The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the Story

Police Raid Gizmodo Journalist’s House

There’s much to discuss about Gizmodo’s decision to pay $5,000 for an iPhone left in a bar by an Apple engineer. However, when police begin kicking down the front doors of journalists over this incident, things have spun out of control.
What the press is not writing about – as journalist and professor Dan Gillmor [...]

The Game-Changer: Netbooks v. iPad

I’m not fan of Apple design (or any technology design that substitutes centralized, corporate control for open systems). I’ve been vocal about this since my days at Wired back in 1999.
This isn’t to say that I think every company should be forced to open-ness, merely that I will fight the wide-spread adoption of such [...]

On The Ridiculousness of Viacom + Copyright

There comes a time when an idea is pushed so far to the extreme that it becomes un-defendable. For years, I thought we’d reached that threshold with copyright. Services like My.Mp3.com, which allowed for virtual music lockers, seemed perfectly legitimate.
Time and again, though, the copyright cartels have used their money and influence to derail legitimate [...]

Archiving the Distributed Story: I Have No Idea

My buddy Glenn Platt, a professor and program director at Miami (OH) University, and I were chatting the other day about distributed stories.
I feel confident that I know what a distributed story is, how you build a network to tell those stories and some tools you might use that don’t seem obvious.
More importantly, he asked [...]

journalists versus bloggers

Finally found the link (via Twitter) for Scott Rosenberg’s new book. I’ve been awaiting this chapter in particular: Journalists versus Bloggers.

The Problem of Newspapers, Framed

It’s difficult to imagine a time in the near future when new software applications won’t be rolling off the digital assembly line, changing — or more likely making easier — our interactions with the cyber stream of information that is shaping the way we will live in the next, near future.
This is problematic for storytellers, [...]

My New York City Experience

This book — or more accurately the process of the book — is about exploring the new ways we create, consume and connect with stories, information and data. That has changed dramatically despite what you will read writers telling you.
They are wrong. The world has changed. A good story is still important. It’s just not [...]

4 Thoughts on Design

My main point is that the tradeoffs should usually be skewed further in the direction of “Obvious” than we care to think. (Don’t Make Me Think, p 14)
I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about the editorial side of digital news, but that’s only part of the story. In fact, it’s not even half [...]

Newspapers v. the Web: 2 Choices, 1 Answer

Image via Wikipedia

Of the 23 percent who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.(July 20, 2006, The Pew Center for the People and the Press: Online Newspapers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership)
I’ve [...]

4 Steps to Create A Modern News Story

(The) “big successes” on the Internet, Web sites such as YouTube, have content that’s 95 percent generated by the public. Content on the Tribune’s site is 97 percent house generated, just 3 percent public — the comment boards and photos. (June 18, 2008, Chicago Reader: Will Newspapers Survive?)
There is a disturbing construct I’ve noticed in [...]

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