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.
Tag Archives: norgs
The Greatest “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” talk about community, tech and open source EVER (A repost and re-tweet)
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”
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.
A challenge to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer
Christopher Anderson, after noting the conversation that Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer are having on the future of news reporting, and after outlining how a specific story was produced at the Philadelphia Daily News, lays down a interesting challenge to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer.
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani April, 1997:
There are also many other ramifications that the new journalist will have to take into consideration while handling information and exploiting the different tools.
quote First, the behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search. The first group is satisfied which just seeing what’s there – they seek pleasure and surprise. The second group is looking for specific information – their priorities are easy and rapid access, and accuracy.
Second, geography is no longer an issue. Because of the Internet global reach, geographical audiences and ethnic audiences can overlap (for instance, Swiss readers living in the United States access our magazine online) as well as thematic audiences (say, worldwide car racing fans hooking up to an Indianapolis newspaper).
Thirdly, the development of the many different types of intelligent agents will double the human public in all of its diversity by becoming an artificial public. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots: software which behaves according to their owners’ desires.
Forth, we will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
Fifth, we will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques. The first name that comes to mind is, of course, Microsoft, a software company which has recently rolled out a magazine (Slate), launched a TV/Web station (MSNBC), and started projects for local Web guides (Sidewalk). But there are thousands more doing the same, becoming news publishers all the while being car manufacturers or phone companies.
Finally, and it’s an essential point, we are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard. The digital revolution is giving birth to multiple new forms of devices bringing together the quality of television images, the communication power of telephones, the memory and speed of computers, the selection and ease of use of newspapers. They are spreading out in different shapes and forms and locations: cellular phones with e-mail capability, network computers, videotext, electronic paper, digital wallets, voice recognition, audiotex, pagers, beep-watches, and so on. The future will allow us to access worldwide information, in many different forms, adapted to needs and places
Alternative journalism documenting Fishtown and Kensington
In Episode 6 of “Shadow World”, David S. Kessler took a break from giving interviews to let the location speak for itself – Front and Berks – the Berks El Station.
I can still recall the elderly man following me from the train station, as the sun was setting, when I was just a kid. He propositioned me for a blow job. He said he would pay me money. I walked faster and acted as if I couldn’t hear him. Eventually, he got the hint.
Right around that corner, on a different day, maybe that same year, I was jumped and earned one of the broken noses I’d keep as souvenirs of my days in Fishtown and Kensington.
David S. Kessler’s effort, to me, qualifies as a powerful act of journalism. One that provides insight into a world many of us in Philadelphia are familiar with, but to those on the outside, would have a hard time fathoming.
He spent a year recording short, under five minute, video interviews with those he met under the Frankford El in Kensington. Philadelphia Weekly wrote about the effort last year but you can experience it yourself at undertheheel.blogspot.com.
Another great piece of journalism that documents the true life story of four teens who commit murderer in Fishtown is “Fishtown”. It was was recently published in hardback. You can read more about “Fishtown” at Geekadelphia.
Update 11-30-08: Alfred Lubrano, in the Inquirer, writes about Witness to Hunger, a program of Drexel University that distributed digital cameras to 40 women in North Philly who documented their stories, and in the process exposed realities of living in poverty in North Philadelphia. Make sure to visit the site.
Imagine if the project’s next step was to enable these families to publish to Flickr and YouTube next. It would enable them to reach wider audiences and raise awareness so much further.
How about some realistic expectations, more experimentation, and less punditry about punditry?
Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry – that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don’t we have a better press corps?
Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they’re being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you’ve purchased newspaper stock, then you’re a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper — even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market — is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It’s safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That’s what’s happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who’s got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?
That’s what I thought.
Here’s the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?
You don’t need to knock a man down to argue his ideas
No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis’s ideas are very much up for debate – I don’t think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what’s happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read “The Innovator’s Dilema” – NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he’s willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It’s a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.
Related:
Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?
Nick Denton: A 2009 Internet Media Plan
Wired: Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources
Silicon Alley Insider: Record Traffic Not Saving Financial News Sites
Metafilter: Can nonprofit news models save journalism?
Jeff Jarvis: Saving Journalism (and killing the press)
And, because this vid is so fit for the Daily Show, I just have to share it (vegetarians – do NOT click this):
Technology and business model shifts can drive innovation
David Cohn, contributor at Columbia Journalism Review, Seed Magazine and Wired has been exploring the future of journalism for a long time now, notably on his blog, at NewAssignment.net and NewsTrust.net.
His latest effort, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is Spot.us – a service founded on the principal that journalism is a process and not a product.
It’s an interesting effort. It joins other non-profit journalism resources such as NPR and ProPublica in working to solve the funding question that has been consuming those who want to see journalism flourish as business models and technologies shift. In this particular solution – it is YOU who determines what stories you fund directly.
Commentary by Dan Gillmor: Spot.us Launches
Commentary by Beth Kanter: Spot.Us: Community Funded Reporting
By Digidave himself on his blog: Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting
And introducing the service at vimeo: Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro:
Spot.Us – Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
And yes, this is me riffing off of a great conversation that was held by Aaron and Arpit at BarCampPhilly.
So, what is ‘truth’ anyway? Ben Kenobi and Sarah Palin Share The Stage
What’s your reaction to Sarah Palin’s performance in her interview with Dave Gibson last night? If you were a conservative, it most likely was positive. If you were liberal, most likely negative.
How can I confirm such a crazy statement? How can there be two opposing opinions of the same event? Two different takes on the ‘truth’ of it?
Go to memeorandum and follow the discussion on blogs that match your political view point and follow the discussion on blogs that don’t.
Or switch between CNN and Fox News if you want a massively bad head ache.
Witness reality torn asunder.
Back in 1997 Dave Winer wrote a piece about programming that helped solidify how I felt about my career choice – he summed it up as a pursuit of truth: Programmers:
Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can’t lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That’s all there is! I think programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There’s something spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it.
…When a programmer catches fire it’s because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed. I’ve seen this happen many times, a programmer languishes for months, chipping at the edges of a problem. Then all of a sudden, a breakthrough happens, the pieces start fitting together. A few months later the software works, and you go forward.
When I look at memorandum each day and click away from the warm confines of blogs that share my political view, I am confronted with the the fact that truth is greatly determined by our point of view.
Thank you Obi-wan Kenobi, you bastard.
John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President is both interpreted as a disaster by liberals and as an inspired move by conservatives.
But one thing is for sure, the move has dominated our attention and driven us a way from weightier topics like the economy and moves taking place across the world, with light weight controversies and indignities (kinda like Britney Spears news does every once and a while).
On this point, two folks I read daily for their points of view (usually opposing), greatly agree:
Doc Searls: Framing wins:
I don’t know if the McCain campaign actually intended for this to happen, but the way it looks to me right now, it’ll work. Palin is single-handedly turning Barack Obama into John Kerry: a policy wonk quarantined to the bottom end of the FM dial. It’s amazing to watch.
Groundhog Day: Competing Messages: Attention Deficit Nation:
…as I watched the media coverage around the announcement, and that of the self-important, self-aggrandizing “blogosphere,” it became clear, to me anyway, just what this was about.
While this is at least partially about winning attention for McCain’s candidacy, some of it even negative attention, it is mostly about taking attention away from Obama’s campaign. And, in that regard, it’s been a brilliant tactical move. Whether it will be enough to swing the election his way remains to be seen.
Obama at the bottom of the FM dial. And so moved are the policies and important events of the world taking place, while we are dazzled and spun every which way.
Jay Rosen outlined the strategy, in a piece posted on September 3rd, that was prescient: The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option:
John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ’68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.
At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.
It’s not like much of the press isn’t reporting on the lies and mischaracterizations spewing from McCain/Palin. Witness WashingtonPost.com on the 9th: As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They’re Undone:
From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” critics, the news media and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.
Wired.com on the 10th: FactCheck.org Finds That McCain’s ‘Facts’ Don’t Check Out
Fact is the media, mass and independent, are being played like marionettes in a game to control your attention and keep Obama, policies, or real impacting events like the economy, from the public discourse.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon did a good job of tracking one of the latest false controversies – the ‘lipstick on a pig’ quote that was taken out of context. He mistakenly attributes the mass media as being the first on the story when Memeorandum was spreading the meme a day before it broke across the country: New heights of stupidity:
It isn’t surprising that the McCain campaign wants this sort of tawdry, Freak Show/Reality Show vapidity to determine the outcome of the election. If you were them, wouldn’t you want that, too? And though it’s not news that establishment media outlets are so easily and happily manipulated by these tactics, tactics which enable them to cover “stories” which their empty-headed reporters can easily comprehend, it is still striking to watch the now-decades-old process unfold and observe how absolutely nothing has changed.
It makes you wonder if ‘truth’ really matters anymore. Marc Fisher at Washington Post goes so far as to wonder if the Boomer ingrained distrust of authority has morphed into something far more ominous: For Working Moms, ‘Flawed’ Palin Is the Perfect Choice:
In this hyperdemocratized society, the national conviction that anyone can succeed is morphing into a belief that experience and knowledge may almost be disqualifying credentials.
Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin’s lack of experience as an asset. “I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent,” said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. “And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things.”
This is where culture wars, identity politics and self-suffocating academic theories of deconstructionism have led us: Authority is suspect. Experience is corrupting. Ignorance is strength?
Next will be “war is peace.” Or have we already heard that one?
Shades of Nick Carr there huh?
Boing Boing posted about a book that might be the most important must-read of the year (I’m buying this today): True Enough: the science, history and economics of self-deception:
Manjoo makes a good case. He walks through a number of net-based conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum, speaks with their adherents, the experts who claim it’s all bogus, and then to cognitive scientists and other scientists who explain the gigantic gap between what is so obvious to non-partisans and what is blindingly, passionately important to the adherents.
Grounded in history and science, True Enough paints a dismal picture of a species with a limitless capacity for self-deception and selective reasoning. But Manjoo doesn’t ascribe the rise of truthiness to fragmented media alone: he calls out PR firms, media outlets and others who have profited from the erosion of the truth.
Here’s a link: Amazon.com: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hardcover)
So what to do?
As a programmer with a drive to find and share ‘truth’ I have no idea whatsoever. To me, 2+2 will always equal 4. Trusting a sound bite is like criticizing a system’s infrastructure without recognizing the context it was built in. I don’t give a damn what a politician says on the matter. We should all be looking for the big balls of mud that provide us with truth.
But slacktivist has an idea (which I don’t agree with) and that is to fight fire with fire – witness his latest post – John McCain, Friend of NAMBLA.
And a reminder – beware the October surprise: NYTimes.com: Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan. It’s about time we close the deal, but why did it take seven years?