Anthony De Rosa

On the surface, the story of a newspaper company during an age of digital revolution does not seem like the best candidate for a gripping drama. In the hands of Andrew Rossi and through the eyes of David Carr, Brian Stelter, Bruce Headlam, and Tim Arango there lies something akin to The Social Network for the news business, a movie uniquely capturing this moment in time.

There’s a scene midway through Page One when David Carr goes to meet the guys who run Vice, a brash and unvarnished multimedia content company that CNN just partnered with in an effort to court a younger demographic. “I don’t do corporate portraiture,” Carr tells them as they attempt to give him their pitch. Vice co-founder Shane Smith tries to make a case for why Vice is doing the job that the New York Times failed to do. “Everyone talked to me about cannibalism! That’s fucking crazy! So the actual — our audience goes, “That’s fucking insane, like, that’s nuts!” And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing, and I’m sitting there going like, “You know what? I’m not going to talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks me up.” Carr interrupts Smith for a history lesson “Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.”

That moment sort of crystallizes the two worlds that Carr and the Times now live in. Countless outlets like Vice and others were born in an age where virtually anyone can cobble together a place on the media landscape, but often with little regard for those who came before them. Some are outright contemptuous of the Times and newspapers in general, as a few attendees at SXSW, the annual Austin gathering of digerati expressed by a show of hands that they would not miss the Times if it ceased to exist.

Others, like Markos Moulitsas, are annoyed by the perceived authority that the Times has, citing Judy Miller’s blind acceptance of WMDs in the lead up to the war in Iraq as essentially being a stenographer for the Bush administration. The movie pulls no punches when it comes to the fiscal crisis at the Times and also the confidence crisis some had in their ability to provide the news, following the failings of Miller and Jayson Blair.

The fallout following their scandals coincides with the Times beginning to find its legs again, with the help of digital natives like Brian Stelter. Carr and Stelter come from different generations but they’re both digital hybrids — one adapted to the present who has became even more influential because of it; the other absorbed by the wisdom of the past who has became a force to be reckoned with.

Page One weaves together the day to day machinations of hunting down a story; misdeeds at the Tribune company being a particularly compelling one. Carr coaxes the truth out of sources in a vibrant and unexpectedly exciting way. Drama drips from the clouds of uncertainty during an uneasy moment in the paper’s history. A moment, the film admits, that seems like it has always existed. The numbers are more stark and the challengers more formidable than in previous eras where network news and radio grew as alternatives sources for information. Disruption has always been the norm, but the digital age brought the institution to a point where it was forced to stare into the abyss, consider its mortality and find a way to save its own life.

The movie does not have all the answers — we are all still trying to figure them out ourselves. It does, however, give pause to those who think the Times is replaceable.

There is much that we have gained in the last decade or so with the  invention of Twitter and Facebook. These platforms, along with the web itself, have given us a tremendous ability to publish and transmit information far faster and wider than ever before, but those who think we can simply replace the DNA that exists within the walls of The New York Times building are simply ignorant of what role it has played and will continue to play for years to come.

The publication has not always been perfect, as a collection of mortals will often fail to be, but the film displays an institution that tells stories that still have wide impact on our lives with an influence that still reigns above many of their digital counterparts. This story is their own. It is a story well told, that left me rooting for it to continue to be told for years to come.

The biggest takeaway from today’s Apple announcements at their annual worldwide developers conference was how many companies they’ve just disrupted.

Hey Blackberry, you know that your BBM that many find to be the sole reason they stick by your side instead of bolting for a shiny new iPhone. Say hello to iMessage. Start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your iPad. If you still want to talk to your friends tied to their Blackberries, there’s always What’s App.

So Dropbox, you’ve been one of the most useful apps I’ve come across in quite some time. My files auto-synced in the cloud, I barely have to think about it. I move effortlessly from one machine to another and my stuff is right there, a click away. Welp, I’ve got some bad news for you. iCloud. 5 gigs of storage and get this, it’s free. Well, unless you’ve got some non-iTunes music you wanna sync. That’s gonna set you back $25 a year. Cmon, that’s a fraction of the money you’ve stolen from artists and those poor multi-millionaire music executives (if any of them still exist anymore.)

What else? Instapaper, a brilliant app by former lead developer for Tumblr, Marco Arment was just replaced by a feature in Apple’s Safari browser, called “Reading List” which stores what you’re browsing for offline reading later, and syncs it across both your iOS devices and your Mac. Poor guy. His reaction on Twitter was priceless.

If Larry David is a social assassin, what does this make Steve Jobs?

Some companies were disrupted in a positive way. Today was Twitter’s lucky day. Apple just built in Twitter integration at the base level of iOS5. Enter your Twitter credentials in your iOS device settings and you’re set. No need to log into Twitter again for most of the apps you regularly use.  Shoot something with your iPhone or iPad camera? Bam, send it to Twitter. Tired of having to keep logging into Twitter on  Safari? No longer. Same goes for YouTube,  Maps, and your contacts.

Remember all those times you had to fumble with the lock on your iPhone to shoot a photo? No more, you’ll be able to have a one click shortcut on the lock screen to get right to shooting. If you hate using the on screen button to shoot images as much as I do, you’re in luck. You can make the volume button a camera shutter.

The news and magazine business even got a little disrupted, with a new feature called Newsstand, which will be a place for all your newspapers and magazines. Don’t really see the value-add here, since you already download them in the app store. Better organization and background downloading seem to be the benefit.

You know how Android phones have these really cool notification pages that tell you all sorts of things like how your stocks are doing, what the weather this weekend will be, who just emailed you, and what your significant other just posted to their Facebook wall? It’s finally come to your iPhone and iPad. Customize it for what you want to see. Much more useful and informative than that boring screen-saver you’ve been staring at.

That covers your iOS devices, but what did Apple present for the Mac? Lion is the new OS, and it’s only going to be available as an Apple App Store download for $30. A lot of what is coming here morphs it closer to an iPad experience. Full screen apps, all sorts of gesture based features like swipe to change apps or go back and forth between webpages. Mission control lets you manage your documents like you’re grabbing them and moving them around physically.

The most blatantly iPad-esque feature is Launchpad which literally looks like the way your apps are presented in grid format on your iPad, but on a Mac. Apple’s newest mouse supports gestures but you’re going to get a lot more out of this if you’re using a trackpad or laptop. Even the mouse is getting disrupted. No-one is safe.

Perhaps the most life-altering feature here is Resume, which has two parts: auto-save and versions. This is something that is long overdue for the entire software industry. The OS will automatically save where you are in any app in short increments, so if you happen to lose power or just boneheadedly close your app while working on it, you’ll get back the documents and everything else exactly how you left it. If you want to go back to where you were at some point in time, Versions has you covered.

So in summation: Blackberry, Dropbox, Instapaper, GroupMe, and heck even AT&T and Verizon took a bit of a beating today from Apple. Twitter comes out on top. Unfortunately for Anthony Weiner, there was no “one more thing” in the form of a Time Machine.

Anthony Weiner is about as uncensored online as he is offline. But is he really bold enough to post a photo of himself sans pants over a Twitter account?

I’m less interested in the politics of the matter than the technical evidence that could show whether the congressman sent the photo himself or if it was sent by someone else. Over the weekend, I posted my analysis on the authenticity of the photo behind the scandal. Weiner’s friend and former “freeloading” roommate, Jon Stewart, used my post from the other day on The Daily Show to illustrate some of the methods for how the congressman could have had his account hacked. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Every photo tells a story

Within just about every digital photo, there are clues left behind called “metadata” that identify the make and model of the camera used, the time the photo was taken and sometimes even the location the photo was taken at. I ran one of the earlier photos that Anthony Weiner had taken through several tools (here is one you can try yourself) that look at the “exif data” within the photo. Here was the result from this photo:

This tells us that the congressman usually shoots his Twitter images with a Blackberry 9650, with a pretty high resolution of 2,048 x 1,536. I then compared this data to the lewd image he was alleged to have sent to a young woman over Twitter.

Here’s the data I found for that image:

Notice a lot of the data that appeared in the earlier photos is missing in the scandalous photo that has Weiner in hot water. There is no make or model listed, and the dimensions of the photo are much smaller. This could indicate a few things. The data could have been stripped at some point because it was uploaded to yfrog or through some other service; it could have been taken by a camera, uploaded to a computer and then uploaded to yfrog; or it simply could have been edited with any photo application. There are applications that will allow you to go in and modify the metadata for a photo.

A special thanks goes to Joe Brooks who was able to get one of the few people who happened to view the larger version of the image before Weiner deleted it. Brooks walked this person through the process of finding the image on his computer, where it was cached. If you want to view the image, be aware it’s a large photo of a man in his underpants and click here.

It is important to note that 18 days prior to the incident, this person, named Dan Wolfe or @patriotusa76 on Twitter, mentioned a rumor he had heard many days before the image was sent that stated Weiner would be involved in a sex photo scandal soon:

Seems like a pretty odd coincidence, no? I’m not going to try and make heads or tails on this — I’ll lleave that for the lawyers — but it is something that should be investigated.

Others have done excellent jobs at looking at other aspects of how the congressman could or could not have been hacked. Philip Bump used to work for Adobe and is something of an expert when it comes to Photoshop. He looks at how the image could have been manipulated. Grace Lidia Suarez, a criminal defense lawyer, figured out how you could upload a yfrog image with nothing but an email address. A hacker wouldn’t even need Weiner’s twitter account details to make it appear the image was sent from his account.

The technical evidence is not conclusive but seems to lean in Weiner’s favor. Although his public comments seem to be undermining what evidence he has that helps him, which is what I told The Today Show this morning. He told Luke Russert of NBC News, Wolf Blitzer of CNN, and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC (who mentioned my exif post on her program last night) that he cannot say “with certitude” that that is not him in the photo. Weiner’s exact quote was “It certainly doesn’t look familiar to me, but I don’t want to say with certitude to you something that I don’t know to be the certain truth.” What exactly does he mean by that? Why couldn’t he just say yes or no? Instead, Weiner answered the question by pointing to some type of photo manipulation.

This leaves open the possibility that a photo of Weiner in some state of undress exists somewhere and someone was able to gain possession of it, either by hacking his computer or having it sent to them from Weiner or from someone he had sent it to previously.

If the congressman can’t say without a shadow of a doubt that the photo is of him, it leaves the case wide open.

Michael Arrington, the bull in the china shop that is the tech industry, recently revised his 2009 proclamation that he would divest himself from the companies he was covering and stop investing in startups to avoid a conflict of interest. In his revision, he announced he has begun investing in startups again and rationalizes it by making the investments public record. This has led to cackles from his peers, most notably from Kara Swisher who pointed out the hypocrisy of his boss Arianna Huffington to allow Arrington to be the sole exception to her policy of not allowing her employees to invest in the companies they cover.

Investments, however, are just one component of what can lead to a conflict of interest. I would submit that a far bigger conflict that goes unspoken and leads to much worse journalism are the relationships writers have with the people they cover. Friends, lovers and acquaintances muddle who gets covered and how they are treated by the people covering them. I can speak with some degree of seeing this with my own eyes when it comes to the New York tech startup beat and the founders they cover. Many of the same people writing about these startups are good friends with the principals, and the nearly flawless fawning coverage reads more like an extended arm of their public relations group than anything resembling real journalism.

On top of that you have people who hop between being journalists and working as either advisers or evangelists who participate in promotional events for products. The conflict of being an adviser or an evangelist is obvious, diluting the person’s journalistic ethics and their ability to be impartial.

The participation at various events can be harmless in some cases if it’s simply to cover the event and gain information about a product. Too often, though, the participants wind up becoming a shill for the very product and, in fact, in some cases, are even used in the promotional material. They also make their affinity for the product or service known through social media. These folks can no longer be taken seriously on any journalistic level.

Would disclosure help fix this problem? If there was better transparency of the investors, would the relationship the writer has with their subjects lead to a more informed reader who could take those biases into account when reading an article? In a study I was directed to by Boston.com’s Courtney Humphries, the answer is that disclosure may actually make writers less ethical.

The study (PDF) found the participants felt that if journalists disclosed their conflicts they would have carte-blance to lay their biases on thick. Assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management Daylian Cain along with with Don Moore at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley and Professor of Economics and Psychology George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University conducted the study.

In the end the only basis for our ability to weed out good information from bad, propaganda from well balanced editorial or commentary, is our own motivation to seek out alternate sources. Al Gore once changed the famous Thomas Jefferson quote: “A well informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will” to “The well-informed citizenry is in danger of becoming the ‘well-amused audience’“.

Given the rapt attention toward the political aspirations of a certain New York City real-estate mogul in recent months, it’s not difficult to see which of the two quotes applies more accurately to our modern culture. We’re all too eager to reinforce that which we already believe rather than look for proof to the contrary.

A decade ago, we wondered what happened to the product that Google just announced. The Chromebook, Google’s version of a netbook, finally has the ecosystem and infrastructure to support it. Many have declared the PC age on its deathbed, with mobile on the verge of overtaking its marketshare. Google simply believes the PC will evolve, into the cloud and beyond local based storage.

Google will make their notebooks, running entirely on their Chrome OS, available in June, partnering with Acer and Samsung for the hardware and Verizon for connectivity. Samsung will charge $425 for a Wifi only version and $499 for one that includes 100MB data service. Acer’s version will cost “$349 and up.”

The notebook has virtually zero boot time — hit power and you’re on. The battery is said to last an entire day. Your files, entirely in the cloud and accessible anywhere, have built-in security. Updates to software, purchased in the Chrome App Store, will be automatic.

Some of Google’s strongest and most widely used apps: Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, will be available online and off, within the Chrome OS. This is where Google will attempt to eat into Microsoft’s bread and butter: Outlook and Office. While many large corporations use Outlook for their email, and Office for their documents, the flexibility that Google’s free versions of these applications, which don’t require a download and can be accessed anywhere, are an attractive alternative.

These Google applications are, however, already readily available on existing hardware like your laptop or work computer. In order for Google’s post-PC device to succeed, it will need to attract a market that cannot or does not want a fully functional notebook computer, and have been unimpressed with the netbooks that have come before it. What exactly will the Chromebook bring to the table that isn’t already available over the web with existing netbooks, at virtually the same price?

Perhaps they simply want to play Angry Birds on a bigger screen.

The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.

Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.

The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.

The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.

If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.

It began with the White House announcement that President Barack Obama would make a statement at 10:30pm ET. The speculation on Twitter was that this was either going to be a major update on events in Libya or that Osama Bin Laden had been captured or killed. Below is the twitter stream starting from last night with some comments in between that give it context.

Is Facebook just an elaborate direct marketer’s masterwork? Should I think twice before using my existing Twitter account to log into various services all around the web? Should I be worried about handing my credit card over to Sony? These and other perfectly valid and  simultaneously conspiracy theoretical ideas tend to float in and around my head from time to time. The big scare du-jour, is if Apple’s iPhone and Google’s mobile OS, Android, are tracking and archiving our every movement.

A journalistic tennis match on this topic took place over the course of the last few days. First, this is old news. Apple responded to congress regarding this almost a year ago. Digital forensics specialists have known you could track locations on iOS devices for some time, and have used the data to assist law enforcement. Alex Levinson, an RIT student, even published a research paper and subsequent book last December detailing data acquisition techniques for iOS products, like the iPhone and iPad. He says that Apple is not collecting the data.

The Wall Street Journal added Google to the mix, citing that Apple is not alone in the practice of collecting user information. Julia Angwin at the Journal claims that not only are Apple and Google collecting the data and storing it locally on the phone, but they actually regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The endgame? Angwin believes they’re racing to build a massive database of location information in order to tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services. Today, Apple seemed to indicate that was part of their plan, as they revealed they’re building a crowd-sourced traffic service.

Apple outright denies they’re collecting user locations.

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

In response to the outcry, Apple will release an update to store less information about location and discontinue backing it up entirely. Apple claims that the information they were receiving was anonymous and only stored the wifi hotspots and cell towers around the phone, which could be up to 100 miles away.

I’m as digitally paranoid as the next guy, but this seems like an odd case and strange timing. Why did something that was discovered months ago only recently receive greater attention? Will we see the same thing happen with the earlier reports about apps collecting and sharing demographic information?

Much like Facebook boycotts, we seem to get up in arms about our data being compromised, captured, leveraged, bought and sold, only to lose interest and go on about our lives. Most of us don’t really have the time to care or feel the convenience and novelty of these devices and websites outweigh the potential of being taken advantage of. That’s exactly what many companies in the business of buying and selling data and demographics are banking on.

Blogger ethics tend to be better than traditional journalism ethics when it comes to linking to sources. It’s actually far more likely you won’t find a single link in any articles in most mainstream news publications online. Sometimes they may even write out the source, but won’t link to it.

Here’s an example of where the New York Post cites TV Newser and Mediaite, but refuses to link to either. Both Newser and Mediaite are generous with links to their sources. Apparently the New York Post is a common offender. The Post has gone so far as to have allegedly admitted, by way of correspondence from one of their reporters, that they in fact have a policy to not credit blogs (or anyone else) if they can verify independently after they’ve been tipped off from the source they choose not to cite. Other parts of News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch’s empire, which includes the Post, may have the same policy as well.

Recently, NBC New York used a good deal of their reporting from a post written by NYC The Blog, which does excellent coverage of stories that often fall between the cracks, and does so with great detail. The author of the post originally did not bother to mention his source, then added the mention, but has yet to link to it.

Why are mainstream news outlets so averse to the link economy? Even here at Reuters, links are rarely seen, if ever, in the context of the articles we post. Felix Salmon recently referred to the Wall Street Journal as “the kid in class with his arm around his homework” in reference to their refusal to link. The New York Times is just as stingy with their links, relegating their modern link-friendly journalism to excellent places like The Lede.

The Lede is one of the few places I’ll return to multiple times a day, because it’s indicative of the way the world works now: real-time and part of a cooperative effort among outside sources, linking back and forth to one another, without regard for their internal or external affiliation.

Journalism today is a collaborative effort and the digital natives link to their sources as a matter of course. They understand the value of the link economy and it is rarely a one way street. Linking out doesn’t take traffic away from your site; instead, it makes your site more valuable as a comprehensive source of where information is flowing, it helps to show you’ve done your homework and are able to back it up.

This is not particularly new ground I’m covering here. Jeff Jarvis has written extensively on the link economy. Our own president of media, Chris Ahearn, believes in the link economy and Felix Salmon has weighed in on how the link economy benefits Reuters.

The issue is both technical and cultural. Many of these crusty old media behemoths are still embedded in the maw of very old editorial workflows that simply make it impossible to link out. Personally, I find this hard to believe, since if they’re publishing to the web, surely they have some way of linking within their articles. What I find more easy to believe, but not entirely a valid excuse, is the culture.

The culture of current “old media” newsrooms does not have the ethical inclination to link. They’re still provincial and afraid that once someone has clicked a link to a referring source, they’re gone forever. The digital natives practically have the link embedded into their DNA. Sure, there are some bloggers with loose ethics when it comes to citing their sources by way of a link, but few of them do it by way of policy and the ones who do so often are not the ones running a business behind it.

How long will it take for the old guard to make way for the link friendly digital natives? Considering how much the powers that be are relying on those natives to help them transform the media business into something that can feasibly exist in the current landscape, sooner than you think.

An application that wasn’t even in the app store a week ago just raised $41 million.

We’ve reached the point where simply the idea of an app is now enough to raise multi-million dollar capital. Were any of these folks around back in 2000? Certainly some lessons have been learned the first time around. Most investors and companies are avoiding the same mistakes but that hasn’t prevented plenty of head scratching deals to emerge in the last few months.

The app, called Color, is a photo sharing application that allows you to post and view images by people in the same proximity as each other.

“Not since Google have we seen this,” is what one Sequoia Capital partner told Color Labs co-founder Bill Nguyen when he met with them recently.

Those seven words inspire such an abundance of eye rolling that one has to wonder what the guys over at Sequoia are smoking. Better yet, how quickly can I put together a pitch deck boasting some superfluous social, hyper-local, organic, mobile game changer of my own?

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, has a rosier view of the current frothiness of the tech market. He’s poised to take LinkedIn public soon, so his motives for such optimism may be a bit self-interested. “If you look at the crop of companies in the growth phase now, they all have very solid economic models behind them. Some at the center of the pack have business models that could live for a long, long time.”

VC money seems to be funnelling mostly to Internet based startups over the past two years. While there are some ridiculous deals being made, there are real companies making real money on the Internet. Drugstore.com was snapped up today by Walgreens for $409 million dollars, raising the stock up 114% in trading this morning. The Internet based drug retailer had over $456 million in sales in 2010, making it the 8th largest online retailer in the U.S.

The good news is that the victims of the eventual fallout of this current hyper-investment in the tech market will hopefully be limited to these private big shot investors and venture capitalists who have only themselves to blame. The underlying victims may be startups with real business plans and an actual solution to a real problem, who after the crash will find it tough to move their venture to market. All the while the Techcrunches and newly launched Beta Beats of the world will be there to assess the carnage.