Journalism

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Being Robert Scoble

October 2, 2008 in Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News | 9 comments

Traditional journalism is static. Its basic units are the article, the story, the piece. The new journalism is live. It doesn’t have a basic unit any more than a river or a storm have a basic unit. It’s process, not product. Even these things we call posts, texts, tweets and wikis are less unitary than contributory. They add to a flow, which in turn adds to what we know.

In 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” and compared managing in business (a subject about which he remains the canonical authority) to leading a jazz band. You surround yourself with skilled folks who only get better at what they do. Drucker lived a long time, but it’s too bad he’s not around to see what the Live Web is doing both for knowledge and the work that increases it constantly.

To bring this into focus, dig Jeff Jarvis’ Replacing the Article. Specifically, Jeff is looking for a new “unit of coverage” that includes at least three subunitary components: 1) “Curated aggreagtion”, 2) “A blog that treats the story as a process, not a product”, and 3) “A wiki that give us a snapshot of current knowledge”. He’s looking for discussion as well (as he must, else all he’s got is another article, no?). “Where do you think the best – most intelligent and illuminating – discussion is going on?” he asks.

Problem is, the Live Web is getting more and more flowy and decentralized. The unit Jeff wants may be all of the above and a lot more that isn’t here yet. Somebodies have to go invent them. And they will. When they do, it’ll be in the river, not alongside it.

I found my way to Jeff’s piece through my FriendFeed, which I visited after scanning Twitter Search; and from Jeff’s post I pivoted off to MoneyMeltDown, Calculated Risk, Monitor Credit Crisis Blog and Inman blog, all off Jeff’s links. None, he says, do the job he wants. “Can anyone point me to a reporter or expert who is using a blog to both report and discover?” he asks?

Well, there’s Scoble and his FriendFeed top 165 list, about which Paul Boutin says,

If you follow Robert Scoble at all — and you sort of have to unless your DSL is dead — you know he can’t help overproliferating everything he does. While the entire staff of Vanity Fair takes months to assemble its 100 most powerful list, Fast Company’s token webhead spews 165 names in one pass for his “hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding.” Robert, let me put on my old Condé Nast editor’s hat and redline this back to you: GREAT START, BUT PLS TELL US WHO THE FK THS PPL ARE…

Jeff’s point exactly. (Aside: I once had lunch with Jeff at a cafeteria in the Condé Nast building, where Jeff worked at the time and that our kid called “The Candy Ass building”.)

Here’s what’s even more new: Scoble isn’t managing the people who inform him. It’s the other way around. He’s being managed by the jazz in his band. Scobleization is more like what happens in Being John Malkovitch, where all these people take trips down a portal into Malkovitch’s head. Those of us being FriendFed are all being Scobleized, but (as Dame Edna says) in a nice way. That is, we’re being fed knowledge even as we flow with the river as well. Process, not product.

Yet we aren’t subordinating ourselves to the process, unless all we want to do is SEO and AdSense fishing. We’re increasing the worth of ourselves as the sovereign and independent units we call human beings.

To be Scobleized is to be human, and to grow. Because that’s what we do at our best.

The other day I was hanging with Scoble when he said “Isn’t this a great world?” Louis Armstrong, the great jazz player, couldn’t have sung it better.

Matters of mattering

September 20, 2008 in Journalism, Past, Places, Politics | 8 comments

Sarah Palin said yes, thanks, to a road to nowhere in Alaska, a story in Thursday’s LATimes, is one among countless gotcha!s which in sum comprise a sea of bad news across which Alaska’s governor is obliged to walk like Jesus. So here’s a thought. What if the Gravina Island Bridge, the $398 million “bridge to nowhere”, was not much worse than any other piece of pork — just easier for hand-wringers to target?

I mean, hey, if you were a citizen of Ketchikan, where your whole town depends on tourism for its existence, and where your airport is on an island that can only be reached by sea — and where your whole state has always depended on large sums of federal largesse and involvement — this bridge may not have been pork. It was business as usual, and just your town’s turn to score.

Could it be that Senator Stevens was doing his job, and doing it well? Looks to me like the bridge would have gone forward, and never would have been a Big Issue, had Katrina not wiped out New Orleans and required large efforts to rebuild infrastructure there, highlighting porky projects elsewhere in the country.

In other words, what we’re looking at here is Politics as Usual. That is more than enough to explain Sarah Palin’s initial support for the bridge, her change of position after the winds of popular opinion shifted, and her truth-shading after the fact. More importantly, the whole thing says little about her ability to serve the country as Vice President, or as President in the not-unlikely chance that John McCain will fail to serve out his first term.

I won’t be voting for McCain/Palin. But the governor’s porky political past is not one of the reasons.

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Reflections

September 19, 2008 in Journalism, News | 6 comments

Jeff Jarvis:

  Newspapers and newspaper companies are about to die. The last remaining puddles of auto, home, job, and retail advertising are about to be sucked down the drain thanks to the economic crisis and credit is about to be crunched into dust. So any newspaper or news company that has been teetering will fall. If Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG can fall, so can a puny newspaper empire — and there’ll be no taxpayer bailout for them. When this happens, will it be Sam Zell’s fault? Hardly.
  The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves...
  Want to see who’s to blame for the state of your paper? Get a mirror.

I’m not quite so pessimistic, although I agree about the direction of history’s vector. Meanwhile, in respect to this…

  When the internet came, did you all – every one of you as responsible, smart journalists, on your own – leap to get training in audio and video? Did you immediately hatch new ways to work collaboratively with the vast public of bloggers able and willing to join in local journalism? Not that I saw.

… credit where due to the LATimes for hiring Tony Pierce to run the paper’s bloggig and blogging-outreach operation. It might be a matter of deck chair rearrangement, but at least it was one good move.

Money and blogging

September 14, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Ideas, Journalism | 22 comments

Here’s JuiceTorrent. Here’s how it works.

I like that it’s a grass roots project to create a new and less centralized advertising economy. (Or maybe it’s decentralized. I’m not sure which, because the site doesn’t yet say what happens behind the curtain. Is it like BitTorrent in its architecture? If so, does it use the BitTorrent protocol in some way? And what’s actually centralized? Who sells the advertising? How is relevance determined? How is pricing determined?)

I also like anything that can start breaking what amounts to a near-monopoly on advertising by Google. At U.S. v. Microsoft, 10 Years Later, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s top legal honcho, became impassioned at just one moment during the 1.5 day event: when he was asked about an advertising deal between Google and Yahoo. This would combine the #1 and #2 online advertising companies, leaving Microsoft a distant #3. Disregarding the irony of crying “waah” because Microsoft is losing at a game it failed to buy (or innovate) its way into, Brad still has a case.

What I don’t like is the corrupting influence of the advertising economy itself.

Right now online advertising is a river of gold flowing out of the ground in California, and millions of bloggers — along with countless new and traditional businesses — are rushing to grab some. In addition to the other economy-distorting consequences of this rush, it is corrupting blogging’s original nature, which is amateur in the best sense or the word. Amateur is derived from amatorem, the Latin word for lover.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making money by blogging. I am saying there’s something wrong with blogging mostly to make money, or to let advertising determine the purpose of your blog and what you say with it. If your business is the latter, you’re flogging, not blogging.

There is an old and subtle distinction here. Businesses and professions at their best are ways to pursue passions and organize talents — not just to make money. Of course they can’t thrive unless they make money. But few of us go into business just saying “I can’t wait to return value to my shareholders.” Investors are the main exceptions, but the best of those know that human passions other than greed are at the heart of every good business.

And it’s a distinction I’ll be making at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas at the end of this week, somewhere in the Citizen Journalsism Workshop.

Meanwhile, check out JuiceTorrent. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes, since right now it’s single mention on the Web comes from Emil Sotirov of People Networks, which created the service. (I discovered Emil and his work through a comment here.) If this be a snowball, we can mark where it started.

[Later… Emil answers many questions above in the comments below.]

Getting Gustav

August 31, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News, Places, problems | 5 comments

A little guide to New Orleans radio & other Hurricane Gustav sources.

If you’re using a regular over-the-air-type radio, and you’re within 750 miles or so of New Orleans, tune in 870am to hear WWL. It’s one of the original (literal) clear channel stations. In the old days you’d get them from coast to coast at night, but in recent years the FCC has chosen to allow new stations to clutter the AM band at night (when signals skip off the ionosphere). But still, worth a check if you’re within range. WWL also has a hurricane coverage network of other stations in the area.

If you’re listening over the Net, your station choices are WWL and WIST. Here’s a link to a browser thingie that plays WWL (using Windows Media or Silverlight). Here’s WIST’s audio page. Wish either used .mp3, but this isn’t the right time to complain. Both have excellent local coverage right now, from what I can gather. Lots of listener call-in stuff.

Here’s AP hurricane video.

Can’t get Technorati to chart less than 90 days, but this chart shows Gustav action.

Full Circle‘s Tracking Hurricane Gustav on Social Media.

Rex Hammock’s Where to go for Gustav information. Includes the Gustav Information Center, Nola.com, Wikipedia’s Gustav entry, GustavWiki.

I’ll add more as the night goes on.

American Red Cross Flickr photos. Those with “Hurricane Gustav” tags. All photos with hurricanegustav tags.

Andy Carvin wants to make the ultimate Gustav mashup map.

See the comments below for more.

Undeleted

August 7, 2008 in Blogging, Future, Ideas, Journalism | 9 comments

My Wikipedia entry is once again the stub it was. The threatening stuff at the top of the page is gone. The deletion debate page is now archived. At the top it says,

  The result was Clear case of snow. Article needs some improvement, but doesn’t require deletion to address issues.. TravellingCari 01:58, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I’m not sure what “clear case of snow” means. Is it that there were twelve votes to keep the entry and none for deletion? Or is it wikipedia-speak for something else? No matter. I’m glad the entry was saved, and grateful to the folks who helped save it — both on that page and in comments elsewhere. Much appreciated.

I used to think I should do more writing and editing in Wikipedia; to put my shoulder to the vast wheel of a project from which I draw many benefits and contribute almost nothing. I know lots of well-sourced material I could bring to many subjects, and I could help with copy editing on many more. In fact I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but editing poorly-written articles on Wikipedia. So could lots of other people.

I hate to say it, but there are more highly leveraged things I can do. Most of those involve writing as well — writing that’s mine and not anybody else’s. I turned sixty-one last week. While I have just as much energy and drive as I’ve ever had, I also know that I’m ratcheting down the short end of life’s stick. I need to do more of something I’ve always sucked at: investing my time wisely and deliberately, even as I continue to enjoy spelunking down the digressive tunnels of my insatiable curiousity about damn near everything. As digressive intellectual tunnels go, Wikipedia has no rivals in the online world. Among those digressions is figuring out how Wikipedia works, and how to participate in a fully engaged and meaningul way. I feel like I need to be a lawyer to figure out all the rules.

So here’s what I’ve learned and now need to put to work.

First, I need to write newspaper op-eds. Here’s a good one by Dan Gillmor that ran the other day in the San Francisco Chronicle. And here’s another, by David Weinberger, in the Boston Globe. I should follow their lead.

Second, I should start writing books. For real. Since Cluetrain came out, Chris Locke and David Weinberger have put out two books apiece. Me: none. I’ve been accumulating text toward The Giant Zero, which is about the Net and its infrastructure (which I believe is inadequately understood — by everybody, including myself). I’m part of an offline community that’s working toward establishing a think tank or an academic center (like Berkman and CITS) we’re calling the Internet Infrastructure Institute. A lot of the writing is excellent fodder toward that book. My corpus of writing for Linux Journal contains more than enough material to gather into a book. There’s also the history quietly being made by the VRM community as we work toward giving customers far more power in the marketplace (among other good things).

So the will and the ways are there. I just need to make the time and use it wisely. Advice is welcome, because I’m sub-optimal at both.

Life in the vast lane

August 6, 2008 in Journalism, Life, Past, problems | 5 comments

Yesterday I not only learned that my Wikipedia entry was nominated for deletion, but that Tara Hunt‘s went through the same process a while back — and failed to survive. She’s still here in the physical world, still on the rest of the Web, but gone from Wikipedia.

I’m also sure her experience with Wikipedia deletion — being marched to the gallows by a finger-pointing Wikipedian, then standing there while the gathered crowd gave a thumbs-down before the trap door dropped — was reason alone to write The Whuffie Factor, a forthcoming book that comprises the entire Usage section of Wikipedia’s whuffie entry. There is a link for Tara there, and for the book too. You can follow Tara’s to the deletion log, where you’ll find records of its execution. The book is graced with pure potential: it has no entry yet.

I’m impressed at how well Tara took her sentence, while awaiting her entry’s execution:

There are oodles of entries on Wikipedia like this, though. Debatable ‘notables’, some who obviously do use their pages as their resumé, many people who have, obviously, accomplished a lot in their lifetime, but who are not widely known for these accomplishments and missing any ‘notable third party sources’. Others I searched for are nowhere to be found, who are well-known authors, presenters, inventors and real thought leaders. But they haven’t been quoted or featured by some national publication to be verified as mattering to history. And all judgements on “delete” or “keep” are still made by a handful of individuals.
Is Wikipedia the people’s encyclopedia? Well, no. Not really. I mean, it gets closer than the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it uses similar editorial guidelines. Its advantage is that there are more sources (people) to add entries so that it can grow and encompass knowledge faster than the small, paid editorial team at EB. But I don’t think it was meant to be the people’s encyclopedia and this is where our tempers run high.
I could think, “I’m being deleted? What do these jerks know about my accomplishments?” and be personally offended and upset by this. But Wikipedia is no measure of my worth. It’s an encyclopedia that is editable and online. Period.
Should there be an encyclopedia of people? Well, there is already. It includes the internet, but extends into phonebooks, government records and personal anecdotes. Maybe we can’t all be written into history like we want to be, but know that this is a century’s old issue: History is not ‘a fact’, it is a point of view. History has been written by a small percentage of the population over time and, because of ‘scaling problems’, will probably continue in the same fashion.

Fine points, gracefully delivered.

I think the main problem for Wikipedia isn’t just scaling. It’s that Wikipedia is worst at something it is also best at: dealing with living subjects. On the one hand I’m astonished at how well Wikipedia stays on top of changing topics such as the world’s tallest structures. (Here’s a second entry, and a third.) On the other I’ve often winced at how lousy Wikipedia can be at presenting accurate biographical information about living people (Dave Winer comes to mind), and at maintaining both accuracy and neutrality on topics such as, well, neutrality. Too much of what gets written are iterative errors and approximations by partisans.

That’s why I’ve always been happy enough with a Wikipedia stub. Soon as you get past the minimal, errors and approximations set in.

All of reality is a work in progress. Especially the tiny corner of the universe that supports life. We need to remember that the Net is still new, the Web is even newer. That both have profound effects on life is undeniable. But it’s a few seconds after the Big Bang and all we have a few light elements, a lot of heat, and no galaxies. The best we can do, as Kurt Vonnegut taught, is just to be kind to each other.

Preferring BlogWorld to Flogworld

July 31, 2008 in Blogging, Journalism, News | 2 comments

I’ll be at Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas in September. Gotta say that I wouldn’t be going if it didn’t coincide with another obligation in town. But since I’ll be there, I’m interested in seeing if a sharper distinction can be made between blogging and flogging. You can see the split by looking Blogworld’s own promotional jive. On the one hand there’s this…

  …if you want to influence decision makers, sell a product or service, if you want to promote yourself as an industry expert, or build your brand using new media…

And on the other hand there’s the Citizen Journalism Workshop, with a program developed by David Perlmutter, Ph.D. In addition to being the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at Kansas University’s School of Journalism with a distinguished adacemic pedigree — and a blogger — David is busy doing research on a grant from Knight Foundation to “study the relationship between reading blogs and newspapers”.

Generally speaking, I’ll be a lot more interested in the latter than the former.

Looking forward to seeing some of ya’ll there.

[Later…] I just learned that I might be on a panel. You can guess what I’ll be saying. Though I’ll be listening too.

Why newspapers shouldn’t die

July 30, 2008 in Journalism | 7 comments

Dan Gillmor:

  Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.
  First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it — as they would all the time — as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I’m absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties.
  Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it’s already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can’t set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful.

Those aren’t just opportunities. They’re advantages that papers still have. Even if they’re not using them.

Cool. Literally.

July 27, 2008 in Fun, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Science, Travel | 1 comment

This shot here (and above) has found a home here as well.

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