This editorial shows how a smaller market group "gets it" as far as the future of news. Students and teachers of Journalism, do you get it?News Sentinel | 12/30/2004 | Who has ‘the news’?

Tsunami update with a good list of who to donate money to. I have been looking at earthquakes and volcanoes through history, and was surprised to find that the most deadly earthquake took place in 1556 in Shaanxi (Shensi) province China. More than 830,000 people were killed. This one is beginning to shape up as one of the worst ever. t r u t h o u t - Tsunami Death Toll Jumps Over 120,000

Best of 2004Top Ten Internet Hoaxes of 2004Top 10 Net Hoaxes / Urban Legends of 2004 - Printer Friendly

So it goes. R.I.P. Susan Sontag.

Bibliography

E-mail build-up is that thing that happens when we go on vacation. What is your strategy? Do you bring your laptop on vacation? Do you sneak out to the local library or Internet Cafe to "just check" email quickly and then find that 15 minutes has stretched into an hour and a half? I say, let it build up, and then use Junk Filters to help clean out the dross. Be liberal with deleting chunks of emails. Don't forget to have fun on your vacation. The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > E-Mail Doesn't Take a Holiday

Podcasting is the next big thing, and here is a guide to making your own podcast. Playlist: Puncturing Podcasts

Well I never...Wired News: Cell Phones That Do It

Blogs, blogging. Here is a thoughtful piece about blogging and journalism from the NYTimes (registration required--or use bugmenot.com.) The New York Times > Magazine > Phenomenon: Your Blog or Mine?: "There are two obvious differences between bloggers and the traditional press: unlike bloggers, professional journalists have a) editors and b) the need to maintain a professional reputation so that sources will continue to talk to them. I've been a journalist for more than a decade, and on two occasions I asked acquaintances whether I could print information that they had told me in social situations. Both times, they made clear that if I published they would never speak to me again. Without a reputation for trustworthiness, neither friendship nor journalism can be sustained over time."

Mark Glaser provides good information about online publishing. This is from his Online Publishing Association newsletter.

"InternetNews reported that Google had applied for a patent called "Method for searching media," which could signal that Google News will bring in money by indexing print magazines and newspapers and then charging a subscription cost for viewing them. The patent also mentions a technique for allowing publishers to serve new ads into archived pages."

Go take a look at "EPIC 2014" the flash movie that presents a possible scenario for the development of news media in the near-term future where Googlezon, the algorithm powered searching giant beats any and all legacy news businesses as the news tool of choice. It seems fanciful, and there are lots of flaws in the little movie, but there might be some truth to it, too, in light of this new patent and the direction Google is moving in.

Cool but unattainable at least in the USA. Portable playstation, hot phones that can be remotes to your TV and more, Linux handheld computer, a camphone with a hidden keyboard...read it and dream of travel or better infrastructure in the States....Forbes.com: Five Gadgets You Can't Buy In The U.S.

Future of news. Dan Gillmor, author of "We the Media" is leaving the Mercury to start a new venture. Here is an exclusive interview from OhmyNews. Interesting questions and answers. I haven't seen a picture of Oh My before, either. OhmyNews is a Korean news portal that relies on citizen reporters and professional editors. Stories are submitted and posted online. As a story "rises to the top" of Ohmynews, it gets edited so that if it makes it as a top story, it reads and is 'vetted like any legacy media story. Gillmor is going to practice what he preached in We the Media and start a news enterprise that is not dominated by a large company, though he takes pains to point out that he is not an anti-capitalist. OhmyNews International

The first 10 years of Online Journalism and some ideas about the next 10. Milestones in online journalism: " the next 10 years will be as unpredictable as the first decade. But a key issue will be how journalists respond to the ways non-journalists use the internet to express themselves"

The House that Murrow built...Printer Friendly Version - Moyers retires his bliss

"Astroturfing" means setting up a fake grassroots email campaign. Looks like Michael Powell and FCC got astroturfed big time by a right-wing extremist group. The resulting censorship of television and radio has an impact on everyone else. Attention, FCC: You've got mail: "o refresh: According to Mediaweek, 99.9 percent of 'indecency' complaints to the FCC came from one group -- the Parents Television Council. This completely hijacked the process of viewer complaints, which in turn drove FCC Chairman Michael Powell to tell Congress people were outraged (except only a select, censorship-prone group really were), and the chilling effect of politicians being riled up was felt immediately in Hollywood. It was heartening to get hundreds of e-mails from p"

Consumer Action to work for media reform. SinclairAction

Voting irregularities. Isn't this important news? How are media gatekeepers outside of Ohio deciding to ignore this developing story? The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Election 2004

In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the Black Caucus, asked that the tainted Bush electors be challenged.  This year at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will demand an immediate "investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines and new technologies used in 2004 election, how election officials responded to the difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our elections systems and administration." Their action requires the consent of a single Senator, which did not come in 2001.  As the battle to save democracy rages in Ohio and elsewhere, January, 2005, could be very different.

It might be good to watch this story. It might be time to write or call your senators and ask them to allow the doubts to be settled.

I assigned the NYTimes article to my students for reading. The move of marketing into intimate social relationships and what that means for what people think life is about what they value is disturbing to me. My family shops at second-hand stores and we have gotten the "Blackspot sneakers" from adbusters.org. If its marketed, it makes us suspicious. We don't watch commercial television. Are the hours of viewing TV likely to make one embrace the idea of selling as a social pasttime? Let's talk. What do you think? Poynter Online - Convergence Chaser

I remember back in grad school when "PLATO" was the hot system and Bitnet was the standard thinking about what an effort it would be to digitize the UIC library. The has come, soon we will have search access to the Bodlian, Harvard and other major libraries. The New York Times > Technology > Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database: "Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."

Collaboration environments are springing up across the web. From Wikinews to this site which aims at investigative reporting. Do you have a favorite conspiracy you want investigated? Send them a note, and they may put the team on it. This is such an obvious technology for the classroom that it will probably take a long time to get adopted...Center for Online Investigative Research | To assist one another in important investigative research projects.

Wikinews is now the news as Wikipedia moves into a peer reviewed news center, like indynews but a bit more neutral. The story is making its way around the blogs. I had written about it when I saw the chloracne story on Yuchenko first in Wikinews, and subsequently in mainstream papers.CyberJournalist.net: The potential for WikiNews: Collaborative news by all

Blogs, blogging Do you make sure your students have started a blog they can show to employer? Let's not hamstring our students by ignoring what we may not fancy ourselves...TCS: Tech Central Station - We Have Met the Enemy, and They Will Be Us: "Indeed, the current generation of freshman pro journalists is the last one which will have been hired in the pre-blog era. If you were an editor looking for a new hire these days, what would your first move be after checking your candidate's resume and clips? To check their blog, of course. And what self-respecting Bob Woodward wannabe doesn't have a blog now? (As our hypothetical editor, would you even consider hiring a candidate who didn't?)"

RFID I just bought some J Crew trousers and found a strange little tag sewn inside a nice little pocket inside of them. It advised me to cut the label and device out before washing or wearing the slacks. I googled for J Crew and RFID and found they are a case study in retail so it seems to be my first encounter with RFID. IDTechEx: Smart Label Revolution - The complete introductory report to low-cost RFID and beyond

Blogs, blogging. Bloggers, journalists, and confidential sources on a collision course.

Mr. Abrams said he thinks many bloggers should be entitled to the same kind of protection he is seeking for his client and other traditional journalists. “I think a blogger who communicates with and tries to communicate with thousands of people is not less deserving than a journalist who may communicate with a smaller audience through a small-town newspaper,” the attorney said. “There should be protection so long as information was obtained for the purpose of dissemination to the public at large in some sort of analogous way to what ‘journalists’ do.”

Bloggers Blur the Definition of Reporters’ Privilege

Future of news and WIKI. Here is the new wikinews. I was interested in the Ukraine story, as it included phonecam photos from the people in the streets. Then I noticed the thread about the illness of Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko (?????? ?????????? ??????) because it mentioned chloracne, something that I had heard about when my husband worked at UIC School of Public Health. I was browsing on Friday. Over the weekend, the mainstream papers picked up the story about Yushchenko's illness. Interesting sequence especially since the Wikinews was in all the blogs last week. Who is scooping whom? Main Page - Wikinews

Future of newscontinued. Time-shifting, competition from Internet, cable, and radio have already signaled the end of the dominance of broadcast news. The networks, and sadly, lots of educators, are still looking at the future through a rearview mirror, and don't see the necessity of preparing students for the 24 hour news cycle and to give them the skills they need to do better news reporting than bloggers or citizen journalists. The question isn't "if" TV news is going, going, gone. The question is "when." NETWORK NEWS COULD SOON SAY GOODBYE

Ethicsand blogging. When is a blog a sneak attack by unscrupulous admen? MediaPost Communications: "'For 18 years, we have worked very diligently to ensure that the entire PR industry and the video and audio providers within it, endorse full and complete disclosure. So a blog that does not clearly disclose its sources, violates so many of the tenants we've worked to create,' says Laurence Moskowitz, chairman, president and CEO of Medialink, a leading provider of VNRs for corporate marketers."

The future of news doesn't seem to lie in print on paper. I have been following the story of "EPIC 2014" because it is a typical example of how a network creates and transforms a meme into a frenzy, in EPIC's case a Flash movie, into a web phenomenon. EPIC 2014, a simple animation that purports to document the history of the news from the present to the year 2014 in which no news organization is left publishing in the face of "Googlezon" and the "Google Grid," is simply an 8 min. projection of trends and "what ifs" showing how customization, reputation rankings, computer algorithms, and P.O.V. editing could transform both how news is gathered as well as how it is presented to its users. Is it profound? Yes and no. The tech discussion communities like metafilter and slashdot discuss some of its shortcomings in terms of technology (Friendster is an economic joke, for example) and its relatively unsophisticated production values. Should you watch it? Yes. Watch it with your students and discuss it with them. It works for me like a good cartoon, or a koan, presenting complexity in simple form. McLuhan notes how we tend to view the future through the rearview mirror. Newspaper circulation figures show a steady decline. Studies of the vital 18-34 group like the one reported in this brief Wired article Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry point to an electronic future for those who are in the business of gathering and reporting news information. Tom Curley, CEO of A.P. gets it, noting that "The franchise is not the newspaper; it's not the broadcast; it's not even the Web site," Curley said. "The franchise is the content itself." The current buzz comes down to this: today's readers are used to being viewer/users (v/users), not simply readers. V/users want to do things with information "as they may think" to paraphrase Vannevar Bush. News is what the v/users are going to make it, as they search, link, use RSS, blog, Wiki, and talk back to the news media and each other in worldwide, networked "multi-log." Join or perish.