More on-line news in Florida than ever

Here's a link to a good roundup in the St. Pete Times on the growth of on-line news sources in Florida. Interesting that the new one on the block is secretive about its financial backers but says its news will be "fair and balanced" and people are tired of negative stories. Gosh, wonder what could be happening there. Rupert, are you in this picture?

Thanks to the good guys at Progress Florida for pointing out this story. Progress Florida is mentioned in the article, too. You can sign up to get their daily roundup of what's going on around Florida and be as smart as your blogger.

Top 5 on-line journalism stories of the year, and Florida is in the mix

Here's one view of the top five on-line news accomplishments of 2009.



Check out the third entry, which includes a Tampa event in the string of tea parties that right-wing actors performed in.

Read about the list on Daily Kos.

How to be a reporter

The Florida Democratic Party annual conference takes place this weekend in Orlando, and your blogger is one of the presenters during Saturday's part of the program given over to the Florida Progressive Coalition.


Can't wait? Here are my notes and outlines on How To Be a Reporter. There will be even more on citizen journalism from other presenters.

The Problem

Here are two of many recent analyses (10/2009) of how the news media are in trouble and what might emerge:

·         http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/media Article in October Atlantic Monthly by Mark Bowden analyzing the political thuggery behind the Web-based attacks on Sonya Sotomayor, Van Jones, ACORN, etc.

·         http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091012/baker Oct. 12, 2009 The Nation “How to save the news.” William F. Baker argues for public money to back public broadcast outlets to create something like the BBC or state broadcasting in Germany and other countries. He has some favorite non-profits, www.propublica.org and www.undertoldstories.org among them.

You can step up for the thousands of vanished reporters

Are you nosy? Driven? Convinced? Like to write? Or take photos, video? You could be a reporter.

·         For advice, fire up the search engine to find tips and tutorials. The Society of Profesional Journalists www.spj.org will expose you to ethics, story-telling, citizen journalism. The AP association of managing editors www.apme.org will do the same. Note that dressing up as pimp and prostitute and carrying a hidden camera into ACORN offices is not considered ethical. Impersonation can be illegal, as can unannounced recording.  The hidden camera may have its uses but not in up-front reporting. Professionals (?) wear their company ID’s laminated around their necks.

·         Warning.  Reporting can be dangerous. Not as much as lumberjacking, but still … You need a thick skin. Sometimes a lawyer. This is where a big publishing company or news agency comes in handy – you have legal protection built in. The citizen reporter can turn to The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press www.rcfp.org and various Wiki sites to help understand issues such as libel and shield law.

 -30-

This is what I call health care. Thank you, Hampton Inn

This is a bittersweet story about taking care of people in a death watch. Thanks to the St. Petersburg Times for working up this touching story of kindness amid tragedy. It seems to have started with a clerk at Hampton Inn reading news online. Speaks well for us toiling in this virtual environment.

Technology Thursday. Stuff to blow minds

This blog doesn’t often devote itself to technology. I’m interested but way behind the times and figure anything I say would be old hat. Nonetheless …

Last night, thanks to a chance meeting the day before with Alex de Carvalho organized by tireless Obama campaigner Brad Schenck http://twitter.com/bradaschenck to toast the conversion of Arlen Specter, I went to a meeting of Refresh Miami and was plunged into a hundred people who are at a much higher level of Internet understanding than I am and for at least a while here I’m Tweeting and Facebooking at speed and ricocheting around cyberspace where new things reside and are announced.

Look at this: Something better than Google, and coming soon. It’s called Wolfram Alpha.

Now, I remember having had a change to invest in Google at the beginning and passing it up. Will the same thing happen with Wolfram Alpha? Yes, I had more money then.

A few clicks further, and I’ve been captured by yet another microblogging service that promises to hit close to home. Take a look at flaprogressives.com. Here’s a rundown by the creator of it all ( think), Dave Harper.

This could speed up our campaigning in ’10, which brings me back to earth.

UPDATE: Thanks to Alex and Twitter for letting me know about this link to a slide show of pix from the Refresh Miami event Wednesday night. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQ8lafzqc8

Your blogger can be seen in several pix wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt, with Flip camera in hand.

How busy are we? How bored are we?

Here’s a fascinating video about the explosion in information technology.



And the antidote from the New Yorker: Are we bored silly in our frenetic lives? The late novelist David Foster Wallace says yes. Is all that information not getting the job done? Warning: This is a long read, especially if you continue in the same issue of the magazine and read an exerpt.

They keep your content more or less indefinitely

Happened to stumble upon (hint?) news that Facebook's guru had sort of explained a revision of their terms of service. Since many of us blog-readers also prowl Facebook, I thought you'd like to read about it here. Click away.

A day later, an UPDATE: This turned out to be pretty controversial, and now there's talk of rescinding Facebook's new terms of service. A link to the Huffington Post writeup.

Get digitally close ... Republican thinker ... Afghanistan and Pakistan

It's Saturday 6 a.m. and I've finally finished reading last Sunday's NY Times magazine. There's a terrific recipe for duck breasts but first let me tip you to the three big articles. They will only take a week or so to read.

First, are you afraid of Facebook? Twitter? Read this and learn to be brave:
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You


The next is about Pakistan/Afghanstan. Do you think this is a simple problem? Read this article by Dexter Filkins and learn of the subterfuges and camouflage that extend from the Tribal Areas to the Rose Garden. Especially good if you've just read "The Way of the World" by Ron Suskind. This book became famous recently for the "forged letter" about Niger yellowcake and Mohammed Ata's purported training Baghdad but it's more about Pakistan. The author was practically there when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.

Next is the Republican view of why they're about to lose massively. David Frum outlines how they've neglected to help their fellow citizens and have created a society with increasing inequality. This is heartless stuff, so brace yourself.

Biden news in the middle of the night

My email inbox shows a Huffington Post urgent at 1:34 a.m. with an AP story reporting Joe Biden as the VP choice. I’m guessing that this broke up plans by the Obama campaign to make the announcement later at some civilized hour on the East coast.

My first awareness of the choice came at 3:08 a.m. when the iPhone on my bedside table vibrated with a text message. I was asleep but not in a deep cycle, and I heard the buzz. Reaching over and picking up the phone, I saw that Biden was the choice, and I noted the time. It was gratifying to have a political promise fulfilled – to make the announcement by text message. I know, the news media made their usual little scoops, beating the news by an hour or so and probably forcing an early announcement. This is how they train for the big stuff, like investigating official corruption. More power to them.

Now the first Obama-Biden rally is to be available for our watching in a new way, too – on the Internet, 3 p.m. Eastern, at www.barackObama.com.

Let’s all be there.

UPDATE: Well, I went to that website and, good thing I'd turned on C-Span, because otherwise I wouldn't have seen the speeches from Springfield. So, a political promise broken early in the Obama-Biden campaign. Nothing resembling live TV was available on the Obama website. I rambled over the Ustream.tv and found it there, but it was so scrambled by buffering delays that C-Span was the only solution.

Let it be noted, I'm still for Obama-Biden.

A Facebook development

This column in Saturday's Miami Herald is a good exposition of your need to get a Facebook account. If Marco Rubio and Beth Reinhard are on Facebook, what's your excuse?

And once you've signed up, check out the Miami-Dade Democrats on Facebook, and sign up for our Group, and become a fan of our Page. A little search will reveal all.

The Internet and the 2008 election: We're ahead

This report from Pew Research has been in the news today. Here's a link to a summary of the report, and therein is a link to the full text.

Boil it down and it says our side is ahead in use of online tools for campaigning. To keep it that way, all of us need to hone our skills. Try something new. Try something else. Talk to your friends about it and see what they do. Try another new thing.

Texting with Obama on the campaign trail

The small figures on the stage are Rep. Robert Wexler and Commissioner Stacy Ritter.

The parking lot at the Bank Atlantic arena in Sunrise was full to the brim when I arrived – late, having also heard Barack Obama’s earlier foreign policy speech in downtown Miami. Other late arrivals were still streaming in. The lobbies were busy with concessions but missing something, I thought: lots of desks where people could sign up to volunteer for and donate to the Obama campaign.

Inside, the seats were full almost to the rafters and a thousand or so standing people milled around the stage. It’s a great crowd, but a missed opportunity to sign up 10,000 people, I thought.

Sorry, Larry. That was the old way of doing a campaign. Here’s how they did it instead, no paper to get lost, no rustling up scores of tables and banners and a vast staff to collect the names and enter them in a database.

Before the presumptive nominee arrived, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler and Broward Commissioner Stacy Ritter warmed up the crowd, and Ritter, the chair of Obama’s campaign in Broward, got many in the crowd to volunteer without effort – the Web 2.0 way, the SMS way, via text messages.

“Everybody has a cell phone, right?” she cried.

“This is Florida, Broward, everybody has a cell phone, right?” she repeated. “Get it out. Text FL to 622-62.”

That’s how you volunteered: text FL to 622-62. Takes 20 seconds. I saw tons of people do it in the upper balcony where I sat, and they did it happily. A woman in front of me wasn’t yet a texter, so she had her husband do it on her mobile. And she laughed and enjoyed her enrollment in Obama’s volunteer corps.

That, to me, was the news of the event – something new. The speech was great, so was the one earlier to the Cuban American National Foundation in downtown Miami, but I had heard the ideas before. This smooth use of technology in front of 16,000 people (est. by the Sun-Sentinel) was confirmation of what we’re reading about the Obama campaign.

This has been in The Nation and also, more recently, in The Atlantic. We might have been more familiar with this if there had been a lot of campaigning in Florida, but no, we’re getting it late in the game. And it’s impressive.

Let me refer you to a summary in The Atlantic, June issue, where the author opines that Obama’s use of technology puts him in a league with other presidents who became powerful through new communications media. The examples were Andrew Jackson (improved printing presses and the use of the postal service), Abraham Lincoln (vigorous growth of newspapers), Franklin Roosevelt (radio chats), John Kennedy (television).

Now we’re in the Web age, and if we hadn’t had a Republican dolt for president for eight years (It’s on the internets, he ventured) we might be like some countries with a lot of public WiFI, or like Britain, with a Web address to petition the government.

“If Obama wins,” the article concludes, “and if he can harness the Web as a unifying force once the voting is done, he could be a powerful president indeed – the kind that might even deliver on some of the audacious promises that Obama the candidate has made.” It goes on to say that the Web could stall him, too, but I prefer to dwell on the delivering of audacious promises. Of which I heard plenty Friday in two speeches.

And by the way, Text FL to 622-62. And don’t forget to volunteer for your local Democratic Party, too.

Your TV Guide

Happened to discover: Live TV coverage of the Florida State Legislature, now in its annual session, is available on my neighborhood cable system, Atlantic Broadband. It’s Channel 78 here on the Beach. Sort of like C-span, one of my favorite TV channels. Schedule info is available on line: http://www.wfsu.org/tfc/index.html

Video of Joe Garcia's speech launching candidacy

Here's Joe Garcia's speech announcing his run for Congress in FL-25.

Check out JoeGarcia08.com

There's a website for Joe Garcia's campaign for congress in our 25th District. And Joe speaks there inviting your participation over the coming months.



And there's a button to click and contribute. Go and click it.

Next announcement may be on live TV

From the depths of the messy desk rose up the password to open the account at ustream.tv.

This is live streaming television, or do we call it video? You need a video camera and an internet connection, and you use that password to get into your account at ustream.tv, and right on the opening screen there’s a button that says Broadcast Now.

You also can just watch what people are putting on. Live, as I tried it, was the International Beatbox Battle Convention, and for a while I was one of 162 people watching around the world as people used their voices and a microphone to make every noise on earth. It helped to speak German, as Berlin was the venue. Another choice was a livecam of a litter of dachshund puppies. There were 476 live shows at that hour Friday evening.

But I digress.

Ustream.tv has been on this blog before, back in September or so when Sen. Chris
Dodd was here giving a news conference and it was being broadcast live via ustream.tv, and someone watching on the internet sent in a question via email. This is opening doors, or something.

Now if you look at ustream.tv’s home page, there’s a panel of highlights and in the middle a Jan. 29 broadcast announcing that the Republican national convention in Minneapolis will be broadcast live gavel to gavel on ustream.tv. The founder and CEO, Brad Hunstable, stresses that they’re open to all parties and candidates. Barack Obama has used it. John McCain, too. So look for an announcement here that we’ll promote our candidates and meetings whenever possible on live streaming video.

Darn, now the learning process begins.

First thing I learned was NOT to click on the panel with what might have been a Republican attack on Hillary Clinton. It froze my computer and made it emit a loud electronic alarm signal.

Florida Netroots in Wall St. Journal

We are getting a hint of national notice in the dinosaur media. Here's a link to an item in the Wall Street Journal featuring the blogosphere in New Hampsire.

We're advertising on line in the Miami Herald

As you save 35 cents by reading the Miami Herald on line, don't feel cheap. As of Friday, your generous donations to the Miami-Dade Democrats are helping pay for a raft of Internet advertising in the Herald.

We have officially endorsed three candidates for the Nov. 6 municipal elections, and the ads boost the party and the three candidates -- Marc Sarnoff for Miami City Commission, Jonah Wolfson for Miami Beach City Commission, and Amanda S. Garner for Homestead City Council.

UPDATE: Two more candidates now have our official endorsement: Fernando Alvarez, running for Hialeah City Council Group 1; and Darwin Brett Brown, running for Homestead City Council Seat 4.

And you'll see that if you click on the ads, it will take you to the form where you can make a donation, and fill up the treasury again.

Thank you in advance!

Virus, shmirus – let’s get together

Something odd hit my email inbox during the weekend. From someone whose name I barely knew came an email with a vast tower of addresses, followed by the single word test.

I looked at it and wondered why Rachael Lee Coleman, the managing editor of the Miami SunPost, would send me a test. I had had a few exchanges with her predecessor but no contact with Ms. Coleman.

My suspicious mind tossed up the concept of the dreaded virus. And life went on.

Monday morning my inboxes were starting to fill up faster than normal, and a lot of the incoming had that same vast tower of email addresses, followed by the single word test, and then one more single word: received.

It was looking more like a virus, I suspected. A few more emails down the pike, and I saw that others were suspecting virus and saying so. Still, it didn’t grow exponentially. My two computers and two email-account inboxes did not ex- or implode.

Coincidentally (as it happened), I was getting emails bounced back from an editor at the Miami Herald, and I suspected that the Herald’s meager servers might be glutted with zillions of those messages with vast towers of email addresses. I called the Herald’s local news desk – No, no advisories from our firewall people, she said. Guess it must be a concern for them.

I also asked the Associated Press if anything was up. Again, not a hint. Queries to several other people more i-intelligent than I also yielded nothing, and then in the afternoon it became clear:

Ms. Coleman sent this to the vast tower of addresses: “I apologize for the initial mass email. I did not send it – our computer guy was here fixing my computer over the weekend and inadvertently emailed everyone who had ever been emailed from this computer. As this is not a mailing list, please do not reply to these messages. I sincerely apologize for any problems this has caused.”

Then came another little rush of emails to all of us – now a community of hundreds of local people, as we could guess from the email addresses, hardly any of them clearly out of town.

Commented one Helen Hill to the community – and to Rachael Lee Coleman: “So you’ve got all of us – disparate people – linked only (by) a computer guy’s error, buzzing at the messages. Some are angry at the intrusion, others happily applaud the idea of turning lemons into lemonade with a new network!

“It’s the perfect parody of an online community site.

“Good work!”

Suzanne Valentine, with a dot-UK email address and maybe the most distant recipient, commented, “My particular favorite so far is Rachael’s apology about the email blast by way of an email blast – such irony.”

Humorist Buzz Fleischman, familiar to those of us who are addicted to WLRN, chirped in with a suggestion “to all my new friends.” His idea: “I think we should all get together and meet face to face. I will recognize you by the bulge caused by 250 or so business cards in your jacket pocket. Talk about networking.

“I guess this is an opportunity to ‘network’ so here’s my website.”

http://www.theradiobuzz.com

A philosophical note from Jonty Braun: “Many of the world’s greatest inventions were created by a harmless error. Nothing like a random event to make new friends and for shameless plugs. Thanks computer guy!”

Jonty also left a web address: “Check out www.karmicshopping.com perfect for your holiday shopping.”

In the spirit of things, I’m going to fire of a “reply to all” and lay my blog on them, too. Shameless plug.

Facebook group grows like topsy against Republican congressmen

They called it "South Floridians for New Leadership" and got it started on Facebook last week, Oct. 4. Its targets are the three Republican members of Congress in Miami-Dade County, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (FL-21) and Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25). Within a few hours it had more Facebook signups than its targets did, and now it's around 150. If you're on FaceBook, sign up and join. Otherwise, sign up for Facebook, and then join. Here's the link to the site.

Thanks to the students at Florida International University for starting the group.