Technovia

Jeff Jarvis is wrong when he says "any witness can perform an act of journalism". Mostly.

Lots of good stuff in Jeff Jarvis' post on myths about the Internet that you hear from "nay-sayers" in "Once and for all". But there's also this bit, which I have to take issue with:

"Bloggers aren’t journalists. True and false. The Pew Internet & American Life survey says only a third of bloggers consider what they do journalism. But today any witness can perform an act of journalism, giving us more eyes on society - which journalists should celebrate." [My italics added]

Saying that "any witness can perform an act of journalism" is rather like saying "any trumpeter can play a guitar". It's conflating "doing music" with "playing a particular instrument" - or, in the above case "giving an accurate first-hand report" with "doing journalism".

As I've argued before, journalism is a process, not a product. It means researching, multiple sources, and revealing something which wasn't revealed before. It's not something that is exclusive to those calling themselves "journalists", but neither is it something which any witness to events can perform simply by giving an accurate account of what they saw.

One thing that history teaches us is that eyewitness accounts often conflict, and the job of a journalist is to dig deep enough to corroborate or refute some of those eyewitness accounts. While any witness can contribute to an act of journalism, unless they do a lot more, they're not themselves doing journalism.

Falcon 1 Flight 4 Liftoff Perfect

The SpaceX Falcon 1 has become the first privately-funded rocket to reach orbit. Fabulous news.

Jason gets it bang on the mark

Macworld | Mac Word | Don't drive iPhone developers away, Apple.

"Yes, friends, I do think it’s that serious. If what we’re seeing now is Apple policy—in other words, maliciousness instead of incompetence—it risks the entire future of the iPhone platform."

T-Mobile G1 unlock "available after 90 days"

Says David Pogue in his review:

"You can unlock this phone after 90 days—that is, use any SIM card from any carrier in it."

It's difficult to see how T-Mobile could actually keep a phone with such an open operating system SIM locked for long anyway.

Joe Wilcox on Google's potential ace

Apple Watch - iPhone - God Phone Meets the Devil:

"What about the Google focus? The phone offers single sign-on to Google's plethora of online services, including Calendar, Contacts, Gmail, Google Talk, Maps Street View and YouTube. Suddenly, the hodgepodge of Google applications and services has a single point of connection and synchronization. If this mechanism works, and well, then the G1 and other Android-based phones will be powerful data and telephony devices out of the box.

As I've blogged before, sync is the killer application for the connected world. In 2007 I warned: 'If Google gets synchronization right before Microsoft, it's game over.' Ditto to Apple. Google's sync magic requires no PC."

As I've also posted, sync with no PC required is a huge feature. A phone which never has to connect to a PC is much more powerful than one which does.

What matters most about the T-Mobile G1: no PC required

Me, for Mobile Computer Mag:

"This is clearly a window into Google's view of the future – and it's a scenario that probably keeps many Microsoft executives awake at night. Microsoft's strength has always been the PC, and much of its marketing and technology has been geared to the idea of having a PC on every desktop. After all, Microsoft's Office and Windows franchises – the company's cash (sacred) cows – depend on it."

Both Microsoft and Apple see the mobile phone as an adjunct to the PC. Because Google has built the software inside the T-Mobile G1 to sync only with its servers in the cloud, this model is broken. The mobile phone gets set free.

Within a few years, I can see a large chunk of people not having their own "personal" computer, but instead relying on their phone for email, web, social networks, and so on. Oh sure, they'll use PCs - but why would you need your own when all your data lives in the cloud, and you can access that from any machine?

Could Apple's attitude to developers get any worse?

On the day that Google launched something with a rather different approach, this little gemcomes to light:

"Aparently [sic], Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE"

So Apple's solution to the issue of developers being unhappy about their applications being rejected on spurious pretexts is to try and stop them talking about it to anyone?

It's this kind of crap that makes me want to make the Mac I'm typing on my last. There has to be way which supports neither convicted monopoly abusers or control-freak obsessives.

Free and crap

O'Reilly signals Free Web 2.0 party is over? - broadstuff:

"What O'Reilly is talking about here is a typical example of what happens if everything is free - in those sort of markets, there is no way to extract extra value from delivering quality, so cheap-to-produce cr*p drives it out. "

This is worth saying, repeatedly.

The true state of journalism today

Telegraph journalist: I'm pessimistic about the new newsroom culture | Media | guardian.co.uk.

"The growth of blogs and online communities seems to be contributing plenty in the way of opinion, of which there's already plenty and not much in the way of facts. This is creating a brand of journalism in which it doesn't really matter if you get things wrong.

Again, it's becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in. Facts are no longer the currency they used to be."

I know that Jeff Jarvis and other new media boosters will race in and tell this guy to get with the programme, shape up or die, and stop being a curmudgeon. But they are wrong. They should read that sentence about the Telegraph's business model over and over again, because it is the true nature of frontline journalism now.

Is that the journalism we want? A journalism where journalists never leave their screens, but instead endlessly rewrite stuff in order to chase page views? A journalism where a strident, fact-free opinion is worth more than something that digs into the meat of a story and finds new gems there?

It used to be true that 80% of a journalists work was rehashing - other people's stories, press releases, feeds, whatever. But it was the other 20% which added value, because it was based on writing stories which were unique to you, from your sources. Now that 20% has been taken over by writing opinion instead, because opinion is cheap and - if you write something controversial which readers can argue with - attracts page views.

Again, it's worth asking: Is that the journalism we want? If it is, then fine. But we have to be aware that in moving to that model we will be losing something valuable. Calling people curmudgeons for pointing that out is silly.

Mmmm.... PlayStation PlayTV

Want!