I’ve been tagged by Perkonis to list some of the magazines I read.

Before I do, a quick note (since these memes are funner with stories anyway).

When I first began my love affair with the idea of being a "journalist" it was because of magazines. I never thought I’d be doing the digital thing. But here I am (loving every minute of it).

At UC Berkeley I used to stop a specialty magazine store. I say "specialty because it didn’t just have your Maxim, GQ, Wired and staple nudie magazine.

This store had every magazine imaginable. Newspapers from all over the world, photo magazines, sport magazines (every sport), every major political weekly, zines and more. I would stop in regularly just to browse. When I moved to SF, I was lucky enough to live just around the corner from another specialty magazine shop. It wasn’t as big, but it was enough to give me the fix I needed.

And lucky for me, at Columbia there is yet another specialty magazines store (perhaps better than the one in Berkeley. It has every quarterly I could ever want.

So what do I read? Well, for the most part I read online. But when I do buy magazines they are:

Adbusters
Wired
The New Republic
BusinessWeek
The Economist (never overlook the economist)
and Pizza Magazine Quarterly

Okay — the last one was just a joke to make sure you were still paying attention. Plus, I love that there is a magazine for this (only a specialty magazine store would ever carry this one).

I tag: Paris Lemon and Eric Skiff

muuuuwwhahahhahahah

If a journalist is just a trafficker of information, then what is a social bookmarker?

Is socially bookmarking for sites like Digg, Netscape or Reddit an act of journalism?

As a “Top Digger” and a Netscape Navigator, still active on both sites and also a practicing freelance journalist — this is a question that crosses my mind regularly.

Let’s examine:

A journalist (professional or blogger) goes out in the world, gathers information. Distills and filters that information, boiling it down to the essentials. And finally, they present that data to the reader. In the past the presentation meant the artistic element of writing a story, maybe including a photograph. But on the Web this means taking into consideration design, reader interaction and new media elements (video, audio, flash etc).

The problem from the reader’s perspective: Even with Google there is just too much information out there. News organizations are fighting like hell for our attention — and we don’t want to waste our time trolling the major papers (the Post, The NY Times, the LA Times, etc,) to try and find the most informative and best presented story possible. We want that story to come to us.

Enter the freelance news recommender…..

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Tonight I met Adrian Holovalty, one of the younger innovative minds in journalism. I was familiar with his work and excited to hear him speak.

Lately in conversation with people I’ve been asking this question. "What is a journalist?"

I’ve formulated what I believe to be the short, to the point, answer, but it’s always a good conversation starter and interesting to hear other people’s first response.

I ask because I’m tired of the "citizen journalist," "blogger," "profesiona journalist," "coder/techie" distinction. We are all journalists.

Is there a new breed of journalist for the web? A Journerd?

I’ve boiled my answer down to one sentence, three words.

A "trafficker of information."

Journalists are in the information business. We traffic information. When information moved slowly, that meant putting it down on paper and sending it out through the mail. But information moves much faster. And a new-age journalist has to sift through a lot more — but their job is still fundamentally the same: People want the news fast, accurate and fair. So we gather, filter and present it.

During his talk, Adrian was speaking my language, from the second he called "reporting" "data," I knew I would  get something out being in his audience. He showed a traditional journalist doing this job in three phases: Gathering information. Distilling information and presentation. And then he showed the new media journalist — the hard core coder/journalist (which is still rare).

It’s the same process, using different methods.

At NewAssignment.Net I’ve learned a bit about the mindset needed to create the types of sites Adrian was showing. I understand how to manipulate a content management system and have even helped design one on Drupal (skin and all). But unfortunately I do not have the skill set (yet) to make one myself.

When I take the time to think about it — the future seems wide open. The evolution in the exchange of information is rapidly increasing, soon we will be walking upright.

Also in attendance was Jonathan Dube from CyberJournalist, whom I’ve been a fan of and will be working with Assignment Zero to get us more editors (thanks John).

Over at Assignment Zero my role has shifted recently. I handle most things on the back end, the site improvements that I spreadheaded are almost complete — and now I’m helping to set up other editors to take over specific topics. I admit I’ve been slow to blog recently, but I’ve been pretty slammed. Still, some of my favorite journalism bloggers somehow find time to do it every day. How, I don’t know. Nor can I promise I’m going to devote as much time to Digidave as I do to Assignment Zero right now. But it is something on the horizon — when things clear up, I intend to fully digest all that I’ve learned about what I sometimes call "punk rock journalism." For now, a quick teaser.

These editors responsibilities as I see them are different from a traditional journalist.

How do you do journalism in a networked age?

1. Set up shop

We are inviting people to come into a mutual space and work on a project together. That space has to be spruced up first. Put a welcome mate in front of the door and make sure to have appetizers out for the early guests.

2. Outreach

The idea behind networked journalism is that other people are already interested in the topic somewhere out there in the blogosphere. Smart mobs are already organized around niche blogs, they just don’t have a platform to collaborate. Hopefully by now you’ve set up shop. Now you need to ping them and let them know. If you are covering the environment, for example, lord knows how many environmental blogs are out there, waiting for the chance to contribute their time, information, expert knowledge of a subject to a greater cause. Outreach in this sense is more than just a newsroom opening up a comment thread to their stories. It’s actively seeking out contributors.

3. Working with Participants

Easier said than done. Journalists aren’t trained to necessarily engage or collaborate with other people on a project. Just as there is a gap in the number of journalists with online skills or management skills, being a journalist doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to engage, manager or communicate with volunteers. This is actually an important and subtle talent

4. Edit the Copy

Ahhh, a sigh of relief. We haven’t gotten to this stage in Assignment Zero, so I won’t know for sure. But since the final copy is produced by one person that works with a crowd of researchers, I imagine it will be somewhat similar to traditional editing of copy.

And that’s all I have time to spew out right now. More to come eventually.

On a side note: Don’t forget to check me out at Vibe Wire’s e-Festival of ideas. I’ll be on a virtual panel with……  Dan Gillmore!!!!  For those who don’t know me — I am a huge fan of Gillmore’s — and the only downside to being on the same panel as him: I won’t be able to quote him as I often do to explain what’s going on in citizen journalism. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to come up with my own brilliant tag lines over the weekend.

I had a great time at PodCamp NYC 2007. It’s nice to see an internet community come together in the flesh. One thing I know from having worked with people virtually for so long now, face-to-face meetings are invaluable.

And although I am still new to the community, I am beginning to recognize people by face and name — and I’m being recognized back. Which is a good feeling, much better than "link love," which only goes so far.

At the end of the conference, somewhat drunk with my friend Noel, who is also working on a NewAssignment.Net project, I began to look ahead. We tossed around ideas for a journalism unconference.

I’m hoping that in my spare time, with the helps of others, we could organize such a conference, which would be the physical manifestation of the pro-am model/community.It would truly be a coming of age for citizen journalists to organize a
conference and invite the main stream media to attend on their own
unstructured and constantly evolving turf.

Also on the horizon is my idea of the "open book." Tracing the philosophies of open source back through Western philosophical traditions. Although it has been on the back-burner for some time now, I have decided it is definitely a future goal. I will be helping Jeff Howe on his book about Crowdsourcing and I’m hoping at the end of it, I’ll be better equipped to write a book my own. If I could do this before 30, it will be a major victory in my life.

While a journalism unconference will probably come sooner than that, there is a strictly virtual conference directly ahead for me. Next week I’ll be a guest panelist at VibeWire.Net’s e-Festival of Ideas.

This is an electronic conference, almost the complete reversal of an unconference, where guest panelists/speakers commit themselves to answer questions in a forum for the week. Not only am I looking forward to answering questions from what I imagine will be mostly an Australian youth audience, but in seeing the drawbacks and advantages of a conference where nobody has to actually do any work to attend.

Wired News used to have an archive where all my little clips were kept safe and updated.

Sadly, that feature has been squashed. So I’ve collected all the links I could remember and put them here. I tried to put the most recent at the top. But they are not necessarily in chronological order.

I have also added links to all my Seed Magazine Stories — anticipating the day when they delete this feature on their site too.

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