Conover on media

5 Lessons from newspaper contests

2008-04-15T02:02:00.001-04:00

Here's a humbling series of events, and the still unpopular lessons I learned as a result: In February 2005, my co-workers put a crown on my head and carried me to the front of a banquet hall to receive a plaque that said I was the state's Journalist of the Year. I'd secretly dreamed of winning that award for years, but it took the end of my career as an editor to make me eligible. I got my

BONUS POST: "Ad hocracy"

2008-03-19T15:43:00.003-04:00

I'm breaking up my series on newspapers to float an idea that I'm hoping to present at a workshop next month.It comes from this basic observation: We've already got the free tools to construct ad hoc breaking news networks around discrete events: Blogs act as a reverse-order chronology of evolving events; Twitter gives us two way communication across platforms, plus a means to capture text via

MEDIA REVOLUTION: Why The Tower Must Fall

2008-03-16T00:01:00.004-04:00

From a generic perspective, it’s probably fair to say that the public history of new media began five years ago this month with the invasion of Iraq. Technorati was tracking fewer than half a million blogs in March 2003, but 24/7 coverage of the war meant cable news needed things to talk about, and there were the bloggers – this strange new species of pundit – always talking, talking, talking. I

An old idea has a new future

2008-03-11T18:14:00.008-04:00

Back in the late 1990s, at roughly the same time as the advent of the ill-fated :CueCat, my employer invested in a failed technology called "GoCode." Both of these devices had the same goal: to connect print readers easily to the Web. :CueCat was a bigger flop because it had a bigger footprint, but I'm sticking with the GoCode scanner system because I got up close and personal with it.Here's how

Foundations of 21st century journalism

2008-02-21T11:02:00.007-05:00

Up to this point, I've been talking about some of the concepts that shape my thinking about media and journalism: Quality; epistemology; the cultural flaws that warp these discussions; the ideas that I think will lead us around those obstacles to answers. But I haven't really offered any answers of my own.One reason: What use are they? They're not scholarly. They're not researched and footnoted.

"Blackboxing" news judgment

2008-02-18T20:41:00.003-05:00

Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series wouldn't be much of a story without a device known as "the ansible," a sort of sub-space radio that allows people to communicate instantaneously from planet to planet across light years of empty space. The story doesn't work without it... but how does it work?Card's answer? It doesn't matter. The ansible is a black box: In science fiction terms, that means that

Gloom and Doom

2008-02-17T21:27:00.003-05:00

I hear this quite a bit: Journalists (particularly print journalists) are tired of hearing all the "doom and gloom" about what lies ahead for the industry.The statement is usually followed by a call for "solutions" and bolstered by high-ranking reassurances that "newspapers aren't going away."Which probably explains why I'd rather talk about doom and gloom than sweetness and light.Some points

Why quality is a moving target

2008-02-06T18:11:00.000-05:00

I got my first regular job at a professional newspaper in my final semester of college. It was a job that no longer exists: Paste-up guy for The Chapel Hill Newspaper.In those days, editors used pencils to draw page layouts on pieces of paper and stories came out of typesetting machines in long single columns. My job was to take those typeset columns, run them through a machine that coated the

Are you thinking, or "quorum sensing?"

2008-02-06T14:31:00.000-05:00

In the fall of 2005 I wrote one of my final science-beat articles on research into a biological phenomena called "quorum sensing." Specifically, quorum sensing represents a form of chemical communication between bacteria. That's vaguely interesting, but the exact moment at which quorum sensing transformed my understanding of the world took place when a microbiologist described bacterial behavior

Quality and other essential bullshit

2008-02-05T22:39:00.001-05:00

"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then to work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value." -- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974Our topic for Feb. 25th (absent a spiffy

Wake up!

2008-02-05T14:27:00.001-05:00

I mothballed this blog in 2007 for many reasons. Some of them were conceptual (I felt that discussing media absent the larger context of culture was pointless); others were personal (I'd stepped down from a "management" level job and returned to reporting).But it occurred to me last week that it was time to bring it back in a new, and very specific, incarnation: From now until Feb. 24, I'll be

Times-Select RIP

2007-08-08T13:09:00.000-04:00

File it under We-Told-You-So: Management at the NYT is preparing to shut down Times-Select, the company's $50-a-year paywall experiment. I don't feel like dancing on its grave, because the idea of paying for certain types of content shouldn't be lost, and Times-Select (in concept, anyway) came close to being that kind of product. But there's a message in this headline that's going to cause a lot

NEW CULTURE, NEW MEDIA

2007-05-17T12:38:00.000-04:00

I spent the weekend at a gathering of what might best be described as the post-mass-media tribe in Black Mountain, N.C.They don't read newspapers, and why should they? Newspapers scorn them to begin with.They don't watch much TV, either.Big music labels piss them off. Small labels that care about music turn them on.They don't like one kind of music: they love all sorts of music.They would rather

WHAT IF YOUR BUSINESS PLAN WAS LOVE?

2007-04-24T11:29:00.000-04:00

I've developed a new schtick for explaining the concept of news judgment to civilians: A newspaper is a big averaging machine, I tell them.Here's how it works: When reporters and editors get new information, they estimate its newspaper value based on their subjective mental picture of the average audience they're trying to satisfy. If they're thinking very clearly, they'll also abstract the

SHOOT BETTER VIDEO: 33 tips from Ellen Seidler

2007-02-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

One of the perks of finishing up one assignment (helping modernize our paper's website) and heading on to the next one (back to the newsroom as a combo print/online features reporter) is that I'm finding cool stuff as I pack up my office. Today's gem: Notes from a fantastic class given last March at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism during my week as a 2006 Western Knight Center

HYPING HYPER-LOCAL

2007-01-04T13:37:00.000-05:00

The big issue in newspapering these days isn't quality or ethics but preservation: preservation of jobs, status, and the printed product, but also to some extent the preservation of our own cultural myths. The aloof-but-wise senior editor. The tough-but-fair city editor. All manner of reporter stereotypes. We desire not only to preserve newspaper journalism in the digital age, but to do so with

INVEST OR FAIL

2006-12-15T12:03:00.000-05:00

We don't know all sorts of things about the business future of online media, but there's one thing that's already quite predictable: the eventual profit-margins in 21st century media are likely to be far less generous than the fat and complacent margins to which we grew addicted in the 20th century.I'm confident about this because we already know that the Web is inherently competitive, and in any

DEATH TO UNSIGNED EDITORAL ENDORSEMENTS!

2006-11-10T22:29:00.000-05:00

Attention, newspaper executives: In case you were wondering what to cut next, the dumbest thing you put in print every damned day are those unsigned editorials written by ... well, who exactly? Even the people in the newsroom don't really know, and the people outside are pretty sure Satan is involved somehow.You've been told this before, but you're creatures of habit, and apparently one of your

Hey, let's hire this Winer kid...

2006-10-18T23:09:00.000-04:00

Wanted: News organization with vision, guts, asbestos underwear and enormous brass balls, willing to hire free-thinking, outspoken tech-pioneer to serve as chief technology officer. Apply to Dave Winer, somewhere on the road to the future...Today on Scripting News, Dave runs an excellent list of suggestions for news organizations that want to master the transition to the new news. But the last

It's the tools, stupid

2006-10-05T22:56:00.000-04:00

Some things are so fundamental that you just have to keep repeating them until people start imagining the concept, and this is one of them: The future of news media and its affects on society isn't going to be shaped by updated versions of the obsolete institutions we already have, but by the invention of technological tools that radically change the rules. Today's mediascape is superhuman in

Our motto at work

2006-09-20T23:10:00.000-04:00

Commerce hubs and the future of advertising

2006-09-20T12:06:00.000-04:00

I've learned three things of consequence since I set aside reporting to work on new-media development last November: first, if your news site sucks, upgrade your content management system; second, stop thinking about documents and start thinking about databases; and third, online advertising is primarily a form of information, and its most profitable future relies on packaging and delivering that

Hope for the indies

2006-08-25T12:41:00.005-04:00

Progress toward the new information economy continues to surge and sputter in uneven ways, sometimes confusing us but other times pointing ahead to tantilizing possibilities. I found an example in September's issue of WIRED, in an article about Netflix's new role in creating distribution deals for independent filmmakers.The article (not available online until Sept. 1) showcased the power of

Corrections: The error of our ways, & vice-versa

2006-05-31T13:38:00.000-04:00

A letter to Romanesko from David Cay Johnston, written in response to Ted Vaden's ombudsman's column in the N&O, bears amplification, because Johnston flat-out gets it (although I do disagree with one of his formulaic solutions). He writes (bolded emphasis is mine):The analysis of errors and corrections in Ted Vaden's Sunday column in the Raleigh News & Observer is troubling on many levels -- and

Media message? Kill the court jester

2006-05-05T12:19:00.000-04:00

So the family downloaded the video of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Association dinner and gathered around the old monitor to watch.And being a journalism-based household, we all had the same reaction:What in the HELL were these "journalists" doing at a gala event with the people they're supposed to be covering?Most of the reaction to Colbert's performance has focused on how

A blog blog

2006-04-26T11:44:00.000-04:00

To get some idea of what we've been up to recently, take a peek at a new blog-about-local-blogs that Janet and I started a week ago. We're doing it for the newspaper as part of the new Postscripts project (Janet came up with the brand, logo and slogan), and here's the skinny: We "launched" it on the night of April 18th by quietly sending out the link to two local bloggers.The next morning we had

Competition and its alternatives

2006-03-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

(Cross-posted from Xark!)I offer this as proof that even really cool ideas can take a while to find their audiences, particularly when that audience is saturated by media in the first place. Anyway, thanks to the few Charleston bloggers I have found and added to my reading list, I've finally encountered something I should have been tracking for weeks: a Charleston City Paper guy named Jay

The campaign against Wikipedia

2006-03-07T12:57:00.000-05:00

(Editor's note: This post began as a news item at Xark!, but grew into a stand-alone essay.)I first noticed this back in February while speaking about Web trends to a Public Relations/Business Communications class at a local college. When I asked about Wikipedia, everyone who spoke expressed a clear message: Wikipedia, to them, was not so much a resource as it was a threat.Multiple students

The Katrina Tapes

2006-03-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

What's really all that new in the AP Katrina video story?In a word: Video.The failure of the Katrina relief effort isn't news. Americans learned back in August and September that the government response to the Katrina disaster was inadequate. And though bias-warrior conservatives tend to blame the media for all negative perceptions of their champions, Katrina swept those arguments away like so

Forget all that other stuff

2006-02-28T23:21:00.000-05:00

Talk media with people who aren't in the media, and you'll figure out pretty quickly that the motives outsiders ascribe to us generally fail to connect with reality because their assumptions have one basic, fundamental flaw: They figure the process of newsgathering is somehow rational and deliberate.Here's a much better picture, from the great Lenslinger: Mad Skills of a Veteran Photog.(

Journalism from a software perspective

2006-02-17T17:37:00.000-05:00

On Feb. 9, while reading up on the web framework Django, my eye gravitated toward an unfamiliar acronym in this sentence: “Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.” So what’s DRY? To programmers, DRY means “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” and the link explaining the principle led

NYT gots some 'splainin' to do...

2005-12-21T16:50:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting, but it's clearly not going to happen. Not on its own accord, anyway. Not out of a sense of transparency or ethics or the public's right to know.The brass at The New York Times thinks its decision to hold a story about the White House's warrantless domestic spying program for more than a year is none of our business. So they're not talking.And, not to put too fine a point on

An online reading list for old and new media

2005-11-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

I want to offer the folks in my newsroom a useful reading list on topics related to journalism, emerging media, etc. But rather than build it as a text document, I'm going to build it here.So this is the goal: Instead of compling an exhaustive, show-off list of web resources related to journalism, media, new media, convergence, blah-blah-blah, I'm going to put together an edited list: Not

The New Media Food Chain

2005-10-17T13:20:00.000-04:00

Anybody who has followed Jay Rosen's recent PressThink coverage of the Judith Miller debacle at The New York Times has probably noticed a change in the color of the sky this week. Some future historian will likely declare the Miller case a milestone in the development of global networked media, concluding with 20-20 hindsight that this was the week when we entered a new world.In the Old World,

The Media "singularity"

2005-10-04T11:17:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: When one of my posts over at Xark! (a criticism of Anderson Cooper called Enough with the posing) initiated an interesting back-and-forth about media credibility and objectivity, it prompted me to write a long comment. I'm cross-posting it here because, as I read over it on the page, it occurred to me that I had inadvertently described a state of media singularity -- an

The Intelligence Briefing model of journalism

2005-09-23T12:40:00.000-04:00

Posted today at PressThink in reference to discussion on the NYT's Times Select paywall: What's valuable today? Information that comes with a high degree of confidence and carries predictive power. What's parsley? Politicized opinion, infotainment, stenographic reporting and "analysis" of the obvious. I think we are in the middle of a paradigm shift that will divide information and

Getting ahead of disaster

2005-09-01T12:25:00.000-04:00

The problem with a disaster like Katrina is that it is literally too large and too profound for the average person to wrap their brain around. Consequently, the media now resembles a bunch of blind men describing an elephant, only we're doing it around the clock.Making matters worse, in our rush to catch up with events, in our need to provide "hurricane porn" 24/7, we've overlooked another

Guerilla media

2005-08-14T19:52:00.000-04:00

Whilst cruising around the Chihuahua desert one afternoon in 1988 with my cavalry troop's executive officer, I listened as he waxed philosophical over an MRE."A tank costs $2.6 million," he said. "But what if you took that $2.6 million and bought a bunch of dune buggies, mounted guided missiles and machine guns on 'em, and offered each dune buggy crew some kind of bonus for harrying the hell out

Being wrong: It's a good thing

2005-07-25T07:36:00.000-04:00

One could argue that what truly distinguishes homo sapiens sapiens as a species isn't mental capacity, opposible thumbs or subcutaneous fat, but evidence that suggests we're the only animal that will choose death over being proven wrong.People don't like to be wrong, but they should really give it a try every now and again. Being proven wrong is the gateway to all new knowledge, and it's actually

The newspaper of the future

2005-07-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

Passed along from Andy Rhinehart this morning: This link to Digital Deliverance and its summary of New Media principles in the wake of the NYT's weekend story on "the newspaper of the future."Not so much new, but a really good summary to pass along to your colleagues.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... an update

2005-07-19T10:50:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog and/or PressThink know that back in June I wrote a long post about my dissatisfaction with the standard blog format and my desire to try something new.Since then I've been developing that new idea over at Typepad.com, a blog hosting service that offers unlimited team blogging (for a cost). In the next few days, I plan on taking it to the next phase, sending out author

My say to the PressThink crowd

2005-07-15T17:49:00.000-04:00

Jay Rosen's July 7 post at PressThink on how the press should shun Novak until he comes clean (how positively Amish!) notched 265 comments, the majority of which I felt served as an example of how practically any media thread these days rapidly devolves into a political food fight.On Tuesday, a guy calling himself antimedia showed up on Rosen's comment board with a bunch of Rove stuff I hadn't

Let's parse the Rove story... or not

2005-07-15T14:37:00.000-04:00

So here's the news: Karl Rove told the grand jury that Novak gave him Plame, not the other way around.And here's the Noise Machine spin: This is good news for Rove, and the Liberal Media is trying to hide it.And here's the deal: The Republicans have gone completely off the deep end.I want to make one thing clear, right up front: I'm not an expert on this story. Yeah, I've kept up with it better

Finally, a funny comic strip!

2005-07-08T20:55:00.000-04:00

Bruce Tinsley is an idiot, but you gotta give the man his props: He's an idiot with the world's best business plan:1. Draw an insufferably pompous right-wing political cartoon about a reporter who is also a duck;2. Get prickly conservatives around the country to call local newspapers to lobby for its inclusion on the grounds that "It doesn't matter if it's funny -- you liberals run that commie

H5N1

2005-07-01T20:51:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago I pushed the line of insubordination with my daily complaints about our off-the-charts fearmongering on West Nile Virus. I also talked a former boss out of assigning a blowout package on the threat of weaponized smallpox, writing a lengthy memo that detailed the problems with her "we're all gonna die" thesis.I tell these stories to prove a point to people who don't know me:

Into the Great Wide Open

2005-06-27T16:29:00.000-04:00

Howdy, everybody. I’m back off of vacation, rested and tan and fired up … to put this little foray into blogging into RSS mothballs. That is to say: Your aggregator may occasionally find a new post here, but I expect they'll be rare. The simple truth is, this six-month experiment has been so informative that I’ve now graduated to something new. That’s not to say that media is no longer a

Simply appalling

2005-06-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

Money talks. It always has.Here's a story demonstrates the way government works: It does what lobbyists, contributors and powerful men tell it to do. I'm not saying this is a new development. I'm saying it's happening right now, and the story below makes that apparent.The question is, where's the outrage? Where's the accountability? How is it that the White House doesn't even make a sincere

Spoletoblog: Howzitdoing?

2005-06-07T11:52:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: I've been on something of a hiatus from this blog since the start of the Spoleto festival on May 27. Also, I'm in the middle of an e-mail blackout: I haven't received an e-mail at my home account since May 23, so if you're wondering why I haven't written back, that's why. Here's a field report from "our little experiment," working towards the memo I will eventually write on what

Spoletoblog does something cool...

2005-06-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

Spoletoblog has been building a nice little audience over the past five days (more than 1,000 hits a day since Saturday). But what makes me happy about it is that we're already demonstrating the medium's natural ability to tackle the kinds of issues that tend to choke traditional newspapers.For instance: Our print edition has chosen not to address the controversy over a risque scene in Mabou

New (?) review

2005-05-28T17:09:00.000-04:00

From the Speculative Literature Foundation... Rich Horton's Market Summaries: Anthologies: Miscellaneous, 2004 ...From Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome, Daniel Conover's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (another near novelette) was pretty fun satirical stuff about aliens kept under wraps by the White House for the technological knowledge they promise....Mine was the only short to get mentioned from

Spoletoblog update

2005-05-28T16:38:00.000-04:00

At the moment, Spoletoblog is close to notching its first 1,000-hit day (975 at 4:35 p.m.), although I've figured out that that's 975 since this time yesterday, which is not quite the same thing. Anyway, a thousand hits is good for a blog like this, no matter how you count them.The comments, however, are lagging. Obviously it's time for me to insult somebody's mom (although, on the bright side,

Abusing the Koran, and our trust

2005-05-27T17:13:00.000-04:00

Joe Conason has a new piece up at Salon advancing the Koran desecration story. If you're not a subscriber at Salon, be prepared to watch a little ad to get your free site pass (clever, que no?). It's relatively painless.Anyway, to summarize briefly: A Defense Department civilian employee assigned to military intelligence units gave Pentagon investigators a sworn statement last summer in which he

Judge: Enough with the paganism

2005-05-26T22:18:00.000-04:00

How pathetic is this? A judge in Indiana has prohibited the divorced parents of a 9-year-old boy from exposing him to their "non-mainstream" Wiccan religion.You could almost see it if somebody was complaining, or if one parent was trying to limit the other parent's rights. But their religon is one of the things on which the divorcing parents agree. This was nothing more than a judge simply not

Spoletoblog on the eve of the festival...

2005-05-26T21:27:00.000-04:00

The 2005 Spoleto festival starts at noon, but as far as I'm concerned it began tonight with a preview performance of Mabou Mines DollHouse (one of the things I'd actually like to see this year, having interviewed director Lee Breuer and found him utterly fascinating). Since we're actually going to start promoting the blog tomorrow, I figured it would be cool to go out and catch just a bit of the

Alternate realities

2005-05-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

Here's E&P editor Greg Mitchell asking an extremely relevant question: In the week after (Newsweek's) retraction, where is the comparable outrage over the military's cover-up of the "friendly fire" death of Pat Tillman?The answer is, sadly, that those of us on the right are so bitterly entrenched at this point that they simply cannot consider that question. They literally cannot see it.Orson

Jerry Falwell on evolution

2005-05-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

Jerry Falwell is a creationist. Stop the presses. But I point out this piece by Falwell not for its arguments in favor of creationism (he doesn't make any), but instead for what it reveals about the passion surrounding the issue. In a challenge directed at Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, Falwell equates the assault on evolution in the public schools to "the efforts of religious

A new kind of journalist

2005-05-23T12:42:00.000-04:00

Jeff Jarvis promotes a link to a post in BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog. I'm not familiar with the source, but the topic is interesting and pretty much in line with the conversation many of us have been having. What will journalists be? The description of the city editor of the future sounds an awful lot like Superman.

Spoletoblog.typepad.com

2005-05-21T21:32:00.000-04:00

In the morning, our paper will publish its 2005 Spoleto special section and, with it, the URL for our first blog, the cleverly named Spoletoblog. (For those of you who are "From Off," Spoleto is a three-week arts festival in Charleston, S.C. Each May, it brings world-class music and theater to our small, historic city. Piccolo Spoleto, a companion festival, offers a wider array of arts at more

I become a whiner

2005-05-18T16:11:00.000-04:00

Rather predictably, the fallout over the Newsweek/Isikoff blunder drove me right into the ditch. I was so foul-tempered and snippy that I left a comment at PressThink that is so whiney and unintentionally ironic that it actually made me laugh at myself. My grousing complaint: People who complain about the press being ignoble, inaccurate, blah blah blah focus on the blunders, when of course the

First the WSJ, now the NYT...

2005-05-16T14:37:00.000-04:00

The New York Times launches itself as a premium content site with TimesSelect, but what I like about this one is that you get it as part of your subscription to the print edition. Critics will say "but the spirit of the medium is a la carte... why bundle?" I say that establishing yourself as a multi-dimensional information source is a good thing. You subscribe, you get all the web stuff free. You

Dang. Monday.

2005-05-16T13:35:00.000-04:00

Had to bury another cat this morning, so that now I've got a matched set of little rescue kitties sleeping in the dirt next to the too-small stray I took in while Janet was out of town last August. The great irony: Janet went out and got the two littermates to "cheer me up" after the little one gave up and died. Both have now been hit by cars. Pixie survived long enough to reach the emergency vet

Running out of patience...

2005-05-14T17:55:00.000-04:00

Whatever you do, make sure you check out this link from E&P: It's a transcript of Scott McClellan blowing smoke up the White House press corps' collective ass on May 12, the day after the Cessna incident. Several things jump out at you: 1. McClellan's talking-points act is wearing thin (can you imagine having to deal with such an insufferable jerk day in, day out?); 2. The WH press corps, which

Letters to the editor

2005-05-13T08:48:00.000-04:00

Two back-to-back letters on the pagan package, the only ones that have appeared so far.Appalled at sectionI was appalled at this past Sunday's section of Faith & Values. The editor(s) missed a great opportunity with this section and showed a great lack of judgment, publishing a section almost exclusively on paganism, witchcraft and Wicca.One would think you could have come up with a better

The pagan story: What we learned...

2005-05-10T13:03:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, my story on neo-pagans in the Lowcountry appeared on the cover of our Faith and Values section. The mainbar ran about 95 inches and told a story of the last 14 months in the local pagan community, beginning with the suicide of that community's most visible and controversial figure. The sidebars, just counting the text, ran another 80 inches. You can find my links to all the elements of

Oooo, I wouldn't have told that one...

2005-05-10T09:54:00.000-04:00

Here's one of those things that you just couldn't make up (link).Well, I guess you could make it up. In fact, it reminds me of a joke......WHICH I won't tell here. In summary, the joke concerns a church revival in which members of the congregation come down to the altar and confess their sins (murder, adultery, coveting, the works), and after each confession, the preacher says "Well, that's a

Google ranks credibility

2005-05-08T14:18:00.000-04:00

Here's a BTC piece on Google doing something akin to what I first suggested online back in January: scoring the credibility of information sources. Starting with news organization and bloggers is one thing, but what you're really grading here, it seems, is popularity and clout. It's not what I want, but whatever. It's a start.The real trick is grading EVERYBODY: Let's pin the Long Tail on

Geek humor

2005-05-08T09:05:00.000-04:00

A clever little lyrical romp by a talented and complex software designer.

Recognizing and writing about proxies

2005-05-07T18:38:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the most valuable realization I ever had while running the local news operation came in the 1990s during the "Where Are My Glasses?" scandal. Given the right set of circumstances, a story can become a proxy for a complex set of emotions and grievances. When that happens, you've really got two stories, not one. And you should act accordingly.The "Where are my glasses?" story in a nutshell:

Yikes!

2005-05-07T13:34:00.000-04:00

Sounds like the folks over at East Waynesville Baptist are now fully committed. According to Radosh (and this link off a WNC TV station), the church tossed some members who refused to toe its political line.Then a bunch more folks quit in protest. I remember this church from my cub reporter days at The (Waynesville, NC) Mountaineer, 1990-1992. The thing that strikes me about this is that nine

And so, in conclusion...

2005-05-06T09:42:00.000-04:00

We're all hard-wired to relate to group norms. This is a value-neutral statement. This behavior is useful, and since we're not going to change our neurology, the best thing to do is to become aware of the dynamic. Much of the cultural tension in America today is the result of being stuck in the middle of a transition between norms. The new norm attempts to judge others by whether they are

Turning it around, again

2005-05-05T23:39:00.000-04:00

So I went rambling the other day and wrote this long thing on normative behavior, socio-biology, instinct and media conferred legitimacy. But what happens when I turn that lens on myself instead of using it to peer into other people's heads?Lo and behold, I do it too. I get furious when people drive to the front of a line of cars trying to merge and then force their way in ahead of everybody who

Legitimacy, and who controls it

2005-05-04T14:17:00.000-04:00

So this morning Janet and I got into a newspaper-and-coffee-on-the-porch conversation about the paganism package (which I wrote and she's designing), and it dawned on me it might make a good post. Janet was a little amazed that there were people around the newsroom who apparently feel no pang of conscience when it comes to making disparaging remarks about the pagan story -- or pagans in general,

Hot Dang!

2005-05-03T16:27:00.000-04:00

Ever have one of those days when you feel like you're water popping on the surface of a deep-fat fryer? I mean, consider:Circulation is in big trouble... The Sun in Baltimore just dropped 11.5 percent daily... just a litany of bad circulation figures... E&P called yesterday "Black Monday."This morning we held our first serious meeting about the future of our online enterprise, and the boss

A cool beta: kinja.com

2005-05-02T12:05:00.000-04:00

Speaking of things that filter and connect, here's a cool beta site: kinja.com.At first glance, it seems a pretty simple online aggregator, but what caught my eye was its combination of customized watchlists and editors suggestions.

Happy Birthday, Dave Winer

2005-05-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday to you,Happy Birthday to you,Happy Birthday Dave WinerYou pretty much invented this mediumand we all really appreciate it, at least most of the time...

An e-mail

2005-05-02T10:12:00.000-04:00

Here's an e-mail, received this morning from a conservative reader. I like to post these from time to time because I think they capture a sense of fear and frustration that struggles to be heard in the culture. Is the writer appealing to a nostalgic myth of the past? I think so. Does this statement leave out horrors (public lynchings) and injustices (second-class citizenship for many Americans)?

What should I write about?

2005-04-30T16:35:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I sent out an e-mail to many of the people I've written about or interviewed in the past 17 months and invited them to suggest story ideas, profile subjects, etc. Scientists are over-represented, African-Americans are under-represented, but this is a pretty interesting cross section of the Lowcountry. Here are excerpts from some of the first replies (names withheld):Development: I have

The news-side addiction

2005-04-30T01:24:00.000-04:00

I've been in features now for 17 months, but every now and then I'll get tapped to do something over in news. Most of the time it's pretty simple. When I break stuff it's usually because the subject is so obscure that nobody else cares enough to cover it. Today I actually blundered into news. I'd been assigned a vague news-side piece on South Carolina's latest attempt to ban same-sex marriage (we

Back to normal? What's normal?

2005-04-27T10:53:00.000-04:00

My uncomfortable brush with traffic from an A-List blog should have subsided by now (I don't actually track such things, so guessing), and I'm breathing a bit easier. There's no evidence that I've horribly offended anyone I respect, and there's been no ominous message that begins "Conover, please come see me in my office." The experience (like so many) was instructive. It taught me that I've

The 'Uh-Oh Feeling"

2005-04-25T17:26:00.000-04:00

Hi. Jay Rosen included my post on Tim Porter's blog in a thing he put up this afternoon at PressThink, and that means one thing: much more traffic than this blog normally receives. For those of you who are here merely to get a bit of background to go with Rosen's comments, let me sum up this blog so you can go back about your regularly scheduled life: I blog about the stuff I'm trying to do. It

Deep Thoughts on Tim Porter

2005-04-25T11:54:00.000-04:00

Tim Porter's Friday blogpost, "The Mood of the Newsroom," was uniformly praised by some of my favorite people in New Media. Plus, I consider myself a Tim Porter fan. So why did I feel the urge to talk back to it? Am I one of the defensive newsroom people he describes? Am I really reacting to Porter's ideas, or to my emotions on the subject? Am I simply that much of a knee-jerk contrarian? God I

"Stand-alone journalism"

2005-04-21T11:55:00.000-04:00

Great post at PressThink this morning here.

Great Gawd Awmity

2005-04-20T01:17:00.000-04:00

Whew. I just finished jamming out one of the longest non-fiction articles I've ever written in my life, the kind of magazine-style prose that makes newspaper editors sit up and shout "CONOVER, YOU SUCK!"And maybe they're right. I'm not sure. I didn't want to write this story so long. I'm sick of long stories and constantly trying to find ways to write things shorter... or at least break them down

Global Warming hits the streets

2005-04-18T21:08:00.000-04:00

My little experiment went out with the morning paper, but whatever feedback I'm going to get is likely to be slow in coming. It wasn't exactly promoted, even though we devoted two open inside pages in the Health/Science page to my materials. No promo off the front page, so people are going to find it slowly, if at all (for those of you keeping score at home, it's the section BEHIND the automobile

Blogger wire service

2005-04-14T09:04:00.000-04:00

A few years back, I imagined what it might be like if one stood the notion of an international wire service on its head. Rather than a series of bureaus sending reports back to a central office, I doodled with the idea of something more like a loose intelligence network. Something like this: I own stock in a factory in Kiev, and political unrest leads to riots there. I'm reading the news stories

"Napoleon Dynamite:" the concurrent resolution

2005-04-13T09:42:00.000-04:00

I just think this is kinda cool: Idaho is in the process of honoring the 2004 indie-film-hit "Napoleon Dynamite" with a state resolution. Lawmakers do goofy stuff like that all the time, but the guy who wrote this one was really on his game. Consider the ultimate "WHEREAS" clause:WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose

The vanishing journalist

2005-04-12T14:29:00.000-04:00

The American Society of Newspaper Editors revealed a study today that shows the number of working journalists at American newspapers has declined 4 percent since 2001. Findings:* Overall staffing in newsrooms tumbled from an estimated 56,393 to 54,134 today — a four percent decline. * Numbers of white men fell the most, decreasing by a net 1,744 or 5.5 percent. The number of white women

Blogging, Zen, podcasting and pagans

2005-04-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

I love my Zen Micro as a technology, but I've got to adjust to it. The ability to reliably record a three-hour interview is great, but now that I have that ability, the task of retrieving notes from something that big is just daunting. I'm not sure how many hours it took me to get my eight pages of notes out of my recording of my sit-down with pagan poster family The McGreggors, but it was

More Zen...

2005-04-11T11:20:00.000-04:00

The Zen Micro does a much better job of recording meetings than I first imagined: I recorded two long events Friday and Saturday (a group meeting and a group interview) and you can make out everything everybody says. Not only that, but the ability to download an audio file to a computer makes transcription much easier -- more and better controls for playback, etc. The thing I really want now is a

I get Zen

2005-04-07T15:01:00.001-04:00

Yesterday an editor suggested that I road-test my idea for a daily Spoleto podcast by creating something similar out of stuff that's going on now that has nothing to do with Spoleto... a mock-up, in a sense. And since my favorite idea was to hangout at the door to venues and stick a microphone in people's faces as they exited, that put the pressure on me to come up with a portable recording

So, to atone...

2005-04-06T14:49:00.000-04:00

Here's the transcript of testimony given by a Baptist preacher last week at a hearing on a bill to ban gay marriage in South Carolina. It arrived in my e-mail this morning.I don't offer it as an endorsement of a religion -- as I said in my previous post, I am not a Christian. I don't offer it as proof that all Southerners are right on race or sexuality, or even that the preacher is representative

In which I gaze at my navel

2005-04-06T10:57:00.000-04:00

This will be a long post, so forgive me. Or skip it.First, some confessions: My father is a Christian minister, but I am not myself a Christian. That fact should not be read as a personal condemnation of Christianity, and I feel that I respect the faith to this day. But it is also true that I have been too harsh in judgment of my Christian brothers and sisters. I don't say this to retract my

Bye, cat

2005-04-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

One of our two almost-year-old cats, El Presidente De Todos De Los Gatos, was hit and killed across the street from our house this morning. We buried him in the back yard just after sunrise. He was a really nice cat. I didn't want to have pets again, but kittens grow on you. I will miss him very much.

Very cool blog link

2005-04-04T11:27:00.000-04:00

My friend Robert Huffman sent me this link in an e-mail: PostSecret, a collaborative art project. I love it.

Big news in Bluffton

2005-04-04T10:27:00.000-04:00

Steve Yelvington announced the launch of Bluffton Today on Friday while I was out of town. Not only is it big news for New Media, it's just down the road.

Don't go see "Sin City"

2005-04-03T21:56:00.000-04:00

I think I'm pretty much free to make this statement because nobody is ever going to accuse me of being hip, but Richard Rodriguez's "Sin City" is an amoral, moronic piece of trash.But why should anyone care? Bad stuff gets made all the time. Well, here are a few reasons: It's being marketed as cool. It's being lionized. Put another way, "Sin City" isn't just a bad movie: It's pathology being

Punching the tar baby

2005-04-03T16:55:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't have done it, but I stuck my nose into the faux "diversity in blogging" debate. Like the Schiavo case, one should just let these things play out and trust that people will pick out the credibility of the sides on their own.But I do get frustrated by it all. Here's my position: There is real, structural inequality in the "real world." Depending on how, where and to whom you are born,

And a good time was had by all...

2005-04-03T00:34:00.000-05:00

We turned our three-night camping trip into a two-nighter and drove home after a full day of hiking today, arriving at home in time to watch the second half of the UNC-MSU game. Perfect timing. We got rain. We got 46-mph wind. We got SNOW (sort of). We had a blast. But with a chance of real snow in the forecast, it was time to come home. We really just weren't set up for that.

Suggestions, please

2005-03-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

A week ago I got the go-ahead to explore creating a single-event blog for the newspaper. The concept calls for a team blog that would post bits from more than a dozen reporters, editors and reviewers involved in covering a three-week international arts festival here in town. It would be the paper's first formal step into the blogosphere. Yesterday I got to spend about 40 minutes on the phone with

Got My Mojo Workin'

2005-03-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

Dave Winer, in an act of valuable public service, has posted the lyrics to "Got My Mojo Workin'" here.This cleared up some decades-old misconceptions for me. For instance, I had interpreted the line "I got some red-hot tips I have to keep on ice" as having something to do with a choice portion of the female anatomy "keeping Hell on ice."Come to think of it, though, "keeping Hell on ice" is a