Media
clock | November 22, 2008Last week, Terry Gross interviewed William Ayers on Fresh Air on NPR - you can listen to the podcast here.
James Fallows and Dave Winer have completely opposite reactions to the interview. What do you think?
clock | November 18, 2008...and the journalism that can help. Jay Rosen and Conor Friedersdorf on Blogginheads.tv:
clock | November 17, 2008The geriatric leaders of the government of Italy are making fools of themselves by trying to regulate bloggers, i.e., get them to register with the government, pay taxes, be liable for what they write, etc.:
The law's impact would turn all bloggers in Italy into potential outlaws. This could be great for their traffic, I realise, but hell on the business aspirations of an Italian web start-up, not to mention any tech company that wants to sell its blog-publishing software in Italy, or open a social network here. In addition to driving out potential tech jobs, the stifling of free speech also…
clock | November 16, 2008There is quite a lot of chatter around the intertubes about changes in the communication environment that happened between the last and this election and how those changes may be affecting the way the new White House communicates to people as well as how the new White House will receive communications from the people.
A lot of people are impatient - they want to see everything in place right this moment. Easy, guys! The inauguration is on January 20th. Until that time, Bush is the President and the Obama communications folks have time to think through, design and implement communication…
revere | October 22, 2008I confess that I am a political news junkie. In the 2004 election my main source of information were blogs (DailyKos, MyDD and Eschaton were my mainstays, with lots of others being hit on a regular basis). I still read them (I've added OpenLeft, AmericaBlog and ThinkProgress to the must read list, hitting lots of others almost as often), but unlike 2004 Mrs.R. and I also watch cable news, usually MSNBC's 7 pm to 10 pm line-up. It's mainly entertainment value. We don't learn much we didn't already know. It's sort of like the old days when the family gathered around the TV set each night,…
clock | October 20, 2008This I first posted on June 24, 2004 on www.jregrassroots.org, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics. I love re-posting this one every now and then, just to check how much the world has changed. What do you think? Was I too rosy-eyed? Prophetic?
In the beginning there were grunts, tom-tom drums, smoke signals, and the guy on the horse riding from village to village reading the latest King's Edict. That is Phase I in the evolution of media.
Phase II was ushered in by Gutenberg. Remember the beginning of Protestantism? Luther nailing copies of his pamhlet on the doors…
clock | October 18, 2008Joe Killian is a reporter for Greensboro News&Record. Friday, he went to a Sarah Palin rally at Elon University and filed a report from there for his newspaper.
But he also got assaulted - the first reporter so far - and then blogged about the incident.
Pam has more details.
Joe lived through the ordeal and joined us all at ConvergeSouth for a while.
More local discussions here, here, here and here.
clock | October 18, 2008I am back from the 4th ConvergeSouth, the do-not-miss Greensboro conference about the Web, blogging, journalism and community (and the model/inspiration for our own science blogging conferences, including the third one) . Big kudos to Sue Polinsky, Ed Cone and the cast of thousands for putting together the meeting again, making it better and better every year. And of course, thanks to Dave Hoggard for hosting the legendary BBQ with (even more legendary) banana pudding.
I rode to Greensboro with Kirk Ross and came back home with Anton Zuiker, having interesting conversations with each.
Dave…
clock | October 18, 2008TPM explains the origin of the term, what it evolved to mean, and who in the U.S. punditocracy is on the tire, who is off for good and who's off but yearns to get back on:
Meghan McCain: "It was a really fun experience.... Everybody really relaxed. It was fun to kind of see big journalistic figures, like Holly Baily swinging on the tire swing and Jon Martin helping my dad grill ribs."
clock | October 16, 2008Andrew Sullivan, who blogs on the vastly popular Daily Dish (one of the few sane conservatives out there and very informative and entertaining to read) just published a long essay in The Atlantic - Why I Blog? Worth your time and effort to read - just a short excerpt:
From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I'd edited a weekly print magazine…
clock | October 12, 2008Every year, when I go to ConvergeSouth (and I still need your help with my session this year), I look forward to seeing again some of my good blogospheric friends. And somewhere very, very high on the list of people I am most excited about seeing again, are Dan and Janet, journalists and bloggers from South Carolina who are regular, annual participants there.
Their blog Xark has been one of my regular reads for a few years now. So, I was astonishingly flattered when I went there the other day and saw my own face on top of the page! Yikes! What have I done?
Oh, Xarkers just thought they…
clock | October 12, 2008The future of newspapers is bleak, but there are three saving strategies: 1) hyperlocal papers will beat the big city, state, national and international papers, 2) telling the truth instead of false equivalence will foster reader loyalty, and 3) the print-to-web mode of thinking will be replaced by web-to-print, community-driven model.
Carrboro Citizen is an examplar of all three strategies. If you know that Carrboro is tiny, you already see how hyperlocal it is. If you have read it for a while, you know that they do not do the dreaded he-said-she-said tired, old schtick - they tell is at it…
revere | October 8, 2008Early yesterday morning I received an email from my publisher that the journal for which I am co-editor in chief has been sold. Our journal is one of 180 published by BioMedCentral (BMC), the largest open access scientific publisher. The business model of BMC and other open access publishers is to charge the author, not the reader. BMC journals are online only (there are one or two exceptions) and hence have no page limitations. Charges are for a single article, whatever the length. Color photos, movies and supplementary files are all included in the charge (it is not a page charge,…
clock | September 30, 2008If you came to either the first or the second Science Blogging Conference (or both) you may remember that, among other goodies in your swag bag, you also got a copy or two of Inside Duke Medicine, the employee publication for the Duke University Health System.
And, you may remember it looked kind of....soooo last century ;-)
Furthermore, it had its publishing model backwards - it was Print-to-Web, i.e., the well-crafted articles were first printed in hardcopy and then posted online almost as an after-thought.
Well, that model does not work, so Duke got smart and hired a visionary - Anton…
clock | September 26, 2008Remember this?
Well, apparently that blog post (not mine, but the source) raised quite a lot of hackles, so much that the PBS Obmudsman had to step in and try to explain:
But, I have serious problems with the episode that unfolded recently in which a journalism student at New York University, Alana Taylor, authored a Sept. 5 posting as an "embedded" blogger on MediaShift, writing critically about her class content and professor at NYU without informing either the teacher or her classmates about what she was doing. The headline read: "Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School." This…
clock | September 26, 2008Jay Rosen. Makes you think. Watch the video here (no idea why there is no embed code#$%%^&*) and read the accompanying blog post here.
The number one reason why journalists should blog is that it tutors you in how the Web works. You learn about open systems, and getting picked up; you become more interactive and have to master the horizontal part-- or your blog fails. Fails to stick.
As I like to say often - "blog is software". But there is more - watch the video.
clock | September 24, 2008Since BlogHer cancelled several parts of their Fall Tour, including the one in Greensboro, this does not mean that you go home on Friday night after ConvergeSouth as there WILL be a Saturday program, says Sue.
awild | September 18, 2008Speaking of bad science reporting...
Not the right ant.
Nope.
Camponotus? You've gotta be kidding.
It isn't Lasius, either.
Nor Ectatomma. (And isn't that Corrie Moreau's copyrighted photo?).
awild | September 16, 2008Here's something that bugs me. Instead of emphasizing the real significance of the find, a discovery like the "Mars ant" Martialis heureka is usually condensed down to "Wow, this ant is weird!".
I've pasted below a sampling of leads:
Newly-Discovered Bizarre Ant - Boing Boing
'Ant From Mars' Discovered in Amazon Rainforest - Fox News
'Ant from Mars' found in Amazon jungle - Science News
But weirdness misses the point. We have weird ants already. The suicidal exploding Camponotus is plenty weird. So are the gliding ants, and the ants that swim. The real story here is the…