A quick guide to the maxims of new media | Mark Coddington We journalism/new media nerds like to think of ourselves as being pretty open, but we can be a bit clannish at times: We close ranks to defend a few core principles, we have our own hierarchy of gurus and we use our own set of words and phrases. When I dove into the future-of-journalism world, I quickly found that a few of these phrases function as shorthand for big, fundamental ideas. They often get traded without explanation and sometimes without links, leaving the uninitiated pretty confused and possibly a little turned off, too. Consider this your dictionary for those phrases. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” Where it came from: This is the signature phrase of Jeff Jarvis, the Entertainment Weekly/TV Guide/San Francisco Examiner veteran, CUNY journalism prof and author of “What Would Google Do?” What it means: Your best bet is simply to read that initial post — Jarvis explains the concept pretty well there. “If the news is important, it will find me.”
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...
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. You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. This change is, well, epochal. Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity.
Rebooting The News Quote and Comment 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:
Taking science journalism “upstream” « through the looking glass Today I spoke at Science Online London as part of a plenary panel session curated by David Dobbs and also featuring Martin Robbins and Ed Yong on “Rebooting” (aka the future of) science journalism. This is the typed-up version of my talk, along with links and extra bits of context. As the academic on the panel (not to mention the only one that isn’t, shhhh, in any way a journalist) I thought I’d focus on an idea: an invite to take things “upstream”. That probably sounds dirtier than it should. The term “upstream” is (a) a metaphor and (b) jargon. In essence, it’s an argument for showing more of science in the making, not just waiting for publication of “ready-made” peer-reviewed papers. Imagine science as a river. The term “upstream engagement” has various antecedents, but really stems from a (2004) report from think-tank Demos, See Through Science, by James Wilsdon and Rebbecca Willis. I should note, the idea has its critics, e.g. This sort of upstream work can be pretty niche.
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
» Open Foo: sharing practice, social movement and technology Circle of Complexity 4Aug 2010 In the discussion under my recent post on incompatibilities between open source and open data Bill Anderson pointed out frequent confusion between “open source” and “free software”. He cited Richard Stallman’s essay which argues that open source is a software development methodology, while free software is a social movement. Building on that, Bill wrote that “‘Open data’ is not a data development method; it’s a data sharing practice (…)”, which sounded quite right. However, after reading Stallman’s essay again and looking at the official definition of open source software (linked also by Stallman) I view the distinction between these two quite differently. “Open” as sharing practice The official definition of open source software specifies conditions of sharing and distributing source code. “Open” as social movement Attaching a societal idea to the “open” results in the second layer in this schema. “Open” as technology Discussing openness
No easy way to be free | genomeboy Last year I was asked by a friend and colleague to contribute an article to a special journal issue she was co-editing that would be dedicated to personal genomics. I was happy to be asked and I think the issue as a whole turned out rather well. This morning someone forwarded me an email from a market research firm that is selling this very same 98-page issue for 400 EUR (single license), 1250 EUR (site license), or 1950 EUR (“Enterprisewide,” whatever that means). Look, I understand these are tough times for journals. Right now seven of the 14 articles are free. The other thing that sticks in my craw is the way this dysfunctional and perverse food chain operates. But I think there’s a difference between selling expensive journal subscriptions and selling that very same scholarly content as “market research” at an even more obscene markup. This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Some Newspapers Shift Coverage After Tracking Readers Online Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources. Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data. Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online. “How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. But Mr. Mr.
Let the Adaptations Begin! Image by Kalwa via Flickr Lately, all the news about e-books, iPads, social networks, digital information, and so forth has left me a little cold. Searching for an explanation, I think I found it. We need to go deeper than just the glow of technological changes. We need to truly adapt to the modern information age. On this blog, we’ve talked before about how culture trumps technology or why scholarly publishing hasn’t been disrupted yet, but I think academic culture is in a sort of passive-aggressive dance with change. It’s time for some revolution, not just a slow evolution. Humans have always adapted culturally and socially faster than evolutionary forces would demand. What we are able to do which other animals aren’t able to do is to rapidly adapt to completely new environments. It’s been hard to know what to do. We’re not in the midst of change. The waves of change are now lapping at our cultural norms. From a construction standpoint, it’s over with. We need to adapt. Like this: