Why We Should Welcome the Ruination of the Reporter

Collapsing revenue models among traditional news outlets, particularly newspapers, are erasing free capital once used to fund legions of reporters who would do the miserable work of following sporting events, city council meetings, police beat, and numerous other areas of generally local interest. As these reporting jobs disappear, members of the media establishment decry the loss of “reporters in the trenches” of the daily drudgery of local journalism, who might, once in years, if the stars align favorably, turn up some juicy misappropriation scandal or a powerful human interest story. Seeing the loss of menial journalism, journalists at all levels fear that new media will slowly encroach and destroy their jobs as well. In truth, journalists are less concerned about the death of local reporting than they are about protecting their own positions and livelihoods.
News flash: journalism isn’t dead. Menial labor is. Why should a human attend every single city council meeting in every township across the country when a webcam could attend in their place? Why should human reporters waste time summarizing and reporting the major points of that meeting when software can do just as admirable a job? Reporters witness and summarize, doing drudge work for years before they graduate to journalism, the aggregation and analysis of events and the identification of trends of importance. Instead of reporters wasting their time covering bureaucratic machinations, they can instead learn to leverage technology to actually engage in true journalism, something our Touring-test-limited computer friends are incapable of. To lament the loss of “reporting” is to rail against the introduction of the mechanical loom, or any other labor saving device. The mechanization of every industry has destroyed jobs, but has also freed human capital, the most precious of all industrial inputs, to be employed in a more valuable role. In this case, human capital is no longer wasted on witnessing and regurgitating, but can be instead employed analyzing and thinking. When it is no longer necessary to spend human capital in menial functions, it is insulting to humanity to continue to do so.
In this time of transition, the journalistic profession should stop struggling futilely against the advance of technology and instead identify what coverage is being lost rather than worry about the loss of jobs. While technology can and should fill in the gaps, it won’t unless someone deploys it to do so. We are in danger of losing transparency in local government, knowledge of our own communities, and a forum for local dialogue about events of general interest. Rather than swearing to die like John Henry with their notebooks and pens in hand, reporters should instead become true journalists to alert society of what we are in danger of losing and advocate for the deployment of resources to prevent it.

Tourism in Italy: A Wikipedia Article Review

 I picked this article because I resided in Italy for three years and traveled extensively.  As written, the article is lengthy, but suffers from multiple weaknesses and has been nominated for deletion at least once.  The “Travel and Tourism” project in English Wikipedia is somewhat established, but is still working to produce a coherent batch of articles, making this one ripe for review and editing as standards are agreed upon.

Comprehensiveness:  The article focuses primarily on the history of tourism in Italy and the various tourist attractions.  While not completely inappropriate, most “tourism in…” pages focus significantly on the economic impacts of tourism, which is largely lacking from this article, aside from the intro.  Furthermore, the various areas of Italy are grouped into “regions” which are overly broad.  Only two cities of note are addressed in any detail.

Sourcing:  This is the article’s greatest weakness.  Hardly any sources come directly from government sources, respected newspaper, travel journals, and the like.  Every Region (in the proper Italian use of the term) has their own tourism page, in additional to the national page.  Data regarding tourism’s economic impact on Europe’s third-largest economy abounds in other governmental and non-governmental sources.

Neutrality:  No issues exist.

Readability:  The quality of writing varies through out the article, but, in general, is prone to lengthy run-on sentences.  Much of the article could benefit from editing aimed at reducing unnecessary verbiage.

Formatting:  While generally adhering to the Wikipedia Manual of Style, the arrangement of subjects within the article is somewhat haphazard.  This most likely results from a lack of coherent vision regarding the salient topics to be covered.  It roughly resembles other “Tourism in…” articles, but this subject area is only a few years old in Wikipedia and lacks consistent standards.

Illustrations:  Adequate, though not terribly notable illustrations are used.

The first and foremost revision for the page would be to ensure that it is keeping with the emerging standards for tourism pages in Wikipedia.  Given Italy’s richness in historical and cultural attractions, much of the detailed discussions of regions and cities should be relegated to sub-pages.  Sourcing needs to come primarily from government and international information sites, though there are obvious opportunities for cross-referencing within Wikipedia that have yet to be implemented.

My Wikipedia user page can be found here.

Reaction to In the Plex, by Steven Levy

While charting Google’s growth from a dorm room start-up to an Internet behemoth, Levy paints a mostly positive picture of the company, its founders, and its intentions in the world in his book.  He depicts an organization struggling to hold on to its founders’ vision while surviving in a world of corporate competition, privacy pitfalls, and Beltway politics.  The most fascinating aspect of Google is its intense focus on data-driven growth and user happiness.

Has Google, as its competitors and Congress charge, become a monopoly?  Is it possible to have a monopoly on Internet search and advertising?  Is it possible to have a monopoly on anything inherently Internet-based, aside from access?  Internet search, alone, generates no revenue, at least not for Google, so its practices there can only classify as monopolistic if one ignores the actual definition of the word.  While it certainly possesses market power with regards to advertising, Google does not exercise it by charging prices above the market.  In fact, given the design of the system and the lack of human oversight, it drastically reduced barriers to entry into online advertising through the online auctioning of adWords.  Microeconomics reigns supreme under Google’s advertising schema and aside from the occasional abuse of adWords to launch attack campaigns, fault is hard to find.  Does Google have extreme market power in terms of influence?  Certainly.  Do they abuse it?  No.  Even during their China adventure, when they kowtowed to the CPC’s demands for censorship, they attempted to subvert those demands by informing users when censorship occurred and providing a link to the uncensored version of Google search.  While the results of their system may not please established institutions, by and large, Google remains a steadfast champion of the people, whether intentionally or not.

In fact, their data-driven approach appeals so strongly, that certain government functions might be better executed by Google.  Monetary policy comes to mind.  If Google can analyze Internet search user happiness by measuring short and long clicks, consumer preferences by their search and buying habits, and what a user may be looking for based on their first three keystrokes, their data collection and analysis can likely monitor and influence macroeconomic behavior far more impartially than Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve system (Great Moderation, anyone?).  If the rate of trades indicates a bubble forming, Google could tighten credit.  If lending slumps, it could loosen reserve requirements.  What’s more, Google’s systems have a demonstrated capacity to learn and could be far more responsive to short term phenomena if desired.  A dispassionate, data-driven system would handle business cycle management far better than mere humans subject to self-confirming biases, shortsightedness, and political influence.  The predictability of such a system in itself would likely reassure traders and consumers alike, leading to fewer instances of market euphoria or panic.

Is Google good for society?  For now, I would say yes, undoubtedly.  While Levy’s book routinely praises Google, perhaps beyond the point of wisdom, he describes a Larry Page and Sergey Brin that I can understand, empathize with, and trust.  Were the Internet Wars to begin today, I would gladly swing a sledgehammer for Google (given my nonexistent programing skills).  What terrifies me though is the succession of leadership.  Every organization, no matter how well intentioned, eventually becomes self-serving.  Look at our government bureaucracies, Microsoft, political parties, and labor unions.  There must be a social law akin to entropy:  every organization devolves to sustaining itself.  I trust Google now, even given its errors and failures.  Will I trust Google in thirty years, after the founders have retired?  A far more questionable proposition, to say the least.

Reaction to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody

Human beings are inherently social animals.  Shirky’s premise states that the internet as a technology drastically reduces past barriers to forming and maintaining groups and consequently radically changes the level of collective response one could expect to a given event.  He posits that three levels of interaction exist within the internet: sharing, collective collaboration, and collective action.  Sharing consists of self-publishing of images, videos, music, and writing.  In the past, such publishing required significant infrastructural support, leading to broadcast media, the music and movie industry, publishing houses, and the like, which is no longer required.  In addition, group forming on the internet through venues such as Facebook and email encourages people to
participate, since forming groups is what we naturally do.  Many internet features such as tagging, rating, and reviewing serve as a filter for subsequent users, identify the
content that others felt related to a certain topic or possessed a certain value
to others.

The second tier of behavior, collective collaboration, exists on the principle that if the effort to contribute is low, then some people will contribute a lot, but just as
importantly, lots of people will contribute a little.  This is an example of a Pareto or power distribution, popularly known as “the long tail.”

The third tier, collective action, is the most difficult to achieve, but again, the internet
has drastically altered the dynamics.  Since news of an event is now broadcasted widely in a durable format, people with similar interests can more readily find each other and contribute to a group effort.  Now if an event occurs that affects many people, they are not limited by geography from organizing to take action.

While some features of the internet are already well understood, like sharing, we are still hemmed in by mental models formed on old technology. People still email individual documents to lots of people rather than post them centrally and merely send a link.
More fundamentally, as Shirky notes, we have trouble understanding that just because content is public, does not mean it is intended for you.  On the flipside, people are now prone to broadcasting far more information than is prudent in a media that is far more
durable than those commonly available in the past.  Two Congressmen have resigned in the past year alone because of information transmitted via the web or cellphones.  This lack of understanding means we are still in a phase of exploring with regards to technology.  Successful technologies augment our existing proclivities, but if a product fails to deliver one key feature, it may be doomed to failure.  Shirky provides three
basic features of a new social platform: the promise, the tools, and the bargain.  These features provide a framework for analyzing new technology to determine its likely success.

Given the internet’s propensity to undermine existing hierarchical organizations, how can it be instead used to support those organizations? Any company suffers from imperfect knowledge of itself.  Employees may not understand decisions made
by superiors and superiors may not know of vital information held by a subordinate.  How does one best remedy this without undermining the existing chain of command?  An option might be a company forum where all users are anonymous, but everyone participates. Such a forum would rapidly lose appeal if no proposals discussed led to
actual action.  At some point, anonymity may have to be shed to take action.  The promise of such a platform would have to appeal to both management and employees to encourage participation and, as noted, an explicit bargain would likely need to be immunity from retribution.

The Pareto distribution as a concept seems to have numerous applications beyond the scope of this class, particularly in biology. The incidence of harmful or beneficial mutation in a species would seem to follow a power law distribution; very few mutations have a disproportionate impact on an organism or population and the vast majority are almost completely inconsequential.  A Pareto distribution could also describe the broad category of infectious diseases, with a few diseases having high rates of mortality, but the majority causing only minor symptoms.  A quick look about the web indicated
that it does apply to epidemiology in terms of transmission; i.e. one Canadian
flight attendant was disproportionately responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS,
whereas most other infected people probably transmitted the disease to just a
few others at most (though this Patient-Zero theory is criticized).  This application is fairly obvious given Shirky’s description of loose networks of groups.

All in all, a worthwhile read.