It’s because it’s time to fork this blog.

For good.

Last week I started a job with the federal government. I’m now a webbist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, part of a communications team devoted to food safety. I’ll be helping  use the web, social media and digital technologies to do public service. [See site links below.]

Which is to say: 2.Oh. . .Really. As in for real. As in practicing what I’ve preached. In public. Of, by and for the public.

[!]

Which brings us to this blog, the one that so recklessly–indeed without pity, temperance, empathy or foresight!--poked a stick in the eye of those who dared to blunder around with social media technologies to actually accomplish things.

[!]

Oh, it gets worse. The blog topics I’ve hurled tinfoil thunderbolts at create so many potential conflicts of interest the neck snaps:

The future of media, and the persistent misdeeds of legacy news companies? They cover food safety issues all the time. Tzzzztz!

Health 2.0, and the persistent misdeeds of those who seek to use digital technology to do. . .well, all kinds of stuff? Deeply involved with public health, federal agencies, private companies and political interests. Tzzzztz!

Web 2.0 technology generally, and the persistent misdeeds of those who are selling and evangelizing such technologies? My team will be using such technologies. We already are. Tzzzztz!

Government 2.0, and the federal agencies that. . .TZZZZT!

Politics 2.0, and . . . .TZZZZZZZTTTZZZ!!!!!!!!

I think you see what I’m up against. I’d rather stick a fork in this blog rather than a lobotomy needle in its brain. Or, far worse, compromise my ability to do the people’s work without fear or favor. I work for you now. You should demand I be independent and unentangled or tainted by even a perception of conflict of interest.

Oh, sure, I could reinvent myself as a private-citizen blogger.

Hey, maybe I’ll blog a moving personal memoir about a bright-eyed lad from Cleveland who came to Washington many years ago to pursue his destin–ZZZZZZZZZA, A-OOOH-GA! A-OOHH-GA!!!!!@#@#?! DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

No. Better to do the thinkable and retire from blogging.

[Brief pause to feign serious reflection.]

Yup, that’s my decision. Retire from blogging. And I’m stickin’ with it.

So: Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for commenting. And Retweeting. And saving to Delicious. Etc.

But mostly, thanks for reading.

I mean that.

Really.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Sites and tools my colleagues and I will have a hand in:

• Food Safety & Inspection Service agency site.
• Multi-agency consumer-oriented food safety site, foodsafety.gov, led by my friends at the Department at Health and Human Services. [Redesign/relaunch due soon.]
• Food Safety Working Group, reflecting the administration’s commitment to transparency and civic engagement in food supply safety.
• Multiple Twitter feeds, widgets, YouTube channels, etc.

The latest: The Washington Post’s “The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition),” an Outlook section essay by Post staff reporter Ian Shapira.

True, it’s shorter than my usual Print ‘n’ Read picks, only 1,918 words [11,317 characters, or 81 Tweets]. But it’s worth reading away from the link-spattered madness of the computer screen anyhow, for reasons that will become clear below. 

In the piece, Shapira writes about an article of his that was summarized, linked to and quoted by Gawker, the well-trafficked pop culture/gossip/media blog. He uses this incident as an object lesson in how new media  may be ripping off–perhaps killing–traditional journalism by essentially rewriting it for its own audience.

Shapira argues that the Gawker entry quotes his piece at too much length and with insufficiently prominent attribution. He may have a point on both counts.

“Fair use”–the exceptions to copyright law that allow writers to quote from or summarize a copyrighted work–has no specific legal definition. In the age of the Internet it’s a moving target, and clearly some news aggregation sites and blogs habitually cross over the fat grey blur separating fair comment from appropriation.

But even if Gawker had been more circumspect in its work, the broader issue Shapira raises–that the economics of legacy media are threatened by linking and derivative re-reporting of work done by costly professional news operations–misses a crucial point.

A mainstream news site like the Post’s derives A MAJORITY of its traffic from “the side door,” which is to say via search engines, news aggregators, Twitter, big portals like Yahoo or MSN, and other sites, like Gawker, that link to its content. Not a little of its traffic, or a supplement. MOST of its traffic. *

The idea that meaningful numbers of people wake up in the morning, snap on the ‘ol PC, crack their knuckles and “read” washingtonpost.com from its home page inward and linger there until sated is a fond memory dating from the days of the dial up connection and 13-inch monitors.

Today, news users start in other places and wind up at reading online news at CNN, USA Today, New York Times or other big media sites via links pointing to them elsewhere.

Today’s news consumers are browsers and nibblers of ecumenical tastes and little loyalty to anything other than what appeals to and appears to them at a particular mouseable moment in time. Sorry, Ye Big Media Brands with Finely Tended Gardens. Those gardens have not had walls for many years. The emperor hath no box hedges.

So: If a news site like the Post’s gets most of its traffic from links appearing on other sites, it already is generating meaningful revenue from those links. The thought that it monetizes traffic that comes only from the Post site itself is. . .kind of weird thinking. A page view that comes via Gawker, or this humble blog, or a Twittered short url is worth exactly as much as a page view from washingtonpost.com’s “Opinion” site.

[Whether the Post has learned to maximize the revenue it derives from those page views enough to cover salaries, benefits and nice downtown offices [it hasn't] is beside the point. It has no serious options other than to try.]

If it tries to require those who link to its stories to pay a fee, the links will go away. It will have far less traffic to monetize. And it will hardly slow erosion of its print subscription base, which used to be the anchor of its business but increasingly is becoming, well, the anchor of its business, in the sense that it is pulling it deeper underwater with irresistible weight to certain death.

Rebuild the walls around your content by charging people to visit or link to it and you risk becoming the North Korea of Media–isolated and backward, depriving your citizens of nourishment and the benefits of global connection. You become a digital Kim Jong Il, but without the crazy hair and nuclear weapons.

But back to my original point, about recommending this article as a Print ‘n’ Read. When you print out Shapira’s article, there is no advertisement on the printed page that hums out of your printer.

What a missed chance! A perfect opportunity to sell a bona-fide print advertisement! Now that’s a quality ad impression, as they say in the biz.

I propose a partnership: When I recommend Washington Post articles as Print ‘n’ Reads, we can do a revenue share.

But I’m not going to pay for the privilege of linking to it.

[Interest revealed: I'm a former Post editor, but I have no access to current site metrics. Until 2006 I did participate in several formal and informal discussions where these "side door" numbers were discussed by people with knowledge of them. If traffic patterns have changed, someone please drop me a quiet note. Same for other mainstream news sites.]

It represents a thorough re-thinking of what an “article” is.

Elsevier's Article of the Future

The press release details key features:

• A hierarchical presentation of text and figures - readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest.
• Bulleted article highlights and graphical abstract - readers can quickly gain an understanding of the paper’s main message and navigate directly to specific sub-sections of the results and figures.
• The graphical abstract encourages browsing, promotes interdisciplinary scholarship and helps readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests.

What’s significant here is the way the developers essentially started from scratch, with the needs of an online user in mind.

Yes, the core is essentially an old-school journal article.

But from the bulleted list of key findings on top, to the multiple points of entry based on different use cases and learning styles, to the hyperlinks galore, the developers have identified ways to make it work better in the form a vast majority of readers now encounter journal articles–online.

An irresistible question for students of mainstream media’s reluctant, stumbling transition to the web: [Please forgive my intemperate language and use of capital letters]

WHY IN HOT SCREAMING HELL HAVE MAINSTREAM NEWS PUBLISHERS NOT DEVELOPED AN “ARTICLE OF THE FUTURE” BASED ON USE WEB CASES LIKE THIS OVER, OH, I DON’T KNOW, THE LAST 15 YEARS OR SO?

Ahem. Thank you. I feel better now.

A video walkthrough of the Article of the Future, voiced in a wonderfully British manner, can be found on the press release page.

The half-day Washington meeting was held in response to two trends:

(1) the $40 billion [give or take] that will be spent over the next 10 years [give or take] to fund the medical system’s adoption of health information technology–electronic medical records, clinical care deliver systems and telemedicine, mostly.

(2) the increased use of social media in the worlds of health care and federal public-health agencies

The hoped-for outcome? To ensure the innovations in social media technology are integrated into all this spending and system reform–to keep the public involved with health care reform, essentially.

My role was to warm up the crowd. I did my best to convince them, essentially, that what they were gathering to do was very good and important. And also really, really hard.

For instance, while the use of social media to elect Barack Obama is always cited as evidence of the power of social media, frankly that may be easy compared to a lot of what people are hoping to use in health care.

Getting millions of people to go to a polling place on one specific day to pull a lever, touch a screen or mark a ballot using social media really isn’t all that complicated.

Using social media to get one obese 68-year-old man who lives alone to test his blood sugar three times a day for the rest of his life? Now that’s a social media challenge.

Anyway, the panels were full of people working on this stuff.

I learned the most from leaders of the federal government’s social media teams in the Health and Human Services sphere. The meeting drew the A-list. Here’s a quick run-down:

Andrew Wilson [@AndrewPWilson], head of Health and Human Services’ Center for New Media.

His main point: Now that some groups are using things like Twitter, blogs and widgets to respond to public health crises, it’s time to spread social media mojo across departments, agencies and the government.

He, like other federal web leaders, is also trying to figure out how to use these same tools to get meaningful input from the public without being overwhelmed by it–and to turn it into something valuable.

• Wilson invited input from the meeting’s audience to hear their ideas for how HHS can use social media in new ways.
• The agency recently signed an agreement with Facebook, allowing agencies to use the platform to do public outreach.

Sanjay Koyani, FDA Director of Web Communications

Koyani leads the FDA’s effort to reach the public with health alerts, including a recent social media campaign to get the word out about the recall of peanut products. The widget alone got 19 million page views and placement on 20,000 sites with very little promotion, he said.

• When the peanut product recall kicked in, he went to launch a Twitter profile–and learned for the first time that that agency already had one.
• The agency is providing webinar briefings for bloggers, to ensure that this group of increasingly influential web communicators is educated about the process, risk, science, etc.

Koyani’s presentation.

Erin Edgerton, M.A., CDC Senior Social Media Strategist

Edgerton leads, among other things, the CDC’s effort to use social media to respond to public health emergencies. She said her team’s role is to “invent ways” to get public health messages out. Check out this gallery showing the tools available for the H1N1 flu outbreak.

• CDC now offers e-cards you can send to loved ones reminding them to. . .wash their hands to avoid spreading the flu.
• The CDC’s main page is closing in on 1 billion [!] annual page views.

Edgerton’s presentation.

David Hale, @lostonroute66, NIH Information Specialist

Hale’s work blew me away. He leads the National Library of Medicine’s effort to do semantic and national language processing of Twitter traffic to sift out the noise and find evidence of emerging public health concerns. They’re also looking for trends in misinformation.

• He’s also leading something called Pillbox, a tool that would identify drugs based only on their physical appearance.

His presentation

WTF were they thinking?

Thanks to the Post’s “Shoptalk” employee newsletter [posted on an employee alumni website not affiliated with the Post] we now have some idea. In the June 16 edition, Charles Pelman, the staffer who organized the salons, was interviewed by Shoptalk staff about his new job.

This interview came long before the Post had to backtrack and aver they had no idea what was being said about the salons. If only we’d known. . ..

The “money” quote from the interview, as it were:

What goals have you set?

We’re thinking of doing eight to eleven salons, five to six day-long briefings and one major leadership summit per year. The salons are two-hour dinners with reporters, editors, policy makers, politicians, advocacy groups and other people who have a stake in a particular topic.

How will you measure success?

Profits. We want to drop some money to the bottom line. We want to be one of the engines of growth.

Well, there you have it. WTF?

Here’s TF.

I won’t belabor the issues many others have so thoroughly covered, including today’s  “apology” by publisher Katharine Weymouth, which feels a bit short of fulsome. 

Instead I want to point out something that’s gotten lost in the media frenzy: That the topic of the first “salon” [sorry, I find I have to use quotes when referring to that] was to have been health care reform.

As an independent journalist [among other things] and participant in the “health 2.0″ movement, I find this particularly distressing.

The fact that Weymouth and her team identified health care reform as the first ripe target for a scheme to bring together “the powerful few”: CEOs/lobbyists, “Congressional and Administration officials” and Washington Post health care reporting and editorial staff” demonstrates the peril faced by the group with the biggest stake in health care reform.

I refer, of course, to patients.

Significantly, Weymouth did not invite to her “salon” anybody living with a chronic disease, or someone who lost her health insurance when she lost her job, or anyone who has declared bankruptcy under the burden of paying for a loved one’s brain surgery.

Now I suppose the patient community could have raised $25,000 to sponsor the event and buy a seat at the table. [We could have all chipped in for some nice clothes and a haircut, so our rep could fit right in.]

Imagine how the conversation would have been different if that patient advocate had co-sponsored the meeting of members of Congress and Administration officials, to say nothing of the top leaders in the Washington Post newsroom!

A fatuous fantasy, I know, laughable on its face.

But it illustrates how once again that–despite what appear to be sincere efforts to introduce patient-centric healthcare reform by some members of Congress and the Administration–the very people who are the ultimate beneficiaries or victims of healthcare reform are offered no seat a the table.

Not even Katharine Weymouth’s dinner table.

Three weeks ago, a number of other “stakeholders” in healthcare reform created something called a Declaration of Health Data Rights, a statement that spells out what rights patients have to the electronic information about their care to be gathered as part of any healthcare reform plan. [Interest revealed: I signed onto it and agreed to blog on it as part of a publicity campaign.]

As I’ve argued before, things like the Declaration are necessary because patients don’t really have access to the process when the difficult, ethically complicated, legally messy and often sneaky and malicious work of making healthcare law takes place.

There are many reasons to be disgusted with the Washington Post’s salon misadventure.

The fact that it demonstrated a reflexive Washington habit of gathering an exclusive cabal of the most powerful and moneyed interests to discuss such an important issue may be the most disgusting of all.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Patients are going to have to force themselves into this debate against the resistance and indifference of the Washington establishment. Patients cannot afford the luxury of deference and e-mail.

And so I repeat the rallying cry: Patients: Aux barricades!

So I thought I’d check out the health reporters on Muckrack.com, a website that aggregates Tweets of our nation’s journalistic corps.

It can be fascinating to see what sort of brain-lint the media produce minute-by-minute on the world’s tiniest news platform.

As I began writing this entry, for instance, there were dozens of Tweets not so much reporting, but wondering aloud what was up with, the “fact” that Gov. Sarah Palin seemed to be resigning, or at least not running for re-election, or something.

It was an enlightening moment in journalistic pop anthropology. You could see the complex thoughts of inside-the-Beltway sophisticates taking shape right before your  eyes.

Tweeted Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post: “Something must be up, I guess. Kind of weird.“

Talk about your first rough draft of history.

The Health Journalist Twitterers

But anyway, I was there to check out the Health niche. The health reporting corps has not for the most part discovered Muckrack yet: Only 10 health reporters’ Tweetstreams were aggregated on the Muckrack’s Health page.

They comprised three Baltimore Sun reporters, two from the Chicago Tribune, and one from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. [All Tribune Co. properties]. Then there is one each from CNBC, CBS News, the Montreal Gazette, and the New York Times.

And how were they using social media? The mixed bag you might expect.

Journalists on Twitter: Seeking Sources, Thinking Out Loud, Promoting Self, Getting Personal

Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune, for instance, used Twitter to conduct some of source-fishing, cogitate about topics in her notebook, promote her own articles and, like all public-spirited Tweeters, reveal some personal information.

For health reporter Julie Deardorff, the professional is personal

In Deardorff’s case, at least, the personal was professional.

• On Thursday June 25 she reported that she “injured my intercostal muscles by coughing for a week straight.”
• Two days later she reported she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.
• And two days later she was back on the beat, trolling for sources to discuss the Nuval nutrition rating system.

Best-of-Class: Mike Huckman of CNBC

The most prolific health Twitterer on Muckrack–and, with over 3,000 followers, the most watched–is Mike Huckman, the pharma reporter for CNBC. Anybody interested in the bloodsport in the drug trade should follow Huckman’s sluice of reports, rulings, research and rumors about the companies that make America’s meds.

There is also insight into the life of a business journalist, such as this ripe observation about dealing with flacks. [Note the #prfail hashtag]:

mhuckman #prfail Just got call from PR person.I pick up phone,as always,”This is Mike.”They say,”Mike Huffman?”Pitching pvte co anyway,so 0 interest
a day ago by Mike Huckman, Pharmaceuticals Reporter, CNBC

Doctor!!!! Doctor!!!!!

CBS medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton Tweets about her comings and goings conducting interviews. Fairly routine stuff for journalistic Tweetle.

But for someone who is both a journalist and an M.D., she can be unusually enthusiastic. Within the stretch of 5 Tweets she managed to use 10 exclamation points. That may be a record of some sort.

New York Times and Twitter: Not a Healthy Situation

The smart set says that it’s poor form to use Twitter simply as a “push” device, as a tool to inflict yourself on the world. Everybody who participates in Twitter [it is said], even journalists, should expect to give more than they take, share tidbits with people who may appreciate them, develop relationships, etc. This is the spirit of the social web, it is said.

The biggest violator of this principle among the health reporting set on Muckrack is the estimable Tara Parker Pope, author of the New York Times’ Well health blog.

Her Tweetery consists almost entirely of two things: Links to her own blog entries and acolytic admirations of the fine work of her fellow Timesfolk. [i.e., "Interesting slide show on NyTimes Lens blog of homeless transgendered teens. http://bit.ly/14POwF"]

It’s true that Pope also gets personal; she Tweets about her preparation for the New York City Marathon.

taraparkerpope My 5.4 mi run tonight spent 630 calories according to http://www.gmap-pedometer.com . But now I’m 800 calories worth of hungry.
Tara Parker Pope, Well Columnist, New York Times

But that’s professional self-promotion too: Pope is the proprietor of RunWell, an online community for distance runners the Times launched recently.

Clearly Pope hasn’t gotten the Tweet about social media ethos. Another Twitter profile bears Pope’s name and likeness. nytimeswell is nothing but a botstream that’s triggered every time her blog updates.

All is not Well at the New York Times blog autofeed

Actually it’s triggered more often than that. Check out the series of simuTweets on celiac disease.

I found it peculiar that the New York Times was using Twitter is such a graceless manner compared to its peers.

The Times, after all, recently hired Jen Preston as its first Social Media Editor. Her task, presumably, would be to help staff make enlightened use of social web tools like Twitter.

So I clicked over to Preston’s feed in Muckrack to see how she is faring.

Not all that well, it turns out.

The Times’ social media doyenne hadn’t updated in about 3 weeks, and only three times since this one:

Working on response to 1,000 replies to last week’s question, how can @nytimes better use Twitter. MediaBistro conference later.
12:15 PM Jun 3rd from web

Michael Anderson's Resume: The Medium is the Message

Talk about the-medium-is-the-message. Marshal McLuhan should be thrumming happily in his grave like a turbine.

Note how this compares to the home page of reigning datavisualist demi-god Edward Tufte, whose bio appears about three screens down, stacked below several sedimentary layers of seminar promotion. Granted Tufte is a demi-god whose acolytes follow him around like Photoshop Deadheads, so doesn’t need to work that hard to sell himself. But still.

I often yammer about how infographics can convey more information–can tell a story–better than prose.

Compare Anderson’s self-presentation to a conventional resume’s gray blocks of letters that most of his peers depend on. It’s clear which document makes a better argument for hiring Michael Anderson.

Maybe before you hire Edward Tufte?

Update: I poked around Anderson’s site and found his old-school PDF resume. It sucks. Sucks wind. Hot, tornadic wind. Dude: What’s with the cursive font? Who the hell would hire you for an infographics job?