I just got around to reading this article by Dave Winer from a couple days ago concerning what an initial step toward an open newsroom would look like. Essentially, Dave’s idea is to get the experts on a topic to communicate directly to the readers through the newspaper. He writes:

Now, to be clear — I’m not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I’m talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters’ so I would choose experts who express themselves well.

Seems to make a lot of sense to me, and if these experts are producing content that is as good as the reporters, then it somewhat lessens the need for droves of reporters to pull quotes from the experts. I don’t see “expert reporting” as replacing all journalists at a paper, but I definitely see it as an important first step toward lessening the huge overhead that many papers operate under.

Link via Opening the newsroom, Step 1 (Scripting News).

So as many have reported, written about, and tweeted Apple released a public beta of Safari 4 today. Since I primarily use Safari for web browsing this mattered a lot to me and I was excited to get my hands on it to see what the future holds. Below are some initial impressions.

First, it’s FAST. I mean significantly faster in loading pages. I don’t have facts and numbers, but loading pages is much more smooth and quick.

The new UI is interesting, and in general I’m a fan of it. The subtle changes work in my mind (but to read a more intensive look at the UI check out Sebastiaan’s post at the Cocoia Blog).

While most of the changes work for me there’s one significant one that absolutely frustrates me: the incorporation of the tab bar into the top bit of the window. With the new tab bar setup you can no longer drag a link to the tab area to create a new tab. Sounds like something small, but when you do it frequently it can be a pretty frustrating change to try and get used to. In the new version of Safari the only solution I’ve found is to drag the url onto the Safari icon in the dock. This will create a new tab, but it seems a little ridiculous to have to drag a url that far in order to open it.

Also a small gripe that is probably just a result of Safari 4 being a beta release, but while trying to link to Sebastiaan’s post above I realized that the hyperlink button in WordPress breaks Safari. The link window appears, but won’t actually allow you to do anything (even close it). Your only option is to reload the page. Hopefully that will get ironed out.

Anyway, in general I’m happy with the speed improvements and most of the UI changes and hopefully in future releases of Safari 4 Apple will make it so that a url can be dragged over the “+” icon to create a new tab. That would make a lot of sense to me and frankly seems like something that should be in there now.

Tonight was the first time that I took place in the weekly CollegeJourn talk. This week it was the “Bring a Professor” chat so in addition to the journalism students that usually take part in the discussion there were a significant number of journalism professors and professionals there as well. Below are some of my first impressions of the system and the mode of communication.

First, as much as I like the idea of a streaming chat interface it was just too many people to make that useful. The lag between entering a message and seeing it appear was just too long. Personally I liked the idea that @joeybaker provided which was combining Twitter hashtags and Tweetchat. This would utilize Twitter and create what seems to me to be a more open group chat forum.

Second, after taking part in a discussion I truly understand the power of tools like Twitter. For something that (correct me if I’m wrong) has only been going on for the last couple months CollegeJourn brings together a surprising number of people who are really, truly bright. The ideas that were being bounced back and forth (even in a limited CoverItLive chatroom) were great. Hearing opinions from students, professors, and professionals was really great for me. Even though I’ve only really been into this college journalism scene since I was hired at the Whitman Pioneer it is something that is truly captivating.

Third, three hours is just too long in the present format. It was exhausting, and frankly I got too hungry by about 7:15 p.m. and had to drop the chat to make dinner. Thus, I missed out on some of the discussion concerning collaboration. While the length provides for some excellent discussion I think that a slightly shorter session (maybe 2 hours) could be a lot more digestible.

Fourth, just to reiterate, there are some really bright students out there in journalism. They’re smart, motivated, and passionate about what they do; it’d be great to have more people like that here at Whitman. CollegeJourn is a great idea and a great place for them all to come together.

Anyway, it was a great experience, and I plan on taking part in future chats. If you’re interested in college journalism, or even journalism in general check it out every Sunday night from 8-11 p.m. EST.