Dave and I are at the Online News Association annual convention in Washington DC today for a special live edition of our show. Unbelievably, we are counter-programmed against the Jon Stewart rally for sanity on the National Mall.
But we’re an official part of the program at ONA and the show must go on. What we plan to do is summarize some of the major themes or master narratives that have emerged over 70 weeks of Rebooting the News, and then include in the discussion whomever shows up.
Some of those major themes are…
We’re already using the rebooted system of news.
Every node in the network is a participant in the system.
Today the sources go direct. (And journalists have to adjust.)
It’s easier to trust “Here’s where I’m coming from” than the View From Nowhere.
(As King Kaufman said: “Objectivity and impartiality are journalism’s version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.'”)
It’s dangerous for the news industry to rely on the tech industry for its next generation of tools.
There’s a cycle in tech: problems in openness build up, leading to closed systems, which then get disrupted by the next level openness.
We’re still serving the updates without the background knowledge needed to make sense of the updates; we need to fix that.
People come back to places that send them away.
Blogging is about owning–independently–the means of production; when we rely on companies for that we inevitably lose.
The enemy of progress is complexity.
Efficiency is creativity. The more efficient we can learn to be, the more we can do in the rebooted system of news.
We should have Checkbox News by now.
The 100 percent solution is a good path to innovation.
If you hear fire trucks in the night, in the morning you should be able to find out where the fire was.
Narrate your work.
We make shitty software.
Later… Well, we didn’t get to all those themes. But those are the themes. Here’s my post on the citizen’s agenda in campaign coverage, which was referred to.
And here’s the show– with audience participation. We hope you like it.
Rebooting The News 
I tried to clean up that buzz in the audio. You’re welcome to it if you think it’s better (it is bigger, and a little echo was introduced as a side effect of the noise removal). http://amyloo.com/miscaudio/reboot10Oct30-cleaner.mp3
I want to help work on the backstory problem. You think it might be something the Knight Foundation would go for? They don’t seem as particular about local-only projects as they have been. I’m thinking of an arrangement that lets members of the media find vetted explainers at a centralized site and grab embed code that directs readers to the original stories, animations, videos or graphics.
[…] Rebooting the News #70: Special Live Edition at Online News Association […]