a newspaper reader’s reflection

November 7, 2011

jennylm36 Uncategorized , , Leave a comment

Our many readings and class discussions about the changing journalistic landscape made me take a closer look at myself, and where I fit in as a consumer of news.

 

I understand that changes brought on by the Internet, new advertising models (AdSense!), self-publishing via blogs and crowd-sourcing information (on Wikipedia, and even Yelp), has made it so that the traditional newspaper monopoly on news production, content, and advertising is no longer completely viable. In a 2005 blog post, “The last presses,” Jeff Jarvis provided a frank assessment:

 

“Today, the news about newspapers in America is not good: more layoffs (despite MoveOn’s whining, more competition,     more fear, less revenue, lower stocks. The time that many  hoped was a long way off may upon us already. Newspapers are going to start to die.”

 

Now, as we’re almost into 2012 (seven years after Jarvi’s assessment), it seems that indeed, some newspapers have become extinct, others are shrinking,  and a few titans are still there.

 

I, for one, am glad for that.

 

I appreciate the perspective, timeliness, and democratic nature of citizen-journalism, but even as a 25 year old young woman – I still much prefer to read The New York Times over what a friend might be posting on a blog. Yes, I may visit Wikipedia to get a quick backgrounder on some events or topics, and my friends and I enjoy visiting Gawker and   for the celebrity-related gossip information – but when it comes to issues of foreign policy, or domestic economics, or even film reviews– I find that we still go to The New York Times.  A lot of us also are avid listeners of NPR and watch the NewsHour.

 

Perhaps this is an effect of us growing up in households, where our parents tuned into NPR on the car, where they read a hard-copy of the paper in the morning with their coffee, and where Dad turned on the NewsHour when he arrived home at work.

 

Sentimentality aside, I truly believe that there is a qualitative difference as well. as the New York Times has good writing. I appreciate so much that I can find something to read in each section, and that it will be well written. Sometimes film and book reviews read like A+ literary essays for my undergraduate institution’s composition classes.

 

Eric Alterman observes in his March 2008 New Yorker article, “Out of Print: The death and life of the American Newspaper” that “we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.”

 

There are great blogs out there to be sure, but we still turn to the reporting, writing, and level of thought in newspaper articles. And I will be happy to pay for a subscription, so that I will be able to access New York Times content online.

 

It is said that many more people get their news from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. But who are we following on Twitter? And what are we re-sharing on Facebook? I am following the same people whose articles I read, and when I read news my friends have posted – it’s always an article from NYtimes.com, WSJ.com, or WashingtonPost.com. The sources of the news are newspapers – the difference is the .com lets my friends and I “share” it and promote an article more widely. So before, our parents might have clipped an article and mailed it to someone. A few years ago, we would probably have emailed the link. But now, we just click on the Twitter or Facebook icon on the very same webpage as the article itself.

 

And if and when that day comes when newspapers really have died (or will they successfully evolve?) well…. Kevin Kelly writes that artists, musicians, photographers and other creators that they just need 1,000 true fans to make a living. I will be among the 1,000 true fans of the writers who work I value, appreciate, and want to read more of.

Wikipedia Article Review

October 4, 2011

jennylm36 Uncategorized , Leave a comment

For this week’s blog exercise, I chose to evaluate the Wikipedia entry for The Brookings Institution (note: not the Brookings Institute), as it is a place I am familiar with, having worked there for three years. (my user-page is found here).

Comprehensive? No.

The article provides a brief introduction to the organization, and touches upon the Institution’s history, impact, research areas of focus, and some notable scholars and Board Members.  On whole, I found the article to be a bit sparse and scattered, and think that if someone were researching public policy think tanks, or trying to apply for a job at Brookings, they would do better to visit the actual Brookings Institution website. The article would be much more informative and useful to user if it covered the topics of organizational layout, list of scholars, and also publications.

The article can certainly do a better job of explaining the organizational layout of Brookings. It lists three “centers” under a paragraph about Brookings’ “Political Stance” – a place that does not really make sense Of the three centers listed, one is not even a policy center at all, but an Executive Education program. I would have added a section called “research program and policy centers” and written:

The Brookings Institution is comprised of five different research programs – each headed by its own Vice President & Director, and affiliated scholars. These five programs are Governance Studies, Global Economy and Development, Foreign Policy, Economic Studies, and the Metropolitan Policy Program. Some of these programs also have policy centers within their program, to do more in-depth exploration of specific policy issues. There are 11 policy centers at Brookings, and then two international centers – one in Doha, Qatar and another one in Beijing, China.

The article as it currently is, does not convey this information.

It would also be helpful for the article to have a list of past and current Brookings Institution scholars. There is a separate link at the bottom of the article to a “list of Brookings Scholars” but this list is far from comprehensive and also very out of date.  Some of the scholars are linked to their own Wikipedia page, but others are not. It would be good to have an active link for all the scholars.

The “publications” section is also not entirely clear (it begins by noting how Brookings publishes an Annual Report – and then starts listing research publications). The Annual Report is put together each year by the respective vice presidents of the programs, the Communications Program, and the Development Program. This has nothing to do with Brookings’ actual policy publications of books, pamphlets, and papers.

Other factors?

Evaluating the article on some other factors, I would say:

  • Is it readable? Yes, the article is readable, written in a way that people looking up this topic would understand
  • Is it written from a neutral point of view? Yes, the article acknowledges that Brookings has been alternately described as centrist, left-of-center, conservative and liberal. It notes some ways in which Brookings has stood out, and also acknowledges some critiques of the Institution and some of its scholars.
  • Sourcing:
    • I see that there are many sources linking directly to a Brookings webpage, or, to some dated material. There are a few newspaper articles and books mixed in. I think that the article could more effectively cite relevant information from the Brookings website, as well as bring in some additional information from other sources. For example, when I read that Brookings was consistently ranked among the top think tanks – I immediately thought of Dr. James McGann, the Assistant Director of the International Relations Program and Director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and also is the Director of the Think Tanks and Foreign Policy program, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has been studying think tanks in foreign policy for some time, and since 2006, has released an annual “Global Go To Think Tank Index” –where he ranks and assesses the top think tanks in the world. The Brookings Institution has consistently ranked among the top in Dr. McGann’s reports.
    • I would have also added some information from P.W. Singer’s article, “Factories to Call Our Own” – which appeared in an August 2010 issue of the Washingtonian. Further shedding some insider insight and reflection on think tanks, and Brookings as well.
  • Formatting: I think the article adhered to the overall Wikipedia Manual of Style.
  • Illustrations: There are only two pictures in the article – one of the actual Brookings building, and one from a Brookings event where Dmitry Medvedev spoke.  I think some more pictures would not hurt – perhaps a picture of Robert S. Brookings, who founded the organization, and one of the organization’s current President, Strobe Talbott.

By including some additional information and drawing on some updated sources, this Wikipedia entry would be much improved.

“In the Plex” by Steven Levy – Some Thoughts

September 26, 2011

jennylm36 Uncategorized Leave a comment

Steven Levy’s In The Plex provides an illuminating account of everything Google. He discusses with insight and humour the people, philosophy, products and developments of the company.

Using the case of Google, Levy shows how technology and policy intersect and often clash. Digital innovation brings about benefits while at the same time creating new tensions. How do we protect our privacy when we are putting so much information online? How do we decide who ultimately has ownership of the sharing of information? The government, the hosting site or company, or we the users?

These are some of the issues that some scholars of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program (and in particular, it’s Center for Technology Innovation), sought to address. I found Levy’s book interesting in part because I recognized many names as individuals who I had interactions with in my previous position at Brookings. A few (Robert Rubin, Sheryl Sandberg) had served on the Board of Trustees, and several others – Vivek Kundra, Aneesh Chopra, Julius Genachowski, Paul Otellini, John Doerr – were individuals whose offices my program had coordinated with on many occasions, to discuss some the issues Levy raises in his book (of net-neutrality, the role of spectrum, and privacy.) My office had also worked with the Federal and Government relations offices of Microsoft, Google, AT&T and Verizon, and so it was interesting to place the work of these DC offices, into the timeline of events and background of issues that Levy so thoughtfully discusses.

The chapter that made me think the most – to my own personal experiences, and my Management and Ethics classes at the Kennedy School – was Chapter 6, “GuGe: Google’s Moral Dilemma in China,” on Google’s experience in China.

As the book notes, Google China had it’s coming out party in January of 2006. I went to study abroad in Beijing, China exactly one year later, in January of 2007, at Beijing University, not too far away from the GuGe offices. As a student of U.S-China relations, and as an intern at CNN Beijing – I often went to Google.com to conduct research. And on many an occasion, ran into the Great Firewall of China. Some students ran into the government’s internet police cartoon characters of Jing Jing and Cha Cha (a play on the word, “jing cha” – which means police in Chinese) when they tried to search for certain topics. Others’ searches came back saying that a site did not exist or were not available. We learned to go to Anonymouse.com and other places, to find the news and information we needed to write our papers.

At CNN Beijing, sometimes the news screen would blackout – not from any actual mishap, but just a quiet reminder from the government that they were there, that they were watching, and that they could turn the station off. And this – all in the lead-up of relaxing restrictions for journalists before the 2008 Olympics!

My personal experiences in and my own cultural understanding China gave me greater appreciation for the difficult situation that Google found itself facing. I couldn’t say that Google did not try. The situation it ultimately found itself in after having been hacked, and the consequences of having private correspondences of employees and activists and dissidents been exposed – is similar to ones we have discussed in my ethics class. Those questions are certainly hard ones to answer. New technologies present us with new challenges for which there is often no rulebook and no precedent. We will have to be as innovative in finding ways to address policy problems raised by technology, as we are in developing new technology.

Reading response – “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”

September 12, 2011

jennylm36 Uncategorized , , Leave a comment

Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations addresses how improved Internet technologies have affected the way people come together and changed the scope of their actions as individuals and groups.  Individuals and groups are using the Internet to connect and act on the issues and interests important to them. They are taking collective action and forming communities outside of traditional institutions.

Shirky provides numerous real-life examples of how people have used connective technologies like email, mobile phones, Twitter and MySpace to connect, share, organize, and act. There are interactions that are focused on finding others with shared interests and building communities (stay-at-home moms on Meet-Up, editors on Wikipedia). Others want to share their creative and expressive work (photography enthusiasts posting on Flickr and political wonks maintaining a blog). Still others are concerned with getting information out to the public when a government does not want that information to get out (Egyptian activists using Twitter during the revolution; Chinese parents during the Sichaun earthquake), or organizing a group to address shared grievances (disgruntled airline passengers and victims of abuse by the Catholic Church). Whether for a social or political end, the channels of online technology have amplified people’s voices and augmented their audience.

Though the majority of his examples illustrate how online action has led to positive change, Shirky does a good job of also acknowledging some of the consequences. For example, not everything published online is necessarily of artistic merit (i.e.: teenage MySpace posts about going to the mall), bad groups (i.e.: pro-anorexia chat groups and terrorist organizations) can now mobilize like good groups, and hate speech can be communicated just as broadly as good speech.  Shirky tries to reconcile this not through net value argument – that the value of freedom generated by social tools outweighs the problems – but with a normative argument that “freedom is the right thing to want for society.”[i] As for how society should respond to the tensions between the good and bad arising from the ease of online communication and connection, Shirky does not give an answer, but says it is certainly something that merits further thought.

Shirky makes an astute observation that in the process of using social technologies to gain the power and build the support to exercise leverage when voicing their demands, groups have been able to “progress from coordination into governance.”[ii] He encourages us to view the rise in group-networking not as an invention, but rather as an event that has happened, and cannot be undone. Towards the end of the book, Shirky writes that “a more remarkable and longer-lived change will be in the offing, though, if people are able to start using these tools to bypass government or commercial entities in favor of taking on problems directly.”[iii] (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff describe this social trend as the “groundswell”). So perhaps group-networking is indeed an event that has happened, as Shirky noted, but it is also an event that it still happening. In the few years since the publication of Shirky’s book, we have increasingly seen such action.

*As this is a class focused on the use of digital technologies, I thought it only appropriate that I should read this book from a Kindle download instead of a hard copy.

*If you go to Clay Shirky’s website, he tells you to go to Wikipedia to find his biography.

[i] Kindle location 3727

[ii] p.292

[iii] Kindle location 3882-84

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