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Thursday, January 15, 2004
Blog & Roll 
| | In Tracking the reporters, Dave provides extremely useful marching orders for all bloggers who wish to cover any subject at all. The matter at hand is politics ('tis the season), but his observations and commands apply across all boards: |
| | It would be much better to track the candidates by issues, rather than watching reporters. |
| | What you'll find out when you track reporters is that they aren't doing their job. This has very limited value. |
| | Instead we should do the job they should be doing, raise the bar, give them an incentive to do their job. |
| | If you track them you give them too much power, and they'll just whine about it, and it won't improve the quality of information voters get. |
| | Mainstream political journalism mostly involves chanting, not reporting. It is too often, as Jay Rosen so perfectly put it, about the game, the race. Not the stuff that really matters: real character, real values, real abilities to govern fairly and responsively and to make wise decisions. Not just to look good on TV and editorial pages and then win a series of horse races. |
| | One of the reasons mainstream journalism has trouble going deep is that (sorry, here we go again), markets are conversations. Yeah, that's awfully broad (always has been), but it gets to the problem. Humans are built to acquire knowledge, deep knowledge, through more than just reading publications and watching TV. We're not just consumers of news. We're not just in the market for transmitted wisdom. Some of us (no, not all of us, but enough) need to ask questions, go deeper, scaffold understandings that we try out on others, gradually framing up new understandings, and newer ones after that. Online journals, each surrounded by its own changing galaxy of inbound and outbound links, are far better equipped to inform and to be informed; and not just to transmit information as so much data. Think of the difference between talking and announcing and you get the idea here. |
| | Find the future of journalism by following the devolutionary arc of the disc jockey. Start in the prefab present, when most disk jockeys (we'll leave out exceptions like Big Rick) are as interchangeable as light bulbs and none of them choose their own music; then go back to the 1950s. |
| | When I was growing up, disc jockeys were more than personalities. They were music connoisseurs. They chose the music they played. They had sensibility. Taste. Connections not just to The Industry, but to artists, promoters, venues. The business was screwed up in many ways, but Rock & Roll was truly run, at least for a little while, by the guys who spun the records. In fact, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland because that's where a disc jockey named Alan Freed named it, and launched the genre. |
| | Right now we're relaunching journalism in an environment that supports talking and not just announcing. Good as many of them are, political journalists can't change the way the political conversation works. |
| | The rest of us can. And will. |
| | This will make for better broadcast journalism, by the way. (Because of its mostly one-way nature, "broadcast" is a category in which I include print as well as radio and TV.) But it shoud be a secondary effect of a primary job that's now open to anybody. |
Free plus Fee
Clearer Channel
We're Number Two
World of edge
| | Let's take seriously the assumption that Intelligence is at the Edge. That is, let's *really* suppose that we're SMARTer than the people "at the top" and "in the center". Let's act on the maxim, "Nobody knows as much as all of us." |
| | Here's the idea -- an instant, bottom-up meeting. WTF. Let's get together face to face. Let's talk about the end of telephony and the beginning of communication, about the end-to-end principle and its enemies, about smart people and dumb companies, intellectual property and creative commons, digital democracy and info-surveillance, e-commerce and the war against customers, and whatever else is on our minds. Let's get to know each other, learn from each other, exchange ideas, frustrations, tools, toys and hacks. And let's see what happens from there. WTF -- it'll be lots more exciting than talking corporate heads behind podiums. |
My, hows tie fly
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