hard deadlines

According to the Providence Business News, the folks at the free local news site Newport Now have bought the paper Newport This Week from East Bay Newspapers.

Congratulations and best wishes for great online-hardcopy synergies!

In a provocative post on his blog, PressThink, media theorist Jay Rosen asks a troubling question about the recent NY Times investigative report on the Tea Party movement. He zeroes in on one sentence: "It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny." And then he asks, as one might if one were not a journalist, hey, uh, is that true? About our country and tyranny, that is?

Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, while praising the meticulously reported story by David Barstow, wonders about offering, without context or challenge, such a highly charged assessment. If it is accurate, he argues, the story should say so. And if not, why is the New York Times mute? "If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story," says Rosen.

We're not talking theoretical stuff here. People have been known to believe patently counterfactual statements — things that make them willing to do extreme things. It seems to Rosen — and to me — that what we should ask of journalism is not a fake purity that refuses to choose a side, but a willingness to bring the facts to the table, even at the risk of appearing to lose "objectivity." Says Rosen:

In a word, the Times editors and Barstow know this narrative is nuts, but something stops them from saying so. And whatever that thing is, it’s not the reluctance to voice an opinion in the news columns, but a reluctance to report a fact in the news columns, the fact that the “narrative of impending tyranny” is ungrounded in any observable reality, even though the sense of grievance within the Tea Party movement is truly felt and politically consequential.

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That’s what created the pattern I’ve called “regression to a phony mean.” That’s what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.
— Jay Rosen, PressThink

If you're a regular reader, you pretty much know where I stand on this — with David Weinberger, who argues that transparency is the new objectivity. We cannot not communicate, as Colin Cherry used to say. And we are humans, hardwired by evolution to fit facts into patterns and make meaning. We can't help it, that's who we are. Being a "journalist" shouldn't mean checking your meaning-maker at the door. If you tell us where you're coming from and provide the evidence for your assessment, we're much more likely to trust you than a voice from nowhere cloaked in illusory objectivity.

If the U.S. is sliding toward tyranny, uh, please say so. And if it is not, please do us the service of calling it like it is.

Full disclosure: I know Jay from grad school, and I think he's pretty smart about this stuff.

Media theorist Paul Levinson says some very smart things about digital culture in his new book "New New Media," and local news site Newport Now did a nice review and interview over the weekend that makes for fun reading (that touches on some of the digital-vs-print journalism questions that are very timely.) No link to Amazon (you can google for that) but you can find more on Levinson's blog here.

Full disclosure: Paul was a professor of mine in grad school, and I think he is very smart about this stuff.

Yesterday's New York Times had a great example of the kind of reporting that only big media can do: "Efforts Lag at Making Highway Work Zones Safer." A sweeping 6K-word overview of state and federal oversight issues, this is the kind of reporting that makes the Gray Lady what it is. Whether you're interested in the issue or not — and, well, with all the new construction going on here in RI, who wouldn't be — it's also a fine piece of reportage.

My Sumerian is not what it used to be, so forgive what is probably a shaky translation in the title, but the news that Google has partnered with the Iraq National Museum to digitize their entire collection is just fantastic news. You can read about it in the New York Times, which also contains a link to the prior work done by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (whose Virtual Museum of Iraq is an overwrought Flash nightmare with absolutely Gutian information architecture.)

It's a narrow, specialist fascination of mine, I know, but there are pieces in the collection that illuminate the origin of writing. I celebrate Google's vision and thank them on behalf of the generations of scholars and students who will now have access to these materials for the first time.

Hat tip to Saul Kaplan (@skap5, web) for spotting this.

Lcross impact site. Photo courtesy NASA

At a press conference this morning, NASA researchers with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCross) team announced that last month's impact experiment had produced definitive evidence of water in a shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole.

In a statement posted on the NASA web site, Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist said, "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."

Read more at the LCross site.

The importance of this finding — not just for pure planetary science, but also for exploration — is hard to overstate. Local sources of water would make permanent bases a possibility. Colonies. Domes full of hydroponic plants. A jumping-off point for travel to the outer planets.

And as far as I know, the sf writer to most fully explore this possibility was Robert A. Heinlein, whose character Manny Davis is a Lunar ice miner in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I'm glad I made Jack get up so early to watch what was a pretty anticlimactic impact last month. While it might not have been immediately apparent, that was a huge moment.

Jeff Jarvis speaks with participants.

More than 150 localbloggers, journalists, media execs, and academics gathered at the City University of New York (CUNY) grad school of journalism today for the third annual conference on new models for news, this year focusing on local news blogging.

"What we're seeing happening is entrepreneurship," said Prof. Jeff Jarvis, organizer of the conference, as he kicked off the morning session, "What that means is that journalism is going to be an ecosystem."

And for the next eight hours, the participants explored the ins and outs of that new ecosystem in a series of panels, discussions, and much informal best practice sharing. The scope ranged across presentations from Spot.us, who crowdfunded a story on the Pacific garbage patch in yesterday's NY Times to the founder of New Jersey's hyperlocal Baristanet, who talked about the social pressure her kids feel having a mom who's a localblogger.

Okay, okay, I can't do the news voice anymore. Go take a peek at the wicked robust Twittering from the conference.

This was just an awesome day, where everyone I talked to was doing *exactly what I was.* I mean, how cool is that?

And it reminded me that I've been going to this kind of conference for 20 years now. In the late 1980s, as hypertext was on the rise (and yes, Web folks, hypertext existed that long ago) the academic conferences were full of hand-wringing about the impact of the digital. Believe it or not, there was much worry about navigation and being "lost in hyperspace." Sounds charmingly naive now. Then, in the mid-1990s, there were conferences on digital narrative where people trembled about the disappearance of the author into the text. Been there, done that.

Now, the digital tsunami has finally made it to the last high ground, the sacred gray eminence of news. Only those who have not been paying attention see this as something sudden.

As Steven Colbert said in his show this evening, discussing the SF Chronicle's decision to go to glossy paper stock, "Print your newspaper on something you know people will buy," said Colbert. "Fried food."

Mmmm. Now THAT'S a new business model.

Update: Followups from Jeff Jarvis, Dorian Benkoil at Poynter.

Resources:
NewsInnovation.com
New Business Models
Baristanet
Larchmont Gazette
Spot.us
SFGate story on Chronicle paper
ColbertNation.com

Full disclosure: The conference was free for participants, but the imputed value is significant. This statement is intended to conform to (and parody) FTC disclosure requirements.