Scripting News

News you won't hear on CNN tonight

Thu, 10 May 2007 03:38:33 GMT

ThinkProgress: "11 Republican members of Congress pleaded yesterday with President Bush and his senior aides to change course in Iraq."

From Doug Kaye, via email, RSS was the question for one of the answers on today's Jeopardy. If you know what the clue was, please post a note.

The future of news, part 3

Amyloo has a clear vision for how online news will develop, based on a very simple observable fact, news organizations specialize. Create a website that's the union of all the specialties. You don't need to replicate the stories, just links to the stories. Each site gets to run ads on their pages, but part of what makes a site attractive is how functional it is. If you have great reporting but the ads make your site more difficult to read, net-effect your reporting isn't so good.

BTW, part 2 of the future is Checkbox News.

Part 1 is Hypercamp, the meatspace Newsroom Of The Future, although I haven't been able to successfully convince anyone to partner with me on developing it. (And it requires too much capital for me to do it on my own.)

It's sad in a way to watch the various new media startups struggle to find a way to make money, because there are so many ways, they just haven't spotted them yet.

Business Week misquote

Wed, 09 May 2007 19:14:59 GMT

I know you're not supposed to object when a big print pub like Business Week quotes you, but they got it wrong, even when they quoted me verbatim from the web. I didn't think it was possible, but here it is.

Here's the article, and here's the quote.

I do not believe "one factor spurring the growth of unconferences is their ability to tap the smarts of the people who usually sit mute in the audience."

Yet they say I believe that.

I don't know if they believe it. Or if it's just some short-hand, or empty throwaway words that fill up all Business Week articles.

Truth be told, most things they call unconferences are not, imho, unconferences, and don't address the question I said they should address. If you determine the schedule ad hoc, but still put speakers in front of a silent group of people, you haven't changed very much, imho. If that's spurring growth, then it's not a good kind of growth.

Further, I don't think the kind of unconferences I like are actually growing. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but I like to stay grounded in the truth. When I say something is growing, I want that to mean something. So I don't say something is growing when I don't believe it is.

See below, on The Scientific Method, as it applies to journalism.

What I would teach a journalist, part 2

Wed, 09 May 2007 18:22:37 GMT

A few days ago, in response to a query from a reader at the University of Nevada, I outlined how I would start teaching Web 2.0 to journalism students.

I think perhaps I said some things without explaining enough, so there were some misunderstandings.

I said skip Drupal and get the kids on blogspot.com or wordpress.com asap, because they need to be blogging before anything else happens. I saw this at a meeting with J-school students at Cal a few weeks ago. There's a real resistance among students to just get started. I've seen the same thing with software developers. Every writer will tell you the same thing I said. You want to be a writer young man or young woman? Then start writing.

Too often people start by designing then building elaborate online castles, that turn out to be reinventions of castles other people built, and then on opening day, have no idea what to do next. Why don't the people use it? Ahah, that's the real problem. By spending a lot of time thinking and planning and coding, you're just putting off the reckoning. You need to deal with that first. What do you have to say? Having an empty blog will raise that question, at the beginning, before you have a chance to bark up wrong trees.

I also said there's no curriculum and I meant it. It isn't some airy-fairy idea, I have hair on my chest, and a loud voice. Just kidding (well, I actually do). Why is there no curriculum? Because no one knows WTF we're doing, so how could we have a curriculum. It's like asking Lewis and Clark to have a curriculum for the Denver Nuggets. What are the Denver Nuggets, they might ask. I'm sure they passed through Denver on their exploration of the west, but there was no city there, and certainly no basketball team. See my point? You and your students are exploring the unknown.

On the other hand, there are some things that are known, the basics of journalism, how to do research, question the interests of your sources, disclosing your own interests, etc. That doesn't go away, but that's all in your Journalism 101 text. And there are writing skills and editing skills, all of that comes into play when writing, whether you're writing for print or bits.

And one other thing they don't usually teach in J-school (as far as I know) -- The Scientific Method. Please, let's be very very circumspect in stating our hypotheses, knowing what we know and don't know, and be careful not to have anyone say things they don't mean.

Philip Meyer: Journalism and the Scientific Tradition.