YouTube and the news

A friend just asked me in a Gmail chat if I’d heard about the UCLA student being Tasered by police late Tuesday night. Apparently he was asked to leave the UCLA library but from there it gets murky. The report in the Daily Bruin, the UCLA student newspaper, identified the student as being Iranian-American, and eyewitness accounts implied there was an element of racial profiling in the vigorousness of the police officers’ actions.

The incident was captured on cell phone video — when my friend mentioned that in his "chat", the first thing I thought, and the first thing I asked him, was, "Is it on YouTube?" He didn’t know, but twenty seconds later I had my own answer: it was — several different ways.

Here’s the video, on YouTube, in a post that concentrates on the alleged racial aspect of the incident.

"Citizen journalism" strikes again.

Postscript to “The Globe & Facebook Unite”

I should have looked at WashingtonPost.com.

If I read an article on the Post’s Web site and want to share it, there’s a handy little box offering me a plethora of links, under the heading "Save & Share Article": Digg, Google, Facebook, Reddit, De.licio.us and Yahoo!

Here’s an example.

Boston Globe & Facebook unite

Along with the customary "print this article," "email to a friend," "RSS feed," and the ever more common "Del.icio.us" links beside the online versions of its articles, The Boston Globe now offers a truly contemporary option: "SHARE ON FACEBOOK."

Facebook advertises itself as "a social utility that you share with the people around you," and it’s precisely this "sharing" theme that the Globe is looking to capitalize on. At least, that’s my interpretation.

The Globe might also be hoping this will be a way of reaching younger viewers/readers, say, in the elusive and ever-so-popular 18-28 demographic. But they might be hoping in vain.

Mad.Co.Uk, a United Kingdom-based Web site of business news and "insight," reported in an Oct. 19 article titled "US politicians turn to cable TV and internet to reach voters":

However, being on a social networking site doesn’t necessarily reach out to younger voters as much as it used to. Figures from two online measurement companies, Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore Networks, show that the average age of MySpace visitors is closer to 35 than 21.

According to the Newspaper Association of America’s publication The Source, 35 is about the age at which daily newspaper reading picks up — to 47%, after languishing at 35% – 37% for 18-34 year olds. (Source: NAA chart) Those figures are from 2004, so it would be reasonable to assume that the percentages would be even lower now.

But partnering with Facebook (as with De.licio.us, a link-storing and -sharing site which I use) is still a smart move – and I’m curious to see what other publications, if any follow suit, and how long it takes before they do.

Note: A quick scan of the Boston Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and New York Times Web sites revealed printer-friendly and email links, and, in the case of the Herald, a De.licio.us link, but no other sharing options.

The Atlantic, again

The Atlantic has just tapped Michael Hirschorn to write the "Content" column for each issue of the monthly news magazine. Hirschorn is the executive vice president of original programming and production at VH1.

Hirschorn was a co-founder, with Kurt Anderson, of Inside.com, a well-funded (millions on promotion, alone) venture to capture the market in media and entertainment news, that sputtered after about a year and was bought in mid-2001 by Steve Brill, of (the extinct) Brill’s Content fame. Brill bought it to merge it with his Media Central, "a vast collection of trade magazine web sites covering various aspects of the media industry," according to a July 25, 2001 report in Media Life. Hirschorn was among several former Inside employees who left within a few months of Brill’s purchase of the company.

Hirschorn’s first column, titled "Thank You, YouTube" (written pre-sale to Google), is an analysis of the rapidly growing phenomenon of "DIY video," with an interesting tie-in to the demise of the traditional (and boringly cookie-cutter) sit-com on network television . An enjoyable column to read, with some viewing recommendations I plan to check out (although I almost have to be dragged in front of a television screen unless there’s baseball on, I can handle watching video-ettes such as those on YouTube).

I can’t help but interpret the hiring of Hirschorn to write this regular column as a move by The Atlantic to slide onto the conveyor belt carrying everyone and everything toward the Internet. Also, maybe an attempt to capture and hold more of the 25-35 demographic? VH1 is, after all, known as "MTV for adults."

(Note: the online version of Hirschorn’s column contains embedded YouTube videos.)

The Sir Edmund Hillary of bloggers?

Blogging makes it into the pages of The Atlantic!

In the Cover to Cover section of the November issue, in a blurb-style review of a new book by Andrew Sullivan called The Conservative Soul, one of the two Benjamins (Healy and Schwarz — the reviewers) describes Sullivan thus: "a New Republic senior editor and prominent blogger."

This is the first reference I have yet noticed in The Atlantic to "blogger" as a means of identifying and establishing the credibility of a journalist or author. When I read that description, it shouted to me that a magazine that likes to regard itself, and be regarded, as one of the highest mountain peaks of top-notch journalism has accepted that certain forms of blogging (i.e. "serious," "journalistic" blogging) must be acknowledged as journalism.

AJAX — and it’s not a cleaning product

This blog is hosted by Typepad, a blog hosting service that was recommended to me around three years ago by a journalism professor back in northern California. It’s a pay-service, but he recommended it because of the greater range (at the time) of "professional" options it offered than other, free, services such as Blogger.

I haven’t explored any of those free hosting services recently, but what I do know is that when I log into Typepad one of the first things I see is a range of links to "industry" news items — often on various aspects of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon. (Not quite sure what to call it, but phenomenon will do, for now.)

A few days ago, I logged in, and this is what I saw:

One of the great things about all this Web 2.0 stuff you keep hearing about is just how easy it can be to create compelling user experiences by gluing different services together. Our friends over at Google demonstrated that recently by putting together ajaxsearch.typepad.com, a demo site of some of the great things you can do with the Google AJAX Search API and a TypePad blog.

Google’s Mark Lucovsky built demos on his TypePad blog of integrated web search, blog search, video search and even mapping. We love seeing creative uses of our Advanced Template Set functionality, and Mark lays out on his blog how you can implement the solutions he built."

I followed the link to Mark’s blog, and this is what he had to say:

Inspired by a blogger named Marjolein Hoekstra, this morning I signed up for a TypePad account so that I could demonstrate how to add Google AJAX Search to a TypePad blog. I got a little carried away and ended up building out a complete TypePad solution. Something that should be pretty easy to migrate into your own TypePad blog. Just follow these instructions:"

And, of course, he gives instructions. They assume a certain amount of basic knowledge regarding Typepad template editing, and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, doing this at all would require a Typepad "Pro" account, but the results are undeniably cool.

Down the right-hand side of Mark’s blog are customized search panes, in order: Google search; Google video search, with four panels of video stills below the search box, name links to videos that other people have uploaded, and a link to "upload your own videos"; Google map search with a picture of the map, which on Mark’s blog is centered on Santa Barbara and has links below it to "A few great places" — namely "Sushi, Lucky’s, BikeShop, TheBiltmore, Jeannine’s, Cava, SanYsidroRanch, Sunstone, Melville, PhysicalFocus." Mark’s tour of the best parts of SB, no doubt.

What’s the potential of this for journalism? For journalism in the world of Web 2.0, for "old-school" journalism, for the wild and crazy (I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson; excuse the hyperbole) frontier between the two?

I’m not sure, but I know that before too long someone like Adrian Holovaty (who created and maintains Chicagocrime.org from data extracted from the Chicago Police Dept.’s Citizen ICAM Web site melded with Google mapping software) will create a new, web-based form of journalism that breaches boundaries.

A postscript to Mark’s entry, that encapsulates the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying:

"p.s. – If you are a Blogger user, check out http://ajaxsearch.blogspot.com"

Ethics in the wild & crazy new frontier

A friend listening to NPR’s Morning Edition radio show this morning told me about this latest development in the Mark Foley-congressional pages saga:

(From the Drudge Report):

ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER

FAMOUS IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD

**UPDATE Thu Oct 05 2006 11:54:13 ET

A posting on ABCNEWS.COM of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser.

The website PASSIONATE AMERICA detailed the startling exposure late Wednesday.

…

ABC explains in a statement: "On Friday, ABC News published instant messages between a former page and Congressman Foley with the IM screen name of the teenage victim redacted. Immediately, we discovered that in one instance, the screen name of the teen on one IM exchange had not been properly redacted. ABC News immediately took down the posting [version 1], redacted the screen name and re-published the posting [version 2]. We certainly believed that we had taken care of the issue quickly. Last evening, after an inquiry from Matt Drudge, it came to our attention that a blogger was able to access our deleted file [version 1] by typing in a slightly modified web address. To be clear, no one visiting our website would have simply stumbled on the old version."

Apparently, by announcing the congressional page’s screen name in its report, ABC revealed enough information for a blogger to track down the page’s real name and identity.

As I say in my post above this one: "the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying."

I haven’t had much time to consider all of the ramifications of this, but one of the first that springs to mind is this:

The immediate nature of hyper-text based journalism necessitates hyper-vigilance on the part of journalists to ensure accuracy — and to prevent ethical violations with the potential to radically alter the lives of the people we report upon.

BPD meets YouTube — and we’re all connected…more than we realise

I have previously described the Boston Police Department’s Weblog as not being particularly blog-like, as I have come to understand the term. The posts are written in standard police report format with accordingly often stiff phrasing and awkward construction: "A registration check revealed that the vehicle license plate had been reported stolen." — What was stolen? The license plate, or the car? "…the officer discontinued following the suspect vehicle. " Discontinued?

I have also noted that the information contained in the blog is nowhere near as searchable — and consequently only a fraction as useful  — as that provided by the Chicago Police Department and collected, sorted, collated and merged with Google mapping software by Adrian Holovaty on his site chicagocrime.org.

However, after a little time spent this morning cruising the BPD blog, my respect and appreciation have increased. I’m also impressed.

In an entry posted on Sept. 25, the BPD seeks the public’s help in identifying a woman whose partially decomposed body was found last year in a chimney. To this end, the BPD has inserted a video taken from YouTube. The video is of a digital reconstruction of the woman, showing what she might have looked like before she died.

I tried the video and it didn’t work. That could have been due to the age and decrepitude of the computer on which I’m composing this. However, the BPD anticipated this possibility and included below the video a link to a PDF file of still photos.

At the bottom of the entry are other links: to a PDF document with photos and identifying details; to the America’s Most Wanted page on this case (it was profiled on that show in mid-September); and to another bpdnews.com post asking for help in identifying a body found on Causeway Street (Boston) in early June.

These are the moments when I am awed by the people-connecting power of the Internet/World Wide Web.

These are the moments when I am awed by the potential power of tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of strangers contributing their small part to work towards a whole that is much greater than anyone can envision.

And the truly stunning element of this is that most of those people will probably never know the extent of their contributions. Will never know how many lives they affect or touch.

It is, indeed, the ultimate web. (Especially once the world of the Web reaches at last the few billion "un-connected" people. Although whether that will be an unequivocally good thing is debatable — but that’s a whole other discussion…)

Craig’s a citizen, too…

Turns out Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and $10,000 co-funder of Jay Rosen’s new venture NewAssignment.Net, has been interested in ‘citizen journalism’ for a while. He was a regular attendee at meetings held by the San Francisco-based citizens media group in April and May, 2005.

At those meetings, he joined such now well known ‘grassroots journalism’ activists as JD Lasica and Dan Gillmore in discussing "citizens media strategy".

Read the transcripts of those sessions here.

BPD blog hacked — the info.

So here it is, from a posting by Caroline Roberts on bostonist.com:

Much to the dismay of those hoping to keep up with non-fatal shootings, non-fatal stabbings, and bachelorette parties "gone wrong," BPD News, the Boston police department’s online blotter, has fallen prey to individuals who claim to be Turkish hackers. "hacked by metlak / Ownz here / F*&k papa." originally replaced the site’s content. Metlak, is that meant to be an insult of Big Papi? Metlak and company have left their fingerprints on Massachusetts news websites before – the hacker took down the website for the Greenfield Recorder back in June. Turkish hackers have been blamed for taking down even bigger fish than the BPD blog, including European websites for Sony Music and the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.

According to a Boston Police Department missive on Universal Hub and the Globe, the BPD’s hosting service is working on the problem, and the "F*&k papa" message is gone. They’re making progress as a "test post" is now up and the BPD site seems to be recovering. If you have the urge to read BPD News, you can still access older pages through Internet search engines and cached files. The BPD News site is hosted by an external company and doesn’t’ sit on a city server. Perhaps if they were under the protection of Government Center (or even the Roxbury fortress) rather than out milling about in the open sea of cyberspace they wouldn’t be a Cyprus for the Turks to invade.

And, from boston.com, The Boston Globe’s website, in the New England in Brief section (Sept. 22):

Boston police are investigating the invasion of the department’s online news blog last evening. Someone hacked into BPDNews.com and left a line that read, “hacked by metlak / Ownz here / . . ." along with some profane language. The department took down the site about 9:30 p.m., soon after it was contacted by the media. Elaine Driscoll, the Police Department spokeswoman , said she did not know when the hacking occurred. “This is an unfortunate incident," she said. “We’re going to investigate this matter immediately. It is a very important tool that we use to disseminate timely information."