The Politico newsroom inside News Channel 8

Every time that I step into a newsroom, I remember what it was like to live off of that electricity in the air when I was at NBC News.  It was the human buzz of stressful inquiry as events incessantly unfolded before our journalistic eyes.

We’ve come to believe that this buzz is much diminished in the waning days of traditional journalism.  But I’m seeing some signs of life as I travel around the northeast this month.

Local TV (Americans’ number source for news) has long been criticized for considering their web presence as an afterthought.  At Washington D.C.’s Newschannel 8, they’re launching a new website in June that will merge their cable news channel with their local station.  And rather than having TV feed the web, the station manager, Bill Lord, told me that the web will feed TV.  It will be text plus video plus citizen journalism all in one place,” he said.  They’ll also be hiring 100 local bloggers.  “We’re flipping the model.”

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After turning off all site comments on Tuesday, AOL-owned Engadget today flipped the comment switch back on, ending a two-day hiatus resulting from its editors seeing too many comments that were “mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations.”

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us. Read more…

MCDM Director Hanson Hosein and Ross Reynolds, an MCDMer and host of KUOW’s The Conversation, will discuss the future of communication and news during a Fireside Chat at the Sorrento Hotel on Monday, Aug. 17.

You can watch the video here.
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You know Twitter is a Hot Topic when the opinion of one 15-year-old British teen is presented by a U.S. bank as “fact” — and the MSM jumps all over it. Without caveats. Shame on you, Bloomberg, because as a wire service, you helped this story go viral.

Matthew Robson, I believe that the execs at Morgan Stanley used you as PR fodder. (Which succeeded, probably beyond the wildest dreams of their marketing/PR folks.) Enjoy your 15-minutes of fame!

In the “I can’t believe that they really said this” category (it may explain the sorry state of banking in the U.S.), Morgan Stanley execs reveal their total disconnect with reality: Read more…

Today, Peter Rojas and Ryan Block – the masterminds behind Engadget and Gizmodo – launched gdgt, “a place for you to engage with your devices and hang out with people who are as passionate about their gear as you are.”

gdgt appears to be a church for gadget geeks, so it’s no wonder why the site came to a halt due to traffic shortly after its launch this morning. As proven by the success of their previous personal technology news sites, the gadget audience is lively and loyal. Read more…

MCDM’s Kathy Gill talks with Tim Reha at the Seattle Wine Awards in early June. The UWMCDM new media team working the event — Annie, Filiz, Meg, Rubi — helped Washington wineries get started with their Twitter accounts and live-tweeted the event (with text and photos). Ladies, we could not have done it without you!

I feel like I’m living on the cusp of the world Orson Scott Card created with Ender’s Game, a world where anonymous internet posters Locke and Demosthenes shaped global public opinion. Today, public opinion is increasingly shaped by discourse on the Internet, although we don’t have two clear antagonists in the online public sphere. Case in point: Iran and Twitter.

But what, exactly, do we know about Twitter and the Iranian election?

We know that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have used Twitter as a platform to claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole last week’s election. We do not know if these claims are accurate, although the Guardian Council is investigating 646 poll complaints.

We know that Twitter has helped spread false information: that 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran (rather tens or hundreds of thousands, according to newspaper reports); that Mousavi was put under house arrest (he appeared at the protests); and that, last Saturday, the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid (not reported by any news organization although the committee is investigating hundreds of claims). Read more…

I watch amazed as the events in Iran unfold. Who knows how this will turn out. More often than not, the common people do not fair well when they stand opposed to a tyrannical regime but I have hope. The eyes of the world are upon them. My eyes are upon them. These are not my enemies. The people of Iran look all too human to me. They do not appear to be the ghastly nuclear bomb building “other”. When I see the pictures and look in their faces, I see my neighbors, my family. Their expressions of fear, hope, and defiance bind me to them. I am empathetic. I hope for their safety and well being. I yearn for their freedom. Read more…