When everyone is on the scene and reporting
Maurice Cardinal interviews Michael Tippett in person, May 9th, 2007
Photo Courtesy of Flickr user KKMichael Tippett is decisive -- in a laid back kind of way. He is also the CMO and co-founder of NowPublic.com, one of the largest aggregators of crowdsourced news in the world. All of NowPublic's content is user-generated and crowdsourced, including the constantly changing list of topic headings on its home page.
We have been conditioned by mainstream news media to believe everything we read. Michael Tippet and his company NowPublic challenge this belief daily. They DO NOT want you to sit back and read the news. They want you to contribute.
Edited for clarity [When you see copy inserted between square brackets [like this], it means I (the interviewer) added information for clarity, or to briefly expand upon an issue to give it a frame of reference.]
Maurice Cardinal: Why does the mainstream news industry have such a challenge getting people who comment on their articles to remain civil?
Michael Tippett: I was just at a conference in Seattle, put on by the Seattle PI (Post Intelligencer newspaper), other local media, plus MSNBC, and bloggers. There were people on both sides of the fence, and they were saying the same thing, “the comments we get in an official capacity as a PI writer, reporter, are much more hostile.”
I think it’s this idea that if you represent an institution, a news organization, to some degree you have to dehumanize the news. You have to be objective and right down the middle - you’re not subjective. You’re not taking it from a personal perspective. If you read “The Economist” for instance, they don’t even tell you who wrote it. It’s just “The Economist” and a set of facts from “The Economist,” and uh . . . it’s true. So people believe that they’re dealing with an institution when they’re dealing with a news organization. You can’t hurt an institution’s feelings so you can be more vitriolic and more vicious. While if it’s a blog, it’s someone with a point of view and they’re taking time and putting their personality on the line. So people treat them with a little more civility because they’re dealing with a human being and not dealing with a big bureaucracy.
There is an institutional challenge. Institutions just move slowly. The companies that move fast are small, and they’ve got the Internet. Smaller companies are more nimble and there are many more of them. The reality is that because of the Internet and the kind of period we’re entering, many of the assumptions we have about basic human motivations are being challenged. This whole notion of Web 2.0 where people are willing to share freely doesn’t fit with the old model so companies like NowPublic, Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace rely on having people involved for reasons other than money. And it’s always a little bit tricky to get it right.
In many cases it’s the detail of the execution that makes you a success or a failure, and in many ways it’s an experimental approach that has to be done by many people in a sort of reckless fashion where you throw something at it to see if it works. So the whole committee approach where you have a strategy and a mission statement, and you define goals, plan things out and work things over, and have things approved by a different layer, it just doesn’t work.
The audience will tell you what they like and dislike. NowPublic is a perfect example. It was started from many points of view. My partner, Leonard Brody, is a lawyer. His family has been involved with CanWest [broadcast and print media company] for a long time so he sees it as something that impacts the news media. He’s grown up on the fringes of that business and that’s why he’s interested in NowPublic. He sees the newspaper industry and what’s happening there.
