Yesterday I listened to an excellent Radio Open Source podcast episode. Christopher Lydon interviewed Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, about what he’s been learning about the Occupy movement by talking to protestors in Boston — and putting it into a global economic, social, and historic context that I found sobering.

So give it a listen:

Mark Blyth (6): Going to school on “Occupy Wall St.”

One point Blyth made that particularly struck me — and that I especially wish every journalist would take to heart — is this: The labor movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It didn’t spring into being fully formed with collective bargaining and arbitration procedures. It coalesced gradually, in fits and starts, from a society struggling with the “volatility constraint” that comes with rampant inequality.

Birth is messy. Infants aren’t born talking in complete sentences. So don’t look at the Occupy movement expecting this:

botticelli-birth-venus

Boticelli's "Birth of Venus"

After listening to all the context Blyth offered, I suspect we’re watching the earliest phases of a different kind of labor movement: the labor pangs that precedes the birth of something that might eventually walk and talk. Something that probably won’t go by the name “Occupy.”

I only hope the world can collectively raise this baby right.

Adirondacks (Tivoli 440/540): Mobile Reporting
As more and more users turn to mobile devices for news and information, journalists should be including the platform in their news gathering and delivery. But how? This session will take a big-picture look at trends in the mobile industry, the differences between mobile and the web, the significance of having a mobile presence and the best tools to use in the mobile space.

Here are some things I’ll be mentioning…

My Twitter ID: @agahran (be sure to spell it right — most people get it wrong)

Know your mobile media channels — if you understand this, you can do a better job of mobile publishing/engagement and reporting from the field

Will Sullivan, master of all things mojo: @journerdism

Will’s excellent mobile journalism tools guide

I’ll expand this post after the session with links to whatever mobile stuff we end up discussing.

First, my colleague Jason Da Ponte gives an excellent overview of the current and evolving mobile landscape, and the role of journalism in an increasingly mobile media environment.

My part starts around 21 minutes in. Afterward, Jason & I answered questions.

I only played a small role in this project — the vast majority of the work was done by Susan Mernit and Kwan Booth – my Oakland Local cofounders and partners in the House of Local media consulting group.

Yesterday, Susan, Kwan & I participated in a one-hour live chat hosted by J-Lab about this learning module. You can replay the complete transcript. We got really great interaction on this. J-Lab told us that this live chat attracted far more readers and participants than its other live chats. It was fun, and I’m glad it was a success!

CNN tech Writer Amy Gahran talks to CNN about… by BeyondPixBroadcast

And here’s the transcript.

Now that you’ve seen the finished product, here’s the backstory….

My interview was scheduled for 11:40 am. CNN arranged to have a car pick me up at my home in Oakland to drive me across the Bay Bridge to a TV studio in San Francisco. The pickup time was 9:30 am — a bit on the early side, but you never know about bridge traffic, even on a weekend holiday. The driver actually came early, and there was no traffic, so I arrived at the studio around 9:45 am.

I rang the buzzer on the building’s outer door, which was locked. No one answered. Tried again a few minutes later, and nothing. Ten minutes later, still nothing. I verified I had the correct address, but saw no signage indicating a TV studio was in that building.

So I called CNN headquarters to see if they had an on-site contact for the studio. They gave me a number that sent me to the voice mail for their Los Angeles bureau. Not helpful. After three more calls to CNN, I finally learned that this building wasn’t their studio — it’s an independent studio they lease time at (pretty normal for TV).

CNN staff was apparently searching around for an on-site contact, and I was getting a bit nervous at that point. Since a lot of media & CNN people follow me on Twitter, I posted for help there too. But didn’t get much response. Hey, it was a holiday for many…

Nearly an hour after I arrived, someone finally came down to let me inside. I waited in the studio (alone, surprisingly) for a bit. Then around 11am the makeup artist arrived. Shortly after the engineer walked in. Then a second engineer arrived — who, as it turned out, was redundant, so he went home.

cylon CNN

This is who.. er.. what was interviewing me at CNN. I now suspect that the "C" in CNN stands for "Cylon".

The interview itself was pretty quick. But I wasn’t actually talking to Fredricka Whitfield. She was just a disembodied voice in my ear. I was sitting in a chair in front of the CNN backdrop. I snapped a photo of what I was actually talking to (see left).

Once everyone was on site, it all ran smoothly. And that’s my point here — TV people often pull things together at the last minute, but they do manage to pull it all together, on a daily basis, and it works. I just happened to be unfamiliar with their process.

Now I know to expect that unless you’re going to a full-time network studio, people may not show up until the last minute. Which makes sense if a network is leasing studio time — which I gather does not come cheaply.

After my interview, the driver was kind enough to drop me at Dolores Park, in time for the annual Easter celebration of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Here are my photos. (Note: Some are not safe for work.)

It was a blast! I especially loved the Hunky Jesus competition. (The winner was “Jesus F*cking Christ”, but my favorite was “Son of Godzilla.”) And of course, there were many exultant cries of “He is risen!” and “Ahh… men! Ahh… women! And Ahhheverything in between!”

I only regretted that I was wearing full-on business attire. But at least with the TV studio makeup overload still fairly fresh on my face, I did blend in a bit with this crowd. At least in spirit. I definitely felt like I was playing dress-up.

After the Hunky Jesus competition, I strolled over to Revolution Cafe on 22nd street to enjoy some live jazz…

Revolution Cafe Jazz

Live Jazz at Revolution Cafe, SF, Easter 2011

Today at the Knight Digital Media Center, I wrote about new advocacy/awareness tool from Sunshine Week: a model proclamation that news orgs and other activists/advocates can customize, publish, and challenge specific government officials and agencies to adopt. It gets into specifics, at least to some extent.

See: Sunshine Week shows how to call for open government

It’s a good start, but here’s what else I’d love to see from Sunshine Week…

I’d really love it if they called for no more pdf-format publishing of government documents with arcane meaningless titles and no useful metadata. (City of Oakland, are you listening? Nah, I didn’t think so….)

…OK, personally I’m skeptical of the value of proclamations, even ones that call for specific actions. What I’d really love to see from Sunshine Week is an online interactive database where people and groups could file public incident reports about specific examples of government opacity or obstructionism, so we can track this issue better.

Mobile apps: Yes, this is the year for you to launch your Ipad/Iphone/Droid app. Come hear about cheap ways to get your mobile app built, and possible ways to monetize quickly.

Panel: Joshua Errett (NOW), Amy Gahran (Contentious.com), Paul Wagner (Forkfly)

Well, actually there I’ll be representing Oakland Local, where I’ve been leading our mobile initiatives. And I’ll be making the case that for the vast majority of news/media outlets seeking to go mobile, and app is probably not where you want to start. It makes more sense to start with a mobile-friendly web site, and build out from that base.

Just yesterday I learned that on Twitter (a social media service I use a lot), if I begin a tweet with an @ reply (such as: @lisawilliams said…), that tweet will only be seen by people who not only follow me but who ALSO follow the Twitter user named after the initial “@”.

You’d think I would have known this already, but every once in a while something major slips by me. Twitter changed how it handles “@ replies” a few months ago — something that caused considerable controversy on the service. It was a controversy I happened to miss. But thanks to the kindness of a stranger, I’m now caught up on the issue and can offer some useful tips.

I’m writing about this issues because it has significant implications for how I’ll be doing live coverage of events via Twitter.

Whenever I’m at an event (such as a conference, talk, or arts event) that I think might also interest some of my Twitter followers, I tend to “live tweet” it — posting frequent updates about what’s being said, what I’m seeing, reactions to what’s happening, etc.

I do this so much, and have gotten pretty good at it, that I have attracted many Twitter followers because of it. So I’ve decided to explore offering live event coverage as a professional service.

BUT: What if only a fraction of my nearly 5,000 Twitter followers have the opportunity to see my live coverage? And what if those people are already, in a sense, part of the “in crowd?”

That’s the situation when I start my live tweets with “@”.

Yeah, big problem. Especially if part of the value I bring to the table with live event coverage service is the size of my Twitter posse.

Fortunately, it’s fixable…

Here’s what I have been doing:

When I live tweet — especially when I’m covering what’s being said at an event — I’ve tended to use a format like this:

@scottros: “I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.”

…That is, the first thing I do is identify the speaker in a way that people can find and follow that person on Twitter. Then I deliver the quote. This makes sense for reading, but not for how Twitter works now.

Some Twitter users hack around this by inserting characters like “.” or “r [space]” before the @. This is apparently sufficient to trick Twitter into serving those tweets up to all your followers.

It works, but I don’t like it.

I believe in trying to make tweets read as naturally as possible, within that 140-character constraint. It’s challenging, but I’ve come to think of it as an art form. Well, at least a useful writing skill.

In my experience: Being as readable as possible on Twitter counts. It encourages more people to follow you, retweet you, and interact with you.

Too many people use Twitter’s character-count constraint as an excuse to get cryptic or vague in order to save space. The problem is, when people have to think too much (or at all) to decode or interpret what you wrote, you become less interesting. And you’ll only succeed on Twitter if you’re interesting.

My proposed solution:

Here’s what I’m going to try: From now on, when I’m live tweeting and quoting someone, I’ll begin with the quote, and end with the attribution in parentheses. That would only add one character to my current style.

For example, the tweet I shared above would look like this:

“I envy journalism students now. You all have the opportunity to publish. Just start publishing now, whatever your passion is.” (@scottros)

If I live tweet that way, then ALL of my Twitter followers would see the tweet — whether or not they also follow author Scott Rosenberg on Twitter.

What do you think of this approach? Please comment below.

I’ll try this out tonight. I’m attending a book signing, which I’ll be covering for Oakland Local. It’s fun stuff: Local illustrator Chris Lane will be discussing his new book, Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection. (Event details)

Once I try this live-tweeting strategy, I’ll get a sense for whether and how well it really works. But you let me know what you think.

…Yeah, this seems like a minor, picky point of style. However, given how Twitter now works, it would vastly increase the audience for my live event coverage.

I thought other Twitter users might find this info useful as well, especially journalists and others who do live coverage of events or breaking news via Twitter. After all, I can’t be the only avid Twitter user who missed this, right?

…Oh well, maybe I could be, I dunno.

In my own defense, when Twitter made this change back in May, I was at the apex of several major, stressful life changes — including selling my home of 12 years, downsizing my possessions to fit in a single room, and relocating to a new and very different city. I remember seeing the #fixreplies hashtag, but at the time I didn’t have the mental energy to figure out what people were talking about. My bad.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to Alex Howard (@digiphile on Twitter) who kindly pointed out to me this change in how Twitter works last night. I was live-tweeting a talk that Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything and founder of the intriguing new Mediabugs project. Alex liked my coverage, which he only saw because he also follows Scott on Twitter. He wanted more people to be able to see what I was doing, and kindly clued me in about the implications of starting with @.

RESOURCES:

Alex directed me to his discussion with Leslie Poston about implications of the @ reply change. This is quite thought-provoking and readable. If how people actually connect via social media matters to you, give it a read.

More recently, blogger Patrix covered this issue: Understanding Twitter @Replies Behavior. The comment thread here provides considerable clarification.

Finally, it’s important to understand how Twitter distinguishes between replies and mentions.

The event is billed as a “strategic overview of how to evaluate key areas of your company — including customer service, marketing communications and human resources — and determine why and how they might benefit from social media participation.

Here’s the liveblog:

I’ll also be tweeting event coverage and observations at my own Twitter account (agahran), with cross-posting to the Metzger Associates Twitter account (MetzgerAssoc). You can also follow the hashtag #execsocmed. And I’ll be tagging some tweets with the popular hashtag #socmed (for “social media”), to encourage broader discussion and participation.

This event is NOT part of BlogWorld Expo, which is also in Vegas this week, and which I’m not attending (several folks have asked).

I’m doing this particular bit of coverage as test for a new professional service I’d like to start offering more systematically: Good event coverage for hire. More about that in my next post…