Second: I tried out a new way of explaining The Contraption and its demise. I said that I had been told by a lawyer friend that in any transaction involving sale of an asset, there’s a moment—perhaps it is only conceptual one—when no one owns the asset. Meaning the seller has reliquished it, the buyer hasn’t taken possesion. And that, said my friend, is when a smart lawyer can make a buck.
Interesting conference. Sorry I can’t be there. But here’s my blog on the subject today:
Uh, I almost forgot: PressThink is up for an ONA award, too. But that’s later tonight.
Comments
Posted by: Glynn Wilson at November 14, 2004 3:17 PM | Permalink
Two important moments from the I, Robot panel. (Here’s a report from the ONA site.)
Posted by Jay Rosen at November 13, 2004 12:02 PM Print
Robots and journalism come together in the dream factory: you have to admit that has sex appeal. Before that, the keynote address from Wonkette, who should be in the movies. (And she’s a blogger.) Should be quite interesting.
This conference, the Online News Association, received a gift when Tom Curley, boss of the AP, engineered an act of intellectual leadership in the guise of giving an opening address: This is going to be a period of great change for the media, as we wrestle with many old and new demons at the same time — legacy technology, silo-ed bureaucracies and entrenched workflows on the one hand, and the killer apps and new voices of the Internet on the other.
Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: “Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation– for the user’s trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There’s a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times ‘brand,’ and creating it from scratch.” More…
The People Formerly Known as the Audience: “You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.” More…
Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site: “Howard Weaver, Vice President for News at The McClatchy Company said, ‘It comes as close as anything I?ve seen to a roadmap for the near future.’” More…
The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. “Just so you know, ‘the media’ has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not ‘get behind’ candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy? or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn?t know what it?s doing..” More…
They’re Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: “I?m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what?s coming on, news-wise. Don?t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn?t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think.” More…
Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: “We?re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they?re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening.” More…
Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality “The important thing is to show integrity– not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well.” More…
Introducing NewAssignment.Net: “Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.” More…
Assignment Zero: Trend Reporting Gone Pro-Am “NewAssignment.Net just launched its first reporting project, a partnership with Wired.com and Newsvine. It’s called Assignment Zero. Here’s the deal, and the links.” More…
Assignment Zero Lands. OffTheBus Launches. Lessons Fly. “‘A highly satisfying failure,’ Jeff Howe called it in Wired. No, ‘a spectacularly successful failure,’ says Beth Lawton at The Digital Edge. Meanwhile, OffTheBus.Net launched this week, carrying the lessons of ‘Zero’ into political space…” More…
What I Learned from Assignment Zero “Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results.” More…
Rollback: “This White House doesn’t settle for managing the news–what used to be called ‘feeding the beast’–because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country.” More…
Bush to Press: “You’re Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don’t Accept That.” “Bush and his advisors have their own press think, which they are trying out as policy. Reporters do not represent the interests of a broader public. They aren’t a pipeline to the people, because people see through the game of Gotcha. The press has forfeited, if it ever had, its quasi-official role in the checks and balances of government.” More…
Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind’s Scoop: “”Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004.” More…
Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: “Savviness–that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political–is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.” More…
Journalism Is Itself a Religion: “We’re headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers.” More…
News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: “Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for “news as conversation,” more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry’s internal dialogue.” More…
Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: “They’re not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the user???s experience no one has total control. There’s tension because there’s supposed to be tension.” More…
Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: “An industry that won’t move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don’t have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise.” More…
The Migration: “So while people in the old press pack up, and tell stories about giants they knew in the era when, they are also asking each other: where headed? As in: How are your people planning to make it across? And as the preparations are made the headlines keep landing, where they have for years: ‘Newspapers struggle to avoid their own obit.’” More…
The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away: “McClellan, Bush, Cheney, and Rove proved there were other ways. Replace news management with press nullification. Drop the persuasion model, in favor of the politics of assent. Choose non-communication to demonstrate that you ought not to be questioned (it only helps our enemies.)” More…
Grokking Woodward: “Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn’t have such access, and this probably influenced–for the better–their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn’t broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk.” More…
News Comes in Code: Judy Miller’s Return to the Times “Just one man’s opinion, but now is a good time to say it: The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the last year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position.” More…
Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: “This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the ‘we’re fair and balanced, you’re not’ crowd,ugg classic cardy, wherever I may have located you.” More…
A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times: “The Post’s links don’t expire, you see; links to the New York Times do. The Elliot column couldn’t embed itself in the Web, and sink proper roots. It’s effectively “gone.” From Elliot’s point of view, he loses a potentially huge readership for his work. Can he afford it?.” More…
Bill O’Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: “O’Reilly feeds off his own resentments–the establishment sneering at Inside Edition–and like Howard Beale, the ‘mad prophet of the airwaves,’ his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice.” More…
Rather’s Satisfaction: Mystifying Troubles at CBS: “Dan Rather and CBS took the risky course, impunging the motives of critics, rather than a more confident and honorable one: Let’s look at our sources and methods. What can explain such a blind reaction? Here is my attempt.”More…
The View From Nowhere: “Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for ‘vocal critic,’ and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism.” More…
Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: “Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: ‘parachuting in.’ That’s when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it’s hard to walk in other people’s shoes.” More…
The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: “The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?.” More…
The Abyss of Observation Alone. “There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional ‘role’ that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don’t trust journalists. They don’t trust that abyss.” More…
THE WEBLOG, THE WEB and JOURNALISM TODAY
“Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post.” Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: “Opinion based on information ‘everyone’ has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it?s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What?s important is that they put new information in. More…
Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four “outside” voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere.” More…
Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: “What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never.” More…
PressThink’s Blue Plate Special Launches. We Name the Top Blogging Newspapers in the U.S. “Number One is the Houston Chronicle, Number Two the Washington Post. There’s more. And there’s a big chart. So check it out. More…
Notes and Comment on BlogHer ’05 “I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldn???t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk..” More…
Top Ten List: What’s Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? “The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today???s journalism comes out of the market economy.” PressThink’s most linked-to post. More…
A Second Top Ten List: What’s Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? “The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly.” More…
Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: “Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they’re opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out.” More…
Editors Rock Who Let Weblogs Roll: “When you’re sitting at your desk and there are things strange, wonderful and new on your screen, you may have to re-decide what journalism ‘is’ and is finally about, in order to cover the new class of cases that arise when you’re doing it live online.” More…
The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism “It’s pirate radio, legalized; it’s public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we’re closer to a vision of ‘producer democracy’ than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform.” More…
No One Owns Journalism: “And Big Media doesn’t entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn’t. These things were always true. The weblog doesn’t change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends ‘the press’ to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night.” More…
Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness “Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is “the story.” Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access– as in getting your calls returned.” More…
Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: “Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It’s a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed.”More…
Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes “Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers ‘replacing’ the traditional news media. We’re grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn’t run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity..”More…
Questions and Answers About PressThink “The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It’s also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won’t pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What’s strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones.” More…
CAMPAIGN POLITICS AND THE PRESS, 2004, HIGHLIGHTS:
Politics in a Different Key: “It is the politics of the savvy class. Its members are the insiders. They are the pros. They are the pundits, handlers and funders, vultures and parrots who run and staff the campaign story, which is above all the inside story of how you get elected in this country. Its outstanding feature, Joan Didion wrote, is “remoteness from the actual life of the country.” They are the people of this remoteness.” More…
A Politics That is Dumber than Spam: “I remember the moment when presidential campaigns turned from just maddening and absurd to completely empty for me. It might have happened years before, but I am a believer in politics. So it took until the fall of 2000. Bush and Gore were then fighting it out, not by opposing one another in any kind of argument, but by running virtually the same campaign, on the same issues, pandering to the same groups, advancing a rhetoric that sounded the same but for a few catch phrases.” More…
Private Life, Public Happiness and the Dean Connection: “Somehow it had all gotten away from them. Presidential campaigns had drifted out of alignment with most Americans. The ritual no longer seemed like something the country did for itself every four years, but what a professional cadre did, and sold back to the country as ‘politics.’ But it wasn???t, really. At least it wasn???t democratic politics at anything like capacity.” More…
The Master Narrative in Journalism: “Were ‘winning’ to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?” More…
Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: “Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention… Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good.” More…
Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: “How is it you know you’re the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that’s why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what’s going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate.” More…
Psst…. The Press is a Player: “The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst… the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?” More…
Die, Strategy News: “I think it’s a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news.”More…
He Said, She Said, We Said: “When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report ‘what happened.’” More…
If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: “Maybe irony, backstage peaking and “de-mystify the process” only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I’m heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism’s contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?.”More…
Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: “No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That’s a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing.” More…
Down at the Tick Tock Diner, I Caught Up With CNN: “‘Nobody had ever asked to anchor convention coverage from the floor,’ Feist said as we shared a booth– like real diners. CNN got the new gear, tested it out, and made the request to the Democrats. The Democrats said yes. And right there the sky box era at conventions came to an end.”More…
Stark Message for the Legacy Media: “Journalists find before them, with 50 days left, a campaign overtaken by Vietnam, by character issues,ugg boots cheap, attacks, and fights about the basic legitimacy of various actors– including the press itself, including Dan Rather. It’s been a dark week. And the big arrow is pointing backwards.” More…
Every Four Years Journalism “The Every Four Years headset is like outdated software still running because it’s an expensive decision and major disruption to replace a piece of press think so big, with so many parts. There is no agreement on a new ‘think’ system. And there is every incentive to keep the old program going for another election cycle, even though the world has moved on.” More…
Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: “‘A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,’ he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand.”More…
This is a challenge to people in mainstream newsrooms, because they are not used to associating content quality with quality of connection. On the other hand, I didn’t get the sense that Yahoo or Google were there yet, either. Bloggers, I said, were showing the value of being interconnected.
That an “active two-way connection” with the public is essential to successful journalism has indeed been a big secret in the news industry; and Curley was being clever in his phrasing because he knows most journalists do not see it that way. For two-way journalism is hardly the norm in American newsrooms.
PressThink: An Introduction
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
? William Blake
Study Journalism at NYU
Jay Rosen’s bio
E-mail PressThink
Introduction to this blog
Q & A about the blog’s POV
PressThink wins an award
NewAssignment.Net
New project! Beatblogging.org
Just How Did John McCain Obtain What He Has in the Bank with the Press?
Obama tells the Best Political Team on Television: You Have a Choice
Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality
“An Attractively Against-the-Grain Enterprise…”
Three Vetting Stories Went Awry at the New York Times: Find the Pattern.
Public Editor to Bill Keller: “You Haven’t Got it.”
Cliff Notes Version of the Q and A with New York Times Readers About the McCain Investigation
For the New York Times, Too, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Risks
The Campaign Press is a Herd of Independent Minds
“Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page.”
A Stooge Figure Speaks
These Beat Reporters Will Try the Social Network Way
Out in the Great Wide Open
Beat Reporting With a Social Network: Can it Work?
Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site
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Like PressThink? More from the same pen:
Most of the Institute fellows (working journalists) were innocent of what PressThink had said Monday when I greeted them at luncheon Tuesday. Tim Porter at First Draft, who was there event blogging (but in a different way than I was), told his readers what happened at the Omni Tuesday, drawing the lines of argument “back” to my set-up piece, Not Up To It. Porter’s account made Romenesko, so Not Up to It had a second debut.
I told the audience at ONA that I felt journalism was at a similar moment, when no one quite owned it. “I see it as up for grabs today,” I said. It’s not clear exactly who is in possesion. “And that’s why were having this panel today with Google and Yahoo, not traditionally thought of as journalism companies.” I don’t know what Bill Gannon of Yahoo thought of this comparison. But Nathan Stoll of Google said he agreed with my assessment: weird moment, up for grabs, lots of uncertainty, not clear who owns it.
As the rest of the developed world seems to know, the American mind is particularly snake-ridden at this juncture, to borrow a word from George H.W. Bush.
Life is Change, Growth is Optional, Choose Wisely
“The news, as ‘lecture,’ is giving way to the news as a ‘conversation,’” said Tom Curley in his opening address. “An active two-way connection to the audience has always been the secret to success in our business, whether you’re talking about inspiring a letter to the editor or selling classifieds and cars.”
Read about Jay Rosen’s book, What Are Journalists For?
Excerpt from Chapter One of What Are Journalists For? “As Democracy Goes, So Goes the Press.”
Essay in Columbia Journalism Review on the changing terms of authority in the press, brought on in part by the blog’s individual–and interactive–style of journalism. It argues that, after Jayson Blair, authority is not the same at the New York Times, either.
“Web Users Open the Gates.” My take on ten years of Internet journalism, at Washingtonpost.com
Read: An extended Q & A
Jay Rosen, interviewed about his work and ideas by journalist Richard Poynder
Audio: Have a Listen
Listen to an audio interview with Jay Rosen conducted by journalist Christopher Lydon, October 2003. It’s about the transformation of the journalism world by the Web.
Five years later, Chris Lydon interviews Jay Rosen again on “the transformation.” (March 2008, 71 minutes.)
Interview with host Brooke Gladstone on NPR’s “On the Media.” (Dec. 2003) Listen here.
Presentation to the Berkman Center at Harvard University on open source journalism and NewAssignment.Net. Downloadable mp3, 70 minutes, with Q and A. Nov. 2006.
Video: Have A Look
Half hour video interview with Robert Mills of the American Microphone series. On blogging, journalism, NewAssignment.Net and distributed reporting.
Recommended by PressThink:
Town square for press critics, industry observers, and participants in the news machine: Romenesko, published by the Poynter Institute.
Town square for weblogs: InstaPundit from Glenn Reynolds, who is an original. Very busy. Very good. To the Right, but not in all things. A good place to find voices in diaolgue with each other and the news.
Town square for the online Left. The Daily Kos. Huge traffic. The comments section can be highly informative. One of the most successful communities on the Net.
Rants, links, blog news, and breaking wisdom from Jeff Jarvis, former editor, magazine launcher, TV critic, now a J-professor at CUNY. Always on top of new media things. Prolific, fast, frequently dead on, and a pal of mine.
Eschaton by Atrios (pen name of Duncan B;ack) is one of the most well established political weblogs, with big traffic and very active comment threads. Left-liberal.
Terry Teachout is a cultural critic coming from the Right at his weblog, About Last Night. Elegantly written and designed. Plus he has lots to say about art and culture today.
Dave Winer is the software wiz who wrote the program that created the modern weblog. He’s also one of the best practicioners of the form. Scripting News is said to be the oldest living weblog. Read it over time and find out why it’s one of the best.
If someone were to ask me, “what’s the right way to do a weblog?” I would point them to Doc Searls, a tech writer and sage who has been doing it right for a long time.
Ed Cone writes one of the most useful weblogs by a journalist. He keeps track of the Internet’s influence on politics, as well developments in his native North Carolina. Always on top of things.
Rebecca’s Pocket by Rebecca Blood is a weblog by an exemplary practitioner of the form, who has also written some critically important essays on its history and development, and a handbook on how to blog.
Of the many weblogs that comment on the state of journalism today, Tim Porter’s First Draft is one of the most thoughtful.
Dan Gillmor used to be the tech columnist and blogger for the San Jose Mercury News. He now heads a center for citizen media at UC Berkeley. This is his blog about it.
A former senior editor at Pantheon, Tom Englehardt solicits and edits commentary pieces that he publishes in blog form at TomDispatches. High-quality political writing and cultural analysis.
Chris Nolan’s Spot On is political writing at a high level from Nolan and her band of left-to-right contributors. Her notion of blogger as a “stand alone journalist” is a key concept; and Nolan is an exemplar of it.
Barista of Bloomfield Avenue is journalist Debbie Galant’s nifty experiment in hyper-local blogging in several New Jersey towns. Hers is one to watch if there’s to be a future for the weblog as news medium.
The Editor’s Log, by John Robinson, is the only real life honest-to-goodness weblog by a newspaper’s top editor. Robinson is the blogging boss of the Greensboro News-Record and he knows what he’s doing.
Fishbowl DC is about the world of Washington journalism. Gossip, controversies, rituals, personalities– and criticism. Good way to keep track of the press tribe in DC
PJ Net Today is written by Leonard Witt and colleagues. It’s the weblog of the Public Journalisn Network (I am a founding member of that group) and it follows developments in citizen-centered journalism.
Mickey Kaus’s kausfiles appears at Slate, the online opinion magazine. His thing is politics. His style is satirical. His eye for detail is accurate to the inch. He’s fun to read and he’s one of the original bloggers. LA-based.
Here’s Simon Waldman’s blog. He’s the Director of Digital Publishing for The Guardian in the UK, the world’s most Web-savvy newspaper. What he says counts.
Novelist, columnist, NPR commentator, Iraq War vet, Colonel in the Army Reserve, with a PhD in literature. How many bloggers are there like that? One: Austin Bay.
Betsy Nemark’s weblog she describes as “comments and Links from a history and civics teacher in Raleigh, NC.” An intelligent and newsy guide to blogs on the Right side of the sphere. I go there to get links and comment, like the teacher said.
Rhetoric is language working to persuade. Professor Andrew Cline’s Rhetorica shows what a good lens this is on politics and the press.
Davos Newbies is a “year-round Davos of the mind,” written from London by Lance Knobel. He has a cosmopolitan sensibility and a sharp eye for things on the Web that are just… interesting. This is the hardest kind of weblog to do well. Knobel does it well.
Susan Crawford, a law professor, writes about democracy, technology, intellectual property and the law. She has an elegant weblog about those themes.
Kevin Roderick’s LA Observed is everything a weblog about the local scene should be. And there’s a lot to observe in Los Angeles.
Joe Gandelman’s The Moderate Voice is by a political independent with an irrevant style and great journalistic instincts. Link-filled and consistently interesting.
The Jenny of Jenny D. was a journalist for 15 years. Now she?s getting a Ph.D in Education. Her blog records her discoveries. ?Education, public policy and politics, middle-aged moms, life in the Midwest, life in the academy.” Or just: life.
Former AP reporter Chris Allbritton’s experiment in independent war reporting, online and reader-supported. Allbritton is in Iraq now, sending back reports. In 2003-4 he taught digital journalism at NYU.
H20town by Lisa Williams is about the life and times of Watertown, Massachusetts, and it covers that town better than any local newspaper. Williams is funny, she has style, and she loves her town.
Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing at washingtonpost.com is a daily review of the best reporting and commentary on the presidency. Read it daily and you’ll be extremely well informed.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former correspondent for CNN,Ugg Boots Sale, has immersed herself in the world of new media and she’s seen the light (great linker too.)
Micro Persuasion is
Steve Rubel’s weblog. It’s about how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the business of persuasion. Rubel always has the latest study or article.
Susan Mernit’s blog is “writing and news about digital media, ecommerce, social networks, blogs, search, online classifieds, publishing and pop culture from a consultant, writer, and sometime entrepeneur.” Connected.
Group Blogs
CJR Daily is Columbia Journalism Review’s weblog about the press and its problems, edited by Steve Lovelady, formerly of the Philadelpia Inquirer.
In 2005, CBS News launched Public Eye to help it cope with criticism. The idea is to have a blog that works like an ombudsman. It’s a promising venture that bears watching.
Lost Remote is a very newsy weblog about television and its future, founded by Cory Bergman, executive producer at KING-TV in Seattle. Truly on top of things, with many short posts a day that take an inside look at the industry.
Editors Weblog is from the World Editors Fourm, an international group of newspaper editors. It’s about trends and challenges facing editors worldwide.
Journalism.co.uk keeps track of developments from the British side of the Atlantic. Very strong on online journalism.
The Huffington Post is a high traffic left-leaning group blog with more than 100 contributors, including PressThink’s Jay Rosen and a sprinkling of Hollywood celebs. Mostly politics.
Digests & Round-ups:
Memeorandum: Single best way I know of to keep track of both the news and the political blogosphere. Top news stories and posts that people are blogging about, automatically updated.
Daily Briefing: A categorized digest of press news from the Project on Excellence in Journalism.
Press Notes is a round-up of today’s top press stories from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Richard Prince does a link-rich thrice-weekly digest called “Journalisms” (plural), sponsored by the Maynard Institute, which believes in pluralism in the press.
Newsblog is a daily digest from Online Journalism Review.
Syndicate this site:
Read the whole blog column here:
http://www.southerner.net/blog/weeklyblog050.html
First, Bill Gannon, Editorial director and managing editor, Yahoo! News explained that Yahoo News, an aggregator, relies on “human editors” (journalists) and thus their judgment, which he said distinguished it from Google News. Nathan Stoll, Google News product manager, agreed. He said that Google News—the idea for which came from a computer scientist—was a selection system based on an algorithm. It’s automated, unlike most other news sites, or blogs for that matter. (Here’s another site, neither Google nor Yahoo, that was originated by a person, but operates on an algorithm.)
What contraption? You can read about it here (Cooper) here (Porter) and here (PressThink.) How will I be “injecting” into ONA my sense of a contraption that has stopped working, gone dead? We will have to see what happens. I’m not sure anyone knows how you blog ideas “into” events.
Southerner Daily News
And there doesn’t seem to be much hope that the snakes will be driven out any time soon. Sorry Europe. Where’s Saint Patrick when we need him?
Okrent on faux objectivity.
For example, here I am, blogger at an event: conference of the Online News Association. It’s meeting in Hollywood all day today. (Hollywood: still our dream factory, right?) At 2:00 I will be part of a panel called I Robot. How to leverage automation to your advantage.
***
Newspapers face a particularly interesting dilemma.
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Sustainable? I have my doubts.
***
As Benjamin Franklin said, “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
More on ONA when I return to base. Cheers.
UPDATE, 10:25 pm: Big congratulations to Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, writer of Dan Gillmor’s E-Journal, author of the all-important book, We, The Media, and winner of the 2004 Online News Association award for online commentary, small sites. (PressThink, and Mark Glaser of OJR were the other finalists.) There’s a reason why Gillmor’s weblog has, at last count, 2293 links from 1883 sources. ONA recognized that with this award, its first given to a blogger. (Full article on the winners.)
Now I have to dash to Wonkette. After that it’s Robots in the Press Room, with PressThink invited to give a blogger’s eye view of automated news sites. And then it’s the Big Politics ‘04 Panel, with Arianna Huffington, Joe Trippi, Mickey Kaus, Jehmu Greene, Dave Winer, moderated by Dick Meyer, editorial director, CBSNews.com.
So that was event blogging, too. During my part in I Robot, about two hours from now, I am going to be injecting where and when I can the image of a “contraption” that has broken down in mainstream journalism and specifically newspapering.
“Not mainstream journalism the practice, but the contraption it has for explaining, situating and defending itself has in 2004 finally broken down, given out after 40 years of heavy, reliable use.”
Posted by: Tim at November 15, 2004 2:26 PM | Permalink
continue reading
Journalists truly care, so don’t write us offReaders want their lives, their lifestyles and their sensibilities to be taken more seriously. They don’t want to be made fun of for their political point of view, the faith they freely and proudly espouse, the place where they choose to live or how they raise their children. And when they read about people like themselves in stories about social or cultural issues, they don’t want them to be unfairly portrayed as unenlightened or bigoted or racist because they share a real fear that the culture ? popular and political ? is in decline.
And that’s a bigger challenge for us because we’re not very much like our readers. We tend to be younger (by 10 years or so); live in town (certainly not in the suburbs, where the majority of the readers are) and we rarely go to church, if we are religious at all. We don’t hang with the same folks our readers hang with. We don’t read what they read. (I doubt more than a third of the news staff could tell you who Rick Warren is. For journalists reading this: Google him.)
That disconnection is at the heart of the crisis American journalism faces.
Posted by: Kenneth Roberts at November 14, 2004 12:13 PM | Permalink
We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America–and who are doing it now online–continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached…
Now in its current meaning,”to blog” the ONA would be to attend sessions and post summaries of them. Like Jeff Jarvis was doing this week. “Session notes” is the default style. An extremely useful thing to do, especially for those who type fast. Also common is the “here I am” post, and the “who I saw” entry. When they get back home, bloggers cast a backward look and interpret what went on, as I did with BloggerCon III. (Notes and Observations on the People of Moore’s Law)
I said that human editors are good to have, a smart algorithm is also good, but what will ultimately spell the difference in quality is the strength of the relationship or two-way connection between the filterers (editors) and the users for whom the filtering (editing) is done. The stronger that two-way connection is between editors and users, the better the filter will be in filtering in and out— for those users.
By Glynn Wilson
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Nov. 14 (SDN) ? So much for the value of “staying the course” and “staying on message” and not “flip-flopping,” the political frame that dominated media coverage of the presidential election of 2004 and led to the victory of George W. Bush.
With Not Up to It, my post from earlier this week, I described what I intended to say the next day to a group of journalists at an Institute here in Los Angeles. That was blogging the event beforehand by “releasing” into Net space some of the ideas I planned to inflict on the participants the next day:
Read it. This is the head of the AP with a radical’s message about change. See Command Post on it too.
Most of its readers got there via Tim’s event blogging. A signifcant number were steered in by Marc Cooper of the Nation, who blogged it the next day. ” …Rosen rocked the boat as one of our lunch-time speakers, declaring flatly that the American mainstream media model—something he calls ‘the contraption’?has effectively collapsed.”
More later. Here’s the schedule.
Blogarama
My Ecosystem Details
« What Does a Great Newspaper Want From its Critics? Accountability Committee at the Times | Main | Off the Charts: Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Political Vision » November 13, 2004 Print How Do You Blog Ideas into Events? PressThink Tries to Find Out Event blogging– “live.” We have only scratched the surface of what it’s about. For example, here I am, blogger at an event: the Online News Association. It’s meeting in Hollywood all day today. At 2:00 I will be part of a panel called I Robot. How to leverage automation to your advantage…. (read more)
Hollywood, CA, Nov. 13: Event blogging— “live.” We have only scratched the surface of what it’s about.
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