News Lawyer

Great musings from Tony Long of wired.com regarding journalistic (and human) desensitization to suffering. He blames it on culture’s stylized violence that diminishes our ability to care for those we do not already know.

Long says censorship is not the answer. I agree. I wonder, though, if journalists and future journalists might use a little restraint in looking for stories that might sell but pollute our cultural puddle?

A recent news item cited Senator Hillary Clinton for receiving sizable campaign contributions from Chinatown busboys and waiters, most of whom are presumably living on the margins and some of whom have already (proudly) said that they were merely following orders from community leaders. Donating at the behest of another person is strictly prohibited under federal campaign finance laws.

Catching Hillary and other politicians who garner money from suspect sources is a good thing. Our political offices are not for sale. But what is less clear is whether putting all of this information on the internet does not in some way infringe on other freedoms.

By analogy, the internet is in some ways like new traffic light photo technology that catches drivers who roll through empty intersections, or perfect speed traps that nab otherwise good drivers doing 75 on a long stretch of barren highway. Sure it’s still the law, but the law was passed in a time when enforcement was nowhere near 100%, a critical component for policy makers trying to ascertain the impact of speed limits on traffic patterns, safety issues, simple economics and overall convenience. Better enforcement throws the prior agreed-upon equilibrium of weighed interests out of kilter.

There is a lot of information about each of us that is public but not very accessible. In the pre-internet era, it would take a motivated person to dig up, say, my voter registration or property records. The information wasn’t private per se, but it was effectively shielded from public view due to the effort involved in digging up the public records. Newspapers could print my information and the information of my neighbors, but voter rolls and other mass quantities of data do not make for compelling reading.

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece on Subprime lending, tying in data on rates of subprime lending to community maps. The riveting maps took complex data and made it accessible and understandable to the general public. In the coming months we are going to see exquisite internet mashups showing public information laid out in maps of all types. This mapping is a prime component of the New Media Workshop course at Columbia, a cornerstone of the New Media concentration. Obviously, these maps are going to make data mining much more convenient. But therein lies a subtle problem.

There is a lot of public information that, while public, we would prefer not to have broadcast. As the mapping software gets more intricate and more data gets mined, the public will have access to maps showing all sorts of interesting data about their neighbors that they would not otherwise work to have access to. For example, the voter rolls are public information, but are not generally accessed by the public. Conceivably, local community papers could create maps showing the addresses of Democrats and Republicans on a resident-by-resident basis. That access might not be comfortable for Democrats in Crawford or Republicans on the Upper West Side, as their neighbors would suddenly know who the specks of off-color are in their community’s otherwise monochrome map. Such minority status could well be a stigma for the outed. Over time, extreme minorities might take to registering themselves as something other than their preferences, yielding less speckled, albeit more inaccurate, maps, and distorting our culture and political system. Criminal records, property tax data, voter information – all of these could conceivably be mapped, giving all members of a community a far more intimate look at their neighbors than they had previously.

Our privacy culture and laws were in part based on the premise that public information would be mined only by the most overzealous of neighbors. Now, public information on the internet makes everyone that overzealous neighbor. Public information may be crucial in checking the appetites of avaricious politicians and for informative pieces like the aforementioned Times article. But, without revisiting what should lie in the public sphere, our past and present will soon be fodder for our neighbors, the world over.

One stab at the new journalism business model – putting the investigative journalists upstream of the newspapers.

This model might actually work. Investigative journalism is expensive and newspapers are finding that they cannot afford to keep this infrastructure in-house. Instead, investigative journalism would be outsourced to an organization specializing in the field, which would then sell pieces to the newspapers or publish their own. There might be significant economies of scale and savings associated with an organization specializing in investigative journalism. Such an organization could keep more newspapers in business, who could then concentrate on less expensive endeavors. On the other hand, this kind of wholesale investigative journalism organization might be more opaque – easily politicized and steered towards investigating certain parties and topics, with the public less able to discern the bias of a supplier of news up the supply chain from the newspaper rather than the bias of the newspaper itself.

On Forbes.com, some more bad news for journalists and those who aspire to the profession. The relevant quotes:

Another endangered species: journalists. Despite the proliferation of media outlets, newspapers, where the bulk of U.S. reporters work, will cut costs and jobs as the Internet replaces print. While current events will always need to be covered (we hope), the number of reporting positions is expected to grow by just 5% in the coming decade, the Labor Department says. Most jobs will be in small (read: low-paying) markets.

And broadcast journalists aren’t immune to this trend, either:

Radio announcers will have a tough time, too. Station consolidation, advances in technology and a barren landscape for new radio stations will contribute to a 5% reduction in employment for announcers by the middle of the next decade.

The writing is on the wall at Columbia Journalism School, where, according to one professor, even senior print faculty are stressing the need for all students to learn web skills. Ironically, some print students are more resistant to this emphasis than the professors, apparently fearing the technological learning curve or perhaps clinging to obsolete romanticisms of the profession.

The internet has changed the journalism economic model, with bloggers supplying content that journalists had previously charged for in print publication. At work here is the tragedy of the commons – bloggers and citizen journalists typically use news unearthed by professional journalists without compensation, republishing and repackaging the original news items with opinion. Each republishing and repackaging of the original reported content reduces the demand for the actual original form of the content – much like the case in the music industry and file-shared songs. With most news organizations losing money, the issue is whether an economic model can be developed to encourage reporting despite the lack of financial incentives to report. For even if intellectual property law developed in a way in which reported facts are protected by copyright, journalists would then only stand with musicians, trying to establish the fame necessary to generate ancillary income from (reporting) gigs that generate so little revenue of its own. By emphasizing New Media, Columbia Journalism School is trying to give its students the skills necessary to be one-man bands – to report and produce content in a variety of mediums for distribution over the internet. Each journalist would then be a hybrid – a reporter/publisher/producer/writer/techie – to varying degrees. To bring the analogy one step further, Columbia Journalism School is one step closer to making the logical yet startling concession – that traditional newspapers will wither like record companies, increasingly irrelevant distributors of content in the online world.

(Hat Tip: Instapundit).

At the risk of beating the musician-journalist analogy to death, here’s one more example, from Wired.com.  Jonathan Coulton combined a “name your own price” strategy with quirky music to build up a very loyal fanbase.  Would a name your own price work in journalism?

Interesting quotes compiled by 10 Zen Monkeys. Good job.

There is an interesting parallel to law here. Commercial attorneys and those whose coin of the realm were intellectual property licenses and other commercial papers are getting killed by the internet, where their hard work gets posted and pasted by a multitude of companies who would prefer to pilfer something on the cheap rather than pay an attorney to draft the language. It doesn’t even matter that such language might be inapplicable or worse. And it doesn’t matter that using such language could get the thief in trouble for practicing law without a license – the pilfering continues unabated.

Regarding writing more specifically, it seems now that writing is merely the platform for something more lucrative – a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. Writers write books but earn better money speaking (or even more lucratively, consulting). Musicians make little from albums but earn great amounts of box office booty. Published lawyers become the safe pick for a multitude of high-paying gigs, whether public speaking, consulting, or straight practice of law.

In short, we’re entering a brave new world where intellectual property laws are routinely broken by common citizens. There is no stopping it. There are no easy answers, except by finding indirect ways to make money off of our writings.