In his assessment of the journalistic implications of the WikiLeaked Afghanistan War Logs earlier this week, Jay Rosen made a provocative prediction:

Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect — not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget…. The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works…and often fails to work?

It’s early still, of course, but it’s all too likely that Rosen’s forecast — the leaked documents, having exploded, dissolving into a system ill-equipped to deal with them — will prove accurate. I hope we’ll be wrong. In the meantime, though, it’s worth adding another layer to Rosen’s analysis: the role of journalists themselves in the leaked documents’ framing and filtering. If, indeed, the massive tree that is WikiLeaks has fallen in an empty forest, that will be so not only because of the dynamic between public opinion and political elites who often evade it; it will also be because of the dynamic between public opinion and those who shape it. It will be because of assumptions (sometimes outdated assumptions) journalists make about their stories’ movement through, and life within, the world. The real challenge we face isn’t an empty forest; it’s a forest so full — so blooming with growth, so booming with noise — that we forget what a toppling tree sounds like in the first place.

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[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

WikiLeaks, data journalism and radical transparency: I’ll be covering two weeks in this review because of the Lab’s time off last week, but there really was only one story this week: WikiLeaks’ release of The War Logs, a set of 90,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan. There are about 32 angles to this story and I’ll try to hit most of them, but if you’re pressed for time, the essential reads on the situation are Steve Myers, C.W. Anderson, Clint Hendler, and Janine Wedel and Linda Keenan.

WikiLeaks released the documents on its site on Sunday, cooperating with three news organizations — The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel — to allow them to produce special reports on the documents as they were released. The Nation’s Greg Mitchell ably rounded up commentary on the documents’ political implications (one tidbit from the documents for newsies: evidence of the U.S. military paying Afghan journalists to write favorable stories), as the White House slammed the leaks and the Times for running them, and the Times defended its decision in the press and to its readers.

The comparison that immediately came to many people’s minds was the publication of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War in 1971, and two Washington Post articles examined the connection. (The Wall Street Journal took a look at both cases‘ First Amendment angles, too.) But several people, most notably ProPublica’s Richard Tofel and Slate’s Fred Kaplan, quickly countered that the War Logs don’t come close to the Pentagon Papers’ historical impact. They led a collective yawn that emerged from numerous political observers after the documents’ publication, with ho-hums coming from Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, the Washington Post, and even the op-ed page of the Times itself. Slate media critic Jack Shafer suggested ways WikiLeaks could have planned its leak better to avoid such ennui.

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[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He's reading and reacting to Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. Over the next several weeks, we'll be running Matthew's ongoing twin review; here are parts one, two, three, four, five, and six. — Josh]

In a chapter called “The Deepening Page,” Nicholas Carr offers a swift and graceful account of the history of writing. He traces the rise of logic, coherence, and depth from magical formulae scratched on potsherds and wax tablets by the ancients, through the pious allusions of the middle ages to the graceful periodic sentences of the eighteenth century. Their prose represented not only a formal triumph, but a neural one as well. “To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought,” writes Carr, “one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object.”

The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

To Carr, the story of manuscript, printing, and publishing is the rise of the “deep page,” with modern literature as the apotheosis of literacy. The process a grimy Gutenberg started in the mid fifteenth century culminates in Wallace Stevens, whose poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” glories in the deep page: “The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind / The access of perfection to the page.”

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Sometimes you can spend an entire morning racing the clock to put together the perfect blog post, and once you’re done, find a quote or two that would have let you sum up the entire thing in a lot less time. Such is the case with this great exchange between veteran reporter Tom Ricks (now blogging at Foreign Policy magazine) and David Corn at Mother Jones. Ricks pretty much trashed the “War Logs“/Wikileaks story that has been the buzz of the journalism world for the past few days, and dropped this gem:

A huge leak of U.S. reports and this is all they get? I know of more stuff leaked at one good dinner on background.

David Corn responded with a thoughtful post that is worth reading in full. The essence of it, however, is this:

These documents — snapshots from a far-away war — show the ground truth of Afghanistan. This is not what Americans receive from US officials. And with much establishment media unable (or unwilling) to apply resources to comprehensive coverage of the war, the public doesn’t see many snapshots like these. Any information that illuminates the realities of Afghanistan is valuable.

This captures the essence of the question I was trying to get at in the fifth point of yesterday’s post (“journalism in the era of big data”). I noted the similarities between “War Logs” and last week’s big bombshell, “Top Secret America.” The essence of the similarity, I said, was that they were based on reams of data, which, in sum, might not tell us anything shockingly new but that brought home, in Ryan Sholin’s excellent phrase, “the weight of failure.” And this gets me excited because I think it represents something new in journalism, or something old-enough-to-new: a focus on the aggregation of a million “on the ground reports” that might sometimes get us closer to the truth than three well placed sources over a nice off-the-record dinner. And I’m fascinated by this because this is the way that I, as a qualitative social scientist, have always seen as a particularly valid way to learn about the world.

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I’m very pleased to provide an update on the case of Hollman Morris, which I’ve written about here and here. Hollman is the noted Colombian journalist who was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to come study here at Harvard — only to have his request for a student visa rejected by the United States government. An American official told Hollman he was being rejected under the terrorist activities section of the Patriot Act; Hollman has done much courageous reporting on ties between right-wing militias and the Colombian government, which has opened him up to criticism from those he reports on.

I’m happy to say that the U.S. State Department has reversed its decision and decided to allow Hollman into the country. He’ll arrive here in Cambridge within the next few weeks and will be able to study at Harvard as we’d originally hoped.

Lots and lots of people worked hard to try to get us to this point — in the human rights world, where Hollman has been held up for years as a model reporter; in the journalism world, which can be counted on to rally around a case like his; and in the community of past Nieman Fellows who wanted to see Hollman join their number. We’re very grateful to all who got involved and argued a journalist shouldn’t be kept out of this country based on who his reporting angers. We’re also grateful for those within the State Department who recognized the need to reverse their decision.

One of the traditional highlights of the Nieman experience is the weekly “sounding.” That’s what we do every Monday night during the year: One by one, the Nieman Fellows each prepare a meal for their Nieman colleagues and spend an hour or so telling the story of their career and life in journalism. I suspect Hollman’s going to have some good stories to tell.

Here’s the press release we just put out: Keep reading »

Whenever big news breaks that’s both (a) exciting and (b) relevant to the stuff I research, I put myself through a little mental exercise. I pretend I have an army of invisible Ph.D. students at my beck-and-call and ask them to research the three most important “future of news” items that I think emerge out of the breaking news. That way, I figure out for myself what’s really important amidst all the chaos.

The Wikileaks-Afghanistan story is big. It’s big for the country, it’s big for NATO soldiers and Afghan civilians, and (probably least importantly) it’s big for journalism. And a ton of really smart commentary has been written about it already. So all I want to do here is chime in on what I’d be focusing on if I wanted to understand the Wikileaks story in a way that will still be relevant one year, five years, even twenty years from now. I want to briefly mention three quick assignments I’d give my hypothetical Ph.D. students, and two assignments I’d keep for myself.

— Watch the news diffuse: The release of the Wikileaks stories yesterday was a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion. More complex than the usual stereotype of “journalists report, bloggers opine,” in the case the Wikileaks story we got to see a far more nuanced (and, I would say, far more real) series of news decisions unfold: from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010; let’s try to map it.

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BrandFlakesforBreakfast might have put it best: “…If you live in a cave, you need to be aware of the fact that Old Spice owned the internet yesterday.”

Indeed. How the brand did that owning is fascinating (and, if you haven’t seen it already, ReadWriteWeb’s detailed description of that process is well worth the read); essentially, Old Spice’s ad agency spent an entire day curating the real-time web, writing and producing videos based on that curation, and posting them to YouTube — where, again, the real-time web could do its thing. It was, as Josh pointed out, the advertising world’s answer to the Demand Media model of content creation: research, churn, lather, rinse, repeat.

And — here’s where Old Spice parts ways with Demand Media — pretty much everyone seems to love it. (As one web metrics firm noted, “We took a look at some of the most explosive viral videos we’ve measured, including Bush dodging Iraqi shoes, Obama giving his electoral victory speech, and Susan Boyle, and found that in the first 24 hours, Old Spice Responses outpaces all of them.”) It’s a popularity, notably, that seems to bridge the culture. The Atlantic wondered whether the campaign augurs the future of online video, while Reddit posted an open letter declaring, “Ok, you won us all over Mr. Old Spice Man. On reddit…our demographic is notoriously difficult to crack. And hell, you cracked it well, on our home turf which we patrol carefully, and we liked it.” Online denizens from Alyssa “big on Twitter” Milano to 4chan — yes, that 4chan — have also apparently hopped onto Mr. Old Spice Man’s noble steed.

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