WOW!

If you have an iPad, or if you know someone who has an iPad, download Flipboard as soon as you can to get an idea of what a fresh approach to web browsing – you remember browsing, don’t you? - looks like.

The developers call it “your personalized social magazine.” For once, the buzzwords are justified.

At its heart, it’s not all that unusual, taking automated feeds — topics you like, your Facebook news feed, your Twitter feed — and presenting them in an engaging and visually-pleasing way.

But therein lies the beauty of this app. Because, unlike, say, your usual Twitter feed, which is just 140ish characters and a link, Flipboard reaches into that link and presents the content that’s being linked to. If there is no link, the tweets are presented solo, as pithy pullquotes.

Some samples:

And, while this is primarily a browsing tool, you’re not locked out from the social web as you are in some of the toddling efforts from “magazine” magazines. You can comment on or like a Facebook post, reply to a tweet, etc.

To be sure, there are improvements that would be welcome. The ability to sync with Google Reader would be nice. Also, the app’s sudden popularity makes it non-responsive at times, according to the comments on its page. And, as this isn’t meant to be a full replacement for Facebook or Twitter, there’s no way (yet) to create new posts, only contribute to existing content.

I feel like I’ve finally seen something completely new and uniquely tuned to the pad-browsing environment in Flipboard.

UPDATE: The backstory, from ReadWriteWeb.

New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products

Shifting about in these language games, journalists have kept objectivity more or less the same over the years: a system of signs meant to persuade us to accept an account of what happened because it appears to contain only what happened and not what the composer of the account feels about it. That’s why you should trust it: because it appears unadorned. The way we capture this in popular culture is by reference to Joe Friday: “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

That’s not to say that an account presented this way actually is pure fact. No way. There is no act of journalism that is not saturated with judgment. Even a photograph is framed by the picture taker. When I refer to “Just the facts” I simply mean: that is how the story asks to be understood, not… “that is all there is to it.” There is always more to it.

In other words, the very act of reporting is an endless series of choices and value judgments. So, what to do? Rosen has five numbered idea bombs, meant to spark discussion, each considered and provocative. This is my favorite of the moment:

4. The View from Nowhere may be harder to trust than “here’s where I’m coming from.” Objectivity is often seen as safer by self-styled traditionalists in the mainstream press. But I like to put the accent on what’s tendentious about it. So I make use of my own term, the View from Nowhere, to describe the ritualized uses of objectivity and to suggest that there is something strained about them. Easing that strain is not impossible. It means shifting to a different rhetoric: “Here’s where I’m coming from,” sometimes called transparency. This is a different bid for trust. Instead of viewlessness, “You know where I stand; judge accordingly.”

As the right-leaning law professor, Knoxville homeowner and photo enthusiast Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit likes to say, you should read the whole thing.

Witness Talmadge Robinson said the duck boat was stopped in the river when the collision occurred. A nurse’s assistant, Robinson said he was sitting ashore when he saw the barge approaching the immobile vehicle. “There was a really loud bang. The thing was a sitting duck.” Robinson said he helped pull three children in life jackets out of the water.

To me, that’s just too on-the-nose to keep. Either it’s an unintentional slip, or the witness thought he was being Mister Clever. Either way, I’d strike it. You?

Producing the Cornell Daily Sun. Flickr photo, cc by foreverdigital

I’d missed this last week when it was first posted, so thanks to Towson University’s Stacey Spaulding for pointing out a short but convincing essay on why it makes a lot of sense for a college student to work on the university newspaper, even if a career in journalism is the furthest thing from her mind.

No other extra-curricular activity on campus is better for your career — no matter what that is — than the newspaper.

That’s because nothing else … is as complex and deadline-driven.

A Homecoming Committee chairwoman once protested to me, “We host a whole week of awesome and fun activities!”

“Yeah, but you have a whole year to organize it,” I replied. “The newspaper staff publishes a paper every week and updates a website every day — which is much more impressive to a potential employer than taking 11 months to organize a parade and a dance.”

As long as we’re defining “newspapers” as the paper and its digital editions, I think this is good advice.

Here’s a video of one editor as the print edition comes off the (still-proprietary) press:

It’s still very much an experiment. For instance, there’s the “Ben Franklin” edition of the Daily Saratogian’s web site, made in WordPress, and the “regular” edition, presumably built with an expensive, proprietary system. (Personally, I like the temporary version better – it’s much more readable without the usual newspaper-online blast of dozens of headlines on the home page.)

I gather that this will not immediately become business-as-usual at Journal Register, but I hope it informs some longer-term changes. Even better, I hope it strikes fear into the hearts of the sales staffs of the multi-million dollar publishing software suites that have been soaking a gullible less-than-opensource-savvy industry for years.

(Edited because “gullible” was a tad harsh.)

Photo by flickr user are you my rik?

Here we are in the great weekend marking the beginning of the 235th year since we gave notice to old King George. We celebrate July 4th — the instant of the camel’s back breaking, our collective Popeye moment —  but we neglect to mention the many years to come where the British, unsurprisingly, did not simply wish us well and hop onto the nearest eastward-sailing clipper ship.

We also tend to forget amid the fireworks and Bedding Barn sales that, 15 years after our first wobbly steps toward nationhood, we finally adopted a rulebook — the Constitution and its Amendments — the first of which guaranteed, famously, freedom of religion, freedom of gathering and petition, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.

Without those, this would be a very different place.

I’m thinking about this because of the calendar, of course, but also because I’m very close to returning to something I care about very much — journalism.

This time, though, I won’t be barking through a two-way radio at television news crews or working to convince newspapers that they’re no longer in the newspaper business. This time I’ll be joining a team at Aol’s Patch.com that has the simultaneously simple and audacious goal of helping towns and communities throughout the United States to learn more about themselves through the shared creation of local, community-driven news and information sites.

To transmogrify Professor Jay Rosen’s quote, this is the news formerly known as hyperlocal.

I say that because the news in my community isn’t weirdly small or odd or quirky. It’s not hyperlocal, despite what a hundred newsroom improvement committees said in the past five years. It’s just news. It’s what happened here, and it matters to me. It’s the topic that everybody’s talking about that somehow never makes it into The Sun. It’s the bike shop that opened and the restaurant that closed. It’s our elaborate system for shoveling the blizzard’s snow-heaps long before a city plow is rumored and it’s the kids cartoons projected through the shadows of lightning bugs onto a garage door on a steamy June evening.

Most of us live here, in a community. Whether it’s a town or a neighborhood or just a couple of blocks that don’t fit into the greater scope of the county’s Master Plan, this place is where we begin and end most of our days. We celebrate and we lament, festoon our homes with cardboard storks and greet out-of-state aunts at the door, come to mourn and remember with a folder of photos, a lasagna and a bottle of red wine.

Major metro newspapers have tried to get at this, with spotty success, as have weeklies (many owned by those same daily newspapers). Independent individual efforts have sprung up as well, many capturing the rhythms and news of a community with an attention to detail that the dailies and community weeklies miss.

But there’s never been an effort like Patch. On the network’s about page, the manifesto is clear: “We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.” There’s a full-time editor for each of the dozens of sites that have already launched, as well as a budget for freelancers. These sites are not merely aggregators of existing content, or blogs commenting on the comings and goings of their town. Each Patch site generates original reporting about its community every day. Each Patch site is a reliable source of news and information for a community about itself, and, increasingly, an online gathering point for ongoing discussion and community-created content, including news stories, announcements, photos and videos.

For years, when I worked in newspapers, I hoped that we could get there. In just a few weeks, I get to join the team at Patch and throw my shoulder into the best hope yet for unlocking the potential of true community journalism.

More news, as it happens.

Photo: CC from flickr user Lachlan Hardy

Remember recently how Alan Mutter warned that the business of local TV news — supported primarily by expensive advertising on its flagship news programs — was about to be newspapered? That is, to have its very business model rendered, eventually, moot?

Well, here are two more signs that the other shoe is dangling by the merest nanometer of fingernail for local TV news. The first sign is about as concrete as you can get and the other is informed speculation about what Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) may be up to in the TV space, as soon as this coming Monday.

First, the news, which, here in Baltimore at least, is not good for the news. David Zurawik reports in The Sun that viewership for 11 p.m. newscasts at the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates has plunged over the past five years in the key demographic of viewers 25 to 54 years of age:

• WBAL (NBC) down 62%
• WMAR (ABC) down 56%
• WJZ (CBS) down 52%

That’s right: The winner of that horserace lost only about half of its 11 p.m. audience.

The usual suspects are cited in the article: The Internet (correct – how much of the late news is actually news for people who are interested in the news?); Our Changing Lifestyles (if this is another word for choosing how to spend a half hour and finding the local tv news wanting, then correct); The arrival of the dreaded Nielsen People Meter (whining and misdirection — if the more accurate and precise tool shows a drop in audience, what does that say about those figures you reported for years using the less precise tool of a hand-completed diary?).

But, to me, the key here is that all of this plunge happened before the onslaught of hyperlocal competition from Aol’s Patch, Yahoo, Fwix and others just now threatening to wash away the footing from under local tv and newspapers. If the past five years have been interesting, the next five are starting to look, well, Biblical.

. . .

And now, the speculation, comma, informed division.

Remember Steve Jobs “hobby,” Apple TV? It was a set-top box released in 2006 and, largely, un-updated in any compelling sense since then. You can rent movies through it, watch video podcasts, show off your photos and watch YouTube videos. Not bad, but you can do a whole lot more with a Boxee box.

There’s currently a growing groundswell of informed speculation (which, in the Apple community, is often 2/5 wish-fulfillment and 3/5 tea-reading) that as soon as this coming week’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple will reveal a new approach to Apple TV that could very well shift the paradigm for how we “watch tv” in the same way that they changed how we listen to music when iTunes went from a hobby to a full-blown business.

And no one has done a better job of channeling that combination of dreamy-thinking and clue-sifting than Adam Lisagor, in his post titled iPad TV:

I’ve owned and used an Apple TV box for two years. When I found out it could be “opened up” to allow for additional media, it started to overtake my usage of my DVD player and my cable box. So if Apple TV has been, up to now, a hobby, I have been right there with it, a tinkering geek.

But would Steve keep a hobby around for so long without any real plans for it? … Now I’m not one to get all drooley over rumors (yes I am) but when Engadget broke news last week about the next version of the Apple TV box being 1) cheap ($99), 2) run on iPhone OS and 3) streaming-only, without internal storage, I got excited. There are pieces of this hobby that are starting to fit together, and once they do, the hobby will have matured into something important.

For one, what of the massive $1 billion data center Apple’s building in North Carolina? I’ll just echo what others have speculated: this will be where our video originates when we pluck it out of the sky and siphon it through all our devices (including the cheap, tiny new box that sits by the TV).

… It could even be that the Apple TV is the lynchpin of the whole operation, the way that iTunes started as a “hobby” that organized our music collection, and revealed itself to be a hub upon which more than one industry was redefined.

It could be argued that this could be actually good for local stations — allowing them to get their news video in front of even more people in non-traditional channels — but if they don’t think of a way to monetize that video, it’s not. Would you pay 99 cents for access to a video of aftermath of a car crash or a house fire? I’m guessing no.

The reason local television stations (and, under the same model, newspapers) could previously rake in all that advertising cash isn’t so much about the content, but about the content-aggregation. For one discrete half-hour a day, they could guarantee advertisers that a sizable percentage of the local population would tune in for the news/sports/weather bundle and, likely, see the ad in the bargain.

See above for why that’s already no longer working. If Apple and Google get serious about TV, it probably just adds to the pain for local TV stations.

Now this is really interesting.

For the first time that I can remember, the typical traffic burst pattern established for more than a decade on the Internet has flipped with the iPad: The spikes are coming on the weekend.

This bears further study, but this is an intriguing clue as to how those two million early iPad adopters are using their devices.

That means the sites – which are fine, focused products - could be passing up their greatest customer acquisition opportunity: their content itself. Non-members who reach a story page are greeted by a Times+ sign-up and login overlay, obscuring the article; there’s no taster, no excerpt and no way that anyone will find those articles via search sites.

In poker, they call that “all in.”

Alan Mutter has a message for local TV stations: What happened to newspapers is probably about to happen to you next.

Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch “Two and a Half Men,” audiences will fragment to the point that local broadcasters will not be able to attract large quantities of viewers for a particular program at a finite point in time.

This will shatter the mass-advertising model that has served local broadcasters so well since the advent of the medium that some stations in the best of times were able to pocket pre-tax profits as high as 50 cents for every dollar of advertising they sold. While profits nowadays are running at a more modest 20% to 30%, they are well ahead of the pre-tax earnings of such corporate behemoths as Wal-Mart and Exxon.

The challenge to the lucrative local broadcasting model will have a direct impact on the quality, such as it is, of local television news – the medium that approximately 70% of the population counts as its primary source for news. This is a matter of great concern, for which no clear solution is evident.

The quote comes from the first of two posts adapted from testimony Mutter is scheduled to present at a Media Ownership Workshop being conducted Friday by the Federal Communications Commission at Stanford University. Definitely worth reading.

Photo: Creative Commons licensed from flickr user Tjflex2.

In theory, I’m okay with Facebook being more open to the world. But that assumes that the people using it realize they’re likely talking in public, not just among their friends.

Thanks to openbook, you can now see how that’s working out, by searching Facebook statuses of lots of people – not just the people in your circle of friends.

The site defaults to a random-rotation of potentially embarrassing phrases (“don’t tell anyone,” “playing hooky,” “rectal exam”), but I’m sure you can come up with better on your own.

It’s hard to say what’s more mind-blowing: That they stream two billion videos a day, or that we got here in just five years.

Happy 5th Birthday to YouTube.