MediaShift

The benefits of publicness « BuzzMachine I’m reworking an early but foundational section of my book, Public Parts, arguing the benefits of publicness, a list I presented at the PII conference in Seattle a few weeks ago. I’d like to bounce my thoughts off you and ask for your views of the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole. I won’t go into great detail in this list because I’m eager to hear your thoughts. Here’s my opening bid: * Publicness makes and improves relationships. To make connections with people, you need to be open and share.

Aiming for the Young Crowd, Google Pitches a Google+ Summer Camp - Mike Isaac - Social Kids driving you nuts, now that school is out? Google announced an online summer camp on Monday, a collaboration with Make magazine that matches teens with maker-movement celebrities through the Google+ social network. Using the company’s Hangouts video group chat tool, kids age 13 through 18 can watch makers create projects online, many of which are composed of stuff lying around the house (think Mentos and erupting Coke bottles). The “camp” lasts for six weeks, on Monday through Thursday mornings, with most Hangouts run by teenage camp counselors when the celebrities aren’t guest-starring.

Place de la toile Internet, convergence des médias, téléphonie : quelles conséquences sur l’information, la communication, les liens sociaux, et, finalement, l’organisation de notre vie ? Les écrans nous sont désormais familiers, mais nous ne connaissons encore que les prémices des effets liés à leur domination. Place de la toile est une émission qui aborde les différents aspects de la "révolution" numérique, du côté des conséquences qu’elle induit sur l’information, les médias, la communication, les liens sociaux entre les individus, et finalement, l’organisation de notre vie. Elle fait un tour hebdomadaire des connaissances, s’attarde sur les principaux concepts liés à cette métamorphose, rencontre les acteurs, raconte les principaux événements, discute de l’économie, de la politique, et de la philosophie de cette révolution. Chaque semaine vous retrouverez :

Technology Policy Institute - Studying the Global Information Economy FUTURE OF JOURNALISM On 23 September, world class media thinkers including Jeff Jarvis, Rafat Ali, Mark Glaser and Paul Bradshaw, joined the European Journalism Centre (EJC) for a day of debates on the future of journalism at PICNIC 2010. Held in Amsterdam every year, PICNIC is a renowned festival-cum-conference that blurs the lines between creativity, science, technology, business and society. Covering the successes and failures of recent years in the media industry, as well as the growth of public engagement, EJC’s exclusive one-day PICNIC 2010 programme focused on the real need to reconstruct journalism and its relationship with the citizen and society. The four general concepts of the EJC session included:

Exploring edX 1.0 When Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced their intention last month to provide free, online education, the world listened. The unveiling of edX, the universities’ joint open-source platform for web-based learning, garnered buzz around the globe. The next question was obvious. What will edX — and the future of online higher ed — actually look like? New Business Models The ongoing goal of the New Business Models for News project is to inform the discussion about the future of news with business specifics — experience, facts and figures. After months of research and analysis, we have created business models that we believe demonstrate there is a sustainable future for local news. For the purpose of our models we utilized data from a top-25 metro market and hypothesized that the sole daily newspaper had ceased publication. We began with the assumption that there will continue to be a market demand for quality journalism and that the market will find a way to meet that demand. So, what will fill the void?

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching Jacqueline A. Gilbert Professor of Management Department of Management & Marketing Jennings A. Jones College of Business Murfreesboro, TN 37130 USA jgilbert@mtsu.edu Ricardo Flores-Zambada Director Recursos Humanos del Sistema Tecnológico de Monterrey Monterrey, Neuvo Leon MX 64849 riflores@itesm.mx Clay Shirky: Society doesn't need newspapers, it needs journalism This is an extract from Clay Shirky's article, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. The full essay can be read here. If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidise the Baghdad bureau.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days. Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception.

From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate. This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality.

WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape WikiLeaks affects one of the key tensions in democracies: the government needs to be able to keep secrets, but citizens need to know what is being done in our name. These requirements are fundamental and incompatible; like the trade-offs between privacy and security, or liberty and equality, different countries in different eras find different ways to negotiate those competing needs. In the case of state secrets v citizen oversight, however, there is one constant risk: since deciding what is a secret is itself a secret, there is always a risk that the government will simply hide an increasing amount of material of public concern. One response to this risk is the leaker, someone who believes that key elements of political life are being wrongly kept from public view, and who circulates that material on his or her own.

The Future of the Press Lord Justice Leveson has one of the least enviable jobs in public life. His assignment is to adjudicate between the demand for privacy and the principle of free speech. He must do so against the backdrop of a public outcry, an unfinished criminal investigation and a galloping technological revolution. He has taken evidence from comedians making serious points and some serious people behaving like comedians. Liquid Newsroom Steffen Konrath @StKonrath Here's how the process of the Liquid Newsroom can be used to publish a summary (curated) article. The last piece I published here on this blog today was a teaser for the "Sun on Sunday" article by Peter Preston. The original piece captured my interest as Rupert Murdoch's Sun on Sunday has been discussed by The Guardian for quite some days now. The Guardian is one of the news sources I regularely monitor for media and journalism related news. That's why it is part of LNR's incoming stream of news items (left column, first screenshot next to this article). I selected the news item in the content stream in the LNR and its content appeared on the right.