The intimacy of disaster: why journalism is personal, and the main challenge of 21st century media

I’m starting to see patterns in people’s memories of the 9/11 attacks.

I’ve been reading a lot of people’s stories lately, as we’re collecting them over at Citizenside. When you’ve read enough of these recollections, you start seeing patterns. One motif keeps coming back time after time: the phone call from a loved one.

At home, at work, on that day many of us were interrupted by a phone call from a friend, a parent, a child.

“Turn on the TV, something’s happened,” they said.

That phone call played out a billion times around the world that day. It was, in a sense, a proto-tweet. After all, what’s more common on Twitter than “I have seen something that you should check out”?

At its essence, that phone call is a basic act of journalism, motivated by a personal relationship. It’s about sharing information with your nearest and dearest in an emergency.

If something on the scale of 9/11 were to happen today, the results from a media perspective would be quite different. Eye-witnesses would flood the internet with video, photos, and other content. Facebook, Twitter, and other services would be blazing with links shared and re-shared. The scale of this content sharing would be colossal, petabytes per second.

But if you zero in on an individual’s action – whether it’s filming and posting a video, commenting, or linking to it – it comes down to something very personal.

We’ve all seen the multimillion-view scoring videos on YouTube: the music videos, the random viral hits, the subversive advertising ads. But that’s just the thinnest slice of what’s posted there, and it’s not representative of the majority of what’s out there.

My team here at Citizenside contacts people every day regarding fascinating videos they’ve taken of news events. Often they only have a few dozen views. They weren’t uploaded by someone who wanted to get a million hits and an ad deal. They’re usually uploaded by someone who was in the right place at the right time and wanted to show their friends and family something they saw.

The subtext of posting a video on YouTube is often “This is what I have seen. You need to know it, because you are someone I care about.” It’s a personal act to film something, upload the video, and tell your friends. We are members of networks because of personal connections. The really important business of news happens between these personal connections, on a personal scale: we witness an event and tell others about it.

That’s the main difference between 2001 and 2011. Now sharing news can mean sharing videos, pictures and other stuff, rather than just a simple phone call. When stuff happens, we still tell our loved ones about it. Only now we do it in ways that generates ‘content’ as a by-product.

A billion photos texted around the world generate content in a way a billion phone calls don’t.

The kicker here is that all this content we’re all generating has value to people beyond its immediate (and personal) audience. It has information value to a wider network of people beyond our loved ones. In some cases, it even has economic value.

This has created the major media challenge of the second decade of the 21st century: finding a way to extract maximum benefit from that flood of content generated by millions of essentially personal information transactions among small groups of people.

Note that I say ‘benefit’ here and not ‘profit’. Overall, everyone benefits when information is more easily available. Yes, some people may make a lot of money off of this, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s a different story. And exactly how to do it is still an open question.

Don’t be fooled by the broadcast towers, the printing presses, the millionfold growth figures of Twitter and Facebook. Even in the case of huge, world-stopping news like 9/11. At its essence, news reporting happens one-to-one, because individual people want to share something important with their friends.

Journalism, Social Media

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9 September 2011

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Can citizen journalism ever be objective? . . . Should it?

Cross-posted from the Citizenside blog.

Here’s a story: today we received a series of great photos from our contributor pete_riches. He was in central London this weekend and saw one of the visually most impressive demonstrations I’ve seen in quite a while: thousands of UK Sikhs marching to Trafalgar Square in memory of the violence at Amritsar in 2004.

Sikh high priests lead the march through Piccadilly

Sikh high priests lead the march through Piccadilly

And thereby hangs a tale. The marchers told pete_riches they had gathered in memory of the Amritsar massacre. This was the event on June 6th, 1984, when Indian troops stormed the holiest Sikh shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, on a Sikh holy day, brutally massacring over 7000 praying Sikhs.

Others know the Amritsar Massacre by another name – Operation Bluestar, or the Amritsar raid. In the accounts of this event, Indian troops stormed the temple on June 6th, 1984 to dislodge heavily armed Sikh extremists, after a tense standoff lasting several months. The official report of the death toll was close to 300, though some reports eventually put the total at closer to 1000.

Of course, these are two descriptions of one and the same event. C.P. Scott, former editor of the Guardian, famously said that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” Many facts can be independently verified and backed up by evidence. But in this, as in many situations, it seems that which set of facts a person chooses to accept depends greatly on their point of view.

There’s no dispute that there was violence at the Golden Temple in Amritsar that day. And it’s sure that this was an important and terrible day in Sikh-Indian relations, which set off a chain of events and reprisals that have caused friction between Sikhs and Hindus in India for decades.

At Citizenside, we’re here to promote citizen journalism, not to take political positions.

In the editorial team, we try to investigate and verify the facts as much as we can. We try to be as open and transparent about our process as possible. And we’re totally committed to the authenticity of the images and videos you see posted here. But unlike many news organisations, we can’t (and don’t) impose some version of objectivity on our members. That’s one reason we deal primarily in images and video; they’re often less amenable to being slanted towards a particular point of view than text. pete_riche’s photo report shows you the scale of this event better than any written report could, and the images speak for themselves; a river of orange turbans flooding Picadilly, stern priests with sabres drawn leading them to Trafalgar Square.

In text, the image description takes the Sikh point of view, presumably as told to pete_riches by the marchers on the day. Rather than change this text to fit with the ‘official’ account of events, we kept it essentially as it was. We believe that eyewitness views are a vital raw ingredient of news reporting. When processed with other ingredients – analysis, expert opinion, and so on – you get the final ‘cooked’ product of mainstream news reporting.

Citizenside news is, in a way, news reporting in its raw form, straight from the eyewitnesses themselves. There’s an essential value to that, which we don’t want to tamper with.

In many ways this raw product should be treated the same as any news reporting: with caution. We show you what’s happening, you make up your mind. It’s not our place to do it for you. What we can do is bring thousands of eyewitness reports closer to you, and make them easier to find.

We’re also building community reporting tools that will make it possible for you to help improve or add to an initial news report, if you were there too.

With many eyewitness reports taken together, we can start building a more complete picture of what happened at any given event. Working together, we can create a shared account that reflects much more than what a single reporter could ever see.

I think that’s really something worth working towards.

Journalism

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8 June 2011

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From hunter-gatherer to farmer: evolution of the foreign correspondent

[I'm at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. This post is cross-posted from the Citizenside blog]

The task of foreign reporting is changing profoundly. Thanks to social media channels, readers from Ohio to Osaka can get information straight from the source in other countries. So do we still need foreign correspondents?

This dinosaur just evolved.

Richard Sambrook, formerly head of Global News at the BBC, knows his foreign reporters. He was on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, along with Mimosa Martini and Mort Rosenblum. He described a vivid image of foreign correspondents as they were in the past:

You could call the old model the hunter-gatherer correspondent. Twenty years ago the average foreign correspondent was white, male, middle-class, didn’t speak the local language, relied on perhaps a dozen sources in the country he was posted, and only had to make one or maybe two deadlines a day. This model doesn’t exist any more.

When a reader in New York can simply follow the twitter feed of a protestor in Tahrir  square, it’s clear that that style of working and living is no longer possible. Those old correspondents often benefited from the limited information available to readers and viewers back home. “One of the dirty secrets of foreign reporting,” said  Sambrook, “Is that you could in the past say what you wanted and the people back home would just have to trust you. They’d never know. Now they will know.” So is foreign reporting dead? It’s more important than ever to know what’s happening around the world and how it could affect all of us. But do we need foreign reporters for this? After all, foreign reporting has several big drawbacks, as enumerated by panel moderator Charlie Beckett:

  1. It costs a lot of money. Sending highly-paid reporters (especially TV reporters, with their expensive kit and teams of assisitants) abroad is expensive.
  2. Often foreign trips are just ego trips. Many foreign correspondents have become celebrities. They’re part of the story, and often the correspondents want to be seen ducking the bullets. They’re easily accused of being vultures. “Photojournalists are even worse,” said Beckett. “They pretend their work is some sort of art form. Do we really need them?”
  3. Colonialism of the mind. If you have to send someone out, then the news has to be reported from a home perspective. We hear correspondents talking about ‘Our troops’ etc. What about seeing things from the perspective of the locals? Isn’t that interesting?
  4. New technology means you don’t need to send anyone. In early days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, we learned more through social media than anything else. Why not just hire local professionals? Why not train up locals instead of sending your people? Why not partner up with local news agencies? “Don’t get on a plane, get networked,” said Beckett.

Goodbye information scarcity, hello managing abundance

In many cases, technology has made eyewitness reports of events in far-away countries widely available. Our members’ reports from the Ivory Coast to Algeriashow how much is possible. So is there still a role for professionals to play? Sambrook says yes, but it’s vastly changed from the old hunter-gatherer model. Sambrook described the new way of working as the “Farmer correspondent”:

Now a foreign reporter has to be multilingual. People drawn from diverse backgrounds, often with a strong history of connection to the country they’re placed in. They’re working with hundreds of sources, thanks to social media.

I found this description interesting because it describes precisely the sort of work our editorial team at Citizenside does every day. We interact with our community of thousands of contributors worldwide, asking for more information, verifying packages, and making sure that the best information makes its way to our homepage. This sort of work doesn’t even have to be on location – Andy Carvin’s work on the revolutions in the middle eastis an excellent example of this. Really the task of a foreign reporter is becoming more editorial. Instead of seeking out and transmitting scarce bits of information, the task is managing an abundance of eyewitness information shared through social media. It’s collating, curating, and explaining context and implications in a way that readers back home can understand easily. There is still a role for pros sent out into the field, especially in conflict situations. Conflict reporting is dangerous. Mimosa Martini described a situation that occurred to her in Iran:

When I was in Iran, covering the election and subsequent riots, my Iranian cameraman turned his camera off. He was afraid he’d get trouble from the security services. I argued with him, but eventually realised he was right. What’s the worst they could do to me? Send me out of the country. To him? Far, far worse.

But parachuted correspondents like this aren’t specialists in the local situation: they’re crisis reporting specialists. There’s simply no way they can ever know a situation and gain access as well as the people who live there. That’s exactly why the members of the Citizenside community are so important. You know your own backyard like no one else. You are all foreign correspondents, to our readers in other countries. Your intimate access to the news happening right around you is your huge advantage.

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15 April 2011

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Hello Citizenside

It’s official – I’m the new Editor in Chief of Citizenside.

There’s even a press release, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Citizenside is a Paris-based startup that has become one of the world’s largest citizen journalism agencies. The concept is simple: now that many people carry a phone capable of taking photos and filming videos, it’s obvious that ordinary people will be the first ones on the scene in the case of a big news event. This crowd of technically enabled roving reporters represents a huge resource for journalism.

As proven by the epic images from 7/7 and the Hudson river plane crash, news events are increasingly covered by the people who experience them first-hand. That’s where Citizenside comes in. Anyone can become a member and start contributing photos or video.

The site features a community-created stream of news images from around the world. If there’s a really good scoop (like with the John Galliano video now making the rounds, which was filmed by one of our contributors) Citizenside sells the content on to our network of media contacts.

But what you see on the homepage isn’t just random uploads like on YouTube. We can verify and confirm everything that gets posted with a sophisticated back office system. There’s also a points and levelling-up game dynamic built into the community, which we’ll be putting a lot of energy into developing further. More on that later.

Citizens, News, Revolution

It’s an exciting time to be starting with Citizenside. So-called ‘amateur’ content is increasingly important to mainstream media. Watch any news report from what’s happening in Libya or Egypt right now, and you’ll see plenty of mobile phone footage.

As Peter Beaumont wrote in the Guardian, “The barricades today do not bristle with bayonets and rifles, but with phones.”

There has been another critical factor at work that has ensured that social media has maintained a high profile in these revolutions. That is the strong reliance that mainstream media such as the Doha-based television network Al Jazeera has had to place on material smuggled out via Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This arrangement means that videos have often been broadcast back in to the country of origin – when Al Jazeera has managed to avoid having its signal blocked.

No matter how the pictures come out, news has a vital role to play in any political situation, a fact only made more obvious in times like those we’re seeing in North Africa and the Middle East now. And increasingly, people on the street are the ones best placed to generate the best, most informative content. Whatever you think of the role of Facebook and Twitter in changing governments, the flow of information from the people is essential. As Charlie Beckett pointed out:

the outside view matters in these situations. Any support, tacit or otherwise,  for dictators like Gadaffi depends in part on global public opinion. Instead of the so-called CNN effect, we now have the Al Jazeera or YouTube Effect.

Whether the reports, pictures and information come from trained, professional journalists or ordinary witnesses with mobile phones seems less and less relevant. Personally, I’d take the raw video from a person on the streets of Tripoli over the word of a correspondent at the border hundreds of kilometers away any day.

The future of journalism is bright. It belongs to all of us, and I think Citizenside will be a big part of it.

This is going to be fun.

Journalism, Social Media

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1 March 2011

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Journalism Without Story: Uncovering Britain’s Real Class System

Image by Peter Grundy - grundini.com

It has begun.

After over a year in the making, last week we launched the Great British Class Survey for the BBC. The response has been excellent. It’s already the biggest investigation into class ever performed anywhere in the world, by a huge margin.

The survey is the first stage of Britain’s Real Class System, a nationwide BBC investigation into class in the UK. The results will be published in an interactive visualization online and in a BBC Two documentary later this year.

Why Class?

This project is a case example of the sort of non-narrative journalism that the internet makes possible. Social class is a complex system, like climate change or a country’s financial situation. The best way to understand the way a system works is to interact with it. Narrative forms like text stories or TV documentaries can explain one facet of a system’s behavior. But in order to really understand the way a system works, you need to tinker, prod, push and play with it to see how it reacts – a point I developed at some length in Stop Telling Stories.

Some Background

We decided to investigate class because it’s an important issue that doesn’t lend itself easily to a linear narrative exposition.

Class is an all-pervasive concept in Britain. It was really surprising to me, as a Canadian, when I first moved here. I soon learned that almost anything, from the type of shoes you wear to the papers you read to, of course, the way you talk, could be considered an indication of your class. I’ve had some English people tell me that when they meet someone, they almost instantly and subconsciously form a judgment on where that person fits in the system. Upper working class? Lower middle class? Where?

A lot of British people seem confused about it too. And you’d think they would know.

I often wondered why the working, middle, upper class system was so strong in the UK, until someone taught me a bit of history. Almost every other country in Europe has been invaded and occupied or undergone at least one revolution in recent centuries. England did have a civil war in the 17th century, but it was swiftly followed by the restoration of the old order. So Britain is the only country in Europe that hasn’t been successfully invaded or undergone a revolution in the last 1000 years. British society has evolved gradually, organically, since 1066. No wonder there are still vestiges of a feudal/industrial class system.

But is that really how it works?

The class system popular in Britain today evolved during the industrial revolution. Back then, the vast majority of the population worked in factories or on farms that were owned by an aristocratic ruling class but administered by a professional middle class. Workers were relatively voiceless and the aristocrats had politics and wealth all sewn up. It made sense at the time to classify society according to the way power was distributed.

But it’s clear to anyone that British society doesn’t work that way any more. Traditionally, being upper-class means you’re elite, but this requires you to come from a noble family – and that’s no guarantor of wealth or power any more. There are working-class cabinet ministers and the richest person in the country (and fifth-richest in the world) was born to a merchant family in Rajasthan, so he’s outside the class system altogether.

This is a problem. People are making judgments – and even basing policy – on a mental model of society that bears no relation to reality.

Or does it?

There’s only one way to find out.

Discovering the System

The purpose of the Great British Class Survey is to gather data that will allow us to find out how class actually works in the UK. Great British Class Survey is the first step of this interaction. We’ve partnered with Mike Savage and Fiona Devine, two of the foremost experts on class in Britain, to design a survey that will collect the right kind of information. We launched the survey on the One Show last week:

For the survey to bring in good data, we needed the reach to be as wide as possible, so we made use of every channel we had to get the message out. There was quite a bit of news coverage, including pieces in the Guardian, the Mirror, and industry press coverage. Our executive producer also spent a grueling morning on launch day doing back-to-back interviews with no fewer than 27 regional BBC radio stations, from Cornwall to Scotland.

The Experience

It takes about 20 minutes to take the survey, which asks you questions about everything from your income and job to your tastes and hobbies. At the end you get a class report that compares your wealth, social network and cultural range to the rest of the country.

You also get a personalized coat of arms based on your hobbies, which you can post to Facebook. (It’s a fun touch, but this actually got us in trouble with the Court of the Lord Lyon, who wrote a grave letter to inform us that he is the only person with the right to issue coats of arms in Scotland. The College of Arms, meanwhile, seemed unmoved by these heraldic amusements. We’ve updated the web page to discourage people from taking their coats of arms seriously. That’s mine on the right.)

I’m pleased to report that we’ve got an 89% completion rate on the survey – almost 9 out of every 10 people who start taking the test submit a completed questionnaire. Given that this takes about 20 minutes and involves a fair amount of thinking, I think this is a great result. It proves the point that people will engage with involved, thoughtful current affairs content online – you just have to present it to them in a way that’s rewarding to them. Here we tell each user a little about themselves, so there’s an incentive to finish the test.

Where Next?

This is just the first part of the Britain’s Real Class System project. We’re collecting data now, which will take some weeks, and then Professors Savage and Devine (and doubtless many grad students) will analyze it for patterns. We’re going to use this data to create a class map of Britain based on the three aspects of class that we’re measuring: what you’ve got (economic), who you know (social), and what you do (cultural). Hopefully we’ll discover some sort of groupings or patterns – groups of people with similar profiles in all three aspects of class.

When the analysis is complete, we’ll be working with the data visualization masters at Stamen in San Francisco to create an interactive visualization that people will be able to play with. It’ll be something on the scale of Gapminder or similar. The idea is to present this complex data in a way that’s easy to view and engage with. You’ll be able to look at the results in a myriad of ways, including a class map of Britain, or a display of the different classes (if, indeed, we find any) side by side – or you could just look at class in your home town, or compare, say, men vs. women, or old vs. young, or urban vs. rural class systems . . . the permutations are up to the user.

There’s still a lot of new respondents coming in every day, and we need input from as broad a group as possible. How about you? Fancy finding out how you compare to the rest of Britain in terms of power and influence? Why not give the survey a go?

Journalism, Social Media

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5 February 2011

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Stop Telling Stories

This is, more or less, the text of my presentation to the news:rewired conference at Microsoft HQ in London today.

UPDATE: The BBC College of Journalism has posted video of my talk.

Maybe journalists shouldn’t tell stories so much. Stories can be a great way of transmitting understanding about things that have happened. The trouble is that they are actually a very bad way of transmitting understanding about how things work. Many of the most important things people need to know about aren’t stories at all.

But this is an issue with many, many stories in it, such as

That’s a story. Our work as journalists involves crafting rewarding media experiences that people want to engage with. That’s what we do. For a story, that means settings, characters, a beginning, a muddle and an end. That’s what makes a good story.

But many things, like global climate change, aren’t stories. They’re issues that can manifest as stories in specific cases.

And there’s the rub; in order to tell stories about these big, systemic issues, journalists need to create a microcosm.

This can work. I’ve read, and watched, some very good pieces of journalism attacking specific aspects of a big issue. But the way that stories transmit understanding is only one way of doing so. When it comes to something else – a really big, national or world-spanning issue, often it’s not what happened that matters, so much as how things work.

In the pluralist democracy our media is supposed to support, figuring out how things work is vitally important for the public. There are lots and lots of systems that people interact with:

The energy market.

Parliamentary government.

The health care system.

The global climate.

I could go on. There are many systems like this, which deeply affect people’s lives.

When it comes to understanding a system, though, the best way is to interact with it.

Play is a powerful way of learning. Of course the systems I’ve listed above are so big that people can’t play with them in reality. But as journalists we can create models that are accurate and instructive as ways of interactively transmitting understanding.

I use the word ‘play’ in its loosest sense here; one can ‘play’ with a model of a system the same way a mechanic ‘plays’ around with an engine when she’s not quite sure what might be wrong with it.

The act of interacting with a system – poking and prodding, and finding out how the system reacts to your changes – exposes system dynamics in a way nothing else can.

That’s why, in my current project, we’re using interactive methods, and no storytelling. The project is called Britain’s Real Class System and it’ll be launching in the first quarter of 2011. It’s the largest social investigation ever conducted in the UK. As we’re pre-launch I can’t tell you too much here, but I can explain the basics.

The Problem with Class

There’s a problem with class in the UK. The system right now is organized into a working/middle/upper class pyramid. This is essentially a legacy of a Victorian industrial society which has almost entirely ceased to exist. When someone like Alan Sugar can call himself working class, and someone like Lakshmi Mittal isn’t considered upper-class, there’s obviously a problem in the system. So the point of our investigation is to find out what Britain’s class system actually is, today.

But telling a story about this huge system is almost impossible. It’s like fish trying to tell a story about water.

Stage 1 is an interactive survey that asks people all sorts of things about their interests, their attitudes, and many other questions relevant to their position in society. It’s based on the BBC’s LabUK platform, which is the BBC’s scientific survey system. This will allow us to effectively interview hundreds of thousands of people about class. By taking the survey, people will find out something about themselves: namely, how their wealth, social contacts and cultural range compares to that of other people in the UK. Everyone likes to know where they stand. And they’ll be giving us invaluable data as they find out.

We’ve constructed this survey in partnership with some top sociologists, and a very talented scientific team will analyze the data. the output will be a massive interactive visualization that lets people explore Britain’s class system as it actually is.

Of course we haven’t designed this yet, but we’ve got some of the best people in the world ready to pounce on the data. The result will be something on the level of Gapminder or the NHS Atlas of Risk or similar. Users will be able to see the results on a map, zoom in on their home town, compare men vs. women, or urban vs. rural, or any permutation they like. By playing with the system, the users will be able to understand functionally how class works in the UK.

Both parts of this project demonstrate compelling interactivity. It’s the interactive equivalent to a good story. The best documentaries and text journalism are interesting to watch and read for their own sake, even if you don’t care about the issues. They’re well constructed stories.

Here, we’ve got the interactive equivalent. We’re creating systems that are engaging and fun to interact with. They’re surprising, they pique your curiosity. And hopefully, they’ll increase understanding of British society, one of the most important systems affecting people’s lives here.

And there’s not a trace of storytelling in sight.

Journalism

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16 December 2010

25 Comments

WikiLeaks – Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

I believe WikiLeaks made a mistake in releasing the diplomatic cables the way they did. But the combined US response has been positively frightening.

I can imagine Assange’s position a few weeks ago, before the diplomatic cables went live. Assange was in charge of an up-and-coming website that had broken several important news stories. He was making waves in the media world, and making a name for his organization. It was a good place to be.

Then he was offered the mother of all secrets. One day he opened an email offering him a breach so big, it would have to be noticed at the highest level. He knew that releasing the diplomatic cables was going to blow WikiLeaks right out into the open. It was going to make headlines around the world and make Assange a household name.

I can see the temptation. But I think it was the wrong decision.

WikiLeaks has built its media reputation and its reservoir of goodwill through good deeds. The organization is rooted firmly in the values of liberal democracy and civil society. People who care about freedom of the press and an open media naturally welcome something like WikiLeaks.

They’ve done plenty of good exposing hidden wrongdoing in the past.

But here’s the rub. The current WikiLeaks story is different. In the case of the diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks is mostly not exposing hidden wrongdoing. It’s exposing hidden right-doing, which dies when it’s in the open.

Not everything that happens behind closed doors is intrinsically bad. Diplomacy is secret for a good reason. Sometimes negotiations have to happen in private so they can be frank. Sometimes people only cooperate in secret because open collaboration would be dangerous to them.

Secrecy is intrinsic to high-level relationships between countries, just like it is to relationships between people. That’s why we have things like lawyer-client, doctor-patient, and spousal privilege, for instance.

That’s why I think that releasing the diplomatic cables was a mistake. In cases where diplomats are genuinely working for the good of their country, there’s no wrongdoing there to expose, even if the diplomats are doing so in secret. “Exposing” the secrets of diplomacy might be doing more harm than good – and crucially, it might damage WikiLeaks’ ability to do good in the long run. Clay Shirky has written an astute analysis on this point.

I can see why Assange decided to release these documents, but it might have been the wrong decision for WikiLeaks, and for democracy and openness around the world.

A Chilling Response

What’s even more damaging is the nature of the US response. I found this passage in this morning’s Guardian chilling:

Asked about the New York Times’s role in publishing the leaked cables, Lieberman told Fox news the newspaper “has committed at least an act of bad citizenship. Whether they have committed a crime I think bears very intensive inquiry”.

Let’s be clear here. The New York Times, and even WikiLeaks itself, hasn’t leaked anything. Private Bradley Manning leaked the diplomatic cables. What the NYT and WikiLeaks are doing is publishing leaked information, which is something different.

Here we have an influential US politician implying that a newspaper might be guilty of a crime, for publishing information embarrassing to the government. This is not something I would have expected to hear in the land of the free, where the First Amendment to the constitution protects freedom of expression. Matthew Ingram wrote more on this in an excellent post on GigaOM. He writes:

More than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.

This, I think, is why so many people (including myself) felt so conflicted about the WikiLeaks story at first. WikiLeaks is doing a sort of work that’s very important in a pluralist democratic society. Exposing hidden wrongdoing is one of the purposes of a free press and the lubricant of representative democracy. This is about enabling an egalitarian society where the strong do not oppress the weak. That deserves to be protected.

But now that organization has gone and done something bad. In releasing the diplomatic cables they haven’t exposed wrongdoing, they’ve endangered good work that must necessarily be kept secret.

I am a supporter of WikiLeaks in general. But I think releasing the cables this way will do more harm than good.

Journalism

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8 December 2010

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