Rebooting the News #79

A few minutes on the Arizona shootings and the “both sides do it” attitude about political discourse that seems to be mandatory for the political class and Washington journalists. Some, like Dave Weigel, broke free of that. Others, like Matt Bai, were trapped within it.

As Jay said on Twitter, the rhetorical extremes are a feature of the “he said, she said” style in reporting on public controversy, not a bug that he said/she said corrects for.

Twitter and the court order it received to hand over information about Wikileaks and its supporters. The most impressive part:

far more interesting than the government request for wikileaks related info, is the fact that Twitter has gone out of its way to fight for its users’ privacy. The company went to court, and was successful in asking the judge to unseal the order (something it is not required to do), and then promptly notified its users, so that they could seek to quash the order. Twitter could have quite easily complied with the order, and would have had zero legal liability for doing so. In fact, many other Internet companies routinely hand over their users’ data in response to government requests, and never take steps to either have the orders unsealed, or give their users notice and thus an opportunity to fight the order.

The unbundling of Twitter: loosely-coupled tools for a new blogging ecosystem. Also called the re-invention of RSS. To understand what we’re talking about, see Dave’s sketch of how the parts all work together.

The View from Nowhere has definitely crossed over into the mainstream of journalistic thought. Jay’s ideas about it were featured on NPR last week.

Dave’s ideas about future safe archives found a home in the New York Times Magazine this week. And pretty respectfully, too.

Here’s the show; please comment if you feel so moved. Thanks!

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Jan10.mp3