This was originally published on the New Media Strategies blog. That is where I work.

Google’s long-rumored awe-inspiring Facebook-killing social networking behemoth was revealed on Tuesday: Google+. And it’s pretty OK. Good even.

The suite of tools forms the building blocks by which Google hopes to stitch together a social graph to compete with Facebook’s. Invites to Google+’s central components and five of its main features are trickling out after a large rush on Wednesday night.

Google’s been managing expectations admirably, and Facebook still exists as of Friday afternoon. But Google+ is more than it seems. The foundation Google is laying has potential to merge the social and static Web until they’re practically synonymous.

But maybe you haven’t been poking around Google+ and you’re curious. While you’re waiting for an invite, here’s what you can expect.

Overview

To use Google+, a person must already have a Gmail account with a Google profile. Having your email routed through Gmail with a Google App does not count—it must be a Google account.

The first thing many people will see when using Google+ is the Stream. The Stream, like a Twitter feed or Facebook News Feed, is populated reverse-chronologically with content your friends and connections share with you.

What you share and recommend online will show up in the streams of people who are connected to you, and will also all be gathered in an enhanced Google profile page. Google profile pages already exist for many Gmail and other Google property users, but once Google+ is activated the profile will offer more opportunities for someone to share information about him or herself, including this new sharing stream.

Along with the stream and enhanced Google profiles, Google has announced five other features as part of Google+:

Circles – Circles allows a user to group his of her friends into as many or as few communities as he or she would like. When sharing media or links online, you can then choose exactly with which of your circles you would like to share. It works similarly to Facebook’s lists, but because it is baked-in from launch, should have an almost universal adoption rate.

Hangouts – Hangouts are group video chats. A user can signal they are in a Hangout to a circle or larger group of contacts, which other users can then join to have a video chat.  Up to 10 friends can join a Hangout at any one time.

Sparks – Sparks are topics you are interested in that you choose to follow. Each Spark you visit will be populated with stories about that topic, with weight given to what is new and what you are likely to be most interested in. This will pull from data including what you share and what your friends share, and what you have read in the past.

Instant Uploads – Instant Uploads is a feature by which photos that you take with your phone or other Instant Upload-enabled device is uploaded directly to your Google+ profile. These can be automatically shared with a select circle of your friends that you can curate, so that other circles do not see these images.

• Huddle – Huddle is a group texting/messaging application initially launching on Android similar to GroupMe, though it requires a data plan to function rather than relying on the SMS.  Huddle pulls from the circles you create so you can have conversations among small groups easily.

Will It Work?

The true test of Google+ will be whether it can integrate all the above features gracefully into a user’s established Web experience.  Google+ has the potential to be a large evolution for Google, and the social nature of the tools will permeate all of the company’s platforms.

Recently announced features like the +1 Button, for example, gracefully affect people’s Web experience whether they are a part of Google+ or not (though being a part of the club enhances the button’s utility). The Google-specific Like button works not only on links found within a Google search, but also on items posted into a user’s Stream. More features like this are likely on the horizon (I’m looking at you, Google Wallet).

What will be more important to watch is how large, established Google sites like Gmail and YouTube, Google’s Android smartphone operating system, and the Chrome OS and Web browser begin to exploit the new social philosophy more deeply, and where brands fit into this mix.

What Can I Do Now?

For individuals, snag a Google+ invite and check it out, see if the vocabulary of Google+ suits you better than Twitter’s staccato or Facebook’s deluge.

For brands and organizations it’s time to make you are well-positioned for Google+’s growth:

• Continue SEO and Sharing Efforts: With Google+’s dual focus on traditional search engine algorithms bolstered with social sharing and community graphing, continuing established SEO efforts remains important.  Similar to what Facebook is trying to do with Microsoft Bing, we can expect sharing to affect Google search more and more.
• Get +1: After a strange ‘me too’ phase, the benefits of Google’s +1 button for users is starting to take shape, so it should see more use. For brands, using the +1 button will help drive search rankings and placement.  Integrating the +1 button into pages and sites will be key to improving not only the SEO of a page within the context of a Google search, but also to increasing its reach within Google+ streams going forward.
• Enhance Google Profiles: If you have let any profiles on Google-owned properties (YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, etc.) drift, now is a good time to spruce them up.  Focus on making sure all platforms have the most up-to-date profile information and all link to proper home or landing pages.

What to Look Out For

In a best-case scenario, users will flock to Google+, drawn by its tighter ability to control who sees what content and its deep integration into the Android platform.  This will allow brands to better marry their social sharing efforts with search engine optimization and non-social discovery in a way which Facebook, Bing, and even Google have tried before without fully succeeding. This will all create a better feedback loop between social sharing and non-social discovery so that each builds on another, driving even more people towards specific content and communities.

In a Google Wave-like scenario, where it turns out Google has moved into a new field too hastily, Google+ will lose significant steam once the initial buzz dies down, and consumers may stay tightly tied to their Facebook profiles.

I’m a bit leery of Google+ as is, but I’m pretty excited about its potential.  If Google successfully weaves this new social strategy through its many platforms and tools, the new relationship graph could hasten a sea change in how the Web is used.

I took to Crowdtap recently to get some things off my chest and to have some fun.

Crowdtap is a place where you can answer questions and do surveys to get points. It was kinda addictive.

Anyway, here’s how it turned out:

I kept a blog called Intestines for awhile featuring simple collages. I was restricted to two elements — a headline and a photo — both usually from the same magazine.

Here are some of my favorites. The rest are at Intestines, a blog which I consider pretty much dead.

This post first appeared on New Media Strategies’ blog. That is where I work.

In the hyperconnected morass that is South by Southwest Interactive, it’s easy to get stuck in the “did I check-in/update/tweet about this panel/party/handshake” infinite loop. With a slew of new apps and sites to check out and an ABGC mindset – Always be Generating Content they say – it can get overwhelming.

But even when it does come time to put the smartphone down, it’s hard.

More and more we are seeing a better understanding of the psychology of motivation and incentive determining the functionality of popular websites, social applications, and online communities. By applying these insights, either borrowed from hugely-popular services or applied anew, developers are creating experiences that are difficult to step away from. Many have hit on the idea of using game mechanics to motivate action – the gamification of the Web.

Game mechanics can include things like points, rankings, badges or other incremental rewards for specific actions. Whether discussed as a larger trend or a specific instance, many panels, speakers and attendees at SXSW Interactive were buzzing about gamification.

Two speakers dealt heavily with gaming as a framework to motivate actions for the social good. Seth Priebatsch, founder of mobile check-in app SCVNGR, described a “game layer” in his keynote. Priebatsch sees a world in which we move beyond the “social layer” we codified last decade, building upon it a vast layer which taps into our individual motivations to encourage action through these game mechanics. If Facebook is the hub of the social layer, Priebatsch hopes SCVNGR is the basis of the game layer.

Similarly, author and game designer Dr. Jane McGonigle spoke to her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, which analyzes how videogames entice players while making daunting tasks manageable while keeping them fulfilling. She spoke about the benefits of games in a broad way, but the motivators are the same: progression toward a goal, intermediate incentives and competition.

Both McGonigle and Priebatsch see the potential for these incentives to be repurposed for social good. But this isn’t what we’ve seen in practice. The past two years have featured the use of these motivators in a commercial capacity. During the next two this trend is sure to grow.

Game mechanics can create very sticky user experiences when implemented well. Foursquare is the obvious example. Its use of game mechanisms – awarding mayorships, passing out badges, and awarding checkin points – has inspired hundreds of millions of checkins and a 3400% rise in users just in the last year.

Sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow use karma or reputation points to incent valuable comments and additions. LinkedIn‘s oft-touted progress bar encourages people to add more to their profiles.

In Reddit, Stack Overflow and LinkedIn’s cases, the game mechanics are applied narrowly to encourage a very specific activity. While Foursquare has had incredible growth, we’ve seen that recently the company has struggled to find a balance between being a geosocial game and a tool for exploration and making human connections.

This is the struggle many strategists and developers are likely to find themselves in as they try to apply game mechanics to their projects. Coming back from Austin with the gamification-high still tingling in your nostrils, it’s tempting to start adding leaderboards to every community you’re crafting.

Before you go and do that, consider these three things:

The mechanics need to reinforce the action. This is the hardest and most important piece of including gaming mechanics for your app, website or community. Are the mechanics reinforcing the connections or actions you want people to create or do? Under-implement the mechanics and they’ll feel tacked-on and superfluous. Overstress them and the gameplay can overshadow the primary motive of your campaign, starting a points-race among your users.

Don’t lie with implied rewards. As Evan Jones of Stitch Media points out in his great SXSW talk How Progress Bars Change the Way We Live, for all the simple genius behind LinkedIn’s profile completion progress bar, when you reach 100 percent nothing happens. When you have incremental movement toward an endpoint, like progress bars or rankings or levels, there is an unspoken pact with the user that the progress they are completing will result in some payoff in the end. Not providing one is using the game mechanics to in-essence lie to your users, promising something that never comes.

Part of winning is making others lose. If competition is part of your system, be careful not to turn off new users by allowing early adopters to run away with all the points. Make sure the ranking system you set up doesn’t allow for easy griefing.  Foursquare keeps mayorships competitive by limiting each to two months of checkins. Think about a user months down the line, will he or she have an insurmountable barrier to entry?

Game mechanics can create the initial bonds to your community, but the experience must be more than just the game. We can bet that the next breakout online social experiences – whether via mobile, on the Web-based or otherwise – will feature them prominently.

What are your favorite examples of gamification? Any places you’ve seen it backfire?

Remember the 20th Century? Think hard. It was before YouTube, before American Idol even, before all of that. You were probably younger and had better skin tone.

The 20th Century began a long time ago, and a lot of great things wouldn’t've happened without it. One of the the more interesting things that can trace it’s ancestry to the the time is anonymity, a state that no century before shared.

Anonymity didn’t always exist, but many people in the early part of the 20th Century grew quite used to it, and it was embraced. Whole cities were built around the idea. It spread.

The century went on like this for some years, and the Internet came along. The Internet and anonymity went together like cellphones and Twitpic. Both flourished as handles were registered and Geocities populated. Be who you want to be! Or be your undisclosed self if you want. Join some group of like-minded recluses bound by common interest, without people knowing that you live in a big city or a big commune, whether you’re a high school teacher during the day or just high.

As the Internet grew, though, it betrayed anonymity. With that the 20th Century was all but over.

It only takes about 33 bits of information (entropy!) to identify an individual online, experts say. The first few bits are easy enough, you may have to work to make them not automatically available. Internet users are increasingly transmitting freely the medium-difficulty bits, via cookies and cross-logins and browser info. With the Web stressing “social,” our culpability in the death of anonymity is obvious.

Our increased comfort with sharing identifying information online is a large part of it, but that’s the kind of thing that only worries olds. Technology is the part that can seem scary and invasive. Hey, why don’t we write Greasemonkey scripts linking the People of Wal-Mart to their Facebook profiles, or let’s make a FriendFeedesque site that automatically aggregates all your accounts (including your cached Xanga) without your opt-in. If it’s possible and easy, it’ll happen. It’s getting easier.

Our increased willingness to share our identity on the Internet and the Internet’s increased ability to aggregate this information, cross-reference it with surfing trends and pattern recognition to spit out whole people is changing the Internet. Post-anonymity,

The Internet will be less voyeuristic. People will be much less likely to post their deepest darkest whatever or their most embarrassing XYZ when it’s obvious it’ll be around forever, tagged, optimized and with a share button. People will also be less likely to make fun of random people when the identities of all parties are known, shown and linked back to your work profile. So goodbye People of Wal-Mart (thank god), goodbye Look at this Fucking Hipster and even Overheard in D.C.

It will be a medium for social reinforcement. Instead of a place where teenagers and deviants and teenage deviants hang out (I came up during this time of the Internet, it was scary/wonderful), the Internet has become a place where grandmas and marketers congregate and exchange the currencies of grandmommery and marketry. And guess what, the world is only producing more Internet-addled grandmas and marketers. When these people find you online they will do what we do in the real world: reward you for actions that they approve of and criticize actions they don’t. You’ll do likewise, and the same power dynamics that exist in your house or your school or your work will translate easily and fully to the Internet.

The Web becomes more relevant to real life. Social graphs and social graphing calculators are already calling on APIs at all hours of the day, and are no longer the next big thing. This point steps into the wrong side of my “don’t be trite” rule, but. The Internet of 2010 already is miles more personalized than 2008, and as anonymity passes there is no reason the trend won’t accelerate. The Internet you will find most easy to use and most useful will be the one that gives you what you like, what people you like like, and what people who like what you and your friends like like. You will like this! But it’s not all roses…

The Internet will cease to be a tool of discovery. When you’re only being shown what you will like, the real world becomes your most trusted outlet for discovery. This plays right into the hand of the real-world lobby (“Surprise Yourself! Go Outside!”) and leaves Internet advocates pining for the days when the Internet could be used to find something completely novel, something not crowdsourced or shared or otherwise vetted, happy accidents. In a post-anonymous Internet, we’ll ask, “Would you even want to take that chance?”

The post-anonymity Internet will continue to have tons of great information on it, how could it not. Those of us who don’t already will begin to live our lives on it. Those of us who have lived our lives on the Internet in front of a computer will find that “my life on the Internet” actually includes more and more interacting with the Internet in places without a computer. But without anonymity, what are you willing to post online? Where are you willing to visit (PhillipHerndon.com?)?

Social pressures search advancements are retarding the free-wheeling no-holds-barred say-what-I-wanna life the Internet’s seemed to be nurturing the past 15 years. The public anonymous Web is on its last legs. Press “Like” below to share this article with your friends.

Tim, Sameer and I recorded this cover of Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” in June 2010. Tim did all the production and mastering and takes the second verse. Sameer on first, me on third.

Seth Pardick’s third album, Turn Off Your Radio, came out recently! The title track’s a take off on Nilsson and one of my favorites of the bunch right now.

The eight other songs Seth and I recorded at my homebrew studio setup right here in Arlington. All in all I think it’s his best yet, and my best recording/producing effort to date (though still pretty lo-fi).

I recorded his last albums too, you might remember.

Anyway here it is, right click + save as to keep the .mp3s forever:

1. Turn Off Your Radio
2. Pacific Ocean
3. The One that I Held in my Hand
4. River is Wide
5. Blood From a Stone
6. See Me Fall
7. Remember My Name
8. Bridges
9. Crab Apple Cider Blues

In a story I can only interpret as a big “screw you” to the New York Times Co., the Boston Globe covered news that the NYT Co. is giving a $20 million ultimatum to the Globe’s unions with a front-page story on how everyone in the Boston area could not possibly live without their paper.

The story, “Threat to Globe triggers flood of feelings” (yes I’ve run into horrible A1 headlines in the Globe before) comes off as narcissistic and self-important.

News that The New York Times Co. might shut down the biggest newspaper in New England if its unions don’t swiftly agree to $20 million in cuts sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry from places as disparate as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Johnny’s Luncheonette in Newton Centre, and voices as varied as US Senator John F. Kerry and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. To some readers, such a loss seemed unimaginable, but others said the transformation from paper to the Internet is inevitable.

OK, that was rough but not too bad. But hey Globe reporters, what did citizens say to you when you asked them how important they think you are?

Losing the Globe is more than the shuttering of a company, readers said. It would be, they said, the loss of something essential to Massachusetts’ very sense of itself — and one of the few forces for public accountability in the region.

Heaven’s be!

They recalled articles exposing corruption and waste in government and other institutions, and stories giving voice to those who otherwise would have no power at all.

Surely some people disagreed? Yeah, but thankfully they’re idiots.

Critics of the Globe, especially in anonymous comments posted on the newspaper’s website, said the newspaper was falling victim not just to turbulent economic times but what they called its own “liberal bias,” though they did not provide specific examples. Some complained about ink stains; others about perfumed inserts in the newspaper. Still others raised deeper concerns about customer service.

After the jump the story becomes somewhat less exaggerated, with readers giving pretty much every argument for keeping the paper, from “I want a real paper,” to:

“Could you imagine our kids going through life not knowing what a paper is?” said…Suzanne [Locke], who teaches at a Cambridge private school.

I don’t quite understand her argument (without the Globe they wouldn’t know what a paper is?), but here’s the kicker:

Still, the Lockes admitted, they don’t get the paper every day. Mornings are consumed with getting the boys ready for school and rushing off to work, where Steven Locke reads Boston.com, the Globe website.

This one comes right at the end:

Peter Wolf, the front man for the J. Geils Band, said losing the Globe would destroy readers’ connection to the region.

Destroy connection to the region! Can we get a quote on that?

“I can’t say it starts my morning but it starts my afternoon and it’s an old friend,” [Wolf] said. “Unfortunately people don’t get the impact till after it’s done. And when it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”

Oh. Not quite the rending of the flesh I was expecting.

Now, I understand that it’s tough to hear your favorite hometown paper might be going under (especially if you work there). I know that if the Washington Post I’ve been reading for the past eight years were to be threatened, or if word that my childhood paper the Tampa Tribune was closing got out, I’d be disappointed.

But if either then ran a self-indulgent story like this on the front-page the next day, my eyes would roll out of my head. This could have passed as a column. It’s not the kind of thing to be bandying around as journalism when you’re about to go out of business.

I generally think the Globe is a great paper. I love The Big Picture, the Ideas section, and the Reporters’ Questions section of this page down on the right. I would really rather they not go out of business (though going online-only wouldn’t really affect me here in DC). However, they really need to check themselves next time they decide to run a story about how important they are.

****

Misaligned Richter scales: While the Globe reports that news of a possible closure “sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry,” the Boston Herald reports sources saying the “dire message sent a shockwave through a newspaper that has been battered by bad news and decimated by layoffs.”

At the end of the day today my buddy Seth Pardick came up and gave me one of the first copies of his new album, Virginia’s Where They Do the Swing.

He and I have been working hard on the album for the past few months (he more than I), and I’m proud to say six of the ten songs on Seth’s second effort were recorded by none other than me.

Seth has a folky, lo-fi vibe (lo-fi mostly due to my meagre recording setup). You can probably catch him performing somewhere around Reston if you keep your eyes out.

Here are the mp3s for the new album (right click and “Save As” to keep). Those asterisked are the ones not recorded in my luxurious home studio. They’re collaborations with Micah Nagel. On the rest Seth plays all the instruments. I mostly clicked buttons and fondled knobs.

To start with, I suggest ‘When I Get Home,’ which is my favorite (I’m also liking ‘Yes, I Know’ a lot right now).

1. Green Eyed Gal*
2. Yes, I Know*
3. Brandywine
4. Occam’s Razor
5. Ten Foot Tall Blues
6. Lazarus, Rise*
7. Speed of Sound
8. Damsel With a Dulcimer
9. When I Get Home
10. Got a Mind to Go Out Walkin’*

I also recorded much of Seth’s first album back in 2007. I also highly recommend it.

The votes are in, and a new president’s been elected. The 2008 election cycle has been called the longest, the most expensive, and, for many, the most inspiring and interesting they can remember.

All the focus on the campaign led to record numbers of viewers/readers for print and television news, with websites seeing some of the largest gains.

Which is to say the larger media outlets loved the election. It got people to read, to watch, to debate and to be involved with their news sources.

Also, though, the election showed the weaknesses of the mainstream media. As they got hooked, news consumers looked first to the large media for their news. There they found slow, tentative coverage with little of the analysis they craved. So they branched out, found political blogs, rumor sites, and even to a greater degree began watching the speeches and debates first hand in order to form their own opinions.

We’ve been told that new media is weakening the old guard, but during this election cycle we saw just how new media would finally break the press.

From early in the primaries, the candidates saw this happening to differing degrees, and responded in kind. From the WSJ:

“This year’s campaign…has marked a change in the role the press plays. The prominence, readership and influence of online political sites has mushroomed, taking away some of the prominence of the mainstream media — traditional television networks, newspapers and news services. Campaigns have taken to getting out word of pending shifts in strategy by leaking them to political websites, and both parties catered to bloggers at their conventions.

“For example, when word first circulated that the McCain campaign was about to launch its first TV ad linking Sen. Obama with former Weathermen radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign promptly told the political website Politico.com…that it intended to counter with an ad calling Sen. McCain ‘erratic in a crisis.’ … [W]ord of the Obama team’s planned countermove was circulating among politicians and journalists before they had even seen the McCain ad that prompted it.”

After years of getting scooped by the Internet, large media outlets now found themselves being routinely scooped in political coverage, a market they were supposed to have cornered. How did this happen? After all, it was the big guys who had the credentials, who were there on the campaign planes flying from stump to stump with the candidates.

In the Internet, candidates saw something hard to control and impossible to predict, but something where the plurality of voices lead to stories rising to the top based on the strength of the message. The candidates also saw a place that, if they hit first and well, might be won over.

Mainstream news outlets began to respond. From Time:

“As politics has expanded to more platforms–blogs, YouTube, comedy shows–the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

“This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people’s appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered.

…

“The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media — all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy — learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn’t snark, you didn’t exist.”

From the Washington Post:

“Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online…the wire service is evolving into the world’s largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it.”

Later:

“‘It’s enough that we’re expected to always be first, this incredible pressure to break the news,’ one AP political reporter told me. ‘But now we also have to magically find a brilliant and nifty lead, the unique angle, while still beating everyone else. I feel like I’m competing with Politico, the New York Times and Reuters simultaneously.’ And, indeed, they are.”

The media splintered. Analysis came quicker and reporters found their voices; instead of pretending reporters are robots transcribing events verbatim, we read them knowing they may be wrong (sometimes expecting them to be so). The robot work we’ve passed on to the video streams, the transcripts, we can compare. And in this election many did.

The media became less about trust, and more about depth. It was great.

Was great, as it turned out. TV networks pulled back on election night. For all the streamlining and sharpening they mustered in the months leading up to the election, they pussyfooted at the last second.

The NYT admits:

“It was clear long before 11 p.m. that Mr. Obama had won, but anchors were skittish about saying too much too soon.”

In fact, “Barack Obama’s victory was told tentatively, elliptically, less with numbers than with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy. Throughout the night, the obvious was hinted at with gauzy video clips filling the screen. As states toppled in Mr. Obama’s favor, news programs ran lyrical pictures of the Obama family that looked as iconic as a Kennedy scrapbook.”

But they wouldn’t say it. After Ohio came in they wouldn’t just say that Obama was the winner, was pretty much the winner, that it the chances of McCain winning Virginia, Florida, and California (one of the only ways he could have won after that) were between slim and none.

Watching CNN, I remember two anchors coloring in states, showing how many electoral votes McCain would have if he won various remaining states.

“I’m not going to be dishonest and say it’s possible McCain could win California, Washington, or Oregon,” one anchor said, leaving McCain woefully under 270 votes. “So?…” the other anchor led. “Yeah,” he replied.

Obama’s victory was only a formality of tallying votes and closing polls, but no one on the networks would go so far to even say Obama had a pretty good chance of winning at that point.

This pulling back is going to continue. Newspapers will take a break and a deep breath before bemoaning the inevitable decline of print again, and cable news will begin throwing scandal after scandal up on the screen, seeing which kinda sticks before beating it to the ground.

But the next time something captures the culture’s interest and imagination like this election did, those news agencies that took the lessons of the last two years to heart and those that change the way they cater to the journalistic needs of their audience will have the advantage.

The blogs and rumormills and social media sites aren’t going to go away, but the news sources that can provide the most timely analysis, with updates and changes and refinements, they’re the ones that’ll get through this alright.

The way journalism is made changed in this long election cycle, and people loved it. As we pared the candidates to one, they became real people with flaws just like us. Their supporters also became real people, as we saw beyond them as symbols and discovered they had motives, morals, insecurities, and virtues. But best of all, reporters began showing us their sense of humor, their opinions, and at times their fallibility, and they began to become people to.

Let’s keep that going.