As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Online Identity”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Tools and Techniques of Creation”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Principles of Creation”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Tools and Techniques of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Principles of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

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Update: Rich Gubby wrote to pitch his Wapple Architect Mobile plugin for WP. I’ve tested it and believe it’s another good option. Thoughts on Wapple are appended below. I’ve also updated the theme names for clarity.

WordPress is activating two new themes for mobile phones, one for smart phones and the other for standard mobile browsers. These will be displayed automatically for visitors based on the phone. However, this upgrade only applies to WordPress.com users at the moment. What if you self-host your WordPress blog?

No worries. Upgrading your self-hosted WordPress blog is rather painless and involves just two plugins, one of which I blogged about previously. These two plugins are the same that WordPress has modified for WordPress.com users.

1. Download the following plugins:

-WordPress Mobile Edition by CrowdFavorite
-WPtouch iPhone Theme by BraveNewCode

2. Upload and Activate WordPress Mobile Edition

For WordPress Mobile Edition, you’ll need to drop one file in your plugin folder and a folder in your themes folder. The creators explain this here.

Once uploaded, activate WordPress Mobile Edition on the plugins screen in your dashboard. This will add a link called “Mobile” to your Settings section. Click “Mobile” to access the settings. In here, you will see two lists. The first is for traditional mobile browsers and the second is for smart phones. Delete the list of smart phones as we’re going to let WP Touch handle those. Click “Save Settings.”

3. Upload and Activate WP Touch

For WP Touch, you just have to drop the WP Touch folder in your plugins folder.

Once uploaded, activate WP Touch on the plugins screen in your dashboard. This will add a link called “WP Touch” to your Settings section. There are a lot of adjustments you can make here, but the plugin will be working immediately. I go into more detail on the WP Touch settings in a previous post.

4. Test

Now, jump on your phone and take the site for a test drive. If you don’t have access to a smart phone or a non-smart phone, I’ve found a couple online tests. They aren’t perfect, but will give you a basic preview:
-Smart phone test
-Non-smart phone test

Update:

Another Option:

If you’re comfortable editing CSS, Wapple Architect Mobile is another option worth checking out. The options are rather robust and allow for a high degree of customization. The biggest pro may be the fact that one plugin takes care of both smart and non-smart phones.

In my previous post about WP Touch, I mention that it does give your blog an application feel. If you prefer a more customized look, Wapple offers that. Updating your mobile theme with a unique header is done via dashboard. However, color and typography options must be managed by editing a style sheet. The style sheet is well-commented, but may be a steeper entry point for novices.

You can find the plugin here. You’ll also need to register for an API key for activation here.

If you visit Mediactive via mobile, let me know if you run into any conflicts. I’ll update with surprises we find.

Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson (Washington Post op-ed): New-model journalism needs community support. American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting — as society has, at much greater expense, for public education, health care, scientific advancement and cultural preservation, through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy and government policy. It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including print newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears.

The sentiments behind this executive summary of a new report are fine ones. No one wants to see journalism disappear whether or not newspapers do.

But the authors’ solution is, in part, another example of asking taxpayers to fix problems we can solve ourselves.

Before continuing, I should note that Len Downie, former executive editor at the Washington Post, is a colleague at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University. I admire him and his work, and the report he and co-author, a professor of communication at Columbia University, have released is an excellent compendium of some of exciting new projects under way in the journalism sphere.

In fact, their wide-ranging look at the new entrants — people and institutions trying journalism and business experiments amid the failure of newspapers — could well have been the basis for an entirely different conclusion, namely that we’re making wonderful progress, than the recommendations they come up with.

The authors especially seem to crave government intervention at several levels even as they praise market solutions. (In his well-reasoned post today Jeff Jarvis says that the authors “are addressing the business problem of news without doing reporting on the business.” I agree with most of Jeff’s post but disagree in part on this point.)

Instead, as I read this, the authors effectively dismiss what they earlier surround with great praise, saying it’s not nearly enough to replace what we’re losing. Of course that’s true today (though there’s insufficient recognition of the deep and valuable news/information flow in important niche arenas that journalists rarely if ever covered in their monopoly days). It won’t be true in a few years if current trends persist.

Several of the recommendations make good sense (and are already happening in some cases), such as encouraging journalism schools to be part of the local media ecosystem in a more direct way; spurring philanthropy; and, a very good idea, persuading public broadcasting to turn its mission to a more local focus.

But when the authors call for collective action, watch out. What they’re talking about is using government. The only institutions that seem able to use government without being used are too-big-to-fail banks and military contractors; the rest of us fall into the inverse category. Journalists get government help at some peril.

For my money, the most problematic recommendation (among several mistaken ones) is the fifth:

A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.

Whoa. Think about it. Take taxpayers’ money — this is a new tax we’re talking about, or diversion of current fees and taxes — and give it to councils that will pick winners, re-establishing a journalistic priesthood to replace the increasingly ingrown and unimaginative one we’ve had. Who’ll pick the councils, moreover? Government, that’s who, either directly or by proxy.

Now, government has long had a hand in supporting journalism, as I noted in this post a few months ago. Some of that support has been indirect, such as postal subsidies (though even those were targeted by intention). Others, which were never justified, included the odious 1970s law, still in effect, that let newspapers combine business operations in communities to preserve the illusion of competition.

The only government intervention I’d support at this point would be the one that’s apparently not on the table: a taxpayer-funded wiring of America, putting fiber-optic lines everywhere, or at least to every curb. Let private businesses and local institutions light it up. Nothing would do more to spur media development of all kinds.

Look, we definitely do have a problem in the journalism craft. The upcoming period will be messy, at best. Maybe there will be a time for intervention in a more “collective” and direct way on the news. Maybe, but not now.

Let’s watch the market work — a market that includes for-profit, not-for-profit, volunteer and all manner of new approaches, in addition to the remaking of some traditional methods. It’s increasingly clear to me that it is working.

From yesterday’s Washington Post online chat featuring media critic Howard Kurtz:

Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.

When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).

So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.

Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.

Unpack Kurtz’s reply and your jaw will drop. He acknowledges the reader’s point but then and amplifies his newspaper’s negligence.

This isn’t a trivial point. As the Atlantic’s James Fallows has noted in painful detail (here, here), the Post editorial page made a rookie error. The Nobel Peace Prize rules are clear: The only time it can be awarded after death is when the honoree had already been named “but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10.”

As Jim Fallows noted, allowing posthumous awards could spark “a debate every year on whether Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi, or Gandhi was the most deserving choice.”

Kurtz, coming to his colleagues’ defense in a way that utterly dismisses the reader’s serious chiding of a paper he or she has long cared about, says Neda was a symbol, but that the rule “should have been mentioned” in the editorial. Come on. Had the Post editorial writer or his/her editors known of the rule, they would never have run that piece in the first place without a different spin.

The media critic runs totally off the rails when he says the editorial page gets a pass in any case. “It is by definition opinion,” he said, as if opinion journalists have less obligation to being factual than other journalists.

I infer from the still-uncorrected editorial (at least on the Post website) that the editorial page editors believe the same thing. In their world, and Kurtz’s, writing opinions means you have license to make it up as long as it has a certain truthiness.

Then again, this is the same media critic, after all, who had a glaring error in an online column last month that the paper didn’t budge on for several days despite having known about the mistake early on. When the paper did address it, the error was replaced with words that were only partially correct, and that half-truth remains intact almost a month later.

UPDATED

Arizona Republic (10/09/2009): More turning to psychics for economic advice. When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical. Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.

Even though it’s shrinking along with all metropolitan newspapers in America, the Arizona Republic remains by far the biggest news organization in Phoenix and the state of Arizona. It still helps set the agenda for public discourse, and claims to be a responsible operation.

The story quoted above, which ran on the front of its local/state section, demonstrates serious irresponsibility on the part of the newspaper. It’s a textbook example of why smart readers are tuning out the press.

Consider the way the story starts. The word “apparently” is a tip-off that the piece is based on no actual data. Who’s the source for this alleged mini-flood of new customers? Why, the people selling the product. Makes sense to me: In I-can-see-into-the-future territory, we can just take their word for it.

Not a single customer is quoted. We hear only from the people who are claiming to be getting this influx of new customers. Can’t the newspaper find even one client?

Look. Newspapers run astrology columns — something I’d ban if I ran a paper, because I’m old-fashioned — with no disclaimers that there is no scientific basis for what these planet- and star-gazers tell us. But the astrology columns run, typically, near the comics, which is the fiction section of the daily paper.

No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.

It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.

I have to note that journalists spent much of the last decade quoting with a straight face the people from the financial and real estate industries who sold inflated goods to suckers, pulling big fees from the transactions. (Note: I do not indict the entire industry. I have a financial advisor who works for one of the big banks, an old and close friend who’s never, ever steered me toward something that was aimed at enriching him, and someone who’s comfortable with my tendency to buy and hold.)

The peddlers got rich, and then disclaimed culpability for the bubble or the financial catastrophe it spawned for those average folks (many of whom, we should noted, played the markets like insane gamblers who lose their kids’ college money at Las Vegas casinos). Maybe a responsible story would have contrasted the slimy advice from the past with the advice people now seek — foolishly, in my view — from the self-professed seers.

Had this story appeared on April 1, I’d have applauded the piece as droll satire. Running with scarcely a hint of reality, it only satirizes the condition of the newspaper industry, or at least this corner of the trade.

(Note: The updates to this include some or all of the 3rd, 4th 7th and 8th paragraphs. Also please understand that the post update will make some of the earlier comments feel out of place. This is my doing, not the commenters’. Anyone who commented early on and wants the comment removed, please email me.)

The UK Health Service site, Behind the Headlines, is an excellent resource for calm and understandable health information — making sense of alarmist news stories.

Also, do read Dr. Alica White’s “How to read articles about health and healthcare” (pdf). Great advice.

Via BoingBoing