Online publishers can't afford to remain politically neutral

Once you make the transition from newsroom reporting to website publisher, you’ve added a long list of responsibilities to your daily work. There’s the technology of publishing a website and managing a readership database. There’s metrics – tracking who is reading the site, from where and for how long. There’s money, both on the expense side and earning income. You might be selling ads, invoicing advertisers, tracking campaigns, or soliciting grants, completing reports and managing a non-profit board.

With all of those extra responsibilities, do not forget about one other – one that directly conflicts with what you were taught as a reporter, but is nevertheless a responsibility that’s vital if you are to remain in business successfully.

You’ve got to get active, politically.

Decisions made by elected officials determine what information you can access, as well as who can access your publication, and how. They determine how much you pay in taxes, what infrastructure supports your business, as well as the same for your competition.

That’s why the news industry, for generations, has actively lobbied lawmakers to ensure that their decisions either help or at least minimize the harm to its companies.

But as an independent news publisher, you cannot rely on news industry lobbyists and established industry voices to represent your interests. Remember, those newspapers and broadcast and cable stations are your competition now. One characteristic of the environment that they are attempting to have government create (or maintain) is one in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to launch and grow successful competition to their businesses.

Fortunately for your current endeavor – though perhaps not for your former job – the news industry slept through that challenge in the 1990s, allowing the commercialization of the Internet in ways that made such competition inevitable.

But Big Media is fighting back now. Witness the attempt to gut “net neutrality,” the ability of the U.S. federal government to prohibit carriers from given traffic to certain parts of the Internet preference over traffic to other sites and services. A federal appeals court struck down the FCC’s ability to do that this week, potentially eliminating legal restrictions against Internet Service Providers demanding payment from you to allow your current readers future access your website.

As an independent news publisher, it is now very much in your economic interest to get on the phone and call your representatives in Congress, to ask that they make net neutrality a federal law, and to give the FCC the power to regulate ISPs on this issue.

It’s also in your interest as a reporter to get involved in local and state decisions about access to public records. In the Internet era, there’s a huge difference between “public records” that are available 24/7 on a public server in comma-delimited format, and “public records” that are available between 11am-1pm Mondays in a courthouse office, for physical inspection by someone not in possession of any electronic recording device.

Which type of public document would you rather deal with in your reporting? Remember, you can’t always count on your former colleagues in the traditional news industry to represent your interests here. With a newsroom of reporters who know shorthand, but no computer programmers on the newsroom staff, it’s conceivable that a newspaper publisher might not have a problem with the second option described above, and decline to push hard for legal changes to make the first a reality.

As an aspiring leader in your community, you should also take public stands on issues that affect the well-being of your community, whether they be school bond issues, commercial development plans or the police department budget. Whatever a newspaper publisher would have gotten involved with in the past, you, as a news website publisher, should consider taking on now. (See Amy Gahran’s excellent piece for KDMC’s News Leadership Blog, Going on the record: Civic engagement is for journalists, too!.)

Of course, that newspaper publisher assigned different employees to handle all those different tasks, and you might be going it alone now. But that’s no excuse to disengage from the political process that affects your livelihood… as well as that of the entire community you aspire to cover, and by doing so, represent.

So you will have to find a way to disclose what you do – to make clear to your readers what is reporting, what is advocacy and how one affects the other (or not). But don’t ever be afraid of losing credibility by engaging. I suspect that you’re more likely to put your credibility at risk if you fail to stand up for yourself and your readers. No one wants to follow a wimp.

So engage in local politics when you need to. And engage with your readers to let them know why you’re doing that, and how they can do the same to protect their interests.

After all, a community that’s engaged in its political process is one that going to want to read more about that process… building a larger potential audience for journalists’ work.

See, I told you that political engagement would serve your business’ interest!

Tim Berners-Lee's Web of people

Amid the dot-com jargon and techie talk, World Wide Web granddaddy Tim Berners-Lee conceded last week something about his offspring: That somewhere beneath the convoluted coding, acronyms, zeroes and ones, the Web is human, after all.

Speaking to a fire hazard of computer programmers, Web producers and journalists at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication last Thursday afternoon, Berners-Lee crammed a career’s worth (OK, maybe several careers) of wisdom and clairvoyance into a little less than an hour of accessible Netspeak. He waxed nostalgic on the Internet’s historical terrain, then prognosticated a Web future rooted in sociability, customization and, above all, user demands.

“We’ve got to keep building those wish lists, because they will inspire people who are doing the coding,” he said. “There are a bunch of geeks… who are itching to find a problem to solve.”

The moral: keep feeding the innovators. You never know what they might come up with, and there’s no predicting what bizarre idea might take off running.

“What if, just before wikis came out, somebody had said, ‘Hey, suppose there was a website that said: Anybody can edit this. Please be careful. It would be nice if this were an encyclopedia. Those are all the rules.’ You would not have invested. You would not have been the manager that said, ‘Yes, OK. Write it.'”

And per his road map, the Web’s uncharted territory is vast and ripe for discovery. As he has since day one, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee sees a blank, royalty-free canvas.

Berners-Lee on what’s in store:

We just hope that there is just a natural tendency to broader interoperability. That we will end up with a very powerful platform in the future. The sea of interoperability…. One of the things that you have to remember now is that we’re seriously thinking that the Web isn’t all there is… that downstream, there’s a huge amount of stuff. So that means that you don’t have to do your work looking to the Web as though it is the geographical terrain. You can do it as though it were something you can send back. Like undercooked beef. It’s OK to say, ‘The Web is fine, but what we really want is this.’ You know, ‘blogs are great. They’re interesting. But what if, instead, we had this?’ So the technical community needs to have feedback from people who are maybe being frustrated by how the Web is doing in all this.

If you go away today with any one thing in your head when it comes to the Web architecture, it’s that it is a universal space. It’s got to be there like a white piece of paper, for people to do other stuff on it. And the Web is great because of all of the creativity that other people have put in. It mustn’t control what other people want to do with it. It clearly has got to be able to work on any hardware platform.

There are some things we can worry about and some things we can get hopeful about. A lot of people are excited about virtual worlds; second lives and things. Some people are worried about the fact that my ISP might stop me from accessing all the new video sites because they are my cable company, and they want to be the person to decide what movies I watch this week. There are some slumps around there, but I think we’ll avoid them.

On digital humanity:

When you design something in the Web, there is a social side to it. The Web actually has protocols like http, but it’s got human protocols, too…. I make a link to another Web page because if I link to good Web pages, my Web page will become valuable. And if my Web page becomes valuable, it will be linked to. And if my Web page is linked to, it will become more read. And I like to be read! It all comes down to psychology. Sometimes it comes down to money, OK? ‘I like to be read because I get cash.’

It’s not a web of computers, it’s a web of people. It’s people that make links, it’s people that follow links. People are affected by many things in what we do; in the policies we should enact — or that we should tweak, or that we should interpret. There’s psychology at the base. There’s a large amount of mathematics about it. There’s a very, very large number of disciplines around websites, and there are great people in the spaces and doing great things who probably don’t know each other. So one of the motivations of Web science is to get people in these disciplines talking to each other.

On creativity:

The creativity has always been the exciting bit for me. We do our software design in such a mechanical, mathematical way. We analyze it and we use software engineering tools. But the actual creative leap to how we’re going to do the thing, or the fact that we will write the program in the first place, is done subconsciously by a mechanism that we cannot analyze. It is not provided to us. We do not have a portal, we do not have the debug access to a brain that allows us to figure out how it was we came to it.

Individual creativity is very special, but group creativity — when we do things together, which is what we actually have to do to solve all these big problems — is even more interesting. And one of the reasons I wanted to make the Web a big sandbox is that I wanted it to be a tool for group creativity. I wanted us to pool all our thoughts and brainstorming together so that we will somehow make our combined brains be slightly less stupid than our individual brains.

On social networks:

These social networking sites are starting to develop new ways of actually determining how you trust friends, and friends of friends have a different status than friends or friends of friends of friends…. One of the things they’re doing is creating new forms of democracy. Or new forms of meritocracy…. It kind of works, but maybe we can improve on it. And maybe, out there in the Web, we will end up producing a new social mechanism, which will improve on the existing democratic systems we’ve got today, and we’ll be able to run the country better. How about that? Run the world better. Don’t aim low! OK?

On inventing the Web:

Inventing the Web was actually rather straightforward. It was the sort of thing you could do on the back of an envelope and code up in two months. But explaining to people that it was a good idea—helping them get over all their misunderstandings of what it was supposed to be, was very difficult.

Because it was a paradigm shift, the difficulty of explaining the Web in the first place was that we didn’t have the vocabulary like “link” and “click.” So I could show someone a Web page and click on it and, tah-dah! Another window would open with a different Web page. So what? No big deal.

What they couldn’t understand was what was really interesting about this link was that this one really could have gone anywhere; to any data you could imagine being out there and conceivably interesting. Now the fact that pretty much anything you could imagine existing out there has got a high chance of being on the Web. And the fact that that link could have been there was just really difficult for people to understand.

In our meetings I wanted us to build the Web as a collaborative design so that we would always leave pointers back to why we made decisions. We would always leave pointers back to the documents we’d read when we had our meetings. So that somebody coming in would be able to understand. Somebody who’s going to reverse a design decision we’d made can find out why it was made; find out what they’re going to damage. And also, when they leave, they don’t have to do the big debrief and explain to everyone what they’ve done, because it’s there. They’ve woven it into the group…. So the first Web browser was an editor. It was designed really to be a collaborative thing.

On Gopher:

It was way more popular than the Web. Taking off exponentially, with I think maybe a sharper time constant. The University of Minnesota then announced that, by the way, they might be licensing the material. You might have to pay royalties. They were toast. Overnight. And people were putting a huge amount of pressure on me to get something from CERN. And CERN, to their huge credit, did produce, 18 months later… a document that declared that CERN would not be charging royalties on the World Wide Web. And that’s why it happened. That’s why it took off.

On bobsleds:

There’s a phase at the beginning of a bobsled run when you’re pushing. The whole team is pushing. And it’s really hard because the bobsled has in fact got some inertia. And then it picks up speed. And then in the later phase, you’re all in the bobsled steering, and things like that. But there’s a very important transition phase when you stop pushing and jump in. And for the Web, that was about 1993. So I was concerned in 1993 and started sort of rushing talking to people about what sort of consortium we would do. And eventually the result was the World Wide Web Consortium.

It's up to Congress now to protect Net Neutrality

Today, the United States Justice Department came out against “Net Neutrality,” endorsing the concept of allowing telecom companies to decide which websites and online services it will allow its customers to access, and at what speeds. The U.S. Congress must respond swiftly, by enacting legislation to preserve net neutrality and protect the interests of small publishers and private citizens.

The Justice Department bought the industry line that it needs to be allowed to charge publishers more to serve their content faster than others, in order to raise money for capital expansion of the Internet. From the department’s press release:

“The Department also noted that differentiating service levels and pricing is a common and often efficient way of allocating scarce resources and satisfying consumer demand. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, allows consumers to send packages with a variety of different delivery guarantees and speeds, from bulk mail to overnight delivery. These differentiated services respond to market demand and expand consumer choice.”

Make no mistake: The battle over net neutrality is a battle over control of the content on the Internet. Those attacking net neutrality want to return to the pre-1995 era, when high distribution costs, such as the postal service’s differentiated service and pricing levels, created a formidable barrier to entry for publishers, preserving corporate control over almost all entertainment and news media.

Those supporting net neutrality, myself included, point to the explosion in people-powered media over the past decade, which was made possible by the unprecedented ability of individuals, anywhere, to publish to a global platform, on an equal footing with corporate media.

Yes, publishers who serve millions of readers each day ought to pay more to have their content on the Web than those who serve dozens. But they already do. The industry’s plan, however, would charge individual publishers different rates for bandwidth based on negotiated deals. AT&T, for example, could cut a deal with Fox News, serving its content to subscribers at a faster rate than that of the New York Times. And people-powered sites from DailyKos to Free Republic would be left with the digital scraps, their readers waiting while AT&T gives higher priority to requests for webpages from its corporate partners.

Here’s another analogy: Let’s contrast the Internet, with its current policy of net neutrality, against cell phone networks, where telecoms can decide which content to deliver. Which offers you more content, more powerful services and at lower cost? Which allows you, personally, to speak to more people around the world, at next to no cost?

It’s no contest. That’s why publishers and consumer advocates from across the ideological spectrum, from MoveOn to the Christian Coalition, have endorsed the continuation of net neutrality. The Internet is the ultimate manifestation of the Enlightenment ideal of a marketplace of ideas. In an era of newsroom cutbacks, it provides a ever-needed check on abuses of government and corporate power. Not to mention a place for people of all tastes, backgrounds and affinities to celebrate their culture. If the Bush administration is going to do the bidding of corporate America, defenders of the public interest must urge Congress to defend this larger coalition of public and private voices.

We would not have the diversity of voices and services available on the Web today were the Internet not developed under a policy of net neutrality. Which makes the words of one Justice Department official in endorsing net neutrality’s end so ironic.

“Consumers and the economy are benefitting from the innovative and dynamic nature of the Internet,” said Thomas O. Barnett, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department’s Antitrust Division. “Regulators should be careful not to impose regulations that could limit consumer choice and investment in broadband facilities.”

Precisely. Which is why the U.S. Federal government should leave the Internet the way it is, and not permit telecoms to decide which websites they will serve to us on their backbone networks.