It’s like pre-curation: You know that what you’re going to get will be interesting and good. So far there are questions out – with some answers – to people like Jeff Jarvis, Yancy Strickler (Kickstarter), John Borthwick (Betaworks), Donald Glover (Community), Nieman Lab, Ezra Klein, Elizabeth Stark (Vowch) — and me! Co-founder Cody Brown, who founded Kommons with NYU classmate Kate Ray, sent me a question on Saturday, and caught me in a moment of weakness with this catnip for media wonks: “What was the NYC media community like before Twitter?”. I spent the next hour blurting out my response. Boom – free content for Kommons, and now, Mediaite. My answer is below, in its blurted form, free of the links I would have probably spent half an hour methodically inserting. You know what? Find your own damn links. Just kidding. But as I told Kool Kid Kody, I’d been meaning to write on this for a long time and now I am glad I did. My answer below:

Twitter really did turn everything on its head, particularly for people who were classic “bloggers.” Prior to Twitter, there was RSS of course, but being linked and mentioned in other blogs was the social currency. Things got written up, as opposed to tweeted in 140-character bites. (So, panels and parties and events would tend to get write-ups. I did a lot of that at “Eat The Press” at HuffPo, and a lot of reports on TV moments, and a lot of transcribing. Also, pre-Twitter, I remember how reporters thought it was very clever to seek out people on Facebook for quotes (that, I recall, was at one point revolutionary). This is the more narrow answer to the NYC media community question.

More broadly, though, ACCESS was just different (and when I first became active in 2008 I was steeped in the election, so my community was in NY and DC). It was like Twitter was its own little city, wherever you were from, if you were in that mix, you were in it. And it was like a little badge of membership, of commonality. Twitter has created connections between people who would not have otherwise had them (it’s how I showed up at Joe Scarborough’s book party circa March 2009 to an effusive welcome from Suzy and Jack Welch, my Twitter buds). That was back in March 2009 – when Twitter hadn’t yet “tipped”: Ashton and CNN hadn’t yet battled – Oprah hadn’t yet anointed – Maureen Dowd hadn’t yet embarrassed herself with a clueless, condescending interview with Ev and Biz. So Twitter was also a huge flattener. Before it went “mainstream” as it were, it was much more of a conversation and the attention people used to court by, say, posting comments on blogs could be gotten by @ replies. So if you were an early adopter, it was useful.

(BTW, I was an early adopter for media but not for tech – I became active in mid-2008. So for me Twitter was a huge part of covering – and consuming – the 2008 Conventions, but was totally absent from my experience during the primaries. Which up until this Kommons question, I hadn’t thought about.)

One of the big things about Twitter though was how it broke news – it subverted the gatekeeper function of the traditional media and allowed people to just shout stuff out. And so famous people Twittering became news stories (Shaq finding out he had been traded on Twitter is one.) It was also a way to break stories – if you cared more about planting a flag (“First!”) than traffic or a byline, there it was. So as people were building their own “brands” the incentives started to blur a bit, I think, too.

I wrote a lot about this stuff here, in a post that is now a relic but also, a time capsule: Pet Peeve: Journalists Opining on Twitter Who Have No Clue About Twitter

But I have to say that what seems to me to have changed things maybe even more (is that sacrilege?) was the rise of embeddable code. When I started at FishbowlNY in April 2005, there was no YouTube. There were very few people clipping TV moments, you had to see it or read about it after. (My bread and butter for a while was doing next-day write ups of The Daily Show, and I actually remember how it felt to have technology make you obsolete.) The ability to pull and embed clips from across the dial changed the distribution game, and made water-cooler moments shareable to those who had missed them – in now *created* water-cooler moments from things that would otherwise have been missed. (I remember how the clip of Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck went viral – as I can recall, that was the first real widespread “View” moment. I still credit Danny Shea at HuffPo with making The View must-watch daily TV for aggregators – he pulled a Sherri Shepard clip of the day and recognized it as a goldmine of clippable moments. Online, I feel like “clip culture” has taken over (despite my preference for the written word over video). It’s not long ago at all that the big media companies were violently opposed to permitting clips – there was NBC pulling all those clips of SNL down from YouTube (they went embeddable just a few weeks after the return after the writer’s strike, in Feb 2008, just in time to become a player in the election with Tina Fey’s “bitch is the new black” – the ability to disseminate those moments every week played a huge part in the SNL resurgence); there was Viacom pulling Stewart and Colbert off YouTube, before reluctantly coming up with their own embeddable system; and there was Hulu, finally entering the picture in March 2008 as well. NBC and MSNBC were the first to offer their stuff in embeddable, clipped form. And they saw an advantage in this in how they were picked up and disseminated. The upshot: “Next Day Pickup” became a metric. Probably the best example of a TV show that got this from the start is Jimmy Fallon. His team got that, sought out influencers, played to online interest – not in a calculated, fake-feeling way but because the Fallon team identified an audience they wanted to reach and gave that audience material that demonstrated that they understood and respected it, rather than being all, “Internets! Jimmy Fallon has deigned to notice you, now you shall post this video!” Which you have seen from other MSM types. That ain’t a winning strategy.

Anyway – there have been a lot of big game changes since I started five short years ago (I mean, really. Five years. Wow). But I do think that while Twitter was a major major game changer, the whole embeddable-code thing has also ended up being, as Joe Biden would say, a BFD. And thank you Cody for your question because I have been meaning to write about this for a while, and now I can just scoop up this first-draft version and paste it into a blog post – and then, of course, tweet it out. xoxo

Hersh, the longtime New Yorker investigative reporter, was months ahead of the  New York Times on their bombshell CIA stories linking former Vice President Dick Cheney to secret CIA programs targeting Al Qaeda leaders, both on Saturday (“Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project” by Scott Shane) and Monday’s front page (“C.I.A. Had Plans to Assassinate Qaeda Leaders” by Shane and Mark Mazzetti). In a speech at the University of Minnesota four months ago, Hersh said:

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And Hersh has been on the scent of under-the-radar cross-border teams operating in Iran for over a year.

Brown makes a good point: Where is Hersh in the crediting? And, more to the point, why didn’t anyone listen to Hersh months ago? Why didn’t anyone care?  Hersh doesn’t even get any credit under the CIA Times Topics other coverage bar (Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004), however does get a mention) .

New York Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis dismissed the question of crediting, saying in an e-mail, “Our story said the plan never led to any missions; that no such missions were carried out. That’s quite different.”

Leaving the similarities between the two stories aside, there seems to be more here than just a newsroom’s reluctance to credit. Four months is a long time to pick up a story — but Hersh’s only went as far as the minor leagues, with pickup from a few places but no larger breakthrough (he did attract some skeptics, though). Hersh also spoke at length about Cheney on NPR shortly after the Minnesota speech, suggesting that Cheney had left “stay-behinds” in the Obama administration, including in the NSA — allies who would keep him in the loop and through whom he could potentially influence policy.  Again, his remarks got picked up in smaller outlets but failed to make a larger dent.

Sy Hersh has been right about Abu Ghraib, stovepiping, and has won a mantle’s worth of awards — so why aren’t people hanging on his every word? There is a contingent in the media community who view him with skepticism, despite his track record, who think that in between the scoops and stories Hersh displays an overzealous paranoia. Said one senior journalist who covers high-level issues of politics and national security:

“He sees ghosts around every corner — he’s been wrong a lot and he overreaches. It’s a little like the phrase, ‘a broken clock is right, twice a day.’  He is just hugely controversial. Methods, personality, results.”

But New Yorker editor David Remnick stands by Hersh, strongly: “If you quote me saying anything, I hope it’s that he is a national treasure.” Remnick, who has worked with Hersh for 11 years, said that this was not a question of Hersh’s Cheney story being turned down by the New Yorker, or of Hersh being doubted or questioned.

“I didn’t disbelieve him, of course I didn’t … he can’t write every story that he knows about,” said Remnick. “There’s a difference between talking and writing. There’s a difference between hearing things and suspecting that there’s a great story and nailing down to the degree to which you publish it in the New Yorker. And it’s my job to collaborate with Sy and as an editor to do that.”

Hersh, reached by the Daily Beast in South Asia yesterday, didn’t sound surprised by any of it: “I said what I said, they can always say what they say … The last time they said the government doesn’t torture; this time it’s the government doesn’t assassinate.”

As for the NYT credit, Remnick said: “It’s a hit or miss thing — I worked at the Washington Post for ten years — it’s not the most joyful part of your day when you have to credit your rival. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong — and sometimes you’ll see the credit ingeniuously placed … in investigative reporting, the difference between having nailed the story and having suspected it was there is a long distance — otherwise he’d be in the magazine every week.”

Remnick noted that part of collecting these stories is deciding which ones to run with: “Sometimes we want to kick ourselves.” Remnick says that Hersh is “working on something extraordinary — but while he’s working on story X he very often hears about Y and Z … he hears a lot of things. So does Jane Mayer, so does Steve Coll.” Remnick said that he and Hersh were faced with such a choice with the Abu Ghraib story: “Abu Ghraib was something he found out about in the midst of working on something else — it was like a triage thing in the emergency room — we had to dump the other thing and decide in two seconds which one to choose.”

Whatever the skeptics may think of Hersh — and however he may spout off rather than be safely fact-checked in print — Remnick says he is proud to have him. “To be hoenst, there aren’t many people doing what he does. So when you strip away all the commentators and all the rest — when you get down how many people are really up to their elbows in very, very hard-to-get stories, and then among those people, how many people have the sources that they’ve developed over time to really get there — not just suspect something, but get there — you’re now down to very narrow circle. And Sy is one of those people.”