We call out items for two lists, without debate, about what about current journalism should stay and what should go. (I didn’t start recording in time to get most of the first list. Sorry.)

What should stay:

Integrity
Speaking truth to power
Commitment to facts
Accuracy
Be a witness
Balance

What should change:

Truth should be acknowledged as plural
Acknowledge the interactive tools
Drop the arrogance of the assumption your audience is stupider than you
Learn to listen
Embrace the customer as innovator and partner
Publicly-traded media companies should change their message to Wall Street to include serving the public trust as part of their mission
Less “silo-ing” of topics
Gutlessness
The fear of looking partisan (“We should only be afraid of being wrong.”)
Stenography
Stop passing off infotainment as news
Transparency!
Change the way corrections and clarifications are handled
Learn from Jon Stewart—blurt out the truth
Reward people for collaboration
Independence from politics and product placement
Revisit copyright
Work more with journalists from other outside the US
Drop the US-foreign distinction

Jeff Jarvis reminds us that these lists do not represent consensus, just ideas called out from the group. [Good, because there are a couple of items on the list that are far more important than others and which would require major changes to implement. It was intended just as raw material.]

Matt Thompson explains how he and Robin Sloan at the Poynter Institute came to make EPIC, a “documentary” about the future of media. (I blogged about it here.) They recently updated it and added a more upbeat ending: ordinary citizens making media via social networks. “I hope we can learn from communities like CraigsList and MetaFilter”

Susan Mernit (moderating this session): Are you saying that the readers feel like they have an ownership stake…?

Matt: “People are bowling alone but they’re Everquesting together.”

Me: The hardest thing for me to explain when I talk with mainstream journalists is the sense of some sites being ours and others being theirs: CraigsList, Wikipedia, even Google feel like ours, no matter how irrationally.

Merrill Brown: I used to feel that way about my hometown paper. I wonder if a paper-based medium can recapture that…

Jay: People used to think of it as our newspaper. Now it’s the newspaper. That’s because journalists have sought authority by separating themselves, rather than by connecting. They know and we don’t. Papers set up boards where readers could have “their say” (ghetto-zing them).

Jeff Jarvis: (Citing a reader of his blog) Newspapers have to stop thinking of themselves as things and start thinking of themselves as places.

Craig: People are overwhelming trustworthy. They’ll point out problems. There’s a very small number of crazy people. You already have people in your organizations who know how to deal with them. Some can be turned around/ Some have to be barred from the site.

Susan asks which technologies can make real changes. People talk about blogging, content management,

Jeff Jarvis talks about how easy it is to do video from your laptop, turning everyone into a possible contributor to mainstream TV networks. And then he says, memorably: You’re going to find a lot of airtime given to Michael Jackson and not very much blog time.

Rebecca: We’re too focused on computers. Our communication devices are being distributed far more broadly than that.

Froomkin: It’s blogs. Blogs are highly evolved. They’re the alternative the media have kept demanding of their detractors.

Matt: Newspapers don’t make much of the tremendous amount of information — names, quotes, photos — streaming through them. Why isn’t all this put into a database?

Jay: Blogs aren’t a big technological advance. But they give our blogs a look as professional as MSM pages. The most interesting tech goes horizontal, enabling there to be self-informing publics.

Halley: We don’t need better buggy whips.

Andreas Neus: Audible voice is tremendously important.

Ty Ahmed-Taylor (Comcast) talks about the importance of tags. The NY Public Library put lots of photos on line with a terrible taxonomy; they would have done better to put it onto Flickr, he says. Also, video blogging will be the next big thing.

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After you spend a year at the Nieman Foundation, says Jay Rosen, no one at your paper even asks what you learned. If you were Microsoft, sent an employee away for a year to learn, and didn’t even ask what they learned, you’d be fired. “This profession doesn’t value intellectual capital,” Jay says. “It doesn’t even really respect learning.” New media has forced traditional media to have to learn quickly. “It has not happened,” he says. “There’s this huge gap between what most journalists know about the Web and what’s actually happening on the Web.” If the traditions are going to survive, professional journalists will have to jump in and learn.

For example, Jay says, journalists often believe that people on the Web have no neutrality. But Wikipedia shows otherwise. Journalists think what’s on the Web is unedited. But the Web has its own way of editing: Readers edit.

The people who started online companies are moving towards journalism. When Yahoo! started, it didn’t think it would move toward journalism. Likewise for CraigsList [Craig is here. Yay Craig!]. If professional journalism is going to survive, it’s going to have move toward the ways of the Web.

Journalism has protected itself by separating itself from politics, economics, the public… That’s how you had integrity. Now the question is how you create connections. “That’s very much the ethos that professional journalists absorb.”

He is worried about this “learning deficiency.”

[Great. I love Jay]

Craig: During any serious change, jobs are lost. There’s a need for some sort of self-help. I’d be willing to put links — ones sent to me — about what these changes are about.

Rob Enderle: Big corporations, not just media, don’t take advantage of people’s learning. It should be up to the individual to drive through the organization what they’ve learned.

Len Apcar, Editor in chief of NY Times Digital says that there is a 150-year-old culture at The Times. If the website organization of The Times had found room in the newspaper’s building, it would have been crushed because of the culture. After ten years, the culture of the website and the newspaper have to come closer together. We’ve learned that “success breeds success,” e.g., Andrew Revkin‘s blogging a trip through Greenland. I don’t need money so much as a willingness to try. If Nick Kristoff wins a Pulitzer for his travel reports, Len wants the web person who went with him to be in the photo. That would be a huge step, he says. [I find it depressing that that would be considered a huge step.] Conclusion: We need a change in culture, not just more money.

Matt Thompson says that we need to talk about what “survive” means.

Dan Froomkin: It’s not that the new media branches are up on what’s going on and the old media branches aren’t listening. The new media branches generally aren’t up on what’s happening. It comes back to fear. We need boldness and time is running out. “Yahoo harvested online aggregation of breaking news before we even knew what it was.” The same thing is happening with hyperlocal reporting. “At least we still have tremendous value in our enterprise reporting and opinions.” He ends by saying, “It’s very depressing.”

Danny Schechter shows a bit of his film, Weapons of Mass Deception. [I don’t know why we’re watching this.]

Rebecca says it’s not the question whether mainstream journalism survives. It’s whether journalism survives. the MSM are doing more audience-pleasing content and are less concerned about doing the work that would advance the public good. We need to look at the business model issues, she says. If you’re working for a corporation that is most concerned about short-term business interests, can you do good journalism? [Yay, Rebecca!]

Len: I’ll go out on a limb and state four square that there are bedrock values: Judgment and editing counts for something. Some people need editors to get their ideas across. There are sometimes no right answers about what the lead should be, but there should be a discussion. He also favors fact-based reporting and true curiosity-based reporting. A good reporter does what happens at Wikipedia: aggregating the views and ideas of experts. That’s a useful thing. People don’t have time to do it themselves. We need independent media to uncover certain sorts of stories. [He actually gives an example of a story about accidents at railroad crossings. My question is exactly what types of stories are best done by media institutions.]

Jay: Exactly what limb did you go out on? The media system gained power at the expense of other actors such as political parties and old boss systems. During this period, journalists didn’t come up with new ways of explaining their value and the grounds of their judgment. Journalists have relied on the most innocent explanations of their work.

Dan: So how do we explain ourselves?

Jay: I talk about citizen journalism.

Rebecca reports on the webcred conference. We should stop talking about the conflict between MSM and blogging. Instead we should be talking about what we can do to keep citizens well informed and how can we help make the citizenry better able to understand what it reads. We’re all in this together and need to figure out how to improve the ecosystem. She asks if we really have the tools we need (a point Halley brought up earlier)? And what are the commercial incentives? Do we have the right business model for creating responsible credible media?

Craig: People are frustrated at what isn’t covered, at how stories get raised and dropped. [What’s most interesting to me is how we’re “taking back” not only content but metadata and even what constitutes a story.]

After lunch, we’re going to spend time building a list of what should change and what should be preserved.

[Technorati tags: whosenews media jayrosen]

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Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Media Center are sponsoring a conference called Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good. There are about thirty people sitting around circled tables and another twenty in chairs outside the magic circle. The invitee list is heavy with mainstream media folks, new media folks, and academics, with a handful of bloggers who blog about blogging. Mainly white, mainly male, mainly American, skewing 40+.

The official agenda:

Mainstream media and the connected society: Will the traditions of professional journalism survive? Should they?

Technology, humanity and the digital datastream: Who or what is in control? Who profits?

We media, the culture and the common good: How we know, how we learn, and how we trust in the emerging ecosystem of participatory, always-on media

We go around and introduce ourselves and an idea we care about. Impressionistically: Change in authority, enlarging and globalizing the conversation, whether journalists are becoming free agents, whether the youngest generation is going to care about news and reading at all, preserving brand, how to “aggregate eyeballs across platforms,” how can we measure and monetize trust, what does the market want us to do, can the new media (e.g., MSNBC, NYT online) support the great operations that MSM support, how can MSM embrace the passion arising among readers who are discovering their voices, how do we scale business models, how do we maintain craft, how does our media system serve (or, currently, undermine) democracy, how to give ethnic and alternative media access, how to engage people politically,

This is clearly intended not to focus on blogs v. journalism, which is fine, but as a blogger I am feeling under-represented. I’d guess the MSM folk feel that bloggers are over-represented. And I’m confident the blogosphere feels blogging here is mis-represented.

You can read an opening position paper — actually, a short book — here, written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by J.D. Lasica. I’ve skimmed it and it looks really good.

[Technorati tags: whosenews media]

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The NYTimes.com site is re-fashioning itself, launching in April. That’s what Robert Larson, director of product management and development of NYTimes.com, told me when I interviewed him for the issue of Release 1.0 that came out last week. (Here’s the article’s first section.) They’re doing something bold and important, which I think may mark a turning point…but perhaps not the one NYTimes.com envisions.

The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See “Note on Links” at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you’ll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google’s rankings.

I think this may bring about two crises (“crisis” in the old sense of crossroads):

First, if the topic pages don’t give away enough information, if they have too many enticing links that make us pay $2.95 to retrieve the article, they will position The Times as a hoarder rather than as an authority; initially, they are thinking about publishing the summaries written for The Times Index, not the archived articles themselves.* It’s crucial to our trust in newspapers that we feel they are on our side, working to make us all better informed; it will be a sad day for the mainstream media when we lose that sense.

Second, the first comparison we’re all going to make is to the Wikipedia page on the same topic. My guess is that, while nothing can duplicate The Times’ 150 years of cultural artifacts if they’re made freely available*, we’re going to find the Wikipedia page more useful, more current, more neutral, and more linked into the Web. If we don’t, we’ll edit the Wikipedia page until it’s better. And then we’ll link it to the NYTimes.com topic page. In this head-on comparison between what the best of the closed systems can do with what the newest of the open systems comes up with, you’ll hear the groan of the hawser as the ship of trust changes berths.

*[I added these two phrases after sleeping on it.]

Note on links: Thanks to Dave, the Times does offer bloggers a way to link to articles without having to pay the archive fee, but this only works for articles published after May 5, 2003. Plus, it’s hackier than most non-techie bloggers are going to put up with.

Of course Jay Rosen’s piece on the NY Times’ acquisition of About.com definitely will be on the exam….

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Ethan’s got the full story about Jeff Ooi, an outspoken global voice, being pulled in by Malaysia’s Criminal Investigation Division for questioning about the content of his Weblog. Says Ethan:

Jeff was questioned for two hours and released. It’s unclear whether the authorities will close the case regarding Jeff’s weblog, or whether he may be subject to future questioning and harrasment.

So far, he’s continuing undaunted in his blogging…

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OnFolio‘s new version supports Firefox. Yay! I had bought rev 1 a couple of months before I switched from Microsoft IE, and I’ve missed it.

OnFolio does something really simple: When you come across a Web page you want to save, it makes a copy and puts it into a folder of your choosing. Of course you can do that yourself, but you end up with component parts all over. OnFolio gives you its own foldering system, lets you add keywords and descriptions, and makes the whole thing hassle-free. (It uses the MHT file format to store all the elements in a single file. [Correction (see comments): It uses MHT to share content with non-users.]) Of course, it does more than that, but that’s the functionality that got me to buy it. It’s a great way to organize your research.

But here’s my worry about OnFolio’s fate. If other people are using OnFolio for the same basic service as I am, how long will it be before someone writes a free add-in to Firefox that saves Web pages into MHT format? I’m not convinced that the extra features in OnFolio are going be attractive to enough people…

(Neattricks has an interesting set of reviews of what seems to be v1, with responses from OnFolio.)

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Tonight I’m leading another discussion at the Berkman Center, open to all.

Last time, we talked about Net friendship, and it went really well in part because I only talked for a few minutes at the beginning. It turned into a very interesting, very informal discussion.

That’s what I’m aiming for tonight as well. I’m going to open with just a few comments. I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but perhaps something like this:

We have an image of time as a series of “nows” that march past the razor blade of the present. That’s an incoherent view (IMO). It’s also inconsistent with our lived experience of time which is far clumpier and invested: We experience time as seasons (annual to daily) and memory (the clustering of what matters to us). We can’t get to nows no matter how hard we try. (Important note on the domain of discourse: I’m a westerner. I make no claims about other cultural perspectives.) My hypothesis: It’s harder to make the time-is-nows mistake on the Net because on the Net we’re directly confronted with our tangly threads of interest.

But, because of the way we experience the Net — facing forward, looking at a screen — the fabric of time turns into raveling threads that constantly demand us to re-weave them.

I’d like us to talk about how we experience time on the Internet. E.g., I way too frequently go to do something online and three links later can’t remember what I was trying to do. At first I thought this was a sign of oncoming old age, and there may be an element of truth to that, but it seems also to be encouraged by the Net itself.

I also hope that we talk about the ways in which different Net tools — email, mailing lists, IM, etc. — present time.

But obviously if the discussion works, it’ll go where it wants.

The session is open to all and we serve pizza. 6-7:30 pm tonight at the Baker House [map] [Technorati tag: berkman ]

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Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe today grades Larry Summers’ presentation: C+. It’s a well-done piece that takes Summers’ remarks on their own terms. (I’ve blogged about it here, but I heartly recommend Kuttner’s comments instead.) [Note: The link will break soon because the Globe has decided it’s not worth it to be a long-lasting influence on our culture.’[Technorati tags: summers harvard]

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Vimeo lets you assemble video based on author’s tags. For example, you could automatically assemble a movie about concerts, about funny things, or all the video Steve Garfield’s posted. [Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link. Steve also recommend an essay by Jakob Lodwick on Tagwebs, Flicker and the Human Brain. I haven’t read it yet.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy ]

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Julian Bond raises excellent issues about dealing with tag spam. The folks at del.icio.us and flickr and the like seem also to be looking at “interestingness” to increase relevancy rankings, where interestingness is some computation of the change in popularity, cluster analysis of tags, and other stuff I equally don’t understand. [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags]

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