Mark Cuban, another crusty old billionaire (although just a pup compared to Rupe), used these remarks as a jumping-off point for his own flight of rhetorical fancy, in which he argued that social-recommendation networks such as Twitter and Facebook were far more important than Google, and that therefore Rupert was right and all the “information-must-be-free bigots” who criticized him must be wrong. But as Steve Rhodes (@tigerbeat) pointed out on Twitter after I posted a link to Cuban’s rant, all the social-recommendations in the world aren’t going to help Rupert if he insists on putting his content behind pay walls.

David Santori made a similar point in a comment on one of my paywall-related posts at the Nieman Journalism Lab. As he put it:

“overlooked in all this is the social aspect: any web item that interests or amuses or intrigues me, I want to share. And if I can’t share it promptly and easily — in an email link or on my blog or Facebook “wall” or in a tweet — I will be frustrated and irked just in proportion to the degree of interest I felt in the item.”

and

“The NYT registration barrier was in fact a micropayment system, one in which the payment was extracted in the form of the reader’s time and keystrokes to log in whenever they got a link to a useful story.”

I think both David and Steve make an excellent point, one which publishers ignore at their peril. Readers online may not pay you directly with currency, but they pay you with their time and attention (the foundation of the so-called “attention economy”) and it’s in your interest to make things as easy for them as possible — which is just one strike amongst many against pay walls. And if Mark Cuban is right (which I think he is) about social recommendations becoming increasingly important as a way to find valuable content, what happens when someone shares a link to your pay-walled content?

What happens is a potential reader runs headfirst into that wall, or has to jump through all sorts of hoops to read it (i.e., check to see if there is a Google News loophole), and that is a significant disincentive to a) read anything further, or b) share any links themselves. It’s the classic cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face problem: you try to generate incremental revenue through restricted access, but by doing so you deprive your content of even more valuable re-distribution through recommendation networks, which in the long run reduces your traffic and thus your revenue.

Tearah Moore, who recently returned from Iraq, posted a number of comments about what was happening, including the fact that stretchers were being brought in, that one person had allegedly been shot in the testicles, and that the shooter had died. Among other things, Carr notes that Moore’s tweet about the shooter being dead was wrong (although she didn’t say that she knew this, she just commented on it). But his main complaint seems to be that her tweets about someone being shot in the testicles, etc. had no redeeming value and were therefore “entertainment or tragi-porn.”

As he puts it, her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out but was a case of “look at me looking at this.” He then goes on to say that the tweeting of events during protests in Iran did nothing to actually change events in that country, and that all of this so-called “citizen journalism” is merely selfish and egotistical. And finally, he argues that this applies to the shocking video footage of Neda Agha Soltan’s death in Iran — that the person shooting the video didn’t try to help, but simply engaged in a cruel and unfeeling act of voyeurism.

The question of whether bystanders or observers should intervene in emergency situation is a worthwhile debate to have, but I don’t think Carr’s examples meet the test.

Tearah Moore isn’t a medical person, nor was she a military police officer, so the idea that she should have either been helping victims or tracking down the shooter instead of posting to Twitter is a little absurd. As for Neda Soltan, she was being attended to by a doctor while the person videotaping was there. What more could have been done?

As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad that someone was there to videotape it and let the outside world know about it — just as I’m glad someone was there to record Nguyen Van Lem being shot in the head, or Phai Thi Kim Phuc (who now lives in Toronto) running down the road in Vietnam after having her clothes burned off by a napalm attack. Would Carr rather that no one had videotaped Neda’s senseless death at all? It’s one thing to argue that tweeting from Iran was useless, but Neda’s death very clearly galvanized protests in that country, and international criticism. And while Tearah Moore posting observations to Twitter might not have accomplished much either, it easily could have, had events gone in a different direction.

The fact that Moore made mistakes, meanwhile, is also to be expected - she was probably listening to the same broadcasts we all were, which quoted military officials as saying the shooter had been killed. Is that her fault? Dozens of TV stations, radio stations and newspaper websites reported the exact same thing. The same criticisms were made during the Mumbai attacks, when the wrong hotel was identified as being on fire. “Twitter is completely unreliable!” many people cried — but the mainstream media were just as unreliable, as they often are in such intense situations.

Whether social media turns us all into selfish voyeurs is a valuable question to ask, but I don’t think Carr has provided us with any examples that make that case. As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad people feel a compulsion to “report” things that are happening wherever they might be. That is a fundamentally journalistic impulse, and the more people who have it, the better off we will all be — even if we have to put up with errors and misunderstandings along the way. Suw Charman-Anderson has a good post on the topic as well, and feels Carr is attacking a straw man of his own creation. David Quigg has what I think is a smart take on Carr’s post as well, and so does Alex Howard (@digiphile).

So why and how are comments on Globe stories taken down? Why doesn’t the Globe require commenters to use their real names? Why do some comments simply disappear, while others are replaced by a message that says they weren’t “consistent with our guidelines?” Do Globe reporters ever respond to comments, and under what conditions?

These are the kinds of questions that our Community Guidelines FAQ was developed to answer. It also deals with how we approach other forms of community engagement, including live discussions (which we do using software from Toronto’s Cover It Live) and forums, which we are in the process of rolling out on our Globe Investor site, and hopefully elsewhere.

In coming up with our policies, we have looked at the way many other media outlets handle comments and community — including sites such as The Guardian (whose policies are here), the CBC and the New York Times — as well as non-media communities like Metafilter and Slashdot. Like all of those sites, we want to allow our readers to comment on issues they feel strongly about, but at the same time we want to maintain a civil tone that encourages dialogue instead of partisan attacks.

We are probably never going to achieve that balance completely, or to everyone’s satisfaction. But we are trying hard to do so, because we know that many of you look to the Globe as a place where you can discuss important topics, and we want to encourage others to do so.

The FAQ is a work in progress, so please let me know what you think, either by posting a comment here or by reaching me at @mathewi on Twitter or via email at mingram@globeandmail.com.

Megan Garber has a thoughtful and all-around excellent piece at the Columbia Journalism Review that looks at how mainstream media and several blogs handled a story about Justice Antonin Scalia and comments he made about a landmark anti-segregation ruling:

In the teeming world of the Web — one defined not merely by seemingly endless variety on the part of news outlets, but also by, consequently, seemingly endless choice among news consumers — one of the rarest and therefore most valuable commodities is trust.

That tenuous good — a function of authority, accuracy, and audience attention — is a limited resource largely because one of its key components — attention — is itself finite. Each audience member has only a limited amount of attention he or she can give to news stories. And that limited resource, in turn, leads to a tension between plenty — the variety and redundancy of news outlets available to audiences — and scarcity. With the end result being, among other things, that no longer is reader loyalty something that can be safely assumed, in the old ‘well, where else are they going to go for their news?’ model. In our world of media plenty, no longer is the cultivation of trust one component of the journalistic equation; it is a key component. It is, in many ways, the component: If people doubt the accuracy of the journalism you produce — or, worse, if they don’t pay attention to it in the first place — then what, really, is the point?

For bloggers, whose journalism evolved with the Web, the visceral instinct toward trust — the implicit recognition of its primacy—is coded, so to speak, into their journalistic DNA. Mainstream outlets, on the other hand — outlets which, up to now, have been able to take their readership largely for granted — don’t generally share that instinct. They’ve always been interested in cultivating trust, of course — trust builds audiences, which builds both revenue and journalistic impact—but their relationship with trust has been more detached. They’ve generally understood trust as something to be ‘earned’…but not as something that is implicitly, and existentially, necessary. While they’ve had to work to maintain reader trust…they haven’t had to work too hard at it. Because, again: where else are the readers going to go?

As my friend Craig Newmark likes to say: “Trust is the new black.”

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous

Micah Sifry talks about how Atrios and Digby see the blogosphere evolving, and the rise of corporate blog entities.

Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to flourish in the national political blogosphere in the U.S.? Two powerful indie-bloggers, the pseudonymous Digby and the once-pseudonymous Atrios (Duncan Black), posted links back to my Friday post about Technorati’s new top blogs metric, that in essence expressed nostalgia for those good ‘ol days when all it took was a PC and a strong point of view to make it in the Big Blogcity.

One of the interesting elements in all this is how it’s a self-reinforcing problem (or a vicious circle), because of the linking policy at “big media” outlets.

It’s worth paying closer attention to Digby’s point about who links to whom. In essence, she is saying that when it comes to the link economy, indie bloggers are more generous than Big Media types, who she says mainly just link to each others. And I think she’s right; the linking patterns discerned by our friends at Linkfluence show that in general, the blogs at big newspapers sites are far less likely to link to “regular” bloggers than the reverse. And this isn’t a matter of one type of blogger (the indie), simply “leeching” content from the content generators, since Big Media bloggers are just as often doing their own opinionizing as much as they are reporting real news.

Whether we like it or not, this may well be a serious trend, one that doesn’t bode well for independent bloggers.

Posted via web from mathewingram’s posterous