Media | Ryan Sholin

About that graphic comparing the Trenta to the stomach…

Jan 24, ’11 6:56 AM

Charles Apple points to an explanation from Canada’s National Post, getting at the details of how the illustration you’ve clearly already seen — the one comparing Starbucks cup sizes to the average human stomach — from which we learn a bit about the convoluted nature of news today.

To summarize the sequence:

Reuters moves a story on the Trenta.
National Post graphic artist gets to work.
National Post puts it on their blog.
National Post puts it on their Tumblr.
Graphic goes viral.
Graphic shows up on CNN, where Anderson Cooper, not really up on the Canadian newspaper industry, credits the National Post with a sort of vague but enthusiastic attribution, calling it “a website.” Well, sure, but.

Perhaps the most interesting question about this, which Charles Apple asks: Did this graphic ever appear in print?

I’m not sure the answer matters, really, other than as evidence that you can create original content and drive loads of traffic (fleeting as it may be in this case) to your original content, even if it’s just an online illustration intended to gussy up an interesting wire story.

More fun questions: OK, so the traffic came and went, but did the National Post expand its reach by scoring some new Facebook fans, Tumblr followers, Twitter followers? Probably.

Customer service, community management, and comment threads

Jan 11, ’11 8:30 AM

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been on one side (or quite possibly the other) of an exchange that goes something like this:

PERSON AT NEWSPAPER WITH WEB-RELATED JOB: Sentinel, this is Ryan, how can I help you?
USER: Your website’s all wrong.
PANWWRJ: Really? What’s wrong?
USER: You don’t use XMLT 4.1. It’s still on 4.05. And your feeds are all gunked up with UTF-7. And your reporters talk too much about the city council. They should be writing stories about what the county commission is doing to the street in front of my house! And why can’t I read your forums on my jailbroken Palm Pilot? I can read the [LARGE NEWSPAPER LOCATED ON A DIFFERENT CONTINENT]‘s blogs on it just fine.
PANWWRJ: Interesting.

Fun, right? Right? Guys?

OK, so maybe it isn’t that much fun to take that call.

But why do we get them? Do print readers give us as much input? What’s the ratio of letters-to-the-editor sent by mail to the number of website comments expressing an opinion on an issue?

Paul Ford, who you might vaguely remember as the guy responsible for scanning and cataloging the archives of Harper’s a few years back, has given the phenomenon illustrated in the above call transcript a name:

Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

Read his piece on the Web as a customer service medium. Now. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

To loosely paraphrase, summarize, and otherwise interpret his thesis, for those of you that insisted on continuing to scan this post without pause:

The Web, and related communication methods, provide the instant gratification of a little “swoosh” sound as we send our opinions off into the ether, and a “ding” as they arrive in inboxes, as text messages, or even a handsome little bit of javascript that refreshes a “thumbs up” count next to a comment on a news article as we mash the little thumb in earnest, albeit truncated, appreciation of what’s been said.

Instant gratification.

Funny thing about instant gratification, however, is that it’s the perfect way to set the expectation that my swooshing e-mail, my dinging text message, and my refreshing little thumbs-up have an effect, a value, an importance. When my vote is added to the poll results, I feel I have been consulted on the issue.

Here’s Paul Ford on “Why Wasn’t I Consulted”:

It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

Let’s go back to our call transcript, and see what our news website user is trying to express, exactly.

USER: I am important, and my opinion matters.
PERSON AT NEWSPAPER WITH WEB-RELATED JOB: Of course you are, and it does. Honest.
USER: So next time you decide to upgrade your webserver to Venus 5.89 instead of Mars 4.12, you should ask me about it first. Why Wasn’t I Consulted? I probably know more than you about it, anyway.

A-ha.

Sound familiar?

“My readers know more than I do.” — Dan Gillmor

So if we’ve established that the Web is the best medium ever to feed the “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?” need, and we’ve established that in the broad, overarching sense of the relationship of a single reporter to the public at large connected by the Web, that our readers know more than we do, what are we doing to tap into that need and that knowledge?

Well, there’s an obvious spot on news sites where we can tap in, but we don’t always.

Comment threads.

A few ideas:

At the bare minimum, it’s easy to recommend that reporters pay some amount of attention to comment threads on the stories they report.
Giving users an up and down voting mechanism on individual comments is probably also a prerequisite to doing this efficiently.
From there, your reporters should now have a way to sort comments based on the thumbing-up users have taken care of for you. (Wasn’t that nice of them?)
Now, rather than jumping in to rehash, argue, or troll-feed the problem users (whose comments have now been voted down, and in an ideal world of commenting systems, you’ve collapsed and made all but invisible in the thread), your reporters can evaluate the best comments in the thread and participate, clarify, answer questions, or even just say “Hey, thanks, that’s a great idea and we’ll look into it.”
That’s that kind of feedback that meets a user’s WWIC need at a much higher level. Even if you’re just engaging users to say “thank you,” they’re now participating in a conversation instead of a one-way rant/complaint/critique, and are likely to behave accordingly.

If you’re a social media manager, or a community manager, or an online editor, or a web producer, or bear the weight of some other title that involves this sort of work, you’re probably already doing this, right?

More to think about

Metafilter founder Matt Haughey — and if you know anything about Metafilter, you know they do WWIC right — tells a story about spending a few hours in an airport with Craig Newmark:

“He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem, sometimes it seemed to take half an hour to get spammers dealt with. He was totally engrossed in his work, looking up IP addresses, answering questions best he could, and doing the kind of thankless work I’d never seen anyone else do with so much enthusiasm.”

Is that how you handle customer service?

If not, what sort of software and systems would make the job easier?

Looking forward to ONA10

Oct 28, ’10 7:59 AM

As I write this over breakfast, deep in the suburbs of our nation’s capital, ONA10 is already getting started, bleary-eyed workshop participants wandering the hotel halls in search of coffee, out-of-state attendees drifting through airports and trains and cabs and…

OK, I’m probably romanticizing this way out of proportion, but the honest truth is that I had a great time last year.

For me, last year, the theme of the conference was “swagger,” as in, “my posse has swagger.”

This year, I’m looking to focus more on paying attention during the sessions, learning something, and generally soaking up information from journalists with their boots firmly planted on the ground, putting ideas into action.

ProPublica Photographer: I Was Followed by BP Security and Then Detained by Police

Jul 21, ’10 9:55 AM

[NOTE: I'm experimenting with ProPublica's new "steal our stories" republication feature. Forgive me as I continue to try out different online syndication models, using my blog (and you, dear readers) as a test kitchen. This story originally appeared at ProPublica.]

by Lance Rosenfield, Special to ProPublica July 7, 10:37 a.m.

Freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield was working on assignment for ProPublica in Texas City, Texas, last week, when a BP security guard began following him. Rosenfield was later detained by police after taking photos for two ProPublica stories. One revealed that BP2019s Texas City refinery had illegally emitted 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air in April and May. The other reported that the Texas City refinery continues to have serious safety violations five years after an explosion at the plant killed 15 workers.

What follows is Rosenfield2019s account of what happened on Friday night after the police, accompanied by the BP security guard, stopped him at a local gas station.

I parked my car on the shoulder of Hwy 197 near the Texas City sign that is in the pictures, on the south side of town and the refinery. I walked onto the median where the sign is and took the pictures. I walked back to my car and drove a couple of miles to a gas station that is on the way to my hotel. I noticed that what looked like a security truck, which had a light on the top, was following me, although he continued on when I pulled into the Valero gas station. I got out of my car to fill the tank and moments later two Texas City police cars pulled in next to my car, essentially blocking me in, although I wasn’t trying to go anywhere, I was trying to get gas.

The first police officer asked me what I was doing and said he had gotten a report that I was taking pictures near the refinery. I told him I am a photojournalist and had only taken some pictures of a Texas City sign. He asked to see the pictures and I told him I didn’t think I had to show them, legally. Another police officer walked up and again asked to see the pictures. I told him the same thing, but assured him that they were just pictures of the city sign, taken while I was in the public right of way.

He said I could show him the pictures or he could handle this another way, including calling Homeland Security and taking me in. I agreed to show him the pictures on the back of my camera, while he took my driver’s license. Meanwhile, the truck that had been following me showed up, driven by a security guard with a BP patch on his uniform. The first police officer seemed to fade back during all this, but remained present in the background. I asked the second police officer– Officer T. Krietemeyer–for his card, which he gave me.

Officer Krietemeyer took my name, driver’s license, the car license number, my D.O.B., Social Security Number and phone number.

The BP security guard asked for my personal information and I declined because he is a corporate security guard and I had already given it to the police. Then the BP security guard asked Officer Krietemeyer for my information, which he gave him.

I protested and asked on what legal grounds could the police officer share my information with BP? I was never on BP property. They told me it was standard procedure and I told them I didn’t agree with it and didn’t understand what legal authority they had to share that information.

They said that when there is a Homeland Security threat, then BP files a report. I said I wasn’t a Homeland Security threat, that Officer Krietemeyer had already determined that the pictures posed no threat. Also, I was not under arrest, so why was BP getting my information? I asked the BP guard for his information, which he gave me: Gary Stief, BP Security.

They both told me they would call Homeland Security/FBI agent Tom Robison to come down and explain it, as if that were a threat to me. I said I didn’t think that was necessary but Officer Krietemeyer called Mr. Robison anyway and handed me the phone, which I didn’t ask for, but my natural reaction was to take the phone. They had already spoken to Mr. Robison when they arrived; when he got on the phone he asked what my problem is. I told him I didn’t understand why BP was getting my information, but he had it anyway and we were starting to wrap up here. He said, “Oh no you’re not, you’re staying right there until I get there.” This was obviously a scare tactic.

Mr. Robison arrived several minutes later and asked what my problem was. His demeanor was aggressive and antagonistic. I repeated myself, in a respectful manner. He aggressively explained that a refinery like this is a terrorist target and any time people take pictures of it, they have to investigate.

He asked who I was working for. I said I’m a freelance photojournalist working on assignment for ProPublica. He asked for verification of that so I showed him the letter from (ProPublica senior editor) Susan White. Officer Krietemeyer took down the information. Mr. Robison tried to dig at what the article was about, and I stayed mostly vague because I’m not the writer and I didn’t see the significance anyway. Eventually he asked if it’s about BP and I said yes, which seemed to make him angrier.

I then felt like Mr. Robison and Mr. Stief, the BP guard, started harassing me, primarily by keeping me there and talking to me in an aggressive and antagonistic manner, and relating what I had done to terrorist activity, ignoring what had actually happened. This went on for some time. I stayed calm and polite and on point.

Mr. Robison twice asked Officer Krietemeyer if had he reviewed the pictures carefully and concluded there was no threat, to which Officer Krietemeyer said yes. Mr. Robison seemed to be shaky with adrenaline; he was clearly worked up.

Stief said he was ready to go so the group broke up quickly.

I shook all three men’s hands.

I’m guessing the whole thing lasted 20 to 30 minutes.

Clay Shirky: ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’

Jul 7, ’10 2:03 PM

The internet guru on the death of newspapers, why paywall will fail and how the internet has brought out our creativity – and generosity

Epistemology and sources

Feb 2, ’10 10:16 PM

Back in the excellent philosophy class I took in high school (Hi Mr. Lutness!), epistemology was simply explained as How You Know What You Know.

And different philosophers said you know what you know for different reasons. George Berkeley, for example, had this whole “seeing is believing” thing, for example. If he didn’t perceive it with his own senses, it might as well not exist.

No retweets for him, I suppose. No newspapers. I seriously doubt he would have trusted cable news had it existed in his day.

(Scholarly friends: I am aware that Berkeley took the above given as step one, and then rambled off into metaphysics, yes. I am not going to go there today.)

And so we come to a few amusing events of the past week or so. I have three in mind.

Jason Calacanis, Web entrepreneur and investor, posts a series of tweets about the Apple tablet the night before and morning of its unveiling. Journalists at several surprisingly major news organizations repeat and report the rumors Calacanis starts.
Someone poses as the philosopher Jurgen Habermas on Twitter.
Someone pretending to be from a rich family claims to give millions to help post-earthquake Haiti.

In all three cases, [GENERALIZATION AHEAD] our desire to believe seems to have been the primary reason we did so.

You got duped by @Jason

The Calacanis story took advantage (and indeed, mocked) the breathless pre-announcement hype about the tablet. I probably saw it because someone retweeted one of Jason’s early posts claiming to have been a beta tester, and I have to ask myself why I clicked. The truth is, I was quietly reading everything I could get my hands on about the tablet, building up my own hopes and dreams of a magical and wonderful device.

Multiply me by millions, and you get an idea of what the demand was like for information, rumors, patent translations, and actual leaks about the tablet in the run up to the moment when the little heavy-thing-landing-in-a-pile-of-dust “iPad” text dropped into Steve’s slide on screen in San Francisco.

So Calacanis, just for fun (I think), provided some supply for that demand.

Was he a reliable source? Only if you’d never paid attention to him before, which really works out well for him when you do the math. There were plenty of people who had followed Jason’s work, attitude, and penchant for showmanship long enough to stay skeptical.

Of course, anyone with a search engine could also quickly become a skeptic.

The moral of the story for reporters? Consider your source’s history on the topic and motivation at all times. Then consider it again.

I got duped by @JHabermas

Look, I dropped a philosopher’s name earlier, and I’ve done bits and pieces of reading on postmodern philosophy, and I’m a big fan of Guy Debord and whatnot, but I haven’t studied Jurgen Habermas. But I do know he’s the “public sphere” guy, and when I retweeted @attackerman’s “THAT’S JURGEN HABERMAS” update, I didn’t do a whole lot of investigation. None, actually.

But, of course, someone knew better.

Jurgen Habermas’s audience knows more than I do. Follow the trail from that link and its comments, and you’ll even find someone who (claims to have) tracked down Habermas on the phone:

“He added that ‘my email address is not publicly available,’ which suggests that perhaps he didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. In fact, the father of the public sphere doesn’t seem to understand the internet very well at all, judging by his few previous references to the topic.” [The links are in the original.]

Wait, run that back a paragraph. Did you catch that little parenthetical disclaimer I dropped in?

“…someone who (claims to have) tracked down…”

Hedging my bets.

Why?

Because I don’t know the person who says they made the call to Habermas, and I didn’t take the time to even check their About page. The author did, however, include a link to an mp3 he says is the recorded conversation between him and Habermas about the Twitter account. That would be easy enough to listen to, and anyone familiar with Habermas’s voice could confirm it’s him.

But I haven’t listened, although I would be amused to hear some sort of creative remix of it if such a thing were to go viral.

Moral? If you don’t know the answer to a key question about your source, someone else probably does. Find them. And ask them.

Stefan Roberts didn’t dupe Wikipedians

A man says he’s Stefan de Rothschild, and he’s giving $2.5 million to Haiti.

Ingredients:

Famous European name
Unusually large charitable donation
A few quick Web sites
A handful of Wikipedia entries

I’m going to lean heavily on this Valleywag post to explain the sequence of events (I know, consider the source, right? But there’s lots of links in that post, too.) The important part is that the guy was a faker, and although no journalist caught it, he was busted when he caught the attention of Wikipedia reviewers who noticed he kept putting the same fake pages up on the encyclopedia I’ve linked to four times in this post.

Here’s a quote from Valleywag’s story:

“What brought Roberts down was one of the tools he used to hoist himself up, Wikipedia, on which he posted no fewer than five fake entries: for himself, for his fake line of Rothschild family members and for one of his fake companies, Rothschild Estates. His antics caught the attention of the Wikipedia Review after editors kept deleting the fake entries and Roberts kept trying to resurrect them.”

Moral: Give a small number of editors a reliable system for tracking down claims of truth, and it gets easier to spot falsehoods, whether the editors have expertise on the topic or not.

[UPDATE: So there's a comment below that points out an important factual error I made in the Rothschild bit. In fact, it's an error that makes this "moral" have no backup in the actual narrative of the fraud and its discovery. I'll explore it further and report back here, or in the comments, about what I figure out.]

I like tools and systems and truth, so I’m going to repeat variations of the aforementioned morals-of-the-story in a real general way for a moment. Bear with me.

If you give journalists tools to help them spot anomalies in the system of the news, it gets easier to discern what’s true.
If you give journalists tools to help them track how truthful sources are, it gets easier to tell readers what’s true.
If you give journalists tools to ask their sources and readers good questions, everybody wins.

Did I mention I like tools? And truth? And also, links. Feel free to suggest a few more in the comments of this post, or wherever fine links are shared.

A Newsstand for the Tablet that might work

Jan 29, ’10 7:59 AM

“Newsstand” by triin on Flickr.

Mario Garcia probably believes the lifespan (halflife?) of print newspapers will stretch out ever so slightly longer than I believe, but I’m constantly inspired by his original thought about the problems associated with sustaining any version of the existing structure of journalism, assuming for the moment that it’s a good idea.

And of course, he’s thinking about the Tablet. (I’m going to try to avoid focusing on any single product here, instead using the word “Tablet” as code for: multitouch slab of glass with applications and payment systems built in. Maybe there will be more than one entry in that genre.)

Here’s Mario on something he calls a street sales app:

“Based on this, I can imagine that the iPad could lure the undecided (or reluctant) newspaper reader by offering a menu of headlines from various sections of a newspaper—-or from various newspapers, of course, and make it so interesting, that I may click to read that story, and pay for that one-time user experience.”

Let’s take that a big step beyond a list of headlines.

We’re talking about a physical, visual device that allows the user to move things around with their hands. OK, their fingers. Fine. But that allows us to present the user with — instead of a list of headlines — a stack of newspapers.

Yes, yes, I know, I know, you don’t want to read a giant PDF on a Tablet, you want the Web. You want the full browsing experience, or if you’re thinking is slightly more advanced, you want a completely new sort of interface that’s more Minority Report than Washington Post.

I’m right there with you.

But there’s something that a “Washington Post” app for the Tablet removes from the equation, even if you’re smart enough to build it with in-app purchases of feature/exclusive/enterprise stories, puzzles, and databases.

It removes choice from the equation.

A choice that we do have when we open up an RSS reader and look at a list of 100 headlines in the morning.

A choice that we do have when we walk by a newsstand on the way to the subway station.

Now, truth be told, when I walked by the newsstand on the way to the subway station, I was already in a silo, with steadfast plans to purchase a New York Times and do the crossword on the way to the office. But at least I’d see the other papers, the other headlines.

So maybe a real live Tablet Newsstand is a good idea. If I’m not going to purchase a subscription to the New York Times, maybe I’ll glance at the headlines and buy a copy on my way to the office now and then. Maybe I’ll want to do the crossword. Or maybe I’ll see a great headline in the San Francisco Chronicle and buy that instead.

After all, the interfaces for a bookstore and library that Steve Jobs showed off the other day didn’t offer one chapter at a time, or one story at a time, they offered a book, sitting on a shelf.

Engadget’s photo of Steve’s slide.

(Yes, I’ve heard of Delicious Library.)

Of course, things brings up all sorts of interesting questions about which newspaper and magazine publishers would be willing to go in together on this sort of thing. They’d have to build the app themselves, decide how to split up the revenue, who to feature on which pages — this is all the sort of thing they might have preferred Apple take care of, eh?

So I’m interested. I’m interested in a newsstand that provides some opportunity for serendipity and revenue, not based on subscription models or paywalls, but based on the idea that I might pay something like 99 cents for a Tablet version of the New York Times when I’m in the mood to interact with it and, most likely, fiddle with the crossword on the way to work.

What I would fund: An imaginary challenge for news business models

Dec 16, ’09 11:17 AM

Last night, I was browsing this year’s public Knight News Challenge entries ahead of the midnight deadline to enter, and I caught myself thinking about what the project doesn’t fund when it comes to supporting journalism.

And the answer appears to be business models.

My friends at the Foundation might dispute this, or maybe not, but rather than make this into a post about what they’re doing right or wrong (after all, I won a News Challenge grant in 2008, and thus, am friendly with a wide swath of the winners thanks to some fun conferences the Knight Foundation was kind enough to fly me out to) I’m far more interested in just playing a bit of Fantasy League Foundation here, making a short list of the things I would support if I had 5 million dollars or so to give away. (Full disclosure: I do not have 5 million dollars to give away.)

Two specific projects I would fund:

1. Technically Philly’s News Inkubator

The team at this Philadelphia tech blog includes Sean Blanda, who you might remember as the organizer of BCNI Philly, along with his other varied credits as a student and professional. Their KNC10 proposal, News Inkubator, would serve as a source for news startups looking for help with the legal, financial, and administrative issues that come with running a real live business. In short, they would have allowed hyperlocal journalism impresarios to focus on content and outsource a modicum of worry on the business side of things to the Inkubator project. At the very least, they’d learn something and put it into action, rather than casting about for friends and neighbors to provide legal support, accounting, and a sales force.

From a post at Wired Journalists by Sean about the News Inkubator project:

“With the administrative burdens outsourced, the barrier for creating a sustainable news organization in the city is lowered dramatically.”

2. CoPress

(Full disclosure: I’m pretty sure I’m still an adviser to CoPress, which became a for-profit company earlier this year after their KNC09 proposal was rejected.)

CoPress is a disruptive innovator in student media, providing student news organizations of all shapes and sizes with hosting, support, and a network of interested developers and journalists to lean on as they move away from legacy content management systems with little flexibility and no room for learning about the actual management of content and systems.

Here’s an excellent short presentation from CoPress on innovation, especially in student news organizations, but with a stylish overview of the challenges facing everyone in the newspaper business:

And a few ideas for projects I’d like to fund:

Match up local businesses with mobile news consumers. Foursquare and Gowalla get this. Google certainly gets it. Show me a model that involves delivering deals to mobile news consumers based on their current physical location, and I’ll throw money at it.
Connect local nonprofits with local journalists and technologists to provide job training for underprivileged neighborhoods. I’ve written a bit about how I think a coworking space could fit into this sort of model.
Replace low-value remnant ad networks and AdSense with forms of advertising that don’t embarrass readers, journalists, and publishers. (Hint: I come to your news site for content and information, not to whiten my teeth.)

Here’s what I wouldn’t fund:

Anyone claiming that their hyperlocal news model is going to scale up to become a cross-country overnight success. Hyperlocal is made of people. You can build something awesome once, in one town, but neighborhood news and advertising is about shoe leather, guts, and determination — not about software. No two neighborhoods are the same, and no two hyperlocal mavens are the same.

What about you? What’s on your news business wishlist this year?

The diaspora of information

Oct 13, ’09 10:32 AM

Given: Dan Gillmor famously stated (and I’m paraphrasing from memory): “My readers know more than I do.”

I like to take it an order of magnitude up into the branches of the tree, along these lines: “The diaspora of information (having been set free by the Web, mostly) knows infinitely more than I do.”

So here are a few links to some of the latest advances in what I think of as the tools, techniques, and tricks to surfacing the valuable information out there in the diaspora.

How Yelp deals with everybody getting four stars (on average)
Published at venturebeat.com.
Star ratings on the Internet are ripe for some sort of psychological research, aren’t they? Merlin Mann spent a few days griping about this on Twitter recently. Check it out when you can.

StackOverflow Shares its Mojo: White Label Q&A for All
Published at ReadWriteStart on October 12, 2009.
Stack Overflow was a huge inspiration for ReportingOn. Now, for $129/month, your own Stack.
“Because the company allows users to rebrand the tool, override style sheets and insert HTML, forum owners can insert advertisements and generate their own revenue.”

Share Folders in Google Docs
Published at Google Operating System on October 12, 2009.
Seems useful for small/student newsrooms using Google Docs as their file management system, right?
“You can now share folders with your contacts and even make some of your folders public. If you allow anyone to view or edit a folder, Google generates a publicly accessible URL for a page that lists all the files from your folder.”

Google Wave And The Dawn Of Passive-Aggressive Communication
Published at TechCrunch on October 12, 2009.
MG Siegler looks at Google Wave and sees a blend of synchronous and asynchronous conversation, then cleverly tags it as ‘passive-aggressive.’
“Whether Google Wave succeeds is really irrelevant. More important is if the idea of Wave does. Again, the idea of passive-aggressive communication.”

A peek behind Technically Philly’s Knight Grant Application
Published at Wired Journalists on October 8, 2009.
A featured Wired Journalists post by Sean Blanda covering the backstory of Technically Philly’s Knight News Challenge grant.
“With the administrative burdens outsourced, the barrier for creating a sustainable news organization in the city is lowered dramatically.”

My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown
Published at BrianManzullo.com on October 8, 2009.
How do you cover a midnight state government shutdown at a student newspaper? You link. And then you link some more. Brian Manzullo has the traffic to prove it works.
“Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links.”

Readers expect news to find them
Published at Nieman Journalism Lab on October 7, 2009.
Of course we do. Gina Chen revisits “…if the news is that important, it will find me…”

Next Trends from ONA: Curation, Entrepreneurship, the Real-Time Web
Published at Poynter Institute on October 7, 2009.
Steve Myers lists the crucial takeaways from this year’s Online News Association conference, including this: “Curation is the new aggregation.”

The Rise Of SlideShare And How Corporate Presentations Became Entertainment
Published at SiliconBeat on October 6, 2009.
Chris O’Brien on SlideShare’s growth and why we watch: “Somehow, these presentations have left the dimly lit confines of conference rooms and trade shows to take their place as new forms of art and expression. Business has become entertainment.”

Knight Foundation to Fund Plug-and-Play Version of EveryBlock
Published at Poynter Institute on October 5, 2009.
Pat Thornton talks with Gary Kebbel about a possible future for EveryBlock’s open-sourced code: “The Knight Foundation is working with advisers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to form a team to further development of EveryBlock and make it much easier for news organizations to set up the software on their sites, Kebbel said. Knight will work with several news organizations around the country to install EveryBlock for them. Once this additional development is completed, the new code will be released.”

ONA09 debrief and the swagger

Oct 6, ’09 2:24 PM

Well, it’s been a pretty awesome week.

I spent most of last Thursday through Sunday at the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and if you follow me on Twitter or spotted a short post on my blog over the weekend, you know that Publish2, my current employer, was honored with a rather pleasant award on Saturday night at the Online Journalism Awards.

And earlier that day, I helped lead an unconference session on “Context and the Coming Link Economy,” which turned out to be one of my favorite conversations of the weekend, with help from Matt Thompson, Elaine Helm, Jay Rosen, and other journalists who turned out to talk through the ideas we had in mind.

Meanwhile, I caught a few excellent panels each day, including one about the Journalist as Entrepreneur moderated by Mark Briggs of Serra Media and Journalism 2.0.

Mark was one of many people I was excited about meeting for the first time in person at ONA, and we had a good time and a managed a solid conversation or two, but I think we both saw something had changed in the attitudes we saw from the journalists in the room, or at the very least, that there was something different about this conference.

He was using the word “swagger” to describe it. In this post, he outlines exactly what he means:

“Instead of simply feeling positive about the future, many people I talked to had confidence that their organization was on the right track. Even people who were looking for jobs didn’t seem to be scared.”

That’s a shift. A big shift.

The time of handwringing has past. Anyone still tearing their shirt over what comes next for the news business should take note: The news business is moving on. It’s time to get on the boat. Train’s leaving the station. Put up or shut up. Demos not memos. Your metaphor of choice, but the message is clear:

It’s time to get busy building a new ecosystem for news.

Some of us have a head start.

Hence, swagger.

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Ryan Sholin

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