Tag Archives: journalism

How to invest in closing America’s “information voids” and digital divides

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(Graphic by New York Times)

In the same way that poor diets affect our physical health, America’s infodemic is being fueled by poor information diets. About 2,100 newspapers have folded since 2004, driving a ~58% decline in newsroom employment.

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Digital outlets have not replaced the jobs or journalism reporters produced and editors verified.

Now, the New York Times reports that “pink slime” outlets are filling the information voids left behind, with the emergence of pay-for-play digital outlets that launder partisan attacks for a few dollars an article and digital duopoly of Facebook and Google dominates the digital advertising markets.

None of this is new nor, in 2020, can we really say that no one saw this coming.

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Clay Shirky was brutally honest about the fate of the newspapers back in 2014, after he “thought about the unthinkable” in 2009.

In an essay that accurately predicted the ongoing trend in the industry, Shirky asked the crucial question that keeps people who believe democracies depend on a robust, independent free press to inform publics engaging in self-governance: “who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?”

His answer remains instructive:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

There were good ideas in the Knight Commission’s report on the information needs of American democracy, but it’s hard for me to argue that the polluted social media and cable news ecosystems of today are meeting them, given the collapse documented above.

In 2020, there is still no national strategy to catalyze that journalism, despite the clear and present danger absence poses to the capacity of the American people to engage in self-governance or the shared public facts necessary for effective collective action in response to a public health threat.

Investors, philanthropists, foundations, and billionaries who care about the future of our nation needs to keep investing in experiments that rebuild trust in journalism by reporting with the communities reporters cover using the affordances of social media, not on them.

Publishers could build out new forms of service journalism based upon data that improve access to information, empower consumers, patients, and constituents to make better choices, and ask the people formerly known as the audience to help journalists investigate.

We need to find more sustainable business models that produce investigative journalism that don’t depend on grants from foundations and public broadcasting corporations, though those funds will continue be part of the revenue mix.

As Shirky said, “nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

Finally, state governments need to subsidize public access to publications and the Internet through libraries, schools, and wireless networks, aiming to deploy gigabit speeds to every home through whatever combination of technologies gets the job done.

The FCC, states and cities should invest in restorative information justice. How can a national government that spend hundreds of billions on weapon systems somehow have failed to provide a laptop for each child and broadband Internet access to every home?

It is unconscionable that our governments have allowed existing social inequities to be widened in 2020, as children are left behind by remote learning, excluded from the access to the information, telehealth, unemployment benefits, and family that will help them and their families make it through this pandemic.

Information deprivation should not be any more acceptable in the politics of the world’s remaining hyperpower than poisoning children with lead through a city water supply.

New “State of Open Data” book captures a global zeitgeist around public access to information and use

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For a decade, I’ve tracked the contours of open data, digital journalism, open source software and open government, publishing research on the art and science of data journalism that explored and tied together those threads.

This week, I’m proud to announce that a new book chapter on open data, journalists, and the media that I co-authored with data journalism advisor Eva Constantaras has been published online as part of “The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons!”

We joined 43 other authors in a 18-month project that reflected on “10 years of community action and review the capacity of open data to address social and economic challenges across a variety of sectors, regions, and communities.”

The publication and the printed review copy I now possess is the end of a long road.

Back in January 2018, I asked a global community of data journalists, open government advocates, watchdogs and the public for help documenting the “State of Open Data” and journalism for a new project for Open Data for Development. While I was at the Sunlight Foundation, I seeded the initial network scan on journalists, media and open data.

Over the past year, people and organizations from around the world weighed in – & Eva Constantaras joined me as co-editor & lead author, creating a “network scan” of the space. The writing project traveled with me, after I left Sunlight, and over this winter we edited and synthesized the scan into a polished chapter.

The book was originally going to be introduced at the 5th International Open Government Data Conference in Buenos Aires, in the fall of 2018, but will instead be officially launched at the Open Government Partnership’s global summit in Ottawa, Canada at the end of May 2019.

The book, which was funded by the International Research Centre and supported by the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network. As a result of that support, “The State of Open Data” was also published in print by African Minds, from whom it may also be purchased. (While I was paid to edit and contribute, I don’t receive any residuals.)

Last night, I joined Tim Davies and other authors at the OpenGov Hub in DC to talk about the book & our chapters. Video of Davies, who managed to cover a tremendous amount of ground in ten minutes, is embedded below.

Thank you to everyone who contributed, commented and collaborated in this project, which will inform the public, press and governments around the world.

 

On data journalism, accountability and society in the Second Machine Age

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On Monday, I delivered a short talk on data journalism, networked transparency, algorithmic transparency and the public interest at the Data & Society Research Institute’s workshop on the social, cultural & ethical dimensions of “big data”. The forum was convened by the Data & Society Research Institute and hosted at New York University’s Information Law Institute at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as part of an ongoing review on big data and privacy ordered by President Barack Obama.

Video of the talk is below, along with the slides I used. You can view all of the videos from the workshop, along with the public plenary on Monday evening, on YouTube or at the workshop page.

Here’s the presentation, with embedded hyperlinks to the organizations, projects and examples discussed:

For more on the “Second Machine Age” referenced in the title, read the new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

Berkman Center maps networked public sphere’s role in SOPA/PIPA debate

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A new paper from Yochai Benkler and co-authors at the Berkman Center maps how the networked public sphere led to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act being defeated in the U.S. Congress.

“Abstract: “This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations.”

Key insight: “We find that the fourth estate function was fulfilled by a network of small-scale commercial tech media, standing non-media NGOs, and individuals, whose work was then amplified by traditional media. Mobilization was effective, and involved substantial experimentation and rapid development. We observe the rise to public awareness of an agenda originating in the networked public sphere and its framing in the teeth of substantial sums of money spent to shape the mass media narrative in favor of the legislation. Moreover, we witness what we call an attention backbone, in which more trafficked sites amplify less-visible individual voices on specific subjects. Some aspects of the events suggest that they may be particularly susceptible to these kinds of democratic features, and may not be generalizable. Nonetheless, the data suggest that, at least in this case, the networked public sphere enabled a dynamic public discourse that involved both individual and organizational participants and offered substantive discussion of complex issues contributing to affirmative political action.”

One data set, however, was missing from the paper: the role of social media, in particular Twitter, in reporting, amplifying and discussing the bills. The microblogging platform connected many information nodes mapped out by Berkman, from hearings to activism, and notably did not shut down when much of the Internet “blacked out” in protest.

The paper extends Benkler’s comments on a networked public commons from last year.

As I wrote then, we’re in unexplored territory. We may have seen the dawn of new era of networked activism and participatory democracy, borne upon the tidal wave of hundreds of millions of citizens connected by mobile technology, social media platforms and open data.

As I also observed, all too presciently, that era will also include pervasive electronic surveillance, whether you’re online and offline, with commensurate threats to privacy, security, human rights and civil liberties, and the use of these technologies by autocratic government to suppress dissent or track down dissidents.

Finding a way for forward will not be easy but it’s clearly necessary.

12 lessons about social media, politics and networked journalism

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In 2011, I was a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, where I talked with a workshop full of journalists about working within a networked environment for news. As I put together my talk, I distilled the lessons I’d learned from my experiences covering tech and the open government initiative that would affect the success of any audience relationship and posted them onto Google+. Following is an adapted and updated version of those insights. The Prezi from the presentation is online here.

1) We have to change our idea of “audience.”

People are no longer relegated to being the passive recipients of journalists’ work. They have often creators of content and have become important nodes for information themselves, sometimes becoming even more influential within their topical or regional communities than journalists are. That means we have to treat them differently. Yes, people are reading, watching or listening to the work of journalists but they’re much more than an “audience.”

In the 21st century, the intersection of government, politics and media is increasingly a participatory, reciprocal and hypersocial experience due to the explosion in adoption of connected smartphones that turn citizens into publishers, broadcasters and human sensors – or censors, depending upon the context. More than half of American adults have a smartphone in 2013. The role of editors online now includes identifying and debunking misinformation, sifting truth from fiction, frequently in real-time. The best “social media editors” are creating works of journalism from a raw draft of history contributed by the reports of the many.

2) Good conversations involve talking and listening.

Communicating effectively in networked environments increasingly involves asking good questions that elicit quality responses — the more specific the question, the better the chance for a quality response. The Obama administration’s open government initiative’s initial use of the Internet in 2009, at Change.gov, did not ask highly structured questions, which led to a less effective public consultation.

3) The success of any conversation depends upon how well we listen.

Organizations that invite comments and then don’t respond to audience comments or questions send a clear message — “we’re not listening.” There are now many ways there are to listen and a proliferation of channels, going far beyond calls and email.

Comments have become distributed across the Internet and social Web. People are not just responding to those made on a given article or post: they’re on Twitter, Facebook and potentially other outposts. Find where people are talking about your beat, organization or region: that’s your community. Some organizations are using metrics to determine not only how often sentiments are expressed but the strength of that conviction and the expertise behind it.

4) No matter how good the conversation, its hosts must close the loop.

When the host of a conversation, be it someone from government, school, business or media, asks someone’s opinion, but doesn’t acknowledge it, much less act upon it, the audience loses trust.

If we seek audience expertise but don’t subsequently let it inform our work, the audience loses trust. Increasingly, to gain and hold that trust you must demonstrate the evidence behind your assertions by citation, with research tied via footnotes or hyperlinks, source code or supporting data.

It’s better not to ask than to ask and not act upon the answer. It’s similarly better not to engage in social media at all than to perpetuate the same old one-way communication streams with legacy broadcast behaviors. There are also new risks posted by the combination of ubiquitous connected mobile devices and the global reach of social media networks. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it is better to be thought a fool than to tweet and prove it.

5) You must know who your audience is and where, why, when and how they’re searching for information to engage them effectively.

TechTarget, one of my former employers, successfully segmented its traditional IT audience into niches that cared passionately about specific technology and/or issues. The company then developed integrated media products around highly specific topical area, a successful business model, albeit one that has specialized applicability to the news business. Politico’s approach, which now includes live online video, paid subscriber content for “pros,” policy segmentation, email newsletters and events, is the most apt comparison in the political space, although there are many other trade publications that cater to niche audiences.

Here’s the key for both specific audiences: IT buyers have decision-making ability over thousands, if not millions, of dollars in budgets. Policy makers in DC have similar authority on appropriates, legislation or regulation.

Most general readers do not have budget authority nor policy cout and therefore will not sustain an effective business model. If you can create content that is of interest to people with buying power, then sponsors/advertisers will bite. The model, in other words is not a panacea.

6) Your audience should be able to find and hear from YOU.

It matters whether the person whose name is on a social media account actually engages in it. For instance, President Obama doesn’t directly use social media, with a few notable exceptions. His White House and campaign staff do, at @WhiteHouse and @BarackObama. Some GOP candidates and incumbents actually maintain their accounts. If you take away the president, the GOP is ahead in both houses of Congress. They have attracted huge followings.

Why does a personal account to complement the masthead matter? It stays with the reporter or editor from job to job. While many networks or papers have adopted naming conventions that immediately identify a journalist’s affiliation (@NameCBS or @NYT_Name) that practice does create a gray area in terms of who “owns” the account. @OctaviaNasrCNN was able to drop the CNN and keep her account. @CAmanpour was able to transfer from CNN to ABC. Even within networks, there is a lack of standardization: Compare @DavidGregory or @JakeTapper to @BetsyMTP.

7) People respond differently to personal accounts than mastheads.

Andy Carvin taught me about this dynamic years ago, which I’ve since seen borne out in practice. He compared the results he’d get from asking questions on his personal account (@acarvin) to a primary NPR accounts (@NPRNews) and found that people responded to him more. They followed and viewed the news account (more) as a feed for information. The White House @OpenGov dCTO account explored by creating her account, @BethNoveck, and found similar results. Incidentally, she then was able to keep that account after she left public service.

8) Better engagement with the audience requires the media to change established traditions and behaviors.

How many reporters still do not RT their competition’s stories, whether they beat them to a story or not? The best bloggers tend to be immense linkers and sharers. This is much like the decades-old question of whether a given newsroom’s website links to stories done by competitors or not. This behavior now has increasing consequences for algorithmic authority in both search engines (SEO) and social networks (SMO.) If we aspire to hosting the conversation around an issue, do we now have a responsibility need to point our audience at all the perspectives, data, sources and analysis that would contribute to an understanding of that issue? What happens if competitors or new media enterprises, like the Huffington Post, create an expectation for that behavior?

A good aspirational goal is to be a hub for a given beat, which means linking, RT’ing or sharing relevant information in a source-agnostic manner. If the beat is a given campaign, statehouse, policy area or geography.

9) Data-driven campaigns create more of a need for data-driven journalism.

Social media is important.. In Election 2012, social, location, mobile and campaign data — and how we use it — proved to be an equally important factor. Nate Silver pulled immense audiences to his 538 blog at the New York Times. Online spreadsheets, visualizations, predictive models, sentiment analysis, and mobile and/or Web apps are all part of the new ‘data journalism’ lexicon, as well as an emerging ‘newsroom stack’

Why? President Obama’s reelection campaign invested heavily in data collection, science and analysis for 2012. Others will follow in the years ahed. Republicans are investing in data but are appear to be behind, in terms of their capacity for data science. This may change in future cycles.

Government social media use continues to grow. More than 75% of Congress is using social media now. Freshmen Congressman in the House start the terms in office with a standard palate of platforms: Drupal for their website, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube for constituent communications. By mid-2010, 22 of 24 Federal agencies were on Facebook. This trend will only continue at the state and local level.

10) What are governments learning from their attempts?

They’re behind but learning. From applying broadcast models to adopting new platforms, tools for listening, archiving, campaigning vs governing, personal use versus staffers, linking or sharing behaviors, targeted consultations, constituent identity, privacy and security policies, states and cities are moving forward into the 21st century. Slowly.

11) Know your platforms, their utility, demographics and conventions.

Facebook is gigantic. You cannot ignore it if you’re looking for the places people congregate online. That said, if you’re covering politics and breaking news, Twitter remains the new wire for news. It’s still the backchannel for events. It’s not an ideal place to host conversations because of issues with threaded conversations, although third party tools and conventions have evolved that make regular discussions around #hashtags possible. Google+ is much better for hosting hangouts and discussions, as are modern blog comment platforms like Disqus. Facebook fits somewhere in between the two for conversation: you can’t upvote comments and it requires readers to have a Facebook account – but the audience is obviously immense.

12) Keep an eye out for what’s next and who’s there.

Journalists should be thinking about Google+ in terms of both their own ‘findability’ and that of their stories in search results. The same is true for Facebook and Bing integration. Watch stats from LinkedIn as a source or forum for social news. Reddit has evolving into a powerful platform for media and public figures to host conversations. StumbleUpon can send a lot of traffic to you.

The odds are good that there are influential blogs with many readers who are covering your beat. Know the most important ones and their writers, link to them, RT their work and comment upon them. More services will evolve, like communities around open data, regional hubs for communities themselves, games and hybrids of location-based networks. Have fun exploring them!

Eight open government recommendations for Canada

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Earlier this year, I accepted an invitation from Canadian Minister of Parliament Tony Clement, the president of Canada’s Treasury Board, to be a member of Canada’s advisory panel on open government, joining others from Canada’s tech industry, the academy and civil society. The first — and only — meeting to date was held via telepresence on February 28th, 2012.

I chose to accept the invitation to sit on this panel — in an unpaid, nonbinding and entirely voluntary role — because I viewed it in the same vein as my participation in the open consultation on the U.S. National Plan for Open Government that the White House held prior to the launch of the Open Government Partnership last year. I viewed it as an opportunity to represent a perspective at the (virtual) table that valued the role of journalism and civil society. I disclosed my involvement on the panel using the Internet, including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Here are the recommendations I made when I had an opportunity to speak:

1) Cooperation or partnerships with media for publishing and improving open government data. The Guardian’s datablog is top-notch in covering the United Kingdom efforts. This could include the ability to bring “cleaned” data back into a media platform. This should never preclude investigative work in the service of government accountability in the use of that data nor any restrictions regarding journalistic work.

2) A mobile strategy to involve citizens in governance, particularly remote towns, an issue in the immense country of Canada. Government should not neglect mobile websites, email and txt in favor of “Web 2.0” services.

3) An “analog” strategy, to ensure all citizens offline are included in any open government process, whether it involves a consultation, election, budgetary guidance, including the use of phones and town halls.

4) A demand-sensitive approach to freedom of information requests. Media and open government advocates should be further empowered to get more access to crucial “good government” records and to ask direct questions of public officials. Dataset releases should be prioritized by both the public interest and in the public interest.

5) A focus on releasing raw government performance data about government services and about regulated industries, as means of driving transparency into industries and government, providing material for both government and corporate watchdogs to hold institutions more accountable. Joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, as the United States has done, would be a substantive example of such a move.

6) A national citizen scanning initiative, akin to Carl Malamud’s “Yes We Scan” notion, to digitize government information.

7) A focus on meaningful engagement on social media platforms, not simply broadcasting political agendas, with incentives to listen to the concerns of constituents, not increase the volume of outbound communication.

8 ) Measure open data outcomes, not volume: I suggested later in the meeting that measuring the impact of open data should not come from the number of data sets published nor the number of apps on the minister’s iPhone. The success of the effort would be judged upon A) improvements to internal efficiency or productivity, B) downstream use of data, not total datasets published C) the number of applications that are actively used by citizens, whether in the service of driving greater accountability or civic utility.

A note on disclosure

Questions have been raised by author Evgeny Morozov about whether I should be on this panel or not, given that I write about open government. (He indicated on Twitter that he thinks that I should not be.) I asked several professors and editors prior to accepting the offer if they saw an issue with joining, prior to accepting the offer. All replied I could do so if I was open about my involvement and disclosed it. The Canadian government itself subsequently made that disclosure, along with my social publications on February 28th. I have been waiting for them to publish a more detailed, full record of the open government panel discussion, to no avail. (The above recommendations constitute publication of my notes made prior and during to the meeting but should not be viewed a transcript. An extremeley general, high level summary can be found at open.gc.ca.)

To date, in that context, my sole involvement has been to give feedback on Canada’s open government plan, listed above, over a teleconference screen. I have also talked with David Eaves, who also sits on the advisory panel (see his post on his involvement for more information).

When I was in Brazil last month for the Open Government Partnership conference, I did attend a dinner at the Canadian embassy that included Clement and the Canadian delegation, along with Eaves. While I was there, I talked with Canada’s deputy CIO about how I personally used social media and derived value from it, along with how I had observed large institutions accumulate and retrieve knowledge internally using collaboration software. I also talked with attendees about hockey, Brazil, dinner itself, and Eaves’ experience being a father of a newborn baby. I do not know if open government or open data were the subject of subsequent conversation with the Clement, ambassador or their staff: I left after dessert.

If you have strong opinions about my involvement, as described above or elsewhere, please ring in in the comments or contact me directly at alex@oreilly.com.

What is the relationship of social media and politics in 2012?

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Taking stock of global freedom of expression on World Press Freedom Day

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In 2010, only 1 in 6 people lives in countries with a free press, according to a new report on press freedom from Freedom House. There is a long road ahead to establishing and protecting freedom of expression for humanity.

Freedom House Survey of Global Media Independence

This week, defenders of free expression are celebrating the progress of press freedom and recognizing the challenges that persist globally on World Press Freedom Day 2011. This is the 20th anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration that helped to establish UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day. The United States is hosting this year’s World Press Freedom Day in Washington, D.C. at the Newseum. You can watch the livestream below and follow the conversation on Twitter on the #wpfd hashtag, both of which are embedded below.

wpfd2011 on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

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To learn more about global freedom of expression and and the organizations that protect journalists and support the collection and dissemination of news about our world, visit:

ProPublica: Understanding the budget standoff and government shutdown [CHEATSHEET]

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This ProPublica story by Marian Wang (@mariancw) is syndicated under a Creative Commons license. If you found it useful, make sure to follow @ProPublica on Twitter and do what ever else you can to support their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting. For more on this story, the Sunlight Foundation has also provided a helpful guide to the possible results of a government shutdown. -Editor.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congress has two days to reach a budget deal to fund the government for the rest of the year or else come Saturday, the federal government will go into a partial shutdown.

But what’s the budget standoff all about and what would a shutdown really entail? Here’s our attempt to explain the basics:

Basics behind the budget standoff

The GOP and the Obama administration are currently locked in a standoff over a difference of $7 billion to $30 billion – miniscule amount of the total $3.5 trillion budget. (OMB Watch, an open government group, has a thorough account [1] of the budget battles that led up to this point.)

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has a simple summary [2] of the GOP’s budget proposal, put forward by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on Tuesday: It lowers corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy, extends the Bush tax cuts permanently, calls for repeal of both the health care law and Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and freezes discretionary spending at 2008 levels.

The Obama administration has offered to cut $33 billion from current spending levels but hasn’t given many specifics about what those cuts would entail

Political calculations

The negotiations have been a bit complicated for a few reasons. The first is that it’s not always clear what the two sides are using as the baseline [3] for cuts — whether it’s current operating levels or Obama’s proposed budget for 2011 (which never passed). Both parties have at times used the 2011 budget proposal as a baseline, making the cuts sound more impressive.

Another reason it’s been hard to nail down numbers is that Republicans haven’t always been on the same page.  The Tea Party-supported GOP freshmen, who aren’t at the negotiating table, have stuck to a hard line on the budget. House Speaker John Boehner, who is at the negotiating table, says there’s “no daylight between the tea party and me.”

But it’s clear that in the run-up to the November elections, the GOP pledged $100 billion in cuts, and when the House in February proposed [4] a list of somewhat scaled back spending cuts closer to the Obama administration2019s current offer, House leaders got grief from some GOP freshmen [5] and pledged the next day to cut a full $100 billion. (That’s using [6] President Obama’s never-enacted 2011 budget as a baseline, so it translates to about $61 billion in cuts from current levels.)

Boehner, moreover, pledged not to stop at $100 billion [7], according to Time magazine: “We’re not going to stop there,” he said at CPAC. “Once we cut the discretionary accounts, then we’ll get into the mandatory spending. And then you’ll see more cuts.”

But this week, he reportedly told President Obama that he could probably agree to about $40 billion in cuts [8] (using current levels at the baseline). That’s still $7 billion more than the administration has offered to cut. Democrats have complained that the GOP keeps shifting its goalposts [9] for compromise.

How a shutdown works

At agencies whose budgets are subject to Congressional appropriations, workers are put in two groups: essential or non-essential.

Essential workers keep working though they won’t get paid until funding is back again. Non-essential workers will be furloughed, so they won’t go to work until the funding issues are resolved, and they won’t get paid for days missed unless Congress specifically says so.

Which federal workers will be affected?

The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday night posted some guidance [10] on what would happen in the event of a shutdown. Workers find out from their agencies whether they’ll be furloughed until today or, at the latest, Friday.

The Washington Post has a piece on how frustrating this has been [11] for some workers. And the New York Times has noted that the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for federal workers, has sued [12] the Office of Management and Budget to get more information on agencies’ contingency plans.

The president and members of Congress, who aren’t subject to furloughs, will still get paid though a bill to reverse that has passed the Senate but not the House [13].

Lessons from the last shutdown

At this point, most of the predictions about what will happen in a shutdown are based on what happened in previous shutdowns. And most of the information cited on this seems to have been taken from a Congressional Research Service report [14] released in February [PDF].

The report notes that from 1995 to 1996, two shutdowns occurred- one that lasted five days and furloughed 800,000 workers; another that lasted 21 days and furloughed 284,000 workers. That’s a lot of variation, and keep in mind that entirely new agencies [15] have been formed in the 15 years since the last shutdown.

Which government services would be affected?

The New York Times has a handy list laying out how various government services might be affected [16]. Some things that would continue mostly unaffected are military operations, the Federal Reserve, the postal service, and Medicare and Social Security payments. An accompanying story also outlines some potential scenarios [17] in more detail:

The National Zoo would close, but the lions and tigers would get fed; Yellowstone and other national parks would shut down. The Internal Revenue Service could stop issuing refund checks. Customs and Border Patrol agents training officials in Afghanistan might have to come home. And thousands of government-issued BlackBerrys would go silent.

2026 In any shutdown, the government does not completely cease functioning, of course. Activities that are essential to national security, like military operations, can continue. Air traffic control and other public safety functions are exempt from shutdowns. Federal prisons still operate; law enforcement and criminal investigations can continue.

The Times also has a piece on how state governments may be affected [18] by a federal shutdown. The answer: not too much if it’s a short shutdown, but a long one could present real problems.

Follow on Twitter: @mariancw [19]

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Building a revolution in relevance in an age of information abundance

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Revolutions rooms“We’ve had a decade’s worth of news in less than two months,” Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for Politico. In the Saturday edition of Politico’s Playbook, Allen looked back at the Arab Spring and Japanese ongoing challenges:

It was Feb. 11 – seven weeks ago — that Mubarak fled the Arab spring, a rolling reordering of Middle East power that could wind up affecting global security as profoundly as 9/11.

It was March 11 – 15 days ago – that we woke to the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which will have ripple effects on the fragile global economy for months to come.

And, oh, we’re in three hot conflicts at once, for the first time since World War II.”

Related, in the NEW YORK TIMES: “Inundated With News, Many Find It Difficult to Keep Up on Libya”

“People interviewed across four states said that at a time when the world seems to stagger from one breathtaking news event to another — rolling turmoil across the Middle East, economic troubles at home, disaster upon disaster in Japan — the airstrikes on military targets in Libya can feel like one crisis too many.”

Through it all, I’ve been following Andy Carvin (@acarvin), whose Twitter feed has been a groundbreaking curation of the virtual community and conversation about the Middle East, including images, video, breaking news and unverified reports.

To wax metaphorical, his account has become a stream of crisis data drawn from from the data exhaust created by the fog of war across the Middle East, dutifully curated by a veteran digital journalist for up to 17 hours a day.

Carvin has linked to reports, to video and images from the front lines that are amongst the most graphic images of war I have ever seen. While such imagery is categorically horrific to view, they can help to bear witness to what is happening on the ground in countries where state media would never broadcast their like.

The vast majority of the United States, however, is not tracking what’s happening on the ground in the region so closely. NEW YORK TIMES:  

“A survey by the Pew Research Center — conducted partly before and partly after the bombing raids on Libya began on March 19 — found that only 5 percent of respondents were following the events ‘very closely.’ Fifty-seven percent said they were closely following the news about Japan.”

Understanding the immensity of the challenges that face Japan, Egypt and Libya is pushing everyone’s capacity to stay informed with day to day updates, much less the larger questions of what the larger implications of these events all are for citizens, industry or government. In the context of the raw information available to the news consumer in 2011, that reality is both exciting and alarming. The tools for newsgathering and dissemination are more powerful and democratized than ever before. The open question now is how technologists and journalists will work together to improve them to provide that context that everyone needs.

Finally, an editor’s note: My deepest thanks to all of the brave and committed journalists working long hours, traveling far from their families and risking their lives under hostile regimes for the reporting that helps us make it so.