Xark!

Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy

Abstract: This 2,600-word essay describes how a news-media industry equipped with semantic tools could develop a standards-based certification program for journalism. Certification would be by non-governmental bodies similar to the ISO, and would focus on information processing and coding standards rather than on matters of ethics. The effect of such a standard would enable interoperability between semantic directories, which would allow for the creation of software that compares facts and checks the accuracy of statements.It is the second in a series of essays about semantic media. Since some readers had difficulty imagining the system, I've added an FAQ for these ideas, and added descriptions to the links listed at the end.

There's nothing exciting or romantic about standards. Personally, I find them tedious.

There, I've said it.

But there's no happy and profitable future for journalism without professional standards, and for that future we should be willing to sweat a little tedium. If my conclusions are correct, then our emerging information-based global economy will require interchangeable, robust data in the same way that our current economy requires that every finely threaded quarter-inch screw must have 28 threads per inch, machined to precisely the same height and pitch and thread-axis angle, regardless of whether the screw is manufactured in the People's Republic of China or Alpharetta, Ga.

Manufacturers of products that require screws need to know not only that the fasteners they buy are machined to precise dimensions and specifications, but that the tolerance of the machining and the durability of the materials fall within known quality standards. This generic uniformity makes it possible for manufacturers around the world to compete primarily on cost, and it works because manufacturers voluntarily abide by standards that were published and certified by international bodies.

If we are to benefit from a global semantic economy, then the information that fuels its industries and drives its markets must be structured, coded, stored, published and quality-certified to international standards. This is a foreseeable future (one among many), because we now possess the tools and techniques required to build the first platform that would make semantic markup of narrative documents a profitable, persistent revenue stream across the publishing industry. So long as the value of these resources continues to expand, we can expect to see voluntary participation in these activities, with resulting increases in productivity and organization.

Imagining the Semantic Economy

Abstract: This 3,000-word essay proposes and describes an economy based on exchanges of intelligently structured data; argues that the path to that economy will not be imposed from above but will emerge like a crystal lattice in a super-saturated solution; explains why a Semantic Content Management System for the publishing industry could be the profitable catalyst for this development; discusses the outline of such a system.

Clay Shirky blew up the grand vision of The Semantic Web in 2003, which is probably why serious people aren't particularly alert to the possibility of a semantic revolution building in response to current conditions. That's probably because the general perspective on semantic architecture is that it must be grandiose and top-down. I believe the route to our semantic future comes from the opposite direction, and I've tried to make that case by imagining and describing a publishing system that would create information structures that could spread because the publishing system would make those structures profitable.

But the widespread inability to imagine the benefits of such tools points to a more fundamental lack of understanding, and it occurred to me recently that maybe it's time to address it.

It's the Semantic Economy, Stupid.

Reform the media? How 2009.

David Carr's delightfully sadistic evisceration of Sam Zell and the toxic-waste disaster that is today's Tribune Company left me ranting loudly from the kitchen while my wife tried to work in our home office. “Why do you still get so worked up about media?” she asked. “Why do you even bother?”

A fair question, to which I finally developed a two-part answer late in the day: 1. Because apparently I'm still not "over" media, or at least my belief in what media could be; and 2. Because the future of our society is just too damned important to consign its fate forever to the Zells of the world.

Rupert and the Paywall Oblivion Cliff

Got this email this morning from our friend Geoff, who works for the BBC in London.

saw you across the Times paywall this morning - it's created a little media storm here. everyone is watching VERY CLOSELY to see what their hits are going to be like for the next few weeks now. it SHOULD be a flop and Murdoch will have egg on his face.  SHOULD... right?

Here's my reply (lightly edited):

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I really can't figure out Murdoch's play here. Then again, I haven't looked at how the Times paywall works. How much can you get for free, how is the payment taken, what are the options, etc., etc. (author's note: the reason I don't know is that I'm not sufficiently convinced of the plan's viability to even go study its details seriously). I suppose it is possible to have a pay-to-read system that's intelligent, but I just don't see that there are many "newspaper" products in the world that have sufficient uniqueness and value to succeed on that basis.

Congratulations on your promotion to executive editor of your metro newspaper!

I'm sure it was well-earned, too.

The Revolution Will Be Commercialized

"Nowadays, for both poles of the political spectrum but especially for the right, politics is a business—the entertainment business. The freak show, as Mark Halperin termed it, has been turned into a fully merchandised product. It was Fox’s Roger Ailes who had the insight that the American right was an underserved market, one with a powerful kind of brand loyalty. Fox News has turned a disaffected segment of the populace into a market, with the fervor and idiosyncratic truth standards of a cult. Wingnut-ism has been monetized, is one admittedly partisan way of looking at it. Palin stokes the disaffection of her constituents and then, with the help of Fox, offers to heal them, for a price. And—surprise—they’re more affluent than most Americans. Fifty-six percent make over $50,000 a year, according to a Times/CBS poll. Running for president is no doubt part of her business model. But forget elections (as many Palin supporters already seem to have done); she’s already the president of an alternative America—and also its CEO."

-- Gabriel Sherman, in his April 25th article about Sarah Palin for New York magazine.

This pretty much sums it up

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

Reid, racism and ... oh dear Gawd

I think I get it. The "uproar" over Sen. Harry Reid's "racist" statements about President Obama is a calculated episode of Republic rage designed to assert a passionate proxy claim: that Republicans have for years caught media hell for statements about black people, and now they want the same standard applied to Democrats. 

So let's set aside Reid's remarks and deal with the GOP grievance for which this controversy is a stand-in. Does the mainstream media apply a double standard on race when it comes to Republicans and Democrats?

Answer: I think so.

But here's the difficult part for Republicans. It's not a context-free double standard, and it's probably not going to go away until party leaders establish a sustained public track record of confronting the racist-wacko wing of the GOP. There are clearly party officials who find this corner of the conservative base frightening and offensive, but political calculus has long required that they trend lightly on their neo-Bircher constituents.

Neither can media attitudes (not to mention public skepticism) about Republican racial credibility be laid entirely at the feet of a few closet Klansmen. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was a successful racist gambit. Lee Atwater felt so bad about his role in perpetuating that era that his conscience compelled him to a deathbed confession of his political sins. George H.W. Bush gave us Willie Horton, and his son won the Republican nomination in 2000 with the help of push polls in South Carolina that insinuated that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Earlier this year a majority of Republicans believed that ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. And so on.

Is it fair to tar all Republicans with this brush? No. Think back to the conservatives who confronted the extremists at various campaign rallies in 2008, or even to McCain trying to correct statements made by audience members at town hall gatherings. I'm no fan of Michael Steele, but I certainly don't think he's a black-on-black racist. 

So if you Republicans want an apology for Trent Lott, here's mine. Lott shouldn't have had to resign his Senate leadership post for those comments he made to Strom Thurmond. Dumb? Yes. Firing offense? No. I suspect Lott was just trying to say something nice on the man's100th birthday and probably wasn't thinking too clearly about the fact that he had just publicly endorsed an explicitly racist campaign platform from 1948. Mistakes were made.

But here's the part I wish more Republicans would get. Lott was sacrificed for your party's collective sins since the middle of the 20th century, and the sins of the father will continue to be visited on his children until you confront the cynical political calculus that keeps nine out of 10 black voters in the Democratic camp. 

The deep irony here is that in setting the racism bar so low for Reid, Steele and the Republicans are laying a trap for the next ill-equipped white guy from their party who says something quasi-stupid. As a liberal I can't say I'm upset about that, but my agenda here is pretty simple. In the same way that only Nixon could go to China, only the Republican Party can push the die-hard remnants of white racism out of the mainstream once and for all.

Consider it a practical quest. I sure wouldn't want to be known as the "white party" in a country with our current demographic trends.Not a good long-term branding solution.

*(For the record -- and so as not to hide behind the view-from-nowhere -- I don't consider what I read of Reid's remarks to be racist, or anything less than candid truth. But racism is, like obscenity, in the eye of the beholder... which is part of what makes it such a tiresome subject.)

What's interesting in the media discussion

So here on the first day of this new decade, I'd like to say a couple of things.

First, even though the future-of-media topic features exciting and frightening new trends in information and culture and learning and communication and authority, it's important to remember that this is a story about money. I'm happy The Tower is falling, but it's not falling because it sucked so bad for so long. It's falling because it's not profitable anymore. That's all.

Second, if your idea for the future of journalism doesn't propose either a new subsidy for the profession or a new concept of "content" that has a market value independent of what advertisers will pay for it, then I'm not likely to be interested. This doesn't mean that your idea is without merit -- we're headed toward a complex 21st century media ecosystem, not a new mass-media monoculture, and there are all sorts of new things we'll have to make for that ecosystem. It's just that ideas based on old assumptions about content probably aren't helping us derive the shape of the next media economy.

Most of our new-media ideas still assume that the future of journalism is inextricably linked to advertising, and since the television-industrial complex is failing, their prescription is typically just a variation on the idea of ever-less-expensive content costs. Others ignore sustainability and propose a non-profit future. If you're comfortable with those limits, you're in a great big club, because this is where most of our discussions are taking place today.

I'm not comfortable with it. I worked in the business for 20 years, and I don't see any way around this observation: Quality is expensive, and crap has diminishing returns. So whether you're telling me that the future is social media, or iPhone apps, or paid content schemes, or search optimization, or niche aggregation -- whatever -- unless you're changing the game, you're still talking about 21st century iterations of 20th century media. You're part of a race to the bottom.

I suspect that the changes we'll experience in the next decade will make what we saw in the past 10 years look mild by comparison. I suspect that companies will develop profitable ways to configure and package information that cannot be appropriated, re-Tweeted, copied or pasted. Not stories per se, but something deeper. In other words, a news-media future that's based on the creation of lasting value instead of the renting of ephemeral attention.

The pieces of that future exist today. Knitting them together won't be simple. 

Then again, things always look simpler looking back from the end of a decade. And won't that be fun?

(Here's the original version, which took too long to warm up)

Paid content and free content at George's Restaurant

While eating my breakfast at George's Restaurant in Oak Park this morning, I noticed that just about every other customer, upon entering and saying hello to George, stopped at the counter and browsed through a stack of newspapers: The Sun Times, the Tribune, the local Oak Park paper. They'd pick out one or more and carry the papers to their booths to read over breakfast.

On their way out, the diners would pay their bills and return the free (to them, anyway) newspaper to the stack for the next patron. And so on.

I've noticed similar systems elsewhere, including coffeehouses that provide free copies of The New York Times despite selling The NYT out of a rack by the cash register.

So yes, somebody paid for the content in those newspapers, but certainly not everybody who consumed it paid.

Which raises the question: Why aren't newspaper companies cracking down on the sharing of their products in restaurants, diners, bars, coffeehouses and other public gathering places? Why should newspapers sell copies to libraries, which are just going to share them with the public, at the same rate that they sell subscriptions to individuals?

And if newspapers aren't all whacked out about this blatant theft of their intellectual property at George's Restaurant, then why do so many otherwise rational newspaper employees wax certifiably insane whilst lecturing the rest of us about the evils of "giving away content on the Web?" 

And the answer is: Because they're in the business of giving away content in order to sell ads. The only difference between "stealing" a read in a print copy versus the same free read online is that print ads are expensive enough that newspaper companies never had to care about all this rampant diner piracy. If online advertising were nearly as valuable, newspaper companies wouldn't be bitching. 

Got it? Any questions?