Rebooting The News

This is a heads-up to people who subscribe to the podcast. There is a problem with the feed that will cause some subscribers to not get every episode. (It could be a majority of subscribers not getting any episodes, depending on how their clients are programmed.)

Until this problem is fixed, you should manually visit the site periodically to see if there’s a new MP3 available and download it to to your listening device.

This is a repeat of a problem that hit our podcast in the beginning of the year. It was fixed, the feed was working properly for a few months, but it’s broken again. The Automattic people are aware of the problem, and hopefully will have a fix soon. As I understand it, all podcast feeds on wordpress.com are broken, btw — so if you’re hosting a podcast there, you should be aware of the problem.

We continue to use WordPress because Jay is very comfortable with it. We checked out Tumblr, and it’s not any better at podcast support than WordPress is.

A personal note, none of these programs work as well as the tools we had when podcasting was booting up in 2001-2004. Had our tools been this bad, there would be no podcasting, I’m sure of it. As these services have scaled, important features are breaking. This of course totally sucks.

Robert Scoble: Is the tech press needed anymore? A revealing post. He writes…

“So, what’s up with the headline I picked for this blog? I’m noticing that lots of app developers are seeing HUGE adoptions without being pushed ANYWHERE but on Apple’s iTunes app store. That’s how MyTown got so big. It’s also how Instagram got so popular so fast. FastMall’s CEO told me that’s where almost all of its users came from.

“Do app developers need the press anymore? They tell me yes, but not for the reason you might think. What’s the reason? Well, they suspect that Apple’s team is watching the press for which apps get discussed and hyped up.”

Sure enough, the TSA story (introducing “patdowns,” and “don’t touch my junk” to the vernacular) went viral, as we predicted in RBTN #72. So did one of Jay’s tweets on it.

Jay returned to video for Resentment News (and More Blondes Per Square Foot): Explaining What Fox News Channel Is. Should this experiment continue?

Scripting News: The Design Challenge. How to make the river-of-news style aggregator more attractive to the eye. Any takers?

Tumblr’s $25 million, the “freemium” model, and the competition for engineering talent.

Dave’s got a love affair going with Hacker News. What’s that about?

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Nov22.mp3

Jay took to video–a new YouTube channel–to express himself on the extraordinary interview Jon Stewart did with Rachel Maddow last week. Background (including the original interview on MSNBC) and a place to comment at PressThink.

Uh, Dave: do you mind if I ask you something? … Did you invent RSS? “…Every step in that chain was necessary to get to the point where the Times could get on board, and there was enough software and users that it mattered. But looking back, the moment when RSS 2.0 came out, followed by the NY Times stories flowing through it, that was the point when the fighting stopped and mass-scale deployment began. That was the moment of standardization. And my contribution was that I marshalled the users, software, content and yes, the tech industry so they were all marching in the same direction. This, imho, was a lot harder than merely having an idea!”

Dave had an experience with a new service and the result was: The tech industry is a virus.

Terry Heaton: Online advertising’s missing link: “The only thing the industry knows is mass or direct marketing — the pushing of a message or, as Doc Searls calls it, ‘signaling’ to an individual or a crowd. Put the right signal with the right crowd, and the magic of commerce happens. But what happens when people are fed up with all the relentless pushing and use technology to protect themselves from the bombardment? This notion is unpalatable to the marketing world, so it is ignored.”

Jay: This post by an irate flyer is quite an example of the sources going direct! It leads my 40 twits page by a mile. The background was in the New York Times last week. Flier Patience Wears Thin at Checkpoints. But this puts an exclamation point on that story. The press should be hopping on it. Gawker did. And here’s USA Today, with a piece that mentions the blog post that went viral, getting homeland security security Janet Napolitano on the record too. See? The rebooted system of news works.

Extraordinary posting on Tumblr from Newsweek.com staffers. They are fighting back against plans to fold their operation into the Daily Beast site after the merger that brought Tina Brown to the editor’s chair at Newsweek, the magazine. Listen to these quotes:

“…It would only be fitting that its Website would be the first to go. Like most print publications, Newsweek magazine has been led by people who deep down don’t understand the Web, and because they don’t understand it, they fear it and don’t value it… Newsweek.com may have always remained an ugly stepchild to its print grandparents, who were too busy burning money to notice….”

A little example of view from nowhere fundamentalism.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Nov15.mp3

Dave was part of a two-day discussion at the Library of Congress about how to preserve the writing we do online in the blogosphere. We talked about that. (Dan Gillmor in Salon: saving our digital heritage.)

The new MacBook Air was released: a few remarks on technology and the manipulation of geek desire.

Dave on what the White House blogger should be: “The White House blogger should be as independent as the Federal Reserve chairman or the head of the FDA. His or her job is to start small and build a network of information on how Americans can help America. Not fluff, not fear, but what’s really going on. And to be controversial. Newt and Karl will say it’s run by left-wing biased limp-wrist sissies. Let em say it. Link to them saying it.”

The View from Nowhere! It keeps getting bigger as the controversies roll on. It was a factor in the absurd suspension of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC. It’s there in Jay’s post on Andrew Breitbart and ABC News. (Jay’s 2003 post on it.)

Brooke Gladstone on On the Media stands up for the right thing in a little segment on the View from Nowhere. The noise about “bias” does not matter much, she says. “It’s the reporting that matters. Reporting that is undistorted by attempts to appear objective. Reporting that calls a lie a lie right after the lie, not in a box labeled analysis. Reporting that doesn’t distort truth by treating unequal arguments equally.”

A new browser debuted this week: Rockmelt. We kicked that around a bit.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Nov08.mp3

Here’s a new MP3 for RBTN #70, a live podcast at the Online News Association meeting in Washington, on Oct 30.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct30b.mp3

Thanks to Greg Linch for sticking with us. The first MP3 was largely inaudible — we had no setup time, no time to check the hardware. Next time we’re going to make sure we take enough time to get everything working before we go live.

But — that said, it was a great group of people, and a lively RBTN discussion. Makes me want to do some live sessions at NYU in the coming months.

Dave and I are at the Online News Association annual convention in Washington DC today for a special live edition of our show. Unbelievably, we are counter-programmed against the Jon Stewart rally for sanity on the National Mall.

But we’re an official part of the program at ONA and the show must go on. What we plan to do is summarize some of the major themes or master narratives that have emerged over 70 weeks of Rebooting the News, and then include in the discussion whomever shows up.

Some of those major themes are…

We’re already using the rebooted system of news.

Every node in the network is a participant in the system.

Today the sources go direct. (And journalists have to adjust.)

It’s easier to trust “Here’s where I’m coming from” than the View From Nowhere.

(As King Kaufman said: “Objectivity and impartiality are journalism’s version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”)

It’s dangerous for the news industry to rely on the tech industry for its next generation of tools.

There’s a cycle in tech: problems in openness build up, leading to closed systems, which then get disrupted by the next level openness.

We’re still serving the updates without the background knowledge needed to make sense of the updates; we need to fix that.

People come back to places that send them away.

Blogging is about owning–independently–the means of production; when we rely on companies for that we inevitably lose.

The enemy of progress is complexity.

Efficiency is creativity. The more efficient we can learn to be, the more we can do in the rebooted system of news.

We should have Checkbox News by now.

The 100 percent solution is a good path to innovation.

If you hear fire trucks in the night, in the morning you should be able to find out where the fire was.

Narrate your work.

We make shitty software.

Later… Well, we didn’t get to all those themes. But those are the themes. Here’s my post on the citizen’s agenda in campaign coverage, which was referred to.

And here’s the show– with audience participation. We hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct30.mp3

PressThink’s new design and the little design feature some call “Winerlinks.”

Online News Association: what are the master narratives of Rebooting the News? For that is what we are going to discuss with the people who come to see the live taping of our show in Washington.

Dave participates in Jay’s class and reads eight news executives grappling with the rebooted system of news, followed by ten bloggers and new media thinkers doing the same thing.

Juan Williams and NPR: I believe Brian Stelter’s piece is the first time “view from nowhere” made the New York Times. Or the first without quotes, at least. Pressthink on it. Jay was on NPR’s On Point about it.

The fun of blogging and the sources going direct: Virgin America, power plugs, and Jim Fallows.

Intelligent. Elegant. And mature. New blogging and commenting guidelines for The Guardian’s journalists/

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct25.mp3

Dave and I are taking our show to DC where we will do it live for the Online News Association, which is by far the biggest gathering of people who are trying to reboot the news from within, as it were.

So what should we do there? What do we need to be telling them? What do they need to hear? What do they need to be telling us? What do we need to hear from ONA?

Dave joined in the discussion during Jay’s graduate course in “the ethic of the web.” The assignment was to study eight speeches by news executives trying to come to grips with a rebooted system of news.

Dave’s post this week: The enemy of progress is complexity. Worth discussing!

Request from a listener Anna Tarkov: the Washington Post tells its staff not to engage with critics on Twitter, but also says Twitter is for users to engage with the Washington Post. Techdirt explains what’s screwy about this.

Martin Neisenholtz, head of the digital side of the New York Times, said last night: Thirteen different teams had to work together in order to construct the New York Times’ iPad app. Dave offers his review of the app.

Come on: 1300 journalists covering one story? That’s absurd. Jay expands on his critique.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct20.mp3

Our guest this week was Saul Hansell, programming director of AOL’s Seed.com, and a former technology reporter for the New York Times. Saul is also a loyal listener to Rebooting the News and says that he sometimes has the urge to argue with the hosts, so we invited him on to do just that.

We talked about pros, amateurs, pro-am journalism and what happens when the sources go direct.

We talked about Dave’s suggestion, going back many years, that the New York Times give a nytimes.com blog to everyone quoted in the newspaper and everyone who published an op-ed page. (See his post for more elaboration on this idea.)

We talked about AOL’s ambition to be a company that uses all methods: high-priced talent, part-time freelancers and the people formerly known as the audience—machines as well as humanoids—to get the job done, rather than dogmatically picking one and calling it “the” way. (Jay’s summary, not Saul’s words.)

We talked about what it’s like to report about the technology industry for 12 years, as Saul did, and then become an executive at one of the companies you used to write about.

Saul explained how articles like this one, How Old is Sharron Angle? in AOL’s Politics Daily arise from search data showing that people want to know such things.

We talked about Dave’s “Amen brother!” shout-out to Bob Woodward, after Woodward said he had no use for Twitter. Dave said he was like a nicotine addict warning a kid not to smoke.

Here’s the show; we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct11.mp3

Our guest this week is Ryan Tate, a reporter for Gawker Media, a listener to this podcast who has been following Dave Winer’s Scripting News since 1997.

Some of the items we discussed:

Why Nick Denton doesn’t care about your resume or where you went to college. (He looks you up on the web.) Ryan began as a commenter at Gawker sites, though he also had a career as a “print” journalist.

Why Gawker sites don’t practice “access journalism” in the same way that more traditional news organizations do.

The Apple iPhone anttenagate story and the role of readers in bringing it to light.

Ryan’s coverage of Facebook’s privacy changes, which began with this post.

The Angelgate story and the acquisition of Techcrunch by Aol.

The founding insight of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media: that journalists are a lot more interesting to listen to in a bar than they are to read in print. Eliminating that gap is his editorial approach.

The creation of a new editorial culture at Aol (amid a hiring spree) and at Yahoo– without what Ryan called “the old media baggage.”

The shift of economics correspondent Peter Goodman from the New York Times to the Huffington Post. “With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on,” Goodman said. “This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.” While he said he was happy at the Times, he found he was engaged in “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”

The Facebook Movie and what was and wasn’t captured there. (Dave’s review and Lawrence Lessig’s.) We agreed that the film will be good for Zuckerberg.

Dave went to a hackathon this week, but he has some doubts about them.

Oh, and Ryan Tate is writing a book on skunkworks and why they work.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Oct03.mp3