It suggests instead that the archive can be deployed: as a set of shared curiosities, a local politics, or epistemological adventure. Where the archival impulse could be recast, for example, as the possibility of creating alliances: between text and image, between major and minor institutions, between filmmakers, photographers, writers and computers, between online and offline practices, between the remnant and what lies in reserve, between time and the untimely.

An archive actively creates new ways of thinking about how we access our individual and collective experiences. An archive does not just supplement what is missing in state archives, it also renders what is present unstable.

The production of a concept is a provocation, a refusal to answer to the call of the known, and an opportunity to intensify our experiences. The archive is therefore not representational, it is creative, and the naming of something as an archive is not the end, but the beginning of a debate.

We tend to think of archiving as the inward movement of collecting things: finding bits and pieces, bringing them together, guarding them in a safe and stable place. The model of this type of archiving is the fortress, or the burning library. This model already provides a clear sense of the limits, or ends, of the archive: fire, flooding, data loss.

The astonishingly resilient archiving practices around Napster or the Pirate Bay, and the even more virulent promise of actual or imaginary archives far beneath or beyond them -- if, for one moment, we could step outside the age of copyright we all inhabit, and fully embrace the means of digital reproduction most of us have at our disposal -- not just directly follow the trajectory traced by Benjamin and Langlois, but extend it to a point in the not-so-distant future where we will think of archiving primarily as the outward movement of distributing things: to create ad-hoc networks with mobile cores and dense peripheries, to trade our master copies for a myriad of offsite backups, and to practically abandon the technically obsolete dichotomy of providers and consumers.

Archival initiatives have unconsciously continued this theological impulse. Their desire to document that which is absent, missing or forgotten stages a domain of politics which often privileges the experience of violence and trauma in a manner in which the experience of violence is that which destroys the realm of the ordinary and the everyday.

Archives have traditionally been the dwelling places of historians, and the epistemic conceit of history has always been housed in the dust of the archives. But in the last decade we have also seen an explosion of interest in archives from software engineers, artists, philosophers, media practitioners, filmmakers and performers.

We do not control the distribution of our work. Period. It's horrible and bizarre and it is also the way that the media world works now. You can't push; the content has to pull. (Especially if we are talking numbers in the millions.)

Less obviously: how would anyone build an audience growth strategy without relying on huge social hits and a distinctive voice? How many content sites or apps have you visited as a result of marketing? Then how many did you go back to?

Rather than say, "Well, long, narrative pieces of writing suck for us," we changed the ordering of our narratives. We get the stakes up very, very high. I'm talking within the first 100 or 200 words, even if the story is two or three or four thousand words. And if we want to keep that narrative lede and we know we have nuggets down low, we drop in a tl;dr box to capture the kind of reader who wants to know what the point is exactly. (If you're a regular reader, you will start to notice this pattern.)

Looking across the industry gives the impression of herd movement — Crazy new ad formats! Daily deals! Metered paywalls! — without the experimentation and evolution that we’ve seen in news.

“If the two sides of a news-providing organization are really working at cross purposes,” Kovach and Rosenstiel write, “the journalism tends to be on the side that is corrupted.”

If you run a small local news site, chances are this is exactly your situation: You’re the publisher *and* the editor. But you also have no insulation or distance from your community, so your ethical values and instincts are all-important.

First, people need to understand and experience data ownership. Second, we need to have a more open conversation about data and ethics. Finally, we need to change the way that we collectively think about data, so that it is not a new oil, but instead a new kind of resource entirely.

From the start, Maddow's brand is not so much out lesbian or angry liberal, but full-on nerd: the chunky black glasses, the flailing limbs. She doesn't seem to care much about the question that Olbermann has fixed on: So just who is Sarah Palin? "We don't know very much about Governor Palin," Maddow says, when Olbermann finally gives her a chance to speak. "She's basically been a human-interest story in terms of the political press in this country thus far." Then she moves on to what really interests her: not politics as personality but politics as mechanism, not who is winning power but what is being done with it.

Clutter isn't just the advertising, it's everything -- the entire environment of a page. If we take a page out of Apple's design book and focus on creating content experiences that are more elegant, even long-tail content can be sold as premium -- because advertisers could count on finding the right audience, the right content and the right environment.

Explain your ethical decisions in a blog, social media or other forum. A decision you can’t explain is a decision you should reconsider.

Disclose any personal interests, relationships, affiliations or experiences that might influence your journalism — or give the appearance of influence — on a particular story or in your general performance.

Our principle of transparency and attribution is an obligation to our readers and viewers, not to sources.

Journalists should consider whether transparency about opinions will build credibility better than a stance of neutrality. Opinions are acceptable in some journalism contexts and not in others.

As entrepreneurial journalists and innovative organizations seek new business models for news, journalists should discuss ways to protect the integrity of editorial content and should be transparent about revenue streams and relationships with revenue sources.

Journalists should strive to go beyond “he-said-she-said” stories that present conflicting accounts of an event or issue. The journalist’s job is to learn and report the truth in these cases.

Journalists should closely and skeptically examine the motives of sources asking to speak confidentially. Even if the motives are legitimate, journalists should keep in mind that confidentiality prevents accountability.

If your organization has a policy not to identify survivors of sexual abuse, you should make exceptions for survivors who wish to speak on the record. (Incredibly, I once worked for a newsroom that made no exceptions, a hurtful position that treated sexual assault survivors as though they had some cause for shame.)

Journalists and news organizations should not remove content from digital archives except in extreme cases, such as for legal reasons. When people who were acquitted of criminal charges (or convicted many years ago) request removal of embarrassing but true stories, a better solution is to code those stories so they will not show to external search engines. Archives should be updated to reflect the outcomes of criminal cases or other charges of wrongdoing.

There is another barrier to my online news consumption habit: my own OCD. When I am reading a newspaper, I know approximately how much is left unread at any time, and I know when I have finished a section. I can say to myself, “Self, you have now caught up on the news.”

Steve Krug touches on this problem in his book “Don’t Make Me Think.” He likens navigating a website to navigating a store. In both instances, you’re looking for something, but online there are no visual markers to tell you what’s around you. My old boss, Brian Boyer, once told me that he thought about websites in the terms of Frank Lloyd Wright’s interior design: At every point, you should allow for “a peek around the corner,” a glimpse of what surrounds where you are.

Yet by and large, news websites overestimate my grasp of whatever they’re writing about. If we’re several days into a story, I have no hope of finding the backstory on a newspaper’s site. This makes me sad, because newspapers certainly have done a more trustworthy job compiling the information than anyone else.

Topic pages address this issue to some degree, but they are, for the most part, not very well done. For one, they tend to be in reverse chronological order (which makes great sense if you’re already familiar with the topic). I would love to see tag pages used to this end. An editor could specify which article (or articles) are the definitive ones. In lengthy, developing stories (like Arab Spring), these definitive stories would be numerous. Secondary to that, a reverse chronological river of posts about the subject could update savvy readers with the latest happenings.

When I was learning Python, my mentor Mark Ng gave me a helpful piece of troubleshooting advice. He told me to delete code — not add patches — until something worked. I feel this is where the news industry must go. Services like Instapaper are popular for exactly this reason, and newspaper websites are going to have to follow suit. There’s no reason Instapaper couldn’t have been developed by a newspaper, much like there’s no reason Craigslist couldn’t have been developed by a newspaper.

There’s a lot of technology in the book. It’s not the tools of technology, it’s the feelings of technology. I try to describe the feelings you get when you video chat, or the feelings you get from farming a job out to a thousand computers. That all came from my work at Twitter.

One of the things I’m trying get across is that books are just as much technology as your iPhone. When books were new, the scene felt just as chaotic and confusing as what’s happening in San Francisco right now.

The vision of the Internet as a vast digital wasteland isn’t correct. Everything is awesome and we have more stuff to read than we ever have in history. I think part of the answer comes with devices and interfaces: we need to create more devices without distractions, like Kindles.

I realized that for me, the iPhone had gone beyond just being a habit. I decided that with the job I have now, which is a full-time writer, it’s actually more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes than it is for me to e-mail or read all my tweets.

Online, my digital identity enters a new and multiple and constantly-shifting world everyday.

It’s like waking up in a brand new train station every single day. Some good friends and interesting acquaintances are usually there with you, passing through, but you can’t be sure any of them will actually be present. And, rather like my offspring, there’s no predicting or accounting for what kind of knot people’s knickers will be in on any given morning.

Digital sociality means constantly trying to ascertain if you’ve understood the context of a conversation enough to enter it.

Digital sociality means having to re-orient yourself in space and time and relationality each time the context changes, which can be minute-to-minute.

Digital sociality means patching together disjointed fragments in order to frame a present in which to be.

Digital sociality means the effort to communicate intent and tone and personality with economy and concision, without necessarily being sure who’s listening or how they will hear what you say.

Digital sociality means pressure to maintain enough of a traceable public identity, via blog and social media platforms, that people can build the trust necessary to engage with you as an actual entity and not an anonymous troll (I waxed didactic on this one in Dave’s comments section this morning).

The challenge of digital sociality is it’s all a constant, repeating learning curve.

Recognize any parallels yet between these claims and contemporary pearl-clutching concerns over digital media? Not that many of the concerns aren’t legitimate, on the terms by which we were raised to understand life and knowledge and education and ourselves. But there are power interests involved and invested in these understandings.

And all the hand-wringing about the terrible things happening to our children because of digital practices? They read a lot like Don Quixote, published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615, wherein the protagonist buries himself in his books so deeply – individual, independent reading was a new practice in European culture at this point – that, from so little sleep and so much reading, loses his wits and his capacity to distinguish real from imaginary. He then, of course, became an icon for all the generations after who saw in his story the possibilities of literary imagination and format.

That doesn’t mean the losses for those invested in monastic culture in 1500 or so weren’t real. It doesn’t mean Socrates wasn’t right about memory. It just means that when we talk about reading in a digital age, we need to think carefully about what is being protected in the lamentations and critiques.

This is called ‘self-presentation’: we navigate and manage it, all the time, in human life. Most people speak differently to their friends than they do to their mothers, for instance. And, we address people in power over us from different relational positions than we do cashiers in grocery stores, even if we’re entirely respectful in both interactions. We have what Goffman (1959) called different ‘faces’ for these different facets of our lives. We have lots of faces, and we navigate between them all the time.

That’s what makes blogging as just one’s plain old self harder, in a sense, than sitting down and writing for a far larger audience under somebody else’s masthead. There, no matter how thoughtful your piece or how much pressure to rise to the reputation of that publication, you are already handed a voice of sorts to inhabit, a self that is both shaped and backed by a brand far bigger than you.

Not here. Here, you can be anybody. But you have to cobble that self together from the nearly infinite contexts and selves reflected back at you by the disco ball of the blank screen.

The academics who don’t ‘get it’? Who object essentially, as some did, to the idea of their work being represented outside of their control?

Sure, they’re ignoring the water-cooler discussions conferences exist to provoke. Sure, they’re conflating a whole pile of prejudices about what the internet is and isn’t and what prestige is and isn’t in a world turned upside down by information abundance. But.

I also think some of them may be grappling with – or maybe trying to fight off – context collapse. They’re clinging to a notion of professional self that circulates in professional, gatekept circles. They don’t want their ideas represented in a medium they associate with the illustrious musings of Snooki, or with litanies of what people had for lunch.

That’s what it all looks like until you throw yourself into that void and figure out who else is out there to talk to.

Maybe they glance our way out here and they don’t see ideas and peers and the potential for networks or connections. Maybe they glance our way and they see all that plus the rest of the infinite mirror ball of possibility and they cannot figure out who they’d ever speak as, here, and don’t want to be tossed into that paralyzing void?

No way out but through. Welcome to living in public.

For starters, we do not need every story from a publication. We only need stories that we will enjoy reading or need to know because of the information in them is really important. This paves way for a possibility of using interests, and preferred publications as a means to recommend and figure out what articles you might enjoy from other sources.

Good, relevant content should find the reader instead of the reader having to search the content universe. A lot of this we already do unconsciously with a source focused consumption approach, by skimming or dismissing a story even before we finish reading the title. Surely this is the first thing that a truly digital content consumption medium needs to address. If we are still skimming every story from each source we might be interested in, then what did we gain over the analog way of consumption?

A system that allows for highlighting of passages or curate content around themes is valuable only when you see the possibilities that these tools empower.

For the first time the marginalia has the chance to be an equal partner of the content.

Later in the first section of his book, Bayard also talks about the notion of an inner library, a subset of the collective library. These are those particular books which orient individual readers to books in general and to other people. An inner library includes those books which have made a deep impression on the reader and those which are most useful and used.

As Lichfield correctly notes, so-called “wicked problems” “often cut across beat boundaries, taking in politics, economics, technology, and other issues.” You can’t understand climate change, or help point toward solutions to climate change, just by covering the EPA.

In other words, Quartz is arguing that a well-educated audience is capable of understanding the world as a whole and acting upon that knowledge. What this audience needs is not the “monitoring of beats” but help in “making sense of the world.” Public accountability comes not from staking out a beat, but from helping members of the public understand how complex things fit together. Because they understand how the world works, citizens will be able to act democratically in new ways. And when the important issues in the world change, than the focus of coverage will likewise shift.

What’s more, even in those halcyon days when investigative reporters could spend years on an investigation, the number of readers that investigation reached was tiny: you needed to fortuitously be a reader of the right newspaper on the right day when it appeared, and you needed to be interested in the subject. Today, investigations are much more likely to reach a broad and influential audience, because they are easily available, in perpetuity, no matter where you are in the world.

Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you.

One of the best new media properties to come along in recent years is the Atlantic Wire. It’s run on a shoestring budget, and staffed by young, smart, hardworking kids with fantastic reading skills. Many of them can write, too — but they write short and punchy. Which is something else Old Media needs to learn how to do: it’s always much more fun reading a Gawker pickup of a Washington Post story than reading the original piece.

The biggest shortage in journalism right now isn’t good writers, or even enlightened proprietors willing to fund investigations. It’s critical readers – journalists who can see when they’re being snowed, who can read between the lines, who can pick up information from across the blogosphere and the twittersphere and be able to judge it on its own merits rather than simply trusting the publisher.

So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena—the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. “The environment” is a beat, but “climate change” is a phenomenon. “Energy” is a beat, but “the global surge of energy abundance” is a phenomenon. “China” is a beat, but “Chinese investment in Africa” is a phenomenon. We call these phenomena our “obsessions”. These are the kinds of topics Quartz will put in its navigation bar, and as the world changes, so will they.

And philosophical, because it means changing what might (a little pretentiously) be called the phenomenology of journalism. Phenomenology is about how we structure our experience of the world. Beats provide an institutional structure. Obsessions are a more human one.

What I mean by this is that when people notice a change in the world around them—a phenomenon—they don’t care what beat it belongs to; they just want to know what caused it. The institutional framework answers the question like the blind men in the Indian parable who are brought an elephant and asked to say what it is. The one who touches the elephant’s leg says it is a pillar or tree trunk, the one who feels the tail declares it to be a rope, and so on. But to unpack something like the financial crisis you can’t simply talk about securities, interest rates and banking regulation; to understand China’s activities in other parts of the world you need to be more than just a China specialist; to comprehend climate change you need science, economics, domestic and international politics, and more besides. To explain the world’s big phenomena you need to see (or feel) the whole elephant.

Even once you’ve identified a phenomenon worth covering, how do you make it manageable? How do you decide where it starts and ends? How do you follow it as an incrementally evolving news story while also helping your audience grasp the bigger picture?

I often wonder if we should build some kind of forgetting into our systems and archives, so ways of being expand rather than contract. Drop.io, an online file sharing service, allowed you to choose the length of time before your data would be deleted. This seems not only sensible, but desirable.

Proustian memory, not the palest ink, should be the ideal we are building into our technology; not what memory recalls, but what it evokes. The palest ink tells us what we’ve done or where we’ve been, but not who we are.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are, we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

The problem with reading the New York Times is that the Times is all about tempered and metered interpretations of what’s going on. Meanwhile, TV news is all about total extremism. It’s about facial expressions, and performance over content. Watching Fox, I can understand the appeal of Santorum. It doesn’t make me like him anymore, but I can at least get it.

My network is not talking positively about Santorum in any way. It’s not even talking positively about Romney. They’re both lunatics. But I know better than to think that’s how they’re actually being discussed beyond my network. I want a tool that gives me what’s outside of my perspective on these issues — because otherwise I have to do a lot of really difficult and exhausting work to find it.

With young people, the thing that gets them fastest and easiest is the thing that can spread the most easily. They access news through the ether. It’s pretty crazy — it’s not active consumption. I interviewed a whole group of kids 24 hours after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. I asked them — “How did you hear about the shootings?” The answers were all random. “My grandmother called me. She called me to talk about how dangerous colleges are.” “My parents saw it on the news and they asked me about it.” “‘Love and Support for Virginia Tech’ went through my Facebook because this one girl I met three years ago went to Virginia Tech.” It was very ambient.

I’m definitely optimistic. I roll my eyes when journalists say, “oh my god, kids these days, they’re not into news, when I was that age, blah blah blah.” I’m like — you were a nerd! There have always been geeky youth who were always into news. But the vast majority of young people have never been into news. Maybe kids ended up getting ambient news through newspaper routes. But then again, because of how the internet is structured, maybe they’re getting ambient news in new ways.

1: Observing. 2: Following. 3: Endorsing. 4: Contributing. 5: Owning. 6: Leading.

At the bottom of the Engagement Pyramid, communications and relationships are technology-centric and more automated; at the top, they are more personal and labor-intensive. Using technology to automate interactions at the bottom of the pyramid helps us scale engagement efforts to reach lots of people. Websites, databases, email and social networks are excellent tools to this end.

Engagement roles blur the line between what’s inside an organization and what’s outside it. Framing work through engagement roles exposes the fact that organizational needs can be done by employees, partners or customers; and that helps organizations take more holistically stock of the range of talent available to fulfill its goals.

When we capture these organizational responsibilities as engagement roles, we suspend judgement about who should or shouldn’t be doing them. That abstraction gives organizations more flexibility and speed in responding to what’s happening internally and externally – right now. It might be a new staff member with a new set of skills or it might be a particularly good rate from a partner with some extra capacity this month.

Engagement roles don’t just increase organizational flexibility; sometimes they help us rethink what’s possible.

Let’s say that one of the engagement roles we’ve identified for organizational outreach is ensuring favorable blogger coverage. It’s an engagement role, so we’re not pegging it to staff or agency personnel, and we soon discover we have a handful of enthusiastic customers who are plugged into the blogging community and way more credible than any staff or agency professional would be. So we shift staff and agency resources away from doing the outreach themselves and into engaging these key customers in doing the work.

As an idea, the engagement role isn’t some major conceptual breakthrough. It’s really just a way of abstracting the position descriptions we already use at work (note: this is different than a job description – a difference I’ll get into in my next post on “engagement plans“). Engagement roles are a simple trick for separating the work that needs doing from the people who do it, and opening that up to people outside the organization.

Sometimes the distinction between news reporting and news distribution gets blurred. This is particularly true when it comes sense making. For example, when I post a link to a story on Facebook along with a personal note, I’m providing context to my friends, context that will help them see how this story fits into their lives. That’s not reporting, but it’s also not just distributing. It’s somewhere in between. I will almost always be better at providing contextual bridges to what my personal networks care about – and this is something journalists need to use to their advantage.

Managing the relationship with me up to this point is the work of the news service’s information networking staff, but once I’m contributing, the editorial staff will start to take more of an interest, possibly even pulling me into its pool of affiliated writers and reporters. As part of the service’s network of local contributors, my reporting gets featured in increasingly prominent ways by the editorial team, based on the quality of my reporting and its alignment with the service’s mission (owning). If my work becomes good enough, I may eventually be brought in as part of the service’s editorial team (leading).

One of the other roles of information networkers is working with the editorial team to ensure the news service’s content is optimally “engaging” – that is to say, that it’s written in ways that fully engage other readers in ways that ‘network the content’ out to the rest of the community. Every article needs hooks for local information networkers to attach the context that makes it meaningful and relevant to other readers. How does this issue affect my neighborhood? How does it affect businesses or families like mine?

In the United States, the government made an investment early on in a technology designed to connect citizens so they could govern themselves. This wasn’t the internet, but the postal system, established in the US Constitution, and implemented in a way that encouraged citizens to use the mails, the connective technology of the time, as a civic space.

Legal scholar Larry Lessig suggests we’re in an age of corporate capture of American politics, a form of corruption so deep that there’s no alternative but to strike at the root: public financing for campaigns, end of corporate personhood. He may be right. But there’s another school of thought that sees an evolution of politics in parallel with a shift in dominant media. As we move towards participatory, internet-based media, perhaps we’re moving towards a newly participatory, internet-based democracy.

What these four movements have in common is that they’re not about civics as usual. In conventional civics, we define a problem, figure out who’s got the ability to change it, marsall support for our movement and persuade the decisionmakers to make a change. That’s not what these groups are looking for. The Tea Party wants those systems to shrink to the point of disfunctionality, removing problems from the realm of government and leaving them for individuals, NGOs and corporations to solve. Occupy seems deeply divided on whether it makes sense to try to influence existing systems of power, or to build new forms of power. Wikileaks and Anonymous see power as being located within media, not existing political systems, so they’re unlikely to pick loci of influence that are similar to those used by Bob Graham or Tom Steinberg.

What if you don’t just want gay and lesbian people to have the right to work and to marry? What if you actually want people to like and accept them? You’re likely to work for cultural change, seeking positive portrayals of gays and lesbians in the news and in entertainment media. It’s helpful to have legislation passed and to get authority figures to say the right things, but cultural change tends to be a media-driven theory of change, designed to slowly win over the hearts and minds of millions.

I’m seeing lots of activism these days that recognizes that it may take a long time to change laws, the attitudes of people in authority or the culture as a whole. In the meantime, can we provide services to people in harm’s way? If gay youth are at risk of bullying, depression and suicide, we might provide hotlines and build support groups. It’s hard to scale this work, but it’s a deeply satisfying and practical way of working, fixing addressable problems in a community. Whether or not our work sets an example for other communities, it was worth doing.

Raising attention is useful for attracting money and for passing legislation, but there’s a danger that attention can quickly dissipate if underlying political systems are too badly broken to make real change possible. In those cases, using attention to support direction action looks like a good alternative. This returns us to Jase Wilson in Kansas City. If the government won’t create a trolley line, Wilson wonders whether he might be able to build one himself by gaining attention and raising money from possible supporters.

I believe we want governments to help us ensure that digital civics leads to a world that’s more fair. It’s the nature of civic engagement that the articulate and the angry get the most attention. This tendency may be amplified in digital civics, given that much of the practice involves manipulating and channeling attention. If digitally savvy activists gain support for their causes at the expense of the less wired, and communities with disposable income finance new public goods, while poorer communities go without, we should expect governments to help level the playing field. This might mean learning from civic innovations in more privileged communities and providing funding and support for similar interventions in less-resourced areas.

What is the status of knowledge produced from the study of that document, from the analysis of an assemblage that only exists in the 21st century? Does it tell us something about the 1800s? Obviously I'm not the first one to ask such questions, but it's important to note that these are not questions about 19th century American literature. They are questions about digital information.

With the right title, a kid’s publisher can deploy something the world of adult publishing can only dream about: a large, well-oiled and highly networked group of professional and semi-professional taste makers who can make that book a hit even before it’s published.

Many of the most arcane practices of the publishing industry are methods for working around this dilemma. It begins even before a book goes to press. Those unfamiliar with publishing’s peculiar customs may wonder at the mystique surrounding “in-house enthusiasm,” a key factor in the success of any book, whether it’s for adults or for children. In an ideal world, publishers would be enthusiastic about every single book they publish, right? But all too often the manuscript doesn’t fulfill the promise of the proposal, or the novel that one editor adores leaves everyone else cold. The ability of a book to generate interest in random staff members is a publisher’s first sign that it has legs. This is the beginning of the long and elaborate winnowing process that separates the also-rans from the hits, much of which happens even before store clerks take the books out of the carton.

I’m not arguing that every news organization should get into the business of monitoring the state of public knowledge. This is only one of many possible ways to define impact; it might only make sense for certain stories, and to do it routinely we’d need good and cheap substitutes for large public surveys. But I find it instructive to work through what would be required. The point is to define journalistic success based on what the user does, not the publisher.

The world is changing with amazing speed, and we need to pay close attention to what is happening. ... No one in our business has yet launched a really impressive or successful electronic product, but someone surely will. I’d bet it will happen rather soon. The Post ought to be in the forefront of this -- not for the adventure, but for important defensive purposes. We’ll only defeat electronic competitors by playing their game better than they can play it. And we can.

We were learning quickly how digital media differed from print. We still had no real idea of how we would deliver these whizbang products to anybody—the Internet wasn't really ready for primetime yet and our mutimedia visions bumped up against a pre-broadband reality—but PostCard was a great vehicle to use to demo the future. Legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, seeing PostCard presented at a Post board meeting and grasping how it could be used to provide all sorts of contextual and supplemental content to support news stories, growled, "My God, it will take all day to read this thing." I think that was a compliment. Shortly after, the Post's board created a new division of the company to build digital products, the beginning of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate spending to chase the vision of the future that Kaiser had written about and I had crudely prototyped.

(Contrary to popular myth, by the way, there was no "original sin" of newspapers somehow failing to think to charge subscriptions for online editions in those early days: in fact, we talked about paid-content models all the time, and Kaiser’s memo even suggested that money could be made selling individual stories to thousands of readers for pennies apiece. Indeed, many early newspaper online products and sites, including The Post's first online service, Digital Ink, did charge for access. But they ran up against technological barriers and audience resistance that generally made subscriptions unworkable. The alternative was the old newspaper revenue fallback, advertising, which proved to be less than effective because of the end of media scarcity and competition from the likes of Google, craigslist and many others for the ad dollars newspapers used to dominate. Believe me, if we could have figured out to get people to pay us directly for digital news back in the early days, we would have done it.)

I am here to suggest that this the work we need to face in the years to come because the unit of measure for whether or not something is important is no longer dictated by the cost of inclusion.

Google has never wavered from their goal of being an information retrieval company because “information retrieval” is just a benign way of saying “everything”. If every natural language researcher on the planet uses Wikipedia as its training set Google was clever enough to realize that they could do what Facebook is trying to do by building a suite of tools – often very good tools – and treat the entire Internet as their training set for teaching robots how to interpret meaning and assign value.

Dispute is notoriously difficult to codify, especially in a database, but one of its most important functions is to shine a light on two or more opposing views so that might better see the context in which those ideas exist. I am not suggesting that we do away with structured metadata but this is not necessarily where all of your time is most needed today. You have the gift of magic that no robot will ever have: We call it language and story-telling and these are the things that you are good at.

I am saying that by encouraging documentary efforts outside the scope of the contemporary zeitgeist we create a zone of safekeeping for historical records and their stories for a time when we are ready to reconsider them.

I am saying that all those works not yet deemed worthy of a scholar’s attention still have value to people and their inclusion within a larger body of work is an important and powerful gesture for encouraging participation. Consider the authority record as a kind of gateway drug to scholarship.

Whatever comes next will offer a compelling, differentiated audience.

"Digital news skills" are listed as blogging, twitter, Facebook and putting video on the web. Honestly, if you're a journalist and you can't do any of those things, I would argue you really have no business being in the profession in the first place. And I'm 53 years old. Starting a blog is hardly rocket science. Digital video? Hit record on your iPhone, plug it into your USB port, go to YouTube, upload. How hard can it be? Twitter? Please! Twitter is MADE for journalists, particularly headline writers.

Ali said it’s not enough to simply provide people with news — it has to be valuable or actionable information. It also helps if you can package multiple resources together. In the travel industry, businesses are divided into areas like editorial (travel guides), transactional (booking flights and hotels), and organizational (plan your trip, track your flight). But there’s a fair amount of randomness that goes along with that. You may look up art museums through Frommers, find your flight through Hipmunk, and use GateGuru to navigate airports. “With Skift, on the business traveller side, we’re trying to take the randomness out of the equation and make a more directed way of delivering information,” he said.

The GIF, invented by CompuServe in 1987, has many advantages over video: It requires no Flash and works in any browser on any device. It is silent, and therefore viewable in environments where sound is not available or desirable (i.e., the office). It’s incredibly shareable, as any visit to Tumblr will attest. And, perhaps most interestingly, a GIF is harder to take down than, say, a YouTube video, where one DMCA notice or the whim of the uploader can turn a video into a black void. (Try to watch this hilarious, adorable, RIDICULOUS video of U.S. gymnast’s Aly Raisman’s parents on YouTube, and you’ll get the dreaded “This video has been removed by the user.” Gawker was able to snag the video in a different format.)

To get beyond the edges you have to go deep, very much like danah boyd has done with her work. The work danah has done is deeply helpful as it surfaces the difference in understanding across personality types, age ranges, and many cultural influences. She deeply understood the problem that most people on line (youth and adults) were not openly social as was (and sadly still is) the common assumptions of things to come. Privacy and small groups is much more common. Today we see Facebook privacy setting with 70% or more with “Friends Only” or tighter for sharing information ([Pew’s Privacy management on social media sites” report).

People have moved from finding information and media as being their biggest hurdle, to refinding things in "my collection" being the biggest problem. Managing what people come across and have access to (or had access to) again when they want it and need it is a large problem. In the "come to me" web there is a lot of filtering of information, as we have more avenues to receive information and media.

Their task is to manage a flow of information, yet they can seem quite inefficient at the task. Apart from the fact that many journalists tend to jealously guard their sources rather than share them across the newsroom, there are questions to be asked about how good journalists are at managing the data generated from the job they do. Do we destroy too much information after we write our piece or broadcast our interview? To what extent do we store and analyse the information we already have?

Print newsrooms have a habit of throwing out the raw material of journalism because the product – the article – is considered the ‘finished’ version. But when have newsrooms considered datamining primary source material collected as a standard process, which could produce more leads, more valuable intel and as a result, more stories? If you were designing a newsroom from the ground up, would it have at its core a database rather than a printing press?