BuzzMachine

It’s just pizza
: The single cushiest assignment I ever got in my allgeged journalism career was finding America’s best pizza for People magazine. I traveled coast-to-coast and snarfed and snarfed and finally put the crown on Gino’s East in Chicago.

So tonight, for old time’s sake, I decided to have Gino’s again. I walked many blocks to Gino’s only to find some heretic serving thin-crust pizza there. Gino’s moved. So I walk well more than a mile to the new Gino’s only to find an hour-long line. Wait and hour and then it takes another 45 minutes to get the pizza.

Damn, it’s just pizza.

I walked back and came upon Uno’s, which I never liked as much. But I sat at the bar and waited a full frigging hour to get a pizza with enough cheese to employ a cardiac unit for a year.

It’s just pizza.

I regret not naming New York’s John’s No. 1.

Fisking
: David Pryce-Jones

Access is down… WBL… Grrrrr.

What they call interactivity
: I’m now watching a panel on what they call hereabouts interactivity.

It’s not what I call interactivity.

They think it’s about creating pages with buttons for people to push. Flash! Wow! They look at this medium as the curator of a kids’ museum looks at an exhibit: Let’s give them buttons to push; let’s make things light up; that’ll make them happy; that’ll involve them. The moderator of the panel calls it “story-telling.” She calls it a means for the audience to “learn in a hands-on way.” She calls it “news experience.” They show us maps that click and let you do a simulation to fix the traffic problem in Seattle.

Pardon me, but that’s news as masturbation: the reader goes off in a corner and plays with himself.

I don’t call that interactivity.

Interactivity is people interacting with people.

In this new medium that the audience owns, it’s about — pardon me for repeating myself — the people finally having a voice. It’s about us in big media listening.

News is a conversation.

I’m debating whether to say all this and make an ass of myself or just sit here and grumble to you.

Grrrrrrr.

: The MSNBC person showed off big Flash things she called “interactives.” A new noun, to me.

She said, “We directly challenge the audiencde to think about an issue.”

Man, that’s condescending!

: The PBS person, to her credit, said that what’s missing is real two-way interactivity. Yea!

She showed off her interactives on — cliche alert — fair-trade coffee, asylum, and gentrification.

: What turns these people on is Sim news. It’s not real news. It’s simulated for your safety.

: This is horse-to-water journalism. They want to get you to drink. But what if we don’t want to?

Tribune on blogs
: My colleage Denise Polverine, editor of Cleveland.com, asked the jackpot question of the Jack Fuller session at Online News. I’m proud to say that she first plugged our hyperlocal blogging efforts and then she asked Fuller about Tribune journalists blogging.

Hems begats haws.

“There are a number of issues,” Fuller said. “If you have somebody whose name is part of your newspaper and they blog, unedited, there is a potential quality-control problem.” He immediately acknowledged that it’s really no different from a correspondent talking on TV — unedited. If you have a fool reporter, there’s a “quality-control problem.”

He says there is another issue: economic — “how the income gets cut up.” Well, if a reporter blogs as part of his or her job, that’s not an issue. If it’s outside, then the reporter will surely not make any money to cut up.

But then he acknowledged: “There is everything right about people at the paper being in more continuous engagement with the audience.”

Damn right.

: I just saw that Mary Hodder blogged this on my comments before I could. She says:

I have to say, I don’t think he gets it. Blogs are about trying to find as much truth as possible, to be fair and accurate, to get as close to meaningful information as possible, but they are not impartial, and we, the audience are desperate to know what people think, especially those that have developed expertise in a particular area, with access and time (because it’s their job..) to things we don’t have time for, to hear their comments and to be able to comment back. We, the audience, understand that blogs are partially journalism, but also opinion, constantly iterated, and the usefulness is in this more temporal aspect. ….

Damn right.

News is a conversation.

Let’s say that again and etch it in brass:

News is a conversation.

Jack Fuller at ONA
: Jack Fuller of Tribune company is giving his keynote. He admits that the company has spent $600 million onlline — net. Yow. Entertainment Weely went through $200 million before it broke even but it’s now a $300 million-a-year business. Compare and contrast.

However, they did make 2.75 billion on AOL stock. “Net-net, we’re real happy how it all turned out.”

: He admits that, at first, “I looked at the new medium and saw the old one. I saw a newspaper — online.” But, of course, that has changed.

: “It’s easier to destroy value than to create it with this new medium,” he says.

The frictionless transfer of information “creates perfect markets,” he says. “… and as any soybean farmer will tell you, you don’t want to be in a perfect market.”

Yes, that is a moral to this story: News is a commodity.

So we need to ask (me talking, not Jack) whether news is really our business. See this alternative from commenter Hugh MacLeod (which I’ll repeat yet again on my panel tomorrow):

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as “things”, rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like [Joi being a central weblogger] brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won’t (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

(more…)

Blog or live?
: Not sure how I’ll blog the Online News conference. We shall see…. This is old home week for many; I’m a hermit and never go to conferences so it’s less so for me, though I still ran into lots of people I know, which isn’t hard in this business…. Right now, I’m sitting next to Mary Hodder from UC Berkeley…. Over there is Shiela Lennon from ProJo…. Saw Vin Crosbie….

Etch-a-post
: A cool Etch-a-Sketch online thanks to Elf.