Rebooting the News #81

We used to do this show using Blog Talk Radio’s services. That appears to be ending.

The big rebooting-the-news event today is that AOL bought Huffington Post. Equally important, Arianna Huffington becomes editor-in-chief for all of AOL’s editorial properties, including Patch.com. Here’s Arianna’s explanation of the deal.

Jeff Jarvis: “One wonders why big, old media companies didn’t buy Huffington Post. The better question is why they never started their own HuffPos. Only one did: The Guardian.”

Also of interest to both Dave and I: Bill Keller, the New York Times and Wikileaks. It’s good that Keller sees the threat to him and his tribe in prosecuting Assange. But he’s also been focused on separating himself and his newspaper from Assange as an undesirable.

Dave at Scripting.com: “Along comes WikiLeaks to prove that even investigative journalism works differently with the advent of the Internet. But that’s okay, because finally — the mainstream guys, instead of fighting Internet-inspired change, see the opportunity and are embracing it! The Times, Guardian, Spiegel et al, have been working with WikiLeaks to establish a publishing workflow that protects sources and gets readers the information we need. Before judging the Times as wholly ineffective and dishonest, let’s acknowledge that someone down there is doing their job. They may not like Julian Assange, but that’s life. We all have to do things we don’t like. Or you could just sit it out.

But equally big has been the uprising in Egypt and the superior performance of Al Jazeera, along with the continuing debate over how to credit (without overstating) the role of social media in such events.

Dave: The Internet is for revolution. “We must make it so that a country, if it wants to turn off Internet-enabled revolution, must turn off the Internet itself.”

What Jay told Jose Antonio Vargas of the Huffington Post:

“Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: ‘Tunisia’s Twitter revolution?’) and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims (‘It’s not that simple!’) only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted. Revolutionary hype is social change analysis on the cheap. Debunking is techno-realism on the cheap. Neither one tells us much about our world.

“Almost everyone knows it’s not as simple as saying Twitter or Facebook ’cause’ revolutions. Almost everyone knows it’s foolish to discount social media and peer to peer communication as new and potentially disruptive forces. Grown-ups trying to puzzle through what is actually happening will have to leave the sandbox in which the debunkers and their straw man playmates throw headlines at each other.”

Here’s the show; we hope you like it. Please comment if you are so moved, or if you have a solution for us to replace Blog Talk Radio. Thanks.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Feb07.mp3