Peer News Sounds Dumb
Pierre Omidyar has backed a new news site called Peer News, headed up by John Temple, formerly the editor of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News. In a recent post by Sarah Lacy, he seems all over the place, and some of the things planned just seem plain dumb.
“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:
-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?
-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?
-How do you do that in a sustainable way?
One of the major failings of industrial print media was their incapacity to support open social discourse, principally by demonizing or simply ignoring all but the most powerful or bourgeois voices. So, how will you right that egregious wrong? He’s not saying.
On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.
Hmmm. Wikinews?
The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community. “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.”
But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.
Here’s where we wander into dumb. Community, but no comments? ‘Hosts’ that answer questions? Who gets to ask questions? This is more of the same old ‘we know better than you’ editorial overlord thinking that has led newspapers, in general, to the brink.
Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”
Gee, how brave. That’s what blogs have been doing for over a decade.
So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.”
Um, so we are going to pay to read stuff that hosts serve up, where they decide what are the important questions to ask, and we don’t get to participate directly. I don’t think so.
Update on Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 8:35AM by
Stowe Boyd
John Temple has clarified his thoughts about comments at Peer News. It seems that he meant there will not be anonymous comments:
The second thing that will make us different is how we’ll handle what most news sites call comments.
How many of you, and be honest with me, how many of you read comments because you think you’re going to learn something from them? Give me a show of hands. How many of you are embarrassed by the comments on your own Web site and think they reflect badly on your community or news organization?
Maybe now you’ll understand why we’re not going to have “comments”. (I put quotes around the word comments after Jay Rosen pointed out that it sounded like I was saying it was going to be a one-way conversation. My point was that we were going to have debate, discussions, conversations - not comments. We think we can create a more satisfying and civil environment through this approach, rather than using “comments” after an article.)
We all know how comments on news sites can descend into racism, hate, the ugly side of humanity…how they can reflect badly on news organizations and often only reflect a narrow slice of their communities… in truth, the comments sections of most news sites often act as a keep out sign to decent people… why would anybody want to participate given the tone and nature of the speech found there?
The problem…or at least a big part of the problem…anonymity…
In a civic square…you have to show your face …you can’t avoid responsibility for your words..
We plan to recreate that experience…
I would like to see John write a longer post on this topic, with fewer ellipses. These are just some notes he prepared for a talk, and the talk and the notes — prior to his updating them to clarify what he meant regarding comments — were confusing enough to make a long list of people wonder about what he was actually saying, and led Sarah Lacy to write what she did.
But blocking anonymous comments introduces a host of other issues: an abused woman would be unable to discuss her plight, a worker might not comment on illegality for fear of losing his job, and other at-risk members of the community might have the voices stilled by fear. It might be be possible, and more sensible, to have verified identities in the system without disclosing those identities in public.
