Journalism
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Tab closings
These are all the non-advertising-related items I just moved out of this post here on doc.blog. This Wired piece on podcasting’s history fails to mention either Dave Winer or RSS. Huge oversights, those. Without mentioning the Wired piece, Dave offers many corrections. Mount Hope Cemetery in Lander, Wyoming: the final resting place of many memorable characters in Ethel Waxham… Continue reading
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The Daily Tab for 2017_06_06
Required viewing: A Good American, a documentary on Bill Binney and the NSA by @FriedrichMoser. IMHO, this is the real Snowden movie. And I say that with full respect for Snowden. Please watch it. (Disclosure: I have spent quality time with both Bill and Fritz, and believe in both.) Bonus dude: @KirkWiebe, also ex-NSA and a colleague of Bill’s.… Continue reading
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Loose Links
Jamie Bartlett in The Guardian: Forget far-right populism – crypto-anarchists are the new masters. Well, yes, no and maybe. Hard to tell. At least it’s a good look around many curves. Says here Robert E. Lee was a bad guy. Specifically, a white supremacist and slave abuser. You’re hundreds (or thousands) of miles but only one… Continue reading
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Brands need to fire adtech
Brands are starting to bail from adtech, and news about it is coming fast and hard. The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more… Continue reading
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Saving High Mountain
I’ve long thought that the most consequential thing I’ve ever done was write a newspaper editorial that helped stop development atop the highest wooded hilltop overlooking the New York metro. The hill is called High Mountain, and it is now home to the High Mountain Park Preserve in Wayne, New Jersey. That’s it above,… Continue reading
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How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content
Journalism is in a world of hurt because it has been marginalized by a new business model that requires maximizing “content” instead. That model is called adtech. We can see adtech’s effects in The New York Times’ In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left, by David Chen. His prime example is the Newark… Continue reading
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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks
Imagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears. We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind. You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized… Continue reading
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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well already: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.” So here’s a message from humanity to Google and all the other spy organizations in… Continue reading
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Seeing is believing
I didn’t watch Monday’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I listened to it, while I live blogged what I heard in a window on top of it. This was after getting up in the middle of the night at an AirBnB with terrible wi-fi in the middle of London. While Hillary scored some… Continue reading
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An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers
[Update: 29 June 2016 — Forbes has backed off, but Wired hasn’t yet. So the invitation stands. So does a path forward.] A few days ago, I followed this link at Digg to Forbes, where I was met by the message above. Problem is, I don’t have an ad blocker installed. I have tracking protection.… Continue reading
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Old wise in news bottles
That headline just came to me and I don’t want to lose it. So I’ll post it now and fill in the large blank below later. Continue reading
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What everything isn’t
We know shit. I mean, in respect to the Everything that surrounds us, and the culture in which we are pickled from start to finish, what we know rounds to nothing and is, with the provisional exception of the subjects and people we study and love, incomplete and therefore somewhere between questionable and wrong. But… Continue reading
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Valley Fire losses
Here is the current perimeter of the Valley Fire, according to the USGS’ GEOMAC viewer: As you see, no places are identified there. One in particular, however, is of extremely special interest to me: Harbin Hot Springs. That’s where I met my wife and made more friends than I can count. It is, or was, … Continue reading
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Content as Icebergs
(Cross posted from this at Facebook) In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now. For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my… Continue reading
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If marketing listened to markets, they’d hear what ad blocking is telling them
What follows is my comment (the first one!) under Confusion Reigns as Apple Puts the Spotlight on Mobile Ad Blocking, in AdAge. I’ve added some links. Marketers should be looking at what the market wants, and why. The market is customers, and they are speaking to marketers today by making ad blockers the most popular… Continue reading
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A history lesson in how to automate journalism with war and sports metaphors
What I’ve always loved most about the Web† is how it allows each of us to publish on our own, as individuals, for the whole world. I started doing that as soon as I could get a dial-up account with a nearby ISP (the late Batnet of Palo Alto) in 1995. Here is one of… Continue reading
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The greatest western I’ve ever read
— is John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains. It’s one book among five collected in Annals of the Former World, which won a Pulitzer in 1999. In all five, McPhee follows a geologist around; and all five of the geologists are interesting characters. None, however, is more interesting than J. David Love, who grew up… Continue reading
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The untold pirate radio story in New York
[Update, 4 June 2016—I’m attempting to listen right now to WFAN/101.9 and it’s obliterated by signals flanking it on 101.7 and 102.1. Maybe my tweet about it here will finally get some journalists interested in the topic.] The radio dial here in “upstate” Manhattan and the Bronx is packed with pirate radio signals. Many are… Continue reading
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Dear Magazines: please quit screwing loyal subscribers
When my main credit card got yanked for some kind of fraud activity earlier this month (as it seems all of them do, sooner or later) I had the unpleasant task of going back over my bills to see what companies I’d need to give a new credit card number. Among those many (Amazon, Apple,… Continue reading
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Newsstands are à la carte. How about online as well?
I travel a lot, and buy newspapers wherever I happen to be. That would be true online as well, if I could do it. But I can’t, because that’s not an option. For example, my butt is in California right now, but my nose is in Boston, where I’m reading the Globe. I don’t want a… Continue reading