Beta World

This week a fight broke out between Tim O'Brien, a tech reporter for the NYT, and Jeff Jarvis, author of the book What Would Google Do? and proprietor of the blog BuzzMachine.

At the heart of the debate: is it fair for blogs to break stories that are really just unconfirmed rumors? It started when O'Brien's NYT ran a Sunday piece accusing blogs of having low standards. O'Brien thinks that blogs disgrace journalism in a way when they publish things that they don't know are true.

Jarvis doesn't dispute that blogs sometimes (perhaps often) print unverified rumors. He just thinks that publishing the rumor breaks down the wall between journalist and audience and makes the process of journalism more democratic and transparent. According to Jarvis, by publishing a rumor, the journalist is saying "Help me out. Do you know anything about this topic?" She is running in "beta" mode, where a company puts something half-finished out there and lets the masses help find the bugs.

But this debate doesn't only apply to journalism. Jarvis says that it's not just newspapers that have the NYT's outdated view of product production -- it's any part of society that is still stuck thinking in the mass production mode:

....there’s the problem: journalism’s myth of perfection. And it’s not just journalism that holds this myth. It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).

There is a certain level of authenticity about running in beta. There's a humility -- you are not desperately trying to sell something shiny and polished -- rather you're coming clean and explaining who you are and what you're about. It's like Barack Obama coming right out there and admitting that he'd done cocaine. I think more and more, this is what we will expect -- authenticity over perfection. This article regarding the importance of Twitter to certain politicians confirms that notion:

Biz Stone, who co-founded Twitter, said politicians are increasingly establishing themselves on social networking sites, much as entertainers have done...

Stone sees [politicians] Booker and Newsom's emphasis on personal transparency as a triumph of humanity, rather than technology.

"If they have good character and compelling things to say they'll make friends," Stone, who is fan of both men, said of Twitter politicians....

Booker compared the level of personal connection to sitting down simultaneously with thousands of people at their kitchen tables. He's tweets about his penchant for coffee and working late and has a proclivity for quoting renown philosophers and leaders.

"I don't have to go through the media to reach people anymore," said Booker, who estimates that he's gaining 5,000 to 7,000 new followers on Twitter every day. "My staff has been concerned, but I've seen how it lets people connect with me."

That ability to publish frequently and independently allows everyone to give up on striving for perfection and begin emphasizing speed and authenticity. So what you have here is a media world that is increasingly saying "politicians, products, companies, we are not going to go through you to get to the article anymore. We are going to use the crowd to verify and confirm. We are going to go beyond press releases (which might mean publishing unverified rumors and labeling them as such) in order to get to the truth. And at the same time you have politicians (and even some products) who are Twittering and getting around the media to get their unalloyed version of reality out to the masses quickly.

In both cases, the product being pitched is much less edited and polished. But by using beta mode to go around traditional sources of resistence, politicians and journalists may each be putting out a more authentic, raw product. It's possible that we now value transparency and speed in our society so much that fairly soon, institutions and individuals won't have the choice to do anything else.