Yearly Archives: 2007

10.14.07
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Duty to buy a newspaper?

Roy Peter Clark at Poynter certainly has kicked off an interesting discussion with a column on the journalism centre’s website in a call to journalists to dig into their pockets and buy the newspaper. His full argument is worth a read, but the essence is:

I owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere — and to the future of journalism — to read them. It’s no longer a choice. It’s a duty.

And here’s why: There is one overriding question about the future of journalism that no one can yet answer: How will we pay for it? Who will pay for good reporters and editors? Who will pay to station them in statehouses, or send them to cover wars and disasters? Who will finance important investigations in support of the public’s health and safety?

Poynter has done a great service in collecting some of the blog posts that comment on the column. I’m not going to take aim at the original column. There are plenty of people who have done that.

My information diet

I’ll be honest. I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a physical newspaper. I get them from time to time on flights and at hotels, but the last time I put down money and bought a newspaper. I’d have to think hard about that. I think I bought a Guardian right before I joined the newspaper.

But I’m drowning in information. If this diet were food, I’d be the size of a small block of flats. Super-size me. I actually have to do a lot just to filter and sift the massive amount of information available. I’m constantly looking for signal in the noise. No one news source does it for me, and I compare a lot of news sources because they all have a point of view.

Before I leave the door, I have Sky News and BBC Breakfast on the laptop TV, more for background noise than information to be honest, although it’s good to know what the domestic (read British) media and press are exercised about today. I can’t filter TV news so I don’t ‘use’ it much. It’s too time consuming for what I get out of it. To be brutally honest, sometimes I get so pissed off at TV news for wasting my time I flip the channel to Everybody Loves Raymond. The BBC TV news podcast isn’t updated until I’m at work or else I’d just watch that and skip the fluff. If there is a good piece of video, I’ll see it. If a politician or presenter says something of note, I’ll see it repeated a million times during the day or in the papers.

Now, on my half hour commute in the morning before I hit the Tube, I listen to the NYTimes Front Page podcast and the hourly NPR news update downloaded to my iPod via iTunes. I just can’t find a good top of the hour headlines podcast in the UK. I haven’t checked the BBC lately. I wish they would produce a World Service headlines podcast. If I have time, I also listen to podcasts from On the Media, the Economist, the BBC’s Pods and Blogs (which I used to contribute to) and This American Life (although Suw and I usually listen to that together over breakfast on the weekend).

On the Tube, I usually skim stories from four newspapers: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald-Tribune and the Guardian. If I see something I need to read, I’ll mentally bookmark it for when I get to work. I also check on the headlines the BBC News website and do a quick check on CNET and Wired. I’ve been doing this for years on my Palm handheld using a service called Avantgo. The screen is great, and I don’t really have this fetish about paper. It’s just information, and it’s easier to organise this way. And it’s much easier to deal with on the Tube. I also have an RSS reader on my Palm, QuickNews, which I wish was better. That gives me headlines from Marketwatch and a half dozen blogs.

Most everyone else on the Tube reads the Metro free-sheet. I don’t. It’s just a rehash of what I’ve already seen on Sky and the BBC, and unlike most everyone else, I’m not interested in celebrity news. Besides, I never have to go looking for celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere. I also have an environmental issue with all of those free-sheets. What a waste.

When I get to work, I fire up my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, and look through the blogs and traditional news sources. I check Popurls.com to get a quick filter of social news sites, video sites and aggregators. I usually have NPR on in the background and give a quick check to NBC’s evening news via iTunes. I get e-mail newsletters from the Washington Post – my old hometown paper – and the NYTimes. I also get an e-mail from NewsTrust and SimplyHeadlines.com, aggregators of different sorts. I also get a morning e-mail from Global Voices giving a great roundup of global blog buzz. Friends are always sending me links via Del.icio.us, mostly to do with new media journalism, and I get things passed along directly via IM.

A former colleague at the BBC said that someday everyone will consume their news like me. I’m not so sure. Very few people actively seek out as much information as I do. I don’t extrapolate my own behaviour too much. I am a very wired news junkie. It’s my job to know what’s going on. But there are a lot of people doing one or more of the above.

But as some people in the Poynter discussion have pointed out, lack of information is not my problem. Lack of time and a limit to the amount of attention I have is more of a problem. I still don’t think this is an issue that most journalists have grokked. There’s who, what, where, when and why, but too many journalists don’t seem to think they need to explain to readers, viewers, listeners: Why should I care?

Relevance

Again, this is one of the posts where the comments are worth reading. Steve Yelvington in his post, A troll in scholar’s clothing, echoes one of the sentiments in the post which is that news has to be relevant to consumers, the audience in order for them to buy it. Steve says:

Quit blaming the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with paper. It’s your journalism that isn’t relevant. … We’re not going to get meaningful content and services from journalists who spend their time reading each other and sniffing around each other’s scents like a pack of dogs.

Don’t compare your journalism with that of another newspaper. Compare it with the needs of the community.

Amen brother. As Steve has often pointed out, newspaper audiences (in the US), have been declining since the 1970s, when the Internet was still in the lab.

I love the depth of the style of journalism that newspapers have traditionally done. That’s not to say that television is not capable of it. TV documentary units in Britain and long ago (and long since dead) in the US have produced some excellent journalism. But now, what is the business model for this content? What pays for this relatively expensive work? That’s the crux of the original post.

For a number of reasons, most people aren’t like me. They don’t see the reason in their busy lives to seek out news and information like I do. I grew up with newspapers and watching the evening news every night with my parents. I knew that to make economic, political and any of a number of other everyday decisions, I needed quality information. But I am in the minority, and as long as I am in the minority, newspapers and the kind of journalism that they represent will be in decline in the developed world.

I think the issue of relevance is at the heart of newspapers decline. Why should most people care about news? Journalists take it for granted, but I fear that it’s only occasionally obvious for our audiences.

When I was back in Washington this March, I struck up a conversation about world affairs with an IMF employee on the Metro. She got off a couple of stops before me, and an African-American man had overheard us and came up to me after she got off. It was after the wobble in Chinese markets had sent stocks swooning the world over. He wondered how something in China could affect the US economy because suddenly it had affected him. I had to get off at the next stop and didn’t have time to say that the Chinese and Japanese held a majority of the United States’ foreign debt. Anything that impacted the appetite for the debt would hit the US, possibly hard. And that’s just one link between the two countries. China and the US need each other economically for a myriad of reasons. China has its own finely tuned balancing act in terms of growth, inflation, internal stability, resources and the environment.

The man on the Metro represents, to me, a failure of journalism. It was a failure by journalists to explain to everyone in our communities why the story was important. Until our journalism really is essential to people’s lives and we make that case, newspapers will get crowded out by a dizzying array of information and, yes, entertainment choices.

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10.12.07
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links for 2007-10-12

10.11.07
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links for 2007-10-11

10.10.07
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‘A nerve has been hit’

Jack Lail said former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO Alan Mutter definitely hit an ‘organisational nerve‘ with his post about the ‘Brain Drain‘ happening in journalism. The post was hard hitting, quoting from a number of anonymous digital savvy journalists in their 20s and 30s looking for their exit at their newspapers and possibly out of the media full stop. Alan writes:

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

This is one post where you need to read the comments, like this one:

The large MSM paper I work for has had virtually 100% turnover in it’s online operations in the last 18 months. I’m not talking about the Podunk Daily News either, you’d know the name. … I just don’t understand it, there are people in the mix who really are trying to save this industry but who are battling of all things, this industry.

This comment pained me:

I have reporting experience and two journalism degrees, but I frequently have dinosaur reporters and editors treat me like IT support staff and dismiss my ideas because I’m not “one of them”.

For many journalists, ‘real’ journalism is still about the format, not the content. It’s as if their words, which they wrote on a computer, were somehow less important because they never quite made it off of a computer. Hopefully, when confronted by their own argument, these journalists will see how paper thin it is. Somehow I doubt it because they’ve held to this line for most of the 10 years I’ve been an online journalist, but one can hope for some sort of poetic justice. If they learn some HTML, maybe they’ll find work in the future.

And this isn’t necessarily about age or experience. This isn’t just fresh out of college grads with, as one blogger said some outsized sense of entitlement. One commenter is leaving a major newspaper’s online wing after seven years. That’s a lot of experience lost.

Patrick Beeson, a web project manager for the E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the post “among the most revealing portrayals of what’s wrong in most newspapers. Namely, legacy newsfolk not allowing for often-younger journo-technologists to play a guiding role in that paper’s strategy going forward.” This isn’t about turning your newsroom over to your youngest staff, but it is about having the humility and the vision to know what you don’t know.

As Alan says, some of this is about territory and turf, short-sighted management more concerned about owning the change than achieving change. And I’ve spoken to a lot of online news veterans who also struggle with the transition as the flat, collaborative environments of their newsroom meets the rigid hierarchies in traditional newsrooms. Integration isn’t the problem. It’s the terms of that integration. As Jack said, “This may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways.” This is an organisational issue as much, if not more, than a generational one.

Journalism professor Mindy McAdams points to a great post by young journalist, Meranda Watling, who gives her experience of being involved in discussions about new products “that there is no way in hell would float with my peers.” (Great blog Meranda. Nice design, and I do hope you do that education Tumblog.)

Mindy’s post is titled “We need a tourniquet”, and she said Alan is:

…talking about a legion of Merandas who are giving up and leaving because it’s so obvious to them that management has no clue what readers want or respect. The comments back him up, again and again. (That persistent sound you hear is our lifeblood leaking out.)

This post has kicked off a great conversation in the online journalism community, a community I’m proud to be a part of. It’s worth looking through the trackbacks to Alan’s post.

But to quote Rob Curley, this isn’t about skillset, it’s about mindset. It’s not about age or experience. I’ve spoken to some journalism school grads who talk as if it’s the 1940s, not the 21st Century, and I’ve worked with seasoned journalists who humble me with their digital knowledge and foresight and remind me that I have a lot to learn, like Steve Yelvington.

Steve and I shared dinner and drinks in Kuala Lumpur earlier this summer after we finished three days of workshops on citizen journalism with Peter Ong and Robb Montgomery, and he told me about coding a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in the mid-1980s. Steve’s a pioneer. Steve knows his technology and his journalism. He had this to say about Alan’s post:

We are at a critical turning point for American newspapers. We can’t afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. The Internet not a publishing system, a Web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we’ve been doing for the last century is not going to work. We need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.

Most of us are just impatient for the future that we know is there to be grasped. But we won’t wait forever. If the industry can’t or won’t do it, we’ll do it on our own.

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10.10.07
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links for 2007-10-10

10.09.07
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links for 2007-10-09

10.05.07
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FOWA07b: Me – Preparing for Enterprise Adoption

I’m not really very good about blogging my own talks, and people seem rarely to take notes of what I say at conferences, so I’m going to attempt to reverse the trend, starting with my FOWA slides.

I would strongly suggest that you go and read Steph Booth’s excellent notes of my talk alongside the slides – it’ll give you a bit more of an insight into what I said. I believe there will be, at the least, audio being produced from the talks, so if I ever get hold of that I’ll do a slidecast of the whole thing.

I decided a while back that it might be fun to have a 100% LOLcat slide deck, and it seemed that FOWA would be the ideal place to do it. I experimented with a few LOLcats in a presentation I did a couple of weeks ago (which I need also need to put up online soon) to some HR execs, and they seemed to go down ok. So I spent Monday and Tuesday looking at hundreds, possibly a couple of thousand, of cat pictures on Flickr. Sounds like a chore, but there are so many cute ones that I actually found it very soothing and enjoyable. I then used Big Huge Labs’ LOLcat creator to actually make the slides.

(I would really like to see a better LOLcat creator that gives you the ability to scale the photo, adjust the position of the photo in relationship to the text, and give you a bit more control over text size. Other creators I looked at also insisted that you upload the photo first, whereas Big Huge Labs’ gives you more ways to access the photo, including pulling in from an URL. Some of the LOLcats I ended up with weren’t quite as spot on as I would have liked, but I didn’t have time to sit and use Photoshop or something to do a better job. Hm, maybe a job for Moo… then they could let you do your own LOLcat fridge magnets too. I would so totally buy those.)
Giving the talk was slightly strange, because Carsonified, who organise FOWA, had completely the wrong talk title in all their literature, and I hadn’t realised that until the end of last week. I’d spent the last couple of months thinking through stuff about the adoption of social software in business, and to suddenly discover that everyone was expecting a talk on “the future of blogging” was a little worrying. Indeed, I think that a few people at least were disappointed that I didn’t talk about the future of blogging: From the stage, I couldn’t see the whole room, just the front half, and what seemed like a lot of people got up and left in the middle of my talk. That’s disconcerting, to say the least.

That said, I got a pretty good reaction from the people I spoke to afterwards, so that’s encouraging. I had a particularly good chat with Dennis Howlett about how things really haven’t changed much since the mid-90s, when “the ‘new’ was treated with suspicion and where finding champions was a devil’s own job”. In a way, that’s quite depressing, because it means that I am simply re-inventing the wheel. Still, I hope that the people who stayed did get something useful out of my talk, even if it was only axle grease.

10.04.07
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FOWA07b: Leisa Reichelt

Ambient intimacy
Term to describe an experience that she was having online.

Ambient intimacy, dates to Feb or March this year, associated with a photo on Flickr of Andy Budd’s bedroom, when you compare this to other stuff online, that’s not so intimate. We can learn so much about people, much more quickly than we ever could before. So now we’ve got Facebook status, Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Dopplr – gives us a huge amount of info about people.

What’s more amazing is that we’re expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips iwth this info, it’s just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flickr, facebooks, myspace, lastfm, dopplr, upcoming, skyype status, IM presence, RSS readers, blog posts, comments, Jaiku…

Ambient – atmospheric, part of your environment, non-directed, no specific purpose, distributed. Not one-to-one, not a conversation but also not broadcast. Messages that are going into a sort of defined area and creating this effect. Intimacy, results in some interesting search terms. Wasn’t thinking about that sort of intimacy when coined term.

Japanese mobile phone research looking into teen usage. Discovered stuff about news generation, personal archiving, etc. But also using text messages to create techno-social system to stay in touch even when they couldn’t be in any oother way. similarto the experiences we have now with these social technologies.

Found that teens were using msging to maintain open social channels. Not important messages, just about awareness of location and activity. This research is 10 years or older. But could be talking about Twitter – using Twitter very similar way to way Japanese teens were using texts 10 years ago.

People have been trying to understand this for quite a period of time. Robin Dunbar has worked on this for a white, but focuses on primate behaviour. Dunbar’s number. Also a great book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”.

Dunbar interesting re: Twitter because we talk about the human imperative to communicate and create relationships. He says that the reason that our brains are the size they are is to track all our relationships with other humans, so we can outmanouvre them to get food, sex, climb the pecking order.

Grooming, picking fleas, is about forming these relationships. But you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to “pick fleas” on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them. Explains a lot about why she has the imperative to connect the way she does. But our troupes have expanded, from primates to modern world.

Twitter or Jaiku, use to pick each others’ fleas en masse. Gives phatic expressiveness to a virtual space. Phat expression is speech where the function is to share feelings and be social, not about ideas or information. Hey, how are you? Internet has lots of places for our smart idea, but what it hasn’t had until recently, is a place for “hey, how are you?”. Flickr, Twitter, really amazing in terms of ways that they can transcend time and space to give us micro-insight into people’s lives on a day to day basis.

David Weinberger “continual partial friendship”.

Johnnie Moor” about exposing more sufface area for others to connect with.

About overcoming geographical dislocation that’s part of our lives. But it’s a love/hate thing. Notcied that hte more specifically that an app supposts just ambient intimacy, the more polarised people are. People really do hate or love it.

Kathy Sierra worries that such things are false interaction, that our brain needs a full interaction experience, including body language, tone of voice, etc. but Twitter only does a bit of that, and that causes stress to your brain.

If we thought that ambient intimacy was the only intimacy we would ever need, then there may be a problem. But it’s really part of a balanced diet.

Also an issue of information overload. According to New Scienties, there was an article that said ‘infomania dents IQ more than marijuana’, IQ was reduced by 10 points. Again, Dave Weinberger, says, it helps that hte volume of stuff is to great that there’s 0 expectation that you can keep up.

But all of these things, this possible false connectiveness, and information overload, leads us to think what do we get out of it? Why do we bother?

Small Tom Coates moment, who cribbed it from Peter Kollack:

Why people take part:

1. anticipated reciprocity
2. reputation
3. sense of efficacy
3. identification with a group

List represents great insentives: getting value back from your network, increasing your reputations which helps you get more opportunities, and having a crowd to run with. Crowd you run with online can be more and more valuable as you add to it.

Robert Wright – two types of game, win/lose game, zero sum game where everyone wins. (Also a third game, Test Cricket.)

As you build up the network, the network grows smarter, so you can draw on that network back when there’s osmething tha tyou need. When I need ideas or contacts or experience, and the first port of call is Twitter or Facebook, for both personal and professional stuff. Less about egotistically saying what I had for brekkie, but building a high-value network. Feeding into the network, in ways that can be valuable – it’s not wasting time.

Designers need to take responsibility for designing apps that take into account the fact that we human beings are highly distractable, and to try and reduce congnitive load involved in keeping track of our social networks, and maintaining aareness.

Ambience kicks in again – your app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that they are able to pay attention to it, it can’t just ben an app that is installed and forgotten about. Needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green, so you walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way will bum pinto people. So needs to support hte people that you see, that your’e waaving to, but without getitng in the way of what you need to get done.

Key principles need to keep in mind. top six: not rocket science:

1. Keep it lightweight – it’ not supposed to be the centre of attention, small footbrint, keep in mind that copious functionality isn’t necessarily a good things, keep it simple.
2. stay out of the way – invisibility, your app is about facilitating a social network, it’s not aobut you or your company or your app, so more you reduce resistance this message being delivered and recieved, the better your app is. So if you send an email to say there’s a message on yoru social network, so you have to log in to see it, then that’s not a good way of staying out of the way. Desktop app that shows me your stuff, that’s better.
3. open your API – not about controlling the way your communication happens. Twitter and Flickr do this, once they opened their API, the innovation that developed blossomed.
APIs support openness between platforms, your app is not an islenad, you are not going to hold people in your space. Need to recognise that people use different apps in a suite, so how can you integrate with that group rather than siilo ourselves off.
4. portable social networks – Think that people use different apps all the time, and i fyou usre more than two or three you know there is no joy in maintaining lots of lists of friends. This isn’t about locking peole in, you are part of a greater environment, so look for ways to make use of other lists, or make your list more portable.
5. use the periphery – small movements, just be there hovering in the background, grab attention only when you need to.
6. allow for time-shifting – whilst its about being in the moment, we do need to be able to go back and catch up on stuff.

Twitterific, designed to use Twitter’s API, so when someone sends a Twitter, it delivers through a little window that opens. Colour is very background, it’s transparent, it’s not demanding and distracting, and f you you don’t interact with it, it just fades away as if it was never there at all.

Refinement of IM, or Growl messaging, and it’s better because of timing – IM messages often flick on and off too quickly. Twitterific have thought more carefully about how long it needs to be there to be useful.

Pretty much all of these are in action, except portable social networks, is being done by Twitter and Twitterific.

Ambient intimacy is more than a passing phenomenon. Can also