Cit Media

In this week’s cover story, Newsweek suggests replacing the term “Web 2.0″ with the more descriptive phrase “Living Web,” which refers to the dynamic quality of web content, the organic patterns of growth and expansion online, and the social interactions occurring everywhere.

Not only is the name “Living Web” more logical, but it makes sense to the vast majority of people who don’t know what “Web 2.0″ means. This piece provides a solid overview for those trying to understand what is happening on the web by defining concepts like “user-generated content” and “tagging” and explaining what sites like deli.cio.us and Flickr actually do.

I think the most important take-away from the article comes from a quote by Tim O’Reilly, who Newsweek describes as an “early promoter of the Web 2.0 idea,” in which O’Reilly says that “the central idea is harnessing collective intelligence.” (The established newsweekly boldly nods to, but does not dwell on those who “believe that an army of bloggers can provide an alternative to even the smartest journalists.”)

Ultimately, what writers Steven Levy and Brad Stone driving home is the fact that the future of the web, and virtually all of the economic and social opportunities it affords, is undeniably in “our” hands.

I wish I could have attended yesterday’s “Un-Conference” about the future of journalism in Philadelphia, where a bunch of great folks met to discuss how a great American city can have great American journalism in an era when newspapers are coming under attack as businesses and news “consumers” (precisely the wrong word, which is why I put it in quotes) are becoming part of an emergent conversation.

Congrats to Karl Martino of PhillyFuture.org and the others who put this together. They are helping to invent tomorrow.

UPDATED

The Commonwealth Club event is scheduled for Thursday evening, March 30, in San Jose. (Details here.) Howard Weaver, VP of News for McClatchy, which is buying (some of) Knight Ridder, is the latest panelist. Howard Weaver, who was scheduled to be a panelist, has pulled out, unfortunately, but it still should be an interesting conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are Newspapers Yesterday’s News? To remain competitive in the coming years, these scholars say, daily newspapers will have to strengthen their efforts to attract younger readers, make more imaginative use of the Internet, and develop stories, mostly local in nature, that better meet the needs of readers who have thousands of news and information sources at their fingertips.

There’s something facile about this analysis, though it makes many worthwhile points, because even the most dense people in the news business recognize the reality of the situation.

But the chief problem with this analysis is its apparent view that newspapers are telling stories to audiences, in whatever medium. There’s far too little recognition that the audience is part of the journalism process, or should be, in a world where newspapers’ most valuable roles may be as conveners of community conversations.

This is a huge leap for the industry. It’s fundamentally not in the DNA. It will be, or the papers won’t survive.

Salon: Washington Post on Domenech: “We did plenty of background checks”. Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, told Salon Friday that Post editors had thoroughly vetted young right-wing blogger Ben Domenech before they hired him to write for the site. He said editors saw no “red flags” that Domenech was a plagiarist. Domenech resigned from the Post site Friday after bloggers discovered that he’d copied entire passages from publications, including Salon and Rolling Stone, while he was working for his college newspaper. After he graduated, he wrote articles for the National Review Online and New York Press that also contained plagiarized passages.

Ouch all around…

You’ll find them — including instructions on what channel to set the TV (Fox News; you had to ask?) and what temperature to set in the room (apparently the veep and staff don’t know how to work the thermostat) — in Dick Cheney’s Suite Demands. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

The BBC’s Rhod Sharp points me to “Portrait of a flashover,” in which New Orleans resident Gibbons Burke, armed with a digital camera and sound instincts, covers a fire. Sample from the text:

It appears firefighters are in the house from what look to be flashlights shining in the window, but this is a reflection of lights from the fire truck. There are six fire trucks on the scene. At this point the men are fighting the fire is in the bathroom of the second story above the front door near the flames.

Something happens and the south wing of the home blows up - fire ignites the hot burning gases that must have been accumulating in the attic adjacent to the upper bathroom. Tongues of ignited hot gases spew out several feet from the eaves under the roof line…

As Rhod notes, “There’s not much out there that qualifies as citizen journalism if this doesn’t.”

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day.

And it’s the younger readers who’ve forsaken newspapers almost entirely.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is taking bids for the 12 Knight Ridder papers it’s dumping, um, divesting, in the buyout of the bigger chain.

Good news for citizen journalists everywhere: Jonathan Weber’s New West Network has raised equity financing to continue and expand one of the best initiatives of its kind. New West has more in common with traditional media than most citizen media, but it’s engaging the audience at several levels.

I’m going to look at ajaxWrite as soon as the company’s servers come up for air (they’re swamped at the moment). It’s a Web-based writing tool that emulates Microsoft Word, according to the site created by Michael Robertson and his team.

Sounds interesting, anyway…