I guess basically the lesson I learned was one that I applied in this wiki experiment, which is, ‘What the heck, try it!’
Michael Kinsley, 6/29/05 on Open Source
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Chris’s Billboard
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The new Internet verb is: to wiki. A cousin of: to Google. Or: to Yahoo. Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that’s written and edited by its millions of anonymous users around the world. But now you can get Wikinews or Wikibooks. There’s a Wikispecies out there, if you like. And then Michael Kinsley took over the Los Angeles Times editorial page and made a major cyber splash with the news a couple of weeks ago that the LA Times would publish “wikitorials,??? editorials that readers of every variety could rewrite. About a thousand readers contributed to a piece on Iraq called “War and Consequence.??? He was trying on one of the Internet’s newest collaborative tools, dressing up the page that could probably use the web’s saucy interactivity the most. For about two days the experiment worked, until vandals flooded it out with pornography. The paper removed the page and all traces of it from the Internet. You could say the joke was on old media but Michael Kinsley might still be the person to help them get relevant.
Michael Kinsley
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Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times, former editor of the New Republic and Harper’s, founded the online magazine Slate in 1995
[by ISDN from Los Angeles]
Jimbo Wales
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Internet entrepreneur and founder of Wikipedia
[by phone from France]
Kevin Willey
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Editorial page Editor for the Dallas Morning News
[by phone from Dallas, TX]
Regarding the LATimes story, don’t neglect the inspired thoughts of Brian Montopoli of CJR Daily– pretty sharp as well.
Hey, great catch. I would like to ask Mr. Kinsley why he hadn’t thought of calling it “shreditorial” or “pickypicktorial”? (or other mashup names)
And as I’ve spoken about with Brendan off-blog, there’s a lot of good tools that are out there, it’s just that “blog” and “wiki” have planted themselves in the public mind, and when the rubber hits the road, the blog and the wiki out of the box are not very fit for a lot of media uses. They’re good for specific things.
As for suggestions, I have a few to offer on constructive media. But don’t take my word for it– it’s only theory. Do watch some smaller experiments, such as the Spokane Spokesman-Review, which has asked five reader-bloggers to act as ombudsmen/newswatchers in the News is a Conversation feature. My almanac tells me that the S-R has a circulation of around 100,000, so anything done by a paper with ten times the size would have to scale appropriately.
Well, since you mention it Jon…
> the blog and the wiki out of the box are not very fit
> for a lot of media uses. They’re good for specific things.
Here at Open Source, the blog has been in “very beta” for quite a while now, and I expect some improvements are in the works. However, IMO, blog is not the right tool for the job. It’s time to move on to a full-fledged, old fashioned web page — one with a blog attached to it, of course, because blogs play a critical role in this endeavor. However, a blog format serves the general listening audience very poorly as a source of information about the show. I’m thinking along the lines of the old Connection website, where:
* the topics of that day’s show were quite clearly featured using a prominent and consistent format, frequently using supporting graphics.
* links to archives of past shows were readilly accessible and searchable.
* information was categorized, and presented as suited the topic on a page by page basis (archive access one way, discussion another, for example), rather than things simply lost in the “toilet-paper*” jumble of a chronological blog format.
Call it a portal to the show, if you will. I suppose you could accomplish the same thing with the current blog software, but it would take a lot more discipline.
Of course, I don’t doubt the possibility that a lot of this is already in the works. But as someone who wants to actively pitch in to “being a source” such improvements in the tools can’t come soon enough for my enthusiasim.
*NOTE: for the uninitiated, “toilet paper” refers to the presentation of information on a page in a way that requires a lot of vertical scrolling — it is not any sort of comment on the quality of the information here.
P.S. Sorry if this isn’t the right thread for my comments, but there’s no general feedback thread I’m aware of, so I took Jon’s opening for the tangent…
Amen to the reworking of the site. I have trouble finding things.
Things I recommend you highlight on the home page include:
1) links to the MP3 files to download
2) an entry point into a Suggestion Box
3) the entry point into a page of Calls to Action, where you ask for specific things to help prepare for future shows (suggested web sites, guests, tech tools, other resources)
Thanks.
Hi Ken Lac and avecfrites,
July 1 is the big day. Brendan has been working frantically behind the scenes to get ready for the new site launch. I think you’ll find that most of your good suggestions will have been addressed…and if not, there will be a clear place to post ongoing recommendations. The new site will indeed be a kind of “portal” that will make navigation much more straightforward; but it will retain lots of the best elements of the blog. Let us know what you think once the new site is up.
Katherine and Brendan: Grand! I knew you’d be on the case. I’ll keep my beans in the freezer until then. Sorry for hijacking the thread.
Back to original topic… I suspect the LAT Wiki problem falls in the “large corporate target wearing ‘kick me’ sign” department as much as anything.
Smaller-community or narrower topic discussions might attract less of that kind of thing. Either way it would be unlikely that a newspaper’s management would pay for a 24 hour staff of offensive-Wiki-postings monitors.
Here are a couple of ideas about online adjuncts to opinion pages. I’ll probably be listening to the show as a podcast, not live, so I won’t be able to phone in. But I’d be interested in Kinsley’s response:
Instead of writing traditional “print” editorials and posting them online, can you write editorials FOR the Web environment — embed links to internal or external sites, data or images that support the arguments in the editorial.
Similarly, you also might encourage a fact-checking forum (Wiki, moderated discussion, survey forms attached to editorial pages, whatever) — a bloglike place for the editor and readers to post and annotate links to online content that either supports or challenges the points made in the editorial… not just sites with conflicting opinions, but evidence.
That’s probably wishful thinking, but I’m imagining something like, “here’s /link/ what politician X said in January, and here /link/ is what he said in his op-ed; see the contradictions,” or “here are /link/ the official state budget figures from last year and /link/ this year’s proposal… notice the mayor’s brother-in-law’s name /link/ in paragraph six.”
(If official documents online were filled with paragraph-by-paragraph anchor tags, that would help a lot. Hmm. How is the Congressional Record set up? I’ll have to go look sometime.)
I’m intrigued by the idea of robustly-linked facts and arguments: “Look at this…” followed by, “Oh yeah, well look at /this/ instead…” Call it the Vannevar Bush Dueling Memex.
Whether people (myself included) would have time to read or write such a resource is another question.
cheers,
Bob
… Connecticut Yankee in Knoxville
Here is a Wiki page for editing a letter to the editors that will be contributed on Sunday.
And some links:
* Snapshot of the letter
* Kicking off the letter
* Wikitorial Fork
* Initial skepticism
My 3 Wikitorial suggestions:
* Establish a social contract
* Creative Commons licensing
* Require registration, ban images and build a community to moderate
My 3 techniques to enhance the editorial section of the LA Times:
* Let online readers vote on wikitorials to be printed
* Let online readers vote on the best blog post of the week (not on the Times’ site) to be printed
* Michael, think back to your debate team days. Get the UCLA debate team to host a community of debate and construct the right rules. The tools will follow.
Ross
Ross is a sharp guy, and I thank him for joining the conversation. The wiki-letter was an interesting experiment, though signing it “the community” is even a little more facetious than signing something “the editors.”
Ironically, it was Kinsley who said just a few months back, in response to a group letter spearheaded by Susan Estrich asking to hear more women’s voices on the editorial page: “We don’t run letters from 50 people…”
Of course, now we’re begging the question: are we just after another gimmickytutorial? Ross suggested “Let online readers vote on wikitorials to be printed.” But they could simply vote on the quality of the existing editorials– that would be a small step forward in the direction of constructive media.
Jon
ross, BobS, and JonGarfunkel — thanks for the links and great ideas.
One tool I would recommend is to use a Technorati-like service that shows who’s linking to the editorial (this in fact could be used until the wikitorials are “re-envisioned”), enabling readers to see what other people are saying about it without all the nasty site defacement.
P.S. I am a great fan of the show and the idea(l)s behind it. Go get ‘em.
Yes, that was the elephant on the room for this show. I was thinking of bringing this up, but, blah. I would have asked whether we should, when we design community software, try to strive for equal access. Would it be a great experiment if instead of 80/20 men/women it is 90/10?
But how is the model wrong? Is it editorials in general?
Sorry for the frequent posts, but no one else was around. It would be nice to have separate channels during a broadcast: one for new questions/comments to be raised on air; one for simple interjections, or background info.
Many people going to glance at this thread and say, “ack, too long!” or “too many posts by a few folks” and think it rather insular. There are ways to kill online discussions outside of conventional spam.
You know, although the web has been around for a decade. and internet technologies for many decades before that, there’s still something . .
. . . insanely great . . .
about being able to tune in to a radio show in Boston, and participate in the radioopensource community, while sitting in a room overlooking the ships in the Dublin Docklands.
Great show guys – keep it up – you’re inventing the future.
James (in Dublin Ireland, though could well be Timbuktu, Mali)
JamesFlynn yes I agree completely!
I love listening to faraway radio stations via the Internet.
One question I have is, only a few stations carry Radio Open Source over the air, and Open Source’s (ugh) “business model” is based on people giving contributions to those stations.
How can you contribute if you’re not nearby? It would be nice to have a PayPal tip jar and find some way to distribute the coffee money to the various stations that pay syndication fees (?) I have a feeling figuring out how to get a few bucks from ‘net listeners and not upset the applecart would be a horrible political yuckathon punctuated by explosions…
…but still. Maybe paypal donations would fill up a “virtual public radio station membership” created by many far flung listeners? And you’d just go through the list of stations from beginning to end, filling up the memberships $35 at a time and then start all over again at the top (sort of like the Dean Campaign’s bat, there could be a little icon showing Mary’s coffee mug filling up. Or even more satisfyingly, the boot on Brendan’s car being systematically destroyed as listeners donate).
It’s great to read a dispatch from Dublin! Welcome James.
In thinking about some of the exchanges last night (wikitorial) I came away about suprised about Chris’s fixation on bombast and dogmatic opinion being the base and history of editorials. I heard Chris and Keven (Dallas) leaning very much to the view that we reach truth through openness to other opinions and the development of thought pieces that reflect and incorporate these multiple views of the elephant… to wit Michael’s point about learning from the WSJ editorials! It suprised me about Chris because I thrill in the way he actually LISTENS to his guests and lets them speak. Its unique and one of the reasons his shows draw us like no others. The caller Christina touched a feeling I have heard frequently that the US is tiring of the shrill “my way or the highway” Jay Severin- style bloviators and in fact seek from editorialists a synthesis of perspectives that aims at truth rather than selective support of a pre-established position. I have heard that one leader once forced his advisors who disagreed to each present the points of the OTHER side, to the satisfaction of that other side! The result was mind-opening for the advisors and insightful for the leader making the decision. We need this synthesis and truth today. Only factual challenge will dethroned the right wing idiocy and narrowness that rules 51% of this country today.
Thanks.