April 2009
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Month April 2009

Entries 5 Total

Bookmarks for April 24th

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for April 24th. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • In defense of Twitter – kottke.org – A great post concerning how there is nothing inherent to the banality of Twitter updates; this banality exists in "real" conversations as well. It's a good point and one that I've been trying to make recently with friends who "just don't get Twitter."
  • An interview with Tweetie creator Loren Brichter | Software | Macworld – Interesting interview with the creator of Tweetie (my new Mac Twitter client of choice). One of the best points is about how he set out to build a Twitter app that he could use to manage his Twitter accounts. I've found the best apps to be those that developers built to solve their own needs.
  • A Crash-Course in WordPress Plugin Development – Nettuts+ – What appears to be a good Nettuts tutorial on creating a basic WordPress plugin. Should be helpful this summer when I attempt to write some of my own. Should be fun!
Posted on April 24, ’09

Expanding the notion of link journalism

One of the things that I’m extremely interested in expanding at The Whitman Pioneer is the use of tools like Publish2 among the newsroom. I think that the potential for link journalism is tremendous and I definitely think that Publish2 is the best among what’s out there right now. However, I have a significant problem with it in terms of how applicable it is to the future of news.

Expand Editorial Standards

Publish2′s website states that: “Free Publish2 accounts are available to journalists who maintain our editorial standards.” Furthermore, those standards read:

At a time when digital technology is rapidly transforming and expanding the practice of journalism, and allowing anyone to wield “the power of the press,” editorial standards are more important than ever. These standards are what separate journalism from marketing, PR, paid advocacy, or personal expression, which on the web are increasingly difficult to differentiate.

While I certainly agree that “digital technology is rapidly transforming and expanding the practice of journalism” I’ve come to steadily disagree with the idea that the solution is reassert editorial standards within the journalism community.

We’ve come to live in a time when almost anyone can break a news story with Twitter or their blog and where others can provide HD video coverage of an event with something that fits in their pocket. Due to this, I think that the extension of the editorial standards into civil society is more important than ever.

How does this factor into the future?

I have a hard time foreseeing a future for newspapers if they do not rely heavily upon their communities for contributions. While letters to the editor, guest columnists, and other means of involvement are great I think that the greatest potential is building a newspaper site that incorporates stories from the entire community.

Personal blogs, independent papers, art magazines, etc. all make up the coverage of a community and all carry the potential to add to the worth of a local paper. Sure, a journalist could link to this content with Publish2 and get it onto the paper’s site that way, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the community.

How much more interested in a local paper would a community be if it knew that it could submit links that would be included on the site? Sure, this could be accomplished with Delicious but it would be easier with a link-sharing tool that focusing on news stories.

Does it defeat the purpose of Publish2?

While I recognize the role that limiting membership in Publish2 to journalists plays I don’t think that expanding membership opportunities would detract from their purpose.

If the concern is that the quality of stories linked to would deteriorate then that shows an alarmingly low respect for the general news-reading community. The great thing that Publish2 has that Delicious and other tools don’t is the quality of stories. I sincerely doubt that by opening up Publish2 the quality would degrade.

Ultimately I have a hard time conceiving of the rationale behind limiting Publish2 to journalists. It certainly creates a nice little community of journalists, but so did the institutions of the old model of journalism that is collapsing by the week.

By expanding the possibilities of Publish2 the diversity of stories linked would rise and the utility of the service to news orgs would be drastically increased.

Postnote: Don’t get me wrong, I really love Publish2 and the service it offers. My hope is that the above didn’t come off too harsh and that it’s simply taken as advice for how to move the service forward. To see some of the great examples of how newsrooms are already making use of Publish2 you can see their examples page.

Posted on April 23, ’09

Bookmarks for April 22nd through April 23rd

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for April 22nd through April 23rd. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next? – Interesting piece about how the future will be something different in terms of the economy. I'm not so sure about people who claim that capitalism has utterly failed; I think it has, but I'm not sure that means it won't regenerate.
  • To Tweet or Not to Tweet – NYTimes.com – An atrocious interview between Maureen Dowd and Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Throughout the whole thing Dowd comes off as antagonistic and vindictive. The closing of the interview is great though:

    Dowd: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?

    Biz Stone: Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message “Help.”

  • Welcome to the New Media Campaign Tools of 2012 | Mother Jones – Interesting read about the use of technology in the Obama campaign. The link between my.barackobama.com and actual physical volunteering and organizing is particularly interesting.
Posted on April 23, ’09

Tips from the Wall Street Journal on charging for news

This is from all the way back on April 8th, but the Nieman Lab has a video of Alan Murray, the executive editor of the Wall Street Journal discussing the mindset that the journal adopts in terms of charging users for content. He outlines 5 fundamental aspects to their business strategy that are quite good. Perhaps the best point made is that:

2. You can’t charge for exclusives that will just be repeated elsewhere. This was my favorite lesson from Murray, who explained, “If it’s a big news story, if we report a takeover and — we could hold that behind the pay wall, but if we do, BusinessWeek or someone else will simply write a story saying ‘The Wall Street Journal is reporting x,’ and they’ll get all the traffic. Why would we do that?” So they drop the pay wall, “and take the traffic ourselves, thank you very much,” Murray said.

I think out of all the discussion concerning the creation of a business model for online news this point is one of the most important. The reality is that information is no longer a rare commodity and very few people will be willing to pay for general news stories.

There’s also a series of other short videos with Murray on Nieman’s Vimeo account. Below Murray discusses how the Journal has changed since its takeover by Murdoch.

Posted on April 21, ’09

Bookmarks for April 20th through April 21st

In order to share what I’ve found to be useful/interesting/etc. while browsing around below are my links for April 20th through April 21st. You can find my full set of bookmarks at my Delicious account.

  • Design Considerations for Touch UI ~ Authentic Boredom – An interesting post with a video and a link to an article about what must change design-wise when we start seeing touch-based devices truly coming to dominate the realm of computers. The whole notion of having a computer based off of touch-based gestures is fascinating and I think that at some point it will become reality. I think that the adoption of the iPhone and other devices has shown that people are willing to put down their physical keyboards and mice.
  • Create Vimeo-like top navigation – A tutorial for creating a navigation menu ala Vimeo. Interesting in the way that it could conserve space. Might now work that well for a large news site, but it may be useful for blog pages or for article pages.
  • Coming Home to Rwanda – An interesting article from Michael Abramowitz at the Atlantic about the recent efforts between Rwanda and The Congo to work together to bring refugees from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda home.
Posted on April 21, ’09