loose wire blog

The Dangers of Faking It

(my weekly column, syndicated to newspapers)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

A 40-ton whale jumped out of the water and crash-landed onto a sailboat the other day. The moment was caught on camera by a tourist, the whale suspended a few meters above the boat before it smashes into mast and deck, leaving behind a mass of barnacle and blubber.

Amazing stuff. So the first question from a TV interviewer to the survivors of this close encounter between man and mammal? “Was this picture Photoshopped?”

Sad, but I have to admit it was my first question too.

Photoshopping—the art of digitally manipulating a photo—has become so commonplace that it probably should be the first question we ask when we see a photo.

After all, it’s understood that every photo in every fashion magazine in the world is Photoshopped—a wrinkle unwrinkled here, eye unbagged there, an inch lost or gained below and above the midriff. We assume, when we look at a flattering photo of a celebrity that it was Photoshopped first (apparently every celebrity has a Photoshopper to do just this.)

But what of news photos? How do we feel about manipulation then?

Take the latest hoo-ha over some BP photos. Turns out that some photos on its website were tweaked to make BP look a bit more on-the-ball about monitoring the Gulf oil spill than it really was. Blank screens at its Houston command center were filled with images copied from other screens, prompting a search of BP’s website for other altered photos.

Another photo showed a helicopter apparently approaching the site of the spill. Upon closer inspection the helicopter was actually on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One can only guess why BP thought it necessary to make the chopper look as if it was flying.

BP, to its credit, has come clean and posted all the photos to a Flickr page “for the sake of transparency.”

But of course, it’s not enough. First off, the explanation is weasel-like: it places the blame on a “contract photographer” and writes vaguely of incidents where “cut-and-paste was also used in the photo-editing process.” It promises to instruct the photographer not to do it again and “to adhere to standard photo journalistic best practices.”

Well, yes and no. I’m willing to bet that a contract photographer did not make these kinds of decisions alone. And to suggest that a photographer contracted by BP to make photos for BP is somehow being asked to perform as a photo journalist is disingenuous.

I’m guessing, for example, that if the contract photographer had snapped some images of dying pelicans or oil-heavy beaches they wouldn’t be posted to the BP website “to adhere to standard photo journalistic best practices.” (In fact it’s quite fun to browse their photo gallery and look at how carefully the photos have been collected and presented. Compare them with others on Flickr, the titles of which sound unfortunately like items on a menu: “Hermit Crabs In BP Oil,” for example.)

Of course, no one expects BP to publish anything that may undermine its position. The problem lies with the fact that someone, somewhere in BP thought it worth tampering with what it did publish to improve its position.

Some have argued, so what? They fiddled with a couple of photos to make themselves seem a bit more industrious than they really were. So what?

Well, I would have thought it obvious, but the fact that people have argued this suggests it requires an answer. First off, it was bloggers who exposed the fraud. Hats off to them. A sign that crowd-sourcing this kind of thing works.

Secondly, while in itself more pathetic than malign, the manipulation proves that manipulation happens. We (well, not we journalists, but we bloggers) checked, and found the photos were faked. What else has BP faked?

Suggesting it’s the work of some rogue contract photographer doesn’t cut it. If BP’s PR crew knew what they were doing, and held themselves to “stand photo journalistic best practices, ” they would have spotted the amateurish Photoshopping and taken action.

Instead they didn’t spot it, or spotted it and didn’t care, or they actually commissioned it. Or did it themselves. Whatever, they didn’t come clean, so to speak, until they’d been had, and then wheeled out the “transparency defense”—a tad too late, I fear, to convince anyone that that’s where their instincts lay.

Photos, you see, are pretty strong stuff.

Since their invention we have granted them special powers. Photographs preserve information and speak to us in a way that words do not—and, perhaps, video. Think of all those photos that have captured not only a moment but a slice of history: 9/11, the Vietnam War, the Spanish Civil War.

The problem is that we’re gradually waking up to the fact that photographs lie. It’s an odd process, this learning about the power of misrepresentation. It’s part technology, part distance, part a growing understanding that we have ascribed photos a power and finality they don’t deserve.

Let me put it more simply through an example: Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photo of the Falling Soldier. This one photo seemed to sum up not only the Spanish Civil War, but war itself. Only, it’s now widely believed the photo was staged, that Capa may have asked the soldier to fake his death. Does it matter?

Capa’s biographer Richard Whelan argues it doesn’t, that “the picture's greatness actually lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy.”

This, is, of course, incorrect. Its symbolic implications lie in its accuracy.

And, of course, this is the problem. We need our photos to say something, to express a view that supplements, that goes beyond, the text that might accompany them, the truth that we need to have illustrated for us. And that’s where the problem begins.

Capa may not have intended his photo to be quite so iconic. After all, he took a bunch of photos that day, most of them unremarkable. An editor decided this was one of those he would publish.

Photographers are now aware they get one shot. So they’re pushed to capture more and more in the frame—more, perhaps, than was ever there. And, it turns out, have been doing so for as long as there have been cameras. One of the first war photographs, of the Crimean War’s Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton in 1855, was staged—by physically moving cannonballs to the middle of the road.

Nowadays the cannonballs could have been moved more easily: by Photoshop. A mouse click can add smoke to burning buildings in the Lebanon, to thicken a crowd, darken OJ Simpson’s face, or, in the case of Xinhua photographer Liu Weiqing, add antelope to a photo of a high-speed train.

Just as digitizing makes all this easier, so it makes it easier to spot errors. The problem is that we don’t have time to do this, meaning that it falls to bloggers and others online to do the work for us.

But it’s not as easy as it may look with hindsight, and the fact that we create a distinction between images we expect to be faked—fashion, celebrity, sex—and those we don’t—news, suggests that we either have to get a lot better at spotting fakery or we need to insist that photos contain some watermark to prove they are what they’re purporting to be.

The bottom line is that it’s probably a good thing that the first question we ask of a photo is whether it’s fake. Turns out that we should have been asking that question a long time ago.

But there’s another possibility: that there may come a point where we just don’t trust photos anymore. It’s probably up to us journalists to find a way to stop that from happening.

Media's Future: Retail

(This is a copy of my weekly newspaper column, distributed by Loose Wire Service)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

As you no doubt know, Rupert Murdoch has decided to put up a front door on the The Times’ website, demanding a modest toll for reading the online content.

Needless to say this has prompted laughter among those who think that content should be free. This is silly: Someone needs to pay for this stuff at some point. And no one else has any better ideas right now, so good luck to them, I say.

Though I would counsel them to be smarter about the way they make folk pay. Demanding a credit card in the age of PayPal, as well as lots of other personal data is old wave. If you want to make light of the pay wall, make scaling it easy and simple.

(Disclosure: I worked, and occasionally work, for another Murdoch company, The Wall Street Journal.)

But what disappoints me elsewhere is the limited range of options being discussed. For most the question is: how do I charge for what we do? This is not the right question—or at least not the only question.

Think about it. We’re in the midst of some of the most exciting viral experiments in the history of the world. Twitter, Facebook, Ning, flickr are all evidence of the extraordinary effects  of high viral coefficients—in other words, the ability to expand users exponentially.

Now we know all about this, especially those loyal readers of this humble column.

But news organizations seem to ignore it.

They have readers. Lots of them. But the only thing that they can think of using that network for is to give them ads, or make ‘em pay.

A better question, then, is to ask: How can we make use of this network?

Well, one way to would be to sell them stuff.

Some news websites do this. The UK’s Guardian website offers books, CDs, gardening tools and holidays to its readers. Not that you’d necessarily know this to look at the website. The “readers offers” link is buried way down on the right hand side of the home page.

In fact, I was surprised to find that the Guardian has a dozen self-contained mini websites, called verticals, that try to sell their readers stuff. From mortgages to hand trowels.

But I’m guessing this isn’t making a huge dent in the losses the company has been suffering. I couldn’t find anything in their annual report mentioning any of these websites or their contribution to the bottom line. (My apologies if I missed it.)

To me this is an opportunity lost.

Not least because the Guardian, as many English-language newspapers, are developing huge markets overseas. Of the main British newspapers, for example, more than half their traffic comes from overseas, according to Alexa data. For the Guardian, Telegraph, Times and Independent, a whopping two thirds of their readers are outside the UK.

The Guardian website has a quarter its readers from the U.S. For the Times it’s more than 30%. Even the Daily Mail, not known for its global view, has more than a third of its readers in the U.S.

These foreign-based readers are huge opportunities missed. Not for advertising, but for selling them stuff. After all, if people go there to read stuff, wouldn’t they also be interested in buying stuff?

There are signs that this is the case. The Guardian Bookshop, for example, delivers all over the world, and has more traffic from outside the UK (55%) than from within it, with the United States accounting for 17% of visitors.

But the actual volume of traffic is still tiny for these verticals, suggesting that they’re not really part of the Guardian vision of its future. Still, at least it’s trying. I couldn’t much except wine for sale on the Times’ homepage, and nothing on the Daily Mail’s.

To me it’s obvious that if you’ve got an audience you try to sell them stuff. Especially if you’re not charging them for what they are there to see. And ads aren’t filling the coffers. So somehow you’ve got to sell them something else. And if your audience is overseas then that’s a clue about what they might not be able to get where they’re accessing your site from.

Books is an obvious one. Food is another. More than 10% of Brits live overseas, so it’s fair to assume that a fair few of them miss their PG Tips and bangers. Indeed, there are dozens of websites catering to just that.

But of course it’s expensive. At one website I visited $20 worth of chutney will cost you $60 to ship to Singapore, for example. And many won’t ship to far-flung places that aren’t the U.S.

Which is where we come back to the network thing. Newspapers still don’t really understand that they have a readymade community in front of them—defined by what they want to read. So while I may not be willing to pay twice again to ship the chutney, I might be willing to split the shipping cost with others living nearby.

But whereas I may not be willing to take that risk with people I’ve met on eBay or a porn site, I might be more inclined to do so if they’re the kind of people who read the same paper as I. So it’s both common sense and good business sense for The Guardian, say, to leverage its existing network of readers and to use the data it has to make it easy for that community to make those kinds of connections.

The readers get their chutney at a reasonable cost, the paper gets a cut of the sale.

In short, a newspaper needs to think of itself as a shop. You may go in for one thing, but you may come out having bought something else. Indeed, online shops have already figured this out.

Take Net-a-porter for example. It’s a fashion clothing e-tailer, run by a woman who was a journalist and who wanted to be a magazine editor. Instead Natalie Massenet set up an online shop, but which is also a magazine.

A recent article (in The Guardian, ironically) quotes her as saying: "I hadn't walked away from being editor-in-chief of a magazine – I'd just created a magazine for the 21st century instead, a hybrid between a store and a magazine that was delivered digitally."

In other words, Net-a-porter goes at it the other way round: It’s a retailer that also informs. Newspapers could be informers who also retail. Of course fashion is relatively easy, and the road is littered with possible conflicts of interest. But probably fewer than the sponsored editorials we’re starting to see even among serious broadsheets.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to sell your readers something, if you feel that something reflects your brand and your commitment to quality. Indeed, your readers may thank you for it. The power of the network, after all, isn’t just about size: It’s about trust.

Turning Off the Comment Demon

By Jeremy  Wagstaff

(this is my weekly syndicated newspaper column, distributed via the Loose Wire Service.)

Someone defaced my Wikipedia page the other day. Yes, it’s absurd that I have a Wikipedia page—ask my, er, fans, about that—but even more absurd that someone should bother enough to deface it.

(Just in case you’re interested, they hinted darkly that my college band wasn’t quite as successful as the page suggests, among other allegations.)

Now I’m not here to talk about Wikipedia, or myself, but about how we relate to each other online. But let’s get the Wikipedia thing out of the way first.

The thing about Wikipedia is that you can edit something in two ways: You can set up an account, in which case other people can see what you’ve changed, or you can do it without creating an account, in which case your Internet address—the computer you’re accessing the web from—is logged.

My detractor did the latter. So all we know so far is that he or she is in London. That narrows it down quite a bit, and my henchmen in that fair city are now combing every corner of it to unearth the miscreant.

Now I mention this because of something else newsworthy: The Sun Chronicle of Massachusetts has just allowed users of its website to comment again on its news stories. Comments were banned in April after they “drove discussions into the gutter—while hiding beneath the veil of anonymity.”

Now comments are back, but you’ve got to hand over a credit card number, your name and community. The paper reckons they’re the first to start doing this.

I wish them luck. In the few days since the new rules have been in place I couldn’t find any comments, but I didn’t look especially hard.

They’re fighting an uphill battle, because their argument is based on a misunderstanding.

They ask: “We would never allow these kind of attacks and crude language in the newspaper; why is it OK online?” Actually, the question goes to the heart of what we’ve been doing online, and why we’ve probably got to do it differently.

Because online people speak their mind. If they’re sure they’re anonymous.

This is basically why you can’t scroll through the comments on a YouTube video without feeling slightly ill. Why even supposedly erudite websites like The Guardian attract a swarm of anonymous venom directed at the writer and other commenters. This is true pretty much everywhere I’ve looked. Which is why The Sun Chronicle threw its hands up in despair.

Anonymity is great for certain things. In repressive regimes. To avoid data mining marketing types wanting to find out your thoughts. To share painful and personal details in online discussions.

But it’s also broken down our sense of shame. Things we’d never say or do we do and say online because we’re pretty sure we’re not going to be found out. With every caustic remark or snarky put-down we feel a bit smarter, and we make everyone else feel a bit less comfortable.

It’s not all like this. The early Internet was a model of cooperation, often to complete strangers who were anonymous. Now I see people on some sites still going to extraordinary lengths to help answer other people’s questions, solve their problems, with no possibility of personal gain.

In one recent case news that the bassist of a great 1980s band, Japan, circulated on a mailing list, along with word that he had fallen on hard times and didn’t have medical insurance.

Quickly there was a whip-round on the mailing list. People bought memorabilia, sent money by PayPal, prompting a heartfelt thank you from the patient. It was wonderful to witness.

Indeed, my sense is that the smaller the group, the more caring and thoughtful people are. They’re sometimes catty, and don’t always agree, but on the mailing lists I’ve followed they seem genuinely keen to help and share. Many smaller software developers rely on this feedback mechanism to improve their applications.

So back to the Sun Chronicle. They are comparing apples with oranges: readers’ letters they would print, and online comments. Of course, they’re not the same thing. One is a community, the other just pretends to be. In the old days writing a letter to the newspaper involved thought, effort and a stamp. Now you can comment on something just by clicking a button.

One was designed to share a perspective with all readers—and the editor—much as one might stand up at a town-hall meeting. An online comment is more akin to a heckle at a sports game, where your cussing is spontaneous—and hopefully drowned out by your fellow fans. Hopefully; it would be awkward if the player, or ref, or whoever you aimed your abuse at, heard you and, David Beckham-like, came over for a chat.

Anonymous comments are anonymous because the author doesn’t want to be held to those remarks. If I found the person who defaced the Wikipedia page, I’m sure they’d be a tad embarrassed. But unfortunately the solution is not to end anonymity, because that supposes those same people will now offer their comments in a more tempered, community-minded way.

Of course, they won’t. They probably won’t comment. They’ll go off somewhere else.

Which might not be a bad thing. But if we all insist on credit cards, names and addresses, a lot of the oxygen that social media relies on will disappear. Websites like Sun Chronicle may attract some comments from people, but nothing like before. Likewise with the traffic to the site, which is likely to have been fed by the vibrant, if somewhat unpleasant, comment threads it spawned.

And there’s the rub. Because we haven’t figured out yet how to make money from these news sites, that traffic may end up being more important to our survival than the sense of decorum we’ll recover if we turn the comment spigot off.

Now I know you’re all going off to deface my Wikipedia page. I’ll be watching.

Using LinkedIn to Research Spies Like Us

Several of the 11 alleged Russian spies leave interesting imprints on LinkedIn, suggesting rewarding pickings for journalists.

Donald Heathfield, for example, had 74 connections.

His specialities sound like they could equally applied to espionage:

Comprehensive management of Risks and Uncertainties, Anticipatory Leadership, Building of Future Scenarios, Development and Execution of Future Strategies, Capture of Strategic Opportunities, Global Account Management

Amusing to hear the recommendations:

“Refreshing to work with him as he puts complexe initiatives together that always fits with the end goal that was laid out as our objective.” November 3, 2008

Gerard Bridi, President, Accor Services WiredCommute
was with another company when working with Don at Future Map

“Working with Don is very enjoyable. He has a pleasant style, whilst always acting professionally. Very results and solutions focused. He does not get flustered when problems occur, patiently facilitating teams to craft a way through to their end goal.” November 2, 2008

Top qualities: Great Results, Personable, Expert

Tracey Foley (Ann Foley), Heathfield’s wife, doesn’t have so many connections (20) but she’s a member of many groups—including four French related one and a Singapore group one. We know that Heathfield had connections in Singapore and Jakarta. Something to explore there?

Michael Zottoli appears to have a LinkedIn account, but only 10 connections and hasn’t updated it since his move from Seattle to Virginia. Patricia Mills, his wife, doesn’t seem to have a LinkedIn account.

Mikhail Semenko had 124 connections, a twitter account (10 followers, 3 tweets) and a blog about China (one post talks about the need for greater Russia China cooperation).

Richard/Cynthia Murphy NJ. Cynthia has 98 connections on LinkedIn and is a member of three groups. Christopher Metsos has no LinkedIn page that I could find.

Anna Chapman’s public profile seems to have been removed. But her main profile is still active, (you can also find it here.) and indeed, her company, PropertyFinder Ltd, has a similar name to Ann Foley’s public LinkedIn profile page: homefinder. A link there, maybe?

Her twitter feed stops abruptly on June 26 at 4.46 am (and yet wasn’t arrested until June 28. I guess she took the weekend off.) She was following a lot more people than were following her (687 vs 277, but she was really only just getting going: After tweeting first on March 13, she didn’t do much until June 16, after which she was tweeting every few hours. Could something have prompted her into more frequent updates?)

She also has a number of recommendations, from Said Abdullaev, a VP of Moscow-based Fortis Investments, who offered this:

“Anna’s entrepreneurial flair does not cease to amaze me, she sees opportunities in places were most would not think to look, and she makes them work.” November 24, 2009

The Future Of News: Wet Paper and Scissors

(This is a copy of my weekly column for newspapers and print media.)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

Waiting to board a train in London, knowing my smartphone battery was flat, and that the UK trains are too cramped to open a laptop on, I bought myself a magazine or two.

It was like a trip down memory lane. I’ve caught that train to the ‘burbs many a time in my life, but not for a decade or two, and I’d not bought a magazine to read on a train for probably the same length of time.

It was great. Of course, the choice of magazine mattered: in this case Wired and Private Eye.

Flicking through each for a first inspection, mentally noting the places I wanted to go back to, removing all the detritus that would otherwise drop and litter the platform, enjoying the contrasting feel of Wired’s gloss and the Eye’s rough-hewn paper.

Wired is now on the iPad and, I heard, pretty impressive. The Eye, meanwhile, looks identical to its earliest iterations in the 1960s. Same layout, same paper, same logo, same jokes.

The point is this: physical magazines—paper—are not going to die out. Any more than radio is going to die out (I learned from Wired that 80% of music is still listened to on the radio.) Any more than torrents will kill TV. Or laptops will kill desktops. Or netbooks will kill iPads. We think too binary, too winner-takes-all.

But some things have changed, and I am surprised that print media hasn’t caught up.

Whereas in the past I might, had I felt the urge, snipped out a story I found worth keeping in the magazine I was reading, I’d be a fool to do that now. My days of cuttings are over: Since all my libraries are digital, why on earth would I want to start building one of bits?

Of course, there are tools for this: Evernote, for example, lets me take a photo of something and will store it in a database having scanned it for words, so I can use those words to search for it in the future.

But it’s not a good solution. Nowadays we save, clip, annotate and share on the fly, and we expect to be able to do so. ( Although, as I outlined in a column a week or so ago, this isn’t as easy as it could be.)

The world of Facebook and twitter is a world of annotating and sharing, and we’re used to see articles online whore themselves out with little icons at the bottom encouraging us to do just that.

But what I’d like to see is traditional media, having already embarked on a bipolar world of digital and atoms with their online versions and their print editions, do a better job of matching the two.

For example: I have really enjoyed reading Wired in print. I’ve read stuff I would never have read online: partly because I’ve bought the magazine for $7 (shocking myself and the shop assistant who I felt was about to say “You know you can read most of the stuff in here online for free, right?”) and I want to get my money’s worth.

But it’s also partly because it’s so dang portable. And my that I mean not that I can read it on planes and on the sofa, a la ebooks and iPads, but also at all stations in the bathroom bar the shower, if you know what I mean.

And at breakfast, spilling coffee and muesli over it.

But the problem is the annotation.

Nowadays we expect to be able to share and store stuff. I found myself wanting to share some of the stuff I’d read and realizing I couldn’t. Well, I could have grabbed a passing waitress and told her about the interesting snippet I’d come across, but that would have been weird.

I wanted to be able to save some of the stuff online for later.

But I couldn’t. At least I couldn’t easily and seamlessly.

I could search online for the same article, but Wired are smart/dumb: they don’t put all the stuff in their magazines online.

This is where I think publishers need to be smarter. I would like to see them use QR tags—barcodes—to help those people dumb/smart enough to buy their premium print copies save what they have in post-print formats.

Each article, for example, would include a barcode which you could snap with your camera phone. That would automatically save a copy of the article to your online account, or email it to you, or however you want to save it. It wouldn’t be fiddly: it would be easy as highlighting it.

The article could be stored in a subscriber/print purchaser’s corner of the website. It would require users—even casual purchasers like me—to sign up, and then the publisher would get all sorts of interesting data about what stories are being stored (and, if you want to be clever, where, since the cellphone is a moveable beast.)

For me, I’d rest easier knowing that my reading is not ephemeral. For the publisher, they will collect data about their offline readers, and, at least in my case, start to rebuild a relationship with a reader they lost about a decade ago.

(Some publishers are doing something a little like this, but their efforts lack imagination. The Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh sports a barcode at the bottom of its print edition first page, and users can use that to jump on their mobile phone to the online edition.)

The equation has changed. Just as journalists must now think beyond the next headline in the way that they produce news, media publishers need to think beyond getting eyeballs to their new content. In the end, publishers should try to make it as easy as possible for consumers to not only access their content, but to store it, because that’s the way to build loyalty.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to find some scissors to cut out these articles I found interesting. Once the magazine’s dried off from being dropped in the bath.

Bangalore Social Media Journalism Training

There are still some spots available for a two-day training session I’m conducting in Bangalore, India for WAN-IFRA onJune 17-18 2010 on Integrating Social Media to Journalism:

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Orkut have all changed the way that people learn, confirm and share information. How can journalists and editors make use of this new social media for their stories? How can social media be used to increase the productivity of our journalists and editors? How can social media be used to promote content and to build loyalty and trust with readers? What are the tools that they have to use?

The training programme has three modules:

1.) Digital tools for reporters
2.) Integrating Social Media into the workflow and
3.) Writing for online

The training contents include Web 2.0 and its impact on media, cellphone basics: how to get more out of cellphones, reporting tools: a look at ways of reporting better using Web 2.0 services, gadgets and software, plus modules on Wikipedia, mashups, twitter, GPS and others.

The participants will learn how to use the hardware and software to be a better journalist and how to integrate social media into their reporting, editing and newsroom. A considerable amount of time will also be used to help print journalists looking to upgrade their skills to be able to think, report, write and create for online.

Target Group
Management executives, publishers, editors, reporters, journalist and producers who want to get familiar with the new tools for convergent journalism.

If you’re interested contact V Antony by email or by phone on +9194442110640 or fax: +9144424359744.

Video: Curated Media

Me talking (briefly) about the idea of Curated Media at the Media Development Loan Fund shindig

The Publisher Audience

By Robin Lubbock

For years I've been meaning to write this post, but it seemed so obvious that I kept neglecting to write this thought down.

I am the publisher. You are the publisher. Anyone with a screen is the publisher. That changes everything. It moves institutions that are publishers on paper or on the air one step further away from the audience. It means newspapers and broadcasters have to find ways to market their wares to the new publishers.

Let me say that again with a little more detail.

In the old days newspapers and broadcasters made selections from a wide range of competing news producers (AP, Reuters, staff, freelancers, etc.) and decided which of those sources would be published on any given day. The newspaper editor decided what would go into the paper, where each story would appear on each page, and therefore what the audience would read.

The person who buys paper as a vehicle for news has the decisions about what appears on that paper made for him by the editor.

But when people started buying screens instead of newspapers that changed. The decisions about what appears on the screen were, and are, no longer made by the newspaper publisher or the broadcaster.

The person who buys a screen, not matter what size, as a vehicle for news, also decides what news will appear on the screen. The screen owner has become the publisher. The people who used to be called the audience have become the publishers.

Each day each member of the new publisher/audience produces a single, individual, unique publication for one person: themselves. That publication includes some e-mail, some news, some productivity applications, some video, some blogs, some comments, perhaps an e-book, some more e-mail and so on.

The power that newspapers and broadcasters used to have to decide what the audience would read, hear and see, is gone. That means the old idea that newspapers and broadcasters are the gatekeepers is also gone.

The institution that used to be the publisher or broadcaster has become just another news producer which has to try to get the new publisher/audience's attention, in competition with the same organizations that used to compete for its attention.

The old publishers have moved back a level. The new publisher is the audience.

The implications of the audience being the publisher are huge and a little obvious, but deserve a separate post. Coming soon...

And of course the newspapers, broadcasters and booksellers are trying to get their hegemony back by producing tethered devices and apps. But that too is another story.

In the browser-based world we mostly inhabit the publisher audience is still enjoying the fruits of the screen revolution.

The New Normal: Constant Flux

(This is a copy of my Loose Wire Sevice column, produced for newspapers and other print publications. Hence the lack of links.)

I was reading a blog by a World Banker the other day—now there’s a phrase I wouldn’t have thought I’d use a few years ago—about our old favorite in this column: Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s good that the World Bank is blogging, and talking about Twitter. And one shouldn’t judge the thinking of the Bank from the words of this World Bank employee—who is not part of the banking part of the Bank.

But it does reflect, I suspect, a lingering and dangerous misconception about what Twitter—indeed, social media—is among institutional thinkers.

The writer, Filipino Antonio Lambino, writes:

The point is this: norms will continue to shift around a bit (or a lot) but will eventually take hold.  The same medium or application is likely to be used differently by different people in different contexts – and rules of engagement will emerge for these various uses.  Until things settle down, however, some of us are bound to remain a little conflicted and uncomfortable.  And through this transition period, by using what we like and rejecting what we don’t, we become direct participants in the norm-setting process.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The truth is that there is no norm. Or the norm is that there is no norm. We’re now in a state of constant flux. Antonio can become a direct participant in the norm-setting process, but he will be disappointed if he’s looking for some norm-setting moment. The reality is there is none.

The fact that he’s using a blog—and tweeting his post on his twitter feed—should give him a clue. Blogs were the first assault on the citadel of there being any ‘norm’. They were initially a reaction against the idea that you needed to know HTML, the formatting and design language of the web, in order to create stuff on the web.

The argument went: Why should we have to know that kind of thing to be able to share our thoughts online? We don’t have to know how to make a notebook to write things down. We don’t have to know how to make a camera to take photos. Why should we have to know the inner workings of the web in order to use it to create stuff?

So blogs were born. But they quickly evolved. There was no norm. Blog is short for web-log since it was assumed that blogs would be online journals. But they’re not. When was the last time you read a blog about what someone was up to? Blogs are a medium for ideas and reporting.

Then along came things like Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster et al.

All have had to adapt to their users. YouTube was ‘broadcast yourself’ but now is more about rebroadcasting what other people, or TV stations, have already broadcast.

Facebook was supposed to be for college kids to connect to each other. Wikipedia was originally supposed to be content produced by academic specialists. It only took off when they let anyone contribute. Now it’s evolving again, as users wrestle with each other over what constitutes a Wikipedia-worthy entry.

And this process of evolution is also evolving. Twitter started out as a SMS message sharing system. Users took it in different directions and the founders were smart enough to follow. As you know, most of the features that make Twitter what it is—hashtags, mentions, retweeting—were all devised by users themselves.

Twitter is just one: look at FriendFeed, Google Buzz etc as examples of flux, where users figure out how they want to use it and the creators of the service hold their breath. 

The point, as Antonio would say, is this: Norms were norms because they were set by a limited group of people. Those with power—either financial or political. Newspapers have all sorts of norms, from the headline size to the fact that sports are usually at the back. Norms get established because the creators are limited in number and control the means of creation.

That’s no longer the case. Now the people who create things on the web have to genuflect before their customers, because the customers determine the success of a product. The customer is the user is the creator. The customer sets the norm. The creator of a medium in this new world is not the creator of the content that makes it a success. The two have been separated.

Hence, a norm today may not be there tomorrow. It used to be the ‘norm’ that if someone followed you on Twitter, you politely followed back. That’s no longer the case (spammers put paid to that, but it also became unwieldy.) It used to be the norm that you posted links to your own content on twitter; now you do it sparingly unless you’re a Twitter god.

So, Antonio and others who are waiting for things to settle. They won’t. Already Twitter is becoming something else, and probably has a life span of five more years max. Other services will come and take its place. It’s a fast moving universe.

I’m glad the World Bank is making space for Antonio and like-minded souls to ponder the significance of these new networks. My advice: jump in and experiment, and enjoy the ride. Just don’t expect it to come to a final destination. Especially one called Norm.

We’re All Kevin Smiths Now

(This is a copy of my Loose Wire Sevice column, produced for newspapers and other print publications. Hence the lack of links.)

A few weeks ago a gentleman of, by his own account, more than average girth was thrown off a Southwest Air flight between Oakland and Burbank.

Unfortunately for the airline this was no ordinary gentleman but Kevin Smith, director of such classics as Clerks and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and, perhaps more importantly, a man conversant with social media.

As he was unceremoniously removed from the flight because he was a “customer of size” and therefore a safety risk, he turned to twitter to vent his spleen.

The resulting fracas was what we in the nerdy world call a twitter storm. That is, one person is able to leverage the power of social networks to make a much bigger noise than would otherwise be the case.

Some commentators have suggested this is a new kind of customer: “a new kind of uglry customer who isn't always right but insists on his right to share his feelings with us and his right to be heard”, as one Singaporean travel industry insider put it.

Of course, this isn’t the case. There have always been Kevin Smiths, it’s just they have not been able to convey their disquiet so effectively. Now they have, at their fingertips, the ability to express and disseminate their feelings.

I’m a Kevin Smith. We’re all Kevin Smiths. We’re all capable of knowing when we’ve been discriminated against—not, in this case, because of his girth but because he was not told before he got on the plane, or when he bought his ticket, that he wouldn’t be able to fly.

We’re all Kevin Smiths, and we’ve all got the tools of Kevin Smith. Perhaps not the colorful turns of phrase, but the means.

Now I’m not blaming Southwest here, at least at the corporate level. Actually they did all the standard things to try to put out this blaze. They tried to reach him by email, by phone, and then publicly by twitter, to apologize.

They blogged about it, about their policy and the lessons learned.

But their failure was to understand that information travels much faster now. So in the crucial hours—no, minutes—after Kevin Smith was dumped off the flight there was a chance to turn all this around.

It didn’t happen. Either those overseeing the Twitter feed didn’t see it coming, or they were at dinner, or they had to escalate the matter. Whatever happened, there was a chance to stop the storm before it had left the building.

In this new world, minutes count.

People in the leisure industry would do well to draw different conclusions than perhaps they are.

The temptation is to label Kevin Smith a noisesome celebrity and thereby both give him star treatment and to treat him as an unusual case.

He’s not. He’s a star, true, and he’s got a strong following, both online and offline. But his diatribe is just as likely to be echoed by others—indeed, the anger his supporters felt is as much to do with a sense of injustice as of having their hero treated shoddily.

In the old days we could write a letter to the CEO, or complain to the cabin crew, or write a letter to the local paper. Most of us wouldn’t bother.

But now we can. We can tweet about it, Facebook it, blog about it. It may not always snowball but it’s there, out there for millions of other people to find, indefinitely.

In other words: Not only do we have the means to vent our spleen, but we have access to everyone else’s vented spleen. No longer are we the lone eccentric to be tolerated or ignored, bought off with a $100 voucher or a free pass to the poolside barbeque.

We are validated.

So no, Kevin Smith is not the new kind of ugly customer. He’s everyman: He’s a customer who not only knows what he wants but knows that he’s not alone in wanting it. And that he can find a way of getting satisfaction in the most public way possible if he feels his rights are violated.

Not exactly good news for those companies that would rather we kept quiet or were bought off. But good news for those of us who have bitten our tongue and kept mum one too many times.