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Tracking bugs with the Times

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The response to my idea in January that newsrooms borrow a page from the open-source playbook and adopt bug-tracking systems wasn’t exactly thunderous (not that I had any reason to expect anything else!). But I was pleasantly surprised — while reading the New York Times’ recent internal report recommending a variety of smart moves the paper should take to combat the erosion of readers’ trust — to see that the flagship paper of American journalism is talking about taking a step in this direction. The Times committee proposes that the paper begin to use a database to track errors:

 

Last year we published almost 3,200 corrections. We can do better. Our goal should be to eliminate error, beyond acknowledging it and correcting it.

The proposed database would track the types and causes of errors that lead to corrections. The data would come from a mandatory form filled out by the individual(s) responsible for an error. It would include a draft of the proposed correction, with an explanation of how the mistake happened and how it could have been avoided.

This is OK, as far as it goes, but notice that the responsibility for entering the error falls on the party least motivated to do so — the “individual responsible for an error.” The resulting system may help the Times notice patterns of errors that it can try to remedy. But it won’t fundamentally improve the feedback loop between the paper and the world it is trying to cover — unless and until the database goes public. Why not open it up and let readers file “bugs” against stories? As I wrote in a follow-up post in January, “I think this approach would pay off best for a newsroom that is having difficulty convincing readers that the publication is actually listening to them. If you showed the public that you were recording and responding to the issues they raised — whether you end up publishing a correction or simply saying, ‘We don’t think that needs correcting, and here’s why’ — I think you’d start to bank some confidence and trust pretty quickly.”

The difference between a private database and a public bug-tracker is the difference between a management tool and an open channel of communication. The former isn’t a bad thing, but the latter is what you want if you really intend to restore public trust.

The report seems overly worried that tying names of journalists to numbers of errors would be unfair to individuals (“Only masthead editors, department heads and the editor in charge of overseeing the error-tracking system should have access to names in the database”). Certainly, the paper’s managers are being enlightened to say that they’re not going to judge reporters based on “raw counts of an individual’s errors,” which “can be simplistic and misleading.” Well and good. But the idea that these numbers need to be kept private seems both overprotective and naive.

The readers who know a subject well enough to know that an error has been made in coverage of that subject also know very well exactly which reporter(s) were responsible for the goof. Bylines are public. Journalism is public. Errors are public. If a particular reporter ends up embarrassed because of an unduly large number of errors associated with his name, he should be. A well-designed public error-tracker for a newspaper could help make sure that those reporters who have real problems getting their facts straight either improve or are eventually retired or moved to less sensitive jobs. Meanwhile, if readers complain repeatedly about a particular reporter’s errors and the paper feels they’re not errors at all, then at least its response and defense of that reporter would be on the record.

The Internet ensures that criticism of journalists and complaints of their mistakes will be public and will name names. Newspapers can’t reverse that. But if they handle things right, they can provide an orderly and reliable record of complaints lodged against them, of actions taken to correct errors or to demonstrate that charges of error are simply mistaken. If they do so, they will help bolster public trust in their work. If they don’t do it on their own terms, the distributed intelligence of the Net will continue to do it on terms that editors will find less and less hospitable.

Apple vs. the press

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As long as I’ve written about blogs I’ve made the point that blogging and journalism are separate activities that may or may not overlap. Since this debate has now entered the legal realm, let’s restate this with mathematical precision: Bloggers can be journalists; journalists can be bloggers. Neither state — I Am A Journalist, and I Am A Blogger — excludes the other, but neither guarantees the other. There is an axis of blogger to not-blogger, and an axis of journalist to not-journalist. The two axes are orthogonal, not parallel.

The legal matter that forces us to contemplate such a graph is Apple Computer’s suit against three online journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal the sources they used to publish some advance scoops about forthcoming Apple products.

We’re fortunate to be at a moment in history when changes in technology, begun a decade ago by the rise of the Web and accelerated by the introduction of anyone-can-publish software, mean that the spectrum of journalism has been broadened in ways that were previously unimaginable. The danger in the Apple suit lies in the possibility that a bad court decision — like one a lower court has already delivered in this case — might careless and foolishly decide that in order to be a journalist one has to receive a salary from some operation that some legal authority has defined as a journalistic entity.

That such a definition would be not only wrongheaded but actively harmful to the vibrant and lively democratic free-for-all on today’s Internet is the point of an amicus curiae brief filed today by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. I’m proud to be among the signers of this document, which was written by Lauren Gelman of the Stanford center. (Here’s a full list of the amici, with links.) The brief argues that, when the courts need to determine who receives the various legal protections available in some circumstances to working journalists, it should decide who is a journalist by looking at what putative journalists actually do, not who pays their salary or what membership cards they carry or what degrees they hold:

 

Amici come together to urge this court to hold that Internet publishers, including webloggers who are engaged in the reporting and dissemination functions a journalist performs, may invoke the protection of the journalists’ privilege on equal footing with traditional reporters and news organizations….

The applicability of the newsgatherers’ privilege is determined not by the reporter’s formal status as a ‘professional journalist,’ but rather by the reporter’s functional conduct in gathering information with the purpose of disseminating widely to the public.

If you take the time to read the somewhat confused state court decision that is now under appeal, you’ll see that the judge’s initial ruling, in favor of Apple and against the Web sites, declares that it doesn’t really matter whether you consider the Apple news sites to be conducting journalism or not, because, the judge seems to be saying, journalists have no business publishing trade secrets anyway.

I’m not enough of a lawyer to try to predict where that argument is headed; it seems of a piece with a variety of assaults taking place today on the rights of journalists to protect their sources. (The parallel amicus brief presented by the AP, a long list of California newspapers and the Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press tackles this issue.)

What I do know is that, if the New York Times or Time magazine published a scoop from an anonymous source about a forthcoming Apple product, the company wouldn’t be suing the press. So it’s important here for people who do journalism at all points along the spectrum from “pro” to “citizens” to step forward and say: If you ask questions with intent to publish, and you publish information someone considers news, you’re a journalist, and should be treated as one by the courts.

Interesting reading

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## Peter Drucker looks at the big picture of the world economy today — really four economies, he says: information, money, multinationals and mercantile exchange.

  For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world’s foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could
conceivably make America Number Two.

## Cynthia Ozick reviews Joseph Lelyveld’s memoir. I haven’t read the book, but the former N.Y. Times editor apparently did a vast amount of legwork researching his own childhood. This is Ozick’s discussion of the limitations of Lelyveld’s approach:

  …There is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld’s workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: ”If this were a novel,” ”If I were using these events in a novel,” and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld’s memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. ”Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood,” Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research.

Well put. I think one of the reasons I chose, as a young writer, a career as a critic rather than as a reporter was that I could not see devoting my life to writing that was all “nailed-down.” Reporting is a necessary and valuable skill, and I have deep respect for those who do it well; it’s hard, hard work, too. But it will typically miss that dimension of “the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective.” In American journalism as it is conventionally defined by those who carve out the job descriptions, a critic’s portfolio is broader, and it’s possible, under the right alignment of stars, to feel as well as to record — or rather, to record what one has felt along with what one has witnessed.

## Apparently there’s a movement afoot in the world of writing about games to be less “nailed-down.” It’s called the “New Games Journalism” — “a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player.” I’ll need to read up. This was sort of what I had in mind 15 years ago when I began to move my attention from the world of theater to the digital realm, and thought, hey, why not try writing more ambitious reviews of videogames? I’d just turned 30, though, and was already feeling that the gaming world was one I would be less and less able to keep up with as the decades advanced. (So right!) So I wrote one opus — an “experiential” discourse on the world of Super Mario — and moved on to broader terrain.

Goodness abounds

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Here are some things that have happened lately that are good:

Reissues of two previously unavailable early Mountain Goats albums, Zopilote Machine and Nothing For Juice, are now available. These are great if you are already tuned in to John Darnielle’s taut no-fi frequency; if not, last year’s We Shall All Be Healed remains the best intro. (Though if you go download “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song” you just might end up disagreeing with me and thinking that those older albums make a plenty fine intro, too.) A new album, The Sunset Tree, looms next month as well.

JD Lasica and Marc Canter, working with the Internet Archive, have opened the doors on their Ourmedia project — free hosting for video and audio files. I’m looking forward to playing with it.

Google Maps is here, and doesn’t seem to be going away, and it’s just really good. And you know, what’s good about it isn’t exactly the same as what’s cool about it. I mean, it’s fun to use the “Ajax”-powered thingies and slide the map around by grabbing it. But what makes it where I go now when I need to find something is that it’s much easier to read than the older services — which I assume will now frantically scramble to catch up. (It also claims not to work in my Opera browser, but in fact works just fine — though the scrolling is smoother in Firefox.)

Robot combat

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Ouch

What could be a better diversion for two robot-besotted five-year-old boys than San Francisco’s annual Robolympics? We went Saturday, spent about an hour watching the “two bots enter, one bot leaves” arena combat in the gym at SF State, then wandered over to the more peaceful confines across the way where swarms of Aibos wandered the stage.

This was Matthew and Jack’s favorite. No wonder: The sword lights up, the bot does Mifune moves — this snapshot doesn’t really do justice.

Browser wars: back from the dead!

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Since there’s yet another round of speculation about Google’s plans to transform the universe by developing its own sorta-kinda operating system, I think it’s time for a little game of connect-the-dots.

OK, we know all about Google’s expanding universe of Web applications that now go way beyond Web search, what with Gmail, the Google Desktop Search, and the latest product to turn the geek smile, the new Google Maps.

Thanks to the patient explication of Jesse James Garrett, we now have a name for the bundle of technologies that make this generation of Web-based applications feel more usable than their predecessors: “Ajax,” an acronym referring to “Asynchronous Javascript + XML.” All you really need to know is that this stuff makes it possible for Google (as well as a few other innovators) to design Web services where stuff happens very fast on your screen without your having to wait for the browser to send a request back all the way across the Internet to a server, and for that server to send some bits back to you. With Ajax, this all happens via services that are already built into your browser, rather than insisting that you wait while Java takes its long march into your browser window — or that you open your computer up to the myriad vulnerabilities created by Microsoft’s approach to building Web applications.

So Ajax is cool, and all eyes are on it. Meanwhile, Microsoft, prodded by the success of Firefox, has woken from its slumber and announced that it will update Internet Explorer as soon as this summer. We can be reasonably certain that the new IE will provide its users with some of the key improvements that Firefox users now enjoy, like tabbed browsing, which Opera users like me have had for, like, ever. (Opera even automatically saves and restores your tabbed window sets — God, it’s good! But with the right set of plugins you can pretty well match it with Firefox, and for free.)

Opera’s CTO, Hakon Lie, along with a group called the Web Standards Project, has issued a challenge to Microsoft. Microsoft, under the slogan “embrace and extend,” has a history of adopting previously extant standards and then twisting them just enough to make everyone’s lives miserable. To this day, Web designers often have to build two versions of sites, one to serve to IE and one to serve to everyone else — or they have to make compromises in how a site is served to make sure its pages don’t break on these incompatible browsers.

Microsoft developers say this time they intend to do better. Lie and the Web Standards Project plan an “acid test” to see just how well the new IE handles some of the subtleties of newer versions of standards like CSS (the “cascading style sheets” that give designers fine-grained control over a Web page’s layout).

It seems to me there’s another acid test anyone can perform: When the new IE is out and gets automatically distributed across the Net (to the millions of Microsoft users who now have automatic updates turned on so they don’t get zonked by some viral crud), all you’ll have to do is fire it up and visit your nearest Ajax-powered site. If Gmail works, great. But if the new Microsoft browser, in order to deliver some new benefit or other, turns out to break the Ajax armatures that hold the new Web applications together, then we’ll know that the company is up to its old tricks again.

Burning down the games

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I’m trying to be really, really good and hunker down on my book work, so I didn’t make any effort to check in at the Game Developers’ Conference even though it was right here in San Francisco, and now I’m kicking myself, because it appears that two of my favorite thinkers on the subject — my old friend Greg Costikyan, and Brenda Laurel, whose “Computers as Theater” was pivotal in shifting the course of my career — delivered blistering rants today at a panel there. I don’t know if the event will ever be more thoroughly documented, but in the meantime, these notes will do [link via BoingBoing]. Here are choice excerpts:

 

Costikyan: How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here, right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love.

Laurel: GTA [Grand Theft Auto] I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some of Brenda Laurel’s talk drew from material in her essay here on “New Boys.”

Microsoft snaps up Groove

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Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks: And it’s making Ray Ozzie, Groove’s founder, chief technical officer. [Link via Dave Winer.] This strikes me as a pretty big deal — here’s why.

Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, started Groove as an effort, once and for all, to solve the still incredibly thorny set of problems surrounding collaborative software. This is an area that’s been legendarily difficult for technology companies to crack (Netscape, for example, foundered after it took a turn in this direction by acquiring a company called Collabra). Ozzie and Groove haven’t figured everything out, but they’ve come a lot closer than many of their predecessors. Most recently, Groove has found a big client in the U.S. government, which has adopted its technology for extensive military use (causing a certain amount of controversy).

By scooping up Ozzie and Groove, Microsoft is doing what it has always done: extending its reach by embracing (or consuming) smaller companies that have made technical breakthroughs Microsoft’s big research labs and development teams haven’t been able to match. It’s a smart move for Bill Gates and company — an indication that they remain absolutely determined not to fall behind the competition, and a sign that Microsoft intends to push the boundaries of collaborative software’s capabilities. It will be interesting to see where they take Groove: Let’s face it, Windows and Office are both pretty creaky for users who want to share and coordinate work nimbly and quickly. Gee, maybe information technology does still matter, sometimes.

Google autolink debate frenzy

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I’m too mired in book work to offer much besides pointers, but here are pointers galore on the important controversy over the Google toolbar Autolink feature — in which Google offers to overlay its own links to certain types of information that it finds on everyone else’s Web pages. In 2001 Microsoft proposed putting something similar right into its Internet Explorer browser, and Walt Mossberg and many others blew the whistle on it. Links should be considered part of the vocabulary of Web content; inserting links is tantamount to tampering with the content.

This time it’s been Dave Winer who’s been blowing the whistle insistently. Here’s Dave’s case against Autolink. The opposite point of view — it’s a tool, I should be able to use any tools I want once content lands on my screen! — is smartly summarized by Cory Doctorow here and here. Paul Boutin in Slate, and Tim Bray, also offer good, careful perspectives.

Me, I think the issue is fundamentally political more than technical; Google is now powerful enough that it needs to learn to tread more lightly in areas like this. My hunch is the Google-ites, encapsulated in their “let’s bring all the world’s information to light!” mission, simply had no idea what an ethical morass they have plopped themselves into. If the past is any indication, they’re nimble enough to step out.

Random links

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I’ve been sick all week with a miserable cold — no fun, but hey, it does wonders for catching up with RSS backlog.

## GQ is not normally where I turn for quality reporting on the Valley, but look — they got John Heilemann to write about Google, and, well, it’s a great read. [via John Battelle]

## In a recent Wired piece pegged off his new book, Daniel Pink explains why I no longer need feel guilty about dropping math in high school before calculus kicked in.

## Evolution and cooperation? How’d that happen? Some big questions briefly plumbed in American Scientist. [via Arts & Letters]

## This is the way the world ends: Or maybe not. Dozens of theories and ideas inspected. Good fodder for the next time my five-year-old son asks, “Could the earth ever explode?” — which will be soon. [via MeFi]

## Hypercard reverie: a tour through late ’80s monochrome multimedia. With more chapters here. [via Boingboing]