While I’ve previously rhapsodized about open-media platforms such as WikiLeaks as an idealized, power-balancing mechanism for democracy, all that is only possible assuming that the expectations and practices of a free society remaining intact.

That is far from a safe assumption: The New York Times notes that an important shield-law bill for journalists is heading for a vote in Congress has been modified in the wake of the WikiLeaks/Afghanistan story:

“Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats of New York and California, are drafting an amendment to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities …”

So what exactly is a traditional news-gathering activity? And who, for that matter, is a journalist? Both of these things could be addressed in the bill in a manner that seems hostile to both technological and social innovation.

One step in this direction is to add specific language to the bill …

“… defining who would be covered by the law as a journalist — an area that can be tricky in an era of blogging and proliferation of online-only news media outlets.”

Reference:

“After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Law Bill”
New York Times, August 4, 2010

The WikiLeaks/Afghanistan story is a watershed moment for journalism in the online era.

Everything is different now, and assuming that both technological advancement and the practices of a free society remain unimpeded, the clock will never turn back.

Beyond the actual recalibration of the official Afghan war narrative — WikiLeaks has demonstrated how a decentralized media entity can set the agenda and force the hand of legacy news institutions.

In doing so, WikiLeaks has exposed a raw nerve about the leadership role of legacy news media in serving democracy’s vital information needs — but it has also defined and reinforced the value of traditional journalism as a formal, methodological and professional process of inquiry and publishing.

All this adds up to a truly new media ecology, one that has been struggling to be born, and which, if it survives and propagates, will utterly transform the conversation of democracy, the nature of self-governance, and the business of journalism.

No boundaries, no borders.

NYU media savant Jay Rosen notes that WikiLeaks is a “stateless news organization,” one that can “report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”

Well — it is not necessarily new, that capacity has existed as long as the open, peer-to-peer Internet has. It’s just that no one has truly made good on that promise until now.

In doing so, Poynter Institute’s Steve Myers asserts, WikiLeaks is “changing the news power structure” in profound ways, even as it deepens the need for professional journalism as a practice:

“It has cracked open governments and corporations without apparent repercussions because it has no headquarters, no printing press or transmission tower, no physical address. It’s just a confederation of skilled volunteers and Web servers. In that sense, WikiLeaks is of the Internet.

“In inserting itself between source and publisher, WikiLeaks has shifted power away from the monoliths that once determined what is news and toward the people who, before the Web, would have been stopped in the newspaper lobby before they could see a reporter.

“WikiLeaks allowed The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel access to the Afghanistan war logs a month early as long as they kept quiet until WikiLeaks published them on its site. In striking that bargain, those news organizations found themselves not as gatekeepers of information, but as guests with VIP access.

“And yet WikiLeaks needed these titans of old media. It needed their reporting, their reach, their distribution networks, their reputation.”

Sources vs. partners.

This is an uneasy relationship and has fomented profound bitterness amongst press champions and critics alike.

As quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review’s hard-boiled retelling of how the war logs made the leap from a wiki to the traditional press, New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt takes pains to distance his work from Assange, and in doing so takes a seemingly ad hominem tone, describing Assange as “flouncing”:

“I’ve seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together,” says Schmitt. ”But we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He’s making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that’s not what it was.”

In Myers’ Poynter column, Times editor Bill Keller also carefully, and more soberly, defines it as a source relationship — one that is altogether seemly and responsible:

“Deep Throat had an agenda. Ellsberg had an agenda,” Keller told me by e-mail. “That doesn’t invalidate the information they provide us. If we refused to work with sources whose motivations we didn’t share, a lot of important stories would go untold.

“The critical thing is what we do with the material — check its authenticity, draw our own conclusions from it, put it in context, and lay it all out for readers on our terms, not the source’s terms.”

In fact, the difference between “source” and “partner” will define how journalism as an industry, as a practice and as a cornerstone of democracy functions for decades — decades — to come.

Press leadership or media innovation?

Consider the bitterness of marketing blogger Jordan Zimmerman, a non-journalist everyman who seems to suggest that if the Afghan war-logs story were left to legacy news media, it would never have even been investigated in the first place:

“The media has been censored over the years. It’s now made up a bunch of lackluster, lazy journalists who are afraid to go after a hard-core story. Maybe it’s because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Whatever the reason, it’s an outrage. No wonder newspaper readership is declining! It’s because journalists today lack the guts to write the stories that need to be written … WikiLeaks, on the other hand, isn’t afraid. They put it all on the line to talk about real issues… Whatever happened to free speech, and freedom of the press? These are fundamental principles on which this country was built. Don’t people deserve to know the truth? At the very least, don’t they deserve the opportunity to have all the information available and the freedom to draw their own conclusions?”

Leslie Griffith, an award-winning SF Bay Area TV news anchor, expresses the same bitterness, and decries the demonization of “whistleblowers,” even as she praises WikiLeaks as a serpent-slaying “Wiki-Tiki-Tavi”:

“Now, we have Pvt. Bradley Manning and the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, doing what reporters should have been doing all along [emphasis added]. Out of fear of being fatally scooped, and in the continued hope of keeping America dancing to their jingoism tune, the Pentagon and FOX News are now calling these whistleblowers traitors.”

WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum sounds a similar note in an interview with his longtime friend Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, that uniquely hacker-centric bucket of fascinations, cultural observation and anti-secrecy sentiment:

Boing Boing: What do you think of the White House reactions so far to the “Afghan War Diaries” leak?

Jacob Appelbaum: It’s clear that the White House is attempting to shoot the messenger. These documents provide concrete evidence of events that have occurred during the last six years of the Afghan war.

Boing Boing: The Department of Defense has called Wikileaks a “national security threat.”

Jacob Appelbaum: Wikileaks is not a national security threat; we are an international security promise.

Boing Boing: What do you mean by that?

Jacob Appelbaum: We promise our sources that we will get their information to the public. We have released information about what is actually happening in Afghanistan. We are telling you the facts as the US military saw fit to document them. We are telling you these facts because they document an important first-hand perception of everyday life in Afghanistan that our source felt important to show the world.

This new media-ecology is not yet mature nor even truly widespread. But it promises to be an extraordinary growth medium for true democracy.

Meanwhile, journalists must learn to love, or at least live with, the hackers and open-society advocates who are at once their sources, their collaborators and their goads.

Tangential to the Wikileaks story is this fascinating AP news item.

Is a world without secrets a technological inevitability? Not without a fight, I reckon, but extrapolate a few human generations out, and the sociological consequences are fascinating:

Hacker builds $1,500 cell-phone tapping device
By Jordan Robertson, AP Technology Writer

Saturday, July 31, 2010

A computer security researcher has built a device for just $1,500 that can intercept some kinds of cell phone calls and record everything that’s said.

The significance of Chris Paget’s work is that it shows how cheaply such devices, which have been around for decades and are often used by law enforcement, can now be built by hobbyists with equipment easily found on the Internet …

Is this whole e-book thing a self-fulling prophecy of the mass-market, mass-media world? If so, what does it say about the quality of the text produced by the companies that service those markets, the role of such text in society, and the difference between a surplus of evanescent fascinations versus those vital works of prose and verse that one wishes to preserve and savor for the ages?

All the buzz about Amazon selling more e-books than hardcovers therefore seems curious. In terms of pure economics, I personally almost never purchase hardcovers because they’re too expensive, the ones I own are always used and cost less than $5 — or, on occasion, something I splurge on because it’s special and I want it to stick around.

Generally, I purchase paperbacks. Amazon’s press release neglected to note the number of paperbacks sold, which underscores the fact that while the phenomenon of e-books outselling hardcovers is “interesting,” it’s also a calculated effort to boost their own brand, their Kindle reader, and the cultural phenomenon they hope to make much hay out of.

Thus, one wonders whether the journalists and news outlets feverishly reprinting Amazon’s press release about the triumph of the e-book may be doing just that — reprinting a press release.

The New York Times did better than that, however, in noting that paperbacks were excluded from Amazon’s calculation, and that the press release itself is a volley in Kindle’s sales and psychological battle against the iPad:

“Amazon does not specify how paperback sales compare with e-book sales, but paperback sales are thought to still outnumber e-books …

“Analysts said Amazon’s announcement could assuage investors’ concerns that the iPad threatens Kindle sales. Amazon’s stock price is down about 16 percent in the last three months, in part because of those fears.”

What The Times doesn’t mention is what this cultural trend overall means. I know there’s plenty of prognostication about the death of bookstores and print books, but I think a lot of it is akin to feverish goading rather than actual cultural forecasting.

I spoke with a bookstore manager yesterday at an author reading, and asked how business was.

“We can barely keep up,” she said.

Does this boost her hopes about her shop surviving the Kindle?

“Remember,” she noted, “we only need to lose 25% of our customers to the Kindle to go under.”

It occurred to me that part of that phenomenon, however, was linked to the cost of their rent, for a shop centrally located on a chic and busy San Francisco thoroughfare.

One other thought — perhaps the boom in e-book sales is linked in part to what Clay Shirkey calls “Cognitive Surplus” … there’s lots of time, lots of ideas, lots concept,  text and easy-to-access, easy-to-create media in the world now. In his review on Shareable.net of Shirkey’s new book, Paul M. Davis notes that:

“It’s as easy to post a lolcat as it is to report breaking news; as immediate to share a photo with friends on the other side of the world as it is to show it to a neighbor.”

I will add a corollary to that relevant to e-books, to wit: Print books are complicated, expensive and in the mass-market context, quite disposable. They are in fact a form of cognitive surplus, and not necessarily a good form. Perhaps we have too many lousy books out there, pushed out too easily by commercial mills with profit, only profit, on their minds.

E-books are easy and a great place to dump the stuff that shouldn’t have been in print in the first place.

When something deserves to be in print, needs to be in print, the market and the means will remain. Perhaps not on the scale and with the profit margins that mass-market media corporations demand, but … so what?

As Ursula LeGuin pointed out in her Feb. 2008 Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”:

“I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”

E-books, hardcovers, paperbacks … they’re all media with a place and a role in society. When something is important enough to end up in print, it certainly will. For the rest, the Internet is an accommodating host.

Columbia Journalism Review weighs in on a controversial Pepsi-sponsored nutrition blog at Scienceblogs.com. It’s a fascinating parable on the negative impacts of commercial sponsorship on information media:

“At least two well-respected science journalists and a handful of scientists have canceled their blogs at the popular and heretofore highly respected ScienceBlogs.com community, protesting Seed Media Group’s decision to give PepsiCo a nutrition blog … Scienceblogs.com has [since] taken down the Food Frontiers blog, writing, ‘We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.’”