Power at the edges

Dan Gillmor wagers in “We The Media” that the center won’t hold if we waste power at the edges.

His comment (p. 109, Ch. 5) follows a discussion about ways governments can more effectively fight asymmetrical threats such as bioterrorism.

But his point applies just as well to politics and media: The powerful lose strength when they don’t absorb and apply innovative outsider ideas. They can’t afford to ignore ideas just because the ideas didn’t originate with headquarters.

Leaders, in other words, must be aware of and respond to small changes in their environments, because small changes left unaddressed often grow to overwhelming size. Think newspapers, and the Internet. Think classified ads, and Craigslist. Think old-line political fund-raising, and Internet donations.

The earthquakes rocking the media and politics are hardly the kind of changes William Butler Yeats was thinking about when he originally wrote that the center cannot hold. He was talking about the Second Coming, and writing in the aftermath of World War I:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….”

Lawlessness is overstating the current situation, but things are certainly falling apart in the media world and the old rules aren’t working so well.

As Gillmor connects the dots between the key Internet developments of the last couple decades, it’s obvious that Big Media wasn’t paying full attention to the technological innovations that now overwhelm us. We noted the changes as a cultural phenomenon, something that early adopters were doing, and even wrote about them.

It’s easy to see in hindsight how revolutionary the innovations were. Big Media had a few early adopters who experimented; a TV news report on an early version of online newspapers is making the rounds on YouTube. But most of us didn’t put too much effort into applying what we were writing about.

What were we doing instead? We were focusing on our core mission: reporting and writing about our communities, reporting investigations and covering the latest breaking news. Major technological upgrades are expensive and complicated and are the kind of capital improvement project that doesn’t happen often: When my newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, rolled out a powerful new newsroom pagination system in 1999, among the driving factors for the upgrade was that our old computer system couldn’t be certified to work after Y2K.

The new system also gave us each Internet and e-mail access, and brought major changes in the way we interacted with the public. People still called and wrote letters to the editor, but our conversations with readers sped up as more and more readers got e-mail access at home, or via the public library or even their own workplace. It has been interesting to see, for instance, how many e-mails are time-stamped at breakfast time, when most people first read their newspaper.

Compare that time frame with Gillmor’s, and it shows again that it has taken too long for newspapers to embrace talking to readers and the broader community. I think part of the resistance stems from the fact that newsrooms function — for better or for worse — as a series of interconnected interruptions. Toss in a large volume of conversations with readers and people start looking for ways to dial down the sensory overload.

In Chapter 4, Gillmor offers insightful advice to PR professionals on using new media, but it applies just as well to journalists and government leaders.

Listen, he writes, because people outside your organization may know things you don’t. Ask questions, and be open to what they tell you. Offer more information, in more ways, and be transparent. Find the experts, and create conversations.

In other words, don’t try to be the final authority on all things. Find out what you don’t know, and pool your resources. Give-and-take builds relationships, and community, and loyalty.

Gillmor’s description in Chapter 6 of the role of grass-roots technological changes in last two presidential election cycles is especially thought-provoking in light of last fall’s historic election of President Obama. His campaign team recognized and brilliantly applied the decentralizing power of the Internet to raise money and organize supporters.

Though “We The Media” was first published just four years ago, Obama’s election and the current implosion of media business models were looming but still thought to be in a distant future. The speed with which they arrived shows how fast the changes are accelerating now that they’re spreading from the edges to the broader population.

The center must use ideas from the edges to solve problems. Why would it want to waste that powerful intellectual capital?