Giving Readers What They Want?

One of my favorite anecdotes about working as a local-daily journalist is that my most popular story ever was about something that never happened. One day in September 2007, the local police in Guilford, Conn., started getting a lot of calls that there was a dead mountain lion on the side of I-95. By the time the state DEP people got there, though, the animal was gone. Not such an interesting anecdote, except for the fact that mountain lions haven't lived in Connecticut for decades. Animal control was adamant that there was no way the carcass could have been a mountain lion, although they noted that they get a lot of calls every year of "mountain lion" sightings -- none of which have been confirmed. So I wrote a short, tongue-firmly-in-cheek story about the dead "mountain lion." The next morning, I had 25 voice mail messages and dozens of emails -- by far the most response I ever got to a story. A story that made clear it was about a misidentified piece of roadkill.

I thought about the story again this week while reading through the New Yorker's recent profile of blog impresario Nick Denton. Denton argues that while he is definitely in the gossip business -- and nothing wrong with that -- he often disagrees with readers about which stories are important. Denton orients his editorial philosophy around the pursuit of page views, and each post's page includes an updating number of how many people have read it. The only problem is that you can sometimes end up with all mountain-lion stories. That is, if we're hoping to preserve journalism as some sort of key element in American democracy, the page-view model may not have a lot to offer us.

Blogging on 42nd Street

With all the recent focus on nonprofit journalism as a future for news reporting, I hadn't thought until recently (well, today, actually) about the role that libraries could play. All libraries, from the small-town ones to the New York Public Library, are thinking the Internet can offer new ways for patrons to search their catalogs and find out about on-site events. But some, like the NYPL, are creating original weblog content to draw in users who might not have been heading for a library site in the first place. While this seems like an obvious way to market libraries, who are trying to peer into the future as in-person research becomes less and less a part of their function, but it raises questions about how far the trend could go. Will libraries be hiring writer-bloggers to create must-read sites? How does the academic, intellectual role of a librarian fit in with the stereotype of the writing-in-my-underwear blogger? Just goes to show it's not only newspapers and magazines that are having to recalibrate their missions for a digital readership.

What are ... our new robot overlords?

I had a pretty exciting Wednesday this week - helping IBM make computers smarter than humans. Designers at their Watson research facility in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., are designing a computer to play Jeopardy, and as a former contestant living in the New York metro area, they asked me to come "spar" with the machine. Turns out they were looking for average Jeopardy contestants like myself - those who had won no more than two games (I, sadly, placed second in my only game). Unfortunately I signed something prohibiting me from saying how the computer did, but let's just say it was competitive. More than competitive.

Apart from the cool factor of having a computer answer trivia in the form of a question, the potential software could help computers understand human language better and solve problems we didn't think machines could grasp. Just another step on the way to making ourselves obsolete, I guess.

Here's the NY Times article on the overall project from a few months ago.

Disclosure: IBM paid me a (small) consulting fee for participating in the sparring matches. I'm eager to think and write more about the effort as soon as they tell me I won't get sued for doing so!

Spoilery

In scanning through articles on Project Muse (an academic journal database) just now, I noticed that hypertext author and scholar Stuart Moulthrop prefaced an essay on Watchmen with the disclaimer, "This essay reveals key plot details of the graphic novel Watchmen and the film based upon it." Are we really going to start putting spoiler alerts on academic writing now? And about a book and movie that came out 23 years and 6 months ago, respectively? Should we?

Pres. Bush really made "emboldened" happen. Remember when he first said it and everyone thought it was a made-up word a la The Simpsons' "embiggened"? At least three academic panelists at the conference this weekend have used it.

More from Yale

Jeff Jarvis (paraphrase): "The future of news is entrepreneurial, not institutional. ... Journalism becomes a task rather than a profession, as anybody can perform acts of journalism."

The language of crisis

Fascinating conference today and yesterday at Yale Law School on new media, journalism and economic models for the future. A combination of the usual suspects (Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Brill) and a variety of journalists, law professors, economists, sociologists ... One of the great things the conference is doing is enacting its precepts with a live video stream, live blog and constant Twitter updates - it's even creating a feedback loop between David Carr tweeting in the audience, panelists reading the tweets and responding during their talks, and Carr asking questions in person.

One disappointing thing, though: about 80 percent of the panelists are middle-aged white men. What does it say about this language of crisis that these are the people having the discussions?