spencercritchley.com

Even blogs can have re-runs. This post turned out to be pretty popular, so here it is again, almost as good as new:

Blogs, podcasts & e-newsletters make it easy for anyone to be a journalist. But just as the debut of desktop publishing led to some very ugly documents, these newer tools are spawning some very sloppy journalism, which does no good for the reputation of participatory media. Here are some tips on how good journalists do useful work (first published on my O’Reilly blog):

1. Respect the value of people’s time. Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It’s not fascinating just because I said it.
2. Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it. A good focus is a simple idea that people care about–in a newspaper story, it’s the lede. It’s a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article or program–everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth as a model: the whole first movement is based on four notes.
3. Look for the heat in your subject. Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. This primacy of emotion is routinely abused in mass media–hence the prevalence of sex, death, greed and vanity–but you don’t have to go that far, just look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide. For example, this headline and first sentence draws you into a recent Scientific American blog about a primitive member of the genus Hibbertopterus:
   

   Supersized Water Scorpion Strolled Scotland’s Shores
   The other day I had an unfortunate run-in with a cockroach in my apartment…

4. Whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions. These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and clichés.
5. Use plain speech, and talk like a real person. Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can’t say it plainly, that may mean you don’t understand it well enough yet.
6. Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. They seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, “If you find an adjective, kill it.” Try it, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare “The widow Douglas was sanctimonious and hypocritical” with the way Twain wrote it in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn:
   

   The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.

7. Opinions are not facts, even your opinions. Opinions make personal journalism lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions when you’re predisposed to believe something. This is the source of deluges of unreliable information on the Web.
8. Identify your sources. Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive–even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! –and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility.
9. Identify interests. If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that’s another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying.
10. Fact-check. Reputable pro media outlets use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: spell-check!

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BTW, O’Reilly editor & blogger David Battino has a good in-depth article on producing podcasts in December’s Electronic Musician, with a companion web-based guide based on a podcast with composer BJ Liederman (of NPR themes fame).

A very nice review of “Nowhere Motel” by The Desert Mothers at Australian music site duggup.com.au, which has made us their featured artist of the day - excerpt:

Today’s track is a ripper, for a whole bunch of reasons. My favourite one is that if you are interested you get to hear the stages the song went through as it was created as the recording process moves along. (this assumes that like me, you actually are interested in stuff like that). So, if you have ever wondered about how a song is created? Then today is your day because…

1. Spencer Critchley (the driving force behind The Desert Mothers) has documented the whole process from audio sketch to the finished product above complete with MP3 excerpts from the recording along the way.
2. “Nowhere Motel” is a great song (which is a really good thing).

Read the whole review…

Have a listen -and if you like, write a short review!

Click to go to our iTunes location

(This will launch the iTunes app from your browser, assuming you have iTunes installed.)

My new band The Desert Mothers has a new release, “Nowhere Motel”, which I’m really excited about - give it a listen. Here’s our web site, which has a music player on the home page:

http://thedesertmothers.com

If you like it, give it a thumbs up! You can listen to or buy it at one of my new favorite online music stores indiestore.com or Amie Street. At indiestore, you can buy it for 99 cents, right here: http://www.indiestore.com/desertmothers. At Amie Street, they have a really interesting model under which the price rises, up to 99 cents, as the popularity of the song rises. Right now, because it’s brand new, “Nowhere Motel” is just 13 cents! You have to buy a minimum of $3.00 worth of credits towards this and other songs to get started, but they have lots of great music to buy there, so it’s still a deal. http://amiestreet.com/thedesertmothers. Soon “Nowhere Motel” will also be on iTunes and a lot of other places.

I recorded it with great, great talent from across the country, using a new web-based recording service called esession.com, which is like a virtual recording studio. My players were:

• Gina Fant-Saez on vocals. Gina is a wonderful singer and songwriter, and the engineer/owner at Blue World Studios in Austin, where U2, Sting, Shawn Colvin and others have recorded.
• Pat Mastelotto on drums. He was a member of Mr. Mister, and has played with XTC, King Crimson, David Sylvian and many others.
• Byron House on bass. Byron has played with the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Dolly Parton, and many others. He also produced the latest album by the Waybacks.
• Bruce Kaphan on steel guitar and dobro. He’s played with David Byrne, Sheryl Crow, the Black Crowes, American Music Club and the Red House Painters, among others.
• Tom Roady on precussion. The Dixie Chicks, Kenny Chesney, Michael McDonald, Ricky Skaggs, Trisha Yearwood, many others.
• Gene Rabbai on piano. Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, and more.
• Me on guitar, songwriting & production (my brother Owen contributed to the songwriting).
• Marc Urselli mixed it. Marc is a 2-time Grammy-winner, including for Les Paul’s "American Made, World Played", featuring Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and others.

I’ve written an article about the whole experience for O’Reilly Digital Media, complete with MP3 excerpts from the recording process. You can find it here:

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/12/13/esession-online-recording-for-all.html.

If you find that you REALLY like “Nowhere Motel”, I hope you’ll tell your friends about it. You can:

• forward a Desert Mothers music store link to them:
  http://www.indiestore.com/desertmothers for Indie Store or http://amiestreet.com/artist/13359 for Amie Street

• or find free tools for promoting The Desert Mothers at:
  http://amiestreet.com/promote/The+Desert+Mothers

• Or, you can even buy the attractive hat or T-shirt! You’ll find those here:
  http://www.cafepress.com/desertmothers

My new musical project is The Desert Mothers, who have just released their first single, Nowhere Motel.

Listen to it at thedesertmothers.com, or on the great social music site Amie Street:

It’s early days, but just like the record industry, American democracy is being taken apart and rebuilt by digital technology and the web.

Several trends are converging to make this possible and, I think, inevitable. All are characterized by the loss of centralized control to open and/or free systems. These include the rise of open political platforms, such as moveon.org, as an alternative to parties; and the disintermediation of news coverage via blogs, YouTube and citizen journalism. Lately I’ve been following the rise of a third trend: alternative ways of tracking candidates’ reputations. The latest example of that: Wonkosphere.

Wonkosphere uses patented technology licensed from the University of Arizona to track how much buzz there is about candidates, as well as the tone of that buzz. It crawls hundreds of blogs every day. To measure buzz:

[Wonkosphere] measures the proportion of buzz for each candidate in all blogs for the 24 hours preceding the latest update. Percentages for each candidate are calculated every four hours. To get the value we first analyze each blog post for each candidate, and score the prominence of the candidate’s name within the post. We sum these prominence scores across all candidates then express their scores as a percent of the total.

As for tone:

Tone measures the amount of positive and negative language used in statements about the candidate in blog posts. On the home page and top of the candidate pages, we indicate whether the tone value is high, low, or average compared to the average range of tone values for all the candidates in the last 24 hours. These values are broken out for liberal and conservative blogs.

We also calculate an average tone value across all posts each candidate for each calendar day, broken out by political persuasion of the blogs mentioning the candidate.

Wonkosphere also plans to reintroduce its “Mud Meter”, which it used in 2004 to measure mud-slinging between George Bush and John Kerry.

As I mentioned, Wonkosphere’s tech is patented (and they even trademarked “Mud Meter”), but the content is free. I don’t see any mention of plans for an open API, but that would be welcome.

As with the Wikipedia trust-coloring system (which is not limited to politics and which I wrote about here) and the Truth-o-Meter (wrote about it here), data graphics are used to powerful effect: condensing storms of information so that meaning can be seen at a glance.

And come to think of it, free, powerful data graphics generation is another trend behind technology-enabled open democracy.

Following my recent post about a color-coded reputation management system* for politicians (indicating their truthfulness by the color used to display their names on web pages), I came across Politifact and its Truth-o-Meter.

Politifact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly that will “analyze the [presidential] candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.”

I found it via the techPresident blog, where Joshua Levy notes that the it could benefit by being opened up to users:

…and let them pore through the records and make the connections. As Jay Rosen’s recent overtures to crowdsourcing and the various projects of the Sunlight Foundation have shown us, the crowd is smarter than a few individuals; open up the process to them and you’ll be amazed at what they find.

And I’d like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there’s less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn’t end up visiting. A system that follows you around like, say, your name.

News of computer scientist Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring system revived - and improved - an idea I’ve been playing with: automated reputation-management for politicians. The idea is to make the concept of honor meaningful again, by creating new social rewards and penalties for behavior that affects the rest of us. (It could, of course, also be applied to journalists, corporate leaders or other public figures.)

Chosen as a Top 10 blog post of the month by Carnival of Trust

De Alfaro’s system, now operating in demo form on a sample of a few hundred Wikipedia pages, ranks the trustworthiness of Wikipedia authors by measuring how long their contributions last without being edited. Text contributed by the author is color-coded for trustworthiness:

Text on white background is trusted text; text on orange background is untrusted text. Intermediate gradations of orange indicate intermediate trust values.

I think it would be useful to be able to do the same thing with politicians’ names every time they appear on the web. Here’s how I think it might be spec’d:

• Our software would crawl the pages of factcheck.org, looking for the names of politicians.
• The software would check to see if each name appeared in the context of a correction of an untruth/exaggeration/”misstatement”.
• The reputation of each politician would be scored according to how many appearances his/her name made in such negative contexts.
• Any time the politician’s name appeared on a web page, it would be displayed in a box of the appropriate color. In this case white might not be the best choice for “trustworthy”, since the politician might not be trustworthy, just unranked. So we might go spectrum-wise from green for “honest” to red for “frequent liar”. (On a relative scale - I’m not enough of a Puritan to believe there are people who are 100% honest or 100% dishonest.)
• This color-coded display could be accomplished either on the client side or the server side: on the client side as a browser plug-in, or on the server side as an extension of the publisher’s content management system.

I think there would be a strong value proposition for both consumers and publishers. Imagine the impact of seeing your news presented this way:

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

vs.

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

And imagine the possible impact on politicians’ respect for the truth. Currently, if factcheck.org or some other organization calls you out on a fabrication, the impact is more or less safely sequestered within their limited reach. This way, the impact could spread everywhere, the way good or bad word on one’s reputation spreads through small real-world communities.

Why use factcheck.org as opposed to open ratings? If the reputation ranking were open, I think we could count on enormous amounts of abuse by partisans, including attempts to undermine all trust in the system. The people behind factcheck.org are journalism experts, and the site is avowedly non-partisan. But it might work to make the ranking system “porous” as opposed to fully open, like the new publish2 journalism community, or in fact like granddaddy slashdot. People who had themselves earned a reputation for honesty could be allowed to rank the honesty of others.

There would probably be claims, especially by those with names of an embarrassing color, that factcheck.org (or any other arbiter) is not in fact non-partisan. And so consumers might choose alternative arbiters, if it came to that. But here, too, some reputations would weigh more than others, as they always have.

Adapted from a reply on John Jarvis’ Buzz Machine blog:

The Internet and cheap digital tools allow crowd-sourcing of news by amateurs, not just because the technology makes production and distribution fast, easy and cheap, but also because it diffuses risk through the crowd. So it makes any individual’s share of the risk small enough to be acceptable, and makes the small compensation (recognition, fun, etc) acceptable as well. In the same way, the net itself has been made available for next to nothing by diffusing the cost (risk) through countless servers and routers.

But in discussions of the amateur future of media there’s an issue of risk management that usually goes unexamined. Traditionally, risk has been contained by corporations (for profit or not), and individual reporters have been able to risk time, effort and potential liability because a corporation was both compensating them for and insuring them against risk.

The question for the future is how we make sure we still cover important stories if they require a lot of risk to be taken on by one or two individuals. The diffused risk model is fine - and may even be better in some ways - for reporting stories that can be reported from the outside, by amateur observers. For example: speeches, earthquakes, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.

But some of the most important stories will still require individuals to take on very large amounts of risk, including months or years of time and potentially huge liability. For example: financial crimes, political corruption or wars.

We might dismiss old ways of doing things, but we can’t just dismiss risk (I’ve noticed - and certainly been guilty of it myself - that when risk has been lost track of, hand-waving starts). In the new media world, some risks (such as printing costs) do disappear into the cloud. But only some.

Not all risks are financial. One possible outcome of the “amateurization” of news is that politically important stories stop being covered (and I’d say such a trend is already well under way, as the unit value of hard news coverage drops relative to to coverage of the nexus of sex, death, entertainment, shopping and celebrities. Not because only old-style experts can possibly report hard news, but because the risk isn’t being managed (including, I’d have to say, the risk involved in becoming an old-style expert).

This transition might lead to a financially optimal result. It might also amount to democratization in some ways, in that publishing is opened to all. But socially, the picture may not be all bright. It amounts to whether or not it matters if there remains a distinction between citizens and consumers.

I’m not saying “old ways good, new ways bad”. But neither am I saying “new ways good, old ways bad”. As is usually the case, I think the new reality is likely to be complicated. We’re going to have to find new ways to manage risks - like maintaining a healthy democracy - that will still be worth taking even after the old ways of handling those risks are gone. The “buggy whip maker” argument says that you shouldn’t try to force your fellows to pay you for economically unproductive activity, such as, by some lights, journalism. Again, not all risks are financial.

(Cross-posted at dailykos.com.)

In 2008, let’s take back our language, too.

As far as I can tell, the first time the USA was widely referred to as the “Homeland” was when the Bush Administration created the Department of Homeland Security. I thought it sounded creepy then, and, what with events since, it sounds even creepier now. Among the many other things that need to be fixed after Bush finally goes, we need to fix that name.

The greatness of America is precisely that it is not a Homeland. America is an idea, an idea that draws people from other places around the world. They come, and always have, because that idea is better and more powerful than any nativist myth about any physical piece of territory.

Yes, the land of the USA is spectacularly beautiful and bountiful. And yes, of course, it’s our home, and we should defend it if and when it’s attacked. But as much as we love it, our land is not what defines us, and the fact that it happens to be our home does not begin to suggest America’s true value.

What defines us is democracy, and what is best about us is democracy.

That’s the reason that terms like “fatherland” or “motherland” or indeed “homeland” have always sounded foreign to American ears. They sounded foreign not just because they were used in other countries. They sounded foreign because they are foreign to the idea of America. Because America is, first of all, an idea, not a “homeland”.

By creating legislation like the “PATRIOT Act”, turning our enemies into cartoon “evildoers” and by claiming to defend “Homeland Security”, the Bush administration has tried to shift the way we talk, and therefore think, about America. And that is a great threat to the security that matters most.

Our true homeland is freedom.