According to Jeff Bercovici, a freelance journalist from Agence-France Presse  "killed" 20 people by reporting on the burning of a Koran. According to Mathew Ingrahm, AFP has no responsibility for any such thing. Surely the truth is in the middle, but where? Scott Rosenburg has argued that large-audience publications are able to propel obscure and tangential events onto the news agenda, and that these propulsions are ethically and politically consequential. Furthermore, news editors around the country discussed the impending Koran burning with an eye for exactly this kind of responsibility, finally and collectively arriving at a quasi-universal display of disdain for the news value of the burning, leaving the AFP alone among large-audience publications to put their stamp on the story in its earliest moments. In my view, this is why the question of responsibility is pertinent. If there is a consensus among news organizations about the news value of an event, then the individual editor hardly needs to worry about behaving irresponsibly in reporting the story. News value here is like a force of nature: the story is news and there is no dilemma to speak of. But when a story's "outbreak" can be traced to a single organization in the midst of conscious and deliberate disregard by other established organizations, then we may expect that ethical deliberation has occurred, about whether it is right or wrong to publicize the story in question. Under such circumstances, the question of responsibility is very much in order. And in this connection I may remark that we have yet to see a statement from Andrew Ford's editors at AFP about their reasons for covering the story.

"the best reason to believe that social media can aid citizens in
their struggle to make government more responsive is that both
citizens and governments believe that."

source

A source is an individual who provides the raw materials of a story, and to my
way of thinking there are three kinds of sources: witnesses, protagonists and
experts. I think that I can make myself, and those I know more available as
sources in each of these ways.

Sometimes witnessing is just being in the right place at the right time. The
other day I was riding my bike when I heard a skidding noise, and looked up to
see a pickup truck sliding sideways down the street. The driver quickly
recovered and drove off without incident. But in another moment I might have
watched that truck crash in a newsworthy way.

Beyond happenstance however, I believe there are habits and skills that make us
better witnesses. For one thing, it seems possible to cultivate an ability to be
in the right place at the right time. Many events are likely to be newsworthy,
and attending them gives us a front-row seat to some piece of the news. One must
also master a set of witnessing tools -- whether an educated eye and ear, a
particular camera, or a helicopter. The combination of tools at your disposal
gives witnessing its consistency and texture.

I do not have much experience as a news source. But I imagine that if I am
called to be one, it will require self examination. In the case of the skidding
truck, I noticed that the actual direction and speed of the car's movements were
not immediately obvious to me. What did I really see? How do I know what I
saw, or what happened? How much more challenging and serious must these
introspections be for a witness to a newsworthy event. Being a source is a
complex ethical act.

Expertise is also growing more elastic in our day and age. Anyone can
participate
in an expert community. There are journals and blogs that cover all kinds of
subjects, and it is human to delve deeply into something, even if it is
something traditionally defined as non-serious or trivial. Experts on video
games, for example, often have important things to say about society.

A protagonist, finally, is a principal in a newsworthy story. One way to become
a protagonist is to live ethically and honestly, and tenaciously to pursue a
line of work that will benefit self and others. In a democratic society like
ours, anyone who lives in this way can play an important role in newsworthy
events.

Maybe the common thread here is that being a source is kind of like being a
reporter. But I guess we already know that by now.

Here's a thought:

When launching a new initiative in journalism or in software, there is a tension
between convenience and investment. On the one hand, our production must be
intuitive and welcoming; it must respond and adapt to us, and make us feel
appreciated and understood, or at least cared for and helped. On the other
hand, our production must itself BE assisted by our readers and users, if not by
our consumers. This requires that our readers and users put themselves in our
shoes and join our cause, and that they weigh reflectively the merits of our
enterprise in comparison with others seeking their support.

The requirement of convenience leads editors and designers to put themselves in
the shoes of their readers and users, while the requirement of investment leads
readers and users to put themselves in the shoes of editors and designers. The
sweet spot of successful initiative lies on the border between these styles of
planning, which deploy very different kinds of skills, and prioritize
conflicting needs and motivations. If convenience is systematically favored
over investment, then your initiative will be biased towards consumption, and
therefore erratic or passive. If investment demands are too high, your
initiative will lack vitality and force.

End Communication.

It is often said that journalists do not know what their readers want, or at least that traditionally they have not known.  But this is a very coarse-grained statement.  In fact, journalists are in constant touch with readers who provide feedback which strongly influences news production.  This too is usually acknowledged by stating that journalists "write for other journalists." Both statements separate the categories of "journalists" and "readers," or rather both rely on this exclusion in an implicit way.  Our vocabulary seems to contain a root exclusion between "journalists," and "readers:" journalists are not readers (although they read so much!) and readers are not journalists.

The exclusion stems from feedback practices.  Clearly, for any published story there will be people who read the story, but whose feedback is not considered by its author as important or relevant enough to be considered in judging the value of the story.  Every author has heard critiques that are not well founded or that are odious, or that simply present nothing new, and that therefore would threaten the author with the prospect of wasting time or even of an ill-advised shift in values if not throttled or filtered in some way.  And it is not easy to tell in every case which readers should be filtered or excluded.  But my point here is only that every author must deal with this class of readers and that this class is only a subset of the total group of readers.

The claims that journalists do not know what their readers want, or that journalists do not care about or listen to their readers are therefore false.  What is true is that journalists are authors and therefore filter their feedback and its effects on their writing.  Wherever such a falsehood is claimed therefore, it must be doing other work, like asserting that the feedback of some portion of readers deserves greater consideration than it has heretofore enjoyed.

"Links are not endorsements." The refrain is common, but is it true?
Yes and no. One can link to things one wants to put down or weaken or
disrupt. But even here one is calling attention to something, ratifying it,
if not as worthy of support, as worthy of consideration, as a peer.

Rapid News Awards has a blog at http://rapidnewsawards.wordpress.com
and a home page at: http://rapidnewsawards.org

On Rebooting the News #38, Dave Winer uttered some words of wisdom
that I want to echo.

“In order to do a really good job of developing some new technology…
you need to have some users around who aren’t just sort of being
hypothetical about how they might use your product. A lot of times
the feedback you get from people is one level removed. They say,
“well, I understand what you’re doing, but I don’t think everybody
else will.” That kind of feedback’s not very useful. The kind of
feedback that’s useful is “I would be able to use this product in a
whole new way if you just added this one feature to it.” Those are the
things you’re looking for. And so whenever you have… a convening of
people who are trying to do something new with technology, that
presents an opportunity for technologists not just to create something
new but also to learn the process of creating new things.”

This is the first weekly update for the open source Rapid News Awards project.  Rapid News Awards will be an experimental funding system that retrospectively funds high quality metajournalism with an authoritative social network.

Here is what has been accomplished this week.  

I have settled on both front-end and back-end web platforms, namely Google Web Toolkit for the front end and Google App Engine for the backend.  I was looking for platforms that are powerful, well supported, and actively developed, and these toolkits fit the bill nicely.  This means I'll be able to use one programming language for both front-end and backend development, namely Java.  I believe this will significantly reduce overall system complexity.  For version control I am using Git.

I mapped out an initial version of an API (Application Programming Interface) with Steve Farrell of project 89.  Farrell's technology will provide Rapid News Awards with real-time vote counting and sorting functionality.

I have begun development using the eclipse editor.  I created a project and developed some code that implements a portion of the API.  I have also taken a few steps in the front-end.  Currently, I can display a list of sorted votes using dummy, hard-coded data.

My goals for next week are to have a working frontend and backend communicating with each other to display existing votes and add new ones.  In addition, I plan to settle on a blogging platform and a platform for the web site, and to upload the source code to Github. 

In a recent comment, Josh Young issued a fundamental challenge to the concept of rapidly retrospective news, asking in effect: what kind of journalism will it produce?  This calls for a more thorough defense and justification of the retrospective paradigm.

The issue, in short, is this: How will the retrospective news media ecosystem incentivize and sustain the proper journalistic norms and values?  As Young Points out, "there's an entire incentive structure here--complex and complete with potential feedback loops both good and bad." He calls for an explanation of this incentive structure, a "high-level description of the value chain and the dynamics that hold it together and keep it flowing more or less efficiently."  Although the issues involved are too complex for a single posting, I will do my best to advance this conversation, and hope for enough reactions to provoke forward movement.

Young's focus on incentives brings out a basic aim of the rapidly retrospective paradigm: to reshape the environment in which journalism is produced - and for which it is prepared.  In other words, as the funding environment changes, so too will the journalism funded.  A heavily funded retrospective ecosystem necessarily influences the form and content of the journalism it sustains.  Therefore, retrospective news media should ensure as far as possible that attention and funding are distributed to good journalism only; that bad and mediocre journalism are neither funded nor noticed.  Should a heavily funded retrospective ecosystem systematically distribute funding and attention to bad or mediocre journalism, the paradigm would be discredited.

In order to guard against such an outcome, rapidly retrospective news media organizations should be structured to incentivize conduct which will promote good journalism while ignoring bad and mediocre journalism.  Each organization will need to grapple with these issues in its own way, and I cannot provide a comprehensive discussion of incentive structures in this post.  I will, however, offer two principles that seem initially promising, and invite feedback.

First Principle: Awards should be decided by reputable journalists

In order to ensure that awards are given to good journalism rather than bad, the judges sitting on award councils should be reputable journalists. Judges should have a history of participation in a community of journalists and of attachment to journalistic norms. They should evince a sensitivity to the collective sentiment of their peers - where the term "peers" includes both professional journalists and the best informed readers and sources.  Reputations could stem from participation in print media or electronic, or could combine aspects of both.  But a retrospective news media organization should only include among its awarding council members whose reputations depend on the sanction of other reputable journalists, and who are concerned to maintain that reputation going forward.  In short, the journalist who is concerned to maintain a reputation among his or her peers is the journalist who can be relied upon to distribute awards according to journalistic criteria.  The fundamental assumption here is that journalists seek to merit the respect of other journalists along with that of the best-informed readers and sources.

Second Principle: Fundraising should be separated from Award selection

The pursuit of significant funding relationships with individual or corporate advertisers or donors, whether public or private, should be carried out by people who are not on the award council.  Separate career tracks should exist for individuals dedicated to editorial pursuits and those conducting fundraising campaigns.  Furthermore, the pursuit of funds should be rigorously separated from the awards process itself.  Collusion between editorial staff and fundraising staff about either editorial criteria or sources of funds should be stigmatized, limited, or fenced with procedural safeguards.

The assumption here is that donors and advertisers are motivated differently than journalists, and that in critical moments they will prioritize non-journalistic aims over journalistic ones.

Conclusion

The suggested structure of a rapidly retrospective news media organization is similar to that of a prospective one.  In particular, it posits a distinction between and interaction among journalists and non-journalists -- along with a cautious approach to their coordination. It should be stressed, however, that the concept of a journalist is underspecified here.  In particular, it may include readers and sources insofar as they function to sustain journalistic norms and values.  I will write more about this in future posts.