Susie: When did you start using Twitter? Was it for personal, professional, or educational purposes?

I’m almost positive I joined Twitter in April 2007, although I don’t think I started using it regularly until that summer. Since episode 1, I’ve been a regular listener of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech. I believe I heard Twitter mentioned first in this episode, and signed up shortly after.

In 2007, all use of Twitter was experimental. There was no distinction between personal, professional, or educational. It was a new tool, and people had to invent how to use it. Since the beginning, up until about three weeks ago, I used Twitter as a mix of all three. I posted images from awesome vacation sights, scored a two-year gig at Publish2 by tweeting “I want to live in startup land”, and tapped the knowledge of people smarter than I by tweeting questions I’ve run into.

Susie: Have you always been open to using Twitter?

Yes, until three weeks ago.

Twitter is/has been an amazing communications platform. When I started, the advantages to Twitter over other platforms were three-fold: forced brevity, serendipity from asynchronous relationships, and real-time updates.

Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Because of this design constraint, the cultural focus became pithiness. Pithy updates about what you’re working on, pithy reports from the conferences you’re attending, and pithy descriptions of (along with the link to) the brilliant article you just read.

Furthermore, you can subscribe to this pithy information stream from anyone on the platform. Most of the time, the thought-leaders of whatever context you’re passionate about aren’t in your same geographic vicinity. People like @jeffjarvis, @cshirky, @zephoria, and @timoreilly. You can’t just drop in the room to hear them lecture, or invite to coffee. On Twitter, however, you can and you can.

Lastly, you can do all of this in real-time. Publishing becomes almost conversational. For a couple of years, I even had every tweet sent to my phone as text messages.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to Twitter that, three weeks ago, overran the positives. I haven’t established my thoughts well-enough to go into too much detail, but I will say a couple of things.

I tired of not having full access to my data. You’re only permitted to access your last 3,200 tweets. Search is a terribly mangled mess, and only goes back seven days. Think about it this way: Want to find your notes from the conference a year ago, or your updates from your vacation to India two years ago? Good luck, it’s technically impossible. There’s no way to export your data either.

I also am increasingly wary of letting a corporation control my namespace and identity without being guaranteed specific rights. Like nearly every other service on the web, Twitter’s Terms of Service has a clause explaining they can delete you at a moment’s notice:

Twitter may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally and may not be able to provide you with prior notice. We also retain the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time without prior notice to you.

If Twitter is your primary method of communicating, as for many Facebook is becoming, then you absolutely must have the right to a portable identity.

We urgently need an open Twitter protocol that co-exists with Twitter.com. Part of that needs to include a decentralized reading interface so that reading is closely coupled with publishing. I’d prefer spend my free time and attention working on that, rather than “serfing the web.“

Susie: Have you taken any classes where the instructor used Twitter as a teaching tool? If so, what class and in what ways was it used?

No, I haven’t taken any classes where the instructor used Twitter as a teaching tool.

For fall 2009, I signed up for a number of entry-level geography courses. In one of the classes, the professor made it clear laptops could only be used for taking notes. If caught using it for anything else, the infraction would be grounds for a “F” in the course and forfeit of course credit. If you used your cell phone for texting, you’d lose an immediate letter grade. Proof is in a PDF of the syllabus.

On the second day of the new term, I flew down to San Francisco for the Online News Association’s annual conference. There I had the fortune to meet people like Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times and Brian Boyer of the Chicago Tribune. Publish2 won a big ol’ award on Saturday night. It was an extraordinary time that reinvigorated my enthusiasm for helping reinvent the news industry.

I can’t say the same about classes whose structure fundamentally cripples new opportunities presented by technology. Think about it: the web is potentially more disruptive than the Gutenberg printing press. It’s in the process of flattening the music, movie, and news industries, and will change education, government, and healthcare in the future. In most traditional classes, not only do you not have the chance to experiment with the web, but you’re actively discouraged from doing so. This is broken.

The Monday following ONA, I informed the registrar of my intent to withdraw from my classes.

Susie: What do you think are the benefits of using Twitter in the classroom? Do you think there are any negative aspects (i.e. distraction)?

See my response to the second and last question for the benefits. Regarding whether Twitter is a distraction or not, separate the tool from the instructor and the course. If students are bored in class, they will find a means to engage their mind. Before technology X, it was passing notes, reading a book, or skipping class altogether.

Susie: Do you think more instructors should use Twitter as a tool?

Yes, especially this one. If not to teach (there’s only one @jayrosen_nyu), then at least to have a working understanding of the platform, its strengths, and its limitations.

Susie: How do you think instructors should use Twitter?

Let’s take a step back and frame your question in a broader context. It really should be “How do you think instructors should use technology?” When you get down to the nitty-gritty, Twitter really isn’t all that different from Tumblr, WordPress or YouTube. It’s a text-based real-time communication platforms limited to 140 characters that empowers its users to reach a global audience.

Without asking this broader question, you’ll end up trying to “meet the future by doing what [you] did in the past”, as Sir Ken Robinson artfully explains:

The current system of education was designed for an industrial age. You spend tens of thousands on a four-year degree because you used to learn things that would last most of your career. Throwing new technology at these old systems won’t fix anything; in many cases, it will only exacerbate the issue.

Think about technology holistically because it enables you to do in fundamentally new ways. Use Twitter as your real-time notepad, then archive those thoughts on a blog post. When you’re working on a piece, publish all of your source material along with intermediate revisions so the curious reader can explore how your thoughts developed.

Broadening the question opens plenty of possibilities.

Informational interviews are a key part of finding stories, David says. He consumes a lot of coffee, talks with people about what they’re working on, and then also asks about what else they’re working on. That secondary information can lead to interesting pieces down the road.

Marshall has a detailed workflow for tracking down stories in the tech sector. He’s been working for ReadWriteWeb for the last year and a half, and is responsible for two to three posts a day. Most of the time, stories are “interrupt-driven” or dependent on the news of the day. The whole staff logs into a single Fever account to share RSS reading responsibilities.

One source of feeds is pretty ingenious. A research assistant dug up people who first linked popular web services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. on Delicious. He did so for a number of startups over the last couple of years and put all of that information on a spreadsheet. Based on this aggregate information, he was able to identify 15 or so people who regularly link upcoming web services before anyone else. Subscribing to these Delicious accounts has multiple stories a week about hot new startups.

Most of the ReadWriteWeb writers use Tweetdeck for Twitter. Marshall has the 4,000+ people he’s following organized into different categories, including NY Times, analysts, augmented reality, etc. The team has a Skype chat they keep open 24 hours for coordinating on stories. They use hashtags within the conversation to enable people to find information of a specific type (i.e. which stories need editing with #edit).

For tracking reactions to pieces he’s written, Marshall searches for conversations based on a specific URL with Friendfeed, based on the ReadWriteWeb domain in Digg, and recently favorited tweets.

Libby Tucker notes that the differences between David and Marshall’s reporting styles. David flies to Urbana, Illinois to interview a scientist, whereas Marshall notes that if he has to put his pants on, it’s a big day.

The lunch session at SPJ’s Building a Better Journalist conference today was YAPOTFON, or Yet Another Panel On The Future Of News. Conversation was facilitated by President-elect Hagit Limor (@hlimor).

DJ Wilson is the President and General Manager of the KGW Media Group in Portland. “More than ever, people are consuming media.” Part of it is the 24/7, anytime, anywhere demand from consumers. KGW is a content business that works to meet that demand.

Rita Hibbard (@rthibbard) is the executive director and editor of InvestigateWest, a reporting non-profit in Seattle started by ex-Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers. The bad news is the sheer number of journalists that have been laid off; the number of credentialed reporters in Olympia, Washington has gone from 25 to 6. [Ed note 10/25: This may also be due to waning interest in covering government] “Readers and news consumers are starting to wake up to what’s being lost out there.” We’re not replacing the investigative troops, but figuring out new ways to get the job done. InvestigateWest is brand new; incorporated in May, website launched in July, and first story will be out next month. It’s a piece on the misuse of public lands. They generate original, high-level investigative content. The business model is to syndicate it to as many media partners as possible, not build up their website. The first grant InvestigateWest received was from the Bullitt Foundation, which hasn’t traditionally funded journalism.

“Collaboration is a big part of this new media ecosystem.” InvestigateWest is working with a number of media partners in ways that would not have happened five or ten years ago. “The era of one dominant media source in a community is over.” News will now be an ecosystem of many parts.

Steve Woodward (@nozzlsteve) is CEO and a co-founder of Nozzl Media. Nozzl Media is a startup that builds tools for news organizations to provide real-time, personalized streams of information to their audience.

“A lot of people in newspapers thought the internet was a fad and wouldn’t go away. When it persisted, they didn’t understand why it persisted because they didn’t use it.” It’s important, Steve argues, to learn from the past. Newspapers have moved online, but they aren’t learning new tricks. Display advertising online is forecasted to peak this year and then decline. Newspapers need to think seriously about video ads, search ads, and other formats for helping businesses get their message out.

85% of all potential advertisers in any given market are never contacted by ads salesmen. Most are just going after the same 15% over and over again.

“Be the competition,” Steve argues. Sales staff should act as an ad network now. Sell ads for your competitors too, to allow the client diversify the platforms, and take a cut of that.

Abraham Hyatt (@abrahamhyatt) is the founder of Digital Journalism Portland, an award-winning journalist, and currently working on a year-long research project looking at innovation on mainstream media websites.

Abraham hates the phrase “the death of newspapers.” It’s a crutch, he says, that polarizes thinking and limits the realm of possibilities. The really interesting examples of innovation are the super-local shops. The one or two person news organizations that are experimenting and have a willingness to fail. “It’s the little guys that are weaving together a tapestry of innovative ideas.” They’re the ones that are going to shape the future of news.

DJ says that technology is driving the core of what they do. On a business side, they’re balancing revenues with expenses and using technology to keep up. Abraham mentions that small groups are the ones that are nimble enough to try experiments and DJ says there are multiple groups within KGW doing this. She also believes that there will always be money in producing content; it’s a matter of figuring out how to deliver it on all of the platforms.

What are media sites doing well? Abraham has been pleasantly surprised by the number of organizations that are making money on mobile. They aren’t making money on their content, rather they’re building different consumer applications. DJ says that KGW is doing a lot to optimize their video delivery on their website. They’re also generating revenue by working with many businesses to offer coupons, and then taking a cut from any sales generated. Steve hasn’t seen much innovation from newspaper websites. “They have a lot to learn from tech companies.” The Palm Pilot was very successful in the 1990′s because they spent a tremendous amount of time measuring shirt pockets. This is called “form factor” and is really important. Newspaper companies don’t think about form factor. “No one under the age of 40 likes broadsheets, they like tabs… Why aren’t there special coffee shop versions of the paper that are more tailored to the experience?” Newspapers, Steve argues, need to invest in significantly refining user experience, both on the web and in print. They redesign at a drop of the hat but nothing ever changes significantly.

Jay Rosen, who you should follow on Twitter if you don’t already, lays an excellent foundation:

Ryan Sholin breaks down the argument for linking into five parts. Basically, journalists should be responsible citizens of the web. They have responsibility to their readers to provide as much information as they can bring together, responsibility to build bridges between the different parts of their online community, and responsibility to point readers in the direction of the right information when the journalists don’t immediately have the answer.

One point I touched on and want to reiterate is linking is a process of showing your work. This is fundamentally a Good Thing. Both Sean Sullivan and Paul Balcerak agree. In the age of newspapers, buggies, and clapboard houses, the reader was forced to make the assumption that the publication fact-checked and caught all of their errors. Hyperlinking text inherently means that the reader can then go and check out what you’re linking to. If you’re writing a piece with facts you want to substantiate, you can link to the source of every one of those facts. In fact, I agree that it’s “suspect for journos not to link whenever possible.” Making the reporting process transparent builds trust between the publication and the reader, and trust builds brand.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of traditionally print publications that haven’t caught wind of this. A few days back, NYU Local, the upstart publication at NYU, accused the Washington Square News of pilfering their posts without attribution. They found five examples of where NYU Local originally reported the story, only to have Washington Square News rewrite the story and pass it off as their own. If you read through the comments, you’ll notice these examples aren’t necessarily where NYU Local had the scoop, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a critical point Lily is making:

Over the weekend, your former editor and current contributing writer Sergio Hernandez posted about “The Embittered Feud Between NYU’s Junior Journalists” on his personal blog. The post itself was worth reading, but part of Sergio’s response to the onslaught of NYU Local contributor comments was even more interesting and on-point. We complained about your shoddy linking and he dismissed it, saying that we are completely different beasts, and that your online presence is a mere formality. Because your primary medium is print, perhaps for you the web essentially serves as another vehicle to display that print content. Sergio was right in some ways: your paper and our blog are completely different beasts, but the fact remains that your website and NYU Local are not. When you translate content to the web, you need to adjust it to coincide with online ethics. And one basic tenet of those ethics is linking. As young, informed internet users, we assume you know all of this already, so why haven’t you acted on it?

I suppose this is more an argument of “shoulds” than realities. Because, in reality, it is all too easy for you to say that WSN behaves like a traditional newspaper, free of links, and leave it at that. The thing is, you spent the summer re-vamping your website (for the second time in less than two years). Why bother making your site more attractive if you couldn’t care less about advancing the level of your online content?

Not only that, but the “ethic of the link” is actually a more powerful tool, method, and ethos for journalism than anything that came before.

It’s a big, wild internets out there with many examples to illustrate my point. I’d like to share a few:

• The Money Meltdown – Matt Thompson’s response to the beginning of the global economic crisis offers original curation to provide context and background to one of the largest stories of our lifetime. His blog about the future of context in news is also a recommended read.
• UC walkout: Headlines, tweets and links – Nate Miller and Laurel Rosenhall also approach telling a story through a mixture of context and real-time curating.
• “What We’re Reading” on The New York Times Bits Blog – Journalists do a significant amount of reading as a part of the reporting process. A Publish2 widget in the right sidebar allows them to leverage that work and provide value to their readers.

Ultimately, linking provides tremendous value to your readers because it allows you to highlight the most authoritative voices in a story. At Publish2, we build the tools, including the one I used to add links in this post, to make this happen.

The topic for this BarCamp? Redefining J school. The news industry is going through epic change that most J schools are ill-equipped for. It’s time for a new style of learning. We brainstormed several possible sessions:

• What courses should you take to supplement your journalism career? What are good minors to a journalism degree?
• What do students want from professors? How can students take initiative and enhance classes?
• Crowdsourcing, and leveraging the knowledge of the community to put together a story
• Where’s the line between PR and journalism?
• Digital basics (blogging, Twitter, Google Alerts, etc.) and how those tools can be used
• How to get paid internships (i.e. kickstarting your career while still in college)
• Where’s the line between work and life when building your personal brand online?

Granted, I’ve done a lot of punditry in the last year talking about how J school is obsolete and needs to be completely reinvented. It’s time to translate grand ideas into action.

We’re planning to meet at 6:00 pm PT in the EMU Fishbowl, next Tuesday the 6th. Join our Google Group to stay in touch, or leave a note in the comments.

On Tuesday, July 21 around 11 pm Pacific, I stumbled across a serious information security flaw in DuckWeb, the University of Oregon’s student information portal. For some of the work I’ve been doing with Publish2, I’ve been paying close attention to the composition and beauty of URLs. When printing out my degree audit for a trip down to Eugene the next day, I realised that the print version of the degree audit had a unique string of digits at the end of the URL. Curious, I changed the last two, refreshed, and ended up with someone else’s degree audit.

Now, I believe this is what security experts might call a “really stupid programming error.” Better yet, I found out that I could log out of DuckWeb and, with the URL I had copied and pasted into a text file, still access the print view of my degree audit.

According to an article published today in the Daily Emerald:

The glitch originated in the system the University uses to upload degree audits. All degree audits for which information has changed on a given day are uploaded simultaneously that night and assigned what [University registrar Sue] Eveland said is a randomly-generated nine-digit number called a batch number. That number is at the end of the URL for the printer-friendly version of the audit and it is the one Bachhuber used to access the degree audits.

Eveland said only the first audit uploaded on a given night was accessible through the glitch. She also said the University removes the data tied to the batch numbers every 30 days, which she said means that only “15 to 20” audits would have been available to those who knew about the glitch at any given time during a 30-day period.

To correct the facts stated in the article, I originally emailed both the Registrar’s office and University IT Help late Tuesday night. I didn’t expect a prompt response during the summer, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly they both responded to my email and acted on the flaw (by first disabling the print functionality and then later adding a patch). One of the people I corresponded with credited the screencast I originally made of the exploit as “very valuable in [their] initial testing.” Additionally, I did not look at the degree audits of three other students.

If I were doing the reporting on the story, I would also vet the claims of the University in regards to the number of student records you could access with the exploit. Only allowing “15 to 20″ student records to be publicly accessible to anyone is still in violation of FERPA and, depending on how the system works, the exploit could have allowed access to different student records at different periods of time. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been able to print my degree audit the entire time I’ve been at the University of Oregon.

This Week in Rebooting the Ecosystem for Reinventing J school

Writer’s note (because there ain’t no editor): In all seriousness, the three of us love, like serious humanly love, This Week in Tech, Rebooting the News, and all people, podcasts, and/or cities we tease at in this episode. It’s only out of love that we jest. We have better technical difficulties too.

To frame the solutions to the problem, we begin by establishing some of the ways in which J school is a broken model for the 21st century. In most other fields, Joey Baker points out, academia is the research space. If that’s not the case, then it’s the military. The news industry is the only one where the industry leads and academia is behind.

Greg Linch points out another issue in that J schools, as institutions, are really slow to change. They have a critical inability to adapt quickly. This is a bigger issue in the 21st century because some of the tools journalists need to know how to use are changing at an exponential rate. As both Joey Baker and I point out, many of the tools taught in a four year undergraduate program are obsolete or nearing such a stage by graduation. J schools aren’t going to get back ahead by teaching “social media.” The problem isn’t with what they’re teaching, but rather how they’re teaching it. Another fundamental that needs to change.

A third issue is that the core curriculum is one size fits all. The class structure and material of 200-level courses is generally designed for the perceived average of 200 hundred students. As such, it doesn’t match any of them well and at least some of them are in the extreme ends of the bell curve where the class is completely worthless.

The grading system is broken because there’s no system of rewards for those who try experiments and learn from their failures. The list goes on.

It’s not the end of the world for journalism schools, the university system, or newspapers. There are just fundamental ways in which each need to change.

On a related note, I thought of two more parallels between J school and newspapers in the past 24 hours. One: all of the university lectures around the world are pretty much rewrites of the same thing. Two: students have very little say in the content of what they get from the professor.

The solutions aren’t unique and won’t be easy to implement, but all of the ideas we discussed would make us excited to be back in school (bootcamps, barcamps, testing out of classes, and experiential education ftw).

Our picks of the week are:

• Tynt Tracer, from Joey – If you turn off the annoying “feature” where it adds a link to the end of the bit of text you’ve copied, then it’s a tool that offers really cool analytics on what people are copy and pasting from your website including word clouds and all that jazz.
• Kaltura Community Edition, from Greg – open source video server you can host yourself.
• Skitch, from Daniel – Wickedly simple and fast way to communicate visually (Mac only).

Enjoy the podcast. It’s worth skipping the first nine minutes and then listening to the rest all of the way through. Greg has a brilliant point that we actually had to create an addendum for at the end.

Later: In my rush to get this post out, I missed two really great sets of ideas from earlier this year: “Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts” from March and “Bring-a-Professor chat wrap-up” at CollegeJourn in February. Absorb those as well.

Fred [Wilson] is suggesting that the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like those industries, education can be peer produced, delivered as bits, and curated by a community. Like the music and newspaper industries, the cost structures embedded in the education industry’s current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses.

As I’m reading this, a parallel between newspapers and the university system came to mind. Newspapers, as institutions with a business model rooted in a specific project, started uploading their content onto websites in the 1990′s without much concern as to how the Internet would fundamentally change their businesses. They treated their websites as side projects at the very most and minor annoyances most commonly. I think this is very much the case with universities. Progressive schools like MIT have started uploading their courseware, one critical component of their “business model”, to the web for anyone to download free of charge. At the moment, they still have natural monopolies on accreditation and physical space although part of me suspects that those too could change. Considering the newspaper industry isn’t failing gracefully right now, I’d like to think that there are lessons universities can learn from how newspapers dealt with the fundamentally transformative technology known as the Internet.

On a related note, David Wiley argues that OpenCourseWare initiatives are going to have to find a sustainable business model by 2012 or many will fail. To me this says that traditional educational structures that are attempting change will have to show signs of being able to successfully do so in the next few years, or else they will be destined to a downward spiral similar to many newspapers today. This timeframe seems a bit short to me, but I support the assumption.

Conversation from the entire day is up in four parts of video that I’m planning on listening to the entire way through. As someone said in the first hour, the value of the degree is becoming less and less while the cost is becoming more and more. There is a lot of space for this issue to be fixed.

I had the opportunity to get lunch today with Ryan Knutson (@UOknutson), a former colleague at the Daily Emerald that I respect and consider a friend. He’s several weeks away from graduating with a double major at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Given the current state of the newspaper industry, and thus the education industry that feeds it, I thought it might be interesting to ask him about his perspective on the situation, where his felt his J school was successful and where it needs to improve, and why he’s optimistic about the future of news.

When he discusses the journalism school, I think there’s an important note to be made: most of the value in the education he obtained was from the skills he learned, not necessarily the academic side of journalism. As the tools and methods needed to do journalism change at a greater and greater pace, the four year approach of the university becomes an inappropriate and ineffective mechanism for delivering knowledge. I think this is a large root cause reason for why J schools are having such difficulty in trying to figure out what to teach. They have an idea of what will be applicable today, but not four years down the road. On the plus side, though, there will be more and more demand for weekend or short-term workshops to learn special skills such as Flash, database design, Final Cut Pro, and the basics of editing audio.