Kathlyn Clore

I watched several top-notch golfers implode today, beaten up by unyielding greens and cliffside fairways at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

But while watching the final round of this major championship, as well as during the hours I spent at Pebble Beach helping with local newspaper coverage of the U.S. Open, I saw an unspoken storyline playing out.

And that’s the continued self-destruction of traditional media outlets.

Where to begin….

At home during today’s final round, I tuned into NBC’s coverage while keeping an eye on Twitter. I monitored the hashtags #usopen and #pebblebeach, as well as the commentary of a few sportswriters I follow via my own account. All afternoon, Twitterers bemoaned the wonky weird commentary of Johnny Miller, a former PGA great who is now synonymous with odd golf announcing. An AP writer picked up on one especially bizzare comment:

Did anyone at NBC respond to this and many other Tweets about the announcers’ odd deliveries? Did the broadcasters respond?

Of course not. Would it have been difficult to tune in to what their viewers were saying? No. Would it have been difficult to plan ahead and perhaps solicit and take questions from folks at home via Twitter? No.

Lest we get too down on the TV boys, a look at newspapers.

All week at the media tent, I felt somewhat in awe of the big-name newspaper guys. Most are old enough to be my dad (I say “dad” because there were something like 10 women in the media tent) and they work at big-brand papers: The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The New York Times. Heady stuff.

Mind-boggling, though, is that they’re all sitting next to each other, each writing slightly different versions of the same stories without realizing that portals like Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are aggregating all their work in the same place anyway. When are journalists going to realize that the only “on ramp” to their work isn’t their brand’s website or printed product?

I have no idea why they all didn’t talk to each other - especially newspapers who share owners - to determine who is writing what, and how not to overlap.

Oh yeah. And extra weird is that the paper dudes sit right next to the dudes from AP - who, by the way, work for a wire service nearly every other newspaper represented at the U.S. Open pays to provide copy.

And they’re all.writing.the.same.thing.

The night before the final round, nearly every outlet I named above carried stories on the following topics:

- Tiger Woods’ big jump up the leaderboard and his quest for a comeback

- Phil Mickelson’s implosion in Saturday’s round

- Dustin Johnson’s lead; the fact that he’s a two-time winner at the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Monterey

- The little-known Europeans in the hunt: McDowell and Havret

- Tom Watson playing all five U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach

….and aside from various notebook items, that about covers it. So, what’s the problem here?

Think Google.

Here’s the Google News page for Sports, as seen about two hours after Graeme McDowell laid up for par on 18 to become the first European in 40 years to win a U.S. Open:

You can see that the national papers trump regional content providers, which is somewhat of a shame in this case. Consider the case of Dustin Johnson, who had a horrible Sunday round after playing well all week and owning the lead going into the final round. He’s won the past two AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments; the regional media are quite familiar with him and prepared to write good stories about him. He comes from South Carolina; the reporters from that state probably also have a lot of local knowledge on him.

But because regional newspapers - like the Monterey County Herald and San Jose Mercury News - are typically part of newspaper chains whose owners reside states away, they’re not able to quickly adopt to new media … and consequently don’t do things that would bump them up in Google rankings.

For example, neither the Herald nor the Mercury News have a policy of including many (if any) outgoing links. Further, their archive systems are terrible; most stories expire in two weeks. so it’s not really worth linking back to them. This complete lack of participation in linking culture seriously hurts them when it comes to helping their copy stand out on Google or on Yahoo homepages.

Also, it’s just kind of sad that sports writers from different mediums don’t link to each other - especially when many are friends (as I saw this week). Why don’t newspaper and magazine writers link to each other, for example? Trust me, the staff writers for Golf World and Golf Digest and the rest were all online writing the same storylines as everybody else, but their writers will usually have additional time to write even longer features on the tournament. Wouldn’t it be nice if, via linking culture, newspapers like the Monterey Herald could make their readers aware of a golf magazine writer’s blog - where he will likely post his longer and more insightful or golf-specialized posts - and for the magazine writer to link back to the paper (because some of his readers could benefit from the quick-hit stuff that newspapers live off of?).

When Wikileaks unencrypted and published exclusive US military footage of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter gunning down 12 people in Baghdad – including two Reuters journalists – the organisation gained new viewers and international attention.

Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School, told The Independent:

“This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up. It’s not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it’s about immediately. It’s a whole new world of how stories get out.”

Wikileaks is a loosely connected group of tech-savvy editors, cryptologists and activists. It doesn’t have a headquarters or office.

But it manages to break major stories the mainstream press was unable to report. Reuters had been working for two years to access the Baghdad video through the Freedom of Information Act.

In less than a week, the 18-minute version of the black-and-white footage – to which Wikileaks added narrative text and subtitles – was watched 4.6 million times on YouTube.

A 40-minute, unedited version was viewed half a million times.

Those counts don’t include copies and versions shown by broadcasters like CNN.

What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks has been receiving and publishing leaked memos, reports, databases and briefings since 2006. It publishes explanatory press releases alongside the documents it receives from whistleblowers around the world.

Much of the information published by Wikileaks has resulted in front-page stories that lead to political or regulatory changes. These kinds of changes are the primary motivation of the site.

Wikileaks says it has published more than a million documents without revealing an anonymous source.

A few major Wikileaks scoops:

A report from the commodities company Trafigura about toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast. Wikileaks published the information after Trafigura successfully filed a “super-injunction” against The Guardian. This was lifted after Wikileaks published the documents.

The site published a membership list of the secretive British National Party. Policeman and other professionals are not allowed to join the far-right political group; a few of the members Wikileaks exposed were fired from their jobs as teachers, policemen and clergymen.

Operating manuals for the US prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay. These described prisoner intimidation tactics involving dogs and described hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross.

A list of websites blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

A recording of a top state official in Peru talking with a lobbyist about payments to help Discover Petroleum of Norway firm win contracts. Peru’s energy and mines minister resigned as a result of the story.

Internal documents from Kaupthing Bank, an Icelandic bank taken over by that government in 2009. The documents exposed large loans the bank made to its shareholders in the weeks prior to the financial crisis in Iceland.

Kaupthing Bank’s lawyers fought to keep the story off of RUV, the national public broadcaster in Iceland. They filed a successful injunction against RUV, but the news anchors mentioned the story on air – as well as the injunction – and referred viewers to Wikileaks for more information.

National outrage over the injunction sparked a movement called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). It is an ongoing attempt to craft media laws that would attract media businesses – particularly those with an investigative bent – to set up shop in Iceland.

Wikileaks has been recognised with awards like the 2008 Economist New Media Award and a 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award.

The “wiki” prefix rather reflects the concept guiding Wikileaks: For anyone to be able to upload and post sensitive documents – like the encrypted US Army video – without editorial interference.

There is no relationship between Wikipedia and Wikileaks.

Who is Wikileaks?
Journalists at Wired UK, Mother Jones and Al-Jazeera have written stories profiling the shadowy and small organisation.

All reach the same conclusion: There are more questions than answers about Wikileaks.

Two things about the people involved in creating and propagating the site are certainly true:

• They’d rather journalists didn’t bother profiling them. Rather, Wikileaks organisers seem to prefer that journalists focus their attention on materials leaked through their website.

  
  

• They’d rather not give out any information about themselves. This ethos evokes images of spies and so-called “hacktivists.” And of course, they refuse to give any information about their sources.

An Australian man named Julian Assange is the public face of Wikileaks. Little is known about Assange’s background, place of residency or daily whereabouts. His behaviour during one-on-one interviews with journalists has been described as erratic and slightly paranoid.

He has left comments on articles about Wikileaks in which he says the articles contain inaccurate or unfair information about the Wikileaks. But he does not typically respond to the resulting offers to provide more detailed information about his Wikileaks colleagues.

Assange did research for the 1997 book, Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.

The book profiles the lives of early Internet hackers. Some bloggers have speculated that Assange is himself one of the pseudonymous hackers profiled.

A podcast related to the book is available here.

Verifiable information about other Wikileaks contributors is difficult to find.

Conspiracy theories
Wikileaks is the kind of organisation about which it is easy to spin conspiracy theories:

• It regularly publishes sensitive information governments and big companies don’t want the public to see.




• Little is known about where its servers are – some reports say Sweden, others Iceland – although its main domain name is registered in California. It also has, though, mirror sites and country-specific domain names.




• While it is customary in Western journalism that whistleblowers remain anonymous, information is usually available about the journalists or media outlets who gather and publish scoops.

Some people have wondered if Wikileaks is a front for the CIA.

One of the sources cited by conspiracy theorists is John Young, an American who runs the website Cryptome. It has a mission identical to that of Wikileaks; it has posted around 54,000 documents

There is a connection between Young and Assange – the two corresponded at length in a series of e-mails Young posted on Cryptome – but the tone of their current relationship is not clear.

Young responded on his website to recent questions about his opinion regarding Wikileak’s potential CIA ties:

“Copying the behavior of spy agencies is exactly what they want in order to legitimate their criminal chicanery. Until Wikileaks becomes a fully open and accountable operation it is the same as the spy agencies and indeed helps legitimate their manipulation of public opinion on behalf of their self-promotion “in the public interest.”

Business models
In early 2009 Wikileaks suspended operations to focus on fundraising.

It took all its material offline – although distributed copies remain scattered around the Internet – and said it was focusing on meeting a fundraising goal of $600,000 with a minimum of $200,000.

Wikileaks quickly met its $200,000 goal.

The site says it accepts no government or corporate funding. It relies on private donations and pro-bono support from lawyers.

The staff who manage daily operations – which Assange has said is himself and four others – is not paid on a regular basis. As for keeping fed, Assange has said he “made money on the Internet.”

In 2008, Wikileaks experimented with auctioning exclusivity rights to thousands of e-mails between Hugo Chavez and his speechwriter (himself a former ambassador to Argentina).

The auction was logistically difficult to arrange and was the subject of more media coverage than the content of the e-mails. Wikileaks has not since attempted duplicate such a large-scale auction.

Three years ago, journalists were frantically reporting on a complex credit crisis they would eventually be critiqued for failing to predict.

Dutch reporters reported day and night on the “kreditkrisis.” Spaniards were busy covering the “crisis de crédito.” French speakers were abuzz about “pénurie de crédit.”

Changing vocabularies
Nomenclature for the crisis that burst on to front pages around the world in 2007 has evolved as the scope of the crisis itself developed.

As housing prices fell in the United States, the credit crisis began. Words like “subprime” and “adjustable rate mortgaged” danced across front pages.

As housing prices dropped and pink slips flew, we realized we were in a time of financial crisis. The European Central Bank and US Federal Reserve added billions of euro into the financial markets, prompting the need for many charts, graphs and explanatory stories.

We began talking about a economic crisis. Photos of Britons lined up outside Northern Rock ran across wire services everywhere. World leaders like Gordon Brown, George Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel kept op-ed writers in business with their support – or lack thereof – for national and international bailout schemes.

Employment data and a lack of consumer spending started to indicate we were in a recession, a tricky term economists like to argue about.

Later, it became the global recession.

In February, the Associated Press, a ubiquitous wire service that produces a style guide considered in the United States to be “the journalist’s bible,” went so far as to give the crisis its own title: the Great Recession.

A crisis by any other name
Many European publications and wire services have rejected the term.

“Let the historians, not the sub-editors, categorise major historical turning points,” Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of the EUObserver, said via e-mail.

Reto Gregori, chief of staff at of Bloomberg News, said journalists at Bloomberg are loath to use capital letters when it comes to characterising the economy.

“Historians and economists will determine whether the recession that started in December 2007 should be called the Great Recession,” Gregori said via e-mail. “At Bloomberg News, we’re sticking to ‘a recession’ at this point.”

Bloomberg News is a 20-year-old initiative of Bloomberg L.P., an American company data and software company well-known for the news terminals it sells to financial firms. It says about 350 newspapers and newsmagazines subscribe to its newswire.

Tim Quinson, executive editor of the Europe, Middle East and Africa bureau at Bloomberg, said Bloomberg may reconsider its position in the future. When doing so, it will take cues from academia.

“We have decided that we won’t change our wording until the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard University declares that the recession is over. Then analysts can review the landscape with more of historical perspective,” Quinson said via e-mail.

“Until then, we will call it a recession.”

Ditto at The Economist, the increasingly influential weekly newsmagazine from Westminster. It has gained in circulation in each of the last four years, unlike competitors like Forbes or Business Week.

Tom Standage, the business affairs editor at The Economist, said journalists there do not use the “Great Recession” unless quoting sources who use the term.

In the past, the Economist has tracked the use of the term “recession” in the business press.

“Typically we say “the recession” for the rich world and “the downturn” when talking about developing countries, many of which did not go into technical recession,” Standage said via e-mail.

The term “Global Recession” has been discussed in the newsroom and smaller meetings dedicated to updating the Economist’s in-house style guide, Standage said.

Generally, he said, it is disliked and not likely to find its way into the Economist’s style guide.

“We dislike jargon and other terms of art,” he said.

David Marsh, who edits the style guide at The Guardian, says the term “Great Recession” appeared in print 17 times in the past 12 months.

Guardian reporters included the term mainly when quoting sources and usually qualified it with a date range, “Great Recession of 2007-09.”

“The fact that it needs to be qualified by suggesting when it took place demonstrates, in my view, that it is not yet a widely accepted definition,” Marsh said in an e-mail.

Marsh said it is unlikely the term will be included in The Guardian’s style guide.

Nor will it crop up in style manuals at the Financial Times, executive editor Hugh Carnegy said.

Carnegy said he finds the term “rather portentous” and added that he prefers to let historians name the era.

“Once adopted, there is a danger it would proliferate in an irritating way,” he said in an e-mail. “In fact, thanks to the AP, it already has!”

Crafting constructs
Great Recession is an obvious throwback to Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted until the Second World War.

The term Great Depression was not used during those years, though. The then-president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, did use the phrase “a great depression” in speeches as early as 1930. But the term didn’t become popular right away.

It took until 1934, when a British economist Lionel Robbins published a book called The Great Depression, before a definite article and capital letters were added.

While most historians and stewards of journalistic style – including the Associated Press – readily use the phrase to describe what is widely accepted as the worst economic downturn of the last century, at least one is more cautious.

The Economist does not use the phrase Great Depression, preferring instead “the Depression.” The capital letter helps distinguish from other depressions.

“The lesson of history is that after the Great Depression, people found a new term for depressions (recessions),” Standage, at The Economist, said.

“Might the same happen again now? Will the Great Recession catch on, and subsequent recessions be referred to as downturns?”

Standage added that he hopes not; downturn is a euphemism used in countries suffering a recession.

In a January, 2008, column, the late linguist William Safire posited that the crisis would soon come to be characterized by a phrase starting with “the Great.” His column contemplated possible follow-on nouns like “Fall,” “Reckoning,” “Devaluation,” “Unwind” or, indeed, “Recession”.

Like the editors at The Economist, FT and Guardian, Safire warned against prematurely naming the era.

“…a national or global economy takes longer to sink deeply into recession. That’s why it is premature to settle on a word or phrase for whatever it is we’re going through today. An extended credit crunch or credit crisis? A “recession that would curl your hair,” in the Eisenhower-era phrase? Or just a run-of-the-mill recession, a mere “bump in the road,” the inexorable exhaling during the business cycle?”

Although the AP has taken a stand and assigned a special moniker to the era, it is quite evident that other editors are more cautious about using potentially inflammatory language to describe the crisis.

—
Flickr images from users alexthepink, Herschell Hershey, mike d’ leo

Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?

Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).

A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).

In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.

These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.

This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.

This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper

This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.

Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.

They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.

“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.

“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”

The remark came at the end of a post describing information flow within the community of bloggers concerned with the daily politics of the European Union.

One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. Frisch’s site is among them.

The team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.

“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.

“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.”

Bloggingportal.eu turned a year old in January, 2010. The number of blogs it aggregates and monitors has doubled since its launch.

“It somehow shows that we are growing although some blogs stopped posting regularly and it is difficult to filter them out,” Müllerleile said. “However, compared with national political blogopsheres the number is still tiny and I think we still have not reached a critical number of people who write regularly on EU/European affairs.”

Bloggingportal.eu launched on 25 January, 2009, the result of follow-up efforts to a pair of 2007 blog posts about the development of an EU blogosphere. In these, EU blogger Jon Worth attempted to categorise and characterise prominent EU blogs.

“The sheer number of links below means I never quite know where to start for good EU analysis on blogs – maybe time for some better aggregation somewhere?,” he wrote.

So began Bloggingportal.eu. It started as a collaboration between Worth, Müllerleile, and Norwegian media professional Bente Kalsnes. Stefan Happer donated programming expertise and the site initially aggregated about 275 blogs.

“We do not have any funding so we have been working on it in our free time which has been a challenge. We are still beta and we are trying to implement new features. And we are always looking for new people who want to get involved,” Müllerleile said.

The community of people who are interested in closely following the political machinery of the EU may be small, with many a student among the bunch.

But most EU bloggers are focused on moving beyond surface-level EU stories that appear in traditional national newspapers. Many of these stories contain inaccurate information, Müllerleile said. The EU blogosophere is a realm in which to suss and discuss errors made in mainstream press.

To those Europeans surfing happily outside the existing EU blogosphere, though, examining and debating the inner workings of the European Union is a fantastically dry proposition.

Curation – employing editors handpick the most noteworthy posts – is an attempt to make the EU blogosphere more accessible, personal and relevant.

“So many Europeans feel disconnected from European issues and bogged down by the complexity of the institution itself. Having an editor create a path through the information can be a definite bonus for those not already familiar with the topic,” said Ruth Spencer, an editor at Th!nk About It, a European blogging platform supported by the EJC.

This idea is captured in the logo of Bloggingportal; here the stars of the European Union flag dance within what could appear to be a drop of water.

The drop represents the “pure essence” squeezed out of the EU blogosphere, Müllerleile said.

Will it catch on?

This may depend on the ability of writers, translators (machine or human) and readers to break through language barriers.

At the moment, national communities in Europe do not interact much with one another online, a report by French research agency Linkfluence concluded in autumn, 2009. Most interactions and conversations happen within the respective national communities, the report said.

Conversations about how to best overcome this challenge are happening around the EU blogosphere. Models like Café Babel, which pays translators, and Global Voices, which uses volunteer translators, are often cited.

“Bloggingportal isn’t a content creator but an aggregator,” said Spencer, the Th!nk About It editor. “The best they can do is take as much as possible from all the EU languages.”

Müllerleile said Bloggingportal.eu initially tried translating posts using automatic machine translation, but were unsatisfied with the results.

“We are thinking of other solutions but nothing has emerged just yet,” he said.

It’s indeed a good challenge for Bloggingportal’s future years.

(This was originally published in my local newspaper, to which I contribute occasionally. It’s here.)

An autumn moon rises over the pink sunset on Monterey Bay as Kathleen Tarp calls out to the day’s final visitors at the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation Gallery. Constantly smiling, she chats up a middle-aged couple visiting from Ohio. On a wooden easel, a trumpeter wearing a purple beret plays colorful jazz against a previous Pacific coast sunset Tarp captured in vivid strokes of oil paint.

Tarp is one of 31 local artists who display and sell their work in the waterfront gallery at 425 Cannery Row.

“Artists and Cannery Row go together like Coke and pizza. We have a history of artists being here on the Row,” said Dick Crispo, the notable local artist who helped start the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation at a 1981 meeting in his living room.

Crispo looks on from a second-story window as Tarp locks up and descends into the night. His home, studio and personal gallery is next door to the collective’s gallery, which was his boyhood home.

“People come here looking for artists because they associate artists and writers with Cannery Row,” Crispo said.

Cannery Row was made famous in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same name. Even then, Steinbeck’s first-chapter descriptio of Monterey’s sardine-canning district reads like an elegy, as though he sensed the rowdy character of the place would disappear.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light . . . a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote.

Fish are no longer caught or canned here as they were then, when the smokestacks and corrugated metal of sardine canneries dominated the waterfront.

But the flavor of the Row as Steinbeck depicted it lives on in the vibrant characters making their living on this meandering street.

Among them are local businessmen braving the frigid business climate. There’s the local firefighter who opened a frozen yogurt shop in July. In the same month, a pair of brothers from Utah began selling gourmet sardines, bringing the oily fish back to the Row for the first time in 50 years. A family of Nepalese immigrants opened an import shop in September and a family of Thai-Americans began filling a tiny shop with startlingly uniform hand-knit hats in October.

The newcomers join the entrenched businesses that have thrived in the area for decades, including the Sardine Factory, the Whaling Station, the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, and the kitsch shops in the Bear Flag Building. The Intercontinental recently opened a waterfront resort known as The Clement. Mix in the franchise presence - Bubba Gump’s, El Torito, the Chart House and the Holiday Inn - and Cannary Row is a premier tourist destination.

But if there is a keystone of Cannery Row, a central focus to ensure enough business to ensure sales of the “catch of the day” remain high enough to pay the dishwasher, its the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The Aquarium, which marked its 25th anniversary on October 25, 2009, is today the main draw for visitors to Cannery Row. Aquarium officials estimate that in 2009 about 1.9 million visitors will enter and be inspired by the magical worlds of live kep forests, sea-horses, sea otters and jellyfish.

AGE OF AQUARIUM

“It really anchors one end of Cannery Row,” said Mimi Hahn, the aquarium’s director of marketing. “And in our surveys we see that people find our exhibits actually inspiring. … When you come to the aquarium, you’re seeing what’s right under the water.”

Nearly all the sea life available to watch or touch in the aquarium connects to the ecosystem of Monterey Bay itself. Some staff like to say a visit to the aquarium is akin to strolling through the underwater neighborhoods of Monterey, Hahn said.

In addition to enchanting exhibits like The Secret Life of Seahorses, a local ecological focus is part of how the aquarium creates a unique sense of place for its millions of visitors.

In 2006, aquarium staff began partnering with local restaurants to cultivate awareness in Cannery Row kitchens about sustainable seafood eating habits. Twenty-four restaurants participate in the free partnership, in which they are asked not to serve seafood that is on the aquarium’s “red list.” The partnership seeks to helps tourists and locals quickly implement consumer knowledge they glean at the aquarium.

“People who go to the aquarium are generally environmentally aware and they choose restaurants that are similarly motivated,” said Sheila Bowman, senior manager of outreach and education for the Seafood Watch program.

Many are also interested in cutting back on paper. In January, the program unveiled a free iPhone application version of its Seafood Watch card. The application displays three categories of seafood supper options: Green for best choice, yellow for good alternatives and red for seafood to avoid at the table.

“We like the overall idea that people could carry around their iphone and have better and more current information than someone who has a piece of paper,” Bowman said. “That way you don’t just read the list on paper. You can click through the list and read why you should be eating wild alaskan salmon.”

The app has been downloaded about 200,000 times.

Appropriately, sardines - the bread and butter of businessmen on the Row during the early 1900s - are on its list of best choices for seafood purchases on the West Coast. This is good news for Daren

Warnick, who opened the Cannery Row Sardine Company in July.

THEY’RE BACK: DOWN TO BUSINESS

“This area is missing sardines,” Warnick said. “I was walking to my car one day and jut thought, ‘Hey, sardines would work.’ With the history and tourism here, it just seemed to fit.”

Tucked next to the Fish Hopper restaurant, Warnick’s shop in July began selling boneless, skinless sardines for about $7 a can, in addition to other canned seafood. With his kitschy label on T-shirts and the sardines receiving good reviews among foodies, business is good, Warnick said. Whole Foods will also soon begin stocking Warnick’s sardines, which are fished from as far north as Washington.

Cannery Row Sardine Company is one of a spate of new businesses on Monterey with plans to become mainstays for locals and tourists. Another good bet is Myo, a self-serve frozen yogurt shop at 685 Cannery Row.

Stuart Roth, an outgoing Monterey native and career firefighter with the Monterey Fire Department, opened Myo in July with longtime buddy Paige Meyer and two additional business partners. The Row previously had no frozen yogurt shops.

Myo, for Make It Yourself, is sparklingly clean and blindingly colorful. It offers constantly changing flavors and types of frozen yogurt as well as toppings ranging from fruity pebbles to fresh fruit from Del Monte Produce.

“Cannery Row is just a magnificent spot,” he said. “It’s got everything, so much to offer. It’s a neat area, and for locals I think it is underutilized.”

Over at the Little Hat Shop, at 645 Cannery Row, Nicole Chalardpru and her family of Thai-Americans are knitting up hats in just about every color, texture and style imaginable.

Many are sized and themed for children, including a series of fruit-themed hats. Each is made by hand.

“You can’t just go anywhere and find these,” Chlardpru said. “It’s a unique product. We have fun making them. Once you start doing it, you just can’t stop.”

ARTISTS ABOUND

“I came here in 1974 for the Monterey Jazz Festival, and I thought, ‘This is where I want to get old,’” said Kathleen Tarp, a singer who has been painting for about seven years. “So I travelled all around the country doing the music thing and then came back here in 1999.”

Tarp is one of 31 artists who volunteer at the gallery one day a month so the collective can save on commission fees. Small oil, water color and mixed media prints sell for as little as $35; larger works cost more.

Tarp welcomes customers heartily, freely punctuating her remarks with an emphatic, “Right on!” She’s quick to get on the phone to other artists when customers have questions or requests for companion paintings. There is no trace of the snooty atmosphere often associated with art galleries.

“We’re artists, we don’t have any money either,” Tarp exclaims. “They’re always checking you out see if you have any money. And you know those salespeople don’t have a dime either!”

Just as much as smelly sardines, artists have always been a part of Cannery Row. In the late 60s, Crispo and other artists worked in the former Hovden Cannery, which they could rent collectively for $150 a month as long as they agreed not to damage any of the knotty pine or copper inside the former cannery.

That space is now the main entryway to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, constructed in the late 1970s with a $55 million gift from David and Lucile Packard.

I am in the middle of a tedious editing project.

Many documents have been poured over. Much has been learned - by me. Some phrases have been changed. Also, by me.

Hopefully, both products - me and the documents - have been improved.

A problem I’ve been mulling:

New terminology reflects a gradual shift in publicly accepted thinking and emerging realities. As Innovation Journalism playboy David Nordfors wrote in 2007, innovation requires new words (iPhone, smart phone, Twitter) and a public that can use those words in conversation.

Simultaneously, as we integrate new words the existing realities move toward becoming “old” and the terms we use to describe the existing reality become stale.

This is a problem for editors, who have to decide what phrases are passe, which represent commonly accepted vernacular, and what terms represent still-fringe nomenclature.

At the moment, it still seems acceptable for media workers and academics to use the terms:

New Media
Cross-Media
Cross-platform
Hybrid media
Online media
Internet media
Online Television

Which of these these terms fair and accurate? A bit passe, some of them, I have begun to think.

Here I begin to feel like a climate change scientist: Can I describe a particular time frame in which these terms will go bad? If so, how? (With a degree in linguistics?)

New media doesn’t particularly seem that new anymore; the term is particularly confounding because “old media” isn’t an apt characterization of anything, really. To deem “old media” and “print media” synonymous would be a cheat, inept.

I do like the phrase “legacy media brands”, I like how it hints at “the establishment”; those large branded chains that are slow to change.

Separately: In the face of: free papers, the free press and freesheets — what’s the most succinct term for papers that cost money? Paid-for papers?

Anyone?

Is the threat of climate change what legacy media brands needed to finally implement innovative new media strategies?

Starting with a syndicated editorial that ran in 56 newspapers, the international press have demonstrated far more collaborative spirit in coverage of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen than the politicians who have been sent to Denmark to take action.

The editorial, penned at The Guardian, notes:

“If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.”

In addition to 16 newspapers from Asia, 20 European countries ran the editorial. The 1,113 words - in English - of the editorial were translated into 20 languages.

Indeed, COP15 has been a boon for syndication, distributed coverage, interactivity and aggregation.

On Facebook, a group called The Climate Pool has become a second home for the content of 11 different news publishers, including: Agence France-Press, ANP (the Netherlands), APCom (Italy), RIA (Russia), dpa (Germany), Lusa (Portugal) and The Associated Press (United States).

The group accumulated more than 5,000 fans as of the start of COP15. Participating agencies have posted articles relating to Copenhagen coverage, opening these up for comments. The group also includes discussion forums, on which - impressively - journalists from The Climate Pool have engaged with other Facebook users.

According to its own press release, The Climate Pool was initiated by a global media network called MINDS International. Based in Germany, MINDS began its life as European Commission-funded project in 2004; it now operates with funding from its members.

The group represents a departure from the isolated positions of news agencies like the AP, which distribute content to paying members but act as vertical silos online, unwilling to share content. An executive from the AP told Journalism.co.uk that participating in The Climate Pool is an experimental project “to help the agency better understand what tools are best used for covering certain events and answer questions about social media newsgathering and distribution.”

For netizens who want to comment on COP15 proceedings as they happen, enter the OneClimate Channel.

Thanks to the free video-sharing platform Justin.TV, the is running an interactive livestream of the meetings in Denmark. Viewers are able to watch live meetings, in English, while discussing with other viewers in real time alongside the video.

Live broadcasts are available on the COP15 site itself, but the UN site does not offer viewers a chance to comment.

In between official briefings, interviewers from the OneClimate initiative host discussions on various climate change themes with other activists. These too are open for real-time reader comments.

The Channel, which is live during business hours, can be embedded across the Internet.

“OneClimate.net has always been in the business of producing free digital spaces and tools for amplifying the voices of thousands of climate action groups around the world,” a press release from the initiative said. “Its new interactive TV channel is based on the same philosophy.”

OneClimate is part a UK nonprofit called OneWorld Network, which began in 1995 and is now a distributed network of activist sites.

Finally, thematic blogging platforms like the EJC’s ThinkAboutIt campaign and Global Voices Online have been active for months.

Both offer netizens a portal to blogs of citizens from all over the world; they’re reliable sources for authentic voices speaking from countries like Brazil, India, the US and the EU27.

The question is: Will the politicians at Copenhagen listen?

New media strategies like syndication, distribution, aggregation, social networking, curated lists, real-time discussion and search do provide entry points for more voices. But is it all one big echo chamber?

Communications staff in charge of compiling media briefings for their respective politicians each day of the COP15 have no excuse not to have their hands full of material.

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to visit Lisbon for a lovely long holiday weekend.

Portugal is now home to one of the more interesting newspaper startups (yep, you saw me put those two words next to each other) I’ve read about, called i.

Peter Preston briefly profiled it in The Guardian at the start of October. The Editor’s Weblog, in Paris, profiled it last week and the NYT took note yesterday.

Here’s a video - with English subtitles - showing a “day in the life” of the staff at i:

What makes i an interesting product?

Its magazine-style layout, for one, with bold colors and lots of cutouts. It’s design is so nice, in fact, that the Society of News Design recognized it as the best designed newspaper in Spain and Portugal.

Second, its information architecture is radically different from that of a traditional serious daily. From the NYT:

“So i puts the op-ed pieces at the front of the paper. They are followed by political, business and other news stories — all jumbled together, rather than separated by subject. An article on a political scandal in Lisbon could appear alongside a piece on a Wall Street deal, for example.

The final section, called More, groups together entertainment, culture and sports news.

“We approached the design from the way the reader thinks, not the way editors think or the way newsrooms are organized,” Mr. Avillez Figueiredo said. He said research showed that readers paid little attention to distinctions between sections and simply looked for the most interesting headlines.”

I completely agree with Figueiredo’s perspective here: When I scroll through my RSS feeds, Twitter or even a destination site like NYT or WSJ, I am always looking for the most interesting headlines. Increasingly, this tendancy is starting to translate to how I read printed newspapers.

So far, circulation and subscription figures at i look good.

I know I’d love to read it.

I see no reason why this newsworthy and educational video segment, shown on ABC7 news in Washington, should spur the ire of anyone from angry parents to the FCC.

The news report, shown at the end of a national awareness month for breast cancer, depicts a victim of breast cancer giving herself a self-exam, with a doctor narrating and consulting. It is indeed slightly uncomfortable because of the personal subject matter. But it depicts what breasts in a way that must surely be easy for cancer sufferers to relate to: dealing with their breasts - so often seen by society as sex objects - as clinical objects to be poked and prodded by medical professionals.

I don’t know why some viewers want to pretend breasts and or cancer are not facts of life. But that’s what two Canadian women found earlier in October when a public service announcement video they produced to promote a charity event in Toronto called the BoobyBall that benefits breast cancer research.

As explained in this interview, the two women behind the ad and corresponding fundraiser are are marketing their efforts to young (attractive) philanthropists. Fair enough.

I liked very much this graf from a Newsweek article about the video:

“…Dennis Durbin, an associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, ‘While the ad does push the boundaries a bit for a serious subject, note that beautiful women displaying large breasts are used to advertise everything from beer to cars,’ he says. The ads are a welcome contrast both to traditional ads that use sex, like beer ads, and to traditional perceptions of women with breast cancer, who were once seen as diseased and unworthy.

‘This ad takes women’s breasts back from being an object to sell products to being a symbol of beauty and life, something worth protecting.’ ”