yelvington.com

Matt Thompson creates one part of what I suggested the other day should be the new fundamental unit of news coverage, replacing the article.

MoneyMeltDown is a well-curated aggregation of links to the best coverage.

To recap, I think the new unit of coverage needs to include:

1. Curated aggreagtion. Do what you do best, link to the rest. Here’s the best of the rest. See: MoneyMeltDown.

2. A blog that treats the story as a process, not a product, with continuing coverage and conversation, asking and answering questions, giving updates, filling in gaps: a reporter showing her work. Have you seen a good example? CalculatedRisk is more of an annotated aggregation and that’s valuable but I think it fits better in No. 1 above. The Christian Science Monitor credit crisis blog looks more like a collection of articles. From an industry perspective, the Inman blog is another annotated aggregation. Can anyone point me to a reporter or expert who is using a blog to both report and discover?

3. A wiki that give us a snapshot of current knowledge. Where else would we find that but Wikipedia?

4. Discussion. Where do you think the best - most intelligent and illuminating - discussion is going on?

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

Talking this over with some smart folks over the last few days — in one set of conversations about newspapers and online technology and in another conversation with NPR’s David Folkenflik for a story he’ll air shortly — I came to see that we haven’t yet created the proper elemental unit of coverage of stories like these.

Six years ago, in an insightful essay, Blogger cocreator Meg Hourihan wrote that the elemental unit of online media was no longer the publication or section or page or story but the post. I think that’s right: countless grains of information, thought, or opinion, each with its own permanent link so it can become connected to something larger — carbon atoms adding up to earth.

But that alone won’t work as an organizing principle for informing a world. It is the underlying base from which we have to start. But we have to add more value atop that shifting beach.

We have many tools to work with now, first and foremost the link. The link can take us to more or less background, depending on how much each of us needs, and to original source material and to many perspectives.

The link becomes more important than the brand in news. I said to Folkenflik last night that I never would have thought to go to This American Life as a brand to find the best explanation of the credit crisis, but I did. (Its reporters are working furiously on a sequel for this week’s show.) Lots of people discovered that report and spread the word around — with the link. The link changes everything.

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

This is the way to cover stories and life.

It’ s not an article, a story, a section, a bureau, a paper, a show. We have to use the new tools we have at hand to create new structures for covering news and informing each other. As I said in the post below, old structures are crumbling and new structures will be built in their place. We need to create that something new now.

What do we call it? I don’t know. The topic table. The beat bliki (ouch). The news brain. We’ll know what to call it when we see it.

: LATER: See Steve Yelvington on community memory and what he’s building.

Here’s Folkenflik’s story.

No one’s in charge. I didn’t think that’d be worse than having the bozos we had in charge. But it is.

You’d think the one thing our politicians would be competent at is politics. But they couldn’t even count votes.

We knew the White House was a vacuum. Congress is a vacuum. Wall Street is lie. Detroit and the era it represents is dust. Journalism is sinking like a wet witch.

Who’s in charge? It’s falling to us, the people. We’re in charge. Problem is, we’re not ready. We’ve used the internet so far to organize some knowledge and yell at each other. We are just beginning to create the tools to organize ourselves. If only the meltdown of every authority structure could have waited a few years. Then again, necessity is the mother of organization. New structures don’t replace old structures while they’re still in place. New structures fill voids. And, boy, do we have some voids to fill.

Two paragraphs from the end of my book:
Whatever causes they take up, Generation G will be able to organize without organizations, as Clay Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody. That ability to coalesce will have a profound destabilizing impact on organizations. We can organize bypassing governments, borders, political parties, companies, academic institutions, religious groups, and ethnic groups, inevitably reducing their power and hold on our lives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2008, Richard Haass argued that the world structure is moving from bi- and unipolarity (i.e., the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one’s in charge). We are in an open marketplace of influence. Google makes it possible to broadcast our interests and find, organize, and act in concert with others. One need no longer control institutions to control agendas.

Haass chronicles the dilution of governments. Bloggers Umair Haque and Fred Wilson have written about the fall of the firm, and earlier I examined the idea that networks are becoming more efficient than corporations. In my blog, I follow the crumbling of the power of the fourth estate, the press. One could debate the stature and power of the first estate, the church. What’s left? The internet is fueling the rise of the third estate—the rise of the people. That might bode anarchy except that the internet also brings the power to organize.

Our organization is ad hoc. We can find and take action with people of like interest, need, opinion, taste, background, and worldview anywhere in the world. I hope this could lead to a new growth in individual leadership: Online, you can accomplish what you want alone and you can gather a group to collaborate. Being out of power need not be an excuse or a bar from seeking power. That may encourage more involvement in communities and nations—witness the youth armies that gathered in Facebook around Barack Obama, a powerful lesson for a generation to have learned.

But in the pinch and crunch, we still haven’t managed to elect candidates truly of the people: the first politician to emerge from the web. We haven’t created financial networks of scale; Prosper.com is cute but it’s not the next BofA. We are only beginning to organize the new infrastructure of information and news; Wikipedia and Digg are fast and big but shallow.

I’m reminded of Bob Garfield’s chaos scenario for advertising, in which he argued that the old media world would crumble before the new media world was ready for marketers and advertising dollars would fall into the crevice between. That is what is happening with our political and financial and industrial and journalistic leadership. The old is crumbling fast — and angry voters yesterday helped push it over the cliff. But what now?

As threatened, in my Guardian column this week, I try to catalogue the yes-but contrariness I hear about the internet’s opportunities–and my responses:

It never fails. I’ll be talking with a group about the amazing opportunities of the internet age and inevitably someone will pipe up and say, “Yes, but there are inaccuracies on the internet.” And: “There are no standards there.” Or: “Most people just watch junk.” There the conversation stalls. I take it as personal failure, not keeping everyone’s eyes focused on the future. Suddenly, we’re spinning our wheels in the present or sliding back to the past, missing the chance to explore and exploit our new reality. Once and for all, I’d like to respond to these fears and complaints. They won’t go away. But at least I could, as the prime minister does in question time, refer the honourable curmudgeon to the replies I give here.

There’s junk on the internet. True. There’s junk everywhere (even on bookshop shelves). The mistake is to think that the internet should be packaged and perfected, like media. It’s not media. Blogger Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, says the web is instead a place where we talk and connect. In his 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow called it “the new home of the mind.” The internet is life. Life is messy. Get used to it.

Most people watch junk. True. But “most” is a measurement that mattered only in the mass media economy, which is over. In our new mass of niches, we each may seek out and support what we like. Yes, we’ve all watched our silly flaming cat videos (not to mention Big Brother). But we’ve also watched moments of genius made possible by the internet. Why concentrate on the crap when brilliance is only a click away?

Anyone can say anything on the internet. True. And God bless it for that. That cacophony you hear is democracy and the free marketplace of ideas.

There are inaccuracies on the internet. True. But the web enables us to correct our mistakes - because nothing is finished there. With a link or a comment, we can also correct others. And thanks to Google, we can look up facts from many sources in an instant. I’d say the internet has given us a greater respect and facility for facts and has made us as a society more accurate.

Wikipedia has mistakes. True. So does this newspaper. Both are better at making corrections than books and encyclopedias. Wikipedia, like the web, has enabled an unprecedented collection of knowledge, passion, creation, and collaboration.

We need a seal of approval for internet content. False. The last thing we need is a system for certification. For who should have the authority to do it? Who would wield that shield in China, Iran, or Saudi Arabia? The web is not one-size-fits-all. Neither is knowledge.

Bloggers aren’t journalists. True and false. The Pew Internet & American Life survey says only a third of bloggers consider what they do journalism. But today any witness can perform an act of journalism, giving us more eyes on society - which journalists should celebrate.

People are rude on the internet. True. They’re rude in life, but perhaps more so online, thanks to anonymity. But we all know who the idiots are. The smart response is to ignore the stupid.

The internet has no ethics. True. It no more has a moral code than a telephone wire, a car, or a knife. We who use it bring the ethics and laws we live under already.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s please return to the full half of the glass and examine the many new opportunities the net presents from these challenges. When you see nothing but junk, create quality. Where quality is hard to find, curate it, adding your own seal of approval with a link. When you read inaccuracies and misunderstandings, add facts, corrections, context and journalism. If people on the internet get things wrong, educate them. When you hear the noise of people talking online, listen. I know I come across as the internet triumphalist. Somebody has to. Somebody needs to be the contrarian’s contrarian.

When I decided to write my book, What Would Google Do?, I also decided that I did not want access to Google.

I had a few reasons. First, I didn’t want the company line but instead wanted to reverse-engineer Google’s success from a distance, trying to figure out what made it successful and how those insights could be used by other companies or institutions. That skill could be applied to other companies one admires, like Amazon or craigslist. I hoped the discipline would also yield a broader worldview than just Google’s on the internet age.

Second, the book would necessarily be admiring of Google and so I didn’t want any suggestion that my admiration came from any relationships in or favors from the company.

I’m glad I made the decision. A couple of bloggers just assumed that I had such inside access. I set them straight and I’m grateful that they each corrected the misimpression.

For the record, I’ve met various Google executives and mentioned that I was writing the book but asked for no information or access and received none. Until I finished the book, I even refused to join an industry-group meeting inside Google’s New York offices because I didn’t want to sign the required (and irritating) NDA. I did later go to a meeting at Google on an unrelated topic (I had son Jake with me and knew he’d like to see inside). For a column I wrote in the Guardian on the antitrust inquiry into the Google-Yahoo deal — after writing a blog post on the topic — a Google exec contacted me. I did use some valuable insights from comments on this blog written by Bob Wyman, who works for Google; that exchange is fully in the open. That’s the sum of my Google contact.

What are the objections that are constantly thrown in your face when you try to talk about new opportunities on the internet?

I’m thinking of writing my Guardian column this week responding to some because I’m tired of having to answer the same complaints over and over. I sometimes despair at being able to advance the discussion about the opportunities of the connected age, as someone in the room will inevitably say: “Yes, but there are inaccuracies on the internet.” Or: “Most people watch junk.” Or: “There are no standards.”

It happened last night as I gave my first presentation based on my book to a group of scary smart foundation grantees doing great work in areas from housing to science to women’s health to taxation. I was asked to speculate on what Googley charities would be like and we discussed themes including transparency and openness, acting as a platform and network, and new roles in a linked ecology of news and information. I’ll grant that their circumstances are different from those of companies and other institutions because they deal in often controversial and sometimes sensitive areas and their goal is often to influence not the population but policymakers (though I’m still enough of a cockeyed democrat to hope the population is who should influence the policymakers). Halfway through, those same old objections arose. I take it as personal failure that I’m sometimes not able to keep the discussion headed toward the future and find us spinning wheels in the present or, worse, sliding backwards.

Sigh.

And then I got email for a panel discussion at NYU on Oct. 21 called Crossing the Line, which asks these questions: “Are there any ethics on the web?” “Should bloggers be held to journalistic standards?” “Who makes the rules — the media, the courts or YOU?”

Sigh.

The implied answers, of course: The web has no ethics… Bloggers have no standards…. The wrong people are making the rules (if there are any).

To hash over these weightless questions they have nothing but the products of big, old media: David Carr of the NY Times, Liz Smith of the NY Post, Jim Kelley of Time, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, and Sherrese Smith, counsel for WPNI.

Mind you, just across campus, NYU has at least two of the country’s greatest thinkers on the internet and its implications for society, Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. But they’re not on that panel. New York is thick with great practitioners of new ways on the internet, but they’re not there.

Same old questions/objections/complaints/fears. Where is the talk of new opportunities in our new reality?

So please share the questions/complaints you hear all the time and how you answer them. Then instead of repeating ourselves in the future, we can just hand the curmudgeons and worriers a link.

: LATER: Here are the complaints I’m working with now.

* There’s junk on the internet.
* Most people watch junk.
* Anyone can say anything on the internet.
* There are inaccuracies on the internet.
* Wikipedia has mistakes.
* We need a seal of approval for internet content.
* Bloggers aren’t journalists.
* The internet has no ethics.

Any others you hear?

I’m writing my responses in the column.

Smart: sponsored power at Newark. Thanks Samsung.

After I wrote the chapter in my book on Googlified insurance — thanks to the wisdom of the crowd in the comments here — I tried out the ideas on a couple of insurance executives. “You may be mad,” one of them emailed later, “but you had some good ideas.” Actually, my readers did.

I proposed a scenario in which the community of the insured gained responsibility for its own health, which would require insurance and medical companies to hand over control to them, to be fully transparent with data and information, and to provide services the community could use to improve its health and reduce its own costs.

Let me play out two implications of this with my own health situation. First, a case of cutting costs:

Because of my afib, I have to take Coumadin, a blood thinner. I am required to go to the medical group every 2-4 weeks for them to prick my finger and make sure the dosage is OK. In some people, it can be variable and volatile. Not in me. I’ve been on the same dosage with the same effect since I started. But they keep bugging me to come in. They yell at me.

When I get there, I’m offended at the waste of money. There’s a nurse who sits at a computer and judges my results and then types and types and prints out a sheet. There’s an assistant who does nothing but prick my finger and then marks up that printout. It takes them two people to do what my diabetic mother does many times a day on her own. They charge me a $20 copay each time I do this. I shudder to think what they charge the insurance company. It’s like watching a government bureaucracy in white coats.

My point: If my interests and those of my community and insurance company were aligned, I would put up a fuss and whistleblow this boondoggle. If I knew it could have an impact on my costs, I’d report this to the insurance company. If I knew my community had the power to do something about it, I’d tell my tale in a community forum and gather critical mass around imposing efficiency.

But my interests are not aligned with the insurance company’s. They are out to screw me. They think I’m out to screw them. The doctors who are screwing us think we’re all screwing them.

By the insurance company holding onto the power in this relationship, it screws itself. We have no interest in helping them. If, instead, they enabled the community and each of its members to take control of health and costs, if they acted as a true service to the community’s and its members’ needs, then they all would benefit — except perhaps for the unnecessary and now jobless assistant and the doctors who can no longer skim a profit on this scam.

Second example: I’m tussling with my cardiologist about the dosage of the drug I take that stops my fibrillation (the poetically named Rythmol). I’m on a high dosage but it’s working well (knock wood). The doctor says he wants me on a lower dosage, but the last time I tried I nearly went into afib and had too many palpitations (and I couldn’t concentrate under the pressure to get my book written). The risk of the drug is that even as it stops afib, it can cause afib. The risk of not taking the high dosage is that I can go into afib — and the more you get afib, the more afib you’re going to get. The risk, either way, is getting more cumulative bouts of afib. I’ve already had enough to make me a life-insurance risk, which is to say that the condition was not sufficiently managed early on when I got it (after 9/11/2001) and before I went on Rythmol.

[Note, as an aside, that my life insurance company is screwing me for a condition that I got from 9/11 and it's a company run by and for military people. I wonder how they treat Iraq veterans. More on that another day.]

There’s a health decision to be made here. It’s about balancing risks. The only way to make that decision is to look at as much clinical data as is available and judge that against the comparative risks and against my personal experience. The doctor will come to a conclusion based on his education and reading and a few minutes’ consideration in my case.

But the decision is properly mine. My health should be under my control. It is ultimately my responsibility. But the system is not set up for me to make that decision. It is not set up to inform me or give me control.

At Davos last year, I sat at a table with a bunch of doctors who complained about their patients going to the internet to get what they said was misinformation. They didn’t want the internet to get in the way. They wanted to remain in control. I told them they were looking at this the wrong way. Instead, I said, they should point their patients to what they though were the best resources.

Doctors, I said, should act as curators of information for patients. That’s not what doctors do. They don’t have the means or, they’d argue, the time. Insurance companies offer some information to patients, but it’s lite and not too valuable. (Did you know you should eat less? Not smoke? Exercise? No, really?)

If insurance companies and doctors tried to empower patients and their communities to take control of their health and the costs surrounding them, if they gave us information about both the medicine and the business of it, they might succeed. Right now, no one does.

I don’t remember where I heard it first but one replacement for the discredited value of journalistic objectivity is intellectual honesty: reporting that which contradicts one’s own beliefs or hypotheses. That is the way to support one’s credibility.

Example from today’s NY Times: Dexter Filkins reports on his return to Iraq. Even as he promotes his book, The Forever War, he wonders whether the war could be over. There are plenty of caveats, as well their should be. But he also writes:
When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?

We’re spending $700 billion to bail out the idiots who got us into this mess and we end up with nothing to show for it but the bag we’re left holding and maybe a disaster averted (we hope).

We could be spending a lot less to get a lot more. A national wi-max buildout would cost between $5 billion and $14.5 billion. That would enable every American to get high-speed access to the internet and to its education, commerce, connectivity, innovation, jobs, and value. With a lot left over.

Or take the $700 billion and divide it by America’s 114.5 million TV households. Minus the 40-percent-plus margin that cable companies make on internet access (that’s the number I heard from them), we could provide broadband access to every one of those homes for about $300 a year. That means we could give every American free broadband access for 20 years.

We could buy 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines. Want world peace and understanding? Give one to every Muslim on earth and every citizen of China (or since China can afford them, make that everyone in India or everyone in Africa and South America combined) and you’d still have more than 500 million machines left over.

Or we could give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions. We could give 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions like mine. That alone would improve our competitive position and transform dying industries.

Or we could more than triple total annual R&D spending in the U.S. I can’t find total R&D on alternative energy but with this money we could multiply what Google.org is spending by a factor of 35,000.

Of course, these comparisons are specious. We’ll see a lot of op-ed charts that make such apples-and-kumquats correlations. The point will always be the same: Where are our priorities? Where are we investing our money?

And what are we getting out of spending this $700 billion. We, the people, damned well better make demands on our representatives to get something for our money.

Tom Evslin has a good list of suggestions that would in some ways treat the bailout like a bankruptcy reorganization. Robert Reich has a similar suggestion for a “giant workout of Wall Street.” Here’s Don Tapscott calling for unprecedented transparency. These are about extracting a pound of flesh for our ton of gold.

But I also want something about investing in our future and the economy: broadband access, technology, education, R&D, something that will build the future rather than mortgage it.

: LATER: Says Umair Haque:
The time is now.

Now is the time for revolutionaries to step up and build something better, something more real, and something greater.

There will probably never - at least in our lifetimes - be an opportunity for total economic reinvention this tremendous.

My book - and disorganization, amplified - put me behind with all kinds of things, among them promoting One Web Day, which comes Monday with lots of events the world around. It’s more important than ever for us, the people, to claim ownership of the internet and to protect it and to promote it.

Imagine if we spent the half-trillion dollars we’re using to bail out mortgage fools and thieves on spreading broadband everywhere in the country. Which would help the economy and the next generation more? Naw, that’s too easy.

When Hurricane Ike hit Texas, the government, acting on our behalf, offered bailouts to the thousands whose homes — built in risk-prone areas — were damaged or destroyed: payment for hotel rooms, aid in rebuilding. But when your neighbor’s house burns down, she gets nothing from us. She gets help only if she has paid for insurance. If that same neighbor gets cancer, she’ll also get no help from us unless she or her employer could afford insurance.

But the government is — we are — bailing out banks that risked too much on bad investments. By buying time, the bailout could also give a lifeline to people who borrowed too much on their homes. If the neighbor lady overmortgaged herself with a now-toxic loan, she might get a break. But if that neighbor lady defaults because she has cancer and has to pay her medical bills before her responsible 30-year, flat-rate, well-documented mortgage, well, she’s out of luck.

Perhaps every sick person without insurance should march on Washington to show that they’re a big disaster, too. Perhaps they should add up the impact of their illnesses on the economy to prove their financial weight. To expose the moral relativism of our collective national view of tragedy and obligation, maybe they should put up signs on their homes and wear badges that say, “Bail me out.”

In today’s NY Times, Floyd Norris argues that it’s worse than that, for the government is bailing out the most irresponsible offenders who put themselves and the economy at the worst risk. Lehmann wasn’t so bad, so it got nothing. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and those teetering now will get saved in some form because of the greater impact of their greed and irresponsibility.
Lehman did not measure up because its chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., simply was not reckless enough as he ran Lehman into the ground.

Had he had the foresight to make a lot more bad bets in the derivatives market, the government would have feared financial chaos and might have nationalized Lehman, just as it nationalized A.I.G., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Or it would have subsidized a takeover, as it did for Bear Stearns.

The Paulson-Bernanke Doctrine is not “too big to fail.” It is “too reckless to fail.” If you get your company into enough trouble to threaten the financial system, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, won’t let you collapse.

The problem for those left holding the bag — us — is that we have no leverage ourselves to demand conditions in return for our involuntarily generous rescue. Before any bailout is agreed to, shouldn’t our representatives demand responsible regulation in the future and repercussions for irresponsible management in the past — or, for that matter, demand a new look at our national priorities (helping out that neighbor with her cancer and her foreclosure)? No, it’s an emergency. We need decisive action to avoid disaster. No time for that. Of course, we could have avoided this disaster with responsible regulation and management in the past.

I believe in the market but I also believe that government must decide when to regulate just enough. (That is the essence of why I am a Democrat.) Our government has failed us and will continue to, I fear. What we need is a new moral scale. If you put yourself at risk, it is your responsibility to protect against that risk. If you put the rest of us at risk, then you will suffer the consequences but we will have sufficient oversight, demanding sufficient transparency to try to stop you from doing harm. If fate deals you a bad blow, then we need a structure to help protect you (that is, health insurance is just as great a national obligation as after-the-storm and after-the-fall bailouts).

If you’re at Web2.0 Expo, please come to the session I’m running Friday at noon. It will be the first time I talk about my book, What Would Google Do?, in public. I’ll run through the rules and lessons I intuited from Google and then I’ll invite Steve Adler, editor of BusinessWeek, and John Byrne, editor of the online version, on stage to see how they are doing against these laws — what they’re doing now, what we think they could do next, and what the audience suggests they should try. I hope it will be a fun session.

A bunch of current and former reporters at the LA Times are suing the new boss, Sam Zell, “accusing him of recklessness in the takeover and management of the newspaper’s parent, the Tribune Company,” says the NY Times.

Journalists are such a whiny bunch, always complaining, constantly blaming someone else for their problems. But friends, as the Rev. Wright would say, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Newspapers and newspaper companies are about to die. The last remaining puddles of auto, home, job, and retail advertising are about to be sucked down the drain thanks to the economic crisis and credit is about to be crunched into dust. So any newspaper or news company that has been teetering will fall. If Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG can fall, so can a puny newspaper empire — and there’ll be no taxpayer bailout for them. When this happens, will it be Sam Zell’s fault? Hardly.

The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves. Oh, I, too, am angry at the state of newspapers in America but I’m angry at the right people. The LA Times’ problems — like those of other papers — were caused by by decades of egotistical and willfully ignorant neglect by the owners, managers — and staff — at the paper.

When more than one editorial regime had the hubris to think that they should turn the Times into a national - even international - paper, opening bureaus all over the globe and insisting on writing every commodity news stories under their own bylines while letting local coverage suffer, did you protest, litigators? No, those bylines and bureaus were yours.

When the paper was the most overwritten, under-edited consumer of wasted ink and paper in the United States of America, boring its audience with jump after jump of self-indulgent text and forcing readers to flee for TV, did you get out your pencils and start trimming and tightening? No.

When the paper failed even at covering its own hometown industry, did you jump in to fill the void? No.

When the internet came, did you all - every one of you as responsible, smart journalists, on your own - leap to get training in audio and video? Did you immediately hatch new ways to work collaboratively with the vast public of bloggers able and willing to join in local journalism? Not that I saw.

When the link economy emerged, enabling papers to find new efficiencies by saving resources long spent on commodity news so they could concentrate on their real mission — local — did you grab the opportunity by the horns and beg to cover the hell out of Encino? No.

When the Chandlers and the erstwhile Tribune management did not invest sufficiently in building new products online and driving audience, advertisers, and resources to it and to the future, did you protest? Did you sue? No.

You bear your share of responsibility for the paper’s past and thus its present. Whether Sam Zell is the guy to get the paper to the future, I have no idea. But I can look at your stewardship and see the results.

Want to see who’s to blame for the state of your paper? Get a mirror.

So we’ve essentially nationalized an insurance giant. Now that we, the people, are in the insurance business, let’s rebuild it as a real community service (as my commenters suggest).

: Now that we are in the insurance business, Rex Hammock wonders whether we can appoint Warren Buffett to the board.

In this week’s news from Wall Street and in last week’s news convention we are seeing the problems that arise when people who are granted stewardship over our assets — charged with the care of our news or our money — instead think they have ownership of them.

The most appalling moment at last week’s Online News Association meeting in Washington came when a representative of the World Association of Newspapers showed off a would-be “standard” for publishers to tell search engines what they may not do. He demonstrated how a news site marked up its content and then showed how a search engine — French, no surprise — followed the instructions. Et voilà: The news site’s content didn’t show up at all. And they were proud of this. I was frightened. They have created a system to hide news. (Our news.)

Here was WAN’s protectionist view of how to preserve news — or rather, its control of news. Luckily, search engines are ignoring it, pointing out that most of these controls exist already and that WAN’s reputed standard could become a boon to spammers. The standard is meaningless, useless, and dangerous. But according to a representative of the Newspaper Association of America, that hasn’t stopped them from signing on. What are they thinking? We need to find more ways to get our journalism into more hands and more conversations and to involve more people in that process, sharing more information. Not our august associations of newspapers. They want to protect their ownership of news.

I heard more than one news executive I respect say at this year’s meeting that the ONA feared becoming the online organization of a dying medium. Wonder why. The hall was filled with employees of old-media organizations that happened to have added new-media arms. The awards they give each other are almost all to their own kind. And they say the blogosphere is an echo chamber.

If I were the ONA, I would cancel whatever schmanzy digs it has reserved for next year’s fest in San Francisco and hire an abandoned factory floor or put up tents in an empty field and I’d open the thing up, begging all the new practitioners of news to come and share. The organization acts as if online news is their domain because theirs was the news business. They owned news.

No more. Now — thank goodness — the press-sphere is made up of an endless variety of players: professionals, former professionals, bloggers, witnesses, technologists, aggregators, analysts, networks, platforms, business people, foundations, NGOs, search engines….

News organizations didn’t own the news as they thought. They were stewards of it. Their stewardship is proving to have been inadequate. Their definition of protecting the news has been to protect their control of it — see: WAN, NAA.

The same can be said of our financial institutions. Their stewardship of our own assets is proving to be disastrous. They thought they owned the industry. Instead, they had the privilege of handling our money so long as they had our trust. They have failed horribly.

The same is said — but too often not meant — when we talk of government. Politicians’ stewardship is clearly lacking.

The original definition of stewardship made it clear that the people who took care of a household and managed its assets — its stewards — acted as servants, not owners. Their control was granted based on trust.

We need new systems and new stewards. I’m not suggesting that the mob take over news, finance, and government. We’re too busy for that. We need stewards but we need stewards we can trust. The key to trust today, in any of these arenas, is openness and transparency. Hiding from the world is no way to get there.

My Guardian column this week is a reprise of the discussion here about Google and its size in the market.

Joe Nocera tells a cautionary tale in today’s NY Times about Google’s power in advertising. The man who runs Sourcetool.com complained to the Justice Department after Google found that his site didn’t live up to its standards and raised the rates on him (Google’s way of shooing away sites it doesn’t approve of). The implication is that Google can wield too much power as a monopoly.

But in the Google age, nothing is as it seemed.

I don’t want to be accused of being an apologist for Google (which will happen anyway because my book is admiring) but I can see their stance on Sourcetools. It’s not a splog — the owner puts effort into building a useful directory, Nocera says — but it does look and act like one. Google is trying to protect us from sites — even paying advertisers — that detour and delay us from getting the answer to our question. If I ask for earthmoving machinery, I’d like to get the link straight from my first search (on Google) rather than being directed to Sourcetool, where I’ll take five more links to get a not-very-satisfying list of companies. Google says it always focuses on the end-user.

Nocera and Sourcetool point out, though, that Google holds the power to raise prices and disadvantage sites without explanation or appeal. That raises fears that it can and will act as a monopoly.

Except the issue isn’t that Google is a monopoly. It’s that Google has become the marketplace. It where we all go for information. It’s where advertisers go for us.

It’s no different from a newspaper. Even when there were two papers in towns, one of them was the marketplace for homes, cars and jobs. That allowed the paper to set rates as high as the market could bear, which was very high. Google would say the difference is that it doesn’t set rates, the market does in auctions for keywords. Except in this case, by punishing Sourcetool, Google did set the rate. And it has the power to do that.

craigslist is also no different, except that Craig Newmark set most rates at zero. He’s the marketplace now and now that he has us by the neck, he could raise rates — as eBay did once it dominated the marketplace it created (though that invited competition from Amazon, Etsy, et al).

What it comes down to is trust. Once a service becomes the marketplace, do we trust them not to use that position to gouge us? There really is no alternative. The closest was Yahoo and now even it is coming to Google to sell ads because that will be far more profitable — that is what the Justice Department antitrust division is investigating now.

But if the Feds rule against the Yahoo deal, it is in essence stealing hundreds of millions of dollars not from Google but from Yahoo. It is restricting Yahoo’s access to the marketplace. That would be as unfair as Google unfairly punishing a site that doesn’t meet its standards.

The first obvious solution is transparency. If we all knew Google’s standards and trusted that they were, indeed, looking out for the end-user and if Sourcetool knew Google’s standards and abided by them, that would blunt Sourcetool’s complaint. Indeed, part of its complaint is that it can’t find out the standards. But then here comes the Google age wrinkle: If Google revealed its standards, it would only be feeding the needs of evil spammers, giving them to manual to game the system.

Still, the bigger Google gets, the more trust will be an issue. I think they need to look at alternatives. Why not, for example, establish an appeals panel made up of advertisers and users to adjudicate issues such as Sourcetool? This would require Google to hand down its laws — or more to the point to draft its constitution: the definitions for good sites rather than spam, not in algorithm-busting detail but as high-level goals. But another Google era wrinkle appears: scale. When the web is developing by the minute, it’s impossible — and potentially limiting and dangerous — to write even the broadest definition of what’s good. And your good is not mine.

It’s all about trust. The question will be whether I trust Google or the government or the market more. I’ll take the market first, Google second, government third. If Google uses its power monopolistically and maliciously, I believe it would hurt Google’s business as some painful proportion — not all — of its audience and advertisers look for alternatives and then as entrepreneurs and competitors see the opportunity to meet that need.

The government didn’t need to go after Microsoft. Google has. That it is say, the market created an opening Google is now trying to fill with Docs and now Chrome. The irony here is that Microsoft, so long burned by antitrust harassment, is not empathetic with Google’s possible plight at the hands of the same tormenters but it wants to join in the tormenting. But that’s a different drama.

I’m not sure whether Google was unfair to Sourcetool or not. I don’t think it’s a very good service; I see it as a delay and detour, though not a malicious one. Nocera is sympathetic to Google’s view: “Listening to Google executives explain how the company’s algorithm works, I came away largely convinced that Google was operating in good faith.” But then, we need to ask whether Google used its power well in this matter.

Larry Lessig famous wrote that code is law. Today, Google is law. It is up to Google to convince us — the market — that its law and enforcement of it is just. To do that, it must be as consistent — which gets harder the bigger you are — and open as it can be.

(My Guardian column, up Monday, also touches on another solution: Competition.)

I’m at the Online News Association hearing Tina Brown talk about her Daily Beast. She told me last night it will capture the daily zeitgeist with editors–more than 20 of them–rather than algorithms.

She throws over her past in print. She says it is good to work online in a medium that is “vibrant with life instead of constantly obsessed with fears of its own extinction.”

“Old war stories about the glories of media in the past,” is no longer exciting. “Yes, it was great but hey, it’s over. The tipping point has happened.”

She confesses being new to the web world. She’d never heard the word “wireframe” and says that tech geniuses are in another hemisphere. She recalls having scoops to hold onto in print but that day is over. She is happy not to be boxed in in presentation. She discovers the new world. She’s a convert.

She discovers “citizen journalism” as well but she cites big media efforts to get contributions rather than citizens’ enterprises. It’s a paragraph taken from some speech in 2004.

Now she gets to her pitch. Wind up: “People seeking to be informed are becoming increasingly overwhelmed.” Cue the stats about how many blogs and YouTube videos there are. She said that at the Democratic convention, everybody was filming everybody else: “a hall of mirrors.” Now she quotes Nick Davis bemoaning “churnalism.” Methinks she’ll cure.

She says we fear we’re going to miss that special moment of news. She says there’s so much we can’t believe: splogs, flogs, and misinformation. “That’s the part that scares me the most.”

Tina to the rescue. “What can we do to cut thorugh all this static, fake stuff, and noise…. There’s nothing wrong with algorithms. They’re fantastic…. It is the time for editors to reassert themselves ot curate in a more rigorous way.

Forward to the past. She praises other aggregators — Real Clear Politics, HuffPo, Arts & Letters Daily — “but there is still room, I think, for more metaaggregation with a distinctive voice just as there was always room for another magazine with a distinctive point of view.”

She says they started development eight weeks ago and hope to be up in the early fall. The launch will be evolutionary, she says, with new features up every 4-6 weeks.

She offers a site for “the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.”

She says her job as an editor was the write clever billings and headlines to get readers to read stories they wouldn’t otherwise read. The first duty of the journalist whether in print or online or no TV is to attract interest, she says. The next is to bring skepticism.

One underestimates Brown at one’s peril. From the sound of it, it’s magazine-think to the web, editing the world. For the proof, I’ll await the pudding.

In questions, she says she wants people who will forego the wisdom of the crowd to have their own take.

She says “there has to be pushback” against big-media companies hiring young people without experience and making writers put out too much. “It will indeed destroy their brands.”

It’s all very magazinethink.

“I think this period where anybody thought that anybody could write a posting for a venerable brand is a terrible mistake…. There hasn’t been enough pushback from the creative world…. The great con of the 20th and 21st century is the way that talent has been exploited by this technology boom….”

A journalism student asks for advice. She’s a print student but she’ll take a job in print, online, anything. “Well, you’re an easy lay, aren’t you,” says Tina, who advises not to go to a big company like Time Inc, where “you’ll be making big-media slugs coffee all day long.”

One person from the audience tries to hear more about her business plan. Tina won’t talk about it. Another tries to get her to talk about her video strategy. She won’t talk about it, saying she doesn’t want to give Forbes any ideas I get up and ask her to give us some idea of what the Daily Beast will be and she cuts me off and she she won’t talk about it. “I don’t want to give a press conference about The Daily Beast.”

As I sit down, the friend next to me says, “She’s a tough lay.”

For the first time, I decided not to go to the World Trade Center site on today’s anniversary. My wife has wondered for years why I insisted on going. I said it was to pay respect and my thanks. It is my unfuneral.

But this year the hole is, at long last — too long — filling up. This year, the place will be used to score political points — at least it will be in a fair and balanced way. This year, I’m busy with life.

And this year, I’m angry. Every year, the emotion is different. I take my own pulse on the day. That emotion is a bit more self-centered this year, probably because I’m upset that the health condition that came out of 9/11 for me continues (though I’m fine). Last night, because of the condition, I got screwed by an insurance company, which also brought forward the life-passing-before-eyes moment of seven years ago. It’s making 9/11 seem like Groundhog Day. It won’t go away.

It’s vital that we remember. That is why I went to the site for six years. But there’s no forgetting.