Carnival within a Carnival: A crowdsourced reply to this month's prompt

When the call came for the February blog carnival, the first thing that jumped to mind was that the prompt questions of “What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?" and "How do you see it playing out in terms of application by journalists, and impact?” were topics we had touched upon during the first few weeks of the semester in my multimedia writing class.

While this is not explicitly a journalism class, it does have -- as I tell the students -- "journalistic DNA" in that is is about collecting, processing, understanding, and presenting information in a coherent narrative or story. The general focus of the class is on multimedia storytelling, especially using various elements of a nonlinear online presentation (text, audio, video, still photos, multimedia combinations, curation) to tell complete and coherent stories. That's a skill that applies to modern journalism, public relations, and a wide variety of other media communication practices.

So, what I decided to do for this month's Carnival was to crowdsource my response, by holding a little blog carnival of my own within the class.

An ongoing class assignment is to write blog posts each week about social media/digital media/digital journalism topics. Generally the students are responsible for selecting topics of their own posts, usually looking at sources such as Mashable, GigaOm and the like for inspiration and ideas to blog about. Often, multiple students have selected the same topic; for instance, during the week of the SOPA/PIPA online protests several students chose to write about that.

But having blog replies to a specific question was something we had not done before, and the students generated some thoughtful and interesting responses in the assignment.

Two trends that were repeatedly identified as affecting journalism were greater use of Twitter by journalists, greater distribution of news content via mobile devices, and of course the combination of those two trends. While use of Twitter and mobile are already well established in journalism, students' comments mostly addressed where they think these trends will go and what the implications will be:

"People will simply rely on their Twitter feeds for accurate, up to date information from reputable sources. I am not saying that the need for full, in-depth articles is being replaced, but the method that we are being routed to these articles is going to change." -- Brett Vergara

"The impact (mobile devices) will have on journalism as a whole is a continuation of the movement away from the traditional means such as magazines and newspapers. Journalists will have to adapt their presentation style to fit digital mediums and to be able to be easily read on tablets and smart phones." -- Matt Sosenko

"I believe that Twitter and smartphones are where journalism is headed. It just makes things much simpler and easier as our lives become more fast-paced and we have more of a need for quick news right at our fingertips!" -- Krista Pilla

But going mobile has a down side, as another student pointed out:

"The problem is, the screen is so small that it doesn't fit an article in the window like it would if it was a computer. Because of this journalists have to change the way they write articles. They need to be shorter, and more to the point. This does not mean to get rid of all the details. In fact, only the most important information should be in an article or blog. Without the filler it makes it much easier for smart phone users to read articles on their phone." -- Kyle Marzola

The potential for aggregation through services such as Storify and Pinterest was mentioned by some students as well

"I think that journalists can definitely use this application (Pinterest) . They can make posts of their own using this site. It will be different from the work they are used to but every job and career requires advances in technology. I think it’s a great system to use and I hope that this site stays high in the social media market." -- Sarah Grabar

Finally, taking an even deeper step back from the tools to their implications, one student noted that the evolution of how news is presented has raised the bar for news literacy on the part of the audience.

More people, especially young ones, he said:

"get most of their news online and from social media sites. While this may seem harmless, it is putting in place a massive assumption: that readers will be able to recognize the difference between a company’s PR team, a group of advertisers or a news story. Those uneducated in the field of communication might take the information linked to by a company with just as much trust as a news organization trying to expose that same company’s lies or misdeeds. In the long run, it means a heavier burden on journalists. Not only do they need to grab the attention of potential readers, they also need to remind the readers of who they are and what their position in the media world is." -- Nick Donovan

These students are, of course, the next generation of news consumers and -- some of them -- news producers. That makes their views especially relevant to this topic of the future of news and technology's implications on that future.

Student reviews of Storify

I've been intrigued by the concept of Storify since I first read about it a few months ago as it was entering its public beta phase. I don't know all that much about it other than what I have gleaned from examining a few presentations on the site and hearing reading what others have to say about using it; I haven't set up an account as of yet to try it for myself.

But from what I do know, it seemed like exploring Storify was a natural for a class I presented recently on the evolution of story narrative. Readings for the class included posts by Mathew Ingram and Jeff Jarvis last summer debating the value of articles, along with thoughts on the changing structure of story narrative from Jonathan Stray and a widely cited post from Nieman Lab's Megan Garber about how Twitter may represent a new paradigm that is a hybrid of spoken and written communication forms.

When I asked if anyone in the room was familiar with Storify no hands went up; in fact out of two classes with a combined 32 students no one had even heard of it. So as an in-class exercise, the students were assigned to go into Storify, examine some presentations and offer some thoughts about what characteristics of it made it effective (or ineffective) as a storytelling tool.

The comments were more positive than negative, but not by an overwhelming margin. One plus that came up repeatedly was that the tool allowed for various sources and types of media (from tweets to photos to video) to be collected all in one place; the ability to include photos and videos easily was seen as a highly positive thing, in fact. The format allowed for a variety of ideas to come across in a single presentation, several students noted. They liked that the story creators could mix in their own ideas as well.

On the negative side, some students questioned the accuracy and credibility of the items that were being collected into the presentations. Some called it too Twitter-centric, and said some of the presentations they examined seemed to be little more than a random collection of entries with no real rhyme, reason or context. Storify bills itself as a way for people to tell their own stories intermixed with social media-generated content from others, but the student critiques seemed to say there was too much of the latter (random content) without enough of the former (narrative to place that content into context).

Even the site layout received mixed reviews, with some students saying it was not very searchable or easily navigable, though others said they like the simple, direct -- boxy -- layout.

Even though not all of the students liked what they saw, in the end I think the exercise served its purpose of helping the students realize that traditional conceptions of "story" are being augmented by new forms that resemble traditional legacy models in some regards but not others. That was the point of the lesson and it seemed to come across pretty well.

Capitalistic journalism

As an entry in this month's Carnival of Journalism, participants are supposed to offer thoughts in reaction to an essay by Michael Rosenblum about whether journalists can be capitalists. (The specific wording from his piece is “Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist? If so, how? Or why not?")

The short answer -- and this is not meant to be flippant -- is they already are. While some non-profit news models are emerging, the vast bulk of U.S. journalism is done by capitalistic enterprises. History records for us the names of people who were effective capitalists and also journalists: Hearst. Pulitzer. Gannett. McCormick. The Chandlers. The Knights. The Ochs-Sulzberger family.

At the heart of Rosenblum's assertions is the assumption that "there is an instinctive aversion to the idea of making money amongst most journalists." He unfolds the argument from that point with a withering attack on some supposed financial sensibilities of journalists, and the negative result that he believes this has on the field.

I don't mean to turn this into an attack on his work, but the essay seems to be conflating the idea of "capitalist" to "person who earns a sufficient level of income" and from there sets up a false divide. In a formal sense, the capitalist is the owner of the means of production; certainly the various press barons mentioned earlier were that. They were also journalists in that as publishers they helped establish -- or flat-out dictated -- the editorial direction for their newspapers. And in filling the dual role they made LOTS of money.

Some journalists still make a lot of money; in a recent column Bill O'Reilly bragged about being a "1 percenter" and network news anchors' contracts come with seven-figure annual salaries. But the reason most journalists don't reach that stratum is not, as Rosenblum contends, because they fear making money or think it would taint them. It's because they are the labor in the capitalist-labor equation, and the returns to labor as wages tend to be lower than the return to capital. What's fair and equitable for each goes back at least to Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and is largely beside the point for this discussion.

That's because the question "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?" sets out a false dichotomy. There is no natural, philosophical or structural reason the two roles have to conflict. Liebling's adage about the power of the press belonging to those who own one is demonstrably false these days. The low barriers of entry to online publication, in fact, make it ever easier for the journalist as a humble scribe to control (if not own) the means of production, and in that sense be both the capital and the labor in the equation. That's largely what the CUNY program that Rosenblum mentions means to address.

The real question is to what degree the work of journalists can be scaled up to a point that offers substantial earning potential, because scale is the source of big paydays. An author who sells hundreds of thousands or millions of books becomes a wealthy person indeed. But the writers who we think of as journalists tend not to produce at that scale.

Nonetheless, we are in an era where it is possible to distribute high quality content to a vast audience very inexpensively, though the very cheapness of the distribution platform and ubiquity of the content make monetizing it more difficult. We are also in the era of what Chris Anderson has dubbed the Long Tail, meaning finding and profiting from niche audiences is more feasible than ever before.

These factors combine to mean that journalists -- those who report and write the stories -- have more and better opportunities to work independently outside of institutions and make a living at it. Institutional journalism, with the journalists as employees of the enterprises rather than owners of them, will continue. Fewer jobs are found in this milieu now than a generation ago, but that doesn't mean they all are gone. And those working as independent journalists will take up a greater proportional share of the field.

Can we call them capitalists? As long as they manage to be fairly compensated for their work, does it really matter?

The new "walled gardens"

In the early days of life online, the way people got there was through services that were closed to all but registered (and paying) users who were able to interact only with each other. Among these early services were Compuserve, Prodigy and the one that eventually became most ubiquitous, America Online (AOL).

These were popularly known as "walled gardens," a metaphor for their being nice places to visit but with limited territory to explore. Beyond the walls lay the Internet, a vaster but far less organized region of cyberspace.

An interesting article by Justin Peters that I read just today (yes, still catching up on a two-month-old issue of CJR, even though the newer one came in the mail yesterday) says that today's mega-social-media sites -- Facebook, notably -- are trying to become like those original walled-off places.

Peters, however, has a different metaphor that struck me as particularly apt. Facebook, he wrote,

"offered people the cruise-ship version of the Internet—a slick, brightly colored destination for social activities and bonhomie, safely apart from the unfamiliar surrounding waters, a service-oriented environment where you can lean back and enjoy the attentions of your very own information valet. You could leave the ship, but there’s no need to—friends, information, activities, they’re all already there, and if they’re not they’ll be there soon.

"A few caveats apply. You can’t steer the ship. You can’t see how it works. You can’t suggest destinations or routes, and you’re not likely to cruise beyond your comfort zone. You can’t easily meet people who aren’t already like you. If something goes wrong, you’re not allowed to fix it; if you’re displeased with the service, nobody will listen to your complaint."

The problem with this, Peters notes, is that these destination sites seek for people to come to them, and stay with them almost exclusively, as the central feature of their online lives. They endeavor to keep the rest of the Internet -- the part where they can't make any money by collecting user data to be monetized -- outside the realm of user experience.

It's worth a read.

New media provide path to legacy reporting

This morning I woke to the news that the iconic company Eastman Kodak, which is based in my hometown of Rochester N.Y., was entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy re-organization. I found this news, as I'm finding progressively more of my news, through Twitter.

But more important than where I learned it through is where I learned it from. The first tweet I saw shortly after 6 a.m. was actually a link to a follow-up story to the main news announcement, and came from the local daily, the Gannett-owned Democrat and Chronicle. (Side note: if the paper had been delivered on time, I probably would have learned the news from it in hard copy; I was reading Twitter news on my iPad because of the late delivery. Inability to get my paper on time is an ongoing problem, but I digress.)

Working my way back through the Twitter stream were more posts from legacy organizations linking to coverage on their websites. The local PBS affiliate. A local AM radio news station. The New York Times. The first of them to appear actually came from The Wall Street Journal, conveniently re-tweeted about 1 a.m. EST by a former student who now works for NBC News. Intermixed among these reports were tweets from individual local journalists whom I follow, including an on-Twitter conversation that took place about 3 a.m. between a local news producer and the executive editor of the D&C about getting copies of the paper delivered to the TV newsroom.

It was an interesting into-practice exercise in something I'd been thinking about just 12 hours earlier, when I finally got around to reading an article from the November/December issue of Columbia Journalism Review. The essay by Dean Starkman critiques the popular advocacy of journalism's evolution into a non-institutional, loosely networked form and says that news institutions still have value and are worth preserving. Starkman's essay -- which is subtitled "The limited vision of the news gurus" -- is basically a long take-down of what he calls the "Future of News consensus" (FON for short) and its advocates, notably Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. (He's especially critical of Jarvis.)

I actually have been following the work of all four of Starkman's targets for some time. In the past few years I have been to events where I have seen all of them speak, and even was on a panel with Rosen a few years back. And I like a lot of what they say, and use some of their writing and ideas in some of my teaching about the evolution of journalism. I especially like to tell students about Shirky's notion that "everything might" provide the journalism we need -- i.e., that 20 new and innovative ways of creating the news that each provide 5 percent of what the current system does might actually be more valuable than One Big Thing to replace the broken print newspaper model.

I also think Starkman is being a little hyperbolic, and polemical, in the way he presents their views, which he repeatedly summarizes as FON.

But I also think Starkman is essentially on point when he says it's wrong to be dismissive of the value of institutional news organizations and their ability ability to provide valuable public-interest reporting, and when he says that it is naive to think that all of the information we need as a society will organically bubble up from a network in which anyone and everyone can supply information to the whole world. Or that such a news system will have the cohesion and understandability to make it useful to citizens . "Gatekeeping" has become almost a dirty word in the world of networked news prognosticators. But to me, it is just another word for distillation of a chaotic mass of information into a meaningful form that is valuable to the readers.

A couple of years ago, a friend from another institution wrote a blog posting predicting that soon he would get all the news he needs from Twitter. I kind of rolled my eyes at that one.

Now I do find myself getting a lot of news through Twitter. But not, as noted at the top, from Twitter. Even when the tweet is by a friend, or even by a stranger whom I've chosen to follow, there often is a legacy source behind that shortlink that's where the news is really from.

In that, Starkman's self-described neo-institutional model addresses something that matters. He closes his essay with the thought that "rebuilding or shoring up institutions is going to take some new, new thinking, but it can be done." He's right.

Old school way to teach new media

The first lesson in a brand new multimedia presentation course our department is offering was a success, using a very old school form of media. Soon, we'll be getting into blogging, video, social media and all of the other tools and techniques endemic to a course such as this. But for the first exercise on Day One, the students used what was probably the first medium they ever used in a classroom back in pre-school or kindergarten: wax crayons.

I can't claim the lesson was wholly original, as I got the idea from a syllabus from another teacher's multimedia writing course and modified it somewhat. But it was an interesting -- not to mention playful -- way to get some points across.

The lesson started with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, and his notion that "the medium is the message" (along with his famous cameo with Woody Allen from Annie Hall). The students then wrote answers -- in crayon, on plain paper -- to a question about multimedia presentation.

After that, they were asked to reflect on the impact of the medium on the message: how writing in crayon colored (pun intended) what they produced. And that's when it got interesting.

Several students noted -- correctly, of course -- that a message written in crayon would not be perceived as serious. Others mentioned the practical, logistical limitations of the medium: that they wrote slower, and larger, and therefore used fewer words. One said something I hadn't anticipated -- that the inability to erase affected the final output. Another really good point, especially in the context of being used to writing with word processors that allow immediate deletion of any errors.

Nearly all of them wrote in multiple colors, even though no instruction was given to do so. I pointed out that it would be almost as easy to create a word-processed document in multiple colors with the font-color button -- but people seldom do. This became just another way to illustrate that the medium of crayons affected the presentation of the message.

Overall, a successful first class, and hopefully a good omen for the rest of the course.

Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, originally posted at http://pedagogy.dwrl.utexas.edu/node/505

What I Learned at the Journalism Interactive Conference

Ways in which technology offers myriad opportunities to reinvent journalism dominated the conversation at the recently concluded Journalism Interactive conference, held at the University of Maryland on Friday and Saturday.

The discussion about new technological tools in social media, search, presentation (e.g. data visualization software), and other innovations went beyond the all-to-typical “gee-whiz” hype about these tools I’ve seen in many past conferences to really emphasize how to teach students to use such technologies effectively to create better journalism. The usual earnest intonations from assorted speakers about how “teaching the fundamentals is still important” were heard, of course – but they seemed less out of place than I have sometimes thought in the past.

In fact, at many conference sessions I’ve attended, statements about the importance of fundamentals seemed to be almost lip service when juxtaposed with implications that unless students are learning every new technology that comes along and using every gadget that comes out then they can’t be effective journalists in the 21st century. This conference reflected a better balance of the ideas: new tools allow stories to be told in new ways, yes, but the storytelling matters even more than the platform or device with which it is told. And unless the information is accurate, verified, contextual and of interest to the reader, all the technological whiz-bang in the world is meaningless. Good writing still underlies effective media presentation.

That said, it was impossible to escape the message that students must be far more savvy about two things: the inner workings of the technology that is transforming journalism, and an understanding of business. The conference had many in-depth discussions of both topics.

With regard to technological skills, several industry professionals said they have had internships and even full-time jobs available for which they could find no qualified candidates because the jobs required an understanding of scripting languages, website development tools, and the like. Knowing about analytics for audience metrics, and how to use tools such as metadata to make information stand out to audiences, is a critical skill, for example.

The journalists themselves don’t have to be highly skilled programmers, these professionals said. But if they are going to work in the growing field of multimedia presentation they need to know more than just how to use applications for word processing, image editing and social media. They need to do some of the coding for the interactive web and mobile presentations themselves and also need to be able to speak capably with those high-level programmers who make the presentations come to life. “We live in a digital world and programming is the language of that world,” Associated Press director of interactive media Shazna Nessa said in one session.

As for business skills, the idea of entrepreneurship was raised repeatedly – from students developing their own businesses to being “intrapreneurs” who help the organizations they join become more innovative and adaptable to the changing world around them. More generally, students entering the commercial world need more business acumen and an understanding of topic such as accounting and finance that comprise the vernacular of business, several presenters said.

Conference presenters from an assortment of backgrounds – working professionals, consultant and academics themselves – all said there was a need for more interdisciplinary work. Journalism and communication programs should be collaborating, especially, with business schools and computer science departments on their campuses.

A couple of other random thoughts:

• Data visualization, or visual representation of large amounts of numerical and textual data, is going to be a much more significant aspect of information presentation (journalistically and otherwise) in the near future. A simple example of this are “word clouds” created by the popular Wordle site; more sophisticated examples can be found at the Associated Press’s experimental Overview project.
  
  
• Developing content with mobile devices in mind also is becoming more important at an increasingly rapid pace. Predictions are that smartphones and tablet computers likely will be the main way most people access online content in just a few years.
  
  
• Conference organizers deserve major props for a really thought-provoking event that featured many terrific presenters with highly valuable insights – most of whom were also entertaining and engaging. A real standout in this regard was the Innovative Storytelling panel featuring Shazna Nessa of AP, Mark Luckie of the Washington Post and Richard "Koci" Hernandez of University of California - Berkeley. Panels and presenters this good aren't all that common at conferences such as this, and overall it made for a fantastic experience.

Random thoughts from social media conference

Spent a long but fruitful, and enjoyable, day at the second Social Media and Communication symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology, one full of catching up with old friends/colleagues and gathering some interesting take-aways on the state of communication and journalism.

The featured speaker was NYU professor Clay Shirky, author of the books Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. His central message was how the interactive, collaborative tools afforded by the Internet today are fostering social change by enabling relevant communities to self-organize and apply collective intelligence to social problems. Such collaborations make use of what he called cognitive surplus -- time people have to work together productively in virtual arrangements -- in the book of the same name.

Two of his examples were related to collaborative problem-solving of a couple of very high-end, "out there" mathematical questions via the route of mathematicians sharing ideas about potential solutions via blog posts and comments. In one case, the series of posts and comments was reconfigured into a paper sent to an academic journal and accepted on the basis of its ideas. But the journal editors ran into a stumbling block with it because whomever submitted it didn't identify an author. Well, there was no one author (or even two or three), which presented a problem from the academic editor's frame of reference.

Shirky extended the example to say that it illustrates how print publishing, which for most of its history has facilitated and sped up the sharing of ideas, is now in many cases an impediment to it ... because of the cultural mindset embedded in print and its publishers.

One of the most interesting things he said (in my view at least) was that tools don't get socially interesting until they are technically boring, by which he seemed to mean when they became commonplace and mundane. This is the point he says we are at now with Internet collaborative tools but one we reached only recently. But only because we have reached that point can we use the tools for socially interesting results such as the math problem examples he gave. The most valuable outcomes of using the tools are the ones no one can anticipate or expect, he said a couple of different times.

Another interesting panel featured several journalists talking about what they are looking for in terms of relevant skills for working in modern newsrooms. Included were senior editors from Messenger-Post Newspapers, City Newspaper, The Minority Report (which serves the Rochester area African-American community), the Democrat and Chronicle and WXXI television. A special guest panelist was Tom Callinan, a former top editor of the D&C and other Gannett papers who recently retired from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Callinan opened the panel by telling the audience, largely students, that a mindset oriented toward change was one of the most valuable assets they could bring to the job. But what was interesting was how quickly the conversation evolved into discussion of core journalistic values still being critical, including accuracy, inquisitiveness, solid ethics, strong writing skills, an understanding of news (as apart from opinion and infotainment), and passion for the work.

The importance of good writing -- meaning writing that is free of clutter, bias and errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation -- repeatedly came up. Yes, it's important to be able to work across platforms and tell stories in different ways that take advantage of the characteristics of modern multimedia tools, including social media. But what gives the work meaning and impact is adhering to all of the traditional characteristics of good solid journalism.

Other featured panelists at the event -- who offered opening and closing keynotes, respectively -- were Pam Moore of Zoom Factor and Maggie Fox of Social Media Group. Both of them focused on the impacts of social media on marketing, business and advertising.

But truly the best part of the day was the reunions with a number of old friends, mostly former work colleagues from the Democrat and Chronicle, some of whom are still working there and others (like Tom C.) who have moved along to other positions. Some of us managed to gather for a reunion photo. Networking is usually the best part of nearly any conference I attend, and this was no different.

Photo caption (L to R): Cynthia Benjamin, Jack Rosenberry, Patrick Flanigan, Bob Finnerty, Tom Callinan, Sebby Wilson Jacobson.

Earthquake news traveled virally

So, we had an earthquake today. I didn't feel it. I think I was out driving around; it happened at 1:51 p.m. EDT and I was driving home around then. I'm assuming with the mildness of the quake's impact in Upstate New York, being in a moving car would obliterate any chance of feeling it.

My first inkling that an earthquake had occurred was when my wife said something about a friend texting her (and a bunch of other people in a texting group) asking whether any of them had felt it happen. That was about an hour after the quake hit.

My next instinct was not to turn on the TV, as I might have in the past, but to jump on the computer to see what people were saying about it on Facebook and Twitter. The first such entry I saw was from a former student who works in Washington, DC -- not far from the epicenter -- who had FB and Twitter entries with references to the HuffPo website's coverage of the event (which he didn't much like). Another friend who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, still relatively close to the quake's location, had a Facebook post about it. Several Rochester area friends mentioned feeling things shake as well.

Another friend from eastern Pennsylvania, who now teaches at a college there but is originally from California, had at least a couple of dozen Twitter observations about the differences between West Coast quakes he had experienced and this one. He also provided my absolute favorite social media news tidbit with the observation "I was able to pinpoint the epicenter pretty quickly based on descriptions and known locations of tweeters. Took me about a minute."

Now, that's some social media based reporting.

It wasn't until about 4 hours later that I turned to legacy media for news about the quake, and even then I didn't turn on the TV or navigate to a news website. Rather, I looked at the AP news app on my iPad, which had a nice summary story as typical of a wire service. I looked at USA Today's coverage through its iPad news app also. Thus I augmented the first-person reports I had read with the professional coverage that had the "official word" on magnitude of the quake, along with details from a wide range of areas affected by it (from South Carolina to New England to Ohio).

I suppose I'll read about it in tomorrow's print edition of the local paper, too, but that will most likely be a version of the AP story I already have read, augmented by comments from local people whom I don't know. Hearing from people whom I do know is more worthwhile to me, and social media have allowed me to do that already.

Put another way, Twitter and Facebook told me most of what I needed to know, from trusted sources who experienced the event. (To paraphrase Jay Rosen's framing of journalistic authority: they were there, I wasn't, I let them tell me about it.) The AP story was a nice follow-up and I appreciated having the immediate access to it that the mobile app gave me.

Most significantly, both the viral distribution of individual experiences and the professional summary have a role to play in coverage of events such as this. Today's experience was a nice microcosm of that.

Observations from the AEJMC conference

A few random thoughts from the recently concluded AEJMC conference in St. Louis.

* The best line I heard all week in any session was Lisa Williams of Placeblogger during her talk at the J-Lab luncheon. In discussing the emergence of small news operations, Williams compared current large institutions (think: big metro daily newspapers) to the Titanic, and said that when you're coming upon the iceberg you're better off in a kayak (think: small, entrepreneurial organization).

In another terrific analogy, she compared the current media landscape to the high-tech industry of the late 1980s, which was dominated by large, centralized institutions who clung to outdated technologies and ways of working, and eventually went out of business. (One of those was Digital Equipment Corp., which she called "the Knight-Ridder of its time," drawing a laugh from the audience.) As companies such as DEC disappeared, smaller startups such as Google came on the scene using technology in innovative ways to better serve customer needs. "The future is small," she said, meaning many smaller organizations will collectively make bigger impacts than the large central ones that are now fading away. That applies to technology, and needs to apply to journalism as well, she said.

* The same session featured David Boraks of DavidsonNews.net, an online community news site in North Carolina. Boraks talked about how he started off with a journalistic mindset, but quickly learned that success required a business mindset. The operation now employs three people, including one who is editor of a companion site in a neighboring town.

In a post-session discussion among me and several friends, someone asked about whether Boraks should be considered a journalist? Citizen journalist? Citizen who IS a journalist? My reply: he's a publisher, plain and simple. His operation is virtually identical in the scope and style of its coverage to any small-town weekly printed newspaper, led by an editor/publisher with a variety of responsibilities to the operation and the readership; Boraks just does it without printing his work on paper and stuffing it in the mail to readers.

When Boraks described his work, it seemed he is doing exactly what my good friend Howard did in operating the weekly newspaper in Seneca Falls when I lived and worked there 30 years ago. The main difference is that Boraks is able to publish on a more ongoing basis rather than writing and editing his stories for several days to meet a once-a-week deadline. And he doesn't have the expense of printing and mailing the product. But the journalism is the same, it seems to me. And so is the business side, with support from local business as advertisers and readers as "subscribers"/supporters. (Boraks doesn't have formal subscriptions but does ask for and does receive voluntary contributions, and said he might some day investigate a pay wall.)

* There seemed to be less talk at this year's convention about j-schools as community news providers. Last year, there were multiple sessions on that topic and I attended as many as I could. It's something I'd love to see my program get into, if at all possible. But no real mention of it this time around. It seemed to be replaced, to some degree, by talk about journalistic entrepreneurialism, as illustrated by what Williams and Boraks had to say.

* AEJMC did its usual fine job of organizing everything, but they sure have a knack for finding convention hotels that are confusing places to traverse. This one's quirks included:

• Meeting rooms in two different places separated by a city block walk along the street, or underground passage between the two buildings.
• One small suite of presentation rooms on the 21st floor of one of the buildings, reachable only by a particular bank of elevators that were well hidden.
• A mezzanine level in one of the buildings up what should have been one short flight of stairs from the lobby, but with no stairs or escalator to it. Getting there required riding the elevator.

And next year we go back to Chicago. If it's in the same hotel that was used for the 2008 convention in that city, there is a a floor that cannot be reached directly by the escalators from anywhere: you need to go to the floor above it and take a set of stairs down. At least the St. Louis location didn't have that.

Two neat takes on news webpage design

(Disclosure: This started life as a GooglePlus post, then I decided to repeat it here in the blog with some additional information)

I've long maintained that news organizations shoot themselves in the feet regularly with cluttered, hard to navigate or difficult-to-access websites. I think this is related to the whole "people won't pay for news on the Web" issue. It seems to me many people think "I'd have to pay for THIS mess? It's a pain to access for free. No way I'd pay for it." Maybe people would pay for better, more functional access; maybe that's why they are willing to pay for apps.

Two neat presentations I came across today bring the point home. One, a serous take that I found from Nieman Lab's Week in Review for this week, walks through a designer's critique of the NYT website with some suggested revisions. Many of the same points are made, albeit in a somewhat snarkier way, in a funny post on Laughing Squid.

The same Week in Review column had this very informative link from Jonathan Stray about evolving news story forms as part of its Reading Roundup. Mark Coddington always does a remarkable job with this column and I'm pleased to be able to pass along some of his work but he deserves the credit for these interesting reads.

Growth of Patch, indie sites shows citizen journalism going mainstream

Note: This article also appears in the Summer 2011 edition of the CCJIG newsletter and on the AEJMC Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group blog

One of the most striking recent developments in the world of online news, and citizen journalism, has been the rapid expansion of the Patch.com network of local news sites owned by AOL.

Patch was started in 2008 by a group that included Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive. Armstrong joined AOL in early 2009, and the company acquired Patch that June. Patch sites were located in 11 communities in New Jersey and Connecticut in late 2009 but grew to about 100 sites in nine states by August 2010 and approximately 800 sites across 20 states by early 2011.

These local news sites primarily cover affluent bedroom communities that surround large cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. Each site has an editor, who is provided with equipment – a computer, cell phone and digital camera – but no office; instead, editors work from home or from community locations such as coffee shops.

More recently, Patch has moved aggressively to augment the paid professional editors with a citizen journalism component of volunteer writers and local bloggers contributing to the sites. Each site lists all of its contributors, which can run to several dozen on some sites, and a section of the home page highlights local bloggers.

But independent online community journalists have been critical of Patch, notably the idea that an outside corporate entity can ever have the true community connection that they see as the heart of local journalism. In an interview with LA Weekly, Timothy Rutt, who runs the hyperlocal site altedenablog.com, compared Patch to “Walmart moving in and driving out the mom-and-pop businesses.”

Now, Rutt and operators of some other independent sites are joining forces in a network seeking to counter the influence of Patch. The coalition, which calls itself Authentically Local, announced its formation in mid-May 2011 with 30 founding members. By the end of May it had grown to nearly 50. The list includes names that are familiar to many CCJIG members from having representatives of the sites on CCJIG convention panels – including BaristaNet, Oakland Local, West Seattle Blog, Twin Cities Daily Planet and iBrattleboro.

In a news release announcing the coalition’s formation, the members said they “have joined forces to launch an ‘Authentically Local’ branding campaign to emphasize the importance of supporting homegrown media, stores and places.”

“Local journalism doesn’t scale and it doesn’t need to scale. It needs to emerge from people deeply engaged in their local community, determined to make a difference and provide a vital service,” Lance Knobel, a co-founder of Berkeleyside.com, said in the news release.

While the Authentically Local group’s concerns are understandable, it’s not entirely clear why an a priori conclusion that “local doesn’t scale” is warranted. Operators of the Authentically Local sites are in the same situation as – and essentially fighting the same fight as – local retailers and dining establishments against national big box stores and restaurant chains. They make that analogy themselves on the AL website.

But is it necessarily and automatically the case that out-of-town ownership degrades the quality of the journalism?

For decades before online hyperlocal news coverage emerged, out-of-town ownership of small local newspapers was not the exception but the rule. And while many of those chain papers were poor to mediocre, some were pretty good – while some of the small locally owned ones were true rags. In other words, ownership had no general correlation with quality. In a similar vein, there seems to be little fundamental difference between small local newspapers being owned by large corporations (e.g. Gannett, which owned dozens of such papers but was not the only corporation that did so) and a local news website being owned by a large corporation (i.e. Patch/AOL).

Patch encourages editors to share information about themselves on their sites, and a quick review of a few sites revealed that many editors had local roots, as either natives or at least longtime residents of the communities they cover. Many have worked for local weeklies or dailies in their coverage area before joining Patch. If these individual journalists are capable and sensitive to their communities they will find good, local stories to cover. And if the editors are conscientious about soliciting and curating the work of citizen journalists in their area, local flavor and connections will emerge.

Patch is still an experiment, and one trend that has developed with ventures into online local coverage by large legacy media organizations is that such experiments have a short leash and their owners are quick to cut them loose if the economics don’t work out as hoped. Loudon Extra, TBD, and sites launched by The New York Times that were later taken over by AL member Barista.net stand as evidence of that.

But the interesting and important thing about the emergence of Patch and other legacy media forays into this arena is how they indicate that hyperlocal and citizen journalism are no longer some exotic oddity.

Instead, citizen journalism is becoming a routine part of the landscape of news coverage, a development documented by J-Lab in its New Media Makers (2009) and New Voices (2010) reports and encouraged by its Networked Journalism project.

The more routine and more expected such coverage becomes, the more it will contribute to the emerging news ecosystem, no matter who owns the site where it is published.

- - - - - - - - -

Background information in this story about Patch came from published reports in sources such as Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, LA Weekly and The New York Times. The author has completed a comparative content analysis of Patch sites and independent hyperlocal ones (though not specifically the Authentically Local ones); the results of that research will be presented at the Thursday Scholar-to-Scholar session at the St. Louis convention.

GoogleDocs helps in teaching journalistic writing

This month's Carnival of Journalism is about "life hacks," specifically addressing the "tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively."

One of the best tools/sites I've found for work as a teacher of journalism is GoogleDocs. For collaborative work of teacher and student on journalism writing assignments, it's a great device.

On the extremely unlikely chance that anyone reading this isn't familiar with GoogleDocs, it's very simply a cloud word processing application that lets the creator of a document share it with anyone else so that both can edit. This makes it an outstanding writing tool for journalism classes.

In-line comments, "footnote" side comments and color-coding of text/highlighting are all aids in giving feedback, and said feedback can be more immediate because there is no need to wait until the next class period to return items done on paper. Files are time-stamped when shared, so it's painfully obvious when a deadline is missed. For in-class work that's not completed by the end of the class and needs to be finished later, students can just save into their Google accounts and access it later from anywhere else they have Internet access: no concerns about saving to servers that students can't access from home or dorm, corrupted files on flash drives, incompatible word processing files, and the like.

For a draft-and-revision process, one electronic document is created, and updated as many times as called for with editing/comments from the teacher and revisions by the author (plus revisions are tracked neatly). This is far superior to attachments flying back and forth with a new version for every exchange, and the accompanying lack of clarity about which is the most up-to-date version.

All of this adds up to a process that is the closest thing I've found in an academic setting to the system used in actual newsrooms, where a writer files a story electronically into a database where editors can access it, edit it, comment on it, return it for revision, and check the revisions all within a tightly time-specific environment. I'd recommend it to anyone teaching journalism at any level.

Traditional-form journalism a "luxury"?

I read an interesting online exchange between two social media thinkers whose opinions I really respect, and what was most interesting was how far apart their thinking was on the topic of Twitter, journalism and the place that traditional articles have in the mix of modern-day reporting.

Appropriately, I was alerted to the exchange from several tweets.

It started with a post by Jeff Jarvis on his blog Buzz Machine that led off with the comment "A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process."

That prompted a response from Matthew Ingram at GigaOm making the point that as important as stream-of-news coverage is, more fully fleshed-out articles that add meaning and context are just as valuable. (Both of their posts were later updated to include the other's reaction, and their own reaction to the reaction, which later evolved into a lengthy back-and-forth on Facebook.)

The crux of Jarvis's argument is that when journalists' time is so precious, he'd rather have them putting that time into reporting, and dispensing it to the audience as rapidly and efficiently as possible, primarily via Twitter. That's why he calls articles summarizing news events after the fact as "an extra service to readers. A luxury, perhaps."

The gist of Ingram's response is that considering articles a luxury goes too far off in one direction because "while real-time reporting is very powerful, we still need someone to make sense of those streams and put them in context. In fact, we arguably need that even more."

My own view lies closer to Ingram's. The contemporary environment is incredibly rich in information, much of which is original on-the-ground reporting from professionals and also from citizen journalists. While I see Jarvis's point about journalists making the best use of their time, arguably there is no shortage of reporting out there. Sense-making is what is in short supply.

The exchange reminded me of an article in Nieman Reports a fews years ago by Simon Waldman, who at the time was director of digital publishing for Guardian Newspapers. He wrote that “The disciplines of traditional media aren’t just awkward restrictions. Deadlines, limits on space and time, the need to have a headline and an intro and a cohesive story rather than random paragraphs, all of these factors force out meaning and help with understanding. Without the order they impose, it’s much, much harder to make sense of what’s happening in the world.”

In the 2005 article, Waldman said with regard to citizen-witness contributions to coverage of the December 2004 tsunami in southern Asia, the power came from the vividness and volume of the comments. “But out of this sheer volume, " he also wrote "the movement’s great weakness was exposed – the lack of shape, structure and overall meaning to all that was available. There is a fundamental difference between reading hundreds of people’s stories and understanding the ‘real’ story. … Making sense of it all needed the sort of distillation, reduction and, yes, the editing process that happens in traditional media.”

Even when the reporting is being done by professional journalists -- as in the several examples cited in Jarvis's post -- I think that holds true. The ongoing process of the reporting is important, but so is the follow through of articles that provide context and summary.

I also found it interesting that a number of comments attached to Jarvis's and Ingram's posts compared after-the-fact curation to the old journalistic practice of the rewrite desk, which I think offers a good analogy and a good perspective on the worth of traditional journalistic values and practices even with all of the modern tools and techniques at journalists' disposal.

Failing to try

This month's Carnival of Journalism entry is supposed to address "A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility."

Given that I sat out the past couple of month's worth of J-Carns (does that count as failure? It feels like it) because I was buried in grading (oops, that's the forbidden apologizing -- or maybe excuse-making, which is even worse), this seemed like a good time and a good topic for which I could return to the fold.

I have to say I've never failed spectacularly at anything; I don't expect to be in the running for the "fight at the end for the biggest failure of the lot," as David described it in the assignment. But a major reason for not failing at anything spectacular is not trying anything spectacular. Which is essentially the failure I'm choosing to discuss.

Early in my career, while working as a beat reporter for a small newspaper, what I wanted more than anything was to be an independent free-lance writer, supporting myself with my work outside of the context of an institutional employer. I'd spend free time combing through Writers' Market, looking for ideas of places to pitch for my work. I had some small successes at it, getting a few small contracts for trade journal pieces and such.

But where the failure came was passing up a golden moment to make the move at trying to carve out a career path along that line.

I had left that staff job to spend two years back in school, full time, earning a master's -- an MBA in fact, which gave me a certain level of knowledge and expertise about businesses that could have been leveraged into writing, perhaps, for finance magazines and the like. My wife was the primary breadwinner the whole time I was in school. I had those occasional free-lance pieces and a part-time job at the local daily, but we mostly lived on her paycheck.

Then even the part-time job ended when I finished school and the paper said they had no openings and no plans to hire me. So there I was: no steady job, lots of free time (with no classes to worry about), finances reasonably well covered. We weren't rich but we weren't starving either, and this was before the kids came along to complicate life and family expenses. Hence, the golden moment.

And I blinked.

Rather than take the opportunity that was presenting itself to really see if I had it in me to be a self-supporting independent free-lancer, I sought out (and fairly quickly found) another newspaper staff job. It was in copy editing, rather than reporting, and I found that the tasks of editing fit my skills and personality better than writing. I had a long and successful career as a copy editor that led to my current academic position, so I have no complaints or regrets really about how things did turn out. (Like I said, not a spectacular fail.)

But it's impossible not to wonder where things could have gone had I chosen the other path. The story I've told happened in the mid-1980s, when personal computer technology was just starting to explode on the scene. Dozens of technology and computer magazines appeared over the next few years; with that as a specialty I might have had more work than I could handle.

Or, one of the things I liked, and was pretty good at, as a copy editor was page design. Could I have been on the ground floor as a Web designer, and maybe founder/owner of a design shop, as the Internet took off a few years later? Who knows where I might have ended up -- if not for a failure of nerve.

College-based community media workshops

This month's Carnival of Journalism topic asks those of us participating in it to address how the sources of news in a community could be expanded, playing off the recommendations of the Knight Foundation's exploration of information needs of communities in a democracy.

I think universities with communications programs are especially well positioned to help address one of the 15 needs cited by the Knight Commission report, specifically:

Recommendation 7: Fund and support public libraries and other community institutions (my emphasis) as centers of digital and media training, especially for adults.

Our college is a community institution, right?

One of the ideas that's been in the back of my mind for a while that would articulate this recommendation is using the school's resources to help local citizens learn more about being news providers with some sort of workshop or seminar.

I could see it taking shape as a day or day-and-a-half event, consisting of a combination of lecture, exercises, small-group and large-group discussion of issues in the emerging news ecosystem, followed by break-out workshops on principles of basic journalism and skills development for writing and multimedia. We have faculty, staff and even student expertise in these areas plus a core of alumni who are working professionals who might be involved as guest presenters. We have the facilities, including classrooms, computer labs, large and small meeting spaces, and on-campus catering capability for meals or snacks.

Or, more formally, it could be done as a certificate program for non-matriculated students who could take some combination of our traditional (or non-traditional, e.g. online) courses on topics such as journalism basics, multimedia journalism, Web design, digital video production, and desktop publishing.

All the potential is there. Finding the human and financial resources to act on it is the next step.

UPDATE (Saturday Feb. 18) : Courtney Shove has created a roundup summary with links to all of the posts in this month's carnival. Check it out.

Budget conundrum

I dislike paying taxes as much as anyone. But I have to wonder when Washington politicians are going to get serious and talk about tax increases to stem the tide of progressively deeper national debt.

President Obama's 2012 budget proposal, according to The New York Times, totals $3.7 trillion with a $1.1 trillion deficit. That means it budgets $2.6 trillion in revenue. Obama says it's fiscally responsible; Republicans say it doesn't cut deep enough. All kinds of arguments are taking place about little nips and tucks to the budget of a few billion here and a few billion there to try and bring it into better alignment.

But here's the thing. Four areas of the budget that no one is talking about cutting add up to a figure that already surpasses total revenue by a wide margin. Thus, it's mathematically impossible to make enough cuts to areas of the budget where everyone is looking to bring this budget into balance, or even to reduce the projected deficit by a meaningful amount.

Three of the four areas -- Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security -- are supposedly untouchable for political reasons. The fourth is interest on the national debt, which we have to keep paying because defaulting on it would truly collapse the world economy.

Those four areas added together total about $3 trillion in spending (see table below). With projected revenue of $2.6 trillion, this means that if every remaining dollar in federal spending were eliminated, the country would still be in the hole by $400 billion. Read that carefully. Not just trimming some programs, but completely eliminating EVERY federal agency except for the Defense Department, Social Security Administration, and portions of Treasury and Human Services that deal with debt issuance and Medicare/Medicaid, respectively, wouldn't be enough to get the budget back to positive.

And the cuts that are being talked about are, by comparison, a pittance. $1 billion sounds like a lot of money, but here's an analogy to explain what that amount means in relation to the overall budget situation:

Picture an upper middle class family with a very comfortable -- what some people would consider truly lavish -- income of $260,000 a year. But for a variety of reasons they were overspending their income by around $110,000 a year, and need to cut back. How effective would they be in closing the gap with savings of $100 here and $100 here? Equivalently, that's what $1 billion is in a $3.7 trillion spending plan. So when you read about $5 billion here or $10 billion there, it's like that family trying to close its six-figure deficit with tweaks of $500 or $1,000. Realistically, it cannot be done.

This federal budget has reached a point at which it cannot be balanced with cuts. Sadly, none of our political leaders has the courage to say so.


$1100 billion (1.1 trillion) Medicare and Medicaid
$808 billion Social Security
$677 Defense
$474 Interest on debt

= $3059 billion ($3.059 trillion) total spending on "big four" areas

against

$2600 billion ($2.6 trillion) projected revenue

= $459 billion deficit

Funny line from TV's Big Bang Theory

One of the things I like best in a TV show is smart writing, and one of the shows out there with that characteristic is the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the show, it centers on the interaction of four researchers at a university who meet every stereotype of the classic nerd. The nerdiest of them all is an astrophysicist named Sheldon Cooper, well played by a talented actor named Jim Parsons.

It's not the most high-brow show in the world; in fact, a disappointingly large proportion of episode plot lines and within-the-show jokes resort to the "nerds-never-get-laid" cliche. (Even the show's title plays off that theme, of course.) I'm no prude and the jokes don't offend or bother me. I'd just like to see the writers reach beyond them more often than they do. They're surely capable of it, as last Thursday's episode illustrated with some of the funniest lines I've heard on TV in a while.

The storyline begins with university president "inviting" the four compadres -- more of an ultimatum to attend than an invitation, really -- to a reception with major donors. Sheldon initially refuses to go, feeling it is beneath him.

He changes his mind when a friend persuades him that unless he's there to argue for donations to support the work of hard science, the money might go to the geology department -- whom Sheldon disparages as "the dirt people." He admits the prospect scares him.

Then prepare to be terrified, his friend continues, because the benefactors might even decide to support -- gasp! -- the liberal arts. Millions, she implies, could go to poets, literary critics and "students of gender studies." I was already laughing at that as she said it.

Sheldon's horrified reply: "Oh, the humanities!"

I laughed harder than I have in a long time at a TV show. Good job, Big Bang writers. More smart stuff like that and fewer cheap sex jokes and I'll like your work even more.

The power of viral media

Buffalo-area Congressman Chris Lee isn't the first politician to resign in the wake of publicity over a personal scandal, and unquestionably won't be the last. But his case may have set some kind of record for speed with which the downfall took place, and shows the power of viral dissemination of information outside of the mainstream news media.

Not so long ago, when news cycles were measured in hours or even days, it would take quite a while for a scandal to play out far enough to result in a powerful person's downfall. Weeks or months could go by as news came out and slowly made its way into public consciousness, those affected by it could work to get favorable counter-information into public view, etc. Even the situation with Eric Massa, another upstate New York congressman who resigned over some unsavory personal behavior, took a few days to unwind.

But with Lee, news of a flirtatious e-mail conversation he apparently had with a woman he contacted via Craigslist was posted on Gawker in mid-afternoon, and led to his resignation by dinnertime. In a story posted at 2:30 p.m., his spokesman was saying that the congressman believed his e-mail account had been hacked; at 5:30 Lee was calling it quits. That was before it could even be reported on a traditional TV newscast.

Traditional media were still trying to figure out how much credence to give a report on Gawker when Lee made it easy for them by giving the story both a more powerful angle (his departure) and instant credibility (why would he have resigned if it wasn't true).

News truly does move in hyper-speed these days.

The downside of constant connection

I check my e-mail pretty frequently, from first thing in the morning until maybe 9 or 10 in the evening. (More on what "first thing" means shortly.) I have Facebook and Twitter accounts that I check a few times over the course of a day, too. I don't post a lot, just a few times a week to each; mostly I check to monitor information other people are putting out there.

However, I don't have a smart phone. I don't want a smart phone. I don't use my "dumb" cellphone all that much; a few calls and texts a week mostly to my wife and kids. (Only a few people other than family members even have the number, and it's turned off more hours of the week than it's turned on.) Without a smart device, of course, e-mails, tweets and Facebook updates can't reach me constantly. Sometimes, a few hours pass before I get them.

Does that make me a Luddite? If you took what's said in a lot of the news ricocheting around the tech world at face value, it would seem so. Being technologically up to date is equated with being constantly connected, constantly on. When Mashable posts an entry titled "31 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed" there's a subtle implication that unless you have all of these latest and greatest tips, tools and tricks, you're just not with it. (That post was shared 105 times on Facebook and tweeted more than 1,700 times, BTW).

But being constantly connected can take a toll, as an article from today's New York Times points out:

All of this amped-up productivity comes with a growing sense of unease. Too often, people find themselves with little time to concentrate and reflect on their work. Or to be truly present with their friends and family.

The Times writer quotes Ana Dutra, 46, a top manager at a Chicago-based executive recruiting firm, as saying that technology has afforded her more freedom, “but there’s a little bit more slavery as well ...If you are available all the time, what does that mean?”

Balance of work and life is something professionals have always struggled with, but technology has torn down some barriers permanently, in the eyes of people who study it. The Times quotes Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, as saying that "home has invaded work and work has invaded home and the boundary is likely never to be restored ... The new gadgetry has really put this issue into much clearer focus.”

The theme of the Times article is nothing new; I've seen others almost exactly like it. Perhaps it is a recurring theme because of a growing recognition of how corrosive an always-on life can be.

Being connected is important to me, which is why I check my e-mail and social networks numerous times over the course about 13 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week. But balance, and downtime, are equally important. Without them, there's no time to synthesize or think about the information flowing in. That's why it doesn't bother me that it might take a while for me to get to an e-mail or see a tweet, even about something that's interesting and important to me. Very little of it is SO urgent that a few minutes or few hours will make a difference.

And, I've even redefined "first thing" in the morning. Until a few weeks ago, that meant about 6:30 a.m., right after breakfast, when I'd pour a second cup of coffee and fire up the computer to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and some online news sites. But I found that spending 20 minutes or so doing that was a real impediment to getting out of the house in a timely fashion to go to the gym and get some exercise before work. So these days, when the computer gets turned off for the evening it goes into my briefcase, and the next time I'm online is when I get to the office around 8:30 or 9 the next morning. I can honestly say I haven't had to address anything since the beginning of the semester for which those two hours in the morning have made a difference.

(Granted, not all people could say that. If I were still a working journalist, I doubt I'd make such a blanket statement because in that world, these days, urgency of information delivery and dissemination is the cardinal value.)

To me, having the time to assess and think about information flowing in is crucial for understanding it and what it means. Constant connection to an endless torrent of data undermines the ability to do that.