Today we toast Josh Marshall. Ten years ago he started Talking Points Memo, which was basically just a left-leaning slew of posts linking to breaking news out of the Florida recount, the sort of thing that would barely rate a Tumblr today (and in fact, he coded the whole thing in HTML by hand until 2003, when somebody explained this amazing thing called Moveable Type). From humble beginnings he wound up with TPM Media, an entity that actually employs reporters and commits acts of actual journalism, to the point that it was the first Internet news outlet to receive a Peabody award.
This is interesting to me because sixteen years ago this fall, I sketched out for one of my professors what I thought an “Internet-enabled newspaper” would look like. It would mean being able to link relevant stories together, and even update them as additional news broke. It would mean pictures right up on a website immediately. It would mean embedded USENET groups, so you could have feedback and discussion tied directly to an article. (Yes, I thought this was a selling point back then. Shoot me now.) He was very intrigued, but I don’t think I really grasped what was possible, because at the time there weren’t really smartphones or cameraphones – hell, I didn’t have my first cellular phone until 1996, if I remember right.
Actually, the first Internet-enabled device I had was a borrowed Palm VII for a couple of weeks in late summer of 2000, which would show “web clippings” on its dinky 160×160 4-bit grayscale screen if you raised its antenna and chanted to the voodoo gods long enough. I soon latched onto an AT&T phone that actually let me check my mail on an even dinkier screen (using CDPD over TDMA, gah), and in early 2002 I was saddled with a Blackberry (and support responsibilities for same) because some C_O had heard that they worked in the World Trade Center when the cellular was overloaded. Not until 2003 did I have a device which brought it all together and would do email, web and camera all in one – and the SonyEricsson P800 was a disaster of a phone to use as a phone even if the rest of the features were splendid, which they weren’t. Even as late as 2004, the platforms of the Metro weren’t chockablock with people all looking down at their phone all the time, the way the Caltrain platform was by January 2009.
Back during the last boom, the pundits all talked about how the Golden Convergence was coming, and that set-top box on your TV would be your computer, your mail, your movies, blah blah blah. I don’t think they figured on the convergence happening on the phone. And really, that’s what’s transformed news. How many cameraphone videos do you see during natural disasters or unexpected incidents? How much of your breaking news do you get from Twitter?
For the last couple of weeks, it seems like everyone on the internet has been taking the piss out of Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek essay in which he asserted that “What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.” It apparently completely eluded him that in such a world, there would be a market for people who wanted to get into the editing, reviewing, critic-ing and filtering business.
And now, in 2010, Josh Marshall has set the bar for how Internet-based journalism works – because he didn’t know what Cliff Stoll knew. The moral of the story is this: just because you live in the future, don’t assume you live at the end of history.