The Modern Journalist

Cluetrain and Crowds: The Philosophy of Modern News Thinking

Image by Bill McIntyre via Flickr

I’m not finished reading either of these books; however, there’s enough percolating around in my head that I wanted to make sure I got it down before the next set of ideas washed them away.

I’m a proponent of reading books at the same time because it allows the ideas to smack up against each other very much like a conversation. This particular conversation started as I reached the midway point of Cluetrain and the end of Part I of Crowds.

In Crowds, James Surowiecki writes this:

…under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in the room (Introduction, xiii)

That’s not a particularly powerful statement because anyone who’s ever worked in a group dynamic knows that’s the case; however, for news organizations, this is exactly the the issue: what is the right situation, how do we know how to create it and how can we manage it.

And the answer to those three questions is this: you can’t.

I set out in my book to answer that question — although I didn’t know that was the question I set out to answer. John, my writing partner, pointed out that what I was really talking about was using each medium effectively for what it does best.

But to do that, I have to find a way to explain the simple truth that Surowiecki sets out in his book. And I don’t know if that’s possible.

Or I don’t think it’s possible for me at this moment because while I know what the newsroom should look like, I know I have to answer the questions about how to get it there.

He goes on to write:

We assume that the key to solving problems or making good decisions is finding that one right person who will have the answer…The argument in (The Wisdom of Crowds) is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. (xv)

Chasing the expert. In my story the expert is the reluctance of the reporter/editor to acknowledge their lack of expertise and instead engage the crowd in data-mining. That sentence cleared much in my head. This is a book about removing the expert without making the expert feel unneccesary.

Surowiecki lays out four components of a crowd — unscientifically chosen — that are necessary to create a working group:

diversity of opinions: which means anyone who wants to be involved

independence: people can’t decide together

decentralization: people draw on whatever knowledge they want

aggregation: an agent must decipher/interpret the data into a decision

Which is you hone it done is what Larry Lessig has written in the Future of Ideas when he discusses how to build a community (I will have that review up in a bit), but more importantly you can turn that into th efirst Thesis from the cluetrain manifesto:

Markets are conversations

The online world, the cluetrain authors argue, is radically different than the offline world in that you can create interactive conversations — and if you don’t, they will happen anyway.

In other words, you have a diversity of opinion that can be aggregated in a decentralized manner independent of any information you provide that results in: something better.

The cluetrain authors continue:

One the Net, you said what you meant and had better be ready to explain your position and how you’d arrived at it. Mouthing platitudes guaranteed that you would be challenged. Nothing was accepted at face value, or taken for granted. Everything was subject to question, revision, re-implementation, parody — whether it was an algorithm, a political philosophy or, Gold help you, an advertisement. (Internet Apocalypse, 5)

The Web changed everything philosophically but not in practice. My response to that passage read: And this is the fundamental disconnect with journalists. If you believe questions undermine you, if you’re a priest on high as the programmers were in the sixties protecting the Hulking Giants from the proletariat programmers, you will quickly find yourself banished by the Hands On Imperative: people will find a way to get their information out and you — who used to be the gatekeeper — will represent, right or wrong, everything you are supposed to fight for, the Freedom of Speech.

The comparison of the traditional journalist in the sea of change (mine) with the protectors of early computers in the sixties at MIT (from Steven Levy’s Hackers) is important for me — and hopefully for those who know the history of technology — because it represents the same issue: control over emerging technology.

The MIT students in charge of the computers tried to keep the hackers out of the system, but the hackers were hell-bent on getting their hands on that technology. And eventually, the system of governance was washed away, which ushered in the age of software.

These ideas — crowds, community, intelligence and conversation — are what my book is about. But it needs to be about how to harness those within a new environment of reporting. My newsroom of the future won’t resemble a traditional newsroom, although the form and functions will be there.

But this is about something bigger than just a newsroom. I think.