Apologies for the extended bout of blog hooky. My excuses are not all that profound. Mostly, I’ve been finishing up the new book proposal. Also, riding herd on a long-drawn-out basement remodeling project which should allow us, belatedly, to provide each of our now-eight-year-old boys with their own bedroom turf. (I think the term defensible turf is relevant here.)

And also, finally, I have been catching up with the rest of the known universe and plowing my way through the Harry Potter cycle. As a Tolkien cultist from youth, I’d long resisted, but the time finally came, and — while I remain a Tolkien man through-and-through — I freely admit to the addictive nature of J.K. Rowling’s books: she has created a worthier world than I’d expected from the Oxbridgian mimicry and the iconic images (impossibly cute round-spectacled kid face with robes and wand, etc.) that represent it on and beyond the covers of the books themselves.

This passage (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) describing Dumbledore’s Pensieve caught my blog-enchanted eye. (Of course many others had previously noticed the same parallel.)

“What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

Easier to spot patterns and links, indeed!

News organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort deciding what “leads” — what goes on the front page; what goes in the newscast at the top of the hour; what’s important. This is how professional news organizations deploy the minds and time of some of their best-paid and most experienced employees: They sit down at daily meetings and argue this stuff out; sometimes they agonize over it.

In the era of scarce column-inches and broadcast time this made a lot of sense. But that era is fading. With the Web reshuffling how the most avid users of news get their information, editors’ roles are changing — not vanishing, but definitely being challenged.

These thoughts are occasioned by Dave Winer’s new experiments remixing the New York Times. A while back he offered us the Times River — a simple reverse-chronological list of “head-and-deck” links from the newspaper’s RSS feed that is perfect for scanning on mobile devices or just checking in to see what the latest Times stories are. In his latest rethinking of the flow of Times headlines, Winer has built an outline-style interface to the same set of headlines, built around the Times’ own keywords.

These pages are notable for their simplicity. There are no distracting ads, no complex navigational tools, no typographical elegance or design flourishes. It’s just the text and you. A part of me looks at this and thinks, “How crude.” Another part of me looks at it and sees the same spare utility as the original Google home page — and wonders if, a handful of years from now, I’m going to prefer keeping up with my Times this way over continuing to kill trees with my lifelong (but now imperiled) newspaper consumption habit.

Years ago, during the dotcom mania, as Salon’s home page got more and more festooned with stuff that Salon was playing around with to try to increase revenue, a software developer did something similar with our news flow — he “screen-scraped” our headlines and presented them in an ultra-simple list form. (His script still appears to be running but it no longer works properly — Salon’s home page has been redesigned a bunch of times since then.) This was a kind of proto-Salon River. Use of it never spread beyond a tiny handful of geeks. If it had — if hordes of Salon users essentially defected and said they preferred that version of our home page to our own — it would have presented us with a business dilemma.

But I think the real resistance to this new vision for news delivery will be less on the business end (business tends to extract some kind of value anywhere large numbers of people can be congregated) than in the newsroom itself. Because the whole “river of news” approach, like the “newest posts on top” design of all blogs, takes a big bite out of the editor’s job. The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

I think that there are still plenty of readers who like what editorial judgment adds to the arrangement of the news. Of course, they don’t always agree with it, and many like to argue with it. But they want their quick scans of the news to be ordered by something besides chronology, so they choose a publication to make a deal with, saying, in effect, “I’m giving you my attention and you tell me what you think is important. If I disagree often enough I’ll move on, but in the meantime, tell me what you think matters.”

The real question over the next decade or so will be, how many of those readers are there? Is it the vast majority — which is what most editors believe? Or is it a shrinking tribe of news consumers who grew up under the old dispensation?

Although most professional editors will immediately dismiss the scenario, I think it’s quite possible that the “editors’ cut” of the news will dwindle in importance until we hit some threshold where the majority of users decide they don’t want their thinking “arranged” for them.

At that point, the “river” will roll right across the front page. And some editors may need to find other outlets for their talents.

• Kevin Kelly appears to be blogging, and, unsurprisingly, in just a few posts he’s providing considerable food for thought. In this post, he describes his (successful) effort at creating a sort of desktop memento mori:

  I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

• David Edelstein, my favorite film critic (I’m biased, as we’re old friends and former colleagues), has begun a blog called The Projectionist for New York magazine’s Web site:

  Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

  And who knows where this might lead? Movies connect with us on an unconscious level, and blogging is a pipeline to the id.

• Finally, Bill Wyman, who I worked with for many years at Salon, has a fine new blog on the entertainment industry — with a heavy emphasis on music — at Hitsville.

Because I am always behind reading my feeds (aren’t you?) I only just read this post by Doc Searls from a week ago. Coming from a slightly different angle, using his increasingly valuable VRM argument, Doc’s “Toward a New Ecology of Journalism” arrives at a similar place to where I ended up earlier this week in the Times Select discussion:

…The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of ‘impressions’ to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

…The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this….

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

I think this is right, though the long-term-ness of the vision will have most hard-hearded business people smirking their disbelief as they point to corporate-media revenue numbers with long strings of zeroes dangling from them.

I also think that, frightening as it can look, this is ultimately a great opportunity for journalists. We have the chance to invent new ways to support our work — ways that don’t depend on the essential bait-and-switching of old-fashioned advertising.

We can also give up the contortions and distortions of the old-school “Chinese walls,” the barrier erected between the journalists who create the news reports that have value and the people who sell…other stuff that ends up paying the salaries of the journalists. In any case, I’ve long thought that this beloved wall — for all its ethical value, when it worked — had an insidious side-effect of allowing journalists to pretend that they weren’t working for businesses at all. This innocence (or naivete) has left many of them ill-equipped to do more than rend their garments as their industry undergoes slow-motion collapse.

From a thoughtful piece in the Washington Monthly about why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert doesn’t get more buzz comes this:

Some experts suggest that human nature also just resists bad news. Dan Heath, coauthor of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, observed in an e-mail to me that columnists who inflict hard truths on readers

have to make deposits along with the withdrawals. Otherwise, if they cause us hurt twice a week, we instinctively look away, like smokers who don’t want to look at blackened-lung photos. Conversely, if Dave Barry took a stand on health care, I think it’d be fixed overnight … he’s made so many deposits and so few withdrawals that millions feel like they owe him something.

I imagine this principle applies even more heavily to bloggers.

The demise of Times Select (see previous post) has served as a milestone moment for the continuing debate over the future of news online. Kara Swisher says it’s inevitable now that her paper, the Wall Street Journal, will follow the Times and tear down its pay gate. Jay Rosen offers a good overview of the discussion. His conclusion is optimistic:

I think real value is in weaving yourself into the Web. “Conversation” is blogger’s shorthand for that larger idea…. Advertising tied to search means open gates for all users. It means link rot cut to zero, playing for the long haul in Web memory and more blogs because they are Web-sticky.

If you read me here you know I agree. But of course there’s a “but.” And the “but” is all about money. The “but” is something that many of the believers in the bloggy future of news don’t always confront head on.

When you accept that the future for news on the Web is open and does not include much subscription revenue, you also have to accept that your revenue online isn’t going to match your old revenue; it won’t support as many full-time staff. Maybe it will improve steadily, but I don’t think it will ever reach the equivalent of print.

This is basic economics: in most cities, newspapers were monopolies or near-monopolies on paper for the last few decades. They’ll never be monopolies online. Or maybe a very small number (2 or 3) newspapers will become near-monopolies online by establishing their brand and authority — surviving into the Web age while the rest of their peers die off, as the Web replicates for the entire U.S. the same process of consolidation that happened, city by city, in the second half of the 20th century.

I write this with some experience from the trenches at Salon, where we had what I would consider hands-on, ahead-of-the-curve experience in trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenue. For all Salon’s quality and achievements, that has always been an uphill fight.

Institutions like the Times will face the battle with all sorts of resources Salon lacked. Still: the near-monopoly newspaper always had subscription revenue, display ad revenue and classified revenue to bank on. Google ads can’t match that today, and probably not for a long, long time. Display ads placed on pages readers find through Google are better. But right now, all of the online advertising an open newspaper Web site can garner is at best icing on the old three-layer cake. If that’s all you need, great. But each of those three old revenue streams has already started to dwindle, and if you take the long view and accept that they’re all likely to vanish eventually, then you face inevitable shrinkage.

None of this is any argument for simply behaving as if the Web weren’t here and rolling up a drawbridge against change. It is instead an exhortation for both sides of the whither-journalism debate — the blogosphere and citizen’s journalism believers, and the old-school newsroom brigade — to come to terms with the bottom line of the journalism business today.

We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don’t know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don’t have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.

Given all this, I think it’s important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It’s understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.

If their profession has a future — and of course it does — the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.

This morning the Guardian published an op-ed I wrote following up on my post a while back, “There is no “first blogger.’ “ Its slightly verbose title is The blog haters have barely any idea what they are raging against. It was fun to expand on the argument and offer my own case for the long-term significance of blogging after a decade (or so).

It was also interesting to reread the piece (which I wrote a couple of weeks ago) after my post last night about corrections in the Times archive:

This confrontation between newspaper and blogosphere could easily leave you exasperated at both the Wall Street Journal’s sloppiness and the bloggers’ occasional self-righteousness. But as you rolled your eyes, you might miss the dust-up’s most interesting angle: the flurry of blogged retorts to the paper produced an accurate record of the facts around blogging’s rise. Bloggers aren’t any better than Johnny Deadline at getting facts right the first time around, but they’re a lot more efficient at correcting their own, and everyone else’s, goofs.

Meanwhile, Slate’s Jack Shafer pooh-poohs the Clark Hoyt public editor column about fixing the Times archives. Shafer thinks Hoyt’s specific examples are weak and that people who are aggrieved over errors in old Times stories should just combat the bad information by building their own Web sites.

I think this dismissal reflects head-in-the-sand thinking on Shafer’s part. It’s great that the Web lets people go out and publish their own retorts, but that doesn’t let newspapers off the hook. Professional journalists have no idea how frustrating and infuriating it can be to try to get a newspaper to fix a mistake. Even today, typically, the response from most newsrooms is defensive and the likelihood of obtaining satisfaction much smaller than it should be. As journalists, ourselves, when we face such problems we know how to pull the levers and we often get special, collegial treatment.

If the Times is capitalizing on its archives, it ought to take more responsibility for the new currency it has granted to old stories (and their errors). Shafer’s attitude is that people who are hurt by these old stories should go out and fix the problem themselves. I’d do that, if I were in their shoes, but I’ve been a journalist all my life. I don’t think the Times can take such a cavalier stance. Because in the end, if the paper tells its subjects that it’s their responsibility to establish an accurate public record, people will start wondering why they need the paper’s version of the record at all.

LATE UPDATE: JD Lasica’s post reminds me of the piece he did for my Salon Technology section back in 1998 titled The Net Never Forgets. These aren’t new problems; they’re just new for the Times — and it has, well, a longer tail of old issues to resolve.

I love the convenience of RSS, but one of the problems of life inside the feed reader is that once you find a few dozen feeds you want to follow, the cost of adding a new feed becomes too high. When you find a site you like, you think, “Gee, I want to subscribe — but do I really want to add another feed? I can’t keep up with the ones I have!” (I know that the casual “River of News” approach, where you just let the stuff stream by you, would mean no guilt over not keeping up, but I haven’t achieved that level of Taoism detachment yet.) So over time we stop adding new feeds to our RSS diet. This perpetuates the “first-mover advantage” and makes it harder for newcomers to gain subscribers. (They still can, and do, of course.)

Here, as I mentioned in my BarCamp post, is my idea for a feature that RSS readers should but don’t (as far as I know) have: a sort of “New Feed Probation” or “Test Drive” zone. New feeds you subscribe to are automatically placed here (unless you deliberately put them somewhere else). They remain here for a preset time period (a week, a month, whatever you choose). At the end of that period, your reader flags the feed for you, tells you how much you’ve read it, and asks whether you want to keep it or not. You can see whether you actually ended up reading much of it during the “trial period,” and make an informed choice.

Sure, you could do all this yourself, manually. (I do, sometimes!) But wouldn’t it be nice if the reader helped you with this clerical task — and, in the process, encouraged you to explore new information sources and blogs?

If you’re going to write a cranky op-ed complaining that bloggers aren’t fit to shine real reporters’ shoes, as a journalism prof named Michael Skube did recently in the LA Times, and then you cite Josh Marshall as one of your examples of these failures to pound the pavement, you shouldn’t be surprised if people snort in derision. Love it or hate it (I love it), Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is the model of a muckraking blog; it regularly breaks stories.

But wait, this gets more ridiculous. Marshall emailed Skube, who told him that he didn’t include Marshall (or any of the other blogger examples) in the piece; some editor inserted that sentence. “Perhaps I’m naive,” Marshall wrote. “But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.”

Now Jay Rosen has written a blistering retort to Skube’s piece, complete with a crowdsourced litany of examples of blogging-driven reporting. And the LA Times has posted an editor’s note about the matter Marshall raised.

Ah, you figure, the paper decided to set the record straight. Think again. The editor’s note is entirely devoted to presenting a semi-mea-culpa note from Skube: “An editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.”

So, before, Skube had told Marshall that “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site…Your name was inserted late by an editor.” Now, he’s saying exactly the same thing, only he’s also admitting that he approved of the change even though he didn’t really know if it was true. And the paper is saying, “See? The writer agreed to the change! So there’s no problem!”

The LA Times editorial page editor seems to think that this comic routine closes the case. Sorry. Both the paper and the professor now look bad. The editor’s note tells readers that the paper cares more about proving its rectitude in the relatively arcane question of whether the editor had checked with Skube before inserting Marshall’s name than it cares about actually providing its readers with an accurate description of Marshall’s blog as one that does or does not do original reporting.

It’s bad enough for a newspaper to have made this silly error; but everyone makes errors. The damning behavior is the refusal to admit the mistake; the game of finger-pointing; the hiding behind the gears of process; and the institutional facade that says, “Something went awry here but we’ll never come clean because our dignity is more important than the truth.”

Ironically, the LA Times seems to think it’s OK to not correct the piece because, hey, it’s just an op-ed, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. But Skube’s complaint against blogs is built on the notion that opinion is inferior to “the patient fact-finding of reporters.” It’s unfortunate for him that an argument along the lines of “blogs such as Josh Marshall’s are inferior because they don’t do real reporting” is widely known to be false.

I will let Skube have the last word: “Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life… The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.”

There’s a debate going on about Gnomedex: Dave Winer posted a critique, Chris Pirillo responded.

My thoughts (I originally posted on the conference here): I don’t mind that Gnomedex mixed up politics and technology. Heck, I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades now. That’s good. By assuming that this is the root of people’s beef, Pirillo lets himself off the hook a little too easily: “We were just taking risks, don’t you want that?”

My problem with Robert Steele’s keynote (and some of the other presentations) was a different one: I’ve got no issue with the extremity or outrageousness of Steele’s positions and statements. Bring on the controversy! I just thought he was disrespectful of the crowd.

In my years as a theater critic, covering night after night of often under-funded and under-attended underground and avant-garde performances, I was always ready to give anyone a break as a long as it was clear that they’d had something they were trying to express, and they’d put an effort into trying to express it. What got my dander up was watching shows where the creators had plainly failed to try — they hadn’t worked at it, they’d just thrown something together.

When you get on stage, you’re commanding some public time. It’s a precious and valuable resource. You owe it to the people who come to try to use it well. I’ve begun some regular public speaking this year — once or twice a month, I come to some group or company and talk about the topic of my book — and invariably, I spend a day or two in advance reviewing my talk, customizing it for the particular crowd, updating it with new material. I owe that to the people who are giving me their time.

Steele? He raced through his slide deck like someone with an ADD seizure, flipping forward and back through dense, unreadable slides like someone whose keyboard was gummed up with ketchup. At first I thought it was a comedy routine. Then I got it: he hadn’t prepared. He was doing his preparation live, in front of us, deciding what he was going to talk about, and in what order. So instead of provoking us with his ideas we ended up exasperated by his incoherence. If he’d taken his hour to explore, in depth, any one of the stream of controversial pronouncements he was spewing, it might have been fascinating. Instead, it was a bit of an insult.

As for Michael Linton, another controversial speaker who drew criticism with his introduction to “open money,” I felt he had more substance than Steele. But he, too, failed to introduce his material in an accessible way, and missed an opportunity to win support from a crowd of unconventional and open-minded tech enthusiasts because he couldn’t even begin to communicate his idea clearly. Linton needs to become as effective an evangelist for open money as Guy Kawasaki (who also spoke at Gnomedex) is for…Guy Kawasaki. Then maybe we’ll have a chance to figure out whether we like his ideas or not.

I haven’t been to previous Gnomedexes so I can’t compare this one to its predecessors. Overall I still thought it was better than many other conferences I’ve been to, but maybe it was a let-down to some alumni. Either way, Gnomedex is no more exempt from the laws of public speaking than any other conference: If a keynote speaker can’t be bothered to prepare a cogent talk, the audience has a right to its disgruntlement.