Archimedes’ Hot Tub

We go to conferences to glean new ideas and confer, of course, with people about topics that interest us. I got to do both this weekend at the Byte B@ck, the Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Conference. A side note: the SPJ, the largest journalist organization in the U.S., has 12 regions. Region 1 covers New England, New York, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsyvlania. This conference was fabulous (disclosure: I helped organize it, but just look at the sessions and the speakers)! I wish we had recorded things, because at almost every point there were at least two sessions I wanted to attend, and sometimes three.

I want to highlight some of the things I did attend. I’ll start with Ethan Zuckerman’s session on whether civic news was the future of journalism.

It may be possible to interact with Ethan and not find your mind whirring about something new, but in half-a-dozen engagements I’ve yet to have it happen. He has a gift for bringing into sharp focus something I’m been trying to articulate for myself. His session at Byte B@ck was on civic journalism, and as director of MIT’s Center for civic journalism, he has a lot to say on this. He started by stating the main challenge for journalists today: we are competing for people’s attention in a world saturated by demands for attention. Here’s what he said about why people often don’t pay attention to the news:

I think journalism has a civics problem. My argument is that we talk a lot about the survival of journalism, because we are deeply concerned about what happens if we don’t have a strong 4th Estate.

But I think a lot of our assumptions about how citizens participate in that debate probably could be challenged.

I agree about the civics problem, though I haven’t said it that way. I rarely write about politics per se, but I get angry when I read political coverage because so much of it is what Thomas Patterson calls horse race stories [Informing the News, a book summarized by Phil Hilts at the Byte B@ck session on specialized journalism]: who’s ahead, who’s behind. There is little room in that kind of reporting about the real winners and losers: the people political action affects most directly. I have fantasized about becoming a political reporter and *never* writing a horse race story, focusing solely on how what the candidates and elected officials say plays out in the lives of ordinary citizens.

I’m sure I’m naive to think I could avoid falling into the trap of covering politics like sports, or to think I could connect it to people on the ground in a way today’s political journalists don’t. Honestly, on the few occasions when I’ve interviewed elected officials, what they say actually is so carefully couched that it’s hard to figure out what it means. I can no more connect these people to something practical than I could connect a celebrity to my daily life.

I’ve probably unconsciously fallen into what Ethan calls ‘learned helplessness.’ News coverage is so regularly about something we can’t do anything about that it may make us more passive and withdrawn about being involved politically. This lack of action is a tragedy; democracy works, at least on the local level, because people involve themselves in making it work.

Ethan recommended The Good Citizen: A History of Civic American Life in part as a sanity check; our democracy has gone through different iterations, and the political process is vastly different than it once was. There is room for change. He also highlighted several examples of democracy in action: Carmen Rios and her SPARK Summit combating sexual violence, Pakistan’s Sughar Center, which promotes the involvement of women in civic life in rural Pakistan, the Icelandic entrepreneurs who founded Mailpile to help protect our email from prying eyes, and the Dream Nine immigration activists. Ethan also talked about one of his graduate students, who is writing on civic crowdfunding (note to self: could be a good story there).

These become examples of what he calls “monitorial citizenship.”

My question was whether journalists were even necessary for these kinds of independent political action. The examples Ethan gave of journalists effecting ways to involve people in the news were not satisfying to me (or to Ethan). He highlighted things like the ShoutBack feature now being used by some publications to give people a voice on stories, David Bornstein’s Solutions Journalism and Danish Broadcasting Corp.’s ‘constructive journalism’ movement. That last sounds most promising — no reporting critical stories unless you can find an alternative answer. Ethan’s own PromiseTracker project in Brazil sounds fascinating (note to self: there might be a story there, too).

Ethan said journalists “all need to get over their allergy to advocacy journalism.’ I’m not so sure. I have friends who become so engaged in their stories that they become activists; their stories are wrapped in the context of the cause, meaning they might miss all the reasons why the cause will fail. Advocacy journalism is perhaps better than partisan journalism; I think there would be a thin line between advocating for political change and becoming partisan about a topic, and while there’s a place for partisan writing and reporting, I think we would lose something important if all journalists became advocates or partisans.  Advocates tell stories that matter to them and their cause. Partisans likewise focus on their party’s point of view and advancing it. I don’t think these forms of journalism work well in what Ethan called the pointillist world that is emerging from our vast technological advance. Who will cover that in its context? Not advocates or partisans. They eliminate points of view. At the same time, advocating in some form for those without a voice has long been a tenet of journalism that I admire.

I emailed Ethan to see what role journalists play in a world of monitorial citizenship. He responded “I see a huge role for journalists in the politics I’m imagining. Many of the important civic issues aren’t ones average citizens are likely to discover for themselves. My hope is that we might see a bigger role for journalists, as people realize the profound value of having someone knowledgeable investigate issues they care about. My hope is that linking reporting and mobilization will get people to value journalism more, not less. Fingers crossed.”

Fingers crossed, indeed.

One unexpected quirk of a Boston tech ecosystem I’m writing about for Boston magazine is the age of the founders: of the four companies I focus on, none of the founders was in their 20s. Some were in their 50s. Most had started other companies, or been executives someplace else. I started asking why, and was told that these companies were solving hard problems businesses have. The famous youth cult in Silicon Valley were largely formed around softer consumer tech, solving relatively easy problems (no offense to Google, of course). Business customers want their problems solved by people with grey hair and demonstrated business competence.

It’s probably confirmation bias on the part of companies, but then I ran across Noam Schieber’s New Republic cover story Silicon Valley’s Brutal Ageism. It’s an old story — dislike of anyone old enough to know better was evident when I was in Silicon Valley (1998 to 2004) — but he starts with a San Francisco plastic surgeon making his money from helping men look like they’re in their 20s again (actually, some men in their 20s want to look younger, too). It’s a brilliant anecdote, really marvelous.

Scheiber’s main thread follows along with a 40s something entrepreneur with several small successes under his belt. It’s hard to say why VCs won’t fund him; Scheiber makes the idea out to seem like an upgraded version of DropBox (meaning DropBox would be a candidate to buy the company for its technology, usually a welcome outcome for VCs). It’s painful entertainment watching the entrepreneur struggle to raise money, kind of like seeing the tenor miss the high note at the opera. (The entrepreneur, Nick Stamos, is based in Boston. He should be talking to the Boston VCs who funded the companies I’m writing about.) There are reasons why older tenors miss high notes and older entrepreneurs don’t get funded, according to these suggestive statistics put together by Harvard Business Review, though they aren’t strong enough to be more than suggestive. The statistics also suggest that Silicon Valley VCs do continue to fund older entrepreneurs, by the way.
But then, people in the Valley who tout youth also do things like make LarryandSergey hire Eric Schmidt, and Mark bring in Sheryl Sandberg. They forced 30-year-old Steve Jobs out of Apple, at the time the right move for the company; Jobs needed seasoning. That Jobs could never have made peace with Bill Gates, the thing that saved Apple from bankruptcy in the late 1990s. He became the Jobs of legend only in his late 40s, when the iPod/iTunes combo took off.

Scheiber’s Botox-craving 20-year-olds is a kind of wake-up slap to the Valley. It should be obvious that experience matters, even in programming. The idea that older programmers can’t learn new languages and techniques is stupid. I’m reminded of the Jon Franklin story about a former slave who learned multiple languages in his spare time, developing fluency in new ones well into his 70s (I haven’t found a link online). Nobody wins when they’re investing in Botox.

One reader of my piece on Boston Under Water, the cover story in Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine, wrote in to say “I’m keeping a copy of this week’s magazine so that in 30 years I can pull it out and have a good laugh at the absurd predictions and loony policy suggestions. Thanks in advance for a good laugh!”

First, I would be happy in 30 years to be one of those reporters whose articles get held up as an example of how little we really know about the future. If I’m still coherent, I’ll breathe a small inward sigh of relief that I didn’t talk up the plans some have to retreat to Worcester.

It is certainly true that science is not linear. We are not marching along the x axis in a perfect set of dots, sea levels rising a tad each year. Within the last five years, sea levels around Boston even dropped slightly in an 18-month period.  But they’re on the rise again, and my article was based on what scientific models predict will happen over time. We can mock models for their inability to predict the weather more than a few days out, but sea level models work on long-term averages, not specific points (here are good basic and intermediate explainers of how the models work). The models have worked well for what we know of the past, which gives them some authority when talking about the future.

I fear my scoffing reader will not bother to save their copy of the magazine when the basement starts flooding twice a day.

One of the bonuses for speaking at a conference is getting to attend the rest of the sessions and learn from them. The Power of Narrative, Mark Kramer’s latest writing fest, features a number of tracks looking at multimedia storytelling. Tonight, I went to see Val Wang talk about the techniques she used to put together Planet Takeout.

She wanted to tell a local story that showed how immigrants adapt to their neighborhoods, and picked Chinese takeout restaurants because they have adapted Chinese cuisine to American tastes in a unique way, and because takeouts become a unique part of a neighborhood. She used digital graphical tools like mapping, did immersive radio reporting, shot a limited amount of video and worked with a documentary photographer to create deep portraits of these everyday places. I found her approach creative, and appreciated little bits like using a Chinese takeout menu as the model for one of her entrypoints into her stories.

She said access was an issue, and that it took her two to three months to secure access to the four Boston-area takeout restaurants she covered. She then spent another two to three months reporting, gathering stories from each of the restaurants and their customers. Then it was another three months or so of producing the pieces.

Val said that she had hoped to spark some participatory journalism through her project, but this has so far been a disappointment. She encouraged people to contribute via instagram photos and stories of take-out places that matter to their neighborhoods. “That was experimental and frustrating,” she said. “It was hard to get people to do.”

I wasn’t surprised; when I was at LatitudeNews, we wanted the site to be participatory, a hybrid citizen/pro journalism model. We also found it hard to get much participation. Val did play a brief story that a listener had recorded, and showed a map with photos of take-out places in other regions. But she said she so far only had a smattering of responses, and not the groundswell she had hoped for.

It was a valuable session not least because I got to see Zeega in action. Zeega offers a simple way to meld photos, video and audio together into story form. I’ve seen Kara Oehler, Zeega’s founder, talk about it both during its development and after the product was introduced. She’s dynamic, smart and inspiring, but until tonight I simply didn’t get why a journalist might use her product. But Zeega was the basis for Planet TakeOut’s multimedia component, and Planet Takeout was in part the basis for Zeega’s features — the two were developed together, in a sense. Seeing how Val used Zeega, I got it and why it matters as a tool for journalists. It may be time for me to experiment with it (hope it doesn’t take me nine months to produce a project!)