And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

Amateur journalists with blogs may help fill gaps in information about some news stories, but my experience being in the middle of this public health story is leading me to further believe that there is just no way a crowd of self-motivated but distracted citizens will replace a few well-paid and focused professionals when it comes to holding powerful people accountable. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author and newspaper editor Eugene Roberts said, many important stories don’t break, they ooze. And only professionals have the economic incentive to provide the kind of sustained expertise — and now the kind of reader-source organization and leadership — that’s needed to cover the stories that ooze rather than break.

In the story about Miami’s Legionnaires’ outbreak, there’s a role for all of the key players in the flow of information in a free-market democracy — professional journalists, the government, private business, business clients and the general public. The way that each of these key players acted as news broke provides some focused insight about the roles — sometimes interchangeable, sometimes unique –  these institutions play in an increasingly convoluted media world.

I found out about the story for two reasons — first, a professional journalist broke it and then a colleague of mine sent it to me. As a guest of the hotel two days before it was evacuated, this story couldn’t have been more relevant to me. But I relied first on an impersonal, professional reporter and then on a personal contact to get the news to me.

Jose Pagliery wrote the first story about the outbreak for The Miami Herald. He was the only reporter on duty last Saturday, when he got word that another reporter for the paper had been tipped off to the story from sources at the hotel, Pagliery said. With that information, he was able to call the county health department and get enough information to write up a quick story. Without that reporter’s ear to the ground and without a professional journalist to call the health department, Pagliery said he suspects the story would have been come out much later, if ever.

I had been in Miami for a meeting with the Knight Foundation. Another person who was there just happened to hear the tail end of a television story about the outbreak while she was on a trip to Grenada later that same weekend. Her curiosity piqued, she searched the Web for keywords she had heard in the TV report and discovered the CBS4 story that confirmed that both she, I and perhaps a dozen other people at our meeting had been staying at the hotel that was the suspected source of a deadly disease. She immediately sent us all an e-mail with a link to the article. That’s the kind of concierge information service that probably can’t scale to a large media organization, but that would have incredible value to readers if mass customization of news story selection ever comes about. For those of us who already have organic online social networks, we get the concierge service for no cost other than being engaged with people who are curious and alert about the world around them.

When I found out about the story, my old reporting instincts went in to full gear. Mostly, I wanted to know why the hotel had told me and other guests two days before the evacuation not to drink the water without alerting us to any potential health risk. Two of the most fundamental questions for reporters whose job is to hold powerful people accountable are “Who knew about this? And when did they know it?” I wondered if the hotel had known about the risk much earlier than it had disclosed to its guests — a decision that might have prioritized their money over my health.

These details were missing from the stories in The Miami Herald and on the CBS4 Web site. So on Sunday I quickly e-mailed the reporters as well as the public relations department at Kimpton Hotels, the parent company of the Epic Hotel. Amid the hustle to church, a visit from my mother-in-law, plans to host a party at our house that night, and caring for our two young kids I posted a call out to other potential guests on Twitter and made plans to write a blog post about the additional information.

That was Sunday. Today is Thursday. I’m just now getting around to writing the post.

This story directly affected me. I was trained as a journalist, worked as a journalist and now I teach journalism. And a four-day turnaround time is the best I could do? Yes. Because I had other things to do that only I could do. In the short run, the opportunity cost for me of not grading finals, not attending a faculty meeting, and not writing my book was greater than me not reporting on this story. Over the last few days I did talk to a representative of the hotel, an epidemiologist from the health department, a TV news producer, a newspaper reporter and several other guests at the hotel. I wanted to share what information I had with them, but what I really wanted is for them to do the hard work of reporting and delivering the news so I could get back to my day job.

If I had not been personally invested in the answers, would I — as a mere “citizen” — have bothered to contact all these people? I can tell you I’ve not bothered to pursue any of Miami’s previous 19 cases of Legionnaires’ it reported in 2009 — even though, as I later found out, the city saw more than twice the number of cases than in any of the previous four years, according to the Miami-Dade County Health Department Monthly Disease Report. And I’ve not been able to find a single other one of my fellow 400 hotel guests who has been blogging or Tweeting about the story.

Two Epic Hotel guests from Denmark did contact a personal injury law firm to determine whether they might have legal action in the case. Driven by the private interests of the two men, the firm would have no doubt become a great source of expert reporting on the issue. But unless the case had gone to trial, much of the most important information would never have become part of the public debate about whether powerful people made the right decisions to protect lives.

So, with the hotel cleared as the source of the bacteria and with no symptoms of the pneumonia that can turn Legionnaires’ fatal, my attention to this story is just about gone. Even if the county hadn’t given the hotel a clean bill of health yesterday, my reporting still probably would have been done. And it would have left many important questions that I would not attempt to answer. My personal interest in reporting the story might have eventually added elements to the news as it broke. But with that interest now almost totally gone, it will be up to someone else to cover what may be a more important story — the one that oozes.

The public health story that still affects anyone visiting or living in Miami is the dramatic increase in the number of Legionnaires’ cases there this year. If I were a resident or frequent visitor I’d be even more terrified that the source can’t be traced back to a single luxury hotel. I might still prefer my chances with the county’s water to my chances with the county’s roads and highways, but something is causing a jump in a deadly bacteria and the cause might be preventable. In an ideal world with limitless resources, someone would test chlorine levels in water throughout the county, compare them to the levels found at the Epic Hotel and deliver those findings to the county’s residents. In an ideal world, someone would follow up on the Herald’s reporting that people in the health department have concerns about “inefficient international communication channels” that prevented it from searching the hotel earlier. That reporting, too, would make its way to anyone drinking county water.

And even though the hotel was cleared, I’d still like to know why the hotel wasn’t more upfront with its guests about potential health risks in the water. And whether or not any other hotels at which I might be staying are using powerful filters that make the water yummy but may leave it susceptible to deadly bacteria.

I am not going to do that reporting. I doubt a volunteer cadre of Miami residents or business travelers will take it upon themselves either. I don’t trust the health department or the Kimpton Hotel company to do it, because their interests conflict with my own. Who is going to do it? For public health stories and other news that oozes, I want to hire professionals whose job it is to not amuse me but to give me the information I need to make my own decisions about how to best protect myself, my family and my friends from anyone or anything who would do us harm. Just tell me where to send my check so I can get back to my daily life.

Ms. Clark died on Saturday. But the Triangle’s newspapers should ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

But it also tolls for online community sites if papers begin to kick the bucket.

The News & Observer broke the story, which piqued my curiosity about an apparently fascinating woman I didn’t know. I Tweeted that I wanted to know more about her. And Ruby Sinriech Tweeted right back that a thread of comments had been posted on the front page of her site, OrangePolitics.org.

And, sure enough, eight people — including a former town council member, the news director at the local radio station and the editor of the up-and-coming Carrboro Citizen — posted memories there.

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of reader memories on local media sites:

News & Observer – Chapel Hill News editor Mark Schultz made a plea for memories on his blog. The N&O got one.

The Herald-Sun – A story, but no comments.

WCHL – A story, but no ability to comment on stories. Which explains why Joe Schwartz went to OrangePolitics.org to leave his.

Chapel Hill News – A story, but no ability to comment on stories.

Carrboro Citizen – The ability to comment… but no story. Although editor Kirk Ross also posted on OrangePolitics.org.

I can’t rightly explain what’s happening here. Structurally, there’s not much difference between the comments on OrangePolitics and the other sites. OrangePolitics is the only site that allows anonymous comments, but those are held for moderation. The registration processes for all the sites are about the same, although the MSM sites pry for a bit more personal contact information. All sites post the comments of registered users immediately (including my single-vowel post on the N&O that I can’t seem to remove.) So it’s not a technical/structural issue.

Clearly the leaders of local media “get it.” Three leaders of local news organizations were online adding and/or seeking comment. So it’s not a philosophical issue.

So what is it? Why did the story get reported in one place, but discussed in another? Is it that OrangePolitics.org is almost totally user-generated — that conversation is woven in to that community’s information gathering process?

What would the community have lost without the newspaper reports? Finding a vacuum, would the news have broken elsewhere and still elicited comments online?

Also, it’s not as if the newspaper stories didn’t include community memories of Ms. Clark — the N&O had two sources and the Herald-Sun had five, including two of the state’s most prominent politicians. But, oddly, none of the voices on OrangePolitics.org were included in the news stories and none of the voices in the news stories were found on OrangePolitics.org.

Is this part of some new media symbiosis that brings new voices to the table while retaining the old? That merges a reporter’s initiative with a community’s contributions?

I’m not convinced. I think that kind of symbiosis would require more interaction between the two. And right now they don’t touch or acknowledge each other in any meaningful way. It is, to steal from some of my newly acquired parenting jargon, “co-playing.”

But, honestly, I’m stumped here. And I’m supposed to be giving a lecture on this kind of thing in a few weeks… I hope Dan Gillmor’s right…y’all want to help me out here?

P.S. — Oh yeah. One of the best pieces of online journalism I’ve seen recently came from Andrew Dunn, the University editor at The Daily Tar Heel. He posted it to OrangePolitics.org…

Journalism Is Writing That Does Something

I got in to journalism because I believe it has a purpose. One of the first things I talk about with my students on their very first day of their very first introductory news writing classes is that one of the fundamental differences between journalistic writing and the kinds of writing they’ve been doing in most of their other courses is that news writing is supposed to DO something. It is meant to be read, and being read it is meant to be applied – if not immediately, then someday, in perhaps subconscious ways – by the readers.

For me, journalism is supposed to DO a lot of things – hold powerful people accountable, clearly explain an increasingly complex world, give voice to the voiceless, make people safe, keep them healthy, save them money. Through all of these things I see journalism in service of an efficacious democracy and efficient markets.

Unfortunately, too often I think we talk about citizen journalism – and all the changes that are coming about as part of the digital communication revolution – with a very limited scope of concern. We talk a lot about what these changes mean for journalism, without going the rest of the way down the road and talking about what these changes mean for the things that journalism is supposed to DO. What effect do these changes to journalism have on democracy and free markets? What effects COULD they have if we as journalists and educators make different choices?

Competing Interests: More Voices … and Free Content

Citizen journalism is an important topic for us to be discussing for two reasons. If you’ll permit me briefly to stop halfway down the road, there are two reasons journalists are drawn to the discussion about the effect it has on journalism. The first is that citizen journalism has the ability to bring new voices to the discussion – to give voice to the voiceless. This is the great promise of citizen journalism. Whether we believe it can or cannot accomplish this lofty goal, I hope that we can all agree that the goal is important and central to our a common belief that the voices of the weak, the lonely, the common, the inarticulate, the shy, and the outcasts are as critical to an efficacious democracy as the voices of the powerful, the educated, and the loved.

The second reason journalists like to talk about citizen journalism … well, OK, the reason publishers like to talk about citizen journalism … is because it is free content around which they can sell advertising. And more advertising may mean more money to pay professional journalists. And most of us – at least those of us who need to eat and who are not independently wealthy – like to think there is some market value in being a professional journalist. I don’t want to gloss over this point. You would not see news companies embracing – or at least grappling with — citizen journalism so aggressively if it did not have the potential to positively affect the bottom line. Does anyone think that any news company would have comments on its stories if it had to pay readers for each comment? Of course, this isn’t anything new. It’s the same thing in print. Does anyone think community papers or local TV stations would have a “pet of the week” if they had to pay the owner?

Is ‘More’ Inherently ‘Better’?

As we head the rest of the way down the road and wonder what effect amateur journalism will have on democracy. If one of the things that amateur journalism can do is empower new voices, then we should assume that the effect – whatever it is – would be big.

Citizen journalism itself is a political term. I’m going to call it amateur journalism, and I intend “amateur” as a positive, not a normative, term. Advocates of citizen journalism use the word “citizen” because it conjures images of democracy, empowerment and wholesomeness. But we would, of course, not exclude non-citizens from our discussion of whatever it is we’re discussing. Journalism is whatever journalism is, and its definition is not really important for this discussion. We can disagree on that, at least for the time being.

Since the early days of the Internet, the arrival of a new, more democratic, more civil media, has been one of the visions of online political utopians. In his April 1997 article for Wired magazine, Jon Katz led off this way: “On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.”

But more voices just means more voices. It’s a guarantee of quantity, not quality. In fact, it’s a guarantee that the quality will change. In any system, as capacity increases homogeneity decreases. So we’ll get more minority voices – some of those will gain acceptance by the majority and some will be seen by the majority as malicious and uninformed.

If we look at the history of online campaign communication we see that it is the fringe candidates who tend to be the early adopters – Jesse Ventura, Howard Dean, Ron Paul. Countercultural religious and sexual groups were some of the early adopters of online communication.

The worst of these new voices – the mean and (especially offensive to journalists) the uninformed — send waves of panic through professional journalists who have sacrificed a lot of financial and social benefits to doggedly pursue The Truth. But, even as we’re terrified that the mean and uninformed will dilute our professional reportage those among us who are even slightly optimistic can still see the possibility that citizen journalism will bring new voices to our civic life.

A Neo-Jacksonian Era of Political Media

I’m not only slightly optimistic, but I believe that civil society has the power to encourage the best traits of citizen journalism and discourage the worst. Even a cursory study of the history of American civic life shows that its rules and systems are not static – Thomas Jefferson believed constitutions and laws expire with the end of each political generation every 19 years. There have been times in our history when our system has become suddenly more democratic – when new voices – some mean and many uninformed – have rushed in to the system. And while we are not captives to history, we can look to those eras to see some ways that new voices have changed our country.

Michael Schudson in his book, The Good Citizen, which is a history of American civic life, talks about three different phases of citizenship that we’ve experienced. In our current day we value the “informed citizen,” a private, rational actor who is a product of public schooling and student of a transparent government. But, Schudson says, our current era, which started at the end of the 19th century, was preceded by an era that was dominated not by private, rational, informed citizens but instead by a politics of affiliation. This era of Jacksonian democracy first saw a postal system that brought new connection with centers of power through a flat-rate system that didn’t discriminate against Americans living on the frontier. That was followed by a flourishing of newspapers that saw themselves as an association of their readers.

The era also saw the rise of the political party, with an emphasis on party. Schudson described the era this way: “During the campaign you have marched in torchlight processions, perhaps in a military uniform, with a club of like-minded individuals from your party. If you were not active in the campaign, you may be roused on Election Day by a party worker to escort you to the pools on foot or by carriage. On the road you may encounter clubs or groups from rival parties, and it would not be unusual if fisticuffs or even guns were to dissuade you from casting a ballot after all.”

In the days of Jacksonian Democracy, civic life was about engagement not information. Translated in to two staples of today’s online political media, it was about candidate ring tones not issue grids.

If you look at online political communication, I think you see a step-by-step return to some of those ideas. In 2002, the second most popular feature on candidate Web sites was the position paper. Eighty-three percent of candidate sites had them. But by 2004, according to Pew Internet & the American Life Project, nearly as many people sent or received political jokes via email as had researched candidates’ positions online.

I’d argue that we are in an era of emerging neo-Jacksonian media in which information is still critically important, but in which affiliation is the primary method of receiving that information.

Journalists Should Learn From Campaigns

So history is one place we can consult for some options about incorporating a sudden rush of new voices in to our political system. The other place we as journalists can turn is one of our sister institutions in our current political system. Just as political campaigns have studied journalists in their efforts to become better communicators, journalists must now study political campaigns to see how they are incorporating citizen journalists.

That’s right – political campaigns – those paragons of risk aversion have been more innovative and more comfortable at incorporating citizen journalists than news organizations. And that, my dear colleagues, is something of which we should be ashamed.

Campaigns have always grappled with how to incorporate volunteers in to their organization. Professional campaigners often view volunteers with derision, even as they may acknowledge their contribution to the campaign – much in the way that many professional journalists deride their readers even as they acknowledge that they are the essential to media economics.

My impression is that most campaigns would be happiest if they could attract voters without attracting volunteers, because there are two ways that volunteers can actually be bad news for a professional political campaign. Probably the worst way is for a campaign to decline a volunteer’s offer of help. Shunned volunteers become your campaign’s most ardent opponents. But campaigns can also get in to trouble when they ACCEPT the help of a volunteer. Volunteers without clear direction are the devil’s playground. As Schudson says about political parties in the Jacksonian era, political campaigns today “help articulate, channel and organize popular demands.”

Replace “popular demands” with “information,” and that is what professional journalists should be doing with citizen journalists. Professional journalists should help citizen journalists “articulate, channel and organize” information.

And here’s where it becomes apparent that citizen journalist is probably synonymous with citizen. Because this is what professional journalists should already be doing – helping citizens articulate, channel and organize information.

Political campaigns first used the Internet for position papers and to accept donations. In 2004, Howard Dean’s message of empowerment combined with the Internet to give supports a whole new role in the campaign. And this cycle, Barrack Obama, with his background in community organizing, has become the master of online social networking. More and more campaigns are using the Internet to help volunteers play productive roles in accomplishing the campaign’s mission.

Here are some lessons that journalists can learn from political campaigns:

1. Have something for volunteers to do. More and more news organizations are creating “reader councils” of audience members who they can call for a quote. But it’s important to give citizen journalists something specific and measurable to do. And – as all journalists know – every assignment should come with a deadline. CNN’s iReport is a model of why this is so important. They created iReport to intake video from viewers. Most of it was unremarkable until the day of the Virginia Tech shooting. Because CNN had set up the infrastructure to intake amateur journalism, graduate student Jamal Albarghouti knew he had a place to upload his cell phone video of shots being fired.
2. Recognize volunteers. John McCain has a “Spread the Word” section of his Web site, where volunteers can earn “points” each time they comment or post to a political blog. Steve Yelvington does a great job of this at Bluffton Today.
3. Help volunteers recruit other volunteers. Barack Obama recently created a Web site called fightthesmears.com. On it, he asks supporters to send the campaign claims against Obama that they believe are false. That’s a great example of distributed reporting – a subcategory of citizen journalism. But he also allows visitors to upload their email contact list to the site and share with their friends the Obama campaign’s refutations of the “smears.” Amateur information distribution is probably more important than amateur information collection. People trust information they receive from their friends more than information they receive from institutional sources. We know that people are more likely to vote and give money when asked by someone they know.
4. Have fun. People learn more when they have fun. Even if the content is not information rich, fun makes news accessible.
a. Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning Minnesota political blog, mnblue, for instance, tracks the moves of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman on a “Weasel Meter.”
b. Fun is how people use news. Within days of the New York Times breaking the story about Eliot Spitzer, Facebook has over 100 groups on the New York governor, ranging from supportive to crass: “Elliot Spitzer is my Pimp”; “Gov. Spitzer, We’re Not Mad, Just Disappointed”; and “Spitzer Swallow Mr. Governor?”

I didn’t just pull these out of thin air. They each correspond to one of the four audience needs that have been consistently found in uses & gratifications research, as Clyde Bentley outlines in the paper he presented for the conference.

1. Creating an infrastructure for volunteer journalists helps your audience give and receive relevant and complete information.
2. Recognizing your volunteers satisfies their need for personal identity.
3. Helping volunteers recruit other volunteers satisfies a need for integration and social interaction.
4. Entertainment is, well, entertainment.

To an audience of journalists – people who have strived to maintain a non-partisan stance in their professional code of ethics – the suggestion that we study campaigns for lessons on how to engage with amateur journalists may be uncomfortable if not appalling. But to think that professional journalists are not already engaged in a political campaign is to have your head buried in the sand.

A Call for Authentic Leadership From Journalists
We believe in competition and consumer choice. We invented the “man on the street” interview to help give voice to the voiceless. But as long as we continue to endorse these values, more voices will mean more competition. And when consumers make their news and information choices, they are voting for us less and less often. Despite everything that we’ve done for democracy, we are campaigning in an anti-incumbent environment.

I’ll continue the analogy of the political campaign by saying that I believe the interaction between professional journalists and citizen journalists is a representative democracy. We aren’t living in a dictatorship in which professional journalists can exercise their craft without the consent of the audience. But neither are we living in a direct democracy in which every individual will do his or her own reporting.

Even as media becomes more democratic and we see a rise in amateur reporting, professional reporting remains important. It is not efficient for every citizen reporter to attend the city council meeting and blog about it. Even if they have the ability to publish, they will cede some of their rights and responsibilities to a representative reporter so they can pursue a more lucrative or gratifying use of their time. But, though they’ve ceded this duty, they expect to be consulted at appropriate intervals. We are entering an era in which an increasing amount of the journalist’s power derives from an active — if sometimes uninformed — audience.

We are campaigning, whether we like it or not. And we’re not just running against ourselves in a vote of no confidence. We’re running against real competition. If we don’t help citizens “articulate, channel and organize” information, political campaigns will.

And what this neo-Jacksonian media market needs is what any representative democracy needs – it needs authentic leadership, and journalists need to provide it. That’s a concept with which many journalists may be uncomfortable and it’s the topic for another conference.

The future of democratic institutions is not inevitable. Whether citizen journalists coalesce around non-partisan journalists or campaigns or (as has been the case more often than not) partisan journalists like Joshua Micha Marshall and his Talking Points Memo, each of these outcomes will give American democracy a different flavor. We can argue about which flavor is better, but we cannot argue that partisanship and non-partisanship are not different flavors.

As we watch what is happening to amateur political journalists in less democratic countries, how can we not embrace the spirit citizen journalism and how can we not resolve to foster the best of its potential?

In Malaysia, a blogger was elected to parliament this year. In South Korea, citizen journalism has changed the course of two presidential careers. In Egypt, a UC Berkeley student studying journalists’ use of new media tools is arrested for photographing a labor rally and reports his arrest via Twitter. In Jordan, Queen Rania is answering questions on YouTube later this summer. And in our own country, ColorOfChange.org brought national media attention to the Jena 6 and is quickly challenging the NAACP in membership.

How can we not embrace these people that share our values – these people who also believe that journalism can DO something — hold powerful people accountable, clearly explain an increasingly complex world, give voice to the voiceless, make people safe, keep them healthy, save them money.

We should neither abhor nor promote amateur journalism for the sake of protecting journalism. We should come to whatever opinion we have about it because we believe it is the best for democracy and capitalism. I, for one, believe we must foster it and LEAD it for the benefit of democracy at home and abroad.

The debate about the definitions of journalism and journalists are a waste of time. We should replace it with an attempt to define what authentic leadership of a democratic press can and should be.

By coincidence, I recently found myself reading two things that, as a pair, illustrated nicely the reason I’m so sanguine about the future of news and so panicked about the future of news companies.

From Travels With Herodotus, a book about the Greek father of history by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapusciniski, comes an argument that men have been journalists even before they were paid to be:

” [Herodotus] was probably one of those chatterboxes who prey upon helpless listeners, who must have them, who indeed wither and cannot live without them; one of those unwearying and perpetually excited intermediaries, who see something, hear something, and must immediately pass it on to others, constitutionally incapable of keeping things even briefly to themselves. To be a conduit is their passion: therin lies their life’s mission. To walk, ride, find out — and proclaim it at once to the world.

There aren’t many such enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world. He is alive, and being somehow obliged to deal with this condition, feels the less effort it requires, the better. Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great, all-consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact — to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, mainly to preserve oneself within oneself. So when someone like Herodotus comes along — a man possessed by a craving, a bug, a mania for knowledge, and endowed, furthermore, with intellect and powers of written expression — it’s not so surprising that his rare existence should outlive him.

…. Herodotus’s mind is incapable of stopping at one event or one country. Something always propels him forward, drives him on without rest. A fact that he discovered and ascertained today no longer fascinates him tomorrow, and so he must walk (or ride) elsewhere, further away.

Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy — lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kindred and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday’s most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance.

For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. ….

We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him — the delight in life. Herodotus is the antithesis of this spirit.”

In blogs and the world of no-barrier publishing that they herald, I see the awakening of a million Herodotus’s who might have otherwise been possessed of an extinguished heart.

But with this proliferation also comes a splintering — a world that could make the curious even more lonely. A world without city desks to call in to, as David Simon wrote recently in his Esquire article, “A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back“:

“[T]he other day, I saw a column of black smoke due east of I-95 just above Eastern Avenue — dark and thick enough that I drove there. It was a roadside car fire, no injuries. Nothing worth a call to the desk. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. Who I was gonna call it in to, I have no clue.”

Yup, even if newspapers go belly up, there will always be someone who drives in the direction of the smoke, witnesses the fire and provides stenography of it. But without city desks, who will prod the reporters to look for what is not easily seen? Who was the city editor for Herodotus?