Category Archives: Journalism, norgs, the future of news

Chris Amico’s “Tools for news”

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Tools for news is a Django driven application that lists web apps, references, software, and more that would be useful to anyone building a mashup, but in particular if you are a journalist. Via DigiDave.

Flash, UI, and football fans check out “Inside the Playbook” at NYTimes

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The NYTimes uses Flash to produce analysis of each match-up in the NFL playoffs and a fun game to predict winners.

Here is one example of upcoming game analysis: Inside the Playbook: Philadelphia at Minnesota

Here is the predict the winner game: Inside the Playbook Challenge

And go Eagles!

Doc Searls: “What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called ‘data or ‘information’ but rather to feed hungry minds?”

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Doc Searls: Beyond mediation: We are all media now, right? That’s what we, the mediating, tell ourselves. (Or some of us, anyway.) But what if that’s not how we feel about it? What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called “data” or “information” but rather to feed hungry minds? That’s different.

I believe that we truly are the media now.

When we criticize ‘the media’ we are criticizing ourselves. Media is intermingled. It’s everywhere and each of us take part from the smallest of web forums to the largest of social networks. That implies a civic responsibility.

People hate that word – responsibility – but there it is. And when it comes to media – the responsibilities that spring from it are now shared by us all.

Newspapers, news organizations, and social media in transition

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This much is clear – by the end of 2009, there will be many fewer newspapers publishing in America.

Some attribute the fall of newspapers to:

Coming from where I come from, with the experience that I had at Philly.com, I couldn’t help but think that Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky’s point of view is a damaging re-write of history that obscures complicated truths. This is disappointing for me because both of them have important knowledge for newspaper organizations that can help them in their on going efforts to evolve, and their posting of what are essentially pieces that incite rather than provide insight did no one any favors. Jeff Jarvis, in particular, has been a major force in pushing along papers to meet the future. And I am literally a *fan* of Clay Shirky’s writings – I share many of them with who I work.

It could be that Clay Shirky was trolled by the off the wall piece by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate about Jeff Jarvis. It was a true blue hatchet job. Still, I felt the need to reply in comments to Shirky’s piece and to Jeff Jarvis’s piece celebrating Shirky’s article.

Me, replying to Clay Shirky (paraphrasing):

Sadly it is people like Rosenbaum who get the limelight, when perspectives of those within the industry are far, far different.

In fact they are so different that I say it is a dangerous re-writing of history to say that “The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.”

You can pull famous examples such as Dan Gillmor or Jay Rosen or Jeff Jarvis himself.

You can look directly at archive.org to see the competitive state of newspaper websites in the late 90s or early 00s (note when they stopped evolving – the .com crash).

Undeniably there some within news organizations that are (were?) willfully ignorant – for sure – however I can tell you from personal experience that the majority of my ex-co-workers were not keeping their heads in the sand and had fought (are fighting) tooth and nail to bring culture change to their organizations.

Take a look at

http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/

1997.

These organizations were doing fabulously well in their economics btw. So much so that what is occurring is a textbook example of “the Innovator’s Dilemma” (thank you Henry Copeland for suggesting that book to me so long ago!).

You are more correct in your glacier analogy – however – think of it as a slow approaching death – a frog in a slow boiling pot of water.

Speaking of Dan Gillmor – I remember the difficulties he faced in getting his first blog off the ground within Knight Ridder. But he wasn’t alone in pursuing the future.

It is factually incorrect to state otherwise.

If there are any lessons to be learned by all this – they won’t occur if the narrative becomes a simplistic “we spoke – they ignored”.

And to not expect people to cry out as they lose their jobs – jobs that many have been fighting to transform when they are still relevant (the reporting not the papers) is bull.

Oh, and speaking of those in the trenches, consider speaking to Wendy Warren, Will Bunch, and Daniel Rubin of Philly.com, the Daily News, and Inquirer.

As Jeff Jarvis himself spoke well of two years ago:

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/03/25/saving-journalism-and-killing-the-press/

This narrative of “us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get” needs to stop.

Me, replying to Jeff Jarvis (paraphrasing):

I’ll call bullshit on Clay and you both on the idea that no one has been “caught up in this great upheaval”. I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky. I share his writing with folks at work all the time and I’ve actually quoted him to you in various responses to you over the years.
There have been many newspaper folks fighting for change in that industry over the past ten years.

Ya know, there is part of me that is downright mad at this – it almost resembles a re-writing of history.

I maybe in your ignore list now Jeff, I’m not sure.

But I am secure in knowing that of the many, many people losing their jobs and careers in the midst of this ongoing revolution – a revolution I feel part of as an early adopter, promoter, evangelist, software engineer, blogger and more – there are thousands that do *not* deserve blame for what is going on.

I WILL NOT thumb my nose at them.

They fought, and in many places continue to fight, to drive business and culture changes in organizations that still have relevant value in a world where we are no better informed then we were 10 years ago according to Pew.

Change is life. But the big story here isn’t in the numbers of people who willfully looked the other way. There was some. But not the vast majority of people I worked with in the trenches at Philly.com.

Hell no.

And my heart goes out to them who fought (and continue to fight) with everything they have – to turn their ship around from the glacier that Shirky is right to indicate.

When the definitive history of this is recorded, hopefully it will capture the truth – that many of the guns pointed at the patient were those of the patient – but willful ignorance was the least of these. That many knew they were pursuing immediate profits over long term investments. Others were fighting for change and evolution to meet the future in every single project they worked on and found frustrating blockers in culture and immediate ROI turnaround demands of established businesses meeting the calls of investors. That culture and technology were dealing death blows to the ‘paper’ as information costs dropped towards zero and we each became empowered with our own printing presses – the Web.

There are *many* reasons. But I repeat – the narrative of “us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get” needs to stop.

Everyone needs to get over themselves already.

Elsewhere and recent:

Talking Points Memo has announced it will be sending two new additional paid reporters to Washington DC while it has been reported that newspapers will be sending far fewer to cover happenings at the Capitol.

Pew Research Center, in a recent study, has announced the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of news.

Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) is buying Consumerist from Gawker Media. More on the news at Consumerist.

Business Week takes a look at other business models for journalism including a glance at Spot.us.

And at the LA Times an important milestone has been reached Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.

Meanwhile, Gabe Rivera speaks some hard to hear truth (to some) about automated news filters: Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work.

Jay Rosen summarizes the moment: Migration Point for the Press Tribe:

The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on–also called their business model–no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.

Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans–is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it’s time to panic.

CNN gets rid of the crawl

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I expected this to be bigger news in my circles, but it hasn’t registered. CNN has rejected the news crawl for a far less busy headline flip in its news broadcasts. The new UI makes it far easier to absorb the news broadcast without constant distraction and sometimes even helps to clarify whatever it is that is being reported. Great job CNN.

NYTimes: The Flipper Challenges the Crawl

NYTimes on using GeoDjango

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Nice work NYTimes.

Open: Represent:

We built Represent with Django, the Python web framework. Although we do most of our work with Ruby on Rails, we chose Django for this project so we could use GeoDjango, an add-on that supports geometry fields and extends the ORM to allow spatial queries.

We started with maps from New York City’s Department of City Planning showing district boundaries for City Council, State Assembly, State Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. We used the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library, a translator library for raster geospatial data formats, through GeoDjango’s LayerMapping class to populate a PostgreSQL database extended with the PostGIS spatial extension. The geometry relationship functions provided by PostGIS allow for quick, accurate lookups to determine which legislative districts contain your address.

Represent shows you your address in relation to each of the political districts that contain it. To draw the maps of your districts, we used GEOS, a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite, an API for modeling and manipulating 2-dimensional linear geometry, via GeoDjango’s GEOS API. GEOS allows for the conversion of a geometry to KML, which can then be consumed by Google Maps.

But to do all that, we need an address: yours, hopefully, if you live in New York City. To turn that address into coordinates, we built a geocoding service based on Geo-Coder-US, the perl library that powers geocoder.us.

NPR is in trouble

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Blame it on changing technology, blame it on the journalists, blame it on shortsighted management, blame it on missing that oncoming glacier, blame it on the economy (everyone is WAY to concerned with throwing stones right now if you ask me) everyone is feeling pain right now and many institutions people rely on are being shook.

NPR: NPR Cuts Jobs, Cancels Programs.

The Greatest “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” talk about community, tech and open source EVER (A repost and re-tweet)

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I shared this previously, but it is worth a repost (many reposts), via Jay Rosen (as does title!). I’d say my entire career has been formed by this effect one way or another. And I am thankful.

When we think about the problems we face today, here is how the Internet provides a participatory platform to help. There’s nothing in here that refutes human nature – it just celebrates an important facet of it: When we gather around communities of interest we care deeply about – we look out for others within that community of interest. The Internet changes the stage for which we can connect across those passions.

YouTube: Cay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:

1995: “Publishing Models for Internet Commerce”

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Here is another must read from long ago. So much is still perfectly relevant to today. Tim O’Reilly: 1995: Publishing Models for Internet Commerce:

We’ve based our work in these two areas on two distinct but overlapping observations about publishing:

1. On the net, “Information is plentiful. Trust and attention are
scarce.” (David Liddel) The development of brand identity is a
critical part of publishing success in what you might call
“commodity information businesses” where no one has a lock on
proprietary content.

2. A reference work is essentially a “user interface” to a body
information. What does that interface look like online? How can
a publisher who specializes in making sense out of complex
topics do it better on the net?

In an information glut, it is not content but context that is
king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not
because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure
there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it
has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular
class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the
establishment of “information brands” on the net–publications that
have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.

…The actual content is valuable–but far more valuable is the
relationship with the people who like the same kinds of things we like.

This relationship runs all through publishing–and not just
magazine publishing. Publishing marketing is always affinity marketing:

“If you liked Steven King’s last novel, you’ll like this one even better.”
“If you like Steven King, you’ll like Peter Straub.”
“If you like Steven King, you’ll like these other books from the same
publisher.”

…In the old model, the information product is a container. In the
new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other
centers it.

…I believe that there’s a tremendous market for those in the
publishing business to turn their experience in making sense of
complex bodies of information to this new world of online information
publishing.

…In many ways, selectivity is the inevitable “other face” of
universal distribution. When you can get anything you want, how do you
select what you want? At the end of the day, while a consumer can walk
into a bookstore and order any book in print, he or she typically
browses through a much smaller selection offered by the bookseller. In
fact, one of the key grounds on which a bookseller competes (other
than location) is the nature of the selection that it offers.

And information has a funny characteristic. Up to a certain point,
more choice is better. Then the situation flips. The user gets
overwhelmed, and less is more. Publishing shows us the role not of the
gatekeeper (who allows only certain content to be published), but of
the adviser, whether that adviser is a trusted columnist or reviewer
in a newspaper, or a trusted clerk at the local bookseller.

Understanding this role will be important to the future of commercial
online services.

…The net isn’t 30 million people, it’s tens of thousands of
overlapping groups ranging from a few people to perhaps a couple of
hundred thousand at the largest. As I told one large publisher trying
to figure out what to do about the Internet: “Yes, there is a billion
dollar opportunity here. But you’re going to find it a few million at
a time.”

Think niche. It’s the net’s greatest strength.

Look for opportunities to reinforce the fundamentals of the
Internet–participation, access, communication.

Read the whole piece.