Independent bookstores across North America are in trouble. The business model is changing as more and more readers move to tablets and e-readers, with competition from video games and the lure of all that is available on the Internet.

When an independent bookstore finally finds that its business is no longer working, and it announces that it is shutting down, part of any community dies with that bookstore. The death of the local independent bookstore, general or specialized, mom and pop operation or bibliophile specialized, is always news.

My local bookstore in Kitimat is about to close.

It wasn’t the marketplace (as such).

It was murder. Murder most foul. It was killed by Bell Canada.

No, this wasn’t a case of Bell wanting to increase the number of downloads of e-books and magazines on smart phones and tablets. Bell is a big, dumb corporation and the left hand doesn’t talk the to right hand that way.

In Kitimat, the store is Bookmasters/The Source. Now you begin to understand. As well as the local book, magazine, toy and souvenir shop, the store is a Source franchise.

It’s not that this was an unsuccessful franchise. The Source (Bell) Electronics (the corporate entity) last week suddenly cancelled the franchise contracts of 10 small mom and pop, hybrid Source stores across northern British Columbia, putting 10 small businesses out in the cold, out of pure, stupid corporate greed. The Source (Bell) Electronics plans to replace the mom and pop stores with the kind of high pressure sales “full service” stores you see the major metropolitan areas.

So before going back to the issue of the bookstore, let’s look at the decision by Bell’s corporate headquarters and ask, does it even make business sense?

The question that you have to ask up here is: will there be enough business in the small communities of northern BC to sustain a full up The Source with its obnoxious high pressure sales people, most of whom actually know very little about electronics, other than what is some sales manual? Given the uncertain economic conditions here, I doubt very much if a corporate Source store will succeed in the long run. Interestingly The Source is still promoting hybrid stores under The Source Express franchise, so the question is why are they killing the stores in northern BC? Is there any solid business research behind this move? Or it is an ego-trip from corporate?

There is already talk across northwestern British Columbia of a boycott of the new stores, in protest to this high handed corporate action.

A boycott might actually succeed. There is, of course, fierce competition in electronic retailing, both from national chains and from locally owned electronic stores. In northwestern BC, there is a decades long tradition of mail order, going to back to the time when there was little available at retail due to relative isolation and transportation problems. Now it is easy to order via Internet or on E-Bay. Almost everyone I know up here provides regular work for Canada Post and FedEx or UPS.

(An aside: When the old Radio Shack stores became The Source in Canada, the electronic parts and gadgets that were once carried by Radio Shack disappeared. When, as a TV news freelancer, I needed some gear, I was told by Bookmasters/The Source that they carried it when they were Radio Shack but it was no longer available via The Source. I bought the gear I needed on E-Bay from California)

Another reason that I am pissed off at this. It is going to cost me money. Bookmasters/The Source carries magazines not available on the racks of Overwaitea or Shoppers Drug Mart. With no bookstore in town, if I want those magazines, which are not available electronically, I am going to have drive 60 kilometres to the next nearest bookstore in Terrace once a month or pay postage fees which, for American magazines, are often higher than the subscription fees.

I found about the store closing on the weekend from a friend, I visited the store today (unfortunately all the bookshelves had already been sold).

Today, the more I think about it, even though it is an example from a small town, Bookmasters could actually be a viable business model to sustain independent bookstores, by combining paper books with electronics.

Yes, I frequently buy e-books from Amazon or Apple for my iPad. I see a review or a mention in a news story or on a website and I can download the book with a click.

When it comes to the simple joy of reading, the trouble with Amazon/Kindle or Apple is that often there is not enough information provided that let’s me decide to buy a book. That’s where browsing the bricks and mortar bookshelves comes in.

Take science fiction, unless I read a review in Analog (which will no longer be available in Kitimat after Bookmasters closes) I can’t tell from the one or two sentences on an e-book page whether or not this book is worth buying. Browsing the small science fiction section in Bookmasters let me look at the cover, look at the blurb at the back, perhaps the first few pages and then decide whether to buy and I often do buy.

The other point about a physical, bricks and mortar bookstore is serendipity. Amazon may have recommendations based on past purchases, but there is no way Amazon can tell that a book I see on a shelf in a store will grab my interest. I seldom leave a bookstore without some serendipitous purchase that would never appear on my Amazon profile.

The book business is increasingly moving toward the electronic. Some bookstores are already selling iPads and Kindles. At the same time, some publishers and business analysts are saying (hoping?) there will still be a demand for a physical book.

It seems to me that if we want the independent bookstore to survive as a viable business model, that there should be serious consideration of a hybrid store that sells both books and electronics. A store could sell either hard copy books or e-books through some sort of download station. That way the customer has a choice. That store could also a sell a selection of tablets and other e-devices, selected software and who knows what is around the corner.

Consider the camera store. In the past decade, the camera store has gone from selling film cameras, film and darkroom equipment (remember darkrooms and chemicals?) to what is essentially an electronics store, selling digital cameras (and camera accessories), software, tablets, memory cards and all kinds of accessories. The old film camera shops that refused to move to electronics are long gone. (But the surviving stores still sell used film cameras to enthusiasts)

Who knows what the future will bring in e-books? The explosion in tablets in the past few months is probably only a hint of things to come. Independent bookstores that stick with the old model will die. But, as I said, communities thrive on bookstores. Independent bookstores have to be on the front lines of e-innovations. Surviving independent bookstores should perhaps start looking to the camera retailer as a possible model for adapting to a fast changing future,  just like a camera store does today, selling “content” and “content delivery” in multiple forms, including the good, old-fashioned books first brought to us by Johannes Gutenberg..

So for now, the closing of Bookmasters/The Source in Kitimat will usher in another example of the current corporate monoculture. Bell#FAIL

But perhaps, the silver lining in this cloud (and it is overcast and snowing in Kitimat today) is that the hybrid electronic stores in the small markets of northern BC could be resurrected  across the world as way of saving the independent “content” store.

About two weeks ago, with the usual great fanfare pioneered by the late Steve Jobs, Apple unveiled its Ibook 2 e-book software. The software has great promise, according to Apple, allowing the user to create the kind of e-book that authors have been waiting for, adding graphics, video, photo galleries, even 3-D.

The euphoria was short lived.  A tech blogger named Dave Wineman did what many people don’t do, read Apple’s End User Licence Agreement (EULA) and the alarm bells rang (if alarm bells can ring on Twitter). (I saw a tweet about Wineman’s initial post, retweeted it and posted it on Facebook)

Use Apple ibook software and create a work, and ask for money, and they own it and they own you.

For the past two weeks, the debate has raged, largely within the tech community and that’s the problem. While a couple of the tech writers may have written a tech book, it is absolutely clear that most of the people debating Apple’s move know absolutely nothing about the long struggle by creators to have some form of control over their work, to maintain the integrity of their work and not to get screwed.

The Apple ibook EULA is the road to serfdom for writers and if it succeeds, it is another blow against creative writing around the world.

After the initial post, more tech writers and bloggers took an even closer look at Apple’s EULA and it got worse.  Unlike conventional paper publishing, if Apple rejects and refuses to distribute the work, you can’t sell it elsewhere.

Here are the key clauses in the Apple Ibook 2 EULA.

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

Then Apple adds

Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.

It quickly became apparent that Apple’s restriction also meant the author couldn’t sell the book (“the work”) as a printed book, without Apple’s permission and Apple presumably taking a cut.

Use Apple software and you become a serf, a serf to Apple, obliged, like the medieval peasant, to sell your product to your overlord, in this case, Apple.

Those blogs in the tech community that raised the alarm said that this could set an incredibly dangerous precedent, that a software company can use the licencing agreement to restrict or control what is created by that software or, like that medieval baron, take a cut of your production.

The Ed Bott report on ZDNet calls Apple’s latest attempt at controlling content  Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement

Bott asks:

Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

Bott also says that Apple software is an enhancement of the open source EPUB format.

 An Apple support document notes that “¦iBooks uses the ePub file format” and later refers to it as “the industry-leading ePub digital book file type.” But iBooks Author will not export its output to that industry-leading format.

Sascha Sagan is even more scathing with post on PCMag.com iBooks Author: You Work For Apple Now

With iBooks Author, Apple just made a hideous play to kill authors’ rights over their work…  it affects every single person who wants to use Apple’s new tool to get their word out. Like iBooks Author? Apple now owns you…

I’m feeling a personal terror here because I make my living as a writer. I’m writing this column now in Apple’s TextEdit. If Apple took the same approach to TextEdit as it does to iBooks, I wouldn’t be able to put my columns in PCMag’s Digital Edition (sold through Zinio). Apple would control how PCMag does its business.

My wife is an artist; she creates some of her work on a Mac. Could Apple then forbid her from selling it on Etsy or through an art gallery with a little-noticed clause in a licensing agreement? That’s what iBook Author heralds.

Up until now, Apple has kept creative tools divorced from the means of distribution… Apple has always made a distinction between enabling the creative process and selling the product of that process.

Apple’s iBooks Author erases that distinction. Apple owns the creative process of anyone who uses the tool.

One tech writer who comes to Apple’s defence is Paul Carr in his Pando Daily blog, seems to have a “get over it” attitude by saying Apple Restricting Sales Of Ebooks? Uh, Yeah, That’s What Apple Does by saying that the free Ibook 2 software is designed to attract a critical mass of new content into their iBooks store,” then Carr predicts “the company will probably relax their EULA restrictions, like they did with DRM in the iTunes store.”

Carr (and others) point out that there is a lot of e-book software out there and authors are “more than welcome to boycott Apple’s awesome new free software” but he adds: “But we won’t. We’ll pick Apple, and we’ll like it. Because this is Apple, and that’s what we do.”

Wineman has already responded to that in a follow up blog and says

If you don’t like it, don’t use it! Duh.
You’re missing the point. The issue is that this is a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what I can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself. No consumer EULA I’ve ever seen goes this far. Would you be happy if Garage Band required you to sell your music through the iTunes Store, or if iPhoto had license terms that kept you from posting your own photos online? It’s a step backward for computing freedom and we should resist it.

One author, Holly Isle, has already started a protest by pulling her books from the Ibook store. In her blog The Apple iBooks Author Issue: Small things, and large principles

And the rule of software is this: Software does not get to dictate the use of output. Period. Software does not get to tell you WHERE you can sell what you’ve created, only that you have the right to sell it (in the cases where software requires a commercial license if you are producing for profit).

Software does not get to tell you, “If you create this work on our software and we don’t want to distribute it, we own the rights to the version our software created, and if you want another version, you will have to disassemble this one, and rebuild it from scratch on other software.”

A few days later, came the backlash from the Apple tech community. In the Apple blog Loop Insight, Jim Dalrymple asked what the fuss was about.

The fact is, none of it is true. I’m not sure if they just misunderstood or they jumped on a juicy headline, but here’s what the EULA is all about, as I understand it.

Apple is providing free tools for authors to create books. If you want to give away your book for free, you can do that. For example, if a teacher makes an iBook for students, they can give it to them at no cost and Apple doesn’t care.
If, however, you create an iBook using Apple’s tools and you want to sell it, then you have to use the iBookstore and give Apple its cut.
That sounds fair to me. Use Apple’s tools, sell your product, and give Apple the money it deserves for providing you with a way to make and sell a product.

He concluded with a complete and utter display of ignorance by saying:

The hubbub over the EULA seems like a whole lot of nothing to me, perpetuated by people that didn’t understand what they were reading.

That of course lead to a lively exchange in the comments section.

Actually it’s Dalrymple who doesn’t understand what he is talking about. Apple’s demand is unfair, unfairness that authors have been fighting for a century or more and, were, for a while, winning. Now the threat is back.

George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The problem with the tech writing/blogging world is that many believe in a continual reinvention of time, not exactly Groundhog Day but more like a Star Trek type temporal loop where everything begins again and again and again, but slightly different each time.

The techies, believing each new day is a new universe, don’t remember the past, and therefore are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

First, let’s take the argument that because a good portion of the population likes Apple products, authors will willingly give up their creative rights to this super-controlling mega-corporation. A mega-corporation that we now know from The New York Times produces those products in horrendous conditions in dark satanic mills in China.

I don’t want to use a stereotype but I have to wonder how many geek writers know anything about the history of professional sports. With Apple and the creative community, we’re getting into a similar situation that happened for generations in professional sports. Let’s take the oldest professional leagues: baseball and hockey. Young athletes wanted to play in the “major leagues.” The young athletes started in the minors, and to get into the minors they signed contracts that essentially made them into serfs, owned by the team and team owners. Even when they reached the major leagues, the original six in the NHL, for example, and became stars, they were still serfs. Many NHL stars (and some baseball stars) had to take off season jobs to make ends meet. They finally got so fed up they formed unions.

Now those players with the support of their unions get multimillion dollar contracts from the team owners. While a few say the athletes are overpaid, it’s a lot better situation than being underpaid serfs, owned by the team owners.

Authors have always been at odds with publishers over rights, over payments, over how a book is designed, published and sold. That will never change (unless publishers disappear altogether, which is possible).

For authors, unions are not a solution, especially in the United States, when court decisions in the 1930s, when creators were fighting the movie studios, ruled that to be unionized, creators must be employees. Laws in other countries are not as restrictive, but then Apple is in California, where those precedents were set.

The problem, ignored by the tech community, is how just how bad things are in publishing today, compared to say 25 and 60 years ago; how conditions for many authors have gotten worse through the years, problems that have little to do with the technical revolution of the past two decades.

An 1827 print of an author in a garrett, Death found an author writing his life, Designed & done on stone by E. Hull. via Wikipedia

For most of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth century, there were hundreds of publishers, some small and some large, general and specialized, competing to sell books to the public and therefore competing for authors.

An author still had to have a good manuscript to sell to a publisher. If the publisher liked the manuscript, then the author had to make sure that the publishers’ boiler plate contract didn’t take that author to the cleaners. The publishers’ contract always tried to control as much of the rights as possible, and keep as much money from the author and in the publisher’s pocket as possible. There were always the young and naive authors, like eager jocks with an offer from the major leagues, willing to sell themselves to a serf contract just to be published. Hard lessons brought the rise of the literary agent as well as countless articles advising authors how to avoid being ripped off. It was all part of the game, tough contract negotiations are an accepted part of the free enterprise system.

Things began to change about a quarter century ago with the rise of the chain bookstore. The main problem for authors was that publishers no longer sold books to the public. They sold books to the chain bookstores. The chain bookstores tracked sales and decided, often on the performance of one single title, whether or not an author’s next book should be picked up. If a chain indicated that it wouldn’t pick up an author, that publisher wouldn’t look at that author. (Imagine that in sports, a pitcher has one bad inning, a goalie lets in a few too many balls or pucks  in one game, a quarterback has a bad day and throws interceptions and that’s it for their career)

Then came the corporate consolidation, hundreds of publishers shrank to a handful, all owned by large transnational media corporations. While the famous names of publishing houses remained, they were usually shells, each one a branch of one of the mega-corporations. That reduced the choice authors and their agents had in submitting manuscripts.

The combination of corporate consolidation and the chain bookstore raised the always difficult barrier to entry for new authors to almost insurmountable heights. In the long past, a publisher would take a risk on a new author as a long term investment, counting on the fact that a few of those authors would break through and repay that initial investment thousands of times over. And oh yes, those publishing houses were in business, so even the thousand of so copies printed of that new author’s book were designed so there was an easy break-even point.

All of that is long gone. No wonder kids want to get published for free these days, often it is the only choice they have.

The demands of the corporate bean counters at both the publishing house and the chain bookstore also meant the death of the “mid-list” book, the book from an experienced author which would usually makes the publishing house a small but healthy profit. The trouble was both the publishers and chain bookstores no longer wanted healthy profits, they only wanted hugely profitable mega best sellers.

With the rise of new technology, authors were faced with new problems. As first music and later video downloading hurt the bottom lines of the big media corporations, there was increased pressure for even more profitable best sellers from the hard copy product, books. More authors were dropped. Publishers put minimal efforts into books, especially minimal copy-editing and, of course, the public blamed the author, not the publisher, for all those typos.

By mid-decade after the millennium, new technology had begun to hit the book business. Independent bookstores were almost all gone. Now the chain bookstores and their overwhelming power is going. Publishers are left wondering what to do. Almost everyone now working in publishing have spent their entire careers in the business model of selling to the chains, not the public, They don’t know what to do as they face this brave new world and thus they go out of business.

By this time, most authors no longer care much about publishers. If publishers hadn’t been screwing all but their biggest best selling authors for more than a quarter of a century, the publishers might have had allies. They don’t.

Amazon brought the promise of e-books. E-books would liberate the author from the publishers. If publishers no longer did good overall editing, no longer did copy editing, no longer helped clear picture rights, no longer did even minimal publicity, and advances were dropping, why did an author need a publisher? Why not invest in the book yourself, pay for a copy editor, do the publicity, which the publisher left up to you anyway, take the complete risk in the marketplace and, if successful, reap all the profits (even when Amazon took its cut)?

It appears that the promise of e-books is not as great as authors hoped. The spectre of corporate control is once again haunting world of creative writing.

The tech writing community is failing to learn from history, long years of history. I wonder how many of the tech writers who ask what the fuss is about on the Apple EULA have ever read a boiler plate contract from a book publisher that comes close to asking for your first born?

It’s not just the EULA for the iBook software, that EULA is a precedent that leads to a road to author serfdom.

If Apple, which has the most attractive platform at the moment for selling e-books, gets away with that clause in the End User Licence Agreement, the idea will spread. Right now it applies to “free” software. How long before it applies to software you pay for, buried in a corporate EULA?

Right now Apple and Amazon take a cut of the book price. How long before they start demanding, just to get on the platform, as publishers used to do, a percentage of other rights?

The choice could soon be, work for free using free software (and somehow pay the rent, mortgage and grocery bills, an increasing problem anyway for creators that those well-paid tech writers always seem to say doesn’t matter ) or, if Apple succeeds, get your work on a platform that has the potential buyers, but at a likely increasing cost as years go by in terms of both income and rights.

That’s no different than the naive author who signed publishers’ boiler plate (or even worse work for hire) and then got nothing when the book became a hit movie.

That’s no different than a medieval serf forced to sell all their produce to their liege lord.

That’s no different than the farm kid who signed a serf contract so he could play in the NHL or the major baseball leagues.

That’s no different from the merchants in a neighbourhood paying a “percentage” to the local crime boss for “protection.”

The worst case scenario, and one probably no science fiction writer ever imagined, an author who creates a book has to pay a percentage to the software company and another percentage to every electronic platform, not only for book sales, but for every other rights sale.

It hasn’t happened yet, but history has shown time and time again that this is the kind of rights grab that corporations try for.

Tech writers and  tech bloggers get real. Learn from history, before you’re screwed as well.

That’s what the fuss is about.

(Disclosure I have an iMac and iPad, also three PCs and an Android phone).

(I have cross-posted this editorial from my news site Northwest Coast Energy News because it also concerns journalism. Thus comments are disabled for this post. Should you wish to comment, please use the posting at  the original Accuracy is the best neutrality. It’s all about the bitumen. )

Memo to my media friends and colleagues:

Last Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011, the District of Kitimat sponsored an “educational forum” here at Mount Elizabeth Theatre on the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline project which, if approved, would carry bitumen from Alberta  to the port of Kitimat and on to Asia.
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There was an hour of presentations  covering all sides the debate, followed by a question and answer period.

The Enbridge educational forum in Kitimat, Sept. 20, 2011.  Left to right, Ellis Ross, Chief Counsellor, Haisla First Nation,  Mike Bernier, mayor of Dawson Creek, Greg Brown, environmental consultant and John Carruthers, President Enbridge Northern Gateway  Pipelines. (Robin Rowland/ Northwest Coast Energy News)

Throughout those two hours, the word used to describe the substance that could come to Kitimat through that pipeline was the word “bitumen.”   Panelists Ellis Ross, Chief Councillor of the Haisla First Nation,  John Carruthers, president of Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines talked about “bitumen,” so did environmental consultant Greg Brown, they all spoke about “bitumen.”  The questions from the audience were about “bitumen.”

Of course, after a couple of years of hearings,briefings and educational forums on the Northern Gateway pipeline project, with more to come (especially when the Joint Review Panel’s formal hearings begin here in January) the people of Kitimat are used to the word “bitumen.” Everyone from grade school kids to seniors know the right words to use, especially since Kitimat is also the site of proposed liquified natural gas projects (which introduced a whole new set of terminology.)

When we talk about (and sometimes debate) the Northern Gateway project on the cross trainers and treadmills at the Riverlodge gym, the word used is “bitumen.”

While the Kitimat meeting was underway the rest of the continent, and especially the media  was focused on another pipeline project, the proposed Keystone XL project that would carry bitumen from Alberta down to Texas to be refined there.

So it was no real surprise when Open File Ottawa ran a short item by freelancer Trevor Pritchard on the debate over media use of the words “oils sands” vs the words “tar sands.”

Type in “Alberta tar sands” into Google, and you get 852,000 results. Perform a search for “Alberta oil sands” instead, and you end up with 334,000 results–not even half that. And if you change “Alberta” to “Alberta’s,” the gap widens even further.
So why do most media outlets tend to default to the phrase “oil sands”? Is “tar sands” pejorative? Or do both terms carry their own bias?

Pritchard pointed back to an article in the Tyee posted after the Calgary Herald attacked the late NDP leader Jack Layton for using the term tar sands.

Tyee quoted the Calgary Herald editorial (no longer visible on the web)this way:

Interestingly, the Calgary Herald didn’t so much take issue with the statements themselves, as it did with his vocabulary.
“It’s not what Layton said,” read an editorial from early April. “It’s the loaded and inaccurate language he used repeatedly, referring to the oil sands as ‘dirty’ and ‘tar sands’ — a word that’s part of the propaganda lexicon for radical environmentalists.”

Nearly two weeks later, the Herald was still ruminating about Layton’s and Obama’s language choices.
“Tar sands is inaccurate and pejorative,” wrote columnist Paula Arab.

In today’s polarized world, you might expect the Calgary Herald, in the centre of the Alberta oil patch, to be in favour of the term “oil sands”

However, most of the mainstream media seem to have bought into the idea that if the sandy hydrocarbons found in northern Alberta are called “tar sands” (it certainly looks and smells and feels like tar) it is pejorative, while “oil sands” are neutral. As comments on both the Tyee and Open File stories show, those who tend toward the environmental point of view consider the term “oil sands” energy industry spin.

Open File asked the Canadian Press for their take on the subject, since the CP  Stylebook (like its equivalent from the AP in the United States) is considered the usage Bible not only for the Canadian media for most non-academic writing in the Canada.

Senior Editor  James McCarten responded:

Canadian Press style calls for the use of the term “oilsands” (all one word), as it is both the official term used by the petroleum industry and the least susceptible to misinterpretation or misunderstanding. It is also in keeping with accepted style for terms like “oilpatch” and “oilfield” — consistency is a critical element of any effective writing style.
It’s also important to choose the most neutral term available.

“Tarsands,” while at one time the industry’s chosen term, has been appropriated in recent years by opponents of the oil industry and has taken on political connotations, so we choose to avoid it.

To which commenter Raay Makers responded:

So let me get this straight: CP deems the term preferred by the petroleum industry “neutral,” while the term “appropriated” by opponents of the oil industry isn’t. They obviously have misconceptions of the meaning of the term neutral.

An hour after I read the Open File story,  I turned to CBC TV News and watched Margot McDiarmid’s item on the Keystone debate.  In her first reference to the Keystone pipeline, McDiarmid used the term “oil sands bitumen”  to describe what would go through the Keystone to Texas.  Relatively accurate. But then at the end of her item she said “oil” would be flowing through the Northern Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat.

Even though I worked in radio or TV for three decades and know the necessity to keep things as simple as possible  in a short item, I was appalled.  To describe the bitumen that is going  through those pipelines simply as “oil” is misleading and inaccurate.

If you’ve sat through briefings, attended hearings and read the documents, it is clear that bitumen behaves differently in a pipeline from conventional oil, whether it is crude oil or refined oil.

That difference is at the heart of the debate over both pipelines. It appears that no one outside  of the local media here in Kitimat and media along the Northern Gateway route seems to understand that difference, not even at the centre of the current debate about the Keystone XL in Nebraska.

So I checked. What term is the media using to describe what will flow through the Keystone and Northern Gateway pipelines?  The media is all over the place, calling it oil, crude oil, crude, tar sands oil, oil sands crude, oil sands bitumen.

I first checked the CBC.ca site:

Max Paris in the written story tied to McDiarmid’s item uses “oil sands bitumen,”  the CBC interactive uses “oil sands crude.”

Today’s New York Times uses the term “oil pipeline” to describe the Keystone project.

In a Nebraska local paper, the Omaha World Herald, reporter Paul Hammel describes it as “a crude-oil pipeline”

In another local paper, the  Lincoln Nebraska, Journal Star   reporter Art Hovey uses “oil.”

An Associated Press story today, (at least as it appears on the Forbes site) is totally inconsistent, with the web friendly summary speaks about Keystone XL carrying “tar sands oil,” but the main body of the story calls it “oil.”

Reuters uses the term “oil” in this story 

An editorial  from Bloomberg uses “oil” in the lead

On first look, it might seem wrong to allow TransCanada Corp. to build the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

It goes on to eloquently describe the situation in Alberta’s sandy hydrocarbons

What’s more, a new conduit would seem to only encourage the further development of the Athabascan oil sands in Alberta. This is a dirty business, to be sure: Vast tracts of spruce and fir are cleared to make way for open-pit mines, from which deposits of sticky black sand are shoveled out and then rinsed to yield viscous tar. For deeper deposits, steam is shot hundreds of feet into the earth to melt the tar enough that it can be pumped to the surface. Then there are the emissions associated with mining Canadian oil sands: It produces two and a half times as much carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases as oil drilling in, say, Saudi Arabia or west Texas.

Bloomberg as you might expect from a business site, goes on to give the argument for building Keystone XL in terms of jobs and the economy (and in a much more measured way than the strident columnists in the Postmedia chain here)

Bloomberg concludes

Keep in mind, the U.S. is crisscrossed by thousands of miles of pipelines carrying crude oil, liquid petroleum and natural gas. One of these is the Keystone 1 pipeline, which already carries crude from the oil sands. Yes, these pipes sometimes leak — spectacularly last year when almost 850,000 gallons of oil spilled from a ruptured pipe in Michigan. Far more often, when leaks occur, they are small and self-contained.
After the public hearings, the U.S. should give TransCanada the green light — and then make sure the company manages pipeline design and construction with care.

Get the picture. As far as I can tell, no one, no one in the major news media is accurately describing what will flow through the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines. Again the accurate descriptions come from  the local media in northwestern BC who have attended years of local briefings and hearings.

Oil comes from oil sands, right? Here is where the use of the term “oilsands’ leads to misleading coverage.  It is where senior editors at CP and other senior editors at other news organizations are wrong.  Saying oil or crude will flow through these specific pipelines does lead to  misinterpretation and misunderstanding and it comes directly from the ill advised use of the words “oil sands.”

Say “oil” and, although it is a generic term, most people think of the substance you put in an engine, ranging from the thick, black gooey stuff that goes into a two stroke boat engine, through the lighter oil that goes into your car or the even lighter oil used by model makers. “Petroleum” would probably be a better generic term.
Say crude and  most people would think of  James Dean covered in the crude from the gusher in Giant or similar movie scenes. Or for those old enough to remember, they think of the opening of the Beverly Hillbillies when the “bubbling crude” comes out of the ground at Jed Camplett’s farm.

So what is going through the pipelines?  While Enbridge uses the term “oil” in its promotional brochure on Nothern Gateway (pdf file), in the briefings here Enbridge officials always talk of “bitumen.” They know that the people living in Kitimat, again whether supporter or opponent, have done their home work. Everyone here  knows it won’t be “oil” in the pipeline.  But it seems that the public relations branches of  Enbridge and TransCanada  still believe they can spin the media into reporting the pipelines will just be carrying oil.

So what is going to be in the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines? Read the documents filed with the Joint Review Panel and you find out it is “diluted bitumen”  (The bitumen from those sandy hydrocarbons in Alberta has to be diluted or it won’t flow through the pipeline.)

Documents filed with the Joint Review Panel by Stantec, an environmental consulting company based in Fredericton, New Brunswick,  hired by Enbridge, and frequently retained by the energy industry  uses this definition:

diluted bitumen A hydrocarbon consisting of bitumen diluted with condensate in order to reduce viscosity, rendering it suitable to be transported via a pipeline.  In addition to condensate, other subjects can be used as a dilutant (naptha and synthetic oil)

So what is condensate?

Again as defined by industry consultant Stantec condensate is:

condensate:  A low density mixture of hydrocarbon liquids that are present in raw natural gas produced from many natural gas fields or which condense out of raw gas if the temperature is reduced below the hydrocarbon dew point temperature of the raw gas.

(Another angle the media has ignored about the Northern Gateway project. While it carries diluted bitumen west from Alberta, there is a twin pipeline that carries the condensate east to Alberta.)

What to call the pipelines and the product?

So let’s talk about Northern Gateway and Keystone XL first.   These pipelines are different from the other pipelines that Bloomberg and other media say crisscross North America.

These pipelines will be carrying diluted bitumen, not oil, not crude.

When the public think of oil they think of a lubricant that enhances flow, not a gritty substance that has to be diluted before it can move. Diluted bitumen is a mixture of sand and soil and crude hydrocarbons, with various petrochemicals added to so that that mixture can actually get through the pipelines.

The use of diluted bitumen is raising all kinds of questions.   There were questions at last week’s forum on the effect of the friction from the sand on the stability of the pipelines.  There were questions at the forum about the corrosive nature of the condensate added to the bitumen on the stability of the pipelines.

These questions do not arise when it comes to conventional pipelines which have been built for the past century.

While there have been major oil spills for decades on land and sea, there has never been a major spill  of bitumen in either a pristine watershed or the ocean.  There has never been a major spill involving this mixture of  bitumen and condensate.

Unfortunately, the ultimate answer to the question of how dangerous such as spill could be, will only be found out if there is disaster.

A photo map of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline (in yellow) showing its route close to the Kitimat River, site of the town’s water supply. (Enbridge. Filed with the Joint Review Panel)

The Northern Gateway Pipeline follows the route of the Kitimat River. One of the most frequent questions is what happens to the town’s water supply if the pipeline breaks.

There are thousands of pages on the Joint Review Panel website that show that Enbridge and their consultants have done all kinds of tests, modelling and contingency planning to support their stand the pipelines  and the tankers are as safe as possible. There are documents from environmental groups and others that take the opposite position.

So to maintain its already shaky credibility the media must be accurate.  Accuracy is the best form of neutrality.

So here are my style/copy suggestions:

The media should call what is going into the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines  “diluted bitumen” on first reference and “bitumen”  on subsequent references.

It is NOT accurate to call it “oil.” It is not really accurate to call it “crude.”

It is  crude oil mixed with sand and the condensate chemicals.  To call what will go through the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipeline simply as oil  or crude is leading to gross  misinterpretation and  complete  misunderstanding.

The media should continue to use oil when they are referring to conventional oil flowing through a conventional pipeline.

The public isn’t stupid.  If you ask a Grade Three student in Kitimat about bitumen and condensate you’ll get a pretty good answer. If the media has to produce sidebars,  graphics, interactives, explainer items,  to explain what bitumen is, the sooner the better, so that those taking part in the debate and those reporting it know what they’re talking about.

Tar sands/Oil sands

It is clear that the Canadian  media managers who decided in the mid 2000s that the term “oil sands” was more neutral than “tar sands” blundered.

Yes the environmentalists do use “tar sands” and for some it can be pejorative.  But if you have ever seen the stuff it certainly is tar.

Just as Enbridge uses “oil” in its brochure  on Northern Gateway but says the real thing “bitumen” in meetings, “oil sands” is the preferred energy industry spin term. The use of the term “oil sands” reduces media credibility.

Using “oil sands”  likely amplifies the general belief that the “corporate media” is in the pocket of big business and thus reduces the credibility  of the shrinking numbers of  hardworking reporters left working in the field.

Here crowd sourcing and social media help. There are postings both on Open File and Tyee saying the terms “bitumen sands” or “bitumen-bearing sands” are proper neutral terms. I have used the term “sandy hydrocarbons” in this article, I came across it in a briefing document some while ago and it stuck in my mind (though I can’t remember where I saw it).

It is up to public editors, ombudspersons and style book editors to make the call here for their organizations.   I believe that if the media starts using “bitumen sands” as a technically accurate and neutral term for what is found in northern Alberta, the readers and viewers will  quickly accept it.

The big picture. Why isn’t the environment in the style books?

There is a bigger problem that I discovered when I was looking into this issue.  I checked the Canadian Press Stylebook to see what the editors said about the environment and found nothing. Absolutely nothing.  There are chapters on business news, entertainment, sports, even travel, but nothing on environmental coverage.

A very quick check with copy editor friends seems to have come up with same result across the media. Media stylebooks don’t consider the environment important enough to have a full chapter. (I may have missed some of course, the check was very quick) yet environmental stories are in the news every day.

The Associated Press was founded in 1848, in part so the New York newspapers could cooperate in getting the latest business news from Europe, first from ships and then from the transAtlantic cable.  So business news has been essential to the media  for at least a century and a half.  This, I believe, has created this historical, and probably   unintentional, institutional bias that favours word usage preferred by business.  If  media style books had  environment chapters then the question of  oil sands/tar sands would  have been considered more thoroughly and the “neutrality” of “oil sands” questioned.

Who knows what other environmental issues have been considered only superficially because stylebooks don’t have a chapter on the environment?

Reporters in the field  are often left angry and frustrated by rulings from public editors and ombudspersons who may, despite their efforts, err on the side of  “neutrality” rather than “accuracy” especially in this era of extreme polarization.

Media managers often take the path of least resistance, especially if they are being inundated with complaining e-mails and letters.

A stylebook chapter on the environment should stress accuracy over neutrality. Thus it serves the public.

A rigorous chapter in a media style book on the environment (and also on science which is also lacking) would give guidance to reporters in the field, editors at the desk  and allow managers to tell the complainers with agendas just how the issue has been examined.

This site has always used bitumen to describe what will be in the Northern Gateway Pipeline. From now on it will use bitumen sands in copy, and will use tar sands and oil sands in direct quotes as appropriate. I hope the rest of the media will follow.

Disclosure: I worked for CBC.ca from 1996 until I took early retirement in 2010. I have also freelanced for both Canadian Press and OpenFile.

Glossary of terms used in Stantec environmental report (PDF excerpt from original file)

I intend to write a longer blog on the raging debate over Kai Nagata’s now famous blog about his resignation from CTV News, Why I Quit My Job putting it in a wider and historic perspective.

Throughout my career I’ve known people who have gotten fed up in the way Nagata did and quit. So quitting is nothing new and I will include that in a future blog.

As the backlash against Nagata grows, I think a crucial point has to be made now. As I said in some Facebook and other posts, Nagata’s blog wouldn’t have gone viral if it hadn’t touched a cord with a lot of people, including many of his generation. The blog has an audience around the world that is still growing.

A lot of people are now saying Nagata is a self-indulgent egotist in his mid-20s. Maybe. Elders have attacked restless, ego-driven 20-somethings since the first agricultural settlements in Anatolia seven thousand odd years ago.

Many influential voices in journalism are saying that Nagata should have stayed and fought. One of the latest comments comes from someone highly respected in the broadcast news industry, Howard Bernstein, Quitting Solves Nothing.

Nagata isn’t the only talented young journalist who has quit the business (although it looks like Nagata didn’t hold out as long some people). I know other people in their 20s in Canada, the US and the UK who have also quit but who haven’t voiced their dissatisfaction so eloquently as Nagata. So perhaps quitting does solve the problem of knocking your head against a brick wall. It feels so good when you stop.

The first question that has to be asked is: with jobs in journalism so scarce and competition
for those jobs so fierce that the managers who actually want talent have their pick, then why are so many of the best and the brightest who can quit (not married, no mortgages, not overburdened by student loans) actually quitting?

I have seen Facebook and other postings from very talented journalists and former journalists, I know,  all in their late 20s, early 30s, (and whose work I respect)  all saying Nagata is right.  Most of the criticism appears to becoming from an older age set, from late 30s up until retirement.

The second and more important question is where’s that all important audience that the media managers keep telling us they are trying to serve?

The audience for news among the 20 to 30 demographic is dismal.  Those dismal figures go beyond the supposed disinterest that age group has in news.

This is the demographic that the advertisers supposedly hunger for, supposedly  would kill for: 18 to 34. Where are that audience? Not watching TV news, that’s for certain. Why are the news ads filled with safety bath tabs, reverse mortgages,  non-medical life insurance and topical pain relievers?  The advertisers aren’t that dumb, if the 20 to 30s were watching the news, you’d see a lot more ads than there are now for smart phones and tablets, computers, cars, adventure vacations and eco-tourism trips, starter condos and the furniture for those starter condos. Instead the ad dollars are going to attract poor, aging, arthritic, worried boomers. At the same time, in any TV newsroom, the managers go on and on and on and on about the “younger audience” while producing the kind of news piffle that led Nagata to quit and has driven that audience away.

The 20 to 30s are also not reading newspapers, at least on paper, they browse online at the free news buffet.

It’s not just that they are part of the download generation who expect free stuff. The news media hasn’t produced anything that they think is worth paying for. After all they will pay for music on iTunes and for non-pirated software or anything else they feel has real value. The news media doesn’t produce anything that would attract an 18-34 audience that would mean advertisers would throw money at the media to get their attention.

Among my non-journalist friends in their 20s, one thing is very clear.  They don’t trust the media at all. Any media.  While mostly aging conservatives attack the CBC for its supposed left-wing bias, many of 20 to 34s I talk to lump the CBC together with CTV, Global and Sunmedia as “corporate media.”  I am surprised and disheartened that many young people believe that all the networks, including the CBC, and the major newspapers jump to Stephen Harper’s commands.  (I am sure I can hear Harper saying, “I wish” especially when he is facing Terry Milewski.)

Like the rest of the audience, the 18 to 34 are titillated by Charlie Sheen’s self destruction and they did watch some of the royal tour by William and Catherine.  But they are also concerned about the future of this poor planet and the crisis that climate change will bring and know that the media on whatever platform isn’t doing enough coverage of those stories.

The current News International scandal, the closing of The News of the World  (as well as the likely cynical substitution by the Sun on Sunday) and the continuing revelations about the abuses of the media owned by Rupert Murdoch  (as well as the fact that Conrad Black is going back to jail in the U.S.) will do nothing to improve the trust in the media among younger people.

So it’s not just Kai Nagata that’s quitting the media. It’s the whole damned demographic.

The real story is not Kai Nagata, it’s an entire generation, that all important audience,  disillusioned by the metric driven nonsense that consultants tell managers this generation (that isn’t watching or reading) want.

The journalists in that generation who are quitting and posting on Twitter and in blogs that didn’t get as much notice as Nagata’s  are voicing what the rest aren’t saying (and isn’t that the journalists job?)

For my friends and colleagues who are still in the business and are still fighting from the inside, good for them, they might (might) make a difference (maybe).   However, we must remember the definition of insanity, if you keep doing the same thing over and over and get the same result, and you don’t change  what you are doing and keep doing the same thing, you must be insane.

While there are small victories in those internal fights, the important strategic battles are being won by the beancounters and metric mad managers (who are picking up their huge bonuses on their way out of the office each weekend).

Some of those young people, some still journalism students, and many who quit their jobs without publishing their manifestos,  who I follow on #futureofnews are working to create their own start-ups or exploring new forms of  entrepreneurial journalism or are struggling as two-track freelancers (both working for the current media and working to innovate).

So it is likely that if anything saves journalism. it will come from one of those quitters who are free to create a new model and mode of news delivery.  Maybe that’s why Kai Nagata touched such a raw nerve with the (the cliche) main stream media.

For those who follow  #futureofnews on Twitter, and similar groups, there has been a lot of buzz in the past couple of weeks since the launch  on March 24, of a new (so far Apple only??) app called Color.  It’s called a proximity photo sharing social media app, and allows people close to each  other to share photos.

A combination of photo crowd sourcing and social  networking.

Most of the chatter is among the younger folks who tweet, follow and discuss the future of news, those who are digital natives, the true early adopters,  the indicator of new trends.

So much chatter that I decided to check it out.

While it is available as an Iphone app, the news release says it is available for the Android, but I couldn’t find it in the Android store and the front page of their website says new Android version coming soon.

So without an Android app I could find, I am going to have to go by the buzz.

My first impression at the  Apple App Store was that  was  that creators are  a kind of arrogant bunch.  On the App store and their press releases  it is “Color™  ”  

Really?

 Imagine trademarking the word “color?”  The company is based in Palo Alto, California, so one has to wonder how and why the US Patent and Trademark Office allowed it? I wonder how long that  trademark will last?  The trolls are probably already calling  their lawyers with everyone else not too far  behind.

The news release calls the program

Color™ is a miraculous, free application for iPhones and Android devices that allows people in close proximity to capture and have real-time access to photos, videos, and text simultaneously from multiple smartphones. Color is the best way of sharing an experience without the hassle of passing cameras around, emailing or uploading images and videos online.

And goes on to say

Every photo, video, and text captured by each smartphone through Color is instantly shared with surrounding phones also using Color. There are no attachments, uploading or post-production work required.  For the first time with Multi-lens, you will finally get to see and keep all photos from everyone at a shared moment, including ones that you are actually in.

One tech site has been calling Color™  the “next Twitter.“

So back to the future of news. One has to immediately wonder if this yet another nail in the coffin of professional photography?  And what does this do for copyright? Are copyrighted photographs finally  dead and buried?

Well this his how the process  is explained by readwriteweb.com

What Happens to the Content?
There has been confusion about where the content generated by Color goes and how is it shared. Are the photos taken using Color archived? [ Color chief scientist D. J] Patil  [formerly of Linked In] explained that if you participate in a Color group, that content is not only shared in real-time with others in proximity to you, it also appears in the ‘History’ section of the app as an album. You can share albums, photos and videos using Twitter, Facebook, email or SMS.

So far, Color has no search or archiving mechanism on its website. So the only way that people who weren’t at an event are likely to see albums is if they’re been shared via the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

It’s just been a couple of weeks, so who knows?  And with a program being described as “miraculous” that is a lot to live up to.  The company also has $41 million in venture capital and the app (for now) is free, so where’s the return on the VC investment?

As for photojournalism, let’s wait and see.  

The company had its first real time use at a movie premiere.

The big test comes in a couple of days, when the Daily Telegraph uses it to cover the Royal Wedding. The Daily Telegraph and all the other British papers and wire services will have their best shooters covering the wedding, so the color crowd sourcing photo sharing will be a fascinating addition.

A couple of thoughts:

Color™  has been promoting at events like concerts, premieres, tech conferences (of course) and family events.

It’s not the best PR, but it looks like Color™  will enhance the social coverage of breaking news.

What if  Color™  had been available during the G20 disturbances in Toronto? During the G20  everyone had a camera or smart phone camera.  All those pictures of both the black hooded rioters and the subsequent police misconduct could have been shared with the participants, the onlookers, the journalists and probably the police photo units from multiple angles in real time,

Or the more recent student demonstrations in London?

What happens if there are people with Color™  equipped cameras during the next major disaster or a terrorist attack?  Or folks in Syria and Libya are right now downloading Color? 

There will be a lot of amazing photos produced on the breaking event. The pros, however, will still be needed to take the iconic images (that is, of course, it anyone wants to use and pay for them).

The one group that is going to be hit hard by Color™  are the paparazzi, already suffering and seeing their income drop now that everyone has a camera. Imagine the big star walks down the street and instead of being stalked by one pap, fifty cameras shoot and share the images.

Who knows. Stay tuned.

If this journalist wonders about the state of the profession (which he loves or thinks he does) and how low it has fallen,  he has to wonder how in the world (to be very, very polite) can anyone with an ounce of  intelligence misquote a tweet, my tweet.  It’s only 140 characters!!!!! And any computer can copy and paste, right??? It should be easy to quote a tweet, right? Wrong!

As an  author, I regularly check myself in Google and to my horror I have found that a misquoted tweet from me has gone around the planet,  thanks to AFP, appearing in newspapers in Canada  and the world (thanks AFP).

So back to the beginning, I was following the debate about Elections Canada, which has the misfortune to enforce an antiquated law meant to promote election fairness across this vast country. Elections Canada reminded Canadians that it was illegal to reveal election results from one time zone to another.

Most of the debate on Twitter was about ordinary citizens doing the revelation by tweeting.  But, of course, the news media around the world are not bound by Canada’s rules and can report the results freely.  We’ve seen this on U.S. television for decades. On the last election night, when I was still working  for CBC, one of my jobs was to note sites and blogs that published the election results and write a story (that of course would not have gone up on the CBC election site until the polls closed in BC).  The first, if I remember correctly, for 2008, was a TV station in Atlanta.

So in the midst of the online debate, at 09:28, April 21, I tweeted

The Elections Canada ban is irrelevant. Watch for tweets from @bbcbreaking, @CNNbrk, @reuters, @AP, @BNO #elxn41 #novotetweet

 But when AFP wrote the story, the wire service moved only the first few words, not the complete quote.

The earliest use after my Tweet that I can find is  the Calgary Herald   and this is how AFP reported it:

Author Robin Rowland, tweeted from Kitimat, British Columbia: “The Elections Canada ban is irrelevant. Watch for tweets.”

A couple of days ago, the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, which holds most of the  surviving artifacts of the ill-fated RMS Titanic,  recreated the morse code radio distress messages as “real time” Tweets, exact minute by minute, almost a century later.

The museum’s idea was certainly an imaginative way of using Twitter in 2011.

The event has three lessons  on the future of news.

First, the Titanic recreation mirrors the way news organizations and individuals  today tweet in real time for breaking news.

Second while  a news organization might have had the idea to do something  similar, using the files in its morgue (that is if the beancounters haven’t discarded the archive or donated it for tax reasons to a local library or  university), it was the museum that created this Twitter event,  That shows again that news organizations are in stiff competition, not only with other news media and the bloggers and social media but with any organization with the imagination to  do something about a news pegged historic event.

Third, this was a great news and social media story that the news media didn’t pick up.  The only story I saw was an advancer from CBC.ca that I saw after the fact and so I missed the tweets.  The reaction to those who know about the Tweets and retweeted or commented to #ns_mma or  #Titanic were very engaged in the real time story.  The media missed this one,.

I am one  of those who has always been fascinated by the Titanic story, going back to the first time I saw A Night to Remember on television as a small child (and for some reason, that I was never able to track down, the Titanic story always made my mother very upset. She was born in 1914, two years after the sinking, so there may have been some sort of connection)

One last note, During the CBC lockout, I wrote a blog about the Titanic’s musicians and how badly they were treated by the White Star Line,. See  On Contract on RMS Titanic

UPDATE  Jeff Jarvis has written a broadside about the media and business plans,  Hard Economic lesson for news.  I don’t agree with all of what Jarvis says, it is probable that too much of an emphasis on economics is what got the news media in trouble long before the Internet, But Jarvis does say:

* There is huge growth potential in increasing engagement.
Facebook gets roughly 30 times the engagement of newspaper sites,
Huffington Post’s engagement is also a multiple of newspapers’. If we
are truly community services, then we must rethink our relationship with
the public, becoming more a platform for our communities, and that will
multiply engagement and, with it, audience, traffic, and data. We have
not begun to extend and exploit the full potential of the value news
organizations can have in relationships with their communities: more
people, more value, more engagement equals more value to extract.

The Nova Scotia Museum’s Titanic recreation is one example, as I said, where imagination does create reader/audience engagement.

The news media, however, following tired standard operating procedures and so the news media failed. In this case,. following and reporting on this story would have cost just pennies and increased reader engagement on a news story that has fascinated for 99 years.

RR

It didn’t take long after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down today for a commentator to dis  the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution.

It  was so fast that it is almost as if the Daily Telegraph’s Will Heaven’s declaration that “twitter had nothing to do with the Egyptian revolution” was ready to go with the column all ready written on his hard drive.

Lastly, it was the real human bravery – standing up to hired, camel-riding thugs – and persistence of the protesters that led up to this moment. New Media, if it played a part, was but the smallest of tools in comparison.

Heaven is apparently echoing Malcolm Gladwell’s early contention that social media has little to do with social change.  In his original column in the New Yorker in September 2010, he used the example of the sit in movement in 1960, in Greensboro, when four young African Americans demanded an end to segregation by simply asking for a cup of coffee at Woolworths.  News of the sit-in spread by word of mouth and by the media of the day, newspapers, television and radio. And as Gladwell correctly points out, the Twitter revolution in Iran, was less important than the Western media initially thought and, so far, appears to be a failure.

Galdwell points out the 1989 Romanian revolution took place before the Internet, but fails to note that the Romanian revolution took place at the end  of the collapse of Communism in the rest of  Eastern Europe, spread again by traditional media, word of mouth,  in person or by phone, by radio (including broadcasts from the BBC and Radio Free Europe) newspapers and television.

The point of both writers, who seem have some sort of bee in their bonnets about new media, is that acknowledging the role of social media in the events in Egypt somehow takes away from previous revolutions or attempted revolutions. 

Huh?  

To use an American example, how does the work of Wael Ghonim  and his friends and colleagues in Egypt take anything away from Paul Revere galloping a horse through Massachusetts yelling the “The British are coming. The British are coming?”

It is clear that the young people in Egypt were able to organize themselves through Facebook, Twitter, text messaging. More important they were able to stay organized, even when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet. We will probably hear a lot more in the coming days of how that remarkable scene in Tahrir Square was kept alive through social media.

 If the technology had existed  on April 19, 1775,  Paul Revere, a prominent and well off silver smith, would have had the money to have the latest smart phone and would have used Tweetdeck to send that “The British are coming” to update his status on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In. That status update would have immediately retweeted and the status updates shared faster than the time it actually took Revere to saddle his horse.

By coincidence I have been reading  Stacy Schiff’s biography of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.  When Julius Caesar and his legions landed in Alexandria in October 48 BCE, the people of the city rioted.  The reasons were complex, resistance against an invader mixed up with the supporters of the various factions, supporting Cleopatra or her brother Ptolemy XIII.

According to Schiff, at the height  of the crisis between December 48 BCE and Caesar’s final victory in March 47,  Rome heard nothing from Caesar.  It is not clear from the book why or how there was no communication, since even at that time,  large sail-driven freighters regularly carried grain from Egypt,then the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, to Rome.  One other reason for unrest that year was that the Nile flood was disasterously low and the harvest had failed.  That meant few, if any, shipments of grain to Rome. As well the December-March period is not the best for sailing between Alexandria and Rome.  But some merchant ships probably reached Rome. Any news they carried would have been rumours. It is likely that since in the beginning, things weren’t going well, Caesar was besieged in the royal palace by the citizens of Alexandria, that he couldn’t (or didn’t want to) get the news out. Compare that with getting the news out of Egypt today, even when Mubarak tried to cut off communications.

Even a century ago, with the steamship and the telegraph, that news would have gotten out.  Even if a city was under siege, there would still be a way for a journalist or diplomat to get to a telegraph or cable head. Accounts of nineteenth century correspondents are full of  harrowing tales of going hundreds of kilometres to get that telegraph point.

On  Sunday night, half a world away from Tahrir Square,  the Superbowl was in its final moments, the Pittsburgh Steelers  were desperately trying to gain the lead from the Green Bay Packers, when  the power in Kitimat failed.  No lights, no TV.   Just a few years ago, for the people  of Kitimat, it would have meant  scrambling to find a battery powered radio (or as one guy did, going out in the snow to turn on his car radio).  As for me, I just launched Tweetdeck on my Android and within a minute or so there were a dozen tweets giving the final score Packers 31, Steelers 25.

The power was out for three hours, on for an hour and half, then out again for almost seven hours overnight.

The game over, the house dark, (luckily dinner was ready),  Tweetdeck was active on my Android, so updates from Tahrir Square came up every few minutes.  That is the difference, that is key. In the past,  from the time of  Caesar to the American Revolution, you would have had to wait until a sail-driven ship arrived with the news.  After the telegraph, most people would have had to wait until the morning newspaper came out.  Beginning in the late 1920s and even  today, news would come through the radio (television is irrelevant during a power failure).  Even the Internet was not a factor,  even with two laptops with battery power, the router is powered by a plug in the wall.

Now with a smart phone, I could still keep up with  events around the world.  So someone tweets from Tahrir Square, someone else retweets it, a news organization picks up that tweet, and sitting in a darkened town thousands of kilometres away, I get that news.

I was tweeting the blackout, which resulted, the next morning, my former colleagues at CBC Radio calling me  in my dark, cold (no heat) house for an update that they could air to CBC listeners.

Technology is a tool, and a tool can be used by anyone. So the critics who say an authoritarian government can try to use social  media for propaganda and the secret police can use it to track down dissidents are correct. A  desperate government, like Egypt, can try to cut off the Internet and world telecommunications, but that will likely fail.  In today’s wired world, with a myriad of sources and providers, and millions of tech savvy users, it is less likely that all communications will be entirely shut down. In the old movies, you see someone climbing at telegraph pole to cut the only line to the outside world.  Today there are not only cell phones, but good old land lines that were used for good old dial up  connections.  Then there are satellite phones and who knows what’s coming next.

US President Barack Obama just said the Egyptian revolution happened at “blinding speed.”  That’s what social media does, it accelerates and amplifies events.  So Malcolm Gladwell, yes, there have been revolutions and protests since the dawn of civilization, but social media is the game changer,  it’s the difference between earphones from an MP3 players and a giant amplifier that fills a stadium  or city square with sound.   To use an old tech analogy,  the trumpet sounds, and thanks to Twitter and Facebook that fanfare is head around the world in real  time.

UPDATE
There has been a growing debate on the role of social media and what happened in Egypt. 
Skeptics vs what they call cyber utopnians.
Jay Rosen of   New York University, a participant in the debate, has created  a curated summary. with lots of links

The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” article
 

A reader of the part of one of this blog, might ask, “Did you really spend  thirty years in new media?”

The answer is a yes and I was into computers long before that.

In 1968, as a teenage page at the Toronto Public Library system, I was part of a summer experiment in the multimedia of the day, as libraries dipped their toes into the water of the new era beyond books.  We made a student science fiction film and as part of the project we filmed 1968-epoch computers being installed at the Ontario Science Centre, then under construction.

As an editorial assistant at CBC Radio News  1977-79 I had used a very primitive computer system  assigned to its then internal wire service.  By primitive,  its memory  was the equivalent of an amoeba compared to humans.  You had to type a story, perfectly, on a green CRT screen, because there was no memory to save your work. When the story was ready, you pushed Enter and it was dumped to punch tape, then sent over a regular teletype circuit.

I arrived in London in December of  1980, born of British parents in a then British colony, and thus a dual citizen, following the track of  other  generations of young Canadians. London was the place to advance a career.  London did that for me, creating a media geek rather than a foreign correspondent. So I began my 30 years in “new media.” 

Another aim in going to London was to do research for a couple of planned books.

Over Christmas I worked in a crazy pub, the Duke of Kendal, and then in January 1981, after registering as a researcher at the British Library, I landed a job in the  mail room of French Travel Service, an independent rail tour service affiliated with SNCF, offering package and independent rail tours to France.  The job paid the rent and let me do my research at the British Library.   There was one unexpected bonus.   FTS was one of the British  travel companies that was experimenting with the UK developed Prestel videotex system. Although I had nothing to do with the Prestel reservation system, it fascinated me and I was looking over peoples’ shoulders as they operated.

Lesson 1: IT should always be the servant,  never the master. Know your hardware and  software

The computer chap at FTS (there was no IT in 1981) was a tall man with a black beard, in an area, London Victoria, of  mostly clean shaven business types.  The computer reservation system was a main frame in a clean room on one side of the small office.  The man appeared to be  incredibly arrogant and he began every conversation  I overheard with the managers and their secretaries, all shorter in stature,  (he never lowered himself to speak to me).  Towering over them, he would say: “You don’t know much about computers, but…..”  And he would get his way.

In retrospect, it was then I probably decided that I had to know more about computers.  Perhaps because I was an avid reader of science fiction and guessing that computers would be a big part of the future, a year later, back in Toronto,  I would take a basic computer course at (programming  punch cards) and with that basic understanding of all hardware and software I was using.  It is not just that if you know the basics of  the system you are using, you will not be intimidated by the  IT personnel, you will know enough, as some one who is working in the media, to be tweak the system and be creative.

After a couple of months, and wrapping up the research at the British Library, I answered an ad for  someone with computer experience (rare in 1981) at Universal News Services, the UK public relations wire (later part of the PR Newswire empire) UNS  was also experimenting with the British videotex system, Prestel.   Rather than sending out the news releases by teletype, the releases would be easily available for newspapers editors outside of  London on a TV screen, information retrieved from a central mainframe computer.

It wasn’t exactly a leap into the future. Given the strength of the National Graphical Association (one of the unions later broken by Rupert Murdoch) I would  type the stories on a typewriter, and the an NGA member would enter it into the computer just as they would send out a news release by teletype.

Lesson 2  What goes around comes around I  There ain’t no such thing as  a free lunch

UNS promised the newspapers a “free”service, meaning they weren’t charging for what today would be called page views. (Some Prestel service providers did charge and soon found they had few clients– an indication of the shape of things to come).   British Telecom was still charging for both the phone lines that went to the Prestel mainframe and a usage metre. Newspaper clients didn’t understand  the difference between what today would be called bandwidth and the actual content and so UNS constantly got letters of complaints from newspaper editor who did not understand that difference, just like someone today, perhaps a teenager,  with a mobile phone in 2011 who spends time with a free app and doesn’t know about bandwidth charges.

Lesson 3  What goes around comes around II. Life in 140 characters.

There wasn’t much you could say with the limited Prestel system, but one venerable news organization did adjust very well,  creating short snippets of news. Which is why I blogged in  March 2009, that the Economist invented the tweet without knowing it. 

After a few months at UNS, I was invited to lunch at the Canadian High Commission in London, which was recruiting Brits working in Prestel to come to Canada and work on the competing, Canadian developed Telidon system.   After a little wine, some good food and persuasion from the diplomatic corps, I decided to head home. A few months later I was back in Toronto,.

My first job was with the Southam Infomart project. Southam was then the largest Canadian newspaper chain. How Southam ran Infomart was probably the first example of how a large media corporation  can completely screw up a project. (Knight Ridder was running its own experiment in the US and their project was shut down about the same and I have no knowledge how KR ran their videotex project. However, from the few online comments I have seen, it appears KR did not make the horrendous mistakes Southam did)

I was there just a few months, before there were a series of layoffs, the project was failing and  failing quickly.  After a couple of months of  unemployment I was hired by the CBC’s parallel teletext experiment Project Iris.

Lesson 4  Engineers know nothing about content. Neither do the sales force.

Although Southam was a content company, a  newspaper chain with a storied and respected history in Canada, Southam abandoned management of their first new media experiment to the techies, in this case a group of  former IBM middle managers (who kept telling us, the content staff, “This is what we did at IBM.”) The other key figures were the sales staff, who  somehow convinced Sears to put its soon to be released 1982  catalogue on  the system, despite the fact the graphics were primitive. So the majority of the company effort was an early experiment in e-commerce.  Only there was no audience for the service, there were no sets in homes. Bell was planning to offer the service but even then we asked  who would take it (although we were optimistic it would take off).  Even then I had to wonder, what were they thinking?  At least in the UK the Economist  created readable content for Prestel.  The news content at Infomart didn’t even come from Southam, they picked up a raw feed from the Broadcast News wire, without stripping the headers and with no index so a viewer could find stories.

As for CBC Project Iris, it too was managed by engineers, since the funding came from an agreement between the Department of Communications and CBC Engineering headquarters in Montreal.  Unlike Southam,  Mother Corp  did not cede editorial content control to the engineers, so there was a  small, but very real newsroom repurposing CBC content for the service, which did have an audience, 200 test homes.  Later we also had an American audience, since CBS was also testing teletext and one of the test sites was WIVB in Buffalo, with 50 test homes, which meant each audience (if it wanted) could see each other’s feed. So the CBC project continued long after the Southam project died, until it was killed by Brian Mulroney’s budget cuts.

So thirty years later, what goes around, comes around.   Media and content organizations are still  often under the thumb of engineering departments, but now they are outside vendors and engineers, whether it  is Google’s arcane search algorithms,  page or layout design created for the web or tablets or phones by software engineers with no background whatsoever in content.

Then there is Steve Jobs, until recently the CEO, but still the godfather, of Apple, giving desperate media companies offers they cannot refuse, demanding that they charge for content  on the Ipad so Apple can get its  30 per cent cut,  content that Apple says it can censor at will.  Of course, there were dozens of tablets at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, but the question is how many of those tablets will survive the evolutionary competition and whether or not one tablet succeeds by giving the media companies a way of saying no to the godfather from Apple.

Lesson 5.   Apps, brought to you buy the butterfly effect.

In physics,  chaos theory is summed up by this phrase. “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” (or if a butterfly flaps its wings in one area, it triggers a hurricane across the world) In the days of videotex, there were no homes with sets in North America.  So the companies experimenting with the technology had to make some money. So they came up with the  idea of putting videotex sets in malls as sort of electronic guidebooks.   One of the best commercial clients for videotex in the early days were restaurants. The content could be produced easily, menus were mostly text and restaurant pages did not really need the photographic quality graphics that made the Sears catalogue project a failure. So the idea was to have a guide to the restaurants in a large mall or perhaps even  neighbourhood.

How do you make it easy for people to use the system? The engineers came up with a brilliant solution.  Touch screens.

The problem was that in the period 1980-1984 touch screens in malls  and offices were a total, utter complete and costly failure. Why? Because  idiots, whether they were teenagers or adults who hadn’t grown up, were constantly stubbing lit cigarettes onto the touch sensitive part  of the screen.  A single cigarette could destroy a computer system costing thousands of dollars.  The videotex booths disappeared from malls almost as quickly as they had appeared.

So think about this.  Over the past 30 years, smoking has been banned indoors, in malls, and in offices,  because of the proven  connection between cancer and second hand smoke.  With little historical memory of the videotex failure, it is perhaps a lucky coincidence that second generation, PC based touch screens began to appear in government and corporate offices at about the same time as smoking bans.   The success of large touch screen systems allowed the development of apps on smaller smart phones and tablets

Smoking bans likely not only made the air cleaner and saved lives from second hand smoke, the bans also brought you the apps you finger on your Android phone or your iPad tablet.

One last note, today there are apps for your smart phone using the GPS interface that will let you find restaurants nearby and the  menus, so the concept was right, but 30 years too early.

So when you’re developing a technological innovation, remember success or failure may depend on  something that has absolutely nothing to do with how fast your hardware is or how good your code is. It may depend on something like a ,bunch of  executives lying at a congressional hearing in Washington about the addictive properties of nicotine.

In North America, most of the videotex and teletext projects in both the United States and Canada died between the fall of 1984 and the spring of 1985. The official reason was budget cuts, whether the project was in the public sector or the private sector.  The main reason, of course, was that the growth of  the personal computer made the videotex system obsolete and the growth of multichannel cable television was quickly becoming highly profitable, especially due to carriage fees on cable channels, and teletext was just not  worth developing.

Lesson 6.  Experts are often blind to the world around them.

Over the past 30 years, companies and governments have often been blind sided by an  “unexpected” technological development.  The latest example, of course, is Wikileaks, which, in retrospect, could have been foreseen as a by product of putting all records in electronic form.

The videotex and teletext systems began development in the UK (Prestel)  and Canada (Telidon) in the mid 1970s.   

The statement attributed  to Thomas J Watson of  IBM, that the world would only need five computers is an urban myth. In the 1950s and 1960s, IBM  was concentrating on large expensive mainframe machines to be used by  universities and corporations.  It was clear the a machine that would rent for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month (in 1953 dollars) would be totally inaccessible to the general public.

Even by the 1960s, that there was a growing public interest in computers and there were visionaries who began looking for a way to involve the public, create a market,  give access  to information and even make a profit.  The solution was videotex.  The computer keyboard had already been developed.  Add some memory, make the keyboard a little smarter, connect it to a TV set (already in every home) and then by phone line to (usually IBM for videotex and DEC for teletext) mainframe computer, and lo and behold, the public would be introduced to the world of personal computing.

So when I first became interested in videotex in London in the winter of 1981, and when I returned to Canada in the fall of 1981, I was told by the companies I worked for on both sides of the Atlantic and by other people in the industry at meetings, that all the experts believed it would take 20 years of slow but steady improvement of the keyboard-phoneline-mainframe system before there was a viable personal computer system

In 20 -20 hindsight, Monday  morning quarterbacking, the failure of videotex was certain. Steve Wozniak had introduced the first Apple II personal computer in June 1977 followed by the Apple II Plus in June 1979.  I had actually considered buying an Apple II Plus in the that summer of 1979 before I headed for London.(it was too expensive especially for an impoverished freelancer)  As I was working in videotex, IBM, the maker of the mainframes used by some of the videotex system, was already working on the development of the personal computer. In August 1981, as I resigned from UNS and went for a two week vacation in Greece, IBM launched the first personal computer.  There were competitors, the Atari and Commodore systems and the Tandy TRS-80, the “Trash 80″  which many techy journalist of the era fell in love with and CP/M machines like the Osborne I bought in 1983, while I was still working at CBC Project Iris. The introduction of the IBM PC XT in March 1983 ( I saw it at a trade show in Toronto that month) with its amazing 10 megabyte internal hard drive, which was the first truly consumer friendly PC, meant videotex was doomed.

As I said, what goes around comes around. It’s thirty years later and what, apart from the tablet, was hot at the Consumer Electronics Show this year?

 One big item was a real old fashioned idea, obsolete for  more than a quarter of a century, connecting your television set to a computer system, and giving it a keyboard.  Of course, it is a high definition set and one of  the reasons to connect to the Internet is to download movies, but the system also allows the user to have complete access to the World Wide Web.  If  one of those experts from 1981 had been caught in a time warp and suddenly reappeared in a living room  in Christmas 2011, where the family gathers around to watch a downloaded movie on an HD set and check their e-mail at the same time, that expert, with no knowledge of what had happened in the previous three decades, would have thought their prophecy had proven true. (And given that the telecoms want to charge more for all that bandwidth to download  a movie, that too might bring back memories for our time traveller).

After Project Iris was killed by  Brian Mulroney,  I kept my connection with developing tech with my new Osborne.  I wrote my first book, King of the Mob, on that four inch screen.  In October 1988, I joined CTV News as a writer on the CTV National News.

Lesson 7.  Beware of software executives bearing gifts

At CTV at that time, 1988 to 1994, the TV news writing software was awkward and primitive, compared to the expanding and consumer friendly software creating for the growing PC and Mac markets.  A company named Columbine had created a mainframe based software for tracking commercial sales and placement.  The company threw in the news writing software as an added inducement for bean counting corporate executives to buy the commercials tracking system.  While Columbine may have had some expertise in tracking commercials,  the news writing software was a mash up.

Add on software, is, in most cases, a very bad deal.

There is exactly the same situation with Novell Groupwise, which is certainly not the best e-mail client in the world, but because it’s added to the Novell’s networking software, which seems to work well, many companies force their employees to use Groupwise, even though there are much better products on the market.  Why would any company in its right mind, spend all that extra money licencing Groupwise per workstation in addition to all the money they pay for the Novell’s networking software, when there are better products available such as Thunderbird?  Not to mention, Gmail. During the CBC lockout, we created a duplicate of the CBC Groupwise system using Gmail, at no cost  (and it worked better)

Lesson  8.   Managers should always consult that people who actually use the hardware or software.

I can’t count the number of times that media managers, based on talking to consultants, fast talking software sales people and sometimes even IT people, impose software and/or hardware on staff without asking them to see if it actually works for what the company wants to do with it.   One of the few times that staff were consulted was at CTV News, when management brought us in to see what they thought was a great piece of TV news writing software, to replace the much hated Columbine.   It was a good piece of software, but as the sales people enthusiastically ran through its features, my techy alarm bells started ringing, and so I began asking questions, about how the lineup editor and the producer would communicate if one was at the main desk and one in the control room and how the writers would work with the lineup editor.   What management didn’t realize was until I the user and techy guy, began asking the questions was that the vendor was presenting software that was really good for a small local station, (the vendor’s client base in the US) but totally inadequate for a network news operation.  They didn’t buy that software.

In the fall of 1993, I began co-writing the first book on Researching on the Internet. It was a rather exciting time to be writing that kind  of book, just as  Mosaic and later Netscape,  opened up the World Wide Web.  It was also the time that both PC and Mac were taking off, with hundreds of small  new companies in fierce competition with each other, just to survive.

Lesson 9.   Software vendors will always promise you the moon, the stars, and a galaxy, far, far away.

Software sales people haven’t changed in a quarter of a century.   They promised you the moon with a 10 megabyte hard drive PC in 1983 and now in 2011,  with mobile phones on the genius level, compared to the computers that  actually sent NASA to the moon, they promise you the stars.  Whether it’s 1983 or 2011, the software guy who comes to your office or greets you at a trade show  (even these days, it is still usually a guy) is wearing a company polo shirt and nicely faded blue jeans, sounds more like a  California surfer dude than a geek, has a big smile, is so good looking that he’s may be also registered with Central Casting and so really loves his tech that he really believes that his product is the greatest thing since the invention of  the silicon chip and COBOL (look it up on Wikipedia).

Caveat emptor.   That’s Latin for “let the buyer beware,” which  leaves one wondering, given that the Romans were such good engineers, if there were  tech trade shows in the Coliseum when the gladiators had a day off.

The surfer dude salesman’s supervisor also wears the company polo shirt but sports dress pants, is in his late 30s, maybe wears glasses, sounds more like a professor and is geekier than his sales staff. He was probably the good looking kid at a trade show long, long ago and far, far, away and stopped going to the gym when he was promoted or married or both.  His role, of course, is like that boss in an auto dealership,  with the sales manager offering you “the deal”  the sales person can’t.   If you were wearing a media badge, that usually meant the software was free.   For  anyone else,   the manager has visions of the ten thousand workstation contract.  The pitch is always the same, whether it is 1983 with the first PC, the multitude of tablets at the CES 2011 and the new, new thing at whatever trade show is hot in 2021, our software is the greatest thing since the creation of the universe.  After a while, to  the jaded veteran, it all sounds exactly the same.

There is one lesson that holds true, for hardware or software,  in 1983, in 2011 or 2021. Never buy Version 1.0. Never!  (At least, in the beginning,  in 1983, Version 1.0 was usually stable, if incomplete with minimal features. These days with the rush to market and pressure for profit, Version 1.0 is actually closer to Beta  0.56 Build 1066 ).

Lesson 10.   One of the great failures of the mainstream media was its lousy coverage of the software industry

Again, with 20-20 hindsight, it is easy to see that an early indication of the coming failure of the mainstream media was not in its adoption or failure to adopt new technological innovations, but the media’s failure to cover the software industry as it was then covering the police beat, city hall, provincial or state and federal governments.

When I was asked to write Researching on the Internet, I had already been following tech for a decade. I knew everything was changing at high speed.  The solution was not to create a software manual, impossible in any case, because unlike Version x.x of software, the web wasn’t static. My idea for book (especially since it was written in a time of transition) was to give the reader some basic principles so that they could work with the web as long as possible.  The idea was right, because Researching on the Internet stayed in print and selling (and making me a profit, the book “earned out.” long after the actual  software had been replaced by new versions)

So with that in mind, when I approached software companies, my questions were similar to  those I   often asked as a reporter, to police, to city hall, to the big industries in town and in the locker room.  Software companies traditionally held their developments secret so as not to reveal them to competitors, which is perfectly understandable.   The problem was that most  software companies were used to uncritical coverage as they announced their latest products.  They were not expecting even the mildest kind of  critical question even a local sports reporter whose was perhaps too close to the home team might have  asked a hockey coach about his plans (or lack of them) for the coming season.

I remember meeting with an executive of one then prominent software company, who turned pale at some of my pretty innocuous questions, and quickly palmed me off to a PR person, who simply repeated how good their products were and showed me to the door. (It later turned out that the company’s financial position was not as good as it claimed and it was later sold).

One area that was generally ignored by the mainstream and the computer press  (the latter dependent on advertising from software companies) was  softcide. Softcide was a common practice during the boom of the 1990s where one company with deeper pockets, bought a company with a better product, then killed that product, so that the next so-called “upgrade” resulted in angry customers being offered the inferior product, while support for the better  and now orphaned software was abandoned. The business press was even worse, usually caring only about the stock price and not the actual management of these companies.

It was only when some of those outraged customers,  computer writers, former employees and sometimes current and anonymous employees  who were branching out on their own began blogging with inside scoops on the software industry did the mainstream media catch  up (and even today the MSM is too often dependent on those bloggers.)

In 1994, I returned to CBC where I would work as a TV lineup editor, then  web writer and producer and later photo editor.  I watched as online news started as a hole in the wall closet office experiment, then a small team working and changing on the go until, like all other online news operations,  it was finally folded into the corporate machine

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Lesson 11.  Team should mean team

Team has become a cliched buzzword.   Software companies and your ISP sign off their messages  with the X Team.  So spammers take advantage of the team cliche.  (I have received auto spam from the “robinrowland.com team,” not bad for a one man operation.)  At the same time, television news, using the same  cliched buzzword, promise “full team coverage,” as does every other TV station in town. Not to  mention the newspapers.

One has to wonder why the executives, whether in software or the media, are so blinkered that they actually believe that the public pays attention to this constantly repeated nonsense.
A good newsroom has always been a team, going back 150 odd years or more to the first major newspapers. Software with its often millions of lines of code is also a team effort.

In many cases, bean-counting management, applying cost benefit analysis, have undermined team efforts in both industries, with staff cuts, ignoring morale problems and by creating bureaucratic headaches. while creating a message track of a team effort.

Like all cliches, like all message tracks, the team analogy is based on truth.  In the 30 years that I have worked in new or online media, the system worked best when the IT staff were present in the actual newsroom, rather than on another floor or even another city.  In a couple of cases, it was one single person who was  working with us in developing projects.  In another case,  the IT staff,  programmers, network administers and hardware geeks were crammed into a small office with the news staff, because there was no room  for them anywhere else.

In all three cases, the majority of the IT staff saw what we were trying to accomplish and worked their butts  off to help us to make sure their system they had created did what was supposed to, especially in cases where there problems getting stories up on the web during breaking news and the miracle workers created instant work around.

Unfortunately, when the IT people eventually had their own office, they soon lost interest in what the newsroom needed and their aim was to fullfil the IT department’s priorities and the demands of IT culture.   It got  even worse when bean-counting management consolidated IT network and technical support in call centre in a city hundreds of miles away with people who never actually had any concept of what the media staff were trying to do.  (At least the call centre was in Canada, not Bangalore or Kuala Lumpur).

IT culture at its best can  be creative, at its worst it is a bureaucratic nightmare. Unless there is a symbiotic relationship with the actual productive staff, when the IT culture is separate from the newsroom culture, the system breaks down.  It’s as if the journalists are the leopards and the IT staff the lions, the journalists are the Orcas and the IT staff the sharks, similar creature in an  similar environment, but with different and often competing goals.

The worst case of IT disconnect came in 2001.  At one major news organization, the IT staff had scheduled a network upgrade for September 13,  2001.  The idiots were so blind that the network upgrade went ahead regardless of the events  two days earlier on September 11 and the entire system slowed to a crawl. IT honchos were rather put out at the escalating calls of complaint, starting with front line news staff and escalating to senior news management, when the network upgrade didn’t work properly

The journalism programs at Columbia (Tow Center for Digital Journalism ) and New York University are currently working on a programs/curriculum that will create “journo-programmers” 

(See also Nieman Labs  Boston Hack Day Challenge and  Educating the journo-programmer. )

I was one of the first journo-programmers myself .  After I returned to Canada from London, I took a programming course at York University. It being 1981. I programed using punch cards. The course was invaluable and because I always had a basic understanding of how computers worked, I was always able to adapt to new innovations.

There’s one problem, however, with what Columbia and NYU  are attempting. There is no mirror image  curriculum where the IT people are trained as programmer-journos  (or programmer-doctors, programmer-cops or programmer-millwrights etc. ). While it is a good that a young journo-programmer knows, the basics of code and/or how to run a server, it is not going to do that young man or woman  much  good when they come up against corporate IT and their priorities.  The journo-programmer may know what he/she is talking about but if history is any guide, in most cases, they will be ignored by IT.

Many corporate IT people still believe that anyone who calls to report a problem is the cliched dummy who puts their coffee mug in the CD drive holder and knows nothing about the system. I say many because I and my geek colleagues always made it a point to find out who were the better and more responsive IT people and when possible went directly to them.

We always joked that best training in dealing with corporate  IT was watching M*A*S*H.  Unfortunately, in too many cases, these better IT people soon left either  because  media IT salaries were low compared to other areas, because other companies recognized their talent and hired them away,  they left because they couldn’t stand the stultifying bureaucracy or were fired  because their bosses didn’t want employees who were smarter than they were.
 I have always thought that at any company, no matter what the product or service, all IT staff should be made, as a condition of employment, to start at the bottom, at least for a month and work in their company’s main product or service line.  However, that dream for the working staff (and perhaps a nightmare for the IT staff) will likely never happen.

Throughout my career, and this is a good reason to have journo-programmers, if we could avoid working with the IT people on the other floor, we did our own work arounds.

Of course, if the news staff and the IT were truly a team,  then there wouldn’t be these kinds of problems.

It soon became apparent at those news organizations that were early on the web that they had to quickly expand their staff beyond the pioneer geeks. 

 That’s when the in the broom closet IT staff created the first template systems, which then grew into in house and later outside vendor supplied Content Management Systems.   Those Content Management Systems meant a whole generation of  journalists, working on the web, never actually had to understand the nuts and bolts of how the system worked. They simply showed up for work and wrote their copy or uploaded their photos and video in a system that too them was not too different than the typewriter of an earlier generation.  (That is if the system actually worked.  Again senior management was too often seduced by the promises from software vendors, bought expensive CMS systems that were not suitable for the news, TV  or magazine media)

Lesson  12.  Be aware of the innovation cycle and be prepared for it.

As everyone who works in the media knows, the business is mired in a deep crisis and that crisis is getting worse as new innovations seem to appear almost every day, with corporate news executives flopping around like fish out of water in their efforts to catch up.
 After about a decade of relative stability from the late 1990s to the late 2000s after the introduction and then the maturity of  the world wide web, in the past few years, came Facebook, then Twitter, then the smart phone, then Foursquare, then the iPad and now Quora.
 
This is reflected on the Twitter feed #futureofnews.  I quickly noticed something about those posting on #futureofnews (I admit that this is unscientific and anecdotal, but perhaps someone looking for a PhD dissertation can quantify it). 

There is, as far as I can tell, an age related reverse bell curve, on those who are posting, either on #futureofnews or #journalism and discussing the survival of the news media.  The majority of posters are either in their 50s and 60s or in their 20s,  students and young journos.

 There are people I met at the Computer Assisted Reporting Conferences in the heady days of the early 1990s, or who appeared on the early CAR and Online news lists like Dan Gillmor, Steve  Yelvington, Danny Sullivan, Steve Outing,  gurus from then and now like Don Tapscott and  other slightly later pioneers like Jim Brady (@jimbradysp) and Jeff Jarvis On the rising side of the reverse bell curve are the younger side,  people in their 20s,  like Adam Westbrook and Cody Brown.

Why is that?  News management these days might like to believe that anyone over 40 is obsolete as far new media technological innovation is concerned.

Not so. My contemporaries, call us the over the hill gang or the geeks from Cocoon, if you wish, were part of a innovation cycle, where we had to adapt to something new every day.  While there are people in  their 30s and 40s on #futureofnews, they are usually not the most frequent posters. Most of those people came into journalism in the relatively stable and mature period of the world wide web from approximately 1996 to 2006.

It is the generation from 18 to 28 that face the greatest challenges. It is a time of economic crisis for  all of society and even more so for the news media, at a time  of  technological innovation that is proceeding at warp speed.  (After all the previous generation, my generation, faced innovation at a time of prosperity and apart from a couple of downturns, economic stability)

That is why the new generation journalists or journalists-to-be are most frequent posters  on #futureofnews and that is where the most productive feedback and mentoring occurs between the previous generation that faced an innovation cycle and the current  generation.

I am not optimistic that the current (mostly aging) corporate news management can adapt to both the economic downturn, the increasing pace of technological innovation, and for the west, especially the United States, too long comfortable at the top of the heap,  growing international competition.

If only a few executives come to realize that we are in a period of evolving media (as I discussed in part one  of this blog) some of the better media will likely survive.

As for the long term survival of  traditional journalism that tells the world both what it wants to know and also what it needs to know,  it is likely that, if anyone saves the craft and the profession, it will be someone who right now is 19 or 21 or even 28, who will discover the key to future success.

If they want help of an old veteran, I’ll be glad, grasshopper, to tell them more tall tales of punch cards and four inch screens and hand coding html news stories.   The world is different, but as I have said what goes around comes around, so I write  in the hope that the Tao of News will give them some ideas on how to be flexible and adaptable in the few of the latest new, new thing,  how to deal with bean-counting managers and corporate IT call centres, so they can do what’s really important, cover the news.