Zac's shared items in Google Reader

Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available

2009-02-26T20:00:32Z

Shared by Ryan Sholin
Wow. Wow. Check out the wireframes.

I'm happy to announce the availability of annotated wireframes for the Digital Newsroom portion of the Populous Project. The functionality, as eloquently described by Gary Kebbel at the Center for Future Civic Media Conference, is being able to "edit from the beach." I'll never forget that description because it elegantly describes the core of what we're trying to accomplish with this software: allowing editors and reporters to get out of the office and into the communities they're covering more often.

At UCLA we'll probably have to forgo the beach and just attend class more often, or after 10 hours of work leave the newsroom and finish from home. But there's also a lot more to it. The vast majority of collegiate editors I've spoken to over the past year said a large impediment to their ability to plan and manage a collegiate newsroom effectively is something to connect a bunch of busy editors outside of the office.

For example, as the editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin I manage 10 departments and am tasked (with a great deal of help) with making sure 40 plus editors can communicate and coordinate their content on a daily basis. The result is a File Maker Pro dump for our story planning, three whiteboards for our photo planning, a whiteboard to plan our sports coverage, a whiteboard to plan our multimedia content, a whiteboard for story ideas, a few whiteboards for copy tips, a whiteboard for video coverage, a few google docs few people have access to, dozens of email threads, and countless thousands loose sheets of paper.

If that seems like too much to keep track of it is. We also have daily meetings to tie it all together, and somewhere in there we try to foster video and multimedia convergence efforts. The bottom line is that our system doesn't work as well as I need it to. We need a way to see everything at once, neatly tie it together, and collaborate in real time in and out of the office. And we're not alone, because there is currently no free and easy way of accomplishing this that is specifically tailored to a college newsroom.

Two weeks from now we should have a working prototype of the Digital Newsroom, the part of the Populous Project that will solve the issues I'm talking about in this post. At the start of UCLA's next academic quarter on March 30th the Daily Bruin will be using it full time to plan our content and collaborate. It will also be released open source for anyone to take, add to, and adopt.

I've written about the conceptual foundation of this software before, so rather than getting into a detailed description of what it does I'll let interested parties take a look at the wireframes. Something I do want to note, however, is that the Digital Newsroom is not specifically designed to support copy flow. Editing versions of stories is something we would love to be able to accomplish, but just is not in the scope of this project. Instead, we're offering a suite of features that can be used to plan and coordinate almost anything that would appear in a newspaper.

Some of the things it will do:

Plan stories, photos, graphics, video, and anything else.
Link coordinated content
Integrate a staff list
Notify reporters when they have an assignment
Allow the newsroom to post editable documents and files
Allow comments on any entry to facilitate collaboration

In the future, once we have a usable demo, I plan on doing a screen cast and writing a post that will incorporate that as well as a few nice screenshots of the product. For now please keep in mind that the wireframe is to demonstrate functionality and not design, and that the final product will be fully skinable. 

Follow me on Twitter @anthonyjpesce and visit my blog at www.anthonyjpesce.com.

Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

2009-02-22T21:29:34Z

The sorry predicament of the newspaper industry has given rise to a testy argument about journalism's future. In one corner are current and former editors who believe news organizations committed a fatal mistake by giving their content away for free on the

Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XC, Protecting the Stage

2009-02-02T19:49:27Z

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

2009-01-31T02:56:56Z

Shared by Zac
The money shot:

"Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues and also, not everyone loves the Kindle.

"What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so."

Apps for America

2009-01-23T11:00:15Z

Sunlight Labs recently announced Apps for America, a mashup contest to create applications using Sunlight data to “make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent.”

Sunlight is offering $15,000 as the first prize, and scaled prizes to second, third and honorable mentions.

Entries must be applications that use a host of government information APIs or datasets, including the Sunlight Labs API, OpenSecrets.org API, the FollowtheMoney.org API, the Capitol Words API and other Sunlight APIs and datasets. We also encourage you to use Sunlight’s code libraries, which the Labs recently open sourced.

Adrian Holovaty - Founder, Everyblock.com, Django Project, Aaron Swartz - Director, Watchdog.net, Peter Corbett - iStrategyLabs, Xeni Jardin - BoingBoing.net and Clay Johnson - Director, Sunlight Labs will judge the entries.

Submissions are due on March 31st. Winners will be announced on April 7th.

Post from: Megan Taylor: Web Journalist

Apps for America

Newspaper subsidy? Try this…

2009-01-24T12:10:00Z

Want to subsidize news, newspapers, and journalism? I have an idea I could stand behind. But it’s not this: Nicolas Sarkozy has given France’s newspapers a €600million subsidy over three years—including a free subscription for every 18-year-old Frenchman—on top of the €280 per year it gives them now. The U.K. is dancing around the topic of government support for regional papers. And the argument over government bailout of papers is simmering in the U.S.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson. I don’t want government interfering with news and speech (he who giveth may taketh away). And I’m not at all sure that it’s newspapers that should be the beneficiaries of subsidy; they have not given journalism responsible stewardship in the last decade and a half.

But here’s a government subsidy I can get behind: broadband and technology development. An investment there will do more for the future of news than any dollar, euro, or pound given to keep presses rolling.

* If the Obama Administration gets the entire country on broadband, news organizations will have a much larger public to serve online than they have now in print. They will be able to expand coverage through collaboration. They will be free to use rich media for compelling news experiences.

* Advertisers will have no excuse but to go online, when most everyone is there and when it can serve rich media beyond the banner.

* Investment in technology development and entrepreneurship in media—with tax breaks and direct subsidy—will also create rich new experiences and will create jobs, new wealth, and the potential for more export of media as well as demand for better education.

* Tax breaks for the poor to subsidize computer purchases—which are now inexpensive enough to contemplate—will end arguments about the digital divide and will create at least some jobs in the U.S. industry. A goal of 100-percent-connected youth will also improve educational opportunities and, in the long run, reduce the cost of textbooks and curricular materials, as a bonus.

* Providing media and internet literacy education—including not just the consumption but the creation of media—will do more than a year’s newspaper subscription to assure a next generation of discerning news users and citizens.

The net result will be a much healthier news industry built on a new platform in new ways for the future. This is a better investment in an informed society than bailouts, subscriptions—or, for that matter, pothole repairs.

Lessons from Spot.us

2009-01-24T21:25:14Z

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 ofthen 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.

Google Quick Search Like Quicksilver from Google [Featured Mac Download]

2009-01-13T10:08:00Z

Mac OS X only: We've been crazy about Quicksilver—a free application launcher for Macs—for years now. Today Google is releasing a new search-and-launch application called Google Quick Search developed by Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer of Quicksilver.

Like Quicksilver, Google Quick Search not only searches for and launches files and applications—it also can drill down into content and perform context-specific actions. So, for example, Google Quick Search indexes my Address Book contacts; if I perform a quick search to pull up my contact card, I can hit Tab to drill down into possible actions to perform—like composing an email or starting an IM chat.

Google Quick Search integrates with Spotlight, so it's not reinventing the wheel, either. Where it really covers new ground, however, is its integration with Google search. Much like the previously mentioned Google Mobile iPhone App, Google Quick Search offers as-you-type search results from both your desktop and the web. It features quick and easy site-specific searches (also just like Google Mobile for iPhone), indexes items from your Google account (Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums, for now, but presumably more to come), and even offers handy keyboard shortcuts to quickly start a new site-search (for example, invoke Google Quick Search and hit Cmd-3 for Wikipedia).

The application is currently just a prototype, so expect to see some rough edges. That said, in my experience with it so far, it's been smooth and responsive for such an early release. It's feature set isn't up to the level you'd expect from Quicksilver, but it's a great start, and an exciting application to keep an eye on. Google Quick Search is a free download, Mac OS X only. Best of all: It's open source—just like Google Chrome. If you give it a try, let's hear what you think in the comments.

Google Quick Search Box for the Mac [Google Code via Official Google Mac Blog]

Automattic Turns on WordPress TV

2009-01-17T16:20:55Z

Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform WordPress , yesterday announced their new site WordPress TV, a place where you can find all things WordPress in visual form. Filled with tutorials for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the site has also been designed to give footage from WordCamps of the past a home on the Web.

Sponsor

At the moment, WordPress TV hosts about 24 150 videos [thanks Michael], divided between WordCamp TV and basic how-to videos but a lot more is on its way. Over time the site is expected to host a variety of videos as well as slideshows of presentations made by the WordPress team.

"We hope you'll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community," Matt Mullenweg said in a post on the launch of the new service.

The introductory video (embedded below) gives a brief overview of the site and calls out to the WordPress community for help; if you've got a video you think should be added, or want to request a specific tutorial, you can put in a request to Team Automattic.

Great move by Automattic in adding WordPress TV to their growing list of projects.

Discuss

Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save newspapers - Jan. 7, 2009

2009-01-08T03:19:59Z

CEO Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save newspapers.

Shirky-load

2009-01-03T12:00:00Z

I finally finished CJR's long interview with Clay Shirky (Part I | Part II), which focuses on media consumption -- and along the way, he drums out all the doomsdayers. There are several good sections, but I most like where he talks about relearning: "One of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist." See also: CJR's feature, Overload!

Israel Invades Gaza: Online coverage, "citizen reporter" resources.

2009-01-04T06:39:00Z

Today, the Israeli government sent ground troops into the Gaza strip region, as part of an 8-day offensive on Hamas. Two recent Boing Boing posts related to this topic drew intense discussions with an extremely high number of comments, so I thought I'd open up a new thread today -- clearly you, our community, have a lot to say about this, and about alternative resources for news, information, and insight on the conflict.

Among the resources I've pointed to before: Global Voices' special coverage on the Gaza conflict. Rocketboom did special coverage from the region earlier in 2008, worth re-watching for FAQ about those homemade rockets from Hamas. Last week, representatives of the Israeli government held press conferences of a sort on Twitter, and today Twitter is abuzz with tweets pointing to Al Jazeera's new "Gaza coverage" twitterbot. CNN is reporting that some of the weapons being used by Israel to attack mixed civilian and military targets come from the United States. There are an awful lot of protests, pro- and against, going on around the world.

A request in advance to those joining the discussion thread here on Boing Boing: keep it civil, respectful, on-topic, and please avoid personal attacks and moralizing. The road to Godwin's law is a short one. Let's not go there. Predictably, there is much fawning about in mainstream outlets over amateur op-eds on YouTube. If you *really* want endless rivers of unmoderated attack-comments, please just go there, instead. (Thanks, Derek Bledsoe)

Image: Israeli flag holder on right, courtesy formsixteen. Palestinian flag holder on left, courtesy jilliancyork.

Previously:

Very depressing local media predictions - Lost Remote TV Blog

2009-01-04T03:42:35Z

Shared by Zac
Comment number 21 nails it in this ad revenue discussion. Find out why people leave one media and remedy that problem--Or become the media they're leaving you for.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper share value fell $64B in ’08

2009-01-01T19:32:23Z

Shared by Zac
The graphs are scary, but the thing to consider is scale. Newspaper companies can't keep doing what they're doing and survive. Lots of the business needs to be turned on it's head. I'm going to have a long post up at blog-o-blog this week about this.

How wired have you become in the past year?

2008-12-28T18:24:00Z

It’s been quite a year for journalism. It’s been scary at times, aggrevating at times and there have been some glimmers of hope for future success. I don’t feel like the same person who started 2008 and who ends it now, and I bet you don’t either.

A year ago, I issued a call for ink-stained print journalists to put some effort into learning a little more about how the wired world works by immersing themselves in some of the tools and techniquest of the web.

The post stirred a lot of conversation, but I only heard from a couple of reporters who were taking on the MBO program. I’ve not heard back on progress from any of them in months.

Editors John Robinson in Greensboro and Linda Grist Cunningham in Rockford set up similar programs for their newsrooms. Robinson, I know, rewarded at least two staff members for completing his list of “get wired” goals.

Out of the post also came the birth of Wired Journalists, which has grown into a tremendous resource for journalists looking to hone their online skills. If you find Wired Journalists useful, be sure to thank Ryan Sholin and Zac Echola. They’ve done a great job with the site.

Just now I got an e-mail from Paula Froke at AP who did not contact me in January, but has done an admirable job of working through the list of tasks. Read her post on her accomplishments. Her progress report isn’t a mere check list of items completed but show her to be an admirable type of person: She often went beyond the basic tasks and stretched herself to learn new skills.

Whether for the MBO program or not, feel free to leave a comment about what you learned about online journalism in 2008.

How wired have you become in the past year?

Attention + Influence do not equal Authority

2008-12-28T16:19:00Z

In the dustup over whether it is a good idea to sort Twitter posts by authority - defined as the number of followers one has - John Naughton rises above the cloud to see a larger fallacy in the discussion: The number of followers one has does not equal authority. It stands for influence (or I’d say, it is a proxy for attention - and then, in some cases, influence).

The problem Naughton sees is the same one that plagues analysis of online discussion using media metrics. In mass media, of course, big was better because you had to be big to own the press: Mass mattered. We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded. Indeed, we now complain about things getting too big - when, as Clay Shirky says, what we’re really complaining about is filter failure. That is why Loic Le Meur suggested filtering Twitterers by their followers; he’s seeking a filter.

The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.

But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said. This is why I always cringe when reporters call themselves experts. No, reporters are expert only at finding experts. Now to put this back in Twitter terms: Reporters don’t have authority. They have attention and possibly influence because they have so many followers. But that doesn’t give them authority. There’s the fallacy Naughton pinpoints.

“So we need to unpack the concept of ‘authority,’” Naughton argues.

One way of doing that is to go back to Steven Lukes’s wonderful book in which he argues that power can take three forms: 1. the ability to force you to do what you don’t want to do; 2. the ability to stop you doing something that you want to do; and 3. the ability to shape the way you think.

In my experience, the last interpretation comes closest to describing the authority of the blogosphere’s long tail. It’s got nothing to do with the number of readers a particular blog has, but everything to do with the intellectual firepower of the blog’s author.

Naughton argues that the number to manage on Twitter is the Twitter_index - that is, the proportion of followers to (what?) followees. He believes it ought to be 1.0 - that is, equal - “otherwise one gets into the online celebrity, power-law nonsense that Le Meur describes.”

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I’ll go halfway there. When I wrote for TV Guide and People, I supposedly had an audience northward of 20 million. I’ll hasten to say that was utter bullshit on many levels - the idea that one could trust syndicated research to count readers (as opposed to purchasers) and the presumption that every reader read every page (or ad - which is the real bubble in old media). Still, those were the numbers we bragged about, as if they gave us authority.

Dare I say that this blog gives me more authority - in Naughton’s and Lukes’ terms - than those publications did? My hackneyed example of Dell Hell reached more people in a more meaningful way than any review of Babylon 5 (though I still get in trouble for panning it).

But note well that the authority in Dell Hell was not me. I didn’t have authority (I didn’t write about PCs or pretend to any expertise in customer service). It was my message that had authority or at least relevance, as that was the reason it was passed around. And it was the passing around that invested it with authority.

So to that extent, Le Meur’s not wrong when he tries to find a way to express and calculate the idea that it’s not the author who holds authority but his or her audience. But his critics are also right when they say that number of followers won’t get him there. I think there is no easy measure, but if it exists it will be found instead in relationships: seeing how an idea spreads (because it is relevant and resonates) and what role people have in that (creating the idea, finding it, spreading it, analyzing it) and what one thinks of those people (when MrTweet.net tells me that John Naughton follows someone, I’ll see more authority in that than, say, whom Robert Scoble follows - no offense, Robert - because Naughton is so highly selective). That is what the totality of the press-sphere will also look like as various players add varying value to add up to a whole (and in 3D, the sphere will look different to each of us, so one-size-fits-all measurements will become even more meaningless).

Part of the problem in the Twitter discussion is also that the number of followers is, in the end, a proxy for celebrity while links - which Google PageRank and, for better or worse, Technorati value - come closer to measuring at least relevance. As old media faced more and more competition it became more and more about fame (and that was when access to the celebrity became more valuable than access to the audience). The internet’s value is that it is more about relevance. So I think the reason some people reacted so much from the gut against Le Meur’s suggestion is that it unwittingly corrupted the new world with the crass celebrity of the old. The last thing we need or want in the web is Nielsen ratings.

Meta journalism

2008-12-29T23:20:00Z

Ketzel Levine is a NPR senior correspondent who came up with the idea of doing a series about how Americans are handling the economic downturn...and then got laid off by NPR in the middle of her reporting. Here's the series, American Moxie, How We Get By.

(link)

2009: Year of the Hacker

2008-12-27T06:58:06Z

Shared by Zac
Generally true of recessions/depressions, we see a spike shortly afterwards of new small businesses. If the gift economy/cognitive surplus thing turns out to be true, I wouldn't doubt that we'd see more innovation happening sooner. And if pressed to make predictions for 2009, I'd say innovation will come in big strides rather than the incremental improvements we saw this year.

Looking ahead to 2009, I can't help but wonder what tens of thousands of skilled tech workers being kicked into ...

Carnival of Journalism: Five positive predictions for new media in 2009

2008-12-21T15:42:00Z

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Dave Cohn is asking for positive (if possible) predictions for the new media world of 2009.

How about 5?

Mobile video streaming goes mainstream: Probably tied to disaster/breaking news reporting from non-professionals, a la 9/11 blogs, the YouTube tsunami of 2004, Flickr bombings of 2005, and the livetweeted siege of #Mumbai in 2008. Whether it’s the expansion of a startup like Qik or Flixwagon or a wildcard like an improved iPhone with a real video camera, something is going to change in 2009 that’s going to put live mobile video at our fingertips.
Fewer newspaper jobs means more local news startups: As major metro news organizations continue to contract, consolidate, and implode, more journalists will walk away from the press, but not walk away from reporting. Right now, most of this is happening at the national level (think: Politico) or in local blogs, but as more entrepreneurial journalists leave the “industry,” more of them will start small businesses of their own, reporting on their neighborhoods.
Local news organizations will continue to improve at being “of” the Web and not just “on” it: Yep, that means more newspapers (and local TV stations) on Twitter, blogging, livechatting, streaming video, participating in comment threads, and generally getting in gear — though still perhaps far behind the pace of Internet time. This seems obvious enough, although as a media critic, if all you’re looking at is a selection of major metro papers, you’re not going to see the changes as clearly as readers — or participants in the news site’s social web — will see them.
Alternative business models for monetizing journalism will flourish: There are plenty of ideas kicking around already on this front, although few of them are coming from traditional news organizations. That won’t matter, because people with ideas for solving the riddle of funding quality journalism without the revenue of a standard daily print product are already having success.
Crowdsourcing tools will evolve on the backs on existing platforms: I’m thinking DocumentCloud plus Twitter or Facebook, or some similar combination that lets a large news organization with a large social network power through large documents (think: US Attorney firings data dump analysis at Talking Points Memo, but with a much bigger crowd and structured data instead of a comment thread.)

And of course, a bonus prediction:

Major newspapers and huge newspaper companies will continue to consolidate, sputter, fail, and close — but it won’t matter. The people formerly known as readers will be too busy informing each other about their world to notice.

So, got any predictions of your own for 2009? (Remember, we’re trying to keep it positive…)

Previously

PHOTO: Spotted at The Smithsonian Air and Space

2008-12-19T19:05:00Z

Spotted at The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Build something that flies = big problem. So the Wright Brothers broke it down into smaller chunks: 1) wings, 2) controls, and 3) propulsion. Nice historical precedent for the idea of dividing problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to digest them. “The Wright Brothers – Inventing a Flying Machine” offers more details.

Zac's shared items in Google Reader

Digital Newsroom Wireframes Available

Why the debate about financing journalism misses the point. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XC, Protecting the Stage

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

Apps for America

Related posts

Newspaper subsidy? Try this…

Lessons from Spot.us

Go. Now. Really.

There are stories no one is telling.

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

Google Quick Search Like Quicksilver from Google [Featured Mac Download]

Automattic Turns on WordPress TV

Eric Schmidt wishes Google could save newspapers - Jan. 7, 2009

Shirky-load

Israel Invades Gaza: Online coverage, "citizen reporter" resources.

Very depressing local media predictions - Lost Remote TV Blog

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper share value fell $64B in ’08

How wired have you become in the past year?

Attention + Influence do not equal Authority

Meta journalism

2009: Year of the Hacker

Carnival of Journalism: Five positive predictions for new media in 2009

How about 5?

Previously

PHOTO: Spotted at The Smithsonian Air and Space