"We the media" should find finer focus

Dan Gillmor’s opus on the necessity of grassroots media in an increasingly digital world sends a well-received message: digital media is bettering access to soapboxes for the rest of the world.

I get it, Gillmor. I get that easier media access and a more diverse range of voices creates better journalism.

Problem is, the mountains of content that have already piled up on the Internet leave me unconvinced that quality journalism can be found at the grassroots level on the Web. Gillmor might disagree, but I think establishment media – a name at the top of a good piece of journalism – is necessary to lend credibility to an article (or video or slideshow or other multimedia, for that matter).

“We the media: Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people” has some great points hidden beneath a lot of rubbish – much like the Internet. The first several chapters are almost patronizing to today’s savvy media students, explaining what exactly an RSS feed reader does and that (gasp) information can be shared via peer-to-peer networks. No journalist on the top half of a rock is unaware of these functions.

But the meat of Gillmor’s argument comes in later chapters, assuming readers can wade through the “Internet for Dummies” junk early on. Chapter 10, “Here Come the Judges (and Lawyers),” finally addresses that this digital media is causing big business and big government to take notice and, ultimately, attempt to limit freedoms the press has enjoyed for more than 200 years in America.

He gets to the root of the regulation problem in addressing the Internet as a global medium instead of a regional one. It’s really difficult to regulate libel and fair use on a global scale.

Fair use, in particular, has been called into question as significantly more people not only have access to these media, but they also have access to the means by which they can concoct their own work. Through this access, and excessive indirect sourcing of previously established material, current fair use standards are being called into question.

The core of fair use questions resides in property rights, according to Gillmor. A government that relies so heavily on free market principles, including well-defined property rights, is increasingly regulatory, and regulation implies limits.

Proponents of regulating fair use want more established property rights for intellectual property, the likes of which media has never seen before, according to Gillmor. The author suggests though that to take intellectual property is not theft, contrary to what these proponents would have one believe, because the originator still had access to the property.

These questions of fair use and property rights in a digital media are far more interesting than the initial chapters of Gillmor’s book, which focus too heavily on elementary principles in digital media. Media students would be better served by a lengthy discussion of these potential problems than in tutorials on how to subscribe to trendy new Web features.

Maybe next time this huge proponent of Internet journalism will find a more effective medium to present his research on digital media.