I recently finished reading Girls lean back everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the assault on genius, which is a history of American literary and artistic censorship by a lawyer who argued some of the seminal cases before the supreme court, Edward de Grazia. It’s hard to imagine today how delicately sex had to be treated in early 20th century American writing, lest the author and publisher land before a court. This book documents the long legal shift to the freedom that authors enjoy today, where every Borders has a well-stocked “erotica” section. And it really was a long shift — the protagonists in this story fought over decades, one incremental advance at a time, and knew they were doing so. That is, for me, the biggest lesson.

In 1921 James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the US, and its publisher criminally prosecuted, for writing that now seems tame. There aren’t even any dirty words in the passage that caused the most uproar; it’s just a girl leaning back to watch the fireworks, leaning back to show more and more of her stockings and garters and underthings to a man she fancies, and it’s poetic as hell.

A few decades later Allen Ginsburg’s Howl landed the poet before a judge. Books by D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and — my personal favorite — Henry Miller were also banned as obscene at one point or another. All of these works are free today, but it took decades of legal battles.

At first, there were many subjects that simply could not be talked about at all. One of the very first novels to deal frankly with lesbianism, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, contained no sex at all other than the sentence “and that night, they were not divided” but was ruled obscene because it depicted “inverts” in a positive light. But even heterosexual sex was illegal to depict, if the writing was sufficiently explicit.

All of this gradually changed. By the mid 50s, American judges had ruled that discussion of sex in itself was not obscene. In 1964, de Grazia defended Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the Supreme Court ruled that any work “not totally without social value” could not be held obscene. This decision effectively freed the written word entirely, and in subsequent decades, plays and photographs and films would be freed to.

But it took 80 years.

And that’s what struck me most: deep social change takes a long time. The book is a legal history, so it is full of the arcana of American obscenity legislation and long-forgotten legal tactics. But these excruciating details show that the players took a deliberately long view in many cases. Their game was played out over decades. Also, the conflict wasn’t anything so simple as authors versus cops; this is not an underdogs vs. establishment story. Judges played a pivotal role in the freeing of artistic speech, particularly supreme court Justice Brennan who patiently transformed the law, piece by piece as the appropriate cases arose, over almost 20 years. The opposing villains, if they can be called that, included conservative politicians, state prosecutors, and citizen pressure groups.

I think of this now as I ask the question: how do societies change?

Even my most progressive Chinese friends tell me: we don’t want a revolution. China has had too many disastrous revolutions already. Partially, this attitude may be the result of state intimidation. But maybe it also reflects the reality that China is already slowly liberalizing in very many ways. I see a similar slow history in the gradual legalization of gay marriage in America and other countries. Some freedoms are found in revolutions. Others unfold much more slowly. I wish I knew how to say, in any specific case, whether earthquake or erosion is the stronger force.

Writing style needs to change to take advantage of the hyperlink. That’s the message I want to inject into the discussion about whether deep, long-form writing can survive online — especially long-form journalism. Many people assert that articles need to be shorter online than they are in print, and David Carr even famously argues that the internet is making us stupid by destroying our attention span.

But I don’t think the web is shallow at all. I think it’s the deepest medium ever invented, with incredible potential for telling complex, irreducible stories — or at least it can be, if you don’t treat it like print.

Here’s how a long story works in print:

The yellow bits are the unique information that can only be found on that page. The other bits of writing are there to provide the context needed to make sense of the whole , or to get the reader up to speed if they don’t know the backstory. In print, this is absolutely necessary, because a print story is a self-contained object. There is no where else the reader can go to look up an unfamiliar term, to check out a sub-plot, or to investigate the history. That is why we have context paragraphs. That is why we have little definitions of terms that might be unfamiliar to some, and explanations of who a source is and why we should believe them (“David Carr, the curmudgeonly New York Times columnist who has been covering media since 2002.”)

Online is different. We can move the context, verification, and background out of the main story, paring the piece down to a thing of streamlined beauty — but all the depth is still there, via links, for anyone who wants it.

When I try to understand how the internet changes communication, one of the points I keep coming back to is the personal nature of online media: it’s now possible to present a different experience to every single reader (user? viewer?) Choosing whether or not to follow a link is a simple way for a reader to tailor the presentation to what they already know, and to indulge their own curiosity. And links let you skip the boring bits.

We’re used thinking of “an article” as a self-contained unit of story. It’s not. The component parts of a story might even be written at different times, published on different sites, or created by different authors.

And now our diagram looks like the web actually looks, lots of pages from different people about different aspects of a very complex world. That is the medium we write in, not some simulation of a stack of paper, no matter what your word processor shows you. Of course, the web also allows fully interactive stories, but it’s often forgotten that hypertext itself is an interactive medium — or it can be, when we put the right links in the right places. People have been experimenting with non-linear stories for decades, but given that a generation or two has now grown up with hypertext, it’s probably time to let our storytelling style grow up too.

Online, short doesn’t necessarily mean shallow. We’re just measuring “depth” wrong when we only look at a single article. That’s not how people actually consume the web, and we shouldn’t force them to.

On Friday night I went down to Victoria Park in Hong Kong and found 150,000 people holding candles in the dark. It was June 4th, the anniversary of the state-sponsored killings of  hundreds of democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen square.

I could not understand the speeches over the loud-speakers during the two hour presentation. I have few close Chinese friends, and I have never managed to have a candid conversation about what happened in 1989. Many of the people in Victoria park were not even born when the Chinese military opened fire on its own people. I know the history, from documentaries and books, but I don’t know why it should matter so much on a balmy Friday night, 21 years later.

But a hundred thousand people weeping over candles says it still means something.

I began to ask people why they were there.

“We came to learn about the history,”  three young girls told me in halting English. They were secondary school students, and their teacher had encouraged them to come.

That history is not taught in mainland schools, and all mention of what happened in June 1989 is elaborately censored online — including web pages, online forums, IM conversations, and personal emails. Last year a former Chinese solider was arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night for publishing an open letter calling for a review of the incident.

Hong Kong operates under a different constitution, and you can talk about Tiananmen here — most of the time. Last week a group of activists tried to display a statue called the “Goddess of Democracy” in front of the Times Square mall, a sort of faux Statue of Liberty that mimics a famous paper-mache figure erected by the original protesters in Tiananman square in 1989. Thirteen people were arrested and the statue was confiscated.

“It wasn’t hurting anyone,” said a man in his late  20s, who would only identify himself as “a worker.” “It’s not right for them to take it away.”

He said this was his first June 4th vigil, as it was for many others I spoke to. In fact it’s estimated that this was the biggest turnout ever, exceeding even the very first vigil in 1990, when Hong Kong citizens openly feared what the 1997 handover to China might mean for their freedoms.

This demonstration would be impossible in Beijing. Officially, the students who were calling for “democracy” remain dishonored; the Communist Party of China insists to this day that the military violence was necessary to maintain stability of the country. That’s what they say when they can be forced to talk about it at all — for the “June fourth incident,” as it’s been blandly retitled, is taboo. The June fourth incident does not exist.

There was no coverage of the Hong Kong demonstration in the Chinese media; nothing on Xinhua, nothing in China Daily.

And I think that’s why people keep coming. Occasionally someone I talked to used  words like “freedom” and “democracy,” but when I pressed them it always came down to specifics. The statue was taken away. The Chinese government won’t talk about what happened. There was no grand ideology uniting the people in Victoria Park, no deep ideals other than this: we want to talk about it, and you will not let us.

When it comes down to it, the 1989 protestors didn’t know what they were doing. They wanted change, and they boldly called out the crimes and repression of their government during the horrors of the cultural revolution and after. But they also wanted to force students to attend demonstrations, according to later interviews. The protest movement was hardly democratic or even organized; it had no coherent philosophy and was riddled with internal power struggles. It’s easy to make the students and workers of 1989 into heroes or martyrs, but the truth is messier.

“I’m willing to keep an open mind,” one Hong Kong medical student told me. “Maybe there was no way to finish the affair without blood. But many mainland students don’t fully understand what happened that day. They need to know so they can make a careful judgement.”

Maybe that’s the sort of diplomatic language that will be necessary for reconciliation. But the history isn’t so bloodless. People died. Lots of them. People lost limbs and family and friends, and then lost friends again when everyone connected to the protests was quietly rounded up, silenced, or exiled. A series of laminated yellow posters recalled the victims, with the name, photograph and whatever is known of the story of each one. We know that some people were shot or crushed by tanks; others simply disappeared that night.

Does it help to imagine a woman sitting alone in her Beijing apartment, grieving silently for a long-lost lover? She can’t even write an email to a friend to say how she feels (try; it will bounce.) There will be no commiseration. It is not yet allowed.

And here, at last, I began to see what was denied to me as an outsider. I am not Chinese. I do not have family on the mainland — family who disappeared 21 years ago, and family who live still with the threat of a government that cannot talk about what it did. For me Tiananmen is abstract; I can make it about ideals like “freedom of speech” or “human rights” but I have no faces to attach to the violence. It was not my statue they took away.

“For me it’s a memorial,” said a middle aged man there with his wife. He wore glasses and a white polo shirt, with a camera slung around his neck. He had a slight pot belly. He said he had two children.  ”I have to keep coming every year until the Chinese government admits what they did, and that it was wrong,” he said.

“I may not live to see that day.”

There was a dream that the internet would mean the end of the media gatekeeper; that anyone could get their message out without having to get the attention and approval of the media powers that be. This turns out to be not quite the case.

I took data from the Project form Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2010 report to create this chart showing the market share of the top 20 news web sites. In theory, the internet busts media monopolies by allowing anyone to publish for free. And there’s no doubt it’s been disruptive. But according to data from Nielsen, the top 7% of 4600 news and information sites get 80% of traffic (from American viewers.) We see a big concentration of power, as the rapid falloff in the chart above shows, and much of it still belongs to “old media.”

Organizations such as CNN, Fox, the New York Times and USA Today rank in the top 20. But so do new media giants AOL, Google News, The Huffington Post and Yahoo.com, which is the biggest news site of all.

(It’s also interesting to note that many of the top 20 new media news sites produce little or none of their own news; in the extreme case Google News produces no stories at all of its own. While some see aggregation as parasitic, I think it’s obvious that it delivers a tremendously valuable service to readers.)

For better or worse, the ability to publish anything nearly for free hasn’t meant the end of big media monopolies. It’s simply shifted the landscape and the power balance.

The limiting factor to getting your message out is no longer having access to an expensive printing press or a TV station. It’s attention: how many minutes of time can you get from how many people? In this game, brand still matters hugely. There are only so many URLs a person can remember, only so many sites they can check in a day.

You have an audience, or you don’t. Mindshare is now the barrier to entry in the media world. Perhaps it always was, though I daresay it was easier to get viewers to check out your new television network when there were only 13 channels. Online, the number of channels is infinite for all intents and purposes; a single person will never exhaust them all.

Which is not to say that the internet has changed nothing. We have seen over and over that bottom-up effects can propel something to mass attention, with no big company behind them. This is often called “going viral,” but that’s not quite a broad enough description of the effect. In many cases, what happens is that something becomes just popular enough to get picked up by mainstream media, who then propel it into the spotlight.

And what this PEJ top 20 list doesn’t take into account is that people now get online news from lots and lots of sources other than news websites.

Facebook is now the most widely used news reading program. It’s also now the #1 site on the internet. Should it top this chart of news sources? Meanwhile, Twitter has become a primary news source for very many people. And then there are mobile news apps, some of which belong to old media news organizations and some of which don’t. The richness of news distribution systems today is well captured in another PEJ report on the “participatory news consumer.”

So has the internet made it easier to get non-mainstream messages out? I think the answer can only be yes. But don’t expect that anyone will be reading your alternative narratives just because you’ve put them online. Your best bet to to be heard still lies with a small number of very large companies. And although the internet per se is relatively uncensored in many countries, commercial gatekeepers like Apple and Facebook own important dedicated channels, and both of them engage in censorship (1, 2).

The village of Kangzhuang, in Henan Province, China, was built in 2006 next to the Tianrui cement factory (in background, above), to house villagers relocated after the government bought their land. A huge grey cloud of dust hangs permanently over the village. The villagers told me that the factory is shut down for a day or two whenever air quality authorities come to visit, then started up again as soon as they leave.

I visited Kangzhuang on another story. But eating dinner that night, covered in a film of dust, I suggested to a Chinese colleague that this issue of cheated environmental regulations deserved to be investigated further.

“That’s not news,” she said. “That happens all over China, every day.”

And she’s right: it’s not news. All chronic problems fade from attention, and old news won’t interest (most) readers, or sell papers. But we’re leaving the paper era, and this changes things. In the web era, documenting old, marginal, or incomplete stories is much more valuable — and much more affordable — than it used to be.

There has been much discussion of how web writing style must differ from paper writing style, but the difference in medium also changes what stories can and should be covered. Despite its physicality, paper is a deeply transient medium. Yesterday’s newspaper lines birdcages, but yesterday’s web stories will be showing up on Google five years from now. An editor selecting stories needs to be thinking about not only tomorrow’s page views but next year’s as well, and also, crucially, how the story will function in combination with stories from other outlets. There are close ties here to the concept of stock and flow in journalism, and the new-media notions of topic pages and context.

I ran into this paper-web cultural divide discussing a pitch for a story about the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq war. I had done a little bit of new reporting on the topic, but mostly I just wanted to write a thorough summary of the various estimates and a careful, clear analysis of how reliable each might be. An editor friend said that, since the studies I would be referencing were several years old, this wasn’t news and would be hard to sell to the outlet I was proposing; I said that I was planning to write an authoratative article on a topic of great international concern for a general audience, a piece which doesn’t really exist yet. I felt that this would be exactly the sort of public service that journalism is supposed to be, and further, we’d have a good shot at getting in the top five results on Google.

We clearly had somewhat different conceptions of what stories count as publishable journalism, which seemed to be derived from our focus on different media.

Not only is the web a permanent medium, it’s a distributed, accessible-from-anywhere medium (unless your government doesn’t want you to know about certain things, but there are ways around that.) A single report of environmental cheating at a cement factory is not going to change anything for the people who will get sick from cement dust, but hundreds of such reports all over China might. If editors, used to selling papers, think of stories as throwaway consumables rather than careful additions to a permanent store, they miss opportunities for collective action.

But how to fund such long-term, speculative projects? After all, every story costs money to produce. I think part of the answer lies in another medium-driven difference: the web is more amenable to journalism of different levels of quality and completeness. The New York Times aims to be “the paper of record,” which means it hopes always to tell the full story, and to never get a fact wrong. On the web, this is ridiculously inefficient. As a social medium, the web draws power from collaboration and conversation — say, between different papers in different places — and that process is severely hindered if only “finished” work makes it online.

Yes, there will always be a need for the authoritative voice and the carefully edited, sub-edited, copy-edited and fact-checked article. But what about all that other good stuff that journalists produce in the course of their work? What about the juicy trimmings that had to be cut from the main story, the tantalizing leads that the reporter hasn’t had time to follow up, and the small incidents that have meaning only in aggregate? The web demands that we put more online than we would publish on paper, and provides a place for information of all grades. In this new medium, amateur journalists (such as bloggers and thoughtful commenters) are often much more adept at creating value from information by-products than their professional peers. News organizations will have to find forms for publishing unpolished information, such as the beat blog.

The report of environmental malfeasance in Kangzhuang is not yet a story. It hasn’t been checked against other sources, we haven’t heard from the local government ministry about whether they did a proper environmental study prior to putting 2,300 people next to a factory, and anyway the journalists who visited the town (myself among them) are currently busy writing up an entirely different story. But this tidbit deserves to be aired in a public place, so that others can build on it in the future. This is a valuable public service that could be provided for low cost, a service that is possible only on the web. Will an industry trained in the paper era see this possibility?

UPDATE: Debrouwere continues the conversation with a response to the key points here, in the comments to his original post.

Dutch journalist/coder Stijn Debrouwere has written a very thorough post describing the ways in which standard tags, like the ones on this blog or on Flickr, fall short when applied to news articles. There are lots of things we might like to know about a story, such as where and when it happened and who was involved. This additional information, sort of like the index to a book, is known as “metadata”, and there is within the online journalism community a great call for its use, including by Debrouwere:

Each story could function as part of a web of knowledge around a certain topic, but it doesn’t.

So here’s a well-intentioned idea you’ve heard before: journalists should start tagging. Jay Rosen insists that “Getting disciplined and strategic about tagging” may be one way professional journalism separates itself from the flood of cheap content online.” Tags can show how a news article relates to broader themes and topics. Just the ticket.

News metadata is a major topic, and many people have speculated deeply about the value of creating news metadata at the time of reporting, such as the ever-sarcastic Xark and the thoughtful Martin Belam who writes about why “linked data” is good for journalism. But I’m going to respond to Debrouwere because I read him today, because he has lovely diagrams that explain his good ideas, and because, in criticizing “tags” as a form of metadata, I think he misses some very important points.

And he’s not alone. My sense is that many of the coder-journalists of today have not learned from the mistakes of generations of technically-minded people who wished to talk about the world in more precise ways.

Moving forward from simple tagging, Debrouwere imagines more sophisticated annotation schemes that start to pick up on what the tags actually mean. For starters, the tags could be drawn from separate “vocabularies.” Does a tag refer to a person, or a place, or perhaps an event? Debrouwere uses the following picture, which I’m going to borrow here because it explains the idea so nicely:

But, he says, we can get even more sophisticated. What did the story actually say? If it mentioned a person, what did it say about them? Was it an interview? A profile? Did it criticize them? Here’s the diagram he draws: Continue Reading »

Dowser.org is a new online news site that aims to cover solutions to social problems. It’s journalism, but focussed on what we are learning about what can be done.

A media theorist might say this is reporting from a “solution” frame. Whatever you call it, I support the idea.

They are actively soliciting feedback on their idea. This was mine:

Great idea.

I think solid information on who is solving which problems is really important. I have three broad suggestions.

1) Please consider including a set of “topic pages” as well as running news stories. Social problems are often complex and contextual, and we badly need continuously-updated primer articles that bring the newly curious up to speed on specific problems.

2) If you guys have any money at all, you should solicit contributions from freelance journalists for coverage and analysis of interesting global projects.

3) consider publishing in more than one language, or allowing hybrid computer-human translations using, e.g. the free World Wide Lexicon system.

I’m a freelance journalist and computer scientist living in Hong Kong, who specializes in applications of technology to social problems. @jonathanstray on twitter.

Would love to keep in touch.

There’s a great deal more I could say on why I made these specific recommendations. For now, I’ll leave it to the hyperlinks. For additional ideas on how to offer good translations of every page for near-free, see also Yeeyan.com, a successful volunteer news translation community with 100,000 users.

(hat tip: @NiemanLab for bringing them to my attention.)

The comments on the news are more revealing of a culture than the news itself. Journalism too often has a commitment to a sort of sanitized neutrality, and certainly tries for clarity, smoothing away complex disagreements. That has its uses, but the comments are a much messier, more divided, more personal look at a culture. They have the texture of life at street level.

First, America. On January 30 New York Times ran an article headlined “U.S. Suspends Haitian Airlift in Cost Dispute” which described how the US had stopped medical evacuations to Miami because of a state vs. federal arguments over who would pay for their medical care. The comments reveal a deeply divided country:

The richest country in the world bickering about who is going to pay before it treats patients who need critical care from the poorest country in the Western hemisphere! We Americans should be very proud of ourselves!

Another wave of third world, uneducated people of an alien culture is about to hit our shores, helped this time by the Obama administration’s desire to show compassion. Unfortunately, the tax-paying citizens of this country will have to pay, in more ways than one.

Meanwhile, Nigerians are talking about the Underwear Bomber. Global Voices has helpfully collected some of the blogger reactions. For America, the story was about fear and terrorism and security. For Nigeria, it was about reputation and identity:

Be honest, when you heard a Nigerian man tried to commit a terrorist act in America, how many of you immediately thought ‘Please don’t let him be [insert your ethnic group]?

There’s an Igbo proverb that says, “If one finger touches palm oil, it spreads to all the other fingers.” This is indicative of how Nigerians the world over felt when they heard the news of a young man who attempted to detonate a bomb on U.S. soil in the name of Al Qaeda. Many of us worried that the actions of this one finger would spread to cover the entire 150 million of us.

How does disowning him help Nigerians understand what role extreme Islamic ideology played in causing him to attempt detonating an explosive device on board a US-bound airliner? How does it help Nigerians understand the complex interplay of religious faith, access to extremist religious groups and ideological brainwashing?

Meanwile, the ever-wonderful ChinaSMACK took a break from pop-culture scandal (on the site right now: Hong Kong Girl Shows Off C Cup Breasts To Ex-Boyfriend) to translate online Chinese reactions to news of US sales of arms to Taiwan. And the Chinese, often portrayed as uniformly nationalist, are just as diverse and divided as any other country:

We don’t need to fear America selling arms to Taiwan, as soon as a war started these advanced weapons would be quickly consumed by our lower-quality but numerous weapons and many soldiers.

I only know that without America, the whole world would be chaotic.

As long as America exists, the world cannot be peaceful.

What I want to know is, where are the foreign voices in these conversations? Right now each culture is talking about the others like they’re not in the room. And they’re right. Our global conversation is fragmented and unmapped. It’s not a small world after all.

My iPhone seemed to work better on ice, so I spent the last two hours alternating between chilling it in the freezer and pressing buttons. The WiFi kept cutting out, and I read somewhere that one of the failure modes for the iPhone radio was thermal. Amazingly enough, it worked, and the WiFi would run for maybe three minutes after ten minutes of chilling. I desperately needed it to work, because my 3G service was down until I could install Ultrasn0w, the iPhone unlocking software. Which can only be installed by a program called Cydia, which only downloads new software over a WiFi network. I have to use unlocking software in the first place because US model iPhones are keyed to work only with AT&T, which doesn’t exist in Hong Kong. I successfully unlocked my phone months ago, and everything was working fine until I upgraded the firmware, which I did in the hopes of fixing the WiFi which failed last week.

If you didn’t follow that, consider yourself fortunate. You’ve never needed to wonder about such things.

It gets better. When I reset my phone it lost the WiFi password to my home network. I couldn’t find it written down. I couldn’t remember the password to log into my router to look it up. The internet told me how to reset the router at the hardware level, but to reconfigure the wireless I’d need to connect my laptop to it with a cable. Which I didn’t have. Luckily, I eventually remembered the router password.

I started drinking.

Password problem solved, every ten minutes I’d open the freezer door, reset the WiFi on my phone, wait for Cydia to download its package list, then tell it to download the mere 50kb of Ultrasn0w and hope to hell the radio didn’t blink out in the middle of the tiny transfer. Now I know exactly how many bars I get in the back of the freezer.

After eight or nine tries, I opened the freezer door to find my phone on the 3G network. Success!

Actually, it was way more involved than this. I left out a bunch of steps, all the things I tried that didn’t work. And of course the firmware upgrade did not fix the WiFi, so this experiment put me right back were I started and wasted six hours of my life and two tumblers of rather nice whiskey. At least I didn’t have to go out of my way to retrieve the ice.

I found this awesome little video exploring the idea of plugging in someone else’s brain for a while to see how they see the world.

I sort of feel like this is what I’m doing when I hang out with certain people, or when I read certain authors or watch certain films. It’s always exhilarating to step inside someone else’s exquisitely constructed universe. Communication excites me.

This is from TV Ontario’s YouTube channel — that would be in Canada, folks, and the purveyor of my childhood television. My mom used to direct shows for them. Glad to see they’re still doing the occasional interesting thing.