Spalpeen

And the other wisp of zeity geist floating around at the moment? Open data. Remember that? Data.gov.uk and so on. Well, there’s lots of data, qualitative and quantitative, sitting in the HMIC service. But can I get at it in a raw format, take it to do my own comparisons and analyses and so on? Will I find links to a place on data.gov.uk where it’s all been made available for this sort of thing? Take a wild guess. So that’s nicely connected to one of the principal government information strategies, then.

(via rbrtbrk-deactivated20120210)

On the churnalism debate, the Nick Davies book is great. But, it is a history book. To rage against churnalism is like raging against the weather. I am not scared to say that most of what I do is churnalism. Journalists are outnumbered by press officers, bombarding us with stuff. A news organisation has to be part of that conversation. You have to be a canny churnalist, though. Use blogs to point readers to information, take information from press officers, but use your skills to sort the wheat from the chaff. Add value by your insight and link to other information. Use blogging tools. Don’t waste time rewriting stories – just link to people who have done a story well. If you can do all that, and be a new modern journalist, you can still make the time to do the real stories, and keep up with everything else.

Then they showed the Apple software we’d all have to use to send them each album. It required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom drive, type in all of the album info, song titles and bio, then click [encode] for it to rip, and [upload] when done.

I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their software. They said yes.

I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.

http://gizmodo.com/5688044/the-day-steve-jobs-dissed-me-in-a-keynote

Amazing that Apple had (has?) no capacity to use existing high quality formats.

I grew up thinking of journalism as a profession that served a high, noble purpose: the pursuit of truth, and knowledge, and making the world a better place. But Peretti rightly nails a disturbing fact about the “post-journalism” world of web publishing: if maximizing traffic is your primary goal, you’ll be more successful if you instead focus on feeding the dark beasts of human id.

How to engineer a viral web hit: just add “Mormons, Mullets or Maniacs” - Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing (via seanbonner) (via mikehudack)

It’s not an either or decision. If you’re simply looking to get traffic, you’re not doing good journalism. Good journalism is better if lots of people read it, but it’s not a prerequisite.