David Berlind posts the raw material behind his journalism. Cool!

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Jay Rosen has a terrific post arguing that the B vs. J debate is over. I don’t think it’s actually over until we figure out — invent — together the new world that’s emerging, but Jay points to five important premises. I’ll post the five here, but the piece is worth reading in its entirety:

1.) Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and blogging means anyone can own one. That is the Number One reason why weblogs matter. It is the broadest and deepest of all factors making this conference urgent.

2.) Instead of starting with “do blogs have credibility?” or “should blogging obey journalism ethics?” we should begin in a broader territory, which is trust. Trust as it is generated in different settings, online and off, in both blogging and in journalism — or in life.

3.) Look around: blogging partakes of a re-surgent spirit of amateurism now being seen in many fields earlier colonized by professionals.

4.) If news as lecture could yield to news as conversation, as some have recommended, it might transform the credibility puzzle because it would feed good information to journalists about the trusters and what they do and do not put their trust in.

5.) Among bloggers there is the type “stand alone journalist,” and this is why among journalists there is now the type: blogger.

Yup.

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Britt has a terrific piece — with the terrific title “The Commons of the Tragedy” — about blogging and journalism. He says that not only are we — all of us — writing the first draft of history, but we’re engaged in what he calls recursive journalism: “the amazing detail and clarity possible when the blogosphere gets on a story and combine our individually flawed viewpoints into a coherent and relevant representation.” He quotes Arianna Huffington:

When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and refuse to let go. They’re the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to get them off a story is to cut off their heads (and even then you’ll need to pry their jaws open). They almost all work alone, but, ironically, it’s their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share their work freely, feed off one another’s work, argue with each other, and add to the story dialectically.

It’d be easy to dismiss this by pointing to all the ways bloggers get stories wrong and to the genuine strengths of professional, full-time news organizations. Yes, of course. And I demur from the idea that blogs tend toward a single “coherent and relevant representation” — our views remain distributed and diverse. But none of this should mask from us the fundamental truth that Britt and Arianna point to: For better or worse, the who, what, where, when and why of journalism is changing.

(Note: if you use the “echo chamber” word on me, I will sit in a corner with my fingers in my ears chanting “Dean won! Dean won!” until you go away.)

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This Flash documentary by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson on the future of media describes a possible path from here to 2014 for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and the NY Times. I think it eventually goes off the rails, but it’s well done and, IMO, worth the 11 minutes.

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This is way cool — a major news service (hey, we’re talking The Beeb here!) distributing its news by letting us view it wherever and whenever we want. And in lots of languages. Here’s an informal email (lightly edited) from someone who works there:

BBC World Service have gone public with RSS 1.0 feeds

I’m proud to say we at the BBC World service have launched RSS 1.0 (RDF) feeds to the public and automatic discovery of the rss feed is also in place.

There is no help or notification page of any type yet because we are tackling the problem of working with many different languages. The multi-language rss reader and aggregator market is still very much in flux it would seem. We are very much relying on automatic discovery at this stage, as not to confuse our audience.

We chose RSS 1.0 because of its universal acceptance throughout the blog/web sphere and it includes a date element for every single news entry, giving our audience a better experience of RSS. In the future we may offer RSS 2.0.

We do not believe anyone else has RSS syndication in as many languages as we currently do, making this a worlds first for the BBC. We have yet to release any information to the press or news sites like Slashdot or boingboing yet because we have not created pages to help people who are unfamiliar with rss.

—- If you would like to try some of the World service RSS, here are some examples.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/index.rdf Albanian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/indepth/index.rdf – Albanian in-depth news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/pressreview/index.rdf – Albanian press review
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hungarian/index.rdf – Hungarian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/sport/index.rdf – Hindi sports news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/index.rdf – Persian arts news

Comments are welcome at my blog

So, put one of them feeds in your aggregator and smoke it!

Note: The author of the email requested that I remove his name from this blog entry, which I have done.

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Salon has a point/counterpoint on election fraud in Ohio featuring the name-callin’, contempt-drippin’ Greg Palast saying Ohio belongs to Kerry and Farhad Manjoo defending his article saying that Kerry really did lose. If it’s not obvious, I think Farhad comes out ahead on this one.

On Thursday Night, I heard Farhad lay out the issues at the beginning of an NPR talk show. He was excellent. then Heather Gerken and Steve Ansolabehere, from Harvard and MIT respectively, were interviewed. They were good, too, but I was quite surprised to here Ansolabehere say that he was “100%” confident that Bush won Ohio. Gerken responded similarly. When do researchers and academics ever say they are 100% certain? Is it literally beyond all imaginings that the e-voting machines were hacked? I mean, I’m 98% certain they weren’t, but how could I ever get to 100% on such a topic? Maybe I’m over-reacting — and I was listening in the car and not taking notes, so I may not have gotten the exchange right — but I feel like the media are on a mission to reassure the public. And that is not the media’s role. That’s why we have politicians and soma.

Tom Hartmann was also on the show also, and while I am not as alarmed as he is, it was good to hear a skeptic.

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Wow. I just gave a talk to 30 editors of trade journals. Even though the title of my talk was “Bloggers Are Not Journalists (But Blogging Will Change Journalism),” the session taught me that one should not say say, imply or gesture that the community of bloggers could provide a depth of expertise that might come close to that which professional journals offer. I also learned that pointing at the window and saying “Look over there!” will not distract them long enough, especially the second time.

There were, in truth, a couple of people who were vocal in their contempt for bloggers: It’s a fad, it’s bad information, it’s wanking by unemployed losers who have enough time for blogging but apparently not enough to change out of their pajamas. The rest of the group seemed to be open to looking into this blogging thang. It was more fun than I’m letting on.

At the session I paid some but not sufficient homage to the virtues of professional journalism. But, I’m so dismayed by how broken journalism is that I tend to under-emphasize the hard-won value it still brings us. We’re going to have to invent a way of take full advantage of the courage and professionalism of journalists, a way that rewards them for telling us the truth they’ve earned, without requiring them to erase their own point of view.

We have to invent it? Nah. Journals and journalists will invent it. They already are.

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Andrew Leonard, the guy who edited my piece on the myth of echo chambers, thinks maybe there’s more to the echo chamber idea than I credited.

I think there’s truth in what he says, but I’d add a big “nevertheless”: Nevertheless, living on the Net brings you more divergence of thought than if you live only in your daily newspaper or favorite network news shows. The mainstream media are the real echo chambers.

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Dan has won the 2004 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. So deserved. Not only is We the Media the seminal statement of how the Net is transforming journalism, Dan has been walking the walk before most of us could crawl.

Congratulations, Dan.

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Jay compiles a fantastic list of “What’s going on here that we don’t understand, do we, Mr. and Mrs. Jones?” He asks for help understanding what thread runs among the topics.

I left a comment, basically repeating a post from a few days ago:

Great list, and I agree with Shrinkette: Sounds like you’re gestating the blog entry we’re all waiting to read.

I think you can see one of the pivot points in Stewart’s refusing to be CrossFire’s “monkey”: The journalists want to entertain and the entertain wants to tell the truth.

The entertainer is the pivot here because I think part of the new — but transient — narrative is that “The media are the last to know”…and in particular, the last to know that they’ve lost their pompous, false claim on our trust. “The media are the last to know” is a comic trope since, obviously, they’re in the knowing business. Hence, the narrative has become comedic. Their every protestation of seriousness — from Dan Rather’s apology to Sam Donaldson’s toupee — now only makes them look more ridiculous.

Go read the list and leave Jay a comment that makes sense of it all…

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