Anderson@Large

Obama’s NAACP Speech in Black and White

President Barack Obama’s speech to the NAACP’s 100th national convention was heard through a racial prism.

White journalists wrote about Obama’s call for African Americans to take “personal responsibility.”

Meanwhile, black journalists focused on Obama acknowledging the “pain of discrimination is still felt in America.”

Indeed, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own home shatters the illusion of a post-racial America. Ironically, Gates is represented by one of Obama’s mentors, Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

Obama took note of the disparate media narratives. He told Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson:

I’ve noticed that when I talk about personal responsibility in the African American community, that gets highlighted. But then the whole other half of the speech, where I talked about government’s responsibility . . . that somehow doesn’t make news.

My colleague Richard Prince wrote:

Under one widely criticized headline, the New York Times summarized the speech as, “Obama Tells Fellow Blacks: ‘No Excuses’ for Failure” in a story by the Washington bureau’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Black journalists I know are questioning how some media outlets — including the New York Times — seemed to jump on Obama’s pleas for more personal responsibility with headlines like ‘No Excuses for Failure’ while downplaying other parts of his speech that talked about continuing problems with racial discrimination in America,” Eugene Kane, columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, wrote Friday in his blog.

In the new news ecosystem, black folks must write the first draft of their history. Otherwise, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

What You Do in the Dark

My mother used to warn me that what you do in the dark will come to the light.

The glare of the economic downturn has turned the light on Ponzi schemes. Tonight, PBS will air an investigation into Bernard Madoff, the world’s biggest Ponzi schemer.

A lot of folks want to know how the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to uncover “the scam of the century.”

I was among a group of Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellows who recently visited the SEC. While there, we met with a number of officials, including Kayla Gillan, SEC deputy chief of staff, and Scott Friestad, deputy director of the Division of Enforcement.

While Gillan couldn’t comment on a pending investigation, she noted:

Our job is to ensure that the required disclosures are made. It’s up to investors to determine whether proper decisions have been made.

Friestad observed that Ponzi schemes tend to be an affinity crime. Victims come to know the perpetrator through their church or other relationships. Investors tend to be middle-class, but not sophisticated about financial issues.

Madoff was an exception in that he targeted the rich and powerful. He met his victims through his synagogue, charitable causes and Palm Beach social circles.

You can watch the Madoff mess on air (check your local listing) or online.

Speaking Truth to Power

It is now old news that the newspaper industry is on a death watch. The story behind the story is that old media dug their own grave.

New York Times’ columnist Frank Rich wrote:

If you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq). To prove the point, the partying journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom could be seen (courtesy of C-Span) fawning over government potentates — in some cases the very “sources” who had fed all those fictional sightings of Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D.

Colbert’s routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it “fell flat.” The Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.

Frank continued:

It’s immaterial whether we find the fruits of their labors on paper, a laptop screen, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or podcast. But someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won’t.

Frank is right that the platform doesn’t matter. The people formerly known as the audience migrated to new media outlets because old media lost sight of their mission “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Old media truth-teller Walter Pincus observed:

American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.

The bottom line: The legacy media made their own bed, and must lie in it.

Old Media, Same Whine

This afternoon, the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet will hold a hearing on the “Future of Journalism.”

The future of digital news is bright, but distributors of print news have seen better days. So, old media want to go back to the future.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has launched a TV ad campaign urging viewers to unplug their PC, PDA, etc., and curl up with the Sunday paper.

While readers are getting their tactile groove on, perhaps they should pop a VHS tape into the VCR and crank up an 8-track cassette.

Unfortunately, there’s no going back. Jeff Jarvis wrote:

Add this all up and it keeps getting clearer and clearer: It makes less sense every day to try to preserve and protect - to invest in - what is obviously a failing model. Every day that papers keep printing is a day that they haven’t reinvented themselves for a new reality.

Fact is, newspapers have been holding on to an outdated business model for decades.

I was creating a timeline of my experience as a citizen journalist and stumbled upon a post dated June 21, 2000, “Online News -- Up and Dot-Coming,” in which I wrote:

A new Pew Research Center poll on media trends heralds the arrival of online news sites. The poll found that “old media’s” audiences, particularly younger and better-educated Americans, are migrating to the Internet for news and information.

I continued:

Still, there isn’t a broad smiley-face in the Internet news space. One reason: “old media” gatekeepers are making it difficult for “new media” to serve their audiences. In the name of “professional standards,” “old media” are denying “new media’s” applications for press credentials, a journalist’s ticket to news events and newsmakers. The credentialing committees dominated by “old media,” have a vested interest in keeping out new voices (click here for details). In short, “old media” fogies are in charge of accrediting their more nimble “new media” rivals.

Yeah, I know you’re probably saying, “Why should I care whether some byte-stained wretch gets a ticket to play?” Well, as more and more Americans look to the Internet for news, the lack of access impedes online journalists’ ability to get the story (click here for details). And if we don’t cover the story, it may not get covered.

Back then, institutional journalists decided to wait out online journalists. Online news sites and old media used the same business model (re: aggregate eyeballs). When the money disappeared in the wake of the dot-com bust, online journalists disappeared.

Fast forward to today. Citizen journalists are motivated by passion not the bottom line. So, we are not going away.

Meanwhile, institutional journalists are losing their jobs, newspapers are an endangered species and old media are running out of money. 

But there will be no bailout for legacy media. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs observed:

I think that might be a bit of a tricky area to get into given the differing roles.

Ya think?

Start Spreading the Digital News

I am leaving for the University of Maryland to participate in a Knight Center for Specialized Journalism seminar on the economy. This crash course on the financial crisis and its impact on families and communities is welcome news.

But sometimes no news is good news, particularly if the news is provided courtesy of a government bailout.

Soon-to-be former Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks recently wrote:

If we’re willing to use taxpayer money to build roads, pay teachers and maintain a military; if we’re willing to bail out banks and insurance companies and failing automakers, we should be willing to part with some public funds to keep journalism alive too.

Actually, we’re not willing to bail out automakers, banks or insurance companies. Americans took to the streets on Saturday because like AP Chairman Dean Singleton, they’re mad as hell.

The legacy media conflate news with newspapers. News is a socially constructed category. Publishers bundle together different stories, information, e.g., weather, sport scores and stock prices, and ads. But as noted in the Wall Street Journal:

City newspapers are no longer the dominant way people get news or the main way advertisers reach consumers.

Indeed, readers are getting their news online. News consumers are not interested in bailing out failed news bundlers who are stuck on stupid an obsolete business model.

Old Media Public Enemy No. 2, Arianna Huffington, wrote:

As you’ll see, for me the key question is whether those of us working in the media (old and new) embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.

Huffington continued:

The great upheaval the news industry is going through is the result of a perfect storm of transformative technology, the advent of Craigslist, generational shifts in the way people find and consume news, and the dire impact the economic crisis has had on advertising. And there is no question that, as the industry moves forward and we figure out the new rules of the road, there will be -- and needs to be -- a great deal of experimentation with new revenue models.

Legacy media say without them, there would be no investigative reporting. Tell that to the voiceofsandiego.org, an online news outlet that investigated a real estate swindle that fueled the state's foreclosure crisis.

Huffington told MSM nemesis Jeff Jarvis:

In the two biggest stories of our recent time—the war in Iraq and our financial meltdown—investigative journalism did not fulfill its mission. We all have a real stake in not only preserving what investigative journalism is but in making it better.

So, start spreading the news. Newspapers are on a death watch, but digital news is alive and kicking.

The Revolution Will Be Digitized

A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists found that today more bloggers are imprisoned than journalists from the mainstream media.

During an interview on Democracy Now!, Antony Loewenstein, author of “The Blogging Revolution,” said:

The bottom line is that many, many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda. Bloggers and blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the Internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put.

Last week I attended the Alliance for Youth Movements Summit, which brought together independent voices and grassroots leaders from around the world. The program included a panel discussion on how to stay safe in repressive regimes like Egypt and Iran.

The presenters talked about various communications tools they use to stay secure such as using multiple SIM cards. Some also use avatars, which gives new meaning to the adage that on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.

Activists send text messages, and join Facebook and Twitter. They use the microblogging platform to plan demonstrations and tell their story. Bloggers in Mumbai, for instance, provided eyewitness accounts to the terrorist attacks and sent tweets to organize relief efforts.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature, recently observed:

Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day.

Back in the day, Gil Scott-Heron told us, “The revolution will not be televised.” In the YouTube era, the revolution will be online, where digital activists are posting the “first rough draft of history.”