And now you too can waste your time in learning! Here are five videos about journalism, blogging, tweeting, collecting and sharing information, and how stuff is generally changing. In no particular order:

1. “The Arab World on the Front Edge of Media”, by Moeed Ahmad, head of New Media for Al Jazeera

Figuring out which tweets from the Iranian protests are true. Tracking falling bombs in Gaza using SMS and open-source mapping mash-ups. Releasing war footage under Creative Commons licenses. Moeed has a seriously interesting job, and speaks with great eloquence about how his small new media team fits into a huge global news organization.

2. Clay Shirky and Alex Jones discuss the catastrophe of lost newspapers

There is a strand of thought that says democracy is screwed because the newspapers are going away. Basically, newspapers are responsible for a huge fraction of the of the world’s factual news reporting, and their business model just exploded. Paper is going away, but online advertising is only about 10% as lucrative because there’s much, much supply. Shirky does an amazing job explaining the economics of what’s happening, and why he thinks it’s a problem. You can find similar content in his famous March 2009 article, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” if you don’t want to sit through the hour. Either way, Clay is not an optimist.

3. Jay Rosen speaking… somewhat… slowly… about how bloggers gain trust online.

The talk is called “If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn’t. So Let’s Get a Clue” (text version.) He begins with a nifty introduction about the relationship between the “closed” newsrooms of traditional journalism and “open” journalism of bloggers. They’re not the same thing, he says. They produce different products. And then much about “blogging ethics”, which he defines as the practices through which bloggers gain the trust of their audience. In the spirit of the link economy, here I can do no better than blockquote a recent post from Blackfive. Rosen would have wanted it that way.

Here are his 10 key ideas for social media:

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

4. Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for Journalism

This presentation is awfully pretty. And it needs to be, because he’s speaking about a lot of numbers. He assumes that the traditional city newspaper collapses. Can an ecosystem of blogs plus a “New News Organization” sustain a profitable business? He runs the numbers, and releases the spreadsheets openly at newsinnovation.com. Bottom line: an online ad-supported news ecosystem does seem financially viable, employing about the same number of journalistst. It just won’t look anything like a traditional newspaper, and will operate on 10%-15% of current newspaper revenues (and employ many fewer people).

5. The Yes Men throw a pretend press conference, dressed as the American Chamber of Commerce

I adore The Yes Men for keepin’ it real. Here they pretend to be the US Chamber of Commerce, reversing their position on global warming (saying that Chamber now thinks it’s real.) A guy from the real COC bursts in half way through, and hilarity ensues. The best part is, Fox News ran the story on air, before quickly correcting it.

I’d like to thank The Yes Men for reminding us that mainstream journalism lacks appreciation for the absurd. Online media doesn’t. That would certainly explain the success of Gawker, anyway.

I had intended to do this myself. But I’ve discovered that I’m back in graduate school full time, so I’m looking for a collaborating programmer who wants to do the majority of the coding. If you have some programming skill and you want to get into web apps, drop me a line!

But mostly, you’ll do this because you think that the world needs better multi-lingual communication. In particular, you want people to be able to keep track of news from places with oppressive internet censorship regimes (Iran, China, some Middle East), and you want the people who live there to be able to have public, real-time conversations with the rest of the world.

(Getting an uncensored internet connection in these places, one that can actually reach Twitter, is a different problem. But believe me, that problem has an active community around it.)

Spaz is written in Adobe Air and will need to call the Google Translate APIs.

It is absolutely true that journalism is much more than random tweeting or blogging. I have been particularly inspired by the notion that “journalism is a discipline of verification,” and a tweet or a blog post neither requires nor endures the fact-checking and truthfulness standards that we expect of our more traditional news media. I also agree that search engines are simply not a substitute for being there. Someone must be a witness. Someone has to feed their experience into the maw of the internet at some point.

However, when Cohen says “the mainstream media — expelled, imprisoned, vilified — is missed” he is implicitly arguing that only the mainstream media can produce good journalism.  Traditionally, “journalist” was  a distinct, easily defined class: a journalist was someone who worked for a news organization. There weren’t many such organizations, because a distribution monopoly is an expensive thing. All this has changed with the advent of nearly free and truly democratic information distribution, and we are seeing a rapid erosion of the the distinction between professional and amateur or “citizen” journalists. The result is confusion, uncertainty and fear — especially on the part of those who have staked their careers or their fortunes on the clarity of this distinction.

But I see a big difference between journalists and journalism, and this is where Cohen and I part ways.

In my view the failure of journalism in Iran was not the failure of the mainstream media to hold their ground (or their funding, or their audiences) but rather the failure of the journalism profession to educate the public about what exactly it does, and how to do it. When Cohen asks questions such as

But who is there to investigate these deaths — or allegations of wholesale rape of hundreds of arrested men and women — and so shed light?

my answer is, the Iranians, of course!

Naturally, a young activist-turned-reporter does not have the experience or connections of an old-school foreign correspondent. But such a person is there, and they care enormously. What they lack is guidance. What is and is not journalism, exactly? What are the expected standards and daily, on-the-ground procedures of verification? Where can someone turn to for advice on covering the struggles they are immersed in? And what, actually, differentiates the New York Times from a blogger? We need clear answers, because the newspapers are no longer the only ones declaiming the news.

Perhaps the mainstream media couldn’t be in Iran, but they could have been mentoring and collaborating from afar, and yes, publishing the journalism of non-career journalists. And such a project needs to begin long before times of crisis, in every region, so that those who are there are ready.

If “citizen journalism” has so far been somewhat underwhelming, it is because we have not taught our citizens to be journalists.

A new study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society opens with the following narrative:

Iran, a country rich in history, culture, and education, supports a large online community, including perhaps the fourth largest ‘blogosphere’ in the world (or the second, third or seventh). Because the Iranian press is under the control of religious conservatives who sit above elected officials in Iran’s peculiar hybrid political system, and because that conservative control is used to silence dissent, Iranians who think differently go online to express their views. Here, the inherent freedom of the Internet (anonymity, decentralized control, etc.) allows the true minds of Iran’s youth, journalists, and intellectuals to be known publicly. In their blogs and online chats we see their rejection of the regime, its brutal paternalistic control, its enforcement of archaic sexual mores, its corruption and incompetence, and of the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic itself. The government, worried, has cracked down. Bloggers have been sent to jail, websites are being blocked, and user bandwidth is constricted, but the Internet continues to be one of the best hopes for homegrown democratic change in autocratic Iran. If you read Iranian blogs, it is clear that many Iranians want drastic social and political change.

The authors of the paper then do the homework to ask if this story is true. And it is true– but so is a story about social and religious conservatives using the internet, or a story about the many sites devoted to Persian poetry and literature. Part of the confusion here is that we have, in the West, our own story about what it means to be liberal, freedom-loving, democratic, as contrasted with closed, repressive, backwards. Our ideas about the social and political struggles of Iranians do not map neatly to reality.

John Kelly and Bruce Etling actually did the work, looking at the whole blogosphere and not just the celebrated examples. The web was crawled; all Persian-language blogs were identified and their entries were captured over a period of seven months, and network analysis was performed on links both between the blogs and outside into the greater internet. Simultaneously, Persian speakers read each site and reported on the main topic of discussion, whether or not the poster wrote anonymously, the age of the author if it could be determined, and other variables. After all this,

If the Iranian blogosphere is a place where women speak out for their rights, young people criticize the moral police, journalists fight against censorship, reformists press for change, and dissidents press for revolution, it is also a place where the Supreme Leader is praised, the Holocaust denied, the Islamic Revolution defended, Hezbollah celebrated, Islamist student groups mobilized, and pro-establishment leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, reach out to their very real constituencies within the Iranian public. Furthermore, a great deal of the discourse in the Iranian blogosphere has little to do with an outside observer’s preconceived list of key issues.

There are many surprises here. Conservatives bloggers are more likely to write anonymously than reformists, and are younger on average. Religion is widely discussed, but mostly as religion and not politics. Gas subsidies are at least as hot a topic as proper women’s dress. And something like 20% of all blogs are concerned with poetry.

The paper authors also cross-reference their map to data from the OpenNet Initiative, which systematically tracks government censorship of web sites. Yes, there is state censorship, yes, bloggers have been arrested,

and yet Iran is not a garden-variety authoritarian state. Power is not perfectly concentrated, but exists in a number of often competing institutions. Elections are contested and have real
consequences, even if who is allowed to compete is tightly controlled. Despite conservative control of the press, criticism of government policies and officials is widespread, often from competing members of the establishment itself as well as what opposition is tolerated. Amid the repression in Iran, there is a great deal of contentious public discourse about politics, at least in the Iranian blogosphere.

This study is a shining example of actually, you know, going out into the world and looking. Iran and Islam and Freedom are topics both loaded and ambiguous, the stuff of talk-show hosts dreams. It’s easy and fun to argue endlessly about what turns out to be your own preconceptions, your own way of seeing the world and not theirs. But this is has little to do with reality, and I’m terribly, terribly that glad someone decided to peek outside the castle walls.

If, thanks to widespread satellite television and the occasional short-lived newspaper, conservative clerics lack a total monopoly on one-to-many mass media, even less do political reformists and modern-minded youth have a stranglehold on the Iranian blogosphere. This is why the story about Iranian online discourse usually reported in the West is so inadequate. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the larger network of bloggers is its sheer diversity. As in the American blogosphere, the cartoonishly simple portrayal of political attitudes and human characters found in mass media fade in the face of the complex variety of real human voices. Our imagined enemies are not always the cardboard villains we assume them to be, and our imagined allies are not always the freedom-loving liberals we read about. There are clerics who favor relations with the West, and secularists who favor the enrichment of uranium. The Iranian blogosphere features thousands of politically attentive individuals, commenting on every imaginable issue, with a breadth of perspectives

For more on this startlingly informative study, see here.