Scripting News

Today's links

Washington Post podcasts.

Ted Leung: "If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web?"

Empire of the Air

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:22:46 GMT

I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary Empire of the Air, the history of radio. Highly recommended.

There was a pivotal, electrifying moment in the story, an interview with Helen Kelley, who was around when radio was new (interestingly she didn't seem that old, must have been an old interview). She said there came a point soon after she started listening to radio when she realized she could stop practicing the piano, because she "didn't have to make her own music anymore."

I said out loud: There it is, that's the moment we're reversing now. It was a mistake to believe that creativity was something you could delegate, no matter how much better they were than you, because it's an important human activity, like breathing, eating, walking, laughing, loving.

Reporters have lives too

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:06:31 GMT

WSJ (dim) view of live-blogging. I was interviewed for this piece, as a favor to some live-blogging friends who were also not included in the piece. Good for all of us, because it's such a non-story. Some people blog about the details of their lives, some don't. Okay, what's next?

Someone ought to do a story about the lives of Wall Street Journal reporters. What do they eat for breakfast. Do they allow other reporters to bring laptops to their weddings. It's pretty funny, because the more they make us out to be freaks, the more I learn they're pretty much like us.

I listenened to a (respectful) interview yesterday on Fresh Air of Martha Raddatz, an ABC News reporter with two kids, one 26 and one 15. Both love their mother. She's married to a reporter, their step-dad; he worries about mom when she's in Iraq. How do I know all this personal stuff? She talked about it in the interview. No one makes fun of her for this, quite the opposite, it gives her depth, makes her more interesting, better understood, more believable.

BTW, thanks for the Fresh Air podcast. Great stuff. It's already making a difference! ";->"

Multiple days of NewsHour

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:36:07 GMT

At dinner on Saturday with people from the NewsHour, a couple of us fans asked if it would be possible to have a feed that included more than one day's worth of shows. We were told that the limit was technical, not legal, their simple CMS didn't have a way of including more than day in the feed. I volunteered to write a script that would include the last week's worth of NewsHours, and they said go ahead, so I did.

http://pbs.newsriver.org/newshour/podcast.xml

Right now it's only got 3 days worth, since that's when my agent started running. After a week I'll add code to cut out stuff older than one week.

Caveat: That feed may not be available forever. The hope is that the NewsHour folk will take it over. But for now, I'll keep maintaining it here (it's easy, a script does all the work).

Editorial comment: This is the first time I've read or written feeds with the itunes add-ons, and I gotta say -- what an awful ugly design. I faithfully reproduced all the garbage they make podcasters include to be compatible with iTunes. I'm proud to say none of my feeds include that stuff or ever will, and I hope iTunes ends up on the scrap heap it deserves to be on for what they did to RSS. Now I know how the Third World feels about the US. ";->"