journalists talking about the web framework Django

Sure, it's an hour long and, yes, it's very "inside baseball" (it is, after all a panel at a web framework conference), but isn't it refreshing to hear journalists talking about creating things again?

mind suitably blown

It takes a while to get to the good stuff, but when she shows you how thin this thing is, you realize that there maybe is a future for this type of reader after all.

Now if they could just figure out how to get rid of that annoying flash between pages.

Mozilla debuts a mashup engine for the rest of us

The trick with mashing up with the web is that it's actually not very easy or very intuitive. That's why people like Adrian Holovaty are so brilliant: they make it look so easy.

The lack of ease-of-use has, however, created a gulf between those that get it (those fluent in dozens of different APIs) and the rest of us. Well Mozilla (that's the Firefox people) just built a bridge across that gulf:


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Will this do to the programmable web what Blogger and Wordpress did to publishing--finally democratize it and make it ubiquitous? Clearly, when you name a piece of software "Ubiquity" you hope the answer is a resounding YES.

CNN plays dress-up

Have you paid close attention to CNN.com lately? Noticed any strange icons lurking next to a headline, perhaps?

See it yet?

Down there, next to "Nude model tells why she bared all" (classy, by the way), on the other side of the video camera icon, it's a ... T-shirt?

Yes, someone down in Atlanta thought that the true way to appeal to the youths was to start competing with Threadless for the hipster T-shirt demographic. And really, who wouldn't want to be seen at the show wearing this:

While most of the shirts currently available skew towards the "nude model" demographic (fully three of the ones currently available involve being drunk or hungover at work), it's the more serious ones that truly make you scratch your head. Like, who's walking around with this on:

I mean, that doesn't even make sense.

While CNN offers an extensive FAQ on their shirts (though, oddly, "Why on earth did you think this was a good idea" isn't one of the questions), they don't give any insight as to the seemingly random selection of headlines. Though it's interesting that they've built a scarcity logic into the designs--they're only available while the headline remains on CNN's front page.

Anyone care to wager on how long this feature will stick around? And what they'll replace it with? My money's on phat pants.

building a newsroom from scratch

A fascinating article by Chicagoan Geoff Dougherty documents how he's been building the Chi-Town Daily News from nothing. It's a case study in how new news organizations will be built now--volunteers trained and tightly orchestrated through virtual means:

To my ongoing dismay, the Daily News doesn't have a helicopter. Or a cops reporter, or staff photographers. We're a two-year-old, nonprofit, online newspaper with an annual budget of less than $200,000 and an office full of thrift-store desks.

But we do have a network of three dozen citizen journalists spread throughout the city, and some powerful software that enables us to keep track of where they live and what they're interested in covering. That system allowed us to find a citizen journalist who lived near the building collapse and get him to the scene -- within minutes.

Welcome to the new frontier. I've made the point a number of times recently that truly successful online journalism is currently at the point that newspapers were at in the old west: one-person shows, deeply (and sometimes troublesomely) tied into the community. Transitioning an already-established paper to the medium is still difficult (hence all the job hemorrhaging) but a venture like the Daily News can start small and build organically in ways that big news organizations simply can't do.

Roll your own front-page-only newspaper

The brains at 37Signals document a way of leveraging the newly-opened Newseum's collection of 600 daily newspaper front pages into a customized PDF of the front pages of the day's papers of your choosing. It's a brilliant use (abuse?) of the technology behind the Newseum's collection, as well as yet another way of thinking about how we can access the news in this day and age.

Torch vs. Twitter

Twitter proved itself to be quite useful today, as Mindy McAdams points out, by giving on-the-spot updates of the position of the Olympic Torch and the protests surrounding it.

Mapping the news

Above is a map I built with Yahoo Pipes that takes news feeds (for this sample it's the International and US news feeds from Google News), scrapes the feeds for geographic information and plots that information on a map. As a result, it creates on-the-fly a map of the world's news.

It's not right all of the time (and when it's wrong, it's pretty comical, like the story on Princess Di's death which has hopped from Alaska to South America to the middle of the ocean during my time in building the system). But it's a powerful proof-of-concept that took a matter of minutes to build instead of a matter of days.

This type of dynamic geospatial presentation used to be the domain of programmers and computer scientists, most of whom didn't care enough about the news to try it. But now, with tools that can be quickly learned, it's possible to create sophisticated new ways of interpreting and presenting news.

These type of free tools allow the creation of a class of hacker-journalists, people able to leverage technology to help tell stories people need to hear. As people write about the downfall of traditional journalism, due to the destruction of newspapers, they tend to overlook the new types of journalists that are only beginning to emerge.

the Washington Post rethinks editing

A memo leaked out of the Washington Post today has them rethinking how their editing process works, and makes some attempts to retool it towards a more immediate web-based workflow:

Currently, stories in the A section are routinely changed by a half-dozen different editors (an audit by Don Podesta for this project found fingerprints of 12 different editors on one single inside piece). Under the new model, many stories will be handled under a "two touch" rule; they will have a first editor and a second editor.

Unbelievable, really, that a story would get looked at by 12 different editors. The levels of inefficiency in the old system are pretty stunning. It's good to see some people are beginning to rethink a system that sounds like a complete headache for everyone involved.

the web reorders news presentation

Scott Karp makes a good argument today that the traditional newspaper editorial presentation--what is most important--breaks down on the web:

Organizing news by importance as the default makes sense when you’re only delivering the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news publishing is continuous, it’s not the best way to server frequent news consumers.

Can you write your own sports section?

That's the question now posed with the launch of Bleacher Report, a user-generated sports writing site.

It's yet another no-brainer of a concept that newspapers didn't already think of: Why not open your sports section up to fans? Isn't that half the point of sports anyway, the fan involvement and excitement?

Sports sections are expensive to produce and generate little ad revenue. Back when papers were selling, they helped to sell them, for sure, but now with superior (at least superior in quantity and immediacy) coverage of sports on the web, how does a paper compete?

It again comes down to the question of whether papers still need to be the end-all-be-all for their town when the monopolies of geography no longer apply. One way to still function in that role is to allow the town in, instead of keeping at a distance.

Letting them in through sports--where you have a large number of engaged, vocal people at a local level--seems like an obvious choice. Too bad someone else beat the local paper to it.

Everyblock Interviewed

Adrian Holovaty, the creator of the local news aggregator Everyblock (which I blogged about here) has a great interview up on Fimoculous.com. It deals extensively with the technical side of the site, but also includes an interesting philosphical discussion of what the site does and doesn't currently provide. On user-generated content, Holovaty makes a good point:

If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal.

It may be a bad name, but Reuter's "Mojo" initiative gets it right

It's hard to endorse something with such a terrible name, but Reuters Mobile Journalist initiative--that's MoJo for short folks, sorry--is a brilliant concept. The essential idea was to equip journalists with a do-everything mobile phone (Nokia's N95, which has a 5 megapixel camera stuck on the back), a bluetooth keyboard (so you're not typing everything out on the multi-tap keypad), a mini tripod (for easy video blogging), a little mic, and even a solar charger. This small collection of tools is powerful enough to accomplish most of the tasks a one-man-band journalist may need. If a journalist can shoot video, take photos, and even write and file stories using equipment that probably weighs less than three pounds combined, it means that that journalist can be quicker and more agile, able to adapt faster to a changing situation and get needed information out.

It also means that more people can be journalists. With one exception (an adapter to plug the mic in), all of this stuff is off-the-shelf equipment. And once you get past the phone, it's all pretty secondary. With the sheer volume and ubiquity of mobile phones across the world today suddenly the ability for everyone to be a journalist is within reach. Scary for journalists, yes, but amazing for empowering a multitude of voices.

While the collection of examples on the Reuters site is underwhelming (they mostly equipped tech journalists with the equipment, so you get the usual collection of trade-show handjobs), the possibilities are endless. I'd love to see them give 100 of these kits to youth media creators or 100 to farmers in developing nations or 100 to soldiers in the front lines (dare to dream--there's no way the Army would allow it) and see what happens. In the right hands, it has the potential to be a wildly disruptive technology, especially when paired with a backend designed for it (still waiting on that one though).

"'Experiment' has not traditionally been part of the print publishing vocabulary"

Scott Karp has a good roundup of three newspaper sites using his new Publish2 linking system to offer their readers links to bloggers and other news sources outside their walls. He focuses on the speed with which these newsfolks implemented his system, but I'd rather look at something else.

I think the examples Karp gives are a great manifestation of the "smart filter" argument I've been making with colleagues lately: As the Internet becomes an ever-increasing cacophony of voices, readers are looking more frequently towards smart filters--sites that simplify the choices by offering a series of links that have been selected not by algorithm but by people. 

And who better to offer those choices than editors, the people who have been making choices as their career?

Just look at how the Knoxville News was able to integrate a nice collection of related links to bloggers writing about a similar topic:

But, the counter argument goes, these are links outside of the news organization--why would we want to send readers away? Because sometimes you've got to send them away to have them come back.

That's actually the crux of the smart filter argument: If people see you as a good source for links--be it internal or external--they'll come back regularly. And if they don't--if they see you only as a source for walled-in information--they'll only visit when they think you'll have something to offer a much larger conversation. And since the current state of online news is as much about eyeball equity as anything else, having people come back and look to you as an authority and a source of information--whever that information may reside--is a good thing.

User-generated innovation

One of the unusual characteristics of a caucus versus a traditional vote is that everyone who attended knows the outcome. Yet traditional media has rarely reported these outcomes, waiting instead for official
results.

That type of information embargo is impossible anymore, thanks to the ubiquity of user-generated content creators on the web.

Witness the information flow coming out of Maine today, with near-real time results being put up on a Google map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&om=0&msa=0&msid=108855644820400443340.000445d3794716293aa9b

It'll be interesting to compare these informal results to the real deal one they're announced. If they're even close, it'll be a major ground-shift on how this stuff can be reported.

moving past free

"The Internet is a copy machine," explains Kevin Kelly in The Technium. And as such, Kelly suggests that it's simply not possible to try to fight the tide of facsimiles that wash over the web.

As a result, he argues, you've go to start offering things to go along with your content that can't be replicated, and thusly are "better than free." He lists eight good ideas to use as starting points and sums it up quite nicely:

Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.

mobile transformations

A new UN report says that mobile phones are transforming developing nations.

The take up of mobiles was allowing developing nations to "leapfrog" some generations of technology such as fixed line telephones and reap more immediate rewards, said the report.

Is there a designer in the house?

The New York Times could not have come up with a less interesting way of presenting the photos they're pulling in from their citizen journalism experiment, the Polling Place Photo Project? It's possibly the least inspired design I've seen on the Internet since the end of GeoCities:

What's the incentive to click on any given image? What's the logic in the order? Or the overarching narrative in the design (seemingly the only place to find a narrative in the project)? The AIGA, the leading design trade group country, was involved in this project--were they brought in to cater?

Compare this with a truly dynamic photo project, The Whale Hunt, which dealt with a similarly formalist challenge of presenting a huge number of photos in a compelling way, but broke out of the table structure the Times chose:

Sure, photos of polling places are kind of boring, but there are hundreds of photos in the Whale Hunt that are just as boring as many of the polling place photos are--if not more so. But the way Jonathan Harris chose to present them simply demands a user click on them, ponder them, and think about the story they tell, both individually and collectively.

With the Polling Place Photo Project, the Times had a chance to tell a new kind of story about an overlooked institution. But in choosing the least creative way possible to display the images, they end up telling no story at all. It's worse than a missed opportunity--it's a blown one.

Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Part of the problem affecting news organizations right now isn't simply the notion that giving away their news for free is killing them, it's that there are so many new ways of interacting with information that can lessen the need to go to a traditional news site.

Take, for instance, the current (as I write this) top 50 Google Trends listing:



Anyone want to guess what the biggest story touching people's lives is right this instant? Clearly there's a massive snow storm pummeling Chicago. People have woken up and want to know if the schools are open. I know this not because I've gone to one of the dozen or so news sites that are being queried on Google, but because the aggregate data of Chicago news organization searches and snow closing searches clearly point to only one logical conclusion.

One silver lining: Clearly when there's an emergency, people still turn to news!

One not-so-silver lining: Bad news for print--apparently nobody thinks of it as a breaking-news medium, as every single search is for TV and radio.

One bonus lining: I love that enough people have gotten sick of the Midwest winter at the same time that they've queried "Groundhog Day" enough to spike it into #28:

"Our business is becoming more entrepreneurial all the time"

Via Romenesko:

"Entrepreneurial skills are essential for all journalists these days," says UC Berkeley j-prof Marcia Parker. "Our business is becoming more entrepreneurial all the time. I don't think j-schools do enough in this field. Many of our students are hungering for these skills. While not everyone will want to start their own businesses, they need to understand that drive and bring that spirit into even traditional newsrooms that are looking to create new editorial products and services."