Questions

One of my numerous short-term jobs in the chaotic second half of my career was editor of an online prediction site, where users submitted their best guesses of what stock prices, sports scores or political polls would indicate at some fixed date in the future, usually days or weeks away.

I curated the submitted questions, wrote others, and reported the results. It was a fascinating experience in coordinating the so-called "wisdom of the crowds," backed by venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road.

Among our partners were media companies, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. They saw the service as a novel way to gauge reader interest in various topics.

I didn't think much about it at the time, but what we were doing was part of a larger attempt by media outlets to shape their content to appeal to more people -- a kind of popularity contest for what used to be decided independently of any user feedback.

Since my earliest days as an online editor/producer, I'd used a similar technique -- opinion polls -- to survey our users on provocative questions. At The Netizen/HotWired in 1996, we staged regular polls about the presidential candidates that election cycle, for example.

But by far our most popular poll was when we asked "Do you prefer a Mac or a PC?"

The results were trending PC early on until a prominent Mac enthusiast got involved, which dramatically altered the results. This was an early opportunity for me to witness the unprecedented power of online influencers.

As part of his effort to get out the vote, the Mac enthusiast attacked me as the editor of The Netizen, assuming for some reason that I was a PC-sympathizer, without verifying whether his assumption was true.

(In fact I strongly preferred Macs -- the only computers I had ever owned were Macs.)

But I was and am a journalist, so our poll presented the question in a neutral manner, since we didn’t want to bias the results.

Meanwhile, the anonymity of the online environment made it easy to attack me or anyone else via email, or on bulletin boards and the like, without giving them a chance to respond. That of course was the opposite of the journalistic process I was accustomed to.

I didn't take the Mac attack personally -- it was the first of many -- because it was clear to me that in the new age when everyone had an equal voice, this was how the game would be played. The real problem, of course, was how this spread of social media would affect the world of traditional journalism, which I believed was fundamentally about the search for truth.

It’s been my mission from those days until now to try and counteract the excesses of social media by working to promote and protect traditional journalism and our methodology. To me that's a vital step if we are to preserve the democratic experiment that has been going on in this country for 250 years.

Can anyone make a discernible difference in something this enormous? IDK, but I'll probably die trying.

(I published the first version of this essay in 2021.)

HEADLINES:

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• Musk has turned a dangerously flawed view of “waste” into a philosophy of government. (Atlantic)

• Environmental justice offices to close under Trump administration, impacting vulnerable communities (Scripps)

• Education Department, with mass layoff, cuts nearly half of its staff (WP)

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