Why we have no time to think

Just came across this wonderful explanation of lack of attention span in our increasingly connected world. That’s why it’s ever more difficult for static media, such as newspapers, TV, parents and employers, to command attention.

BTW, the easiest explanation of asymptotic is that the curve line never quite touches the base line.

Twittering a murder trial

I’ve been playing with Twitter the past few days, trying to understand the strange appeal of posting and perusing 140-character tweets from friends. Along came veteran Wichita Eagle court reporter Ron Sylvester to demonstrate Twitter’s effectiveness as a news tool. Ron has been following a hot local murder trial, posting frequent updates via Twitter. It’s dramatic, informative and addicting to follow Ron’s posts, known as tweets. Just a few days into the trial, the American Bar Association Journal has posted an online story on Ron’s experiment.

The Knight Foundation’s transformational mission

I’ve always been impressed with the Knight Foundation’s dedication to journalism, but never more so than in the past few years under the leadership of former Miami Herald Publisher Alberto Ibaurguen. Alberto and the board set transformation as the mission, and they’ve walked their talk with a series of thoughtful grants, both large and small. Lately they’ve been focusing on digitial delivery of news and information.

Two sets of Knight-funded grants were announced this week. A lot of the attention went to the second round of News Challenge grants, because they’re big ($5.5 million worth), they’re international and because one went to the inventor of the Internet (no, not Al Gore). But I’m just as interested in the small grants funded by knight through the New Voices program at the University of Maryland. Worth a look for some very cool citizen media ideas.

Saved from Google by a good editor

In preparing the item below for the blog and the op-ed page of The Wichita Eagle, I wanted to use the familiar quotation: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” 

I wasn’t sure who said it, but when the first Google item I clicked on said H.L. Mencken, I thought, “of course, Mencken,” and went on my merry way.

This morning I got this message from Rhonda Holman, one of the editors on the page:

In your commentary, you wrote: “In pre-television days, the renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, ‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’”

A bit of Internet searching indicates this is often misattributed to
Mencken and should be attributed to A.J. Liebling. 

I called Rhonda and promised to get to the bottom of this. I looked at Google again and found 80,200 items attributed the quote to Mencken and 23,700 to Liebling.

I was shaken enough by the disparity to call the Reference Desk at the Wichita State University Library. There I got help from Angela Paul, who confirmed Rhonda’s catch of my mistake, using The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

So, thanks Rhonda, thanks Angela.

I sure hope it was Liebling! 

Citizens as gatekeepers

Inexpensive technology has put the tools of mass communication in the hands of the masses, diluting the power of traditional news media. We are in the early days of a rapidly expanding movement of do-it-yourself news, often called citizen journalism. I think it has great potential for serving democracy.

The renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Now everyone with a computer and Internet connection is a potential publisher; everyone with a video-enabled cell phone is a potential broadcaster.

 This unprecedented power shift is not without risk.

In two recent columns in The Wichita Eagle, Davis “Buzz” Merritt, my colleague at the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State, raised alarm about the potential dangers of iReport.com. It’s a site owned by and run by CNN as a sort of YouTube for news. It allows anyone to post news video with none of the accuracy, fairness and taste filters provided by traditional news organizations.

Professor Merritt raises the excellent point that current law protecting Internet activity gives no ready legal recourse to those who may be harmed by false reports. That should be corrected. 

But we should never go back to the days, just now coming to an end, when a small number of professional journalists, known as gatekeepers, got to decide what everyone should read, hear and see.

Merritt paints an ugly picture of iReport.com’s potential content as “stuff posted directly by any idiot or criminal with a camera and a computer.” That’s not what I see when I actually look at the site.

This week’s most viewed story subjects included the 2008 Presidential election and natural disasters in China and Myanmar. There were also silly videos about bridesmaid dresses, but no content fluffier than you’d find in the features portions of most newscasts.

Merritt finds CNN irresponsible for posting amateur video that hasn’t gone through a professional vetting process. I think CNN and other news organizations are smart to encourage citizen journalism.  Pushing back a frontier always involves danger, but the harm is usually offset by the resulting progress.

On a national level, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is encouraging community foundations to develop local experiments in citizen journalism.

I’m working with the Wichita Community Foundation to put together a local group to brainstorm ideas for Sedgwick County. If you want to be involved, send me an email. Or a video!