstoppable.
Only one thing is certain: we’ll all be astounded by what’s
to come.
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laws and other codes
As we’ve already established, the mass media in the latter part
of the 20th century was organized, for the most part, along a
fairly simple, top-down framework. Editors and reporters inside
big companies decided which stories to cover. They received
information from a variety—but not too big a variety—of
mostly official and sometimes unofficial sources. Editors mas-
saged what reporters wrote, and the results were printed in
newspapers and magazines or broadcast on radio and televi-
sion. Alternatives did exist, particularly when desktop pub-
lishing came on the scene. But the conversational aspect of the
news we’ve been discussing in this book hadn’t arrived.
Technology and an increasing dissatisfaction with mass
media have created the conditions for a new framework. To
understand this, we must first understand the technology and
the trends underlying the collision of journalism and tech-
nology. These trends take the shape of laws, not the kind
enacted by governments but the kind imagined by scientists and
acute observers of society.
The first law is named after Gordon Moore, cofounder of
computer chip maker Intel. More than any other, Moore’s Law
is the key to understanding today’s reality and tomorrow’s
possibilities.
Moore’s Law says that the density of transistors on a given
piece of silicon will double every 18 to 24 months. It’s been true
since Moore came up with the notion in the 1960s, and the pace
of improvement looks set to continue for some time to come.
There’s no historical equivalent for this kind of change; humans
are fortunate to do anything twice as fast or as twice as well
even once, much less double that improvement again and again.
Moore’s Law is about exponential change: it doesn’t take long
before you’ve increased power by thousands-fold.218
As engineers shrink millions of transistors onto tiny chips,
they can embed enormous calculating power—something akin
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to intelligence—into almost every electronic device we use. You
and I use many computers each day: the microprocessors, also
called microcontrollers, are in computers, handheld devices,
alarm clocks, coffee makers, home thermostats, wristwatches,
and automobiles. Most of these devices contain vastly more pro-
cessing power than early mainframe computers.
Not only are we embedding brains into everything we touch,
but we’re adding memory to everything, too. The manufacturers
of computer memory chips and disk drives are improving their
products at an even faster pace than Moore’s Law. And now,
with modern communications—wired and wireless—we’re con-
necting devices that are more and more powerful.
Grassroots journalism feeds on all these innovations.
Devices for collecting, working with, and distributing data are
becoming smaller and more powerful every year. People are fig-
uring out how to put them to work in ways professional jour-
nalists are only beginning to catch on to, such as collaborative
news sites where readers do the writing and editing and posting
newsy pictures from camera phones.
Moore himself has been somewhat surprised at how long
Silicon Valley’s engineers have kept his law not just alive, but
vibrant. “It went further than I ever could have imagined,” he
told me in 2001.
Next, consider Metcalfe’s Law, named after Bob Metcalfe,
inventor of the Ethernet networking standard that is now ubiq-
uitous in every personal computer.219 Essentially, Metcalfe’s
Law says that the value of a communication network is the
square of the number of nodes, or end-point connections. That
is, take the number of nodes and multiply it by itself.
The canonical example of Metcalfe’s Law is the growth of
fax machines. If there’s only one fax machine in the world, it’s
not good for much. But the minute someone else gets a fax
machine, both can be used, and real value is created. The more
people with fax machines, the more value there is in the net-
work—a utility that greatly exceeds the raw numbers—because
each individual user has many more people to whom he can
send faxes.220
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Each new Internet-connected computer is a node. So,
increasingly, is each new mobile phone that can send and
retrieve Internet data. And in a few years, it’s probable that
most of the smarter devices made possible by Moore’s law—
everything from refrigerators to cars to computers—will be a
node. When billions or even trillions of people and things are
connected, the value of the network will transcend calculation.
Finally, we have Reed’s Law, named after David Reed, about
whom I’ll talk more in Chapter 11. Reed noticed that when
people go online, they don’t only conduct one-to-one communica-
tions, as they would with a telephone or fax machine. They con-
duct many-to-many, or few-to-few, communications.
According to Reed’s Law, groups themselves are nodes. The
value of networks in that context, he asserts, is the number of
groups factorial. Here, factorial means that you take the number
of groups, and every integer less than that number all the way
back to one, and multiply all of those numbers together. For
example, 8 factorial is 1 times 2 times 3 times 4 times 5 times 6
times 7 times 8. The number of group nodes factorial is a very,
very, very big number.221
Obviously, Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law are as much
opinions as anything else. But they make sense intuitively, and
more and more they make sense in a practical way: the more the
Net grows, the more valuable and powerful it becomes.222
All of these trends, applied to communications in general,
add up to an even more “radical democratization of access to
the means of production and distribution,” Howard Rheingold
told me.
The people who’ll invent tomorrow’s media are not in my
age bracket. They are just growing up now. In a decade, Rhein-
gold observed: “The 15-year-olds today in Seoul and Helsinki,
who are already adept at mobilizing media to their end, will be
25. And what they carry in their pockets will be thousands of
times more powerful than what they have today.”
What does this mean for news and journalism? As the tech-
nologies of creation and communication grow more powerful
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and become smaller, and ultimately become part of the fabric of
life, we’ll have vastly more raw data. And we’ll need tools—and
humans—to help us make sense of it all.
creating the news
There’s no longer any doubt that personal publishing of various
stripes is becoming a major trend. The Pew Internet & Amer-
ican Life Project found that in mid-2003, slightly less than half
of adult Internet users had used the Net to “publish their
thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and other-
wise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”223
If you added in the under-18 population, no doubt the numbers
would rise significantly. While much of what is considered pub-
lishing on the Net consisted of trading files, causing some
doubters to downplay the survey, the bottom line was that there
was an enormous and growing cadre of content creators, some
of whom were creating news.
The tools of creation are now everywhere, and they’re get-
ting better. Musicians can get the near-equivalent of a big
recording studio in a package costing only a couple of thousand
dollars, or considerably less if they’re willing to make some com-
promises. Digital video is becoming so cheap that anyone with
the requisite talent can make a feature film for a fraction of what
it once cost. The notion of writing on the Web is expanding to
include all kinds of media, and there’s little to stop it.
The Web can’t compete today—and may not compete in
our lifetimes—with live television for big-event coverage. The
architecture just doesn’t permit it. But for just about everything
else, it’s ideal. Adam Curry, who became prominent as a VJ on
MTV and has since been exploring the blogosphere and even
newer media,224 envisions “Personal TV Networks” that use the
Net in a more appropriate way to deliver video content. In an
introduction to a session at a 2004 blogging conference,225 he
described it this way:
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Since the invention of the video tape recorder, most content
delivered via television is created offline and prepared well in
advance of its broadcast slot. In many cases a program will
have to be cleared through the legal department and be
reviewed for network “policies.” And so the program sits in a
queue, waiting to be distributed. During this time the pro-
gram could be distributed by bike messengers and still arrive
on time when you would normally turn on your set as
directed by TV Guide. Or...it could be distributed via the
Internet. Since big files take a long time to download, a day’s
worth of downloading should be time enough. The download
can take place at night, when usage of your network and pc is
low and, most importantly, you aren’t waiting for it. It’ll “just
be there” in the morning.226
Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and abroad are
using camera phones (soon to be video-camera phones) and
SMS to share information. Soon, said Larry Larsen, multimedia
editor at the Poynter Institute, location will be one of the data
points. For example, he told me that if he’s house-hunting, he
should be able to visit a location and ask his Treo handheld for
all relevant news stories within a two-mile radius. “If the bulk
of that includes violent crimes,” he wrote me, “I’m out of
there.”227
But how easy will it be to use the tools of creation? Blogs
set an early standard, but they’re still relatively crude instru-
ments. You still need to know some HTML to make a blog
work. In the future, tools need to be drop-dead simple, or the
promise of grassroots journalism won’t be kept.
The reporter of the future—amateur or professional—will be
equipped with an amazing toolkit. But reporting is more than
collecting facts, or raw data. Rheingold’s smart mobs are mor-
phing into a news team of unparalleled reach. Is there depth to
match?
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In Snow Crash,228 a 1991 novel of a post-apocalyptic Amer-
ican future, Neal Stephenson offered an image that has stuck
with me.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intel-
ligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their
computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules
that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They
serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that
happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups
are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or
the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as
belonging to a class that is at once above and far below
human society.
The gargoyles in the novel aren’t journalists in Stephenson’s
vision. They’re more like human personal assistants, with a dual
role: recording what’s going on in the environment and then
interacting with the network by looking up someone’s face or
biography from the Net, for example. In a sense, the gargoyles
are web-cams with brains.
“Journalists are supposed to filter information, not just be
web-cams,” Stephenson told me. There’s too little respect for
the journalistic function when people see it as “a primitive sub-
stitute for having web-cams everywhere. No one has time to sift
through all that crap.”
The sifting process will be handled both by people and
machines. The role of the journalist will surely change, but it
will not go away. But the role of automated tools will grow.
sorting it out
The ability to get the news you want is the hallmark of a net-
worked world. People can create their own news reports from a
variety of sources, not just the ones in their hometowns, which
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typically have been dominated by a monopoly local newspaper
and television stations that would have to dig deeper to be
shallow.
Creating our own news reports is still a largely haphazard
affair. The sheer volume of information deters all but the most
dedicated news hunters and gatherers. But the tools are
improving fast, and it won’t be long before people will be able
to pick and choose in a far more organized way than they do
today. New kinds of Big Media are emerging in this category,
including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. But the opportunity
for small media is enormous, too.
I’ve been a fan of Google News229 since it launched in
“beta” form (it was still beta as I wrote this) in early 2002. The
brainchild of Krishna Bharat, it has become a popular, and I’d
argue essential, part of the web news infrastructure. The search
engine “crawls” various news sites—designated by humans—
and then machines take over to display all kinds of headlines on
a variety of subjects from politics to business to sports to enter-
tainment and so on. The display is calculated to resemble a
newspaper. It’s an effective glimpse into what’s big news on the
Web right now, or at least what editors think is big.
A user who wants to be better informed on a particular topic
can use Google News to drill deeper, which may be the most
important aspect of the site. One click and the user gets a list,
sorted by what Google estimates is relevant or by date, of all sto-
ries on a given topic. There’s a great deal of repetition, but it can
be eye-opening to see how different media organizations cover the
same issue, or what different angles they choose to highlight.
A useful element of Google News is called Google Alerts, a
service that lets users create keyword searches, the results of
which are sent by email on a regular basis. But as of early 2004,
the service didn’t let you read the alerts in RSS (the syndication
format I discussed in Chapter 2 and will look at again below), a
serious drawback.
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Another Google News drawback, as of this writing, was a
refusal to acknowledge news content from the sphere of grass-
roots journalism. For example, only a few blogs are considered
worthy. This underestimates the value of the best blogs. Bharat
told me the site has one basic rule: news requires editors, and
Google News is displaying what editors think is important at
any given moment. He saw the site as “complementary” to what
newspapers do, but this seemed to understate its potential. Of
course, it would not exist without the actual news reporting and
editing from elsewhere. But it has the potential to turn into the
virtual front page for the rest of us.
Microsoft, racing to catch Google in the search-engine wars,
has long been established in the news business. MSNBC, the
company’s partnership with General Electric’s NBC News unit,
is a classic news site—big, heavy, rich with content. It’s innova-
tive in how it provides multimedia news. Now Microsoft is
making Google-like experiments in news, too, with its
“Newsbot,”230 the early tests of which closely resemble Google
News.
More interesting, by the sound of it, is an upcoming
Microsoft product called NewsJunkie, which is due to be
released later in 2004. As Kristie Heim reported in the San Jose
Mercury News on March 24, 2004, it is being designed to keep
track of what readers have already seen, but with refinements.
“It reorganizes news stories to rank those with the most new
information at the top and push those with repetitive informa-
tion to the bottom, or filter them out entirely,” she wrote.
In looking at the major web companies’ moves, I’ve been
most impressed with Yahoo!’s direction. The MyYahoo! page
has been more customizable than any of the other major sites,
letting the user create a highly tailored news report. In early
2004, Yahoo! folded RSS into the service, letting users select
feeds from weblogs and other sites and add them to the
MyYahoo! news page.231 It’s the best blend yet of old and new.
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syndication takes off
Let’s revisit RSS. You’ll recall that RSS is a file generated auto-
matically by weblog and web site software, and increasingly by
other applications, that describes the site’s content for the pur-
pose of syndication.
Here’s an example. A typical blog consists of a homepage
with several postings. Each posting consists of a headline and
some text. The RSS “feed,” as it’s known, is a file containing a
list of the headlines and some or all of the text from the post-
ings. In other words, RSS describes the structure and some of
the content of a particular page.
RSS feeds can be read by “aggregators” or “newsreaders,”
software that allows individuals to collect news from many dif-
ferent sites into one screenful of information instead of having
to surf from one page to another. Today, RSS readers are fairly
primitive, but that will change in coming years.
Some of the most exciting new work surrounding RSS is
coming from fledgling companies such as Feedster, which mines
RSS data and keeps track of bloggers’ mentions of products,
among other things. The inherent possibilities seem nearly end-
less, including the ability to follow conversations in much more
detailed ways. As I was finishing this book, Microsoft quietly let
it be known that it was planning “Blogbot,” a search tool that
sounded very much like Feedster and Technorati. Surprisingly,
Google, which owns Blogger, a company that makes blogging
software, hadn’t done any of this.
The technologists looking at this field see rich lodes in RSS
and other data created on blogs and web sites. Mountains of
data are being created every day by RSS feeds and other struc-
tured information, and smart entrepreneurs and researchers are
creating tools that I believe will become an integral part of
tomorrow’s news architecture.
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Dave Sifry, a serial entrepreneur, started Technorati in 2002. By
April 2004, he was tracking more than two million blogs, with
thousands coming online every day. Though many people
abandon their blogs, the trend line is growing fast.
Technorati’s tools are basically semi-canned queries that go
into a giant, constantly updated database that Sifry likens to a
just-in-time search engine. The service helps people search or
browse for interesting or popular weblogs, breaking news, and
hot topics of conversation. It also lets users rank people and
their blogs and blog topics not just by popularity—the number
of blogs linking to something—but by weighted popularity,
determined by the popularity of the linking blogs. You can also
see not just the most popular blogs, but the fastest-rising ones.
My blog had about 2,100 incoming links the last time I checked.
If I get 100 more, that’s gratifying but not, relatively speaking, a
huge change. But if som