40 years ago this week... the future as demo

I first read about Doug Engelbart's innovations in collaborative computer technology in mid-1980s books by Ted Nelson and Howard Rheingold, more than 15 years after Engelbart entranced an audience of engineers with a demonstration -- in 1968 -- of devices and ideas that most of the world wouldn't see for decades... the first mouse, hypertext linkages, expanding on-screen outlines, and a bigger idea behind them: That creative use of connected computers could augment human intelligence.

Luckily, that 1968 glimpse of the future was preserved on film and has been available in various Web incarnations. Now, for its 40th anniversary, you can read, watch and listen to more here:

The Innovation Journalism Blog: Come Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos":

"On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his team from SRI International Augmentation Research Center performed 'the mother of all demos' in front of a gaping audience of one thousand computer engineers. The demo let the cat out of the bag in a monumental way; Doug's big idea that the big thing about computers was not automation, but augmenting human intelligence was demonstrated in real life... The audience could do nothing but cheer."

Telling a friend's story

Jeanna Duerscherl of The Roanoke Times steps out from behind her cameras to talk about covering the very personal story of a friend's battle with a rare, incurable cancer. See her blog at Backstory: Photographing my friend:

"Typically, journalists tend to avoid telling stories about people they know on a personal level. It's complicated: Our job is to tell people's stories - not become part of the story. And when we have closer, personal relationships with the people whose stories we're telling, sometimes our stories intertwine. And sometimes it becomes impossible not to become part of their story. That's why we explain our relationships to our readers."

The photojournalist shot video interviews with her roller-derby friend, Brooke Smith, as well as a slideshow of stills that accompany the story. In her blog essay, she discusses the thought process behind doing the story at all:

"I needed to make sure I would be doing it because I believe this story has the power to make people stop for a moment and reflect on their own lives."

To see how well she succeeded, here's the full story, Brooke Smith: Letting go, letting God. The text is by reporter Rob Johnson, who also interviewed Brooke's doctors and friends.

(The designer of the white-text-on-black Web page isn't credited. Personally, I think that layout makes the story hard to read, but the "print this" button switches it to black-on-white.)

Narrative non-fiction textbook online

Gay Talese has come up in classroom conversations more than once this month, but it's just a coincidence that I stumbled on this link to one of his most famous articles, and more.

Best Esquire Magazine Stories - Top Articles in History of Journalism - Esquire: "Five years ago, we named 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,' by Gay Talese, the greatest story Esquire ever published. Here, as we close out our 75th anniversary celebration, are the top seven, with several republished online in their entirety for the first time ever."

Also included, for Media History students writing about Vietnam, John Sack's article "M," and for popular culture fans, Tom Wolfe's profile of stock car racer Junior Johnson. The others are great, too, even if the "Top articles in history of journalism" needs an "in Esquire" modifier.

However, I'm also intrigued by Esquire's 70 greatest sentences, starting with this one:

"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well."
--Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," 1936

Your Newspaper on YouTube

My old neighbor Jack Lail from KnoxNews.com just pointed to this story...

To YouTube or Not To YouTube?, posted at the Newspaper Association of America, whose motto is "Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century."

... He's even quoted in the story, which talks about newspaper Web sites managing this whole "multimedia" business with YouTube's help. Jack also points out this map of YouTube using newspapers.

Also quoted, Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor, news video for washingtonpost.com, calling YouTube "both a curse and a blessing" for newspapers, cursed for competing with newspapers' own video efforts. "But the good side of it is that they've made video workable on the Web," he said.

Blogging does journalism; journalism embraces blogging

Across the Atlantic, Paul Bradshaw at Online Journalism Blog asks,
Are these the biggest moments in journalism-blogging history?

Since most of his list cites bloggers doing journalism, I mentioned a couple cases of journalists doing fine work with blogs, and tipped the hat to the cat in the middle... catalyst Dave Winer, with four nominations about professional journalism coming to accept blogging:

• 1999: Silicon Valley newspaperman Dan Gillmor starts blogging, encouraging tech community to think about journalism and journalism community to think about a new kind of "my audience knows more than I do" journalism.
  http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1999/10/25/danGillmorsWeeBlog.html#5
  


• 1999-2000: Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (now http://poynter.org/romenesko) introduces the newspaper industry gossip blog. (Can't believe I didn't mention this in the original post.)


• 2002: On the LongBets site, blogger, software designer and RSS visionary Dave Winer of http://scripting.com bets the New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz $2,000 that: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.” http://www.longbets.org/2/
  
  
• 2006: Pulitzer Prize for Public Service cites the blog run by the New Orleans Times Picayune after hurricane Katrina stopped the press and the delivery trucks: http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7072
  
  
• 2007: Five years after his LongBet, Winer is declared the winner. http://www.longbets.org/2/ By then, the Times itself had embraced RSS and blogging, converging on the present.
  

A call for 'forensic journalism'

South African born anthropologist John Comaroff uses a phrase I haven't heard very often, "forensic journalism."

He defines it as an anthropology for the public: "the kind of journalism that precisely takes as its obligation the probing of surfaces -- why are we hearing what we are hearing..."

Christopher Lydon interviewed him for his blog/radio podcast, heading the entry This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff

Here's Comaroff on Obama's "audacity of hope."

"I have the audacity to hope that the return to democracy is going to be about hearing. But that, of course, throws a moral obligation on journalism. I think that the press let us down very badly over the Iraq war. I think it gave a free ride to a president who didn’t deserve a free ride, even when there were plenty of critics making very strong arguments, well-backed arguments about the falsity of the claims [justifying the war in Iraq]. They were cowards. They were self-censoring. In a democracy, no one self censors.

"I have an enormous respect for forensic journalism. Forensic journalism is basically anthropology for the public: the kind of journalism that precisely takes as its obligation the probing of surfaces: why are we hearing what we are hearing, why are we being told what we are being told, who is asking the questions on our behalf.

"I think that journalism is the first estate, not the third or fifth or whatever, it is the first estate—the estate of truth. And it can only be the estate of truth to the extent that it represents its population. We know now that politicians don’t–they represent capital, they represent capacity to turn financial assets into votes in congress. They don’t necessarily, when they vote, represent us… But, the press is always there and always ought to be representing us."

Follow the link above for more text transcripts, the full 52 minute audio interview, and a brief video clip.

Telling stories with online depth

This August item from Slate includes a links to PDF and Excel files full of census data... a nice example of one way online journalism can empower readers to dig deeper.

Sorry, Pal, but You're Rich. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine:

"...two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the Republican fiscal clown show of the past eight years. Second, I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich."