Journalism In Ferguson or Just One Big Selfie?

The movie camera has always been the boogeyman of authority and unrest. In Vietnam, color movie cameras were used-the film was shot, shipped, processed and telecined for broadcast on nightly news programs. This first television war with action shot by photojournalists in the field, specifically in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, was a strong influence on the American public’s perspective of the conflict. When cable TV in the home was popularized in the 1980’s, video broadcast technology was ready with 24-hour news channels that relentlessly covered conflict around the globe via satellite. This CNN effect became the new normal for how we expect to watch war, conflict and unrest.

Technology of the new century has given us in miniature a movie camera and a world wide publishing network not of broadcast journalists, but of individuals. This movie platform is so quick it’s viral. Anyone with modest means can live stream (broadcast) what is happening in front of them to the rest of the world. It sounds earth shattering and it very much is. Beginning in 2010 during the Arab Spring we saw the impact of this through the lens of people closest to the conflict. But now I feel a new twist to citizen journalism since the Arab Spring that we may have seen take shape during the Occupy Movement of 2011. The camera has turned back to look at us. This selfie generation is really only a few years old and it’s network effect is seen worldwide. If broadcast photojournalism was selfless, is internet journalism the news selfie?

Monday night (8/18/2014) I watched a two live streams from Ferguson by KARG Argus Radio and the other by Tim Pool (@Timcast) of Vice News. Most of what I remember from KARG’s “I am Mike Brown Live from Ferguson, MO” was two guys driving around for hours trying to get directions on how to get to the designated media area. Perhaps I missed the important parts that took place outside the car. The latter from @Timcast was representative of what I believe is selfie journalism. This is not a direct critique of Tim and his work, but more a reflection on what I’m seeing as the journalist becomes the subject of the story. It’s not a brand new thing - Geraldo Rivera’s work from the 1970’s is an example - but the trend appears to be amplified by the immediacy of the platform.

If the tendency in each of us is to turn the camera inward to capture the mundane and important events of our lives, if that’s now in our DNA, then it stands to reason that both professional and citizen journalists are adopting this reporting style. Like getting a phone call from a friend on vacation who wants to tell you about the amusement park ride she just enjoyed, the movie camera is now just a subset of the communication device which conveys the storytelling of the person who is there. Camera’s are no longer the important cold lens of truth that they once were.

Since Monday, some journalists have been arrested and the police in Ferguson have suggested that they are part of the problem because protesters would tend to “act out” for the camera. If journalists seem eager to insert themselves and become part of the story, does this change the narrative of what’s happening on the ground? Would a focus on editorial, aggregating footage from cameras of the subjects of the story be a better alternative? What is the value and role of the journalist?

Here are some time coded samples with notes from @Timcast for you to consider:

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h30m Good place to start @Timcast on camera

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h40m Shots fired and police fire teargas

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h46m Shots are fired over the heads of the journalists

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h48m22s Journalists are down on the ground

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h52m @Timcast back on camera, talks about what just happened

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=2h54m40s He finally interviews someone! This woman lives in the area of the riots and talks about what has been happening between residents and the police. I think this was the most important part of the video and we get a valuable perspective.

http://youtu.be/CmqHVKNZkhM?t=3h30m Later @Timcast has an infamous run-in with the police about press credentials. It looks like a tense situation and seems that the cops wanted media out of the line of fire.

The State of The WordPress Ten Years After

All of the sites I maintain run on WordPress, except one. That's a legacy site that I hope can eventualy be moved to the WordPress platform in the near future. Why? Because WordPress can handle the complexities of media embedding and sharing without requiring a PhD in computer science on the part of the webmaster. The reason for this is that the development community around WordPress is a vibrant and active one producing for example, 336 themes and 6,758 feature plugins in just the last year that provide new features to the websites that run WordPress- or 18.9% of the entire web. Whether you know it or not, you probably frequent several websites built on WordPress. After ten years of development as a simple blogging platform, almost 70% of websites run WordPress purely as a CMS, 20% as a hybrid blog/CMS, 6% purely as a blog and a new 7% as an app platform. After ten years, WordPress has changed not only the look of blogs, but of the entire web.

Check out this video by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, for in depth discussion of the statistics above and the future of the platform, as discussed below:

http://wordpress.tv/2013/07/27/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-word-2013/

This is all great, but the "web" now and in the future is all about mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, social sharing and rich media streaming to these devices. WordPress must address this complexity to thrive and I'm happy to say it looks like that's exactly what's happening. As a personal sidenote, the majority of my frustrations as a WordPress user have been around the wp-admin panel (or "Dashboard") and arcane methods of embedding, formatting and presenting media, such as pictures, audio and especially video. Social sharing buttons can be a special place in hell all their own as new services pop up that you may want to link to from your blog. This blog right here- imperfect as it is- is a bit of a sandbox for me to try out new themes and plugins that solve some of these frustrations.

So what's coming in WordPress that will define it's second decade? First, in 3.6 code name "Oscar" (for jazz pianist great Oscar Peterson- got to love Mullenweg's penchant for jazz-based code names as a homage to his saxophone playing youth), a focus on the 2013 theme formatting well on all devices, media streamlining with native audio embedding and smart video handling using simple content URL's rather than complex embed codes, and much needed changes to the wp-admin UI. These are welcome changes to the point release that I'm looking forward to. Very rarely can I create a post in WordPress right now without switching out from the "Visual" WYSIWYG editor to the "Text" page source code editor and playing around with some embed codes and basic HTML formatting. But there's more under that hood in how WordPress will address development moving forward.

As I understand it, WordPress' new software/feature model will now support parallel release development and will follow a layered stack. The "core" will be the foundation of the stack along with layers for other services, plugin features and presentation layers. As a much less monolithic approach to development, this allows teams to form around these layers and submit updates to the project when ready. That to me is the definition of platform development, having seen such models work successfully on past open source kernel projects I've been a part of. Based on comments during the Q & A section of the talk, I gathered that this new cycle of development could possibly cause headaches for those who support the installed base for their clients. Change is always difficult initially, but the needs of the installed base will always be heard. Perhaps WordPress ends up with an Ubuntu-like LTS model with a stable release maintained for x number of years for enterprise customers?

While listening to Mullenweg's presentation, it struck me how much thought was put into realigning WordPress as a platform and adopting a nimble and distributed development approach. The first ten years was birth, early development and feature growth through add-on plugins and themes. The next ten years will see a faster integration of new features, bug fixes and security updates. For the WordPress end user the Google Chrome model was referenced: WordPress would automatically update with the latest fixes and enhancements without direct user intervention, ensuring that all installations were running the latest/greatest codebase. This is how all our modern operating systems and most apps behave today so it's great to see that idea ported to WordPress.

This brings me to my last thought, what do I think is in store for WordPress in the future? These are my predictions going into the next ten years, so let's seen if any of this speculation turns out to be fact. One theme Mullenweg has mentioned often (and again in this presentation) is that WordPress can be the antidote to the walled garden of the web, especially those places where user agreements allow those companies rights to your content. So as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. change your rights and privacy continually, your site's content is owned by you and I do believe WordPress will evolve to a richer feature set that provides the usefulness of a social network with a distributed and individually owned content model. Just take a look at Pressgram to see an exciting example!

Then there's the app. I was surprised but not shocked at the newly reported growth of the platform supporting standalone apps. In the presentation there was a demonstration of a kiosk built on the CMS. That could be a "killer app" for WordPress. The software was already designed for the cloud day one, based on open source web standards and now it could have the potential as a software stack running on hardware. Think of this app as a complete CMS framework with connectivity built in, but also on standalone devices including mobile and embedded. Would we eventually see the WordPress environment branch out into something like a Facebook Home or Chrome OS?

What other developments could we see on the horizon for WordPress? Although a seemingly fiercely independent company, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) could see interest in outside partnerships, investment and even attempts at acquisition during it's next decade. In the competitive environment of behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, I could see WordPress providing the foundation for a mainstream social network or CMS strategy as a competitive edge for a company with deep pockets of cash. Apple has come and gone with iWeb, Microsoft could make it's first foray into open source without negatively impacting it's core, proprietary products, Google's culture could mix well with WordPress folks although they already have their own blogging platform and Yahoo is just buying stuff (although they just recently bought Tumblr)... This is just far-fetched speculation and I have no insider information, but it's interesting to consider that as WordPress platforms grow to power 20% of the web, it's not hard to wonder what the market will make of this asset in the future.

Most important, I look forward to working with all the new features to come in WordPress in the coming years. Great software, developers, content creators and communities make WordPress one of the very best things of the web.

Douglas Engelbart and The Future, Now

[caption id="attachment_821" align="alignleft" width="300"] © Mike Gebhardt / drnormal, All Rights Reserved[/caption]

The Future (intentionally capitalized) is important. It's as important to us as food, water and shelter and is made from our dreams and desires to create a prosperous life for ourselves. It exists in the earliest cave art, religion, science, literature, education- because we visualize and desire to bend the inevitable Time, to our own will. It's the heart of creativity and who we are and we should pay reverence to it as amazing and somewhat mystical because it transcends needs of The Now, pointing a compass to a destination- a collective idea- traveled by like minded people. The Future is both large and complex, and small and personal.

Douglas Engelbart was a special man who actually lived in The Future. Not just in his dreams- Engelbart manufactured The Future for himself and for all of us. I can trivialize his biography simply as "inventor of the mouse" or you can read more about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart  I think his memory is best served if you watch and listen to a man who invented The Future right here, on this blog, in these embededd videos, on this Internet. All of this existed in 1968, just not in that collective Now.

I'm concerned about The Future. Mainly because a person who thinks about these things everyday has pointed out that The Now seems to taking over more thought time in our consciousnesses which is confusing to me, since we have every bit of information, technology, and tool at our disposal to create The Future on a grand scale. I never imagined Instagramming my lunch to post on Facebook when I was a kid watching Star Trek on rerun television. I imagined we'd cure disease, eliminate poverty, bigotry and war, double our lifespans, and travel the stars exploring strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. I think we can still do these things and they're easier than we think. What we need is a collective dream- a grand challenge much like "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth". We haven't even done that in over 40 years!

I think we should tackle the problem of Time. We're slaves to this fundamental thing that we still don't understand well. Matter on the other hand, is becoming very clear to us- how it exists, where it exists- but we need a detailed understanding of Time if we are to grow into The Future next. We have it inside us. We can do it individually by starting small, making every thought have a future component to it, but we must begin to dream again of The Future here in The Now.







 

Thank You, Igal Koshevoy

Thank you, Igal Koshevoy for the help and all you did for Portland. I will greatly miss your presence.



 

 

 

 

A last minute, short message letting me know a meeting wouldn't be happening Tuesday night alerted me to something wrong. Very wrong. A few vague tweets later I could feel that something bad had happened in the tech community and a quick follow-up message "by now you probably just saw the announcement…" was numbing. Damn!

The world continues to feel senseless to me. I'm asking why someone who made this a much better place had to leave us now? There's no answer. All I have are memories of how he presented himself and how much he helped.

I can't remember exactly when I first met Igal Koshevoy, but I'm sure it was at Cubespace. My first recollection of him was picking up some bags of production gear as I was packing up an event there. I shot him a glance, like saying: "umm, where're you going with my bags??" Wearing one of the heavy backpacks, he also grabbed as much as he could carry in each arm unbalanced and asked if my car was parked out front. I recall he opted to take the stairs and I worried that he was going to throw out his back or worse, fall down the stairs. He didn't. I think this was a bit of a guy thing, probably part of his past as an Eagle Scout. I could relate to that.

Most often he would swoop in unannounced to see what he could do to help pack in or out- kind of like a conference ninja- I didn't ask, he just quietly appeared with a smile. He had other responsibilities, but he always found some time for the 'grunt work'. More importantly that's what he did in the tech community as a leader. Ignite. BarCamp. Open Source Bridge. Ruby Brigade. ePDX. OpenConferenceWare. Calagator and Photographer & Artist. That's the short list, but the things he did held a great impact on the people of the open source, startup and tech communities in Portland, Oregon and beyond. He was the definition of mensch.

We shared some funny moments during Open Source Bridge 2011. He tried to take some pictures of me at the podium while I packed up after the keynote. It devolved into me posing like a Roman Emperor addressing the Senate. He didn't post the photos, probably for a very good reason. In 2012 I really wanted to catch up with him because there was an idea for a community project that I wanted his opinion and guidance on. I privately told a few people that I knew the perfect person to discuss this with, but we didn't run into each other as had been usual and I completely missed the opportunity. I'll have that to regret the rest of my life, wondering what guidance, input and advice he would have had.

Some people who knew him better than me have written eloquently about how he touched their lives. Pouring over his Flickr photostream, I'm reminded of the events and find pictures I hadn't seen before. He not only documented the rise of this new Portland tech community from it's beginning, he also captured in photographs some pivotal personal moments of mine. As I commented to a friend and someone who also knew him well, his passing is kicking over a few rocks in my life to see what's underneath. That's a bit tough to acknowledge at the moment, but reading the last section of this thoughtful blog post by Addie Beseda struck a nerve- that it's time be open and public about how we feel and what we need from each other. Our social apps give the power to share the most intimate yet mundane details of our day to day lives, yet that seems to me a smoke screen, a diversion from the very real feelings we hold tightly inside. Like Igal showed up for our community events and projects, we must find a way to show up for each other during the times when selflessness can paradoxically turn to a feeling of isolation. That's hard work but I'm reminded that Igal made hard work look fun in the context of community.

Thank you, Igal Koshevoy for the help and all you did for Portland.



We are planning a Celebration of Life for our friend and colleague, Igal Koshevoy. We welcome all who wish to participate, volunteer, and contribute to these efforts. Igal’s memorial will be Sunday, April 21st from 4-7pm at First Unitarian Church, 1211 SW Main St, Portland, OR. Please RSVP at Eventbrite so we can plan accordingly. You can sign up as a volunteer when you RSVP, or by contacting carolynn@tenx.org. We have set up koshevoy.net to help our community celebrate Igal’s life. Please share memories, photos or words of remembrance, and read what others have shared. We have also created a Facebook page, and on Twitter we request that you use the hashtag #igalko or his twitter handle @igalko. Stumptown Syndicate is accepting contributions on behalf of Friends of Igal Koshevoy, if interested please read the Contribute page.

Memorial Site: http://koshevoy.net

Memorial RSVP: http://igal-koshevoy-celebration.eventbrite.com/#

Memorial Live Stream: http://new.livestream.com/bcHD/igal

 

 

The Pull of Minecraft

I've always been involved in some form of media making since I was in grade school picking apart/repairing cassette tape recorders, so get off my lawn. Specifically, outliers and mainstreamers that insist on coming up with newfangled media taxonomy every few years, primarily to define digital media and the Internet. One of my 'favorites' has been Transmedia which I've felt has been over-hyped and inconsistently defined. I've heard people stammer when I've asked them to tell me exactly what it is. Even Wikipedia and one of the key proponents of transmedia Henry Jenkins, appear to differ on the definition. It seems to me it has never adequately defined anything really new as Disney could be seen as a transmedia storyteller par excellence before the internet even existed. The problem these folks have is defining the unique little flower that transmedia is, and not to confuse it with cross-platform storytelling. Transmedia is a push the story and audience to the media platform exercise with either positive or negative results (Jenkins: "... are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms..."). And let's face it, it's a marketing strategy to get paid more for telling a story in multiple places. There's nothing wrong with that if you're successful. If you create characters, back stories and story arcs that are compelling enough to bring an audience to additional media platforms then good for you, but there's nothing new here. Marvel, Lucas, DC, Dark Horse, Roddenberry have been doing this for years, well before the 1991 invention of the term transmedia. It's just cross-platform storytelling.

Why am I bringing this all up now? Partly because the transmedia folks will mention interactivity among the storytellers and audience, though this seems lacking in the formal definition. Marketing proponents push to the platforms and have even fought their audiences from time to time, sometimes by declaring full creative ownership or even copyright infringement control over their fans. I think that violates the original intent of transmedia. I think transmedia should be wholly redefined from what it currently is: pushing a story to multiple media platforms, to the better definition of pulling fans to media platforms for the purpose of sharing the storytelling experience.



Enter Minecraft. This amazingly popular indie game released in 2011 after 2 years of alpha/beta development that I became aware of during a presentation at the XOXO festival last year by Portland's 2 Player Productions who created a beautiful documentary about it: "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". And then around the holidays my tween daughter began to enthusiastically play the mobile version, watch YouTube videos and talk to her friends about it. What did I discover?

Minecraft is different. It's a game with an audience. It's an open ended game- you can do what you want, which is a key to it's popularity. Participants create worlds, characters, stories and challenges to their heart's content. They create elaborate scenarios- dare to call them stories on their own. This personal walled garden of storytelling between the participant and their device of choice (PC, game console or mobile) is by default not a shared experience. The shared experience comes when Minecrafters make videos (mini movies if you will) exploring their creation to share with an audience on YouTube. There's no push to YouTube as a platform, rather it's a natural choice to share what was created in the Minecraft game world. Like evolution taught us, pick the best tool for the job and the job at hand is to share my creation in Minecraft, and the best tool is a YouTube video. Because this is a purely creative endeavor, the YouTube video is the perfect platform to share the experience of your creation without actually being there. Think about composing and performing music. Because space and time won't allow me to sit and listen to Bird perform his music for me live, I can purchase a recording that I'll enjoy without actually being there. Or perhaps it's the artist who shares a photograph of her painting on Facebook. A large part of the history of recorded media is about encouraging new fans to an alternate creation of the work.



Minecraft videos are very popular on YouTube. They spark interest in people who don't even play Minecraft because these presentations tell a story of creation, survival, exploration and discovery. They can be engrossing if you take the time to watch a few choice videos. They even have their own creative style: typically hosted by one or two presenters either showing off an original creation or exploring a world created by someone else and downloaded as maps or mods. This is a feedback loop in it's purest sense of creating game play and passively viewing that story. That's a natural call-to-action that inspires to create and share more in Minecraft. The sharp growth in new videos posted and purchases of the game should be a marketers dream...

And this all takes place on the media platforms that transmedia pundits have been babbling about for years: digital video and games. Advertisers should be salivating as creative agencies have been striving for years to crack this duopoly of mediums in the hopes of getting twice the audience and theoretically, twice the payout. But the natural tendencies of this symbiotic relationship between interactive game and passive viewing experience were baked into this product from the start. Minecraft itself was created as a space to build. More options, fewer rules, open to modification- this starts to look less like a game as we've come to know them and a little more like those silly virtual worlds like Second Life that we would all be immersed in by now. We're not of course because those worlds are just as advertised, a second life not really well integrated into our first life, the one we already barely have time for. A game field with open play, come as you can, build as you can, share when you can, integrates very well into our day to day first life just like building a project in Legos (an obvious Minecraft inspiration).

So how do we monetize it? That's the question everybody want's to answer, right? Well let me tell you something right now, you can't. Period. Move along. You may think you can: hey, how about targeted in game ads? Nope! Lower thirds? Nope! Pre and Post rolls? Nope! You may see these in videos and game play and whether they'll be effective or not for the ad platforms that use them, they won't be for you. Game over. Why? because they interrupt the open feedback loop. They put unwanted graffiti on a special place created by someone who wanted to share it. It's within our nature to be creative but we also must be able to trust ourselves and the audience in order to have the confidence to share what we've made. Invasive advertising breaks that trust by cheapening the platform.

So begin with the idea that you can't monetize this at all, at least not in the ways you're familiar with. Then look at the success of it, the millions of viewers and almost 10 million paid downloads of the game. What does that tell us about successful campaigns or content? Are you the one to shoehorn a story across media platforms in order to push your audience there, or would you rather ride the natural pull and symbiotic feedback loop between platforms? The key I think is allowing your fans to build the world, the message, the campaign, the story, in an unrestricted and natural way using the media tools they're familiar with.

Simply put: Don't push. Let them pull.

Say Goodbye to Conferences, Say Hello to Love - XOXO Part I

I have been blessed to be thrust into the world of conferences these last few years as a planner, producer and videographer. Not the trade shows and expo floors that I've worked and attended in the past as a corporate technical marketing engineer, but special interest groups, birds of a feather type affairs that typically attract an audience of bright people to watch engaging speakers give their talks. For me it started small with something called a "Cyborg Camp" (how cool is that, right?) at a former SE Portland co-working office called Cube Space and then Bar Camps, Journalism Camps, Wordpress Camps (a lot of camping in there) and on to larger Open Source community conferences. And Portland, Oregon has hatched several of these gatherings, large and small, with WebVisions being the largest homegrown gathering of web and mobile designers in its 12th year and growing annual events in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Barcelona to Open Source Bridge, the Portland conference for open source citizens in its 4th year and Word Camp (Portland Edition) in its 5th, for the community of bloggers and developers on the Wordpress platform. What makes these conferences work is the people involved, from attendees, speakers, organizers and volunteers who put their hard work and love into the event each year. Sometimes these gatherings can find the right venue to fit the atmosphere of the event and sometimes, for several reasons finding the right place to hold an event is a challenge.

Part I: Say Goodbye to Conferences, Say Hello to Love @XOXO

Sandy Didn't Ruin Romney's Campaign, Big Bird Did!

 

 

 

It was at the height of election night that I sent out this tweet based on a conversation I just had with my daughter about the Obama vs. Romney presidential race. Seeing the truth in this simple idea isn't that hard. You will read much more complex arguments as to why Romney lost his bid for president, but I think it was just that simple.