Today is the day that much of the internet is going dark to protest the SOPA/PIPA acts in the United States.
I wrote a little piece on it for Acceler8or, and I’ve blacked out my logo for the day.
Please, take a moment to register your displeasure with legislators. Don’t break the internet.
Like it?
Well, I told you I had some neat things in the works, and today, I’m happy to report that Acceler8or.com, a new website featuring news and original articles about transhumanist and Singularitarian culture, is online and rocking.
The site editor is none other than R.U. Sirius, whom you might remember from his time editing Mondo 2000, or perhaps his collaborations with Timothy Leary, or maybe even from his presidential bid under the banner of The Revolution.
I did the design and implementation of the site, which is based on WordPress, with some rich customizations, and a theme I build from scratch using the Blueprint CSS framework.
Already, there’s articles on the death of music, a new BBC series called All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, and many links to current news of interest to transhumanists, futurists, and technophiles.
I couldn’t be happier with the project, so pay the site a visit, and watch for coming tweaks and improvements as more and more content gets added.
ReadWriteWeb reports today on a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The takeaway?
According to the survey, 46% of people now say they get their news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local television is more popular among Americans, with 50% indicating that’s their regular source for news.
Not to mention this beautiful graphic:
So things are looking good for the web. Not so good for newspapers. Even less well for magazines, and worst of all for cable news.
I suspect that a large reason for the 13.7% drop in cable news numbers can be directly related to the perception of partisanship on most of those stations. At least, I hope that’s the reason — it’s a good one.
CC-licensed image, courtesy of Steve Rhodes, via Flickr
This post is an amalgam of several emails I sent to a private journalism-related listserv. I’ve got a project brewing in the ol’ noggin relating to journalism, objectivity, and transparency. I figured I’d post this publicly, in the hopes of soliciting more opinions, so please feel free to post in the comments.
So, one of my pet peeves about the universe of journalism is the fact that most (primarily non-journalist) folks, and particularly those on the conservative end of the political spectrum, insist that journalists must be “objective” in their reporting.
This notion is, of course, under constant debate, but it has recently been brought to the fore by several cases, including Juan Williams, Keith Olberman, Helen Thomas, and Octavia Nasr, who was fired over a mere tweet which was seen by some folks as partisan.
See also this article on TechCrunch for some insight:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/08/we-need-more-opinions-in-news-not-less/
Frankly, I don’t believe that it’s possible for such a thing as genuinely objective reporting to exist in the real world. We might aspire to write just the facts, we might try our best to present every side of an argument without favoring one or the other, but ultimately, there’s no such thing as a human with no bias, and therefore by logical necessity, no reporting without bias.
Furthermore, because of the epistemological impossibility of “objective” reporting, I’m personally inclined to treat those who base their journalistic reputation on objectivity as suspect, because they either A) haven’t considered the philosophical consequences of their claim or B) they don’t believe that I’ve thought about it deeply enough to see their claims are bogus, or perhaps worst of all C) they genuinely DO believe that they are being more objective than anyone else, which is a level of self-delusion I’m not prepared to accept.
The primary benefit that a professional journalist brings to the table (in my opinion) is the impetus towards investigation and a willingness to discuss multiple points of view in their stories. Take for example Dave Weigel, who was fired from the WaPo for comments he made on a private listserv. Even though he didn’t personally hold the same beliefs as the folks he was reporting on, nobody was complaining about the content of his stories. He was reporting on a point of view that differed from his own, and apparently doing it well enough to satisfy the conservatives of the world (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this point). Ultimately, he was undone by expressing his personal opinions in a private forum.
Perhaps it is that the real advantage of professional journalism over “citizen journalism” is in fact that it requires a certain amount of exposure to ideas which may not completely cohere with your intellectual predisposition? Maybe what the NYT, Dallas Morning News, and Chicago Tribune offer is the opportunity to encounter a bit of cognitive dissonance from time to time. It may not be comfortable, but that just means you’re thinking about it.
I thought Mathew Ingram presented it well in this article on GigaOm :
David Weinberger, a former fellow with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has also argued that “transparency is the new objectivity,” and that readers can now make up their own minds about whether journalists are credible or not by looking at the sources of the news they are reporting, rather than relying on the notion of objectivity. “Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases,” he said in a blog post last year. “Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.” Transparency is also much more effective online because journalists can link to supporting evidence for their arguments, Weinberger said, instead of just relying on the principle of objectivity to buttress their opinions. “Objectivity,” he wrote, “is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.”
Jay Rosen has taken to referring to the mythical objectivity which some journalists invoke as the “view from nowhere”, a term apparently coined by Thomas Nagel, and he’s got a lot of opinions which I find myself agreeing with on the subject.
Any thoughts from the noosphere on the subject? Is transparency the new objectivity? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.
Tags: Chicago Tribune, Citizen journalism, Dallas Morning News, Dave Weigel, David Weinberger, Entertainment/Culture, Epistemology, Helen Thomas, Jay Rosen, Journalism, Juan Williams, Keith Olberman, logic, Mass media, Mathew Ingram, news, Objectivity, Octavia Nasr, Philosophy, Professional journalism, Thomas Nagel
See, folks, this is why October in Chicago is so great. Just look at this list! So many horror movies! So little time!
Oct. 1
Oct. 2
Oct. 4
Oct. 8
Oct. 9
Oct. 9-10 — Music Box Massacre @ Music Box Theater, including:
Oct. 15
Oct. 16
Oct. 22
Oct. 23
Oct. 23 & 24 — Horror Society Film Festival @ the Portage Theater including:
Oct. 25
October 26
October 27
Oct. 28
Oct. 29
Oct. 30
Did I miss some? If I did, leave me the info in the comments, and I’ll add them to the list…
Tags: Chicago, Entertainment/Culture, films, horror
Here’s a short list of key words that will guarantee I will ignore your TV show, movie, etc.
Did I miss some of your favorites? Let me know in the comments.
Perhaps not the most exciting video ever, here’s a quick, 45-second look at the environment at Millennium Park yesterday evening, during a free show by legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen and his band.
Once again, shot with Motorola Droid phonecam. This one is hosted on Youtube, because I wanted to get an idea of quality differences between the videos that I encode and upload to my own host, and those which are encoded and hosted by YouTube. Consider it an A/B test with the Maifest video below.
Wowee! My old friends published a mention of my book, along with a mini-interview, in this week’s Happytown column!
Here’s the relevant portion:
Not a day goes by in which someone doesn’t ask, “Hey, Happytown™, whatever happened to that Ask Ian the I.T. Guy? He sure had a nice ponytail.” In an effort to satiate Orlando’s thirst for information on our former I.T. guru and columnist, Ian Monroe, we tracked down the man himself and found him with a newly minted degree from the Medill School of Journalism in Chicago and, more exciting still, a new book! It’s called The ____ of _____ by Means of Natural _____, which probably needs a tiny bit of explanation.
See, Monroe, ever the intellectual prankster, “cleaned up” Charles Darwin’s masterwork, The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, for evangelical Christians by redacting every word in Darwin’s book not also found in the Bible. Now even Baptists can read about evolution without risking their immortal soul! Thanks Ian!
Here’s our tiny little interview with Monroe. For more information on the book check his website at www.ianmonroe.com.
Happytown™: Aren’t you making fun of Jesus and thus risking eternal damnation?
Monroe: On the contrary, Jesus is never mentioned in the Origin of Species. If he were, I assure you, he would retain his rightful place as lord of lords within my King James Version as well.
Happytown™: Is it possible to still glean important concepts from Darwin’s work after running it through your Jesus sieve?
Monroe: Not really, no. It’s pretty unreadable. However, I did learn some interesting things about the Bible while I was working on it. For instance, did you know that unicorns are mentioned in the Bible twice? That makes them more real than the entire continent of South America, which didn’t even appear once.
Happytown™: Are you planning to do the same for other great works of science?
Monroe: Darwin was particularly well-suited to analysis through a biblically correct lens; I imagine that most modern science would yield even more redactions. However, I invite readers to “correct” their own texts with the interactive Bible masher on my website, ianmonroe.com/bibleizer/.
So, the Bibleizer doesn’t work at the moment … terribly sorry about that. I’ll have it working tonight, though, so stay tuned. (I’ll update this post when it works.)
This comes via boingboing.net today.
After J-school, I’m more convinced than ever that newspapers (ink on dead tree) are pretty much doomed, with the exception of some niches — free papers, alternative papers, hyperlocal neighborhood papers.
Even among my journalist friends, I can’t think of anyone that has an actual subscription to a dead-tree daily newspaper.
Anyway, enjoy the video.
As many of you are probably aware, I’ve spent the last couple of months working on the Interactive Innovation Project for Fall 2009. This is the capstone project of my year at Medill.
The project has been about obituaries in print and online, and about how obituaries drive readership to local media outlets.
One of the two major pieces of the project was to produce a report on the state of obituaries in America these days. I had a pretty large hand in this aspect of the project, as I was one of the primary authors of the report. I’m happy to say that today, that report has been released.
From the obitresearch.com blog about the project:
“To better understand the nature of our project and the role of Legacy.com in today’s obituary publishing industry, the Fall 2009 Interactive Innovation Project team at the Medill School of Journalism has been diligently researching the history and trends of American obituary writing. We have summarized our findings in a report that we have released this morning. In this report, we examine the nature of the contemporary American obituary, a phenomenon that constitutes an important content category for modern newspapers – and, increasingly, for publishers in other media.”
UPDATE: Oh, hey, look at this — we got a mention on the Washington Post Post Mortem blog!
UPDATE 2: Another mention, from an Editor & Publisher blog!
UPDATE 3: An article about the report appeared in the Vancouver Sun.
UPDATE 4 (12/8/2009): A story about the report appeared on the Northwestern University website. We also got a link from Romenesko on Poynter.org
UPDATE 5 (12/11/2009): The AP wrote a story about the report, mentioning me by name. That AP story has gotten republished all over, and even ended up on NPR’s Morning Edition. Today, Michael S. Malone did an opinion piece for ABC News, which also mentions our report prominently. Another article on Canada.com. Oh, hey, look at this! My buddy Jeff Billman wrote it up for a blog on the Philadelphia City Paper. Here’s another article on Examiner.com.
The _____ of _____ by Means of Natural _____
Mr. Antonym |
