|
|
| A Word on the New Journalism |
 |
|
Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 06:04 AM EST
|
One of the best things about doing Groklaw is that it's a conversation. As soon as I write something, readers begin to provide more and often better, or at least more nuanced, information. As they do, I often add it to the base articles, with an Update notice, or sometimes it shows up in the next one. That is what makes it hard to mirror Groklaw articles accurately and another reason why I don't let Google in. Stories are typically not finished for about 24 hours, sometimes more, because Groklaw is a group effort. After I posted an article in which I wrote that Venezuela was working on a decree adopting FOSS for government use, based on a report in the media in the US, for example, there was a comment from Rafiel, a reader there in Venezuela, that the decree had just passed, and he provided a link to the PDF of the adopted decree in Spanish and a link to an English translation, all of which I added to the article.
Dan Bricklin has a column on audio, transparency, and the new journalism, which I know you will enjoy, since he writes in part about you and Groklaw while tracing the media coverage of the Massachusetts decision on Open Formats. He noticed a change in the quality of comments on the story here after audio of the informal announcement and a full transcript were made available here, even a change in the way I wrote about it compared with the first story. He also notes a difference between comments on Slashdot when they ran an earlier, briefer story about the event, which seemed to lead to less comprehension of the story, and comments here, and he attributes the difference to the fact that we made a lot more information available, not just a brief report from the media. Take a look. He praises your commenting. I think he's on to something. He suggests that not just raw data but also hearing a person's voice, not just a journalist's report about that person's speech, leads to greater understanding and less mindless criticism. [blink] . . . . . . Hmm. . . If that's so, I'd best start podcasting right away. Or at least any time I get it into my head to write about Santa. I'm not touching the Easter Bunny. Although just between you and me, rabbits don't lay eggs. I'm pretty sure about that. I trust if I'm wrong, a reader will so advise me lickety split so I can update my article. The new journalism is all about credibility. He references Dan Gillmor's blog in which Gillmor suggests replacing the goal of objectivity, the foundation of the old journalism, with his suggestion of four pillars of good journalism for today's journalists: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency. By transparency, he means in part linking to source material, "bolstering what we tell people with close-to-the-ground facts and data". That has always been Groklaw's foundation and its hallmark. To me it's not just an ethical imperative; it's natural, because it's technically possible now. There are no space restrictions online, compared to a paper newspaper, for example, which can only be so big, the Sunday New York Times notwithstanding. So there's no reason not to share everything you know and all you can find, so your readers can make up their own minds. Gillmor participated in a conference put together recently by Harvard's Berkman Center on blogging, journalism, and credibility. I can't recommend reading all the comments on that page, but as is typical for Berkman, the collection of references and resources is excellent, including podcasts by some of the participants and a transcript done live as the conference went on. Audio of the event is promised. Anyway, the official translation of Eric Kriss's remarks is now on the state's website ("Edited and condensed from a transcription of the original oral comments." -- Say, would that be moi?) They are also translated into French, by a Groklaw reader who decided it was an important story for French readers to know about too and contacted me first and then Bricklin and Kriss to get permission. First he translated Groklaw's transcript, and when the official one was put up, he updated his translation to match. And this mushrooming of information, spreading in ways not originally anticipated, is also part of the new journalism, as is the fact that I am collecting the best of your comments to send to Mr. Kriss. Well, actually, I'd like it if some of you would help me do that. If any of you would like to do that, see if you can pick the 10 or 15 best comments from the two articles and email them to me, please. As always, leave a comment that you are working on it, though, so others know who is doing what. I don't think we need more than maybe 5 people, tops, on this. Oh, yes, you unbelievers. Jonathan Schwartz really *is* going to answer your questions, and soon, I'm told. He's just been busy. Speaking of the human voice and raw data instead of reports about it, you might enjoy this BBC program, a rather intelligent exploration of patents in the US, including remarks by Larry Lessig. You have to have RealPlayer to listen to it. I mention it here, not because I like to confuse you by putting links to something that seems unconnected to the main theme. It actually is connected. One of the interviewees is the head of the USPTO, and he tells us why he thinks the Patent Office is fostering innovation. He can tell because they are issuing more and more patents. I figure this is a fine test case for Bricklin's theory about audio.
|
|
|
|
| Authored by: PeteS on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 06:32 AM EST |
Transparency is one thing I look for in any news report. Being naturally
sceptical, I always look at the source material. A lack of even cited source
material raises red flags for me as to the veracity of an article.
I am happy to note that has never been an issue here.
PeteS
---
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: ram on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 06:54 AM EST |
These are good observations on New Journalism (Bricklin's, Gillmor's and yours
too). So much of what Old Journalism has degraded into is Big Media controlled
spin and censorship that only pretends to be informative and objective but
actually is quite otherwise. Here's a speech by Bill Moyers, given at a Society
of Professional Journalists conference last September, titled Journalism
Under Fire.
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 07:01 AM EST |
I found this, from 26th October 1998, in a few seconds in an archive named Google:
"IBM, along with an
aggregation of Unix-savvy partners, is building another flavor of the Unix
operating system with the goal of building the leading Unix product for the
Intel architecture.
Hoping to generate business for ISVs, OEMs, and
VARs, IBM is driving development of a Unix OS for Intel's IA-64 using IBM's AIX
OS with technology from SCO's UnixWare and Sequent Computer Systems'
PTX.
Code-named project Monterey, the 64-bit OS is expected to be
delivered within 18 months, said executives at the Armonk, N.Y.-based
company.
IBM said it also plans to transfer AIX technology to SCO's
UnixWare and promote it in the Unix IA-32 market. The end result should be a
product line with Unix running on IA-32, IA-64, and IBM microprocessors in
computers that run the gamut from desktop to large enterprise
systems."
Read more here.
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: fudisbad on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 07:04 AM EST |
| For current events, legal filings and CC10 rulings. Please make links
clickable.
To start off: a brief
from MGM vs Grokster. ---
See my bio for copyright details re: this
post.
This subliminal message has been brought to you by Microsoft. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 07:31 AM EST |
My local rag encapsulates the news into a form that I can cope with in about
fifteen minutes a day. I trust the editor to include all the important stuff
necessary for me to do my democratic duty as a well informed citizen.*
On the net things aren't as neat, the available information is practically
infinite. On Groklaw, I trust PJ to do the filtering. Presented with the
original documents, I am lost and completely out of my depth. I also don't have
the time to read all the documents and posts. It is important to me that PJ
updates the articles. In that respect she filters the posts and incorporates
the really important ones.
<ramble>
*Noam Chomsky would tell me that my trust is misplaced. I realize that his
politics aren't popular but I can't find anything wrong with his analysis of the
media.
At this point I sigh, delete a couple of hundred words and go out to shovel
snow.</ramble>
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: BitOBear on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 08:08 AM EST |
You cite the dynamic nature of the conversation and the short-period updates,
especially during the first half-hour, as the reason to "keep google
out".
Why not "let google in" after the article is, say, a week old.
I don't know for certian how your robots.txt is arranged, or if such a barrier
is possible (Expert Google People here?), but establishing a public presence in
the search world, and possibly some posterity thereby might be a good thing.
Perhaps some sort of frozen-page portal that published static snapshots of each
major thread would be significant and/or useful.
Then again, by _not_ being spidered/logged you have probably kept the forum
clean of people adding bogus posts in the attempt to game the search engines (a
la the Wikki plague 8-).
It just seems that the people who wouldn't already know about this site might
languish in ignorance. If, for instance, congressional interns, software-patent
pundits, and fledgling stock investors are a worthy audience then keeping them
from finding this site "the obvious and most likely way", being google
or whatever, is a disservice. You know, they might see references to grok law,
but then also see the search come back nill, and not realize the scope and
quality of the resource because it "didn't google".
It becomes a quesiton of "the other audience", the casual types, to
whom "you should check out groklaw if you want to know more" directly
translates to a quick stab with some search engine somewhere.
Is it _good_ one wonders, to have the presence of groklaw within google, defined
by the external comments _about_ the site as opposed to the site content itself?
I would think not, especially given the way the site is misrepresented by the
parties involved.
Do you/we really want SCO's vision of groklaw to be how the world sees the site
first? Consider that when I just googled "groklaw" I got the seeded
link, then two links to radio.weblogs.com, then two Linux Today headlines, then
two things from theinquirer.net as "Groklaw sends a Dear Daryl letter"
and then "Groklaw woman quits job after SCO questions her integrity".
Setting it up so that this yellow trash reporting show up as first-page
commentary on this site, will pre-color the site in the minds of the people who
we know really need to come here. It just seems counter-productive.
I don't think it is _right_ that excluding groklaw's content from the net causes
the tripe out there *about* the site to completely overshadow the actual *value*
of the site. But it does.
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: etmax on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 08:24 AM EST |
PJ,
you may be interested to know that there is a language (South American from
Memory) where part of the natural sentence structure includes the source of the
information. People (outsiders) are thought to be liars if they don't follow
these rules. My source is an article in "New Scientist" from some
time last year, but I must say they would make good journalists wouldn't they?
---
Max - Melbourne Australia[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Simon G Best on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 11:05 AM EST |
It's sometimes said that a lot of communication is nonverbal (a percentage is
often quoted, but quite how communication is quantified for these purposes is a
mystery). This could be a part of why audio recordings make a difference
compared to textual transcripts. (It might also be why Daleks are such
convincing liars - how do you read the body language of an oversized pepper-pot
with an electric voice?)
Putting it the other way round, textual
transcription filters out almost everything except the actual words and syntax.
Tones of voice, facial expressions, gesticulations, and so on, get almost
entirely removed. A lot of information disappears.
When it comes to
conversations, there's also the issue of feedback. Conversations are often
dynamic, with the participants interacting in real-time, responding to each
other's body language and so on. But when reading a piece of text, we can end
up unwittingly reading our own, imagined body language into it - quite possibly
getting completely the wrong impression of the kind of person the author
is!
So, yes, the difference an audio recording can make is not entirely
surprising :-)
---
FOSS IS political. It's just that the political
establishment is out of touch and hasn't caught up. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Franki on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 11:48 AM EST |
If the conversation is the reason you are not inviting google.
Perhaps it would be of use to make a sub domain like archive.groklaw.net and let
google into that.
You could put stuff in the archive once you are satisfied that the conversation
is complete.
Or you could use some form of delayed mirror.. I'll bet there are dozens of
people here that would be happy to mirror Groklaw, delayed or otherwise.
Currently Groklaw is the only news site I know of that goes out of its way to
not get attention.
I really think the story needs to get out to more people then those that already
know groklaw exists.
rgds
Franki
---
Is M$ behind Linux attacks?
http://htmlfixit.com/index.php?p=86[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: blacklight on Sunday, January 23 2005 @ 03:54 PM EST |
"He references Dan Gillmor's blog in which Gillmor suggests replacing the
goal of objectivity, the foundation of the old journalism, with his suggestion
of four pillars of good journalism for today's journalists: thoroughness,
accuracy, fairness and transparency."
I would define objectivity as comprising and inseparable from thoroughness,
accuracy, fairness and transparency. However, Dan Gilmor pointed out that some
lazy journalists and probably quite a few people mix up objectivity with
neutrality, although he did not use that word. And the results of neutral
reporting are at times grotesque, to say the least.
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
- podcast? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, January 24 2005 @ 07:03 AM EST
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, January 24 2005 @ 12:33 PM EST |
"So there's no reason not to share everything you know and all you can
find, so your readers can make up their own minds."
This works OK until a blogger is working to their own agenda.
If the blog owner is selective about what they include, or leave out, then the
end result is no better than the "old" journalism.
In the above event the blogger just replaces the proprietor, the mechanism is
the same.[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, January 24 2005 @ 01:47 PM EST |
Interesting points->
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php
system5
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Brendan Scott on Monday, January 24 2005 @ 05:22 PM EST |
> One of the interviewees is the head of the USPTO, and he
> tells us why he thinks the Patent Office is fostering
> innovation. He can tell because they are issuing more and
> more patents.
Yes, I have seen his comments elsewhere on the web. It's understandable. He's
hardly going to stand up and say, "My organisation is doing a truly awful
job and, moreover I am directly responsible for killing innovation in this
country." is he?
Brendan [ Reply to This | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: star-dot-h on Monday, January 24 2005 @ 11:06 PM EST |
The problem with the way the media appraoches "objectivity" arises is
that they always assume there are two opposing sides to a story and are too
constrained to explore the credibility of each side they present as
"opposing". So you can get someone who spends their life researching a
particular issue, whose thoughts are peer reviewed by a credible panel of, er,
peers being quoted along woth Mr. Cranky as though Mr. C. had equal credentials.
Surely "objectivity" does not mean that one cannot review issues,
compare arguements and then arrive at conclusions based on the credibility of
the data presented.
Journalists seem afraid, time constrained or lazy to do this which is why blogs
are getting so popular. Blogs tend to vbe the opposite of afraid to jump to
conclusiosn.
The problem with blogs is, of course, picking out the diamonds from the rough.
The danger is that the few diamonds out there give blogging in general
credibility that is undeserved for what are essentially long editorials.[ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
