Journalism

When the Problem Is the Story

Doc Searls — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:02:18 +0000

Linux isn't a story anymore.

That's a good thing, but not an interesting one. Let me explain.

Journalism's main product is the story. In newsrooms, the three words uttered most often by editors to reporters are "What's the story?"

As I was taught by an editor long ago—and as I have found to be true constantly ever since—all stories are about three things:

A character. Usually human, but not always. Could be a cause. A sports team. A political party. Could be good, or bad, or neither. All that matters is that the character is interesting. You can also have more than one, but a single one is better.
A problem or conflict. A situation that challenges the character, or characters, further defining them and making them more interesting. Problems and conflict keep people interested, so they keep reading, watching, listening, turning pages, talking to others about it, and "move the narrative along" (as the news watchers like to say).
Movement toward resolution. Doesn't matter if the end never arrives. Hell, look at soap operas. You just have to keep the story moving in the direction of conclusion. Newsroom aphorism: "No story ever starts with 'Happily ever after'." Another: "If your team is up forty points with five minutes left, your new story is about how you get out of the parking lot ahead of traffic."

All three of those are why Linux isn't much of a story any more, even though it's bigger in the world than it has ever been.

Linux had character when it was easy to cast as an underdog operating system, and the problem was beating Windows. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, did his best not to be interesting, but his fans made him interesting anyway:

Us included. The above is from a slide show that was featured in a story I wrote back in 2002 that's off-web at the moment, but also beside the point, which is that Linus and his penguins were characters in stories that were interesting at the time and aren't anymore.

That's because Linux has achieved the world domination it longed for in the early years.

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Will Anything Make Linux Obsolete?

Doc Searls — Tue, 09 May 2017 11:27:19 +0000

by Doc Searls

Remember blogging? Hell, remember magazine publishing? Shouldn't be hard. You're reading some now.

Both are still around, but they're obsolete—at least relatively. Two cases in point: my blog and Linux Journal.

Back when blogging was a thing, in the early 2000s, about 20,000 people subscribed to RSS feeds of my original blog (1999–2007, still mothballed here). At its peak, I posted many times per day and had a strong sense of connection with my readership.

Same went, by the way, for my postings in Linux Journal, on our website and on one of our own blogs, called IT Garage—lots of readers, lots of engagement.

Most early bloggers were journalists by profession or avocation—good writers, basically. Some blogs turned into online pubs. BoingBoing, TechCrunch and TPM all started as blogs.

But blogging began to wane after Twitter and Facebook showed up in 2006. After that journalism also waned, as "content generation" became the way to fill online publications. Participating in "social media" also became a requisite function for journalists still hoping to stay active online (if not also employed).

These days, I blog only a few times per month, for readers that range in number from dozens to hundreds. Usually I duplicate those posts in Medium, where they get about the same numbers. Meanwhile, I have 23.7k followers on Twitter (as @dsearls). Although that's a goodly number, you could say the same for the average parking space. (Which, if it could speak, might say "Hey, I had 25k impressions on passing drivers today and engaged 15.") From what I can tell from counting clicks of shortlinks I produce with Bit.ly, most of my tweets are clicked on by a few dozen people, tops. I'd gladly trade all my followers (and my Klout score of 81) for the actual readers I had in my old blog. But alas, this is now.

Thanks to loyal subscribers, Linux Journal is still trucking along, proving it is possible to operate a journal that isn't just another sluice for "content".

But we have to face the facts here: content production has clearly obsolesced journalism—just like TV obsolesced radio, cars obsolesced horses and printing obsolesced scribes. All of the obsolesced things do persist, but in a diminished state relative to what obsolesced them.

To understand why and how, it helps to raid the works of Marshall McLuhan, the media scholar best known for saying "the media is the message" (or "the massage"—he said both) and coining the term "global village" decades before the internet materialized one.

The analytic system McLuhan and his colleagues created for understanding how one medium obsolesces another is the tetrad (Greek for group of four). Every medium, he said, does four things. These are discovered in answers to four questions:

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The Problem with "Content"

Doc Searls — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 15:23:11 +0000

by Doc Searls

Back in the early '00s, John Perry Barlow said "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened." Linux Journal was one of those containers—so was every other magazine, newspaper and broadcast station. Today, those containers are bobbing around in an ocean of "content" on the internet. Worse, the stuff inside the containers, which we used to call "editorial", is now a breed of "content" too.

In the old days, editorial lived on one side of a "Chinese wall" between itself and the publishing side of a newspaper or magazine. The same went for the programming and advertising sides of a commercial broadcast station or network. The wall was transparent, meaning it was possible for a writer, a photographer, a newscaster or a performing artist to see what funded the operation, but the ethical thing was to ignore what happened on the other side of that wall. Which was easy to do, because everything on the other side of that wall was somebody else's job.

Today that wall has been destroyed by the imperatives of "content production", which is the new job of journalists and everybody else devoted to "generating content" in maximum volumes, all the better to attract "programmatic" advertising.

You can see the wreckage of one such wall in a January 2017 The New York Times story titled "In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left", by David Chen. In it he writes, "The Star-Ledger, which almost halved its newsroom eight years ago, has mutated into a digital media company requiring most reporters to reach an ever-increasing quota of page views as part of their compensation."

As I explained in my January 2016 article "What We Can Do with Ad Blocking's Leverage", the advertising we're talking about here isn't the old Madison Avenue kind that lived on the other side of journalism's Chinese wall. It's a new all-digital kind called adtech. While adtech is called advertising, and looks like advertising, it is actually a breed of direct marketing, a cousin of spam descended from junk mail.

Like junk mail, adtech is data-driven, wants to get personal, finds success in tiny-percentage responses and excuses massive negative externalities. Those include wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the crap out of people and filling the world with crap—including fake news and fraudulent advertising.

Here's one way to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech, using the Star-Ledger as an example:

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Debugging Democracy

Doc Searls — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 16:24:44 +0000

by Doc Searls

You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.—Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet, 1969.

I began writing this column on November 9, 2016, on the balcony of a hotel in Istanbul, while a call to prayer echoed through the streets below. I took that as good advice, because a few hours earlier my country elected an Internet troll, Donald Trump, as its president Perhaps by now we're calling this day 11/9, in the mold of 9/11. I'm an optimistic guy, but color me pessimistic about where my country is now heading, led by a world-class narcissist.

And forgive me for obsessing not only about where this is going, but how we got here. Our country has been hacked, and that matters.

Disclosure: I'm a political independent, and not a fan of Hillary Clinton, though I thought she was the only sensible choice, given Trump's shortcomings, many of which should have disqualified him, flat out. But he won. Why?

I don't know, though I did see it coming. Mostly I felt it. Polls said one thing, my senses another. "We know more than we can tell", says Michael Polanyi. Evidence: most of the time we don't know how we'll end the sentences we start, or how we started the sentences we end. Yet we know what we're talking about. And if we succeed, another human being gathers our meaning, even though they can't repeat it verbatim.

To say something is to express some care about it. We also tend to hear what we like to hear more than what we don't, even if we welcome what might disagree with us. Those of us who work with logic (such as Linux Journal readers) have a high regard for the rational. But while logic and reason sit on the mental board of directors, emotions cast the deciding votes. As Bellow says, the soul wants what it wants.

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