I feel horrible

Sally's blog has not been up on the blog roll.
Make sure you check her out.

The Bald Truth

Jessica is all over this book. She always finds relevant videos.
So does Kasey.

Make sure you check in with Courtney who found, among other things, a different video of Shirky.

Another conversation you didn't know you were having

Let's start (or end?) with this post from Alyssa.
Especially the notion that Google is too good not to use, that we have to redefine privacy, that we need to figure out why we're willing not to care. And Lisa says we don't care.
The thing is, just the sheer prevalence of Google is a kind of power.
Here's Kevin on what happens when you use. Sheila knows a lot about cookies and spyware. M. Fitz doesn't like cookies so much anymore.

Matt D. is a good reporter, so he tried to pin down what Google does. Courtney A. pursued this question to all kinds of different levels. Who's in control? What kinds of information is truly surrendered. What about IP addresses? Is Google kind of an alternate consciousness, sorting all our questions and choices? Allison says Google is her best friend. But then she and her real friends thought about that a little more. We might want to discuss Jess's analogy to a drug dealer. Is Google a privacy time bomb?

Don't be evil? Jessica and Courtney A. discovered that was quietly decomissioned. why? Courtney isn't sure it ever meant anything anyway. Sheila seems to agree. I like the Lithwick reference -- the ranking system. Jessica thinks the two questions are inextricably linked. The motto and how Google exercises its basic function are inextricably linked. Matt wonders whether the slogan would really ever prohibit the company from doing something. Like, for example, putting in cookies that study what you look at even when you're not using Google. M. Fitz suggests that one's person's good may be another person's evil. I'm guessing that the bright line in our room will be age., that younger users like Greg won't be terribly bothered by the nature of Google and will be OK with its claim not to be evil. But Greg also believes in a kind of Lockean response to Google. Vive la common sense and les natural laws! Lisa doubts the boys of Google are mature enough to have a fully developed notion of good and evil worth paying heed to. The more you guys blog, the more Mephistophelean the pact seems to me.

If you don't read each other's blogs, you miss a lot! Check out Jessica's Google instruction videos.

A discussion you didn't know you were having

Dan doubts that it's advancing or transforming communication. Anyone want to argue?
Matt D. doubts it's transforming journalism.
John says FB sometimes breaks stories ahead of the journalists.


We need to talk about the criticisms, especially the terms of service criticism

I found this amazing page on FB privacy-- scroll all the way down and see some of the encyclopedic content.
Matt D. did a privacy survey
M. Fitz thinks the hacking and messing-with is the decline and fall.
Kasey thinks the very notion of privacy might be changing.
Tina on the Obama threat.



Matt D. thinks it's a mall.
MFitz can walk us through fan pages.

Life and death and the personal and the private.
A divorce is personal. Does a FB divorce cheapen life?
Relationship status, anyone?
A lot of you are pondering FB and death: Tina here.
This from CA is the kind of definition thing I was looking for. Part 1 has some good stuff too.
Lisa is also asking: what is it?
So is Jessica. (Remind me to say that the WAY Jessica got on FB is significant.)
I do want to talk about what a friend is. Tina on that.
I had my own experience with that, which was widely covered.

remind myself to show Dillon and Tripp and Rizzo and my new friend Michael.

remind myself to talk about the changing nature of transit through life -- re Wendy and the widening of the opinion circle.

You Guys

I've been trying to rememeber where it was that I had seen a real detailed rendering of a sample of the plagiarism problem. Matt reminded me.

Which is why -- thank you Courtney A. -- SPJ said it was theft.

Sheila doesn't like the online Courant.
Contained in Lisa's critique on the same themes is my suspicion that one of the things a newspaper -- or almost any news institution is selling is discernment about what is and isn't worth bothering with.

Jessica makes some interesting points on the Auriemma story.
Courtney A. seems sympathetic toward AA.
but it seems to me that we keep stumbling back toward the question: WHAT IS A JOURNALIST?

Matt explains the journalism notion of leaving a story in place.

Matt also gives you a radio reporter's view of the plagiarism story.

Dan almost never blogs about the assignment, but he always has interesting things to say -- this time about aggregation, Wikipedia and the whole concept of selling something of value (which may not be the future model for newspapers anyway).

I may eventually assign the podcast of this show on hyperlocal news referenced by Lisa. I thought Bass's comment on comments were the most interest part of his remarks (but Paul and I are old friends so I've heard al ot of his spiel before).

More Courant

Props to Greg for looking up the circulation figures.

Jessica wonders about the plagiarism scandal. Was it the kind of thing tha happens when you suddenly have 15 people soing a 30-person job?

Bowden Barks

So ... Mark Bowden.
If he were here tonight, what questions would you ask him?
What questions would you ask Richmond and Sexton?
Did you notice anything interesting about the WAY this article appeared?

Alhough he doesn't specifically reference the Atlantic article, Dan has a lot to say about what he imagines to be the mind of a blogger and a blog reader.

Here's Lisa on "what you have to worry about," but her post makes me think: who really dropped the ball here? I think Courtney C. wonders the same thing.

For Courtney A. it was the moment-to-moment nature of news (also mentioned in Pew) and the the question: what does journalism even mean? Is it sometimes little more than gossip?

Jessica, as we said, drew a lot of cross-parallels. In many ways, she sees Bowden's piece as documenting the new signfiicance of "every man" -- a rise caused by this.

Le Pew and You

In looking at the Pew study, Kasey was intrigued by the shift away from institution and toward indivudal.

It is increasingly the case, as the Pew study notes, that individual reporters can be supported and underwritten. There are even hyperlocal sites where stories are sponsored.

Kasey wrote about every writer having an equal voice. (Not sure I get the throwing star.) Can we talk about this?

Greg analyzed the report. He wrote, about the losses at newspapers, that they have made things worse by cutting. Discuss.

Matt was interested, of course, in the financial viability of radio news.

Courtney A. had alot of thoughts. She made reference to this article, which used Connecticut, in particular, to look at what happens when conventional legislative coverage withers. She, like Kasey is interested in the whole notion of citizen journalism and, like me, was intrigued by the rport's finding that citizen journalism sites seem to have less interactivity. We have to think about what that means, but we may not get there tonight.


She also noted the finding about how legacy sites do not link often to citizen sites. Not surprising but worth thinking about.

Courtney also frets about the death of newspapers. Kevin wonders what difference it makes if they publish only online.

(Jus)Tina posted on what Sheila would call the Silo Effect, the tendency of people to seek out information that confirms and does not challenge their existing prejudices. But she is also interested in something I too find fascinating: the most undocumented impact of online sources on sports coverage -- including sources that trash traditional sports coverage. Sports is really interesting, because its fans tend to geek out and will happily pay for more of what they want.
Why is that? There's an easy answer. An oddity. One of the early contributors to the preceding link then decided to geek out on something else and became one of our go-to sources last year for election coverage. That transition is described here. (I'm intrigued by the idea of a subculture of counter-experts. We may have to return to that.)

Jessica did sort of an omni-post, Pew, Annie Le and Bowden all together. She highlighted the decoupling of content from ad revenue in the Pew study.


Of interest to me: The New Haven Independent was among the new alternative journalism ventures mentioned.

Early moments in class blogging

As usual, Courtney A. has come storming out of the gate. I recommend her posts and the links therein.



But ...could there be ...another comparably high traffic blogger in our midst? Matt Dwyer had a lot to say in his first few days of blogging. And Matt is not the only one in class to focus on the Annie Le story. Jessica went there too.

So maybe we should all think a little bit about the Annie Le story and how it plays in to our subject areas.

To that end, I offer you this, which has quite a lot to say, although it misses the point that the New Haven Independent is more new than old media. (It's not a newspaper in any traditional sense.)