BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

May 19, 2005

Media links

: I'm at a media talkfest Friday and often get asked for blogg links; here's a link to some. Plus my media category. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

News without newspapers?

: Doc Searls comes out with on-the-spot insights that abstract and summarize big trends with the clarity a new pair of glasses brings and he does it with the ease and frequency with which Howard Stern farts. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

At the Syndicate conference this week, I was standing next to Doc and a fellow media executive who was saying what all us media executives say all the time: We need to find the business models that will support quality journalism. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Without missing a beat, Doc says, "You need to come up with business models that support news without newspapers."NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Exactly. You needn't take that as a literal prediction -- though some will -- to find truth and value in that. We need to look at a world in which support from classified, retail, and national advertising will leak or pour out and in which the audience goes wherever it wants to go. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

We need to rethink about newsrooms as news-gathering (not just news-creating) operations that bring together the community's news and share it wherever, however, and whenever the community wants. And, yes, we need to think of new business models to support this.NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Calling all cars

: Wow. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Go look at the amazing ChicagoCrime.org, which takes feeds of data on crimes throughout the city and plots them on GoogleMaps by neighborhood and type and even provides RSS feeds for crimes reported on every police beat and block. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

When I started in this online biz, lo, more than a decade ago, this was one of the blue-sky ideas we always heard would be so cool. Well, once data is in a data base and somebody can get a feed of it and parse it, the cool is possible. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

This is the hyperlocalest of hyperlocal news. [via Lost Remote]NO DVD CRACK doom 3

: And I shouldn't be surprised that the genius -- and I mean genius -- behind this is Adrian Holovaty, who's changing media and the world from Kansas. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

When editors and politicians are customer-service representatives

: I spent the afternoon yesterday with Craig Newmark, always a delightful trip. And during various conversations, he unfailingly makes reference to customer service. People usually react as to a punchline when the founder of the incredibly successful Craigslist says he is founder and customer service representative. But for Craig, it's not a joke. It's a creed. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Rory O'Connor does a great job capturing that view from Craig's Q&A at the Personal Democracy Forum:

What’s behind its amazing, word-of-mouth success? “We provide a simple and effective community service,” explains Newmark. “We are persistent about basic values, and establishing a culture, systems and structures of trust and goodwill.”NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Sounds simple enough. So why isn’t there a “Craigslist for Politics” yet? According to Newmark, it’s because there’s a lack of trust in our political system. “At Craigslist, we view customer service as a high expression of moral values,” he noted. “People are looking for institutions that reflect their values. Our political parties are not service organizations.”NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Of late, Newmark added, he has been looking into media rather than politics. “News operations must also deal with issues of morals and trust,” he said. “We need better, more moral and trustworthy information.”

So what would a Craigslist for news be? It would be about trust. It would be about service. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

The story is the story

: Amazing how anything can split and anyone can spit along party and ideological lines, even about Newsweek's incompetent and dangerous journalistic mistake. I was talking about that with Jay Rosen just last night: about how his criticism of Newsweek's error has earned him attacks from the left. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Isn't this story about journalism, not ideology? For some, though, nothing is not about ideology. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

David Brooks does well summarizing the ideological perspectives and pissing on the Newsweek affair.

...Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine's blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media....NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet....NO DVD CRACK doom 3

This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven?...NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers.

Whining media bashers? How about dissatisifed media consumers? How about disappointed fellow journalists? How about unhappy fellow Americans?NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Brooks is right to say that it's silly and offensive to bash Newsweek and not bash the fanatical murderers who used this report as an excuse to kill. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

But I think he's wrong not to bash Newsweek himself, not to also criticize the magazine for making such an irresponsible error. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

Brooks spends a paragraph saying that he used to work at Newsweek and he likes those guys and doesn't believe they're commies and that's very nice. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

But by not criticizing the report, the net message of this otherwise spot-on column is that press people defend press people, that we circle our wagons around our screw-ups, that we stick together first. Especially today, with the press' trust in tatters, that is the wrong message. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

What we should be saying is that we criticize each other first and we accept those criticisms first because we want to get to the truth together. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

When the still-surprisingly-employed Dan Rather screwed up with his memoes -- and after my readers here forced me to comment on that as a media story not a political one -- Rosen and I were pointed to as liberals who criticized Rather along with the conservatives. That may have been apparently factual but it was the wrong conclusion: We were journalists criticizing journalists because we should.NO DVD CRACK doom 3

What a relief

: No more stories about dorky Star Wars losers without lives waiting in line for a damned movie. NO DVD CRACK doom 3

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