Writing the news we want to be true, or writing the news that is

Many of us are concerned about Tibet, China's control over that country, the many Tibetans killed by the Chinese government, the exile of Tibets government, the usurpation of Tibetan Buddhism by China and so forth.   So when a friend pointed me at a News article titled "China agrees to give Tibet back to the Tibetans" which started off by saying that "In an unprecedented announcement, President Hu Jintao of the Peoples Republic of China has announced the long-desired return of the land of Tibet to its indigenous people,"well, I was kind of ecstatic.  Reading down the article said he had agreed to return the land to its people, free the Panchen Lama, and a bunch of other things including ending the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners.

Sounded cool but it started to sound like a hoax.  Heading over to Google News I see this article over there, but all the rest of the Tibet articles talk about a wave of self immolations, recriminations against China over the immolations, and other violence by China against Tibet. 

Obviously the guy who wrote the article was pulling an Yes-Men-esque stunt on the rest of us.  He was writing the news that we want to be true, and doing it so well that a lot of people are falling for it.

As of this writing the article has over 10,000 page views, over 2000 likes onto Facebook, almost 140 tweets, etc.  Clearly it's catching the imaginations of a lot of people. 

I mentioned the Yes Men because of some stunts they've pulled.  Their an activist group whose schtick is to stage fake news, the sort of news we want to be true.  The biggest stunt they pulled was to arrange to be interviewed by the BBC posing as representatives of Union Carbide and apologizing for the Bhopal disaster, and promising to pay reparations.  In case you don't know about that event - the disaster was a chemical plant explosion in India that killed and poisoned a bunch of people in India.  Union Carbide has denied responsibility and refused to pay anything (so far as I remember), so what they did was concoct the sort of news we want to see happen.  Namely, a large company actually taking responsibility for their misdeeds.

In this case the target is China and Tibet, but we have the same pattern.

In the Transition Town movement there's a process we call "back-casting" where we create a picture/story/etc of where we want to be and project that backwards to find out how we get there.  One of the ways some Transition groups have approached it is to publish fake newspapers containing the stories we want to be true.

But - is it appropriate for The News? 

The story was published on AllVoices.com, a citizen journalism website.  Anybody can sign up for the site to write articles and earn money.  It's real easy to sign up - I just went through the process and got signed up in about 30 minutes.  It appears to be a small website still with not many people writing on the site.  Their pay structure appears to be pretty good.  etc..

But the point of mentioning this is that the people on the site aren't always gonna be proper journalists with proper journalist ethics.  In this case the guy obviously wasn't interested in posting Real News but instead News That We Want to be True.  But because AllVoices is hooked up with Google News as a News Source, the article can be found (right now) as a news story on Google News amongst all the stories of bloodshed in Tibet.

The stories we see in a place like Google News obviously should be true.  We want places like Google News to contain Real News.  The reason is so that we can interpret the world as it is with the benefit of accurate information about the world which exists.

Real Journalism ideally focuses on Real News.  This is completely distinct from the News That We Want To Be True sort of story as this one about Tibet.  Fortunately AllVoices has policies saying that News That We Want To Be True (or any other sort of false news report) violates the policies of AllVoices, will be removed, the author will lose out on earning any money from pieces that violate policies, etc. 

Maybe there should be a place to publish News That We Want To Be True.  There are places which publish Hoax News such as The Onion (an utterly fine publication), for example.  Hurm.  We just have to make sure we don't pollute Real News with News That We Want To Be True ... right?

Illegitimate download sites and digital books and seeing my book available for free download

I have written a book, Node Web Development (available through the publisher, or amazon.com), and have a blog http://nodejs.davidherron.com/ that's in part meant to promote the book as well as write about Node.js and thereby get some attention to myself and indirectly the book.  One strategy I'm following is to look for people who've written reviews of the book, and promote their book review.  That helps me, it helps them, we all win, etc.  But it means I'm typing the name of the book, Node Web Development, into search engines, carefully going through the search results, and I just came away disturbed by what I found.

There's this scummy underbelly of the Internet where copyrighted works you're expected to pay $$'s for are available for free download.  The sites who do this feel scummy, are full of scummy advertising, scummy popup ads, etc.  These sites might be unseen most of the time, I'd certainly never seen them come up in search results before today.  But a yahoogle search for "Node Web Development" today brings up a couple dozen of these sites within the first 10 pages of search results.

It's disturbing to say the least to see the book I sweated over for 9 months available for free download.

There's a saying some "leading thinkers" came up with - the information wants to be free.  We convert our works into digital form, to make it easier on our customers to use, but that digital form then makes it really easy to copy the file around and for example put it up on a download site where people can access it for free. 

It's nice in theory to say "the information wants to be free" but when your income model is earning revenue from sales of your work it doesn't feel good to see my work set free for download by anyone.

By saying "the information wants to be free" they're talking about a free flow of data and information in the soup of culture.   Yes, I understand that in theory.  But there are times what sounds like a wonderful theory doesn't feel so good when you're presented with reality.

I've sent the publisher a report of a dozen or so sites I found making the book available for free download.  The publisher is the one who owns the copyright, so it's their job to protect the book and e.g. send takedown orders and the like.

Another defense I can think of is for there to be more web pages out there mentioning the book.  That is, bury these scammy download sites in the search results by making legit postings on a variety of websites.  Hence, this blog post mentions the name of the book, Node Web Development, in a deliberate attempt to get indexed by the search engines .. (wink wink)

I've read some "free e-book" advice that there's a submarket of "free e-book" authors who throw together "books" that may be of dubious quality, and their revenue model is to fill the free e-book with affiliate links.  And along the way of distributing the free e-book they might collect email addresses into a newsletter so they can market other products to those people later on.  In other words some people use free e-books as a not-so-honest marketing method.  In this case my book is not in that vein, and the publisher is not that sort of publishing house.  Our revenue model is a straightforward sale of a book to a buying customer.

Bleah