A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.

Rebooting the News #23

Podcast recorded at 10:30AM Pacific on 8/31/09. Show notes by Jay.

The web thinker, blogger and seer Doc Searls was our guest on this show.

We talked about how Doc covers wildfires in Southern California as a knowledgeable committed amateur, and how far behind the big news producers are (still) in adapting to the live web.

We talked about various missing pieces--holes--in the rebooted system of news. Some that Doc noticed, some that we noticed.

For example, when there is a knowledgeable committed amateur, aggregating news and adding expertise as Doc does for Southern California fires, how do people find him or her? It's a hole in the system.

Doc noted that live search is a big hole. "That was a ball picked up by Google and Technorati and then dropped."

Jay: Why are the Washington Post's readers complaining to their ombudsman that the health care coverage they're getting doesn't provide the primer and critical background information that would allow them to grasp the updates to issue?

Fresh Air with Terry Gross recently provided that explanatory narrative through her interview with author T.R. Reid, but why is that kind of journalism still so rare? Hole in the system.

We talked with Doc about the Google takeover of the library system of the future, and the way we seem to be dependent on these companies that can turn against our interest or even disappear.

Dave's inspiration of the week was Brewster Kahle of Archive.org who is in fact fighting that takeover.

We also discussed project VRM, Doc's attempt to rethink and redraw advertising by empowering the buyers to communicate what they truly want to the producers. Advertising is itself a hack, an improvised solution for how producers of goods (vendors) and the users of those goods (consumers) can get into some kind of productive alignment.

The Internet is going to transform that relationship just as it has others; and that is why no one should expect the advertising subsidy for news to return. For more see Doc's post, Toward a New Ecology of Journalism.

reboot09Aug31.mp3 (audio/mpeg, 10.3MB) Monday, August 31, 2009.