March 27, 2008

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Journaling on journalism

March 27, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Taking notes on the Media Re:public gathering here in Los Angeles.

“Its not clear to me that one unit of increase in media equals one unit of increase in democracy” — Ernest Wilson, of the USC Annenberg School of Communications.

Arianna Huffington: “Bloggers suffer from compulsive disclosure disorder, and journalists suffer from attention deficit disorder.” (Damn, I’m both, though one is — mostly — under control.) Quoted by Richard Sambrook, currently on stage. Might have that a bit off. Also, “The DNA of big media is absolutely hard-wired to the one-to-many model.” He continuers, UGC is “way too narrowly defined”. And “this kind of participation is still a minority sport”. Great line: “The notion that you need a business model for accountability is an interesting one.”

“YouTube, I understand, is about to go live”. That’ll be fun.

“Personalization has overpromised and underdelivered for fifteen years. But I think it’s about to happen.” And “Web 3.0 … the data driven Web… is about to break hard upon us.”

“Reinvent a social purpose for media that resonates with the public”: A challenge to the room.

EthanZ to Richard: Do you believe citizens can shape the agenda? Rather than you guys choose first and (and then the audience reacts)? He advises “really sophisticated media monitoring”; but of the blogosphere, and not just other traditional media.

Susan Mernit on reconnecting media with social purpose… We only see two kinds of coverage: events that happen, and events that people make (e.g. civic leaders).

Much more (than what I’ve written here) from David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman.

Roberto Suro, USC Annenberg: We conflate journalism as a business enterprise with journalism as a social actor.

David Weinberger, speaking, being deep and funny as usual: We spend most of our time online trying to figure out what we came in to do… Every tag is a front page. Every tag is a bookshelf.

DW: In an age of abundance of good, the struggle is over metadata. And, I have trouble applying the ‘commodification’ term to everything here, because it suggests that all things have equal value. Or low value.

Tag: .

School of Journalism Marketing and Stuff

March 27, 2008 in Journalism | Comments closed

Back last Fall, when news came that the Medill School of Journalism was thinking about changing its name (and in fact had already dropped “of Journalism” from its website index page), I wrote a post saying, basically, that this was wrong as well as dumb. In fact, I thought it was so wrong, and so lacking in support, that it would die on the vine.

Well, apparently not. Eric Zorn reports in the Chicago Tribune that the idea is not only alive, but wrong as ever. Names “reportedly under consideration” (by a secretive committee) include “The Medill School of —

 
  • Journalism
  • Journalism and Integrated Marketing Communications
  • Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications
  • News Media and Integrated Marketing Communications
  • Audience and Consumer Information
  • Media Arts and Sciences
  • Information and Influence

In The Future of News, Steve Boriss writes,

  More than most, I am sympathetic to scrapping the word “journalism,” which has come to be associated with a failing model that only its practitioners still believe delivers objective, verified truths. But do we really want to combine news gathering with sales and entertainment disciplines like marketing, media, and persuasion? And, isn’t the public tired of journalism insisting it is providing pure “information,” and in fact showing increased interest in a more helpful and stimulating combination of fact and opinion?

  The right answer must be too simple for j-school eggheads — the “Medill School of News.” By news, I mean “new information about a subject of common interest that is shared within a community.” Everything from as small as news of family and friends, which is now being served by Facebook and MySpace, to as large as news of our universe. Not just news of government, but also news of the private sector, our neighborhoods, our vocations, and our avocations. The public no longer believes in “journalism.” But renaming it “news” is a change they can believe in.

I almost like “School of News”. And I agree that it’s wacky to combine news (or journalism, or both) with “entertainment disciplines” (though I wouldn’t cal them that. I even agree that “the public no longer believes…” but I’m not sure it’s journalism that they doubt.

As it happens I’m sitting in the Annenberg School for Communication, where Media Re:public is about to begin. On the wall of the vast lobby are six big flat-screen TVs, four in the middle with news channels, one on the right with ESPN and one on the left with CNN. Sound comes from the last two. Nobody is watching. Yet at our table we can’t ignore the CNN one, which is blabbing behind our heads, which are turned away. For most of the last hour CNN has been obsessing on the murder of a Rutgers student in front of her toddler son. I’ve heard “stabbed multiple times” so many times that my inner Mona Shaw wants to take a hammer to the screen. I can’t find the story on the CNN.com index page, but maybe I’m not looking hard enough. In any case, I’m sure that what they’re pushing out the tube is news yet not journalism.

And I think I’d rather have Medill teach the latter. No matter what they call the place.

The Kurse of KFI

March 27, 2008 in Life, News | Comments closed

I just learned that KFI’s new tower went down while it was going up. This was the long-awaited replacement for the tower that was knocked down in 2004. Here’s what I wrote about it back then. It was delayed by local opposition to reconstruction, and the tower was a compromise design. (Here’s a story from the Orange County Register.)

When I used to listen to KFI at night in New Jersey as a radio-obsessed kid, I was hearing the signal from the old tower, which was installed in 1947. (As was I.) Back then the site was in an open field in La Mirada, CA, near the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Later I-5 ran nearby. Now it’s in the midst of office buildings and parking. It’s lucky nobody was seriously hurt. (There was one minor injury.)

I try not to care about this kind of stuff, because my concerns these days are with the leading rather than the trailing edge of technology. But what the hell. I know too much about it not to be interested.

[Later...] Mary Lu has a nice long report.

Comms hell

March 27, 2008 in problems, Science | Comments closed

Here at the Westin in Los Angeles, connectivity is pretty good — about a megabit in each direction. (For a fee, of course.) But the last two days, at the Hilton in Loma Linda and the University of Redlands, were terrible. I’m not sure if it was just because they blocked stuff (as was the case with Redlands), or because the system was bad (as was the case with the Hilton), but I’ve come to the conclusion that two things cause these kinds of problems in general. One is charging for something that ought to be free. The other is subtracting value from something that doesn’t need it and only pisses off users.

In the long run it makes as much sense for hotels to charge for Internet as it does to charge for television. (Yes, they used to do that too. There were coin-operated TVs.) Or for using the toilet. But it’s a business because they know they need Internet service now, and because doing it themselves is too complicated. So they hire these outside outfits to do it for them. (In the case of the Hilton it was iBahn.) And too many of them just don’t do a good job.

Yet we saw in Loma Linda how easy it is to bring fiber to homes, and for anybody to hook by fiber to anybody. The cabling and conduit are progressing upwards in convenience and downward in price, to a point where it will be as easy to put in fiber as it is to install a drip irrigation system. What makes the Interent complicated is that it comes to most places as a secondary service to telephony and television. Yet it doesn’t have to be, and in the long run it won’t be.