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As with yesterday’s map, this is a .jpg I put together from this .pdf at the San Diego County Emergency Homepage. Click on it to see it in full size. Other sandiegofire maps are at taoe.org, map.sdsu.edu. and SignOnSanDiego.com.
Here’s the latest Ranch Fire map.
And, speaking of the demand side supplying, dig Network News in a Box: a free grassroots news collection/distribution tool in response to breaking news events.
Northwestern’s Medilll School of Journalism has long been in the first rank of J-schools, right up there with Columbia, Missouri, Berkeley, Texas, Michigan… In fact, Google puts Medill right behind those, in that order, in a search for “School of Journalism”.
Yet here’s Medill committee to explore suggestions for new name, in The Daily Northwestern.
It begins,
The Medill School of Journalism is forming a committee to explore a possible name change.
Dean John Lavine said the committee will consider altering the name to better represent the school and what it offers.
“We’re really exploring what the name should be, could be, what people think about it,” he said. “There will be a process for people to have real input on it, and that’s what is important.”
Lavine did not comment on specific names being discussed, but said that in informal conversations he’s had with students and others, adding “Integrated Marketing Communications” to the name was a popular idea.
The piece goes on to quote a number of students on the matter, and closes the piece with the only source that makes complete sense:
Chardae Davis, a Medill junior, said the possible change really bothers her, and that the school was too old to change its name.
“It’s a brand in a way,” she said. “Medill has a reputation and the name stands for something.”
While she understands that journalism is evolving and so the curriculum is changing, Davis said that doesn’t mean the name should be altered.
“We came to Medill for Medill,” she said. “Not for the Medill School of Journalism and insert rest of name here.”
Back in the middle of the piece, there’s this:
“This is not something that any school at NU gets to decide,” Lavine said. “Only the trustees get to decide the name. That’s the way it should be.”
Let’s hope the trustees listen to Ms. Davis.
Meanwhile, “School of Journalism” has already been dropped from the Medill home page. It’s just MEDILL now. The About Page says,
Since 1921, Medill has been recognized worldwide as one of the real jewels at one of the nation’s elite universities. At Medill, young men and women have been shaped for the incredible successes they have achieved in journalism and the Medill-invented field of integrated marketing communications. Here, journalism students are taught on the streets of Chicago and Washington, D.C., and marketing students are taught through projects for real-world clients in for-credit residencies. Something else about Medill: Our values. They are: 1.) Be respectful of the school and of yourself and of others – which includes personal and professional integrity; 2.) Be the best – which means making no small plans, being bold and taking risks; and 3.) Be distinctive; be you – which includes resisting conformity, thinking uniquely.
I’m sure they teach well and do good work. But Journalism and “Integrated Marketing Communications” — a buzzphrase if there ever was one — should, at most, have squat to do with each other. Here’s what Medill says about the latter at its page:
Pioneered at Medill, the graduate program in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern educates students for careers in marketing communications and marketing management. The program combines the traditional areas of marketing communications with business skills in marketing, finance, statistics and organizational behavior to form a unique program on the cutting edge of marketing communications and customer relationship management. Top marketing and media organizations need forward-thinking professionals who understand the changing marketplace and who can implement a customer-focused approach that is critical to their future success. They look to Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Communications master’s degree program to find these professionals.
Well, the one upside I see here is that maybe I could talk to some of these people about VRM, and how “relationship management” should go two ways and not just one. But I’m sure, if we have that conversation, it won’t be anywhere near the subject of Journalism.
Lanna Action for Burma, a new Thai blog, is running a Panty Power Campaign against the government next door, in Burma. I’m not making this up. Here’s what it says:
SPDC is the State Police and Development Council, which rules Burma, brutally.
The pointer comes from a friend in Thailand who says this thing is serious — or about as serious as things like this can be. Except there is nothing else like this. But I’m not there and have no idea.
Meanwhile, Violet Cho of The Irrawaddy writes this in “Panties for Peace” Campaign Wins Wide Support:
The “Panties for Peace” campaign aimed at Burma’s military regime is gaining momentum, with the establishment of a committee to drum up support in Thailand.
The campaign began on October 16, with women throughout the world sending packages to Burmese embassies containing panties. Burma’s superstitious generals, particularly junta chief Than Shwe, believe that contact with any item of women’s wear deprives them of their power.
“Panties for Peace” campaigns have sprung up in Australia, Europe, Singapore—and now Thailand, where a Lanna Action for Burma committee has been formed in Chiang Mai to support the feminine protest.
Ying Tzarm, a co-founder of Lanna Action for Burma, told The Irrawaddy that the campaign was aimed at undermining the superstitious beliefs of the military regime.
Liz Hilton, a supporter of the Lanna Action for Burma and a member of the Empower foundation, said that by sending underwear to the men of Burma’s overseas embassies women would be delivering a strong message to the regime.
Beats going to war, seems to me.
That headline occurred to me as I was reading Jay Rosen’s Formula for Online News Success at MediaShift Idea Lab (via Ben Tesch), right after following the latest from Nate Ritter on the San Diego fire situation (tag: sandiegofire), including his Twitter feed, which demonstrates Twitter as a kind of live news router. (As do Chris Messina’s Twitter hashtags.) The Union-Tribune is now also flowing news at sosdfireblog.blogspot.com. Found that via Nate, along with Cat Dirt Sez, another San Diego fire blogger. Also Brian Auer. And Califorinia Fire Followers Set Twitter Ablaze, by Michael Calore..
And thus the Live Web emerges.
[Later…] 4:32am PDST: This post shows up on a Google Blogsearch search for sandiegofire (sorted either by date or by relevance), but not yet on Technorati or on Google (where the top/lucky result is the http://s.technorati.com/sandiegofire).
[Later again…] Here’s the right Technorati search, to include all authority levels. (My blog doesn’t have high authority, at least not yet. And my search default was set for high authority when I did the search the first time, above. So my post in fact was indexed quickly and I just missed it the first time.)
Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burba (here’s the .pdf) has just been released by the Open Net Initiative, and the most important story it tells is about how the story is told. The summary:
| Burmese netizens, operating in a constrained and challenging space in a country with especially low Internet penetration rates, have demonstrated that the tools of information technology can have a strong impact on the global coverage of events as they are unfolding, and sometimes on the events themselves. The events in Burma also provide a chilling example of the limitations of the Internet, access to which was ultimately vulnerable to the unilateral choices of a repressive regime. However, even the vast majority of Burmese without access to or knowledge of the Internet may have benefited from the enduring achievement of a small band of citizen bloggers and journalists — the uploading of vital, relevant information to the Internet was broadcast back in via television and radio and spread through personal networks and communities throughout the country. |
Read the whole thing.
I’ve been looking for news about the Malibu Fire. Inciweb has nothing (though it does cover the Ranch Fire in the Ventura County back country, which has grown past 29,000 acres and looks kind of ominous, though hardly as sexy as one that drives celebrities into the sea). Technorati has 408 results as of this morning (6:18am, Pacific, 9:18am Eastern), including a pretty big pile of videos. About half are more than a hundred days (or hundreds of days) old. Some of the personal videos are hysterical and/or lame beyond endurance. Why post them at all?
What I want to know right now, for example, is whether the “Malibu castle” that we heard burned down (over the radio last night) is the landmark that overlooks the Malibu town center. I see here, on a YouTube’d Fox News report, that indeed it is. Or was. This video report is helpful too, from KCBS/2. S
With its ability to toggle between date and relevance searches, Google Blogsearch gets us to this post about this post from 1pm yesterday, of a Channel 2 TV report. More recent is a Google Earth blog post that points to a CNN report from 1:45am Eastern, this morning. Most of the blog reports go to TV reports, such as this one from KNBC/4. Or this one from KCBS/2.
Technorati defaults to date search, and also lets you filter by “authority”, and that helps some, but probably filters out some good stuff too. (My old blog had high authority. This new one had none at first, but is doing a little better now. Not sure it would make the cut for that last search. We’ll see, I guess.)
If there’s any solid citizen journalism on this fire, I haven’t been able to find much of it — beyond the latest on blogging.la and in LA Observed. From what I can tell right now, your best first source is a Google News search. But I’m just one guy. Maybe one or more of the rest of ya’ll can show otherwise. Hope so.
Meanwhile, the fires will keep coming. They always do. So will the earthquakes and other disasters of our own and nature’s making. The Better Ways of gathering news, getting it out, and finding it in a hurry — you know, fast enough to save lives — have not yet been invented. The parts may be here, but the wholes are not. In fact, the holes are a helluva lot bigger.
Prediction: when the hole gets filled, a river will run through it. Many, in fact.
[Later..] Good comment here. Scott Rosenberg also runs with the river-running-through-it theme.
Driving through the Maine countryside today, I realized suddenly that it was time for Hal Crowther to weigh in on Something Important again. Hal used to do this weekly back when we were both several decades younger and living in North Carolina. I’m long gone, but Hal’s still there, putting out essays no less interesting but far less often.
Sure enough, my email tonight includes a note from a fellow ex-Carolinian, now living in Bangkok, pointing to Hal’s latest, Stop the presses: The future of the newspaper—without the paper. As usual, it’s strong coffee:
| It’s hard to dispute that the newspaper is doomed in the long run, as an inefficient and wasteful medium that technology can easily improve upon. I’ve never argued that point, in spite of my personal feelings—certainly not on Sunday mornings as I peel off the two dozen junk sections crammed into my local paper, fill a garbage bag with them and wonder which shady grove of whispering pines was sacrificed to make the wretched things possible. Compared with audio-visual advertising, they’re also a primitive, low-yield way to deliver a commercial message. |
| But the key point of understanding is that while the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not. The evolution from Gutenberg to Gates may be irreversible, but as new media replace old ones there’s no official passing of the torch of responsibility, no automatic transfer of the sacred trust the First Amendment placed upon the free press and its proprietors. In fact the handoff, such as it is, has been fumbled very badly. As newspapers are eviscerated, marginalized and abandoned, they leave a vacuum that nothing and no one is prepared to fill—a crisis on its way to becoming a tragedy. When railroads and riverboats began to go the way of the passenger pigeon, no one was harmed except the workforce and a few big investors who had failed to diversify. If professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic. |
Even if you don’t agree, read on. It’s killer writing. They don’t get any better. Dig:
| The Tribune Company, the grasping conglomerate owner that strangled the Los Angeles Times, has been entertaining a buyout offer from an “angel,” Chicago real estate megabillionaire Sam Zell, who’s on record saying “there is no difference” between running a newspaper and managing any other for-profit business. If that isn’t irony enough, Zell’s nickname is “The Grave Dancer,” for his ability to spot moribund properties and exploit them profitably. How I’d relish the opportunity to lecture him on the difference between owning a newspaper and owning a mall. Carroll argues that these corporate leviathans are “genuinely perplexed” by journalists–“people in their midst who do not feel beholden, first and foremost, to the shareholder. What makes these people tick, they wonder. The job of any employee, as they see it, is to produce a good financial result, not to indulge in some dreamy form of do-gooding at company expense. … Our corporate superiors regard our beliefs as quaint, wasteful and increasingly tiresome.” If we believe Carroll, who ought to know, nothing we ever held sacred is safe from jungle capitalism and its harsh ideology, as we might have guessed from the awful mess the free market has made of American health care. Citing Carroll and Washington Post owner Donald Graham as his star witnesses, Baker comes to the radical conclusion that “free-market capitalism doesn’t really work very well in the newspaper business, and if rigorously applied, tends to destroy it.” |
| “Angels” who come to the rescue of shareholders smell a whole lot like vultures to me. And the vultures are circling. They may not grasp much of what it took to put this country together, but they have keen noses for carrion. If Zell is the Grave Dancer, “The Grave Digger” is a fitting nickname for Murdoch, that successful devourer of sick newspapers whose purchase of the Journal feels like one of the last big nails in our collective coffin. I picture Murdoch with dirt on his shovel and the WSJ lying there next to the hole he’s digging, not quite dead but very pale and breathing irregularly. Perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to news in America was when Murdoch put the word “Fox” next to it. His gross pollution of the media mainstream in Australia, Great Britain and now the USA secures his place in history as an archenemy of the English language itself. |
| But the Dancer and the Digger are merely broad-shouldered, beady-eyed wealth magnets, crude engines designed by nature for the mindless multiplication of property. A world gone desperately awry gives them far more credit and attention than they deserve. If newspapers achieve extinction, along perhaps with “the news” as we knew it, only the liberals will blame Rupert Murdoch. He’s an end-game player. The newspaper industry stood with a foot in its grave long before Murdoch became an American citizen (for the sole purpose of circumventing the law that only an American citizen can own a television network). |
Then he turns around and hits blogs too:
| Let me put it this way: At any moment there are 40,000 stories out there claiming to be the gospel truth. Many of them are good as gold, presented by people with the best intentions; many are lies and distortions sponsored by people with the worst. Most are muddle and nonsense. It takes years of experience or constant immersion in the news cycles, or both, just to begin to sort them out. The most plausible, professional sources are often the most ruthless liars, and usually the most generously funded. Never in history has so much sinister talent, or so much money, been committed to creating, shaping, manipulating, dominating or suppressing the stories we hear or don’t hear. A blogging orthodontist with a genius IQ is no match at all for Karl Rove, Roger Ailes or Rupert Murdoch—believe me. It’s not even David vs. Goliath, it’s Goliath vs. Tinkerbell. |
Worse, he quotes Andrew Keen. But I’m willing to let that go, because Crowther does the job Keen botched. That job was to challenge, and not merely to deride. Sez Hal,
| In this time of public apathy, the Internet’s spirit impresses me more than its performance. When you show me how Web sites and blogs will generate enough revenue to feed, house and clothe the next generation of full-time truth hunters unashamed to call themselves journalists, I’ll shelve my skepticism and join the parade. Either way they’ll replace us, at least in the sense that they’ll be here when we are gone. And The End may be much nearer than clueless luddites like me can calculate. According to Joel Auchenbach of the Washington Post, a committed blogger, cyber-marketing technique—tracking page views or “eyeballs” minute-to-minute—is already corrupting editors hungry for readers. In the wired, market-driven newsroom, O.J. Simpson trumps global warming every time. |
Well, crap was king in most newsrooms long before Don Henley wrote and sang Dirty Laundry. Really, is Rupert Murdoch any better or worse than William Randolph Hearst? But Hal’s right about every business model he trashes here. Including the one thanks to which countless bloggers have become no less obsessed with eyeballs than any other “journal” — traditional or otherwise — that lives mostly to serve ego and advertising. More importantly, he’s right that we haven’t found the business model that makes a living, and not just a cause, for full-time truth-hunters.
Difference is, I’m an optimist. One thing I want out of VRM is jobs for journalists, all working directly for the readers who comprise the market for truth — and not just for the advertising money that always threatened to currupt journalism, whether or not it succeeded.
In fact, it was for this very purpose that I applied for a Knight News Challenge grant, just a few hours under the wire last week. We’ll see how that goes (I’ve heard nothing, and can’t tell if the online application even went through), but I do want to get us there.
John Scalzi: …so much of the advice boils down, essentially, to this: “become a starfucker for more popular bloggers.” Lots of great quotable shit. I like this:
| If you’re spending your time starfucking a blogger, your sense of priorities are unspeakably out of whack. It’s like sleeping with the screenwriter in Hollywood. The screenwriter who wrote the direct-to-home-video feature. That debuted on the public access channel. In Bakersfield. |
Much more good reading there. Via Kevin Marks.
John Quimby asks, Why is Newspaper 2.0 still Newspaper 0.2? His bottom lines:
| Newspaper 2.0 might be coming soon, but we really won’t see what it looks like until 2.0 managers include video and audio as well as web design and graphic animation fully integrated on their pages. |
| Since the entire concept of Newspaper 2.0 is being and has been pioneered in Santa Barbara, to some degree because of the shift in the value of our own conventional media, it will be interesting to see if someone around here will make it a reality that others can see and advance. |
Anybody up for doing an sbnewsriver on the South Coast? Datum: We did one once for the Day Fire, now well over a year ago. We should have had one for the Zaca Fire.
Land rush time: I just ran a whois for sbnewsriver.com. It isn’t taken. Neither is sbriver.com.
Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now.
Unless, of course, it’s been fed out through syndication and picked up by a news reader or feed search engine (e.g. Google Blogsearch or Technorati) that’s paying attention to how long ago something got posted.
Note that feeding is not cycling. Rivers don’t flow in circles.
News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.
But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.
There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.
This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.
Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.
To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.
It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.
A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver — if not many of them. Most papers will copy other papers, of course. But one paper will start the trend, take the lead, and break the ice that’s damned up their purpose in static sites and tombed archives.
One of them will see that there’s a Live Web as well as a static one. And that the Live Frontier is where the action is, and will be.
I’m betting they’ll follow the New York Times, just like they always do.
If that happens the Times will, as it has done before, follow Dave Winer, who has been showing them how with NYTimesriver for years.
As usual, Dave has been taking the Times, and all of journalism, to school. (Not that they want to go, but he’s taking them anyway.) His latest post is A new view of NY Times news, and it’s a great demonstration of open source development out here in the everyday world. The dude isn’t just talking about the cheap-as-water billion-dollar idea that will save the industry’s ass. He’s actually doing the work of making it happen. He’s thinking out loud and demonstrating his thinking, right where everybody can see it and put it to use.
I was just wondering if the term “river” has even come up at the ONA (Online News Association) conference in Toronto this week. Let’s see…
A search for ona and toronto on Technorati brings up 29 results. When I add river or newsriver the results go to zero in each case. When I search for ona and toronto on Google Blogsearch, I find 3,215 results, which narrow down to 440 (all spam blogs, or splogs) when I add river, and zero when I substitute newsriver.
Let’s see what they say a year from now at the next ONA. I’m betting that newsriver will be one of the top topics at the show.
