Huffington Post Seeks Teenage Bloggers to Not Pay | Commentary and analysis from Simon Dumenco. The Blog That Peter Wrote. Wile E. Coyote and Print Publishing — The Tragicomedy of Desperate Measures. Image via Wikipedia I seem to recall the sequence, but there were so many pratfalls in these cartoon classics that I may be imagining it — Wile E. Coyote laying out planks or track in front of himself in a desperate attempt to survive a hare-brained scheme gone awry and bridge a fateful chasm, running out of materials, and then, after hanging implausibly in a moment of painful realization, plummeting with a whistle to become a puff of dust on the canyon’s floor.
Printers and newspaper publishers are doing an equivalent schtick, but instead of one mangy coyote hoping to buy enough time to make it to the other side, there are two, and they’re fighting. Worse, neither can really describe the other side they’re supposedly aiming for. This tragicomic effort was captured recently in three separate writings, two of which were related, as well as an interesting development in the world of popular fiction publishing.
The first essay, from D. Like this: Like Loading... Now Can We All Agree That The “High Quality Web Content” Experiment Has Failed? It’s hard to imagine anything more perfect than Slate’s decision to lay off its respected media critic Jack Shafer. Not perfect in a good way — I count myself amongst Shafer’s legions of fans — but perfect in the way that Alanis Morissette not understanding the meaning of ‘Ironic’ is perfect, or the way that a safety inspector falling out of a tenth story window would be perfect. “I tolllldddd yyoooouuu sooooooo…” I mean, what better illustration could there be of online media’s woes than an ezine laying off its media critic because the economics of web content don’t support a writer of his stature and specialism? At least Shafer can take some satisfaction in the fact that his departure is in and of itself an absolutely perfect piece of media criticism: Jack Shafer as both medium and message.
Slate’s admission that, even with a minuscule staff of 60 and the financial “might” of the Washington Post company, it can’t make money from online content is also perfect. …and he’s right. AND YET. Twitter and Facebook riot restrictions would be a mistake, says Google chief | Media. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has criticised David Cameron's proposal to limit the use of social media sites during civil unrest in the wake of the riots that took place across England earlier this month.
Schmidt, speaking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival on Saturday, said that such a move was likely to backfire, highlighting how when the Egyptian authorities turned the internet off to try and quell unrest earlier this year it merely "enraged the citizens and got them to leave their homes to protest". Asked in Edinburgh what he thought of Cameron's suggestion, Schmidt said: "I think it's a mistake. It is a mistake to look into the mirror and try to break the mirror. Whatever the problem was [that caused the riots] the internet is a reflection of that problem.
If you have a problem, use the internet to understand what the problem is. " "It was a strategic error. The government already appears to be rowing back on Cameron's initial suggestion. Privacy and social media investigation: how I tracked down an entire family from one tweet | Joanna Geary. Last Saturday I presented to students taking part in the brilliant Young Journalist Academy. The topic was “New Media” (not my title) and the primary aim was to get them up and running with their own blog and learn to publish online. However, I also knew it would be the perfect opportunity to gauge just how aware a group of bright, 16 and 17-year-olds were on the issues of web privacy and of just how easy it is to track down information about people online. The case study I included shocked them, especially when it came to Facebook privacy.
I won’t be publishing it online in order to protect the identity of the individuals involved. However, I have been asked to explain the process I went through to obtain the information that I did. This is the purpose of this post. It frightens me how simple it was to get all that I did. Step 1 I chose a few keywords “gunfire, shot, attack, missile” and ran them through Twitter search. Step 2 I check the Twitter profile of the tweet. Step 6 Google again. PC Richard Stanley. The Curious Case of Istyosty – When is a Proxy not a Proxy, General Legality and the Moral Highground « Rev Dan Catt's Blog.
Skydebate: the @Louisemensch @johnprescott @paullewis social media #riot debate. The New Precision Journalism - Preface. Preface The original Precision Journalism was written in the 1969-1970 academic year while I was the happy guest of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. It was updated only once, in 1978. The principles of social science research have not changed very much since then, but the technology has. And so this book is an attempt at a new start. It has a new title because 90 percent of the material is new. The concept of precision journalism is, as often happens in social science, much older than the term itself. In the winter of 1971, Everette E.
In 1972, when John Gallman of Indiana University Press broke my string of rejections and accepted the manuscript for publication, we decided that Dennis's descriptive term had the right ring, and so we adopted it. The current volume was made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the William Rand Kenan Jr. Twitter and the Riots | by Martin Robbins @mjrobbins | Science. SPOS #265 - Journalism And The New Media With Jay Rosen. The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: My Talk at South By Southwest. Pew: Nonprofit journalism doesn’t mean ideology-free.
Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with a new study this morning that looks at the new universe of nonprofit journalism — and tries to get beyond the ProPublicas of the world to see who else is producing journalism under the legal structure of a 501(c)3 exemption. After all, remember, “nonprofit” signals a tax status, not a belief system or a commitment to any particular ideals, journalistic or otherwise. The study found more than a little ideology lurking under that IRS umbrella. Of the 46 sites examined — 39 nonprofit and 7 commercial as a control — around half “produced news coverage that was clearly ideological in nature,” the researchers report.
Pew had the expected nice things to say about the usual nonprofit rock stars, like ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and California Watch. (Because it attempted to cover an entire universe of nonprofit outlets, researchers had to limit their targets to a reasonable number. And there’s some truth in that! When the Internet Thinks It Knows You. Maybe 'New Media' Needs a New Metaphor. Saturday I attended a couple of workshops about "New Media" ("Experiments in new media: Beautiful failures and startling successes" before lunch and "Rebooting science journalism: Adapting to the new media landscape" afterwards.)
Together they convinced me that neither revolution nor evolution are the right metaphors for the impact of digital media. A better model for what's happening in our profession is a forced migration. Old niches (like "science beat reporter" or "science writer for magazines") are drying up, so we're stampeding into new media. Not because they're better than our old watering holes in print and radio and TV, but because we have no choice. More and more of us find now that only digital media give us access to the public. Both also said that science journalism itself would keep thriving. For people used to traditional journalism, it's important not to be the kind of emigrant who refuses to learn the new language or otherwise adapt to a new country. You Can Stop the Social Media Hype: Business Collaboration News « Don’t trust anyone who says they’ll reveal the “secrets of social media.” There are no secrets of social media. As someone who’s seen the bubble of the early web and new media business burst, I’m feeling a sense of deja vu.
There are people who make a good living off hype and the naivete of others. They see a short window of time when people are still in learning mode or “behind the curve,” and they swoop in with shiny promises bathed in snake oil, take as much money as they can get, then run. The rest of us are left here in their greedy and destructive wake to pick up the pieces and, worse, to deal with the disillusionment of people who’ve been burned by a con artist claiming to know the “secrets” of social media that will make everyone rich. We’ve been here before. The 5 C’s of the Web and Social Media In 1995, I began teaching workshops about the Internet to businesspeople and spoke of the “5 C’s of the Web”: Communications. Communications: Check. Social media won’t save the world. Signs O' The Times. Here is a picture taken by an entity who wishes to be known as Rufus T. Firefly, communicated to me (with permission) by my friend Mr D.
M. of Leeds. "I thought you might like this sign for your collection," said Mr. D. M., to whom I'm sure we owe our gratitude. I'm rather fond of odd signs. Whereas this notice, observed in a garden centre, gives me hope that Ents still walk the Earth. Some remind one of golden ages that perhaps never were ... ... perhaps in mysterious realms, far away ... whereas others warn of clear and present dangers, closer to home ... ... and some serve as salutary reminders of one's fleshly, corporeal estate. Kanye West, media cyborg « Snarkmarket.
Tim Maly’s #50cyborgs project is unfolding this month, 50 years after the coining of the term “cyborg.” Here at Snarkmarket, our Tim has already contributed. Here’s my addition. So, I love Tim Maly’s kickoff post: What’s a cyborg? It’s fun, revelatory, provocative, and it uses design to tell its tale. (You know I love that.) Tim laces the post with striking images, and he labels them: This is a cyborg.
But I think he misses one. Because this is a cyborg, too. I’m not saying that because of the sampler on the pedestal or the vocoder attached to the microphone (although somebody could do a great #50cyborgs post about the recent robotization of pop vocals). Isn’t there such a thing as a media cyborg? Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)
This hits close to home for me. P.S. Rectifying Asymmetries — Experts Are Battered From All Sides, But Are We Any Smarter. It’s not easy being an expert these days, it seems. Every time you turn around, there’s someone challenging you, raising an objection, making a point. And the proliferation of channels has the potential to not only thin your message but level the playing field with antagonists. But are experts worth defending from the onslaught of the new information economy? In an article earlier this summer in the New York Post, David Freedman, obviously pimping his book “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us–and How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” talks about the pace of change in the medical literature in particular, assigning a reliability problem to a high-churn publishing environment in which frequent, novel findings are prized over infrequent and/or non-novel results.
The problem returns to filter failure — yet again. That’s a harder question to answer. . . . to separate the verifiable from the nonverifiable is a conscious, tedious process that most people are unwilling or unable to do. Like this: Listen & Watch | The Monti.
Transparency is the new objectivity. A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge. Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.
You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. This change is, well, epochal. New rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest « BuzzMachine. Try this on as a new rule for newspapers: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. That’s not how newspapers work now. They try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets.
So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions.
In the rearchitecture of news, what needs to happen is that people are driven to the best coverage, not the 87th version of the same coverage. There’s another angle to this: News is not one-size-fits-all. It certainly means that The New York Times needn’t. So why did they do it? So you do what you do best. That is the new architecture of news. So, Mr. The internet is messy, fun and imperfect, just like us. Last October 23rd David Weinberger gave the 2008 Bertha Bassam Lecture at the University of Toronto. I happened to be in Toronto but only found out about the lecture on the 24th. Fortunately Taylor pointed out that the lecture is online.
I’ve never met David Weinberger (his blog is here) but I hope to one day. I maintain his book – Small Pieces Loosely Joined – remains one of, if not the best book written about the internet and society. Everything is Miscellaneous is a fantastic read as well. The Bertha Bassam lecture is classic Weinberger: smart, accessible, argumentative and fun.
Contrast that to the experience of listening to someone like Andrew Keen, a Weinberger critic who this lecture again throws into stark relief. Indeed, this blog is a triumph of Weinberger’s internet humanism. I hope you’ll watch this lecture or, if you haven’t the time, download the audio to your ipod and listen to it during your commute home. Like this: Like Loading... Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On. The reboot of journalism. Rebooting The News. Quote and Comment. What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today? I’ve largely stolen the title of this post from Daniel Mietchen because I it helped me to frame the issues. I’m giving an informal talk this afternoon and will, as I frequently do, use this to think through what I want to say.
Needless to say this whole post is built to a very large extent on the contributions and ideas of others that are not adequately credited in the text here. If we imagine what the specification for building a scholarly communications system would look like there are some fairly obvious things we would want it to enable. Registration of ideas, data or other outputs for the purpose of assigning credit and priority to the right people is high on everyone’s list. While researchers tend not to think too much about it, those concerned with the long term availability of research outputs would also place archival and safekeeping high on the list as well. So, filtering, archival, re-usability, and registration. An imaginary solution Practical steps for today. Let the Adaptations Begin!
Taking science journalism “upstream” « through the looking glass. A quick guide to the maxims of new media | Mark Coddington. Culture, Anarchy and the Conceptual Value of Links | Brian Frank. No easy way to be free | genomeboy. PubCasts for Journals « Geet Duggal. NYC J-Schools Take Divergent Paths on Training, Hyper-Local. The Hamster Wheel.
Radiohead Contemplates Digital Realities — Parallels for STM Publishing. How to save science journalism. The Future of Social Media in Journalism. Radio Television Digital News Association | Communicator |Why Are Viewers More Aggravated Than Ever With Our Reporting? Betaworks and The Times Plan a Social News Service. Online Journalism or Journalism Online? There is a difference. “A completely new model for us”: The Guardian gives outsiders the power to publish for the first time. Some Newspapers Shift Coverage After Tracking Readers Online.
» Open Foo: sharing practice, social movement and technology Circle of Complexity. Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
Top Ten Ideas of '04: Open Source Journalism, Or "My Readers Know More Than I Do." Online - Making Sense of News.