Web+10+1...

What ever happened to the manifesto?

Clyde

Live Tampa Bay sunrises online

Hello all!
Starting today (official launch is Monday May 2) we're live streaming the sunrise over Tampa Bay on tampabays10.com, every Monday thru Friday.

I have really become dependent on my Treo 650. I see the sun come up every day on my way to work. It is so beautiful.

I was driving in the other morning, wishing I could take the sunrise with me every day, wishing I could see it when I was at NAB last week- and I realized that if I streamed it - I could - and so can anyone else.

The link is http://www.tampabays10.com/news/live.asp. You'll see doppler or live news there most of the time - but Monday thru Friday - on clear days - you'll see the sunrise...

Citizen journalism discussion webcast

Hey all - here's something cool that will be broadcast online regarding blogging. I'm going to try to catch it - if not - I hope they archive it!


Hello,
The weblog writers support group[1] that meets at Harvard
University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society is going to be
discussing citizen journalism tomorrow evening, Thursday, April 14,
beginning around 7 pm EST. We've invited some journalism folks and
some folks from Wikinews[2] to add to our blogger perspectives. I'm
hoping some of you and your colleagues might care to join us either
physically or virtually.
The Berkman Center is in Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Avenue,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
We're broadcasting (tech stuff willing) at:
http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u beginning around 7 pm EST.
A few of us will be hanging out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), too:
irc.freenode.net/berkmanbloggroup.
Someone will probably take live notes at a URL to be determined, but
on the Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog[1].
[1] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings/ (Thursday's
agenda: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings/2005/04/13)
[2] http://www.wikinews.org/
Cheers,
Jessica
--

Streaming the Pope and a web only full blown newscast

So - I've been mesmerized by the Pope video. Check out the feed that we've been sending via
our website.

I predict that we'll see Papal chic in fashion and pop culture starting very soon. Especially since the whole world has just read theDaVinci Code.

Ritual-wise this feed has been amazing. So much color and tradition.

Since CBS is pre-empting our morning news for the Pope's funeral, we're going to do a live webcast - tailored to the online audience only - of our morning show "This Morning Around the Bay." I am so psyched.

We got a nice shout out from Lost Remote on this too - there's a decent discussion getting started in the thread there.

WISH ME LUCK!!!

Here's a second article in Lost Remote.

"Mr. Brokaw, what do you think about bloggers?"

NOTE: I initially posted this yesterday afternoon in my Yahoo! 360 Degrees blog (if you would like an invite to 360 Degrees, email me), and it received over 10 interesting, insightful comments, so I figured I would open it up to our discussion group and the wider Internet audience, by re-posting it here.

Yesterday Tom Brokaw spoke at Yahoo! Campus as the latest guest in "the Influentials: Yahoo! Speaker Series."

I had the opportunity to ask him a question at the conclusion of his speech.  "Mr. Brokaw, as someone who was raised by my maternal grandparents (who were first-generation immigrants), I appreciate your comments on 'The Greatest Generation,'" I said. "Secondly, I appreciated your comments about the role of the citizen and the obligation to take personal responsibility. My question is, what do you think the role of the citizen journalist is, and specifically what do you think about bloggers?"

He answered that he thinks it is great that the internet has provided the opportunity for various voices to be heard. He also answered that he's an avid reader of Yahoo! News. He did point out that he is wary of the political polarization to far-left and far-right that has been occurring in the blogosphere (no, he did not actually use the term "blogosphere" -- that is just me paraphrasing).

I recorded his entire speech and the Q & A via my iPod and iTalk adapter, and I'll be posting the MP3 online to share later tonight as soon as I get home. (Or earlier -- if anyone at Yahoo can lend me an iPod USB cord.) He basically said that blogging is good in his opinion.

These are some very weird times for broadcast journalism. First, Dan Rather announced his retirement. Then Tom Brokaw announced he would be stepping down late this year. Last week Ted Koppel announced he would be leaving "Nightline" after 25 years. Today Peter Jennings announced he has lung cancer, though he will continue to work while undergoing treatment. What is happening with all the great white men of broadcast journalism? It's making me feel old.

I think we all (and citizen journalists/bloggers, in particular) have a lot to learn from the successes and failures of Jennings, Brokaw, Rather and their colleagues. It's a mistake for online news people to discount TV news as a dead medium as we move onto this new way ot tell stories.

And TV news is not a dead medium.

TV news *does* seem to suit and satisfy a segment of the U.S. population very well, particularly in the older side of the demographics. Many folks in my grandparents' (and parents') generations feel comfortable and perfectly fullfilled by getting their news items selected and read to them each evening by someone who they respect and trust. Unlike younger people in our generation, many of these avid TV news viewers do not want to have to sift through the information themselves on the Internet or maybe they don't think they have time to do it, or don't feel comfortable doing it.

My dad, for example, is a huge TV news fan, and every single night he watches the evening news, and I don't think he will change this habit. Believe me, after 10 years of me working on the Internet and singing its praises, he's still not interested in getting his news via the Web as a primary source. At least not yet.

When I decided to attend Vassar, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. This may seem a bit strange to anyone familiar with the college, because Vassar does not offer a Journalism or Media Studies major. It's a liberal arts college, and they take that really seriously. Still I wanted to attend the school.  I talked to several journalists, students, teacher, and professors about this "problem" of Vassar's lack of a journalism major -- and came to the conclusion as a high school senior that I could be an even better journalist if I had a rich and varied liberal arts education.

But I didn't stop there. I  took every single media-related course that was offered. I wrote for the college newspaper ("The Miscellany News") and by my senior year I became Editor-in-Chief. While taking classes, I also interned at the local city paper ("The Poughkeepsie Journal," or "Po-Jo" as it was called), and in New York City first at ABC News' Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer and second at David Lauren's now-dead "Swing" magazine. One of my favorite things about interning at ABC was to watch "Nightline" with Peter Jennings from up on the catwalk in the live studio.

Peter Jennings is my favorite of all these guys. Peter Jennings is a whirlwind. He does not just accept the text written for him -- he makes furious notes in the margins and adds his own thoughts/questions off-the-cuff. He's impressive to watch from behind-the-scenes.

For a while around this time, I was convinced I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. My dad's mother would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say "A journalist." And she would kind of frown for a second considering the lack of glamour and money a newspaper writing career would provide, and then she'd think for a moment and start to simle, saying hopefully, "A broadcast journalist? Those women are so smart." (No doubt she was thinking of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer.) Hence, I was veered a bit in this direction.

But my internship at ABC -- though fullfilling and interesting -- ultimately convinced me that broadcast journalism was not 100% right for me. I realized that the topics highlighted in our weekly newsmagazine show were really limited by which topics appealed to the most mainstream of people. 

Like almost all enwsmagazing programs, the "investigative reporting" leaned toward hidden cameras catching babysitters and nannies hitting children in their care and exposing local hotel chains that didn't properly clean the rooms.  These may be actually be important topics that people do care about, but they weren't the types of issues I personally to which I wanted to devote my career and my life. (Here is the tongue-in-cheek account I wrote about my internship with Diane Sawyer at ABC that was published in the campus newpaper when I was a senior at Vassar.

Serendipitously, I became obsessed with the Internet around this same time. While I was Editor-in-Chief of Vassar's school paper ("The Miscellany News"), we brought the publication online. In 1994, I also had the good fortune of taking a class called "Hypertext Rhetoric and Poetics" with Michael Joyce, author of one of the first "hypertext novels" called "Afternoon." Hypertext as a freestanding form of organizing words and information, and later as the building blocks for the Internet excited me -- its power to enable writers to tell stories in new ways really inspired me. In 1993 I wrote a (somewhat-clumsy-sounding-to-2005-ears) article for Vassar's newspaper about how hypertext was empowering female writers in new ways. 

I truly believe in the power of blogging and online journalism to improve our abilities to share stories accurately and compellingly. I think some of this is already being done. The topic-oriented pages created by the Yahoo! Full Coverage team are a great example. They provide a rich context to help readers get a 360-degree understanding of major events from a variety of different perspectives and sources. Blogging -- though it is lately criticized for often being politically polarizing -- also gives individuals and citizen journalist the power to report events and share them with thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. It's incredibly empowering.

Still, I have tremendous respect and awe for these men of broadcast journalism and their ability to report the stories of the world for the past 20-30 years.

If you're interested in this topic, be sure to read this LA Weekly interview with Nightline executive producer Leroy Sievers about "the death of serious news." My friend Josho sent me that one, and it supplies some interesting details on the state TV network news from an insider.

As a final aside -- the photo at the top of this post is of my friend Laura who works on the Yahoo! Full Coverage team and me with Tom Brokaw. The photo was taken by Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang with my Sony Mavica camera. Laura and I said, "Jerry, can you please take our photo with Tom?" And Jerry said, "OK, but you have to promise you won't sell it on eBay."

That's a promise! I just wanted it for my blog, of course. And for the memories.

What do YOU think about all this? Do you think that TV broadcast journalism is dying/changing/irrelevant? What do you think the role is or should be for bloggers or citizen journalists? Do you consume all or most of your news online? via newspapers? or via TV? Please share. I'm curious.

Will Our Next Pope Be a Blogger?

ABC News details a bit about how Pope John Paul II used his media-savvy to become a global superstar. (He released a music video, featuring him singing and reciting psalms and the Gospels. He also recorded the rosary.) It's also interesting to note that he became pope in 1978, the same year that instant global television became available.

In this AP piece on the difficult process of determining the next pope, there's an aside mentioning the Internet and how it may affect the selection of the new pope:

...And there's another source of information that wasn't around in 1978 -- the Internet. A cardinal's every utterance is now stored there, if his fellow churchmen are curious. That could also make or break some of the "papabile," as potential candidates are known in Italian.

I wonder if it would be possible to have an Internet-savvy pope. Do the cardinals ever go online? Could we ever have a pope who had his own blog?

Who's a journalist?

I was going to post this here, but then I thought, "Hey, I have a blog." This is the trouble with having contributing power in multiple places. Anyway, I'm cross-posting here so you don't have to click over to Snarkmarket to read it if you don't want to.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a sweet little essay today granting press credentials to anybody who wants to be a journalist. I totally agree with Weisberg's sentiment, but I think he's asking the wrong question -- and I post this because I think a lot of us might be.

"Who is a journalist?" strikes me as a fairly useless question, and not just since the arrival of the Internet. It seems to me we should be asking "what is journalism?"

Journalists derive the title exclusively from the function of journalism -- not how good they are at it, not what institution they represent, not what stories they cover -- but the bare fact of what they do. Judith Miller and Matt Cooper of Time can't claim any special place in American democracy from the fact the word "journalist" appearing under their names on their business cards.

But the acts of gathering information, synthesizing, and disseminating that information publicly in an essentially verifiable report -- those acts, when done in tandem, can and should receive
special protections, no matter the context in which they are performed.

It's journalism, not journalists, we should be struggling to protect. I think we sometimes lose that distinction (hat tip to Rebecca MacKinnon, who might agree with me). Whether bloggers constitute journalists is abstract and immaterial. What in newspapers and on blogs and on
television constitutes journalism, now, that strikes me as a provocative question.

Despite 1) appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, and 2) being funny, this, I would argue, is not journalism. Haul Jon Carroll's pajama-wearing ass into court and make him testify. This, however, strikes me as journalism. Others might quibble. But at least we'd have a good conversation.

Weisberg notes that bloggers are trying to have it both ways in terms of the law -- the folks being sued by Apple want to be treated like journalists, while those in danger of being regulated by the FEC want to be considered something else. "A more consistent stance would be to assert that the First Amendment should apply equally to everyone who practices journalism," Weisberg says, "Whenever and wherever they do it, and that political advocacy online should be treated consistently with advocacy offline."

An even more consistent stance would be to assert that the First Amendment should apply equally to all acts of journalism, no matter the source.

Edited to say: Or, what Jess said Scott Rosenberg said, below. Twice.

Are Typewriter Users Journalists?

I agree with Scott Rosenberg's assessment that to ask "Are bloggers journalists?" is like asking "Are telephone callers journalists?" or "Are typewriter users journalists?" or "Are mimeograph operators journalists?" or "Are writers journalists?" (As Rosenberg eloquently concludes, "Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.")

Are Typewriter Users Journalists?

I agree with Scott Rosenberg's assessment that to ask "Are bloggers journalists?" is like asking "Are telephone callers journalists?" or "Are typewriter users journalists?" or "Are mimeograph operators journalists?" or "Are writers journalists?" (As Rosenberg eloquently concludes, "Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.")

There's a blogger in da' house!

The Whitehouse - that is!

By now, you've probably seen this, but in case you haven't - here's a link to Garrett Graff's blog entry on gaining access to the briefing room:
http://snipurl.com/dayo

I thought the discussion about what gives a news organization"legitimacy" was pretty interesting...Marks a pivotal time in our history...

Looks like it's tough even for bloggers to turn something super compelling after a day on The Hill!

Opinion over news?

Based on a survey I read last week from Harris Interactive about Americans attitudes towards 9/11 and Iraq, I wrote a column for my Monitor blog on why I think opinion is starting to trump news.

Too many Americans, for whatever reason, are confusing opinion and news reporting. (Read the Harris poll - it will blow your mind.) My own thesis is that in the past, opinion/commentary always had a very clear "wrapper" that signaled to the reader (viewer or listener) that what we were about to read, hear or listen to was commentary.

But in the post-9/11, 24x7 media world of the early 21st century, that wrapper has disappeared, or in some cases, deliberately removed.

I love blogs, believe in blogs, but I also believe they share some of the responsibility for this turn of events. Bloggers can be journalists, are journalists. But can they be journalists and columnists at the same time? In the world of "professional" journalism, at least the one I respect, that's a big no-no. You're a journalist, or a columnist, but you can't be both.

It's not a simple problem. People are confusing opinion for news, and making important choices not based on facts or events, but on what spin meisters from other side are throwing out as opinion. Not to overstate the problem, but it ain't all that healthy for democracy.

Rappers and Bloggers: Separated at Birth?

I enjoyed Josh Levin's piece on Rappers and Bloggers in Slate last week. Did anyone else read it? What did you think?

Some of his points are amusing (such as "both groups share a love of loose-fitting, pajama-style apparel" pajama-hadin anyone?), but I like what he writes about blogging as a form of sampling and/or collage:

Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts. For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage.

Web + 10 Content

"We need to preface this all by saying that we all believe in basic journalistic standards."
-- Ron James (managing online editor, SignOnSanDiego.com)

Choice

"The biggest thing we all keep coming back to is choice."

-- Elaine Zinngrabe, assistant general manager and exectuve producer of the Los Angeles Times

We must give users a choice:

any platform or delivery method

multiple sources

any subject matter

must be relevant to user

when and where

available on-demand

Utility

"My RSS reader *is* my filter."
-- BBC reporter Kevin Anderson (when asked if journalists should act as information filters)

We must provide utility -- our content must:

be useful

must make life easier or more efficient

be actionable

include databases, traffic, weather, yellow pages

be evolving to continually meet the needs or our users

Expand the role of the journalist

"I never went to journalism school -- I learned from osmosis. You learn the value of telling the truth."
-- Tom Regan (associate editor of The Christian Science Monitor

We must maintain and expand the role of the journalist:

think in mulitiple channels

be a storyteller, using a new set of tools to make the story richer

look to the edges of content for inspiration

place emphasis on fairness

report the collective truth

Citizen Journalists

"Can journalists become smart mobloggers?"

-- Theresa Moore, executive producer of web content for WTSP-TV Tampa Bay's 10

We must acknowledge citizen journalists:

recognize that they hit niches

respect that they have some leverage

they can be additional eyes and ears

they provide checks, balances and alternative points of view

Flexibilty

"We have no idea how they are really going to acccess us in five years." -- Jessica Barron, senior editor, Yahoo! Inc.

We must be flexible:

web content will always be a dynamic situation

we should try new things and be open to new forms of content

t is in our best interest to adapt, adopt and embrace new technologies