I do try to put down something about the methods and the main findings at minimum. It also helps to write it as if you were explaining it to a classmate so that you don’t use shorthand that won’t make sense to you later.

I couldn’t resist using a new software tool. I’m using Scrivener, a Mac-only application for writers. I like that it is designed for re-organizing and tagging which is what I’ll do when I have a better handle on how I want to organize the project. For now I can just write whatever comes to mind. Well-organized text files would probably work just as well.

Today, however, I followed a link from Jay Rosen’s Twitter that said “Blogs vs. big media in news diffusion, huh? Submit to frame check http://tr.im/sFL9 by @sjcobrien. Its one system, baby.” This took me to Chris O’Brian’s post where he argues against distinguishing between blogs and mainstream news. “I see blogs not as competition, but vital parts that help expand the conversation around news and information. I worry less about who is winning the battle of breaking news first, whether it’s mainstream sources, blogs, or Twitter.” It’s a valid point, but that is not a criticism of the research that was actually carried out. There are lots of other things one could or should focus on when researching the news media ecosystem but a study is just that. One article might add one piece of the puzzle and there is always more to do. It seems perfectly reasonable to explore where news memes originate particularly as we have lost several mainstream news organizations recently and the two major newspapers in Chicago are currently in bankruptcy. I could think of more useful “memes” to track, but it seems like an interesting piece.

It is necessary to develop some form of categorization of news sources (which need not be binary) to research this question. This is always imperfect but it can be done in better or worse ways. That’s where Scott Rosenberg adds to the conversation. Rather than criticizing the idea of doing the study at all, he digs into the methods and finds that “the study relies on Google News to draw a boundary between the news media and blogs. A site that appears in Google News is considered media; everything else is a blog. While this approach is convenient, it ends up slicing off some of the top layer of the blogosphere in arbitrary ways.” Good point. It’s really key to know that, by this definition, if a phrase shows up on the Daily Kos, which is a Google News source, it would count as mainstream news in this study. It’s important to develop better ways of categorizing news, which may (gasp) involve human decision makers as well as computers. Developing categories of news sources is not the same as labeling journalists who, like Chris O’Brian, may write for many different types of outlets.

Let’s discuss what kind of meaningful distinctions remain among news organizations so we can do better research rather than waving our hands and saying it’s impossible.

Along similar lines Google just announced a new tool, Google Squared that “automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet” (see full announcement) For example, “A search for “small dogs” pulls a list of small dogs organized by size, weight and breed” (read further).

These first examples are fairly uncontroversial, particularly because this is a neat new technology and not something people rely on .. yet. Just to illustrate the potential minefield that could await Google, why doesn’t the unemployment rate graph that Google provides let me break down the figure by race, for example? I’ve heard on the news that the rates are very different for African Americans and I want to look into that in my county. I know how to download data from the BLS, but most people don’t and certainly won’t. Race classification is a political issue in France, however: “Classifying people by their ethnicity is illegal in France – the nation of “liberty, equality, fraternity” considers all people should be equally French with no differentiation” (The Guardian). I hope this highlights the potential difficulties.

There are much more subtle issues that can have major consequences for how we understand information – see Tufte’s quite illuminating book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information for examples.

You might notice I identified Tom as a “style columnist” since that is the section of the Washington Post in which his article appears, a fact that is incredibly easy to miss online where the context is more likely to be a link that says “look at this biased article in the Washington Post” rather than your own perusal of the style section. Alexandar wrote:

As a TV critic, it’s his job to offer a viewpoint. “I never talk about policies,” Shales told me. “I talk about how [Obama] comes across on TV. I like him based on what I see on television.”… But judging from the steady flow of complaints after each Shales review, a surprising number don’t see a distinction from the news pages.

Alexander feebly suggests labeling the piece as a review, and also acknowledges that this probably would not help.

Would these same conservatives be upset to find this article in the style section of their physical copy of the Washington Post? Probably. Would a lot of these people who are mainly interested in politics actually read the style section? No. News articles were circulated among groups long before Twitter or WordPress, but it was harder to accomplish. The one ideologue who does read the article can easily announce it to interested parties that share his/her views, which was not the intended audience of the style section.

The audience may have misunderstood the intent of the article, a television review, but the paper may also have misunderstood its readers and how those readers gets news – not just through the paper but through interpretive communities.

Also, for those of you reading via RSS, I just updated my my blogroll with some of the interesting blogs I’ve been reading this year.

I wonder if some people who watch the “Crazy cat attacking spuds dog” get the presidential radio address as a related video?

That’s almost 1.5 cents per person. Facebook’s Causes app seems to be highlighting a lot of half-hearted support for this cause. It’s an interesting design problem. Certainly the intent was not to show how superficial support for a cause can be, but some very basic data reveals this problem to everyone.

It reminds me of an online vote for officers in an organization I belong to several years ago. The election was not contested yet some voters did not vote for one of the candidates. The online voting system emailed the results to the group and it caused a bit of a problem because it showed the vote count rather than just the winners. Sometimes a little bit of obfuscation makes everyone happier.

Another speaker at CNMS was Jane Hirt, recently named the new managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. She spoke about her success managing the Trib’s commuter tabloid the RedEye – a rare physical paper that has been a financial success in recent years. One thing she mentioned was that they see the competition of the RedEye as anything people do to pass the time. I wonder how that translates to the mission of the Trib? Here’s Chicagoist’s take.

In the process of training this application I had to figure out what the application calls activities, which took me a while. It isn’t useful to think of activities as application-specific things like ’spreadsheet’ or ‘finder’ since it keeps track of active application already, and it isn’t useful to think about them as projects ‘mil blogs’ or ‘credibility’ since there’s a separate field for projects. My activities, I figured out, were things like writing, data analysis and taking notes, which I do in several applications for several different projects.

Now that I have this set up properly I think it will be very interesting to see ‘what I’m doing’ according to these three different measures, active application, activities, and projects. Then again, maybe I don’t want to know