Notes for tonight's podcast

Sunday, April 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

We're going to start recording our weekly podcast in about 20 minutes at 6PM Pacific, so I have to hurry up and put my notes together! I love a deadline.  

I loved this classic exemplar for Jay's Curmudgeon Studies J-school curriculum, esp the part where he says that some (huge) percentage of everything in the world originated in his word processor (I'm exaggerating).  

The exact quote: "Several studies have shown that more than three-quarters of the news you see, hear or read anywhere is at least derivative of something that originally appeared in a newspaper." I have a very neat rebuttal -- 100 percent of everything you read in a newspaper originally appeared in the world unless they got it wrong, which happens far too often.  

The sources originated everything Mr. Brinkley -- and last time I checked -- we don't get paid bupkis, so that part of the news system should make the transformation pretty well. 

I watched Bill Moyers on Friday, he had David SImon from The Wire who is a great writer, but contradicts himself when it comes to the Baltimore reporters. In the first part of the 50-minute interview he says that the reporters never really got the story and were' never effective. But in the second part he says the opposite, and laments their failure, though he doesn't blame bloggers, that's the least of it. 

The problem with all the curmudgeons is that they stop at hand-wringing, no one wants to talk about next steps to reboot the news. As you know if you're a regular listener to the podcast, I think we're far along in the reboot. 

I want to talk about the 40-twits app, and next steps. 

Briefly about my visit at Nieman in Cambridge last week with Josh Benton and Zach Seward. 

I want to talk about Oprah joining Twitter, and what might be coming next. 

And of course I want to talk about whatever Jay wants to talk about.  

Jay's 40-twits page actually just has 20 for now.