No Respect (or Protection) for Web Journalists

I consider myself something of a tech-nerd, so when Gizmodo leaked the specs and images from the upcoming iPhone 4G last week, I was intrigued.  I saw the link on Twitter and immediately scanned through the images, soaking in every detail Gizmodo offered.  While I was curious as to how they got the device from the notoriously secretive Apple, that wasn’t the first thing that ran through my mind.

No, the first thing was something like this: “A front-facing video camera for video chats? A better rear camera? More memory? Sign me up!”

After I overcame my initial gawking though, it became clear that the real story was the journalistic angle.  Gizmodo apparently bought the device from someone who found it at a bar in California, tried to return it (although didn’t simply return it to the bartender, a questionable decision), and then sold it for $5,000.

Now, that alone would be an interesting ethical situation, but I think the real issue at hand is how Apple and the State of California reacted to Gizmodo’s at best questionable acquisition of the sought-after device.  Today, news broke that Jason Chen, the journalist who unearthed the story, came home to find that the California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team inside his home.  They broke in through the front door, ultimately seizing his computer, hard drives, phone, and camera.  I say broke in because, although the police acted under a signed warrant, shield laws should protect Chen and all journalists from such illegal search and seizure.

Chen, however, works from home, and Gizmodo is far from a typical news organization.  Web journalists still operate in a wild west of sorts, as some question whether traditional media laws apply to them.  This legal limbo is ridiculous, as Chen is clearly a journalist regardless of whether he works from home or not.  And, as Gawker (which owns Gizmodo) pointed out in its wonderful letter addressing Chen’s harassment, California has specific laws in place to ensure journalists don’t have to disclose sources.  They add that the state violated Chen’s “de facto newsroom” in the raid, which is absolutely true- can you imagine the uproar if police tore through the New York Times newsroom?

Whether Chen and Gizmodo acted ethically in obtaining the iPhone is not in question; to my knowledge, they didn’t break any laws in doing so.  What is sadly in question is Chen’s position as a journalist.  Hopefully Gawker sues California and sets a precedent that web journalists are indeed the peers of traditional media reporters.  Their contributions are vital, and we as a society need to respect and protect them.

Oh, and I know this isn’t one of the blogosphere’s “vital” contributions, but since I think this new phone is pretty damn cool, here’s the original report:

Ignoring Malcolm Gladwell

I love Malcolm Gladwell.  Outliers was fantastic, as are his New Yorker pieces.  I will always remember his take on the NFL, which forced me, a passionate sports fan, to question the dangers of such physically demanding sports.  I felt dirty watching games this year because of his articles.  That’s powerful reporting.

So when I read his quote about the value (or lack thereof) of J-schools, I took it to heart.  He told me to focus on something, embrace the narrowness, and dive into the modern media environment with at least one very specialized skill.

I came to my Independent Media Project with him in mind.  I wanted to concentrate on a single topic I love, but couldn’t come up with anything I was absoloutley confident with. .  I liked listening to other people’s ideas in class, but it seemed they were almost all tailored to their hometowns.  As a DC native, I feel the city is pretty well media-saturated, and while I’m sure there’s an angle I didn’t see, I don’t feel an overwhelming urge to cover anything there.  My non-political passions yielded nothing, either.  I have no desire to pursue music journalism because I can’t affect any change thorugh it. Chuck Klosterman is the most socially conscious music/pop culture critic I’ve ever read – about as good as anyone can be in the field – and even he has little (if any) influence on political discourse or thought.  I don’t want any part of sports reporting for the same reason.

But just when I was starting to feel like an unemployed George Costanza rattling off ridiculous potential careers, it hit me.  My passion isn’t related to a single topic, but rather the general field of investigative reporting.  I want to make the lives of these hard working journalists- and by extension, all people- easier in someway.  I want to give the public the answers it deserves.  I decided to start a website that simply files hundreds upon hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests, serving as a library for previously buried government documents.  Reporters could browse the documents, organized by subject and year, without any sort of wait.  They could look into leads without expending huge amounts of time and energy, minimizing the cost of in-depth reporting.  It would be like WikiLeaks, only for legally available government documents that no one has bothered to unearth yet.

Through this site, I could pursue my passion in all sorts of important issues.  War, discrimination, and civil liberties would all have a home at the site.  If I was successful enough, I could even hire a staff of reporters to look into the most sensational documents we find ourselves.

What I took from this exercise was the realization that I don’t need to completely narrow my passions, but utilize them.  Limiting myself seems like a dangerous idea; I just need to be creative in how I pursue my interests.

Here’s the Costanza clip.  It’s from “The Revenge” episode.

Municipal Internet

My family has always been behind the times on technology.  We had a 13-inch tv and no cable until I was 12 or 13, which I suppose I have to thank for my literacy.  We had dial up Internet until I was 16.  A couple of years ago we finally upgraded to HughesNet, satellite Internet service meant for people in the middle of nowhere, despite the fact that we live five miles outside of D.C.

A lot of this has to do with my mom’s irrational, non-ideological hatred of the major cable companies. (Hey, I’m all for bashing Comcast, but my Mom doesn’t have any problem with their consolidation; she won’t do business with them or Cox because they dug a hole in our yard once when I was four.  I’m 19 now.  She knows how to hold a grudge.)  However, I finally got my first taste of broadband last year, when we made the big migration over to Verizon (see, I told you our hatred of cable companies wasn’t for any good reason!), and I was blown away by how fast it was.  I instantly called up websites, watched LOST episodes uninterrupted, and basically spent all winter break streaming video online.  I even bought a SlingBox so I could take advantage of our high-speed access while I was at school.

I did all this because I didn’t really know what I was missing out on when I was a kid.  Dialup Internet is monumentally inconvenient and defeats everything I love about the web, rendering it a shell of itself.  Having that until I was a junior in high school is almost unimaginable, but says a lot about the state of high-speed web access in our country.  It’s just not all that accessible, since the dearth of options corners the consumer into picking between a few companies that offer essentially the same thing: mediocre, expensive service compared to overseas providers.  That means people like my mom, who have a problem with the providers (even those with a good reason), are stuck with either an untenable dialup connection or confining corporate options.

This is exactly what we get for privatizing the Internet.  Municipal Internet, as advocated by Free Press, would offer a much better alternative to the corporate mess we have now.  Today, the Internet is a basic necessity, and local governments charged should step in and provide competition.  I don’t see any difference at all between paving roads and stringing fiber optic cables; both are core needs of a modern population, but government intervention in the Internet is seen as obtrusive.  Had the government not stepped in to regulate road construction, we’d be paying tolls each time we hopped off an exit, as private companies would control all our roads.  We can’t let this happen to the Internet.

The Importance of Jeremy Scahill

Nobody goes into journalism for the pay.  Even way back in high school, when journalism first piqued my interest, I knew that it calls for long hours, hard work, no rest, and little thanks.  Of course, back then I figured I’d wind up at the Washington Post or some other newspaper and live happily ever after.  Shows what I know.

Anyways, however willing I am to admit how hard life as a journalist will be, it still seems tough to imagine what it’s actually like.  Especially in today’s landscape, I’m unsure of whether I’ll even be employed by anyone or whether I’ll just freelance and hope for the best.  With a second major (or minor?  Who really knows?) in the lucrative and employable field of English, it’s easy to get frustrated about my future beyond Ithaca College.

Jeremy Scahill, though, embodies exactly the type of journalist I want to be, and his visit gave me a huge jolt of energy.  I came back from his speech, book clutched to my side, ecstatic about my future.  I know things will never be easy as a journalist and that the odds of me having anywhere near the career of Scahill are slim, but his passion is contagious.   He had a really rough time getting started in the field, and ended up stalking Amy Goodman to get a job.  He lived in a homeless shelter and scraped by on whatever pay he could find.  Even today, he still doesn’t have a steady job.

So the only reason Jeremy was successful is his passion. I’m not sure he told us anything we didn’t already know – aside from a handful of hilarious stories, of course – but his enthusiasm for what he does is an appreciated reminder of why I’m following in his footsteps as best I can.  I know I can put up with the uncertainty as long as the work is rewarding; it’s just nice to have the surge of energy from somebody as determined as Jeremy to keep me on the right track.

Convergence Media and the Independent Press

In a few minutes I have to run off to IC Asia Night in the Pub to shoot a story for my News Writing II class.  I’ve often been frustrated that I’ve done more video production than writing in my two News Writing courses this year. I complain about it constantly, to the point that it’s become a joke among my friends, especially those that are TV-R majors.  I’m definitely a words guy; I just don’t function as well with video camera as I do with a pen, and I often feel handicapped by the medium.

That said, I definitely recognize the value in learning different skill sets, and I’m happy my classes have pushed me out of my comfort zone.  If it had been up to me, I would’ve just kept on writing, leaving my multimedia skills suspect.  This year, I have made noticeable progress in my ability to tell a story with a camera.  While its nowhere near my medium of choice, I know how to frame a shot, mic up an interview, and all the monotonous little things that make getting behind the camera so daunting.  Plus, since at the end of the day I’m still just telling a story, I’m able to function decently in the post-production stages.  I’m not a brilliant editor, but I’m getting the hang of it, and I know how to maintain the flow of a story.

I’m happy I know all this because I’m clearly going to need it.  I’ve been reading a lot of Izzy Award Winner Jeremy Scahill’s blog, Rebel Reports, lately in anticipation of his speech on Monday and noticed his effective use of video to tell a story.  The most obvious example of this was his post on “Blackwater’s Youngest Victim,” in which he turns an article he wrote about a 9-year-old killed by Blackwater into a short documentary.  He obviously had help, but his skill in both print and video is admirable.  Plus, he even compiled a slide show to accompany it.

This sort of media convergence is necessary to survive as an independent media outlet.  The audience is looking for diversity of content, and by providing that to them on his own website, Scahill is able to connect with the audience without having to rely on anyone else.  To have that same sort of autonomy, I need to continue to improve on my video skillset.

So with that, I’m off to film IC Asia Night.  No complaints here!

Oh, and here’s Scahill’s video:

Misplaced Trust in Google

Ah, Facebook chat, this is why you were invented.  At 2:00 AM last Wednesday, bleary eyed and lethargic, with the rest of an essay to polish off, I naturally logged onto Facebook and started talking with my friend Stephen.  I wanted to avoid work at all costs, and was eager to see he was still awake.  And because we’re oh-so-cool, conversation naturally drifted to net neutrality.

Yes, these are the things we talk about at 2 in the morning.

Anyways, we decided that if net neutrality is able to loosen the big telecommunications companies’ grip on the Internet, then Google is going to immediately gobble up an even larger portion of the web.

“That’s okay, I trust Google,” Stephen said.  “They’re run by tech nerds, not businessmen.”

When I disagreed that they didn’t care about money just as much as anyone else, I was stunned by Stephen’s response.  “It’s alright, high technology is the one place capitalism is actually effective,” he said.  “If one mega-corporation is going to be ruling my life, I’d like it to be Google.”

The idea is interesting and gets right to the core of my trust issues with Google.  I don’t think you can legitimately argue that Google is any different than other companies.  They care about the bottom line first and foremost, and won’t simply advance technology for the common good.  If that were true, Google would be giving us free laptops devoid of advertisements left and right; instead; instead they continue to effectively merge their services with targeted advertisements.  They are cleverly collecting as much information on each of us as they can, hoping to be able to sell highly specialized demographics to advertisers. There’s nothing altruistic there; just greed.

So if we can accept that Google, Apple, and other “hip” tech companies are, above all, corporate entities, then the discussion becomes not whether corporations are philanthropic, but whether capitalism is actually good in scientific fields.  I certainly can see the argument, since capitalism does a good job rewarding ingenuity and developing new technology.  It says something that Stephen, one of the smartest and most anti-capitalist people I know, buys into the logic.  Greed is a great motivator, and is certainly able to accelerate progress in some instances.

However, I’d worry that we’d pay too high a cost.  You can’t simply divorce the tech sector from the rest of the world, and there’s little doubt in my mind that capitalism fails in the rest of the world.  Therefore, if you give tech companies free reign (i.e. Friedman-ite economic policies), then the invisible hand will end up funneling all the money to them, meaning tech companies would wind up becoming far too powerful.

The government should be funding research itself, building our networking technology for us, instead of depending on private companies to advance technology.  It’s not as if government-funded research is ineffective: as much as I hate nuclear weapons, The Manhattan Project was subsidized by the government, and it produced the single greatest (in the pejorative sense) scientific breakthrough of the first half of the twentieth century.  If we simply devoted government resources to expanding Internet technology, we would not be at the mercy of huge conglomerates.

Blurring the Line Between Citizen and Journalist

While Mayhill Fowler wasn’t playing completely inside the lines in her coverage of Obama and Clinton, her story raises the important issue of the blurring line between citizen and journalist.  Sure, she was affiliated with the Huffington Post, but she had about as much formal training as a man off the street, positioning her as just another person with a mic, essentially.  In today’s world, I can find little distinction between Fowler and the average citizen, since any other person in those buildings could’ve submitted the same content to the Huffington Post or another source.  Since I’m a big proponent of defining journalism by its content as opposed to its producer, I don’t see a large difference between Fowler doing this pseudo-undercover reporting and the average citizen holding up their cell phone.

Along those same lines, I have little sympathy for a politician who stumbles and is appalled that his folly pops up online.  The tools are all out there in the open, not obscured in some underground community dedicated to catching stupid things said on the campaign trail.  I place blame squarely on Obama and Clinton for not recognizing the constant media presence in public.  Obama in particular should have been smarter about his remarks, since he based his campaign around new media.

That said, I love that Obama’s “guns and religion” comment – one of the most honest statements I’ve ever heard from a politician.

Oh, and here’s another video of Clinton’s remarks, this one a little different than the one I found in class.  The President starts speaking a little more than 10 seconds in.

Comments and The Huffington Post Investigative Fund

I have an interview with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund in eight hours for an internship I desperately want, so I’ve spent a lot of the past day reading and rereading the site.  My reading hasn’t been contained to the indulgent/torturous, “God-I wish-I-could-work-here,” sort though—I’ve surprisingly managed a little bit of critical reading as well.

One of the main things I’ve noticed stands out to me each time I read an article on the site: the lack of a comment section.  It jumps off the digital page in an age when public interaction is at unprecedented levels.  The forum is a virtual necessity on the medium, and I was completely thrown by its absence from the site.  My perplexion was compounded when I thought about the Fund’s most prominent affiliate, the Huffington Post, which thrives on its vibrant comment section.  The decision to do away with comments entirely simply didn’t make sense to me.

I say “didn’t” in the past tense as if it makes perfect sense to me now; it most certainly does not.  That said, I can see why a site like the Fund would opt to deemphasize the forum, since its staff places such a premium on in-depth reporting.  The stories themselves are so involved and comprehensive that a comment section, especially one as prominent as the Huffington Post’s, would distract from the overwhelming quality of the original reporting. Forums tend to be a sort of wild west of information, with shoddy facts running rampant and petty arguments overshadowing substantive discussion.  To put it simply, forums often wind up being everything the Fund isn’t.

To put any sort of check on the forums would require more manpower than its worth, too.  There aren’t too many staffers on the site, which is funded entirely by private investors.  Their time is probably too valuable to be spent moderating comments when they could be out digging up stories on the streets of D.C.  The problem could even be a licensing issue; I’m unsure of how the creative commons license works, but perhaps it places some sort of restriction on interaction.  Unlikely, but possible.

Plus, the site gets the best of both worlds in some instances, as they have a link at the bottom of some articles asking for tips.  These tips have led to some prominent stories on the site: one article about the wrongful termination of an accident victim’s insurance coverage says that, “Heather Galeotti’s story, reported here for the first time, came to the Huffington Post Investigative Fund through its citizen journalism project.”  Clearly, the Fund is getting what it needs from community interaction.

That said, I’m still a big proponent of comment sections when feasible.  I think that the Internet’s potential for crowd-sourcing and its dynamic ability to unite readers should be tapped as often as possible.  While I’m not dying to moderate a comment section on the site if I were to get the internship, I think using all the web’s tools is important for a site to be successful, and would certainly be willing to help implement such a feature.

Oh, and here’s a video from the site, just one of many the Fund publishes.  There’s some seriously cool stuff on the site, so make sure to check it out.

Bloggers: More Than Just Guys in Their Underwear

I was talking to my friend about blogs over the weekend and his take on their value surprised me.  “The goal of any blogger is to be sold in Urban Outfitters,” he explained.  It was said partly in jest, but I think it strikes at a larger issue concerning the public’s perception of blogs.  Sure, there’s plenty of crap out there, but good writing and thorough reporting still trumps all in any market.  The blogs that just repost other people’s work fall flat on their face, and the one’s that keep you up to date on the bloggers every movement (the “Just had a turkey sandwich for lunch.  It was great!!!”-type blog) are only read by the founder’s mom.
Meanwhile, the blogosphere provides us with plenty of thorough analysis from sites with strong voices and dedicated reporters.  A site’s credibility shouldn’t be damaged simply because its platform is called a blog; journalism should be judged on its content alone.  By ignoring blogs because they’re written by “people in their boxers,” the public risks losing out on valuable, community-driven journalism.
That said, things are looking better as the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous as a journalism platform—look no further than the Huffington Post for evidence of this sort of success.  Its up to blogs like the Huffington Post to keep up their strong work and end the stigma surrounding bloggers.

Revising the Curriculum: WikiLeaks

I learned about WikiLeaks a couple years ago, but I knew relatively little about it beyond the basics.  The site wasn’t designed for me, I thought, but for dissidents in China or Iran or another country with limited press freedom.  Plus, I’m not working for some huge multi-national corporation, so who am I going to blow the whistle on?
However, while browsing through the site today, I realize that document literacy is a bit of a whole in my journalistic tool belt.  I mean, I’ve done my share of reporting on budgets to have encountered a lot of federal jargon and bureaucratic paperwork to know what I’m looking at, but I still find it sort of hard to sift through the sheer amount of documents WikiLeaks provides.  To be able to make proper use of the service, a journalist needs to be able to quickly analyze the information posted there.
That means document literacy is as important a skill as working a video camera, so we should be learning that, too, in our journalism classes.  Without it, then future investigative journalists will be ill-equipped to handle the information digital whistleblowers provide.