Final Thoughts

We've come a long way.

In my first Journalism class, we were assigned to read a report that suggested ISPs should subsidize newspaper sites. One year ago, I sat in a Missourian lecture hall full of people who couldn't understand why forcing commenters to use their real names was a problem.

A friend of mine who recently graduated from the newspaper sequence used to espouse that "nobody knows how to make money on the Internet" as if it were an absolute fact. The shortlist of people who'd quit their day jobs for web start-ups didn't seem to change her mind.

So I spent a few years being really outspoken, and almost enjoying it.

I still have no problem playing devil's advocate. I really dislike the idea of making iPod touches/iPhones required for freshmen (they're cool, but why should we target a single arbitrary mobile platform? In the real world there are Blackberries, Windows Mobile, Google Android, and some shell of Palm OS. Why should we pick an arbitrary platform when we could... well, this is an argument for another day.)

Anyway, something changed. The journalists and the technical people are starting to speak the same language. And today's presentations were not only in the same language, but on the same page.

Matt Thompson's experiments with context speak directly to Paul Boll's realization that journalism should make people smarter. It's related to the same discussion we've had about what belongs on Money Commons.

And he may not know it, but his discussion of clutter on news sites was really about usability. That's as web-geeky as it gets.

Jane Stephen's idea is essentially a way to rapidly establish niche media outlets in a standard, repeatable manner with a very small staff. This takes an idea straight out of the blogosphere and tries to localize it. Since quite a few bloggers have managed to make a living with this on a global level, it makes sense to try and apply it to local journalism.

And of course, there's Jen Reeves, Community, and Money Commons.

Money Commons is not a failed project, it's an experiment that provided insight. I learned a lot about RSS, XML, Wordpress, php, workflow, aggregation, XAMPP (Apache MySQL PHP and phpMyAdmin), and a few... we'll call them principles.

1. Never assume you'll be able to dismantle someone else's code. That's only true if it's clean and documented, and if you don't always do that yourself, why should anyone else?
2. Wireframing is not something you can skip. If you don't know the content structure of a website before you design it, you will be unhappy later.
3. Great content works a lot like trees that fall in the middle of the forest. Yes, it happened, and it was pretty impressive, but nobody gives a damn.

I'm trying to look at this third problem from two different angles. (Oh, and because I'm me, that also requires me add a list of things we should try to do along with it.)

In the weeks before our Salad Daze premiere, we pitched the story to every newsroom in Columbia, in addition to a list of other promotional efforts. We did this because we wanted to spread the message to large, existing audiences.

KOMU, and the other newsrooms, already have audiences, so rather than building them, what we need to do is interact with them better. I have a creeping suspicion that part of the reason we're having trouble with this is that journalism is used to being a mass media. Journalists sent stuff to the Audience, period. And so all of our traditions in how we "do" news aim at that, rather than building relationships with and interacting with audience.

That's what Money Commons, Smart Decision, Ning, Twitter, and all the other things we've been playing with are meant to do.

We already know that some, if not all, of these things are really good at doing just that.

I just installed a new system called BBClone for monitoring traffic on BeTheShoe.com. It's faster and gives me better data, but for the past two years we've been able to see what kind of traffic we get. And in looking at the data, we've found that when we do things that engage our audience, traffic spikes.

The days around a premiere, a trailer release, a news story... you can pick these events out on the timeline without even knowing when they occur. And that makes sense, because every time we do one of these things, we plug the website everywhere we can, directing every audience we put ourselves in front of to go look at that content.

With that in mind, it's really obvious how to make these engagement projects work: push them to our existing audiences beyond just word of mouth. Can we have an on-air Twitter graphic? A prominent Twitter link on the front page of KOMU.com? Can we do that for Ning too?

In other words, if we're up to things, we should tell our entire existing audience about them.

One last thing: There was a woman in the audience this afternoon who was asking about research. Of course I like the idea of having data that tells us a little more about the measurable impact of these new technologies and techniques, who doesn't? But I think it's easy to forget that we're just getting started. The computer geeks of the world know where the technology is going, and the Mike Fanchers, Matt Thompsons, and Paul Bolls of the world know where the journalism needs to go. But the details about how to make the pieces fit together - which is really what Money Commons and Health Commons are about - are still napkin sketches.

But there's something to be said about napkin sketches. They tend to point to exciting times.

Twittermania

Everyone and their mother is Tweeting about the new Nielsen study. The two big headlines: Twitter is growing really fast, and it sucks as a marketing tool.

Um, was this a revelation to anyone?

Growth is obvious... Considering that the people who were skeptics in 2008 are now recruiting friends from outside the tech-and-media-audience, yeah, that seems fairly clear.

But as for marketing?

Advertising is all about eyeballs and impressions. So if you want to grow your audience, you need to put things in front of new people. Your followers aren't new people, they're people who are already interested in paying attention to you.

On the other hand, it's really good at communicating with people you know by just "throwing stuff out there," instead of having to write them directly. Last night everyone was Tweeting about the RJI flood. Everyone wants to know about that, but without Twitter, chances are whoever saw it first would not have sent a mass email out.

From a journalist perspective, I think having @komunews Tweet what's on the upcoming show is a great idea. But that's something you do as a way to communicate with your existing audience. It won't bring in new people.

The Nielsen data wasn't negative for Twitter, it just tells certain journalists/PR/marketing people that they never quite understood it to begin with.

S3, Tara, and Media Giraffe

It looks like I'm going to be teaching Tara web design. It actually sounds like fun.

I've been spending too much a lot of time playing with Amazon S3, because of Project Shoestring. It's a neat system... apparently part of Twitter's backend runs off of it.

The way I've been explaining this to people has centered around the concept that it lends you economies of scale. So if you need to host an online portfolio, it's probably not cost effective, but if your project needs to handle outrageous amounts of traffic or send very large files, it's much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

I started thinking about what this can do for journalism, and my first instinct was, well, nothing. Journalism is mostly short videos and blocks of text. It doesn't seem to need it.

But then again, maybe it doesn't have to be. There's some really interesting stuff going on with IPTV. There have been online "TV stations" like Revision3 for some time, but they used to distribute using poor quality or exclusively by BitTorrent. They've only recently been able to stream video, thanks to Flash 9 (H.264 encoded video) and specialized services like Bit Gravity and BrightCove, which aren't cheap.

But Amazon S3 is designed for services like this, and it charges based on usage, so it's possible to start a small streaming video operation with only a few advertisers.

This is happening at a time where the costs of equipment is in freefall. You can buy a decent prosumer HD camera for $600. It doesn't support XLR and it records to HDV, but it does the job.

So, hypothetically, a group of tech-savvy journalists could do broadcast style coverage and deliver high quality content via web without the startup costs of an actual broadcast station.

Would it be sustainable? Perhaps, but it's a longshot. The point is, now it's plausible, whereas ten years ago the technology to do something like this didn't even exist.

Dear Convergence,

Convergence, you need to put an end to this, immediately.

It doesn't matter how, but it's time to either clean up your act or bring it to a close.

For the last few days I've been talking to a guy who was assigned to build a custom Wordpress theme for his Convergence capstone. He bought a book, started working, and quickly ran into trouble.

So I took a look at the code, and it wasn't wrong, it was just full of little odd things. The CSS was double-spaced, there were CSS descriptors that would work if only the element they described appeared on the page.

In other words, he didn't actually know CSS, and as we went over this, he started to realizing exactly how deep in over his head he was.

This wouldn't be that bad, except it's becoming a pattern.

I don't know what Convergence is supposed to be. I don't know if they want their graduates to know how to build a website, or a Flash application, or edit video well. But whatever they think Convergence Journalists should be able to do, they should actually teach them how to do it.

Throwing people into a situation where they're expected to create a professional quality website with no prior xhtml/css experience is the equivelant of sending someone out to shoot a story for KOMU when they've never used a camera before.

To be fair, I'm self taught on everything but Avid. But that takes time, research, practice, and a couple projects that can stay far away from my portfolio.

And yes, I throw myself into these positions all the time, but not without scoping them out first, and certainly not on any sort of deadline. The difference is I do it to myself, knowing exactly how involved the subject is and having plausible goals. These convergence people almost never have any idea what they're getting into.

A few months ago I met with a group of people working for KBIA with a nearly indentical problem. One girl was learning HTML from a book for the first time while she was supposed to be building them a new site from scratch.

Tonight a girl came into KOMU with a camera full of pictures to use in a Flash map. She's never used Flash before. I don't know how this is supposed to work.

The program has gone along for years banking on the idea that "look, we're new, and we're not sure what we are yet." But how many classes will be allowed to graduate who are supposed to be experts in online media, and no virtually nothing about how to make online media.

This isn't print or broadcast, where having some new media skills is an asset. New media is supposed to be their thing.

Under normal conditions, I'd write off my observations as, well, being me. We'll call this the iMovie effect. I think iMovie is the Ford Pinto of video editing software, but even I have to admit it does make it possible for people to edit video without spending any time learning how to do anything.

The problem is, almost everyone I've ever met in convergence has the exact same complaint.

[EDIT] Apparently this starting happening after a certain semester. Or people tend to be more critical of the whole program while they're in the middle of a crisis. [/EDIT]

That's telling.

- Jason

More on Twitter, and branding media

Twitter keeps growing on me, and my roommate keeps mocking me for it. Earlier tonight I posted something and my phone rang in response 30 seconds later. That doesn't happen with, say, Facebook.

At the same time, some girl I've never met started following me. She knows some of the other movie people, and... got me thinking.

She's PR, so she's been Tweeting (virtually every two minutes... it gives Tweeters a bad name) about branding and advertising.

Coincidentally, I've been personally attempting to protect Kinkos from the recession in preparation for this premiere. (Posters start going up Thursday.) Considering that we're already over $400 over our original budget, I'm sort of in a Catch-22. We have to spend as little money as possible, but at the same time we have to try everything we can that might bring more audience to the show.

This girl linked to a post, that basically said pushing name recognition isn't enough; you need to engage your target audience. This is really obvious. Using Facebook alone, I could gather an audience of 200 people for a show, because these are people we know and who know what we do.

But that's Facebook's upper limit.

For anything more, we have to actively engage people.

Flyers don't work. Last year, prior to the screening of American Gothic (first feature), we plastered campus and downtown. Within 48 hours, every flyer we posted came down.

Nobody was walking around stripping flyers, they were just covering them up. There were so many groups, bands, businesses and the like that were trying to drive a message that our ads couldn't stay up for more than a day before someone else came along with their own flyers.

Did people see the flyers? A few, but I've heard much more about the Marquee over Missouri Theatre. So instead, we're trying new things: printing larger, color posters and putting them in coffee shops and other local arts-supporting businesses. Emailing other groups, people, etc who are interested in indie film... We'll see how well it works a week from Saturday.

Which brings me to journalism. A few days ago I saw a TV ad for the New York Times. It's true (in part by design) that the press sort of has a bad rep. In the meantime, newsrooms are adopting Twitter like it's will magically solve all their problems.

But Twitter is all about engagement, and plenty of journalists would be appalled by the idea of building a brand around their paper.

At the same time, all journalism serves PR goals. Talking to people/sources is engagement. It counts. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone talking about the identity of a newspaper.

The Broadcast world does. Anchors are all about personality and identity. Even in the midst of a straight news story, the reporter still has a face, voice, and a demeanor.

Newspapers don't. They have reputations, but when was the last time we saw a newspaper publicly communicate identity to its entire audience?

It's an odd line of thought.

On the other end of the spectrum, Newsy has apparently had success growing astroturph. Digg and the Web 2.0 world are designed to disregard this stuff... who knew it might actually work.

That's right, I owe you a blog post this week...

It'll have to be brief because... I need to pack.

Xampp works. I'm going to take a shot at our MoneyCommons to-do list over break. In the meantime, I'm helping Jenn Kovaleski and Liz build their portfolios... they look really good so far.

On an unrelated note, since all those people called into KOMU about the rumored gang initiations at Walmart, I've had an uncontrollable urge to see how far this can go. I mean, if so many people will freak out over something that sounds so sketchy, what else will they believe?

Plots of B-movies? Bad conspiracy theories? Zombies?

And I always thought all this technology made people more skeptical.

My attention needs to voluntarily divert, so this'll be brief

Quote of the week: "Journalists are supposed to make people smarter." I'm going to start using that... As much as I dislike being anywhere but bed or a shower at 8:30 AM, I'm really glad we woke up early to see him.

Missed Twitter hashtag opportunity of the week: #Liz_Coffee.

And we have a running theme too: technology that doesn't work. To put matters in simplest terms, KOMU's ability to get content online collapsed Wednesday night. The input switch was messed up, the deck crapped out, and all of a sudden we were getting severe distortion on the live input.

Add in the small fits of misbehavior from ACM, and I think Tara got it right in her tweet: "crazy fun night dot comming."

It's funny how the most stressful, dysfunctional nights can actually be fun when you're doing it with other people.

Now, doing it alone, not so much. After trying a few more times to make sense of the WordPress theme files without doing too much damage, I'm taking a shot at installed xampp, starting in about 15 minutes.

I have absolutely nothing else that I need to do this weekend aside from make this work. So if I break my own setup in the process, oh well, I'll fix it Sunday night.

Of course, the big news of the week is the premiere of Salad Daze.

Fun with Wordpress, and Creeds

A summary of my work this week comes courtesy of Bradley Halpern: "Wordpress is easy to break."

I know two guys on opposite sides of the East Coast who manually configured WordPress installs. I successfully confused both of them, which is usually bad news.

I'd go into detail about what wasn't working and what we tried, but honestly, if you just picture me beating WP with a stick while it laughs defiantly, you've got the idea.

Speaking of things that are broken, or allegedly broken, or in the view of Mike Fancher, not broken at all, I need to talk about the journalist's creed.

For reasons that sane people don't understand, I really like philosophy. It messes with your head, because in real life, something like ethics is really fluffy. It's the 21st century, we're big on moral relativity, and it's completely unintuitive to take something like that, and discuss it using extremely high standards of logic.

That's the creed: it's an Aristotle-esque declaration of the nature and characteristics of a journalist. I hadn't seen it in well over a year, and I'd never seen it in that light.

And why? Fancher was talking about the creed the way Walter Williams wrote it: the hard way. It's empowering, really.

The day after Fancher talked to us I read this article about how the press in Baltimore, which used to be a really good watchdog, doesn't have the resources to do it anymore.

If hyperlocalism and the like is what it takes to save journalism, we've missed the point.

Unfortunately, this semi-rant can't actually go anywhere, because that would require me to have something resembling an original thought on what can be done about it. I do agree with Fancher though, that the solution is in the ad money.

And I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the online ad money.

Guts

I'm going to keep this short, because I need to get back to installing MySQL on my laptop. After digging through some very thick CSS just to change the color of the links in the CODA (slideshow thing... named after the first guys to do it, who are geniuses) I realized that I had to go ahead and install MySQL+Wordpress so I can get a full working duplicate of MoneyCommons in a safe place where I can - how should I say this? - break it.

I'm almost there... I just need to get it to interact with my PHP install.

Of course, this is sort of over my head. I'm improvising. And so far... well, I'm making progress. Slowly.

KOMU went smoothly. Two reporters spent the duration of our shift debating if Ash Wednesday was a Catholic holiday.

My response: "Wait, Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent? Go figure... I didn't know that."

Tara looked at me like I was nuts. That seems fair.

Embedding things

Weekly rip on ACM: All of our problems tonight could have been avoided if ACM had a decent "preview" button. (Of course, we could've double checked everyone's work more carefully and get the same result, but blaming the technology feels better than admitting fault.)

On an unrelated note, the draft of the MoneyCommons Widget is coming along. I'm really surprised that the hardest part so far was embedability.

That's really weird. I started using php because it allows for Includes. You can type a short line of code that literally splices documents together. And for some reason that I think involves the positions of files after they've been rendered by WordPress, including the widget on the page gave me an error.

I wound up going the iframe route. And yes, I'm one of those web-standards people doesn't like iframes. But it's cross-browser compatible, it looks okay, and it's very embedable.

I'd never been a big fan of Flash. Partially because the first large project I ever did on it became corrupted. True, it's good at animation, being a video player, etc. But as far as interfaces go, Javascript + CSS are easier to use and do a better job.

But at the same time, my dog could embed a Flash object in a page with no real extra work of the developer's or the dog's part. Not true for the sort of js/php/css interfaces I built for PRX and (sort of) the widget. (Entire stylesheet had to be restructured to make the iframe work.)

Does this mean I'm warming up to Flash? Maybe. I'm still convinced its overused (although not as much as it used to be), but that doesn't mean I don't want to learn it.

And that's why I'm seriously considering that Flash authoring class for next semester.

Mobile things

I was arguing with myself about what to include in my ePortfolio (more on that later) when I found myself stumbling around on the RJI Collaboratory for no particular reason. I found this:

Mobile App Standards:(From mobile session): The Collaboratory can work towards creating standardized platform of mobile applications/interfaces

Whoa...

RJI admits that's out of its league - it belongs to Google, Apple, and Amazon. But that's an interesting question nonetheless.

I have an HTC Tilt. I don't read news on it. Partially because I refuse to pay $500 per year for a data connection when there's WiFi virtually everywhere I go. But for the most part, I don't want to read anything longer than a quick email on a tiny screen.

Does anyone else agree with that? Not at all. Every iPhone user has a special relationship zooming in and out of CNN.com.

On the other hand, I understand, and agree, that mobile devices have limitless potential for breaking news. Especially with the coming of the Integrated World (a less dreary version of The Cloud), which will let you receive a newsbrief, and push a button to send the developing story to your laptop. Not to mention streaming video and audio - especially on mobile devices - is in its infancy.

Here's a question: do we need new standards, or do we already have them?

RSS is very good at deploying headlines. H.264 is incredibly efficient for video. MP3 streaming (or download) is easy. And some of this is stuff you can do with Twitter, which is already very mobile friendly.

So it seems what we need isn't new standards, but new software... Songbird style projects that "revolutionize" the web. The problem is, we need it for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm OS and it's successor, Web OS, Google Android, and Symbian.

I doubt these applications will be standardized. Why should they be? iPhones and Palm Pre may work well with a touchy, glassy interface, but when RIM came out with a finger-oriented Blackberry it got really bad reviews, because that's not what Blackberry users want.

And of course, there's still the Kindle, which kept selling out despite the fact that it was a Generation 1 proof-of-concept that was not easy to read. Generation 2 is supposed to be a sweeping improvement, but what will it look like in 2015? Will there be a day when the New York Times simply stops printing and delivers a daily digital paper to millions of subscribers' eReaders?

And that, for the record, is something people seem to be willing to pay for.

Hmm...

Tweeting and Cake

To summarize this week at KOMU, ACM was a pain in the ass (as usual) and I made a huge breakthrough on the Money Commons Widget. Next step: embedability and aesthetics, then we're good to go.

But I don't want to dwell on that, because there's a much more interesting discussion/rant floating around Twitter.

I'm sold on Twitter. It took me almost 3 weeks, but I'm starting to see how it will becoming increasingly useful as I acquire more contacts.

Backstory: I know a lot of technical people. Most of them don't understand Twitter. Some of them laughed when I told them I had one. And for good reason: I don't care when that person I met yesterday at KOMU is doing their laundry.

Facebook emerged as a way to keep in touch with everyone you've ever met. It has utility. Twitter, or microblogging in general, sounds really petty. But what it becomes is one giant ongoing communal chatroom.

And the moment Jen mentioned "forced tweeting," my feed exploded. And it wasn't a neverending dribble of people doing routine things, it was a discussion.

There's a downside: I could only see a small part of the conversation, because I'm not following all the participants. So I thought being forced to Twitter meant being told, "Go sign up for Twitter and play with it." Apparently it meant "Jump in and use this as a reporting tool."

I have to agree, that's a terrible idea.

Why? Because it's just like giving Missourian reporters cameras. They go shoot without mics, you can't hear through the wind, they don't white balance, and when they come back to edit they put a dissolve between every cut.

It's not their fault, you just can't throw people into that without some sort of practice.

And then there's the other dilemma. We'll call it "The Things I See When I Google Myself" Dilemma. Or, more importantly, "Things My Future Employer Will See When He Googles Me" Dilemma.

We live in a funny age. There are lot's of people who support blogging, Twitter, the idea that everyone can publish their thoughts at the click of the button. And then there's the old guard who not only stay out of it, but will making hiring decisions based on what they find in people's personal content.

Some of this is common sense, of course. No one can reasonably think that posting drunken pictures of themselves in a public forum is a good iea. But at the same time, CNN has fired people for blogging. Most of the time, they weren't blogging about work, either.

This can be pretty extreme, especially when we get into some old school journalists who solemnly believe journalists shouldn't vote in order to remain objective.

And here's a slightly radical suggestion: there's absolutely no way to determine what will upset someone you haven't met.

So we have some options. We can operate semi-anonymously, using handles and protected profiles. We can write nothing but sterile material. (I have almost never conducted an interview where something isn't being held back because the source - for entirely fair reasons - doesn't want it published.) We can say to hell with it, that we don't want to work for anyone who wouldn't hire us on the basis of a blog isn't someone we want to work for. (Requires large ego.)

But in all likelihood, this will resolve itself in the next decade.

In the meantime, I have a suprisingly Google-proof name.

Thinking out loud

I used to be an RSS junkie. I had 20 feeds, I skimmed the entire batch on a daily basis, and it took me over an hour to read everything. One day I discovered I had better things to spend my time on, and quit.

Two or three relapses later, I broke the habit, and something funny happened: I had to stick to glancing over a small handful of sites on a regular basis.

And something funny happened.

I kept checking Time Magazine, Ars Technica, and Reddit, but all the big news outlets went.

No more CNN.

And why? Because CNN was breaking stories a day after the new media outlets discovered it, and a day before Time wrote a thorough, well-sorted explanation.

In hindsight, Ars was doing the same thing with science-technology issues. The day after CNN ran the Megan Meier story, Ars wrote a better story that actually covered the issues, instead of just the event.

That's not to say CNN is doing a bad job, just that they're reporting on a very microscopic level.

Which brings me back to the Missourian.

I spent the second half of the summer working on the Public Safety Beat, and wound up covering this controversy emerging from the Columbia police being armed with tasers.

It was an incredibly complicated story. We had documented cases where police used a taser (usually just as a threat) to put an end to a violent confrontation without anyone getting hurt. At the same time, all of Columbia saw the man who fell off the bridge over the summer, and I met an 18-year-old kid, who, after being the victim of an assault, was tasered 5 times by an officer who may have fudged his report. The kid was charged, and the prosecutor dropped the case and advised the kid to sue the city.

And to top it all off, the public understanding of what a taser is and how it works, including what the Missourian had already printed, was flat out wrong. No fault on the previous reporters; they got their information from the parties leading the debate, and they were confused too.

So there was a place for a compelling, complex narrative that really explored all the different elements in play of a very hot, controversial topic.

We never wrote it.

We wrote a lot of taser stories, but they were always micro. Someone holding a meeting. Someone protesting. Something happened. And yes, we needed to do all of that, but in all these little incidents, any sense of on explanation of what was happening got lost.

The economic crisis is infinitely more complicated than tasers ever were. It needs explanation. And of course, we've been seeing a long string of bad news, but the public needs more than that.

Which is why I really like the idea of having reporters go out and ask people basic questions, to just explain something to the public.

But I think we need to do this on two tiers.

I grew up Jewish fairly financially literate. I always assumed that everyone knew not to put things they couldn't afford on credit cards, that you can't pay for things with imaginary money... I'd never even heard of second mortgages.

My freshman year, I learned exactly how wrong I was. The level of not so much irresponsibility
but sheer cluelessness was staggering.

But at the same time, in talking to other people who would never buy things they couldn't pay for in cash about the economy, I noticed something: none of us had the slightest clue what we were talking about.

So perhaps, in addition to asking common sense advice questions for the people who have already found themselves in debt, we should try and make sense of the jargon flying around the regular news. At an earlier time, that would mean finding someone to explain what Freddie Mac actually did. This week, it would be the logic of behind stimulus package, Keynesianism etc. Just whatever is appearing in other stories, especially if they're local.

Will it work? No idea.

The ism

In print-land, there's a really high percentage of people who have no desire whatsoever to do reporting. There are the girls who come out and say "I just want to design pages," a flock of former creative writing types (myself included), aspiring columnists, and photographers who have a borderline sexual relationship with their $2000 SLR's.

And sitting in the newsroom, "look, I'm not going to be a reporter," is sort of a mid-level secret. Something you'd tell someone you met ten minutes ago, but you wouldn't want it announced in the middle of the newsroom.

Or on a blog, come to think of it.

That's why I spent the summer meeting reporter after reporter who'd check to see if anyone was looking, and then add, "just to be clear, I don't really want to be a reporter."

And so, when I meet someone who really likes the rough, dirty part of journalism, chasing sources and pursuing stories, my reflexive response is, "Good for you."

It takes a certain personality to really love doing that.

Speaking of certain personalities, it takes a certain personality to do this technical stuff. I've been called everything from "brilliant" (not true) to "psychotic" (that's okay). Which brings me to Wednesday night: most normal people don't find themselves thinking about how ACM is better at confusing people than managing content.

Here's what's going on: Prior to now, the Dot Com group rewrote all the news stories for web. Now the reporters do it. And that's a great idea, except it's very new, and the Dot Com people were never quite sure which stories are written up.

Meanwhile, there's no dashboard in the system that we can look and see what stories need what components. And in an open php based CMS, it'd be pretty easy to make an admin page for that.

Here's where we cross the line from "just thinking" to "OCD": there is a white board that is supposed to have all that on it. But... why shouldn't it be automated?

I stayed 20-30 minutes late to help a reporter export and copy her package to a harddrive, she was telling me that she just wanted to go out and be a general assignment reporter. I said "good for you," per usual, and started thinking...

Are all these back end people... the designers and the copy editors and the technocrats... are they really journalists? Yes, yes, they're all essential to journalism, since (until recently) you can't really deliver the content to an audience without some of these people. And because of the environment they work in and the people they collaborate with, the training and background is certainly a valuable asset to their professions. But is what they do journalism?

But then again, it's really just a pointless, hypothetical semantic rambling.

KOMU, attempt 1

Bad news first: I almost got killed on the way over, courtesy of directions from Google Maps that were flat out wrong.

Everything else is, well, interesting.

I have no broadcast experience, with the exception of shooting one story for J2100. But I've been using Avid Media Composer since August, and... it all converts. All Avid editing products seem to be alike. All Content Management Systems are alike. In all honestly I wasn't expecting to catch on so easily.

Something interesting: I got into a conversation with Stephanie about the Avid Content Management System. Apparently it's filled to capacity at a less-than-staggering 100 stories. KOMU.com is running an old version of the software, and being Avid, an update is expensive.

That's odd. Because Avid's editing software gets away with being pricey because it's not easy to put a good Non-linear Video Editor together. (Premiere is first becoming usable.) Content Management Systems, on the other hand, are available in abundance. They're open source, they're flexible, and they're free.

Am I missing something? Is there some critical feature that makes Avid's CMS somehow better than django, Drupal, or even a heavily modified WordPress? Especially in the age of H.264 streaming, when Adobe Flash is all you need to post video online.

Hey

I can post to my blog using a mobile device.

Hello world

I've officially lost count of the number of blogs I've tried to start. I think the record lands at about 2 weeks, mostly because I didn't have much content.

This will not be another failed attempt, since it will have focus, and... well, I'm obligated.

Some explanation. JasonG01 is a new handle I'm establishing, because my actual name is too common and I can't even reserve a decent domain name.

A lot of people don't "get" blogging. A lot of people can't understand social networking. And to be entirely honest, I still don't get Twitter. But when radio first came around, people thought it had no future outside of hobbyists. It was a toy. A waste of time. I believe the quote is that "nobody wants a talking piece of furniture in their living room."

Oops.

Next question: why is this relevant to my professional development.

Short answer: because whatever I want to do with my life, it lies at the intersection of media and technology. As far as I'm concerned, the two are inseparable, and always have been. See also: moveable type, telegraph, broadcasting, cable, and portable camcorders... yeah, they change things.

Speaking of which, someone at KBIA is looking to make a third readaptation of jplayer, an online radio-story interface I made last Fall.

Apparently people like it.