Moderating a new-media panel discussion with Chris Rabb and Ruby Sinreich at ConvergeSouth 2007. (Sue Polinksky photo)
The bulk of my writing about media and and new media can be found in these two categories at Xark, but my essentially defunct Conover on Media blog contains some original pieces that either pre-dated Xark seemed too arcane for its efforts to build a general-interest audience.
HIGHLIGHTS
2020 Vision: What’s Next For News: My response to Clay Shirky’s Thinking the Unthinkable represented my ideas about the likely progress of the current media meltdown, but also everything I could put together about how 21st century journalism might go about reassembling itself. See also: A Virtual New-Media Interview, and New Media Virtual Interview No. 2.
The “Lack of Vision” Thing: Well, Here’s a Hopeful Vision For You: Today’s paradox is that we live in an information society that doesn’t value our traditional information producers (journalists). In this essay, I propose a radically different approach to the practice and business of journalism, based on the principles of the semantic web and information architecture. See Also: Journalism From a Software Perspective, a lengthy post in which I introduced some of these principles in February 2006.
The Imagination Gap: I critiqued the predictive value of Jeff Jarvis’ study of new business models for news as too artificially limited by his demand for immediacy and used a comparison to Kevin Kelly to suggest that we should be more interested in the semantic journalism ideas I expressed in The “Lack of Vision” Thing. Jarvis responded, which brought renewed attention to the informatics model and led to my follow-up post on the subject, The Future is Nearer Than You Think. As one reader noted, many of the ideas that are key to my thinking on these topics are outlined in my July post Free Wants to be Big. Also related: The Limits of Social.
Narrative is Dead! Long live Narrative! How essential is the narrative form to the cause of journalism? In this long-form essay, I put forward the case for a “theory of the press” that encourages non-narrative innovation as the path toward preserving the value of quality narrative.
A New Form of Writing: Good writers for newspapers, TV and radio make appropriate use of the strengths of each medium. So why don’t we write for the Web with the same goal? In this visibly short essay, I make a case that the spirit of the Web should inspire us to write in succinct summary, but to write and link as much supporting material as necessary to achieve clarity. The post itself is an experiment in the form, with 20+ links, at least 14 of which lead to pages that I created to serve this essay. And to answer my question, one reason we don’t write this way is that we don’t yet have the interface that would make it practical.
The Big Pool of Money Experiment: What would happen if we created an ISP fee that could be divided up around all the content creators who applied for a traffic-based share of the resulting fund?
The Newspaper Suicide Pact: Why the newspaper industry’s ill-fated pay-wall plans for the summer of 2009 won’t work, and what it means for the future. See also: The Paid-Online-Subscription Pipedream: Another 3-Point Plan To Save Newspapers.
10 Reasons Why Newspapers Won’t Reinvent News: Newspapers haven’t been innovators. Here’s why we shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon.
My Final Newspaper Article: The editor of The Post and Courier’s Faith and Value’s section requested this column. The bosses at The Post and Courier refused to print it. Which is just poetic.
Web Coordinates 2.0: Written in conjunction with New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen, this was the beginning of an update to his original Web Coordinates project.
‘Free’ Wants to be Big: Why the flip-side of freeconomics isn’t a free-culture hippie utopia but the return of Very Big corporate power.
Why Comments Suck (& Some Ideas on Un-Sucking Them): Advice for news websites that just can’t quite figure out how to interact with the public.
Axioms For 21st Century Media: Fifteen ideas to consider.
Organizing #CHS News Twitter From The Ground Up and Charleston Hashtag Summit: Two posts on how local professional and citizen media worked together in Charleston to create a shared folksonomy for news.
Paid Content and Free Content at George’s Restaurant: A simple example demonstrating the fallacies of the “Stop giving away content on the Web!” argument (Hint: It’s not about giving away content, it’s about the value of the ads on the content you give away).
When “Shoddy” Is Your Business Plan: Why journalism on the cheap doesn’t have a great future.
The Fire That Frees the Seed: Why the death of the metro newspaper isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Twitter: Menace or Threat? A rant about dumb mass-media coverage of new media themes.
Who’s Watching the Watchdogs?: Examining the popular (among some journalists and most corporate media executives, anyway) view that democracy is doomed without their well-compensated services.
/editorial endorsements: My argument for the abolition of unsigned editorial endorsements by the mainstream press.
Resetting the Filters: Why we need a new and improved theory of press political press coverage.
Five Lessons About Newspaper Contests: Why I stopped entering them, and why your news organization ought to join me if it hopes to survive.
Why The Tower Must Fall: The newspaper crisis isn’t a technology problem or a business problem. It’s a culture problem.
An Old Idea Has a New Future: Why optical scanners and visual bar codes — a rejected technology from the 1990s — has a print industry role using a new device: the cell phone.
Ad Hocracy: This post proposed using Twitter and available free tools as the basis for ad hoc news networks connecting event and breaking news coverage to mass media. It did so in March 2008, about a month ahead of the session I led on this at the 2008 CreateSouth conference — and several months before the unveiling of Search Twitter made this dream a reality, without all the cludgy work-arounds.
Foundations of 21st Century Journalism: Written for students and faculty in advance of my SPJ-funded engagement at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, February 2008. Other media posts written in my “Oxford Series” include: Waking up the blog; Quality and other essential bullshit; Thinking versus Quorum Sensing; Why quality is a moving target; and Gloom and doom.
Latest Project: Embedded, Geo-Tagged Video Maps: I thought this was an exciting technology in September 2007, but I couldn’t get my fellow newspaper editors to even visit, much less play with, the examples I created and published.
New Culture, New Media: What does mass-meda have to offer post-mass-media sub-cultures?
What If Your Business Plan Was Love? If you’re making media based on angering the least number of audience members, you’re going about it backwards.
Hyping Hyper-Local: Talking back to the popular misunderstanding of the value of hyperlocal journalism to newspapers — and readers.
21st century Trust: The Techno-Geek Way!: Transparency is the new objectivity. But how do you use modern information tools to determine and communicate credibility?
Commerce Hubs and the Future of Advertising: I was WAAAAAY too early to this party.
Competition and Its Alternatives: Explaining to my colleagues why I linked to the other media in my market when they wrote things that were relevant to my topic. Didn’t make my colleagues like it any better, but…
The Campaign Against Wikipedia: There was a time (March 2006) when I was one of the few newspaper editors who was publicly defending Wikipedia during the initial attempt by the mass-media to discredit the strange new “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Reporters cast me in the “opposing viewpoint” role.
The Intelligence Briefing Model of Journalism: What if Predictive Intelligence were more important to communicating and organizing information than “objectivity?” You might wind up with something like this.
