Archive for December, 2008

Date: December 19th, 2008
Cate: Uncategorized
2 msgs

December Carnival of Journalism – Positive Predictions for Next Year

It’s that time of the month when a bunch of us journalists collectively get together to blog about something. I have the great honor of hosting this months “Carnival of Journalism” with the suggested theme: Predictions for 2009 with a positive spin. No small order. Hopefully this wash of posts will give you something to be optimistic about.

Charlie Beckett Kicks it off with a post entitled “Predictions for 2009: from Croydon to Kenya”

Banking, voting, political campaigning, business and education are all being revolutionised by a device that gets around African official corruption, incompetence and logistical barriers.

Jack Lail (who recently brightened up my day with this) gives us some “pragmatically positive predictions. Hard times are ahead – but many of them will result in a greater good.

Are those positive predictions? From a pragmatist’s point of view, they look positively sunny with patchy gray clouds.

Doug Fisher (whose students are producing nice work) gives us 10 predictions for 2009 from Mobile to the statement…

“Some media house is going to just blow it up and refashion itself into a social media site.”

Andy Dickinson thinks 2009 will be the “year of the journalist.” Andy makes an important distinction between media brand and individual brands. While the latter is having troubles – Andy thinks individual journalists will be able to step into their own.

“Whilst the idea that demand for content outstrips the supply of those
capable of creating may not ring true for most itâ??s clear that a
journalist with some web savvy, a good presence online and an
understanding of their audience is an increasingly valuable proposition.”

The ever interesting Paul Bradshaw plays devil’s advocate with the many predictions that 09′ will be the year we all go mobile. His post “What Won’t Happen in 2009 and What Will” begins with an emphatic “2009 will not be the year of the mobile web.” He closes the post with.

So by 2010, when the bids have been put in, funds released, and
pilots completed, we should see some very interesting new media indeed.

My friend and scholar Bryan Murley like many others had to dig down deep to come up with positive predictions for 2009. As he notes – these are tough times and it can be hard to see past the gray. But he does write a poetic verse near the end.

…the reason I think 2009 will be a turning point is because
higher-level editors and publishing types will begin to listen much
more acutely, and implement some of these ideas, because they will have
to in order to ensure the survival of their businesses.

Maybe thatâ??s not a prediction, but more of a prayer.

Adrian Monck has observations more than predictions – the kind of observations you can only get when reflecting on the greater lessons of history. He writes:

It seems to me that we have talked for years now of technology and communities
without ever stopping to ask what – if anything – might bind them
together. The assumption is that it is conversation, that the
connection simply enables and lo and behold the community pops into
existence. Well, conversation is not enough. You have to do something.

Ryan Sholin gives us five solid predictions in list-form about what he expects to see happen in 2009. He even goes to find the silver lining in the obvious grey clouds.

Fewer newspaper jobs means more local news startups:
As major metro news organizations continue to contract, consolidate,
and implode, more journalists will walk away from the press, but not
walk away from reporting.  Right now, most of this is happening at the
national level (think: Politico)
or in local blogs, but as more entrepreneurial journalists leave the
â??industry,â? more of them will start small businesses of their own, reporting on their neighborhoods.

Alfred Hermida our Canadian ally agrees with Sholin’s sentiments. He expects to see more guerrilla journalism at the community level. Like chicken noodle soup – that stuff is good for the soul.

I have yet to meet a journalist who said they went into the profession
for the pay. Perhaps the time has come for a realignment, moving away
from journalism as a for-profit business and emphasizing instead
journalism as a public good.

Now you may rock out to hope!

(when I listen to the lyrics of this song, I can’t help but think of the news industry)

And yes: This month’s carnival was hosted by a hipster.


Date: December 18th, 2008
Cate: Links and People

Links: Including One to Win $40 To Support Spot.Us!

Chrys Wu is having a contest on original reporting and the winner gets a $40 donation made in their name to a Spot.Us story of their choosing (along with the praise of their peers and blog accolades).

Entering the contest is as easy as leaving a comment on the link above.

Persephone Miel has finished working on her opus funded by the Macarthur foundation. I haven’t had time to dig deep into it, but don’t doubt that it’s in-depth and intriguing. The Media Re:Public

My buddy at the Bivings Report passed this study along about the state of newspaper websites.

Some interesting tidbits…

While only seven percent of sites had social bookmarking features in
2006, 92 percent of the sites offer this feature now.  We also saw a
similar trend when it comes to allowing readers to comment on articles;
only 19 percent of newspaper sites offered this feature in 2006.  Now
75 percent of sites do.

Date: December 11th, 2008
Cate: My Work
26 msgs

Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left

The following was my final project to graduate with a Masters from Columbia’s journalism school. I reported and wrote this article almost two years ago. Its foundation can be found here. I have no good excuse for sitting on it this long.

The thesis:

  1. The Dean campaign in 2004 didn’t elect a President, but it did become a breeding ground for new leadership in liberal politics.
  2. The software behind this grassroots movement became politicized and powered the progressive left which has since come of age.

I am finally getting around to publishing it now for two reasons:

  • To my knowledge it is the only close examination of the technology and techies behind the Dean campaign. I hope I did that period of history justice: The story below doesn’t show it – but I spoke/studied close to 40 Deaniacs: From (A)ldon Hynes to (Z)ack Exley
  • That history is more relevant now that Obama, an obvious descendant of Dean’s online organizing techniques, has proven they can be used successfully.

And so I am publishing

Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left

It was a cold and snowy January evening in Burlington Vermont when Zack Rosen heard the words he’d been dreading and half-expecting from his candidate Howard Dean, the onetime Democratic frontrunner for president, turned laughing stock.

Rosen, a computer science major who had dropped out of college his sophomore year to volunteer for Dean was bundled in a snow jacket and pants, like most of the other campaigners who were milling around that afternoon. Rosen and Clay Johnson, a software engineer for the Dean campaign, were sitting together at Rosen’s cubical, which held three computer monitors. Nearby they had mounted a television on a portable stand where the two stared bleakly at the live broadcast of Dean speaking from the Iowa caucus. Johnson began to wag his head in disbelief to Rosen. As Dean tried to reenergize his campaign, after finishing a disappointing third, he produced a ten second sound bite where he appeared to be yelling uncontrollably at the crowd. The “Dean Scream” was captured by television cameras and rebroadcast across America, turning Dean from a presidential hopeful to a Saturday Night Live Skit.

Everything Rosen, a 20-year-old computer programmer had worked for was unraveling before his eyes. “Things got pretty out of control pretty quickly. People circled off into their groups of friends and started talking about doing their own thing,” said Rosen.

Leading up to the Iowa defeat, Rosen had carefully orchestrated the development of the social networking
features that came to power Dean’s Internet success, mustering the magic of an obscure but robust content management system from Belgium, known as Drupal.

Thanks to Rosen, Drupal was powering hundreds of local Dean Web sites around the country. If you were an active Dean supporter, whether you knew it or not, you had encountered a Drupal site. And if you were a Dean organizer, by time the campaign was done, you were intimate with the software.

The night of the “Dean Scream” Rosen had to find his way home. He lived on the other side of town and
didn’t have a car. He relied on rides from other campaigners. The bench near the parking lot behind Dean’s Burlington headquarters, normally a place for strategic conversations, was filled with nervous campaign staffers chain smoking. “People tried their best to do their jobs, but everyone knew how bleak the situation was,” says Rosen, who stayed with the campaign another month only to return back to the University of Champaign Illinois where he dropped out a year earlier. Completely broke Rosen relied on his college friends for a few weeks while he regrouped. When the dust settled, Rosen decided not to go back to school. It had crossed his mind, but he longed to repeat the magic of the Dean campaign.
“All these ideas and methods that we were doing could have been used by many different groups of people, but we were kids, we didn’t know anything about anything,” says Rosen.

The Dean campaign didn’t elect a President, but it did become a breeding ground for new leadership in liberal politics. “The phenomena was a self-organizing thing that happened around
Dean, and the campaign was smart enough that they didn’t snuff it out, they started looking for ways to work with it,” says Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a hub for technologists and politicians to share ideas.

more))

Date: December 11th, 2008
Cate: Quote
3 msgs

The Newspaper Industry Gets Its First R&D Lab

From the first issue of Wired Magazine – when I was 11 years old.
credit to Cyrus.

“The railroads fell victim to a classic example of forgetting which
business you’re in: Failing to see themselves as transport companies,
they were out-competed by trucking companies who saw that their
business was not trucks, but transportation.


The same thing could happen to the newspaper industry, according to
Roger Fidler, director of new media at Knight Ridder, a huge newspaper
chain based in Miami. “If we don’t do more R&D, we will lose our
industry,” Fidler said.”

Date: December 9th, 2008
Cate: Uncategorized
8 msgs

This is NOT the Time to be a Skeptical Jerk

“If you are optimistic you run the risk of looking naive.
But if you are skeptical I can guarantee you will end up looking….. skeptical.”

I just received what I think is my favorite piece of hate-mail yet. I get antagonistic emails every now and then. Some are constructive and try to point out the flaws in Spot.Us. Those are always welcomed. I never claim to know for certain if Spot.Us will work – but I am 100 percent confident that it is something we should explore. Otherwise we should stick our heads in the sand and hope the storm ends soon (hint: it wont).

But every now and then I get an email that just makes one so angry the only descent response is to laugh. In this day, at this hour, in this moment of crisis for journalism somebody thinks the best use of their time isn’t pulling themselves up, but trying to drag me down.

The following email came from an AOL address. I’m not judging – but I know some people who would already date the persons web knowledge with that bit of information. This person is also the publisher of a local publication in New York (a section of Manhattan) with a circulation of 15k. This is precisely the type of person that can use Spot.Us to double their freelance budget!

In searching through my email history (AOL can’t do that!) – I also see this person emailed January 18th saying that he had interest in my projects (this was before Spot.Us) but that his real problem was “I am looking for reporters, that is what I need – somebody who can stick to a story.” Through a quick back and forth in that January 18th email – the conclusion was that he could not pay any reporters. The irony gets better.

Twelve months later I send a large email trying to fundraise for a Spot.Us reporter who will investigate what is ailing the Oakland Police Department. The very type of fundraising this individual needs. The response…

Hmm I don’t know David

now, at last, I see your pitch

give me money and I will do investigative reporting

not nice

and a little strange

I think you should have talked it over with an adult before you started.

this will not succeed on this planet I give you a guarantee signed in blood

but it is so arcane, so crazy, I think I will print it

don’t you have friends that you can talk with to stop you from doing such a nutty thing?


Signed
XXXX
Aside from obviously rudeness it just goes to show how skeptical some journalists have become. And here is the lesson of the day, stolen from the bottom of an ice-tea cap.

“If you are optimistic you run the risk of looking naive.
But if you are skeptical I can guarantee you will end up looking….. skeptical.”

Skeptics tell me that people will never donate to journalism.

My response: “If I had a small $5 donation every time I heard that, we’d have funded hundreds of investigations by now.”

“Yes we can.”

« Older Entries