Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 59

What phone(s) should I buy? Or not?

I've been debating my phone strategy: I now have a two-generations-old iPhone on AT&T and a Nexus One on T-Mobile plus an AT&T laptop card.

Do I buy the new iPhone 4? Do I buy a new Android? Do I shift on Android from T-Mobile to Verizon? Do I move to one phone and platform? If so, which one? Do I get mifi? How do I convince my wife it's not insane to buy new phones? (The last one's the toughest because when she looks at me like I'm crazy, she's right.) So here's my rationale and...

The Quark of programming?

I think Google's App Inventor tool that enables anyone to program an Android app could be profound. But then, I thought Buzz was a big deal, so what the hell do I know?

Is it possible that the App Inventor could do to development what Quark did to publishing and Blogger did to the web: enable anybody to do it?

Dave Winer is skeptical and speaks from experience. He and I just made a bet: "that in two years Google's Android app developer will not have any effect on the priesthood of...

Will video become intimate?

There's something surprisingly tragic about Apple's latest touching, brilliant commercials for the iPhone 4's FaceTime. At the end of each of these commercials — the first four below are vignettes about two new babies, one new hairdo, and a new set of braces — I feel a need for the people on either end to hug. But they can't.

Now, of course, the video call only brings them closer together than a plain old telephone call could have — or an email or an SMS or (does anybody send them anymore?...

Publicness bibliography

A few of you asked for my bibliography of sources for my research on publicness. Here are some key books so far (I don't mean to show off with the German entries; I'll be lucky if I can dig into them but I hope to try). Dates (usually) refer to first publication. This does not include many newspaper articles (many great ones from the NYTimes at the turn of the last century), blog posts, and online essays.

Arendt, Hannah; The Human Condition; Chicago; 1958

Benkler, Yochai; The Wealth of...

Independence day for newspapers

Today Journal Register, a newspaper company, declared its freedom from old publishing methods and old journalistic methods. The company's 18 dailies published today, July 4, using nothing but free, web-based tools. And they involved their communities in their journalism in new ways. They call this the Ben Franklin Project.

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Here's their VP of content, Jon Cooper, reporting on the work of the project in each paper (my emphasis):

The difference between how these stories are usually written and...

Hyper times

For the record, I do not count The New York Times ending its New Jersey version of The Local and passing over its readers to Baristanet as a failure. The idea that The Times could have owned and run a blog with a journalist in every town and neighborhood in New York — let alone America — simply didn't scale. The more important skill for The Times to learn is working with networks of independent entrepreneurs who own and run their own local enterprises. That's what will scale. So I say this...

There is no hot news. All news is hot news.

The most dangerous defensive tactic parried by legacy news organizations today is their attempt to claim ownership of "hot news" and prevent others from repeating what they gather at their expense for as long as they determine that news is still hot. It is a threat to free speech and the First Amendment and our doctrines of copyright and fair use. It is a threat to news.

The old companies — NY Times, Advance, Gannett, Belo, McClatchy, Scripps, AFP, AP, Washington Post, et al — are lining up a...

The importance of provenance

News, like art, requires provenance.

I tweeted that today, joining in a conversation between Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen as they tried to understand how the Washington Post could quote only unnamed complainers in its McChrystal story. Tweeted Jay: "We're supposed to trust it because the Washington Post ran it. And that's the problem. It gives us no other grounding for trust." In the Post's view, then, its brand provided all the provenance needed: it was the source for trust. But in our view...

The myth of the opinionless man*

The problem in the cases of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal and ousted Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is not that they had opinions. Of course, they had opinions. Indeed, we should damned well want them to have opinions. If they each only accepted what they were told without doubts and complaints, without discrimination, they'd each be be very bad at their jobs, wouldn't they?

The problem is not that those opinions were reported. Publicness — transparency, openness, authenticity...

This is social news

Last week in Berlin, I spent the day with the student-interns at Axel Springer's in-house, two-year journalism school (that's common in the industry in Germany) to critique the work they did creating a new news site that used social tools to report: This is South Africa. The site — and the students — were impressive because they stretched the definitions of news and reporting and the culture of journalism and did so inside a media giant. Companies in the U.S. would be wise to inject such...