ABC’s Nightline has been working on a piece about blogging. Rumor had it that it was going to be shown this Thursday. The new rumor is that it will be shown this Tuesday.

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At the beginning of next week, Technorati will launch a new tag aggregation feature: When you search on a tag, you’ll be shown a list of “related” tags. The relationships are automatically discerned by the software, analyzing the other tags used by people tagging the same set of pages and photos. Dave Sifry let me play with a beta of it, and the suggested tags were generally quite relevant.

There are two types of relationships the “related” tags help with. First, they suggest slightly divergent topics so you can browse off the path you were heading down. Second, they help get over the problem that people use different words to flag the same ideas; the “related” tags can help you find more sources that are directly on the path you were heading down. So they help with both digression and focus. [See my disclosure statement.] [Technorati tags: technorati tags taxonomy]

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For reasons that are unclear, but I wasn’t inclined to argue about them, I’ve been invited to a “summit” on “democracy, terrorism and security” in Madrid next week, me and my close personal friends Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Dan Gillmor, Joi Ito, David Isenberg, and Bill Clinton…you know, the same old crowd.

About thirty of us (excluding Bill) are in a group talking about the Net, democracy and terrorism, not a topic I know a lot about. I presume there will be some arguing in favor of tightening security on the Net in order to prevent terrorism, an approach me and my jerking knees oppose. I mean, everything I know about security could be written on the back of a tie-dyed t-shirt, but I do think some of the batten-down-the-hatches arguments ignore not only the social and political costs but miss ways an open, worldwide network can help in the fight against terrorism. But I’m willing to listen and learn. And the format of the conference sounds like it should facilitate learning: The first day we meet behind closed doors and on the second we engage publicly.

The Summit is sponsoring an online forum about its topics right now… [Technorati tags: madrid terrorism]

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We divided into three groups and talked about what we think the news media will/should look like in five years.

The groups tended to believe that citizen reporters will be integrated into the “ecosystem,” with the media operating as aggregators of information, or as places, perhaps clustered by topic. Open source content. Creative Commons licensing. Training the young. Niche reporting and advertising. On demand. Cross platform, off PCs and onto mobile devices. Slice-and-dice. More globalized. Conversation is the entry point to the culture.

Jeff Jarvis summarizes each of the three groups’ presentation with a word: Trust, transparency and conversation. [Yup. And how does this compare with the news media’s current values of, approximately, trust, authority and accuracy?]

I believe that if questioned, the groups would disagree about the likely specific fates of, say, The New York Times, the BBC, etc. E.g., will citizen journalists be working for the news media or will the news media of the future be loose aggregations of content, some of which is created by professionals but much of which won’t? Will the business model come top down or will there be small changes and experiments so the business model can grow organicallly?

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Rebecca points to Kent Bye’s New Media Ecosystem. I haven’t read it, but the snippet looks interesting, and I look forward to reading it.

I have an overly simple view of the media ecology: News is getting commoditized. The momentum — for better or worse — is on the side of voice, passion, connection and bias. The space between commoditized news (the AP) and the voices expressing that news increasingly belongs to aggregators, not to the news media.

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Discussion of how user-led coverage ought to be. Occasional, isolated, and relatively random points:

Jarvis: On the blogs, you’ll find lots of discussion of social security and not much of Michael Jackson. In the mainstream newspapers, it’s just the reverse.

Brian Reich: There’s a generation gap here. We need to start training the younger generation in journalism. That’s the only way the news business will accept young people as credible journalists.

Lisa Stone: Don’t forget email. It’s key.

Jim Kennedy (AP): Let’s not throw journalism out. Instead lets rethink how journalism enters the culture. [Applause] [This has been Rebecca Mackinnon‘s point as well.]

Katherine von Jan (Faith Popcorn’s group): We want to hear more directly from the source of news. Plus we’re becoming a more viusal society. I don’t see how we can translate old newspapers into something relevant today.

Halley: If we could get the NY Times on XBox, we’d be there!

Jay: Sociologist Raymond Wilson said that there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses. There are ways of talking to people as masses, and those ways have histories. For journalists to survive as socially significant creatures, their function lies in engaging and addressing people as a public. The notion that we’re going to continue to be “consumers” is in my view retrograde.

Me: I think we’re seeing a growing bifurcation between commoditized news that is aggregation-fodder and personalized views that reflects ideas/events through individual interests and viewpoints. The problem facing the news media is that they’re stuck in the middle. [Technorati tag: media]

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A quick post — swinging unpleasantly between the obvious and the wrong — during the first morning break at the Whose News conference:

Don’t a lot of the MSM’s woes go back to their commitment to “coverage,” i.e., the idea that there’s a set of events that the MSM are morally and professionally obligated to report on, even if it’s not of particular interest to readers? That creates a bunch of news that no one wants to write and no few want to read. In contrast, bloggers, and Jon Stewart, get to talk only about we want to.

There’s a Postmodern point somewhere in this about the idea that there’s an independent world of Big Events, but leave that aside for the moment. It’s enough that papers feel an obligation to cover events that readers should care about, even if the readers don’t. I don’t dispute that. I don’t want news media to be guided only by reader interest if only because interests are responses more than they are inner states. I want there to be a record larger than my own interests. I want the opportunity to have my interests expanded and educated. And when some story I didn’t care about turns out to be tremendously important, I want to be able to go back through the archives (and not for $2.95 a pop, by the way) to learn what I didn’t know I needed to know.

I don’t know the economics of maintaining something like the AP, which is in the business of providing commoditized, miscellanized coverage. But I think we’re heading towards a time when we need the AP more than we need the NY Times. How much better would The Times be if it gave up on its obligation to provide “coverage”? Where will this infrastructure of miscellaneous stories come from? AP? WikiNews? Citizen journalists? Free-agent professional journalists? Free-agent editors? Everywhere and everyone?

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We begin by watching Rob Corddry’s piece on how to become a new media person, on the Jon Stewart Daily Show. Some of us are dismayed that he’s taken as news, but most of us seem to think the media need to learn from it. People ask if The Daily Show is popular because it blurts out the truth, is irreverent, is passionate… (Obviously, it’s also because it’s funny.) Craig Newmark says one of his favorite quotes now is: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Or else they’ll kill you.”

Anonymized comments:

Jon Stewart, someone says, is liberated from having to suck up to sources.

It’s easier for him because he only has a couple of segments.

Real journalists have to be dispassionate. E.g., if you’ve ever covered a plane crash…

All we should learn from Jon Stewart is that media literacy in this country stinks.

How do we make what we do as lively, interesting and engaging as what Stewart does, but with more content?

We shouldn’t pander to our readers by adopting Stewart’s irony.

Stewart plays the valued role of court jester, but nothing more than that.

My 25-year-old daughter would say that this discussion shows that we’re a bunch of old fogeys.

We live in an ADD culture. We don’t have enough time. We want to get news and entertainment.

This is the what the customer wants. We ought to listen.

The news industry is the only one that tries to adapt customer behavior to what it wants. (Murmurs of disagreement. It’s called “marketing.”)

Discussion of the role of passion in journalism: Is it an obstacle to fair reporting? Or is it a requirement to keep news human? Rather’s mistake was that he was unable to admit that he made a mistake.

(Me:) Stewart is a jester, but the point is that the jester is now more trusted than the king. Stewart’s object of derision is the mainstream media. If the MSM would follow a clip of, say, Cheney saying “I never said X” with the four clips where he did say X, we wouldn’t be watching Stewart.

Half the country hates Stewart. There’s still plenty of room for non-Stewart news sources.

Do the media provide a product or a service?

The media don’t really know what their customers want.

Stewart focuses narrowly — the White House press corps, primarily — and his relevance is limited.

If the media were more transparent, people would be more forgiving.

It’s not about journalists’ passion. It’s about the audience’s passion.

[Jay Rosen, star of the Daily Show segment, walks in late and gets a standing ovation. Except for a couple of people.] [Technorati tag: media]

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In an interview at CNET news, Federal Elections Commission chair Bradley Smith said:

“The real question is: Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.”

Omigod. Have we completely forgotten what democracy is about? Scary. (Thanks to Salon for the link.)

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Just a couple of highlights because I’m getting tired.

Len Apcar (NYTimes Digital): I’m ecstatic we bought About.com because it says we’re not a newspaper company. It’s the second largest acquisition in our history; the largest was the Boston Globe.

Dan Froomkin: We’re not delivering enough value. Newspapers create little articles and then we incrementally update them. We should instead be delivering the value that’s in the newsroom: Time lines, context, blogs, maps, video…We’re not monetizing our value because we’re not delivering our value.

Jim Kennedy (AP): We should get past the advertising model and be looking at the Amazon and eBay models.

Jan Schaffer (J-Lab): We’ve been talking too much about me-too journalism. There’s real value in media developing exclusive content.

Now we’re doing a list: What should we create.

Use the existing tools to invent new forms of digital story-telling
True Internet video
Distributed revenue infrastructure
Distributed trust infrastructure
Discover which bloggers are saying interesting things
Reputation system for individual journalists
At least one open source journalist at a major media outlet
Let us tag your articles
More niche e-newsletters, blogs, sites, etc.
Training programs for employees and audience
Really attack the cost side of article production
Create value around R&D so more will be done
Geotag everything
More contact between reporters and people, and not just online
Primers, FAQs, timelines — things that leverage the knowledge base of beat reporters
Encourage voice
RSS everything
Be transparent — show us the process as far as possible
Publish drafts and queries when it’s ok
Get on the right side of the copyright fight
Open your archives because that’s where the common good is
We want to talk with one another, not just comment on your stuff
If you feel constrained from blurting out the truth, what’s your business about?
Be interesting, fun
Have some of your folks get involved in sw development to see what they learn
Better partnering

Tomorrow, we’re told, we’re going to talk about the missing piece in this discussion: Readers.

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