At the end, I noted:

Given that groups often have considerable reach and influence, it makes sense for news organizations to actively engage local or relevant groups, especially via social media.

The online activities of groups are now a key channel for news, information, communication, and engagement for most Americans. It makes sense to build bridges with these channels in order to reach wider audiences and listen more effectively to community issues and concerns.

Which is yet another reason for the news business to get over its traditional stance of aloofness/separation from the community under the fig leaf of objectivity.

I’m doing this as a pilot test for a new professional service I’d like to start offering: Great live event coverage.

In my experience, most online event coverage isn’t so great. A few folks will be tweeting or blogging in several places, some hashtags will be used, but it’s all rather confusing and inconsistent to follow. Also, a lot of people tend to tweet items like “Jane Doe is speaking at this session now.” Uh-huh… AND….?

Liveblogging/tweeting has turned out to be a real strength of mine — I’m good at it, and I enjoy it. I’ve also had the good fortune to collect a sizable Twitter following among folks whose interests in media, business, and other fields overlap with mine — and who enjoy my particular blend of reporting, analysis, and attitude. (Or at least I guess they do, because every time I do live event coverage my Twitter posse swells noticeably and those folks tend to stick around afterward.)

I do a lot of live event coverage via Twitter and CoverItLive. For instance, earlier this month for my client the Reynolds Journalism Institute I liveblogged/tweeted J-Lab’s Fund My Media Startup workshop at the 2009 Online News Association conference.

So, being a longtime entrepreneur always on the lookout for new opportunities, I’m looking for ways to offer live event coverage as a service for my clients. Today’s event is an experiment on this front.

I want to figure out how this service could work in a way that would appeal to my Twitter posse, maintain my integrity and independence, and provide value to clients who’d pay for it.

Here are some of the issues I’m wrestling with, that I’d welcome your thoughts on…

QUALITY AND RELEVANCE

I wouldn’t accept just any live-coverage gig. It has to be a good fit for my interests, and those of my Twitter followers. So I’d be concentrating on events in areas such as:

• Media and journalism
• Energy
• Environment
• Government transparency and civic engagement/action
• Key media technologies (mobile, mapping, databases, collaboration, etc.)
• Social trends/dynamics (including race, gender, sexuality)
• Offbeat entertainment (science fiction, indy arts & music, strange festivals, zombies, etc.)

INDEPENDENCE

I’m a lousy lapdog. I don’t generally go out of my way to be rude or snarky — especially when someone has invited me to their event and given me a platform. But I do have attitude, a sense of humor, and I say what I think. I must always feel free in my event coverage to disagree, question, criticize, or challenge.

The people who hire me to cover their events need to understand that at some point I will say something they won’t be 100% comfortable with. I am not their mouthpiece. I am providing a service of visibility and engagement. That’s always going to be a bit uncomfortable. In fact, that’s the point.

So, hiring me is not like hiring a PR agency to make you look good. It’s more like issuing a press pass — but knowing that there will be consistent coverage throughout the event. I’ll also work to make sure the online audience gets represented in the live event, by posing questions and comments on their behalf.

TRANSPARENCY

Here’s the background on today’s gig, so you know what the terms of this coverage are.

Doyle Albee, president of Metzger Associates (a PR/communications firm based in Boulder, CO) has hired me to cover this event. I chose to do this because:

1. Doyle is a cool guy and a friend of mine from Boulder. He appreciates my perspective, even though we regularly disagree. He likes how I cover events and wants me to just do what I do — which includes allowing me to question or critize what happens at the event, if I see fit to do so.
2. Dave Taylor, another longtime Boulder friend of mine, is co-leading the event. Doyle and Dave are both great presenters, and I learn much from observing them.
3. The lineup of speakers looks pretty good.
4. This isn’t a mob scene. While I like covering events, major mob scenes like South by Southwest tend to put me on sensory/info overload pretty quickly, and leave me quaking in a fetal position. I prefer covering events for small-to-medium groups where I can get a real sense of what participants think, how peoples’ thinking evolves, and which takeaways are most meaningful.
5. It’s not summertime. Vegas summers slay me. Today is a pleasant, cool early autumn day, more my style.

Full disclosure: Metzger has paid my expenses and waived my fee to participate in this event. I did not ask for a fee for this coverage since I’m fine-tuning this service offer. However, for future live event coverage with this or other clients I will get paid a professional rate for the service.

I decided to not ask for a fee for this event because I want to engage my Twitter posse in a discussion about how I can do event coverage as a professional (fee-based) service in a way that works well for my Twitter followers. That is, I didn’t want to start selling this service before talking to my tweeps about how I can make this work for them.

My liveblog is appearing on Metzger’s site, and I’ll be cross-tweeting to Metzger’s own Twitter account. So while I might occasionally have something to critize, since they’re opening up their platforms for me to use I’ll be civil. Unless something truly egregious happens — and in that case, I’ll still be civil, but I’ll say what I mean.

Anyway, that’s the general plan. What are your thoughts, opinions, questions, criticisms? Please comment below, or tweet me @agahran, or e-mail me.

Again, this is an experiment. I’m not expecting everyone to be happy, or everything to run smoothly. But I do expect to learn a lot. Let me know what you think.

Without going into details, I’ve been handling a lot of major personal stuff lately — and I’ve been fortunate to have a strong and growing circle of close friends who have stepped up to offer me a steady supply of energy, support, perspective, honesty, sympathy, empathy, nurturing, and fun.

And I do this for them, too. That’s the core of deep friendship and other loving connections: You give of your own energy to help sustain others who are running low or in transition. At certain points we all need more nurturing; and at other times we have an abundance of energy and emotion to offer. Life comes in waves.

Personally, I’ve always found it very hard to ask for the help or nurturing I need. I don’t trust people easily, especially where my feelings of vulnerability are concerned. I assume that any emotional need I have, however small, will be perceived as too great an imposition. I don’t expect other people to be available to me. (Yes, I’m working on changing this mindset, quite deliberately. It’s a coping mechanism I’ve outgrown.)

As I’m reaching out more to my close friends, I’m wishing I had a tool that would help me to gauge their situation before I make a request, so I can be more sensitive to when I might actually be imposing.

Here’s what it might look like…

Imagine an online social network where your “friends” truly are only your closest friends — your confidantes, the people you care for most and who care about you, your trusted support network or tribe. This is definitely about quality, not quantity.

Imagine that you could download a small app or widget that would allow you to specify your current level of available emotional energy, attention, and time — that is, what you have to offer whoever in your circle might need it. It would also allow you to specify your current emotional needs from a customizable category list, and rate them low / medium / high. You could even transmit notes like “Need encouragement to finish filing my taxes” or “feeling lonely on the anniversary of my divorce” or “shoulder massage badly needed” or “I haven’t had a good laugh all week.”

This information would not be published in any way — it would only be available to the people whom you specify, through this app. It wouldn’t be available to search engines or for syndication.

When the people in your close circle are connected through this app, you could look at the app’s dashboard whenever you feel like you have some energy, attention, and time to offer, and indicate the current resources you can offer. The dashboard would display the current needs of your close friends, ranked according to how well they match with your emotional availability. Then you could take action — from arranging a coffee date to sending a text message to stopping by to give a hug and listen — to respond to that need.

Friends with significant needs or crises would be flagged (perhaps even via mobile alerts), so you’d know if a loved one needs immediate attention and realign your current priorities if needed. Because when you experience a death in the family, the end of a significant relationship, a serious illness or accident, the loss of a job… just reaching out to contact your closest friends can seem daunting. What if you could simply alert your entire support network with just a few clicks?

…Obviously, more would need to be fleshed out — like tracking needs that have gone unmet for more than a day, or having multiple friends collaborate to meet someone’s need. But what do you think of this nascent idea? Does it already exist? Could it?

On Jan 14., the Pew Internet and American Life project released a report on Adults and Social Networking Services. It said, “The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has
more than quadrupled in the past four years — from eight percent in 2005 to 35 percent now.”

Over at the Knight Digital Media Center News Leadership 3.0 blog, Michele McLellan observed: “It appears that American adults are moving into social networks more quickly than top 100 news organizations…”

The Pew report defines social network sites as “spaces on the Internet where users can create a profile and connect that profile to others (individuals or entities) to create a personal network.” MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are classic examples of this model, and they’re useful to research. But this research leaves out other powerful services that enable people to easily self-organize into social networks: Twitter, Ning, Meetup, Delicious, Digg, Slashdot, LiveJournal, and even news communities such as Newsvine and NowPublic. As such, I suspect Pew’s research vastly underestimates the proliferation and growth of online social networking among U.S. adults.

McLellan cited recent Bivings Group research which found that only one in 10 major news org sites offer social networking features such as the ability to create profiles and “friend” others. According to McLellan, “This suggests news organizations are limiting their reach to being familiar destinations or findable on search — both of which are valuable, but not enough. …I fear the problem is cultural, and perhaps less tractable than technical constraints.”

Furthermore: “The old, still powerful culture of the newsroom may suggest that there is ‘one way’ to get readers just waiting to be discovered, a quick fix that will build audiences and create revenue. Now. That fix used to be home delivery. Now it’s the Web site — if only we can figure it out. That’s a fallacy: It’s not the site, it’s the links, the connections and the network. It’s trial and error and trial again.”

I think McLellan is on to a couple of interesting things here. First, that mindset and culture — not resources and technology — are the key barriers to news orgs benefiting from social media. This is especially true since most social media can be leveraged for no cost at all. Second, she notes that the willingness to continuously experiment is the most likely path to success in media. This includes not just trying out new technologies, but learning how to value engagement other than pageviews on your site.

Right now, in the midst of industry-wide retrenchment and even despair, it can be hard to put energy into opening up, reaching out, and making connections. But trying to hold on tight to a shrinking piece of the action is no way to move forward. As Pew, and McLellan, indicate, social media can be one of the more rewarding ways news orgs can connect more fully with their audiences and communities. Investing in this particular mindset change, and treating social media as a priority rather than an afterthought, might yield surprising advantages.

(NOTE: I originally posted this article to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Two tweets from Wilson especially caught my attention:

crash

Mike Wilson's first post about the Denver plane crash he survived

And then, a couple of hours later…

crash2

Mike Wilson reflects on a similar bullet he dodged earlier

…Next I was making breakfast, listening to Colorado Public Radio, which was (of course) reporting on the Denver airport accident. They followed that with a story that stopped me cold for a bit: Witnesses, Families Remember Lockerbie Bombing. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 — a terrorist attack that killed 259 on the plane and 11 on the ground.

On the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, I was a 22-year-old journalism student packed up and ready to head back home to NJ after spending a semester in London. I’d been at the office Christmas party for the business magazine where I’d been interning. When I entered the house I’d been sharing since August with five other students, my housemates who hadn’t yet departed for home were sitting in the living room, crying. Mindy said, “Diane’s plane crashed”…

My onetime college housemate, Diane Rencevicz, on the victim’s list of Pan Am flight 103. She was 21 when she died.

Diane Rencevicz was a fellow Temple University student. She was the quietest heavy metal fan I ever knew, and I didn’t know her well. We merely shared a house for a few months. But I liked her well enough. And I was stunned to think that, at 21, she was suddenly dead.

In fact, she’d died taking exactly the same flight that Linda (my other housemate) and I were slated to take the very next day: Pan Am 103.

The next few days happened in slow motion.

In the morning I visited a local hospital to get tranquilizers for Linda, who was so distraught she could barely speak. I remember dropping my key through the mail slot of the lovely terrace house we’d rented on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Linda and I took a cab to Heathrow airport, where we bid Mindy farewell. While we were waiting at the gate, there was a bomb scare and everyone evacuated briefly to the parking lot. Really bad timing.

Eventually we got on the mostly-empty plane and flew across the ocean to JFK. My legs trembled the whole flight, I kept getting up to pace, and the flight attendants kept making me sit down. I remember their expressions, they’d just lost several friends and had to keep functioning. I didn’t argue with them, and they weren’t angry with me.

My family met me at JFK airport. My mom was crying. Lots of people were crying. I was exhausted. They took me home to NJ. Christmas happened. I attended mass with my family at the Catholic church down the street. The priest mentioned the bombing and I felt numb. Even though I was a news junkie, I avoided the news for weeks.

A few days later, Linda and I attended Diane’s memorial service. There, I was stunned to learn that Diane had an identical twin sister. Maybe I’d known that before, but I’d forgotten. Never in my life did I have such a strong feeling that I was seeing a ghost. That really shook me, more than anything else about that experience.

WHY NOT ME?

I dodged that bullet for the most mundane and human of reasons. Linda is a methodical person, and she made our flight arrangements. I didn’t want to depart for London on my birthday, so we agreed to fly out the next day, on Aug. 22, 1988. We were staying in London for four months. So Linda scheduled our flight home for exactly four months later, on Dec. 22.

And that’s really why I’m here today.

I have very strange, mixed feelings about this experience. Not getting killed in that bombing did not change my life in any dramatic way — except that I continued to live, and I felt more aware of others who don’t get to do that. I became very aware of chance, and randomness. For a while, flying made me very nervous. Then that fear wore away.

Soon after I returned home I was introduced to Stacey, who’d be my closest friend for several years. She introduced me to her ex-boyfriend Tom, whom I married a decade later. I worked for a bad book publishing company in Philly, then a business magazine on the Main Line outside Philly, and then lived very briefly in north Jersey, and then moved to Boulder in 1995.

Since then….

Some of my sisters and cousins had kids, and one of my nieces now has kids of her own. My brother survived leukemia. My grandmother died. My parents aged, sold the home where I grew up, bought a smaller home nearby, and are doing well.

My career took off in interesting, independent, entrepreneurial directions. It’s been feast or famine, but never boring. I’ve done work I’m proud of, and made some humbling mistakes. I’ve helped, inspired, frustrated, confused, and annoyed people.

I’ve backpacked on the Continental Divide and camped under buttes in the Utah desert. I once got a 2-hour foot massage in a Beijing hutong, I left an Amsterdam Indonesian restaurant at 10:30 pm while it was still daylight, and I grazed breakfast at a farmer’s market in Rome. For a few days I lived blissfully on tapas, tempranillo, and flamenco with a friend in Barcelona.

I have many friends around the country and in several parts of the world. I learned to kickbox, and I learned how to live as a polyamorous person in a monogamous world. I’ve seen my body and mind change, for better and worse. I’ve generally gotten much stronger and more flexible, in almost every way. I’ve laughed a lot. I’ve hurt a lot.

And I just kept breathing. By chance, because Linda was methodical enough to make four months mean exactly four months.

WE ALL DODGE BULLETS

This isn’t the only bullet I’ve dodged. I remember at least two occasions when I was nearly in bad car accidents. And who knows about the near-misses I never even knew about. It just so happens that in my life I dodged one particularly famous bullet that warrants public remembrances in national media. I feel sadness for the people who died in and above Lockerbie that day. And I feel anger for the people who willfully took those lives.

But mostly, it just feels weird. Surreal. All the stuff I’ve experienced and done since that day, my place in the overlapping ripples and flow of life… it could have ended, right there.

And someday it will end. That’s certain.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane that blew up. That’s all. I dodged that bullet. It doesn’t feel like a miracle, or grace, or even that I was “saved” by chance. It’s just how things happened to go for me. And it reminds me how very different life can become, very quickly.

Each moment is its own world, and one moment does not always determine the next. We have no choice but to roll with that. But we can choose to be aware of the ubiquitous possibility of instant, drastic change.

When I tune into that awareness, my life is much richer. It doesn’t necessarily make more sense, but it feels more meaningful.

That’s what Horn Group VP Susan Etlinger did earlier, for the PR/Blogger panel her company is hosting tonight. She’s one of several Twitter users who helped launch this hashtag simply by adopting and promoting it:

hashtag

Susan Etlinger helps launch a hashtag by using it.

And here’s the fruit that this kind of coordination can bear: Check out the #PRblog hashtag

…So: what’s a hashtag, and why is this so important?…

A hashtag is just a short character string preceded by a hash sign (#). This effectively tags your tweets — allowing people to easily find and aggregate tweets related to a topic, person, or event. For instance, for the recent Thin Air Summit, many Twitter users included #TAS08 in their tweets. Take a second now and check out that link to see how easy that hashtag made it to follow the action during and after the event. That’s much easier than trying to find and follow everyone who happens to be tweeting that event. It’s also a great way to discover new people you might want to follow on Twitter.

RESOURCE: The Wild Apricot nonprofit technology blog offers a great tutorial: Introduction to Twitter hashtags. This explains how to use hashtags in tweets, and follow them via Hashtags.org. However, you also can follow a hashtag simply by searching for it via Twitter search.

It’s essential to coordinate, promote, and use hashtags at least a few hours before an event starts. That way, your Twitter followers will know that the event is happening, and how to follow it. They’ll also know how to spread the word of the upcoming coverage.

Ideally, use the hashtag in promotional tweets a couple of times before the event — and include in those tweets a link to the event’s info page, if any, so people know what you’re talking about.

Then, just before the event starts, do what Susan did and post a heads-up on the hashtag. Then just make sure you include the hashtag in all your event tweets. The easy way to do it is to leave it as a snipped on your clipboard. But if you’re typing it manually every time, double-check your spelling before you post! A misspelled hashtag won’t do folks much good.

This kind of coordination would have been a big help at last night’s Changing Media Landscape panel at the Columbia Univ. school of journalism. Sree Sreenivasan assembled a stellar panel of media innovators, it was worth watching. (See Columbia blogger Greg Bocquet’s wrapup of the session.)

Columbia live-streamed this session on Mogulus, which provides a chat room for backchannel discussion. That is helpful — but it’s kind of a walled garden, and it also demands a fair amount of dedicated attention. Aside from the audio portion, that kind of live coverage is not the kind of thing you can have running “in the background,” to follow while multitasking — which is what a lot of Twitter users do.

Some people at the Columbia event or watching on Mogulus were live tweeting it — but they weren’t using a hashtag. In fact, they didn’t choose and start using a hashtag (#cml2008) until the session was almost over. Unfortunately, this meant that very little of their Twitter coverage was easily findable. It was also harder for their Twitter followers to promote this live coverage.

Why should Columbia j-school care about hashtags and live Twitter coverage of their events?

• Expand public discourse and awareness with a key community. Columbia is teaching new media, and Twitter is where more and more thought leaders, innovators, and new media enthusiasts hang out. These are the people who would be especially interested in panels like this — and who would forward to their followers (“retweet”) posts that resonate with them. Best of all, you get this benefit by requiring a minimum of effort from the community. They don’t have to go to your streaming video site and log in to participate in a small, closed chat unconnected to the rest of the internet. They just follow the Twitter hashtag.
• Gauge community reaction. People live-tweeting your event will do more than report on what’s happening — they’ll comment on it. They may even praise it, or criticize it, or raise questions. And other Twitter users may react to those tweets. If all or most of that discourse includes the event hashtag, it’s easy to follow later and get a sense of what people thought and felt about the event. This is often important after the event as well as during, since people tend to mull things over and debate.

What do you think about hashtags for live Twitter coverage? Do you use them? Got other tips? Please comment below.

Earlier this week I wrote about the internal and external obstacles journalism schools face when trying to achieve collaboration with other academic departments (such as computer science). That spurred a pretty interesting discussion in the comments.

This discussion got me thinking: Right now, it’s becoming obvious to many journalists that our field sorely needs lots of top-notch, creative technologists. Developers for whom software is a medium, and an art form. Developers with a deep passion for information, credibility, fairness, usefulness, and free speech.

However, my impression is that, so far, it’s not nearly so obvious to most “geeks” (and I use that term with the utmost affection and respect, as do many geeks themselves) how they might benefit from collaborating with journalists, j-schools, and news organizations.

So if journalists need geeks, but right now they don’t need (or even necessarily want) us as much, the question becomes: What’s in this for the geeks? Why might they want to work with us? Where’s their incentive?…

There is a bright spot of opportunity: Many hardcore geeks (especially those who create free software, where the mantra is “free as in speech, not free as in beer“) share core goals with journalists — especially regarding public service and free speech. That’s a solid launching point.

One of the people whose views on bridging the journo/geek culture gap I respect most is my Tidbits colleague Rich Gordon, from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He runs a pioneering program that offers scholarships to Medill’s graduate journalism program to people with education and/or expertise in computer programming. (This effort is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant — and they’re seeking a followup grant.)

In his comment to my earlier post on J-schools, Gordon wrote, in part:

“Journalism and computer science partnerships will work only if the two academic departments see these collaborations as equally valuable. In my experience, there are cultural and communication gaps that need to be closed.”

And in this MediaLab post, Gordon elaborated:

“Journalists and technology professionals do have two things in common. First, the best people in both fields really do want to change the world and make it a better place. Second, both believe that people want and deserve access to the best possible information. But there also is a substantial gap between journalism and computer science.

“Too many journalists don’t respect technology development as a creative activity — they think developers should just build stuff they want. Too many technologists don’t respect journalism as an intellectual activity — they think journalists just pump out content for their algorithms to process.

“Too many journalists really don’t like technology change; they blame it for hurting media businesses, threatening their livelihoods and diminishing the quality of news available in local communities. Too many technologists think it’s not their job to worry about the negative impact of technology innovation on media companies and journalism — and when they do think about the consequences, think only about information at the national and global level (which is broader, deeper and more accessible than ever) and not at the local level (where online news ventures rarely do the kind of original reporting that newspapers do).”

…I think that pretty much nails the key mindset differences that define this culture gap. But there’s also the organizational angle. I was discussing this recently with Brian Boyer (a programmer currently in Gordon’s graduate journalism program, and part of Medill’s Crunchberry Project team). He observed that generally news organizations don’t see themselves as tech companies. Yet, he said, geeks “want to work at a place where tech is at the core of the ideas. News orgs need to realize that they’re tech organizations now — they live and die by the Web.”

Given that context, I ask again: What’s in this for the geeks? How can we foster more mutual understanding and respect? What compelling reasons can journalists offer that honor geek values, culture, and goals? How can journalists demonstrate that we can and will respect talented, passionate geeks as full partners (or even potential leaders) in collaborative efforts — not pigeonhole them as IT lackeys?

I’m asking journalists to start from this point: “Journalism: So what?” I’m also asking geeks to speak up about how they view journalists: our efforts, our culture, our goals, and what might make us more appealing as collaborators.

Any ideas? Please comment below.

]]> http://www.contentious.com/2008/10/31/working-with-journalists-whats-in-it-for-geeks/feed/ 2 http://www.contentious.com/2008/09/12/local-just-one-set-of-ripples-on-the-lake-of-news-and-information/ http://www.contentious.com/2008/09/12/local-just-one-set-of-ripples-on-the-lake-of-news-and-information/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:28:30 +0000 Amy Gahran http://www.contentious.com/?p=1842 Clearly Ambiguous, via Flickr (CC license) Local is just one set of ripples on the lake of news and information.

UPDATE SEPT. 15: I’ve launched a new series fleshing out this discussion. See Being a Citizen Shouldn’t Be So Hard! Part 1: Human Nature

When it comes to information that helps people function better as citizens in a democracy, how important is local, really?

Geographically defined local communities are the focus of the new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Earlier this week, I posted this comment (and this one) on the Commission’s blog questioning the Commission’s assumption that community = local.

Don’t get me wrong: I love that Knight is trying to determine what kinds of information people really need to function as citizens today. I agree that’s a crucial line of inquiry these days. However, I’m concerned that by assuming those needs are inherently tied to “local,” the commission could miss a very important (perhaps the most important) part of what “community” really means to people today.

I was honored to see this very thoughtful response to my comment from Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. He made several good points, including this excerpt…

“We chose to look at information needs of communities defined by geography because our democracy is structured along geographic lines. …But [our premises may be wrong]. Or they may be premises that are less relevant going forward, given a population more interested in other ways to bond. As Amy suggests, the younger the citizen, the more likely it is that his/her communication preferences are digital and are more focused on subject matter and areas of interest than the physical community or political subdivision where they happen to live or send their kids to school. That reality will surely influences our thinking.

“And maybe the conclusion we’ll reach is that the powerful force of new communications is so strong that, if a community in a democracy needs informed participants, we need to redefine communities. And maybe that the future structure of our democracy needs to be changed to fit the way we get information — not the other way around.”

That’s pretty big-picture, powerful stuff. I’ve been trying to envision how to move this conversation forward. But there’s been a problem.

I’ve been stricken by writer’s block this week. Believe me, it’s not often I’m at a loss for words, but this has been that kind of week. So although I’ve been reading the discussion I sparked, and thinking a great deal about these issues, I haven’t yet pulled my own thoughts together into a new blog post. This weekend, I hope to accomplish that. So stay tuned to Contentious.com, there’s more to come.

In the meantime, several other people have chimed in on this discussion. Here are some links to their posts and comments

• Defining an alternative to mass vs. niche media, by Donica Mensing
• I also posted about this topic to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits on Monday. Check out the comments.
• Our Continued Wishful Thinking about “Media Localism”, by Adam Thierer. He published this back in July, but it’s relevant to this discussion.

]]> http://www.contentious.com/2008/09/12/local-just-one-set-of-ripples-on-the-lake-of-news-and-information/feed/ 1 http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/07/david-cohn-pushing-journalism-frontiers/ http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/07/david-cohn-pushing-journalism-frontiers/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 02:49:26 +0000 Amy Gahran http://www.contentious.com/?p=1629 At the NewsTools 2008 conference last week, I had a chance to sit down with one of the emerging luminaries of entrepreneurial, experimental journalism. David Cohn runs the BeatBlogging project for NewAssignment.net, and he also works with NewsTrust . Plus, he runs a great blog of his own and is a constant presence on Twitter. Busy guy. I’m glad I got a few miinutes of his time.

Here’s what Dave has to say about where he thinks journalism might be heading, and what he wants to do to help it get there:

…Oh, and in this interview, Dave called me a "force of nature." I’ll assume that’s a compliment:

Thanks, Dave

]]> http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/07/david-cohn-pushing-journalism-frontiers/feed/ 4 http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/01/newstools-2008-i-have-always-depended-on-the-kindness-of-friends/ http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/01/newstools-2008-i-have-always-depended-on-the-kindness-of-friends/#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 21:02:16 +0000 Amy Gahran http://www.contentious.com/2008/05/01/newstools-2008-i-have-always-depended-on-the-kindness-of-friends/ I’m not exactly Blanche DuBois, but…

I’m at the NewsTools2008 unconference at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, CA — where 150 news/media people, academics, and technologists are gathered to figure out better tools to support journalism that matters. (Follow my live coverage on my amylive Twitter account.)

…And I have apparently come down with a cold. It hit me at the opening reception last night, and it’s continuing today. My friend Maurreen Skowran kindly gave me some Sudafed, so I’m functional — but just feeling slightly spacey. So anyone meeting me here, if I seem a little weirder than normal, that’s why.

Like many Mac users, I had a LOT of trouble getting onto the wifi here at Yahoo HQ — something that galled me. I’ve had this laptop on a lot of wifi networks. Why should I have problems with access at Yahoo HQ , of all places?

Anyway, my Poynter colleague Ellyn Angelotti showed me how to get online here. (Thanks, Ellyn!) Mac (Leopard) users who are guests at Yahoo, here’s how you do it:

1. Click on the Airport icon to bring up the Airport menu.
2. Select "join other network"
3. Select "show networks"
4. Selecting the network you’ve been told to usehere today, and enter the password you were given.

Don’t ask me why, but that makes it work for me and Ellyn. Spread the word.

Just before Ellyn solved my immediate access problem, Scott Karp of Publish2 solved my long-term problem. He talked me into finally buying a wireless modem card for my laptop as "internet insurance" — I might need it rarely, but when I need it I tend to really need it. I’m finally sold, dude. I realize why it’s worth the money. Thanks.

It all reinforces to me the value of having a posse. Right now, so many people in my personal and professional posse are available to me online, via Twitter, instant messaging, e-mail. It’s nice, at least for a few days, to have my posse so close at hand. It’s nice to see their real faces and hear their real voices. I never want to take my posse for granted. Thanks.

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