As Facebook slowly opens up, it's becoming possible to pull your own data for your own purposes. Dave Winer mentioned one way, so today, in just a minute, I added a block containing my Facebook status updates to my website pages (see the column on the left). I'm not entirely thrilled with the way it displays, so I may write my own module. At the moment it's just stock Drupal RSS aggregator functionality.
The other night I gave a speech at the John Siegenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University in which I urged the new-media workshop students to look something up on Wikipedia, which is, of course, infallible. That drew a good laugh. Siegenthaler, unfortunately, wasn't appearing until later in the week, so I couldn't tease directly.
Henry Blodget, who made and lost a fortune hyping the dotcom bubble, is back, and he's published a back-of-the-envelope analysis that purports to explain why newspapers are screwed: readers are migrating to the Internet, and Internet advertising can't deliver enough revenue to pay for newsgathering expenses.
Blodget's argument has more holes than a wheel of Emmenthaler. Here are just a few of them.
Are we seeing the death of the paid content model?
There is chatter everywhere -- mostly speculative and unsourced -- about the Wall Street Journal potentially flipping WSJ.com to a free model, a possibility that Rupert Murdoch was described as calling "a wash" financially.
There is a report in the New York Post that TimesSelect is headed for the door. (Didn't they report the same thing a couple of weeks ago?)
The other day I remarked that Facebook's idea of an open platform is a one-way street. Today Wired.com covers this issue with: "Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up."
Bill Densmore and Chris Peck have posed three interesting questions to people who have signed up for the Aug 7-8 "Journalism That Matters" seminar in Washington, and to members of a Facebook group. Here are my answers:
1) How does a community support journalism at a time when traditional newspaper-generated revenue is drying up?
I'm less concerned about journalism at the community level right now than I am about journalism at the national/global level.
As newspapers work to improve their search experience and embrace Web search as well as on-site search, they're being exploited by a new round of automated blog spam that displays Internet drug listings right on the newspapers' websites.
This allows unscrupulous scammers to present their pitch under the "trusted information provider" brand of the newspaper. And it undoubtedly undermines the newspaper's brand.
Tribune Company and McClatchy sites in particular are being targeted. [Update: nytimes.com also is being exploited.]
WSJ reports that Google's long-rumored mobile phone is on its way to becoming a reality.
Drawing from no actual evidence whatsoever, mixed with a big helping of baseless speculation, here's what I think we'll get:
While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.
For as long as there have been J-schools, professors have been telling their students to refrain from projecting their personal experiences onto the world they're covering. At least I hope that's still going on. But judging from the responses to Jeff Jarvis' "Local lives" post, a lot of people seem to be forgetting how to do that.
Jeff's point: Local is very important, full of opportunity, and very hard to do.
