Wikipedia Foretold
I was revisiting Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” the other night, a text credited with having presaged the Web. Reading it, I realized that Bush had also foreseen Wikipedia: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”
Best of all, Bush provides an excellent description of the role of tomorrow’s journalist: “There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”
Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. That’s a mission statement I can believe in.
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Excellent catch!
The news bit applies to what Wikinews aspires to.
David Gerard
21 Mar 09 at 9:50 am
Public record is most usually found in documents. So maybe there is a kind of journalism that can be document based.
I had to laugh when I heard some congressman telling Joe Scarborough that "no one in the House read the stimulus bill" before they voted yes. Then Joe et al were "shocked, shocked!"
Then I asked myself.."Shouldn't that be a journalists job?"
"Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." is very specifically not heroic Watergate journalism.
Michael Josefowicz
21 Mar 09 at 2:50 pm
Talking Points Memo does a great job of poring over documents, in part by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd. A typical post reads, "Hey, we just received a gigantic document, we're putting it on the web, help us look at it." And then the crowd of lawyers, literary critics, forgery experts, and other folks with way too much time on their hands pick it apart: Marshall and co. report on what their crowd discovers.
It's important to note, too, that journalism is also invested in the production of documents — one of the competitive advantages that blogs have is that their archives are freely searchable, and they can cherry-pick the best of what they find from their own (or others') past reporting. There's every bit the same urge to get to a story first and crack it open, but no sense at places like TPM, so far as I can tell, of being bummed out or hesitant to report on something to the gills because someone else got there first. No need to reinvent the wheel when you can link to it instead.
Tim
21 Mar 09 at 3:34 pm
"Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." is very specifically not heroic Watergate journalism.
I'm not so sure! To me, the most memorable (and heroic) scene in All the President's Men is where Woodstein pore over thousands of White House book request slips. If "heroic Watergate journalism" has come to mean something else, that's a function of the misunderstood mythology around those guys, not the acts themselves.
Tim
22 Mar 09 at 2:21 pm
Fair enough. But in the popular culture, and therefore the narrative of many journalist students since then, I bet it was the "we took down a President" story. Consider that how many stories have been dubbed xyz. . .gate. Forty years after the original.
Michael Josefowicz
22 Mar 09 at 6:09 pm
Fair enough. But, I think the narrative of many journalist students since then was more about meeting Deep Throat, getting access to just the right source, and "we took down a President." The fact that it is a myth is not a surprise as the other myth is that the media got it mostly right when reporting about the Vietnam War from 1964 to about 1971. In that context Judith Miller is only the most egregious example, not an outlier.
Michael Josefowicz
22 Mar 09 at 6:12 pm
If you dig Vannevar Bush, check out Russell Neuman's Future of the Mass Audience if you've never picked it up in your travels: http://bit.ly/gXRCJ
ryansholin
24 Mar 09 at 10:49 am
Matt,
In case this hasn't gotten on your radar, I think it's a must read..
http://eaves.ca/2009/03/17/journalism-in-an-open-...
Michael Josefowicz
4 Apr 09 at 12:39 pm