BuzzMachine

Digg releases its official T-shirt. It says “I digg” followed by a blank white space. The shirt comes with a red Sharpie so you can fill in your own blank. Gotta love these guys. [via Jake]

I recommend that every American journalist and news executive listen to this speech on newspapers in the age of blogs by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, who I think is a rare and likely singular visionary in the newspaper industry. He also is the editor I know who has the most courage to face and embrace the future. To those of you who read this space and various of the sites that link in and out of here, there’s not much unheard-of in his speech — except that you won’t hear any of it coming from the mouths of editors elsewhere.

Mike Butcher does a great job blogging the speech. You can listen to or download it here. I’ll un-live-blog quotable bits of it now, undigested and in order. But I will caution my fellow Americans that this lecture is delivered in the native British tongue: irony. So please resist literal-minded comments to wry lines. [Full disclosures: I write and consult for the Guardian, though this isn't an act of sucking up to them; they don't pay me that much. I consult for The New York Times Company, which Rusbridger talks about. Craig Newmark, whom he also talks about, invested in the news startup I'm working on. He talks about meeting the Digg guys; I introduced them. And I've posted on both Comment is Free and HuffingtonPost.]

Rusbridger begins speaking about the fundamental question of the future of newspapers. “Some people,” he says, “think it’s an even more fundamental question than that: whether newspapers have a future. And wrapped up in all that is whether newspapers deserve to have a future. And if they do have a future, as what?” This from the editor who dared wonder whether his company had just installed its last presses.

Rusbridger shows the audience a chart he showed me that describes the fate of newspapers in the Western world. This is my very crude rendition of his crude drawing: The line headed down, to the left, represents newspapers’ circulation and revenue, declining. The line on the right, moving up, is online news traffic and revenue, both rising. In the middle, in the the pincer between these two lines, is the green blob where newspapers are stuck, trying to figure out how to survive and how to leap onto the line that is moving up. The added challenge — this is me talking now, not Rusbridger — is that advertisers still value print, the line on the left, even though it is declining, while consumers — especially the young, which is to say, the future — clearly value the line to the right, online, and that is where the growth is. So newspapers must continue to produce the old, expensive product in print to get higher ad revenue even though the audience they want is already online. A stinky blob, that.

Rusbridger talks about how ownership affects one’s view of these lines. Publicly held companies are, of course, cutting back or selling off to get “out of this business of managing decline.” One British company tried recently to sell its regional papers but couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay the price. Some people, like Richard Desmond, he says, “don’t believe in the internet so they’re just going to pretend it doesn’t exist…. Probably at some point the Express titles are just going to fall off the edge of a cliff as the last reader dies.”

“I love newspapers,” Rusbridger says, still by way of introduction. “I’ve worked in newspapers for nearly 30 years. What I’m saying tonight is not advocacy and wishing the end of newspapers. I think it’s sometimes a bit like the world of second-hand books, because I love that feeling of going ’round second-hand book shops, and the people in musty old cardigans who work in second-hand bookshops, and that feeling of just looking down shelves for books that you didn’t know existed, that serendipity — it’s a very similar experience to reading a newspaper.” But he knows that searching the internet for a particular book is better than going to such a shop. He also acknowledges that his shopping online is “killing my local bookseller off even though I value and treasure my local bookseller. And that’s a kind of metaphor for what’s happening in the print industry today. And a lot of that comes down to this man….”

Cue picture of Craig Newmark. Russbridger explains Craigslist, its impact on the newspaper industry, and its “very unusual business model: It’s free to both sides…. Now that’s a difficult business model to beat.” He says that “the people who are really terrified of Craig Newmark are The New York Times.” He explains that job ads on Craigslist in three cities cost $20 — and that adds up to $10 million a year among 18 employees, he estimates. Then he demonstrates ordering a deluxe $958 ad on the NY Times site — he makes up a call for journalists to work in Guardian America, “and I told them to apply to C.P. Scott in Manchester” (the Guardian’s legendary editor of 57 years). The contrast continues: He shows pictures of Craig’s humble headquarters and the new Times headquarters — “and you see the nature of The New York Times’ problem.” Of course, falling advertising is the problem. Rusbridger reviews the history of newspapers. In Britain, in the beginning, newspapers were supported by their politicians until “advertisers gave newspapers a form of independence.” But now those advertisers are going elsewhere. “There are great, bleeding chunks going out of newspaper revenue at a time when sales are down…. Most journalists are finally getting this The penny is finally dropping….

But he continues: “They’re not necessarily quite up with the next bit, which is about the changing nature of editorial. And this is a thing which is more difficult to grasp and for journalists in a way much more threatening. And I think we’re only at the beginning of trying to figure what this one is all about.”

He calls papers like The New York Times “a tablet of stone, it is a paper of great authority. And if you ever go to a New York Times editorial meeting, it’s a bit like a religious ceremony.” He talks about the effort and resource that goes into the front page. “‘Believe us,’ is the message. If it goes onto the front page of The New York Times it’s there because it’s important…. ‘You may not want to read it but it’s our opinion.’ And this is a model that has existed again for a hundred years….

“This is journalism as revelation: ‘We are the figures of authority. All these important people at the top speak to us. You can’t speak to because you’re too little…. We are the conduit and we tell you what’s important. It’s like this. Believe us.’ And occasionally, the little people would write a letter…. And we’d print a few of these letters very graciously. But most of them we’d drop in the bin…. This was the paper I inherited in 1995, which had been printed since 1821….”

Then came technology that enabled the conversation, first in the form of email. “This was a big challenge to journalists because they didn’t know quite how to respond and some journalists got quite huffy about this and said, ‘Look, push off, I’m the figure of authority here… Our job is to tell you what’s what. We don’t want to hear from you because frankly we’re the experts around here.’” Others, he said, found it valuable to improve their journalism.

But often, the people were ignored, so: “What happened next is that these people started talking to each other. They didn’t ask our permission to do this at all… And they started forming little groups of people who began critiquing newspapers… They went behind our back to our sources because, increasingly, the information that we were using was available on the internet…. A bit cheeky of the readers to do that…” (Remember my warning about irony, folks.)

He says it got to the point where he would come into the office and if the paper had made “a mistake about anything, dozens of people around the world had already spotted this and were challenging this. This was a different kind of audience. The old audience… were willing to take on trust your view of a wide range of information that we were saying is important. And these people are, to a much greater degree, self-selecting…” That is, they follow the news that interests them. “Now they’re not wrong, these people, because the internet now does an awful of information on an awful lot of subjects that’s better than newspapers. I shouldn’t be saying this, live, to the world outside. I should be keeping this as a secret.”

He shows his audience a wide range of sites — across the arts and books and travel — with a great gobs of opinion from the public. “It’s infinitely deeper than the experience of simply reading one critic in a newspaper,” he says. “I’m not saying it should replace that. but it’s a very rich medium.” He says this is “the beginning of a complete inversion of the newspaper model. It’s not us telling you.”

He talks about Arianna Huffington — whom a colleague of his once described as “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus” — and how her HuffingtonPost is bigger the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Republic online. He concedes that it is sometimes “a rather cloying snapshot of liberal America” but adds that unexpected voices pop up. And he compares Huffpost with TimesSelect — opinion in public for free vs. opinion in private at a cost — and goes through the numbers to estimate The Times makes $10 million dollars a year on the pay service (I’m quoting Rusbridger, remember.) But that is “not going to pay the gas bill” on The Times’ new headquarters, he says. So The Guardian follows Huffington’s lead and starts Comment is Free.

And he talks about Ricky Gervais and his record-setting podcast for The Guardian and how, 10 years ago, if he’d suggested to his bosses that they go into the comedy audio business, he wouldn’t have gotten the job. “Now, should a newspaper do that? Our readers seem to think so… But I don’t think it would have occurred to many journalists inside the building.” He talks about TV and newspapers both meeting in radio. It is convergence at last.

And, of course, he asks the question everyone asks:”Where’s the revenue? This is my favorite quote from the book about Google: ‘They had no revenue model until 2001′…. And it’s now worth, depending on the day of the week, between $40 and $80 billion.”

He tells his audience about a wide range of Web 2.0 companies and talks about having dinner with the Digg guys, who he says will “either be multibillionnaires in a few years time or just go on being geeks.” He does take some hope that the aggregators find newspaper content interesting; that’s what they’re aggregating. This is why he says it’s “mad to be sacking journalists,” because we need the content they produce, though he then adds, “we may need to sack some.”

Later, he is asked about aggregators and whether he objects to what they do and whether he can stop them. He replies that, yes, you can tell crawlers to “push off.” And he confesses to sitting with the Digg guys, seeing them make money while The Guardian loses money, and wondering about building a wall. “But actually, they are driving traffic back to the Guardian site. The more of a wall that you put around, whether it’s a wall of payment or a wall of registration, the more you’re repelling people rather than building an audience for the day when we hope that advertising will come in like the cavalry and rescue us. So I think at the moment, the smarter thing to do is to make your content available everywhere and to have it aggregated and linked to like mad by everybody in the world, because that way you will reach a gigantic audience. And that matters journalistically. If you’re in the business of journalism for influence, and because of the Guardian worldview that you believe in, it’s terrific to have an audience of 14 million instead of 400,000. That’s wonderful. So why would you want to turn them away?”

It’s still a controversial issue in some quarters of the news business. See questions from Simon Waldman, bizboss of Guardian Unlimited, here.
And see my Guardian column about the World Association of Newspapers kvetching about aggregation and my arguments with that here.

Rusbridger talks about the value of newspapers to an informed democracy. I won’t try to transcribe that bit, because you do hear this from American editors as well.

“In a way, it’s the most exciting time to be in newspapers. It’s the most revolutionary time since Gutenberg and Caxton [the first English printer]: Everything is being challenged. But it’s also frightening because many of the things we took for granted are also being challenged.”

My transcription is clumsy. Please do listen to the talk in full, with benefit of accent, irony, and intelligence.

My Guardian column this is week is a followup to the grander, cosmic meaning of l’affairianna Huffington and Walgate (it’s here and here). A snippet:

What is a blog? Well, there’s the most frequently asked question of the age. But the answer has nothing to do with the tools and technology that make this phenomenon possible. No, it’s quite simple, actually: a blog is a person in conversation. In this age when every message is manufactured, metered, spun, filtered, and flacked, that is precisely what makes blogs so refreshing: their humanity.

And that is why a scandal erupted in the blog world when George Clooney announced that he did not write what was attributed to him at HuffingtonPost.com, a US group blog….

he Huffington and Walgate affairs reveal less about blogs than about the media world they leave behind, where the words attributed to the powerful, rich and famous rarely actually come out of their mouths anymore….

Richard Sambrook, the visionary director of global news at the BBC, blogs about the role of citizen journalism but, more interesting to me, he codifies what professional journalists do in a distributed world:

So if information is commodotised, and the public can tell their own stories, what’s the role for the journalist? I came up with three things - verification (testing rumour and clearing fog), explanation (context and background) and analysis (a Google search won’t provide judgement). And journalists still have the resources to go places and uncover things that might otherwise remain hidden. Citizens can do all of those things, but not consistently, and with even less accountability than the media. Brand still matters.

I would add that the professionals also have to add a few new roles, both of which require a new level of openness and generosity: They need to share their knowhow with citizen journalists (I dare not say “train” them but rather let their reader-colleagues know how to avoid libel or get access to records or doublecheck a source). And they need to share trust (that is, find out who knows their stuff and link to them, since the professional journalist can no longer pretend to cover everything). [via David Weinberger]

We had Weekend Good Morning, America on (because my wife is boycotting NBC News until Katie Couric leaves) and it was an incredible attempt at old-fartism. They interviewed the organizer of a rave party that turned tragic and, after saying that there were virtually no drugs there, they show a scene from a generic rave party and list all the drugs that are usually there. It made no sense. They then tease a story about the “new trend” in high-school kids having fight parties. Yes, that’s sweeping the nation along with raves and meth and mary jane. Most shocking, they pitch a story about the amazing trend in single women buying houses on their own even before they’ve found “Mr. Right.” Who turned the Wayback Machine to 1967? And they say you need professionals to turn out this claptrap? Yes, you’d have to pay me to do this.

See 25 Peeps. [via Jochen]

Tara Hunt, marketer of the future, says on her blog that Riya, the much-blogged-about (thanks to her) photo face-recognition service, got one million photos uploaded in two days.

The Asheville Citizen-Times (great name, by the way) adds conversation to its news stories. I like their explanation (and not just because I’m quoted).

Alex Albrecht, costar of Diggnation, has just premiered his new cooking show for geeks with the greatest title alive: Ctrl+Alt+Chicken (download it there or watch it, free, via iTunes).

It’s a hoot and a half. He and his girlfriend (I think), Heather Stewart, try to make chicken cordon bleu but fail spectacularly. It ends up burned on the outside and perilously raw on the inside. But it’s still fun watching them and, if you care, you do get the recipe. The show goes just a touch over the top when actors must act in a sketch moment near the start. It’s best when they’re just having fun in the kitchen and, in the great tradition of the Galloping Gourmet before he found the wagon, they’re getting sloshed on wine. The couple thing works. So does the honesty. As they’re melting fat and more fat in a pot and they get rather disgusted at this, Alex says in a cooking show, “This is why people don’t cook. Becuase you look at it while it’s cooking and you don’t want to eat it.” Heather says, “It takes forever and my pizza would have already been here.” They’re planning an episode when they just eat the cold pizza. Now that is cooking for geeks.

Note well that this isn’t just people sitting and talking to the camera. They’re actually doing something. They’re entertaining. They made a show. And they showed the world. They did it without studios or executives or networks. Welcome to the future of TV. I like it.

I’m glad to report that the unconference worked and I just told unconference guru Dave Winer that in email.

The point was that the people in the room would set the agenda and they’d accomplish this via conversation, not lecture. I think it worked for a few reasons:
1. Everyone in the room wanted to accomplish the same thing. We had a goal. We all had different ideas about how to get there. But we came in wanting to move the peanut, not just chew on it.
2. There were the right number of people there: enough to give us varied perspectives and experience but not so many that people couldn’t be heard.
3. The organizers set the exact right tone. They made the essential opening points so everyone else didn’t have to. They set a high expectation for work and civility. Then they let the conversation happen.
4. We came in knowing what the unformatted format would be, so everyone knew what to expect: unconference rules. Thanks, Dave.
5. We had stellar leadership. Wendy Warren, an editor at the Daily News, is a star. When people tried to turn her into the teacher with their raised hands and plaintive-call-on-me-please looks, she tried to get people to just have a conversation. She joined in that conversation but never tried to take it over. When things bogged down, she raised the next subject. When things threatened to get a little citric, she lightened things up. Charm helps. These sessions still need leaders, just not lecturers. The unconference isn’t about anarchy but about empowering and that’s what she did. So if you unconference, pick your leaders well.

This makes me all the more exhausted and exasperated looking at programs for other conferences coming up with damnable panels — and I’m on some: 45 minutes of droning down the line followed by 15 minutes of questions from the audience, when the real goal should be answers from everyone. Almost as bad are the sessions where everyone get a “turn” but because they happen in order of hand raised, the discussion turns into a festival of the nonsequitor (well, I want to respond to the person who spoke three turns ago….). The goal should always be conversation.

There’s a meeting coming up about linking and I was quite obnoxious in my response to the invitation, pitching the Winer gospel of the unconference. I told the organizer to blow up the panels and tear down the essentially insulting distinction between panel and audience and get the people in the room to truly link. He should have told me to go blow but, to his credit, he said he’s trying to figure out how to do this. I know it looks daunting, but it’s really not. At the first Bloggercon, when Dave told me minutes before my session was to begin that the entire room was the panel, I turned into Phil Donahue and let it happen.

At the upcoming Syndicate conference, organizer Eric Norlin pushed me to be one of the keynoters. I tried to refuse; I said that I didn’t know as much as the room, accumulated. I finally agreed to do it only if I could turn into Phil and start the session from the end — the “question” period, except I’ll be the one asking the people in the room questions because they’re the ones with the answers. There will be too many people in the room and not enough time and not a clear enough goal to have an unconference like yesterday’s. Will this work in an hour? Will it be of any value? Will it be utter humilation? I have no idea. But it’s worth the risk to blow up the broken format of the conference. I’ll let you know how the unkeynote works: or better yet, you’ll read on the blogs of those there what didn’t work and why.

: OPML camp struggles with how to unconference.

I’m in Philly at the Annenberg School of Communication for the Norg unconference: A remarkable, perhaps historic, gathering of newspaper people and bloggers starting a conversation about saving news. Will Bunch, a columnist on the Daily News and blogger wrote a post four or five months ago about newspapers reaching their nadir. Karl Martino, a blogger who started PhillyFuture, a gaggle of local bloggers, responded and together with colleages — Wendy Warren, an editor at the Daily News; Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerilla and with hosting from Annenberg — they put together this day.

I say this is the day that the war ends. This isn’t journalism against bloggers anymore. It never was, really. This is journalists and bloggers together in favor of news.

Will Bunch says that in the time since he wrote his post, newspapers are finally showing visible change: newspapers trying not to think of themselves as newspapers but as news organizations (hence “norg”). He says that “newspaper people had staked their identity on being newspaper people.” The conversations at papers on what to do about shrinkage were all about print circulation. “People as recently as a year ago were living in a dreamworld about how to salvage” what they do. He says that in the first 20 years of his career, it’s amazing how little changed. “It was a very static world for the last 50 years…. It was hard for us to imagine a world where newspapers weren’t the dominant news source…

Karl Martino comes up with the wiser metaphor for media’s world change. We always say that TV didn’t kill radio; ergo, newspapers must be safe. Karl, instead, sees this as LPs moving to CDs to MP3s. One m medium — paper — may, indeed, go away. “The music remains. The music doesn’t go away.”

The goal of the day up on the screen: “All we have to do is create the future of local news in Philadelphia. We are the right people to make this happen. The ideas we develop are the essential ideas.”

This is an unconference — no speakers, the agenda in the hands of everyone — because, Warren says, “Whoever’s in the conversation is the right person to have in the conversation.”

And so it begins, with introductions:

Dan Rubin, the newspapers’ daily blogger here (and a good reporter and nice guy) says that he goes out in the morning to pick up his papers and when he returns home his kids already know the news from one.

Fred Mann, who started and runs Philly.com for the papers (we started working together, lo, 12 years ago when I was at Advance) says he just returned from San Jose, where he saw his Knight Ridder colleagues. If this were a vlog, you’d see eyes roll and hear a sigh.

The folks from Phillyblog — which is really a forum — say that they have 6,000 members who report the news. If there has been a shooting, they say, you’ll learn about it immediately from “the people who heard the bullets.”

Duncan Black, aka Atrios (sans laptop), says he’s here because he loves local news and we need to find the way and the economic model to tell the story of the city better.

I’m not giving you the intros to nearly all the people; I don’t type that fast. But it’s a wonderful assemblage of people who are here because they care about news.

Carl Lavin, deputy ME of the Inquirer, says that he works with more than 100 journalists covering the suburbs but that there are hundreds of thousands of people in those suburbs who know more and the question is how to collaborate. He says that newspapers have been talking about being cross-platform for years but — and I’m paraphrasing — that they didn’t get it or mean it. But Bunch’s coining of “norg” has made a change, he said. Lavin also brings up the other question that always comes up: how to make money to support this.

Madrak, a journalist-turned-blogger, says that newspaper people make a mistake when they think that bloggers hate newspapers. They don’t. Bloggers love newspapes; they just get disappointed when they aren’t everthing they can be. (I corrected this quote later with Madrak’s guidance.)

Two students talk about wanting to do this for a living but they are concerned about whether they will be able to. I’d say it’s not clear whether they can get a job. It’s also not clear whether they can make a living. But I do believe they can be paid.

Jen Musser-Metz, who works at Philly.com (and with whom I used to work way back at the beginnings of NJ.com) says that she works to bring the Inquirer newsroom into this century.

Someone who works with the local Indymedia (can’t see his nametag) says his concern is how to fund investigative journalism. The business question comes up from all sides.

Amy Webb of Dragonfire says that she left newspapers because she couldn’t stand editors. That, I recall, is why Nick Denton and I said in an IM long ago, in my blog infancy, said we liked blogs: “no editors.”

: The question at an unconference is: what’s the agenda? The group contributes agenda proposals, going up on a wiki to be edited. A blob of those, all unfairly summarized:

Webb says that online should be run by the technologists more than the editors. Rubin asks what would happen in Philly if a left-wing power bought one paper and a right-wing power the other (note to myself: I need to post about why I think that could be a good thing; see London). I say that the starting point is to define what local news can and should be: what are we saving and what can we do now we couldn’t do before? It’s not about saving newspaper or — pardon me — saving newsrooms. It’s about growing news. Sandy Shea of the Daily News asks what democracy requires as an agenda item. Another question, Madrak says, is that newspapers can be skewed by serving the wrong public. The shareholder question comes up: Are shareholders the constituency of newspapers? Is that in competition with “our constitutional duty,” Madrak asks. This always comes up. But in this room, to my delight, people immediately say that the issue is how to make money. Duncan Black says that newspapers have squandered the opportunity to make money with audience online. The question comes up: what is the relationship of citizen journalism and professional journalism. This will be the meat of it and the discussion revs up here, too fast to Boswell. Diversity is raised as an issue; this room is mostly white. The digital divide is raised and a student says the web must be treated as a utility that goes out to all people (see Philly’s ubiquitous wi-fi project). Warren brings up the issue of bloggers not having the legal protection; see this. Fred Mann, online newspaper company exec, raises the question of whether newspaper companies should be public. I say that the issue isn’t stockholders; the issue is management. A guy from an upstart website that can’t afford investigative journalism speaks up; I say that perhaps one day his company can go public and raise the money to do that. It’s not the stock market — or the market pressure — that is the problem. It’s what you do about that, I believe. Next debate: Is a la carte news bad for us and for democracy? Should there be editors who says what we ought to know? Are editors the best to do that? Duncan Black says this is also a matter of style: We present news dully. Journalism, he says, is not just conventional print journalism; it is Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus and the New York Post (his examples). There is much discussion about the Domenech affair at WashingtonPost.com and why the Post felt it needed to take him over, why other papers have not covered this story, and more. I raise this to the meta level: What are the ethics of news and journalism?

Wendy Warren starts a lightning round: What do we want a norg to be? Answers from the room: A filter…. credibility… interactivity… tangibility (i.e. print, free, to reach people not online)…. multiplatform…. media literacy (not just consumption but creation)…. it has a voice… it gives voice to the public…. relevant… compelling…. agenda-setting…. empowering…. face-to-face… distributed…. continuous…. 24-hour… smarter at promotion…. ethical… economically viable…. cover government… investigative…. diverse…. raise revenue… share revenue with the edge…. support journalism legally… adaptive…. innovative… risk-taking…. resiliant…. able to try and fail and try again….

A young intern at the Daily News gets the last point and she wonders why the heck reporters don’t have blogs to talk with people directly, to engage, to be transparent. Listen to the future talking.

: LATER: What would a meeting be without breakout sessions? So we broke out and talked in groups about the business and platforms; the content and culture; the responsibility, roughly stated. This will be difficult to summarize; I’ll add a link to the wiki when it’s up.

A few interesting ideas that have come up:

The idea of a “norg” as a coop. I think of that as a coop of news gatherers and sharers (e.g., the coop sells your ads and promotes you but you still own what you do: your reporting and content). Another notion is a coop of the public (which, of course, is a public company… which is where this started).

Another idea is that a “norg” can fulfill some of the functions of a wire service (e.g., covering the obvious stuff so everybody doesn’t have to cover it — as CityNews used to do in Chicago… and also aggregating coverage, as the Associate Press does).

I also think it’s important to get out of the idea that there is one company and one business model. There will be many entities, each with its own different business models and ownership.

I was surprised to hear some people, including the paid journalists, saying that they need to break out of the goal of winning Pulitzers. Win the public.

: Underlying this in this discussion in this city with these people is the tension about the sale of Philadelphia Newspapers. This week, bids are due. Who buys — or doesn’t — have a gigantic impact on the possibilities. If it is Gannett or Singleton, one PNI person said, they will do what those companies do. If others buy, the future is more open - for good or bad, I suppose.

: So what the hell is this thing? Well, it starts as a conversation. That conversation will continue in blog posts here and there and, we hope, everywhere and in a forum at norgs.org. It will start to crystalize in a wiki that expresses the goals, lessons, and possibilities of this. Then it becomes a message to the industry, broadly defined, perhaps with discussion at conferences and such. It could be a think tank that tries to reinvent news. It could be a laboratory in Philadelphia and its incumbent players or with new players or elsewhere. It could be a new future for news.

: LATER: Here’s Dan Rubin’s rendition. Here’s Sedley Log’s. Here from The West End.
Here’s Wendy Warren’s compilation of what went up on the white boards and our next steps on a blog; wiki to follow. Karl Martino wakes up and reports (on the day of his baby’s christening, by the way). Photos here: The Fab Four, and ow.

Media Guardian, where I am proud to write a column, has started a podcast. Here’s the first episode (MP3), with my editor, Matt Wells, as host. I’ll be listening in the car in the a.m.