by David Burn | Jun 29, 2005 | Digital culture
This Is Not A Blog, a webzine produced by the Digital Journalism class at New York University in Spring 2005, contains several interviews with prominent persons in the online journalism sphere. Two that caught my eye provide deeper looks at Jim Romenesko and Kurt Andersen.
Andersen is a fan of blogs, but he says they need to be reinvented if they want to achieve clout in journalism. “The speed of blogs is great, but there are complex arguments and thoughts that can’t be compressed into 150 words. I am eager for the next moment in the evolution of blogs to happen, where there are people actually doing reportorial journalism in the blog form.”
He envisions a hybrid blog, whereby a journalist is paid to search out stories and blog about them, incorporating both traditional reporting and opinion. “So then it’s not just all like ‘Look at what this blogger said about this other blogger.’ It all becomes a bit of an echo chamber. The coffee gets pretty thin if you pour it through the grounds 10 times.”
Anderson maintained a blog for a short time on his own site, kurtandersen.com, but abandoned it last autumn while working on his new novel. He says he doesn’t have any spare intellectual energy to share with the world. “I did a few postings. And I’ve always known it could be a very addictive thing. It’s fun. Maybe it’s really old school of me, but I’m paid to write. So why am I going to write for free? Maybe over time I’ll develop a lot of second-rate thoughts to put on the blog.”
Romenesko, on the other hand, has no such quibbles with blogging.
Romenesko is dedicated blogger. He rises every day at 5 a.m. and immediately checks his e-mail and bookmarked Web sites for stories of interest. He later steps out to a nearby Starbucks (go figure), and hooks his computer up to a Wi-Fi connection to work from there, reading dozens of newspaper sites and blogs.
He usually heads home from Starbucks in the late afternoon—still posting until dinnertime—and goes to bed by 10 p.m., only to start the entire process all over again seven hours later.
Romenesko insists that he maintains a “real life” outside the blogosphere. “Of course, between postings I do ‘normal’ things—watch TV, read books, newspapers, magazines, go to movies, meet up with friends, dine out.”
Even so, maintaining three daily blogs takes a great deal of time and effort. So much so that he hasn’t taken more than two vacations in the last five years.
As a host of three blogs myself, I can relate to Romenesko best. Yet, as a writer of things other than blogs, I can see where Andersen’s counter point is equally appealing. For I can envision a day where I have more important and better paying things to write than blog posts. Like books, or screenplays or long-form journalism.
by David Burn | Jun 17, 2005 | Digital culture
Meg Hourihan, co-creator of the personal publishing application Blogger, was recently profiled by the alumni magazine at Tufts, her alma mater.
Having founded two pioneering high-tech companies in the past five years, Hourihan’s English degree may seem a bit incongruous. But she doesn’t think so.
“My career path in technology is not at all an aberration,” she explains. “Many women in technology come to technology later and don’t come through traditional academic, undergraduate degrees.”
She is a strong advocate of creating an educational environment where women are encouraged to enter the math, science and technology fields.
“For me, when I was growing up, I felt there was a stigma of computers and being a nerd,” she recalls. “I went to computer camp in sixth grade. I told people when I got back to school that I went to computer camp and I was just mocked. That definitely had an impact on me.”
by David Burn | Jun 14, 2005 | Digital culture, Lowcountry, Place
Heather and Jon (two Utahns I do not know, except through their respective blogs) attended a wedding in Beaufort recently. Here’s some of what they reported.
Heather: While on vacation in South Carolina we took a leisurely (HA! Jon has scars from all my nagging TO GET A MOVE ON) trip to Fripp Island, a private beach where rich white people roam around in golf carts. We had packed swimsuits and thought that we could pick up sunscreen on the 20 mile drive out, but the gas station we picked had none in stock. They did, however, have four-foot-wide barrels of ice and beer sitting at the end of each aisle, you know, in case anyone got thirsty on their long drive. I HAVE BEEN IN UTAH WAY TOO LONG.
Jon: I’ve been to Austin, I’ve been to Memphis, I’ve been to Talahassee, I’ve been to Apalachicola and I’ve even been to Charleston. However, I’d have to say that our recent trip to Beaufort, South Carolina was the south I’d always heard about. It is the most southern city I’ve ever visited.
This couple likes to take photos and they’re not shy about sharing them. Here’s Jon’s Flickr set from the trip, and here’s Heather’s.
by David Burn | May 27, 2005 | Digital culture, Media
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.” -Jim Morrison
From the Museum of Media History (not a real place, as far as I can tell) comes EPIC 2014, or Evolving Personalized Information Construct, a viral that walks viewers through the history and future of media since Tim Behrens-Lee “founded” the internet in 1989.
Writers Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson make several spooky projections, but due to the mood music in the piece and the soothing narration, their thinking seems legitimate and non-threatening. Unless of course, you happen to work at the New York Times. They claim the Times will be offline by 2014, the once mightly gray lady reduced to “a newsletter for the elderly and the elite.”
Thanks to Tom Asacker for the pointer. There’s some interesting discussion of the piece in his comments area.
by David Burn | May 10, 2005 | Digital culture, Politics
Traditional media star, Arianna Huffington, has opened a can of whoop ass on traditional media (and Matt Drudge). Her group blog, which debuted yesterday, has entries from Walter Cronkite, Larry David, Rob Reiner, Senator Jon Corzine, Tina Brown, Bill Maher, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown and several others.
According to the Washington Post, Warren Beatty says the venture “holds out the possibility that the horrifying danger of media consolidation may be ameliorated.” He says Huffington will provide a forum “not owned by the New York Times, News Corp., General Electric, Disney, Viacom, The Washington Post, Tribune Media, Knight Ridder, Gannett and the like” and that smart writers “will have no fear of being edited or fired for views that might go against the interests of the publisher.”
One post I particularly enjoyed came from former California Governor and current Oakland Mayor, Jerry Brown.
Scanning the TV news tonight, I was struck again by the massive and incoherent stimuli transmitted to American minds in the guise of national news. Is it a post-modern nightmare or Dante’s Inferno?
The rapid shift from one image or story to another–now comic, now trivial, now tragic–undermines one’s critical faculties. Drug and car ads compete with murders in Iraq and a “nuclear option” for the Senate.
The common sense questions–such as, why our government is borrowing madly, tempting nature, engineering foreign nations, cutting taxes for some while increasing financial burdens for others–get lost in the psychic distractions of a perverse media acupuncture of the mind.
The public forum is overloaded with “junk” news, science and politics.
Long ago, America’s founders assumed an educated electorate and the deliberative discussions and reflections that a slower age invited. Then it was an Age of the Book. Now it is the Age of the Screen and its attendant attention deficit.
Not bad for an opening salvo.
by David Burn | Apr 24, 2005 | Digital culture, Lowcountry
A few weeks ago, a new newspaper started arriving at the house every morning. At first, I didn’t take much notice of it, but I gradually warmed up to it, and as I dug deeper and learned more, my jaw dropped. Why? Because Bluffton Today’s online version is a cutting edge experiment in newspaper publishing, happening right here under my nose in small town South Carolina.
Here’s what CBS Marketwatch has to say about it:
Morris Communications Corp. has begun publishing Bluffton Today, a tabloid newspaper tightly coordinated with a Web site, BlufftonToday.com. The hyperlocal publication will be distributed free in the namesake South Carolina community of about 15,000 people. Every reader will be invited to log onto the Web site and comment about stories, as well as start their own blog, upload pictures and even contribute recipes.
“Newspapers have gone on the Web by putting yesterday’s news online,” said Steve Yelvington, manager, Web site development for Morris. “That’s a one-way street. We are doing the opposite; Participation is right at the center of what we’re doing.”
He added: “BlufftonToday.com is a grand experiment in citizen journalism, a complete inversion of the typical ‘online newspaper’ model.”
Readers’ comments about stories will be edited and printed in the hard copy of the paper.
Success will be easy to judge, according to Yelvington. “People will be participating. The reality is people are doing this already, publishing their own Web sites and Web logs. The choice is not whether it will happen but whether we are going to participate in it.”
Still, I have to ask, “Why Bluffton?”
“Bluffton is one of the fastest-growing communities in the Southeast and is the perfect place to launch this new phase of newspaper and Web publishing,” said Morris Publishing Group President and CEO, William S. Morris IV. “We are proud to add Bluffton Today to the family of Morris newspapers.”
Morris Communication, based in Augusta, GA owns more than 30 daily and nondaily newspapers across the country, with total combined circulation in the range of 700,000. The company has a concentrated presence in the Southeast, with four signature holdings: The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), The Augusta Chronicle, the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News and the Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald.
by David Burn | Mar 19, 2005 | Digital culture
Seth Godin points to a great article on “the long tail” by Wired editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson. The piece is available as a PDF from Change This, a site which Godin helped give birth to last summer.
So what is this long tail? I first heard the term a few months back, and like most things involving the web, there was no explanation, just the assumption that I knew, or that I cared enough to catch up to the conversation. The long tail, at least in terms of entertainment and media products, refers to the vast catalog of books, CDs and films that do not rank as best sellers, or even as profit-generators in the traditional distribution-via-retail model.
Anderson explains how bricks and mortar-less enterprises like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes make as much money by providing obscure titles as they do by providing hits.
With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of beeing carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
The uncovering of this new economic truth has several implications. As a writer, the point couldn’t be clearer that simply making one’s work available—especially with today’s print-on-demand self-publishing options—is the big push. For over a decade, I’ve gotten lost in the idea that to “make it as a writer,” I first had to convice editors at small literary presses to take notice of me. That’s the old model. The new model allows me to bypass the gatekeepers and go direct to my audience, especially if I have the ability to market myself, which I do.
Another implication that occurs to me as a music lover and internet entrepreneur is the power of successfully serving niche markets. How about an iTunes-style service (or a hybrid, where users are empowered to choose downloads or streaming) that specifically carries the music iTunes does not? Given my ties to, and history in, the jamband community, I can see such a service providing only live recordings, commonly known as “bootlegs,” although that definition is fast losing meaning in an era where bands increasingly encourage taping of their shows and peer-to-peer file sharing.
Because I know first hand how big a subculture can get, and the startling buying power of said subcultures, the point is to simply provide. One needn’t be the next iTunes or the next hot author to make a living. As Godin says in his post, “figure out how to be: patient, persistent and low cost.”
p.s. Chris Anderson has dedicated a blog to this subject and is busy making a book of it, as well.
by David Burn | Jan 27, 2005 | Digital culture
Author and blogger, Rebecca Blood, is puzzling over some words that David Weinberger uttered.
Blogging is more like a conversation, and “you can’t develop a code of ethics for conversations,” said David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “A conversation with your best friend would become stilted and alienating.”
I think David doesn’t want to see conversations stifled on any level, so he’s afraid of regulations of any sort. Yet, Rebecca is right to point out that human communications always rely on ethics, to one degree or another. She writes:
First of all, publishing a weblog is not at all like a conversation between two people, it’s more like speaking in front of a room full of people–some of them trusted, some of them strangers–and having every word you say recorded and catalogued for future random retrieval. So that analogy doesn’t work.
by David Burn | Jan 26, 2005 | Chicago, Digital culture
Participants in last Saturday’s Blog Walk 6.0 have been posting their summaries of the event. Here are some of my favorite comments:
“More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible.” –Jim McGee
“If I like what you write, it stands to reason that I might like what you read. This is the ‘social’ piece that I was thinking about it. Through things like blogrolls, subscriber lists and listings of who else bookmarked a specific page, I am able to be connected with other like minded people.” –Steve Dembo
“One concept that really crystallized for me is that bloggers are the the new starving artists — we allow our passion for producing our product (the information in our blogs) to adversely impact our ability to rationally place a value upon it.” –Matt Homann
“At the end of the day, Mark Bernstein (Tinderbox!!!) said something to the effect that blogs should be changing the world.” –Dennis Kennedy
“There’s a sense in this crew that the real action is Somewhere Else, that they’re at the margins.” –Mark Bernstein
“BlogWalk 6 was a fantastic event for conversation and idea exchange. It was not a place for decisions or conclusions.” –Tom Sherman
by David Burn | Jan 23, 2005 | Chicago, Digital culture
On a snowy, windy (but nice) day in Chicago, 16 bloggers from all parts of the country and Europe gathered for the first Blog Walk held in the United States. The first five were conducted in Europe. Today’s took place in Room 22 at the Seabury Theological Seminary in Evanston.
The bloggers present represented a variety of industries–education, law, advertising, publishing and high tech to name a few–and thus individual concerns were also varied. I wanted to talk about blogs and wikis as external marketing tools. But other topics took the day. Still, it was highly informative and a pleasure to meet 15 other bloggers on a face-to-face basis.
For a more thorough examination of the event, see Tom’s detailed summary.
