Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Draft: Blogging howto for small city newspapers. "Say goodbye to the notion that reporters are interchangeable parts, readers are right to trust sources that identify themselves, and that goes for reporters too." 

Sylvia Paull: "I hope Jordan gets online and explains his comments; otherwise, we'll be killing journalists by more than guns alone." 

Archive of today's KPBS segment on Podcasting, which begins about 35 minutes into the show. 

I've been hanging out with Dan Conover from The Charleston Post and Courier today. He has a blog, of course. He explains the Charleston point of view as "this car craze looks like it's here to stay" and "Charleston is where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean." 

Andy Rhinehart has this incredible screen saver containing the latest AP photos coming into the newspaper. He just points Windws at a shared folder on the LAN and it picks the pictures at random. It's absolutely captivating. I think it would make a great product. Andy and Dan both started on the same day at The Mountaineer in Waynesville, NC. 

Today's movie is of the newsroom at the Herald-Journal.  

Press release: "Today the EFF asked a California Superior Court for a protective order that would prevent Apple Computer from forcing three online journalists to identify their confidential sources and hand over unpublished materials." 

I got an email from Dan Gillmor saying I didn't quote him correctly, and that's certainly possible, but I think I responded to the essence of what he said. There's nothing controversial about eBay or Craig's List, nor surprising, nor unethical. At some point there will be an MP3 of the session so we can check. Further he says that he didn't give a speech, and this is true. I wrote my comment in real time, as his session was starting up. After the fact, it was more of a Q&A with Dan and to a lesser extent, Paul Jones. This would have been uremarkable at a Silicon Valley tech conference, but was unusual for a blogging conference. I also would not have been at the SV tech conference, that model is over as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe in fountains of wisdom, I think there's more smarts in what we used to think of as an "audience" than there ever is at the front of the room. Funny thing is, I thought Dan believed that too. 

Yesterday and today I'm visiting with the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Last night I had dinner with Andy Rhinehart, who runs the HJ website, and is a Scripting News reader for many years, and my host. We were joined by Greg Retsinas, the managing editor of the newspaper. We talked, of course, how blogs can play a role in the paper. Spartanburg is a fascinating contrast to Greensboro and Chapel Hill, where there are already growing blogger communities. That is not happening yet in Spartanburg, but the management and staff of this paper are interested in getting something started. I think it's time for me to write a brief howto, because all this stuff is so fresh for me now.  

The Herald-Journal has a howto for people with news. Good start! 

An angle the NY Times spotted but buried in the middle of the Eason Jordan piece, is the central role that Rebecca MacKinnon played. "On Feb 2, Rebecca MacKinnon, who worked under Mr. Jordan when she was a producer and bureau chief at CNN, and organized the blog from Davos, contacted him after seeing that conservative blogs had picked up on his remarks."