Rebooting The News

Show notes to come.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Aug29.mp3

In this BlogTalkRadio non-studio podcast, that started really rough, Dave interviews Bora Zivkovic and Arikia Millikan about science blogging.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Aug23.mp3

In this episode we discussed four things:

1. The Wikileaks release of documents about the war in Afghanistan.

(Here’s Jay’s PressThink post on it, with all the links you need.)

2. Apple’s Antennagate.

(Here, here and here are Dave’s posts on it.)

3. Flipboard.

(Dave’s post and Robert Scoble’s video about it.)

4. Shirley Sherrod and Andrew Breitbart.

(Josh Marshall is scathing on it. Joan Walsh is strong too.)

Here’s the MP3; as always, we welcome your comments.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jul26.mp3

Several items from the last week are classic Rebooting the News topics and had to be be dealt with.

1. As Dave wrote at Scripting News, “This morning there’s news of an end-user app development tool from Google.”

‘I’m from Missouri when it comes to these things,” Dave wrote. “This idea of a once-and-for-all development tool is like the Divining Rod of the Olde Days. Perpetual Motion. The goose that laid the golden egg. The fountain of youth. Shangri-la. Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Cold fusion. The Singularity!”

Jay: I’m for Missouri too. Has anyone who counts actually said that this is a once-and-for-all development tool that will mean we can say goodbye to programmers? I’m skeptical.

Dave comments: You added the “goodbye to programmers part.”

Jay: Did I? As I read your post, you think this new development tool from Google will wind up like something called The Last One, which (you told us) “purported to be a development tool so easy an end-user could create their own applications. Goodbye programmers, they said.” You are clearly warning us not to believe it this time around, which raises the question: who said “goodbye programmers!” this time around? Anyone?

Dave: The second paragraph in this Fortune article will do. “Businesses, large and small can now easily create apps for their employees’ Android devices without hiring costly developers.”

Jay on Twitter: Maybe “open” and “gated” (as with Apple vs. Android, Murdoch vs. the Guardian) will go forward together, each compensating for defects in the other and neither wins.

2. Science Blogs–a lively community scientists who blog, and science writers–almost self-destructed when the management decided to give PepsiCo scientists a blog that looked and felt just like the others. A writers’ revolt put a stop to that, and the Pepsi blog was removed, but the damage may be too much to overcome.

3. A fire in the East Village last week–noticed by Dave right away–provides an opportunity to glimpse the rebooted system of news at work.

4. A Harvard Kennedy School (pdf) study showing that the national press called waterboarding “torture” until the U.S. started engaging in the practice led Bill Keller of the New York Times to defend his newsroom’s handling of the question in a strange way: by calling “torture” the politically correct word for torture.

5. WordPress and the podcast showing up as a podcast problem: a brief report from Dave on a bug that has affected Rebooting the News.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jul12.mp3

We’ve been having some problems with the RSS feed for this blog, and as a result some people have not been getting the MP3 of the show. So we’re going to try a workaround and see if it fixes it.

Here’s a reprise of yesterday’s show.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jun28.mp3

If you didn’t get this MP3, please post a comment below.

We opened with some review and commentary on Rebooting the News #55 with Readability developer Richard Ziade, and #56 with Brendan Greeley of The Economist.

We discussed Dave’s post, Why I don’t do interviews.

We sorted through a big event in national politics and Beltway journalism: Rolling Stone, the Church of the Savvy and the resignation of General Stan McChrystal. Jay’s post about The Politico “disappearing” a key passage is here.

Jay: I think you need outsiders as well as insiders reporting on big institutions. Dave: I wish we only had the outsiders.

Meanwhile, CNET reports… growing pains afflict HTML5 standardization. The nasty emails are flying. The big companies are moving in. Momentum toward a common standard is being disrupted. Dave: “This is how the tech industry works,” but it’s surprising to a get a journalistic account that brings us inside it.

We finished up with what Scott Rosenberg called “the war between journalists and bloggers at the Washington Post,” occasioned by the resignation of a young blogger the Post had hired to cover the conservative movement, Dave Wiegel, and a poorly-reasoned ombudsman column about the episode.

Dave’s given up on the Washington Post; he think they’re pretty much dead. Not Jay: “I criticize because I care.”

Here’s the show, we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jun28.mp3

Today’s guest for the full 45 minutes is Brendan Greeley of The Economist.

This week’s notes are provided by a listener, Mark Willis, via his blog post called Finding a Public Sphere in the Blogosphere, which we urge you to check out. Mark writes….

Rebooting the News #56 is a lively discussion of the rhetorical question, “Is blogging dead?” The interlocutors are Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and guest Brendan Greeley, who now writes for The Economist about technology and culture. I first knew his work when he was blogger-in-chief for Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon.

The liveliest part of the discussion wasn’t the future of blogging but its history, as experienced by three early practitioners. I listened to the podcast a second time so I could write these notes:

Brendan Greeley is now technology and policy correspondent at The Economist. Similar beats:

Jose Antonio Vargas | Huffington Post | Technology as Anthropology

Evgeny Morozov | Net Effect | FOREIGN POLICY

BG asks “Is blogging dead?”

Attention has moved to FB, that’s where people are.

Cross-blog links are decreasing, Technoratti traffic has dropped while FB traffic has skyrocketed.

Dave: FB is blogging, why attachment to the word blogging, or to particular software, or form of presentation

Dave never did a Google Blog Search

BG: Could we define blogging as a set of habits?

Dave: natural-born bloggers,

Dave never liked word “blogging” – which he considers a trademark for Blogger software

Dave’s description: “unedited voice of a person”
Which Jay translated as “a person talking with you” – A medium for individuals

Jay’s first look at a blog – InstaPundit.com – didn’t know what he was looking at; appears at first glance to be like a page from a book, magazine or newspaper, but it’s real power comes from linking to the blogosphere. Blogging is blog + blogosphere.

Concentration of “sphere” into several huge sites, not as decentralized as blogging was originally.

Dave sees this as cyclical ebb and flow of technology.

BG: holy grail of radio: finding voices of real people. Blogs provided a database of what real people thought.

Dave on Twitter search: 140 characters not worth searching for.

Next level of innovation: someone breaks 140-character barrier, and we’re back to blogging!

“Facebook is training wheels for whatever will come next”

Dave: Twitter is a river of news aggregator; notification system and blogging tool, an integrated aggregator and blogging tool. Can you imagine FB or Twitter without RSS?

Blogging was this in 2002, Twitter is now”:
DW: “an integrated aggregator and blogging tool”

Jay: Life cycle: new tools emerge, learning curve, adaptations evolve that shape tools to life rhythms

Dave: Twitter isn’t just an outgrowth of blogging, but also SMS, texting. Esther Dyson predicted this in 1990s when web went so graphic.

All these things are iterations of RSS, river of news systems

Jay: media industries grew up around fixed ideas about how media works, understood attributes as assumptions, as givens – ideas about media thought to be unchanging

Brendan: what we used to call blogging has turned into publishing. Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan

Jay: when journalism was professionalized, it came with “de-voicing” of individual journalists. Now a new age of personal journalism – “re-voicing” of American journalism

Dave’s epiphany: writing tool should not be in WP dashboard; something lost with transition from RadioUserland and Manila to WP. He’s working on new blogging software.

Dave: When everyone thinks it’s all locked up, it’s about to blow wide open.

Dave: “Once the users take control, they won’t give it back.”

Here’s the ‘cast; we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jun21.mp3

Our special guest is the developer of the Readability plug-in, Richard Ziade. He’s a partner in arc90, a strategic consulting and software development firm. Recently, his product was in the news because Apple’s Safari browser incorporated it, as Dave explained in a post at scripting.com. (It would be a good idea to read that post before listening.)

Dave and Jay talked to Rich about…

* how he got the idea for Readability and why he decided to make it free;

* what starting where the users start really means for a product like this;

* what he thinks about the criticism that his product strips the ads out and so upends the economics of publishing;

* the “emotional, passionate” reactions many users have had to the Readability product;

* what Apple may be up to by incorporating Readability into Safari 5;

* how we can have both the programming advantages of the iPad and iPhone (iOS, as Apple calls it) and the networked advantages of the open web;

* what a “high level programming environment” is (Jay’s question to Dave after he used that term.)

* how as software develops certain things get thrown out even though they were valuable and worked quite well

* the dangerous moment we’re in where we may lose the possibility that the best journalism will be available to the broadest possible public.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jun14.mp3

Dave gave a presentation at the New York Times. What did he say?

Nate Silver joins the New York Times: what do we think of that?

Sources go direct: an Internet Week event at NYU June 9, featuring Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Nick Denton of Gotham Media, Rachel Sterne of Ground Report and Dave as moderator, followed by an experiment: the open newsroom, which is also known as a hypercamp.

Apple has its big developer’s conference this week: WWDC this week: Any reflections?

We will be doing a live version of Rebooting the News at the Online News Association annual convention in Washington, DC, October, 2010.

The block-by-block community news summit, an event in September that Jay is co-organizing. The research for it includes this list of local news start-ups. We’re going to bring those entrepreneurs together so they can learn from each other.

Jay: two problems with the (old) news system that I have been thinking and talking about a lot lately… 1.) Mixing up context-dependent and context-independent news, as if these were the same kind of news when they are not; and 2.) Mixing up “level one” users of a given news stream (those who are just beginning to master it) and “level four” users of the same news flow, those who have obtained mastery of the issues and problems and people but still want to know what’s new.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it. And do comment if you feel moved.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Jun07.mp3

Gwen Ifill responded to Jay’s suggestion in the Washington Post that “Washington Week” on PBS had run its course after 43 years. Here’s what Jay said: “What is exhausted is the premise of the show: Five insiders (journalists) display their understanding of what other insiders (politicians) did this week for an audience of wanna-be insiders (the show’s assumption about viewers)…”

Here is what she said back…

…Occasionally, I glance around and discover I am the best person to tell (or refute) a story. That happened last week when a journalism professor from New York University used the pages of The Washington Post to take a baseball bat to the head of one of things I love best – “Washington Week.”

My first instinct was to ignore it. Fighting against blogs is a lot like trying to stop oil escaping from a blowout preventer – it can go on forever. Hitting that “send” key can get you in deep.

But, upon reflection, I realized that I could use the opportunity to make the case for some of the things I hold most dear about the work I do.

The professor, who apparently also functions as a self-appointed media critic, was one of a dozen folks asked to contribute to the Post’s Outlook section for a special “spring cleaning” feature about things they would toss out….

I defend anybody’s right to comment on the news of the day – whether it is Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or Larry King or Jon Stewart. I even defend the NYU professor, however misguided he might be.

But we don’t all have the same job to do.

I’m not very funny (not intentionally anyway). I’m not very loud. And I hope you never know my opinions. But the reporters I know are very smart. They know why things happen. They know how they happen. And, on a day to day basis, they challenge and question everyone they meet and everyone they cover. Then they, and we, allow viewers to make up their own minds. How’s that for a novel concept?

If what the professor wants is more yelling, there are plenty of places for him to go….

Jay: Notice that she couldn’t even name me, link to what I said, or paraphrase it. And she turned my Washington Post Sunday opinion piece, which ran in the print edition, into a blog post! “Fighting against blogs…” she said.

The Replaceniks! There are people out there claiming Dave is one. And they’re citing this post from Scripting News as proof. “I said that fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists.”

Jay: So Dave… are you a Replacenik? The term means those who either believe that bloggers, citizen journalists, amateurs can easily replace professional journalists or who keep talking about this prospect as if it were constantly being proposed by legions of writers and critics.

Dave: “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

Jay: In other words, “If professional journalists fled the scene or their model collapsed, we wouldn’t have no news. The sources would fill in.”

Dave: Yes… “I read articles in newspapers… and I go, ‘Man, I will miss the day when this stuff isn’t being produced– if that ever happens.” But I also think the new system will have many advantages over the old one. “I think in some ways we will miss what we have.”

Jay: “Based on what you said I have to conclude you are not a Replacenik and Jason Pontin is full of crap.”

Heard of Google’s 20% time? Journal-Register Company CEO John Paton is giving 25% time to a select group of newspaper staffers at JRC, and equipping them with the technology they need to help push the company forward toward what Paton calls “digital first.” (Jay and Jeff Jarvis are on the advisory board.)

Dave: You know where they should start? “What information do our customers want on a regular basis that they are not getting?” Somewhere in there may be a lot of money.

Jay: In other words, you think they should start on the demand side.

“The online equivalent of white flight.” That’s what Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times said about The iPad and app store last week. The Times gave it the title: “The Death of the Open Web.”

Dave: “How would you fact check the statement, that the open web is dead?”…. “They used to say by the time something appears on the cover of Business Week, it’s time to sell.” That’s how I feel about these articles in the New York Times Magazine. “None of this is news!” Take Steve Jobs and his imperious ways. Doc Searls had that story in 1997.

Dave attended a party at Steve Case‘s house on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of AOL. “It was a re-union from the 80s. A chance to see old friends from the tech industry…”

Jay spoke to the World Bank. Well, to the communications officers of the World Bank about four strategies by which powerful people and institutions try to cope with public scrutiny.

1.) Hiding from the press and declining to appear to in public at all.

2.) Impression management, also known as public relations.

3.) Transparency and openness.

4.) Secrecy by complexity amid opaque and sprawling systems.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it; please comment if the spirit rises in you.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10May24.mp3