Taking Part In A Barn Raising

It’s nothing like the magnificent dance scene from "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers" — although I’d probably pay to see Dave Winer log roll  — but I’m taking part in a modern barn raising. The barn in this case is Dave’s OPML Editor and I gather from talking to him that I’m one of the few non-developers taking part in the process during this phase. That won’t last long.

There’s a weird kind of excitement to watching a program being built before your eyes — and having some input no matter how minor. Read a message or post one about a glitch, blink and someone’s got a solution or the code has been updated.  Sharing is a core value and goal of the program so as I’m working my outline Dave or anyone else who wants can read my take, act on it, comment on it via their outliner or brush it off. My first glimpse of the power in this came Thursday when I decided to use the instant outliner to track my progress with the OPML Editor; a conversation Dave and I had later that day about some of my issues leapfrogged several steps because we were on the same page already.

Of course, Dave did tons of work on it before any of us even got a look but there’s still so far to go — and  plenty of room for other developers to have an impact. I’ve already started a wish list.

Coda: Once some of the usability issues are resolved and it’s ready for wider distribution,  the OPML Editor could make a good tool for journalists (in and out of newsrooms); notes, project planning, group work, resource sharing are just a few of the possible applications. The ground-floor cost is nothing but a little time investment/learning curve. The return on that investment could be manifold. The other editor in my house is already interested.

Les Paul @90

A belated happy birthday to Les Paul, who at 90 is still doing what he loves and doing it better than people half his age. Three Septembers ago, serendipity and an Iridium Jazz Club employee who took pity on a very tired, very hungry woman with a desire to catch the 10 p.m. show combined for an evening that couldn’t have been planned if I tried. I wound up literally at the legendary gutar player’s feet — at a table just below the stage, close enough to watch his still-deft fingers at work and to marvel at the results. Close enough, too, to get teased a little as I ate dinner and sipped my first-ever Lemon Drop Martini.  Guest after guest improvised with Paul and his trio. An amazing jazz saxophonist  in  a bright zoot suit stunned the packed room as he and Paul dueled with sound. Les Paul still plays two shows every Monday night, each — like the one I experienced — a singular event. What a privilege.

His birthday party at Carnegie Hall last Sunday night  illustrates the range of his influence with tribute performers including the Steve Miller Band, Edgar Winter and  Peter Frampton (who I saw in a nightclub in Boston at a cable party that summer with Dennis Quaid as an opening act). And, of course, Paul held court.

Coda: I didn’t know that night  in 2002 that Les Paul was responsible for the iPod of my teen years — insert wry smile —  the 8-track tape.  I had a semi-portable unit in my dorm room at the University of Georgia and a library bolstered by a downtown Athens store where I could buy used 8-tracks until I finally graduated to cassettes.

Harry Shearer’s Riff On Defining Journalists

Harry Shearer, who’s already had an honorable mention here, uses his Huffington Post blog for a riff on the definition of a journalist. He suggests reading it in your best Casey Kasem voice — whatever you do, read the whole thing. Some of it rings true; we might wish some of it didn’t. It’s a tad long but that tends to be the case with riffs.  Just a taste:

Journalists like:

deadlines.
bylines.
a bigger news hole.
free food.

Journalists don’t like:
deadlines.
editors.
cramped press facilities at major news events.
media whores.

Journalists can be Anchors, but never Sales. They can be reporters, or
just repeaters. A journalist looks down on celebrities until the day he
becomes one.

A journalist spends too much time covering a story that gets too little
space so it can be skimmed by a reader who has too little time.

Sy Hersh, Technology and Journalism

The Guardian’s Hamish Mackintosh interviews rabblerousing investigative reporter Sy Hersh about the impact of technology on journalism.  A few excerpts:

So Dan Gillmor’s idea that "we are the media" isn’t quite the case yet? The net does one thing great for people like me: it used to be that if
I wrote a good hard story for the New Yorker magazine and the New York
Times didn’t pick it up then we all felt bad. Now the internet is so
vibrant that everything’s on it on blogs, logs or websites. The blogs are still very undisciplined though and they can be very vicious.

Has the net made it harder to cover up stories such as Abu Ghraib? … The
big impact of the net is that there’s an astonishing amount of
information to be accessed by people who know their way. For me, the
net is all about information flow, and in the long run it’s going to
mean better information.

How important is an online presence to the New Yorker? I don’t
know for sure but I think it’s a big deal for them. I know when I have
a good story going they get about half a million hits a day. …

Changing Linguistic Gears

Steve Outing asks:

"Do you think the terms "citizen journalism" or "citizen media" are the ones we should be using? I’ve been writing lots
about the concepts of citizen journalism, and about the activities of
pioneers in the field. But I can’t say that I’m enamored yet with the
term we seem to have settled on, even though I’ve used it often in my
own writing."

He wonders if J.D. Lasica’s term of "personal media" would work instead, adding  "I like that term a little better than citizen journalism/media — though perhaps it’s not as descriptive."

I wrote about this here a few weeks ago  when Bayosphere debuted

I’ve grown increasingly disconcerted by use of the term "citizen journalism," which seems to suggest that professional journalists — those of us who do it for a living —  aren’t citizens. Grassroots media works in some instances, as do a few other terms (including we-media, as in Dan’s book "We The Media" ), but I’m going with "p2p media" or "peer media" for now.


I’m working on a project now for OJR and we will not be using "citizen journalism" as a term although, of course, we’ll use it in quotes or in self-descriptions.  Robert Niles expressed his frustration with the same issue in a recent OJR roundtable, casting his vote for "Dan Gillmor’s term, grassroots journalism. Why? Process of elimination, mostly." He explains:

"’Citizen’
journalism implies that traditional journalists are somehow not
citizens. Phooey. Professional journalists collectively care more about
the quality and justice of their countries and communities than folks
in many, if not most, other industries. ‘Participatory’ journalism makes me think of George Plimpton suiting up for the Detroit Lions.
‘Reader-driven’ journalism ignores the fact that journalism’s always been driven by readers. Edit a paper that readers don’t read and your publisher soon
will ask you to find a new job.
‘Community’ journalism brings
with it the baggage of what is also called “civic journalism,” an
endeavor that has its passionate supporters, but that is not the same
things as what we are discussing here. So why conflate the two?
That
leaves me with ‘grassroots’ journalism, which gets to the point of what
we’re doing — allowing folks nearest the ground, if you will, to
provide the news directly to other readers.
Maybe terminology
is not important. But if we want our readers to care about their words
in their work, I believe we should give careful thought to our words in
describing their work."


I can live with grassroots but it doesn’t get at the peer-to-peer qualities. I also don’t think grassroots adequately describes journalism nurtured by newsrooms.  Personal media may be about sharing personal media creations but when it’s not neccessarily journalism. Personal journalism? Sounds like its a personalized home page.

Back to you, Steve.

Coda: Re changing minds about terms … I suggested at BloggerCon III  that "podcasting" might be an exclusionary term, leading people who didn’t  know about it to think it referred only to iPods.  I also wondered if the term could draw the wrath of Steve. The response was instant and visceral: nothing could change minds about "podcasting" as the term and, besides, it wasn’t really about iPods. (Say that 1,000 times and people will still believe iPods is the root word.)  It had been in use only a few months but was already embedded in the consciousness of a vocal, active group — and was already at the core of numerous business plans. 

Bittersweet Moment As The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Changes Hands

Today, the paper synonymous with Pulitzer for more than 100 years became part of Lee Enterprises  Nearly half a lifetime ago, I commenced from Washington University into a reporting gig at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were open from the start; odds were, I wasn’t going to be able to convert the job into a permanent post. It was a different atmosphere then, with an emphasis on significant experience at smaller papers and a move to the PD as a step up.  The bulk of my professional experience was from a mix of internships and fill-in jobs at the major metro Atlanta Journal. Worse, in some eyes,  when I returned for a degree I steered away from the world-class j school  at Mizzou.   On the other hand, I had enough experience to avoid being paid at the lowest scale.

I didn’t change the right minds about staying on full time. But from June 1984 on, the P-D has been an integral part of my life. I met my partner Ed Kohn  in the newsroom, first learning from him about using open records and asking tough questions; others became valued friends and mentors. Some of the best advice I ever got was from the late Jim Millstone,  who told me in slightly different words to have a life outside the newsroom.  There was the joy of learning St. Louis City Hall from Greg Freeman, who turned out to be a great columnist and left us far too soon, and other aspects of reporting and editing  from so many other top-notch professionals.  Gossip columnist Jerry Berger shared tips, contacts and Yiddush long after I left.  The paper stood by me  when I came close to being called as a witness in a court hearing about a candidate’s lack of residency, a story I broke, and, after my gig was over, when I was sued along with the P-D by someone upset over my parting series about an urban not-for-profit spending most of its money on administrative services. (The suit , a nuisance filing, was dropped.)

A favorite pre-cell-phone moment: covering the 1984 VP Fair fireworks by the amazing Grucci family and checking before I went out on the explosive-laden barge for a place to file from if there was an accident — until I realized if there was a problem I wouldn’t be the one filing.

Later, the Post-Dispatch and parent company Pulitzer became my part of my beat as a media writer — first,  for the St. Louis Journalism Review, and then for Editor & Publisher, the New York Times and many other publications; moving from someone who had been paralyzed by chance meetings with Joseph Pulitzer Jr. on the stairs  to someone who interviewed him. I covered Pulitzer going public;  the death by a thousand cuts of the rival Globe-Democrat; the rise and flameout of the St. Louis Sun; the arrival — and departure — of editors;  Joseph Pulitzer’s will; the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to freelance photographer Ron Olshwanger — and then broke the still-repeated story that a photo editor  had erased images, including Diet Coke cans, from the photo of the moment that ran in the paper the next day. (For some time, the Diet Coke cans showed up as screensavers in the photo department.)

People were never quite sure how much Ed and I talked about work in progress; he kept newsroom confidences much tighter than many of his colleagues. Occasionally, I astonished him by breaking news about the paper; those were good days.  But as he became more involved in the way the paper was run, it became harder for me to write about the newsroom. Eventually, I moved away from covering the corporate side, too.  It felt incredibly strange to be at Media Week last December and not be chasing the sale story.

Now, the paper’s role in my life is that of news source, dinner conversation/dinner delayer, indirect financial support. I don’t know everyone any more, can’t put a face with every byline.  My own byline appeared last year from a conference.  I’m critical of it, probably hypercritical because I see so much potential; I also can be hyperforgiving.

The Post-Dispatch and Pulitzer Publishing were tremendous supporters of SPJ for a very long time. (My guess is that Lee would be 100 percent behind reviving the St. Louis chapter.) In 2000, publisher Terry Egger arranged for the loan of  then-new conference facilities for a
regional conference still appropriately titled "Change Happens." The anniversary of the first Joseph Pulitzer’s
birthday coincidentally fell at the same time in early April; we celebrated with a sheet
cake bearing the likeness from the masthead and, I think, some words
from the platform. It was a reminder that the ideals — not always the
reality, but the ideals — mattered beyond the Post-Dispatch.

As the Post-Dispatch and the other Pulitzer newspapers become part of Lee Enterprises, we should all remember that those ideals matter far beyond the name Pulitzer. 

Coda: I thought it was a good sign when I realized that Lee’s vice president of news is the same David Stoeffler I got to know in the early ’90s when he was was at the Wisconsin  State Journal.  Today’s announcements included David’s appointment as editor and publisher of the second-largest paper in the Lee chain, the Arizona Daily Star. He will continue as news vp.  I was intrigued to find some of his views about Lee’s news initiatives online, along with a chain-wide professional development site. Take a look.

Media moves

ESPN has hired Washington Post sports vet George Solomon as its  first ombudsman; Solomon retired from the Post in 2003. From the press release: "Solomon will critique decision-making, coverage
and presentation for studio and event production, including SportsCenter,
ESPN Radio and, occasionally, programming outside the news and information
genre." He’ll have a column on ESPN.com at least once a month and will continue to write a Sunday column for the Post sports section.  He’s signed on with ESPN for 18 months. It will take effort across the board to turn this into more than a press-release gesture. ESPN leads other Disney siblings in a lot of areas and this could be another one.

Meanwhile,  Mark Jurkowitz returns to the Boston Phoenix from the  Boston Globe, where I thought his work consistently ranked in the top group of newsnpaper-based media writers. He’ll have more space and more editorial freedom at the alternative weekly.  It’s a mixed blessing for those of us who treasured Dan Kennedy as the  Phoenix media critic; Kennedy is leaving for Northeastern University.  As you can tell, I admire the work of both men but part of me wishes for new voices, new observations. Maybe an op-media column rotating in every few weeks or produced as a sidebar would add some much-needed alternative perspective. (Thanks, Jim.)

Coda: If you haven’t seen it, check out Between The Lines, the 1977 film about the glories and woes of an alternative newspaper in Boston loosely based on the Phoenix. The cast alone (John Heard, Jeff Goldblum among them) is worth a look.  I’m fairly sure I saw it for the first time as a student journalist on The Red & Black at the University of Georgia, back when there really was a big difference between the alt-weeklies and the traditional press.

Robert Niles: “Ultimate Insider”

I’m working in my living room, vaguely keeping track of CNN when I hear a segment start on planning family vacations in  theme parks. Soledad is aghast at the prices and I make a mental note to mention the segment to my OJR editor, Robert Niles, the founder of ThemeParkInsider.com. Then I look up: the expert being introduced as the "ultimate insider" is Robert.  I love it when the bookers get it right. Nice job, Robert.

Theme Park Insider is a great example of  multiple facets of web publishing: self-publishing, niche capturing and community journalism. The site, which has its origins in a 1997 online message board,  attracts a constant following of enthusiasts who track (and report) every price burp, equipment blip and new attraction. It also draws tourists. Providing a base for both at the same time isn’t easy but it’s a mark of a solid niche publication.

Coda: I knew Robert as the site’s editor long before he joined OJR. I moderated a panel during a USC Annenberg conference in 2002 with Robert, Jai Singh and Dan Froomkin. The video of the session is still available.

Podcasting: Don’t Screw It Up

The press release from NBC News announcing its podcasting plans includes the following  from Neal Shapiro, president, NBC News: "With technology racing at lightning speed, it’s incumbent upon us to keep up with it — and podcasting is a great example of how we are doing just that."

That’s also the danger: move too slow and you run the risk of missing the moment; move too fast and you run the risk of messing up the moment.

Iit’s great to see so many media outlets rushing to take part — no matter how appealing/unappealing the offerings may be to me personally. But let’s not screw it up, either.

Some of the allure of pod-listening is time shifting and a certain amount of repackaged content makes sense. Another facet is the creativity, the showmanship, the meshing of a personality with information, news or entertainment in a way that reaches individuals, not mass audiences. Provide some "TiVo" opportunities — audio feeds from newscasts and the like — but take this new medium, genre, whatever you want to call it, and move beyond what you’re already doing to what can be done.

Don’t worry about bragging rights — just getting it right.

Steve Jobs Doesn’t Get It

During a dinner chat at "D: All Things Digital," Steve Jobs was asked about Apple’s lawsuits against bloggers. From John Battelle, who is among those blogging the conference: "He claims that no one has the right to publish confidential
information just because they can, and so far,  the courts are agreeing
with him. " Battelle’s stayed out of the fray thus far but last night’s comments pushed him into taking a public stance.

"I say, fuck that. I’ve stayed out of this one because it’s orthogonal
to search, but it’s directly related to my ability to do my job, and I
am not alone.
At the core of this case is a clear attempt to draw a line between
professional and amateur journalism, and as a practitioner of both, I
have to say it’s a very dangerous line to be drawing. Should the courts
decide whether the next Tom Paine has to work at the Wall Street
Journal before he starting cranking out his pamphlets? I don’t think
so."

He added: "Forcing journalism into some kind of a ‘qualified’ box is a very bad
idea. Jobs vowed at the conference to take this issue to the Supreme
Court if necessary. I hope he does,  and I for one plan to fight him the
whole way there.  If you agree, help EFF work on this issue. "

John gets it.