Amy Gahran › Comments

"In general, I think David hit it on the head when he said that at many schools, the journalism that students produce is “museum work.” It is work that is produced in a vacuum, only to be read and seen by the professors, students and sources.In the last 5 years, journalism schools have taken a step in showcasing student work on their websites, and in some cases, like my experience at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, producing entire websites or in-depth web projects. Students are progressively able to learn to produce for the web and the web, learning multimedia and social media skills. At Columbia, almost every class had a dedicated website that either covered a neighborhood or specific topic. The problem is few people actually visited these websites because of a lack of outreach or as soon as they gained momentum they were killed off at the end of class." - Amy Gahran

By helping to free our local data, by re-inventing themselves as local data hubs, and by working with local businesses and local voluntary organizations, city newspapers could be part of the new conversation. They could then face the future a little more optimistically.  Let’s be honest. They don’t have much left to lose. - Amy Gahran

"A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper. When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?" - Amy Gahran

Every day, I run into stories that might as well include these promotional bullet points:Please go to Google to find the web site of the company I mentioned in this article.Please go to Google to that report cited in this article. ...etc. - Amy Gahran

"This phenomenon of private equity and bank owners asserting their controlling stakes in news companies has been little discussed publicly. In part, that’s because the new owners have been largely silent; one journalist expressed dismay today when he went to the Alden site, and found a single page. To get into the site, you need a client log-on. Several years into their new ownership, we’re seeing increasing impatience among the new owners with the old leadership. A growing conventional wisdom among them: too many newspaper CEOs just aren’t moving faster enough to grasp the mostly digital, multi-platform future. In fact, some of the new owners are meeting directly, without company leadership, with technology players who are offering shortcuts to the digital future. That’s one sign of the impatience.Another is the replacement of leadership, today Singleton and Lodovic, with new talent. - Amy Gahran

fascinating podcast on the evolution of a new way for people to transfer money where they don't have good access to banking. - Amy Gahran

Computer code is not yet art, but it could be.  At RailsConf 2010, Neal Ford discusses aesthetics, constraints, creativity, and why the Ruby on Rails community is closer to art than other programming communities. Code differs from art in that art is ambiguous, while code can't be.  Painting became more artistic when photography eliminated the need for realistic painting. Code must always compile and execute to be worthwhile.  Some of his characteristics for art are that it demonstrate expertise, that it's for enjoyment's sake, that it has a recognizable style, and that it has a special focus outside of ordinary life.  People in the Rails community have creative drive, recognition of excellence, and a distinct style, which makes them closest to realizing this idea of code as art. - Amy Gahran

"A  friend of mine has a favorite one-liner he likes to tell: "What is the perfect day for Mubarak? A day when nothing happens." Egypt's status-quo-oriented president doesn't like change, but his Groundhog Day fantasy weighs heavily on Egyptians. Mubarak has survived assassination attempts and complicated surgery. After he spent most of the spring of 2010 convalescing, everyone in Cairo from taxi drivers to politicians to foreign spies was convinced it was a matter of weeks. And yet he recovered, apparently with every intention of running for a sixth term in September. Egypt's prolific jesters, with their long tradition of poking fun at the powerful, might be running out of material." - Amy Gahran

"Many of Twitter’s trending topics have been fueled by black tweets. Coley has been responsible for several (hash)youcantbeuglyand and (hash)dumbthingspeoplesay also sprang from his iPhone. He has a desktop computer at home, which he used to apply for his supermarket job. But he uses his phone for 80 percent of his online activity, which is usually watching hip-hop and comedy videos or looking for sneakers on eBay. This trend is alarming to Anjuan Simmons, a black engineer and technology consultant who blogs, tweets and uses Facebook “more than my wife would like.” He hopes that blacks and Latinos will use their increased Web access to create content, not just consume it.:" - Amy Gahran

I'm glad to hear this, since SoundCloud is the closest thing we have for YouTube for audio. - Amy Gahran

"Mac Tonnies’s digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn’t worked out perfectly. His “Pro” account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has lapsed, the vast majority can no longer be viewed. Some were likely gathered in Plattner’s backup of Tonnies’s blog; others may exist somewhere on his laptop, though Dana Tonnies still isn’t sure where to look for them. All could be restored if Tonnies’s “Pro” account were renewed. But there’s no way to do that — or to delete the account, for that matter: no one has the password Tonnies used with Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo." - Amy Gahran

"GroupMe's biggest advantage is the so-called "normal factor." While companies like Foursquare have to sell users on the benefits of sharing their location, and Twitter took years to convince the world that tweeting is useful for things beyond broadcasting your breakfast choices, group text messaging isn't such foreign concept. Users don't even need smartphones to do it. "For some people who don't really understand Twitter or the concept of a status update, they do understand conversing with their friends or conversing with the families," Martocci says. - Amy Gahran

Great to see African bands getting high-profile US MSM exposure :-) - Amy Gahran

Poynter listed me as one of the 35 top social media influencers. Cool! - Amy Gahran

When PR goes horribly wrong.... - Amy Gahran

"Here's rooting in a nutshell: Your Android smartphone is based on Linux. A big, bad, scary computer operating system known only by people with neck beards. (Only, not really. But mostly.) Anyhoo, Android apps need permission to access certain parts of Linux, and not all apps have this special "root" access. That includes a few basic things, like the camera flash, and the ability to take screen shots. There are a bunch of other apps that need root access for other reasons, too, but the basic premise is the same. So should you root your phone? If you're the type who loves to mess with things, go for it. If you want to squeeze a little more functionality out of your phone, go for it." - Amy Gahran

One of the best guides to making what can be a fraught decision for android users. - Amy Gahran

"the document that will be the reference point for this energy education revolution (hey, sometimes revolutions start out in very boring ways). While a dozen-page document might sound like something you could punch out in a couple of weeks, the idea is to draw feedback from across the various interested groups and create something that can be used as a single reference point. The project, led by Matthew Inman, an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow with the DOE (who is the embodiment of your favorite high school teacher), will use a wiki to draw feedback from interested parties over the next few months, and will hopefully deliver the first version of the document by the summer, 2011" - Amy Gahran

""One of his first jobs [at the DoD] was studying command and control of nuclear weapons—in fact he drafted the operational plan for nuclear war in 1961," Bloomsbury Publisher and Editorial Director Peter Ginna told The Observer in an email. "As he said to me on the phone, when he saw Dr. Strangelove with a colleague, they agreed 'It's a documentary.'" - Amy Gahran

"While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days. That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors. As in zero." - Amy Gahran

Excellent overview by Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media about the pros, cons, and lack of transparency with the FCC's newly adopted Open Internet order. - Amy Gahran

"She may be in the best possible place to do it. With a team of experienced editors, a new program called Groupon Academy, and a vigorous -- but rewarding -- recruiting process, the Web-based coupon company is investing significant time into teaching and training its writers. "Forty percent of Groupon's writers have prior journalism experience." - Amy Gahran

This is so interesting... I bought "A House without Windows" at a neighborhood yard sale when I was about 8. It became one of my favorite books, truly magical. I still have my tattered paperback. But I didn't know anything about the intriguing, mysterious story of the author's life until I was in my 30s. Then this story pops up in my podcasts this morning... - Amy Gahran

Handy instructions for ripping a DVD from a disc on a Mac - Amy Gahran

Amazing movie, set in Russia. Kind of Pulp Fiction-ish w/ several amazing characters and storylines that start out independent and end up intersecting. Worth watching. - Amy Gahran

I've been having problems getting my new DVD player and TV to play nice. This might help. - Amy Gahran

One of the best science fiction stories I've heard in a long time. well worth a listen. - Amy Gahran

Poly people find themselves with a very large struggle.. There is no lack of love or want that keeps them out of certain relationships. But that doesn’t mean that they should stay in these relationships, either. A lot of genuinely loving relationships can end up being disruptive to the people within those partnerships when those other resources are lacking. And let’s not get into how disruptive they can be for the people around them. That is when the logic wins over love. This is the hardest part of being polyamorous; knowing that the love doesn’t go away when the relationship does. The cruel hope; optimism leaves you wishing on your favorite star for the missing resources to show up. Luckily, one of those resources is patience. - Amy Gahran

"Five years ago, Chris Batty, until this week Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing, was looking to fill un-purchased ad space on the site. He wanted to forgo the “horrendous creative” of ad networks that litter sites with penny stocks and would keep his sales teams pushing buttons instead of building relationships. Batty sought something prettier, more intimate, more unique for the company’s growing real estate. She didn’t act on Batty’s inspiration, but he did — bringing images of artists’ work to stand alongside Gawker’s blog posts. "The result was a workaround that gave Gawker full control over its pages’ aesthetics. Born as a stopgap to complement blog posts, Gawker Artists is now taking on an unexpected life of its own — it became a standalone site in 2006 — in large part by thinking of art not merely as a pretty placeholder for text but as something that could survive on its own." - Amy Gahran

Another good example of a journalist's transparency statement. - Amy Gahran