Selvin 24/7

http://www.freepress.net/files/Deep_Packet_Inspection_The_End_of_the_Internet_As_We_Know_It.pdf

babsselvin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:43:41 +0000

A thorough explanation of Deep Packet Inspection and the threat it poses to net neutrality.

Margaret Sullivan on the future of The Buffalo News : Latest Local News : The Buffalo News

babsselvin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:58:56 +0000

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

babsselvin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:06:50 +0000

“Future-positive” Brunonian on ecology of new media:
“[It's] instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.

That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Get Off the Bus : CJR

babsselvin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:04:31 +0000

OffTheBus writers … may be new to the media, but they have long been participants in America’s greatest tradition-volunteerism and citizen engagement. Now that this tradition has begun to blossom in yet one more venue, the sphere of public information, journalism should take heed and pick up where campaigns and nonprofits have left off. The pro-am model is part of this equation. …
The integration of strands of the pro-am strategy into the journalism mainstream will be bumpy. It will require, among other things, a shift in journalism’s traditional ethical matrix. Transparency and disclosure, rather than neutrality-often tainted if not patently false-must become critical fourth-estate virtues. The pros must commit to figuring out how to harness, cooperate with, and assimilate citizen journalists into the future of their craft. In other words, more professional journalists should take their offline skills-such as interviewing sources-online, and learn to build and manage networks of sources to produce accurate information.

For new media, the reverse is true. While they can quickly aggregate and grow the ranks of citizen journalists, they must take much more seriously the professional side of the equation-the reporting and editing and verification. …
Across the country, news budgets and newsrooms are shrinking. Newspapers are going out of business. Meanwhile, the government is propping up Wall Street with a massive bailout that will cost the public billions, and planning to invest billions more in infrastructure, green jobs, health care reform, sustainable energy, etc. In all this, there are many opportunities for critical collaborative-reporting projects that will engage thousands of people who want to make themselves useful to the press. The Obama administration may have thirteen million e-mail addresses, but together the media-both old and new-have more. The timing for a new social contract between the press and the public could not be better. There will be no reason to mourn the loss of its audience if the press fully understands and exploits the new reality that its audience can now be its ally.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Clay Shirky

babsselvin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:14:42 +0000

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.

The Semantic Web: Scientific American

babsselvin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:50:35 +0000

Twitter: A Media Darling, and a Backlash Target | The Wrap

babsselvin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:06:36 +0000

20 years ago, the World Wide Web was born – SiliconValley.com

babsselvin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:27:22 +0000

On the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?

babsselvin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:03:05 +0000

Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses. … Attention is not scalable.

Award-winning videojournalism

babsselvin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:35:32 +0000

http://www.rosenblumtv.com/?p=2893

This piece by a Washington Post videojournalist just won a $15,000 prize in an international videojournalism competition.

A note about its content: It’s hard to believe this story reflects the reality of life in parts of America. We hear so much about the rich and greedy; here’s a story that shows another America.