Early online-newspaper nostalgia

• Niemanlab.org on: The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early Web’s most innovative newspapers
• CJR.org on: The San Jose Mercury, The Newspaper That Almost Seized the Future

Prodigy, mentioned in one or both of those recent articles, was the first graphical online service I used, c.1988. (The Macintosh version of what became AOL may have been earlier, but I was PC until ’88.) Early rollout served Hartford, Atlanta and San Francisco — perhaps the only time those cities have been seen as having something in common.

Designed for e-commerce over a closed network at under $10/month, it started before the Internet was open to commercial use. Prodigy restricted bulletin board discussion topics, but did have general news sections. It began to do newspaper sites under contract — just before a more flexible America OnLine and a more open Web ate its lunch.

I interviewed beta users and experts for a review/article about Prodigy in ’88 or ’89 for PCWeek, which paid me well but didn’t print it; a new editor said it was because the publication’s focus was now business apps, not “consumer” services, and despite the involvement of major companies, Prodigy was aimed at the home-computer market. (It started as “Trintex” — the three being Sears, IBM and CBS. The network dropped out before the service went online.)

So I set aside my research on networks and hypertext, and switched to writing about boats — until the Web happened and I sailed off into a Ph.D. program… paying the bills with a part-time job at another online news pioneer, The News & Observer’s NandO.net in Raleigh, and (slowly) writing my dissertation about another, http://wral-tv.com, across town.

Note: This has been updated since the original post. I’m was reading the Web that day on a Nook-like Pandigital tablet, lowcost device whose software makes it easier to post a rough draft to WordPress quickly than to bookmark. Some of the roughness may still be here.

For the record, the Pandigital has an older Android WordPress app, Tweetcaster Pro with  ReadItLater, but poor keyboard and no direct hook to Delicious.com (http://delicious.com/bstepno).

Until I get something better, I can’t help thinking how GREAT this would have seemed in 1988.

Google offers data-analysis tools, liposuction for stats

Uses: Inspiration from washing machines, Rebecca Black

GoogleLabs has a new data-mining tool,  Correlate, which allows folks with data (got data?) to use Google’s algorithms to dig through numbers and visualize meaning. Business folks will love to compare brands; political analysts will look for public-opinion trends; journalists should even more other uses. I hope they don’t all try to figure out the correlation between liposuction and property values.

Making correlations is up to you...

To teach you what this might be good for, Google Labs offers several educational tools: a Comic Book, a FAQ file, a Tutorial and a research Whitepaper (pdf).

Here’s the main GoogleBlog article on Correlate:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/mining-patterns-in-search-data-with.html

If you don’t have data of your own, Google already has had tools out there for analyzing public datasets, as discussed in this GoogleBlog article last year: Statistics for a Changing World.

Here’s the site itself: Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool, and it’s support site.

Here are the Google datamine’s top 20 database topics:

1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

11. Last names 12. Poverty 13. Oil price 14. Minimum wage 15. Consumer price index, inflation 16. Mortality 17. Cost of living 18. Election results 19. First names 20. Accidents, traffic violations

Some of the analysis-visualization is based on Trendalyzer, which Google acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, whose Hans Rosling has done an amazing job demonstrating how well-visualized data — and his dynamic lecture style — can increase  knowledge and understanding, from the poverty line to the air line via the wash line.

Maybe a combination of Google’s sharing tools for analysis and great examples like his will inspire journalists and journalism students. First, I wonder if his BBC feature, The Joy of Stats will convince more journalism students to take statistics courses…

Back to Google:
So what are people searching for? Cupcakes, cats, government shutdown, health care, Rebecca Black, or maybe Vanessa Fox…?

Vanessa Fox at SearchEngineLand has insights into all of these tools, including Correlate. See her take on Rebecca, cats, cupcakes, March Madness and more in this 5-minute video: What is it in our lives that we care about most?   Vanessa Fox video from the Ignite Conference

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Other Google News:

I was less pleased — quite disappointed actually — when Google announced it is discontinuing its historical newspaper project. I wrote about it over at the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog: Google Unplugs Newspaper Scanning Project

New tools and new rules

The last week of the semester is a great time for an inspirational speech. Rather than give one myself, I’ve found one in text and video for my “basic newswriting” students, whose semester experiences have ranged from AP Stylebook drills to reading about tornado damage in their own backyard.

During our Communication Week, they heard local reporters talk about their lives — from Beth Macy covering a cholera epidemic in Haiti and Ralph Berrier interviewing pioneers of bluegrass music, to  recent grad Justin Ward launching his career into regional TV news.

Maybe they don’t need another inspirational speech. But we’ve heard enough doom-and-gloom about the newspaper business (and I do teach a newspaper style of writing). Perhaps this will help.

Here… Listen to Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the Knight Foundation, speaking at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Nebraska, whose new dean came from Knight, which is using a newspaper-generated bankroll to fund innovative journalism projects. His real message starts about a dozen paragraphs into the speech…

All you need to do is plug into the stream and you see journalism and mass communication developments coming faster and more forcefully than ever. This is the dawn of a new age in communication, the digital age, and it is even richer with invention than the dawn of the industrial age.

New tools are being invented at a mind-boggling pace. Instead of the telegraph, the telephone and the light bulb, we’re talking about microchips, laptops, smart phones, tablets. We’re talking about companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter: from digital zero to number one in the market, nearly overnight.

As the legendary journalist Hodding Carter III once said, “This is the most exciting time ever to be a journalist – if you are not in search of the past.” The same I would say applies to being any kind of communicator – advertising, public relations, you name it.

That’s what’s exciting. The students of today actually are going to create the journalism and mass communication of tomorrow….

His “New tools create new rules” discussion, alluded to in my headline, comes later. Students should read the whole speech to find out just what he means.

Here’s the full text
and an MP4 video

Happy 30th anniversary to my first computer

The Osborne I and its external monitor; photo probably from 1984. Could I have been singing its second-birthday song?

Harry McCracken, who suffered through being my editor at three different magazines, has written a fascinating history of one of the first “boom, then bust” computer companies: The one I bought my first computer from. In fact, its going bust helped get me into the computer business.

See: Osborne! at Harry’s blog, Technologizer.

I added comments to the first page of the article, but I was (ironically) writing on a screen about half the size of my old Osborne — a Droid — and it left out all the paragraph breaks, making a rather hard-to-read essay. So here’s a copy. I was also using the Droid’s “speech to text” feature, so I’ll correct at least some of the typos here. (Ironically, after posting this version, I discovered I could go back and edit the blog comment at Technologizer, so I went back and inserted some paragraph breaks.)

I was one of about 40 faculty members and grad students who bought Osborne I computers at Wesleyan University in 1982 after the university put some faculty “ideal personal computer specs” out to bid. The case, keyboard and small screen looked a lot like a portable terminal people had been using at the Hartford Courant when I was a reporter there in the late 1970s to early ’80s. I think it had a cassette tape drive built in and was compatible with the newspaper’s ATEX system. Teleram? (After posting this to Harry’s page via the Droid, I searched for Teleram. Here’s a picture and a detailed story. )

At Wesleyan the software bundle was the primary selling point for the Osborne. I recall an Apple ][, if you added to floppy drives and all of that software, would have come in at easily double the price we paid for the Osborne I with dBaseII, SuperCalc, WordStar, mBasic, cBasic , the Original Adventure game MyChess and I forget what all else.

In December 1982 (or was it ’81?) when we took delivery, the bundle also included an external monitor which would double the 52 columns screen making 104 columns (great for spreadsheets), double density disk drives and a 300 baud modem… or maybe the modem was extra. I do remember that the computer center hacked together cables we could use to plug an Osborne directly into the DEC-20 mainframe as a terminal and do file transfers.

Doing document conversion between our mainframe editor and WordStar was another thing. I became a big fan of ASCII and the print-formatting program on the DEC system. I also went to work for the university A/V wizard, Bob White, who physically hacked the insides of 24-inch classroom TV monitors to work with an Osborne so that a professor could show spreadsheets in class. I recall his trick involved cutting some sheet metal and wrapping a cylinder around the back end of the picture tube. (Kids, don’t try this at home! Ymmv.)

I became editor of the Wesleyan Osborne Group newsletter, a “support system” for campus users when the company went bankrupt, and I shared the Osborne with other students to get a discount on a 1983 summer computer course with the amazing Russ Walter of “Secret Guide to Computers” fame… starting me on the way to a second master’s and my 1986-88 hypertext research.

Russ’s courses and the newsletter plus some other how to things I had written for the Wes computer center got me my first job in the computer industry 1984 at MultiMate–also due for a 30th anniv soon) ultimately leading to working for Harry McCracken at IDG. So it’s all thanks to Adam Osborne, as I said in my post at Technologizer.

One thing I didn’t get to mention was that when I finally set to work on my Ph.D., my first faculty adviser at UNC Chapel Hill was a research wizard named Frank Biocca, whose credentials in the world of computer technology began a dozen years earlier, when he worked in P.R. or advertising for Osborne Computers.

Why, Baby, Why? Shaky link to history at USAToday.com

Don’t let your robot-editor hurt your credibility

End of summer ‘lull’ opens opportunities – USATODAY.com.

The “End of summer…” in that headline link might hint that I’m not keeping up with the news. But I just stumbled on USA Today founder Al Neuharth’s column about newspaper history anniversaries while searching for something else and decided to add it to my media-history bookmark collection.

In the process, I noticed a forgotten man — the gent on the right.

I had forgotten him myself, but USAToday.com had remembered him with a link — very badly.

Despite what USA Today might have led you to believe, the man in question was never a country singer married to Tammy Wynette, and did not have hits like “Why, Baby, Why?” and “He Just Stopped Lovin’ Her Today.” He was the first  publisher of The New York Times.

When I think of  the founders of The New York Times, I think of Adolph S. Ochs, the one-time-Tennessean who set its “All the news that’s fit to print” agenda when he bought the struggling paper in 1896, and of Henry Raymond, a former star reporter for Horace Greeley‘s Tribune who was the first editor of the Times in 1851.

But until I saw Neuharth’s column, I had forgotten that Raymond had a partner named George Jones, a former banker turned publisher, who carried on long after Raymond’s death. I pulled down my copy of Meyer Berger’s history of the Times to refresh my memory, and popped over to Wikipedia for a picture.

It was nice of former USA Today publisher Neuharth to remember Mr. Jones, and I’m sure he wasn’t the one who placed that hyperlink to the wrong George Jones.

In fact, I don’t think any human did. My guess is that the link was added by something like a Perl or Python computer script in the USAToday.com content management system, programmed to match up a database list of “famous people” archive pages with names in the news. Result: Wrong George. The fact that the mistaken link has been there for six months doesn’t give me great feelings about the paper’s quality control.

My advice to online news publishers:

• Useful hyperlinks are part of any online story.
• Don’t leave them to idiots.
• Computer programs are idiots, unless you spend IBM-style Jeopardy-beating millions of dollars on them.
• But don’t. It would be better to spend the millions on a new generation of young fact-checkers and editors. You might start the careers of some future Henry Raymonds… or Al Neuharths.

Just in case you think that single computer-generated off-base hyperlink is the only problem, here are the “You might also be interested in…” headlines USAToday.com added to the end of that newspaper-history story for me:

• College hookups aren’t as common as people think (USATODAY.com in News)
• Obama to propose five-year spending freeze (USATODAY.com in The Oval)
• Lake Superior’s great mystery (USATODAY.com in News)
• Obama to Gibbs on last day: Here’s your tie back (USATODAY.com in The Oval)

Actually, I’d rather read about George Jones. Either one of them.

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Sidebar: Speaking of Horace Greeley… I’ve been running into him a lot recently.

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Tim Berners-Lee’s “20 years ago this month” article for the December issue of Scientific American is a great issue-oriented summary of Web history  — and a plea for online entrepreneurs to adopt policies of openness rather than creating “closed worlds.”

An excerpt:

“The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone ‘apps’ rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it.

“It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.”

Kudos : I was able to copy, paste and share that quote here thanks to the open Web standards begun by Sir Tim and used by Scientific American, WordPress and my Android phone–with the assistance of a WordPress Android app.

Page formatting at Scientific American’s site isn’t entirely small-screen mobile-friendly, but the magazine  clearly “gets” Berners-Lee’s belief in two-way hypertext linkage.

So what’s ‘a newspaper’?

Update: Remembering when an attempt to give away New York Times failed. See end.

Does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?

That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”

So today I “founded” two newspapers:

Well, maybe I just founded one and “found” the other, or just found both. I can’t tell whether Paper.li required any action by me — or anyone with a Twitter account.

In both cases, the paper.li/feedname site (http://paper.li/bobstep or paper.li/aejmc) includes links to items from feeds the person or organization by that name subscribes to. It doesn’t mean the person even read any of those items.

A sidebar shows selections from the person or organization’s own feed, calling their author “curator” of the paper.li page.

Background: AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which — like a newspaper — is broken down into sections. One section is the Newspaper Division, for which I keep a Web page and co-author a blog. Coincidentally, our division is pondering whether its name “Newspaper” is still relevant in this day and Web-age.

Apologies  if anyone reading the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog came over here for more details and got only a sense of deja vu. Originally, that post didn’t have any pictures, this one did, and I was going to say more here, but getting the images to show up in two different WordPress systems was too much distraction. (Worth 1,000 words, but also many minutes.)

Update (as promised above): I must add one more thing, inspired by wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.

While I understand the technology and can find the list of 199, I wonder whether the keepers of the Times brand name will understand… and whether anyone stumbling on that page will realize that the stories might not have been written by anyone at the Times. Actually, most of the feeds twitter.com/nytimes subscribes to look like feeds from Times reporters, departments or associates, but their Tweets could be links to non-Times sources. In fact, while I’m typing this latest update the lead item on paper.li/nytimes is actually a story from The Guardian about that other Times in London.

When it comes to use of the “New York Times” name, I wonder if the institution has developed a sense of humor (or modesty) in the past 24 years?

That’s because when I saw that “New York Times Daily” nameplate, I flashed back to 1986 in computer land. That was when the Infocom software/game company, publishers of Zork! (and my favorite, “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”) were convinced by NY Times lawyers to change the name of their little 8 1/2 by 11 user-group newsletter, The New Zork Times, because someone thought a Zork was too much like a York, or something.

The Cambridge company’s response was a name-the-newsletter contest, with the winner to get a free subscription to The New York Times.

In the end, the winner wanted an Infocom game instead, and the headline read “NY Times Can’t Be GIVEN Away.” (Holy cow, it’s still around at an NZT archive.)

Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid

It was a tough decision, but having an excuse to write that headline made it all worthwhile.

My first “smartphone” was a Handspring Treo 180, almost 10 years ago. When I moved to Knoxville a few years later, the lack of T-Mobile service disabled most of the smartness, so I regressed to a Palm TX paired to a Cingular Razr Bluetooth phone, a semi-smart setup.

Last weekend, I wrestled the “iPhone vs. Droid” decision to a conclusion. With a Droid, I get Floyd: Verizon covers the neighboring county, AT&T doesn’t, and Floyd has some of my favorite folks and music stops on the crooked road. (I made the decision despite this horrible Droid website.)

Now I just have to convince my friend Clyde that I ordered the new smartphone (smart new phone?) before reading his blog saying that news folks should get smartphone-savvy right away. “Honest, Clyde, I got the Droid because of Floyd” sounds like one of those 1940s novelty songs.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad next month.

Anyhow, I’ll point AEJMC Newspaper readers to Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri for a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”…  The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.

Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast  mobile devices would  replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.

If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.

By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”

He doesn’t mention one  crossover: Twitter (or Facebook status updates), whether Twitter’s  140-character limit is really enough for a “nugget of news” or not. Newspapers, broadcasters and online-only newsies are already tweeting away to anyone with a smartphone Twitter app, including Clyde’s own blog. So obvious it went without saying, I guess.

(I’m @bobstep on Twitter.)

(Note: If anyone from Verizon offers me a “referrer” bonus check for the slogan “Get Floyd with a Droid,” I’ll take it.)

Future of the book, pad, tablet, literature etc.

Wired has  Steven Levy and a baker’s dozen authors, publishers and spirit-channels (how else to include McLuhan?) reacting to the Apple  iPad’s arrival this month: “How the tablet will change the world.”

Over at FutureOfTheBook.org, Bob Stein adds to what he had to say in Wired, under the heading “Follow the gamers.”  See this for background on Bob.

I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.

See if:book: follow the gamers — my piece in the april Wired.

I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.

Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“  would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.

The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Columbians

Under the heading The Future Journalist: Thoughts from Two Generations, Columbia Journalism School professor Sree Sreenivasan and student Vadim Lavrusik have recorded and posted a conversation at the Mashable group blog. I’m hoping it will reassure my students that their “older generation” journalism faculty are still pointing them toward useful things.

Sree is hardly an “older generation” journalist, if you think that means an ink-stained wretch in a green eyeshade and garters to keep his cuffs clean. I wonder if he ever had his byline set in hot type? In any case, he knows what he’s talking about.

Now Columbia’s dean of students, Sree has been on top of new media developments for the past 10 years, while Vadim has impressive credentials as an adopter of new social media tools — and both have self-promotional skills that it may take to get ahead in 21st century professional/citizen (and amateur/citizen) journalism.

Both also seem to agree on a big paragraph headed “The Fundamentals Are Critical”:

Despite the importance of technology, it’s the fundamentals of journalism that are still critical. The fundamentals include: great reporting and writing, journalistic ethics, specialization by topic or beat, investigative skills, news judgment. Also invaluable, critical thinking and critical reading…

I’ll stop quoting there and let you go read the whole page, watch the video, browse through the comments and add your own. Alas, my snowbound home computer won’t play the video, so I’ll save my own comments for a better connection.

I’m assuming their post will get a discussion growing, unless the Mashable readers with journalism interests are already worn out. Vadim’s essay on 8 Must-Have Traits for Tomorrow’s Journalist generated more than 70 comments at Mashable last month.