Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

Only six months to live! Big surprise for me...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:18:00 GMT

Well, I think I've held out longer than most... seven years in Internet time is pretty long! Since April 2002, this blog has been hosted on the "radio.weblogs.com" server run by Userland Software, the company that makes the blogging package "Radio Userland." The hosting has been included in the modest ($40) annual licensing fee for the software since 2002. Today I stumbled on the news that practice will end in December.

Too bad. I never did get around to memorizing the number in the address. I think 0106327, means that I was user number 6,327. Or maybe it was number 327? I seriously doubt that there were ever 106,327 of us, but maybe I underestimated the operation.

I had switched to Radio Userland from two no-charge-for-hosting blogs, because Radio gave me an automatic backup copy of the blog on my own computer, as well as the security that comes with knowing you're paying for something instead of trusting some dotcom startup's free-service business model. The other two blogs were done with Userland's other program, Manila, and with a system called Trellix -- and both of those blog servers have long since gone away. ("Free" services can be like that. But I hope no one at Google/Blogger is listening.)

Here's my first Radio post: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/2002/04/07.html

Heh... I see that back then I still treated "Web log" as two words some of the time, even referred to "logs" instead of "blogs." How quaint. That was even though I'd been playing with the blogger.com software since the previous December.

Blogging History
Radio Userland at that point was used by some of the top bloggers, including (of course) Dave Winer, who founded Userland. Others included a self-promoting former MTV dude named Adam Curry, as well as Robert Scoble (who worked for Userland before going to Microsoft), and Linux Journal's Cluetrain guru Doc Searls, and more. Unlike every other "blogging platform" I'd tried, Radio put the software on your local computer -- laptop or desktop -- not just out on a Web server someplace. Along with the security of having my own local copy, I liked to work on blog items offline on a laptop in those pre-wifi days. I'd do some writing at a coffeeshop, then connect the modem at home or plug in an office Ethernet and "publish" the blog contents to the server.

As an alternative to http://radio.weblogs.com, Userland also offered the option of using your own server, but I never bothered to make the switch, taking an "if it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it" approach even after I set up http://stepno.com as my static home page. Now I guess I'll figure out how to move the blog over there, at least for archival purposes. I might even use this transition as an excuse to install my own WordPress server, a good educational experience for me. We are using WordPress more and more here at Radford University, but I've never started from scratch. I've used three or four "hosted" WordPress accounts, including http://stepno.wordpress.com and http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stepno -- an experiment and a cobweb, respectively. Always time to learn new things... (For the past year I've been learning about Drupal to do http://www.radford.edu/comm )

In fact, the last time I flirted with the idea of hosting a blog server, it was a year or two before Radio Userland came along: I had licensed a copy of its parent system, Userland Frontier and Userland Manila, intending to host a site at Emerson College's Department of Journalism. But the technology folks across campus wouldn't let me run a server from our building, blaming the antiquated wiring. My office was once the servants' quarters on the fourth floor of a 90-year-old Beacon Street brownstone. When I moved out, Emerson sold the building. Today that floor is a $4 million condo. I suspect the wiring has been upgraded. As for the server, I had (more than) enough to handle with new courses to teach and a dissertation to finish, so I never pressed the issue.

It dawns on me that if Emerson had given me a chance to build that site, we would have beaten Harvard to the punch by a few years. Userland Manila and blogging came to Harvard when the Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society gave Dave Winer a fellowship in 2003, and he set up the original http://blogs.law.harvard.edu using Userland Manila. (A while after he left, the school migrated it to WordPress.)

Radio Userland and Dawn of Podcasting
Geeky digression: The name Radio is full of irony. Perhaps Userland called the program that because blogs are, in a way, a form of broadcasting -- but I don't think Userland actually had "audio programs" in mind, even though it turned out that Radio included the essential tools of what became "podcasting," the idea of sending radio-like programs over the Internet. Winer had built in to Userland Radio an RSS feed generator and an RSS aggregator (receiver)... and he had tweaked the RSS standard to allow "enclosed" media files.

At Harvard Winer started using that kind of "enclosure" feed with fellow Harvard blogger and NPR-veteran Christopher Lydon's recorded interviews. A few weeks later, Userland customer Adam Curry, across the Atlantic, hacked together an Applescript to lift Lydon's interviews out of his Radio folder and dump them into an iTunes folder for transfer to his iPod. A few weeks later, a journalist at The Guardian used the word "podcast" for the first time, describing the Lydon interviews.

(I set up a separate podcasting blog to give it a try myself, got it workign for a demo, but then let my "Podfolk" site become an intermittent music blog instead.)

Anyhow, I'm searching my mailbox for official word that the http://radio.weblogs.com service is closing. Maybe I missed it? Otherwise, I'm a bit annoyed that I haven't been told directly. Maybe something got lost in the mail? In any case, this morning I just stumbled on this notice at the company's home page:

Radio UserLand service closing
UserLand has decided to close the Radio UserLand and Salon Radio services as of December 31, 2009.
Please read the announcement for details of the closure.

Not the most "User-friendly" change of service procedure I've ever heard of. But the more detailed announcement does explain that I can still use the software to publish to my own server... For now, I'll be using my Blogger account until I figure out what to do with these archives.

See me there at http://boblog.blogspot.com

Suggestions? Comment below.

Summer reading: The save-journalism and save-newspapers debate

Sun, 31 May 2009 05:30:20 GMT

For summer catch-up reading: A collection of news and blog pieces on the "future of news" and "newspaper bailout" debates and related issues...

Don't let the title fool you... There's inspiration and a hint of optimism in Barbara Ehrenreich 2009 commencement address at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads

Next, from Jane Singer, in an AEJMC discussion of the future of journalism & mass communication: one blue-sky scenario of how the not-too-distant future might look for our graduates. (Updated link & info: Since my original post, Jane's essay has won an AEJMC prize.)

Senate hears a dim forecast for newspapers' future by Andrew Miga, AP, via Google

Save the separation of press and state, by David Carr, NY Times

In Congress, no love lost for newspapers, Dana Milbank column in Washington Post

Laws That Could Save Journalism by Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown in The Washington Post

"A Newspaper Bailout" by Adam Ross in the Post back in February, describing President Nicholas Sarkozy's plan to aid the French press.

They Pay for Cable, Music and Extra Bags. How about News? by Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango, NYTimes.

Sen. John Kerry's opening remarks as chairman of Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet's hearing on "The Future of Journalism." Also from hearing, Arianna Huffington's testimony.

Video and transcripts from the "Free Press Summit" sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

Duke University's non-profit media conference, including Penelope Muse Abernathy's paper, "A Nonprofit Model for The New York Times?" -- which inspired this follow-up in the New Yorker. And more about the conference at The Nonprofit Road.

"Life after newspapers," by Michael Kinsley.

"The American Press on Suicide Watch," by Frank Rich.

"State of the News Media 2009" C-Span interview with Tom Rosentiel, on annual report of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

"Do newspapers matter?" from the NYTimes economix blog, citing a Princeton study of the impact of the closing of The Cincinnati Post.

Meanwhile, see The newspaper crisis discussed at Princeton event, from NewJerseyNewsroom.com, a site founded when a bunch of journalists got together at a public library and decided to "create a news site -- unlike any other -- to address the growing journalism void."

"Clinging to a dead business model for dear life" and "The Biggest Threat to Newspapers is Newspapers" by Daily Kos

Scott Rosenberg, "How charging for articles could hobble the future of journalism."

"First, stop the lawyers," by Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine.

From the archives:

from "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" by Clay Shirky

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need."

from The Elite Newspaper of the Future by Philip Meyer, last fall in American Journalism Review.

The now-emeritus UNC professor suggests it's o.k. for newspapers to give up on "selling everything to everybody." Instead, he says they should focus on being trusted, responsible sources of evidence-based public affairs news and analysis, aimed at what the sociologists call "opinion leaders" -- what Phil calls "well-educated news junkies."

"The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web."

Soviet spy story footnotes chapter in 'best blogger' bio

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:21:41 GMT

In "Say It Ain't So, Izzy," the New Haven Independent's Paul Bass reviews a recent controversy over investigative journalist I. F. Stone's contacts with the Soviet Union... back when there was one. Apparently, Stone was someone the Soviet KGB talked to often enough in the 1930s to have a code name for him.

Bass's lead: "I.F. Stone, writer of truth to power, hero to generations of independent journalists... and Soviet agent?" The tale starts with a new Yale University Press book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, particularly a handful of pages about Stone, whose career Paul sums up neatly:

Few survivors of the great 20th century political wars have remained as revered as Stone. He was a dogged reporter, a culler of public documents, a courageous defier of McCarthyism. He wrote passionate editorials for the once-liberal New York Post. He was a mainstay of the great newspaper experiment of the century, PM. When McCarthy's crowd drove many liberal writers out of business or underground, Stone refused to buckle. He published his own sheet, I.F. Stone's Weekly. It became a legend that continues to inspire independent journalists, and now bloggers.

Bloggers? In fact, Dan Froomkin at Harvard's Nieman Foundation has called Stone the best blogger ever, even though Stone died a decade before the first blogs were blogged. See Froomkin's review of a different book All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. Also, here's an excerpt from that book: The importance of being Izzy and the death of dissent in journalism.

Marking the 2007 centennial of Stone's birth, Harvard's Nieman Foundation launched an I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, presenting the first one last October. I don't see anything on the Harvard site about a 2009 award, or responding to the Yale Press book about what Stone did or didn't say to KGB spies 70 years ago. I hope this doesn't turn into some kind of Yale-Harvard game, but if it does get people reading, thinking and talking, that's OK too.

Until I've read more, I'll agree with Eric Alterman's Daily Beast characterization to Stone's activities in the 1930s:

"A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, still-foolishly naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, looked away."

I.F. Stone led a long and productive life as a journalist, never disguised his left-leaning political sympathies, and inspired a generation of reporters to dig into public records, look for facts and contradictions, maintain their independence, and speak their minds. It would have been wonderful if he had also written an "apologia" for whatever dealings he had with the Soviets before World War II, or for not thoroughly denouncing the Soviet system before the mid-fifties, but I think his career is transparent enough. As the site for his (downloadable) collected writings says, "Izzy Stone was a reporter, a radical, an idealist, a scholar and, it is clear, a writer whose insights have more than stood the test of time." For even more his work, the entire run of I.F. Stone's Weekly is now online at http://www.ifstone.org