unTimely product launch?

As a long-time Palm Pilot, Palm Treo and Palm TX user who has resisted getting an iPhone, I think the new Time magazine cover was a very rude thing to do the week of Palm's "Pre" launch.

Something ought to be done...

(OK, so I don't know what PreTwitter will look like.)

Confession: Apple products outnumber Palm products in my house two-to-one. But if a Sprint/Pre will work in Floyd, Va., where my AT&T phone doesn't, I might just switch.

The article, meanwhile, by Steven Berlin Johnson, is worth a read... Says he, "I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, 'Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time.'"

Learning Secrecy 101 on college campuses

An investigative report in the The Columbus Dispatch, "Secrecy 101", has gone beyond Ohio's borders to uncover colleges' public records policies concerning college sports. From Alabama to Oregon, the Dispatch reporters found examples of schools censoring player information, often citing a 35-year-old student privacy law whose author says it was intended to protect student grades, not athletic records.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel to the Wall Street Journal, other media are picking up on the story. "Unfortunately, that's the way secrecy laws work," News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy said. "Governments find it convenient to err on the side of confidentiality. So one result is that the $5 billion college sports establishment operates with little public scrutiny."

So far I haven't seen any follow-up in Virginia papers, although the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech are both mentioned in the Columbus, Ohio, paper.

"Across the country, many major-college athletic departments keep their NCAA troubles secret behind a thick veil of black ink or Wite-Out," the Dispatch reporters said. For example, under its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, one university wanted $35,330 to provide documents that were free of charge at more than half the 69 schools who responded to the reporters' record requests.

The Dispatch asked 119 schools for reports of NCAA violations, football players' summer-employment, players' "comp" ticket guests, and flight manifests for team air travel. Fifty schools, including the University of Virginia, either didn't provide information or wanted too much money to comply with the request, the paper said. Virginia Tech received good marks on some, but not all, of the record requests..

Stories:

• The Columbus Dispatch, Secrecy 101 (national schools) and Violations Across the Country, plus a sidebar.
  
• Knoxville News Sentinel: "UT not only school hiding behind FERPA"
  
• Wall Street Journal: FERPA: A Law Grows in Columbus . . . And at a College Town Near You.
  
• AP at First Amendment Center: Report: College sports programs withhold info
• Overview of Freedom of Information on Campus
  

Where do you say the free speech stops?

Newspaper executives, journalists, bloggers and victims of "vitriolic and hateful comments" on newspaper Web sites got together in Knoxville recently for a face-to-face discussion of community voices, public discussions and the pros and cons of anonymity.

The News Sentinel's Jack Lail has a summary, video clips, and more. See:

Getting the mean out of comments: knoxnews.com

In a column about the event, the News Sentinel's editor, Jack McElroy, said the paper's Web site draws 50,000 comments a month: "Some of the comments are intelligent. Many are inane. A few are downright cruel."

The Associated Press Managing Editors and the News Sentinel put together the "Online Credibility Roundtable," supported in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Connecticut news outsourced to Indian staff

Hartford Advocate: News - Outsource This!:
"We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week...

"Vanishing revenues have put the newspaper industry in a death spiral and many papers long ago outsourced other functions (like IT support centers and telemarketing) to India. We devised this issue as an experiment on what outsourced news might look like."

Back when I worked for The Hartford Courant, I remember delivering a bundle of copies of the first issue of The Hartford Advocate to the University of Connecticut for my next-door neighbor, one of the four people who started the paper.

As I recall, Ed, Linda and another couple launched the whole Advocate chain after Ed and the other guy got fed up with "part-time" copydesk jobs at the the now-fading but then-independent Hartford Courant... which eventually was gobbled up by a chain, which was gobbled up by another chain, which then bought the Advocate alt-weeklies.

So much for "alt." But it's good to see someone still has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the same "outsourcing" stunt, but closes with a nice shout-out to former Advocate staffer Paul Bass's New Haven Independent, a Web-only newspaper that has concentrated on what you might call "in-sourcing" his city.

"Mr. Bass said he liked the outsourced issue, but it reminded him, alas, that so much of American journalism these days actually can be done from a desk in Mumbai, and that the threat facing most American newspapers isn’t necessarily outsourcing or even the new frontier of the Internet. It’s dull, stodgy products that have been downsized and bled dry by corporate owners. If what you do can be done, however imperfectly, from Mumbai, he said, then maybe you need to go back to Square One."

To see what I mean by "in-sourcing," which involves having your feet, head and heart in a local community, see this story and this story, including their background links. Nothing there looks "phoned in" -- not from Mumbai; not even from some office across town.

Opening tunnels for data mining

A couple of mines down the road from me in Pulaski County produce iron oxide pigments, not just the sand and gravel that are more common in local "mining" operations.

OK, that's not what the title means by "data mining," but it's something I didn't know before today, and it was easy info to dig up, thanks to a new project called data.gov -- an initiative to make more government databases easily accessible to the public. (In my case, browsing data.gov links led to a database of active mines at USGS. More interested in coal mines? That took following a few more links.)

In an interesting twist on this project, see Apps for America a contest encouraging data-miners and hackers to build applications that USE such public data.

I'll count the first entry as a "proof of concept," even if it's not particularly useful. It turns FBI most-wanted list photographs into a matching game: FBI Fugitive Concentration

Meanwhile, without entering the contest, SunlightLabs has scraped together Unofficial Data.gov RSS feed that it found missing from the data.gov site itself. It also provides the source code of the Python script that creates the feed, and an analysis of the current contents of data.gov.

Transparency in government, participation and opportunities for collaboration are all topics of discussion at the Open Government Dialogue site from the National Academy of Public Administration.

Here's a New York Times blog entry on data.gov:
Throwing Open Uncle Sam’s Data Mine - The Caucus Blog:

"Back on Jan. 21, on President Obama’s first full day in office, he put down a marker on new standards for openness and transparency in government.
His administration has already done a few things, but on Thursday, it took a big step toward its goal and started opening up vast reservoirs of federal data to the online public at a Web site called data.gov.
So far, there are 47 government data bases available there that you can rummage through, with many more to come over the next months and years. The administration hopes the public will use this information to suggest ways to make the government more efficient, responsive and innovative."

It's a beginning. Those aren't the 47 most fascinating collections of government info, unless you're heavily into geology. But it's a start. On the other hand, at least one database-oriented journalist-blogger sums it up as "lame so far."

I'm still browsing both the Open Government Dialogue and data.gov sites. So far the open-the-books attitude reminds me a lot of Carl Malamud's "Reboot .gov" project at YesWeScan.org, and his creations at Public.Resource.org -- as I keep browsing, I'll be watching for connections.

No cigars or green eyeshades in these new media newsrooms

From Harvard's Nieman Foundation and Nieman Journalism Lab, what sites, events or issues were worth Twittering about? More importantly, which of those did readers follow? See 40 most recent links from @niemanlab


I liked the "Inside five newsrooms that H.L. Mencken wouldn't recognize," but I wonder what newsrooms he would recognize today.

After all, Henry didn't even live to see the arrival of the IBM Selectric typewriter in the nation's newsrooms, much less the glowing green CRTs of the later 1970s, the PCs of the '80s or the departure of cigar-smoking as a workplace diversion.

(He died in 1956. His father owned a cigar company. The habit stuck. Amazing what you learn on the Web.)

Perhaps he would have recognized the BLOG. Browse these excerpts from his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

Anyhow, do check out those Nieman tweets, especially Zachary Stewart's multimedia piece on the newsrooms of Talking Points Memo, Gawker, The Daily Telegram and The Spokesman Review. (See Telegram video above.)

Very effective use of short video clips in Stewart's blog, among other things.

Summer reading: Where the jobs are

Radford and Blacksburg didn't make the list, but Forbes magazine came up with some interesting locations in its compilation of Top College Towns For Jobs. Charlottesville is number 14, but no other Virginia city made the top 20. (New Mexico, Colorado and Alabama were the only states with two locations on the list.)

The article's "in depth" slide show is rather shallow, but does report the percentage of workers in university jobs and the area's job growth since 2008, along with the name of a local university. (Durham, N.C., is listed with Duke, but no mention of the lighter blue institution less than 10 miles down the road in Chapel Hill.)

“Across business cycles, college towns are steady and predictable,” John Stapleford, senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told Forbes, although he cautioned that losses in university endowments may soon have a negative effect on the schools' own spending and new-job creation.

When schools DO have money to spend, the effect is magnified, he said, estimating that each new job on-campus creates a need for another half or whole job off-campus to meet the needs of the school, its students, employees and visitors. The Forbes article doesn't discuss any other forces that might be at work on the local economies, such as cuts in state budgets for public universities, or whether last year's employment data could be a one-time-only "bump" in some communities.

While jobs nationwide were down 3.5 percent for the past year, according to Forbes reading of Moody's March to March stats, 62 college towns showed an increase. Forbes' top-20 list -- In Depth: Top College Towns For Jobs -- is presented as a tedious one-at-a-time slide show in countdown order. If you don't have the patience for that, here are the metro areas, starting with No. 1:

1. Provo, Utah
2. Morgantown,W.Va.
3. Durham, N.C.
4. Athens, Ga.
5. Fargo, N.D.
6. Hattiesburg, Miss.
7. Iowa City, Iowa
8. Seattle, Wash.
9. Baton Rouge, La.
10. Las Cruces, N.M.
11. College Station, Texas
12. Charlottesville, Va.
13. Tuscaloosa, Ala.
14. Auburn, Ala.
15. Fort Collins, Colo.
16. Oklahoma City, Okla.
17. Boulder, Colo.
18. Albuquerque, N.M.
19. Jonesboro, Ark.
20. San Jose, Calif.

I wish Forbes also had compiled "job vacancies" data, which might make this a great list of "places to work your way through grad school." I kept looking for a place to click-through to more data. Instead, if you let the slide show keep running, it jumps to a list of "Top 10 Weird Celebrity Family Connections." So much for "news you can use."