Wikipedia Journalism, Virginia Tech and the Pope

I am a big fan of Wikipedia, an affinity I’ve had to defend more than once to my fellow academics. It is as good as any other encyclopedia, probably better, and can be used in similar ways, which is to say, used and perused but not cited for or in serious scholarship. Just as the Britannica wouldn’t be. As a first reference, as an introduction, it is consistently rich and rewarding.

Where Wikipedia has perhaps been most useful might be a bit of a surprise.

When Benedict XVI was elected pope of the Catholic Church, the best, deepest, richest account of the election and of Ratzinger’s rise was on Wikipedia. I looked up the Pope on the site just to see how fast the entry would reflect Ratzinger’s election. It was within minutes of the smoke billowing up out of the Vatican. And then a marvelous thing happened. The entry just kept growing, with increasingly more on his background and links to his writings and views, and to news accounts of his career. It was one-stop information shopping at its best.

So, when I heard sitting here in my office of the terror unfolding at Virgina Tech, guess where I went first? OK, after I turned on CNN to see footage? Wikipedia. The entry on the event was immediate, and it has grown exponentially since, giving us another prime example of crowdsourcing a problem, or, more specifically, of leveraging distributed, network journalism in a defining event. And it only makes sense. With more than 2,100 contributors to the post the last time I checked, including some exclusive photography, and 119 footnotes, the entry accomplishes what an encyclopedia missionally attempts.

What I think is worth learning from is the built-in filter the crowdsourcing provides. The more people contributing, the smarter the entry got, generating yet better contributions and elaborations and links. The entry became its own filter, its own editor, in other words, as contributors self-screened and added yet more nuance, layers of information, and perspectives on the events and on coverage of the events.

To call the entry its own filter is not to discount, however, the heroic efforts of the many editors that rode herd on the information as it came in, editing for content, tone and taste. But it is a bit like taking a standard newsroom model and expanding it out until the reporters number in the thousands and the editors in the hundreds, all disparately located, all working on no deadline, on all deadlines, 24×7. It’s a beautiful thing. Traditional media can or should learn from it.

 

Penn State students pay tribute to the fallen Hokies at the Nittany Lions spring football game (from Wikipedia)

Curt Schilling, blogs & foot-in-mouth disease

As the whole planet now knows, Red Sox hurler Curt Schilling — no stranger to controversy — used his few minutes on talk radio to accuse Giants slugger Barry Bonds of cheating on his wife, taxes and baseball. What is interesting is how and where Schilling issued his public apology — his blog, 38Pitches (Schilling’s jersey number is “38″).

Increasingly, public figures are using their own blogs to communicate, to control their messages, bypassing in the process handlers (if indeed handlers aren’t involved in the blog posts’ writing) and, more importantly, the news media. Martha Stewart, Mark Cuban and even The New York Times’ Judith Miller used their own blogs to apologize, explain and spin the news about them, persuading publics directly rather than risk message diffusion in the media.

The “aha!” moment for me was in 2005, when the Oakland As’ general manager Billy Beane used a blog to explain directly to fans why he and the As were willing to part with star pitchers Tim Hudson, who signed with the Braves, and Mark Mulder, who went to the Cardinals. Bypassing the hordes of As beat writers, Beane persuasively explained in great detail how the As would survive and even thrive, and where instead the team was going to spend the capital the pitchers’ parting opened up. And it worked. The fans bought it, and Beane was vindicated with the As, without two of baseball’s better arms, returned to the playoffs against the Yankees.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of, among many, many other things, the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, writes simply one of the best blogs anywhere, and he routinely uses it to explain his business moves, his distaste for the NBA Commissioner’s strong-arm tactics, his rejection of the new NBA ball players said was difficult to grip and other brouhahas in the center of which the Blogmaverick finds himself. I read him regularly, and I appreciate that he takes the time to put it in his own words and give his own version.

This trend, if indeed it is one, has implications for just about everyone in media, including and especially public relations. Smart executives will be getting up to speed on blogs (Terry Francona, the Cro-Magnon manager of the Beantown Beaneaters had never heard of blogs until Schilling used his to drag his team into the muck; I absolutely detest the Red Stockings, if that isn’t apparent).

Certainly we should keep an eye on who uses blogs and other more interpersonal forms of digital communication to persuade directly, unfiltered and unfettered.

Web 2.0 & troop morale v. protecting bandwidth

A story in Tuesday’s Washington Post alerted us to the decision by the Defense Department to block or otherwise prohibit military computers from accessing 13 hugely popular Web sites, most of them social networking sites, including MySpace, YouTube, PhotoBucket and Pandora, all sites I use regularly. What? Our troops are stuck in, to use Jon Stewart’s words, Mess-o-potamia, having their tours repeatedly extended, in harm’s way 24×7, but heaven forbid they share a photo or scrawl on someone’s MySpace wall.

I wonder what a former student, Capt. Drew Lomax, who served in Iraq and while there took my online writing course, thinks about this inane move by Washington suits far removed from the daily realities of combat. It isn’t a stretch to view the Internet blockade as censorship, and for concerns as mundane as bandwidth? We can only hope that wiser minds prevail and our soldiers get their social networking back.

Wolfowitz resigns: Who cares?

Our food supply is dangerously fragile. Genocide in Darfur continues. Zimbabwe is a house of horrors. And immigrants in France are a police confrontation away from burning more than a few cars and refuse bins. These are a few of the stories more important, in my view, than a Bush crony fighting to keep his post at the World Bank. Few even know what the World Bank is, or what it does. Do we need round-the-clock updates on his future, as the New York Times and National Public Radio have breathlessly provided? Is Paul Wolfowitz the literati’s version of Anna Nicole-Smith? What was in Wolfowitz’s fridge?

I am not saying it is not a story worth covering, but the amount of human resource devoted to blanket coverage of this man, much of it absent accountability for his wildly inaccurate predictions and case for war in Iraq, has become an irritant.

Sorry. I don’t often use this space to rant, but the latest Times update emailed to me on this man’s professional future was just a last straw. I feel better.

Back in the saddle!

I cannot thank you all enough for your prayers and good wishes, cards and letters. It is so good to be back at work and reading again, albeit with one eye. The prognosis on the other (left) eye is good, but it will take around three months to get most of its vision back.

The surgery was a success, and I’ve been an obedient patient since, breaking none of the rules and doing what I have been told to do. I was able to attend graduation, and it was so therapeutic to see so many dear people after two weeks of exile. For those who are interested, it was surgery to re-attach the detached left retina using a silicone buckle that wraps all the way around the retina. It doesn’t hurt; I just can’t see much yet out of that left lamp.

COM 329 — you guys are wonderful. You picked up the ball and ran with it. Jim, Andy, Patrick and I will take it from here and see if we can’t get the site published.

COM 429 — you guys, too, are extraordinary. I heard all about the last class session, and, though sad I missed it, I am proud of you all for wrapping the bough on what was an wonderful course experience.

I thank in particular all those who got in touch — Amanda, Tracy, Erin, Carrie, Vanessa, Tametria, Katie, Ross, Lindsey, Liz, Leslie, Andy, Amber, Ashley, Rebekah, Gerry, Bobby, Elliott and I am sure others my mind simply cannot recall quickly enough at the moment. I especially thank the COM faculty for filling the gap — Kevin and Bob, in particular.

To summer!