Journalism and Innovation

Here is the text version of a speech I gave at an event to benefit San Francisco State University's journalism department last night in downtown San Francisco.
March 24, 2011

Around the middle of 1995 I left what by then had already been a long career in traditional media to find out what a new platform called the world wide web was about.

After helping a small group down on Main Street launch a magazine-style website, Salon.com, I moved over to Third Street to take a job working for HotWired, which was the online side of Wired Magazine.

My job was to head up a team to develop and produce the first daily political news site, to be called The Netizen. We did this in less than a month, working pretty much around the clock.

In the process, I noticed that all of the young men and women on my team kept using words that I had not heard before – or at least not in this type of context. Odd words like:

Bandwith, interface, packet, feature set, functionality, server push, code freeze, firewall, asynchronous thread, cache, node, interactivity, granularity and TCP/IP.

So I kept a list of these and other words on a slip of paper, and once we had launched the site, I approached two of my young colleagues over dinner and asked them to explain what all of these strange terms meant.

They just smiled at me. One of them then said, “David, it doesn’t matter what they mean. Just sprinkle them liberally into your conversation and your market value will triple!”

So I did and it did, at least for a while. This was in the years leading up to the great dot.bomb implosion when we were reminded that what the market giveth, the market also taketh away.
***
I tell that story partially as a cautionary tale of sorts about the topic tonight – journalism and innovation. Back in the 90s, people like me thought we were very likely in the process of reinventing journalism, or at least extending it onto a brave new platform.

We definitely did not think we were contributing to its demise.

Fast forward to today. Right here in San Francisco, we are going through a mammoth new wave of innovation that will inevitably reshape the media industry every bit as much as we’ve seen over the past 15 years.

The best guesstimate I can make tonight is that we have around 5,000 technology startups within the city limits of San Francisco alone. This does not include countless others throughout the broader Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley.

The majority of these little companies are focused in one of three areas – social media, mobile platform (iPad) applications, or advertising solutions.

All of these areas have major implications for how the future of media will play out. So let’s consider the context.

In effect, what happened back in the mid to late 90s is that the world of journalism was hit by the equivalent of a 9.0 earthquake. I do not in any way intend to minimize the current tragedy in Japan by making this analogy, but in terms of impact on an industry and the people working in it, that earthquake shook the news media to its roots, opening up fissures that have not been sealed to this day.

Following the earthquake that was the web came a very slow-moving tsunami that by late in the first decade of this new century had swept away many of the major institutions that had previously controlled journalism and left the rest damaged almost beyond recognition.

Thousands of newspapers and magazines, radio and TV stations around the country shut down or cut back their operations drastically. There was wave after wave of layoffs, until the main adjective used to describe professional journalists became “former.”

Some have suggested that we have reached the point now where “Journalism no longer is a profession, it is an activity.”

Whether or not you entirely agree with this view, the facts indicate that it is not far off the mark. And that gives all of us who care deeply about journalism a choice. Do we try to fight a losing battle to defend what we thought was a profession against the unstoppable tsunami of technological change or do we embrace this change and find ways to help our essential journalistic values survive and make the transition to the new media landscape of the future?

It’s my view that this is no choice whatsoever, but a moral obligation to engage in this fight. While it is true that the old media world as we knew it has been shattered and is in a state of what appears to be terminal decline, it is not true, however, that journalism itself has collapsed. It is a business model that is broken, not journalism.

In fact there are now opportunities to invent a new journalism that is far more inclusive and responsive to society than the old model ever was.

***

One thing we’ve learned from the past two decades of relentless technological advance is that our old ways of doing things get disrupted a long time before we figure out how to adapt to the new. One rule of thumb is that it takes about ten years for society to absorb and adapt to these extremely disruptive, transformative technologies.

That is certainly true of journalism. Our old world has been disrupted but the shape of our new world is only a hazy proposition at this point. That is okay; that is how it has to be.

Many other professions or activities have been disrupted as well – the music industry, the telephone business, the advertising industry, PR, and every other kind of communications channel.

Complicating matters is the fact that the rate of technology change appears to be speeding up, and it cuts across many sectors, not just information technology per se. Consider that scientists can now program DNA in exactly the same way they program computers; or that software can be instructed to behave exactly the way DNA does – in other words, to evolve and reproduce.

In his provocative new book, local author Kevin Kelly explores, as he puts it, What Technology Wants.

He points out that we now have roughly the same number of computer chips wired to each other as the number of neurons in our brains – or roughly 170 quadrillion. In addition, the number of links among files in this vast computer network that now rings the globe is more or less the same as the number of synapses in our brains.

This Technium, as he terms it, has therefore reached the complexity of the organ we most depend on but know the least about – our brains. It follows reason, then, that certain anomalies computer scientists have noticed lately are not mistakes, but efforts by the Technium to reproduce itself.

Thus highly advanced software has been written that allows technology to sort through infinite numbers of options to how to propagate itself, rejecting less optimal lines of codes for those that accomplishes its purposes better. Technology is doing this all by itself now; we have no longer in the loop.

***

Okay, that’s part of the wider context. Let’s bring this back down to our world, the journalism world and talk about what all of these fantastic changes mean for us, and for the practice of an art form that most of us believe is extremely important for the health of our society going forward.

And I want to bring in here the other topic I promised to talk about tonight – the arrival of the tablet, in the form of its best-known product, the iPad, because many have hailed this particular device as the savior of journalism and the news business.

It may not surprise you that I am skeptical about these claims, as I am about all over-arching claims about individual advances in technology, if only because these devices and platforms are iterative in nature – they are always changing and improving.

We have a relentless set of forces at work here – the communications technologies we use to do our jobs and conduct our lives are getting ever more powerful, smaller, cheaper, and indispensable.

The reason the tablet as a form has been so breathlessly anticipated by some journalists is that it is, in essence, like a book, a magazine, or a newspaper in the sense that they are all mobile products that we can carry around with us.

Cellphones too are mobile but too small to serve as proper media platforms – desktops and laptops are too big and bulky. Therefore, neither of them have served as replacements for our old print favorites to date, but some believe that tablets may change all of that.

I’m not going to get into the differences between the many emerging tablet-like platforms for reading out there, from the iPad to androids, to the Sony Reader to the Nook, or the new, faster and more powerful Kindle.

For all intents and purposes these are all simply the early proliferation of options fighting it out for our attention and for market control. In the end, only one of them is likely to prevail but by then, we will scarcely be able to recognize the form its ancestors took back in the beginning days, in other words, today.

But while the future direction of this mobile platform is unknown, we do know enough to say that this offers those of us who care about the future of journalism to do something we did not do an adequate job of at the dawn of the world wide web, and that is to get in at the ground floor and to bring our values and our commitment to preserving great journalism with us.

Just remember whenever we talk about new technologies that it is a mistake to concentrate on the specific technologies themselves, because when it comes to communications technology, it is never about the technology. It is always about the networks.

My former boss and old friend Louis Rossetto, who is the founder of Wired, was fond of quoting a truism from the early days of another technology, the Fax machine.
“When you buy a Fax,” he would say, “You are not buying a machine so much as access to the entire worldwide network of Fax machines.”

In other words, you are purchasing a better way to connect with others.
That can be said for every other important technology in this space, as well as for the entire vast Internet itself.

At its basis, the Internet is one giant sharing protocol where any connected computer device anywhere on the planet can receive and transmit data to any other computer device. So the specific technology you choose is not important – it is access to the networks that matters.

At the same time, the development of tablets has brought us to the point where as journalists we finally may have an optimal platform for doing our work. Desktops were never very good – no good reporter wants to stay chained to her desk.

Telephones were helpful but not perfect because any journalist will tell you it is better to interview someone in person than over the phone.

Cellphones are too small for writing or reading – although an entire generation of text-happy teenagers may be proving me wrong on that point.

By contrast, the iPad and its equivalents offer us the promise that we can be both mobile writers and readers at the same time – we can go where the story is and send it out to our networks much better than we have ever been able to do before.

Here it is also important to note that how we journalists fit into the new interconnected networked world is fundamentally changed from the past. Fourteen years ago I used this phrase to illustrate how our role was changing --
“Journalists are no longer responsible for the final word. Now we are responsible for creating the first word.”

In other words, our job now is to get the conversation going – to set off the viral process by which news and analysis travels at light speed throughout our interconnected networks to audiences far beyond any we could ever have reached before.

Now, every story is indeed both local and global at the same time, and nobody can tell you which of the stories you write will travel the furthest or have the most impact. All we can know is it is not we who will determine that impact, but our networks.

Although our role has changed, it has in no way diminished the importance of maintaining the highest standards of good journalism – originality, authority, verifiability, credibility, fairness, and a commitment to pursue the unattainable goal of objectivity.

These are what we teach our students at places like SFSU, UC, Berkeley, and Stanford, and those students are going to serve as the guardians of these values going forward, as the new technologies whose origins we are witnessing today grow and morph and evolve into the communications channels of tomorrow.

Remember that all of these technologies, including the tablet, will disrupt our world a long time before we figure out how to adjust to them. We are in a moment of transition from an old world that is dying to a new world that is just being born.

It is still very early in this grand transformation, and it is only gradually dawning on us that one key characteristic of this new world is that change is constant – the technologies we depend on will never become static but will continue iterating into the future without end.

Our choice, again, is clear. We can sit back and watch the train leave the station, in which case there’s a pretty good chance that journalistic values will not be on board the train to the future.

Or, to use a better transportation metaphor, we can jump on the rocket of change and hold on for dear life, confident that is better to be part of the process of investing our common future than to settle for grieving the past.

In my view, we owe it to the next generation of journalists to try and get it right this time around.

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