I’m at MIT this week at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, a conference that’s bringing together two years of winners of the Knight News Challenge for discussions about innovation in journalism. The host is the Center for Future Civic Media, a collaboration between MIT professors Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Henry Jenkins and Mitchel Resnick. Their joint project, supported by Knight through the news challenge, is a new academic study center that serves as a space for experimentation, largely by students, in the very wide topic of “civic media”.

In my last visit to the Center, I got a sense for just how broad the definition the MIT folks are using for “civic media”. Jenkins, offering a framing talk for the opening discussions, offers examples that range from remix culture in American politics (using an example of a meme he may have helped launch - Obama as Spock - and the online manifestations of that idea) through pageants small American communities held to replicate the history of their founding. He implicitly makes the point that civic media is much, much larger than journalism by avoiding journalistic examples, and he explicitly makes the point that civic media isn’t about technology, but about personal relationships.

That’s likely a good reminder, as we’re surrounded by an amazing amount of technology to mediate the relationships between the hundred or so people at this event. There is, of course, a conference wiki, an IRC channel, and a twitter feed. Plus there’s a pretty cool tool called Backchan, which invites attendees to post questions and vote on each other’s questions - one users of the tool commented (via the tool) “turning real life into Digg… This can’t end well!”

And we’re all wearing 1990s-cellphone-sized electric name tags from nTAG, a company that spun out of the Media Lab based on research that began in 1995. (Indeed, I remember wearing one of these things in 1998 when I was trying to convince Lycos to join the Media Lab as a sponsor.) They talk to each other, wirelessly exchanging personal data, and generally appear to make the geeks in the crowd very, very nervous. (They’re supposed to be an easy way to exchange digital business cards… something my Palm Pilot was supposed to do as well, but I never found myself using.)

And while I’m not hugely excited about my digital nametag, I can’t deny that a visualization the company founder Rick Borovoy showed is incredibly cool. His system was used at a technology conference involving a lot of Asian attendees. The visualization showed the percent of interactions between people from different countries as relates to a predictive model based on purely random interactions. For instance, you’d expect to see a few hundred conversations between Chinese and Taiwanese attendees - actually, the visualization showed almost none. At the center of the visualization is what we might think of as the “homophily line” - a huge tendency for people from the same nation to interact far more than a random interaction model would predict.

A different visualization from the nTAG folks. I would love to get my hands on the national interaction map Borovoy referred to here. Please see more on Rick Borovoy’s blog

So, yes. As much as I grouse about “shiny for shiny’s sake”, there’s something to be said for technologies that can produce cool datasets like this one. And I suspect that some of the tools we’ll see later tonight, in a classic Media Lab show and tell, will have important implications for the future of human interactions, while some will merely be really cool.

Many of the folks here are more firmly rooted in the world of journalism than in the tech community. Jenkins introduces a panel that includes Jay Rosen, Lisa Williams and Dan Gillmor, three of the luminaries of citizen media. Rosen offers a historical perspective on the press, tracing the rise of journalism to reports on parliamentary debates in Britian. The journalists, he tells us, were the ones who had the skills to communicate the discussion “inside” to “the people outside” - this new institution meant that “the people out of doors grew up, became the public.” This doesn’t mean that journalists are essential to democracy, he tells us, “but that democracy is essential to journalism.”

Much of the discussion focuses on crowdsourcing. Gillmor offers an example from a local mailing list, where people in a community ask each other about local water quality until one is willing to call the town, get the research on the water issues and informs the rest of the list. Rosen makes an argument that crowdsourcing may require the sort of motivation than comes from strong ideological belief - when readers of Talking Points Memo get as incensed as Josh Marshall about the Bush Justice Department, they’re willing to do the work to sort through huge masses of data. In many cases, though, only 1% of people are willing to do the hard work involved with investigating a story, while 10% will be sufficiently involved to participate in crowdsourcing, while others will simply serve as readers. Rosen speculates that the key to crowdsourced citizen media is to identify that precious 1& and turn them loose… and to figure out how to break up reporting tasks to leverage that 10%, but not spend too much time worrying about the 89% who will just read.

The key towards using crowdsourcing well - and perhaps the key in citizen media as a whole - is not exploiting the participants. Gillmor points out that the Huffington Post appears to be using a model where everyone contributes and no one gets paid… very profitable, but unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. Referring to her work with smalltown journalism project h2otown, she notes that she knew the project was going somewhere when participants threw themselves a birthday party… and almost as an afterthought, invited her.

Hundreds of Pakistani lawyers are protesting Pervez Musharraf’s attacks on the judiciary - and the failure of Pakistan’s new government to overturn Musharraf’s actions - with a series of marches from Karachi to Islamabad, referred to as “the long march“.

There’s no shortage of media attention on the protest, including an excellent series of short interviews conducted by the BBC. But it’s reasonable to assume that media outlets won’t be able to watch every encounter between protesters and security authorities.

That’s why noted Pakistani blogger and media activist, Dr. Awab Alvi, is organizing citizen media coverage of the Long March. Bloggers can contribute photos and videos to the blog by sending email to LM@help.pk. Awab is hoping that many protesters will take advantage of Pakistan’s GPRS network to upload photos, video and text reports, allowing near real-time coverage.

The blog currently features a combination of brief bulletins and a mix of citizen and mainstream press photos. Unfortunately, Awab appears to be posting photos to Facebook in a way that makes them very hard to share here, but there are a number of striking images already uploaded.

And, of course, there’s a Twitter feed. Twitter: don’t start a revolution without it!

Law professors Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh brightened my drive to Harvard last week with a dialog about “the architecture of serendipity”. Sunstein is well-known for his concerns about echo chambers and “media cocoons” that allow citizens to insulate themselves, hearing only the opinions and perspectives of people who agree with them. (He develops this idea at length in Republic.com, later Republic.com 2.0, and to a lesser degree in his excellent Infotopia. My review of Infotopia, if you’re interested.) He’s concerned that the customizability and choice offered in digital media can make it easier for citizens to insulate themselves from the sorts of differing views they need to make informed decisions as citizens.

Volokh, one of the smartest bloggers out there, believes that Sunstein overestimates the diversity of old media, suggesting that most newspapers have such a strong center-left bias that they serve as an ideological cocoon, and suggests that blogs invite people to break free of ideological bias, by linking to pieces they critique. So far, so good - this is a well-trodden path, on both sides of the argument.

It gets more interesting, in my opinion, when Sunstein starts defending old media, invoking “the architecture of serendipity”. (Here’s a clip on the NYTimes website, an excerpt from the longer dialog on Bloggingheads.tv, which includes this argument.) He argues that, the “daily newspaper, when it’s working well, builds in the architecture of serendipity.” It’s designed to draw the idea to a headline or story that you might not otherwise encounter, hoping to capture your focus and draw you into a story you didn’t know you were interested in, but which gives you information that changes your worldview.

My regular readers know that I’m interested in serendipity as one of the tools that can help combat homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together, and to share their preferred sources of information, often at the expense of other voices and sources of information. But it’s difficult just to identify good examples of serendipity, and much harder to figure out how to engineer it. It’s worth looking closely at newspapers as tools that try to generate serendipity, and to ask questions about whether we’re losing this function in a move from paper-based to digital media.

Today’s New York Times has six major stories and seven minor stories on the front page. The major stories, which include headlines, large blocks of text and, in two cases, photos or graphics. Those stories include substantial hooks to interest a reader - 200-400 words of text, plus images, designed to convince a reader to a) buy the newspaper and b) read the body of the story. The seven stories at the bottom of the page include 17-48 words of text as hook, and three include pictures. Count every mention of a page inside the edition you could turn to - the paper equivalent of a hyperlink - and there are 23 links a reader can follow from the front page.

The contrast to the online edition of the Times is pretty stark. Just counting possible links (using a search for anchor tags in the source HTML), there are 423 other webpages linked from the front page. A more careful count, ignoring ads, links to RSS feeds and links to account tools for online readers, gives 315 content links, possible stories or sections a reader could explore from the front page. While there are almost 14 times as many pages for a reader to explore, they’ve got much less information on what links to follow: while twelve stories have text hooks, the wordcount ranges between 10 and 26 words. While there’s a good chance one of those stories might convince you to click on it, you won’t start reading it on the front page, the way you might with the 200-400 word stories in the paper edition. (There are lots more images to choose from - 15, one of which is a video - in contrast to the seven images on the paper front page.)

Okay, so the paper gives 7% as many options to the reader that the online edition does, though provides up to 20 times as much text to get a reader invested in a story. So what? And isn’t this just a function of what medium is good at? If the paper edition of the New York Times could support hyperlinks, wouldn’t there be 300 on the front page? (And if computer monitors were as eye-friendly as printed paper, wouldn’t the Times website feature lots more text?)

Newspapers have at least three public-interest functions. They report news, they offer a space for public debate, and they prioritize news for readers. There are powerful online alternatives for those first two functions. I’m starting to get concerned that there’s not much good thinking about that third critical function.

As Sunstein points out in his conversation with Volokh, there’s a much wider range of information available online than there was in the days where old media was the only media. Not only do we have an explosion of citizen media, we’ve now got the opportunity to read
newspapers from around the world (including an amazing African collection via AllAfrica.com) and access a much larger wealth of newswire stories than would be available in any newspaper. We haven’t achieved perfect equity in this field - people in wealthy nations have far greater opportunity to read and write online than people in developing nations, and there are a whole lot more small-town American and European newspapers online than websites for African and Indian papers - but it’s hard to make an argument that we live in anything other than a more info-rich and info-diverse environment.

(There is, on the other hand, a good argument to be made that certain types of media, especially investigative journalism and international journalism written by foreign correspondents, are in real danger. You might be interested in a previous post on business models for “difficult journalism“. My sense is that there’s less and less support for difficult journalism, especially at papers like those in the Tribune network, which are facing strong management pressure to decrease the amount of news they report, ensuring parity with advertising.)

It’s also pretty clear that we’re not hurting for spaces in which citizens can express opinions. It’s not easy to get a letter to the editor published in the New York Times, but it’s pretty trivial these days to publish a blog. (See, again, my caveat that this is a whole lot easier to do in Canada than in Cambodia.) And there are new types of news outlets that specialize in amplifying personal opinion, like the Huffington Post, which are able to put some opinions in front of very large readerbases.

With such an embarrasment of riches, you might expect unprecedented diversity from online news sites. You’d be disappointed. Major news aggregation sites like Yahoo News and Google News offer tens of thousands of stories… but there’s a huge amount of overlap and clustering. The Project on Excellence in Journalism, as part of their 2006 State of the News Media, offers “A Day in the Life of the News“, an attempt to look at the entirity of the day’s news in the United States. They report, “The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events.” It’s not that there aren’t more stories available on Google News - there’s tons of deep coverage accessible to anyone willing to search - but that you may be disappointed if you’re relying on Google News to put a story on the front page that you didn’t expect to be interested in but find compelling or useful (my operating definition of serendipity).

You may be disappointed for a different reason from news voting sites like Digg and Reddit. These sites rely on their users to suggest stories, and to vote on which ones should lead the coverage. As a result, these sites provide a lot of stories that may be interesting, if you share the interests (and perhaps the demographics and psychographics) of the reader/editors. But they’re pretty unlikely to surprise you with serendipity - because readers have so much in common (see Whois reddit?, in which community respondents self-report that the site’s users are 92% male, 70% employed in the IT industry or as students, and 70% from the US), they often use the same sources to find stories, and are likely to vote up stories that emphasize certain technical and political viewpoints. (See my post on “Homophily, serendipity and xenophilia” for lots more on this idea.)

And here’s where the 19th century technology of the daily newspaper proves itself to be a very powerful “persuasive technology“. When an editor assigns front-page real estate to a story, she’s telling the reader that these are the stories that demand the most attention and persuading you to read them… or at least read them long enough to decide whether or not they trigger your serendipity switch. Many newspapers have a convention of putting the biggest stories of the day “above the fold” and saving the bottom of the front page for important local stories and for “the serendipity box”, a place on the page for a story that might escape your attention if the editor didn’t feature it.

The Times, to their credit, sometimes treats half the front page as an opportunity to drive readers to stories they probably don’t know they’re interested in. Today’s largest story, in terms of page real estate, is “Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servant’s Slums”, a story about class divides in modern, urban India. It’s certainly not breaking news, and it doesn’t have much to connect it to the day’s news agenda. But it’s a lovely piece of storytelling - the key factor David Weinberger identifies in getting people to pay attention to developing world news. Being on the front page works - the India story is the #3 story emailed from the NYTimes site today, suggesting that a large number of people found it compelling enough to pass it on. (Story #8 is a front page story from yesterday on South Korean mothers moving their children to Australia or New Zealand for better educational opportunities, another classic serendipity box story.)

A possible (counterintuitive) conclusion is that more choice might mean less serendipity. It’s probably possible for you to read the six major stories on the New York Times homepage, and might be possible for you to read the 13 the editor chose to feature today. I don’t care who you are, but you’re not going to read the 315 stories linked to from the Times’s online page. Navigating that page requires a great deal of personal choice - you surf through a pick the topics that are of interest to you… which may mean you filter out topics you don’t know you’re interested in, or topics you’re actively disinterested in, which might capture your attention in a moment of serendipity.

In the paper edition, you’re trading choice for trust. It’s harder to find precisely the stories you know you want, but you’ve got the opportunity to let the editor surprise you. It isn’t always the case, but the most surprising story I encounter in a given day is often something put forward by the “Old Gray Lady“.

If it’s possible to engineer serendipity with ninteenth century technology, it’s certainly possible with the resources we have today. But it’s not easy. Most recommendation technologies - the algorithms Amazon or NetFlix use to suggest what movies you might watch next - are a form of collaborative filtering. These systems take information about your preferences (either the movies you tell it are your favorites, or the ones you’ve expressed interest in by purchasing) and use this information to find other users who’ve expressed the same preferences. Then they recommend items that other user has liked that you haven’t expressed a preference about.

My friend Nathan Kurz, who’s turned his substantial brainpower to this topic more than once, argues that these systems aren’t about recommendation, but about prediction. The sorts of systems Netflix is seeking via its Netflix Prize do a good job of making consistent, safe recommendations of stuff you’re predisposed to like, penalizing systems that take a risk to try and recommend stuff you’d never heard of and are going to love. Quoting Nate:

Predict how well the user will like each of the items in the dataset, and recommend the items with the highest predicted values. And since Root Mean Square Error is easy to measure (and hence easy to write papers about) this is what many algorithms try to optimize.

The problem with this is that it tends to produce the safe recommendations in the user’s comfort zone, rather than the risky recommendations that might expand their horizons. But the solution to this is not to use this same prediction system and randomize the results, but to design a system based around recommendations rather than around predictions. Instead of predicting what is most likely to be liked, give the recommendations most likely to be loved.

Nate’s got some good theories about how to build systems that engineer serendipity, but they largely boil down to matching people to people. Expand that set of people you’re taking recommendations from to include people who share some interests, but live in a different information universe, and you’re likely to diversify your recommendations. Find someone who shares your interest in early 1980s techno music, but lives in Lagos, and you’re likely to find some serendipitious recommendations.

Sunstein’s proposed solutions for architecting serendipity are also pretty human-focused. He recommends that bloggers make a conscious effort to link (civilly and politely) across ideological lines and that both bloggers and blog readers should monitor their media consumption to ensure they’re diversifying their inputs. In other words, the move into digital media may put the responsibility for finding serendipity from editors to readers. It’s hard to know whether this will happen - as Volokh observes, “to the extent that this is a problem, it’s a problem that’s a result of basic human failings, and that freedom and extra choice will reinforce those failings…”

Like most basic human failings, you’ve got to accept that something’s a problem before you can address it. There’s been a lot of celebration and self-congratulation about the diversity of voices that we’re able to hear in this new medium. (I’m guilty as charged on those scores.) It’s worth thinking about whether we’re doing as good a job of discovering new voices as we are at raising our own voices.

Bonus links:

- Professor Sunstein offers the idea that a university can serve as a source of serendipity, putting people in touch with people they’d otherwise not have the chance to interact with.

- On the subject of people you’re probably not interacting with, David Sasaki, managing editor of Global Voices’s Rising Voices initiative, goes into a maximum security prison in Kingston to visit his grantees, a group of Jamaicans learning to blog in prison.

- Sometimes it’s the pictures, not the words, that catch our eye. Jen Brea interviews blogger Cedric Kalonji about his astounding photoblog which documents daily life in Kinshasa.

A few days ago, media critic and comic Jon Stewart interviewed Hillary Clinton campaign chair Terry McAuliffe on the Daily Show. After McAuliffe announced that Hillary Clinton was winning the primary race and would be the President come November. Stewart observed, “Your strategy right now appears to be, ‘If we act deranged enough, maybe they’ll just give us the country.’”

Fortunately, it looks like this isn’t going to work in the US. But Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party appears to be pursuing a truly deranged strategy and, tragically, it’s likely to work in Zimbabwe.

There’s been no shortage of election violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe, documented by groups like Sokwanele. But recent events have suggested a new, and more frightening, phase of voter intimidation as the presidential run-off election nears.

- Morgan Tsvangarai, the challenger to Robert Mugabe, who received the largest plurality of votes in the first round of elections, has been detained twice in the past week. In the name of safety, Tsvangarai is being prevented from holding rallies or public meetings for the weeks leading up to the election. These strictures don’t affect Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, just the opposition.

- Multinational aid agencies are no longer permitted to work in Zimbabwe, as of Thursday. This move by the government has at least two implications. One, NGOs can’t help with election monitoring, as some may have during the first round of elections. Second, NGOs may not be able to feed MDC supporters, who are denied food aid… or are being forced to surrender their voter ID cards to ZANU-PF officials in exchange for food aid.

- A US and UK diplomatic convoy was forced off the road by police, attacked and robbed by ZANU-PF supporters. The attackers threatened to burn the diplomatic vehicles unless the diplomats agreed to be taken into police custody. The US ambassador, James McGee, has been detained previously by Zimbabwean law enforcement. His spokesman reminded the press that, whatever situation the diplomats had faced, “it is really nothing compared to what the Zimbabwean people suffer on a daily basis.”

THe overall impression I’m getting from recent news is that there are no hold barred for the next three weeks, leading up to the June 27th election. This is a bit more unusual than you’d expect - one of the odd things about Zimbabwe is that, despite problems of hyperinflation, unemployment, widespread unemployment and pervasive political violence, some aspects of government have continued to work. When Barry Bearak of the New York Times and Stephen Bevan of the Sunday Telegraph were arrested in Harare for “committing journalism”, a court quickly threw out the charges and released the men, arguing that the prosecution charged the wrong crime and had insufficient evidence.

The view of Zimbabwe as a totalitarian dictatorship, thoroughly rigged, isn’t an accurate one - instead, there are lots of Zimbabweans in the parliament, judiciary and press trying hard to reclaim their country. And a governmental fondness for rules and procedures means that the structures of democratic checks and balance have some power in Zimbabwe… even if legislation permitting ludicrious violations of privacy and restrictions of speech are passed through parliament.

The most recent stories, especially the story about the diplomats, suggests that this may be slipping away. You don’t arrest and threaten diplomats - it’s how you become a pariah state and lose cooperation from other states. If ZANU-PF and the Mugabe government feel so threatened by this upcoming election that they’re not even pretending to follow international norms, this election is likely to be an extremely ugly and bloody one.

Right. Sorry about that.

A large number of my readers haven’t been getting updates from this blog for a month or so. I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.5.1 shortly before I took most of a month off to heal from eye surgery. That latest edition of WordPress software has an error in it that caused people who’ve been subscribed to my blog for a long time - or subscribed using LiveJournal and other feedreaders - to get no new posts from me for, oh, a month or so.

For those who missed me… thanks, and welcome back. It should be fixed now. If you’re subscribing to this site through an aggregator, you might want to make sure you’re subscribed to the feed at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/feed/ - older URLs like http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/wp-rss2.php are now “depricated”… which basically means that WP may not support them much longer and you should really stop using them.

All of which is fine, but WP screwed up pretty badly in not supporting those old URLs for those of us who’ve been using them for a long, long time. If you’re a Wordpress blogger and people have complained they’re not getting your updates, or if you’ve seen your traffic fall off, you may want to check what feeds people are subscribed to. If you’ve upgraded to 2.5.1 and folks are using this old style of URL, there’s a decent chance your feeds are blank and not registering new stories.

If that’s the case, the fix is over here - it involves patching two files and rebuilding your database. According to a conversation on support forums, the bug will be fixed in 2.5.2…

I try not to spend very much time looking at traffic statistics on this blog. I don’t sell ads, so frankly it doesn’t matter how many people are reading so long as I continue getting good comments. But I do occasionally check in on my ClustrMap, a graphic visualization of where readers are downloading content from. Because it’s been running for almost two years, there are a lot of little red dots on the map. And it makes me happy that people are logging on from every corner of the world.

You won’t be surprised to discover that I watch the Africa map more closely than others. A few months ago, I noticed that there were only a handful of African nations where I’ve never recorded a visitor: Chad, Central African Republic and Western Sahara. Someone visited from N’Djamena a few months back, shortening the list to two, and in the last couple of weeks, someone logged on from Bangui in the Central African Republic. Bienvenue, mon ami Centrafricaine!

(I realize that it’s possible that people in Bangui have been reading for some time and that their location wasn’t correctly parsed by ClustrMaps’s geolocation service. But I’m celebrating the appearance of a small red dot nevertheless.)

Time to get with the program, Western Sahara. And past time for me to write something about the Central African Republic. The trick, of course, is that I know very little about CAR. In fact, the one personal story I have about CAR basically reinforces how little I knew about African geography before I came to Ghana for the first time in 1993.

The Fulbright program invited all scholars travelling to sub-Saharan Africa to an orientation meeting in Washington DC. One of the scholars at the meeting was a brilliant and attractive young woman studying primates in CAR, and I briefly nursed the idea that perhaps I’d take a road trip and go visit her, since Ghana and CAR looked pretty close to one another on my desktop globe. I realized, oh, 48 hours after arriving in Accra that any trip that involves 1300 miles overland and five border crossings, including several hundred miles through Nigeria (which was convulsing with conflict after Sani Abacha had seized power) wasn’t the sort of thing one did casually to visit a woman who you’d barely met.

Most people (myself included) don’t visit CAR at all - there are very few flights into Bangui, and relations with neighbors can be tense. CAR has had terrible luck with governance, suffering through one of Africa’s most notorious dictators, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, whose flamboyance, arrogance, corruption, and alleged cannibalism make him one of the continent’s most spectacularly awful figures. Ange-Félix Patassé, democratically elected in 1993, was only able to hold power against François Bozizé through the help of rebel troops led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, now on trial for war crimes committed in CAR. Bozizé now holds power and has held elections… just not ones that have permitted Patassé to compete.

Many of the problems CAR now faces have to do with the weakness of the government, not with questions about its legitimacy. Northern parts of the country, where the government and army have little influence, have been plagued by bandits, and by soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony’s violent and strange rebel group, nominally at war with the government of Uganda.

According to some analysts, France isn’t helping matters either. Vincent Munié, the head of Survie-France, an organization that takes a critical look at French involvement in Africa, points out that the French government has traditionally provided military support to leaders of CAR (including ones it later deposed), whether or not CAR’s military is behaving responsibily. In 2006, French aircraft and troops helped put down a rebellion in Birao, a city in the north-west of the country. In the process, CAR troops are accused of numerous human rights abuses, and critics accuse French forces of turning a blind eye to brutality by CAR troops.

It’s hard to know what a nation like CAR will be able to do to turn itself around economically. CAR is cursed with the four major traps that economist Paul Collier believes plague the “bottom billion” nations - it’s landlocked, conflict-ridden, corrupt and blessed with enough mineral wealth to finance insurgencies. Collier himself visited the country on behalf of the World Bank, attempting to find solutions, and was shocked to hear that the nation’s ambition was to reach the economic status of Burkina Faso within twenty years. (Burkina Faso is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it’s light years ahead of CAR.)

Ba-banzele men in the forest in northern Congo. Photo by Michael Nichols, from his gallery “Ndoki: the Last Place on Earth”.

In the spirit of David Weinberger’s “Ninja Gap“, I offer a cultural reason “hook” for those who want to learn more about the CAR: the music of the Ba-Banjalle (also “Bayaka” or “Ba-Banzele”) people. Hunter-gatherers in the rain forest, the Ba-Banjalle have a rich set of songs and polyrythyms associated with everyday activities as well as with the stories members of the tribe tell one another. Louis Sarno, an idealistic graduate student from New Jersey, moved to CAR in the late 1980s, married a Ba-Banjalle woman and dedicated himself to documenting their music and culture. His book and CD, Song From the Forest, is an amazing work. A little easier to find is this release from the Anthology of World Music. The track below - Ngoma - comes from that album. It’s a sung invocation to animal spirits offered before a hunt. (And it’s as beautiful as a hundred ninja.)

Ngoma (3:45)

David Weinberger somehow manages to find time to write books, write thoughtful blog posts, AND produce a periodic newsletter - Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization - that’s one of he best reads on the ‘net. I’m deeply flattered that the current issue features David’s thoughts on some of the topics I’m obsessed with: media attention, caring, international understanding. More generously, he gives me the chance to react to his essay within the essay…

David’s generosity isn’t the main reason I’m linking to his piece - it’s that he’s broken some important theoretical ground with his important new concept in media criticism: The Ninja Gap. It takes a moment or two to explain - bear with me.

Almost anyone who’s heard me give a public talk has heard me observe that Japan and Nigeria have roughly the same populations, but vastly different media representation: you’re roughly 8-12 times more likely to find an article focused on Japan in an American newspaper than an article on Nigeria. There are a lot of possible explanations for this phenomenon, from racism to comparative economic power. David offers a new one: Japan’s got ninjas, and Nigeria doesn’t.

It’s a brilliant observation because it’s funny, true and highly relevant to conversations about media attention. Johan Galtung, in his seminal “The Structure of Foreign News“, draws a persuasive metaphor between a radio receiver’s ability to tune in one of many radio stations, and a listener’s likelihood to “receive” a piece of news:

F4: The more meaningful the signal, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.
F5: The more consonant the signal is with the mental image of what one expects to find, the more probable that it will be recorded as worth listening to.
…
F7: The more a signal has been tuned in to the more likely it will continue to be tuned in to as worth listening to.

Context matters, Galtung argues. If we’ve got a mental image of Africa as a backwards and technically retrograde place, we’re likely to miss stories about innovation in mobile commerce (see the lead story in issue 407…) or success in venture capital. Galtung’s fifth maxim is closely linked to the idea of cognitive dissonance - it’s uncomfortable to attempt to resolve new information that conflicts with existing perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.

Context doesn’t just come from hard news - we all consume far more entertainment and advertising content than we consume of hard news. This information helps shape our views of these countries, and likely helps us unconsciously decide what sort of information to accept or reject. These perceptions construct something over time that might be thought of as a “nation brand” - as the man who coined that term,marketer Simon Anholt, observed, “Ethiopia is well branded to receive aid, but poorly branded as a tourism destination.”

In this context, Japan is a place branded in many of our minds as a place that’s innovative, high-tech, and more than a little strange. Whether or not we’ve been to Japan, we’ve encountered anime, monster movies, martial arts flicks, SONY tv’s and Toyota trucks. Whether or not our ideas about Japan are well-founded, reflect the reality on the ground, are rich in stereotypes, etc., we’ve got preconceptions about Japan. On some level, the fact that we know that “Japan = Ninjas” means that we’ve got receptivity for a story about Japan that we might not have for Nigeria.

And so, Nigeria needs ninja. Or as David explains:

One reason we care about Japan more than Nigeria (generally) is that Japan has a cool culture. We’ve heard about that culture because some Westerners wrote bestselling books about ninjas, and then Hollywood made ninja movies. Love them ninjas! Nigeria undoubtedly has something as cool as ninjas. Ok, something almost as cool as ninjas. If we had some blockblusters about the Nigerian equivalent of ninjas, we’d start to be interested Nigeria.

In other words, we’re more inclined to pay attention to Japan because we’ve got some context - a weird, non-representative context, for sure - while we have almost no context for stories about Nigeria. The context we do have for Nigeria - 419 scams - tends to be pretty corrosive, and may make us likelier to pick up only the stories that portray Nigeria as wildly corrupt and criminal.

David’s observation leads him to some concrete advice for those of us trying to inspire xenophilia: write better: “Good writing can make anything interesting. We will read the story about the Nigerian peddler and his neighborhood if there is a writer able to tell that story in a compelling way.”

That’s harder than it sounds. But it’s also one of the best pieces of constructive advice I’ve seen on cultivating xenophilia: tell good stories in a compelling way. And it wouldn’t hurt to throw a ninja or two in there while you’re at it.

If you haven’t had your daily dose of Weinberger from this post - and you might be surprised to know that the USDA for Weinberger is higher than you probably think - you might consider watching this video interview, produced by Ulrike Reinhard, who was kind enough to interview me a few days earlier. Feel free to ignore the first couple of minutes of Dr. Weinberger being unspeakably nice to me and fast-forward to the point where he disagrees with me and points out my pessimism and his comparative optimism on the Internet’s ability to help us encounter serendipity.

While we’re on the homophily/xenophilia/serendipity track, allow me to point you to a wonderful comment on my H/X/S post from Aaditeshwar Seth, a computer science researcher and new media innovator, who offers a useful perspective on xenophilia and homophily in terms of strong and weak social ties. Citing Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties“, Seth argues that we can see social graphs cluster in terms of strong and weak ties, and that xenophiles may be people who connect different strong-tied groups. I’ve got one of Seth’s papers queued up for addition to a future homophily reading list - hope to post some of the papers I’ve been reading later this week or early the next.

One of the themes I was struck by at the Berkman at Ten conference was the idea that the net is now mature enough that we should be studying what’s actually happening, not just what we think should happen. While that doesn’t sound like that much of a breakthrough, it’s useful to me, at least, in thinking about how the center takes on projects and research topics. A good bit of the early work at the Center - especially our work on ICANN - was far more prescriptive than descriptive. A project like the Open Net Initiative, on the other hand, is careful to focus on documenting what’s happening around the Internet, leaving change of those realities to related projects like Psiphon and Global Voices Advocacy.

The focus on journalism at the Berkman Center over the past couple of years has been a focus on what’s really happening, not on what we thought might happen. I suspect that had you asked Professors Zittrain, Nesson and Lessig in 1998 whether the survival of high-quality journalism in a digital age was part of the Center’s mission, your question would have been met with a curious look. Now you’re likely to get a curious look because it’s so apparent that the question is central to our research.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Berkman colleagues - and colleagues throughout the Boston/Cambridge community, including friends at the Business School, the Nieman Center and local newspapers - talking about business models for journalism in a digital age. A conversation we had on Wednesday makes me wonder whether there’s an opportunity here to move from the prescriptive to the descriptive. In other words, while I’ve spent a lot of time lately agonizing about how Global Voices might find a revenue model to sustain our work, the answer may be to look closely at revenue models people are already using to support substantive journalism in the era of blogs, Craigslist and media consolidation.

One of the groundrules for these conversations has been a focus on journalism that’s difficult to finance: investigative journalism and international journalism. This isn’t meant to imply that other types of journalistic writing - political opinion or entertainment journalism, for instance - are somehow inferior… just easier to finance. Investigative and international journalism is expensive, requiring travel, research and time. Many of the stories that result are “long-tail” stories - they’re not going to be interesting to the entire news audience as, for instance, Iraq war stories were in 2003. The people who’ve been participating in these conversations believe firmly that there’s a public interest in reporting these stories, and that this work is essential for partipatory societies even if it’s not easily supported by pure for-profit models.

A conversation about supporting this sort of journalism tends to start with a good deal of despair about the state of American newspapers and the dismal future young journalists face. Newspaper layoffs are so common that graphic designer Erica Smith is maintaining an interactive layoffs map, called “Paper Cuts“. Jill Carroll, in a paper for Harvard Shorenstein Center, documents a 30% reduction in the number of foreign correspondents employed by US newspapers. Media critic David Shaw bemoaned a shrinking “newshole” for international news, reduced 70-80% between the mid-1980 and 2001.

If we’re interested not in preserving newspapers, or the ability to make a living as a professional journalist, it’s possible that the picture changes somewhat. Accepting Dan Gillmor’s observation that people will “commit acts of journalism” - and observing that some people appear to commit these acts serially - it’s possible that there are a number of business models that might support “difficult” journalism on an ongoing basis.

Some models that have come up in conversation:

The 5% Model - One of the problems American newspapers suffer from is the difficulty of delivering a 20% return on investment year to year to investors, a level of return that’s evidently demanded by financial markets. Perhaps traditional newspaper models are sustainable if the goal was to return a much more modest - say 5% - return on capital investment.

Cross Subsidy - Related to the 5% model is the idea that newspapers support “difficult” journalism with more lucrative content - entertainment, sports and local news. If other parts of a newsgathering operation are sufficiently profitable, it’s possible to finance in-depth reporting.

The Membership Model - Newspapers outsourced much of their reporting to the Associated Press, using a shared news bureau to provide a breadth of coverage difficult for any one paper to provide. While AP is now large, powerful, and sometimes critiqued by newspapers for high fees, there’s still room for membership-based bureaus. Eight Ohio newspapers are sharing resources on state-wide political coverage in a new collaboration called OHNO, an interesting swipe at AP.

Ad Supported - The default internet business model - supporting coverage through a combination of banner and keyword ads - may be able to support “difficult” journalism, either through cross-subsidy or just attracting sufficient attention to key stories. The concern on the model is that there’s a constant temptation to fish for attention-grabbing stories. This can be a benefit in a cross-subsidy model, but it might be dangerous for a tightly subject-focused news outlet.

Niche Content - High-quality niche content can survive on subscription models. One example offered in our discussions is statehouse newsletters. Local newspapers find it expensive to provide deep statehouse coverage - subscribing to specialist newsletters may well be cheaper. And lobbyists find the content to be mission-critical and are willing to pay a premium for the information.

Foundations Pay - A great deal of high quality journalism is already foundation funded - listen to the credits at the end of an NPR show for a sense for some of the major players in the field. ProPublica, with backing from the Sandler Foundation, is promising a newsroom of 26 journalists, “all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact”. This is, for better or worse, the model that Global Voices is currently using to find support.

One Rich Guy - A variant on the foundation model - which comes complete with program officers, oversight boards and all sorts of checks and balances - the one rich guy model has been responsible for some excellent journalism in the case of Al Jazeera. It’s known to be a weak model for investigative stories about the rich guy in question.

Public Funding - The BBC’s funding comes from television license fees, a form of public funding for public interest reporting. That said, it’s hard to imagine a future in which public broadcast funding is massively increased in the US - and even harder to imagine a future where independent reporters and bloggers could successfully compete for that funding. We raise this model so we can talk longingly about working as journalists in Europe.

Advocacy Journalism - Highly partisan political organizations have turned out some excellent investigative journalism - see the Polk Award Talking Points Memo won for coverage of the US Attorney’s controversy. A major concern is that while advocacy journalism on different sides of a political issue may serve to provide balance and fact-checking, it’s not hard to imagine situations in which a key issue might only be investigated by highly partisan journalists on a single side of an issue.

Sponsor a Beat - In one of our conversations, someone mentioned blogs raising money for reporters to cover specific stories. David Axe of War is Boring uses this model - I’d love other examples of international and investigative journalism sponsored this way.

Indirect Revenue - This is the model I end up advising most new bloggers to take: don’t expect your blog to make money directly, but look for the indirect ways it benefits your work. Blogs lead to freelance work, to books, to speaking invitations - it’s possible that serious journalism in whatever medium may have indirect benefits to the author that outweight direct benefits.

Our conversations have included some theoretical models as well. If you’ve got examples of people trying these models, I’d love your links.

Multimedia production - A small team might produce the same story in different media - text, video, audio - and sell to various news outlets. The ability to sell stories across platforms might make a model more fiscally sustainable. (Circle of Blue, a non-profit effort focused on covering the world’s water crisis, is pursuing this sort of model)

Translation as cross-subsidy - This is a model that’s come up a few times in talking about sustainability and Global Voices. We translate lots and lots of content to produce our site, and our translators are phenomenally talented. A service like Global Voices could serve as a showcase and legitimator for translators, a front-end to a web-based human translation marketplace, and profits from that marketplace might cross-subsidize our translated coverage. (I’m firmly convinced that someone will build a strong, multi-lingual, reputation-based online translation marketplace in the next couple of years. A major regret in life is that I don’t have the time to do it right now.)

TookTheBuyout.com - More a joke than an actual model - a site designed to give all the talented journalists who’ve taken buyouts from mainstream newspapers a place to publish independent investigative reporting. Given the name recognition of some of the people who’ve stepped down from papers recently, this might well be ad supportable.

I’d love your input on other models that people are pursuing or thinking about. This isn’t a theoretical issue for me - over the next few years, Global Voices needs to pursue one or more models to support our work, even if that model involves continuing to persuade foundations that our work is important and worth supporting. Examples focused on investigative and international journalism are the ones that are most helpful; models that are in use and supporting high-quality journalism are the most interesting ones. Please share what you know and help me get beyond a short dozen of models here.

I’d hoped that spending three weeks offline would be a great time for ideas to ferment, much as they do when I’m on vacation. Turns out that this healing thing is harder work than I’d anticipated. Rather than a wealth of insights to write about, I’ve mostly got a backlog of unanswered research questions that I wish I’d been able to research. That, and a new addiction to episodic dramas produced by HBO.

One of the questions I’ve wanted an answer to for some time is how the community focused on Darfur has managed to attract so much attention to their cause. While the situation in Darfur is dramatic and dire, there are a number of other situations on the African continent that demand attention and, generally, receive a small fraction of the attention paid to Darfur. Medicines Sans Frontieres publishes an annual list of stories they feel are underreported, including situations in Somalia, eastern DRC and the Central African Republic. (I wrote at some length on the topic of “underreporting” and these top-ten lists some months earlier.)

My interest in this question about Darfur isn’t because I want to wag a finger at the Darfur movement, but because I hope other movements can learn from it. There aren’t a ton of examples of situations where a large number of Americans have become passionately interested in political and security situations in developing nations without a strong indicator that the US might become militarily involved in those countries. (In other words, Iraq doesn’t count.) Tibet and Darfur are the main ones that come to mind. And while Tibet has been a celebrity cause du jour for years now (and benefits from the substantial charisma and media savvy of the Dalai Lama), interest in Darfur has developed quite rapidly and may have preceded mainstream media coverage of the issue.

(On the to do list is some searching through blog search engines, Lexis/Nexis and the NYTimes site to see when Nicholas Kristof picked up on the issue, in comparison to early blogs like Passion of the Present. A quick bit of research suggests that Kristof wrote his first major piece on Darfur in March 2004, titled “Ethnic Cleansing, Again“. Passion of the Present began publishing in March 2004 as well. I just glanced back at the personal blogs of Jim Moore (a former Berkman colleague) and Ingrid Jones, two bloggers who’ve been passionate and vocal on this issue since early 2004, and wasn’t able to find references before March 2004. Please send links if I’ve got this wrong - it would be very interesting to see a blog conversation about Darfur preceding Kristof’s article. (For what it’s worth, the earliest refernce I found on my own blog is February 4, 2004. And that post refers to BBC coverage, suggesting that it’s an instance of the blogger - me - following the mainstream media.))

One of the core arguments I’ve been making about media attention and the developing world is that it’s difficult to expect people in the developed world to choose to read about stories in the developing world unless someone makes the case that a particular story has relevance for that individual. It’s hard to discover these stories unless either someone in authority (a newspaper editor, a television anchor) leads you to the story, or unless your peer group leads you to it… in which case the homophily problem kicks in. Even if led to the story, it can be very difficult to connect with it - something Joi Ito has refered to as “the caring problem“. The Darfur story is an intriguing exception to these generalizations, and is worth studying as such.

Fortunately, that study is taking place. Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics POLIS thinktank announced earlier this month that their center will study the emergence of the Darfur story in depth. He’s invited readers to offer their own theories - Rob Crilly, an excellent freelance journalist based in Nairobi, has weighed in with a compelling case:

The roots lie in the civil war of the south, when evangelical Christians from America found it easy to identify with a largely Christian population in the south pitted agains a Muslim, arab government in the north.

They carried their activity across to Darfur, bringing it the attention of many people who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of Sudan’s problems. But it has also attracted a bizarre mishmash of often conservative, religious groupings in an anti-Khartoum alliance.

Their black and white analysis has generally done more harm than good, and has sucked in people with a liberal viewpoint - including many of my esteemed colleagues in the press, who have a romantic notion that rebels are always the good guys.

I’ll be very interested to read the POLIS study and see whether they concur with Crilly’s analysis. I’ll also be interested to see whether there was activist media leading authors like Kristof to the story, or whether the movement picked up with mainstream media recognition and legitimation.

I feel a little like one of those late-night TV ads, where we see the photo of an overweight, schlubby-looking guy (i.e., someone who looks like me), followed by a toned, fit, six-pack-ab’d superman, whose stunning transformation was made possible through an all-grapefruit diet and three hours a day of headstands. In my case, my external appearance hasn’t changed very much, but man, get a load of my right retina!

Here’s a picture - an optical coherence tomograph - of my right retina two months ago. That nasty red stuff was scar tissue, obscuring the fovea (the center of the eye, with the highest nerve density) and pulling on the retina, causing it to ripple and distort.

Here’s what it looks like today:

It’s not perfect - the red shows areas where the retina is thicker than in a normal person. It’s possible that the thickness comes from inflammation, which continues to decrease as I heal from the surgery, which was only three weeks ago. Looking at the cross-section shows just how much distortion of the retina has been removed. Here’s before:

And after:

Those nasty, hollow cysts in the retina? Gone, more or less. The two remaining ones in this image may recede as the eye heals further.

There’s a great deal of faith involved with having surgery. Not only are you trusting somebody to cut holes in your body with the hope of making you well, but you’re confronted with the reality that you’re going to feel worse - for a while, at least - after the surgery than you did before. Despite my elation today, my right eye still has a lot of healing to do, and is only working 20/60 corrected today. (The goal, based on today’s progress report, is 20/25 in that eye in the next couple of months.) While vision in that eye has moved from Mark Rothko to Claude Monet to “Did I put on the wrong pair of glasses?”, and while reading is now possible, it’s still not easy. This process takes a long, long time.

And, of course, unlike the guy with the six-pack abs, I’ve had nothing to do with this transformation. I just lay there, heavily sedated, while Dr. Jorge Arroyo worked his magic. And I’ve basically griped and complained while friends - especially my lovely wife - and my doctor here in Pittsfield, Dr. Andrew Danyluk, have nursed me back to health.

And so I’m very, very grateful and very happy to be (partially, a few hours a day) back online.

Here’s hoping that anyone else who has to go through vitrectomy and retinal peel to combat diabetic retinopathy has at least this level of good fortune.