Rebooting The News

We started off with what Google calls “personalized search” others call “social search,” and Dave calls “two-way search.”

Dave: “They found a way to integrate real time with the normal Google search.”

Jay: “One of the problems that arises when we gain local producers is how we are going to find what they produce.” So these developments in social search may assist in that.

Dave: “Maybe news is becoming search and search is becoming news… Google has taken a huge step towards doing that.”

Why does Dave call it “two way” search? Because… “I am providing it information as much as it is providing me information.”

Jay: Anything that allows individual posts or articles to be found regardless of what container they came in is part of the rebooted system of news.

But we both agree: Authority is still important. Institutions matter. Stored trust counts.

Dave: yes, but when trust is “stored” the people who benefit from it become complacent and build walls to enclose themselves and the insiders they hang with.

Jay: And related to that is my post for LA Observed: The Wrap gets punk’d. Reporter retails a story that turns out to be quite wrong: that Republican consultant Frank Luntz had abandoned politics from Hollywood. And she never corrects or follows-up. But this happens all the time in the industry– sources BS the reporters, who pass it along if it makes for a juicy story, and when the proof comes in that the story was wrong who remembers?

Dave: Ageism and NYU Local.

Then we unfolded the ideas in Dave’s post Hypercamp Revisted, inspired by Obama’s event with Republicans in Baltimore and David Weinberger’s response.

Dave: Imagine a hybrid of 1.) newsroom, 2.) press conference and… 3.) “open.” Bloggers and journalists with an interest in a given topic are invited to a state-of-the-art workspace, a room with great connectivity, podiums at either end of the room, and pipelines in and out, so that it’s both easy to reach and constantly broadcast over the web. The industry people and political players who want to reach the assembled reporters pay to be present. But they are not at the center, they are allowed to hold their events at the edges, or “out in the hallway.”

Inspiration of the week: the city of New Orleans.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it, and if you feel so moved…. comment.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Feb08.mp3

You can listen live here, noon Eastern.

Dave and I both want to talk about his post, Hypercamp Revisted.

I assume Dave will want to discuss what Google called “social search” and what he termed “two-way search.”

I’d like to return to the open source assignment desk project, and discuss some of its specs.

Flip cameras for every reporter, innovation labs at six newspapers, profit-sharing for all workers: some of John Paton’s moves as the new CEO of the Journal-Register newspaper company http://jr.ly/uafd

It’s possible I will want to talk briefly about my post at LA Observed this week: The Wrap gets punk’d.

We led off with–come on, what else could we lead off with?–the iPad’s debut. Dave’s: “It’s a big iPhone.” And a closed platform, “pure Apple.” The duality has always been Jobs vs. Woz. The artist vs. the tinkerer.

Jay: “It’s sort of an attack on gatelessness.” And as I said on Twitter, “There’s one thing–and only one–I find interesting about the iPad so far: that it shifts back to ‘read only’ from the read write web.” Also see this compendium of similar reactions.

We sorted through Obama’s appearance before House Republicans as an instance of “the sources go direct.” Dave said he agreed with David Weinberger’s assessment. “More bad news for the media, ” said Weinberger, “The Republicans are better at questioning the President than you are.”

The striking thing about the announcement that Candy Crowley would get her own Sunday show was that no one even bothered to ask her if she had any ideas for reviving this almost brain dead form.

We went through Mark Coddington’s post, A quick guide to the Maxims of new media. Many of these maxims have been discussed in this podcast. Dave said he had a problem with “if the news is important it will find me.” We both had a problem with the way “information wants to be free” is deployed (ideologically.) Dave said he had a problem with “readers more than we do,” but also said he had to work out the reasons why. He’ll get back to us! Jay said that Winer’s maxim, “people come back to places that send them away” should be on the list. Dave added, “only steal from the best.”

We moved on to a fascinating story: AOL Tries To Seed SXSW With Coverage Of 2,000 Bands, via its new assignment desk system. (Link.) We both agreed that it was a brilliant experiment and highly relevant to the rebooted system of news, in part because it asks, “what would 100 percent coverage look like?” and actually tries to create it. It’s almost like the beginning of a wikipedia system for the indy music scene.

Dave: “It doesn’t stop when the event is over; in a way this becomes a coral reef for a rebooted music news system.” Jay: Studio 20 wants to create such a tool, so we’re looking for models and prototypes that might get us there. The key part is that when you select an assignment you get a set of instructions for doing a good piece, in addition to a task to complete.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it and that you may even be moved to comment on it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Feb01.mp3

First you can listen to the show here, live noon Eastern.

The iPad is clearly something we need to discuss. The concern I want to to voice was summed up well by David Carr of the New York Times. “”This is a device for consuming media, not creating it.” Also see this compendium.

Also interesting: AOL Tries To Seed SXSW With Coverage Of 2,000 Bands via its new assignment desk system. (Link.)

Which leads to something I want to discuss with Dave: the open source assignment desk system.

Our first show done face to face in the NYU radio studio! (Pardon the glitches, but the sound quality should be way higher.)

We discussed the announcement that Dave Winer will be a visiting scholar at NYU and a technical adviser to the Studio 20 program. Here’s Dave’s explanation for why he was interested: Year Zero for Journalism.

Big news in the news world this week: The announcement that the New York Times will go to some kind of metered or pay system for NYTimes.com in 2011. Here’s Jay’s post on it, and Dave’s post at Rebooting the News on an alternative approach to achieving new revenues. We discussed both.

A frequent topic of discussion on Rebooting the News, Twitter’s suggested users list, became topical again when Twitter dropped the old format and came up with a new one: suggested users by topic: entertainment, sports, tech, news, etc. Dave was placed on one of the new lists. But he asked to be dropped. So we kicked that around.

Jay thought this little announcement by the Education Writers Association (the people who cover schools) was revealing for students of the new system of news. The group decided to shift course, which includes…

* Moving from a closed membership organization to a more inclusive, online-based community focused on education media, but open to anyone interested in education. Community members will include journalists, policymakers, educators, academics, and others with a connection to education issues.

* Becoming a voice for quality education coverage.

We finished up with Apple’s big announcement, due later this week. Dave speculated about what it will be and why it will matter.

Here’s the show: we hope you like it. (45 mins)

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rewboot10Jan25.mp3

We have some news, people. Dave Winer will be named a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for 2010. He will assist the Studio 20 program, which I direct, as Technical Adviser. During the academic year Dave will also curate a speakers series at NYU on the intersection of technology and journalism, which of course is the running theme of our Rebooting the News podcast.

We’ve been collaborating on this show since March 2009. Because Dave is also moving to New York City–actually, he will split his time between Gotham and the Bay Area–we hope to do the podcast in a real live radio studio at 20 Cooper Square, headquarters for the Journalism Institute at NYU. That should improve the sound quality, and we can have guests join us in person. (The ‘cast has been on break; it will start again Jan. 25.)

For me and the students of Studio 20 this is a major “get,” as the bookers for TV shows like to say. Our focus is on innovation in the news system and adapting journalism to the web. As a software developer and one of the proto-bloggers, Dave Winer has been an innovator from the moment his career began in the 1980s. As a co-founder of blogging, RSS and podcasting he is directly responsible for some of the disruptions that are shifting power to the users. This is a change that journalists need to recognize and adapt to without complaint.

I first met him in 2003 when he was a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University’s Law School, where one of his agenda items was to get Harvard excited about blogging. (It worked.)

But nothing expresses the reason I wanted him at Studio 20 better than the long bet he made with Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of the New York Times Digital operations, in 2002. This was the bet: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” They each put up $2,000. Winer won. He gave the cash to the World Wide Web Consortium. In other words, to the open web, the platform on which we both do most of our work.

I’m betting that he can help us synthesize a new approach to doing J-school, post-disruption. As technical adviser and visiting scholar (discipline: empower the users!) Dave will be sitting in on classes from time to time. He will be available to students as they tackle their own projects. Occasionally he will be hanging out at 20 Cooper Square with his laptop. You know… visiting.

And so it is with great pleasure that I say… Dave Winer: welcome to NYU, and point you to his own post explaining why he wanted to join us.

Dave was in New York last week and visited the New York Times, meeting many of the Times people we follow on Twitter. So we talked about that.

WordPress made an important announcement: that it was implementing the Twitter API. Dave: “It’s a beautiful move.” Respectful, but also insidious. We talked about that and what the phrase “to implement” means in software.

Update: And now Tumblr has done the same thing.

There was also news in the strange world of url shorteners; we sorted through that a bit.

Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, Twitter: both Dave and Jay use them all as writing platforms. But where then is “home?” Dave’s working on it!

Jay explained his mock-up for explainthis.org and the reactions he’s gotten so far to the idea. (“What’s your question? Journalists are standing by…”) A site like this would be part of the rebooted system of news, he says.

Jay’s been Tweeting and talking a lot about (the demonic) Demand Media. Well, it must have worked because the CEO of that company got in touch and Jay has an interview scheduled with him. We talked about that.

Update: the interview with Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt ran at ReadWriteWeb.

Here’s the MP3 for Rebooting the News #37, recorded Dec. 15, 2009…

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09Dec15.mp3

Our guest was Howard Weaver, former VP for editorial at McClatchy Newspapers and a career newspaper journalist who is also quite active on Twitter. He writes a blog about the transformation of the news business.

We talked about where the future-of-news discussion gets off track; putting users first; “eat your vegetables” news; the J-school we need for the world we are actually in; the job of the professional journalist when there are way more participants; the Twitter firehose; Google vs. the news business and more….

Here’s the mp3

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09Dec07.mp3