Publish and be filtered

After wittering on for ever about why journalism is changing irrevocably, I’ve read two things that make the point much more clearly.

One is a post by Scott Porad on Journalism 2.0 on the relationship between journalism and the I Can Has Cheezburger brand of user-generated humour. The other is a weighty essay by internet pundit Clay Shirky on the danger of imposing classification schemes on web content. 

Scott Porad’s point is that there is a “fundamental shift in the concept of reporting from ‘sourcing’ toward ‘filtering’.”

In times gone by, a lot of the value of a reporter was the ability to dig out sources. Now, there are sources by the million. The value of journalism lies in filtering these to find the most reliable. Tools and techniques to do the filtering will become much more valuable in future (journalists and graduates take note).

The Clay Shirky essay – “Ontology is Overrated” – is a much heavier piece, but there is a similarly clear and relevant lesson in it. 

When you catalogue books in a library, you assign books to slots in a classification system. You need this, because a book is an abject and needs to go on a shelf. 

But the internet has no shelves. Instead, it has a vast wash of content that is impossible to fit into a pre-determined classification system. 

So we have taken to putting content on to the web and letting people assign their own classification tags to it (think Flickr). 

As Shirky says:

In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality – the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It’s what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don’t point to it, other people won’t read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.

It’s that last sentence that sums up our problems in a nutshell. The web is all about filtering after publishing. Journalists will find their work cut out to keep up with that.

Unmitigated blogging tags

It’s all-too easy to take this blogging nonsense too seriously – you know: try to burnish each post so that it flies off the Google listing straight into readers’ browsers and pushes you to the pinnacle of the Technorati rankings.

Which is why I always smile when I visit my pal Peter Ashley’s Unmitigated England blog [which I am happily going to pimp here].

He writes poetically and idiosyncratically about an England we half recognise – a mixture of the nostalgic and the fantastic, that may possibly have existed once in someone’s drowsy, mid-afternoon reverie. Perhaps in the 1930s.

He also never uses the same tag twice – preferring to treat web metrics with the contempt they often deserve. Visit Unexpected Alphabets No 8, for example, and you’ll see it tagged MILK CHURNS, WEIGHING MACHINES, WICKER PIGEON BASKETS. And there’s not an example of any of these anywhere in the post. Meanwhile, the Old Gits post is labelled:  BATH CHAIRS, PEOPLE’S FRIEND MAGAZINE, SMITH KENDON TRAVEL SWEETS, WINCARNIS. Whatever they are.

Also, I notice from the blog, it was Len Deighton’s 80th birthday this week. Though he’s best known for his Harry Palmer novels, my favourite is the alternative history SS-GB. Many happy returns to him…