December 22, 2012
I feel like I’m coming in from the Web wilderness as I start viewing John Branch’s, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek on the New York Times site. Snow blows across a mountain peak as the saga of an deadly avalanche begins to spill down the page: “Avalanche! Elyse!” 650 words later and the reader has an option to see a 45-second clip with Elyse Saugstad, “a professional skier,” a survivor. (more…)
December 31, 2011
Robotics is advancing by leaps and bounds, in no small part because of the superb FIRST robotics competition launched by Dean Kamen in 1989.
A new development with value to the future of publishing is Boxie, the Story-Gathering Robot, invented by Alexander Reben at the renowned M.I.T. Media Lab. Boxie is a robotic journalist; it could handle those “man on the street” videos with ease. (more…)
November 16, 2011
Over at PressThink Jay Rosen observed that professional journalism has been optimized for low participation. He explains that “until a few years ago, the ‘job’ of the user was simply to receive the news and maybe send a letter to the editor.” This was a logical outcome of the available technology. “Journalists built their practices on top of a one-way, one-to-many, broadcasting system,” he noted. (more…)
June 22, 2011
In The Wall Street Journal today the ever-reliable Walt Mossberg reviews the first Google Chrome computers. Of course the first version ain’t very good, and they really screwed up on the pricing. But it is the future (or part of it, anyway). (more…)
May 10, 2011
With little fanfare the Columbia Journalism Review yesterday released the most intelligent and insightful report I’ve yet read on the business of digital journalism. The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism is the understated title of the must-read new report on the news business. Implicit in the report is a call to action: as Thich Nhat Hanh has observed, “Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing?”
I’ve only read three chapters and if that’s all there was I’d still be crowing: start reading, NOW. (The full 143-page report is available for free download. What a gift.) (more…)