W00tBloggyBlogg: u graduated wtf are you gonna do now?

Noah Barron: Boy, I sure wish I knew. I’m looking for a job but it’s turning out to be really difficult, given the journalism market right now.

WBB: lol srs? u prolly suck at jourlsm amirite? or maybe they saw ur uggfase on fasebook hehehehe

Noah: I hope not. I think I bring a variety of skills to the table–writing, editing, Web design, video production, photography and graphics, but mostly I’m finding it’s well-nigh impossible to get any kind of response from employers I send applications to.

WBB: wtf is well-nigh? also dont end ur sentences w/ a preposition. so like u send apps in & the doods are like “rofl this fool sucks” or wut?

Noah: Honestly, I have no idea. I send out resumes to nearly every position on MediaBistro and other similar media job sites–dozens of applications total–and have never gotten a single return e-mail or call. Not one.

My only job leads are from internships I’ve done and personal contacts I’ve made. I guess I’m just surprised that in the age of digital journalism, a digital journalist’s digital job searches are so seemingly useless.

WBB: whatvr dood dont cry QQ y not start ur own blog and make bux on ads etc?

Noah: I mean, that’s definitely an option. I already have a site, but haven’t developed it properly. I just feel like I need health insurance and a steady income coming out of graduate school…is that too much to ask?

WBB: obvi!!!! u should post more lohan upskirts imo

Noah: See, that’s what I’m trying to avoid. If I’m going to be a DIY-blogger/journalist, I want to create meaningful, interesting content that is relevant enough to belong in a newspaper, but is tailored to an online audience.

WBB: o so like blah blah darfur blah blah global warming zzzzz yeah thatll get lots of hits. gg dood.

Noah: Come on Bloggy, don’t you think we can find a way to package socially-conscious, important news for the casual Web reader while also turning a profit?

WBB: ….

Noah: Well, what do you suggest?

WBB: durr y not offer something useful to ur readers instd of whining on the interwebz? that’s y most blogs r real boringzzzzz urs included :/

Noah: You’re right, Blogg. It’s not too late to turn this column around and offer helpful content. How about a toolbox filled with essential survival equipment for freshly-minted online journalists, resources I’ve gathered over the last two years?

WBB: rofl!!!! whatever dood too bad google ads doesnt pay u in foodstamps AYO!!!

You: Online

Presenting your body of work, identity and bona fides online is the first step in the right direction. That means you need webspace, a UI and a URL. My first day on the job at OJR, Robert Niles told me to register my own name. Best advice I was given at grad school. If you can’t get your name, you likely can find a variation that’s not already taken.

[WBB: lol unless ur given name is perezhilton or freepr0n...]

1. Get a free blog at Blogger or WordPress, or. if you’re a bit tech-savvy…
2. Put the WordPress platform on your site, for which you will need…
3. Webspace and your own domain. There are a million places to register a URL and buy hosting space…I use GoDaddy, but there’s probably one tailored exactly to your needs.
4. Or, just use GoogleAps and Google Page Creator to easily create a clean, simple site with 100 MB of free storage.

[WBB: ...o rly? i just use myspace for the journalism imo. and by journalism i mean spring break pix]

The right tool for the job

There are a multitude of free (or cheap), powerful tools available to the online journalist that approximate expensive software and make you look more professional than you are. Which is a good thing.

5. Slide and Picasa offer great free image hosting and cool slideshows for your multimedia journalism projects.
6. Picnik approximates Photoshop for refining and color-correcting those images.
7. OpenOffice is the free solution to not having the money to get the MS suite for your small business. It supports one-click PDF export from Word and text documents, too. Very handy.
8. VistaPrint is a great place to create business cards, stationery and other stuff for almost free (usually the cost of shipping) and smart perusal of RetailMeNot often yields coupons that make it even cheaper.
9. Submit your podcast audio (which is hosted on your server) to iTunes so everyone can find it.

Make money

More likely than not, a recent grad/DIY journalist with a just-launched blog can’t subsist purely on Google AdSense revenue and PayPal donations. Sooner or later you might have to find a part- or full-time gig. Here are some of the more obvious online J-job portals, such as they are.

[WBB: yeah worked real well for you lol ps i'd like extra ranch and no onions lolll]

10. JournalismJobs
11. MediaBistro
12. MediaPost
13. Ed (2010), for internships
14. New Assignment for open-source reporting jobs

There are thousands more tools, techniques, job sites and opportunities–so please contribute to this evolving list. After all, that collaborative process is what makes online journalism so exciting.

[WBB: thats what she said]

(Shoutout to Nick Sylvester, from whose explanation-of-why-he-was-fired-from-the-Village-Voice-blog I kinda lifted the gimmick for this article. Semi-NSFW?)

We know that we will hear sounds, voices and stories that share a certain style, designed to enthrall listeners for the whole program and keep them glued to their car radios even after their commute home is over–the vaunted “driveway moment.”

In his new book, Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production, veteran radio producer Jonathan Kern makes it clear that the recipe for a compelling NPR broadcast is no alchemy, but rather a well-worn list of techniques for planning, interviewing, recording, editing and post.

Like the radio shows whose hosts he coaches, Kern’s book is thrilling at times when it reveals a juicy detail, but often suffers from a syrupy tone and pacing and a certain self-satisfaction. Granted, this is a book by an NPR veteran for NPR employees and tote-bag-toting loyalists, and as such, it contains more than enough unhelpful platitudes like “A good reporter looks and listens for the truth.” But there are good nuggets to be had for the online journalist who reads between the lines.

I offer a meta-reading of Sound Reporting; there are a number of great NPR tips that can be adapted for the do-it-yourself podcaster and these are worth repeating. If you host an online show, file audio reports or do any kind of internet radio news, much of NPR’s wisdom still applies. From Sound Reporting:

“Remember that a radio audience consists of listeners, not viewers. When you write for radio, you can easily emphasize the aural nature of the medium: ‘Coming up we’ll hear from the woman who broke the story’…

“There are no headlines. That means we don’t have a way to catch a potential listener’s ear the way a big headline at a newsstand catches the eye; to get our news, people have to make the effort to turn on the radio and tune to a specific station.”

(Kern’s frequent use of italics mimics the NPR trademark vocal delivery; one can almost hear Steve Inskeep musing along with the author. Kern does in fact include a section on marking up a script with underlining for spoken stresses and warns that overdoing it can sound “mannered”…)

“Get people to use analogies to explain technical subjects. That may require you to let the interviewee know what you’re looking for. ‘You say the Earth wobbles on its axis. Help me visualize this.’

“Identify and statements that may need fact checking, or a balancing statement or response. You don’t want to put any falsehoods on the air, so listen for assertions that may need to be checked. And if a guest makes allegations about an individual or organization, make sure you solicit a response from the person or group being criticized–ideally a second interview, but at least a statement that the host can read on the air.”

Check to that you still have a conversation [after you edit]. Sometimes a producer gets so wrapped up in technical and editorial details–in making sure that he preserves the essential elements of the interiview, makes perfect edits, leaves the breaths intact, and so on–that he forgets to listen to the finished product to make sure it still sounds like a normal discussion.”

The discussion of music is one of the most interesting in the book. I have often noticed how excellent the choice and mixing of interstitial tunes is on public radio (and personally gloated when my favorite Ratatat tracks were on high rotation.)

“Like the sounds in a news report, the music added to an interview should be there for a reason–and the way it’s introduced or faded should make a point. Sara Sarasohn describes the morphology of a music piece. ‘A hot hit means were starting on something. A sneak-up means the music here is tightly connected to the thing before it. When the music comes up full and ends, and then a someone starts talking, that’s a change of direction–the thing the person starts talking about is completely different from the music that just ended. A warm hit [starting the music at low volume] in a pause means we’re building momentum on this same subject we’re discussing. Sometimes you can have music come up and end, then you hot hit something else, and then that fades under some talking, and that’s a really big change of direction.’”

Perhaps least satisfying in Kern’s book for podcasters is his section “Beyond Radio” where he brusquely touches on online radio and podcasting itself. Kern leans heavily on the wisdom of Maria Thomas, NPR’s digital media chief, and she’s a virtuosa of the obvious.

“‘People who are looking at the Internet on the job often can’t listen to audio at their workplace,’ says Maria Thomas…They may fear that the sound will disturb the person working in the next cubicle or the corporate IT department may not allow them to download audio players.”

Kern advises that podcasters provide text versions of their radio scripts, not to skimp on recording quality and “don’t forget what radio has taught us about keeping listeners’ interest.”

What Kern does to keep our interest is spice in transcripts of short exchanges between reporters and interviewees from programs like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Day To Day and Talk of the Nation. Inevitably, the actual journalism is infinitely more engaging then the discussion of it, and I found myself being disappointed each time Kern came back after I got absorbed in a discussion of aridopsis foliage with a botanical geneticist or a chat about Bo Diddly rhythms with Dr. John. This is obviously why Kern is a producer not a scriptwriter–he sure knows how to pick ‘em–but his own material is pretty boring.

The book ends with fairly boilerplate bellyaching about the future of journalism with cit-j reporters covering the London Underground bombings (oh no!), concern that consumers of news will only get the news they want and not the news they need, (eep!) and that, according to NPR Web editor Todd Holzman, different media might “converge” (you think?) to allow for new and powerful ways to deliver the news. “It’s finding a way for the world of digital media to extend radio to a larger, younger audience,’ Holzman says. ‘There are many ways to tell a story.’”

In words Michele Norris would never dulcetly intone on air, “No duh.”

HOST: For O-J-R dot org, I’m Noah Barron.

Since Spett’s column, the story has enjoyed retellings by on the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune websites, as well as coverage in Editor&Publisher, Poynter’s Romanesko blog and more. Spett was later interviewed by Michele Norris on NPR. The story and its popularity among media professionals was derided on a Gawker.com post as “inane,” and Spett was called “a cockstrong young j-school student,” though most of the criticism was directed at the journalism community for not letting the issue die.

Since then, 18 Medill faculty have signed a letter asking for Dean Levine to be held accountable and produce his notes. Many did not. A week ago, the Dean issued a mea culpa to faculty and students apologizing for his lack of transparency.

On February 27th, Eric Zorn on the Chicago Tribune’s web edition reported that Spett’s investigative reporting professor David Protess phoned all 29 students and confirmed Spett’s reporting. It took more than two weeks for anyone to do the followup vetting. “It takes initiative,” said Spett on a phone call with OJR. “If you’re on my side and it turns out I made a mistake, you’re in a tough position. If you support the dean and my reporting checks out, what position are you in then?”

As the media response to his story unfolded, Spett has been posting clippings from newspaper websites and blogs on his Facebook page mini feed, to provide his Facebook friends “a place where they can find it all. I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing. They don’t have to click on it.”

[Disclosure: I worked with David Spett in South Africa when we were both interns at the Cape Times. When the dust settled, I decided to contact Spett and ask him about his experiences as a young reporter experiencing his first media circus.]

“Most people talking about me are journalists talking about me as a journalist,” he said. “A lot of people do think that this is relevant beyond Medill. Medill is where we are training the future people who will be talking about issues of incredible importance.”

Spett is ambivalent about seeing his name in print–as a subject of a story rather than a byline. “It’s exciting, it’s scary, I’m glad people care about the issues. Part of me is shy wants to be an ordinary person that’s not in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.” He said the affair has boosted his interest in doing investigative journalism in the future.

“It feels really strange. I’m not really used to it. My feelings are very complicated. Proud, also shy. I’m a little awkward socially, so it’s kinda scary when people recognize my face and say “You’re the kid that wrote that story’. If I ever break a story this big again–Gawker said I wouldn’t–I have a taste of what the follow-up might be.”

He has not responded to the many blog posts about his story but said that some of the more personal attacks against him were hurtful. “One professor attacked me and said that I have a history of publishing my dislikes of professors. In fact, I criticized a class once as a Freshman. Part of me is a little bit hurt, I am angered by that. These are the things that happen when you break a story like this. I’m not going to start attacking these people.”

Spett, who writes for the Daily Northwestern as an opinion columnist, has been careful to avoid appearing biased about the dean’s use of the unnamed sources and has stated several times in interviews that it is his goal to present the facts and let readers decide for themselves. “I’m a very opinionated guy,” he said. “This has been very good practice in keeping my opinions away from the facts. It’s my first real experience writing a story that has gotten this big.”

Despite getting the kind of attention most journalism students lust after, Spett is unsure whether it has helped his career. While some professors at Medill have urged him to pursue investigative reporting as a career, he stated simply, “I hope I get a job in journalism. I hope this helps.”

For the most part, they’re pretty affordable. And the stuff that’s expensive is worth it, in this reporter’s humble opinion. The methodology for gathering the gear? Pretty casual–mostly I asked my working journalist friends, Googled for slick gadgets and lauded gear that I own and use myself (or want desperately but can’t quite afford). Just to be clear, I’m not hyping this stuff for personal gain of any kind–these are actual products I like, use or want. Nobody gave me free stuff or anything. (Which is a bummer, really.)

It’s the Online Journalism Review’s first annual Top 9 Gifts for Online Journalists list! (In reverse order of awesomeness.)

So, happy holidays from OJR, don’t say I never gave you anything.

9. Record sound

It’s not terribly thrilling, but boy is it useful. Belkin’s TuneTalk Stereo allows you to record large amounts of digital audio right to your iPod’s hard drive and then upload to your computer for later transcription. Add a cellular microphone like this one and record your phone interviews. 80 GB of hard drive space–or more–means that you can save every interview you have done and prove that you’ve never misquoted in your whole career. Be sure to get your subject’s consent before you record your conversations, though.

8. Listen

If you’re like me, you listen to a lot of audio. Digital files of interviews, podcasts, the mic feed from DV cameras, YouTube videos, my iPod–you get the point. Pretty soon, it becomes worthwhile to get a really good pair of noise-canceling headphones. Unfortunately, quality is extremely commensurate with price in this department–and you can really spend a bundle. For this list I picked the second-best Bose noise-cancelers out there. The QuietComfort 2 is last year’s top of the line, and at $300, it’s still pricey, but $50 less than the current QuietComfort 3. People love ‘em: “Bose’s standard-setting noise-canceling headphones have just upped the ante.” (CNet.com) If you’re going to spend the money, this series is the one to get.

7. Write and draw

I want one of these pretty badly. The Bamboo Fun is a consumer-grade PC drawing and writing tablet. It’s not for expert draftsmen or NASA engineers, but if you want to publish a Web comic, scribble your own handwriting and have it translated to text or decorate your blog with art and script of your own design, this is the tool you want. It’s cheap–100 bucks for the small 5.8″ x 3.7″ writing area one, $200 for the big 8.5″ x 5.3″–and it comes with a bunch of cool paint-type software. The biggest selling point for me is the paper-like textured drawing area and the 512 different pressure setting on the pen nib. (The harder you press, the thicker the line, etc.) Awesome.

6. Find your way

After extensive searching, it became clear that there are so many car GPS systems these days, but one is actually much better reviewed than the rest. They all do the big task pretty well: helping you get to an appointment on time when you are lost in an unfamiliar area. But, many people really like the Tom Tom series. It’s small, easy to use and Bluetooth compatible, though some reviews point out that the list of phones it talks nicely too is a little small. The best all-around unit seems to be the Tom Tom Go 720, which, in addition to the range of expected features, allows you to download celebrity voices to replace the stock U.S.S. Enterprise-style synth voice. I particularly like the idea of being told where to drive by Mr. T. I pity the fool who missed the Fairfax offramp.

5. Carry stuff

If you looked in my messenger bag for clues to my inner self a la Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, you’d find the clues of a techno-frantic lifestyle: phones, chargers, cameras, spare batteries, USB thumb drives, scribbled notes and nicotine gum. A good bag can add a sense of compartmentalized organization and calm to an otherwise hectic interview schedule. I really dig Chrome Bags. They’re super big, have a certain hipster cache with the seatbelt buckle and side-slung profile, and best of all, keep my stuff in the right place. The biggest one, the “Kremlin”, is 3000 cubic inches, which apparently is the actual volume of the Kremlin. (Not really.) These guys make excellent laptop bags as well.

4. Take pictures

Okay, so we all take lots of pictures for our jobs. Oftentimes, as online journalists, we are not necessarily trying to take print-quality pictures sharp enough to grace the cover of Time Magazine. Blogs do not require 10 megapixel resolution. But as a writer and blogger who has shown up to countless conferences with crummy pocket cameras with only 3x zoom, I can attest to the fact that sometimes you need a little more. Plus, having a bulkier SLR slung around your neck gives you a ton of silent credibility–and can get you into places for the story that a fanboy waving a happy-snaps camera cannot.

Luckily for us there are a bunch of really good cameras in the middle zone between entry level and $3000-minimum 10 mp pro grade cameras. I defer to the Digital SLR Guide website, which has a really solid list of SLRs for under $600. Their choice? The Olympus Evolt E-330. It’s 7.5 mp, and, like a consumer grade camera, has live-viewing through the LCD screen (which is unusual for SLRs), allowing you to shoot from the hip if you want. It won a couple awards too, from Popular Science and J.D. Power (those glass-trophy guys who rate stuff). Shop around though, this camera and 14-44mm zoom lens sell for anywhere from $500 to $999 on the official site.

3. Get there

“Go get me a copy of that lawsuit/document/public record/etc.!” your editor yells, probably without those typographical slashes. The dread fills the pit of your stomach. You have to try to park downtown and go to the County Courthouse or City Hall or the Hall of Records or whatever. It will take five hours, cost $30 and surgically extract the joy from your day. Except there’s a solution and I use it every day of my life. It’s called a motorscooter. Instead of crawling through traffic, I zip to the front of each stoplight, beating everyone (including potential journalistic competition) to the destination. Parking? You don’t pay. Here in Los Angeles, there’s a strip of sidewalk in front of the courthouse that has a dozen scooters rowed up at any given time, all belonging to couriers who’ve figured out the secret of modern urban transport.

Full disclosure: I am a rabid Vespa aficionado and I love my ET4 to death. There are tons of quality, utilitarian scooters out there by Honda and Yamaha, but for me, there is no substitute for the sexy lines of Enrico Piaggio’s buzzing “wasp.” The best choice out there now in terms of modern, 4-stroke fuel efficient Vespas is the LX150. It’s got enough pep in the 149cc motor to get you up the hills while keeping emissions low and fuel economy high (around 80 mpg). $4199.

2. Read

To be honest, I don’t really know where I fall with Amazon’s Kindle wireless reader. I love E-ink technology and find it tremendously readable. But do we need a lightweight replacement for newspapers and books? This is an endless debate for another column, but I will say it might be the half-way solution for those who hate reading newspapers online but can’t haul 20 lbs. of Sunday editions around in their backpacks all day. Who knows. Some part of me says “Bah, people will always want to hold physical novels in their hands…” and some other part of me looks around his room and sees a big blank spot where his shelf of CD jewel cases used to be. So, Kindle is on this list as a heavily qualified late entrant: I’ve never used one, I know it’s going to be controversial: it’s too expensive, battery life may be an issue, Amazon charges you to read free content(!) but Kindle has the potential to change the way we read the news and blogs. This is one to watch and expect more reporting on it from me soon. They’re all sold out, so this may not be an good gift idea, either. Wiki: Kindle.

1. Connect

I debated pretty hard with myself for a good four minutes about whether or not to put the i-word on here. Unless you have been blogging from inside a sensory deprivation chamber, you probably know that there’s a big debate around the iPhone. This is not the time or the place and I am not the guy to explain it to you, but basically, Steve Job’s new cash calf can do all sorts of pretty neat stuff like keypad-less email and web browsing, a manner of phony GPS roving that uses Google maps to tell you where you are (but only when you tell it where you are), and of course, it plays music like a puny iPod only big enough to hold a fraction of your music. You could fill it to the brim with Robert Pollard/GBV back catalog alone.

But the biggest problem (aside from face-grease on the touch screen) is that you are stuck with the lumbering crippled behemoth that is AT&T née Cingular. Most anecdotal reports I’ve heard say that L.A. coverage is hopelessly spotty (read: more hopelessly spotty than other carriers). Worse still, if you unlock the SIM card to get Verizon or shudder, T-Mobile, (why you would want that, I have no idea), you run the risk of your friends in Cupertino nuking your phone from space.

That said, the Apple iPhone is the number-one gift for online journalists in 2007. The ability to live-update blogs with text and pictures effortlessly and from anywhere is indispensable. The sheer ooh-ahh factor is off the charts. Yes, the iPhone is way overpriced, has a wimpy HD, a totalitarian service plan and bogus coverage, but it is so dang cool that this list would be hopelessly remiss if it wasn’t at the top. I don’t have one yet but it is only a matter of time. (Mr. Jobs if you are reading this, I’m only kidding, please send me one. The 8gb preferably.)

Reading this back, I see the ultimate solipsist gift registry, as if I’m marrying myself. Remember when Homer gave Marge a bowling ball with his name pre-engraved on it? It’s better to write about receiving then to give, I suppose. Happy holidays and I hope this list has helped you please the most important online journalist in your life, which may or may not be yourself.

Often, the first thing a patient does when searching foreign healthcare options is to begin an extensive Web search.

“Medical tourism entails the splicing of two sectors, medicine and tourism,” write Milika and Karla Bookman in their report “Medical Tourism in Developing Countries,” which came out this year. “Both are labor intensive and both rely heavily on the Internet to spread information.”

When potential patients hit the Web, they are confronted with a broad range of slick websites posted by clinics from Bangkok to Brazil, often touting luxury recovery facilities in a resort-like setting, top-quality doctors and prices far lower than those available in the U.S. So how does one separate the legit from the shoddy? An appealing front-end website does not a qualified clinic make.

That’s where consultant David Williams’ site, MedTripInfo.com comes in.

“The reason I started it was to provide a sort of healthy business blog for medical tourism. It’s a useful thing to talk about and I noticed there is a lot of interest but a lack of good info,” Williams said.

“Medical tourism Web portals are front ends promoting travel arrangements but don’t really provide good information for patients. The idea of MedTripInfo was to have patients be able to discuss their experiences with one another. It’s a platform for peer discussions and a way for providers overseas to get their information out there.”

The site features country-by-country profiles, patient testimonials and healthcare policy information. Because medical tourism–or as Williams prefers, “international medical travel”–is so new, MedTripInfo is really the first of its kind: a med tourism website watchdogging other websites.

The site is free to use and entirely supported by advertising. Williams, who also runs a healthcare consulting firm called MedPharma Partners, hopes to inject a bit of sanity and careful reporting into an industry that is often characterized by hearsay and alarmist rhetoric.

“The challenge is that you’re trying to put a quantitative objective view on an issue that’s still emerging. It’s hard to be definitive,” he said.

Most media reports about medical tourism tend to focus on botched jobs performed in back-room clinics and ignore the reality: that a growing number of informed healthcare consumers are turning overseas for lower-cost, often higher-quality care.

“Some journalists do just look to find something shocking, exciting.”

Scarcity of information

Getting a handle on the trend is almost impossible. As was earlier stated, the numbers are the source of the problem. “It has been said that medical tourism is so new it can’t even be measured,” write Bookman and Bookman. Williams says that since American healthcare institutions have no way of tracking how many patients leave the system to go elsewhere, the numbers must come from hospitals and clinics abroad, who often misrepresent how many patients seek their services. “They’re putting out the numbers for their own self interest.”

Major healthcare destinations like Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital often count each consultation as a separate visit and therefore a different patient, which drastically inflates their numbers, Williams said. The truth is, no one really knows how many people travel for healthcare and which kinds of procedures are most often performed. Cosmetic and plastic surgeries are extremely popular–the so-called Thailand tuck–because those are the procedures that are not covered by U.S. insurance. However, Williams reports that major organ transplants and heart surgeries performed in India are growing in popularity, not simply because of their low cost, but because the quality of service is so high.

Williams has prepared an industry white paper that he hopes will wake up the major U.S. healthcare providers to the opportunities available overseas. He writes:

“Increasingly, patients are traveling for ‘serious’ surgeries, including cardiac and orthopedic procedures. This builds on the established phenomenon of medical tourism for cosmetic and dental surgeries. Employers, health plans and benefits consultants are taking notice and in some cases are launching pilot programs. The media have drawn attention to medical tourism, while medical travel facilitators have sprung up to help patients and companies go abroad.”

He hopes his research will encourage major insurance companies to cover patients willing to travel. In turn, that will inspire more careful numbers reporting and better research about who’s a good doctor and who isn’t.

“If you compare the auto industry, which, like healthcare, has been shielded from foreign competition like Honda and Toyota, you see that the prices have continued to rise, reliability is lower. Healthcare is like that in the U.S. Service isn’t particularly good, costs have skyrocketed. It’s protectionism, a lack of exposure to competition. If you look anywhere else, the costs are lower and the quality is often higher. A healthy medical economy has more competition.”

Mainstream healthcare institutions have made attempts–if meager ones–to address this growing trend.

The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) released a set of guidelines for patients considering plastic surgery travel.

The list recommends patients “Ask for certification information and who the certifying body is,” and to ensure that the operating physicians speak English. “If you cannot be understood properly, be prepared for complications.”

Additionally, (and perhaps confusingly), the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS) has its own set of guidelines for overseas surgery-seekers, recommending specifically that patients forge a relationship with an American doctor before they travel.

“If you are thinking about having surgery overseas, consider establishing a relationship with a local board certified plastic surgeon before going on your trip. Then, if complications arise when you return home, a qualified surgeon will be familiar with your goals and procedures.”

A new class of healthcare consumer

Medical tourism is a case of Internet savvy early-adopters who accept some degree of health and financial risk in order to embrace a new set of opportunities. Becki Bozard, 49, a Portland-area social worker, underwent bariatric “duodenal switch” surgery in the U.S. and lost 190 pounds. Afterward, she was plagued by health problems and needed to get the muscles of her torso repaired and have the loose skin trimmed off.

“I’d had seven hernias—count ‘em—around the mesh they put in my stomach and my doctor told me I would continue to get hernias if I didn’t get reconstructive surgery on the muscle walls in my gut,” she said.

After her weight loss surgery, the muscles of her abdomen were so weak and disconnected in several places that they could not hold her internal organs in place. They were popping out of her mid-section like bulges in a tire with worn-out sidewalls.

Her insurance company, which paid for the original gastric Lap-Band, refused pay for the reconstructive abdominoplasty to fix her body afterwards. She worried that her muscles would continue to atrophy and that she would be doomed to walking around with a heavy kilt of excess skin. “They said they wouldn’t pay for plastic surgery, and offered to continue to fix my hernias for the rest of my life.”

A U.S. doctor quoted her $22,500 for the procedure she needed. She didn’t make enough money to afford the procedure out of pocket. And so Becki began looking for answers on the world wide web.

“Getting surgery in another country was already in the back of my mind, but I hadn’t thought of it for reconstructive plastic surgery. I went back online to the websites I knew, asked who else was facing this problem. The outpouring was ‘Yeah, go overseas.’”

Bozard found a vibrant online community of informed healthcare consumers sharing information, via websites like www.tlcmedicaltravel.com, a travel agency and “medical tourism concierge service.” Med tourism would not be in existence without the Internet, she said.

“Weight loss people are the most determined to get what they want,” she said. “You do your research on the Internet. We’re using our heads when it costs us money. When you’re a medical tourist, you want a single surgery and you don’t want it screwed up. You’re going to find somewhere that will do the best possible job for the best possible price.”

These days, Bozard describes herself as a weight loss “mentor,” helping others find overseas healthcare and Web resources. “People that don’t have the Internet, I tell them, ‘Can you get online?’ because it’s going to be a lot harder if you’re not online. I don’t want someone I know to go without doing their own research.”

Bozard and others like her are part of a new class of self-educated healthcare consumers who, faced with situations where prohibitive costs or a lack of services, no longer rely on their general practiticioner to act as “the captain of the ship” guiding them through the murky waters of specialists, insurance and referral, said Dr. David Goldman, M.D., an ethics expert and surgeon at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.

As the American healthcare system grows more costly and more complex, a new class of healthcare consumers like Bozard is on the rise. They want real information about overseas opportunites and want to cut out the middlemen. Information providers like David Williams of MedTripInfo have begun to answer that demand. Whether or not this free-market healthcare model will prove to significantly impact the way American doctors, insurance companies and patients do business remains to be seen. But none of it would be possible without the Thomas Friedman Earth-flattening potential of the Internet to bring Brazilian doctors and Oregonian patients together.

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light’s gone out for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century
–”Bodysnatchers” by Thom Yorke/Radiohead [In Rainbows, 2007.]

Can a major rock band turn out a profitable album without a major label to back it? Can said band sell the album as a legal DRM-free mp3 download? Can said download still make money even if users themselves are allowed to choose how much they are willing to pay? (No really, zero bucks is okay.)

Well, if the band is Radiohead and the album is In Rainbows, the Magic 8 Ball says ‘Yes.’

As has been widely reported and blogged about, the album logged 1.2 million downloads on its first day. How much did people pay? I paid £3 (about $6). (Hey, I’m a grad student.)

Rumors, polls and inside sources circulating indicate that the average buyer paid £4, or about $8, which would mean that Radiohead has made about $10 million or more since the record’s release on Oct. 10.

With numbers like that, and self-released digital downloads in the works from Madonna and Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails, some are claiming that the major labels are hearing their deathknell.

This so-called “anti-marketing” has lead Pitchfork Media reviewer Matt Solarski to wryly suggest that “they’ve turned this into a moral question of sorts, by giving us the freedom to pay actual money for what amounts to an album leak. Only a band in Radiohead’s position could pull a trick like this. Well played, gentlemen.”

Nonetheless, the entire experiment may have been a simple ploy to raise sales of the actual CD release, coming in January of 2008. The mp3s are 160kbps–middling quality–so perhaps Radiohead hopes that fans of the album will shell out for the disc.

Radiohead is among the last big-name bands that has resisted releasing their material for paid download from Apple’s iTunes store.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood told the Gothamist blog: “We talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that’s kind of good enough, really. It’s never going to be CD quality, because that’s what CD does.”

All this after another strange online event, the appearance of a phony countdown site to the album that turned out to be the world’s most epic rickroll. (If you just clicked that, you really need to use the Interwebs more. Here’s what a ‘rickroll’ is.)

Amazon.com and PayPal, among others, for years have been offering publishers the ability to put out online “tip jars.” PBS long ago established a reasonably successful business model that relies in part on consumer’s donations. And services like Priceline have applied the “name your price” model to online travel sales. But Radiohead’s apparent success with its In Rainbows release might tempt other content publishers to consider voluntary pricing models. (Of course, not even making the album free can stop piracy; In Rainbows is Piratebay‘s 25th-most popular audio torrent right now.)

In any case, the record is hugely popular, cheap or free online, and creating tons of free buzz for the band. Radiohead guilts us into paying for something that we could have for free, and then slams us with a higher quality CD release a few months later, will inevitably sell out their tour dates… and (most of us) love them for it. I still think Amnesiac is their post-OK Computer high point, but that’s another debate… until then, enjoy the new profit model, the newly romantic balladry mixed in with Radiohead’s typical post-pop existential dread and the fact that you gots it all for cheap.

(In Rainbows reviews, from MetaCritic.)

Old game, new tools

Andrew Rasiej, the founder and publisher of Personal Democracy Forum and Tech President.com had a somewhat grim view of the actual dialogue. “It’s direct mail for the 21st century,” he said referring to the influential lobby MoveOn.org. “It’s not the robust participatory democracy it could be.” He said that candidates like Hillary Clinton, who recently invited users to vote for her campaign’s theme song, were really just harvesting an e-mail address list.

The famously viral “Vote Different” video that targeted Clinton with a remixed dystopian Apple ad was so popular because Web citizens found that she was saying one thing and doing another online, said Rasiej. “She claimed it was a debate, but the questions were all preselected and filtered.” Rasiej believes that Clinton’s campaign managers wanted to capitalize on the online community but “didn’t understand” that the dialog has to be free and open to gain the trust of the Internet community. Four million viewings later, Clinton’s campaign has “woken up” he said.

The panelists noted that many politicians allow finite debate and video posting in so-called “walled gardens” of their campaign websites and MySpace pages, but haven’t yet embraced open-source politics. “The politician who fails to recognize the trend does so at their own risk,” said Rasiej.

Barack Obama’s campaign (which of course had nothing to do with the Apple ad) is also backwards thinking, several panelists noted. The webmaster running the Obama MySpace site–with 160,000 supporters–asked Obama for a salary, $39,000, and was refused. “That’s 25 cents a voter and they said no,” said Raseij. “Keep in mind, campaigns often spend one dollar per email address for mailing lists.”

New game, new players

Steve Grove, head of News and Politics at YouTube, was more optimistic. His site has seen an unprecedented rise in user-created political dialog in the form of videos and “…anything that brings more people to the table is a great first step.”

“It’s a conversation, not a distribution mechanism,” said Grove. “It’s so antithetical to the way politics has been run for the past 30 years.”

Tools like Meetup and Eventful allow regular citizens to choose when and where the real-world debates happen, as well, essentially giving citizens a voice to demand the discussion come to them in person.

One audience member asked about the infamous “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” video of a student agitator getting tasered by security at a John Kerry speech. “Are we in danger of high-keyed, emotionally-driven politics in this trend, are we being desensitized to real issues?”

Raseij responded “What’s shocking about that video is that John Kerry said nothing.”

Truth.con?

The panelists agreed that in an era of horizontally accessible media, fact checking, like that done by panelist Viveca Novak of Annenberg Fact Check, at the University of Pennsylvania, becomes increasingly crucial.

“The Internet is a blessing and a curse,” she said. “There’s great information and a great deal of disinformation,” noting that her website busted Bill Richardson for including bogus facts in his YouTube videos. “Now we are drinking from the firehose.

“There’s a low barrier to entry, but many [participants] aren’t armed to the teeth with facts, as they should be,” said Grove. “But I don’t share Andrew’s disdain for MySpace politics. This is an era of intense experimentation. Not all top-down politics is a bad thing.”

In an election with no incumbent, and a range of candidates as diverse as America has ever seen (female, African-American, Mormon, pro-choice Republican, etc.) new media throws an additional curveball into an already unstable game. The real question is whether new voters and non-voters will turn out as a result of the YouTube revolution. Online registration, mobile phone voting information and a bevy of other technologies designed to get out the vote can become “the digital equivalent of walking the precinct and knocking on doors,” said Raseij.

“They used to be called stringers.”

Such was the tone of Monday’s Knight Digital Media Center discussion “It’s a Conversation, Stupid: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, UGC and Journalism,” hosted at USC Annenberg.

As it turned out, there wasn’t much “stupid” to go around, either in the audience or the panel. Gelman, along with Yahoo News editor-in-chief Neil Budde, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson and Kinsey Wilson of USAToday.com were pretty much preachers addressing a converted choir. It wasn’t a question of whether online interactivity and talkback were worth incorporating into the way news is reported, it was a question of when, how and with what vetting process.

The panel began by presenting a few examples of what didn’t work: the L.A. Times’ 2005 reader wikitorial experiment that lasted two days before collapsing under the weight of user-posted pr0n, following a referral from Slashdot. Neil Budde said that a similar fiasco caused Yahoo News to shut down its forum features.

Budde then pulled up a slide of a Google search for his name, with “Neil Budde sucks” being the top list item. So, clearly, user talkback is going to happen whether the professional news dot-coms facilitate it or not.

Anonymity versus persistent identity

“What’s the right amount of anonymity [on a site] to get validity as a poster?” asked Budde. The panelists agreed that the push and pull between a user’s desire to post anonymously versus the site’s interest in culling out trolls creates a unique dilemma, one that increasingly complex software can solve.

“We wanted a sort of universal credibility meter,” said Davidson. “Until that exists, things like Open ID and other technologies create portable reputations.” Newsvine’s system puts new users into a holding pen, called the “Greenhouse” where they post and debate and the good seeds naturally separate from the bad. Senior users help junior users “graduate” to the main content area.

“We want to differentiate the good from the bad in new users,” he aid. “But you can’t just pay attention to the good, you have to carefully monitor the new.” Unlike eBay’s user rating system, which has been shown to shut out new users from transactions, he said his site is good at assessing who will become a “valuable” contributor.

Metrics such as page view time, frequency of views, traffic habits and so forth help them build a picture of each user and decide whether or not to reward him or her with content-creation privileges.

“I can’t reveal all of it,” he said, in regard to his site’s user-profiling techniques. “If I did, it would be too easy to game.”

An army of photographers?

CNN.com’s Gelman pointed to a number of examples of his news network’s ability to get fresh, breaking and legit images quickly, thanks to “iReporters,” users who post material themselves.

The recent political upheaval in Myanmar, the so-called “Saffron Rebellion,” presented a challenge for CNN because they had no reporters in the country at the time. Yet, images of the conflict began rolling into the website–material that no other networks had. They decided to run with them.

“You have to balance the possibility that it may be wrong with the importance of getting (the pictures) out there. After they passed the threshold of authenticity, we put them on the Web and on air.”

One audience member asked about profit sharing: “Aren’t these citizen journalists doing your job for you, for free?”

Gelman said no, that in certain circumstances, as in the Virginia Tech shootings where CNN used Nokia cellphone video taken by Jamal Albarghouti, his network does pay for UGC. And handsomely, too. But the vetting process, as well as quality control concerns, are quite serious, he said. [OJR smelled trouble way back when, though. Visit the archives here.]

Questions within questions

Moderator Michelle Nicolosi, managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (and its website) and former editor of OJR, boiled it down to what she called “The Big Giant Question.”

“Should newspapers and their websites have the same brand? The same quality level? How heavily should they maintain filters? Are they doing a service or disservice [by allowing uncontrolled online content]?”

USAToday.com’s Kinsey Wilson said “there needs to be some commonality; we have about a 50-percent overlap. You have to play to the strengths of the medium, though. One of the interesting conversations we have is the question of quality: how do you maintain credibility and what role does speed play in credibility?”

Gelman: “Trust is the bond with the audience. At CNN we call ourselves ‘the most trusted name in news,’ and according to studies by Pew, that’s true. But if you look a little closer, you see that there’s not a lot of trust of journalism. How do you redefine what trust is–there are different expectations now–a different standard of trust. Part of the opportunity for us was to figure out what our audience demands. Authority or authenticity?”

Each panelist seemed to agree that more journalists, citizen or otherwise, on the streets equals better news. “We can’t be everywhere at once,” said Wilson.

Gelman agreed: “Ninety percent of being a journalist is showing up.”

This third installment of Bungie Studios‘ epic, if convoluted, tale of cyborg supersoldier (Master Chief) vs. religious zealot aliens (the Covenant) vs. infectious galactic zombie plague (the Flood) picks up where 2004′s best-selling Halo 2 left off. Though the Xbox Live online features of the previous game were wildly popular, fans complained about the somewhat abrupt and unsatisfying ending.

Unlike say, George Lucas, Bungie was smart enough to listen to its fanbase and cranked out an unexpectedly moving finale to the Halo trilogy with many community suggestions incorporated into the final disc.

One such ardent Bungie fan is pillar of the Halo community Claude Errera, better known by his admin handle “Louis Wu,” (an apropos nod to Larry Niven’sRingworld) the founder of halo.bungie.org [aka HBO]. Though unaffiliated with Bungie, Errera’s site is the most widely-read fansite for the Halo series and garners a jawdropping 600,000 pageviews a day. (He doesn’t sell advertising, by the way.)

HBO’s recipe of game rumors, news, strategy, “machinima” (animation cinema made by video capturing Halo games), fan-made art, contests and forums are the focal point for the Halo community–so much though that Errera’s name appears in the Bungie “Thank you section” of the credits in Halo 3.

OJR spoke to Claude about what makes a vibrant fan community and how to run a good forum site for them.

OJR: You’re thanked in the credits of Halo 3. How long have you been involved in the Halo community and how did you get started?

Claude Errera: I was one of the people who kicked off blam.bungie.org when the first information about what was to become Halo leaked out of E3 1999. So… I guess 8.5 years. I got started because bungie.org covered ALL Bungie games; Blam (and Halo as it followed) was just the next step on the road.

OJR: Why do you think the Halo series has such an active community? What’s most rewarding about being involved with it?

Claude Errera: It’s active for a few reasons – Bungie does a great job of interacting with their fans, which makes their fans want to interact with them. Bungie’s inspired enough enthusiasm with the game that people want to create things for it (artwork, models, fiction, etc), and sites like HBO provide a place to show those creations to the world, which in turn inspires others to do the same. It’s a positive feedback loop.

The most rewarding part of being involved is seeing what people are capable of creating – and helping to get those creations out to the rest of the world.

OJR: How will Saved Films (built-in video capture feature) and Forge (built-in level editor) affect the quality and popularity of user-created content–machinima for instance?

Claude Errera: I think quality will go WAY up, because getting the shot you want will become much, much easier. (We might go through a phase of ‘every angle under the sun because we can’ filmmaking at the beginning, but it’ll settle down; it always does.) I’m not sure quantity will increase all that much; it still requires the ability to capture video from your Xbox to turn it into something that can be shared on YouTube.

OJR: What’s the best thing about the Halo fan base?

Claude Errera: For me, it’s the amazing creativity the fan base is capable of.

OJR: Where could the community improve?

Claude Errera: Well, that seems like a nebulous question. Where could the planet improve? Where could our nervous system improve? The community is made up of individuals – some are positive contributors, some are negative contributors. I don’t think the COMMUNITY can be blamed for either one.

Subgroups (like site forums) can improve their own little worlds by treating newcomers with kindness and respect, instead of scorn; on the internet, we’re usually too quick to flame. That is not unique to the Halo community, however, and the solutions are not different for us than they are for any other group.

OJR: Describe the culture that has grown up around halo.bungie.org. Generally speaking, would you say posters are well-behaved? What are some problems you guys deal with? How did you resolve them?

Claude Errera: In general, yes, the community is well-behaved. We occasionally have people who want to see if they can disrupt things; they actively troll to try and rile people up. We deal with them with warnings to begin with, and then bannings; often, what’s perceived as a problem is really only a misunderstanding, and some gentle guidance is enough to get things back in line. For folks who really ARE a problem, it’s just a matter of teaching the forum regulars that feeding trolls is generally a bad idea. If they don’t get a reaction, they leave.

OJR: Does HBO make advertising revenue? How many traffic do you get?

Claude Errera: HBO has a strict no-advertising policy. We get about 600,000 pageviews/day.

OJR: You could be making tons off Google ads right?

Claude Errera: When we started bungie.org, we had one overriding dislike, among the entire group of founders – we HATED banner ads. I still do. I’m willing to forgo the income to avoid subjecting viewers to them.

OJR: You are doing all the work for free–what do you do in your day job and how to you find time to run the whole site?

Claude Errera: My day job is web design/webhosting. Bungie.org is just a busman’s holiday. I find time… hmm. I don’t know how that happens. I think I must be cheating someone.

OJR: What lessons does the Halo experience teach for creating online gaming communities? What lessons have you learned about running a healthy secondary forum community around a game?

Claude Errera: I’m no expert – but my experience tells me that the keys to managing a successful community are consistency and fairness. Update regularly, give people credit for what they do, stay on top of issues that might build into problems, don’t overreact. If you give people a platform from which to spread their love for a great game, they’ll flock to it.

OJR: Newspapers still sort of treat Halo and other massively successful game franchises as underground or outsider. A lot of the reporting is like “Gee, games make a lot of money, who knew?” Why are journalists so far behind the curve? What would you like to see in mainstream media reporting about games that’s not there now?

I think journalists might be behind the curve simply because gaming became a successful adult entertainment outlet relatively recently. Not that long ago, video games were the domain of kids – I think there are just a lot of writers that haven’t noticed the change. It’s becoming clearer with every runaway success, though.

OJR: Big open-ended question: the future of gaming and online communities-where are we going? You’ve been hosting LAN games for years and have made lots of friendships purely online-how does something like Halo change the way we forge relationships in real life?

Claude Errera: Heh – you lied. You said there wouldn’t be anything long. I don’t know where we’re going – but I think that neither aspect is going away any time soon. Online gaming is getting more and more social; full voice communication, optional video communication, and now tools that let us relive (and share with others) the moments we enjoy together in a game. At the same time, getting together to play with friends in person is so enjoyable that no matter HOW good the online gaming gets, we’ll still find time to do this; there’s nothing like high-fiving the guy next to you when you score a particularly hard-fought flag cap, or throwing a pillow (or something harder) at the guy who just betrayed you for the hell of it.

10 years ago, the idea of teenagers traveling out of state to play games at the house of someone they’d never met in person was unheard-of; not only was the potential payoff unclear enough to make the risk hardly worth it, but parents would never stand for it. Today, however, it happens regularly; we often know our online friends better than we know our local ones, and the bonds formed can be pretty strong.

Halo is showing that even folks who don’t want to play competitively can enjoy companionship online – co-op is a great way to enjoy the campaign experience. All in all, I think that Bungie is lighting the way towards the future of social gaming – we’ll look back at Halo 3 as the beginning of a paradigm shift. (Heh – now THAT sounds a little pretentious…)

If that sounds like jargon, it probably is. Monday’s presentation at Annenberg, “Understanding the Gamer Disposition: What gamers can teach us about learning in the 21st century” was largely an obfuscated statement of the obvious… that gamers like those who play World of Warcraft (WoW) are early adopters of online communities and use them in unexpected ways.

Thomas has managed to create a research field for himself that allows him to do what he obviously loves: put in lots and lots of gaming hours. “At this point, I’ve played so much Warcraft that I feel like I should introduce myself as a level-70 warlock who plays a university professor on the USC server,” he quipped.

Thomas argues that WoW, Star Wars Galaxies, SecondLife and other massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) of their kind aren’t terribly useful as teaching tools of actual facts, but rather have a secondary market that teaches players how to learn and teach other players. Translation: secondary player-created resources, like ThottBot, a forum of quest strategies for WoW, spring up to allow players to share their experiences in game and synthesize new ways of playing.

“Players pass knowledge around, teaching others how to find information for themselves.”

However, Thomas seems to hold the belief that these objective-driven game environments give rise to an ethical community system. “Games can’t necessarily work as teaching tools, but they can teach ethics and civic engagement,” he said.

That’s the case in WoW, where the game design–by virtue of being an RPG (role-playing game)–has collaboration at the core of its architecture, but what about online games that don’t reward collaboration?

“The social life of a game exists outside the game,” he says. “The gamers define what constitutes citizenship.”

Fine for World of Warcraft, not so pleasant for online first-person shooters or games like Grand Theft Auto. Thomas believes that games are a “transitional phase” of massive online communities, with games easing our culture into the realm of the future, where online avatars represent us and interpersonal relationships are forged in a virtual space.

As a gamer, however, I find that is not always the case. If the game design rewards cooperation and being nice to one another as in WoW guilds, players will do it–not for altruistic reasons, but for self interest–and if the game does not reward those behaviors, like in Halo 2, where intimidation and threats may help you win, players won’t behave that way unless forced to by the threat of banning.

It’s scary to think that if games are to be these ethical learning engines that teach us how to act in the virtual space, game design inevitably rests in the hands of major media conglomerates that want to sell as many units as possible, with little or no regard to the kind of meta communities that emerge as a result.

Thomas did present a compelling profile of the so-called “gamer disposition.” With more than nine million players logging into World of Warcraft, this is a demographic that is becoming rapidly more important for media folks to understand.

He said that typically, (1) gamers are “hungry to be evaluated and scored” and that improvement and curiosity to see new things keep them playing, (2) gamers quit playing when they stop learning and (3) dissatisfaction with the status quo defines a gamer personality.

In WoW, for instance, players want to get better equipment and level up their guy for two reasons, the first being status, but the second, and more important, being the desire to see new and interesting things built into the game world. “Purple shiny pants let you see new things more quickly,” he said, cheekily summarizing the motivation for getting new equipment in MMO-RPGs.

In the end though, none of these attributes amount to altruism or actual ethics, which are the ingredients to real social world-building. But for the business world, the gamer disposition can be novel and advantageous. Thomas told an anecdote about a software exec who, when presented with a new project, instead of recruiting people and hiring resources to tackle it, simply assumed that the resources and people were already in his company and went out and explored the building to find them. When pressed about it, the exec, a gamer, said “Well, it’s like a quest, right, and I assume that the solution is built into the game environment.” Novel indeed, but not always correct.

Douglas Thomas sees a future where we all lead second lives, with an ethically culpable avatar representing us online. “By 2011, 80% of Americans will have some sort of avatar,” he said. He looks to games as the ushers of this new world order. “The first thing many Brazilians do when they log onto SecondLife is set up dance clubs. People hear the music, and start to talk to one another.”

The benefits of an altruistic, curiosity- and community-driven online realm seem nearly limitless. But to gamers like me who have heard 13-year-old boys with sniper rifles shouting things that would make a Hell’s Angel blush, that future seems a bit overly rosy. The future of the online world will probably look a lot like the present of the real world: there will be nice people, there will be jerks, there will be rewards and drawbacks to being either. Choose wisely.