Eyes East: Latest posts

Have more fun

Chris Amico — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:55:50 -0700

Before she flew to Russia ahead of Barack Obama's trip there this week, someone gave Margaret Warner an HD Flip Cam to shoot a few video diaries for the web. They came out a little bouncy, not quite the quality we'd get from more serious video equipment and the sound, while way better than I would have expected, could still be a bit clearer.

But the big thing I see in this video, and what I really like about it, is a reporter having fun.

There's this unscripted feel about the whole thing (I don't know how much was rehearsed), like a blog post. There's also a sense of how much time this reporter has put in covering Russia, and how much she knows about the subject. Then there's that diversion about ice cream, which a couple of my colleagues thought was weird. Personally, I think it's one of the best parts. Maybe I empathize after so much time spend hunting down Magnum bars in Dalian.

Reporters tend to be fun people. Hurried, sarcastic, sometimes cutting people, but fun, especially off deadline. But how often does that come through in what we produce? It's tough to find much life in inverted pyramids.

When journalists (myself included) talk about their craft, we tend to take the high tones of a mother dishing out broccoli. This is good for you, we say, and maybe we're right on that (especially on weeks when Michael Jackson hasn't died).

Sometimes, though, we could all use a bit more ice cream.

Do something.

Chris Amico — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:28:20 -0700

Alex said this in a recent email, and it's worth repeating:

In the end, I think, doing something is what's really important. There can be a lot of wanking over platforms, implementation, topics or whatever. But doing something, and including people, being open in approach, is probably the most important thing to do, I think, and once the ball's rolling, let it roll in they way it wants to.

Remember that when meetings multiply, when platform wars become software crusades, when your computer does things that cause you to swear in Portuguese and Chinese and Italian.

Doing something is what's important. Do something that matters.

Twenty years

Chris Amico — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:54:18 -0700

The Beijing I knew in my brief visits is a product of the last two decades, the time since Tiananmen Square, when China traded political freedom for economic liberty. It's a city I remember as thriving, diverse, crowded and still growing. It's the only place in China I ever heard anyone acknowledge what happened twenty years ago today.

I wrote about that memory two years ago, when I was an English teacher in Dalian. The day after getting blank stares from a group of college freshmen when I asked about the date, a graduate student dismissed the movement, saying: "Maybe they had too much free time. I don't really know what it was about. You know, I was small when all that happened."

I don't really know what else to say about Tiananmen. Fortunately, there's an internet of thought out there:

More Links

You can follow all my Tiananmen-related links on Publish2 or in my link stream

Beyond publishing

Chris Amico — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:26:51 -0700

This blog has been rather neglected since I moved to DC.

There's been work. And finding an apartment. And adjusting to life on the East Coast. I've also been writing a lot more Python than prose lately, and I'm finding it can be tough to switch cerebral hemispheres on the fly.

I've also been waiting around until I had time to rebuild the blog in Django. This weekend I finally did it.

The back end borrows much from James Bennett's example, Coltraine, with a few hooks on which to hang a couple cool features I've got in the works.

For starters, note the links at the bottom of most posts. Those are part of the blog and part of my larger link stream. That's the advantage of building on top of your own database: everything can be connected. Expect more development along those lines in the future.

Could I have done this in Wordpress? Probably. But I didn't really want to. Building in Wordpress means relying on third-party modules or learning enough PHP to hack a blog platform to do things it wasn't really meant to. Doing it in Django means I get to build what I want exactly like I want.

I don't want to dump on Wordpress too much here. It's a great platform, and for blogging, it's probably the best. Wired uses it (or more accurately, MU). So does the New York Times and plenty of other news organizations, on top of the millions of bloggers.

Wordpress is a great platform for blogging--easy, flexible, with lots of add-ons--but this has never been just a blog. Like I told CLB when I switched from Blogger to Wordpress:

Easy isn't necessarily what I'm going for, though. This blog is partly a learning tool for me, so I'm kinda looking for a more do-it-yourself platform. Basically, I treat this blog like my father treats the house I grew up in: something to be constantly upgraded and meddled with, but never really perfected.

The iTunes for News we have

Chris Amico — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:41:17 -0700

Let's talk about what iTunes does.

Back when it first launched, it was a companion to a piece of expensive hardware, the iPod, and a way to sell music that could be played on that piece of hardware. Both are Apple products, and the two work together as seamlessly as as Windows and Internet Explorer. One company, with a well-cultivated following, a lot of marketing and slick design, figured out how to make it easier for music fans to listen to--and pay for--music than downloading MP3s off Napster and its successors.

Did it stop piracy? Not in the least. But someone, finally, got those damn kids to pay for their music.

Skip ahead a version or two. Let's talk about what else iTunes does. It is an aggregator.

I know that's a dirty word among some newspaper types these days (Walter Isaacson, on the Daily Show, bemoaned the Huffington Post and others for linking to original content) but iTunes is certainly one of them, and for podcasts, it's the best I've used.

I use iTunes everyday. I use it to pull in podcasts (all free) from a handful of sources, most some flavor of public radio (and yes, I donate to KCRW in LA in good years). What iTunes does, and what I what I continue to wish news sites would do, is makes content easy to find, through the store, and it puts it all in one place.

We have such a thing for online news. In fact, we have plenty. There's competition among them. I have a whole category for them on Tools for News:

Feed readers.

Want an iTunes for news? I prefer Google Reader, but others are just as happy with Bloglines. You can make it a page with Netvibes. If you want your content a little more filtered and mainstream, use My Yahoo or iGoogle, plus you'll get calendars and weather. All of these are free, for both producers and consumers.

Will any of this save newspapers (or news organizations that don't use paper)? Depends on how we use the tools that exist, or what new ones we invent, and what we do with the traffic that lands on their sites. But fantasies about micropayments and hand wringing about "giving away our content" won't fund serious journalism, either.

Imagine...news on your computer

Chris Amico — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:46:20 -0700

It's not as far fetched as you might imagine:

This video has been making the rounds, but I had to post it because--aside from being broadcast the year I was born--it says something about the way news consumption has changed in my lifetime.

I hear some version of the lead in on this piece pretty regularly from members of my parents' generation: "I just can't imagine sitting down with my coffee and a computer screen. I like the feel of the paper." Funny, that's exactly how I read the news, and discuss it, and create it.

A lot of the people I hang with, online and off, are well past this debate. We work where the interesting stuff is happening, where we get to invent something.

But plenty are still living in 1981.

Update:

Salon founder Scott Rosenberg, who worked at the SF Examiner a few years after this piece ran, says it better:

What you can see at work in this clip is the “computers will replace trucks!” perspective that continued to hobble the news industry’s online efforts for many years. The “Electronic Examiner’s” use of the computer as an efficient transport mechanism for the same old product was understandable; it was a Herculean effort in 1981 just to get this stuff to work (and there were precious few customers/users).

But even as the downloads sped up and the connect-time costs dropped, the industry held onto that approach, instead of coming to grips with the fundamentally different dynamics of a new communications medium. What had made sense in the early days over time became a crippling set of blinders. The spirit of experimentation that the Examiner set out with in 1981 dried up, replaced by an industry-wide allergy to fundamental change.

“Let’s use the new technology,” editors and executives would say, “but let’s not let the technology change our profession or our industry.” They largely succeeded in resisting change. Now it’s catching up with them.

Tools for News teams up with SND

Chris Amico — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:36:27 -0700

The toolkit for online journalists has moved to a new home with the Society for News Design.

Shortly after I launched Tools for News in late December, Tyson Evans from SND emailed me about teaming up on the project. Matt Mansfield helped convince me to come on board. Chrys Wu has more on the hackathon that got it all migrated.

The toolkit is now part of a growing network of apps and sites under SND's banner. Expect development to pick up and the overall look and feel of the site to improve.

Everyone's login should still work. If anything doesn't show up or if you have any trouble logging in, shoot an email to eyeseast at gmail.

The old address will redirect to the new one. When I get a chance, I'll put in a better redirect that picks up more than just the project root (at the moment, any url starting with http://projects.chrisamico.com/toolkit/ sends you to http://toolkit.snd.org). Some links within the site, especially in tool descriptions, point to the old URL structure. If you find those, kindly hit the edit button and take out the /toolkit/ part.

Anyway, Check it out.

Quick update: One thing I forgot to mention before, you will have to update your feeds, since the site's domain has changed. Make sure your feedreader now points to http://toolkit.snd.org/feeds/...

Experts

Chris Amico — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:09:42 -0700

Steve Yelvington talks about being a local expert. This pushes farther a concept Jeff Jarvis advanced a few months back: The building block of journalism is no longer the article. Matt at Newsless describes this as systematic knowledge accumulation (he's talking about within journalism, in this case, but I think it's applicable here).

Let's think about what that might look like a bit. For a given topic or issue, I might want to pull together:

News articles
Blog posts
Forum topics
Links to other places talking about the issue
Videos
Podcasts
Profiles of people who show up a lot (usual suspects)
useful datasets (maybe even APIs)
Background information

Most of that is just an accumulation of everything a news organization produces, organized by tag. The New York Times pretty much does this with its Times Topics pages (good example: The Stimulus). But all three posts I linked above call for something than just organization, and that's where the last bullet point comes in.

At some point, someone needs to look at this pile of information and take a broader view, figure out what's significant and what questions remain unanswered. Newsless suggested something similar, in the context of exit interviews with outgoing beat reporters:

I’d be tremendously curious to hear from these departing journalists a birds-eye-view of their beat. What were the most important developments they covered that even those readers who weren’t paying attention should be aware of? What from their beat should their community be keeping an eye on in the near future? What processes had they developed for covering the beat? Which stories had they always planned to do but never got around to? What advice would they give to anyone who wanted to pick up where they left off?

Unshackled from the need to be viewed as opinionless arbiters, ex-reporters might be able to give a more honest, probing, far-reaching assessment of their beats than they could while they were on the job. A collection of these interviews for every city would be a marvelous trove of knowledge, the beginnings of a stellar information asset. The interviews could be conducted by anyone — local bloggers, the reporter’s former colleagues, rival news orgs, Facebook friends.

As I said in a comment on that post, I did something similar when I left the Antelope Valley Press after two years on the education beat. I'd covered two 25,000-student-and-growing districts (AV High School District and Palmdale Elementary) and one that was tiny and shrinking (Acton-Agua Dulce Unified). The week I left, I wrote a series of notes to my successor outlining what was worth knowing about the districts, who was worth talking to and how I'd gone about covering the beat.

Building that into the process of news, adding in aggregation, curation and reflection by reporters who really know a beat means moving institutional knowledge beyond the newsroom walls.

News as we've known it--in articles with inverted pyramids--lives somewhere between Twitter and Wikipedia. What I think Steve and Jeff and Matt (and others) are all talking about is making this broad view just as institutional, being instantaneous and encyclopedic at the same time. Being experts.

Note: the Times does almost exactly this. I think this is new. Times Topics started as simple tagging but major topics now have extensive background notes.

PBS Newshour Online

Chris Amico — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:37:59 -0700

Funny story: Back in October, I started building a little Django-powered web app that ultimately became Tools for News. I'm up coding one Friday night (my girlfriend was in Guatemala at the time; I'm not THAT much of a nerd) and send out this tweet:

eyeseast: The little journalists' toolkit I mentioned yesterday is coming together. A few good folks are testing it now. Going to try adding comments. Oct 11, 2008 05:37 AM GMT

A few minutes later, this direct message appears in my inbox:

NewsHour Howdy there. We're digging the toolkit for journos. Any chance you'd be interested in this opening we have? http://twurl.nl/yu0zho 10:48 PM Oct 10th, 2008

After recovering from a brief state of shock, I fire off a resume with a link to my portfolio and a few other projects.

Skip ahead. Barack Obama is elected president. Thanksgiving happens.

Editors from the Online NewsHour call. We chat about open source projects and new ways to do journalism. We make fun of CNN's election night holograms. Damn, I think, this sounds like a fun place to work. They fly me to DC to meet the whole team. I continue to think this could be a very cool place to work.

Christmas happens. I build a prototype timeline application and launch Tools for News.

An editor from the Newshour calls the first week of January to offer me the job. I start Feb. 2 (one week from today). Holy crap, I'm moving to DC. My job involves Django, data and generally building cool shit.

Big lingering question: Now that Twitter has gotten me a job, am I obligated to no longer make fun of it, or to make fun of it more.

Lessons from Spot.us

Chris Amico — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:25:14 -0700

I'm about to leave the warm embrace of the Bay Area and in doing so, take myself out of the jurisdiction of Spot.us. I was lucky enough to meet David Cohn when the San Jose Mercury News opened its newsroom for CopyCamp last year, and he suggested I pitch something in his alpha phase. At that point it was just a simple wiki, The Point and David's seemingly-infinite energy.

In December, when Spot.us launched officially with its new site and its own mechanisms for handling donations, my story was published and republished and spread farther than I had ever expected. It was the first Spot.us story published in print and was translated into Swedish (not really sure what to make of that, but thrilled).

So, as I said, I'm about to leave Spot's territory (more on that in the next post), and it's about time I reflected on my brief involvement with the startup and tried to draw some lessons from the whole experience.

Go. Now. Really.

It's time to launch that great idea you've been kicking around. Really. Stopping pissing away your energy and get it going already. Fail early, often, debrief and relaunch. Iterate!

David took this lesson from Jason Calcanis, and he applied it beautifully. Spot.us as it exists now is an ecosystem exponentially more complex and diverse than the little site David slapped together in late Spring, and the next iteration will probably be an order of magnitude or two bigger and better than what exists now. So what? Four projects that might never have happened were funded, reported and produced with a wiki, an outside organization and a belief that it could work. Optimism is a powerful thing.

There are stories no one is telling.

I knew that, really, but it's refreshing seeing new angles, new questions and new stories. It's heartening to see journalism in the Bay Area coming from something not owned by MediaNews. It's about time.

If it's new and exciting, you're going to have to explain yourself

I never quite figured out the twitter pitch for Spot.us. I had to explain it to almost every source I spoke with, and often a few PR people on the way, but it usually meant a few minutes at the beginning or end of an interview were left to just talking about Spot.us and crowdfunding and where this story might be published.

I don't think I used the same explanation twice. I talked about giving people a voice in media and finding new ways to pay for journalism. At one point, I just told someone: "It's like a wire service, so this story could end up in a lot of places. We just have a cool new way of funding it." David is better at this.