 Thank you, Colin. That was a very nice introduction. Good afternoon to you all. It's my honor to be here because when I was a fellow at the Schroenstein Center, this was one of the fixed points I had to get because all these lunches really had been very impressive. I remember Wendy Seltzer talking, so that was really great. And I'm not an academic. I'm more from the practical side, so I'm very happy to have you guys from Liberia here, who are also practitioners, journalists, just as I was. What I would like to share with you are some of my thoughts, which are part of my research work, which I've been doing for the Schroenstein Center last year, as Colin mentioned already. And of course, which had an impact on the work I'm doing with my company. My company is called Blockform, and it's based in Berlin, Germany, and in Oslo, Norway. So you see it's already an inter-European global company. But to make it real global, we do have the most of our customers in the United States, so we are really experiencing what does it mean to be a global company. And I have to say thanks to Skype and all these great innovations, it's really possible to do also as a small, innovative company to be global. I see three big trends in the internet, and we were talking before this luncheon a little with Amar, and he said that recently you had some real big experts on the future of the internet, and as I learned, there were some even apocalyptic views there. That's why I'm very happy to share very positive views, because I think I have been founding a newspaper which was only in the internet in Germany in 2000, so I have been through all this experience of hype, of visions that should happen tomorrow, and wealth that pours down like warm rain to everybody who just has a good idea. And I have been also to the valley of tears when it came down to reality. But what I managed is to get this newspaper really through all these difficult situations, and we succeeded to be one of the most important only online newspapers in Germany, which I can tell you is not quite easy, because there are many out there in Germany doing that. But still it proved to me that if you have the right spirit, if you have the right ideas, you can survive, you can even create something new, and there will be something I would like to encourage everybody of you, even if you don't see it at the moment, just try it, just do something, and you always have a fair chance to be successful. From my experience when it comes to citizen journalism, I think participation is one of the big trends in the internet. To talk about this here at the Bergmann Center is almost a little too arrogant for me, because there has been so much expertise and that this can happen, I think partly as a result of the existence, of the sheer existence of this center. But yet though when I was in the Schrodinger Center, I took a close look. What does it mean, citizen journalism? It's a word you can hear when a publisher says, how can I cut costs? The first thing he invents is citizen journalism. Or when you ask the YouTube kids what are you doing, then they'll say it's citizen journalism. The bloggers are said to be citizen journalists, so I didn't meet anybody who really know what it is, and therefore I took a look and we did some quite extensive research at about 300 websites worldwide who were dealing with environmental issues in particular. We choose the environmental issues because there is such a variety of things out there that you should focus on something to compare. And when we looked into it, I would like to redefine, and that's again the point why it's nice to be at the Bergmann Center, because here you can redefine things, the word of citizen journalism, and rather speak of network publishing. I think a citizen, everybody is a citizen, the biggest citizen was Citizen Kane, and I don't know whether this is where we want to go. A journalist? Not everybody is a journalist. I do not believe that by just claiming to be a journalist, you are a journalist. I think it's craftsmanship. I can tell you out of many, many years of experience, and you as professional journalists will know that. You have to learn it. You have to have several framework things that enables you to do that, like legal protection, like money, sheer money. Journalism without money doesn't work. It's also an experience out of 30 years of being in this business. So I don't think that the combination of citizen and journalism brings us any further. And I'd rather like to talk about network publishing because what people are doing is much closer to what publishers have been doing than to journalists, which means they have a mission. Other than the YouTube kids, they say, we do have something we want to tell an audience. Other than the sheer dating platforms, they are not looking for girls, but for getting some message out and being understood and heard. So I think this is a very, very similar approach to traditional publishers. And I think also when it comes to how they run their business, they are not journalists in terms of, here we are the journalists and here is the publisher. They have to look, where does the money come from? How is our protection? What technology do we use? How do we increase our reach? These are all publishers' questions. So I think that's where these folks are to be found. And network publishing, I think, because all of them, if you look at them, the network is essential for their work. I know that, or I think so, at least at Jochai Benkler is now also teaching here, so I just can warmly recommend his very thorough book, so to say. So if you really have two weeks with this nice weather and not doing anything else, then you should read the book. But he, I think, developed very, very interesting thoughts about the wealth of networks. The second book I would strongly recommend, although it's a little heretic when you have Benkler, then I would recommend another guy, Kerst Sandstein. I don't know whether you have ever come along with him. And he's here as well? Okay, so then it's not heretic? Kerst Sandstein, Infotopia. Well, it's his latest book. For me, this was the best book I've read in all the time when I was here in the Shorenstein Center, because he, on like 200 pages, sums kind of up how these things are working and why they're working. You can then still disagree, but you get a really good mental understanding of what can work and what cannot work. And if you want the 10-page version, you will have to do as an unbelievable review of Infotopia. So if you only have a half sheet, since I got lucky enough to help since the editor chapter. Okay. Great. When you look at network publishing, I think you can identify four groups of network publishing which do something of the same, but still something which is quite different. I would like to divide these groups and put what we did when we did the research on these websites in the first group, citizens who do media-like projects or projects which are similar to traditional media. These are operations which have a long-term perspective, which have some kind of basic infrastructure and which have some kind of collaboration between citizens and journalists. Those we have been looking into, like, that's why now it's a term to praise Ethan because you can praise him like all the time. It's big websites like worldchanging.com, which is a pure environmental website which is a non-profit. It's like treehugger.com, which is a full-profit operation which has been sold to Discovery Communication in June or July, which is in Latin America. We have many of these media-like operations close to the social movements. It's Atina Chile, for instance. It's Ecoportal in Argentina. We do have them in Korea as the mother of all citizen journalism or my news. We do have them in France with AgoraWox. We do have them in Germany with Readers Edition. That's the project I'm running. You say, you know, there have been the newspapers. There have been the magazines. What have they been doing? And now let's just transform it to ordinary citizens doing that. The interesting thing, therefore, us was that when we looked into it worldwide that there have been very, very many similarities between the different projects. Although they never, physically, could never have been talking to each other, they did things very similar. Although they were kind of committed to environmental issues, they were taking it very seriously in trying to be neutral, in trying to be like a journalist to achieve some objectivity, not to just post out their opinion. So they built up restrictions to themselves, which is not the first thing you would think of when ordinary people go out and do some publishing. They all had some infrastructure with check and balances on their topics. They all have some orientation. How can we increase our reach? They have some brand thinking about what they wanted to build. So I think it's very interesting that you can with these citizens. That's what I would then call citizens as journalists, but not citizen journalists, but people who are in media-like projects. The second category I would like to define is activists. What we found is that network publishing really develops its strength at the point where people have a limited goal for publishing, especially in the environmental world. Ten years ago, if you want to change something or if you want to fight some crazy project or some pollution thing, then you had to really run and try to get the attention of the local newspaper, of the local radio, of whatsoever. This is over. They go publish themselves whenever they discover something and engage themselves to change something significantly. So this kind of activist is the second category. We have found lots of them, for instance, in the U.S., where there is an initiative which is called Stop TXU. This was an initiative where ordinary people just started to publish against a huge energy company in order to stop them to build very dirty factories and they succeeded and they had a very smart combination of publishing, of lobbying and of interacting with all other people. But the publishing was always their genuine part. They were not saying we tried to get an article or tried to get three minutes in the local radio. They said, we publish ourselves. We had the same in the UK. We found some examples where people were just stopping building projects by just publishing what's going on, where there is corruption and so on and so forth. So activism, I think, is a very important part of this network publishing. The third category I would like to define are the bloggers. So Ethan, of course, is here again. I personally think that the bloggers are much more different to the traditional media than everyone believes. And I have a strong vote for keeping out the bloggers of the traditional media. I do see a tendency right now that big publishers say, yeah, let's just hire some bloggers. Or that they say, oh, we have a 65-year-old columnist who we don't want to write in the paper anymore. Let's blog him. And I don't like that, because I think what we have seen is that the essential of the blogger is his freedom. And freedom, I think, is 100%. It's not 98%. It's 100%. And freedom is very annoying. I had big problems with bloggers myself, and they can be very nasty. But I think that's what they have to be. And the moment you integrate them into the traditional media, they lose that. I met some bloggers who are now doing blogging for a time in Jesus Christ. I mean, they were just kind of marketing themselves. And I think it's killing this new, really new format. The interesting thing is we made a survey on the bloggers. So we asked about 300 bloggers worldwide, what is your self esteem? What do you think you are? And it was very, very interesting. Only a very tiny minority of about 20 or so percent said, we are journalists. But 80%, so the overwhelming majority said, we are analysts and commentators. So they defined themselves completely different from journalism. They would never come, and it was interesting. It was bloggers from Africa, from Asia, from Europe, from everywhere. With some nuances, basically they said all the same. When we ask them, what's your relationship with the traditional media? What is always a big fear among the traditional media that they say the bloggers kill us. A very, very tiny minority was saying, we are here to replace the media. An overwhelming majority said, we are here to complement the media. We do something the media does not do, so we do something different. And of course, these own descriptions made clear to me that we should leave them the freedom, we should give it to them. Ethan explained to you, friends from Africa right now, that it's so easy to set up a blog, and I would encourage you to do the same if you want to express your opinion, do it. But don't let you buy any traditional media. That's not good. The fourth category following to the media-alike citizens, the activists and the bloggers, the fourth category I would define, which is a completely different one in the big field of network publishing, is Wikipedia. I think that Wikipedia is one of the most important innovations. For me as a journalist, it's the most important innovation, which the internet has brought into this business. I know that there is a lot of discussion about Wikipedia, and I know there are lots of problems with Wikipedia, and I know that there are some interesting alternatives like David Sanger's Citizenium. I don't know whether you have looked into that, which is a Wikipedia-like thing which tries to just have better writing, because I think that's Wikipedia's biggest weakness, that this is not text, it's just a collection of information and it's not a narrative there, so I think that really can be an improvement. But per se, I think Wikipedia has brought something into journalism which we would call something like to be a clearinghouse for information which has not existed before and which now is also highly respected among traditional journalists. When I met a good friend of mine in the Shorenstein Center, Dan Ochrant, the former public editor of the New York Times, a very, very well-respected journalist here in the US, and he was public editor at the New York Times, so he was the guy, the ombudsman, so to say. He had to take up what the readers were saying and when the journalists were writing the right stuff, so he was kind of in the immediate between them. And he told me that like four years ago, it was not allowed for a journalist of the New York Times to even use Wikipedia as a source. It was not allowed. Before I left, a week before I left, I happily read an article in the New York Times in the business section where one business guy quoted Wikipedia and then he added, yes, even New York Times journalists read Wikipedia. So I think this tells a lot how much it is accepted. The special thing about Wikipedia, I think, is that they have developed a way of collaborative working which no other internet, network publishing, but also no other traditional entity has developed to my knowledge. We have seen some attempts to copy Wikipedia. There was a big experiment at the Los Angeles Times two years ago where they started a big tutorial, so they invited their readers to rewrite the editorial and it ended up in pornography after one hour, where I have to say, what in 2005, even the traditional media should have known that there is pornography out there. But when you watch and we watch this disaster in our research a little, when you watch it, then you see it's not anarchy, which is the essential of Wikipedia. It's more a kind of very refined hierarchy. You cannot just post something, but you will be immediately corrected. You have a structure developed which really takes care of the quality. So I think this Wikipedia has started to be something very, very new where I would recommend other than for blogging. I think Wikipedia, in the right way, is one of the most important models for institutions, for media, because that's what you can do and where you really can involve ordinary people in the proper way. So that's a brief category about the, how I see this network publishing. I think you will be able to contribute a lot. I think participation, as what I described, is one of the things which really changes the internet. I think the second next important thing will be design. I think when you look at the internet today, it looks like the cars in the beginning of the 20th century. You see everything, the steering wheel, you see everything. I mean, MySpace looks like a car like in 19. But over time, the cars have become all the same. You cannot tell whether the breaks in the Mercedes are done by the same manufacturer as for Chrysler, or it's all the same. What is really this distinction and what makes the character of the cars is the design. That's the only thing which is different. And I think that when you look back into industries, everything starts very chaotic, very unorganized, and at some point, design gets into it to structure things better. I think one of the big weaknesses when it comes to the internet as an information medium right now is that it's very, very hard to find something. You have very, very few editorial quality. YouTube is a great thing, but you should never see YouTube as a medium. YouTube is a database. It's just a database. And a database is something completely different to a medium. And that's, to my understanding, one of the second point where the traditional media will meet with the internet its design. It's how you organize your content. It's very often more important to leave stuff away, to explain it better, to integrate the things you have. You have video, you have text, you have interactive things, you have everything, and you have to find a way to make it user-friendly so that people really understand how to do it. To my understanding, for many of these community things which are around, Facebook, for instance, was one of those who immediately understood that design is the key thing. But MySpace, I have to be frank. I can't use that. It's just terrible. For me, it's terrible. You get lost, you don't find, and it's just another pleasure. And I think that this will be something which is changing, and that's where we are right now also doing our work. We are producing digital magazines. We just took the old traditional picture of a magazine and transformed it to the Internet. So that's just a brief video. That was a British television broadcasting about Internet innovation, which praised us, so I have to play that. So that's others about us. What we are doing, we are producing magazines where we have all these advantages you have in a magazine which are sometimes very traditional, but which are, I think, very wise to organize content and to use the good things about the Internet, like the combination of text and sound, the animation. I mean, this is for young people you never should hear. But you can flip through here. It's a different thing than television, and it's a different thing than a magazine. It has a third dimension. You have here interactivity. You have here interactivity. Again, for Ethan, the global, it's in Dutch, so even I don't understand it. It's like who of the stars is environmental friendly, so you have to look whether it's good or bad. What would you guess? Good. Are you environmental? Let's try. Yes, he is. And then it describes what is his project, what is he doing. Or Paris Hilton. Good or bad, what do you think? Bad. Just in environmental aspect. Yes, so the shark. You can do that again and again as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. I think he's very happy. So I think that this is, of course it's funny, but I think it's important to be funny. Who says that content only has to be dull? I think that's the secret of media. That's why media has become strong. Here you can choose your products, you can get information. Or here, that's something I like very much. It's just photos with an animation. And when you look at this animation, it's, you know, a third dimension. And this is the internet. That can be only done on the internet. So we will go on for hours, I assume, I hope. We are doing with my company, we are doing this stuff for many publishers, but also for corporations. Because I think when we are talking about participation, that's also one of the trends that corporations or interest groups will become their own publisher. It's not only single people, it will be themselves. And this will change the media landscape, I think, quite significantly. That's something we did for the New York Giants. You know, they don't need the traditional media, that's just an ad. They don't need the traditional media. They can be their own media. They have their own content. And I think, for instance, when it comes to sports, I think Wendy, you had this great experience. And I'm sure the sports organizations, they will get away from the media. They will be their own media. And they will kill everybody who goes into this, and Wendy can tell, so we did something with them, but it's not the NFL, so... But here again, it's a combination of the video and the text. It's emotional. It's more than just the information. And this is something I like very much, because this is a memory where you have to guess how well you know your team and how well you know the enemy's team. And that's something which only the Internet can do. It's usual, you say, now here, I'm European, so that's wrong, you know, and that's wrong too, and that we keep doing it. So, some experts... We can help you. Yeah, please. He's the quarterback. Okay, so you know the quarterback here? Of the Eagles? And who is Lito Shepard? I don't know him. You see. So, however, the great thing of this is, you know, it's a playful thing. It's a combination of information and fun, and it's just nice. And this is the strength, to my understanding, of the Internet. It's not so much about just putting a video and replacing television. That's not interesting, but to create involvement of the readers, to really get them to do the same stuff. So, we did... Well, we are in the process of doing some stuff, also with Harvard right now, but there is one final thing I want to show you. Well, we did for a cooperation, which is confidential. That's why I... That's just saying demo. But it's an airline. It's a European airline, based in the north of Europe. So, you may guess with this, but, however, they had a very interesting question. They were saying, you know, we are based in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. So, there was this huge... This is a huge territory, and they had 10,000 employees, and they said, we want to create a new magazine for our employees. We want to interact with our employees, because they are here and there, and just to ship a printed paper is not reasonable. What can you do? So, we created this interactive magazine, and we encouraged to get people involved to communicate. So, you have here the possibility to write a message to your friends. Let's say, Wendy, where are you? Okay, Wendy? And then you can send it, and it's going out there, you know, like in the horizon, and now we will have a little time and find it. And I can tell you that the employees of this airline got crazy about that. They spent hours, and then... But then, the management realized that they were spending hours, and you know what they did? They didn't stop them. They also started to throw in some planes. So, it was really a playful communication. Wendy, where are you? You see that? So, I mean, it creates just a different space, and it's such a different way, to my understanding, what a medium can do, that I think this will be the future of the Internet. And I'm not at all pessimistic. I think these are so many wonderful opportunities you have. On the one hand, you have people involving themselves and contributing, and on the other hand, you have a technology that is more sophisticated and simple at the same time. So, I would say from my experience, there is no reason at all to be pessimistic. And if you have fun with this, just do the same wherever you are, and then you will contribute to the further development of the Internet. And now I'm happy to discuss with you. Wendy is going to hand up to... Hold on. Wendy, have you been referred to so many times and used this as a demonstration? So, yes. Building on the comments that you were making about my run-in with the NFL and sports teams embracing this as a way to reach their audiences and also your comments that many of the sites out there aren't trying to be objective, do you think that there's a problem, and is it a short term or a long term problem, as organizations decide that they don't need the media to spread their message, they'll just do it themselves and start making it more difficult for the media traditional objective journalists to gain access and comment on their work? Well, I think it's a big stretch. I think it's a big problem for societies, and I think it will... That is what my feeling, the thing which changes most the business model of this division is it's not the bloggers. The bloggers didn't take away nothing from the media. But this shift from not spending advertisement anymore but doing it yourself and of course manipulating, that will be a threat for the media. When it comes to the cooperation, I have been here so many times at this great place that I am very positive, because I've heard from the young people that they were saying they strongly believe that communities do have the ability to correct themselves, to create some transparency within their own thing. And I think this is what will happen. I think we will see much more watch blogs or whatever who are directly to the corporations and who will attract... We do have, for instance, in Germany, we have a big tabloid, I don't... I would say this is, if you would combine Fox News and what's very trashy New York Post? Yeah, New York Post. And then multiply it four times and it's a very strong, biggest tabloid newspaper in Germany. Very manipulative. They are a little right-wing, not very much, but a little, so they would always manipulate in a very thin on a thin line. What started to exist three years ago was a watch blog that was called BuildBlog. And a huge community started to correct every mistake in this newspaper. And what happened was very funny. Of course, I know the editor of this newspaper and he got mad about this. You know, it's like the elephant with the fly, he can't trample them. He has to find a way to kill them more sophisticated. So they were collecting things, how to sue them and so on, but they didn't do it because they knew it's such a strong community, they knew it was the majority. But what they did, they started to use this watch blog as an internal control thing. Like they were reading it carefully and they were then taking their journalists and saying, why did you do that? Why did you do this mistake? So it really had a direct positive effect. And I think that is what will happen at that point. This is gorgeous. I used to be a designer, so I really appreciate this. But I guess my question is kind of twofold, that you're taking a new media and putting an older one on. So this seems to be a bit of a transitional technology and the effects seem more spectacular than informative. They seem to be like a little bit of YouTube residing in the magazine. And I wonder where the participatory elements are in this structure for people to kind of communicate in the circulation of ideas. Well, first of all, I think everything in the internet is transition. That's part of the internet. No one of us does have the result and that's how it will be. I think what we are working on now is to enable people to do that themselves. I'm an old school journalist, so to say. So I don't believe that you give the best thing you can give the people is to say, oh, you're so great, do it yourself. I think you should say, you're so great and now I will tell you what you need that other people really can get what you are saying. So this is pretty sophisticated, you know. It's not in terms of technology, but also in thinking how do you do it, how you create it, what is the communication process behind it. So what we are working now is on a community platform. We do have, as one of our products, a community where we want to combine the social media experience plus this design experience. I think that people will always more and more contribute, but that's my understanding. You have to create a channel where they can articulate themselves. I do not think that the future of the internet will be Microsoft swallowing Facebook. I mean, that may be the future of corporate something, but this is not, I don't want to be, I don't want to have my profile at Microsoft, that's for sure, because I, every day I'm angry with Outlook, so I don't want that. But what will happen is that many, many communities, niche communities will start to exist and use the tools of these communities themselves. The magazine, for me, is more a brand, a brand which can be taken by a community which explains more than just the individual position. On the one hand, I love what you're doing. It's an incredibly good whole. It's very, very stimulating. It's a really exciting new medium. On the other hand, it makes me incredibly nervous. And what makes me nervous about it is that the trend that we've been following is a trend towards democratizing the tools. I was able to talk with my friends earlier today and sort of show off how quick and easy it is to publish with a blog where it's literally at the level of complexity of writing. And while this ease of use has had both positive and negative implications, I would say that some of the writing it's enabled probably outweighs the negative parts that have come out of it. In some ways, you're sort of raising the stakes of what's necessary to publish in a certain particular type of this medium. This is not the sort of thing that the average citizen can come up with. This is the product of very sophisticated writers and designers and programmers and a few other people working on it. And in many ways, it seems like a very clever response from the traditional media to the sort of democratizing layer of this new media. But I worry in some ways that this is sort of creating almost a new medium where the doors are shut to the amateurs. And I'm wondering, first of all, do you think that's true and are you concerned at all about the sense in which you are literally building a medium which is now in the midst of one of the most democratic mediums out there, substantially less democratic? Thank you for this controversial question. It's always good to have you here. So... You knew the dangers. Absolutely. But I have an answer. That's why I'm doing this thing here, readers edition. This is a newspaper which is only done by the citizens. It's the most simple thing you can have. And what I'm learning there is that people are, first of all, much more capable than you would think. They can do almost everything a journalist can do. Almost, I say. But what I also see that there is a lot of limitation for the ordinary people. And I'm not thinking that you should say, open the doors and please just do whatever you want. You're great. You want people, you want to express yourself. What do you want to express yourself? What do you want to say? One of the most problems we have, and that was one of the experiences we had with most of these network publishing things we were looking at, people were writing what they were thinking, they were interested in anything. I sometimes have been thinking I should rename this, not readers edition, but writers edition. Because the ordinary people, you know, once they start to write, it's craftsmanship to know how you have to write that people understand you. It's not like just write, but they didn't care at all. They said, wow, here is my name. I can write that great. And it's a lot of daily work to educate them, to tell them, stop here, change the story, do it like that, and so on, so that you get understood. So I strongly believe that you have to educate people that they become part of the medium, and then they will become part of any medium, I believe. When it comes to this technology, yes, it is very sophisticated because we are not a non-profit organization, we have to earn our money. But when you take this, for instance, we have now built the first part of the network community is called New Soundland, which is a music community, which we will do also with some support from John Henry Klippinger, who is also well known here at this place. And he knows everybody, so he took some of this everybody to help us. So we have this music community, New Soundland, which will be a very basic community, where you can share everything. But what we will do there as a second lever is what we call cover art. We are creating a tour, which is like a digital magazine, for every artist to create his own digital magazine. Because what happened with music is that by losing the distribution channel of the physical booklets, they are really reduced to the music and my space, to things where I say they don't get along quite well. So we will enable them to create very, very nice booklets, digital magazines themselves. That will be a toolkit, pretty simple, but if they have the right videos, content, they will be able to make marvelous products out of it. So yes, we do have that in view. On the other hand, I have to say, to make a 3D animation or so is just professional. And I'm quite glad. There is one more book I have to recommend, because this is something you can really disagree on, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur. But if you disagree on that book, I think some of the things he's saying are quite valid, though, that you do not do good to the people if you say, just pour in whatever you will and then it's working. You have to have some quality limits to get people in. I'm very confident that people can adapt to law. Okay? That is satisfying, even. Silence does not constitute a sense. It might be a follow-up on Ethan in a much more primitive way. What comes through me, on the one hand on the other hand, is in the authoritarian mode that's being imposed, and partially I'm sure it has to do with language. But when you say ordinary people, perhaps in German, it translates into a different way. And I think part of the excitement of the ink man is that everybody's ordinary. And I think by making such a clear distinction, you get an audience, perhaps not everyone here, but a lot of people happen to take sides of having to say, I'm an ordinary person. You cannot impose that on me. And I think somewhere more in the style and the sound that you can soften some of what it is that you're doing because in German there's a very strict language. And I think it's that Germanic quality somewhat. I hear coming through here that makes someone like me say, hey, I'm ordinary. I don't want somebody to tell me I'm ordinary and that I have to do X, Y, and Z to be considered a journalist longer. So as I say, I don't think it's the act itself or just a structure. Is it Germans or journalists? I love German. I think journalists and the power they've had inside with the sword, I knight you and you know what you're saying and you guys don't. Is it the basis of what you're saying, too? And it's not just words, it's a power. So I bet there's a power at this point. Yeah, I would strongly agree on both, basically, but I don't think it's in German. No, I'm Austrian. So that's... Yeah, but no, no. The white one is in the white one. It's a friend of mine. He's a journalist. He's coming in now to Oxford for a sabbatical and then we asked him why would he do that and he said he wants his daughter to learn a second language, so UK. So that's about the relationship between Germans and Austrians. We are definitely different. But I think it's really about journalism. I think journalism has created an arrogance and many of the new movements are a result of the arrogance. The arrogance I don't think is not only saying you are ordinary and I'm better. Although they think like that. I have been journalist for many years and hopefully I'm not so arrogant because now I'm on the internet but Ethan brings me back even. Journalists, despite people. That was one of the reasons why I founded Readers Edition. I can tell you why. When I ran NetSitem, I said where we get so many valuable contributions from our readers and I would pass them over to my journalist and say, wouldn't you follow that up? And they would rather spend another half day looking into the wire and finding a story which is safe than following an interview. And that's why I said, okay, if you don't want to really integrate this stuff coming from the reader, we make a second edition. That's why it's named Readers Edition. That's the history which is only done by the readers. And then let's see what's interesting for the readers in front. So I think this is international. I think this is in the political coverage here in the U.S. and how these journalists act. They really don't even care about their readers. They're working in a small circle with their sources and they don't care about the reader. But what I'm still saying, I think you should get away from this arrogance, but I think it's taking readers more seriously when you say, hey, it takes something to write an article. It's not like you sit down at home at 10.30 with three beer drinking and then write an article. There is a structure. You should think about it, and so on. So, but I thought about it. I thought about it. It's worth for me for here. Over the course of the article, I usually don't have to do it all in advance. That's about the balance, I think, to give them a helping hand and not being arrogant. I think it's a thin line. You are very right with your observation, but I don't think you should just drop it completely. So there's this split and you also the sort of not hiring bloggers and staying free and staying unaffiliated, where do you see, and you discuss the number of these new emerging oh my new style collaborations that you look at, where do you see the professionals and the amateurs coming together, or how do you see them becoming less orthogonal and perhaps more complementary? Well, first, many of the bloggers are former journalists, so they must have learned their arrogance somewhere. That's why the old journalists hate them so much because they know exactly what makes them some of them. So, but when it comes to ordinary people, that's for me just the word not to have to say citizen journalist because I want to get rid of them. So I think professional journalists and ordinary people should collaborate. They should really, journalists should tell, they should integrate people in their working process. Like the problem with Wikitori that the Los Angeles time was they just took like a marketing act, they said wow, now let's write the readers and I could have told you, it never works. You just can't say everyone can write. We have big problems with readers' edition sometimes with people who are just crazy. They are not crazy people. They are crazy people. Crazy people aren't here. That's true. And they want to destroy, I don't believe in black and white everybody is good or everybody is bad. I don't think, it's a little grey everywhere. So, and you must take care that your main goal to give those who are serious and who deliver quality and who want to improve their own quality to give them a place. So you have to teach them. You have to show them what to do. You have to, the most important thing for us is to really tell people, and I had huge discussions with our people to say, look this is a long text, yes but it's not an article. And for me, that's not arrogant. It's important to tell him, because if he, and that was one of the problems to my understanding with another project that failed which was run by Dan Gilmore here, also familiar with the center in the biosphere they just let people write whatever they want, you know, and it's of course, then no one wants to read it. I mean, I met the other day with a magazine guy who is in a very special magazine publishing. They even do everything with mathematics. They know exactly what the readers were. I don't like this kind of journalist, but it's there is some wisdom there too, you know that you have to know something about your reader that you can, so I think those projects who we've been successful we'll be journalists and ordinary people can have it. I would strongly recommend, for instance, when it comes to the New York Times, they get 1,000 letters to the editor every day. They publish 15. I asked Dan So what happens to the 985? Well, they throw them away and I think this is ridiculous, you know I think why don't they open up a Wikipedia of readers I mean, that would be a great thing and there is no reason to say we throw that away. Not to harp on the same issue but you mentioned that you don't consider YouTube a media you consider You mentioned that you don't consider YouTube a media, you consider the database so where do you exactly draw the line? I think a medium is there when you have some editorial layers that make sure that not what everything gets in also gets out to put it very simple that can be a very small layer that can be but it's not sufficient to say you know you have this IP ruling that whenever there is something bad just take it off that's not media for me media is that there is some editorial will so to say, now that may be German but where people have to where people who contribute know that there are some guidelines they have to observe in order to be published So Wikipedia has guidelines Does it become a media and not a database? Absolutely a medium because when you look at Wikipedia I mean you never should only compare Wikipedia with the New York Times or you're from where, from Italy? No, from Ukraine Ukraine, so what's your main newspaper? In Ukraine now I wouldn't even begin to try to guess what's main But you have some newspapers there, right? Yes Okay, but that's that's maybe difficult to compare but if you take the New York Times or the Economist or I don't know I wouldn't compare Wikipedia to them I would compare Wikipedia with your newspapers in Ukraine with my local newspapers in Germany with the local newspapers in the US and if you compare them then you see the real value of Wikipedia because we had took a closer look on the coverage on the on this Virginia Tech massacre where Wikipedia really did an excellent job and you know what, there were many many mistakes in the Chicago Tribune in NBC, in big media but there was no mistake in Wikipedia so I think if you compare that with the local media, they achieve a lot of quality But if you're using that as a threshold then YouTube has them in the last mistake so document but you have no context Maybe a useful intervention here would be to bring in some of the language that's being proposed by our colleagues over in MIT who are starting a project that they call the Center for Future Civic Media and just so that we have more competing terms in this space they are trying to talk about civic media which they define is very very different from citizen media or citizen journalism or network publishing but one of the interesting pieces of the definition that Henry Jenkins offered is that it's not just a technology it's a technology with a community of use around it and a practice of use around it and I guess what I would say is with YouTube there are many many many different practices of use around it there's a whole YouTube phenomenon that we do in posting a response video and that's become a very very interesting sort of cultural phenomenon but that's a tiny fraction of YouTube a lot of YouTube is just TV content that's been slapped up there there's no clear community of use for it Wikipedia I would argue is very much a medium in as much as yes it's a tool a Wiki but a very very clear community of use with quite a rule set and quite a well-established practice arguing with Wikipedians about what's exactly the right and proper thing to do because they've spent days and weeks working it out where I might push back a little bit on you is that I don't think I think you're over defining blogs a statement you made earlier that most bloggers are former journalists it's just wrong there's 70 million plus bloggers out there I don't think there are that many former journalists in the world if you take citizen journalism yeah I disagree just looking at my own community just looking at the community of 150 people that I work with on a regular basis I'd say about 20 to 30 percent have a journalistic background and particularly when you look at the larger set of blogs that we point to maybe the 5,000 that we point to regularly it probably drops to about 10 percent I was saying to this group earlier today that blogs are paper you know you can write a diary on a piece of paper you can write a newspaper on a piece of paper that we brought I think you're talking about a very specific narrow group of blogs which are blogs that sort of consider themselves to be in that media space and media sphere but I worry in some ways that by using the term blog which covers this vast range of me writing about my cute cat you know all the way up to the Huffington Post that you may undercut some of your own conclusions about it because it is such a broad category no I agree on that of course I have to focus on those who are competing in the field of media and of course you're right that that was just a provocation that's one of the number of journalists consider we promote successful so I think it's what I just wanted to say is that blogs and media is very different because the blogger and there I completely agree every blogger he's not responsible to anybody except to his community and that's it so he is the medium so to say but he does not have any strong links and therefore I think this quality of an individual person being everything which traditional media has been in the past this is a new quality which I like I mean we have had that by the way in the age of enlightenment in Europe we had the pamphleteers as you may remember they are always referred to ok you said that but they kind of disappeared they didn't follow up they were absorbed by the media in some way and I think that because there is such a variety and when it comes to global voices the best example I think is to do that with traditional media you have to have these people as individuals and it's great and it's such a huge value which I want to see myself very last question the demo that you show that was the sports team and you picked the new players it suggested I want to name for whatever that was and it's almost like a collision of gaming it's a gaming interface memory ok with editorial and a way to learn and teach it looks a little like gaming so I'm kind of excited about how those things are coming together there and I wondered have we seen that elsewhere I mean is wikipedia going to have a thing where you have to put the heads of the kings of England on different things? is that how we are going to learn things? it's very interesting to me like as a learning tool for a generation that this is their way of connecting to data and I tell you what I met yesterday with one of the executives of Time Inc. who is one of our customers and they are watching that very closely and he told me I didn't know that I always stopped my children using that he said that Nintendo is having this you should know that why EE and he told me there is a news channel where you can go around the world with the game and find the news I haven't used it I haven't brought it with me and that shows to me if you want to be in journalism you have to be very aware of what's going on there because if people if this is the way how people in the next generation inform themselves then the media would be damn well off to know that and to find a way to speak their language and it's a much higher level of engagement of any participant than reading the paper which apparently everybody under 18 doesn't want to do anymore anyway but I like this it's never a 12 year old yes I'm just deeply concerned about the future of the media I mean relative to the kind of fascinating technology we see now you being a former journalist I'm not mistaken how do you see the media are standing 10 years, 15 years to come not Africa, let's look at the European media because we are a little bit far behind what's the future of the media with respect to these kind of emerging developments very good question and it's indeed hard to answer it globally because every country is different just to talk about the US would be completely different to talk about Germany Germany references have a very very strong public radio and television so in Germany for the last 40 years there was almost no market in journalism because it was public radio and television I think when it comes to the future I think the society will definitely have to think what is the value of journalism to us because journalists cost money when it comes for instance to investigative reporting it's just very expensive and the advertisers will not be the ones to finance this in the future so I think you have to find models where this is done in another way I think there are examples where this is already there in the US which is a non-profit organization and I have a strong feeling that many of the journalistic enterprises the truly journalistic enterprises in the future will have a strong non-profit component because you just don't get the money from the market on the other hand we are looking around a little in terms of investigative journalism to do something here in the US there are many foundations for instance who are eager to do something this is important to our society we need that and the market does not give it to us because the advertising is troubling so we need to create another business model and I'm confident this is a value and there will be other models which will strongly go into the direction of non-profit just interacting with the internet maybe you you browse and the Kinect cross the work of a blogger in the coming years will you be able to identify the work of a blogger from the work of a true journalist I think for the involving development I think you don't have to wait for the years to come I think today you have some bloggers who are already doing a better or most important job in their segment than some journalists thinking of technology for instance most of the information I get from technology I get through bloggers so 10 years ago you had computer magazines or whatsoever this is completely democratized somehow I think the journalists I would say there will be a distinction between blogging and journalism not journalists and journalism will be a collaborative effort to really go into the investigative reporting issues which cannot be done by a single person but other than that the one has a media platform, the journalist the other has his own platform maybe on those questions of the future I can't think of a more fitting note on which to end and to break up into smaller groups but please join me in thinking Michael