Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith analyzes how the story of a confrontation between a litterbug and a hardcore anti-litterer in Kensington Market turned into news.

I offer some counter-thoughts.

I first heard about the Jan. 26 incident at Blamblog, but Smith said photographer Adam Krawesky, who photodocumented the confrontation, originally posted his pix at Citynoise.

Smith is taken with the attention generated by the pix: "The comments on Citynoise began quickly: Within a few hours, there were literally hundreds."

The show then moved on to Metafilter, where a parallel discussion developed. On Tuesday, the Toronto Star ran a front-page story on this event on Tuesday -- covering some the same ground that Smith does, without the opining.

Smith wrote about the raging debate:

"What did the discussion reveal? I have never understood why anyone would want to post anything on these forums: You don't know who you're arguing with and why would you care what they think? Furthermore, any and all discussions of any import are turned to mush by the inevitable insults, and insults lead to counterinsults, until you're simply name-calling."

Uh, Russ, you're a writer, so perhaps you could appreciate the fact that people want to express themselves, and the nature of the read-write web and other online technologies makes it easy to do just that.

On the name-calling stuff, there's no doubt it's the worst aspect of dialogue in cyberspace.

Here's Smith again:

... It created an interesting parallel: A case of road rage, when discussed, very rapidly led to road rage on the digital highway.

One theory I have about cyber-communications is that when we write an email to a discussion list or compose a forum posting or blog comment, we're actually writing it to ourselves (in many cases, we're probably writing as we're by ourselves), and so it's an expression of our inner, not our outer voices. Normally we'll say things in our heads that we wouldn't say out loud, especially if the other person was standing right in front of us.

A lesson we can draw from this is the apparent eggshell-thin fragility of our civilization. :)

Smith goes on to talk about the mutual fact-checking aspect of online discussions, and the fact that the courier actually jumped in and posted her version of events (Afterthought - Question: anyone ever hear from the aggrieved driver?)

Here's where, in my opinion, Smith's thoughts go off-course:

The Internet is a parallel news network, spreading news much faster than we in the media can with all our technology and organization. The pictures were posted sometime last Thursday, but Monday morning, the discussion about them had involved thousands of people from all over the world. By the time a newspaper ran the story the following day, it was old news on the Net.

And why did these pictures not make it to the newspapers and the TV stations right away? They -- we -- would have loved to have them. I think, first of all, because it didn't occur to the photographer to go there with them. His first instinct was to post on-line. Not only is it easier to do this -- no phone call, just a mouse click -- but you can control how your story appears and how you get credit for it. And he knew, too, that his story's dissemination would be just as quick and just as effective.

If Russell read the Star story more carefully, the story wasn't about the incident itself, which is relatively minor and happens in varying degrees all over Toronto on a daily basis; it's about how the reaction to the photos went nuclear in various online forums.

As such, I don't think this is the case on which I'd want to build a thesis about how the Internet is now just as quick and effective a news dissemination mechanism as the tired old dead-trees-and-transmitters MSM.

Smith said Citynoise received about 100,000 page views over five days, which is an average of 20,000 page views per day. Pretty good, but for context, a major Canadian MSM online news site would count page views in the range of millions per day.

And to put that 100,000 page views number in perspective, there are 2.5 million Torontonians. You can't assume that 100,000 people viewed the page once (or even that they're all from Toronto, given how the issue went viral), but even if you did, that would be a relatively small part of Toronto's overall population. So I don't know how you can say posting on something like Citynoise is as effective has having a story on the front page of the Toronto Star.

Smith apparently didn't question in his own mind why the site crashed after it received mainstream attention.

(Update: As of Thursday night, it hadbeen viewed 320,000 times)

There's little questioning of other statistics used in the column. Hundreds of comments in a few hours on a topic where it's easy to have an instant, gut-level opinion is not hard to do. It can also involve only a handful of hyperactive people.

The littering/road rage thing is part of urban living, although one member of the community at citynoise seemed to think this was one of the best such posts of all time (better, even, than the crow vs. goose one from Tokyo).

But on just the facts of the matter, it's not big news by the traditional definition: An event of significant importance that is either interesting or important to a large segment of the population.

News as conversation

How about by a non-traditional definition: News as conversation? (Afterthought: Or an older definition: News is what people are talking about)

One of the trendiest things in U.S. journalism is "citizen journalism," which seeks to rebuild bonds between citizens and MSM organizations by having the citizens contribute to the newsgathering process.

CJ also seeks to stimulate a dialogue between citizens and journalists, with the news forming the starting point of the conversation. Many journalists prefer the role of news judges or news priests, with their "judgments" and "sermons" speaking for themselves.

While the philosophy of CJ represents a distinct shift, I don't know if it does in practice when you factor out changes in technology. There's always been letters to the editor and op-ed pieces. When I started in journalism almost 20 years ago as a reporter for the Fort Saskatchewan Record (hey, Don Wanagas started there too!) fall meant people bringing in pictures of misshapen vegetables.

At the Regina Leader-Post, some woman stopped to take a photo of a tornado with a Kodak Instamatic. It was a very full-frame image, which had our photographers thinking it's probably just as well this woman didn't realize how much danger she had put herself in.

More currently, the Pearson jet crash produced some classic CJ contributions, with passengers taking cellphone pix of the exodus from the Air France jet, among other things.

However, although I mentioned factoring out technology earlier, you can't, because technology is everything in this trend. The growth of digital media has changed the picture completely, with digital cameras built right into one's cellphone. Toss in miniaturized video cameras (also available in cellphones), digital tape recorders, affordable, easy-to-use photo and video editing software and you can see how the technological barrier between amateur and professional has fallen considerably.

And with the read-write Web, publishing is now a snap (Blogware, for example, isn't as advanced as the publishing tool I use at work, but it also lets one produce a good-looking blog without having any technical Web skills whatsoever).

Again, the online medium naturally accomodates two-way communication. One glaring omission in the Star's coverage of the story was that their online version didn't offer a link to any discussion forum.

Globeandmail.com, in comparison, does allow people to attach their comments directly to stories.

To me, discussion is important in the online world, because it allows the building of community.

While Smith is likely right about the ease of publishing making a difference versus trying to sell them to an editor (although we don't know that Krawesky saw the photos as having commercial news potential), the real crux might be that Krawesky saw himself as a member of the citynoise community, and so when he had something good, his first instinct was to post there.

Question: If we have dozens, hundreds or thousands of such micro-communities forming in a city like Toronto to exchange news and information, what then becomes the role of the MSM in helping keep the entire city informed?

Last thought before bedtime

Smith didn't put it this way, but here's another question: Journalism used to be described as the first draft of history. Should we now start thinking about it as the second draft?