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Power List: Media Old + New
Here's our take on influence in SF. Agree with us or argue with us—just keep reading.
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posted on November 21, 2007
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Google, Inc.
Internet search-engine company, founded in 1998
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Why: “Simply by virtue of its popularity, Google’s power to influence where people go on the Internet and what content they see is enormous."1
“Google (and Wikipedia, whose entries often rank near the top of Google searches) are quickly becoming central authorities. So the question is whether intellectuals are going to mope about this shift—or whether they’ll see it as an opportunity to shape popular opinion. And if they make that shift, they’ll take their cues from the spammers and charlatans, the drug pushers and the pornographers.2 Google is so popular that it’s now not only a name but a verb. From 10,000 search queries each day in the beginning, Google now fields more than 3,000 searches per second.3 I didn’t really understand the power of Google until I was here for several years. Looking back, even looking at the memos I wrote in the first year I was here, you could see [Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin] viewed Google at the level it is today. They saw it, I didn’t.4 I’ve found myself more and more wary of Google, out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.5 You can’t really think about the Internet without thinking about Google.6 It’s Google’s world; we just live in it.7 They may buy the government—who knows?
Compiled by Googling the phrase “power of Google” on November 2, 2007
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Christa Scharfenberg
37, acting executive director, Center for Investigative Reporting
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Why: 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that produces investigative stories for radio, print, TV and the Web.
“We try to cover stories of national and international import that other media aren’t. The decline of investigative reporting is terrible for democracy but great for us—we’re driven by trying to give citizens the information they need to participate in democracy, and by the guiding principle behind all of the stories we research: to reveal injustice and hold the powerful accountable for their actions.”
Web Exclusive: Read more of this Q+A below
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Craig Newmark
55, founder, Craigslist
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Why: Yes, Newmark is the man behind missed connections and the apartment-hunting revolution, and the birth of an online community that gets 30 million visitors a month—but that’s not all. He’s also a powerful advocate for net neutrality, fighting to keep big media from regulating Web content.
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Steve Jobs
52, cofounder, CEO of Apple
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Why: There’s the PC, of course, plus that little animation company he cofounded, Pixar Animation Studios (which was bought by Disney, making Jobs its single largest shareholder). Multiply that by the number of design- and tech-forward iBooks, iPods and iPhones he’s dreamed up over the past decade, and it all adds up to one powerful man. Want proof? for the first time ever, Apple is worth more than IBM.
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Amelia Ashley-Ward
50, publisher, the Sun-Reporter
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Why: You want this woman on your side. Ashley-Ward publishes the Sun-Reporter, Northern California’s oldest and largest black-oriented newspaper, and she’s a 25-year veteran of the business; in short, her endorsement counts. Politicians, advocacy groups and citizens beat a path to her door because they know she gets things done.
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Mark Zuckerberg
23, founder and CEO, Facebook
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Why: Wunderkind Zuckerberg founded the social-networking site Facebook in 2004, and tech tongues wagged when he refused an offer of $1 billion for the company last year. Call him prescient: In October, Microsoft took a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing, putting the site’s value at $15 billion. Today, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site on the Web.
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Valleywag
Silicon Valley's tech-gossip e-rag
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Why: Valleywag, from the folks who brought us the irresistible Gawker, is the kind of snarky, funny and smart site we hate to love. More importantly, it democratizes the tech world, giving us a layman’s account of just what happens behind all those closed doors. Who broke the story about Google’s Page and Brin using NASA’s Moffett Field as their own personal 767 parking lot? Valleywag, of course.
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Additional Q+A with Christa Scharfenberg
How did the Center for Investigate Reporting get its start?
As a home for intrepid freelance investigative reporters. It’s expanded and contracted a number of times. Right now, there are 11 people on staff—a production team in New York working on documentaries and eight people in Berkeley.
We’ve done multimedia reporting—print, television, radio and Web—from the start. We got an upper hand because we’ve always operated that way—we release them all in coordination for maximum impact. Our reporting is pretty broad in terms of topic areas: environment, criminal and social and international. Not “gotcha” journalism—no one person, but systems and larger structural issues.
How do you choose what stories to fund?
For a small organization, we pick topics that will have as much impact as possible. We don’t aspire to compete with The New York Times or Washington Post. People cannot go to typical news outlets and get the resources and support they need for in-depth investigations.
As you’re Berkeley-based, you’re pretty far removed from the media center that is New York. How does that benefit you?
The benefits to being out of the fray? We have a perspective on story selection—we see the world differently than people in Washington and New York. Our investigations aren’t expected, and we really get into things that are underreported. It can be an uphill battle. but it has served us well.
Because you operate free from the constraints of more traditional journalism (advertisers, for instance) you’re able to greenlight stories that no other media outlet can afford to produce. How does that feel?
We are staying true to the essential core value of journalism and the role it plays in journalism. The emergence of ProPublica [the NYC-based nonprofit journalism organization founded by Herbert and Marion Sandler, which plans to give away its stories] can be seen as a threat, but we feel there is such a void in in-depth reporting that there are stories everywhere that aren’t being told. Citizens need access to information. We believe we are playing a very important role in the functioning of democracy. We feel like the luckiest people in the world to be doing the work that we are doing because it’s so important to democracy and it’s so important to do it. We increasingly are working with reporters at newspapers where a reporter on a beat who wants to do more in-depth reporting within his or her beat is taking a leave of absence to work on a story that we help fund.
In recent years it seems that there has been a clear shift in power from the corporations to the consumers, and that organizations like CIR are instrumental in empowering the everyman. Is that a specific goal of the organization, or just a happy side effect of producing stories that hold corporations accountable?
So much about citizen journalism and blogging gets information to the people, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a substitute for the kind of trained, expensive, skilled reporting that we fund. Massive data collection requires skill and training to sift through it all and make sense of it. We’re driven by giving citizens the information they need to participate in democracy.
CIR is very strategic about where investigations are placed—in other words, you maximize the impact of the investigation by putting it, in essence, on the right desk. Would you say that CIR is very influential in terms of getting stories the best possible platform?
We try. In some cases, we have better luck than others. Television, radios and magazines are more familiar working with freelancers. Newspapers are harder because they have their own reporting staffs; they don’t want to outsource to outside reporters. And newspapers have traditionally had the most influence on news. You never know what you’re going to come out with in the end. It’s always our hope it will have influence. When A leads to B, it’s incredibly satisfying.
CIR has been around since 1977—do you think the work that it funds is more vital now than it was when CIR first started?
Yes. I think there has always been a need. There’s a kind of romanticizing of the past—like there was muckraking and accountability all over the place. But it’s always been in short supply. Now the decline is so rapid, it feels and is more dire. But it’s always been tough and a challenge to commit to consistently producing investigative reporting. It’s risky. They might come up with nothing after eight months.
Who wields influence over CIR, and whom does CIR wield influence over?
I think that our seasoned reporters and producers wield the ultimate influence. We don’t do anything without their work, so it really comes down to their stories. We have great influence within many of the media outlets that we work with, that we’ve established contacts with over the years, that can be at times invaluable. We try to choose outlets that will reach the largest group. The broad mass public, targeted policy makers, decision makers and citizen-advocacy groups take the info we reveal and use it to bring about needed reforms. That core group changes with each story.
I really do believe that there is a critical moment happening in journalism. With organizations like CIR, there is the possibility of establishing a new model for the distribution of news. We’re in a limbo state now, but in coming years I believe this type of organization will spring up all over the place and deliver stories to the public that mainstream media is failing to do. I think that you will see more and more of this type of organization.
As a nonprofit we are funded by foundations and individuals. There aren’t a lot that are interested in funding media because it’s hard to measure impact. But I think people are viscerally feeling the decline of this kind of journalism. There needs to be a major investment of money—though it’s risky—but we need it if this kind of reporting will stay alive in this country. Most people do not fund media, but they’re going to have to. We need a revolution in the funding world, and I think it’s a really critical time.
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Google, Inc.
Internet search-engine company, founded in 1998
|
Why: “Simply by virtue of its popularity, Google’s power to influence where people go on the Internet and what content they see is enormous."1
“Google (and Wikipedia, whose entries often rank near the top of Google searches) are quickly becoming central authorities. So the question is whether intellectuals are going to mope about this shift—or whether they’ll see it as an opportunity to shape popular opinion. And if they make that shift, they’ll take their cues from the spammers and charlatans, the drug pushers and the pornographers.2 Google is so popular that it’s now not only a name but a verb. From 10,000 search queries each day in the beginning, Google now fields more than 3,000 searches per second.3 I didn’t really understand the power of Google until I was here for several years. Looking back, even looking at the memos I wrote in the first year I was here, you could see [Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin] viewed Google at the level it is today. They saw it, I didn’t.4 I’ve found myself more and more wary of Google, out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.5 You can’t really think about the Internet without thinking about Google.6 It’s Google’s world; we just live in it.7 They may buy the government—who knows?
Compiled by Googling the phrase “power of Google” on November 2, 2007
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|
|
Christa Scharfenberg
37, acting executive director, Center for Investigative Reporting
|
Why: 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that produces investigative stories for radio, print, TV and the Web.
“We try to cover stories of national and international import that other media aren’t. The decline of investigative reporting is terrible for democracy but great for us—we’re driven by trying to give citizens the information they need to participate in democracy, and by the guiding principle behind all of the stories we research: to reveal injustice and hold the powerful accountable for their actions.”
Web Exclusive: Read more of this Q+A below
|
|
|
Craig Newmark
55, founder, Craigslist
|
Why: Yes, Newmark is the man behind missed connections and the apartment-hunting revolution, and the birth of an online community that gets 30 million visitors a month—but that’s not all. He’s also a powerful advocate for net neutrality, fighting to keep big media from regulating Web content.
|
|
|
Steve Jobs
52, cofounder, CEO of Apple
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Why: There’s the PC, of course, plus that little animation company he cofounded, Pixar Animation Studios (which was bought by Disney, making Jobs its single largest shareholder). Multiply that by the number of design- and tech-forward iBooks, iPods and iPhones he’s dreamed up over the past decade, and it all adds up to one powerful man. Want proof? for the first time ever, Apple is worth more than IBM.
|
|
|
Amelia Ashley-Ward
50, publisher, the Sun-Reporter
|
Why: You want this woman on your side. Ashley-Ward publishes the Sun-Reporter, Northern California’s oldest and largest black-oriented newspaper, and she’s a 25-year veteran of the business; in short, her endorsement counts. Politicians, advocacy groups and citizens beat a path to her door because they know she gets things done.
|
|
|
Mark Zuckerberg
23, founder and CEO, Facebook
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Why: Wunderkind Zuckerberg founded the social-networking site Facebook in 2004, and tech tongues wagged when he refused an offer of $1 billion for the company last year. Call him prescient: In October, Microsoft took a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing, putting the site’s value at $15 billion. Today, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site on the Web.
|
|
|
Valleywag
Silicon Valley's tech-gossip e-rag
|
Why: Valleywag, from the folks who brought us the irresistible Gawker, is the kind of snarky, funny and smart site we hate to love. More importantly, it democratizes the tech world, giving us a layman’s account of just what happens behind all those closed doors. Who broke the story about Google’s Page and Brin using NASA’s Moffett Field as their own personal 767 parking lot? Valleywag, of course.
|
Additional Q+A with Christa Scharfenberg
How did the Center for Investigate Reporting get its start?
As a home for intrepid freelance investigative reporters. It’s expanded and contracted a number of times. Right now, there are 11 people on staff—a production team in New York working on documentaries and eight people in Berkeley.
We’ve done multimedia reporting—print, television, radio and Web—from the start. We got an upper hand because we’ve always operated that way—we release them all in coordination for maximum impact. Our reporting is pretty broad in terms of topic areas: environment, criminal and social and international. Not “gotcha” journalism—no one person, but systems and larger structural issues.
How do you choose what stories to fund?
For a small organization, we pick topics that will have as much impact as possible. We don’t aspire to compete with The New York Times or Washington Post. People cannot go to typical news outlets and get the resources and support they need for in-depth investigations.
As you’re Berkeley-based, you’re pretty far removed from the media center that is New York. How does that benefit you?
The benefits to being out of the fray? We have a perspective on story selection—we see the world differently than people in Washington and New York. Our investigations aren’t expected, and we really get into things that are underreported. It can be an uphill battle. but it has served us well.
Because you operate free from the constraints of more traditional journalism (advertisers, for instance) you’re able to greenlight stories that no other media outlet can afford to produce. How does that feel?
We are staying true to the essential core value of journalism and the role it plays in journalism. The emergence of ProPublica [the NYC-based nonprofit journalism organization founded by Herbert and Marion Sandler, which plans to give away its stories] can be seen as a threat, but we feel there is such a void in in-depth reporting that there are stories everywhere that aren’t being told. Citizens need access to information. We believe we are playing a very important role in the functioning of democracy. We feel like the luckiest people in the world to be doing the work that we are doing because it’s so important to democracy and it’s so important to do it. We increasingly are working with reporters at newspapers where a reporter on a beat who wants to do more in-depth reporting within his or her beat is taking a leave of absence to work on a story that we help fund.
In recent years it seems that there has been a clear shift in power from the corporations to the consumers, and that organizations like CIR are instrumental in empowering the everyman. Is that a specific goal of the organization, or just a happy side effect of producing stories that hold corporations accountable?
So much about citizen journalism and blogging gets information to the people, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a substitute for the kind of trained, expensive, skilled reporting that we fund. Massive data collection requires skill and training to sift through it all and make sense of it. We’re driven by giving citizens the information they need to participate in democracy.
CIR is very strategic about where investigations are placed—in other words, you maximize the impact of the investigation by putting it, in essence, on the right desk. Would you say that CIR is very influential in terms of getting stories the best possible platform?
We try. In some cases, we have better luck than others. Television, radios and magazines are more familiar working with freelancers. Newspapers are harder because they have their own reporting staffs; they don’t want to outsource to outside reporters. And newspapers have traditionally had the most influence on news. You never know what you’re going to come out with in the end. It’s always our hope it will have influence. When A leads to B, it’s incredibly satisfying.
CIR has been around since 1977—do you think the work that it funds is more vital now than it was when CIR first started?
Yes. I think there has always been a need. There’s a kind of romanticizing of the past—like there was muckraking and accountability all over the place. But it’s always been in short supply. Now the decline is so rapid, it feels and is more dire. But it’s always been tough and a challenge to commit to consistently producing investigative reporting. It’s risky. They might come up with nothing after eight months.
Who wields influence over CIR, and whom does CIR wield influence over?
I think that our seasoned reporters and producers wield the ultimate influence. We don’t do anything without their work, so it really comes down to their stories. We have great influence within many of the media outlets that we work with, that we’ve established contacts with over the years, that can be at times invaluable. We try to choose outlets that will reach the largest group. The broad mass public, targeted policy makers, decision makers and citizen-advocacy groups take the info we reveal and use it to bring about needed reforms. That core group changes with each story.
I really do believe that there is a critical moment happening in journalism. With organizations like CIR, there is the possibility of establishing a new model for the distribution of news. We’re in a limbo state now, but in coming years I believe this type of organization will spring up all over the place and deliver stories to the public that mainstream media is failing to do. I think that you will see more and more of this type of organization.
As a nonprofit we are funded by foundations and individuals. There aren’t a lot that are interested in funding media because it’s hard to measure impact. But I think people are viscerally feeling the decline of this kind of journalism. There needs to be a major investment of money—though it’s risky—but we need it if this kind of reporting will stay alive in this country. Most people do not fund media, but they’re going to have to. We need a revolution in the funding world, and I think it’s a really critical time.
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