Journalism
-
This Thing is Bigger Than Journalism
Journalism as we knew it is washing away. But the story is bigger than journalism alone, and bigger than a story alone can tell. (Image borrowed from the brilliant Despair.com.) We who care about journalism are asked to join the Save Journalism Project, and its fight against Big Tech. Their pitch begins, and adds, On the first point, we… Continue reading
-
The Online Local Chronicle
After we came to Bloomington in the summer of 2021, we rented an apartment by Prospect Hill, a quiet dome of old houses just west of downtown. There we were surprised to hear, nearly every night, as many police and ambulance sirens as we’d heard in our Manhattan apartment. Helicopters too. Soon we realized why:… Continue reading
-
On Blogs
Thoughts I jotted down on Mastodon*: 1) Blogs are newsletters that don’t require subscriptions. 2) Blogrolls are lists of blogs. 3) Both require the lowest possible cognitive and economic overhead. 4) That’s why they are coming back. I know, they never left. But you get my point. *I just learned that my Mastodon account is… Continue reading
-
The New News Business
Eigth in the News Commons series. Back when I was on the board of my regional Red Cross chapter (this one), I learned four lessons about fund raising: People are glad to pay value for value. People are most willing to pay when they perceive and appreciate the value they get from a product or… Continue reading
-
The News Business
Seventh in the News Commons series. How does the news business see itself? Easy: ask an AI. Or a lot of them.* That’s what I’ve been doing. Unless otherwise noted, all the following respond to the same three-word prompt: the news business. Here goes… Microsoft Bing (Full name: Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer), which… Continue reading
-
DatePress
Sixth in the News Commons series. The Big Calendar here in Bloomington is one fed by other calendars kind enough to syndicate themselves through publishing feeds. It is put together by my friend Dave Askins, who writes and publishes the B Square Bulletin. Technically speaking, it runs on WordPress, and uses a plug-in called ICS.… Continue reading
-
Some remodeling work
As Dave says here, we’re remodeling this blog a bit, starting with the title image, which for the last few years has been a portrait of me at work, drawn by the fashion illustrator Gregory Wier-Quitton. My likeness online is not in short supply. Here’s a sampling from a DuckDuckGo image search for my name:… Continue reading
-
Whither Medium?
I subscribe to Medium. It’s not expensive: $5.00 per month. I also pay about that much to many newsletters (mostly because Substack makes it so easy). And that’s 0n top of what I also pay The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Reason, The Sun, Wired, and others that… Continue reading
-
Stories vs. Facts
Fourth in the News Commons series. Stories and facts have always been frenemies. Stories can get along fine without facts, though facts are good to have for framing up stories.* Facts by themselves are blah, and need stories to become interesting. So: different beasts, often in conflict. That conflict itself makes a good story. Such… Continue reading
-
We Need Whole News
Third in the News Commons series. Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.* Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include… Continue reading
-
We Need Wide News
Second in the News Commons series. How do people get news where you live? How do they remember it? For most of the industrial age, which is still with us, newspapers answered both those questions—and did so better than any other medium or civic institution. Newspapers were required reading, delivered daily to doorsteps, and sold… Continue reading
-
We Need Deep News
First in the News Commons series. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — Countless journalists “Breaking the News” is the title of… Continue reading
-
All home now
From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were… Continue reading
-
The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten… Continue reading
-
Wayne Thiebaud, influencer
Just learned Wayne Thiebaud died, at 101. I didn’t know he was still alive. But I did know he had a lot of influence, most famously on pop art. Least famously, on me. Many of Thiebaud’s landscapes were from aerial perspectives. For example, this— —and this: In me, those influenced this— —and this— —and this—… Continue reading
-
On solving the worldwide shipping crisis
The worldwide shipping crisis is bad. Here are some reasons: “Just in time” manufacturing, shipping, delivery, and logistics. For several decades, the whole supply system has been optimized for “lean” everything. On the whole, no part of it fully comprehends breakdowns outside the scope of immediate upstream or downstream dependencies. The pandemic, which has been… Continue reading
-
What becomes of journalism when everybody can write or cast?
Formalized journalism is outnumbered. In the industrialized world (and in much of the world that isn’t), nearly everyone of a double-digit age has a Net-connected mobile device for sharing words they write and scenes they shoot. While this doesn’t obsolesce professional journalists, it marginalizes and re-contextualizes them. Worse, it exposes the blindness within their formalities. Dave… Continue reading