A new report from Harvard suggests that the Internet is “redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations.”

Stop the presses.

The report from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government purports to peer into the future of news in America. But “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet” neither advances the theory of creative destruction introduced by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 40s (and later appropriated by enterprising Harvard Business School professors-consultants Richard Nolan and David Croson in 1995, then Clayton Christensen in 2001), nor illuminates the migration of news and information consumers to the Internet.

Rather, the report by JFK Government School professor Thomas E. Patterson applies a thin methodology – web traffic estimates of “unique users” – to support old chestnuts about what is happening to traditional organizations that produce print, broadcast and Internet news for what was formerly known as the mass media audience, local and national. Patterson all but apologizes in the second sentence of the report: “ … our assessments are necessarily speculative.” Veritas.

The shaky methodology and flawed premise validate conclusions that have been obvious for some time. Sure creative destruction is and has been occurring in news as well as every other sector. Almost everyone understands that. But we should be wary about conclusions based on unreliable, comparative metrics on how someone’s computer is hitting someone else’s servers on a monthly basis, then spreading that data over a time when computer and media usage have increased exponentially. As media usage changes and expands, it is reasonable to expect that “monthly users” are increasing or being redistributed throughout media.

The Harvard report assigns commercial statistics to apples-to-oranges comparisons about content and services — only some of which have to with the distribution of news and advertising — that different platforms provide in the eroding, controlling environment of mass-media distribution.

The conclusion that local web sites are losing audience to big, online competitors is largely unsupported, counter-intuitive to the Internet’s organizing principle of community. There’s more of everything, a proliferation of sources, and an endless array of choice in open markets, physical and virtual, for news and information.

Our research suggests that audiences are using multiple brands — as many as 12 to 15 day — for information, including news, and for interacting. That should change tired, self-serving notions about monopolizing or dominating markets to those who are the best at facilitating and serving markets.

At a time when all producers of online content and services crave fresh insight on the shift in media usage and behavior, Harvard has given us a hollow report that is so old school.

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Each month I have dinner with good friends who happen to be editors at three of the nation’s leading news organizations. Given our friendship and a common kinship to newspapers, conversation invariably turns to journalism and its current woes. As a recovering journalist turned digerati, I am left to defend “Dale’s Internet” during spirited after-dinner dialectic and wine tasting.

This month’s debate: Who screws up the most?

The debate begins with the claim “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” The new twist is that my friends are convinced that Google, Wikipedia and a gazillion bloggers are not only spreading bad information but instilling bad habits in good reporters.

Reporters have become poor spellers who don’t check things, they contend, because they rely so much on that insidious web of misinformation and opinion. The editors worry that professional reporters are beginning to perform like the unskilled and distrusted amateurs of the Internet.

My friends are also upset with the error surcharge. They complain that newspapers and broadcasters pay a far higher price for making errors or expressing opinion than do Internet sites.

I wanted to tell them that the public expects more – perhaps too much – from professional news organizations and their promise of rigor, objectivity, and truth to power.

I also wanted to explain how the Internet itself acts an editing mechanism where editorial judgment is applied at the edges, sometimes after the fact, not in advance.

Instead, I yielded to the wine, the time and a respect for dedicated friends doing the hard work of a good profession

Then came the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Near the end of the broadcast, Williams paused to announce a correction. The previous week, NBC reported that Russia had planted a flag on the seabed directly under the North Pole in a move seen as a symbolic claim on the resource rich region. NBC ran video footage from Reuters called “Russia plants flag under N Pole.” Reuters posted the story and video on its news site on August 2.

The problem was that a 13-year-old boy who saw the footage on NBC thought the Russian MIR submersible in the video looked a lot like the submersible used in the search for the Titanic more than a decade ago. Which it was.

Blaming Reuters, Williams acknowledged the error. Poof. It was gone.

Reuters merely posted this clarification above the story on its site: “This story contains file shots of Russia’s MIR submersible. The story also contains video of a submersible which was shot during the search for the Titanic in the Atlantic.” Poof.

The bad video tumbled without correction from one medium to the next. CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other stations ran it for days. Dozens of newspaper sites linked to it.

On the Internet, an error gets around like a lobbyist in Washington. Reputations are shaped by how quickly peers, critics, friends, experts and, yes, editors correct it. Participation in the process of setting the story straight is part of the currency, as well as the sport, of the Net.

It used to be that journalists were expected to be an expert on something. Today some 13-year-old probably knows more about the thermal tiles on the space shuttle than a reporter covering NASA. Chances are the 13-year-old is communicating with a larger network of readers on My Space. So why not use their knowledge network, even if the kid (or the reporter) may misspell “Endeavour.”

That’s the promise of We Media – the media environment where shared or connected knowledge is an opportunity, not a threat. As great as the promise of “truth to power,” interactivity and communications technology enable citizens to spread knowledge,

“Who screws up the most?” is not the question we ought to be asking at dinner parties, in newsrooms or on the Internet. We ought to be asking how skilled journalists can collaborate with connected, informed citizens to better make sense of a complex world.

Editors might help everyone with their spelling. Or they could blame an algorithm.

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AP reports that disgraced Conrad Black is seeking a new trial for swindling hundreds of millions through his international media empire. Just in time: the 2004 documentary Citizen Black by Canadian film makers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine is marking the rounds on the Sundance Channel. Aside from several self-conscious moments by writer/director Melnyk, a Michael Moore wannabe, the documentary exposes an elegant crook masquerading as an arrogant dilettante merely by turning the camera on Black. There are revealing insights about the feudal lords of newspapers as well as fortunes made and squandered.

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(We’re catching up – we sent these iSIGHTINGS to our email subscribers on Aug. 7. If you aren’t on our email list, you can sign up here.

Trust us. Or trust me.
Trust systems are one of the cornerstones of iFOCOS work. We’ve posited that trust is in flux: diverse communities in a society shaped by global access to news and information are assuming influence and attention at the expense of institutions such as media and government that organize power geographically through a controlled model of community.

We view a diverse, connected society as a civic strength; our ability to express differences though many forms of media makes us stronger.

Our thinking has been influenced by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, famous for his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Now comes an apparent downside.

Read more

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iFOCOS founders Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison are organizing an event this fall in Washington, DC. It should be of interest to anyone who thinks the greatest opportunities for the connected society are in using media and communications technologies to improve the world. The event is called The Power to Change the World, (www.changesummit.com), a summit on how media can make a difference. Join global leaders from news, business, government, technology, public policy and activism on Wednesday, October 24 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. Registration is now open and limited to 150 people, so sign up soon. Nominations are also still open for discussion leaders at this U.N.-style summit. Have a big insight about the four big questions? Contact Dale Peskin: dale_peskin AT yahoo DOT com.

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Maybe you thought to yourself, gosh, wouldn’t it be nifty to take a walk in the middle of a big hurricane? Or maybe you’d settle for the video. Here are some videos of Hurricane Dean posted to Weather.com by eyewitnesses in Grand Cayman, Belize and Playa Del Carmen. The video sharing setup (more here) is hosted by Magnify.net, the same service we’ve been using to collect submissions to Random Acts of Media. Our friends at Magnify tell us page views more than doubled in a 24 hour period due to Dean-related uploads and viewing.

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Giving up control is difficult. Last week the US mobile phone company Sprint Nextel unveiled a new brand, Xohm, for its much-anticipated next-generation wireless broadband WiMax service. With the new brand Sprint also seems to be trying to shed its "our way or the highway" heritage, shared with wireless carriers around the globe who have defined their business models around absolute control of their networks and the devices that use them.

Or maybe Sprint is just trying to shed  whatever brand yuckiness accounted for the company’s 95 percent drop in profits and the loss of 714,000 customers in the previous three quarters.

One of the ways Sprint is trying to open up is symbolic – by changing the way it tells its story. Sprint has launched a new blog to share at least some of the company’s internal thinking about its new broadband service. Through the blog Sprint is thinking out loud about what it means to be a carrier that both controls and profits from a network and yet is open to unhindered and unimagined uses for that network.

The blog also gives the company a place to acknowledge and think out loud about unfavorable feedback to the new brand name, like this from CrunchGear:

It xounds like “home” but with a z and the reaxon there’s an x in there ix becauxe “The X-factor makes it cool.” Mmmhmm.

 (iFOCOS says: Xohm ryhmes with ohm, or with the sound of a cat expelling a fur ball).

Strange thing, though. Last week the Xohm blog was linked from the Xohm promotional web site, which otherwise has  nothing of use to anybody other than an email signup for Xohm alerts. This week, the blog link is gone – although the blog itself is still alive and kicking. Which makes you wonder if the mild blowback over the (insert coughing sound – xmmm) brand provoked second thoughts on the whole blog idea within Sprint. If so, allow us to offer some third thoughts: put the link back and relax.

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washingtonpost.com’s “On Being” project is simply stunning: real stories from real people based on the simple notion that “we should get to know one another a little better.” An elegant design and interface, enhanced by professional video production standards, bring to life the musings and passions of ordinary extraordinary people. This is how journalism from MSM should look on the web: visual, interactive, compelling, real. The big problem: You can’t find “On Being” on The Post’s dense home page. Which raises the existential question of whether it really exists.
Look here: http://specials.washingtonpost.com/onbeing/

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How ‘bout we invite the CEOs and CFOs of media companies to compete against the varsity from business schools at CNBC’s MBA Challenge. You can play on your own or against the likes of venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky.

For more accomplished financial athletes, there’s the Copenhagen Business School MBA Challenge where you can test your executive capabilities in an immersive MBA simulation game.

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Our favorite media pundit Jay Rosen shared this test for understanding how people define and are defined by communities. What I carry in mine:
– Driver’s License. Geographic community.
– Business cards. Connections to global communities.
– Insurance cards. My health and wellness, anywhere.
– Apple Pro Care. Ticket to my technology.
– Hidden Creek Country Club card. My shadow life as a golfer.
– Dad’s “Hole-in-One” card. DNA; remembering moments with my father.
– Family photos. Real life.
– Key cards. Access to current worlds.
– Code card to storage facility. Holding tank for past worlds.
– Voter’s registration. Citizenship badge.
– Affinity cards. Privilege passes for a global citizen.
– Credit and debit cards. Convenience currency for life on the go.
I’m local so long as my wallet is with me, even if I’m in Beijing. Now my goal is to retire the wallet and put all my communities on an iPhone. Which I’ll also lose.

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Sao Paulo, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful standing, 15,000 billboards have been stripped from a city that resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. Flickr set

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You have to admire the chutzpah of any group that seeks to save journalism from itself by blowing with the wind. But inspired by native forces, the goo-goos at Journalism That Matters gathered in “open space” at a George Washington University cafeteria to agonize over the ill-winds of change. All the right people – which, in the language of the event, were those who were there – blew away inhibitions in feel-good exercises designed to find salvation for journalism at the crossroads. All in about 30 hours. Which is very fast when you consider that journalism has been at someone’s idea of a crossroads for a coupla hundred years.

The outcomes were as predictable as they were quick. Flip-chart wisdom validated pre-planned outcomes including (1) research and education agendas sustaining journalism; (2) “breakthroughs across silos of thought and practice;” and (3) a framework for launching the Next Newsroom, a business with margins that appeal to the low financial expectations of civic-supportive, community investors.

While its agenda is earnest, JTM suffers from dated, naïve assumptions about the ongoing transitions in journalism, community and civic life. And then there are JTM’s breezy rules of engagement: “whoever comes is the right people/whatever happens is the right thing ….” That’s just silly. Serious plans require rigor, talent and scrutiny.

We’re all for journalism that matters. Who isn’t? As far as we can tell there’s nothing stopping journalism-that-matters from happening. Better reporting from the very people who seek better reporting is a good place to start. So would the inclusion of the fairly brilliant innovators outside of journalism’s tortured and clubby network. With so many inspiring innovations, enabling technologies, fresh investment and creative ideas emerging from a media-savvy society it’s hard to embrace a woe-is-journalism agenda. The wind blows forward.

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If the Next Newsroom sounds familiar, it is. It borrows language from Newspaper Next (request the report; don’t republish), the “transformation project” financed by newspaper publishers. Both projects owe to Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen’s broadly applicable, 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The difference: the American Press Institute paid Christensen’s consulting company $2.5 million to repurpose his case studies; JTM organizer Chris Peck bought the book. ($12.21 for the paperback at Amazon). Never mind that Christensen famously forecast the demise of the newspaper industry. His company, Innosight, happily competes for consulting engagements to help fix the industry.

The situation reminds me of the fertilizer problem at my golf course. We hire an enterprising service called Birds-B-Gone to chase away the flock of geese that summers by the lake on the 16th Hole. Trained dogs cause the geese to fly off to a nearby course. That course then hires the same service to chase them back to ours. Birds-B-Gone gets good both ways.

Though they share terminology, the two Next projects come from different parts of the goose: JTM from the heart, Newspaper Next from the, ah, wallet. The competing initiatives, both aimed in some way at saving newspapers, exacerbate the rift among journalists and publishers about solving a common problem. Only the goose-chasers make out.

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