A profile of Clay Shirky appears today on the Australian news site Sydney Morning Herald. Shirky has a new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

The tendency in newspaper offices, including those where I work, is to discount social media activity and reader participation as something less than “real news.” Editors are already tossing aside the idea of citizen journalism, often based on a few timid attempts teaching readers to approach news-gathering on the same, tired terms of 20th Century newspaper journalism. Too bad for them, they’re missing the big picture, and giving up before they’ve really started.

Shirky sees a much wider playing field, where reader-supplied content can be most important, even while sharing the grid with more trivial stuff. Here he is on a recent Ted talks:

For those unfamiliar with the Apple/Gizmodo circus of this past week, here’s a basic rundown:

• Apple, a company known for actively keeping products secret until launch, plans to release a new generation iPhone sometime later this year.
• An Apple employee was carrying a prototype of the phone, and inadvertently left it in a California bar.
• Another individual, who clearly knew the status and value of the phone, scooped it up. He released photos of it, which were quickly published on tech news site Engadget, and then put it up for sale.  There can be little question that his understanding of what he had was extensive, and that his act therefore constitutes theft.
• Gizmodo, a tech news Web site that operates in an extremely (read: absurdly) competitive environment for breaking technology news, purchased the prototype phone. Again, any logical evaluation of this transaction would call the act: purchase of stolen property.
• Gizmodo editor Jason Chen published a video of himself running through a thorough examination of the product. Pundits immediately began weighing in on the matter.  In large part, tech journalists and bloggers – who tend to loathe Apple’s secrecy because it makes reporting more difficult – reacted with glee that an Apple product has been “outed” ahead of Steve Job’s schedule.
• Apple requested that Gizmodo return the stolen phone, and Chen complied.  But some time later, police raided Chen’s home, confiscating computer equipment as evidence. Criminal charges against Chen, for buying stolen property, may be pending.

This is where things get silly. Chen and Gizmodo, spurred along by others in media, are calling it a First Amendment issue – with an assertion that Chen is being targeted by law enforcement for daring to publish a story about a secret product.  First Amendment watchdog groups are rushing to the defense of Gizmodo. Even Jon Stewart, the greatest contextual journalist/comedian in America, has weighed in, presenting this as an Apple getting too powerful for its own good throwdown.

Stupid.

Every day in America, there are First Amendment issues that deserve attention. The role of the media  - and in this new age, the “media” includes basically everyone – is tantamount to democracy itself, and protections on the right to properly investigate and publish information should never be taken for granted.

But journalists who defend Gizmodo by classifying this particular incident as a First Amendment matter, are virtually peeing on the structure that supports their own careers.   As John Gruber has argued, “Gizmodo isn’t in trouble for spoiling Apple’s secret; they’re in trouble for breaking the law.”  In a tweet today, Gruber points to a statement from EFF and asserts “Unless I’m reading this wrong, EFF is arguing no warrants against journalists, ever, no matter what they may have done,” and follows with this:

I’m a 1st Amendment zealot but journalists are not a special class of super-citizen with warrant immunity.

Exactly.  While I’m a huge fan of Apple products, I think it’s mostly amusing when the company’s secrecy around product launches is breached.  But when members of the fourth estate begin to insinuate that their journalistic mission trumps routine property crimes, and when the Constitution becomes a shield of advocacy for every two-bit sleezy reporting stunt, that’s just wrong.

Put yourself in these shoes: You leave your laptop under a bench at the airport, and when you return a few minutes later in a panic, it’s gone. The thief roots through your hard drive, finds some interesting information about your company and sells the laptop to a “reporter” who then digs through your files and publishes that information about your company on the internet.

Is that a First Amendment issue?  Or is it a crime, on the part of both the original thief and the purchasing thief? You make the call. My call is that the First Amendment is too important to sully with this kind of stuff.

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber posts: Attention is the Real Resource.  Nice insight into how a very successful site utilizes full-content RSS feeds.

..The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

The routine argument for supplying RSS feeds has been to “drive viewers to your Web site”  -  with an underlying implication that the Web site is your “real” product, and RSS just a route into it.  That tunnel-vision gets pushed away among leading edge sites like DF, even as many media sites plow the opposite direction.

When I encounter a site that is clearly in the game for pageviews – doing stupid stuff like running photo galleries with full page reloads for every new photo, just so they can load in a more ad impressions – my tendency is to leave and not come back.  The tactic of deliberately annoying your users seems a pretty shaky path.

Take a look at Steve Yelvington’s post -  Continuing the participatory revolution, in which he revisits a theme first offered back in 1999.

News is no longer just a report. It’s a conversation, a broad process in which many people contribute to varying degrees.

In my own experience with reporters and editors, this idea is very slow to sink in, where it sinks in at all.

For example, every time the topic of reader participation arises, discussion quickly diverts to article comment policies, a relatively minor and already ancient piece of the participatory picture.  Even this nod toward interactivity is often a sinkhole. For in most cases, journalists don’t actively participate in their own articles’ comments, but instead treat comments as a lowbrid Letters to the Editor section of their Web site.  Little wonder that comment feeds can be a race to the bottom of public discourse – if you don’t cultivate the garden it’s going to be weedy.

There remains this sense, prevalent,  that newspapers are the authoritative and professional source, the diamond in the internet’s rough. Until this idea is tempered, talk of ‘emerging business models’ among newspaper folk  is mostly quaint.  Good online journalists will always be needed, but those who camp out under the shelter of the newspaper tradition? Lunch meat.

Last Wednesday’s keynote announced the Apple iPad, and it produced a colossal wave of feedback in the digital (and even analog) worlds.

The Minnov8 gang dedicated their whole weekly podcast to this new gadget, and the reaction there was largely positive.  I believe it was Phil Wilson who suggested that, even if version one of the IPad lacks certain much-wanted features, the device still stands to be a game-changer over the next several years.

In the geek gadget community, reaction leaned negative.  Engadget and Gizmodo focused on what the iPad doesn’t have and doesn’t do. Still, I noticed that the gadget hound sites, which were blasting insults full-force on Wednesday and Thursday, are quickly walking back, making certain that search results going forward show summaries that are more wait-and-see than the earlier point-and-laugh. Why are they doing this? Look no further than a brief, Slashdot review from 2001 of the iPod, in which Apple’s then-new mp3 player was dismissed as “lame.”   Ooh. That stings.

Read More…

National Geographic, long lauded for its excellent mapping, is equally masterful at infographics. Here’s a chart that imparts most of what you need to know about the health care debate.  A lead-in description is here, but hardly necessary. I believe the graph puts our forthcoming, um, historic health care reform in perspective. Looks like we’ve got a long, long way to go. [via Kottke]