Dan Bricklin carefully recounts what he went through to turn blog posts into a book, including those durn typographic issues. Learn from Dan!

[Tags: books blogs dan_bricklin publishing ]

1 Comment »

The New York Times owns the Boston Globe and is asking the unions to come up with $20M in savings. According to a report on WBUR this morning, the Times isn’t even giving the unions enough time to go through their own legal processes for making such decisions. So, here are some possible outcomes:

The Globe folds.

The Globe is bought, presumably by someone with a drug problem.

The Globe becomes an insert in the New York Times. The insert covers not just local news but maintains some of the Globe’s identity, personality, and personalities. (Also, the comics.) If I were the NYT, I’d be running spreadsheets to see if folding the Globe into the NYT (quite literally) would increase local circulation and ads enough to make it worth the considerable operating expenses.

And, as an auxiliary idea, I wonder if people would be willing to pay for online access to the Globe if it did two things: 1. Continue to provide free access to individual articles, for we need to be able to link to them both to keep the Globe relevant and to grow our culture. 2. Enhance the current Globe site so that it has more of the unitary newspaper feel. That is, let us have more of a sense that we’re reading an object that has a start and a finish, so that we’re tempted to sit down with it once a day and go through it. Let us turn pages until we’re done. (Of course, the pages would be full of links.) Provide us with all the electronic reading tools we could ever want, but tempt us to treat it as a whole through which we take a walk every day. And charge us $100/ year for the privilege. Since we’d be able to get at any of the individual articles for free, the Globe would be charging us for the online equivalent of curling up with the paper in the morning.

I acknowledge that that may be the stupidest idea since unsliced bread, and perhaps it is merely an old fogey desire. But, heck, it’s not like I’m writing for a responsible newspaper!

[Tags: newspapers media boston boston_globe everything_is_miscellaneous ]

2 Comments »

From Terry Heaton:

The freedom of the press clause in our beloved First Amendment is about to undergo perhaps its most serious challenges, because “the press” isn’t as neatly defined as it once was. A fascinating case in Phoenix is headed for court, and it ought to give any practicing journalist pause.

According to The Arizona Republic, blogger Jeff Pataky’s home was raided by ten Phoenix police officers armed with a warrant last month. He was out of town, and his girlfriend was handcuffed for three hours while police conducted the raid. They seized computers, files and anything associated with Pataky’s website — are you ready for this? — Bad Phoenix Cops.

Pataky apparently has an axe to grind with Phoenix police but says his site contains tips and inside information that comes from “good” cops in Phoenix. Now that the department has all of Pataky’s equipment and files, it’s pretty easy to see where this is going.

…

…And here’s the thing: anybody with an ounce of ink in their blood knows that Pataky deserves First Amendment protection, but they’re unlikely to say it publicly, because “the (professional) press” thinks of itself as a special class of people and have railed for years against the likes of Pataky….

More at Terry’s site…

Be the first to comment »

David Eaves makes a crucial point in a post inspired by Clay Shirky‘s and Steven Johnson‘s recent brilliant postings about the future of journalism. Pardon me if I rephrase David’s point, and possibly shade it a little differently.

The mythic figure of the journalist is still that of the young Woodward and Bernstein. They are detectives in a noir world where everyone — and, most important, every institution — has a secret. The journalist is the lone truth teller, forcing the secrets out into the light. The institutions keep as much secret as they can because they have selfish interests to protect. The journalist, on the other hand, has no interests other than the truth. Thus he (and in the myth, the journalist is a man) is committed to and guided by objectivity: seeing things as they are, untainted by self-interest.

That’s a valuable myth so long as institutions are built on the assumption of secrecy. But imagine a world of perfect institutional transparency. If all is light, the noir journalist is a peeping tom at a nudist colony.

Now, we are not going to have a world of perfect transparency. But the defaults may be flipping from need-to-know to need-to-hide. Customers, clients and citizens already casually betray most of what institutions used to keep hidden, from the real-world mileage of cars to the spread of protests in totalitarian countries. Laws and norms are changing, bringing institutions to disclose more on their own.

Will this bring about a fundamental change in the practice of journalism? By itself, probably not. Much of traditional journalism already assumes transparency in business, government, and, yes, sports. Greater transparency will give current journalists more to report on. But there will always be people and institutions with dark secrets, so we will always need noir journalists.

But it’s certainly not yet settled what the new mythic journalist will be like or how we will support our old noir types.

[Tags: journalism media newspapers noir david_eaves ]

6 Comments »

Ethan Zuckerman has pointed us at the coverage of the military coup in Madagascar, a country of 20+ million folks with almost not mainstream media on the ground. The news coming out is getting here via Twitter (#madagascar) and blogs. GlobalVoices is one good source.

[Tags: madagascar blogging media twitter journalism ethan_zuckerman ]

Be the first to comment »

Congresspedia has become the Open Congress Wiki, where we can build transparency and knowledge together.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous e-gov egov democracy congress politics ]

Be the first to comment »

On the heels of Clay’s splash o’ cold water — to paraphrase: “Revolutions aren’t pretty” — comes Steven Johnson‘s eloquent pointing to the “old growth forests” of online news as indicators of what might be. As brilliant as ever.

[Tags: news journalism media clay_shirky steven_johnson ]

2 Comments »

At the Newseum site, mousing over a map pops up the front page of the local newspaper. Cool!

(And won’t the site please start taking ads so we can all run the headline: “Ad Newseum!” Please”?)

[Tags: news media everything_is_miscellaneous mashups ]

2 Comments »

This post by Clay Shirky will be at the center of future discussions about the newspaper revolution. It is itself a pivot point. And it’s beautifully written, with a pause-worthy insight in every paragraph.

[Tags: newspapers journalism media clay_shirky everything_is_miscellaneous ]

4 Comments »

I thought Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer last night was a righteous misfire. Stewart was on his high horse, but Cramer was on his little Shetland pony. The result: It was hard to watch.

Stewart was making an important, broad point: Mainstream financial journalism as embodied by CNBC fails the most basic tests of journalism overall. These folks knew better, but give us bread and circuses. Right on, Jon

But feisty, cocky Cramer came onto the show as a Stewart fan, and just kept agreeing and apologizing. I thought ultimately that was pretty disingenuous of Cramer, but it left Stewart looking like a bully. We wanted to see Stewart tear into William Randolph Hearst, but Hearst sent Dear Abby in his place. Except — to mess up the metaphor — Cramer does epitomize CNBC’s tabloiding of financial news, Cramer is a financial insider who knows better, and Dear Abby would have put up more of a fight.

[Tags: jon_stewart jim_cramer cnbc media journalism financial_news ]

You can see the entire, unedited interview here.

The Daily Show runs an anagram contest. The phrase to be anagrammed at the moment is: “Envoys to Afghanistan and Iraq Are Named”

Here’s my best attempt: “On the QT, Iran damns any gain of area saved”

And yours?

5 Comments »