Fake news

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Steve Mays

Nick Denton has been something of mover and shaker in the blogosphere since the beginning. Here’s his take on “fake news”:

“I don’t mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn’t new at all. The state won’t go bankrupt. The product isn’t revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news. Of course the public knows that most of these stories are published for the massaging of sources — and that’s why they don’t read them.

To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news. That’s not news.”

This is a pretty good summary of where I find myself in regard to news these days. You?

“New media landscape”

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Steve Mays

Clay Shirky thinks the media has failed to appreciate the full significance of WikiLeaks:

“WikiLeaks allows leakers transnational escape from national controls. Now, and from now on, a leaker with domestic secrets has no need of the domestic press, and indeed will avoid leaking directly to them if possible, to escape national pressure on national publishers to keep national secrets.

WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.

The state will fight back, of course. They will improve their controls on secrets, raise surveillance and punishment of possible leakers, try to negotiate multilateral media controls. But even then, the net change is likely to be advantageous to the leakers – less free than today, perhaps, but more free than prior to 2006. Assange has claimed, when the history of statecraft of the era is written, that it will be divided into pre- and post-WikiLeaks periods. This claim is grandiose and premature; it is not, however, obviously wrong.”

paper.li

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Steve Mays

I LOVE Twitter. It’s where I follow the insights and links of 131 like-minded souls. I tweet with some regularity but it’s the sum of these parts that makes Twitter so valuable/interesting to me.

paper.li compiles all of those tweets into a daily “paper.” While I prefer to follow my Twitter stream on my iPhone app or Tweeti on the MacBook, paper.li offers a better answer to: “What do you see in Twitter?!”

It’s like having 131 hand-picked editors, commentators and comedians, continuously scouring and curating the web just for me.

Dave Winer’s advice to Keith Olbermann

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Steve Mays

This post doesn’t depend on knowing who Dave Winer or Keith Olbermann is (are?). It’s about media and brand. My favorite part of Mr. Winer’s advice:

“…the future of communication is not about the bottleneck that MSNBC and their competitors control. I don’t think you really need them. Unless of course you need to make $5 million a year, in which case you probably do need them. But if what you’re interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time — if being influential is what you’re about, they really did you a favor.

So here’s what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O’Brien’s playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I’m sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O’Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that’s a lot of “depends”) there won’t be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you’ve got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you’ll have a lot more people watching you.”

Leo Laporte has done such an amazing job of this. Same for Arianna Huffington, and I’m sure there are others that don’t come to mind. Begs the question: Who owns the Keith Olbermann brand? MSNBC/Comcast? Or Keith Olbermann? Who owns your brand? Have you established a brand? What is it and where can I find it?

Esquire profiles Roger Ailes

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Steve Mays

I knew Roger Ailes was THE man behind Fox News but I had forgotten –or didn’t know– some of the other facts that make this Esquire profile so interesting. I know, you’re thinking an elite, East Coast rag like Esquire won’t treat Roger in a fair and balanced manner. Who can say? I can tell you that the piece absolutely savages Mr. Ailes.

You have to be of a certain age to remember or care what a lying turd Dick Nixon turned out to be but it was Mr. Ailes who put him in the White House.

He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — “I wasn’t worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting.” And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.

Can he make that horrible lightening strike twice?

“What kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?”

If you love Fox News, you gotta love Roger Ailes because he IS the network.

What will 2011 bring for journalism?

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Steve Mays

“…syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s just a cost.”

“Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.”

Full article by Clay Shirky

Just “get the bloody story”

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Steve Mays

“Yet journalism’s stock-in-trade is disclosure. As we have seen this week with WikiLeaks, power loathes truth revealed. Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails, as it does in the case of most international bodies.”“The great American editor Oz Elliott once lectured graduates at the Columbia School of Journalism on their sacred duty to democracy as the unofficial legislators of mankind. He asked me what I thought of it. I said it was no good to me: I was trained as a reptile lurking in the gutter whose sole job was to “get the bloody story.”

via Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk

Journalism in the Age of Data

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Steve Mays

I keep reading how data visualization is the future of journalism but it didn’t sink in very far. This documentary (?) turned on the light bulb in several ways.

I remember (sort of) the first time I inserted some audio into a story that aired on the radio station I worked at. Zowie! How cool is that? Well, better than no sound at all (maybe).

As I watched this, I realized how little understanding is communicated by the sound bite or some TV Ken/Barbie sticking a mic in someone’s face. Real depth, real insight and understanding will happen online (although we’ll soon stop making that distinction if we haven’t already).

I was also struck by the really smart men and women featured. They are not pretty faces. You don’t get on TV unless you look good. I sure hope J-Schools are paying attention to this.

The news organizations (if in fact it turns out to BE news organizations) the bring these skills to the party will win and we’ll all be better informed.

[via Cool Infographics]

“In future the only secrets will be spoken ones.”

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Steve Mays

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins argues the job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment. “It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks’ revelations”

“If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.”

“The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”

I particularly liked the line, “An electronic secred is a contradiction in terms.”

smays.com

“My fingers and penis are frozen, but it was worth it.” — Dwight Schrute

Category Archives: Journalism