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Category: News of News (Page 10 of 11)

News and comments about news and media

Gillmor visit

Just winding up a good and long visit with Dan Gillmor. Not only was it great to meet Dan and to spend time with him, but I also managed to catch up with some old friends and to meet some new neighbors and to get a peek inside the experiment at creating and maintaining an online town square at the News and Record.
I’ll be spending most of today catching up with the work that I set off to the side while spending the good time with Dan and others. But that is a a small cost.
The folks that work at ibiblio really made the whole, occassionally complex, visit a delight by digging in and helping out often above and beyond the call and by being creative and smart about it all.
We should have Dan’s talk online shortly and the bloggers con as well.
Dan’s ideas about how to help organize citizen journalists and how to make news more of a conversation are world-changing, but built on close observation and exerience reporting on technologies in Silicon Valley.

Dan Gillmor Today at 3:30

We’ve been having a great visit with Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People this weekend.
Today Dan will be speaking to my class in Emerging Technologies and Issues.
Then later today:

Dan Gillmor public talk
We the Media: Grassroots Journalism for the People, by the People
Monday February 14, 3:30
Freedom Forum Conference Center
Carroll Hall, UNC
Learn More

News and Record visit

[to be filled in later]
Visit with Dan Gillmor to the News and Record. Escorted by Ed Cone, we meet with a good number of the N-R staff lead by John Robinson and a fair number of G’boro bloggers including a reconnection with Dave Wharton who is now a Classics Prof at UNC-G and a blogger.
More on the very interesting Town Square idea that N-R is working to develope, etc later.
[to sleep perchance to dream]

Blog Together – Feb 12 (winer and Murphey Hall)

First here’s what Murphey Hall looks like from the outside and what the room for the conference looks like. You enter from the middle of the building and go behind the Ashcroft-offending status. Do not show these statues on televisions during the Super Bowl. Dave Winer is here blocking David so that he will be decent for viewing.
Anton reports news coverage on WCHL, this morning in Chapel Hill Herald. I did brief interviews for the Daily Tar Heel and for WUNC. Blogomania continues.
Jen O’Bryan is printing name tags based on the sign-ups on the wiki, so sign up or look like a luzer with a hand written tag tomorrow.

Ossie: I’ll remember him as JFK

Ossie Davis died at age 87 still acting and still an activist. He’ll be remembered for his part in bringing new black movie making to us in “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” for advising Spike Lee on “Malcolm X,” for his parts in “Malcom X” and other Lee films, for his long marriage to Ruby Dee (1948 – present) and more. He was a tireless worker in his art and in politics and social change. He gave eulogies at the funerals of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

For me, oddly enough, his turn as John F Kennedy in the wonderfully touching story of aging, dignity, and Egyptian Soul-sucking mummies, “Bubba Ho-Tep” is the most memorable. The story could not have been carried off without Ossie’s ability to bring something deep out of something potentially so shallow, something surprising out of something so potentially predictable. He has great help from the main lead, Bruce Campbell as a man who might be Elvis, writer Joe R. Lansdale, and director Don Coscarelli. But for me Ossie is the presence that keeps Bruce/Elvis on his toes, that keeps you believing when it’s obvious you shouldn’t be believing, that takes the movie where Lansdale’s story wants to go. Ossie like his character in Bubba Ho-Tep was active to the end, never stopping to be involved, Unlike his character, Ossie was never confused about who he was. He never accomodated and never wavered.

Triangle Bloggers Update – Feb 12

Please come to any or all events and please repost as appropriate. Also if you or folks you know would like to help out, please contact me, Paul Jones (jones at unc.edu) and/or Anton Zuiker (anton at zuiker.com)

The Triangle Bloggers Conference has grown to nearly 100 registered participants including representatives from local and regional presses.

Three Blogger Events are coming your way in the next week. Triangle Bloggers Conference in Murphey Hall (Saturday 2/12), Dan Gillmor talk in Carroll Hall (Monday 2/14) and in Greensboro Dave Winer at the News and Record (Wednesday 2/9). Details and links below.

Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – noon:30 (and beyond) Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Learn more

Dan Gillmor public talk
We the Media: Grassroots Journalism for the People, by the People
Monday February 14, 3:30
Freedom Forum Conference Center
Carroll Hall, UNC
Learn more

Dave Winer, community journalism discussion
Wednesday February 9, 7 p.m.
200 East Market St., Greensboro
Learn more

ibiblio brings Dan Gillmor to Chapel Hill – February 14

ibiblio will host author, journalist and blogger Dan Gillmor for a public talk on Valentine’s Day.

Wired by cursive or by typing or by keyboarding?

We all know that having to explain things in writing helps you clarify your thinking and helps you remember facts. Well at least for most of us. Good writers, that is those with good handwriting, have better grammar and better test scores or so say education researchers in a recent NYTimes article.

However, another handwriting expert, Albany -based Kate Gladstone, is quoted as saying “that while a student needs to jot down 100 legible words a minute to follow a typical lecture, someone using print can manage only 30. ‘That’s fine for class,’ she said, ‘if the class is first grade.'”

I was sent a reference to the NYTimes article (which is heavily discussed on the blog Collision Detection) by the person who has the worst handwriting, does the most compulsive note-taking, and is the single fastest typist of anyone I know.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Those of us who never managed even a C in penmanship as it was called back in the day. Those of us who were required to take typing in what was called “junior high.” Those of us who were forbidden to take any classes in creative writing or journalism until we had completed two semesters of typing. Those of us who have tried to become poets instead of novelists because we can’t imagine writing more that 5000 words on anything — and having to edit our own writing. Those of us so dyslexic that any grouping of letters seem like they might be an actual word if we could just work out the anagram in front of us.

Harvard Blog Conf: Gloves coming off

Journalists take off the gloves and start punching now that computer guy, will find the name, compares them to mainframe computer people.
NYTimes Jill Abramson takes the bait first and never gives up.
MSNBC’s (Rick Kaplan? Jon Bonne?) says that there is a blog associated with every MSNBC show. He loves them bloggers. But who will assure quality and, of course the title of the conference, credibility. Decries that mistakes are seen as willful in news these days in the eyes of citizens. MSNBC ran 19,000 citizen-shot videos about the tsuinami. Says that commentators, like Scarboro, are not fact checked?!?
Jimmy Wales holds up wikipedia as an example of a success. He holds that wikipedia is better than old school pedias. That gets the old school journalists all jazzed up. In particular, NYTime-sters. He says that IBM survived the end of the mainframe. So NYTimes can too — if they are willing to change.
Voice I don’t recognize says that cable news has moved from new to commentary — for cheapness.
Powerline John Hinderaker talks about the power of links as a source of trust and of access to more data etc.

Harvard Blog Conf after lunch

Discussion of how institutional journalist can take the “good” parts of blogging and keep the basic values of journalism that have developed over time. Bill Mitchell of Poynter is talking about his paper on “Earn Your Own Trust, Roll Your Own Ethics: Transparency and Beyond.”. (Bob Steele helped on this paper).
Librarians are getting a nod along with journalists and bloggers.
Transparency being discussed and nuanced.
Karen Schneider, FreeRangeLibrarian, is speaking for librarians and is saying that she represents the end of the information transaction. The user end. Tales of rural internet connectivity. She has been live blogging the conference at FreeRangeLibrarian.

Harvard Blog Conf more on Rosen

Since 2002, the majority of New York Times readers are online readers. While members of the NYTimes staff see themselves as putting out a traditional paper newspaper, the readers are now world-wide and online. When will the staff get the clue.

600 blogs are on the Harvard/Berkman Center since they set up free blogs there.

Dave Winer is up allegedly responding to Rosen with a highly romantic version of what a blogger is.

Bob Giles of the Neiman Foundation praises Ed Cone and the News and Record

Blood Done Sign My Name (orangepolitics.org version)

William F. Winter former governor of Mississippi recently reminded the Seminar for Southern Legislators that 1970 was a watershed year. “[A] remarkable group of so-called New South governors had been elected across the South. Running on platforms promoting racial equity, educational quality and economic development, they brought a new tone to the political arena which had been dominated for so long by the one issue of race. Their names would soon be known across the nation — names like Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, John West of South Carolina, and Linwood Holton of Virginia.”

But Tim Tyson, who was only 10 years old at the time and living not far from Chapel Hill in Oxford NC, saw a different world. The murder of black veteran Henry Marrow sparked riots and burnings and marches, showing that racial equality was far from a done deal.

Haunted by the murder story and having become in the meantime a historian (after a stint at Crook’s Corner), Tyson visited and revisited his former home town of Oxford, putting together a history of the events in the still divided town. A history that some had actively tried to erase and rewrite.

The murder is not mystery, but many mysteries surround the murder. Blood Done Sign My Name is compelling, personal, local, particular, broad and always interesting. The book also calls on us to continue to confront our shared racial problems.

The contenders for the UNC Summer Reading Program are good books as well. Tracy Kidder’s book on Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, will be the Carrboro community read. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi has won several important literary awards since it was first published. But neither of those books can compare with the power and the insistence of the history of Oxford and of Henry Marrow as told by Tyson.

I’m hoping that the Summer Reading Program will inspire future historians, some UNC students who are incoming this fall, to visit the rich resources of the Southern Oral History Collection. There they will find oral histories recorded by Eddie McCoy of Oxford who gives us more background of Oxford, the murder and the lives there before and after.

Notes:

Sally Greene and I have blogged about Blood Done Sign My Name over the past year and have had the privilege of chatting with Tim Tyson, who is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center this year.

Amazon reviews.

The official UNC Press Release about the Summer Reading Program is here.

WUNC’s State of Things featuring Tim Tyson

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition featuring Tyson and Juan Williams
revisiting Oxford

Phil Meyer on bloggers and on Armstrong Williams

Phil Meyer’s USAtoday article dated 1/12/05 points out that bloggers have become the watchdogs of the press.
Phil also points out, in an email message, that the Public Relations Society of America has taken a strong stand on the Armstrong Williams case. As you will recall, Williams was paid to promote No Child Left Behind by the Bush Adminstration [your tax dollars at work propagandizing you]. Phil laments that the Society of Professional Journalists has not acknowledged the case at all.

Wirelessness redundant!

On page 7A of today’s News and Observer, Nextel has a full page advert for their wireless service. The irony is that the area pictured in the advert is the lawn of Weaver Street Market in Carrboro. Memsy Price, a Nortel marketer, who is pictured in the advert doesn’t need Nextel to get internet access while at Weaver Street.
At least two wireless quilts cover the Weaver Street lawn. The first is completely free and open to all. It’s provided by Weaver Street as part of the Town of Carrboro’s wireless blanket.
The second comes from the UNC offices in the same building as Weaver Street Market (just upstairs). That network is restricted to UNC faculty, students and staff. But that group is a pretty significant part of the Weaver Street community.
To be fair to Nextel, they have very wide coverage in this area if their maps are an accurate guide, but the advert selling Carrboro as the reason to have their wireless plan is funny to me and a bit wrong.

Giving Patents Back to the Commons

The news is alive with the rustle of pundits trying to make sense of IBM‘s giving 500 patents [list of the patents in PDF] back to the Commons (or in this case the Open Source Community). There are over 160 stories in Google news on the subject.
Not one to be left out, I too took a call from a local paper (also known as the News and Observer — hopefully called “Nuisance and Disturber” when I was in school) to opine on “what does it mean?”
Since my contribution may not make the paper tomorrow as the number of stories begin to push over 200, I give it here:

IBM is one of the biggest patent holders in the world. It takes a lot of guts to step up to the plate and not only say that the patent system in the US is badly broken, but to also here are some patents back. Things that should not have been patented. Things (processes or inventions) that should be out there free so that they could facilitate innovation. IBM need not give up all their patents, only the ones that should not have been patented in the first place, patents that were filed as a defense against false patent claims later.


Matthew Szulik,
CEO of Red Hat, was also adamant about false and defensive patents during his talk today. Red Hat has assigned several patents to the Free Software Foundation, he said, in order to make sure that the processes remained free for all to use.

UPDATE: The N and O story is out and I’m not in it. I must become more pithy and less insightful! The story is a remix of yesterday’s NYTimes story with two paragraphs of local quotes dropped in. The NYTimes reporter is credited and the local reporter “contributed to this story.”

The Localness of local news

My collegues, Phil Meyer and Jock Lauterer, were two of the guests on yesterday’s State of Things call-in discussion show on WUNC. They were joined by Ken Ripley of the Spring Hope Enterprise. Along with them was, Robert Ashley, the new editor for the now-Paxton-run Durham Herald-Sun who had, as Rickie Ricardo would say, “Some ‘splanin’ to do.” The Paxton Group recently took over the Herald Sun and immediately and without ceremony canned over 20% of the staff from top to bottom.
I, like many of you, listened to the show in the WUNC SoT Archives as I was in a very exciting faculty retreat almost all day yesterday.
I did catch the end of the show during the evening rerun. Enough to hear Phil challenge newspapers to get out and make mistakes, to take audacious chances and to change the business. This was in a response to a call from “David from Greensboro” who asked if the Herald Sun might follow the Greensboro News and Record’s ground breaking staff blogging effort.
Ruby has some comments on this and other parts of the show on OrangePolitics.org

On listening to the archives, I’ve been enjoying Jock’s insights into the odd space that the Herald Sun occupies. Jock says that the Durham newspaper market is like a teenager — not quite a full grown daily and a community newspaper. Sometimes it shows itself off, flexing its muscles, then it panics and retreats to smaller more local behavior.

Phil Meyer is as deep and insightful as always describing the odd travels of newspapers over the past few decades esspecially the changing advertising market and the changing nature and competition in classifieds.

During call-ins, resourceful Fiona Morgan of the Independent makes up for the fact that Ashley wouldn’t return her calls. She jumps into the fray quickly naming names of those who were let go — more that Ashley had confessed to. He split hairs on who was a reporter and who wasn’t. The conversation turns to a discussion of news cartooning which Ashley (thinking now of Jock’s comment) says is no longer merited in a market the size of Durham. Jock also laments the firing of Ross Taylor the photographer. The gist seems to be that the paper is thinking like a small town paper (in Jock’s definition).

Today’s show will be Latino Media in North Carolina.

Off to presentations by NetApp President Thomas Mendoza and Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik.

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