Rebooting The News

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A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.

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• We’re on summer break for a bit.
• Rebooting the News #94
• Rebooting the News #93

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As several of you noticed, Rebooting the News has been on a bit of hiatus. Summer travel and conferences have put Jay out of town on Mondays, and so the show is on break, as NYU itself is from June to September. But we’ll probably be back before that; we just don’t know exactly when.

Thanks for your interest in RBTN.

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Our guest this week: Lisa Williams: blogger, news hacker and CEO of Placeblogger.com

Update on Dave’s Blork system…

The importance of learning programming and doing it yourself, which Lisa is attempting to do.

Appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt, Jay tried to suggest a rebooted-system-of-news direction for the new Huffington-led AOL, which TechCrunch is now a part of. This is what would make the new AOL distinctive as a news company:

1.) Toward news tools, technologies and sharing systems, the default setting is “open.”
2.) An editorial culture emerges at AOL/Huffington Post Media Group that is grounded in where journalism and technology are now, not where they have been.
3.) AOL/Huffington Post Media Group separates two things that have been confounded with one another: journalism that is grounded in reporting, and the View from Nowhere. In fact, you can have one without the other, and that is what Huffington and company should do: jettison the View from Nowhere, insist on fact-based reporting.

Last week, Bill Keller went full curmudgeon on us–or, troll, take your pick–and Nick Bilton of the Times answered him.

New association of local news sites springs up: authentically local:

Local doesn’t scale. Local isn’t McDonald’s, even if the McDonald’s is right down the street. Local doesn’t send profits back to a home office somewhere else. Local is something that’s part of what makes where you are unique. As unique and flawed and loveable as your own kids. Something is authentically local if it’s the first thing you’d want an old friend, visiting from the other side of the world, to see. It’s authentically local if its disappearance could potentially break your heart.

Local is suddenly the newest, hippest, most lucrative frontier. The local advertising market alone is estimated to be $100 billion a year. Companies like AOL, Google, Apple and Groupon all want a piece of the action. Some of the devices they sell you are even collecting data about everywhere you go – all to help their local campaigns.

Dave: I just saw this come across my feed from Berkeleyside, an authentically local blog: Markos Moulitsas says… I live in Berkeley “because it makes Bill O’Reilly cry.” You’re not going to get that from Patch.

So here’s the program: we hope you like it.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11May23.mp3

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Dave’s report on traveling to Amsterdam for the Next Web conference.

Mike Arrington: “These people, the tech press, just disgust me.”

Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital site (and conference) on Twitter… The biggest difference between Arrington and me “is that he is simply not a journalist.”

Journalist or not a journalist? That’s the wrong question., says Dave. It’s really insiders vs. outsiders.

Insiders vs. outsiders! McClatchy proved the value of the “outside-in” approach during the build-up to the war in Iraq. See this speech from John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, upon accepting the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from the Nieman Foundation in 2008.

Why, in a nutshell, was our reporting different from so much other reporting? One important reason was that we sought out the dissidents, and we listened to them, instead of serving as stenographers to high-ranking officials and Iraqi exiles. I’m afraid that much the same thing may have happened on Wall Street. Power and money and celebrity, in other words, can blind you. Somehow, the idea has taken hold in Washington journalism that the value of a source is directly proportional to his or her rank, when in my experience the relationship is more often inverse.

Is there an outside-in approach possible in tech journalism? Jay: I think there is. Dave: I’d almost given up all hope for that.

One reference point for it: Consumer Reports on the iPhone antenna problems.

And how’s about pay-to-speak at tech conferences, which is just part of a larger problem with the tech industry.

Tom Evslin: “If we’re going to pay papers for online access, we should expect good online practice to be followed.” Like: link to what you are talking about.

Felix Salmon: The hermetic and arrogant New York Times.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it. Feel free to comment.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11May09.mp3

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Dave calls this “the best RBTN we’ve ever done.” Why? “All the others were punditry. This one was a user and a developer going back and forth.”

What we were going back and forth about was Blork, the new RSS-based blogging tool and news aggregator that Dave and others (like Adam Curry) have been developing.

Screenshot of what the Blork system looks like when you’re adding to your feed, or when Jay is using it to post to Twitter.

We were talking about Jay’s feed. And his top 40 page.

We also discussed his (unsuccessful) attempt to create a control room or discussion forum off of his Twitter feed by using the Facebook page feature. Here’s how it used to work when Jay used Friendfeed for this.

Dave at scripting.com: “There are new features in the product based on this discussion and Ted Howard is looking into ways of replicating the FriendFeed experience for Jay.”

Here’s the show; please enjoy it.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Apr25.mp3

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No time for show notes this week, but a good show! Please listen:

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Apr18.mp3

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The coming media frenzy over the royal wedding shows, in a way, that we do not have a free press. Because they have to go overboard with it; they have no choice.

YouTube is incorporating livestreaming.

Chris Dixon: Google’s Social Strategy…. ” Should Google try to make social networking commoditized or new profit center? The advantage of creating a new social networking profit center is obvious: if you win, you make lots of money. The advantage of commoditizing social networking is that although you forgo the potential direct profits, you open up a wider range of pricing and product options…

“By interoperating with other social networks, messaging systems, check-in services, etc., Google could encourage 3rd-party developers to build on their platform. If Google chose, say, RSS for their messaging system, it would already work with tens of thousands of existing tools and websites and would be readily embraced by hackers in the open source community. The web itself (http/html) and email (smtp) are famous examples where the choice to open them unleashed huge waves of innovation and (eventually) killed off closed competitors like AOL.”

We’re missing an institution that would bring about open protocols whether or not these protocols benefit that institution.

The simplest way to create value in journalism is to save the user time.

People come back to places that send them away.

Jay has a new page on Facebook specifically for discussion of his Twitter feed: www.facebook.com/jayrosentalk.

The minimum blogging tool Dave’s been working on is now called Blork. “Its a reading and writing environment for news.”

Here’s the show, hope you like it.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Apr11.mp3

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Dave: My linkblog merges with my realblog. Plus: an update on the new blogging tools.

Part of the Engadget team moves to sbnation to start a new tech blog there. Why? There had been no progress in the content management system at AOL since 2003, was one reason. They’re frustrated. (See Nieman Lab on sbnation.)

The strange series of attacks on the Huffington Post from New York Times people. What’s up with that? It included this exchange:

Times person: :”I look at your writers much less than I find myself clicking on stuff that’s been aggregated or the more salacious, boob-related posts.”

Huffington: “That’s really a shame. I think you’re missing out. Jason Linkins is doing some of the best media writing. Amanda Terkel’s coverage of Afghanistan has been ahead of the curve. Shahien Nasiripour has been breaking news constantly on Wall Street reform. Maybe you should be reading more of that and clicking less on the boobs.”

Evan Williams and his next step after Twitter.

News publishers go after Zite. “If creating an app that makes it easier to read your content is a threat to your business, you’re doing business wrong.” — Mike Masnick. “Note to Media: Don’t Fight Zite, Learn from It.” — Mathew Ingram.

Here’s the show; please enjoy.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Apr04.mp3

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Some of the items we found worth talking about this week:

Bill Kelller: WTF:

Has anyone actually seen James O’Keefe and Julian Assange together? Are we quite sure that the right-wing prankster who brought down the leadership of National Public Radio and the anarchic leaker aren’t split personalities of the same guy — sent by fate to mess with the heads of mainstream journalists?

Sure, one shoots from the left, the other from the right. One deals in genuine (albeit purloined) secrets; the other in “Candid Camera” stunts, most recently arranging for fake potential donors to entrap a foolish NPR executive into disclosing his scorn for Republicans and the Tea Party. Assange aims to enlist the media; O’Keefe aims to discredit us. But each, in his own guerrilla way, has sown his share of public doubt about whether the press can be trusted as an impartial bearer of news.

The New York Times paywall is here. Today it debuts in the U.S.

Social Camera and the $41 million that Color raised.

Explicating Dave’s post, An Internet inside an Internet. “…There’s a new kind of software coming online. Just beginning to see the outlines of it. This is the kind of work I live to do. This is exactly where I like to be. It feels like a new Internet is springing to life inside a corner of the Internet. It’s like opening a jewel box and finding a universe in there.”

Andy Carvin’s model of live curation via Twitter.

The Journal-Register Company’s open advisory board meeting in Torrington, CT.

John Paton, the “digital first” CEO of Journal Register, told the Newspaper Association of American convention (these are the publishers and executives) what time it is, and he did it in ten tweets. For example:

“The newspaper model is broken and can’t be fixed.”

“Newspapers will disappear in less than10 years unless their business model is changed now.”

“The new newspaper model must become digital first and print last.”

“Stop listening to print people and put the digital people in charge – of everything.”

“Newspapers must invest in content, sales and disruption – sell or outsource everything else.”

Bill Gates vs The Internet. Dave, blogging in 1994. “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”

Here’s the show, a little longer than the usual 45 minutes. Hope you enjoy it.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Mar28.mp3

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Jay’s presentation at SXSW on the Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: it worked! (The text, the audio.)

The big event in the Rebooting the News world this week was the debut of the paywall, or “pay fence,” or metered system at the New York Times.

Dave’s post on it really got around on the Net. “Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?”

Part of the Times own coverage: Media reporter Jeremy Peters, Times Online Pay Model Was Years in the Making… Many reporters and editors embraced the reach of the free site while others worried about further cuts if The Times could not tap a new source of revenue. “I believe that our journalism is very worth paying for,” said Jill Abramson, The Times’s managing editor for news. “In terms of ensuring our future success, it was important to put that to the test.”

David Carr of the New York Times on Twitter: What I think you should pay for the digital New York Times. nyti.ms/gQfbwX

Jay on Twitter back to Carr: “Ever worry about that word, ‘should?’”

Carr’s post says… When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan… People, real actual people, went and reported that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost.

Scripting News: What Twitter and the New York Times have in common. “Neither company has a way to sustain itself financially.”

Twitter’s announcement to developers at SXSW. Dave’s post: Twitter’s new developer roadmap.

A few words on NPR and its funding mess: Dave’s post on it. Jay’s post on it.

Jay had an interesting experience with: Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own.

Here’s the show. Hope you get something good out of it.

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Mar21.mp3

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Jay was on a plane flying back from the SXSW conference, so I did something new I’ve been wanting to do for a while, a call-in show.

The first caller was my old podcast partner Adam Curry, so we spent quite some time talking about blogging, podcasting and catching up.

Must do this again sometime sooon!

mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11mar14.mp3

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