Rebooting the News #94

Our guest this week: Lisa Williams: blogger, news hacker and CEO of Placeblogger.com

Update on Dave’s Blork system…

The importance of learning programming and doing it yourself, which Lisa is attempting to do.

Appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt, Jay tried to suggest a rebooted-system-of-news direction for the new Huffington-led AOL, which TechCrunch is now a part of. This is what would make the new AOL distinctive as a news company:

1.) Toward news tools, technologies and sharing systems, the default setting is “open.”
2.) An editorial culture emerges at AOL/Huffington Post Media Group that is grounded in where journalism and technology are now, not where they have been.
3.) AOL/Huffington Post Media Group separates two things that have been confounded with one another: journalism that is grounded in reporting, and the View from Nowhere. In fact, you can have one without the other, and that is what Huffington and company should do: jettison the View from Nowhere, insist on fact-based reporting.

Last week, Bill Keller went full curmudgeon on us–or, troll, take your pick–and Nick Bilton of the Times answered him.

New association of local news sites springs up: authentically local:

Local doesn’t scale. Local isn’t McDonald’s, even if the McDonald’s is right down the street. Local doesn’t send profits back to a home office somewhere else. Local is something that’s part of what makes where you are unique. As unique and flawed and loveable as your own kids. Something is authentically local if it’s the first thing you’d want an old friend, visiting from the other side of the world, to see. It’s authentically local if its disappearance could potentially break your heart.

Local is suddenly the newest, hippest, most lucrative frontier. The local advertising market alone is estimated to be $100 billion a year. Companies like AOL, Google, Apple and Groupon all want a piece of the action. Some of the devices they sell you are even collecting data about everywhere you go – all to help their local campaigns.

Dave: I just saw this come across my feed from Berkeleyside, an authentically local blog: Markos Moulitsas says… I live in Berkeley “because it makes Bill O’Reilly cry.” You’re not going to get that from Patch.

So here’s the program: we hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11May23.mp3