dan gillmor of the san jose mercury news gave the closing keynote at the fifteenth acm conference on hypertext and hypermedia in santa cruz, california. these are my annotated notes of his talk and his responses to the audiences’ questions.

journalism is changing

• professional journalists need to learn new stuff
• citizen journalism blowing up (i.e. blogging)
• hard to keep secrets with camera phones (e.g. Abu Ghraib)
• post 9/11, Tamim Ansary sends email that becomes news
• bloggers freak about trent lott’s statements

dan’s experience of journalism

• seeing more interesting news from web (esp. email) than on tv (me: i wonder if that is due to more time on web vs. watching tv?)
• journalism has been in lecture mode (bad)
• can’t write about tech in silicon valley because your readers know more than you do and they tell you about it
• journalism is a conversation (cluetrain…)

the possible effect?

• possibly “less bullshit in public” (rheingold)
• possibly harder to con people (global fact-checking)
• nasa asked for photos of shuttle accident – thousands respond

examples of self-assembling journalism

• the command post (virtual newsroom)
• dnc bloggers got press passes
• wikipedia is awesome!
• center for cooperative research (9/11 timeline, starts in 1979)
• people writing their own tools to these accomplish tasks
• decentralized journalism is more than textual blogs (e.g. bushin30seconds)
• dan wants better tools with human connection – to track conversations (me: call to arms seems geared toward a more UI/HCI audience?)

questions:

how does the web avoid becoming cb radio (where everyone is drowned out)?

• “in the blogosphere everyone will be famous for 15 people” (weinberger)
• micro noise is important
• news aggregators
• links as proxy for reputation/trust (pagerank in blogs)

how do we stay in the moment?

• IRC on screen behind presenter (me: wow neat idea)
• continuous partial attention
• hopes we don’t lose the ability to focus (dan feels he would have been labeled ADD as child)

does fact-checking just make better liars? (analogy: antibiotics create antibiotic-resistent germs)

• uhh, maybe, not really
• real time, distributed fact-checking tools should help
• respects matt drudge for signing name, but… people are skeptical now

cathy marshall: what is the future of traditional journalism?

• holds big media in high regard (especially his paper’s company: knight-ridder)
• but the product is often too dumbed-down
• no guarantee of future – unlike entertainment industry (which is fortified legally)

how do feedback loops (of grassroots journalism) affect traditional news? (i.e. fake beheading video)

• terrorists need journalism (is that a significant moral issue?) yes.
• journalism is a cog in many wheels
• dan won’t point people to acts designed for that purpose (to be pointed at)

what is the effect of blogging on dan?

• trolls (vandals, disruptors, extreme right-wing), bum him out, had to shut down comments for a day
• need to protect anonymity online