[Data-modeling] Freebase: Something strange and very dangerous, by Phil Meyer

[Dwight Hines]

You have to read all of this to see the relevance to freebase, WEX,  
and where we are today.  Note that the number of journalists in the  
U.S.  declined by 5% this past year.   The number of journalists  
killed in Iraq alone was over 200.
dh
===============

The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for  
complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great  
complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary  
to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as  
it is now to be able to read and write.
H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 1904

===
		
Something strange and possibly dangerous
Posted on March 28, 2008 by dpotter

Technology has changed journalism in ways that journalists themselves  
don’t understand. Phil Meyer, known to many as the father of  
investigative reporting and a longtime leader in journalism research,  
says we’d better figure it out if we want to survive. Here’s the text  
of a speech Meyer delivered last night at a symposium in his honor in  
Chapel Hill, N.C.

Perhaps the most quoted line in Precision Journalism, is this: “They  
are raising the ante on what it takes to become a journalist.”

I used it to open the third edition, published in 1991. And now I  
have a confession to make. At the time I wrote it, I could not be  
certain that it was true.

It was time to raise the ante, sure enough. But the mainstream media  
were being painfully slow to keep up with the need for better and  
more skillful journalism. I guess I thought that if I announced that  
standards were rising, perhaps that might nudge the process along a bit.

An “ante,” of course is what you pay to buy into each hand of a poker  
game. It ensures that you have a stake, some commitment, before you  
see your cards. Putting time and money on the table for journalism  
education is the way that most people in newspapers and broadcasting  
make their commitment. And now, 17 years after I made that rash  
claim, the ante really is being raised. This time, I am certain. And  
technology is the cause. While we were worrying about other things,  
learning to do journalism got harder.

And it’s going to get harder still.

The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient.  
Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What  
they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing  
it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.

This is why we still need newspapers – or something like them. Ronald  
Coase, the British economist, once asked why we need business firms.  
Why can’t all their activities be coordinated by individuals  
contracting with one another instead of working in a bureaucratic,  
command-and-control environment? The answer, he said, is transaction  
costs. If a manager had to negotiate with a free-lancer for every  
task, the cost in time would be unbearably high.

Searching for information on the Internet involves something like  
transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate.  
We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the  
task of the new journalism.
So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been  
employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting,  
gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism  
education will spend so much time on the new tools that we’ll short- 
change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added  
part.

Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn’t enough. We  
need to supply the interpretive framework, too.
Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event  
there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This  
concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth  
Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.)  
Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs  
than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual  
levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of  
public meetings and press conferences won’t do that.

The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean  
Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with  
financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders  
that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit  
squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern.

In academe, we have a parallel concern. Patterns and structures are  
what lead us to theory. The social sciences have been chronically  
short on theory. When I was a first-semester graduate student at this  
University, I took Alexander Heard’s seminar in the scope and methods  
of political science. In our conversations, sparked by an amazing  
list of guest speakers, including Angus Campbell and David Truman,  
the scarcity of theory was a recurring theme. Without theory,  
research isn’t cumulative. It just stacks up loosely related facts.

That was in 1956, the same year that Robert A. Dahl published his  
modestly titled A Preface to Democratic Theory. Dahl argued that  
social checks and balances were far more important for the protection  
of our liberties than the checks and balances in the Constitution.  
Society protects the Constitution as much as the Constitution  
protects society. Dahl’s model makes our role all the more important.  
There won’t be an enlightened public to keep democratic values alive  
if we don’t do our job.

I began practicing journalism in the waning days of the Industrial  
Revolution. Mass media were a product of the Industrial Age. Its  
starting point was 1776, which I am sure you will recognize as the  
year that James Watt invented the reciprocating steam engine.  
Industrial power enabled mass production, which yielded standardized  
products, which needed mass media to sell them. You see the parallel:  
standardized products, standardized information.
Newspapers were the main mass medium for most of the 20th century,  
and they evolved toward natural monopolies, only in part because of  
their high capital costs. The other factor was that buyers and  
sellers in that standardized world needed the efficiency of a single  
marketplace to minimize their transaction costs.

I’ve been reading about a nice example in a new history of the Kansas  
City Star by Harry Haskell, the grandson of an early Star editor.  
(Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star) William  
Rockhill Nelson started the paper with a hand-fed flatbed press in  
1880, a time when Kansas City already had four English-language  
newspapers. Nelson gained dominance in that market by becoming an  
influential voice in the development of the young city, helping to  
plan its wide boulevards and green parks. Advertisers want influence,  
and they find it easier to get if they can piggyback on a medium with  
influence of its own.

When journalism schools arrived, their mission was a simple one:  
provide cheap labor for the newspaper industry.
That emphasis left us a little bit short on the other functions of a  
university, research and service – present company excepted, of  
course. And that might be why so many of the main theories in mass  
communication evolved elsewhere. Paul Lazarsfeld got his two-step  
flow through sociology. He had chosen political communication to  
study because its output, voting behavior, was easy to quantify. Gate- 
keeping theory originated in social psychology. And a promising  
recent development, the idea of the public’s attention as a scarce  
economic good, came from a political scientist, Herbert Simon.

Journalism schools were closely tied to an industry that was so  
successful that it didn’t see any need for theory. The owners of the  
dominant newspapers could make money whether their products were good  
or bad. And so the research they wanted looked for trivial, low-risk  
ways of optimizing content and minimizing cost.

We now live in a different world. After World War II, specialized  
media began prospering at the expense of more general media. As Alvin  
Toffler put it well before the Internet, instead of a few messages  
going to many people, we began having a system that generates many  
messages, each going to relatively few people. Newspapers used to  
bring us together. The media that are replacing them may drive us apart.

How can this system yield enlightened understanding by the public?  
What happens if we all gravitate to narrowly-directed messages from  
senders who would rather reinforce our prejudices? They are motivated  
to do it, of course, because that’s an easier way to get our attention.

The other way to get attention is to provide entertainment, and that  
takes more of the scarce supply away from public issues. Remember  
Neal Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he recalled the two  
dystopian novels that I read in college, George Orwell’s 1984 and  
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell saw totalitarian government  
arising through perpetual war and high-tech surveillance of the  
citizens. Huxley envisioned government control exercised with  
voluntarily ingested drugs and rigid social stratification. Postman  
claimed that Huxley had it right except that our drug is  
entertainment. This was 1985! Just look around, and you can see how  
the ways of being entertained have multiplied since then. When I see  
students who know everything about popular culture and next to  
nothing about public affairs, I tend to agree with Postman. On the  
other hand, the events of the past five years have lent some support  
to the Orwellian model as well.

The world is changing very fast, and we need to understand what is  
happening and its implications for democracy. As faculty, we have the  
responsibility to discover, as well as impart, the truth. And we have  
the privilege of investigating whatever interests us. There is plenty  
to choose from. But without theory, our efforts cannot be cumulative.

Ronald Coase, the economist who figured out the importance of  
transaction costs, noticed this problem in business schools. For  
years, he said, they concentrated all their research efforts on  
institutional studies.
“Without a theory,” he said, “they had nothing to pass on except a  
mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory or a fire.” What  
makes this meeting important is that we are looking for ways to pass  
on the work that we do.

Last week, a newspaper reporter asked me why, at the age of 77, I  
care so much about the future of journalism. “I have grandchildren,”  
I explained. But there is more to it than that. I want the work of  
journalism and journalism education to advance, to be cumulative. I  
want the conversation to continue.

Two decades ago, when the late James A. Carey and I were the guests  
of Ev Dennis at the Media Studies Center, Jim guided me to the work  
of Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form) who suggested that  
life is a conversation. When we enter the room, we find this  
conversation already under way. It is heated at times. We try to get  
the drift of it, and then maybe add a few ideas of our own. Our  
little contribution is attacked by some and defended by others. Then  
the hour grows late, we have to go, and the conversation continues  
without us. If we are lucky, what we have said might affect that  
conversation long after we have left the room.

We need to turn our conversation toward an economic theory of  
journalism. We need to apply existing theory to understanding the  
processes and effects of the new media. We need to learn how to sell  
enlightened understanding to the public so that it can preserve its  
democratic values. The synergy of mass media and mass production is  
gone, probably forever. Something strange – and possibly dangerous —  
is taking its place.
We need to understand it. The ante has been raised. I hope you’re ready.

Philip Meyer has just retired as the holder of the Knight chair of  
Journalism at the University of North Carolina. He’s the author of  
“Precision Journalism” and “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving  
Journalism in the Information Age.” E-mail: pmeyer at email.unc.edu

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