NewsTrust - Most Recent Stories

The article as luxury or byproduct

Sun, 29 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 29 (Opinion) - A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process. * See the amazing Brian Stelter covering the Joplin tornado and begging his desk at The Times to turn his tweets into a story because he had neither the connectivity nor the time to do it in the field and, besides, he was too busy doing something more precious: reporting. (It’s a great post, a look at a journalist remaking his craft. Highly recommended for journalists and journalism students particularly.) (And aren’t you proud of me for not drawing the obvious and embarrassing comparison to Times editor Bill Keller’s Luddite trolling about Twitter even as his man in Twitter, Stelter, proves what a valuable tool it is?)

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News is a subset of the conversation «

Sat, 21 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 21 (Opinion) - Here’s a tale that reveals how journalists tend to think of their role in the conversation that makes up news and society. I think the conversation is happening all around us, with or without the journalists. I teach now that it’s the role of the journalist to add value to that conversation: verification, debunking, facts, reporting, context, platforms, teaching…. The late James Carey defines the role differently. As Jay Rosen explains in the Carey Reader: “The press does not ‘inform’ the public. It is ‘the public’ that ought to inform the press. The true subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having with itself.” But I’m seeing that news organizations think it is their role to lead the conversation (they set the agenda), allow the conversation (you may now comment on our story, now that it’s done), and judge the conversation (see Bill Keller’s sniffing at vox polloi). That’s why I went theatrically batshit on Twitter against the BBC for holding the first day of a meeting this week about *social media* under Chatham House Rule, which decrees: “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

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Cookie Madness!

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!

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Confusing a public with the public ?

Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 08 (Opinion) - I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics.

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Bizarro identity

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - I’m still trying to get my head around Facebook’s moves to become the king of identity online. Hell, if Leo Laporte couldn’t quite figure it out on yesterday’s taping of This Week in Google, then I’m not capable. But here’s where I am. Help me advance this…. I think my problem is this: I want the exact opposite of what Facebook did. I want the Bizarro Facebook. Instead of Facebook controlling my identity, I want to be able to control and publish and set access to and rules for the use of my identity online, allowing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, anyone access to it under my terms. When I tweeted that, ad man Rishad Tobaccowala tweeted: “you are right. What we want closed (our data) they want open. What we want open (create and transfer) they want closed.” He then added: “When it is so easy to “like” is it really like? A profusion of “liking” will soon be like… Noise.” Agree.

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News(paper) in the cloud ?

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Apr. 13 (Opinion) - I think it’s possible today to run a news organization — up to the point of publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture. John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, is about to prove it with his Ben Franklin Project. John and I were sitting in my CUNY office as he told me about the technology he’s saddled with at this orphaned newspaper company where he just took the helm. He used a term I swear I hadn’t heard in well more than a decade: “VDT.” That stand for “video display terminal,” the old, dumb box that was wired into newspaper mainframes. I was talking with a bunch of young journalists shortly afterwards and they’d never heard of VDTs (though they thought it could be cured with a shot). Well, Paton still has VDTs.

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Italy endangers the Web

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - Dangerous precedent: A judge in Milan has convicted 3 Google execs for privacy violations, holding them responsible for a user-uploaded video on YouTube. Google's response: "It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built."

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Cheap Laptops

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Khan - Sep. 15 (Comment) - Online PC shop offering laptops, desktop computers, netbooks, software, video games and mobile phones.

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Charity or collaboration?

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - The New York Times has accepted free stories from ProPublica. It has endorsed a journalist getting help from the public via Spot.US to underwrite a story that might appear at NYTimes.com. And Poynter’s Bill Mitchell says the paper is even wondering about foundation support for its work (but for perspective, I suspect one could safely

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APIs: The new distribution

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Mar. 10 (Comment) - The Guardian just announced that it is releasing all its content through an API as well as making available many different data sets through a data store, all of which can be mashed up into others’ sites and applications.

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AP, hole, dig

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Jun. 16 (Opinion) - The AP is still trying to preserve its way. But, as I often say, protection is no strategy for the future. In the story - which, note, I'm only summarizing here, without the quotes from the AP that might better state its stance (ahem) - the agency comes off like a policy ping-pong game, going back and forth:

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Credibility is not binary

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - May. 14 (Opinion) - I've seen a couple of efforts lately to help determine who's credible online and though I understand the need and the motive, these attempts are fundamentally flawed and perhaps even more damaging than they are helpful. The latest is Newscred and Techcrunch describes it today. I used a Techcrunch beta invite to poke around. It's very simple -- though that's the problem; credibility isn't so simple. They list articles and you get to "credit" or "discredit" them. These scores are, in turn, compiled for writers and publications. The first and most obvious problem, which TechCrunch points out, is that this is bait for grudges. Fox from one side, the Times from the other will get discredited by their detractors all day long. One man's bias is often the other man's truth. The second and more fundamental problem is that there's no basis to decide credibility. Does one error ruin an article's credibility? How many discredits does it take to ruin a reporter's or a publication's? And then what does that mean? That they lied? That you don't believe them? That you don't like them? That they make mistakes? That they don't report enough? That they use anonymous sources? That they relied on bad sources? That they wrote it badly? That they weren't transparent? And who's doing the judging? Are they credible? Who's judging the judges, then? Over the years, I've heard of various attempts to determine credibility or bias algorithmically, in an effort to take out this human bias in the process of finding bias, but that's just an engineer's wet dream. Again, the problem is definition (not to mention technical limitations of analyzing text and ideas). Newstrust has tried to do this in a subtler way, with star ratings and comment, but it faces the same issues: Who's doing the rating? On what basis?

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The CBS interview

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:14:02 -0700

Buzzmachine - Apr. 21 (Interview) - [Note the video submitted for review was posted today - the story quote is from the 4/20/07 blog and are provided for context] Last week, I did an interview for the CBS Evening News about the online civility discussion. It didn't make it to air (after my Free Speech segment also did not see the light of video, I'm getting a complex). So now it's an online exclusive, an Eye to Eye segment intro-ed by Katie herself. You can watch it here. Given CBS' new video-everywhere deals, I think I'll soon be able to embed such a segment. But now I can only link to it. The taping of the segment was both funny and emblematic of how big TV works. I did the whole interview looking at the camera in Washington while Daniel Sieberg asked the questions in New York. But after we finished it all, they realized they'd set up the shot wrong -- "wrong" being a relative term, relevant to the orthodoxy of old TV. I was looking straight at the camera but Daniel was looking to the side, as if we were in the same room with bookshelves behind each of us. That's how they often make such interviews. But we were now now in visual syn

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YouTube is good for TV

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:34:33 -0800

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Feb. 20 (Opinion) - The days of doing business by telling customers what they cannot do are nearing an end. If your customers want to watch your shows, listen to your songs, read your news, or play your games, can you still get away with telling them they cannot unless they come to you and use your devices, pay your fees, and follow your rules? That could work in a scarcity economy in which you owned all the stuff and the means to get it. But no more. Business isn't about control any more.

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Size doesn't matter: The distributed media economy

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 18:37:10 -0800

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Dec. 27 (Opinion) - No, size does not matter, not in media, not anymore. I know that's counterintuitive and counter everything we've assumed about mass media. But today what matters is reaching the right people by the right means. That has always been the case. Only now, thanks to connected, collaborative media, it's finally possible. I'll pull together a lot of links around this topic below. But most of them are still trying to measure mass: the new pageview, the new audience count, the new click. I say the change we're facing is much bigger than just the obsolescence of the pageview, much more fundamental: Size doesn't matter. Relevance, credibility, and attraction do. Instead of measuring quantity, we have to measure quality. And only when we do that will the true value of these new media be unlocked for everyone.

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So how would you solve Iraq?

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:18:40 -0800

Buzzmachine - By Jeff Jarvis - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - I come with the question and neither an answer nor an attitude: So how would you solve Iraq? And, no, “getting the hell out of there” is not an acceptable answer, dooming the Iraqis to the civil war many have already declared, and to worsening bloodshed and anarchy. From a humanitarian — that is, a liberal — perspective, we cannot abandon these people to such terror.

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