The function of a newsroom in the future is to coordinate the voices of the world to produce a coherent news product. That job will be done in very much the model that Tumblr is doing it. You could have started with a blogging community or you could have started with a news organization, but they’re both heading to the same place.

The Times of course has the best newsroom. So why don’t they evolve a blogging platform like Tumblr’s? They should have. I’ve been begging them to do it since the mid-90s. There’s still time to gather some of the leftover energy in the web, and to be prepared to catch some of the deserters when Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter et al stumble at growing into the space formerly occupied exclusively by the Times, Wash Post, etc.

But less time remains all the time.

Dave Winer — NYT growing the wrong way.

For the longest time (since freshman year, early 2007), I’ve been dedicated to Google Reader. I briefly switched to Fever and switched back because the mobile interface wasn’t as functional. Given this whole new Google+ thing, I have less and less confidence of serious, necessary product innovation happening with Google Reader.

How I use Google Reader

Currently, Reeder, an excellent app for both Mac OS X and the iPhone, is my primary interface for Google Reader. It’s lovely, syncs well, and is amazingly integrated with other services. Click a button, choose a service, presto.

I’m subscribed to a total of 568 subscriptions, everything from friends to thought leaders to product blogs to aggregators. Surprisingly, not a lot of mainstream news organizations. My subscriptions are bundled into folders: A-List, B-List, B-High (pretty much Techmeme and Mediagazer), and then by topic (Media & Journalism, WordPress, etc.) or context (friends, Automattic, projects, etc.).

A fair number of people I know have switched away from using an RSS reader in favor of Twitter (example), under the auspices that “if the news is that important, it will find me.” I understand the value of serendipity — I also want to be deliberate about the information I consume. I zero my subscriptions on an almost daily basis.

What a Reader should be

A reader is for engaging with information; it’s a tool for consuming, managing, and using knowledge. In addition to presenting new information to consume, I also want it to pay attention to, infer insights from, and make accessible in an evergreen matter what I’ve already read. For me, this presents the pinnacle of personal information management — an intelligent tool that can reinforce what I already know and help guide me towards what I need to know.

Dave Winer has been thinking about this for much longer than I have — read him first. Basically, unread counts and the rigamarole associated with subscribing to a new feed are the two big deal breakers for RSS readers. In addition to fixing this, I think the new reading interface should:

• Present content based on type. Blog posts should look like blog posts. Quotes shouldn’t look like blog posts… they should look like quotes! Statuses should look like statuses, videos should behave like videos, etc.
• Keep track of what I’ve read and emphasize what’s new to me. Similarly, pay attention to links within pieces of content. If multiple pieces include the same link, nest those together so I can quickly skim the conversation once.
• Offer insights into my information diet. Help me better understand what I’m consuming, how often I’m consuming it, and how I can better improve my consumption patterns.
• Sync states across platforms. It bugs me to no end when I read a Twitter mention on the web and the read state doesn’t persist to the mobile app. If you’re sending email notifications too, the act of reading an email notification should put the web notification should be put in the read state.
• Help me budget my time. Prioritize content when I only have 15 minutes to spare, or I’m at work. I’ve seen some websites show “estimated reading time” — take that further.
• Make it easy to engage with the content. Whether it’s sharing, favoriting, or commenting, let me interact within the reading interface. Reeder does the sharing brilliantly; I pick which services I use and the action is only a tap away.
• Help me remember what I know. I partially use WordPress for this (e.g. useful tools I’ve come across or smart information from Clay Shirky). There’s a certain amount of friction with this approach (both good and bad). It would be awesome if I had a secondary system for quickly accessing information I’ve previously come across. A search engine for information I’ve consumed.

That’s what I’ve got. Let’s start iterating.

Half the comments I get on Twitter are part of a “media strategy.”

Which means someone read a book that said if you want to achieve success you have to “engage” with people.

I bet Klout has something to do with it. If they get a reply from me, that counts as a certain number of points toward their score. Which theoretically I guess gets them consulting business, working on other people’s “media strategies.”

So they ask questions a machine could come up with. I recommend an author. They ask if they should read one of his or her books. I don’t know.

People must realize, don’t they, that this is all pointless. It’s a bubble on a bubble on a bubble on a bubble. When you dilute things that much, is there really anything left?

Dave Winer — The idiocracy of social media

“Every node in the network is a news node.” The easiest way to see this is in the Twitter network, where every user is a potential source of news.

Sources go direct.

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.

“It’s easier trust ‘here’s where I’m coming’ from than the ‘view from nowhere’.” A reason for this is that people have access to a lot more news, as well as background information on that news. Journalists traditionally believe that the “mask of objectivity” is what allows people to trust them. Now, users can see the shallowness of the approach.

It’s dangerous for the news industry to rely on the tech industry for the next generation of publishing tools. Journalists cover tech icons as if they were messiahs. This creates a situation where news organizations passively absorb direction from the voice of God. There is a wish and hope the iPad will deliver a magic solution for newspapers.

The news system was built to deliver a stream of updates about what is new today. It’s been weak on context, or the background information you need to understand the story. A major design challenge in the rebooted system of news is how you can deliver both at the same time.

Question: How would you reboot mid-term election coverage?

Rosen: You’d develop a citizen’s agenda for coverage by polling the citizenry for what they want politicians to talk about. Then, in political debates, you’d look at whether the candidates are actually discuss those issues.

Question: Where should transparency be shown in news coverage?

Rosen: The easiest way would be to just link the byline to a background page on the reporter. It should have a listing of relevant topics and your perspective on them. Instead of saying “here’s the view from nowhere,” you’d say “here’s all of the information I had to write this piece.”

Winer: It’s not always about transparency, either. It’s about being clear about where you’re coming from. A blind man approaching the back of an elephant is going to have a completely different perspective than a blind man approaching the front of the elephant.

Question: Where should news organizations go if they can’t rely on technology companies for the future?

Winer: We’re really, really, really early in the news system of the future. Twitter is a large company now, but it doesn’t have a guaranteed position. For instance, updates on Twitter are limited to 140 characters. Is this the ideal length for a news item? Probably not; there’s room for innovation. Do it yourself.

Question: What is open source, can it be applied to the news industry and, if so, in what ways?

Winer: They’ve actually giving some things away but others aren’t free. Licenses for software use to run hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, certain things are given away but other things are charged for. ”Who cares how you pay the bills?” The news industry insists to make money in a very particular way. Anything else is sacreligious. It’s this inflexibility that’s breaking the business.

Rosen: The motivations of people who contribute to open source projects are usually “if we all contribute, then we can all benefit and others can benefit too.” Just think about what we could do if we applied this to news.

Winer: Others choose to go open source to wipe out their competitors. The analog in the news industry is “open the doors” and let everyone contribute. Otherwise, they’ll fork you. Whomever embraces this model, and does it well, will win.

WinerLinks gives you paragraph-level permalinks on your posts or pages. v0.2, released just a moment ago, adds WinerLinks to your RSS feed too, as well as a magical showy-hidey mode if you only want the links to appear on hover.

Download it at WordPress.org, leave feature requests or bugs in the forum, and fork the project on GitHub.

Dave Winer and Jay Rosen in the 12th edition of Rebooting the News explore a concept Dave refers to as a “coral reef” for local information. The importance of a coral reef in the sea is that it is a habitat for many other species to prosper. His argument for starting In Berkeley, what he thinks is the first local blog for Berkley, is that it might provide a coral reef for a lot of tremendous local data to grow from. Given the right formats for information storage, it can become a repository for community knowledge that everyone within the community can both contribute to and benefit from. What got me thinking, though, was what these formats might be.

The obvious one is the article slash blog post. There really isn’t any distinction. The blog post is the big bucket in which you can drop any sort of community data. The unfortunate thing about the generic blog post, however, is that the data you put in the post generally isn’t structured in such a way that the aggregate of the posts offer value too. If I report on a crime, lost dog, or house for sale with a given location, a given time, and other common values, the information is presented to me as readable, but not enhanced.

A local blog as a coral reef, or many different types of data sets for information to hangout around, would offer a vibrant, growing, and evolving habitat for a community’s collective knowledge. For instance, an article about rent prices going up, something I used to be concerned about as a student, would be closely related to a database of community-contributed rent rates. This information would be a part of a larger, community-created housing data set that included rating of landlords, whether utilities were included or not, etc. The rental rates mashed with location, however, could generate a interactive heat map that offers timeless value.

I think the key point I’d like to make, however, is that the data shouldn’t get lost within its framework. In a blog post, there’s much information that, if presented in a hybrid structured/readable format, could be be useful as an aggregate as well. Projects like OpenCalais do this by taking a brute force approach to deriving data and relationships from unstructured, block text. Posts could be published as semi-structured information however, in a manner I’ll write about when the idea is better fleshed out.

Building off this coral reef concept, Dave and Jay started talking about the virtual assignment desk for the NY Times hyperlocal blogging experiments. It’s a blog post and an email address right now, nothing better than what could’ve been done, had newspapers been this forward-thinking, with GeoCities in the 90′s.

We’ve started a project called Edit Flow [PDF because the wiki is currently down] under the CoPress umbrella that might create a nice intersection between the coral reef of information and distributed assignment desk. The goal the project is to enhance the editorial workflow capabilities of WordPress in five stages: custom post statuses, meta data for posts, workflows and user groups, a pitch system, and then windows for visualizing the aggregate of the information. Each stage provides a nice foundation for the next. The pitch system is how you’d enter all of the information, or assignments, into the system, and it would be just as easy to build a public interface to that data as it would a private one. In fact, easier because you’d be free of the WordPress admin. It’s a coral reef because it’s a whole bunch of editorial hooks you can hang information from, and it’s an assignment desk because, well, that’s exactly what we intend to build.