Beyond Comment Threads: A Mozilla journalism challenge on building better community conversations around the news. So far, nothing terrifyingly new. Paragraph-level commenting, Slashdot-style threading, collapsing, and moderation. And if I could figure out how to register for the site, with or without OpenID, I might be able to comment on the entries.
(via PBS IdeaLab)
Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account? Craig Silverman talks with Andy Carvin about covering revolution from afar, performing atomized acts of journalism to connect individual tweets to sourcing, evidence, witnesses, and narrative.
Wikileaks and The New York Times: Wade Keller confirms what I, for one, suspected about the relationship between the two. Assange was (mostly) treated as a source of data, but as with all sources, it’s a complicated relationship.
January 2011 Carnival of Journalism: The role of Universities… Check out the massive roundup of posts examining how universities, news organizations, and communities can collaborate and operate in tomorrow’s local information ecosystem.
A social media skills course at Columbia, taught by @zseward, @lavrusik, and @nyt_jenpreston? Sounds like the right idea.
Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks, it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both. Without looking too deeply, I believe in what WikiLeaks is trying to do, but I’m profoundly worried to see here, for example, Tor server traffic mined for data. That’s the sort of behavior Tor is designed to protect people from, not subject them to.
Mayor Daley, paraphrased: You like transparency, reporters? How about I post all your FOIAs online?
Further notes on the Wall Street Journal’s use of Foursquare: Are location-based networks too personal for news?
Is Reddit journalism? The inevitable investigation.
If your interaction with Reddit is anything like mine, you’re a 9-percenter.
Remember the 90-9-1 rule of online community interaction? Well, on Reddit, I rarely say a word, and I’ve probably never started a thread, but I do so enjoy their magical little UI for upvoting posts and comments, especially on my phone, often in the middle of the night while trying to get a child back to sleep.
That places me somewhere between a lurker (90 percent) who never logs in, just reads and scans, and at best, might link to a thread from elsewhere, and an active participant (1 percent) who posts daily, optimizes their headlines to be more likely to garner enough upvotes to land on the homepage (please note the title of this blog post), and/or creates “novelty accounts” — usernames designed to be part of the joke themselves.
It’s a fascinating community, with Reddiquette that has evolved over the years, and a language of acronyms as described by David Weinberger in a blog post this weekend that acts as the beginning of a set of open questions along the lines of “Is Reddit Journalism?” But those quotation marks are my own. David’s questions are much better than that.
His questions revolve around the idea of “Reddit and community journalism” (the actual title of his post, clearly not optimized for upvotes at the time of this writing.) Several key Reddit acronyms are covered, including TIL (Today I Learned) and AMA (Ask Me Anything).
Sound familiar?
Open up a daily newspaper, and find what in no uncertain terms we’d call “community journalism” in the form of interviews with and profiles of local personalities, unsung heroes, hidden gems, people in your neighborhood, etc.
That’s an AMA.
Admittedly, the request queue for print coverage in this vein could be considered a little less democratic than on Reddit, where a search for “IAMA request” strongly resembles the early days of the Help A Reporter Out mailing list.
And of course, we’ve all read columnists elaborate on some interesting tidbit of information or history of their community, sharing a discovery with their readers, who often write back in the form of letters (and now, comments, naturally) and share their own point of view, rebuttals, or even memories of the factoid in question.
That’s a TIL.
Now, go upvote this on Reddit.
If it makes it to the homepage, I’ll write a sequel titled “10 ways Reddit is like a newspaper in the 1980s.”