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Kevin: Tom Glocer, chief exec of Thomson Reuters, had some harsh advice for the New York Times. "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices? Does The New York Times do a good job covering sports? So-so. Do they do a good job covering business? No. How about The New York Times on Israel, FT on Germany and France, which is really good, ESPN on sports and other smaller things coming together on a style sheet every morning?"
Coming to San Francisco
I’m going to be in San Francisco between 15th and 23rd April, although up in Sebastopol for the weekend. I have two projects running at the moment that I’d like to explore with anyone who’s interested.
The future of the social web
What might the future of the social web look like? What trends and developments in technology, demographics, etc. might influence how things could change? If you had to ask “What if…?”, which “if” would you ask?
Books and publishing
How do you write? What are the challenges to finishing a long-form piece? If you’re an agent or a publisher, what are the missing pieces in your publishing puzzle? What tasks or processes are clunky and awkward?
If you want to meet up with me to talk about either the social web or books, let me know.
And if you just want to meet up for a chinwag, then I’m holding a bit of a do on the evening of Tuesday 21st. I’ve tried to do an event thingy on Facebook, but again, ping me by email or @suw me on Twitter if you fancy coming. The location is to be decided – please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for somewhere nice and relatively quiet (big noisy venues aren’t my style; I like to be able to hold a conversation without shouting).
links for 2009-04-08
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Kevin: Newspaper co-operative, the Associated Press, is relying on a 1918 ruling to root out 'misappropriation' of its content. Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica does a great job of going through the relevant case law, the 1918 US Supreme Court decision International News Service v. Associated Press. Just as we had with music and sharing sites, grey areas of the law will become less grey over the next few years as cases make their way through court.
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Kevin: It's clear. The newspaper industry is steeling itself for a fight, for some newspapers it might be a last stand. Dean Singleton, AP's chairman and vice chairman of MediaNews, and AP SVP Sue Cross are talking about content pirates. Tim Windsor hopes that all of this talk doesn't lead to New Century Network 2.0.
links for 2009-04-07
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Kevin: An excellent overview of the powerful RegEX (Regular Expression) function in Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes can do so much, and it's visual approach might just help many people (including me) get their head around programming and scripting. Very useful guide for journalists who want to do powerful analysis on web sources.
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Kevin: Patrick Smith, now of paidContent:UK but previously of the Press Gazette, writes about why the UK journalism's 'Trade Bible' failed. It's a good list of not only why the Press Gazette failed but why other publications are failing. Editorial lost out to publisher Wilmington's other goals. The latest business model didn't work and like so many other print publications there are a list of failed online strategies.
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Kevin: A great column from (North Carolina) News & Record Editor John Robinson providing real world examples of how social media has enhanced their coverage. John says: "Everyone who spends any time on Facebook or blogging or Twitter knows that they are valuable informational tools, which makes them valuable journalistic tools. It's not rocket science." John walks the talk.
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Kevin: People think I'm a little crazy about geo-tagging, but it's a small bit of fundamental work that opens up a world of value-added location-based services that could be sources of revenue for news organisations. Dan Gillmor highlights how easy this is to do with his class. As Dan says: "The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags."
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Kevin: Some great tips from the ultimate innovator: Thomas Edison. Be passionate. Question your assumptions. Change things up. Learn to collaborate. Don't forget the customer.
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Kevin: To sum up Kinsley's view, look to the last sentence: "If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news."
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Kevin: A good quick list on how journalists should respond to comments. The first tip is essential. Responding to comments is part a journalist's job. Period. There are also good tips on how to deal with negativity or even makes a racist comment. Also, one of the key points that I make is that the journalist sets the tone. If you're aggressive in the post and aggressively defensive, prepare for a very unpleasant experience, one which you've helped create.
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Kevin: Tip of the hat to Alf Hermida and Mindy McAdams for highlighting this brilliant collection of video tips and best practices from The Digital Journalist. The collection has articles on workflow, how to improve videojournalism stories and how to make the transition from stills photography to video.
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Kevin: MOBVIS is a new mobile service that will compare images in its database to landmarks as seen by a mobile phone camera. It's an interesting project that builds on some of the augmented reality projects that have been in academia for a while. However, I am always a bit sceptical with these projects seeing as one obvious application – tourism information – become very expensive with data roaming charges. But whereas the augmented reality projects in the past relied quite heavily bespoke technology, it's nice to see this kind of thing filtering down to consumer tech.
Complexity and news: The Financial Crisis
One of my biggest criticisms of my profession, journalism, is that we don’t do complexity or nuance very well. My friend and colleague Bobbie Johnson once referred to this as ‘binary journalism’. I always found it odd that many media commentators criticised George Bush’s Manichean world view (a view that is in itself simplistic) when the media delights in over-simplified stories of good versus evil that seem have more of a place in comic strips than journalism. However, whether it’s climate change or the global financial crisis, journalism needs to deal with complexity. We need to explain it to our audience in ways that engages and adds to their understanding.
Unfortunately, I fear that journalists are leaving this job to GAB – the Global Association of Bloviators, well-paid commentators who make a helluva lot of money not explaining a complex world but rather engaging in polarised shouting matches on talk radio, cable television and comment sites. It can be greatly entertaining and distracting, but it’s the information equivalent of professional wrestling while Rome burns. We can’t have binary journalism in an analogue world where often things exist not only on a continuum but in complex, multi-dimensional inter-relationships.
But therein lies the challenge. How do you Jedi mind trick people who might prefer the theatre of cable news or the simple morality tales of tabloid newspapers into caring about something that in the end is really complex but have a real impact on their lives as the global financial crisis has? I think that engaging readers using social media and creatively telling stories is the way forward, and we’re starting to see some great examples of this.
During the financial crisis, the collaboration between US National Public Radio’s Planet Money and This American Life have produced some of the most enlightening and entertaining programs on the subject. One of the programs, The Giant Pool of Money, has rightly won a Peabody Award. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has interviewed one of the creators, Adam Davidson, about a model for complex news.
NPR’s Adam Davidson on “The Giant Pool of Money” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
Adam says that journalists need to acknowledge their own ignorance in covering complex stories, and he talks about other lessons he learned in creating what has become a series of some of the best journalism on the financial crisis in any medium. The full transcript is on Nieman’s site if you’d prefer to scan it.
More than this, I think that Adam hits on why I prefer to blogging, in particular, and digital news in general to traditional print or broadcast media, which is that news can be a process of learning that the journalist shares with the audience. Also, as Rob Paterson points out, digital media can be much better than traditional linear media in dealing with complexity, although Adam has done a wonderful job dealing with complexity during a long-form radio program. I appreciate this in Rob’s explanation:
The POV was always going to be – EXPLAIN! The presenters of the show would be representing us. They would start from a position of NOT KNOWING and not understanding the jargon. The irony is that even the so called experts have told Adam that they too have learned from the show.
They got rid of the voice of authority and took their listeners on their own journey of discovery.
I understand all too well the illusion of the ‘VOICE’ that Rob is talking about. The deep bass voices of presenters are meant to represent authority, but the presentation cannot overcome the fundamental superficiality of sound bites, the same interview aired in heavy rotation and minute-thirty packages. Why not just dispense with the theatrics and focus on finding out what we all wanted to know? How the hell did this mess happen? What led us to here?
The global financial crisis is now being packaged into media theatre complete with two-dimensional villains and victims that do a disservice to the real story: The West has maxed out our personal and collective credit cards. Politicians and commentators on the right point to irresponsible borrowers while those on the left point to irrresponsible greedy lenders and financiers. The crisis is here, and while the media retreats into a comfortable narrative that places responsibility on some other segment of society, it will only put off a little longer the hard choices that all segments of society will have to make. This is a moment when journalism can shine, even during this time of industry and individual anxiety. The global financial crisis cries out for great intelligent story-telling. Let’s do the story justice, and hopefully in doing so, we’ll find solutions to the crisis sooner rather than simply putting off the hard choices.

links for 2009-04-04
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Kevin: Ryan Thornburg has a pretty gloomy take on a recent survey of online journalists. "I think the survey we did here at UNC does a much better job showing us the future of news… which is bright if you dream of a future of inexperienced, homogeneous copyeditors shuffling text around a Web page." Frankly, the industry would have more experience if they hadn't shut down so many online divisions in a bout of schadenfreude after the dot.com crash. I have more than a decade of experience in online journalism, but only because I was one of the few to survive the post dot.com crash decimation of online news departments by executive editors who believed – quite wrongly – that the crash vindicated their belief that the internet is a fad. The lack of experience is the industry's fault. The mass cull of digital journalists in 2000-2001 now means a crippling lack of digital experience for the industry.
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Kevin: "Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce, according to a new University of Melbourne study."
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Kevin: A simple wizard to create a map based on location data in a Google Spreadsheet.
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Kevin: Christkian Spanring has a great how-to showing how to use Google Docs (in this case spreadsheets), Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps to create a simple map-based mash-up. Mashups are now getting to the point of being doable by those with limited technical skill, not saying that Christian has limited skills. That comment is more directed to cut-and-paste coding journalists like myself.
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Kevin: The Guardian API tracks the use of swear words (well, a cross section of profane terms) used on the Guardian in the last decade. Way to go Tom Hume for an intriguing use of Guardian API.
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Kevin: The Knight Citizen News Network has a great directory of free and low-cost digital tools for journalists and citizens.
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Kevin: Steve Buttry has a great list of links to Twitter resources for journalists including primers on how to use Twitter, journalists and editors on Twitter and other resources.
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Kevin: Steve Buttry gives a great set of tips to editors who want to lead their newsrooms into the Twitterverse. I think journalists are increasingly realising that they should use Twitter to monitor their beat, but I think it is less well appreciated how much traffic Twitter can drive to your site. Even less well appreciated is how this can connect journalists with their colleagues and more important communities around their content.
links for 2009-04-03
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis referred to this as the 'heavy metal' rendition of Clay Shirky's post on the death of newspapers. Syracuse University communications photography and political science student Joey Baker has some pretty blunt comments for newspaper journalists. Charging for 'basic content' is just asinine. (And I'd say that most journalists are rather expansive in their definition of exclusive content.) He believes that news sites could actually use a great user experience or great UI to differentiate in a market where the content is rarely that different. Discuss.
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Kevin: The Guardian Media Group has asked the British government to investigate Google News and other content aggregators as it prepares its Digital Britain report. From the submission: "We welcome the interim report's focus on respect for IP and copyright, but believe there is a glaring omission from its examination of such issues: the negative effects of aggregators and search engines on the ability of and incentives for UK content providers to invest in quality content."
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Kevin: Dave Chase highlights something very important in terms of securing the future of professional journalism. No business can cut its way to success. While most discussions of new business models talk about ways to cut production costs or new ways to fund journalism. "While those items help, it's clear the only path to long-term economic viability is to directly address the revenue piece of the equation." Dave outlines 10 mistakes newspapers going all digital must avoid.
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Kevin: Matthew Ingram has uploaded his presentation on Twitter that he gave to his colleagues at the Globe and Mail. He took out some slides on traffic data but otherwise its all there. Twitter is becoming a big traffic driver, especially to specialist areas with engaged journalists (think the Guardian Technology section for a not so random example).
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How to Embed and Play 720p HD (High Definition) YouTube Videos (&fmt=22 Code Hack) » My Digital LifeKevin: How to embed high definition YouTube videos.
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Kevin: At least 121 members of Congress (out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) are using Twitter.
Saving Newspapers: The Musical
A tip of the hat to Harvard University’s Neiman Journalism Lab (a must follow for journalists on Twitter) for this gem.
Let’s all sing along: “In the name of name of digital ubiquity, where you can get the news anytime for free, is there any room for dinosaurs like us, journalists who are already extinct.” New business models: Offer businesses good reviews on Yelp? Sell Marijuana when it’s legalised?
Well, it looks like their solution is a little behind the British tabloids in their plan to save newspapers. But I’ll leave you to watch it. I may have already ahem…revealed too much.
Technorati Tags: newspapers, business models, future, revenue, musical

links for 2009-04-02
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Kevin: Tony Hirst of Open University shows how to do an easy map-based mashup using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Maps. Tony is worth adding to your RSS feeds. He has some great, simple guides for representing data.
Proofreading the Public Domain
This is cross-posted from Chocolate and Vodka, but I’ve included different invite codes in this post.
For the last few months I’ve been working with Book Oven, a Canadian start-up whose aim is to make it easier to prepare long texts for publishing by making it a simple, collaborative process.
The first thing we’ve focused on is how to proofread a manuscript for typos. The problem with reading a whole book all at once and looking for typos is that you can get so caught up in reading that your brain starts to skip the mistakes, seeing what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is. But what if you were presented with just one sentence at a time? You’d lack some context, it’s true, but you don’t really need a lot of context to know if “teh” is a misspelling of “the” or that “their” should be “there”.
That’s what we’ve built at Book Oven, and we’ve called it “Bite-Size Edits”. It presents you with a random snippet of text, with a sentence above and below for limited context, and if you spot a typo you can suggest a correction by editing the sentence and clicking “Suggest changes” (click on the images for a closer look or visit our complete How To).
You can also tell us that the snippet is OK as it is by clicking “No changes”, or that there’s something confusing about it by clicking “Skip”.
If our calculations are correct, it will take 100 people just 10 minutes to proofread a 100,000 word book, and we want to bring that collaborative power to bear on on the public domain. Thousands of texts have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, but although they have been very carefully proofread some still have a small number of errors. Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg’s founder, called for help in removing these errors, so we’ve set up a version of Bite-Size Edits, which we’ve called the Gutenberg Rally, to focus just on texts from Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders (Gutenberg’s proofreading site).
If you’d like to pitch in, all you need to do is pick an invitation code from the list below and visit the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally site to create a new account. When you’ve successfully signed up, please leave a comment with the code you used and I’ll cross it off the list.
Now, just a little word of warning. The site is in alpha, which means that you will almost certainly find things that are broken! We have a feedback form that you can use to let us know and a forum to discuss things (which, is itself something that’s not entirely finished, as it’s not yet fully integrated – just sign in with the same username and password that you create when you join the main site). We’d love your feedback, so don’t spare the horses!
If you explore the site, you’ll find that you can start your own projects, upload your own text (.txt files only at the moment) and can send it to Bite-Size for the community to proof. Please feel free to experiment, but be aware we’re still ironing out bugs and that we have a lot more social functionality still to unveil!
So, for the love proof-reading, get cracking! Oh, but be warned. Bite-Size Edits has been described by one usability tester as “evilly addictive”. Don’t say we didn’t tell you…
(Obviously I can’t update the list whilst I’m asleep, so if you pick a code that doesn’t work, list it in the comments and try another!)
Invite Codes
64sBhU00
9cmRd303
2SZWT4VN
CMIMAPxN
DnZ8idpk
2wAcreZV
INuDo0QJ
Ea4Cx9G3
XHLEILQl
O6yuVrkM
pRZXtN20
t9FQdS3F
o9B2I7T4
eOGMdeK7
gBj9Aqad
bApjyzOw
dZ2OzmLD
dIAgKFHH
MBr9KcfD
amc60MoK
8Mq2UzGd
WiK1TR3U
rCvYJ23b
ysSRF0ig
ZUiOzf5l