Layer Cake Journalism 4: hellogoodeveningandwelcome

David Frost: Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?
Richard Nixon: I'm saying that when the President does it, that means it's 'not' illegal!
David Frost: ...I'm sorry?

Top Tips for Valet Service Journalism?

Talk about a sign of the times in the journalism industry. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call recently received an internal e-mail inviting them to work as valets at a private Christmas party for the Lehman family, who own the paper. And at least two employees have already accepted the offer.

From the Denvir Westword blog. That's Colorado. Meanwhile in Missouri at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Columbia....

You're invited to "Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy," a unique, two-day, action-planning session designed to change the landscape for news and information-service providers, artists and publishers. We'll plan, join and start setting up the Information Valet Economy, where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, and make money referring their users to content - and advertising - from anywhere.

The Information Valet economy conference AKA...

...new models for journalism.


This is what the conference offers. It is:

designed to change the landscape for news and information-service providers, artists and publishers. We'll plan, join and start setting up the Information Valet Economy, where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, and make money referring their users to content - and advertising - from anywhere.

Got to be worth a look, right?

On being less literal about the virtual

Camden, London, September 2008
Robin Hunt

The media’s morbid fascination with the “Second Life divorce” reveals how most media -especially newspapers, even if they also have an online presence- is still trapped in a mentality that understands “the virtual” as opposed to “the real”. (”Second Life affair leads to real life divorce,” said The Guardian). A Second Life affair is no more virtual than flirting over txt messaging, handwritten letters, telephone calls or even a club’s bar. (All flirting is virtual). The “alter-egos” of people on so-called “virtual worlds” or “environments” are still determined by those “outside” the machine. We are those alter-egos, we are the machine.

From Never Neutral. [It's down the story...]

The Semantic Web, Well Explained for Journalists

"In the semantic web, it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting," John Breslin, the founder of the SIOC project, told Journalism.co.uk.

From Journalism.co.uk. Part One.

For example, some publishers are feeding their entire historical archive of material through Calais to be tagged which means it can be filtered and searched more easily. Although these tools aren't of immediate use to most journalists, the scale of this project reveals how many content providers are turning to this technology to make sure their content can be found in the new semantic world.

Part Two on the detail.

Bill Hurt and Holly Hunter were the Orwell of the 80s

Discuss.

Asked if he has become a journalistic cynic, he responded, “That, my friend, is the understatement of the year.” He then quoted a line from the 1987 film “Broadcast News”: “You’re lucky if you can get out while you could still cry.“

“The IFC Media Project” gives Mr. Yago a chance to critique what he sees as misleading media practices. Much of the territory it covers is well worn in print and on the Internet, although not addressed as often on television.

NYT on a user's guide to making television news.

Trust & Thomas Friedman

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)

Check the date of Friedman's NYT piece.

Objectivity: Poynter Dean not a believer in its myth...

...which is quite a complex thought.

Others claim the reporter's rule of remaining objective has never really been the case, and for newspapers to pretend to "hold on" to it in the growing age of online opinions and fast-moving facts only holds them back. "I'm not a believer in the myth of objectivity to begin with — what we are talking about is fairness," says Keith Woods, dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute. "We may aspire to [objectivity], but we have not come close to achieving it."

Anyway, Joe Strupp at E&P explores that ole subjective, objectivity.


Meanwhile, this is the second & third paragraph of a more challenging essay (in progress) I was was just sent by Andrew Calcutt, from the University of East London & Philip Hammond, of London South Bank University. This weekend I'm giving the essay a good read. I saw them present this last month: now it's time to think about it.

We subjects first make the world our object; then we make it again, this time as the object of our subjectivity. Objectivity arises from the collective application of subjectivity in the contentious process of producing mental objects – knowledge, designed to capture that material object – the external world, which we subjects have previously made. Objectivity is the condition of those mental objects which are the further objectification of the objective world – the world made into their object by human subjects.

In that journalism is a form of knowledge, it is a particular mental object produced by a specific, designated subject – the journalist. As reporters, journalists apply their subjectivity to that which has already been produced by human subjects. The reporter’s job is to identify the primary object resulting from the actions of human subjects – the event, and make it into a secondary object – the story. By a process of mental production, materialised as words, sound, pictures and the arrangement (design) of these elements, journalists transform an object produced by some subjects (actors whose have actions have resulted in an event) into another object for the cognition of other subjects (readers, listeners, viewers and users).

Future of American Newspapers Resolved Today - it's official

The American Press Institute (API) will host an invitation-only, closed-door "summit conference" Nov. 13 in which 50 CEO-level executives will ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.

The one-day conference at API's Reston, Va., headquarters will be "a facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value."

From E&P. There will be a full report.

Thinking at Risk from Twitter?

"It's becoming harder and harder to step back and reflect, as journalism has shattered into a food fight" that values attitude over opinion, said Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman. The capacity to think is so at risk now with blogs and Tweets that reporters often have to react without time to absorb information. "The ability to think through something," she said, "hasn't sped up."

From Poynter.


Attitude over opinion? How about fact over opinion? Or analysis over fact?


The 'food fight' ? I'm going to write about that later.

Director of Global News BBC: it's just like 1976

The BBC I-Player team think about Paul Dacre's ideas on Blogging.

It seems to me the known knowns will be a continued need for information about an ever more interconnected world; an appetite for storytelling in a way that engages interest, a need for analysis and explanation and an opportunity to debate and discuss. But these things will increasingly be delivered through an internet that is more tailored and personalised thanks to data-driven services, video-rich and live (in the way we can now take video comments on some issues for example) and more open networks of people and information rather than closed systems offering limited and pre-determined choices.

Richard Sambrook romps from Howard Beale to, er, what do we do now, Captain Mainwaring?

Did you know there was a website entitled: Magazine Death Pool?

It's creator, aka The Grim Reaper (a magazine insider, then?), was interviewed this week by Media Life.

Which magazine death over the past month has been the most surprising?

None. At this stage of the game, there aren't that many surprising magazines shutdowns.

Every one that has shut down didn't shock anybody because of their dubious status. Without rock-solid fundamentals to withstand a terrible economy, coupled with the migration of consumers getting news and entertainment from the web, there is a lot of toast out there.

Magazine Death Pool.

Real World Suffers Population Losses as Privileged Elite Evolve in Subsidised Environment

Obama was an Elitist too, right?

Today, I worry that too many journalists write only for other journalists. Columnists who have never really lived in the real world let alone knocked on hundreds of doors, write columns only for their friends. Large parts of the media are increasingly populated by a privileged elite of top university graduates who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments, and are impervious to what the great majority of people are thinking, removed as they are from the commercial imperative of actually connecting with enough readers to make their papers financially viable.

Some of you here tonight, I suspect, may sneer at the kind of family-values paper I’ve just described – that almost comic obsession with the letters page. Those values, you’ll argue, belong to another era. Well, maybe. My own view is that some values are timeless.

Those "elites" again.


And for the BBC-bashing bit.


Wikipedia (via Roy Greenslade) reveals that the author of the quote was:

... educated at University College School, a private fee-paying school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship... In his school holidays, [he] worked as a messenger at the Sunday Express [his father, Peter... was a prominent journalist on the Sunday Express] and during his pre-university gap year as a trainee in the Daily Express. From 1967 he read English at Leeds University...

So no privilege there, then? Just real world.

A new Photographic Agency for Climate Change

Our second goal is to explore new funding sources as a group. There is a lot of interest in climate change right now but organizations looking to create projects involving photography don't have a resource to handle the photography. We want to help them build the projects from the ground up and secure new sources of funding.

Joshua Wolfe & GHG Photos, from the Digital Journalist.

The Rapture (part 2) - P.J. O'Rourke sees the Light

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone- gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

P.J. O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard.

The Death of Memory: 'USA 08'

When I said Terrorist I meant to say...

The presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said she was hard-pressed to find a similar moment when the tone had changed so drastically, and so quickly, among so many people of such prominence.

“I don’t think that’s happened very often,” Ms. Goodwin said. “The best answer I can give you is they don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, and they recognize how the country saw this election, and how people feel that they’re living in a time of great historic moment.”

Others in the professional political class were not so sure. Some wondered whether simple pragmatism was the explanation.

Pragmatism or the 'wrong side of history'? Make your mind up here at the NYT.

Objectivity, the New Yorker trial

By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, the key issue was whether [Janet] Malcolm’s changes in the wording of Masson’s quotations rendered her story knowingly false — the standard that Masson, a public figure, would need to prove to win his libel suit.

In extending latitude to writers, the court found that “deliberate alteration of the words ... does not equate with knowledge of falsity ... unless the alteration results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement.”

While the case was important because it helped to further clarify libel law, its significance was further felt in unveiling the tension between traditional, fact-bound reporting and the kind of literary journalism that had been popularized in magazines like the New Yorker.

Although Masson v. New Yorker was a defamation case, it also was a trial of literary versus traditional journalism. As Kathy Roberts Forde suggests in her compelling book, the struggle between the two forms has a history that long pre-dates the Supreme Court case.

Objectivity as a tenet of journalism was a natural extension of the growth of “pure science” — relying “on observation and measurement to explain the world” — that solidified in the late 1800s at universities across the country and soon spilled over into the social sciences. As Forde points out, “[b]y the 1920s, journalism had turned toward the social sciences.”

Robert D. Richards on "Literary Journalism on Trial", by Kathy Roberts Forde.

The Economist Gets Soppy and Romantic

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

I've missed that old "content management system" talk. Content is King, gentlemen?

Presidents and the Press, when the campaigning never stops

Since the Clinton years, this has been the era of the permanent campaign, with the line between running for election and running the country practically erased. Bush took Karl Rove into the White House, turned policy into an arm of politics, and governed the same way he campaigned: treat the press as an out-of-favor interest group, control the message at all cost, repeat it incessantly regardless of changing facts, admit no mistakes, show no uncertainty, reward loyalists, and ignore critics or else, if necessary, destroy them. This approach to what’s known as strategic communications won Bush two elections; it also helped destroy his Presidency. Campaigning and governing are not the same. They are closer to being opposites.

George Packer in the New Yorker.

Context not Content was McCain's failing

The editing tricksters of YouTube helped defeat McCain whenever it starved him of context. Surrounded by peers, contemporaries, buddies, colleagues, fellow veterans — men like himself — McCain might have made more sense.

From the Medium at the NYT.