Rebooting The News

We’re live from the radio studio at NYU! “Amateur radio at a high level of quality.”

Jay: I re-introduced PressThink this week: The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism. Part of what spurred it was this Tweet from Danny Sullivan: “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.” Right on, Danny.

Dave: “When you post on all these other sites that are corporate owned, you are trading a bit of the future of the web away. When you write on PressThink, you are helping the web…. Danny Sullivan is right.”

Dave: “They pick their battles.” There are times when journalists do not try to stand apart from events and give their view. And then there are times when they simply quote experts, as if they had no view.

Jay: There’s a move afoot to make Iceland a key part of the rebooted system of news, which of course is an international phenomenon. See: A Vision of Iceland as a Haven for Journalists and for those Dave calls “media hackers.”

Dave: Speaking of freedom of speech, the George K. Polk award went to someone anonymous for the Neda video from Iran.

Jay: Well, it didn’t really go to an individual someone, but to the act itself. In a sense to the rebooted system of news.

Dave: Does it matter who you get news from?

In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model….The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don’t think so! … So when the New York conversation drifts, it doesn’t end up where the Silicon Valley conversation ends. I guess this is no surprise, right? Where it ends up is with the (forgive me I don’t know the terminology) the guy writing the story that informs everyone else. Who is everyone else? It’s the hamsters again!

Dave: I want to get in-depth information when I have to make an intelligent decisions, but it doesn’t have to come from professional journalists.

Jay: What we need is a single set of standards whether it’s professional journalists, amateurs, experts, accidental reporters.

Jay: A little item that shows how far the rebooted system of news has developed. “The new journalism must be one that is open to both amateur and professional reporters.” That’s what Committee of Concerned Journalists founder Bill Kovach said at the National Press Foundation’s annual dinner last week. Kovach is a consensus figure in the American press, a former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, former editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and a certified newsroom heavyweight.

Dave: When to be worried. “You want to be worried when one company has a very large piece of the culture on their servers.” We need to wake up to where the tech world is headed. The news industry does not seem to realize this; the book industry… might.

Jay: We have to pay close attention to the battle between the open systems and closed systems, and continually ask ourselves who is truly on the side of “open.”

Dave: “The only open that matters is whether or not you’re free to put whatever you want to on the web.”

Jay: “The same network that allows for open source wonderful-ness allows Al Queda to organize in cyberspace.”

Here’s the show, recorded Feb. 22. We hope you like it. And please do comment.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Feb22.mp3

First off, you can listen live here.

A few words about our set-up here at NYU

Lead off: Follow up from Google Buzz

Jay’s items:

PressThink is back: that’s worth a mention. Part of what spurred it was this Tweet from Danny Sullivan: “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

Something I had wanted to get to last week: A Vision of Iceland as a Haven for Journalists and for those Dave Winer calls “media hackers.”

A little item I took some pride in, and a direct sign of how far the rebooted system of news has developed. “The new journalism must be one that is open to both amateur and professional reporters.” That’s what Committee of Concerned Journalists founder Bill Kovach said at the National Press Foundation’s annual dinner Tuesday night. “Somewhere each day,” he added “another site moves a step closer to becoming a direct competitor or a valuable new addition to the legacy press.” Kovach is a consenus figure in the American press, a former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, former editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitiution and a certified newsroom heavyweight.

A theme I would like to unfold and get Dave’s thoughts on: learning that efficiency can be creativity. Occasioned by the Studio 20 project to build an open source assignment desk system.

Dave: Joel Spolsky, Marco.org and blogging.

Got suggestions? Put them in the comments.

Google Buzz Breaks Trust

Our obvious first story is the unfortunate launch of Google Buzz. Dave’s post was Google did something seriously wrong. Jay’s comment on Twitter. “I waited, read the news about Google Buzz, absorbed the accounts and experiences of people I trust, and disabled it before ever opening it.”

From watching what others said, Jay’s sense was: “it was not ready for me.” Dave: “You were right, it was not ready for you.”

Dave: “When I’m evaluating a piece of software I want to feel like that’s a safe thing to do. It’s a new piece of software, I haven’t entered any data into it, how could I reveal anything?” Jay: “You need a safe place to play with it where there aren’t any consequences.”

The New York Times reported Google’s non-apology as an apology, Dave said. “The tech industry has yet to learn how to be a responsible member of the society it is a part of.”

Why did they do it? Well, Facebook directs more online users than Google.

The BBC Lays Down the Law

Last week, the BBC told its news staff to get on board with the rebooted system of news or find another job. It’s not an option. This is from an in-house newsletter:

“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary…” For BBC news editors, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools, says Horrocks. Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand.

“If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen.”

Pretty amazing statement!

Dave: The problem isn’t to extract money from the news flow, but “how to expand the flow to cover all the stuff that’s now relevant.” The demand for news keeps going up. And what observers often say is that our attention span will be the limit. But even if the attention span stays constant, the demand for news will go up because people will want more specific news that connects to the lives they’re actually living.

Jay: What I found striking about this report from inside the BBC is that it focused on “the program” as the locus of all newswork, and pointed to how outdated that way of thinking is.

Teaching the World to Report

Dave: I’d like to see a book from the New York Times: “here’s how to write for the New York Times.”

Jay: This is part of our idea for the open source assignment desk, which Studio 20 is going to create. It has to contain not only assignments contributors can browse, but also instructions for how those assignments can be completed well. “This has never really been done because professionals wanted to keep instructions for how to produce accounts to themselves.” Dave: “If we actually saw their recipe we might get nauseous.”

Then we batted around the idea that journalism schools need an “extension” model, teaching the wider world how to report.

What to Reject When You’re Rejecting The Wisdom of Crowds

Jay: As I wrote about at my Posterous, I’m getting really tired of people debunking the notion that crowds are “all wise.” It’s a piece of crap. Digital Maoism? Groan. “That’s like calling someone an open source Hitler.”

Here’s the show; we hope you get something out of it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Feb16.mp3

First you can listen live here.

For this week’s show, there’s Google Buzz, of course. Dave: Google did something seriously wrong. (Jay’s comment was picked up by quite a few. “I waited, read the news about Google Buzz, absorbed the accounts and experiences of people I trust, and disabled it before ever opening it.”)

A few items I want to talk about:

BBC tells its news staff to get on board with the rebooted system of news. It’s not an option. Seriously:

This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

“If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.

I found this totally fascinating and so did my Twitter followers: Iceland aims to become an offshore haven for journalists and leakers.

….we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden, for example…we could take the First Amendment from the United States, we could take Belgian protection laws for journalists, and we could all pack these together in one bundle, and make it fit for the first jurisdiction that offers the necessities of an information society.

I also want to talk about the problem of “instructions” and the open source assignment desk project.

And I might have a word or two about the debunkers of the wisdom of the crowd concept, the topic of my post at Posterous this week.

Got one yourself? Put it in the comments.

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.