So, what is Facebook Lite?

Depends on who you ask. Tech Crunch reports that it looks much like Twitter or FriendFeed:

Okay, while it seems that most of the users who are getting this message now are not seeing much different, earlier this week, it looks like a very select few may have gotten a sneak peak at Facebook Lite. According to their tweets on it, it appears to be a more Twitter-like. One user notes that it, “looks like a simplified version of twitter with comments enabled. On 2nd thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.”

That is of course very interesting since Facebook just bought FriendFeed for around $50 million yesterday.

Tech Crunch features this screen capture of Facebook Lite.

The Washington Post, however, says it ain’t Twitter-esque or FriendFeed-like:

But in reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed ? at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense.

Think about how slow Facebook is to load at times on some broadband connections here in the U.S., and just imagine what that much be like on connections that are several times slower. And then also consider that all of Facebook’s datacenters are here in the U.S. So for the data to get around the world, it creates an even longer natural load time. So Facebook is stripping the site back and allowing Facebook Lite to be a site where new users can quickly write on friend’s walls, send messages and build their social network. The basics.

As we said, it’s testing in India right now, but the plan is for Facebook Lite to hit places like Russia and China as well, we’re hearing.

Cross-posted from The Farm Report

I noticed it 30 years ago, when I began teaching. In my history class, students seemed to have little interest in the cast of characters until photography came along. Pictures changed the way we looked at history. We were never as interested in George Washington as were in Abraham Lincoln. It was because of those portraits of Lincoln, where we could look into his haunted eyes.

You can’t hide from pictures. The horrific video of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding out on a Tehran street not only makes the political upheaval in Iran more tangible, it also shows the power of new media. We don’t turn to television, toward any immaculately dressed network news anchor, to see these images. We click on YouTube and get handheld cell phone video from a helpless bystander.

The photographer was a doctor, not a journalist. But the new media have changed the way we regard journalism and changed the very nature of the game. That journalists are bitching about this is somewhat hypocritical. Journalists have always bowed and scraped before the gods of competition. We believe that competitive journalism is better journalism. And as newspapers folded or were gobbled up by chains, we lamented at the cost of competition. If you wanted to create a competitor in a one-newspaper town, you were out of luck unless you have a couple billion for start-up cash.

Now all it takes is a kid with a keyboard or a bystander with a cell phone. The citizen journalist is all around us. It’s taken us back to the days of colonial journalism in America when a kid with a printing press could make a difference. So why should we – i.e., journalists – bitch about this?

Because we can. As Morley Safer said this week, “I would trust a citizen journalist as much as I would trust a citizen surgeon.” Agreed, big guy.

There are still a number of questions to be raised about how new media have democratized journalism. I go into detail about this in my new piece for The Florida Engineer. In the piece, I chat with Tom Wolfe about his concerns about how new media and all of our cool new time-saving toys are eating all of the precious hours from our too-brief lives on this planet.

But if we raise issues about any of this, we’re put down as Luddite assholes for even asking questions. (Odd … that would seem to make them the small-minded ones.)

Certainly, information posted on The New York Times website carries with it the credibility of that magnificent franchise. Maybe JoeBobsDailyNews.com can’t complete with that. (Don’t Google that. To the best of my knowledge, there is no JoeBobsDailyNews.com.)

The arrogance of now – whatever generation sits in the throne room – is that what we have achieved is it. But we need to see that we are always in transition. The over-used buzz phrase on campuses these days is that “change is the only constant.” Like all clichés, it suffers from truth.

Newspapers and news organizations are evolving. The public now has tools to rival a reporter’s toys. We’re coming together and something new is emerging. It’s fun to watch and it’s scary. We teeter on the precipice of trivialization. If you don’t believe me, ponder the media attention this week given to Perez Hilton’s face cut and resulting rant.

Yet on the other side of the precipice is a new world order of information sharing. It continues to make this — despite the media saturation of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” — a fascinating time to be a media watcher.

Sometimes, my friends in the newspaper business tell me they’re baffled that our journalism enrollments are through the roof at the University of Florida. We are more than 100 students above our enrollment cap in journalism. Despite bad news in the news business, students still  line up to petition to get into our program.

“Don’t they read newspapers?” my friends ask. “Don’t they realize what’s happening to our business?”

Of course they do. But I have some good news.  The best of today’s students still have the same convictions about public service and the people’s right to know as any newspaper journalist. They are committed to strong and accurate storytelling.

They’re just not so sure that these functions require newsprint.

I tell my friends that today’s journalism students have “faith in the function, if not the form” of journalism. No matter how it’s delivered, there will always be a demand for news and information.

The News Media Guildi is protesting (and rightly) on behalf of its members at the AP because of new social media policies at the news organization that will now require reporters and editors to remove comments and other info on their Facebook pages that don’t meet AP standards.

From Editor & Publisher:

“It is making some people cringe,” said Kevin Keane, News Media Guild administrator. “It is not appropriate for a company that heralds free speech.”

Keane also objected to another portion of the new rules that states: “Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages.”

“You can’t tell people not to talk about anything internal to AP,” Keane said. “It is too broad. People have the right.”

Equally is its backwards policy on reporters using Twitter to communicate news. Here is both the Facebook and Twitter provisions from AP’s Q&A-format policy:

Q. Anything specific to Facebook?

It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted. Also, managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It’s fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses.

Q. How about Twitter?

We’re still the AP. Don’t report things or break news that we haven’t published, no matter the format, and that includes retweeting unconfirmed information not fit for AP’s wires. Feel free to link to AP material that has been published. It’s difficult for most people to link to AP Mobile stories right now, so link to member and customer sites instead and try to vary the links to spread the traffic around. It’s a good idea to reference the AP in the promo language, i.e. Just how much geek can be chic? Test your fashion IQ with this interactive game. Also, when tweeting, remember that’s there a big difference between providing an observation (”I nearly bumped into Chris Matthews outside Penn Station”) and an opinion (”I nearly bumped into the loudmouthed and obnoxious Chris Matthews”).

BTW, that’s not opinion about Matthews; he is an obnoxious loudmouth. That’s how he puts bread on his table.

EveryBlock cofounder Daniel X. O’Neil, speaking on the panel “Why the News Still Matters,” went this tweet one better. “I think there’s just a lot of real unnecessary negativism about journalism,” he told the 170 or so people in attendance. “Frankly, I think it’s going to be great. I swear to God we’ll look back ten years from now and we’ll all be making an insane amount of money and we’re going to look at each other and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, you were there that day! Remember, we all thought we were screwed?’ No, we’re not. Everything’s great. It’s literally impossible for the answer to the question ‘What happened?’ not to be valuable.”

Wow, the rosiest assessment ever. I believe I am going to be making an “insane amount of money” in 10 years. Just not in journalism.

And this assessment of Chicago news that is just as applicable in Tampa Bay:

When the future is fraught with uncertainty it helps to be young and brave and not afraid to starve. And something else might be essential. This sine qua non is naivete, a key ingredient of The New News: Journalism We Want and Need, a report commissioned by the Chicago Community Trust, just published by the Chicago Media Workshop, and distributed at the conference. It’s an earnest, ungainly attempt at a “snapshot” of online journalism in Chicago, and although the snapshot is fairly depressing the report doesn’t seem to notice this.

“Most of the online publications aren’t backed by an established organization,” it allows, “and function as a side project of an individual or group rather than a core mission.” Meanwhile, on the local MSM front: “It seems clear that there is less local news in our two leading newspapers today than there was 20 years ago.” Moreover, “Trends suggest online news publications are likely to supplement, not replace these news outlets.”

In other words, Chicago newspapers aren’t what they used to be, and online journalism is in no position to make up the difference. But onward and upward anyway. The report’s laced with gusts of ingenuous enthusiasm. For Charles Benton, CEO of the media-focused Benton Foundation, progress is a matter of journalists hooking up with their BFFs the politicians. “The question before us now, then, is, where do we want to end up?” he writes in The New News. “For it is through the far-seeing policy goals of the public sector that we can help guide the dynamic innovations and flexibility of the private sector.”

Four nonprofit groups devoted to investigative journalism will have their work distributed by The Associated Press, The A.P. will announce on Saturday, greatly expanding their potential audience and helping newspapers fill the gap left by their own shrinking resources.

Starting on July 1, the A.P. will deliver work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica to the 1,500 American newspapers that are A.P. members, which will be free to publish the material.

The A.P. called the arrangement a six-month experiment that could later be broadened to include other investigative nonprofits, and to serve its nonmember clients, which include broadcast and Internet outlets.

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Founder Roger Simon wrote this to them:

I wrote a letter to the Pajamas Media network bloggers yesterday, some of whom took it a bit more personally than intended. We disbanded the ad network part of our business for a simple reason: it was losing money and we couldn’t see how in the reasonable future that would change.

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. I might too. [What's their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.]

One blogger’s response.

Penelope Trunk delivered career advice on Yahoo Finance until two weeks ago, when Yahoo dropped her Brazen Careerist column. Trunk says Yahoo decided the column didn’t draw enough traffic to warrant the premium rates advertisers pay to be in its financial news package. So out she went.

Now, I have sympathy for a career columnist with career problems, but my concern here isn’t with whether she was handled fairly but with what her experience suggests about the direction that online journalism is heading.

That direction seems to be toward handing over tighter and much more precise influence over editorial content to the outside people who write the checks. If she’s right about the reasons for her dismissal, Trunk has become an early casualty of the new order of online news — calibrated journalism.

Under the new rules, the commercial value of specific editorial offerings is estimated with precision, rewards and punishments doled out accordingly, and coverage cut to fit.

His arguments are in the same ballpark as my controversial post last year about the non-wisdom of the crowds:

Even more troubling about the idea that customers should dictate the content of newspapers is that we get awfully close to the troubling concept of collective decision-making, or the “hive mind,” that is already alive on much of the Internet. Better journalism will not come about by a popular vote of the masses; they’ve already spoken along those regards and like Fox News and Entertainment Tonight more than they will ever like international affairs coverage. The collective will “vote” not to seek the truth but to seek a point of equilibrium — in other words, not choosing what is true but the slant on the facts that they can live with, akin to the online collective mind displayed in Wikipedia or digg.

So what does all this abstract theory have to do with daily newspapers? It leads publishers to abandon their mission and hand over control to the collective mob. Don’t get me wrong; I am all for opening up the newsroom to more transparency, including more and different voices, changing our focus from the pseudo-objective he said-she said dichotomy, getting more aggressive and courageous in speaking truth to power. I like bloggers; they add to the richness of the community and provide interesting new ways of framing arguments or discussions. And I’m not saying don’t listen to your audience, since your primary responsibility is to them as citizens of the democracy.

But journalism (the act of finding new information and presenting it in readable and prove-ably believable ways to consumers) is not compatible with a collective, which will seek to impose the tyranny of the lowest-common denominator. Good journalism needs individual perspectives, human decision-makers, a real name attached to it that consumers can hold accountable. Unfortunately, that idea is losing out to aggregators such as Google News (which makes news decisions based on an algorithm) and meta-aggregators such as digg or reddit, where the online collective decides what is news and what is not.

But the Atlantic’s Michael Hirschorn disagrees, as Wasserman points out, and implores editors to give the readers what they want. To demonstrate the gap between what those editors think is the most important news and what readers think, Hirschorn looked at daily newspapers’ front pages and the corresponding “Most E-Mailed” stories list on their websites on those same days:

In my own attempt to formulate a reader-response theory, I reviewed a week’s worth of front pages of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times in September and compared them with each day’s most–e-mailed list, which seemed more useful than the most-blogged list, because it factors out agenda-driven blogging.

I had expected the most–e-mailed results to track the lineups of the more baldly audience-focused TV newscasts, which have increasingly made a fetish of “news that matters to you,” and hence are packed with tedious features on your health, your real estate, your job, your children, and so forth. Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting. What they were not, generally, was important, at least not in the grand tectonic geopolitical sense.

Hirschorn then goes a step further in his logic, in a conclusion that is a must-read for any journalist who hopes to have a job in this industry in three years:

… [B]ased on my very unscientific analysis, what readers think is interesting and what editors think is important tends to overlap less than one-quarter of the time. This could simply mean that because hard news is ubiquitous or already on the front page, Web users assume their friends already know about it and don’t need an e-mail to bring it to their attention.

But wouldn’t readers forward anything they find interesting? My more sobering conclusion is that readers might no longer need newspapers for news. And by “news” I mean the traditional newspaper functions of reporting on congressional hearings, city-council meetings, sporting events, earnings reports, and so forth. This is now commodity information, available instantly and everywhere, thanks to the wires and more-specialized services. Even “scoops,” traditionally the gas that fuels the journos’ competitive fires, bring only bragging rights, since what’s in the morning’s newspaper has already been digested on the Web, the radio, and the morning TV shows, and has been deposited in your in-box before you can be bothered to pick up an actual newspaper.

Wasserman responds that such thinking is a dead-end for quality journalism:

… [C]hasing what’s interesting has always been a lot easier, and a lot more bankable, than pursuing what’s important. Big-city tabloids have done it for generations. So has local TV news: fast-paced, personality-driven, human-scale — and hollow to the core, a civic blight.

Civic blight is a great term for the end result of the media and political vapidity we see today in our nation. The rise of bloggers and the rebirth of civic activism is a welcome antidote to it, but I fear it might not be enough to overcome the impact of ratings-driven, corporate-profits-focused MSM.