Placeblogger, an effort by The Center for Citizen Media, Pressthink, and Lisa William’s H20town launched on New Years. It’s focussed on sharing with you blogs that cover a geographical region. I believe this will grow to be an important service over time. And I gotta admit – it is great to see so many ideas expressed from Philly Future adopted in a national effort. (disclaimer – they might make me an honorary adviser due to influence). Read Pressthink for more.
Category Archives: Journalism, norgs, the future of news
Norgs stories: The Web Disintermediates (wait for it…)
One of the ideas that gets branded about whenever slumping circulation numbers are screamed from headlines, CD sales are found to be tanking, movie ticket sales slumping, or broadcast TV viewers disappearing, is the notion that because the Web disintermediates the middle-man between content creator and content consumer, people are going to the Web and abandoning “traditional” media.
There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.
A simple out of the box example – What is a good link blogger like Eschaton, other then an aggregator of sorts?
How about YouTube? What of Google or Yahoo!?
Something to chew on as you read the following stories:
paidContent.org: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment (source for the graphic)
Philly Future: MyFox Philadelphia – Fox News Wants Your Blog
Philly Future: DigPhilly.com – NBC 10 Wants Your Blog (includes a who-who in local social media efforts)
Washington Post: Howard Kurtz: At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?
Center for Citizen Media: Newspaper as Blog Portal
The Sad Irony of Layoffs at the Inquirer and Daily News
Last week a prime example of the utility and the need, for news organizations like those in our newspapers, played out in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer as it reported on mismanagement in Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services.
Mismanagement that has led to up to five children deaths in 2006.
In the report’s wake, two officials have been ousted and workers are left up in arms and in disarray, organizing a huge protest last Friday.
Contract negotiations are taking place at the Inquirer and Daily News, in the midst of huge shifts in the newspaper marketplace. Shifts that have been taking place for sometime now, shifts that force the issue – newspaper companies must change their business models or die.
Knight Ridder papers responded to changing marketplace, the past six years, with ever shrinking budgets, ever tightening belts, and consolidation of resources and empowerment in the hands of the few. The culmination of which was the fire sale that took place over the past year.
In Philadelphia a sense of optimism sprung as it was a group of local business leaders that purchased the papers. They talked of investment, and a recognition that further cuts were almost impossible to make.
So you gotta give the Daily News’s Will Bunch a pass for the bleak tone in his latest piece on the situation at the papers and the industry at large. I’m reflecting his irony here. This post being an echo of his in a sense.
How could he not feel that way with the memo him and other Philadelphia Media Holdings employees received Friday? A memo that sounded, I bet to his ears, all too familiar.
While saving the paper isn’t about saving jobs – it is about investment. Bold bets. A look towards the future. That’s hard to do with less and less resources, with folks busy just trying to keep up.
There is massive opportunity for the papers to reinvent their business models. And there are folks at the papers with the knowledge and wherewithal to do it (read all of Will’s post). But time is running out.
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More at PJNet by Leonard Witt.
Condolences
To Susie Madrak, who said goodbye her father last weekend. Read her tribute to him. If you don’t know her, you are missing out on knowing a special, passionate soul. Her part in running the Norgs unconference was central to it being a success, in every way.
And to my friend Lynne, who lost her grandson this weekend.
My heart goes out to you.
Norgs Stories for October 10th
Whadda week!
- Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and everyone’s hearts are a flutter. There’s been much grousing about what this means (see Memeorandum), but like damn near always, I find what’s missing is a historical perspective. Google acquired large particiaptory media companies in the past. Think Blogger. Think DejaNews. This fits what has always been in the company’s DNA. A recognition that the web is social software. The frightening thing is that companies are liable to take the wrong lessons from this. Time for everyone to take a deep breath. For some interesting thoughts see Scott Karp, Scott Rosenberg, Niall Kennedy, Susan Mernit, lostremote, Jeff Jarvis, and Don Dodge.
- ONA sounded like it was a success this year, where real progress was made and minds opened.
Jeff Jarvis called it “The death of Eeyore”, sharing the optimism and passion he noticed at the conference.
But it had to happen. Someone had to go back to that tired fiction,that tired lie – that of a ‘fight’ between blogging and journalism. This time it came from a blogger – Mike Arrington, of Techcrunch – who talks about it, from his point of view on his blog.
It’s clear that from Jeff’s perspective, and Staci’s at paidContent,Arrington turned it into a polarized circus, and helped make bloggers look bad.
Mike Arrington doesn’t speak for the rest of us folks. Take note of Staci’s and Jeff’s reactions. We gotta continue to build bridges of understanding – not walls.
Amy Webb was there and thought that papers might be looking to hard at video as a savior.
- Speaking of building bridges of understanding – Doc Searls has a set of ten tips for newspapers, that sound very much in line with what we’ve been discussing here. It’s a good read, even if you find yourself nodding in agreement the whole time.
- Jay Rosen’s Q & A at Slashdot is a real must read. He answers, in depth,questions about NewAssignment.net, Citizen Journalism and the news industry.
- Rebecca Blood, talking about product customer service, and a concrete example with United Airlines, explains how Social Media Works.
- A long piece, that I have yet to read, but which looks to have much to chew on, is Alice Goldman’s paper (of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) Community Node-Based User Governance: Applying Craigslist’s Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance.
Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
Norgs stories of the week
Craig Newmark doesn’t plan to cash in on the current tech media bubble: “We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards.”
Michael Kinsley in Time asks Do Newspapers Have a Future?.
Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian writes why you might not want a Wikipedia piece on yourself. Leads me to comment on his blog, “I feel craven and souless – but I *want* someone to care about what I’ve done so much as to contribute to Wikipedia article on me and Philly Future. But I’m not *notable*. Just an average Joe. And as some would say (Ben Franklin I believe) – I guess I haven’t done anything worthy of being written about yet.”
Newsvine plans to expand into local news coverage according to Mike Davidson in a thread at paid Content having to do with the economics of local news coverage and an interesting article at The Seattle Times on Citizen Journalism.
Does Bob Woodward have enough juice left to influence the debate on Iraq? Or will his book be looked at as just another partisan hit job (ridiculous considering the other books he’s published painting Bush in a positive light)? Do facts matter anymore? Or is all that matters in this post-modern me-media age is our own points of view?
I’m starting to see technologists waking up to the political situation in the country now. About time. Lets ask ourselves, in this age of uber-connectivity and communications tools – why are we growing ever more divided, and ever more frightened?
Jay Rosen is taking questions about Citizen Journalism at Slashdot.
Mark Glaser publishes a guide to Citizen Journalism referring to a timeline published by IndyMedia’s Chris Anderson.
But where’s the mention of Slashdot?
Terry Heaton says that papers should work harder to provide databases of local information:
Remember that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible. That ought to be the core goal of any Media 2.0 business, because that’s where the eyeballs and the money will be. We can either be contributors to the knowledge/information base by supplying content (the expensive end of the value chain), be the aggregator of local the local knowledge/information base, or we can do both. Let’s see, hmm. Which path should we take?
Hitwise opens up to reveal some interesting information from its datacenter. Look at the market share the top 25 have. It strikes me that it is so… small. Think about it.
Journalists confronting each other was a theme this week as The Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch challenged the Washington Post’s David Broder to do better journalism and Salon’s Scott Rosenberg challenge’s Slate’s Jacob Weisberg to do the same.
Google Reader, Google’s RSS personal aggregator, upgrades. Its new functionality and UI are good enough to provide Bloglines with its first real challenger, as far as I’m concerned. I think I’m switching.
Jeff Jarvis gets on ABC with a clever piece about participatory media.
Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
Ed Cone: “What’s the deal with Philly?”
Hehe. That’s Ed Cone sharing the news about the Daily News’s Wendy Warren joining the Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin, participating at ConvergeSouth. It already looks to be an interesting gathering, one that I want to make if fates permit.
Speaking of Philly, did you know that YearlyKos might choose our town for the location of next year’s convention?
I can’t explain why Philly has such a preponderance of great, nationally known bloggers, but we do, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s the cheesesteaks or water ice? Maybe it’s old Ben’s legacy. The great blogosphere here, and the new local ownership of our two big papers might herald a new age for media, communications, and civic involvement (yes civic involvement). Check out The Next Mayor or Young Philly Politics.
Speaking of Philly being a great place to blog, and while there’s no denying that Philadelphia is facing some huge challenges, it truly is a great place to live and work. Comcast is hiring.
NewAssignment.net is looking to hire an editor
Reuters has donated $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, enabling it to hire its first editor. Jay Rosen:
It’s going to be a fun job. This is editing horizontally amid journalism gone pro-am. The idea is to draw “smart crowds” – a group of people configured to share intelligence – into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the “pro-am” part.
NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it’s closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today’s announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.
Read the rest of Jay Rosen’s thoughts about the development over at Comment is free.
Norgs stories of the week
* NewAssignment.net has launched a blog and is looking for potential stories to cover. Mark Glaser has been surveying folks at MediaShift and it looks like they want to see the U.S. Government as the focus of any investigative reporting. I’ve been asked to help advise NewAssignment.net. Finding models to pay for acts of investigative journalism is crucial. If, in any way I can help, I am happy to do so.
* keepgoing.org: The Big Fish: The story of Suck.com, it’s rise and eventual fall, is chock full of early web publishing lessons. Suck (and Feed) are two efforts that don’t get mentioned very often in these conversations, since they no longer exist, but maybe should.
* Mark Glaser: News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?: Last year the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation joined with five journalism schools in pledging $6 million dollars to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Education – News21
* Tom Mohr, formerly of Knight Ridder Digital, has a solution for the newspaper industry’s woes: and it sounds suspiciously like recreating the Market Leader CMS platform and Knight Ridder Digital.
* Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post, describes a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. It costs money, but the end result is an investment that will help papers be far more flexible in their reporting.
Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
Adrian Holovaty: “Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview”
Adrian Holovaty: A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change:
This is a subtle problem, and therein lies the rub. In my experience, when I’ve tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don’t immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public. They want it to be as fast and streamlined as possible to take information batch X and put it on Web site Y. The goal isn’t to have clean data — it’s to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface.
But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it’s not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same “news article” bucket, you can’t easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can’t easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.
I left a comment responding to a poster saying this sounded like the Semantic Web, I’ve been meaning to write Adrian for a while now as well:
Hello Adrian,
I’ve been meaning to say hello to you for a number of different reasons over the past few years.
I’m an old Knight Ridder Digital developer. One of the folks that helped develop the Cofax CMS that was later replaced by KRD with… something else.
Cofax was a framework as well as a CMS, and in some very positive ways (well *I* think so :)), Django reminds me of it. Cofax was open sourced, but when KRD replaced it, well, work pretty much kept me from going back, refactoring, and taking it where it could still go. It’s still in use in many places. Well enough of that…
I definitively agree with you that newspapers are terrific places to work if you are a software engineer. The pace is quick, the work challenging, and you get the rare opportunity to not only practice your profession, but do so building tools and services that connect, inform and empower people.
It’s hard to beat.
anonymous – yes, I think Adrian is talking Semantic Web here. But like Adrian’s call for newspaper organizations to take a hard look at how they manage information in their publishing systems, Tim Berners-Lee has made the same call to the web developer community. The hard sell has been that that the Semantic Web likewise solves a series of problems of lost opportunity. It requires an investment in time and effort by the developer community to see its potential archived. Adrian, please correct me if that’s an incorrect understanding on my part.
Great piece.
Related reading material: Aaron Swartz: “The Semantic Web In Breadth” and Shelley Powers: “The Bottoms Up RDF Tutorial”. Then there’s “Practical RDF” also by Shelley Powers (which I ummm need to get around to reading, but have always heard good things about).
More at Techdirt.