Journalists take off the gloves and start punching now that computer guy, will find the name, compares them to mainframe computer people.
NYTimes Jill Abramson takes the bait first and never gives up.
MSNBC’s (Rick Kaplan? Jon Bonne?) says that there is a blog associated with every MSNBC show. He loves them bloggers. But who will assure quality and, of course the title of the conference, credibility. Decries that mistakes are seen as willful in news these days in the eyes of citizens. MSNBC ran 19,000 citizen-shot videos about the tsuinami. Says that commentators, like Scarboro, are not fact checked?!?
Jimmy Wales holds up wikipedia as an example of a success. He holds that wikipedia is better than old school pedias. That gets the old school journalists all jazzed up. In particular, NYTime-sters. He says that IBM survived the end of the mainframe. So NYTimes can too — if they are willing to change.
Voice I don’t recognize says that cable news has moved from new to commentary — for cheapness.
Powerline John Hinderaker talks about the power of links as a source of trust and of access to more data etc.
Category: Information Commons (Page 25 of 26)
Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other
Discussion of how institutional journalist can take the “good” parts of blogging and keep the basic values of journalism that have developed over time. Bill Mitchell of Poynter is talking about his paper on “Earn Your Own Trust, Roll Your Own Ethics: Transparency and Beyond.â€. (Bob Steele helped on this paper).
Librarians are getting a nod along with journalists and bloggers.
Transparency being discussed and nuanced.
Karen Schneider, FreeRangeLibrarian, is speaking for librarians and is saying that she represents the end of the information transaction. The user end. Tales of rural internet connectivity. She has been live blogging the conference at FreeRangeLibrarian.
Since 2002, the majority of New York Times readers are online readers. While members of the NYTimes staff see themselves as putting out a traditional paper newspaper, the readers are now world-wide and online. When will the staff get the clue.
600 blogs are on the Harvard/Berkman Center since they set up free blogs there.
Dave Winer is up allegedly responding to Rosen with a highly romantic version of what a blogger is.
Bob Giles of the Neiman Foundation praises Ed Cone and the News and Record
Listening in on Jay Rosen of Pressthink doing his presentation/paper/talk on “Bloggers v Journalists is Over” now at the Conference webcast. Almost like he’s reading Dan Gillmor’s book to us. Looking for new ideas. None so far.
“One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future,” said Paul Jones, director of the public digital library ibiblio.org and one of the competition’s judges.
I did get the final say in the final paragraph (above) of the National Journal article that came out today. No, I can’t read it either because it’s behind a subscribers only restriction. But Sarah did send me a copy. No, I can’t reproduce the whole article here, but hey I gave you the last paragraph.
Remember I did have more to say and it made more sense too.
The Duke Moving Image Contest got several nice mentions in Copyfight as well including a call to arms today.
We’ve gotten a lot of folks signed up on the wiki for the Triangle Bloggers Conference. Many more than we had planned for originally. We’ve already secured a bigger room — now a small auditorium for the conference. If you have topics you want covered or a followup lunch group topic (like a Birds of a Feather session). Go to the conference wiki.
Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
NEW LOCATION: Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE
Dan Gillmor will also be doing a public talk on Monday February 14, 3:30 – 5:00 in the Freedom Forum Conference Center in Carroll Hall (home of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication). If you are more interested in hearing Dan than in meeting bloggers, then this is the event for you. We will have copies of We the Media for sale and for signing at both events.
Just took an email query from Sarah Stirland of the National Journal about Duke Law‘s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Moving Image Contest. Sarah asked what struck me in particular about the winners.
I said:
One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future. That is the future effects of the current laws or to an imagined future. That film was from Poland! (actually a cartoon) “Music for our Grandchildren”
More often film-makers looked back either in humor as in “Stealing Home” or as documentarians speaking about the extreme difficulty of practicing their craft. “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” Then they were speaking only of the current state of the law and how it has an impact on them as individuals.
This tells me that the story of the documentarians is real and immediate. We’ve been digitizing a lot of folkloric documentaries for our Folkstreams.net project and had to wonder if such films made in the 60s and 70s could be made again in the current legal climate. The answer as “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” tell us is not without great difficulty if at all. Will all documentarians have to become lawyers?
One other perhaps obvious note. All the winners were in black and white. But these days with digital editing and cameras it’s just as cheap to do color as to do black and white. I am still wondering what that means, but I suspect that it has to do with feeling the past is more compelling, more authentic and perhaps more free (to use images from at any rate). It could also mean an unhealthy avoidance of the future.
For my earlier post on the contest results, see http://ibiblio.org/pjones/wordpress/index.php?p=223
In today’s Business Section of the News and Observer is the result of a very long interview/discussion with John Murawski boiled down to tolerable newspaper length. Includes classic (read older) Jones picture and more. What am I talking about? ‘We’re better if we share’ says the title so I guess that’s it.
Phil Meyer’s USAtoday article dated 1/12/05 points out that bloggers have become the watchdogs of the press.
Phil also points out, in an email message, that the Public Relations Society of America has taken a strong stand on the Armstrong Williams case. As you will recall, Williams was paid to promote No Child Left Behind by the Bush Adminstration [your tax dollars at work propagandizing you]. Phil laments that the Society of Professional Journalists has not acknowledged the case at all.
I have read all of the four books selected or under consideration for the three local let’s-read-a-book-together programs. Not only that I’ve met three of the authors and I go a long ways back with two of them. In fact, I’ve written here about two of them and their authors. (just establishing my credentials).
My SILS collegue David Carr will be leading the discussion of Tracy Kidder‘s book about Paul Framer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” in Carrboro.
UNC is deciding between Tim Tyson‘s “Blood Done Sign My Name” and Kidder’s “Mountains” with Yann Martel‘s “Life of Pi” still in the running.
The rumor or more than a rumor is that Chapel Hill will mount a let’s-read-a-book program with Bland Simpson‘s “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering.”
I wrote about Kidder and Farmer’s visit here to Chapel Hill to boost a fund raiser for Partners In Health and have several posts about Tim Tyson, my connections to him and others in his book and the national NPR story on the book.
I would have trouble ranking the books, but as far as social consequence of their discussions there is no doubt that “Blood” and “Mountains” are the more important.
“Pi” is a fine literary novel that I would recommend to anyone, but not particularly for a community book that would encourage a community to confront their local unresolved issues.
“Ghost Ship” is an interesting bit of North Carolina history retold as a nonfiction novel. Whatever social and community circumstances surround the mystery are largely unexplored. If the book were paired with David Cecelski‘s “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina,” we’d get a better understanding of the people, the history and the life of the coast of NC. I did greatly enjoy reading both books while on Ocracoke Island in sight of the lighthouse there.
[more after a break — poor UNC just defeated by Wake Forest]
The shared problem and shared project of this area is the problem of facing up to our shared histories. “Mountains” uses the tales of a single man and his struggles to bring light on the history and consequences of our relationship with our sister revolutionary democracy Haiti. Though Haiti can be avoided by exoticising it, by saying it’s over there across the water. Farmer would not allow that. His own book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, is strong and clear analysis of interactions of health, human rights and geopolitics. A discussion of “Mountains” can not avoid grappling with the questions that Framer makes it the business of his life to constantly reencounter. He wants us to know that mysterious Haiti is not a mystery but a part of our own doing across history.
Tyson’s book addresses many of the same questions as does Kidder’s book on Farmer. His book however is close to home. In fact not far from Chapel Hill. Not in the far distant past, but in the recent past. In 1970. Tyson tells the story of a murder that is not a mystery. As in Farmer, the “mystery” is our history and our collective doing and our decision to ignore and disown our deeds.
Just my luck, I leave perfectly good warm pizza here in the Lab (thanks Kimberly) to sprint over to Duke Law for the announcement of the winners of The Center for the Study of the Public Domain‘s Moving Image Contest. Once I got there their pizza was cold.
You may recall that I was one of three judges for the contest; the others were Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown and FullFrame Documentary Festival‘s Laurie Racine.
The winners chosen by the three of us and the winner of the People’s Choice Online Voting were announced by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle.
As you can imagine, especially if you know the judges, there was a divergence of opinions, but we picked four very strong and enjoyable films. The People did a fine job too — since I agree with them that “Stealing Home” is particularly good.
“The contest asked for 2 minute movies about the ways that intellectual property affects art– specifically documentary film or music.”
Drop by and have a view.
Let me put in a plug for “Music for Our Grandchildren” which was produced in Poland. If you want to watch that one and you are not in Poland, then you might want to get your download from Duke.
Fred and Patrick have added a list of sites with RSS feeds on ibiblio to the home page. It’s not complete — we started with our active webgroup — but it’s a giant step forward. I’ve been impressed about how much is going on. Next steps include ibiblio aggregators and publishing.
At the same time, Fred has created a group blog for ibiblio-staff to communicate with you. ibiblog is off to a good start with editting by Bret Dougherty, the Iron Dog himself.
The Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 has outgrown the room we had reserved in Carroll Hall. I’ve secured the newly renovated auditorium in Murphey Hall nearby known as MU116. This is the Classics Department building so it comes complete with Ashcroft-offending statues at the entrance to the room. Tasteful, classic and partically clothed. The room has comfortable seating, plenty of technology and wireless access.
So the new info is:
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Murphy Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FREE
On page 7A of today’s News and Observer, Nextel has a full page advert for their wireless service. The irony is that the area pictured in the advert is the lawn of Weaver Street Market in Carrboro. Memsy Price, a Nortel marketer, who is pictured in the advert doesn’t need Nextel to get internet access while at Weaver Street.
At least two wireless quilts cover the Weaver Street lawn. The first is completely free and open to all. It’s provided by Weaver Street as part of the Town of Carrboro’s wireless blanket.
The second comes from the UNC offices in the same building as Weaver Street Market (just upstairs). That network is restricted to UNC faculty, students and staff. But that group is a pretty significant part of the Weaver Street community.
To be fair to Nextel, they have very wide coverage in this area if their maps are an accurate guide, but the advert selling Carrboro as the reason to have their wireless plan is funny to me and a bit wrong.
Just back from a great dissertation defense of Deb Procopio’s work on the Internet and the Knowledge Gap. One important finding (I gave my copy with makes on it back the Dr. Procopio so I’m working from memory) is that Internet use works aggressively to close the Knowledge Gap of Lower Socio-Economic Status (called SES in the trade) people. Internet use doesn’t just move up everyone’s knowledge equally although it does move everyone up. But it demonstrably and significantly helps out citizens of lower SES. Dr. Procopio worked with some large datasets from the Knight Foundation surveys covering several years and several communities and her findings were consistant throughout.
Look for more about this.
The news is alive with the rustle of pundits trying to make sense of IBM‘s giving 500 patents [list of the patents in PDF] back to the Commons (or in this case the Open Source Community). There are over 160 stories in Google news on the subject.
Not one to be left out, I too took a call from a local paper (also known as the News and Observer — hopefully called “Nuisance and Disturber” when I was in school) to opine on “what does it mean?”
Since my contribution may not make the paper tomorrow as the number of stories begin to push over 200, I give it here:
IBM is one of the biggest patent holders in the world. It takes a lot of guts to step up to the plate and not only say that the patent system in the US is badly broken, but to also here are some patents back. Things that should not have been patented. Things (processes or inventions) that should be out there free so that they could facilitate innovation. IBM need not give up all their patents, only the ones that should not have been patented in the first place, patents that were filed as a defense against false patent claims later.
Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat, was also adamant about false and defensive patents during his talk today. Red Hat has assigned several patents to the Free Software Foundation, he said, in order to make sure that the processes remained free for all to use.
UPDATE: The N and O story is out and I’m not in it. I must become more pithy and less insightful! The story is a remix of yesterday’s NYTimes story with two paragraphs of local quotes dropped in. The NYTimes reporter is credited and the local reporter “contributed to this story.”
My collegues, Phil Meyer and Jock Lauterer, were two of the guests on yesterday’s State of Things call-in discussion show on WUNC. They were joined by Ken Ripley of the Spring Hope Enterprise. Along with them was, Robert Ashley, the new editor for the now-Paxton-run Durham Herald-Sun who had, as Rickie Ricardo would say, “Some ‘splanin’ to do.” The Paxton Group recently took over the Herald Sun and immediately and without ceremony canned over 20% of the staff from top to bottom.
I, like many of you, listened to the show in the WUNC SoT Archives as I was in a very exciting faculty retreat almost all day yesterday.
I did catch the end of the show during the evening rerun. Enough to hear Phil challenge newspapers to get out and make mistakes, to take audacious chances and to change the business. This was in a response to a call from “David from Greensboro” who asked if the Herald Sun might follow the Greensboro News and Record’s ground breaking staff blogging effort.
Ruby has some comments on this and other parts of the show on OrangePolitics.org
On listening to the archives, I’ve been enjoying Jock’s insights into the odd space that the Herald Sun occupies. Jock says that the Durham newspaper market is like a teenager — not quite a full grown daily and a community newspaper. Sometimes it shows itself off, flexing its muscles, then it panics and retreats to smaller more local behavior.
Phil Meyer is as deep and insightful as always describing the odd travels of newspapers over the past few decades esspecially the changing advertising market and the changing nature and competition in classifieds.
During call-ins, resourceful Fiona Morgan of the Independent makes up for the fact that Ashley wouldn’t return her calls. She jumps into the fray quickly naming names of those who were let go — more that Ashley had confessed to. He split hairs on who was a reporter and who wasn’t. The conversation turns to a discussion of news cartooning which Ashley (thinking now of Jock’s comment) says is no longer merited in a market the size of Durham. Jock also laments the firing of Ross Taylor the photographer. The gist seems to be that the paper is thinking like a small town paper (in Jock’s definition).
Today’s show will be Latino Media in North Carolina.
Off to presentations by NetApp President Thomas Mendoza and Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik.
Anton Zuiker is the Mister Sugar behind the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005. He’s posted a recent review of the state of the conference on his site.
We’re a month away and we’ve had great response from great folks.
The Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 already has some great folks signed up and is going to be bigger than 50 persons soon with greater than a month to go.
If you will be attending and you want to go online during the conference, you need to register with the UNC Wireless network. I can do this for you. Send me email with your name and your MAC address and I will sign you up for conference period access.
One addition of particular note:
Dan Gillmor, former San Jose Mercury News tech reporter and author of “We, the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly, 2004) will be among the participants.
You’ll have a second chance to hear Dan on Monday Feb 13 when he will be giving a public talk on campus (not sure where yet) in the afternoon probably around 3:30. I suspect he will be talking about his ideas concerning distributed journalism and grassroots journalism.
Collegue and ever alert observer, Phil Meyer, writes to say that the New York Times and its future arethe cover story on the current Business Week. Further, the future is red but not rosy. Not all of the Times’ troubles are tied to their mismanagement and missing oversight of reporters like the infamous Jason Blair. Many are the problems of a paper-based information source trying to make the move to the Internet. More people read the NYTimes than ever and more of us read it on the Net (disclosure: I get the paper edition too, but end up reading a good bit of the paper on the Net anyhow). The question is as always: Where is the Money? This is no small question since good journalism requires good money — unless you are me blogging in the public interest :->
The B-Week article ends:
The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. “The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn’t growing, and the one that is growing — the Internet — isn’t producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality,” says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.
Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times’s journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America’s most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.
Now those are real challenges. Does Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma point to any answers?
In related news news, Phil points out that a lack of standards and a lack of copyeditors makes the Times less readable. For example, he says: “I wrote to the Times ombudsman to complain about Maureen Dowd’s affection of the British spelling of “whine.” She uses “whinge,” which will stop an American reader in his or her tracks. I was told that every op ed writer is entitled to use the spelling and grammar of his or her choice.”
As anyone who has read this blog knows too well, copyeditors can make a real positive difference. I miss them. They help make me sound smarter.
Recent Comments