While some in the media sphere are consumed by the desire to redesign the way news websites like the New York Times look, others are thinking about redesigning how we write about the news online — including Vadim Lavrusik, who handles journalism outreach for Facebook, and wrote a recent post for the Nieman Journalism Lab on the topic of redesigning the news story. But the reality is that these two things are closely connected: most news websites look the way they do because most news organizations still approach journalism in a fairly traditional way, and until that changes and media outlets embrace the idea of “news as a process,” the way that their websites look is unlikely to change.

That’s not to say that news sites like the New York Times haven’t made concessions to the real-time nature of news, or the fact that many stories no longer have a defined beginning or end — something Paul Ford wrote about for New York magazine recently, describing traditional media as the “epiphanator” because of its love of tidy endings. The NYT often posts stories that are time-stamped, so that readers can see when they were created, and on some of its blogs it occasionally posts updates that have time stamps on them as well, so that it’s obvious when new information was added.

The news, frozen in time

Those kinds of concessions are few and far between, however. In many cases, both on the web and in the NYT’s iPad app, the impression given is that the news displayed is frozen in time, a snapshot of reality taken at a particular moment — in some cases the previous day, and in other cases a time that is difficult to pin down. It’s not just the NYT, obviously: Other news outlets suffer from the same problem, in many cases because their publishing systems are set up to pump out newspapers, not websites. But it’s also a symptom of the way that many media outlets think about what they do.

Media analyst and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has written about the idea that the story format is an antiquated model that no longer serves the purposes that real-time and digital media require, and there is a lot of truth to that. My response to Jeff’s original piece — where I tried to defend the need for curation and analysis as well as real-time streaming of news — seemed to rub Jeff the wrong way, although I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. But how do we blend them together? How does the real-time nature of journalism and the explosion of sources change the way that news organizations publish?

In his Nieman Lab piece, Lavrusik talks about some of the elements that media companies need to consider when designing the future of the news story, including the need for context, which is what I was trying to get at in my response to Jarvis’ piece: it’s great that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio is curating thousands of tweets from the Middle East about the Arab Spring, and that one-man newswire is hugely informative — but how do we make sense of that for people who aren’t connected to Twitter all the time?

Curating the curator

Ideally, someone would have an army of reporter/editors “curating the curator,” by pulling together stories (or whatever we want to call them) from Carvin’s stream, or anyone else who is doing something similar. Storify and Storyful provide tools for doing this — something I’ve argued is becoming a crucial part of what journalists do in this real-time, digital age — but so far not many traditional news organizations have made use of these or any other similar tools. The New York Times and other newspapers have done their own live-blogging of news events, but it is still relatively rare.

Brian Stelter of the NYT provided a great example of how real-time journalism occurs when he used Twitter and Tumblr to report on the tornado in Missouri earlier this year. Not only did his use of those tools allow people to see what he was experiencing behind the scenes as he reported, but readers could effectively see the story taking shape in front of them as it occurred, instead of reading about it in pre-packaged story format later. But while the tweets and Tumblr posts and photos contributed to his eventual story, none of that content appeared on the NYT site while it was happening.

Why can’t we see the evolution of the story?

It’s great that the New York Times allowed Stelter to experiment with Tumblr in this way, but why couldn’t the paper make more use of that content somehow on its actual website? I don’t know exactly how it would do that — maybe a Twitter module that updates in real time, or an embedded Tumblr stream of some kind, or a Storify widget that some editor puts together based on Stelter’s output. On a related note, why has no one experimented with former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg’s idea of story versions, so readers can see which parts of a story have changed over time?

As Lavrusik notes in his piece, user contributions are another huge element of the news that few organizations are really taking advantage of. Many newspapers have the occasional feature where readers can contribute photos, and most have comments — but those comments are often hidden or dumped in a heap at the bottom of a post, where they seem like an afterthought. When everyone can be a publisher and anyone with a smartphone can function as a journalist, how do we incorporate that into the way a modern digital-news organization functions?

Maybe somewhere there is a newspaper or web designer who is thinking about a new kind of site that can incorporate these kind of real-time elements. I hope so, because the way that most news sites function has to change if it’s going to adapt to the way that the news works now — instead of trying to patch and tweak a decades-old publishing model. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more links about the evolution of the news story, Associated Press editor Jonathan Stray had a great roundup in a recent post.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Kevin Lim and jphilipg

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We often take for granted what Twitter and other social-media tools offer in terms of instant publishing, until someone live-tweets a historic event like the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound or a congressman torpedoes his political career with an ill-advised photo. In another example of the power of instantaneous publishing, a woman in Florida who was raped posted messages about her attacker and the incident to Twitter — raising questions about how the traditional media should handle such an event, and reinforcing how the way we consume news and information is changing.

The victim, whose name appears on her Twitter profile, posted a message about the attack within minutes of it happening, describing the man who raped her and the vehicle he was driving. She followed that up with several other tweets about her physical and mental state as a result of the attack. She even posted a message from the back of a police car as she was being taken to the hospital by the police. Eventually, the Florida authorities asked that she stop posting messages relating to the details of the actual crime, presumably because they might affect the investigation of it.

As Mallary Jean Tenore and Kelly McBride note in a piece at the Poynter Institute website, this kind of real-time reporting by someone involved in a potential news story can make things very complicated for the mainstream media. Should newspapers and wire services have used the woman’s name? Typically, those kinds of details aren’t released by the police and other agencies involved in a sex crime — but what if the victims release names themselves? The woman in this case has said several times on Twitter that she had no real expectation of privacy when she posted the messages, nor did she mind people writing about it (although she did ask later that the Poynter piece not use her full name).

Using Twitter during such a sensitive personal incident may look like just another example of social-media “oversharing,” but the victim said she specifically decided to continue talking about her rape despite the police request because she thought it might help other women who had also been involved in sex crimes. She also said many people contacted her saying they had been, but were afraid to talk about it (she also said that one of her main concerns about her name being used was that the reports would follow her whenever someone searched for her name in Google). She told Poynter:

Many of my close friends and I communicate via Twitter. It was a way to reach out quickly to a large number of people who had the potential to have information or the ability to help. People I have never spoken with before have sent their support via Twitter. I could not have gained that through any traditional means of communication.

In a media-related sense, this is another example of what programmer and media theorist Dave Winer has called “the sources going direct,” meaning that a potential source for a news story — someone directly involved in an incident, or someone with a newsworthy opinion about an event — publishes their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook or in a blog post, without waiting for a reporter to interview them. Billionaire Mark Cuban became well-known for doing this after interviews with journalists, posting his own thoughts and email responses as a way of setting the record straight. But Twitter allows anyone to publish while an event is occurring.

On the one hand, that can provide different viewpoints on a news event — including those of the victim or victims, those of the police (who have started to use social media for their own purposes), as well as bystanders and so on. While that can be valuable because readers no longer have to rely on a single “official” version of events, however, it can also be difficult to pull together all these different viewpoints and make sense of them (the BBC has been experimenting with new ways of showing a story with multiple conflicting viewpoints).

That’s one reason why I’ve argued that we need more people collecting and curating and making sense of these kinds of stories — whether they are professional journalists or amateurs, or even people who don’t see themselves as journalists at all. We need more ways of curating and making sense of real-time news now that it is coming at us from dozens or even hundreds of different directions.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

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“Investigators say they’ve never dealt with a naked man attacking a robot before.” So starts perhaps the most insane local news story we’ve ever heard. According to an ABC affiliate in Florida, a disgruntled man, sporting nothing more than his birthday suit and an AK-47, opened fire on a robot last week, after threatening to shoot himself and anyone who crossed the threshold of his home. The ,000 SWAT bot was sent in to investigate, and captured every inch of the man on video before being pumped full of bullets. Deputies say the man eventually surrendered fully-clothed and was taken for a mental evaluation. No word yet on when or if the footage will be released in a Robo COPS: Disrobed and Dangerous Special Edition. For now, you can check out video at the source link below.

Naked Florida man opens fire on SWAT bot with AK-47, no kidding originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let me catch you up. We received a tip back on Monday indicating that the Adamo XPS had disappeared from Dell.com. This of course caught our attention as the super-thin Dell was just announced back in late October and only available for purchase since December.

We of course checked it out and found that the XPS model wasn’t found on the Adamo microsite (www.AdamoByDell.Com), which just so happens to be the first site listed on Google for that model. The Adamo XPS also wasn’t listed alongside the other Adamo models or on Dell.com’s master notebook list that also includes Alienware models. The only way you can find it on Dell.com is if you use the search tool and even then the purchase link on the product page is dead.

We then reached out to our Dell contacts, but they didn’t respond in a timely manner. I then asked two separate Dell chat agents who both clearly stated that the Adamo XPS was discontinued. Satisfied with the conclusion that the XPS was in fact gone, I ran the post not thinking anything of it. It was just another news story to me. But not to dell apparently.

Several other sites ran similar stories on Monday except they simply asked the question whether or not the Adamo XPS was discontinued rather than stating my conclusion that it was dead. Throughout the day, these stories were updated, quoting an official dell spokesmen that stated that the model was in fact still around and not discontinued. Dell finally emailed us and commented on our story nearly six hours later.

The comment:

Hi Mark. I saw your article and thought I’d drop a quick comment to clarify the issue.

The first point I’d like to make is that the Adamo XPS is still available in the U.S. at select Best Buy Stores and on bestbuy.com, still starting at $1,999.00. It has not been “discontinued” as such, but was meant to be a proof point to Dell’s design and engineer capabilities. Because of this, it was similar to a “limited edition”, and most of the original supply has since been accounted for. Those who want one can still get it from the aforementioned sources.

Also of note: the original Adamo is still available on adamobydell.com with a starting price point of $999.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions

JohnBatDell

First, my name is Matt, not Mark. But that comment just confirmed my post. It states that most of the Adamo XPS’s limited supply have nearly been exhausted and the model is currently only available from Best Buy. Right? That’s what it says.

Ok, so maybe calling the Adamo XPS discontinued is a wrong choice of words, because apparently it was only intended to be a limited edition model anyway. But it’s a fact that the model has reached the end of its life and therefore deserves the R.I.P sentiment I gave it in the post’s picture.

This brings us to today as Gizmodo finally ran its Adamo XPS R.I.P. post. (they later pulled it from the front page) Dell quickly sent us an email asking when were we going to update our post because apparently we got it all wrong and Gizmodo ousted us as their source — even though they didn’t in the post, but I still love Rosa. Dell’s request didn’t sit very well with me so I pulled out my Sherlock Holmes pipe and went to work reconfirming my original post.

Once again I confirmed that the Adamo XPS is no longer on Dell.com. It’s still not listed as a current model or available to purchase. The only way you can pull up the model is still by searching for it. AdamoByDell.com, Adamo models, master list.

Then John Biggs and I both contacted Dell Chat Support and were told that the model was “discontinued” and “reached its end of life.” Check the gallery below for transcripts.

Fair enough, Dell told us that Best Buy still had it online and in stores so I checked that out, too. The only thing is we can’t find it in any store besides one in New Jersey. It’s not at any location in Detroit, Flint, San Francisco, SoCal, Denver, Phoenix, Philidelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, upstate New York, or New York City proving that it’s in very limited supply. Once again, check the pics below.

I then called my local Best Buy location where I was told that yes, I could still order it, but I better hurry because it was discontinued.

What it seems we have here is a company trying to save face. You see, the Adamo XPS only hit retail shelves back in December and people just started to get their hands on the product. Laptop Magazine posted their review of it the same day I wrote its obituary. It could be true that the Adamo XPS was just a limited-time product, but it was never marketed as such. Even if it was a Halo project of sorts, why remove nearly every instance from Dell.com and the Adamo microsite? It’s an amazing piece of modern technology that Dell should display for the whole world to see — even if it’s at the end of its intended life.

It’s true that you can still buy the Adamo XPS brand new in the box from a few retailers. It’s just like how you can still buy 2009 model year cars even though they are really discontinued. Except you don’t get a discount on the Adamo XPS.

And we have another ebook reader! This time around it’s the Que from Plastic Logic. Just because it’s not the Kindle or Nook, don’t write it off. This device, and the software it runs, might be special enough to make a mark in the ebook reader scene.

It’s not the hardware that’s unique — although it is nice and I’ll get to that in a bit — it’s the software that formats publications to the device while retaining the feel of the print version. Watch the video above to see a demo of USA Today. You’ll see that it looks and feels like the real thing. Headlines are up top along with buttons to different sections. It even embeds the news story’s image in a familiar fashion.

As for the hardware, it’s damn thin — like so thin breakage might be a concern. But the screen size is large enough that reading a newspaper or magazine article feels right. The USB port, SD card slot, and speaker are located on the bottom and are the only ports on the otherwise sleek device.

There is a bit of lag when navigating. Actually, it’s more than a bit, but that’s the norm in ebook readers right now. They are laggy, but that will likely improve.

Plastic Logic is targeting an April release with Barnes & Noble as the retail partner. The 4GB version will run $649 while the 8GB version with 3G will cost $799. Yeah, ouch.

Monocles are back, people! So says Fez from Ron and Fez, the Sirius XM radio program that spent a hot 10 minutes on this news story that says that monocles are back in fashion with young people. Time to get me some monocles!

Look at the evolution of eyeglasses: nowadays, you don’t even to wear ‘em. You can rock contacts, or, better yet, if you have money or a proper health care plan, you can get LASIK. But monocles? That’s a fashion statement right there.

Monocles are said to be coming back in order to tap into the old way of fashioneering. Why suffer with a pair of glasses that’s on your face every waking hour when you can pop on a monocle when you need it? Trying to read a street sign? Whip out the monocle. Want to look like a hipster in the back rock of class? Monocle, baby.

Another possible reason for the monocle comeback? Steampunk. Maybe people want to look like a Neo-Victorian gentleman strolling down Oxford Street?