Praise for Mediactive “Dan Gillmor has thought more deeply, more usefully, and over a longer period of time about the next stages of media evolution than just about anyone else. In Mediactive, he puts the results of his ideas and experiments together in a guide full of practical tips and longer-term inspirations for everyone affected by rapid changes in the news ecology. This book is a very worthy successor to his influential We the Media.” --James Fallows, Atlantic Magazine, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square and Breaking the News “Dan’s book helps us understand when the news we read is reliable and trustworthy, and how to determine when what we’re reading is intended to deceive. A trustworthy press is required for the survival of a democracy, and we really need this book right now.” --Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist “A master-class in media-literacy for the 21st century, operating on all scales from the tiniest details of navigating wiki software all the way up to sensible and smart suggestions for reforming law and policy to make the news better and fairer. Gillmor’s a reporter’s reporter for the information age, Mediactive made me want to stand up and salute.” --Cory Doctorow, co-editor/owner, Boing Boing; author of For the Win “As the lines between professional and citizen journalists continue to blur, Mediactive provides a useful roadmap to help us become savvier consumers and creators alike.” -- Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution and co-founder of America Online “It’s all true – at least to someone. And that’s the problem in a hypermediated world where everyone and anyone can represent his own reality. Gillmor attacks the problem of representation and reality head on, demanding we become media-active users of our emerging media, instead ii of passive consumers. If this book doesn’t get you out of Facebook and back on the real Internet, nothing will.” --Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age “An important book showing people how to swim rather than drown in today’s torrent of information. Dan Gillmor lives on the front line of digital information – there's no-one better to help us understand the risks and opportunities or help us ask the right questions.” --Richard Sambrook, Global Vice Chairman and Chief Content Officer at Edelman, and former BBC Director of Global News “With the future of journalism and democracy in peril, Mediactive comes along with sage and practical advice at a crucial time. Dan Gillmor, pioneering journalist and teacher of journalists, offers a practical guide to citizens who now need to become active producers as well as critical consumers of media. Read this book right away, buy one for a friend and another one for a student, and then put Gillmor’s advice into action.” --Howard Rheingold, author of the Smart Mobs and other books about our digital future “Dan Gillmor’s first book, We the Media, was an indispensible guide to the rise of the “former audience” — that is, to the vital role that consumers of media were beginning to play in creating and distributing media. Now, in Mediactive, Gillmor builds on his earlier work by explaining clearly and concisely how to achieve media literacy in the digital age. Through common-sense guidelines and well-chosen examples, Gillmor shows how anyone can navigate the half-truths, exaggerations and outright falsehoods that permeate today’s media environment and ferret out what is true and important. As Gillmor writes, ‘When we have unlimited sources of information, and when so much of what comes at us is questionable, our lives get more challenging. They also get more interesting.’” --Dan Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, former Boston Phoenix media critic, and author of the Media Nation blog at www.dankennedy.net Mediactive Mediactive By Dan Gillmor Copyright 2010 Dan Gillmor ISBN 978-0-9846336-0-9 Mediactive by Dan Gillmor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/3.0/us/ -- or contact Creative Commons at 171 Second St, Suite 300; San Francisco, CA 94105 USA (phone +1-415-369-8480). Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://mediactive.com/cc. Contents Foreword ............................................................................................................ ix Chapter 1 Darwin’s Media .............................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 Becoming an Active User: Principles ....................................... 15 Chapter 3 Tools and Techniques for the Mediactive Consumer ............ 31 Chapter 4 Journalism’s Evolving Ecosystem ............................................. 51 Chapter 5 Principles of Trustworthy Media Creation .............................. 63 Chapter 6 Tools and Tactics for Trusted Creators ................................... 77 Chapter 7 Owning Your Online Presence ................................................. 95 Chapter 8 Entrepreneurs Will Save Journalism, and You Could Be One of Them ............................................................................. 109 Chapter 9 Laws and Norms ....................................................................... 125 Chapter 10 Teaching and Learning Mediactivity ....................................... 145 Chapter 11 A Path to Tomorrow ................................................................ 159 Epilogue, and Thanks ................................................................................... 177 Acknowledgments ......................................................................................... 181 Foreword By Clay Shirky As print and broadcast give way to the Digital Age, the media are in upheaval. The changes have sparked fascination, confusion and peril—especially when it comes to news, which is so essential in democracies. We need a media environment that serves us, both as individuals and as a society. Yet turmoil in journalism threatens our ability oversee the people who act on our behalf. Media participation is critical to avoiding this threat: not just to keep politicians in check but also to balance the power of the whole crazy range of people we rely on—police and doctors and energy executives and pharmaceutical researchers and bankers, and all the other people who make decisions that affect us without requiring or allowing our direct input. Solid journalism helps keep those people working on our behalf (and it keeps us honest, when we work on behalf of others). The turmoil is inspiring large numbers of ideas and experiments from people who know the risks and want to help create a valuable media in this new century. The experiments fascinate me as a writer on media and the Internet, and they fascinate my students at New York University and Harvard. They differ in small and large ways, but most have at least one thing in common: They imagine trying to fix the supply of news, either by vetting or filtering sources in such a way as to preserve the old, relatively passive grazing habits of 20th century news consumers. Dan Gillmor, as you will see in this book, takes a very different approach. Dan doesn’t make upgrading the sources, or the gatekeepers, or the filters—or any other “them” in the media ecosystem—his only or even primary goal. Dan wants to upgrade us, so we can do our own part. He wants us to encourage media to supply better information by helping us learn to demand better information. And he wants us to participate as creators. Dan’s proposal for making news useful to us, as citizens and consumers, is the most ambitious one going. He wants us to become mediactive—active users of media—to help us live up to the ideal of literacy. Literacy, in any medium, means not just knowing how to read x that medium, but also how to create in it, and to understand the difference between good and bad uses. Dan’s conception here is extraordinarily broad. Although he is a journalist, and is concerned with journalism and society, he conceives of media and our engagement with it across a broad range of behaviors, attitudes and tools we need to adopt. He offers a framework, first, for thinking of ourselves as active consumers, with the necessary virtues of skepticism and patience with complex stories, and with very practical guidelines for making judgments about the trustworthiness of stories and sources. His framework then extends to us as producers, offering a simple but informative guide to many of the ways that we can now make our own media and put it out in public, advising each of us to participate on the network and also to have a home base online that we control. He offers advice on making the media we create visible to the people we want to see it (today, visible means findable). And in furthering his commitment to the “active” part of being mediactive, he offers suggestions on how each of us can be a trustworthy source of information, beyond simply vetting others for trustworthiness. Dan’s framework includes not just individual action but group action. As more and more of our information and opinions about the world are filtered through social networks, the book sets out ideas for being a good community participant, passing along not just links but context to one another—being as good at sharing and interpreting media for one another as we are for ourselves. And it takes group action to the highest order of aggregation: what kind of society we want to be, given our access to these new tools and to their attendant freedoms. Dan has an extraordinary resume. He was the technology and business columnist for Silicon Valley’s hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, both before and during the Internet boom. He was an early blogger, and one of the first to blog as part of his newspapering duties. He wrote a book on citizen media when almost no one had heard of the idea. He’s run an academic program dedicated to treating journalism as an engaged and entrepreneurial field open to innovation, rather than a craft simply practiced by existing institutions.