ReelChanges: viewer-funded documentaries

Big banner on the wall: "How can the intersection of journalism & technology serve democracy?" That's the overarching theme of NewsTools 2008, where 200 or so folks are gathered today (and tomorrow) at Yahoo! as well as Saturday at a Sunnyvale hotel for Innovations in Journalism Expo 2008. I'll post a few highlights from today:

ReelChanges

The most impressive new venture I've come across today is ReelChanges.org: viewer-funded documentaries, which launched shortly after midnight last night.

I knew of founder Hal Plotkin from his days as a tech reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he and his small team have been "working in a cave" for the past year to open the nonprofit Center for Media Change, which just launched the nonprofit ReelChanges.org and an upcoming site, ReelChanges.com.

ReelChanges is all about audience-funded media, particularly documentaries and investigative journalism. Films already on the site include Life on the Inside, a moving behind-bars look at a wrongful conviction and life inside the nation's largest women's prison. "Our goal is to democratize the media," said Plotkin, who contrasted ReelChanges' model with the agenda of the corporate media. The site's guidelines for filmmakers are here.

Plotkin said some of the site's functionality, such as its "transactional module" for donations, is still at least 10 days away. Plotkin and team have grand ambitions for ReelChanges, with an eye on becoming a major player in the transaction journalism space, suggesting a prospective "transformation of journalism." He cited one early user's willingness to pay for a video roundup of a scrapbook convention and he could see the day when people want to pony up for coverage of an event important to their niche interests. (Think of parallels to Eventful.com, which uses the power of the crowd to entice music acts or speakers to make an appearance. Here it would be stories you'd like to see covered, a la Christopher Allbritton's audience-funded trip to Iraq or Josh Marshall's coverage of the 2004 presidential race.)

I'll be watching ReelChanges' progress and pulling for it to succeed.

Other sites worth a look

Other urls that have come up today:

• Redwoodage.com, (Think. Share. Act. Live.), what used to be called a lifestyle portal -- a site that appeals to the over-40 crowd.

• MediaRights.org, a site that "maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. By engaging with the MediaRights community, filmmakers reach audiences, educators and librarians bring films into their classroom, and nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns."

Good news

Best bit of news I heard today was that Geneva Overholser will become the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication this fall. Congrats, Geneva!

Other folks I spotted or chatted with today: Larry Pryor, Amy Gahran, Leonard Witt, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Jon Garfunkel, Robert Niles, Mary Hodder, Dan Gillmor, Barry Parr and many others.

May 1, 2008 at 09:19 PM in Film, Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

9 tips to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Catching up with Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog:

9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Top tips:

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.

 Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D, notes that internally linking is also important, and is something the top newspaper sites do well. “The main reason Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to themselves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is measured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV station in the country. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and values them accordingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal linking, therefore, always reaps SEO rewards. ...

2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front. ...

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. ...

5. Highlight your best content on every page. ...

6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.

7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.

8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.

9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

More from Mark:

State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting. Live-blogging a panel in Berkeley, Calif., on the future of investigative reporting.

Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?

April 30, 2008 at 10:15 PM in Media, New media, Search engines | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net

I missed this essay by Nicholas Carr earlier this month: The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net, an excerpt from his new book  The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.

April 29, 2008 at 11:13 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Long-term trends in the mediasphere

My 20-minute phone interview with Jen McClure, founder and executive director of the Society of New Communications Research -- about long-term trends in the mediasphere -- just went up on the NewCommReview site. I'll be speaking at the NewComm Forum on April 24 in Sonoma County, Calif. 

April 10, 2008 at 07:48 PM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Washington Post wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes

Washington Post: The Post Wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes. Walter Reed, Cheney and Virginia Tech Coverage Recognized. A video included, too. Congrats to all the winners (I've been in a newsroom when two Pulitzers were announced, it's an amazing feeling). Great work.

April 7, 2008 at 11:08 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

How to take journalism into the 21st century

Veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tom Abate has a four-part series about the future of media:

• Take me to your leader
• The Pyramid and the Cloud
• Newspapers don’t FARK yourselves to death
• Follow the audience into the 21st Century

April 7, 2008 at 12:14 AM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Do the media matter in the presidential race?

NY Times: A short video debate between author David Corn and Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post about whether "the media" remain influential enough to bias the presidential campaign.

April 6, 2008 at 08:44 PM in Media, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Fifth Innovation Journalism conference coming to Stanford

The fifth Conference on Innovation Journalism at Stanford University, put on by the Human Sciences & Technologies Advanced Research Institute, is now open for registration. It takes place May 21-23. The keynote panel, "How can the news industry succeed inthe innovation economy," wil include John Markoff, Matt Marshall, Tony Perkins and Michael Kaneilos. I'll be there.

April 6, 2008 at 12:08 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Your traditional media at work

Glenn Greenwald at Salon: The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. "The Clintons are Rich!!!!" will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

"Media critic" Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama's bowling and eating habits and how that shows he's not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama's bowling was his biggest mistake, a "real doozy."

Obama's bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling "with disastrous consequences." And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time's Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama's "Patriotism Problem," where we learn that "this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right." He trotted it all out -- the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama's angry, America-hating wife, "his Islamic-sounding name." ...

And journalists wonder why the public holds them in such low regard?

April 5, 2008 at 10:05 PM in Media, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The new rules of media

Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog: The New Rules of Media.

April 2, 2008 at 12:52 AM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

'Reinventing Local Media'

Terry Heaton, one of the wisest observer of the personal media revolution, has a new book coming out, "Reinventing Local Media: Ideas for Thriving in a Postmodern World." The book is a compilation of the essays Heaton has written over the past five years, during a time of epochal change in the world of communications. It's more than 500 pages long and fully indexed.

Says Terry: "It's my hope that it will be one day be used as course material in colleges and universities everywhere."

The book will be available, likely at Amazon and other online distributors, within a month. The price is $24.95.

March 30, 2008 at 05:42 PM in Books, Media, New media, Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The death and life of the American newspaper

Eric Alterman in the New Yorker:  The death and life of the American newspaper. Excerpt:

As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. ...

As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Unfortunately, in much of today's journalism, neither is there enough passion, voice or sense of wonder.

Terry Heaton at AR&D: Deconstructing professional journalism. Excerpt:

Lippmann is the “father of professional journalism,” and the apple never falls very far from the tree. And so we’ve had decades of an elitist press getting all comfy with the power brokers of the culture — in fact, becoming the NEW power brokers — and it is against this that the people of the culture are objecting.

March 27, 2008 at 12:26 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Why has Obama's former minister dominated the news?

I've been astonished, though probably shouldn't be surprised, at the prominence that news organizations — chiefly the cable networks — have given during the past 10 days to the flap over remarks by Barack Obama's former minister, to the exclusion of all the pressing issues facing this country.

The video above provides some context to explain how the Fox News "virus" has infiltrated other news outlets. MoveOn is offering people a chance to sign a petition urging news outlets to stop this nonsense:

This week, Barack Obama gave one of the most honest and inspiring speeches on race in American history after weathering days of the media's relentless, divisive, and racially charged attacks. But have you wondered where these attacks came from and why they dominated the news?

Reporters like NBC's Tim Russert focused on the "Reverend Wright controversy" only after FOX and other right-wing media did. It happens over and over: FOX airs a right-wing smear and the mass media repeat it.  Film director Robert Greenwald just released a short video called FOX Attacks Obama: Part 2 which shows how it happens.

We are launching a petition demanding the big networks stop parroting FOX and distracting Americans from real issues. We'll hand-deliver your signatures to major media outlets next week. Watch the video, and sign the petition, here:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3495&id=12363-7671297-HJOMvC&t=454

The petition, which we're launching with Greenwald's Brave New Films, says: "FOX is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject FOX's smears of Barack Obama, not parrot them and distract Americans from the pressing issues of the day." The more signatures we deliver, the bigger the impact—so please tell your friends.

Media watchdog group Media Matters has chronicled how FOX spent months trying to smear Obama by associating him with Reverend Wright's words. Greenwald's new video shows how the attacks successfully migrated to the mass media—Tim Russert repeated Sean Hannity's smears virtually word-for-word!

Meanwhile, the big networks all but ignored Pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain was "honored" and "proud" to receive. Hagee says Katrina was God's punishment for homosexuality, Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism, and Catholicism is the "Whore of Babylon" and "a cult."

It gets worse. At the same time they relentlessly reported on Obama's pastor, most network journalists also ignored Rick Parsley, a televangelist who McCain called his "spiritual guide" when accepting his endorsement last month. Parsley has said:

I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed...

Ignoring McCain's spiritual advisers while going after Obama's is what we expect from FOX, which is more a Republican mouthpiece than a real news organization. But when real news outlets follow FOX's lead, we have to hold them accountable. Otherwise, FOX will continue to elevate smear after smear against Democrats into the mass media in 2008. 

March 21, 2008 at 12:55 PM in Media, Politics | Permalink | Comments (5) | | (0)

Why political reporters should disclose whom they voted for

In the March 24 issue of Time magazine, James Poniewozik explains why he thinks journalists should "go open kimono" when it comes to their preferred political candidates: The Case for Full Disclosure. Admitting that reporters care who wins is the best way to make political news trustworthy. Excerpts:

On Feb. 5, I woke up, went for a run, showered, had a yogurt smoothie, took the kids to school and voted for Barack Obama. Only one of those facts is worth your knowing, and it is the one that most journalists would never tell you. ...

It wasn't always so, but as grubby "reporters" evolved into white-collar, credentialed "journalists," it has become a tradition—a pointless one. If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it's more important, and transparency in it is more essential.

I'm with you 100%, James. And I voted for Obama on Feb. 5.

March 20, 2008 at 08:45 PM in Media, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

iPhone users break all records for Web media access

Steve Safran at Media 2.0 Intel: iPhone users break all records for Web media access.

Owners of iPhones are redefining what it means to use the mobile web. And we have to pay attention because there is a giant opportunity for local media if we act quickly.

M:Metrics has conducted the first survey of iPhone users, and it's an eye-opener. iPhone users hold in their hands a true web device - and that's exactly how they use it.

In January, the study found, 85 percent of iPhone users accessed news and information via their phone. The market average is 13 percent. Even Smartphone users like those who own Blackberries only clock in at about 58 percent.

Asked "Have you accessed web search?" (via your mobile phone), 59% of iPhone users said yes, 37 percent of Smartphone users did so as well but only 6 percent of the rest of the market does.

"Have you watched mobile TV/video?" iPhone owners: 31 percent. Smartphone: 14 percent. Market average: 6 percent.

And there's this: 50 percent of iPhone owners accessed a social network site or blog. The market average in this category is 4 percent. The social web meets the mobile web head on.

Let's face it - the hype was right. This thing really is a game-changer. ...

March 20, 2008 at 12:00 AM in Media, Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

No returning to era of all elites all the time

In response to this week's Newsweek article Revenge of the Experts suggesting the expert is back and user-created content is on the wane, columnist Tom Regan offers this in today's Christian Science Monitor: Credible Web? It's where we click most. Expertise is essential online, but the Internet's real 'killer app' is choice.

I'm quoted in the piece. Here are some additional thoughts:

An expert in the Newsweek article said, the world is "too dangerous a place for faulty information." People can deal with vetting information in two ways: rely solely on experts and authority figures. Or become a fact-checker, treating unverified information with skepticism and consulting multiple sources — professionals and amateurs alike — to get at the truth.

I've seen very little evidence that the sweeping cultural shifts we've seen in the past half dozen years show any signs of retreating. This is just a bit of wishful thinking on the part of traditional media folks. 

As Doc Searls likes to say, this is or thinking, when it should be about and thinking.  Experts and amateurs will continue to offer useful, reliable news and information.

Young, tech-savvy people in particular now typically rely on social networks that they've fashioned to take cues from their friends on which movies to see, books to read or vacation destinations to target. And didn't Lonely Planet Guide successfully explore this terrain for travel and Zagat's for dining back in the '90s?

The old guard will forever sniff at the likes of Wikipedia, but young people have learned to trust ourselves rather than relying exclusively on a caste of experts. Most of us are experts in one subject or another. The dissolution of information monopolies at the local level spells trouble for professional journalists at hundreds of U.S. newspapers that will vanish in the next decade.

Millions of cell phones now are capable of capturing fairly high-quality video. Just this week I learned of a new site, Qik, that will let any of these devices stream live video, further speeding the obsolescence of professional reporters on the scene of a news event.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't receive an email from a newspaper reporter asking for job leads in the tech startup world. That doesn't bode well for the cult of the expert.

To be sure, too many readers are still too credulous about what appears on the Internet. (The latest video hit piece on Barack Obama making the rounds is testament to that.) We need to fine-tune our B.S. meters and do a better job in figuring out that not all sources are created equal.

Web 3.0 will not be about turning back the clock to the era of elites and experts. It will be about making this hyperconnected  global social network more relevant to our lives.

Having said all this, I think it's true that we'll remain attracted as a society to professional entertainment rather than information. We'll still have a bifurcated world where top-tier writers, producers and technicians dazzle us with profound, gripping stories. But they no longer have a monopoly on entertainment, as millions of grassroots media makers also take to the stage with stories worth sharing.

March 19, 2008 at 01:43 PM in Citizen media, Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

It's always about the money

Terry Heaton's latest is a keeper: It's Always About the Money. Excerpt:

As Upton Sinclair wrote long ago, "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." This is our problem. This is our sin, one for which we can only assign blame to the mirror. Some local media companies are about to die — as in, go away permanently — if we don't do something about it.

J.D. Lasica first coined the term "Personal Media Revolution" in his seminal book, Darknet, Hollywood's War Against The Digital Generation, and it is complex and profound. However, most people in media think of it as just bloggers and YouTube and Facebook and such. The demagoguery of Andrew Keen in his book, Cult of the Amateur has done considerable harm to media company thinking, because it badly misses what's really taking place and instead offers a "professionals versus amateurs" theme.

The problem is that the rise of personal media includes the use of its technology by businesses, and this is the ultimate disruptor for professional media and the advertising industry that supports it. When a business creates a dynamic website, it becomes a media company, and nobody knows this better than our friends at Google. Go back and look at the iceberg, for the rise of personal media is supported by the internet pureplay companies, who view the Web itself as their business platform. ...

I'll be writing more about the experts vs. amateurs meme later this week.

March 18, 2008 at 12:34 AM in Citizen media, Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The state of the news media is troubled

The Project for Excellence in Journalism on Monday released its annual State of the News Media report. From the introduction:

The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than  a year ago.

And the problems, increasingly, appear to be  different than many experts have predicted.

Critics have tended to see technology democratizing the media and traditional journalism in decline. Audiences, they say, are fragmenting across new information sources, breaking the grip of media elites. Some people even advocate the notion of “The Long Tail,” the idea that, with the Web’s infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers.

The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists ...

                                                                          

March 18, 2008 at 12:26 AM in Citizen media, Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Coverage of the Journalism Enterprise unconference

JEEcamp is an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we've learned so far.

I couldn't make it to Birmingham, UK, for the unconference this past weekend, but here's coverage of the event via Coveritlive.

March 17, 2008 at 02:16 AM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Newsweek's 'Revenge of the Experts'

Newsweek: Revenge of the Experts. The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.

In my view, it's never been an either/or proposition, but Newsweek is engaging in wishful thinking if they believe that the move to user-created material is a fleeting proposition.

March 17, 2008 at 02:05 AM in Citizen media, Media, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Where's the new business model for news?

At the IdeaLab blog, San Jose Mercury News reporter Chris O'Brien has an insightful post today: Is that my corpse they're talking about? It's in response to a trio of entries the past few days, including one I wrote titled, Newspapers: Innovate or die.

Excerpt from Chris's piece:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don't see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying. ...

Why is there all this energy around reinventing the content and almost none being directed toward reinventing the business models? It represents a failure of imagination. ...

At the end of his post, Chris also outlines a few of the efforts aimed at identifying "a way toward a more sustainable journalism."

March 13, 2008 at 04:02 PM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

SXSW: Pop culture and social media collide

TechNewsWorld: At SXSW Interactive, Pop Culture and Social Media Collide.

CNET News.com: What makes you Internet-famous? Inside the SXSW Interactive "core conversation" titled, "I'm Internet Famous: Status in Social Media,"

March 10, 2008 at 11:24 PM in Media, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Journalist becomes object of derision at Mark Zuckerberg SXSW keynote

CNET News.com: Journalist becomes the story at Mark Zuckerberg SXSW Interactive keynote. (By the way, when did a Q&A with a reporter become marketed as a "keynote"?)

I've been seeing a lot of journalists lately who forget that they're not the story, the interview subject is.

March 9, 2008 at 11:28 PM in Media, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Bringing entrepreneurial thinking to journalism

Dan Gillmor at the IdeaLab blog: Bringing entrepreneurial thinking to journalism.

March 8, 2008 at 02:02 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Next Newsroom Project coming to Duke in April

Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News, who's putting together The Next Newsroom Project at Duke University on behalf of the Knight Foundation, wants to pass along word of the gathering April 3-4 in Durham, N.C.:

Our goal is to research and design the “ideal” newsroom for campus media, and for the past nine months, we’ve been interviewing folks and profiling newsrooms to gather ideas. You can learn more about our work at our web site.

The next step in our process is to hold the Next Newsroom Conference at Duke. We’ll be gathering a number of folks we’ve interviewed and inviting many others to join us for two days of discussions to help us develop our proposal.

On Day 1, we’ll be hearing a keynote delivered by Saf Fahim, who has designed some of the most advanced newsrooms in the world. We’ll also have a panel on the Newsroom of the Future that will include folks from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and several other advanced newsrooms. Day 2 will be organized around a series of breakout sessions designed to spark wide ranging conversations about the newsroom of the future.

I won't be able to attend, but I can't think of a more important gathering for the news industry on the near-term horizon.

March 5, 2008 at 11:55 PM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Americans view traditional journalism as 'out of touch'

Announced at the We Media conference last week: Zogby Poll: 67% View Traditional Journalism as "Out of Touch." Internet is the top source of news for nearly half of Americans; survey finds two-thirds dissatisfied with the quality of journalism.

Zogby has had a woeful track record in the Democratic primaries this spring, but this finding sounds like a no-brainer.

March 3, 2008 at 12:25 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Of bloggers, political reporters and what journalism has become

Political blogger DavidNYC in today's DailyKos brilliantly analyzes why bloggers and traditional media's political reporters are like oil and water. I think he's dead on -- and it's a telling indictment of modern journalism: 

I submit the following:

•     Science reporters love science
•     Sports reporters love sports
•     Political reporters hate politics
  

These are broad generalizations, no doubt. But I think there's a lot of truth to them, truth which can teach us about ourselves, about the traditional media, and about the relationship between us.

I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I say that science reporters love science. They thrill to the genome, the Hubble Deep Field, exobiology, exoplanetology, the Large Hadron Collider, stem cells, Schroedinger, Hawking, Wiles, Lake Vostok and coral reefs. Love of the subject is why they went into science reporting in the first place. ...

But oh - the political reporters. They are a breed apart. They like politics-as-theater: Hillary's pantsuit, Obama's turban, the Clenis, the flight-suit, America's Mayor, dead-or-alive, he-said, she-said and all the world's a stage.

But they hate what we identify as politics: winning elections because they matter; ensuring our judiciary respects the Constitution; passing legislation to help the disadvantaged, the middle class, the environment, the world.

They hate all this because our brand of politics is about caring, and there is nothing more uncool, more gauche, more unacceptable than caring. Like the astrophysics geek (of course), or the armchair sabermetrician, we politi-philes are nerds at heart - nerds who care about our chosen subject, and nerds who care about outcomes.

I think we all know that political reporters, on the other hand, are the ultimate post-ironic kool kidz, snickering in the corner at us propeller-heads who wear our hearts on our sleeves. Sports writers understand that, in the end, what they write about really almost always is just a game. The problem is that political reporters think the same way about their beat as well.

And this, I think, explains the antagonistic view many political reporters have toward bloggers. I think it almost boggles their minds that there are people out there - normal, ordinary people - who care about politics and aren't paid to do so. At the same time, we despise the Maureen Dowd-style obsessions shared by such a wide swath of the political reporting class, and we have a hard time respecting anyone who doesn't take politics as seriously as we do.

Put another way, political reporters hate what we love and love what we hate. This stands in stark contrast to the science and sports worlds - examples which I picked in part because these are other interests of mine, but also because I think they are good stand-ins for just about any other topics. Sports & science reporters & bloggers have plenty in common; political reporters and bloggers share little.

I'm not sure, though, that political reporters could really have any other m.o. The twentieth-century invention of "objective" reporting all but prohibits reporters from caring about political outcomes. This means that the kind of people attracted to political reporting almost necessarily have to find politics appealing only as some sort of grand kabuki.

It wasn't always this way - the slavish obeisance to "objectivity" replaced what used to be sharp-elbowed partisanship in American print media. But could our frayed modus vivendi with the political press corps actually be preferable to the alternative?

March 2, 2008 at 10:46 PM in Media, Politics, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Roles of bloggers, journalists blurring more than ever

Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift: Distinction Between Bloggers, Journalists Blurring More Than Ever.

The time-worn debate of Bloggers vs. Journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.

How indistinguishable are large independent blogs and traditional media sites? Take the following quiz:

1. Who won a recent Polk Award for investigative journalism, a blogger or MSM reporter?
2. Which big New York-based website has four editors and four reporters, and is looking to hire two more reporters — a blog or traditional media outlet?
3. Which site hired a young blogger fresh out of college? Blog or MSM site?
4. Which site in Silicon Valley edits 80% of stories before being published online? Blog or MSM site?

Answers: 1. Josh Marshall, Talkingpointsmemo blogger;
2. Gawker blog;
3. NYTimes.com, hiring TVNewser’s Brian Stelter;
4. GigaOm blog. ...

"I think the argument about bloggers vs. journalists has been over for years. We've all co-existed just fine for a while now, and the truth is, the distinction is less relevant every day. There are thousands of journalists who now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists. Josh Marshall winning a Polk Award is a sign that the distinctions are becoming less relevant. I don't think readers care whether what they're reading is in a blog or not. What they care about is whether they trust the source of that information, whether it's a mainstream site or a pure blog." — Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com

Great quote from Brady. It's a point Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and I (and others) have been making for years, and it's good to see it becoming a widespread reality.

February 28, 2008 at 03:04 PM in Citizen media, Media, New media, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Media organizations back Wikileaks in court

David Ardia at the IdeaLab blog: Media Organizations Back Wikileaks in Court. And why it's important.

February 28, 2008 at 01:34 PM in Free speech, Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Producers Guild of America bicoastal event

The Producers Guild of America had an interesting live new media event on the East and West coasts last night on "Local T.V. Meets Global New Media," and a video of the event is now up. (You can skip SF Mayor Gavin Newsom's intro for the first question at 10 minutes in.) Panelists included Craig Newmark, Dan Rosenheim, Vice-President & News Director, KPIX-TV, and Danny Passman, Vice President, DailyMotion, among others.

February 27, 2008 at 11:14 PM in Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

NY Times launches a Baghdad blog

The New York Times announced today the launch of Baghdad Bureau: Iraq from the Inside, a new blog supplementing the Times’s Iraq war coverage "by providing insights and stories about daily life in Baghdad and what it is like living outside the Green Zone."

Good idea. Give it some time, and let's see how it compares with cit-j site AliveinBaghdad.org.

February 27, 2008 at 10:00 PM in Current Affairs, Media |