The New Media Diva

There used to be a time when “breaking news” meant something was burning, a life was a stake or a Heisman Trophy winner was ridin dirty in a white Bronco.

Nowadays, it’s Bernanke saying that the economy “may ‘contract’ slightly” or the prez doing the NATO hustle and flow.

Is it just me or is something wrong with this picture? And don’t blame it on 9/11: Shoot, I remember going out on breaking news stories about dog bites.

Bites. Even nips. Nudges.

Not attacks.

I even remember some shops pulling out their BN banners for urgent Britney Spears information.

Since “breaking news” is being used for all types of stories, what should be used with something borderline or even, heaven forbid, 9/11-ish?

“We Really Mean It Breaking News?”

“Really Serious Breaking News?”

“Get The Hell Out Of Dodge Breaking News?”

“Fo Damn Sho Breaking News?”

Whoops. Just checked CNN. Naomi’s on the rampage.

How about “Hide Your Cellphones Breaking News?”

I was at war with myself over this post: Part of me wants to keep Monocle a secret; the other half wants to tell everyone about the mag so it can make enough to stick around.

In a time when it seems that quite a few mags are intent on dumbing themselves down, Monocle is a breath of stylish, witty fresh air. The mag, which is the brainchild of Tyler Brule, is a cross between Harper’s, Vanity Fair and the Financial Times, but better (if that can be possible). From its site: “Monocle is a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design.”

I think I picked up my first copy of Monocle at the Toronto airport on my way back from ONA 07. I was hellbent on not liking it, even before I opened the cover. I’d read wallpaper*, which was started by Monocle’s founder Tyler Brule, from time to time and found it to be sometimes too hip for its own good: The correspondents seemed to write as if everything was an inside joke only they had the punchline to.

Or maybe I was jealous that I didn’t glazed ebony bookshelves designed by some brooding Swede.

My snark-preparations were thrown off by an article on Abkhazia, “Breakaway state.” Besides my own shop, I had hardly seen anything in the mainstream press about the state, at least not in-depth I was hooked: I shelled out £75 for a subscription.

If it was just the reporting that mattered, I wouldn’t be as enamored with Monocle as I am: The photography is simple, yet breathtaking. If you get the chance, snag the November issue and check out the photo essay on Berlin’s Tempelhof airport.

Another plus, and you may think I’m being picky: the paper. The quality of the paper Monocle is printed on is the best I’ve found in a mag in a long time. I have no idea what brand of paper is used, but it’s a thick-weighted, uncoated matte. I love the feel of it, the solidness. (Note to The Economist: Sometimes your print bleeds and rubs off on my fingers. Just thought you should know.)

Something else I should mention: For the £75, not only do you get the mag, you get online access to videos that extend the hard copy stories. It’s fabulous blend of old and new media. One thing that stuck out though: There’s no two-way communication between the mag and the reader. No letters to the editor, no actual feedback venue on the site save for the contact page.

Granted, there is a tad bit of wallpaper* in Monocle: It’s very, very upmarket. But, if you can ignore the ooh-ahhs over items such as the Fuji Klasse W 35mm camera - which costs about US$800 - and focus on the actual reportage such as the article on Africans in China (both can be found in the latest edition), you’ll be impressed.

Via Editor’s Webblog:

Over at Online Journalism Blog Paul Bradshaw has listed ten ways OJ has changed over the past ten years. Bradshaw gives props to conversations between site authors and visitors (a la Cluetrain Manifesto), amateurs and A/V tools and their relatively low prices.

Bradshaw also highlights the importance of RSS feeds (I couldn’t agree more with this):

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader - and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper - or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

I know folks who don’t use RSS feeds. I don’t see how they can manage the web without them.

I’m still having a hellified time with del.icio.us’ daily blog posts. I have no idea why I keep getting the error message I described in this post. In any case, yet another mystery to solve.

On another note, I lemminged (is that a word?) and splurged on Moo cards. It was time for me to re-order personal business/calling cards and I couldn’t fathom shelling out my life savings over CHF200 yet again for plain white ones. My flickr photos are on one side, my contact info on the other. Very, very attention getting. Depending on the type of business you’re in (I wouldn’t recommend these for in “serious” trades such as banking or insurance) you may want to take a chance on Moo cards: they stand out, especially during conferences when folks are swapping contact info like mad.

Yet another note: I’m investigating the option of using Wordpress as a CMS for a couple of projects. There are some kick-$$ templates out there, but they’re pricey. Mimbo is an option though. I know it’s a lot to ask, but WP is such a wonderful product that it’s almost a shame that it hasn’t been CMSed already (perhaps it has and I just haven’t found the package). I’d thought about attempting to tweak it myself, that that would require time and patience…neither is in great supply for me right now.

By the way, I got a hold of danah boyd’s “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence.” Getting into it tonight.

Wired Mag has an article online about an estimated US$30 million effort at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology to literally piece together the work of East Germany’s Stasi. Researchers at the Institute are using digital methods to tape together the 5 percent of surveillance files ripped up by the Stasi during the fall of communism.

From the article:

“That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally “paper-wolves” and “rip-wolves,” German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

There’s no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.”

According to the article, Frauenhofer is using a system of scanners to “digitally tape together the torn fragments” from 400 bags. Each bag has about 40,000 fragments. The massiveness of the project equals the size of the Stasi’s surveillance program.

“As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic’s Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler’s Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.”

Via Instapundit. Image: jgaray/Wikipedia