Journalism (and much else for that matter) is mostly a question of platform now, you just may not have noticed it. By platform–a word, that like ‘risk’ means so many things it almost has withered to a semantic husk of itself–I’m thinking about the technological variety, generally a software system that facilitates, automates and otherwise organizes some human activity. Once upon a time it was the human bit that constituted the ends, with the platform as the means, now ends and means are mixed up, perhaps nowhere more than in journalism.
At least that’s the conclusion I draw from three bits of today’s reading, of passing interest to anybody who is watching the intersection between media and technology with fascination or dread.
First (and most interesting), New York Magazine’s Max Read asks “Can Medium Be Both a Tech Company and a Media Company?”
This is pegged to a story I didn’t know about (and am going to catch up on) in which a tech publication covering its own domain trips up on just what enterprise they are engaged in.
http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/medium-a-tech-company-or-a-media-company.html
“Medium wants to straddle the divide between media and tech — to be both a platform (tech) and a publisher (media). This can place it in an awkward position: Institutionally, is it on the closed-ranks side of the “new class of industrialists” of the tech industry, to whom the question of Airbnb’s liability in the deaths of its guests is already settled? Or is it an editorially independent media company with a mandate to ask uncomfortable questions? So far, its defense against the differing interests of its two halves is transparency. This morning, Matter’s editor Mark Lotto weighed in on the entire set of comments: “I can’t think of another publication or platform where an editor and his boss would have this exchange in front of everybody.”
–As Read points out, it’s possible to find such transparency pretty easily (including going back to the pre-web days). Further, is ‘transparency’–another word of the moment, along with its sibling ‘disclosure’–enough? Is having a lively debate about the meta-ethics of a story the same as facing up to a potential conflict of interest? Platforms it seems to me are awfully conducive to this recursive hall of mirrors feel–they yield data about data about data (think the cascade of comments that never ends, even after it’s become very, very meta.) Not sure what it this is–and even if it’s bad per se–just doesn’t feel like journalism.
Exhibit 2 is a piece from BBC Social Media Editor Mark on the BBC Academy Blog, “#Paris: UGC expertise can no longer be a niche newsroom skill” that raises lots of interesting points. Underscores the reality that social media/user generated content sources are now not just part of the reporter’s job but often most of it, with challenges about verification, and just stomaching what you see in your feeds. (We’ve come a long way from checking the AP and UPI wires instead of writing your story.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/fbb87059-ab13-4b79-b5ad-5a47a417fb8a
“But how much time and resource can we afford to spend on uncovering the truth? Are we as invested in the search and verification tools as we are in training our staff across newsrooms to appreciate and understand the risks of UGC fakery? And finally, perhaps most importantly, do we have enough safeguards in place to help those who work with UGC on a regular basis cope with the distressing and disturbing material they see?”
Finally, The NYTimes profiles its most prolific commenters.
“These frequent commenters have also become a community, one that has its own luminaries.
“But who are they? We decided to take a look at some of the most popular commenters on The Times site, which receives around 9,000 online comments a day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/23/nytnow/23commenters.html?_r=0
Short profiles, with photos, that predictably (see recursion above) garnered more than 700 comments.
A Few Reasonable Words 