By coincidence, here are two related posts.

Gilad and Devin at Social Flow track the enormous kinetic energy of a single twitterer who figured out shortly before President Obama’s announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. But my way of putting this — kinetic energy — is entirely wrong, since it was the energy stored within the Net that propelled that single tweet, from a person with about a thousand followers, across the webiverse. And the energy stored within the Net is actually the power of interest, the power of what we care about.

Meanwhile, The Berkman Center today announced the public availability of Media Cloud, a project Ethan Zuckerman and Hal Roberts led. Ethan explains it in a blog post that begins:

Today, the Berkman Center is relaunching Media Cloud, a platform designed to let scholars, journalists and anyone interested in the world of media ask and answer quantitative questions about media attention. For more than a year, we’ve been collecting roughly 50,000 English-language stories a day from 17,000 media sources, including major mainstream media outlets, left and right-leaning American political blogs, as well as from 1000 popular general interest blogs. (For much more about what Media Cloud does and how it does it, please see this post on the system from our lead architect, Hal Roberts.)

We’ve used what we’ve discovered from this data to analyze the differences in coverage of international crises in professional and citizen media and to study the rapid shifts in media attention that have accompanied the flood of breaking news that’s characterized early 2011. In the next weeks, we’ll be publishing some new research that uses Media Cloud to help us understand the structure of professional and citizen media in Russia and in Egypt.

Now Media Cloud is going to be a very useful tool. And it was not trivial to build. Congratulations to the team. And thank you.

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I’ve just sent out the August 18, 2009 issue of JOHO, my newsletter. (It’s completely free, so feel free to subscribe.) It’s all new material (well, new-ish) except for one piece.

[Tags: joho newsletter technodeterminism news journalism media cluetrain ]

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With it’s new Fresh view, Delicious builds on the TweetNews idea of using links in Tweets (and other measures) as a way to find what’s newest and most interesting. As the blog post about it says:

Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood”  by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs). Try clicking the ‘x Related Tweets’ link for any given story to see the Twitter conversation appear instantly inline.

It’s a welcome reslicing, not a whole new beast, but it seems useful.

[Tags: delivious everything_is_miscellaneous twitter news ]

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Terry Heaton has yet another excellent entry in his continuing series on the media r/evolution. This one is on the news as a process — never done, never entirely right.

I’ve been thinking for the past few days about the news as a network. I’ve been finding that the network view of institutions is helpful because it lets you think about the ways in which the odd properties of The Network, and especially the Web, may be getting applied to those institutions — how those properties fit and don’t fit, and what that means for how those institutions can and should interact with the Net. In fact, at the moment I’m thinking about that as the organizing principle of a talk I’m giving at the Open Gov Innovations conference in a couple of weeks.

Terry’s process view of the news is helpful because it reminds us that a news story is messily spread over time, with many hands touching, and thus contradicts the ol’ writing-boom-published timeline of yore. Nah, the news is always in process. Dave Winer’s river of news is another useful metaphor, capturing the flow of news that we care about.

Metaphors are not exclusionary, so I also like the network idea. The river of news as it flows past us is part of a continuing process, which has shape and some persistence because it is a network. And I think the news is a network pretty much fractally: A hyperlinked news story is embedded in a network of links. Stories are slices through complex webs of ideas, with connections through the river of time and the semantic space of causality and influence. A collection of stories (what we used to call a “newspaper” or a “nightly news show”) is a web of related pieces — related by chronology but also by cross-commentary and references. Reporters rely on networks of people. Readers read within networks of people and ideas. The events themselves that the news “covers” are so deeply enmeshed in networks of history and culture that the very notion of a “story” is now suspect.

There are at least three problems with networks of news. 1. Networks can be lazy; they are so sprawling and full of goodies that there’s some type of focused work they may not get around to. 2. Networks lower the barriers to social gravity, so that we can be irresistibly attracted to people who are like us. (Ok, so opposite magnetic poles attract, and thus my metaphor has failed. Damn!) 3. We know how to turn hard objects into money, whereas it’s way harder to figure out how to make networks of news economically sustainable.

But the networking of news feels to many of us like the news assuming a more natural, authentic shape, freed from the rectangle of paper into which it has been force fitted for so long.

[Tags: news journalism media jeff_jarvis michael_arrington nytimes ]

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I’m embarrassed to say that it’s been years since I’ve read Newsweek, so I may be the last to have noticed, but Newsweek is no longer a news magazine.

I picked up the June 16 issue somewhere for free — on a shuttle flight, I think — and thumbed through the offbeat, humorous, human-interest features, only to find myself at the back cover. Important note: I grabbed it because Stephen Colbert was advertised on the cover as “guest editor,” although except for a couple of funny essays, I don’t think that actually affected the content.

Newsweek and Time used to be your way to catch up on the week’s news. They covered the news. This particular issue of Newsweek made no such attempt. Rather, it had a theme: Iraq. The articles, in a 27-page section called “Features” (in a 68-page issue) included a photo essay, an essay on “how we’ll know we’ve won,” speculation on how we might commemorate the war, and articles on video games, West Point grads who are worried they’ll miss the war, families disrupted by deployments, Canada’s attitude towards conscientious objectors, soldiers who love battle, and a backgrounder on Iraq vs. Iran. Some of these were interesting articles, but they weren’t news of the week’s happenings.

As for coverage of events outside of Iraq: None…unless it made it into one of the fun sections, like the humorous quotes of the week.

The rest of the issue reads like blog posts: opinions, reviews, provocative essays, bright little snippets.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. Coverage is one of those big, ingrained ideas that actually make little sense — like objectivity, except coverage makes much less sense than that. Newsweek’s problem is that now that it’s lost its news-in-a-capsule medicinal prescription, will people take the weekly dose, since it’s now competing with the monthlies (The Atlantic, Harpers, etc.) and even with the Sunday magazine that comes with your newspaper?

I doubt it. But it’s not like I have a better idea. With news now spreading at the speed of typing, would anyone today start a magazine that reports on what happened last week? Newsweek is right to decide that rather than attempting coverage it will focus on being interesting. The problem is that there’s an over-supply of interesting now, and it is likely to remain a buyer’s market.

[Tags: journalism media news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Newsy, a project in collaboration with Univ. of Missouri’s Journalism School, pulls together a half-dozen media reports on a topic, stringing them together with their own reporter-at-a-desk commentary. The sources include mainstream news and less mainstream news. For example, here’s Newsy’s meta-coverage of China’s new Net blockage:

Newsy is a manual curation and production project. At least during this beta phase, it seems to be doing one or two a day, which means they may have more luck getting their stories embedded elsewhere than in drawing a regular crowd to their own site. In fact, the site has announced a syndication deal with Mediacom to provide stories for mid-Missouri cable tv subscribers. (The project is also probably a Fair Use lawsuit magnet, unfortunately.)

[Tags: media news missouri global_voices everything_is_miscellaneous newspapers journalism copyright copyleft fair_use ]

Comments Off on Newsy is meta-newsy

Chapter 3 left readers with a problem without resolution. If facts don’t provide as firm a bedrock as we’d thought, then are we left to believe whatever we want? Is there no hope? [Spoiler: No, we’re not free to believe whatever we want.]

Because Chapter 3 was pretty abstract, I want to be sure to address its question in some concrete ways. So, Chapter 4 opens with a brief scene-setter that says that we all love diversity, but when there’s too much, we can’t get anything done. I’m now at the beginning of a section that will give maybe four general rules for “scoping” diversity so that a group has enough internal difference to be smarter than the smartest individual, but not so much that they can’t get past bickering. I plan on following that with a more abstract section that asks whether the Net is making us more open or closed to other people’s ideas. At the moment, I like the idea of beginning with the concrete and moving to the abstract, in large part because I think the abstract question is pretty much impossible to answer.

I can’t tell yet if the chapter structure is going to work. There is so much to say about this topic. And I have a concern that the reader is not expecting the book to take this turn. But I won’t be able to tell that until I have enough distance on the prior chapters to be able to read them with some degree of freshness.

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On the heels of Clay’s splash o’ cold water — to paraphrase: “Revolutions aren’t pretty” — comes Steven Johnson‘s eloquent pointing to the “old growth forests” of online news as indicators of what might be. As brilliant as ever.

[Tags: news journalism media clay_shirky steven_johnson ]

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At the Newseum site, mousing over a map pops up the front page of the local newspaper. Cool!

(And won’t the site please start taking ads so we can all run the headline: “Ad Newseum!” Please”?)

[Tags: news media everything_is_miscellaneous mashups ]

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To encourage people to start using the FutureOfNews tag at Delicious.com, The Knight Foundation is giving away an entrance badge to the SxSW conference to someone who uses that tag today or tomorrow. Knight hopes that we’ll keep using the tag forever after on pages of interest to those who care about the FutureOfNews.

The winner will be announced on their site, KnightPulse.org at 5pm EDT, Wed.

[Tags: news knight media journalism futureofnews ]

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