Dan Gillmor points to an incendiary post by Paul Conley, who declares, "you cannot train someone to be part of a culture" and "there's no room for Web newbies." Conley is writing about B2B (trade) journalism, but presumably the same position might be taken in regard to general journalism.
Registration has begun for Ifra's PublishAsia 2008, to be held April 2-3 in Macau, China. Macau is the former Portuguese colony on the Chinese coast.
The Web seems to be the major focus. Ifra's announcement cites these topics:
After Charlie Gibson's excellent handling of the New Hampshire primary debates Saturday night my hopes for television journalism were temporarily raised, but watching the coverage over the last two days has restored my cynicism. The cable networks may have temporarily pushed aside the likes of O'Reilly and Dobbs, but I still feel like I'm watching coverage of Britney Spears or Anna Nicole.
Aaron Smith at Pew muses about the effect YouTube is having in the presidential primary race as Barack Obama's powerful Iowa caucuses speech is relayed around the Internet:
As newspapers fade from their historical role in covering world events, we're left with an unhealthy dependency on the newsgathering and news judgment of television networks. Writing for MIT's Technology Review, former NBC reporter John Hockenberry shreds any notion we might have that the networks are up to the task.
A particularly telling vignette:
Mallary Jean Tenore has a piece at Poynter.org titled Journalists Develop, Dismiss Digital Identities that includes the predictable "other side" in which a luddite just doesn't have the time.
In this case the luddite happens to be the "editor/opinion pages" of the Houston Chronicle. That's sad, because it's another example of failure to perceive opportunity.
"Digital identity" is just plain identity. Either people know who you are and what you stand for, or they don't.
We're coming up on the time to post New Year's resolutions. Here's a proposal: Newspapers should resolve to be more like Apple and less like Microsoft.
Just a few years ago, Apple was beaten. Its goose was cooked. It was on life support in the shape of a temporary investment by Microsoft, which feared antitrust action if Apple disappeared.
There's a movement among some of my blogbuddies to line up in the outrage column in the wake of this week's FCC decision on broadcast licensing, which drops a longtime general ban on assignment of new licenses to owners of daily newspapers in the same market.
I just can't get excited about it. It may feel good to carry a lance against big corporate media ownerships, but it seems to me a case of fighting the last war.
Get this: 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, while only 20 percent of online teen boys do so, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life project. This comes as no surprise to me; I have two such female creatures in my household and it's something I can observe up close.
Saul Hansell of the New York Times reveals that Google has people in its magic black box. Aha! The great mechanical brain turns out to be a mechanical Turk.
