Keynote at the Innovation @ Creative Industries Conference in Berlin

Projekt Zukunft Berlin - the futurist initiative of the city of Berlin organized the conference "Innovation @ Creative Industries", and invited me to make the opening keynote. The conference website is here.

Here is the short description of the event:

Creativity and innovation are of key importance for the economic and social well-being of Europe’s cities. At this, creative industries play an important role due to many reasons: They are a major source of innovative ideas. They offer services and products which contribute to the innovative activities of other entrepreneurs within and outside the creative industries. And by being intense technology users and fast trend follower they often demand even more new developments. Yet, the high impact of creative and cultural workers on the cities’ innovation performance is often not widely known.

Therefore, the international and high profile conference „Innovation @ Creative Industries“ brings together 200 creative workers, artists and key stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors around Europe to reveal the benefits of the booming creative industries and approaches to stimulate their contribution to innovation capacity of regions.

Here is the keynote I delivered at the event:

I wish to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak here today. This is an important event. The creative industries are important in the innovation economy – not only as an industry among others producing innovation, but as a part of the mindset that drives innovation, that enables society to incubate ideas and transform them into value, across the spectrum of human activity.

Also, Berlin is my mother’s home town, which makes it an extra treat to be here.

The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University is based on three new concepts: Innovation Journalism, attention work and the Innovation Communication System. Innovation Journalism is Journalism covering innovation. It tells us how innovation happens, covering the innovation processes and the innovation ecosystems that nowadays determine our futures. In 2003, I did a Google search, and got thousands of hits on the expressions technology journalism and business journalism, but zero hits on innovation journalism. Journalists were covering innovation, but there was no name for it. It was done within traditional news beats – technology or business or politics or culture. But innovation is not about technology OR business OR politics. Innovation is about the combination of them. Innovation journalism can be seen as a horizontal news beat, crossing the traditional news beats.

People think innovation something techie. As a physicist and techie myself, I will stick out my neck and say that innovation is about language. Every innovation is an innovation in language. It needs a name so we can call it something. It needs a definition so we know what it is. And it needs a story, so that we can relate to it. If any of these three things are missing, the innovation will not happen.

I suggest society can not innovate faster than it can create new shared language. Society has an infrastructure for creating new shared language, for example journalism, communication and PR. Today we live in an attention economy, where attention is a scarce commodity. It has attention workers – people who generate and broker attention professionally. These are, for example, journalists working for ad-based media, or communicators and PR people. They are all stakeholders in public attention, and when there is public attention, then shared language is more easily created.

They are key players in the innovation communication system, which influences the flows of attention around innovation issues.

Innovation journalism, attention work and innovation communication systems are concepts that are constructive for discussing how innovation systems work, how innovation happens. They help society create new shared language around innovation processes and ecosystems.

Innovation journalism connects the innovation economy and the democratic society, which are not well connected today. I get worried when I hear innovation business leaders in democracies speak highly about the innovation policies of governments in non-democratic countries, at the same time expressing frustration over the lack of good policies by their democratically elected governments in Europe. I think this is because we lack the ability to have a public discussion around innovation issues. There is little incentive for elected politicians to spend much time on innovation, when journalism is not organized in a way that it is able to cover it.

The EU is hopefully recognizing this, and I hope they will address journalism and the creative industry it in their policies for developing Europe as the worlds leading innovation economy. Innovation funding can be used for developing innovation journalism, VINNOVA in Sweden is doing it already, as are Tekes and Sitra in Finland, together with the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. More countries will hopefully do it, and hopefully more of the creative industry can be involved.

Storytelling is very important for innovation. Innovation needs vision and scenarios, and they need to be imaginative and inspiring. It needs new metaphors, introducing us to new things by analogies to things we already know.

We only need to look back at the role of science fiction to realize how important creative storytelling is for innovation. Science fiction gave us grand fantasies of futures shaped by scientific discoveries and technological progress. We grew up reading about how the interaction between people and technology conquered the universe. When these stories were written, they were fantasies, made to tickle and entertain. But in fact they were blueprints of the future. Young people got inspired, and chose educations and professions that enabled them to make the science fiction stories come true.

These science fiction stories were powerful, because they put science and technology into a social context, fantasizing about how it would change the human mind, the way societies work, and culture and art. We can see the results today.

And still, science fiction was until recently not considered good literature.

Our parents and teachers rarely looked upon science fiction as a respected form of literature. They preferred we read the classics.

The thing about science fiction was that it bridged popular science, technology and the humanities. That is tricky. The British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave in 1959 a well known lecture about how the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — saying it was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. He noted that “literary intellectuals” felt no requirement to know anything about science and technology, they would even take pride in not knowing anything about it.

Innovation is often about bridging and mixing things that are separated, and this there comes with challenges for the innovators. It will trigger controversies and there will be politics. Think of, for example, convergence in information technology, where phone companies and computer companies are finding themselves increasingly in the same business, going from being complementary to being competing. That comes with a lot of politics both within organizations and between them.

Many useful innovations fail, because they did not manage to build a constituency, they lost the politics.

And even when innovations succeed, the innovators may fail. Entrepreneurs know how difficult it is to survive success. They need to be good politicians.

Innovation will continue to increase, and so will the politics, as our whole society gets increasingly affected.

The world economy is going through a fundamental shift. Economic growth used to be driven by doing more of the same. Now it is more about the new replacing the old. In the more-of-the-same economy, we switched our phones when the old one broke, in the innovation economy we switch our phones because we want the newer models.

In the more-of-the-same economy, researchers lived apart from the market people. The researchers focused on the future, while the market people played the more-of-the-same game. There was a chasm separating the techies and the market folks, they had different interests, different priorities and different languages. A version of C.P. Snows two cultures in the industrial economy.

Today, in the innovation economy, every launch of a product, process or service, is just a step on the way, a preparation for the next launch. The most important thing now, is to work on what comes next. That is the nature of the innovation economy. This means that researchers and market people are moving closer to each other, they need to bridge the techie and the market cultures. We need to bridge that to politics and the broader society, as well.

Many people still think of innovation as something very technological. This is a reason to why C.P. Snow’s “humanities culture” has until recently not cared very much about it, some people taking pride in being ignorant about it. Unfortunately, leading newsrooms live with the cultural divide between science and tech on one hand and the humanities and social issues on the other hand. This is not helpful for the democratic society in the innovation age.

The humanities are as important for innovation as science, technology and business. But most important of all is to bridge between them, to let social aspects, arts and humanities interact with science, technology and business in the same story.

Now, at the core of innovation there must be creativity, free spirit, and radical thought. The key value of an innovative society is not acceptance. It is tolerance. No entrepreneur will expect to be accepted all the time, few people will know what they are doing or the potential significance of it. But new initiatives need to be tolerated, so they can develop to the stage when people will be able to accept them.

My grandmother was a psychologist here in Berlin in the 30s, working closely with Wilhelm Reich. Reich was free-spirited and provocative. He changed the world by marrying two concepts: sexuality and revolution, he coined the expression “the sexual revolution”, planting one of the seeds for the youth rebellion and counterculture of the 60s. The “Sexual revolution” was a social innovation, not a technological innovation or a business innovation, but it has driven technological and business innovations, for example in healthcare.

It is the concept is the essence of an invention, and how this concept succeeds in creating change is what is the essence of innovation. This is the difference between invention and innovation. An invention can be done by one single inventor. But in order to be an innovation, it needs to engage people and make some change to their lives. Innovations are the outcome of innovation processes driven by ecosystems of stakeholders.

And, I will continue to repeat, innovation is about people.

Doug Engelbart in Silicon Valley is known as “the inventor of the mouse”. Doug is a pioneer of human-computer interaction, the invention of the mouse was only a small part of his big contribution, which was manifested in the so called “mother of all demos”, where he and his team at SRI in 1969 demonstrated live a fully functioning computer network with computers running interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext, using a mouse. The idea behind the demo was to show how computers may help people interact better with each other.

Before getting his job at SRI, Doug had missed a number of job opportunities by saying that computers could be used for augmenting human intelligence, when everybody knew that computers should be used for automation. He said that computers should be small, when everybody knew that the bigger computers were, the better they were. Doug was bridging C.P. Snows two cultures, but few people on either side knew what he was talking about.

The people working with Doug were hippies, children of Wilhelm Reich’s sexual revolution, which was big stuff in California in the end of the sixties. They were young intelligent revolutionaries trying out LSD and and testing programming computers so that they would produce artistic sounds and patterns that would assist transcendental meditation. They loved reading science fiction. For them, technology and humanities were the same. That mindset shaped the way we relate to computers today.

Doug’s higher goal has remained throughout his life. He says we need to develop our collective intelligence in society, so that we can solve the big complex problems that are threatening humanity, like nuclear wars, global warming or pandemics. For this, he says, we need to develop technology that develops us. He talks about the “human system” and the “tool system”, where the humans develop the tools and the tools develop the humans. That is the core of the collective intelligence. When Doug spoke at my yearly journalism conference at Stanford two years ago, he pointed at journalism s the perceptive system of our collective intelligence. Not the sensory system, but the perceptive system, that helps us formulate concepts and deliberate what they mean. That is another way of describing the importance of creative industry in the innovation economy. Storytelling, creativity and art needs to be there.

Now let’s talk a bit about the risks that entrepreneurial innovators have to live with. For their visions to come true, they have to engage people around them, to bring in different stakeholders. They will need to play politics, and they need to do it good, because they are stirring the pot, and they are connecting things that people often feel don’t belong together.

In Silicon Valley, innovations are nowadays often developed by small companies, that then are acquired by bigger companies, except for small companies that themselves grow into big companies, like Google. This is a trend that we can see coming to the rest of the world. There is something with big companies, which makes it difficult for them to innovate radically. Not impossible, but still difficult.

This is what I call “the intrapreneur’s dilemma”. An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who innovates inside an existing organization. The “intrapreneur’s dilemma” goes like this:

When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization,
few will understand what he/she is doing,
but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization,
few will remember who started it,
but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs - they risk punishment for success. Organizations that want to be innovative need to find solutions to the intrapreneur's dilemma and its consequences, if they don't wish to set negative examples that will scare off people from intrapreneurship. Here is an example: as long as a new project is of little impact and not well understood, the intrapreneur will be fighting for its continuation while others may ignore its existence or perhaps wonder why it should be allowed to steal attention from the more important core activities. Once a project has impact and receives recognition, incumbents within the organization will want to influence or control it. People may reason that 'a project as important as this one should not be run by a trouble-maker'.

Many entrepreneurs I know say it is futile to be an intrapreneur. Any entrepreneurial spirit must leave and start their own startup. Then they are in a better position to balance the forces, so that they can come out on top.

This can be true, but it can also be that there are ways of organizing companies and societies so that creativity and innovation can be a part of the system, without killing off the creators and innovators.

In order for us to discuss these very important issues, we need the creative industry. We need storytellers of all sorts, who can earn their living on helping society develop shared narratives about how we can change things for the better, how we can solve problems, and that can stimulate our brains with creative visions and scenarios about what our lives can look like. Just like science fiction did.

But keep in mind that this requires creative storytelling that is horizontal. We need to bridge C.P. Snows two cultures to succeed. The storytelling should not preserve and isolate the silos in society. It should punch through the silos, and help people understand how they relate to other people in the system, who have very different skills from their own. When the creative industry does this, it will be a central component of the innovation economy.

Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism

The Finnish Innovation Journalism research initiative is organizing a Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism, taking place on Sep 25 at the University of Helsinki.

The conference is named "Weather Casters of the Future? - The Role of Journalism in Understanding Technological and Social Innovations". The conference is sponsored by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. I will be attending the conference as a keynote speaker.

The Finnish Injo initiative was started in 2005 by media entrepreneur Seppo Sisätto, and has in recent years been spearheaded by Turo Uskali. The Finnish initiative, backed by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, SITRA and Tekes, includes a major research project - Global Innovation Journalism - performed in collaboration between the Universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Tampere.

IJ-6 Conference Sum-Up

IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism took place at Stanford on May 18-20 2009. The conference carried the title "Task: Journalism succeeding with innovation". It was the most successful IJ-conference so far. For details about what was going on, check out the conference website.


IJ-6 hosted 241 people from 15 countries. This is our record so far, last year we had around 180 participants. The conference had a new format this year - instead of lots of panel discussion following each other, we arranged massively parallel workshops, so that all participants could take part in discussing topics that interested them. It was very successful. We had only three plenary presentations the two first days - all of them keynote sessions, which I had the pleasure to moderate.

The opening keynote was delivered by Vint Cerf, "father of the Internet" and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, who co-invented TCP/IP and co-founded the Internet-culture. We had a surprise visit by Doug Engelbart, who sat in with us on stage for the Q&A. Doug invented the computer mouse, as a part of demonstrating the first computer system with GUI, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext. Doug's lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since.

It was good to have them both on stage at the same time, they both have a big part in changing the world. The picture with both of them will be something to show the grandchildren one day. Both Vint and Doug take an interest in the future of journalism and are friends of the Injo Initiative at Stanford. Vint is on our advisory board, and keynoted once before, at IJ-3. Doug keynoted IJ-4.

The second keynote was by Curt Carlson, President SRI International, followed by a panel of three ace journalists: Gregg Zachary - now working with developing journalism in Africa, Michael Kanellos from Greentech Media and Eric Eldon from Venturebeat. Curt is just like Vint and Doug a regular guest of IJ-conference, and he is a member of our advisory board. Curt has a particularly deep understanding of how innovation happens, the impact it has on the world, his knowledge spans across tech, business and politics, and he is at home on all these arenas. The discussion among them was how journalism is managing to cover innovation today.

The third keynote was given by Jason Pontin, CEO and Editor in Chief of the Technology Review - which won a gold medal for best technology magazine last year. Jason's point was that for a publication to survive, the leadership needs to know both journalism business and content, it's not enough to know only one of them. He was joined by Amir Jahangir, CEO of SAMAA TV from Pakistan, and Thomas Frostberg, Senior Business Columnist of Sydsvenska Dagbladet from Sweden.

The third day of IJ-6 was dedicated to two parallel tracks, whereof one was case studies from the practice of innovation journalism in various places around the world.

The other one was the Academic Track, held for the first time this year. When we made the call for papers we expected perhaps half a dozen contributions - Innovation Journalism is a very new research topic. We got many submissions, and could accept no less than 20 papers. The Academic Track has a website of its own, where the conference papers are available - check out http://ij6ac.innovationjournalism.org

Location-Awareness Story Wins Stanford InJo Pick Contest

Wired Magazine’s Contributing Editor Mathew Honan’s story ”I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” has been chosen as Stanford InJo Pick 2009: The Best Innovation Journalism Story & Journalist of the Year. Honans’ story described his experiences after starting to share his iPhone’s location with everyone in San Francisco.

The choice was made by over 200 attendees of IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. Sixteen stories were nominated by Stanford Innovation Journalism 2009 Fellows from five different countries and discussed in depth by attendees in 16 separate groups, led by the proposing Fellow and attended by the nominated article writer.

Founder and Editor of Earth2Tech Katie Fehrenbacher received the second place award with ”The Story of Grid Net: How Ray Bell is Betting WiMAX Can Fix the Grid.”

Xconomy’s Chief Correspondent Wade Roush was voted to third place. His story was ”SiOnyx Brings ”Black Silicon” into the Light; Material Could Upend Solar, Imaging Industries.”

OPENING ADDRESS, IJ-6 THE SIXTH CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION JOURNALISM

OPENING ADDRESS, IJ-6 THE SIXTH CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION JOURNALISM
David Nordfors
Founding Executive Director,Tthe VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism
H-STAR Institute
Stanford University

18 May 2009, Stanford University

Welcome to IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism.

Thank you all for coming here, especially you who have travelled all the way from Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, Pakistan, Israel, France, Chile, Mexico, UK, Korea and Kenya.

Thank you also to the funding organizations that are making the Innovation Journalism Initiative and IJ-6 possible. Above all, thanks to VINNOVA, the National Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, that initiated the collaboration with Stanford in 2004, and who partnered with Stanford in upgrading the Innovation Journalism program to a research center this year - the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism. We are now a part of H-STAR, the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute here at Stanford, and we are really looking forward to build a solid body of research that will add further traction to our other activities. Thanks to the agencies and foundations that have made it possible for journalists and researchers from around the world to join the center at Stanford: the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, Sitra and Tekes in Finland, the Competitive Support Fund and the USAID in Pakistan, Ad Futura in Slovenia and Conacyt in Mexico.

These are turbulent times for the media. When we started the Innovation Journalism program in 2004, the word 'blog' was quite new. Inside the newsrooms, people were discussing if blogs were to be taken seriously or not. Our Injo Fellow Marcus Lillkvist wrote the first story in Wall Street Journal on that blogs were getting ads, and that some blogs were earning enough money to hire people to work with them. The blogs contained mostly news from the paper publications. Today, online publication is in the lead.

In 2005 we recorded a roundtable discussion with Vint Cerf, Whit Diffie and a number of other experts and journalists. On the cover we wrote 'journalism stands at the crossroads of redefinition'. Vint was in the middle of switching jobs, going from Worldcom to Google. Since then, nearly all journalists in that video have switched jobs. Vint is still at Google.

The media industry is facing a business challenges, their business model is bust in several ways. Controlling the infrastructure for distribution of content was the key to making money. Control the production, control the distribution, control the content. When your channel of information gets public attention, sell that attention to advertisers by letting them pay to push their info through your infrastructure. People could control printing presses, fleets of trucks distributing freshly printed paper, broadcast concessions. But they can not control the Internet. In fact, as we move toward Net Neutrality - a concept promoted by Vint and many people in the Internet culture, where those who control the infrastructure of the Internet are forced to not censor the content - it may become illegal to try doing it. The trend in the media just now is to move away from vertical integration. Those who produce content are moving away from controlling the infrastructure, such as is the case with blogs. And those who control the infrastructure are moving away from producing and controlling the content, such as the companies providing the cables, the ISPs, and companies offering tools for aggregating and organizing information and transactions, such as Google, Facebook, or eBay.

In the eighties software industry broke out from the hardware industry. In the nineties network services broke out from the network infrastructure providers. Perhaps we are seeing now how content is breaking out of the media. We will have an industry providing the infrastructure for spreading content - like Facebook, Google or eBay - and other industries providing content, among them the journalism industry. A number of these players are earning their money by selling our attention to advertisers, and we are offered a greater variety of products and services in return for directing our eyballs here or there. Our attention used to give us news and entertainment. Now it's giving us tools as well, for example Blogs, word processing, search engines. That's actually not bad. But it will be bad if it ends up with that attention gives us only tools, and no good content. We need both.

This also means that the definition of journalism needs to be looked over.

According to the Oxford dictionary on the Internet, AskOxford.com, a journalist is, I quote, "a person who writes for newspapers or magazines, or prepares news or features to be broadcast on radio or television". Ironically, Oxford's Internet dictionary does not say a word about journalism on the Internet. But just pushing in the Internet in that sentence won't solve the problem. The problem is, we have been used to identifying the content with the carrier. This is understandable, because that was the way it was. But today, no more. Here is another example of how we have identified the content with the carrier: LPs and CDs used to mean music. Today CDs are no more pieces of plastic with music information on them. We rip the music and toss the plastic. LPs represent memories of old times, when vinyl was music and vice versa. But the cat is out of the bag, the information has broken free, the vertical integration is broken, and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put Humpty back together again, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs, who seems to have brought back vertical integration to some extent with the iMac, and with the iPod, iPhone and iTunes. He is earning good money on it and people like it. So let's be careful with saying that vertical integration is gone from the news business forever. But we won't go back to old times.

We must look at how we can redefine journalism. It still means something, even if it is not brought to us on paper, through the radio or TV. It remains valuable. The old definitions related journalism to the medium. How about defining journalism by its relations to its constituency? How about talking about what journalism does for people, rather than stating which infrastructure it uses for spreading the information? For example, we can define journalism as the production of news stories, bringing public attention to issues of public interest. Journalism gets its mandate from the audience. It is required to act in the interest of the audience. This was valid for good newspapers, and it remains to be valid without newspapers. We are talking about the principles of journalism, that's what defines journalism. So when we are talking about the crisis in the media industry, we are perhaps not trying to address how to save the old business models, or how media should continue to be controlled by those who produce the content. We are talking about the importance of finding business models for the principles of journalism.

We need to adopt new definitions and find new models, or things might get worse. For example, in some countries around the world, public service broadcast is payed for by placing a fee on TVs, radios and other equipment used for taking part of public service content. The companies that collect these fees are very committed to the task. Now that public service TV is broadcast online, they are stating their intentions to collect public service fees on all personal computers. I guess all cell phones will soon be next. How much sense does that make? And as long as the production of public service journalism is payed for by these fees, the public service news organizations will be stepping on their own eggs when reporting on any Internet issues.

Which brings us to the next issue. Given that journalism will develop a strong innovation system, enabling it to continuously renew itself, so that it like the rest of the information industry is always aiming at the next product rather than aiming to prolong the lives of its earlier ones, what is its mission in society?

Society is going through a fundamental change. We are getting less driven by doing more of the same, and more driven by making new things replace the old. Curt Carlson, who is speaking later today, defines innovation as the process of creating and introducing new value in society. That's what is driving society more and more, not doing more of the old stuff. Power structures are shifting as a consequence. In a more of the same economy, power is in regulation. When society is driven by the introduction of new things, innovation often trumps regulation. Look for example at music. Innovation means that everything gets more connected. In the more of the same economy, it's easier to divide the labor, to establish professions following established routines, to write textbooks about how things were always done and how they should continue to be done. In the more of the same economy, people can group together with other people doing the same things as themselves, focus on that part and not communicate much with the rest of the world. In the innovation economy, however, everything is changing, technologies, business models and policies shape each other interactively, and everything becomes everyones business.

People in society need journalism to tell them the story of how the innovation economy hangs together, where the power is, how science, technology, business and politics co-evolve, and how this depends on and changes cultures. Doug Engelbart is suggesting we need to be connected in a collective intelligence, so that we can solve fundamental challenges, such as global warming, pandemics, the threat of nuclear wars, and so on. But our communication is limited by our shared language. How do we collectively develop words and stories that enable us to talk about the things we benefit best from talking about, and which enable us to find solutions, build wealth and happiness? Journalism is an obvious player, Doug has said he sees it as the perception system of our collective intelligence. Not the sensory system, but the perception system.

When we look it how we are interacting collectively today, it is valid to ask if we are heading for collective intelligence or if we are heading for collective neurosis. Here, again, the importance of matching business models and principles of journalism are important. We definitely need good business models promoting the principles of journalism, offering an incentive for directing public attention to issues of public interest, and facilitating a public dialogue which will deliver the greatest value to the audience. Without good business models for journalism, the players for public attention will soon be dominated not by those representing the audience - i.e. the journalists - but by those representing the sources - i.e. PR. I like both PR and journalism, they are both needed. They are both a part of the ecosystem that will hopefully direct our collective attention to maximize our collective intelligence.

In todays innovation economy people need professional news organizations, driven by incentives to represent the interest of the audience, to cover innovation so that people can engage, and can create maximum value for themselves and others. It needs to interact with other professionals, representing stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem, who also are playing for the public attention. Together they form the innovation communication ecosystem.

That is what the Innovation Journalism conference is about, and we will today and tomorrow, with the help of the Innovation Journalism Fellows 2009, discuss various aspects of how journalism can best play its part in the innovation economy. The workshops are defined and moderated by the Fellows, who will be summarizing some bullets on best practices. We will be doing it in two ways. Today we are looking at themes - "How tos". Tomorrow we will be meeting journalists who have covered innovation well - our Injo Picks 2009 - and talk with them about how things are done the best way.

All the workshops are organized by our Injo Fellows 2009: Christian Borg, Ellen Andersson, Fredrik Wass, Jörgen Lindqvist, Kerstin Sjöden and Mats Lewan from Sweden. Anna Kattan, Anu Partanen, Juha-Pekka Tikka and Jussi Rosendahl from Finland. Afzal Bajwa, Hamza Habib, Mubarak Zeb Khan and Sarah Hasan from Pakistan. Sabina Vrhnjak from Slovenia and David Luna from Mexico. Both Slovenia and Mexico are in the program for the first time this year.

This year we also have for the first time a special academic track on the the innovation ecosystems and the news. which takes place on wednesday in parallel with other interesting talks from the field. Just like innovation is new as a keyword for journalism, journalism is new as a keyword for research on innovation. I hope we will get a good dialogue between journalists and academics, it is really needed in order to move forward. The people who have put together the academic track are Vilma Luoma-aho, our Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Visiting Injo Researcher from the university of Jyväskylä in Finland, Marc Ventresca, Professor at Said Business School in Oxford and Senior Scholar at the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journlaism at Stanford; and Turo Uskali from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, former visiting researcher with us here at Stanford.

We should also be very grateful to Johanna Mansor, without who two stones would not be standing on top of each other here today. Thanks to John Joss, who is checking all the texts by all the Fellows and will be taking part in the moderation of the conference. We also are very grateful to all of our members on the Directors Advisory Board: Vint Cerf, Curt Carlson, David Demarest, Anders Flodstrom, Don Kennedy and Jacob Ziv, and the Program Advisors of our Center who are here today, who each are carrying a part in building the global initiative: Violeta Bulc, Turo Uskali, Amir Jahangir and Rick Horning. Final thanks to our friends that have given us advice on the conference: Mei-Lin Fung, Allison Murdock, Lisa Friedman, Laszlo Gyorffy.

EurActiv Explains Innovation Journalism

The European newsletter EurActiv has published an interview on Innovation Journalism. It is very well edited, and explains in clear and simple langugage the concept of innovation journalism, its importance in society, and the challenge of making it happen. The story is written by EurActiv writer Gary Finnegan.

The interview is here. (Also available as PDF here, in case the link does not work).

Where the Injo Initiative Stands Today

Here is a summary of the Innovation Journalism Initiative 2003-2009. It will be presented on May 20 at the IJ-6 academic track - check out the IJ-6 academic track website

The article is published by the Innovation Journalism Publication Series. It will also appear as a chapter in the forthcoming "Handbook of Innovation Related Research Education" edited by Hans von Holst, Hung Nguyen and Jan Wikander.

(download the article http://www.innovationjournalism.org/archive/injo-6-1.pdf )

Innovation Journalism Vol. 6 No. 1 May 1, 2009

By David Nordfors

This article presents a review of the innovation journalism initiative so far. The novel concepts of innovation journalism, attention work and innovation communication systems are present

ed and put into context, explaining why journalism and communication may be considered important components of the innovation economy, as well as how this may benefit society. The need for a new definition of ‘journalism’ is discussed, suggesting a definition based on the relation between journalism and its audience, rather than on its relation to the medium it uses for communicating with the audience. The role of journalism in the innovation economy is a novel academic research field. The rationale for this research is presented together with examples of plausible research topics. Innovation journalism initiatives are emerging in several places around the world. The seminal VINNOVA Stanford initiative at Stanford University is presented together with the national initiatives in Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Pakistan, Mexico, and the EU.

IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism

IJ-6 The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism will take place at Stanford University on May 18-20 2009. The IJ-6 conference website is here.

IJ-6 is a meeting place for discussing the best ways of covering innovation in the news, the business of doing that work, and how innovation journalism interacts with society. The conference welcomes a varied set of participants: Working journalists, policy-makers in media and innovation, academic researchers, faculty and students in related areas of study, and other professionals connected to the news industry.

Check out the IJ-6 and register for the conference on the website!

IJ-6 Academic Track: Call For Papers

IJ-6, The Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism

Stanford University
May 18-20 2009

Here is a pre-announcement for IJ-6. We are presently working on the conference layout with this years' InJo Fellows, and will soon come back with more info.

The opening speaker will be Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, and the person most often called 'the father of the Internet'. Vint is an advisor to the new VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University.

Since Innovation Journalism has attracted considerable interest from researchers at universities, the conference this year will offer a special track for academics, besides the traditional mainstream conference which mainly targets professional journalists and innovation experts.

Here is the academic track call for papers:

THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS AND THE NEWS

The Vinnova Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism invites you to IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism. The academic track is a venue for researchers to present work and ideas relating to the interplay of journalism in innovation ecosystems, increasing our understanding about the role of attention work in innovation economies.

About IJ-6:
IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism is a meeting place for researchers and professionals to discuss the best ways of covering innovation in the news, the business of doing that work, and how innovation journalism interacts with society. The conference welcomes a varied set of participants: Working journalists, policy-makers in media and innovation, academic researchers, faculty and students in related areas of study, and other professionals connected to the news industry.

Main themes of IJ-6 Academic Track:

• How journalism and innovation interact
• The ability of journalism to cover innovation, and the practices
• Towards a system view: public attention in innovation ecosystems, its stakeholders, and the interaction between them.

Examples of research topics of interest

• The concept of attention work, the professional generation and brokering of attention,
• The concept of innovation communication systems; the flow of attention in innovation systems.
• How innovation processes and innovation ecosystems interact with public attention, with news media as an actor
• Interdependencies between journalism and other actors in the system.
• The roles of reputation and trust in the innovation ecosystem
• How journalism can cover innovation processes and innovation ecosystems
• Professional codes of ethics and principles of innovation journalism
• How newsroom and other professional organization affect the coverage of innovation
• Business Models for innovation journalism
• How journalism plays a part in connecting innovation with various publics and with democratic processes and the public interest.
• Models of innovation and the media, including firm, industry and economy-wide innovation systems
• State of the art as well as theory and practice in the teaching of innovation journalism
• Public narratives of innovation

Call for papers:

Schedule:

• March 10, 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (800 words).
• April 12, 2009: Notification of abstracts accepted for presentations
• May 15, 2009: Deadline for submission of full papers (max. 20 pages, APA format).

Dr. Vilma Luoma-aho (vilmaluo@stanford.edu) is the point person for submission of abstracts. Please send Word documents, not .pdf. Your abstract should have a title and 2-5 key words, with no identification information visible. Please include in your email message text the following: the tentative title to your abstract, your full name, phone number, email address, organizational affiliation and street address.

Academic Program Committee

• Vilma Luoma-aho, Stanford University
• Marc J. Ventresca, Naval Postgraduate School and University of Oxford
• Turo Uskali, University of Jyväskylä
• David Nordfors, Stanford University, Conference Chair

For more information on previous conferences and on Innovation Journalism:

• Previous conference: The Fifth Conference on Innovation Journalism (2008) http://ij5.innovationjournalism.org/
• Official Innovation Journalism publication series site http://www.innovationjournalism.org/essays/

Scaring up an Audience in the Attention Economy

(This essay has been published by Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum - here - and the EJC Magazine of the European Journalism Centre - here)

Thousands of lives were consumed by the November terror attacks in Mumbai.

"Wait a second", you might be thinking. "The attacks were truly horrific, but all news reports say around two hundred people were killed by the terrorists, so thousands of lives were definitely not consumed."

You are right. And you are wrong.

Indeed, around 200 people were murdered by the terrorists in an act of chilling exhibitionism. And still, thousands of lives were consumed. Imagine that a billion people devoted, on average, one hour of their attention to the Mumbai tragedy: following the news, thinking about it, discussing it with other people. The number is a wild guess, but the guess is far from a wild number. There are over a billion people in India alone. Many there spent whole days following the drama. One billion people times one hour is one billion hours, which is more than 100,000 years. The global average life expectancy is today 66 years. So nearly two thousand lives were consumed by news consumption. It's far more than the number of people murdered, by any standards.

In a sense, the newscasters became unwilling bedfellows of the terrorists. One terrorist survived the attacks, confessing to the police that the original plan had been to top off the massacre by taking hostages and outlining demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media. The terrorists wanted attention. They wanted the newsgatherers to give it to them, and they got it. Their goal was not to kill a few hundred people. It was to scare billions, forcing people to change reasoning and behavior. The terrorists pitched their story by being extra brutal, providing news value. Their targets, among them luxury hotels frequented by the international business community, provided a set of target audiences for the message of their sick reality show. Several people in my professional surroundings canceled business trips to Mumbai after watching the news. The terrorists succeeded. We must count on more terror attacks on luxury hotels in the future.

Can the journalists and news organizations who were in Mumbai be blamed for serving the interests of the terrorists? I think not. They were doing their jobs, reporting on the big scary event. The audience flocked to their stories. Their business model - generating and brokering attention - was exploited by the terrorists. The journalists were working on behalf of the audience, not on behalf of the terrorists. But that did not change the outcome. The victory of the terrorists grew with every eyeball that was attracted by the news. Without doubt, one of the victims was the role of journalism as a non-involved observer. It got zapped by a paradox. It's not the first time. Journalism always follows "the Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics: You can't measure a system without influencing it.

Self reference is a classic dilemma for journalism. Journalism wants to observe, not be an actor. It wants to cover a story without becoming part of it. At the same time it aspires to empower the audience. But by empowering the audience, it becomes an actor on the story. Non-involvement won't work, it is a self-referential paradox like the Epimenides paradox

(the prophet from Crete who said "All Cretans are liars"). The basic self-referential paradox is the liars' paradox ("This sentence is false"). This can be a very constructive paradox, if taken by the horns. It inspired Kurt Gödel to reinvent the foundation of mathematics, addressing self-reference. Perhaps the principles of journalism can be reinvented, too? Perhaps the paradox of non-involvement can be replaced by ethics of engagement as practiced by, for example, psychologists and lawyers?

While many classic dilemmas provide constant frustration throughout life, this one is about to get increasingly wicked. Here is why.

It is only 40 years since the birth of collaboration between people sitting behind computers linked by a network, "the mother of all demos", when Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI demoed the first computer mouse, interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, e-mail and hypertext.

Only 40 years after their first demo, and only 15 years after the Internet reached beyond the walls of university campuses, Doug's tools are in almost every home and office. Soon they'll be built into every cell phone. We are always online. For the first time in human history, the attention of the whole world can soon be summoned simultaneously. If we summon all the attention the human species can supply, we can focus two hundred human years of attention onto a single issue in a single second. This attention comes equipped with glowing computing power that can process information in a big way. Every human on the Net is using a computer device able to do millions or billions of operations per second. And more is to come. New computers are always more powerful than their predecessors. The power has doubled every two years since the birth of computers. This is known as Moore's Law. If the trend continues for another 40 years, people will be using computers one million times more powerful than today. Try imagining what you can do with that in your phone or hand-held gaming device! Internet bandwidth is also booming. Everybody on Earth will have at least one gadget. We will all be well connected. We will all be able to focus our attention, our ideas and our computational powers on the same thing at the same go. That's pretty powerful. This is actually what Doug was facilitating when he dreamed up the Demo. The mouse - what Doug is famous for today - is only a detail. Doug says we can only solve the complex problems of today by summoning collective intelligence. Nuclear war, pandemics, global warming. These are all problems requiring collective intelligence. The key to collective intelligence is collective attention. The flow of attention controls how much of our collective intelligence gets allocated to different things.

When Doug Engelbart's keynoted the Fourth Conference on Innovation Journalism he pointed out that journalism is the perception system of collective intelligence. He hit the nail on the head. When people share news, they have a story in common. This shapes a common picture of the world and a common set of narratives for discussing it. It is agenda setting (there is an established "agenda-setting theory" about this). Journalism is the leading mechanism for generating collective attention. Collective attention is needed for shaping a collective opinion. Collective intelligence might require a collective opinion in order to address collective issues.

Here is where innovation journalism can help. In order for collective intelligence to transform ideas into novelties, we need to be able to generate common sets of narratives around how innovation happens. How do people and organizations doing different things come together in the innovation ecosystem? Narratives addressing this question make it possible for each one of us to relate to the story of innovation. Innovation journalism turns collective attention on new things in society that will increase the value of our lives. This collective attention in turn facilitates the formuation of a collective opinion. Innovation journalism thus connects the innovation economy and democracy (or any other system of governance).

There is an upside and a downside to everything. We can now summon collective attention to track the spread of diseases. But we are also more susceptible to fads, hypes and hysterias. Will our ability to focus collective attention improve our lives or will we become victims of collective neurosis?

We are moving into the attention economy. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Some business strategists think 'attention transactions' can replace financial transactions as the focus of our economy. In this sense, the effects on society of collective attention is the macroeconomics of the attention economy. Collective attention is key for exercising collective intelligence. Journalism - the professional generator and broker of collective attention - is a key factor.

This brings us back to Mumbai. How collectively intelligent was it to spend thousands of human lifetimes of attention following the slaughter of hundreds? The jury is out on that one - it depends on the outcome of our attention. Did the collective attention benefit the terrorists? Yes, at least in the short term. Perhaps even in the long term. Did it help solve the situation in Mumbai? Unclear. Could the collective attention have been aimed in other ways at the time of the attacks, which would have had a better outcome for people and society? Yes, probably.

The more wired the world gets, the more terrorism can thrive. When our collective attention grows, the risk of collective fear and obsession follows. It is a threat to our collective mental health, one that will only increase unless we introduce some smart self-regulating mechanisms. These could direct our collective attention to the places where collective attention would benefit society instead of harm.

The dynamics between terrorism and journalism is a market failure of the attention economy.

No, I am not supporting government control over the news. Planned economy has proven to not be a solution for market failures. The problem needs to be solved by a smart feedback system. Solutions may lie in new business models for journalism that provide incentives to journalism to generate constructive and proportional attention around issues, empowering people and bringing value to society. Just selling raw eyeballs or Internet traffic by the pound to advertisers is a recipe for market failure in the attention economy. So perhaps it is not all bad that the traditional raw eyeball business models are being re-examined. It is a good time for researchers to look at how different journalism business models generate different sorts of collective attention, and how that drives our collective intelligence. Really good business models for journalism bring prosperity to the journalism industry, its audience, and the society it works in.

For sound new business models to arise, journalism needs to come to grips with its inevitable role as an actor. Instead of discussing why journalists should not get involved with sources or become parts of the stories they tell, perhaps the solution is for journalists to discuss why they should get involved. Journalists must find a way to do so without loosing the essence of journalism.

Ulrik Haagerup is the leader of the Danish National Public News Service, DR News. He is tired of seeing 'bad news makes good news and good news makes bad news'. Haagerup is promoting the concept of "constructive journalism", which focuses on enabling people to improve their lives and societies. Journalism can still be critical, independent and kick butt.

The key issue Haagerup pushes is that it is not enough to show the problem and the awfulness of horrible situations. That only feeds collective obsession, neurosis and, ultimately, depression. Journalism must cover problems from the perspective of how they can be solved. Then our collective attention can be very constructive. Constructive journalism will look for all kinds of possible solutions, comparing and scrutinizing them, finding relevant examples and involving the stakeholders in the process of finding solutions.

I will be working with Haagerup this summer, we will be presenting together with Willi Rütten of the European Journalism Centre a workshop on 'constructive innovation journalism' at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Summit, 3-5 June 2009.

Announcing the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism

PALO ALTO, 19 Jan 2009. We are pleased to announce the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism, founded by H-STAR institute (Human-Sciences Advanced Research institute) of Stanford University and VINNOVA (the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems).

Starting in January 2009, this new research center at Stanford pursues human-sciences and technology research in areas that will impact and promote the development of innovation journalism, i.e. journalistic coverage of innovation processes and ecosystems. This involves looking at how journalism influences innovation, how innovation influences journalism, and the ability of journalism to recognize and cover innovation. It will build a network of researchers in innovation journalism by hosting visiting scholars from Sweden and inviting researchers from other countries to join.

The new center will take over the operation of the Stanford-based Innovation Journalism Fellowship Program. The world's first fellowship program in innovation journalism, which was initiated by VINNOVA in 2003 and has been located at Stanford since 2004. Each year selected journalists participate in workshops and conferences at Stanford and collaborate with newsrooms across the U.S. in covering innovation. The program has so far hosted journalists from Sweden, Finland, and Pakistan, with support from several sources.

VINNOVA will provide the initial funding of the center; additional sponsors will be sought to continue and expand the Center's activities.

The founding director of the new Center is Dr. Stig Hagström, Professor (Emeritus) in the School of Engineering at Stanford and former Chancellor of the Swedish university system. Its founding Executive Director is Dr. David Nordfors, who coined the term “innovation journalism” and set up the first Innovation Journalism initiatives, in Sweden and at Stanford.

H-STAR is a Stanford interdisciplinary research center focusing on people and technology - how people use technology, how to better design technology to make it more usable (and more competitive in the marketplace), how technology affects people's lives, and the innovative use of technologies in research, education, art, business, commerce, entertainment, communication, national security, and other walks of life.

VINNOVA is a Swedish State authority that aims to promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden. Its particular area of responsibility comprises innovations linked to research and development. The agency funds research that supports a competitive business and industrial sector to maintain a flourishing society, and seeks to strengthen networks that contribute to these goals.

Why I Stopped Calling Journalism "The Media"

(This story is also being published by the EJC Magazine)
This story has been translated into Spanish by Patrcio Cevallos Quito on his Pizarrablog (here)

I have stopped calling journalism "the media", and saying the "media industry" when talking about the companies that make journalism and news. Instead I say "the news industry" or "the journalism industry."

Everybody knows by now that the media industry (I say it intentionally this time) is facing challenges. It is working hard to come to grips with the Internet.

Information theory enabled us to define information without referring to the carrier. Information technology liberates the Karma from the flesh. Information can be ripped off one medium and copied onto another. It can be processed: filtered, distorted, enhanced, synthesized. It can be sorted, compared, matched and aggregated. It can be distributed around the neighborhood or sent into space. The various layers of information and machinery formerly glued together are sliding apart. The same is going for the industries that have been handling them. We are witnessing the progression of the information technology revolution.

In the 1980s software separated from hardware. Software became an industry of its own.

In the 1990s network services separated from the physical networks. Network services became an industry of its own.

Now, the content - the narratives - is separating from the media. What we know as the Media Industry is on its way to separating into two industries: those that provide the medium and those that provide the narratives. The trend is a shift away from vertical integration, where single companies own the whole chain from the journalists to the printing presses and the trucks. Perhaps vertical integration can come back someday in another shape, Steve Jobs is showing it's possible for personal computers.

But right now, the trend in what has become known as the media industry is to separate. It used to be a good business for newspapers to own a printing press and trucks. Now it is becoming a liability. Using fossil fuel to deliver yesterday's news printed on dead trees is not a sustainable prospect. With the Internet it is a different game. It is definitely not about owning hardware, and it is not a good idea for news organizations to be Internet Service Providers. It is probably not even a good idea to own the software platform that works as medium for the news stories. Filling the basement below the newsroom with software engineers is expensive, it is much cheaper to use open available platforms, like Blogger, YouTube or Facebook. They are probably ore reliable anyway. And if New York Times will build their own platform, the other news outlets will not want to use it, so teh Times will need to take all the development cost themselves. Bad business.

Media companies are becoming confused. What is their core identity? Editorial content? Marketplaces? Blogospheres? Social networks? The traditional unified bundle of medium, content and classifieds is falling apart; the media industry no longer knows what it is.

It is not that Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" isn't valid for the bigger picture. The message is now "Internet." That message is so big the media industry will be completely reorganized. And, just as McLuhan said, new media are rapidly being created within the medium of the Internet. They are nesting and mating. So is the content really separating from the media, if we think in terms of McLuhan? No, the content and the media are co-developing more than ever. But at the same time: Yes, the vertical integration between different levels of content and media is dissolving. The people providing YouTube and the people producing content for YouTube are not in the same organization. The production of narrative is not bundled with the provision of media. They go partying together, but they have stopped going steady.

So what happens to journalism? It will survive, but the circumstances will change. Journalism will not be run by people who control media. Not as things look now. Maybe some new medium that can do it will emerge some day.

But the essence of journalism was never really about mass communication technology, anyway. The deeper concept has always been collective attention. The big business model of mass media has always been generating and brokering attention, what I call "attention work." When newspapers and broadcasters sell ads, they are actually selling the attention of the audience, which was generated by their journalists. The traditional mass media attention business model is A) control a carrier of information that can reach the masses, B) generate attention around the carrier by transmitting interesting information on it and C) sell the attention by charging advertisers for broadcasting their information over your carrier.

How to contain and sell the attention? Controlling the carrier has so far been the answer. This used to mean owning a printing press and the trucks for delivering newspapers, or owning a radio or a TV channel. Not everybody could do that. It required organizations and capital. On the Internet, anybody can publish. It does not require any organizations or capital. Even worse, on the Web, audience attention jumps around wildly. So even if you manage to get a lot of attention, it is not easy to collect it and transfer it to someone else. People will read your story, click on some link that leads to someone else's page, and click on an ad there. Or they will find your story through Google, and click on ads there. The Internet does not encourage walled gardens. Today it is all about revolving doors. The attention workers on the 'Net nowadays refer to audience as "traffic".

In principle, journalism should be in better shape than ever. The core competence of journalists is to generate attention. If you think that sounds bleak, think again - it is very rich. Everybody wants to inform society, only those who can generate attention succeed.

Attention is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity in a world where the problem is not a lack of information, rather the abundance of it. The competition for peoples' attention is fierce. It was easier to manage attention in the walled garden than it is among the revolving doors. We live in an attention economy, and it is going global.

When the attention economy grows, the market grows for attention workers, who generate and broker attention professionally. Do not mix them up with knowledge workers, who generate and broker knowledge professionally. Engineers and analysts are knowledge workers. An advertiser is an attention worker. Journalists are mostly attention workers (they are knowledge workers if they are paid by the audience, and not by advertisers). When journalists switch professions they often go into PR and communications. Attention workers can jump between different attention jobs. Attention workers and knowledge workers have different cultures. The difference is in "need to know" vs. "want to know". Read more about it here.

Public attention is a requirement for public debate. Society needs it. Without shared attention it will be difficult generating shared language that lets people collectively identify which issues are important. Language enables them to act. With everybody trying to catch everybody else's attention, competition for public attention has become even more interesting.

At the same time, attention is gravitational. Attention attracts attention. Everyone is interested in knowing what everybody else is talking about. This is the explanation behind a lot of celebrities and fads. A number of celebrities are famous for being famous. People follow fads because they know other people are following fads.

Reasonably, there is now greater value than ever in generating and brokering attention. The competition is greater. There are more voices. But this does not mean that the era of champions is gone and the grassroots movements will rule the fore. Quite the opposite.

The Internet is creating a global, interconnected, real-time market. Soon, nearly everybody will be online. If a superstar gets the attention from half of the world of any community, will the other half be able to avoid giving their attention, too? They will give at least half an ear. With all the overlapping communities, adding up to the world community, there will be an ecosystem enabling protagonists to play for omni-global attention. The Internet can become the nervous system of a global collective consciousness (although a number of regional powers will try to stop this from happening).

In short, Internet is the biggest opportunity so far for professional journalism. It is true that now that everybody can publish, everybody can be a journalist. But it is not true that everybody will be a journalist.

I was in the first punk rock wave that reached Sweden in second half of the 1970s. Punk rock told us that we could do better than watch Led Zeppelin play, fighting among thousands of other fans to get a peep of them on the stage far away. We now could go to the local club and watch our friends play raw rock music. Even better - anyone who wanted to play could start a band. There was no natural competition between bands. There was a lot of collaboration. Mass-produced instruments where cheap. Nobody cared much if you did not play on a Gibson Les Paul or Fender Stratocaster guitar. I recall a guitarist bragging about playing a "Gippson" guitar. Cheap was cool. Recognize it today?

Blogs are punk rock. It's the Blogosphere vs the Main Stream Media. I recognize it all from the punk rock days.

But in 1976, some teenagers in Dublin started a garage band named "U2." In 1981, Rolling Stone Magazine called them the next big thing. They became superstars. Just like Led Zeppelin.

Who will become the U2 of journalism blogs? It is bound to happen. There are a number of candidates by now: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Engadget, Huffington Post. They have all gone past being garage bands playing for free at local pubs. They are running commercial operations employing people and working on finding new business models.

Some of these blogs are growing larger audiences than many so-called "mainstream media". Their style is maturing. They are renewing journalism.

Everybody can blog. Not everybody can be a journalist. Who is a journalist on the Web?

Journalism is about serving an audience. There has been a lot of work done on the principles of journalism. These principles are perhaps best codified at Journalism.org. They include some tricky concepts like "truth" and "objectivity," which are very difficult to nail down. But the general message is there: It ain't journalism if it doesn't serve the interest of the reader. I subscribe to that.

So how do we know if a blogger is serving the audience or him/herself?

Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus showed it was a good idea to categorize plants by the visible characteristics of their reproduction mechanisms. Generally, a concept needs to have a reproduction mechanism to hang around. In any profession or business, that mechanism involves a business model. Without a business model that reinforces journalism, journalism will cease to exist as a profession. Let's look at the basic principles of the journalism business model.

There are today three business principles for journalism: one that sells content to the audience (e.g., newsletters), one that sells the attention of the audience (e.g., ad-based publications), and one that gets sponsorship for delivering information to the audience without biasing the message in favor of the sponsors (e.g., public service).

All three business models depend on one thing: loyal attention from the audience. In order to draw loyal attention from the audience, the journalist has to in return be loyal to the audience. This is the difference between journalism and PR. Public relations works on behalf of the source. Journalism works on behalf of the audience. If journalism loses the attention of the audience, it will not have customers. It will not have advertisers. It will not have sponsors.

For amateur bloggers, this does not matter much. They will publish what they want, not having to show loyalty to anyone.

But if they start getting a lot of attention, they will have to choose if they want to benefit from it. If they choose to build a reputation on the attention they are receiving, they will soon become dependent on it. The more their reputation depends on the loyal attention of the audience, the more they will need to care about their loyalty to their audience. This is true for both rock bands and bloggers. Original punk rockers would not suck up to anyone, including an audience. For U2, the audience is their constituency.

Until now, a journalist has been defined as someone working on behalf of an organization with a journalism business model. All such organizations have had business models that manage printing newspapers or broadcasting, something that has required considerable effort and varying amounts of cash flow.

The Oxford Dictionary on the Internet - askoxford.com - defines journalism as "the activity or profession of being a journalist", and defines a journalist as "a person who writes for newspapers or magazines or prepares news or features to be broadcast on radio or television."

That has until now been a convenient definition. Either you are a journalist or you are not. The requirement is being connected to an organization that controls a medium.

With the Internet, that no longer applies. Anybody can publish on the Internet. But there will be a power distribution of attention (the same type of curve as the famous "long tail"). Some people will get a lot of attention. Others will get attention only from family and close personal friends. Journalism will be done by sites producing news that have developed a dependence on their audience, forcing them to be loyal to it.

Therefore, at the core of maintaining journalists is the loyalty to the audience and a business model that reinforces the loyalty to the audience. If that is in place, journalism will flourish as a profession in the attention economy.

Storytelling, attention and loyalty between journalism and audience, and a business model that keeps reinforcing it. This should do the trick for defining journalism in modern times.

So let's look at how journalism is defined today, in December, 2008. It shows the state of consciousness around these issues.

Contemporary Definitions of Journalism

Encyclopaedia Britannica at www.britannica.com follows the Oxford dictionary; journalism is "reporting news for media: the profession of gathering, editing, and publishing news reports and related articles for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio."

It is ironic the Internet is not mentioned in the askoxford.com and Britannica.com definitions of journalism. A recent OECD report suggests it is high time they do something about it. By 2007, 58 percent of OECD country households had access to the Internet. Korea was in the lead, with 94 percent. Non-OECD economies are following, with some, like Singapore and Israel, well ahead of OECD averages. Eighteen percent of all OECD Internet users created Web pages in 2007.

The effects on media industry will just grow. Japan had as many as 35 million people reading blogs in March, 2007, double the number two years earlier. Internet advertising accounted for 7 percent of global advertising expenditure, growing faster than on any other medium. This is a very important indicator, since the traditional business model for journalism earns money by selling ads.

It can be that Oxford and Britannica are experiencing a dilemma: Saying "Joe is an important guy, he was on TV" convinces people Joe is important, even if the ring of importance has ebbed since there came more cable channels than people could count. Saying "Joe is an important guy, he was on YouTube" is not at all convincing. But when Barack Obama broadcast his talks on YouTube, it was seen as very important. Lesson: It is not about the medium, it is about symbols of collective attention and reputation. As the medium becomes shared by increasing number of very diverse brands, the medium will mean less, and the brands will need to mean more.

It seems the Internet and YouTube are confusing concepts for people trying to define journalism in terms of media. Why?

Traditional media, like newspapers, TV and radio, are all one-to-many communication infrastructures. The infrastructures are operated by publishers/broadcasters. Therefore the infrastructure comes to represent the publishers/broadcasters in peoples' minds.

The traditional media are built around certain hard technologies, printing presses or radio transmitters and receivers. This limits the information they deliver. Newspapers can't deliver real-time information, video or sound. Radio and TV are very linear - they deliver only one moment at a time on each channel, limiting the overview. This makes people connect the different media to different types of storytelling: Newspapers are good for analysis, depth and length. TV is good for visualization, emotions and breaking news.

The Internet is not a traditional medium. The Internet does not lock in the information. The core of the Internet, TCP/IP, is not much more than a protocol for sending information across connected digital networks that speak different languages and use different technologies. If anything, it loosens the bonds between the content and the carrier. The vision is that any machine can be connected, any content carried. It does not matter if the content is text, sound or pictures. It does not matter if the information is old or new. There are no special types of contents or emotions that become the character of the Internet. Everything is about packages of bits. The communication does not need to be one-to-many. It can be one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many. There is no obvious connection between it and publishers/broadcasters. The medium is no longer controlled by "the media".

Wikipedia's definition is slightly less problematic in this sense: "Journalism is the profession of writing or communicating, formally employed by publications and broadcasters, for the benefit of a particular community of people. "

The hard technologies of mass communication are moved backstage; no listing of "newspapers, radio and TV". The Internet can fit into it, leaving Wikipedia one up on Oxford and Britannica.

But Wikipedia runs instead into another problem. Wikipedia defines journalism as a profession, working for the benefit of the audience. The benefit of the audience is OK. It is in line with the second principle of journalism of the Committee of Concerned Journalists: "its first loyalty is to the citizens." Real life may often be more cynical than that, but clearly loyalty is a requirement journalism.

When Wikipedia liberates the definition of journalism from the delivery infrastructure, like newspapers or TV, it lets go of a strong argument: journalism is a profession. Perhaps Wikipedia is compensating by stating journalists must be formally employed by publications or broadcasters. This definition saves journalism as a job, but it weakens the definition as such.

Is journalism always a profession? Dan Gillmor has for some years argued that journalism is becoming an act instead of a profession. Dan makes the case for citizen journalism, where the the audience will be journalists. While the greater involvement of the audience in journalism is beyond doubt, the breakthrough of true citizen journalism is waiting to happen. Regardless the outcome, Dan is making a strong point against the traditional journalism profession. People now better think twice before using 'profession' as a component in the definition of journalism.

In each case, Wikipedia gets it plain wrong in defining journalists as "formally employed by publications and broadcasters." What about freelancers?

The Oxford, Britannica and Wikipedia definitions of journalism all rely on a crutch, relating to its circumstances surrounding journalism rather than catching it by its essence. The essence of journalism is not "printing press" or "broadcast equipment." The essence of journalism is not "employment," either. These are the circumstances of journalism. Innovation is changing the circumstances rapidly. People are getting confused. They have a feeling for what journalism is because they know what journalism does for them. But they don't have words for it. The challenge: finding a definition of journalism that both catches its essence and survives changing circumstances.

Wikipedia catches a part of the essence in "communicating for the benefit of a community." But that is not enough for defining journalism. Teachers, lobbyists and PR people can all be communicating for the benefit of a community, but they are not journalists. Wikipedia sorts them out by adding "employed by a publication or broadcaster." That sounds like a circular definition, it's like saying "journalism is when journalists communicate for the benefit of a community."

A good definition of journalism enables it as a profession without defining it as one. I also think it is possible to make a definition of journalism that does not bundle it with the medium that carries it. A good definition defines journalism by its essence, and not by its circumstances.

Finally, let's look at the American standard reference. Merriam-Webster Online plays it safe with many definitions.

Journalism is defined as 1 a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b: the public press c: an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium 2 a: writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c: writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

News is defined as 1 a: a report of recent events b: previously unknown information news for you c: something having a specified influence or effect news for lawns and gardens — Garrison Keillor> news>2 a: material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast b: matter that is newsworthy3: newscast (a radio or television broadcast of news)

Websters is actually doing reasonably well, they just need some weeding. Journalism 2b and, especially, 2c will continue to work in the future, as may 1c. The definition of news is also doing well in cases 1a, 1b and 2b.

But the rest may not serve their purpose in due time.