We get the net—and society—we build

January 5, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
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The next time you see someone on Twitter point to an argument and gleefully announce, “Fight! Fight!” and you retweet that, think about the net you are encouraging and creating. You’re breeding only more of the same.

Oh, we’ve all done it. At least I’ll confess that I’ve done it. I’ve been in fights online I’m ashamed of. Like kids left alone by the substitute teacher, we — many of us — exercised our sudden freedom by shooting spitballs around the room. Have we gotten that out of our systems yet? Isn’t it time to stop and ask what kind of net and society we’re creating here?

I’ve been the object of potshots from a cadre of young curmudgeons who attack me instead of my ideas. We give it a haughty name — the ad hominem attack — but it’s just a kind of would-be assassination, sniping at the person to shut off the idea. I’ve watched these attacks be retweeted as reward, over and over again. Some might say that’s what I get for being public. Hell, I wrote a book about being public. But I hope personal attack isn’t the price one has to pay for sharing thoughts. What chill does that put on public discussion?

I was waiting for another example of a “Fight! Fight!” tweet to write about this choice we have. But then today I read about something far, far worse in singer Amanda Palmer’s blog. She, too, was getting ready to write about being the object of hate online — something we briefly talked about in a conversation regarding social media a few weeks ago. But then Amanda searched and found the tragic, wasteful story of a girl who couldn’t take the abuse she’d received online and off and finally killed herself. That’s only partly a story about the internet. But it’s very much a story about damaged humanity. Go read Amanda’s post now and watch the video there if you can bear to. Especially read the comments: heartfelt stories from more victims of attacks who, thank God, are here to tell their tales and share their lessons.

In the U.K., people are being arrested for posting hate online — “malicious telecommunications,” it’s called, as if the “tele” makes it worse. In France, a government minister is demanding that Twitter help censor, outlaw, and arrest the creators of hate online. I side with Glenn Greenwald on this: Nothing could be more dangerous. “Criminalizing ideas doesn’t make them go away any more than sticking your head in the sand makes unpleasant things disappear,” says Greenwald.

Yes, this is not a trend that can be delegated to government and wished away with legislation or prosecution. Or to put it another way: This is not government’s problem.

This is our problem. Your problem. My problem. Every time we link to, laugh at, and retweet — and retweet and retweet and retweet — personal attacks on people, we only invite more of the same. And every time we do *not* call out someone and scold them for their uncivil behavior, we condone that behavior and invite more of it. Thus we build the net — and the society — we deserve.

Again, I’ll not claim purity myself. I’ve ridiculed people rather than ideas and I’m ashamed for my part in that.

And mind you, I won’t suggest for a moment that we should not attack ideas and argue about them and fight over them with passion and concern. We must argue strenuously about difficult topics like guns and taxes and war. That is deliberative democracy. That process and freedom we must protect.

But when argument over an idea turns to attack against a person, then it crosses the line. When disliking a person becomes public ridicule of that person, it is hate. Dealing with that isn’t the responsibility of government. It is our responsibility.

The next time you see a tweet ridiculing a person or linking to someone who does, please respond with a challenge: “Is this the world you want to encourage? What does this accomplish? What does this create?” A week or so ago, I finally did that myself — “Really?” I asked a Twitter fight announcer. “Is this what you want to encourage? Aren’t you ashamed?” — and I was only sorry I had not done it before.

It would be self-serving and trivial to point to personal examples of attacks that spread. Indeed, it is self-serving — and ultimately only food to the trolls — to respond yourself to attacks on you; that gives the attackers just what they want. But that should not stop me from giving support to others who are attacked by those who think that scoring snark shots will only get them attention (because to date, it does). The next time I see an attack on a person, I need to call it out. I’d ask you to do the same.

We are building the norms of our new net society. It can go either way; there’s nothing, absolutely nothing to say that technology will lead to a better or worse world. It only provides us choices and the opportunity to show our own nature in what we choose. Will you support the fights, the attacks, the hate? Or will you stand up for the victims and against the bullies and trolls and their cheering mobs who gleefully tweet, “Fight! Fight!”?

Please read Amanda’s post and the comments from her supporters — Gaga would call them her little monsters — and take their stories to heart. Whose side are you on? Which net and society will you build?

January 2, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
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In What Would Google Do? I wrote this about the idea of the Googley car company, using Zipcar — just sold to Avis — as a jumping off point to the idea of a car company as a service that gets you where you want to go (more than a manufacturer that sells you steel). Little could I know that Google was developing the self-driving car. So this morning, I fantasized that Google had instead bought Zipcar as the start of a service that just gets you where you want to go (serving you entertainment and advertising along the way). Here’s what I wrote in WWGD?:

I discussed my rationale for the open-source car platform with Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist you’ll hear from shortly, and asked him what a Googley car company would look like. He said it already exists. It’s Zipcar, which provides 5,000 cars to 200,000 drivers in various cities and campuses. Drivers join Zipcar for $50 a month, then make reservations online and pick up a car in any of a number of garages, paying $9 an hour or $65 a day in New York, including insurance, gas, and 180 miles. I can get similar rates from traditional rental companies but with less flexibility and convenience. Zipcar says each of its cars replaces 15 privately owned cars and that 40 percent of its members decide to give up owning a car. Similarly, Paris’ mayor announced in 2008 that the city would follow its successful bike-sharing program by making 4,000 electric cars available to residents to pick up and drop off at 700 locations. The goal is to get Parisians to buy fewer cars.

I know what you’re thinking (and can hear the peals of laughter all the way from Detroit): The last thing a car company should want is fewer cars. Are you nuts, Jarvis? Are you a communist or some tree-hugging fanatic? No. I’m just turning the industry upside-down. When I put the question to adman Rishad Tobaccowala, whose agency works in the auto industry, he said Detroit is not really in the business of making cars. He channeled the Googley car company and said: “I’m in the business of moving people from place A to place B. How can I do it in different ways? And as they are moving from place A to place B, how do I make them feel secure and connected?” He said that except for sleep, we spend more time moving around than at home. “Screw Starbucks as the ‘third place.’ The third place today is the automobile.” What is the automobile really about? “Navigation and entertainment,” he said—not necessarily manufacturing. Indeed, Tobaccowala said the most interesting parts of the General Motors business had been OnStar and—credit crunch aside—financing. Manufacturing is expensive, vulnerable to commodity pricing, labor-intensive, weighed down by gigantic benefit costs, and competitive. There’s the tyranny of atoms.

What if a car company became the leader in getting people around and used others’ hardware: planes, trains, and automobiles? You tell the system where you need to go—or with access to your Google Calendar, it just knows—and it gives you choices at various price points: Today, you can take the train for less. Tomorrow, you drive because you’re running errands. The day after, you carpool to save money. This weekend, you get a nice Mercedes for the anniversary dinner. Next week, you take a chauffeur-driven car to impress clients. Along the way, you can pay for options: your entertainment synced in the car, wireless connectivity on the train, alerts to your iPhone, navigation concierges who direct you around jams. This is the new personal transportation and connections company built on the old car company as a platform. Hop aboard the Googlemobile.

Atomizing the article

December 31, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Washington Post did good reporting under the headline above on the state of negotiations on the so-called fiscal cliff. But the report is long because it carries all the equipment an article carries — the background paragraph (the sixth paragraph), atmospherics (seventh paragraph), quotes (eighth, ninth paragraphs), play-by-play (paragraphs 10-22), getting to some key details on the third screen.

Compare and contrast that with Henry Blodget’s summary under this headline. Now some will say that Henry — like a anthropologist with a camera in a remote village that has never seen one — stole the soul of the Post’s article. But I say he performed a service: He pulled out just the key facts of what’s new in five cogent bullets plus two additional paragraphs, giving us facts the Post didn’t get to until paragraphs 25-28. He read all that so we don’t have to.

Now I’m not criticizing the Post here. It did the reporting. I’m criticizing the form. I’m also not criticizing the Post for following that form; that’s what print dictates: a one-size-fits-all, one-stop-shop for this story.

This is a wonderful example of how online provides journalists the opportunity to atomize the article into its component assets. Blodget gave us the what’s-new part. Someone else could create the background, play-by-play (from the middle of the Post article), players, timeline, quotes, and so on.

Now I know the argument we’ll hear: Blodget took value from the Post. But I say he added value for readers, for I’m sure many of us are sick of reading the same old stuff, we just want to know *what’s new* — that is, the *news*. That’s what the Post and newspapers should be paying attention to here: where is the value for the market?

We can quickly tie ourselves in knots discussing business models. Maybe the Post should run Blodget’s summary as value-added for its readers, giving him a share of the ad revenue. Does Henry pay the Post for the value of its reporting? Or is his link payment? That depends on how the links perform (I’ve been wanting to perform tests of that for research).

My point here is simply that, of course, reporting has value but that the full-blown, kitchen-sink article is not always the best way to convey that value. Here’s just one example.

NRA arms Santa’s elves

December 24, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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WASHINGTON, D.C., December 24, 2012 — National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre today announced that the NRA had trained a cadre of armed elves to ride with Santa Claus on his trip around the world tonight.

“The only thing that stops a naughty guy with a gun is a nice guy with a gun,” Mr. LaPierre said during a hastily called press conference, held in apparent response to the firestorm over his proposal to place armed guards in every American school. “Let this be a lesson to principals and politicians in this country: Santa Claus is setting an example not only by arming his sleigh but also by having the courage to create the only international data base of naughty people.”

In addition to carrying a bag of gifts for children around the world, Mr. Claus’ elves will pack heat: namely Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, each equipped with high-capacity magazines and more than a thousand rounds of hollow-point ammunition. Mr. Claus himself is reportedly carrying a Smith & Weston 9mm semiautomatic pistol under his beard should he be met with resistance leaving his sleigh and entering chimneys and living rooms. His spokeswoman, Mrs. Claus, also confirmed that to accomodate the extra load of armed guards and weaponry, North Pole Corp. added a tenth reindeer to its sleigh, named Blitzkrieg.

“As America’s preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years, the National Rifle Association is ready, willing and uniquely qualified to help win the war on Christmas,” Mr. LaPierre said. “We did it for the nation’s defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we’ll do it for Santa Claus today. Our culture — that is, our evil Hollywood media — have done Mr. Claus a disservice by portraying him as merely jolly and nice in movies, cartoons, and now videogames. That is an invitation to every insane killer that his journey would be their safest opportunity to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk. Well, let me tell you: His elves may look small and they may spend the rest of the year making toys, but tonight, they’re prepared for the worst.”

Mr. LaPierre continued: “Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses, even sports stadiums are all protected by armed security. We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable character in our culture, we leave him utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and will exploit it. That must change now! Now Santa Claus is armed, thanks to the NRA. We believe in Santa Claus. And Santa Claus believes in the NRA!”

Mr. LaPierre also announced that as part of the NRA’s new North Pole alliance, Santa Claus agreed to place realistic toy guns under every Christmas tree around the world. “We are proud to take part in training the next generation of shooters,” Mr. LaPierre said.

At his press conference, Mr. LaPierre refused to take questions from the press. Unanswered were questions regarding what will befall the well-armed Mr. Claus when he travels to most civilized countries in the world, which, unlike the United States, have laws regulating the possession of guns and ammunition. This could lead to the prospect of Mr. Claus being arrested and jailed as he and Christmas come to Australia, Japan, and other nations with strict and successful gun controls. “let the death of xmas lie on the conscience of #guncontrolnuts,” said one NRA supporter on Twitter in a discussion following the announcements.

Also in the discussion on Twitter, CNN host Piers Morgan criticized Mr. Claus for his new stand in favor of guns and against gun control and invited him to appear on his prime-time show. “Come on, America,” Mr. Morgan tweeted. “Ban Santa Claus and enforce background checks on his elves. Do it now.” This led to further calls to deport Mr. Morgan, to which one Briton tweeted in response: “Nobody in Britain wants Piers Morgan to be deported. We’d much rather he was strangled in his bed by Santa.”

* Sadly, the LaPierre quotes are adapted from his own speech.

* Earlier: FTC fines Santa Claus.

I confess a journalistic sin

December 14, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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I just got off the phone with Bob Garfield of On the Media talking about the shooting in Connecticut and the discussion that ensued on Twitter around an account alleged to be that of the shooter. He called me because I screwed up — and particularly because I am a journalist and journalism professor who screwed up.

After the shooting, I followed the trail of many on Twitter to an account that was written by a person of the same name that had been broadcast on TV news as that of the shooter. It was eerie reading and I said just that. I did not use the name of the person or the name of the account because I knew better: these facts could change. But then I also foolishly did not include a conditional statement in my tweet: I did not say “if this is the account of the killer, then…” Or I did not say this was the “alleged” or “reputed” account of the person named as the killer. These are basic, basic journalistic skills drilled until they are reflexes and I would use them in any story for print. I didn’t use them online. That was wrong. We don’t learn these things as journalists just to cover ourselves or to sound like journalists. We learn them because the key skill of the journalist is to say what we do *not* know and to make that clear. That is the essence of credibility.

I immediately tweeted that I should have added the conditional statement. I then erased the single tweet, which I hate doing because one should not try to eliminate the record. But on Twitter, there is no way to amend or correct a tweet — a fundamental structural problem, I think, but I’m not shifting blame to Twitter — and so it could continue to be retweeted and passed around.

As you know by now, it soon was reported that the original name was wrong. A person by that name was being questioned and his brother was identified in the press as the killer. Though as I write this, the police have still not verified either. So caveats still apply. And I am not using the names still.

Also, as this proceeded, the Twitter account associated with the first name got new tweets. That is apparent evidence that it was the wrong account. But even that is not foolproof as one can send delayed tweets. So nothing is certain. That is the important lesson.

Bob Garfield wanted me to shrug and say oops — such is news. I wouldn’t do that. Yes, this is news and we’ve all — not just journalists but also everyone who ever watches a breaking story on TV and now on the net — learned that facts change. But it was wrong. Bob also wanted me to blame haste. But I wouldn’t do that, either, for by that argument, one would need to wait hours, days, weeks, or even longer before reporting any facts and clearly that’s not going to happen.

No, we always need to be as diligent as possible about verifying facts — and listening to TV news, I’ve learned, is not sufficient. That includes now not just journalists but those who spread what they hear from journalists via Twitter, Facebook, et al. We need to be careful about saying what we don’t know or how we know what we’re saying. Those attributions and caveats are important. I left them out of my tweet. That was wrong, especially for me. I am sharing this here both to share the lesson. I’m sorry.

: LATER: Looking at Twitter reaction, I want to be clear that I’m not blaming Twitter’s length; I could have fit an attribution and caveat in the tweet.

Taxes are an obligation, not a moral choice

December 4, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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In its tax fight with Google, Starbucks, and Amazon, the UK has in essence been demanding that they tax themselves: that they pay more tax than they are legally obligated to because lawmakers, in their hectoring, say that would be the “moral” thing to do.

Now see this discussion by Reuters’ brilliant Chrystia Freeland about the notion of plutocrats self-taxing. She says, quite rightly, that the concept of self-taxation is a challenge to the authority of governments: rich people are saying they can better spend their money to benefit society than society’s representatives in government can.

The irony, then: The UK’s lawmakers are undermining their own authority when they demand that Google et al meet different — perhaps higher — demands than their own laws’. They are abdicating their responsibility to write good tax laws and to negotiate tax treaties with other nations, which are attracting business and thus tax revenue from these multinational companies by offering them better deals than other countries (it’s called competition).

And therein lies another challenge to the authority of national governments: that multinational corporations can indeed play states against each other to get the best deal in minimizing taxes and thus maximizing profits (which, let’s remember, is their fiduciary raison d’etre: maximizing shareholder value). This is especially true in the digital economy, when companies can operate anywhere, even apparently nowhere (across distributed, virtual networks), and also find customers anywhere (that’s the subject of a Guardian story today lamenting the VAT taxes it loses to multinationals selling products directly to consumers, offering lower tax rates and thus better prices … which usually is seen as a good thing for consumers).

Taxation is not a moral question. It is a legal obligation. It is the role of government to write and enforce equitable tax laws for the benefit of society. In the current fight over taxes in the U.S. — which, of course, is what the fiscal cliff is all about — we see various sectors predictably acting in their own self-interest: the middle class wanting to tax the rich, the rich hoping to at least minimize that change. In the end, after much needless pain and struggle, Congress will have to pass a tax law and we will pay our taxes as is our legal duty. I would agree that is a moral duty: to serve and protect the rest of society, to give us services and to help those in need.

But if government makes taxation a matter of moral choice, then what of the law? Where is the certainty that both companies and individuals require to plan their lives if we are held to some unwritten standard? Where is the certainty of government revenue to do its work if taxes are a matter of taxpayers’ judgment?

In an age when borders are increasingly meaningless, when citizens can organize themselves, and when new and stateless armies of hackers bear new but damaging weapons, the authority of governments is being challenged on many fronts. Here governments challenge even their own authority.

Why The Daily is counting its days

December 4, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Guardian asked for my take on the death of The Daily. Here it is (with links that fell out on the way to London):

On Twitter, I’ve already been accused of schadenfreude over the death of News Corp.’s soon-to-die, pay-walled, tablet-only, once-a-day news venture called The Daily.

Not so. I’d have loved to have seen an online-only news service make it. But The Daily was, in my view, doomed from the start because of all the adjectival modifiers listed above.

First, the pay wall: News Corp. proprietor Rupert Murdoch has elevated charging for content to a religion. He says people should pay for his products (though I’ve never seen a successful business plan in a competitive market built on the verb “should”). He turned his Times from an internet presence of note into a footnote because he insisted upon putting it behind a wall.

With The Daily, Murdoch wanted to prove that he could start and we would buy a news product online. But he forgot a key lesson of selling subscriptions, one he surely learned when he owned magazines: that it takes a lot of marketing expense to acquire customers. It costs money to charge money.

When it started, I calculated that The Daily would need to net at least 750,000 subscriptions — 1 million when accounting for cancellations (aka “churn”) — to break even on an operating basis, what with a share of sales going to Apple on the iPad. Murdoch promised he would sell “millions.” In the end, it reached 100,000 subscribers, not nearly enough to compensate for a reported $30 million in development cost and $500,000 per week burn rate.

Mind you, I am not against charging for content. I will happily sell you my books. But The Daily wasn’t much worth paying for. Though it looked quite nice and its content was competent, that content was all-in-all just news and news is a commodity available for free in many other places. Larry Kramer, publisher of the much-larger USA Today, just said with admirable candor that he can’t put up a pay wall online because his product “isn’t unique enough.” Ditto The Daily.

Next, The Daily started as an iPad-only offering. Eventually, it branched out to the iPhone and to Android tablets (but only for Verizon telephone customers) and the Kindle. I hope that other publishers learn from this misguided “mobile” strategy. Too many have dreamed that the tablet would return to them the control over brand, experience, and business model that the web and its links took from them. Too many think they need to create new products just for so-called mobile devices (though we actually often use them when stationary, at desk or on couch).

No, a news organization should have a strategy built around relationships with individuals, serving them wherever, whenever, and on whatever platform they like. My needs don’t change just because the device in my hands does.

Finally, there was the absolutely befuddling decision to make The Daily daily. News was only ever daily because it was forced into that limitation by the means of production and distribution of print. The internet freed us from those shackles of time. Why put them on again? Nostalgia?

In the breakup of News Corp. that is the real outcome of the London news scandals and the Leveson inquiry, the new company had to start cleaning up its books, getting rid of money-losing ventures. The Daily was the first to go. But there are more in that stable, starting with the New York Post, which loses, by one account, $110 million a year just to give Murdoch what he has long called his “bully pulpit.” Now he has a bully pulpit with almost four times more subscribers for free on Twitter. Can The Post’s obit be far behind?

Journalism as service: Lessons from Sandy

November 28, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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I was badly informed in the aftermath of Sandy. I blame the news. After all, isn’t that its job: to assure we’re informed? Shouldn’t news organizations be judged by that standard?

The other day, I argued that news should be seen as a service, not a product, and that journalists should measure their success not by column inches or by page views but by results: whether we, the public, know what we want and need to know. Sandy provides a good test-bed for this idea of outcomes-based journalism.

After Sandy, what journalists provided was mostly articles when what I wanted was specifics that those articles only summarized. Don’t give me stories. Give me lists.

I wanted lists of what streets were closed. I wanted lists of what streets the power company was finally working on. Oh, the utility, JCP&L, gave my town, Bernards Township, lists of streets, but they were bald-faced lies (I know because my street was on that list but their crews weren’t on my street). The town and our local media outlets only passed on these lists as fact without verifying. I wanted journalists to add value to those lists, going out to verify whether there were crews working on those streets. In a word: report.

I wanted media organizations or technology platforms to enable the people who knew the facts — my fellow townspeople — to share what they knew. Someone should have created a wiki that would let anyone in town annotate those lists of streets without power and streets — if any — where power crews were working. Someone should have created a map (Google Maps would do; Ushahidi would be deluxe) that we could have annotated not only with our notes and reports of what we knew but also with pictures. I’d have loved to have seen images of every street blocked by trees, not just for the sake of empathy but also so I could figure out how to get around town … and how likely it was that we’d be getting power back and how likely it would be that buses would be able to get through the streets so schools could re-open.

But instead, we got mostly articles. For that’s what journalists do, isn’t it? We write articles. We are storytellers! But not everything should be a story. Stories aren’t always the best vehicle for conveying information, for informing the public. Sometimes lists, data bases, photos, maps, wikis, and other new tools can do a better job.

My local weekly paper was as useful as always. Not. It gave me articles days after the fact that told me nothing I hadn’t already ferreted out. In my town, Patch* blew it. Here was its opportunity to be *the* hyperlocal resource for my town. Even though it had no newspaper to fill, it still insisted on giving me articles. When I couldn’t reliably find out about where power work was occurring from the town or Patch or the paper, I did use Patch to post an open letter to the town complaining about officials passing on JCP&L’s bogus lists and I learned more from the comments there than from those articles. NJ.com* gave me articles but also did give me some lists, constantly updated, which I hung on to find out the latest on roads and transit — and so I could decide whether I had any hope of getting into New York and work. Those lists were great but, a statewide paper being what it is, they couldn’t tell me about my neighborhood.

That’s where the need and opportunity remain: in very local information. No one has cracked the geographic nut well — not big papers, not big networks of sites, not Twitter. Desperate to find open gas stations, we gathered around the #njgas hashtag but it wasn’t terribly useful learning that a station 50 miles away just opened up. I needed someone to add value to that list of posts about stations by putting them on a map.

After my neighbors and I got out our chainsaws and cut through probably three dozen trees to free us from our blocked streets and driveways, I went to Nextdoor.com, a platform that enables neighbors with verified identities and addresses to create private networks.

In a neat bit of functionality, I was able to delineate my own neighborhood — which is valuable information to a site, knowing what someone considers a neighborhood to be. But Nextdoor scolded me and said I didn’t have enough neighbors, forcing me to include people who live 2.5 miles away I’ll never meet — because Nextdoor thinks it knows better. Its mapping data sucked and many of my neighbors couldn’t join but Nextdoor wouldn’t let us fix the addresses — even though we know better. We wanted to talk about power and buying generators and trees still lying over our streets and more but Nextdoor gave us a tab to talk about “crime and safety” because they think they know what we want. No. You’re a platform only if and when your users take over what you’ve built and use it in ways you never imagined because they find it that useful.

What I want from news and technology companies is a platform that enables us in the community to share our knowledge. I want them to provide an opportunity for — or shame — shame town officials, utility companies, transit officials, as well as local businesses — even gas stations — into using such a platform to share the data they have and invite residents to add to and improve that knowledge. I do not expect the journalists to be able to gather all that information. In the words of Emily Bell, Clay Shirky, and Chris Anderson in their new tome, Post-Industrial Journalism, I expect the journalist to move up the value chain. Or in my words, I want the journalist to add value, to ask and answer the questions that aren’t already known. Do what you do best and link to — or build a platform for — the rest.

* Disclosures: Patch has long listed me as an advisor though I am not one. I am, however, an adviser to NJ.com and helped start the service back in the day. I have no relationship with Nextdoor.