New Media Literacy: Core Principles, Best Practices, Strategy And Ethics For The Independent Web Publisher - Part 1

Sponsored Links

Do you buy into everything you read, or do you analyze, research, and question what you learn? Are you willing to start reconsidering the way you read and select your trusted news sources? Is a new media literacy really needed?

Photo credit: Yurok Aleksandrovich

You live in the era of information overload. Technology is becoming increasingly cheaper, and it's not in the hands of an oligarchy anymore. But if anybody can create, publish and distribute media, how can you find the info that really matters in this jungle of data? What's the best way to separate "the news from the noise"?

New media journalism researcher and online publisher, Dan Gillmor, looks in Part 1 of this article, at what should be the guiding ethics of this emerging media literacy, such as credibility issues in new media, the problems of privacy, and those key journalistic values that the Internet revolution and those riding it may have lost track of in their rush to create commercial value.

Intro by Robin Good

 

Principles of a New Media Literacy

Intro

Media are becoming democratized. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts. The networks that made this possible have provided vast access to what people have created-potentially a global audience for anyone's creation.

But the expanding and diversifying media ecosystem poses some difficult challenges alongside the unquestioned benefits. A key question: In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we live, work, and govern ourselves in a digital age depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we'll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

These norms are principles as much as practices, and they are now essential for consumers and creators alike. They add up to a twenty-first-century notion of what we once called "media literacy," which has traditionally all but missed the emerging methods of participation that are becoming such a key element of digital media. (This is only one reason that we should seek a replacement for the expression "media literacy" - because it connotes something that has become quaint to the point of near-irrelevance.)

 

Issues of Credibility

Trust and credibility are not new to the Digital Age. Journalists of the past have faced these questions again and again, and the Industrial Age rise of what people called "objective journalism" - allegedly unbiased reporting - clearly did not solve the problem.

We don't have to look very far, or very far back in history, to note some egregious cases. The New York Times' Jayson Blair saga, in which a young reporter spun interviews and other details from whole cloth, showed that even the best news organizations are vulnerable. Fox News still maintains a slogan of "fair and balanced" - two falsehoods in three words. The Washington press corps, with dismayingly few exceptions, served as a stenographic lapdog for the government in the run-up to the Iraq War. And so on.

But the credibility problem of traditional media goes much deeper. Almost everyone who has ever been the subject of a news story can point to small and sometimes large errors of fact or nuance, or to quotes that, while accurately written down, are presented out of their original context in ways that change their intended meaning. Shallowness is a more common media failing than malice.

Traditional media boast processes, however, aimed both at preventing mistakes and - when they inevitably occur - setting the record straight.

The new media environment is rich with potential for excellence. But it is equally open to error, honest or otherwise, and persuasion morphs into manipulation more readily than ever.

Consider just five examples, two from the political world:

1. The 2004 U.S. congressional elections were notable in many ways, not least the widespread adoption of blogging and other conversational tools by candidates, staffs, and supporters. But in South Dakota's U.S. Senate race, the campaign of Republican challenger John Thune paid two local political bloggers whose work influenced the state's major newspaper; not until after the election, which Thune won, was their paid role widely known.





2. Venture capitalists have poured considerable funds into a startup called PayPerPost, a company that serves as a go-between for companies wishing to get bloggers to write about products and services. Although PayPerPost encourages bloggers to disclose this arrangement, the disclosure can be easily hidden or omitted entirely at the blogger's choice. This practice has drawn well-deserved contempt from those who favor transparency in media, and equally derisive rejoinders from paid bloggers who don't care what people think of what they do.





3. Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, among other major companies, have been caught paying bloggers directly or indirectly to promote the firms or their products - but without disclosing their corporate ties. The stealth marketing, also called "buzz marketing," caused mini-uproars in the blogging community, but a frequently asked question was whether these campaigns were, as most believe, just the tip of an influence iceberg.





4. President-Elect Barack Obama has been the target of mostly shadowy, though sometime overt, rumors. They range from the laughable to the truly slimy. What they have in common is a single factor: They were plainly designed to poison voters in swing states. They were equally plainly having an impact; a nontrivial percentage of Americans is not sure whether he is a Muslim. (Obama's staff created a special section on the campaign website aimed at countering the rumors.)





5. On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter so-called sock puppets - people posting under pseudonyms instead of their real names, and either promoting their own work or denigrating their opponents, sometimes in the crudest ways. As with the buzz marketing, it's widely believed that the ones getting caught are a small percentage of the ones misusing these online forums.

Craig Newmark, founder of the craigslist online advertising and community site, famously says that most people online are good and that a tiny percentage does the vast majority of the harm. He is undoubtedly correct.

In the traditional news world, even though we understood the prevalence of minor errors in stories, even by reputable journalists, we also understood that, by and large, the better media organizations get things pretty much right. The small mistakes undermine any notion of absolute trust, but we accept the overall value of the work.

In a world with seemingly infinite sources of information, this equation is harder to solve. But we can make a start by being better informed about what we read, hear and watch.

 

Supply Side: Watching the Watchers

One of most serious failings of traditional journalism has been its reluctance to focus critical attention on a powerful player in our society: journalism itself. The Fourth Estate rarely gives itself the same scrutiny it sometimes applies to the other major institutions. (I say "sometimes" because, as we've seen in recent years, journalists' most ardent scrutiny has been aimed at celebrities, not the governments, businesses, and other entities that have the most influence, often malignant, on our lives.)

A few small publications, notably the Columbia Journalism Review, have provided valuable coverage of the news business over the years. But these publications circulate mostly within the field, and can only look at a sliver of the pie.

To be fair, the news media do cover each other to some degree. But most of that coverage focuses on reporting related to corporate maneuvering and profiles of stars - not bad to do but not sufficient to what the public needs. Only very occasionally do journalists for major media organizations drill in on each others' successes and failures as journalists. When they do it, they tend to do it well; it is unfortunate that they don't try more often.

The Internet has been a boon to media criticism in several key respects. First, bloggers and Web-only publications are providing some of the toughest and best work of this kind.

• Salon's Glenn Greenwald tends toward overwrought descriptive language, but he reports with enormous depth and is singularly persuasive in showing how American journalists have continually botched even basic duties when it comes, for example, to covering the debate over government electronic surveillance.
• In Los Angeles, blogger Patrick Frey ("Patterico"), a lawyer, relentlessly watches and critiques - also sometimes with over-the-top language - the Los Angeles Times' coverage, particularly political stories.

Both of these writers make clear their political leanings, left for Greenwald and right for Frey; readers refract that information through their own lenses to make their own decisions.

These two writers are among legions of people who have taken up media criticism, not as their primary occupation but as a part of what they do in their daily lives. When they care about something, they care about the journalism covering that topic - and now they have a way to discuss what they've seen. Their work, however, is diffuse. The diffusion is a natural aspect of the Web's distributed nature.

Several sites, including one I'm co-founding seek to generate and collect some of the criticism. There are two of note.

1. The admirable NewsTrust project (I am an advisor) asks people to rate articles from major media organizations and blogs across a variety of criteria that, we hope, adds up to quality.
2. In the United Kingdom, the Media Standards Trust is doing brilliant work to promote better journalism, and its Journalisted project aims to create a database of journalists to encourage transparency and accountability.

The word "accountability" resonates. Apart from raw market mechanisms and the legal system's bludgeon of libel lawsuits - both, sadly, are flawed as countermeasures to poor journalism - we have had a largely unaccountable press.

New media tools are pulling down some walls and helping to create the possibility of deeper nonlegal accountability. More thorough and robust media criticism, and a conversation around it, will serve us all better.

 

Demand Side: Democratization Means Participation

As noted previously, the democratization of media is well under way. This takes two major forms.

1. First, the tools of creation are increasingly in everyone's hands. The personal computer that I'm using to write this essay comes equipped with media creation and editing tools of such depth that I can't begin to learn all their capabilities. My phone boasts video recording and playback, still-camera mode, audio recording, text messaging, and GPS location, among other tools that make it a powerful media creation device.
2. Second, we can make what we create widely accessible. With traditional media, we produced something, usually manufactured, and then distributed it - put it in trucks or broadcast it to receivers in a one-to-many mode. Today, we create media and make it accessible: People come and get it. This distinction is absolute crucial, because although there is plainly an element of distribution here, even in the traditional sense, the essential fact in a one-to-one or many-to-many world is availability.

This democratization gives people who have been mere consumers the ability to be creators. With few exceptions, we are all becoming the latter as well as the former, though to varying degrees.

Even more exciting, media democratization also turns creators into collaborators. We have only begun to explore the meaning, much less the potential, of this reality.

Media saturation requires us to become more active as consumers, in part to manage the flood of data pouring over us each day but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we do see.

When we create media that serves a public interest or journalistic role, we need to understand what it means to be journalistic, as well as how we can help make it better and more useful.

This adds up to a new kind of media literacy, based on key principles for both consumers and creators. They overlap to some degree, and they require an active, not passive, approach to media.

 

Why This Matters

We are doing a poor job of ensuring that consumers and producers of media in a digital age are equipped for these tasks. This is a job for parents and schools. (Of course, a teacher who teaches critical thinking in much of the United States risks being attacked as a dangerous radical.) Do they have the resources - including time - that they need?

But this much is clear: If we really believe that democracy requires an educated populace, we're starting from a deficit. Are we ready to take the risk of being activist media users, for the right reasons? A lot rides on the answer.

End of Part 1

Originally written by Dan Gillmor for Dan Gillmor: Blog and first published on December 26, 2008 as "Principles of a New Media Literacy".

About the author

Dan Gillmor's principal gig these days is the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Dan Gillmor also writes articles and has published a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O'Reilly Media), and is working on a new book about media in the digital age. From 1994-2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press.

Photo credits:
Issues of Credibility - Josef Muellek
Supply Side: Watching the Watchers - vacuum3d
Demand Side: Democratization Means Participation - Andres Rodriguez
Why This Matters - Marc Dietrich

Dan Gillmor -
Reference: Dan Gillmor: Blog [ Read more ]