Doc Searls's Blog, page 15

Tweeting a Blog

For eight years I blogged here in a style that was basically tweeting with titles. Now I'm doing it again here, with Wordland. David Weinberger explains why it's awesome.

Loose Links

The big and scary news about the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, is that she died first, and suddenly, of hantavirus, which kills up to half the people it infects—often quickly.  It’s bad shit—or from bad shit: from rodents. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer’s, died later of his wife’s absent care. Their poor dog died in the crate he was in when Betsy brought him back from the vet. His death brought to mind what apparently befell the young male lead in “Ex Machina.”

Sara Watson: “I believe more than ever we are approaching the Troy-is-falling moment.” Bonus Sara link: A People’s History of Tech.

I never had Facebook Messenger on my computer, just on my phone. In order to get it on my computer, Facebook required a password change, which was a freaking ordeal, with pin codes sent to “your devices” or “your chat” that failed to appear, far as I could tell, anywhere, plus other fails. Confusing things further is that I made the huge mistake many years ago of adding a second Facebook account for David Searls, just for dealing with relatives and old friends who knew me before the world nicknamed me Doc. Confuses the shit out of both accounts. Also messing up the first account up was that I got it back in ’06 when Facebook was only for university folk and it has remained stuck ever since on a university address I haven’t had since 2010. I have another address associated with it, but that sometimes seems not to help. Anyway, that was just a half hour of my life wasted. Okay, here’s a link, to Jamie Smith’s newsletter. Somewhere in there he says “Password reset is the new login.” Too true.

We save daylight tonight by losing an hour. Here in Indiana, where we should, and used to be, in the Central time zone, we are at the far western edge of Eastern, which means the Sun comes up in the afternoon. I’m only half kidding. It rises at 8:04 AM and sets at 7:48 PM. In other words, at 3:56 minutes before Noon, and 7:48 after noon.

Talking Right

Great speech by David Brooks at a recent ARC conference in London. I read here that he was booed and heckled, but in the video one only sees smiles, warmth, and occasional laughs (e.g. to “At Chicago I had a double major in history and celibacy”). It’s a short, deep, and caring talk that comes from a conservative philosophy that seems lost in modern times.

Bookings

Even in a small city such as Bloomington, one can make fun discoveries all the time. Yesterday, for example, I discovered Redbud Books, which had a table set up to sell books from Cory Doctorow's increasingly vast oeuvre while the man himself spoke to a packed classroom in the Media School here at Indiana University. He'll be here in person when we host him on April 4th (less than a month from now) at the Hamilton Lugar School as part of our Beyond the Web salon series. You can join on Zoom at that link. Cory is a brilliant and original speaker (in addition to being a great writer and activist). See you there.

It’s about time. And space.

This informative video by @lainaminute (L.A. in a Minute) on Instagram expands on something I anticipated when I shot this photo album of the KSPN/710 transmitter site in Burbank, almost four years ago: that the land under the transmitter—19 acres of fenced-in grass surrounded by suburbs—would be put up for sale by Disney, which at the time owned the station. I'm surprised it took this long.

First Drafting

Writing with Wordland is like Tweeting, but on my personal press (this blog) instead of Elon's. Or any other giant's. As a difference in kind, it's absolute.

Radio’s Death Knells

The radio station known since 1935 as KSFO, “The Sound of the City,” was a landmark at 560 on the Bay Area radio dial for most of the last century.  Other landmarks were KGO/810, KCBS/740, KFRC/610, and KNBR/680. KFRC went away in 2005, as religious programming moved to AM from 106.9, and KCBS added that channel as the FM service by which it now entirely identifies (even though the AM signal covers most of California). KNBR pushed KFOG off 104.5 and now identifies with that FM channel. But the worst ignominy was a move by Cumulus Media, which owns both the 560 and 810 signals. First, it killed the KGO callsign, which had been in use for 101 years (during most of which it was the Bay Area’s top-rated station), and moved the KSFO callsign and programming—generic syndicated right-wing talk—to 810. Then it rebranded the 560 signal KZAC, did nothing with it, and took it off the air this past Monday, roughly on its 100th birthday. Where once had stood two first-rank full-service radio stations, long on news and personalities, now stands one off-the-shelf talker and a blank silent space on what used to be the AM dial. Nice work.

I also just learned that WINZ/940, one of Miami’s landmark signals, will drop six of its seven towers, go from 50,000 watts by day and 10,000 watts by night down to just 16 (sixteen!) watts at night, meaning hardly on the air at all. Meanwhile, in Chicago, WSCR/670 and WBBM/780 are moving to lesser facilities, with smaller signals, so the land underneath their tower and its ground system can be sold off. Two years ago Las Vegas lost KDWN/720 and KXST/1140, when the land under their towers was cleared to make room for yet another shipping transfer center. Both stations had already been downgraded in prior transmitter moves. On California’s South Coast, KVEN/1450, the only sports station in the region, went away in 2021 when Cumulus turned in its license.

AM in Canada has thinned as well. CHML/900 in Hamilton, which I sometimes listened to nightly in New York City, went off the air last year. Long gone by now are CBL/1070 from Moncton, CINW/940 (formerly CBM) and CINF (formerly CBF) in Montreal, and CBJ/1580 in Chicoutimi. All had monster signals that covered large parts of North America at night.

Not that most people are missing these stations, AM radio, or radio at all. (FM is on death row as well, but executions are still a decade or two away.) But I think what just happened in San Francisco is worth a bugle call.

Bonus link: H.R. 979, the  AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025. It requires an AM radio in every new car. Note that no bill requires that new cars have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. But the market wants those. Its younger demographics barely know that AM radio exists.

 

Monday Monday

Naming today's tab dump after one of The Mamas and The Papas best songs. Here is a lipsync'd video on YouTube. Dig the old-skool stereo.

Where I explained customer-to-company AI agent-to-AI agent interaction (you know, markets as conversations) in May of last year.

Giving Away Tabs

If I share the link to one of my open tabs and close it, the reader gets a new tab when they click on the link, no? So, in that case I'm giving away tabs, seems to me on a Sunday afternoon.

I don't have Hulu, and I don't have cable, but I do have an antenna outside, so we'll be watching the Academy Awards tonight on WRTV/6 from Indianapolis. RabbitEars.info tells me that WRTV is actually on channel 25 (and 6 is its "virtual" channel), 54 miles away, and with a signal it calls "poor" here. But I have a new outside antenna memorably named DAT BOSS MIX LR antenna High-VHF/UHF (Repack Ready), vectored toward WRTV and the rest of the TV tower farm on the far side of Indianapolis from here, and it gets the station just fine.  I've been to that farm, and here is a photo of WRTV's tower on the north side of it.

We'll be watching the Academy Awards on our new Samsung QN42S90D TV, which Consumer Reports rates highly at that link. ~$850 on Amazon. We have it mounted on a wall frame that lets us aim it in different directions, depending on who's watching where in a smallish room. Since it is hard to use external speakers with it, we're forgoing those. The speakers in it sound pretty good, considering. And the picture is gorgeous.

Total News

27th in the News Commons series

Nearly everything I’ve been writing in the News Commons series has come out of breakfasts Joyce and I have enjoyed with Dave Askins at the Uptown Cafe in Bloomington, Indiana. (A tech perspective: The Uptown is to Bloomington what Bucks of Woodside is to Silicon Valley.) At the most recent of these, Dave said Total News—News for All Time was a good way to talk about the Future—>Present—>Past approach to news that he came up with a few months earlier (see that last link), and which has been framing up everything I’ve been thinking and writing about news since then, including all my posts (#17 to #24, so far) about the #LAfires.

This got me thinking, on the spot, about how we frame news in the here-and-now. Toward co-thinking about that, I organized a spreadsheet with rows titled by sugar packets and columns headed by sweetener packets, on our breakfast table there.

Help remember that conversation, I kept the packets and just laid them out on my desk for a closer look:

C, P, and M stand for

Character,Problem,and Movement.

As I explain in What are Stories? (#21 in the News Commons series), these are the three requirements of every story.

And, as I explain in The Blame Game (#23 in the series), stories tend to go through four stages:

Live reporting,Human interest,Blame, andComing to an understanding

All of which we’ve seen, in abundance, in coverage of the #LAfires since they happened.

The columns in the grid of sugars and sweeteners stand for

FramingPerson or PeopleHuman interestBlame or reponsibilityUnderstanding

The F is what matters. Because every story has a frame. In fact, everything we think, know, and tell stories about has a conceptual frame. Frames are where the vocabulary we think and talk in terms of comes from.

For a quick grasp of that, read Framing the Net, which I wrote for the Berkman Klein Center’s Publius Project when I was a fellow at the center back in 2008, but which applies at least as well today.

The other four columns (P, H, B, and U) are provisional. So are the four above that. The only parts of that ad hoc spreadsheet I’m sure about, so far, are the three requirement rows: Character, Problem, and Movement. If a visual helps, here’s one:

Back to Dave.

Persistent readers of the series might recall (in #16) that Dave shut down the B Square Bulletin on December 20. That was bad news at the time. The good news today is that he’s brought the B Square back up. He explains his new vision here. An excerpt:

Total News—News for All Time: Future, Present, and Past

A newsroom that is founded on a commitment to Future, Present and Past will deliver what today’s local decision-makers need—comprehensive, accurate information about topics in their full context.

Local decision-makers range from elected and appointed officials to business owners, voters, parents of school-aged children, and rank-and-file residents. We’re all decision-makers.

Future. The B Square will help make Bloomington a place where it’s easy for residents to find out what is going to happen. When does the North-South football game start? When is the public hearing on the new tax? When will the school board interview the superintendent candidates? When does the city’s 3rd Street repaving project start?

Present. Bloomington will be a place where it’s easy for residents to find out what just happened. Who won the North-South football game? Did the county council approve the new tax? Who is the new superintendent of schools? Why was traffic backed up on 3rd Street late Tuesday afternoon?

Past. Bloomington will be a place where it’s easy to find out what happened a long time ago. What is the history of the North-South rivalry? How much revenue has the old tax generated for the county over the last 20 years? How many people have had the job of superintendent of schools, and who were they? How many traffic crashes has that stretch of 3rd Street seen over the last 10 years?

This is a working model for news production everywhere—from towns like Bloomington to cities like Los Angeles. I’d like to see us working out the prototype in both places—or anywhere anyone else wants to run with it.

To be clear, Total News is not about how we produce news now, but how we prepare for news in the future, and how we keep archives that inform future news.

Now for some what-comes-nexts.

First, from the 5th to the 10th of this month I’ll be at SCaLE in Pasadena, learning and talking about Personal AI (another series on this blog, relevant to both the #LAfires and how news in the future will be produced and improved). I’ll also be giving a keynote for Kwaai.ai, at their annual summit, inside of SCaLE. Much of what we’ll be talking about are learnings from fire resilience hackathons that have been happening in L.A.) I would love to meet there at SCaLE, or nearby, with anyone working on Total News following the #LAfires. (Looking at you, KPCC/LAist, LA Times, Hear In LA, and anyone else I’ve sourced in writing about the LAfires.)

Second, I see the News Commons series feeding into a book. I don’t know yet if I’ll write that book alone, with Dave, or with some collection of other contributors. It’s too early to say because most of the work that needs to be done hasn’t happened yet. By work I mean putting together the best way to do calendars (the future), to produce news stories based on facts (the present), and to flow our calendars, collections of facts, and stories, into archives that are maximally useful for future stories (the past).

Third, I want to organize events around all the above. Stay tuned for more on that one.