Oops, and 10 conclusions from the Illinois Primary

With turnout of less than 30%, I’m loathe to draw many conclusions from Tuesday’s primary vote. Among the few things I do know:

1. I, along with 213,000 other voters, screwed up and now the Democratic Party is trying to figure out how to dump the roided-up, woman-bashing pawn shop king Scott Lee Cohen from the Lt. Governor spot we gave him.  I was influenced by all those ads “job fair” ads on sports radio enough to give him the nod on the blog– but don’t blame me: I voted for Rickey Hendon.

2. Some political science student somewhere is going to have a fun figuring out the impact of Dan Hynes’ Harold Washington ad. I haven’t seen the numbers but my guess is that the hubabuloo and crocodile tears Pat Quinn brought on in response to the ad helped him.

3. Andy McKenna and Dan Hynes will likely never run for anything again– though at least McKenna didn’t cry.

4. Pat Quinn’s chances for re-election hinge on Bill Brady’s 420 vote lead. Moderate Republican Kirk Dillard would mop the floor with the inconsistent Quinn. Brady, on the other hand, is far enough out of the mainstream (pro-Creationism, voted against a bill to outlaw anti-gay discrimination, opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest, doesn’t believe in global warming) that even Quinn will stand a fighting chance.

5. About two-fifth of the GOP electorate voted for one of the hard-core conservatives in the race, Brady, Andrzejewski and Proft.

6. Andrzejewski would have been a better investment among the tea party crowd then was Patrick Hughes in the Senate race. The push he received from Rush Limbaugh et al in the final days could have propelled him more had it come earlier.

7. I’ve had Charles McGrath’s New Yorker look at the Tea Party movement on my mind all week.

8. The SEIU is a force to reckon with in Illinois politics. Giannoulias, Quinn and Preckwinkle all had their endorsements. Of course, the SEIU is also responsible for giving u Rod Blagojevich.

8b. The Cook County Democratic Party remains the force to reckon with in Illinois politics, at least for another few months. Each of the candidates it supported in statewide races won.

9. Despite all the hopeful nattering of Logan Square progressive bke-rider set, Mayor Daley is unlikely to face a serious challenge in 2011– not even if the SEIU opposes him.

10. Alexi Giannoulias is in for a tough race against Mark Kirk. Consider the difference in style, and relevancy, of the initial two ads from the Republican and Democratic Senatorial Campaign committees:

First, the GOP ad:

And the Dems’ entry:

My Illinois Primary Ballot

Joe Germuska and his Tribune Interactive colleagues built Election Center as a catch-all for election stories and info. The most interesting part is the Ballot Builder, which allows you to sketch out your vote and share it over Twitter or Facebook, if you dare. Not many have: I count 6 mentions on Twitter. (Kind of odd. In an era of ubiquitous sharing, I’d think sharing your vote would be a natural. Presumably, if you think highly enough of someone to vote for them, you’d like others to do so as well. Perhaps the cultural legacy of the secret ballot outweighs that.)

Even my most civically-engaged friends have not been following this election, I suspect that a good chunk of the people who’ll vote tomorrow are deciding in the last hours. To help out, here are my picks. I’ll walk through the races from the bottom-up, as those are the races people are following the least. (I skipped the judge races altogether, you’re better off checking the recommendations of the Chicago Bar Association, though maybe they can get someone from Tribune Interactive to help make their list more web-friendly.)

For Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner, I’ll be happily voting for Todd Connor. I’ve been impressed by Todd when I’ve seen him around town and what I’ve learned from his consistent Twitter presence.  He’ll bring a smart, good government approach to an agency that has a legacy of nepotism and corruption.  He also sports an impressive list of endorsers– though beware the pop-up audio on his site. I’ll also be voting for Mariyana Spyropoulos, the only other candidate I’ve looked into. She was appointed to the position by Gov. Quinn, and like Todd, has an impressive slate of endorsements, including both newspapers, and should be a voice for independence.

I’m voting for Tom Dart and David Orr out of appreciation for the jobs they’ve done. In the Assessor’s race, I’m voting for Ray Figueroa. Not because he was jumped last week, allegedly by thugs associated with his opponent, Berrios. In short, he gets my vote because both of his opponents are ethically-challenged hacks. (The Tribune editorial board explains its support for Figueroa.)

For County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle is far-and-away the best choice. Take a gander at the recent “candidates forum” on Chicago Tonight, Preckwinkle is an adult among adolescents.)

I’m in the Illinois 7th Senate district. After some research, including help via Twitter, I’ve decided to vote for Jim Madigan. I probably agree with the incumbent Heather Steans on most issues, but the manner in which she was appointed to her position, her history of strong support for Rod Blagojevich, and a (perhaps irrational) sense of anti-incumbent fervor has me supporting Madigan. (David Ormsby has a post critical of both candidates.)

I tend to skip races where there is no opposition– but I’ll pull  levers for Jan Schakowsky and Lisa Madigan.

I’m voting for Justin Oberman, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and (tossing coing) Scott Lee Cohen for Treasurer, Comptroller and Lt. Governor, respectfully. I’m most enthusiastic about Raja, least enthusiastic about my Lt. Governor vote, a position I’d vote to abolish.

A month ago, Pat Quinn would have had my vote. As the vote has neared, I’ve seen him as a dithering, grandstanding, thin-skinned, race-card playing professional politician. Dan Hynes’ Harold Washington ad, below,  is the most influential local political ad I’ve seen in awhile (since Harold’s own lakefront walk ad, perhaps.) But as influential, if not more so, has been Quinn’s over-the-top reaction to the ad and his enlistment of a group of aging pols pining for the race politics of the 1980s. I appreciate that Dan Hynes is thinking about tax reform, and think he’s a much better chance at winning in November.  Should Quinn win the nomination, I’ll certainly take a long look at the GOP choice, as will many other normally consistent Dem voters.

Unlike the Governor’s race, I’d be happy to see any of the three as my Senator.  Cheryle Jackson has received the least attention, as David Hoffman and Alexi Giannoulias have gone after each other, but she’s run well. Should she lose, but finish strong, I’d add her name 2011 daydream lists local political junkies keep drawing up. And Giannoulias–  young, smart, and empathic– could be a great Senator. That said, in the political environment that is early 2010, I think Hoffman stands the best chance of winning in November, and I’m sticking to the call I made last fall.

But don’t take my word for it: Progress Illinois has put together its own guide to the Democratic ballot; WBEZ’s “Election File” has a lot of resources– including this fun look at election judge training by Sam Hudzik. Steve Rhodes has his own Election-eve summary.

A lot of lurching: Gabriel Sherman on the Washington Post’s Demise

It took me a few days, but last night I finally got to Gabriel Sherman’s Post-Apocalypse, an autopsy of the Washington Post.) Andrew Beaujon notes that “Sherman’s Twitter feed has a lot of things that didn’t make it into the story, some of which are much, much better than what actually landed.”) Here are my takeaways:

In a new era for journalism, The Washington Post has yet to figure out what it wants to be. The result has been a lot of lurching–some of it (like salongate) embarrassing, much of it merely ineffective, but almost all of it suggesting a newspaper in disarray….

The success of Kaplan may have also provided a financial cushion that insulated the Post from making changes necessary to survive in a new climate

“Len wouldn’t do things they felt needed to be done,” says former Post political reporter Peter Baker, who left the paper for the Times in 2008. “A whole generation of younger editors were smothered by a leadership that was resistant to change.”

Many of the people I spoke with agreed that the decision to let [Harris and VandeHei] walk out the door [to Politico] ended up being a disaster for the Post. “What a mistake,” says Baker. “The most obvious indictment is the failure to foresee what opportunities were out there that John Harris and Jim had created.

Some in the newsroom felt the frenzied coverage of the White House party-crasher scandal was driven in part by the millions of hits the story generated. A week after the story broke, Style editor Ned Martel convened a meeting attended by 25 reporters and editors to coordinate coverage of the scandal. “If I were to call a similar meeting on Al Qaeda’s recruitment in the U.S., you know what I would get? I might get two people there,” says a senior print staffer. “You’d have trouble getting support on the Web to mobilize.”

And an indication that collaborations with nonprofits could bring unwanted complications:

In December, thePost printed a news piece on the national debt in partnership with a publication called The Fiscal Times–without disclosing that the organization is backed by financier Pete Peterson, a well-known deficit hawk

Skepticism, Excitement and Fear: A Scan of Reactions to Google’s New Approach to China

A lot of smart people have shared thoughts on Google’s announcement that 1) it may pull out of China, and 2) that its data– our data– may have been compromised. Here’s a quick run-through of posts that caught my eye this week, ranging from Evgeny Morozov’s skepticism about Google’s motives to Ethan Zuckerman’s and Jonathan Zittrain excitement at the prospect Google engineers  building anti-censorship tools, to Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski’s fear that “the once unified global Internet space will begin a process of disintegration.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan

This is not Google standing up for free speech. …. It’s about Google standing up against attacks…. the censorship aspect of this conflict is a side show. Google.cn censorship has never mattered — not because of market share. Anyone who cared could reach Google.com by using proxy servers or VPN. Millions do….Criticisms of Google for its China policies never made sense to me. They only make sense if you think companies should not be trying to make money….Google should be applauded for taking a big risk here. But it’s not egalitarian at all. It’s about exposing China’s nasty cyber attacks, general corporate insecurity (threatening the Cloud move, among many other things), and Google’s lack of patience with China’s habit of blocking YouTube and Blogger.

Ethan Zuckerman:

I suspect we want to hold Google to a higher standard because they’ve put forth an informal motto: “Don’t be evil”…The move to leave the Chinese market may be an example of Google returning to its core values and demonstrating an unwillingness to compromise….By (obliquely) accusing the Chinese government of involvement in corporate espionage and challenging the government to shut the company down for providing uncensored search, “Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it.” (Those evocative words arefrom top Chinablogger Imagethief.) This isn’t a temporary strategic retreat – this is a retreat where you detonate the bridges behind you….A Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. These tools would have a built-in market – the millions of users who were enjoying Google’s tools from within China – and could radically change the landscape of the internet freedom field. An emphasis on internet freedom tools would allow Google to engage with a smaller Chinese market, but would allow them to maintain a toe in the waters while maintaining a stance of disengagement with the Chinese government.

Jonathan Zittrain:

My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user…. Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches.  Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com….Drawing a line is both the right move and a brilliant one.  It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards.

EFF’s Danny O’Brien:

It will be a long time before we understand all the ramifications of Google’s decision to cease censoring their Chinese services — and the cyber-attack on their corporate and user data that prompted that change of heart…. Security experts have long warned that systems designed to make compliance with lawful interception more convenient can also create security vulnerabilities of their own. By providing an attractive one stop shop for outside attackers, surveillance compliance systems by their very nature often override the secure compartmentalization of data

Evgeny Morozov:

Their supposed naivete about whom they were dealing with just doesn’t sound very convincing. Are we really supposed to believe that, until they experienced cyberattacks on the email accounts of the Chinese human rights activists, they thought that their counterparts in the Chinese government were all good and well-meaning chaps who would never think of such a thing?…If the logic is that Google can’t guarantee the security of its Chinese users, well, they are really in bad shape and should close their shop everywhere. If, on the other hand, they completely changed their minds about the ethics of their involvement in China and now think that a little bit of censorship is evil in itself and clashes with Google’s mission, then what’s the point of framing it as a cybersecurity issue?

Douglas Rushcoff:

Google’s actions just don’t add up….Why the sudden wakeup call? Iit’s because Google realizes it is in bed with the bad guys. It has supported the actions of a regime that eventually turned on its online facilitator, Google. So Google is saying it is fine with repressive regimes as long as they don’t repress Google without the company’s knowledge. No, that’s even too stupid for a corporate communications department to imply. Which, to me, means there’s more going on. The first and most likely possibility is that Google is attempting to create a distraction. From what? From the fact that some Chinese hackers broke into their servers and gained access to what was supposed to be secure private and corporate data. Get it? That means none of our stuff on Google’s servers is safe.

Jeff Jarvis:

Zeit Online calls Google a quasi-state — in a post under the headline “The Google Republic” …The internet is the New World and Google is its biggest colonizer: the sun never sets on Google….[O]n the internet, new states form across interests, ignoring borders. Those interests can be business — and we’ve seen what look like business-states before — but also causes, principles, and dangers (e.g., Al Qaeda). Interest-states will gain more power and that power will come from nations. [W]e are beginning to witness the emergence of new and competitive interest-states.

Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski:

Censorship, surveillance and information warfare are part of an emerging storm in cyberspace in which countries, corporations and individuals are vying for control….For years, cyberespionage activities that target groups and countries of strategic interest to Beijing, such as the GhostNet network we uncovered, have been tracked back to mainland China. The fact that these activities have not been proved to have been carried out by the Chinese government speaks to the success of strategies that rely on privateering and outsourcing to criminal hacker groups, thereby shielding authorities from any direct blame. Similar strategies are said to be carried out in Russia, Iran and elsewhere….

How China responds to Google will have far-reaching implications for the future of cyberspace….it could block Google from indexing Chinese domain or IP space altogether, shutting Chinese information space off to users of Google. Should that happen, the once unified global Internet space will begin a process of disintegration as countries define their own sovereign clouds….How our leaders respond is equally important. While Washington and other capitals realize the importance of cyberspace for the projection of military and intelligence power, they’ve been slow to recognize its importance to the advance of democratic values worldwide and as a global asset to be protected in its own right.

My 2009 Most Influential Media

Last week, I posted a summary of the year’s Most Influential Media About Media as defined by suggestions from others. (Earlier, I summarized the year’s highlights in Chicago media.) What follows are the links that influenced my thinking about the Internet.

The media event of 2009 was Michael Jackson’s death. (Pending a major disaster or revolution, the media event of 2010 will be the World Cup.) At the time, I was struck by our use of Twitter and Facebook to spread the news. While traditional news organizations were silent, we slowly began to accept TMZ’s report. I capped that odd day by listening to a live tribute mix by Maseo on DeLaSoul’s Dugout. Later,  John Kass’s criticism of “the deification of Jackson” rang true.

Chad Ochocinco. I’m not generally a fan of flashy football players (there are  some exceptions), so it took his social media evangelism on HBO’s Hard Knocks for me  to come to appreciate Chad Ochocinco. Ochonico created his own iPhone app, and announced plans, with Motorla, for the “Ochocinco News Network.” His responses to the death of his teammate Chris Henry, on UStream and Twitter, were touching, odd for the genre, and his use of the web to interact with fans was fun and good for the sport. I’m glad he backed away from his threat to shut things down.

Andrew Brandt:

He is still the player who complains about his contract on an annual basis, flaunts the rules and regulations of the league and engages in much “look-at-me” behavior such as running a race against a horse. However, he has strategically and cleverly built a nice brand, aided by the recent success of the Bengals and his genuine suffering for the loss of a friend last week….Ochocinco perfectly illustrates the anxious relationship between the NFL and its players, wanting them to be the marketable commodities yet not overly individualistic in their expression.

Keith Cunningham asked if Chad is the new king of all media. (The old king of all media resurfaced in the TV ad of the year.)

While it’s early in the game for the OCNN, this is another sign that traditional media is being challenged on every level.  When you think that it was TMZ that broke Michael Jackson’s death – not CNN or NBC – Ochocinco’s concept doesn’t sound so crazy.  It’s also proof that anyone with motivation, creativity, access, and resources has the ability to participate in, or even change, the entertainment and news landscape.

One of my takeaways from 2009 is that talent matters. I think of that every time I listen to This American Life–Ira Glass is so good that even his pledge drive spots are interesting.  (It’s hard to pick one episode, but Switched at Birth, from 2008, comes to mind.) Public radio chat mavens Warren Olney and Brian Lehrer find capable, professional vacation replacements for their respective shows, but none have the ability to craft and manage a conversation the way they do. Likewise, my reading of  EveryBlock’s acquisition by MSNBC.com is that a bunch of really, REALLY smart people working their asses off for a couple of years, with help, can succeed.

Mixing sharing and privacy. One of my challenges in 2009 was figuring out how to talk about my wife’s pregnancy, our plans for our daughter, and, well, her existence. (Mandatory YouTube link to babbling infant.) I started off cautiously, with some anonymous Twittering, but when I attended a birthing class and learned more from my social media conversations than I did from the class itself I realized that anonymous was not going to cut it, and opened up a bit more. Eventually I started, along with some other Nuevo Dads, a Google Group, which has been an invaluable source of guidance, product advice and humor during my first weeks of fatherhood. (I heard Harper Reed explore the power of email in a question he asked Craig Newmark last month and am waiting for his follow-up blog post.) Similarly, I’ve noticed that commenting on the Facebook activities of close friends is increasingly irrelevant as  inside jokes and other context-dependent references are lost on the majority acquaintances not seen since 5th grade.

When Rupert Murdoch threatened to go off the Google grid, Nick Carr and Umair Haque had the two most interesting responses, from opposite perspectives.

Carr:

Murdoch’s suggestion that he’ll pull News Corp content out of Google’s database could turn out to be a brilliant signaling strategy, one that could alter the balance of power on the Net….There are signs that the signal is working. Bloomberg reports today that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now considering blocking Google in one way or another. Faced with a large-scale loss of professional news stories from its search engine, Google would likely have little choice but to begin paying sites to index their content. That would be a nightmare scenario for Google – and a dream come true for newspapers and other big content producers.

Haque:

If Murdoch “wins,” society is worse off. Readers lose, because choice in news is limited, and prices inevitably jacked up, without better news having been created…. the challenge for newspapers is scarcity — real scarcity, not artificial. Can newspapers offer distinctive perspectives, rich with knowledge, expanded into topics, that make readers authentically better off? That’s what scarce, distinctive news might look like.

Twitter, plusses and minuses.

Evgeny Morzov on Twitter’s “Power to Misinform.”

Anyone trying to make sense of how Twitter’s “global brain” has reacted to the prospect of the swine flu pandemic is likely to get disappointed. The “swine flu” meme has so far that misinformed and panicking people armed with a platform to broadcast their fears are likely to produce only more fear, misinformation and panic.Thus, Unlike basic internet search — which has been already been nicely used byGoogle to track emerging flu epidemics — Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process.

Erik Hersman’s more optimistic take:

Many individuals who have information are not on Twitter, Facebook, or any other big social network. So, while there is a great deal that can be done with the open channels available in the developed world, most of the world is not on those channels when it matters most…..What we have is the beginnings of an ecosystem for emergency and disaster information. The projects are disjointed and unconnected, and there’s little hope of making them one cohesive unit (nor should the necessarily be). What I do hope to see in the future is that the protocols, tools and processes for gathering, making sense of, and then disseminating crisis information becomes more open and standardized.

Morozov’s TED Talk, How the Net aids dictatorships, was also noteworthy.

, as was his Moldova’s Twitter Revolution and thoughts on slacktivism. He sparked interesting reactions and disagreements, including from Patrick Meier, Ethan Zuckerman and Juliana Rotich. Zuckerman, the proto-conference blogger, summarized the “dueling views of digital activism” presented by Morozov and Xiao Qiang at the ARS Electronica Cloud Intelligence conference. Curated by David Sasaki and Isaac Mao, the conference was full of good stuff– as was Sasaki’s Democratizing the Geography of Information.

Future of News

Richard Sambrook summarized the Twitter Iran meme:

Social media can be a huge benefit in news coverage – not least it was one of the few ways for people in Iran to communicate with the west. But mediation by people who understand the story and don’t have a particular agenda to advance is still needed to get a grasp of what has, and hasn’t, actually happened and a measured sense of proportion. What was evident on Twitter this weekend was the accelerating effects of a continuous news cycle and appetite. Just as 24 hour news channels must stay on air with some kind of coverage, social media is even hungrier. And noise fills the void when events or facts can’t. Of course, it’s not “either/or”… you can have the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera and also have Twitter, which this weekend has reinforced its place for the energy of debate, discussion, links, rumour, gossip and more. Enjoy – (I will!) – just don’t take it all as fact.

Key in the future of journalism section was Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable essay.

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting…This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. … So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs? I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it….When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

I come to closer to Shirky, but found Richard Posner ’s argument salient:

If eventually newspapers vanish, online providers will have higher advertising revenues (because newspaper advertising will have disappeared) and may decide to charge for access to their online news, and so the critical question is whether online advertising revenues will defray the costly news-gathering expenses incurred at this time by newspapers. Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely…Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Other links I recall from earlier in the year:

The StupidFilter Project: “Because the internet needs prophylactics for memetically transmitted diseases.” (Thanks to Fitz for the heads up.)

The BBC’s Digital Revolution. Cassette Boy’s remix of one of its documentaries was silly, but fun.

The Financial Times’ Matthew Garrahan on The Rise and Fall of MySpace

Daniel Hernanez’s blogging on the swine flu outbreak in Mexico City.

Andrew Sullivan

The Texas Tribune, which looks like an online newspaper.

Larry Lessig on the limits of transparency.

Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices, a collaboration between the New York Times Magazine and Pro Publica. Emma Heald described how the collaboration worked.

Fake Steve Jobs on Net Neutrality, mobile networks, and innovation, A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T.

When you’re lucky enough to create a smash hit product…you do not go out and try to fuck it all up by discouraging people who love your product. What you do, instead, is you fix your fucking shitty ass network you fucking shit-eating-grin-wearing hillbilly ass clown!…He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.

EFF’s review of Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy, its Terms of Service Tracker,  and How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them)

Jake Weisberg on the Kindle

What we should worry about is that the system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There’s a risk that what replaces it won’t allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there’s also a chance it could allow more writers to make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we’re losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I’m optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just like Gutenberg did.

Benjamen Walker, late of Theory of Everything, started his new show on WFMU, Too Much Information.

Josh Catone in Mashable: Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media

A New Spin on Inside Stories

Yaroslavsky’s deputy for special projects, Joel Sappell, seems prepared for the extra attention and also determined that the 3rd District supervisor’s revamped website, to launch in October, will “go beyond flackery.” The intention is to transcend ribbon-cutting photos and news releases about Supervisor Zev to create stories on little-known county programs and issues…”If the stories are interesting and tell people something they didn’t know, something that is significant, then we have done our job,” said Sappell, previously an editor at the Los Angeles Times.

The MLB Network on TV, and the MLB iPhone app; Chan Finn talked about the net’s impact.

Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg on The meaning of open.

The imagined Tiger Woods animation from Apple Daily in Taiwan.

2009’s Most Influential Media About Media

Earlier this month, I asked for thoughts on the most influential media of the year.  (Here are the lists from 2007 and 2008; [edit: and thoughts on Chicago-specific 2009 media happenings.) The following is a summation of what I heard. Thanks to everyone for sharing-- [here's my list for the year.]

The most significant media event of 2009 wasn’t Barack Obama’s inauguration or Tiger Wood’s fall from grace, but Michael Jackson’s death. Twitter reports and TMZ drove the coverage. Jay Smooth collected a set of links on Jackson, and posted this commentary about “the mix of deep human connection and weird media circus.”

2009 saw lots of discussion about the challenges of journalism, in case you missed it. Several high-profile reports were mentioned:

• The Reconstruction of American Journalism, by Len Downie and Michael Schudson, via Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
• The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy: Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. From the Executive Summary/Conclusion.
• The Media Consortium’s The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course for Journalism, penned by Tony Deifell.
• Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, by the Center for Social Media at American University, penned by Jessica Clark.
• Also from the Center, Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting, Center for Social Media.
• State of the News Media 2009, Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism
• Instant White Paper: The Future of News: Creating a new model for regional journalism in America - (pdf), by Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media.
• Saving the News: Towards a National Journalism Strategy, by Free Press.
• The NEW news: Journalism We Want & Need, by the Community Media Workshop.

Conferences also took up the future of news question. Mark Hallett of the McCormick Foundation liked Richard Rodriguez’s Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper, originally presented at the New American Media conference. Michael Skoler, Reynolds Fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism, pointed to Steven Berlin Johnson’s South by Southwest speech, Old Growth Media and the Future of News, “a brilliant summation of what the future of news will look like and why it will be better than today’s news.” Ruth Lopez flagged this NPR debate, ”Good Riddance to Mainstream Media.”

And blog posts:

• Leah Benancourt on How Google Wave is Changing News: “Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog started its first public wave on November 10, and since then it has attracted more than 300 blips. Following that success, StephanieYiu, RedEye’s web editor, and Scott Kleinberg, senior editor of digital and print, now lead a half-hour public wave session every day.”
• Fake Steve Jobs’ Why the Mainstream Media is Dying: “What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere “aggregators” and the “real journalism” gets done at places like the Times. Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. If newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing — muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit.”
• Brian Newman liked Bill Wyman’s Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers are Failling.
• Dennis Haarsager liked Jay Rosen’s Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press.
• Joe Germuska pointed to the Guardian’s crowd-sourced analysis of MP expense reports, and wants to know more. ”There were four lessons written up soon after it went live, but I would like to hear at least one more insider report now that several months have passed. Were any stories broken out of information provided by the public?”

Facebook. Siva Vaidhyanathan liked the First Monday article Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data by Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai, and danah boyd’s Facebook and MySpace Users Are Clearly Divided Along Class Lines.  Beth Kanter pointed to boyd’s Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media. WFMU’s Benjamen Walker shared A Fan of Big Brother? Facebook Launches Government Page, It’s SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites (“The percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds who have a profile on a social networking site has dropped for the first time – from 55% at the start of last year to 50% this year.”) and Sarah Palin Turning To Facebook To Spread Her Political Views. Rich Gordon of Medill likedFredVogelstein’s Wired article, Great Wall of Facebook: the Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet– and Keep Google Out. Mark Hallett tagged Dan Schultz’s In Search of a Community that Takes ‘Me’ Out of Social Media.

Perennials. Several tech thinkers are mentioned every year, including:

• Jonathan Zittrain’s 2008  book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It was mentioned several times; someone also mentioned James Dennis’ response to Zittrain.
• Henry Jenkins, for his blog and his book, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture.
• Larry Lessig, for Code, both the original and v2.0 (“even more relevant today than when it was written”); The Future of Ideas (2001), and his talk on the Google book search settlement.
• David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (2007)
• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody was flagged, as was his talk “Where do people find the time?”

Seth Godin was mentioned frequently, for his books Tribes and What Matters Now, available as a free e-book, and for his TED talk.

Tunji Lardner highlighted another TED Talk,  Pranav Mistry’s on his SixthSense technology.

Platforms

• PACMan3000’s  The iPhone is a Platform: The tech media… are still judging Apple by the Mac versus Windows saga that played out over twenty years ago. Yes, licensing did work out for Microsoft in the end, but the question here is will the same strategy work out with mobile devices?
• Kevin Gibbons’ look at the effects of United Breaks Guitars and its, as of 12/21, 6.7 million views:  ”A  single YouTube video complaint about a bad experience with United Airlines has contributed towards United Airlines share price dropping by 10% and costing shareholders a reported $180 million!”
• Brett Kelly on why Replacing Google Reader with Twitter is Nuts

Policy.

• Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world(Draft) (pdf), The Berkman Center.
• Eliot Van Buskirk, in 2008, on the FCC’s rationale for approving the Sirius/XM merger: “someone took one look at streaming radio on an iPhone and the deal was done.”

Other links:

• Brian Newman wrote that “with all the talk about Free, I revisited Esther Dyson’s 1995 article (1995) on the subject …[S]he was not only quite prescient, she nailed the subject better than Anderson or Kelly has in their works. In one article.”
• David Weinberger’s optimistic, Is Hobbes the inevitable outcome of the Internet?: “Society has a tradition of drawing lines of privacy based not on what we can physically perceive but on what we’re allowed to notice…[A]s we get used to the new opportunities for invading privacy, we’ll develop norms that rope off some areas and some topics so that even if we happen to have looked down the social media blouse of the woman next to us, we’re not allowed to comment on what we saw.”
• Brian Newman suggested Eric Scime’s The Content Strategist as Digital Curator, saying “arts orgs need to understand this.” and Mike Masnick’s Trent Reznor case study video.
• Gene Koo liked Venkatesh Rao’s two-part post, The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office.”
• j.ello’s The Unspoken truth about managing geeks. (“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”)
• John McManus linked to Jack Balkin’s “The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age,” 36 Pepperdine Law Review 101 (Jan. 29, 2009).
• Daniel Ernst cited two articles from the September issue of Wired Magazine, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine and Why Craigslist is Such a Mess.

Twitter. For the first time, several people mentioned favorite Twitterers, including @beyondbroadcast, @iwantmedia, @zoecello, @NASA, @Sciam and @timoreilly.

Audio. “I’ve been in a more aural mode for new ideas lately,” wrote Joe Germuska, and he wasn’t alone. A couple of you mentioned WNYC’s On the Media. Anonymous pointed to BlogTalk Radio’s GameChanging a weekly podcast about new development in social media, flagging the episode Recommendation Engines and Predictive Marketing. From Books to Baseball. Kyle Reis of the Ford Foundation wrote that “some of the most amazing ideas that are entering my brain these days are coming in through the auditory channels in the form of Radio Lab podcasts.”

Books. Rich Gordon tipped me off to The Curse of the Mogul. “The best book I’ve found on the business of media. We should have no more meetings about the future of the media business without requiring all participants to read this book.”  Two chunks from the Introduction that stood out for me:

[There] is a peculiarly American paranoia about the media industry’s ability and inclination to mold the national psyche. This suspicion is reflected most prominently in articulated fears about the diversity and independence of news but extends to broader fears about potential cultural indoctrination by massive malevolent media conglomerates….As broadcasters represent a smaller and smaller part of the media that the public consumes, these regulations become more and more irrelevant and the massive regulatory infrastructure that supports them becomes more and more anachronistic. The fact that these rules persist and new ones continue to be proposed is a reflection of just how deep-seated and irrational these fears about the media are.

Bonnie McEwan liked The Chaos Scenario by Bob Garfield. Alberto Ibarguen of the Knight Foundation suggested Elizabeth Eisenstein’s, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, saying it “put our media transition in a much bigger, historical context for me… made me think longer range [and] stamped out any remaining inclination to whine about the impact of change that I may have had left over (I didn’t have much) from days near a newsroom.” Eric Steuer of Creative Commons suggested Dave Cullen’s Columbine. Steve Rhodes went old school, point to A.J. Liebling’s The Press; Timothy Crouse’s The Boys On The Bus and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail. (It doesn’t quite fit my parameters, and he didn’t respond to my solicitation, but last week Mayor Daley praised Marcus Jacques’ When China Rules the World. The Center for Social Media’s Pat Aufterheide liked Bill Patry’s Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars–here’s the blog.

Pat also recommended a novel, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Golden Tattoo. Other novels mentioned: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer; One Second After by William Forstchen and Cory Doctorow’s Makers.

Other nonfiction books on the list:

• Stephen Baker’s The Numerati
• Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke’s Beyond the Echo Chamber: How a networked progressive media can reshape American Politics
• Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders, Curtis Faith
• Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel
• Free: : The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson
• Honest Signals; How They Shape Our World, Alex (Sandy)Pentland
• Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, P.W. Singer
• How We Test Software at Microsoft, Page
• Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century, Nilekani
• Crowdsourching: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, Jeff Howe
• And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture , Bill Wasik

I’ll end with Michael Wesch’s Anthropological Introduction to YouTube– I tageed most of the links above “2009” on Delicious.

Trib Reporter “finally got through after being on hold for 50 minutes”

The Chicago Tribune published an article today describing the trials its reporters faced in traveling through a snowstorm to cover an ugly football game. The detail!

Brad Biggs: Biggs worked to get out a day early. Calls to the carrier were unsuccessful….He  found room on a United flight at 3:55 p.m. Friday that got him to Baltimore before the storm.

Brian Cassella: Cassella rebooked for a flight first thing Sunday. He was one of many trying to get on that United flight, as there were 88 names on the standby list when he boarded.

David Haugh: Haugh had his original flight canceled and rebooked later Saturday night — only to have that one canceled too. So he took a circuitous route to Baltimore. His 5:56 a.m. US Airways flight from Chicago connected in Charlotte, N.C. After a 70-minute layover there, he arrived in Baltimore.

Vaughn McClure: He initially was to leave Chicago at 11:35 a.m. Saturday, but his flight was rescheduled for 7:30 p.m, and eventually canceled…. Thanks to the help of customer relations representative LaMarkus Jones, McClure made an earlier United flight and arrived with four hours to spare.

Dan Pompei: Pompei spent an hour trying to get in contact with an airline representative with no luck. He tried again a couple of hours later and finally got through after being on hold for 50 minutes.

2009 Chicago Media Highlights: Parking Meters & Peraica

What were the most important events in Chicago media in 2009? I’m not sure, bere’s what I remember:

• Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky owned the TIF and parking meter privitization stories.

• Dumke and Joravsky aside, on the Olympic bid story, Chicago media largely chose to be cheerleaders rather than muckrakers. Steve Rhodes called out Greg Hinz and the S-T ed board in this September post, but his criticisms could have applied to a lot of folks.

• Chicagoans for Rio critiqued the bid more effectively than any local journalist did.

• In the year that Twitter went mainstream, Cook County Commissioner @tonyperaica was the most interesting local pol online. His live reports of Commission meetings opened a new window onto the sausage making– though his colleagues weren’t always happy about what he was saying.  @johnfritchey was the most interesting Democrat on Twitter. County Commission hearings could be more interesting with the two of them tweeting side-by-side in 2011.  (Peraica also introduced an online database, CookEmployees.com.)

• Progress Illinois had comprehensive coverage of the Hartmarx Bankruptcy and tried to crowd-source state budget cuts.

• Dan O’Neil and Max Brooks thoroughly reviewed the City’s pdf-ridden TIF database website.

• The Uptown Update blog published video of kids running around Leland and Sheridan on a summer night. Though not all that gripping, the video moved onto local TV news as an example of a summer crime wave, actual or imagine.

• Greg Hinz was consistently the best political reporter in the city. Exhibit A.

• Rich Miller’s Capital Fax was the definitive source for impeachment coverage.

• Thomas Frank redefined “The Chicago Way” in his WSJ column. (“Sell off public property without public scrutiny. Prohibit public input on an essential public service. Rationalize the whole thing by insisting that government can’t run such things as well as the private sector can.”)

• David Schalliol posted amazing photos of Chicago on Flickr.

• Jim Tyree led a group that bought the Sun-Times in October. Maybe now it will have the resources to develop a website and online strategy.

• EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC– but stayed in the Loop. Another local news startup, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, wasn’t acquired, but moved to New York. Suburban-based MLBTradeRumors blew up, becoming the site for coverage of the hot stove league.

• The Chicago News Cooperative debuted, in collaboration with the New York Times [fd: and with the support of my employer]. Its debut generated lots of noise from the media gagglespehere, including a thoughtful post by Dan Sinker.

• Google unleashed the Data Liberation Front out of its Chicago office.

• Chicago Now and ESPN Chicago joined the local scene. Neither has become relevant, yet, though Chicago Now has at least found a couple of quality bloggers.
• The Parking Meter Geek did a great job covering the revolt against the parking meter privitzation.

• Granta published a sold-out Chicago issue.

• An assortment of working and unemployed journalists, students, professors, geeks and entrepreneurs attended the Chicago Journalism Townhall at the Allegro Hotel in February and the Chicago Media Future Conference at Columbia College in June.

• Tom Joyner was dropped from WGCI by Clear Channel, then returned weeks later on Soul 106.3. Steve Dahl reinvented himself as a daily podcaster; one of his biggest fans, Rob Feder, returned as a blogger on Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo.org and his former partner Garry Meier landed in WGN’s midday chair, which he used to shill for a Ron Santo statue.

• WGN AM was a mess. Led by former Howard Stern foil Kevin Metheny,  it found space for Glenn Beck impersonator Jerry Agar, gave a time slot to Simon Baninter– his schtick is that he’s French and zany –, embittered housefraus in DuPage County by cancelling the Kathy and Judy Show, and replaced newly-installed morning host John Williams after 6 months with SF import Greg Jarrett. (Jarrett’s affable, but tries just a bit too hard.) Feder detailed WGN’s travails last month.

• Jack Conaty left Fox Chicago after 22 years and Oprah announced plans to leave town, but shut down Michigan Ave. for a party, first.  Paul Harvey died.

• The Sports pages engaged in a hiring war. The Trib and Sun Times have been snagging one another’s reporters this fall and took it to a new level this week.  Swapping Rick Morrissey for Brad Biggs is a good trade for the Trib, though it’s not clear what will happen to his blog. Biggs’ Twitter stream is essential for downtrodden Bear fans.

• Speaking of downtrodden, the place to be following  Bears losses this season has been The Score’s postgame show, hosted by Doug Buffone and Ed  O’Bradovich, sports radio’s version of Statler and Waldorf. Less important, and more random, was Hub Arkush’s series of “scoops” that the McCaskey family was feeling out new leadership for the Bears.

• Jeff Joniak and Pat Foley continued to be the two best play-by-play men in town.

• Mark Grote and Bruce Wolff found a niche for retro sports talk on The Score 670’s Saturday afternoons. Where else can you get your Dallas Comegys, Vince Evans and Barry Foote?

• Jay Cutler has proven himself to be a bigger jerk than Jordan– Stefan Fatsis called it in April.

Foursquare’s emerging mores

The great thing about the Internet is that its new enough that there are few rules, and fewer experts, as we all bop along trying to figure this thing out. (And it changes so often: Google Wave! Chrome extensions! Brizzly!) Lately, I’ve been thinking about Foursquare. I’ve been derided for the dull nature of some of my mayorships, so perhaps I’m extra-sensitive.

Some Foursquare observations and questions:

• It’s reaching the mid-adopter phase where people who have never been to SXSW Interactive are using it.
• My use of the service has overlapped with my newfound status as a #nuevodad. As a result, most of  the mayorships I’ve claimed are hum-drum spots within blocks of my home– the drugstore, the grocery store, the dry cleaners.
• As recently as last week, I derided a friend for checking in at his workplace. Today, I checked in at my office, and it felt OK.
• Unlike Facebook, where I’m friends with a lot of people I don’t know, and Twitter, where I follow 3x as many strangers as friends, I’ve been firm that I’ll only play Foursquare with folks I actually know. As MC Siegler pointed out, “location adds a different element…because it’s the bridge between the online social world and the real-life social world. ” After all, I don’t want to end up with my face plastered on garbage cans.
• Do you check in on public transit? At the station, or on the bus/train? If the latter, how does that map?
• Are any politicians using it?
• How might nonprofits use Foursquare? Foursquare itself announced a campaign with Pepsi to raise funds for Camp Interactive in New York.  Margo Anderson and Beth Kanter have both thought about the question. I’m less interested in its utility for fundraising, and more curious about how arts organizations could use it to build audiences. (Margo sites two such examples.)

Google Zeitgeist Loves Brian Piccolo

Either Ecuadorean Internet users developed a newfound love for a 1960s Chicago Bear or there’s some wacky in the Google Zeitgeist juice. Via Global Voices and Cobertura Digital, we find Ecuador’s top, and hottest, Google search terms for the year. The top three search are for Ecuador, Hi5, and videos– simple enough. Then, atop the list of most searched football players: Brian Piccolo. At first I wondered if if could be some young Brazilian prospect recently signed by LDU– but it seems that the only one out there is indeed the one who played running back for the Bears in the late 60s– and who lives forever thanks to James Caan’s portrayal of him in “Brian’s Song.” I’m left to presume that either Andean Internet surfers are obsessed with tearjerker sports movies– or someone at Google Zeitgeist is having a laugh.