If I ever build a shrink ray, I'm going to name it the Internet

Found in the comments to a diary post at Daily Kos, left as part of someone's signature:

If the Earth really were your mother, she would grab you with one rocky hand and hold you under water until you no longer bubbled. -- Kathleen Dean Moore

It's a small world. Kathy Moore works in the Philosophy Department at OSU.

Also, the quote is pretty darn funny.

[Media] Four Links That Should Be Posts

But alas, I've been too busy.

Slashdot: Some newspaper chains launch their own ad network. Too little, too late to compete with Google & Co.?

WSJ Blog: Newspapers' online growth isn't as impressive when placed in context.

BuzzMachine: What if we divided up the newsroom into discrete companies? I have to say, I find this idea fascinating - but what happens when one part starts losing money? Does it just die out? What effect will this idea have on the end product?

LOCAL MAN: Doug MacGill discovers 30-year-old critiques of objectivity and applies them to his work for the NYT and Bloomberg News. This should have happened industry-wide at least 20 years ago. The fact that it didn't.... well, I'm not sure what that means.

[Journalism] The Nichification of the Media

OK, this turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be. I'm going to preface it by saying I'm not going to address the question of reporting in this post. Maybe in another one. I'll also say that thus far, this is a bit disjointed. Please flame away. That said....

I think this post is pretty accurate.... probably:

Media are mutating from mass to niche. OK. We get that.

...

That recess is a subtraction from the wall and that subtractive quality is what struck me this morning when I read a blurb in Paid Content announcing that a former Boston Globe political columnist will become managing editor of Politicker.com, a soon-to-be network of state-specific political news websites that appear poised to sprout from the New York Observer, the political weekly based in Manhattan.

1. The move from mass to niche is, indeed, correct, and is in no small part web/technology-driven. The ease with which information is moved around means that "newspapers" are less and less useful (or viable) as a way to organize information. Newspapers are tied to specific locations, to geography. The web is not. Which one will win in the long run among people who have grown up on the web?

2. Please note that #1 does not mean that newspapers will die out completely. The newspaper as a singular focal point of news, as an object around which content is structured, will undergo (and is already undergoing) significant changes, potentially losing most of its status.

This is also pretty astute:

Rather this announcement is a case is exemplary of the subtraction that has started and will continue to hit the journalism side of media just as it has already rocked the business side of media. We’re all familiar with this latter concept. Craig’s List started to subtract classified ad revenues; Monster.com et all started to poach on the job-wanted ads; Yahoo and its cohort have siphoned off display advertising, and so on.

Think of the Associated Press as the predecessor to this movement on the content side. Now add a heavy dose of topical breakdown to that, and you're getting somewhere.

More:

[T]he inexorable power of nichification is driven by the impulse toward efficiency. Thats what economics is all about. The drive for efficiency. And in so many walks of life specialization is efficient. Boring, maybe, but efficient.

This is interesting. I think it's correct, but I also deplore it. Newspapers, for some reason (a relatively privileged position in society, perhaps) are pretty far behind most other social institutions when it comes to fragmentation and specialization as part of a quest for greater efficiency (after all, Taylorism was so 1920s... or at least 1970s).

I posted once, I think (though I can't find it at the moment) about the nature of modern capitalism: It likes specialization. It likes to break things into tinier and tinier pieces, each more specialized and specific than the tier before.

You can see this is modern production techniques, the creation of ever-smaller niche markets for products, and even in the further specialization of job roles.

The belief, of course, is that same efficiency that underlies MiniMedia's point. And that same efficiency is, I think, anathema to good journalism - and to the creation of a good newspaper. (It's also anathema to human nature, to being a grounded human being, but that's another post.)

MiniMedia's conclusion:

How well does that analogy transfer to content and how does all this play out? How the hell would I know. But I am certain that every force in the world of media is prying loose the mortar in that wall I depicted above, and popping out stones at an accelerating pace. What I lay awake some nights wondering is: how many stones have to pop out before the godamn wall breaks?

I vacillate on my answer to these sorts of question, but, as of today, I think the wall breaking will come in the form of a radical shift in the business side of journalism, in how people are paid and what kind of name is on the check (or direct deposit slip, ha-ha). It will be less noticeable when it comes to the act of reporting (and here I differ from a lot of folks who are talking about this on the web). Certainly there is, and will continue to be, an upswing in the use of multimedia (electronic paper, anyone?).... but I still think the fundamental idea behind most media - reporting the events of the world - will not change.

Part of me expects a rapid and radical proliferation of content-specific niche organizations, like the one mentioned in MiniMedia's blog post. Those orgs would then sell, AP-style, to other organizations that simply collated content to produce a geographically grounded product. It would mean the outsourcing of almost all news production from the newspaper company in question. (Here I'm thinking of places like Politico or perhaps The Hill.)

This has already happened in radio, to some extent, and with disastrous consequences. Many radio shows are produced in advance and in a different state in which they are played, which removes radio as a social medium, as participatory, as well as removing the possibility for local, updated content.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are becoming more participatory in a sense, with the proliferation of comment-enabled websites and acceptance of the occasional bit of user-generated content. So that difference exists, and is important.

But what about the hyperlocal? I think it will still be produced locally, though certainly there is a question of resources - small newspapers can rarely afford to fund quality investigative journalism, or even comprehensive coverage (and certainly both the Lebanon Express and OSU's Daily Barometer are examples of this, albeit very different ones). There's also the question of user-generated content and what role that will play on the hyperlocal level.

I think users will have to take over more of a role. It's Indymedia meets the SPJ, and there's already one hell of a collision going on (see, for example, the reporting being done at leading political blogs like TPM or Firedoglake). But both sides are going to have to play nice sooner rather than later if anyone is interested in quality journalism surviving.

So what's my verdict? Change is a-comin', and as Mark over at Notes From a Teacher says on a near-daily basis, we (as a society) need to start changing the way we train and teach people to participate in the world of journalism - if that, is we are interested in seeing journalism survive in a useful form. I, for one, am definitely interested in that.

Still Amazed at How the Awesomeness of Apophenia; Or, the "Get Into College or Die" Crowd Strikes Again

This was great.

Specifically, this passage:

What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew's data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort's content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones. [emphasis added]

An Anecdote about Editors and Technology

From a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

The last journalism conference I went to was at PSU and it was for editors only. One of the workshops was on journalism and technology, and there was a guy from a Redmond, Wash. paper who was leading it and told his audience that his newspaper's entertainment guide now had its own MySpace page and it was getting a lot of comments, critiques, blah, blah, and that it was really reaching the younger audiences.

A balding, middle aged guy shot his hand up: "What's myspace?"

Every balding, middle-aged male editor (yes it's a stereotype but it was a true one at this conference!) shared the same question. This was less than two years ago.

It's going to take a new generation to make switch to technology-based journalism. And that's... going to take awhile.

Sidebar: That conference WAS odd though because the stereotypical "editor" was there and when I walked in it felt like... I was a complete outsider, or the person that should've been getting them their coffee. One of those things you'll never forget.

This reminds me of the new comment system instituted at the Albany Democrat-Herald, Lebanon Express, and Corvallis Gazette-Times: It would have been neat in 2002. Too bad it's almost 2008.

This conversation started as a result of this post.

Forest Grove News-Times Column on Anonymous Online Speech

via bz, kind of a funny story....

“Truthful” was part of an on-line exchange concerning the U.S. role as global policeman, part of which has been reprinted on these pages.

In response to a comment by Alana Graham, “Truthful” said he/she couldn’t use his/her real name because of “liberals.”

Liberals (a category which apparently includes me) “have a venomous side that makes them seek you out to personally harass you.” The liberals will label you a bigot or “anti-this or anti-that,” go after your job, send “protesters in front of your residence or work,” according to “Truthful.”

Wow. If us liberals were that organized, we’d all be debating how to elect Vice President Edwards to the Oval Office.

Sorry “Truthful,” but the real reason you don’t use your name is that you’re a chicken.

I think Truthful was playing the martyr in this case.

That said, it's good to see the columnist defending the ability of people to leave unsigned comments on the newspaper's web site. It's a practice that I support.

On the other hand, the suggestion that it's only cowardice that causes people to choose to leave unsigned comments is, um, not correct.

John Schrag should check out some of the comments made at LCSD Board meetings and online news stories about same.

Robots Are Taking Over The Web

Not the best-made video I've ever seen, but I think it gets the point across quite well.

More On Newspapers

I love philosophy.

More than that, I love theory and analysis. It was once suggested to me that I'm not really a philosopher, but a theorist, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.

This piece from Adrian Holovaty provides lots of analysis (and a little bit of theory). And it's about newspapers. What's not to like?

For example:

Let me clarify. I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

That is genius. Why hasn't this happened yet?

Except, of course, that is has - sort of. Anybody heard of, I don't know, Google Earth? I know it doesn't necessarily track the exact types of information that he's talking about, but it's a very well-known tool for doing the same type of thing. And I'm sure that there are plenty more tools of this type - database, aggregating, and mapping, as well as adding features like keywords, geographic locators and a halfway decent search engine. Hell, even Flickr lets users map their photos to geographic locations.

The more I think about it, the more I'm surprised Google hasn't actually done this yet, combining Google News and Google Earth. I wonder if Google News doesn't have the capacity at the hyperlocal level to do this (and I agree with Holovaty that the hyperlocal level is where this is the most useful).

I am so drooling with desire right now. Imagine this: Want to track your son's summer baseball league? Go to the local newspaper website. You could do stats and results, browse news stories about the games, and view the games via location - including breaking down stats by location, time, etc. It's not rocket science; in the case of baseball, I bet this is already being done, but probably just for the majors, minors, and maybe college ball. All it needs is a few very enterprising programmers to come along and create an (open source, please) template for this which local newspapers can then adapt for their own use.

Holovaty spends some time discussing why this would be a good idea for a newspaper to follow up on, and how this relates to/is journalism. I want to excerpt one point, because I think it nails the local papers and their use of the Internet to the wall (the possible exception being the G-T and Theresa Hogue's use of podcasts):

But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it's not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it's a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same "news article" bucket, you can't easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can't easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.

Sigh. I can't wait. Of course, I also don't expect the owner of the local papers to actually implement any of this in my lifetime. The three websites are all cloned from the same template, and it's not a good one. When it comes to multimedia and the use of the Internet, the Daily Barometer is years ahead of the local "real" newspapers.

Cat, the Internet, and the Dominant Power Paradigm

This is, ironically, the first post to mention cats on this blog, yet it has nothing to do with the cats I live with. Go figure.

So the cats-with-captions meme has made it to Time magazine. The author of the column is sure and enthusiast, but he says something completely out of place and yet totally correct at the end of this piece:

We may be witnessing a revolution in user-generated content, but the more mainstream the Web gets, the more it looks like the mainstream: homogenous, opportunistic and commercial. It's no longer a subculture; it's just the culture. And don't we have enough of that already? Are we facing a future without a weird, vital, creative phenomenon like lolcats? Say it with me: "Do not want!"

I suspect really, really serious Internet junkies have been saying this for years. Nevertheless, I think Grossman is correct. As the Internet gets professionalized and institutionalized (and as major companies take over the hosting and running of most of the functions that used to be performed by either tiny outfits or individuals), the quirky character and constant revolution that made it so raw and unfiltered are disappearing. The Internet is beginning to recognizably match the values of the dominant paradigm now that there's a critical mass of folks involved. When it was a self-selected group that differed from the dominant ideology enough, it did have a slightly different character.

Look at it this way: For me, the 80s were a time when people didn't really know how to incorporate digital technology into culture, and the result was messy. By the mid-90s, the "problem" was solved. I think there's a parallel there to the Internet, and what we're seeing now is the use of the Internet in such a way that serves the dominant power paradigm.

(This doesn't mean that the Internet is monolithic, but that it's main uses reflect American 'values'. Certainly you can find almost anything out there - I'm talking about the main uses for the majority of people)

There will never be a constant Internet revolution until there is a constant social revolution.

Population Density

Ran across this comment, which I will excerpt:

Princeton University is located in Mercer county which has a population of 350,761 (2000) and a land area of 229 square miles. This works out to be 1,532 people per square mile. This is somewhat above the average for all of New Jersey of 1,174 people per square mile. Note that New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation.

By contrast, Seoul (10.356 million people) has a population density of 44,310 people per square mile. Central Paris (2.154 million people) has a density 64,186 people per square mile. A better comparison is Urban Paris with a population of 9.645 million and 9,173 people per square mile. Greater London has 7.7 million people and 12,644 people per square mile.

The comment is left, as far as I can tell, as part of a response to Paul Krugman's column on how the U.S. has been left behind when it comes to getting people hooked up to broadband Internet. The gist is that it's a far easier task when everyone lives so close together.

I agree with this, actually, but I still think Krugman's larger point is valid: We - as in the U.S. telecoms - aren't even trying. Not to mention the U.S. government or FCC - they've not lifted a finger to make this happen.

Hopefully with the advent of newer, longer-range forms of wireless, high-speed Internet access will continue to grow in the U.S.

Bonus: Look at the numbers above, then check out those for Linn County, Oregon.

Population, 2006 estimate: 111,489 people
Land Area of Linn County: 2,292 square miles

That comes to roughly 48.6 people per square mile. Now in all fairness, Linn County is mostly agricultural and includes a lot of the Cascades foothills, but still. ~50 people per square mile vs. 12,000 for London? I can't wrap my head around that.

Benton County:

Population is 79,061.
Land Area is 679 square miles.
Population Density is 116.4 - quite a bit higher, but that's Corvallis for you, not to mention a much smaller county size.