Breathe In, Breathe Out

TWIT on Journalism, Twitter

This Week in Tech or TWIT as it's known, is a podcast focused on, well, technical news of the week. As such, it's usually not that exiciting, though it does serve a purpose.

image by chodhound, via Flickr (CC license)

But the episode I listened to today broke the pattern. Host Leo Laporte and guests discussed the future of journalism, online and traditional. What made this stand out for me was the discussion wasn't coming from the usual suspects, traditional journalists. Instead, it was veteran content providers from he online information flood that continues to flow over the banks.

Stating the obvious usually doesn't count for much, but I found it refreshing when the panel agreed that most blogs are, at best, secondary sources of news. They are simply commenting or expanding upon the stuff uncovered by primary journalists - the men and women who dig up topics, research and filter them before presenting them to the public. So if the flow of financing for traditional journalism switches to secondary online sources, where does that leave us? Don't know about you, but I don't want to depend on Huffington Post as my primary source of news.

There were other discussions on meat and potatoes reporting subdizing stuff like international news: think New York Times. And of course recognizing how much times goes down the drain as the Twitter stream flows by. I'm starting to see a really big ratio of 'stuff I can't use' to 'stuff I can use.' Still, it's fun to watch the flow - sometimes.

As I think about this stuff, I'm leaning toward the idea of online delivery mainly supplementing local news. Let's face it, most local news doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to report it.

If you are at all interested in online and traditional news, I wouldn't hestiate recommending a download and listen. I hope to see more TWITs like this in the future.

Information Wants to Be Embodied

We attended a performance by author David Sedaris at a local theater a few months ago. I had heard Sedaris a few times on public radio's This American Life, but didn't know much about him. For an admission cost of $95, I wondered what kind of performance he'd give us.

I guess I was expecting a kind of stand up routine or lecture. Instead, Sedaris mostly just read from a manuscript he was working on. And he was visibly editing the script based on audience reaction.

I loved every minute of it.

Had you told me beforehand I was paying good money to observe a guy editing copy, I probably would have dismissed the whole idea. After all, I could listen to Sedaris for free on the radio or borrow one of his books from the library.

What would make me happy to pay for something I could get for free?

Kevin Kelly couches the question in slightly different terms, but does a great job explaining in Better Than Free. He starts by making the point that the Internet creates copies of everything digital. This makes stuff that can be digitized more or less free.

But there's a paradox here: superabundant copies become free. However, when this happens, it's the stuff that can't be copied that becomes scarce and valuable.

Kelly calls the stuff that can't be copied "generative qualities." He lists and elaborates on a number of them in the essay. For the David Sedaris performance, the thing I was paying for was embodiment:

At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today -- which may draw ticket holders to a big theater -- may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won't have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

It's a bit ironic that I found Kelly's essay in my news aggregator, available for free as are the hundreds of feeds I read regularly. Would I pay for this essay? Sure, if it were in a more permanent and convenient form like, say, a book. That would add a generative quality of accessibility, and make it worth a few bucks to me.

But it would also add the generative quality of findability, perhaps exposing the essay to readers who might not find it on the Internet. According to Kelly, findability is one of the value functions by aggregators. Not the software programs that process RSS feeds, but the organizations that package talent and information. Part of the bargain here is the aggregators (producers, distributors and labels or PDL), offer avenues to direct attention to the information being produced.

I think Kelly himself kind embodies this quality with his websites and books. He's also part of the lineage of that grand aggregator of information from the 1960's, The Whole Earth Catalog.

And if Kelly wants to come read from his manuscript , I'll happily buy a ticket.

Things Aren't Always What They Seem(ed)

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

Sounds like something from another time, another place. And in fact it's a quote from Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe himself.

But Abe didn't know about Photoshop or photo manipulation at all. Hell, photography itself was relatively new and exhibiting it's raw power over the masses at the time

But now even familiar photos can be doctoed so that people who know well theunderlying events in the photo are fooled. The Mind Hacks blog points to a recent study where researchers showed people altered photos of the Tiananmen Square incident and a Rome anti-war demonstration.

Not only did it turn out that their memories of the actual events were inaccurate, reflecting the doctored photos -- they also rated themselves less likely to attend a demonstration in the future.

Even more chilling is a pointer to earlier studies that "suggest that people often believe initial false news reports even when they're aware of them being falsified."

Honestly, Abe, this is troublesome. Things aren't always as the seem(ed).

Yellow Journalism: Not So Bad?

Yellow journalism generally gets a bad rap, but maybe it wasn't really so horrible. Some of the same factors that gave rise to yellow journalism are with us today. But we might all benefit from it this time, at least according to one journalism scholar.

It seems like everything's reality TV and celebrity gossip, neither of which I have much interest in. But everything isn't, thank goodness.

The hugely fragmented market for TV programming provides a lot of choice, and a TIVO provides the means to capture it and let me view it whenever I want. A lot of crap on TV, but I don't have to see it. No slam against Dancing with the Stars or Entertainment Tonight fans: they can do the same as me. (At least when the writers come back from their strike.)

Same idea with news and other sorts of topical information. The Internet has made for an almost infinitely segmented market where all sorts of regular (and irregular news) can be found. And that trend will expand greatly in the future.

Search engines make finding news and info easy, and distribution technologies like RSS and email bring it to you so that you can do whatever you want with it on your own timetable

This level of choice seems relatively new and shiny, but it's not, not really. We've seen stuff like this before in an unlikely place - the era of yellow journalism about a hundred years ago. At least that's what writer Steve Boriss is getting at in Yellow Journalism: the Golden Age of American News.

Now most of us are used to thinking of yellow journalism as a bad thing, what with Citizen Kane telling his journalists "you supply the headlines, I'll supply the war."

But there's a lot more to it than that. Yellow journalism arose in response to both technology's effects on publishing and distribution, along with population growth. Boriss paints a clear time line of all this:

• expensive-to-publish newspapers appealing to the elites at first;
• then steam driven presses driving down the cost of production;
• then the telegraph and telephone making in all current and relevant.

Suddenly in the late 19th century, technology stood the elite and the unwashed side by side, so to speak. The audience was a mass one, but the media hadn't caught up.

Then Joseph Pulitzer came up with a formula for covering the real news, but doing so in a sensationalist way that also appealed to the masses. The serious news presented in a way appealing across the board, driving circulation and profitability to new heights.

According to Boriss, this lasted until the elite publishers got pissed enough to form a cartel out of the Associated Press, drying up the sources of sensational news treatments and setting the tone of the news business for the next 100 years.

So here we are again. Technology has dealt us a new hand. If you want sensationalized news, it's just a click or two away. If you want the serious stuff, same thing. But now it's really segmented, coming from too many sources to count - for now, at least.

Not everyone will agree with Boriss' ideas. One commenter on the blog that published the post took exception, saying in effect it could promote even more Britney and Paris news than ever before. If Boriss is even remotely onto something here, the answer is yes, it probably will. And there will be people ready to snap up even the most minute gossip nugget. I'd bet saturation determined by advertisers,not news consumers.

There aren't any Pulitzers or Hearsts - yet, though we do have Murdoch. But that's OK. I'll just start to worry when someone like Murdoch owns Fox News and MSNBC at the same time.