a curious Yankee in Europe's court

In news that startled a bit this week, two major names in journalism in the US announced their departure from their star posts in traditional media to sign on to new media.

The New York Times lost economic reporter Peter Goodman. The struggling Newsweek lost political columnist Howard Fineman. Both of these prominent journalists have just joined the staff of one of new media’s most visible success stories, The Huffington Post.

Goodman was interviewed by the Washington Post about his big jump (“Huffington snags N.Y. Times star” Howard Kurtz, Sept 21, 2010). Goodman told Kurtz, “For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view… It’s sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.”

Goodman went to to express dissatisfaction about a confining aspect of the process of reporting imposed on him by the gray lady Times.

Writing yesterday in reaction to Goodman’s statements, news media expert and journalism instructor Dan Gillmor commented  (“The second great migration to new media” Salon, Sept 22, 2010):

I’m also convinced that a big part of what’s happening is a sound one from a journalistic sense: That is, reporters want to be liberated from the lazy-journalism tyranny of the idiotic notion that there are two equal sides to everything — do a story on the Holocaust, get a quote from a neo-Nazi — and they grasp better than their old-media editors do that human voice is the heart of story-telling.

Gillmor linked to a related post on Goodman and Fineman by Salon co-founder and author Scott Rosenberg. In his post, Rosenberg voiced sympathy with some of the huge, older news organizations (“Journalists follow their voices, vote with their feet” Sept 22, 2010).

Rosenberg particularly noted the “phenomenal-sized audience” of Yahoo News, and the “blue-chip” reputation” of the NY Times.  This constrains them to be more cautious in their ways, he wrote.

Excerpt:

The challenge for their [Times and Yahoo] managers is a subtle one: How to infuse their coverage with the distinctive human voices of journalistic observers who no longer wish to suppress their personal perspectives, while also insuring that the big megaphones they own do not turn into amplifiers of treacherous rumors, personal vendettas, or partisan lies. (Fox News provides a handy negative exemplar here.)

In a blog post this week, James Bridle lays bare his optimism about humans and our doings. And this gutsy enthusiasm is a good and intelligent thing.

It’s not some pie-in-the-sky, be happy type of simpleton perspective. Bridle grounds his hope in close scrutiny of the systems we create, in particular publishing.

Bridle, a publisher and writer, is founder of the website booktwo.org. He describes the site’s focus as “the future of literature and the publishing industry”

Writing the recent post titled “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony and Historiography” (Sept 6, 2010), Bridle reflects on a public talk he gave recently:

I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth…

…I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

The particular system that Bridle goes on to discuss is Wikipedia.

…for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

Read the full entry here.

(Found my way to Bridle’s post via the blog Bits at the New York Times)

The free, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has just posted  its three millionth article. Yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor had an article citing the details, plus a little commentary on how things are going (“Wikipedia blows past 3 million English articles” by Chris Gaylord, Aug 17, 2009).

Of course, there are far more posts, if you count the site’s 270 other languages. Eleven languages have collected more than 100,000 articles, with German nearing 1 million.

Thank you, grazie and danke Wikipedia!

Even though the Internet and all the evergrowing, new technology related to it fascinate me endlessly,  I’m also left feeling intellectually and emotionally flabbergasted much of the time. While brooding about this a few days ago, a comic image of my besieged state of mind spontaneously popped up — it was of a tiny, wildly excited, yapping Chihuahua chasing cars zooming by on the street. The poor thing doesn’t stand a chance.

But after reading Mathew Honan’s Wired article last week about some of the new, Location-Aware software, I realized in a flash of hyperventilating, cognitive collapse that my racing Chihuahua self-image is simply wrong — in fact that Chihuahua has been flat out run over. Squashed!

An excerpt from Honan’s piece: (“I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” Wired, Jan 19, 2009)

I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!

Finally, some promising numbers for U.S. newspapers, according to Nielsen Online, as reported this week in Editor & Publisher. The online audience rose more than 12 percent in the most recent quarter, compared to the same period last year, E&P reports (“Newspaper Sites Gain Audience in Q2″ by Jennifer Saba, July 29, 2008).

More here.

The inventor of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wants to help its users protect themselves from the lowlifes online who are trying to hide who they really are and what they’re really up to.

To fund this project, he plans to use the money coming to him as one of 16 winners named yesterday of the Knight News Challenge award, according to an article in InformationWeek (“Sir Tim Berners-Lee To Track Origins Of Digital Content” by K.C. Jones, May 14, 2008).

Jones’ intro:

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a technology that will give users more information about the origins and sources of digital content.

As Jones notes, this is one of the biggest challenges of the moment in relation to the Internet. Read more here.

Last month, in an article in the Telegraph on the same subject, Berners-Lee discussed various aspects of the problem of “cyber imposters,” and his hope to find a solution (“Technology could be used to protect youngsters from internet predators,” by Tom Peterkin, April 30, 2008).

EIAA (European Interactive Advertising Association) reported this month that adults living with children spend more time online than adults in households without minors. The findings about online trends in Europe are from EIAA‘s first ever “Digital Families” report, according to the media trade organization.

“Almost three-quarters (73%) of people living with children are logging on to the internet each week, compared with only half (52%) of those without,” the EIAA report reveals.

Overall, digital parents are ramping up their web time, spending 11.6 hours online each week (up 36% since 2004) and over a quarter are heavy users of the internet (27%). Digital families are also more likely than those households without children to use the internet at the weekends (58% vs. 40%).

This online activity has meant that digital families are consuming other media less as a result of the internet – 44% of digital parents are watching less TV, almost a third read fewer magazines and newspapers (31% and 30% respectively) and almost a quarter (24%) listen to the radio less.

Read more about the study here.

Yesterday’s Seattle Times has an editorial warning that the Internet is in jeopardy (“Internet in jeopardy as neutrality erodes” The Democracy Papers series, March 5, 2008). I liked this piece in particular because it outlines this complex issue simply and briefly.

A key sentence:

The Internet has developed into a clean canvas for all to play on and create. The cable and telecommunication companies that dominate broadband in the United States are fighting any network-neutrality law that would ensure the Internet stays this way.

See here for more discussion of this important battle now underway.

No way! says U.S. Congressman Edward Markey. This week he proposed new legislation to bar exactly this from happening in the U.S., according to an AP story on the Wired website (“Bill Bars Web Traffic Discrimination” AP, Feb 13, 2008).

Markey is trying to head off a coalition of major telephone and cable companies, including AT&T and Qwest, who reportedly want to be able to charge whatever the market will bear, in effect, for Internet access.

From the AP article:

Markey, who introduced similar legislation in 2006, said the bill doesn’t regulate the Internet, only makes sure the rules of online engagement are fair. His spokeswoman said he wanted to defuse critics’ arguments that the bill amounts to regulation, which she called inaccurate.

“It does, however, suggest that the principles which have guided the Internet’s development and expansion are highly worthy of retention, and it seeks to enshrine such principles in the law as guide stars for U.S. broadband policy,” Markey said of The Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

The hot issue at the heart of Rep. Markey’s legislative fight is what is known as “Net Neutrality.” Its supporters have their own website, SAVETHEINTERNET.com. Members include Google, most prominently, plus hundreds of websites, small businesses, educators, and public interest groups such as the ACLU, Consumers Union, MoveOn.org, and Common Cause (see list here).

For anyone wanting to learn the basics of this battle, the website offers a Net Neutrality 101 page.

Writing today in The New York Times about Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo, tech reporter Matt Richtel explains that “zero dollar” is the insider’s phrase for the burgeoning trend of software wants to be free (“Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo” Feb 9, 2008).

“A growing number of consumers are paying just that — nothing. This is the Internet’s latest phase: people using freely distributed applications, from e-mail and word processing programs to spreadsheets, games and financial management tools. They run on distant, massive and shared data centers, and users of the services pay with their attention to ads, not cash,”Richtel writes.

How much this free software preference is motivating Microsoft in its yearning for Yahoo is the subject of Richtel’s article. He quotes various technology experts and corporate spokespeople on the subject. A conversation he recounts with a college student whose software of choice is the free stuff is particularly interesting.

Financial Times also has a brief article today discussing this aspect of Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo here (“Microsoft’s motivation” Feb 9, 2008, subscriber only).