Then seemingly out of nowhere the CEO of Yahoo is kicked out and a “For Sale” sign is put up on their front yard.

Both Yahoo! and AOL were technology giants that are moving to become media entities. AOL doesn’t hide it with the HUGE investment in Patch and acquiring HuffingtonPost. Yahoo perhaps made the shift too coy and thus might have to start breaking apart. Yahoo hasn’t made the drastic switch of resources that AOL has and the potential sale might be a direct reflection of poor internal investments. Now AOL’s big bet might not win – but at least it was a conscious bet that the company made to become a content creator of massive proportions. I think Yahoo always rested its laurels on being a search company with a few social properties here and there (they never utilized Delicious or Flickr that well).

And thus the lesson below…..

Technology companies must understand that they are also media companies.

Media companies must understand that they are also technology companies.

Why?

Because the two are married.

Let’s take a step back to get here.

1. All media is social

The intent of media is to communicate something to people. Skirting the “if a tree falls in a forest” question – I’d say that all media is social.

2. Then what the hell is social media?

What we call “social media” is a misnomer given #1 above. A more proper understanding of it might be “minute media” or media about minutia (then again, ‘minutia’ is all about perspective; ‘dog bites man’ is big news to the man’s family). When blogs bursted on the scene in the early 2000′s we saw some of this minute media. It turns out that was just a crack in the damn. The real wave of minute media came around life-casting ie: Twitter, Facebook updates, etc. But this is all media.

3. Minute media is made possible by technology.

See: the Internet, the falling cost of publishing, etc.

4. If technology powers this rapidly evolving media (it defines the medium) then technology companies are media companies. That might not mean “journalism” companies – but media companies nonetheless.

Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter and more are all technology companies that make their money because of the media they produce or enable.

Even Apple is a media company to some degree. They build hardware with the intent of syncing it to their very massive and user-friendly media store iTunes.

Some of this is not news for folks (Lisa Williams may be the first person I heard to clearly state this). When I look at AOL’s and Yahoo’s moves it strikes me as apparent and something to take pause to notice. AOL, while often berated for patch, should be applauded because while most technology companies that move into media deal with ‘content’ AOL made a specific goal to do community journalism.

So where does this leave media companies?

They must move to become more like technology companies. They must learn to either create their own platforms for minute media or truly adopt/adapt to other platforms. They must find and define the platforms that enable the type of media they want to support. This, I believe, starts where Jeff Jarvis’ post about platforms being journalism leaves off. It’s not that platforms are journalism – it’s that technology enables media and journalism is a type of media that requires a type of platform. Journalists love to complain about Demand Media, for example, but it’s a beautiful case where a media company has built a technology platform to support the type of media they want to make. I agree, it’s not journalism – but then journalists must BUILD the platform that enables their type of media or pray somebody else does. Newspapers should define that technology platform instead of waiting for somebody else to build it for them (charging them an arm and a leg in the process).

I’m a little under the weather so I’m not even going to give this a second read/edit. But hey, this is my semi-minute media space. It’ll hopefully be interesting to somebody.

I love this question and I’m pumped on finding out what tools and tricks other folks use.

I’ll start with the newest tool that has changed my email experience

Nudgemail

Email can cause more stress than it’s worth, and then I found Nudgemail. If you’re like me – you hate seeing unread emails in your inbox. You’ll open them and find out that this email requires action but you can’t tackle it until next Thursday. If you’re a list-maker like me – you have a choice 1. Leave it unread, starring at you everyday until next Thursday when you can tackle the problem or email it to thursday@nudgemail.com. Next Thursday at 6:30am that email will be re-sent to you. You can email virtually any date/time. 3pm@nudgemail.com, december21@nudgemail.com, etc, etc. I’m willing to admit that email acts as a bit of a to-do list for me. But I refuse to let that mean that email is in charge of my life or should constantly stress me out. Nudgemail gives me control over my inbox. If it’s a problem that I can’t tackle until Tuesday – then tuesday@nudgemail.com takes care of it for now and I can move on to a more urgent matter.

Apple Keyboard Shortcuts

I just got back from visiting my parents and teaching my mom about keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps mentioning keyboard shortcuts is a bit of a yawner for other Carnival of Journalism folk, but it goes without saying – this is a BIG time saver. I’m lucky that I learned to type young (thanks mom) and I’ve picked up the Apple keyboard shutcuts pretty quickly. I love finding new ones too. Do yourself a favor, find a useful one on that list and spend a week making it second nature. I’ve probably increased my productivity a bajillion fold not having to slow down to click from tab to tab, window to window, etc.

In August 2010 I did a post: “Five Tools to Increase Productivity” and it might help to list those here as well. I’ll give short explanations and if you want the full introduction to these tools, check out the link.

The Viddler Interview

I get contacted by students all the time. Journalism professors like to point to Spot.Us and they often assign projects that involved interviewing journalism entrepreneurs or new media models, etc. I try to make myself as available as possible. I also try not to get annoyed that I’m asked some of the same questions all the time. When people ask “where did the idea for Spot.Us” come from – I don’t want to be flippant and just write back in an email “from my head” nor do I want to spend 10 minutes writing out the real story (over and over again). Instead – I respond via Viddler, a YouTube competitor. If you check out my Viddler profile you’ll see I have almost 100 videos. All of them are titled “Answers for XX.” Typing out the answers without shortchanging the students would probably take a minimum of 20 minutes each. Using Viddler it’s closer to 5. The mental relief is also great. So create a second YouTube account or a Viddler account or some other video uploading competitor and use that second account as a way to talk with others who might be asking you long winded questions.

Text Expander

Do you write a lot of emails? Do many of them have the same elements or formats? Do you run an organization and sometimes you need to reach out to various people but you don’t want to mass email people (lame?). Do you write a lot of html and would love some shortcuts? Check out Text Expander. It creates files of text that are at your fingertips just create a short code like “news-orgmail” and when you type it – BAMN instantly the full text that you want to send to news orgs is pasted into your email. You can have as many short coded emails as you want.

Jing

This tool comes via Kara Andrade and Erik Sundelof. Jing is a screencast tool which is incredibly useful if you work with a remote team building and managing a website. If you’ve ever had a phone conversation with a web developer about a bug,  you’ll know that communication is hard. You’ll ask them to get on the computer so they can see what you see. But you are never 100% sure if what you are saying translates. All that goes away with Jing.

xPad

It is as cool as it sounds. The xPad is the ultimate notebook. Do you take notes on your computer? Do you use Microsoft Word to save those notes. If so – please stop reading this right now and slap yourself. Microsoft Word is a horrible way to take notes. It is clunky, big files, slow to open, slow to close and worse yet – doesn’t easily transfer online (people that cut and paste word documents into a  WYSWIG editor are a pet peeve.) For a long time I just had an internal system of using TextEdit (Rich Text Documents). It worked okay. I’d keep one blank document open at all times (note taking) and save important ones. Luckily Joy Mayer, a fellows Missouri Reynolds Fellow told me about xPad.

Rapportive

This little plugin helps you know who you are talking to. If you are like me and you get an email from somebody new one of the first things you do is Google them to get the details. Rapportive does that for you. Right there in your inbox they’ll search for related social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Forget searching to find out who this person is – it’s already in front of you. Related but not as practical: Gist.

Grease Monkey

Grease Monkey is the script that fathered all scripts. First: If you don’t use Firefox, stop reading this and slap yourself.

If you do use Firefox, are you using it to its full potential? Maybe not. Download Grease Monkey and then search through the seemingly endless add-ons. The important thing here is not to get lost in the sea of possibilities. Instead think about a problem you already have in your browsing experience.

From the launch of Spot.Us, I’ve always said the following:

• Anyone can tackle the crowdfunded journalism model. In fact, NPR could do it tomorrow and blow me out of the water. It’s just about being transparent and giving up control over how donation money gets spent.
• This model would have more success at the national or international level.
• This model would have more success if a known brand took the lead. (Again, I always tend to cite NPR.)

There has been much opining about the New York Times pay wall that went up this week. I was quoted in a Neiman Lab post on the topic; I wrote about it for the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where I’m currently a fellow; and I was a guest on WNPR, an NPR station in Connecticut, to discuss the topic with other news professionals.

Here’s one thing that I previously haven’t said publicly: Whether or not they know it, and without identifying it as such, the New York Times has taken a big step towards the NPR model. And that puts them just a stone’s throw away from the Spot.Us model. In some respects, I actually think they are closer and more likely to pull it off than NPR.

Subscription Plan Isn’t About Access

Let’s start by calling a “duck” what it is. The “pay wall” is not a “wall.” It’s incredibly porous. A savvy reader can find a dozen ways around it, from finding a Tweet of the story you’re interested in to removing part of the Times’ URL. In other words, the subscription plan is not about access. People that think the fee is about access are the same folks who think they have to pay AOL for Internet access in order to keep their AOL email address. Savvy readers will know it isn’t about “access” but rather something else. For starters, it benefits the print subscribers, who pay less for digital access than all-digital subscribers. Fair enough.

But I am willing to bet a LOT of people will pay for a “subscription” not for access and not because it comes with their print subscription, but for something else.

Donation Driven Journalism

If there is one thing that Press+ has taught us (aside from the fact that really rich folks can hype up a technology product and sell it off for millions of dollars) it’s that, yes, people will pay for news even if access to is never truly restricted. That’s a limited audience/market, but it exists. Interestingly enough, the price point doesn’t matter as much as one would think. That audience will pay $5 if you ask, and they’ll pay $15 if you set that as the benchmark.

National Public Radio has known about this small market for a LONG time. I could have told you this within 10 minutes of launching Spot.Us. But at least today we can see it as more of a given for the conversation. There is an audience that will pay for content. It’s small, and not a replacement for advertising, but it’s there.

The NYTimes.com subscription plans are not enough to sustain the entire organization, but it is a new revenue stream that didn’t exist before. You can call it a “pay wall” or a “metered wall” but, again, I think we should call a duck a duck. This is a donation system, plain and simple. News organizations don’t want to refer to “metered walls” as “donations,” and I understand why. I’m happy to stroke their hair as they cry into their ink-stained hands. We can call it whatever they want, but it’s a donation because there is no HARD reason for anyone to pay it other than because they want to or are too uninformed about how to get around it.

A Modest Proposal

Assuming the New York Times doesn’t want its future tied to the technical ignorance of the masses the way AOL currently does with its dial-up customers, the next question is: What can the Times give to its new donors? As Dave Winer and Steve Outing have both said:

“Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?” (Dave Winer)

Tote bags? Bumper stickers? Membership to a wine of the month club (with wine reviews from the Times sent along with every bottle)?

These incentives are necessary because the Times needs to find other ways to keep a paying customer on board. Where one month somebody might pay, the next they’ll slap their face and say, “Why am I doing this? It’s certainly not for access.”

These tote bag gifts mimic NPR fundraising. But let’s think even further. What could be an incentive that would increase transparency and participation in journalism and not cost the NYT organization infrastructure costs (ie: purchasing and shipping thousands of tote bags)?

Imagine if along with every $15 monthly “metered access” payment a NYTimes.com reader also got five NYT Points. After three months they’ve accumulated 15 NYT Points. Those points can then be used to vote on topics, areas of coverage, or redeemed for the tote bag mentioned above (an excellent plan B).

Again, NPR could do this tomorrow, except — believe it or not — NPR is a bureaucratic nightmare when it comes to how donations are handled. Remember, each NPR station is unique and the mothership NPR, aside from being caught in a culture war, is not allowed to fundraise from individuals the way independent stations are.

But the Times doesn’t have this hangup. Whether they admit it or not, they’ve begun fundraising efforts this week. So will the NYT find something to make it fun for donors? Or do they think that the false claim to “access” is enough?

Opportunity to Interact with the Times Community

I think there are a lot of smart folks at the Times and they’ll be watching how people react and pay/don’t pay for this subscription system. For those that do pay it one month the question is, will they continue to pay? For that, they need to be purchasing something. Call them “NYT Points,” call it “NYT Membership” — I don’t care. But I think a part of it should include giving those members a stake in how the funds from their subscription are spent.

In other words, there could be a new sense of transparency and participatory control in how a news organization spends its funds. With their new metered pay wall, the NYT is just one incy-wincy step away from cracking the code to crowd-funded journalism. Why do I want to pay my $15 this month? Because then I can vote on next month’s NYT coverage. This would be the NYT using a kind of Spot.Us model.

And if that day ever comes, you won’t find anyone happier than me.

To understand it’s epicness – you first have to close your eyes and think back to a time long ago on the Internet circa 2005-6. Maybe you had a MySpace or Friendster account. The Numa Numa guy was still hot on the meme scene, Digg ruled all traffic everywhere and Techcrunch was just the opinionated blog of a lawyer. This was an Internet without Twitter, Facebook was for college students and all we had were blogs and RSS. In that dark and desperate time we didn’t have WJChat‘s, PubMediaChats or any other Twitter chats.

No my e-friends. Back then, to get a regular conversation going we resorted to blog carnivals. Long live the blog!

The Carnival of Journalism, at its height, consisted of about 30 or so journalist bloggers. Every month a new blogger would host and ask, via email (how quaint), a question for all the participating bloggers. Point of order – this is how I first digitally met my current housemate and fellows RJI fellow Will Sullivan. We didn’t meet in person for another two or so years, but I felt as though we were colleagues because of our monthly blog carnival.

Sometime around 2007-8 the Carnival ended and since then social media has taken hold so we have regular ongoing quick chats. Don’t get me wrong, I embraced Twitter early and still love it.

But blogs are not dead and there is a level of communication we can achieve beyond chatting with blogs as a facilitator. While this might turn into a failed experiment (like testing carrier pigeons after the advent of the telegraph) writing one blog post a month isn’t a high calling. And having friends, making that commitment (or at least trying to make that commitment) and having a single topic to swarm around makes blogging that much better.

And so – we are reviving the Carnival of Journalism.

Interested in joining? FANTASTIC

Caveat for the first four months

Normally the Carnival of Journalism is an open ‘community controlled kinda thing.’ The first four months of this COJ, however, won’t be for two reasons.

First: I want to make sure it starts strong. I hope to prime the pump so in May I can pick a new host and he/she will organize the next COJ and pass on the torch, etc.

Second:  I’m organizing a conference at RJI for mid-April (more details on that soon). Like a benevolent dictator I will use the Carnival of Journalism leading up to this conference to spur conversation among participants. This way – when everyone shows up at the conference – we can skip the intros and jump right into the topics at hand.

What are the topics at hand? The same topics we will write about once a month, every month, leading up to the event.

And the first topic is: DRUM ROLL PLEASE………………………….

The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community: One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.”

Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario? Or is this recommendation wrong to begin with? No box here to write inside of.

Not only will this be a topic we discuss at the RJI conference coming up in April (details on that event to come in a future post) but it is a topic YOU, dear friend, should feel free to write about for the next Carnival of Journalism.

HOW IT WORKS

• Join the Carnival of Journalism by filling out this form.
• You’ll be added to a Google Group for future communications.
• Write and publish a blog post on January 20th by 10am PST on the topic above and let the COJ host (that’s me) know about it.

I’ll see you at the Carnival.

David Cohn is a 2010-2011 RJI Fellow working on a project called “Community-Funded Reporting.” Read David’s findings, other blogposts, and talk back at cohnd AT rjionline.org and @digidave on Twitter

I do not think we hold our tech blogs to high enough standards. I think we let them take us on cult of personality rides and we get infatuated. Today I am a total back-seat tech-writer. As I read various tech blogs I find myself wondering how I would cover issues. I have lots of praise but also constructive criticism for the current tech blog scene. Since people often ask me what sites I follow to stay on top of things I figure a post like this will let me rant and answer that question.

Disclaimer: I’m focusing on organizations that cover technology. If this list were to include tech pundits or individuals (Kottke, Laughing Squid, Rough Type, etc) it would be much longer. I am also excluding sites that cover the cross-section of technology and media (Nieman, MediaShift, Buzzmachine, PaidContent, etc). This is not an exhaustive list. It’s tech-blogging 101 for those that need to be introduced.

So without further adieu – my list of tech blogs and their vibes.

Read Write Web

Right now Read Write Web is the New York Times of tech blogs. This isn’t just because they have a syndication deal (which they do) but because RWW provides a sense of analysis that other tech blogs don’t. I recently met Richard MacManus, the founder of RWW, who confirmed that their emphasis was on context rather than speed. This may seem counter-intuitive in a world of speed and constant updates, but it is what separates them and as a reader I appreciate it and trust them more than most tech blogs because of it.

Wired

It’s hard for me to objectively describe Wired. Not that objectivity is the goal, but I worked there for the first year out of college and it is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. As a result, thinking about Wired gives me warm fuzzies and I know first hand how much love and attention goes into the editorial process. As a result this is a go-to source of tech news. It is for many people because Wired is one of the first sources of tech news. For some, like my father, Wired isn’t a news source – it’s a cultural touchstone. It represents the tech revolution itself.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is guilty of the cult-of-personality. You cannot separate organization from Mike Arrington who has shaped it from the ground up. This is not a bad thing. Mike has a strong personality and he knows it. His importeur is all over TechCrunch. So whenever I read TechCrunch (which from what I can tell values speed over context) I have to put on my Mike Arrington goggle filters. That said, TechCrunch pushes boundaries in reporting and that is why I love following them. They have mastered the art of respectfully changing an article based on reader comments. At one point they even tried to kill embargoes for their site. I am sure it didn’t work – bu that kind of radical thinking shows the role that techblogs can have and that’s why TechCrunch is notable. They are not afraid to push boundaries while covering technology.

Mashable (Updated from Comments)

The truth of the matter is – I love some of the PEOPLE at Mashable (Vadim Lavrusik and Tamar, etc) but I DON’T like Mashable. In fact, it comes to mind as a tech blog who I wish would step it up.  First: In tone and ethos it comes off way too much like MTV. Everything is very flashy, glitzy, etc. It makes an old man like me have seizures. More important: They are a tech company disguised as a news site. They write how-to’s, lists, digg-bait, etc. As a result they have a dog in the tech-race that they are covering. I think all tech blogs have a dog in the race to some extent – but none more obviously so than Mashable IMHO. I like their content when I’m in a certain mood. But if I’m not in that mood – it can actually irk me.

Venture Beat

I like Venture Beat because it is straight and to the point. Follow the money. This is the Wall Street Journal of tech blogs. I’ve known a few writers who have worked here over the years and I think they do a good job of following the industry. It’s also interesting to note that like GigaOm this blog was started by a tech reporter from a newspaper. Today in journalism we talk about entrepreneurialism and personal branding. These tech blogs are living proof of why.

GigaOm

Similar to Venture Beat this is an example of a tech reporter who owned his beat and turned that into owning his own media company. That is admirale and has a larger lesson for the journalism industry. In fact, GigaOm is becoming more and more of a general purpose destination. They cover everything from the environment and media, but with a tech spin. They also do a good job of letting you know the individual writers including Mathew Ingram (one of my all time favs).

Engadget/Gizmodo

In truth I am not an Engadget or Gizmodo fan. My interest in technology is rarely gadgets or gizmos. These two sites occupy the same space in my mind. The recent iPhone 4 kerfuffle was notable. I think these blogs tend to be caught up in shiny new play things and that is not interesting. It’s straight consumerism. They might as well be printing catalogs for Apple and other companies. Just my anti-consumerism two cents.

Business Insider

I’ve been following Business Insider back when it was called Silicon Alley Insider. One of the defining things about this site is it’s New York attitude and approach to covering technology. They are distinctively not caught up in the hype machine that can be silicon valley. I love this about them. They also BLEW ME AWAY with their investigation on Facebook. Talk about holding a company’s feet to the fire.

Lifehacker

I love this site for thinking out of the box. This shows you how technology can improve your life on a very practical level. Whereas Venture Beat is all about following the money, this site is about following the practical uses for your everyday life. For that, it is invaluable.

Search Engine Land

I’m including this as an example of a niche tech site. There are tons of these (some of the best cover specific sites like All Facebook). They are fantastic when you want to dive deep. Search is arguably the most important online industry and this is a great blog to follow it. I also recommend John Battele’s Searchblog if you want the go-to independent blogger source and for many of these niche topics the independent blogger who covers the beat is just as insightful as the niche organization.

Silicon Valley Watcher

The last on the list Silicon Valley Watcher does an amazing job of staying very personal (Tom Foremski) but with an air of professionalism. It’s just a good read. No final analogy (although I think Tom’s time at the Financial Times is reflected in this blog.

So what is your favorite source of tech news and how do you describe it?

——–

As many a reader know, I love drawn out analogies. Here are some of my favorites.

• Journalism bloggers as musicians
• The Community Dream Team: Tech versions of the 1994 Basketball Dream Team. Lawrence Lessig was the Larry Bird of my Internet Dream Team.
• Cities as relatives (I will soon include Columbia Missouri to the list of “my three cities”).
• Community journalism as baseball and as a social gathering.

I’ve always wanted to see a Crunchbase for journalism startups. If this is a time of experimentation then we need to keep better track of projects that start and fail. When I talk to young journo-entrepreneurs that don’t know what Backfence was, I’m concerned we are going to reinvent the wheel. Or worse – reinvent a squeaky wheel.

All of this is to say – we can learn from projects that fail (failure is not a bad word). Recently a Y Combinator project “NewsTilt” launched to great fanfare only to shut down three months later, returning money back to the investors. I want to examine this not from a high-horse position, but because from my point of view the speed at which this happened allows us to hone in on specific lessons.

1. Under Promise and Over Deliver

This is a general rule of thumb whenever you are going to try something for the first time aka a web-startup. When you launch, you probably only have one iota of functionality. That is the functionality you can promise. From their press release: “NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news.”

Stop right there. No ONE thing will save journalism. You will never find me claiming that Spot.Us is going to save journalism. I often say that Spot.Us is PART of the solution or PART of the future for journalism – but there is no silver bullet. As awesome as you think your startup is, don’t claim that you are inventing the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you have indeed done that, others will say it for you. When Spot.Us launched my stated goal was to fund 4-6 enterprise reporting projects in the first year. Looking back that might have been a VAST under-promise. But hey, I delivered and then some.

Meanwhile NewsLabs (the company of NewsTilt) claimed “This is the future of journalism.”

It seems the CTO also learned this lesson as stated in his farewell note:

In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).

2. Duty and Teamwork

It is easy to start speculating here because of the nature of how this venture shut down. The CTO wrote a farewell post noting that the CEO had left two-weeks earlier. There was also mention that for one of the three months the startup was around the CEO was on a honeymoon. This leaves room for a lot of WTF questions which I won’t go into, but my friend Matt Mireles does (glad somebody asked these questions and pointed out the craziness). I’m less interested in the drama that probably occurred behind the scenes than I am from the lesson we can take here – which is around the role and relationship of founders. (note: Hacker News has a thread where the CEO says he will give his own postmortem explanation).

I was lucky to meet Paul Gahram the week before NewsTilt shut down. He gave a talk about successful startups and his first rule is: Founders, founders founders (to the tune of – location, location, location).

The idea and technology behind a startup is not nearly as important as the founders. That is the heart and soul of a startup. He went on to talk about dynamics of founders, the number of founders and the relationship between founders. Bottom line, it’s important that they have a strong and trusting relationship. Things WILL get tough and you need to be able to lean on each other. The analogy Paul used was that of soldiers. They form a bond with each other such that they don’t want to let each other down. Marines go through hell during training to become “brothers” so that in the thick of battle you don’t show a tint in your armor. It’s not because you aren’t scared – but because you don’t want to cause concern for your other brothers. When things are tough, you smile and carry on, usually bearing more than your normal load. The startup world moves so fast that if both founders feel that bond, they’ll both smile, carry more than they can – and will often come out of it with a stronger startup than when they entered the tough times.

3. Your value is NOT just for journalists

NewsTilt had a good proposition for writers, as Spot.Us contributor Matt Baume noted, but it needed to be checked with an appeal to a larger audience. I’ve ranted about this recently. NewsTilt was not the startup I was discussing in that original post – nor do I think they are 100% guilty of this journo-startup-sin, but I think a comparison with True/Slant gets my point across.

• In fact True/Slant and NewsTilt are VERY similar (they should have studied True/Slant. The technology NewsTilt offered wasn’t that much better.
• Both had a shot at marketing but True/Slant‘s efforts were more geared toward attracting readers (same with The Faster Times). NewsTilt started by appealing to and attracting to reporters. Great for a discussion in the journalism community among journalists who discuss the future of journalism – bad for the other 99.99 percent of the population.
• An interesting side note: True/Slant was bought by Forbes, although it was not a true acquisition Forbes was an early investor and the founder was a former editor of Forbes and is now head of innovation. This could have been a signal to NewsTilt that potential exists are tough.

4. It takes more than three months

If your goal is traffic and engagement (for the sake of traffic) it will take more than three months. Plain and simple. Which is to say – don’t quit on your startup. Granted if lesson #2 (duty and teamwork) is hitting the fan, you have other issues and maybe should throw in the towel – but you can’t quit after three months because the traffic isn’t where you want it to be. Iterate, learn and adapt. Three months is not enough time to evaluate if you are able/unable to achieve your under-promised goals. The lesson here: The best way for your startup to fail is if you quit.

If you build it – they will come only works with ghosts and baseball fields. Websites don’t possess that power (except for Kevin Costner’s website)

5. Technology won’t necessarily solve a social problem.

Journalism faces a lot of problems. Some of them are technical. Or better yet, some of them are the inability of news organizations to become technical. Or better yet, some of them are a result of technology changing the way we exchange information. Or better yet, some of them are about how technology is changing the economics of content. Or better yet, some of them are related to how technology is changing the way people spend their time (I know you’d rather be LOL Cating right now).

Point is: Technology is very much a part of this discussion – but it is not necessarily the solution to what is a very deep and nuanced social issue. I think (although I certainly don’t know) the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all the sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.

Again – technology is certainly a PART of the solution, but it needs to be integrated within the fabric of a social context – where the problem exists.

As such – I don’t have a long reflective post for you. This post will be filled with tasty hyper-links (courtesy the Publish2 plugin that has been a fun toy to play with this week). I hope they keep you coming back for more and convinced that I am indeed alive and working.

Hyper link bomb has been dropped.

Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand | PBS
PBS Mediashift
Some reporters may bristle at the idea of thinking of themselves as a brand, considering it the equivalent of selling out. This overlooks the fact that a journalist’s identity has always been a part of the job, otherwise why have bylines?
Tags: Digidave

Why aren’t we paying for news?
Reflections of a Newsosaur
With their backs against the wall, 2009 was going to be the year that newspaper publishers finally got together to charge for the interactive content they have been giving away for free for more than a decade. Nearly two-thirds of the way into the year, however, there has been far more talk than action.
Tags: payment

Star Wars West Coast Defense
flickr.com
An awesome collection of photos showing Star Wars on the West Coast
Tags: photos, star wars

Social networks: 8 ways to engage users with news
socialmedia.biz
Here’s a slightly revised version of the Social Networks: Engaging Users With News webinar J.D. Lasica gave to a few hundred virtual attendees when I flew out to the Poynter Institute in Florida in May.
Tags: presentation, social media

New York should copy DataSF.org
megantaylor.org
Today, I saw an example of where New York should be heading. Infosthetics pointed out San Fransisco’s open data initiatives, including DataSF and San Francisco CrimeSpotting.
Tags: datasf

NPR – On the Tipping Point?

McSweeney’s LISTS: Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend.
I wish my father didn’t protect his Tweets because they are hillarious. They are all to me and he isn’t 100% sure if they ever reach me or what he is doing there.

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
The more I get away from reading and writing inverted pyramids, the more I agree with Matt’s conclusion: “As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story.”

Video of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan

DataSF.org and SF Crimespotting: San Francisco City Opening its Data
DataSF [datasf.org] is an online repository of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. Similar to the goals of the data.gov and USASpending.gov initiatives, DataSF aims to improve access to data, help the community create innovative apps, understand what datasets the public likes to see, and receive feedback on the quality of the data. Included data ranges from all the trees located in the San Francisco streets (planting date, species, and location) to all its building permits or complaints.

Digging into Oakland crime statistics
For about 2 years now I’ve been doing monthly graphs & analysis of the OPD crime stats. I load up the data from CrimeSpotting.Org into an access database, and look at it 16 ways from Sunday.
Tags: Local, oakland, crime

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
I Tweeted this early yesterday and it received more re-tweets than ANYTHING I’ve ever Tweeted before.
Tags: visual, resource

I am often asked if “right now citizen journalism could replace professional journalism.” My response is…. no.

There are certain characteristics of news organizations or “professional” journalism that if it were to stop tomorrow wouldn’t be easily replaced – if replaceable at all.

Since I’m often viewed as a poster-child for participatory journalism I can imagine some old-school journalists giving each other a hi-five, walking a littler taller, and feeling a sense of victory from a response like that.

But what I want to point out is the silliness of that question and pose its opposite.

The silliness of that question: If Major League Baseball stopped tomorrow would all the little leagues in the country be able to replace it? If industrial sweater factories shut down tomorrow would knitting hobbyists be able to replace them?

Nobody would ever ask these questions because the goal of little leagues and knitting groups isn’t to replace their professional counterparts. Instead, they are to create a sense of community, a positive activity for children and if they were to disappear there is no way their professional counterparts could replace them.

So I ask: If citizen journalism activities were to stop tomorrow could professional journalists replace them? My answer is no – and that will be part of my response to this question from now on.

In truth, however, that is the tit-for-tat response. So what is the real lesson here?

It is not an either/or question and what spawned this post is really just being tired of framing the question as such.

What I want to know isn’t if one can replace the other – but how the two might work together.

It isn’t working 100% but I’m going to make an effort to take the best of my Google Shared Items (automatically saved via Publish2.com) and start linking to them here.

Early in my career I made a name for myself as a good curator of content. NY Times writer Saul Hansell said he thought I was in the top 98 percentile of people who can read and absorb content. I don’t know about that (although I’ll take the compliment) – but I am excited to start linking more to things I’m reading that don’t suck.

So here they are: Links of the day that don’t suck.

How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying

Marshall Kirkpatrick (one of the best tech writers around right now) does a great post for ReadWriteWeb analyzing how companies are starting to (mis)use Twitter. we now know that companies including Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net have started paying Twitter users to hawk their products.

David Cohn: Amid recession, is San Francisco losing its heart?

A blog post updating some Spot Reporting that we are working on.

Claim: Internet hurts journalism more than it helps

From whose perspective???? I call bullshit on this whole study.

An After-Life for Newspapers
 A gathering of friends including Chris O’Brien, George Kelly, Mark Glaser, Eve Betty and Alexis Madrigal. I wish I could have been there to chat with them all. This is a great video that really shows what is possible when you get a bunch of people and some wine in a room. 

Fail Fast

Best advice I could ever give a news organization. Fail early and fail often. Otherwise – you’ll just be trying the same stuff over and over again.

The Future of Journalism Will Be Radically Different
Somebody shut this jackass up (its me!).

The AP’s new stance won’t end well, for it or its members

So says Terry Heaton.

Twitter Passes NY Times.

Before dismissing this comparison as one of those apples-and-oranges deals, take a moment to think about it. Literally out of nowhere, the little micro-blogging platform that constrains your messaging to 140 characters or less, is, according to Compete.com, this very month passing the august NYTimes.com, as measured by numbers of unique visitors.

Looking at my early blog posts and Tweets are informative to me now. You can tell in the beginning I wasn’t sure what to do. My first @ message was to my friend Mary Specht and it was a complete accident (start at the bottom of the Tweet feed below to see the first tweets). My second post was a massive throat clearing. My fourth blog post was about Digg and how I used it to find original stories. The irony today being that anything on Digg is already old news. My fifth post was pure satire (I am officially over Amanda Cogdon)

Regardless of what you Tweeted, blogged, etc – it is important to take a step back and look at how you first engaged with these tools. Hindsight being 20/20 what would you do differently? How can this help one prepare for adapting to use the next tool that comes around? Because there will be a next tool. Remembering what it is like to have fresh eyes, how would you design your own startup to change journalism?

On a p.s: Also interesting is how you remember things better when you have jotted down notes like this. The lunch, for example, was with MrBabyMan – now the #1 Digger in the world. A community which, I’m sad to say, I’ve fallen out of touch with since Spot.Us turned my life into a whirlwind.

Then you might notice my “Useless Mutant Power” meme. That is in reference to my guilty pleasure blog “Useless Mutant Powers.” Yes – even my hobbies are nerdy. More than anything, however, this side-blog and my early Tweets were baby steps.

What baby steps did you take and how might that of influenced where you are now?