Journalism

I’ve now passed 20,000 shots on Flickr. When doing that few things please me more than finding out that one of them now illustrates its subject on Wikipedia. (Where I remain a stub, by the way. I don’t mind. Wikipedia entries about living folks are too often wrong.)

Here’s another. I know there are more, but not how to find them.

But that’s not the point, which is that the primary source of media now is each other. We’re rebuilding everything back up from Layer Zero. That’s us.

While stading in Harvard Square yesterday, taking pictures of NSTAR workers fixing whatever it was that caused the underground fire there last Friday, a guy on a bike comes up and says, “YouTube. Just look up Harvard Square fire. Some great footage.”

He didn’t say, “Tune in Channel 4 at 6pm.”

Here are the results.

I hope that answers Chris Pirillo’s question.

Unrelated…

A few minutes ago I transfered all the photos I took yesterday while biking, driving and walking around Cambridge. Got a lot of great ones, including shots of the work at Harvard Square, Spring on The Yard, sunset on railroad tracks, friends at a restaurant, family doing fun stuff…

Then I put the SD card back in the camera and re-formatted it.

Then I discovered I had failed to transfer the pictures.

I’m still bummed.

And that doesn’t even cover yesterday’s other screw-ups.

In the midst of which the doctor told me I still have chest pain because my lung isn’t done healing and I should give it more exercise.

Anyway, enjoy the footage. The longest. The best.

Bill Moyers on Rev. Wright (via Dave):

Well, there were stories at their times about Fallwell, Robertson and McCain & Hagee. They weren’t as big as Obama and Wright, but they were still stories.

Indeed, we need honest conversation sabout race. I thought Barack Obama’s speech on the subject right after the Wright mess first broke was an excellent opener for lots of conversations, many of which are still going on.

We need honest conversations about gender too. A couple days ago my wife caught an interview on NPR with a voter in North Carolina who regretted that the choice among democratic presidential candidates had come down to a black man and a woman — and that he’d prefer the former over the latter. Of course, that was just one voter, but still: what does that say? Other things being equal, is sexism a bigger handicap to a female candidate than race is to a black candidate? Before I heard that, I hadn’t considered the possibility. Nor the possibility that voters in the U.S. might be less favoring of women candidates than voters in Israel, the U.K., Germany and India, all of which have elected women as heads of state. Something more to think and talk about, if we can possibly get past the personalities at hand.

The Wright-Obama story, however, isn’t just about race. It’s about stories. It’s about the reason we need to “beware the terrible simplifiers”. Because simplification is what journalists do.

Even the best reporters don’t just communicate facts. They organize those facts into stories. That’s what they’re assigned to write, or to show on TV, or report on the radio, and that’s what they do. And they do it because stories are by nature interesting. They are, I believe, the base format of human interest. Here’s how I described that format in an earlier post:

In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger asks, Where are Obama’s Friends? The story, in Henninger’s words: “supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry”. (He doesn’t mention Bill Moyers, who certainly qualifies now.)

We need to remember that all stories are simplifications. Sometimes they are terrible, and sometimes not. But still, they always veer toward the simple, because that’s what’s most interesting.

Back on December 11, 2005 — long before there were blogs, but not long after I learned to write in HTML — I posted Microsoft + Netscape: Why the Press Needs to Snap Out of its War-Coverage Trance. (It was one of the many articles I failed to sell to a magazine, but still managed to post on the Web.) The bottom lines:

Actually, it’s typical journalism. More than a dozen years later, it’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Adam Tinworth: The next mindshift change journalists need to go through is that they no longer have a finished product. The issue is never complete. The feature is never done. The news is always evolving. And this is hard for us old-school hacks. If you were to ask a group of people what words they associate with journalism, I’d lay odds that “deadline” would be in there somewhere. But we’re moving into a post-deadline age, when the publishing time is now, and then as soon as you have new information. Or a new conversation. Or a new contribution.

Thing is, deadlines help. They are the procrastinator’s brutal friend. But they are no longer finish lines. They are stages in building projects that may never be finished. Not if the subject stays interesting.

Papers are endangered. But I’m not sure the same is true about the collection, editing and printing of news. Or of journalism at its best (as well as its worst, which will always abound).

Marc (Andreessen, not Canter — from down here it’s so easy to confuse these tall guys) has started a serial posting on the subject of newspapers. It led me to revisit my advice for newspapers, which I first offered in ten-point form a little over a year ago.

It’s gratifying to see many papers following advice in numbers 1 through 6…

But still coming up short on the last three:

So I just went to the other Marc’s site, and whoa! Dig the title of his latest post: How to build the mesh - #4: the Live Web. Way(s) to go!

Here’s where I wrote about The Live Web in 2005. Marc does a nice job of bringing the whole thing up to date. In that piece I give credit to my son Allen for coming up with the term in the first place, back in 2003 as I recall.

Hope it finally catches on.

And a hat tip to Chip Hoagland for getting me started on this.

Editor & Publisher: The San Jose Mercury News, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Cincinnati Enquirer all reported nice increases in daily circulation.

However…

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, headlines the New York Times. “They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop”, it begins. It’s about blogging for bucks. Marc Orchant and Russell Shaw, both of whom died recently, and Om Malik, who recently survived a heart attack, serve as instructive examples of “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment”.

Mike Arrington “says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen…This is not sustainable’.”

The piece goes on:

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Since this system does not feature the ‘chinese wall’ between editorial and advertising that has long been a fixture of principled mainstream journalism — or rather because writing, publishing and advertising are much more intimately mashed up in this new system than it was in the old one — I suggest a distinction here: one between blogging and flogging.

I brought that up on The Gang on Friday and got as nowhere as I did when I put up the post at the last link. So far it has no comments at all.

Still, I think distinctions matter. There is a difference in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other.

Two additional points.

One is about chilling out. Blogging doesn’t need to be a race. Really.

The other is about scoops. They’re overrated. Winning in too many cases is a badge of self-satisfaction one pins on oneself. I submit that’s true even if Memeorandum or Digg pins it on you first. In the larger scheme of things, even if the larger scheme is making money, it doesn’t matter as much as it might seem at the time.

What really matters is … Well, you decide.

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 —

In The Future of News, Steve Boriss writes,

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.

More than a year ago I suggested to folks from Frontline that they put out their shows on BitTorrent, serving as the Alpha Seed. I’m pretty sure Dave Winer (at the same conference) said the same thing. Maybe I got the idea (like so many others) from Dave.

I also remember thinking, if not saying, that BitTorrent distro was inevitable. The economics of transmission map nicely to the sociology of the show. The market is a conversation among seeds. This is radically different from the transmitter-based system we have now.

So now comes news from Michael O’Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it’s DRM free. As it ought to be.

Read the whole post. Follow the links. There lies the future.

Here in the U.S. the new challenge is for the entities we call stations to find roles and relevancies other than distribution of network shows.

The only answer, I believe, is the “One Fond Hope” I appended to the Ten Prophesies I uttered on a public media panel (and in this post at Linux Journal) exactly one year after delivering the BitTorrent distro advice to the Frontline folks (and to the rest of public media folks attending my closing talk there).

The idea is outlined here.

CBC can go with BitTorrent because they’re not defined as just a collection of stations. That is, they have stations, and they produce and distribute; but they are not tied to any one band or medium for distribution. When AM radio became too retro, they went about dumping it (including CBL/740, on which I used to listen to stories late at night when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey).

It’s different here in the U.S., where stations run the show. Literally. They still can, but they’ll have to become far more involved with their local and regional communities — which need no longer be defined by the reach of signals from transmitters. Because the new transmitters, in many cases, will be the listeners and viewers.

Bonus link.

Another.

Another.

Forrest Sawyer gave a killer talk at The Future of Multi-Media Digital News & Cultural Networks, which was put on at UCSB last year by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

I took part as well, on a panel that followed Forrest’s talk, speaking as a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society there. The pull-quote: We have seen the failure of the traditional media to live up to their responsibilities of oversight and challenging the government. And, …those who have not yet come to feel ashamed, will feel ashamed.

I enjoyed meeting and getting to hang with Forrest that day. He was a good and friendly guy, and not the least bit vain. So I’m not surprised to find that, a few months after this event, he was credited with “acts of heroism” following a helicopter crash in which he was also injured. Initially, everyone thought they were dead, including executives at the Travel Channel, that last story said.

Says here the Wall Street Journal, long a fee-to-see site, is now secretly free: …in many cases, the method is drop-dead simple; in some cases, it requires the Firefox browser and add-on software. But in all cases, it’s completely legal, and in fact it’s hard to see how the Journal could object to it at all.

I subscribe to the print Journal, and will continue to do that.

I’ve generally avoided going behind the Journal’s paywall, or even visiting the journal’s website, for several reasons:

So, Rupert, hurry up with the free version, but for real this time. Your paying subscribers will thank you.

Says here at Amazon that Cluetrain is …

I’ll be on a podcast later today with Dennis Haarsager, who was already a blogger before he was suddenly told last week to fill the CEO shoes that had just been vacated at NPR.

As it happens Dennis and I were both on the “Technology and Trends: What’s Around the Bend” session at IMA 2008 several weeks ago.

Here are the slides from my brief talk at that panel. Here’s Dennis’ latest post, going over his new job and the challenges facing public broadcasting. His money paragraph:

Agreed. Earlier Dennis says online distribution is coming on much faster than broadcasting did in its developing years. That’s key. Today BitTorrent is a transmitter. An iTouch is a radio. In most urban and suburban locaitons, your favorite programs and stations will both be easier to tune on a hand-held with a wi-fi or a cell connection than on a car radio with a tuner. Producers and listeners will be closer than ever, and stations will face steeper challenges than ever to remain relevant participants in local and regional culture, and not remain distributors of national programming.

Lots of comments below that post, by the way. Check ‘em out.

Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in Concord Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.

Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.

Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.

Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.

More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:

Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”

From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank’s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”

No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.

Well, in a way it was, no?

Here’s an interview with B.L. Ochman, in which she asks me how (roughly speaking) I drink from the Niagra of information in which all online writers stand. Reading it this morning, I see it gives the impression that 1) I have some kind of formal or routinized approach, and 2) that I no longer look at RSS search engines and feed readers. Neither is true.

Much of the time I’m reactive. Such as this morning. A few minutes ago I got up, walked up to the attic where my “office” is, sat down at the laptop, and decided to start by closing some of the too-many tabs that are open in Firefox. I got to the one with B.L.’s interview and decided to post this pointer. Now, being my digressive self, I’m writing something more about it.

The tab was opened in the first place by my feed reader, when I clicked on the feed I’ve had for years of a Technorati keyword search for my name. I look at that feed once every few days or weeks. There are also feeds of searches for Linux, Linux Journal, VRM, tiddlywiki, Berkman, Berkman Center, Bob Frankston, net neutrality, public radio and public media. At the moment. These change, depending on what I’m writing about. The older feeds are from Technorati, and the newer ones are from either s.technorati.com or from Google Blogsearch. Even though I still consider Google Blogsearch inferior to Technorati in the sum of stuff it finds — and even though GB lacks some of the useful stuff Technorati provides, such as the trend graph and the ability to search for tags — it’s simple, has no diaplay advertising to slow it down, and let’s me create an RSS feed in one click. Same with s.technorati.com.

Anyway, I just weeded my reader. I do that every month or two. I also added a Cluetrain search feed, because there seems to have been more commentary going on about Cluetrain these last few months. Perhaps oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever subscribed to a Cluetrain search before.

I also react to email, which is still a torrent, even though nearly all my spam problem has been cleared up by running mail to my Searls.com address through the Gmail laundry. So far this morning I’ve avoided it. Same goes for IM, or IMs. I have three of those: Jabber, AIM and Skype, and dozens of contacts combined. If I fire it up, I’ll be hearing from somebody by one of them in a matter of seconds, so I leave it off more than I used to. Not good, because often there are people (co-workers, family members) who need to get in touch with me right now.

For that, of course, there is still the phone. My not-very-trusty old Treo 700p still serves that purpose, until the Verizon contract runs out this summer and I get something that works on GSM, so I can take it overseas as well. (I also have a GSM mobile I use only overseas, but would rather have one phone than two.) I’ve also lately become appreciative of SMS texting. I call this my “bat phone” mode. Works great except in the subway. Hard to tell somebody downtown that you’re going to be late when there’s no signal.

Anyway, my actual work is mostly proactive. In that mode I use Google so much that I don’t even think about it. I also use Google’s and Yahoo’s image search engines. It’s weird that Google’s seems systematically to exclude Flickr images, while Yahoo’s promotes them. Example, searches for “chilterns” in Google’s and Yahoo’s image search engines. Be nice to combine both somehow.

Anyway, time to go back downstairs, make coffee, have breakfast and otherwise enjoy a mostly-offline Sunday with the family.

Emerson said, If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

There are corollaries. When the miraculous becomes mundane, people complain about it. Think about air travel. And, When the awful becomes common, people tend to ignore it.

The latter is the risk for Santa Barbara in respect to its landmark newspaper, the News-Press. To put the SBNP in perspective, both the paper and the city’s offices overlook De La Guerra Plaza in the middle of town. The paper’s building is larger and far more pretty and imposing. And, of course, it’s currently trying to bully the city about how the plaza is improved. The paper’s hostility to the mayor and other elected officials is a matter of editorial policy. And that’s far from the whole of it.

The proprietress of the paper is Wendy McCaw, who may be setting new records for litigious obstinacy by a newspaper owner. The “meltown” of the paper is now moving on two years in age, and progresses toward closure on an asymptotic curve: one with a long tail of decay akin to the half-life of Strontium 90 — one that constantly approaches but never arrives at a conclusion.

I’m not in Santa Barbara enough these days to sense how inured folks are to the awfulness of a civic landmark going through a screaming divorce from its constituency while still cohabitating with it. But I do fear for the town becoming a bit too accepting of an unpleasant situation that shows too few signs of ending.

That fear was allayed by the release of Citizen McCaw, and by reading this comment by John Quimby about its premiere. But, as they say, constant vigilance is a price of anything worth keeping.

Look for more amidst stuff tagged wendymccaw or sbnp.

In this comment to this post, John Quimby writes,

The people “vetting” our election haven’t been “vetted” themselves.

Try this thought on for size…

The reporters we knew and admired when we were young were educated in journalism and many of them served in the Army covering WWII. They invented broadcast news and had combat experience with average American soldiers all over the world. That experience gave them a keen sense of official BS and they weren’t afraid of the risks it took to get the story and send some truth home. They felt they owed it to the humble people they served to get it right. They knew how to tell a story.

See where I’m going?

While you’re following John’s thoughts about storytellers and stories (and please do: it’s a good thread), a few thoughts about the nature of the latter, and what any journalist, regardless of reputation and talent, will have a hard time telling.

In this post about journalism, I wrote,

The basic job of newspaper reporters is to write stories. In simplest terms, stories are interesting arrangements of facts. What makes stories interesting are: 1) protagonists (persons, groups, teams, “issues” or causes); 2) a struggle, problem or conflict of some sort; and 3) movement forward (hopefully, by not necessarily, toward a conclusion). Whether or not you agree with that formulation, what cannot be denied is the imperative. Stories are made to be interesting. It is not just coincidental that this is a purpose they share with advertising.

The story in WWII (John’s example, above) was a simple one. There were good guys (us, the Allies) and bad guys (the Axis powers). Countless war stories — good ones — came out of WWII. Those stories — along with stories about The Depression that preceded The War — were the prevailing narratives around dinner tables for kids growing up in the Fifties, when broadcast journalism was maturing under the influence of Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow and other exemplars. Wars won by everybody working together, and suffering through hardships, as happened with WWII, had many positive effects on the country and its citizens. Our fathers’ experiences in “the service” (as they called it then) during WWII made instant friends of countless strangers who had similar experiences. People meeting for the first time, regardless of class and race differences, often found common bonds in the ritual of exchanging data about membership and service in various military branches, divisions, boats, and battle fronts.

Our parents’ sacrifices gave them great moral authority — and of a kind that none of the succeeding generations would achieve again. Tom Brokaw was right to call our parents The Greatest Generation. They rose to the challenge, but they were also cast in the role.

Same with journalistic veterans of the same war.

Not only have we lost that whole generation of WWII journalists, plus many (or most) of the best of those that followed as well. Meanwhile, there is more journalism than ever, and much of it is good. Just harder to find, or to follow, in the midst of so much other stuff. Many more needles, much bigger haystack.

But the bigger problem is the lack of a single narrative, much less a heroic one. Worse, there is a narrative that needs to be woven, yet has few if any weavers, because it is not a happy one. That narrative is the inevitable decline of Pax Americana, and of our country’s ability to lead the world in the manner to which it has becomed accustomed, and which is proving ever more delusional.

This new narrative is required not only because the U.S.’s percentages of the global economy and populations are shrinking, and not only because its recent president(s) had foreign policy failures, but because what’s “super” about U.S. superpower — a near-limitless ability to make high-technology war, backed by a fighting force of finite size with few allies — is an anachronism. And it would still be an anachronism if most of the world didn’t already consider our approach to foreign relations tragic and absurd.

I’m not sure the people of any Great Nation are ever ready to face the fact that the height of their military and economic powers has passed. Or that the leadership they most need to assert is no longer only a military and economic one. But I am sure that we need leadership — journalistic as well as political — that is anchored in our true and enduring strengths as a people and as a polity.

The U.S. still stands best, and most credibly, for essential values the rest of the world desperately needs to respect: freedom, liberty, democracy, suffrage of women and minorities, and rule of law, to name just a few. The high value we place on eduction, on caring for others, on self-sacrifice, on economic well-being, on the worth of individuals, on respect for land and resources — the list goes on — are also ready-built platforms for leadership in the world.

I don’t know how to frame that new leadership narrative, much less express it. The best advice I’ve seen so far comes from George Lakoff and The Rockridge Institute; but we’re in a partisan season, and they’re naturally taking sides, lately on behalf of Barack Obama.

I believe Obama is in the best position to craft this new narrative, that his aspriational rhetoric has the best chance of transcending the partisan boundaries that divide us. But right now each remaining candidate’s focus is on beating each other rather than facing the challenge of changing our role in the world.

Obama and his people need to fight for the next nine months, and it’s likely that his rhetoric, no matter how well-expressed, will be mocked for its emptiness and the lack of track in his relatively short career. That mockery will get air time becaus we won’t be able to get out of sports and war journalism — and politics — until the election is over.

That’s when Then What? begins. I’m hoping the new president is good at telling the new story that needs to be told. But I’m not holding my breath. (Or my blather, or you wouldn’t be reading this.)

Life in the Vast Lane — What lives past the Web 2.0 bubble is my EOF essay in the February Linux Journal. One sample:

The challenge, of course, is to build out the latter.

I really really really wish I was back in Cambridge right now, where for sure I’d be in the Ames Courtroom, taking part in the hearing where all five FCC commisioners are participating.

I could do the same, to some degree, from here in my stuffy London hotel room, if the FCC’s #@$%& Real audio stream wasn’t hosed. “The server has reached its capacity and can serve no more streams”, it says. Try later.

[Later…] Amazingly, at the Nth try, it now works. More in the next post.

… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it?

Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:

This would be pure PR jive and nothing more if the release were restricted to the first paragraph. But when two high-level Google Execs, including its Chief Legal Officer, provide sales blurbs to just one side (so far) of a partisan political battlefield, expect Serious Questions to follow.

To help answer those questions, some context.

First, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, makes clear at least one strong trend in computing that is being led by Google (along with Amazon, Yahoo and others): Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. No, personal computing won’t go away, but much of what we need, from storage to applications and raw compute power, will be available (and increasingly relied upon) as utility services. As utilities, these are going to be as free from prejudice about usage as are electricity, gas, water and waste treatment. (That is, not totally free, but sensibly so.) Looking at what the GOP says it will do with Google utilities, I’d say that’s the case here.

Second, it’s important to study how utility providers such as Google engage with large customers (and whole countries) that some find objectionable. For a view on that, check out the recent talk by the dissident Chinese journalist Michael Anti at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman has a long and helpful write-up. So does David Weinberger. From the latter:

Somewhere in there (not sure it got on the podcast) Michael said that Google had great leverage through a single simple fact: most people working for the Chinese government use Gmail. Leverage isn’t always something that is actively used. In fact, in many (perhaps most) cases it doesn’t need to be brought up at all. It’s simply a fact that must be recognized.

Whether one likes or dislikes Google’s engagement with China, or the GOP, at least it’s engaged. For some things it may be in a better position to make a positive difference than if it were not engaged.

As for Yahoo, Michael said that the company had completely lost face in China. Never mind that, as this TechCrunch post puts it, Yahoo owns only 40% of Yahoo China. And that Yahoo may have “been made a scapegoat for the flaws of US foreign policy”. The fact remains that Yahoo, according to the International Herald Tribune, “provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a Chinese journalist for leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site…”

There is no doubt that Google has been far more successful than Yahoo in dealing with China. Is it just because Google has a “don’t be evil” imperative and Yahoo does not? I don’t think so. Rather I think that Google has been smart and resourceful in ways that Yahoo has not. Specifically, Google has stayed true to its roots as a tech company with specific and easily understood guiding principles. Yahoo had those too, and for longer than Google. But Yahoo broke faith with those principles, and lost its integrity, when it decided to become an entertainment company and hired Terry Semel as its CEO. In doing so Yahoo ceased being a flagpole and instead became a flag — one that soon will be flying from somebody else’s pole.

Voices Without Votes, from Global Voices and Reuters. Very interesting stuff.

I took three years of Deutsch in high school, but I gave them all back when I was done. Still, I do recall enough to gather that Gabriele Fischer put Das Cluetrain Manifest to good use in her latest editorial in brandeins Online, titled Gesprächs-Angebote.

Via Nicole Simon.

Robert Niles in OJR:

He goes on,

When we’re in Santa Barbara we get the LA Times, and I agree with Robert’s complaints. And I’ve been advising papers to get the clues for a long time too. This time, however, Robert offers a new clue that I really like:

Lots more there. Read the whole thing.

Via the Head Lemur.

That headline is the one I was going to use at first when I wrote Journalism in a world of open code and open self-education, over in Linux Journal. It’s a thinky piece, but that’s what can happen when journalists hang out in a place like the Berkman Center, where we did a lot of thinking out loud about journalism yesterday.

For my part, I thought about stories, and their limitations as ways to freight facts. Also of their advantages for telling truth. As my old friend the priest Sean Olaoire once said, “Some truths are so deep that only stories can tell them”. Sean is one of the world’s best story-tellers. I’m not always sure about his facts, but I also know that’s not his business.

The business of journalism is also worth thinking about. Because telling stories is what we do, and moving facts from mind to mind isn’t the whole job there. There are other purposes. I visit at least one of those in that piece too.

Nice to learn via Virginia Postrel that The Atlantic’s archives are now open and linkable, liberated from incarceration behind the paywalls that were fashionable at major magazines until too many of their writers also became bloggers (or already were), and the logic of openness began to prevail. (Or so my theory goes.) Note that the story at the third link is from the New York Times, which saw the same light a few months back.

Anyway, bravo. Now I’ll start subscribing to the print magazine again.

Woops! I just tried to subscribe, by clicking on the Subscribe link at The Atlantic site, went through a remarkably fast & easy process that featured opt-in (rather than opt-out) radio buttons for promotional stuff, hit the Send Order button and… bzzzt: went straight to Page Not Found. Not good.

Just tried it again with a different browser. Same result.

Hope they fix that soon.

Public Broadcasters Opt for CC is the encouraging title for an informative and linky post by Michelle Thorne at icommons.org.

By subsuming all electronic media, and by placing every recording and playback device at zero functional distance from each other, the Net makes radio and TV transmitters obsolete the moment high-enough-bandwidth wireless connectivity becomes ubiquitous.

We’re one good UI away from the cell phone becoming a radio. (Thanks to the iPhone, it already serves as a TV.) And we’re one smart cell company away from radio- and TV-as-we-know-it from being replaced entirely — or from moving up the next step of the evolutionary ladder.

Public broadcasters know that. That’s one reason they now call themselves “public media”, a move that separates the category from its transport methods. It’s also why they’re thinking hard and long about the role their online transmissions and archives play in a world without physical borders. That’s what Michelle’s article is about.

After visiting positive moves made by a number of institutions, Michelle’s final paragraph makes clear that the challenge is only beginning to be met:

She could easily have put depressing links behind every one of those “howevers”. If I had more time, I’d do it myself.

Still, it’s good to see movement in a positive direction. I’ll be looking to see more when I attend the IMA’s Public Media 08 conference in Los Angeles next month.

Picturing CES, continued is my latest post at Linux Journal. It leads to a long report in the form of captions to over two hundred pictures (though far from all) shot at the show.

While trying to make sense of some of what I saw out the window while flying from Los Angeles to Boston yesterday, I ran across Physical Geography of the U.S., an online summary of its subject that is so deep, interesting, well-written and well-sourced that it is hard not to keep reading it, and to follow its many links.

And it is not alone. It is one subject among seventeen at Bob Parvin’s Website, which is dedicated to literacies that range from the celestial to the household. Here they are:

Tutoring for Mastery of Reading and Writing and Arithmetic

Tutoring English Grammar and Composition

Finding and Reading eBooks

Beginning Urban Skywatching

Physical Geography of the U.S.

Economic Literacy

Global Warming and Warning

Approaching the Bible

Islam: One American’s Findings

DNA: Life’s Common Denominator

Nutrition: What should we eat?

Help for Microsoft Windows XP

Bread Machine Baking

Tips for No-Knead Bread Baked in a Pot

Links to Video Performances of Great Arias

The Home Library, an electronic home reference library

Recollections of an Old Farm Boy

I’ve had a few minutes more than the rest of you to explore all this, but what I’ve seen so far is just as engaging as the first item I found.

So, see what you think. I suggest starting with the last item.

The Tide Shifts at CES.

I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.

What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one.

The latest addition to the portfolio of fun hacks on Twitter (which include Dave’s Twittergram) is Politweets, which Ted Shelton says “brings out the really intriguing aspect of Twitter — the ability to tap into the pulse of some very interesting distributed event (like an election) and see what is happening”.

I’m sure there’s something on Facebook that does the same thing. But Facebook is AOL 2.0. It’s heavy and complicated and wants to run my life. So I mostly avoid it. My loss perhaps, but that’s beside the twin points of live vs. static and light vs. heavy.

Ev Williams did a nice job of explaining The Light Side in his talk at LeWeb3 last month. Here’s the video.

Barney Brantingham, who probably holds the record for length of service as a Santa Barbara News-Press journalist (nearly half a century), gives us The Endless Stunner: News-Press Strife Goes Way Past Overtime. The money grafs:

The refs call penalty after penalty: offside against Team McCaw: illegal procedures, ineligible receivers downfield, unsportsmanlike conduct, personal fouls, touchbacks and safeties and everything else in the rule book. Everything, that is, except blow their whistles to end the craziness.

This game has been running now for 18 months but time on the clock seems to be expanding like a Salvador Dali surrealist watch face. If this was a real football game the players would all be drawing Social Security before it ends — if it ever does. It’s like one of those 1930s marathon dances except that McCaw’s legal tapdancers never seem to get tired or slump to the floor.

The year 2006 has gone into 2007 and now 2008. Just the other day, National Labor Relations Board Judge William Kocol ruled that McCaw violated enough federal unfair labor practices to fill a whole L.A. Times sports section. Among other things, his 71-page decision ruled that McCaw must rehire eight journalists fired in retaliation for their union activities. She disregarded their “fundamental rights” as employees, Kocol said. Some people have been saying that the workers have no rights and that McCaw could do anything she wanted. She owns the paper, doesn’t she? No so, the judge ruled. Employees have a legal right under federal law to organize and it’s illegal to try to thwart them.

This was settled in the courts generations ago.

So the yellow flags have been thrown against the paper once more and once more McCaw has vowed to appeal. That’s her legal right too and she can afford it. But the handful of journalists could never have financed this battle if they hadn’t been backed by the NLRB, the Teamsters — and the law of the land. By one estimate, the Teamsters have shelled out $400,000 in the battle, and are still racking up costs without end.

Here’s the LA Times piece on the latest.

Required reading: Andy Olmstead’s posthumous post. Also here. Follow the other links too. In the (literal) end, there’s no better writing about what couldn’t be any worse.

As a photographer with nearly 18,000 shots on Flickr (and hundreds of thousands on hard drives), Dave Winer’s FlickrFan looks like a killer thing. I’m especially interested in turning our idle flatscreen “TV”s into useful ways to display the work photographers and services (such as the AP) that I like. When I get home to Santa Barbara later this week, I’ll give it a whirl.

Meanwhile, I think we’re going to see TV undermined absolutely by “content” of the users’ own choosing. TV itself isn’t even TV any more. It’s just one way among many for people to display pictures and video that could come from anywhere, produced and distributed by anybody, including (and especially) the user himself or herself.

When the TV ceases to be a TV, and can be whatever you want, wherever you want — yet still remains that attention-grabbing thing that a screen tends to be — all kinds of interesting things can happen.

I think we’re not only seeing the end of TV, but the beginning of a new life for digital photography.

Tristan Louis is done with Palm. While his tale of tech support woe (ask for support, fail to get it, vow not to continue supporting the company), it does contain an interesting veer from the typical to the surreal: a tech support supervisor who claimed to be the company CEO.

The basic problem, as often happens with lame CRM systems, was that the company forgot that Tristan was ever a customer — even though he had been one for many years. I had the same problem with Dish Network last year.

So one advantage to VRM, as we build it out, is that customers can become trusted respositories of relevant relationship data. That way when the company forgets that somebody is a customer, the customer can remind them and business can proceed.

Meanwhile, Tristan is looking for a replacement phone and provider:

Tristan’s basic request (for an unlocked device, presumably with some specific featurs) here is a personal RFP. Simple market logic is required: a request for a variety of specifics, broadcast selectively to providers of those specifics — without necessarily giving up any more information than the deal requires.

When helpful customers show up, suppliers are much more likely to help them.

This story by Dennis Howlett, on how Twitter spread and processed news of the Bhutto assasination, casts light on the continuing birth of The Live Web.

We also saw it a couple months back with coverage of the California fires near San Diego.

And it’s still early. It’s important to remember that. Everything on the Web is still just a prototype.

Actual dialog:

To understand journalism, you need to know the nature of The Story. Every story has three elements: 1) a character, 2) a problem, and 3) movement toward resolution. The character could be a person, a cause, a ball club — doesn’t matter, as long as the reader (or the viewer, or the listener) can identify with it (or him, or her, or them). The problem is what keeps us reading forward, turning the pages, or staying tuned in. It’s what keeps things interesting. And the motion has to vector toward resolution, even if the conclusion is far off in the future.

Sports are pure story fodder. Teams and players are your characters, the games and the procession of opponents are the problem (and the problems within the problem), and there is always movement toward resolution. Even after resolution, new problems, often with new characters within the team’s own character, are being queue’d up.

There are lots of important developments, however, that do not conform to the story format, so they go unreported. One example is murder in places where sudden and senseless death is common. Such has been the case in Los Angeles for many decades. It was, after all, the very point of Chinatown.

Well, L.A. is no Chinatown for Jill Leovy, who has been blogging otherwise uncovered homicides around the city for most of the last year. Her blog is one of the LA Times’s, and it is itself the subject of Life After Death, a Times story about a reporter reporting stories that fail to fit in the Times’ own limited number of pages. Leovy’s own story is an interesting one…

… as are the stories she crafts and her blog hosts:

Stories are the basic format of human interest. The LA Times’ many blogs provide ways to surface more stories, in more ways, for more readers who might find some of those stories meaningful. Or effective, if a larger purpose is involved. Clearly The Homicide Report is far more than an accessory to the coroner’s office. Its own story is Leovy’s mission to expose and reduce the plague of death that continues to afflict her city:

As for the rest of the LA Times’ blogs, it’s getting harder to tell where the paper ends and the blogging begins — unless all you read is the paper and never go online, in which case you miss more and more of what the paper is becoming.

Supporting that observation are Tony Pierce’s take on his first day as blog editor at the paper, and departed assistant editorial page editor Matt Welch’s blast at an especially pontifical piece by Tim Rutten, the Times’ media columnist. Rutten (whom I’ve always liked, for what it’s worth) is moving on too, as he explains in this piece about turnover at the top of the Times’ parent company.

Companies are ways of organizing work and resources. They are also teams on missions to solve problems. How the ones we call ‘papers’ adapt to a world where more can be written online than off, and for more readers, is the top evolutionary challenge for the institution we call journalism, and therefore its most important story.

The principles of practice are the same. The enviornment is not. Nor are the opportunities, which are far more abundant, if less obviously remunerative. (Not all journalists can live alongside the advertising river. Nor should they.) Which means there will continue to be a struggle between missions like Leovy’s and the need for paychecks.

Los Angeles Magazine has a long and excellent piece by RJ Smith on the News-Press mess in Santa Barbara. It’s about two subjects. One is the meltdown at the paper itself — a story that’s now a year and a half old, with no sign of ever ending. The other is the question of whether a newspaper — especially one that has long been a bedrock civic institution — is a public trust. The News-Press, sadly, is not. It only looks like one. Via Craig Smith.

O’Reilly has made the entire corpus of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 available. You can download every issue in .pdf form at that link. (It would be cool if the download page included titles. Perhaps the lazyweb can fill in some blanks there.)

If you want to see the one issue I wrote, select the year 2004 and hit the Download Issue link for May. Or just click here.

The whole series has enormous historical value. Esther was (and still is) unusually good at both seeing future directions and bringing a critical sensibility to covering those who would take us there.

Release 1.0 wasn’t cheap. (Nor is its successor.) For many of the years Release 1.0 ran, I not only subscribed but also went to Esther’s equally exceptional PC Forum conference, which I still miss.

Props to O’Reilly for putting this important periodical on a public bookshelf.

When it comes to controversy, after abortion, nothing beats guns and kids. — Rick Segal

Heading into a heavy travel schedule. IIW in California, biz in Toronto, LeWeb3… So expect light blogging.

Meanwhile a few loose links on the outbound…

Tony Pierce is now blogging for the LA Times. So there’s hope. For the Times.